Walking on the Far Left

I visited London today to go to Marxism in a day. A smaller conference than  the annual Marxism festival  and organised by the SWP in Birkbeck University, it featured talks by several prominent activists both from and outside of the SWP (including Wayman Bennet, Geoff Brown, Paul Holborrow, Alex Callinicos and Joseph Choonara), it acted as a pleasant space by which people of many age groups could discuss and gain insight into various pressing political topics alongside a very knowledgeable panel, to which our involvement was highly appreciated.  The conference was opened with with excellent talks by Professor Alex Callinicos and SWP activist Katie Coles on the ever growing importance of Marxism in today’s society, and its evolution in its application economics and political sciences over time. This was then followed by Yuri Prasad’s talk on the need for revolution in understanding and fighting against racism, which inspired a lot of discussion. It was through listening to...

In its crude sense when used in colloquial dialect, anarchism is regarded as the operation of a society without the presence of a state or alternative political vanguard to enforce law and govern the people, often being synonymous with chaos and connoted with political violence. It is also clear to note that little is done to distinguish the similarly rooted yet subtly differing ideas of anarchism and anarchy, with the latter being more widely used in quotidian discussion, relating more to a state of disorder and limited organisation of society. However, what is often disregarded is that anarchism and anarchy can often exist in more implicit forms that do not necessarily feature use of force, direct action and political violence so as to achieve revolutionary aims and reconstitute existing models of society (Christoyannopoulos, 2024). It can instead take on a more pacifist appearance. As described in Henry David Thoreau's Theory of Civil Disobedience , an approach similar to what ...

  When examining the application of anthropology to the physiognomy of society and the social and demographic dimension which has shaped it, a lot of this can be linked back to  Hegelian dialect, which has been further reviewed and built upon through understanding Engels’ perspective on the matter. This can be outlined in his 1876 manuscript, The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. This manuscript, which consists of only an unfinished introduction and which was never published within Engels’ lifetime, provides an insight into the ways in which the foundations of a society ruled by a variety of constructs and social norms based off of physical and socially constructed characteristics of individuals based off of age, gender, and sexuality. While a lot of what is presented in this work would seem like a rather crude and empirical observation based off of a specific time period, it can prove to be useful in providing a possible (albeit overly simplistic and heavily b...