YCL Wales: building the movement
Comrades of the growing Young Communist League Wales highlight the importance of education in building the YCL and the need to combine theory and practice.
There are no shortcuts, we must build class politics and trade union struggle
Harry Williams is a Labour and RMT activist Why do Marxists contest elections? Is it to show that reform of the state is possible? Why do some Marxists join the Labour Party? Is it to prove that the Labour Party is secretly a socialist organisation in need of nudge in the right direction? These are […]
Socialist Democracy and Real Human Rights
Robin Talbot discusses the limitations of bourgeois democracy under capitalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the promise of real human rights through socialism.
Introduction
Back2Basics is the Young Communist League’s series on Marxist concepts made easy. Its aim is to provide a starting point for those interested in learning about communist theory and a foundation for further reading and study.
1. Materialism
The philosophical underpinning of Marxism-Leninism is often referred to as “dialectical materialism”. Parts 1 and 2 of this series set out what that actually means; materialism in this issue and dialectics in the next issue.
A new Challenge for young workers and students
Comrades and friends It brings me great pleasure to welcome you with this editorial to the new website of Challenge, the magazine of the Young Communist League of Britain (YCL). In particular I would like to greet first time readers of Challenge and those aren’t members of the YCL (yet!). The YCL is a democratic […]
2. Dialectics
Every scientific investigation must have a method. The choice of method will affect the whole course of the investigation and it is important to base your method on the reality of the situation you are studying. The method used by Marxists in studying the world around them is Dialectical Materialism.
3. Commodity Production
The economic basis of capitalism is commodity production. In order to study commodity production dialectically, we must begin by studying its smallest self-contained unit – the commodity.
4. Surplus Value
In part 3, we discussed the value of a commodity and found that this came in two forms – use-value and exchange-value- and that they were derived from the labour required to produce the commodity, use-value from specific labour and exchange-value from abstract social labour. But under the capitalist system, labour itself (or more accurately labour-power, the capacity to labour) is sold as a commodity. So what is the value of labour? This was the stumbling block of classical political economy and it was Karl Marx who first solved the problem.
5. Class
“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.” (Marx & Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party)
Class is a concept at the heart of our Marxist understanding of the world, yet many claim that the ‘working class’ no longer exist. How do we approach this problem?
