The UK Prime Minister may have the regal touch in northern England, but he’s been wrong-footed on the constitutional challenges posed by the Celtic Alliance of first ministers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, argues KENNY MacASKILL
Where does money come from?
Once it was a supposedly a physical thing, allegedly tied to an amount of gold — but money only really got into its stride when it was created out of nothing by nation states and financial institutions. What does that mean in a world with multiple currencies and distinct rich and poor nations, asks the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
NEIRLAY ANDRADE, a member of the Communist Party of Venezuela’s political committee, outlines her party’s position on the crisis facing the country
A look at Taylor Wimpey’s accounts shows why Labour’s market-led housing strategy won’t deliver more, cheaper homes, as promised, says SOLOMON HUGHES
DAVID HORSLEY remembers the remarkable life and death of US black revolutionary George Jackson, whose politically passionate prison letters were published as Soledad Brother
Cuban trade union federation CTC leader OSNAY MIGUEL COLINA speaks to Ben Chacko about life and work under a crippling US siege
A part of the British empire’s network of slavery, today the Caribbean island of Nevis faces a new form of exploitation in the form of crypto-colonialism, CLAUDIA WEBBE writes
Challenges from the unscrupulous misuse of AI to steal actors’ voice and physical likenesses is being met with a firm union response, writes LYNDA ROOKE
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” (attributed to Henry Ford)
OUR last answer explored the way that money is central to the circulation of commodities under capitalism. It argued that money is more than simply a token of value, a facilitator of exchange: it is itself a commodity, with (as Marx declared) the remarkable property of being able to make more of itself.
Debt, in particular, has become a commodity, bought and sold between large financial institutions. Credit is the basis of what Marx called “fictitious capital” — value in the form of paper money, shares, stocks, securities, and debt, all today existing primarily in digital form and all above and beyond what can be realised in the form of commodities or physical, productive capital.
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US financial instability is exposing the limits of a dollar-dominated global economy — and giving the Global South a historic chance to build an alternative, says MURAD QURESHI
Class struggle is the motor of history but the direction and detail of change at any time and place is the outcome of many factors, suggests the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
Humans are part of the ‘animal kingdom’ – and of nature in general – but also distinct from it and labour (work) is part of what makes us unique, declared Engels. His insights 150 years ago into how our species came to be and how we differ from the rest of nature, are as important today as they were then, says the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Dignity is important to all humans, argues the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School, but it does not come about automatically. In a less than perfect world, dignity can accompany suffering, but the collective dignity of working people is achieved through acting together to change the world.