Victor’s Reviews > A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left > Status Update

How is it? I had this on my list but now that Simon has gone full social patriot, I’m not sure I need to read this after all.

It’s a good punchy read. Quicker and easier to digest than other more substantial histories (for example, Cliff/Donny Gluckstein’s book on the Labour Party which has a lot of valuable material) while providing the reader with a comprehensive and sufficiently detailed narrative.

I’m afraid I don’t agree with you that Simon has gone ‘full social patriot’ with all that the term implies politically - at least not much more true than saying Left Voice is soft on the Russian regime because it doesn’t explicitly recognise Russia as an imperialist state.

There are risks with any position taken on a complex issue where inter-imperialist conflict is combined with elements of an anti-occupation/national resistance war. On that basis you’d have to call the US SWP social patriots for their position on China during WWII, and its split the Workers Party the real internationalists on that question.

If all imperialist powers had been backing the Chinese government to the hilt, then World War II would have been a very different conflict indeed…