JB

We read that Ivory Coast , once called the “economic miracle” of Africa, with rapid growth in the first two decades after independence from France in 1960, is one of Africa’s major agricultural exporters – around 40% of the world’s cocoa, and more rubber and cashew nuts than any other country on the continent....
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From the Socialist Standard, July 1989. Up until 1789 France was an Absolutist state ruled by a king who claimed that his total power to rule had been granted him by god. All the top posts in the army, the government, the civil service, the church and the judiciary were reserved for the members...
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Whose president is Barack Obama? He would have us believe that he is president of “all Americans.” But how is that possible when there are such sharp conflicts of interest in American society? Does the business owner have the same interests as the workers he hires at or below the minimum wage? Or consider...
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It couldn’t have gone unnoticed the news coverage of Obama’s visit to Ghana and Africa but underneath the PR gloss of the memories of slavery roots , a much more mercenary purpose existed. The new scramble for Africa Today’s race is not for colonies to conquer but for natural resources and America has stepped...
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MORE’S UTOPIA AND THE MEANING OF SOCIALISM The word utopia, together with its derivatives utopian and utopianism, is a familiar part of our political vocabulary. It originated as the title of a work by the Tudor lawyer, statesman and writer Thomas More, first published in Latin in 1516 as a traveller’s description of a...
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Socialists often meet with the argument that while capitalism may have been a terrible system in the past, with the awful gap between rich and poor, today we are gradually improving things and such inequalities no longer exists. So what do the anti-socialists make of these recent statistics? “The rich-poor gap also widened with...
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Xenophobia flourishes in Africa too, encouraged by state-building. It is not only in the West that black people are subjected to racism and abusive languages by the host nation’s population as “bloody foreigners”, “parasites”, “aliens”,”refugees”, etc, but also Africans living in other African countries are grimly accustomed to the same abusive language. Matters have...
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From this month’s Socialist Standard At the start of capitalism land was grabbed on a large scale by Europeans in the Americas, Africa and Asia – wherever there were useful, desirable, valuable resources. Never mind the indigenous populations, they could be bought off cheaply or cowed into submission militarily. Accumulation was the name of...
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Socialism won’t be a problem-free society but it will allow problems to be dealt with rationally. Capitalism is a society beset by problems, from poverty, unemployment and homelessness to war, violence and insecurity. As the current recession shows, even those who consider themselves to be comfortably off and with a relatively ‘good’ job may...
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From the Western Clarion, Dec. 1917 One of the most amazing paradoxes to be found in modern civilization is the workers belief that they are free. Every experience points to the fact that they are quite the reverse. Their whole life, from childhood to the grave, is composed of actions most of which are...
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