Workers' Liberty

According to the official history of MI5, Britain’s spy-hunters considered Jack Jones, the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in the 1970s who died recently, to be a paid agent of the USSR.

[The following article was an "As We Were Saying" column in Socialist Organiser, in 1991, during the Walton by-election.

Introduction

Whilst the participation of Rifondazione Comunista and other parties of the “radical left” in the Prodi government of 2006-08 was clearly a serious mistake and has been belatedly acknowledged as such by Bertinotti himself (see il Manifesto, 6 April 2008), Hugh Edwards is wrong to concentrate his fire on Bertinotti and the PRC

Christian Picquet, former editor of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire paper Rouge, will no longer be able to hold on to his full-time post in the LCR office after the poor level of support won by his tendency at their recent conference.

Support Edinburgh and Liverpool!

Liverpool and Edinburgh councils are now moving towards a decisive confrontation with the Tories.

The recent political collapse of much of the local government left in
face of the Tory offensive was not inevitable. Other and better
things were possible.

The bitter experience of Labour in government in 1964-70 and in 1974-9 pushed many activists away from reformism and towards revolutionary socialism.

The left devotes much of its efforts to campaigning against imperialism, which is no surprise given the present foreign policy of the American and British governments.

Janine on Stroppyblog er... argues with the argument that "the left should just stop arguing among themselves".

The Jewish-Palestinian Arab conflict is one of the most complex political questions that confront the serious Marxist left. We publish an editorial from the US publication May-June 2007 issue of Against The Current, and a response from Sean Matgamna.

Dear comrades,

I want to discuss the “Letters from the Editors”, entitled “Nakba One, Two, Three?”, in the May-June 2007 issue of Against The Current.

It seems to me that one of the fundamental responsibilities of those who fight for a rational, working-class, socialist, and consistently democratic approach to the Jewish-Arab conflict is to work to counter the demonisation of Israel and the pervasive falsification of the history of the Israeli Jews, to banish it to the dunghill to which history has consigned the other products of Stalinism.

THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT, NEW LABOUR, AND WORKING-CLASS REPRESENTATION: Class, union and party. By John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna. April 2004.

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007
Those of you who have not been to NUT Annual Conference for a few years may find the experience a very odd one.

By Martin Thomas

This is a reply to comments on the Labour Party question by Chris Ford and Tom Rigby posted on the awl-chat list in January. I've reproduced Chris's and Tom's comments below for easy reference. For previous rounds in this debate, click here and here.

At the AWL summer school in July 2006, John McDonnell MP, Maria Exall and Sean Matgamna debated "Blair, new Labour's crisis and the fight for working class representation". Hear John McDonnell's speech by downloading this MP3 file.

As Leon Trotsky once wrote, the revolutionary party is the memory of the working class. It is, it must be, also the memory of the Marxist movement itself.