Public meeting:

Thursday 27 September, 6:00pm

Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn

Room AM101, Alan MacDiarmid Building

Two hundred years ago, Karl Marx, the founder of scientific socialism and one of the greatest political thinkers in history, was born.

Marx’s theoretical and political perspective has shaped the modern era like no other. It has guided social struggles involving millions of workers around the world, including the 1917 Russian Revolution, which demonstrated the possibility of the working class overthrowing capitalism and beginning the socialist reorganisation of world society.

Amid the deepest breakdown of the capitalist system since the 1930s, classical Marxism is more relevant than ever. The concepts and categories Marx developed are the only means of understanding the economic turmoil, geopolitical conflicts and class struggles that characterise the world today.

The lecture will refute the various claims, promoted on university campuses for decades, that Marxism is outmoded, or merely another prism through which academics can carry out a critique of culture and society. It will make clear that Marx’s theoretical breakthroughs were inextricably linked to his political work as a revolutionary determined to arm the emerging working class with a program that advanced its independent interests.

For young people, confronting a future of mass unemployment, poverty, authoritarianism and world war, Marxism remains the only basis upon which a fight can be taken up to build a mass movement of the working class capable of reorganising the world in the interests of human need, not the profit interests of a tiny corporate and financial elite.

The lecturer, Nick Beams, has played a leading role in the world Trotskyist movement for more than four decades. He is an international authority on Marxist political economy and a frequent contributor to the World Socialist Web Site.

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