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	<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; Books</title>
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	<copyright>Copyright &#xA9; World Socialist Party (US) 2010 </copyright>
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		<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; Books</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org</link>
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	<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>Crisis: the stories so far</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/06/crisis-the-stories-so-far/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/06/crisis-the-stories-so-far/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 04 Jun 2011 05:14:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crisis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2283</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis And The Failure Of Capitalism by Paul Mattick. Reacktion Books: 2011. Just yesterday, we were all supposed to believe that the globalisation of capitalism and free markets was the route to freedom, peace and prosperity for all. Then, with barely an explanation, and somewhat out of the blue, the story changed. Now we are to believe that, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, prosperity will have to give way to austerity. The good times are over. It is characteristic of crises that the stories we are expected to believe suddenly change. But how can we understand the change? And might there not be better stories than the rather grim and gloomy one we’ve been ordered to swallow? Paul Mattick Jnr’s short book is just such an alternative. For him the crisis signals the complete bankruptcy and destruction of mainstream economics. Why crisis is impossible Why did the crisis appear as a bolt out of the blue? Why was it not expected or anticipated by any economist or mainstream commentator? In short, because there is no place in the standard economic story for crisis, any more than there’s a place for wizards and interstellar travel [...]


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		<title>Marx and the Anarchists</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/01/marx-and-the-anarchists/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/01/marx-and-the-anarchists/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 30 Jan 2011 06:30:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2039</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Review of Karl Marx and the Anarchists by Paul Thomas This excellent book is a running commentery on Marx&#8217;s fierce battles with crackpots he regarded as disasters to the socialist movement: the anarchists Max Stirner, P. J. Proudhon and Michael Bakunin. One of its principal merits is that it debunks, with the support of voluminous and correctly interpreted quotations, the idea that Marx was a dogmatic old bully, hopelessly impatient and irritable with anyone who dared to dissent from his views. Stirner&#8217;s sole claim to fame is his book, The Ego and his Own, which was purported to be a rebellious challenge to all the established institutions but is actually a pathetic rehash of Hegelian idealism. The greater part of The German Ideology, Marx and Engels&#8217; &#8220;settlement&#8221; with German philosophy, consists of the reply to &#8220;Saint Max&#8221;, as they called him. Proudhon wrote so much, with so many contradictions, that it is impossible to list them all. Suffice it to say that one keen observer (Albert Hirschmann) has pointed out that Milton Friedman&#8217;s arguments today were originally put forward by Proudhon in the 1840s. Bakunin was opposed to writing, on the grounds that &#8220;action&#8221;, not books, was necessary (although he did write a [...]


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		<title>The prophet debunked</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/03/the-prophet-debunked/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/03/the-prophet-debunked/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:56:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1437</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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 through; and apparently Oslo and St. Petersburg lie on the same longitude, 59 degrees North. Macmillan should be ashamed to have allowed this slapdash product into print. This would not matter except that the representatives of Trotsky on Earth have launched a flurry of chaff to attack this biography of their idol. Forensic hair splitting has been their method, and finding faults, such as that Natalya Sederova (Trotsky’s partner) died in 1962 rather than 1960 as the book claims. This is, of course, a distraction tactic. Hardly any of their reviews deal with the meat of the book. Peter Taaffe, leader of the “Socialist Party” of England and Wales (SPEW &#8211; formerly Militant) performs the usual Trotskyist miracle of simultaneously denying and justifying the repressive tactics and terror of the Bolsheviks. David North of the World Socialist (sic) website cavils over trivialities, and even manages [...]


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		<item>
		<title>The Latest from &#8220;Comrade Žižek&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2009/12/the-latest-from-comrade-zizek/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2009/12/the-latest-from-comrade-zizek/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:32:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>MS</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1131</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[(A review of First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek) Has Slavoj Žižek (the superstar Slovenian &#8220;theorist&#8221;)  signed a piece-work contract with Verso Books? One can&#8217;t help wondering because this slim volume brings his tally with that publisher alone to around 21 titles. This Stakhanovite output would be more impressive were it not for his notorious habit of recycling old  material, like any good stand-up comedian does. This two-chapter offering is no exception: Žižek seems to have rapidly assembled the book by combining his favorite quotes and theoretical hyperbole with some recent news stories from the unfolding economic crisis. The first chapter (lamely entitled: “It’s Ideology Stupid!”) promises a “diagnosis of our predicament, outlining the utopian core of the capitalist ideology which determined both the crisis itself and our perceptions of and reactions to it.” Setting aside the question of whether ideology can determine a crisis, Žižek does at least provide some valid observations on capitalist ideology aims to shift the blame for a crisis away from the capitalist system itself. Yet few of his ideas strike the reader with much force of insight or novelty; and the chapter is haphazardly organized – as if Žižek’s only aim was [...]


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		<title>WAS NOWHERE SOMEWHERE?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2009/07/was-nowhere-somewhere/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2009/07/was-nowhere-somewhere/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 18 Jul 2009 02:41:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>JB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Theory]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1038</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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 remote island. Utopia is a pun: it can be read either as ou-topos, Greek for ‘no place’, or as eu-topos, ‘good place’ – that is, a good place (society) that exists in the imagination. More invented the word, but the thing it represents is much older. Plato in his Republic discussed the nature of the ideal city state. Medieval serfs took solace in the imaginary ease and plenty of the Land of Cockaigne. More’s utopia, however, is the first to embody a response to capitalist social relations, which in the early 16th century were just emerging in England and the Low Countries (in agriculture and textiles). As the first modern utopia, it has a special place in the emergence of modern socialist thought. Contents of More’s Utopia The work consists of two ‘books’. Book I is More’s account of how he came to hear of Utopia. [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Food Business</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2009/03/food-business/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2009/03/food-business/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:56:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=970</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Eat Your Heart Out. Felicity Lawrence. Penguin. Following on from Not on the Label, this is another book by Felicity Lawrence that exposes much that’s wrong with the food we eat and the way it’s produced and, therefore, much that’s wrong with capitalism as a way of running the world. Lawrence describes conventional farming as ‘a system for turning oil into food’. There is simply more profit in industrial food production than in plain healthy food like fruit and veg. Consequently consumers’ food choices are manipulated, so that we ‘want’ what the food industry sells at the biggest profit and we buy what we have been persuaded to buy. This is mainly achieved by advertising, but also by more insidious means: adding massive amounts of sugar to baby food gets babies, and therefore children and adults, hooked on sweetness. Let’s take a couple of case studies. Processed cereals, for instance, represent ‘a triumph of marketing’. And agricultural subsidies from government help to keep companies’ costs down and profits up. The nutritious part of cornflakes is deliberately removed because it gets in the way of a long shelf life. As a result of this and the addition of sugar, breakfast cereals [...]


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		<title>Poisoned For Pennies</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2008/10/department-of-book-reviews/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2008/10/department-of-book-reviews/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:35:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>virgo47</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Environment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=575</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Poisoned for Pennies &#8211; The economics of toxics and precaution: principal author Frank Ackerman with Lisa Heinzerling, Rachel Massey, Wendy Johnecheck, and Elizabeth Stanton (2008)   The purpose of Ackerman’s book is to expose the weaknesses of the “cost-benefit method” of economic analysis, which has been promoted heavily since the Reagan administration, and increasingly used in this capacity since then, as the best way of determining whether a particular attempt at instituting public health safety or environment regulation of society, business, and industry should be allowed to proceed. Ackerman, who has spent the 21st century devoting his writing and speaking efforts to exposing the potential harm and overall inadequacy of using this method as the sole or main test for public policy in this arena. He, writing this book in conjunction with several others and using already published work, summarizes the process of cost benefit analysis as simply Calculating monetary value of costs Calculating monetary value of benefits Only recommend adopting policies where costs are less than benefits The book would not be of as much value to the average reader and in particular to socialists unless it offers some other way to determine the advisability of enacting health and [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>We Could Live To Be 1,000 Years Old But For Capitalism</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2007/12/socialism-and-immortality/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2007/12/socialism-and-immortality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:23:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dr. Who</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=301</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The latest book by Aubrey De Grey, “Ending Aging” (St. Martin’s Press, 2007), raises the mind-bogglingly provocative possibility that science may within 20 years be able to extend human life long enough to develop successive improvements in life-extending therapies, thus potentially rendering humans capable of a youthful lifespan of 1,000 years. It all seems to hinge upon the much-anticipated ability to extend the lifespan of a middle-aged 2-year-old mouse to 5 years rather than the usual 3 using bioengineering techniques that would essentially clean up the junk that is produced within and outside their cells, as it is with ours, which is a normal byproduct of the metabolic process. You can see a video of an introductory talk by Dr. De Grey brieﬂy outlining his engineering approach to indeﬁnitely extending the human life span. Capitalist society, for all its extraordinary scientiﬁc developments, has long reached the point at which it increasingly limits the potentials to enjoying the fruits of such developments by the human race. It is this tension between the mode of production and the means of production that introduces a potentially revolutionary situation for our species. Socialists are encouraging fellow humans around the world to work to bring [...]


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		</item>
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		<title>Socialism Or Your Money Back</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2004/12/socialism-or-your-money-back/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2004/12/socialism-or-your-money-back/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:01:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>WSPUS</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=141</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Published by The Socialist Party of Great Britain to mark the centenary of its formation, ‘Socialism or Your Money Back’ presents a ” . . .running commentary from a socialist perspective of the key events of the last hundred years as they happened. Two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the General Strike and the rise of Hitler are covered, as are the civil war in Spain, Hiroshima, the politics of pop, democracy and the silicon chip, and much more. The book will be of interest to those wanting to study the political, economic and social history of the twentieth century, as well as to those committed to the interests of the majority class of wage and salary workers and who want a different society to replace the profit-wages-money system that is capitalism.” Now available from WSP-US for US$12 Postpaid Send cash or check payable to WSPUS to WSP(US) POBox 440247 Boston, MA 02144 USA No related posts.


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		<title>Kropotkin on Mutual Aid — Review</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/1956/01/kropokin-on-mutual-aid-%e2%80%94-review/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/1956/01/kropokin-on-mutual-aid-%e2%80%94-review/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 1969 21:59:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Paul Mattick</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Science]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=174</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[MUTUAL AID. By Peter Kropotkin, with Foreword by Ashley Montague, and including “The Struggle for Existence” by T. H. Huxley. Extending Horizons Press, Boston, 1955, pp. 362, $3.00. This new issue of Kropotkin’s work on Mutual Aid, first published at the turn of the century, not only satisfies the need for its continued availability but — in some measure — also helps to combat the current neo-Malthusianism and the renewed, though futile, attempts to present capitalist competition as a “law of nature.” Provoked by Huxley’s belief that in nature and society the struggle for existence is one of all against all, Kropotkin demonstrated that both in the animal world and human society it is rather mutual aid which secures existence and makes for progress. What Huxley proclaimed passes under the name of Social Darwinism — “the survival of the fittest.” The successful in society are such by way of “natural selection.” Nothing can be done about it, and no apology is needed, as nature is neither “moral” nor “immoral,” but “non-moral.” Of course, attempts are made to defy “natural law” through the establishment of social order designed to mitigate the struggle of all against all. Yet this promises little for [...]


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