Workers' Liberty

Page 1: Stop the BNP - for a working class campaign against fascism
Page 2: Israel/Palestine - Two states for two peoples!

The split between the SWP and Galloway-sycophants in Respect has politically destabilised and reduced both sides. Destabilised in the sense that the SWP was presented with the problem of sticking to its perspective of building a populist alternative to New Labour whilst the Galloway faction lost its best organisers and activists.

For the third time in 15 years Silvio Berlusconi has won a convincing victory in the Italian elections of 13-14 April. His rightwing People of Liberty party, along with his ally Umberto Bossi’s populist and racist Lega Nord (supported in wide areas of the north), has been guaranteed comfortable majorities in both houses of the Italian parliament.

By Hugh Edwards

Particularly since it expelled the bulk of its founders and trade union activists in 2006, the Workers Power group has been notable for combining rhetorical u

The mayor of London receives the salary of a Cabinet Minister - that is, £137,579 per annum plus expenses. The latter are bound to be high.

Pierre Lambert was in his time one of those “orthodox Trotskyists” who kept a banner of anti-Stalinist revolutionary Marxism flying in the worst years of Cold War and declining class struggle.

Statement from "L'Etincelle": The Central Committee of Lutte Ouvriere decided on the 2nd of February to "suspend" the "Etincelle" minority faction until the organisation's next congress, which will be in December.

The new Hands Off Venezuela film No Volverán (Never Again) is misnomer, because inspite of its title, it repeats the mistakes of earlier lefts.

“Exposed” in the current right wing campaign against Ken Livingstone, as the underground group central to Livingstone’s “team”, Socialist Action have always been a weird collection of individuals. Right-wing and strangely apolitical when Martin Thomas wrote this history in February 1991 (Socialist Organiser 476), they are much more right-wing today.

The left-wing website Indymedia seems to have allowed itself to be manipulated by the anti-semitic right again. A recent report on the site, citing the Iranian-government-sponsored Press TV (for which Yvonne Ridley works) as source, claims that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a former agent of the Israeli secret police Mossad.

Parables for Socialists 11
Now.. mainstream... politics in the media is reduced to a sub-species of sports commentary...The 'Revolutionary Communist Party' (RCP) was a small 1970s splinter of the SWP... middle-class cult in the 80s and early 90s... It functioned as an ideological scab-herding outfit during the great miners' strike of 1984-5

A few weeks ago I was at a meeting in Leeds, entitled “Socialist Feminism and the Fight for equality”, publicising Feminist Fightback,.

Review of Bryan D. Palmer, 2007, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928, University of Illinois Press

Greg Wilpert, Changing Venezuela By Taking Power: The Policies of the Chávez Presidency 1999-2006, Verso 2007

I had an interesting altercation with some rrr-revolutionary “anti-imperialists” Workers’ Power people at a post support group meeting yesterday.

A Debate between Nick Cohen, author of "What's Left"? and Sean Matgamna, at the Workers' Liberty Summer School, Ideas for Freedom, June 30th 2007

Sean Matgamna
Nick Cohen
Summations [And on-line discussion]

9/11: conspiracy cannot be dismissed

John Moeller, in his article ‘The “nine eleven truth” movement’ (Solidarity 3/110) makes a number of good points. But he fails to recognise that because some proponents of a theory are crackpots one must not dismiss what others, with some evidence to support them, are saying.

The old Workers' Socialist League of 1975-81, the Thornett group, was a break away from the Healy WRP... to the "right", by people who expected good things for the working class from the Wilson Labour government elected in February 1974.

By Gerry Bates

As we go to press, Arlette Laguiller, candidate of the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvriere (LO), looks like getting maybe five per cent of the poll, or one and a half million votes, in the first round of the French presidential election on 23 April.

Lutte Ouvriere itself, Laguiller’s organisation, is probably in real terms the strongest avowedly-Trotskyist organisation in the world, thanks to a solid and stable routine. They run 400 regular workplace bulletins. On a series of international questions, from Europe to Afghanistan, they and we have shared views differing from almost all the other would-be Trotskyist groups in the world.

Introduction

The following discussion between Tony Benn and Mark Osborn and John O'Mahony appeared in Socialist Organiser, 10 Septempber 1994)

An assessment of Nick Cohen's book

By Stan Crooke

Socialist Appeal and its international current, In Defence of Marxism are the foremost “Trotskyist” apologists for Hugo Chávez. Two recent articles they’ve produced indicate the extent of their disorientation as well as making me laugh.

By Sacha Ismail

Socialist Action, a tiny but deeply insidious group to be found mainly in Ken Livingstone’s office, are well-known for their support for Stalinism. Back in the days when they were still upfront about their views, they justified their enthusiastic support for the Soviet Union etc as “workers’ states” (usually without any qualifying adjective like “degenerated”) by reference to their elimination of the market through the nationalisation of everything that moved.

By Jim Denham

The Morning Star is the daily publication of the British Stalinist “left”. Prior to the collapse of the USSR and the Stalinist empire in 1989/90, it was subsidised by “Moscow gold”. Since then it's been subsidised by the dues of rank-and-file union members, most of whom are completely unaware that their hard-earned wages are being used to finance the last gasp of Stalinism in Britain.

There was a discussion at Workers' Liberty's 'Ideas for Freedom' discussion weekend about 'The Left and Cultural Relativism'. The two speakers were Janine Booth and Peter Tatchell. These are the notes from Janine's contribution.

BY THOMAS CAROLAN

This article will do no more than tabulate some of the symptoms and some of the causes of the political and moral chaos that has engulfed the erstwhile “revolutionary left”. In pursuit of “anti-imperialism” the most numerous force on the left — the SWP — is now in close alliance and makes solidarity with clerical-fascists such as Hamas and Hizbollah.

From Tribune 27 June 1958

Peter fryer: “stopped from marching”

Some most unfortunate incidents marred last Sunday’s demonstration organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.