Left groups and people

Socialist Green Unity Coalition, Respect, SWP, Socialist Party, Weekly Worker, IWCA, RDG, Green Party, Ken Livingstone ... and a few others.

A Dave Spart for our times

Private Eye magazine used to carry a regular column ("The Controversial Voice", sometimes "The Alternative Voice") by a fictional character called Dave Spart who specialised in banal non-sequiturs in a parody of leftist jargon, usually ending up contradicting himself. I was reminded of Comrade Spart as I watched Aaron Bastani’s denunciation of the Royal British Legion (RBL) on his Youtube vehicle The Bastani Report , part of the Novara Media operation run by Comrade Bastani, and streamed live on 6 November. It is an incoherent stream of consciousness (complete with much effing and blinding)...

Due process and a fair hearing

There is now a single unified “left” slate for the expanded Labour Party National Constitutional Committee. With the backing of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Momentum and several smaller organisations, this slate will probably receive many Labour Party nominations and the majority of the delegate votes. The opposing slates from Labour First and Open Labour are yet to write anything publicly on what they see as their role on the NCC. The united left candidates have co-signed an article for the Labour Hub website. Some of what they have to say is promising if vague. Other questions...

Bolshevism and NGO politics, in history and today

Martin Thomas discusses In Defence of Bolshevism and some other modes of politics. This book, by way of polemics and discussions from different eras, explains what “Bolshevism” means in the field of left-wing political organising. Another way of summing it up would be: the opposite of 38 Degrees. 38 Degrees is a left-wing movement which sees itself as exceptionally progressive, democratic, and attuned to “people power”. It declares that its “campaigns are chosen and led by our three million members”. Its leaders would, I guess, consider “Bolshevism” to be old-fashioned and too hierarchical...

French Trotskyists debate Israel-Palestine

A debate is ongoing in the pages of French revolutionary journal Convergences Révolutionnaires, on the topic of Israel and Palestine. Convergences is the publication of the Étincelle group, with whom Workers’ Liberty has longstanding links. An article by Pierre Hélelou and Gil Lannou, Israël-Palestine : une nouvelle donne [Israel-Palestine: a new situation], points out reasonably enough that the “embryonic Palestinian state, whether in the West Bank or Gaza, has been unable to live up to any of its promises and limits itself now to being a mere security apparatus, politically and financially...

Left must reshape the Remain movement

The headlines following from Saturday’s People’s Vote demo have, understandably, focused on its size. Organisers say 670,000 people took part. If true, that is bigger than the Trump demo this summer. It’s plausible that it was bigger that the anti-austerity March for the Alternative in 2011, at the height of the public-sector strikes. It’s possibly the largest since the anti-war demonstrations in 2003-4. Whatever the truth, it certainly dwarfed the overwhelming majority of protests that have taken place in recent years. Workers’ Liberty took part in the “left bloc” organised by Another Europe...

Due process, not personalities

The rancour that has been produced by the upcoming nominations for the expanded National Constitutional Committee has reopened the row between the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) and Momentum. The Centre Left Grassroots Alliance, which included both organisations in its negotiations, was unable to reach an agreed slate. Depending on who you believe, CLPD then released the details of their preferred slate, as agreed or without agreement. There is now an ongoing back and forth as to why Momentum were unable to agree to the slate which now has the backing of the Labour Representation...

New facts on undercover cops

More than a thousand political and campaigning groups have been targeted by undercover police operations over the years since 1968. In the latest instalment of a slowly-accumulating mass of revelations, the Guardian on 15 October published a list , compiled by the Undercover Research Group, of 124 groups within which police agents were placed between 1970 and 2007. The undercover cops quite often enticed activists (generally women) into sexual relationships, and even had children with them. The list also records claims that in some cases the cops acted as provocateurs, making the groups...

“It’s good to follow a polemic in real time”

Q. Tell us a bit about your websites, Splits and Fusions and Red Mole Rising. A. Red Mole Rising came first, and it is now a nearly complete archive of the press of the Fourth International in Britain, that is, of the group best known as the IMG, from 1950s into the 2000s. It has complete runs of International, Black Dwarf, Red Mole, Socialist Challenge, Socialist Action, etc., and lots of magazines and pamphlets. I’ve worked with loads of people on that. Some of The Week is up there, and I’m intending to do the rest of The Week some time soon. Splits and Fusions is a much broader and more...

Workers' Liberty 3/62: Fighting left anti-semitism in the 1980s

Introduction Fighting left antisemitism in the 1980s When the facts came out Gerry Healy discovers the World Jewish Conspiracy (1981) Who were the heresy-hunters in 1983? Download whole Workers' Liberty 3/62 as pdf (Note: by mistake, the printed copy is numbered WL 3/61. It should be WL 3/62). -------- Fighting left antisemitism in the 1980s Supporters of Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty find themselves especially unpopular just now [2003] with certain sections of the pseudo-left, because of our attitude to George Galloway MP. The hostility which our stand on Galloway has aroused reminds me of...

The 1980s and left antisemitism

Consider Ken Livingstone and the Labour Party, Al Capone and the US government. They jailed Alphonse Capone, a multiple-murderer gangster, for tax evasion. That was odd, but I think it better they got him for that than that they didn’t get him at all. So with Ken Livingstone’s separation from the Labour Party on antisemitism. Livingstone has for nearly four decades been a public purveyor of political antisemitism. Here I want to consider how serious antisemitism has spread into the Labour Party by way of the ostensibly revolutionary left — the WRP and the SWP — and their ex-members migrating...

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