Robinson successfully defended his school from closure, fought for the unification of the teaching unions, mentored future trade union leaders and transformed teaching at the Marx Memorial Library, writes JOHN FOSTER
The great balloon fiasco
While it is impossible not to see the absurdity of ever-escalating US claims over balloon spying – in the press, by the military and by politicians – they have deadly serious consequences and raise the risk of war, argues ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
In this image provided by the FBI, special agents assigned to the evidence response team process
material recovered from the high-altitude balloon recovered off the coast of South Carolina, at the FBI
laboratory in Virginia; and (right) the remnants of the large balloon drift above the Atlantic Ocean
A judge in a German court ruled that the ban activity imposed on renowned Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah was unlawful, reports LEON WYSTRYCHOWSKI
At the very moment Britain faces poverty, housing and climate crises requiring radical solutions, the liberal press promotes ideologically narrow books while marginalising authors who offer the most accurate understanding of change, writes IAN SINCLAIR
From Gaza protest bans to proscribing Palestine Action, political elites are showing a crisis of confidence as they abandon Roy Jenkins’s apologetic approach for Suella Braverman’s aggressive ‘hate march’ rhetoric, writes PAUL DONOVAN
ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the legal case behind this weekend’s Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival and the lessons for today
Ben Chacko talks to RMT leader EDDIE DEMPSEY about how the key to fixing broken Britain lies in collective sectoral bargaining, restoring unions’ ability to take solidarity strike action and bringing about the much-vaunted ‘wave of insourcing’
The summer of 1950 saw Labour abandon further nationalisation while escalating Korean War spending from £2.3m to £4.7m, as the government meekly accepted capitalism’s licence and became Washington’s yes-man, writes JOHN ELLISON
KARL MARX famously said in the Eighteenth Brumaire that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
While there are many examples of this insight from history, Marx could not foresee how farce would become the staple of the US ruling class, how elites would defend what they see as their interests with a web of calculated deception extending beyond the limits of the absurd.
Like the mad General Jack D Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s great film, Dr Strangelove, a US Air Force four-star General, Mike Minihan, “sent a memo on Friday [January 27] to the officers he commands that predicts the US will be at war with China in two years and tells them to get ready to prep by firing ‘a clip’ at a target, and ‘aim for the head’,” as reported by NBC News.
More from this author
The prospect of the Democratic Socialists of America member’s victory in the mayoral race has terrified billionaires and outraged the centrist liberal Establishment by showing that listening to voters about class issues works, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
In 2024, 19 households grew richer by $1 trillion while 66 million households shared 3 per cent of wealth in the US, validating Marx’s prediction that capitalism ‘establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital,’ writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
ZOLTAN ZIGEDY reflects on the lessons from two books looking at the US labour movement and the recent history of spontaneous mass uprisings – and finds two pernicious ideologies working against the interests of the people
