Party and class

The emancipation of the workers is the act of the working class itself, not of a benevolent superior; and workers’ emancipation means also “freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, and class struggle”. In some ways, that argument, from Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, requires less imagination today than it did back then. Then, the working class was a minority in almost all countries; the industrial working class in mass production and in big cities, on which Marx focused, a smaller minority. In Capital volume 1, 19 years after the Communist Manifesto, he found that even...

Mahalla textile strikers, in the Egyptian revolution of 2011 How can the working class becoming politically aware, organised, cohesive and self-confident enough to become society’s new ruling class, overthrowing the capitalists in favour of collective ownership with democratic self-rule? That is the decisive question about socialist revolution. But Socialist Worker ’s explanation of “revolution” ( by Isabel Ringrose, 4 December ) ducks it in favour of advocating more militancy in general, plus the presence, in the wings, of a fiercely-organised “revolutionary party”. Ringrose deserves credit...

There is a grey area between what Lenin called “bourgeois workers’ parties” or “liberal labour parties” and straightforward bourgeois parties with worker support but no organised working-class base. On that Eric Lee ( Solidarity 643 ) is right, I think. The issue was raised as long ago as the 1960s by the withered and right-wing character then of the French Socialist Party and German Social Democratic Party. Yet “a grey area” doesn’t mean “no difference”. The Democratic Party in the USA certainly draws on union officials; but the unions have no structural role in it comparable to the unions’...

The six recent contributions I will survey here mostly seek to identify an Antonio Gramsci usable for active socialist politics amidst the welter of Gramscis around us. They construct their usable Gramscis mostly from the terms which have figured largest in the “orthodox” Gramscis since the 1950s (the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI), the Eurocommunist, and then the academic): hegemony and war of position. My case will be that active socialists can gain more from seeing Gramsci’s arguments around those terms as weak areas, and starting with stronger seams of Gramsci’s writing. Jan Norden finds...

I agree with Eric Lee’s substantive argument ( Solidarity 593 ) that socialists must aim to reconstruct mass politics, not just hope for better “leaders”. But I think he gives a skewed picture of Trotsky’s 1938 declaration about “the crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”. Trotsky’s argument was not one about poor leadership in politics in general, for example in bourgeois governments, but a specific one about the labour movements at that time. The previous 50 years or so of educational and organising work by socialists of different sorts; of industrialisation and urbanisation; and of...

We'll be studying Lenin's What Is To Be Done? in the context of Lars Lih's commentary in Lenin Rediscovered , Thursdays 8pm (UTC+1) from 15 April to 27 May inclusive. Sign up on Eventbrite Zoomlink https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81679399952?pwd=WW9lRzF1M1l4VVVsWTZVOFdyTS84dz09 Study guide : click here to download as docx , and here to download as pdf . Please read the texts indicated as reading for the first session before you join the course. Schedule Session 1: Models and adversaries Reading: Extracts – German SPD model, Bernstein’s revisionism and Russian socialism before WITBD. Click here to...

The proposed launch of a Compass Labour Network has started a new round of debate on the old idea for a "Progressive Alliance" between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.

A new TV drama — Guerrilla — tells the story of the British Black Panthers. Long-time black and left activist Darcus Howe, who recently died, was a founder member of the group and consultant for the show. In this interview from 1995 Howe discussed the politics of “black power” with Dan Katz. Darcus Howe: The Panthers have been grossly misrepresented in political circles. They were an intensely revolutionary organisation, the largest non-establishment political party ever to exist in America — larger than the Communist Party or any left-wing group. There were thousands of them all over the...

Further exchanges on party-building, cooperation, and debate - Neil Faulkner Further exchanges on "workers' action to impose lockdowns" - Stuart Jordan and Martin Thomas

The pdf/ print version carries an abridged version of this article Where now for the Labour Party? Following election defeats and facing environmental and economic crises, many articles are asking what direction Labour should take under its new leader. On the eve of the leadership result, Neal Lawson, director of the Compass lobby group, wrote an article on Open Democracy in which he argued for what he called a new approach. Labour must pursue new "alliances" and "build capacity", he said. It must unite a range of "countervailing forces" that will "transform our country as it comes out of the...