Few of Karl Marx’s words have produced more scorn than his observation that society is "more and more dividing into two hostile camps" — capitalists and workers.
One million children in Britain live in poor quality housing. Council house building has practically ceased and millions of people are too poor to buy a home. Millions more live in fear of a rise in interest rates that will make their mortgage unpayable. New Labour has no solution to the crisis except sell-offs and privatisation. But past struggles show how we can fight back.
Many people on the left once saw the Chinese leader Mao Zedong as a great revolutionary — in the same league as Marx, Engels and Lenin. They carried Mao’s portrait on many of the demonstrations across the world in the late 1960s.
In London to promote his new film, Moolaadé, Senegalese film maker and novelist Ousmane Sembène spoke to Ken Olende and Charlie Kimber
Ousmane Sembène was born in 1923 in Senegal. At the time this was part of the colony of French West Africa.
What do you imagine when you think of a philosopher? Someone who spends his or her time pondering the meaning of existence, but never reaching any conclusion? Or someone far removed from the real world?
In 1879 Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels summed up their politics thus:
Marxist economics has an image problem. In recent years a new movement has challenged the idea that there is no alternative to the neo-liberal capitalism espoused by the multinationals, governments and global bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and G8.
There are only a handful of leading women activists associated with the trade union rank and file Minority Movement in the 1920s. None of these is as well known or documented as AJ Cook, JT Murphy or Tom Mann. Why was this?
In 1968 you exposed the US massacre at My Lai in Vietnam. Last year you exposed the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. How can things like this happen when those prosecuting the war talk about bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to the world?
