Since 2010, one in five firefighter jobs has disappeared alongside 30% funding cuts — all while climate breakdown brings record blazes and flooding. It’s time to fund our fire service properly, writes FBU general secretary STEVE WRIGHT
Latest editorial
Defending materialism: Lenin the philosopher
NICK MATTHEWS looks at the great Bolshevik leader’s intense three-week period of furious study in the British Library in 1908 and the timeless classic on Marxism and philosophy it produced: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
Lenin speaking in Moscow's Red Square on May Day, 1919
In the current climate, it is vital to bust the myths and put forward the case for a humane and decent social security system that supports people, argues FRAN HEATHCOTE
CWU leader DAVE WARD tells Ben Chacko a strategy to unite workers on class lines is needed – and sectoral collective bargaining must be at its heart
Labour must not allow unelected members of the upper house to erode a single provision of the Employment Rights Bill, argues ANDY MCDONALD MP
With 121,000 vacancies and 44.8% of staff feeling unwell from work stress, the NHS 10-year plan will not succeed unless the government takes immediate action to retain existing staff, writes ANNETTE MANSELL-GREEN
With 90 courses from health and safety to neurodiversity, AI and political economy, we are helping workers understand the political context of their struggles, writes general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE
LIKE many of the participants in the Marx Memorial Library symposium Lenin in Britain, held earlier this year (available on the MML website), I learned something new about Lenin.
The session I found particularly fascinating was the one by Robert Henderson. Robert was the former curator of the Russian collections at the British Library and his assiduous detective work in the library archives has helped map what Lenin spent his time doing during his six visits to London between 1902 and 1911.
The title of Robert’s excellent book, The Spark that Lit the Revolution, alludes to the fact that Lenin in 1902 had produced the Bolshevik newspaper Iskra (The Spark) at what was then the Twentieth Century Press at 37a Clerkenwell Green. This was despite the challenges of communication with Robert Quelch, editor of the Social-Democratic Federation journals Justice and Social Democrat. Lenin’s English was as poor as Quelch’s Russian.
More from this author
NICK MATTHEWS welcomes the return of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music to the repertoire of this years’ Three Choirs Festival
From sexual innuendo about Blackpool Rock to Bob Dylan’s ‘God-almighty world,’ the corporation’s classist moral custodianship of pop music has created a roll call of censored artists anyone would feel honoured to join, writes NICK MATTHEWS
NICK MATTHEWS previews a landmark book launch taking place in Leicester next weekend
As new wind, solar and nuclear capacity have displaced coal generation, China has been able to drastically lower its CO2 emissions even as demand for power has increased — the world must take note and get ready to follow, writes NICK MATTHEWS
