Workers' Liberty

Excerpts from writings by Marx and Engels where they explain that their "historical materialism" is not a simplistic economic determinism. Download pdf: see "attachment".

“Socialism is the answer” to the crises and crying injustices, the inequalities and absurdities, of capitalism. But what is it, this socialism?

An abridgement of Marx's Capital, volume 1, produced by the German Marxist Otto Rühle. Download as pdf (see "attachment").

This course covers Capital volume 1 in 10 weeks. The basic reading is either 'Capital' volume 1 itself, or Otto Ruhle's abridgement of 'Capital'. Copies of that abridgement are available, price £1.50, from the AWL, or you can read / download the document from this website.

KARL MARX IN AUGUST
(To the tune of "Joe Hill")

I dreamed I saw Karl Marx last night,
I saw him standing there,
His hair jet black, no longer white,
Fierce eyes, with a bold young stare:

In his notes on the history of economic thought in 1861-63, first published as Theories of Surplus Value (but in fact the second draft of Capital, volume 1), Marx comments on the way a rich country can exploit a poorer one.

Part 1 here | Part 2 here

Despite the Grundrisse being 150 years old, such ideas in it are, essentially, new for the left even today. The huge manuscript remained almost unknown for over a century.

Part 1 here | Part 3 here

The response is never automatic; the process is never linear.

The working class is the revolutionary class. It is the gravedigger of capitalism and the architect of socialism. Everyone who has even heard of Karl Marx knows that those were central ideas.

A guide to studying the Communist Manifesto (PDF). If you prefer to download it as a Word file, click here.

A guide to studying the Communist Manifesto ('Word' file). If you prefer to download it as a PDF, click here.

I’ve been reading Francis Wheen’s new book Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography, part of a series, “books that shook the world”. An extract was in Saturday’s Guardian

By Paul Hampton
Read this article in French here.

An article, “Marx and religion” by Anindya Bhattacharyya in Socialist Worker (4 March 2006) argued that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not very hard on religion and scorned “liberal” contemporaries (especially Bruno Bauer) who were.

This 1860 article by Karl Marx is a concise account of the struggles of the people of Sicily for freedom through centuries. So is the politics of it, in his last paragraph. Marx loathes the French emperor Napoleon III and says that he will do what he will do in Italy for dynastic and imperialist reasons. Marx nonetheless thinks that “any change” — even a French intervention in Sicily — “must be for the better”. Better than the ongoing slaughter of Sicilians by their own savage Bourbon government.

Karl Marx (1818-83) was born into a middle-class family in Germany. At university he was one of many radically-minded philosophers. In his mid-20s, partly under the influence of workers' socialist groups he met during a stay in Paris, he decided to throw in his lot with the working class then emerging as a social force in Europe.

Tom Unterrainer reviews Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume V: War and Revolution by Hal Draper

This coming Saturday (10 July) sees the start of a six-part summer course on Marxist philosophy. Classes take place in Hackney on Saturday afternoons. Full course details are below.


a 6-part course based on Marx's 'Theses on Feuerbach'

Paul Hampton concludes his series about world trade

A revolutionary alternative to both free trade and fair trade is the perspective held by the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. It is based on the core ideas of Marxists a century ago, applied to the circumstances we live in today.

I offer a different assessment of Daniel Bensaid's Marx for our times to the one given by Alan Johnson in Solidarity 3/40.

Daniel Bensaid's book Marx for our times§ is one of a number which Bensaid has published since 1990 to rethink Marxism in the light of the disconcerting events of 1989.

Until then, Bensaid's current, the USFI, and many others had located their politics within a view of history as proceeding on two levels. The "underlying" history of the second half of the 20th century was relentless advance by the "world revolution" through more and more victories "against imperialism". It was both pushed forward in a mechanical way, by the ever-stewing "crisis of imperialism", and pulled forward inexorably, the predetermined end-point of any negation or destruction of the existing order being the "world revolution".

by David Riazanov, Francis Boutle publishers

This is not an easy book to understand, but the effort to do so is worthwhile. It is not a work of hagiography, but an example of how the method of Marx can be used to develop the Marxist understanding of history.

Marx and Engels commented on many conflicts and wars between the great powers of 19th century Europe. In this article Hal Draper demonstrates that their political attitude towards those conflicts was consistently based on advancing, not whichever of the established five great powers seemed the “lesser evil” or more progressive, but what Engels called “the sixth great power… the [workers’] Revolution”.