Workers Party/ ISL archive

1916: The Easter Rising

Ireland and the Revolutionary Tradition of Easter Week From Labor Action , 14 April 1941 Easter Sunday morning, 1916. Three o'clock. James Connolly. Irish revolutionary leader, was talking to his daughter and some of her friends, all asking why the revolt so carefully prepared had been countermanded. Connolly knew that the arms from Germany had been intercepted, he knew that the arrangements had broken down, but he knew that the British government was going to strike. He could not let the revolt be stamped out without resistance. It seemed to him, and rightly, that the resulting demoralisation...

The Warsaw ghetto and the meaning of resistance

Warsaw wrote two brilliant chapters in its history during the war, and also entered a dark blot on its pages. The first was the uprising, against the Nazi occupation, of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, starting on 19 April 1943 and lasting about six weeks. This struggle of the Jews, and especially of the Jewish workers, against overwhelming odds is one of the most glorious episodes in the book of struggles of oppressed peoples and labour for freedom. The second event took place a year and a half later in October 1944. This, often referred to as the Warsaw Insurrection, was the work of the...

Why is the working class central?

Hal Draper answers the question: why is the working class fundamental to the socialist project? Why do socialists believe there is a special connection between their own great goal of a new society and the interests of labour, this one segment of society? Is it because we “idealise” workers as being better, or more clever, or more honest, or more courageous, or more humanitarian, than non-workers? Isn’t it rather true that the workers have time and again followed reactionary courses and leaders and have by no means shown any invariable affinity for progressive causes? ... Aren’t they filled...

Three giants of the socialist revolution

January marks the anniversaries of the deaths of three giants of revolutionary socialism — Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Lenin. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were theorists and organisers of the German working-class revolution of 1918–9. They were executed by the German state, aided by the reformist labour leaders, in January 1919. The articles printed here — Liebknecht’s “In spite of all!” and Luxemburg’s “Order is established in Berlin” — were their last. The “Spartacus” they refer to is the Spartacus League, the Marxist group around Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Clara Zetkin which founded...

Complete run of Labor Action online

David Walters has announced the completion of a major milestone for the Left Opposition Digitization Project for the Marxist Internet Archive: the complete run of Labor Action, the newspaper of the Workers Party (U.S.) and Independent Socialist League from 1940 through the Autum of 1958. Writers for this paper included, among others, Max Shachtman, James T. Farrell, C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper, and Irving Howe. The 19 years of Labor Action represents approx. 1,000 issues published, over half of which are full broadsheet in size. Presented in beautifylly digitaly optimized PDFs...

Why we should not back US Democrats

Introduction With Mitt Romney’s scorn for “the 47%”, many left-minded people will conclude that they must support Barack Obama in the USA’s presidential election in November. The Democratic Party is firmly controlled by capitalist interests; Obama’s administration has increased inequality in the USA; yet the TUC’s pamphlet for 20 October sets up Obama’s policies as a model for Britain. “USA shows the way”. When Franklin D Roosevelt was president, from 1933 until his death in 1945, and put through the “New Deal”, the political gap between Democrats and Republicans in the USA was even wider than...

The Workers' Party USA: “The freest party I ever belonged to”

In Solidarity 242, we began series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the USA — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who broke from the SWP USA in 1939/40 to form the Workers Party, and the tradition they built (the Independent Socialist League, and later the Independent Socialists and International Socialists). Here, we reprint an extract from a speech by Al Glotzer given at the “Oral History of the American Left Conference”, organised by the Tamiment Library in New York from May 6-7, 1983. The conference brought together many of the...

James Connolly

[A text of the Irish Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, 1947] On Easter Monday 1916, some hundreds of republicans and socialists rose in arms in Dublin to overthrow the centuries-old British rule in Ireland. Among their leaders was James Connolly, who for most of the years since 1896 had been the leading writer and agitator for socialism in Ireland and amongst the Irish in America [1903 -1910]. Ever since 1916 Connolly’s name has been widely honoured in nationalist Ireland, and ever since then significant minorities have tried or pretended, in one way or another, to continue his...

Matt Merrigan on the IRA in the mid-fifties

An article by Matt Merrigan in the New York "Shachtmanite" weekly, Labor Action, 19 September 1955, vol.19 no.38. The original title was "Festering Sore: the Partition of Ireland", and it was datelined "Dublin, August 24". The Irish and English papers in the last few weeks have featured the Irish Republican Army's raids on British military installations as precursors of an all-out campaign to focus world attention on the continued partition of Ireland by Britain. The raid on Arborfield Barracks in Berkshire, England, by IRA commandos; and the removal of thousands of rounds of ammunition and a...

The last speech of Bartolomeo Vanzetti

This is the famous last speech of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the class-war prisoner who, alongside Nicolo Sacco, both of them Anarchists, died in the electric chair in August 1927. This speech despite its broken English, is so beautiful and moving that it falls naturally into verse form. No-one has ever expressed more splendidly and with such stirring, simple language the aspirations and hopes of all those who fight for a better world. Once read, these words form part of every socialist's heritage. This typographical arrangement of Vanzetti’s speech first appeared in Labor Action, an American...

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