We need to learn the lessons of 2012 if we want to build a student strike for Palestine today.

Stalin played a key role in getting the infamous 1947 UN resolution that partitioned Palestine adopted with the required two-thirds majority of the UN Assembly. Present-day supporters of Stalin prefer that we bury and forget these facts.

When we found the Revolutionary Communist Party in May this year, we won’t be starting from scratch. We are carrying on a long and rich tradition that traces its roots to the Communist Manifesto.

Experienced trade unionist John McInally introduces Wellred Books’ latest publication: a fascinating biography examining Lenin’s life and ideas by Rob Sewell and Alan Woods. With support for communism on the rise today, we say: Lenin lives!

One of the most common misconceptions about the Russian Revolution is that the ideas and methods of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party led inevitably to the Stalinist regime and all the crimes that went with it.

There are many earnest people in the west who look to the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions) campaign as a ‘practical’ way to show solidarity with Palestine. BDS calls for Israel’s economic and cultural isolation in order to hit the Zionists in their wallets. Its activists often point to the example of the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa, which, they say, was brought down in large part through sanctions and pressure from the ‘international community’. But is this really the case?

Throughout the self-proclaimed ‘civilised’ western world, the ruling classes have banded together to denounce Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October and have rallied around Israel’s ‘right of self-defence’ as it bombs Gaza to smithereens. But this is not the first time we have been told to accept a bloody war against an oppressed people in the name of the oppressor nation’s ‘self-defence’.

The following short article by Karl Marx, published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1857, comments on the Indian Rebellion that broke out against the British East India Company the same year. In a few short lines, Marx skewers the hypocrisy of respectable English society reeling in horror at the violence of the rebels; the product of decades of oppression. His words bear great relevance today given events in Israel-Palestine.

The history of Chile, where the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s brutal coup d’état is being commemorated this month, is an example of the danger that awaits those who fail to distinguish between the two. As was the case with socialist leader Salvador Allende, reform sometimes takes on a revolutionary garb. It’s crucial for communists to understand what separates the two phenomena.

It has been 50 years since the coup d’état against president Allende in Chile. In this article, Carlos Cerpa Mallat describes the events that preceded the coup, how the transition from dictatorship to the current regime took place, and draws the main political conclusions of that tragedy, which are necessary to arm the new generations.