Coming to us all the way from Chile, Pablo Abufom is the Sunday keynote speaker at the Second New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies National Conference – Labour Weekend 2024. Pablo will speak to “Resisting neoliberalism in Latin America: The 2019 Chilean revolt and the struggle for constitutional reform.” Please note: the Sunday keynote is…
The Saturday keynote panel of the Second New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies National Conference – Labour Weekend 2024 brings together experienced Tino Rangatiratanga activists Catherine Love (Te Ātiawa, Taranaki, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngā Ruahinerangi), Kassie Hartendorp (Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa), and Dougal McNeill to speak on “Te Tiriti and the struggle for socialism.” Wellington City…
Today the climate crisis and humanity’s broader relationship to non-human nature are among the most important questions for the Left to grapple with. However, even among socialists the Marxist theory of ecology is not widely known or discussed. This session will seek to introduce people to the ‘Theory of the Metabolic Rift’ and its application…
Indigenous resistance in Palestine and in Aotearoa responds to the violence of settler colonialism, and it is initiated in both cases by British colonialism. There is a common whakapapa. But indigenous resistance has a commonality beyond what it fights against. The commonality exists in indigeneity. This panel of young, indigenous activists from Palestine and…
There have been three periods of major transformation in Aotearoa’s political economy: the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 1980s. Founded in 1916, the Labour Party was responsible for the latter two transformations, while the Liberal Party – in many ways the precursor to Labour – was responsible for the first. Aotearoa’s right-wing parties have never…
“Precisely the defeated man must try the outside world again” – Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (1954). It is easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism. This phrase has become something of a shibboleth for the contemporary left, a diagnosis of our present condition and a bleak indictment of our…
The Canterbury Socialist Society is thrilled to be able to host this guest lecture for our August event, 2024. Berkay Koçak is a political science doctoral researcher from Türkiye, currently based in New Zealand, specializing in political theory and Marxist political economy. Berkay completed a PhD in the Political Science and Public Policy programme at…
“The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.”― Peter Kropotkin————————————————————— Through mutual aid, we acknowledge the ways that governments have failed our…
“Marx was not simply the best or most consistent or radical socialist, but rather the most historically, and hence critically, self-aware. By “scientific” socialism, Marx understood himself to be elaborating a form of knowledge aware of its own conditions of possibility.” – C Cutrone, “Capital in History: The need for a Marxian philosophy of history…
In many ways, the 2020’s seems further away from the ‘end of history’ than the 1920’s. This has led some commentators to characterise our current moment as ‘the end of the end of history’. Indeed, after declining in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, both the number of conflicts and conflict deaths has increased in recent…