Extra

SWP/IS: history and myth

Author: 
Sean Matgamna

Eric Hobsbawm somewhere discusses one of the oddest conundrums in labour historiography, one paralleled now in the historiography of IS/SWP: the 20th century reputation of the Fabian Society as far-sighted pioneers of independent labour representation - the gap between what was and what is afterwards widely accepted as having been.

AWL versus SWP

Material for an AWL day school, November/ December 2005, and other stuff on the political differences between AWL and SWP.

Why the Crisis in the SWP? "The politics of IS" - a 1969 polemic

Author: 
Sean Matgamna

The explosion of political discussion in IS, ignited by the sudden change of line by Cliff in favour of building the embryo of a "revolutionary party" seemed six months ago to be the most hopeful thing on the British left. Many, seeing also the new-type IS positions on Vietnam and the Middle East — a radical break with the abstentionist attitude of the group to this kind of struggle in the first 15 years of its existence — wondered whether the leadership might not even disavow other aspects of its past.

Grèce : une situation pré-révolutionnaire

Suite à d’assez larges discussions avec des socialistes [1] en Grèce et dans d'autres pays, nous avons écrit la résolution suivante comme base pour une discussion internationale plus formelle sur les questions en cours. Il a été traduit en différentes langues, y compris le grec. Si vous voulez écrire des commentaires ou une réponse, envoyez-les nous à awl@workersliberty.org - ou signalez-les ci-dessous.

Elections communales et gauche radicale en Belgique

Author: 
Jean Peltier

Percée du PTB et bilan contrasté

Analyser les résultats d’élections communales est toujours une gageure parce que, dans les choix des électeurs, se mêlent des motivations très diverses, allant des questions purement communales aux grands enjeux nationaux. Chercher à tirer des enseignements généraux à partir des résultats des scrutins à Durbuy et à Puurs n’a pas un grand sens. Par contre, les résultats dans les villes – et surtout les grandes villes – donnent des indications intéressantes.

The 1940 Split in the SWP (USA) and the Founding of the Workers’ Party

By Max Shachtman

The Workers Party was organised as a result of the factional struggle that broke out in the American Trotskyist movement (the Socialist Workers Party and its youth organisation) when the Second World War began, and ended in a split. Those who founded the new party had reason to be confident.

The end of the USSR: in the beginning was the critique of capitalism

Author: 
Sean Matgamna

Click her e for pdf.

[Editorial introduction to the symposium, WL16]

The Russian socialist revolution is dead? It died long ago!

It died not in December 1991, when the USSR formally ceased to exist, nor in August 1991, when the failure of the attempted coup finally broke the back of what power the "Communist Party" had left.

It died more than six decades earlier, when Stalin led the state bureaucracy he personified to the final defeat of the working class and the destruction of the working-class communists led by Trotsky.