Year: 2020
Religion – Thy Name Is Superstition
Banish Gods from the Skies, and Capitalists from the Earth! The first phase in the struggle to end the political and economic exploitation of our class is to learn to question the thoughts we inherit from well-intentioned parents and teachers; to challenge the strictures of the priests, parsons, rabbis and mullahs and to question why…
The Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth
We envisage socialism as being established globally and almost simultaneously. In 1847 Engels wrote: “Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone? No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilised peoples, into such close relation with one…
Time for a New Revolution
Part One – What Happened Part Two – What Could Happen Part 1: What Happened? As the presidential election draws near both contestants make fatuous appeals to America’s near-sainted Founding Fathers and that almost sacred scroll known as the Constitution. History has seen more than its share of distortion. Myths and misconceptions have sprung up…
Manifest Destiny
The Mexican-American War Each year tens of thousands of Irish-Americans proudly celebrate their heritage on St Patrick Day, yet few are aware of the fate of the Irish in the St Patrick’s Battalion, el Batallón de San Patricio, who chose to fight under their green flag for Mexico against the aggression of the United States…
America’s “Good” Wars
On December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States. Even within the most avowed Leftist anti-war activist there exists a belief that the Second World War was fully justified in stopping Hitler’s Nazis. They claim it was a just war for freedom and to…
Savior of Capitalism
Roosevelt’s New Deal brought an array of acronyms for new government agencies to the attention of the American public, NRA, WPA, CCC, TVA et al. The only one absent was capitalism’s SOS. There is no doubting that many of the projects initiated by the New Deal were indeed beneficial to America’s infrastructure and were a…
Racism
Some people claim that human beings can be divided into races on the basis of physical characteristics like skin colour, and racism is the theory that one group of people, identified in this way as a “race”, is superior to another. Racism results in hostility towards the group thought of as inferior, the practice of…
The Virus: Our Perspective – Covid and Class
If you were to compile a list of essential workers that your community has been reliant on during the Coronavirus crisis, you’d very likely not include billionaires, CEOs, businessmen, bankers, economists or the royals or that class of people who live off rent, interest and profit. Your list would include workers we encounter every day…
Meanwhile in East Africa . . .
As the world’s attention centres upon the COVID-19 pandemic it is easy to forget that there are many other destructive threats happening to people. There has been another plague taking place. Swarms of locusts have ravaged the Horn of Africa, East Africa and parts of Pakistan and India. Since December, billions of desert locusts have…
S.P.G.B. Summer-School-2020
All six talks can be heard via the following link – Summer School audio. Plans for this year’s Summer School sadly ground to a halt earlier in the year, as the lockdown came into effect and our usual venue – Fircroft College – had to temporarily close. 2020’s Summer School looked like it would be…