Workers' Liberty 3/26: Looking backward

Sean Matgamna reflects on 50 years in the socialist movement. Workers' Liberty 3/26

Submitted on 15 December, 2009 - 11:50

Author:

Sean Matgamna

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Sean Matgamna reflects on 50 years in the socialist movement. Workers' Liberty 3/26

Submitted on 22 December, 2009 - 21:24

Author:

Sean Matgamna

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Sean Matgamna: finding my way to Trotskyism, part 2: from "communism" to "orthodox Trotskyism"

Submitted on 18 December, 2009 - 11:06

Author:

Sean Matgamna

It was very hard to distinguish between criticism of Stalinism - which is what the Communist Party's "communism" was, of course - and basic hostility to the ideas of communism.

What is to be done?

Submitted on 17 December, 2009 - 13:58

Author:

Sean Matgamna

V. Credo
Trotsky knew:
I see the bright green strip of grass
Beneath the wall.
And the clear blue sky
Above the wall
And sunlight everywhere
Life is beautiful

Working Class Life in Ennis in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Sean Matgamna Examines His Own "Roots and Branches"

Submitted on 17 December, 2009 - 13:51

Author:

Sean Matgamna

Like many revolutionary activists over the ages, Sean Matgamna was an immigrant, someone shaped in his thinking by the shifts and contrasts from living in one culture to living in another.

Sean Matgamna: would my 18 year old self say to me now: "you are on ‘the far right of the far left’"?

Submitted on 17 December, 2009 - 13:36

Author:

Sean Matgamna

[This is a copy-edited and slightly expanded version of the text in WL.]

What would my 18 year old self say to me if somehow he could meet me today?

The dilemmas of "communism"

Submitted on 17 December, 2009 - 13:19

Author:

Sean Matgamna

At 15 I fell in love with the idea of communism — the image, the goal, the seduction, the hypnosis, of it. I fell in love with the idea of humankind as a great caring family, a world governed by class and then human solidarity. I’ve never fallen out with it.

Debating theories of the USSR

Submitted on 17 December, 2009 - 13:08

Author:

Sean Matgamna

Workers’ Fight — the initial group of what is now the AWL tendency — inherited the “orthodox Trotskyist” view that the USSR and the other Stalinist states were “deformed and degenerated workers’ states”. Why did we take so long to move away from that view towards the conclusion that the Stalinist states were in fact a new sort of exploitative class system?

The AWL: from "orthodox Trotskyism" to the "Third Camp"

Submitted on 17 December, 2009 - 12:21

Author:

Sean Matgamna

I disagreed strongly with the Healyites’ decision to bail out from the Labour Party in 1963-4. But it’s not really true that I broke with the Healyites over the Labour Party.

Working-class solidarity: how British dockers built it and how they lost it

Submitted on 17 December, 2009 - 11:29

Author:

Sean Matgamna

Nothing will ever efface for me the memory of my first real strike — on the Salford docks — the first time I saw my class acting as a surging, uncontrolled force breaking the banks of routine capitalist industrial life and, for a while, pitting itself against those who control our lives.