Scottish Labour's leaders cannot keep blaming Westminster for the collapse at the ballot box, says VINCE MILLS
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Hans Modrow, 1928-2023: Son of the German Democratic Republic
The man who oversaw the peaceful yet tragic end to state socialism in the east, then stayed to fight for the working class in the newly unified Germany, passed away on February 10, aged 95. KEITH BARLOW salutes his life and career
Over 30 years since apartheid was abolished, nasty anti-migrant rhetoric sweeps the corporate media. The Commnunist Party is ready to fight back, says ROGER McKENZIE
Over 100,000 people are expected on Brussels’s streets today. Ben Chacko speaks to Belgian Workers Party’s PETER MERTENS on wage and pensions attacks that have united the fightback
FRED BAYER says the cuts to the congress cycle could be disastrous for the Scottish trade union movement
Berlin’s Soviet war memorials are becoming the latest front in a political struggle to ‘de-Sovietise’ German history. NICO POPP reports
Western Marxism is a particular version of Marxist theory developed in – and acceptable to – the capitalist nations of Europe and North America and largely divorced from political action, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
HIGHLY regarded by the many who knew and knew of him, it would be no exaggeration to say that Hans Modrow was the son of the German Democratic Republic, of which he was the last-but-one Prime Minister. Only five when the Nazis came to power, his generation was overshadowed by hatred, fascism and war. He trained as a machinist. Towards the end of the war, he was conscripted into the Volkssturm (a mass militia set up by Hitler in 1944).
He was taken prisoner of war by the Red Army and went to the Soviet Union. There he attended an anti-fascist school. In 1949 he returned to the east of Germany, the part which then became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He worked again as a machinist and joined the GDR’s Free German Youth organisation.
He soon joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) – founded in 1946 through a unification of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on the territory of the future GDR.
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