Workers' Liberty

No better, more democratic, or more effective rules for organising relations between peoples and fragments of peoples exist than those of Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades. Nothing else is more conducive to working class unity across the divides and despite them. They are the principles of all who are Marxists and stand in that great tradition.

The consequences of the opposite approach — or of an approach of unprincipled eclecticism and zig-zags — are well illustrated by the politics of Socialist Worker and the SWP on Kosova.

The Chinese road?

Samuel Farber, Cuban “Third Camp” Marxist and author of The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered, was interviewed about the book in US socialist journal Against the Current (November 2006). Here we reprint an extract with his predictions for Cuba without Castro.

The last three issues of Solidarity have carried Sean Matgamna’s series about the British left and the events in Northern Ireland in 1968-9 — arguably the biggest internal crisis the British state has seen since the early 1920s. The last article (Solidarity 3/120) summed up the turning-point debate at the National Committee of IS (forerunner of the SWP) in January 1969, and the initial positions mapped out by the IS/SWP majority and by the Trotskyist Tendency within IS (forerunner of Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty).

• Part 1: Why Northern Ireland Broke Down,

• Part 2: The Irish Workers' Group, I S and the "Trotskyist Tendency",
• Part 3: Why Northern Ireland Split on Communanal, Not Class, Lines
  
  

By Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky was murdered by an agent of the Stalinist USSR in August 1940. Leon Trotsky was a great defender of the traditions pursued by the Bolshevik Party when they made a revolution in Russia in 1917. One of the Bolshevik’s great contributions to socialist ideas was their approach to the national question.

By Clive Bradley

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. Clive Bradley discusses the issues.

The history of capitalism is filled with examples
of nations conquering nations, taking control of
territories, plundering economies, downgrading
language and culture and treating the conquered
peoples as less than equal. Russia under the Tsar
was a "prison-house of nations": the ethnic
Russian majority oppressed other nationalities
within that country mercilessly.

1. An abstract or formal conception of the question of equality in general and national equality in particular is characteristic of the bourgeois democracy by its very nature. Under the pretence of the equality of the human person in general, bourgeois democracy proclaims the formal legal equality of the proprietor and the proletarian, of the exploiter and the exploited, and thus deceives the oppressed classes in the highest degree.

The Theses on the National and Colonial Question of the Second Congress of the Communist International, which met in July-August 1920, are one of the most important documents of revolutionary socialism. We reprint this text over on page 16. They were drafted by Lenin and amended in important respects by the Congress.

These are two of Lenin's most important pamphlets on the question: The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914); and The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up (1916).

It was in discussing the attitude of the English to that Irish struggle that Marx coined his famous phrase: "No nation that oppresses another can itself be free".

The Marxists supported the Irish national struggle. They could have coupled that support with a programme of consistent democracy for dealing with the Protestant-Irish minority within Ireland. In fact they largely failed to do so. The issue was made more complicated by the fact that the Protestant Irish minority comprised not only a distinct community of all social classes from worker and farmer to capitalist in the northeast, but also a privileged landlord caste spread across the whole island.

Thus some Argentine Marxists have been campaigning for a "Second Independence" of their country; and large sections of the Marxist left were persuaded to support Argentina's minicolonial venture in th

By Martin Thomas

First published in Socialist Organizer
No. 567 & 568, 24 June and 8 July 1993

It is a very long time since I have read anything so coloured by the mentality of the “intellectual” thug, by utter moral bankruptcy and by unimaginably anti-intellectual sectarianism as Stan Crooke’s review (WL43) of my book The Very Bastards of Creation. From my own viewpoint, the only positive aspect of Crooke’s review is that it will guarantee that more copies will be purchased by public libraries in England. Keep it going, Stan.

The Irish National Liberation Army, INLA, the group which sparked the current new wave of communal bloodshed in Northern Ireland by killing Loyalist Volunteer Force leader Billy Wright, considers itself more left-wing than the Provisional Sinn Fein/IRA. Most of its members and sympathisers consider themselves Marxists, some Trotskyists.

It serves “Paddy the Old Believer” [Patrick Avakuum, ‘Socialism or Nationalism?’, WL40] right that he should get a diatribe from James D Young [WL42] in return for writing a ridiculously “soft” review of Young’s “The Very Bastards of Creation.”