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• Music

  Beethoven: The first rocker

  30 November, by Angela Klein

  Two hundred and fifty years after Beethoven’s birth in December 1770 what is the relevance of this great composer?

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• Marxism

  Engels: theorist of war, theorist of revolution

  30 November, by Gilbert Achcar

  On the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frederick Engels we republish this appreciation.

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• Covid-19 pandemic and economy

  The crisis triggered by the pandemic and the economic policy of the European Union

  16 September, by Daniel Albarracín

  This chapter will address the pandemic crisis at the level of political economy and, in particular, the fundamental decisions that the European Union is adopting, whose measures will take precise form once its particular institutional procedure is completed.

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• Political theory

  Analysing global capitalism

  24 August, by Phil Hearse

  Socialist Resistance and Mutiny are organisations in Britain which are both part of a process of forming a wider organisation which has the provisional name of Anti-Capitalist Resistance. Over the past six months, Mutiny has had a dialogue with American Marxist theorist William I Robinson. Phil Hearse, a Mutiny member who also supports Socialist Resistance, wrote a ‘presentation’ of Robinson for SR members, strongly supporting some of his ideas, while raising concerns about imperialism and Robinson’s ideas about a ‘transnational capitalist’ class’. We publish this below, together with a rejoinder from William I Robinson.

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• Trotsky

  Leon Trotsky and revolutionary art

  24 August, by Michael Löwy

  Eighty years ago, in August 1940, Leon Davidovich Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico by Ramon Mercader, a fanatical agent of the Stalinist GPU. This tragic event is widely known today, well beyond the ranks of Trotsky’s supporters, thanks, among other things, to the novel The Man Who Loved Dogs by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura ...

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• Marxism

  Angela Davis: An Interview on the Futures of Black Radicalism

  28 June, by Alex Lubin, Angela Y. Davis, Gaye Theresa Johnson

  "The concept associated with Black Marxism that I find most productive and most potentially transformative is the concept of racial capitalism.... Global capitalism cannot be adequately comprehended if the racial dimension of capitalism is ignored."

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• Marxism

  Why doesn’t official Russian historical politics need the real Lenin and how is his method relevant at a time of crisis

  10 May, by Ilya Budraitskis

  “The (Russian) state needs a Lenin shorn of his political ideas and real biographies, a Lenin-monument. Whenever he becomes a true Lenin, a rebel and destroyer of the old order, the authorities automatically begin to regard him as a monster.”—says the historian and political theorist Ilya Budraitskis. In this comprehensive interview, conducted in Russian by Marine Voskanian for Business-Online and most generously translated for LeftEast by Sean Guillory, Budraitskis explains how Lenin was a heretic for the socialists of his time, and why demanding greater redistribution doesn’t necessarily mean being a leftist.

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• Historical events

  1918 flu pandemic killed 12 million Indians, and British overlords’ indifference strengthened the anti-colonial movement

  2 May

  In India, during the 1918 influenza pandemic, a staggering 12 to 13 million people died, the vast majority between the months of September and December. According to an eyewitness, “There was none to remove the dead bodies and the jackals made a feast.”

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• Pandemics

  Social contagion - Microbiological class war in China

  2 May

  Wuhan is known colloquially as one of the “four furnaces” (四大火炉) of China for its oppressively hot humid summer, shared with Chongqing, Nanjing and alternately Nanchang or Changsha, all bustling cities with long histories along or near the Yangtze river valley. Of the four, Wuhan, however, is also sprinkled with literal furnaces: the massive urban complex acts as a sort of nucleus for the steel, concrete and other construction-related industries of China, its landscape dotted with the slowly-cooling blast furnaces of the remnant state-owned iron and steel foundries, now plagued by overproduction and forced into a contentious new round of downsizing, privatization and general restructuring—itself resulting in several large strikes and protests in the last five years. The city is essentially the construction capital of China, which means it has played a particularly important role in the period after the global economic crisis, since these were the years in which Chinese growth was buoyed by the funneling of investment funds into infrastructure and real estate projects. Wuhan not only fed this bubble with its oversupply of building materials and civil engineers but also, in so doing, became a real estate boomtown of its own. According to our own calculations, in 2018-2019 the total area dedicated to construction sites in Wuhan was equivalent to the size of Hong Kong island as a whole.

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• Fourth International

  “Livio Maitan’s last book”

  28 November 2019, by Franco Turigliatto

  This address was given by Franco Turigliatto at the launch of Livio Maitan’s book Memoirs of a critical communist: Towards a history of the Fourth International at the Historical Materialism conference in London in November 2019.

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