Public Political Education Day
Tēnā koutou katoa! The International Socialist Organisation of Aotearoa is pleased to invite you to a political education and discussion day as part of our annual organisation-wide hui. The day will consist of a series of formal talks or presentations, followed by chaired discussions between all attendees. There will be a short break between each […]
Competition (And Cooperation) For A Socialist Future
Competition is lauded as a foundational aspect of both the capitalist economy and human development. It is proclaimed that because of competition in the market, capitalism forces businesses to distribute goods and services as efficiently as possible; that without competition, innovation would be minimal if not impossible, and people would have no incentive to do […]
Thinking About Ecology with Marx – A review of Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene
The destruction of the natural environment in the Stalinist regimes through the twentieth-century made it understandable that, for many, Red and Green seemed incompatible. Think about the disaster at Chernobyl and the erosion of the Black Sea coast in the USSR, the catastophes of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in China, the coal-fired pollution across Eastern […]
The Wizards Who Delved Too Greedily
Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is, unfortunately, a commercial product owned by for-profit company Wizards of the Coast LLC (WotC) and therefore by that company’s owners: Hasbro Inc. We say unfortunately because D&D is also an experience, a source of joy, and a source of community for a lot of kids and adults alike. From fantasy […]
A Full Tide for Socialism
When the International Socialists met for our national conference over Queen’s Birthday weekend, we had an opportunity to reflect on how exciting, but also how difficult, the past years have been. Exciting because, finally, after decades of low levels of class struggle, our side is on the move again: there have been strikes and struggles […]
Why You Should Be a Socialist
This piece was given as a public talk at a meeting of the Pōneke branch of the International Socialist Organisation We’re living through a mass extinction event. Unlike any previous mass extinction on planet Earth, this one is entirely caused by human activities. We don’t know of any intelligent life anywhere other than on this […]
Rebel Lives: Sylvia Pankhurst
A review of ‘Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel’ by Rachel Holmes, 2020, Bloomsbury Publishing This biography of Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) is told comprehensively and magnificently by Rachel Holmes. No other British person can match Sylvia Pankhurst’s record stretching over the first half of the twentieth century. Such was the length, intensity and variety of Sylvia […]
The Political Independence of the Working Class: A lesson from the early years of the Chinese Communist Party
At the centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party it is doubtful that its leaders of today will be drawing any lessons from the party’s early history. Two great revolutions of the twentieth century reinforce the principle that the working class must maintain its political independence in relation to other classes. In 1917 […]
What Karl Marx learned from the Paris Commune
Well before the Paris Commune, in the German Ideology and “Theses on Feuerbach”, both written in the mid-1840s, Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels argued that it was only through struggle that the mass of workers and oppressed could come to see their own power, throw off the ideas of capitalism and become capable of founding […]
Celebrating the Paris Commune of 1871
“The workers of Paris, amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs … They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters […]
