Revolution Follow

As we saw in last week's column, Germany failed to pull off a bourgeois, or capitalist, revolution in 1848. The country remained divided, politically and legally, into many small states.

Revolution, we are usually led to believe, is either impossible or undesirable. Yet the capitalist world in which we live today was brought about by revolution.

The young Karl Marx wrote in 1845, "Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point however is to change it." The need to change the world has seldom been so obvious. $6 trillion has been spent on the Iraq war, while food prices soar and millions starve.

Forty years ago this week saw an iconic moment in the history of the anti-war movement.

Among the many events staged to mark International Women’s Day last week was the Capital Woman conference in London. The highlight of the event was a speech by the black revolutionary Angela Davis.

"People need to understand that this so-called ‘war on terror’ is not Pakistan’s war – it is the US and Britain’s. Our country is being used just like when we were used against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

A Turkish revolutionary flees to Germany looking for her mother.

Revolutionary socialists in the Balkans face a difficult period ahead. The region has long been at the centre of imperial rivalry between the US and European Union (EU) on one side and Russia on the other. Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence marks a new stage in the ratcheting up of tensions.

At the 1907 conference of the Second International (the organisation of European socialist parties) Rosa Luxemburg helped write a resolution committing each party to opposing its own government in a time of war.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 represented such a fundamental transformation of society that no part of the old world would be left untouched.

The 1905 Russian Revolution started when troops massacred over 1,000 peaceful demonstrators.

Rosa Luxemburg was a unique thinker and fighter. She was born in Russian-occupied Poland in 1871. When she was 16 she joined a revolutionary party and within a few years was one of its leaders.