The ideas in The German Ideology (TGI) have had great influence over the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) and all of the SPGB’s companion parties which make up the World Socialist Movement (WSM)[i]. Because the WSM is made up of thousands and thousands of party comrades and fellow travelers these ideas deserve some exposition […]

Back in October 2008 I suggested that globalization ‘has lost impetus and may even have passed its zenith’. Now, in the aftermath of Brexit and the inauguration of a protectionist American president, even the capitalist press talks about ‘de-globalization’. Some pundits (e.g.: Simon Nixon in The Wall Street Journal, 5 Oct 2016; Pierpaolo Barbieri in […]

Talk given by Karla Rab at the Community Church of Boston on May 3rd, 2015 “Socialism — A nice Idea, but it’ll never work because it’s against
 HUMAN NATURE!” That assertion has been encountered many times by socialists explaining the case for socialism to someone new to the idea. Here’s why it’s wrong: Probably the […]

  Talk given by Ron Elbert at the Community Church of Boston, November 13, 2016 You might have seen clips of House Speaker Paul Ryan warning a crowd in Wisconsin (Joe McCarthy’s home state!) that if Republicans were to lose control of the Senate, guess who would become chairman of the Senate Budget Committee? A guy […]

No, ALEC is not a new kid on the block. ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC was born in 1973 – the brainchild of Paul Weyrich and a group of Republican Party state legislators. This was not Weyrich’s first brainchild: he also fathered the Heritage Foundation and somewhere along the way coined the […]

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, […]

The United States of America has been under one-party rule since its birth at the drafting of the Constitution. This document was drawn up by a small group of men (the founding “fathers”) representing four major economic interests – money, public securities, manufactures, and trade and shipping. In the conclusion to his classic work An […]

There is a political dispute going on about climate change, global heating, or global climate disruption. The dispute, unfortunately, is not simply about what to call it but about whether ‘it’ is happening at all, and if it is whether ‘it’ is being caused by human activity. 

You Don’t Need Marx to be an ‘Anti-Capitalist’ Why do we need to read Marx’s Capital? Or should I say: Why do you need to read Capital? And who do I think ‘you’ are, anyway? Well, let me tell you . . . You are, I imagine, a fellow worker. That is, you depend on […]

National Public Radio (NPR) and the Centre for Public Integrity (CPI) teamed up to produce a special investigative report on the increased incidence of black lung disease in coal miners. The results of their combined investigations were released on the NPR’s radio stations on July 9–10, 2012 and broadcast on Public Broadcasting Systems (PBS) television […]