From the Socialist Standard, July 1989.
Up until 1789 France was an Absolutist state ruled by a king who claimed that his total power to rule had been granted him by god. All the top posts in the army, the government, the civil service, the church and the judiciary were reserved for the members of...
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History
1789: France’s bourgeois revolution
The Russian Revolution recalled
Even 90 years after the Russian revolution there are still some who claim that the event shines as a beacon for socialism. We were able to say at the time that whatever was happening in Russia it was not a socialist revolution.
In August 1918 the Socialist Standard pointed out that, while there were...
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Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Our subject this evening is “Socialism – Utopian and Scientific.” Most relevant in the examination of this subject is history. Not the...
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Materialist Conception of History
Down through the ages there have been various interpretations of history. For example, there are the theories which see in history the working out and realization of some sort of divine plan – like Hegel’s philosophy of history, which sees the whole historical development of society as the realization stage by stage of the...
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Economic Roots of WW2
Chopping up history is a common method of distorting it and preventing anything being learned from it. Chopped-up history comes to us as a series of largely self-contained, unconnected and accidental events which were crucially influenced by the personalities of the leaders of the time. The implication is that there is no overall pattern...
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30,000 Dispossessed Die In Cyclone
The 22,000 confirmed dead and 41,000 reported missing that followed the cyclone that struck Myanmar, formerly Burma, on Saturday, revealed a tragedy of unspeakable horror, yielding nauseating stories of impossibly strong winds, damage to life and property wrought by falling trees and, as though that were not enough, the main culprit, a 12-foot high...
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We work harder but get poorer in the U.S.
According to a 2003 report on the Federal Reserve website examining changes in wealth distribution from 1989 to 2001, certain stark realities are encountered. The wealthiest individual of 1989, estimated then at a worth of 7 billion dollars, was replaced by an individual today worth 42 billion. The average wealth of the richest 400...
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William Morris’ Vision of Socialism
from the ‘Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made’ lecture series, the talk dates from Sunday 12 December 1982, and was held at the Prince Albert pub in Kings Cross, London.
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State and class in pre-colonial West Africa
Was the state instituted for mutual protection or did it arise when society became divided into classes?
Long before Marx and Engels, political thinkers and philosophers had written extensively on the concept of the state. In the 1640s, Thomas Hobbes had argued that the state was essentially a contract between the individual and the government....
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Russia and State Capitalism
From Dave Perrin’s history of our companion party in the UK. the development of the WSPUS’ thinking developed on identical lines:
The World’s First Socialist Revolution?
When Jack Fitzgerald of the SPGB wrote in the Socialist Standard that the Russian upheavals of March and November, 1917 were by far the most important events of the...
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