TUC general secretary PAUL NOWAK speaks to the Morning Star’s Berny Torre about the increasing frustration the trade union movement feels at a government that promised change, but has been too slow to bring it about

IN CELEBRATING the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels it is difficult to overestimate his contribution both to the development of the international working-class movement or to Marx’s own theoretical work and its wider dissemination.
Engels was an organiser. He was a profound critic of capitalist society. He developed a pathbreaking analysis of the origins of class societies and of gender relations.
And he did this in a close working partnership with Marx — a partnership that ensured Marx’s own work of transcendent genius was fully preserved and made available to our movement.
First and foremost, I want to stress the importance of Engels’s first book The Condition of the English Working Class.

The EIS president who defended Marxist politics in the 1980s fought Thatcherite educational policies while organising Teachers for Peace rallies and ensuring Morning Star circulation in Scotland’s pit villages and factories, writes JOHN FOSTER

Robinson successfully defended his school from closure, fought for the unification of the teaching unions, mentored future trade union leaders and transformed teaching at the Marx Memorial Library, writes JOHN FOSTER

