Workers' Liberty 21, May 1995

The best results for revolutionaries in decades

By Gerry Bates As we go to press, Arlette Laguiller, candidate of the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvriere (LO), looks like getting maybe five per cent of the poll, or one and a half million votes, in the first round of the French presidential election on 23 April. If this happens, it will be probably the best score that revolutionary candidates have ever achieved in a modern European election — better than the two per cent (600,000-odd) which LO has usually got since Laguiller first stood for president in 1974, and much better than the 236,000 which Alain Krivine got in the 1969 presidential poll...

Who Are Lutte Ouvriere?

Lutte Ouvriere itself, Laguiller’s organisation, is probably in real terms the strongest avowedly-Trotskyist organisation in the world, thanks to a solid and stable routine. They run 400 regular workplace bulletins. On a series of international questions, from Europe to Afghanistan, they and we have shared views differing from almost all the other would-be Trotskyist groups in the world. However, they tend to reduce politics to bread-and-butter industrial militancy plus socialist propaganda. They have little interest in, for example, specific mobilisation against France’s large fascist...

We don’t want to march straight

Masculinity, Queers and the Military By Peter Tatchell Published by Cassell, £4.99 The campaign for queers in the military mistakenly assumes that all the rights straights have are desirable and that queers should have them too. Instead of being critical of the institutions of hetero society, this assimilationist mentality slavishly worships all things straight. There is nothing honourable or worthy about the military. It is a homophobic institution which epitomises the worst aspects of straight male culture — violence, domination, conformity and authoritarianism. No self-respecting queer...

Ripping open the doors of the establishment

By Peter Tatchell The “outing” of 10 Bishops by OutRage! during the Church of England General Synod last November was arguably the biggest and most successful “outing” accomplished anywhere in the world. Previous “outings” by gay activists (mainly in the US) have been generally confined to naming lone individuals. None have ripped open the closet doors of an establishment institution quite so decisively as the OutRage! revelations in front of Church House, the London headquarters of the Anglican Church. The naming of the Bishops by OutRage! has already produced some startlingly positive...

What are the ethics of outing?

By Peter Tatchell Over the last 10 years, only two MPs (out of 650) have come out — Chris Smith in 1984 and Michael Brown in 1994. At this rate we will have to wait 300 years for all 60 or so closeted MPs to pluck up the guts to be open about their homosexuality. Fed up with this procrastination and cowardice, In January OutRage! wrote to 20 MPs calling on them to “make the morally responsible choice to come out voluntarily”. A collective coming out by several parliamentarians would, the letter suggested, establish lesbian and gay MPs as a fact of live and ease the way for open homosexuals to...

Chronology of a disaster

1930: Slump hits Germany. Unemployment rises to three million. Heinrich Bruening of the Centre Party becomes Chancellor and takes emergency powers to rule by decree. Nazis get 18% of the vote in September 1930 elections (they had got only 2.8% in 1928). 1932: April: the Nazi militias, the SA and SS, are banned. May: Franz von Papen becomes Chancellor. June: he repeals the ban on the SA. Hundreds are killed or injured in street battles. July: he sacks the Social-Democratic state government in Prussia. 1933: January: President Hindenburg appoints Hitler as Chancellor. February: on pretext of...

Fight for free education!

By Rosie Woods, Left Unity supporter and recently elected member of the National Executive of the National Union of Students I’ve been to the conference of the National Union of Students’ — held every Easter — twice before. This is the only time of the year when students — some 1,500 delegated from their colleges — have a chance to get together to discuss and vote on issues relevant to them. I hoped campaigning on student financial support would be top of the agenda. The appalling level of student poverty certainly means it deserves to be. However, this was not to be… Labour Students dominates...

For the United Front against Hitler

Oskar Seipold was a member of the Prussian Diet, elected on the official Communist Party ticket, who later defected to the Left Opposition. He delivered this speech in March 1932. It has been abridged slightly. The nations of the entire world and especially we in Germany are living under such conditions that every serious conversation turns directly to the questions of high politics — to that of the revolution. Thirteen years ago, after the overthrow of the Hohenzollerns, the working class was factually master in the German household. The state based itself on the workers’ and soldiers’...

Democracy was possible in 1917

By Colin Foster Al Richardson overdoes it a bit in his response to Robin Blick (WL 20). To Blick’s claim “that during the Russian Revolution Lenin’s ‘elitist and coercive “blood and iron” state socialism’ triumphed over Martov’s ‘vision of a society that was both collectivist and democratic’,” he replies that the option “both collectivist and democratic” was impossible in 1917 because of the harsh world context and the great backwardness of Russia. So what did the Bolsheviks think they were doing? He does not, or seems not to, dispute Blick’s description of the Bolshevik revolutionary regime...

Education: right or privilege?

By Liam Conway, Central Notts NUT The big news from the conference of the 230,000-strong National Union of Teachers (NUT) at Easter was a decision to ballot for a day of strike action against excessive class size. It follows several weeks of high-profile campaigning by FACE (Fight Against Cuts in Education), a grassroots organisation of parents and school governors. Won against hard-fought opposition by the NUT Executive, the vote on class-size action also linked the NUT at a national level to the FACE activity, for the first time. FACE has grown out of protests in areas with big cuts in...

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