Left groups and people

Join our online debate, Towards a new revolutionary left? - between Workers' Liberty, Mutiny and Red Flag. From 6.30pm on Sunday 12 July. More details here: https://facebook.com/events/716502102445346/

The great wave of street protests after the killing of George Floyd on 25 May still continues, but the pace looks like slowing. Activists will be thinking about how they can continue their efforts over the months and years needed to win and consolidate change. That this killing has generated so broad a protest must be partly because a pandemic which has hit the worst-off hardest everywhere, and a wave of job cuts which has done similar, especially in the USA, are in everyone's minds.

Ruth Cashman, who is standing for election to the Momentum National Co-ordinating Group (London region), discusses the future of the left. Part three of three articles. Part one, 'How I Became a Socialist' + part two, 'The irreplaceable strategy of simply keeping going'. The depth of the recession facing us means that the Tories might either force through an enormous amount of new cuts or that they will calculate that such a magnitude of cuts are not worth it. That the economic hit and ensuing social chaos will be too great. Whatever is in store for us, it has been a big failure of the Labour...

Ruth Cashman, who is standing for election to the Momentum National Co-ordinating Group (London region), describes how early-life experiences and reading books made her a socialist, and what socialism means to her. The first of three articles. Part two discusses militant trade unionism in local government. Because my parents were socialist trade unionists — they met on an anti-fascist demo — we always talked about politics at home. We’d talk about the anti-apartheid struggles or Section 28 and many other things. If someone had asked me if I was a socialist when I was six, I would have said,...

Abbie Clark is Secretary of Stevenage CLP and a candidate for the National Coordinating Group of the Labour left group Momentum (nominations open 28 May, election 16-30 June), on the Forward Momentum slate - elected onto the slate as part of Momentum Internationalists. She spoke to Sacha Ismail. With Josh Lovell, I founded our Stevenage Momentum group at the end of 2015. A lot of us had joined the Labour Party, but found there was little pre-existing organising on the Labour left, and that it was a bit of a hostile atmosphere for new left-wingers. There wasn’t much room for debate or...

Momentum Internationalists is a platform launched by supporters of Labour for a Socialist Europe to promote left-wing, class-struggle, pro-democracy and internationalist ideas in the big Labour left grouping Momentum as part of the debates around the coming elections for Momentum’s National Coordinating Group (NCG: nominations 28 May to 11 June, voting 16 to 30 June). MI’s first action after launch was to initiate an open letter to Keir Starmer protesting against his pro-Modi u-turn on Kashmir, demanding that Labour uphold conference policy to “stand with the Kashmiri people fighting against...

Things are dark now for socialists almost everywhere. Nationalism, nativism and violent reaction are on the march across the globe.

A large group of people who had been prominent in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) [in the 1960s have] written an open letter about the importance of supporting Joe Biden [for US president]... They tell us “this is an all hands on deck moment,” and that supporting Joe Biden in order to defeat Donald Trump “is our high moral and political responsibility”. The letter of the sixty-six appeals to the lessons of history, which I think is always a good idea. What they do with history, however, strikes me as selective and superficial. When I saw the letter mentioning the stormy year of 1919, I...

Woman's Place UK wrote to Workers' Liberty requesting that we publish the letter below. It is a response to an article by Workers' Liberty activist Natalia Cassidy, "Anti-trans feminists blinkered on Tories", and refers to a video by Workers' Liberty activist, Zack Muddle, "Fighting for trans rights in today's labour movement". Natalia Cassidy and Zack Muddle replied to the letter below, here. Workers' Liberty champion open debate, and we publish WPUK's letter in that spirit. For more on what we believe on trans rights, see for example "Support trans people's rights!" passed at our 2018...

Tony Reay, who died on 23 April, was a campaigner, trade unionist and socialist. For most of his adult life he worked closely with Workers’ Liberty comrades in the civil service trade unions, first the CPSA and then the PCS. He was based in Lewisham for the past 30 years and was hugely respected in the Lewisham labour movement. I first met Tony 27 years ago, just after I moved to London. The then AWL industrial organiser discovered I was now living across from the road from Tony, and sent me to visit Tony with the instruction to recruit him. I still don’t know if that was the organiser’s sense...