Trotsky once spoke of a raincoat that had holes in it. It was a perfect raincoat, he said - as long as it doesn’t rain. With the far left’s confused non-response to Trump’s fascism (when they aren’t simply congratulating him on pwning the liberals, and after spending a lot of energy denying he was a fascist to start with), hasn’t the revolutionary left as a whole turned out to be such a raincoat?

Topics discussed: Introductions; The SWP (Socialist Workers Party) and SWSS (Socialist Workers Student Society) in 1984; the miners’ strike; the revolutionary left in the 70s and 80s; a busted flush; the end of ouverism / workerism after the miners’ strike; East London IS (International Socialists), stewards and activists; York University; the social basis of Libertarian Communism in the postwar militancy; Mark Fisher vs the last generation to get a whiff of workers organisation; anarchists against the miners; state capitalism and Polish builders; Solidarnosc; Leninism vs the counterculture; Castoriadis (Socialisme ou Barbarie), Mike Kidron, Nigel Harris and Alasdair Macintyre (Socialist Review Group and International Socialists), Italian Autonomism breaking out of the ideology of Trotskyism; social justice in sectarian Ireland, segregated US, the Vietnam war; the Communist Historians Group and the utopianism of the countercultural left; Trotskyist disappointment after 1989 and the Colour Revolutions; How the SWP decided to become Trotskyist; conspiratorial, underground Marxism vs. Marxist (and post-Marxist!) rethinking; ‘Shock Doctrine’ Marxism, ‘No Logo’ and the rise of ‘anti-imperialist’ campism; defending the center / in defense of liberal modernity.