As we reported earlier, the staff at Lambeth College in South London are waging a determined struggle against cuts to conditions and jobs. Today, June 11th, saw a rally outside its Clapham site in support of the indefinite strike action being waged by UCU members, who are also now joined by their comrades in Unison. The rally was very successful and shows how much support and enthusiasm the workers here have. If Read more…
On June 3 the LSE Marxists had the first meeting of the LSE Marxist Society. This also marked the last event of the London Marxist Societies this academic year. We held the meeting in order to analyse, from a Marxist perspective, the work of Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the 21st Century, who’s been all the rage recently and is coming to speak at LSE this month. This proved to be popular with over 20 people Read more…
LONDON MEETING FOR THE ANTIFASCIST SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN: http://www.marxist.com/solidarity-with-antifascist-resistance-ukraine-london.htm The Marxist Student Federation expresses its solidarity with the anti-fascist resistance in Ukraine. In the last few months the Kiev authorities have been incorporating neo-nazi paramilitary groups into the state apparatus. These paramilitary groups are the government’s answer to the fact that ordinary soldiers are refusing to fight against their own people in the rebellious provinces of the East. These “Battalions” are composed of Read more…
Aberystwyth University management has again taken the offensive against the workers, this time over the issue of pensions, as the management proposes to close the current pension scheme, and replace it with a second rate scheme. The management is seeking to replace the current defined benefit scheme and replace it with a defined contribution scheme for staff on grade 5 and below. This amounts to nothing less than a huge attack upon Read more…
The ongoing dispute at Lambeth College is emblematic of the entire austerity and privatisation programme. The militancy of the struggle against attacks on terms and conditions at Lambeth College and the closure of the Brixton site could in turn be an important point of reference in the struggle against austerity in general. Taking advantage of a poor Ofsted report, the hugely overpaid Principal Mark Silverman plans to launch an all-out offensive on Read more…
The budget presented to Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) Council for the academic year 2014-15 contains a glaring omission. Following the controversy over the salary of the General Manager of CUSU (an unelected member of staff at the Union) in October, you could be forgiven for assuming that the CUSU leadership would clean up their act in this year’s budget. But rather than address the fact that the General Manager was reported to Read more…
The classic text by Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, is an application of the principles of Marxist philosophy to scientific discovery. Engels proves that it is dialectical materialism that is best suited to explain the natural phenomena observed by scientific experiment. Next month will also see the publication of an article in the quarterly In Defence of Marxism magazine that follows in Engels’ footsteps with a Marxist analysis of the field of Read more…
This week, in advance of the upcoming Euro elections, the Oxford Marxist Society hosted a meeting on the EU crisis and the socialist alternative. Twelve people attended the meeting and enjoyed an interesting discussion about the Marxist view of the EU. Arturo Zoffmann Rodriguez, member of the Oxford Marxist Society, gave the introduction to the topic. He began by explaining the depth of the crisis in different European countries and its economic and social impact. Read more…
Recently a young worker and member of the Leeds Marxist Society travelled to Cuba as an international delegate to the May Day celebrations. We publish below his thoughts on what is happening in Cuba now and where it is going in the future. ————————————————- I had the opportunity to go to Cuba this year as an international delegate to the May Day celebrations. The background to my visit is that the island has Read more…
Eleanor Marx, daughter of the greatest political scientist in history, faced the formidable task of living up to her family name in the turbulent period during the birth of the organised labour movement in Britain. What she managed to achieve in this period, under the influence of her father’s ideas, makes Rachel Holmes’ new biography Eleanor Marx – A Life, an appropriately impressive project. Revolutionary theory and the revolutionary movement Eleanor, who Read more…
Yesterday I got chatting to the person sitting next to me in a coffee shop. He’s an international student in London. He had an awful experience that depicts the state of higher education in the UK for international students. He came to London two years ago, he had studied in three institutes across London, two of those went bankrupt and had to close. His fees were never paid back. After the first Read more…
This month the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) published a report which confirmed that charging £9,000 tuition fees is actually going to cost the government more money than the old system used to. Alongside the arguments for free education, Marxists pointed out at the time of the fee increase that even from a capitalist point of view increasing tuition fees was a shockingly short-sighted policy. Sure enough, the report finds that just Read more…
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