Jamie Perkins explains the history and importance of LGBT History Month and highlights the YCL’s plans including an International Webinar later this month.
A Worker Reads History by Bertolt Brecht.
Bertolt Brecht is an eternal darling of leftist lovers of poetry. As a young man, Brecht discovered Marxism in the process of looking for methods to politicise his artistic aesthetic. Brecht’s work is thus built on historicism and critique of established institutions, as well as the various myths surrounding these institutions.
This artistic methodology of Brecht is best seen in his poem A Worker Reads History. Here, Brecht recounts centuries of historical events, which he exaggerates in order to emphasise the place of the Worker. Brecht shows the historical events as impermanent and transitory, with one constant: mighty buildings and great men change, but cooks and builders remain. The poem contains little description – as most of Brecht’s work, it is intended to alienate the reader and put them outside of the described events so that the reader can adopt a critical attitude.
Earlier this week British Copyright Collective ‘PRS for Music’ launched their new ‘Online Live Concert’ license to an outcry of disgust and condemnation from many within the British music scene. In short, their new licences require PRS-registered artists wishing to monetise livestreamed sets OF THEIR OWN MATERIAL to pay for the privilege of doing so. The minimum PRS will charge for such a license is £22.50, regardless of how much the livestreamed gig actually makes.
The feature match of the midweek card was the one that many teams and fans alike had their eyes on as two perennial title contenders took the stage at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium with the reigning champions Liverpool taking all three points home with them to Anfield in their bid to become back-to-back Premier League champions since the 1980’s.
Recently Tesla’s stock rose by almost 5% per cent, pushing Musk’s net worth up to $183.8 billion. This makes the self-styled celebrity the world’s richest man, surpassing Amazon’s infamous Jeff Bezos. For Musk’s cult of free-market fanboys this simply proves his genius – a fair reward for the world’s most brilliant inventor. But what is really behind the Tesla empire? And what has Musk actually invented?
Could West Ham continue their impressive unbeaten streak alive? How would Arsenal respond to playing the same team they had lost to in the FA Cup so soon? These questions and more are answered below.
Friedrich Wolf lived in the tumultuous times of social and political crisis in Germany. Born in 1888, Wolf served in the military during the First World War, and the brutality of the war pushed him into left-wing pacifism as a young man. Wolf came from a family of Jewish communists, whose livelihood was threatened after Hitler’s rise to power.
Debojit Banerjee reports on the inspiring farmers movement taking to the streets of India today to challenge the right-wing Modi government on the nation’s Republic Day.
Global capitalism will never solve poverty and hunger because the profit motive will always be placed above all. Western investment does not care about African, Asian, and South American peoples and their living standards – it is simply interested in maintaining a subservient population that can provide cheap labour.
The ongoing pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the UK economy. While the socialist countries have been able to move past this period of turmoil, protecting their economy, and more importantly, saving countless lives; the UK continues to suffer.
Conversation with Comrade Lenin by Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1929
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and came to be one of the most celebrated communist poets in the Soviet Union and internationally. He was also a talented playwright, artist and actor who used art as a medium to convey the politics and ideals of the new socialist state.
The Carpet Weavers of Kuyan-Bulak Honour Lenin by Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German Marxist poet, playwright and theatre director. Brecht lived through a turbulent era. Narrowly avoiding conscription at 16 during World War One, he worked prodigiously through throughout the period of the Weimar Republic. Brecht was forced to flee with the rise of the Nazis in 1933. He left the USA during the McCarthyite “Red Scare” returning to what was then the German Democratic Republic. He died on the 14th of August 1956.
Ballads of Lenin by Langston Hughes, 1933.
Langston Hughes was a poet and social activist of African, European and Native American heritage. A communist who was particularly involved with the struggle of African-Americans, he travelled extensively around the USSR and was involved in film making and Soviet anti-segregation propaganda before travelling to Spain to report on the Civil War.
After various accusations and a testimony in front of the US senates anti-communist Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations he was distanced from the Communist Party USA and the socialist movement as a whole. Although still venerated as a great African-American activist and poet large sections of his work are still shunned due to their intimate attachment to the communist movement.
Maryam Pashali analyses the historic trends behind the storming of the US Capitol and argues that labels of ‘fascism’ provide an easy scapegoat for the leading capitalist ‘democracy’ and its centuries of fostering white supremacy.
Muhammed Shabeer writes about the recent wins of the CPI (Marxist) in Kerala despite smear attempts by the likes of the fascist BJP Party.
Social media is indispensable when following a debacle like Trump’s deranged protest in real time: it can help you get an idea of things before the media does, and sometimes see stuff the media misses. But it comes a cost barely worth paying: reading people’s often nonsensical takes. Here are 20 that no socialist should have said.
A prominent study published towards the end of 2020 through Cambridge University made the stark finding that “This is the first generation in living memory to have a global majority who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works while in their twenties and thirties”, receiving significant coverage in parts of Britain’s media.
Woman’s Question by Frances Moore
A Sheffield teacher and activist in the National Union of Teachers, Frances Moore (1906 – 1994) was married to Bill Moore, who was a fulltime worker for the Communist Party. Although Frances’ busy life left with little time to write in her younger days, later on she produced a substantial body of poetry, some of which was published. The poem featured here raises clearly the need for women’s equality.
Evan Richards writes about the difference between labour in a capitalist society and that of a revolutionary socialist society, arguing that only socialism can truly emancipate workers from wage-slavery and other forms of work-based exploitation.
[To Margot Heinemann] by John Cornford
John Cornford from a relatively privileged families and attended Cambridge University. It was at Cambridge that he met and fell in love with Margot Heinemann and where they both joined the Communist Party. John’s mother, Frances Crofts Cornford, was a poet, and he himself was already writing poems at school.
After gaining a BA first-class honours in History, he became the first Englishman to enlist against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and was killed in battle on the Andujar and Cordoba Front on 27 or 28 December 1936.
Cornford wrote just a few poems in Spain, including A Letter from Aragon, Full Moon at Tierz: Before The Storming of Huesca and the poem featured here [To Margot Heinemann].
