On November 6 we lost our friend and comrade Paul Mepschen. Paul was for many years a supporter of the IIRE.

In late November and early December the IIRE will again organize an international three-week school for socialist activists. This 'Ecosocialist school' is a unique opportunity for activists to come together, learn, exchange experiences and build networks. To facilitate participation, we keep costs as low as possible and, if necessary, help fund travel costs for activists from the Global South. 

Introduction:

Sixty years ago, on October 1, 1965 the Indonesian army set in motion its plans to seize power from president Sukarno and to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), one of the main forces supporting the president. In the article below, dated November 1965, Mandel criticizes the political approach of the PKI in the preceding period. 

The two world wars and the catastrophes of the period between (victory of Nazism, Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War) hardly leave the cumulative vision of historical meaning and progress intact. Nietzsche, Péguy and Sorel already vigorously rejected historical fetishism and the ideology of progress that puts vigilance to sleep in the face of an inevitable accumulation of facts. 

Walter Benjamin had a profound understanding of the intimate links between conceptions of positivist origin and the representation of mechanical time, ‘homogeneous and empty’. 

Well beyond its own marginal activist circles, Situationism, of which Guy Debord was the central character, coloured the spirit of the times in the 1960s and had a diffuse but important influence on the movements of 1968. Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which he developed a critique of consumer society, urban alienation and generalized commodity fetishism, could be read as a precursor of the 1968 movements.