Party and class

Colin Waugh’s review of The Russian Revolution: When Workers Took Power is right that Marxists must learn from the experience of workers’ struggles: revolutionary socialism certainly is dialogic. The Bolsheviks followed those principles and this helps explain their success in 1917. However I disagree with Colin’s critique of Kautsky and Lenin about the relationship between socialism and the working class. Colin claims Kautsky asserted that “Marx and Engels created their conception of socialism in isolation from workers” and that Kautsky assumed “the essentials of modern socialism were defined...

In Chapter 3 of The Russian Revolution: When workers took power, Paul Vernadsky discusses Lenin’s 1901/1902 document What Is To Be Done?, referring among other things to Lars T. Lih’s 2005 book, Lenin Rediscovered. Later (pp163-169) Paul demolishes Lih’s claim that in 1921 Lenin was still a disciple of Karl Kautsky. In Chapter 3, however, he broadly accepts Lih’s approach to What Is To Be Done?, which is that it’s primarily about urging revolutionaries in Russia to model their activity on methods used by the SPD in Germany. He discusses the 1902 passage by Kautsky which Lenin both paraphrased...

The assessment by Ben Selwyn, an English correspondent for the Canadian socialist e-letter The Bullet, is typical: Labour’s great mobilisation on 8 June “placed socialist ideas firmly back on the political agenda... let the proverbial genie of class politics out of the bottle”. Even conservative commentators interpret the Grenfell Tower fire as showing how working-class people are abused in an unequal society. The word “socialism” comes up more in workplace discussions. Paradoxically, Labour’s 8 June manifesto nowhere uses the words “socialism”, or “socialist”, or equivalents. It nowhere uses...

It is February 1917. A large crowd are gathered to hear socialists and pacifists denounce the war. As the speeches start the snow begins fall... The hundreds who assembled that snowy night, looking like a scene out of Dr Zhivago, were not in Petrograd 1917 but in Waterfoot, Rossendale. The rally held that snowy evening was to support the candidature of Albert Taylor, a local anti-war trade union leader and member of the British Socialist Party (BSP) in a parliamentary by-election; the campaign on his behalf (he had been imprisoned at the request of the Liberal party agent) was a coalition of...

“Opportunities for the left have been created which never existed before.” US leftists, broadly defined, agree with the above statement by Eric Lee ( Solidarity 410). But that is where agreement ends. The social-democratic and Stalinist left, the identarian left, the non-profit left, as well as most of the labour left are united in supporting Hillary Clinton as the only way to stop Donald Trump. However, in my view, and that of most revolutionary socialists, this is the best opportunity that we have had since at least 1968, if not 1936, to lay foundations for launching a genuinely independent...

At the Lutte Ouvriere fete on 14-16 May, we met comrades from IZAR (Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Left), a group expelled in 2015 from the “Mandelite” (Fourth International) organisation in Spain because they called for a stance more independent from the leadership of Podemos, the new broad leftish party. The following critique is part of a document published by IZAR with sympathisers in France, the USA, Germany, Greece, and Italy. “There has been no balance-sheet on the many attempts to build ‘broad parties’ over the last 25 years by the sections of the Fourth International. “Whether in the...

13 February 2016 conference: Before ’68: the Left, Activism and Social Movements in the Long 1960s Two contributions 1. Militancy and Solidarity on the docks in the 1960s 2. The life and times of Bob Pennington Click here to download pdf .

At Workers' Liberty summer school, Ideas for Freedom 2015, we hosted a workshop about public transport systems and the struggle for workers' control, featuring Herman Rosenfeld from the Canada's Free Transport campaign; and Janine Booth, worker on London Underground. Click the video below to play. (Audio only from 15 mins).

At Workers' Liberty summer school – Ideas for Freedom 2015 – socialist Daisy Forest debated the Bishop of Manchester David Walker, on the question of 'Love thy neighbour, or class struggle?' Below is a video recording of the debate, and also a transcript of Daisy's speech. We live in a world in which enough food is grown to feed everyone, in which the productive capacity of human kind could meet the needs of each and every human being. Yet we live in a world where everyday children die of starvation or from preventable diseases or are blown to pieces in one of the dozens of conflicts which...

While the Labour right openly try to sabotage and smear Jeremy Corbyn, more subtle Labour centrists tell him that he must move only as fast as the middle ground. The Labour left surge of the early 1980s saw the same debate. That makes this exchange from that time relevant today. Vladimir Derer was the secretary of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, a central force in that early-1980s surge and still important today. Sean Matgamna of Workers' Liberty replied to him in Socialist Organiser, then the paper of a broad range of activists on the Labour left. By Vladimir Derer Comrade O'Mahony...