Bill Jenkins remembers the Wall Street crash of 1929, seventy years ago this month, which plunged the world economy into recession, and punctured capitalism’s dreams of an endless golden future Read more...

Kate Foster looks at education in Russia in the first years after the revolution Read more...

What has been the outcome of the war in Kosova? The bosses' magazine, The Economist, euphemistically calls it a "messy peace". Read more...

Battered but unbroken by his fight inside the USSR with Stalin, Trotsky began his foreign exile in 1929 by creating an international opposition (ILO). Dave Stockton reveal the obstacles that had to be overcome by the ILO in building unity around political principle, a trusted international leadership and disciplined practice Read more...

It is a fair bet that Hitler would be on most people’s top ten list of twentieth century figures who were “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Kershaw’s excellent first volume of Hitler’s life tells us why they’d be right. Read more...

Introduction

The Balkans are being torn apart by two wars. The first, waged by NATO with laser-guided missiles from over 700 fighter planes, is designed to bomb Serbia into submission. The second is being mercilessly fought by Serbian army and militia against the Kosovar Albanians with the aim of driving them from their homeland; in a word, genocide. Read more...

East Asia was hailed as the most dynamic region of the capitalist world in the early 1990s showing the rest of the "emerging markets" the shape of their own future. Now, as Michael Proebsting reports, that future is likely to be rather different as slump provokes misery and revolutionary crises. Read more...

The last ten years have seen US stock markets boom as the country experienced its longest post war economic upturn. Keith Harvey asks, will the coming stock market crash push the world's superpower into steep decline? Read more...