The oppression of women and the origins of the family as we know it remain key issues facing anyone who wishes to fight for a better world today. Huge numbers of women still suffer sexual abuse and harassment. In some parts of the world they live in slave-like conditions. Millions of girls and women alive today have been forced to undergo female genital mutilation, one of the most barbaric methods used to control women’s sexuality, while millions of young women are trafficked for sexual exploitation. Violence against women is still an everyday occurrence, with femicide a continuing phenomenon.

The Reverend Thomas Malthus gained notoriety in the 19th century as an ardent defender of poverty and inequality. He asserted that the poor were not poor because of capitalist exploitation or injustice, but because there were simply too many of them, competing over limited resources. Today, Malthus’ ideas still circulate in various different forms, and have even gained some influence on the left. In this article, Adam Booth draws on Marx and Engels’ critique of Malthus to expose the false and reactionary implications of these ideas today.

The rapid emergence of the Socialist Movement (MS) in various parts of the Spanish state (Basque Country, Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon, Castile and Madrid) is a fact to be celebrated by other communists in Spain and internationally. In underlining this important fact, the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) wishes to establish a dialogue and a fraternal exchange of views with the comrades of the MS, in order to clarify the tasks and tactics that lie ahead for the communist movement.

The fall of the short-lived Second French Republic in December 1851 marks one of the most rapid and complete reversals in modern political history. Born out of the February Revolution of 1848, the Republic appeared to promise a new era of progress and democracy for the whole of Europe. But this proved to be a false dawn. In less than four years the most democratic republic on Earth was transformed into its opposite: the naked dictatorship of Napoleon III.

Issue 42 of In Defence of Marxism magazine is available to pre-order now! Alan Woods’ editorial, which we publish here, looks at the Marxist view of the state and the role of the individual in history – unifying themes in this issue. This issue includes a Marxist critique of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything; an analysis of the class struggle in the Roman Republic by Alan Woods; a look at the rise of ‘authoritarian’ governments and the Marxist view of Bonapartism; a review of Honoré de Balzac’s Human Comedy; and Trotsky’s invaluable article, Bonapartism and Fascism.

Born in 1632 in the Dutch Republic, the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza was one of the great fathers of Enlightenment thinking. As Hamid Alizadeh explains, Spinoza’s philosophy – which contained a materialist and atheistic kernel – represented a revolutionary challenge to the authority of both Church and state.

In the 1960s, especially in radical student circles, there were many fanciful ideas floating about. The most pernicious and erroneous of these was the view represented by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that “neo-capitalism” had evolved ways of avoiding capitalist crisis, and that the working class had been integrated into the system as passive consumers in the “affluent” society. As Daniel Morley explains, these were the pseudo-Marxist ideas of the so-called Frankfurt School.

Promoted by some activists as a means of combating oppression, identity politics is increasingly being used by the establishment to attack the left and the labour movement. Workers and youth must fight back with revolutionary class struggle.

Today is the 175th anniversary of the publication of that founding document of the Marxist movement, the Communist Manifesto. Written in 1847 by Marx and Engels, and published the following year, the Manifesto retains an astonishing vitality today. Indeed, it is more relevant now than when it was written. We publish below an article by Trotsky written in 1937 on the occasion of the Manifesto's 90th anniversary.

This year’s New Year edition of Der Spiegel features an interesting piece titled, “Was Marx right after all?” Full of astute observations about the state of capitalism, it’s a piece symptomatic of the anxiety of the ruling class. But the ‘solutions’ it proposes – reactionary and utopian ideas based on keeping capitalism intact, like ‘degrowth’ and Keynesianism – are really no solutions at all.

So-called left activists, even some self-described Marxists, often exclaim with despair and frustration: "look at how terrible things are, why hasn't there been a revolution yet?" As Alan Woods explains in this article, those who ask such questions have no understanding of the consciousness of the masses, nor of the dialectical method, which Marxists use to penetrate below the superficial surface appearance of society, to the growing tension underneath. This article, which originally appeared in issue 37 of In Defence of Marxism magazine in March 2022 (buy and subscribe here), provides an excellent analysis of the world situation, and

Vast quantities of arms have been poured into Ukraine from the West following Russia’s invasion in February. Even beforehand, NATO and the US provided the Ukrainian Army with a considerable amount of weapons and training.

Interest in the ideas of Leon Trotsky is growing, as workers and youth look for a revolutionary solution to capitalism’s crises. But some on the left have muddied the waters in regards to ‘Trotskyism’. It is important we set the record straight.

For a century, the ruling class has produced industrial quantities of lies and distortions about Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Party and of the October Revolution of 1917. This article, therefore, sheds an important light on the life of this revolutionary giant. Covering the formative years of Lenin’s life, the following article – first published in issue 36 of In defence of Marxism magazine, gives a portrait of Lenin in his youth: from his boyhood years, to his making as a revolutionary, the founding of Iskra up until the eve of the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, out of which the Bolshevik

There are many myths surrounding Lenin and the Bolsheviks – particularly regarding the origins of the revolutionary party in Russia. Rob Sewell examines an important chapter from the history of Bolshevism, and the lessons for Marxists today.