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REDLETTERS News and Reviews

  • Kevin Halpin and the fight against anti-union laws

    How Kevin Halpin and his comrades resisted the 1970s onslaught on trade union rights

    An extract from Kevin Halpin's autobiography - MEMOIRS OF A MILITANT

    Posted in communist, Halpin, militant, union

  • ‘The Child is Father of the Man’ – A Promethean Vision Reviewed by Dr. Faysal Mikdadi

    Rahim traces Marx’s early development in a way that helps the reader to see why such great works as Das Kapital and many others took so long to produce. Rahim also shows why occasionally, Marx’s style of writing appears to meander in such a way as to produce some apparently forbidding internal contradictions. That is the very essence of dialectical writing where a reasoned argument is developed over time. For the likes of Karl Marx, there would be none of today’s easy fixes and platitudinous writings that are made up of assertions with little reasoned substance. A quick flick through many so-called academic publications shows that these books have very little to say and take up a great deal of space to say it.

  • Marxist economist Michael Roberts reviews A Promethean Vision

    A Promethean Vision – The Formation of Marx’s Worldview

    Reviewed by noted Marxist economist Michael Roberts

    Eric Rahim has written a clear and cohesive account of how Karl Marx formed his unique materialist conception of history.  At Marx’s funeral in 1883, his long-time friend and close collaborator, Friedrich Engels commented that Marx had developed two ground-breaking discoveries that were the basis of ‘scientific socialism’: the materialist conception of history and the law of surplus value.  These two discoveries provide the searchlights for understanding the development of human society and social organisation in the 21st century.

    Rahim takes us carefully and historically on the journey that led Marx to conceive of the first of these.  Starting with Hegel as the teacher of the contradictions of history between state and individual; between the relative and eternal; between free will and determination, Marx turned Hegel upside down to reject Hegel’s idealism that all is the product of the contradictions of thought and mean’s ideas and instead offer a Promethean vision of history, namely that material conditions shape history and that man shapes those material conditions.

    Posted in Adam Smith, communism, Das Kapital, economics, Frederick Engels, Hegel, Marx, Marxism, Marxist

  • New light on a revolutionary leap forward

    It's not often that a book has something original to say about the development of Marx’s thought yet this is the achievement of Eric Rahim’s work, A Promethean Vision, says JOHN FOSTER

  • OUT NOW – A PROMETHEAN VISION, THE FORMATION OF KARL MARX'S WORLDVIEW BY Eric Rahim

    When did Marx become a Marxist? Eric Rahim's A Promethean Vision sets out to answer this essential question.
    Posted in Adam Smith, communism, communist, Das Kapital, economics, Frederick Engels, Hegel, Marx, Marxism, Marxist, philosophy, socialism, socialist

  • A life as hard-boiled as his fiction

    Too often, those who write about Hammett either gloss over his political beliefs or attack them. Of course, such writers have every right to challenge political positions with which they disagree. But if this is all they do, they end up telling us more about themselves than they do about their subject and in a biography this rather defeats the object.

  • 1000 Days of Revolution

    The experience of Popular Unity and its dramatic and bloody end is dealt with in a new book from Praxis Press, 1000 Days of Revolution. This book contains nine chapters, each one written by a prominent Chilean communist as part of their party’s attempt to self-critically analyse the weaknesses of Popular Unity.

  • Memoirs of a Militant by Kevin Halpin – order now

    'Memoirs of a Militant is not just a memoir, despite its title. For all its entertaining anecdotes and first-person reflections it is also a guide to revolutionary practice - above all in how communists should work in the mass movement and how to unite the daily struggles of working people with the larger battle for socialism.'

  • Marx 200: The Significance of Marxism in the 21st Century

    LAST year’s Marx 200 event in London was not just an opportunity to celebrate Karl Marx’s bicentenary. It was also an opportunity to answer whether Marxism continues to be a living theory which allows us to understand social reality and help change the world when it is put into practice.

  • Marxism ‘a force for change today,’ John McDonnell tells Marx 200 conference

    JOHN McDONNELL declared Marxism a “force for change today” as he addressed the closing session of a conference marking Karl Marx’s 200th birthday yesterday.The shadow chancellor received stormy applause for a speech in which he paid tribute to the revolutionary thinker and noted that public interest in his ideas had soared since the bankers’ crash of 2008.