Neil Faulkner provides an overview of the main terms and concepts plus basic reading material for his Marx 101 session on the Marxist theory of history.
Since 2009, the climate change movement has been losing momentum. But failure should not be taken as the whole story of Copenhagen and its aftermath, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh.
The British political regime faces a crisis of confidence. This report presents empirical evidence for the democratic deficit, growing protest, the state of the trade unions and the strategic implications for the left.
The response to the wave of riots that swept England this week is finely balanced between those denouncing the rioters as hooligans and those talking about poverty and police harassment. Neil Faulkner looks at the causes and consequences.
Chris Harman, in this article from 1985, summarises the history of general strikes and analyses different forms of mass working class resistance. He also outlines the factors determining when it is appropriate for socialists to raise the general strike slogan.
This article aims to answer two questions. First, why build a revolutionary socialist organisation? Second, what is required to build such an organisation?
Free to download or read online this short book by John Rees draws on the experience of recent mass movements and past revolutions to suggest ways in which the left can maximize the effectiveness of all those who want to transform society.
The violent centralised nature of the modern political state has been on display recently both on the streets of Arab cities and Britain. How should socialists view the state? Do we need a state at all? Alex Snowden introduces Lenin's classic book The State and Revolution.
All revolutions, said Frederick Engels, start as a ‘revolution of the flowers’ in which an isolated and unpopular regime faces a broad mass movement drawn from every corner and every class of society. The Jasmine revolution, as befits a revolution named after a flower, is no exception.
Shortly after leaving Palestine in 1945, Tony Cliff wrote this seminal article about the foundations of Israel and Western imperial intervention in the Middle East. He locates hope for the future in the workers and the poor across the region.
In this chapter from his book Marxism at the Millennium, Tony Cliff, writes about the relationship between the struggle for democratic freedoms and socialism.
The student revolt of the past few weeks has changed the face of British politics, creating tensions in the fragile Con-Dem coalition government, confronting police brutality and radicalising a new generation of young activists. James Meadway looks at where next for the movement.
The urgency of creating an ecologically sustainable form of human economy is plain. While Deep Ecology may appear to be a radical alternative, it fails to focus on the key question of material social relations, argues Dominic Alexander.
The huge student protest on 10 November and the anger generated by the betrayal of election promises by the Liberal Democrats marks a new phase in British politics argues Neil Faulkner.
Alex Snowdon introduces Brian Pearce's classic article about the history of rank and file movements in the trade unions and looks at the lessons for today.
We are told by the media and politicians that the concept of class is no longer relevant. Lindsey German argues that we cannot understand the current crisis without it.
Free to read or download online, Chris Nineham's short book looks at the ideas of Georg Lukács the Hungarian revolutionary whose work explored the hold of capitalist ideas on workers' consciousness and how it could be broken.
On the 70th anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky, a leading figure in the 1917 Russian revolution, Alex Snowdon introduces a key chapter from the radical book "The Lessons of October".
Georg Lukács made a large contribution to Marxist theory, but especially significant are the series of essays he wrote under the title History and Class Consciousness. Of these the crowning achievement remains the section Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat’.