SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
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How can we reclaim ‘our land?’
If anything, the demand to reform land ownership was stronger in the past. It is no less pressing today and it needs to go far beyond the ‘right to roam,’ explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
MASS TRESPASS: Protesters take to Dartmoor to oppose the (since failed) attempt to ban wild camping there by a local landowner, January 22 2023
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
OUR last answer — to the question “Is this land our land?” was No. “Our” land is owned by a ruling class of landowning, industrial and (increasingly) financial capitalists. And the relatively small amount (between 8 to 10 per cent which is publicly owned is, like our rivers, streams and atmosphere, being privatised and polluted in the interests of profit.
Land presents a paradox. It is a privatisation which dwarfs all others in value, yet today receives relatively little attention. It is less a focus of activism today than it was in 1867 when Karl Marx (or rather his translators) coined the term “land-grabbing” or in 1881 when Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originator with Darwin of the theory of evolution through natural selection, became president of the newly formed Land Nationalisation Society.
In 1909 Winston Churchill (certainly no Marxist) — declared: “Land is by far the greatest of the monopolies… the land monopolist has only to sit and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes manifold, without either effort or contribution on his part; and that is justice!”
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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
