We are proud to announce the launch of the new biography of Ted Grant, entitled “Ted Grant: the Permanent Revolutionary”. Alan Woods, the author of the book, will be publically launching the book at a meeting on May Day – Wednesday 1st May – hosted by the UCLU Marxist Society in London.
Bolivarian candidate Nicolas Maduro won the Venezuelan presidential election of April 14 by a narrow margin. With 99.12% of the votes counted, there was a 78.71% turn out, with Maduro receiving 7,505,378 votes (50.66%), and Capriles 7,270,403 votes (49.07%). Capriles declared that he does not recognise the result and demanded an audit of 100% of the vote. Jorge Martin discusses the election results and the future of the Venezuelan Revolution.
Thousands of people in two Scottish cities took to the streets on 30th March to protest against the bedroom tax, which has now been brought in by the Tory-led government as part of a package of attacks on the welfare state and on the most vulnerable in society. Our correspondents from the Glasgow and Edinburgh Marxist societies provide reports of the demonstrations in these cities against the cuts.
The Thatcher period was a turbulent one, with many that shook the labour movement and the political situation in Britain. The articles presented here give a thorough background and analysis of these events, showing the real legacy of Thatcher.
On Thursday 11 April, a packed Socialist Appeal meeting at University College London saw miners’ leaders and trade unionists recall the brutality of Thatcher and the bitter lessons etched into their consciousness.
On Thursday 11th April, a packed Socialist Appeal meeting at University College London saw miners’ leaders and trade unionists recall the brutality of Thatcher and the bitter lessons etched into their consciousness. The speeches from John Dunn, of the Justice for Minerworkers campaign, and Chris Herriot – an ex-miner from Scotland – demonstrated the anger that exists across the country towards Thatcherism and the passion to fight for a socialist alternative.
With the presidential elections in Venezuela due to take place this weekend on 14th April, we publish here an article on the legacy of Hugo Chávez by Jorge Martin, the International Secretary of the Hands Off Venezuela campaign, which originally appeared in the April edition of Labour Briefing. It is almost an impossible task to sum up the legacy of Hugo Chávez in 650 words, but that was the space which was available.
In the last week of March, Alan Woods, founder of the Hands off Venezuela campaign and leading figure of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) was in Venezuela. He was invited to participate in the Meeting of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity. We publish here a report of the week’s events at this crucial turning point for the Bolivarian Revolution, with the presidential elections due to take place on 14th April.
Members of the PCS walked out on strike at 1pm on Friday 5 April and continued their strike action until the following Monday when they staged a mass “walk-in” at 1pm. In Portsmouth, Ministry of Defence jobs and working conditions at the Naval Dockyard are under threat. Sion Reynolds, vice-chair of the Portsmouth trades council, reports from the picket lines in Portsmouth.
It has been a busy period within student politics over the past few months as students from across the political spectrum have campaigned for positions within student unions, culminating in the NUS conference this week. These campaigns provide a decent backdrop for the second article in our series on the student movement, in which we analyse the broader question of student activism and the role of the Marxists.
In the same week that the Home Secretary Teresa May is due to be hauled in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee to be questioned over her failure with the UK Border Agency (UKBA) and the failure to deal with the backlogs of immigration cases, she will also have to deal with the fallout from union members’ action in her department as PCS call a week-long of strikes.
The following article was originally published in the summer issue of our theoretical magazine In Defence of Marxism. In a previous article from the IDOM magazine, we polemicised against the theory of “under-consumption” as an explanation of capitalist crisis. In this article, we wish to look at Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and explore the wider question of how to approach economics in a dialectical manner.