People are angry at the banks. They blame them for causing the crisis. They blame them for having to be bailed out and then still paying their top people obscene bonuses. They see them as producing nothing, just making money out of shuffling money around. Some of these criticisms are justified. Some are not. Banks...
Read more »

Read more »

“No weak men in the books at home The strong men who have made the world History lives on the books at home The books at home It’s not made by great men (x4) The past lives on in your front room The poor still weak the rich still rule History lives in the books at home The books at home It’s not...
Read more »

The number of UK children living in “severe poverty” rose in the four years before the recession Save the Children says The number of children in homes in this category rose 260,000 to 1.7m from 2004 to 2008. The report warns there is a danger that severe poverty could rise even further. The government defines relative low-income...
Read more »

Marx begins his examination of capitalism in Capital with the analysis of the commodity; and he succinctly explains the reason for his starting point in the first paragraph: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary...
Read more »

This series of short articles will examine the first volume of Marx’s Capital from a “socialist perspective,” which is to say, with an eye to how an understanding of capitalism can contribute to our understanding of socialism. I should recognize the obvious fact, right away, that a worker hardly needs to read Capital to arrive...
Read more »

The earthquake in Haiti and similar misfortunes are presented as unavoidable natural disasters. To some extent, this is true. But it ignores the consequences of the deliberate pursuit of profit at the expense of environmental protection. It is not a coincidence that the number of victims of recent disasters such as the Asian tsunami...
Read more »

The Use-Value of loan capital, which is made available through the banking system, consists of producing profit, and this type of profit is described as interest. The rate of interest is arrived at by competition between lenders and borrowers, or by supply and demand; the lender of loan capital striving to obtain the highest...
Read more »

Read more »

When we were children around about the time that we were tiring of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders we discovered the board game Monopoly. I can’t remember the details or the rules – something about cards that said such things as “Pass Go, collect £200″, “Go to jail”, “Get out of jail”. In real...
Read more »

‘You can fool all of the people some of the time . . . and some of the people all of the time . . . but . . . The US occupation forces in Afghanistan have learned a particular lesson from the disaster that is Iraq, and they have learned it big time....
Read more »

Given the competitive nature of capitalism any agreement on trying to deal with climate change was bound to be feeble and inadequate, If we were living in a rationally-organised world, and a problem such as the threat of a too rapid global warming arose, a co-ordinated global response would be organised as a matter...
Read more »

Everyday taxicab rides may appear to be lacklustre experiences that are quickly forgotten. However, this might not always be the case. Sometimes our views of events may become clouded and we cannot see things for what they really are. However, after taking many cab-rides in an urban city, I began to see things in...
Read more »

Marx’s Conception of Socialism Marx usually referred to the society he aimed to see established by the working class as “communist society”. Precisely because he believed that “communist society” would be the outcome of the struggle and movement of the working class against its capitalist conditions of existence, Marx always refused to give any detailed...
Read more »

(A review of First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek) Has Slavoj Žižek (the superstar Slovenian “theorist”)  signed a piece-work contract with Verso Books? One can’t help wondering because this slim volume brings his tally with that publisher alone to around 21 titles. This Stakhanovite output would be more impressive were it not for...
Read more »

At a recent bookfair in Toronto, members of an organization called, “Supreme Master” handed out leaflets on climate change. The main thrust of their argument is that greenhouse gases are not the major cause of global warming, but de-forestation for cattle grazing land is. To support this contention they offer various statistics, some of...
Read more »

Too good to be true We are conditioned to accept the absurdities and contradictions that capitalism throws up. It is possible now to build a world where every single human being is adequately provided with the material means of a full and happy life in a truly meaningful democratic society; where there is no such thing...
Read more »

Capitalism and food security – an oxymoron Food security for all the people of the world will only be possible whem the profit motive is taken out of food supply. It’s official! Now more than one billion people are hungry and in desperate need of food aid according to the World Food Programme. To meet...
Read more »

Unemployment – Is it really the problem? Is unemployment really the problem? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to play down the misery of the millions who have lost their jobs – or the millions more who are going to lose their jobs – as the world slides deeper into the next Great Depression. I know...
Read more »