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Marxist theory is our sharpest weapon in the class struggle. Here, you can find our most recent theoretical and historical articles. For news and analysis, click here.

You can also visit our education hub to find a selection of articles, books, talks and reading guides.

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Marxism and multiculturalism

Most current debate on multiculturalism revolves
around fundamental conflicts within liberalism. The liberal hegemony has meant
that the intense and detailed debates that accompanied the evolution of Marxist
social democracy have been relegated to the historical margins. The Marxist debate starts from a very
different perspective. Its focus is not the individual, but society as a whole.
This article is a re-examination of these debates and of
their historical interpretations in order to throw a new light on issues today. 

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Soldier of Discontent

In the autumn of 1916 the Industrial Workers of the World, better known
as the Wobblies, were trying to organise lumber workers near Everett,
Washington in the USA. A series of attempts to organise by the workers
had lead to a murderous response from the employers. Charles Ashleigh was appointed to run the Wobblies defence campaign – this article is in memory of him, a soldier of the proletariat.

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The Meaning of October

"The October revolution laid the foundation of a new
culture, taking everybody into consideration, and for that very reason
immediately acquiring international significance. Even supposing for a
moment that owing to unfavourable circumstances and hostile blows the
Soviet regime should be temporarily overthrown, the inexpungable
imprint of the October revolution would nevertheless remain upon the
whole future development of mankind." Trotsky – The History of the Russian Revolution

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Intelligent design in modern cosmology?

During the 1980s
and 1990s, advances in chaos and complexity theory began to demonstrate a fact
understood more than a century and a half earlier by the founders of scientific
socialism, Marx and Engels, that systems which show an apparently high degree
of complexity or “design” do not require the hand of a creator but emerge naturally
from the apparently mundane interacting and contradictory forces at play inside
the system. It may come as a surprise to many then to find that in the field of
cosmology there are respected scientists groping towards the revival of the
mystical idea of intelligent design.

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The ‘Spirit of Petrograd’? The 1918 and 1919 Police Strikes in Britain

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Marxists have always maintained that
at some stage the intensity of the class struggle affects even the "armed
bodies of men" of the bourgeois state. Such an example was the police strike in
Britain at the end of the First World War. In the late summer of 1918 the sight
of 12,000 furious Metropolitan constables marching on Whitehall sparked panic
among ruling circles in Britain. Under the leadership of the National Union of
Police and Prison Officers, militantly class-conscious policemen conspired to
overturn their role as the subservient body of the State.

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[Ted Grant Archive – Update] Communist Party Leaders Want Post-War Coalition With The Tories

After the Crimea conference, the British Communist Party leaders came
out with a position advocating a National unity government with the
Tories for the post-war period. This policy of class collaboration was
denounced by Ted Grant, who wrote in 1945
that, "to support Churchill is to support monopoly capitalism. To
support the capitalists, the interests of the working class must be
betrayed. It has taken the advanced British workers the experience of
50 years to realise that the Liberal and Tory Parties are parties of
capitalism."

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The Cato Street Conspiracy – part two

In the period of intense and bitter struggles described in Part 1, the
massacre at Peterloo in August 1819 was just the most extreme example.
Arthur Thistlewood was able to gather around him a mixed collection of
other individuals equally impatient to bring matters to a head and have
it out with the country’s political leaders. They believed that violent
direct action was the answer.

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In memory of Phil Lloyd (1934-2007)

Comrade Phil Lloyd has died in Swansea at the age of 74. He joined the
tendency led by Ted Grant back in the 1950s. He was a pioneer of the Marxist
tendency and played a key role in its development. Alan Woods was one of the
youth that that Phil Lloyd helped to recruit and educate. Here Alan remembers
the man and fighter.

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The Cato Street Conspiracy – part one

Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are
doomed to repeat them. For this reason, socialists take the study of the past
struggles of working people very seriously. In 1820 six men, convicted of treason, were publicly hanged
and then beheaded outside Newgate Prison in the City of London. The crime of
which they had been convicted was plotting to assassinate the entire Cabinet as
it sat enjoying a working dinner. This attempt at a violent coup d’etat is now
largely forgotten, tucked away as a footnote in the history books. It deserves
to be better known.

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