When the People's Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 October 1949, China was one of the poorest and most wretched societies on earth. Illiteracy was as high as life expectancy was low but as Chinese leader Mao Zedong had remarked even before the formal announcement of the creation of the PRC, The Chinese people have stood up.

Today's China is at the forefront of the world economy, it has eliminated absolute poverty and is leading the world in tackling climate change, and the development of new, high quality productive forces, essentially conforming to the fifth industrial revolution.

China has achieved this unprecedented development in less than a century, yet these achievements are frequently misinterpreted or distorted. This collection of essays, organised by the co-editors of Friends of Socialist China, aims to challenge these misconceptions and provide the political, historical and economic context that best explains China's astonishing rise.

A 'new Mexican revolution' in the time of Trump

In Mexico in Transformation, David Raby argues that since 2018 Mexico has undergone a process of change which no-one anticipated and which is nothing short of revolutionary.

The 2018 victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, usually known by his initials AMLO, and his Morena movement began a multi-dimensional programme of social change, referred to as the Fourth Transformation. This has been cemented by the subsequent victory of Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's first female president.

The Fourth Transformation includes the fight against corruption, including the war on tax evasion. Mexico's restoration of energy sovereignty is also crucial move, gaining national control of oil, gas, electric power and lithium has fundamentally transformed the country's prospects

Progressive welfare programmes such as public universal pensions, restoration of free public education, free universal healthcare and many others increase the economic scope of the public sphere on a scale which has few if any parallels in the Western world.

Participatory democracy is also advancing as is the constitutional recognition of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican rights.

The administration of President Donald Trump in the US poses a threat to its southern neighbour with threats of trade wars and border tensions but Mexico's unflinching stand of dignity and independence has earned praise from across Latin America and the world, and its strong economic and political bargaining position may enable Mexico to resist US hostility successfully.

This is an account of five significant episodes in the history of the working-class movements in Britain and Ireland which, to various degrees, challenged the power of the capitalist state.

JOHN FOSTER uses these case studies to stress the importance of language, of how arguments are constructed to mobilise for change but also how social barriers obstruct revolutionary transformations.

Two chapters analyse the labour movement on Clydeside across half a century; the 1919 strike and the UCS Work-in of 1972. A third looks at the 1919 Belfast general strike which generated a common class language to momentarily overcome imperialist- and employer-promoted religious sectarianism. A fourth chapter looks at the 1920 Councils of Action, influenced by the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The final episode is the 1842 Chartist-inspired General Strike, which crucially influenced Marx and Engels in the development of their own theories of class consciousness, organisation and mobilisation.

Foster discusses Marxist theories of language, especially those developed in the early Soviet Union, which integrated the processes of thought, language and action. If properly applied, he argues, these can create the conditions for the effective communication of class consciousness and thereby mass mobilisation.

Languages of Class Struggle aims to recover and re-emphasise the arguments advanced by Marx and later Lenin, namely that it is capitalism's own contradictions, economic and political, that can - once actively exposed - be used to challenge ruling-class power. Such moments may be relatively rare, but it is precisely these moments of crisis and the contradictions they lay bare that are critical for our understanding of social change.

David Ivon Jones was born in Wales in1883 and died in 1924 in the Soviet Union. In his death-bed 'Political Testament', Jones urged his comrades to 'carry out the great revolutionary mission imposed on colonies in general and South Africa in particular with revolutionary devotion and dignity, concentrating on shaking the foundations of world capitalism and British imperialism'.

The 'Delegate for Africa, ' as Jones was known in the Communist International, is now commemorated by a plaque on the

Unitarian chapel in his native town of Aberystwyth. But it is in South Africa that his legacy is particularly treasured today by the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress.

This collection of his articles and speeches, in both Welsh and English, testifies to his deep humanitarian and communist principles. They embody and express his love for his Welsh homeland, for his adopted South Africa and its native peoples and for revolutionary Russia and its working class and peasantry.

David Ivon Jones was a patriot and an internationalist, who unsparingly committed himself to the liberation of all humanity.

We walk around believing that we know something about ourselves-our fears and desires; our talents and failings; our likes and dislikes.

Even if we aren't always clear about the origins of these qualities or preferences, we believe that there is a core self that is true. We think that we are a certain kind of person, that we have a stable personality and that some things are in our nature or true to it, while others are not. We are not always sure how we know these things, only that we know them. We accept it on faith that our self-knowledge is an accurate report of objective reality.

But how reliable is this? How much do we really understand ourselves and our world, despite all the scientific advances of the past few hundred years?

These are the kinds of questions that Being. Belonging. Becoming. seeks to tackle. Grounded in science and informed by philosophy, this book delves into the complexities of the human self and how it influences our perceptions of ourselves, others and the world around us.

We walk around believing that we know something about ourselves-our fears and desires; our talents and failings; our likes and dislikes.

Even if we aren't always clear about the origins of these qualities or preferences, we believe that there is a core self that is true. We think that we are a certain kind of person, that we have a stable personality and that some things are in our nature or true to it, while others are not. We are not always sure how we know these things, only that we know them. We accept it on faith that our self-knowledge is an accurate report of objective reality.

But how reliable is this? How much do we really understand ourselves and our world, despite all the scientific advances of the past few hundred years?

These are the kinds of questions that Being. Belonging. Becoming. seeks to tackle. It delves into the complex dynamics of selfhood, personal narrative and how it influences our perceptions of ourselves, others and the world around us with science and philosophy as a guide.