UN: Israeli Settlement Expansion in West Bank Reaches Record Levels

December 13, 2025

 

in News, West Bank

DaysofPal- Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank has reached its highest level since the United Nations began systematically monitoring such activity in 2017, according to a new report by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

In a document submitted to members of the UN Security Council, Guterres said indicators of settlement growth peaked in 2024, marking an unprecedented surge in construction approvals and tenders. The report noted that plans were submitted, approved, or opened for tender for approximately 47,390 settlement housing units during the year, a sharp increase from around 26,170 units in 2023.

The figures represent a dramatic rise compared with previous years, the report said, pointing out that the annual average between 2017 and 2022 stood at roughly 12,800 settlement units.

Guterres strongly condemned the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, warning that such activities fuel tensions, deprive Palestinians of access to their land, and undermine the prospects for establishing an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

He stressed that settlement expansion entrenches Israeli unlawful occupation, violates international law, and infringes upon the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. The UN chief reiterated his call for an immediate halt to all settlement activity.

According to the report, more than 700,000 Israeli settlers currently live in settlements considered illegal under international law, among a Palestinian population of about three million in the West Bank.
These figures do not include occupied East Jerusalem, which the Israeli occupation annexed in a move not recognized internationally.

Guterres also expressed deep concern over a troubling rise in settler violence, including attacks allegedly carried out in some cases with the presence or support of Israeli security forces.

He warned that escalating violence and military operations have resulted in significant civilian casualties, including women and children, as well as widespread displacement and destruction of homes and infrastructure.

Israeli military operations in the West Bank have intensified since the outbreak of the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023.

Since then, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers, the report said, underscoring the deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in the occupied territory.

Shortlink for this post: https://daysofpalestine.ps/?p=70315

New Israeli settlement in West Bank town near Bethlehem threatens the Christian presence in Palestine

Israeli settler groups have begun bulldozing Palestinian lands in the town of Beit Sahour to make way for a new settler outpost. The settlement threatens the existence of the largest remaining Christian community in the West Bank, residents say.

By Jeff Wright 

 December 11, 2025

MONDOWEISS

Israeli soldiers and police officers at the former Israeli military base, Ush al-Ghurab, at the edge of Beit Sahour outside of Bethlehem in February 2010. (Photo: Najeh Hashlamoun/APA Images)

Last month, Israeli settler groups began razing lands in the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour just east of Bethlehem. Before long, settlers placed caravans on a hilltop known by locals as Ush al-Ghurab and announced the establishment of a new settler outpost called Shdema.

A predominantly Christian town, residents of Beit Sahour tell Mondoweiss that the encroaching settler presence threatens the existence of the largest remaining Palestinian Christian community in the West Bank.

According to a report by the Balasan Initiative for Human Rights, the new Shdema outpost “marks a substantial escalation in Israel’s settlement expansion and territorial consolidation in the Bethlehem district.”

“The emergence of the Shdema settlement must be understood as part of a broader territorial strategy designed to reshape the demographic and geographic reality between Jerusalem and the Bethlehem hinterland,” the report states. “The consequences for Beit Sahour’s residents are significant and multifaceted.”

In a letter to supporters shared with Mondoweiss, Dr. Elias Iseed, mayor of Beit Sahour, wrote that this settlement “is not simply a construction project,” but “an act of dispossession.”

“It is being built directly upon Palestinians’ lands, homes, and backyards, stealing the soil from beneath peaceful families who have lived here for generations,” the mayor wrote.

According to the Balasan report, the 100 dunams (approximately 25 acres), “had been earmarked for public facilities.” These included “a children’s hospital to be built, recreational areas, cultural center, green space, and community hall, plans that had already begun implementation with donor support before settler pressure forced their suspension.”

According to Israeli settlement watchdog, Peace Now, the outpost “is intended to choke the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour and block its development,” adding that the site on which Shdema is being built has been reserved for Palestinian development projects for about 15 years, but that “there is no limit to the settlers’ audacity in establishing outposts and creating facts on the ground.”

According to the Balasan report, “only about 7% of Beit Sahour’s administrative land remains accessible for building due to settlement encirclement and the Annexation Wall.” This has caused an intensification of “demographic pressure” on the town, limiting its urban development and encouraging “the displacement of its population, mainly composed of Palestinian Christians.”

“Beyond its material impacts, the settlement plays a symbolic and cultural role in the ongoing effort to entrench an exclusive Zionist narrative in the area,” the report states. “Israeli settler groups have repeatedly invoked biblical justifications for taking over the site, despite archaeological evidence refuting such claims. These ideological assertions accompany attempts to rebrand the area as part of a ‘return of Jews to Bethlehem,’ a rhetoric deployed to normalize settler presence and obscure the illegality of the project under international law.”

As mayor Iseed writes, the West Bank has already witnessed a historic rise in settler violence:

“According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there were 757 settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank since January 2025, a 13% increase compared to 2024. These attacks include assaults, destruction of property, and intimidation, often carried out with impunity.”

Yusef Daher, Coordinator of the Jerusalem Liaison Office of the World Council of Churches, tells Mondoweiss that settler encroachment has devastated local communities, “because we have neither the time nor the strength to stop this land grab.”

“We are an unarmed people enduring extremely violent Israeli settler gangs under the protection of their army and ministers,” Daher said.

The Balasan report asserts that the establishment of Shdema constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of the civilian population of the occupying power to the territory it occupies and proscribes the expropriation of land.

“The outpost further contributes to the creation of irreversible facts on the ground, undermining the right of the Palestinian population to self-determination and violating obligations of the occupying power to protect property and ensure public order and civil life,” the report states. “In this context, the establishment and expansion of the Shdema outpost are not isolated violations but form part of an unlawful territorial regime that the International Court of Justice [in its July 2024 Advisory Opinion] found incompatible with international law.”

“By entrenching and expanding civilian settlements on confiscated Palestinian land Israel both deepens the illegality identified by the Court and exacerbates its obligations of cessation and non-recognition,” the report added.

Consequently, the Shdema outpost, which “reinforces an internationally unlawful situation,” must be brought to an end by third States, the report concludes.

Rifat Kassis, General Coordinator of Kairos Palestine and a resident of Beit Sahour, told Mondoweiss that the settlement “is a direct assault on the heart of the Christian presence in Palestine.”

“By confiscating what remains of our towns’ open spaces and tightening the ring of settlements around Beit Sahour and Bethlehem, this project threatens the very existence of the largest remaining Christian community in the Holy Land,” Kassis said. “If allowed to continue, it will be the last nail in the coffin of the Christians’ presence in Palestine, accelerating displacement, severing social cohesion, and pushing more families to forced migration.”

“We make this plea not because we expect political leaders — whose governments consistently choose their interests with Israel over justice for the oppressed — to change their course,” Kassis explained. “We write it so that our own descendants will know that we were not silent, and so that the future generations of those governments will know that their ancestors stood by in silence while a people, and a Christian heritage rooted in this land for two millennia, were being pushed toward erasure.”

Illegal Israeli settlers destroy dozens of olive trees near occupied East Jerusalem


December 14, 2025

Middle East Monitor

Israeli soldiers stand by as Israeli construction vehicles destroy agricultural lands and uproot centuries-old olive trees in the village of Karyut, south of the city of Nablus, West Bank on December 08, 2025. [Issam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]

Illegal Israeli settlers damaged about 40 olive trees on Sunday in the town of Mukhmas, northeast of East Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, according to local authorities, Anadolu reports.

In a statement, the Jerusalem Governorate said illegal settlers raided the al-Hayy area of Mukhmas and cut down roughly 40 olive trees owned by a Palestinian resident.

The governorate described the attack as part of an ongoing pattern of violence targeting Palestinians and their land, adding that it followed the Israeli army’s demolition days earlier of a park and playground in the town as pressure mounted to assert control over the area.

Illegal settlers recently established an outpost near Mukhmas that has become a gathering point and staging area for repeated attacks on local farmers and agricultural land, the statement added.

According to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, an official body, illegal Israeli settlers carried out 621 attacks against Palestinians and property in the occupied West Bank in November.

Israeli forces and illegal settlers have killed at least 1,093 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, injured nearly 11,000, and detained around 21,000 since October 2023, according to Palestinian figures.

In a landmark opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

From Second to Third International

3 December, 2025 - Author: Rayner Lysaght

 Workers' Liberty

Abridged from a pamphlet, “The First Three Socialist Internationals”, published in 1989. Though idiosyncratic in its slant on some points, this tells the story of the three large-scale efforts so far to make socialism an organised international movement.

Helped by the Russian Liberals, the Tsar did manage to crush the [Russian] Revolution of 1905 with the minimum concession of a Parliament (Duma) with limited powers and elected on a limited franchise. The Austrian Government bought off its own radicalising workers with manhood suffrage. In the USA, the most radical trade union leaders formed the International Workers of the World (IWW) with the support of the SLP.

For the International, the Revolution was followed by intensification of existing tends. Though capitalist Europe did not move to repression immediately, it had done so by 1910. Unlike the IWMA after the Commune, the workers’ movement was now too strong for its world organisation to collapse. Rather, the Revisionist challenge to its politics intensified and was now matched on the Left by revolutionaries, mainly in Eastern Europe, seeking to develop these politics so that the working class could take State power and begin to institute Socialism. In the centre Bebel, Kautsky and their equivalents led a majority into trying to reconcile two increasingly opposite trends. This position came to give its name, Centrism, to the practice of Social Democratic Party bureaucracy.

Revisionism

At first, Revisionism made the advance. In 1906, Auer and the German Social Democratic Party Executive met the trade union leaders and agreed not to call for any future political strike. The following year, at the International’s seventh Congress in Stuttgart, the Executive’s Report included a proposal for it to accept colonialism. The Socialist Party of America and the Labour Parties of Australia and South Africa went further, moving to bar non-white immigration, particularly to their countries. The International was still principled enough to reject these proposals.

However, it could not move decisively the other way. The problems created by colonialism were not faced. Moreover, though there was support for an attack by Luxemburg’s friend and political ally, Klara Zetkin (1857-1932), on the Austrian compromise that fell short of women’s suffrage, proposals for an international campaign for universal suffrage in all the States were shelved.

The most significant debate at Stuttgart concerned the prevention of war. From 1905, each frightened State Government had been trying to consolidate support by calling for national unity against others. Now the International debated four motions, three from tendencies in the French section. The most radical was that debated by Gustave Hervé (1871-1944): influenced by Syndicalism, it called for a general strike in the participating countries. It had the sympathy of Connolly, in America, who tended to Syndicalism, but was attacked not only by the German trade unionists but by Lenin and others of the Revolutionary Left as being impossible and, hence, diversionary. Jules Guesde’s proposal argued that militarism was just another aspect of capitalism and thus not to be opposed in a single campaign. Jaurès and the old Blanquist Edouard Vaillant (1840-1915) called for action against war but recognised a right of national defence. Bebel was close to this position but stressed both the central role of capitalism and went further in distinguishing between offensive and defensive war. In the end, a compromise was passed unanimously. It included two paragraphs drafted by the Leftists Lenin, Luxemburg, and the Russian Centrist Menshevik, Yuli Martov (1873-1923). They provided the theoretical core for the movement from which the Communist International would arise:

“If a war threatens to break out, it is a duty of the working-class in the countries affected and a duty for their Parliamentary representatives, with the aid of the International Bureau as an active and co-ordinating power, to make every effort to prevent war by all means which vary naturally according to the intensity of the class struggle and to the political situation in general.

“Should war break out nonetheless, it is their duty to intervene in order to bring it promptly to an end, and with all their strength to make use of the economic and political crisis created by the war to stir up the deepest strata of the people and precipitate the fall of capitalist domination.”

These guidelines for future action were vague enough but they did represent a position from which Socialists could advance their cause even in the teeth of a crisis such as that which would eventually smash their International.

In the meantime, this continued to grow. Australia had more Labour Governments. The German Social Democrats became the largest single party in the Reichstag. The Socialist Party of America had a member elected to Congress. Yet, increasingly, this organisational advance was accompanied by political fudges by the centre to keep the movement united.

The International’s last two Congresses, Copenhagen (1910) and Basle (1912), showed little political advance and were mainly irrelevant to the debates being conducted within the International’s Left wing. The projected Vienna Congress, which the outbreak of the 1914 War aborted, was expected to move to expel the most vital political part of this wing, Lenin’s Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (Bolshevik). Few of the old guard took part in this new left. In 1908 Kautsky tried to relate the day-to-day struggle to the ultimate revolution. He succeeded less in clarifying the probabilities than in annoying his Party’s leadership. Under pressure from it, he rewrote the offending sections, making the work more moderate. Plekhanov still blocked with Lenin on the need to maintain a tightly-disciplined and conscious working-class political party in Russia: he opposed him on nearly everything else. In the USA, de Leon had failed to win control of the IWW. His party became an isolated sect.

Weakness

The big weakness of the Left was that its varying answers to the questions it faced kept it divided against itself, weakening what was already numerically small compared to the Centre and the Right. Its members were ready to block with some who can be seen now as its political opponents to defeat other Leftists. By 1910, after five years of repression, the Bolsheviks within Russia itself numbered less than fifty. Lenin blocked with the Right Centrist Plekhanov against the Left Centrist Martov and against Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879-1940), who tried to act as honest broker in Russian Social Democracy between the Bolsheviks and the more Right-wing Mensheviks. Trotsky related better to Kautsky than to Luxemburg and Lenin himself could not understand Luxemburg’s opposition to Kautsky. For her part, she was not too upset when it looked as if Lenin and Bolsheviks would be expelled from the International.

Of all the Left, history would prove Lenin the greatest. His position as citizen of the most oppressive State in Europe made him less ready than his comrades in countries of the West to compromise on the need for revolution. However, he insisted, against the Mensheviks, that this revolution would have to be led by the workers and small farmers who would provide the revolutionary government, rather than by the bourgeoisie. It required an International of tight homogeneous revolutionary parties to lead the workers; though Lenin did not yet realise this, such parties would be as different from German Social Democracy as that was to Britain’s Independent Labour Party. Such parties would be firmly dialectically materialist; the “private” nature of religion [in society] asserted by Marx and Engels and used by Centrists and Revisionists as a party norm could not be maintained as the latter.

Trotsky and to a certain extent Luxemburg recognised that the revolutionary Government [in Russia] would have to move against the capitalists immediately on a social and economic as well as a political front: the strategy of Permanent Revolution.

On the other hand, Lenin recognised well the issue of national self-determination. Marx and Engels had seen this according to three overall principles for recognising the validity of a national claim: the extent of its popular support; its helpfulness to progressive movements in Western Europe; and, not least, its weakening effect on the Russian Empire. Lenin and Luxemburg went beyond this to develop more general theories. Luxemburg’s view was coloured by her experience in Poland, where the 1905 Rising had not stimulated nationalism. She rationalised this by referring to the growing interdependence of world industry and trade which made real national economic independence a mirage. In some cases — such as the Balkan States’ independence from Turkey — national freedom might help social and economic development, but in general the most a nation could expect was autonomy. Against this, Lenin insisted on the political nature of national self-determination. Its denial blocked the way to Socialism for the proletariat of both oppressed and oppressor nations. It encouraged the first to concentrate support on movements led by its national bourgeoisie (as in Ireland when Labour left the leadership of the national struggle after 1916). Even more certainly, for the second, it offered bribes from the product of the exploited nation and developed in it habits of racism and chauvinism.

A third disagreement between Lenin and Luxemburg was their concept of imperialism. Lenin saw it as centred in the export of capital, Luxemburg in the export of surplus commodities. In practice, they did not argue about it.

The International grew and, despite criticism from the Left, so did its bureaucracy, centrism and revisionism. Then, in July 1914 on the eve of its Jubilee Congress, the latest Imperialist war scare became a reality. The International could not react. First Austrian Social Democracy voted its Government war credits, then the extreme right wing of Russian Social Democracy (including Plekhanov) and then, most devastatingly, the German SocialDemocrats, followed by the French (including Guesde and Vaillant. and with Hervé’s support) and most of the British. Most of these found democratic excuses for their actions. The Austrians and the Russians recalled Marx’s fears of Tsarist Russia. The French insisted on their superior democratic rights (they had maintained manhood suffrage since 1881) compared to Prussia. The British cited Germany’s breach of Belgian neutrality. Only the Russian war effort could not be masked as democratic. None considered their own States’ colonies and oppressed nations. Revisionism had beaten both Centrism and the Left. The Second International had ended.

It reappeared after the War, after a series of conferences held by those who could not bring themselves to accept the new Russian Workers’ State, in 1923, organised on such a basis it was completely reformist and, in Lenin’s view, by its relationship to its affiliates’ national States, bourgeois. It liquidated itself again with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939; this time it was revived only in 1951.

The Socialist vanguard reappeared as the Third International demanded by Lenin when he heard of the disintegration of the Second. For most of the subsequent war he was alone in his demand. Delegates of his Party attended Congresses of anti-War Socialists in neutral Switzerland at Zimmerwald in 1915 and at Kienthal in 1916. At these, their calls for a purged International were opposed by those who wanted to make it easy for the pro-war Socialists (social-chauvinists) to reunite them. Lenin isolated the Bolsheviks and their allies further by insisting on Socialists having a duty to turn their imperialist war into civil class war, rather than just calling for peace.

Then, in March 1917, the workers of Russia overthrew the Tsar. The country’s bourgeoisie began a struggle to assert its claim to State power. Against this Lenin developed his views to accept Trotsky’s concept of Permanent Revolution and a programme, less than Socialist, but on which the workers could take State power. Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks. In November they led the workers to establish the world’s first countrywide Workers’ State.

Early

Despite Lenin’s early call, it was not until the First World War had ended in November 1918 (and not until a month after a Congress at Berne had started the process of exhuming the Second International) that, in May 1919, what had now become the Communist Party of Russia convoked the founding Congress of the Third, or Communist, International (Comintern).

Two points must be understood about the new International. In one important way it was very different from its predecessors. For the first time, more than two Asian countries were represented in a Socialist International. Besides a Japanese Communist Party there were formed, either in time for the founding Congress or in the next four years, the Communist Parties of China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Persia (Iran) and Turkey. As yet these were small, yet they made the Third International more truly international than the first two and were a pledge that, unlike the Second, it would not hesitate to oppose colonialism.

But how would colonialism be opposed? How indeed would capitalism be fought. These questions were set by the nature of the International’s non-Russian sections. Although it had been founded by revolutionaries, it was not composed of revolutionary parties. The French Socialist Party had been among the most revisionist before the war. It had been among the firmest in supporting its bourgeois war effort; now, it was equally notable in that the majority of its conference delegates voted to affiliate with the Comintern. The Parti Communiste Français being based on this internal majority, its real political change was doubtful.

A more subtle confusion was in the position of Socialist Feminists like Luxemburg’s old ally Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952). Both had opposed the War; Kollontai as the world’s first woman Commissar had decreed for women’s rights beyond the expectations of the Second International. Whether from age or demoralisation, neither would fight to maintain these standards later. On the other hand, Rosa Luxemburg had doubted the need to found the Comintern though she was murdered before its first Congress.

Friedrich (Fritz) Adler (1879-1960), leader of Austria’s Anti-War Socialists and killer of that country’s War Minister, wavered between Second and Third International, tried to build a Centrist (Two-and-a Half) International in 1921, but joined the resurrected Second International in 1923.

Although the founding of the Comintern was a major move towards a genuine revolutionary World Party of Socialism, its simple existence could not guarantee such a Party. It could be produced only as a result of a period of revolutionary struggle and sympathetic but firm guidance from the best elements among the Russian Communists.

Certainly, the years after 1918, there were plenty of revolutions. The trouble was that, with the considerable exception of the Russians’ struggle against counter-revolution, they were all defeats. Germany and Hungary in 1919, Italy in 1920, Germany again in 1921 all failed to gain for the workers state power. Save in Hungary, all were defeated by the weakness and treachery of the Revisionists.

The Third Congress the following year passed a set of Guiding Principles for the Communist Parties in their work which, though regarded by Lenin as based too much on the Russian experience, included, even then, useful advice.

Principles

The International agreed to Lenin’s Guiding Principles on the National and Colonial Question, which directed co-operation between — but not amalgamation of — Communist and Revolutionary National bourgeois parties in oppressed States. It also passed proposals for joint action on a principled basis between Communist and other non-revolutionary parties of the working-class where, as in France and Germany, the Communists organised between a quarter and a third of the State’s workers. This was the strategy of the United Front.

Yet the Communist Parties remained weak and under pressure from a reviving bourgeoisie. This was most aggressive and successful in Italy, with the Fascist takeover of 1922. (The leader of this, Benito Mussolini, 1883-1945 was, like Guesde and Hervé in France, a former Left Socialist turned Social Chauvinist). The non-Russian Communists remained dependent on Russia and were thus open to infection by a new form of bureaucratic degeneration, one that occurred within the Russian Workers’ State as it developed.

• Note from the editor: Some readers have asked what we mean by “idiosyncratic in its slant on some points”. I have in mind some of Lysaght’s passing comments as, for example, in the last instalment on Karl Kautsky’s book on the agrarian question. Neither Workers’ Liberty nor Lysaght’s group (now called Socialist Democracy, in Ireland) have “lines” on such questions, but I will write some notes for the online version of these articles.

UTOPIAN SOCIALISM

When socialism was proposed as the alternative to class struggle

 3 December, 2025 

Author: Colin Waugh

 Workers' Liberty

In the article titled The Chartist workers” fight for knowledge (Solidarity 751), I set out to show that an important dimension of the Chartist movement was an aspiration towards “really useful knowledge”.

A visceral hatred and fear of Chartism was widespread amongst the well-off in the late 1830s and the “hungry forties”. The “Corn Law rhymer” Ebenezer Elliott summed up what lay behind this when he wrote:

“Prepare to meet the King of Terrors” cried

To prayerless Want, his plunderer ferret-eyed.

“I am the King of Terrors,” Want replied.

In other words, the well-off feared what starving workers might do. Especially after the 1839 events in Newport and the 1842 “Plug Plot”, many would have seen the Chartists as a subhuman mob that must be crushed before they could destroy the social order.

However, for much of the second half of the 1840s it seemed as if the Chartist threat might have subsided. Then in the early months of 1848, stimulated especially by the February revolution in France, the Chartists made plans to submit a third petition to parliament, on 10 April. This revival of Chartism stirred up so much fear that 70,000 people across London were sworn in as special constables, cutlasses were issued to the regular police, and a military force, including cavalry and artillery, was lined up to stop the Chartist demonstration moving from its assembly point on Kennington Common to Parliament. This confrontation ended in anti-climax. Nevertheless it was with the aim of forestalling a further revival of Chartism that the first Christian Socialist group was formed that evening, at a house in Bloomsbury.

Group

This group was started by two lawyers, John Ludlow (1821-1911) and Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), and two Church of England clerics, Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872). Within a short time they won support from a substantial body of well-off people and also from a few working-class activists. Their strategy had two linked aspects: a drive to provide workers with religious education and a drive to promote producer cooperatives. In 1854, when the link was broken, the group disintegrated.

The Christian Socialists’ conception of religious education derived ultimately from a view put forward by the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1830, following the two acts of parliament (1828 and 1829) that had removed some of the legal restrictions on Catholics, Coleridge argued that the Anglican church could justify the tithes (ie the compulsory taxes) by which it was supported) if its priests everywhere were to be organised as a “clerisy” — that is, a national network that would provide education, both religious and general, to the working population.

Then in 1840, when the fear of Chartism was already very high, the influential — and racist — writer Thomas Carlyle published a short book titled Chartism. In this he urged that Chartism must be defeated before it was too late, and that the answer was (a) to get workers to emigrate and (b) to teach those who remained to read. He said that the Anglican clergy must do this teaching, and alleged that so far they had failed to do so.

The education strand within Christian Socialism derived, then, from Coleridge’s concept of clerisy and this demand by Carlyle.

Important

The single most important organiser of the Christian Socialist group was John Ludlow. He was descended from Edmund Ludlow, the Civil War general who in 1649 had signed the king’s death warrant. He was born in India where his father was a soldier, educated in France, and then became a lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn. (He spent a good deal of time visiting his sister and her husband in Martinique.) In 1830, when he was ten, Ludlow watched a crowd surging along the street in Paris at the start of the July revolution that overthrew the Bourbon monarchy. Later, having become an adherent of the critical utopian socialist Charles Fourier, he was strongly influenced by the Protestant cleric Louis Meyer. Meyer had founded a movement aimed at getting affluent young men to help the poor. He urged Ludlow to start a similar group in London. Ludlow was also influenced by the strands in French socialism which aimed to build producer cooperatives. Once in England he contacted Maurice, twenty years his senior, and recruited him to both these causes.

Abandoned

Maurice was brought up as a Unitarian, but as a young adult abandoned this to become a broad church Anglican — i.e. he rejected on the one hand the evangelical emphasis on salvation or damnation in an afterlife and, on the other, the high church tendency that sought to move closer to Catholicism. When Ludlow first knew him, Maurice was the Chaplain at Lincoln’s Inn and also a professor at King’s College, the institution set up in 1829 by Anglicans to counter the supposedly irreligious University College. From the late 1830s Maurice had been firmly convinced that Chartism must, in his word, be “crushed”.

Kingsley, no less racist than Carlyle, was an Anglican vicar in Hampshire. He wrote two influential anti-Chartist novels: Yeast, A Problem (1848) and Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850). (Both these books were heavily influenced by Carlyle, and a character based on Carlyle, Sandy Mackaye, is central figure in the second.) Kingsley’s favourite line was to claim that although he was a parson he was also a Chartist (a barefaced lie). He went on:

I am not one of those who laugh at your petition of April 10th; I have no patience with those who do... But my quarrel with the Charter is that it does not go far enough in reform. I want to set you free, but I don’t see how what you ask will give you what you want. I think you have fallen into the same mistake as the rich of whom you complain... I mean the mistake of fancying that legislative reform is social reform, or that men’s hearts can be changed by Acts of Parliament. If anyone will tell me of a country where a charter made rogues honest or the idle industrious, I shall alter my opinion of the Charter, but not till then... Be fit to be free and God himself will set you free.

The group of workers recruited by the Christian Socialists included several significant activists. The most important of these was Lloyd Jones (1811-1886). Starting out as a fustian cutter in Ireland, Jones was by 1849 a tailor in London, having been a high profile Owenite socialist organiser across much of England, including Lancashire, Yorkshire and London itself. After the Christian Socialist group as such broke up in 1854, Jones would go on to work closely with Ludlow and Hughes in the drive to give cooperatives and unions a stable legal basis. He did this right up to his death in 1886 while at no stage moving from his initial agnostic stance on religion.

Involved

In April 1849 these and many other workers became involved in bible reading and scripture discussion sessions led impressively by Maurice at the Cranbourne Coffee Tavern in The Strand, London, and then in the nearby Hall of Association, which had been built by one of their workers” cooperatives. They persuaded artisans in several trades, notably tailors, bakers and shoemakers, to form cooperatives. However by 1854 most of these cooperatives had either failed or become small capitalist firms.

Following the formation of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) in 1851, engineering employers throughout the country declared a lockout beginning on 1 January 1852, the aim being to get workers to sign “the document”, ie an undertaking not to join the union. There was a long struggle, but by June the engineers had been starved back to work. In this situation, the Christian Socialist group convinced the ASE leader (and co-founder) William Newton to put a motion to the national executive as follows:

That in the opinion of this meeting the resistance of Labour against Capital is not calculated to enhance the condition of the labourers. We therefore advise that all our future operations should be directed to promoting the system of self-employment in associative workshops as the best means of effectually regulating the conditions of labour.

As a result of this, and with Christian Socialist financial support, two cooperative engineering workshops were set up in London, one in Mile End Road and one in Southwark. But like the other Christian Socialist cooperatives both of these failed shortly afterwards — in this case essentially because ASE activists were more interested in organising struggle against mainstream employers.

Maurice’s idea of “socialism” was that all humans were children of God. In his opinion, then, all workers had to do to change their situation for the better was to recognise this and treat one another as brothers or sisters. Maurice also believed that the class structure of society was made by God and that therefore workers should not seek to change it. He saw producer cooperatives as a means by which they could treat one another appropriately, and his initial support for the formation of cooperatives was based on this. However, he rejected any idea of political organisation, especially any version of it that entailed majority rule, and in 1854 this finally led him to separate himself from the other group members.

In 1853 he had been sacked from his post at King’s College, on the grounds that he disbelieved in eternal damnation. Early in 1854 he convinced the other Christian Socialists that they should set up the London Workingmen’s College, and this opened in the October with Maurice as principal.

Cooperative

Although they continued to work with Maurice through this college, Ludlow and Hughes from this point increasingly devoted themselves, especially in conjunction with Lloyd Jones, to the cooperative movement, working through parliament to improve the legal position both of cooperatives and other workers’ self-help organisations, including both burial societies and trade unions. Ludlow drafted two parliamentary bills granting limited liability to these organisations. Hughes became a Liberal MP and Ludlow eventually became the national Registrar (i.e. the top civil servant responsible) for Friendly Societies. (Towards the end of their lives both Maurice and KIngsley became professors at Cambridge. Kingsley was appointed as professor of modern history there in 1860, having been appointed the year before as chaplain to the Queen. In 1861 he also became a private tutor to the Prince of Wales.)

In his 1954 book chapter The Christian Socialists of 1848, John Saville, at that stage still a Communist Party member, argued that the main effect of the Christian Socialist group’s 1848-54 activity was to make it more difficult than it would otherwise have been for Ernest Jones and others to rebuild the Chartist movement in the 1850s, thereby contributing to a situation in which “the majority of the British working class lived in conditions of semi-literacy and material poverty and insecurity for many decades to come”.

A third article will argue that this, though valid in itself, is not the whole story.

Was Menshevik Georgia a model?

 3 December, 2025 

Paul Abbot

 Workers' Liberty

Eric Lee’s The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism deals with the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Georgia in 1921 and the lead-up to the failed August Uprising in 1924, picking up where his earlier book The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 left off.

His central argument is that the events in Georgia played an important role in the final break between the two internationals, which he refers to as “the birth of democratic socialism”. This international context is the real original contribution of Lee’s book, and whilst I am unsympathetic to his assessment of the conflict and the conclusions he draws from it, it surely good that he has clearly and lucidly laid out the case for his side.

Georgia was a significant base for the Mensheviks, who enjoyed genuine dominance among the working class there. After the February Revolution, the Mensheviks controlled the Tiflis (now Tbilisi) Soviet, but argued that an alliance of the working class, soldiers, and the progressive bourgeoisie were at the heart of the revolution, and it was of utmost importance to preserve this alliance.

Difficult

The Mensheviks in power were faced with a difficult situation: they were a socialist party that drew their power from the working class and overall sought to remain part of Russia, yet were thrust into a position of national leadership at the head of a newly independent Georgia. They opposed dual power, and under their leadership the Tiflis Soviet renounced any claims to state power and subordinated itself to the (also Menshevik-ran) traditional bodies of the state. In their eyes, their task was to rule as befit a nation whose productive forces were unready for socialism: Prime Minister Noe Zhordania argued that they could not “avoid serving in one way or another … the interests of the bourgeoisie”.

For criticism of the Georgian Mensheviks in power, see Paul Vernadsky’s review of The Experiment and the ensuing back and forth, and the more recent debate in Solidarity between Lee and Vernadsky over German support for Menshevik Georgia.

In February 1921 a Bolshevik uprising broke out in Lori (disputed between Armenia and Georgia), at the very least in part engineered from Moscow. This came after Stalin’s ally Orjonikidze had repeatedly pushed for an invasion of Georgia, and the uprising was used as a pretext for invasion. Trotsky argued for more “preparatory work inside Georgia in order to develop the uprising and later come to its aid”, but was away in the Urals when the decision was made. Lenin acquiesced to the invasion, but expressed reservations which would grow over time.

Georgia was quickly conquered, and the new rule certainly was repressive. Lee chronicles the repression carried out against the trade unions, the church, intellectuals, cooperatives, peasants, and the Menshevik Party. Local communists were also badly treated by Moscow, with Stalin and Orjonikidze purging those who counseled more sensitivity towards national sentiment in Georgia: this episode was at the centre of Lenin’s final struggle against Stalin, and he worked hard to try and support Georgian communists such as Mdivani.

Despite the repression the Mensheviks endured underground, and in 1923 would form a committee (Damkom) to coordinate an uprising against Soviet rule, alongside the right-wing National Democrats, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Social Federalists, and Skhivists (dissident Mensheviks). Shortly before the uprising was due to take place one of its leaders was captured. He attempted to warn the others that the Cheka knew about their plans, but they carried on with the uprising at the end of August 1924.

Damp squib

For the most part it was a bit of a damp squib: the first shots were fired a day early in the city of Chiatura due to a miscommunication, and other local revolts the next day were small and isolated. The chief exception to this was Guria, an area which had experienced a Menshevik-supported peasant rebellion in the run up to the 1905 Revolution, where large numbers of peasants joined the August Uprising. Within a few days it was all over, and the government response was bloody.

Events in Georgia were closely followed by the European socialist movement, and Second International figures such as Karl Kautsky saw it as a practical and real-world alternative to Bolshevik Communism. In 1922 the Berlin Conference was held as a final attempt at reconciliation between the Second and Third Internationals (also including the Second and a Half International which was wavering between the two), and somewhat unexpectedly the Soviet invasion of Georgia came to dominate the proceedings. The discussions at the conference were acrimonious, and no practical cooperation came out of the conference.

Following the failure of the August Uprising, Kautsky wrote that Bolshevism had gone “from being the beneficiary of the revolution to its gravedigger”, and that when spontaneous revolts arose in the Soviet Union the Second International could not “condemn participation”.

Persuasive

Lee argues persuasively that the invasion of Georgia in 1921 provided a model for later Soviet invasions of bordering nations they saw as within their domain: namely, presenting the invasion as aid for local communists, either in power (Hungary and Afghanistan) or involved in a workers’ revolution.

Overall however, his conclusions are wrong. His opposition to the Bolsheviks is made less coherent by the cast of characters he selects as worthwhile critics of them: it is a grave insult to put Rosa Luxemburg alongside Samuel Gompers, the racist pro-war American union leader. On the war, Lee largely skirts over the fact that many of the book’s heroes fully supported their own government’s war efforts, such as Zhordania and Irakli Tsereteli.

The book’s epilogue about the refoundation of the Second International in 1951 is when things really go off the rails. Lee praises them for choosing sides in the Cold War and giving their “full support” to collective security and the foundation of NATO, pointing to former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg as part of this tradition.

Lee writes off the Bolsheviks as a whole. He is wrong to do this, and his alternatives are not very convincing. However, the invasion of Menshevik Georgia in 1921 was a terrible crime, not only against Georgia but against the Bolshevik project itself. It helped to inaugurate the rule of a bureaucratic anti-democratic clique, and cement the idea that workers’ rule could be implemented from outside at the tip of a bayonet.

 

Portugal 1974: The Carnation Revolution Remembered First-hand

Former Waterford Glass worker, Tommy Hogan, was part of organising a solidarity delegation in 1976 from the factory to understand more about how Portuguese workers overthrew the dictatorship. He recounts the lasting impressions of this revolution from below, and points to lessons we can learn today.

written by Tommy Hogan November 20, 2025

September 1, 1973, saw a US-sponsored coup defeat the democratically elected, Marxist-inspired government of Salvador Allende in Chile.  The terror that followed sent shock waves through the international left. The idea of a parliamentary road to socialism lay buried beneath the body of Allende and the thousands of left-wing activists and sympathizers who were murdered by the military junta. Pinochet’s dictatorship would last until 1990. It so happened that a small number of Chilean refugees, part of the exodus fleeing the military dictatorship of General Pinochet, arrived and settled in Waterford.

Just nine months after this, on April 25th 1974, young army officers of the Portuguese MFA (Armed Forces Movement), staged a coup against the Caetano authoritarian regime and its handling of the colonial wars it was waging in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. Not only were the professional officers unhappy with the fact that they could be overtaken in promotions by noncareer officers, but they believed victory in the colonial war was impossible. The war was taking a huge toll on the Portuguese economy. Almost half of the national budget went to the military at the expense of public services and the welfare of the working class. On that day, thousands of workers poured onto the streets. Women put carnations in the rifle barrels of the soldiers, giving it the name Carnation Revolution. Watching the events on television we had no idea how things would unfold.

The overthrow of the legacy of Salazar’s 50-year dictatorship in Portugal ignited a revolution that would unfold over 19 months. Massive workers’ struggles erupted. Strikes, occupations, tenants demanding rent caps and reductions, squatters occupying empty properties – with whole working class communities taking part – made it seem like a true festival of the oppressed. The revolution changed not only Portugal but had an impact on the fascist dictatorship in Spain, hastening its end, and also on the rule of the Greek Colonels.

 

Waterford socialist shopstewards

In February 1974 a number of us were shop stewards and members of the Socialist Workers Movement (SWM), which was the forerunner of the SWN today. We were active in the first all-out strike at Waterford Crystal. This action was led and directed entirely by the shop stewards. It was subsequently declared official by Matt Merrigan, the Irish District Secretary of the ATGWU. The four-day shut down involved over 2,000 workers.

Visits to our local Waterford branch by leading national comrades of the SWM, some of whom had traveled to Portugal, kept us informed of events unfolding there. One important analysis by revolutionary socialist Tony Cliff characterised the period as “Dual Powerlessness”, because neither side, at that juncture, had the political power to impose their will.

We saw the events in Portugal, mass mobilisations of tens of thousands of workers and peasants, on RTÉ news every night. Many of the demonstrations were organised by the influential Portuguese Communist Party and the far left. The Communist Party had deep roots in the trade unions. Revolutionary soldiers and their units who commanded great respect among the people for their role in initiating the revolution would also march in uniform with the people.

In the autumn of 1974, the cutters’ section at Waterford Crystal discussed a motion, put forward by the shop stewards, which proposed solidarity with the Portuguese workers. This provided the opportunity for us to share with our members, many of whom had little knowledge of the events in Portugal, the information gained from the socialist literature we were reading. But an older conservative layer of the Glass workers trivialised our efforts to contact workers in the Portuguese Glass industry. They said that what was happening there had nothing to do with us.

However, the motion was carried in the name of  the five hundred members,  the cutters’ section of the 11/64 branch of the ATGWU. We  forwarded our motion to the workers of Atlantic Crystal located in Marinha Grande in Portugal. It would be 1976 when we got to meet with those workers at their factory.

 

International solidarity 

Early in 1975 a number of us sought leave from the company to go to Portugal to “visit” the Glass works, at Atlantic Crystal. This was agreed, but later revoked, by the company personnel manager, on the grounds it was too dangerous. Calling us to his office he said “driving into work this morning I heard on the news there is big trouble in Portugal. I will not be responsible for anything that might happen to you; you can go wherever you like on your annual leave.” He was referring to an attempted coup by far right military officers and former President Spinola.

In early 1975, the SWM hosted a comrade from Portugal for a national speaking tour. Successful meetings were held in a number locations, both North and South. In Waterford, we attracted a good attendance of Glass workers and workers from other employments. At the time we were selling two hundred copies of the monthly SWM newspaper “The Worker” in the factory, and more copies across the pubs of Waterford and south Kilkenny.

In the summer of 1976, four local branch members of the SWM, three of whom were shop stewards at Waterford Crystal, set off by car for Lisbon. As we journeyed down through the North of Portugal, we saw small peasant holdings populated, in the main, by elderly men and women, dressed entirely in black, working on their holdings. There seemed to be an almost complete absence of young people there. Portugal, not unlike Ireland, endured high levels of emigration.

The large wealthy land owners and the Catholic church, had big holdings in the South and Center of the country. These large estates (Latifundia) were worked by landless labourers.

Following the April revolution, almost two and a half million acres of land was seized, much of it by landless labourers and small holders. After the November 1975 counter coup, which saw the defeat of the revolutionary left and the consolidation of power by the more moderate military and political factions, land owners began demanding the return of land which had been occupied.  A land reform law in 1977/8 consolidated the return of this land, now deemed to be illegally occupied, to the former owners.

 

Lisbon

On reaching the outskirts of Lisbon we were taken aback to see the extent of the shanty towns. They were something outside our experience, only scenes that we had seen in Catholic magazines like the Far East with its pictures of the slums of Calcutta. The people there were literally living on the margin, with shelters made from cardboard and corrugated tin, all tightly packed together. Many were from the countryside looking for work and a better life in the city. Portugal in 1974 was one of the least developed countries in Europe and, for the majority of the population, the poorest. As the shanty towns grew so did the working class. We could only imagine what it would have been like to live there, summer or winter.

In Lisbon we made contact with members of the party of the revolutionary proletariat and revolutionary brigades, the PRP-BR. These were tough comrades prepared to take armed action against the fascist regime, and who understood that, if the revolution was to ultimately be successful, the workers would have to be armed and supported by the revolutionary soldiers. They said it would be bullets which would determine the final outcome. They were close to radical officers and the revolutionary soldiers on whom they put a strong emphasis. They had support and influence among some sections of workers and also with tenants and squatter groups.

 

Atlantis Crystal

We got the name of a worker from a factory – Atlantis Crystal – which was the famous centre of glass making in Portugal, located at Marinha Grande, a town north of Lisbon. We travelled there and were greeted with a warm welcome by comrades of the local PRP-BR, one of whom was a leading shop steward at the Glass works.

We were taken on a tour of the plant where we exchanged experiences of how work was organised, payment systems, the role of women in the factory (of whom there seemed to be few), union organisation, and the extent of control the workers had within the factory. Although the factory remained with the owners, the workers commission involved itself in operational and investment plans.

Inside the factory, there were posters in every section of Otelo Carvalho, a  Presidential candidate and  former army officer who was central to the 1974 coup. Although standing as an independent he was supported by the revolutionary left. He came second in the election, with not far-off a million votes. That evening we met with workers from the glass works and were introduced to a couple of local members of the PRP-BR.

They told us that on the morning of the revolution in 1974, they felled trees from the surrounding forest and placed them across the road, to disrupt the movement of army and police. They were armed, but the need for use of weapons did not arise. That day the inhabitants of the town and workers from the surrounding area struck work and gathered in the town center. The local police kept a low profile. There was a feeling of euphoria and excitement, the dictatorship was toppled, and now new possibilities were opening up.

They recounted how in the days following the coup and for some time afterwards, some managers and their underlings (who were in fact police informers) did not show up for work, some being driven out of their jobs by the workers taking strike action. According to official reports, in February 1975, 12,000 police informants  had been removed or suspended from their jobs, despite appeals from the socialist and communist parties for restraint. ¹

One of our comrades gave a brief talk on Ireland and again great interest was shown in the situation in Ireland, questioning us about our own organisation and the politics of the Irish republican movement. They had a number of shop stewards, members of their own organisation present and others, who were close to them.

During our brief stay in Portugal we met with many people in bars and restaurants with whom we spoke – sometimes with difficulty because of the language. With few tourists in the country, people were eager to engage in conversation. The topic was always the political situation. Once people knew we were from Ireland, we got a warm reception. It was surprising how well-informed many people were as regards the situation in Ireland. You could feel the atmosphere was still somewhat charged,and there was much discussion about what the future might hold. Concerns about the threat of a return to dictatorship had diminished.

When we sought hotel accommodation in Lisbon, there were no rooms available. We soon learned that hotels all over the city were taken over by the “Retornados”. With Portugal’s withdrawal from its colonies, very quickly over half a million many embittered and disillusioned right wingers returned to Portugal and had to be integrated into the population of 9 million. They included small business people, farmers, government officials, military personnel, administrators and their families etc.

 

Workers’ control

Within weeks of the overthrow of the regime strikes for higher wages had exploded. Occupations were commonplace in pursuit of wages and the dismissal of those who collaborated with the secret police. Over a period of 19 months, some banks were nationalised and almost a 1,000 workplaces were under workers’ control. These included not just factories but offices, hotels, clinics, nurseries, Lisbon airport, the giant Lisnave shipbuilding works and the Radio station.

Many of these were overseen by the workers commissions, while in some, workers assumed ownership, and became co-operatives.  Many sectors of the economy were nationalised, partly due pressure from the workers in occupation of their workplaces, but also to save the economy from bankruptcy.

Private schools and hospitals were occupied by teachers and doctors, some of which are still in public ownership. By October 1974, it is estimated workers had set up several thousand Workers Commissions; where these combined, sometimes including tenants’ councils, they formed a kind of nascent soviet or workers’ council.

Occupation of empty houses had begun almost immediately and continued to expand despite threats from municipal authorities, and the newly installed Salvation junta.  Radicalised soldiers had begun setting up structures similar to the workers’ councils. On a number of occasions, the soldiers refused orders to take action against the workers.

 

Reaction

There would be six provisional governments over the period 1974-6. There were several right wing coups to smother the revolution. In March 1975, one such by former President Antonio Spinola failed. The prospect of a return to fascism – the enemy that united all – saw massive numbers of workers and revolutionary soldiers mobilise against it, forcing Spinola to flee the country.

Radical officers with Communist Party backing launched a coup in November 1975, which was premature and quickly put down by the army loyalists.  The Communist Party, supported by some sections of the far left, changed tack, abandoning some of their own officers. To what extent this was preplanned is still debated. More than a hundred officers were arrested, many of whom were the leaders of the revolutionary units. Revolutionary soldiers were demoted and relegated to the reserves.  Left militants in the Lisbon area were arrested and jailed.

The ruling class had effectively recaptured a monopoly of the armed forces. The  power of the state was restored. The new rulers quickly began to denationalise some of the bigger corporations. Surprisingly, resistance was low given the recent big demonstrations and protests outside the parliament. The 25th November coup would come to be seen as the end of the revolutionary period.

 

Reformism

This was not Chile of 1973.  While the preparedness of the conservative officers within the army was underestimated, there was practically no bloodshed. However, the revolutionary groups tended to over-rely on the MFA and not focus enough on the economic struggles of the workers. This approach  prevented the deepening and development of the nascent workers’ councils, which could have been rallied to oppose the coup.

The revolutionary left also tended to underestimate the capitalist elite’s ability to divert the revolutionary movement into delivering some reforms but which fell far short of  what the movement was demanding. Also it underestimated the influence of the Socialist and Communist Parties within the working class.

The absence of an experienced revolutionary party embedded in every workplace and neighbourhood was a decisive factor in the defeat of the revolutionary forces. There was nothing comparable to the Bolsheviks in Portugal in 1975. Lacking sufficient penetration in the working class the revolutionary left was unable to call a general strike in support of the soldiers. Reformism in the shape of the Socialist Party, which Portuguese workers had no experience of, at the decisive moment of the struggle, became attractive to large sections of  the working class and among radical army officers.

 

A glimpse of revolution in Portugal

During our brief visit the high point of the revolution had passed. Yet we could still feel the excitement felt by people on what they had achieved. It was an astonishing period when people ruled themselves, taking control of their own destiny. Short of taking power the working class made great gains, including a new constitution, democratic free elections, welfare state, workers rights. These were concessions the elite had to make in order to regain the stability of the state. Working people rightly considered they had achieved a great victory, something they were very proud of, and that after 50 years of authoritarian fascism they had endured.

Many of those who participated in those momentous and historic events,  and those of us who were around at that time are now in their seventies and beyond. The story of the Portuguese workers revolution, although politically defeated, their dedication and heroism, their exercise of dual power and self-management of workplaces and communities, needs to be remembered. It needs to be passed on to the new, younger generation of revolutionary socialists, and remembered today just how close the Portuguese workers came to unlocking the  door of history and creating a new world.

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