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”.
Mass protests change people. The act of collectively standing together pushes aside the powerlessness we experience in everyday life, builds confidence and generates a sense of strength.
“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.”
1973 in Chile was a year of hope and tragedy. Hope because one of the world’s best organised and most militant working classes was engaged in a fierce class war, and tragedy because it lost. Fifty years have now passed since the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973, which established a seventeen-year military dictatorship. The lessons of the period remain important.
Two years after seizing power in a coup, Min Aung Hlaing’s junta in Myanmar continues to be ensnared in a civil war that shows no signs of abating.
Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) is often described as the “founder of German social democracy”. But his influence on the German workers’ movement was mostly disastrous.