Party and class

Socialism, Reformism and Democracy [a 1994 debate between AWL and former Labour leader Michael Foot]

Do official Labour politics offer any real hope today? Or must serious socialists, and even serious democrats, look instead to the revolutionary left? Such was the question in debate before a packed audience at London's Conway Hall last Wednesday, 9 March, when John O'Mahony [Sean Matgamna], editor of Socialist Organiser, a paper banned by the Labour Party leaders in 1990 for our Trotskyist politics, confronted Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. John O'Mahony accused the Labour Party leadership of paving the way for Thatcherism and then succumbing to it. In 1974 a wave...

Workers' Liberty 3/3: Factory bulletins in the 1920s and today

Workers' Liberty 3/3 (March 2006) reproduces many communist factory bulletins from the 1920s, and discussion from that era about how they should be produced. "Workers cannot write newspapers? Really? Just tell us some news about your factory". It also includes information on workplace bulletins produced by the AWL. Click here to download pdf .

Letter: La Follette: no glory and no analogy

In his Solidarity 696 column Eric Lee cited the La Follette presidential bid of 1924 as a model of “progressive coalition politics” relevant as “the real possibility of another Trump presidency” looms. Even with the warmest assessment of La Follette (which I don’t have: see below), I don’t see it. Who would be the La Follette of today, the slightly-left “third party” candidate whom socialists can use to get a boost? John Anderson (a liberal Republican) in 1980, Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive) in 1912, or at a stretch Ralph Nader (Green, 2000), are the only possible analogues. I can’t imagine...

1924: when they all came together

The Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were a high-water mark for Socialist politics in the U.S. Sanders, who campaigned as a Democrat, won over thirteen million votes, 43% of the total, in his first attempt. The self-defined “democratic socialist” came within a hair’s breadth of defeating Hillary Clinton and winning the Democratic nomination. He would almost certainly have defeated Donald Trump in the general election. It was a remarkable result, considering the history of socialist politics in the U.S. Most historians point to 1912, when Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate...

The Communist Women’s Movement – high point of first wave feminism

A century ago, an international communist women’s movement began to develop a perspective for women’s self-liberation that still resonates today. The record of those early struggles has been translated into English for the first time by Mike Taber and Daria Dyakonova, The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922 (Brill 2023). The book provides a history of the greatest working class-based women’s movement to date, through the voices of the women involved and one that has great relevance for today’s socialist feminists. Communist Women’s Movement In 1917, the Russian working class took power led...

Larisa Reisner a Bolshevik, revolutionary life

Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) lived an extraordinary life. She fought for working-class socialism at its high point a century ago, but died just before Stalin snuffed out the workers ’ state she had fought to defend. Cathy Porter’s newly updated Larisa Reisner: A Biography captures Reisner’s passion and sheds new light on her life. EARLY LIFE Larisa Reisner was born on 2 May 1895 in Lublin, then in tsarist Poland. (Both her names are often misspelt with two “ss”.) In 1898, her father Mikhail Reisner was exiled to Siberia for his political activities and for the next five years the family lived in...

Rebuilding the forces of socialism

Workers’ industrial struggle has revived in recent months on a scale not seen for decades. That is cause for great hopes. Left-wing political mobilisation, though, has failed to match it. On issues like the NHS, new anti-strike laws, asylum rights, and the environment, activity on the streets has been small in proportion to the number of people opposed to official policies. That reflects a low ebb of socialist activity in the broadest sense. The activist socialist groups are often not very active and have little cooperation and little dialogue. Many people see themselves as socialists and yet...

A political party of the workers

With the advent of an Irish Socialist paper in the labour movement of America will come of necessity a host of questions and questioners upon the attitude of the proprietors of that paper toward the political parties at present in the field for Socialism. Such questions are unavoidable, and it is therefore best that they be faced at once at the outset without delay or equivocation. Let it be noted therefore that The Harp is the official organ of the Irish Socialist Federation [ISF] in America, and that that body was founded with the intention, expressed and desired, of spreading the light of...

Will workers be the revolutionary class?

The emancipation of the workers is the act of the working class itself, not of a benevolent superior; and workers’ emancipation means also “freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, and class struggle”. In some ways, that argument, from Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, requires less imagination today than it did back then. Then, the working class was a minority in almost all countries; the industrial working class in mass production and in big cities, on which Marx focused, a smaller minority. In Capital volume 1, 19 years after the Communist Manifesto, he found that even...

Revolutions, socialist and other

Mahalla textile strikers, in the Egyptian revolution of 2011 How can the working class becoming politically aware, organised, cohesive and self-confident enough to become society’s new ruling class, overthrowing the capitalists in favour of collective ownership with democratic self-rule? That is the decisive question about socialist revolution. But Socialist Worker ’s explanation of “revolution” ( by Isabel Ringrose, 4 December ) ducks it in favour of advocating more militancy in general, plus the presence, in the wings, of a fiercely-organised “revolutionary party”. Ringrose deserves credit...

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