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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History
30,000 Dispossessed Die In Cyclone
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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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...
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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...
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A Witness At Ludlow
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...
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Trotsky states his case
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...
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