Party and class

Click here to download pamphlet as pdf . Abridged introduction How did the Trotskyist left in Britain come to be scattered and divided into hostile and competing groups? At the root the divisions are a product of the repeated defeats and the continuing marginalisation of revolutionary socialism. Small groups - and the biggest of the groups in Britain, the SWP, is still a small group - groups without implantation in the working class, have little power of cohesion when strong political divisions emerge. When members of a small organisation whose raison d'etre is propaganda for certain ideas...

Where Is the Petty Bourgeois Opposition? A Repeated Challenge Remains Unanswered. In his open letter to Comrade Trotsky, Comrade Shachtman, repeating the challenge issued by the Minority since the moment it was accused of representing a petty-bourgeois tendency in the party, declared: “... it is first necessary to prove (a) that the Minority represents a deviation from the proletarian Marxian line, (b) that this deviation is typically petty-bourgeois, and (c) that it is more than an isolated deviation — it is a tendency. That is precisely what has not been proved.” Comrade Trotsky has been the...

In discussing the history of IS — Jim Higgins’ book is an example of it — there is a danger of scapegoating Cliff. For people like Higgins the "Bagehot Question" arises. Walter Bagehot, the Victorian political economist and analyst of the British constitution, asked the question concerning the then reclusive Queen and her playboy son, the future Edward VII: How does it come about that "a retired widow and her unemployed son" can play the pivotal role in the legal structures of the British constitution? How could "Dr Ruth" achieve such power in the organisation that prided itself — to a...

Sean Matgamna spoke at a fringe meeting at Marxism 2013 about what a revolutionary organisation is and is not, and what the history of the workers' movement can tell us about the role for socialists in changing society. Click here to listen to the recording . What is a socialist organisation for? The socialist movement today is plagued by a number of words which are commonly-used but much-abused - "democratic centralism", "Leninism", "the revolutionary party". In much of the left today, these words are used to describe and defend undemocratic, irrational regimes and cliques. Others on the left...

The organisational nature of a Marxist ”revolutionary party” has to be shaped to what the Marxist party exists to do in the outside world. What, fundamentally, irreplaceably, does it do? In the course of its life a Marxist party does many things, from organising strikes, to street-fighting with fascists and racists, to organising insurrections. But fundamentally, through all the phases and varieties of its activity, it works to educates and enlighten the working class so that it can see capitalist class society as a whole; the place of capitalism in history as one exploitative class society in...

This is the third part of a review article looking at the themes of John Riddell’s new book of documents from the early communist movement. This week Paul Hampton discusses the idea of the workers’ government. Probably the most wide-ranging and rancorous discussion at the Fourth Congress concerned the transitional slogan of a workers’ government. This debate is of exceptional importance to the tradition represented by the AWL, yet outside our ranks it is rarely discussed or propagated at present. Translations of the theses and debates at the Fourth Congress were published by our predecessors...

Click here to download as pdf Click here to download as mobi Click here to download as epub Or read online below: Korea The SR Group 1950-5 SR and state capitalism Cliff on Russia and China 1956 SR and ISL SR in the Labour left, late 1950s SR and peace campaigning The turn to “Luxemburgism” From the Labour orientation to the shop stewards “Linking the fragments” mid and late 1960s 1968: growth and demagogy After 1970 The dispute on Europe 1971 1972-5 Chronology We can periodise IS, and the Socialist Review group which came before it, in the following fashion. • From 1948 to their expulsion in...

In 1920, the German workers' movement stood at a crossroads. The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) had split from the pro-war SPD in 1917. In 1918 the war was finally ended by a revolutionary upsurge of workers, soldiers and sailors, which forced German surrender and deposed the Kaiser. Radicalised by this struggle, and disgusted by an SPD whose leadership had sided with the ruling class to save capitalism, even to the extent of having revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht murdered in 1919, thousands streamed into the ranks of the USPD. But what direction...

The explosion of political discussion in IS, ignited by the sudden change of line by Cliff in favour of building the embryo of a "revolutionary party" seemed six months ago to be the most hopeful thing on the British left. Many, seeing also the new-type IS positions on Vietnam and the Middle East — a radical break with the abstentionist attitude of the group to this kind of struggle in the first 15 years of its existence — wondered whether the leadership might not even disavow other aspects of its past. But actually the leadership disavowed none of its past. Cliff said he had always advocated...

To explain why Eric Hobsbawm backed Kinnock over the Labour left as “a pre-occupation with party over class” seems to me misleading (“The paradox of Hobsbawm’s legacy”, Solidarity 260). I don’t think this is his view, but Liam McNulty’s phrasing implies that Marxists prioritise “class over party”. While in a “first principles” sense this has an element of truth — because we put the goal of working-class self-emancipation higher than allegiance to any organisation as such — in practical terms it is wrong. As Trotsky put it in ‘What next? Vital questions for the German proletariat’ (1932): “The...