Subjects Archives: Marxism

The German postal service has released a postage stamp, designed by visual artist Thomas Mayfried, to commemorate the 200th birthday of Karl Marx.

MARTIN ROWSON tells Ben Cowles what inspired him to create a comic-book version of The Communist Manifesto.

In the fourth episode of K is for Karl, Paul Mason travels to Manchester, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Here, Mason shows us how the use of human labour and the development of machinery brought about contemporary capitalism.

A specter is haunting human affairs these days: it’s the thought that Karl Marx (on his 200th birthday this week) may have been more right than wrong about rich-get-richer bourgeois economics.

It’s not just that Marx’s ideas remain relevant — we’re also in the midst of a great new age of Marxian thought.

Two hundred years after Marx’s birth, the challenge is to reinterpret the world using his mode of thought and his method and in the process, critique the old interpretations which we have inherited.

Karl Marx was born in Trier 200 years ago today. The legacy of the political economist is fiercely contested. The Ecologist was among the first magazines to examine his ecological thinking – in an essay published in 1971. Here, GARETH DALE, an editor of the book Green Growth, examines Marx’s own claims about nature and society – and our original interpretation of them.

If the importance of Fidel Castro in the history of Cuba is undeniable, talk about a Castro brothers’ Cuba is inaccurate on the political level.

Thinking of the relevance of Karl Marx on the 200th anniversary of his birth on 5 May 1818, takes me back to a wonderful picture of him in Algeria. It was taken in his final year in 1882. Underneath the full white beard is that familiar glint in his eye. He is up to something.

Capitalism is an economic system driven by its own immanent tendencies, which the State that presides over it normally supports, sustains and accelerates.

One day the people of Paris decided to stop work, build barricades and overthrow the government. That’s what we call a revolution.

Two centuries later, the ‘father of communism’ should not be judged on disciples’ excesses.

In the second episode of K is for Karl, Paul Mason visits the places and influences around London which contributed to Marx’s writing of the Communist Manifesto. The year is 1847.

Ashok Mitra who passed away on May1, 2018, was the doyen among Left intellectuals in the country, held in the highest esteem by one and all for his absolute integrity, his outstanding intellect and his commitment to the cause of the working people.

In the first of a series of five short films, British journalist and filmmaker Paul Mason searches for the roots of Marx’s thinking in Berlin, where he began his university studies in 1836.

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has turned in her campaign materials to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and warns that Russiagate is being used to silent dissent.

Given the clearly right-wing nature of the ruling parties in the countries that withdrew from UNASUR, the move can be seen as the latest blow against a fading trend of left-wing governments in the region and a result of the increasingly bitter inter-state debate swirling around Venezuela’s political future.

What does Engels say about the root of women’s oppression? Is there validity to his argument today?

The Algerian journalist Mohsen Abdelmoumen interviewed Mike Davis recently. This is a fascinating interview that ranges from the question of Marxism today to the politics of Middle East to the necessity of socialism.

Two hundred years have passed since the birth of Karl Marx. Few historical figures of any kind have been so influential ‑ surely no thinker has. Yet many now would dismiss his ideas as outdated, as flawed, as tending towards totalitarianism. Why should we remember him?  What can we possibly learn from him now?