The World (AWL AGM 2026)

1. Into a new era of capitalism

Since the 2008-9 crash, capitalism has been moving towards a new era, which could be briefly named “new nationalism”. This is expressed and promoted in politics, at its extreme, by ultra-nationalism. The relatively “flat” world market of high neoliberal globalisation is being replaced, not by autarkies or even semi-autarkies, but by a patchwork of ad hoc deals between states and groups of states. Trump’s chaotic initiation of tariff war in April 2025 was both an expression of that movement, and a dramatic acceleration of it. As Sven Beckert puts it in a new global history of capitalism from the 16th century to now: “There are signs that capitalism may have reached a new moment of reinvention… tariffs, nationalised maybe better: alliance-ised commodity chains, immigration restrictions, and statist industrial policies are re-emerging”. The reinvention is far from complete, and we cannot know what travails may come in the meantime. As Antonio Gramsci wrote in a different context: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. The "new nationalist" regimes are typically anti-immigrant. World-wide, the era is one of increased militarism and risk of war. It makes economic hegemony patchy, piecemeal, and unstable. Neoliberal globalisation was apt to generate financial crises. The new era will do that too, and probably more so, and with more difficulties in the way of capitalist states organising recoveries from crisis, because it makes concerted action by governments more difficult and generates blockages to flows of trade and investment.

Our basic response is for workers' unity across borders. We oppose retaliatory tariffs and push to reduce borders between countries, especially barriers to movement to people. We are for reversing Brexit.Crises will create new openings both for the working-class left and for the broader nationalist right, including its far-right variants of ultra-nationalism. Our first task now is to prepare ourselves so that we can be a sufficiently energetic and educative force in those turmoils to come.

2. Accelerating into the Anthropocene

In 2025, two major reports found we are accelerating towards more extreme Anthropocene scenarios.

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that we have now breached seven of the nine planetary boundaries beyond which humans cannot safely live. In addition to escalating disruption to water, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, the escalating dissipation of novel chemical wastes, escalating deforestation, and escalating climate change and biodiversity loss, capitalist society has now pushed us beyond the "safe operating zone" for ocean acidification.

The University of Exeter's 2025 Global Tipping Points report explains that global warming will soon exceed 1.5°C, putting "humanity in the danger zone where multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people."

Already warm-water coral reefs are  experiencing unprecedented dieback, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of millions who depend on them. Polar ice sheets are approaching tipping points, committing the world to several metres of irreversible sea-level rise that will threaten most of the world's major cities. Every fraction of additional warming increases the risk of triggering further damaging tipping points. These include a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that would radically undermine global food and water security and plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters.

Limiting the magnitude and duration of the overshoot beyond 1.5C warming and minimising the now immanent risk of tipping points requires halving global emissions by 2030 and achieving net zero by 2050. Yet the fossil fuel industry is expanding and emissions continue to rise year on year. Trump's USA is the most reckless of the big power governments; the EU is retreating on eco-regulations; China continues to increase coal power and other ecologically destructive industry under cover of its claims to be going for an "ecological civilisation".

Activism to stop climate change has been pushed back since the big wave of protests around 2019 (school student strikes, XR, etc.). However, there are signs of new struggles emerging around adaptation. There have been large demonstrations in Valencia in the aftermath of the 2024 floods; a smaller mobilization after the Californian wildfires. The Iran protests are in part is driven by water shortages, land subsidence, air pollution and energy insecurity. There is some embryonic trade union activity around workplace heat. As we accelerate further into the Anthropocene, we can expect this activity to increase and for larger and more international movements to emerge. We can and must build support for socialist policies to survive the Anthropocene.
 

3. China v USA

Only China chose to confront the USA over tariffs, rather than swerving. In the China-USA conflict chosen by Trump, China is so far coming out better, and is likely to continue to. It now has a stronger technological and supply base than the USA in many sectors.

4. China's crises

Chinese capitalism, however, has its own internal contradictions. It is still not out of its property slump which started in 2020. It has huge excess industrial capacity. Huge numbers of young workers in its cities are unemployed or in casual jobs, but it faces demographic problems of an ageing population with very low immigration. Xi Jinping’s tightened repression to restrain corruption shows a government anxious about losing grip. The 2022 protests against ultra-lockdown and A4 movement showed that despite its huge surveillance machine the government cannot eliminate dissent and sometimes has to concede to it. Strike levels had declined since 2016, but have risen again in 2023, 2024, and as far as we can tell 2025. The government still has extensive powers of economic management, as it showed when it evaded the post-2008 crash which affected almost every other industrial country, but extensive is not infinite.

5. The USA's crises

US capitalism did better in 2025 than could be expected with Trump’s tariff vagaries. The tariffs have been scaled back and, on best estimates, widely evaded; but the rising stockmarket and relatively buoyant output and jobs figures must mostly be put down to the economic bubble around Artificial Intelligence. AI has been developing since the 1960s, and Large Language Models since the mid-2010s. They do have capacities, but they are not all-transforming; most firms even in the USA are finding it difficult to get returns from spending on AI; a new “AI winter” is likely before too long. Expansion of cryptocurrency use, and expansion of non-bank lending to business, are probably creating other bubbles. Whether the bubbles will burst or slowly subside, and when, we cannot know, but the USA is incubating crises. The world economy is still highly interconnected, with almost everywhere connected into the USA, so a US crisis will spread globally.

6. The politics of the "new nationalism"

Often the politics of the “new nationalist” regimes are far-right and authoritarian. Some far-right authoritarian regimes established before 2008-9 have tightened their grip (Putin came to power 1999, Erdogan in 2003). Others have come to power in the wake of that crash: Modi 2014, Duterte 2016, Bukele and Bolsonaro 2019, Meloni and Marcos 2022, Netanyahu re-elected in 2022, Milei 2023, Kast 2026, etc. In Britain, France, Germany, Reform, RN, AfD have gained ground. These far-right politicians and movements come in many different variants; the extent and character of their popular bases vary, and so do their chief catch-cries. There is some common ground: the undermining, where the regime find necessary, of bourgeois constitutional structures, readiness to dispense with established rules of law, a widening of the “Overton window” as in Labour dispensing with the internationally recognised legal framework for migrants and asylum seekers. For now there is some distance in Britain between Reform UK’s electoralist far right, which could end up merging with the Tory party, and the “Tommy Robinson” street far right, but we cannot tell how that will evolve.

7. Trump

Trump has a mobilised mass base behind him (MAGA), has created his own hit-squads within the official government machinery (mass recruitment into ICE, purging of top ranks of FBI and military), and has gone a considerable distance in an institutional takeover asserting “unitary executive” power over the other elements of the USA’s supposed checks-and-balances governance (Congress, Supreme Court, previously semi-autonomous federal government agencies). There is dissent within Trumpism, of which probably the most important case so far is the Supreme Court’s 22 Dec 2025 six-to-three decision to block “federalising” National Guard troops to send them to Chicago. Trump’s advanced age increases the possibility of the Trump-MAGA movement fading through internal conflicts. But the difference between Trump 2.0 and 1.0 is the growth of a stronger far-right moneyed machine and the creation of a governing team with much more coherent politics than the one assembled by Trump 1.0. There is opposition; and there is more to oppose. The unions, despite much decline since their mid-1950s peak, remain the strongest social movement in the USA, and the central force to defeat Trump unless the MAGA movement falls apart from its internal contradictions, which it is not doing yet. Trump poses a threat to the fabric of more-or-less liberal democracy in the USA. It would be foolish to rely on hoping to limit the damage until January 2029 and relying on November 2028 elections (or even on Nov 2026 mid-term elections) to bring a “return to normal”.

Many universities, museums, media firms, and law firms have already been brought to heel, to one degree or another. Federal workers’ union rights have been cancelled. The National Labor Relations Board has been largely neutralised and may be ruled unconstitutional. There has been sizeable protest, the latest estimates being seven million on the streets 18 October 2025 and five million on 14 June. Some unions, notably the SEIU, have turned out contingents for them. Yet the shape of the protests has remained largely NGO-ish. The Teamsters are passive, de facto Trump-collaborationist; the UAW talks of a general strike, but in 2028. Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor is a welcome remobilisation and rejuvenation of the “Sanders constituency” there, but Mamdani as mayor will have difficulty carrying through even the local economic measures he has promised, let alone doing anything decisive against Trump. The ongoing organised core of the “Sanders constituency” remains the DSA, but that is weak both politically (swing to “camp-ism”) and organisationally (a lot of the activity just electoral or of the type of running food banks, weak socialist-advocacy work). The fight for a working-class response to Trump remains to be won.

8. The workers' movement since 2008-9

The 2008-9 crash produced some boosts to the left, very broadly defined. Syriza in Greece, Corbynism in Britain, the Sanders mobilisation in the USA, even the Socialist Party’s victory in France’s 2012 presidential election, were examples. But, even if the ignominy of the subsequent SP presidency and then SP collapse in France was exceptional, those left-political surges proved to be less robust than the right-wing nationalist surges created by the same crash. The biggest broadly-left sequel was not in formal politics but in street protests over the whole decade starting in 2010, chronicled by Vincent Bevins in his book If We Burn. It was possibly the biggest wave of street protest ever in history; but it depended on loose social-media networks, it lacked political consolidation, and more or less everywhere it subsided with only small sequels of ongoing organisation or (notably in Brazil) it saw the discontent on which it had fed neatly re-channelled by the far right. Lesson: to do politics, you need politics, and politics embodied in ongoing deliberative-democratic organisation and large-scale political education (debates, publications, programmes). There have been many significant industrial battles since 2008; there were new spates in France, the USA, and the UK following the Covid lockdowns and during the period of high price inflation in 2022-3; the US unions and the UK unions have since 2022 maintained their density levels (about 10% and 22%, respectively), breaking a pattern of decades of downward drift; that achievement includes inspiring local advances here and there; but there are no clear examples of general advances in union organisation. In short, the upsurges from below were diffuse enough, the countervailing factors (industrial restructuring, hostile governments, insufficient openings created by capitalist growth for morale-reinforcing gains), and the capacities of the organised working-class socialist left to build ongoing organisation weak enough, that we lost out. On all evidence, recent electoral swings to the far right are not so much about people being “converted” from left-wing answers to right-wing. Many broadly-left ideas remain popular, but fewer working-class people think that the mainstream left will execute such ideas or that the further-left has the capacity to push the mainstream left for concessions. There is a diffuse disillusionment with politics. The far-right may have no answers for the working class, but it offers, at least, answers to make “the nation” “great again” which have not yet (recently) been attempted; so it gains backing on “give-us-a-try” bases which can then be hardened into more positive support.

9. The avowed Marxist left

For all that, in the UK and in many countries, young people, especially young women and especially formally-educated young people (now a large percentage of the cohort), remain broadly leftish in their sympathies. (The far-right has picked up some support among young men in recent years, but that remains a secondary trend). The pool in which the Marxist left can (given sufficient energy and effort) gain at least a sympathetic hearing is, by historical measures, large. What has been lacking since 2008 is capacity to consolidate organised forces. Part of that is simply insufficient energy by the left in making itself accessible: visible literature stalls, meeting-advertisements, and so on, on the streets and on campuses, have declined even when left membership numbers haven’t.

Britain now has far-left groups (rs21, Counterfire, ACR) who lack the energy even to produce a regular “core” publication sold energetically on the streets and in meetings. In the rest of the world the, so to speak, “post-Trotskyist” left has mostly done poorly too, despite real openings since 2008. Some of that seems to be leaderships formed in the high days of the 1970s, or maybe 1980s, fading and lapsing and finding no strong young supplements.

The DSA in the USA grew from a small, inactive, elderly group into a visible organisation of nearly 100,000 members, mostly young, through the two Sanders campaigns. It ebbed after 2021, but has recently regained some ground, as the Mamdani campaign shows. But its politics remain fundamentally reformist, given spurious radical edge by “campist” rhetoric; it has no regular well-promoted publication; a lot of its activity is either limitedly electoralist or NGO-y (food banks, etc.)

The International Socialist Organization was, ten years ago, by far the most active far-left group in the USA. Its policies on issues such as Israel-Palestine were poor, but it had serious and well-argued things to say on other issues. In 2019 its leaders, old-established and new alike, gave up. It dissolved. Only online-based grouplets remain.

The LCR in France was after 1989-91 the most lively and respectworthy “Orthodox Trotskyist” group in the world. Its move to expand itself by forming the NPA in February 2009 was sensible in general terms, and at first successful. But then it turned out to lack a coherent group of people with the energy to lead the NPA. Many of the most qualified LCR members hived off when the NPA was formed, or soon after. The NPA became a mess, its publications desultory, its political activity more and more a dispirited search to find something “broad left” to latch onto. It lapsed, with no visible debate, from a long-standing de-facto socialist “two states” stance on Israel-Palestine into rhetorical “absolute anti-Zionism”.

Worldwide, since 1989-91 refuted the perspectives of “Orthodox Trotskyism”, there has been a political fading of groups derived from that current into feeble “camp-ism”. The LCR at least proclaimed a need for rethinking: “new epoch, new programme, new party”. Its “new programme” turned out to be only a diluted version of the old one. The RCP in Britain is the same sort of evolution in caricature. As Socialist Appeal it managed, somehow, to find some new younger leaders after 2009, who deployed consistent energy and so recruited significantly on campuses; but, especially in its current off-the-wall “RCP” phase, the group has dumped all its old would-be Marxist ideas, without argument or accounting, in favour of an incoherent mélange picked up from its surroundings.

We cannot and must not see ourselves as a fringe element of that decaying “post-Trotskyist” spectrum. We can and should seek unity in action with groups from that spectrum whenever there is sufficient agreement; and debate (rather than a passive “each do our own thing” regime) where there is disagreement. There are many respectworthy and valuable individuals from that spectrum, and we can and should seek to discuss patiently and seriously with them, listening carefully and respectfully, hoping to win them over. Our perspective for building a big revolutionary socialist movement is of "splits and fusions" rather than just direct numerical growth of the AWL. But the domain to which we orient for the future revivals and reassemblings must be larger than the "post-Trotskyist" spectrum.

Our relations with groups like Standing Together in Israel, and SR in Ukraine, are as important. These are new groups of different political background, and with which our unity-and-debate policy has different axes. There are more possibilities with new currents of that sort. In relation to them we can be a lever bringing in “rediscovered Marxism” dug out from under the old “Orthodox Trotskyist” pilings-on, and work to shift people from broad-social-movement politics towards a class-focused programme.

The “interregnum” between the old high-neoliberal-globalisation era of capitalism, and the emerging era of “new nationalism”, will generate bigger and more energised pools of young people angry against capitalism and nationalism and ecocide, and open to ideas of consistent Marxist working-class organising as the antidote. The question for us is whether we can mobilise ourselves sufficiently to build an organisation coherent enough, educated enough, lucid enough to be a lever in the unpredictable but sure-to-come workers’ battles of the interregnum. As we noted in 2022: “‘Intellectual “clairvoyance” of the terms of the struggle is indispensable. But this clairvoyance is a political value only in as much as it becomes disseminated passion, and in as much it is the premise for a strong will’, wrote Antonio Gramsci. He argued that the core activity of a revolutionary socialist must be that of a ‘democratic philosopher’ or ‘permanent persuader’.”