As well as seeking to dominate the world oil market, green issues are still playing an unacknowledged role in America’s strategic thinking, despite Trump calling global warming a ‘hoax’ and renewable energy a ‘scam’. Targets of the US administration, Canada and Greenland, are rich in minerals such as lithium that have a major role in green technology. China, US imperialism’s main rival, currently dominates lithium production. Its strategic importance was shown when the US was forced to back down in its tariff war when global supply chains were disrupted due to China’s ban on lithium exports.
Read moreAssessing the ‘fascist’ Meloni government
Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government in Italy has been in power for over three years now. If she lasts to the end of her full term, in October 2027, she will be one of only two Italian prime ministers to do so since the second world war. But what exactly is the character of Meloni’s government? Is it fascist, or ‘pre-fascist’, as some left groups claim? What explains its stability relative to many other European governments? And in what direction is it heading, asks CHRISTINE THOMAS?
Giorgia Meloni became prime minister of Italy in October 2022, almost exactly 100 years after around 40,000 of Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts marched on Rome. The assembled march was a prelude to King Victor Emmanuel III making Mussolini prime minister, opening up the ‘ventennio’ – 20 years of totalitarian fascist rule. Given that Meloni was previously a member of the MSI – the post-war successor of Mussolini’s fascist party – it was inevitable that analogies would be drawn between the two events.
Read moreRevisiting Corbynism and its lessons
The annual Socialism weekend in November included a discussion, led by CLIVE HEEMSKERK, on the lessons of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. With obvious relevance for current debates around Your Party and the fight for a new mass workers’ party, we are publishing what is a combined version of the introduction and reply.
The first thing to understand about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2019 – ‘Corbynism Mark One’ – is that it was a product of economic and political factors that persist to this day. That those factors resulted in Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in September 2015 was an ‘accident of history’ which could have equally manifested themselves in the formation of a new party. And that is an important context for the debates around Your Party, launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana in the summer. Whatever role Your Party may or may not play in the period ahead, the objective factors that are putting the question of a new mass workers’ party on the agenda will remain.
Read moreResponsible governance or class struggle?
Zohran Mamdani, a self-described ‘democratic socialist’ and now mayor of New York City, faces a choice: responsible ‘governance’ or responsibility to the struggles of the working class, argues JEFF BOOTH of the Independent Socialist Group, the US co-thinkers of the CWI. The full article is available on the ISG website at independentsocialistgroup.org
Mamdani’s win in the race for mayor is a reflection of developing class war in the US, including the inevitable fight over money, land, jobs, and real political power to win even minimal reforms for working people.
Read moreThe real Chávez legacy
In the wake of the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by US imperialism, we are reprinting an article by TONY SAUNOIS that was first published in the April 2013 edition of Socialism Today, No.167. This was following the death of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, and draws up a balance sheet of the legacy of Chávez and the ‘Bolivarian revolution’. The article warns that despite Chávez implementing reforms to the benefit of the poor masses in Venezuela, unless the revolution were to go further and break with capitalism the way would be paved for a growth in corruption, inefficiency, and economic sabotage and collapse. These processes were greatly intensified and accelerated under Maduro, who sought even more to accommodate with capitalism, resulting in the economy collapsing by a mind blowing 80% during his presidency, fatally undermining the previous economic and social gains of ‘Chavismo’.
Read moreShining a light on London’s housing crisis
Homesick
By Peter Apps
Published by Oneworld Publications, 2025, £20
Reviewed by Helen Pattison
Homesick is a raw portrayal of the housing crisis in London today. Peter Apps’ book shines a light on this crisis through interviews with ordinary people. Many of the interviewees talk about their, sometimes, low-quality housing in the 1980s but compare it to today when they have little certainty and housing eats up a huge part of their incomes. Private renters in London now spend about 40% of their incomes on rent alone.
Read moreEditorial: What now for Your Party in the fight for a new mass workers’ party?
It would not be exaggerating to say that the hopes and expectations raised by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s appeal in July to join “a new kind of political party” to take on the “corporations and billionaires” have dimmed as the process of actually founding the new party has gone on.
The inaugural conference of Your Party in Liverpool, taking place after this edition of Socialism Today has gone to press, might achieve a reset of sorts. On the other hand, the unresolved differences between its leading figures and their supporters, not least between the separate camps around Corbyn and Sultana, could come to a head sooner rather than later.
Read moreCapitalist production and the JLR cyberattack
Beginning in September, the UK car plants of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) stood still for five weeks. Production halted in its factories, and those that manufacture the specialist components it uses, with knock-on effects for the myriad of jobs that rely on car manufacturing in the surrounding plants in the West Midlands and Merseyside.
The stoppage was not caused by militant industrial action, as seen in the 1970s, but was the consequence of a cyberattack. The impact of the shutdown shows how important just one company’s car manufacturing is to the UK economy. The UK’s third-quarter growth rate fell to 0.1%, from 0.3%.
Read moreLessons from fighting the BNP in the 1990s
In November Socialist Party members Lois Austin and Hannah Sell appeared before the SpyCops inquiry. In answering the Met Police ‘justifications’ for their undercover policing, important issues about how to fight the far-right were contested. HANNAH SELL writes.
In 2015 the then Tory home secretary, Theresa May, set up the Undercover Policing Inquiry, known as the SpyCops Inquiry, to investigate the activities of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad, which ran from 1968 to 2008 and which had sent undercover officers into around 1,000 different organisations, all but a handful of them on the left. It took almost six years before the Inquiry began, and four years later it is still rumbling on.
Clearly its eventual conclusion will condemn some of the worst ‘excesses’ of the undercover officers. These include that a number of them had sexual relationships, including fathering children, while they were undercover, and that officers spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and other bereaved families.
Read moreThe revival of Die Linke
TOM HOFFMAN of Sol (CWI Germany), explains why Die Linke (the Left party) has undergone an unexpected electoral and membership growth recently, and what this could mean for the future development of working-class struggle in Germany.
The past year has been one of the most turbulent in the history of Die Linke. Roughly twelve months ago, the party seemed on the verge of falling into political insignificance. Before the turn of the year, Die Linke was still well below the five percent threshold required to enter the Bundestag (German federal parliament) in polls for the federal election. At that time, no one would have bet that Die Linke would be where it is today: with a strengthened parliamentary faction in the Bundestag and a membership that has doubled to 120,000.
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