The Hamilton Hacker

Nice wee bit of sly humour from the April 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Slipping Standards

465? Wow!

Don't Leave Me This Way Rain or Shine Thorn In My Side

Is it really 25 years to the month that the following two copies of the Socialist Standard - with a copy of the SPGB's 1978 pamphlet, Questions of the Day, thrown in for good measure - landed on the doormat?

What was I thinking buying that particular issue of the NME?

July 2011 Socialist Standard

July 2011 Socialist Standard

Editorial:

Britain's care home crisis

Regular Columns

Pathfinders: Fission confusion

Cooking the Books 1: Good capitalism, bad capitalism?

Cooking the Books 2: Profits before petitions

Material World: Money - a waste of resources

Halo Halo: Why a socialist world won't be paradise

Greasy Pole: Calm down and listen

50 Years Ago: Britain and the Common Market

Main Articles

Is the crisis over? Whatever happened to the financial crisis?

Democracy and Capitalism Can capitalism and democracy co-exist?

The archbishop is right “We are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted” (The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams).

Pedalling in ever-decreasing circles A look at the old Clarion Cycling Club

Anyone know a lifestyle anarchist? Keep a look-out for people who are chock-full of undirected, ill-informed revolutionary gusto, but empty of any desire to organise their views into a coherent critique of the world.

What environmentalists are up against The continuing deforestation of the Amazon.

Letters, Book Reviews and Meetings

Letters to the Editors: Reformist charities; World War Two; Plain English

Book Reviews: Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology. Ed. Iain McKay (AK Press 2011); Marxism and World Politics. Contesting Global Capitalism. Ed by Alexander Anievas (Routledge 2011)

TV Review: Choosing To Die

Film Review: Jumping The Broom

Action Replay: Ring-Fenced

Socialist Party Meetings: Clapham, Glasgow, Birmingham & Manchester:

Voice From The Back

All Right For Some; The Middle Class Myth; A Dog's Life; The Class Divide; Law and Disorder

Marshmallows and bacon sandwiches

Before Santa tries to break and enter later on tonight:

Still the best Christmas flavoured article ever to appear in the pages of the Socialist Standard.

As much as I love Kirsty Pogue; Slade; Graham Parker; Greg Lake and Wizzard for their yuletide offerings, this is still the best ever Christmas song:

I couldn't find a proper video for The Waitresses's classic. Surely there's one out there somewhere?

"Pssst! Don't mention the Socialist Standard"

Just as well Deathy goes by the Pig's Feet Pik Smeet monicker in the Standard. The Texas Education Board would collectively blow a gasket in the added confusion.

Hat tip to Steve C over at Facebook for the latest American Right fuckwittery.

Truth that hurts

I'll hazard a guess that Alan J over at the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back, got a few bound volumes for his Xmas 'cos he's been peppering the blog in recent weeks with reprints from the pages of the Socialist Standard.

If you ask him nicely he might post that classic mid-eighties review of Our Favourite Shop. In the meantime, here's a smattering of his reposts:

Communist Commotion (1957 article on the sorry history of the British CP.)

Walking the Plank (1932 article on the expulsion of JT Murphy from the CP.)

Is Nicaragua Socialist? (No, not Latin Quarter's follow up single to Radio Africa. A 1987 article from the Standard.)

Chile: myth and reality (An article from '73.)

Background to Cuba (An article from 1961. Kennedy in the White House and Paddy Crerand still at Parkhead.)

Russia's Afghan Hound (1980 article on . . . you can guess.)

Solidarity, the Market and Marx (As I posted yesterday about Ian Bone's youthful days in Solidarity in South Wales, I have to include this 1973 Socialist Standard article about Solidarity that was penned by a socialist originally from South Wales.)

There's a shed load more of old articles from the Socialist Standard over at the SOYMB blog, but as Kara just called and wants the kettle on, I'll let you find them for yourself.

Humbuggery

Still my favourite Christmas story after all these years.

December 2009 Socialist Standard: Down and out in Mayfair

December 2009 Socialist Standard

Editorial

Copenhagen: another predictable failure

Regular Columns

Pathfinders Calorie counts and pet scans

Cooking the Books 1 This year’s Nobel Prize for Economics

Cooking the Books 2 Free is good

Material World The advance of capitalism

Greasy Pole BNP – Question Time Without Answers

Pieces Together Capitalist Paradox; Drug Pushers Pay Off; All Right For Some

50 Years Ago Second thoughts

Main Articles

Down and out in Mayfair We still live in a society that if you don’t have the ability to pay you ‘goes’ without.

Capitalism and food security – an oxymoron Food security for all the people of the world will only be possible when the profit motive is taken out of food supply.

The World Around You Someone employs you, and you work for them, and they control a big part of your waking hours.

Too good to be true We are conditioned to accept the absurdities and contradictions that capitalism throws up.

Debating the “S-Word” Is any word more over-used and misunderstood today than “socialism”?

On modern life (Eric Fromm ) Some selected quotes from Fromm's 'The Art of Loving'.

How I got to be a socialist “… I came to know about ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ but always preferred ‘our’.”

Ire of the Irate Itinerant Cartoon Strip

Book Reviews, & Meetings

Book Reviews:Why not socialism? By G. A. Cohen; Where the Other Half Lives: Lower Income Housing in a Neoliberal World Sarah Glynn, ed; Critical Social Theory and the End of Work By Edward Granter; Free. The Future of a Radical Price. By Chris Anderson; Plebs. By Colin Waugh.

Socialist Party Meetings: Clapham, Chiswick & Norwich:

Voice From The Back

End of a dream; How about socialism?; Capitalism is gangsterism; The new gangsters

'Before it gets shoved under the bed next to the boworker . . . '

As closing lines to articles goes, you'd have to go some to top the closing line to last month's Pathfinders column in the Socialist Standard

Capitalists think they can save money by forcing puritanical self-denial on workers, but with the stress of exploitation we face, we don’t need temperance, we need to lose our tempers. [My emphasis.]

The link to the article is here and, if you start at the top, you get the full benefit of the pay-off line.

Now, where is this month's Socialist Standard

A novel approach to politics

Back to the Socialist Standard.

There are long term plans to digitise every issue of the Socialist Standard going back to September 1904, in order that they can be made available online for anyone and everyone to read but, in the meantime, the work of posting articles of interest from old Socialist Standards falls on the shoulders of a few members who do the work off their own bat.

So, therefore, kudos to my old Central London Branch mucker Rob S for recently posting on the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog three old articles from the Socialist Standard on novelists and thinkers who have been of interest to socialists going back several decades:

From the March 1971 issue of the Standard, Robert Barltrop's review of the (then) recently published paperback version of the four volumed collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell: Coming up for Orwell

From the May 1987 issue of the Standard, Carl Pinel's Leo Tolstoy: author and anarchist

And from the November 1973 Standard, Paul Bennett's Camus: Portrait of a 'Rebel'

It'll come as no surprise to seasoned SPGB watchers that of three authors under discussion, Tolstoy comes out best from the three review essays. (Though with obvious qualification.)

To be honest, despite being a long term fan of Barltrop as a writer, I'm rather disappointed by the tone of his article on Orwell. A bit too sniffy and vinegary for my liking. Maybe, as someone who had just returned to the SPGB after ten years of other political activity, he was playing to a particular gallery a bit.

I much prefer both Brian Rubin's article on Orwell from the December 1983 Socialist Standard and (I believe) Les Dale's article on the Political Ideas of Orwell from the October 1986 issue of the Standard.

Of course Orwell knew about the SPGB. As an avowed anti-Stalinist writer and journalist in London in the 30s and 40s how could he have not crossed paths with the SPGB? There is the mention in passing to the SPGB in the aforementioned Collected Essays but it's also the case that I remember from a few years back a comrade mentioning that when he looked at Orwell's collected papers for research purposes in London they contained a number of SPGB pamphlets, with scribblings in the margins.

I wish now that I'd asked him what Party pamphlets were in Orwell's collected papers and what were those damn scribbles.

November 2009 Socialist Standard: Free at last . . . . Twenty years beyond the Berlin Wall.

November 2009 Socialist Standard

Editorial

Socialism was never tried

Regular Columns

Pathfinders Gullibility Travels

Cooking the Books 1 Out of control

Cooking the Books 2 Free is cheaper?

Material World Malawi: Children of the Tobacco Fields

Greasy Pole TV Debates - much ado about nothing

Pieces Together Warren's Wallet; Silent Tornado; Bombs Wa-Hey!

50 Years Ago The Darwin Centenary

Main Articles

The fall of “communism”: Why so peaceful? Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down, symbolising the collapse of state capitalism in Eastern Europe.

The Myth of Soviet “Socialism” Vladimir Sirotin from Russia explains how that country was never socialist.

Workers State? Pull the other one How could anyone have seriously argued that the workers ruled in Russia?

Joining the killing machine The campaign to win the young to war has come a long way from the ‘Your Country Needs You’ poster with the pointing finger of Kitchener used in the ‘First Great War’.

Afghanistan – lying about dying 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.

Billion dollar bribery The duplicity, fraud and criminality that lies at the heart of world capitalism.

Ire of the Irate Itinerant Cartoon Strip

Letters, Book Reviews, & Meetings

Letters To The Editors: Getting from here.

Book Reviews: Che Guevara and the Economic Debate in Cuba. By Luiz Bernardo Pericás; Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. By David Aaronovitch; The Trouble with Capitalism. By Harry Shutt; Enough. By John Naish.

Socialist Party Meetings: Glasgow; Manchester, Clapham, Chiswick & Norwich:

Voice From The Back

Too much Month at the end of the Money; Famine and Feast; Up in smoke; Onward Christian Bankers

World Socialists a twitter

Being the slow reader that I am, I've only just spotted* this most excellent competition in the September issue of your soaraway Socialist Standard:

Competition for the Twittering Classes

The latest fad for micro-blogging is coming under fire, with a study showing that 40 percent of ‘tweets’ are ‘pointless babble’ and only 8.7 percent pass along ‘news of interest’(BBC Online, 17 August). Considering the gargantua of garbage which is the printed book output, this is not a bad batting average. However, keen as ever to raise the bar of public discourse, Pathfinders proposes a competition for the best expression of the Party Case in 140 characters or less. Brief reflection offers: ‘World for the Workers, not the Rich W**kers’ however you are sure to do better than that. Emails or letters to our Clapham office. Closing date 10 November, for our December issue, and best ideas will be printed. First Prize will be, of course, comradely adulation, as we socialists are trying to move away from material remuneration systems.

Why not? I'm sure I read somewhere that someone has been putting The Communist Manifesto on twitter (bugger if I can find it, though). And, no doubt, someone from Aufheben will eventually get around to serialising The Grundrisse on twitter . . . but we may get socialism before that particular exercise in twitter publishing is actually completed.

My contributions to the comp are the following:

world socialism - for a world without war, want, wages and the fat controller.

Banish the gods from the sky, the capitalists from the earth and the chuggers from the high street.

I thought I'd play it safe with a careful tweaking of the classics.

I can already feel the "comradely adulation" coming my way, and I don't like it. It seems so unnatural: comradeship and the SPGB, I mean.

*'just spotted' roughly translates as 'this post has been in draft for three weeks'.

Face off

Clinging onto the back bumpers for dear life, the SPGB finally climbs aboard the Facebook bandwagon:

Socialist Party of Great Britain Facebook Group

Socialist Standard Facebook Group

Feel free to grab onto the toggles of our collective anorak.

Coming Soon:

The SPGB on Twitter . . . but only once it's truly passe.

Tubes being tested

Remember back in the day when the blog had its act together and would post details of the latest Socialist Standard each and every month. What happened to the good old days? Will they ever return?

Nowadays, if I want to post details of a Socialist Standard article, I have to go the circuitous route of posting a link to the Richard Dawkins (dot net) website because it carries a repost of a piece from this month's Standard.

Nice to see that the article generated a few comments from the pocket protector brigade . . . even if they do come off as a surly bunch of gits. I guess that comes with the high IQ and the love for prog rock.

PS - You can view the latest Standard by clicking on the superb front cover on the right hand side of the screen.

The Original Cockney Red

Before Karl Marx's Normblog Profile, there was his 'interview' with the Socialist Standard from 25 years ago.

'The Homer of the Cesspit'

Interesting overview of life and work of Emile Zola from this month's Socialist Standard.

A megaupload of H E. Hardy Edgar Hardcastle articles

Hot on the heels of Graham's Ragged Trousered Philanthropist blog comes an updating of Edgar Hardcastle's page over at the Marxist Internet Archive.

Edgar Hardcastle? Click on this link (or this one) for more info on who Hardcastle was. Passing SPGBers - or that even rarer breed, regular readers of this blog - will know who I'm wittering on about.

Same deal as with post about RTP: here's the newly added articles that caught my eye, but be sure to click on the link to discover your own favourites:

From the August 1937 Socialist Standard G.B. Shaw as a Guide to Socialism

From the April 1938 Socialist Standard Trotsky-Stalin Feud. An American View

From the August 1936 Socialist Standard Socialists Do Stand for Equality

From the April 1939 Socialist Standard The Last Hour in Madrid

A lecture from October 1978 The Materialist Conception of History

From the November 1936 Socialist Standard What to Do About Fascism?

Kudos to Adam in London and Mike in Tokyo for the work done in updating Hardcastle's page. Hopefully, there'll be more to follow.

The ink's still wet

Quick one

If you cast your eyes to the right hand side of the blog, you'll see a new Socialist Standard front cover. The July issue has hit the news stand, and if you click on the image it will take you to the contents page of the current issue.

Give me a couple of hours days weeks and I'll have a post up on the blog with the details of another stupendous addition to the socialist canon.

Excuse me . . .

. . . whilst I act out the self-aggrandising dick routine.

Granted it isn't on a par with The Beatles on April 4th 1964, but 4, 5 and 6 on google for the Socialist Standard is not bad.

I even made it to number 3 on google with SPGB.

I want a chocolate teapot by way of a reward. Failing that, a chocolate fireguard will do.