IMAGINE Autumn 2020

New journal ‘World Socialist’

The World Socialist Party of the United States is excited to announce the first issue of its new quarterly journal, World Socialist. It contains articles on the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, the US–China confrontation, the presidential election, ‘human nature,’ the Wall Street bombing of 1920, revolution in ancient Anatolia, ‘How I became a […]

After shipwreck

William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies describes how boys marooned on a deserted island descend into ‘savagery.’ But here is a true story of real boys in the same situation who behaved quite differently.

Mind your own business, Mr. Goodman!

Ventilators at a hospital have defective valves. A helpful neighbor replaces the valves and saves at least ten lives. For doing so he is at risk of being sued. Why?

Homelessness in North America

Canada and the United States are supposedly among the world’s wealthiest countries. Yet many people in those countries are homeless, while at the same time many homes are left empty.

River Silence

40,000 indigenous people have been forced off their land along the Xingu River in order to build a dam. Who gives a damn?

War with Iran? Teetering on the brink

Strictly speaking, the United States is already at war with Iran. By the rules of international law, the drone attack that killed General Soleimani and other high-ranking figures was an act of war. Iran will now retaliate against an American asset. How long can this crazy game of tit for tat go on without triggering […]

Fire on 9th Street

A lethal fire at an apartment block in a poor neighborhood of Las Vegas was in the news recently. An accident or a predictable result of the business of letting housing accommodation for profit?

Imagine Free Access

Introduction It is the main job of socialists not to theorise about the exact workings of a future economy, but to educate people on the main principles that might underpin a future communist society in its lower and higher phases, and then give them the tools – in the form of socialist democracy – to […]

Where Leninists go wrong

From the Summer 1986 issue of the World Socialist The whole Leninist theory of imperialism turns on two or three major concepts: the twin notions of super-profits and super-exploitation, monopoly (denned in a strictly legal sense) and investment strategy. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin pretended to have discovered an ultimate and final stage of capitalism, and […]

Feminist theory – a socialist critique

To attempt to write a socialist critique of feminist theory is difficult. This is not the result of any ambiguity in the attitude of socialists towards the role of women workers in capitalism, but because of the difficulty in finding a single body of theory that can be identified as feminist. While most feminists would […]

Building Profits V Building Homes

A post about the practicability of socialism, this is an abridged version of an article from World Socialist (No.2 Winter 1984) by Brian Montague and Ray Rawlings about how socialism will address real problems. The article anticipated the rise of the internet and the home computer and interactive television and the promise of E-democracy. Housing is one […]

Capitalism as a world system

From the Summer 1986 issue of the World Socialist Capitalism is basically an economic system, one in which production is oriented towards the accumulation of capital out of monetary profits realised on the market, the source of these profits being the unpaid labour of those who produce the goods that are sold. Production for a market, […]

Here Comes The Robots

The aim of this article is to explore the effects of a particular form of technology on the state of society. It will examine the concepts of robotics and artificial intelligence; the concept of the technological singularity; what such an event would mean for the labour market; and, because of the central role of the labour […]

Bedtime stories for your children and grandchildren

The Donkey and the Common: A Fable A donkey once had the freedom of a delightful common. There was plenty of sweet grass to be had for the cropping, and though the fare varied with the course of the seasons, there was never a lack of thistles to give piquancy to the diet. Gorse bushes […]

The WSM: Our Practical Program

An article by the late comrade Isaac Rab. This was published in The Socialist,1929. What practical program do you fellows propose? What are your demands? Such comments have been made concerning our first issue. A perusal of the contents of that number ought to have cleared away this confusion regarding our position. The similarity of the […]

Is The World Socialist Movement Marxist?

The following piece is a transcript of a talk that was given at the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s 1998 Summer School, Marxism Revisited, which was held at Fircroft College in Birmingham, England. It is reproduced from the pamphlet of the same name. The Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed in London on 12th June, 1904. […]

UNAFFORDABLE AND UNSUSTAINABLE HOUSING IN NEW ZEALAND

Talk by Moggie Grayson on the World Socialist Party (New Zealand) on Discord 8 January I came to live in New Zealand from England in 1967.  The houses here are quite different from English ones.  I had been used to brick houses with slate roofs.  New Zealand houses are built from wood with roofs made […]