Left groups and people

Socialist Green Unity Coalition, Respect, SWP, Socialist Party, Weekly Worker, IWCA, RDG, Green Party, Ken Livingstone ... and a few others.

Solidarity with the Ukrainian left

We are raising money to fund this speaker tour. Please donate here and share around. Tour dates Eventbrites to register for meetings here • 5 March: Reception from 5pm, London, Bread and Roses, 68a Clapham Manor Street, SW4 6DZ • 7 March: Workers' Liberty International Women’s Day meeting, London, 7.30pm, Marchmont Centre, 62 Marchmont St, WC1N 1AB • 8 March: Speaking at a fringe meeting at TUC Women's Conference • 9 March: Public meeting, Nottingham, 7pm, Mechanics Institute, 3 North Sherwood St, NG1 4EZ • 10 March: Public meeting, Sheffield, 7pm, Quaker Meeting House, 10 St James Street, S1...

Ukraine, Israel and the left

Solidarity has long argued that sections of the left have fallen into particular form of antisemitism. Starting from ultra-hostility to Israel which goes beyond criticising the real misdeeds of its governments and into demonising it as the world’s hyper-imperialism and hyper-racism, they end up reflexively hostile to all “Zionists”, i.e. all Jews who have some default or instinctive affinity with Israel, however critical. Readers who wonder why should look at how the same sections of the left portray the war in Ukraine. In this portrayal of the conflict, Ukraine takes on many of the political...

Ukrainian socialists visit UK in March

Olenka and Brie, two activists from the Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialniy Rukh (Social Movement, SR), are visiting Britain in March. Their visit is hosted by Workers’ Liberty. The comrades will meet activists, trade unionists, socialists and feminists as they briefly tour the country, speaking at conferences and public meetings. No one on the British left should understate the significance of what they have to say or misunderstand the urgency of their message. The comrades of SR have been active in countless campaigns against the Ukrainian capitalist class. And now they have the...

Tom Nairn, 1932-2023

I met Tom Nairn, who has died at the age of 90, only once, when I was 17 or 18 and he came to speak at a meeting at my university. I remember wondering how someone even more shy, awkward, and dishevelled than I was could have become such a high-profile influence on the 1960s left. Nairn wrote not awkwardly but exuberantly, floridly, splendidly. The literary-only character of his activity was typical of the New Left Review ( NLR ) editorial group of which he was part. Perry Anderson, its leading figure, had taken over the Review in 1962, at age 24 - he can scarcely have been shy - and though...

Ahmed Shawki, 1960-2023

Ahmed Shawki, formerly the most prominent leader of the International Socialist Organization in the USA, died on 22 January at the age of 62 after some years of ill-health. With maybe 900 members, and over 1,000 at some high points, the ISO was in the early 2000s the most active revolutionary socialist group in the USA. Its political history could be traced back to the Workers' Party of Max Shachtman (from 1940) - with twists and shifts along the way, and as it turned out enough of those to destroy the legacy. The Workers' Party's continuation, the Independent Socialist League (ISL), stopped...

John Molyneux, 1948-2022

John Molyneux, who died aged 74 on 10 December 2022, was perhaps the last of the actual 1968 generation still prominent in the Socialist Workers Party, SWP (or, rather, near it: since retiring in 2010 he had been in the Irish offshoot, SWN). In IS (as the SWP was then called) he first became prominent as part of the Southampton IS branch which in 1970 allied de facto with the Trotskyist Tendency (forerunner of the AWL) in opposing the IS’s August 1969 shift from tinny (as we saw it) sloganising about troops out of Ireland to mealy-mouthed but unmistakable support for British troops on the...

A harmful split in the French far left

Over the weekend of 9-11 December 2022 the French New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) held its national conference. By the end of this conference, there were two NPAs. In short, the leadership (including past Presidential candidates Philippe Poutou and Olivier Besancenot) attempted to split the NPA by walking out of the conference and announcing its intention to expel all minority groupings. We in Workers’ Liberty think that this split is bad and unnecessary. We note that the leadership faction was able to win a majority of votes for its people in internal elections, but could not command a...

Class struggle in Ukraine

"The Gvardeiska mine is not giving in!" - occupation over wages, conditions and management, 2020 • “A government of millionaires against billionaires”: Denys Pilash analyses Zelensky • Ukrainian trade unionists battle against Putin and for rights: interview with Ivanna Khrapko • Ukrainian socialists hold conference • Ukrainian feminists on the front line: interviews with Kateryna Kostrova, Yana Wolf and Katya Gritseva • “The right to resist”: global feminist anti-war manifesto • Women and Roma in the war • What socialists are doing in Ukraine: interview with Denys Pilash • Delegation to...

The left and lessons from Corbynism

Michael Chessum met Martin Thomas from Solidarity on 15 October to talk about his new book on Corbynism, This Is Only The Beginning . Near the end of the book (p.210) it says: “Socialist was the movement’s prevailing adjective, but its immediate policy programme was… social democracy, and there was little or no collective discussion inside Corbynism about what a truly socialist or anti-capitalist programme might look like in the future”. Wasn’t that fundamental? And wasn’t the same lack also true of the “movements” of 2010-15 which the book describes as feeding into Corbynism? Corbynism was an...

The valuable, critical Marxism of Paul Le Blanc

Paul Le Blanc has been one of the most prolific revolutionary socialist authors in recent decades, publishing scores of books, articles and reviews, in large part devoted to the early twentieth century Marxist tradition. Le Blanc’s work has numerous virtues. He writes clean and readable prose, makes theoretical issues accessible, represents various points of view objectively, puts the historical material in context and explains its relevance to present-day activism. He is honest about his own mistakes and the evolution of his views. And Le Blanc takes an ecumenical approach, willing to engage...

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