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30 June 2022

Dear Comrade:

Thank you for your letter of 28 June and its enthusiastic response to the establishment of a new section of the International Committee in Turkey.The formal expansion of the work of the ICFI is, whatever the country or region, an important political milestone. But it is a source of special satisfaction that it has become possible to make this advance in the country where Trotsky, having been exiled from the Soviet Union, so decisively developed the struggle against the Stalinist regime on a world scale and initiated the founding of the Fourth International. During the visit with the comrades of Sosyalist Eitlik Grubu to the island of Prinkipo, one could not help but be deeply moved by the awareness of Trotskys monumental historical achievement. But we could also draw satisfaction from the fact that we are continuing the work that Trotsky initiated on Prinkipo, and that Trotsky would have been in complete solidarity with the political principles and program of the International Committee.

The experience of our comrades in Turkey is certainly, as you write, of great significance for the development of a section of the International Committee in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. We worked patiently to create, on the basis of a unified conception of the entire historical experience of the Fourth International, a firm foundation for the establishment of a new section.

The resolution of the Sosyalist Eitlik Grubu deserves the most careful study. The SEGs recognition of the political authority of the ICFI should not be understood in a merely organizational sense. The political authority of the ICFI is based on its historical association with the defense of the foundational principles and program of Trotskyism. The SEG resolution identified the essential historical content of the continuity of Trotskyism:

4. Only the ICFI represents the political continuity of the world Marxist/Trotskyist movement. This continuity goes back to the founding of the Left Opposition under the leadership of Leon Trotsky in 1923 to defend the strategy and program of the world socialist revolution against nationalist Stalinist degeneration. It was this strategy and program that guided the October Revolution in 1917 led by the Bolshevik Party in Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

5. The founding of the Fourth International in 1938 under the leadership of Trotsky after the collapse of the Communist International paving the way for the Nazis to come to power in Germany in 1933; the founding of the International Committee in 1953 by orthodox Trotskyists led by James P. Cannon of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the US against the revisionist-liquidationist tendency led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel; the political struggle by the British Trotskyists led by Gerry Healy against the unprincipled reunification with the Pabloites in 1963; and the struggle of the American Trotskyists led by David North in 1982-86 against the national-opportunist degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain and the regaining the control of the IC by orthodox Trotskyists, constitute critical turning points in this political continuity.

Continuity is not conferred upon an organization through some sort of formal proclamation, let alone in the manner of a British knighthood. A young organization must establish its continuity with the antecedent history of the Trotskyist movement by taking up the fight, in the present, against the opponentsStalinist, Pabloite, state capitalist, social democratic, labor, petty-bourgeois radical, anarchist, bourgeois nationalist, and liberal reformistof revolutionary Marxism. This fight is conducted on a theoretical, political, and organizational plane, and is always directed toward establishing the complete and unconditional political independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie.However difficult and contradictory the process, the political movement that conducts this struggle expresses with ever increasing clarity the continuity of Trotskyism and, thereby, moves into alignment with the objective trajectory of the world socialist revolution.

Great historical events, such as those through which we are now passing, reveal the essential class nature of a political organization and the interests that it serves. Of course, the response of an organization to a great crisis is conditioned by its antecedent history. The outbreak of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia has rapidly exposed the state-capitalist and Pabloite organizations as contemptible agents of American and European imperialism. Their theory of Russian imperialismclosely associated with Shachtmanism and related varieties of state capitalist conceptionsnow serves as an ideological justification for support to US and European imperialism and their lackeys in the Ukrainian regime.

In an attack on the International Committee, Oleg Vernyk of the Ukrainian Socialist League (USL) (an affiliate of the International Socialist League-ISL) writes:

We are well aware that in this confrontation with two imperialisms, Western imperialism and Russian imperialism, Ukraine only plays one role: the role of victim.

It is difficult to imagine a more absurd and deceitful statement. The Ukrainian victim is a regime that was brought to power by a coup in 2014 that was financed and organized by the United States, using local fascist organizations to provide the necessary military force. During the last eight years, the US and NATO have carried out the training and arming of the Kiev regime in preparation for war against Russia. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were directly trained by the United States in the years leading up to the war.In a report posted on June 25, the New York Times wrote:

Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat on the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said in an interview that the relationships Ukrainian commandos developed with American and other counterparts over the past several years had proved invaluable in the fight against Russia.

The scale of US/NATO support for Ukrainealready measuring in the many tens of billions of dollarsis without historic precedent. According to the Times:

The commandos are not on the front lines with Ukrainian troops and instead advise from headquarters in other parts of the country or remotely by encrypted communications, according to American and other Western officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. But the signs of their stealthy logistics, training and intelligence support are tangible on the battlefield.

Several lower-level Ukrainian commanders recently expressed appreciation to the United States for intelligence gleaned from satellite imagery, which they can call up on tablet computers provided by the allies. The tablets run a battlefield mapping app that the Ukrainians use to target and attack Russian troops.

On a street in Bakhmut, a town in the hotly contested Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, a group of Ukrainian special operations forces had American flag patches on their gear and were equipped with new portable surface-to-air missiles as well as Belgian and American assault rifles.

What is an untold story is the international partnership with the special operations forces of a multitude of different countries, Lt. Gen. Jonathan P. Braga, the commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, told senators in April in describing the planning cell. They have absolutely banded together in a much outsized impact to support Ukraines military and special forces.

To claim, in the face of these facts, that Ukraine plays only one role: the role of victim is a blatant and contemptible falsification of reality in the interests of imperialism.

The political basis of Vernyks endorsement of the imperialist war follows:

However, we members of the USL/ISL have as our basic principle the defense of Ukraine as a political subject, the defense of its working people, the defense of the unconditional right to self-determination of the Ukrainian people and the struggle for the preservation of the integrity of the state.

This one paragraph exposes the USL (and its ISL sponsors) as reactionary nationalists and bitter opponents of the Marxist theory of the state. It is an ABC of Marxism that the state is an instrument of class rule. How, then, can the struggle for the integrity of the state be reconciled with the defense of its [Ukraines] working people? Of course, Vernyk makes no mention of the fact that the Ukrainian capitalist regime is utilizing the opportunity provided by the war to abolish laws and regulations protecting workers that date back to the Soviet era. Nor does Vernyk ever explain why the alleged unconditional right to self-determination applies only to Ukraine as defined by the Kiev regime, but not to the predominantly Russian-speaking populations in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

The reactionary basis of Vernyks defense of the Ukrainian regime is most starkly revealed in his attempt to rebrand the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, as a politically heterogeneous movement that included progressive tendencies. Vernyk writes that

in the history of the right-wing political formation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, there were endless transformations, cracks, radical changes in its slogans, certain inclinations to the left and to the right, cooperation with Hitler and the war on two fronts, among many other events. To this we must add the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1943 and the massive entry to that organization in 1939 of the communists of western Ukraine that miraculously escaped total extermination by the Stalinist regime. All of this forms part of Ukraine's history that is often characterized as extremely complex, controversial and ambiguous.

Vernyk leaves out of his discussion of this complex, controversial and ambiguous history any mention of the central role played by the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as collaborators of the Nazis in the genocidal extermination of Ukrainian Jews and the mass murder of Poles. Seeking to sow political confusion, Vernyk promotes the anti-Marxist national chauvinist tract written in 1948 by Petr Poltava, who was then a leading ideologist of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In a reprehensible attempt to politically rehabilitate the OUN as an organization that included genuinely left-wing tendencies that espoused a form of socialist-tinged nationalism, Vernyk claims that Poltava represented a tendency towards democratization that was beginning to emerge withinthe ranks of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), toward the ideas of the left and the incitement to a simultaneous war against German national socialism and against Stalinism.

Vernyk goes so far as to claim that Poltavas pamphlet annuls all the arguments of Russian propaganda and its ICFI lackeys regarding the assertion that any nationalist liberation movement in Ukraine should be considered, without exception, a far-right current and Nazi.

Let us review the text by Poltava that has inspired Vernyk and the USL/ISL. It is titled, Our Teaching about the National State. The pamphlet begins with an explicit denunciation of the Marxist theory of the state and nation as wrong and tendentious.Poltava wrote:

Their [The Marxists] view that nations will be able to manage without states in the future is utopian, fantastic, and lacking any basis in reality. In all Marxist theory about the state there is a clear effort to deny that the state has any significance for the people and for humanity in general, as well as any attempt to present history as nothing more than a class strugglewhich, as we have already stated, is totally incorrect.

Insisting on the essentially ethnic basis of the state, Poltava inveighed against the existence of multinational states. He declared: Obviously states of this type should not exist; they should be restructured as soon as possible. The practical implications of this argument were demonstrated by the OUN in its genocidal attacks on Jews and Poles.

Poltavas text is suffused with reactionary nationalist mysticism:

We nationalists believe in this eternal truththat an independent national state is the only form of political organization that guarantees a people the best conditions for all-round development of its spiritual and material resources. Without its own national state, that is, without a state extending over all its ethnic territory, a people cannot fully develop.

At the conclusion of the text, Poltava declared that the Bolshevik USSR is an implacable enemy of individual subject people and humanity in general.

Why does Vernyk draw inspiration from this reactionary anti-Marxist ideologue? Clearly, his aim is to create an ideological and political bridge to the present-day Ukrainian nationalists, falsely attributing a progressive content to the war being waged by the Kiev regime in alliance with US and European imperialism.

Toward this end, Vernyk dishonestly attempts to portray Trotsky as an ally of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. Vernyk cites a brief passage from Trotskys 1939 essay, Problem of the Ukraine, in which he defended the slogan, in opposition to the Stalinist regime, of A united, free and independent workers and peasants Ukraine. [Italics in the original].

Vernyk conveniently and duplicitously leaves out of his discussion of Trotskys 1939 article any reference to passages in which Trotsky vehemently condemned any collaboration with and concession to the organizations and parties of reactionary Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. Trotsky wrote:

The Ukraine is especially rich and experienced in false paths of struggle for national emancipation. Here everything has been tried: the petty-bourgeois Rada, and Skoropadski, and Petlura, and alliance with the Hohenzollerns and combinations with the Entente. After all these experiments, only political cadavers can continue to place hope in one of the fractions of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie as the leader of the national struggle for emancipation. The Ukrainian proletariat alone is capable not only of solving the taskwhich is revolutionary in its very essencebut also of taking the initiative for its solution. The proletariat and only the proletariat can rally around itself the peasant masses and the genuinely revolutionary national intelligentsia.

Trotsky concluded his essay with the following timely warning:

At the beginning of the last imperialist war the Ukrainians, Melenevski (Basok) and Skoropis-Yeltukhovski, attempted to place the Ukrainian liberation movement under the wing of the Hohenzollern general, Ludendorff. They covered themselves in so doing with left phrases. With one kick the revolutionary Marxists booted these people out. That is how revolutionists must continue to behave in the future. The impending war will create a favorable atmosphere for all sorts of adventurers, miracle-hunters and seekers of the golden fleece. These gentlemen, who especially love to warm their hands in the vicinity of the national question, must not be allowed within artillery range of the labor movement. Not the slightest compromise with imperialism, either fascist or democratic! Not the slightest concession to the Ukrainian nationalists, either clerical-reactionary or liberal-pacifist! No Peoples Fronts! The complete independence of the proletarian party as the vanguard of the toilers!

As is to be expected from this politically bankrupt opportunist, Vernyk attempts to cover up his capitulation to the Ukrainian bourgeoisie with pathetic slanders against the International Committee. He writes that a United States citizen, Mr. David North, has been defending the interests of Russian imperialism and its propaganda apparatus on issues related to Ukraine. According to Vernyk, I accepted this assignment when it became clear that official Russian propaganda no longer has sufficient informational space within the American media or any other country in the western orbit. Does Vernyk actually imagine that such nonsense will be believed by anyone?

But I must note that his accusation has an ironic character, inasmuch as the primal sin of which the International Committee and I personally are guilty, in the eyes of the Pabloites, has been our relentless exposure of the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism. This included the ICFIs work on Security and the Fourth International, which unmasked the agents of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Trotskyist movement.Moreover, at a time when the Pabloites were singing the praises of Gorbachev, the International Committee was warning that his policies would result in the culmination of the Stalinist betrayal of the October Revolution, that is, the restoration of capitalism.

The Putin regime is the reactionary resurrection of a bourgeois state that emerged out of the 1991 dissolution of the USSR. But the opposition of the International Committee to this regime, including its invasion of Ukraine, is from the socialist left, not the imperialist right.

Precisely because its opposition to the Putin regime is rooted in its antecedent struggle of the Fourth International against Stalinism and the various revisions of the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet Union (both Pabloite and state capitalist), the International Committee analyzes the current war in the historical context of the dissolution of the USSR, which proved a political disaster for the Ukrainian, Russian and international working class.

The way out of this disaster, from which the present war emerged, is to be found not in alliance with US-NATO imperialism or with Putins capitalist regime; but only through the unified struggle of the Ukrainian, Russian and international working class against all the warring states. The working class in Russia as well as in Ukraine must uphold the principle: The main enemy is at home.

These comments on Vernyk might serve, perhaps, as an illustration of how the International Committee upholds the defense of Trotskyism. In the relentless exposure of the enemies of Marxism, the International Committee continues the great historical work of the Fourth International and, on this basis, educates the working class and prepares it for the fulfillment of its revolutionary tasks.

It is our hope that the initiative of our comrades in Turkey will serve as inspiration for the efforts of socialists in Russia and Ukraine to expand the work of the International Committee and raise the banner of Trotskyism in their countries and throughout the former Soviet Union.

With Trotskyist greetings,

David North

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More here:
Letter to a Young Trotskyist in Russia - World Socialist Web Site - WSWS

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has published a draft bill for a second referendum on Scottish independence. It specifies October 19, 2023 as the date for the poll, defines the question to be put, Should Scotland be an independent country?, and outlines who can vote.

Since the power to legally call a referendum lies with the Conservative government in Westminster, which has ruled out doing so, Sturgeon has requested a ruling from the Supreme Court on whether the Scottish government can act unilaterally.

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She told the Scottish parliament in Holyrood Tuesday that a defeat would prove, No matter how Scotland votes, regardless of what future we desire for our country, the UK Government can block and overrule. The UK Government will always have the final say. This would mean, Sturgeon continued, if the law says that is not possible, the General Election [due 2024] will be a de facto referendum.

Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party (SNP) are orchestrating a reactionary stunt on behalf of a section of the bourgeoisie in Scotland.

Particularly under the brutal and boorish rule of Boris Johnson, there has undoubtedly been a growth in support for independence from the government in Westminster. The last Scottish independence referendum in 2014 delivered a 55 to 45 percent No vote. According to the latest Ipsos Mori poll, 51 percent are in favour.

But such polls only underscore the deeply divisive nature of an effort to make Scottish nationalism the dominant issue on both sides of the border.

With the working class throughout the UK coming into struggle against the Johnson government, and amid the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, the pro-austerity, pro-war SNP advances a nationalist policy of divide and rule.

There is no progressive content to the call for Scottish independence. No one has ever seriously tried to explain how workers in Scotland are specifically oppressed over and above workers in England by British imperialism. The furthest the argument goes is that Scotland is forced to accept governments and policies it does not choose. But not voting for Johnson or his predecessors is something the bulk of the working class in Scotland share with their counterparts in England and Wales.

Moreover, the main issue of concern for the SNP is Scotland remaining within the European Union, not as a democratic issue but from the standpoint of the economic interests of the Scottish bourgeoisie and a privileged layer of the upper middle class. Speaking to Sky News this week, Sturgeon referred to Scotland voting 65 to 35 percent against Brexit and said, Back then [2014], Scotland was told we would lose European Union membership if we voted for independence and now we are out of the European Union because we didnt become independentthats happened against our will.

The surprise victory of the Brexit campaign of the most right-wing elements of the Tory Party in the 2016 referendumanimated by fantasies of a global renewal of British imperialism through Thatcherite deregulation, a deepened alliance with US imperialism and the freedom to strike global trade relationhas undoubtedly acted as a spur to social reaction, trade and military war. But this was only one expression of the deepening of inter-imperialist and national antagonisms that have reached such malignant and deadly dimensions today.

The SNPs anti-Brexit stance in 2014 was in fact shared by most of the British bourgeoisie, whose agenda was to pursue trade war from within the EU, not outside of it, and to spearhead a drive to war as Washingtons point man in Europe acting to police the independent global ambitions of Germany and France.

As has been proved by the savage austerity measures and attacks on democratic rights throughout the continent, and the lineup of all the EU powers behind the US-NATO war with Russia, both alternatives in the referendum on EU membership were then and are now hostile to the fundamental interests of the working class.

A Scotland freed from Westminster would be independent in name only. Home to just five and a half millionpeople, it would be even more ruthlessly subordinated to international finance capital than it already is, with the SNP charged with enacting tax and spending cuts and scrapping regulations to make the region attractive for investment.

The SNP wants to regain membership of the EU while preserving access to the UK market. But the threatened collapse of the Northern Ireland Protocol amid an explosion of sectarian tensions is a warning of the political realities that national divisions create.

Economically, such a policy would facilitate a ferocious race to the bottom between Scotland and the UK, with attacks on workers of the kind already set out in the SNPs spending review to 2027. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, the axe is set to fall on a wide range of public service areas. These include a savage 8 percent in real terms cut over the next four years for local government, universities, prisons and rural affairs. According to the Unison trade union, this will equate to around 40,000 job losses, with the public workforce reduced to pre-pandemic levels. Cuts on this scale made in England and Wales would be equivalent to 480,000 jobsa perspective Johnson would happily embrace.

Public bodies are to find annual efficiencies of 3 percent. Even prior to the spending review, National Health Service workers were offered a well below-inflation 5 percent pay rise and local government workers a grindingly low 2 percent.

An independent Scotland would also remain a loyal member of the imperialist war camp. Sturgeon commented in May in reference to the war in Ukraine, Im even more firm in my view today that coupled with a strong relationship with the United Kingdom, membership of the European Union and NATO will be cornerstones of an independent Scotlands security policy.

Sturgeon is in addition offering her threadbare status as a politician seeking national self-determination to portray NATOs imperialist war aims in Ukraine in a similar light, declaring with reference to the war, At its heart the Scottish independence movement is an internationalist project.

The SNPs vestigial opposition to Trident nuclear submarines being based at the Faslane naval base near Glasgow would, like previous opposition to NATO, be swiftly jettisoned. Stewart McDonald, the SNPs defence spokesperson, told the BBC regarding NATO, We would join on similar terms of Norway or Denmark in that we dont want to permanently host nuclear weapons from other states but we certainly would take our commitments as members of the alliance seriously.

The operative word in McDonalds statement is permanently. Phillips OBrien, professor of strategic studies at the University of Andrews told the Daily Express, If it defined anti-nuclear as at no time will nuclear weapons be allowed on a naval ship in Scottish waters then that indeed would probably make Scotland not eligible for NATO, but I dont think theyre defining it that rigidly.

Former SNP defence spokesperson and Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, now a Liberal Democrat, Stuart Crawford suggested in the same paper that the nuclear naval base, might be the biggest bargaining chip Scotland might have in any possible future independence negotiations.

Workers in an independent Scotland would confront the same political challenges as they do today but would do so while cut off from their class allies in the rest of the UK.

A politically criminal role is being played by the pseudo-left in providing a left cover for the SNP and its scheming for a Scottish capitalist state.

Writing for the Scottish Socialist Party in the pro-independence National, Ritchie Venton claimed, the subservient relationship with Westminster, and financial straitjacket under devolution, means that like the Tories the SNP/Green government is operating the same pay restraint. Freed from such subservience, he insinuated, the SNP could honour a peoples mandate to defy and defeat Tory cuts to pay, jobs and services.

The Socialist Party Scotland, affiliated to the Committee for a Workers International, claims in its statement responding to Sturgeons announcement, We stand for a united struggle of the working class in Scotland, England and Wales against the Johnson government and for a socialist alternative, before adding, Thats why Socialist Party Scotland fights for an independent socialist Scotland.

Slapping the slogan an independent socialist Scotland on the SNPs push for a referendum makes independence no more progressive than calling for a left exit did for Brexitits sister Socialist Partys policy in 2016.

Equally so adding the call for a voluntary socialist confederation with England, Wales and Ireland as part of the struggle for socialism internationally. No explanation is ever offered as to why encouraging national divisions here and now facilitates a future struggle for socialism either in the UK or internationally. The SSP, SPS et al have long ago written off any prospect of unified working-class struggle, let alone a programme of social revolutionroutinely branding workers in England as politically backward and championing the creation of a Scottish state as a supposedly more accountable vehicle for passing various limited social reforms.

The fight for socialism requires a joint struggle by the British, European and international working class.

As the Socialist Equality Party wrote ahead of the 2014 referendum, The unity and independence of the working class is the criterion against which every political party and every political initiative must be judged. This is essential under conditions in which the planet is being befouled with nationalist poison.

Separatism, the SEP explained, only weakens and divides the working class in its struggle against capitalism. Moreover, if national identity outweighs class unity in Britain, then it outweighs it everywhere. It means that the fake left are the advocates of the creation of innumerable mini-states based on ethnicity, language or religion, the Balkanisation of the world.

In their struggle against the austerity and war policies of British imperialism, workers across the UK must fight for the overthrow of the Johnson and Sturgeon governments and the building of a socialist Britain within a United Socialist States of Europe and the world.

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Scottish National Party makes renewed right-wing independence pitch - WSWS

Hayeks father, August, was a physician and a professor of botany at the University of Vienna. His mother, Felicitas, was the daughter of Franz von Juraschek, a professor and later a prominent civil servant. Because his mothers family was relatively wealthy, Hayek and his two younger brothers had a comfortable childhood in Vienna, which was then capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During World War I Hayek served in a field artillery battery on the Italian front, and after the war he enrolled at the University of Vienna. Hayek was attracted to both law and psychology in his early university years, but he settled on law for his first degree in 1921. Among his classmates were a number of people who would become prominent economists, including Fritz Machlup, Gottfried von Haberler, and Oskar Morgenstern. In 1923, his last year at the university, Hayek studied under the Austrian economist Friedrich von Wieser and was awarded a second doctorate in political economy. He also began working at a temporary government office, where he met Ludwig von Mises, a monetary theorist and author of a book-length critique of socialism. (Von Misess book was originally published as Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen ber den Sozialismus in 1922 and translated as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis in 1936.)

Von Mises quickly became Hayeks mentor. After a trip to the United States in 192324, Hayek returned to Vienna, married, and with von Misess assistance became the director of the newly founded Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. Hayek also became a regular attendee at von Misess biweekly seminar, passed his Habilitation (an oral examination that is a necessary step toward becoming a university teacher), and published his first book, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, in 1929.

In early 1931 Hayek was invited to England by Lionel Robbins to present four lectures on monetary economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The lectures would ultimately lead to his appointment the following year as the Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics at LSE, where Hayek remained until 1950, having become a naturalized British subject in 1938. Immediately upon arriving in England, Hayek became embroiled in a debate with University of Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes over their respective theories about the role and effect of money within a developed economy. Hayek wrote a lengthy critical review of Keyness 1930 book, A Treatise on Money, to which Keynes forcefully replied, in the course of which he attacked Hayeks own recent book, Prices and Production (1931). Both economists were criticized by other economists, and this caused each to rethink his framework. Keynes finished first, publishing in 1936 what would become perhaps the most famous economics book of the century, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Hayeks own book, The Pure Theory of Capital, did not appear until 1941, and both World War II and the books opaqueness caused it to be much less noticed than Keyness work.

In the mid-1930s Hayek also participated in a debate among economists on the merits of socialism. Those discussions would help shape his later ideas on economics and knowledge, eventually presented in his 1936 presidential address to the London Economic Club. During the war years LSE evacuated to Cambridge. There Hayek worked on his Abuse of Reason project, a wide-ranging critique of an assortment of doctrines that he lumped together under the label of scientism, which he defined as the slavish imitation of the method and language of Science by social scientists who had appropriated the methods of the natural sciences in areas where they did not apply. Although the project as originally envisioned was never completed, it became the basis for a number of essays and also led to the 1944 publication of Hayeks most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, which became an immediate best-seller. In the same year Hayek was elected as a fellow of the British Academy.

At the end of World War II, Hayek began work on a theoretical psychology book based on an essay he had written during his student days in Vienna. In 1947 he organized a meeting of 39 scholars from 10 countries at Mont Plerin, on Lake Geneva in the Swiss Alps. This was the beginning of the Mont Plerin Society, an organization dedicated to articulating the principles that would lead to the establishment and preservation of free societies. Von Mises, Robbins, and Machlup were among the original attendees, as were Milton Friedman, Frank Knight, George Stigler, Aaron Director, Michael Polanyi, and the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. Hayek had been instrumental in bringing Popper from New Zealand to LSE at wars end, and he had also secured a publisher for Poppers book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper and Hayek would remain lifelong friends.

In 1950 Hayek left LSE for a position on the newly formed Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In 1952 his book on psychology, The Sensory Order, was published, as was a collection of his essays from the Abuse of Reason project under the title The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. Hayek would spend 12 years at Chicago. While there he wrote articles on a number of themes, among them political philosophy, the history of ideas, and social science methodology. Aspects of his wide-ranging research were woven into his 1960 book on political philosophy, The Constitution of Liberty.

F.A. Hayek, 1950.

In 1962 Hayek left Chicago for the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in West Germany. He remained there until his retirement in 1968, when he accepted an honorary professorship at the University of Salzburg in Austria. In 1974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, which, ironically, he shared with Gunnar Myrdal, whose political and economic views were often opposed to his.

Hayek returned to Freiburg permanently in 1977 and finished work on what would become the three-part Law, Legislation and Liberty (197379), a critique of efforts to redistribute incomes in the name of social justice. Later in the 1970s Hayeks monograph The Denationalization of Money was published by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, one of the many classical liberal think tanks that Hayek, directly or indirectly, had a hand in establishing.

NASA engineers asked Sally Ride if she needed 100 tampons for her first trip into space, which lasted six days.

In the early 1980s Hayek began writing what would be his final book, a critique of socialism. Because his health was deteriorating, another scholar, philosopher William W. Bartley III, helped edit the ultimate volume, The Fatal Conceit, which was published in 1988. Hayek died four years later, having lived long enough to see the reunification of Germany.

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F.A. Hayek | Biography, Books, & Facts | Britannica

The prerequisite to building left power within the Labour Party is building a fighting socialist movement outside of it. Protecting the internal power the left currently possesses is important. However, without giving due focus to expanding and nurturing the activist base upon which any serious attempt to take control of the party would rely, the left will not only forfeit what we have today, but future opportunities too.

That is why I am standing for the Momentum National Coordinating Group (NCG) on the Your Momentum slate. Any coherent plan for the organised left in the Labour party must recognise that internally we are in retreat. Externally, however, the scale of our crises necessitates not just change but organisation. Polling shows popular support for strike action, thousands joined RMT picket lines last week and swathes of young people continue to be politicised by the climate emergency. This is the terrain which Starmers leadership has forfeited, and thus the terrain which socialists in the Labour Party are obligated to occupy, and given our present material conditions its ripe for organising.

The Labour Party, of course, remains the only vehicle we have to gain state power and we have no choice but to work with what we have. The way we convince activists working in non-party political environments, like the climate movement, to join our cause and give their time for the advancement of socialism within the party is not by neglecting the broader movement, but by rolling our sleeves up and doing the work alongside them.

Reduced to its very fundamentals, Momentums purpose must be to build an active, engaged base of socialist Labour Party members who can select principled candidates and pound the streets to get them elected. These prospective members need a reason to join our cause. If Momentum members can fight, and lead, the struggle for socialist change in communities across this country, we provide them with that reason.

This is how we grow our influence within the Party again. To win internally, the left must grow its ranks once more. With an insurgent leadership campaign like that of 2015 an unlikely but not impossible prospect, we must find an alternative. If grassroots left powerexists anywhere in this country just now, it is in our trade unions.

Look no further than Mick Lynch and the RMTs innate ability to clearly communicate class politics, winning the public over even when faced with the hostilest of media. Their narrative is clear. Its about us, and them. Those who create the wealth, and those who profit fromthat wealth creation. Over the last week, Marxs theory of surplus labour has been communicated countless times on TV screens and its garnered popular support.

The next task though is to mobilise that popular support to join the picket line. This can only be achieved at a grassroots level through community organising and, with close to 20,000 members and active local groups, Momentum is well placed to do this. Supporting thedevelopment of the UKs emergent class struggle trade unionism in the ways that we can is crucial to combatting the multiple crises facing workers in our country, to building a movement that can change the political weather, and to strengthening the position of the left within the Labour Party. Momentums current NCG has begun the work of creating a trade unionists network to help with this task. If elected this will be a priority for Your Momentum.

The fight within the Labour Party is a fruitless one if it is not accompanied by concrete socialist organisation and attempts to advance the class struggle in our communities. Internal Labour elections must be fought, and fought determinedly, because the power we have within the Labour Party currently is a foundation upon which we can build. But, we can only build if the energy of the class struggle is propelled inside the Labour Party and that means Momentum must build those links. It is not a question of one or the other and Your Momentum gets that.

Momentum is too important to fail. As the largest organisation of socialists in the UK, it should play a leading role in advancing the cause of the working class in our age of crisis. Your Momentum has a plan to build left power but ultimately, only with patient and steady work in the manner outlined above can we turn the tide in UK politics.

Coll McCail is a candidate for the Momentum NCG elections standing on the Your Momentum slate for Scotland

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Momentum should play a leading role in advancing the cause of the working class in our age of crisis | Coll McCail - Bright Green

After a week of determined action by tens of thousands of rail workers, the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union (RMT) huddled back into talks Monday with Network Rail and the train operating companies.

Yesterday, RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch confirmed that all cuts remain on the table, including mandatory 7-day working, new grading structures, salaries and roles, lower pay and longer hours contracts, and massive attacks on the railways pension scheme. He issued a statement explaining that the employers have taken an extremely hard line, we believe at the behest of the government in order to push through their agenda of 2 billion of cuts and what they call Workforce Reform.

Yet RMT officials are continuing their fruitless negotiations with Network Rail and the train operating companies, complaining that government ministers should be in the room.

The Johnson governments brutal agenda for workplace reform at all costs is crystal clear, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson declaring Sunday that there will be no return to business as usual and that mass closures of ticketing offices will proceed. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps denounces strikers for upholding steam age working practices, insisting the Thatcherite agenda for Great British Railways will be imposed.

The RMT has already signalled its willingness to reach an accommodation with the government. Its sole demands are for a below-inflation 7 percent pay deal and a commitment to no compulsory redundancies. But more than 2,900 railway jobs have already been destroyed in recent months via a union-endorsed Voluntary Severance Scheme.

It is necessary to draw a balance sheet of last weeks national strikes and the political lessons for the working class.

Last weeks three-day strike by rail workers won massive public sympathy as the start of a fightback among millions of workers hit by the same cost-of-living crisis and who want to defeat the class war offensive of the Johnson government and the employers.

Strike ballots are underway this week of 40,000 BT telecoms workers, 115,000 postal workers and thousands of train drivers. British Airways ground staff will strike this summer, joining rail workers, refuse workers, bus drivers and barristers. Nurses, junior doctors, teachers and civil servants are calling for strikes. If brought together, these disputes would encompass three million workers and lay the basis for a general strike to bring down the Johnson government.

Workers are entering battle as part of an international resurgence of class struggle. General strikes have taken place in Belgium, Italy and Greece. Mass strikes have erupted in Turkey and Spain, while pilots and other airline workers have struck across Europe. On every continent, the working class is launching collective action against soaring inflation and the impact of a pandemic that continues to claim lives. Governments are pouring billions into military budgets as they prepare direct military aggression against Russia and China that threatens to trigger World War III.

In his speech yesterday to military leaders, British Army General Sir Patrick Sanders declared that NATOs war in Ukraine was Britains 1937 moment and that all-out war against Russia must be prepared. The war effort would mean working now with industry partners to make the Army more lethal and more effective, with better equipment in the hands of our soldiers at best speed. We cant be lighting the factory furnaces across the nation on the eve of war; this effort must start now.

War against Russia and China demands class war at home. The Johnson governments determination to smash the rail strike is preparation for an all-out assault on the working class. Amid a raging economic crisis, the ruling class is determined not only to make workers pay for the war in Ukraine but the impact of a continuing pandemic, with workers left to foot the bill for multi-billion bailouts of the corporations and the super-rich.

It has tabled legislation that will create a scab agency workforce to break strikes. Anti-strike laws for essential industries are being drafted that will outlaw industrial action unless minimum service levels are met, effectively ending the right to strike in transport and other essential services. Similar legislation was used this week in Spain to ban strikes by Ryanair pilots, with the company boasting not a single service was halted.

State repression will not end there. An insight into discussions in ruling circles was provided by Liberal Democrat MP Munira Wilson who demanded on television Sunday that Johnson should be working with the army and others to put contingency plans in place if the strikes are going to continue, insisting exceptional times call for exceptional measures.

During the 1926 General Strike, Stanley Baldwins government mobilised the entire British military against insurgent strikers. Guard battalions backed by cavalry and armoured trucks occupied docks. Troops occupied bus and transport depots. Battleships were deployed by the Royal Navy to Liverpool, Portsmouth, Hull, Cardiff and other cities, anchored within firing range of barricades. A 50,000-strong Civil Constabulary Reserve force drawn from army reservists and former soldiers was run by the War Office, alongside a reserve police force of 200,000, supporting an army of scabs prepared long in advance.

During the miners strikes that rocked the Heath government in 1972 and 1974, sections of the military backed by the Royal Family laid plans for a military coup, with the army placed on high alert. In 1977, more than 10,000 Army, Navy and RAF personnel were drafted to break the national firemens strike.

During last weeks strikes, the need for unified action was raised on pickets, including calls for a general strike. The main obstacles to realising this are not the hated Tories and their anti-strike legislation, but the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party. The trade union leaders are sitting on a powder keg. Their attacks on greedy employers and threats of future strikes are pitched at placating workers own mounting anger. But in practice, they are suppressing and delaying action, holding strike ballots at staggered intervals while they seek a modus vivendi with the government.

On the eve of the rail strikes the TUC coordinated a letter from the UKs 14 largest unions including Unite, the GMB, Unison and the CWU, begging the government to get round the table with unions and employers. TUC President Frances OGrady urged on Monday that Shapps needs to stop inflaming tensions and negotiate with unions for a fair resolutionone which the Tories have no intention of offering.

Amid what the ruling class has dubbed a summer of discontent, not a single major strike has taken place this week. Rail strikes have been shelved, including on the London Underground where strike mandates are being sat on, even as Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan proceeds with a slash-and-burn agenda against the entire transport system.

The rail strikes have exposed the vicious right-wing character of the Labour Party, epitomised by its leader Sir Keir Starmers threat that any MP visiting picket lines would be disciplinedan edict not even Tony Blair would have dared issue.

Labours Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy spoke for them all. Asked whether he would back strike action by Heathrow ground crew demanding restoration of a 10 percent pay cut imposed during the pandemic, Lammy replied No, no, no! He opposed the strikes, because Im serious about the business of being in Government.

Widespread support for rail workers has produced a wave of popular support for the RMT, considered a militant trade union, and for General Secretary Mick Lynch. His demolition of right-wing media personalities, including Piers Morgan, Kay Burley and Richard Madeley, and of Tory politicians, has been applauded.

But Lynchs political appeal, like that of the TUC, is pitched to the Tory government and employers. Their argument is that Johnsons efforts to replicate Thatchers frontal assault on the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984-85 strike is socially explosive and unnecessary. Lynchs appeal is that any changes to structures, working practices, or conditions have to be agreed with our union, not imposed. Like its TUC counterparts, the RMT wants to retain its corporatist partnership with the rail bosses and the government.

The union has given the Johnson government more than a year to prepare its offensive against rail workers, participating in the Rail Industry Recovery Group initiated by Shapps along with the rail bosses since May 2021. They signed its Enabling Framework Agreement for massive cost savings centred on redundancies and the gutting of terms and conditions, safety and pensions.

At the RMTs rally on Saturday, Lynch declared his support for Sir Keir Starmer, Thats what weve got. He must win. Weve got to push him and persuade him to get into a position where hes in the front rank with you, all of you. He is trying to channel social discontent behind a pro-war party no less hostile to the working class than the Tories. Rupert Murdochs Times joined the acclaim for Lynch for this reason, ascribing his popularity to his picking reasonableness over revolution.

The working class must intervene independently to assert its control over the dispute.

This means forming rank-and-file committees in every depot and workplace, opposing all attempts to restrict industrial action and expanding the strike to encompass all rail and transport workers and every section of the working class.

Conditions are emerging for a general strike to bring down the Johnson government and bring an end to pay cuts and deepening social inequality. But this means a political fight against the sabotage of the TUC and Labour who are de facto partners with the Tories.

A general strike in Britain will rapidly win the active support of workers across Europe and around the world. The answer of the working class to war, social inequality and the mounting attacks on democratic rights must be the fight for world socialism.

Rail Workers: Tell us what you think. What are conditions like at your work place? All submissions will be kept anonymous.

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Lessons of the British rail strikes - WSWS