Karl Marx

Who can save the Earth?

The Ecological Rift , the latest book by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, epitomises the strengths and weaknesses of the Monthly Review school: “half echo of the past, half menace of the future”. Read the rest of the article here .

Life after "Marxism"

The Film Theatre worker lights your way, with the aid of a torch, down the darkened corridor to the cinema/classroom. You take your place at the battered school desk. The lecture has already started, but you pick it up quite quickly. A middle-aged German tutor is lecturing to a class of 20-something students and the subject is Marx’s Das Kapital. You’re confused. The seminar is relevant and engaging enough, but the sense of surreality is heightened by the interspersed scenes. A statue of Marx is swung through a Berlin park skyline, pitching up on what looks like a children’s toy train. All the...

C is for capitalism

At the most fundamental level, capitalism is a system based on labour-power — the general human capacity to create new wealth — becoming a commodity, something to be bought and sold, across society. Capitalism is geared around the relationship between those who own the factories and workplaces, and buy labour-power, and those who have no choice but to sell their labour-power. Workers sell our labour-power — in capitalist society, a commodity like others, and yet not quite like others because it embodies the capacity to add new value — for a pittance sufficient to keep us in trim to continue...

Uncovering the truth about human society

“[The capitalist mode of production] is based on the dominion of man [sic] over nature. Where nature is too lavish, she “keeps him in hand, like a child in leading-strings.” She does not impose upon him any necessity to develop himself. It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the temperate zone, that is the mother country of capital. It is not the mere fertility of the soil, but the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons, which form the physical basis for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the natural...

Here's God?

The question of how to respond to religion, and the fact that a lot of working-class people (particularly in the so-called “developing world”) hold religious beliefs, has been a tricky issue for revolutionaries for... well, forever really. Karl Marx famously described religion as an “opiate”, comparing it to a drug that people take to make themselves feel better rather than actually dealing with the root causes of their problems. He said that it promised people a “heart in a heartless world” but only provided an “illusory happiness”. We think that was pretty much spot-on then and remains...

Trade unions, socialism, and working-class sectionalism (excerpts from Marx, Engels, Connolly, and Gramsci)

Marxists support, orient to, and give great importance to trade unions as basic organisations of the working class. But in most circumstances, in capitalist societies, trade unions are dominated by the better-off sections of the working class, and often follow a narrow sectionalist policy. The British labour movement was like that for all the time that Marx was politically active in Britain, and broadened out only after Marx's death and when Engels, though still alive, was an old man. None of the excerpts below is a straightforward "educational" explanation of the socialist and Marxist case...

The theory of Permanent Revolution and Ireland: is there a socialist quintessence in Irish nationalism?

[This is a copy-edited and slightly expanded version of the text in Solidarity replying to Lysaght .] A dozen years on from the “Good Friday Agreement” (GFA) things in Northern Ireland are far from settled. The Good Friday system is far from stable. The political system set up by the GFA is an intricate network of bureaucratised Catholic-Protestant sectarianism. Communal antagonism is still so strong that it takes 60 or so permanent walls to keep active communalism from erupting into violence across Belfast. Militarist republican activity is still a major factor in Northern Ireland. It is a...

What do we mean when we talk about socialism?

“Socialism is the answer” to the crises and crying injustices, the inequalities and absurdities, of capitalism. But what is it, this socialism? Too often it is a vague and cloudy and undefined “big word”. In part, this is deliberate policy by the socialists. Before the great founders of modern socialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, socialism had been mostly what they came to call “utopian socialism”. Some great benevolent thinker — and some of them were very great thinkers and splendid human beings, such as the Englishman Robert Owen — would work out a blueprint for an ideal socieity...

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