Imperialism

Debating internationalism in the Democratic Socialists of America

Dan La Botz is a US socialist active in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Solidarity . He is a co-editor of the independent socialist journal New Politics , and a supporter of the Internationalism from Below initiative. He spoke to Daniel Randall of Workers' Liberty about debates in and around the DSA, especially about what approach the organisation should take to international issues. What follows is an edited transcript. This interview was conducted prior to voting on resolutions at the DSA's recent convention. At that convention, a resolution broadly representing the “campist”...

Angelo Del Boca, the honest historian of Italian colonialism

On 6 July, Angelo Del Boca, the most honest and fearless historian of Italian colonialism and its crimes, died aged 96. He was a lifelong socialist, a former partisan fighter and journalist. As a historian, his work was concentrated on the demolition of the presumed “humane and generous” character of Italy”s imperialist adventures. He was rewarded by the open and fierce hostility not just of the country”s reactionary Right but also of the intellectual and historiographical currents of social-democrats and Stalinists for ever in the search for a “progressive” patrimony. The myth of the Italians...

New mobilisations inside Israel

The new mobilisation of the Palestinians within Israel is, or could be, a historic shift. The Arab grandees, and much of the small middle class, had fled Palestine before the 1948 war started, many hoping to avoid war and return after the Arab states had won. The Arabs remaining in Israel after the war and the expulsions were mostly peasants. They lived mostly under military government until 1966. Large tracts of their land were seized by chicanery. As with the Palestinian Arab people in the West Bank and Gaza who submitted to Jordan and Egypt seizing those areas and extinguishing the UN...

The Wretched of the Earth, 60 years on

Frantz Fanon was only 36 when he died but in his short life he wrote one of the classic anti-colonial works of all time. The Wretched of the Earth became one of the best-known revolutionary texts of that stormy decade. It was first published in France in 1961: an extract in May, exactly 60 years ago, in the magazine Les Temps Modernes , then the whole book in December. Fanon was born into a relatively privileged background in the French colony of Martinique in the Caribbean. He left, aged 18, to join the Free French forces towards the end of World War 2 and went on to study medicine and...

The left should oppose nuclear weapons and NATO

When the New Statesman published Paul Mason’s provocatively titled article, “How the left could save Nato”, in late November 2019, it attracted a deserved torrent of criticism. But in the Labour leadership election that followed, neither the eventual left candidate, Rebecca Long-Bailey, nor the other tentative left contender, Clive Lewis, opposed participation in NATO. Indeed, Lewis had previously defended it. And from early on, Corbyn’s leadership had reconciled itself to maintaining the UK’s nuclear weapons and commitment to NATO. Now the Starmer leadership has upped the volume by describing...

Why we wrote about Saklatvala

Our new pamphlet on 1920s revolutionary socialist MP Shapurji Saklatvala is out now and can be bought here (profits from the first print run go to the Sage care workers’ strike fund). Its author Sacha Ismail explains why he started reading about Saklatvala and we decided to produce the pamphlet. When I first joined Workers’ Liberty, twenty years ago, I read an article about the history of the Labour Party. Written in 1996 by Sean Matgamna, it cited Saklatvala as an important figure, quoting Communist and Trotskyist veteran Harry Wicks – active in the Battersea labour movement at the same time...

Chagos: the struggle continues

Abridged from the website of the Mauritius socialist organisation Lalit In the apparently low-stakes dispute between Mauritius and Maldives over the delimitation of their maritime boundary, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) on 28 January found, on a preliminary issue raised by Maldives, that Britain has no claim on Chagos [islands previously ruled with Mauritius by Britain from which Britain evicted the whole population in 1967-73, to hand them over to the US for a military base]. Not even “a claim”. The judgment thus lands a legal knock-out. Now, unfortunately, the...

Shapurji Saklatvala: a revolutionary trailblazer

Saklatvala speaking in Hyde Park, demanding the release of the Reichstag fire suspects in Germany (1933) This is the sixth and final part of a series. For the other articles, see here Buy our pamphlet on Saklatvala here

Wadsworth on Saklatvala

Sacha Ismail reviews Marc Wadsworth’s biography of Shapurji Saklatvala, Comrade Sak: A Political Biography (Peepal Tree Press, 2020) There are four biographies of 1920s revolutionary socialist MP Shapurji Saklatvala. Marc Wadsworth’s is the most recent, originally published in 1998 and republished in an updated version in September this year. It’s very good – mostly (when I started writing the recent series of articles on Saklatvala in Solidarity , I tried but failed to get hold of the original edition of Wadsworth’s book; the new version didn’t arrive until five out of six articles were...

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