Author Archive

“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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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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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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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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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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“No weak men in the books at home The strong men who have made the world History lives on the books at home The books at home It’s not made by great men (x4) The past lives on in your front room The poor still weak the rich still rule History lives in the books at home The books at home It’s not...
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Marx’s Conception of Socialism Marx usually referred to the society he aimed to see established by the working class as “communist society”. Precisely because he believed that “communist society” would be the outcome of the struggle and movement of the working class against its capitalist conditions of existence, Marx always refused to give any detailed...
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Unemployment – Is it really the problem? Is unemployment really the problem? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to play down the misery of the millions who have lost their jobs – or the millions more who are going to lose their jobs – as the world slides deeper into the next Great Depression. I know...
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1. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we are loyal Americans. We have unquestioning trust in the wisdom of our leaders. 2. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we are devoted to the principles of free trade and free enterprise. That is why we want to protect the heroin export business of President Karzai’s...
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