On 5 October 1968, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) savagely beat a peaceful civil rights march off the streets of Derry. This police riot was flashed over television screens throughout Ireland and Britain that very evening. Among the defenceless marchers was Westminster MP Gerry Fitt, with blood streaming down his face after being truncheoned. Some 96 people needed hospital treatment.

By Martin Suchanek ANNIVERSARIES NEVER serve as a mere recollection of a person’s historical work. When they are about an epoch-making theorist like Karl Marx, who together with his friend and companion in struggle Frederick Engels, founded “scientific socialism”, there are only two possibilities for the ruling class or the left wing of the bourgeoisie, […]

The heroic fight of the Finnish workers tends to be unfairly overlooked when the great revolutionary events of 1917-18 are recounted. Jens-Hugo Nyberg tells the story

IN THE February Revolution of 1917, the workers and soldiers of Petrograd rose in spontaneous revolt against the hardships caused by two and a half years of war. Civilians were verging on starvation, while those fighting suffered horrendous losses – 1.5 million had been killed, five million wounded, with millions more taken prisoner. Demonstrations by […]

Lenin’s April Theses, at 479 words one of the shortest of his major works, represented a qualitative advance in his strategic thinking, effected a transformation of the Bolshevik Party’s programme and formed the blue print for the victorious October Revolution that, in turn, changed the world. Nonetheless, the theses built on the previous achievements of […]

By Joy Macready The 1917 Bolshevik government advanced a revolutionary programme for women’s rights, struggling to break with the backwardness and prejudice of Russia. The Bolsheviks argued that for women to be liberated, they would have to be relieved of their semi-slave status within the family. This would only happen if the state, now based […]

Konkordiya Samoilova was born in 1876 in Irkutsk, Siberia. Her father was an Orthodox priest. Samoilova graduated with a gold medal from the gymnasium and moved in 1896 to Saint Petersburg. There she studied, like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya before her, at the Bestuzhev Higher Women’s Institute. These bodies were the only higher […]

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, we are republishing this article from fifthinternational.org Sir Oswald Mosley, MP, split from Labour to form the New Party in March 1931, together with a group of left MPs. By October 1932 Mosley had transformed the party into the British Union of Fascists. Paul […]

By Chris Clough Dublin, Easter weekend 2016, saw tens of thousands of people line the streets. Flags, banners and photos of martyrs were displayed on every street corner, shop and building. Socialists and Republicans marched through the city while the government held a military parade, complete with a fly over. Graffiti and stickers called for […]

By Rebecca Anderson The year 1890 saw the first ever May Day demonstration, called by the First Congress of the Second International, with more than 300,000 workers filling London’s Hyde Park. Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, herself a prominent figure in the New Unionism movement which was then at its peak, addressed the crowds: “I am […]

The second instalment in our serialisation of a socialist history of the Labour Party. Read the first instalment: Labour’s early years: 1900-1914 By Dave Stockton The years of the First World War of 1914-18 were critical ones for the British labour movement. Its political party, its trade unions and the role they play in British life […]

The revolutionary legacy of Clara Zetkin By Joy Macready CAPITALISM from its earliest years gave birth to the modern women’s question. Women, particularly the women of the poorest classes, played a major role in its model revolution – in France in 1789. But the Rights of Man and Citizen it proclaimed turned out to be […]

The first installment in our serialisation of a socialist history of the Labour Party. Read the second instalment: Labour recruits for carnage in WW1 By Dave Stockton Keir Hardie speaking at a Women’s Suffrage demonstration in Trafalgar Square Foundation of the Labour Party, Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London, February 1906 IN FEBRUARY 1900, the Labour Representation […]

The concept of cooperatives as an alternative to both private and state ownership has resurfaced courtesy of a recent speech by Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell. This article sets out the Marxist critique of the prospects of cooperatives to exist within and act as a focus to overcome a capitalist market economy. In the 19th […]

How revolutionaries use elections as a weapon against capital.

In 1917 the working class took power in Russia with remarkably little resistance from the bosses. But shortly afterwards the capitalists regrouped and gathered support from the imperialist powers to wage a bloody war on the young communist regime that became known as the Russian Civil War. Ninety years ago in 1919 was a key […]

In 1913 Dublin workers waged a heroic battle against their employers, the church and the police. Despite being defeated, argues Bernie McAdam, the lockout lives on as the most inspirational act of working class resistance in Irish history.

On the 125th anniversary of the matchwomen’s strike in the East End of London, Joy Macready examines the strike’s origins and how it sparked the “New Unionism” movement “Born in slums, driven to work while still children, undersized because under-fed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as soon as worked out, who cares if they die […]

  Almost 80 years ago, the city of Minneapolis was a battlefield in the class war between workers and bosses. Three strikes in 1934 shook the city and American society to their foundations. The feature of these strikes by the Teamster Union Local 574 was that they were led by Trotskyists. Minneapolis boasted the strongest […]

  By Dave Stockton ANY EXPRESSION of sorrow for the death of Margaret Thatcher or praise for her qualities or achievements from any representative of the workers’ movement are a sure sign of past or future betrayals. Doubtless her self-admitted disciple, Tony Blair, will fawn over her memory. After all he shamelessly flattered her in […]

In celebration of International Women’s Day and as part of an ongoing debate about the principles of women’s organisation and the revolutionary movement, Joy Macready looks at the history of early Soviet Russia and its lessons for today The Marxist position on women’s liberation owes a great debt to a remarkable group of women in […]