Material World – China and capitalist property rights

On 16 July British industrial capital’s representative body, the CBI, gave its somewhat begrudging support to what it had called, on 16 May, ‘an expensive option of last resort’, namely the nationalisation of British Steel. Despite their reservations about potential compensation costs and a (probably) valid fear of a negative impact on future investment, for …

The Middle East powder keg explodes

President Trump probably didn’t realise it but when the United States joined Israel in an attack on Iran at the end of February he lit a fuse that caused the Middle East powder keg to explode and with it his ridiculous dream of getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, every single country in the …

Capitalism’s book-burning machines

The media ask whether robots will steal your job, because ‘AI apocalypse’ shifts copy. While socialists ask what the machine was for in the first place, who owns it, who tells it what to do, and where the wealth goes. Marx cared about machinery because he could see what it could do. A machine that …

The architecture of autistic order

When I first got involved in left politics in the early nineties, an older comrade asked me how I thought we’d get to socialism. I drew a straight line with an arrow. Socialism was at the end. That was the goal. The arrow might have to move around obstacles but it always pointed in the …

The White Rose and the Red

The sun is shining, again, although there is a breeze with rather a honed edge to it. I’m sitting under a tree in a West Yorkshire park next to my duo partner with his tenor banjo fully loaded. Around us are food and ice cream stalls, sideshows and charity tombola. Carried on that sharp breeze …

Proper Gander – Class struggle

Silent classrooms with students reading line-by-line in unison, wary that any wrong action will lead to a swift reprimand probably isn’t what we imagine secondary schools to be like. However, this approach has been taken in recent years, as Richard Bilton reports in Britain’s Strictest Schools for BBC1’s Panorama. The Athena Learning Trust runs six …

An Introduction to World Socialism – A Post-Capitalist Society