December 2025 – Socialism Today

What now for Your Party in the fight for a new mass workers’ party?

2 December, 2025Admin

It would not be exaggerating to say that the hopes and expectations raised by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s appeal in July to join “a new kind of political party” to take on the “corporations and billionaires” have dimmed as the process of actually founding the new party has gone on.

The inaugural conference of Your Party in Liverpool, taking place after this edition of Socialism Today has gone to press, might achieve a reset of sorts. On the other hand, the unresolved differences between its leading figures and their supporters, not least between the separate camps around Corbyn and Sultana, could come to a head sooner rather than later.

Capitalist production and the JLR cyberattack

2 December, 2025Admin

Beginning in September, the UK car plants of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) stood still for five weeks. Production halted in its factories, and those that manufacture the specialist components it uses, with knock-on effects for the myriad of jobs that rely on car manufacturing in the surrounding plants in the West Midlands and Merseyside.

The stoppage was not caused by militant industrial action, as seen in the 1970s, but was the consequence of a cyberattack. The impact of the shutdown shows how important just one company’s car manufacturing is to the UK economy. The UK’s third-quarter growth rate fell to 0.1%, from 0.3%.

Lessons from fighting the BNP in the 1990s

2 December, 2025Admin

In November Socialist Party members Lois Austin and Hannah Sell appeared before the SpyCops inquiry. In answering the Met Police ‘justifications’ for their undercover policing, important issues about how to fight the far-right were contested. HANNAH SELL writes.

In 2015 the then Tory home secretary, Theresa May, set up the Undercover Policing Inquiry, known as the SpyCops Inquiry, to investigate the activities of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad, which ran from 1968 to 2008 and which had sent undercover officers into around 1,000 different organisations, all but a handful of them on the left. It took almost six years before the Inquiry began, and four years later it is still rumbling on.

Clearly its eventual conclusion will condemn some of the worst ‘excesses’ of the undercover officers. These include that a number of them had sexual relationships, including fathering children, while they were undercover, and that officers spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and other bereaved families.

The revival of Die Linke

2 December, 2025Admin

TOM HOFFMAN of Sol (CWI Germany), explains why Die Linke (the Left party) has undergone an unexpected electoral and membership growth recently, and what this could mean for the future development of working-class struggle in Germany.

The past year has been one of the most turbulent in the history of Die Linke. Roughly twelve months ago, the party seemed on the verge of falling into political insignificance. Before the turn of the year, Die Linke was still well below the five percent threshold required to enter the Bundestag (German federal parliament) in polls for the federal election. At that time, no one would have bet that Die Linke would be where it is today: with a strengthened parliamentary faction in the Bundestag and a membership that has doubled to 120,000.

China’s revolutionary tragedy

2 December, 2025Admin

OSCAR PARRY explains why, despite the courage and determination of the masses, the revolution in China that began one hundred years ago this year ended in defeat.

The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 represented one of the most gigantic movements in human history. The multi-millioned Chinese masses, led by the Chinese working class, battered at the foundations of Chinese and imperialist landlordism and capitalism in their quest for liberation and a new society.

A Marxist approach to war and peace

2 December, 2025Admin

BERKAY KARTAV reviews a new collection of Leon Trotsky’s writings on imperialist war, half of which are translated into English for the first time.

Against Imperialist War: Writings 1914-1916

By Leon Trotsky

Published by Mentmore Press, 2024, £14.99

“If Europe wants to avoid war, Europe must get ready for war”. These were the words of Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, when addressing the cadets of the Royal Danish Military Academy earlier this year. They highlight the dramatic shifts taking place in today’s capitalist world, marked by increased geopolitical rivalry, polarisation, conflicts, volatility and uncertainty.

The horrific wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo and elsewhere, are graphic illustrations of the rotten nature of capitalism – a chaotic, conflict-ridden system. Capitalism must be overthrown so that, in the words of the Turkish socialist poet Nazim Hikmet, “the children of this world can live and grow and laugh and play”.

Blueprints vs building a real movement

2 December, 2025Admin

Your Party: Grasping the Enormity of the Moment

By Roger Hallam

Published by Hard Rain Books, 2025, £8.99

Reviewed by Iain Dalton

Even before Your Party was founded, sections of its potential leadership looked high and low for any other basis for a new party than the traditions of the workers’ movement. This includes the horizontalist methods of new left formations from Europe – such as Podemos and La France Insoumise – with online editing tools provided by Yanis Varoufakis’ DiEM25.

But another major source is from some of the recent climate movements, particularly those associated with Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion, who has set out his thoughts on the way forward for Your Party in this booklet.

History of trade union struggle deserves better

2 December, 20252 December, 2025Admin

Combining Efforts: 200 Years Of Trade Union History

Exhibition showing at the London School of Economics until 31 January 2026

Reviewed by Jim Horton

A free exhibition dedicated solely to the history of British trade unionism is a rarity. This alone entitles this exhibition to be recommended to activists. With more than one in five workers holding membership, trade unions remain a vital part of working-class life. Yet the history of our movement is either not taught in schools, or taught superficially.

This means many people are unaware of the role of trade unions in achieving better pay and conditions in the workplace, including shorter working hours, annual leave, sick pay and improved health and safety. Outside of the workplace, it was the trade union movement which played a leading role in achieving the right to protest and the extension of the franchise to the male working class in the nineteenth century.