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 in what happens in the world, that things would have been different had other people been in charge or if certain events had not coincided. It follows from this that there is no need to make any fundamental changes in society because a bad historical...
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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 wave that ravaged coastal areas upon which resided millions of the nation’s poor in shanty towns. Myanmar is ruled by a military dictatorship headed by Senior General Than Shwe and Vice-Senior General Maung Aye since the 1990s, but who themselves followed in the footsteps of...
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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 increased from 376 to 543 million dollars. There were 97 billionaires in 1989 and 205 in 2001. One third of all wealth was held by the top 1% of the population. The wealth of the bottom 35% of the population declined. A study by the...
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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. The alternative, called by Hobbes the state of nature, was a thoroughly unpleasant life—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. This, according to Hobbes, the state emerged to improve mankind’s lot. However, Engels, summing up his historical analysis in The Origin of the Family, Private...
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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 First World War, he was stating an opinion which, with hindsight, seems a self-evident truth.1 But the extent to which these important upheavals would actually affect the SPGB itself, and the entire political tradition which had spawned it, could hardly have been appreciated...
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Edit. Note: In The Western Socialist, No. 3-1965 there appeared an article entitled, The Ludlow Massacre (1913) – fifth in a series entitled, Gems From American History. The Ludlow article evoked the following letter from an old-timer member of the World Socialist Party who was a witness to some of the events described in his capacity as a soap-box propagandist for the Industrial Workers of the World at the time. Our soap-boxing began in Albany, New York. Passenger trains furnished the transportation, provided we kept to the “decks” of the dining cars, rode the “blinds” or the water tank...
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The Real Situation in Russia by Leon Trotsky This book consists for the most part of the statement submitted by Trotsky (and 12 other minority members) to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party in September, 1927. The document was suppressed by Stalin and his supporters, and the opposition group—both in the Central Committee and in the country at large—was broken up by the imprisonment, persecution and exile of its prominent members. As might have been expected a copy of the statement was smuggled out of Russia, and now appears in an English edition. It is translated by...
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