Socialist Ideas & Theory

A Response to Bhaskar Sunkara This article was originally published in the left wing American magazine, Counter Punch on the 28th July 2017. The author, Alan Jones, is a member of the Executive Committee of Socialist Alternative, the American sister party of the Socialist Party. At the end of June, in the midst of a growing discussion about socialism in ...

“This has been the biggest school the CWI has ever organised”, said Peter Taaffe from the International Secretariat of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), when opening (together with Juan Ignacio Ramos, general secretary of Izquierda Revolucionaria in the Spanish state) the special unification congress which finished a historic week for the CWI and Izquierda Revolucionaria. It was not ...

Massive demonstrations involving nearly a million people erupted in Petrograd on 2-3 July 1917, in a colossal outburst of anger and discontent. Workers, soldiers and peasants were reacting in fury at the failure of the provisional government – installed after the February 1917 revolution – to transform their terrible conditions. They were suffering high food prices, poverty wages, factory lockouts ...

Far away from mainstream media’s attention, a catalogue of calamities is falling on Yemen. A devastating war, copiously fuelled by the world’s most potent capitalist powers, is subjecting the Yemeni people to enhanced misery, starvation, as well as deadly epidemics. More than 3 million people have been driven from their homes in the last two years. More than 17 million ...

Michael Johnson, from the Socialist Party’s LGBT group, examines the lessons of the Russian revolution for the struggle for LGBT+ rights today. The Russian Revolution is not typically held up as a significant event in the advancement of the struggle for LGBT+ rights. In fact, it’s often seen as the opposite, given the terrible oppression that LGBT+ people faced under ...

On 5 July 2015 a historic referendum took place in Greece against the European troika’s austerity memorandum, with a tremendous 61.5% majority vote for No. But two years later, Greek society under a Syriza-led government is faced with the continuation of the same policies that were applied by the traditional parties of the ruling class, the social democratic Pasok and ...

Thursday 29 June 2017 saw a significant step forward for women in Northern Ireland (NI). Funding to cover the financial costs for them to access abortions in England was pledged by the Tory minority government. The Tories’ ‘supply and confidence’ deal with the ten DUP MPs turned a spotlight on Northern Irish politics. This year marks the 50th anniversary of ...

The death of Rhodri Morgan, the ex-First Minister of Wales, has been met with shock and not a little sadness amongst working people in Wales. ‘Rhodri’ was known affectionately simply by his first name as the affable and eccentric First Minister who led the development of the Welsh Assembly and effectively the first Welsh government. More significantly he was the ...

Here we re-publish an article written by Per Åke Westerlund, from Rattvisepartiet Socialisterna (Committee for a Workers’ International in Sweden), first published in Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party of England & Wales in 2004.   VLADIMIR LENIN, the main leader of the Russian revolution, made the following insightful observation in mid-1917: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing ...

Saturday, January 21st, 2017, will go down in the history books as a truly historic moment. We saw a global revolt of women, not just against Trump but against the ideas and interests he represents; misogyny, racism and the rule of the billionaires. These massive displays of defiance have not come out of thin air. They have come on the ...