Weekly Worker

On 15 November Southwark NUT agreed a motion proposed by a member or sympathiser of the Weekly Worker grouplet. The motion (attached) passed with ten votes in favour, to my vote against, and a couple of abstentions. It will be submitted by Southwark NUT to our annual conference.

The WW leaders – notorious liars with malleable politics - are currently positioning themselves as the go-to people for ‘left’ antisemites, defending Livingstone - amongst others - against justifiable charges of antisemitism.

These people organised a provocation at the recent Labour Party conference when they leafleted

Had it not been distributed as a leaflet at this year’s Labour Party conference, Moshe Machover’s article “Anti-Zionism Does Not Equal Anti-Semitism” would have been just another turgid and distasteful article which had found a natural home for itself in the pages of the Weekly Worker.

A longer version of the same article – entitled “Don’t Apologise – Attack” – had been published in Weekly Worker four months earlier. According to that article:

• Anyone who thought that a retweet by Naz Shah MP – which had suggested that Israel (and, presumably, its population) should be relocated to the USA –

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

Afghanistan’s “Great Saur Revolution”, in April 1978, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that flowed from it 20 months later, at Christmas 1979, were two of the most important events of the second half of the 20th century.

The invasion led to the so named Second Cold War. Their failure to subjugate Afghanistan in a nine-year colonial war was one of the things that shattered the self-confidence of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy, and contributed to its downfall. The April 1978 revolution was a freakish event — an army and air force officers’ coup controlled by the Peoples Democratic

What is the attitude of Marxists to "backward" and "underdeveloped" countries and peoples who are being assaulted, occupied, or colonised by a more advanced but predatory civilisation?
No-one expressed it so clearly and so forcefully as Leon Trotsky:

"What characterises Bolshevism on the national question is that in its attitude to oppressed nations, even the most backward, it considers them not only the object but also the subject of politics. Bolshevism does not confine itself to recognising their 'rights' and parliamentary protests against the trampling upon of those rights.

"Bolshevism

The Weekly Worker has published a reply to our reply. It is not serious but we want to respond to some of its more ridiculous distortions.

1. We have never denied that we previously had limited political connections with the person in question (who the WW refers to repeatedly as "Comrade Alpha" in a rather obvious attempt to imply, without actually stating it, that he was an AWL member and that there is a comparison with the SWP's Martin Smith case). In fact, as we say above, he was never an AWL member or "part of" the AWL (sympathiser, etc).

2. No one denies the individual in question is

(The Weekly Worker has replied to this statement; we have replied to their reply here.)

The Weekly Worker, newspaper of the "CPGB", has published an article alleging a Workers' Liberty attempt to cover up incidents of sexual abuse by a student activist (not an AWL member).

They also accuse the AWL of hypocrisy for highlighting the Socialist Party's failings in its response to allegations against RMT assistant general secretary and former SP member Steve Hedley.

We are quite used to lies from the Weekly Worker, but this looks staggeringly dishonest even by their standards. The article is either

Our 2006 introduction to Workers' Liberty 3/1, about Marxism and religion, has been much reviled on Facebook, but little criticised. Of the three attempts at a critique - by Simon Hardy of the ACI, Marcus Halaby of Workers' Power, and Yassamine Mather for Weekly Worker - Yassamine Mather's was first.

Her objection is that our introduction depicts political Islam as a reactionary anti-imperialist force with its own roots, its own dynamic, and its own autonomy, not just something "installed" or "deployed" or "facilitated" or "opted for" or "promoted" or used as a "tool" by the USA.

We have to

Instead of contributing to discussion and explaining his differences with the majority of the AWL on questions of Islamism, the definition of Islamophobia, and imperialism, Patrick Smith has decided to resign from the AWL, publishing a resignation letter on the website of the Weekly Worker group.

The Weekly Worker group has a record, both historical and recent, of shameless lying, particularly against AWL. At a meeting on Saturday 14 September, the Weekly Worker group attempted to have AWL banned from the Socialist Platform of Left Unity. They claimed that we supported the US's planned

Over the next two and a half months, a fundamental debate will be run among some hundreds of left activists, most of them at present politically homeless and looking for a way forward.

At the founding conference on 30 November of the Left Unity group, the main debate will be between the "Left Party Platform" (LPP), proposed by Kate Hudson and others, and the "Socialist Platform" (SP), proposed by Nick Wrack, Soraya Lawrence, Will McMahon, Chris Strafford, Cat Rylance, and others.

Former Socialist Worker journalist Tom Walker, now a member of the SWP-splinter ISN, explains his support for the