Karl Marx

Marx: the shortlist

A reading group in London on Marx's Capital volume 1, organised by Workers' Liberty, has recently completed its labours, and discussed what to study next. Capital volume 1, according to both conventional wisdom and the stated opinion of Marx's close comrade Frederick Engels, was Marx's "chief work", and anyone who wants to express even a half-informed opinion about the body of ideas which has become known as "Marxism" needs to study it. It is a sizeable book, and it rewards re-reading. Yet, as Marx himself wrote in a preface: "With the exception of the section on value-form [chapter 1 section...

The Fenians: Rise and Decline

Article from Workers' Republic 19, mid-summer 1967. Fenianism is generally thought of as the archetypal physical force movement, directed towards establishing an independent Irish Republic. It was founded in Dublin in 1858. It organised the unsuccessful Rising of 1867. Segments of it played a leading role in the Land League agitation in the 1880s. One of its strands helped to organise the partially successful Rising of 1916. Fenianism was in the line of that Republicanism which has for seven generations now been the vehicle of radical protest against exploitation and oppression in Ireland. At...

Is Marxism Eurocentric?

A common charge heard against Marxism in recent decades is that it is a Eurocentric theory, one with arguably colonial assumptions and underpinned by Western values. If so, then Marxism cannot claim to be a universal theory of human emancipation; it might even simply rationalise the domination of a...

Background notes on Marx's "18th Brumaire"

Timeline of events Since 1830 France had been ruled by the Orleanist faction of the monarchy. It was more liberal than the Bourbons; but "it was not the French bourgeoisie as a whole which ruled but only one fraction of it - bankers, stock-market barons, railway barons, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a section of landed proprietors... the so-called financial aristocracy" (Marx). January 1848: street protests in Palermo against the autocratic rule of the king of Naples, followed by similar upheavals in other Italian cities, including those of the north, ruled by Austria. 22 February...

Walking through Capital with David Harvey

David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital may become the most widely-used handbook for studying the great “critique of political economy” which Karl Marx published in 1867. Harvey’s book has a clear, brisk, and unpretentious style, in contrast to some other guides to Capital thick with lectures on how the author has detected some otherwise-unnoticed complexity in Marx’s argument. It includes frequent, and often useful, comments on contemporary relevance. It is a write-up from nearly 40 years of almost continuous conduct of study classes and reading groups on Capital; and, in effect, the...

Karl Marx on credit and crisis

In discussing fixed capital, Marx refers to growing “pressure on the money-market” as a factor in the downfall of capitalist booms. “If we conceive society as being not capitalistic but communistic, there will be no money-capital at all in the first place, not the disguises cloaking the transactions arising on account of it. The question then comes down to the need of society to calculate beforehand how much labour, means of production, and means of subsistence it can invest, without detriment, in such lines of business as for instance the building of railways, which do not furnish any means...

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

By Dan Katz This book is available for a bit more than £8 on Amazon, which makes it a bargain. The author — Robin Blackburn — is a former editor of New Left Review , and has previously written two good books on slavery ( The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery and The Making of New World Slavery ). Unfinished Revolution is divided into two sections: a 100 page introduction, followed by 150 pages of documents. It is a long time since I bought a new book which includes a section of historical writings — in this case from Marx, Engels, Lincoln and others. It makes a good change to find a writer who...

The Paris Commune of 1871: the first workers' government

The following text is from Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France . It is an account of the events leading up to and during the Paris Commune of March-May 1871 when a radical democratic government of the people (in the main working class) held power. It is a militant defence of the Paris Commune — it caused a stir at the time — and was written for the “First International” (the International Working Men’s Association), the socialist and labour movement grouping in which Marx was a leading member. The French members of the IWMA played important roles in the Commune. In this extract, Marx develops...

D is for democracy

“Without democracy there can be no socialism and without a socialist society, there can be no real and complete democracy.” This simple idea is central to Marxism and inseparable from the work of revolutionary socialists. But it is by no means uncontroversial. The most basic facet of a socialist society is that ownership and control of the means of production — workplaces, machines, tools and processes — will be taken out of the hands of a small group of people and be taken over by the whole of society. But if collective “ownership” is unaccountable and the control undemocratic, then by any...

Making time for Marx

Say what you want about life-threatening illness, but at least an extended spell of convalescence provides a chance to catch up on some serious reading. It is largely thanks to a summer spent in a sick bed that I got an uninterrupted shot at reading volume one of Marx’s Capital , cover to cover. It almost made a particularly virulent infection seem worthwhile. I like to think that what I accomplished in those weeks was a real, if modest, achievement. Even though I subsequently petered out half way through volume two, I am reliably informed that I progressed further than the man who leads one...

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