Feature

Robots are taking over. At least that is the impression given by the mainstream media. Headlines in recent weeks include: “Robots Could Replace 250,000 Public Sector Workers” (Independent), “Amazon To Open A Giant ROBOT-Run Supermarket Staffed By Just Three Humans” (Daily Mail) and “Give Robots ‘Personhood’ Status, EU Committee Argues” (Guardian).

On 14 January 78,000 people took to the streets of Bilbao in the Basque Country to demand “human rights, peace, and a solution to the conflict”. The Basque Country stretches from the north of the Spanish state to the south of France and has a population of barely 3 million. Previous similar demonstrations peaked in 2014 with 130,000 people.

The assault and rape by the police of Théo L, a young black man from the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, has sparked angry demonstrations throughout the country. They come in the wake of a sustained grassroots movement demanding justice for Adama Traore, another black youth killed in police custody in the Paris suburb of Beaumont-sur-Oise in July 2016.

The election of Donald Trump has sent shockwaves across the world. For many, Trump’s victory is part of a seamless growth in support for the populist right. His demagogic rants about “building a wall” and protecting US workers by “putting America first” have been reflected by similar figures in country after country.

Having received reports of one student’s recent experience of learning about the Russian Revolution in GCSE History, it seems surprisingly little has changed in the 25 years since I studied it. Students still hear rather too much about Rasputin’s dubious influence over the Romanovs, and far too little about the role of workers and the broader masses in the events of 1917.

Public sector pay has moved to the centre of political debate. This poses a pivotal question — will the new confidence inside the left and the wider labour movement move beyond the ballot box and the Labour Party and into an increased level of struggle in the workplace?

The Cook Islands in the South Pacific were annexed by the British Empire. On 11 March 1919 the colonial authorities on the main island of Rarotonga sent a telegram to New Zealand: “Serious disturbances by returned soldiers who are taking charge of settlement. Require armed assistance. Can you send warship or other assistance? Fifty armed men at least required.”

A decade ago last month queues began forming outside Northern Rock. The building society had been unable to raise the money to pay its debts. Cap in hand, its bosses had been forced to march up Threadneedle Street to beg the Bank of England for a loan.

Towards the end of the 1930s Frederic Warburg published a number of dissident left wing books, including George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, CLR James’s World Revolution, Boris Souvarine’s Stalin and Andre Gide’s Back from the USSR. These anti-Stalinist books are still readily available today.

There is one remarkable volume that he published at the same time, Ethel Mannin’s Women and the Revolution, which has been altogether forgotten, however. Indeed, Mannin has been pretty much written out of the history of the 1930s left.

Thousands of workers in the streets, soldiers in mutiny, police stations burned, the prisons opened. These were the incredible events of February 1917 that sparked the Russian Revolution.

The author and journalist Arthur Ransome wrote of these events, “Revolution turns the slow river of political development into a rapid in which the slightest action has an immediate effect.”