“In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour as subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by capital’s requirements.” – Karl Marx Canterbury Socialist Society are excited to offer this bonus event to our regular schedule with a guest…
The Canterbury Socialist Society is pleased to confirm our second annual Fred Evans Memorial Lecture. For this lecture we invite a theorist, organiser, or other person of interest to speak on a topic pertaining to their expertise. Fred Evans was a prominent unionist during a pivotal moment in New Zealand labour history – the Waihi…
For our October event, CSS member David Colyer will present a lecture on some of the earliest aspects of the workers’ movement in New Zealand. In the late 1880s a new wave of radicalism swept the industrial world. Millions of workers joined new trade unions, socialist political parties, and the Knights of Labour, which was…
“Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer In the wake…
For our April event Canterbury Socialist Society is excited to host Lachlan, a young Cantabrian, who fought alongside the People’s Protection Units (the YPG) in Syrian Kurdistan against ISIS, and in defense of the attempt to bring democratic, regional autonomy along side sweeping social transformation to the Kurdish people. Lachlan will be providing an eye…
“We are living in a epoch where there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighbourly common sense.” -William Morris, 1895. Our February event is a public lecture on William Morris. William Morris was an artist, textile designer, craftsman, poet, novelist, and pioneering socialist. His fiction…
“All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone We have laid the wide foundations, built it skyward stone by stone It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own” Solidarity Forever For the Canterbury Socialist Society event this September we are delighted to welcome Brendan from…
“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’, a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle…
“Major trends like the increase in average worker output, rationalization, downward pressure on the cost of labor, mass incarceration, and elevated competition have shaped a generation of jittery kids teetering on the edge between outstanding achievement and spectacular collapse. What we’ve seen over the past few decades is not quite a sinister sci-fi plot to…
Canterbury Socialist Society presents “Workers Against War” – a public lecture on this history of the Workers’ Movement opposition to the First World War. Every year ANZAC Day commemorations seem more like war propaganda than the last – and we aim to provide a touch of counter history: that of sedition, desertion, rebellion, refusal, and…