Lenin and Trotsky on Rosa Luxemburg We are also publishing Trotsky's appraisal of the two revolutionaries, written just after they were murdered in 1919, and "Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg", his defence of what Rosa Luxemburg really stood for, against Stalinist slanders, as well as an extract from Lenin's "Notes of a Publicist" in which he defends Rosa Luxemburg against the reformists.
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.
