“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

— Karl Marx, 1844

When Marx wrote those lines, he wasn’t mocking people for believing in something higher. He was exposing the truth of how religion had been used for centuries to dull the pain of exploitation, to give people comfort in the very system that was crushing them. The point wasn’t that faith itself is evil, but it had been manipulated by the ruling class use it as a tool of control of the workers.

In medieval Europe, the Church stood beside the throne, blessing the kings, crowning the emperors, and collecting its own tithes from the starving poor. The priest and the landlord ruled together. Heaven was preached to the worker, while the gold and land stayed firmly on Earth. This wasn’t divine order, it was class order, sanctified and enforced through fear of eternal punishment. Immortalising the ruling class as they were anointed by god to reign over us.

The medieval image of worshippers kneeling before an idol says it all. A class taught to bow, not just to God, but to authority in every form. To obey without question. From school the church taught the workers to see their suffering as destiny, and to find solace in the afterlife rather than justice in this one. Religion became the soft chain that kept the hard chain in place.

This doesn’t mean the working class is foolish for believing, belief has always sprung from the human need to make sense of pain. A sweet pill to take to make you sleep better. But the rulers of each age have twisted that instinct into obedience. The Church became a political power, its cathedrals built on unpaid labour, its noscriptures used, and created, to justify kings, crusades, and colonial slaughter.

Even today, the idols have changed but the mechanism remains. We no longer kneel before altars of stone, but before markets, flags, and celebrity. Capital has taken on the same sacred aura, unquestionable and eternal. The supposedly beyond human control. The “faith” is now in money, in the free market, in the false idea that suffering, the grind, is just how we get by.

Marx’s words still cut deep because they reveal something timeless: every ruling class finds its opium to pacify the people. Whether through religion, nationalism, or consumerism, the end goal for them is the same. To make us believe there is no other way, but their way and our misery is something we must endure.

To break free, we must first see the illusion for what it is. The world doesn’t need divine permission to be just — it needs collective power to make it so.

The Class Consciousness Project

At the heart of this Irish musician’s court case is the right of British people to oppose their own government’s aggressive imperialist warmongering and openly genocidal criminality.

https://thecommunists.org/2025/10/18/news/british-government-versus-kneecap-irish-rap-group/

The IMF: Colonialism via Debt.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was founded in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference, as the Allies planned the post-war world order. With the gold standard collapsing, the U.S. dollar was inflicted on us as the world’s reserve currency, meaning the dollar became the new anchor of the global economy. A subtle but crucial shift that gave the U.S. enormous power, effectively shackling every nation’s economy, that was forced to trade or pay off debts using dollars, to American finance capital. The IMF and its twin, the World Bank, were created to manage this new system of global dependency. Neo-colonialism.

Sold as instruments of “stability” and “reconstruction,” their real function was to secure the economic supremacy of the United States. By issuing loans in dollars, the IMF forced countries into a web of debt and subservience. Each “rescue package” comes with strict conditions: austerity, privatisation, wage cuts, and the selling off of public assets.

The results have been devastating. In the 1980s and 90s, IMF “structural adjustment” programmes ravaged Latin America and Africa, dismantling welfare systems, destroying local industries, and throwing millions into poverty. In Argentina, IMF prenoscriptions led to mass unemployment, food shortages, and uprisings. In Ghana, Zambia, and Jamaica, IMF loans gutted public spending and left economies permanently enslaved to Western creditors.

The IMF functions as capitalism’s global bailiff. Ensuring the dollar, and with it U.S. imperialism, rules unchallenged.

The IMF represents the modern face of imperialism: finance capital extending its grip over the developing world. Any country that decides it does not need IMF debt soon develops a terrorist problem and must forcibly learn western democracy!

The Class Consciousness Project

Stoking racism and creating divisions amongst the masses is an old game played by the British ruling class across the world. Every time things are looking bad for them on the home front they play the same game and they have many actors who help them achieve it. The Israel humping coke fiend Stephen Yaxley Lennon is one such tool but there are many others of differing political persuasions who all act in this drama staged by the ruling class. We must not only oppose the racism and chauvinism that the ruling class promotes but also show the game up for what it is and that includes an exposure of the bourgeois "anti racism" which, in reality, boils everything down to a question of aesthetics alone.

Corporate media and bourgeois politicians are doing their best to stoke racial tensions amongst the British population, the better to continue their austerity and war drives.

They must not be allowed to succeed.

https://thecommunists.org/2025/10/01/news/what-purpose-unite-the-kingdom-movement/

It’s insane that people are “rising up” against a group of ordinary working-class people staying in a hotel — simply because the mainstream media has painted them as dangerous for being brown.

Our country is decaying, as is Ireland — that much is true. But it’s not because of a few people claiming asylum. It’s because of the same class of people who destroyed those asylum seekers’ homes in the first place. It’s because of the ruling class, who profit from every bit of our misery.

Is the lack of affordable housing down to immigration? No. It’s the result of an artificially inflated housing bubble and a total absence of social housing.

Are our stagnant wages caused by immigration? No. They’re caused by trade unions shackled by anti-union laws and by a so-called “living wage” set so low that workers still need benefits just to survive.

Is the collapse of our health service the fault of immigration? Again, no. It’s the product of deliberate managed decline — a calculated push to force through the American model of profit-based healthcare, where our health becomes a commodity.

Need I go on?
Yes, people should be angry — but angry at the right people.

Billy Wright was a true one-club man, making over 600 appearances for Wolves. He earned 105 caps for England, becoming the first footballer in the world to reach 100 international appearances, and captained his country a record 90 times.

A proper image of what football once was — a working man’s game played in the heart of the industrial North.

This photo, from Bradford in the 1954/55 FA Cup against Brentford, captures more than just a football match. You can see the mills and cooling towers in the background, the smoke rising from the factories where the same men on the terraces would have done their week’s graft. On the weekend, they’d stand shoulder to shoulder, caps pulled low, voices raw from shouting for their side.

Football then wasn’t a commodity back then, it was community. The game belonged to the people, not billionaires, Sheikhs, or TV companies. It was forged in the same furnaces that built the cities around it. You can almost smell the coal and hear the hum of the machines behind the roar of the crowd.

This is football in its truest form — cold, raw, and collective. A reflection of a time when the beautiful game truly came from the working class.

The truly human side to football as Frankfurt displays the name Diogo Jota who unfortunately died in a car crash, with his brother, this year.

Regeneration or Class Looting? Liverpool’s Developer Tax Relief Scam

Liverpool City Council has just voted through a new wave of developer tax reliefs, giving private firms discounts and incentives to apparently “stimulate growth” around the docks, Anfield, and the city centre. Areas of the city with little to no investment from the council.

We’re told this is about creating homes and jobs. In reality, it’s the same tired lie that’s defined British housing policy since Thatcher: relying on the market to fix what the market broke.

Developers don’t build homes because people need them, they build them because investors demand profit. Every so-called “regeneration zone” becomes another playground for private capital, with the working class priced out and pushed further to the margins.
Inadequate houses provided for the people who build them

Tax relief means less money for the public purse, less for services, and more dependency on “partnerships” with corporations who only turn up when there’s profit guaranteed.

This isn’t development — it’s subsidised gentrification.
The council hands out public money to private developers who build “affordable” housing at 80% of market rates, still unaffordable to the average worker in Walton, Kirkdale, or Bootle

Meanwhile, actual social housing remains nonexistent, community infrastructure crumbles and decays.

“The bourgeoisie has only one method of settling the housing question after its fashion — that is to say, of settling it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew.”

— Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)

Liverpool has gone from a city that once built homes for its people, to a city that begs capital to build homes for profit.

The working class built this city brick by brick — we shouldn’t have to rent it back.

Priory road, Anfield, Liverpool.
This is the same area where the grand Anfield stadium is and also the same street where the Labour MP Dan Carden has his nice shiny office.

The really disquieting feature for England is this, that she is apparently at a loss to find at home a sufficient field of employment for her unwieldy capital; that she must consequently lend on an increasing scale, and similar, in this point, to Holland, Venice and Genoa, at the epoch of their decline, forge herself the weapons for her competitors. She is forced, by giving large credits, to foster speculation in other countries in order to find a field of employment for her surplus capital; and thus to hazard her acquired wealth in order to augment and conserve it. By being obliged to give large credits to foreign manufacturing countries, such as the Continent of Europe, she forwards herself the means to her industrial rivals to compete with her for the raw produce, and thus is herself instrumental in enhancing the raw material of her own fabrics. The small margin of profit thus left to the British manufacturer, still reduced by the constant necessity for a country the very existence of which is bound up with the monopoly of forming the workshop of the world, constantly to undersell the rest of the world, is then compensated for by curtailing the wages of the laboring classes and creating home misery on a rapidly enlarging scale. Such is the natural price paid by England for her commercial and industrial supremacy.

Karl Marx - British Commerce

"...the putting of labour-power into action – i.e., the work – is the active expression of the labourer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws up the mining shaft, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages; and the silk, the gold, and the palace are resolved for him into a certain quantity of necessaries of life, perhaps into a cotton jacket, into copper coins, and into a basement dwelling. And the labourer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on – is this 12 hours' weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking, regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours' work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed. If the silk-worm's object in spinning were to prolong its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-worker."

- Karl Marx
Wage Labour and Capital

The Middle Aged Revolutionary looks at the inexorable rise of the HMO: Homes in multiple occupancy.
https://middleagedrevolutionaryblog.com/2025/10/23/the-rise-of-the-hmo/