Nationalism and the 'national question'

The life and politics of James Connolly

Michael Johnson's series on the life and politics of James Connolly has been serialised in Solidarity . (More on Connolly here .) All of the editions of the series so far are listed below: How Connolly became a socialist Uniting the Dublin socialists James Connolly: Home Rule and the Gaelic Revival James Connolly, Irish nationalism and the socialist republic Connolly, Millerand, and De Leon Connolly, the USA, and the Wobblies Connolly, the rise of Irish labour and Home Rule Connolly and the Dublin lockout Connolly and the Unionists Connolly and the Irish labour movement Connolly and the First...

Yesterday’s Guillaume Conqueror, today’s migrants?

The Wake is an extraordinary literary undertaking, rooting its narrative in early medieval England by writing in what its author, Paul Kingsnorth, calls a “shadow tongue”: a pastiche of Old English based on its grammar and syntax but comprehensible to modern English speakers. It draws on recognisable tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction to tell a story of Saxons in 1067, the immediate aftermath of the Norman conquest, a suddenly scattered people scrabbling around in the ashes of a world that has been razed to the ground. The book is skillfully written. Although he has clearly done vast...

“Unite the workers and bury the religious hatreds”

At Workers’ Liberty 2015 summer school, Ideas For Freedom, Michael Johnson summarised on the history of the far left in Northern Ireland. Here we publish his presentation. Marc Mulholland’s speech in the same session was published in Solidarity 386 . There are two main approaches that Trotskyists have taken to Ireland since partition in 1921. Both approaches are wrong in different ways. The main problem with both of them is that they ignore the democratic programme to overcome an unresolved national problem which is dividing the working-class movement in Ireland. The first approach I want to...

Benedict Anderson, 1936-2015

Influential historian Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson died on 13 December in Java, the Indonesian island that did much to form his outlook as a scholar of south-east Asia and theories of nationalism. Anderson was born on 26 August 1936 in Kunming, China, to an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. His father was a commissioner in the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, and the family moved to California in 1941 to avoid the Japanese invasion during the Second Sino-Japanese War. From there they moved to Ireland in 1945, and Anderson studied at Cambridge, before receiving his PhD in...

Treize questions sur le terrorisme, l’intégrisme et l’anti-impérialisme

* Ce texte a été publié en 2001 dans Workers Liberty, publication de l’Alliance for Workers Liberty, au moment de l’intervention américano-britannique en Afghanistan. (NPNF) 1. Comment peut-on affronter le problème du terrorisme et de l’intégrisme (1) ? Tout d’abord en ne soutenant pas le gouvernement américain. Pendant soixante ans, les Américains ont été les associés et les alliés du régime fondamentaliste saoudien. Ils ont aidé l’Etat pakistanais et l’Arabie saoudite à financer les talibans dans les années 1990. Ils ont fréquemment appuyé des mouvements fondamentalistes afin de contrer des...

From permanent revolution to permanent confusion

Originally published in two parts in Workers' Liberty magazine in 1986-7. In latter-day Trotskyism the theory of 'permanent revolution' - anti-landlord or anti-colonial revolution being merged with socialist revolution under the leadership of the working class - has become a dogma, used more to obscure the fact of many colonies winning freedom on a capitalist basis than to enlighten. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was one of the most important of his contributions to Marxism, but it has become one of the most vulgarised aspects of his legacy. In particular, the theory of permanent...

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Letters and debate from WL32 Download PDF

Black slavery in North America

History is rich in examples of the revival of institutions appropriate to more primitive civilizations in advanced societies. Mankind is infinitely ingenious in adapting old cultural forms to new uses under the changed conditions of a new social order. Like a thrifty housewife, humanity hesitates to discard familiar acquisitions, however outmoded; it prefers to store them in attics or cellars in the hope of finding a use for them in the future. The history of economics, no less than the history of philosophy, religion, and politics, shows that such expectations are often realized. The rise of...

Negro Slavery in North America

History is rich in examples of the revival of institutions appropriate to more primitive civilizations in advanced societies. Mankind is infinitely ingenious in adapting old cultural forms to new uses under the changed conditions of a new social order. Like a thrifty housewife, humanity hesitates to discard familiar acquisitions, however outmoded; it prefers to store them in attics or cellars in the hope of finding a use for them in the future. The history of economics, no less than the history of philosophy, religion, and politics, shows that such expectations are often realized. The rise of...

Negro Slavery in North America

History is rich in examples of the revival of institutions appropriate to more primitive civilizations in advanced societies. Mankind is infinitely ingenious in adapting old cultural forms to new uses under the changed conditions of a new social order. Like a thrifty housewife, humanity hesitates to discard familiar acquisitions, however outmoded; it prefers to store them in attics or cellars in the hope of finding a use for them in the future. The history of economics, no less than the history of philosophy, religion, and politics, shows that such expectations are often realized. The rise of...

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