Category - No 6

A Review of The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home

Listen! We just read an incredible book. It's called The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home, and it's by Jonathan Kozol. Kozol demands that we gaze unflinchingly at the source of our feelings of impotence about changing society- the public school system. As Paul Simon once observed, "As I look back on all the crap I...

Protecting Women Out of Their Jobs

It sounds like a 21st Century melodrama, but for Norma James, a 34-year-old divorced mother of four, it's all too real. James made history of sorts last year when she had herself sterilized so she could keep her job at a General Motors battery plant near Toronto. 

So Much for the Myths of Hunger

Except perhaps for nuclear war, nothing in our times so threatens a majority of the world's people as do hunger and starvation. The prospects for a reasonably nutritional diet seem increasingly dim for hundreds of millions. Newspaper items predicting mass famine, accompanied by photographs of deformed, starving Asian...

Laboratory! A SftP Play

Laboratory! was collectively written by several members of Boston SftP's political theater group, the Fuming Hoods. This play, while not the most detailed theoretical political argument, has proved to be an entertaining method of communicating basic ideas of "science for the people." Over the past several months, the...

Seveso: Zona Infestata

At 12:40 p.m. I was having lunch with my family in the backyard… My wife was making coffee and we feel a beastly stink… I said, let’s go inside, that one can’t resist… Ten days later they say it was dioxin. So we could have died ten times… 

About This Issue

In this issue we have two articles and one play deal-ing with occupational and environmental issues and their interconnection.

Biological Determinism as an Ideological Weapon

The struggle between those who possess social power and those who do not, between "freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed" is a war fought with many and varied weapons. Of highest importance are ideas, weapons in an ideological warfare by...