Marxism and war

Rohini Hensman’s book is a welcome intervention into debates on the international socialist left.

Above all it is a damning indictment of the state of those broad sections of the left, especially in Britain, who have embraced a negative, anti-Western, anti-US, “pseudo-anti-imperialism” — a politics that is also effectively pro-imperialist (of Russia, China, Iran), anti-democratic, anti-liberatory and ultimately anti-working class.

One of the greatest tragedies of a Third World War which is now drawing closer is the lack of organized opposition to it. The mass of people are not enthusiastically pro-war but they are resigned to it, while the organized social, political and cultural movements, with rare exceptions, are exerting their influence to create the necessary enthusiasm for the all-out Atom War.

Barry Finger reviews The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: the Fate of the Russian Revolution volume two, edited by Sean Matgamna (Workers’ Liberty, 2015).

­Revolutionary socialism at its liveliest is always a vast theatre of ideological battlegrounds, a Permanent War of Questions, as Julius Jacobson — a one-time follower of Max Shachtman — so aptly put it.

The final part of Michael Johnson’s series on the life and politics of James Connolly. The rest of the series can be found here.

Part 11 of Michael Johnson’s series on the life and politics of James Connolly. The rest of the series can be found here.

In March 1914, Asquith made his new and final proposal on Home Rule, putting forward a scheme whereby the Ulster counties could exclude themselves from the new Irish constitution. It was supposed to be a temporary exclusion, for six years, but a general election in the interim delivering a Tory majority could make it permanent.

* Ce texte a été publié en 2001 dans Workers Liberty, publication de l’Alliance for Workers Liberty, au moment de l’intervention américano-britannique en Afghanistan. (NPNF)

1. Comment peut-on affronter le problème du terrorisme et de l’intégrisme (1) ?

Why the poppy is wrong (November 2010)

"Our remembrance" - speech by Ed Maltby (November 2012)

We need our own remembrance (March 2013)

Plus materials on the 2012 University of London Union controversy, in which ULU Vice President Daniel Cooper was witch-hunted for taking an anti-militarist stand:

Between the two imperialists world wars the Marxists considered Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland to be imperialist powers, because in these three states there were oppressed national minorities – Croats, Kosovars and others in Yugoslavia, Slovakians and Sudeten ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, Ukrainians in Poland. If it could be taken apart from the entire context which in fact it had, and if German imperialism had not been German imperialism, Hitler's claim to the Sudetenland, where the majority wanted to unite with Germany, would have been more or less reasonable.

A reflection on the right to strike of British soldiers in the Second World War

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How Hitler could have been stopped.

'Don't let yourselves be reduced to slaves!' The Left Opposition appeals for working class unity. (1933)

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