Imperialism

National rights and the decolonial gaze

Ashok Kumar replies to Sean Matgamna’s article “ Changing the culture of the left ” (Solidarity 469). For Sean's reply click here . More debate on the Right of Return here . Sean Matgamna attracts our gaze as he conjectures on “the whole truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. Alice in Wonderland, a fabled figure of fiction, is a subject of his piece (Solidarity 469) and as we know, when luncheoning with the Mad Hatter, she divined that what we call truth might not be all that it seems. Conman Bolshevism is indubitably one amidst a multitude of truth subjects. “Hostility to the...

Review: An honest opponent of “pseudo-anti-imperialism”

Rohini Hensman’s book is a welcome intervention into debates on the international socialist left. Above all it is a damning indictment of the state of those broad sections of the left, especially in Britain, who have embraced a negative, anti-Western, anti-US, “pseudo-anti-imperialism” — a politics that is also effectively pro-imperialist (of Russia, China, Iran), anti-democratic, anti-liberatory and ultimately anti-working class. The central locus of the book is the conflict in Syria, where much of the left has been utterly wretched. But Hensman probes deeper, criticising the Russian and...

Nationalism and patriotism are dead ends for the left

The call to embrace patriotism is one heard over and over on the left. Particularly in the wake of Brexit and when the far-right is resurgent, many seek some way to ride the tide of nationalist sentiments. But for class-struggle socialists, the project of left-wing nationalism can only ever be politically incoherent and strategically a dead-end. Advocates of British left-nationalism (and English - see below) often draw on the freedom-fighting histories of heroic movements like the Chartists and suffragettes. But this requires assuming there was something particularly British in what socialists...

TV fictions and AWL reality

An open letter to Ashok Kumar It’s been said before, and it will bear saying again. If everything published by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in the last five decades were to disappear, and if future historians of socialism had to rely on what our political opponents said about us, then the historians would find it impossible to make political sense of the story. On the one hand we are people who do, and have always done, everything we can to help workers in their struggle against employers and governments. We throw everything we have into that. We preach working-class revolutionary...

Against supporting "progressive imperialism" in Iraq

Contents [ Note 1 ] Ex-Marxist Blairites and “Reactionary Anti-Imperialists” Their case for backing Blair Support for lesser evils? Not a penny for this system! Progressive Imperial Democrats? Was it the bourgeoisie that won “bourgeois democracy”? The Russian experience No imperialism? Capitulators of today and yesterday Mañana Third Campists Conclusions “The attempt of the bourgeoisie during its internecine conflicts to oblige all humanity to divide up into only two camps is motivated by a desire to prohibit the proletariat from having its own independent ideas. This method is as old as...

Making garish pantomime of the colonial imaginary

By the time of its fourth episode, the point at which this review was written, Taboo, which had occasionally teetered on the edge of greatness, had collapsed into rather grotesque pantomime. The aloofness of Tom Hardy’s performance, which in earlier episodes had given his character, James Delaney, a brooding malice, is petering out into ridiculousness, as he growls his way through a script peppered with faux-profound cliches (“There is business afoot tonight” he says, climbing into a carriage.) The dark Other of the colonial imaginary looms large in the world of Taboo: Delaney begins the show...

Babel-socialism in the light of the Kosova war

There is a story in the Bible about the Tower of Babel. Humankind starts to build a high tower to climb up to the heavens. Offended by this presumption in creatures He has created to be His helpless supplicants and playthings. God punishes them. Where before there had been only one language, humankind wakes up one morning speaking many —all the languages of the earth. God had ensured that the combination of divided humanity in such enterprises as building a tower up to heaven will be impossible in the future. Thus the old story-makers tried to account for the existence of many languages in the...

Civilisation, backwardness and liberation

What is the attitude of Marxists to "backward" and "underdeveloped" countries and peoples who are being assaulted, occupied, or colonised by a more advanced but predatory civilisation? No-one expressed it so clearly and so forcefully as Leon Trotsky: "What characterises Bolshevism on the national question is that in its attitude to oppressed nations, even the most backward, it considers them not only the object but also the subject of politics. Bolshevism does not confine itself to recognising their 'rights' and parliamentary protests against the trampling upon of those rights. "Bolshevism...

“Unite the workers and bury the religious hatreds”

At Workers’ Liberty 2015 summer school, Ideas For Freedom, Michael Johnson summarised on the history of the far left in Northern Ireland. Here we publish his presentation. Marc Mulholland’s speech in the same session was published in Solidarity 386 . There are two main approaches that Trotskyists have taken to Ireland since partition in 1921. Both approaches are wrong in different ways. The main problem with both of them is that they ignore the democratic programme to overcome an unresolved national problem which is dividing the working-class movement in Ireland. The first approach I want to...

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