These are complicated, contradictory times. The capitalist system is in crisis, unable to recover fully from the decade-long great recession. Mass revolt has erupted – the ‘Arab’ spring, protests in Latin America, Sudan, Algeria and Hong Kong, movements around women’s oppression and the environment – yet the organised working class...
Last week, US President Donald Trump announced that under the rarely invoked International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and seventy of its affiliated companies are set to be added to the ‘Entity List’. This effectively bans them from acquiring components and technology from American firms without...
In July 2018, tariffs were imposed on Chinese imports by President Trump’s government and there was immediate tit-for-tat retaliation by China. This has amounted to the biggest trade war since the 1930s and is increasingly taking its toll on the global economy.
The revolutionary movements shaking Sudan and Algeria, and mass upheavals in other parts of the neo-colonial world, underlines the relevance of Leon Trotsky’s 'Theory of Permanent Revolution'. This is particularly the case for the international workers’ movement and revolutionary socialists, and the heroic masses struggling for fundamental...
This week saw two important historical anniversaries – the first conference of the Communist (Third) International, held on 6 March 1919, established to help organise Marxist revolutionary forces on an international basis and, after years of defeats of revolutionary movements of the international working class and the coming to power of...
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the outstanding leaders of the German and international working class movements. They are figures who still today symbolise uncompromising opposition...
Tories torn apart, French workers and youth in revolt, 'populism' on the rise ... revolution in the air?
This week – Friday 30th November – sees the 95th anniversary of the death of the outstanding Scottish Marxist John MacLean. To commemorate this event, we look at MacLean’s contribution to the socialist and working class movement.
After two and a half years of the First World War, Russia exploded in February 1917 in a revolution that overthrew the Tsar's dictatorship. The capitalist provisional governments that took over did not at all fulfill the expectations of the masses of an end to war, need and oppression. Therefore, in October, an insurrection that shook the world...
The horrific slaughter of the First World War has haunted generations. By the time it ended, it had put into question the ‘right’ of the ruling classes to rule, something that helped provoke revolutions and mass struggles around the world. Just the huge military casualties, officially nearly 10 million, maybe more, soldiers killed and...
November 9 is a momentous date in German history. On this date Robert Blum, one of the leaders of the 1848 revolution in German-speaking countries, was executed in Vienna; the Nazis instigated the infamous Reichspogromnacht (sometimes called, in a softer version, “Kristallnacht”) and when the Berlin Wall was opened in 1989. But above all,...
