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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Do Marxists believe in utopias?
Idealistic visions of the future should not obstruct our understanding of social reality as it exists and our efforts to bring about change, says the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
(Left to right) AL Morton, Eleanor Marx and William Morris
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
NEITHER Marx nor Engels spent much time describing in any detail what a future, communist society might be like.
Their efforts — like those of subsequent generations of Marxists — focused on analysing the workings of existing society and then trying to build a movement to end the exploitation, of people and of the planet, which is central to capitalism.
Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was written in answer to would-be socialists who spent their time painting what he and Marx saw as fanciful visions of some ideal society which would be achieved without struggle and needed “only to be discovered to conquer the entire world by virtue of their own power.”
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