On Friday, February 1st 2024, Roger Silverman from WIN and Nikos Anastasiadis from Internationalist Standpoint interviewed Swasthika Arulingam, a trade union activist from Sri Lanka. She described the process behind the huge 2022 uprising that ousted the longstanding authoritarian Gotabaya Rajapaksa, its strengths and weakenesses, and what is the state of consiousness, the Left and the movement … [Read more...]
Jeremy Corbyn – 40 Years as MP for Islington North – Statement by Roger Silverman
Yesterday I had the honour of speaking on behalf of the Socialist Labour Network at the event marking Jeremy Corbyn's 40 years as MP for Islington North. Here's the text of my speech... * * * * Greetings from the Socialist Labour Network and from Newham Socialist Labour. Congratulations, Jeremy, on your lifelong struggle for the cause of socialism – all the more so for the forty years you fought … [Read more...]
Marx and the First International, with Roger Silverman
Speaking at a session of Labour Left Alliance Education Series April 2023 "In the great laboratory of the first world working-class movement, Marx and Engels, concentrating theoretically the whole experience of the working class, pitted the ideas of scientific socialism against all the bogus cranks and eccentrics who had latched on to the movement with their charlatan potions… The … [Read more...]
Sydney Silverman
with Roger Silverman As one in a series 'Lives of the Left' presented by Labour Left Alliance, Roger Silverman tells the moving story of his amazing resilient father and Labour MP Sydney Silverman. Socialist, human rights campaigner, conscientious objector, lawyer, lecturer, Sydney devoted his life to the left; among his many achievements he fought for the admission to the UK of Jewish … [Read more...]
IS LABOUR DEAD?
Roger Silverman: Is Labour Dead? - YouTube At this week's Future of the Left event in Liverpool, Roger Silverman spoke on the question "Is Labour Dead?". That might seem a hard case to argue at a time when, due to the Tory government's gross corruption and ineptitude, Labour is suddenly 33 points ahead in the polls. But, as he says here, this is certainly no party of labour. Here is his opening … [Read more...]
The Twilight of the Monarchy
by Roger Silverman The royal family are often dismissed as a pantomime sideshow. This is a mistake; the role of the monarchy is crucial. Prime ministers are appointed and subject to arbitrary dismissal by the monarch – as seen for instance in the peremptory dismissal of Australia’s mildly left-reformist prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1973. The British prime minister is obliged to report once … [Read more...]
A Turning Point
The death of a monarch who had reigned for 70 years, and the early defenestration of a prime minister less than three years after winning a landslide election victory, both mark a significant turning point in British history. The following extract from a recent editorial in our journal ON THE BRINK (published by the Workers' International Network) is relevant... * * * * What we are witnessing … [Read more...]
Workers Arise! The Fightback has Begun!
by Roger Silverman We’re witnessing the return of nightmares that we’d always been told had been relegated to ancient history. There had been no pandemics since the flu of 1918; no major slump since the great depression in the 1930s; no threat of world war since 1945; no fear of nuclear annihilation since the 1962 Cuban crisis; no trace of inflation since the 1970s. Just look now: plague; … [Read more...]
Britain: Workers Fight Back – By Roger Silverman
June 2022 A new mood is sweeping Britain. The magnificent TUC march last week marked the re-entry of the working class back to the forefront of British history. A wave of protest has begun, with strikes are of railways, airport ground staff, communications workers, nurses, GPs, even barristers… Britain is ruled by a regime which drunkenly staggers from one hollow theatrical gesture to the … [Read more...]
What Was Stalinism?
by Roger Silverman (2003) Socialists today still find themselves under the dark shadow that Stalinism has cast over the history of the twentieth century. It is more than ten years since the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe – overthrown in many cases by workers’ uprisings. These were hideous, corrupt, vicious regimes, and workers rightly celebrated their downfall as … [Read more...]