*PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT DATE DIFFERS FROM OUR USUAL SECOND WEDNESDAY OF THE MONTH* Childbirth is often described as a natural process, but the decisions we make around birth, the care that is available and the risks we face, are embroiled in the dynamics of the capitalist system in which we live. In…
On November 14,1914 the Sultan-Caliph of the Ottoman empire proclaimed an official ‘Great Jihad’ against the allied powers. Today there is renewed interest in the role of Islam in the first world war, and revisionist histories see the conflict as a ‘clash of civilisations’ in which ANZAC soldiers battled with Jihadis. In his lecture Byron…
“Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will…
The Canterbury Socialist Society are back for 2025 with our first event, a panel exploring the political left in the context of local government. Local Government in Aotearoa/New Zealand is fairly opaque. The level of powers devolved to local bodies is less significant than in much of the world, but is nonetheless broader than often…
The Canterbury Socialist Society is pleased to confirm our 2024 Fred Evans Memorial Lecture. For this lecture we invite a speaker to present on a topic related to working class politics and history in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Fred Evans was a prominent unionist during a pivotal moment in New Zealand labour history – the Waihi Miner’s…
“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…
“There is today in the world a dominant discourse […] This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work. The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to formulas, like any animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced…