James Turley and Ben Lewis argue that there can be no short cuts to building the mass, Marxist student movement we need We would like to express our concern at the drift of some Communist Students comrades towards the highly ambiguous Anti-Capitalist Initiative project. We are both veterans of, and also members of the Communist Party ...
Last Saturday's launch of the Anti-Capitalist Initiative provided further evidence of an increasingly fractured, rightward-drifting left. Ben Lewis reports As I reported in last week’s Weekly Worker, bound up with the recent decamping of 15 younger comrades from Workers Power (British Section of the League for a Fifth International) is another far-left unity drive under the ...
Ben Lewis reviews Martin Empson's Marxism and ecology: capitalism, socialism and the future of the planet Bookmarks, pp32, £1.50 In some ways, this Socialist Workers Party pamphlet is a useful read. Although it hardly presents a thoroughgoing critique of capitalism and its plundering of nature, it carries arguments, backed up by numerous figures and statistics, that ...
John Pringle takes a light-hearted look at the failings of revolutionary groups Communism is a system only achievable by the most profound means, the overthrow of the existing social order and its replacement with another, as unrecognisably different as it is improved. Such an undertaking is vast and awe-inspiring. It is the act of a self-enslaved ...
As you amble around your freshers’ fair, you may well come across a handful of excitable young leftists pushing an organisation called Education Not for Sale. They will be against a lot of bad things (but, for reasons we’ll get to later, sheepish on the subject of war). They will be very ‘inclusive’, and keen ...
We often dub CS's opponents on the left such as ENS 'economists' – but what does that mean? Economism is an opportunist political trend that denies the central importance of democracy to Marxism. As such it is a broad organism, whose tentacles extend into the lofty heights of political theory and down into the grime of ...
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Communist Students members Dave Isaacson and Ben Klein reject economism and put forward the case for Marxism: Left unity not on offer This weekend will, farcically, see two separate gatherings to discuss ‘left unity’ in the student movement. Firstly, the ‘Reclaim the Campus’ event on Saturday May 17, called by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty-run Education Not ...
In this article James Turley responds to a letter from Eben Marks criticising Communist Students in the Weekly Worker. James goes on to argue that students have an antagonistic relationship with college authorities... The campus and the state Making overtures to the student population has been a standard feature of leftwing activism for many decades - while ...
Communists argue against sectional politics - but the attacks on the organisational structrues for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people within the NUS must be resisted. By Nigel Davis The formation of gay liberation movements during the 1970s reflected a rising level of radicalised anger among marginalised LGBT minorities, influenced most clearly by the 1969 ...
The NUS women's officer campaigns have been marked by their economism. By Anne McShane The election of a women's officer has importance in a period when women's rights are under attack. Chief among these is the threat to abortion rights. Now women can have an abortion up to the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, with the ...
Jim Grant recounts the last few acts of another left tragedy The in-house student organisation of Respect, nattily named Student Respect, turned out to have had a significant role in the terminal crisis within its host body. It’s worth reminding ourselves of SR’s history. Student Respect was formed in summer 2005, essentially by the SWP ‘turning over’ ...
Leading the Alliance for Workers Liberty’s typically slippery response to our coverage of the Socialist Youth Network launch conference reveals an organisation in crisis and rapidly moving to the right, says James ...