Party and class

Lutte Ouvriere itself, Laguiller’s organisation, is probably in real terms the strongest avowedly-Trotskyist organisation in the world, thanks to a solid and stable routine. They run 400 regular workplace bulletins. On a series of international questions, from Europe to Afghanistan, they and we have shared views differing from almost all the other would-be Trotskyist groups in the world. However, they tend to reduce politics to bread-and-butter industrial militancy plus socialist propaganda. They have little interest in, for example, specific mobilisation against France’s large fascist...

The “IS tradition” of the 1960s, which members and old ex-members of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) cherish, was in fact largely taken from the Independent Labour Party in its last years. The first part of this article described the earlier history of the ILP. After 1946 the ILP mutated. This article tells the rest of the story. From about the time James Maxton died, and Fenner Brockway, John McGovern and others left to join the Labour Party, the ILP shed its character as a trimming, evasive, manoeuvring left social-democratic organism, and took on the character of an “ideological”...

In the last issue of Solidarity, Mordecai Ryan outlined the history of the ILP , the main British "centrist" organisation of the 1930s and 40s. Its nearest equivalent in Britain today is the SWP. As mud is a mix of earth and water so centrism is an unstable and almost always incoherent mix of bits of revolutionary Marxist political tradition and aspiration with alien, reformist, etc elements. But the elements incorporated in any given centrist organisation and the proportion of revolutionary Marxist to other elements vary from organisation to organisation and in a given organisation from time...

Eric Hobsbawm somewhere discusses one of the oddest conundrums in labour historiography, one paralleled now in the historiography of IS/SWP: the 20th century reputation of the Fabian Society as far-sighted pioneers of independent labour representation - the gap between what was and what is afterwards widely accepted as having been. The facts flatly contradicted the Fabians' reputation. They opposed independent working-class politics for as long as they could, pursuing a policy of 'permeating' the Liberal Party with ideas about state and municipal enterprise. They 'come in' late to the movement...

What follows is a summary of the political and ideological traditions on which Workers’ Liberty and Solidarity base ourselves. Isaac Newton famously summed up the importance of studying, learning, and building on forerunners. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wrote, referring to René Descartes, his contemporary Robert Hooke, and presumably also to his direct predecessor Isaac Barrow. In science few people think they can neglect the “tradition” and rely on improvisation. In politics, alas, too many. The summary here, written in 1995, starts as...

Special issue: "How Solidarity Can Change The World". Click "read more" to see contents. How Solidarity Can Change The World Articles by Frederick Engels, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky With an introduction by Sean Matgamna. Socialism after Stalinism - By Sean Matgamna The Principles of Communism - By Frederick Engels The Class Struggle - By Karl Kautsky The Spartacus Programme - By Rosa Luxemburg What does Spartacus want? By Rosa Luxemburg The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International By Leon Trotsky It will be socialism or barbarism - The politics of...

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part Jack Cleary continues his analysis of and selection from Lenin’s 1902 book What is to be Done? Arguing that the educational work of Marxists was essential if the “spontaneous” working class trade “unionist” movement were to become socialist, Marxist movement, Lenin cites the experience of the German labour movement. “Recall the example of Germany. What was the historic service Lassalle rendered to the German working-class movement? It was that he diverted that movement from the path of progressivist trade...