Workers' Liberty

For the Organisation of the Working Youth

(This is a reply to an article in 'Communist Student', the newspaper of the student group linked to the CPGB/Weekly Worker.

“Red” Ken Livingstone’s campaign for re-election is being supported with a high profile statement signed by... trade union militants? left activists? anti-cuts campaigners?

By MARTIN THOMAS

The Weekly Worker group invited an AWL member to debate Iraq (or was it Iran? their story is not clear) at their recent summer school.

by Albert Glotzer
Many of the core activists of today’s left had their thinking shaped by the dramatic struggles of 1979-84, or of the late 1960s and early 70s — times when capitalism seemed to be in intractable crisis, and mass working-class action to change society was a prospect near at hand.

Farooq Tariq, general secretary of the socialist group Labour Party of Pakistan, has been released from prison following his detention without charge by Pakistani security forces. Released on 19 June after a 16-day detention, Tariq describes his imprisonment as “one the of worst jail experiences I’ve had during my 30 years of political activism”.

Parables for Socialists 9

How can you tell when a political purge has turned into a witchhunt, and the witch-hunt has taken on a momentum of its own?

A delegation from the AWL attended the annual fete of the French Trotskyist organisation Lutte Ouvriere on 26-28 May.

By Martin Thomas

Solidarity Scotland, Tommy Sheridan's splinter group from the SSP, has found reasons to gloat despite its electoral rout.

In the first round of the French presidential election, on 22 April, postal worker Olivier Besancenot, standing for the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, won 1.5 million votes (4.11%). That was 300,000 more votes for Besancenot than in the 2002 poll, which at the time was considered a surprisingly good score for a revolutionary candidate.

Unlike the SWP, Permanent Revolution, the group expelled from Workers Power last year, are quite consistent. They supported Argentina in the war and still think they were right to do so. They have posted to this effect, attacking the position of Socialist Organiser/Workers’ Liberty not only on their own website, but on ours too.

“The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce.”
James Connolly

Ted Grant, the last survivor from the leading figures of the Trotskyist movement of the 1940s died last July.

Occasionally you find something in the “left” press which is so bad it makes you sit up, blink and wonder if you’ve read it correctly. Even by the usual low standards of the Morning Star, its 22 March article on the House of Lords was astonishing.

By Amina Saddiq

Occasionally, just occasionally, you find something in the "left" press which is so bad it makes you sit up, blink and wonder if you've read it correctly. Even by the usual low standards of the Morning Star, its 22 March article on the House of Lords was an astonishing example.

Mark Osborn discusses the recent split in Workers Power which was covered in detail in Solidarity 3/96

The Zionist connection. News Line editorial, Saturday, April 9, 1983

A powerful Zionist connection runs from the so-called left of the Labour Party right into the centre of Thatcher's government in Downing Street. There is no difficulty what ever in proving this.

This article was written in 1993 by Martin Thomas and Jim Denham as an introduction to a large collection of documents dealing with Workers' Power
Workers' Power, a tale of kitsch Trotskyism. Documents 1973-93 (not available online, but available for £3 post-free from the AWL office).

Steve Cohen reviews A Margin of Hope – An Intellectual Autobiography by Irving Howe

By Simon Ball

On 1 July, the “League for the Fifth International” (L5I) issued a statement announcing the expulsion of about a third of its members. It has now been revealed that there has been a faction fight going on inside the L5I for two years.

Solidarity spoke to Chris Leary, a former youth activist in Workers Power who left the group in January 2006.

This is an editorial from Solidarity’s forerunner, Socialist Organiser (27 September 1984

In July 2006, the "League for the Fifth International", an international left grouping centred round the Workers Power group in Britain, expelled about one-third of its members.

On Saturday I went to Socialist Resistance's Latin America dayschool, which had sessions focusing in particular on Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba. While there was open discussion where members from other groups could say what they thought - all too rare for many left "schools" - I felt that key questions about the character of these governments were ignored, and it had little focus on independent, working class politics.

The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) has been debating the left’s response to the victory of the Islamist party, Hamas, in the Palestinian legislative elections on 25 January 2006.

An initial response by Nicolas Qualander appeared in the LCR’s paper, Rouge, of 23 February. We print here a translated extract of a reply to Qualander by Christian Picquet published in Rouge, 2 March 2006.

SWP on MAB; Respect's money; Labourstart; the Socialist Alliance's money; "Unite against terror"

By Alan Thomas

The conference of the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform (SADP) on 12 March was bigger than I had expected: 40–50 present over the day.

There were the usual SADP faces, people from the Alliance for Green Socialism, and a national mobilisation of ex-WRPers/Morenoites. Also Hillel Ticktin from Critique, John Bridge and a couple more from the CPGB, and the Red Party.

• Workers' Power - lessons for the revolutionary left by Martin Thomas and Jim Denham, 1993.
  
  
  

• Socialist Action - the greatest defeats? - documents 1989-1993.
  
  

This report by Chris Jones on the discussions on Merseyside about launching a new "United Socialist Party" is abridged from the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform email list.

Two of Livingstone's top advisors - Redmond O'Neill and John Ross - are members of Socialist Action (a self-styled Trotskyist group).