With the arrival of summer and the lockdown beginning to thaw, the Marxist Student Federation has been busy hosting exciting real-life educational events across the country. Get in touch today to join the Marxists and fight for revolution!
Over the last month, with COVID restrictions easing, and the days getting longer and warmer, Marxist societies up and down the country have held hugely successful park meet-ups.
After a year of lockdown, with many of us forced to watch huge political events unfold from our screens, the chance to meet in person to discuss Marxist ideas has been met with great enthusiasm.
Meet the Marxists
The summer ‘Marxism in the park’ series kicked off with a discussion on ‘Do we need a revolution?’ As we move out of the pandemic, people are thinking about what sort of society we want to live in. Whilst most would agree that something needs to change, how we get there is another question.
The second meeting of the series was ‘Is this a crisis of coronavirus or capitalism?’ This meeting struck to the core of our analysis of the last year. The Marxists have explained that the pandemic has acted as a trigger for economic crisis, but is not the ultimate cause. All the contradictions for this period have been in place for years, and the world economy is unlikely to see a long-term recovery.
The third meeting was ‘Is international socialist revolution realistic?’ As Marxists we call ourselves internationalists. But not because it is a nice slogan, it is in fact the only way for capitalism to be overthrown. The last year has seen how international working class solidarity has come to the fore to fight imperialism and occupation, particularly in the case of Palestine.
The final meeting was on ‘Does Communism prevent individuality?’ One of the common myths of Marxism is that it strips everything down to the bare minimum, with little to no diversification in culture, products, and more.
But the opposite is true! It is capitalism that stifles creativity, through cut-throat competition and profit seeking. This meeting allowed comrades to dive into the possibilities that a socialist plan of production would bring for everyone in society to be genuinely free to choose.
Read below for a couple of reports from local Marxist societies about the great enthusiasm they have seen for these real-life educational events. And wherever you are across the country, get in touch to join your local Marxist society, or to set up a group in your school, college, or university.
Join the Marxists! Fight for revolution!
Sheffield Marxists
We started the meetings with a short introduction given by a comrade, and then followed with an opportunity to discuss ideas in smaller groups as well as chat socially. It’s been great to catch up with old and new faces, as well as talk to each other about what we’ve been reading over the last year.
These meetings have been joined by students from both universities in Sheffield as well as young workers. Many more on social media have said they’re looking to come along once they’re done with assessments and exams.
These meetings have proved an invaluable opportunity to talk to each other about revolutionary ideas: especially how we may proceed from the current crisis, and build a Marxist organisation not only in Sheffield, but around the world. Sensing the necessity of this task, a couple of people have already agreed to join us in this fight, off the back of these meetings.
Oxford Marxists
The Oxford Marxists have been running Meet the Marxists meetings over the last few weeks.
Meeting in person has been great for morale. Being out in the fresh air to discuss capitalism’s problems has been something we’ve really been looking forward to.
It’s been very valuable to talk about politics in person, which was a new experience for some of the attendees. It’s so much easier to talk about concrete steps to fix our issues when we meet face to face and can talk naturally. We’ve had plenty of interesting conversations on a wide variety of topics, which is a lot less possible online.
We’ve also been able to share our material a lot more easily, since attendees can flick through anything they’re interested in. There were representatives of Socialist Appeal there who could recommend suitable books to anyone who attended.
Overall, it’s been an amazing opportunity to ask loads of questions, and have them answered in a nice round discussion with input from lots of different people.
