Workers' Liberty

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.

We are now in a period where it is widely acknowledged that there is a crisis of socialist perspectives. This is particularly true for those social-democratic parties across western Europe.

The essence of this debate about reform and revolution was summed up by Rosa Luxemburg at the time when she was engaged in a fight inside the German Social Democratic Party with Eduard Bernstein. Rosa said the debate between reform and revolution was not about different roads to the same goal but it was about different goals.

Tony Benn MP has posed, with remarkable clarity, the issues involved in the current battle over Labour's future. In an article for the Observer entitled "The end of choice at the ballot box", Benn has accurately spelled out the disastrous consequences of a series of related developments, especially the NEC's proposals to change Labour's structure and its decision to create a Lib-Lab cabinet committee on constitutional reform.

Saturday 19 July
It’s 4am when I drag myself from bed and set off for the picket line at my sorting office. We are striking against management’s use of the discipline procedure to intimidate our branch secretary into toeing their line in negotiations. He refused to be intimidated and, in a flagrant abuse of procedure, was sacked.

Ken Coates MEP:
Peter Mandelson’s pronouncement on poverty is hardly a serious proposal. There may just be some benefit but, in general, it’s pitched at a cosmetic level. He has been electioneering for the National Executive elections. We shall see whether Old Labour retain a strong enough position to stop him.

A conversation between Bob Arnot and Kirill Buketov in Moscow, July/August 1997. Kirill Buketov is the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the trade union newspaper Solidarnost and the producer of a trade union radio programme on Russian radio. Bob Arnot is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Critique.