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Proletarian Military Policy
The Proletarian Military Policy was a policy adopted by the Fourth International in response to World War II. It was an attempt to apply transitional demands such as trade union control of military training and the election of officers to transform what it characterised as an imperialist war into a revolutionary struggle against Nazism. Alongside his call for an unconditional defence of the Soviet Union, Trotsky outlined the approach to be adopted by Marxists who were conscripted into the military,"We are absolutely in favor of compulsory military training and in the same way for conscription. Conscription? Yes. By the bourgeois state? No. We cannot entrust this work, as any other, to the state of the exploiters. In our propaganda and agitation we must very strongly differentiate these two questions. That is, not to fight against the necessity of the workers being good soldiers and of building up an army based on discipline, science, strong bodies and so on, including conscription, b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fourth International
The Fourth International (FI) is a revolutionary socialist international organization consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, also known as Trotskyists, whose declared goal is the overthrowing of global capitalism and the establishment of world socialism via international revolution. The Fourth International was established in France in 1938, as Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Communist International (also known as Comintern or the Third International) as effectively puppets of Stalinism and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power. Thus, Trotskyists founded their own competing Fourth International. In the present day, there is no longer a single, centralized cohesive Fourth International. Throughout most of its existence and history, the Fourth International was hunted by agents of the NKVD, subjected to political repression by countries such as France and the United States, and rejec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Burnham
James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was ''An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis'' (1931). Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. He later rejected Marxism and became an even more influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement. His book ''The Managerial Revolution'', published in 1941, speculated on the future of capitalism. Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine ''National Review'' on a variety of topics. He rejected containment of the Soviet Union and called for the rollback of communism worldwide. Biography Early life Born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 22, 1905, James Burnham was the son of Claude George Burnham, an English immigrant and executive with the Burlington Railroad. James was raised as a R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eighth Army (United Kingdom)
The Eighth Army was an Allied field army formation of the British Army during the Second World War, fighting in the North African and Italian campaigns. Units came from Australia, British India, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Free French Forces, Greece, New Zealand, Poland, Rhodesia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Significant formations which passed through the Army included V Corps, X Corps, XIII Corps, XXX Corps, I Canadian Corps and the II Polish Corps. History North Africa The Eighth Army first went into action as an Army as part of Operation Crusader, the Allied operation to relieve the besieged city of Tobruk, on 17 November 1941, when it crossed the Egyptian frontier into Libya to attack Erwin Rommel's Panzer Army Africa. On 26 November the Commander-in-Chief Middle East Command, General Claude Auchinleck, replaced Cunningham with Major-General Neil Ritchie, following disagreements between Auchinleck and Cunningham. Despite achieving a number of tactical su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ted Grant
Edward Grant (born Isaac Blank; 9 July 1913 – 20 July 2006) was a South African Trotskyist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. He was a founding member of the group Militant and later Socialist Appeal. Early life Grant's father had settled in South Africa after fleeing Tsarist Russia in the 19th century. His original family name is reported as "Blank" also in his autobiography, but ''The Guardian'' in an obituary suggested that his full birth name was kept unknown. His parents divorced when he was young and he was brought up by his French-born mother who took in lodgers to supplement her income. He was introduced to Trotskyism by one of these lodgers, Ralph Lee (born Raphael Levy), who discussed politics with Isaac and supplied him with copies of ''The Militant'', the Trotskyist newspaper of the Communist League of America. In 1934, he helped Lee found the Bolshevik-Leninist League of South Africa, a small Trotskyist group which soon merged with other tendencies to fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cairo Forces Parliament
The Cairo Forces Parliament was a meeting of British soldiers in Cairo, Egypt in February 1944 which voted for the nationalisation of banks, land, mines, and transport in the United Kingdom. Among those that took part was Leo Abse who later became a Labour MP. Another participant who later became a Labour MP was Henry Solomons, who was appointed the Labour 'Prime Minister' of the Cairo Forces Parliament. Sam Bardell, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain was secretary and the parliament attracted political activists from the Common Wealth Party and the Trotskyist movement. The Parliament was eventually shut down because of the growing support for the revolutionary ideas promoted by members of the Workers' International League. Adopting the tactics of the Proletarian Military Policy, they were elected to the positions of Prime Minister and Home Secretary. Their revolutionary work was successful in winning the support of many soldiers, as described by Ted Grant,"From ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Army Bureau Of Current Affairs
The Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) was an organisation within the British Army during World War II to promote discussion among soldiers about current events, citizenship, and post-war reconstruction. In August 1940, Lord Croft, Under-Secretary of State for War, had sought the advice of Dr Tom Jones – renowned for his commitment to adult education – about supplying 'mental stimulant' to troops. "TJ" had immediately recommended his protégé William Emrys Williams, who was thus appointed director of the new unit. Both the ABCA and the Directorate of Army Education (run by Lt Col Frederic William Duffield Bendall) came under the Director-General of Welfare and Education. Williams insisted – despite some controversy – on the right to education, in particular in current affairs, for servicemen and women, and ran the ABCA for the duration of the war. For this role, he became known as ''ABCA Bill''. The ABCA was a programme of general education for citizenship for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Workers' International League (1937)
The Workers' International League (WIL) was a Trotskyist group that existed in Britain from 1937 to 1944. Formation The WIL was formed in 1937 by members of the Militant Group, who had split due to false allegations from the leadership of that group that Ralph Lee (born Raphael Levy), then a newly arrived South African member, had misled a strike and used the strike funds to move to England. The split took around a third of the membership of the Militant Group and four of its branches,Bornstein, S. & Richardson, A. (1986) ''War and the International'', London: Socialist Platform, pg.5 including Jock Haston and Ted Grant. The group remained in the Labour Party, where they published ''Searchlight'' edited by Gerry Healy, which in September 1938 was replaced by the magazine ''Youth for Socialism'', which in its own turn was renamed ''Socialist Appeal'' in June 1941 as a result of the WIL's turn of focus away from the Labour Party. The group also produced a theoretical journal ''Wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
State Capitalism
State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor). The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies (agencies organized along business-management practices) or of public companies such as publicly listed corporations in which the state has controlling shares. Marxist literature defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with ownership or control by a state. By this definition, a state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production. This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman (; September 10, 1904 – November 4, 1972) was an American Marxist theorist. He went from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL–CIO President George Meany. Beginnings Shachtman was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated with his family to New York City in 1905. At an early age, he became interested in Marxism and was sympathetic to the radical wing of the Socialist Party. Having dropped out of City College, in 1921 he joined the Workers Council, a Communist organization led by J.B. Salutsky and Alexander Trachtenberg which was sharply critical of the underground form of organization of the Communist Party of America. At the end of December 1921 the Communist Party launched a "legal political party," the Workers Party of America, of which the Workers' Council was a constituent member. Shachtman thereby joined the official communist movement by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American SWP
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid Strike action, strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuban Revolution, Cuba. The SWP publishes ''The Militant'', a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928. It also maintains Pathfinder Press. History Communist League of America The SWP traces its origins back to the former Communist League of America (CLA), founded in 1928 by members of the CPUSA expelled for supporting Russian communist leader Leon Trotsky against Joseph Stalin. Concentrated almost exclusively in New York City and Minneapolis, the CLA did not have more than 100 adherents in 1929. After five years of propaganda work, the CLA remained a tiny organization, with a membership of about 200 and very little influence. The rise of fascism in Nazi Germany and the failure of the c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
