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…
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…