SWP

The SWP / IS tradition

SWP: Forget elections! Radical action needed!

Despite the wall-to-wall Scottish media coverage of campaigning in the run-up to last Thursday’s Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election, some people on the doorstep nonetheless responded to canvassers with the question: “By-election? What by-election?” Perhaps their source of information (i.e. their source of an absence of information) was Socialist Worker , paper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Tucked away in a small article on page three of issue 2874 of the paper (27th September) were four short sentences mentioning that the by-election would be taking place and that “media reports”...

Protest against the barge

On Saturday 16 September 200 demonstrated against the Bibby Stockholm migrant barge in Portland, Dorset. The protest was called by the local “Portland Global Friendship Group” and Stand Up to Racism (SUTR) and was supported by people from across the South West and unions including Unite, Unison, PCS, NEU, and Dorset Trades Council. The rally and demonstration through Portland demanded scrapping the migrant barge and providing safe accommodation for migrants. The rally included speeches from local organisers and union members, officials from the South West TUC, Unite, Bridgwater TUC, Dorset...

Socialist Worker dismisses pro-Ukrainians as “NATO trolls”

Socialist Worker (SW), paper of the Socialist Worker Party (SWP), is ecstatic. At last it has found a trade union (the UCU, which organises workers in post-school education) that has passed a motion at its annual congress backing the Stop the War Coalition (StW) line on Ukraine. True, the motion was passed by just nine votes. True, the motion contained an antisemitic trope jumbling up Ukraine and Israel as imperialist outposts. True, Jewish UCU members critical of the motion have been targeted for antisemitic abuse. True, another, and far better, motion on Ukraine was passed by a much larger...

UCU turns its back on Ukrainians

Little over a decade ago the UCU trade union (which represents staff in Further and Higher Education) was hit by a wave of resignations by Jewish members. They no longer found the union to be habitable for Jews. Their resignations followed decisions by successive UCU congresses to: boycott Israeli academics and HE institutions; sever ties with the Israeli trade union federation Histadrut; disassociate the union from the EUMC definition of antisemitism (a forerunner of the IHRA definition); reject a motion condemning UCU’s decision to invite an international speaker known for antisemitism; and...

Socialist Worker and “end Israel”

S ocialist Worker ’s front page on 10 May read “End the Israeli terror state”. That issue carried nothing on SW’s positive alternative, but it made clear that it was advocating the “end” of Israel as a political unit — “finis Israeli” in the sense that Sigmund Freud wrote “finis Austriae” when Germany took over Austria and declared it part of Germany. Not the end of terroristic methods by Israel in the occupied West Bank. Not the end of that occupation. Not conceding the Palestinians’ right to self-determination in an independent state of their own, in contiguous territory, alongside Israel...

A conspiracy theory of Israel's protests

Socialist Worker has presented the huge strikes and demonstrations in Israel, which have forced the far-right-infested government to pause its plans against democratic checks and balances, as no less reactionary than the government. According to Nick Clark in SW of 27 March : “the protesters also hate Palestinians. But they fear that Netanyahu’s changes will mean the state can no longer pretend to be a democracy”. This is a conspiracy theory in which Israelis don’t care even about their own democracy, but will strike and fill the streets week after week about the state’s cosmetics. Airbrushing...

Victory to Ukraine! — Flyer for StWC demo, 25 February

"Victory to Ukraine!" — flyer to be distributed at Stop the War's demonstration, 25 February 2023. Download here Text of flyer below. Vladimir Putin’s imperialist Russian state is renewing its offensive against Ukraine, ramping up its war right across the Donbas front, using tens of thousands of newly-mobilised conscripts. Putin has no intention of stopping his war any time soon. Stop the War (StW) campaigns for the Western states to stop sending arms to Ukraine and for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations. The StW call to end arms shipments to Ukraine, if carried through by the West...

Ukraine, Israel and the left

Solidarity has long argued that sections of the left have fallen into particular form of antisemitism. Starting from ultra-hostility to Israel which goes beyond criticising the real misdeeds of its governments and into demonising it as the world’s hyper-imperialism and hyper-racism, they end up reflexively hostile to all “Zionists”, i.e. all Jews who have some default or instinctive affinity with Israel, however critical. Readers who wonder why should look at how the same sections of the left portray the war in Ukraine. In this portrayal of the conflict, Ukraine takes on many of the political...

Socialist Worker bemoans backing for Ukraine

“Not a single Labour politician”, complains Yuri Prasad in Socialist Worker of 3 February , “is today prepared to speak out openly against Nato’s flooding of Ukraine with hi-tech tanks and missiles. Whatever their private misgivings about the way arms shipments heighten the danger of nuclear conflict, none will join the platform of a meeting to say so.” Straight off the bat: the big issue of militarism in Ukraine, for SW , is not the armed-to-the-teeth Russian invasion, but the provision of (actually so far pretty limited) weaponry to help Ukraine resist. In an article calling for an anti-war...

A how to which doesn't tell us how

Charlie Kimber’s article in Socialist Worker 2837, “How to Challenge Sunak’s anti-union laws”, in fact fails to tell you how. After a long list of the failings of the union and Labour leaderships, the concluding words for the reader are: “[t]he new laws are another reason to widen, escalate and unite strikes.” But we’d want that anyway. What specific campaigning on the laws do you propose, Charlie? Kimber says rightly that union leaders should refuse to discuss detail of the new laws with the government (not that the government wants discussion...) Like the SWP, we want to make the passage of...

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