Bitcoin: “lying, cheating and stealing”

Michael Roberts writes in his blog: Last week, Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison.  He ran the highly successful FTX bitcoin hedge fund that supposedly made millions for his clients.  But Friedman was exposed and convicted of stealing $8 billion from his FTX customers. He was found to have siphoned billions in …

Demystifying Lenin – 100 years on

Sunday (21/01/24) marked the centenary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, one of the most influential but also misunderstood, socialists of the twentieth century. In this weekend's Morning Star, for instance, the pro-China propagandist Carlos Martinez claims that: "To be Marxist-Leninists in the 31st century means to return to a strategy of a world-wide united …

Critical notes on Postcolonial theory

By Martin Thomas (first published on the Workers Liberty website) "Postcolonial theory came to prominence during a period of massive political defeats for the Left… [But in universities] there is a mass base for what we might call oppression studies… so… a movement from the bottom, which was a kind of demand for theories focusing …

The SWP’s filthy insult to the memory of Hal Draper

The (UK) Socialist Workers Party denies Israel's right to exist, even behind its 1967 borders, and responded to the Hamas pogrom with a call to "Rejoice". These depraved "left" antisemites now have the effrontery to cite the US Marxist (from the heterodox Trotskyist tradition of the Workers Party) Hal Draper in support of their absolute …

Saito: making a mess of Marxist ecology

By Paul Hampton Kohei Saito’s eagerly anticipated new book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2023) will likely gain a wider readership. Ultimately, Saito’s book is disappointing, promising a new version of Marx, but instead reading back badly-formulated contemporary ideas. The book demonstrates that even when starting from solid premises, …

The real origins of the Chinese Communist Party

Above: the official history of the CCP dates its origin to 1 July 1921, but there was no meeting on that day By Paul Hampton The early history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is shrouded in myths. The Maoists have sought to elevate the role of Mao Zedong, at the expense of Chen Duxiu. …

AWL and the Iraq war

On the twentieth anniversary of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, we thought we'd republish the Alliance for Workers Liberty position at the time (in fact this resolution was passed in 2004, but it merely codified the stance that the AWL had taken from 2003 and, indeed, before that in the run-up to the invasion). This …

Gilbert Achcar: “The world situation is that of a new cold war”

From Anticapitalist Resistance: Gilbert Achcar was interviewed by Thierry Labica of France’s New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) on the occasion of the publication of his new book The New Cold War: The United States, Russia, and China from Kosovo to Ukraine (Saqi Books in Britain, and soon Haymarket in the USA). By republishing this interview with …

Answers to Walter’s Holiday Quiz

NB: JD apologises to Walter, who sent in these answers in early January, but they somehow got stuck our system due to technical reasons I don't understand. The quiz itself is here and as there are no prizes, you can still have a go - but look away from the answers if you do. Walter …

Stalinists’ inhuman wrongs on human rights

Above: a section of the Berlin wall in front of the ECHR Credit where it’s due: the Morning Star was one of the few media outlets to note that Saturday 10 December was Human Rights Day. The paper marked it with an editorial and articles by Jeremy Corbyn and Vijay Prashad. Corbyn’s piece rightly draws …