Economists estimate extreme poverty could be drastically reduced for a fraction of global defence spending, yet military budgets continue to expand year on year, says JON TRICKETT MP, ahead of the Stop the War International Conference on Saturday
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Red Rosa, the communist eagle
Lenin described Rosa Luxemburg as a communist eagle after her murder a hundred years ago this week. PETER FROST finds no reason to disagree
As Unison launches its Year of Women Workers, ANNIE COGAN-THOMAS argues that stronger organisation and collective bargaining are essential to winning equality
Trade unions, trades councils and community organisations must work together to build lasting solidarity and resistance to the far right, argues DREW GILCHRIST
Recent violence in Belfast was not spontaneous — it was built on years of failure and political neglect, argues STIOFAN O NUALLAIN
As delegates meet in Brighton this week, Unison faces pressing questions about pay, organising, workers’ rights and political representation, explains ANDY CHAFFER
Andy Burnham’s growing stature has fuelled hopes of a Labour revival – but ALAN SIMPSON warns that Britain’s crisis runs far deeper than just its leadership and traces its roots to decades of financialised capitalism
ONE hundred years ago, as the last days of 1918 became the early days of 1919, the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD), with 50,000 members, held a crucial congress.
Inspired by the success of Lenin and his 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, they voted to oppose both the councils and the Constituent Assembly that were ruling a defeated, demoralised and almost destroyed country and organise an armed uprising to take power and establish a truly socialist Germany.
Communist Party founder and Spartacus League leader and theoretician Rosa Luxemburg was far from convinced that such a move could be successful, but she decided reluctantly to join the fight. This German revolution, with inadequate forces, fizzled out rather as Luxemburg had so sadly predicted.
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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
CJ ATKINS commemorates one of the most dramatic moments in working-class history
Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ represents the first attempt at mass socialist organisation since the CPGB’s formation in 1921, argues DYLAN MURPHY