At a few minutes past noon on Easter Monday 1916, Irish Republican leader Padraic Pearse emerged from the General Post Office in Dublin and read out a proclamation announcing the birth of the Irish Republic. Overhead a banner announced, "We serve neither King nor Kaiser".
Through the vaguest promises, Tony Blair has managed to dissuade many backbenchers from open revolt against his education plans, though others remain firm.
In all probability most readers of Socialist Worker will not have heard of Alasdair MacIntyre. Today, he is best known in academia as the author of one of the most important recent books on moral theory—After Virtue.
In our school history books it is called "the Suez crisis". This was the moment when the sun went down on the British Empire. Egyptians call the events of October and November 1956 "the triple aggression". They remember with pride how they defeated an invasion by Israel, Britain and France.
In 1956 I was a worker in a small factory in Alexandria. I had only just got out prison after two and half years on a charge of leading a Communist organisation. I was 17 years old and a member of a group called Workers’ Vanguard.
"Who is the greatest thinker of the millennium?" asked a recent BBC poll. Karl Marx topped the list. Another survey, this time of the US Library of Congress—the world’s largest library—found that, with nearly 4,000 works, Marx was the sixth most written about individual ever.
Read our new monthly supplement SR, with this issue, with a lead article by Chris Jones on New Myths of the East End, an interview with Us author Studs Terkel and Third World Reports on Mali, Thailand, Iraq and Latin AMerica
French students take to the streets and occupy their colleges. The police attack with batons and tear gas. It’s no surprise that people ask, is it 1968 all over again?
In a recent article in the Guardian Martin Kettle wrote that "after 1956 socialism became more than ever just a matter of religious faith rather than reason".
In May this year we will be marking the 80th anniversary of the General Strike of 1926. It was one of the struggles that, during the 20th century, marked out the British working class as having tremendous strength and combativity – but also craven and incompetent leaders.
