From Vladimir Sirotin (Moscow), translated with explanatory notes by Stefan Yesterday I was at a sickening meeting of the Organizing Committee for Honest Elections and Against the Putin Regime (or something like that). It was attended by a very ill-assorted bunch of people. Sitting on the platform were Udaltsov, Geidar Jemal,...
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News
Russia: Report of a meeting of the anti-Putin opposition
The porn business
Chatsworth is a district of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, well endowed with parkland and sports facilities. It is home to a number of Hollywood film stars. Many famous films and TV series were shot in the area. Chatsworth is also the world center of the porn business, with 200 production companies...
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The “Troubled Teens” Business
On the internet I keep running across the same image – the scowling face of a teenage boy, accompanied by the words: Fix Defiant ODD Children. It is an ad for a “Total Transformation Program” that will “empower” you to “stop defiance, backtalk and lying” and “regain control of your child, your family and...
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Manufacturing the News
Mark Fishman, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, investigated routine news production by examining the work practices of reporters and other news workers. His research findings were published by the University of Texas Press in 1980 in a book entitled Manufacturing the...
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Inequality or Equality?
From a long-term historical point of view, the current highly unequal societies are exceptional, since the vast majority of humans have lived in extremely egalitarian societies. Now the gap between those at the top of society, and the rest of us, is actually getting bigger. Reports from other countries suggest that this is a...
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Drug Dealers
The Independent (UK) today reports on the story that SPGB previously reported upon in June of how the pharmaceutical industry preys on the poor to trial new drugs. Clinical trials for new pharmaceutical drugs are a sensitive business. But tests can be expensive. If they go wrong, companies are liable for compensation. No surprise, then, that in...
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This Land is Our Land
There was a time when ‘land’ used to refer to those parts of our habitat that were cultivated for food, grazed by animals for hide, wool, meat, milk and fertilisation, and to forests from which timber, firewood and food were collected and also to where communities lived sharing the common wealth. Now, as with...
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Crisis: the stories so far
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,...
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Class against class
It’s exploitation that causes workers’ problems. On an ultra-simplistic level we could say that capitalism in the persona of capitalists uses capital (in its basic form, money) to make a profit. By utilising capital in the form of property, equipment, machinery, investment or speculation the capitalist needs to employ members of the working class...
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Joseph Dietzgen – The Workers Philosopher
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...
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