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 […]
Rosa Luxemburg at 150: a revolutionary legacy
Rosa Luxemburg, one of the great leaders in the history of the socialist movement, was born in Poland (then a province of the Russian empire) 150 years ago this month, on 5 March 1871. Luxemburg cut her teeth in the Polish revolutionary underground, but as an immensely talented political leader, she was drawn to the […]
Black communism in the Great Depression
Angelo Herndon joined the Communist Party in 1930 in the depths of the Depression and Jim Crow segregation. The Black son of a coalminer, he had left home at 13 to work in the coalmines of Kentucky. Four years later, he was a Communist union organiser. After organising a desegregated protest against unemployment, he was […]
Rebel Lives: Eleanor Marx
There have been plenty of women socialists whose records of activity are too little known but from whom we can draw inspiration and guidance for the struggles of today. One such whose record deserves celebrating is Eleanor Marx (1855-1898). This article will, hopefully, help revive knowledge of her contribution to the socialist movement for a […]
