The US-Israeli strikes against Iran are part of a decades-long war against the Islamic Republic which has refused to bow to US demands that it surrender its sovereignty, argues VIJAY PRASHAD
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Assessing Chinese socialism 75 years after its revolution
ANDREW MURRAY reflects on the achievements and character of socialism with Chinese characteristics
Red flags flying for Martyrs Day today in Beijing
Scotland’s deepening crises expose the human cost of political complacency — and the toll it is taking on working-class communities, says NEIL FINDLAY
History shows from Iraq to Libya, and now Iran, that regime-change fantasies rarely deliver stability — but they always deliver human and economic cost, says MARYAM ESLAMDOUST
Hundreds protested against the US-Israel attacks on Iran in Parliament Square on Saturday, fearing a wider conflagration and horrified by the targeting of young schoolchildren, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
More than a century-and-a-half after its first publication, the message of the first Communist Manifesto continues to resonate throughout the world, says the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
LUKE FLETCHER outlines Plaid Cymru bold plans for wide-ranging policy consultations with trade unions in Wales
THERE is a story, possibly apocryphal, regarding a parliamentary by-election in St Pancras, north London, in 1949. The Communist Party stood a candidate and, amidst a deteriorating Cold War atmosphere, polled fairly dismally.
Johnnie Campbell, a laconic Scotsman central to the CPGB’s leadership for decades, was dispatched to the locality to rally the troops in the aftermath. Surveying his dispirited comrades, he supposedly declared: “Well, things aren’t going our way in St Pancras right now…but we’ve won in China!”
To many, that was the immediate significance of the Chinese revolution. For millions of Communists and sympathisers around the world, as well as oppressed masses in the colonies and semi-colonies, the victory of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the party-led People’s Liberation Army was a huge advance – really the greatest conceivable – in a worldwide process of socialist revolution.
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BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
STEPHEN BELL reports from a delegation that traced the steps of China’s socialist revolution from its first modest meetings to the Red Army’s epic 9,000km battle to create the modern nation that today defies every capitalist assumption
ANDREW MURRAY casts an eye over past upheavals and asks whether the left can find a fire escape before the world goes up in flames