Marxists

Letter: The German SPD on Zimmerwald, 1915

In Solidarity 662 , Sean Matgamna discussed James Connolly’s response to the Zimmerwald internationalist-socialist conference of 1915 and his promotion of German right-wing (pro-war) socialist voices during World War One. Digging out the response to Zimmerwald in the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD’s) central newspaper Vorwärts , 29 September 1915, gives context. Despite the SPD majority’s rightly-notorious capitulation by voting for German war credits on 4 August 1914 (and again later), Vorwärts responded more warmly to Zimmerwald than Connolly, who printed only a report from French...

Letters: Hands off Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg

I was nauseated by Eric Lee’s unwarranted attack on Clara Zetkin in Solidarity 664 . Zetkin was an outstanding revolutionary socialist, feminist and fighter for working class politics over 50 years, whose mistakes towards the end of her life did not make her a loyal Stalinist. Zetkin’s incredible life (1857-1933) and record deserve to be better known. She joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1878 and became one of its most prominent leaders. They built a mass working class party of one million members, a model followed by the best socialists of that epoch, including the Bolsheviks...

Connolly's Marxism part two

Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly James Connolly had a very narrow idea of the Marxism he expounded. Whereas Marxists such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin) and others of that time thought that there were three fronts in the class struggle, the political, economic and ideological (the battle of ideas), Connolly thought and militantly asserted that there were only two fronts, the economic (trade-union) and political. He believed in fighting for the working-class side in the trade-union and political fronts of the class struggle, and...

Will workers be the revolutionary class?

The emancipation of the workers is the act of the working class itself, not of a benevolent superior; and workers’ emancipation means also “freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, and class struggle”. In some ways, that argument, from Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, requires less imagination today than it did back then. Then, the working class was a minority in almost all countries; the industrial working class in mass production and in big cities, on which Marx focused, a smaller minority. In Capital volume 1, 19 years after the Communist Manifesto, he found that even...

The tragedy of Clara Zetkin

As International Women’s Day approaches (8 March) some mainstream media will run their usual articles about the day and its history. Some may point out that the original name was International Working Women’s Day and that it was decided upon at a 1910 socialist congress in Copenhagen. It may be mentioned that one of the proponents of the holiday was Clara Zetkin, a little-remembered German socialist today who was, at the time, a household name. Among some of the famous revolutionary women of that time, Zetkin stands out. Her friend Rosa Luxemburg was an early critic both of Lenin’s ideas about...

Capitalism and the battles of democracy

“The first step in the revolution by the working class”, wrote Marx in the Communist Manifesto , “is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy”. Thus the 1888 English translation supervised by Engels. A literal translation of the 1848 German text would be something like: “the first step in the workers’ revolution is the elevation of the proletariat to the ruling class, the winning of democracy”. Hal Draper commented, fairly I think, that the 1848 text is “cryptic” as “a way of intentionally avoiding a definite statement” on whether democracy...

The best biography of Connolly

I’m not sure if I’ve read every serious biography or study of the great Irish socialist, James Connolly, but I think I have just read the best. Whereas others have sought either to claim him for their own particular project or discredit him as a nationalist renegade, Liam McNulty’s recent book, James Connolly: Socialist, Nationalist and Internationalist does Connolly the honour of trying to properly understand his ideas and political development. Connolly has too often been the victim of selective and partial readings, whether from nationalists who ignore his long record of activity as a...

Letter: The politics of collapse

Sri Lanka's "left" prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, 1970s Dan Katz ( Solidarity 659) shows us that the collapse of the strong Trotskyist movement in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the early 1960s was no marginal quirk. The world context may be part of it. By the late 1950s the orthodox Trotskyists, those who had stuck to it despite the adversities of the previous decade, had taught themselves to subsist on a perspective that “the world revolution” was despite everything advancing, in a deformed way. Its manifestation was Stalinist and nationalist revolts against US and West European imperialism...

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