Anti-Fascism

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Open letter to a direct-action militant

Comrade, We are sympathetic to the direct action taken against banks, Fortnum & Mason, the Ritz Hotel and other locations throughout central London on Saturday 26 March. We will not join in with moralistic condemnations of your “violence”, nor will we go along with attempts to “disown” you or pretend you are not part of our movement. Indeed, some Workers’ Liberty members were involved in the direct actions which took place on Saturday. We will not join in with attempts in the media and elsewhere to create a division between respectable, non-violent direct-action activists and “bad”...

Climate Camp shuts down...itself

The Camp for Climate Action, a network of direct-action environmentalists, whose main activity has been to organise a series of annual protest camps between 2006-2010, has dissolved itself. I was involved with the network for most of that time. The 2007 Climate Camp at the site of the proposed third runway at Heathrow airport was the first political activity I got seriously involved in. I already thought of myself as a socialist and had read a couple of things. Growing up and going to school and college where I did had given me an embryonic understanding of class, and racism. But it was all...

New revolutions need clarity not confusionism

Hardt and Negri’s musings on the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East ( Guardian , 25 February 2011) are a studied exercise in rapacity. Having mapped the road to nowhere for the anti-capitalist movement a decade ago, these confusionists now seem intent on misdirecting the great revolutionaries who’ve topped dictators. Read the rest of the article here .

Running scared... to the PR spivs

We know that web-based organisations like Wikileaks and UK Uncut are doing a great job, but it is still gratifying to read that corporate Britain is running scared as a result. The question is, will it make the tax dodgers clean up their act. PR Week gives us some clues, but it’s not good news! The report reveals: “One senior agency source told PR Week that boardrooms across the UK were fearful of web-based organisations such as Wikileaks and UKUncut. ‘A lot of corporate Britain is running scared’, said the source”. Leading corporate PR company chief executive, Nick Murray-Leslie of Chatsworth...

Does socialism make sense in the 21st century? A discussion

This pull-out has now been made into a book with other materials. You can buy the book online here . This feature follows on from, and refers to, the “Socialism in disarray” series in previous issues of Solidarity. Click here for part two of the feature ; and click here to download the whole feature as pdf . Part One A: Let me first outline the case for socialism as I see it. Then we will discuss it. The world in which we live is wracked by terrible crises and now by protracted economic depression, by local wars, by famine and starvation in Africa and elsewhere, by ecological disasters now and...

Does socialism make sense in the 21st century? A discussion. Part Two.

Click here for part one . The subjective case for socialism B: But why should I want socialism? Capitalism has, despite the terrible events of the 20th century, and not denying them either, learned a great deal. We have been through a tremendous cycle of capitalist boom and expansion. Things have been getting better, progressively, for a lot of people, for a sizeable portion of humankind, over decades. And why should I want a social levelling-down, to a grey social uniformity and conformity? Why should I pretend that people as people are equal, when they are not equal in capacity, propensity...

Taming the beast by "consultation"?

Lib-Dem Vince Cable, Business Secretary in the coalition government, has described capitalism as a ravening beast... and proposed to tame it by severe tut-tutting. "Markets are often irrational or rigged", declared Cable at the Lib Dem conference on 21 September. He will "shine a harsh ligh into the murky world of corporate behaviour... "Why do directors sometimes forget their wider duties when a fat cheque is waved before them? Capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can..." A Lib-Dem explicating Cable's speech to the Guardian added: "Capitalism left to its own devices...

Tony Benn: the time to organise resistance to this government of millionaires is now!

We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. Join us in the fight It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government's budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services. The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers'...

Markets: mad or just drunk?

When bourgeois apologists talk about the marvellous qualities of the free market as a regulator of economic life, remember what "the market" means in real life! On 30 June 2009 the world oil price suddenly surged, alarmingly. According to the Financial Times, market experts thought some dramatic turn in world politics must be behind the surge, and it "prompted concerns about the impact of rising energy prices on the weak economic recovery". Within days they found that the surge had been due to one individual, working for a Mayfair oil broker, who fired up his laptop after a party and traded...

Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution

Contents One: An Urgent Political Question Two: What Can We Learn From the Resolution of the Third Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. on a Provisional Revolutionary Government? Three: What Is Meant by “The Revolution's Decisive Victory Over Tsarism”? Four: The Abolition of the Monarch. The Republic Five: How Should “The Revolution Be Advanced”? Six: Whence is the Proletariat Threatened with the Danger of Finding Itself with Its Hands Tied in the Struggle Against the Inconsistent Bourgeoisie? Seven: The Tactics of “Eliminating the Conservatives From the Government” Eight: Osvobozhdeniye and New-Iskra...

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