Education, the professions, and a lousy compromise
The world’s oldest profession is – contrary to the popular saying – the scribe. The scribe arose together with the rise of written language and number in antiquity, because reading, […]
Category Archives: working class history
Trotsky and Ukrainian independence
“The Ukrainian question, which many governments and many “socialists” and even “communists” have tried to forget or to relegate to the deep strongbox of history, has once again been placed […]
Robert Burns the revolutionary – and Harry Holland
In the nineteenth century, as the wars to dispossess the Maori of their land got under way in New Zealand, on the opposite side of the globe another violent act […]
The class basis of ‘privilege theory’
The theory of ‘white privilege’ is gaining currency in academic and left circles. There are university courses in ‘whiteness studies,’ and it is often invoked in opinion pieces and blogs. […]
The party of labor and the Labor Party
In the birthplace of industrial capitalism, the young proletariat went through a protracted process of formation into a class. In the first decades the individual wage-laborers were assembled by the […]
The tale of the anti-Semitic Santa
A few days ago a graphic was posted on ‘The Daily Blog’ entitled ‘Don’t forget to feed Christmas.’ Beside a grotesque Santa Claus image the text read, “Remember to support […]
“All Black” fatuousness and death in the forests
My first and best lesson in industrial safety happened in 1978, a few weeks after I started work on the production line at the Ford car assembly plant in Wellington […]
“We have broken stronger wills than yours”
Some of the most impressive struggles by working people this year have been fights by those in the most difficult of circumstances, the workers behind bars. With few means for […]
Attacks on democratic rights – real and imaginary
After considerable public outcry over the misogynist comments on air by broadcasters Willie Jackson and John Tamihere, during the debate on the Roastbusters question, their show has been taken off […]
China, class collaboration, and the Indonesian killing fields
Third part of an investigation of the background to the 1965 massacre of up to a million Communist Party supporters in Indonesia, described but not explained in Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary […]
A worker at large 