Without energy and without a strategic partner, Cuba is currently fighting for its survival. While the population is literally sitting in the dark, the Trump administration is trying to definitively break the socialist project through economic blackmail. What lies ahead for the island, asks MARC VANDEPITTE
The Marxist staycation – Marx and Engels at the Victorian seaside in 1857
KEITH FLETT advises British Marxists to get in the sea
A setback for IG Metall at Tesla’s Berlin plant has ignited claims of intimidation and raised fears for the future of collective bargaining and workplace democracy, says TONY BURKE
The question for the media, in the US and across the globe, says ROGER McKENZIE, is will they do their job fearlessly and call Donald Trump out?
A recent Financial Times column on the Iran war exemplifies how the Western elite worldview is more concerned with strategy and power than legality or human life, writes ANDREW MURRAY
STEVE BISHOP considers the prospects for a settlement of the conflict and how the demands of both sides are being viewed
The PM is drawing cautious distance from Donald Trump over Iran – but history suggests Britain’s support may run deeper than it appears, just as it did during the Vietnam war, says KEITH FLETT
WITH the government’s chaotic handling of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, suddenly announcing changes late at night on Twitter, the attractiveness of a summer break in Britain, for those still able to afford it, has more attraction than usual.
The August weather is notoriously unreliable, but for socialists there is a chance to visit some of the locations that Marx and Engels enjoyed in the second half of the 19th century.
Not quite all are by the sea. There are references in the correspondence to Buxton, then a major spa town, and within reach of Manchester, for example.
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The selection, analysis and interpretation of historical ‘facts’ always takes place within a paradigm, a model of how the world works. That’s why history is always a battleground, declares the Marx Memorial Library
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
From bemoaning London’s ‘cockneys’ invading seaside towns to negotiating holiday rents, the founders of scientific socialism maintained a wry detachment from Victorian Easter customs while using the break for health and politics, writes KEITH FLETT