Béla Kun was a Hungarian communist revolutionary and politician who governed the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. After attending Franz Joseph University at Kolozsvár, Kun worked as a journalist up until the First World War. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army and was captured by the Imperial Russian Army in 1916, after which he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Urals. Kun embraced communist ideas during his time in Russia, and in 1918 he co-founded a Hungarian arm of the Russian Communist Party in Moscow. He befriended Vladimir Lenin and fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.
Amadeo Bordiga was an Italian Marxist theorist. A revolutionary socialist, Bordiga was the founder of the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI), a member of the Communist International (Comintern), and later a leading figure of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt). He was originally associated with the PCdI but was expelled in 1930 after being accused of Trotskyism. Bordiga is viewed as one of the most notable representatives of left communism in Europe.
The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, was a political international which existed from 1919 to 1943 and advocated world communism. It was led and controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and maintained strict conditions of affiliation in order to exclude social democratic parties and more moderate or non-Marxist socialists. The international was intended as a replacement for the Second International, which had dissolved in 1916 during World War I.
Antonio Negri was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt. Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory. Negri founded the Potere Operaio group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published highly influential books, including Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri.
Workerism is a political theory that emphasizes the importance of or glorifies the working class. Workerism, or operaismo, was of particular significance in Italian left-wing politics, being largely embraced in Italian political groups ranging from Italian communists to Italian anarchists.
Thomas Henry Wintringham was a British soldier, military historian, journalist, poet, Marxist, politician and author. He was a supporter of the Home Guard during the Second World War and was one of the founders of the Common Wealth Party.
Ernst Fischer, also known under the pseudonyms Ernst Peter Fischer, Peter Wieden, Pierre Vidal, and Der Miesmacher, was a Bohemian-born Austrian journalist, writer and politician.
Adolf Warski, was a Polish communist leader, journalist and theoretician of the communist movement in Poland. During Stalin's Great Purge he was arrested and executed.
A guerrilla foco is a small cadre of revolutionaries operating in a nation's countryside. This guerrilla organization was popularized by Che Guevara in his book Guerrilla Warfare, which was based on his experiences in the Cuban Revolution. Guevara would go on to argue that a foco was politically necessary for the success of a socialist revolution. Originally Guevara theorized that a foco was only useful in overthrowing personalistic military dictatorships and not liberal democratic capitalism where a peaceful overthrow was believed possible. Years later Guevara would revise his thesis and argue all nations in Latin America, including liberal democracies, could be overthrown by a guerrilla foco. Eventually the foco thesis would be that political conditions would not even need to be ripe for revolutions to be successful, since the sheer existence of a guerrilla foco would create ripe conditions by itself. Guevara's theory of foco, known as foquismo, was self-described as the application of Marxism-Leninism to Latin American conditions, and would later be further popularized by author Régis Debray. The proposed necessity of a guerrilla foco proved influential in Latin America, but was also heavily criticized by other socialists.
The 1924 Estonian coup d'état attempt was a failed coup attempt in Estonia on 1 December 1924, conducted by the Comintern, and staged by the Communist Party of Estonia and Bolsheviks who in most part had been infiltrated from the Soviet Union. Of the 279 actively participating pro-communist rebels, 125 were killed in action, later more than 500 people were arrested. The Estonian government forces lost 26 men.
The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla is a book written by Brazilian Marxist–Leninist revolutionary Carlos Marighella in 1969. It is one of Marighella's most publicized works, serving as guidance to communist revolutionary movements that want to use guerrilla tactics. In this work, Marighella detailed urban guerrilla tactics to be employed in the struggles against authoritarian regimes. The text has been banned in several countries, but remains largely in print and on bookshelves in several others, including the United States.
"It is necessary for every urban guerrilla to keep in mind always that he can only maintain his existence if he is disposed to kill the police and those dedicated to repression, and if he is determined to expropriate the wealth of the big capitalists, the latifundists and the imperialists."
The Hamburg Uprising was a communist insurrection that occurred in Hamburg in Weimar Germany on 23 October 1923. A militant section of the Hamburg Communist Party of Germany launched an uprising as part of the so-called German October. Rebels stormed 24 police stations, 17 in Hamburg and seven in Schleswig-Holstein Province in Prussia, and established barricades around the city. The communist insurgency in Hamburg was futile, lacking support from the rest of Germany or from the Soviet Union, and disintegrated within a day. Around 100 people died during the Hamburg Uprising and the exact details of the event, as well as the assessment of its impact, remain controversial.
Alberto Toscano is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's Theoretical Writings and On Beckett.
The ABC of Communism is a book written by Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky in 1920, during the Russian Civil War. Originally written to convince the proletariat of Russia to support the Bolsheviks, it became "an elementary textbook of communist knowledge". It became the best known and most widely circulated of all pre-Stalinist expositions of Bolshevism and the most widely read political work in Soviet Russia.
Left communism, or the communist left, is a position held by the left wing of communism, which criticises the political ideas and practices espoused by Marxist–Leninists and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they regard as more authentically Marxist than the views of Marxism–Leninism espoused by the Communist International after its Bolshevization by Joseph Stalin and during its second congress.
The Moscow Bolshevik Uprising was the armed uprising of the Bolsheviks in Moscow, from 25 October to 2 (15) November 1917 during the October Revolution of Russia. It was in Moscow in October where the most prolonged and bitter fighting unfolded. Some historians consider the fighting in Moscow as the beginning of the Russian Civil War.
Revolutionary socialism is a political philosophy, doctrine, and tradition within socialism that stresses the idea that a social revolution is necessary to bring about structural changes in society. More specifically, it is the view that revolution is a necessary precondition for transitioning from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production. Revolution is not necessarily defined as a violent insurrection; it is defined as a seizure of political power by mass movements of the working class so that the state is directly controlled or abolished by the working class as opposed to the capitalist class and its interests.
Maria Reese was a German teacher who became a writer and journalist. She was also politically active, and sat as a member of the national parliament (Reichstag) between 1928 and 1933.
Erich Wollenberg was until 1933 a leading member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and in later years an independent journalist and publicist.
