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. […]
Alienation: The philosophical basis of Capitalism
Loss of control is the fundamental expression of alienation. Popularly, and particularly among psychologists, alienation is understood almost exclusively as a psychological state. It refers to a variety of disorders, including anxiety, despair, loneliness, apathy, meaninglessness and powerlessness. Some if not all of these problems will be intimately familiar to us, but are these just […]
Okinawa and the US Empire
Following a brutal and horrific battle between Japanese and US forces which claimed the lives of approximately one third of Okinawa’s population, Okinawa has been forced to house American militarism up until this day. Approximately 20 percent of the Okinawan mainland is used to house US military bases. Military crimes are commonplace and many of […]
Auckland Action Against Poverty Welfare Impact
Today I am going to give a brief overview of the recent Auckland Action Against Poverty Welfare Impact that I attended, what drives me to work in this area, and my plans to build a sustainable welfare advocacy service in Otepoti. Firstly, my interest in welfare stems from my upbringing, living in a household sustained […]
Washington’s warring brothers
This month’s battles over the budget and the Tea Party Republicans’ fanaticism about the health care law obscure the two parties’ common commitment to austerity. The federal government officially went into shutdown mode at midnight on October 1–in another spectacular display of dysfunction in the highest offices of the “world’s greatest democracy.” Some 800,000 “non-essential” […]
Rediscovering the 1949 Carpenters’ Strike
The following was delivered as a talk at the International Socialism Day School 2013 by Kevin Hodder. The 151 day waterfront lockout, and its eventual defeat, of militant workers is legendary, and widely recognised as the beginning of the end for one period of union militancy in New Zealand. Its story is widely known in […]
Labour’s Leadership Battle
We wished good riddance to David Shearer. It’s a good thing he has resigned – he was useless and bumbling against Key when issue after issue offered opportunities to attack the government for its anti-worker record. The common wisdom seems to be that Shearer was a ‘nice guy,’ but in truth he was happy to […]
Film Review: Spirit of ’45
The Spirit of ’45 was a movie centred around the political atmosphere in Britain after World War Two. With the victory over Hitler, British workers felt empowered, and felt they deserved more than the poverty of old Britain. They chose to kick out Churchill and elect Labour for the first time and implemented its radical […]
