Karl Marx

Letter: Taking them down a peg

Andrew Northall (Letters, Solidarity 438) asks important questions about taxing the ultra-rich and the merely well-off. No socialist strategy, I believe, can escape the risk of a “counter-revolutionary reaction” from the rich. That is not just because of our challenge to their income. It is because of our challenge to their wealth and their power. No socialism is possible without taking the top 1% down a peg, and they will resist that ferociously. At certain times they will shrug and pay more tax. Labour’s plans are modest. In 1944-5 (under a Tory-led government), Britain had a top income-tax...

Kimber’s contradictory consciousness

The Brexit vote was “a bitter blow for the establishment, big business, the international financial institutions, the rich and the politicians” says Charlie Kimber, writing for International Socialism Journal. This gives the impression, ″with minor exceptions″, that the ruling class was united in their support for remaining in the EU, which is clearly a fantasy. Cut through the pseudo sociology in Kimber’s analysis and you are left with two points. The leave vote was primarily a revolt against the establishment and was not dominated by racism or hostility to migrants. What evidence does Kimber...

Is socialism against human nature?

Our recently published book Can Socialism Make Sense? takes on the arguments against socialism. In this abridged excerpt a critic of socialism (B) is answered by a socialist (A) on the question of human nature. B: You can’t change human nature. Humanity remains an animal. Human nature — competition, individualism, selfishness, predatoriness — produces, protects, and preserves capitalism. A. If that were true, then why did we not have capitalism all back through history? We have had slave societies, feudal societies, “oriental-despotic” societies (ancient India and China, Inca Peru). The idea...

Letters

I know Leo Panitch pretty well and I think Martin is misrepresenting him in his report of the “parliamentary socialism” workshop at the Momentum fringe event at Labour Party conference ( Solidarity 418). When Leo dismisses “insurrection”, he means that he doesn’t think that armed struggle with the bourgeois state — civil war, which Trotsky did say was the highest form of the class struggle — is feasible. The bourgeois state has tanks, fighter planes, nukes, etc. Unless revolutionary socialists win over the majority of the rank-and-file of the armed forces well in advance of taking power, we’ll...

The world economy since 2008

Since the immediate recovery from the great 2008-9 economic crisis, world economic growth has been slow and troubled. Major areas have slipped back into recession. Now a “third leg” of the crisis, or even a new crash, are possibilities for 2016. Martin Thomas surveys the path, the causes and the sequels of the crisis. The story started in finance. In June 2005 mortgage interest rates in the USA started rising sharply. They levelled off and declined after July 2006, but in the meantime house prices had reversed their giddy rise of previous years. House prices would continue to fall until...

The sham of Osborne’s “Northern Powerhouse”

It is alarming and deeply disturbing to see that some people, many of whom should know better, have swallowed George “high-vis” Osborne’s fantasy-speak about building a “Northern Powerhouse”. This is more amazing when you consider that ever since the Industrial Revolution there has always been a “Northern Powerhouse”, and it was the Conservative Party and Thatcher that destroyed it. Without the coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, engineering and textiles of northern cities like Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and Newcastle (to which Scotland and South Wales must also be added), Britain...

No truth without freedom!

Karl Marx wrote in favour of free speech, free criticism, and free expression in these passages of an article of February 1843, “Comments on the latest Prussian Censorship Instruction” “According to this law,” namely, Article II, “the censorship should not prevent serious and modest investigation of truth, nor impose undue constraint on writers, or hinder the book trade from operating freely.” The investigation of truth which should not be prevented by the censorship is more particularly defined as one which is serious and modest. Both these definitions concern not the content of the...

Why the banks should be confiscated

The HSBC scandal rumbles on, and it’s only the latest of many scandals about the big banks to break since 2008. Yet the mainstream debate never considers taking the banks under public ownership and democratic control, and radically transforming them. One or two top bankers caught particularly red-handed may be eased out, with lavish pay-offs and pensions. Some banks are nationalised, and handed to the same sort of managers as before, to be run as before, and privatised as soon as state aid can make them profitable again. That’s all. All the mainstream debates assume that we need banks run...

Advice or class struggle?

The Guardian has published (18 February) a talk from 2013 by Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in which he declared himself an “erratic Marxist”. Varoufakis praises Marx’s account of how capital both develops labour’s creativity and energy, and simultaneously cramps it within rigid, quantifying limits. But, he says, he himself seeks “a modest agenda” to “save European capitalism from itself”. He learned to avoid more radical aims, he says, when a student in England in the early years of the Thatcher government. At first he thought the “short, sharp shock” of Thatcher’s attacks would...

The gothic reaction to industrial capitalism

What have Karl Marx, Dracula, a modern robotic production line and St Pancras station got in common? According to Andrew Dixon they all have more then a touch of the gothic about them. In this three part series, Dixon makes a convincing and fascinating case that the gothic sensibility has become a way of responding to and critiquing industrial capitalism and the urbanism, technology and pollution that comes with it. Dixon points out that the modern, world-wide obsession with the irrational, deranged, morbid and spectral that makes up gothic started out as little more then an aristocratic...

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