Solidarity 498, 8 March 2019

These are the concluding sections of an article on “The Jewish Problem After Hitler”, by Albert Glotzer (writing as Albert Gates), in the “Third Camp” Trotskyist journal The New International of September 1947 (eight months before the creation of Israel). The article was written in response to an article on the same subject of July 1946 by Ernest Mandel, who would become the main writer of “Orthodox Trotskyism” over decades until his death in 1995. Picture is of people grieving for those killed in 1946 pogrom against Jews in Kielce, Poland. "For decades [before Hitler] the conditions of the...

Paul Le Blanc reviews "In Defence of Bolshevism" by Max Shachtman. (Picture: Shachtman in later years.) This is an important work on Lenin and the Bolshevik tradition. While many have been profoundly impressed by the valuable work of Lars Lih in Rediscovering Lenin (2006), Max Shachtman was articulating and documenting many of the same points in the late 1930s, through the 1940s and 1950s, and into the early 1960s. His defence of Bolshevism was articulated over and over, with facts and citations buttressed with brilliant turns of phrase, sometimes with entertaining (even hilarious) flourishes...

Responses to Sean Matgamna's article in Solidarity 497. That article can be found online here. It has caused some debate within Workers' Liberty and beyond , and has been widely read online. More debate on the right of return here. Sean Matgamna ( Solidarity 497, 27 February 2019) writes as if it is a matter of blinding obviousness that advocacy of any version of the “right of return”‘policy for Palestinians is simply a “coded” way of saying: “destroy Israel, drive the Jews into the sea”. Therefore, anyone who advocates this policy is a racist and its advocacy should not be compatible with...

The Women's Conference of the rail union RMT on 1 and 2 March was hosted by Dover Shipping Branch and was themed around "women in maritime". Jacqui Smith, Maritime Co-ordinator from the International Transport Workers' Federation, told us of ITF's recent battle to stop shipping companies using mandatory pregnancy testing before employing female workers. The conference passed a motion to instruct RMT to develop an organising plan specifically aimed at recruiting women seafarers to the RMT, an initiative that is long overdue. Another resolution asked the RMT to carry out a survey of female...

Alan Simpson, environmental adviser to John McDonnell, wrote rightly in Solidarity 497 about the hope we can draw from the international school climate walkouts, the next one of which is on 15 March . He rightly criticised almost all politicians, and most of the left, for failing to respond seriously to the climate emergency. However, I think the solutions he sketches also fall far short of what is needed. Alan Simpson sees the key to tackling climate change as ″decarbonisation, decentralisation and democratisation″. He advocates local markets taking precedence over globalised ones, and using...

Mike Zubrowski's letter in the last issue of Solidarity makes a strong case for the importance of reading long texts. I agree with the main thrust of what Mike writes, and would agree with it as a critique of my article if I had actually argued what he claims that I did. But I didn't. My article argued that "We can not just rely on a text-heavy newspaper any more." I did not write that reading long texts is not important, nor that other media could replace newspapers. Mike partly acknowledges this by stating that my article 'implied' these things rather than claiming that it actually argued...

Jon Lansman talked to Solidarity . You've said that the concern about antisemitism in the Labour Party is based on realities, not something contrived or invented. Why do you say that? Because I've seen loads and loads of cases at the National Executive, and I know them to be real. I also know that those cases are very rarely to do with Israel-Palestine. I also have plenty of evidence on my own social media, although I try not to look too much at that because it is so unpleasant. I follow the advice of many others who get abuse on social media, and try to ignore it. In short: the evidence of my...

GMB Scottish Regional Secretary Gary Smith was accorded front page coverage in the 3 March 2019 “Herald on Sunday”. Billed as an “Exclusive”, the article in fact consisted of some extracts from an interview with Smith conducted by one of the pro-independence paper’s resident right-wing journalists, Paul Hutcheon. Hutcheon is still remembered for his notorious witch-hunting ‘articles’ about the Falkirk Labour selection contest and Grangemouth Ineos dispute of 2013 (although he has written no shortage of articles in a similar vein since then). Smith used the interview with Hutcheon as an...