Party and class

1848, a year of revolution! From French radicals and Irish nationalists to the various democrats and liberals throughout the rest of Europe, thousands across the continent took to open demonstrations and uprisings with demands ranging from national sovereignty to expanded democracy and improved workers’ rights. It was a truly revolutionary moment spurred on by the unbearable oppression of the masses. But a year of revolution, it was not only. Indeed, it is perhaps better to remember 1848, as Marx wrote in his later analysis of class struggles in France, as a year of the total defeat of...

Solidarity agitates for a workers’ government, meaning a government based on and accountable to working-class organisations, and serving working-class interests. A bourgeois (capitalist) government may very well be run by “professional politicians”, who are not capitalists themselves. Education, lobbying, a web of personal ties, etc. are sufficient to keep the government on a capitalist track. But no workers’ government is possible without extensive (though not necessarily perfect) workers’ democracy and workers’ solidarity. The working class can have power not through wealth or economic...

In his Solidarity 696 column Eric Lee cited the La Follette presidential bid of 1924 as a model of “progressive coalition politics” relevant as “the real possibility of another Trump presidency” looms. Even with the warmest assessment of La Follette (which I don’t have: see below), I don’t see it. Who would be the La Follette of today, the slightly-left “third party” candidate whom socialists can use to get a boost? John Anderson (a liberal Republican) in 1980, Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive) in 1912, or at a stretch Ralph Nader (Green, 2000), are the only possible analogues. I can’t imagine...

The Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were a high-water mark for Socialist politics in the U.S. Sanders, who campaigned as a Democrat, won over thirteen million votes, 43% of the total, in his first attempt. The self-defined “democratic socialist” came within a hair’s breadth of defeating Hillary Clinton and winning the Democratic nomination. He would almost certainly have defeated Donald Trump in the general election. It was a remarkable result, considering the history of socialist politics in the U.S. Most historians point to 1912, when Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate...

A century ago, an international communist women’s movement began to develop a perspective for women’s self-liberation that still resonates today. The record of those early struggles has been translated into English for the first time by Mike Taber and Daria Dyakonova, The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922 (Brill 2023). The book provides a history of the greatest working class-based women’s movement to date, through the voices of the women involved and one that has great relevance for today’s socialist feminists. Communist Women’s Movement In 1917, the Russian working class took power led...

Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) lived an extraordinary life. She fought for working-class socialism at its high point a century ago, but died just before Stalin snuffed out the workers ’ state she had fought to defend. Cathy Porter’s newly updated Larisa Reisner: A Biography captures Reisner’s passion and sheds new light on her life. EARLY LIFE Larisa Reisner was born on 2 May 1895 in Lublin, then in tsarist Poland. (Both her names are often misspelt with two “ss”.) In 1898, her father Mikhail Reisner was exiled to Siberia for his political activities and for the next five years the family lived in...

Workers’ industrial struggle has revived in recent months on a scale not seen for decades. That is cause for great hopes. Left-wing political mobilisation, though, has failed to match it. On issues like the NHS, new anti-strike laws, asylum rights, and the environment, activity on the streets has been small in proportion to the number of people opposed to official policies. That reflects a low ebb of socialist activity in the broadest sense. The activist socialist groups are often not very active and have little cooperation and little dialogue. Many people see themselves as socialists and yet...

With the advent of an Irish Socialist paper in the labour movement of America will come of necessity a host of questions and questioners upon the attitude of the proprietors of that paper toward the political parties at present in the field for Socialism. Such questions are unavoidable, and it is therefore best that they be faced at once at the outset without delay or equivocation. Let it be noted therefore that The Harp is the official organ of the Irish Socialist Federation [ISF] in America, and that that body was founded with the intention, expressed and desired, of spreading the light of...