Fifty years ago Russian tanks rolled across the Czechoslovakian border. They brought the upheavals of 1968, that year of global revolt against war, oppression and capitalism, into the heart of officially “socialist” Eastern Europe.1 Students took to the streets, fought… Continue Reading
In February to March 2018, tens of thousands of university workers in the University and College Union (UCU) at 65 institutions in higher education took 14 days of strike action, in what was the biggest universities strike ever. The strike… Continue Reading
“What’s the danger in turning a blind eye? Your son might die”.1 That was the chilling headline of the “Saturday Interview” with Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick in The Times on 31 March this year. Elsewhere in the article, Dick… Continue Reading
Making sense of the continuing low level of strike activity in the UK takes on greater urgency with the publication of provisional figures for 2017. These show record lows—by some margin—for two of the three main indicators: number of strikes… Continue Reading
1968—a year, but also a mood, an expectation, a world bursting with a promise of revolutionary possibility: a shimmering slice of historical time that precedes 1968 and outlasts it. Commemorating its 50th anniversary properly this year, 2018, must itself be… Continue Reading
The pamphlet Education, Capitalism and the Student Revolt, chapters one and four of which are reproduced here, was written by Chris Harman, Richard Kuper, Dave Clark, Andrew Sayers and Martin Shaw, five student members of the International Socialism group (forerunner… Continue Reading
Women won the right to vote by waging a campaign of extraordinary ingenuity, determination and militancy. The issue of female suffrage touched every town, city and village, and every family in the years before the First World War. Deeply entrenched… Continue Reading
It is now a full decade since the financial turmoil that heralded the beginning of the “long depression”.1 On a global scale, the recession that developed in the wake of the collapse of the Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers in… Continue Reading
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sketched what has come to be known as the gravedigger thesis, widely believed to propose that the objective conditions of capitalism would inevitably produce a revolutionary working class which would overthrow… Continue Reading
Marx’s return Karl Marx’s reputation has changed significantly in the 35 years since the centenary of his death in 1983. I wrote The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx to mark that anniversary against the background of the huge explosion of… Continue Reading