SWP

The SWP's paper Socialist Worker has published a number of articles (rightly) praising Extinction Rebellion's focus on the City of London.

Although the Labour leadership's new bans on four organisations have been justified mainly in terms of the issue of antisemitism, the question of Marxist and Trotskyist politics has also been raised. We republish this article written by one of our comrades for socialist Labour Party magazine The Clarion in February 2017, which discusses the issues in the form of a reply to Labour right-winger Luke Akehurst. At the time dozens of Workers' Liberty people had recently been expelled from the Labour Party. Do revolutionary socialists have a place in Labour? By Sacha Ismail Some activists on the...

Socialist Worker has detailed and decried deaths and casualties in Gaza. And rightly so! But Socialist Worker has not found the space or the inclination to report on protests by movements like Standing Together. Instead, it refers to Hamas, persistently and euphemistically, as a “resistance organisation”, and compares it in favourable terms to other Palestinian forces for its “militancy”. Hamas is a far-right political-Islamist party and militia with its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood. It favours the military conquest of Israel and the setting up of an Islamic state in historic Palestine...

I joined the Socialist Review Group [forerunner of today's SWP] in 1952 and drifted out about 1960. I was a left-wing socialist who believed that social ownership and democratic control should be extended. I believed in international socialism. I was utterly repelled by the Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe. That put me off the Communist Party. When I was approached by an organisation which was left-wing and clearly opposed to Stalinism, I was attracted. The other organisations in the Trotskyist movement believed that the Stalinist states were degenerated workers' states which should be...

Ernie Tate, who died from cancer on 5 February at the age of 86, was once well-known among revolutionary socialists across the world as the central figure of “the Tate affair”. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, he was an active Trotskyist from his early 20s, in Canada. He moved to London in 1965-9, and that was where the “Tate affair” happened, in 1966. Back in Canada, he quit the organised Trotskyist movement about 1980, but remained active on the broader left until his last years. I last met him in 2015, at a conference at the University of East Anglia. An obituary by John Riddell gives...

Fighter against "extremism" John Woodcock (Lord Walney), with two far-right Turkish politicians On 7 February, the former right-wing Labour MP John Woodcock — now Lord Walney, a Tory supporter, and the government’s official for “countering violent extremism” — announced via the Daily Telegraph that the government had asked him to do a new “inquiry” into “extremism”. Walney said that the biggest “threat” is the “far right”, but the Telegraph chose to headline “far left influence in Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Black Lives Matter”. It quoted Walney further as saying that he was worried about...