1973 in Chile was a year of hope and tragedy. Hope because one of the world’s best organised and most militant working classes was engaged in a fierce class war, and tragedy because it lost. Fifty years have now passed since the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973, which established a seventeen-year military dictatorship. The lessons of the period remain important.
Two years after seizing power in a coup, Min Aung Hlaing’s junta in Myanmar continues to be ensnared in a civil war that shows no signs of abating.
Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) is often described as the “founder of German social democracy”. But his influence on the German workers’ movement was mostly disastrous.
Socialist delegates are attending the National Union of Students National Conference this year to secure key activist positions in the union for the left and to fight for a much-needed activist strategy.
The history of class societies is awash with revolutionary uprisings, but no class system has seen more revolutionary ferment than capitalism. Throughout its 250-year history, not a decade has gone by without revolutionary struggle breaking out somewhere, and periodically there are waves of revolution that sweep across several countries. The most recent was the Arab Spring in 2011, in which revolutions erupted one after another across the Middle East and North Africa.
One hundred years ago, in October 1922, Benito Mussolini’s paramilitary blackshirts marched on the Italian capital to demand the dissolution of the government of Prime Minister Luigi Facta. The March on Rome is the foundational myth of fascist power. Through this daring act, so the story goes, the strongman Mussolini installed himself as head of the Italian government.