Editor's Choice

2019 is the centenary of the year in which British workers had probably their greatest opportunity to make a revolution.

Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, British workers struck more than ever before, servicemen and police mutinied, and Labour took big strides electorally. But communists in Britain had still not formed a united party, Labour’s representation in Parliament was unfairly small and politically rubbish, and the trade unions were still dominated by bureaucrats.

Moishe Postone, a Marxist academic at the University of Chicago who died in 2018, skewered antisemitism as an addled, "pseudo-emancipatory" form of anticapitalism, which blames the evils on capitalism not on its structures but on shadowy plots by "the Jews".

A list of introductory articles from Workers' Liberty on key issues...

Afghanistan

Alienation

Antisemitism

AWL

The working class is a global class. Refugees and migrant workers are our brothers and sisters, and we should unite with them against the bosses and plutocrats - who are also a global class, and even the most "British" of them hostile to us.

Openness to refugees and immigration has historically made countries richer both culturally and even economically.

Brexiter: "Migrants are a drain on UK resources, including benefits and NHS"

In 1919 Glasgow was in the grip of a general strike. Although the strike began with the limited demand of a cut in the working week, it raised - as general strikes do by their very nature - the question of power in society.

The strike leaders saw the strike purely in terms of a fight for the 40 hour week, but the press treated it as a threat to the capitalist order of society itself. And for once the press was right.

1919 was a year of turmoil all over Europe. In the confusion following the break up of three great empires in World War I — the Russian, Turkish and Austrian empires — the working class began to assert itself. In Russia the young Bolshevik republic was fighting for its life. In Bavaria and Hungary short-lived Soviet Republics were established, and in Vienna and Berlin there were socialist uprisings.

Articles on the new forms of Stalinist political practice in and around the Labour Party and trade unions

NEW: A briefing about the ultra-Stalinist Red London group. Red London, in their own words.

NEW: The Morning Star resurrects "Blue Labour".

Michael Chessum is the organiser of Another Europe Is Possible. He talked with Martin Thomas from Solidarity ahead of AEIP's conference on 8 December

An examination of the role of a Marxist “Fighting Educationalist Group” in the class struggle and in the transformation of existing labour movements.

Click here for other discussion of the same issue.

“It is necessary to find the particular link in the chain which must be grasped with all one’s strength in order to keep the whole chain in place and prepare to move on resolutely to the next link.”

V I Lenin