Weekly Worker

Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)

Soldiers’ rights or generals’ rights? A reply to Weekly Worker

By Sacha Ismail In “Military coups and soldiers’ rights’ (Weekly Worker, 26 October), a response to our editorial “Keep the army out of politics” (Solidarity 3/100), the knives were out. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, they were not very sharp. Perphaps the CPGB have decided that their orientation to Respect and the SWP requires them to up the ante of their attacks on the AWL. Thus their article not only denounces our “pro-imperialist” (yawn) politics, but has us “joining with Tory grandees and woolly liberals in defending the United Kingdom constitution” — which...

Looking left: SWP and clerical fascists; CPGB; Stop The War and Tories

The SWP and the ‘clerical-fascists’ In Britain the SWP usually claims that it is a “slander” to say that their allies, Muslim Association of Britain, are an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest Islamic fundamentalist party in the Arab world. But the latest number of the SWP’s magazine IS Journal carries an article saying that the left in Egypt should work with the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which SWP founder Tony Cliff, when he was still active in the region, called “clerical-fascist”. The article regrets that the Brotherhood has softened: “The higher ranks of the Muslim Brothers...

Balls on imperialism

Letter to Weekly Worker, from Paul Hampton, AWL John Ball’s uncritical summary of The Politics of Empire (Weekly Worker December 16) rehashes some “anti-imperialist” conventional wisdom but misses the flaws of the book – its distortion of reality and its terrible political conclusions. Alan Freeman, one of the book’s editors, is also a bag carrier for Mayor Livingstone, associated with Socialist Action and the recent ESF. The book reflects these politics. Beneath its urbane pessimism, it is nothing less than a manifesto for second-camp “socialism” that abandons the central role of the working...

In their own words

More, from the participants, on the recent departures from the CPGB/WW. Ian Donovan, a former member of the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB/WW, and a co-thinker, Andy Hannah, have published statements explaining their recent decision to leave the CPGB as a response to the "political agenda" of Manny Neira - who recently left the CPGB in the opposite political direction - "unity - on the ideological rapprochement - with the social-imperialist, Zionist AWL. Unfortunately, the CPGB leadership is too confusionist and has drunk too deeply from the Shachtman-Draper well to put up any real...

CPGB-WW polemic

Debate between the AWL and the CPGB (Weekly Worker)

Kabul 1978 and Petrograd 1917: In defence of the October Revolution by Sean Matgamna. An analysis of the claim by The Leninist and the Weekly Worker that the Stalinist coup in Kabul in April 1978 was a great and authentic revolution (pdf, 338k).

Open letter to the CPGB, by Martyn Hudson and Lawrie Coombs, Solidarity 3/30, 15 May 2003

Crazies of the world unite, Solidarity 3/30, 15 May 2003

Weekly Worker goes ballistic on Iraq, by Martin Thomas, 16 April 2003

On the coat-tails of the SWP, by Martyn Hudson, Solidarity 3/27, 3 April 2003

Under the sign of the oxymoron: the contradictions of the CPGB/WW on Stalinism and democracy, by Sean Matgamna, Solidarity 3/22, 25 January 2003

Marxism and karaoke-Leninism: selected documents from debates between the AWL and CPGB/WW (pdf, 108k)


Fantasy opportunism and the Muslim Association, by Clive Bradley. (For a briefing on the Muslim Association, click here.)


The Socialist Alliance and the labour movement - debate between the AWL and the CPGB, May 2001


Weekly Worker on Afghanistan, October 2001


AWL letter to the CPGB about a joint paper, 22 February 2002

Reply from Jack Conrad of the CPGB

Stalinism and the return of the repressed: Reply by Martin Thomas to Jack Conrad, 12 March 2002

AWL calls for debate on new paper, Solidarity 16 March 2002

Jack Conrad's reply to "Return of the Repressed?"


Critical Notes on the CPGB/WW


Leeds and the politics of the apolitical, by Sean Matgamna

Never Stalinist?, by Martin Thomas

Weekly Worker report on the 29 September 2002 CPGB aggregate held to discuss their relations with the AWL

AWL comment: snap out of it!, by Martin Thomas

Jack Conrad's seven-part polemic against AWL, parts (November 2002 to January 2003) one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven.


Schema or banality: the CPGB and "federal republic"

Notes on Ellen Meiksins Wood, by Clive Bradley

Marxist Theory and History
Around the world
The AWL, Labour and the Left

The force-field of the MAB

By Martin Thomas A few AWL members attended a session at the CPGB (Weekly Worker)'s summer school on 17 August, when they had invited Sean Matgamna of the AWL to speak on "Marxism and Zionism". Sean started by saying that our immediate practical priority must be support for the Palestinians. Yet the only workable way forward for the Palestinians is for them to win the right to an independent state of their own alongside Israel. The programme of a "free", i.e. Arab, Palestine "from the river to the sea" both denies the democratic rights of the Israeli Jews and anyway is impossible to carry out...

CPGB Communist University report

Communist University - Cardiff, 26th June. Attendance for the Communist University peaked at 15 in the debate on Respect, but the discussions were enlightening and mostly quite encouraging. Two things can really be taken away from the event by a partisan by-stander: 1. The CPGB majority position has become considerably more reactionary than it used to be and has become so in quite a short period of time, and 2. The Red Platform within the group is not confined to a smattering of supporters but instead has at least a degree of "sympathy" from many CPGBers. The first debate of the day was on...

Under the sign of the oxymoron

The Weekly Worker group/Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) originated as a small, still ultra-Stalinist, offshoot from the New Communist Party (NCP), which was a stone-age Stalinist breakaway from the real CPGB in 1977. They were called "Tankies" because, as their critics justly said of them, they believed in a "Russian Tanks Road to Socialism". The Tankies first emerged as a distinct segment of the Communist Party in August 1968, when they loudly supported the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia to put down Alexander Dubcek's attempt to create "socialism with a human face" there. The CP...

Debate & discussion: For a republican socialist workers' party

In a recent editorial Jack Conrad (CPGB) argues (Weekly Worker 498 October 2 2003) that "the SA could commit itself to the aim of a new workers' party. Not an old Labour mark two; rather a revolutionary party basing itself on a clear Marxist programme." As if to disprove himself he turns to the Scottish Socialist Party as his example. He says "riddled with left nationalism though it is, the SSP can nevertheless be used to illustrate what can be done". He then goes on to show how the SSP's intervention in the anti-war movement has enabled them to benefit in contrast to the Liberal Democrats in...

Feeble and cowardly abuse

A letter from Ian Donovan of the CPGB/Weekly Worker and a response from Cathy Nugent, editor of Solidarity. The anonymous author of your column, Writing on the Wall ( Solidarity 3/30), seems determined to underline that the AWL leadership has lost the plot politically. Being reduced to flinging personal abuse and grossly mangling quotations is a transparently dishonest method of argument. I counted seven ellipses, often denoting substantial gaps, in one passage (attributed to me) alone - an incredible technique of "quotation" that can mangle someone's words to "mean" virtually anything the...

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