Marx Matters

In a world of war and crisis, the need for fundamental change has never seemed more urgent. But what choices do we have to make a new future?

There's a misconception that Marxists believe history follows a predetermined course as a result of economic laws, which human beings can't affect.

Marxists reject the idea that history is made by charismatic "great men." But that doesn't mean they view individuals as cogs in the machine.

Karl Marx's critique of capitalism seems prophetic today, but his economic analysis can't be separated from his vision of a revolutionary new society.

If ruling class ideas dominate with most people, how can we even initiate a struggle that can change those ideas?

The right's complaints about greed are confined to people with little who try to organize for more. But greed in the boardrooms--that's a different story.

If war is a product of human culture and history, rather than the result of some immutable nature, then it can be changed or done away with.

As the global population reaches 7 billion, it's time to throw out the idea that there are "too many people"--and focus on the real causes of environmental destruction.

We're told that we can't tax the rich because they "create jobs." But capitalists only make investments when it's profitable, not when society needs it.

Capitalism depends for its survival on divisions created in the working class, so the struggle for a new society must challenge those divisions.

Marxism is almost universally--and wrongly--identified with the idea of state ownership of the economy, and, by extension, with strengthening the state.

The right's uproar about Barack Obama and socialism raises the question: Are elections a more practical and peaceful way to get a socialist society.

Marxists don’t believe that socialism can be achieved through the ballot box. But that doesn’t mean we should have nothing to do with elections.

Socialist organizations have played an important role in the great revolutionary struggles of the past. But they can't be formed out of nothing overnight.

An organized layer of workers with a shared consciousness of the necessity for socialism and how to achieve it has to be created.

A leading member of ISO discusses what kind of organization socialists need to be effective in the fight against the system.

For decades, the world has been presented with two models of "existing socialism," even though neither has lived up to socialism's promise of human liberation.

Socialists oppose the violence of the ruling class because they use it to impose class rule. But what about when violence comes from the oppressed?

One frequent objection to socialism is the belief that any effort by workers to democratically control society invariably ends in dictatorship.

After years on the margins, even among the left, the ideas of socialism are being revived as a consequence of the profound crisis of capitalism.

My experience as a teenager, and I suspect that of many socialists, was that as I first became aware of the world's injustices, I found my way to anarchism first.

In the struggle to get to a future society, some forms of organization must mirror what we are fighting against, rather than what we are fighting for.