email: hobgoblinlondon@aol.com ---------------Last updated 12 July 2008
"Let's Get Real About Alternatives to Capitalism"
The Hobgoblin organised a public meeting at London's Conway Hall on July 11 with speakers Andrew Kliman, author of Reclaiming Marx's 'Capital', and Anne Jaclard, feminist writer and member of the Marxist-Humanist Committee in the U.S. Below is the text of an earlier talk by Kliman on "Demonstrating an Alternative to Capitalism." MORECan Social Work change anything?
Seven year old Khyra Ishaq died recently in Birmingham, alleged to have starved to death in her home. John Campbell, a social worker and union activist, asks the difficult question... MORESplit in US News and Letters
A group of members of the US News and Letters Committees has left the organisation to found the Marxist Humanist Committee, "a temporary working group of individuals who seek to re-found a Marxist-Humanist organization in the United States." MORE
Cyril Smith 1929-2008
Cyril Smith was one of those rare radical thinkers: one who, after many decades of commitment to a particular Leftist cause, could face radical changes in the world by radicalizing his own ideas. MORE.
Trying to Save Capitalism from Itself:
By Andrew Kliman
The United States is in the throes of two distinct but interrelated economic crises, a recession and a financial crisis. MORE.
Book Review: Paul Mason's Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global
The two things I liked least about this book are the title and the ending. To live working or die fighting suggests an endless struggle with no positive resolution... MORE.Unpopular Capitalism?
BBC business editor Robert Peston is puzzled over the question why public opinion tends to be unsympathetic to capitalist private enterprise. MORE.
Crisis in News and Letters
Statement from the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of News and Letters Committees, March 2008 MORE
Reification in the 21st Century
Lukacs' Dialectic – the First Hundred Years
David Black
2008 is a centenary of sorts for the great Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs (1886-1971)... Lukacs' ‘problematic’ of a reified ‘false’ consciousness - which can only be grasped in relation to its non-reified liberatory alternative - deeply impacted on the philosophers of the 20th Century. MORE
Iranian Regime Arrests Socialist Students
From an Iranian Correspondent. December 7 2007 During the past few days, over 20 independent socialist students from universities at Tehran, Tabriz, Ahvaz and Shiraz have been arrested by the security forces of the Islamic Republic. MORE
Capitalism and the 'automatic subject'
Adventures of the commodity: for a new criticism of value (Die Abenteuer der Ware. Für eine neue Wertkritik. Munich 2005) by Anselm Jappe, Munich 2005. Reviewed by Karel Ludenhoff. MORE
Talk to the Anarchists
In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”. This was a true word spoken in jest, it contained a lot of truth at the time, and also today... MORE
DARFUR: ”This is not a clash of civilizations”
By Ba Karang
Going by the most recent estimates (Science Journal September 2006), in Darfur more than 200,000 people have been murdered and more than 2 million displaced as refugees. But the world seems to be more preoccupied with other business and values (sic) than the lives of Black Africans dying in the Desert. This is not a clash of civilizations; it is common in war that oppression has created and been mixed with racial arrogance. MORE