Workers' Liberty

Issy Wyner, one of the pioneers of Australian Trotskyism, has died. Read obituaries by John Percy, by Tony Stephens, and by Ruth Braham; and click here for a review of Hall Greenland's biography of Issy's close comrade Nick Origlass.

Part 1 was in Solidarity 3/136. In this second part, the author traces the history of the German workers’ movement in the decade before Hitler consolidated power. It was published in the US Marxist journal Fourth International in February 1943.

Those who do not know what the working class movement has done will not be able to imagine what it is capable of doing and will do in the future. Much of the real history of the movement is lost; it is one of the central functions of revolutionary socialists to act as the custodian of the memory of the working class and its movement.

The Ottoman Empire existed from 1299 until its abolition by Mustafa Kemal’s Turkish nationalists in 1923. At the height of its power, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Empire spread from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Persian Gulf and from southeastern Europe down to the Red Sea.

HM Hyndman, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century thought that “supposing the time had been ripe in England, as many then believed, for a great social revolution, one important fact stood in the way of both the political and physical force revolutionists. In all serious upheavals, previous… London had taken a leading part… This was not the case in the days of Chartism”.

MAURA RUA

Did you hear of "Maura Ru" — Red Mary? She
Betrayed her absent husband: Queen, Tyrant,
Red murdress hated by the tenantry
She tortured for the craic, and racked by rent.

ROOTS
Cockney in voice, English by birth
And domicile, he hears, one apart,
The teacher's cool, cold dissertation:

THE DESTINY OF LAMBS

"The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want!"

We fight the sea at Kronstadt

Across the frozen, hostile, misted sea
To Kronstadt, to attack secured White Guards
Manning the garrison there, mysteriously

'The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be... the conflict between 'the West and the Rest' and the responses of non-Western civilisations to Western power and values'.

The Treason Of The Intellectuals

Bookless, you have the one sweet narrow time,
Can know only your own brief hungry place,
Live in a small slow-burning carapace

On 7 November 1977 a pitched battle took place on the streets of North London between the police and thousands of workers. It was one event in a year-long strike for trade union recognition.

Means versus ends

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Trotsky knew:
I see the bright green strip of grass
Beneath the wall
And the clear blue sky
Above the wall
And sunlight everywhere
Life is beautiful

The General Convention of the Industrious Classes opened in London on 4 February 1839, riding high on a wave of popular unrest and unparalleled mass mobilisations. London Democrat William Cardo wrote that the “Parliament of the House of Lords and Commons would soon be assembled… and at the same time another Parliament, the People’s Parliament would assemble… there would be the spirit of the English people”.

What in Britain is higher food prices, and poorer households having less to spend on non-essentials, in much of the world is outright famine - not because of adversities of nature, but because the poor now cannot afford to buy enough food at the higher prices. At the same time rich governments stuff billions into bankers' pockets to keep them afloat.

May Day, the International Workers’ Day, is known as a commemoration of the Haymarket riots in Chicago on 4 May 1886. But the reason why May Day was first celebrated internationally — the struggle for the eight-hour working day — is often forgotten.

The London Democratic Association advocated the overthrow of the English ruling classes by means of revolution. They rejected outright any limiting of the Chartist movement to pacifist — or “moral force” — principles.

In 1919 Glasgow was in the grip of a general strike. Although the strike began with the limited demand of a cut in the working Week, it raised — as general strikes do by their very nature — the question of power in society.

1919 was a year of turmoil all over Europe.

In March 1947, an immense crowd of people, 200,000 of them, many of the men bare-headed in freakishly Arctic weather, marched through Dublin behind the coffin of Jim Larkin, the founder of the modern

In 1919 Glasgow was in the grip of a general strike. Although the strike began with the limited demand of a cut in the working week, it raised - as general strikes do by their very nature - the question of power in society.

March 17 1968. 20,000 gather in Trafalgar Square for a rally and march to the US Embassy in protest against the US war in Vietnam. The Square is full of the flags of the National Liberation Front (the “Vietcong”), who, only weeks previously had launched the Tet Offensive that had taken a largely rural guerilla war into the cities of Vietnam, getting as far as the gates of the US Embassy in the capital Saigon.

I have read with interest — and some amusement — Sean Matgamna’s history of the “Irish debate” in IS and elsewhere on the left in the period from the late 1950s to (presumably) the early 197

The popular image of Victorian consists of scenes of upper class decadence, lower class destitution and a stifling morality. Working people are passive, society is stable, and the best they can hope for is a rich philanthropist to save Oliver Twist from hardship. That is a fabrication, the creation of historical spin doctors.

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