Food for Thought

Review

 By Ray Jones

Revolutionary Democracy vol XIX no 2 Sept 13

£5 post free from NCP Lit PO Box 73 London SW11 2PQ.

REVOLUTIONARY Democracy is an Indian orientated Marxist journal but it always contains useful coverage of events from around the world, important historical pieces and deep theoretical contributions.

This issue Tahir Asghar provides in interesting update on the situation in Russia with particular reference to the de-industrialisation going on there. Eygpt and Turkey also get coverage.

Nexhimije Hoxha gives a fascinating account of the 20th Congress of the CPSU and an insight into Enver Hoxha’s reaction to it.

Clara Zetkin relates Rosa Luxemburg’s response to the Russian Revolution and the November revolution in Germany. With regards to theory, Ubaldo Buttafava offers a critique of neo-Trotskyist economics and Vitaly Pershin takes a look at Marxist aesthetics and the socialist realism of Geli Korzhev.

In one of the invaluable translations of Stalin common to Rev Dem, this issue includes a blistering 1940s attack by Stalin on “a political” literature and Soviet magazines that bowed to rank rather than talent in a speech to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).