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Can China save COP30?

3 November, 2025Admin

The latest UN conference on global warming is scheduled to open in Brazil in mid-November. Known as COP30, it is the first such summit since Donald Trump became US President in January this year.

His first act on entering the White House in 2017 was to sign an executive order withdrawing America from the flagship 2015 UN Paris Agreement on climate change. This was despite the Paris accord being entirely voluntary with no sanctions at all to enforce its provisions. A wholesale retreat by the other main powers on green policies followed and Trump’s shadow has hung over the preparations for COP30.

Not a model for workers’ politics

3 November, 2025Admin

A new book by the French left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been hailed for providing a strategy for new radical parties to achieve a citizens’ revolution to end the rule of the capitalist oligarchy. TONY SAUNOIS, secretary of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), argues that, unfortunately, it doesn’t.

Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century

By Jean-Luc Mélenchon

Published by Verso Books, 2025, £12.99

France has plunged into one of its most serious political and social crises since the founding of the Fifth Republic by Charles De Gaulle, established in 1958 after a ‘soft’ coup had installed the former military leader as President. In true Bonapartist fashion, this republic concentrated powers in the hands of the Presidency at the cost of the National Assembly.

The current turmoil is a product of the underlying crisis of French imperialism and capitalism, a central component being the erosion of the social base of all the traditional parties in France – both the left and the right. Macron, in the last two years of his second term, has seen his support base crumble. Recent polls put his standing at no more than 17% and some as low as 7%. This institutional crisis of the Fifth Republic is reflected in the departure of five prime ministers within two years. In the most recent saga Sebastien Lecornu resigned a few days after his appointment only to be reinstated the following Friday. Macron had fatally called elections to the National Assembly in an attempt to firm up his support following the 2024 European parliament elections. It was a miscalculation which backfired spectacularly. The new National Assembly was hopelessly split three ways.

Russia’s place in the world capitalist order

3 November, 2025Admin

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears its fourth anniversary, is Donald Trump right to dismiss what is still a not insignificant global power as a ‘paper tiger’? CHRISTINE THOMAS reviews two recent books asking, how powerful is Putin? While, on page 24, we reprint a 1995 article explaining the roots of Russia’s great power aspirations in the capitalist regime established as the Stalinist dictatorship disintegrated from the late 1980s.

Russia under Putin: Fragile State and Revisionist Power

Edited by Andrew S Natsios

Published by John Hopkins University Press, 2025, £39.40

Perfect Storm

By Thane Gustafson

Published by Oxford University Press, 2025, £22.99

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – unleashing the most serious war on European soil since the second world war – together with Trump’s re-election in the US, has raised fears about escalating violence and bloodshed in Europe in particular, but also more widely, and even the possibility of a nuclear exchange.

Mark Rutte, general secretary of NATO, has argued that Russia could be ready to attack NATO within five years. President Emmanuel Macron of France has declared that Russian aggression “knows no borders” and will not stop at Ukraine, while the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, has warned that a Russian war “on the West” is coming in the next decade. All have backed a massive increase in arms expenditure in Europe in order to combat what is being presented as an imminent Russian threat.

And after a disastrous initial invasion, and a long, drawn-out war of attrition, Russia now appears to have consolidated its position in the war in Ukraine. But just how strong is Russia under Vladimir Putin? Two recently published books, Perfect Storm, and Russia under Putin (a collection of essays) offer some useful material to help answer that question.

Can we speak of Russian imperialism?

3 November, 2025Admin

As the newly established Russian capitalist class consolidated its position it moved from an initial obsequiousness to US imperialism to an assertion of its own interests. In Socialism Today No.3, November 1995, LYNN WALSH defended the then not readily accepted idea on the left that it was a proto-imperialism that was developing, in an article republished here in shortened form.

Russia’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, recently set alarms bells ringing in Washington. Referring to the 25 million Russians who live outside Russia in the ‘near abroad’, he said: “There may be cases when the use of direct military force may be needed to defend our compatriots abroad”. (Financial Times, April 21, 1995)

This was not an especially new sentiment. In any case, Russia has already mounted military ‘peace-keeping’ interventions in a number of areas, such as South Ossetia in Georgia, in Dniester in Moldovia, and exerted pressure on Ukraine over Crimea. Nevertheless, in recent months, Kozyrev, the Russian president Boris Yeltsin himself, and other Russian government spokesmen, have been much bolder in asserting Russia’s national interests.

Exposing repression in Putin’s Russia

3 November, 2025Admin

Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation

By Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov

Published by PublicAffairs, 2025, £25

Reviewed by Clare Doyle

Our Dear Friends in Moscow is a difficult book to read but is quite devastating in what it confirms about the brutality of life in Putin’s Russia. Young, mostly idealistic, journalists are on the hunt for sensational revelations about what goes on behind closed doors… in the bowels of the Stalin-era police stations and in the great halls of the Kremlin.

Ideas for a new generation

3 November, 2025Admin

Great Revolutionaries

By Peter Taaffe

Published by Mentmore Press, 2025, £9.99

Reviewed by Martin Powell-Davies

A search through the back issues of Socialism Today will quickly reveal a huge range of articles written by Peter Taaffe, the former general secretary of the Socialist Party.

Peter’s writing, over many decades, helped provide theoretical clarity at a time when others were disorientated by the long post-war upswing of capitalism, and again after the collapse of Stalinism. Peter was also adept at explaining revolutionary theory in a way that young workers, new to the ideas of Marxism, could understand.

However, as someone who really understood the ideas of Marx, he also knew that it is never enough for philosophers simply to ‘interpret’ the world, the point is to change it. That’s why Peter always sought to explain how the ideas of Marxism can be applied to today’s world – in order to change it for the better.

The case for a workers-led new party gets even stronger

2 October, 202515 October, 2025Admin

Barely two months after Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s July 24 joint announcement of “a new kind of politics”, under the temporary banner of ‘Your Party’, simmering tensions between their two camps erupted into the open on September 18.

Eager to knock down the possibility of a new alternative developing to the capitalist parties even before it is properly formed, the establishment media jumped in. The Guardian, the tame house-journal of Keir Starmer’s New Labour Mark II party, relished in the ‘terminal feel’ of an “early split” which leaves, “it would seem”, the hundreds of thousands who signed up “still politically homeless”. (19 September)

Italian lessons: digital democracy is no panacea

2 October, 2025Admin

The most striking political development in Italy arising from the 2007-08 financial crash was the rise of the populist Five Star Movement. Described as ‘a new way of doing politics’ based on a digital ‘direct democracy’ model that allegedly empowered every ‘citizen member’, it was launched by comedian Beppe Grillo, speaking to mass meetings of tens of thousands of people. It defines itself as “independent progressives”, following an online membership vote in November last year, with the party’s representatives sitting in the Left group in the European parliament alongside Spain’s Podemos party and France Insoumise.

In 2018, the Five Star Movement emerged as the biggest single party with over 10.7 million votes, a 32.7% share. But from that position it led coalition governments that failed to resist the demands of capitalism and the Five Star bubble burst, falling to 15.4% in the 2022 election and paving the way for the election of an entirely right-wing populist government under Giorgia Meloni.

Here we are reprinting an abridged version of an article written by CHRISTINE THOMAS, which was first published in Socialism Today issue 238, May 2020, about the rise and fall of the Five Star Movement, as a contribution to the current debate about what form a new party should take in Britain.

Is fascism ‘growling at the door’?

2 October, 2025Admin

With Reform ahead in the opinion polls and more than 100,000 marching on a demonstration called by Tommy Robinson, HANNAH SELL assesses the growth of the far-right in Britain, and the tasks facing the workers’ movement.

Labour is neck and neck with the Tories in current polls, both on an unprecedented low of 16%. More than two thirds of voters have broken with Britain’s traditional major parties.

Discontent is growing on Labour’s backbenches along with rumbles about Starmer resigning in the hope that a new face could fix their predicament. But it is the government’s continuation of austerity, and its failure to improve public services or living standards that are the root of its problems, not Starmer’s lack of charm. This is the inevitable result of Labour’s role as loyal lieutenants of diseased British capitalism. The warning lights are flashing on the dashboard of the world economy, but even before a new crisis, growth in Britain is flatlining and the cost of government borrowing has hit the highest level since 1998. The capitalists are demanding that Labour responds by further attacks on the working class. In this situation, November’s budget can only increase popular anger at this already hated government.

Missing the mark on antisemitism

2 October, 2025Admin

What is antisemitism? What are its roots? How has it been politically weaponised? And how can it be opposed? JUDY BEISHON critically reviews a recent book on the issue.

Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism

By Rachel Shabi

Published by Oneworld Publications, 2025, £10-99

It has been during the war on Gaza, with its massive and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli state, that Rachel Shabi has published her book about antisemitism. What she describes as “a wider global spate of antisemitism” – its reemergence from “dormancy” – came after the start of that war.