Workers' Liberty 32, June 1996

Articles: John Major's "beef war" (Alan Gilbert) Towards a summer of discontent? Rail and post go into battle (Tom Wills) Deep divisions in Israel Germany's workers are fighting back (Rhodri Evans) Socialist Labour Party: Little controversy, no orientation, no hope (Martin Thomas) The new left in Unison (Sleeper) Download PDF

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How Morris became a socialist is rather more complicated than is generally thought. Morris himself only made rare statements about how he became a socialist, spread out in his writings over 16 years. One of the things that finally convinced him was, ironically, John Stuart Mill’s attack on Fourier’s utopian socialism. Before that, however, the crucial influence on him was the British social critics, such as Carlyle, Cobbett and Ruskin. They convinced him absolutely that capitalism as a system was wasteful, that it destroyed workers’ enjoyment in their work, and that it destroyed artistic...

By Stan Crooke Taking its name from a union bureaucrat’s complaint about a “minority of troublemakers”, the National Minority Movement (NMM) was formally established in August 1924 as a rank-and-file trade union organisation. The founding conference was attended by over 270 delegates, claiming to represent some 200,000 workers. It defined the “aims and objects” of the NMM as: “To organise the working masses of Great Britain for the overthrow of capitalism, the emancipation of the workers from oppressors and exploiters, and the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth. “To carry on a wide...

By Martin Thomas John Maynard Keynes posed many sharp questions about capitalism, often further developing ideas which Marx had sketched before him. He framed the whole issue as one of "safeguarding capitalism", but can "Keynesian" methods really do that? This article (download as pdf, see "attachment" below) from Workers' Liberty 32, June 1996, surveys Keynes's insights and criticises bowdlerised "Keynesianism". It discusses Keynes's ideas on the dichotomy between money and other commodities; on the possible "liquidity trap"; on the "multiplier"; on the falling tendency of the rate of profit...