Curated playlist
Anti-Stalinist left
- Nikita KhrushchevNikita Khrushchev stood before a closed session of the 20th Party Congress on the 25th of February 1956, and in four hours dismantled the reputation of a man who had ruled the Soviet Union for decades. The silence in the hall was absolute.…
- Albert CamusAlbert Camus was born on the 7th of November 1913 in Mondovi, a working-class town in French Algeria, to a mother who was deaf and illiterate and a father he would never meet. Lucien Camus, a poor agricultural laborer, died in combat…
- Social democracySocial democracy sits in an odd place. It is a broad, centre-left ideology inside the wider socialist movement, yet in modern practice it runs a predominantly capitalist economy. The trick is the welfare state attached to that economy.…
- André GideAndré Paul Guillaume Gide was born in Paris on the 22nd of November 1869, and by the time he died on the 19th of February 1951, his New York Times obituary would call him "France's greatest contemporary man of letters." He wrote more than…
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society. Few thinkers of the twentieth century managed to shape radical politics from inside a government…
- TrotskyismTrotskyism stands as one of the most contested and consequential political traditions of the twentieth century. On the 20th of August 1940, in Mexico City, an NKVD agent named Ramon Mercader attacked Leon Trotsky in his own home, and…
- C. L. R. JamesC. L. R. James was born on the 4th of January 1901 in Tunapuna, a small town in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony. He died in London on the 19th of May 1989, and his body was carried home to be buried at Tunapuna Cemetery,…
- Josip Broz TitoJosip Broz, known to the world as Tito, once wrote a letter that read: "Stalin. Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle." He added that if it did not stop, he would send one…
- Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 by Ramon Mercader, a Stalinist agent. He had been sentenced to death in absentia four years earlier at the Moscow show trials. Of all the men Stalin defeated, Trotsky was one of the few…
- EurocommunismEurocommunism was a political current that fractured the communist world from within. In the 1970s and 1980s, Western European communist parties began insisting they had developed a theory of social transformation more suited to their own…