The SNP’s government programme for the next five years raises the threat of more cuts and attacks on the public sector, engagement with unions and service users is essential, argues ROZ FOYER
Happy 200th birthday Karl Marx, from your favourite daughter
Eleanor Marx
MARK JONES recounts the remarkable revolutionary pioneers Goodwyn Barmby and Catherine Watkins, who brought the term communist into the British labour movement.
The West’s policies in Yemen are in tatters as the Ansarallah forces have taken strategic territory and humiliated Saudi-backed militias. This provides an opportunity to end Britain’s shameful policy in the region, argues STEPHEN BELL
KEITH FLETT pays tribute to the resilience of the peace and anti-imperialist movement in Britain that emerged after the September 11 attacks and is ever-more needed today
The US administration is endangering lives by reversing environmental protection laws, CHAUNCEY K ROBINSON argues
It’s time to stop retreating and go on the offensive to promote working-class interests, argues DOUG NICHOLLS
RACHEL HOLMES’S game-changing biography of Eleanor Marx (Eleanor Marx: A Life, Bloomsbury, 2014) not only restored Eleanor to her rightful place as foremother of socialism-feminism but raises serious questions about how we understand and engage Karl Marx’s legacy.
Eleanor, Karl’s youngest daughter and his favourite, was Marx’s first biographer and, Holmes shows throughout in her book, her editorial work was crucial in preserving her father’s legacy and bringing it centre-stage in the Second International, in which she was a central figure.
The work of an editor is a thankless job yet, as anyone who has ever published anything knows, it can make all the difference between a brilliant intervention which will change the world and an inconsequential piece of writing discarded to the garbage can of history.
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MML director MEIRIAN JUMP outlines the recently refreshed library’s busy autumn schedule that ranges from book sales, archival exploration, community work with online education and the ever popular site tours
The Isle of Wight’s Victorian holiday boom drew visitors from across Europe, including the founders of scientific socialism, writes KEITH FLETT
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
NICK MATTHEWS recalls how the ideals of socialism and the holding of goods in common have an older provenance than you might think