What “Free Schools” mean
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24 free schools have opened in the UK and many more are planned to open next September.
Battle of Ideas
Do you really want the EU to break up? An open letter to Britain's left
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Dear comrades,
Do you really want the European Union to break up?
Anti-capitalist, pro-what?
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Anti-Capitalist Initiative website
On 28 April some dozens of activists came together in London, at a meeting primarily organised by a group of people (Simon Hardy, Luke Cooper, and others) who had just quit the Workers' Power organisation. The meeting set up an "Anti-Capitalist Initiative".
The "Perdition" affair
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In early 1987 there was a public controversy about "Perdition", a play by Jim Allen, a radical writer with a Trotskyist background, which was scheduled to be directed by Ken Loach at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
Critics claimed that the play, representing Zionists as collaborating with the Nazis in the massacre of Jews in Hungary, was anti-Jewish, and designed primarily to "delegitimise" Israel; defenders argued that it was being banned for highlighting awkward truths.
The Royal Court cancelled the production at a late stage. Later, the play, in an amended version, was published, and in 1999 it was performed at the Gate Theatre in London.
- Sean Matgamna's critique of "Perdition" in Workers' Liberty 6, arguing against the cancellation under pressure but contending that the play was indeed anti-Jewish
- Tony Greenstein's first polemic
- Sean Matgamna takes a second look at "Perdition"
- Tony Greenstein's second polemic
- Sean Matgamna's second reply
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Economists debate Europe
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Current European Union policies will produce "Great Depression conditions for a decade" in southern Europe, predicts economist Engelbert Stockhammer.
Four programmes for Euro-crisis
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The election results in France and Greece (6 May), and the forced resignation of militantly neo-liberal Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte (23 April), have thrown economic policy in the eurozone into flux.
North Korea: why are unions silent?
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The week leading up to May Day is commemorated each year around the world as “North Korea Freedom Week”, though you’d hardly know that if you were active in the British labour movement.
Permanent Revolution no.1, 1973
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Click on links below to download articles as pdf.
- Editorial: why we publish
- The working class and the Labour Party: review of Barry Hindess's book claiming that the Labour Party had lost its working-class roots
- The "dialectics" of the SLL: critique by Neal Smith
- Ken Tarbuck: notes on the transitional society
- Trotskyists and Palestine
- Programmes of the Irish Republicans
- Rosa Luxemburg on the Belgian general strike
- The Permanent Arms Economy theory: a critique by Phil Semp
- The Manchester engineers' dispute and the "new thinking" of the International Marxist Group
Anarchists disrupt May Day rallies
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Members of the Anarchist Federation in Nottingham, the “Autonomous Nottingham” group and some individuals staged a protest at the Nottingham May Day rally which ended up disrupting the whole rally.
PCS needs more than one-day strikes
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A famous politician once said: “You must be able at each particular moment to find the particular link in the chain which you must grasp with all your might in order to hold the whole chain and to prepare firmly for the transition to the next link”.
The heart of the “third camp”
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In Solidarity 242, 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.
How bureaucracy strangled the Russian Revolution -Workers' Liberty 3/37
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Click here to download as a pdf.
Lenin and Trotsky with Red Army soldiers, 1921
Dave Spencer, 1940-2012
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Dave Spencer died on 24 April 2012, at the age of 71.
Profiteers bleeding the NHS
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Last Tuesday, private health giants Capita and United Healthcare introduced themselves to London’s leading GPs with Andrew Lansley as matchmaker.
Marx: the shortlist
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A reading group in London on Marx's Capital volume 1, organised by Workers' Liberty, has recently completed its labours, and discussed what to study next.
'Apparatus Marxism', Twin of 'Academic Marxism'
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Introduction
Watching the accelerating political and moral degeneration of the Stalinised “Communist International" in the mid-1930s, Leon Trotsky entitled one of his commentaries “Is There No End To The Fall?" Had he been forced to observe the contemporary “revolutionary left" during the Balkans war of April-May 1999 he might have addressed the same incredulous and bitter question to a large proportion of those who name themselves “Trotskyists".
What is Trotskyism?
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By Max Shachtman
Our criticism of Trotsky’s later theory of the “workers’ state” introduces into it an indispensable correction. Far from “demolishing” Trotskyism, it eliminates from it a distorting element of contradiction and restores its essential inner harmony and continuity. The writer considers himself a follower of Trotsky, as of Lenin before him, and of Marx and Engels in the earlier generation.
Libya: the struggle for a constitution
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Those comrades who live near the poshest millionaire villas at Winnington Close, Hampstead may have noticed the removal vans over the last few days shipping out the Picassos and the Chagalls from number 7.
Fight for a workers' government!
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The labour movement can and must push back the Tory government on individual policies. To do more than damage limitation, however, the labour movement needs to drive this government from office.
Uses of religion
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While it was good to read the interview with Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association (Solidarity 242), it was disappointing to see Ira Berkovic falling into the trap of a formulaic denunciation of Richard Dawkins’ supposed views on religion.