The Ku Klux Klan is back in the spotlight. Huw Williams looks at its blood-drenched record.
The film BlacKkKlansman by Spike Lee, in the context of the rise of the far-right in the US and globally, has once again put a spotlight on the history of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The KKK claims a near 150-year history since its origins in the US’s Deep South after the American Civil War of 1861-65.
Proposals aimed at enabling trans people to more easily transition have met with attacks from the right, and sadly parts of the left. Laura Miles argues that socialists must support the fightback.
Transgender Day of Remembrance on 20 November 2018 commemorated 369 trans people murdered globally that year. The 2017 figure was 325, itself an increase on 2016. These figures don’t cover the much higher numbers who took their own lives.
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.
First published in 1988, Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein's The Labour Party: A Marxist History was indispensible to those trying to understand the power and limitations of reformism. Charlie Kimber explains why he has contributed to an updated edition covering the period from Blair to Corbyn.
An extraordinary transformation in the image of the Labour Party happened in 2015 with Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader. A party that had acted as an efficient and loyal servant of the capitalist class was suddenly speaking about a challenge to big business, the banks, and the super-rich.
Several socialist thinkers claim the left should employ the “populist” model being taken up by the right. Héctor Puente Sierra explains why they are wrong.
Phenomena as varied as Donald Trump’s election, Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity and the Brexit vote have been explained in the mainstream media as the result of “populism”. The term is abused by the defenders of the neoliberal consensus to dismiss anybody that questions the dominant economic and political set-up — whether the racist right represented by Italy’s new Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, or the radical left.
Our writers’ cultural and literary highlights of 2018
Eve R Stone Light
There was an evening during the hot sunny summer and Beyonce and Jay-Z were on stage in East London. Every time I think of it, I smile.
My favourite book of the year turned out to be the first book I read, Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. It is quite simply a masterpiece. I am hoping to find Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel Unsheltered under the Christmas tree.
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.”
Socialist Review spoke to socialist activist Martin Haller in Germany about the crisis facing the “stronghold of stability in Europe”.
After the disastrous results for the CDU in the Bavaria and Hesse state elections in October, Angela Merkel announced she would be standing down as CDU leader. The mainstream explanation for her demise is that it’s because she let in refugees. How do you explain it?
The victory of Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential election was a shock felt the world over. Jorge Almeida discusses the crises which led to this point.
Brazil has elected a far-right president. But, three months before the election, the main issue was not the election of Jair Bolsonaro. The far-right did not have a public political tradition in Brazil, and almost no politician assumed to be from this wing.
Bolsonaro appeared with 17 percent of the polls at the end of 2017. But then it was hoped that this year’s presidential election would be one pitting the Workers Party (PT) against the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), a liberal right wing party.
There has rightly been public outcry over the state of the oceans, with shocking images of sea creatures trapped in plastic bags. Amy Leather looks at how plastic developed as a by-product of fossil fuel processing, and has been promoted by the petrochemical industry ever since.
Plastic is bad, isn’t it? That is certainly the new consensus. And no wonder there has been a public outcry. Many of us have been shocked by images like those on Blue Planet of a sperm whale with a stomach full of plastic waste, albatrosses feeding their young plastic or turtles trapped in plastic bags.
A report prepared in 2016 for the billionaires attending the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, estimates that there are more than 150 million tonnes of plastics in the oceans already, with another 8 million tonnes being added each year.
