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 70th 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.
One year ago today comrade Phil Mitchinson
died tragically of a heart attack. He was without doubt a very talented comrade
who devoted his time to editing the Socialist
Appeal and helping to build our tendency in Britain and internationally. Here
Rob Sewell remembers Phil and the role he played.
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.
Just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and later the Soviet Union,
Ted Grant delivered this speech on the crisis in the USSR. To deflect
any blame, Gorbachev and co. heaped blame on Stalin and Brezhnev, even
going so far as to rehabilitate some of the victims of the purge trials
– including those accused of "Trotskyism". But Trotsky was not
rehabilitated: he was still hated by the bureaucracy because they
feared the ideas he represented.
Leon Trotsky’s murder was no accident or spontaneous action by the dictator Stalin, but
a monstrous preconceived act that was the culmination of a murder campaign against
the whole of the old Bolshevik leadership of the revolution and those who stood
by the genuine ideas of Marxism. We republish this article published in Militant in 1985.