Former International Olympic Committee president and unrepentant fascist Juan Antonio Samaranch is dead.

The idea that humans could live in a classless society has always been dismissed as a fantasy by right wingers and is even doubted by many left-wing people. Now history proves it is possible.

In his eyewitness account Year One of the Russian Revolution, Victor Serge, the anarchist and Bolshevik sympathiser, recounts that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1918 “made a great sensation abroad. In Russia, it passed almost unnoticed.”

Fifty years ago, on 21 March 1960, the South African apartheid security forces opened fire on a crowd of unarmed black Africans protesting in Sharpeville against racist laws.

The Black Panthers stood for socialism, and the revolutionary overthrow of US capitalism. Their militant approach offered much more to Black Americans than the failed promise of the Obama presidency.

The Russian revolution may have taken place nearly a century ago, but attacks on it continue. 

It might be hard to believe that in 1964 folk singing was seen as subversive. One night, police turned up at the loft of Melbourne folk singer Brian Mooney, alerted by the sound of "mass folk singing" inside. Having taken names and addresses, the police, cultured then as now, suspiciously asked for the name of the perpetrator of a nude painting hanging on the wall. Informed that the artist was Modigliani, the officer insisted: "Get his address too."

The year was 1969. Liberation and protest movements had sprung up everywhere. From the anti-Vietnam War campaign, to Black Power, Women's Liberation and left-wing political groups, millions were taking a stand, fighting to radically change the world they lived in. And among those millions were lesbians and gay men, activists who'd been involved in all the campaigns and now wanted a voice of their own, a voice for their own liberation.

In 1916 fierce debate ranged among those socialists who had opposed the First World War about whether to support or oppose the right to national self-determination.

The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky compared the theory of anarchism to an umbrella full of holes: useless precisely when it rains. The truth of this insight was forcibly demonstrated when anarchism failed the test of the Spanish Revolution.

In 1949 Mao's Red Army marched into Beijing, promising a new socialist order, free and democratic. The People's Republic of China, however, quickly revealed itself as a brutal society, ruled by a new class of exploiters. But these modern emperors haven't had everything their way. Resistance regularly erupts, and to this day China is home to one of the most heroic traditions of genuine revolutionary socialism that the world has known - the Chinese Trotskyists.

The Russian revolution of 1917 is one of the most contested events in world history. Sandra Bloodworth debunks the myth of the revolution as a Bolshevik coup and argues that the role of workers and peasants in Russia show that a world without war and exploitation is possible.

The story of the Russian Trotskyists who resisted Stalin's rise to power on the ashes of the 1917 revolution is an enormous inspiration.