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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…
Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs (2020). Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary
This 2020 Gibbs-Moore exposé complements the case for non-market Socialism rather well. It’s fact-filled sleuthing explicitly cites the profit motive as root cause of the double-speak hypocrisy much of the ‘green movement’ suffers — a movement which is doing little if anything to mitigate climate warming or ecological collapse in authentic and meaningful ways —…
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…
Mystery of the pig/bird/human flu virus
“Swine flu” is really a misleading term for the current pandemic, inasmuch as no single species serves as host of preference for the new virus. It does not need to mutate as it jumps from pig to human and back again. This is a fully trans-species disease. According to the findings of Canada’s National Microbiology…
The coronavirus, bats, and deforestation
Coronaviruses are not a new phenomenon, nor were they discovered only recently. They were first studied in detail by scientists in the 1960s. The name comes from the ‘corona’ or ‘crown’ of sugary proteins that protrude from the envelope of the virus. Coronaviruses exist in numerous varieties and infect birds and mammals, including bats, pigs,…
Nativism: Covert Racism
There are prominent politicians around the world who propagate a fallacious theory on immigration and, when extremists embrace such ideas, those politicians wash their hands of any culpability. The fear of immigrants is magnified by lies and language. Fear of migrants brings in votes for politicians. Politicians feed on the fear. Fear of migrants brings…