Thin Red Line

I'm terrible when it comes to properly marking anniversaries. I mean it's only just now that I'm mentioning on the blog that Kara and I celebrated our one year wedding anniversary on Saturday. So, in keeping with that tardiness, and to mark the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War/Revolution, I'm finally getting round to posting the following article, 'Spain Turns', that dates from 1937 and which originally appeared in the political magazine, International Review:

Spain Turns

To the best of my knowledge, this is first time that the article has appeared on the web, and the following blurb probably best explains why I have an especial interest in both the article and the magazine:

"From 1936 to 1939 a magazine called International Review was published in New York, with contributions from exiles from Germany and other European countries. It was responsible for the first English translation, from the German, of Rosa Luxemburg's 'Reform or Revolution' and Julius Martov's 'The State and the Socialist Revolution'. Its general political line can be best described as "Anti-Bolshevik Marxism", rejecting Lenin and Trotsky's vanguardism and arguing that the socialist revolution, to be successful, required the conscious understanding and active participation of the working class."

I'm genuinely surprised that there is so little information about the International Review* on the web. The translations of the Luxemburg and Martov pamphlets by 'Integer', that originally appeared in the pages of the magazine, can be found at the Marxist Internet Archive, and there are also a couple of pieces by Paul Mattick from the magazine that can also be found on the web, but further searches about the magazine and its editor, Jonathan Ayres, brought up little or no information. I do have another article from its pages that I will post at some point on MySpace, but fingers crossed that the undertaking of publishing further articles from the magazine on the web can be a project for the greybeards at the MIA to realise.

*I only know of the magazine because there is a near complete run of the it in the SPGB archive. Though there were no formal links between the International Review and the SPGB - how could there be with the Party's hostility clause in place - it was the case that the Party placed advertisements for the Socialist Standard and Party pamphlets in the pages of the magazine, and the magazine did publish an article on the abdication crisis of 1936 that originally appeared in the Socialist Standard, and wrote of the SPGB in approving terms.