And so Brown , Cameron and Clegg engage in the first of their series of televised debates , all the other minor political parties , of course , excluded in this demonstration of media impartiality and fairness . These three political party leaders claim to be working for the betterment of society. Each of...
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Elections
On the UK election debates
Why didn’t anyone wake me up while the revolution was going on? (Why we are not Leftists)
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...
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Obama wins
So the next President of the USA will be Barack Obama. Of course as socialists we know that he is a capitalist politician, the representative of a capitalist party, who will form a capitalist administration to govern the most powerful capitalist country in the world. And that, as a left-of-centre politician getting support with...
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The Revolutionary Vote
The vote is a gain, a potential class weapon, a potential “instrument of emancipation” as Marx put it. Despite Lenin’s distortions , Marx and Engels always held that the bourgeois democratic republic was the best political framework for the development and triumph of the socialist movement. This is another pre-1914 socialist position we see...
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Obama, the Rev. Wright and hesitation
The latest scandal that surrounds Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama’s previous involvement with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and that highlights his difficulty fully disowning this association with the politically radical pastor until a statement unequivocally doing so publicly on April 29th is angrily upsetting his fans and supporters who fear that the time...
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What’s the Matter with Pennsylvania?
From our friend at Marx and Coca Cola Recently at a campaign event Barack Obama made the following comment about the dying Rust Belt towns in Pennsylvania: You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years...
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Selecting a US President: the invisible primaries
The expression “invisible primary” comes from Arthur T. Hadley, The Invisible Primary (Prentice-Hall, 1976). A more recent study refers to the “money primary” (Michael J. Goff, The Money Primary, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). The two terms refer to the same process: the efforts of would-be candidates to gather support, raise funds and cultivate the...
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What it is ain’t exactly clear
If we may go by the trend emerging from the presidential primary results so far, we very likely will see the end of the CheneyBush era next November. Voters both Democratic and Republican have turned out in large, often record-breaking numbers to make preliminary choices from among the presidential candidates who have offered themselves....
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The Mass Debaters
Who has seen whiter, glossier, teeth and lies whiter and glossier still than those bared on television during the recent debates between Democrats and Republicans? The race culminating in the presidential trophy in late 2008 is solidly on, with these wealthy members of the capitalist class vying for leadership of the world’s most prosperous...
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The Iowa caucuses: Wrong end of the crystal ball?
We read in the Boston Globe (Friday, January 4th) that the results of the Iowa caucuses among Democrats and Republicans are important for the unprecedentedly intense grassroots interest they reveal in the upcoming presidential election. But more to the point, to the extent voters in Iowa are still trying to make those two creaky...
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