In-depth analysis

May Fourth movement protest

China and independent working-class politics

The May Fourth movement launched the Chinese upheavals of the 1920s - and the original, pre-Stalinist, revolutionary Chinese Communism


This article argues that a renewed socialism for the 21st century will be based on independent working class politics. It uses the “Third Camp” as a formula for summing up this essential element for Marxist history and for current intervention in the class struggle. China represents a fertile example in both these respects.

Striking telecom workers, 2022

The workers or 'the people'?

Originally published in Workers' Liberty magazine, January 2001


Why should Marxists want to narrow our appeal to 'the workers', enrolling people from other classes only to the extent that they rally behind the working class? Why not seek a broader unity of 'ordinary people'?

The pivot of Marx's critique of political economy is the concept of abstract labour, or universal social labour - labour as the expenditure under standard conditions of a quotient of average labour-power. Abstract labour, according to Marx, is the substance of value.

1906 Labour Representation Committee manifesto

"Lib-Lab" is a way backwards, not forwards

Some, even on Labour’s left, advocate electoral alliances or coalitions between Labour and non-labour movement “progressive” parties — mostly, in practical terms, meaning the SNP and the Lib Dems.

From a class-struggle, socialist point of view, there are many arguments to be made against such “progressive alliances”. Here I try to draw some lessons from Labour’s history, focusing on alliances with the Liberals.

Image of Deng Xiaoping

The moderniser as executioner

Chan Ying on the politics of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997). First published in 1997 in Workers' Liberty magazine.


Deng Xiaoping, the second paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China, died on 19 February [1997] at the age of 92. He had reached an advanced stage of Parkinson’s Disease and eventually suffered respiratory and circulation failure.

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