Archive for the ‘Trotskyism’ Category
US SWP Stands with Trump.
The US SWP (No relation to the British SWP) is a shadow of its former self, down to elderly members and a few others. Its leader Jack Barnes heads what resembles a Congregationalist community. There are shed loads of American leftists who can tell the tale. As Pabloite I am pretty against their founding figure James P Cannon – going back to the 54 split. Not because I think Michalis N. Raptis was right about Stalinism as the wave of the future, or any kind of progressive politics, the post-war states in the East and China, though his views in defence of Yugoslavia are respectable. It’s Cannon’s loud mouthed politics and wise-guy attitude that put me off. More widely they took Trotskyism as a doctrine rather than a tradition with insights, some good, some bad.
In the UK they sent Missionaries into the International Marxist (IMG) group, their factional body, known (sacrilege) as the Tendency. Loathing them on sight I cannot claim to an impartial account. They were against the IMG No Platform campaign against the National Front, and our solidarity with the Portuguese Revolution – their view was that the influence of the Portuguese Communist Party and non-Trotskyist leftists was baleful. I think they expected a degree of deference to the Party of Cannon, which, see above, was certainly not my case.
The SWP always had a bit of thing about the US Constitution. They were however listened to be some who respected the oldest Trotskyist party in the world, with origins back to the 1920s. They ended up creating a mini-groupuscule, the Communist League led by a handful of unconditional admirers, which has stood a tiny number of candidates in various UK elections, with no impact whatsoever.
This is in their paper, The Militant (the original one, not the UK Grantite one).
Now they stand with Trump.
On Aug. 14, Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, announced the indictment of former President Donald Trump and a number of his political supporters under the notorious anti-union RICO law. A grand jury she has been conducting charged Trump with orchestrating a criminal gang, claiming it carried out a far-reaching conspiracy to try to overturn the 2020 election.
RICO stands for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, adopted in 1970 to go after the unions. It allows for prosecuting unrelated “crimes” as a racketeering conspiracy. These laws are used by the government to intervene in the unions and restrict the right of union members to elect the officers of their choice. And they call for severe sentences.
The real aim of the indictment, which draws in 19 named conspirators on 41 counts, is to drive Trump out of politics in 2024 and show anyone who agrees with him politically that they too can be victimized. Like each of the three other indictments against Trump — in New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida — the Georgia charges toss aside constitutional protections of free speech and political association to accomplish the Democrats’ political ends.
(our heart bleeds…)
Unlike the three other cases, the latest charges are not prosecuted in federal court. If Willis’ prosecution prevails and Trump is convicted, it would preclude a victorious President Trump from being able to pardon himself, leaving him behind bars in Georgia for years.
Democrats, Never-Trump Republicans and the middle-class left are determined to silence the Republican front-runner. The Georgia indictment is based overwhelmingly on statements Trump and his supporters made. Willis claims he began a conspiracy one day after the 2020 election by giving a speech saying he had won. She says tweets by Trump making the same claims were “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” And she claims appeals by the Trump campaign for Georgia legislators to send electors pledged to Trump to the electoral college were a crime.
She also charges Trump with soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, based on what he said in a highly publicized phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.” But lobbying state officials and lawmakers seeking to change their minds is not a crime. It’s free speech.
”’
Turning challenges to an election result into a criminal offense and targeting free speech is a serious danger for working people.
Every election under capitalism is rigged to benefit the main capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans, and against working-class parties like the Socialist Workers Party. Huge petitioning requirements to get on the ballot are used to exclude a working-class voice in most states. Being able to speak out against the rigging of elections is a constitutionally protected right.
In other words the election was ‘rigged’
All four prosecutors trying to jail Trump are pushing for rapid trials set early in the 2024 election race. Willis wants the Georgia trial to start March 4.
Jack Smith, special counsel for President Joseph Biden’s Justice Department, demands Trump’s federal trial on charges of trying to overturn an election begin Jan. 2.
The Democrats, FBI and liberal media moguls have been laser-focused on bringing Trump down for over seven years. Democrats choreographed a monthslong show-trial of Trump during the Jan. 6 congressional hearings last year, a predecessor of today’s indictments.
Not a dick-bird on Trumps own politics….
Democrats used vast congressional resources to interrogate witnesses and gin up a case, but now insist those accused only get five months to prepare their defense.
…….
All defenders of constitutional freedoms should demand the charges against Trump be dropped
*****
People have pointed to some parallels with the MAGA red-brown US fringe on the left, focusing their hatred on ‘liberals’ though they have not gone quite in the direction of national populists like the UK Spiked. Nothing on the criminal thieving policies of Trump or his international politics, such as backing Brexit and Bunter Boris .
US SWP Stands with Trump.
Oldest Trotskyist Group in the World Stands with Tump.
Defend free speech for all! Drop charges against Trump. Terry Evans.
Defending constitutionally protected free speech is at the heart of fighting the latest assault on political rights by President Joseph Biden’s Justice Department. Special counsel Jack Smith’s second indictment of former President Donald Trump would gut the First Amendment in an attempt to drive Biden’s main rival for the presidency out of the 2024 race and put him in jail.
The Bill of Rights, the post-Civil War Reconstruction amendments, and other constitutional protections are crucial for working people. It was militant struggle by artisans and farmers that won freedom of speech and assembly, due process and other rights. These are necessary whenever working people defend ourselves, build unions and engage in political activity in our own class interests.
Continues, pages 1 to 301 via above link.
“The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a Trotskyist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on “solidarity work” to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba. The SWP publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928. “
They have a small group in the UK, the Communist League,
“The Communist League is a British political party that was formed by a group of members expelled in 1988 from Socialist Action. Those members had joined the American Socialist Workers Party‘s Pathfinder tendency. It maintained a bookshop in London, originally in The Cut, then Bethnal Green Road. It now operates a web/mail order service from Seven Sisters for Pathfinder publications. The League’s members sell The Militant, the paper of the American Socialist Workers Party. The group claims that many of its members work in the meat-packing industry”
The Wiki piece does not trace their origins to a faction (they used the sacred word Tendency which I will not) in the International Marxist Group in the 1970s. A right pain they even infiltrated, that is one of them joined on flimsy grounds given his location, my central London student cell (when I was doing A levels at Westminster FE).
Unkindly known as a sex cult for ugly people they were something like Mormon missionaries. A handful are still around. The Communist League have stalls, with Spart like hand-written placards, at London demos and sell the Us ‘Militant’. Or had, they have not been spotted recently.
During the 1970s, on issues like anti-fascism and fighting the National Front, the Portuguese Revolution, they were at odds with the Fourth International and the IMG. (they were not formal members but stood ‘in solidarity’ with it for some years.)
In 2017 the minuscule British lot already stood up for Trump,
UK: Communist League says workers need political power
There is hysteria in the middle-class left in the U.K. at the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, mimicking similar hysteria in like-minded groups in the States. An online petition here opposing a “state” visit for Trump because “it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the Queen” has garnered over 1.8 million signatures. British Prime Minister Theresa May invited Trump for a state visit — the kind that entails royal hoopla — as part of efforts to solidify the two imperialist powers’ “special relationship” as the British rulers head toward Brexit.
Thousands attended demonstrations across the U.K. Feb. 20 to “Stand up to Trump.” The actions have been marked by British nationalism, Clifford told the Militant. “If Trump has a state visit, I think it will make our country look bad,” student Sara Sharp told the Independent at the action that day in London.
“Those clamoring about Trump’s visit celebrate ‘our’ — i.e. British — values. But there is no ‘we,’” Clifford said. “There are two classes — the working class and the propertied rulers — with opposite class interests.
“The capitalist class here rules by divide and conquer. They keep foreign-born workers as second-class citizens to superexploit them, just like their U.S. counterparts,” he said. “They try to pit us against each other.” In a BBC Radio Manchester interview, Clifford was asked if he would back the call to bar Trump from the U.K. “I wouldn’t turn out to welcome him, but I wouldn’t back a ban on him coming here,” Clifford said. “I would challenge him to a debate. Trump got elected by appealing directly to working people facing American ‘carnage.’ Trump’s goal is to save U.S. capitalism.
They have got a lot worse since then.
There are reams written about the US group’s degeneration.
Obviously as a Pabloite I’d trace that back longer than many of their critics.
Trade Union and Socialist Coalition scores 5 votes in Dudley and, with 20 Votes in Reading, comes ‘Bottom of the Poll’.
Jen Bottom TUSC, 28, 1.8%, – 0.1%
TUSC Brexit Ultras not downhearted.
The ingredients are there for a significant challenge at the ballot box to Sir Keir Starmer’s Tony Blair-style ‘New Labour’ and its re-heated ‘fiscally responsible’ austerity politics. But to bring together the widest range of trade unionists, socialists of different organisations or none, and working class community and social movement campaigners in a common election campaign, needs a will to collaborate – and organisation, at the top and, as importantly, on the ground.
TUSC, having organised by far the largest working class left-of-Labour challenge at the last three sets of local elections, has consistently reached out to campaign groups and different socialist organisations to discuss their plans for the next general election (see our most recent letter at https://www.tusc.org.uk/19275/24-05-2023/tusc-makes-new-appeal-to-left-wing-groups-to-discuss-general-election-plans/). Hopefully recent events will encourage those who have yet to think seriously about the question to do so now. But individuals and different organisations accepting the need for an election challenge is only the first step. For a start there are election laws to follow.
Organisations currently participating in TUSC as full committee members or observers:
Socialist Party: info@socialistparty.org.uk System Change (formerly Resist): peterforrest53@hotmail.com Social Justice Party: https://socialjusticeparty.uk/contact/ Workers Party of Britain: info@workerspartybritain.org
By election results
By election results 3 August 2023
Cradley and Wollescote ward, Dudley Metropolitan Council
Lib Dem 1321, 52.%, + 14.3%
Tory 353, 14.0%, – 4.8%
Green 79, 3.1%, – 0.2%
Siobhan Friel TUSC 5, 0.2%, -0.7%
Lib Dem gain from Labour
Majority 550
—–
Norcot ward, Reading Unitary Authority
Labour 929, 58.2%, + 0.2%
Lib Dem 280, 17.5%, + 11.4%
Tory 209, 13.1%, – 4.8%
Green 101, 6.3%, – 3.6%
Independent 49, 3.1%, – 0.3%
Jen Bottom TUSC, 28, 1.8%, – 0.1%
Labour hold
Majority 649
Labour hold
Majority 649
From Barry B.
Comment:
You wonder how much longer this lot can sustain this farce of standing for elections. You don’t pay a deposit for council contests – you just get a few people to nominate you, “A number of registered electors must support your nomination by signing the nomination paper.” – but the general elections requires one.
Not a word on the new confetti of the left, the Transform call,
The Weekly Worker has its Ace reporter on the trail…..
On July 25 Left Unity announced its participation in yet another call for a “new party of the left”.1 Besides LU itself, the participants are the Breakthrough Party,2 Liverpool Community Independents3 and the People’s Alliance of the Left (PAL).
The PAL has very little web presence, but appears to have originated as a general left non-aggression pact, including the Socialist Party of England and Wales’s front, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, but which split four months after its launch, when Tusc allowed George Galloway’s Workers’ Party observer status.4 What remains of PAL is therefore in substance Left Unity, the Breakthrough Party and the Northern Independence Party.5 As Clive Heemskerk of SPEW/Tusc commented at the time of the split, in spite of their name-claims to breadth, none of these formations represent either significant forces on the ground, or (apart from the Liverpool Community Independents) electoral impact significantly greater than Tusc’s.6
Now amongst some salient points, and some less then savoury ones casting doubt on the internationalist positon of standing with Ukraine, Cde MCNair affects some bogus knowledge of the history of the French Left. According to the learned lecturer the 1920s Cartel des gauches in France “, its meaning was to commit the workers’ party (the French Socialists) to alliance with the equivalent of today’s Liberal Democrats. ” as an example of what rubbish left unity is.
Well the Cartel des gauches committed the SFIO to a bloc against the right, yes. It involved “the Radical-Socialist Party, (we all know the old joke, they were neither radical, the expression comes from 19th century British ‘radicals’ like John Bright, by the way, nor socialist) the socialist French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), and other smaller left-republican parties that formed on two occasions in 1924 to 1926 a to an alliance in 1932.” It was forerunner of the Front Populaire, 1936-38 a major moment in the history of the French and European left.
Their opponent was primarily the Bloc national, a hard ‘nationalist right alliance with roots in the anti-Dreyfus forces. Another opposing force was the French Communist Party PCF, already pretty isolationist and by the later part of that decade committed to a sectarian ‘class against class’ party, including claims of social fascism against the SFIO.
The relevance of this comparison is beyond unclear. The Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) should stick to talking about things they know about. Such as this, “The People’s Alliance of the Left, founded on equally unsound political foundations, split within four months of its foundation and Transform is unlikely to do much better.”
Tendance Coatesy 