Tag: news

Your Party: The Return of the Left by Oliver Eagleton, editor, £8.99 Verso Paperback 2025

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

This book from the Pabloite Verso publications has been rushed out to justify the need for a new reformist type party under conditions of a global crisis of capitalism, a fascist in the White House and the temporary replacement of the Labour Party as the favourite Party of the British bourgeoisie. While the need for a new party is palpable, this is not the one the working class needs.

The book consists of a collection of interviews edited by Oliver Eagleton, of Zarah Sultana MP, Leanne Mohamad, Stop the War co-founder Andrew Murray, Our Bloc author James Schneider, Andrew Feinstein, and former Corbyn speechwriter Alex Nunns.

Oliver Eagleton is an associate editor at the New Left Review (NLR), a Pseudo-Left publication that promotes a middle-class, reformist, and ultimately pro-capitalist perspective. Like all the people interviewed in the book, Eagleton, through his writing, seeks to channel left-wing sentiment into reformist, dead-end political projects like “Your Party” and the Labour Party establishment.

According to the World Socialist Website (WSWS), Eagleton promotes the illusion that genuine social change can be achieved through the parliamentary system and within the framework of the capitalist state, rather than through an independent, international socialist movement of the working class. He is a specialist in obfuscating class Issues by promoting “left-populism” to obscure fundamental class divisions and the necessity of a precise class analysis of society.

Eagleton’s first interview is with Corbyn’s second-in-command, Zarah Sultana. She is a Pseudo-Left “figurehead. Her “socialist” or “anti-fascist” rhetoric is merely a cover for a reformist agenda that ultimately serves capitalist interests. The feud that broke out between her and Corbyn was more about factionalism and a lack of Principles on both sides. It was also over who controls the not inconsiderable £800,000 membership fund, which is still growing.

Like other pseudo-Lefts, she presents her “rotten and spineless Labour ‘left’ colleagues as part of a fighting socialist alternative to Starmer”. Despite her use of rhetoric such as  “class war”, her focus remains within the limits of parliamentary politics and nationalistic frameworks.

Leanne Mohamad has no differences whatsoever with Corbyn or Sultana and has spoken on Pseudo-Left Platforms. She spoke at Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project conference. Like other interviewees, she seeks to subordinate genuine working-class anger into reformist and nationalistic channels. The  WSWS has noted reports of a “bitter rift” within her campaign team, specifically with the Redbridge Community Action Group (RCAG), as evidence of the unprincipled and factional character it attributes to this political current.

Perhaps Corbyn’s most useful ally in this coalition of frauds is Andrew Murray. Murray has used his influence as a leader in the Communist Party of Britain, the Stop the War Coalition (STWC), and the Unite trade union to keep the working class tied to the Labour Party. Murray is a Stalinist and has a long history in the Communist Party of Britain. He has been a long-standing adviser in the Corbyn leadership.

James Schneider, a key figure of the British “left”, co-founder of the grassroots movement Momentum, and former Director of Strategic Communications for Jeremy Corbyn.  Schneider was a founder member of “Your Party. His Momentum movement was instrumental in facilitating Labour’s purge of left-wing members under Corbyn and in helping contain it within the confines of the Labour Party bureaucracy.

Andrew Feinstein’s politics are based on an appeal for a “more moral government” and “human values,” which explicitly rejects a class analysis of society and obscures the fundamental class antagonisms inherent in a capitalist system.

Lastly, Alex Nunns is an author and apologist for Corbynism: Nunns is the author of The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power and the forthcoming Sabotage: The Inside Hit Job That Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn. These books are part of a veritable “cottage industry” of “pseudo-left” post-mortems that fail to provide a genuine class analysis of the movement’s failure,

Eagleton’s fellow pseudo-left organisations and every political scoundrel under the sun have welcomed Your Party. Probably the biggest of these political scoundrels is Tariq Ali. Ali has been intimately involved in the development of “Your Party” and has now joined it, marking the first time he has been a member of a political organisation since 1981. Ali will feel at home in this anti-working-class party. At 81, he still feels he has one more revolutionary movement to betray. He is also still a darling of the pseudo-left media. Recently, he was asked What do you think are the prospects for the left today?

He wrote, “Starmer is dreadful. I’m in no doubt that his policies will create a space that, at the moment, the far right will try to fill. We need to respond. But we can’t simply do what we did in the past the same way. In the 1970s, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were vital, but the world has changed, the situation is different, and we need appropriate responses. It won’t be easy, but you know it wasn’t always easy in the 1960s and 1970s. It took time to build the anti-Vietnam War movement. We were constantly under surveillance and harassment from the state.

Over the last few decades, we have witnessed the growth of dynamic movements such as Stop the War. Today, the struggle around Palestine has brought large numbers into action. The horrors of Gaza, the complicity of the Western governments in the slaughter, and the scale of the resistance movement on the streets will shape a generation. But we need to think about organisational outcomes, establishing networks and rebuilding a progressive political alternative. For the left, the Labour Party is finished. We should encourage the small number of Labour MPS (especially those who had the whip removed) to work with the Independent MPS to offer an alternative vision and voice for the future. We need some home, not necessarily a formal political party, for the 200,000 who left Labour when Corbyn was marginalised and kicked out; a home to those from the Palestine and anti-imperialist movements; a home for the old and new left. I think we face a long rebuilding period; there is no quick fix. But if we sit back and do nothing, things will only get worse.”[1]

Ali, like other pseudo-lefts, has argued that the new Your Party should be like other left-wing populist movements across Europe, such as Podemos, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise and Syriza (Greece). However, all these organisations have, in one form or another, betrayed the working class. Syriza (Greece), a coalition of the Radical Left, came to power and subsequently implemented austerity measures. Podemos (Spain) was a political trap for the working class, built by professional pseudo-left activists and academics. La France Insoumise (France): a movement led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon explicitly rejects a class analysis of society, instead relying on populist theories that pit “the working class against the French ruling elite. It obscures fundamental class antagonisms, thereby serving capitalist interests. Despite anti-establishment rhetoric, the LFI ultimately defends the French capitalist state, including its police forces and military. Mélenchon has called for increased military spending and supported French imperialist wars. Die Linke (The Left Party) (Germany) is essentially a capitalist party that functions as a loyal opposition and ultimately supports the German state’s foreign policy.

One person missing from the book is Jeremy Corbyn. But his politics dominate Your Party. Corbyn and his acolytes are not leading a genuine socialist struggle but are preparing a political trap for the working class. Corbyn’s goal all along has been to subordinate the struggles of the working class to the Labour Party and the existing political establishment. He has always been pro-capitalist and nationalist. His closeness to the Stalinist British Communist Party and his agreement with its anti-working-class British Road to Socialism in his early political career have kept him in good standing.

His new party will act as a safety valve for working-class anger and work to prevent a genuine break from the pro-capitalist Labour Party. It is seen as a “Labour Party Mark II” that advocates only limited reforms to be pursued through parliament. The recent feud between Corbyn and his number two, Zarah Sultana, is evidence of its unprincipled, opportunistic nature.

Corbyn’s platform, which includes campaigning on issues like “peace” and “social justice” but avoids explicit class analysis, is dismissed by the WSWS as “studied vagueness” designed to obscure fundamental class divisions. The WSWS also criticises Corbyn’s reliance on and work with the trade union bureaucracy, which it characterises as having spent the last 40 years “shifting power and wealth away from the working class to the corporations and the state”.

Your Party is not the party the working class needs. Workers and young people should reject Corbyn’s new party. They should look for a genuine socialist alternative on the World Socialist Website.

Notes

Corbyn’s New Left Party: What It Is And What It Isn’t £3.00-mehringbooks.co.uk/product/corbyns-new-left-party-what-it-is-and-what-it-isnt/

[1] www.counterfire.org/article/tariq-ali-memories-of-the-struggle-reloaded/

Black Arsenal, co-edited by Clive Chijioke Nwonka and Matthew Harle, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 29 August 2024 (£35).

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“When it comes to thinking about politics and race, we cannot always rely on culture as a way to remedy deeper structural questions. Having particular players or particular footballing cultural moments as a point of identification is immense. However, it cannot be a deliberate or a forced thing.”

Clive Chijioke Nwonka

“The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas. In order to create the religion of pure German blood, Hitler was obliged to borrow at second hand the ideas of racism from a Frenchman, Count Gobineau [4], a diplomat and a literary dilettante. Hitler found the political methodology ready-made in Italy, where Mussolini had borrowed largely from the Marxist theory of the class struggle. Marxism itself is the fruit of the union among German philosophy, French history, and British economics. To investigate retrospectively the genealogy of ideas, even those most reactionary and muddleheaded, is to leave not a trace of racism standing.”

Leon Trotsky: What Is National Socialism? (June 1933)

Black Arsenal was published to coincide with the start of the 2024/25 season. It is co-edited by Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Associate Professor of Film, Culture, and Society at University College London (UCL), and writer Matthew Harle. It is the first of its kind. The book was remarkably 10 years in the making, with a stunning amount of research undertaken.

Asked about the origins of the book, Nwonka said, “Well, it was me thinking a lot about my own background as a person and things that had inspired me. I had started working at the London School of Economics, and I was thinking about the role of race in culture and the ways of thinking associated with it. I was being introspective with myself and realising that John Barnes was important to me in terms of being my first source of inspiration and recognition.

Then that led to the inspiration for Black Arsenal. I was at university, trying to make sense of what this concept meant and what other factors might be involved. The chapter ‘Defining Black Arsenal’ is all about the genesis of that idea. Then you start looking at history and why Black people in London gravitate mostly towards Arsenal.

Whether you are from south London or wherever, and then you realise there is a history that goes beyond Ian Wright, back to the 60s and 70s, to Brendon Batson, Paul Davis. It goes back to what Islington was in the 70s. It goes back to the JVC centre and the community work the club were doing in the 80s. All these factors were already in place before Ian Wright arrived in 1991.”[1]

The book examines the black history of Arsenal football club from a broadly academic standpoint. It also features contributions from former players such as Ian Wright and Paul Davis, as well as contributions from Paul Gilroy, Gail Lewis, and personal responses from Clive Palmer, Ezra Collective, and writer Amy Lawrence.[2].

The timing of the book could not be more prescient. Since its publication in 2024, there has been a significant and distinct growth in racist and fascist forces. Recently, as Chris Marsden writes, “Unite the Kingdom demonstration in August this year was the largest far-right mobilisation in British history. Estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000, participation in London exceeded the numbers usually mobilised by anti-Muslim demagogue Tommy Robinson and extended beyond his usual support base of football hooligans and fascist thugs. This core periphery was boosted by the presence of workers and their families, including from among the most deprived layers, who have swallowed the far-right’s message blaming social distress and the collapse of essential services on migration.[3]

It should be noted from the start that Arsenal have not always had a spotless anti-racism stance. Like most businesses, it has made its fair share of mistakes regarding its stance on racism. During the refurbishment of the old Highbury North Bank in 1992, Nwonka recalls, “I remember as a kid, the first week of the Premier League season, there were all these half-rebuilt stadiums because of the Taylor report [into ground safety after the Hillsborough disaster]. Of course, no one wants to watch a building site on Sky Sports – so the idea came up that you cover it up with these illustrations of your imagined fanbase.” The original North Bank mural was an artist’s impression of a sea of white faces, with red and white scarves, which had to be replaced with a more inclusive mural.

The contributions from Paul Davis and Ian Wright are important, as they were key figures in the development of a more integrated Arsenal team. Davis paved the way for Ian Wright and later generations of players. Ian Wright was a game-changing signing from Crystal Palace. Always the rebel, he appealed to both black and white younger working-class fans. He, in turn, set the stage for Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry, and Bukayo Saka.

Despite being seen as a bit of a rebel, Wright and Arsenal, for that matter, have not been shy in exploiting the commercial possibilities of such a global and multi-racial fan base. Nike and now Adidas have moved quickly in exploiting Arsenal’s multicultural teams for profit; Nwonka thinks there is a danger of such exploitation.

“With things like the Arsenal Africa shirt or the Jamaica shirt,” he says, “they have been quite open about the fact that they recognise that there was a consumer base that will find the resonance in something that pays homage to Afro-Caribbean culture. However, I have been attending the Notting Hill Carnival since I was four years old. Moreover, you would always see Arsenal shirts there all the time, rather than those of QPR, Brentford, Fulham, or Chelsea. However, what some brands often do is invest in what they imagine to be Black culture, whereas Black Arsenal, I believe, begins with Black people.”

Football has been a global game since its inception, played worldwide. However, with the advent of satellite television from companies such as Sky, the game has reached a far greater level of global integration.

As David Storey relates, “ Football has always had essential linkages connecting places. Some clubs were formed by, or as a result of, British migrants, and in some instances, this is still reflected in contemporary football. Football has always had essential linkages connecting places. Some clubs were formed by, or as a result of, British migrants, and in some instances, this is still reflected in contemporary club names or colours. Athletic Bilbao’s origins and English name are attributed to English migrant workers in the Basque Country (Ball, 2003). A similar explanation accounts for Young Boys in Switzerland, Go Ahead Eagles in the Netherlands, and The Strongest in Bolivia, among others (Goldblatt, 2007). The shirt colours worn by Juventus were reputedly borrowed from Notts County (the world’s oldest professional club) shortly after the Italian club’s formation (Lanfranchi club names or colours.

Despite this early evidence of international linkages, English football remained somewhat insular for many years (2001). Despite this early evidence of international linkages, English football remained somewhat insular for many years, with restrictions on the importation of foreign players. While the migration of professional footballers is a long-standing phenomenon, and relatively pronounced in countries such as Spain, France, and Italy, the migration of players into or out of Britain was much less apparent (Taylor, 2006). However, recent years have seen substantial numbers of footballers from other parts of the world arriving in the Premier League (and into the lower tiers in the English league system). This internationalisation has occurred alongside the increasing commercialisation of the game.”[4]

While I wholeheartedly recommend this book, it should be of interest not only to Arsenal fans but also to the broader reading public. The historical study of black footballers who played for Arsenal is a legitimate pursuit. However, much of the content of the book is dominated not by a class attitude towards racism, but by too many contributions, including Nwano’s, that see the rise of racism through racially tinted glasses.

Nwonka addressed this, saying, “Of course, I have got a small quantity of criticism from some quarters. One person, when I first posted about the Black Arsenal idea, wrote to me to say: ‘I have been going to Arsenal since the 1970s. I do not see race; I watch football.’ I thought to myself: ‘Well, I am not going to sit here and tell someone whether they should or should not see. However, have you stopped and thought that maybe the reason that you do not see race when you go to Arsenal is that Arsenal has normalised racial difference in a way that some other clubs have not? Moreover, that may be an important thing to recognise?”Nwonka’s original idea for the book was for it to be dominated by appropriate references to French poststructuralists and the postmodernist and pseudo-revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who was and is a darling of the Pseudo-Left groups. Fanon and Poststructuralists were among other pioneers of the anti-Marxist Critical race theories, which is a “body of academic writing that emerged in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which combines postmodernism and subjective idealist philosophy with historical revisionism and racial sectarianism. Although written in a different form, the book remains dominated by these anti-working-class theories that prioritise race over class

[1] www.arsenal.com/news/dr-clive-nwonka-talks-new-black-arsenal-book

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Athletic

[3] Britain’s largest far-right protest capitalises on Starmer’s xenophobic, anti-working-class agenda

[4] Football, place and migration: foreign footballers in the FA Premier League

 David Storey- Geography, Summer 2011, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 86-94

 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd

A Rebel’s Guide to Malcolm X by Antony Hamilton, Paperback – 29 Sept. 2016, Bookmarks Publication

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“The notion was expressed that the British government would not, out of its free will, ‘donate’ self-rule to a colony and that the application of some element of force might be necessary.”

FR Kankam-Boadu

“If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom.”

WEB Du Bois

“Every Negro who lays claim to leadership should make a study of Bolshevism and explain its meaning to the coloured masses. It is the greatest and most scientific idea afloat in the world today that can be easily put into practice by the proletariat to better its material and spiritual life. Bolshevism…has made Russia safe for the Jew. It has liberated the Slav peasant from the priest and bureaucrat who can no longer egg him on to murder Jews to bolster up their rotten institutions. It might make these United States safe for the Negro…if the Russian idea should take hold of the white masses of the Western world, and they should rise in united strength and overthrow their imperial capitalist government, then the black toilers would automatically be free!”

Claude McKay (1890-1948)

Trotsky asked me some straight and sharp questions about American Negroes, their group organisations, their political position, their schooling, their religion, their grievances and social aspirations and, finally, what kind of sentiment existed between American and African Negroes. I replied with the best knowledge and information at my command. Then Trotsky expressed his own opinion about Negroes, which was more intelligent than that of any of the other Russian leaders…he was not quick to make deductions about the causes of white prejudice against black. Indeed, he made no conclusions at all, and, happily, expressed no mawkish sentimentality about black and white brotherhood. What he said was very practical…he urged that Negroes should be educated about the labour movement…he said he would like to set a practical example in his own department and proposed the training of a group of Negroes as officers in the Red Army.

Claude McKay (1890-1948)

A Rebel’s Guide to Malcolm X is further confirmation, if it was already needed, of the British Socialist Worker’s Party’s promotion of racialist identity politics. This small book largely whitewashes, if you pardon the pun, Malcom X’s pursuit of black nationalist politics and support for racial segregation.

Hamilton’s book and the party he belongs to have historically adapted to the reformist middle-class leadership of the international civil rights movement. The SWP presents black nationalism, along with other forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism such as Castroism in Cuba, as complementary to the fight for socialism.

This small book begins by granting political amnesty to Garveyism.[1] The SWP in all their articles on Garvey contain mild criticisms of him, but on the whole, they gave him a free pass, saying, “In the end, he is remembered for giving a sense of pride to black people in the face of the hideous racism of the 1920s. That is worth recalling, and his faults should be seen in that context.”[2]

But as the Trotskyist Lawrence Porter points out “Despite his radical aura, Garvey rejected socialism. Indeed, he steadfastly opposed the struggle for equality even among blacks. As time progressed, the left rhetoric receded and the right-wing essence of Garvey’s politics came to the fore. By the 1920s, he found himself in cooperation with Jim Crow politicians and the Ku Klux Klan, who agreed with black nationalism’s policy of racial separatism. By the end of his life, Garvey boasted he was a fascist.”[3]

The other organisation given a free pass by Hamilton and the SWP is the American Communist Party. Malcolm X was never a member of the Communist Party or even close to it. So it is a little confusing that while he was in prison, his correspondence was opened and intercepted by the FBI. In this letter, Malcom X clearly states he is a Communist.

Under the heading of “Communist Party Activities”, the heavily redacted FBI transcription of letters from Malcolm X while in prison noted:

“Several excerpts from letters written by the subject. [redaction’] these excerpts were not quotes but rather notes jotted down [redaction] on the contents of these letters. On June 29, 1950, the Subject mailed a letter from which [redacted] copied the following: ‘Tell [redaction] to get in shape. It looks like another war. I have always been a Communist. I have tried to enlist in the Japanese Army during the last war, but now they will never draft or accept me in the U.S. Army. Everyone has always said [redaction] Malcolm is crazy, so it isn’t hard to convince people that I am.”[4]

The free pass given to the Stalinists in the American Communist Party reflects their attitude towards the American Trotskyist movement and Leon Trotsky. Neither is mentioned in the book. For an organisation that purports to be Trotskyist, the SWP and Hamilton do not discuss the attitude of Leon Trotsky and the American Trotskyist Party towards Black Nationalism at any point. There is not enough room in this short review to include Trotsky’s discussion with the American comrades on black nationalism, which should be considered in any discussion of Malcolm X.

Trotsky wrote:

“The point of view of the American comrades appears to me not fully convincing. ‘Self-determination’ is a democratic demand. Our American comrades advance as against this democratic demand, the liberal demand. This liberal demand is, moreover, complicated. I understand what ‘political equality’ means. But what is the meaning of economic and social equality within a capitalist society? Does that mean a demand to public opinion that all enjoy equal protection under the law? But that is political equality. The slogan ‘political, economic and social equality’ sounds equivocal, and while it is not clear to me, it nevertheless suggests itself easily to misinterpretation.

The Negroes are a race and not a nation:—Nations grow out of the racial material under definite conditions. The Negroes in Africa are not yet a nation but they are in the process of building a nation. The American Negroes are on a higher cultural level. But while they are there under the pressure of the Americans they become interested in the development of the Negroes in Africa. The American Negro will develop leaders for Africa, that one can say with certainty and that in turn will influence the development of political consciousness in America.

We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation; if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for. We say: If the Negroes want that then we must fight against imperialism to the last drop of blood, so that they gain the right, wherever and how they please, to separate a piece of land for themselves. The fact that they are not a majority in any state today is irrelevant. It is not a question of the authority of the states but of the Negroes. That in the overwhelming Negro territory also whites have existed. They will remain henceforth is not the question and we do not need today to break our heads over a possibility that sometime the whites will be suppressed by the Negroes. In any case the suppression of the Negroes pushes them toward a political and national unity.

That the slogan ‘self-determination’ will rather win the petty bourgeois instead of the workers—that argument holds good also for the slogan of equality. It is clear that the special Negro elements who appear more frequently in the public eye (businessmen, intellectuals, lawyers, etc.) are more active and react more strongly against inequality. It is possible to say that the liberal demand, just as well as the democratic one, in the first instance will attract the petty bourgeois and only later the workers.”[5]

In a lecture delivered at the Socialist Equality Party (US) summer school, held August 1 through August 6, 2021, Niles Niemuth, a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, made the following point. “Trotsky was seeking in brief discussions with American members in Turkey in 1933 and Mexico in 1939 to correct the American Trotskyists’ neglect of the “Negro question,” orient the party to a critical section of the American working class and facilitate the recruitment of worker members under conditions where the twists and turns of the Communist Party had alienated many black intellectuals and workers who had been drawn to Marxism over the previous two decades.” I don’t know if even the Trotskyists in the American section of the Fourth International would have been able to change Malcolm X’s subsequent political trajectory. Still, the ensuing political discussion with Malcolm X would have educated a much larger audience and clarified the question of Black nationalism.[6]

Section four of the book elaborates on Malcolm X’s time in prison and his life in the Nation of Islam. While in prison, Malcolm X read John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Orlando Reade[7] In an interview with the SWP, Reade said :

“Malcolm X read Paradise Lost in the late 1940s when he was a young man serving a long sentence for burglary. He had this desire to read, combined with a deep suspicion of white writers. Malcolm X was trying to bend the literature to make it serve his new radical viewpoint. When he came to Paradise Lost, Malcolm also perceived something true. Milton compared Satan on his way to Eden to European ships on their way to satisfy their appetite for sugar, spice and tobacco. Malcolm saw how Milton associated Satan with European kings and their armies, as well as the colonisers. Malcolm found something profoundly radical in Milton’s critique of worldly power. He found in Paradise Lost a critique of white supremacy.”[8]

In the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine, an article on the women in Malcom X’s life shows they were instrumental in his turn towards the politics of the Nation of Islam. [9]The NOI was not a threat to capitalism in the United States, nor was Malcolm X, as long as he was in it. But as David Walsh points out, it was only after breaking with the organisation that his life became endangered. Walsh writes :

“The assassinations of Malcolm X and, some three years later, of Martin Luther King Jr., could not have been accidental in their purpose or their timing. When Malcolm represented the Nation of Islam, his life was not threatened. Still, when he broke from Elijah Muhammad’s anti-white separatism and suggested, even in a limited way, that race was not the fundamental dividing line in the fight against injustice, he became a marked man. His newly formed Organisation of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) was undoubtedly quickly infiltrated by agents and provocateurs. At the same time, full advantage was taken of the threats made against him by the Nation of Islam. All the cops had to do was sabotage Malcolm X’s security and look the other way.”[10]

As I mentioned at the beginning, the SWP adapted to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. With the advent of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, it continues to maintain its stance in support of Black nationalism. How else would you understand the SWP’s Ruby Hirsch’s fawning article over the recent Super Bowl performance of Beyonce’s “ in which her dancers dressed in the black berets and raised gloved fists of the Black Panthers and stood in an “X” formation, was broadcast to more than 100 million Americans. It was a powerful tribute to Malcolm X and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The reality of the Black Lives Matter Movement is somewhat different from the one described by the British SWP. As Lawrence Porter and Nancy Hanover write, “From the beginning, the ‘mothers of the movement’ Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi—who collectively adopted the famous hashtag—specifically opposed uniting blacks, whites and immigrants against the brutal class-war policies of the capitalist state. Instead, the group did its best to confine anti-police violence protests within the framework of the capitalist system and push a racialist and pro-capitalist agenda.”[11]

Malcolm X was a complex man. Who knows if he had not been assassinated, whether he would have moved further to the left and rejected his brand of black nationalism and taken up a struggle against black and white capitalism. To be blunt, Hamilton’s book is a whitewash of Malcom X’s history and politics and does nothing to clarify today’s issue of black nationalism or racism.

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey

[2] Marcus Garvey: a liberating legacy of challenging racism-socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/marcus-garvey-a-liberating-legacy-of-challenging-racism/

[3] Marcus Garvey and the reactionary logic of racialist politics-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/02/qhdd-m02.html

[4] www.blackagendareport.com/malcolm-x-black-nationalism-and-cold-war

[5] On Black Nationalism-Documents on the Negro Struggle http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm

[6] Race, class and social conflict in the United States. wsws.org

[7] What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost, 2024, Jonathan Cape.

[8] Paradise Lost inspired generations of radicals-socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/paradise-lost-inspired-generations-of-radicals/

[9] www.historyextra.com/magazine/current-issue-bbc-history-magazine/

[10] Two men convicted in 1965 Malcolm X assassination exonerated in New York court-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/19/malc-n19.html

[11]  Black Lives Matter cashes in on black capitalism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/04/blm-a04.html 

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-William is published on 13 Mar. 2025 by Macmillan (£22).

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.”

Sarah Wynn-Williams

“move fast and break things”

Mark Zuckerberg

I must insist upon the masses, and their integrity as a whole. I have great faith in the masses. The noble character of mechanics and farmers—their curiosity, good temper, and open-handedness—the whole composite make. Significant alike in their apathy, and the promptness of their love—I know they are sublime. Before we despair we have to count them in—after we count them in we won’t despair.

Walt Whitman- Democracy

“ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”

WSWS Editorial Board Statement

To a certain extent, you can see why Meta, formerly Facebook would want to ban this book and gag the author from publicizing it. Both actions by Meta failed and backfired spectacularly as the book has sold in the millions.

Careless People is an interesting if limited expose of Facebook. An organization that has been called pretty accurately a ‘diabolical cult’. Wynn-William spent seven years at Facebook and her 400-page book is a pretty damning indictment. The first thing that strikes one about the leading players on Facebook is the stunning level of hypocrisy and duplicity. Williams cites Facebook’s number two Sheryl Kara Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

Sandberg casts herself as a feminist icon however the reality is a little different. Her advice to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – meaning that the mother should work herself to death just before the baby is born. As one reviewer said, “It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.” Wynn-Williams, among others, was also bizarrely invited by Sandberg to sleep in her bed presumably to have sexual relations.

Having said that before Sandberg treated her like a piece of crap Wynn-Williams exhibited a large degree of political naivety and outright fawning over Sandberg and Facebook in general writing “Until this moment, it had never occurred to me to see Sheryl as a celebrity or be awestruck by her… But now I can see how she’s sprinkling some of her stardust, whatever that magical quality is that she has that makes you forget to focus on the substance of the meeting at hand and instead wonder what it is she’s doing differently that makes her better than you.”[1]

The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness.” As a useful analogy for the “Careless People” at Facebook, it only takes one so far. While Zuckerberg and his cohorts were indeed amoral, stupid, reckless and devoid of any principles they were representatives of an oligarch that has now captured the White House in America and is launching attack after attack on the working class. Significant protests against Trump’s attacks on immigrants and escalating deportation operations have erupted across the United States. Student leader Momodou Taal has been targeted by the Trump administration who have tried to have him deported for speaking out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

As Robert Reich correctly states “Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry. All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are. They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer. They are destroying democracy so they won’t have to worry about “parasites” (as Musk calls people who depend on government assistance) demanding anything more from them. When billionaires take control of our communication channels, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for their billionaire babble”.[2]

Or to put it more precisely as a statement by WSWS Editorial Board does “ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”.[3]

This type of wealth is becoming increasingly incompatible with Walt Whitman’s beloved idea of Democracy. But this political and economic situation largely passes Wynn-Williams by. She is completely indifferent to the assault by Oligarch Zuckerberg’s Facebook on the Socialist movement. The orthodox Marxists of the WSWS.Org have faced the brunt of Facebook’s wrath and censorship. What is not mentioned in Wynn Williams’s book is that Facebook was and still is engaged in an escalating campaign of internet censorship targeting the socialist left. Entire Facebook pages were taken down, and individual accounts were permanently disabled, without any explanation given or recourse allowed.

Facebook began its systematic censorship of the WSWS.Org after the January 6th 2021 attempted coup by Trump and his supporters. As Kevin Reed points out “It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy”[4]

Wynn Williams’s book is a well-written but somewhat limited insight into the lives of Facebook Oligarchs. For a far more precise and revolutionary insight into the rise of the oligarchs one should purchase a copy of the newly released book from Mehring books.com entitled The Election of Donald Trump: The insurrection of the oligarchy.

[1] Careless People by Sarah Wynn-William

[2] Three billionaires: America’s oligarchy is now fully exposed-Guardian Online 

[3] Socialism against oligarchy, fascism and war- wsws.org 

[4] Facebook’s “depoliticization” aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/10/poli-f10.html

The Other Side: Stories of Central American Teen Refugees Who Dream of Crossing the Border Written by Juan Pablo Villalobos translation by Rosalind Harvey, Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

This is an important compilation of stories from unaccompanied Central American teenage refugees who risk death to cross the U.S.–Mexico border. Recounted in short vignettes readers learn about the harrowing journey and treatment meted out to young children seeking a better life for themselves and their family. Juan Pablo Villalobos’s introduction indicates that all these stories are true except when he wrote their story to protect some minors’ identities.

The book is aimed at a 12+ audience. It contains significant allusions to violence, including murder and sexual assault. Which unfortunately adds to the compelling nature of the stories. The book is presented in such a way that it works on many levels.

Most of the children are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Such is the massive scale of the problem that in 2016 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees published a major report called Children on the Run: In one interview with 15-year-old Maritza, from El Salvador, she explained to researchers that “I’m here because I was threatened by the gang. One of them “liked” me. Another gang member told my uncle that he should get me out of there because the guy who liked me was going to do me harm. In El Salvador, they take young girls, rape them and throw them in plastic bags. My uncle told me it wasn’t safe for me to stay there, and that I should go to the U.S.”[1]

Juan Pablo Villalobos called this collection nonfiction because the stories were collected via first-person interviews. The book is based on a series of interviews Villalobos held did in 2016; The Other Side examines Central American migration through the stories of 10 children who made the murderous trip to the U.S. on their own.

Villalobos adds , my literary ambition, if I can admit to that, was to write a book that is about Central American immigration and the migration of unaccompanied minors, but these stories are happening all over the world — in Syria, in the north of Africa, in Europe — and it was my hope that the book should resonate beyond the specific moment and the American and Central American contexts.”

With the Fascist Trump in the White House, the situation will only get worse. Figures released recently by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that the United States has detained record numbers of unaccompanied minors attempting to cross its southwestern border. In the last few days, various US media have reported, that the Trump White House is imminently planning to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as part of his administration’s ongoing criminal deportation operations.

[1] Children on the Run-www.unhcr.org/us/media/children-run-full-report

Comment On The CWU’s “framework agreement” backs Kretinsky’s Royal Mail takeover Tony Robson, Laura Tiernan December 20 2024

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

 I want to comment on the recent article on the World Socialist website entitled The CWU’s “framework agreement” backs Kretinsky’s Royal Mail takeover. The article is concise and spot-on. It is a culmination of months of analysis provided by WSWS.org on the current betrayal by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).

The CWU has become an open mouthpiece of Royal Mail and Kretinsky himself. Since the betrayal of the last postal strike, the union has worked around the clock to pave the way for the takeover of Royal Mail by Kretinsky.

As the recent article by Hyland and Tiernan states:

“The CWU’s deal with Kretinsky, “Rebuilding Royal Mail: A Framework Agreement between EP Group and CWU”, was unanimously endorsed by the CWU Postal Executive Tuesday. It sets out the union’s corporatist partnership with EP Group’s investors and gives union officials a seat at the boardroom table.”[1]

It goes on, “ Ward claimed the agreements with Kretinsky “give us the best chance of rebuilding Royal Mail.”Nothing could be further from the truth. The agreements seek Royal Mail’s transformation into a gig-economy parcel business to compete with Amazon. It is part of a global restructuring of the post and logistics sector, using AI and automation to slash thousands of jobs.”

Now, compare this analysis of a genuine and orthodox Marxist position to the analysis peddled by the UK Socialist Workers Party(SWP). In a recent article (which must be said is the only analysis the SWP has made in over five months at the least), “Unions Should Battle on after Royal Mail sell-off, “[2] the SWP takes obfuscation to a new level.

They write.” The postal workers’ CWU union is positive about the deal. It insists that Kretinsky has signed up to significant protection against asset stripping and breaking up the company. And it says that it and the government now have a greater say in how the firm will be run”. This is a lie and completely disarms postal workers as to the true nature of the CWU, the Labour government and Kretinsky. The SWP has become not only a cover for the treachery of the CWU but has become a mouthpiece for Kretinsky, writing that “he pledges that he wants to invest in Royal Mail for the long term. Kretinsky says he has no plans for compulsory redundancies and instead wants to expand the workforce.” Again, this is a direct lie. It is clear to anyone that the SWP is now a junior partner of not only the CWU bureaucracy but also a mouthpiece of the Labour Government and Kretinsky himself.

Any postal worker wishing to fight the CWU’s open betrayal should join the Postal Workers Rank-and File Committee/IWA-RFC and listen and participate in the  PWRFC’s next online meeting on Sunday, January 5, at 7 pm. It will discuss the takeover agreed upon between Kretinsky, the Labour government and the CWU and a strategy to fight back.

[1] The CWU’s “framework agreement” backs Kretinsky’s Royal Mail takeover

Tony Robson, Laura Tiernan December 20 2024 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/20/yvdt-d20.html

[2] “Unions Should Battle on after Royal Mail sell-off-https://socialistworker.co.uk/trade-unions/royal-mail-deal/