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
Does ‘human nature’ exist and if so what is it?
Human nature is not fixed; it has changed throughout history and will continue to do so, argues 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
“…all history is nothing but a progressive transformation of human nature.” Marx, 1847
AN EARLIER Q&A (number 35) asked “Is the answer really ‘in our genes’?”
The answer — No — challenged the claim (most prominently declared in Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene but recycled endlessly in the media and in common discourse) that our collective identity as humans is determined by our biology.
Dawkins in many ways merely updated the arguments of Herbert Spencer — in the 1870s probably the most celebrated and influential but right-wing philosopher of his time and whose ashes are interred opposite Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery.
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
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.
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School