Workers' Liberty

Evolving out of the trade unions, adopting a formal commitment to socialism only in 1918, two decades after its formation, the Labour Party puzzled and perplexed European Marxists.

Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature (2nd edition 2007, Zed books)

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

Continuing a series on the life and times of Tom Mann with an account of the London dock strike of 1889.

Cathy Nugent continues a series on the life and times of Tom Mann

When Tom Mann joined the Social Democratic Federation in May 1885 he was nearly thirty years old. That would have been an advanced age to be converted to socialism by the standards of later, more revolutionary times. But then these were not yet revolutionary times, and socialist ideas had been quite thin on the ground in Britain up to the beginning of the 1880s.

By Laura Schwartz

In 1868 Karl Marx wrote a letter to Kugelman announcing the election of Harriet Law to the General Council of the First International. The election of a woman to the otherwise all male International was, in 1868, certainly noteworthy.

By Barry Finger
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"That is the mentality which sees socialism in the far distance and is really chained to the idea that what workers want is a higher standard of living, ‘a full dinner pail’, ‘peace’, ‘full employment’. All he has done is to hold fast to the existent, making it tolerable by patching up the holes. That is the next stage of socialism. Shachtman is that type complete.

By Cathy Nugent

The socialist and trade union organiser Tom Mann was a rather exceptional person. Not because he was a great socialist theorist — although he published many pamphlets in the course of a political life which only ended when he died in 1941, as a member of the Communist Party.

By Barry Finger

“That is the mentality which sees socialism in the far distance and is really chained to the idea that what workers want is a higher standard of living, ‘a full dinner pail’, ‘peace’, ‘full employment’. All he has done is to hold fast to the existent, making it tolerable by patching up the holes. That is the next stage of socialism. Shachtman is that type complete.

By Ernest Haberkern
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I couldn't agree more with Chris Ford's comments on the style in which the discussion surrounding the splits in the Trotskyist movement on the "Russian Question" have been conducted.

From Factional Struggle and Party Leadership, November 1953

By Max Shachtman. Labor Action, 27 August 1951

By Chris Ford

Below Dale Street tells the story of Guy Aldred. A forgotten figure now, he was, for many years, an important socialist “personality”.

The top officials of the GMB today would be horrified to know it, but Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor, played a major leading role in the early history of their movement. She was active strike organiser and a member of the executive of the Gas Workers and General Labours' Union, one of a number of unions which later fused to form the General and Municipal Workers Union, which became the GMB. Fran Brodie describes the life of Eleanor Marx and the early days of the Marxist organisation In the British labour movement

James D Young (Workers' Liberty 32) is too starry-eyed about C L R James.

C L R James died on 31 May 1989, at the age of 88.