Palestinian women protest in Gaza city during First Intifada

Review:  “The Palestinian Left and its Decline” by Francesco Saverio Leopardi published in 2020.

In 1969 the PFLP declared it was a “Marxist-Leninist” organisation – a term universally used by Maoist organisations. Lenin’s united workers front strategy was replaced by Mao’s popular frontism; his class-based approach to the national question was overturned by prioritising the national conflict over class struggle;  his international workers’ solidarity was replaced by alliances with the ruling elites of ‘friendly countries’; and Lenin’s “arming the working class” during a working-class led political revolution was replaced by “guerrilla struggle” aimed at igniting a mass based popular war.

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Irish left figures with Connelly

On ‘left alliances’ – the opposition, cooperation, and the next government

This is why we want to see a genuinely left government – one based on a mass anti-capitalist and socialist movement in society, that fights for democratic public ownership of the key wealth and resources of society, and a radical transformation of the economy to meet people’s needs. It isn’t a question of left-wing ‘purity’, but what’s practically necessary. Because that’s the only kind of government that can possibly deal with the multiple chronic crises we face, all of which are only going to become more acute as the capitalist world continues to devour itself in the coming years.

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Montage by Diego Rivera to commemorate founding of Fourth International

How the Fourth International fought World War Two

As the anniversary of the end of World War Two is celebrated, the world’s leaders are again recruiting soldiers and arming them with horrific new weapons in preparation for new conflicts, and possibly yet another, even more brutal world war.
This article examines how Trotskyists worldwide struggled, ‘despite all hazards’, to build the slender forces of the Fourth International (FI), intended to assist the working class to overthrow capitalism, and the bureaucratic, Stalinist elite in the USSR and replace them by genuinely democratic, international socialism to end poverty and war forever.

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