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Ninety years ago, on the morning of 13th March 1920, a brigade of
soldiers marched into Berlin and declared the German government of the
Social Democrats to be overthrown. Not a shot was fired by any side and
the response of the leaders of the government was simply to flee. The
very forces which the Social Democrats had place so much trust in had
turned against them. The Kapp Putsch, as it has become known as, was
challenged instead by the workers.
Thirty years ago the overthrow of 2500 years of monarchy brought Iran to the attention of the world. However, what many experts, journalists and academics concentrate on is that the Shah left the country forever on January 16 1979, and that on February 1 Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran and was greeted by over three million people. This has helped to create the big myth that this was an ‘Islamic revolution’ and a rejection of modernity.
In November we wrote about how the German Revolution ended
World War I in November 1918. After 4 years of intense warfare, the
German workers and soldiers ended the war that had cost millions of people their lives. The
emperor fell and a Social Democratic government came to power. This was
Germany's own equivalent of the Russian "February Revolution" of 1917
that overthrew the Tsar.
The workers and soldiers had taken power into their hands but also
handed it over to the very same people who so shamefully supported the war in
1914. Right wing Social Democrats Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske were catapulted
into power and Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who
had opposed the war, were left
with a small group of 3,000 revolutionaries in the Spartacus League.
From the Speakers Corner internet radio show, Heiko Khoo interviews
David Brandon, Marxist historian, on the British state, crime,
punishment, transport and slavery.
Comrade George McCartney passed away in November 2007 at the age of 90. George was active in the trade union movement and Labour movement for most of his life and it is fitting that we remember him a year after his death. We are reproducing the tribute given at his funeral service by his sons Sean and Neil in Cambridge last December.
On the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918,
the armistice took effect on the Western front. One year after the
victory of the Russian Revolution, the German proletariat had entered
the scene of world history and brought an end to "the Great War".
Austria-Hungary soon followed suit and the "old regime" had collapsed.
Thirty
five years ago on 11th September 1973 a coup eliminated the
democratic Popular Unity government in Chile and killed the elected President
Salvador Allende in the presidential palace. In the days, weeks and months that
followed tens of thousands of activists were murdered and dumped in unmarked
graves by the military. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned and tortured –
many in Santiago football stadium. This was a catastrophe for the Chilean and
international working class.
On the 26th of Ocotber 1972, the then President of the Republic of
Dahomey was deposed in a coup d'etat led by Major Mathieu Kérékou. He deposed a
system in which three members of a presidential council would rotate power. He overthrew the President Justin Ahomadegbé,
who was placed in house arrest until 1981 alongside the other members of the presidential
governing council who were Hubert Maga and Sourou-Migan Apithy.
Harry DeBoer wrote this pamphlet in 1987 to inspire
a new generation of trade union activists with the militant traditions of US
labour’s past. As a young man he worked in the Minneapolis coal yards and
became caught up and radicalised in the Minneapolis ‘teamster rebellion’ of
1934. As he makes clear, this was a model strike, and it was led by Marxists.
(See our review of 
We republish one of Ted Grant’s most important
writings. In the years after the Second World War the Trotskyist movement had to
reorient itself to a very different situation to that envisaged by Trotsky when
he had founded the Fourth International in 1938. Rather than falling into
crisis, capitalism in Western Europe and North America was experiencing a boom
which was later described as a ‘golden age’. After the post-War revolutionary
wave was seen off in the advanced capitalist countries, this made conditions
for revolutionaries very difficult. Illusions that capitalism had solved all
its problems began to develop quite widely. Ted analysed the causes of the boom
and why it would come to an end in ‘
Before the
establishment of the NHS in 1948, the provision of health care was inextricably
bound up with religion and controlling the poor. What is clear is that
capitalism has never been able to provide health care for working people and
they have been forced to rely on charity and philanthropy.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the
National Health Service, once described by Tony Benn as the “the most socialist
and most popular” of all institutions in the UK. Supported even by a majority
of Tory voters over the years, ardent supporters of privatisation such as
Margaret Thatcher, was obliged to assure voters that “The NHS is safe in our
hands!”
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