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	<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; Culture</title>
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	<copyright>Copyright &#xA9; World Socialist Party (US) 2010 </copyright>
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		<title>World Socialist Party (US)</title>
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	<itunes:category text="Society &#38; 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>ACTA of Desperation</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/acta-of-desperation/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/acta-of-desperation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Mar 2012 01:28:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Movies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tech]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2508</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One of the more memorable jokes in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the one about the supercomputer which, on being asked the meaning of life, supplied the answer ‘42’. One of capitalism’s most profound illogicalities is its constant need to render unquantifiable things – like knowledge &#8211; in monetary terms so that its beancounters can do their sums properly. It’s the same joke, only accountants don’t get the laughs. NASA is pulling out of its agreement with the European Space Agency over the planned ExoMars Rover programme, citing lack of funds. It has already ceased supplying the International Space Station. Given that the ISS is the most expensive thing ever to have been built by human beings, this seems rather like spoiling the spaceship for a ha’porth of tar, but there’s a slump on and the purse-strings are being pulled tight. Science is worth the money, says Barack Obama’s budget, as long as it’s somebody else’s money. The price of knowledge is being addressed in a different way by the recent signing by 22 countries of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which is the latest international attempt to establish base-line rules for protecting intellectual property rights (IPR). [...]


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		<item>
		<title>No, no, Keshagesh!</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/02/no-no-keshagesh/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/02/no-no-keshagesh/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Feb 2012 22:19:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Stefan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poems]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[capital]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[greed]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[land]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[resources]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2531</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Note. You can listen to this brilliant song by Buffy Sainte Marie at http://www.buffysaintemarie.co.uk or on YouTube. “Keshagesh” is a Cree word roughly equivalent to “greedy guts.” Socialists will identify “Keshagesh” or “Mr. Greed” with the world’s capitalist class, or with capital as the endlessly expanding and all-devouring force of production for profit. I never saw so many business suits. Never knew a dollar sign that looked so cute. Never knew a junkie with a money Jones: He&#8217;s singing, &#8220;Who&#8217;s selling Park Place? Who&#8217;s buying Boardwalk?” These old men they make their dirty deals. Go in the back room and see what they can steal. Talk about your beautiful and spacious skies. It&#8217;s about uranium; it&#8217;s about the water rights. Put Mother Nature on a luncheon plate. They cut her up and call it real estate. Want all the resources and all of the land. They make a war over it Blow things up for it. The reservation now is poverty row. There&#8217;s something cooking and the lights are low. Somebody&#8217;s trying to save our mother earth. I&#8217;m gonna help them to save it, To sing it and bring it No no Keshagesh: You can&#8217;t do that no more! No, no, [...]


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		<title>Film Review. The Iron Lady</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/02/film-review-the-iron-lady-2/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/02/film-review-the-iron-lady-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 11 Feb 2012 19:23:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Movies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SPGB]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2344</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The film The Iron Lady is a paean to a personality rather than a political documentary, and must be judged as such. The personal is political, however, and therefore anyone who lived through what happened in Britain in the 1980s will have some reaction to the politics of this film. Meryl Streep&#8217;s acting, as ever, is extraordinary and this is by far the most remarkable thing about this film. Most of the action effectively takes place inside Thatcher&#8217;s head, as her senile dementia filters a mish-mash of memories, regrets, resentments and pride over the course of her career. This allows the film some poetic license in its random and one-sided presentation of historical events. This device enables, as it were, a multitude of sins, as we are allowed only the most cursory of glances into the dogmatic arrogance of her rule or the huge suffering and destruction of life which her governments both oversaw and caused. We are invited to share in her principled stand that “we must never give in to terrorists” without even so much as a clue that she was simultaneously financing and sponsoring terror on a vast scale through her support of foreign dictatorships and the sales [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Class Dismissed: How Television Frames the Working Class</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/02/class-dismissed-how-television-frames-the-working-class/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/02/class-dismissed-how-television-frames-the-working-class/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:10:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Movies]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2326</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s almost taken for granted that television doesn’t accurately reflect how we live, but it’s not always easy to articulate how it distorts the real world. Class Dismissed: How TV Frames The Working Class is a useful examination of the ways the goggle-box deceives us. The film was made in 2005 by Pepi Leistyna of the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and is easy enough to find on the internet. It only discusses American television, but the trends are recogn


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		<item>
		<title>A Solution for Everyone</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/01/a-solution-for-everyone/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/01/a-solution-for-everyone/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 21 Jan 2012 03:42:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPCanada</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Canada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SPC]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2394</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Recently the media has focused extensively on Toronto Mayor, Rob Ford&#8217;s proposed cuts to the student nutrition programs. At the time of writing, it seems as if Ford has been forced to back off owing to the howl of outrage this proposal produced. A ten per cent cut would mean 58 of its 669 programs would be closed, affecting about fourteen thousand children. The city is considering cutting $380 000 from its annul $3.8 million contribution to nutrition programs which cost a total of $12 million to run, the rest coming from the province and donations. To put it bluntly, kids will go hungry and hungry children can&#8217;t learn effectively. It has been clearly shown that breakfast programs in low-income areas result in 50% lower suspension rate, and scores in math, science, and reading have risen by nine to fifteen per cent. Ford has run into such stiff opposition on the council on this matter that they are looking at other ways to get the city out of debt. Ford&#8217;s 2012 budget proposed $88 million worth of cuts, including closing some swimming pools, eliminating recreation programs, programs for the arts, HIV prevention programs, reducing arena hours, allowing ambulance wait times [...]


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		<title>Reflections on Kafka’s &#8220;Penal Colony&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/11/reflections-on-kafka%e2%80%99s-penal-colony/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/11/reflections-on-kafka%e2%80%99s-penal-colony/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:28:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Joe Hopkins</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ideology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kafka]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[machine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[myth]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2305</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“It was a machine like no other.” With this sentence Franz Kafka opens his metaphorically true story In the Penal Colony. The “machine” is a device that tatoos social imperatives into the skin of those perceived as violating them. The Pioneer (the protagonist of the story, acting in the capacity of a sociologist) shows up in the penal colony just in time to witness the tatooing of a miscreant. The soldier who is duty-bound to administer the tatoo is checking and preparing the machine for operation. He personally is opposed to use of the machine, but he has his job to do and has been ordered by his commanding officer to do it. The miscreant has been sentenced to receive an educative and corrective tatoo that reads: RESPECT YOUR SUPERIORS. The man who was found guilty of violating this social imperative will lie down in the machine under its tatoo needles, and as the tatooed imperative is repeated over and over again the machine will rotate the recipient until his body is completely covered from head to toe with the repetitive sentence (in both meanings of the word). The object of the tatooing process willingly accepts the tatooed message, knowing [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<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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		</item>
		<item>
		<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>Food Prices &#8211; speculation and hoarding</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/05/food-prices-speculation-and-hoarding/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/05/food-prices-speculation-and-hoarding/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 15 May 2011 16:05:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2244</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jomo Kwame Sundaram , United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development writes :- &#8220;Lack of food is rarely the reason that people go hungry. The world today produces enough food to feed everyone. The problem is that more and more people simply cannot afford to buy the food they need. Even before the recent food-price increases, a billion people were suffering from chronic hunger, while another two billion were experiencing malnutrition, bringing the total number of food-insecure people to around three billion, or almost half the world’s population. Global food prices are at the highest level since the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization started monitoring them in 1990. The World Bank estimates that recent food-price increases have driven an additional 44 million people in developing countries into poverty. The rapid rise in world prices for all basic food crops – corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice – along with other foods like cooking oils, has been devastating for poor households all over the world. But almost everybody’s standard of living has been reduced. Middle-class [-income] people are increasingly careful about their food purchases; the near-poor are losing headway and falling below, rather than staying above, the poverty line; and the [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Zeitgeist 3 Review</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/02/zeitgeist-3-review/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/02/zeitgeist-3-review/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:47:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Movies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2119</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“…I’m 94 years old now and I’m afraid my disposition is the same as it was 74 years ago, THIS SHIT’S GOT TO GO!” And so begins Zeitgeist: Moving Forward the third film in a series of independently produced and distributed films by Peter Joseph. For those unfamiliar with these films, which have enjoyed considerable success on the internet, perhaps a quick recap will be useful. In 2007, following on from a live music and visual production, the film Zeitgeist was released on the internet. The content of the film was concerned with religion, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and fractional reserve banking. After viewing this film ‘social designer’ and ex-Technocrat Jacques Fresco contacted Joseph with details of his techno-utopian life work known as The Venus Project. Peter Joseph was so impressed by this that he devoted a large part of his next film the Addendum, and his subsequent life, to expounding these ideas. In the closing lines of this second film, and as an apparent near afterthought, contained the words ‘Join the Zeitgeist Movement dot com’. On the back of this Joseph has been able to amass a large following on the web and through this fan base co-ordinate an international [...]


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