Workers' Liberty

Review of the film Persepolis

High food prices mean famine in many parts of the world. In Russia, the Marxist movement first developed beyond tiny discussion groups in the great famine of 1891. George Plekhanov formulated "the tasks of socialists in the famine" in a famous article.

"From a world in which many basic industries and services were run directly by the state - though actually according to the overall interests of the national capitalist class - we have moved to one each Government's role is redefined as making its national economic arena advantageous for the operation of giant multinationals, and especially of international financiers".

Workers have the social power to overthrow capitalism and to reorganise production under different imperatives — such as to meet social needs and to respect ecological limits.

A survey of the history of the Labour Party - and of Marxists' efforts in relation to it - up to the eve of Tony Blair taking office and dramatically restructuring the party, in 1997.

An article by London anti-fascist, migrants' rights and socialist activist Dave Landau, originally commissioned for Socialist Worker but not printed for sectarian reasons.

Fred Moseley, Costas Lapvitsas, Leo Panitch, and Simon Mohun on the current financial crisis and what it reveals about the dynamics of capital today.

Discussing the Korean war of 1950-3, Shachtman argues for the working class to take its own independent stand in time of war, rather than siding with whichever reactionary camp may be, in the short term, the lesser evil.

Ken Livingstone, from the 1970s to today: class struggle politics disappeared from Livingstone’s agenda, if they were ever seriously part of it, in the early 1980s.

Lenin, Joe Columbo, Rockefeller, Shakespeare, Wernher von Braun, the Pet Pig, Columbus, Conrad Black, Clare Short, Margaret Thatcher...

This article traces ideas developed in Workers' Republic, the journal of the Irish Workers' Group, before the Northern Ireland Catholic revolt in 1968; the place of those ideas in the debates of the 1960s; the reassessments necessary after 1968; and mistakes which we now think we made.

Sean Matgamna continues his critical assessment of the AWL tendency's record on Ireland. We were, he argues, partly trapped by letting adherence to the Communist International's injunction to support "revolutionary nationalists" in conflict with the big powers override the awkward realities of Ireland.

Trotsky, in this pamphlet from 1937, argues that Stalinism was not the logical product of Bolshevism, but of a counter-revolution against Bolshevism - separated from Bolshevism by "a river of blood".

Here we reprint an editorial on Palestine from the US Marxist newspaper Labor Action. War of Independence or Expansion? appeared on May 24th and 31st 1948, on the eve of Israel’s declaration of independence.