The long running dispute at Southern Rail has taken a further dramatic turn after drivers in the Aslef union voted down a deal recommended by their General Secretary Mick Whelan and the TUC by 54 per cent to 46 per cent. A successful and defiant strike by RMT drivers and conductors on the same day […]

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 […]

By Martin Suchanek  This article was originally published in Neue Internationale – Frauen Zeitung, the German language magazine of the League for the Fifth International The war against Islamic State, the renewal of state bans on Islamic women’s dress in the West and the spread of Islamist terrorism has renewed the focus on Islam as […]

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 […]

By Joy Macready Women’s oppression long predates capitalism. Indeed it goes back to the origins of class society. But each succeeding mode of production and exploitation altered the family unit of women’s oppression and exploitation. Capitalism Industrial capitalism revolutionised the nature of production, taking it out of the family home. Although the household stopped being […]

From Clara Zetkin to the New York garment strike of 1908

IN A time of increasing political instability and tension that has given us Donald Trump and Brexit, it’s reassuring to see one old tradition reasserting itself against a global lurch to the right. Returning to the radical social roots that inspired its foundation in the early decades of the 20th century, International Women’s Day has […]

Normally, American Jewish leaders would expect to feel quite positive about a new US President apparently more friendly to Israel than his immediate predecessor. But Donald Trump’s actions since his inauguration seem to have thrown many of them into a panic. This is not entirely attributable to his antisemitic provocations, like his statement on Holocaust […]

By Katie Pelikanou On February 28 representatives from the European Union, European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund arrived in Athens to discuss terms for a fourth bailout package for the Greek government. These negotiations had initially stalled, with the IMF dubious about Greece’s ability to achieve a ‘sustainable’ fiscal surplus, givent that the […]

As epected and intended, the Copeland and Stoke by-elections were severe setbacks for Labour and for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Whatever the particular reasons for the defeat in the two seats, the campaign and the result shows that an army of activists is no use if you haven’t got a clear altnernative. That Labour, not the […]