There has been a significant revival of interest among the radical left in “big picture” questions of socialist strategy that, as Mark L Thomas has pointed out, represents a return to “important debates of the left largely absent over the last three decades”.1 It is not difficult to identify the major factors driving this. Several years of deep capitalist crisis together with the almost total capitulation of social democratic parties across Europe to the austerity agenda have opened up a clear space to the left of these organisations—a development that has reinvigorated the radical left, but which has also forced it to confront fundamental questions of strategic orientation. Furthermore, the dramatic rise of Syriza in Greece—the political force that has most successfully moved to fill the space to the left of social democracy—has also, clearly, been a major factor informing the revival of this debate. Indeed Syriza’s electoral ascent to the point at which it is now widely seen as a possible party of government in waiting poses the question, in very immediate and pressing terms, of how, and to what extent, capitalist state power might be utilised for socialist objectives—one of the oldest and most fundamental controversies in socialist thought.

ISBN-13: 9781909026513

ISBN-10: 1909026514

Language: English

Publisher:

Year: 2013

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 20, 2025, 1:28 p.m.

In the winter of 1939-40 the German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin wrote a remarkable text known as “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. In it he attacked the widespread belief on the left that socialism would come about inevitably, as the fruit of historical progress. “Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion it was moving with the current,” he wrote. Revolution is not the appointed result of humankind’s “progression through a homogeneous empty time”. Rather, “it is a tiger’s leap into the past,” which mobilises the memories of past suffering and oppression against the ruling class. And Benjamin concluded by evoking the fact that, in the Jewish Messianic tradition, “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter”. 1 Revolution, in other words, is not a predictable outcome of a forward historical movement—it is a sudden, unexpected irruption into a history that is a “single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”.2 Benjamin wrote these words at a very dark historical moment, “midnight in the century”, when the Hitler-Stalin pact seemed to symbolise the death of all radical hope. But they fit the revolutions that have swept through the Arab world since mid-December like a glove. Exploding apparently out of nowhere, quite unanticipated, an explosion of resentments deeply compacted over decades, they are not simply rewriting the political map of the Middle East, but have a much broader historical meaning.

ISBN-13: 9781905192830

ISBN-10: 1905192835

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2011

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 20, 2025, 1:27 p.m.

The seismic political upheaval that was the election of Donald Trump has exposed the deep polarisation in the United States and the alienation of millions from the main political parties and institutions. Trump’s self-promotion as an anti-establishment candidate propelled him to the White House in the absence of a serious alternative; Hillary Clinton was rightly seen by millions as part of the political elite that had presided over eight years of protection and assistance for banks and the wealthy and an almost total disregard for the economic and social pain of the rest of US society. Trump’s first acts made it clear that the racism and authoritarianism of his campaign would continue in office. The proposed travel ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries and the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids and deportations put racism and anti-immigration at the forefront of Trump’s confrontational agenda. Following his executive order giving sweeping powers to immigration officers to detain people suspected of committing a crime—including minor offences—or “being a threat”, ICE raids have increased in intensity. Over 600 people were arrested in 11 states in one week in February. In a departure from Barack Obama’s administration, those detained have included undocumented immigrants with no criminal record; ICE agents have been reported in streets and schoolyards, setting up checkpoints and detaining people in shopping centre car parks. The plans for a wall between the US and Mexico, the slashing back of already meagre healthcare for the poorest and the ripping up of the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) are all signals that his promises on the stump were not just bombast.

ISBN-13: 9781910885550

ISBN-10: 191088555X

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2017

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 20, 2025, 1:25 p.m.

ISBN-13: 9781910885871

ISBN-10: None

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2018

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 20, 2025, 1:24 p.m.

For 35 years Egypt was a laboratory for neoliberalism—a local state in which hegemonic world powers and financial institutions played out their strategies for the global economy. It was also a stage on which the United States and its allies rehearsed policy for control of key assets in the Global South. From the mid-1970s their support for the regimes of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were means of containing collective responses to an increasingly aggressive neoliberal agenda. When the Tahrir uprising began in January 2011 the stakes were high: could Egyptians contest al–nizam (the order), a state machine which bore down brazenly upon the mass of people in a local expression of global inequality and inequity? The slogans of the movement, and its aspirations, echoed worldwide—in removing Mubarak, Egyptian activists made tahrir (liberation) a synonym for wider resistance. Two years later Egypt’s revolution is still the epicentre of opposition to capitalist “liberalism” and to the machineries of state which support its relentless search for profit. Where does the revolution stand today? What are its potentials? What is to be done?1 Obituaries for the revolution are produced daily in the European and North American press. Its detractors maintain that the Tahrir events were no more than a “reflex”, at best a “revolt” which shortly exhausted participants. They maintain that a grim reality has settled over the Egyptian movement—the rise of Islamism and the certainty that atavistic religious currents will crush democratic aspirations. In an analysis of developments across the Middle East since January 2011, Agha and Malley maintain that “This is not a revolution”:

ISBN-13: 9781909026247

ISBN-10: 1909026247

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2013

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 20, 2025, 1:23 p.m.

ISBN-13: 9781905192991

ISBN-10: 1905192991

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2012

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 20, 2025, 1:21 p.m.

Everybody interested in the potential for workers’ resistance to the crisis should view two videos shot by BMW workers at a recent mass meeting at the Mini plant at Cowley, Oxford.2 Management announced that 850 people were sacked with immediate effect. Some had been there for four or five years, but there was no redundancy pay because they were agency workers. In one video a management representative reads from a prepared statement which is full of the double-speak management love. At first workers listen in silence as the manager tells them that their shift is to be abolished and their jobs with it. The language is so convoluted that it does not sink in for a while that they are on the dole, without a penny. Anger rises only as they are reminded to hand in their uniforms or face a £25 fine. In the second video the union rep faces the wrath of the workforce, who want to know why they have been treated like this and why the union is so powerless. The union man does not criticise the decision to kill the jobs, only the failure to give three weeks notice. The workers’ anger boils over. One takes the microphone and demands all the subscriptions back from the patently useless union. Others hurl fruit at the union rep. As you watch, you may well end up shouting at the screen, “Why didn’t somebody call for an occupation of the plant?” The fact that nobody instantly came up with a plan for resistance shows the need for greater workplace rank and file strength, a bigger left and stronger socialist organisation. Who knows what would have happened if the left had been big enough in the run-up to that Cowley meeting to circulate workers with the news that the Waterford Glass factory in Ireland had been occupied and that management were already making concessions. What if one or two well known and well respected Cowley workers were part of left networks that had prepared for just such a moment? What if their Unite union was leading resistance across Britain to every job cut? All this underlines the importance of subjective factors and the question of leadership. There are times in history when the weight of the material situation is so great that it almost crushes the message for resistance. At other times the mood from below is so strong that even if there is almost no leadership a fight will burst out. We are in neither of those situations. We are at a moment when what individuals do can makes the difference between resistance and surrender. It is a time of alternatives, of volatility, when history is up for grabs.

ISBN-13: 9781905192496

ISBN-10: 1905192495

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2009

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 20, 2025, 1:19 p.m.

ISBN-13: 9781910885604

ISBN-10: 1910885606

Language: English

Publisher: International Socialism

Year: 2017

Pages: 224

Cataloged: Feb. 20, 2025, 1:18 p.m.

ISBN-13: 9780394716107

ISBN-10: 0394716108

Language: English

Publisher: Vintage Books

Year: 1975

Pages: 267

Cataloged: Feb. 20, 2025, 11:38 a.m.