On June 25th Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (D) filibustered an anti-abortion bill that has the intended consequence of shutting down as many Planned Parenthood women’s health clinics as possible. In addition to restricting the used of the RU-486 abortion drug and banning abortion after the twentieth week of pregnancy, the proposed anti-abortion bill...
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Socialists are reluctant to talk about ‘the poor’ as a distinct social group. In a certain real sense, all of those excluded from ownership and control of the means of life – the large majority who make up the working class – are poor. All the same, there are degrees of poverty. Being homeless...
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Dear World Socialist Party I’m not sure whether you will welcome my query, but with your knowledge of Marxism perhaps you will have some useful advice for me. My life’s dream is to become a fully paid-up member of the capitalist class. How much money do I need to join? I am willing to work hard...
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J. EDGAR, I HARDLY KNEW YA You will never hear an economist argue that increases in productivity are bad. But where do you think the government ever got all that nifty surveillance technology from? From the surveillance industry, of course. If you’re wondering why there was no surveillance industry in 1917 (Pinkertons, yes! police...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Well, I just had to do it: go see this movie everyone was talking about. Let’s just say that Argo has more in common with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream than with Jason and the Argonauts searching for the golden fleece. The film features a fake movie (“Argo”) “produced” by the Central Intelligence Agency...
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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,...
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