From Vladimir Sirotin (Moscow), translated with explanatory notes by Stefan Yesterday I was at a sickening meeting of the Organizing Committee for Honest Elections and Against the Putin Regime (or something like that). It was attended by a very ill-assorted bunch of people. Sitting on the platform were Udaltsov, Geidar Jemal, Lev Ponomarev, Ilya Ponomarev, Vladimir Tor, Ivan Mironov, Mr. Krylov and a number of others....
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Russia: Report of a meeting of the anti-Putin opposition
The porn business
Chatsworth is a district of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, well endowed with parkland and sports facilities. It is home to a number of Hollywood film stars. Many famous films and TV series were shot in the area. Chatsworth is also the world center of the porn business, with 200 production companies employing 1,200 – 1,500 performers (and a few thousand other workers). Here too are the...
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The “Troubled Teens” Business
On the internet I keep running across the same image – the scowling face of a teenage boy, accompanied by the words: Fix Defiant ODD Children. It is an ad for a “Total Transformation Program” that will “empower” you to “stop defiance, backtalk and lying” and “regain control of your child, your family and your life”. ODD, in case you’re wondering, is the “diagnosis” that psychiatrists now pin on...
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Manufacturing the News
Mark Fishman, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, investigated routine news production by examining the work practices of reporters and other news workers. His research findings were published by the University of Texas Press in 1980 in a book entitled Manufacturing the News. At the beginning of his book, Fishman touches on the practical mode of social...
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Inequality or Equality?
From a long-term historical point of view, the current highly unequal societies are exceptional, since the vast majority of humans have lived in extremely egalitarian societies. Now the gap between those at the top of society, and the rest of us, is actually getting bigger. Reports from other countries suggest that this is a general trend in capitalism throughout the world. Clearly there are a lot more poor than...
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Drug Dealers
The Independent (UK) today reports on the story that SPGB previously reported upon in June of how the pharmaceutical industry preys on the poor to trial new drugs. Clinical trials for new pharmaceutical drugs are a sensitive business. But tests can be expensive. If they go wrong, companies are liable for compensation. No surprise, then, that in a globalised economy this business – like many others – is being outsourced to countries...
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Socialism And The Environment – Part One
Introduction In recent years the environment has become a major political issue. And rightly so, because a serious environmental crisis really does exist. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat have all become contaminated to a greater or lesser extent. Ecology – the branch of biology that studies the...
What is Common Ownership?
Quite simply, the common ownership of the world’s resources and productive capacity is the basis for a reorganisation of society that would ensure plenty of the necessities of life for everyone on the planet – no more starving, malnourished people, no wandering homeless, no senseless deaths for the want of easily affordable medical care...
Marx’s Conception of Socialism
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...
