Karl Marx

Marxists and science

“Marxism does not provide a ready-made key for making judgements about scientific ideas. It cannot substitute for a detailed knowledge of the appropriate scientific material.”1 Marx and Engels saw themselves applying a scientific method to economics and the dynamics of class societies. Their philosophical approach was derived from that of Hegel who used dialectics, a discussion between opposing points of view, to arrive at truths. Marx and Engels applied Hegel’s methods to the real world, in particular showing that the capitalist mode of production gave rise to a class whose interests lay in...

Workers' Liberty week school on Capital volume 1

Wednesday 2 to Sunday 6 January 2019, Forest of Dean Click here for pdf . This week school will help students equip themselves to inspire and lead Capital reading groups, using Otto Rühle's abridgement, in the months to come. The writer Edmund Wilson, never a Marxist but for a time a socialist and a fascinated admirer of Trotsky, called Marx the "Poet of Commodities", and wrote: "there went into the creation of Das Kapital as much of art as of science. The book is a welding-together of several quite diverse points of view, of several quite distinct techniques of thought. It contains a treatise...

Jumbling up History

The letter which this article replies to is here , towards the bottom, entitled " All states are racist endeavours " . Mike Zubrowski ( Solidarity 480) is right that to go from saying “all nation states are intrinsically racist” or “all states are racist endeavours” to saying that *Israel*, in particular, is “a racist endeavour”, and therefore should be suppressed (by another state, in fact by a conquering state) is illogical and antisemitic in its implications. It should also be said that claims that “all nation states are intrinsically racist” or “all states are racist endeavours” are an...

How Marx transcended "the rule of law"

With the passing of Robert Fine on 9 June 2018, the British left lost a truly exceptional figure. A respected sociologist at the University of Warwick, Fine was a long-time sympathiser of Workers’ Liberty. Though he was less involved in frontline activism towards the end of his life, he never lost his commitment to working-class struggle. In short, Fine never became a stereotypical “Marxist academic”. To highlight his impressive body of literature I am going to review five of his major books, starting with Democracy and the Rule of Law: Marx’s Critique of the Legal Form (Blackburn Press 2002...

The professor and the helicopter

People tried to construct flying machines for thousands of years before the first planes were built in the early 20th century, and the first regularly-produced helicopters from the 1930s. Suppose a historian were to study all the documents she or he could find about that effort, prior to say 1900, but without registering that the purpose was to find a flying machine. Maybe the historian would imagine that the purpose was just to find some way of getting from place to place, and would comment: why didn’t they just walk? John Kelly, an academic at Birkbeck University, structures his account of...

Why revolutionaries organise

Why revolutionaries organise The working class has the potential to become a great power in society, but can make that potential a reality, even on the most limited scale, only by organisation. That fact follows from two facts about the working class in developed capitalist society. It is the basic productive class. It is simultaneously a wage-slave class. Its members are relegated to relative poverty, cultural and educational restrictions, insecurity, and exhausting work burdens of parcellised tasks. Individual workers, without collective organisation, are merely troops under capitalist...

Marx and Marxism (as summarised by Lenin)

Karl Marx was an activist and writer, who started off as a radical democrat fighting the Prussian monarchy and the established religion of his time and from the mid 1840s until his death in 1883 became a leading figure in the socialist movement. The idea of socialism had circulated as an ideal and a speculation long before Marx. Socialism as a political or quasi-political movement originated in the early 19th century. When Marx was a young man, it was growing in vigour and fame, but was still made up of a chaotic scattering of groups with very varied notions of how their more-or-less-shared...

From Karl Marx to the fourth of July

From The Militant, July 16, 1951 I’m a Fourth of July man from away back, and a great believer in fire crackers, picnics and brass bands to go with it. You can stop me any time and get me to listen to the glorious story of the greatness of our country and how and when it all got started. The continent we inhabit has been here longer than anyone knows—but as a nation, as an independent people, the darlings of destiny favored above all others, we date from the Declaration of Independence and the Fourth of July. The representatives in Congress assembled 175 years ago were the great initiators...

Sven-Eric Liedman's biography of Marx

Sven-Eric Liedman's new biography of Marx is the biggest yet, I think, at 756 pages. Published in the 200th anniversary year of Marx's birth, it must be getting good sales. It is sympathetic to Marx, it records the events of his life reasonably well, and the summaries it gives of some of his writings are usually more or less passable. Yet overall the book is a disappointment. Liedman, a professor of the History of Ideas at a Swedish university, tries at length to demonstrate that he has a better knowledge of Marx's writings and of commentaries on Marx than other writers. The effect is to clog...

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