ALEX HALL interviews PAUL HOLDEN, whose bombshell book uses leaked documents to expose how the Starmer faction used systematic dishonesty to seize power and reopen the door to the corrupting ecosystem of corporate lobbying and sleaze
Where does money come from?
Once it was a supposedly a physical thing, allegedly tied to an amount of gold — but money only really got into its stride when it was created out of nothing by nation states and financial institutions. What does that mean in a world with multiple currencies and distinct rich and poor nations, asks the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
The recent calls to strip Michelle Mone of her peerage after she was caught scamming the public for £122 million should reinvigorate the longstanding progressive demand to completely abolish the entire undemocratic, corrupt relic, writes ELLIOT TONG
As gold hits $4,000 per ounce, soaring from only $250 back in 2001, the US national debt has reached $37 trillion — it’s all about to come crashing down, warns JOHN ELLISON, which our leaders would have known had they only studied Marx’s magnum opus Capital
Now at 115,000 members and in some polls level with Labour in terms of public support, CHRIS JARVIS looks at the factors behind the rapid rise of the Greens, internal and external
Witnessing a war of words at a meeting on tackling militarism at The World Transformed, BEN COWLES spoke to a union rep who is organising against war from inside the arms industry itself, to hear about worker-led solutions to ending weapons production
FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ, ROGER D HARRIS and JOHN PERRY contrast Trump’s warships and F-35 fighters threatening Venezuela with the $20bn bailout for Milei’s collapsed economy, all enabled by a highly ideological IMF
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” (attributed to Henry Ford)
OUR last answer explored the way that money is central to the circulation of commodities under capitalism. It argued that money is more than simply a token of value, a facilitator of exchange: it is itself a commodity, with (as Marx declared) the remarkable property of being able to make more of itself.
Debt, in particular, has become a commodity, bought and sold between large financial institutions. Credit is the basis of what Marx called “fictitious capital” — value in the form of paper money, shares, stocks, securities, and debt, all today existing primarily in digital form and all above and beyond what can be realised in the form of commodities or physical, productive capital.
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