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
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Does Marxism provide a guide to history?
The storming of the Bastille, July 14 1789 during the French Revolution
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 provides not so much a guide, but a tool. And it depends what you mean by “history.”
If you mean simply “the facts” — dates, happenings, actors, the when, what and who — then the strength of a Marxist approach is that it helps you look beyond the prominent individuals or events celebrated in “popular” historical accounts (and much teaching in educational institutions) to answer the question “why” — and in particular to understand the dynamic of historical change.
Engels put this as well as anyone in his speech at Marx’s graveside in 1883: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that humankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as has hitherto been the case.”
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