This week's Labour Party conference marked yet another turning point. Under its new leadership, Labour's policies have turned sharply back to the right, and are now virtually indistinguishable from those of the Tories. As a consequence, Labour has LOST...* well over 150,000 members, with many thousands of socialist activists expelled* almost £15 million in funds, … [Read more...]
The Lessons of Afghanistan
What has happened in recent weeks in Afghanistan has worldwide repercussions. The rout of US and British imperialism represents a historic humiliation and a turning-point, highlighting the paradox of our times: the deepening crisis of the ruling class on the one hand, and the desperate lack of a coherent socialist alternative. A twenty-year war costing billions of dollars, the … [Read more...]
TUNISIA: The End of the Arab Spring?
The popular uprising in Tunisia in December 2010 marked the beginning of the “Arab spring”, a wave of revolution that rocked the entire region, sweeping away the dictatorial regimes of Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt and Gaddafi in Libya and sparking off years of continuing civil war in Syria and Yemen. Still now its repercussions have not died down, as shown by recent uprisings in Sudan and … [Read more...]
CHINA: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party
Greg Benton is Greg is the acknowledged leading expert on the history of the Chinese Communist Party and especially China’s Trotskyist opposition and isEmeritus Professor at Cardiff University.Last month marked the centenary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party. Just a quarter of a century later, it was already in power. Today it is ruling a population of a billion and a half – almost … [Read more...]
SOUTH AFRICA:
Debating a Workers' Programme for Reconstruction Less than three decades since the ANC came to power, South Africa has been convulsed by possibly the greatest upheaval in its history. Desperate poverty has driven tens of thousands in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng to looting, extensively and repeatedly. Trucks, factories and malls have been set alight, and ports and railways in KwaZulu-Natal … [Read more...]
Iran in Crisis
Aman Kafa (UCU member, Worker-Communist Party of Iran - Hekmatist [official line]) gives an up-to-date report and analysis of events from Iran.Three years ago, there were mass protests across more than eighty cities in Iran. Now the recent presidential election has exposed more clearly than ever the hollowness of the regime. Iran's new president is the "hanging judge" responsible in the 1980s for … [Read more...]
Latin America: A New Upsurge
Amid the unprecedented recent wave of protests that has swept the world, nowhere has experienced more widespread turmoil than the South American sub-continent. Recent months have witnessed a general strike and uprising in Colombia; demonstrations throughout Chile and Brazil including well over a million in Santiago and a million in Sao Paolo; in Bolivia the return to power of the Movement For … [Read more...]
Will the World Economy Bounce Back?
Speaker - Michael Roberts author of The Long Depression: Marxism and the Global Crisis of Capitalism.The major capitalist economies seem now to be recovering fast from the catastrophic slump into which they were plunged by the COVID pandemic. Will this revival continue? Or is it just a short-term bounce back, as businesses re-open and vaccinations roll out? Meanwhile the countries of Latin … [Read more...]
Disability – a socialist perspective
One billion people around the world live with some form of disability, making up around 15% of the global population. The total number is rising fast, due both to chronic health conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and mental illness, and to wars, civil wars and environmental catastrophes – all manifestations in different ways of the devastating crisis of capitalism, which together … [Read more...]
France: The Deepening Crisis
Since 2016 (the year of the massive movement against the employment laws of Francois Holland’s minister of employment, El Khomry), there has been no let-up in the struggle. There has been furious resistance by the workers against attempts by the Holland and Macron governments to push ahead with neo-liberal reforms, destroying living standards and employment rights.After a lull at the start of … [Read more...]