Anzac Day: Against the Carnival of Reaction
On Anzac Day 1967, at the height of New Zealand involvement in the ‘American War’ in Vietnam, with New Zealand troops taking part in the suppression of the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation, members of the Progressive Youth Movement in Christchurch tried to lay a wreath following the dawn service in memory of those killed […]
Millionaires, Mana, and the Poverty of Politics
What the hell was Mana party boss Gerard Hehir thinking? When German millionaire Kim Dotcom picked up his Swarovsky crystal cellphone and dialled Hone Harawira, why didn’t Hone just hang up? If Mana aims to represent the poor, is a deal with a millionaire going to build the “brand”? Mana struggles to be taken seriously […]
Review: Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
Chadwick’s Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is a biographical film about the late Nelson Mandela’s life. The film takes its audience through Mandela’s life from his early years as a lawyer to him eventually becoming president. One of the first things which stood out to me about this film was the amount of violence. Long […]
Once We Built a Tower
Once We Built a Tower, a new play from award-winning socialist playwright Dean Parker, has just opened at Bats in Wellington. Socialist Review caught up with the play’s director, David Lawrence, to get some sense of this production. The Bacchanals have quite a history of putting on political plays, and have worked with Dean Parker […]
Web Round-Up: February
A round-up of interesting links and articles from February. The Government was recently revealed to have used ‘mistaken’, i.e. bad, i.e. wrong data in its estimates of child poverty, which – surprise surprise – meant they underestimated the number of children who currently do not have the means to a decent standard of living in New […]
Web Round-Up: January
A round-up of interesting links and articles from January. The Nasty Nats John Minto profiles Paula Bennett, the politician who wanted all beneficiaries to be subject to invasive blood tests. A picture from summer: John Key is a member of the ruling elite, and nobody should forget this image: two multi-millionaires, forcing austerity policies on […]
Daniel Bensaïd’s Slow Impatience
Daniel Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, trans. David Fernbach (Verso, 2013) This absorbing, affecting memoir is a beautiful testament to a richly productive and dignified life. Daniel Bensaïd spent over forty years as a partisan of the revolutionary left in France, writing, campaigning, organising and agitating. Drawn into Communist politics as a young man and then […]
Hillside was the heart of working class in the South
This is the transcript of a speech given at the anniversary of the closure of Kiwirail’s Hillside workshop in Dunedin by Andrew Tait on Friday 20th December, 2013. Right now in Korea, the railway workers union is out on strike against privatising rail. The government has met the strike with repression but this is nothing new […]
Socialist Summer Reading: the best of 2013
Socialist Review asked some left-wing writers for their picks from 2013. We hope there are suggestions here you can enjoy during your summer reading. Tina Makereti: My discovery of the year was poet / novelist / essayist / short fiction writer Kei Millar. I have only read his most recent novel The Last Warner Woman […]
Nightmare on Wall Street: Capitalism and Horror…
Ghost stories and monster tales might be as old as time but the horror genre itself really only came into being alongside modern capitalism. Beginning with the 18th century gothic novel, and growing to include several distinct sub-genres, horror blends into fantasy, thriller and crime novels at one end and science fiction at the other. […]
