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Articles by Peter Taaffe
The 1925-27 Chinese Revolution
Chinaworker.info: This year we are commemorating 100 years since the Second Chinese Revolution 1925-27. This was one of the most remarkable and significant waves of mass struggle ever seen. In the year 1925 the working class of Shanghai, Guangzhou and other industrial centres fought hundreds of strikes against foreign occupation, tyrannical managers and starvation wages, and created powerful union organisations which shone a light forward also for China’s rural masses.
Germany: Huge Breakthrough for Left Party
8.8% of the votes and 30,000 new members — what way forward? In Sunday’s Federal elections (February 23), the Left Party entered powerfully into the Bundestag (German national parliament), after being at 3% in the polls just two months ago. It has become a party of big cities, young people and women. It is the strongest party among first-time voters, the strongest party in the “junior election” of those under 18 years old in schools, and the strongest party in Berlin.
Strike Wave Rocks Bangladesh After Government Overthrown
“Interim” capitalist government prepares clamp down The mass struggle in Bangladesh is at a decisive point. A month after the mass movement forced Prime Minister Hasina to resign and go into exile, a confrontation is building up between a rising wave of workers’ strikes and the new government, representing the capitalist owners of multinational businesses.
Poland: Opposition Defeats the Right-Wing
A mass mobilisation of women and youth in Poland’s recent parliamentary elections has defeated the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party. After 8 years of nationalist poison, corruption, cronyism, the erosion of democracy, the fusion of state and party, the plundering of state institutions and state-owned companies, and attacks on reproductive rights and the LGBT community, PiS has lost its parliamentary majority.
Gorbachev: An accidental architect of world change
The former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, died yesterday. Eulogies have come from many sources, including reactionary defenders of the capitalist system, like Henry Kissinger. But what did Gorbachev really stand for? What was his real ‘legacy’? Below, in a book review article first published in 2017, Peter Taaffe provides a looks at Gorbachev’s life and role. socialistworld.net Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, left a truly historical legacy.
The revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg speaking, Stuttgart, 1907 (CC - Wikimedia) On 15 January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the finest brains of the German working class and its most heroic figures, were brutally murdered by the bloodthirsty, defeated German military, backed to the hilt by the cowardly social-democratic leaders. To mark the 103rd anniversary of her death, Peter Taaffe looks at Luxemburg’s inspirational, revolutionary legacy.
Anne: Hillsborough and the fight for justice
Link to this page: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/1162/33581 From The Socialist newspaper, 12 January 2022 TV drama: 'Anne' Maxine Peake portrays Hillsborough justice campaigner Anne Williams in the ITV drama, photo ITV (Click to enlarge) Reviewed by Neill Dunne, Liverpool Socialist Party Kevin Sampson's short series on the crusade for justice of one of the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster's victims, 15-year-old Kevin Williams, fought for by his family, and quite...
Response to Observer article on China
Link to this page: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/32644 Posted on 15 June 2021 at 11:03 GMT Peter Taaffe, an executive committee member of the Socialist Party and its former general secretary, wrote the following letter to the Observer on 7 June 2021. Simon Tisdall's assertion (Observer 6/6/21) that Xi Jinping's speech "would not have been out of place at a Militant Tendency meeting circa 1976", is both scandalous and risible. Xi's regime is a dictatorial one-party regime.
China Archives |
China Book review: The war on the Uighurs The struggle against oppression by the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, is nothing new. Their homeland has been fought over for centuries and the particular suppression of national rights by Han Chinese regimes […] China China’s global ambition “China’s Belt and Road strategy is acknowledged to be the most important geopolitical initiative of the age”, write the publishers of this fascinating book by Bruno Maçães.
How militant trade unionism defeated the 1971 Industrial Relations Act
Link to this page: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/1122/32086 From The Socialist newspaper, 24 February 2021 Toolworkers mass meeting at British Leyland Longbridge, photo Dave Evans (Click to enlarge) Bill Mullins, former senior shop steward in the car industry and industrial organiser of the Socialist Party, recounts the mighty struggle of shop floor trade unionists 50 years ago in defeating the attempt by Ted Heath's Tory government to legally shackle the workers' movement.
Socialist Party :: Hugo Pierre, a candidate in Unison's general secretary election, speaking at Socialism 2020, 21st November 2020. Click here for a report in the Socialist. Videos will be posted soon.
Link to this page: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/1111/31664 From The Socialist newspaper, 22 November 2020 Socialism 2020 broke previous records - on ticket sales, in the response to the finance appeal to fund the fight of socialism, in the number of workshops and in the participation in the discussion on ideas to change the world.
Starmer's 'Militant moment' - labour movement fightback needed
Link to this page: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/31574 Posted on 30 October 2020 at 10:58 GMT A Socialist Party press release, 30th October 2020 Jeremy Corbyn has been suspended from membership of the Labour Party for saying that antisemitism within Labour has been 'dramatically overstated for political reasons'. He has broken no rule and has always opposed antisemitism.
Tony Mulhearn - a Eulogy
Link to this page: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/29769 Posted on 24 October 2019 at 14:29 GMT Below is a transcript of the leading eulogy at the funeral service for Tony Mulhearn, given by Peter Taaffe, general secretary of the Socialist Party, in the Unitarian Church, Liverpool 17, on 21st October 2019. Tony Mulhearn was a towering figure of the labour movement, particularly on Merseyside.
Former Militant editor Peter Taaffe on Derek Hatton re-joining Labour
Link to this page: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/28739 Posted on 20 February 2019 at 15:01 GMT A Socialist Party press release, 20.2.19 The re-admittance of Derek Hatton, Liverpool deputy council leader 1983-86, to the Labour Party poses the re-occurring question under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of opening the party up to socialist fighters and the need to transform it into a 100% anti-austerity party.
Defending the city that dared to fight
Link to this page: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/28740 Posted on 20 February 2019 at 18:52 GMT Some of the Liverpool 47 socialist Labour councillors at the Durham Miners Gala, 14.7.18, photo Dave Nellist (Click to enlarge) Response to the Guardian's Hannah Jane Parkinson on the record of Liverpool City Council and the Militant Tendency Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party (formerly Militant) general secretary Over the last 30 years, hundreds and thousands of attacks have been made on...
Liverpool's 1983-87 socialist council
Following the Grenfell Tower fire disaster, columnist Simon Jenkins in the Guardian attacked the policy of building residential tower blocks. In the article he says: "When in the 1980s Liverpool's Militant movement asked Everton's inhabitants what should be done with their towers, the reply was pull them down and give us back the streets.
The struggle to transform Labour
Below, we reprint correspondence between Jennie Formby, general secretary of the Labour Party, and Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party general secretary, on the Socialist Party's request to affiliate to Labour. It is more than three years since Jeremy Corbyn was first elected Labour leader. Despite repeated attempts to remove him, he has been kept in place by the popularity of his anti-austerity programme. In response, the pro-capitalist wing of Labour keeps stepping up its attempts to undermine him.
The bosses are 'dishonest' - not Militant and its supporters
Michael Crick, journalist for Channel 4 news and author of a book on Militant (now the Socialist Party), has attacked what he says are "two Labour figures in charge of Labour Party discipline," Gordon Nardell and Jennie Formby. He castigates them for having been "part of a secretive and dishonest Trotskyist organisation," Militant, in the past. These two individuals can answer for themselves over any past political association with us.
For a fighting, democratic Labour Party
As events of recent weeks have made clear, the right-wing Blairite side of the Labour Party remains unreconciled to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the party. They are using every opportunity they can find to attempt to undermine and discredit Corbyn, while trying to push the Labour Party decisively back towards the pro-capitalist, warmongering policies of the Blair era.
200 years of Karl Marx: Marxist ideas more relevant than ever
From The Socialist newspaper, 2 May 2018 The 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Karl Marx is on 5 May. Marx, together with Friedrich Engels, formulated the ideas of scientific socialism which were to shake the world in the nineteenth century and even more so in the twentieth. The Russian revolution of October 1917 stood under the signboard of Marx's ideas.
How to help the struggle to change the Labour Party
Rob Sewell's second article in answer to our reply to him on the question of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union's position on affiliation to the Labour Party is simply lamentable, from a Marxist standpoint. He gives the game away right at the beginning of his 'reply' to our original criticism of the IMT.
The role of the RMT in changing Labour
Rob Sewell, from the IMT group, recently attacked the Socialist Party of England and Wales because of the position that we have adopted on the question of union affiliations to Labour and specifically on the RMT transport workers' union. Truth to say this was "like being savaged by a dead sheep". However, we are replying to him to set the record straight for those members of the labour movement who are unfamiliar with our real views.
Crisis of social democracy in Britain - Which way forward for the Left?
Jeremy Corbyn, through mass support, has fought off the attempted coup by right-wing Blairite Labour MPs and their supporters. Corbyn actually increased his majority in the second Labour leadership campaign in twelve months. But the Labour right and behind them the strategists of British capitalism still remain unreconciled to his victory, so the 'civil war' that has raged throughout the party since his initial election will continue unabated.
Socialist Party :: Lessons of Militant
Michael Crick's book 'Militant' was first published in 1984. Why has it now been re-issued 32 years later? For the very same reason that it was published in the first place: to provide ammunition for attacking the emerging left, specifically the Socialist Party (formerly Militant), and all workers and youth who wish to see the labour movement return to its socialist roots.
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