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.
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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?
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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.
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40,000 indigenous people have been forced off their land along the Xingu River in order to build a dam. Who gives a damn?
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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 […]
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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?
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Impossibilismby Stephen ColemanLike other terms of political abuse which have been absorbed into our political vocabulary, the term ‘impossibilism’ tells us as much or more about the labellers as it does about the idea being described. After the French legislative election of 1881, in which the Fédération du Parti des Travailleurs Socialistes de France won only 60,000 of the 7 million votes cast, a group based around Paul Brousse and Benoît Malon began […]
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The problems of food safety are well-known. In China the baby formula scandal of 2008 hundreds of infants died or fell seriously ill. There have been several seizures of fake meat by police, the most notorious of which, in September 2013, involved the discovery of more than 20,000 kg of chemically treated pork which had […]
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A nation is not a natural community that existed before the state, but that it’s the other way round: the state existed first and then proceeded to impose on those it ruled over the idea that they formed a “nation”. States pre-existed and in a very real sense created nations. Nations are groups of people ruled […]
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“Whatever national differences divide Poles, Russians, Prussians, Hungarians, and Italians, these national differences have not prevented the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian despots uniting together to maintain their tyranny; why, then, cannot countries unite for obtainment of their liberty? The cause of the people in all countries is the same—the cause of Labour, enslaved, and plundered…In […]
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The most common rebuttal of socialist society is that it is impossible to achieve because “you can’t change human nature.” Some people think that socialism sounds great but will never work in practice. They say it would only work in a world of perfect people. What socialists set out to prove is that not only […]
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“There are but three ways for people to escape their wretched lot. The first is via the liquor-store, the second is the path of the temple; but the third is by way of the social revolution.” – Bakunin In a land of 1.3 billion, an organisation of a dozen or so members which has never contested an […]
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From 1861 to 1865 about 620,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. One estimate of the death toll is that ten percent of all Northern males 20–45 years old, and 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18–40 perished. It was perhaps one of the bloodiest wars in U. S history. Not […]
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In 1923 the communist activist Sylvia Pankhurst opened an article with the declaration that “Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance…We do not call for limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and […]
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If there is one thing the employing class is more afraid of than anything else it is the possibility of the workers accepting the idea embodied in the term “social revolution”. Revolutionaries are described as wild visionaries, utopia builders, and so on. In the not-so-distant past, the labour and social-democrat parties did talk in terms […]
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You may say I’m a dreamerBut I’m not the only oneI hope someday you will join usAnd the world will be as one John Lennon Is it possible to mobilise people to fight oppression without fashioning models for a socialist economy for people to fasten on to? The capitalist slogan ‘There is No Alternative’ was […]
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