Manic Internet Preacher

Whilst the SPGB website continues to do its extended impersonation of Lord Lucan, here's just another cheap excuse to once again bring attention to the Socialist Standard Past and Present blog. This morning it chalked up its 8,000th post. Telegrams were read, hosannas were sung and Paul Hollywood refused my request to bake a cake.

Feel free to check it out at your leisure. Discover new (old) Socialist Standard writers such as May Otway, John A. Dawson and Eddie Critchfield. (All top notch writers, in my humble opinion). Sit and wonder if any SPGBers went to the cinema before 1943, and, just think, if the early Impossiblists had hated capitalism as much as they hated John Burns and Will Thorne back in the day, we'd have arrived at socialism  thirteen years before the "White Horse" FA Cup final.

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/

The Imagine Files

You can click on the image on the left for the PDF of the latest issue of 'Imagine', the occasional journal of the Socialist Party of Canada, a sister party to the WSPUS and the SPGB.

The 16 page issue is centered around the general theme of socialist activity in Canada these past hundred years, and carries the following historical articles and reprints that may be of interest to readers:

100 Years For Socialism

A Century of Socialist Journalism

The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike

A Timeline of the Early History of the Socialist Party of Canada

The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike article is a reprint from a 1969 issue of the old SPC/WSPUS journal, 'The Western Socialist', and is of especial interest as its author, Bill Pritchard, was a witness to the General Strike.

I'd also recommend J.M Milne's 'A Timeline of the Early History of the Socialist Party of Canada', if only because in detailing the vicissitudes of the SPC in those early and relatively successful years, Milne helps remind me that the reform/revolution question wasn't settled once and for all by that W.B. (Upton Park) letter that was sent to the Socialist Standard back in February 1910. There are choppy waters ahead, and that's how it should be.

ADDENDUM

Of related interest, the 'What's New? page of the Socialist History Project carries a couple of Socialist Party of Canada propaganda leaflets that were originally published in 1912:

The Evolution of Human Society

Religion – Thy Name Is Superstition

In fact, the Socialist History Project - a website devoted to the study of the history of the Left in Canada - carries a hell of a lot of excellent resources relating to the Socialist Party of Canada:

The Pre-Communist Left

Socialist Party of Canada, 1931-

Larry Gambone's 'The Impossibilists'