Left groups and people

Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins. • See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc. Much of the debate amongst Workers’ Liberty members about the US election has focused on the question of whether Donald Trump, and the movement around him, can meaningfully be described as “fascist”. Whilst this question has an analytical significance (personally I think “proto-fascist” is a more accurate description), it does not, in and of itself, settle the matter of how we think the class-struggle left should orient in the election. One might think Trump is a fascist, and...

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc. Howie Hawkins is a socialist running in the US presidential election on the ticket of the Green Party. On 12 October he talked with Stephen Wood from Solidarity. Workers’ Liberty backs Hawkins in the election. Part 2 of this interview is here. The invective of Trump is what is worse than previous incumbents. Egging on the vigilante militias. Calling the election as being fraudulent before it is even run. People get scared and they think Hitler is on the horizon. But it is quite different. These rag tag militias aren’t going to...

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc. The main impression I get from Thomas Carolan’s article ( Solidarity 565, Trump is a fascist) is that Carolan has belatedly woken up to the threat posed by Trump and is now panicking. Most of those who have labelled Trump a fascist have done so demagogically to advocate for the right wing and lamentable Democrat, Joe Biden. But Carolan is at least coming from the other direction, declaring Trump a fascist first before, last week ( Solidarity 566), following the drift of his first article, and declaring support of Biden’s...

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc. Thomas Carolan (“A socialist vote for Biden”, Solidarity 566, 7 October 2020) is right that a “tradition” should not be allowed to become “superstition”. He is also right that “making an absolute principle of never working in or voting for a bourgeois party” would be mechanical and dogmatic. Standing aside from the Sanders movements in 2016 and 2020 because he was running in the primary of a “bourgeois party” would have been hopelessly sectarian; refusing to campaign or vote for him if he had won still more so. But Carolan...

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc. This US presidential election is different in two ways. It narrows down to a contest between a fascistic demagogue with a militant and part-militarised mass base, and a standard-issue neoliberal. And recent years have seen a sizeable though diffuse new US socialist current round Sanders’ campaigns and the Democratic Socialists of America. At the same time, the International Socialist Organization has wound itself up, and Solidarity sees itself more as an “educational centre” than an activist group. Conclusion: the most active...

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc. Workers’ Liberty supports Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker in the 2020 US presidential election: socialists, standing as the candidates of the Green Party. We also carry debate about that stance and on assessment of Trump. Below is how Hawkins and Walker sum up their pitch, from a statement on the hospitalisation on Donald Trump. Our campaign and the work of the Green Party has never been to isolate or target one politician. Behind Donald Trump is an army of Republicans who are cheering him on at every turn. Behind the...

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc. The golden age of the Socialist Party in the U.S. lasted about a decade. By 1912 the party’s vote peaked when Eugene Debs won 6%. It was downhill from there. After more than four decades of decline, the Socialist candidate Darlington Hoopes won just 2,128 votes nationwide in 1956. If 44 years of decline taught the Socialists anything, it was that maybe it was time to try working inside the Democratic Party, the party that most American workers – and their unions – supported. In 2016 and 2020, that idea was tested in reality...

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc. In the light of the Sanders campaign and a small resurgence of leftish pressure from Democrats, having a straightforward position of never voting for or to even contemplate seeking the Democratic nomination would be counterproductive. But Sanders is not building anything out of this presidential election. And at almost 80 years old, he is, unfortunately, unlikely to be the figurehead of a new movement for any length of time. Since Biden won the nomination, Sanders, whether through being told to shut up or feeling burned, has...

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc. Anyone committed to basic human decency, let alone socialism, should hope that Donald Trump loses the American presidential election in November. Given the nature of the US’s electoral system, this means hoping that Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, wins. Does it follow that socialists should campaign for a Biden vote? This article will argue that it does not, and support the position of those US socialists who back Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, rank-and-file working-class militants running on the Green Party ticket, with...

Progressive International (PI), the latest project of Yanis Varoufakis, who was the negotiator with the EU for Greece’s Syriza government in 2015, held its “inaugural summit” on 18-20 September, drawing many “big names” of the left. Varoufakis was an opponent of Brexit. Then he became an advocate of it. He created DIEM25, an as a movement for reform of the EU, then moved on to PI. At the opening session Varoufakis made a “by the way” comment that there are serious human rights issues in China. Vijay Prashad, a PI Council member responded that the left would tear itself apart if it attempted to...