Workers' Liberty

1. Why and how did nation-states arise? Why does Trotsky argue that the capitalist development of the forces of production has come into conflict with the European nation-state framework?

Leon Trotsky once said that the small revolutionary movement he led was like the apex of an inverted social pyramid, upon which the whole weight of capitalist society pressed down. Hounded and murdered by fascists and Stalinists, the Trotskyists suffered terrible casualties during and immediately after the Second World War, all across Europe, from France to Greece. The politics of independent working class socialism, which the Trotskyists represented, was everywhere defeated.

World War Two created extremely difficult circumstances and political challenges for internationalist Marxists.

By summer 1943 the Axis war machine was suffering heavy setbacks. Although Hitler had completed a total occupation of France in November 1942, and still held on to his conquests in the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and parts of western Russia, the Axis powers no longer looked able to win the war.

No. 1 July 1943

is proletarian revolution coming?

The Stalinist bureaucrats have dissolved the Comintern. “Warning”, declares the Axis propaganda, “this is just a manoeuvre, a chimera, playing dead”. “Hurrah!” the Anglo-Saxon imperialist press cries with joy, “our allies are not communists, they are good Russian patriots”. “Of course, it’s just a manoeuvre” is the rationalisation the communist worker still committed to the Third International

No. 2 August 1943

German soldiers have received the Nazi press’s parcimonious news on events in Italy with bewilderment and with anxiety.

No. 3 September 1943 (This issue is dedicated to the end of the fourth year of the second world imperialist war)

The real face of the war

No. 2 Summer 1943

[Illegible] I came back from leave a few days ago and I was amazed by the situation in Germany. What I saw is not easy to describe.

May 1944

The SPD leadership’s treachery in the First World War left the German working class disarmed. Talk of revolution was smothered by the state of emergency. Therefore it was liberating when on 1 May 1916 Karl Liebknecht organised a demonstration in Potsdamer Platz with the support of thousands of workers from Berlin,

Soldiers! Comrades! A new and decisive phase of the Second World War has begun. Anglo-American capital has launched its troops on the offensive on the European continent. With 4,000 warships, 13,000 planes and half a million soldiers they have begun landings on the French Atlantic coast.

July 1944

Soldiers who fought in Russian remain confused about the contradictory character of Soviet life: on the one hand great, undeniable progress in the cities, including new houses, large roads and modern

(A letter from a soldier)

By Sean Matgamna

The two month "Falklands War" between Britain and Argentina in 1982 was a freak event. It was part of no larger conflict; no issue other than possession of the islands was involved.

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This is how the "victory to Argentina" section of the WSL argued their case, in their major initial statement (WSL Internal Bulletin 7, June 1982).

In 1982, the Socialist Workers’ Party, still retaining bits of a “Third Camp” (independent working class) political tradition from its old slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism”, took a roughly similar attitude on the British-Argentine war over the Falkland Islands to that of Socialist Organiser, forerunner of Workers’ Liberty.

Part One

... And Argentine nationalism?
Argentina suffered British and French intervention some 140 years ago. Modern Argentina, however, has essentially taken shape over the last 100 years. Argentina had no war of liberation. Its population is, to within one per cent, of European immigrant origin — most from immigration within the last 100 years. Its mass popular nationalism dates from the 1920s. This nationalism was, especially in its labour movement manifestations, shaped and consolidated by Peronism.

By Sean Matgamna: from
Workers’ Socialist Review no.2, 1982

Time and again the same quotations from Trotsky have been used to justify a pro-Argentine stance in the Falklands/Malvinas war But the main thing the quotations prove is the pro-Argentine comrades’ lack of grip on the points in dispute.

By Sean Matgamna

Of course you know the story. A man is in the market place, and he sees Death, and Death looks at him intently, recognising him.

Some people refuse to learn. Others refuse to remember. And still others remember what they have learned only up to the moment when events call upon them to put it into practice, whereupon they start to forget. Critics of the Independent Socialist League’s position on the war are asking that we support the United States in the war, not only in Korea, but in the Third World War that is being prepared.

Why is there any need to publish a memoir of the Holocaust? Who but a few on the fringes of society deny the genocide happened? The reason to publish is because a significant section of the left has twisted its solidarity with the oppressed into de facto support for organisations who deny that the Holocaust happened.

In the last issue of Solidarity, Mordecai Ryan outlined the history
of the ILP, the main British "centrist" organisation of the 1930s and 40s. Its nearest equivalent in Britain today is the SWP. As mud is a mix of earth and water so centrism is an unstable and almost always incoherent mix of bits of revolutionary Marxist political tradition and aspiration with alien, reformist, etc elements.

The leading American Trotskyist, James P Cannon spoke at a memorial meeting in New York for Leon Trotsky on 22 August 1945. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had just taken place (August 6 and 9), and Cannon used the occasion to express his outrage at the atrocity.

During the recent Holocaust memorial week, the following question was posed many times in the media: has humanity learned the lessons of the Nazi genocide? The question is hard to answer in sound-bites. In fact, there was very little discussion about what the lessons might be.

By August Grabski*

On 27 January the presidents of Israel, Poland and Russia as well as the representatives of over 40 governments honoured the victims of the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz. Auschwitz is built near the town of Oswiecim in Poland. Here, during World War 2, the Nazis killed one million Jews, 19,000 Gypsies and 70,000 Poles and Russians.

Just before and on 27 January, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, part of the Polish radical left participated in small demos in a few cities (e.g., Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Poznan).