Battle of Ideas

This story of colour bars in the UK railway and bus industries begins after the Second World War, when Britain had a labour shortage and people moved to Britain in increasing numbers from Caribbean countries and elsewhere.

The National Union of Railwaymen (NUR, predecessor of the RMT) declared in 1948 that: “we have no objection to the employment of coloured men in the railway industry” and that “coloured men had been satisfactorily employed on the railways over a long period”.

The expression “antisemitism is the socialism of fools” is widely attributed to the late-nineteenth-century German socialist August Bebel. In fact, Bebel did not ‘invent’ the expression. Nor did he even agree with it.

The original version of the saying is to be found in a speech by Ferdinand Kronawetter, an Austrian liberal sympathetic to the labour movement, at a general meeting of the Margarethen District Electoral Association held in Vienna in April of 1889:

25 of the accused in the Meerut conspiracy case

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

Things never seemed to work out for Walter Benjamin. He failed to obtain the teaching post he wished for in Germany and, for the rest of his life, made only a precarious living through his writing.

As a Jew, he fled Germany to exile in Paris, and then had to leave Paris in 1940 as the German tanks approached. Having obtained a US visa he eventually made his way to the very south west corner of France and crossed the Pyrenees to the relative safety of Spain.

Also at "Parables for Socialists"

1 Gangster rap! Lenin and Joe Columbo

2 Tory social philosophy: Thatcher advises Cameron and Clegg (verse)

3 The Lies Against Socialism Answered

4 And Shakespeare, which group was he in?

5 James Connolly: An Spailpin Fanach

6 The 1984-5 Miners' Strike and the Fate of the Pet Pig

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)