Workers' Liberty

In August 1969 the major group on the far left in Britain, panicked by the pogroms in Belfast and Derry, were so relieved to see the British troops go into action that for nearly a whole year they dro

We go to press just before Labour’s special conference vote on Clause Four.

By Rachel Lever*

By Ray Challinor

I was involved with the organisation from the first meeting. If I remember correctly that was October 1950.

There were 34 members. But that really exaggerates the size of the organisation. A number of the members had been in the Open Party faction of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) — that is, they did not want the RCP to fold up — and were really burnt-out. These people quickly dropped out.

By Chris Jones*

I joined the International Socialists in 1973 and was finally expelled at the 1994 SWP conference.

When I first came into contact with IS, in the late 1960s, I was still in the Labour Club at Lancaster University. The thing that impressed me was their engagement with current issues.

The SWP is, despite everything, the biggest self-styled revolutionary Marxist organisation in Britain today. More than that: there are a lot of ex-IS-SWP people around.

It is now what the Healy organisation was in the late 50s and through the 60s — “a machine for maiming militants.”

By Mark Osborn

The Economist believes that the Algerian government is likely to fall to fundamentalism. If it does, the repercussions will be felt right across the Muslim world and far beyond. The Economist concludes that “we” must “live with Islam,” which is “not like communism, something to be resisted tooth and nail.”

By Antonio Gramsci

By Roland Tretchet

This magazine makes no apology for repeating certain basic truths.

By Dale Street

Widespread disillusionment with the results of market reforms and privatisation is now rife throughout the Russian Federation. This has combined with conflicts between different sections of the old Soviet elite to lay the groundwork for a resurgence of Russian nationalism.

More than 1,000 trade unionists and other activists have been arrested in a clampdown in Bolivia. The government declared a “state of siege” on 19 April — after a six weeks’ teachers’ strike, backed up by a three weeks’ general strike — and then police and troops raided a conference called by the COB, Bolivia’s TUC.

As the establishment commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of “Hitler’s war” in Europe, we take the opportunity to examine the question: how did it happen that Hitler, the crazy war-lord of German imperialism, was allowed to come to power?

While the Allied press does its utmost to whip up a poisonous lynch spirit against the entire German people, the prisoners of all nationalities released from the Nazi concentration camps express warmest solidarity with their German comrades who were the first victims to feel the barbaric whip of the Nazi oppressor.

Smash Hitler. German Left Opposition Appeals for United Proletarian Resistance

By Gerry Bates

As we go to press, Arlette Laguiller, candidate of the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvriere (LO), looks like getting maybe five per cent of the poll, or one and a half million votes, in the first round of the French presidential election on 23 April.

Lutte Ouvriere itself, Laguiller’s organisation, is probably in real terms the strongest avowedly-Trotskyist organisation in the world, thanks to a solid and stable routine. They run 400 regular workplace bulletins. On a series of international questions, from Europe to Afghanistan, they and we have shared views differing from almost all the other would-be Trotskyist groups in the world.

Masculinity, Queers and the Military
By Peter Tatchell
Published by Cassell, £4.99

The campaign for queers in the military mistakenly assumes that all the rights straights have are desirable and that queers should have them too. Instead of being critical of the institutions of hetero society, this assimilationist mentality slavishly worships all things straight.

By Peter Tatchell

The “outing” of 10 Bishops by OutRage! during the Church of England General Synod last November was arguably the biggest and most successful “outing” accomplished anywhere in the world.

By Peter Tatchell

Over the last 10 years, only two MPs (out of 650) have come out — Chris Smith in 1984 and Michael Brown in 1994. At this rate we will have to wait 300 years for all 60 or so closeted MPs to pluck up the guts to be open about their homosexuality.

1930: Slump hits Germany. Unemployment rises to three million. Heinrich Bruening of the Centre Party becomes Chancellor and takes emergency powers to rule by decree. Nazis get 18% of the vote in September 1930 elections (they had got only 2.8% in 1928).

By Rosie Woods, Left Unity supporter and recently elected member of the National Executive of the National Union of Students

Oskar Seipold was a member of the Prussian Diet, elected on the official Communist Party ticket, who later defected to the Left Opposition. He delivered this speech in March 1932. It has been abridged slightly.

By Colin Foster

Al Richardson overdoes it a bit in his response to Robin Blick (WL 20). To Blick’s claim “that during the Russian Revolution Lenin’s ‘elitist and coercive “blood and iron” state socialism’ triumphed over Martov’s ‘vision of a society that was both collectivist and democratic’,” he replies that the option “both collectivist and democratic” was impossible in 1917 because of the harsh world context and the great backwardness of Russia.

By Liam Conway, Central Notts NUT

The big news from the conference of the 230,000-strong National Union of Teachers (NUT) at Easter was a decision to ballot for a day of strike action against excessive class size.

The recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation Inquiry into Income and Wealth shows widening gaps both between social classes and within social classes.

Representatives of nine political and regional groups who attended a meeting of ‘Etehad Chap Kargari’ (Workers’ Left Unity) passed the following resolution on the 12 February 1995 in Germany:

A conference in Leeds on 13 May will launch a new approach to the fight against public service cuts.

Trade union delegates, and observers from community groups and Labour Parties, have been invited to the conference by Newcastle and Strathclyde branches of the public-services union UNISON and by Tyne and Wear Fire Brigades Union.