On this day, 17 May 1959, Kelso Cochrane was fatally stabbed in a racist attack in West London, UK. His murder would become a catalytic event in race relations at the time which eventually led to the formation of the now world famous Notting Hill Carnival. Cochrane was a recent immigrant from North America, having being born in Antigua. Working as a carpenter he aspired to be a lawyer and settled in the Notting Hill area of West London, with a large Caribbean population. At the time the area was a hotbed of activity for British fascists and there were frequent violent confrontations with groups of Black men. Police investigating the murder were accused of being involved in a cover-up and the murderer has never been identified. A huge funeral procession drew the eyes of the press and the government was eventually pressured into launching an investigation into race relations. Cochrane's murder along with general racial tensions in the area led local community activist Rhaune Laslett to organise a small community street fair to bring recent immigrants together in the area in the mid-1960s. This would eventually become the Notting Hill Carnival, which is attended by over a million people each year.

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The Cuban revolution seized the lands of the rich, as well as those of US absentee landlords. Thanks to this early step, huge numbers of Cuban workers were able to own land for the first time. Here are the key policies of Fidel's first agrarian reform, passed into law on this day in 1959.

On this day, 17 May 1949, brick factory worker and former resistance member Maria Margotti was killed by Carabinieri – Italian military police.
The previous day she stood on a picket line of agricultural workers, along with other women, attempting to stop scabs replacing the strikers. Police attacked them particularly violently. So, on 17 May a demonstration was organised protesting against the police violence.
The Carabinieri opened fire on the crowd with machine guns and killed Maria Margotti. She was 34 years old.
Her death caused mass outrage and spurred an escalation in opposition and resistance to the post-war state and its anti-working class policies.


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1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.
2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the thing-in-itself is “beyond” phenomena (Kant), or that we can and must fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which exists outside us (Hume)—all this is the sheerest nonsense, Schrulle, crotchet, invention.
3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.

Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

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Our schoolteacher should be raised to a standard he has never achieved, and cannot achieve, in bourgeois society. This is a truism and requires no proof.

Lenin, Pages from a Diary (1923)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/02.htm

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[...] I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn.
https://telegra.ph/The-Tasks-of-the-Youth-Leagues-05-18

#Lenin, The Tasks of the Youth Leagues (1920)

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On this day, 19 May 1933, Germany's Nazi government abolished collective bargaining – the principal of workers together negotiating with employers over pay and conditions. Instead, conditions were to be regulated by labour "trustees", appointed by Hitler. The following year the system was refined to designate owners of individual enterprises as local "fuehrers", with complete control of workplaces and ability to "make decisions for employees and labourers in all matters concerning the enterprise". In 1935, the Nazis introduced compulsory labour service for 18-25-year-olds, militarily connoscripting young workers into employment. Workers were banned from changing jobs without permission, and maximum working hours were increased from 60 to 72 hours per week while workplace illnesses rocketed. It was just one of many ways the Nazi regime benefited big business, and helped keep workers' wages low, with the US government stating that "It was by such bait that the great German industrialists were induced to support the Nazi cause". Some working class young people rejected Nazism and instead formed gangs called Edelweiss Pirates.

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🔴 A mad world: capitalism and the rise of mental illness

What if it’s not us who are sick, asks Rod Tweedy, but a system at odds with who we are as social beings?

Mental illness is now recognised as one of the biggest causes of individual distress and misery in our societies and cities, comparable to poverty and unemployment. One in four adults in the UK today has been diagnosed with a mental illness, and four million people take antidepressants.

‘What greater indictment of a system could there be,’ George Monbiot has asked, ‘than an epidemic of mental illness?’
Read more:
https://telegra.ph/A-mad-world-capitalism-and-the-rise-of-mental-illness-05-19

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"The forces of democracy cannot be stopped!", soviet poster, 1949

'Don't raise them as lords!', soviet poster, 1956

"V. I. Lenin and Marcel Cachin", by B. Lebedev, 1988

"The first Stalin route", painting by Samuil Adlivankin, 1939

"Laboratory technician", painting by Alexander Stimban, 1963

Lenin in his office in the Kremlin, October 1922 (colorized)