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This month marks the 80th anniversary of the death of John Maclean.
Maclean was an outstanding figure. He was Britain’s most famous Marxist
propagandist and revolutionary organiser. At great personal cost, he
hailed the Bolshevik Revolution and fought hard to promote the world
socialist revolution. The following article gives a glimpse of his
life, commitment and contribution to the workers’ movement.
Fredrick Engels once defined the state as "armed bodies of men",
together with their appendages, in defence of private property. Last month’s BBC
2 TV programme in Britain entitled True Spies by Peter Taylor examined
one of these appendages, Britain’s secret services. The programme revealed how
in "democratic" Britain, MI5 and the Special Branch systematically
infiltrated political groups and organisations, and secretly spied on trade
union leaders such as Arthur Scargill and Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson. While none
of the revelations are particularly startling, what was of interest was the use
of first-hand interviews by ex-M15 agents in explaining their sordid undercover
activities.
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.
This article is a follow-up to Britain's Summer of Discontent – An Earthquake in the British Labour Movement.
The magnificent one million-strong strike of local authority workers on
July 17 has forced important concessions out of the government. Anyone
who still doubted the power of militant industrial action has been
answered.
What a decisive answer to all the cynics who had written off the labour
movement in Britain. In scenes reminiscent of the late 1970s, scenes we
were told would never be repeated in Blair's New Britain, more than a
million local authority workers took strike action yesterday, the first
national public sector stoppage in 20 years. The action by members of
UNISON, the T&GWU and the GMB was described in the London Evening
Standard as "the biggest strike in Britain since the 1926 General
Strike".
The British working class has a history of swinging from industrial action to political action. This is as true today as it was in the 1930s. This article looks at the great struggles of 1929-31, when the polical leaders of the workers’ parties failed to respond to the tasks required of them, leading to the defeat of the workers and the return to power of the Tories.
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.
It is nearly seven years since George Bush, the then president of the US, made his famous “New World Order” speech. This was in 1991. In the build-up to the Gulf War the main imperialist power on earth promised a world without wars, without dictatorships and, of course, a world firmly under the control of a single all-powerful world policeman–the US. After the fall of Stalinism, US imperialism really thought that the world would be firmly under their command and they would be able to dictate the destiny of each and every country. All conflicts in the world were to be solved through dialogue in a kind of “Pax Americana.” Now all these dreams have been reduced to rubble.
Founded after the Russian Revolution, the Third Communist International was a mighty force in the fight for world revolution. But under Stalin, it was transformed into a tool of the Soviet bureaucracy, and then abandoned altogether in 1943.