Imperialism

Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly At first James Connolly responded to World War One in line with the international socialist movement’s Basle Manifesto of 1912. We saw that in the instalments of this series on Connolly in Solidarity 652 and 653. From late August 1914 he shifted to a pro-German stance in line with the previous writings of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Some perverted battle-lines Nothing is more remarkable in this war than the manner in which the ruling class in the countries of the Triple Alliance have appropriated and used for their own...

The German Social Democratic Party's paper Vorwärts announces that its deputies in the Reichstag have voted to support the government's war effort Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly There were no major European wars between the wars of Bonaparte and the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, not for 99 years. There were important wars. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 Paris was occupied and the Prussian king proclaimed at Versailles to be Emperor of Germany, with sovereignty over such other German states as Bavaria. During the German occupation of...

According to Putin cronies such as Sergei Markov, the Kremlin is not fighting a war against a Ukrainian nation seeking to preserve it’s independence. What’s going on instead is a “proxy war” between Russia and NATO. The Ukrainian fighters are merely “stooges” acting at the behest primarily of US imperialism. Sadly this slander that Ukrainians fighting against enslavement by Putin’s gangster state are nothing more than NATO dupes has credence amongst elements on the left, some of whom ought to know better. The notion of “proxy war” is familiar to those who were around at the time of the Vietnam...

An enduring memory from my youth is of my father returning from the pub telling me how he had been taking bets on how long Churchill, by now very ill, would survive. He died shortly after (24 January 1965). The memory hardly fits with the usual image of a cult of hero-worship around Churchill. Some of the views of Tariq Ali have been rightly criticised in Solidarity , but in his new book Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes he has produced a powerful exposé of the Churchill myth and all the accumulated nonsense that it carries in its slipstream. Churchill was never the “hero” that post-war...

Ian Mikardo, leading left-wing opponent of founding NATO, third from left, with Harold Wilson, Aneurin Bevan, Tom Driberg and Barbara Castle In 1949, when Parliament actually voted on signing the North Atlantic Treaty, six Labour MPs voted against. That was near the height of the Cold War, with the Berlin airlift and more. Three of the six were expelled - it seems for solid Stalinist affiliations, not just opposing NATO - and three weren’t. Of the three expelled, two drifted out of politics. The third, Konni Zilliacus, was readmitted in 1952 and was an MP again after 1955 for a very right...

Why does our suggested wording for a motion on Ukraine say “we oppose NATO”, alongside saying that the war is between Ukraine, fighting for its freedom, and Russian imperialism, and not driven by NATO efforts to do down Russia? NATO was set up because West European governments and the USA feared Stalin’s USSR expanding its range of conquest in Europe to the west of the lines of 1945. The NATO governments did not think it worth the risk to push back the USSR from those 1945 lines, and did not intervene when the USSR ordered invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush...

We distrust NATO because we know the big capitalist powers will always give their own interests priority over the rights of less powerful nations. The NATO powers want to push back Putin, but only to restore stable investment and trade conditions, and stall new disruptions. They pushed Ukraine into signing a pro-Putin deal in 2015 ( the now-defunct Minsk 2 ) and they would do the same again. The US wanted to bring some (compliant) form of democracy to Iraq by their sanctions and then war there, but the outcome was chaos and deaths. We have no cause to denounce the trade and financial measures...

Eric Lee’s latest column ( 2 March ) contains the occasionally repeated claim that Marx supported the Anglo-French forces in the Crimean War (1853-6). Reading Marx’s articles in the New York Tribune from the time, which were written in the style of a war reporter and most likely by Engels, it is difficult to discern any clear support for the war. Certainly the articles unequivocally denounced Tsarism and Russian expansionism. It is clear that Marx/Engels saw the Anglo-French axis as more “progressive” than Tsarist Russia. They were scathing of British and French conservatives who showed pro...

Eric Lee’s column in Solidarity 626 gives a potted social-democratic history of NATO, and all but makes the claim that Karl Marx would have supported NATO against Russia, as he supposedly supported “British and French troops in the Crimean War” against the Tsar. Solidarity and Eric Lee both trace our political inheritance back to the erstwhile American Trotskyist Max Shachtman, who fought for independent working class politics in the face of a Trotskyist movement which lent its support to the imperialist Russian state, but in old age moved towards the right and supported American imperialism...

On 14 February the Mauritian ambassador to the UN raised his country’s flag above Peros Banhos, part of the Chagos archipelago north east of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Jagdish Koonjul explained: “We are performing the symbolic act of raising the flag as the British have done so many times to establish colonies. We, however, are reclaiming what has always been our own.” In the run up to Mauritian independence in 1968, the UK (Labour) government separated off the Chagos islands and maintained control of them. Between 1967 and 1973, Britain evicted the islands' inhabitants, about a thousand...