Waste and want: Grapes of Wrath revisited
In his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 25), John Steinbeck described how food was destroyed during the Great Depression: Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges if they could drive out and pick them […]
Council Communist
Book Review from the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard ‘Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick‘, by Gary Roth. Chicago. Haymarket Books, 2015 This biography will be of special interest to many readers of the Socialist Standard. While Paul Mattick (1904–1981) never joined the World Socialist Movement (WSM), his views […]
Law and Order in the U.S.A. (1968)
From the December 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard A member of the World Socialist Party of the US paints a somewhat frightening picture of politics in America If you saw it only on television and stayed off the streets, the political situation in the United States this year seemed like a second-rate circus which […]
Vietnam and the anti-war movement (1966)
From the September 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard Vietnam will one day take its place beside Hiroshima and Auschwitz as an example of a time when the sickness of capitalism exploded into a kind of psychotic nightmare. It is no mere piece of sensationalism, either, to compare Vietnam with Hiroshima and Auschwitz, for there […]
Marxism in the USA (1968)
Book Review from the December 1968 issue of theSocialist Standard Marxian Socialism in the United States, by Daniel Bell, Princeton University Press. 17s. 6d. This book, written over fifteen years ago, has been re-issued with a new introduction by the author. It is a history of the Socialist Party of America and the Communist […]
Can the Tea Party save the American Dream? (2010)
From the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard The right-wing Tea Party movement is, according to some commentators, turning into a mass, ‘grassroots’ movement and revolutionising politics in America. Is it? If the ‘lame-stream media’, to steal an appropriate phrase, is to be believed, then there has been a ‘massive’, indeed ‘historic’, change in […]
Joe Hill: songwriter to the working class (2000)
From the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard Eighty-five years ago, on 19 November 1915, Joe Hill, a rootless, unassuming migratory worker and member of the IWW, was executed by a five-man firing squad in the prison yard of Utah State Penitentiary for the alleged murder of a Salt Lake City grocer and his […]
Trade Unionist Extraordinary (1985)
From the November 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard Eugene V. Debs was born 130 years ago, on 5th November 1855. Although a member of the reformist socialist Party of America, in his speeches and articles he came nearer to the socialist position of the SPGB than any other prominent political orator in America, as […]
Rockefeller’s roast (1914)
From the July 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard For six months past the miners employed by the Rockefeller interests in Colorado have been out on strike against the truck system, and for the right to live where they pleased, and to be attended by their own doctors. Starvation and misery, together with much brutality […]
Where Rockfeller Rules (1913)
Book Review from the June 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard “Poverty,” by Robert Hunter. London : The Macmillan Co. 2s. net. This is a cheap reprint of a work that originally appeared in 1904 in America. It is written by a member of that body of reformers known as the Socialist Party of America. […]