Along with Mark O’Brien and several other authors in this journal, I am anxious to understand what lay behind the dramatic drop in UK strike activity from the late 1970s to the early 1990s and the extremely low level ever… Continue Reading
It is encouraging that Sean Leahy has taken up the challenge of defending the Socialist Workers Party’s line on Brexit after my essay in this journal.1 It means we are now openly debating the defining issue of our age. Sound… Continue Reading
I am grateful to John Kelly for taking the time to respond to some of the issues raised by my review of his history of the British Trotskyist movement, Contemporary Trotskyism.1 I will here just aim to reply briefly to… Continue Reading
Wayne Asher’s article in the previous issue of International Socialism is a welcome intervention in the debate about the revolutionary left’s position on the European Union.1 It avoids some of the more outlandish claims of the Remain camp in not… Continue Reading
Alex Callinicos correctly asserts that “British capitalism is…heavily dependent on access to European markets”.1 Indeed, some 60 percent of British exports find their way into European markets. There is no doubt that Brexit has unleashed the most serious crisis for… Continue Reading
In his critical but not hostile review of my book Contemporary Trotskyism, Christian Høgsbjerg notes, on the positive side, that it is “generally well-informed”, based on “painstaking empirical research” and is “thought-provoking”.1 He agrees that the social movement activity of… Continue Reading
Mental health in the UK and elsewhere is in crisis. It is a crisis with many different faces. At the time of writing one of the most prominent of these is the extremely high level of emotional distress affecting children… Continue Reading
In its first three pages, Donny Gluckstein’s review “German Marxism and the Holocaust” in issue 159 of International Socialism gives a sensitive and perceptive overview of many—but not all—of the arguments I put forward in my essay on the cause… Continue Reading
“The fighting party of the advanced class need not fear mistakes. What it should fear is persistence in a mistake, refusal to admit and correct a mistake out of a false sense of shame”.1 Thus Lenin, writing on the eve… Continue Reading
Mark O’Brien’s article in issue 157 of International Socialism, “What has Happened to the British Labour Movement and What Does it Mean for the Left in the Unions?”, adds to the debates in this journal over the last number of… Continue Reading