Workers' Liberty 2/1, September 2001

The development of industrial society threw masses of women into the factories. Whole industries, like the cotton industry, had a majority of women and children workers, existing in terrible conditions of super exploitation; as Marx put it in Capital, “robbed of all that had previously been considered necessary for life". [1] Middle-class women, on the other hand, were thrown into the home. Whereas previously such women, wives of artisans and so on, had taken part together with their husbands and children in production, now they became ladies of leisure, locked into the home. They were...

After Lenin: the revival and reinterpretation The revival of defeatism did not take place while Lenin was alive, that is, during the first five years of the Comintern... A check of the resolutions and theses, major documents, and publications of the Comintern permits the confident statement: if anyone referred to defeatism at all, it certainly played no role in the programme, policy and principles of the Communist International under Lenin. The first four congresses of the Comintern (from 1919 to 1922) adopted a large number of long, detailed, analytical theses on all the major questions of...

“When Vladimir Ilyitch once observed me glancing through a collection of his articles written in the year 1903, which had just been published, a sly smile crossed his face, and he remarked with a laugh: ‘It is very interesting to read what stupid fellows we were!”’ Karl Radek(1) Introduction to the myth Since the First World War, Marxists, would-be Marxists, and even many non-Marxist socialists have gained a good part of their political education through a close study of Lenin’s anti-war writings of 1914-1918. In fact, even much of anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist literature is often based on an...

VII Caliban: Then the “banker turned politician Milosevic stepped in to divert the anger away from the government by whipping up hatred against Albanians living in Serb-run Kosovo… Milosevic put forward a simple answer to the economic crisis brought about by the madness of the market — blame the Albanians.” Brownstone: Yes, Milosevic used Serb chauvinism. But you present a conspiracy theory of national and ethnic division. The IMF (and later Germany, by recognising Croatian independence) introduce evil from outside. Nationalism “inside" is an artificial thing — nothing but a tool for...

I WHAT the “self-conceit” of the Apparatus Marxists “accomplished” during the Balkan war was to put their “Marxism” to the task of apologising for and making propaganda on behalf of Serbian imperialism attempting genocide in its colony Kosova. In April 1999, as soon as NATO started to bomb Yugoslavia, a broad “Stop the War" alliance was formed. It ranged from Tony Benn MP to Bruce Kent of CND, to unreconstructed Stalinists of the Morning Star sort, and, at the organisational core of it, the SWP. The organisers of “Stop the War" rigorously excluded from their movement all demands for Serb...

Looking at your website article on Israel, I think you write off too easily the idea of a democratic secular state to solve the problem of Israel and the Palestinians. You consider it either as a utopian scheme or as a call for the military demolition of Israel by the neighbouring Arab states. Either way it is not an option, and you call for a two-state solution, an Israeli state next to a Palestinian one. Under present conditions, a two-state ‘solution’ would mean the Palestinians getting a few tracts of land, the bits that they presently control plus a few others. The Israeli government...

Esther Leslie’s article on Walter Benjamin (‘Tragedy, Progress and Struggle’ WL66) is welcome and I hope, along with her, that his work can be rescued from the academics who have done him to death in recent the years. There are, however, a number of problems with Benjamin’s work, some of them quite fundamental, that Esther Leslie’s article doesn’t touch on. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the opportunity to read her book yet, so if any of the points I now raise are discussed there then I offer my apologies in advance. First of all there is, I believe, within Benjamin’s work, but particularly in...

East Timor was discussed at a September meeting of the National Committee of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. It was noted that there were discussions on troops in WL Australia. The minutes then state: “Doubt there will be disagreement on UN troops here [Britain] — after Kosova debates: don’t call for peacekeeping troops; don’t necessarily denounce them. The implication was clear — we shouldn’t have had a problem in Australia — the British debates on Kosova had already sorted out the issues. Unfortunately, the advice offered — don’t call for peacekeeping troops; don’t necessarily denounce...

I don’t disagree with what Chris Reynolds says about progress (‘New forces and passions’ WL63) but I think it is one-sided, in two respects. Firstly there are, I think, two distinct notions in Lenin about the progressive or reactionary character of “imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism”. One is the notion of “moribund” capitalism — that is, the idea that capitalism has exhausted its capacity to develop the forces of production (forced to adopt collectivist forms like monopoly, etc.). Chris rightly argues that if this were so the 20th century would be inexplicable. Capitalism continues...

Some time in the late 80s various fragments of the Healy/Lambert tradition of catastrophist Trotskyism met in all seriousness in Paris for a conference on the theme “Have the productive forces grown since the War?” Chris Reynolds is correct to reject this kind of dogmatism, which flies in the face of reality and by which capitalism has been in an epoch of continuous decline since 1914. He is also correct to reject attempts to maintain the notion of decline by redefining the term and to insist on an analysis that starts from capitalism as it is rather than from our hopes of its collapse or the...