The Tiny Tips column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) is a deeply entrenched cultural practice that affects around 200 million women and girls. It’s practised in at least 25 African countries, as well as parts of the Middle East and Asia and among immigrant populations globally. It is a harmful traditional practice that involves removing or damaging female genital tissue. Often it’s “justified” by cultural beliefs about controlling female sexuality and marriageability.
. . . “the ELN claims to follow Karl Marx, but it seems to me they believe more in Pablo Escobar.” Indeed, drug trafficking helps explain why, after more than 60 years of armed conflict, peace continues to elude Colombia. The violence briefly diminished after the country’s largest guerrilla group, known as the FARC, disarmed in 2016, but the government failed to take control of coca fields and drug trafficking routes that were abandoned by the FARC. And now ELN rebels and a new generation of criminal groups are fighting over this territory.
Representatives for the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant declined to comment on how the pause could impact the plant and jobs. …The plant ‘is not the largest employer by any stretch,’ said Bob Durkin, president of the non-partisan Scranton Chamber of Commerce. ‘But it’s a very important employer. The jobs are really high-quality jobs. They are well paying, family sustaining jobs’.
In a staggering display of police callousness, the South African government has caused one of the worst mining disasters in the country’s history…. The Stilfontein massacre, which left almost ninety dead, has split the South African opposition and exposed a ruling bloc corrupted by mineral wealth. At its heart, it is a story of the contradictions of politics in an extremely unequal extractive economy.
James Schneider, Jeremy Corbyn’s former Director of Comms, argues for a new party…. Zack Polanski, Deputy Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, says we don’t need anything new. There is, after all, a socialist party in the UK already: it’s the Greens.
. . . William Morris . . . believed that the creation and enjoyment of pre-industrial arts and crafts could undo the assumptions about natural inequality that were baked into capitalism. Influenced by both Karl Marx and John Ruskin, he demanded that works of art should actually embody the equality and freedom that had disappeared in an age witnessing the rise of mass production and excessive consumption on the one hand and widespread poverty and drudgery on the other. In News from Nowhere — his novel-length description of an egalitarian, anti-consumerist society — he aimed at nothing less than rewiring his readers’ minds and hearts.
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