“Off the breaking backs of others/Where you got all your bucks/Till we make the revolution I just hope your life sucks” Street Sweeper Social Club is an American rap rock supergroup, formed in Los Angeles, California in 2006. The band primarily consists of guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and vocalist/emcee Boots Riley...
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Trotsky. A Biography. By Robert Service. Macmillan. 624pp. £25. Were Trotsky alive today, he would have the editors of this book shot. It is riddled with irritating errors. Round brackets close square; names change spelling; weird sentences like the idea that Russian radicals “took the bits of Marxism they disliked and discarded the rest” slip...
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Victor Ivanov , head of Russia’s federal drug control agency , said at least 30,000 people died in Russia every year from heroin, 90% of it from Afghanistan. Russia is believed to have around five million drug addicts, half of whom are addicted to heroin. He accused Nato of not doing enough to curb the production...
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The Republican faction of the US Capitalist Party has been trying to build a populist movement around an ignorant fear of “Socialism”. According to these folks, “Socialism” is fascism because of the Nazi’s “National Socialism”. And Socialism is totalitarian because the nationalist movements around Stalinism used the world “socialism” for the state capitalism used...
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We have seen, then, that capitalism is no different from any other form of society insofar as wealth must be produced through the productive activities of human beings. This goes without saying, for without such wealth production no society (or the people living in it) could continue to exist for very long. The key difference...
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The Copenhagen Conference on climate change is over and done, the fourteenth in the last two decades since Kyoto. What did this latest one accomplish? Fifteen thousand delegates from one hundred and ninety-three UN members attended. It was generally agreed that the earth’s average temperature rise be kept at no more than two degrees....
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The percentage of the total national income that went to the top 400 families in the USA tripled, from .52 percent in 1992 to 1.59 in 2007.The top income earners received a total income of $138 billion in 2007. This figure is larger than the yearly output of most of the world’s countries, and...
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Like Michael Moore’s other films, ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’, is brilliant in its way, hard-hitting and funny. He strips away the lies and hypocrisy of “public relations” propaganda to expose the ruthless predators who dominate our society and profit from the misery of working people. And at the same time he makes us laugh. So...
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Halving global poverty by 2015 is one of United Nations’ eight Millennium Development Goals . “Even before the onset of the current global financial and economic crisis, the world had not been on track to meet MDG 1 by 2015…Now the crisis is making attainment of that goal even more elusive,” said a UN Department...
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Attempts to reform capitalism, whether through parliament or dictatorship, have failed. This leaves conscious majority revolution as the only way forward. Long before capitalism had emerged as the dominant social order and imposed its exploitive social conditions on the working class that it had created there arose within the minds of human beings the dream...
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A classic subversion of “We are the world” by the Houston band Culturcide. As Utah Phillips said, “Change the words so they make more sense.”
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(SPGB election manifesto) These elections are taking place 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...
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The SPGB case against socialist industrial unions : As the trade union movement stands to-day it is still craft and sectarian in outlook, still mainly pro-capitalist, even where the workers are organised on the basis of industry.The struggle on the economic held under capitalism has to be, and is, carried on by socialists and non-socialists...
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An interesting article in the Santa Fe Reader. From a liberal “radical”  on the consequences of income disparity… Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. “Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” he says. In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and...
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Enthusiasm continues apace for the online movie-cum-movement phenomenon Zeitgeist, with its articulate, clean-cut and photogenic presenter Peter Joseph touring even harder than Bob Dylan, it seems, to bring word to the world about the ‘resource-based economy’ idea which sounds so new to everyone else and so uncannily like socialism to us. Socialists should applaud...
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The United States of America has the biggest prison population in the world and the highest rate of prisoners per capita of all countries. China, with one-party rule and a population that is 4.5 times larger than the US population, has 30% fewer total prisoners than the US. China’s per capita rate is a...
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A non-toxic spray invisible to the human eye that protects almost any surface against dirt and bacteria. The spray is a form of “liquid glass” and is harmless to living things and the wider environment. It is being touted as one of the most important, environmentally-friendly products to emerge from the field of nanotechnology,...
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In April 2009, interviewers working for the Rasmussen agency asked 1,000 people: ‘Which is a better system – capitalism or socialism?’ 53 percent said capitalism, 20 percent socialism, and 27 percent were not sure. Although ‘capitalism’ came out the clear winner, commentators were shocked that almost half the respondents failed to give the ‘correct’...
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