Socialism Today Issue 287 May 2025

When the theatrics and fantastical hyperbole now indelibly associated with the Trump presidency are set to one side, the tariff war launched on April 2 boils down fundamentally to an attempt to appropriate to US capitalism a larger share of value from the world economy at the expense of its ‘trading partners’, “friend and foe alike” as Trump himself puts it.

No new value will be created from the import tariffs, a tax on incoming goods collected by the US Customs and Border agency on behalf of the federal government at 330 air, sea and land ports of entry into the country. Instead, even at the average tariff rates currently in place after Trump’s April 9 panicked ‘pause’ about-turn in the face of failing US bond markets, an extra $3.4 trillion would be in line to be grabbed by the American state to 2034.

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Five judges from the capitalist establishment have used an interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 to rule that trans women are not to be defined as women. This will be widely seen among the trans community, and the many who have fought for trans rights, as a significant step backwards in the struggle for equality. 

The ruling by the UK Supreme Court will now open the door to the possible exclusion of trans women from resources they have utilised for years, including health, rape crisis and violence against women services. This can only have the effect of harming an already marginalised and highly discriminated against community.

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Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right populist National Rally in France, has been given a four-year prison sentence – two with an electronic bracelet and two suspended – and a five-year ban from standing in elections. Eight other National Rally MEPs, including vice-president Louis Aliot, were also convicted of embezzling €4.1 million of public funds, having overseen “the European parliament taking on people who were in reality working for the party”.

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The May elections, covering almost one-third of voters in England, provided an important snapshot of how political consciousness is developing after ten months of the Starmer government.

But even before the first results were counted – after Socialism Today was printed – one thing was clear. That is, how woefully unprepared for the elections were almost all the socialist and ‘Marxist’ organisations in Britain – with the exception of those, including the Socialist Party, participating in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC).

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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