Battle of Ideas

Martin Thomas spoke to Andrew Gamble about the character of the Trump government. Andrew Gamble is a Professor in Politics at the University of Sheffield and the author of many books on political economy. [The interview was recorded at the end of July, before the North Korea crisis blew up]

MT: Since the 1940s the world markets have been structured by a series of institutions: the WTO, the IMF, the G20, the G7, NATO. The USA has been central to all of these. Is Trump going to blow them up?

Our comment in 1990 when the Morning Star lost its bulk sales in the USSR and Eastern Europe, nearly went under, and appealed frantically for funding from the trade unions in order to survive.

Some of the best people I have ever encountered in the labour movement - or anywhere else, for that matter - were CPers, that is, Stalinists, in one degree or another.

• The printed paper carries an abridged version of this article.

One of the strangest organisations on the British left is the Socialist Party of Great Britain (no relation to the similarly named Socialist Party of England and Wales).

Look at the sheer weight of the examples of antisemitic attitudes, Facebook posts, and behaviour across so many different levels of the party and so many different parts of the country.

There are hundreds and hundreds of examples. Anyone who says there is no evidence either hasn't looked or is deliberately closing their eyes.

Paul Le Blanc reviews "In Defence of Bolshevism" by Max Shachtman. (Picture: Shachtman in later years.)

On 13 April 1919, in Amritsar in the Punjab, India, 50 soldiers under the command of the British General Dyer opened fire on a crowd gathering in the Jallainwala Bagh – a garden-cum-open area popular for meetings and social or religious gatherings.

Many of the crowd were there to celebrate Vaisakhi, the Sikh New Year. No one was armed, there were no disturbances, it was peaceful.

The British authorities put the number of dead at 379, with more than a thousand injured. The actual number of fatalities will never be known.

One Liz Payne, of something called the British Peace Assembly, was given an entire page in the 23 March Morning Star in which to propagate a pack of lies about the war in Kosovo and NATO’s intervention twenty years ago.

One of the most ubiquitous products of advanced capitalism is mental illness. Despite our relative comfort, our god-like technology and our unprecedented freedom, something about the world we live in makes us miserable and anxious.

One of the key texts of early social reproduction theory was Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women, published in 1983. Vogel’s aim in the book was to criticise the ‘dual systems theory’ that emerged from the 1970s, which saw (a) Marxism as an explanation for class exploitation, and (b) patriarchy as an explanation for women’s oppression: two linked but fundamentally separate systems.

In his 1947 essay, “Why I Write”, George Orwell explained:

“The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it…”

Homage to Catalonia, in which Orwell bore witness to the murder of the Spanish Revolution, was the product of this defining period of Orwell’s life, at least the literary and political equal of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.