Page 184 - Leon Trotsky News Today

news Two former European leaders and their post-Soviet power plays dw.com 12/01/2021 Jo Harper Ex-UK PM Tony Blair has finished his work on the TAP, while Germanys Gerhard Schröder is helping on Nord Stream 2. What is it with 1990s Social Democrats that attracts them to authoritarian leaders and their pipelines? © picture-alliance/TASS/A. Druzhinin Theres no doubt Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schröder like each other The completion of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) — w...

“The end is in sight. Effectively deployed testing may be able to ameliorate social distancing until the vaccines arrive …To have several highly effective vaccines for this horrible virus after less than a year is a quite astonishing achievement, among the greatest things that we — by which I mean both humanity in general and molecular biologists in particular — have ever accomplished.” So wrote Rupert Beale of the Francis Crick Institute in the London Review of Books early last mont...

Trumps most aggressive loyalists and defenders now find themselves being attacked by extremists

January 7, 2021 —  Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddells Marxist Essays and Commentary — Many socialist groups today seek to shape their organizational principles in the spirit of “democratic centralism” identified with V.I. Lenin. Yet as historian Lars Lih has demonstrated (“Fortunes of a Formula” and “Further Fortunes of a Formula”), Lenin himself used the term only occasionally, and then with widely varying emphasis. The formula’...

Read online at https://workersliberty.org/node/36580 "Progressive alliance" or socialist politics? Submitted by martin on 5 January, 2021 - 6:10 Author: Micheál MacEoin "The theoreticians of the Popular Front do not essentially go beyond the first rule of arithmetic, that is, addition: "Communists" plus Socialists plus Anarchists plus liberals add up to a total which is greater than their respective isolated numbers. Such is all their wisdom. However, arithmetic alone does not...

The events of this week have made clear that US President Donald Trump is actively engaged in a conspiracy to reject the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, overthrow the Constitution, and establish a dictatorship in the United States.

Best films and television of the year and the devastation of cultural life As the year ends, it is not possible to discuss any aspect of artistic life, or life in general, in 2020 without central reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, which the various ruling elites have permitted to ravage the world’s population. In late March, we noted that “the global health and economic calamity” was without precedent. “Whatever the outcome in the short term,” we wrote, “social life and consciousne...

The movement against the far right in the 1970s was made at gigs and on the street. Jo Holland reviews White Riot and Paul Holborow, tells the story of building the Anti Nazi League. Just over 11 percent of film directors in the UK are women. Statistics around ethnicity are unreliable, but assuming that the majority of this tiny group are white, it is fitting and gratifying that Rubika Shah, director of seminal music documentary White Riot, is an Asian woman. The film takes us back to the time ...

Messenger MODERN countries came up with a system that entails separation of powers embedded in their constitutions. The goal was to strike a balance among the components of the state, and to prevent one authority from overstepping the authority of the other. This is why popular revolutions erupted when some parliaments overstepped and even dominated the executive authorities, as seen during the 17th century in Britain in the so-called “Parliamentary Revolution”, which led to a civil war tha...

Jacobin glorifies Dolores Ibárruri, Stalinist executioner of the Spanish Revolution Part one On December 9, Jacobin magazine, which is closely linked to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), published an article titled “La Pasionaria, Heroine of the Spanish Civil War.” The occasion was the 125th anniversary of the birth of Dolores Ibárruri, gushingly described by the author, British historian Paul Preston, as “an inspirational Civil War heroine and a universal earth-mother figure...