Ben T

housing worker / @unisontheunion shop steward / @labfreemvmt cofounder / @workersliberty / @campaignuyghur / make mars red again / 'un-british' ~keir starmer

[Ben T @bentausz]

Torn between filling in my nationality as "rootless cosmopolitan", "international judeo-bolshevik" or "metropolitan separatist" when the census arrives.

[Workers' Liberty ✊🏿🏳️‍🌈 ⚧️ 🇺🇦 @workersliberty]

New issue of Solidarity out now! Solidarity 769, 10 June 2026

https://t.co/we8p3IusFB

[Michael Chessum @michael_chessum]

I love Andrew Gilligan. Every time I get elected to anything, he runs the same hit piece.

Such original, very journalism.

[Workers Against the CCP @WorkersAntiCCP]

Thursday marks 37 years since the Tiananmen massacre. Join rallies to remember and continue the struggles of all who stood up for democracy in 1989 in the square and in the workplace.

Actions in London, Sheffield, Manchester, Brum, Nottm, Cardiff, Sutton: https://t.co/CR6W4JRXFg

[Ben T @bentausz]

@EdaCaz @ZackPolanski What did the Labour group offer the Green group in return for support that the latter turned down?

[Workers' Liberty ✊🏿🏳️‍🌈 ⚧️ 🇺🇦 @workersliberty]

Trade unionists protested against the far right in Trafalgar Square today.

Our report
https://t.co/B1g8FT3Xmt

[Workers' Liberty ✊🏿🏳️‍🌈 ⚧️ 🇺🇦 @workersliberty]

@AaronBastani This is untrue, you are a journalist and so should fact check to confirm information accuracy. We have never had a policy opposing the age of consent. Retract this and apologise to Workers Liberty and its members.

[Ben T @bentausz]

@Cat_Guevara42 @WriteToRebel How long you got? This moment - holding a big party with the Nazis after helping them to invade Poland, selling them loads of oil and handing over German communists - was a pretty good indicator

[Ben T @bentausz]

@GDC1963 @workersliberty https://t.co/DjsaWinSL5

[Ben T @bentausz]

@GDC1963 @workersliberty It seems the purgers scaremonger about democratic centralism, even in its most open and democratic forms, while imposing a cultish bureaucratic centralism of their own.

[Ben T @bentausz]

@GDC1963 @workersliberty Moving the goalposts I see (in any case we're not a party)

[Ben T @bentausz]

@owenjonesjourno Why conflate the self-determination of the nations repressed by Russian imperialism, with the neoliberal shock therapy? As if one couldn't have happened without the other. Given your long-time criticism of Stalinist repression, I don't get why you don't distinguish the two?

[Ben T @bentausz]

The fact that Owen is a long-time critic of Stalinist repression makes it all the more senseless for him to conflate neoliberal shock therapy with the independence of the USSR's subject nations. As if one could not have occurred without the other.

[Ben T @bentausz]

If you arbitrarily insist on packaging capitalist assault as part and parcel of allowing self-determination for the subject peoples of Russian imperialism, then don't act surprised when people chafing under that imperialism take you at your word and gravitate to the capitalists.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

12 million people are estimated to have been killed by economic 'shock therapy' in Russia alone.

Russia suffered the worst peacetime economic collapse of a major industrialised nation in history.

The Russian economy nearly halved.

The fall in Russian output was much worse than that caused by the Nazi invasion in the 1940s.

Russian male life expectancy fell by 6.5 years, to 57.6 - back to its mid-1950s level.

The overall fall in life expectancy was on the scale of Vietnam during all-out war in the 1960s.

The suicide and homicide rates doubled.

Real incomes collapsed by 40%.

At the time of the Soviet collapse, one in fifty Russians lived in poverty. By the end of 1998, that surged to nearly one in every five.

Full employment gave way to mass unemployment.

As healthcare funding collapsed by a third and poverty surged, disease such as diphtheria, tuberculosis and syphilis rampaged.

Russia was taken over by oligarchs, gangsters implicated in serious crimes who stole the country's resources.

Murderous conflicts in the former Soviet territory included Chechnya, where potentially hundreds of thousands were killed.

Yeltsin's contempt for democracy was underlined by his bombing of the Russian legislature - and the undemocratic farce of the 1996 election.

Putin came to power after the Russian secret services almost certainly staged apartment bombings which killed hundreds.

The invasion of Ukraine has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Need I go on? Yes, the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the great catastrophes of our age.

An alternative would have kept the USSR together (Baltic states aside) on a democratic basis, without ruinous shock therapy.

Notably, a Soviet-wide referendum in March 1991 overwhelmingly voted to keep the Union together (although it was boycotted by six of the fifteen republics - in the Baltic and three small republics).

[Ben T @bentausz]

The hostility of much of the international socialist left toward subject peoples trying to get free of Moscow's imperialist grip, was a gross dereliction and an historic catastrophe. It left the once-strong class struggle and socialist elements within those movements isolated.

[Ben T @bentausz]

@GDC1963 @workersliberty It seems the purgers scaremonger about democratic centralism, even in its most open and democratic forms, while imposing a cultish bureaucratic centralism of their own.

[Ben T @bentausz]

@GDC1963 @workersliberty 2. Are you proposing that YP should be a tightly-controlled, narrow party demanding total loyalty to a strictly-defined set of policies? I.e. Something even more centralist than most of the organisations that have been banned, on the model of old zinovievised Communist Parties?

[Ben T @bentausz]

@thisisyourparty "whatever differences of opinion arise, all members put Your Party’s interests first." How about putting the interests of the working class and winning socialism first? You have the gall to consider us sectarians but demand loyalty to your apparatus before principle and class.

[Workers' Liberty ✊🏿🏳️‍🌈 ⚧️ 🇺🇦 @workersliberty]

By failing to challenge "Epstein class" conspiracy theories in the hope of making easy political gains, the left gives an unwitting leg-up to reactionary political currents.

https://t.co/sz5u9KZRyq

[Workers' Liberty ✊🏿🏳️‍🌈 ⚧️ 🇺🇦 @workersliberty]

Stop the war! Down with despots in Iran and USA

New issue of Solidarity: https://t.co/hfsmzKwTVy

[Ben T @bentausz]

@SolarGrun @SocialistVoice @JeevunSandher @ZackPolanski How about this - the far-right authoritarians governing India, China, Russia and the USA are all vile, and supposed progressives and socialists should be clearly criticising all of them and building solidarity for the workers and minorities those tyrants are attacking.