Socialism Today

Yet again, Britain has a ‘dead prime minister walking’. Keir Starmer has survived his worst crisis yet, for now, but he is living on borrowed time. The next convulsion at the top of the Labour Party is possible at any point, perhaps triggered as soon as the result of the Gorton and Denton by-election. The capitalist media is full of discussion about Starmer’s weaknesses, the personal ambitions of the different contenders to replace him, and the undoubted scheming and manoeuvring for position on all sides.  

None of this surface commentary, however, explains the root cause of the current crisis. Starmer is Britain’s fourth prime minister in four years. In the post-second world war period, prior to the 2007-08 financial crash, there was only one prime minister who was forced out of office in three years or less, the Tory Anthony Eden who resigned after the 1956 Suez Crisis. Since the financial crash and subsequent Great Recession, no prime minster governing on behalf of a single party has survived into a fourth year. Tony Blair, who stepped down as prime minister in June 2007, was the last to do so.

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“These are the most significant changes to how policing works in this country in around 200 years”. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s assertion to the Commons this January is true, if the core restructures in her white paper are implemented. From Local to National: A New Model for Policing contains the only proposals from this pro-capitalist Labour government to show any semblance of ambition. It is telling that the proposals in question are an attempt to consolidate the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state.

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According to new research, by improving efficiency in all aspects of power generation and in society generally, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to reduce by up to 54 billion tonnes the annual global greenhouse emissions – due to burning fossil fuels like coal and gas – that are driving climate change, 10% of the present figure. This is after allowing for the huge quantity of energy needed to run AI computer software, widely reported as a threat to the environment. How realistic is the report’s claim, particularly since the great majority of power is still generated using fossil fuels?

Processing the quantity and variety of data needed to run AI computer software like Chat-GPT requires far more electricity than that used, for example, for task-specific computer modelling, such as to solve particular medical or scientific problems. This is because AI software is multi-purpose, ie it is designed to answer any question on any subject. Also, ‘training’ AI programmes before they can be used uses large amounts of energy. Training Open AI’s GPT-3 required enough electricity to power 120 average US households for one year, according to Carbon Brief. Recent research claimed that compared to task-specific software, AI uses up to 33 times more energy. An AI data processing centre could consume as much energy as a small town.

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For International Women’s Day 2026 we are publishing a speech by CHRISTINE THOMAS at a recent meeting with sympathetic co-thinkers of the CWI on the state of the global movements against women’s oppression.

Next year is the tenth anniversary of the #MeToo movement which became symbolic of the global movements that were taking place against women’s oppression at the time. Obviously sexual harassment was just one aspect of their oppression that women were fighting against. There were also mass protests against sexism more generally, provoked by outrageous comments by judges about rape and sexual assault. Violence against women in all its forms was central to many of the protests and movements, as well as reproductive rights, specifically the question of abortion.

In a general way we can characterise these protests and movements as a global feminist wave; a third feminist wave if we accept that the first wave was the struggle for equal rights at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, especially around the question of the right to vote, and the second wave was the movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, also an international phenomenon, although it took place mainly in the more economically developed capitalist countries.

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HELEN PATTISON reviews a recent BBC Radio Four podcast exploring a growing divergence in the voting patterns of young men and women.

Left Out, an episode of Currently, one of the BBC’s political podcasts, looks into “the political radicalisation of young women – and the silence surrounding it”. While there has been much discussion in the media about young men turning to the right, the podcast argues that young women’s shift to the “radical left” has been largely ignored.

The 2024 general election marked a turning point in the gender voting divergence. Twice as many young men as young women (18-24) voted Reform, while twice as many young women as young men voted Green. Today polls show as many as 44% of young women are considering voting Green, up from 25% in 2024.

The podcast considers why there might be a gender divide among young women and men when it comes to voting and outlook. It raises interesting points about the greater numbers of young women in universities and the separate “online worlds” that young men and women inhabit.

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Back in 1934 Minneapolis was the scene of another bitter struggle, pitching sections of the city’s working class against local bosses and the capitalist state apparatus. ROB WILLIAMS recounts the momentous battles of that time and their lessons for the struggle today.

The tumultuous scenes in Minneapolis, as mass opposition grows to Trump’s anti-immigrant ICE agents, have brought home to US workers and millions across the world that a new period of volatility has opened up.

That this virtual uprising included actions called under the name ‘general strike’, with all its limitations and contradictions, has at least introduced the language of the trade union movement into this mass resistance to Trump’s brutal racist offensive. However, the need to fully put the stamp of the organised working-class on these events, both in Minnesota and across the US, is a fundamental task of socialists and trade unionists, in order to unite workers and young people and undermine the divide-and-rule tactics which the capitalist system has always employed and Trump has taken to extreme limits.

Over 90 years ago, on the very same streets that this furious opposition against ICE erupted, a mighty struggle between workers and bosses took place. Despite some clear differences, there were many features in this class battle that are relevant for the struggles today, not least the essential ingredient of leadership of the workers’ movement and the decisive role that Marxist revolutionaries can play.

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Even though it was Stalinism that had failed not socialism, the collapse of the totalitarian regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe ideologically disarmed workers’ organisations, changing the world balance of class forces for a whole historical era. IAIN DALTON reviews an important new collection of Peter Taaffe’s writings.

The Collapse of Stalinism – its causes and consequences

By Peter Taaffe

Published by Mentmore Press, 2026, £12.99

The collapse of Stalinism was a major turning point in world history, alongside the victory of the October 1917 revolution and the outcome of the second world war the third most significant turning point in the 20th century in shaping the world balance of class forces. Whilst previous material produced by the Socialist Party, such as the Rise of Militant book, covered how the regimes in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsed from 1989 onwards, this new publication adds a richness to understanding how this process took place. It does so through articles written by the late former Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe, stretching over a period of some 45 years.

The book splits into three sections, the first dealing with the character of the Stalinist states. The workers’ democracy of the early years of the Russian revolution under Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky is separated by a river of blood from the brutal, dictatorial regime that is depicted in Peter’s reviews of two books by Soviet dissidents and two by a historian about the rise of Stalinism.

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1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash

By Andrew Ross Sorkin

Published by Allen Lane, 2025 £30.00

Reviewed by Nick Hart

Shares traded on US stock markets at an all-time high. Companies dealing in the latest communication technology leading the way with huge paper valuations. The millionaire class enjoying a previously unimaginable explosion in their wealth, with cheap and readily available credit to allow the population to feel better off than they actually are.

All of these trends sound familiar in today’s world. But swapping AI and cloud computing for the then new innovations of television and telephone lines, they could equally be applied to the 1920s. With the ‘roaring twenties’ now as infamous for the economic boom in America as its abrupt end with the Wall Street crash, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book, 1929,aims to tell the story of how the bubble burst and gave way to the great depression of the 1930s.

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