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...
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1. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we are loyal Americans. We have unquestioning trust in the wisdom of our leaders. 2. We are fighting in Afghanistan because we are devoted to the principles of free trade and free enterprise. That is why we want to protect the heroin export business of President Karzai’s...
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This year’s Nobel Prize for Economics Every year the Bank of Sweden awards a prize to some economist, often called the Nobel Prize for Economics even though it wasn’t established by the old merchant of death himself. It has in fact only been going since 1968. Usually the prize goes to some obscure economist for...
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Is any word more over-used and misunderstood today than “socialism”? In the United States, the “S-word” appears in almost every other sentence uttered by Republicans, who depict the Democratic Party as marching – or at least creeping – towards socialism. “Socialist” has replaced “liberal” in their vocabulary as an insult to hurl at political opponents,...
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From the Socialist Standard, July 1989. Up until 1789 France was an Absolutist state ruled by a king who claimed that his total power to rule had been granted him by god. All the top posts in the army, the government, the civil service, the church and the judiciary were reserved for the members of...
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The Economic Crisis: Will Capitalism Fail? Despite the recent pronouncement by the governor of The Bank of Canada that the recession is over, we are suffering through the worst crisis in capitalism since the 1930s Depression. Even he had to admit that the employment figures might not recover until 2014. So for the over seven...
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Whose president is Barack Obama? He would have us believe that he is president of “all Americans.” But how is that possible when there are such sharp conflicts of interest in American society? Does the business owner have the same interests as the workers he hires at or below the minimum wage? Or consider the...
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How could anyone have seriously argued that the workers ruled in Russia? Incredible as it might seem millions believed that Russia under Stalin and his successors was some sort of “Workers State”. Most – those in and around the official “Communist” parties – thought it was a workers’ paradise, socialism even. A minority...
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The pressure to misinterpret the deaths, as the bodies come back, as nobly purifying is a cynically orchestrated propaganda exercise intended to justify the war. Among the rituals so consoling to our Servants of the People in Westminster is the solemn roll call of the names of recently fatal casualties of...
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Editorial from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard Twenty years ago this month the Berlin Wall came down, symbolising the end of the division of Europe into Western and Russian spheres of influence. Russia had lost the Cold War and its rulers under Gorbachev had decided they would no longer prop up the...
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Leo Tolstoy is famous not only for his novels but for his moral and political beliefs which have inspired, and continue to inspire, both anarchists and pacifists. He was born on 9th September, 1828 into a family of rural aristocrats at their estate at Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula in Russia. His mother, a princess, died...
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From the Socialist Standard, September 2004. Unfortunately, democracy is one of those carelessly uttered words (like freedom, peace, love, justice etc.) that is constantly misused and prone to expedient adaptation. HL Mencken, for instance, mischievously declared: “Adultery is democracy applied to marriage.” Politically, however, its misuse is contemptuously cynical and rarely funny, so it is...
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Our rulers tell us they are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for democracy. Not true. I n June 2009 in Afghanistan a group of heavily armed (with US weaponry) and masked Afghan thugs forced their way into the office of a Provincial Prosecutor and demanded that a detained prisoner be handed over to them. The...
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From this month’s Socialist Standard It was the political power that the Catholic Church once exercised in Ireland that allowed it to cover up for so long the child abuse exposed in the recent Ryan Report. I travelled to Dublin in the early 1950s as a member of a delegation from a Northern Ireland Labour...
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Socialism, true Socialism has never been tried and thus has never failed.  Political philosophies masquerading under the name Socialism were and are nothing more than state Capitalism with a bit of Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism thrown in for flavor. It’s state Capitalism that doesn’t work; in fact it fails miserably and creates misery until it...
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It couldn’t have gone unnoticed the news coverage of Obama’s visit to Ghana and Africa but underneath the PR gloss of the memories of slavery roots , a much more mercenary purpose existed. The new scramble for Africa Today’s race is not for colonies to conquer but for natural resources and America has stepped up pursuit...
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MORE’S UTOPIA AND THE MEANING OF SOCIALISM The word utopia, together with its derivatives utopian and utopianism, is a familiar part of our political vocabulary. It originated as the title of a work by the Tudor lawyer, statesman and writer Thomas More, first published in Latin in 1516 as a traveller’s description of a remote...
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Derrick Jensen, a prolific (and well known) anti-capitalist and environmentalist has written a pretty good argument for the need for political change on a system wide basis. Forget Shorter Hours (subtitled “Why personal change does not equal political change”.) Jensen, who writes from a radical environmental perspective, says: Part of the problem is that we’ve been...
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