In the fourth part of his series on the history and development of money, Adam Booth examines the factors lying behind inflation and explores the role of gold as the basis for an international monetary system. As the collapse of the gold standard - and more recently the european single currency - demonstrate, the contradictions of capitalism will eventually always come to the fore.

On Monday night once again blood flowed in Quetta. At least 61 were killed and 117 wounded, many of them in a critical condition, when terrorists attacked a police training college in Quetta. Around 9:30 in the evening three terrorists entered the college where 700 trainees were present. They entered one of the hostels rounded up and then killed trainee cadets in the building.

As the year draws to an end we would like to remember all those thousands of genuine Communists who perished in Stalin’s camps, butchered simply for defending the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky. Old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin were forced to confess to crimes they had not committed. These famous victims were only the tip of the iceberg. Not remembered are the thousands of Trotskyists who languished in brutal concentration camps. They were brave and defiant to the end. The difference with the Trotskyists was that Stalin’s agents could not get them to confess to false crimes, so they were never brought to trial but just callously executed and buried in the wastes.

The weekend of 21-23 October saw the most successful school ever for the Marxists in Britain, as over 250 revolutionary activists came to London from across the country – and Europe – to take part in the REVOLUTION! festival, hosted by Socialist Appeal and the Marxist Student Federation.

Last Thursday, the criminal courts of Monagas, Carabobo, Aragua and Apure states, among other states, annulled the collection of the 1% of signatures needed to activate a recall referendum, after they upheld claims of electoral fraud which were brought before them in relation to accusations of forgery and identity theft committed during the process. Such a judgement  means that the final step prior to the invocation of a recall referendum, the collection of the signatures of 20% of the electorate, is automatically suspended. The CNE (National Electoral Council) then proceeded to issue a statement in which the suspension of the collection of signatures was ordered across the country.

The recent hardening of Tory rhetoric over Brexit and the status of migrant workers in Britain has shocked many, prompting some on the left to wonder if we too should advocate immigration controls and others, such as Owen Jones, to fall into a spirit of impotent despair. But aside from being a return to form for Britain’s traditional “Nasty Party”, May’s hard talk reflects a deepening divide within her own party and, if anything, a position of weakness rather than strength.