Send Back The Clowns

The October Socialist Standard is now online and can be read as a PDF here. However, if you like to read the articles in the html format, then you can take advantage of the links posted below.

What with late September and early October traditionally being the Party Conference silly season in Britain, I guess it is understandable that this month's Standard has a specifically British flavour. The editorial, the three main articles and the regular column, 'Greasy Pole', focus on both the current fall out in the Labour Party as it comes to terms with future world of Post-Blair politics and on an apparently resurgent Conservative Party, led by David Camcorderon, who is currently in the process of casting off nearly two hundred years of political history by recasting the Conservatives in the image of the Stephen Fry catchphrase, "soft, cuddly and moist".

However, there is something for everyone in this month's Standard with a review of Francis Wheen's new book, an article on John Maynard Keynes as someone who believed in Utopian Capitalism, and a review of the film, 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', which documents those few days in April 2002 when there was an attempted military coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the lessons the outcome of those few days hold for socialists.

On the matter of the Chavez film, this blog has to put its hands up to the mistake that appears in the penultimate paragraph of the review. The film was shown at last year's Anarchist Bookfair, rather than the up and coming one at the end of this month. When I wrote a post on the blog about this year's Anarchist Bookfair a few months back, I was under the impression that the Chavez film was being shown this year but that was only because, at the time of writing, they had yet to update their website fully and I was instead looking at last year's programme. Apologies to the reviewer that he took my blog at its word. Red faces all round, but it at least means that I finally get to appear in the hallowed pages of the Socialist Standard: Even if it is only as a misprint.

Editorial

Leaders, get lost!

Regular Columns

Pathfinders Water World 1, 2 & 3

Cooking the Books Salt Sellers

Greasy Pole Is There Life After Blair

50 Years Ago Mass Suicide

Main Articles

Left, Right and Centre As the Party Conference season begins we look at politicians' politics.

Bored With Politics? Politics is not just about the antics of career politicians - or at least doesn't have to be.

Will Labour Lose? The present Labour government appears to have run out of steam, but trading one group of career politicians for another is not the answer.

Keynes's World (A Capitalist Utopia) Maynard Keynes imagined a society that would be centred on the pursuit of enjoyment rather than accumulation, but like other reformists he couldn't fathom a future without money and commodities.

Zionism: myth and reality Zionism misled many Jewish workers with its promise of a "homeland for Jews". A recent book examines the fate of the million or so non-Jews in the state Zionism established.

Carbon Trading or Social Change?

Reviews, Letters and Obituary

Book Reviews Human Cargo: a Journey among Refugees by Caroline Moorehead; Marx's Das Kapital by Francis Wheen; A Rebel’s Guide to Marx By Mike Gonzalez

Film Review The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Letters to the Editors Ted Grant & Royalty

Joe Richmond

Voice From The Back

The Inequalities of Capitalism; Pardon Our French; Exploitation; The American Dream; Bones of Contention; Big Brother is Watching You