Karl Marx

After describing the rise of trade unions and workers’ wages-and-conditions battles in the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote: “Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers”. Not literally ever -expanding, without setbacks. Marx followed up: “This organisation of the proletarians... is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier”. He didn’t mean that every setback will...

Nearly 170 years ago, Britain was at war with Russia and Karl Marx was convinced that the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, was colluding secretly with the enemy. During his research in the British Museum Marx examined hundreds of British diplomatic documents. His conclusion, according to his biographer Boris Nicolaevsky, was that the documents “revealed a secret connivance between the cabinets in London and St Petersburg dating from the time of Peter the Great.” In other words, for more than a century. Marx went even further than this. Palmerston, he told Friedrich Engels in a letter, had “for...

At the Davos World Economic Forum, the boss of fertiliser giant Yara accused Putin of “weaponising food”. He has a point. Russia and Ukraine together produce 30% of the world’s wheat exports, 20% of barley exports and 75% of sunflower oil exports. But even bigger impact is the effect of the war on fertiliser and natural gas exports. Russia is the world’s top exporter of both fertiliser (15% of global output) and the key raw material for fertiliser production, fossil gas (18% of global output). This summer fertiliser prices were three times what they were last year. A study from University of...

A five-session study course

Karl Marx wrote of capitalism “enforcing economy in each individual business”, while “on the other hand, [it] begets, by its anarchical system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous”. He further wrote of its “shameful squandering of human labour-power for the most despicable purposes”, notably through overdriving workers by bullying us, atomising us, and setting us to compete against each other. Capitalism promotes...

The coming weeks, as labour movement activity dwindles in the second half of December and in early January, are a good time to catch up on reading. Workers’ Liberty is running a half-price offer on all our older books, aiming to redress the backlog in circulation caused by the lack of in-person political meetings over the last two years. We also offer special deals if you buy a few books — for example, both The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1, and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism , for £10 post free. It’s an especially good time to read the longer books, more difficult to work...

See the following articles from a debate about the implications, usefulness, and meanings of "metabolism" and "metabolic rift" in Marxist ecology, and wider questions about Marx's ecological writing, and climate politics today. This debate was sparked by a reading group Workers' Liberty ran on Kohei Saito’s book, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017). See: A review of Marx's Ecosocialism by Paul Hampton, 2019 Study guide for the reading group , 2021 So far, in the debate, are the following articles: Marx, the environment, and...

See other articles in this debate here . At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign power like someone standing outside of nature – but that we, n flesh blood and brain, belong to nature and exist within its midst, and that all the mastery of nature consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” - Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man I think Matt Cooper takes a too narrow definition of “metabolism” as a rather dull process...

See other articles in this debate here . It is unfortunate that Matt Cooper chose the eve of international climate mobilisations for his belated foray into Marxist ecological politics ( Solidarity 607 , 22 September 2021). His musing is vacuous, error-strewn and offers no alternative. Worse, he disparagingly misrepresents the ecological Marxism that underpins the AWL’s climate politics. His essay serves only as an exercise in stale pedantry. Marx During the mid-1840s, as Marx and Engels developed their materialist conception of history, they were already engaged with ecological questions. They...

Marx's Capital volume 1 - 12-session course Format of each session (which we'll vary slightly from week to week): - Quick outline of the passages of Capital covered, and questions - 15 minutes - Work in "breakout rooms" on discussing selected extracts and comments - 30 minutes - Report-back on that work, and discussion - 20 minutes - Review of discussion points - 25 minutes Running from 3 October 2021 to 3 April 2022, every other Sunday at 18:30-20:00 London time, skipping 28 November and 26 December. Zoomlink: bit.ly/capi-z Eventbrite bit.ly/capi-ebrite The basic reading is Otto Rühle's...