SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
Marxism-Leninism and the Russian Revolution
MARY DAVIS examines Lenin’s contribution to Marxist theory and practice and how it relates to the great events of 1917
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
LENIN is commonly perceived solely as a revolutionary activist who applied Marxist theory to the practice of revolution — a successful one! However this is not the whole story. Lenin was an important theoretician who developed Marxist theory in three important and linked areas.
First, Lenin’s theoretical construction of the October Revolution itself. The two revolutions in 1917 were planned and executed through the combination of theory and practice. As George Lukacs put it, the October Revolution was the point at which “theory bursts into praxis.” This was not a spontaneous “uprising,” it was carefully planned in accordance with Marxist theory applied concretely to Russian reality.
Second, Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Lenin himself gave the briefest possible definition of imperialism as the monopoly stage of capitalism. “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”
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