At the dawn of a new year The year 2009 is a year of many anniversaries. As they will soon be reminding us, this is also twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was a time when the capitalists and their spokespersons felt triumphant. They announced the end of Communism, the end of Socialism, even the end of History. But now it is clear to all that their predictions were false. What collapsed 20 years ago was not socialism or communism but only a bureaucratic and totalitarian caricature of socialism. The collapse of Stalinism was a great historical drama, but in retrospect it will be seen by history as only the prelude to an even greater drama: the collapse of capitalism, which is already being prepared. Alan Woods looks at the prospects for 2009.
The German Revolution suffers its first defeat After 4 years of intense warfare, the German workers and soldiers ended World War I in November 1918. The emperor fell and a Social Democratic government came to power. This was Germany's own equivalent of the Russian "February Revolution" of 1917 that overthrew the Tsar.
Art and the Crisis of Capitalism - A Review of “The Mona Lisa Curse” In his The Mona Lisa Curse, the Australian art critic Robert Hughes subjected present-day commercialisation of art to a withering criticism. His programme was a damning indictment of the general tendency of art to degenerate into flashy triviality to the degree that it subordinates itself to money-making and capitalist market economics. It condemned the British artist Hirst for "functioning like a commercial brand" and destroying any true understanding of art in the public's mind by placing importance on the price tag alone.
