At the end of 2004 and beginning of 2005 there was a strike wave in Iraq, which affected many sectors of industry. The fledgling labour movement is beginning to raise its head.
But it is still organisationally weak. It faces many dangers, both from the US/UK occupation which keeps Saddam’s labour laws on the books, and from the Islamist and neo-Ba’thist “resistance” gangs, which have killed and kidnapped trade unionists.
In Solidarity 242 (18 April 2012), we began publishing a series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the United States — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who believed that the Soviet Union was not a “workers’ state” (albeit a “degenerated” one), but an exploitative form of class rule to be as opposed as much as capitalism. They came to be organised under the slogan “neither Washington nor Moscow.”
A new political species has come into existence in our own day.
The existence of different species of plants and animals was recognized long before scientific analysis decided upon the differentiating characteristics which classified them. Since then, however, science has decided that the onion belongs to the very same family as the lily, but that the Douglas fir tree is not truly a fir tree at all; and the common name bellflower is used not for one genus but seven different ones.
Herman Benson was a founding member, along with Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, and others, of the Workers Party, which broke from the US Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the British group of the same name) in 1940 following a debate about how to understand the Stalinist state in Russia.
A leaflet produced by the small Irish Trotskyist group in the mid 1940s, after nationalists split the Irish trade union movement.
This is a leaflet produced by the Revolutionary Socialist Party, which was then the (small) Irish section of the Fourth International, some time soon after the splitting of the Irish trade union movement (Irish TUC) by Irish Transport and General Workers' Union leader William O'Brien and his allies.
An indispensable contribution to the understanding of the role of the Negro in American history is a study of the period between 1830 and 1865. In this article we treat the subject up to 1860.
Marx analysed the problem of a free press thoroughly in two long essays which are to be found in the first volume of the collected edition of his works.
For Marx “the right to think and speak the truth” was an elementary human right and freedom of the press — as he said — merely “human freedom in practice”. Marx recognized that human freedom is made up of a complex of interdependent freedoms.
The following report by Irving Howe of a debate on the record of Bolshevism is taken from the US Trotskyist Labor Action, the paper of the Workers’ Party. The debate between Max Shachtman of the Workers’ Party and Liston Oak, managing editor of the New Leader, took place in New York on 8 November 1946. The New Leader was a right-wing social-democratic journal. Liston Oak had been a member of the Communist Party of America.
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