WeeklyWorker

WW archive > Issue 389 - 21 June 2001

After Gothenburg

It is a shocking image. A 19-year-old protester taunts police ranks during the anti-capitalist actions in Gothenburg on June 15. One policeman draws a gun and the young man turns to scramble to safety. He is apparently shot in the back. As the bullet thuds into him, his face contorts with shock and terrible pain. Moments later, we see him laid out on the concrete with anxious comrades huddled over him. For a moment, the camera picks up a shot of his naked stomach, a small, bloody bullet wound stands out vividly on his flesh.

Letters

Iranian sit-in victory; Hints on euro; Get a grip; Nods and winks; SSP-SA unity; SLP failure; Bad results; Bad results; Where now for the SSP?

Anti-fascism after Oldham

Haringey

Like a hole in the head?

Future party structure

This document was circulated by the Socialist Workers Party leadership just before the election. Its significance is obvious. SWP branches are to be fused into the Socialist Alliance. The old routine, it is now acknowledged, did not train the membership - it isolated them. We are, though, presented with a paradoxical half-way house. The SWP has half-broken with its past, but only half-embraced the future. It is the main force blocking moves to put the Socialist Alliance onto a proper footing as a democratic party equipped with a frequent political paper

Executive committee Harnessing momentum

Past assessed. Plans laid. Politics still inadequate

Stalin Society v CPGB

What was the USSR?

Conservative disarray

Can the Tories reinvent themselves? Michael Malkin investigates

Distortion, slush and chauvinism

Michael Bray (director) Pearl Harbor 182 minutes, general release

Lambeth

Shenanigans sour meeting

Our history Those against unity

The announcement by the British Socialist Party and the Communist Unity Group that they were to form a united Communist Party at a Unity Convention on July 31 1920 provoked the active opposition of the disintegrating sectarian rump, made up of the Socialist Labour Party and Sylvia Pankhurst?s Workers? Socialist Federation, both of which had previously taken part in unity negotiations: the SLP, because the BSP refused to agree as a matter of principle that the future CPGB should not seek affiliation to the Labour Party; and the WSF for the same reason, plus the BSP?s refusal to accept that bourgeois parliaments must always be boycotted. The views of these anti-unity organisations were put in their most precise and articulate form in two open letters: the ?Open letter to SLP members? from its leader James Clunie and the ?Open letter to the delegates of the Unity Convention? from the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) - which was in fact neither a Communist Party nor the British section of the Third International, but what the WSF illegitimately called itself after June 19 1920 in a vain attempt to steal the thunder of the soon to be formed CPGB.

Communist University 2001

August 4-11, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex

Catalyst for regeneration

Pete Radcliff, member of the Alliance for Workers? Liberty and Socialist Alliance candidate for Nottingham East, achieved an excellent result. Sam Metcalf asked him about the general election and the prospects for deeper unity

Lambeth SA Great start?

Document distributed within Lambeth Socialist Alliance

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