Marxist theory is our sharpest weapon in the class struggle. Here, you can find our most recent theoretical articles. For historical articles, click here
You can also visit our education hub to find a selection of articles, books, talks and reading guides.
It will come as a great shock to all comrades to
hear the tragic news of the premature death of comrade Phil Mitchinson, the
deputy editor of the Marxist journal Socialist
Appeal and leading member of the International Marxist Tendency.
Regrettably Phil suffered a severe heart attack late last night, was rushed to
hospital, but staff were unable to save him. He was 38 years of age.
Here we provide a four minute speech by Ted Grant in which he expressed
the confidence that by basing ourselves on the fundamental ideas of
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky we can build a powerful international
Marxist movement. There can be no greater task than this. You can watch
the video here, here or here.
Ted Grant – the founder of Socialist Appeal and the International Marxist Tendency – dedicated his entire life to defending genuine Marxist ideas and fighting for revolution. In this obituary, Alan Woods remembers Ted Grant as a theoretician, a revolutionary, a comrade, and a friend.
Trotsky’s ‘ABC of Materialist Dialectics’ is a brilliant short explanation of Marxist philosophy. It was written as part of a defence of Marxism against a middle-class revisionist tendency in the American Trotskyist movement in the late 1930s, which attempted to challenge its basic principles. As opposed to pragmatism and empiricism, Trotsky defended dialectical materialism as a richer, fuller, more comprehensive view of society and life in general.
We republish this article on the referundum on the EEC Common Market, written by Ted Grant in 1979. The article explains that the struggle against a capitalist common market needs to be linked to the struggle of changing society on socialist lines, as the struggle against the European Constitution today must also be.
We publish this article written by Ted Grant just before the general
election in Britian in 1979. The article demonstrates that the Tory
policies were doomed to failure because of the sickness of British
capitalism and that the reforms offered in the Labour Party programme
were unattainable on a capitalist basis. The only way to carry out
these reforms and take society forward was the nationalisation of the
means of production, and the creation of a planned economy under the
democratic control of the working class.
Someone has said that one of the criteria for winning the Turner Prize is not to be understood. The philosophy behind this is: the less I am understood, the better the art. Yet the kind of art that wins the Turner competition also has merit. They have the merit of holding up a mirror to the society that produced them, and saying: “This is what you are, and this is all you are capable of producing.” These works point out to us that beneath the sleek, comfortable bourgeois surface of modern society, horrors are lurking: dead vermin, murder, death and decay.
We are publishing our second study guide on historical materialism, which forms part of the book “What is Marxism?”. Historical Materialism is the application of Marxist science to historical development. The fundamental proposition of historical materialism can be summed up in a sentence: “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (Marx, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.)
Dialectical materialism is the revolutionary philosophy of Marxism. In this article, Rob Sewell explains this fundamental aspect of the Marxist method.
Dialectical materialism is the fundamental method of Marxism: a philosophy that seeks to analyse and explain the world due to the processes and material conditions in nature; a philosophy that seeks to explain change and motion. John Pickard provides an introduction to this revolutionary philosophy at the heart of Marxism.
Phil Mitchinson explores the ideas of “direct action” associated with the groups that are often at the centre of organising recent anti-capitalist protests.