Nationalism and the 'national question'

Peter Graham: Life and death of an Irish Socialist Republican (1972) Left Wing Urban Guerrillas in Ireland: The Irish National Liberation Army's Bloody Feud and the Saor Eire Episode (1987) Saor Eire and Peter Graham (1996) INLA and the Irish National Question(1997) The Fenians: Rise and Decline(1967) Where the Hillside Men Have Sown: 40 Years of the IRA (1967) Permanent Revolution and Ireland Peter Graham Liam Daltun

Peter Graham: Life and death of an Irish Socialist Republican (1972) Left Wing Urban Guerrillas in Ireland: The Irish National Liberation Army's Bloody Feud and the Saor Eire Episode (1987) Saor Eire and Peter Graham (1996

In Kerensky's periodical, "Novaya Rossia" for July 12, 1939, my article on the independence of the Ukraine (printed in Socialist Appeal May 9, 1939) is subjected to a "criticism" of its own kind. From the standpoint of socialist, scientific, literary, etc., criteria, "Novaya Rossia" is of course of no interest at all. But it possesses this merit, that it enables one to peer into the heads of the Russian middle and petty bourgeois democrats. Scratch any of them hard enough and you will find a feudalist. The periodical fumes over the fact that I wholeheartedly and completely stand for the...

In one of the tiny, sectarian publications which appear in America and which thrive upon the crumbs from the table of the Fourth International, and repay with blackest ingratitude, I chanced across an article devoted to the Ukrainian problem. What confusion! The author sectarian is, of course, opposed to the slogan of an independent Soviet Ukraine. He is for the world revolution and for socialism—“root and branch.” He accuses us of ignoring the interests of the USSR and of retreating from the concept of the permanent revolution. He indicts us as centrists. The critic is very severe, almost...

From the Russian Socialist Movement This year’s 1st May finds Russia in a situation of falling industrial production, massive cuts in social spending, higher prices and taxes, and a growing budget deficit. Against this bleak background the Kremlin is preoccupied with geo-political adventures, propaganda, and combating political dissidence. While the Russian authorities display a touching ‘concern’ for the workers of Crimea and Donets, the workers and underprivileged in Russia itself experience ever more intensely the consequences of the economic crisis. According to opinion polls, 69% of...

RSM's Position Extract from the 1st May Manifesto of the Russian Socialist Movement (Russian Mandelites): "The make-believe ‘anti-fascism’ of the Kremlin is incapable of concealing its open flirting with fascist ideology, as manifested in its financing of ultra-right parties abroad, its active use of Russian nationalists in the role of its agents in Ukraine, its creation of Cossack militias, and its encouragement of xenophobic and anti-semitic statements in the semi-official mass media, etc. The whipping-up of a great-power-patriotic psychosis within Russia, the new and even more severe anti...

A military conflict between Russia and Ukraine is beginning. While supporting the working class and internationalists in Ukraine against the Ukrainian government and right, Workers' Liberty sides with Ukraine against Russia. Why? Because Russia threatens Ukraine with national oppression. Is Ukraine oppressed? Since 1991, Ukraine has been independent. But for the majority of their history the Ukrainian people were occupied, controlled and savagely repressed by neighbouring bigger powers, and mostly by Russia. Russians, mostly Russian-born, dominated Ukraine and there was a policy of...

[Workers' Fight and the Trotskyist Tendency of the International Socialists – now the SWP – were forerunners of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. This is only an outline account, part of a longer article “AWL’s record on Ireland” .] INTRODUCTION The politics of the Trotskyist Tendency on Ireland in 1969 were rooted in the work of the small group of socialists who produced the journal An Solas/Workers’ Republic in 1966-7, under the umbrella of the Irish Workers’ Group, a mainly émigré and mainly London-based organisation. The group producing Workers’ Republic was the original nucleus of the...

Geoff Bell: There is nothing wrong in reassessing Marxist interpretations, but where this has led Socialist Organiser as far as this particular exercise is concerned is to the other side of the class divide. This is illustrated in the January edition of the magazine Workers' Liberty and an article therein by Sean Matgamna. This is entitled "Ireland: lies the left tells itself". A more fitting headline would have been "Ireland: examples of the lies the right tells itself". For what has now emerged from what at first was a sloppy and impressionistic analysis is the one which stands four square...

The count from Crimea’s 16 March referendum was largely known in advance. Unknown still after the result, and dangerous, are its consequences. The most hopeful sign for socialists was a 50,000 strong demonstration in Moscow on 15 March saying “Putin, get out of Ukraine”, and opposing war. Our solidarity should be with the Ukrainian people, for its self-determination against Russia’s drive to dominate; and with Ukraine’s left, against the neo-liberal government in Kiev and the cuts it will push through on the IMF’s say-so. We should demand that US and EU governments cancel Ukraine’s foreign...