Marxism and war

Prominent Indian socialist feminist Kavita Krishnan has taken a strong stand in support of Ukraine. Here she explains why slogans about "peace" and "negotiations" miss the real issues in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Kavita Krishnan is speaking at All the Rage on Saturday 26 November. More details here. Why we should oppose the call for negotiations to end the war “No war, negotiated end to the war” is also the position of the Modi Government as well as all Left parties in India. Sounds reasonable, right? Two sides are at war, both should negotiate instead of continuing the war, right? Wrong...

The German Social Democratic Party's paper Vorwärts announces that its deputies in the Reichstag have voted to support the government's war effort Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly There were no major European wars between the wars of Bonaparte and the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, not for 99 years. There were important wars. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 Paris was occupied and the Prussian king proclaimed at Versailles to be Emperor of Germany, with sovereignty over such other German states as Bavaria. During the German occupation of...

Zoom study group on Leon Trotsky's 1934 article "Nationalism and Economic Life": Thursday 8pm 21 July 2022

Zoom study group, based on Hal Draper's "The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism” (large extracts in Workers' Liberty 2/1, 2/2, 2/3) and "The ABC of National Liberation Movements" (in Workers' Liberty 2/3). Thursdays 7pm 23 June, 7 July, 14 July 2022

Alex Callinicos of the Socialist Workers' Party has argued the war in Ukraine is centrally a battle between imperialist rivals and criticised “leftists who duck the issue of NATO”. Here Lebanese Marxist Gilbert Achcar of the Fourth International and Anti-Capitalist Resistance responds to Callinicos, and Callinicos replies. Dear Alex, I read with interest your critique of my position in Socialist Worker dated 27 March. We have, you and I, quite a long tradition already of debates between us. I always welcome the opportunity since our debate is conducted in the way it should be between Marxists...

This is part one of a series. For the other articles, see here . Buy our pamphlet on Saklatvala here . In 1922, sixty-five years before before Diane Abbott and three other Labour MPs of colour entered Parliament, Indian-born Shapurji Saklatvala was elected MP for Battersea North in South West London. Like some other Labour candidates more recently, Saklatvala was a bourgeois figure standing in a working-class constituency which was not his home. There the similarity ends. The first “BAME” Labour MP was a revolutionary socialist who attacked Ramsay MacDonald for failing to oppose British...

Rohini Hensman’s book is a welcome intervention into debates on the international socialist left. Above all it is a damning indictment of the state of those broad sections of the left, especially in Britain, who have embraced a negative, anti-Western, anti-US, “pseudo-anti-imperialism” — a politics that is also effectively pro-imperialist (of Russia, China, Iran), anti-democratic, anti-liberatory and ultimately anti-working class. The central locus of the book is the conflict in Syria, where much of the left has been utterly wretched. But Hensman probes deeper, criticising the Russian and...

One of the greatest tragedies of a Third World War which is now drawing closer is the lack of organized opposition to it. The mass of people are not enthusiastically pro-war but they are resigned to it, while the organized social, political and cultural movements, with rare exceptions, are exerting their influence to create the necessary enthusiasm for the all-out Atom War. Military men with their national honor, business men with their funds, publishers with their journalists, politicians with their rehearsed inflammatory speeches, are all busily using their respective resources to instill an...

Barry Finger reviews The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: the Fate of the Russian Revolution volume two, edited by Sean Matgamna (Workers’ Liberty, 2015). ­Revolutionary socialism at its liveliest is always a vast theatre of ideological battlegrounds, a Permanent War of Questions, as Julius Jacobson — a one-time follower of Max Shachtman — so aptly put it. For those, and there were precious few, who still valiantly retained the capacity, the sitzfleisch as well as the activists’ militant vigour, in the years leading up to and through the Second World War, to think through and refine volumes...