Buildin Fighting Unions in the Era of Jeremy Corbyn

Unite the Resistance conference with speakers including Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, Megan Charlton from the Durham TA’s dispute and Dave Smith from the Blacklist Support Group - Saturday 12 November, London

International Socialism 152 out now

The new issue of International Socialism is now online, and as a British-based Marxist journal unsurprisingly making sense of Brexit and its repercussions is of central importance, with pieces including topical pieces including The ideology of Europeanism and Europe’s migrant other by Céline Cantat. Other pieces include Martin Empson on food, agriculture and climate change, Mike Gonzalez on two new books on Cuba and its revolution, historical pieces by Hungarian Marxist GM Tamas on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 on its 60th anniversary, Talat Ahmed on colonial troops in the First World War and John Newsinger on a forgotten Wobbly leader Marie Equi. There are also many other book reviews, including Michael Roberts's review of Anwar Shaikh's Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises and Alex Callinicos's review of Gareth Stedman Jones's much discussed Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. All in all, a great looking issue with something for everyone - and since it is hard to read at length online, surely well worth considering subscribing...  

Marxism and Nature / Marxism in Scotland

Two conferences coming up that might be of interest to Marxists based in the UK - one in London and one in Glasgow...

Day School - Marxism and Nature
A one-day conference hosted by International Socialism - programme available now Saturday 15 October 2016 10.30am- 5pm Student Central, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY Nearest tube stations: Russell Square/Euston/Euston Square/Goodge St Venue is wheelchair accessible. 

There are sharp debates on the left around humanity’s relationship to nature, the direction in which capitalism is going and what a more sustainable future might look like. The theoretical discussions around the relationship between nature and society have important political implications. For example, it has become common for theorists to argue that there is no separation between humanity and nature. Marx understood that humans are part of nature but can humanity be subsumed within nature? What does this mean for how we see the human labour and class struggle?

Those who attended John Bellamy Foster’s talk on the Anthropocene at Marxism 2016 this year will have some sense of the discussions going on. The video can also be seen here: http://tinyurl.com/JBF-Marxism16

Marxism in Scotland 2016 - Ideas to Change the World - Saturday 29 October, Glasgow

Is there a future for the Labour Left?

A historic pamphlet from just after the defeat of the 1983 election, written by Pete Goodwin, Is there a future for the Labour Left? A Socialist Workers' Party Pamphlet, is now online at the Marxist Internet Archive.  Wags might say, today a more appropriate pamphlet to read would be 'Is there a future for the SWP? A Labour Left pamphlet', given the massive rise of Corbynism over the past year or so.  However, for those Corbynites willing to defy Tom Watson's edicts and interested in what a 'Trotskyist' analysis of the Labour Party might look like, this little SWP pamphlet is not a bad place to start...  the conclusion however - that a revolutionary socialist organisation independent of the Labour Party needs to be built - may come as somewhat of a shock to those who believe Tom Watson's dossier on hard left entrism...  and may even convince some Corbynites to read some more Trotsky for themselves ... and who knows where that could lead? 

Stand Up to Racism national conference - 8 October London

Book your ticket here

Keep Corbyn Rally - Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Dennis Skinner, Jerem...

International Socialism 151 out now

Issue 151 of International Socialism includes Alex Callinicos’s analysis of the crisis in the Tory party caused by the referendum (written before the result), Eduardo Albuquerque on Brazil, Ralph Darlington on the fight against anti-trade union laws in the past and today, Ron Margulies on Islamophobia in Turkey, Camilla Royle on the Anthropocene and Max van Lingen on the Dutch Socialist Party plus John Newsinger on 'imperial silences from Rhodes to Surabaya'...

Edited to add: Brexit: a world-historic turn - updated post-Brexit analysis piece by Callinicos

Where next after the Leave vote?

Celebrating Cameron's resignation - 'Oh my God, the quarterback is toast!'

After the historic EU vote and the fact that Cameron is now toast, come and discuss where next at Marxism 2016...

Paul Foot on why socialists oppose the EU

[In his last posthumously published book, The Vote (2005), the campaigning socialist journalist Paul Foot stressed that the EU was part of the infrastructure of international capitalism like the IMF and World Trade Organisation, just another a 'capitalist bureaucracy' counter-posed and quite hostile to 'popular democracy' from below. As Foot wrote, 'The bureaucrats who put together the Treaty of Rome were at best uninterested, at worst downright hostile to extending democracy’, as the new political structure enshrined ‘an appointed Commission, with a huge supporting bureaucracy far out of the reach of any electorate’. ‘The plain fact [was] that membership of the European Community meant a transfer of power from elected Parliaments to the unelected European Commission’ while the European Parliament was actually completely powerless and open to corruption, as ‘the MEPs power and authority went down almost as fast as their salaries and expenses went up’. Writing in the Guardian on the EU in 2004, in what must have been one of his very final pieces of writing, Paul Foot re-emphasised why socialists stand against the EU. The essential truth of his argument, that while 'Another Europe is possible, another EU is not', it seems shines through as clearly and cogently as it did then - which is arguably why those socialists who rallied around the independent banner of a left exit - or #Lexit - this time around were right to do so]: 

I voted no in the 1975 referendum on EEC entry and will do so again in the European constitution referendum - whenever that finally happens. In 1975, I was uneasy about some of the company I was keeping. Very rightwing Little Englander Tories for instance, not to mention fascists. But the class lines were clearly drawn. The rich, almost without exception, were for a yes, the workers and the poor for a no. The Labour party and the TUC were for no on two solid grounds. First, the EEC was a capitalist club designed to cut down the influence of the workers. Second, its institutions were created by capitalists for capitalists and were therefore less democratic and more corrupt even than the parliamentary democracies of its member states. Those objections seem just as powerful today.

The basic class issues may be the same, but the party lines have shifted. The bulk of the Tory party, which, under Thatcher, called for a yes vote, now calls for a no. So does its new lunatic and xenophobic fringe, Ukip. In 1975, the yes campaign spent much more than the no. That may not happen again. All sorts of millionaires are throwing their ill-gotten gains at the no campaign. On the left, the bulk of the parliamentary Labour party (better known as the war party) is for a yes. Some trades unions are still doubtful, but the TUC general council is already starting to bow and scrape to Blair on the issue, and will probably end up snivelling surreptitiously for a yes.

In these circumstances it is vitally important that those of us on the left who want to vote no keep our distance from the rightwing campaign. Internationalists, socialists and greens who oppose the European constitution because it will drag us further down into the corporate whirlpool, emasculate trade unions and further deregulate an already rampant private enterprise, are a million miles away from the narrow nationalism of Michael Howard or Robert Jingo-Silk. We cover a wide spectrum. Even those who favour the mildest Keynesian economics, or the right to organise and strike against capital, or the right to speak out and vote for social democratic policies, will find themselves in opposition to the proposed constitution.

We must not allow our voices to be confused with the clamour of the Murdoch press. Our votes may end up in the same place, but the reasons for those votes need to be spelled out independently and separately...