“You could have to work for 134 days each year just to pay your tax bill” (their emphasis) read the headline of a full page HSBC ad in the Times (16 March). “Income Tax, National Insurance, VAT, car tax . . . it all adds up. In fact, in 2009 the average Briton had...
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SPGB
Profit Freedom Day
Capitalism Must Go
(SPGB election manifesto) These elections are taking place in the middle of the biggest economic and financial crisis since the 1930s. In a world that has the potential to produce enough food, clothes, housing and the other amenities of life for all, factories are closing down, workers are being laid off, unemployment is growing,...
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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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May 1968 – The Revolution that wasn’t
What might have happened if, forty years ago, workers in France had taken over the factories and tried to keep production going. 1968 saw an outbreak of protest in various parts of the World. Much of it was very violent and the main thrust of this protest was in France and in America, where...
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Socialist Standard – Sept.
Monthly Publication of the Socialist Party of Great Britain since 1904 Featured in this issue: Who controls the world: the Illuminati or the Market? Why do some people think the world is run by a shadowy group called the Illuminati? Who were they? Hot Air Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol little substantial has been...
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Trotskyists Get It Wrong – Again
The latest issue of Socialist Worker (25 August) of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) carries an article on the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International which took place a hundred years ago. According to the author, John Riddell, the Congress “took a bold stand in the struggle against capitalist war”. No, it didn’t. The...
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The Banks Couldn’t Save Themselves
We have been going for over a hundred years and over that period have come across all sorts of theories as to the cause of and solution to the problems facing society and wage and salary workers in particular. One set are those who say that the answer lies in some reform of the...
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War, Plots and Civil Liberties
Was there really a plot to blow up transatlantic airliners or were the police just using a pretext to fish for information by rounding up and questioning people they suspected were up to something without knowing precisely what? Will ministers eventually say, as they did after the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and...
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The Elections in Iraq
Since the end of the Second World War, when the US forced the Italian government to discharge its Communist Party cabinet members as a prerequisite for aid, to its support for the coup attempt in Venezuela in 2003, the US has been regularly subverting elections around the globe for the benefit of its own...
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Boom Goes Bust in Asia
Socialist Standard, October 1998. Thirty countries covering a quarter of the world’s population are officially in recession. Even defenders of capitalism are now compelled to use the term “world economic crisis”. It had to happen. Given the chronic state of overcapacity and potential overproduction in relation to the market in all the key sectors...
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