Class

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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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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The number of UK children living in “severe poverty” rose in the four years before the recession Save the Children says The number of children in homes in this category rose 260,000 to 1.7m from 2004 to 2008. The report warns there is a danger that severe poverty could rise even further. The government defines relative low-income...
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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 either...
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Dirty gossip about the capitalist mode of production Guess who’s not getting that rose garden??? You would have to search long and hard to find someone who was better at sticking it to the working class than The Economist. It has perfected one of the most truly remarkable posturing acts in the annals of propaganda. When...
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  It is not uncommon to hear leftists talk knowingly of “ongoing struggles” when they project the day after tomorrow of an anti-capitalist revolution, as if it weren’t really over yet with the expropriation of the capitalist class. The working class must evidently “smash” the capitalist state and set up a “proletarian” régime holding down...
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The WSP has produced three leaflets (in pdf format) meant to aid working people to understand the causes of the current economic crisis: “Booms and slumps – what causes them?” – Discusses in plain terms the causes of economic cycles and why “Ultimately, it is the economy that controls politicians and not the other...
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And this man wants to be president. From MSNBC : Senators John McCain and Barack Obama released their Senate financial disclosure statements on Friday, revealing that Mr. McCain and his wife had at least $225,000 in credit card debt…The bulk of the McCains’ obligations stemmed from a pair of American Express credit cards that are...
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Despite the turmoil in the markets, bank failures and write-offs amounting to $120 billion City bonuses will top $12 billion this year.Dozens of bankers at Goldman Sachs, for example, were awarded bonuses of at least $10m each at Christmas, with one lucky trader pocketing more than $20m in cash and shares. The average bonus...
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Anyone who has read Frederick Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England will long remember much of what it says. Page after page describes the lives of workers in the big cities in 1844. Two boys in London, for instance, were arrested for stealing a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop: the...
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