Matt Myers teaches history at the University of Oxford.
Rossana Rossanda represented the very best of the generation drawn to Italian communism in the 1940s. Rossanda insisted on the need for militant working-class politics throughout her life while much of the Italian left lost its political bearings.
A new documentary on Eric Hobsbawm presents a sensitive portrait of a historian who achieved international acclaim despite his Communist politics. Yet Hobsbawm’s Marxism is fundamental to understanding his work, and why he undertook it in the first place.
In December’s election, Jeremy Corbyn was constantly accused of wanting to “turn Britain back to the 1970s.” For the Right, this decade before Thatcherism is the ultimate bogeyman — presenting an age of strong welfare and trade unions as something we should fear.
This June brought the first English translation of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. Movingly illustrating the tragedies of wartime Soviet society, Grossman’s epic novel is a nonetheless powerful rebuke to those who equate Nazism and those who fought against it.
Eric Hobsbawm wasn’t just a historian of the twentieth-century communist movement: he was part of it.
French students face a critical juncture in their fight against Emmanuel Macron. But the movement’s real strength may lie outside the campus.
In 1922 communist militant Shapurji Saklatvala was elected on a Labour Party ticket, becoming the first MP of color in the party’s history.
Corbyn challenger Owen Smith claims the heritage of one of Britain’s great radicals — but his record doesn’t measure up.