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
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What is ‘fictitious capital’?
Today stocks, shares and other securities are completely divorced from actual products. What started as a promise to repay loans has become entirely spurious, explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
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
“FAIRY gold” in kids’ fables is magic money — a fortune that soon crumbles to be revealed as leaves, dust or worthless rubbish. More colloquially, it is precarious or illusory wealth that may vanish as swiftly as it is acquired. That was certainly the case with some speculators following the global banking crisis of 2007–2008.
The real victims, of course, were ordinary working-class families who lost their savings, their homes, their jobs and, sometimes, their lives as a consequence.
The crisis wasn’t some kind of aberration. Marx pointed out that while crises are endemic to capitalism, those involving what he called “fictitious capital,” a subset of financial capital, were central.
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Labour’s fiscal policy is already in trouble. But simply printing money is not a solution, says the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School