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 attending the meeting at which Fred Weston, editor of www.marxist.com, introduced the topic.
Fred spoke about how Piketty’s book is simply giving in-depth statistical evidence for something we’ve known for a long time (that the accumulation of capital leads to the relative impoverishment of the working class, the corruption of democracy, and so on), and that his prescription is nothing new: utopian reformism which functions to maintain capitalism (“let’s just convince the capitalists that they need to give some of their wealth to the workers!”).
The discussion was overwhelmingly positive, either adding on to what Fred’s analysis or discussing what we can do about to fight capitalism and offer a genuine alternative. Fred’s response to the discussion at the end was an impressive answer to all the questions and points raised.
Naturally, in the best traditions of revolutionaries, we all proceeded to the pub after the meeting to continue discussing capitalism and revolution.
The audio files below are both Fred’s introduction to the discussion and his summing up afterwards.
