The National Education Union general secretary speaks to Ben Chacko on growing calls to protect children from a toxic online culture
Latest editorial
What did Lenin have to say about socialism and war?
Writing as a new era of imperialist war was unfolding, Lenin grasped how military conflict is an essential part of the class struggle – a point that’s still relevant today, writes LINDSEY GERMAN
While Iranians take to the streets en masse to protest sky-high inflation, Trump and Netanyahu are threatening military intervention. The Iranian population is trapped between a repressive regime, a suffocating economic war from the outside, and a history of dark alliances, argues MARC VANDEPITTE
Unison Scotland’s BRENDA AITCHISON says her union won’t tolerate further cuts to public services
The Danish Communist Party’s Lotte Rortoft-Madsen assesses the fallout from US threats to annex the huge Arctic island
Trump threatens war and punitive tariffs to recapture Iranian resources – just as in 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh and US corporations immediately seized 40% of the oil, says SEVIM DAGDELEN
Once derided by Farage as a ‘fraud,’ Jenrick has defected to Reform, bringing experience and political ruthlessness to the populist right — and raising the unsettling prospect of a Farage-led movement with a seasoned operative pulling the strings, says ANDREW MURRAY
THE most famous slogan associated with Lenin is “Bread, peace and land” — the simple demands posed after Russia’s February revolution in 1917 overthrew the tsar but when the working class and peasantry still faced the privations of war. The October Revolution, led by the Bolsheviks, took Russia out of the first world war.
Opposition to war was not new to Lenin or to the socialists of Europe. His political activity developed as a new and terrifying era of wars was beginning: the Spanish American war which began in Cuba in 1898, the Boer war between Britain and the South African Boers in 1900, and the Russo Japanese war in 1904, where Russia’s defeat led directly to the 1905 revolution, the “dress rehearsal” for 1917.
These wars marked the beginning of a new era of imperialist war. The latter part of the 19th century had been characterised by expansion of capital throughout Europe and North America. In addition it was the era of a new colonialism — notably the “scramble for Africa” where a number of European powers grabbed the land and resources of the continent.
Similar stories
Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ represents the first attempt at mass socialist organisation since the CPGB’s formation in 1921, argues DYLAN MURPHY
The obfuscation of Nazism’s capitalist roots has seen imperialism redeploy fascism again and again — from the killing fields of Guatemala to the war in Ukraine, writes PAWEL WARGAN
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
As Donald Trump returns, it’s also worth returning to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, writes MATT WILLGRESS