SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
Marx, Engels and the English Easter break
From bemoaning London’s ‘cockneys’ invading seaside towns to negotiating holiday rents, the founders of scientific socialism maintained a wry detachment from Victorian Easter customs while using the break for health and politics, writes KEITH FLETT
Morning Star international editor ROGER McKENZIE says Trump’s ceaseless belligerence is a desperate effort to prevent the emergence of a multilateral world
Don’t dismiss Lebanon as a side theatre of this war, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN — there are signs Israel has expansion in mind, and it has demonstrated its willingness to expel and kill whole populations
The media present Starmer as staying out of Trump’s war — but we’re already deeply involved in a conflict that sees the US and Israel kill civilians on a huge scale, argues IAN SINCLAIR
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER reports on this week’s conference unveiling the findings of the Gaza Tribunal established by Jeremy Corbyn
CHRISTOPHE IMMER of the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt reports on a Berlin conference on the politics of art and the legacy of Marxist critic Hans Hess
THE correspondence between Marx, Engels and others occupies several volumes of the 50-volume Collected Works. The correspondence, of course, is not a diary and much is rightly taken up with the theory and practice of politics.
Yet there are passages which reflect Marx and Engels’ life in mid-Victorian England and how they viewed affairs in what was then the predominant capitalist power. These insights often informed their political and theoretical work and they also take away from the right-wing stereotype that Marx and Engels were iconoclasts untroubled by the issues and difficulties of daily life.
While Christmas had been reinstated as a holiday period in the 1850s, partly thanks to the efforts of Charles Dickens, the marking of Easter developed more slowly. Good Friday, then as now, was an important Christian occasion but Easter Monday did not become a public holiday until after the 1871 Bank Holidays Act. Before then, cheap rail excursions for the working class had started to become a feature.
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