Conor Kostick: SWP, Independent Left, and Left Organising and Activism

In this episode we talk to Conor Kostick of Independent Left, and formerly the Socialist Workers Party, about a range of areas including his own history, activism and historical research, materials in the Left Archive that he has contributed to and issues like the use of social and other media in Left organising.

Conor is an activist on the left, an historian, a researcher, and a novelist in a range of genres. Amongst other things he was twice chairperson of the Irish Writers Union, and a member of the Board of the National Library of Ireland. He was a long time member of the SWP, a former editor of Socialist Worker, and subsequently joined Independent Left in 2019.

You’ll find Left archive documents to which Conor has contributed on his page, as well as some of his other writing, which Conor has kindly made available to the archive.

These documents in particular are discussed in this episode - a pamphlet written by Conor Kostick for the SWM, and public meeting notices from Independent Left:

• Why the Irish Labour Party Fails
• Mutiny! [Public Meeting]
• Ireland’s Greatest General Strike: April 1920 [Public Meeting]

Some further documents mentioned in the course of the discussion may also be of interest:

• Socialist Revolutionary Group Ireland, “An Open Letter to the Communist Party of Ireland”
• Cork Workers Club, “Irish Socialists, Partition and the Struggle in the North” (Originally published as an introduction to their reprint of James’ Connolly’s Ireland on the Dissecting Table.)

Correction: The introduction to this episode describes Conor as a founding member of Independent Left. It had in fact been in existence for some months before he joined.