Anti-Fascism

In response to the death of the protester at the G20 demonstrations yesterday, up to 600 people assembled at the Bank of England on 2 April. They want to call for an independent public inquiry. (A further demonstration has been called around this idea for Saturday 4 April (see events column on this website). The assembly was a collective gathering to mark his death. Demonstrators are demanding answers. Part of that process is gathering together statements from witnesses. The following is a press release from the group co-ordinating this effort: Various participants in the City of London...

[A song of the Industrial Workers of the World] We have fed you all for a thousand years And you hail us still unfed, Though there's never a dollar of all your wealth But marks the workers' dead. We have yielded our best to give you rest And you lie, self-fould old bull. Then if blood be the price of all your wealth, Good God! We have paid it in full! There is never a mine blown skyward now But we're buried alive for you. There's never a wreck drifts shoreward now But we are its ghastly crew. Go reckon our dead by the forges red And the factories where we spin. If blood be the price of your...

Parables For Socialists 20 THIS IS DYSTOPIA , LADY! What world is this, sir? This is Dystopia , lady! World of hallucogenic sights And waking nightmares; Realm of Dire Remembrances And of things seen in our Bleak Imaginings. Strange ancient worlds still are threaded in This ending-time of humankind's pre-history: See it through the lenses of its parts, Its smaller, true and fancied, Past and present, parts, And of its pasts, If you would see it plain, And know what centuries this is: Here old and new combine; Progress and regress intertwine. II This is the Great Dalek Civilisation , Run by...

“Socialism is the answer” to the crises and crying injustices, the inequalities and absurdities, of capitalism. But what is it, this socialism? Too often it is a vague and cloudy and undefined “big word”. In part, this is deliberate policy by the socialists. Before the great founders of modern socialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, socialism had been mostly what they came to call “utopian socialism”. Some great benevolent thinker — and some of them were very great thinkers and splendid human beings, such as the Englishman Robert Owen — would work out a blueprint for an ideal socieity...

Before Hitler Came To Power pt 1. Before Hitler Came To Power pt 2.

RECENT ADDITIONS ARE MARKED WITH AN ASTERISK INTRODUCTION

The author traces the history of the German workers’ movement in the decade before Hitler consolidated power. It was published in the US Marxist journal Fourth International in February 1943. Sherry Mangan (writing under the name Terence Phelan) was a well-known US journalist and secretly, using his journalistic assignments as cover, a key organiser of the international Trotskyist movement of the time. Part 1 here . Unlike classic police reaction, fascism builds on a mass base. To obtain this, it offers the disoriented and desperate petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat a violently demagogic...

THE HIGHER BARBARISM Barbarians at the gate, Civilised folk within: Rabble pull down the great, Mankind begins again: That's how it used to be. Barbarians at the top, The civiliser's rise Brought to a needless stop By people rich and wise: That's how it is today. The outcasts drained the swamp, Built social aqueducts; The rich on the poor now stomp, On life charge usufructs; That's how it is for now. Our world is upside down, Out of kilter, out of sense; God is a witless clown And Clio* far too dense: But that won't allways be. We will rise again: Civilisation yet will win! * The goddess of...

WHY OUR FLAG STAYS RED The "Butcher's Apron", tri-colours galore, Flags of present might: paltry, passing things! Our flag, Flag of the proles and of the poor Denotes long war, and rooted will to fling Red truth against encumb'ring lies, to try Our strength — until humankind wins Liberty! (WL 44)

DURING THE two decades of the great labour militancy, roughly from the mid-'50s to the mid-'70s, the most important revolutionary socialist organisation in Britain was the Socialist Labour League. The fundamental responsibility for the failure of the left then has to be laid on the SLL and on its leader Gerry Healy. The SLL dominated the world of revolutionary politics during this period, overshadowing even sizable organisations like Militant (now the Socialist Party, and Socialist Appeal) and the SWP (then called IS) and blocking the road of development for the tiny "Workers' Fight" group, a...