The victories that followed the American civil war and the 1960s civil rights era are once again under attack, echoing earlier efforts to roll back equality and redefine democracy, says JOE SIMS
Latest editorial
What did Marx mean by ‘abolish the wages system’?
The exploitation inherent in the wage system was more obvious in Marx's time, but has essentially remained the same — and today it's far easier to imagine a world without wages entirely, where goods and services are free, explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Charlie Chaplin at work
In 2010, faced with the closure of their local library, a Buckinghamshire town’s locals turned to an unconventional tactic – borrowing every single book – to defend a cherished community space. MAT COWARD tells the story
The indictment of Nicolas Maduro after a deadly US assault is just the latest phase in a long campaign against the Bolivarian government, warns FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ
Journalist STEVE SWEENEY talks to Roger McKenzie about narrowly surviving an Israeli air strike last week while documenting the mass displacement of civilians – and explains why the real story goes far beyond the attack on him
After 27 years in Holyrood, the former first minister urged unity and respect — but, says NEIL FINDLAY, her time in power told a very different story
The Employment Rights Act 2025’s focus on individual rights forces workers into slow and costly litigation to assert rights, rather than empowering unions. A Campaign for Trade Union Freedom-Strike Map rally at the weekend called for a more radical sequel, reports BEN CHACKO
A LETTER to the Morning Star early last year asked what “abolition of the wages system” (a phrase used by both Marx and Engels) might entail.
There are two questions here: how that abolition might be achieved and what a society that replaces it might look like. But before suggesting the answers, let’s first examine in more depth what the “wages system” is.
For Marx’s readers the answer would probably have been obvious — the “wages system” is another word for capitalism, a situation in which capitalists own the means of production (raw materials, machinery, factories, means of distribution and exchange), exploit the “labour power” of workers, extracting more from them in the way of work than the workers themselves receive in wages (their “surplus value”) and then sell the commodities they produce on a market, realising that value as a profit.
Similar stories
The selection, analysis and interpretation of historical ‘facts’ always takes place within a paradigm, a model of how the world works. That’s why history is always a battleground, declares the Marx Memorial Library
From hunting rare pamphlets at book sales to online panels and courses on trade unionism and class politics, the MML continues connecting archive treasures with the movements fighting for a better world, writes director MEIRIAN JUMP
DAVID MATTHEWS looks at what a collective future for welfare might have in store for us
Labour’s fiscal policy is already in trouble. But simply printing money is not a solution, says the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School