Socialist Standard Past & Present Blog
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Posts
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Cross-posted from the Socialist Standard Past and Present blog:
First post of 2020 on the blog should be a brief look back at 2019 on the blog.
The following are the twenty most popular posts on the blog in the previous 12 months. Of course there’s a couple of anomalies in the mix that I shouldn’t have to point out to the reader but I do think it’s interesting that, overall, the most popular posts in the past year are articles that deal with matters relating to history and/or socialist theory.
It could be argued that those are the type of articles that I am more inclined to push on various social media sites, etc, and there is some truth in that, but people still have to click on those links at the other end so maybe, just maybe, in these uncertain times it’s the sort of material that people want to read. Writers and Editors for the Socialist Standard, please take note.
A special note on the IWW article. That particular piece’s place on the blog dates from a time when I was a bit more eclectic in my choices of what I posted on the blog. (Go back to 2006/07 on the blog, and you’ll see what I mean.) That an article on the meaning of the term ‘Abolition of the Wages System’ posted 13 years ago was still gets multiple hits in 2019 is heartening.
- The Destruction of Nature: by Anton Pannekoek (2019)
- A Commentary on the Communist Manifesto (1930)
- Who The Hell Was Karl Marx? (1998)
- What Does The IWW mean by “Abolition of the Wage System”?
- Lenin . . . Reviewed (1976)
- Djanogly – One Of The Family (2011)
- MMT: New Theory, Old Illusion (2017)
- Karl Marx and the abolition of money (1980)
- 50 Years Ago: Beeching’s Cuts (2012)
- Socialism and Calculation (1987)
- Will Robots Cause Capitalism to Collapse? (2013)
- To have and to hold (1985)
- Friedman, Keynes and Marx (1978)
- 150 Years of The Communist Manifesto (1998)
- Opt For Socialism (1969)
- Trump and anti-socialism (2019)
- The Eileen Critchley Show (1991)
- Under Pressure (2019)
- Socialism v. Imperialism. (1923)
- The Barbary Coast (1943)
It’s been a while.
Hello all,
Just a bit of fun.
At the time of writing, listed below are the most popular Socialist Standard articles on the blog from a particular year. It stands to reason that the longer an article or review has been on the blog, the more ‘hits’ it has, but that is not always the case. Some articles of a more theoretical bent have received successive waves of hits years after they were originally posted on the blog. Hopefully that’s food for thought for current writers and editors of the Standard. (Yes, I know I’m contradicting myself a bit here.)
To access the articles, just click on the individual years:
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/05/lazy-sunday-afternoon.html
What the world’s been waiting for: the 20 most viewed articles on the Socialist Standard Past and Present blog in 2021:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-word-from-your-sponsor.html
Just added a Film Review page on the blog.
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/p/film-reviews.html
At the time of writing all the Socialist Standard film reviews that are currently on the blog on one handy page. I’ve broken them up into decades for easy navigation. Sad to see that some decades are sorely under-represented. I wonder if it was because it was just the case that Socialist Standard writers weren’t reviewing movies, or if it was a conscious decision on the part of the Socialist Standard Editorial Committee not to solicit film reviews for the Standard.
The two most prolific film reviewers in the pages of the Socialist Standard down the years were Janie Percy-Smith in the 1980s and Steve Clayton in the 2010s.
Just added a Theatre Review page on the blog.
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/p/theatre-reviews.html
Following on from adding a Socialist Standard Film Review page on the blog last year, I’ve decided to now add a Socialist Standard Theatre Review page.
At the time of writing, the page is a chronological list of all the theatre reviews that have appeared in the Socialist Standard down the years that have been posted on the blog. The page will obviously be updated if and when new theatre reviews are added on the blog.
People will notice that some decades are more represented than others. The three most prolific theatre reviewers in the Socialist Standard were Ian Jones in the 1950s, Michael Gill in the 1990s and 2000s, and Steve Clayton in the 2010s.
I was expecting more George Bernard Shaw plays to be reviewed in the Standard, if only because Shaw was regularly at the receiving end of political barbs from SPGBers down the years but it turns out that Ibsen, Brecht and Stephen Poliakoff are the most reviewed playwrights in the Standard.
As with the case of the film reviews (and music reviews) in the Standard, it’s a shame that there are a paucity of reviews in the Standard in the early decades of its history. Especially when you consider that there were many fine Socialist Standard writers who could have quite easily turned their pens to such subjects. I guess the Party’s been a weird at times at addressing ‘culture’ in its official publications. Scared that a review of an Irvine Welsh novel might split the Party.
FYI:
The Socialist Standard Past & Present blog just received a malicious DMCA notice for an old Socialist Standard article that dates backs to 1995.
So that's a cheap excuse to post a link to said article:https://t.co/aO345UmZaN#SocialistStandard #SPGB @taslimanasreen pic.twitter.com/sy3TdiFGnN
— A Standard Socialist . . . (@standard_and) July 21, 2023
DMCA is an unlawful copyright violation, and it can apply in Britain.
Arguably, the only person (or persons) who could have legitimately pushed for a DMCA notice against the article were the original publishers of the article – the Socialist Standard – or the author of the article, Carl Pinel.
As there’s about 15,000 other Socialist Standard articles on the blog and, of them, about 50 of them were also penned by Carl Pinel, that’s obviously nonsense.
My guess is that someone falsely claimed a copyright violation on the article ‘cos they objected to its subject matter.
Thanks. The Party, as publisher, does claim copyright and passed this resolution at 2007 Conference:
“Be it resolved that all material created and published by the Party shall be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs copyright licence.”
I think this means anybody can reproduce articles without needing to ask permission as long as they acknowledge the source and don’t change the text.
So you should be in the clear.
Thanks for the heads up about the Conference resolution. I generally knew the Party’s position on the reposting/reproduction of articles, etc but it’s good to have the actual wording.
I’ll have to bookmark it for the next time a dickhead tries to make trouble by claiming a bogus copyright on a article or a review from the Standard.
A “Done & Dusted” catch up special:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-done-dusted-catch-up-special.html
Just posted on the blog.
From 1974, the Special 300th issue of the World Socialist Party of the United States old journal, The Western Socialist:
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-special-300th-issue-of-western.html
The 300th issue was, in effect, a WSPUS pamphlet made up of a selection of transcripts of four- to five-minute radio talks that the Boston comrades of the WSPUS had broadcast in the local Boston area over the previous 10 years.
To quote from Foreward to the Special 300th issue:
“The scripts, sampled herein, run the gamut of socialist propaganda. They are, in effect, a continuing soap-box program and are designed to cast light on the socialist attitude toward the very many questions and problems that confront society in general and the working class in particular. We have had, we think, more responses from these spoken and written messages than from any other single type article. The responses have been mainly favorable but not altogether so. Some of our polemics have infuriated defenders of the Faith and the status quo.”Special mention should be given to the late WSPUS stalwart, Harry Morrison (‘Harmo’), who was the author of these radio talks.
I hope Forum members will find the link of interest.
September 2023’s “Done & Dusted” on the blog:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2023/10/septembers-done-dusted.html
Just scanned in.
A cosy Christmas short story by Steve Coleman that first appeared in the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard:
The ghost of Christmas yet to come (1995)
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/02/blog-post.html
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