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Workers' Liberty 2/1, September 2001

Contents

Dick Whittington's heir —The Truth About Mayor Ken Livingstone

Published on: Sat, 25/08/2007 - 00:57
Author

John Bloxam

Robbed of the official Labour candidacy by Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone defied the New Labour leaders and in the summer of 2000 was elected Mayor of London. No sooner was Livingstone installed as Mayor than he created a Tory-Liberal-New Labour “popular front” government for London.

The most “left-wing” plank in his election platform had been opposition to Blairite plans to privatise London Underground.

His record, as distinct from his reputation, for many years, at least, did not identify Livingstone as a leftist. Yet he had the support of many left-wingers in the Labour Party and trade

In an age of barbarism

Published on: Tue, 27/01/2015 - 16:34

This 2001 publication features an array of articles, letters and debate, many of which are helpful to understanding contemporary issues on the left.

£3.50 + £1.60 postage


This book contains the following articles:

  • Socialists in an age of barbarism
  • The left must unite
  • Who are the anti-capitalists?
  • Two critiques: "Empire" and "new imperialism"
  • Socialists in the 2001 general election
  • The politics of Ken Livingstone
  • The new turn of the SWP
  • The human genome
  • Louis Armstrong
  • China, and independent working class politics
  • "Apparatus Marxism" in the Balkans war
  • Sylvia Pankhurst and democracy
  • Hal
    • Cliff

    Why did Cliff slander Shachtman?

    Published on: Fri, 09/08/2013 - 01:35

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    I: Why did Cliff traduce Shachtman? (Workers' Liberty 62)
    II: Was Stalinism the new barbarism? (Workers' Liberty 66)
    III: Attitude towards the Communist Parties (Workers' Liberty 2/1)

    I: Why did Cliff traduce Shachtman?

    Over the past ten years there has been a good deal of discussion in this magazine about the ideas of Max Shachtman.

    Shachtman was in the 1940s the foremost critic of Trotsky's view of Stalinism in the USSR, and together with his comrades in the Workers' Party/Independent Socialist League

    'Apparatus Marxism', Impoverished Twin of 'Academic Marxism'

    Published on: Thu, 23/08/2007 - 00:59
    Author

    Sean Matgamna

    “You who have really done something, must have noticed yourself how few of the young literary men who attach themselves to the Party take the trouble to study economics, the history of trade, of industry, of agriculture, of the social formations… The self-conceit of the journalist must therefore accomplish everything and the result looks like it…" — Friedrich Engels

    Introduction
    Watching the accelerating political and moral degeneration of the Stalinised “Communist International" in the mid-1930s, Leon Trotsky entitled one of his commentaries “Is There No End To The Fall?" Had he been forced

    Ours Is An Age of Barbarism — Why?

    Published on: Mon, 20/08/2007 - 14:31

    “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement” — Vladimir Lenin

    According to the classic account by Lewis H Morgan, “barbarism” is in human history the stage between savagery and civilisation; between the stage of “savage” peoples who are hunters and casual gatherers on one side, and on the other “civilised” people who have developed cities.

    In barbarism, human beings have become settled, regular producers; agriculturalists, herdsmen, handicraftsmen. Over thousands of years, these “barbarians” create all the prerequisites of civilisation. In barbarism, human beings had

    Is Cuba Socialist?

    Published on: Sun, 29/07/2007 - 00:50
    Author

    Paul Hampton

    This book is a pseudo-debate between Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party and CWI (formerly Militant) in Britain and Doug Lorimer of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP).

    It is also, I guess, an attempt to check the recent rash of Castro-worship in the Scottish Socialist Party, with whom Taaffe maintains a strained relationship.

    The DSP, following the lead of the American SWP, rejects Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, preferring Lenin’s blurred and outmoded formula of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” as the programme for revolutions in countries of less

    Who are the anti-capitalists?

    Published on: Sun, 30/09/2001 - 15:31

    The anti-capitalist movement exploded onto the world political scene in Seattle two years ago. There is very little material available on the development of the constituent parts of the anti-capitalist movement. Many commentators say Seattle “just happened”.
    In fact the movement seems to have different roots in different parts of the world. In the USA three streams converged at Seattle.

    - Direct action groups, many with anarchist-inspired politics, had grown steadily through the 1990s; many had already staged effective local protests.
    - Anti-globalisation NGOs, with significant staff, and

    China and independent working-class politics

    Published on: Sun, 30/09/2001 - 15:14
    Author

    Paul Hampton

    This article argues that a renewed socialism for the 21st century will be based on independent working class politics. It uses the “Third Camp” as a formula for summing up this essential element for Marxist history and for current intervention in the class struggle. China represents a fertile example in both these respects.

    In 1925-27 the Chinese working class lost a revolutionary opportunity because it was subordinated to bourgeois nationalism by Stalin’s Comintern; in 1949 the working class was absent because of the terrible defeat it suffered at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek. Mao’s

    Sylvia Pankhurst and Democracy

    Published on: Sun, 30/09/2001 - 14:48
    Author

    Susan Carlyle and Sean Matgamna

    The development of industrial society threw masses of women into the factories. Whole industries, like the cotton industry, had a majority of women and children workers, existing in terrible conditions of super exploitation; as Marx put it in Capital, “Robbed of all that had previously been considered necessary for life".(1)

    Middle-class women, on the other hand, were thrown into the home. Whereas previously such women, wives of artisans and so on, had taken part together with their husbands and children in production, now they became ladies of leisure, locked into the home. They were deprived

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