Bannister Boo Cats

Here is Luci and my Lleucu. Taken when we first got our two young small furry people!!

>^..^<

>^..^<

Having a juice in Brighton

Here we have Luci reading over a fresh juice in a juice bar in Brighton.

Mikey

Luci in the Boston snow

This fabulous picture is of my Luci in Boston a few years ago.
Why don't we have snow like this?

Mikey

Bookraid

Luci on an American bookraid

Kate's Mystery Books

Luci and me on one of our famouls shopping expeditions in Boston hunting down mystery novels...

My American friends: Ralph, Mya and their family

The cows of Madison

The coloured cows of Madison

Visit the Holt Labor Library

The Holt Library on Fell Street in San Francisco is always worth a visit. I went there today and spent time looking through their Trotskyoid archive. Stuff from the days of the US SWP, when led by Joseph Hansen and others.

take a look at the following weblink:

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/

A Decent Socialist Website

I have come across a new website, and whilst the politics may not be what I agree with, the site is fabulous and well organised. It is a group that was a split from the Workers World Party, for details of this see the following:
http://www.pslweb.org

The history of this split--as shown on Wikipedia-- is below:


The Workers World Party (WWP) is a Stalinist party in the United States founded in 1959 by Sam Marcy. Marcy and his followers split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1958 over a series of long-standing differences, among them Marcy's group's support for Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party in 1948, the positive view they held of the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong, and their endorsement of the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, all of which the SWP opposed.
The WWP describes itself as a party that has, since its founding, "supported the struggles of all oppressed peoples. It has recognized the right of nations to self-determination, including the nationally oppressed peoples inside the United States. It supports affirmative action as absolutely necessary in the fight for equality. It opposes all forms of racism and religious bigotry." Initially the WWP was confined to the Buffalo, New York area, where it had constituted the Buffalo and two other smaller branches of the SWP, but expanded in the 1960s. During the Civil Rights Movement the WWP had a youth movement, "Youth Against War and Fascism", which opposed the Vietnam War.

Mission

Ideologically, the WWP is a fusion of Trotskyism and several other interpretations of communism. WWP continues to make available the writings of many historic communists including Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao. The inclusion of Stalin and Mao along with Trotsky in a communist party is unusual, and is possibly unique to WWP. Most Trotskyist organizations seek out international affiliations, but WWP has organized solely in the United States.


Activities and Organizational Structure

Among activists, WWP has been well-known for sponsoring or directing numerous popular front groups, which critics allege are actually front groups. The party founded the Act Now To Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) coalition shortly after 9/11, and has run both the All People's Congress (APC) and the International Action Center (IAC) for many years. The APC and the IAC in particular share a large degree of overlap in their memberships with cadre in the WWP. In 2004, a youth group close with the WWP called Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) was founded, but FIST claims an independent left-wing political orientation and does not define itself as the WWP youth group.
Also in 2004, the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington DC branches of WWP left almost in their entirety to form the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The newly formed PSL assumed leadership of the ANSWER coalition, leaving the WWP to build a new group, the Troops Out Now Coalition.
True to what it sees as its fundamental principles, WWP has always remained primarily action-oriented. Its pamphlets and books are scarcely theoretical, though the documents are steeped in historical analysis and idiom as a platform for agitation. The party claims it is the most skillful practitioner of united front strategy (as opposed to just tactics) on the U.S. left. They prefer to win influence and leadership through what they see as their higher-than-usual degree of militancy, rather than purely through ideological advances. Critics contend that WWP is not nearly as grassroots or militant as it makes itself out to be, but defenders typically counter, either implicitly or vocally, that such criticism amounts to nothing more than anti-communist and/or right-wing banter. The WWP considers itself an important United States ally of third world solidarity movements.
WWP lists regional offices in 20 major US cities [1]. The WWP claims donations and volunteerism as the source of its funding and operational resources. However, as WWP is not a registered PAC or non-profit (501(c) et seq) organization, ultimate sources of the funds of the party are not public information.


Controversy

Within the U.S. communist movement, WWP's politics are extremely unusual and controversial. The party agrees with Trotsky's description of pre-1991 Russia as being a "degenerated workers' state" and that countries such as Cuba, North Korea and China are deformed workers states. But members of the party nevertheless use the term "socialist" to describe these states, and they often support them much more energetically than do other U.S. communist parties. The WWP also supports Iraq and Libya as countries they consider victims of U.S. imperialism — though it should be noted that WWP does not describe either of those two states as being socialist. The party also has a controversial position regarding the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which it describes as "a battle, not a massacre." Finally, the party opposed both Gulf Wars but was also one of the few U.S. communist groups other than the modern Spartacist League to hail the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Most controversially of all, however, is the fact that WWP has defended Slobodan Miloševi? and Saddam Hussein against attacks from both the right and the left. Notably, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, founder of the International Action Center, is in Iraq as of December 2005 acting as a consult to Hussein's defense team. Clark also spoke sympathetically of Miloševi? at his funeral in March 2006, telling the crowd, "History will prove that Slobodan Miloševi? was right."

The dying bookstores

Bookstores in San Francisco appear to be dying out. We have just found out that the great shop: A Clean and Well Lighted Place for Books has gone out of business in the last year. Also since then, Valencia books with the great bookstore cat Grumblebunny, has gone out of business too.
This is bad as chain stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble now dominate the shop market and Amazon the internet pushing small bookstores out of business, just as they do in the UK!
One day we will live to regret this loss.

Mikey

An odyssey through the USA

We have been travelling through the USA, starting in Madison, Wisconsin; then moving for a couple nights to Chicago Illinois--where it rained continuously on the last night--and now we are over in San Francisco.
Today we spent much time at the various bookshops and visited Borderlands (a great sci-fi bookstore) with a terrific bookstore cat called Ripley. She is adorable.

In the USA

I have arrived in the USA on my oddysey to meet US Trotz!
More later.
Mike

What we stand for

Who am I and what do I stand for?

Well, I am a Marxist and a member of the Labour Party. There's a contradiction in terms. I know many of the lefty bloggers and it seems to be catching on.
I am a member of the trade union UNISON and the assistant branch secretary of the Islington branch.

Politically, I was once in the IMG--International Marxist Group--then its follow-up groups, the Socialist league (who published Socialist Action), the International Socialist Group (ISG-publishers of Socialist Outlook). I left them in 1991 and became politically aligned to a mainly French group called the Lambertists, after Gauloise smoking leader Pierre Lambert.
Now I support a small group called Workers Action (see www.workersaction.org.uk ).

I nivite anyone who remembers all this or even me to write in and discuss those heady days back in the 1980's when we fought Reagan and Thatcher and spent our time in YCND and at Greenham Common.

Cheers for now

Mikey