When Rosa Luxemburg was murdered 90 years ago this month, the international workers' movement lost one of its greatest revolutionaries. Here we reprint an evaluation of her life from a pamphlet by Socialist Workers Party founder Tony Cliff, first published in 1959.
István Mészáros won the 1971 Deutscher Prize for his book Marx's Theory of Alienation and has written on Marxism ever since. He talks to Judith Orr and Patrick Ward about the current economic crisis.
The protests that have shaken Greece are a sign of things to come. Initially over the shooting of a teenager by police in Athens, demonstrations and riots spread across the country, threatening the future of the government and crystallising the depth of bitterness and anger among working class people.
Our societies are supersaturated with unrecognised anger that can suddenly crystallise around a single incident of police abuse or state repression. Yet although the seeds of revolt have been so flagrantly sown bourgeois society seldom recognises its own harvest.
It is accepted wisdom that President Franklin D Roosevelt pulled the US out of the Depression with the New Deal. But in reality there were numerous forces at play.
As global capitalism flounders, the world's governments are scrambling to use state action to try to stop the rot and bail out the system. After two decades of being told that the market works best, the state is back.
Unemployment has risen to its highest level since 1997, and is set to continue increasing dramatically in the near future as the recession starts to bite.
Voters in Glenrothes backed Labour in a surprise by-election win last month. The victory in itself was not the only boost for the beleaguered Gordon Brown.
The scale of the crisis, and the avalanche of job losses, underlines the need for the working class to fight. This is why it was so disappointing to see two unions that have led the resistance, the teachers' NUT and the civil service's PCS, turn away from strikes earlier this month.
By the time you read this, "Sachsgate" - the events that culminated in the suspension of two of the BBC's highest-profile presenters and the resignation of a senior radio executive - will have, in all likelihood, disappeared from the front pages of those newspapers that used it to paint a picture of moral decay with the BBC at its epicentre.
They leech off the system, destroy public services, and bring unemployment and now they're threatening to come to Britain. But this is one group of migrants to whom the gutter press won't be devoting the front pages - hedge fund managers.
The impact of the economic crisis over the past year has led to a significant change in our phone habits according to recent figures from directory enquiry service 118118.
