Socialism Today

HANNAH SELL explains how a misunderstanding of Marxism is shaping the mistaken approaches of most parties on the left towards the basis on which the newly formed Your Party should be organised.

The declaration for a new party announced by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana began with a bang, with 800,000 signing up in support. Since then, of course, public divisions at the top have dampened some of the initial enthusiasm. However, the party’s foundation is under way. It is at an early stage of development, and its future course is uncertain, but it is, nonetheless, potentially an important step towards a mass workers’ party with a socialist programme.

Socialist Party members are participating in the new party arguing for the approach we think is needed. Often those disagreeing most firmly with us are also members of organisations that consider themselves Marxists. This article looks at some of their arguments to try and help clarify the tasks facing Your Party.

Videos of a Labour Party conference fringe meeting showed the latest housing secretary Steve Reed arriving to loud music, wearing a red Trump-style hat with the slogan ‘Build baby build’. Once he got the microphone working, he tried a call and response with the red hat-wearing audience – ‘Build, Baby, Build’, ‘What’s this country gonna do?’

The social media response was derisive. One of the more polite comments was ‘Muppets new film trailer released’. Most workers coping with the housing crisis will not have been following the conference in detail, but there is no reason to think their response would have been more positive if they had tuned in.

The latest UN conference on global warming is scheduled to open in Brazil in mid-November. Known as COP30, it is the first such summit since Donald Trump became US President in January this year.

His first act on entering the White House in 2017 was to sign an executive order withdrawing America from the flagship 2015 UN Paris Agreement on climate change. This was despite the Paris accord being entirely voluntary with no sanctions at all to enforce its provisions. A wholesale retreat by the other main powers on green policies followed and Trump’s shadow has hung over the preparations for COP30.

A new book by the French left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been hailed for providing a strategy for new radical parties to achieve a citizens’ revolution to end the rule of the capitalist oligarchy. TONY SAUNOIS, secretary of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), argues that, unfortunately, it doesn’t.

Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century

By Jean-Luc Mélenchon

Published by Verso Books, 2025, £12.99

France has plunged into one of its most serious political and social crises since the founding of the Fifth Republic by Charles De Gaulle, established in 1958 after a ‘soft’ coup had installed the former military leader as President. In true Bonapartist fashion, this republic concentrated powers in the hands of the Presidency at the cost of the National Assembly.

The current turmoil is a product of the underlying crisis of French imperialism and capitalism, a central component being the erosion of the social base of all the traditional parties in France – both the left and the right. Macron, in the last two years of his second term, has seen his support base crumble. Recent polls put his standing at no more than 17% and some as low as 7%. This institutional crisis of the Fifth Republic is reflected in the departure of five prime ministers within two years. In the most recent saga Sebastien Lecornu resigned a few days after his appointment only to be reinstated the following Friday. Macron had fatally called elections to the National Assembly in an attempt to firm up his support following the 2024 European parliament elections. It was a miscalculation which backfired spectacularly. The new National Assembly was hopelessly split three ways.

As the newly established Russian capitalist class consolidated its position it moved from an initial obsequiousness to US imperialism to an assertion of its own interests. In Socialism Today No.3, November 1995, LYNN WALSH defended the then not readily accepted idea on the left that it was a proto-imperialism that was developing, in an article republished here in shortened form.

Russia’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, recently set alarms bells ringing in Washington. Referring to the 25 million Russians who live outside Russia in the ‘near abroad’, he said: “There may be cases when the use of direct military force may be needed to defend our compatriots abroad”. (Financial Times, April 21, 1995)

This was not an especially new sentiment. In any case, Russia has already mounted military ‘peace-keeping’ interventions in a number of areas, such as South Ossetia in Georgia, in Dniester in Moldovia, and exerted pressure on Ukraine over Crimea. Nevertheless, in recent months, Kozyrev, the Russian president Boris Yeltsin himself, and other Russian government spokesmen, have been much bolder in asserting Russia’s national interests.

Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation

By Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov

Published by PublicAffairs, 2025, £25

Reviewed by Clare Doyle

Our Dear Friends in Moscow is a difficult book to read but is quite devastating in what it confirms about the brutality of life in Putin’s Russia. Young, mostly idealistic, journalists are on the hunt for sensational revelations about what goes on behind closed doors… in the bowels of the Stalin-era police stations and in the great halls of the Kremlin.

Great Revolutionaries

By Peter Taaffe

Published by Mentmore Press, 2025, £9.99

Reviewed by Martin Powell-Davies

A search through the back issues of Socialism Today will quickly reveal a huge range of articles written by Peter Taaffe, the former general secretary of the Socialist Party.  

Peter’s writing, over many decades, helped provide theoretical clarity at a time when others were disorientated by the long post-war upswing of capitalism, and again after the collapse of Stalinism. Peter was also adept at explaining revolutionary theory in a way that young workers, new to the ideas of Marxism, could understand.

However, as someone who really understood the ideas of Marx, he also knew that it is never enough for philosophers simply to ‘interpret’ the world, the point is to change it. That’s why Peter always sought to explain how the ideas of Marxism can be applied to today’s world – in order to change it for the better.