Marxism and the Media — Part one Perhaps nothing elicits more disagreement and debate among Marxists and other left activists than a discussion about the media. There is no doubt that the mass media is omnipresent, mediating every aspect of our lives. How one relates to and interprets the world is largely colored by how the media informs us. The disconnect between what is happening on the ground, and how it is reported in the media becomes even more clear during periods in which workers and youth engage in mass struggle. Excluding those directly participating in the Occupy movement, the public at large was presented with a somewhat distorted picture of what was happening on the ground.
The Moscow Trials: A lesson from history The Moscow Trials, which lasted from 1936 to 1938 will go down as the greatest frame-up in history. Their aim was to liquidate the entire remaining Bolshevik old guard and act as the means by which Stalin could consolidate his power as head of the bureaucratic caste that ruled the Soviet Union. Seventy-five years on, Jim Brookshaw - a former member of the British Communist Party - looks back at what happened and asks: why?
Was Hobsbawm a Marxist? News of the death of Eric Hobsbawm on 1st October was marked by an unprecedented outburst of flattery and adulation in the bourgeois media. For the past few weeks, the flood of obsequious obituaries exceeded all bounds. He was described variously as “the most widely read, influential and respected British intellectual and historian from the Marxist tradition”; “Britain's most distinguished Marxist historian”, and even “one of the leading historians of the 20th century”.
