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What's the Spartacist League up to these days?

hitmouse said:
As someone who knows more about this stuff than can possibly be healthy, I always find it reassuring to learn that there are other people who have more knowledge of it than I've ever acquired. Although I suppose I've learned that particular fact now, will have to try to forget as quickly as possible.
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Things like this seemed important to me 30 or 40 years ago, but now I find them amusing.
 
hitmouse said:
As someone who knows more about this stuff than can possibly be healthy, I always find it reassuring to learn that there are other people who have more knowledge of it than I've ever acquired. Although I suppose I've learned that particular fact now, will have to try to forget as quickly as possible.
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I worked with the IBT in a support group for Mumia Abu-Jamal so I read up on their politics then. Never bought any of their stuff though as that would only encourage them. In person they came across as normal people (and would even go to the pub after meetings) but their politics are completely bonkers. After I heard of the split I had to read what it was about and it turns out the people I worked with were in different camps, so all the while I knew them there was this huge and vitally important political dispute between them. I never heard a peep though, democratic centralism innit.
 
nastyned said:
I worked with the IBT in a support group for Mumia Abu-Jamal so I read up on their politics then. Never bought any of their stuff though as that would only encourage them. In person they came across as normal people (and would even go to the pub after meetings) but their politics are completely bonkers. After I heard of the split I had to read what it was about and it turns out the people I worked with were in different camps, so all the while I knew them there was this huge and vitally important political dispute between them. I never heard a peep though, democratic centralism innit.
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I used to know some IBTers quite a number of years ago. I wonder who went which way
 
petee said:
i've been wracking my memory here - it was an annual, wasn't it?
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I don't think it was intended to be annual. I think it was supposed to be quarterly. Anyway, I bought another one some months after I had bought it (I knew the IBT people and would seem them on demos) and assumed that it would be a new issue, and when I got home, I realised that it was not.
 
The Sparts predecessor the American Socialist Workers Party patiently explain

“As workers begin to use unions to fight for our interests, more will see the need to defend Israel’s right to exist as a question the working class needs to support,” Clifford said. Levy got a Militant."

"Over two dozen copies and two subscriptions to the paper along with three copies of The Jewish Question by Abram Leon and a copy of On the Jewish Question by Leon Trotsky were sold by Communist League campaigners attending the action."


Thousands in Manchester march against Jew-hatred – The Militant

themilitant.com themilitant.com
 
The39thStep said:
The Sparts predecessor the American Socialist Workers Party patiently explain

“As workers begin to use unions to fight for our interests, more will see the need to defend Israel’s right to exist as a question the working class needs to support,” Clifford said. Levy got a Militant."

"Over two dozen copies and two subscriptions to the paper along with three copies of The Jewish Question by Abram Leon and a copy of On the Jewish Question by Leon Trotsky were sold by Communist League campaigners attending the action."


Thousands in Manchester march against Jew-hatred – The Militant

themilitant.com themilitant.com
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Thanks!
 
It's not often I find myself thinking "I am glad I'm not in the RMT", but that article does make me feel like if I was in Manchester RMT, I would have a whole different set of problems on top of the ones I have now.
 
Magnus McGinty said:
It isn’t a national position that I’m aware of.
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That's why I specified Manchester! Sure the vast majority of RMT reps want a ceasefire as much as anyone else, am just thinking how draining it must be having to deal with the one (or possibly a few, if they're doing industrial concentration) headbangers in the meeting trying to sabotage that.
 
The39thStep said:
The Sparts predecessor the American Socialist Workers Party patiently explain

“As workers begin to use unions to fight for our interests, more will see the need to defend Israel’s right to exist as a question the working class needs to support,” Clifford said. Levy got a Militant."

"Over two dozen copies and two subscriptions to the paper along with three copies of The Jewish Question by Abram Leon and a copy of On the Jewish Question by Leon Trotsky were sold by Communist League campaigners attending the action."


Thousands in Manchester march against Jew-hatred – The Militant

themilitant.com themilitant.com
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Hizb-ut-tahrir are bad bastards though, I remember that from the 1990s.
 
Also, it was only 39th mentioning that the Sparts came out of the US SWP that led to me looking up and realising that, at one point, James Robertson, Lyndon LaRouche, and the people who would then go on to found the SEP/WSWS were all in one faction of the SWP together. Those must've been some memorable meetings.
 
petee said:
still ..
en.m.wikipedia.org

Hizb ut-Tahrir - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org

"Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT; Arabic: حزب التحرير, romanized: Ḥizb at-Taḥrīr, lit. 'Party of Liberation') is an international pan-Islamist and Islamic fundamentalist political organization whose stated aim is the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate to unite the Muslim community (called ummah)[3] and implement sharia globally."
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Yes, I know. This of course I do not agree with, but I think that they have the right to express this view.
 
hitmouse said:
Also, it was only 39th mentioning that the Sparts came out of the US SWP that led to me looking up and realising that, at one point, James Robertson, Lyndon LaRouche, and the people who would then go on to found the SEP/WSWS were all in one faction of the SWP together. Those must've been some memorable meetings.
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Having been a member of the Spartacist League/Britain about forty years ago, I have heard of Tim Wohlforth. I did not know much about him, and I have just looked him up on Wikipedia, and found him to be quite an interesting person. (Something has gone wrong with the formatting of my text, and I could not rid this of the bold double-spacing).​

 
PTK said:

Having been a member of the Spartacist League/Britain about forty years ago, I have heard of Tim Wohlforth. I did not know much about him, and I have just looked him up on Wikipedia, and found him to be quite an interesting person. (Something has gone wrong with the formatting of my text, and I could not rid this of the bold double-spacing).​

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Wohlforth was long gone by the time the Workers League founded the Socialist Equality Party, and he has denounced the WL as a cult.
 
Yeah, I think the pro-hospital-bombing loons are probably basically right on that particular point, much like the rest of the far-right, Islamism is a political problem that has to be defeated politically, state bans do more to hide the problem than they do to solve it, any increase in state powers are likely to be used in nasty ways, etc etc.
PTK said:

Having been a member of the Spartacist League/Britain about forty years ago, I have heard of Tim Wohlforth. I did not know much about him, and I have just looked him up on Wikipedia, and found him to be quite an interesting person. (Something has gone wrong with the formatting of my text, and I could not rid this of the bold double-spacing).​

Click to expand...
Yeah, I'd not heard of him before, but he does sound quite interesting. I wonder if his detective novels are any good? (Also if you click on the little [ ] at the top right of your post, you should get an option that shows all the coding, which is good for getting rid of unwanted formatting.)
 
Thought Wohlforth's memoirs were interesting, especially his account of dealing with Gerry Healy, but they didn't really answer the essential 'why the fuck?' question. (At least not in a way I could understand). Some of the case studies in the book on political cults he co-authored are also interesting IMO.
 
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