Karl Marx

Trotsky: The Russian Marxists and Terrorism (1909)

[Note: Evno Azef was head of the military section of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. That party waged a war of systematic individual terrorism against the leading bureaucrats of the Tzarist State. In 1909 Azef was exposed as a long time police agent. Though Marx himself had expressed the greatest admiration for the Narodnik men and women who were hanged for killing Tzar Alexander II, in 1881, the Russian Marxists came to oppose the tactic of individual assassinations. To it they counterposed the education and mobilisation of the working class and, as some of them sometimes put it, an...

Illuminating Marx

Robert Ford is a visual artist based in London. He is currently working producing an illustrated edition of Karl Marx’s Capital. He spoke to Daniel Randall from Solidarity about the project. Around eighteen months ago, I was attending some Capital reading groups, including one run by Workers’ Liberty. I was also watching David Harvey’s lectures. It seemed to me that many people, including many people around the Marxist left, didn’t have any engagement with Capital or grasp of its key concepts. So I wanted to undertake an original project that would make people more interested in the book and...

My Recollections of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

I made the acquaintance of Engels in 1867 – the year in which the first volume of “Capital” was published. “I must introduce you to Engels,” said Marx to me, “as you are engaged to my daughter”; and we went together to Manchester. Engels lived with his wife and her niece, who was then six or seven years old, in a little house in the suburbs of the town, only a little way from the open country. He was then partner in a firm which his father had established. Like Marx, he had fled to London from the Continent, after the failure of the revolution, and he still took a part in political agitation...

THE CIVIL WAR IN THE UNITED STATES By KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELS *

(February 1938) THE CIVIL WAR IN THE UNITED STATES By KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELS Edited with an introduction by Richard Enmale xxv, 325 pp. New York. International Publishers. $2.50.Engels called the American Civil War “the first grand war of contemporaneous history”. Marx later hailed it as “the greatest event of the age”. Today when the nineteenth century has receded into the distance and the bourgeois power that issued out of the Civil War bestrides the world, we can realize the colossal magnitude of the conflict far better than they. The Second American Revolution stands out as the...

An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital

Michael Heinrich’s book, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, (Monthly Review Press 2012) is a lucid and refreshing theoretical interpretation of Marxist political economy.

Apparently, it has gone through nine editions in Germany and is used widely in German...

Lincoln, slavery and self-emancipation

I’m interested by Eric Lee’s idea that Quentin Tarantino’s takes on Nazism and American slavery (Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained) promote the idea of self-emancipation, unlike Steven Spielberg’s (Schindler’s List and Lincoln). But I don’t agree that “the reality is that it wasn’t Black slaves who brought down slavery” but “a mostly (though not entirely) white army led by a white man”. Of course I am not denying the role of the US army in the US Civil War. Nonetheless, American slaves played a central role, perhaps the central role, in their own emancipation. Just before the Civil War...

The Marxes: labours of love

“Most people would come away shocked at what a moderate [Marx] was … if they read what Marx actually wrote.” So says Mary Gabriel, of people who would see Marx as (unjustifiably) responsible for the atrocities of the 20th century, committed in the name of communism. Mary Gabriel places Marx during the events about and for which he wrote, including the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune, and tells of his irreplaceable contribution to the International Working Men’s Association, afterwards known as the First International. But Marx was constantly torn between his devotion to his primary...

Marx and Lenin on press freedom

Marx analysed the problem of a free press thoroughly in two long essays which are to be found in the first volume of the collected edition of his works. For Marx “the right to think and speak the truth” was an elementary human right and freedom of the press — as he said — merely “human freedom in practice”. Marx recognized that human freedom is made up of a complex of interdependent freedoms. “Each form of freedom”, he said, “postulates the other in the same way as one limb of the body postulates another. Whenever one particular freedom is threatened, freedom itself is threatened. Freedom is...

The Poverty of Philosophy: notes for study sessions

Click here to download pdf . "Our conception first outlined..." In Paris (late 1843 to early 1845) Marx met organised socialist workers for the first time. They won Marx over. He became a communist, though still philosophically a follower of Feuerbach. He also (August 1844) established his working relationship with Engels, who had moved ahead politically faster than Marx. Marx and Engels wrote a Feuerbachian communist critique of the left-wing German philosophers, "The Holy Family". In it, they defended Proudhon, with whom Marx had been on friendly terms, against the Germans. Marx was expelled...

Back to that first International?

A century and a half ago, workers’ leaders from a number of European countries met in St. Martin’s Hall in London under a banner proclaiming “All men are brothers.” The organisation they founded has come to be known as the First International. Last week at the giant Bella Center in Copenhagen, a much larger conference representing many more workers was held. The organisation it formed was called IndustriALL Global Union. If I seem to be comparing the two events, it’s not to wrap IndustriALL in the glory of that legendary First International. It’s because the parallels where they exist are not...

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