Skip to main content
Work with the NEU
The fusing of the pandemic, refugee and economic crises
Only working-class solidarity, compassion and organising for the common good will see us through them, writes KEVIN OVENDEN
Refugees wearing face masks on the edges of Lesbos's notorious Moria camp

HUMANITY faces a future of “socialism or barbarism,” wrote the Czech Marxist thinker Karl Kautsky in the period before the first world war.

That “war to end all wars” brought what was then the unimaginable suffering of the slaughter in the trenches. The great leaps in technology and engineering of advancing capitalism were turned to instruments of death.

It was followed by the global spread of a highly dangerous strain of influenza, incubated in the overcrowded, unsanitary military camps. It infected 27 per cent of the world’s population.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
Firefighters put out the fire in the ruins of an apartment building following Russia's missile attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 7, 2026
Features / 8 March 2026
8 March 2026

SEVIM DAGDELEN asks why the European Union is targeting the Swiss academic Jacques Baud, cutting off his access to banking services

ETHNIC STRIFE: Women condemn, yesterday, a video in circulation that allegedly shows a fighter affiliated with the Syrian government holding the braid of a Kurdish female fighter after killing her, in Qamishli, northeastern Syria
Middle East / 23 January 2026
23 January 2026

VIJAY PRASHAD details how US support for Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa allowed him to break the resistance of the autonomous Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)

Guillaume Périgois
Politics / 14 August 2025
14 August 2025

Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT

shower
Books / 13 June 2025
13 June 2025

RON JACOBS welcomes a book that tells the story of the far right in Greece from the perspective of migrants