Fighting global capitalism

Anti-capitalism, globalisation, Social Forums, sweatshops, the environment, war and terror ...

National struggles and inter-imperialist struggles: Lenin answers Stop the War

In defiance of the facts, the Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Workers' Party, Counterfire, etc, claim the war in Ukraine is primarily an inter-imperialist conflict between Russia and NATO, not a war of Ukrainian self-defence. (Some of Stop the War's supporters are straightforwardly pro-Russia, as was on display at its 25 February demo .) Couldn't the Ukraine conflict be transformed into an inter-imperialist war? Of course. That doesn't mean it is one now. In his response to Rosa Luxemburg's 1916 Junius Pamphlet , excerpts below, Vladimir Lenin addressed precisely this kind of issue. (At...

India’s richest man crashes. Support India’s workers!

Adani and Modi Until last month India’s Gautam Adani was the richest man in Asia; last year he briefly displaced Jeff Bezos as the second richest on earth. In the last fortnight, he has lost almost half his $120 billion personal wealth, and his corporations about double that. Just as India’s far-right regime responded to last month’s BBC documentary reminding the world of Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat pogroms by claiming an imperialistic assault on India’s sovereignty , the Adani Group called the release of the damaging information driving its turmoil “a calculated attack on India...

Capitalism and freedom

In his Communist Manifesto Marx defined the communist aim as freedom: “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Elsewhere he wrote: “the association of free and equal producers”. Yet he also declared: “the abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at”. The German word translated as “abolition” ( Aufhebung ) can also be translated “supersession”. But the gist is this. In the marketplace rule “Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham [i.e. atomised self-seeking]”. But if...

New India solidarity group launched

Delhi anganwadi (early years) workers on strike earlier this year About 50 people attended the formal launch of the India Labour Solidarity campaign in London on 6 December. ILS was set up in the summer – its first activity was leafleting at Labour Party conference in September – to “promote solidarity between workers and their trade union and labour movements in the UK and India”. The meeting was chaired by Praveen Kolluguri, a Communication Workers’ Union member in the telecoms sector who is BAME officer of Kingston and Surbiton Labour Party in South London and on the Labour Campaign for...

Politics after the Truss fiasco

Click here to download the power-point presentation from the 23 October 2022 Workers' Liberty Zoom forum on the aftermath of the Truss government.

Shifts in the world order

Economic barriers between countries are growing. The world is less "flat" than it used to be, in the sense of being a free-fire zone for capitalist trade and investment with negligible barriers to surmount at borders. It is more "multipolar", in the sense of differentiated political and economic networks, each with its own centre or centres. How far has this gone? What, in more exact terms, are the trends? What should socialists make of it? Between 1945-7 and 1989-91 the world was, in broad terms, divided into two blocs. One bloc was dominated by the USA. Within that bloc, the old colonial...

Social reproduction and the roots of transphobia

Substantially longer version of this piece here As revolutionary socialists, we fight for the expansion of freedom and human flourishing, and seek to rid our world of oppression and discrimination. We stand in solidarity with the downtrodden, champion individual self-determination and bodily autonomy, and organise to empower people to take control of their own lives. For all these reasons and more, we fight for the liberation of trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender non-conforming people. This struggle flows naturally from our liberatory principles and our commitment to solidarity, combined...

Wage rises, price curbs: where to push

"Don't Pay" , launched on 18 June, aims to get one million households to sign up to stop their energy direct-debits from 1 October. It calls for "a reduction of bills to an affordable level", but says it has no "set list of demands". Its first activity is via "email lists... Telegram, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and Twitter" and leafleting. The initiators are anonymous, say they are "not affiliated to any organisation", but hope eventually to move to organisation - "community groups... building this up street by street, estate by estate and city by city". The domestic energy price cap rose 12%...

Against Russian imperialism

A statement from the Russian Socialist Movement and the Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialnyi Rukh. Although the majority of the left has condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the left camp’s unity is still lacking. We would like to address those on the left who still stick to “a plague on both houses” position that views the war as an inter-imperialist war. It is high time the left woke up and carried out a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” instead of reproducing worn-out frameworks from the Cold War. Overlooking Russian imperialism is a terrible mistake for the left...

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