Solidarity 113, 7 June 2007

The life of Tom Mann

By Cathy Nugent The socialist and trade union organiser Tom Mann was a rather exceptional person. Not because he was a great socialist theorist — although he published many pamphlets in the course of a political life which only ended when he died in 1941, as a member of the Communist Party. Rather it is because, over sixty years, he was involved in most, if not all, of the significant working class organisations of that long period. He was prominent in the early Marxist organisation, the Social Democratic Federation, during the 1880s. He was a leader of the “new unionism” of the late 1880s. He...

Workers go global, second time round

Paul Hampton reviews Live working or die fighting: How the working class went global, by Paul Mason, (Harvill Secker £12.99) THIS book is an ambitious attempt to bring some of the great events from working class history to a new generation of youth. Paul Mason argues that as the working class in the “global south” has expanded, so new workers’ movements are emerging with strong similarities to those that arose during the first wave of globalisation, which began in the 1870s. Each chapter of the book takes a current episode or struggle and juxtaposes it to an earlier class battle. For instance...

Solidarity 3/113 is out

Download the pages, as pdfs, here (click on "read more"), or read it on this website by clicking here . Page 1: Israel-Palestine: End the occupation! Page 2: Hodge; football; greenwash; NHS Page 3: So much for the awkward squad; Curb the cardinals! Page 4: Unison conference, CWU conference, other union reports Page 5: UCU conference; Unison and Israel boycott Page 6: Afghanistan; Ireland; South Africa; Venezuela; Iran Page 7: Anti-gay in East Europe; Putin's missiles Pages 8 and 9 : US Iraq plan in chaos, but Islamists offer no answer Page 10: The life of Tom Mann Page 11: Live working or die...

The Shachtman-Johnson donnybrook

By Ernest Haberkern Click here for the debate around this contribution I couldn't agree more with Chris Ford's comments on the style in which the discussion surrounding the splits in the Trotskyist movement on the "Russian Question" have been conducted. Given the pressure the participants were under at the time the polemical fireworks can be understood. After all, even in normal, repectable, bourgeois political debates, where the participants are not, most of the time, facing life or death decisions, the bounds of propriety are often violated. But we today are removed by these events by almost...

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