Workers' Liberty

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Who was Lenin? He led the workers of the Tsarist Russian Empire to make the most profound revolution in history in 1917. He was the leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party, without which the workers would have been defeated.

Part two of a response to Rayner Lysaght on the history of revolutionary socialism in Ireland.

The third Campaign against Climate Change Trade Union conference on 13 March was attended by a small delegation of Workers' Climate Action (WCA) activists, including AWL members.

Someone has put a lot of time and money into the new Counterfire website launched by the sixty people who recently quit the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) with John Rees and Lindsey German. It's very slick, and frequently updated.

• Who Was Rosa Luxemburg?

• Who Was Leon Trotsky?
• Lenin and the October Revolution
• Who Was James Connolly?
• Who Was Jim Larkin?
• Who Was Antonio Gramsci?
• What Is Leninism?
• Lenin On Democracy and Dictatorship
• What Is Trotskyism?
• The Trotsky I Knew
• Trotsky and Twenty-First Century Socialism
• Issac Deutscher's "Trotsky".
• Trotsky and Deutscher
• The Revolutionary Ideas of Gramsci
• Gramsci and "Post-Marxism"
• The Assassination of Trotsky
• Liebknecht, Luxemburg and the German Revolution of 1918 part 1
• Liebknecht, Luxemburg and the German Revolution of 1918 part 2

[See also: 5 Great Socialist Feminists — Eleanor Marx, Sylvia Pankhurst, Dora B Montefiore, Klara Zetkin, Constance Markievicz]

[This is an expanded version of the text in Workers Lberty 3/26]

The political tendency now organised as AWL originates from Workers’ Fight, a small Trotskyist group formed in 1966. Why, and how?

Workers’ Fight came into existence as a distinct tendency in response to two linked “crises”.

The need to fight against sexism and for women’s liberation remains a key part of socialist politics. Socialist feminism may also be enjoying something of a revival. With this in mind we have collected together here articles from our press about socialist feminists in history.

Trotsky knew:
I see the bright green strip of grass
Beneath the wall.
And the clear blue sky
Above the wall
And sunlight everywhere
Life is beautiful
Let the future generations cleanse it

Antonio Gramsci was a revolutionary Marxist of the early-1920s Lenin-Trotsky stripe. Yet his prison writings of 1929-35 have been used as a source for quite different politics.

[This is a copy-edited and slightly expanded version of the text in Solidarity replying to Lysaght.]

A dozen years on from the “Good Friday Agreement” (GFA) things in Northern Ireland are far from settled. The recently threatened breakdown of the power-sharing executive was avoided. But the Good Friday system is far from stable.

The start of a debate on aspects of the history of Irish Trotskyism and Irish Republicanism. Originally titled: "Irish Marxist rebuts internet slander", and "Comments on a smear job", it appeared on the website of the Irish Mandelites, "Socialist Democracy". In an abusive and typically foolish introductory paragraph, they say that they themselves are unwilling "to join in this arcane discussion, but we do recognise Raynor’s right to defend himself and publish the letter in that spirit."

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• Part one of a reply to this article: "Is there a socialist quintessence to Irish nationalism?"

• Part two of the reply
• The IWG, IS and the "Trotskyist Tendency": Irish Crisis and the British Left 1968-70
• Ireland and Permanent Revolution: a Discussion (Irish Archive)
• Did Gery Lawless Sign Out of the Curragh? Maria Duce...? A Footnote to the History of the Irish Republican Movement
• Marxism and the Irish Revolution — a Critical Response to Rayner Lysaght's Compilation: Communism and the Irish Revolution
• "Ireland and Permanent Revolution", etc: Archive, 1966/7.

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Surfing the net the other day, this writer was surprised to see his name taken in vain as being a “second-hand-tale-spinning adoptive Irish nationalist”.

“Harriet Harman puts class at heart of election battle,” shouted the Guardian front page on 20 January, while the 21 January Telegraph proclaimed “Harriet Harman reopens class war with speech on inequality”. What prompted all this?

“If you’re selling cholera, give me syphilis any day”

Tony Cliff, ‘Interview’ 1996

Review of " Power at work: Rebuilding the Australian union movement", by Michael Crosby. Federation Press, Sydney, 2005.

The SWP has collapsed politically into its "Red-Green-Brown" alliance with clerical fascism - with the MAB, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and other reactionaries. Solidarity has commented on the SWP's ongoing political collapse at each stage.

• The "Reactionary Anti-Imperialists"

• The Prophet and the demoralised opportunists
• An open letter to Chris Harman of the SWP: Break with Galloway and the communalists
• How the "IS tradition" was shaped by the ILP
• The IS tradition and the birth of Respect - An open letter to a SWP leader
• The Sharia socialists
• Ms German replies to her critics
• Respect woos the Muslim vote
• Tony Cliff on the "Clerical-Fascist" Muslim Brotherhood
• The SWP and the"IS tradition"
• "Cover Your Heads", SWP Tells Protest Women
  
  

Many people reading this article may ask themselves “why join the SWP in the first place?” Others still will ask “why go on to join the AWL?” These are legitimate questions. In fact, the answer to the question “why I left the SWP” revolves almost entirely around answering the other two.

“We are not getting excited about the election.” (Duncan Hallas, a central leader of the Socialist Workers Party, in Socialist Worker, on the eve of the 1979 general election which gave power to Thatcher’s Tories.)

One of two things. Either the outcome — the new government — of a May 2010 general election, is a matter of little or no consequence to the working class and to the labour movement and therefore a matter of indifference to socialists. Or it is of consequence, perhaps of great consequence, to the working class and therefore of great importance to socialists. We think it is important.

How should the working-class left respond to the general election and the cuts that will inevitably follow, whichever party wins?

Swindon councillor Lynden Stowe isn’t the only Tory politician who risks being confused with right-wing extremists. Stowe, a near perfect doppelganger of British National Party leader Nick Griffin, was accosted by police officers at the Conservative’s pre—election conference in Birmingham recently when fellow delegates mistook him for the fascist leader. No such vigorous action was taken to bring David Cameron to account for his spurious commitment to cut immigration by 75%.

Lenin called for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a great expansion of democracy.