The 25th anniversary meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation in the Kyrgyz capital may offer a glimmer of hope that international relations do not need to be defined by endless confrontation, writes KENNY COYLE
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Women’s oppression, the origins of the family and the condition of the working class
The Star publishes here an abridged version of Engels Memorial Lecture given by PROFESSOR MARY DAVIS at the Marx Memorial Library earlier this week
Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace by Vincent Van Gogh
The artist, who has just died, is embedded in the subconscious of the Palestinian people
The five young men killed in the A66 crash were responsible for a devastating tragedy — but the crash should force us to ask difficult questions about wider society, argues RENATA MEDEIROS MIRRA
The unwillingness of the British political elite to acknowledge that we are on the edge of a direct conflict with Russia leaves the peace movement with an urgent and onerous task
Committee for the Defence of the Iranian People’s Rights general secretary GAWAIN LITTLE discusses the impact of the US-Israeli war on the Iranian people and economy
Capitalism has extracted itself from crisis before, argues PRABHAT PATNAIK – but through methods no longer available. So it is turning to authoritarianism, militarism and neocolonialism
THE great significance of Friedrich Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property & the State is that it is one of the first Marxist analyses of development of family and origins of women’s oppression (the first was August Bebel’s Women & Socialism, 1879) — a subject in which most men were uninterested.
A short summary of Origins
Much is made of the shortcomings of the anthropological evidence employed by Engels who drew much of his empirical material from two 19th-century anthropologists, Morgan and Bachofen.
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SETH SANDRONSKY recommends a Marxist critique of the ‘race-first’ views of the influential black US theorist Cedric Robinson
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.
ALEX HALL is fascinated by a lucid and historically convincing account of how rent has dominated capitalist economies from feudalism to modernity
Professor MARY DAVIS argues that feminism has been hollowed out by liberal co-option – and only a revival of socialist, class-based politics can restore International Working Women’s Day’s original, radical purpose