Socialism Today – Page 9 – Socialist Party magazine

Who is Zack Polanski?

1 July, 2025Admin

A leadership election is under way in the Green Party between the incumbent shared leadership of two Green MPs Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns (who is replacing the Bristol MP Carla Denyer on the ticket) and Zack Polanski, currently the deputy leader of the Green Party and a member of the London Assembly since 2021.

Polanski is standing for leader as an ‘eco-populist’, wanting to say to the millions of people who have supported Labour in the past, “you’re not leaving the Labour Party. The Labour party has left you”.

Global Warning: Fusion wars

1 July, 2025Admin

According to Jimmy Goodrich, a senior advisor at the Rand Corporation, an organisation with close links to the US military, “whoever masters it (fusion energy) will gain enormous advantages – economically, strategically and from a national security perspective”. Goodrich is warning the Trump administration of the dangers of cutting funding, when China is mobilizing huge resources in this area.

Nuclear fusion, the source of the sun’s heat, could provide nearly unlimited power without releasing any of the greenhouse gases driving global warming. By fusing together atomic particles rather than splitting them, as in conventional nuclear power, no toxic radioactive waste is given off. Also, again unlike in conventional nuclear reactors, fusion has a built-in fail-safe mechanism, if there is a power failure the reactor automatically shuts down.

Where is Britain Going? Its relevance now

1 July, 2025Admin

The following is an introduction, written by HANNAH SELL, for a forthcoming centenary reprint of Leon Trotsky’s important book, Where is Britain Going?, which has as much relevance today as when it was first published in 1925.

Leon Trotsky, along with Vladimir Lenin the key leader of the Russian revolution, wrote Where is Britain Going? to try and prepare the young British Communist Party for the epic class battles which he could see ahead. It has many lessons for a new generation drawing Marxist conclusions today in an era of increasingly stormy events.

As Trotsky says in his autobiography, My Life, when he wrote Where is Britain Going? it was clear that “the fight in the coal industry would lead to a general strike”. Yet the book, Trotsky reported, was treated by the “official leaders of British socialism” as “the fantasy of a foreigner who did not know British conditions”. Just a year later, sooner even than Trotsky expected, the 1926 general strike erupted – the highest peak reached by the class struggle in Britain to date.

At every stage of struggle in the hundred years since it was written this book has had huge value for Marxists. Nonetheless, it is more relevant in 2025 than at any time since the era in which it first appeared. The ailing character of capitalism worldwide and in Britain, and the increasing bitterness of the class struggle, have far more in common with the early 1920s than any period since 1945.

How socialism could save the environment

1 July, 2025Admin

MARTIN POWELL-DAVIES reviews a recent book by Socialist Party member Pete Dickenson that gives a comprehensive socialist solution to capitalism’s environmental destruction of the planet.

Planning For The Planet

By Pete Dickenson

Published by Socialist Books, 2025 (second edition), £11-99

Planning For The Planet – How Socialism Could Save The Environment, is essential reading for anyone serious about ensuring urgent global action is taken to prevent the growing threat of environmental catastrophe.

When its author, Socialist Party member Pete Dickenson, wrote the first edition of his book back in 2011, global temperatures had risen by around 1^◦C above pre-industrial levels. But in 2025, when Pete’s updated second edition is being published, that rise is now already consistently being recorded at above 1.5^◦C.

Back in 2011, the link between rising greenhouse gas emissions and the increase in extreme weather events was still just a theoretical debate. Now it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt, based on measurements of ocean temperatures.

No ideas for ending minority rule

1 July, 2025Admin

Ash Sarker’s recent book on identity politics has drawn media attention for its criticism of the left as well as the right. But it does not adequately deal with the issues it raises, argues BEA GARDNER, in particular relating to identity and class.

Minority Rule

By Ash Sarkar

Published by Bloomsbury, 2025, £18-99

Minority Rule is the first book by Ash Sarkar, who over the past decade has built a sizeable influence as a left political commentator. She also describes herself as a Marxist. Her rebuttal to Piers Morgan in a 2018 TV debate – “I’m literally a communist, you idiot” – has received over eight million views on the YouTube account of Novara Media, which Sarkar is a contributing editor of.

Given her left profile, Sarkar’s book will be a pole of attraction to a sizable layer looking for an explanation about the rise of the far right and attacks on migrants and trans people continuing under the new Labour government. It is therefore necessary to engage with her core ideas and appraise what they offer to those seeking answers.

The revolution can be filmed

1 July, 2025Admin

Battleship Potemkin

A film by Sergei Eisenstein

Reviewed by Clare Doyle

Revolution is not one act, with the class opponents lined up and facing each other for one mighty battle and one side winning outright. It is a drama with several episodes and scenes, which eventually reach a climax in either defeat or the overthrow of one class by another.

There are even ‘dress rehearsals’ in which all the actors are involved but have not yet perfected the roles they must play in order to succeed. Lenin and Trotsky – leaders of the victorious socialist revolution in Russia in October 1917 – characterised the 1905 revolution as a “dress rehearsal” for that great trial of strength just 12 years later. Many lessons were drawn, but all the elements necessary to ensure a successful revolution against capitalism and landlordism had not yet matured.

Diane Abbott: an unfinished memoir

1 July, 2025Admin

A Woman Like Me

By Diane Abbott

Published by Penguin Books, 2025, £10-99

Reviewed by Paul Kershaw

Responding to the news earlier this year that some of the suspended Labour MPs who stood out against the Labour leadership were not being reinstated Diane Abbott posted on social media that this was a badge of honour.

She has been in the news warning that Labour’s move to the right opens the way for the far right, criticising Labour’s failure to counter the anti-immigrant drift of public discussion and defending the WASPI women, who Labour had promised pension justice but then abandoned. For powerful reasons, Britain’s first black female MP is seen as an inspiration by many.

Peter Taaffe, 1942-2025

2 June, 20255 June, 2025Admin

This edition of Socialism Today has been produced as a commemorative issue marking the passing, on April 23, of Peter Taaffe, the inaugural editor of the Militant in 1964, a leading member of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) from its founding congress in 1974, and the general secretary of the Socialist Party until 2020.

Peter was a prolific contributor to Socialism Today and its predecessor magazine, the Militant International Review (MIR), writing a leading article in the first issue of the MIR published in autumn 1969 on the state of the trade unions in Britain after the defeat of the Harold Wilson Labour government’s anti-union ‘In Place of Strife’ white paper. In total the MIR and Socialism Today, launched as a monthly in 1995, together published 173 original articles by Peter, ranging across every facet of the struggle for socialism in Britain and internationally.

Liverpool’s historic struggle

2 June, 2025Admin

The 1983-87 struggle of Liverpool city council against the Thatcher government is one of the defining battles of the working class movement in Britain, with Militant at its heart. An article first published in the spring 1986 edition of Militant International Review, No.31, reprinted here in abridged form, gives a real time account of Marxism in action.

The British ruling class have been shaken to their foundations by the magnificent struggle of the Liverpool city council and working class. In the miners’ strike and in Liverpool are to be found the germs of the mass conflicts which will convulse Britain on a national scale in the future. There can be no other explanation for the vile and unprecedented campaign of slander and of personal vilification of the leaders of the city council and District Labour Party. A new Tower of Babel, of lies, misinformation and half-truths has been constructed by the media hirelings of capital.

The great anti-poll tax victory

2 June, 2025Admin

The ‘unofficial’ mass movement which humbled the seemingly invincible Margaret Thatcher was another example of Marxism proving itself at the head of a mass movement. This article was written on the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of the poll tax to England and Wales, for the March 2010 edition of Socialism Today No.136.

The 1926 general strike and the battle against Thatcher’s poll tax in the late 1980s and early 1990s were probably the two most important events in the consciousness of the labour movement in Britain in the 20th century – although, for Marxists, the epic 1984-85 miners’ strike together with the Liverpool struggle led by Militant, now the Socialist Party, are on a par with these events. There were, of course, differences in the character of each of these struggles. The general strike involved the mobilisation of the mass of organised workers against the austerity programme of Baldwin’s Tory government of the day. The poll tax, while combining some of the features of classical industrial struggles – appeals to the trade unions to take action against the imposition of the tax, etc – was broader and more ‘social’ in the diverse forces that were mobilised. But the one overriding difference between the two was the vital issue of the role of leadership. The general strike, ‘led’ by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), ended in a terrible defeat, while the poll tax resulted in a splendid victory which brushed the defeated Thatcher onto the slag heap of history.