As Israel’s latest brutal war against the people of Gaza drags on, the need to challenge the Zionist state and all those who facilitate its genocidal campaign couldn’t be clearer.
South Korea’s Great Workers Struggle of 1987 was an explosive period of working-class resistance. Millions of workers joined rank-and-file strikes, which swept through the country like wildfire. The uprising was sparked by a surprise announcement on 29 June from the chairman of South Korea’s ruling Democratic Justice Party that, after decades of military rule, the country would transition to free elections.
From secret police records in Russia just before the First World War: “The most energetic and audacious element, ready for tireless struggle, for resistance and continual organisation, is that element ... concentrated around [Vladimir] Lenin”.
Over the past 128 years, the Zionist movement and later the Israeli state have constructed a web of fallacies that surround the creation of Israel and the ongoing conflict, and which also seek to justify Israel’s ethnic cleansing and oppression of the Palestinian people.
Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution, died a century ago, at the age of 53. He made few general statements of theory and left behind almost no self-regarding autobiographical statements. Yet almost immediately after his death, Lenin was made the central figure of a personality cult, as Russian government bureaucrats codified and promoted throughout the world socialist movement an increasingly deranged and tyrannical set of precepts. We got just 53 years of Lenin, but we’ve had a century of “Leninist” ideas that bear little relation to his actual thought and practice.
“We stand today ... before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.”