The Otago Socialist Society is thrilled to be presenting this guest lecture for our October 2024 monthly event. Chris Lam is a recent graduate of the English programme at the University of Otago, having completed their master’s degree this year. Their research focuses on horror, alienation, and the weird in fiction. ———————————–Of Parasites and Plagues:…
“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…
“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…
Federation of Socialist Societies 2023 Conference Registration The New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies is holding our first conference over Labour Weekend (21-23 October) 2023. The ‘main event’ will be all day on Sunday 22nd, and this will be bookended with a Commonweal IV launch party on Saturday evening, and an optional working…
“Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.” Karl…
“Nietzsche already observed that, after the death of God, health rose to divine status. If a horizon of meaning extended beyond bare life, the cult of health would not be able to achieve this degree of absoluteness.” ― Byung-Chul Han Join us for an engaging public lecture hosted by renowned author and sociologist, Ashley Frawley, as…
On the 15th February 2003 a series of demonstrations held across New Zealand against the impending invasion kicked off a coordinated wave of demonstrations which would become one of the largest international protests in history. A month later, on the morning of the 20th March, combat troops from the US, UK, Australia, and Poland began…
The New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies would like to invite the public to our first-ever nationwide online presentation. The topic of discussion is “Inspiration and Betrayal: The Second International (1889-1914) and its Significance Today” and will be hosted by our comrade from the UK, Ben Lewis. This event has been put together in collaboration…
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” -William Morris William Morris was an artist, textile designer, craftsman, poet, novelist, and pioneering socialist. His fiction helped establish fantasy as a genre, his artistic endeavours were an enormous contribution to the British “Arts and Crafts Movement”,…