Party & Programme
End the cycle of splits
24 May 2012
If the left is to build a serious political organisation it will have to facilitate internal dissent, writes Mike Macnair. And that will require both majorities and minorities to act responsibly
What sort of party?
21 Nov 2024
Setting up yet another loose network, a broad left alliance or a confessional sect would obviously be pointless. Mike Macnair responds to an invitation to discuss what is the main question before us today
An unpalatable choice
21 Nov 2024
With a February 23 general election agreed, German society is set to move right, reports Carla Roberts
Whimpering out of existence
14 Nov 2024
The beginning of the end of all those efforts to rally what was the Corbyn movement seems to be in sight. Carla Roberts reports on the factions and the confusion
Debating our culture
31 Oct 2024
Our present differences are minor - a scratch - but scratches have to be taken seriously. Failure to do so risks the danger of gangrene. Mike Macnair reports on the debates at the October 27 CPGB aggregate of members and visitors
Four matches and a friend
24 Oct 2024
Jack Conrad remembers Tom May, December 4 1940-October 5 2024
Crushing it in the egg?
24 Oct 2024
‘No platform for fascists’ and ritual confrontation with the far right have been tested to destruction. As a tactic it clearly does not work. We need a serious alternative, argues Mike Macnair
Symbol of fatuity
17 Oct 2024
Beginning as a left nationalist, he ended up as a nothing. A common pattern. Mike Macnair argues that claims for Scottish independence are illusory because small nations can never really be independent
Formulations, fetishes and failures
10 Oct 2024
Steve Bloom dogmatically clings to ‘new left Trotskyist’ orthodoxy, says Mike Macnair, and this leads him and his co-thinkers to strategic unrealism and abandoning working class political independence
Analysis of historical causes
03 Oct 2024
We must ruthlessly criticise all past attempts. As Mike Macnair once again demonstrates, Steve Bloom’s arguments on method and history only give support to dogmatism and personality cults
Fetishising revolutionary crisis
26 Sep 2024
Clinging to the general strike, and to the idea of taking the tide at the flood, is at the core of present failures. Mike Macnair argues that Steve Bloom’s call for ‘synthesis’ is badly misconceived
Corbyn’s maybe party
19 Sep 2024
An eclectic mixture of soft lefts, reformist has-beens, committed localists, inveterate unity-mongers and the plain deluded have been secretly meeting. But, asks Carla Roberts, can we expect anything more than yet another Labour Party mark two?
Amy Leather vanishes
19 Sep 2024
What lies behind the mid-term changes at the top? The central committee limits itself to a single gnomic pronouncement. Meanwhile, Paul Demarty investigates
A hundred years is enough
19 Sep 2024
Three books, all published in 1924, laid the ideological groundwork for a Lenin cult, which is still responsible for the confessional sects and academic historians alike getting the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution so wrong. Lars T Lih shows that there was no Hegel moment, no April theses break, no conversion to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks consistently upheld revolutionary social democracy
Matters past and present
12 Sep 2024
Historical and theoretical issues are important, but they should not be turned into obstacles. Steve Bloom critically defends Fourth International orthodoxy and, despite that, calls for revolutionary unity in the concluding part of his response to Mike Macnair
Historical and methodological differences
29 Aug 2024
Because revolutions have failed, that does not mean they were bound to fail. Steve Bloom continues his exploration of revolutionary strategy and history