Articles by Socialist Action

First published: October 1991

[Note: this article originally included illustrative ‘figures’ which are referred to in the text. We hope to add these in due course.]

A potential change of government from one party to another is a fairly routine matter in British politics. But what underlies the decline of the present Tory government, and the evident inability of the Labour Party to present any convincing alternative, is something more fundamental. Britain is approaching one of those great turning points in political history which have so far occurred roughly only once a century, which imply a shift in the entire party political system, that is in the form of bourgeois political hegemony.

Since the English bourgeois revolution of 1642–49 there have been only four crises of equivalent scale – 1688 with the ‘Glorious Revolution’, 1783 with the turning point after the American War of Independence, 1832 and the passing of the first Reform Act, and 1886 with the fatal split in the Liberal Party over Irish Home rule. In order to grasp the scale and nature of what is unfolding in British politics today it is therefore valuable to step back from immediate issues and consider the general course of British political history.

First published: April 1996

Theoretical underdevelopment and the false counterposing of theory to practice has critically weakened the left in Britain. This majority British tradition has historically contrasted with the emphasis on the integration of theory and practice by the most advanced working class political currents internationally. The recomposition and renewal of the socialist left in Britain poses afresh the necessity of theoretical exchange and development.

The historical attitude of the majority tradition of the British labour movement to Marxist theory was established very early in its formation. Thus Ben Tillett, a future leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, went out of his way to condemn ‘hare-brained chatterers and magpies of Continental Revolutionists’ at the founding conference of the Independent Labour Party in 1893.

First published: September 1993

Socialist Action gives tremendous emphasis to the international class struggle, the struggle of women, the black community, and all sections of the oppressed as part of working class politics. But it does not treat these simply as individual questions, vital as each is separately. Socialist Action seeks to integrate them in a hegemonic strategy – that is, one in which the labour movement champions the demands of all the exploited and oppressed. Such an emphasis is not a peripheral question but at the core of Marxism. We consider the origins of the idea of hegemony in the views of Marx and its place in socialist strategy.

‘So one army lines up on one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will be a social revolution!… Whoever expects such a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is’ (Lenin, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up).

First published: October 1998

The philosophical works of Hegel were central to the development of Marx’s thought. A consideration of this philosophical background illuminates why Marx was concerned with some particular problems and why Hegel had such an influence on his thought.

The immediate political background to the development of Hegel’s thought was the French revolution – the founding work of Hegel’s philosophy, the Phenomenology of Mind, was written in Jena, site of the battle between Napoleon and the feudal German monarchies. This context led Hegel to be particularly concerned with the question of change!

First published: February 2003

The coming attack on Iraq is the latest in a series of wars waged by the US government – including the first Gulf War in 1991, the attack on Yugoslavia and the bombing of Afghanistan. But many more people than before have understood the real motives for the war and are therefore opposing it.

This is a vital change. Not only would an attack on Iraq kill thousands of Iraqi people but, if successful, it will be far from being the last, or even the biggest, aggressive war envisaged by the US. In his ‘axis of evil’ speech, George W. Bush has already named North Korea and Iran as potential future targets. The Pentagon ‘nuclear posture review’ document in 2002 named a hit list of countries against which Washington is prepared to use nuclear weapons, including Iran, North Korea, Libya and China. At the end of February, responding to a question from the anti-war MP Alice Mahon, Tony Blair declared that after Iraq, North Korea was next.