From London’s holly-sellers to Engels’s flaming Christmas centrepiece, the plum pudding was more than festive fare in Victorian Britain, says KEITH FLETT
Support anti-imperialism in Latin America? Then read the Morning Star
Once the bustling heart of Christian pilgrimage, Bethlehem now faces shuttered hotels, empty streets and a shrinking Christian community, while Israel’s assault on Gaza and the tightening grip of occupation destroy hopes of peace at the birthplace of Christ, writes Father GEOFF BOTTOMS
From a lockdown digital project to a vital tool for class solidarity, ROBERT POOLE and HENRY FOWLER reflect on half-a-decade of struggle
After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
While pretending to seek peace, Europe is heading toward a collision course with Russia – using security guarantees, troop deployments, expropriation and censorship as tools, writes SEVIM DAGDELEN
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
Latin America is a region of huge significance to socialists. Viewed by Washington as its back yard, it has often borne the brunt of imperialist aggression, with a long and bitter history of coups, US-backed military dictators and bloody repression in projects like Operation Condor that killed or disappeared tens of thousands in the war to maintain US supremacy across the continent.
That tradition continues to this day. We see it in the dirty tricks used to stop Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva running for the presidency in Brazil, smoothing the way for the far-right brute Jair Bolsonaro.
We see it in the repeated attempts at violent destabilisation of Venezuela and the promotion of an unelected charlatan, Juan Guaido, as that country’s “president” appointed by Washington.
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Far-right forces are rising across Latin America and the Caribbean, armed with a common agenda of anti-communism, the culture war, and neoliberal economics, writes VIJAY PRASHAD
With its track record of leveraging cultural power for US gain and barely concealed promotion of coup attempts, the US Agency for International Development will not be mourned among the US’s southern neighbours, write JOHN PERRY and ROGER D HARRIS
Long having been considered the ‘US’s backyard,’ Latin America is the crucible of anti-imperialist struggle – yet with the rise of China as an economic and ideological counterweight to Washington, we see a new phase of that struggle emerge, writes BEN CHACKO
FIONA SIM sees the Venezuelan anti-fascist and anti-imperialist initiatives as offering hope to the rest of the world