Workers' Liberty

[This is part of a polemic about the Stalinist PDP led army coup in Afghanistan, in April 1978, with "J-J" (Jack Conrad/John Bridge/John Chamberlain) of the Weekly Worker Group "CPGB").

Moishe Postone is speaking in London on Monday 15 Jun 2009 - 7:00pm, Room G50, SOAS, Thornhaugh St/ Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

Moishe Postone's talk is entitled "History, the Holocaust, and the Left". His article "History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism" is available for free download here.

There are striking parallels between the SWP's attitude to Islam over the last period and the way the Communist Party used to relate to Irish Catholic immigrants in Britain. I had some experience of that.

For a while, over forty years ago, I was involved in the work of the Communist Party among Irish people of devout Catholic background in Britain, people from the nearest thing to a theocracy in Europe, where clerics ruled within the glove-puppet institutions of a bourgeois democracy.

Rosalind Robson reviews Radio 4’s dramatisation of J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (Sundays 3pm)

I very much enjoy historical novels but JG Farrell’s Booker Prize winning book (part of a trilogy about the British Empire) had until now, escaped my notice.

Continuing a series on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and lies about the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

Download texts by Samir Amin, Ellen Wood, John Rees (see attachment): preliminary reading for AWL day schools.

AND THE RISING AFTER EASTER?

"And I'll be seeing Papa soon, please God"
Wrote Patrick Pearse, before they shot him dead,
Leave-taking from his mother; "We, please God,

We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable opposition.... Our tasks... we realize not through the medium of bourgeois governments... but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow. Such a 'defence' cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not even pretend to be miracle workers. As things stand, we are a revolutionary minority. Our work must be directed so that the workers on whom we have influence should correctly appraise events, not permit themselves to be caught unawares, and prepare the general sentiment of their own class for the revolutionary solution of the tasks confronting us.

Comment on the web discussion provoked by the Solidarity 1/134 article, Self-determination for Iraq!.

The left devotes much of its efforts to campaigning against imperialism, which is no surprise given the present foreign policy of the American and British governments.

A NOTE TO A FRIEND WHO DIED FOR IRELAND.
(Peter Graham, 1945-'71)
Your bullet-holed young neck was not in view,
Nor tortured flesh, nor rope-burned stiffened wrists:

Download this article (pdf). It discusses the issues round “globalisation” by way of two critiques, of Negri-Hardt and of the “new imperialism” theory of John Rees, Alex Callinicos and other writers associated with the British SWP.

Even with Labour and the Conservatives outdoing each other to be the party of big business and wealth, some poor people are still popular at Westminster — that is poor people in other countries. Laments for the scale of global poverty and a stern faced insistence on the need to do something about it are becoming the favoured recourse of every politician, most obviously Gordon Brown.

The stated purpose of the USA’s troop “surge” in Iraq which started early this year was to damp down the country’s conflicts enough that the current US-friendly Iraqi government (or, maybe, a

By Clive Bradley

In Manuel Puig’s novel The Kiss of the Spider Woman, two men confront each other in a prison cell, somewhere in South America. One is a trashy movie-loving homosexual; the other a revolutionary, a guerrilla.

The left and the Serb-Kosova-NATO War (1999)

By Sean Matgamna

By Martin Thomas

It is hard to see how the Socialist Workers Party’s pamphlet No to Bush’s War could convince anyone not already “on side” to oppose the war in Afghanistan.

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.

In latter-day Trotskyism the theory of 'permanent revolution'-- anti-landlord or anti-colonial revolution being merged with socialist revolution under the leadership of the working class -- has become a dogma, used more to obscure the fact of many colonies winning freedom on a capitalist basis than to enlighten.

Download whole dossier as pdf; or read articles online:

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.

“Reactionary socialism… half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future.”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto