Events and New Additions to the Website
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Forthcoming Meetings
WAKEFIELD – William Morris: Revolutionary Socialist or Utopian Dreamer? Saturday, 27th FEBRUARY 2016 – 1:00pm. Bill Martin will be among those contributing to this forum hosted by Wakefield Socialist History Group.
*** March ***
LONDON CLAPHAM – Chartism, Working Class Politics and Leadership Sunday, 6th March 2016 – 3:00pm. A talk by Colin Skelly
BRIGHTON – Thoughts on Religion and Socialism Tuesday, 8th March 2016 – 7:45pm. A Group Discussion
FOLKESTONE – Street Stall, Saturday, 12th March 2016 – 12:00pm
CANTERBURY – Street Stall, Saturday, 19th March 2016 – 12:00pm
LONDON WOOD GREEN – Literature Stall, Sunday, 20th March 11:00am – 1:00pm
LONDON CLAPHAM – SPGB Annual Conference Friday/Saturday 25th-26th March – 10.30am until 5pm each day
*** April ***
LONDON CLAPHAM – The 1916 Dublin Easter Rising Sunday, 24th April – 3:00pm A talk by guest speaker Dr Ivan Gibbons
DONCASTER- How Can We Oppose the Trade Union Bill? Saturday, 30th April – 1:00pm – Debate between Tosh McDonald (Labour Party/ASLEF member, and Bill Martin (SPGB)
For details of these and other branch meetings, see the Events calendar.
Also check out the Party’s Meet-up page.
Recent Additions to the SOCIALIST STANDARD archive
MUSINGS ON MUSIC
Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Sex Pistols and Youth (By Ian Westgate, April 1977)
It was once generally accepted that young people were to be seen and not heard. They were constantly being told to have respect for their elders, to dress decently, to watch how they talked, etc. etc. Youth were supposed to accept being “under the thumb”. In the 1950s this was changed…
Sidelight On The U.S.A. (May 1953)
The American Magazine “Time” of February 23rd, 1953, paints a revealing picture of the mercenary struggle that goes on behind the scenes when the big record companies of the United States decide that they have a vocal “hit” personality. “Time” spotlights Rosemary Clooney the latest best seller of the revolving disc…
Music and History (Charles Kincaid, February 1979)
The key to the understanding of social change is the materialist conception of history. Applied to music we find that the changes that have come about in this form of art reflect conditions of different social systems. Ideas about music being the flower of Western culture have long since faded…
One O’Clock, Two O’Clock, Three O’Clock, Rock… (Peter E. Newell, February 1957)
Dixieland, New Orleans, Chicago, Swing, Boogie Woogie, Jive, Bop . . . they all come, and go. And now it’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. Teenagers shout, sing and riot wherever the film “Rock Around the Clock” is showing; dance halls hold weekly Rock ‘n’ Roll nights; records by Bill Haley, the Platters and Elvis Presley, sell by the million, and even the B.B.C. play a few Rock ‘n’ Roll records. Yes, it’s the craze. But why?
THE MIDDLE EAST
Palestine – Dream or Nightmare? (Janie Percy-Smith, March 1988)
The Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip is “home” to 60,000 people. They live in corrugated iron hovels — on average 16 people to every two rooms. The camp has no proper sewage system; dysentery and malnutrition are rife. Thousands of Palestinians are also treated each year for psychological problems caused by the stress of life in a refugee camp. On the other side of the razor wire that keeps the Palestinians in, is an Israeli settlement — Gush Katiff — surrounded by look-out towers and machine guns.
The Socialist Attitude to the Kibbutznik (L E Weidberg, October 1963)
First, we had better define our terms. Most of our readers will probably know what a Socialist is. But if, for example, you think he is a follower of say, Harold Wilson or Nikita Khrushchev, you would be sadly mistaken. Socialists are people who want political power for one purpose only, to revolutionise the world we live in, and change it from a Capitalist system to a Socialist one, where the means of life are owned by society as a whole.
The War Crisis in the Middle East (September 1990)
There are few subtleties about the present Middle East conflict which threatens the world with yet another global war. The conflict is about oil; about who will own and control those areas of the Middle East which produce about a third of the world’s oil and which contain vast untapped reserves of this key raw material…
Editorial: Capitalism Means Conflict (September 1997)
In the Middle East, the PLO and other Arab nationalist groups have been severely weakened since the break-up of the Soviet Union (their major benefactor). With the parallel re-emergence of Israeli “hawks’’ in Tel Aviv this has contributed to the break-down of the Oslo settlement when Israel ceded some powers to Palestine in the occupied territories in the “land-for-peace” deal.
BOOK REVIEWS
The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood (Reviewed by Les Dale, February 1962)
The Thirty Years War was in fact a series of conflicts lasting from 1618 to 1648, which devastated vast areas of Germany. Fought with a savagery that has seldom been equalled even in this bloody 20th century, the war has held the imagination of succeeding generations, whilst other and vaster conflicts have sometimes been forgotten.
Karl Kautsky by Dick Geary (Reviewed by Adam Buick, June 1988)
This book on Kautsky, in the Manchester University Press “Lives of the Left” series, is a useful and well-balanced discussion of the ideas, though not the life (but who cares?), of the person who, after the death of Engels in 1895, became the best-known populariser of Marx’s ideas.
Critique of Marcuse Paul Mattick (A brief review by Adam Buick, November 1972)
This short—and expensive—booklet is a criticism of Marcuse’s assumption, in his One-Dimensional Man and other writings, that nowadays the capitalist class is able to manage the capitalist economy so as to avoid big slumps and at the same time to gradually increase working class living standards.
Man’s Rise to Civilisation by Peter Farb (Reviewed by W. Waters, September 1969)
Those whose ideas about North American Indians have been moulded by Western films and novels will find Peter Farb’s book a revelation. The author takes his readers on a three-dimensional trip, north to south, east to west, and past to present, calling on all the familiar names like Cheyenne, Apache, Pawnee, Seminole, Iroquois, Eskimo, and Aztec, as well as lots of lesser-known ones. He sheds a lot of light on their customs and behaviour.
RUSSIAN PAST
Talks at the Summit (Peter E. Newell, September 1955)
The snows of the Cold War are melting. The Soviet Premier, Bulganin, and the Communist Party leader, Khrushchev, are to visit Britain next spring. They will be feted by the Queen. Even the Daily Mail welcomes the visit—with some reservations. During the war the Russians were our friends, our “gallant allies,” our “comrades in arms.” But since 1945 they have become the villains of the piece. They have become our potential enemies…
Editorial: Famine in Russia (October 1921)
To most of-those who know the history of India under English rule, and of China during the nineteenth century, the huge advertisement of the Russian Famine by the Capitalist Press of this country must seem singularly strange. In 1918 there were 6,000,000 people carried off by the results of famine—camouflaged as Spanish “ ’flu ”—in India. Yet not one-tenth of the space was devoted to this appalling catastrophe that there has been to the Russian Famine, though the former was immensely more disastrous than the latter up to the present…
Cracks in the Russian Dictatorship (Edgar Hardcastle, May 1953)
The signs that the stranglehold of the Communist Party dictatorship is faltering are the most heartening news out of Russia for a generation. The nature of the urgent pressures compelling the changes of policy has yet to be revealed, but whatever they are they give ground for hope that the Russian workers may before long begin to acquire the elementary rights of organisation and propaganda so long denied them.
Russia Puts the Clock Back (Gilbert McClatchie, June 1962)
In the first flush of Bolshevik victory radical parties all over the world acclaimed the victory and gave them generous support, even where they had doubts on some of the methods adopted. The German Social Democratic Party, when threatened, sent to Russia the writings of Marx and Engels and other archives for safe-keeping, believing that Russia was now a budding free Socialist state where writings and documents would be safe from interference. How wrong they were!
PARTY POETICAL BROADCASTS
Poem: ‘To a Patriot’ (F.J. Webb, October 1915)
Poem: ‘The Palace-Builders’ (B.K. McNeeney, March 1975)
Poem: ‘After Seeing a Performance of ‘The Trojan Women” (F.J. Webb, March 1920)
Poem: ‘Billy and Ben’ (Paul Breeze, January 1978)
Comrades,
adam has been scanning and compilingthese additions ot our inconsiderable Standard archives. A few gems ot be found therein.
No-298-June-1929- To
Wives, Mothers and Others
- Communist
Rioting
- Rationalisation
and Unemployment
- The
Labour Party and the Future
- Letters:
Answer to Correspondent
299 July 1929
- Aspects
of the “Woman Question.”
- Trafalgar
Square Demonstration
- “Capital.”
A Criticism of the New Translation
- Points
for Propagandists
- The
Meaning of Disarmament
- The
Capitalist System: How It Works
- Socialist
Brevities: A Life on the Ocean Wave-Under Capitalism
- Aspects
of the “Woman Question”: Part 2 - The
New Translation of Capital: A letter from the translator - Russia
Was Never Socialist: Review -“An Illustrated History of the
Russian Revolution” (Vol. II). - Old
Age Pensions in U.S.A. (Letter from a reader in America.) - A
Look Around : The army of today - Knowledge
- Capitalism
and War
- To
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