Workers' Liberty 22: June 1995

Full PDF below. For decades Lenin’s small body of work on Ireland, filtered through a number of Stalinist pamphlets purporting to expound the ideas of “Marx, Engels and Lenin” on Ireland, has helped shape socialists’ views. In this extended review article, Sean Matgamna argues that this “Marxist dogmatism” has meant, in fact, giving up on any attempt at serious Marxist analysis. Lenin’s writings on Ireland were only casual journalism, worthless and worse if taken as paradigms for socialist politics. Click here for part 2 of the article. “The attempt... to ‘fix’ for all time the point of view...

Full PDF below. [In 1845] England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearances by force only. … The working masses of the towns demanded their share of political power — the People’s Charter. They were supported by the majority of the small trading class, and the only difference between the two was whether the Charter should be carried by physical or by moral force. Then came the commercial crash of 1847 and the Irish famine, and with both the prospect of revolution. The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle-class. The Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious...

Over the last decade, much has changed in the political culture of the lesbian ‘community’. Ten years ago, the dominant voices were those of ‘radical feminists’. ‘Radical feminism’ denounced heterosexual and bisexual women as collaborators with the enemy. Coming out as a lesbian was the only course to follow for a genuine feminist. But even being a lesbian was not enough. You could not fancy a woman because you would be treating her as a sex object. Penetration was mock heterosexuality; sadomasochism was completely beyond the pale. Socialist women could not be real feminists as we were members...

In the 19th century European capitalism developed industry, cleared away feudal restrictions, and also developed the working class. Marx and Engels argued for a recognition of the progressive role of capitalism and an alliance between the working class and middle-class revolutionaries. By analogy many would-be Marxists — Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher, for example, and, most crudely and shamelessly in Britain, “Militant” — have argued that Stalinist forces (that is, bureaucracies like the one that ruled in Russia from the 1930s, or the one that rules in China still) developed industry...

Walter Mosley was talking to Mark Osborn The big change for black Americans was World War 2. Men went to fight and found that they got respect. They were treated like Americans by the people who were trying to kill them, and by the people who thanked them for liberation. They came back from the war, thinking that they were now equals, to places like Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. But there was no work, and black people wouldn’t be hired anyway. So they went to California to get jobs. And then there was a basic economic change. The working people got property and property brought a different...