Perhaps nothing elicits more disagreement and debate among Marxists and other left activists than a discussion about the media. There is no doubt that the mass media is omnipresent, mediating every aspect of our lives. How one relates to and interprets the world is largely colored by how the media informs us. The disconnect between what is happening on the ground, and how it is reported in the media becomes even more clear during periods in which workers and youth engage in mass struggle. Excluding those directly participating in the Occupy movement, the public at large was presented with a somewhat distorted picture of what was happening on the ground.

At the end of the Second World War a revolt took place among the armed forces of Britain in South East Asia that is little remembered. The soldiers realised that Britain was retaining them to fight new colonial wars, against peoples they had supposedly just "liberated". The soldiers sympathised with the peoples of South East Asia who sought genuine liberation. It led to a revolt that affected the army, the navy and the air force with strikes spreading among troops from South East Asia to India, the Middle East and North Africa.

PART III: Some Historical Examples

Before we examine particular applications of the dialectic within the Marxist tradition, in contrast to the far more ubiquitous analyses conducted by the Understanding, it will be helpful to outline the general approaches adopted by these competing camps in slightly more concrete terms.

PART II: Marx's Dialectic

Turning to the tradition of Marxism, we will discover that both Marx and Engels retained the essential Hegelian dialectical structure of universal, particular and individual. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, for example, Engels offered the following popularization of the dialectic:

Many of us know that the origins of Christianity have nothing to do with silent nights or wise men. So what are its true origins? John Pickard looks at the reality of how this religion came about - from the standpoint of class forces and the material developments of society, rather than by the pious fictions fed from church pulpits.

What distinguishes Marxism from Anarchism? Why two theories, by what are they distinguished from each other, what are their relative merits, and which of the two theories, or which combination of their ideas, is the best tool for fighting capitalism and the bourgeois state? Such a process of questioning is necessary for any revolutionary, as an attempt to grasp and conquer revolutionary theory.

Nowhere is the Transitional Programme more relevant than in Indonesia – a country that occupies a very important place in the perspectives for world revolution. Its working class has a rich revolutionary tradition, which still survives though it was drowned in blood in 1965.

Harry DeBoer wrote this pamphlet in 1987 to inspire a new generation of trade union activists with the militant traditions of US labour’s past. As a young man he worked in the Minneapolis coal yards and became caught up and radicalised in the Minneapolis ‘teamster rebellion’ of 1934. As he makes clear, this was a model strike, and it was led by Marxists.

Twenty years ago the powerful repressive Stalinist police states fell one after another under the pressure of mass upsurges. The collapse of Stalinism was a dramatic event and a turning point in world history. But in retrospect it will be seen as only the prelude to something even more dramatic: the death agony of world capitalism.

The artist’s task is not merely to mirror reality in an unthinking way but to impart a special meaning and feeling to what is being depicted: “The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason,” wrote Leonardo, “is like a mirror which copies everything placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.”

The true genius of Leonardo has only really begun to be understood in our own times. Yet surprisingly little is known about his life and person. But in the beginning he was severely disadvantaged.The known facts about his life are simply stated. Born in 1452 in the little Tuscan town of Vinci in the hills above the Arno, Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a lawyer. He never knew who his mother was, though she nursed him as a baby.