Socialist Ideas & Theory

International Executive Committee of the CWI Capitalist society is convulsed and in turmoil. Marxists and the working class face one of the most challenging periods in history. It is essential that we analyse the processes unfolding and face up to the theoretical and programmatic challenges posed, along with the active intervention in the class struggle necessary to build a mass ...

By Hannah Sell. Socialist Party General Secretary This year, 2022, is predicted to see the biggest fall in living standards in the UK since 1956. Inflation, according to the Retail Price Index, is already at 8.2% and is expected to rise further throughout the year. Soaring energy and food prices are leaving growing numbers of working-class people choosing between heating ...

Editorial of the Socialist, issue 1170 The horror of war, of families fleeing for their lives as bombs fall on their cities and towns, is dominating the news. Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is being watched with fear and revulsion. His farcical propaganda claims this is a ‘special military operation’, designed to fight ‘Ukrainian fascism’. Yet Ukraine is being trampled ...

By Niall Mulholland The war in Ukraine has revisited the ‘national question’ in Europe, ie the language, culture, and democratic rights of populations to territory, in a bloody manner, not seen since the Balkans wars in the 1990s following the breakup of Yugoslavia. Niall Mulholland of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) explains how capitalism cannot peacefully solve the ...

Review of “The Welsh Way” by Dave Reid The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution Edited by Daniel Evans, Kieron Smith and Huw Williams Published by Parthian Books, 2021, £10 Ever since the first devolved Welsh assembly in 1999 the idea has been promoted by many on the left that Welsh Labour, and the Welsh governments led by it, ...

Trade unions must fight for a new workers’ party Editorial from The Socialist Issue 1249 The person who said New Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” is now intensely happy about the results of this year’s Labour Party conference. Architect of Blairism, Lord Peter Mandelson, is “just thrilled” at this “tremendous win for Keir Starmer”. He said: ...

By Iby Yassin The global Black Lives Matter movement has empowered many BAME people to speak up about the struggles they face, and to seek equality in a system that disadvantages us. One of the most basic outcomes of equality is representation – to see yourself and those that share your skin colour and culture in all aspects of public ...

Taken from the latest issue of Socialism Today Despite the heroic efforts of healthworkers the NHS has been ill-prepared to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. But the roots of this lie in years of neo-liberal policies, including the marketisation drive in England of the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, argues JON DALE. Ten years of ConDem ...

Statement from the International Secretariat of the Committee For A Workers International On the other side of the coronavirus pandemic crisis, things will never be the same again. This will be similar to the situation after the two world wars of the twentieth century. The general situation has already unmistakably “changed, changed utterly!” Moreover, it is the rapid speed of ...

On 21 August 1940, Leon Trotsky, the Marxist thinker and fighter, and co-leader of the Russian Revolution (along with Lenin), was murdered by one of Stalin’s agents. The article ‘Trotsky’s Assassination’ originally appeared in the quarterly theoretical magazine of The Militant (now the Socialist Party), in 1980. By Lyn Walsh On 20 August, 1940, Trotsky was struck a fatal blow ...