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
LIKE everything else in a class-divided society, education is a battleground. Earlier answers in this series have argued that what is taught, how and to whom, is a function of the economic system that education has developed to serve.
Over a century-and-a-half ago, Marx and Engels declared: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
Communists, they stated: “Have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”
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.
Internationalism is deeply embedded in socialist theory and practice. Examination illuminates its complexity asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School


