Battle of Waterloo 1815
200 Years Since the Battle of Waterloo: A Battle That Changed World History

he Battle of Waterloo—200 years ago, on 18th June 1815—was the last great event that marked the end of that great historical process that was begun in 1789 by the Great French Revolution.

wwi eastern front
WWI—Part Ten: Big Bandits and Small Bandits

Part ten of Alan Wood’s series on the first World War.

bandeira sovietica reichstag
Seventy Years Since the Defeat of Fascism in Europe—How the Soviet Union Defeated the Nazis

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazism and fascism in Europe, 6 days after the Soviet Red Army took Berlin.

May Day Demonstration in Stockholm, Sweden, 1899
May Day—a History of Working Class Struggles

As millions of workers and youth take to the streets worldwide to celebrate May Day as a day of international working class solidarity, we need to reassess our common objectives in the light of a […]

Max Schachtman and James Cannon, July 1934
“The Dog Days of the Left Opposition”

We republish here, for our April-May 2015 organization-wide reading, a chapter from James P. Cannon’s book The History of American Trotskyism, “Dog Days of the Left Opposition.”

WWI—Part Nine: The USA and the War: War is Good For Business

Somebody once said to Lenin war is terrible, to which he replied: “yes, terribly profitable.” The European war suited the American industrialists rather well.

A Review of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”

For Marxists, history is not something dead and buried, an ossified collection of facts and interpretations established for all time, but a living treasure trove of lessons for the present and the future.

WWI—Part Eight: Victims and Aggressors

While the armies of the Great Powers were busy slaughtering each other in Flanders, Tannenberg, and Gallipoli, their weaker brethren were watching with keen anticipation from the sidelines

WWI—Part Seven: Turkey Joins the War

At the turn of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was in a state of terminal decline.

German soldiers Battle of Marne WWI
WWI—Part Six: Tsarist Russia and the War

In the bloody struggle for world domination Russia entered as a second-rate partner of the Entente. The apparent strength of the Russian Empire concealed its internal contradictions and fundamental weaknesses. Russian tsarism combined elements of […]

The Greek Revolution and Civil War: 70 Years Since the Battle of Athens

On December 3, 1944, British snipers, the Athens police, and fascist paramilitaries opened fire on a demonstration of communist sympathizers in Athens’ Syntagma Square, leaving 28 dead. They were protesting against the provocations of the […]

Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro Huye Batista
Cuba 50 Years Later—Where Is the Revolution Going?

The Cuban Revolution, on the basis of its nationalized planned economy and the Cuban people’s willingness to defend it, has endured for decades despite being so closely situated to the most powerful imperialist power on Earth. […]