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Max Shachtman's Under the Banner of Marxism, which forms the bulk of this book, deserves to be considered one of the classic polemics of the Marxist movement, alongside The Poverty of Philosophy, Anti-Dühring, and others. It defends the Bolsheviks, their revolution, their work to build a revolutionary socialist movement, and the continued relevance of their approach.

The bulletins from The Clarion:

• Number 1
• Number 2

And the bulletins from Yellow Pages

• Saturday
• Sunday
• Monday

Above: a Labour meeting. It's good to see older activists coming back into circulation. But where are the young people who are the overwhelming base of Corbyn-Labour's support in society?

Even after the Corbyn surge, which has swelled Labour membership to a size not seen for decades, the average age of Labour members is 53, only a bit below the Tories' average of 57.

More Labour members (29%) are over 65 than are under 44 (28%). Only 4% of Labour members are under 24 - a lower figure even than the Tories' 5%.

In the wake of discussions over antisemitism in the Labour Party and beyond we collate here a series of articles, new and old, on the topic of left antisemitism.

The current debate on left antisemitism and the Labour Party

Over 70 student activists attended the Student Activist Weekender on 7-9 September, coming from campuses across the country to London for a weekend of education, organisation and establishing collaboration.

The event, a Student Feminist Campaign Day (7th) and the Student Activist Weekender (8th-9th),. was co-hosted by a range of student activist groups and campaigns including the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, People and Planet, Rent Strike, UCU Rank and File, Young Greens, Surrey Labour Students and Bristol Student-Staff Solidarity. 

In 1861, during British colonial rule, Section 377 was introduced into the Indian Penal Code: a law with origins in England’s Buggery Act of 1533. This marked, in Victorian language, India’s criminalisation of homosexuality. With the independence of India in 1947, Section 377 survived.

TUC Congress 2018 closed with its accustomed dearth of fanfare, with little to suggest it will be a major political factor in British politics over the coming period.

The one glint of hope was the discussion on the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), where speaker after speaker stood up to make the case for self-determination on trans rights. Behind the scenes several union leaderships, including some regarded as left, have joined the chorus of opposition to changing the GRA on the grounds of women’s self-organisation.

News of state repression against China’s Uyghur people have become prominent in recent months. Reports at the UN estimate up to a million are held in internment camps.
China denies the mass detention and points to constitutional guarantees of equality and religious freedom, but the mounting evidence is discrediting such pretences.

Amid economic crisis and civil unrest in Venezuela, the New York Times reported on 8 September 2018 that the Trump administration has been in secret talks with Venezuelan military officers to stage a coup against President Nicolás Maduro.

This follows Trump’s indications in August last year of a ‘military option’ for Venezuela.

My conclusions from attending a protest against a “Free Tommy Robinson” rally in London on 14 July were as follows:

• There were two anti-Robinson marches but combined they were still outnumbered by the right-wing mobilisation.

The Unite Against Fascism (UAF) marchers probably had an average age of over 50 and they were overwhelmingly middle class. The march was not stewarded. The Antifa march was younger and had a (purely verbal) stated intention of physically stopping the right.

Q:How did the coalition government come about?

Following the collapse of the coalition between the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the People's Party (ÖVP) in May 2017, the People’s Party won the resulting election but were without a majority in parliament. They needed to go into coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ).

Tens of thousands of people, perhaps as many as 100,000, demonstrated in Tel Aviv on Saturday 4 August to protest against the new “Nation State Law”, which opens the door to legally-sanctioned racism against non-Jews.

The law relegates Arabic from the status of official language, and asserts that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”. Israel’s Arab minority, which makes up around 20% of the population, has formal legal equality, but faces frequent discrimination, which many fear the new law will intensify.

An open letter (printed in full below) is being circulated which calls on Labour’s National Executive to refuse to endorse the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) examples of antisemitism. Workers' Liberty thinks the Open Letter is based on a misunderstanding of the IHRA and thus will not help Labour's leadership deal with the controversy over the Party's new code on antisemitism.

Despite what is said, no IHRA examples, exclude criticism of any racist actions of the Israeli government.

Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of the parliamentary fraction of the German left-wing Die Linke party, has announced the launch-date and name for a new extra-parliamentary “broad movement”.

It will be launched on 4 September, and it will be called #StandUp.

On one level #StandUp — targeted at members of Die Linke, the SPD (German Labour Party), the Greens and those not members of any party — is a response to last year’s general election results.

Lois Weiner is a socialist and teacher trade unionist based in New York. She is the author of The Future of our Schools: Teacher Unions and Social Justice (2012, Haymarket Books) and a member of the editorial board of the socialist journal New Politics. She answered questions from Cathy Nugent of Solidarity and Daniel Randall of the Labour Days podcast about the recent wave of teacher walkouts in the US, and the struggle to revive and transform the labour movement in the age of Trump.

There is something dreamlike in the turmoil in and around the Labour Party about anti-semitism. Episodes occur — Pete Wilsman on the seventy rabbis are pulled out of the memory hole; the meeting Jeremy Corbyn hosted back in 2010...

There are demands for confession, retraction and contrition. Corbyn goes through the motions of responding to the latest revelations, disinterred memory of old events. For sure, his opponents in the party and the Tory press are out to get him.

El Cinco de Julio (July 5) is Venezuelan Independence Day. It marks the day in 1811 when a congress of Venezuelan provinces declared Venezuela’s separation from the Spanish Crown. In doing so, Venezuela became the first Spanish American colony to declare independence. For most Venezuelans, this is a day to commemorate not only the initial signatories to the Declaration of Independence, but also the major figures in the broader fight for national liberation from Spanish rule. Chief amongst these is Simón Bolívar, popularly known as El Libertador.

We boycotted the [Iraqi] elections [of May 2018] with a very active campaign. Now many political parties and candidates in particular those who did no won seats complain that there was corruption.

The Prime Minister says that the vote count was so corrupt that all the votes need to be recounted.

Workers' Liberty 3/54: Europe: the Stalinist roots of the “left exit” myth

Download pdf or read online here.

The socialist writer and activist Robert Fine died on 9 June 2018, at the age of 72. We publish tributes from Workers' Liberty people and from others who knew and worked with him. Photo: Robert Fine with Jean Lane (in the clearing in the middle of the photo, slightly right of centre, holding Workers' Action newspapers) at the anti-fascist march in Lewisham, 13 August 1977.

For some of the writings by Robert Fine on this website, and a review of his latest book, click here or scroll down.

Saudi-backed forces are fighting to take control of the port city of Hodeidah.

Hodeidah, on Yemen’s West coast, has over half-a-million inhabitants. It is the only major port controlled by the Houthi insurgents who have had control of most of the populated areas of Yemen since late 2014. The Houthis have been battling a Saudi-led coalition which started a bombing campaign against them in 2015.

Who are we? What are Workers' Liberty and Solidarity? We are a political strand in the flux of the broadly-Corbynite left, a flux which may be reshaping the left for a long period to come.

We are the socialist, class-struggle, consistently-democratic, internationalist strand in the left. That is why we meet such hostility from the NGO-politics, Stalinistic or semi-Stalinist, bureaucratic, nationalistic, and "kitsch anti-imperialist" bloc. That small but vocal bloc represents the deadweight inflicted on the left in the Blair-Brown-Cameron decades, but with feet.

This Friday, 14 June, a trans student and pro-trans activist, Nic Shall, will face the University of Bristol’s disciplinary board for writing an open letter to the University calling for the cancellation of the “A Woman’s Place UK” (WPUK) event in Bristol.

WPUK are an organisation campaigning against proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). These reforms would allow trans people to change the gender on their birth certificates by self-declaration without requiring a medical diagnosis through a long, intrusive, expensive and degrading procedure.

Before the Syrian civil war the Yarmouk district on the outskirts of Damascus was home to almost 150,000 registered Palestinian refugees. It was probably the largest and most well-developed refugee settlement in the world; it was certainly the biggest in Syria.

In May 2018 the last Daesh fighters who had occupied the camp, along with other Syrian rebels, were driven out. The area now stands in ruins and is completely uninhabitable. There are plans for the complete redevelopment of southern Damascus, and the former camp residents may find themselves excluded.

Anne Marie Waters from the tiny political party, For Britain, is standing in the Lewisham East by-election on 14 June. Waters is a far right anti-Muslim bigot and, as well as working hard for the Labour candidate Janet Daby in this election, we must be oppose her racism.

Who is Waters? Waters, was once a prominent Labour, secularist and LGBT activist; in the past she was seen to be on the left. She claims to have been involved in the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign but no-one in that campaign remembers her.

On 19 April 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a small dose of a chemical he had synthesised and experienced the world’s first LSD trip. His experience ushered in two decades of experimentation and clinical research into psychedelic drugs until it was cut short by prohibition in 1970.

Pressure is growing inside Labour for it to take a firm stance against Brexit.

Some of this pressure comes from the right of the Party. On Sunday 3 June Sadiq Kahn called for Corbyn to oppose Britain’s departure from the single market. He advocated Labour supports an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill which aims to keep Britain in the European Economic Area, effectively signing the UK up to the so-called “Norway option”, which would retain access to the Single Market.

[Published in 1968]

“I hate the revolution like sin” said the hangman of Germany’s 1918 revolution, the Social Democrat Ebert. Less direct, but equally clear after the events in France, is the recent statement of the parliamentary leader of the French Communist Party, Robert Balanger: “When we talk about the revolution we now think in terms of a political struggle in which our party agrees to fight the bourgeoisie with their own weapons.”

The conference of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts is being held in Sheffield on 8-10 June.

The conference follows a series of important industrial disputes in education — for lecturers’ pensions and against the destruction of further education — from which the National Union of Students has been shamefully absent. Those disputes form the background for our discussions.

A groundswell of solidarity from local student activist groups, Labour Clubs and others showed meaningful support for the strike where the NUS failed. This needs to be built on.

Socialism Makes Sense: Ideas for Freedom 2018
21-24 June 2018
Saturday-Sunday: Birkbeck University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
Friday evening debate 7pm at Nunn Hall, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
Thursday evening walking tour meet at 6.30pm, Bow Church DLR, look for the red flag.

O, sing me not that song again
My lovely Nora, dear,
The strong, the proud defiant strain
It breaks my heart to hear.

Charles J Kickham(*)

Red London is a Stalinist meme Facebook page and Twitter account which spreads fake news about Trotskyists and others on the left whom they don’t like.

Threats of war are piling up on all sides in the Middle East.

On 8 May US president Donald Trump is announcing his decision on whether the US will withdraw from the 2015 deal lifting many economic sanctions on Iran and restricting Iran’s nuclear program. He is expected to withdraw.

Trump’s new National Security Adviser, since 9 April, is John Bolton, a long-time advocate of the US bombing Iran.
On 14 May Trump will make the symbolic and provocative move of declaring the US Embassy to Israel officially sited in Jerusalem rather than Tel Aviv.

The TUC has called a march and rally for 12 May under the slogan of a “new deal for working people”. There is plenty to protest about.

The cuts since the 2008 crash are overwhelming. There has been a decline in real wages. The NHS has been brought to its knees. At the start of May we heard that one million more children are growing up in poverty since 2010, due to in-work cuts in benefit.

Labour right-winger Chuka Umunna is using European issues as a device for self-promotion and to bash Corbyn, but on the Single Market he is right.

It will be abject if Labour ends up using its votes in the Commons to save the Tory government on a possible pro-Single-Market amendment which will be debated in the House of Lords on 8 May and may be backed by enough Tory rebels to defeat May unless Labour gives her its votes.

The left which has flooded into Labour since Corbyn’s leadership campaign in 2015 now holds the balance of power within the Party. But what kind of left is this, and where is it going?

The Israeli army has killed 44 Palestinians, and injured hundreds more, after Israeli Defence Force (IDF) snipers opened fire on demonstrations on Israel’s border with the Palestinian territory of Gaza, on Fridays between 30 March and 27 April.

One protestor, 18-year-old Abdel Fattah Abdel Nabi, was shot in the back as he turned to flee IDF fire. Another victim was Gazan journalist Yaser Murtaja, killed by a bullet to the abdomen underneath his bullet-proof vest clearly marking him out as a member of the press.

Between 400,000 and 500,000 demonstrators – on top of the 202,000 from pensioners' groups on demonstrations the previous week – came together across France, with around 60,000 in Paris, including the public sector and railway workers, came together on 22 March.

On Monday 12 March Universities UK and the University and Colleges Union (UCU) announced they had reached an ″agreement″ at ACAS in the ongoing dispute over the USS pension scheme.

As details of the ″deal″ came to light UCU members across the country were at first confused as to why the UCU would have agreed such a deal, and then angry.

On Friday 23 March UCU members were emailed by the union with a ″proposal for resolving the dispute″ on pensions from Universities UK.

The new proposal is a significant step back by the employer, and shows victory could be within reach, but does not guarantee enough for strikes to be called off just yet.

On 1 March Donald Trump announced tariffs of 25% on steel imports, 10% on aluminium imports.

Other governments are alarmed by this shift towards trade war. The OECD, a consortium of the world’s 35 strongest capitalist economies, has criticised the move. Further argument will come at the meeting of the finance ministers and central bank governments of the G20 (20 strongest countries) in Buenos Aires on 19-20 March.

Socialists should be alarmed too, for our own distinct reasons.

Workers at five McDonalds restaurants (in Crayford, Cambridge, Manchester, and two in Watford) will strike on Tuesday 1 May. Richard, a Bakers’ Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) activist from Watford, spoke to Solidarity.

I first got involved through one of our organisers, Gareth. I’ve been a member of the union since before the September strike but we didn’t have the numbers in Watford at that point to ballot, but I attended the strike committee meeting in Crayford. I helped build up the campaign with workers from the other stores.

The economic crisis of 2008 and its aftershocks cracked the mystique which the world capitalist system had built in the two decades after the collapse of Russian and European Stalinism. For the first time in 30 years the left is on the offensive in the Labour Party.

Socialism is again on the agenda — a society based on human solidarity, social ownership of industry and banks, and on political, economic, and social democracy.

This book confronts head-on the strongest arguments against socialism now in circulation, inside the Labour Party and beyond.

At last year’s National Union of Students conference, NUS’s broadly leftish leadership was displaced by a new, mostly more right-wing team of officers. President Malia Bouattia, whose re-election we critically supported, lost to incumbent Shakira Martin.

This month’s visit to the UK of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MbS), at the head of a large delegation of Saudi military and business leaders, marks a new low for the Tory government.

It also indicates a major strategic economic priority for the Tory government, as Emily Thornberry put it, “to plug the hole that will be left in Britain’s trade and growth prospects … after Brexit”.