John Smith looks at Britain’s impending departure from the EU in a wider context and explains why the Irish border has become such a make-or-break issue. (Originally published on MR online; thanks to John for also sending it to us.)
Five months before the March 29 leaving date, talks on how to avoid an acrimonious and chaotic exit of Britain from the European Union are on a knife-edge. A ‘hard’ Brexit would be a political and economic earthquake with global ramifications, but even if an agreement is reached the profound political crisis gripping Britain is set to deepen, as the ruling Conservative Party shatters into warring factions and the possibility grows of its replacement by a Labour Party government led by the avowedly socialist Jeremy Corbyn.
Most pundits expect a last-minute deal because this is what usually happens, but standing in the way is a uniquely intractable obstacle—the border between the Republic of Ireland and ‘Northern Ireland’, (more…)
May 5 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. Below we’re running a review of Francis Wheen’s biography of Marx. The review was written when the bio first came out and is by a prominent British Marxist. Its author probably did more than anyone else to re-establish Marx’s crisis theory in the English-speaking world, back in the early 1970s, and also both to re-establish the Marxist tradition in Britain on ‘the Irish Question’ and the imnpact of imperialism on the political outlook of the British working class and the Marxist approach to Labourism and the British Labour Party. We’ve added a few more subheads and paragraph divides to break up the text.
by the ten other people gathered together in Highgate Cemetery for Marx’s funeral. It offers very clear guidelines to those who would take it upon themselves to write future biographies. Marx, said Engels, was before all else a revolutionary:
