Lately, I’ve been thinking – real colonialism has never really been tried. Colonialism envisaged noble goals, laid out by great philanthropists like David Livingstone and Cecil Rhodes – the idea of bringing to a savage continent the three Cs of Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation. Of course, the ‘objective conditions’ were very difficult. Africa was a … Read more
In a move that is no surprise to anyone, Socialist Appeal has come out in defence of the racist Howard Beckett, the Deputy Secretary-General of Unite and Len McCluskey’s hand-picked successor. He was suspended after he tweeted calling for Priti Patel to be deported instead of refugees. If this was a prominent figure on the … Read more
In the latest example of the sensational anti-Semitism of the International Marxist Tendency, we have the organisation’s take on the crisis currently gripping the country. The author of the article is a member of the German section. Funny that, you would think a German would know better. The article begins thus: The Israeli bombing of … Read more
The Socialist Equality Party, the American Trotskyist cult that was formerly the American branch of Gerry Healy’s organisation, has come out in defence of the anti-Semitic Bristol Professor David Miller. I cannot find an official statement on the issue by the IMT, SP or SWP, though I did find a statement from one of the … Read more
In this video from 2019, Alan Woods, head of the International Marxist Tendency (of which Socialist Appeal is the British section) makes the sensationally anti-Semitic claim at 12:34 that the anti-Semitism furor surrounding the Labour Party is a fabrication by the Israeli Embassy and its agents within the Labour Party. Needless to say, I did … Read more
Trotskyists always deny that Trotsky bears any responsibility for the horrors of Stalinism. It is entirely the fault of the ‘objective conditions’. That Trotsky assisted Lenin in suppressing the working-class, establishing a one-party state and crushing all opposition within the party itself are facts which are overlooked. All of this paved the way for the … Read more
For decades, Trotskyists have denied that the degeneration of the USSR has anything to do with Bolshevik ideology. Most of us realise that the seed of Stalinism was in Bolshevism from the very beginning. Trotskyists prefer to blame the difficult conditions specific to ‘backward’ Russia. It was the ‘objective conditions’ of this uncivilised, peasant nation … Read more
Trotskyists are fond of saying that the USSR wasn’t ‘real socialism’. They have any number of excuses – economic and cultural backwardness, imperialist encirclement, counter-revolution, diplomatic isolation, etc. They are convinced that this was unique to the experience of Russia, and that other revolutions in the ‘advanced’ countries of the West will not have faced … Read more
One of the biggest philosophical questions is the problem of evil. Needless to say, it is a problem that Marxists wave aside. The whole notion of ‘good versus evil’ smacks of ‘bourgeois idealism’. Such moralism is to be avoided as much as humanly possible. One can only speak of ‘class struggle’, the forces of progress … Read more
There are a great many things that can be said about Lenin, but it would take up several posts. In this particular post, I will instead offer a couple of quotes that give us an insight into Lenin’s lack of ‘dialectical foresight’ – foresight which even people at the time had! Before and after the … Read more