Third Camp Marxism

A follow-up article by Trotsky on the pogroms of 1905, further to the 1908 article also entitled The Tsar’s Footsoldiers at Work. Above: a 1905 cartoon denouncing the pogroms.

Trotsky worked as a correspondent for a liberal paper in Kiev during the Balkan wars of 1913. In this article he demolished the liberal pretences of the Romanian monarchy by pointing to its oppression of the country's Jewish population.

Above: Grigorii Zinoviev, one of the Jewish defendants in the 1936 Moscow show trial

Extract from) Letter to Michael Puntervold (26/10/36)

Articles by Leon Trotsky on antisemitism and Jewish questions, translated into English by Stan Crooke.

• The Decomposition of Zionism – And What Might Succeed It (1904)

• The Tsar’s Footsoldiers at Work (1908)

• The Tsar's Footsoldiers at Work (1909)

• The Jewish Question in Romania (1913)

Above: On the boat to (eventually) Mexico (1941), Victor Serge on the very far left of the photo. The passengers also included the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the artist André Bréton.

The five-part BBC series Once Upon a Time in Iraq is interesting, and worth watching. And that is despite its peculiar omissions. Where is the struggle of the Kurds for freedom? Why no consideration of the fact that the state which benefited from the US war was, ironically, Iran?

Once Upon a Time is, instead, a story of the grandiose hubris of the US political elite, their political stupidity, their glib carelessness, their lack of concern for working-class Iraqis, and about the devastating impact of the disaster on the Iraqi people. Certainly, that is part of the truth.

The 1917 October Russian revolution produced the world’s first workers’ state. But how did the Bolsheviks govern? Historian Lara Douds has mined state and party archives in Moscow to produce an excellent book, Inside Lenin's Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State (2018) on how the central apparatus operated.

Whilst the mythos surrounding the independence struggle in Algeria of the 1950s and ‘60s, and the subsequent canonization of its central revolutionary party, the FLN, remains strong; less attention is paid by sections of the so-called “anti-imperialist” or ‘Third Worldist” left to the deficiencies of the clique that assumed power following independence.

When Donald Trump gave his inaugural speech to a poorly attended crowd in January 2017, he spoke of ending “the American carnage”.

Carnage isn’t a strong enough word for the three-pronged crisis the country now faces.

The Covid pandemic rages — 150,000 deaths and rising. Expect half a million virus fatalities come election time in November.

Trump’s behaviour continues to make a dreadful situation far worse as he undermines the advice of his own public health experts and continues to promote quack remedies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.

Outsourced cleaners in HMRC offices in Merseyside begin their next strike on Monday 3 August. They’ll strike until 28 August, demanding living wages and full occupational sick pay.

This latter demand is clearly vital in terms of safety and infection control during the pandemic, and is the central demand of the Safe and Equal campaign in which Workers’ Liberty members have been central, so hopefully Safe and Equal can play a role in supporting the strike.