Marx on pay
The ruling class has used parliament to introduce various methods of wage restraint to demoralise the working class. The minimum wage and the “living wage” are current examples.
Marxist Thinking
Marxist Thinking
Waging wars abroad
Capitalism not only generates periodic world war but also on a regular basis unleashes war against individual nations, unable to tolerate others’ independence or accept restrictions on their influence
Deficit and debt
Inextricably linked, though quite different, the terms deficit and debt are often used interchangeably by politicians.
Britain as a nation state
Is the British nation state still needed? Debate on this has at last moved into the glare of media concern. Yet this very development has generated a phoney war to derail growing opposition to the EU.
Democracy and the EU
We find ourselves with our laws made by a foreign body, daily asserting extra powers for itself, trying to force us into a single economy with a single currency and soon to establish a single armed force.
Production for use
Products are presented in the form of commodities and exchanged via capitalist markets. And we can easily delude ourselves into imagining that things have always been arranged as they are now.
Guerrilla struggle
In 1973, a time of intense working class action in Britain, our Party wrote a pamphlet that sought to apply the tactics of guerrilla war to civil political action, civil strife and industrial action in Britain.
Capitalism’s dodgy claims
Capitalism claims to be by nature enterprising. The claim is repeated so often and is so rarely questioned that it has assumed the guise of an indisputable truth.
Britain’s destiny
People are increasingly grappling with fundamental questions about our national destiny. What is happening to society? What kind of Britain is on offer and what ought it to be?
Twenty-five abnormal years
Normally we associate the workings of capitalism with attributes such as mass unemployment and economic downturns. But the twenty-five years following the end of the Second World War were markedly different from all other capitalist periods.
Working class governance
We have all the requirements to manage society. Revolutionary politics will harness them for the greater benefit of everyone within a growing economy.
Party of a new type
Our Party is unlike any other in Britain, a new type of political body wedded to a different destiny, one of workers taking control and refashioning the world.
Finance capital
The history of capital since the Industrial Revolution shows that increasingly it is sucked into the realm of financial speculation.
War and capitalism
Of the many unacceptable costs of living with capitalism, probably the biggest is its periodic tendency to generate orgies of mutual slaughter that originate in the same way. Contradictions and economic conflicts between capitalist blocs become increasingly antagonistic then eventually erupt into global wars.
Society and the working class
Human life is utterly dependent on social organisation and activity. Yet addicts of the free market declare that there is no such thing as society.
Boom produces bust
The surge in capitalist markets from 1997 to 2007 was only achieved by deliberate, reckless stimulation of credit growth, enacted through a combination of abnormally low interest rates (relative to inflation) and exceedingly lax regulation of both credit and housing markets.
Collective organisation
How did previous working class gains materialise? Improvements and reforms came out of past struggle and campaigns by organised workers.
The myth of the market
Over the past 32 years, Britain’s political leaders have lectured us with their mantra of disaster, “Let the markets decide!” Though the personnel in Downing Street have changed, the message has remained obsessively constant.
Unemployment – war on workers
We only have one shot at life. Consigning workers to periods of prolonged idleness is a criminal waste of talent and an indictment of this flawed society that treats us as just flotsam and jetsam.
Social democracy
Social democracy, including its British counterparts such as the Social Democratic Federation and successors including the Labour Party, saw workers as passive, an electorate, a force to be harnessed,
Labour aristocracy
Anxious to work out why the oldest working class, the British, had avoided moving to revolution, external commentators at the height of empire concocted a false argument in an effort to explain away this behaviour. In some circles it is still lazily dispensed a century or so later.
The force for revolution
How do we counter capitalism’s relentless and absolute decline? How do we gather together our power (recently often left dormant) and commence our absolute rise?
Two classes in Britain
In Britain, there are only two classes – those who sell their labour power and those who exploit the labour of others, in other words workers and capitalists.
Contradiction and change
The question of change (and what determines it) is a fundamental part of philosophy. In spite of appearances, nothing can remain the same – all life is development, or motion, and all development involves a series of changes.
State and revolution
In 1917, after three years of world war, Lenin identified the nature and function of the state. He declared that a partnership exists between the state and the dominant ruling class with the former charged with serving the interests of the latter.
Workers are thinkers
Nothing is more insulting to the history of working class struggle than the notion, born of ignorance and malevolence, that workers have to be instructed and commanded to do the correct thing. Indeed, according to some of the disconnected, to do anything at all.
Manufacture matters
At the heart of the birth and development of our working class – and hence of the nation itself – is making things, “manufacturing”. Revitalising it, reinvesting in it, is essential for the health and strength of both our class and nation.
Origins of our class
What were our origins as a working class? The British working class was the first in the world to emerge out of the land, the first to become an overwhelming majority.
Absolute decline
Marx analysed 19th-century capitalism as being in decline, never to recover. Many claim this shows Marx was wrong, because capitalism always manages to recover from its frequent crises. Yet Marx was right.
Dialectics
As thinking beings we always try and make sense of the world around us. Dialectics is the tool for appreciating the inner workings of things, events, phenomena, but more importantly, how they change.