Video

Can Marxism can help us to understand autistic experience in modern capitalism? How might Marxism inform our struggles for equality and liberation? There are different approaches to understanding autism. Perhaps the dominant approach is a medical one: seeing autism as a disease or tragedy, and autistic people as being broken and needing fixing. Over recent years, a more progressive approach has developed. It stresses acceptance of autistic people rather than simply “awareness”, and demands rights, equality and support rather than abusive “treatments”. This approach is based on the concept of...

At Workers' Liberty summer school – Ideas for Freedom 2015 – socialist Daisy Forest debated the Bishop of Manchester David Walker, on the question of 'Love thy neighbour, or class struggle?' Below is a video recording of the debate, and also a transcript of Daisy's speech. We live in a world in which enough food is grown to feed everyone, in which the productive capacity of human kind could meet the needs of each and every human being. Yet we live in a world where everyday children die of starvation or from preventable diseases or are blown to pieces in one of the dozens of conflicts which...

Union members and activists are usually very loyal to our unions, work hard in day-to-day union organisation and disputes, and support our union leaders so long as they are supporting us. But we also often feel frustrated and demoralised when our unions settle deals above our heads or against our interests, drag heels and shy from a fight, or seek to resolve a dispute as soon as it begins. How often have we been baffled by seemingly bizarre actions from our unions? If a union exists to defend its members, why would its leaders behave in a way that jeopardises the interests of the very people they are supposed to represent? Is this cock-up or conspiracy? Or is it just that the union bureaucracy making the decisions is behaving like union bureaucracies do? If we look into what the union bureaucracy has been and is today, and the role it plays in society, we will get a clue as to why it acts as it does. Understanding the bureaucracy is the first step towards challenging it.