Blogs

The article which follows is taken from the new edition of Revolutionary Perspectives (#14) which is just out. It was obviously written before the events which followed the British Navy’s seizure of the Iranian tanker, the Grace 1, off the coast of Gibraltar, but the substance of the analysis has not changed.

Capitalism is typically associated with ownership of firms by private persons while socialism is typically associated with their ownership by the government. However, state owned enterprises (which is the official name) vs private enterprises has very little to do with the actual mode of social labor, production, and distribution.

The first of a three-part critique of Extinction Rebellion, focussing on their attitudes towards the police, legal system and prison.

This second article in our series examines what is meant by ‘services’ and their apparently key role in the richest capitalist states where moving away from production of commodities is regarded as essential to economic advancement. Indeed, despite the setback of the 2007/8 financial crash, World Bank figures show that ‘services’ represent a higher proportion of GDP for the world economy as a whole. For the UK 77.4% of GDP was attributed to ‘services’ in 2018.

The Youth Climate Protest have turned to the mass strike as a weapon of protest. Unconsciously, they have grafted one of the major elements in the struggle for working class revolution onto their "utopian-reformist" demands. In doing so they distort the real meaning of such a strike.

The article here, the first in a series on what was then dubbed the "new economy", originally appeared in the CWO's political journal, Revolutionary Perspectives, in 2005.

Latest issue of our workers' newspaper - an experimental building block of a political working class organisation. We distribute 2,000 copies in front of local factories, warehouses, at Heathrow airport, job centres, housing estates. Give us a hand if you are around...

A critical examination of the concept of free speech, examining some of the background assumptions that common claims about free speech rest on.

As I read Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class I have been watching some of the movies he mentions. My review is largely informed by the historical presentation in his book.

A friend of ours sent us this detailed report. A PDF-file with pictures and graphs is attached...

Since December last year Sudan has been seething but it now looks like the Army have reasserted control. What started as bread riots last December, in the historic working class city of Atbara, transformed itself into a campaign of mass civil disobedience.

On the morning of June 13, two oil tankers were attacked in the Gulf of Oman. One was the Front Altair, owned by the Norwegian company Frontline, but flying the flag of the Marshall Islands. It was carrying a cargo of ethanol from Qatar to Taiwan. The second was the Kokuka Courageous of the Japanese company, Kokuka Sangyo, flying the Panamanian flag which was carrying methanol from Saudi Arabia to Singapore.

For those who think that the political and economic incompetence of our rulers is confined to the Anglo-Saxon states the following article from our Italian comrades, written just before the European elections, only underlines the same sorry story for Italian capitalism.

A review of Mitchell Abidor's translated abridgment of the Anarchist Encyclopedia, an immense, collaborative work produced largely by the French 'grand old man' Sébastien Faure. Abidor's contribution is valuable, but leaves us wanting more.

A review of Jim Jarmusch's anti-zombie film. This review contains many spoilers so you may want to see the movie before reading this.

Freedom Press published a selection of essays by 1910s anarchist activist George Barrett, Our Masters Are Helpless, at the start of this month. Below is an edited and slightly expanded text of the launch event talk.

the first in a series critically analyzing "socialist leaders", dealing with Che Guevara

On 8 May 2019 around 300 protesters, mostly Uber and Lyft drivers, blocked Market Street in San Francisco in front of Uber's international headquarters as part of a global strike by drivers timed to coincide with Uber's IPO. This brief analysis attempts to situate these struggles against working class decomposition, with its roots in neoliberal deregulation, and the rise of so-called "gig economy" work.