The Magazine Wrack and Gobby Bastards . . .

. . . are a couple of new sidebars that I've added to the blog. (Scroll down the page to see what I'm getting at.)

Pretty self-explanatory and they will be updated when the mood takes me.

"Give yourself an ulcer."

Slowly, but surely, adding the links back onto the sidebar. I should take the opportunity to add new links (and delete the old) but my head's a bit spaced at the minute.

So, as an alternative, I thought I'd take the opportunity to highlight material from the re-added links for your delectation. This particular post relates to that bloc of links that are the primarily politically but, for the musos amongst you, you might get the Gang of Four reference in the sub-heading. Click on them once, click on them twice, click on them three times:

World Socialist Party of the United States website

A few days ago, I posted a link to this article on Barack Obama and his long term working relationship with Reverend Wright on the blog that had penned by a comrade in Chicago. It had originally appeared on the WSPUS website, which continues to post good material stateside from a *cough* World Socialist perspective.

The same comrade also recently posted the following article, We work harder but get poorer in the U.S. on the website. Worth checking out. Worth getting angry about the continuing sad state of affairs.

Socialist Party of Great Britain website

The reason I started this bullshit blog in the first place. Sort of.

Downloads of old pamphlets (scanned in a few myself); education documents from yesteryear; and a growing archive of Socialist Standard back issues. If you're in possession of a laptop and a super-sized colostomy bag, you need never leave your armchair ever again.

Industrial Workers of the World

If you don't know who the IWW are, could you please make sure you close the door of the blog on the way out.

Not technically an officially endorsed IWW piece, but the Labor historian, Staughton Lynd's article, Another World Is Possible, does appear on the IWW website and does provide an interesting historical context to that knotty question of labor organizing and union democracy in the US.

I was hoping to see Staughton Lynd speak at the recent Left Forum conference in NYC but his flight was delayed. This will have to do for now.

Wobbly City

Newsletter of the NYC branch of the IWW. The latest issue covers the recent May Day/Immigrant Rights march and demonstration in New York City.

Socialist Standard@MySpace

Not so much 'Socialism with a human face' as 'Socialism with an impeccable taste in music'. But you knew that already.

Latest new/old post on the page is a chapter - How To Achieve Socialism - from the last century SPGB pamphlet, 'From Capitalism To Socialism - how we live and how we could live'.

Thought I would post it on the page after Danny Lambert - did I mention he was visiting NYC for a couple of days? - mentioned that a recent acquired SPGB sympathiser thought it was the best exposition of socialism that he had ever read.

If I remember rightly, the main author of the pamphlet was the late Pieter Lawrence. He really was a fine and lucid writer.

Marxist Internet Archive

You want Martov? They've got Martov . . . You want Pannekoek? They've got Pannekoek . . . You want Fitzgerald? They've got Fitzgerald . . . You want Grant and Cliff? Here, have some sawdust prose and a bendy stick.

Labour Start

"Where trade unionists start their day on the net."

That's not strictly true in my case. Every morning, when I first log on, I click on the BBC News website in the hope of seeing those magic five words.

But enough about me submerged sociopathic tendencies, Labour Start really is an indispensable resource for those of us that recognise that there's this wee thing called class war that is being waged 365 days of the year . . . and that we're getting our arses kicked at the moment.

Recent stories covered on website include American union-busters arrive in Britain; The brutal murder of labour leaders in Honduras; & Police terrorism on May 1st in Istanbul.

NYC Indymedia

Good site if you're wanting to know what's going on in the radical fringe in NYC. The following link has a good selection of pics from the recent May Day march/event in NYC.

Be warned: some of the contributions to the site can be a bit sketchy at times. For reasons unknown, in lefty terms, there's a sizeable contingent of Maoists in NYC. Yeah, I know, bollocks with icing in top. Which commissar told them that they could put down their little red book and pick up a laptop?

John Gray - For Communism

You want Mattick? They've got Mattick. Wait, I've already down that schtick a few links above.

John Gray - For Communism is an old website that hasn't been updated for a bastard age, but it continues to be a good stop off point if you get your rocks off checking out the like of Paul Mattick and Otto Ruhle, and if you like to size up Henri Simon, Karl Korsch and Jean Barrot for good measure.

Good Cajo Brendel hunting.

Interactivist Info Exchange

One of those sidebar links that I never click on often enough. It almost goes off my radar, despite its close proximity, and then when I look in again I realise what a fascinating website it actually is.

Granted, my inner thick kid can be easily intimidated by articles that would be rejected by the Editorial Committee of Aufheben for being too wordy, but sometimes you just have to dive in head first with a dictionary in one mitt and a copy of 'Can dialectics break bricks?' in the other mitt.

No ready made links this time. If you're going to chance it, I can only wish you the best of luck and offer to sell you a demo ready w.o.m.b.l.e outfit that I bought at an Anarchist Bookfair couple of years ago. It turns out that I didn't need it after all.

Resistance mp3

According to Volty over at Shiraz Socialist blog, the SPGB's hostility clause should preclude me from being able to link to such a website. I mean, after all, it's hour after hour of talks by SWP apparatchiks from various Recruitathons down the years.

No jokes about cures for insomnia. No gibes about spotting the fake proletarian accents. Just an excellent idea which I wish more groups - HELLO SP-fucking-GB - would rip off with their own mp3s, you tube clips and shadow puppet theatrics.

New Internationalist

This really should be in another section of the sidebar, and will probably get moved at a future date. I'm guessing that it got planked here because it was one of the first links I ever put on the blog. (When the blog still had pretensions of seriousness - wow, that was a heady five minutes.)

Used to subscribe to the hard copy of the magazine many years ago when I was a night worker at a warehouse in Hemel. The newsagent would give me the strangest looks on those once a month mornings' when I asked if my copy had arrived yet. But, you know, it was nothing compared to the dirty looks I would get from the newsagent a few doors down - liked to spread my left wing reformism around in those days - who I would get my ordered copy of Tribune from. It obviously wasn't enough that I would put my hands up in mock surrender every week, declaiming 'I don't agree with the editorial. I just get it for the Phil Evans cartoons'. She would still look down her nose at me. Those Labour Left Briefing types can be real judgmental bastards sometimes.

But back to the New Internationalist, I always had a soft spot for its essential decency (an underrated quality at the best of times), its photojournalism, for introducing me to the incomparable Eduardo Galeano, and for its reviews of all those albums that I will never ever want to listen to.

Its latest online issue - it's always a couple of months behind - is a special on ethical travel.

Counterpunch

Gets up the noses of people in a way that the Guardian's Comment is Free can only dream about. Claims to be a newsletter, but it's really a blog. Why be shamefaced chaps?

Of course I don't read every article. Too many of the bastards, and more often than not they can be a bit light on the political brain. (No, I don't know what that means either.)

A quick glance at its sidebar threw up the following articles of interest: 'An Open Letter to Michael Moore' (the gist of which is: Michael, DON'T!!!); 'Refocusing Olympic Protest' by the ever readable Dave Zirin; & 'New Labour is Dead', where Tariq Ali does British politics for a (largely) American readership. Tariq was the original 1968 Monday morning quarterback, and it doesn't look like he's retiring anytime soon.

More blog rolls to be added to the sidebar in due course.