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
Why the ‘population problem’ is not simple
This second of a three-part series on human population by the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY unwraps some of the complexities of human demography
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
OUR last answer looked at the over-simple positions often by pro- and anti- population control campaigners — the former arguing that population growth is the major “cause” of poverty, want and the environmental crisis; the latter that there can never be “too many people” and that under socialism our planet could sustain an infinitely greater population.
Few Marxists would agree with either position. Engels, for example, declared that “there is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase.”
He continued: “But if at some stage communist society finds itself obligated to regulate the production of human beings, just as it will have already come to regulate the production of things, then it, and it alone, will be able to do this without difficulties.
Similar stories
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
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
JOHN GREEN asks how can we take decisive action on population levels with a world leader who is a destructive ignoramus