Marxist theory

On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep — but for ever.

Karl Marx was a man with a family to look after, and a revolutionary
who no country acknowledged as citizen. A giant thinker of the modern
era who transformed our outlook in philosophy, economics and political
thought, Marx’s revolutionary activity was hobbled by poverty. Steve
Higham chronicles his hardships and achievements a century and a
quarter after his death.

Marxism
is a not a moral code and is more than a set of ideas. It is a method that, if
applied correctly to the concrete situation, acts as a compass for the movement
towards the transformation of society by the working class in the interests of
humanity as a whole. Anyone can use a compass but it is still necessary to
decide whether to continue heading north or to change direction. Trotsky’s
short article, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, though unfinished, contains some vital lessons for the class conscious
workers and youth.

As young men, Marx and Engels came
out of the German philosophical tradition. They were at this time groping their
way to becoming revolutionary activists. In 1845 Marx and Engels set out their
revolutionary world view for the first time in a book, The German Ideology, that
settled accounts with the Hegelian tradition from which they had just emerged.
It points the way to the clear language of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 and addressed to the workers
of the world.

Here we publish A Marxist View of the 20th Century, first shown at In Defence of Marxism in 2001.
Narrated by Alan Woods, with Lal Khan, Ted Grant and Noam Chomsky.

Today, 25th February 2008 would have been Phil Mitchinson’s 40th
Birthday. Phil who was an outstanding Marxist and a leader of the International
Marxist Tendency died tragically in November 2006. To commemorate this
anniversay we reprint a letter by Leon Trotsky to Jack London’s daughter which
gives Trotsky’s views of London’s book The Iron Heel, one of Phil’s favourite books.

Tomorrow marks the 70^th anniversary of the murder
of Trotsky’s eldest son – Leon Sedov -by agents of the Stalinist secret police,
the GPU. He was thirty-two years of age. This crime constituted part of the
systematic hounding and murder of Trotsky’s key supporters and family, whose
only ‘crime’ was to defend genuine Marxism against Stalin and the crimes of the
Russian bureaucracy.

Andrew Glyn died from a brain tumour on 22 December 2007.  He was 64 years old.  A fellow of Corpus Christi College
in Oxford since
1969, he was a leading socialist economist for all that time.

Andrew left a wealth
of important writing that analysed the development of post-war capitalism. His best-known works were British capitalism, workers and the profits
squeeze with Bob Sutcliffe in 1972; Capitalism
since 1945 with Phil Armstrong and the late John Harrison in 1984 and most
recently, Capitalism Unleashed
(2006), reviewed earlier.