Fighting global capitalism

Two years ago we said that we would write a pamphlet on the ecological crises. In the course of attempting that we realised there was a need for further study and discussion. We should use the conference period to discuss the controversial issues that have arisen from this study in more detail, clarify the lines of agreement and disagreement. This document is not intended as a comprehensive statement but simply an attempt to move these discussions forward. I think for a long time we only really thought about climate change as the big ecological problem. More recently we have come to see...

After nearly two decades of talks, the UN has agreed a treaty to protect the high seas from overfishing, shipping and extractive industry. The High Seas Treaty is the latest and potentially the most extensive curb on maritime capitalism to date. Although the treaty is very limited due to the commitment of the world’s capitalist states to the growth of fishing, mining and shipping capital, it is a significant step forward. Until recently, the seas have been treated as both inexhaustible resource tap and infinite waste dump. But this illusion is becoming difficult to sustain as the ocean...

In defiance of the facts, the Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Workers' Party, Counterfire, etc, claim the war in Ukraine is primarily an inter-imperialist conflict between Russia and NATO, not a war of Ukrainian self-defence. (Some of Stop the War's supporters are straightforwardly pro-Russia, as was on display at its 25 February demo .) Couldn't the Ukraine conflict be transformed into an inter-imperialist war? Of course. That doesn't mean it is one now. In his response to Rosa Luxemburg's 1916 Junius Pamphlet , excerpts below, Vladimir Lenin addressed precisely this kind of issue. (At...

Adani and Modi Until last month India’s Gautam Adani was the richest man in Asia; last year he briefly displaced Jeff Bezos as the second richest on earth. In the last fortnight, he has lost almost half his $120 billion personal wealth, and his corporations about double that. Just as India’s far-right regime responded to last month’s BBC documentary reminding the world of Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat pogroms by claiming an imperialistic assault on India’s sovereignty , the Adani Group called the release of the damaging information driving its turmoil “a calculated attack on India...

In his Communist Manifesto Marx defined the communist aim as freedom: “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Elsewhere he wrote: “the association of free and equal producers”. Yet he also declared: “the abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at”. The German word translated as “abolition” ( Aufhebung ) can also be translated “supersession”. But the gist is this. In the marketplace rule “Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham [i.e. atomised self-seeking]”. But if...

Delhi anganwadi (early years) workers on strike earlier this year About 50 people attended the formal launch of the India Labour Solidarity campaign in London on 6 December. ILS was set up in the summer – its first activity was leafleting at Labour Party conference in September – to “promote solidarity between workers and their trade union and labour movements in the UK and India”. The meeting was chaired by Praveen Kolluguri, a Communication Workers’ Union member in the telecoms sector who is BAME officer of Kingston and Surbiton Labour Party in South London and on the Labour Campaign for...

Click here to download the power-point presentation from the 23 October 2022 Workers' Liberty Zoom forum on the aftermath of the Truss government.

Economic barriers between countries are growing. The world is less "flat" than it used to be, in the sense of being a free-fire zone for capitalist trade and investment with negligible barriers to surmount at borders. It is more "multipolar", in the sense of differentiated political and economic networks, each with its own centre or centres. How far has this gone? What, in more exact terms, are the trends? What should socialists make of it? Between 1945-7 and 1989-91 the world was, in broad terms, divided into two blocs. One bloc was dominated by the USA. Within that bloc, the old colonial...

Substantially longer version of this piece here As revolutionary socialists, we fight for the expansion of freedom and human flourishing, and seek to rid our world of oppression and discrimination. We stand in solidarity with the downtrodden, champion individual self-determination and bodily autonomy, and organise to empower people to take control of their own lives. For all these reasons and more, we fight for the liberation of trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender non-conforming people. This struggle flows naturally from our liberatory principles and our commitment to solidarity, combined...

"Don't Pay" , launched on 18 June, aims to get one million households to sign up to stop their energy direct-debits from 1 October. It calls for "a reduction of bills to an affordable level", but says it has no "set list of demands". Its first activity is via "email lists... Telegram, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and Twitter" and leafleting. The initiators are anonymous, say they are "not affiliated to any organisation", but hope eventually to move to organisation - "community groups... building this up street by street, estate by estate and city by city". The domestic energy price cap rose 12%...