Orthodox Trotskyists News Today

In the competition between Narodnaya Volya and Black Redistribution after 1879, immediate success was all, and all-important. In terms of practical activity, Black Redistribution could do nothing. Its members either fell into inactivity, or defected to Narodnaya Volya. There was historical justice in that, because, as Plekhanov would later stress, Narodnaya Volya had moved ahead of them in the necessary turn to politics.

1. The belief that Israel has no right to exist. That is the core of Left antisemitism, though it comes in more than one version and from more than one root, ranging from the skewed anti-imperialism of the Orthodox Trotskyists through Arab nationalism to Islamic chauvinism. Advocacy of the destruction of Israel, which is what separates left-wing and Islamist antisemites from honest critics of Israeli policy, should not be tolerated in the labour movement and in the serious left.

1. The belief that Israel has no right to exist. That is the core of Left antisemitism, though it comes in more than one version and from more than one root, ranging from the skewed anti-imperialism of the Orthodox Trotskyists through Arab nationalism to Islamic chauvinism. Advocacy of the destruction of Israel, which is what separates left-wing and Islamist antisemites from honest critics of Israeli policy, should not be tolerated in the labour movement and in the serious left.

Last June marked 60 years since the infamous congress of reunification between the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), alongside its supporters in Latin America and Asia, and the Pabloite International Secretariat.

We distrust NATO because we know the big capitalist powers will always give their own interests priority over the rights of less powerful nations. The NATO powers want to push back Putin, but only to restore stable investment and trade conditions, and stall new disruptions. They pushed Ukraine into signing a pro-Putin deal in 2015 (the now-defunct Minsk 2: see centre pages) and they would do the same again. The US wanted to bring some (compliant) form of democracy to Iraq by their sanctions and ...

Shachtman’s polemic against Ernest Erber, which Workers’ Liberty have reprinted, is one of the Marxist movement, like Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy or Engels’ Anti-Dühring. Erber considered himself a socialist of sorts until his death, quite recently, at the age of 96. Mostly he gave his energies to the career he made after quitting, as a town planner, and to domestic life. He wrote occasionally for the reform-socialist journal Dissent.