The formation of the SWP: Workers' Liberty 3/38

The SWP and Israel

Cliff first appeared in the international Trotskyist press in 1938-9 as “L Rock”: the rock would grow into a cliff. He contributed to a discussion on Palestine in the American Trotskyist publication New International. He was obviously a young man trying to think things through. It was an inconclusive discussion, but in 1938-9 he was in favour of the right of Jewish migration. He would criticise himself on that much later, in an interview in the SWP magazine in 1987. In late 1944 Cliff wrote an open letter, published in the RCP journal Workers’ International News, to the delegates at the Labour...

What happened to IS democracy?

There is no doubt that IS was loosely democratic up to the mid 1970s. What happened to that democracy? In 1970 there was a Commission on Factions. Its report denied that there could be such a thing as an ideological tendency: there could only be factions defined by short-term battles over short-term issues. But the Trotskyist Tendency was a tendency. We were people from a different tradition who upheld what we thought to be the basic and long-term ideas of that tradition; we were not a faction in the narrow sense of fighting over each day-to-day issue, or fighting for control. We didn’t want...

The SWP: its crisis, its history, its politics

The SWP crisis of 2013 The SWP crisis of 2013 : weblinks to all the main documents The SWP and "Leninism" : response to Alex Callinicos's "Is Leninism finished?" Where will SWP opposition go? (comment on ISO-USA and Socialist Alternative) The political record of SWP-IS The formation of the SWP (Workers' Liberty 3/38), by Sean Matgamna The paradoxes of Tony Cliff, 1917-2000: a critical memoir , by Sean Matgamna "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice" : review by Paul Hampton of Ian Birchall's biography of Tony Cliff The Northern Ireland crisis of 1968-9 and the left: a 12-part series including...

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