Since early April, Sri Lanka has been engulfed by a wave of mass protests demanding the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Thousands of workers and students have mobilised in the most significant mass movement in 30 years.

World military spending has passed U.S.$2 trillion for the first time, according to new data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Last year was the seventh consecutive year that world military spending increased; total expenditure has almost doubled this century.

“Attention, MOVE. This is America. You have to abide by the laws of the United States.” This was the ultimatum given through a Philadelphia police megaphone to a group of Black activists trapped in their home in the early morning of 13 May 1985.

Who rules Australia? The politicians, the ultra-wealthy class of capitalists or the high-powered bureaucrats who run the state—the military generals, court justices, heads of government departments and so on? The answer is all three. Together, they make up the Australian ruling class.

Of all classes, the middle class is the one with the most people clamouring to be part of it. Many members of the ruling class prefer the label “middle” to one that makes capitalist dominance so overt. Many workers think that having a middle-income job by default puts them in the middle class. And people who want to downplay the working class’s revolutionary potential prefer to say,

More than 160 years ago, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, in the “Communist Manifesto,” described workers as those “who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital”.

The carnage of World War I was ended by revolution in Germany. It began in November 1918 with a mutiny of sailors in Kiel.

In October 1917, revolutionary Russian workers, supported by millions of peasants and soldiers, succeeded in overthrowing capitalist rule and replacing it with their own democratic structures of power.

The starting point for his argument was the class nature of the capitalist state. Drawing on the writings of Marx and Engels, Lenin demolishes the idea that the state is a neutral body standing above social classes. Instead, he argues that the state exists as a means for one class to maintain its dominance over another.

The outbreak of World War I ushered in a new age of barbarism in Europe.

These days it’s no longer viable for the rich and powerful and their political servants simply to deny the reality of climate change and other environmental challenges. The new fad is to talk up whatever (inevitably small-scale) green initiatives are happening, and spruik the array of magical technological fixes that, like Forrest’s beloved “green hydrogen”, are always somehow just on the verge of taking off.

Marx played many roles in his life: activist, journalist, historian, philosopher and also an economist. The crowning achievement of his efforts in economics was the three volumes of Capital.

Capitalism has generated the highest level of economic inequality in human history.

Quentin Beresford’s book Wounded Country: The Murray-Darling Basin—a contested history, published in September 2021, is a warning. State officials, politicians and agribusinesses risk turning Australia’s premier food bowl—the Murray-Darling Basin, which covers 14 percent of the Australian mainland—into desert.

The longest protest for Indigenous land rights, sovereignty and self-determination in the world, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, located on Ngunnawal land in Canberra, will mark its 50th anniversary on 26 January. Established by Aboriginal activists to demand land rights, the Embassy has been a key site for the struggle for Indigenous rights ever since.

Emma Norton speaks to Sherry Wolf and Joel Geier, two long-time revolutionary socialists in the United States, about the turmoil, contradictions and possibilities of the U.S. political situation.

If anything, the use of computer algorithms to guide police appears only to entrench and exacerbate existing biased policing practices. 

The popularity of “build back better” as a slogan reflects that no-one in their right mind would be overly enthused by the idea of “building back the same”.

Wittenoom is an abandoned town in the desert north of Perth. Once, it had a population of almost 1,000, making it the biggest town in the Pilbara. Now, it’s been removed from maps and cut off from all essential services, to stop people from visiting.

The scale of the climate crisis has driven a new generation of radical young activists to demand “system change, not climate change”.