HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS? (ZOOM)
Discussion on recent events.
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Friday, December 05, 2025
Wednesday, December 03, 2025
Bread and circuses for today
The sell-out concert tour of Britain and Europe by Bob Dylan (he’s in his 85th year) presents a prime example of the way capitalism, via its entertainment industry, can sell us meaningless thrills to patch over the uniformity and stress of living in its wage and salary system.
Dylan does have something unique to offer, but the adulation, the hero-worship, as opposed to simple appreciation, of him by the fans at his concerts can only be seen as part of the obsession with celebrity culture that capitalism thrusts upon us as a substitute for mutually cooperative activity. This is something the free access society of economic equality that we call socialism would release.
Tuesday, December 02, 2025
Socialist Sonnet No. 214
Your Party – Not Mine
Is it time a
new party was founded?
Sure, the
old one’s comprehensively failed,
The
locomotive of Labour derailed.
It seems
hope is once again unbounded,
As so often
before, another red flag
To be run up
the polls and kept flying.
Then come
the splits, the schisms, the dying,
Such a
weight of expectation to drag
Down the
vision that was always myopic.
The old
nostrums and canards trotted out,
Members who
cannot debate, only shout:
Who is going
to vote for the shambolic?
This challenge
to capitalism’s resolved,
With, at no
point, socialism involved.
D. A.
Monday, December 01, 2025
World Socialist Radio - Violence and War
Violence and War: Are They Inevitable? The Long View
This episode argues that war and large-scale violence are not primitive constants built into human nature, but rather they became widespread only with the rise of hierarchical, agrarian and class-based societies. For most of human prehistory — during the long era when humans lived as small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands — there is scant evidence of systemic war. It was only with the advent of agriculture, permanent settlements and the resultant scarcity that social hierarchies emerged: a privileged minority gained power over resources and labour, dominance replaced egalitarianism, and the structural conditions for permanent class society were created. Thus, war and institutionalised violence are shown as products of social organisation rather than an inevitable aspect of human biology or “original sin.”
Taken from the December 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard.
World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.
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