The environment has been in the front line of President Trump’s trade war, in particular his battle with China over electric vehicles (EVs) and the minerals needed for the green economy, for example lithium and cobalt. Despite the present temporary and partial tariff wars retreat, his environmental wrecking ball appears not to have lost any of its momentum.
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Learning the lessons of Syriza
In most countries, following the collapse of Stalinism in 1989-91, the working class is still without its own mass political organisations. Syriza and other ‘new left formations’ were initial attempts at filling that void but they failed. One decade on HANNAH SELL looks back at Syriza in government and draws the lessons for today.
On Friday 28 February, 2025 more than a million people took to the streets across Greece, a tenth of the entire population. The general strike, the biggest in many decades, was called to demand justice for the victims of the Tempe train crash that had happened two years earlier. The strike’s demands – against austerity and privatisation, for pay increases and the restoration of collective bargaining – represented an uprising against everything the Greek working class has suffered over the last sixteen years, where average household expenditure today is 31% lower, in real terms, than it was in 2009.It showed beyond doubt that the Greek working class has re-entered the scene of history, a decade on from the defeat resulting from the betrayal of Syriza – ‘the coalition of the radical left’ – which was swept to power in January 2015, only to capitulate seven months later.
Read moreThe Cass Review one year on
The recent Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman shows again how tenuous minority legal rights are in a system based on the exploitation of the majority by a small elite, who ultimately can only maintain their power through the methods of divide and rule. One year on from its publication SARAH SACHS-ELDRIDGE assesses the role of the Cass Review in the ‘culture wars’.
The context in which the Cass Review was published in April 2024 is years of whipping up of anti-trans hate by capitalist politicians and the big business-owned media.
The 2021 census in England and Wales found that 0.5% of the population, or around 262,000 people, identified as a gender different from their sex assigned at birth. In the year ending March 2023, 4,732 hate crimes against transgender people were recorded – up 11% on the previous year and an indication of how bigoted rhetoric affects trans lives. However, it is also necessary to note that the Tories’ decisive eviction from government was not prevented by their enormous investment in divisive ‘culture war’ tactics, with vicious attacks on trans women very prominent.
Read moreWhere right-wing trade unionism can lead
SEAN FIGG reviews a recent new account of the reactionary activities of the right-wing US union leaders during the Cold War period, which revealed in extreme form the other side of the dual role of workers’ organisations under capitalism.
Blue Collar Empire
By Jeff Schuhrke
Published by Verso, 2024, £25
Jeff Schuhrke’s Blue Collar Empire is a useful history of the treacherous role played by some US trade union leaders to defend capitalism and the interests of US imperialism during the Cold War. The aftermath of world war two saw the capitalist ‘West’, dominated by the US, locked into a strategic rivalry with the by-then-Stalinised Soviet Union, the Soviet-dominated countries of eastern Europe, Maoist China, and later, Cuba under Castro. In these countries capitalism and landlordism had been ended, but undemocratic national bureaucracies ruled, blocking the road to socialism. Nevertheless, these regimes were a reference point for workers’ movements around the world. They showed that an alternative to capitalism and imperialism was possible.
Read moreThe myth of the American Dream
The Great Gatsby
By F Scott Fitzgerald
Published by Penguin Modern Classics, £7-99
Reviewed by Scott Jones
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us”.
A hundred years ago, the world was introduced to Jay Gatsby, the ‘green light’ and a commentary on the so-called American Dream – the idea that everyone has an equal chance to ‘make it’ in the US and achieve success. Gatsby was the titular character in F Scott Fitgerald’s iconic work, The Great Gatsby, often crowned the ‘Great American Novel’ – its meaning still poured over by academics and schoolchildren alike, and its representation of the roaring twenties and the Jazz Age regularly celebrated in art.
Read moreThe unions and the political vacuum
Soon after Sir Keir Starmer’s accession to the Labour Party leadership the Socialist Party wrote to the RMT transport workers union, in June 2020, proposing to relaunch the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) – which the RMT’s Bob Crow had been central to establishing in 2010. In response a minority group on the union’s national executive committee (NEC), including the then acting general secretary Mick Lynch, produced an alternative report which scoffed at our argument that Starmer’s victory meant that “once again working-class voters face being effectively disenfranchised” with no mass party available which represented their interests.
“The real threat to members at this present time is the Tory Party”, they said. The union’s decision at a special general meeting in 2018 to “align itself towards the Labour Party” under Jeremy Corbyn’s radical leadership – which led to TUSC suspending all its electoral activity, having already stood aside in the 2017 general election – was now interpreted by them as not being “dependent on who is leader of the Labour Party” but as standing policy.
Read moreDeepSeek and the AI ‘arms race’
Chinese company DeepSeek launched its generative AI ‘r1 model’ in January. Run and primarily funded by Liang Wenfeng, a billionaire and former trader, DeepSeek focuses on novel AI research. DeepSeek has published scientific papers detailing the technological advances used in its ‘Large Language Model’ (LLM) r1 and released the weights of the model open source.
The model uses less energy to run and process the large amounts of human-created data required to ‘train’ it. For what was at that point a relatively unknown company, having to work around the embargo on the export of the chips needed to produce LLMs, r1 performed at a level comparable to the massive LLMs made by tech giants such as Google, OpenAI and others; and at a much cheaper cost.
Read moreRight-wing ‘left populism’ falls flat in Germany
In January 2024 a new party, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW – the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) emerged from a split from Die Linke (the Left Party) in Germany, and initially achieved a political success unprecedented in German post-war history.
A few months after it was founded, it won seats in the European parliament elections in the summer of 2024 and in three East German state parliaments in the autumn. In opinion polls it was ahead of Die Linke for months. But in the German general election on 23 February this year, it failed by a wafer-thin margin to cross the 5% hurdle to enter the national parliament. In contrast, Die Linke achieved almost 9% of the vote, with 64 seats.
Read moreTrump and the new world order
The Socialist Party’s national congress took place from 15-17 March, eight weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president for the second time. TONY SAUNOIS, general secretary of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), introduced the discussion on world perspectives. The following article is based on his speech.
The explosive political and social situation in Britain is against the background of a new historic conjuncture internationally. In the world events we see unfolding in 2025 the decisive processes mean that there can be no isolated national perspectives or analysis. This has always been the case, yet it is even more so today.
If we say that the world is at an historic turning point how is the world situation characterised? The coming to power of the Trump regime brings with it a new world order. It signifies a sharp rupture from the previous post-second world war era. The ascendency of the Trump regime reflects a new dystopian, protracted death agony of capitalism.
Read moreFascism – what it is and isn’t
What does Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency for a second term signify? Is it the reflection of an inexorable rise of the populist and far right internationally? Is it a revival of fascism, as the former Scottish National Party (SNP) MP Mhairi Black argued recently? PHILIP STOTT replies.
Donald Trump’s return to power has shocked and angered millions in the US and internationally. Completely understandably, there is great concern about what this will mean for the working class including immigrants and undocumented workers facing bans and deportations. Additionally, women face possible further attacks on abortion rights, and LGBTQ+ people face even more obstacles in the continuing fight for equality.
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