Solidarity 380, 14 October 2015

The Socialist Party’s political lines are coming apart at the seams and over Europe it is becoming less and less coherent. Twenty years ago, it wrote off the Labour Party as a bourgeois party, stopped calling for a vote for Labour and started running propaganda candidates under various guises such as TUSC, without ever making a breakthrough. Its analysis ruled out any kind of left development within the Labour Party. Now the Corbyn surge has happened, the Socialist Party “wishes him well” from the side lines, while issuing ultimatums and continuing to field its own candidates in the 2016...

Why are so many people attracted to Bernie Sanders’ campaign? The self-described socialist has won the support of millions. More than 100,000 people were excited enough to attend 3,500 meetings throughout 50 states on July 29. In August and September Sanders drew huge crowds in Minneapolis, Denver, Madison, Phoenix, Council Bluffs, Phoenix, Seattle (12,000), Portland, Maine, Portland, Oregon (20,000), Los Angeles (27,000) and Boston (somewhere between 25-30,000). By the end of September he'd received donations from 650,000 people—including $25.5 million mostly in small donations in just three...

When Grace Lee Boggs died, on 5 October in her beloved adopted city of Detroit, she was well into her eighth decade of activism. A brilliant philosophy student who found decent-paying opportunities blocked by discrimination against Chinese Americans, by her mid-twenties Grace Lee was a socialist militant and contributor to the revolutionary Marxist journal New International . Under the party name Ria Stone, her essays there included analyses of the history of World War I and the anti-imperialist opposition, the rising importance of China, and particularly powerful pieces on the March on...

The bringing of criminal charges against the left-wing, feminist activist Bahar Mustafa, apparently for tweeting using the ironic hash tag “kill all white men”, is both ridiculous and outrageous. Bahar was the subject of a huge media storm some months ago over this issue and the “offence” of helping to organise a one-off BME women-only meeting at Goldsmiths University, where she is a student union officer. Scores of right-wingers, men's rights activists, and others who were misinformed and/or over-opinionated got on her case, on social media and elsewhere. Bahar was the focus of a nasty...