SWP

The SWP / IS tradition

Using "anti-imperialism" to avoid siding with Ukraine

Socialist Workers’ Party leader Alex Callinicos has been debating Lebanese Marxist Gilbert Achcar, a supporter of the Fourth International and the Anti-Capitalist Resistance group in the UK, about the war in Ukraine. On 27 March Socialist Worker published a long piece by Callinicos arguing that an “understanding of capitalist imperialism as involving a system of interstate rivalry is completely missing from Achcar’s analysis” and criticising him for arguing that socialists should support Ukraine, including by supporting the provision of weapons by Western governments. On 30 March the SW...

Putin is not a victim of NATO

NATO is a military alliance of big capitalist powers. We oppose it. But to present Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as triggered by NATO, rather than by Putin’s own imperialism, is a whitewash, as in an article by Nick Clark in Socialist Worker of 26 February. NATO was formed in 1949. The first shot it fired in anger was 1994 (over Bosnia). Russia has not been under threat of attack from NATO. Clark claims “thanks to NATO, the US practically funded the whole colonial war” of France in Indochina (1946-54). In fact US funding to France started in 1950 (along with the non-NATO Korean war) and was less...

Socialist Appeal and SWP on the invasion they said was false scare

Shortly before Putin’s 24 February invasion of Ukraine Socialist Appeal poured scorn on all those warning of the risk of invasion. It has made no self-criticism of that, nor of its history of denying Ukrainian rights and soft-pedalling Russian imperialism. Socialist Appeal is these days a noticeable presence on some demonstrations. Unsurprisingly it has turned up to no pro-Ukraine protests. I didn’t see them even at the Stop the War Coalition demo in London on 5 March. SA has not published much on the war itself — as opposed to denunciations of the Tory government, its stance on refugees and...

How Socialist Worker fails to support Ukrainian rights

The Socialist Workers’ Party are not apologists for Putin’s regime or its foreign policy. Yet in practice their stance on the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine will feed into such apologism on the left. The SWP website published three articles in the last week of January, sharing three key themes: That an important aspect of potential escalation in Ukraine is the rivalry and manoeuvring of big imperialist powers, primarily the US and Russia. That the left and labour movement should oppose all ruling classes in the name of working-class solidarity and internationalism. That we should seek...

A welcome contribution to a necessary debate

Daniel Randall reviews David Renton's Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong (Routledge, 2021). David Renton's Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn from It is a welcome addition to a slowly but steadily expanding discourse that aims to develop a critique of left antisemitism that is explicitly from the left, and for the left. Renton and I corresponded while I was writing my own book on left antisemitism, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists , a correspondence I found useful and which I feel helped improve my manuscript...

Socialist Worker and the banks

The SWP's paper Socialist Worker has published a number of articles (rightly) praising Extinction Rebellion's focus on the City of London.

Socialist Worker choose its "resistance"

Socialist Worker has detailed and decried deaths and casualties in Gaza. And rightly so! But Socialist Worker has not found the space or the inclination to report on protests by movements like Standing Together. Instead, it refers to Hamas, persistently and euphemistically, as a “resistance organisation”, and compares it in favourable terms to other Palestinian forces for its “militancy”. Hamas is a far-right political-Islamist party and militia with its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood. It favours the military conquest of Israel and the setting up of an Islamic state in historic Palestine...

Cliff never really understood the British labour movement

I joined the Socialist Review Group [forerunner of today's SWP] in 1952 and drifted out about 1960. I was a left-wing socialist who believed that social ownership and democratic control should be extended. I believed in international socialism. I was utterly repelled by the Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe. That put me off the Communist Party. When I was approached by an organisation which was left-wing and clearly opposed to Stalinism, I was attracted. The other organisations in the Trotskyist movement believed that the Stalinist states were degenerated workers' states which should be...

What we owe to Ernie Tate

Ernie Tate, who died from cancer on 5 February at the age of 86, was once well-known among revolutionary socialists across the world as the central figure of “the Tate affair”. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, he was an active Trotskyist from his early 20s, in Canada. He moved to London in 1965-9, and that was where the “Tate affair” happened, in 1966. Back in Canada, he quit the organised Trotskyist movement about 1980, but remained active on the broader left until his last years. I last met him in 2015, at a conference at the University of East Anglia. An obituary by John Riddell gives...

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