Shortly before Socialist Review went to press we heard of the death of Walter Wolfgang at the age of 95. He was a socialist, a Labour Party activist and an anti-war campaigner — one of the founding members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
He was perhaps most famous for heckling the then foreign secretary Jack Straw’s speech on Iraq at the Labour Party conference in 2005. We wrote in Socialist Review at the time:
Theresa May has announced she's standing down, yet there is still no end in sight for the Brexit debacle. Sally Campbell analyses the European election results and the pressures coming to bear on Corbyn.
Goodbye Theresa. Socialist Review is happy to file you away in the box marked “Tory detritus”. Private Eye’s new issue following May’s announcement that she would be resigning on 7 June features the headline, “Theresa May Memorial Issue: The Prime Minister’s Legacy in Full”, followed by a blank space. But this is far too kind.
Molly and Amy are best friends who have spent their high school careers focusing on getting the best possible grades so they can get into the best possible colleges and kickstart their bright futures.
The day before graduation Molly is in a toilet cubicle and overhears some students joking about her nerdy status. She challenges them, boasting that she will be heading off to Yale while they will probably end up in crappy jobs because they’ve spent their time partying.
Mike Hoolihan is my kind of detective. She dresses like Johnny Cash, rarely smiles and the only adornment in her sparse bedroom is a picture of Patti Smith.
We first see Rosa Luxemburg in a snowy prison yard, guards patrolling the walls high above her. As she walks a raven hops beside her, the first of many references to Rosa’s affinity with nature. It’s 1906 and Rosa has been locked up in Poland for her involvement in the 1905 Russian Revolution.
A remarkable figure amid a revolutionary ferment, Rosa Luxemburg lit the way for generations to come. Sally Campbell recalls her legacy, and we reprint Luxemburg's final article, written the day before she died in January 1919.
Rosa Luxemburg is, without a doubt, one of the most important revolutionaries to emerge from that tumultuous period that ran from the end of the 19th century through to the aftermath of the First World War. This was a time of immense social, political, technological and economic change. It was also the time when socialist revolution became real — and Luxemburg contributed to theorising and partaking in those revolutions, right up until her murder at the hands of the counter-revolutionaries in Berlin on 15 January 1919.
Disobedience is Chilean director Sebastian Lelio’s first English language film, a north-west London-set drama, based on the 2006 novel by Naomi Alderman. Compared to his previous film, 2017’s A Fantastic Woman, this is a downbeat, subtle story of two women who grew up in an orthodox Jewish community.
The #MeToo phenomenon is still going strong, but what exactly are its demands, and how can we judge what it has achieved so far? Sally Campbell assesses the trajectory of the movement.
In September Christine Blasey Ford bravely and matter-of-factly testified before a senate hearing about her accusation of attempted sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The next day president Donald Trump, at a rally, mocked Blasey Ford and bemoaned that “A man’s life is shattered”. He said of her and her supporters, “They destroy people. They want to destroy people. These are really evil people.”
With a toxic realignment of the far-right seemingly taking place across the planet, how should socialists respond to push back against the racists?
We face a grim situation on a global scale. As Socialist Review went to press the second round of voting in the Brazilian election was about to take place and the far-right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, looked likely to be elected president.
This is a man who celebrates police killings and has said of left wingers, “These red outlaws will be banished from our homeland. It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history” — this in a country which was run by a right wing military dictatorship for over 20 years.
Revolution was ignited in Germany 100 years ago by a mutiny of the North Sea Fleet at Kiel. Admirals decided to send it out on 30 October on a completely hopeless assault on the British Navy. Sailors organised to prevent the ships from leaving port. Their commanders responded by jailing more than 1,000 sailors. A mass solidarity movement was organised, led by women in the town, to defend the sailors, the workers of Kiel and nearby cities, and then the soldiers sent in to put down the revolt who ended up joining it.
