Narratives of Betrayal: A ‘Western’ Trope
Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work?
Compared to capitalism, the USSR’s publicly owned, planned economy worked remarkably well.
By Stephen Gowans
http://www.barakabooks.com/catalogue/patriots-traitors-and-empires/ The Soviet Union was a concrete example of what a publicly owned, planned economy could produce: full employment, guaranteed pensions, paid maternity leave, limits on working hours, free healthcare and education (including higher education), subsidized vacations, inexpensive housing, low-cost childcare, subsidized public transportation, and rough income equality. Most of us want these benefits. However, are they achievable permanently? It is widely believed that while the Soviet Union may have produced these benefits, in the end, Soviet public ownership and planning proved to be unworkable. Otherwise, how to account for the country’s demise? Yet, when the Soviet economy was publicly owned and planned, from 1928 to 1989, it reliably expanded from year to year, except during the war years. To be clear, while capitalist economies plunged into a major depression and reliably lapsed into recessions…
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The crimes of Winston Churchill
A good primer on how horrifying former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was:
England celebrates their genocides. The ‘Winston Churchill note’ has enteredcirculation. Honouring a man who swilled on champagne while 4 million men, women and children in Bengal starved due to his racist colonial policies.
The trial of Churchill:
Churchill was a genocidal maniac. He is fawned over in Britain and held up as a hero of the nation. He was voted ‘Greatest Briton’ of all time. Below is the real history of Churchill, the history of a white supremacistwhose hatred for Indians led to four million starving to death, the man who loathed Irish people so much he conceived different ways to terrorise them, the racist thug who waged war on black people across Africa and in Britain. This is the trial of Winston Churchill, the enemy of all humanity.
THE TRIAL OF WINSTON CHURCHILL:
Afghanistan:
Churchill found his love for war during the time he spent in Afghanistan. While there…
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L’Ami du peuple/The Friend of the People
As the French Revolution is one of the subjects of history which occupies my mind a lot of the time, I find it is good to share this very short post.
Guillotines, decapitated elite, and a bloody revolution. No this isn’t a meme on Leftbook, this is the French Revolution that lasted from 1789 to 1799. The aftermath left a nation with a headless monarch as well as ushering in a new area of political thinking. The reasons behind the revolution are vast ranging from rising socioeconomic inequalities, economic mismanagement, environmental factors leading to agricultural failure, unmanageable national debt, and political mismanagement on the part of King Louis XVI. The censoring of newsletters and pamphlets also played a role in attempting to suppress the people from information which lead to many rouge writers to create their own source of info for the masses.
One of those newsletters was L’Ami de Peuple (Friend of the people or The friend of the people) written by Jean-Paul Marat and was celebrated as “The most radical paper of the Revolution“. While typically a…
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Text: Friend or Foe? The role of criticism in China
Against Fascism and War: A Short Biographical Sketch of Georgi Dimitrov
Georgi Dimitrov Mikhailov was born 18 June, 1882 in the village of Kovachetsi, Bulgaria. Eventually, him and his family moved to the capital, Sofia, and as an adolescent worked as a typesetter. In 1902, Dimitrov joined the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party, which splintered in 1903, with Dimitrov following the Marxist Social Democratic Labour Party … Continue reading Against Fascism and War: A Short Biographical Sketch of Georgi Dimitrov
The Spectre Still Haunts 