Marxism 2025

After attending Marxism 2024 I wrote, "Overall it was a lot of fun, if tiring at times, and I am tempted to go again next year.", and I did indeed go the next year.

Thanks to universities shying away from anything remotely looking like support for Palestine the venue had to change to something commercial and so I got to spend a few days in trendy Shoreditch in a venue called Protein Studios.

Shoreditch is not the easiest commute for me and a 10am start counts as early start these days but I managed it using a couple of different routes.

Shoreditch did have the advantage of being full of cafes and restaurants and the one in the same complex, Oat Coffee, was my first port of call each morning.

The format was the same as last year with multiple sessions run in parallel on a variety of national and international topics. That meant quite a lot of moving around the complex and that is when the reduced space really hurt. We also had standard general purpose rooms rather than lecture halls which was not ideal but it just about worked thanks to careful organisation and lots of helpers.

Just to give a flavour of the event, this is the Lenin Room before it got really busy.

This year I found myself doing several theory type sessions which were useful but tiring as there was a lot of content and it was delivered at pace.

A general impression I got was that there were diehard Marxists who though that things like Facebook could be squeezed into a Victorian view of production and others who thought that the original theories needed to be extended or added to.

I am in the second camp, Einstein did not invalidate Newton and Born did not invalidate Einstein.

I also found the idea of a Labour Theory of Value difficult to deal with as in my working life value has always been determined by the end-customer rather that the effort and resources used to produce it.

That said, I was never interested in that minutiae of (any) economic theory but am very happy with the basic Labour v Capital analysis and the need to significantly redress the balance between them so that the wealth is shared a lot more with those that provide labour at the expense of those that provide capital.

A few different views was to be expected, indeed that is the purpose of debates, and that did nothing to diminish the sense of camaraderie that pervaded the event, and that camaraderie was very welcome in a world that had somehow managed to get some much worse (Trump, Gaza, Starmer, Iran, etc.) over the last year. Let's hope there are some good things to talk about next year.