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Dave Osler compares a recent visit to Russia with his first in 1989.
The first time I visited Russia, it was still the core of the experiment that will go down in history as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
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Editorial comments on the ongoing influence of Stalinism in the British labour movement, the need for a campaign to defend the welfare state, and calling for justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
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Beginning on the night of 17-18 May 1944, the entire Crimean Tatar population was deported and scattered across Central Asia. Some 100,000 Crimean Tatars, 40% of the population, died in the course of the deportation and the first year after that.
In the 1950s some minor concessions were made to the demands of the remaining Crimean Tatars. But in 1988 the Crimean Tatars were still campaigning for, and being refused, the right to return to the Crimean peninsula.
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The road to peace:
"Negotiations are once more under way on arms control. Anything that lessens the danger of nuclear conflict is to be welcomed. But nothing agreed between the superpowers merits the trust of socialists... The real road to peace lies not in negotiation between capitalist and bureaucratic imperialists, but in the direction of consistent democracy in international affairs and the overthrow of the imperialists by the working class, East and West..."
No, we are not beaten!
"Have the Tories seen off the British working class? They think so; and they can make an impressive case... The working class has suffered severe defeats... Structural changes in the workforce have weakened the labour movement... The new sections of the working class have the same bread-and-butter needs for militancy as the old sections... [but] they need bold leadership to galvanise them and are demoralised by timidity..."
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The Film Theatre worker lights your way, with the aid of a torch, down the darkened corridor to the cinema/classroom.
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Ernest Mandel, the foremost post-Trotsky Trotskyist for many decades, died in his native Belgium on 21 July, at the age of 72.
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This bulletin contains documents from two disputes in the Workers' Socialist League in 1983, in the period leading up to the final break between a group round Alan Thornett and the WSL majority whose political continuation today is the AWL.
There is also briefer information about some other disputes in that period.
The two disputes documented in more detail are:
1. About the shooting-down of a Korean Airlines commercial passenger jet by the USSR airforce in September 1983. The argument was about whether to condemn this unequivocally (while also opposing the use of the incident to build up chauvinism and militarism); or to place stress on the unsubstantiated possibility that the Korean Airlines plane was a US spy plane in commercial disguise.
2. About the witch-hunt in which a number of socialists were sacked from the Cowley car factory in August 1983. The dispute was about whether this could be accurately seen as central to a general "massive witch-hunt against socialists in industry".
One page of the original bulletin (the end of the introduction) seems to be missing.
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Much socialist critique of Stalinism has begged the question by criticising Stalinists for being too moderate and not pushing hard and fast enough for "socialism". Is it even desirable to push hard and fast for Stalinist "socialism"?
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Workers' Liberty 14 Reviews section
The real history of US labour (Dianne Finger and Barry Finger review a book by Kim Moody)
It takes all sorts? (Liz Millward reviews a book on the Krays)
As modest as Stalin (Jim Denham reviews Jon Halliday's biography of Enver Hoxha)
Helter skelter and stage by stage (Martin Thomas reviews books by Ken Livingstone and Seumas Milne
Marxism without bullshit? (Jon Pike reviews a handbook of "analytical Marxism" by Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene)
"I have made enough voices" (Lilian Thomson writes on Greta Garbo)
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Workers' Liberty 14 Forum section
How not to fight the poll tax; Trotsky on Zionism; Hitler, Stalin, and art.
A symposium on the nature of the Stalinist states: Martin Thomas; Stan Crooke; Duncan Chapple, Pete Keenlyside, and others; Sean Matgamna.
