The WSP has produced three leaflets (in pdf format) meant to aid working people to understand the causes of the current economic crisis: “Booms and slumps - what causes them?” - Discusses in plain terms the causes of economic cycles and why “Ultimately, it is the economy that controls politicians and not the other way around.” “Bubble Troubles” - Deals specifically with the housing market collapse. Good Cap, Bad Cap discusses how capitalism is structured and why economic crisis cannot be blamed on “bad” capitalists.
Crises And Depressions Pt 1, Pt 2 We highly recommended this talk given by ‘Hardy’ of our companion party in the UK. MP3 format.
Please feel free to forward, e-mail, repost and/or print them widely.
“Figures never lie, but liars always figure” - Find out why capitalist economics is a con
Since it’s founding in 1916, members of the WSP(US) have fought the class war.
Goodbye Mr Socialism. Radical Politics in the 21st Century. Antonio Negri with Raf Scelsi. Serpents Tail Press, London, 2008
The Italian intellectual, Toni Negri, who was once sentenced to jail in Italy for giving a theoretical defense of urban terrorism, is highly regarded in some circles. The blurb on the back of this book describes him as “one of the world’s leading experts on Marxism” and as “a guru of the post-modern Left”. He may well be the latter but is certainly not the former.
The opening chapter is a surprisingly indulgent justification of some of the things that happened in Stalin’s Russia, even if this is part of the “Mr Socialism” to which he is saying good bye in this transcript of a question and answer session with another Italian intellectual.
We are now in the middle of the biggest economic and financial crisis since the 1930s. In a world that has the potential to produce enough food, clothes, housing and the other amenities of life for all, factories are closing down, workers are being laid off, unemployment is growing, houses are being repossessed and people are having to tighten their belts. There are in fact already 16 million officially recorded unemployed in the EU. Outside Europe the situation is worse and people are rioting because they can’t afford even the basic necessities of life.
Capitalism in relative “good” times is bad enough, but capitalism in an economic crisis makes it plain for all to see that it is not a system geared to meeting people’s needs.
Bianca Jagger participating in a demonstration during the
United Nations climate change conference in Poznan, Poland
“The politicians just don’t seem to get the seriousness of the global warming crisis. Scientists attending the recent UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland, complained that the gap between political rhetoric and scientific reality on climate change is growing.”It doesn’t matter what the politicians promise,” said French climate scientist Phillipe Ciasis. “Even if we stop emissions growing today, the world will still warm by 2 °C - a lot more in some places. It is too late to prevent that.” Ciais was at Poznan to present the latest findings of the Global Carbon Project, a network of scientists that monitors how humans are influencing the natural carbon cycle.
Book Review from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard
Green Capitalism. Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance. By James Heartfield. www.heartfield.org .2008
James Heartfield is associated with the former Trotskyist (British) Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) which used to publish Living Marxism (LM) and has moved on considerably since “the collapse of Communism” at the end of the 1980’s and the dissolution of the formal RCP organisation in 1997. These days the so-called “LM network” produces the edgy www.spiked-online.com website and organises debates and events under the auspices of the Institute of Ideas and a myriad of propaganda campaigns expedited largely through a robust, sometimes entertaining, and not ineffective style of media entryism.
Socialist society will have no need for money. This will profoundly affect all aspects of life.
Removing money from the current economic equation would strike most people as impossible, unthinkable, absolutely imponderable. Everything we do, every transaction we make, from a simple cup of tea to sending a space probe to Mars, from birth to death and at every step in between, money has become a necessary part of getting what we require. It has become an accepted, entrenched method of acquiring anything and everything but it wasn’t always so and in a genuine socialist system money will be shown to have been an unnecessary, wasteful and divisive way of ordering world communities.
An urban myth is circulating on the internet that banks have been creating money out of thin air.
Those who have seen the cult film Zeitgeist and its sequel Zeitgeist Addendum, popular amongst conspiracy theorists and others suspicious of governments and banks, will have heard recounted the argument that banks can somehow create money out of thin air by the stroke of a pen or, these days, by the touch of a computer keyboard.
In Zeitgeist Addendum this argument is based on what is stated in an educational booklet published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Entitled Modern Money Mechanics it first came out in 1975 and has gone through several editions.
Zeitgeist Addendum begins by describing how it thinks the Federal Reserve Bank (the “Fed”) creates money.
The American government’s potential bail out package is now at $7 trillion and rising. It will be the most expensive single expenditure in American history, more expensive than WWII ($3.6 trillion in today’s dollars, and greater than the Marshall plan, the Louisiana purchase, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, and the entire budget of NASA to date (including the moon landing) together, all in today’s dollars(globalnetnews-summary@lists.riseup.net). You have to wonder how a government that can’t solve poverty, homelessness, and health care for its citizens can access theses prodigious sums. Just like 1939 when a decade of deprivation for the working class was followed by massive amounts of money that magically materialized for the war.
The more things change…
-John Ayers
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Robert Owen. The Owenites introduced the word “socialism” but Owen himself always opposed the class struggle.
Owen’s key idea, indeed perhaps his only one, was: “Man’s character is made for and not by him”. He thought that it was therefore possible to give a person any character you like. He was, in short, a ‘man moulder’.
Robert Owen was born in Wales.
The credit system reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new kind of parasite in the guise of company promoters, speculators and merely nominal directors; an entire system of swindling and cheating with respect to the promotion of companies, issues of shares and share dealings.
The credit system…accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market, which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production.
Focus on the Environment…
Print Copies available for $3. Send Cash ($US), Check, Money Order (made out to WSPUS)
WSM UK WSM Africa WSM Germany Movimiento Socialista MundialThe right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy.
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Socialisme Mondial