Author: wsm_matt
Obituary: Suhuyini Nbang-Ba
A socialist’s life Anoushka Alexander writes: Suhuyini Nbang-Ba, socialist activist, journalist and teacher died at home in the Gambia on 16 September 2020. He was nine days short of his sixty-first birthday and is survived by a brother, a sister, three nieces and four nephews. Suhuyini was born in the small town of Ejura, near…
Rosa Luxemburgo y la Cuestión Nacional
¿Hay un ” derecho de las naciones a la autodeterminación ” del cuallos Socialistas debieran ser partidarios? Esta fue la cuestióndebatida por los Socialdemócratas antes de la primera guerra mundial,especialmente en Rusia y en Austria, ambos imperios multinacionalespor aquél entonces. Lenin, fiel a su visión oportunista de quecualquier slogan era útil si ayudaba, dijo sí…
Pinochet y Socialismo
El apresamiento del ex-dictator Chileno Augusto Pinochet en Londres en octubre de 1998 reabrió el debate sobre el derrocamiento por las fuerzas armadas del gobierno de Salvador Allende ocurrido en el año 1973. En ese momento los Leninistas y los Anarquistas lo anunciaron como una confirmación de su argumento de que no es posible utilizar…
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…
Then and Now
‘Eugene Debs wrote : ‘The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles’ (1904). Fifty years earlier, one former slave…
Coronavirus: The Italian Experience
Italy infected Covid-19 is a new virus and is threatening to swamp regional health facilities. There has been much confusion about whether or not to ‘lock down’ society or let the virus take its course. If the virus is allowed to spread uncontrolled, intensive care units will be overwhelmed, even if it is only the…
Atheism: Transcending Superstition
The question of religion is not infrequently broached with socialists. A variety of cases are made ranging from the absolutely irrefutable word of God, as recorded in the bible (or sacred scripture of choice), to attempts to reconcile religious faith with Marxism. Liberation theology is perhaps the most systematic attempt at this latter approach on…