Groucho Marxism
Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics
Category: Sociology
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It’s end-of-year review time at the company where I work. This is always a stressful time and one which inevitably leads to disappointment for many people, particularly those who don’t get the rating / pay rise / promotion they were hoping for. Thankfully I am not one of them, having long ago given up any…
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We Marxists talk about class a lot. Specifically, we like to talk at length about how under capitalism there exists two classes – the working class and the capitalist class – whose interests are diametrically opposed. But is this really true? In order to answer that question, we first need to define what we mean…
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The political situation across the Western world is looking pretty grim right now. In the US, far-right populist and wingnut Donald Trump recently began his second term as president and seems even more unhinged now than he did the first time round. In the UK, Nigel Farage’s far-right populist political party, Reform, is currently ahead…
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Capitalism is a system that requires continuous growth. Under capitalism, firms must compete to survive, which means they need to constantly expand and increase profits. To understand why this is so, we need to consider how firms operate. Any firm needs to invest before it can make a profit, and in order to invest, it…
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Almost everyone agrees that (a) bureaucracy is a bad thing, and (b) there is too much of it. But what exactly do we mean by ‘bureaucracy’? A good working definition is a system comprised of people who are more interested in maintaining their position than they are in the effectiveness of their work. How do…
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There is no doubt that globally, socialism is in decline. At one time around one-third of the world’s population lived under socialist governments, most notably in the republics of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Today, socialism is the official form of government in only five countries: China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. In…
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The UK’s new left-wing party, provisionally called ‘Your Party’, still hasn’t officially launched yet, but already cracks are beginning to show. The bone of contention appears to be the question of the new party’s stance on Zionism. The dispute seems to have been sparked by Zara Sultana’s recent Twitter proclamation that she is anti-Zionist. This…
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Rosa Luxemburg led an interesting life. Born Rozalia Luksenburg in 1871 to a Jewish family in Russian-occupied Poland, Luxemburg became a German citizen in 1898. Her opposition to WWI led her to co-found the Spartacus League, an anti-war Marxist revolutionary movement, as a result of which she was imprisoned for most of the war. After…
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