Left groups and people

On Saturday some of us were walking from a Workers’ Liberty meeting in York to the rail station. At one junction we couldn’t remember whether to turn left or right. We looked at Google Maps on our phones. Before we could see the answer there, one of us glanced at the real world. There was the station, visible on our right! With the “don’t vote Labour” agitation on the (sort of) left now, it’s an inverse problem. Look on your smartphone, and it’s huge. Watch the real world, and it’s elusive. None of the groups — Collective, No Ceasefire No Vote (NCNV), Transform, We Deserve Better, Workers...

Your review of Irish political theory is spoilt by “alternative facts.” Some time ago you reviewed Kieran Allen’s book, 32 Counties: The Failure of Partition and the Case for a United Ireland. The review ( Solidarity 624 ) has just come to my attention. The piece, by Micheál MacEoin, suffers from a fatal flaw. Early in its introduction the reviewer replaces opinion with manufactured fact, fatally weakening the overall weight of what was otherwise a reasonable effort at polemic. Colons The section in question says: “Its chapter on the Protestant working class is of particular interest. It...

Solidarity agitates for a workers’ government, meaning a government based on and accountable to working-class organisations, and serving working-class interests. A bourgeois (capitalist) government may very well be run by “professional politicians”, who are not capitalists themselves. Education, lobbying, a web of personal ties, etc. are sufficient to keep the government on a capitalist track. But no workers’ government is possible without extensive (though not necessarily perfect) workers’ democracy and workers’ solidarity. The working class can have power not through wealth or economic...

Contrary to media speculation, Jeremy Corbyn is not going to run for London Mayor. The poll is on 2 May; Sadiq Khan is the Labour candidate. The possibility, however, remains open of the local Labour Party defying the Labour leadership and selecting Corbyn (who is still a Labour member, though denied the Labour whip in Parliament) as its candidate in Islington North in the coming parliamentary election. Solidarity has supported the wide protest against Islington North being denied a democratic choice, but has argued against courting exclusion by a “local independent” contest. The result would...

Probably best known for the TV drama Leeds United! (1974) which features a women’s textile workers’ strike (and was discussed in Solidarity 584 ), Roy Battersby had a highly productive and varied career as a writer and director of mainly TV dramas. He started off as part of that generation of left-inclined writers and directors (such as Ken Loach, Alan Bleasdale, Jim Allen, Dennis Potter, David Hare) who worked at the BBC on the Play for Today and then branched out into writing Cracker , Between the Lines , Morse , and many other dramas. As one of his last works he directed the film Red...

John Pilger, who died on 30 December 2023, was once a brave and principled journalist who spoke truth to power. Many of us of a Certain Age can remember being moved and inspired in the 1970s by his exposures of war crimes, racism, injustice and human rights abuses. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra and probably (in Britain at least) did more than any other journalist to bring the horrors of those conflicts to public attention. He twice won the UK Journalist of the Year Award: in 1967 and 1979. His eponymous TV series on ITV was required viewing as far as I...

The Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were a high-water mark for Socialist politics in the U.S. Sanders, who campaigned as a Democrat, won over thirteen million votes, 43% of the total, in his first attempt. The self-defined “democratic socialist” came within a hair’s breadth of defeating Hillary Clinton and winning the Democratic nomination. He would almost certainly have defeated Donald Trump in the general election. It was a remarkable result, considering the history of socialist politics in the U.S. Most historians point to 1912, when Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate...

We are right to criticise “slippery slogans” around Israel/Palestine as elsewhere. Se must push back against another problem too: a sole and superficial focus on individual words, on their emotional and rhetoric force over substance, and using these for virtue-signalling or “gotcha!” politics. One recent protest chant is “Not a war! Not a conflict!” The assertion is false. “Conflict” and “war” do not imply symmetry in military might or indeed culpability. The might of the Israeli military far outweighs that of Hamas, though Hamas and Hezbollah are armed to the teeth by Iran, a dictatorship...

It is good that so many people turn out for Gaza ceasefire protests. It is bad, and odd, that placards and megaphones on those protests are dominated by slogans devised by groups who want not so much a ceasefire as Hamas to war and win; and that most protesters follow the placards and chants without signalling dissent. Best if we, Workers’ Liberty, and other groups who want peace, two states, workers’ unity, can be numerous enough to have our placards and banners dominate. Pending that, let’s analyse some of the slogans. “Free Palestine” was first brought onto marches in a big way by Socialist...

Tom O’Lincoln has sadly passed away. He had had a great influence in revolutionary left politics in Australia since he arrived from the US in 1971. He had in the late 1960s joined the US International Socialists, then strongly influenced by Hal Draper’s politics, including a bureaucratic collectivist analysis of the Stalinist states, rather than Tony Cliff’s state-capitalist one. Tom played a leadership role in a number of organisations of the “International Socialist” tradition (which has fractured a few times in Australia), and there are many tributes to him from current and former members...