Australian Marxist Review • AMR #81 • February 2026

This issue of the Australian Marxist Review is the last issue during the current mandate of the Editorial Committee. Since 2022, the committee has been...

The previous issue of the Australian Marxist Review carried an excerpt from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’s 19th Congress seeking to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin and to offer a reassessment of Khrushchev’s place in the history of the communist movement.

The initial “touchstone” of my paper is the fact that 2025 was the year of making the “eight-point regulation” and its spirit the centre of partybuilding activities.

This is a better world for the October Revolution. No other movement in human history has expanded human development at the scale and speed or reached the same heights of success. Australia is a better country for the work and contributions of communists. Disagree or doubt? Let’s consider the alternative.

Marxists under the science of historical materialism regard capitalism as a progress in human history. It is progressive in that it opens the road to the abolition of slavery in all its forms including wage slavery. That we have such an historical understanding of capitalism does not blind us to the negative features that accompany its historical rise.

Storming the Heavens is a new English-language examination of the context, nature and mechanisms of peasant rebellion in China leading up to and during the Chinese civil war.