By Stephen James Kerr, 14th September 2020 Today we are publishing the third part in a series “A Marxist History of the Police” which examines the balance of class forces in 1820 Britain. To understand the emergence of the police, an appraisal of the relative positions of the working aristocracy, bourgeoisie and working class in British society […]
8th September 2020 An appeal for funds has been made by Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Estaban Volkov, to support the Leon Trotsky House Museum. The Museum requires urgent funds because it has been closed to the public since March because of measures taken to limit the spread of Cov-19. A significant part of the museum’s income […]
By Stephen James Kerr Today we are publishing the second part in a series “A Marxist History of the Police” dealing with experiments towards a police force in Ireland by Sir Robert Peel, up to the infamous Peterloo Massacre in 1819. Part 1: Repression in the face of revolution, examined how the birth of the […]
by Stephen James Kerr, 10th August 2020 Today we are publishing the first part in a series “A Marxist History of the Police”. Part 1 will examine how the birth of the industrial working class and the tumult of the bourgeois revolutions drove the need for new forms of repression. Part 2 will deal with […]
by Robert Montgomery 14th July 2020 “Why is the world financial system in crisis? First in 2008 and now in 2020 we have seen the world plunge into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression with incalculable economic and political consequences. Marx’s work has a theory of economic crisis that explains why capitalism is […]
History will not forget the US President striding out of the White House – waving a bible – after ordering the beating and gassing of peaceful protesters to clear his path. If the horror of watching George Floyd die was not enough, now we have seen the iron fist of the US ruling-class shoot, gas […]
ANZAC Day, April 25th is here again and once again Australians are being asked to stand together and declare “Lest we forget”. Every year though, during the avalanche of militaristic imagery and words that marks this “celebration”, I reflect how it hasn’t always been like this in Australia. During my lifetime I have watched ANZAC […]
by Robert Montgomery, 7th September 2019. While there is growing interest in socialism today, there’s much confusion about its meaning. Among theoretically informed socialists there’s also confusion. The word tends to be used impressionistically, a yardstick for classifying states where capitalism has been overturned. Such states are said to be either socialist or capitalist, either […]
Lenin’s Embalmers is the autobiography of Ilya Zbarsky (1913-2007) a chemist in the Soviet Union working on the preservation and display of Lenin’s body in Red Square, Moscow. Reading like a history of the 20th century his autobiography charts the history of his family, first under Tsarism, through the Russian Revolution, the purges and mass […]