Feature

The novelist Richard Adams, author of the classic Watership Down, died at the end of last year aged 96. Watership Down, first published in 1972, originated in stories about the adventures of a band of rabbits that Adams — a civil servant at the time — told to his two daughters to pass the time on long car journeys. It quickly became a bestseller and was made into an animated film in 1978.

When John Berger died on the second day of the new year Marxism lost one of its finest thinkers and the left lost one of its most eloquent writers.

Many of Berger’s obituaries have referred to him as an “art critic”, but Berger himself hated that description, and it is far too narrow a description of the scale and fecundity of Berger’s work. He is probably best described as a “cultural freedom fighter” — a brilliant and innovative writer across the genres of the novel, film and TV, criticism, theory, photo journalism and poetry.

According to David Remnick, author of a book called Lenin’s Tomb and editor of the New Yorker magazine, Lenin, the foremost figure in the Russian Revolution of 1917, held a “view of man as modelling clay and sought to create a new model of human nature and behaviour through social engineering”. He quotes Richard Pipes, a right wing historian and critic of the Russian Revolution, who sees it as an attempt “to subject the entire life of a country to a master plan”.

Last April Bruce Springsteen cancelled his show in North Carolina, in an act of solidarity with trans activists who were campaigning against the state’s law banning trans people from using the public toilet of their choice. April also saw veteran feminist Germaine Greer restate her view that transgender women are a fiction, which saw further accusations of transphobia. These two responses to the issue of trans oppression illustrate how complex the debates are, making a pressing need for socialists to have a clear understanding.

The factory system tore apart the working class family. As workers were driven off the land and sucked into the new factories and cities of the industrial age, their ways of living fell apart. Many commentators from both the left and the right noticed this with varying degrees of horror and dismay, from Friedrich Engels in Manchester to the reactionary writer Robert Carlyle in London.

‘Everything is allowed to him [the member of the gang], he is capable of anything, he is the master of property and honour…if he wants to, he can throw an old woman out of a third floor window together with a grand piano, he can smash a chair against a baby’s head, rape a little girl while the entire crowd looks on… He exterminates whole families, he pours petrol over a house, transforms it into a mass of flames… There exists no tortures, figments of a feverish brain maddened by alcohol and fury, at which he need ever stop… The victims…kiss the soldiers’ boots…[only to hear] drunken laughte

Fidel Castro’s death at the end of last year has provoked two basic reactions. One is the bitter and utterly hypocritical version of the right. Donald Trump said, “Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.”

We on the left need take no lessons from those whose practice and associates are perfect illustrations, in the past and the present, at home and across the world (in Latin America especially), of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.

World leaders are failing on climate change. Theresa May’s Tory government has given the go ahead to a new nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point, backed the expansion of Heathrow airport and overturned the local decision in Lancashire to stop fracking. Meanwhile climate change denier Donald Trump is heading to the White House.

What are the issues you are confronting in the fast food industry?

What does Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election mean for the Tories? Does it help or hinder the government’s crisis-strewn plans for Brexit? Like every other government, the Tories face not only the bumpy transition from Obama’s administration to Trump’s, but a president elect notorious for unpredictability.