Netanyahu’s failed attempt to replace Shin Bet’s chief violates longstanding Israeli political taboos, as the apartheid state’s internal power struggle spirals to a new level of crisis while Gaza burns, writes RAMZY BAROUD
Does ‘human nature’ exist and if so what is it?
Human nature is not fixed; it has changed throughout history and will continue to do so, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

“…all history is nothing but a progressive transformation of human nature.” Marx, 1847
AN EARLIER Q&A (number 35) asked “Is the answer really ‘in our genes’?”
The answer — No — challenged the claim (most prominently declared in Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene but recycled endlessly in the media and in common discourse) that our collective identity as humans is determined by our biology.
Dawkins in many ways merely updated the arguments of Herbert Spencer — in the 1870s probably the most celebrated and influential but right-wing philosopher of his time and whose ashes are interred opposite Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery.
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Most currently popular arguments for degrowth describe a real problem without recognising its true cause – capitalism’s insatiable need to accumulate, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

Most phenomena have an explanation, writes the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY, but occasionally ‘anomalous’ events have led to new scientific understanding

The fight to defend public services is as important as the struggle over wages, but presents different challenges to workplace organising — especially with regards to bourgeois propaganda and conditioning, writes the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

Marx and Engels’ concern with soil provides a focus for understanding the relationship between capitalism and the environment, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY