Workers Party/ ISL archive

African Americans, 1947: We want to be free!

The US Army which won World War Two, and prided itself on its victory over the Nazi racists, was itself segregated. African Americans were hived off into separate units, often working as cargo handlers or cooks, and commanded by white officers. Not until 1948 did the US government decide to desegregate its armed forces. Not until after the end of the Korean war, in 1954, was desegregation carried through. Since the defeat of radical reconstruction in the Southern states after the US civil war of 1861-5 which abolished slavery, the now-formally-free African Americans in the South had faced an...

Atomic Energy: for Barbarism or Socialism? A Socialist Manifesto From the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

A comprehensive Trotskyist response to the new age which opened with the American atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It was published in Labor Action, New York, at the end of 1945. "The impact of the bomb was so terrific that practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death by the tremendous heat and pressure engendered by the blast." - From a Tokyo broadcast describing the result of the atomic bomb dropped by a Superfortress on Hiroshima. The explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the missiles that were produced by the United States for the...

ATOMIC ENERGY: for Barbarism or Socialism? A Socialist Manifesto From the Dawn of the Atomic Age

"The impact of the bomb was so terrific that prac- tically all living things, human and animal, were liter- ally seared to death by the tremendous heat and pres- sure engendered by the blast." —From a Tokyo broad- cast describing the result of the atomic bomb dropped by a Superfortress on Hiroshima. The explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the missiles that were produced by the United States for the "democratic" camp and dropped on what we were told was an "ape-like, bestial and inhuman" people are still reverberating throughout the entire capitalist world and shaking the very foundations...

April 1940: the USSR and and the World War

The outbreak of the Second World War has once more put prominently at the top of the order of the day the “Russian question”. The signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact was followed by the joint invasion of Poland; by the reduction of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to the state of vassals of the Kremlin; by the invasion and seizure of part of Finland by the Red Army; and by speculation and prediction of coming events which, a year ago, would have been waved aside as preposterous. In bourgeois-democratic circles, these events furnished the occasion for more pious homilies about the identity of...

1948: Flashback on 1939

Flashback on the “Russian Question”. The 1939 dispute in the light of new documents, by Ernest Erber: New International February 1948. The captured German archives bearing on German-Russian relations during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, published by the US State Department, are of special interest to our movement. The captured German archives bearing on German-Russian relations during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, published by the US State. Department, are of special interest to our movement. The infamous pact and the train of political and military events it set in motion were...

Isaac Deutscher: The Anatomy of an Apologist

Issac Deutscher published his biography of Stalin 16 years ago. Since then he has produced a small book on Russian trade unions, several collections of essays and lectures, a three-volume biography of Trotsky and scores of newspaper and magazine articles analyzing contemporary developments in the Communist world. Not only is Deutscher a scholarly biographer and active political journalist, he also has had experience in the Polish Communist and Trotskyist movements. This combination of qualifications has helped him gain a position of special eminence in the expanding world of Kremlinology...

George Orwell's "1984"

That George Orwell’s 1984 is a work of major significance, as a political document if not as a novel, and that it is probably the best delineation of totalitarian society we have, is by now clear to anyone who has read the book. It is a book written from the total energy of an aroused man, with all the passion and percipience at his command; a book clearly the product of fear, as there is every reason it should be; a book which, in addition to its public relevance, has a distinct undercurrent of personal tragedy. There is a kind of woeful rightness in the fact that Orwell died shortly after...

"For a Labor Declaration of Political Independence"

Dedicate May Day 1945 to - a new world of socialism! MANIFESTO OF THE WORKERS PARTY Working Men and Working Women: This May Day, 1945, arrives at a time when civilization stands on the edge of disaster. The war, rapidly approaching conclusion in Europe and with a swifter than anticipated defeat of Japan in the offing, has shown the dual tendencies in capitalism: its tremendous capacity to create the means of abundance; its equally tremendous capabilities of destruction. The world stands at the crossroads. It can either go forward to a progressive society of peace, freedom and security for all...

Yalta 1945: when Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill shared out the spoils of World War Two

Click here to download whole text as pdf . Chapter 1. THE DIRTY WORD: IMPERIALISM Chapter 2. RIFT IN THE LOOT Chapter 3. THE SECRET WAR Chapter 4. KINDNESS AND KINGS Chapter 5. THE LARGE TICK Chapter 6. PEACE AND QUIET Chapter 7. STRANGE BANNERS REFERENCES: All quotations not otherwise ascribed are from the text of the Yalta papers as published by the N. Y. Times. “Sherwood”=Robert Sherwood: Roosevelt and Hopkins. (1948) “Churchill" = Winston Churchill: Second World War, Vol 6 Triumph and Tragedy (1953). “Leahy”=William D. Leahy: I Was There (1950). "Byrnes”= James F. Byrnes: Speaking Frankly...

War or Peace? The socialist answer

Neither Washington nor Moscow - For the Third Camp Against War! The Fate of Civil Liberty in Imperialist War Why This Profit System and Its Government Bar a Democratic Foreign Policy Rival of Capitalism, Oppressor of Labor, Enemy of Peace Fair Deal Parrot or 'Architect of the Future'? Youth Conscription and the Drive Against Academic Freedom From 1950 to 1957, each May Labor Action , the paper of the "Third Camp" Trotskyists, the Independent Socialist League, gave over a week's publication to a special "pamphlet issue" on a big political question. This is the May 1951 special.

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