The Canterbury Socialist Society welcomes you to our famous Christmas Quiz. Get your team together or join as an individual, be ready for a night of fun! Doors open at 6:30pm at Space Academy, quiz starts 7pm sharp. Registrations are a must! Sign up via the humanitix link here.
As per the decision at our AGM we will be having these social events on the fourth Wednesday of every month, and alternate between Pomeroy’s and Punky Brewster. Our regular monthly lowkey social event. Come along for a beer and a banter about political goings on, and anything else that comes to mind. You can…
On 14 February 1951, waterside workers rejected the shipowners’ wage offer and refused to work overtime. Within two weeks the government had deregistered their union, passed emergency regulations making it a crime to publicly support the union or provide funds, and sent the military onto wharves to do watersiders’ work. For five months, 14,000 watersiders,…
‘In world market crises, all the contradictions of bourgeois production erupt collectively; in particular crises (particular in their content and in extent) the eruptions are only sporadically, isolated and one-sided.’ Theories of Surplus Value – Karl Marx What happens when capitalism reaches its limits? Can the system sustain itself indefinitely, or is collapse built into…
*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…