Socialism Today – Page 3 – Socialist Party magazine

Why did the Minority Movement fail?

6 May, 2026Admin

The National Minority Movement, formed in 1924, involved at its height a quarter of the trade union membership and had experienced and authoritative class fighters as leaders. So why didn’t it shape the course of events in May 1926, asks PAULA MITCHELL?

“If the British proletariat had a leadership that came near to corresponding to its class strength and the ripeness of the conditions”, said Leon Trotsky speaking during the 1926 general strike, “power would pass out of the hands of the conservatives and into the hands of the proletariat within a few weeks. But such an outcome cannot be relied upon”.

In today’s volatile, crisis-ridden world, one thing unites all the sparring interests of capitalist powers and big businesses: the attempt to maintain profits and power on the backs of the working class. The only way forward to a secure, decent life for the vast majority of humanity is to break with capitalism and build a socialist society. Huge struggles lie ahead. Building working-class organisation and leadership is paramount.

In this hundredth anniversary year of the 1926 general strike – the closest the working class in Britain has come so far to revolutionary change, betrayed by the leaders of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) – the experience of the National Minority Movement (NMM) is rich in lessons for the struggle for organisation and leadership today.

The general strike today

6 May, 2026Admin

The strike wave of 2022-2023, the biggest in Britain since before the shift in class relations that followed the collapse of Stalinism at the end of the 1980s, brought the question of the general strike back into political discourse. Reprinted below is an article by HANNAH SELL, first published in the September 2022 edition of Socialism Today, No.260, looking at the possibilities of general strike action in the modern era.

In Britain in 2017 just 33,000 workers took part in industrial action, the lowest level since records began in 1893. The numbers, at 39,000, were barely higher the following year. Against this background many on the left, including some who parted ways with the Socialist Party, turned away from the organised working class as the key force in the struggle to change society.

1926 and its roots

6 May, 2026Admin

The General Strike 1926: A New History

By David Brandon

Published by Pen & Sword Books, 2023, £25

Reviewed by Harry Cooper

This book by David Brandon, a lecturer and author particularly of railway history, is an excellent and comprehensive history of the 1926 general strike. One of its major strengths is its focus on the economic context, and particularly the decline of Britain’s industrial power and the crisis in the coal industry, leading to a decisive showdown between capital and labour.

In this context, Brandon carefully reviews the failure of the trade union leadership, their cowardly role, and their fear of a major social upheaval challenging the capitalist order, which led the TUC to sell out the general strike.

Hubris meets reality

1 April, 2026Admin

Amid the unfolding chaos and turmoil of Trump’s war on Iran, HANNAH SELL assesses its origins and global consequences.

The conflict that has raged for over three weeks in the Gulf, and continues as we go to press, is the third US war in the region since the end of the Cold War more than three decades ago. Every aspect of the current conflict demonstrates the weakening of US imperialism over that period. President Donald Trump’s chaotic and reckless approach is both a reflection of the USA’s relative decline and an accelerator of it. Whatever happens from here, the consequences are certain to include a new, qualitative undermining of the power and authority of US imperialism.

What strategy for the ‘lost generation’?

1 April, 2026Admin

“This country is now facing the existential risk of a lost generation”. Those were the words of Alan Milburn, the Blairite former health minister, speaking in February about his ongoing review into ‘NEETs’: young people not in education, employment, or training.

The ‘Milburn Review’ is set to be released in the summer, with an interim report due later this spring. According to the most recent figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), almost one million 16-24 year olds in Britain (957,000) were in the category of NEET as of December 2025.

Labour’s new attack on local government

1 April, 2026Admin

Local government reorganisation is being presented by ministers and council leaders as a rational, modernising reform – a necessary step to “streamline services”, “drive efficiencies” and create “strategic authorities fit for the future”. In reality this poses one of the most serious threats to local democracy, jobs, pay and public services in a generation. For working-class communities and council workers alike, local government reorganisation risks becoming austerity by another name.

Trump’s war on the climate

1 April, 2026Admin

US president Donald Trump is continuing his attacks on climate regulation, with his latest focus on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for setting national environmental standards in the US. He has moved to rescind the ‘endangerment finding’, the legal foundation underpinning key regulations on pollution, boasting “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen”.

The endangerment finding, issued under Barak Obama, formally concluded that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health. It has been called the climate ‘Magna Carta’: its removal could unravel the entire edifice of US climate regulation, stripping the legal basis from rules limiting heat-trapping pollution from automobiles to power plants.

UCU: Building a fighting democratic union

1 April, 2026Admin

This year the University and College Union (UCU) will be marking its 20th anniversary. Drawing lessons from the two decades of its existence, BEA GARDNER explains how a genuinely combative member-led union can be built.

The University and College Union (UCU) was founded in 2006 following the merger of the Association of University Teachers (AUT), which represented workers in the old universities, and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), which represented workers in colleges and new universities. As a result UCU became the largest post-16 education union in the world. UCU covers Higher Education (HE), Further Education (FE), Adult and Community Education (ACE) and prison education and has over 120,000 members organised in branches according to their employers and corresponding sector.

1916 and the real legacy of James Connolly

1 April, 20261 April, 2026Admin

April is the anniversary of the 1916 Easter rising and the execution by the British state of the great Irish Marxist James Connolly. In commemoration we reprint below an article by PETER HADDEN, a leading member of the CWI until his death in 2010, reviewing Connolly’s life of unremitting struggle, first published in Socialism Today No.100, April 2006. This is followed, on page 28, by a contemporary article by Vladimir Lenin, defending the rising and drawing inspiration from it amidst the slaughter of a world at war.

In 1910 James Connolly concluded his pamphlet, Labour, Nationality and Religion, in the simplest and most straightforward terms: “The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system, it must go”. On the anniversary of his death it is necessary to begin any true account of James Connolly’s life with reminders of what he really believed in, what he really fought for.

The Irish rebellion of 1916

1 April, 20261 April, 2026Admin

The Easter rising was a defeat, acknowledged as such by Vladimir Lenin in the article written in the summer of 1916 reprinted below. “The misfortune” of the Irish rebels, he argued, was that “they rose prematurely”, before the inevitable revolt of the working classes of Europe against the horrors of the first world war “had had time to mature”.