Workers' Liberty

The first British Marxists

09 Feb 2008 |

Cathy Nugent

Continuing a series on the politics of the early modern British socialist movement with a brief assessment of the politics of the socialists in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. “Do not on any account whatever let yourself be deluded into thinking there is a real proletarian movement going on here. I know Liebknecht tries to delude himself and all the world about this, but it is not the case. The elements at present active may become important since they have accepted our theoretical programme and so acquired a basis, but only if a spontaneous movement breaks out here among the...

The Lies Against Socialism Answered

28 Jun 2007 |

Sean Matgamna

For most of the 20th century, the common image of "socialism" was the USSR and the other states modelled on it, China, Cuba, and so on. There were always socialists who were critical of Stalin's or Khrushchev's USSR, seeing it as an unacceptably bureaucratic version of socialism, and keen to create a more democratic version in their own countries. By the late 1960s or early 1970s, a big majority even in the official Communist Parties was highly critical of Brezhnev's USSR. But most of those who criticised the USSR clung to the idea that some other USSR-model state - China, Vietnam, Cuba.... -...

Gender and class: why women are oppressed

04 Dec 2006

How the oppression of women began, and what that implies for fighting oppression today. By Lilian Thomson As long as recorded history has lasted, so too has women's oppression. To many people, it just seems natural that women are worse off— it's because of women's smaller size or their capacity to bear children. Men comfort themselves with the thought that women need looking after. It's hard to combat that when history shows that not just the present capitalist system is to blame: in feudal society, and in earlier societies too, women occupied second place to men. But in the late 19th Century...

The truth about Marxism and religion

25 Mar 2006

By Paul Hampton Read this article in French here . An article, “Marx and religion” by Anindya Bhattacharyya in Socialist Worker (4 March 2006) argued that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not very hard on religion and scorned “liberal” contemporaries (especially Bruno Bauer) who were. The article is largely rationalisation, reading back into history the SWP’s current politics of courting some Muslims organisations. It fails to represent the complexity of Marx and Engels’ views on religion: their fundamental atheist outlook; their opposition to organised religion; the place of religion in...

What is the Bolshevik-Trotskyist tradition?

11 Nov 2005

What follows is a summary of the political and ideological traditions on which Workers’ Liberty and Solidarity base ourselves. Isaac Newton famously summed up the importance of studying, learning, and building on forerunners. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wrote, referring to René Descartes, his contemporary Robert Hooke, and presumably also to his direct predecessor Isaac Barrow. In science few people think they can neglect the “tradition” and rely on improvisation. In politics, alas, too many. The summary here, written in 1995, starts as...

Engels' political testament

01 Apr 2005

Paul Hampton reviews Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 50 After nearly thirty years and fifty weighty tomes, the final volume of the English-language Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) was published earlier this year. Volume 50 contains the last letters written by Frederick Engels between October 1892 and his death in August 1895. According to the editors, of the 320 letters, 229 are published in English for the first time. Of the 89 already published, 38 of these were only available in an abridged form and are now published in full. There are also five letters written between 1842...

Robert Owen: a socialist pioneer

10 Nov 2004

Frederick Engels' description of Robert Owen's life and work. In 1843 Frederick Engels — who had been living abroad and been in contact with a number of socialist thinkers of different persuasions, inclunding Marx — decided to go to England, where he spent 21 months working as a clerk in his father’s large spinning firm in Manchester. Once in England, Engels made contact with trade unionists, Chartists and socialists, including Robert Owen. Robert Owen was a self-made man who bought in 1800 some huge cotton mills in New Lanark in Scotland. There he tried to demonstrate that it was posible to...

Engels on the Mexican-American war; week 1 of "Imperialism"

18 Jun 2003

Engels on the Mexican-American war This short excerpt from an article by Engels in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of February 1849 is significant not because every phrase in it can be taken as a model - it is an aside in the heat of polemic - but because it illustrates very vividly how far Marx and Engels were from wanting to stop or restrict the spread of capitalism across the world. In 1846-8 the USA fought a war with Mexico over Texas (where North American settlers had won independence from Mexico in 1835), California (then under Mexican rule), and the area in between (now called New Mexico...

Marx and Engels on war

30 Mar 2002

Marx and Engels commented on many conflicts and wars between the great powers of 19th century Europe. In this article Hal Draper demonstrates that their political attitude towards those conflicts was consistently based on advancing, not whichever of the established five great powers seemed the “lesser evil” or more progressive, but what Engels called “the sixth great power… the [workers’] Revolution”. Draper’s account is here abridged from appendices in his book, War and Revolution: Lenin and the Myth of Revolutionary Defeatism (edited by Ernest Haberkern: Humanities Press, 1996). It forms the...

Friedrich Engels