Socialism Today – Page 2 – Socialist Party magazine

America’s revolutionary legacy

6 July, 2026Admin

With up to nine million protesters on the streets in March protesting against Trump under the No Kings banner – more than the US population at the time of the nation’s founding war of liberation against the British monarchy – CHRISTINE THOMAS takes a timely look at America’s struggle for independence.

In his history of the Russian revolution Leon Trotsky wrote that one of the main characteristics of a revolution is the entrance of the masses onto the scene of history. In this respect, the struggle for independence from British imperialism by the 13 colonies that were to eventually constitute the United States of America was indeed a revolution.

Spain 1936: A crisis of leadership

6 July, 2026Admin

This month marks ninety years since the working class and peasants of Spain rose up against General Francisco Franco’s fascist forces and capitalist exploitation in general. ADAM POWELL-DAVIES draws out the lessons of that heroic struggle for the situation facing Marxists today.

World events in 2026 confirm that capitalism today is in a new era of turmoil. Life for billions is increasingly marked by war, falling living standards, environmental breakdown, and attacks on democratic rights. On the other side of the coin, there is the heightened outbreak of new mass uprisings and revolutionary movements across the world, which in recent years have shaken all continents.

To find such an equivalent level of global volatility and polarisation it is necessary to go back to the two decades between the first and second world wars. This was a period of revolution and counter-revolution, in many ways epitomised in the major class battles which erupted in Spain throughout the 1930s.

The China discussion today

6 July, 2026Admin

In 2007 Socialism Today began a series of articles under the heading, ‘The China debate’, to discuss the complex character of the state and the economy in a society encompassing one-sixth of all humanity. Nearly 20 years later, with developments both within China and in its geopolitical role still a source of contention in the wider working-class movement, we are relaunching the series, starting with this contribution by PHILIP STOTT on China and the Marxist theory of the state.

“Sociological problems would certainly be simpler, if social phenomena had always a finished character”, wrote Leon Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed: What Is The Soviet Union And Where Is It Going? “There is nothing more dangerous, however, than to throw out of reality, for the sake of logical completeness, elements which today violate your scheme and tomorrow may wholly overturn it… The scientific task, as well as the political, is not to give a finished definition to an unfinished process, but to follow all its stages, separate its progressive from its reactionary tendencies, expose their mutual relations, foresee possible variants of development, and find in this foresight a basis for action”.

Editorial: May’s seismic elections and the fight for workers’ politics now

1 June, 20266 July, 2026Admin

The revolutionary events that convulsed Spain from the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 until the surrender of the Republican government to the fascist general Francisco Franco in 1939, began with the seemingly insignificant municipal elections of April 1931.

The sweeping victories for Republican supporters in the local government polls on April 12, however, were so stark in revealing the rottenness and shallow social base of the prevailing feudal-monarchical regime that the King, Alfonso XIII, fled into exile just two days later. This set off a chain of events – including the Spanish civil war, the start of which in July 1936 we will commemorate in the next edition of Socialism Today – during which the working class had not one but many opportunities to take power and begin the socialist transformation of society were it not for the role of the leadership of its mass organisations, trade unions and workers’ parties alike.

Britain’s various polls on May 7, for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd and nearly 5,000 councillors in England which together covered almost two-thirds of the electorate, will not have the same immediate auspicious impact. But they most certainly were a qualitative tipping point in the disintegration of the old methods by which the capitalist class in Britain has maintained its political rule since the achievement of universal (male) suffrage in 1918 and the emergence of the Labour Party as a mass working-class party, particularly in the long post-world war two era, through an alternating duopoly of Labour and Tory-led governments.

Should unions ban Reform members?

1 June, 20261 June, 2026Admin

In light of the increased support for Reform UK among some sections of the working class, including some trade union members, what approach should the trade unions take toward their members currently looking towards or even joining Reform?

Global Warning: The food tinderbox

1 June, 2026Admin

A recent report published in the journal Sustainability predicted that Britain could be close to food riots, partly caused by climate change-driven food shortages and food insecurity. Is the report alarmist or could these be the catalyst for social upheaval in Britain?

How will the Greens develop now?

1 June, 2026Admin

In the wake of the May elections in England and Wales, HANNAH SELL assesses the significance of the Greens’ ballot box surge and their claims to be a ‘workers’ party’.

The May 2026 elections were a turning point in Britain. The votes of both Labour and the Tory party collapsed; ending the duopoly via which capitalism has ruled for the best part of a century. The right-wing populists of Reform surged, and so did the Greens. Under their new ‘eco-populist’ leader, Zack Polanski, the Greens won an average of 17% of the vote across English local authorities, resulting in 441 extra councillors and winning control of five new councils. In Wales the Green vote share was a more modest 8% because Plaid Cymru were seen by most voters as the more effective way to protest against Labour and block Reform. Nonetheless, in these elections the Greens were the main left alternative to the establishment parties and to Reform. Meanwhile, Green Party membership has soared to 230,000.

Behind the Greens’ debate on anti-Zionism

1 June, 2026Admin

A debate has broken out recently in the Green Party in Britain over what constitutes ‘anti-Zionism’. In a contribution to the discussion JUDY BEISHON explains the need to take a class approach to this issue, which has a relevance well beyond the Greens.

The horrific war against the Palestinians in Gaza, along with ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and brutal onslaughts on Lebanon and elsewhere in the region, has led to widespread condemnation of the ultra-right Israeli government by ordinary people worldwide.

Trying to counter the expressions of mass opposition and anger, many states have stepped up repression against anti-war protesters. Also, allegations of antisemitism, including equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, have been widely used as a political weapon by the political right against the left, to try to undermine the left and weaken opposition to the Israeli state’s massacres, repression and wars.

The socialist approach to the EU

1 June, 20261 June, 2026Admin

Ten years on from the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, and with Brexit now an issue in both the unofficial Labour leadership race and in the debate on the character of the Greens, we reprint an article by CLIVE HEEMSKERK, first published in Socialism Today No.201, September 2016, under the title, Corbyn’s Brexit Opportunity. Written during that year’s challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership by the pro-remain MP Owen Smith, it argues the case for a socialist approach to the EU.

The main forces of British and international capitalism did everything they could to secure a vote in the June 2016 referendum to keep Britain in the EU. US President Obama made a carefully choreographed state visit. The IMF co-ordinated the release of doom-laden reports with the chancellor George Osborne. And then there was the shameful joint campaigning of right-wing Labour Party and trade union leaders with the Tory prime minister of the time David Cameron and other representatives of big business. A propaganda tsunami of fear was unleashed to try and intimidate the working class to vote in favour of the EU bosses’ club.

The 1926 general strike: working class power on display

6 May, 2026Admin

This issue of Socialism Today is a special anniversary edition to mark the centenary of the 1926 general strike, the greatest movement to date in the history of the British working class. The opening overview article which follows below is from a major work by LYNN WALSH, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the strike in 1976 and first published in issue No.11 of the Militant International Review, our predecessor magazine, and reprinted here for the first time since.

General strikes are not accidental occurrences, simply the result of mistakes or misunderstandings between leaders. Nor can general strikes be brought about merely by small groups of political activists calling for general-strike action regardless of the time and conditions. A general strike inevitably arises from the open clash of class forces. Like all such clashes on a large scale, a general strike is inevitably rooted in the relationship of economic and political forces, and prepared and precipitated by events. This was certainly true of the 1926 strike, which flowed from the momentous struggles after 1918, marking a decisive turning point of the class struggles in the inter-war years.

“The whole of Europe is in a revolutionary mood”, the British prime minister David Lloyd George wrote to the Paris Peace Conference, meeting after the end of hostilities in the first world war. “The whole of the existing social, political and economic order is being called into question by the mass of the people”. Britain was no exception. Faced with revolts in India and Ireland, the British ruling class was also confronted by a radicalised working class at home. In 1919 there was an enormous upsurge of strikes (35 million days lost) as workers struggled for better conditions and to strengthen their organisations. In many areas, councils of action – soviets in all but name – sprang up to prevent British intervention against the October 1917 revolution in Russia.