Marxists

Hugo Blanco 1934-2023

Peruvian revolutionary socialist Hugo Blanco, who died in Sweden last month, needs to be recognised as a significant figure in the history of the Trotskyist movement. He became a Trotskyist as a student in Argentina in the 1950s, then returned to Peru. Sixty years ago, connected to the international trend led by the Socialist Workers Party in the USA, he played a major role in the peasant movement in La Convencion province in the Cuzco region of Peru. The majority of the peasantry there and elsewhere in the country laboured under semi-feudal conditions. Belonging to the indigenous population...

Public services and democratic control

In August 1869 Karl Marx argued in the First International, the big workers’ movement of that time, for schools as a public service, but not controlled from above by the government. At that time fewer than half of primary-age children attended (mostly church) schools in Britain, and many were sent to wage-work. “National education”, said Marx, “had been looked upon as governmental, but that was not necessarily the case”. He mentioned schooling in the USA, more widespread than in Britain but too patchy and localised. “Education might be national without being governmental. Government might...

“A socialistic nation of scholars and students”

This, from Erin’s Hope (1897), was James Connolly’s first statement of his thesis that primitive communism survived in Ireland much longer than in other countries, indeed until the 17th century, and so the struggle for socialism there equated with the struggle against foreign impositions. It is the fourth instalment on “Connolly’s historiography” in our long-running series on Connolly, politically unexpurgated . “Before the time of the conquest, the Irish people knew nothing of absolute property in land. The land belonged to the entire sept; the chief was little more than the managing member...

Discussing ecology and entropy

Expanded from the version in the printed paper. Workers’ Liberty organises a monthly Marxist ecology reading group. This month we discussed a chapter on “Entropy and ecological economics” from Marxism and Ecological Economics by Paul Burkett. Over the last three decades, Burkett and his co-thinkers have developed metabolic rift theory and played a significant role in restoring Marx as an important ecological thinker. As part of that project Burkett has engaged in critical dialogue with the ecological economists. The ecological economists emerged in the 1970s but trace their roots back to...

Rebuilding the forces of socialism

Workers’ industrial struggle has revived in recent months on a scale not seen for decades. That is cause for great hopes. Left-wing political mobilisation, though, has failed to match it. On issues like the NHS, new anti-strike laws, asylum rights, and the environment, activity on the streets has been small in proportion to the number of people opposed to official policies. That reflects a low ebb of socialist activity in the broadest sense. The activist socialist groups are often not very active and have little cooperation and little dialogue. Many people see themselves as socialists and yet...

James Connolly's Marxism part eight: Socialism in Ireland

The articles by James Connolly in this issue of Solidarity are part of our series, “Connolly, politically unexpurgated”. They express Connolly’s answer on the issue of how socialism would make headway in Ireland given the hostile influence of the priests and the division of the working class on religious lines. We find that amongst a large section of the Irish in this country [the USA], and Irish Socialists here are included, it is tacitly assumed that Socialism cannot take root in Ireland, that the Home Rule press, the supposed conservative habits of thought of the people and, above all, the...

Solidarity as the principle for the future

Hein Htet Kyaw ( Solidarity 669 and 670 ) argues that leftists in the richer countries should avoid “white saviour complex and white guilt” as political guidelines. Instead leftists should stand for “solidarity”. Otherwise, he argues, they end up as “useful idiots for the Islamists”, “campists”, or “useful idiots for Putin and Russia’s colonial war”. Costume-playing as “anti-imperialists”, with the tacit assumption that “the United States and NATO [are] the only imperialist camps on the planet”, they fall into “the anti-imperialism of the idiots”, complicit in the imperialisms or regional...

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