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".

“No nation will put up with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers”, wrote Frederick Engels over a hundred years ago.

Continuing a series on the politics of the early modern British socialist movement with a brief assessment of the politics of the socialists in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century.

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.

How the oppression of women began, and what that implies for fighting oppression today. By Lilian Thomson

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.

Paul Hampton reviews Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 50

Frederick Engels' description of Robert Owen's life and work.

Engels on the Mexican-American war

This short excerpt from an article by Engels in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of February 1849 is significant not because every phrase in it can be taken as a model - it is an aside in the heat of polemic - but because it illustrates very vividly how far Marx and Engels were from wanting to stop or restrict the spread of capitalism across the world.
In 1846-8 the USA fought a war with Mexico over Texas (where North American settlers had won independence from Mexico in 1835), California (then under Mexican rule), and the area in between (now called New Mexico, and then also under Mexican rule). The war ended with Texas, New Mexico and California being added to the USA; and California, with the gold rush, did indeed develop capitalistically at a prodigious pace in the following years.

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”.