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
Are humans ‘natural’?
We are part of the natural world and dependent on it, yet at the same time we dominate nature and shape it. Perhaps communism will reconcile the break, suggests 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
ARE humans “natural?” The answer is, as so often, “yes” and “no.”
Notwithstanding the 38 per cent of adults in the US who still believe that humans were created 4,000 years ago — and Eve merely a spare rib — most people accept that humans have evolved over time from pre-human primates who in turn evolved from more primitive vertebrates who came, probably, from something allied to sea squirts and so on back to when and wherever life first began.
Since earliest times humans have been aware of their biological nature – that we are conceived, live and die as do all other species.
And since Darwin, at least, we have been aware also that we are — or were once — part of the natural world, in relation both to our evolutionary origins and to the conditions of our survival today.
Similar stories
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
The selection, analysis and interpretation of historical ‘facts’ always takes place within a paradigm, a model of how the world works. That’s why history is always a battleground, declares the Marx Memorial Library