Left groups and people

Socialist Green Unity Coalition, Respect, SWP, Socialist Party, Weekly Worker, IWCA, RDG, Green Party, Ken Livingstone ... and a few others.

No run for mayor

Contrary to media speculation, Jeremy Corbyn is not going to run for London Mayor. The poll is on 2 May; Sadiq Khan is the Labour candidate. The possibility, however, remains open of the local Labour Party defying the Labour leadership and selecting Corbyn (who is still a Labour member, though denied the Labour whip in Parliament) as its candidate in Islington North in the coming parliamentary election. Solidarity has supported the wide protest against Islington North being denied a democratic choice, but has argued against courting exclusion by a “local independent” contest. The result would...

Roy Battersby (1936-2024)

Probably best known for the TV drama Leeds United! (1974) which features a women’s textile workers’ strike (and was discussed in Solidarity 584 ), Roy Battersby had a highly productive and varied career as a writer and director of mainly TV dramas. He started off as part of that generation of left-inclined writers and directors (such as Ken Loach, Alan Bleasdale, Jim Allen, Dennis Potter, David Hare) who worked at the BBC on the Play for Today and then branched out into writing Cracker , Between the Lines , Morse , and many other dramas. As one of his last works he directed the film Red...

John Pilger: once an inspiring truth-teller

John Pilger, who died on 30 December 2023, was once a brave and principled journalist who spoke truth to power. Many of us of a Certain Age can remember being moved and inspired in the 1970s by his exposures of war crimes, racism, injustice and human rights abuses. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra and probably (in Britain at least) did more than any other journalist to bring the horrors of those conflicts to public attention. He twice won the UK Journalist of the Year Award: in 1967 and 1979. His eponymous TV series on ITV was required viewing as far as I...

1924: when they all came together

The Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were a high-water mark for Socialist politics in the U.S. Sanders, who campaigned as a Democrat, won over thirteen million votes, 43% of the total, in his first attempt. The self-defined “democratic socialist” came within a hair’s breadth of defeating Hillary Clinton and winning the Democratic nomination. He would almost certainly have defeated Donald Trump in the general election. It was a remarkable result, considering the history of socialist politics in the U.S. Most historians point to 1912, when Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate...

For analysis, not wordplay!

We are right to criticise “slippery slogans” around Israel/Palestine as elsewhere. Se must push back against another problem too: a sole and superficial focus on individual words, on their emotional and rhetoric force over substance, and using these for virtue-signalling or “gotcha!” politics. One recent protest chant is “Not a war! Not a conflict!” The assertion is false. “Conflict” and “war” do not imply symmetry in military might or indeed culpability. The might of the Israeli military far outweighs that of Hamas, though Hamas and Hezbollah are armed to the teeth by Iran, a dictatorship...

Another look at Gaza demonstration slogans

It is good that so many people turn out for Gaza ceasefire protests. It is bad, and odd, that placards and megaphones on those protests are dominated by slogans devised by groups who want not so much a ceasefire as Hamas to war and win; and that most protesters follow the placards and chants without signalling dissent. Best if we, Workers’ Liberty, and other groups who want peace, two states, workers’ unity, can be numerous enough to have our placards and banners dominate. Pending that, let’s analyse some of the slogans. “Free Palestine” was first brought onto marches in a big way by Socialist...

Tom O’Lincoln, 1947-2023

Tom O’Lincoln has sadly passed away. He had had a great influence in revolutionary left politics in Australia since he arrived from the US in 1971. He had in the late 1960s joined the US International Socialists, then strongly influenced by Hal Draper’s politics, including a bureaucratic collectivist analysis of the Stalinist states, rather than Tony Cliff’s state-capitalist one. Tom played a leadership role in a number of organisations of the “International Socialist” tradition (which has fractured a few times in Australia), and there are many tributes to him from current and former members...

Why we have “peace” in the headline

The front page headline on Solidarity this week says “Peace”. It is a way of saying in one word what we said in three (“stop the massacre”, “stop the war”) in previous issues . It is also a slogan rarely used by Marxists in recent decades. Why, and what is different now? From the early 1950s, and the reverberations persist, the Communist Parties in the stronger capitalist countries made “peace” a big slogan and busied themselves heavily with building “peace movements” designed essentially as adjuncts to the USSR’s diplomacy. For Algeria’s independence war, the French Communist Party’s slogan...

What left Palestinians and Israelis say

On 24 October, Standing Together leaders Sally Abed and Uri Weltmann, alongside Palestinian educator and activist Kefah Abukhdeir and Israeli activist Yael Berda, a supporter of the “A Land for All” initiative, spoke at an online webinar organised by activists in the USA. These are lightly edited excerpts from their comments, some of which were made in response to questions from the moderator and therefore do not necessarily reflect “prepared” remarks. The webinar can be viewed on YouTube Sally Abed I identify as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Especially these days, unfortunately, the...

Israel has the right to defend itself, but not to raze Gaza. The Palestinians have the right to win a state of their own, but not to despoil Israel

To Israeli Jews, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh declared on 7 October, when Hamas forces invaded Israel to kill over 1,300 people, overwhelmingly civilians, and take over 100 hostage. “We have only one thing to say to you: get out of our land... There is no place or safety for you”. This was not an “excess” on the fringe of a basically justified struggle, but an effort to kill or panic as many Jews as possible. And probably done by Hamas as part of the network of a regional-imperialist power, Iran, pledged to the destruction of Israel. The rise of Hamas has been framed by Israeli governments’...

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