From its formation in the 1890s, the ALP has consistently sought to mediate the ongoing struggle between capitalists and workers. Labor leaders have striven to confine class conflict within limits that are compatible with the long-term stability and profitability of the capitalist system.
The chants rang out through cities and towns around the world as protesters defiantly challenged the US Supreme Court’s 1 July decision to end national access to abortion: “We won’t go back!” and “Our bodies! Our lives! Our right to decide!”
In the late 1960s, cryptic notes began to appear on poles and noticeboards around Chicago, directing women who were pregnant and in trouble to “call Jane”. The number provided connected them to the Jane Collective (officially the Abortion Counselling Service of Women’s Liberation), an underground network of activists providing illegal abortions in the years before the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. This collective is the subject of The Janes, a new HBO documentary directed by Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin.
Janey Stone’s brilliant Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands: The radical Jewish tradition, published as a supplement to issue 23 of the Marxist Left Review, brings to life the radical history of the Jewish working class. Stone provides a counter-narrative to what historian Maxime Rodinson has called the “lachrymose conception” of Jewish history—the idea that Jews have been the eternal and helpless victims of insurmountable anti-Semitism, saved only by the creation of the armed state of Israel.
'Pravda', the newspaper indelibly associated with the Bolshevik Party and the Russian Revolution, means 'truth'. It’s an appropriate name for a publication that set out to relate and generalise the experiences and struggles of the Russian working class, which was numerically small and scattered over a vast area in the early twentieth century.
“Attention, MOVE. This is America. You have to abide by the laws of the United States.” This was the ultimatum given through a Philadelphia police megaphone to a group of Black activists trapped in their home in the early morning of 13 May 1985. The house on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia was surrounded by hundreds of police. Thirteen MOVE members, including five children, were inside.