Left groups and people

George Hoare, Peter Ramsay, Lee Jones, Anshu Srivastava and Danny Nicol respond to criticisms of the London Full Brexit event from some on the left. We reply to this article here. Full Brexit co-organised the Transforming Britain After Brexit tour because we wanted to open up a space for discussion, within and beyond the Left, over Brexit and the nature of the European Union. In March we held events in Coventry, Manchester, Liverpool, and London, with an event in Durham to come next month and hopefully more dates in cities across the UK after that. We believe that the EU is undemocratic in its...

This is a reply to a Full Brexit article. The “Full Brexit” project describes itself as a network of “activists, academics, journalists and policy experts, all on the broad political left” dedicated to “seizing the historic opportunity Brexit offers for restoring popular sovereignty, repairing democracy, and renewing our economy”. Its list of founding signatures includes Paul Embery (of the Arron Banks-funded Trade Unionists Against the EU group who recently spoke at Nigel Farage’s Brexit rally) and Maurice Glasman (of Blue Labour, slogan “Faith, Family and Flag”). On 25 March, these policy...

Algerian socialist Kamel Aïssat, from the Trotskyist group PST, explains the political crisis in Algeria. He spoke with Sam Wahch and Antoine Larrache of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party, in France]. Translation by Michael Elms. The PST will mobilise with all its forces to try to broadcast our ideas, in particular about a Constituent Assembly, which is in the interests of the majority of the Algerian people, that is, workers, the unemployed, women, all those excluded by the capitalist system, whose demands must be worked into the new constitution. The mobilisation will be very big, perhaps...

As Aristotle is one of the “giants” on whose shoulders Marx stands, we should take an interest in issues of distortion or vulgarisation of Aristotle’s key ideas. It might be that Martin Thomas’s comments on Aristotle ( Solidarity 499) carry a “trace” of this process. One thing Marx and Aristotle certainly have in common is their having been subject to sustained vulgarisation and distortion. The vulgarisation of Marx is a part of our inheritance and that demands we are scrupulous and forensic in our approach to classic texts (comrades might find useful the work of Michael Heinrich on the...

Dan La Botz is a longstanding socialist activist, based in Brooklyn. He is a member of the socialist group Solidarity and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and a co-editor of the independent socialist journal New Politics . He spoke to Daniel Randall about prospects for the socialist left in the USA. DR: How do you think the socialist left should orient to the Bernie Sanders campaign? Dan La Botz: In 2016, after years as a proponent of independent political action to the left of the Democrats, I made the decision to work on the Sanders campaign. I had been a lifelong opponent of the...

I have been reading the record of my last October pre-debate discussion with Sean Matgamna . Your record tallies with my memory of it. However, I would like to clarify some points, especially as our second debate has had to be cancelled. As can be seen from the dates, this document reports two discussions made before the original debate on “Socialism, Ireland, Permanent Revolution and the Provo Campaign”. The cancelled debate was to be a second round of the actual polemic. Inevitably, mistakes were made. Having been interviewed over the telephone, I should have mentioned that the great mistake...

Views on Jackie Walker’s expulsion from the Labour Party, 27 March. It seems Walker has been treated terribly. Which should be no surprise given the nature of the Labour machine — no, not necessarily hot on antisemitism, but very hot on reacting to the right-wing, reacting to the right-wing press, dealing with things administratively, targeting those seen as “cranks”, etc. That in itself is reason not to support her expulsion, the lack of due process. Moreover, it not clear to me that she falls into the category of those who should be expelled, as opposed to some other sanction. Alexander...

More debate on the right of return here. Several readers have objected to our item in Solidarity 500, “More denunciations of AWL”. They argue that we shouldn’t give scarce space to such stuff, and particularly to the item from Gerry Downing, someone whom even Jackie Walker’s “Labour Against the Witch-hunt” campaign has expelled as antisemitic. Better if we could give over pages to reasoned debate with our adversaries on the left. However, such reasoned debate is scarce today. The comments we printed last week came from the website of Socialist Resistance, a small group, but one with...

The US socialist group ISO has now formally dissolved its organisation and stopped publishing on its website SocialistWorker.org. In an online vote involving 474 members and some recently resigned ex-members, almost 70% favoured proposals that involved the dissolution of the organisation. Those who chose to vote also agreed to support “a process for continuing to investigate the 2013 sexual assault case and how a decision then was derailed, and to report the findings publicly.” It is hard to know what this will mean if no organisation continues. The post mortems and reflections on the ISO on...

On 27 March, the anti-Brexit campaigning group Labour for a Socialist Europe, which Solidarity supports, published this open letter to pro-Brexit left-wingers Costas Lapavitsas and Grace Blakeley, calling on them to dissociate from Eddie Dempsey, an RMT rail union activist who had spoken with them at a “Full Brexit” event on 26 March and presented the pro-Brexit case as one of standing up for “the working class” against “left liberals” who ally with “ethnic minorities”. Comrades Lapavitsas and Blakeley, Political movements define themselves by the stories they tell about the world. The story...