Battle of Ideas

We can say:
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,
You are no longer in the circle
Of the living
But you are present amongst us,
We sense your mighty spirit,
We will fight under your banner,
Our fighting ranks shall be covered
By your moral grandeur!
And each of us swears
If the hour comes,
If the revolution demands it,
To perish without trembling
Under the same banner
As that under which you perished.

Above: On the boat to (eventually) Mexico (1941), Victor Serge on the very far left of the photo. The passengers also included the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the artist André Bréton.

This is a speech by Dan Davison, a labour activist and sociology PhD student at the University of Cambridge, for a talk on C.L.R. James and the Haitian Revolution held in July 2020. All page references are to C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: New edn., Penguin 2001). Video, text, and audio.

This is part one of a series. For the other articles, see here.
Buy our pamphlet on Saklatvala here.

In 1922, sixty-five years before before Diane Abbott and three other Labour MPs of colour entered Parliament, Indian-born Shapurji Saklatvala was elected MP for Battersea North in South West London.

Articles by Leon Trotsky on antisemitism and Jewish questions, translated into English by Stan Crooke.

• The Decomposition of Zionism – And What Might Succeed It (1904)

• The Tsar’s Footsoldiers at Work (1908)

• The Tsar's Footsoldiers at Work (1909)

• The Jewish Question in Romania (1913)

Introducing the 2002 edition of his 1987 book There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, Paul Gilroy was pessimistic about how curbs on immigration were entrenching racism, and about the potential of the working class. Yet he wrote: "The convivial metropolitan cultures of the country's young people are still a bulwark against the machinations of racial politics".

Black people have been living in Britain for centuries, but in small numbers, maybe 0.2% of the population in 1951. The much bigger "minorities", since the 19th century, were Jewish and Irish immigrants.

In this issue of Solidarity, we have excerpts from an interview with West Coast US docks activist Clarence Thomas. Thomas calls for the US labour movement to get serious about challenging police racism and violence.

The British labour movement needs to get serious too.

The editorial in last week’s Solidarity suggests a "programme for active working class unity" in response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The article falls short in three main respects.

When I worked long ago in a notoriously unhealthy and dangerous steel works, Stanton near Nottingham, we often had disputes about safety.

When I first worked there the plant had the worst industrial accident record in the East Midlands region. Worse than any colliery. Deaths, limbs lost, massive burns, and cancers and lung disease as a result of fume inhalation.

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