Workers' Liberty

Socialism 2007, the Socialist Party's weekend of discussion and debate, took place on 17-18 November and attracted around 900 members. The weekend was organised into three sessions of two hour debates or talks and a rally on the Saturday and Sunday. Having worked with Socialist Students in Oxford before recently joining the AWL I had bought a ticket some time ago. Furthermore, having never been at one of these events before I had no idea what to expect.

Dave Prentis clearly signalled in his conference speech that organised left activists were in his sights.

The Unison local government conference saw an attack on Socialist Party comrades from four branches who had tried to raise the issue of why Standing Orders Committee had ruled out of order so many motions. The leaflet they produced had used the “three wise monkeys” as a symbol of how their questioning of the decisions had been ignored. This was laughably deemed to be racist and an investigation is underway.

Three leading SWP activists are also under fire from their employers, the union or both.

The Socialist Party has backed Gordon Brown for Labour leader! Unbelievable? Can't be true? No, it's true.

“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.

Dear comrades,

Do you support John McDonnell’s campaign against Gordon Brown for the Labour Party leadership?

It is twenty years since the final collapse of the left-wing Liverpool Labour council of 1983-6.

Through that council, the avowedly Marxist “Militant Tendency” had the leadership of a mass workers’ movement which could have shaken or defeated the government. Arguably it marked the highest point ever (so far) of active mass influence for would-be revolutionary Marxists in Britain, higher than anything achieved by the Communist Party when it was a revolutionary party in the 1920s.

May 83 Labour makes gains in elections for one-third of Liverpool City Council’s seats and wins the Council from the Liberals (who have controlled it since 1973). Militant supporters are central in the new council Labour group.

Open Letter to the Socialist Party for its "Campaign for a New Workers' Party" conference, 19 March 2006.

By Rhodri Evans

The Socialist Party has launched a “Campaign for a New Workers’ Party”.

Selling Solidarity outside the annual conference, this weekend, of the George Galloway/ SWP coalition "Respect", I thought the crowd looked thinner, older, and more dispirited than at the "Respect" conference last year.

• The RSL (Militant) in the 1960s - a study in passivity by Sean Matgamna, 1998.

• Liverpool and Militant by Martin Thomas.

Note: This article was written in 1981. The theoretical framework on which it rests is not adequate.

We regarded Russia as a 'degenerated workers' state', and made a distinction between the Stalinist states in which the old ruling class had been destroyed, and states such as Egypt then, whose state economies we called 'state capitalism' because the old ruling class had survived and the statification of the economy was not likely to last (in Egypt the bought-out capitalists could trade their government bonds on the Cairo stock exchange). The collapse of the USSR in 1991 shows such distinctions to have been a lot less definite than we then thought. The description of the USSR as a 'degenerated workers' state' can now be seen to have been wrong, and wrong since about 1928, when the Stalinist bureaucracy made itself "sole master of the surplus product", to use Trotsky's description of it. In my opinion, the Stalinist states were best described as a distinct form of class society, 'bureaucratic collectivism'. Other comrades in Solidarity and Workers' Liberty think the Stalinist states were a form of 'state capitalism', using 'state capitalism' differently from the way it was used in this article 22 years ago.

Letter from Hannah Sell, on behalf of the Socialist Party, "to the signatories to the 'Declaration for a left electoral challenge to New Labour': George Galloway MP, Salma Yaqoob, Lindsey German, John Rees, Linda Smith, Ken Loach, George Monbiot, Bob Crow, Mark Serwotka". 17 December 2003.
(Note: as of latest reports to date, Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka have not yet signed the appeal. They have been spoken of by the SWP as certain to do so, and presumably Hannah Sell based her letter on those assurances).

The Socialist Party have won a second council seat in Lewisham, south-east London, through a by-election. Local AWL and Socialist Alliance members helped with the SP campaign. Read the SP's press release here.

It seems that the AWL has been a (relatively minor) victim of a scam being operated in the Ukraine by members of the Taaffe group's (CWI) section.