The third 'Internationalist' gathering initiated by Italian socialist group Lotta Comunista is taking place in Paris, May 2025. Workers' Liberty will be sending a delegation, and have submitted two articles for the accompanying bulletin. This article covers the structure of global imperialism in 2025, national liberation struggles, and left unity to defeat the far right.
Imperialism
The period between the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the financial crash of 2008 was the heyday of US-led globalisation. Foreign direct investment and complex global production chains burgeoned. The chief criterion of economic policy for most governments was to make their countries attractive for footloose global capital (good infrastructure, educated workforces, favourable tax and legal regimes, low overhead costs), rather than the creation of national integrated industrial complexes.
This system has been challenged since the 2008 crash by a series of interlocking developments: the rise of Chinese industry; the crumbling authority of the USA as ‘world police’ since at least the Iraq war; the financial crash causing many countries to move away from economic dependence on the USA; Russia’s increasing return to overt colonial conquest, alongside developing a loose economic bloc with China, India, and parts of Africa; perhaps most pressing is the rise of Trumpism, and the wave of far-right electoral success that he has headed.
National struggles
The last two years have seen a return of national struggles to prominence: Ukraine, Palestine, Nagorno Karabakh, the French retreat from Africa, Kurdistan, and a looming conflict over Taiwan..
Unlike comrades in Lotta Comunista, and others attending the conference, we fundamentally consider conflicts such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a struggle for national liberation. We see no justification to say that the Ukrainian people are not engaged in a struggle to defend a national entity from a colonial oppressor, despite their use of NATO arms to do so.
Were the war to expand to Finland (for example), or if British or French troops were engaged in active combat, then it would take on an inter-imperialist character, and our analysis would change. But NATO is a disparate bloc, whose member states support different sides in the war. To characterise it as a conflict between Russia and NATO is false.
While the makeup of global imperialism has changed, Lenin’s observation remains correct, when he argued against Luxemburg that "a war for national liberation in which imperialist rivalry is a contributory element of no great importance" was possible. "Whether such a war will be transformed into an imperialist war among the present imperialist Powers will depend on a great many concrete circumstances, and it would be ridiculous to guarantee that these circumstances will arise... National wars must not be regarded as impossible in the epoch of imperialism even in Europe".
Socialism, the extension of democracy beyond its bourgeois limits, must build on the foundation that capitalist “democracy” provides. The struggle for national liberation is a democratic struggle: a Palestinian state with some guarantee of safety from Israeli settlers, or a corrupt, oligarchic Ukrainian parliamentary democracy are far preferable for working class organisation to the impoverished quasi-state currently in the West Bank, or the mass arrests of trade unionists and falsified elections of Russian-imposed ‘statelets’ in Eastern Ukraine.
On Israel-Palestine, the British far left, and significant portions of the left elsewhere, have been led astray by a collapse into tailing the Islamist nationalism of Hamas. Groups such as the BDS movement prevent building support and solidarity with elements of the Israeli working class, who are able to fight the Netanyahu government and build a broad movement against the occupation.
Workers’ Liberty have supported the activity of the binational (Israeli-Palestinian) group Standing Together in Israel, who have been central to organising anti-occupation demonstrations, protecting aid deliveries to Gaza, and defending Palestinian-Israeli communities within Israel from attacks by the far-right.
The recognition of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in which the Palestinian working class are able to organise and contest Hamas’ leadership, is the necessary first step to peace in the region, and would provide the foundation for workers’ unity between the two nations, aiming towards an eventual regional socialist project.
Rise of the far right: Trump, fascism, rapid realignment in global politics
There is no neat correlation between stagnant income and right-nationalist revolt, but the roots of the far right’s recent rise are an era where post-1991 capitalist triumphalism has mutated into chronic disorder.
This newly-rising far-right has mostly used "constitutional" paths. Where in office, in India, Turkey, Israel, and Hungary, it has heavily damaged bourgeois democracy, but not crushed it entirely. It does not follow that they have gone as far as they ever will go. Where there have been pre-existing national oppressions or intercommunal conflicts, far-right governments have intensified violence against oppressed minorities (Turkey, India, Israel). We should operate on the basis that in certain circumstances there will be shifts by this far right—or sections of it—away from their strategic embedding in constitutional government, moves to make very radical inroads into bourgeois procedural democracy.
The election of Trump will speed the popularity of the far right and its policies across the world. Project 2025 gives some indications of what might happen in the US. The danger is particularly high in the event of a big new world-capitalist economic crisis, and that may come soon.
Trump’s election, and his immediate (though potentially unstable) strategic alliance with the Russian government, have had disastrous consequences for a number of global conflicts. The war in Ukraine is in the process of being brought to a disastrous end, with Ukraine forced into extreme economic hardship for a war it did not initiate. Trump’s maximalist plan of ethnically cleansing Gaza seems unworkable, but has put wind in the sails of the fascist right in the Israeli cabinet, who will impose impossible conditions on any peace agreement with Hamas, and likely fuel further military conflict later on.
The subjective element
The turmoil of the post-2008 years generated new life also on the left. 2010-20 was the biggest decade of broadly-leftist street demonstrations in all of history (Arab Spring, Greece, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Hong Kong...). Yet, fundamentally because the forces which the left had conserved and sustained through the long epoch of defeats from the early 1980s were not big enough, not energetic enough, not lucid enough, not worker-focused enough, we failed to rebuild labour movements on an anywhere-near-adequate scale.
Specifically, the left and labour movements failed to stop the wars of the 2000s, failed to build an adequate labour-movement opposition to capitalist austerity after 2008 and over the longer term failed to campaign for the bold socialist policies which could counter decades of neoliberalism. We have sorely missed what socialists of the last century called the “subjective element”: the existence of a mass workers’ organisation, internationally coordinating activity and able to intervene in ongoing events to advance specifically socialist demands.
Most of the "new broad left parties" and initiatives of the last 20 years — Rifondazione, SSP, Die Linke, Podemos, Syriza, the Corbyn surge, the DSA — have dwindled. There are some partial exceptions, but not many. Workers’ Liberty never thought that those “broad parties” were the answer, though we ourselves worked in the Corbyn surge, and were sympathetic to DEA's work in Syriza.
The left has adapted to and given de facto support to anti-working class, politically reactionary movements — from Scottish nationalism at the milder end, to Hamas — to construct militant-sounding stances and try to win a few recruits by seeming to show radical young people that they had "big battalions" on their side.
Left unity
The only way to defeat the far right is a far stronger, more militant labour movement that fights effectively for social redress for the working class. We are in favour of both unity between activists in the labour movement and unity amongst the revolutionary left, and are actively pursuing both aims.
This work will be piecemeal and involve some hard arguments. This is work for the long term. We do not and cannot know how much (or when) the new far-right surge will shake up the existing left and force reconsiderations among some groups or fragments of groups. We do know that it should shake up the left, and that we should say so.
Polls consistently show young people in Britain are open to ideas and demands that are central to socialist politics. It is the responsibility of the Marxist left to provide explanations about the state of humanity and the planet, and clear answers on how to change things for the better; to provide hope and a sense of agency.
For that to happen the left needs to be visibly functional and effective. A left which is divided into single-faction groups, each cultivating its own garden, where cooperation is limited and debate stifled, is tremendously debilitating — it will stop us from defeating the far right.
The AWL has a long history of advocating and participating in projects based on left unity around specific goals. We see the Marxist party as being not just built in ones and twos but also through strategic debate and “splits and fusions”.
This event is a step in the right direction. There are fewer immediate tasks for joint work internationally, but we should use our time together to establish any shared priorities and agreements, while engaging in open debate where we disagree. We support calls by the NPA and others in the last bulletin to find concrete proposals for joint action, which would be both mutually beneficial to our respective organisations and help encourage the kind of debate and interaction between sections of the revolutionary left that has dwindled for the last few decades, at least in Britain.
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