Party and class

Balance sheet on James P Cannon (2004)

James P Cannon still has a lot to teach Marxists today and the balance sheet on his life and politics is largely positive (Solidarity 3/56 and 3/57). There is no doubt his decision to support Trotsky in 1928 was of enormous significance in creating the international tendency opposed to Stalinism, on whose shoulders we stand today. However, we know quite a lot more about Cannon today than at the time of his death in 1974, and not all the material available casts him in a positive light. A number of collections of his writings from the early years have been published, and although these volumes...

Labour Parties in the USA

Paul Hampton reviews True Mission: Socialists and the Labor Party in the US by Eric Chester (Pluto 2004, £14.99) The debate about working class representation in the United States takes place in very different conditions from those we encounter in Britain. However, discussions on the US left over the last hundred years are very instructive — both for our concerns in Britain and for American comrades today. True Mission discusses the history of third party efforts in the United States over the past 120 years. It has chapters on Henry George’s campaign for New York mayor in 1886, the Socialist...

Marxists and the workers' party. Labour: norm or exception?

Martin Thomas concludes a series on "Marxists and the workers' party" with a warning against fetishising the trade-union-based forms of "old Labour" In 1909, Karl Kautsky, then a Marxist, wrote that moves to set up trade-union-based Labour Parties in continental Europe "must be fought with all the means at our disposal" (Neue Zeit, July 1909, Vol.13 no.7, pp.316-28). Lenin, a few years earlier, had opposed the call for a broad "labour congress" in Russia. "A labour congress means 'taking down the signboard'… it means merging with the Socialist-Revolutionaries [populists] and the trade unions…...

Debate and dicussion: Marxists and the workers' party

Reformism has not collapsed As far as I know, the catchphrase "Build the revolutionary party!" or "Build the party!" was first used as a regular slogan, directed at the general public, by French Trotskyists in the mid-1940s. Similar phrases will have been used by Marxists before then, as exhortations to their own activists or sympathisers, or as occasional rhetoric; but that was, I think, the first time the slogan "build the party" was offered to the public at large as instruction on what they should do to better their lot. In the 1970s the catchphrase was revived by Gerry Healy's Workers'...

"Workers' government": what it means. 2. Trotsky and the CI.

Below are three excerpts from the writings of Leon Trotsky, and a resolution of the 4th Congress of the Communist International. Des textes similaires (pas exactement les memes) disponibles en francais: Le gouvernement ouvrier en France , novembre 1922 Gouvernement ouvrier et Etats-unis d'Europe , juin 1923 Leon Trotsky: Report on the 4th Congress (1922), from The First Five Years of the Comintern, Volume 2 From the united front flows the slogan of a workers' government. The Fourth Congress submitted it to a thorough discussion and once again confirmed it as the central political slogan for...

"Workers' government": what it means. 1. Britain in 1998.

Excerpts from Jill Mountford, The case for a workers' government, Workers' Liberty 45 The mass working-class political movement has, with Blair and his gang, reached the end of a long political road. It is time to ask ourselves, where did we go wrong? Where did we take the wrong turning? The short answer is: when the movement began to lose sight of the original working-class goals for the realisation of which the labour movement first turned to independent politics. It is high time the labour movement - and in the first place its left wing - remembered where we have come from and where...

How the Bolshevik party was built

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part Between 17 July and 10 August 1903, in the course of 37 sessions, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party held its Second Congress in Brussels and London. In reality this was the first, the constituent, congress of the RSDLP. The 'First Congress' held in March 1898 in Minsk had lasted one day and all nine delegates were arrested! The 'party' it proclaimed existed only as scattered, uncoordinated local groups and circles. The 1903 Congress had been prepared by five years of practical work by local circles and...

Class, union, party

1. The Labour Party is still what Lenin called it in 1920, a bourgeois workers' party. In the last decade, there has been an enormous shift within this contradictory phenomenon towards its bourgeois pole. 2. New Labour differs from Old Labour in these respects. The trade union share of the vote at Party conference and of direct and indirect representation on the National Executive has been substantially cut. The role of both Annual Conference and the National Executive in the affairs of the Labour Party has been changed qualitatively. Essentially, they no longer control Labour Party policy, or...

Amendments on the Labour Party

Amendments on the Labour Party to various conference documents, from Bruce R. 'CLASS, UNION AND PARTY' Add new 3(a): "There has been a considerable erosion in traditional working class support for Labour, particularly amongst young people. Symptoms include the increase in electoral abstention, particularly in inner-city areas, and the growth of the BNP." RESPECT COALITION Rewrite para. 18 to read: "In the GLA and euro-elections, we can neither support Respect against New Labour nor New Labour against Respect. If Respect is standing on a watered-down non-socialist platform, the New Labour...

Debate & discussion: For a republican socialist workers' party

In a recent editorial Jack Conrad (CPGB) argues (Weekly Worker 498 October 2 2003) that "the SA could commit itself to the aim of a new workers' party. Not an old Labour mark two; rather a revolutionary party basing itself on a clear Marxist programme." As if to disprove himself he turns to the Scottish Socialist Party as his example. He says "riddled with left nationalism though it is, the SSP can nevertheless be used to illustrate what can be done". He then goes on to show how the SSP's intervention in the anti-war movement has enabled them to benefit in contrast to the Liberal Democrats in...

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