Marxism and war

Why is there any need to publish a memoir of the Holocaust? Who but a few on the fringes of society deny the genocide happened? The reason to publish is because a significant section of the left has twisted its solidarity with the oppressed into de facto support for organisations who deny that the Holocaust happened. In England the Socialist Workers Party, which once prided itself on the slogan “Never Again!”, has uncritically endorsed Hamas in Palestine and Hizbollah in Lebanon. Both deny the Holocaust! Holocaust denial is an anti-semitic conspiracy theory, often stating that the Holocaust is...

In the last issue of Solidarity, Mordecai Ryan outlined the history of the ILP , the main British "centrist" organisation of the 1930s and 40s. Its nearest equivalent in Britain today is the SWP. As mud is a mix of earth and water so centrism is an unstable and almost always incoherent mix of bits of revolutionary Marxist political tradition and aspiration with alien, reformist, etc elements. But the elements incorporated in any given centrist organisation and the proportion of revolutionary Marxist to other elements vary from organisation to organisation and in a given organisation from time...

What follows is a summary of the political and ideological traditions on which Workers’ Liberty and Solidarity base ourselves. Isaac Newton famously summed up the importance of studying, learning, and building on forerunners. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wrote, referring to René Descartes, his contemporary Robert Hooke, and presumably also to his direct predecessor Isaac Barrow. In science few people think they can neglect the “tradition” and rely on improvisation. In politics, alas, too many. The summary here, written in 1995, starts as...

The leading American Trotskyist, James P Cannon spoke at a memorial meeting in New York for Leon Trotsky on 22 August 1945. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had just taken place (August 6 and 9), and Cannon used the occasion to express his outrage at the atrocity. What a commentary on the real nature of capitalism in its decadent phase is this, that the scientific conquest of the marvellous secret of atomic energy, which might rationally be used to lighten the burdens of all mankind, is employed first for the wholesale destruction of half a million people. Hiroshima, the first...

The 1950s movie The Wild One is about a motorcycle “rebel” gang, led by Marlon Brando, invading a small American town and frightening the natives. Someone asks the Brando character: “And what are you rebelling against?” Famously, he replies: “What’ve you got?” The film was, for decades, banned in Britain. That may have been to protect impressionable British Marxists, especially the SWP, from mistaking the Brando character’s philosophy — whatever it is, I’m against it — for a serviceable political programme. It is now the core and only approach of the SWP. Look at Chris Harman’s review of the...

During the recent Holocaust memorial week, the following question was posed many times in the media: has humanity learned the lessons of the Nazi genocide? The question is hard to answer in sound-bites. In fact, there was very little discussion about what the lessons might be. One of the big lessons about what the Nazis did to the Jews, the gypsies, and other people in Europe, is that the ground was prepared for genocide by years of state-sponsored discrimination and prejudice. The Jews and the gypsies were dehumanised in propaganda long before they were exterminated. People had been trained...

By August Grabski Since this article was written Poland’s right-wing government has made it illegal to assert that either “the Polish state or the Polish nation” participated in the Holocaust. Grabski describes the war-time Nazi killing machine, the varying attitudes of the post-war Stalinist governments and a legacy of anti-semitism. On 27 January [2005] the presidents of Israel, Poland and Russia as well as the representatives of over 40 governments honoured the victims of the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz. Auschwitz is built near the town of Oswiecim in Poland. Here, during World War 2, the...

Just before and on 27 January, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, part of the Polish radical left participated in small demos in a few cities (e.g., Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Poznan). Each demo attracted a few dozen people, organised with the message, “Auschwitz (Oswiecim) 1945, Chechnya 2005, Stop the genocide” (as the poster of the organisers put it explicitly in Krakow). The demos were organised in the main by the Committee “Free Caucasus”. This group is dominated by the radical anti-Communist right (activists from the Republican League, who were a few...

I once bought a tape of songs from the 1984-5 miners’ strike, and what did I find in amongst the songs by miners and about miners? A song about the 1982 British-Argentine war over the Falkland Islands which took it for granted that the right socialist approach was to back Argentina — the Argentina of the butchering military junta under Galtieri. That had been the line of a sizeable part of the left, though not, as it happened, of the SWP, nor of Solidarity’s predecessor Socialist Organiser. In the tape about the miners, it was there as, so to speak, part of the “furniture” of the conventional...

By Vicki Morris On 25 August many Parisians will mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the capital, a significant moment in the defeat of the Axis Powers in the Second World War. On 25 August 1944, overwhelmingly, Parisians cheered the arrival into Paris of the French 2nd Armoured Division in the vanguard of the Allied forces. Ever since the Normandy landings in June, Parisian workers had staged strikes, anticipating the end of the fascist Vichy regime and of German occupation, and from 19 August there was a local rising. The liberation of France had been achieved by Allied forces and...