Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money may not grow on trees, but according to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), it appears to be growing exceptionally well for a tiny fraction of Americans. In a recent post on X, Sanders renewed his long-running criticism of wealth concentration in the U.S. ‘Never before have we had so much income inequality’, he wrote. ‘Last year, the bottom 50% saw their income go down by $27, on average, while the top 0.01% gained $2.9 million’, Sanders continued. ‘And the top 0.001%? They saw their income go up by $20 million. In a single year. “Yes. We must tax the rich,”’ 

[Yahoo]

‘“Democratic Socialist” is to the Communist what “National Socialist” was to the Nazi’, reality TV star and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt [sic] posted on X. 

[Fox News]

Zinn expressed the source of his motivations. ‘I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing’, he said. ‘I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers’. 

[Portside]

… Petrograd’s local Soviet government and Bolshevik Party organizations struggled to implement the Bolshevik Party program, fight domestic and foreign counterrevolutionaries, quiet labor unrest, and provide food, fuel, and education to the local population. The methods and strategies used by the government and party organizations to organize public life and fight enemies, domestic and foreign, not only preserved the infant Soviet regime but proved to be the first manifestation of what would become the one-party authoritarian Soviet political system. 

[The Bolsheviks Survive. Petrograd 1919. By Alexander Rabinowitch]

We emphasized, with Marx, that the proletarian revolution is not only necessary to overthrow capitalist rule but also to change the proletarians, so that they become fit to transform the world. Through the experience of prolonged collective struggle and being forced to reinvent their social practices to survive, proletarians throw off ‘the muck of ages’ as Marx put it, the weight of capitalist and pre-capitalist ideology and practices. Fredo thinks it is utopian to put that much ‘faith in revolutionary transformation of attitudes’. But isn’t it utopian to think that the revolution can succeed without attitudes and social practices being thoroughly transformed? 

[Internationalist Perspective]

The fear of acting incorrectly, of causing harm, or of being criticized by others can become politically paralyzing. One interviewee captured this dynamic succinctly when she explained that she would rather refrain from acting than risk doing something wrong. Such statements reveal an important contradiction. The ethical demand to act responsibly can, under certain conditions, undermine political action itself. This is not because ethical concerns are inherently conservative. Nor is it because criticism lacks political value. The problem is rather that individualized responsibility offers a weak response to problems that are fundamentally collective.

[Jacobin]

(These links are provided for information, target sites don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Bolsheviks as history (2005)

Book Review from the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution in Petrograd. By Alexander Rabinowitch. Pluto Press. £12.99

When this book was first published in 1976 it had some contemporary significance. The regime established by the Bolsheviks in November 1917 was still extant and many young people, dissatisfied with capitalism, were discussing Bolshevik tactics and forms of organisation as a serious way to overthrow it. Today, republished nearly thirty years later, it is a work of history much as would be a study of Robespierre and the Jacobins in 1793.

Studying history is not a waste of time of course and Rabinowitch’s research does bring out some interesting points, in particular that the Bolshevik Party in 1917 was not a monolithic bloc under Lenin’s thumb. He shows how in fact Lenin’s views were often ignored by other Bolshevik leaders in closer touch with the feelings of soldiers and factory workers in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then called). It also emerges that Stalin played a rather more significant role than Trotskyists attribute him in their polemics.

Lenin favoured a naked seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party; most of the other Bolshevik leaders were more circumspect; they realised, as Rabinowitch documents, that while most of the workers and soldiers wanted “peace, land and bread” and, by November 1917, were in favour of the overthrow of the Provisional Government under Kerensky because it sought to continue the war, they wanted to see it replaced by a government made up of all the “socialist” parties of Russia, i.e. of the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries as well as the Bolsheviks, that would emanate from the Congress of Soviets and which would take Russia out of the war. The Bolsheviks, therefore, followed the more subtle approach of disguising the seizure of power advocated (sometimes hysterically) by Lenin as an assumption of power by the Congress of Soviets.

Thus the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 looked to be a “Soviet” revolution, with power appearing to pass into the hands of these makeshift representative institutions (the Russian word “soviet” means simply “council”) that soldiers and workers had formed to give expression to their political views. In fact, power had passed into the hands of the minority Bolshevik Party which was determined to hold on to it, alone, come what may. But that’s another (hi)story.

Adam Buick