Left groups and people

To download this as a pdf click here During the night of 8/9 November 1969 monuments in West Berlin commemorating victims of Nazi persecution, including one marking the destruction of a synagogue in the city’s Schoneberg district, were vandalised. “Shalom”, “El Fatah” and “Napalm” were painted on the monuments, in the colours of the Palestinian national flag. On 9 November itself a member of the “Black Rats, Tupamaros West Berlin” planted an incendiary device in the city’s Jewish Community Centre, timed to ignite when the annual commemoration of “Kristallnacht” took place in the grounds of the...

Editorial from Solidarity 453 The public scandal which has erupted in the wake of reports of historical and current sexual assaults in Hollywood, and now the UK Parliament, has brought to light a day-to-day reality. The #metoo campaign was “successful” because it touched on a truth. Almost every woman has experienced some form of sexual assault or harassment. The public conversation in wake of the reports and allegations is welcome and important. The revelations about Harvey Weinstein, with which this public conversation began, showed how men in positions of power can perpetrate abuse on, in...

Twenty-six days after a general election, and on the eve of the Labour Day holiday weekend, (21-23 October) Aotearoa (New Zealand) has a new Labour-led coalition government. New Zealand’s Labour Day public holiday was celebrated for the first time in 1900. The Liberal government of the day offered the new public holiday instead of acceding to labour movement demands for a lawful eight-hour working day. It is poignant that it was this weekend when we learned our wish to be rid of the outgoing National (Tory) government meant swallowing the rat of a coalition government with the nationalist New...

This article by Louise O’Shea from the Australian fortnightly paper Red Flag outlines the important but unstable role of experience in revolutionary politics. Abridged and reprinted here to promote discussion. The label “identity politics” is applied to a range of positions and practices, the key unifying features of which are sectional approaches to challenging oppression and the prioritisation of subjective experience. These can be highly theorised or simply reflect a common sense based on what seem like readily observable truths: that the world is divided between people who suffer...

Moshe Machover, members of Labour Party Marxists, a front for the "CPGB" group, which publishes the Weekly Worker newspaper, have been expelled from the Labour Party. Labour Party Marxists distributed a leaflet at the recent Labour Party conference, extensively quoting Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust, appearing to support the creation of a "Jewish state", to justify the outrageous claim that Nazism and Zionism share an essential ideological core. The leaflet was distributed at a fringe meeting of the right-wing Labour First faction, in a stunt obviously designed to catch...

Most of the time, the key terms of the anti-capitalist Left have no clear meaning, they express and convey emotion, not reason. They are the tools of demagogy more than of reasoned discourse…our language of politics is decayed, disablingly. So opens Sean Matgamna’s timely book on the moral gangrene of the British Left. In connection with apologia for Mao’s murder of 70 million Chinese, he speaks of ‘mind-rotting conflation, purging of the real meaning of words, vandal destruction of important concepts, smart-ass apologist’s attempts to obscure important distinctions.’ And of course, Matgamna...

As Solidarity goes to press on 10 October, Carles Puigdemont, the president of Catalonia, has announced his response to the referendum on independence in Catalonia his government called on 1 October. The Spanish government declared the referendum illegal, and deployed heavy Spanish police force to try to stop it, but it largely went ahead. 92% voted yes, on a 43% turnout. A series of opinion polls carried out by the Catalan government since 2011 has in recent years shown a slight majority against independence, most recently 49%-41% in July this year. Puigdemont asked the Catalan parliament...

The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) have scored remarkable victories over the last three years against Daesh in northern Syria. The YPG was created five years ago. Assad withdrew from Kurdish areas in north west Syria to concentrate his offensive in more central areas. The YPG became the army of the cantons formed in what Kurds call Rojava, “the West” of Kurdish territory. It made its female units (YPJ) every bit as prominent and effective as the male units. It rejected religious sectarianism and nationalism. It armed those it liberated like the Yazidis, and helped them organise in...

Mehmet Aksoy, a London-based Kurdish socialist activist, has been killed by Daesh while volunteering with the Kurdish YPG national liberation forces. Aksoy, a trained film-maker, was volunteering as a press officer with a unit of the YPG when a Daesh unit attacked his position a short distance from the front line in Raqqa. Aksoy had been active in the Kurdish national liberation movement in London for some time. An editor of the Kurdish Question website and Director of the London Kurdish Film Festival, he stepped up his activity following Daesh’s massacre of Yazidis at Sinjar in 2014 and their...

We have a Tory minority government. But how long Theresa May, or any Tory, can stay is another matter. The Tories look likely get a working majority in Parliament, at least on budget and confidence votes, by a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).There will be divisions between the Tories and the DUP, and within the Tory Party as the talks on Brexit proceed and as economic stresses sharpen. The Tories are likely to drop more abrasive policies like reintroduction of grammar schools, but they are in deep trouble. Labour was right to call immediately for May to resign and to say that...