The recent centenary of the Russian Revolution produced a renewed flurry of interest in the events of 1917 and reminded us of their huge impact. The focus of those discussions for revolutionary socialists was quite rightly the significance of the… Continue Reading
A review of Richard J Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Little, Brown, 2019), £35 Breadth and verve made Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) the most sold and most translated of socialist historians ever to write in English. Compared with his… Continue Reading
In March 2011 the Arab Spring arrived in Syria. Syrians had lived under the totalitarianism of the Asad family, first with the father, Hafez al-Asad (1971-2000), followed by the son, Bashaar al-Asad, for 40 years.1 This included a state of… Continue Reading
The election to India’s Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament) ended on 23 May 2019 with the stunning success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies. The BJP is a pro-business and Hindu-nationalist party. It bagged 303… Continue Reading
Avtar Singh Jouhl is the national president of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA GB) and was a leading workplace militant and anti-racist activist in the Smethwick area and in the foundries of the West Midlands from the late 1950s through… Continue Reading
On 8 August 2019 the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, hailed a former torturer—Brilhante Ustra—as a “national hero”.1 This gesture may be very enlightening, explaining who Bolsonaro is: a genealogy of his own roots in the Brazilian Army would connect him… Continue Reading