The Socialist Workers Party leadership is attempting to divide the opposition. Taking the bait would be suicide, reckons Paul Demarty When the attack begins, act as one The Socialist Workers Party’s special conference looms ever closer. Though there are still a few aggregates to take place as I write, most of the delegate votes are in, and ...
Ben Lewis saw few signs of 'Revolt' at the recent Socialist Worker Student Society day school The March 3 ‘Revolt’ day school in London, organised by the Socialist Worker Student Society, was conceived of as a ‘mini-Marxism’ to sign up new activists sympathetic to SWSS and to provide new comrades with an understanding of the ‘International ...
I’m standing in this election to fight for the ideas of communism; to fight for a free and democratic education; and to challenge the influence of capital in universities. The capitalist system is based on relations of class exploitation, a system in which the means of creating wealth are owned by a minority and function purely ...
The ‘softly, softly’ approach of the Socialist Workers Party opposition contrasts with the leadership’s aggression, argues Paul Demarty Opposition needs to stop being the victim There have been several times during the Socialist Workers Party’s ongoing crisis when it looked, for all the world, like it would be over soon. It looked, first of all, like the clockwork-regular ...
CS National Executive member Callum Williamson reviews The year of dreaming dangerously Slavoj Žižek: dictatorship The year of dreaming dangerously attempts to “locate the events of 2011 in the totality of the global situation, to show how they relate to the central antagonism of contemporary capitalism” (p1). Slavoj Žižek attempts to do this by addressing the rise of ...
The leadership can no longer lead - but a positive outcome to the crisis requires more than the removal of the entire CC, argues Paul Demarty The Socialist Workers Party has been waiting a long time for a revolutionary situation. On some occasions, as with the fatuous ‘All out, stay out’ slogan it advanced to striking ...
Ben Lewis surveys the British left’s response to the crisis gripping the SWP, and calls for a radical change of culture Judging the crisis at present ripping through the Socialist Workers Party, our writers have has quite rightly stressed that thetrigger that set the whole thing off was the scandal surrounding its former national secretary, Martin Smith. Yet we ...
Mike Copestake on some interesting factional developments on Wikipedia (!) surrounding the current crisis in the SWP. Readers may remember we in Communist Students also had a bit of fun with a (Stalinoid) group trying to claim the name 'Communist Students'. The article can be read here: http://communiststudents.org.uk/?p=3139 Readers may be amused to find that the crisis in ...
The central committee claims that the SWP has a consistent record of fighting for women’s liberation. Former SWP national committee member Dave Isaacson sheds light on the not so excellent truth Women’s liberation: a class question Firstly I must say that I do not think that the massive crisis currently taking hold of the Socialist Workers Party ...
Jean Frey gives his impressions of the nature and role of the so-called 'Anti-Germans' on the German left. As I became politicised, in particular within Linksjugend, the youth organisation of Die Linke, I came across these militant nationalistic and pro-war activists at an early stage. I first had personal experience of BAK Shalom members at the ...
The wooden spoon goes to the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, writes James Turley Ryan Giggs: own goal He has played for a single football club over 600 times in the last 20 years; he quickly became iconic of Manchester United’s ‘golden generation’, of which he is almost the last survivor; and as such has seen more success ...
Ben Lewis reviews Peter Watkins's (director) 'La Commune' 2000, DVD (first published in the Weekly Worker) La Commune Sitting through this film in its 345-minute entirety requires much coffee and many breaks. You will be thrust into the world of the 11th arrondissement in Paris 1871, to a world where seemingly eternal values are being turned on ...
This is the final excerpt in the current series from Karl Kautsky's 'Republic and social democracy in France', translated by Ben Lewis[1] and published in English for the first time. Kautsky begins his discussion of the Commune by examining the situation in France under emperor Napoleon III Revolutionary Paris in flames One of the first acts of ...