NEXT year, 2023, will mark 90 years since the foundation of the Marx Memorial Library (MML) in 1933.

While Marxist texts were ceremoniously thrown into fires in Nazi Germany, socialists and communists in this country founded a library dedicated to the memory of Karl Marx.

The impetus to protect, develop and disseminate our library on the science of Marxism and socialist history is as strong today as it was then.
 
We started with just 500 volumes and now we have over 50,000. Seismic events of the 20th century echo through our archives. Strengths include anti-fascism and the Spanish civil war, the international peace movement and struggles for colonial liberation.
 
We started with pamphlets and correspondence courses, now our online education provision and digitised collections have a truly international reach.
 
Records of our movement’s history have been safely housed in our striking three-storey building for these nine decades. Marx House is the true focal point of Clerkenwell Green where workers have gathered for centuries, from the Peasants’ Revolt to the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
 
There is nowhere like the MML so we are asking readers of the Morning Star to become MML members. Help us to reach our target of 900 members by our 90th birthday.
 
For just £25 per year members benefit from online access to our annual journal Theory and Struggle published by Liverpool University Press. Back issues dating back to 1934 form part of this subscription. These include MML lectures by Noreen Branson, Terry Eagleton and Eric Hobsbawm, to name a few.
 
A bespoke members’ newsletter will keep you up to date on our work including recent acquisitions and new digital resources.
 
Recent examples include a beautiful pocket watch cast in the 1860s by the International Working Men’s Association when the eight-hour day had been proclaimed — a key objective — inscribed: “We require eight hours for our work eight hours for our instruction and eight hours for repose.”
 
Special lectures accompany our members-only annual general meeting; this April we look forward to welcoming Brinda Karat from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) by video call.
 
There has never been a more exciting time to join us. At this juncture in our history, we have major plans. We are submitting funding bids to support our own financial resilience and explore wider outreach and engagement activities, laying the groundwork for major building redevelopment works.
 
We know our unique heritage has the power to speak to a new generation. Our recent work with Newham Sixth Form exploring the life of YCL member and black Briton Charlie Hutchison, who fought in Spain, has shown this.
 
We have had a visit from Islington primary school students for Refugee Week. They spoke to Herminio Martinez, one of the Basque children who arrived in Britain in 1937, and asked him about his experiences and looked at our archives. They concluded by writing evocative letters to the government demanding more protection for child refugees.
 
We want to do more of this and to do it better. A second bid will look to catalogue our own archives and those of our founders and leading lights from Andrew Rothstein to Rajani Palm Dutt. We know they had fascinating stories to tell.
 
This will be an important decade for us. We envision a MML reaching its centenary year with an accredited archive and library collection reaching the highest professional standards for our movement.