By Dave Stockton OCTOBER 2, 1968 witnessed the massacre of between three and four hundred of the 10,000 young demonstrators who had gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City. State forces under the orders of the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime, claimed they had been fired […]

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 […]