Moderated by Michael Lardner. Presentations by:
Rosa Luxemburg, one of the great leaders in the history of the socialist movement, was born in Poland (then a province of the Russian empire) 150 years ago this month, on 5 March 1871. Luxemburg cut her teeth in the Polish revolutionary underground, but as an immensely talented political leader, she was drawn to the centre of the European workers’ movement in Germany, where, from the late 1890s, she became the driving force of the revolutionary wing of German socialism.Read More »
The revolutionary freedom fighter Chandrashekhar Azad is usually remembered only by the famous photograph in which he is twirling his moustache bare-chested, and wearing a janeu ritual thread, a symbol of masculine nationalism.
Deeper research into his life and political career reveals not only the truth behind this photograph but the progressive political ideas of Azad, who led the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, a revolutionary socialist organisation founded by Bhagat Singh and others in September 1928.Read More »
Writer and academic Ed Rooksby passed away last week at the age of just 46. We republish one of his final in-depth interviews – and remember his contributions to socialist thought in Britain.
In July of last year, the socialist writer and academic Ed Rooksby, who has tragically passed away at just 46 years of age, wrote on the reemergence of communism and Marxism as commonplace terms of political discourse. Having first developed his political outlook during the 1990s and early 2000s—when End of History narratives were at their height—Ed recalled the sheer level of amused derision that describing oneself as a socialist often provoked in those years:Read More »
Describing the October Revolution in Russia, John Reed, in the prologue of his extraordinary book Ten Days that Shook the World, describes the forces vying for power, in the midst of a Revolution that had not yet managed to define its destiny.
On the one hand, what he calls the possessing classes who aspired to remove the Czar and replace him with a bourgeois power, in the style of the Western democracies of the United States and France; on the other, the Bolsheviks, who saw the Revolution as based on the class struggle and insisted on the necessity of the Soviets taking power.Read More »
Leo Victor Panitch, one of the intellectual pillars of the Canadian left and a leading scholar of the global depredations of neoliberalism, died Saturday from COVID-19. He was 75.
Born into a working class Jewish family in Winnipeg in 1945, Dr. Panitch was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Distinguished Research Professor in Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York University in Toronto. He was one of the world’s most respected students of the writings of Karl Marx.Read More »
Wednesday, November 25— This afternoon, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro lamented the death of Diego Armando Maradona, a great friend and ally of the Bolivarian Revolution, and recalled some of the last conversations they held.
“We have received a great blow to our feelings, a great one has left… The eternal Diego… We spoke days after his birthday and he felt very sad about the pandemic. ‘This pandemic cannot go on anymore,’ he told me,” said Maduro, recalling one of the most recent conversations he had with the Argentine star, and how confinement had affected him.Read More »
The fighting peoples of the world lost a humble legend yesterday. Diego Armando Maradona was 60 years old. Arguably the greatest soccer player to ever grace the pitches, the spirited striker combined unparalleled skills in his sport and an unflinching outspokenness before oppression. No other sports figure’s public statements and transformation has equally captured the changing momentum across Latin America.Read More »
This last year we have seen you riding, as an invincible warrior, into combat against an epidemic, the consequences of which you anticipated, with your vision of future, when you filled the island with doctors and research centers to confront – with science – the many diseases that would appear over time.
You knew that it would be poor countries that would be the most affected and made much-needed solidarity a fundamental banner of the Revolution, unfortunately little practiced where selfishness and greed prevail under the name of neo-liberalism.
Although you left for another dimension, you are leading the current battles, from the depths of a rock extracted from the mountains of your Sierra Maestra. We confirm how necessary you are – perhaps indispensable.Read More »
