Revolution Follow

A Venezuelan school taken over by parents, students and teachers is the exciting subject of a new photographic exhibition.

Chris Harman analyses critical choices facing the Latin American left.

Letters

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has become a focus across Latin America for resistance to George Bush, writes Hugh O’Shaughnessy

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a great painter. Anyone who enjoys painting or is interested in the history of art will gain pleasure, and perhaps inspiration, from the exhibition of his work, Rubens: A Master in the Making, now showing at the National Gallery in London.

By December 1905, Russia was gearing itself up for a full-scale counter-revolution.

The First World War precipitated an international revolutionary crisis. That the climax had already occurred in the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 was far from apparent during the immediate post-war years.

The Trade Union Congress (TUC) meeting last week passed a motion to oppose the attempts of the US administration and Venezuelan bosses to overthrow Hugo Chavez.

In order for ideas to gain popular acceptance, Antonio Gramsci argued, those ideas have to be carried down into society by layers of individuals.

In the seven years since he was first elected to Venezuela’s presidency, Hugo Chavez’s government has faced three direct challenges.

In 1986 tens of thousands of Filipinos demonstrated on a busy thoroughfare in the Philippine capital of Manila, in an event that soon became known as the "people power revolution". The mass protests ended over 20 years of corrupt and brutal dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos, restoring liberal democracy to the country.

Who talks of revolution today? The mainstream social democratic left — re-branded as the "centre left" — has long given up talking about socialism, let alone revolution.