Editor's Choice

On Tsarism, the bourgeois liberals under Tsarism, the Provisional Government in 1917, the Whites in the Civil War, and even the Mensheviks and the SRs, what Figes has to say is pretty much what the Bolsheviks said of them. Thus, for example: “Trotsky described Martov as the ‘Hamlet of Democratic Socialism’ – and this is just about the sum of it… [His qualities] made him soft and indecisive when just the opposite was required”.

Workers’ Liberty has been debating theories of racism and their relationship to left anti-semitism. This contribution is by Carmen Basant. An alternative view is published here. And is replied to here.

In the wake of discussions over antisemitism in the Labour Party and beyond we have collated here a series of articles, new and old, on the topic of left antisemitism. An edited selection can also be found in our pamphlet 'Left antisemitism: what it is and how to fight it' which can be purchased here. More articles here.

The current debate on left antisemitism and the Labour Party

A hundred and fifty years ago, on 28 September 1864, the working-class movement took a huge step forward with the founding of the International Working Men’s Association.

A meeting at the St Martin’s Hall in London brought together radical and socialist delegates from around Europe, to set up the organisation which would become known as “The First International”.

2019 is the centenary of the year in which British workers had probably their greatest opportunity to make a revolution.

Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, British workers struck more than ever before, servicemen and police mutinied, and Labour took big strides electorally. But communists in Britain had still not formed a united party, Labour’s representation in Parliament was unfairly small and politically rubbish, and the trade unions were still dominated by bureaucrats.

THE EPOCH

As we go to press on 15 January 2019, it is exactly the 100th anniversary of the murder of the Polish¬German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. She was killed by a right-wing militia operating under the Social¬Democratic government which was heading off the German workers’ revolution.

Moishe Postone, a Marxist academic at the University of Chicago who died in 2018, skewered antisemitism as an addled, "pseudo-emancipatory" form of anticapitalism, which blames the evils on capitalism not on its structures but on shadowy plots by "the Jews".

Rosa Luxemburg considered her most important contribution to be her book, The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913.

The legacy of the Polish­-German revolutionary socialist leader who was murdered by a right­-wing militia operating under the aegis of a Social­ Democratic government just over 100 years ago has come down to us through a haze of sentimental misrepresentation and selective republishing, but now can and should be reconsidered.

In 1919 Glasgow was in the grip of a general strike. Although the strike began with the limited demand of a cut in the working week, it raised - as general strikes do by their very nature - the question of power in society.

The strike leaders saw the strike purely in terms of a fight for the 40 hour week, but the press treated it as a threat to the capitalist order of society itself. And for once the press was right.