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	<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; ALB</title>
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	<copyright>Copyright &#xA9; World Socialist Party (US) 2010 </copyright>
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		<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; ALB</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org</link>
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	<itunes:category text="Society &amp; Culture" />
	<itunes:author>World Socialist Party (US)</itunes:author>
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		<itunes:name>World Socialist Party (US)</itunes:name>
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		<title>Joseph Dietzgen – The Workers Philosopher</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/06/joseph-dietzgen-%e2%80%93-the-workers-philosopher/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/06/joseph-dietzgen-%e2%80%93-the-workers-philosopher/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:39:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2270</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This was article written by Adam Buick for the journal Radical Philosophy 10. Spring 1975 . JOSEPH DIETZGEN is indeed a neglected philosopher. How many people know that he was the man Marx introduced to the 1872 Congress of the First International as ‘our philosopher’? Or that it was Dietzgen, not Plekhanov, who first coined the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’? Or that for the first thirty or so years of this century Dietzgen’s Philosophical Essays were to he found on the bookshelves of any working class militant with Marxist pretensions? Who, then, was Dietzgen? What were his views? And, indeed, why has he been neglected? Joseph Dietzgen was born in December 1828 near Cologne. His father was a master tanner and it was in this trade that Dietzgen was trained and worked. He was neither, a capitalist nor a propertyless worker but an artisan owning and working his own instruments of production. What distinguished him from other pioneer scientific socialists like Marx and Engels was that he never went to university; he was a self-educated man. Dietzgen was involved in the 1848 rising and after its failure left for America returning, however, after a couple of years. He spent another two [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Myth of the Transitional Society</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/05/the-myth-of-the-transitional-society/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/05/the-myth-of-the-transitional-society/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 22 May 2011 00:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Marxism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Theory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[World Socialist Perspective]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2254</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[by Adam Buick, in Critique (Glasgow) [ISSN 0301-7605]. – 1975 (5) : pp. 59-70 Critique has recently published the translation of an article by Ernest Mandel, in which he develops his now familiar theme that, in the course of social evolution, there intervenes – and must intervene – between capitalism and socialism a transitional “society” with its own social base, relations of production, etc.[1] This is a point of view worth discussing but, despite the Marxist terminology in which it is expressed, it is in fact not a view held by Marx himself. As the present article will try to demonstrate, Marx did indeed speak of a “political transition period” between capitalism and socialism but never of a “transitional society”. What, then, did Marx mean when he spoke of this “transition period”? Contrary to what is generally supposed (largely as a result of decades of Stalinist and Trotskyist propaganda), for Marx this period was not that between the establishment of the common ownership of the means of production and the time when the principle “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” could be implemented. Rather it is the period during which the working class would [...]


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		<title>Lessons of Recent Events in North Africa</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/03/lessons-of-recent-events-in-north-africa/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/03/lessons-of-recent-events-in-north-africa/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Mar 2011 06:07:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Mid-East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2229</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Revolution is in the air, or at least the word is. The media talked of a “Tunisian Revolution” in January and of an “Egyptian Revolution” in February. In a weak, narrow sense of the word this could be said to be true. In both countries a long-established dictator was overthrown as a first step towards establishing political democracy, the only kind of democracy that capitalism can offer. Already some changes have been made, even though many of the personnel of the old regime are still in place. There is less arbitrary police repression. There is freedom of speech and to organise into trade unions independent of employers and the government. If this is consolidated it will represent an advantage from a working-class and socialist viewpoint. Workers will have more elbow-room to fight the class struggle and it will be much easier for socialists to express their views. But it is still only a political change, at most a political revolution, that leaves unchanged the capitalist basis of society. Any more representative government that emerges will be no more able to make capitalism work in the interests of all than can the elected governments of countries where political democracy has long [...]


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		<title>James Connolly</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/04/james-connolly/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/04/james-connolly/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 25 Apr 2010 03:54:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ireland]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1521</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[James Connolly was born in Edinburgh on 5 June 1868, the son of an Irish immigrant labourer. He went to work at the age of ten or eleven and then seems to have joined the British army, being stationed in Cork. In 1889 he left ( deserted ) and went back to Scotland planning to marry a girl he had met in Dublin. In Dundee Connolly, who must already have had vague radical Irish nationalist sentiments, joined the local branch of the Socialist League. This was a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, in which William Morris was prominently involved. However by this time there was little difference between the Socialist League and the SDF and it was only an accident that Connolly joined the one and not the other. Soon in Scotland the two bodies united to form the Scottish Socialist Federation which in 1895 became the Edinburgh branch of the SDF. It was this organisation which first introduced Connolly to Socialist and Marxist ideas. But the SDF was not an uncompromisingly Socialist body. It advocated reforms (or &#8220;palliatives&#8221; as they were then called) as stepping stones towards Socialism and was involved in the general ferment of [...]


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		<title>Who bailed out the bankers?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/02/who-bailed-out-the-bankers/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/02/who-bailed-out-the-bankers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:57:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1242</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[People are angry at the banks. They blame them for causing the crisis. They blame them for having to be bailed out and then still paying their top people obscene bonuses. They see them as producing nothing, just making money out of shuffling money around. Some of these criticisms are justified. Some are not. Banks don’t produce anything useful, even if they perform a useful, in fact an essential role, under capitalism. On the other hand, they didn’t cause the crisis, even if they did overstretch themselves like any other capitalist business does when faced with easy profits. It is this general capitalist drive for profits that causes crises from time to time. They were bailed out, but not by us. Not by us? Weren’t they bailed out by the taxpayers and aren’t we the taxpayers? Yes and no. They were bailed out by the government, whose main source of income is taxes, but, no, we are not “the taxpayers”. True, anybody in employment can produce their payslip and point to a deduction for income tax. But who actually pays this to the state? You don’t. Your employer does. In fact you never see the money that is deducted from [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Post-modern guru</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2009/01/post-modern-guru/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2009/01/post-modern-guru/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=881</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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 &#8220;one of the world&#8217;s leading experts on Marxism&#8221; and as &#8220;a guru of the post-modern Left&#8221;. 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&#8217;s Russia, even if this is part of the &#8220;Mr Socialism&#8221; to which he is saying good bye in this transcript of a question and answer session with another Italian intellectual. The other part is the whole idea of the factory proletariat, organised in trade unions and left wing political parties, as the agent of social change: &#8220;the epoch of wages is finished and that the struggle has moved from the level of a fight between capital and labour regarding the wage, to a fight between the multitude and the State around the income of citizenship.&#8221; The &#8220;income of [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Banks, money and thin air</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2008/12/banks-money-and-thin-air/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2008/12/banks-money-and-thin-air/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:17:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=860</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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. If, it says, the government wants more money then, through the Treasury, it creates Treasury bonds which it exchanges with the Fed for currency notes of the same face value; as the government has to pay interest on the bonds this adds to the National Debt and so is “debt money”. Both the Treasury bonds and the currency notes have been created out of thin air. This is one way of [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The return of Karl Marx</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2008/12/the-return-of-karl-marx/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2008/12/the-return-of-karl-marx/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:09:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Marxism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=831</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard Marx is again enjoying something of a revival. After his views on the globalising tendencies of capitalism, it is now his theory of crises that is attracting interest and being discussed in the media. Unfortunately not always accurately. For instance, in an article headlined “BANKING CRISIS GIVES ADDED CAPITAL TO MARX’S WRITINGS”, Roger Boyes, the Berlin correspondent of the (London) Times wrote (20 October): “Marx&#8217;s new relevance relates mainly to his warning about the creation of an exploitative capitalism that ends up destroying itself: ‘An over-expansion of credit can enable the capitalist system to sell temporarily more goods than the sum of real incomes in created current production, plus past savings, could buy,’ said Ernest Mandel, the Marxist scholar, quoting his guru, ‘but in the long run, debts must be paid’. Since these debts cannot be automatically paid through expanded output and income, capitalism is destined for a ‘Krach’ &#8211; Marx&#8217;s word for a crash.” If the suggestion is here, as it seems to be, that it was Marx’s view that capitalism will end up destroying itself in one big Krach, then it is wrong as Marx never argued that there [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8220;You can bring a horse to water but . . .&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2008/11/you-can-bring-a-horse-to-water-but/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2008/11/you-can-bring-a-horse-to-water-but/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:03:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=791</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[However much &#8220;liquidity&#8221; is supplied to banks or however much they are &#8220;recapitalized&#8221; or however low the bank rate falls, unless banks think that the capitalist firms they lend most of their money to, directly or indirectly, are going to make a profit in which they can share they&#8217;re not going to lend. As they say, you can bring a horse to water but you can&#8217;t make it drink. Because of the way it had been financed the initial overproduction in the US housing sector led to a worldwide credit crunch which burst the housing bubble in other countries too. This has led to workers with mortgages having less to spend and to construction and building supplies workers being laid off and having less to spend too, which is having a knock-on effect on other industries and services which has still not yet worked its way through. As a result capitalist entreprises are reluctant to invest at the same level as before because they don&#8217;t think they could sell all they produced at a profit. Governments are desperately rushing around trying to think of ways of restoring &#8220;business confidence&#8221; but basically have no idea whether the measures they are proposing [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Obama wins</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2008/11/obama-wins/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2008/11/obama-wins/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:55:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ALB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=758</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[So the next President of the USA will be Barack Obama. Of course as socialists we know that he is a capitalist politician, the representative of a capitalist party, who will form a capitalist administration to govern the most powerful capitalist country in the world. And that, as a left-of-centre politician getting support with hints of redistributing wealth to the poorer sections of society, he is going to fail, for the simple reason that capitalism simply cannot be made to work in the interest of the majority of the members of society. It is a profit-making system that can only work as such, in the interest of the tiny minority who own and control the means of production and live off the profits produced by the unpaid labour of the majority. This said, there are two points that can be made. First, the rapidity with which ideas can change. A few decades ago it was unthinkable that a man regarded as &#8220;black&#8221; could be elected President of the USA by an a predominantly &#8220;white&#8221; electorate. It is only about fifty years since most &#8220;blacks&#8221; in the South were allowed to vote and that segregation was ended. In some States the [...]


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