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
Is capitalism cyclical?
As long as we permit capitalism to exist, there will be cycles of development and decay, of gains and losses for capitalists, and of successes and failures for the working class, explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Regular crises typically happen every five or six years — it was this, Marx said, that proves the labour theory of value in the same way as the collapse of a badly built house proved the law of gravity.
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
RMT leader Eddie Dempsey's stark warning shook up a fringe meeting at the Scottish TUC
Incredibly, US Republican states are systematically dismantling child labour protections, with children transformed back into the cheap, disposable workers of the Dickens era, reports ANDREW MURRAY
KYRIL WHITTAKER looks at what guides Vietnam 50 years after reunification
DESPITE Gordon Brown’s boast to have ended “boom and bust” capitalism is — and has always been — cyclical. Periodic crises — cycles of growth and decay, of profit and loss for the owners of capital, of victories and defeats for the struggles of working people — are inherent in capitalism.
This was first recognised in the early 19th century by the French economic historian Jean Sismondi. Sismondi challenged earlier classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo who held that perfect competition would ensure smooth growth.
Sismondi, who coined the term “proletariat” to refer to the working class created under industrial capitalism, argued that cyclic mismatches of production and effective demand were caused by inequalities of income and wealth. He advocated modest state intervention to regulate working hours and progressive taxation to provide unemployment and sickness insurance and pensions. In England, his ideas were taken up by Robert Owen who argued for a form of paternalistic socialism.
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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
