Friedrich Engels was born 200 years ago, yet as a thinker was profoundly radical and strikingly modern. While his lifelong collaboration with Karl Marx resulted in many co-authored works, as well as extensive correspondence between the two in which they developed their ideas jointly, Engels also wrote his own brilliant contributions to contemporary debates in the socialist and workers’ movement, and was a leading activist in the first and second international.
84 years ago today, on 4th October 1936, Communists and socialists came together with Jewish and Irish workers in an historic stand to stop Oswald Mosley and several thousand of his fascist Blackshirts from marching through the East End of London. In what became known as The Battle of Cable Street, Mosley and his thugs, with police protection, were blocked by an estimated 300,000 counter-protesters across east London.
The discussion about how a planned economy would work is a crucial one for the workers’ movement and the oppressed.
This year, 21st August marks the 80th anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky in Mexico following an assault at the hands of a Stalinist agent. Alongside Lenin, Trotsky was the central Bolshevik leader of the October revolution in Russia which created the world’s first workers’ state. He would wage a lifelong struggle against both capitalism and Stalinist dictatorship.
