SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests
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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
For 80 years, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings have pleaded “never again,” for anyone. But are we listening, asks Linda Pentz Gunter
Indian communist leader MA Baby considers the chilling escalation of violence against minorities and increasing impunity for their attackers under the Modi regime
by Dr David Lowry, Institute for Resource and Security Studies
This strike is about pay and conditions, says CAMERON HARRISON – but it also shows workers have the power to disrupt the mightiest war machine on Earth
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.
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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
