A towering figure of music, Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770. He grew to be a genius of the European tradition of classical music. His life was a time of turmoil and revolution and at a crossroads of an artist’s relation with society. Beethoven’s musical beauty and genius is best understood in the context […]
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Mauro Espinola is a member of Alternativa Socialista (ISA in Mexico). The first of a series of articles that seeks to clarify and outline the nature of the Mexican Revolution from a class point of view. November 20 marked the 110th anniversary of the beginning of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, in which thousands of […]
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Max Toynbee is a member of Socialist Alternative (England, Wales & Scotland). Review of The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James (published 1938) Most schools teach pupils that the Atlantic slave trade went against European “enlightenment” principles of rationality, equality and democracy; a horror perpetrated against docile and simple Africans that was abolished by high minded powerful European […]
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Arne Johansson is a member of Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna (ISA in Sweden). Pierre Broué takes us on a historic journey that begins with Lev “Lyova” Davidovich Bronstein’s birth on a Ukrainian farm in 1879, the early struggle of his teenage years to understand Marxism and his enthusiastic attempts to organise the Southern Russian Workers’ Union during […]
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Lynn Walsh is a member of the Socialist Party (CWI in England & Wales). Eighty Years Since Leon Trotsky’s Assassination An updated version of an article first published by the CWI, predecessor of ISA, in 1980 (The CWI has since been renamed International Socialist Alternative (ISA)) On 20 August, 1940, Trotsky was struck a fatal […]
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Eleanor Crossey-Malone is a member of the Socialist Party (ISA in Ireland). January 15th marked the 101st anniversary of the murder of the outstanding revolutionary socialist leader, Rosa Luxemburg. This article, first published by Socialist Party Ireland looks at her defence of both the fundamental ideas of Marxism and the necessity of revolutionary change against […]
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On January 9th 1905, hundreds of thousands of Russian workers flooded out on a massive demonstration in Petersburg, then the capital of Russia, to demand from the Tsar that he implement their demands. They were met by the Imperial Guard, who brutally shot into the crowds leaving over 200 dead, hundreds wounded and thousands under […]
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Rob Jones is a member of Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (CWI in Russia). November the 7th was the 140th anniversary of the birth of Lev Davidovich Trotsky, with Lenin, leader of the Russian revolution. In this article from the Russian section of the CWI, Rob Jones looks at Trotsky’s life. On 20th August 1940, the Stalinist agent […]
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Seamus Whelan is a member of Socialist Alternative in the US. The 1979 revolution didn’t have to end in a religious state Forty years ago, in January 1979 the hated Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, fled the country to the U.S. The Shah was driven out by a mass movement led by workers and […]
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Written by CWI supporters in Sudan. Four months of mass struggle on the streets, with a ceaseless flow of demonstrations, strikes, occupations and sit-ins, culminated in the removal from power of dictator Omar al-Bashir one month ago. Since then, a continuing mass sit-in in front of the headquarters of the General Command of the Sudanese […]
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