Socialist Ideas & Theory

By Tony Saunois An international campaign by capitalist politicians and media has been unleashed against president Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan government. It has been used by Labour’s Blairista right wing to try to weaken Jeremy Corbyn. In Spain, the spectre of Venezuela has been held up as a warning of what a Podemos-led government would mean. The close links of Podemos ...

By Pete Watson, Nottingham Socialist Party The European Single Market is a major barrier to any incoming socialist or anti-austerity government. The capitalist establishment across Europe is wedded to privatisation and austerity. And it can rely on Single Market treaties and EU law to impede nationalisation and state investment while ramping up privatisation. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty is the legal ...

Editorial in The Socialist, paper of the Socialist Party of England and Wales “The Labour Party’s announcement that it wants the UK to remain within all the EU’s structures in the years right after Brexit is the best news to come out of British politics in a long time.” So read the 28 August editorial of the Financial Times, one ...

Philip Stott The dramatic rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP) has been thrown into a sharp reverse recently. The partial collapse in the electoral support for the SNP at the June 2017 general election – a loss of 21 of their 56 MPs and half a million votes – speaks to a growing mood of disappointment in a party ...

Hannah Sell Fight for a socialist Brexit Theresa May’s four-week holiday is drawing to a close. She is returning to an autumn of watching her party tear itself apart over the EU. Following her humiliating general election campaign she really is a ‘dead prime minister walking‘; powerless to be more than a passive bystander in the Tories’ civil war. According ...

Robin Clapp, Socialist Party National Committee The Daily Mail reacted with predictable hysteria when, in May 2017, John McDonnell stated: “You can’t understand the capitalist system without reading Marx’s Das Kapital.” When asked to immediately condemn his shadow chancellor, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn refused to do so and correctly added that Marx was “a great economist”. These endorsements are a ...

Tax avoidance has been in the headlines lately, provoking renewed calls to tax the rich and big business. The Socialist campaigns for closing loopholes, and increasing wealth and corporation taxes. But you can’t control what you don’t own: only socialist nationalisation can end the great tax robbery. By Paul Hunt, Coventry Socialist Party It is a time of seemingly never-ending ...

“A zigzag that cannot be explained”. That’s how the right wing Israeli commentator Amit Segal summarized Netanyahu’s decisions regarding the change of the security and entrance arrangements to the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem. There’s no doubt that the removal of the metal detectors and the infrastructure for security cameras less than two weeks after they were installed, was ...

Only the working class taking power from capitalists and bureaucrats can defeat reaction Izquierda Revolucionaria Venezuela & Socialismo Revolucionario On 30 July elections were held to elect members of the “National Constituent Assembly” (ANC). In the days prior to the election, US imperialism and the MUD (the coalition which unites the right and far-right in Venezuela) backed a campaign of ...

The forerunner of the Socialist Party was the ‘Militant tendency’, so-called because it was organised in the Labour Party around the newspaper, Militant. The following is the transcript of an interview with Peter Taaffe, General Secretary of the Socialist Party, and one of the founders of The Militant, conducted by Shaun Ley for the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Party’s ...