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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) &#187; Culture</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>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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		<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>
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		<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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		<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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		<item>
		<title>What Was He Fighting For? (Phil Ochs as the Sound of the New Left)</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/02/what-was-he-fighting-for-phil-ochs-as-the-sound-of-the-new-left/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/02/what-was-he-fighting-for-phil-ochs-as-the-sound-of-the-new-left/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:52:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>MS</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Music]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2067</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new documentary film on the life and music of Phil Ochs, “There But For Fortune,” is being shown in a several US cities now. It hasn’t come too soon, certainly, because Ochs today is largely unknown outside the circle of lefty baby-boomers. Often Ochs is dismissed as a “topical” songwriter whose music, for that reason, hasn’t stood the test of time. “He’s no Bob Dylan,” his critics sometimes say. Dylan himself famously told Ochs he was “just a journalist” (as he threw him out of his limousine). This image of Ochs owes much to his own statements, for he frankly admitted that the pages of newspapers and magazines were a source of songs ideas, saying “every headline is a potential song.” He underscored this by naming his first album “All The News That’s Fit To Sing” – punning on the masthead of The New York Times. The origin of a song hardly determines its value, though; and in his best political songs Ochs cultivated poetry out of such pulpy fertilizer, just like Hank Williams finding song ideas from his sister’s True Romance comic books. Whatever one thinks of his music, though, it was clearly linked to the 1960s New [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<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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		<item>
		<title>What&#8217;s wrong with religion?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/11/whats-wrong-with-religion/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/11/whats-wrong-with-religion/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 06 Nov 2010 18:42:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Religion]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1912</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Occasionally [the SPGB] gets a membership application from someone who has a rough idea of what we stand for. They may have read few Socialist Standards and perhaps been to a meeting or two. They’re fired up and want to get involved so they ask for an application form, fill it in, &#8211; and suddenly they’re puzzled. &#8211; Why do we ask them their views on religion? (It’s not just religion we ask them about of course but their understanding and agreement with our case generally but it’s often a religious view that proves to be a sticking point). ‘Wasn’t Jesus a socialist’? They may ask. And if they do or if they hold the view that the stars or other mystical forces hold the key to our lives we have to politely ask them to find out a bit more about the Socialist case and then come back and talk to us again. So why are we opposed to religious beliefs? Well the socialist or materialist opposition to religion differs slightly from the usual atheist position. The non-socialist atheist argues that there is no evidence and thus no rational grounds for believing in supernatural beings or in life after [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8220;If we listened to it&#8230;</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/08/if-we-listened-to-it/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/08/if-we-listened-to-it/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:10:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Humor]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1665</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[maybe history would stop repeating itself.&#8221; -Lily Tomlin No related posts.


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		<title>Making Bread</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/08/making-bread/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/08/making-bread/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:54:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Trade]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1652</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Wheat is the new gold. As poor countries brace for shortages, it&#8217;s boom time for Kansas farmers. &#8220;It feels like Christmas in August,&#8221; admitted Darrell Hanavan, of the Colorado Wheat Administrative Committee, noting that the harvest just completed in his state seems to have been the most bountiful for 25 years. The dollar value for the crop is almost sure to set a record. The US Department of Agriculture expects US exports to surge by 36 per cent this year. The futures prices of wheat on the Chicago commodities exchanges are spiking at heights that even a few weeks ago would have seemed mad – above $7 (£4.50) a bushel in recent days. Speculators rushing to buy wheat in the wake of Russia&#8217;s export ban may have created a bubble that is not immune from bursting. Russia announced that weeks of fierce heat and uncontrolled fires would cost the country a quarter of its crop and that its wheat exports, which will be frozen from tomorrow, may not resume until next year. Output in Ukraine and Kazakhstan has slumped too. Canadian wheat farmers have been struggling with crops drowned by rains that won&#8217;t stop, and in eastern Australia, the wheat [...]


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