Dead Socialist
J. A. G. Griffith, author of The Politics of the Judiciary, born 14 October 1918, died 8 May 2010.
View ArticleDSW #12
I think it’s worth bringing the Dead Socialist Watch out of retirement for a very special anniversary: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, born in Dublin, 2 February 1882, died in Zürich, seventy years ago...
View ArticleBritish Values Day, One More Time
The people who grouped themselves together under the New Labour brand identity had many, many stupid ideas, one of which was the proposal for British Values Day (also, especially) which they served up...
View ArticleKarl Marx, not a cat person
From Value, Price and Profit (1865), with emphasis added: It is perfectly true that, considered as a whole, the working class spends, and must spend, its income upon necessaries. A general rise in the...
View ArticleThe Webbs on the Show Trials
In honour of Anthony Giddens’ fine essay from the New Statesman in 2006 on “The Colonel and his Third Way“, I repost my favourite passage from the second edition of the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New...
View ArticleSidgwick on Shaw
From his Diary, 8 September 1888: September 8. — Back from a very pleasant two days at Bath. The town revived wonderfully my childish recollections, with its villas picturesquely climbing upwards from...
View ArticleShaw on Sidgwick
From ‘On the history of Fabian economics‘: As late as 1888 Henry Sidgwick, a follower of Mill, rose indignantly at the meeting of the British Association in Bath, to which I had just read the paper on...
View ArticleMay Day Greetings to the Workers of the World!
Here’s the Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir singing Those Were The Days (part of the Total Balalaika Show):
View ArticleVigilante Man
Happy birthday, Woody Guthrie, 100 years old today. Since private security men are back in the news–as well as economic Depression–I thought we might have “Vigilante Man” to mark the occasion. The...
View ArticleOne Hundred Things Norman Geras and I Corresponded About Over the Last Decade
Country music (including but not limited to Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Allison Krauss, and its relationship to suicide) — Marxism — The war in Iraq — The case the British government made for the war...
View ArticleDead Socialist Watch: Special Centenary Edition
It’s a long time since I kept the Dead Socialist Watch up to date. But today marks a special, and a sombre, anniversary, being the centenary of the murder of Jean Jaurès in Paris. Here‘s a piece in...
View ArticleMarx contra Parsons (Protestant, not Talcott)
This week I’ve been reading a bit of Malthus (hence the earlier post about ostriches), and some of the nineteenth-century replies to Malthus, and this footnote from Capital is quite something. It’s...
View ArticleHarriet Martineau on Robert Owen
From the Autobiography (US ed., vol. 1, pp. 174-5): From the time of my settlement in London, there was no fear of any dearth of information on any subject which I wished to treat. Every party, and...
View ArticleHarriet Martineau explains why socialism will come to America before it comes...
From Society in America (1837), vol. 2, pp. 127-8: In England, the prevalent dissatisfaction must subsist a long time before anything effectual can be done to relieve it. The English are hampered with...
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