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Starts Thursday, 30 October 2025 - 7:00pm
MML Event Image
Starts Thursday, 13 November 2025 - 6:30pm
MML Event Image
Starts Thursday, 27 November 2025 - 7:00pm
MML Event Image
Starts Thursday, 26 February 2026 - 7:00pm

Past Events

An opportunity to catch up on what we've been up to

16 October 2025

Using best practice today and the lessons of working class history, speakers will discuss how communities can be mobilised to defend collective class interests and to repel the politics of division. Speakers include: Andy Bain (Chair, Islington TUC) Drew Gilchrist (Chair, Unite Youth Committee & North Lanarkshire TUC) Alex Gordon (Past President, RMT) Stephanie Martin (Glasgow TUC & community campaigner) Chris Neville (President, Manchester TUC) Jonathan White (MML tutor & author) Beth Winter (former MP for Cynon Valley & community campaigner) Chair: Kevan Nelson (Unison, Assistant General Secretary)

9 October 2025

Michael Roberts will analyse the current phase of the world capitalist crisis and Britain’s place within it. The major economies of the world are stagnating in the 2020s. Poverty rates are rising and inequalities of income and wealth are increasing. Global warming is accelerating. And now Trump has launched a trade war against everybody to 'make America great again'. These are multiple crises for capitalism in the 21st century; But can capitalism find a way out?

19 September 2025

Marx Memorial Library Director Meirian Jump presents one of her favourite items in our collection - the scrapbook of National Unemployed Workers' Movement activist Annie Mills

17 July 2025

Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School launches its centenary programming marking 100 years since the 1926 General Strike.

A look back to ‘Red Friday’ – 31 July 1925, a turning point in the lead-up to the General Strike. On that day, miners – backed by the powerful ‘Triple Alliance’ – won a temporary victory, forcing the government to subsidise wages and suspend threatened cuts. Red Friday was more than a win for the miners – it was a moment that reshaped industrial relations in Britain. But the victory was short-lived. In the months that followed, the state intensified its preparations: boosting security, drafting new laws, and launching propaganda to undermine union strength and stoke fear of communism. Red Friday wasn’t the end – it was the beginning of a bigger struggle.

 

The panel

  • Meirian Jump, MML Director – on the Library’s holdings and legacy of the General Strike
  • Professor Mary Davis – on Red Friday’, the miners & the role of the state
  • Eddie Dempsey, RMT General Secretary – on trade union alliances and the enduring power of solidarity
     
26 June 2025

Author James Crossley introduces his biography of Communist intellectual A.L. Morton, who pioneered studies of English radical history A. L. Morton and the Radical Tradition is the first book-length biography of the Communist intellectual A. L. Morton (1903–1987) who pioneered studies of English radical history and helped frame the way we think about transforming England. Morton is now best known for A People's History of England (1938) and The English Utopia (1952), but his output was vast, and he was once widely read in socialist circles and beyond. He published on the English Revolution, Chartism, the emergence of the British labour movement, the legacy of utopianism in working-class movements, Arthurian legends, Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, Robert Owen, William Morris, millenarianism, imperialism, and much more. Through extensive archival work (including recently released secret service files) and a close reading of Morton's publications, this book shows how Morton was a key influence on the famed generation of British Marxist historians associated with the postwar Communist Party Historians' Group, often anticipating their more celebrated findings. This book analyses the interrelated significance of Morton’s political work and his role within the Communist Party of Great Britain at crucial points in its history. The book further functions, then, as a story of English socialism and Communism during the Cold War.

Professor James Crossley is the Academic Director of the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM). James is also Professor of Bible, Society and Politics at MF Oslo and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King's College London. He was previously Professor of Bible and Society at St Mary’s University (2015–2022) and Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and then Professor of Religion, Culture, and Politics at the University of Sheffield (2005–2015). Before that, James had temporary teaching positions at the University of Exeter (2004) and the University of Nottingham (1999–2004). His undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Theology with English Studies, Religious Studies, and New Testament are all from the University of Nottingham (1995–2002).