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 of global industry-electronics, computers, vehicle production, pharmaceuticals, shipbuilding, steel-the boom in Asia had to come to an end sooner or later. It already had in Japan, by far the biggest economy in the region and in fact the second biggest in the world after the...
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Socialist Standard, June 1996. Maximilien Rubel who died at the end of February was not just a Marx-specialist, he was also someone who wanted Socialism in the real sense of a society of common ownership and democratic control from which what he along with Marx regarded as the two great expressions of human alienation, money and the state, would have disappeared. As such he recognised, and denounced in his writings, the rulers of state-capitalist Russia and their state ideologists as the great distorters of Marx’s ideas. His ambition, on the academic field, was to produce a definitive edition of...
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(Socialist Standard, July 1906) No point in the Socialist philosophy arouses such controversy as that of the “class-struggle” and “class-consciousness.” …What then is the meaning of this term “class-consciousness?” At a certain stage in the life of every individual he acquires a “consciousness” of personal identity. He becomes aware of his distinctiveness, physically and mentally, from the external conditions which progressively stimulate his susceptibility to impressions, and possessed of a power to recall, combine, and analyse by successive stages of mental presentation these said impressions and emotions. This sense of individuality, this power of ordered thought (briefly “consciousness”), is...
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Death of a Child
Socialist Standard, January 1994. We live in unfriendly times. As neighbourhoods have made way for wretched anonymous towerblocks, so neighbourliness has become outdated. It is not that people have chosen to become careless and uncooperative; as social animals we are never happier than when we are able to behave in mutuality, empathy and compassion towards our fellow human beings. But the way that life has come to be organised conspires against our will to be human. “There is no such thing as society”, said Thatcher, and her words were met with howls of protest by those who did not...
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