Human beings fighting for

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trudges through the snow don't think love and revoto support her man. In lution are inseparable, fact she didn't go to Mosc- and I don't think that you ow to see John Reed in can talk about Stalinism in 1921, and was much more the film when it ends in I found the film very good film, and you ought inspiring. The portrayal of to go and see it. It opens a the revolution, with the lot of people's eyes to a fair storming of the Winter view of the revolution, and Palace, makes you want to that can't be bad.

reviews 'REDS' is a film about an American revolutionary called John Reed.

He went to Russia in 1917 to witness the revolution, was won to it, and became a communist. He wrote a great book about it, "Ten Days that Shook the World' ', which you should all read.

The unusual feature about the film is its portrayal of the revolution. Other films which show the revolution, like Dr Zhivago, show the middle class going down. This film shows the workers and peasants moving up.

It also shows the participants of the revolution not as hard-faced Bolsheviks, but human beings fighting for socialism.

If you expected the film to be a love story, you're right. The film is spoiled, really, by the cynical portrayal of Louise Bryant as the devoted wife. who independent than the sexist 1921. portrayal shows her.

John Reed and Louise Bryant go out, finish those bosses off, and storm Buckingham Palare.

It is rumoured that the favourable portrayal of a communist and a revolution has something to do with the film not getting an Oscar.

It might sound a contradiction in terms to condemn the rip-off of the prices at the pictures, and then recomn nd that people go. But 1 up recommend that you se it, and possibly take u ih you some of those people who say that the Russian revolution was a coup.

It might have a profound effect. It certainly did on the camera crew. They wire given a brief on the history of the revoltion, and afterwards wen, on strike for more pay and won.

Reviews that I have read go over the top a bit. I I just think it's a very LENIN wrote his classic text on the state amid the turmoil of 1917. The czar had fallen in February, Kerensky was at the head of a bourgeois provisional government in Russia, the war was continuing to wreak devastation, the threat of counter-revolution was looming under the banner of General Kornilov, and the Bolsheviks - though suppressed by the democratic state - were winning new adherents in droves.

Right-wing socialists (like the Mensheviks) accepted the bourgeois democracy of the February revolution as a limit beyond which they should not go, and jockeyed for position in relation to the new regime. From below mass movement of workers, peasants and soldiers organised in councils (soviets) - was calling for peace, bread and land.

At first the attitude of the Bolsheviks was to restrain these popular demands by defending the 'democracy'. Lenin's State and Revolution' was part of his effort to move the Bolshevik leadership to the left and to counter the influence of reformist ideas: he argued that the soviets could become the base of a workers' and peasants' government going beyond the narrow limits of bourgeois democracy.

The revolution, Lenin argues, requires not only a transformation of economic relations (from private to collective ownership of the means of production; and power to another. the working class; a new political form appropriate tor the economic emancipation of labour must be set up in its place.

The bourgeois state is a "special' form of power, standing 'above' the people, sucking the blood of society with its parasitic bureaucracy, police, courts and army.

This power "above' society must be brought down to earth. The narrow horizons of bourgeois democracy must be broken - not to do away with democracy but to extend it.

All officials, Lenin argues, should be elected and subject to recall; all officials The army should be people armed.

This extension of democracy from bourgeois law and parliamentarism into direct popular participation must be the immediate fruit of the seizure of state power.

'State and Revolution' portrays vividly and simply the basic Marxist position on democracy. Marxists are not cynical about democracy. Unlike reformist socialists, we struggle to push democracy far beyond a vote for parliamentarians every five years.

'State and Revolution' is not the last word on the state. It was untinished, written in a hurry and had to rely on Marx and Engels' scattered notes on the state (neither was able to achieve their intended project of complementing their critique of political economy with a parallel critique of law and the state). But as a starting point for understanding the bourgeois state in all its formis, 'State and Revolution' is unsurpassed.