Left groups and people

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

Connolly's politics, or The Green Above the Red? IRSP/AWL Debate Irish Republicanism and Socialism (1982)

Connolly, or The Green Above the Red? Introduction INLA and the Irish National Question Debate: 1. SO: The Irish Republican Socialist Party in politics 2. The IRSP: The prejudices of British reformism against Irish revolutionaries masquerading as Marxism 3. SO: Connolly's politics, or The Green Above the Red? Other articles on the Irish left in the Election: 1. Hung Dail has no answers 2.The Provos turn to politics 3. Provisionals' topsy-turvy view 4. Irish workers can't afford to wait for socialist policies

A portrait of Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party, patron of the Livingstone Labour Left, in 1980

For describing the WRP as a cross between the Moonies, the Scientologists, and the Jones Cult, which exploited young people, etc.,John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna were in 1981 sued for libel by the actress Vanessa Redgrave. This portrait of the WRP was part of an appeal for labour movement support in fighting the libel action. The WRP was then subsidising and producing Labour Herald, the paper of the Livingstone Labour left. Some readers have asked us for more information about the WRP, the organisation which is threatening to bankrupt Socialist Organiser [predecessor of the Alliance for Workers...

Revolutionary politics, imperialism, and anti-racism: a further reply in the "Marxism and religion" controversy

Marcus Halaby’s polemic against Workers’ Liberty’s politics on religion, Islamism, and anti-imperialism ( “The AWL’s anti-anti-imperialist Islamophobia” ) is worth reading because it illustrates some differences between the political method of Workers Power and ourselves in Workers’ Liberty. Click here for the debate of which this is part, which started with a Facebook outcry in 2013 against the introduction to Workers' Liberty 3/1 of January 2006 Marcus expends more than 3,000 words before he reaches what he calls “the crux of the matter”: our disagreement on imperialism. We’ll start with it...

Blitzkrieg and Revolution (May 1940)

I. IF HITLER WINS – PERSPECTIVE FOR SOCIAL REVOLUTION The fundamentals of Marxism have not changed. But the German blitzkrieg has radically altered the political situation. For years all informed persons, from Roosevelt to Trotsky, believed that the Germans would be defeated in the second imperialist war. Revolutionaries looked forward to this defeat as initiating an era of socialist revolution. The imperialist perspective was not very different. The bourgeoisie dreaded the exhaustion of both sides, followed by the revolt of the millions in Central Europe against the long drawn out slaughter...

Remembering Azad Ahmed

On Saturday 2 November a memorial service was held in London by the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan in memory of their fallen comrade Azad Ahmed. Azad was kidnapped and killed a week previously in Kirkuk, Iraq by unknown assailants. Members of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, Kurdistan and Iran were all present to pay tribute to Ahmed, a longstanding member of the Iraqi party’s Central Committee, who had long been a prominent advocate of secularism, pluralism and workers’ rights in Iraq. Workers’ Liberty also sent a solidarity message of condolence and support, remarking...

Workers of the world, awaken!

Workers of the world, awaken! Break your chains. demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken By exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission From your cradles to your graves? ls the height of your ambition To be good and willing slaves? CHORUS: Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Fight for your own emancipation; Arise, ye slaves of every nation. In One Union grand. Our little ones for bread are crying, And millions are from hunger dying; The end the means is justifying, 'Tis the final stand. If the workers take a notion, They can stop all speeding trains; Every ship upon...

Remaking Socialism: From Socialism's Collapse in 1914 to the Foundation of the Communist International in March 1919

THE ECLIPSE OF THE INTERNATIONAL On 4 August, 1914, the Workers' International breathed its last, and that watchword of socialism "Death to militarism", which should have rung out clear and strong above the tumult of mobilisation and the clash of arms, was unheard by the peoples of the world. No doubt this cry of revolt from a workers' movement animated by a true solidarity of the exploited against their task masters would have been promptly stifled by the death-dealing implements of war, and by the weight of censorship and martial law, but ere its defeat it would have awakened the consciences...

The SWP and the Iran-Iraq war: the sudden shift to super-anti-imperialism

In 1988 the SWP suddenly became very 'anti-imperialist'. It became a loud cheerleader for what it sees as progressive or revolutionary nationalisms. It still talks of socialism and class struggle, but now these are proposed as merely the best means to secure the greater nationalist end. It fiercely supports Iraq in the Gulf War. It insists fanatically that it is not even worth thinking about an appeal to the Israeli working class, that Israel must be destroyed, and that a 'two-state' solution in Palestine is worthless even as an interim measure. The war, which began in September 1980, is...

A tragedy of the left: Socialist Worker and its splits

Click here to download pamphlet as pdf . Abridged introduction How did the Trotskyist left in Britain come to be scattered and divided into hostile and competing groups? At the root the divisions are a product of the repeated defeats and the continuing marginalisation of revolutionary socialism. Small groups - and the biggest of the groups in Britain, the SWP, is still a small group - groups without implantation in the working class, have little power of cohesion when strong political divisions emerge. When members of a small organisation whose raison d'etre is propaganda for certain ideas...

1940: Max Shachtman's reply to Leon Trotsky - A “petty bourgeois” opposition?

Where Is the Petty Bourgeois Opposition? A Repeated Challenge Remains Unanswered. In his open letter to Comrade Trotsky, Comrade Shachtman, repeating the challenge issued by the Minority since the moment it was accused of representing a petty-bourgeois tendency in the party, declared: “... it is first necessary to prove (a) that the Minority represents a deviation from the proletarian Marxian line, (b) that this deviation is typically petty-bourgeois, and (c) that it is more than an isolated deviation — it is a tendency. That is precisely what has not been proved.” Comrade Trotsky has been the...

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