Adam Buick and John Crump, The Alternative to Capitalism (Theory and Practice, 2013) This short paperback is a concise introduction to basic Marxian concepts concerning the current system of society – world capitalism – and the alternative to it – world socialism. The texts are carefully written to be fully accessible to readers with no previous knowledge of Marx’s ideas. Apart from the preface, the book consists of three chapters reproduced from two other books that were published in the 1980s and are now unfortunately out of print.* Although there is a note of this fact on the page...
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The work of Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick contains some insights for socialists but it is not Marxian economics and is not socialist. The late twentieth-century saw the demise of many governments that viewed themselves as heirs of the ideas of Karl Marx. The failure of these regimes was seen by their opponents as the triumph of capitalism and the death of socialism. With the rise of neoliberal economics in advanced industrial countries the future of the left did indeed seem bleak. The legacy of Karl Marx and Marxian socialism, however, was far from dead. As the current global...
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Below is an interview with a comrade of ours who explains his progression from being a member of the IRA, through Trotskyism to a World Socialist position. Discussion between Richard (Dick) Montague and Ciaran Crossey Belfast, 21 November 1987 CC I was given your name as a socialist activist in the ’40s by Vincent McDowell. What I’m trying to uncover is information about the minor socialist groupings in Ireland during the ’30s and ’50s. RM Vincent McDowell had been interned in Belfast during WWII. He came out wiser but he was not prepared to publicly say so. He broke...
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“I treat the ridiculous seriously when I treat it with ridicule.” Marx explained in “On Freedom of the Press and Censorship.” Born on 5 May 1818, Karl Marx died 14th March 1883 after a long illness, his end undoubtedly being hastened by the death of his wife in 1881 and his favourite daughter, Jenny, in 1882. Marx devoted the best years of his life in the struggle for socialism and the fruits of his labours are a legacy of inestimable value to the working class. There were less than a dozen mourners for his funeral at Highgate Cemetry. You...
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An article in Scientific American (July 2012) by Professor of Biology and Mathematics Martin Nowak entitled “Why We Help” goes a long way in providing Socialists a scientific argument to refute the idea of “red in tooth and claw” evolution that is supposed to have spawned — on even a genetic level — the strictly competitive “Devil take the hindmost” character of human nature: the product of capitalist society. Professor Nowak writes: “While on retreat with some fellow students and professors in the Alps, I learned about a game theory paradox called the Prisoner’s Dilemma that elegantly illustrates why...
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Five years ago, we reminded readers of this column that ‘nuclear weapons are still there’ (Socialist Standard, February 2008). True, many fewer of them than at the height of the Cold War. But more than enough to turn the surface of our planet into a radioactive wasteland and still have plenty left over. In a recent book entitled The Second Nuclear Age (Henry Holt & Co., 2012), the prominent American nuclear strategist Paul Bracken argues that nuclear weapons are now regaining their relevance to statecraft. They are making a comeback. The risk of nuclear war is significantly higher now...
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PROFIT HOTEL (dirty gossip about the capitalist mode of production!)
The dismal art? After the socialist revolution, will economics be demoted to an art form? Is economics even “soft science”? There is one small problem … A recent article in Science News notes: Annual forecasts of currency values from December 2001 to December 2010, which guided banks’ investment decisions, missed the mark nine out of 10 times, says psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Banks incorrectly foretold the fates of the dollar and the euro in the years leading up to, during and after the recent financial crisis. [Bruce Bower, “Banks confuse...
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