International Socialists (CWI Scotland)

Coming mass revolts will see workers and youth look to Trotsky’s ideas

Peter Taaffe, General Secretary Socialist Party (CWI England and Wales)

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent demise of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe is a crucial time for socialists to discuss the nature of the USSR, why the regimes fell, the subsequent consequences this had for the labour and socialist movement in Europe and internationally, and crucially what lessons can we learn to arm us in the campaign for socialism today.

Luke Ivory - International Socialists

Seventy years ago, the major powers plunged humanity into the horror of world war

Peter Taaffe, from Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party, cwi in England and Wales

"Winston Churchill, wrote the following about Hitler’s rise to power (see picture opposite) in the 1939 edition of his book, Great Contemporaries: “I have always said that if Great Britain was defeated in war, I hope we would find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations”. The Nazis were financed and aided by the British ruling class with massive support from British big business so long as they faced east, towards attacking the Soviet Union. Thus Britain effectively backed Hitler’s rearmament programme in the 1935 Anglo-German naval agreement that allowed an expansion of the German navy that broke the Versailles Treaty’s limits."

And I can’t help but wonder now Willie McBride

Do all those who lie here know why they died?

Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?

Did you really believe them that this war would end wars?

But the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame –

The killing, the dying – it was all done in vain.

For Willie McBride, it’s all happened again

And again, and again, and again, and again.

© Eric Bogle

The seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War falls on 1 September. A minimum of 60 million people died (some estimates put the number as high as 77 million): 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians. While the 'theatres of operations' did not spread to the whole of the world, it nevertheless touched most of humankind and its consequences certainly exercise a profound effect today.

PETER TAAFFE looks at the lessons of this devastating event.

Nuclear weapons were first deployed obscenely at the very end of the war on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then a massive stockpile of weapons has hung like a terrible sword of Damocles over us, threatening to bury humankind and probably all animal life, under nuclear rubble. Why and how did we arrive at this situation, what were the causes of the Second World War, how did it differ from the First World War and, crucially, is it possible today to avoid the nightmare that our parents and grandparents endured during this catastrophe?

A turning point in history

August 1969 was a turning point in the history of Northern Ireland. It was then that the Labour Government of Harold Wilson took the decision to send troops onto the streets, first of Derry, then of Belfast.

The measure was presented as temporary – troops were needed, they said, because, with riots sweeping the streets, with huge parts of Derry and Belfast sealed off behind barricades and with pogroms starting to develop, it was clear that the Unionist government at Stormont had lost control. It was to be a ‘stop gap’. The troops would be withdrawn ‘as soon as law and order is restored’.

Peter Hadden, Socialist Party (CWI in Northern Ireland)

On 9 July 1984 Liverpool City council, led by Militant (the Socialist Party's predecessor), won a sensational victory over the ruthless Tory government of Margaret Thatcher. They secured extra funding for the council's urban regeneration programme. The principled stand by the 47 Liverpool Labour councillors, allied to a mass movement of the city's workers and wider working class, stands in stark contrast to today's sleazy and spineless Labour leaders.

Tony Mulhearn, one of the Liverpool councillors subsequently victimised by the state and witch-hunted by the Labour Party leadership, explains the successful struggle 25 years ago.

Brutal class warfare against the rights and the conditions of the working class

Peter Taaffe, from Socialism Today (April 2009), monthly journal of the Socialist Party (CWI England and Wales)

As the 30th anniversary of the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher – the most hated figure in Britain post-1945 – in May 1979 approaches, her record has been put under the media microscope. Predictably, it is the personality of Thatcher which has been the main subject of investigation by assorted capitalist newspapers – notably in the Observer and by Germaine Greer in the Guardian.

A Residential School setting in West Linton in the Scottish Borders seems a weird place to start the story of the poll Tax but given the history of it’s demise it is as good a place to start as any.

by Ronnie Stevenson, secretary Mount Florida anti-poll tax union, Glasgow

At a Militant (the forerunner of the Socialist Party in England and Wales and the International Socialists in Scotland.) conference in 1987, called to discuss resistance to the Poll Tax Labour Councillor Chic Stevenson moved that we begin to organise for total defiance of the Poll Tax. The strategy involved arguing for all councillors to refuse to implement the tax and for building support for a mass non-payment campaign should it be implemented. 

The decisions which were taken shaped the campaign over the next few years. The ideas of a mass campaign against the poll tax, for building anti-poll tax unions, for mass organised non-payment and non-compliance by local authorities and council trade unions, and for industrial action to defend those victimised for non-payment or non-implementation were brought together in a Militant pamphlet in April 1988.