Join Alan Woods for the launch of The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective this Sunday at 16.00 (BST). To attend the launch event, you must register on this webpage. All those registered will be sent a link to join the Zoom meeting on the morning of the event. This book will prove to be a vital handbook for revolutionaries fighting to overthrow capitalism today. Pre-order your copy now – available for a limited time at a special price.

Across the UK economy, prices are rising and businesses are facing shortages. It is clear that the anarchy of the capitalist market cannot provide society with life’s necessities. The case for socialist planning has never been so clear.

The 30-year anniversary since the fall of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism in Ukraine was marked by celebrations in Kiev on 24 August. Front-and-centre during the festivities were former presidents Yushenko, Kuchma and Poroshenko, who all presided over the transition to the market economy. But behind the jubilation lies three decades of mounting poverty, inequality and repression. This is the real story of capitalism in Ukraine.

We are very proud to announce that the eighth issue of Freedom and Communism, the International Marxist Tendency’s theoretical journal in the Arabic language, is out now. This edition contains a range of articles on various subjects, including current events in the Middle East, the fight against postmodernism, and the legacy of the Paris Commune. Click here to read the full issue. We publish the editorial below, translated into English.

In the past two months, the regime of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has taken drastic measures that have shocked society and have triggered widespread speculation. The state has disciplined a number of large private corporations while instituting wide-ranging regulations on the entertainment industry. The motivation behind these measures was eerily summed up by an obscure blog post that was promoted by all major state media outlets, proclaiming that “everyone can feel that a profound transformation is underway!” But is the CCP state actually

Battles are breaking out across the labour movement, with Starmer purging socialists from the party, and the Unison bureaucracy sabotaging the union’s left-wing NEC. The left must make a stand and clear out these agents of the establishment.

The President of Britain's biggest trade union, Paul Holmes, is fighting back against a vicious witch-hunt by the union's right wing. Unfortunately, the employers and union bureaucracy have been supported by the sectarian antics of the Socialist Party. We say: solidarity with Paul!

For hundreds of thousands of years human beings inhabited the Earth without private property, classes, states, or any of the other elements that make up class society as we know it. And yet we are taught that class division is a natural and universal condition of human existence. As Josh Holroyd and Laurie O’Connel explain in this article first published in the IMT’s theoretical journal, In Defence of Marxism, modern archaeology has produced a plethora of evidence attesting to the fact that the division of society into classes is a relatively recent development in human history. And just as it came into existence, Marxists understand it must eventually go out of existence. ...

The current elections in Russia have been marked by the dirtiest campaign in decades. Having previously declared liberal opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s supporters extremists, the Putin regime has now turned the full force of its propaganda and police apparatus against the Communist Party.

With the British Labour Party's national conference just over a week away, Starmer and the right wing are going into overdrive with their purge, threatening left delegates with expulsion. The stage is set for one of the tensest and most-explosive Labour conferences in decades.

It is undeniable that the pandemic has hammered the final nail into the coffin of the previous epoch. But jubilant claims that austerity is a thing of the past have proved premature, as the ruling class begins to wind up its COVID spending spree and resume attacks on workers. The question is, what is the character of this new period, and what will it entail for the working class?

Last week, in a desperate gamble the Bukele government in El Salvador introduced a new Bitcoin Law that will make the volatile cryptocurrency legal tender in the Central American nation. The measure has been extremely unpopular and has met with all manner of technical and political problems. Since the first of these two articles was written, a massive protest of 10,000 people against the Bukele regime took place on 15 September, marking El Salvador’s 200 years of independence. The comrades from the Bloque Popular Juvenil (Salvadorean section of the IMT) participated actively.

On 7 September, competing demonstrations were held in Brazil, both for and against the Bolsonaro government. We publish two reports from our Brazilian comrades about these protests and what they indicate about the political situation in the country.

On 13 September, Norway held its parliamentary elections. These elections came at a very significant period in Norwegian politics: They are the first elections since the outbreak of the pandemic in March last year. The pandemic revealed the contradictions hidden under the surface.

The latest title from Wellred Books, The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective by Alan Woods will be out in only a few days. We publish below an excerpt from the Introduction to the book, explaining why revolutionary Marxists should study the history of philosophy, and the enormous debt that Marxism owes to earlier thinkers, and in particular to the giants of philosophy that lived in the revolutionary, youthful phase of the bourgeois epoch.