Scottish Labour's leaders cannot keep blaming Westminster for the collapse at the ballot box, says VINCE MILLS
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Leonardo and the dialectics of nature
On the 570th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s birth, JENNY FARRELL takes a look at the techniques that made the great Renaissance painter and scientist’s work so significant
Leonardo’s masterpiece, the Mona Lisa (c1503–1506)
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
LEONARDO DA VINCI was born 570 years ago, on April 15 1452 near the village of Vinci, from which he takes his name.
His mother Caterina was a servant, his father, a professional notary, with whom he was living by 1457 and later with his paternal grandfather. It was during the seven years with his grandfather that Leonardo learned to read, write and calculate.
He never learned Latin, Greek or higher mathematics. Instead, he took up an apprenticeship and ended up in the workshop of a master painter in Florence, which in the 15th century, like much of Italy, was a violent place, where rival merchant dynasties fought each other for power.
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