Over the last year far right and fascist parties, like the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the Front National (FN) in France, the Republikaner Party in Germany and the Lombardy League in Northern Italy, have either grown considerably or achieved significant votes in local and national elections. Dave Beech looks at the factors underpinning these developments and explains what the workers’ movement’s response needs to be. Read more...

Yugoslavia faces the prospect of a horrific civil war between the peoples and ethnic groups that make up this most multi-national of European states. Revolutionary Marxists condemn without hesitation the fomentors of national strife. The Serbian, Croatian and Slovenia nationalists are all guilty of this. Cynically playing with the fire of chauvinism which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths during the Second World War, reviving the pogromist traditions of the Chetnik and Ustasha fascists, they have brought the country to the brink of a repetition of these events. Read more...

With Labour in retreat on lesbian and gay rights Mark Harrison spells out the limitations of OutRage and the politics of “direct action”. Read more...

Infectious diseases have long inflicted suffering and misery on the human race. Today in semi-colonial countries infectious diseases are all too familiar, estimated to be the cause of death for 17 million people (45% of all deaths in such countries) each year.1 Deprived of the resources necessary for the provision of elementary sanitation the masses of the semi-colonies have all too often become the helpless victims of infectious diseases. Read more...

“In the last decades only the surface signs of tradition were destroyed. Traditional structures, like the slave-life of women in the family, remain.”1

These words from a Soviet woman worker show the reality of women’s “liberation” under Stalinism. For decades women in the USSR and Eastern Europe were told that they were equal and free, and that the “woman question” had been solved. These lies, together with the claim that socialism had actually been established, are being cruelly exposed as the regimes crumble one by one. The danger now facing women is that they may exchange one illusion for another. Instead of the bureaucratic chimera of “socialism in one country” and women’s liberation, they are now being offered an equally fantastical picture of what the market economy and mass consumerism can do to lighten the crushing burden of domestic toil. Neither of these alternatives can advance the condition of women workers. Read more...

An action programme for women in the USSR and Eastern Europe

Working women in the USSR and the rest of Eastern Europe are faced with twin dangers. The collapse of the Stalinist dictatorships threatens both the restoration of capitalism and the possibility of a hardline bureaucratic crackdown. The restoration of capitalism would bring untold hardship for the vast majority of women in the degenerate workers’ states. But what, apart from the planned property relations, remains for working women to defend in the degenerate workers’ states? Read more...

Passed by the LRCI International Secretariat, August/September 1990

On the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

The Iraqi attack on Kuwait was motivated by economic aggrandisement necessitated by the Iran/Iraq war and the expenses of maintaining the reactionary military Bonapartist regime of Saddam Hussein. Though this seizure of Kuwait has outraged the imperialist powers it is not a genuine blow against imperialism. Iraq seeks to become the dominant regional Arab power, a power that imperialism must work through and deal with. Its claim to be a liberator of the Kuwaiti people from their reactionary rulers is a fraud. As such we condemn the Iraqi invasion and call for the withdrawal of Iraqi troops. Read more...

Resolution adopted by the International Executive Committee of the LRCI, 4 March 1990

The release of Nelson Mandela has focused the attention of the world upon South Africa in a way not seen since the revolutionary situation of 1984-86. But this time we are not faced with workers’ strikes or uprisings in the townships. Rather, we have the spectacle of the ANC preparing to sell a “negotiated settlement” to the black masses. This is nothing short of a betrayal of the South African workers and should be branded as such. The current stage of the struggle in South Africa is dominated by the ANC’s perspective that apartheid can be abolished peacefully through negotiations with the white supremacist South African government. This policy holds grave dangers for the black masses of South Africa. Read more...

Passed at the MRCI delegate conference, September 1988

Jews: race, nation or “people-class”?

1. The Jews are clearly not a race. The original Hebrew people and language belonged to the Semitic family but two and a half millenia of residence amongst non-Semitic peoples, widespread proselytism to Judaism in earlier periods and intermarriage has made these communities like most other peoples a “racial mixture”. Read more...

Republicanism in Ireland is almost 200 years old. Taking its inspiration from the American Revolution (1776-82) and, more especially, the French Revolution (1789-94) republicanism emerged in Ireland as the doctrine of a developing northern protestant bourgeoisie in its fight against English rule.

The defeat of the 1798 rebellion and the subsequent abolition of the Dublin parliament signaled the end of an Irish republicanism associated with a revolutionary bourgeois class in Ireland. From the mid-nineteenth century on the national struggle passed into the leadership of the petit bourgeoisie based on an overwhelmingly catholic social base. Read more...

The February 1989 issue of Lutte de Classe / Class Struggle, published by the International Communist Union (ICU), the international grouping run by the French organisation Lutte Ouvrière (LO), carried an article on the armed struggle in Northern Ireland. We print here a reply from our Irish section, the Irish Workers Group. Read more...

Adopted by the MRCI conference, April 1988

1. In 1978 the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power. It was a party based on the urban intelligentsia and the upper ranks of the armed forces. The party was based on the Stalinist monolithic model but was riven by factional conflicts. The PDPA’s programme consisted of a series of democratic reforms, based on continuing the policy of co-operation with the USSR which had been pursued by the king until 1973, and which Daoud, in conjunction with the CIA and the Shah of Iran, was attempting to stop. The seizure of power had popular support in the towns. It was, however, not a Soviet organised putsch. The Soviet Union had hitherto been content with Afghanistan as a neutral buffer state. In return the Soviet Union pumped in large amounts of aid being concerned only that the Afghan regime was “friendly”. But the effects of Soviet aid (army training, education etc) were to pro-Sovietise the majority of the army officer corps and state bureaucracy. Read more...

We reprint here an English translation of ‘Draft theses on the Jewish Question today’, first published in Fourth International in the January/February 1948 issue. They are dated January 1947 and the available evidence suggests that they were drafted by Ernest Mandel (‘Walter’) and first discussed by the International Secretariat in Paris at its 16 December 1946 meeting. Read more...

‘The war is no longer just a conflict between two ruling classes fighting for domination of the region . . . The war now is one in which Iran faces the world’s mightiest imperial power (the USA—WP) and its European and Arab allies. Under these circumstances socialists are not neutral... We are with the Iranians—for the defeat of the whole coalition of forces, including Iraq, that is ranged against them.’
(Socialist Worker Review December 1987). Read more...

1. The India Sri Lanka Accord of July 1987 represents the latest attempt at imposing a reactionary settlement on the national struggle of the Tamil people. The accord proposed autonomy which demanded the disarming of the only force enjoying the support of the Tamil people and reliance on Indian troops responsible for the repression of national groups inside India. It proposed a referendum in the Eastern Province in late 1988 to decide whether to continue links with the Northern Province. Read more...

Much has happened but little has changed. General elections in Britain and Ireland have come and gone in the past months. Another loyalist marching season has passed. Read more...

Sue Thomas makes an assessment and examines the current debates going on in the ANC Read more...

Helen Ward critiques the debate going on in the SWP over women's oppression Read more...

Lesbians and gay men are subjected to brutal oppression in capitalist society. Despite some countries having legalised homosexual acts between consenting “adults” in private, oppression, discrimination and legal harassment continue to exist on a massive scale. So much so that millions feel obliged to conceal their sexuality or to repress it. The submerged misery of these millions is incalculable. Against all who voluntarily or involuntarily reveal their sexuality, a massive barrage of repression is unleashed. Read more...

The development of capitalism in Britain and Western Europe was accompanied, as we have seen, by an emerging morality that categorised homosexuals as deviants. Homosexuality was no longer merely an instance of individual depravity. It was a way of life for a whole number of people, especially men, and had to be treated as a threat to society. The development of the systematic social and political oppression of homosexuals did lead to the development of organised resistance. In a number of European countries movements and campaigns for homosexual rights emerged. Read more...

The rebirth of a radical lesbian and gay movement can be dated to the summer of 1969. A routine police raid on a gay bar in New York led to the Stonewall riots. Inspired by the huge street demonstrations of the mass campaign in the USA against the Vietnam War, by the street battles of students in France and Germany and sick of the incessant police harassment they suffered, gays fought back with a vengeance. Read more...

The systematic oppression of lesbians and gay men under capitalism is not accidental. Capitalism utilises the family as a social unit for the reproduction, physical maintenance and early education of labour power. As such, it portrays the family – a monogamous, heterosexual, child producing and rearing unit – as both natural (it has “always” existed) and as normal (anybody not conforming to this set up is “abnormal”). To reinforce the family as an institution capitalism has developed a set of sexual and moral codes which are stultifying for all, but are especially oppressive for women, children, lesbians and gay men. Read more...

Zionism, as a colonial settler movement during the first part of the 20th century, had to be strategically allied to one imperialist power or another. Not only did these powers provide the funds for settlement but more importantly they controlled the Middle East. British imperialism was hegemonic there from 1918 until 1947-53 when it was supplanted by the USA. Read more...

Introduction Read more...

What role can the South African working class play in the fight against the Apartheid state? By Sue Thomas Read more...

Stuart King argues that the ANC cannot provide a real revolutionary leadership to the oppressed Black population of South Africa Read more...

Dave Stockton looks at the National question in South Africa Read more...

For the past six months in Sri Lanka political attention has been fixed on the fate of discussions between the various Tamil guerrilla groups and the United National Party (UNP) government. Also involved in these talks was Rajin Ghandi’s government in India. Neither the ‘ceasefire’ that accompanied the discussions, nor the discussions themselves were a success from the Tamils’ point of view. Read more...

Ranged against Jayawardene are the organisations of the Tamils, many of which have taken up the armed struggle. How should revolutionaries assess the role of the guerrilla organisations in the present struggle? What has the last twelve months revealed about their petit bourgeois nationalism? Read more...

July’s carnage on the streets of the capital Colombo was neither a new nor an unexpected event. Attacks on the 2.8 million minority Tamil population have been regularly aided and abetted by Sri Lanka’s 30,000 strong police force and army 98% of whom are drawn from the 11 million strong Sinhalese majority population. Read more...