Socialism Today – Page 3 – Socialist Party magazine

The Cass Review one year on

1 May, 2025Admin

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.

Where right-wing trade unionism can lead

1 May, 20251 May, 2025Admin

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.

The myth of the American Dream

1 May, 2025Admin

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.

The unions and the political vacuum

1 April, 20251 April, 2025Admin

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.

DeepSeek and the AI ‘arms race’

1 April, 20251 April, 2025Admin

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.

Right-wing ‘left populism’ falls flat in Germany

1 April, 2025Admin

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.

Trump and the new world order

1 April, 2025Admin

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.

Fascism – what it is and isn’t

1 April, 2025Admin

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.

The Vietnam war revisited

1 April, 2025Admin

Fifty years ago this month US imperialism suffered its final ignominious defeat in Vietnam with the fall of its puppet regime in the south. It was a different era then with global, and domestic politics too, shaped by the system clash between Stalinism and the capitalist West. But, argues CHRISTINE THOMAS, Vietnam still has lessons for today’s world of multi-polar geopolitics and a revival of mass struggles.

The ‘Fall of Saigon’ on 30 April 1975 marked the final chapter in a decades-long fight of the Vietnamese people for national liberation. A courageous struggle by a predominantly peasant movement in a poverty-stricken country defeated first French imperialism and then the US – the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, armed to the teeth with the latest hi-tech bombs and military weaponry. With the capture of the south Vietnamese capital Saigon by the North Vietnamese forces, and the chaotic exodus of the remaining Americans on military helicopters, the country was finally united and the Vietnamese able to determine their own future, free from imperialist intervention.

Misreading Labour’s election victory

1 April, 2025Admin

Taken As Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party

By Anushka Asthana

Published by Harper North, 2024, £22

Reviewed by Helen Pattison

Taken as Red was published in September 2024, chronicling the run up to the general election in July 2024, and the election itself. It gives readers the view of the deputy political editor of ITV, Anushka Asthana, a former journalist at The Guardian newspaper, as she watched it unfold from behind the scenes.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about this book is how it, unintentionally, exposes the incredibly rapid pace of events in British politics today. Just six months after its release and the book feels extremely out of date. It is brimming with enthusiasm for the “most seismic election in a generation”, which it puts down partly to the Tories’ destruction of their own party, and Starmer’s ‘bold fight’ to win power.