title: Marion Arnott

text:
Marion Arnott is a Scottish mystery, science fiction and fantasy writer. Arnott also works as an English and history secondary school teacher at St Andrew's Academy in Paisley, Renfrewshire.

She won the Crime Writers' Association Short Dagger Award in 2001 with Prussian Snowdrops which focuses on a journalist who is sent to a remote part of Germany by the Nazis after making fun of the regime. She was also shortlisted for the award in 2002 for her short story Marbles, and in 2003 for Dollface.

Her fantasy short story, The Little Drummer Boy, was nominated for the 2007 British Fantasy Award for best short fiction. The story focuses on Francis, a boy who is routinely beaten by his father, who discovers he can leave his own body at will and enter other people's.

References

External links
 Personal Website

British science fiction writers
Scottish fantasy writers
Scottish science fiction writers
Scottish women writers
Women science fiction and fantasy writers
Scottish women novelists
People associated with Renfrewshire
21st-century Scottish women writers
Scottish schoolteachers


title: Anti-racism

text:
Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups. Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate actions which are intended to provide equal opportunities for all people on both an individual and a systemic level. As a philosophy, it can be engaged in by the acknowledgment of personal privileges, confronting acts as well as systems of racial discrimination and/or working to change personal racial biases. Major contemporary anti-racism efforts include the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and workplace anti-racism.

History

European origins
European racism was spread to the Americas by the Europeans, but establishment views were questioned when they were applied to indigenous peoples. After the discovery of the New World, many of the members of the clergy who were sent to the New World who were educated in the new humane values of the Renaissance, still new in Europe and not ratified by the Vatican, began to criticize Spain's as well as their own Church's treatment and views of indigenous peoples and slaves.

In December 1511, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar, was the first European to rebuke openly the Spanish authorities and administrators of Hispaniola for their "cruelty and tyranny" in dealing with the American natives and those forced to labor as slaves. King Ferdinand enacted the Laws of Burgos and Valladolid in response. However enforcement was lax, and the New Laws of 1542 have to be made to take a stronger line. Because some people like Fray Bartolomé de las Casas questioned not only the Crown but the Papacy at the Valladolid Controversy whether the Indians were truly men who deserved baptism, Pope Paul III in the papal bull Veritas Ipsa or Sublimis Deus (1537) confirmed that the Indians and other races are fully rational human beings who have rights to freedom and private property, even if they are heathen. Afterward, their Christian conversion effort gained momentum along social rights, while leaving the same status recognition unanswered for Africans of Black Race, and legal social racism prevailed towards the Indians or Asians. However, by then the last schism of the Reformation had taken place in Europe in those few decades along political lines, and the different views on the value of human lives of different races were not corrected in the lands of Northern Europe, which would join the Colonial race at the end of the century and over the next, as the Portuguese and Spanish Empires waned. It would take another century, with the influence of the French Empire at its height, and its consequent Enlightenment developed at the highest circles of its Court, to return these previously inconclusive issues to the forefront of the political discourse championed by many intellectual men since Rousseau. These issues gradually permeated to the lower social levels, where they were a reality lived by men and women of different races from the European racial majority.

Quaker initiatives

In 1688, with the "Germantown Petition Against Slavery", German immigrants created the first American document of its kind that made a plea for equal human rights for everyone. After being set aside and forgotten, it was rediscovered by the US abolitionist movement in 1844, misplaced around the 1940s, and once more rediscovered in March 2005. Prior to the American Revolution, a small group of Quakers, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, persuaded their fellow members of the Religious Society of Friends to free their slaves, divest from the slave trade, and create unified Quaker policies against slavery. This afforded their tiny religious denomination some moral authority to help begin the abolitionist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Woolman died of smallpox in England in 1775, shortly after crossing the Atlantic to bring his anti-slavery message to the Quakers of the British Isles.

During and after the American Revolution, Quaker ministrations and preachings against slavery began to spread beyond their denomination. In 1783, 300 Quakers, chiefly from the London area, presented the British Parliament with their signatures on the first petition against the slave trade. In 1785, Englishman Thomas Clarkson, enrolled at Cambridge, and in the course of writing an essay in Latin (Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare (Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?), read the works of Benezet, and began a lifelong effort to outlaw the slave trade in England. In 1787, sympathizers formed the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, a small nondenominational group that could lobby more successfully by incorporating Anglicans, who, unlike the Quakers, could lawfully sit in Parliament. The twelve founding members included nine Quakers and three pioneering Anglicans: Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce – all evangelical Christians.

Abolitionist movement
Later successes in opposing racism were won by the abolitionist movement in England and in the United States.  Though many Abolitionists did not regard blacks or mulattos as equal to whites, they did, in general, believe in freedom and often even equality of treatment for all people. A few, like John Brown, went further. Brown was willing to die on behalf of, as he said, "millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments ..." Many black Abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, explicitly argued for the humanity of blacks and mulattoes, and the equality of all people.

Due to resistance in the Southern United States, however, and a general collapse of idealism in the North, Reconstruction ended, and gave way to the nadir of American race relations. The period from about 1890 to 1920 saw the re-establishment of Jim Crow laws. President Woodrow Wilson, who regarded Reconstruction as a disaster, segregated the federal government. The Ku Klux Klan grew to its greatest peak of popularity and strength. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was a movie sensation.

In 1911 the First Universal Races Congress met in London, at which distinguished speakers from many countries for four days discussed race problems and ways to improve interracial relations.

Scientific anti-racism
Friedrich Tiedemann was one of the first people to scientifically contest racism. In 1836, using craniometric and brain measurements (taken by him from Europeans and black people from different parts of the world), he refuted the belief of many contemporary naturalists and anatomists that black people have smaller brains and are thus intellectually inferior to white people, saying it was scientifically unfounded and based merely on the prejudiced opinions of travelers and explorers. The evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin wrote in 1871 that ‘[i]t may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant’ and that ‘[a]lthough the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points.’

German ethnographer Adolf Bastian promoted the idea known as "psychic unity of mankind", the belief in a universal mental framework present in all humans regardless of race. Rudolf Virchow, an early biological anthropologist criticized Ernst Haeckel's classification of humanity into "higher and lower races". The two authors influenced American anthropologist Franz Boas who promoted the idea that differences in behavior between human populations are purely cultural rather than determined by biological differences. Later anthropologists like Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, Pierre Clastres, and Claude Lévi-Strauss continued to focus on culture and reject racial models of differences in human behavior.

Interwar period: Racial Equality Proposal

After the end of seclusion in the 1850s, Japan signed unequal treaties, the so-called Ansei Treaties, but soon came to demand equal status with the Western powers. Correcting that inequality became the most urgent international issue of the Meiji government. In that context, the Japanese delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference proposed the clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The first draft was presented to the League of Nations Commission by Makino Nobuaki on 13 February as an amendment to Article 21:The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of States Members of the League equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.After Makino's speech, Lord Cecil stated that the Japanese proposal was a very controversial one and he suggested that perhaps the matter was so controversial that it should not be discussed at all. Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos also suggested that a clause banning religious discrimination should also be removed since that was also a very controversial matter. That led to objections from a Portuguese diplomat, who stated that his country had never signed a treaty before that did not mention God, which caused Cecil to remark perhaps this time, they would all just have to a take a chance of avoiding the wrath of the Almighty by not mentioning Him.

Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes clarified his opposition and announced at a meeting that "ninety-five out of one hundred Australians rejected the very idea of equality.
Hughes had entered politics as a trade unionist and, like most others in the working class, was very strongly opposed to Asian immigration to Australia. (The exclusion of Asian immigration was a popular cause with unions in Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand in the early 20th century.)

The Chinese delegation, which was otherwise at daggers drawn with the Japanese over the question of the former German colony of Qingdao and the rest of the German concessions in Shandong Province, also said that it would support the clause. However, one Chinese diplomat said at the time that the Shandong question was far more important to his government than the clause.
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George found himself in an awkward situation since Britain had signed an alliance with Japan in 1902, but he also wanted to hold the British Empire's delegation together.

Although the proposal received a majority (11 out of 16) of votes, the proposal was still problematic for the segregationist US President Woodrow Wilson, who needed the votes of segregationist Southern Democrats to succeed in getting the votes needed for the US Senate to ratify the treaty. Strong opposition from the British Empire delegations gave him a pretext to reject the proposal. Hughes and Joseph Cook vigorously opposed it as it undermined the White Australia policy.

Mid-century revival in the United States

Opposition to racism revived in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Ashley Montagu argued for the equality of humans across races and cultures. Eleanor Roosevelt was a very visible advocate for minority rights during this period. Anti-capitalist organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World, which gained popularity during 1905–1926, were explicitly egalitarian.

In the 1940s Springfield, Massachusetts, invoked The Springfield Plan to include all persons in the community.

Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance and continuing into the 1960s, many African-American writers argued forcefully against racism.

1960s expansion
The struggles against racial segregation in the United States and South African apartheid including Sharpeville massacre saw increased articulation of ideas opposed to racism of all kinds.

During the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow laws were repealed in the South and blacks finally re-won the right to vote in Southern states. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an influential force, and his "I Have a Dream" speech is a condensation of his egalitarian ideology.

21st century
Mass mobilization around the Black Lives Matter movement have sparked a renewed interest in antiracism in the U.S. Mass movement organizing has also been accompanied by academic efforts to foreground research regarding antiracism in politics, criminal justice reform, inclusion in higher education, and workplace antiracism.

Intervention strategies
Anti-racism has taken various forms such as consciousness-raising activities aimed at educating people about the ways they may perpetuate racism, enhancing cross-cultural understanding between racial groups, countering "everyday" racism in institutional settings, and combating extremist right-wing neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist groups.

Proponents of anti-racism claim that microaggressions can lead to many negative consequences in a work environment, learning environment, and to their overall sense of self-worth. Antiracism work aims to combat microaggressions and help to break systemic racism by focusing on actions against discrimination and oppression. Standing up against discrimination can be an overwhelming task for people of color who have been previously targeted. Antiracists claim that microinterventions can be a tool used to act against racial discrimination.

Microintervention strategies aim to provide the tools needed to confront and educate racial oppressors. Specific tactics include: revealing the hidden biases or agendas behind acts of discrimination, interrupting and challenging oppressive language, educating offenders, and connecting with other allies and community members to act against discrimination. The theory is that these microinterventions allow the oppressor to see the impact of their words, and provide a space for an educational dialogue about how their actions can oppress people marginalized groups.

Microaggressions can be conscious acts where the perpetrator is aware of the offense they are causing, or hidden and metacommunicated without the perpetrator's awareness. Regardless of whether microaggressions are conscious or unconscious behaviors, the first antiracist intervention is to name the ways it is harmful for a person of color. Calling out an act of discrimination can be empowering because it provides language for people of color to bring awareness to their lived experiences and justifies internal feelings of discrimination.

Antiracist strategies also include confronting the racial microaggression by outwardly challenging and disagreeing against the microaggression that harms a person of color. Microinterventions such as a verbal expression of "I don't want to hear that talk" and physical movements of disapproval are ways to confront microaggressions. Microinterventions are not used to attack others about their biases, but instead they are used to allow the space for an educational dialogue. Educating a perpetrator on their biases can open up a discussion about how the intention of a comment or action can have a damaging impact. For example, phrases such as "I know you meant that joke to be funny, but that stereotype really hurt me" can educate a person on the difference between what was intended and how it is harmful to a person of color. Antiracist microintervention strategies give the tools for people of color, white allies, and bystanders to combat against microaggressions and acts of discrimination.

It is important that white racial justice activists are mindful in not causing activism burnout for activists of color. According to Gorski and Erakat (2019), of the 22 racial justice activists in the sample, 82% of the participants identified behaviors and attitudes of the white racial justice activists as a major source of the burnout that they feel. The same study also found that 72.2% of the participants said that the cause of their burnout was attributed to the white activists having unevolved or racist views. 44.4% of the activists also said that their burnout was due to white activists invalidating their perspectives as activists of color. 50% of the participants said that their burnout was caused by white activists not willing to "step up" to achieve the goals of the movement. 44.4% of participants said that their burnout was due to white fragility. 50% of the participants said that their burnout was caused by white activists taking credit for the work of activists of color or exploiting them in other ways.

Influence

Egalitarianism has been a catalyst for feminist, anti-war, and anti-imperialist movements. Henry David Thoreau's opposition to the Mexican–American War, for example, was based in part on his fear that the U.S. was using the war as an excuse to expand slavery into new territories. Thoreau's response was chronicled in his famous essay "Civil Disobedience", which in turn helped ignite Mahatma Gandhi's successful campaign against the British in India. Gandhi's example in turn inspired the American civil rights movement. As James Loewen writes in Lies My Teacher Told Me: "Throughout the world, from Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our abolitionist and civil rights movements."

Criticism
Some of these uses have been controversial. Critics in the United Kingdom, such as Peter Hain, stated that in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe had used anti-racist rhetoric to promote land distribution, whereby privately held land was taken from white farmers and distributed to black Africans (see: Land reform in Zimbabwe). Roman Catholic bishops stated that Mugabe framed the land distribution as a way to liberate Zimbabwe from colonialism, but that "the white settlers who once exploited what was Rhodesia have been supplanted by a black elite that is just as abusive."

Opposition

White genocide conspiracy theory

The phrase "Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white", coined by white nationalist Robert Whitaker, is commonly associated with the topic of white genocide, a white nationalist conspiracy theory which states that mass immigration, integration, miscegenation, low fertility rates and abortion are being promoted in predominantly white countries in order to deliberately turn them minority-white and hence cause white people to become extinct through forced assimilation. The phrase has been spotted on billboards near Birmingham, Alabama in 2014, and in Harrison, Arkansas in 2013.

Organizations and institutions

International
 European Commission against Racism and Intolerance
 International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
 UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance
 World Conference against Racism

Europe
 Aktion Courage (Germany)
 Anti-Nazi League (United Kingdom)
 Aktion Kinder des Holocaust (Switzerland)
 Anti-Fascist Action (United Kingdom)
 Black Equity Organisation (United Kingdom)
 Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (United Kingdom)
 Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (Belgium)
 Félag Anti-Rasista (Iceland)
 Forever Family (United Kingdom)
 Hepimiz Zokorayız (Turkey)
 Institute of Race Relations (United Kingdom)
 In IUSTITIA (Czech Republic)
 Les Indivisibles (France)
 Love Music Hate Racism (United Kingdom)
 Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples (France)
 National Assembly Against Racism (United Kingdom)
 "Never Again" Association (Poland)
 Newham Monitoring Project (United Kingdom)
Racist and Xenophobic Behaviour Monitoring Centre (Poland)
 Residents Against Racism (Ireland)
 Rock Against Racism (United Kingdom)
 Show Racism the Red Card (United Kingdom)
 SOS Racisme (France)
 Stand Up To Racism (United Kingdom)
 Unite Against Fascism (United Kingdom)
 UNITED for Intercultural Action (all of Europe)

North America
 Anti-Racism and Hate (United States)
 By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) (United States)
 Anti-Racist Action (North America)
 Black Lives Matter (United States)
 Catalyst Project (United States)
 Friends Stand United (United States)
 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (United States)
 One People's Project (United States)
 Roots of Resistance (Canada) [defunct]
 Red and Anarchist Skinheads (United States)
 Redneck Revolt (United States)
 Showing Up for Racial Justice (United States)
 Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (United States)
 Stop AAPI Hate (United States)
 The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (United States)
 Vera Institute of Justice

Academic
 American University - Antiracist Research and Policy Center
 Boston University - Center for Anti-Racist Research, headed by Ibram X. Kendi
 Georgetown University - Racial Justice Institute
 Temple University - Center for Anti-Racism
 Rutgers University - Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice
 Ohio State University - Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
 University of California, Berkeley - Othering & Belonging Institute

Other
 All Together Now (Australia)
 Fight Dem Back (Australia and New Zealand)
 People's Front of Anti Racism (Japan)

See also

 Allophilia
 Anti-bias curriculum
 Approaches to prejudice reduction
 Color blindness (race) in the United States
 Critical race theory
 Environmental justice
 Index of racism-related articles
 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination
 Internal resistance to apartheid
 Multiculturalism
 Political correctness
 Stop Asian Hate
 Social justice
 Abolitionist Teaching

References

Further reading

 Michael, Ali (2014) Raising Race Questions, Teachers College Press.

External links

 Anti-racism Digital Library and International Anti-racism Thesaurus

 All Together Now

Social theories
White genocide conspiracy theory


title: Labiobaetis soldani

text:
Labiobaetis soldani is a species of mayfly found in the Tirunelveli district of India.  The species was named after Dr. T.
Soldan.  The larvae were collected in a slow-flowing perennial stream.  Larvae were light brown in coloration with yellow antennae and gills on abdominal segments 1-7.  Male larvae measured 4 millimeters while female larvae measured 4.8 millimeters.  Male imagoes were 5.2 millimeters, while females measured 5.0 millimeters.  Both sexes had transparent forewings 3.5 millimeters long and no hind wings.  Head and thorax were dark brown, with yellow legs.  Males' abdomens were reddish brown or white, while females' were brown.

References

Mayflies
Insects of India
Fauna of Tamil Nadu
Insects described in 2014
Endemic fauna of the Western Ghats


title: Electricity (Supply) Act 1919

text:
The Electricity (Supply) Act 1919 (9 & 10 Geo. 5. c. 100) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which amended the law with respect to the supply of electricity. It established the statutory body of the Electricity Commissioners ‘to promote, regulate and supervise the supply of electricity’ under the direction of the Board of Trade. It provided for the formation of electricity districts and, where necessary, the establishment of joint electricity authorities, ‘to provide or secure the provision of a cheap and abundant supply of electricity’.

Background
In 1917, the UK government was planning the reconstruction of the nation's industries after the First World War. The Board of Trade set up the Electric Power Supply Committee, chaired by Sir Archibald Williamson, which proposed the effective nationalisation of the industry.

Subsequently, in 1919 under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Birchenough, the Advisory Council to the Ministry of Reconstruction produced the Report of the Committee of Chairmen on Electric Power Supply. The committee were asked to submit general comments or suggestions on the broad administrative and commercial issues which had arisen out of the Williamson Report. The Birchenough Committee generally agreed with the Williamson Report but recommended that generation and transmission should be a single unified system with state regulation and finance and that means should be found for including distribution as well. This recommendation was very far-sighted but considered too ambitious by the government. If acted upon it would have anticipated the Electricity Act 1947 by 28 years.

Parliament rejected what would have been the effective nationalisation of the industry but enacted two of the committee's recommendations in a weaker form, including the setting up of the Electricity Commissioners and a number of joint electricity authorities formed by the electricity suppliers in each area.

The Electricity (Supply) Act 1919, was based essentially on the Williamson and Birchenough reports and introduced central co-ordination by establishing the Electricity Commissioners, an official body responsible for securing reorganisation on a regional basis.

The Electricity (Supply) Act 1919
The Electricity (Supply) Act 1919 received royal assent on 23 December 1919. Its long title is: ’An Act to amend the Law with respect to the supply of electricity’.

Provisions
The provisions of the Act were as follows.

Electricity Commissioners

To established a body called the Electricity Commissioners to promote, regulate and supervise the supply of electricity (section 1 (1)).  The number of commissioners and their duties (section 1 (2–8). The Board of Trade to exercise its duties through the Commissioners (section 3). Commissioners to conduct experiments on electricity supply (section 3). Appointment of advisory committee (section 4).

Reorganisation of supply of electricity

Determination of electricity districts (section 5). Establishment of joint electricity authorities (section 6). Making orders to confirm schemes (section 7). Powers and duties of joint electricity authorities (section 8).

Generating stations

A joint electricity authority may own a generating station or main transmission line (section 9) and acquire land (section 10). Extensions and new stations require consent of the commissioners (section 11).

Powers of joint electricity authorities

Powers of joint electricity authorities (section 12). Transfer of undertakings to joint electricity authorities (section 13), power companies and joint electricity authorities (section 14), subsidiary powers such as abstraction of water, waste heat, by-product plant (section 15). Deprivation of employment (section 16), plans for capital expenditure (section 17).

Transitory provisions

Construction of interim works (section 18), mutual assistance between undertakings permitted (section  19).

Amendments of Electric Lighting Acts

Transfer of powers of the Ministry of Health, the Scottish Office and London County Council (section 20). Wayleaves (section  22), supply of apparatus (section 23), alteration of type of current (section 24). Amendment of 1882 Act (section 25), substitution of special for provisional orders (section 26), requirement for accounts (section 27).

Financial provisions

Revenue and expenditure of joint electricity authorities (section 28), expenses and appropriation of Electricity Commissioners (section 29), other expenses (section 30).

General

Agreements and arrangements (section 32). Holding inquiries (section 33), power to make rules (section 34). Special orders (section 35). Definitions (section 36). Application to Scotland and Ireland (sections 37 and 38). Transfer of powers of Board of Trade to Minister of Transport (section 39). Short title and construction (section 40).

Schedule relating to section 35.

Joint electricity authorities
Four joint electricity authorities were established after the Electricity (Supply) Act 1922 had enabled then to borrow money to finance electricity schemes.

Main article: Joint Electricity Authorities

 North Wales & South Cheshire JEA
 London and Home Counties JEA
 West Midlands JEA
 North West Midlands JEA.

Later enactments
The Electricity (Supply) Act 1922 (12 & 13 Geo. 5. c. 46). Enabled joint electricity authorities to borrow money to finance electricity schemes.

The London Electricity (No. 1) Act 1925 (14 & 15 Geo. 5. c. lxii) and the London Electricity (No. 2) Act 1925 (14 & 15 Geo. 5. c. lxiii) permitted the London and Home Counties Joint Electricity Authority to purchase company electricity undertakings in the London area.

The Electricity (Supply) Act 1926 (16 & 17 Geo. 5. c. 51), established the Central Electricity Board.

The Electricity Act 1947 (10 & 11 Geo. 6. c. 54), nationalised the UK electricity supply industry. The Electricity Commissioners and the joint electricity authorities were abolished. The ownership of electricity generation and transmission facilities were vested in the British Electricity Authority, and electricity distribution and sales in local electricity boards.

The 1919 Act and most other electricity-related British legislation were repealed and replaced by the Electricity Act 1989.

See also

 Electric Lighting Acts 1882 to 1909
 Electricity (Supply) Act 1922
 Electricity (Supply) Act 1935
 Electricity Act 1947
 Electricity Act 1957
 Electricity Act 1989
 Timeline of the UK electricity supply industry

References

United Kingdom Acts of Parliament 1919
1919 in England
Electric power in the United Kingdom


title: Assassination of Augusto Unceta Barrenechea

text:
The assassination of Augusto Unceta Barrenechea was an attack by the Basque separatist group ETA which took place on 8 October 1977 in Guernica in the Basque Country in northern Spain.

Three ETA members carrying pistols and submachine guns killed Unceta, the Government appointed President of the Provincial Deputation of Biscay and Mayor of Guernica. He was ambushed as he arrived to play his weekly sports game. His two bodyguards, Antonio Hernández Fernández-Segura and Ángel Rivera Navarrón were also killed in the attack, which was ETA's deadliest of 1977. The attack heralded an upsurge in the use of violence by ETA in subsequent years.

Background
The attack resembled the assassination of Juan María de Araluce Villar, the Government appointed President of the Provincial Deputation of Gipuzkoa, a year before. Following that attack, ETA had stated that they intended to kill all Franco-appointed heads of the delegations in the Basque Country. On 2 October 1977, ETA political-military, one of three ETA factions, had announced that it was abandoning the use of violence.

On 5 October, the Anti-communist Apostolic Alliance (AAA), a far-right paramilitary group, had bombed the offices of Punto y Hora, a left wing Basque nationalist weekly publication and on 7 October, the day before the attack, they shot dead a taxi driver who they accused of having ETA links.

Also on 7 October, the government had agreed a draft bill granting amnesty to political prisoners of the Franco government. The law was passed by parliament on 14 October 1977.

Target
Unceta had been born in Guernica on 5 December 1923. He had interests in local businesses and served as manager of Astra-Unceta y Cia SA, a large weapons manufacturing company founded by his father. He had been appointed vice-president of the delegation of Biscay by Franco in 1966 and later became President of the delegation. His last official act before his death was in September 1977, when he participated in a memorial service for Juan María de Araluce Villar.

He had received letters from ETA, demanding that he pay their "revolutionary tax" but refused to do so. He had also received ETA death threats and, as a result, had been granted a bodyguard of two civil guards.

The attack
Unceta was fond of 'fronton', a Basque sport, which he played weekly at the Jai alai court. The attack occurred when he arrived at the court: as he was parking his car, three youths exited a nearby car and opened fire on him and his bodyguards with machine guns, shouting "Gora Euzkadi!" as they did so. He was hit several times in the head and chest and died at the scene of the attack. His bodyguards, who had been travelling in a car 20 metres behind him, were also killed.

The attack, which was claimed later the same day by ETA-military, was ETA's deadliest of the year and the second deadliest attack in Spain that year following the AAA's killing of five left-wingers in the Atocha massacre in January.

Reactions
The killing of Unceta was criticised as an attempt to destabilise the ongoing process of compromise between the Spanish government and the opposition. In their claim of responsibility, ETA rejected this hypothesis, stating that, in their opinion, democracy had not been established in Spain and the country remained a military dictatorship.

The assassination was condemned by all the main political parties on the left and right in Spain and the Spanish king and queen cancelled their attendance at a concert as a mark of respect.

Unceta's funeral was attended by an estimated 5,000 people, including politicians from the governing Union of the Democratic Centre, the Basque Nationalist Party and the Basque Christian Democracy party. At the funeral, right wing activists belonging to New Force and the People's Alliance held an anti-government protest, calling for the government to resign, banging on the cars of politicians attending the funeral and surrounding and unsuccessfully attempting to overturn the car of Eduardo Navarro, the Deputy Interior Minister.

A memorial plaque to Unceta was subsequently placed in the Bilbao Palace, however an attempt to place a plaque commemorating both Unceta and Araluce was voted out in 2010. In August 2008, a street in Socuéllamos, the home town of Ángel Rivera Navarrón, one of the civil guards killed in the attack, was renamed in his memory.

Subsequent police investigation
Following the attack, police cordoned off the area and increased police patrols on the Spanish-French border near Irun and on the mountainous highways in the Basque Country and Navarre. The car used by the attackers was found abandoned near the highway linking Guernica and Amorbieta, it had been stolen at gunpoint by three youths on the morning of the attack.

Police retrieved parabellum and marietta shell casings from both the attackers' and the victim's cars. In December 1978, police arrested José Antonio Torre Altonaga (alias Medios), who named two ETA commanders, José Manuel Pagoaga Gallastegui (Peixoto), and Francisco Javier Aya Zulaica (Trepa), as participants in the attack. Trepa's father released a statement denying his son's involvement.

In 1989, ETA member Martín Apaolaza was tried and acquitted of participation in the attack due to lack of evidence.

Aftermath
The attack marked the beginning of a deadlier phase in ETA's operations and the following three years would see an increase in attacks and killings carried out by the group.

References

1977 disasters in Spain
1977 mass shootings in Europe
1977 murders in Spain
Assassinations in Spain
Deaths by firearm in Spain
Deaths by person in Spain
ETA (separatist group) actions
Guernica
Mass shootings in Spain
October 1977 events in Europe
Terrorist incidents in Europe in 1977
Terrorist incidents in Spain in the 1970s


title: Chiropsalmidae

text:
Chiropsalmidae is a family of venomous box jellyfish within the class Cubozoa.

Genera
 Chiropsalmus Agassiz, 1862
Chiropsalmus alipes Gershwin, 2006
Chiropsalmus quadrumanus (F. Muller, 1859)
 Chiropsoides Southcott, 1956
 Chiropsoides buitendijki (van der Horst, 1907)

References

Chirodropida
Cnidarian families


title: Anne-Elizabeth Stone

text:
Anne-Elizabeth Stone, commonly known as Eliza Stone, (born December 31, 1990) is an American sabre fencer. Her results include an individual bronze medal at the 2018 World Fencing Championships and a team gold medal in the 2014 World Championships.

Career
Stone grew up fencing with her younger brother and sister in Chicago. She first took ballet lessons. She switched to fencing at the age of ten after her father saw a flier for a fencing club at a pizza parlor and thought it would be a good sport for his children. All three ended up fencing for Princeton University.

Stone joined the US national team in the 2012–13 season, during which she took the silver medal in the Pan American Championships after being defeated in the final by two-time Olympic champion Mariel Zagunis. In the 2013 World Championships at Budapest, she was stopped in the second round by Matylda Ostojska of Poland. In the team event, the United States defeated Belarus and Azerbaijan before being stopped in the semi-finals by Russia. They then topped Italy to earn the bronze medal.

The next season, Stone climbed  her first World Cup podium in Dakar. A second bronze followed in the Moscow Grand Prix. In the 2014 World Championships at Kazan, Stone was stopped in the third round by Poland's Aleksandra Socha. In the team event, the United States prevailed over Kazakhstan, China, then Ukraine and met France in the final. They won 45-39 to take the gold medal.

At the 2018 World Fencing Championships in Wuxi, Stone finished with a bronze medal for her best individual result to date, falling in the semi-finals to eventual champion Sofia Pozdniakova. In January 2019, she achieved the No. 1 individual ranking in the United States for Women's Saber. In June 2019 she won her first gold medal at the Pan-American Games, and as a result achieved a career high ranking of 5th in the world.

In 2013 Stone obtained a BA in political science from Princeton University.

She qualified to represent the United States in fencing at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. She competed individually and in the team event alongside teammates Mariel Zagunis, Dagmara Wozniak, and Francesca Russo.

Stone commissioned as an officer in the US Navy Medical Corps in 2022 and is currently earning her medical doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

References

External links

Profile at the US Fencing Federation

1990 births
Living people
American female sabre fencers
Sportspeople from Chicago
Pan American Games medalists in fencing
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Fencers at the 2019 Pan American Games
World Fencing Championships medalists
Medalists at the 2019 Pan American Games
Fencers at the 2020 Summer Olympics
Olympic fencers for the United States
21st-century American women


title: Socialist Workers Party (United States)

text:
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a Trotskyist 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 strikes and is strongly supportive of 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 communist and social democratic left to stop its rise created a situation where radical parties throughout the world reexamined their priorities and sought mechanisms for building united action. As early as December 1933, a Trotskyist splinter group called the Communist League of Struggle (CLS), headed by former Socialist Party youth section leader Albert Weisbord and his wife Vera Buch, approached Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party of America seeking a united front hunger march of the two organizations followed by a general strike. This suggestion was dismissed as "poppycock" by SP Executive Secretary Clarence Senior, but the seed of the idea of joint action had been planted.

Entryism

Early in 1934, some French Trotskyists of the Communist League conceived of the idea of entering the French Socialist Party (the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière or SFIO) in order to recruit members for the Trotskyists, or so some critics have charged. The group retained its identity as a factional organization inside the SFIO and built a base among the party's youth section, continuing their activity until popular front action between the SFIO and the mainline Communist Party of France made their position untenable. This tactic of "entering" the larger social democratic parties of each country, endorsed by Trotsky himself, became known as the "French Turn" and was replicated by various Trotskyist parties around the world. In 1934, the Communist League of America merged with the American Workers Party led by A. J. Muste, forming the Workers Party of the United States.

Throughout 1935, the Workers Party was deeply divided over the "entryism" tactic called for by the "French Turn" and a bitter debate swept the organization. Ultimately, the majority faction of Jim Cannon, Max Shachtman and James Burnham won the day and the Workers Party determined to enter the Socialist Party of America, though a minority faction headed by Hugo Oehler refused to accept this result and split from the organization.

The Socialist Party was itself beset with factional disagreements. The party's left-wing Militant faction sought to expand the organization into an "all-inclusive party"—inviting in members of the Lovestone and Trotskyist movements as well as radical individuals as the first step towards making the Socialist Party a mass party. Although there were no mass entries at this time, several radical oppositionists did make their way into the party, including former Communist Party leader Benjamin Gitlow, youth leader and ex-Jay Lovestone supporter Herbert Zam and attorney and American Workers Party activist Albert Goldman. Goldman at this time also joined with YPSL leader Ernest Erber to establish a newspaper in Chicago with a Trotskyist orientation, The Socialist Appeal, later to serve as the organ of the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Party.

In January 1936, just as the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party was expelling the Old Guard for their factional organization and alleged "violation of party discipline", James Cannon and his faction won their internal battle in the Workers Party to join the Socialist Party, when a national branch referendum voted unanimously for entry. Negotiations commenced with the Socialist Party leadership, with the admissions ultimately made on the basis of individual applications for membership rather than admission of the Workers Party and its approximately 2,000 members as a group. On June 6, 1936, the Workers Party's weekly newspaper, The New Militant, published its last issue and announced "Workers Party Calls All Revolutionary Workers to Join Socialist Party".

Although party leader Jim Cannon later hinted that the entry of the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party had been a contrived tactic aimed at stealing "confused young Left Socialists" for his own organization, it seemed that at its inception the entryist tactic was made in good faith. Historian Constance Myers notes that while "initial prognoses for the union of Trotskyists and Socialists were favorable", it was only later when "constant and protracted contact caused differences to surface". The Trotskyists retained a common orientation with the radicalized Socialist Party in their opposition to the European war, their preference for industrial unionism and the Congress of Industrial Organizations over the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor, a commitment to trade union activism, the defense of the Soviet Union as the first workers' state while at the same time maintaining an antipathy toward the Stalin government and in their general aims in the 1936 election.

Cannon went to Tujunga, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, to establish another new newspaper, Labor Action, targeted to trade unionists and Socialist Party members and aimed at winning them over to Trotskyist views while Shachtman and Burnham handled the bulk of the faction's activities in New York. Norman Thomas attracted nearly 188,000 votes in his 1936 Socialist Party run for President, but performed poorly in historic strongholds of the party. Moreover, the party's membership had begun to decline. The organization was deeply factionalized, with the Militant faction split into right ("Altmanite"), center ("Clarity") and left ("Appeal") factions, in addition to the radical pacifists led by Thomas. A special convention was planned for the last week of March 1937 to set the party's future policy, initially intended as an unprecedented "secret" gathering.

Split from the Socialist Party of America
Prior to the March convention, the Trotskyist Socialist Appeal faction held an organizational gathering of their own in Chicago, with 93 delegates gathering on February 20–22, 1937. The meeting organized the faction on a permanent basis, electing a National Action Committee of five to "coordinate branch work" and "formulate Appeal policies". Two delegates from the Clarity caucus were in attendance. James Burnham vigorously attacked the Labour and Socialist International, the international organization of left-wing parties to which the Socialist Party belonged and tension rose along these lines among the Trotskyists. United action between the Clarity and Appeal groups was not forthcoming and an emergency meeting of Vincent Dunne and Cannon was held in New York with leaders of the various factions including Thomas, Jack Altman and Gus Tyler of Clarity. At this meeting, Thomas pledged that the upcoming convention would make no effort to terminate the newspapers of the various factions.

There was no action to expel the Trotskyist Appeal faction, but pressure continued to build along these lines, egged on by the Communist Party's increasingly vehement denunciations of Trotsky and his followers as wreckers and agents of international fascism. The convention passed a ban on future branch resolutions on controversial matters, an effort to rein in the activities of the factions at the local level. It also banned factional newspapers, establishing a national organ instead.

Constance Myers indicates that three factors led to the Trotskyists' expulsion from the Socialist Party in 1937: the divergence between the official Socialists and the Trotskyist faction on the issues, the determination of Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists, and Trotsky's own decision to move toward a break with the party. Recognizing that the Clarity faction had chosen to stand with the Altmanites and the Thomas group, Trotsky recommended that the Appeal group focus on disagreements over Spain to provoke a split. At the same time, Thomas, freshly returned from Spain, had concluded that the Trotskyists had joined the Socialist Party not to make it stronger, but to capture it for their own purposes.

On June 24–25, 1937, a meeting of the Appeal faction's National Action Committee voted to ratchet up the rhetoric against the American Labor Party and Republican nominee for mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia (a favorite son of many in Socialist ranks) and to reestablish their newspaper, The Socialist Appeal. This was met with expulsions from the party beginning August 9 with a rump meeting of the Central Committee of Local New York, which expelled 52 New York Trotskyists by a vote of 48 to 2 (with 18 abstentions) and ordering 70 more to be brought up on charges. Wholesale expulsions followed, with a major section of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) leaving the party with the Trotskyists.

The 1,000 or so Trotskyists who entered the Socialist Party in 1936 exited in the summer of 1937 with their ranks swelled by another 1,000. On December 31, 1937, representatives of this faction gathered in Chicago to establish a new political organization—the Socialist Workers Party.

Formation of the Socialist Workers Party
The October 2, 1937 issue of the Socialist Appeal included a convention call from the so-called "Left Wing" to "All Locals and Branches of the Socialist Party", accusing the NEC of the party of having "betrayed the principles of socialism" by withdrawing the party's candidate for mayor of New York in favor of LaGuardia and for having ordered "the bureaucratic expulsion of all the revolutionary members of the party who oppose and obstruct this sell-out policy". A convention was called by four Socialist Party State Committees, the NEC of the YPSL and the organized Left Wing organizations of Chicago and New York, originally slated for Thanksgiving weekend, November 25–28, in Chicago, but it was soon postponed until December 31 "in order to provide adequate time for discussion by the membership" of important questions.

In December 1937, an agenda was published by the Convention Organizing Committee naming Cannon as the primary reporter on the Trade Union question, Shachtman on the Russian Resolution, Goldman on the Spanish Resolution, Canadian Maurice Spector on the International Resolution, Burnham on the Declaration of Principles of the new organization and Abern on Party Organization and Constitution. The gathering was to conclude with the election of a new National Committee.

On December 31, over 100 regular and fraternal delegates gathered in Chicago, where they were greeted by a speech of welcome delivered by Chicago leader Albert Goldman, a labor attorney. As editor of the Trotskyist movement's ongoing theoretical magazine, The New International, Shachtman delivered the first official report to the gathering, dealing with the political situation in the United States. He declared: It is entirely inconceivable that American imperialism can succeed in resisting the inexorable tendencies that are pulling it into the vortex of the coming world war.
If the working class is unable to prevent the outbreak of war, and the United States enters directly into it, our party stands pledged to the traditional position of revolutionary Marxism.
It will utilize the crisis of capitalist rule engendered by the war to prosecute the class struggle with the utmost intransigence, to strengthen the independent labor and revolutionary movements, and to bring the war to a close by the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of proletarian rule in the form of the workers state.

The convention devoted a full day to discussion of the labor movement's problems and the role of the new organization in the unions, with Cannon delivering the primary report. While criticizing the "reactionary role which the AFL leadership has played", Cannon declared that "our party...takes a clear-cut position in favor of the earliest and completest possible unification of the AFL and the CIO, and also the hitherto unaffiliated Railroad Brotherhoods".

1940 split
The 1940 split in the SWP followed an internal factional debate over the party's internal government, the class nature of the Russian state and Marxist philosophy and other questions. The SWP experienced many other factional conflicts and splits in its history, but this was the largest and foreshadowed many features of those to come.

The majority faction, led by Cannon, supported Trotsky's position that the Soviet Union remained a "workers' state" and should be supported in any war with capitalist states, despite their opposition to Stalin's government. The minority faction, led by Shachtman, held that the Soviet Union should not be supported in its war with Finland. One of its leaders, James Burnham, held in addition that the Soviet Union had degenerated so far that it deserved no defense whatsoever. Like this debate, most later factional disputes within the SWP centered on different attitudes toward revolutions in other countries.

The opposition faction alleged that Cannon's leadership of the SWP was "bureaucratic conservative" and demanded the right to its own publications to express its views outside the party. The majority faction said this was contrary to Lenin's concept of democratic centralism and that disagreements within the SWP should be debated only internally. Similar disagreements over the SWP's internal government have surfaced in most later faction fights, with most later opposition factions raising similar demands and accusations. Despite this, most of these later factions claimed political descent from Cannon and the SWP majority, not from earlier opposition factions and splinter parties.

The minority faction led by Shachtman eventually split away almost 40% of the party's membership and 80% of its youth organization, the Young People's Socialist League, forming the Workers Party.

World War II
A number of members were imprisoned under the Smith Act of 1941, under Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, including Cannon (see Smith Act Trials). Those imprisoned included the main national leaders of the SWP and those members most prominent in the Midwest Teamsters. With Roosevelt's decision to increase the power of the FBI during this time, the arrests were made swiftly.

The party put into practice the so-called Proletarian Military Policy of opposing the war politically while attempting to transform what they saw as an imperialist war into a civil war. The party lost a number of its members while sailing in extremely perilous convoys to Murmansk. Problems caused by some experienced leaders' imprisonment and many others' enlistment in the armed forces meant that the editorship of The Militant passed through a number of hands during the war.

The SWP was active in supporting labor strikes that occurred despite the wartime "no-strike pledge" and protests against racist discrimination during the war, such as A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement. The Post Office refused to mail some issues of The Militant and threatened to cancel its third-class mailing permit, citing objections to its articles calling for violent overthrow of the government. The SWP said it was being persecuted for opposing racist discrimination.

Postwar years
After the war, the SWP and the Fourth International both expected that there would be a wave of revolutionary struggles like those that accompanied the end of the previous war. Indeed, revolutions did occur in Yugoslavia, Albania, Korea and China, to name only those that resulted in the overthrow of capitalism, but contrary to Trotskyist expectations they were headed by Moscow-oriented "Stalinist" parties.

The largest strike wave in United States history, involving over five million workers, occurred with the end of the war and the wartime pledge made by many union leaders not to strike for the duration, but this did not mean there were not many strikes during wartime as there were many wildcat strikes during this period as well as strikes officially called by the United Mine Workers of America. There were also protests by GIs demanding rapid demobilization after the end of the war, sometimes called the going-home movement. The SWP participation in this upsurge led to a brief period of rapid growth for the SWP immediately after the war.

The end of the war also saw the reorganization of the Fourth International in which the SWP played a major role. As part of this process, moves were made to heal the breach with Shachtman's supporters in the Workers Party (WP) and for the two groups to fuse. This eventually came to nothing, but some SWP members who supported the views of Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman grew dissatisfied with what they saw as the SWP's ultra-leftist attitude towards revolutionary policies. Eventually, they left the SWP in a state of demoralization and some joined the WP.

Meanwhile, a faction within the WP called the Johnson-Forest Tendency, named for C. L. R. James (known as Johnson) and Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest), was impatient with the WP's caution and felt the situation could rapidly become pre-revolutionary. This led them to leave the WP and rejoin the SWP in 1947. This tendency had moved further away from the "orthodox Trotskyism" of the SWP, producing tension. For example, they continued to hold the position that the Soviet Union was a "state capitalist" society. By 1951, their presence in the SWP was ever more anomalous and most left to form the Correspondence Publishing Committee. Dunayevskaya and her supporters eventually formed the News and Letters Committees in 1955 after splitting with James, who was deported from the United States to Britain, where he continued to advise the Correspondence Publishing Committee, which split again in 1962, with those loyal to James taking the name Facing Reality.

Cold War period
The brief postwar wave of labor unrest gave way to the conservatism of the 1950s, the reform of previously radical labor unions and McCarthyism. The SWP's attempt at entryism into the growing civil rights movement, which continued uninterrupted out of World War II, could not fully offset these trends and the SWP experienced a period of decline and isolation.

The party also had a number of splits over these years. One saw the departure of the faction of Bert Cochran and Clarke, who formed the American Socialist Union, which lasted until 1959. That 1953 opposition supported some of the positions of Michel Pablo, the Secretary of the Fourth International, although Pablo disagreed with their wish to dissolve the Fourth International.

The next, smaller split was that of Sam Marcy's Global Class War faction, which called within the SWP for support of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party presidential run in 1948 and regarded Mao Zedong as a revolutionary leader. This faction ended up leaving the SWP in 1958 after supporting the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a position contrary to that of the SWP and other Trotskyist tendencies. It went on to form the Workers World Party.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s the remaining members of the SWP clung to its firmly held beliefs and grew older. Consequently, the party membership shrank over these years from a postwar high in 1948 until the tide began to turn in the early 1960s. The Cuban Revolution signaled a change in the SWP's political direction as it embarked on pro-Castro "solidarity work" through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The result was a small accretion of youth to the party's ranks. In the same period, longtime SWP leader Murry Weiss won another group of youth from the Shachtmanites as they joined the Socialist Party of America. Many of the new recruits were drawn from the student movement, unlike those who had led the party since the 1930s; as a result, the party's internal culture began to change.

1960s

Despite such growing signs of an end to the isolation the group endured during the McCarthyite period, it experienced a new split in the early 1960s. A number of small oppositional groups developed within the party. One of the key issues was the Cuban Revolution and the SWP's response to it. Cannon and other SWP leaders such as Joseph Hansen saw Cuba as qualitatively different from the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe. Their analysis brought them closer to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI), from which the SWP had split in 1953. The SWP successfully negotiated a reunification of the ISFI and the International Committee of the Fourth International, leading to the creation in 1963 of the reunified Fourth International. Two sections of the ICFI, including Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League, rejected the merger and turned against the SWP leadership, working with opponents within the party.

The most important faction opposing the SWP leadership's new line was the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), led by James Robertson and Tim Wohlforth, which rejected the SWP's "capitulation" to Pabloism and opposed joining the USFI. It was critical of the Castro government, arguing that Cuba remained a "deformed workers' state". However, a split developed within this faction between groups headed by the two men. Nonetheless, both the RT and the Reorganized Minority Tendency split to form the Spartacist (see Spartacist League) and the American Committee for the Fourth International respectively, with the latter becoming aligned with Healy's SLL.

In the aftermath, the Seattle branch also left to found the Freedom Socialist Party after protesting the alleged suppression of internal democracy, as did Murray and Myra Tanner Weiss.

The SWP supported both the civil rights movement and the black nationalist movement that grew during the 1960s. It particularly praised the militancy of black nationalist leader Malcolm X, who in turn spoke at the SWP's public forums and gave an interview to Young Socialist magazine. After his assassination, the SWP had limited success in forming alliances with his followers and other black nationalists. But these movements were part of the radicalization that aided the SWP's growth.

The SWP provided a political ideology for African Americans seeking equality in the early 20th century. Black nationalists were in favor of socialist policy and ideas. During the 1960s, the SWP had begun selecting African American candidates on their presidential ticket. The SWP hoped to change American values and ensure each citizen had equal rights under the law. "Many black nationalists turned to the Socialist Workers Party because the SWP proposed that its black members collaborate with other militant African Americans," according to a group of historians studying the public service of African Americans. The SWP expanded the ideas of nationalism to African Americans and arguably expanded black nationalism for generations.

Like all left-wing groups, the SWP grew during the 1960s and experienced particularly brisk growth in early 1970s. Much of this was due to its involvement in many of the campaigns and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. The SWP advocated that the antiwar movement should call for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops and focus on organizing large, legal demonstrations for this demand. It was recognized by friend and foe alike as a major factor influencing the direction of the antiwar movement along these lines. One of the leaders of the antiwar movement at this time, along with Dave Dellinger and many others, was Fred Halstead, a World War II veteran and former leader of the garment workers union in New York City. Halstead was the 1968 presidential candidate of the SWP and visited Vietnam in that capacity.

The SWP was also increasingly outspoken in its defense of the Castro government and its identification with that government. A new leadership led by Jack Barnes (who became national secretary in 1972) made identification with Cuba an ever-greater part of the politics of the SWP throughout the 1970s.

The party also published many of Trotsky's works in these years through its publishing house, Pathfinder Press. Not only were the better-known writings reprinted, many for the first time since the 1930s, but other more obscure articles and letters were collected and printed for a wider audience than they had when first distributed. The expansion of the press also allowed the SWP to host Intercontinental Press, the FI magazine that moved from Paris to New York in 1969, which later merged with Inprecor.

1970s and new leadership
The growth of labor militancy in the early 1970s affected the SWP and currents developed within it urging a reorientation of the party toward this militancy. One such current was the Proletarian Orientation Tendency, which included Larry Trainor, and eventually dissolved.

The international tensions developed further when the SWP and its co-thinkers established the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency in 1973 in order to contribute to the debate for the Tenth World Congress. It argued for a reversal of the Latin American guerrilla war orientation adopted at the Ninth World Congress. This period was the peak of the SWP's growth and influence. The party continued its involvement in the movement against the war in Vietnam, which peaked in 1970–1971. The SWP also supported Chicano nationalism, including the Raza Unida Party. It helped organize protests demanding legal abortion through the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition. With the mid-to-late 1970s decline of these movements and the end of the 1960s–1970s youth radicalization, SWP membership and influence went into decline.

In 1974, the Internationalist Tendency (IT) developed. The IT posed a greater challenge to the SWP leadership's relationship with the Fourth International, as the IT agreed with the Fourth International's advocacy of guerrilla warfare as a "tactic on a continental scale" in Latin America. But despite tensions between the SWP and the International, when the SWP expelled the IT, the International refused to side with the IT. In 1974, the SWP expelled 115 members of the IT, the largest split since 1953. The IT disintegrated over the next few months, some of its supporters finding their way back into the SWP.

In 1978, the SWP leadership decided that the key task was for party members to make a turn to industry. This turn entailed party members getting jobs in blue-collar industries in preparation for, the SWP leadership projected, increasing mass struggles. The 1977–1978 coal miners' strike and developments like Steelworkers Fight Back were among the events pointed to in arguing for this change in policy. Party members sought to get jobs in the same workplaces in order to work as organized "fractions", doing "communist political work" as well as union activity.

As a result, many members were asked to move and change jobs, often out of established careers and into low-paying jobs in small towns. Many of the older members with experience in trade unions resisted this "colonization program", which upset their established routine in the unions, as did some of the younger members.

1980s and after

Internal affairs
Opposition to the "turn to industry" developed within the SWP. This opposition was not homogeneous and was itself beset by differences among different factions.

A further factor in the growing divisions within the SWP was the move by Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and others in the leadership away from the Trotskyist label. In 1982, Barnes gave a speech, later published as Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today, in which he rejected Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, arguing that it failed to sufficiently distinguish between the democratic and socialist tasks of a workers' revolution. Barnes argued that anticapitalist revolutions typically began with a "workers' and farmers' government" that initially concentrated on bourgeois-democratic measures and only later moved on to the abolition of capitalism.

Barnes also argued that the Trotskyist label unnecessarily distinguished leftists in that tradition from leftists of other origins, such as the Cuban Communist Party or the Sandinista National Liberation Front. He argued that the SWP had more in common with these organizations than with many groups calling themselves Trotskyist. The SWP has continued to publish numerous books by Trotsky and advocate a number of ideas commonly associated with Trotskyism, including Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism.

The opposition factions continued to support the theory of permanent revolution and the Trotskyist label: they anticipated that the SWP leadership was reassessing its place in the Fourth International. While declaring their support for the Cuban and the leftist Nicaraguan governments, they were more critical of the Castroist and Sandinista leadership. They also continued to oppose the "turn to industry".

One opposition group rallied around the Weinsteins on the West Coast (with supporters elsewhere too) while a second group rallied around George Breitman and Frank Lovell. Together they formed an opposition bloc on the SWP's National Committee, but in 1983 both groups were expelled.  The opposition factions, having split from the SWP, formed new organizations. The Weinstein group formed the San Francisco-based Socialist Action. The Breitman-Lovell group after a time formed the Fourth Internationalist Tendency. Both groups described themselves as "public factions" of the SWP and set the task of recapturing the SWP to their understanding of Trotskyism. Another group, mainly in Los Angeles, had been close to Breitman, belonged briefly to Socialist Action, and left to join the "regroupment" organization Solidarity.

This was the most recent split or major faction fight in the SWP. The organization has experienced an unusually long period of internal peace since, although it has declined steadily in both its membership and its political influence within the American left. Numerous recent expulsions—sometimes of long-standing SWP veterans—have contributed to the membership decline. In 2003, the party sold its major headquarters building in New York City for $20 million and moved to another location in Manhattan. Party leaders Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters subsequently sold their West Village condominium for $1.87 million.

Activities
The SWP's most high-profile and controversial campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s was its Mark Curtis Defense Committee, established after Curtis, an SWP activist and trade union organizer, was charged and convicted on burglary and rape charges in 1988. The party claimed that Curtis had been framed by police for his role in defending immigrant workers. Curtis was eventually paroled, but he was later arrested in Chicago on prostitution-related charges and then expelled from the SWP.

The SWP now focuses much of its energy on raising awareness about socialist ideas by running political candidates for office, holding weekly Militant Labor Forums and distributing The Militant, a socialist weekly, as well as Pathfinder books, many of which feature Barnes's speeches and writings. SWP members are present in a handful of trade unions and take part in such activities as promoting Cuban solidarity, joining striking workers' picket lines, actions against racism and police brutality, opposing US imperialist wars, defending the Bundy family, speaking out against attacks on democratic rights, and promoting the creation of a broad-based labor party.

On November 5, 2022, during the California abortion proposition debate, Betsey Stone announced the SWP's opposition to the constitutional amendment in The Militant, arguing that "we need to fight to make abortion rarer by changing the social conditions that have led to its widespread use".

International affiliation
Due to legal constraints, the SWP ended its formal affiliation with the Fourth International in the 1940s. It remained in close political solidarity with the Fourth International. The SWP broke formally with the Fourth International in 1990, though it had been increasingly inactive in the Trotskyist movement since Barnes's 1982 speech "Their Trotsky and Ours", which some view as signaling a break with Trotskyism. The SWP action followed the 1985 World Congress and the SWP closed Intercontinental Press in 1986. The SWP's international formation is sometimes called the Pathfinder tendency because they each operate a Pathfinder Bookstore which sells the publications of the SWP's publishing arm, Pathfinder Press.

In 1986, the party won a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a result of years of spying and disruption. It was also found that Herbert Hill of the NAACP, a former SWP member, was an informant on the party after he left in the 1940s.

Election results

Presidential elections
The SWP has run candidates for President since 1948. It received its greatest number of votes in 1976, when its candidate Peter Camejo received 90,310 votes.

Target of COINTELPRO
The Church Committee report of 1976 stated that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had investigated the SWP since 1940 and, in 1961, initiated a COINTELPRO program against it. The FBI said it had targeted the SWP because of its support for "such causes as Castro's Cuba and integration problems arising in the South". Under the COINTELPRO operation the FBI collected information about SWP members' political views, conducted up to 92 break-ins of the SWP's offices, and interfered in elections to damage the campaigns of SWP candidates. FBI officials testified to the Church Committee that the SWP has "not been responsible for any violent acts nor has it urged actions constituting an indictable incitement to violence".

Personnel

National Secretaries
 James P. Cannon (1938–1953)
 Farrell Dobbs (1953–1972)
 Jack Barnes (since 1972)

Prominent current and former members

 Martin Abern
 Harry Braverman
 George Breitman
 James Burnham
 Peter Camejo
 Grace Carlson
 Joseph Carter
 Bert Cochran
 Jake Cooper
 Stephanie Coontz
 Clifton DeBerry
 Farrell Dobbs
 Hal Draper
 Raya Dunayevskaya
 James T. Farrell
 Eric Flint
 Clara Fraser
 Richard Fraser
 Albert Goldman
 Joseph Hansen
 Sidney Hook
 C. L. R. James
 Martin Koppel
 Lyndon LaRouche
 Frank Lovell
 Sam Marcy
 Kathleen Mickells
 Paul Montauk
 Felix Morrow
 George Novack
 Evelyn Reed
 Harry Ring
 James Robertson
 Olga Rodriguez
 Max Shachtman
 Ed Shaw
 Carl Skoglund
 Morris Starsky
 Arne Swabeck
 Larry Trainor
 Mary-Alice Waters
 Eduard Limonov
 David Loeb Weiss
 Myra Tanner Weiss
 George Lavan Weissman
 Constance Weissman
 Herbert Hill

See also
 American Left
 COINTELPRO
 History of the socialist movement in the United States
 List of communist parties
 List of political parties in the United States
 Pathfinder Mural
 Socialist Workers Party (disambiguation)
 Socialist Equality Party (United States) (SEP)

Notes

Footnotes

Further reading

Books
 Breitman, George (ed.) Founding of the Socialist Workers Party: Minutes and Resolutions, 1938-39. New York: Monad Press, 1982.
 Cannon, James P., The History of American Trotskyism: Report of a Participant. New York: Pioneer Press, 1944.
 Fields, A. Belden, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1988. .
 Halstead, Fred, Out Now!: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War. New York: Monad Press, 1978.
 Jayko, Margaret (ed.), FBI on Trial: The Victory in the Socialist Workers Party Suit Against Government Spying. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988.
 LeBlanc, Paul; Bryan Palmer, and Thomas Bias (eds.), US Trotskyism, 1928-1965. In Three Volumes. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.
 McDonald, Larry, Trotskyism and Terror: The Strategy of Revolution. Washington, D.C.: ACU Education and Research Institute, 1977.
 Myers, Constance Ashton, The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.
 Sheppard, Barry, The Party: The Socialist Workers Party, 1960-1988. A Political Memoir. Volume 1: The Sixties. Chippendale, Australia: Resistance Books, 2005.
 Sheppard, Barry, The Party: The Socialist Workers Party, 1960-1988. A Political Memoir. Volume 2: Interregnum, Decline, and Collapse, 1973-1988. Chippendale, Australia: Resistance Books, 2012. .
 Wohlforth, Tim, The Prophet's Children: Travels on the American Left. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanity Press, 1994.

Archival material
 George Breitman Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University, New York. Finding Aid.
 James P. Cannon Papers. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Also available on microfilm.
 Frank Lovell Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University. Finding Aid.
 Max Shachtman Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University. Finding Aid.
 David Loeb Weiss Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University.
 Myra Tanner Weiss Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University.
 Socialist Workers Party records 1928-1990. Hoover Institution for War and Peace, Stanford, California. Finding aid.
 Melba Windoffer Papers. Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington. Finding Aid.
 George E. Rennar Papers. Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington. Finding Aid.

External links
 The Militant homepage
 Pathfinder Press homepage
 James P. Cannon Internet Archive. Marxists Internet Archive.
 University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections - Vietnam War Era Ephemera. Includes ephemera produced by the SWP.
 Catalogue of the SWP publications within Tony Whelan's papers. Held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

Anti-capitalist political parties
COINTELPRO targets
Communism in the United States
Trotskyism in the United States
New Left
Far-left political parties
Far-left politics in the United States
Socialism in the United States
Political parties in the United States
1938 establishments in the United States
Trotskyist parties in the United States


title: Mackenzie Brannan

text:
Mackenzie Eryn Brannan (born May 17, 1996, in Austin, Texas) is a former American artistic gymnast. She won the Senior competition at Nastia Liukin Cup in 2014 in Greensboro, NC with McKenna Kelley. She currently competes in college gymnastics for the Alabama Crimson Tide gymnastics team.

Her college gymnastics debut came in 2015 with her school University of Alabama.

References

1996 births
American female artistic gymnasts
Level 10 gymnasts
Alabama Crimson Tide women's gymnasts
Living people


title: 2014–15 Tractor S.C. season

text:
The 2014–15 season is Tractor's 6th season in the Persian Gulf Pro League. They will also be competing in the Hazfi Cup & AFC Champions League. Tractor is captained by Mehdi Kiani.

Club

Current coaching staff

Management

First Team Squad

Current squad

Transfers

Summer

In:

Out:

Winter

In:

Out:

Competitions

Overall

Competition record

Persian Gulf Pro League

Standings

Results summary

Results by round

Matches

Hazfi Cup

AFC Champions League

Group stage

Kit and sponsorship
Tractor is currently sponsored by the Hamrah-e Aval (Mobile Telecommunication Company) and also Javanane Khayer Foundation. They were previously sponsored by the Bank Sepah. In July 2014, the club signed a contract with Kelme, starting from 2014–15 season.

References

External links
Iran Premier League Statistics
Persian League

Tractor S.C. seasons
Tractor Sazi F.C.


title: Matzpen

text:
Matzpen (, lit. 'Compass') is the name of a revolutionary socialist and anti-Zionist organisation, founded in Israel in 1962 which was active until the 1980s. Its official name was the Socialist Organisation in Israel, but it became better known as Matzpen after its monthly publication.

Origins
The organisation was founded by former members of the Israeli Communist Party – Maki – who opposed that party's unquestioned support for the international policies of the Soviet Union. They offered a more radical analysis of and opposition to Zionism. An early analysis of the Arab–Israeli conflict, written before they left the Communist Party, by Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr (using a pseudonym, N. Israeli), appeared in Hebrew in 1961 under the title of Shalom, Shalom ve'ein Shalom (שלום, שלום, ואין שלום; Peace, Peace When There is No Peace – an English translation was completed in 2009; although still unpublished as of August 2016, the translation is available online). Matzpen drew together Jewish and Arab activists with various backgrounds in left-wing organisations and affiliations. Prominent among them was Jabra Nicola, a Palestinian-Israeli intellectual and activist who helped shape the theoretical orientation of the nascent organisation. It published a magazine of the same name in Hebrew and Arabic. The organisation grew in the period after the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel's occupation of Palestinian and Arab territories.

Core positions
In a statement titled "Down with the Occupation”, from 1 January 1969, Matzpen distinguished itself – together with the Communist Party (Rakah) – as the only forces conducting "a consistent struggle against the continued occupation of the territories conquered in June '67". Faced with a situation in which "Israel controls the whole of the Palestine Mandate territory as well as vast tracts of Egyptian territory and a region in the south of Syria", Matzpen asserted in "General Declaration by the ISO" in March 1968, that "It is both the right and duty of every conquered and subjugated people to resist and to struggle for its freedom. The ways, means and methods necessary and appropriate for such struggle must be determined by the people itself and it would be hypocritical for strangers - especially if they belong to the oppressing nation – to preach to it, saying, 'Thus shalt thou do, and thus shalt thou not do.'" It added, that despite its recognition of "the unconditional right of the conquered to resist occupation", as an organization it could support politically "only such organizations which, in addition to resisting occupation, also recognize the right of the Israeli people for self-determination" in order to enable "a joint struggle of Arabs and Jews in the region for a common future."

In this context, Matzpen's aim was to create a broad front of people opposed to the occupation and in favour of a de-Zionized Israel, which would form part of a socialist federation of the entire Middle East. In contrast to the Communist Party and the Zionist Left, Matzpen insisted that the 1967 occupation was but one stage in the long history of Zionist settlement, and reversing it would be a necessary but not sufficient condition for overall solution to the problems of the Middle East. For such a solution, political mobilization of Arabs, Jews, and other national minorities in the region would be needed. The political framework for this mobilization became known as the Arab Revolution, which combined national and socialist tasks in the process of struggle against Zionism, imperialism and Arab reaction. To advance these aims, Matzpen established links with New Left organisations in Europe and other parts of the world, and also with progressive Palestinian organisations, such as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Many of the original analyses and statements of the organisation were included in a published collection under the title The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism, edited by Arie Bober (Doubleday, 1972).
Bober's book provided an overview of the positions held by Matzpen at the time on a range of issues, and thus is an essential resource on the organisation's analysis of Israeli society and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the introduction to the book he says: "This book is the result of five years' collective effort by a small group of Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel to penetrate the dense net of illusion and myth that today dominates the thinking and feeling of most Israelis and, at the same time, largely determines the prevailing image of Israel in the Western world. According to the Zionist fairy tale, the state of Israel is an outpost of democracy, social justice and enlightenment, and a homeland and haven for the persecuted Jews of the world. This outpost, so the story goes, though earnestly seeking peace with its neighbors finds itself in a state of perpetual siege because of the greed of Arab rulers, the inherent “unreasonableness” of the Oriental mind and the innate Gentile proclivity toward hatred of the Jews.

"The reality, this book demonstrates, is utterly different. The Zionist state was born in the violent expropriation and expulsion from their country of the Palestinian Arabs, and that process continues today. In open alliance with Western, especially United States, imperialism, and in scarcely hidden collusion with the most reactionary forces in the Arab world, the Zionist state actively sets itself against every step, no matter how faltering, taken by the Arab masses to alleviate the centuries’ old misery imposed on them by colonialism and imperialism. Within the territories occupied since 1967, the Zionist state employs a system of direct military repression to expel Palestinian Arabs from their lands and secure Jewish colonization of them, and to crush every expression of Palestinian resistance. Within its own borders, the Zionist state engages in systematic national oppression of its minority of Arab citizens. The dark-skinned majority of the privileged Jewish community itself increasingly feels the sting of racist discrimination, as economic inequality increases and social conditions deteriorate. Far from offering a haven to the persecuted Jews of the world, the Zionist state is leading new immigrants and old settlers alike toward a new holocaust by mobilizing them in a colonial enterprise and a counterrevolutionary army against the struggle of the Arab masses for national liberation and social emancipation – a struggle that is not only just but will eventually be victorious. This state of affairs is, moreover, in no sense accidental. It was the inevitable outcome of the success of the Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. And to change this reality requires not merely a change of government or a modification of one or another specific policy, but a revolutionary transformation of the very foundations of Israeli society."

Matzpen outside Israel
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, supporters of Matzpen abroad published Israca (Israeli Revolutionary Action Committee Abroad). The magazine included many articles published in Matzpen. Some of Matzpen was censored and that material was republished in Israca. Moshé Machover, Eli Lobel, Haim Hanegbi, and Akiva Orr were all part of the editorial board. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, supporters of the organisation and other radical left academics and activists formed another journal in the UK, Khamsin, in which they published their analyses of current events. A selection of material from Khamsin was published under the title Forbidden Agenda: Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East (Saqi Books, 2000).

Splits and debates
In 1970 the organisation started going through a process of ideological and organisational fragmentation, with some members leaving to form new groups, such as Avangard with a Trotskyist orientation, led by Menahem Carmi and Sylvain Cypel, and Ma'avak (Revolutionary Communist Alliance), with a Maoist orientation, led by Ilan Albert and Rami Livneh. A further split within the latter organisation saw the formation of the Revolutionary Communist Alliance - Red Front, led by Udi Adiv and Dan Vered. Avangard also underwent splits, which saw the formation of the Spartacist League in 1974 and the Nitzotz group in 1977.

The theoretical debates that led to the splits in Matzpen had to do with the conceptualization of the relations between class struggle and nationalism in the struggle for socialism. Avangard regarded Israel as a normal capitalist society in which the working class was the primary revolutionary agent. Hence, it saw its goal as the mobilization of that class to create an Israeli socialist republic. It regarded Matzpen's focus on the Israeli-Palestinian national conflict and on the colonial origins of Israeli society as a distraction from the class struggle. Ma'avak, in contrast, saw Matzpen as not emphasizing enough the colonial character of Israeli society. It saw its goal as that of facilitating the Palestinian national liberation struggle as a necessary step towards socialism. In response to both groups, Matzpen re-asserted its combination of support for national and social struggles.

A major split within the core group of mainstream Matzpen took place in 1972, and both factions kept the name Matzpen for their respective journals, an issue that gave rise to sharp dispute between them.  The obvious value of the 'Matzpen' label as a marker of radical left-wing politics was behind that decision. Most of the original leadership remained in what became known as Matzpen Tel Aviv, while the other faction became known as Matzpen Jerusalem. That latter group adopted the name Matzpen Marxist, to distinguish itself from its rivals. In 1975 it changed its name to Revolutionary Communist League, section of the Fourth International, while retaining the title Matzpen Marxist for its regular publication. The Tel Aviv group also changed its name subsequently (in 1978) to the Socialist Organization in Israel and dropped the adjective 'Israeli' in order to avoid possible association with Zionism. Both groups retained the original Matzpen dual focus on class and national liberation. Machover, Orr and Haim Hanegbi remained with the Tel Aviv based group, while the Jerusalem-based group was led by Arieh Bober and Michel Warschawski (Mikado). A youth movement known as Hafarperet (mole) was affiliated with the latter group, and was active in the mid-1970s, mostly in Haifa.

The Red Front trial
One of the organizations to emerge from Matzpen, the Red Front, had a brief history of just over a year. At the end of 1972 many of its members were arrested and charged with espionage and collaboration with the enemy (Syrian military intelligence), based on a secret trip some of them took to Damascus. None of the activists detained and charged were members of Matzpen at the time, or at the time they committed their alleged offences against state security. In a well-publicised trial in 1973 five members of the Red Front were sentenced to various periods in prison. Many of the defendants stated that they had been subjected to torture and other forms of physical and mental harassment by the Israeli security services before the trial, to force confessions out of them. It is obvious that none of them had any interest in working with the Syrian or other Arab regimes, and their sole interest consisted in establishing links with other revolutionary organizations in the region, primarily Palestinian ones. Statements before the trial, submitted by the leading defendants – Daud Turki and Ehud Adiv – allow us to get a clear idea of their perspective.

Turki, A Palestinian citizen of Israel, defined their goal as socialism: “the common goal of all workers, peasants and those who are persecuted in Israeli society. The Jews have a share, and they must have a share, because they are members of the organization on a footing of equality with me, in establishing a new government and a new regime which will allow both the Jewish people and the Arab people to play an effective part in the struggle of the Arab people for liberation”. Turki went on to criticise Zionism, which “instead of adopting, as it should, a neutral attitude, or one of support for the Arab struggle for national and socialist liberation, it has stood beside this movement's enemies, beside the Americans who are persecuting the Vietnamese people, beside American imperialism which is exploiting the peoples of Latin America and the peoples of Asia and Africa, and setting the Jewish people against the Arab people forever. I think that this attitude amounts to a crime against both the Jewish people and the Arab people.” In his view, Jews should support the Arab struggle for liberation rather than a struggle that supersedes nationalism, although both groups have “the same future and would live together in a single homeland under the rule of a single state, a state liberated from all foreign influence and all social exploitation.”

The same approach was displayed by Adiv. Accepting that “all trends of Matzpen” had “a sound theory”, he argued that they lacked “the chapter entitled ‘what is to be done’ to reach the multi-national socialist Middle East they talk of, and in their political activity they restrict their talk to the Jewish state of Israel. That is to say they are preoccupied with convincing the Jews, and completely disregard the Arab struggle, and in particular the Palestinian Arab struggle against Zionism and the state of Israel.” A change of focus was needed to convert the national conflict into a class struggle. This could be done only “if the Jews will prove to the Arabs, who have been fighting Zionism for dozens of years, that they [the Jews] are on their side, that they are prepared to sacrifice everything they have, to be subjected to the same ‘treatment’ and to share everything with them. Without this no Arab will have confidence that the sincerest Jewish revolutionary is really revolutionary. No ideology, not even the most equitable and progressive, can convince the Arabs unless it is accompanied by action on the part of those who adhere to it.”

Beyond organizational existence – Matzpen's legacy
With the rise of new, vibrant and less ideologically rigid protest movements in the 1980s, in opposition to the continued occupation and to the war in Lebanon (Committee for Solidarity with Birzeit University, committees against torture and house demolitions, Yesh Gvul, Alternative Information Center, Workers Advice Center, and so on), the different factions of Matzpen lost much of their raison d'etre. The space for overall left-wing organizations, with comprehensive political agendas, shrank with the growing focus on the occupation and its consequences. Many activists sought new organizational forms in order to enhance their ability to make an effective contribution to the political struggle, without carrying cumbersome ideological and organizational baggage. Much of the energy of the Revolutionary Communist League, for example, went into creating and maintaining the Alternative Information Center, which effectively depleted the League of its own organizational capacity. As a result, most of the Matzpen factions ceased to have a distinct organizational existence by the late 1980s, if not before that. Many of their former members though, continue to participate as dedicated individuals in various activities against the occupation and for workers and human rights.

In 1995 former members of Derech ha-Nitzotz established the Da'am Workers Party, which remains active to this day.

A documentary about the group, entitled "Matzpen", was made by Eran Torbiner in 2003. Another documentary about Avangard was produced in 2009 by Tom Carmi (son of two former leaders of the group) and presented at the Tel Aviv Docaviv festival. It is titled "Away from the Tribe's Centre", and was awarded second prize in the students' films competition. In these documentaries as well as most other books by and interviews with members who ended-up in different factions, the doctrinal differences that led to their divergent paths disappear from view. The focus almost invariably is on activities against the occupation, anti-Zionist positions, the sense of dissent, and so on, which they all shared, rather than on what had set them apart.

Despite the absence of organizational activity, some of the original Matzpen members continue to write and be active politically. Haim Hanegbi and Michel Warschawski played a key role in writing the 2004 Olga Document, which is a statement of the anti-Zionist position and a radical critique of Israeli policies and practices, and Warschawski published his political memoir in English, On the Border (South End Press, 2004; original French in 2002). He further published, together with Lebanese academic and activist Gilbert Achcar, a book titled The 33-Day War: Israel's War on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Its Consequences (Paradigm Publishers, 2007), in which the war is covered with a focus on both Israeli and Lebanese perspectives. Sylvain Cypel wrote a historical and political analysis of Israeli society under the title Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse (Other Press, 2007; original French in 2006). Moshe Machover has continued to publish theoretical papers analyzing Israel/Palestine within the broader Middle Eastern framework, and in 2009, together with Ehud Ein-Gil, he published an article in the UK journal Race & Class, titled "Zionism and Oriental Jews: a dialectic of exploitation and co-optation", in which they analyze the question of ethnic divisions within Israel society.

A new book on Matzpen was published in Israel in September 2010, under the title Matzpen: Conscience and Fantasy (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2010). It is the most comprehensive account to date of the organization's history, based on interviews with former activists and a study of documents. In his review article "Is Zionism the Problem?", Shaul Magid characterized Lutz Fiedler's book Matzpen. A History of Israeli Dissidence (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) as "the most comprehensive history now available in English of the anti-Zionist left in Israel."

External links
Matzpen documents at the Israeli Left Archive
Matzpen.org Huge historical Matzpen archive with images and Arabic, English and Hebrew language texts.
Matzpen text archive in the libcom.org library
Matzpen documentary by Eran Torbiner
AkivaOrrBooks.org Books written by one of the founders of Matzpen, Akiva Orr.

Further reading
 Fiedler, Lutz (2022), Matzpen. A History of Israeli Dissidence, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sources

Political organizations based in Israel
Anti-Zionism in Israel
Resistance movements
Organizations established in 1962
1962 establishments in Israel
Socialism in Israel