The annual commemoration of anti-fascist volunteers who fought fascism in Spain now includes a key contribution from Italian comrades
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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
The Islamic Republic’s suddenly weakened regional position exposes the nation to grave threats from US imperialism
DONG XUE explains why US tariffs hold no significant threat to China
ANSELM ELDERGILL asks whether artificial intelligence may decide legal cases in the future, in place of human judges, and how AI could reshape the legal landscape
Like pieces on a chess board, centrist parties lose ground as they accommodate rather than challenge far-right agendas — socialists must play things better, warns MATT KERR
Yanis Varoufakis and Jeremy Corbyn laid out a roadmap for peace, justice and equality as they celebrated the legacy of inspirational socialist Tony Benn, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The NEU’s annual conference promises heated debate, with motions on international politics, curriculum reform and union amalgamation likely to provoke strong reactions and challenge the status quo, writes Education for Tomorrow editor ROBERT POOLE
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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