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.

"The Sixties" have an almost mythical power which still captivates imaginations around the world. The media and conservative writers paint images of long-haired hippies, smoking pot and listening to psychedelic music, or they dismiss the protesters as spoilt student brats who eventually came to their senses and moved on to settle down in respectable society. But the Sixties was a time of mass struggles that presented a real challenge to the capitalist system.

The Paris Commune was the world's first workers' government. Marx described it as "the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour."

"We have got the dictatorship of the proletariat! ... I rub my hands and chuckle with glee. May the day soon come when the proletariat of Western Europe does the same."

Morgan Philips Price, a Manchester Guardian journalist stationed in Russia in 1917, wrote these words to his wife. He didn't have to wait long.

The French Revolution was a new dawn for humanity. It is one of the main events that shaped the modern world, creating a radically different society.

Martin Luther King maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.