One hundred a fifty years ago a meeting in London met to found the first international workers’ organisation, the International Working Men’s Association. Christian Høgsbjerg shows how Karl Marx made a vital contribution to the IWMA and how he fought to ensure its militant trajectory.
The biggest news story of the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe was the successful boycott of two state-funded Israeli productions.
The successful strike by platinum miners marks an important shift in the confidence of South African workers. The miners, who are part of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), struck for five months in one of the country’s longest running industrial disputes. They won significant concessions from the bosses, a 20 percent wage...
The World Health Organisation (who) warned in April of the “devastating” potential impacts of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics are used to kill bacteria. Before they were used widely in the 1950s, minor infections could become serious or even fatal. They are also vital for surgery and for preventing people from getting ill when their ability to...
Big corporations are cash rich. The 2,000 biggest companies by capital expenditure are sitting on a cash mountain of gross £2.6 trillion. But they aren’t spending it on new rounds of capital investment despite all the talk of an economic recovery. Standard & Poor estimate that such spending is likely to fall by 0.5 percent...
Professor John Aston, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health which represents 3,300 public health experts working in the NHS, local government and academia, has called for the end of the five day week. Ashton argues that a four-day week would reduce high levels of work-related stress, allow people to people spend more time...
10 July is set to see a second round of public sector mass strikes under the Conservative- Liberal coalition government following the pension strikes of June and November 2011. As such the strike by around 1.4 million workers across schools, councils, fire stations and civil service workplaces breaks an unwritten rule among most of the...
We are told that the Great War was fought to stop German aggression. But the bloody conflict pitted imperial states against each other in a war for colonies.
The decision by mass socialist parties in the Second International to support the war cast a long shadow over the continent.
All along the frontlines ordinary soldiers agreed unofficial truces known as 'live and let live'.
As the First World War broke out Lenin called for socialists to oppose their own governments. How his analysis of the war and his defeat slogan were eventually proved to be correct.
A sense of panic had begun to grip the British establishment as the break up of the United Kingdom looms as a possibility. A sense of panic had begun to grip the British establishment as the break up of the United Kingdom looms as a possibility. Socialists should support the dissolution of a key imperialist state and that the left has been able to shape the independence campaign. argues socialists should support the dissolution of a key imperialist state and that the left has been able to shape the independence campaign.
