France: In revolt against Capitalist Crisis

Across Europe, the anger against rising prices, crumbling services and the lack of prospects for youth has exploded into mass struggles.

Some are mistakenly labelling these as just being “Gen-Z” protests – and, of course, the movement of young people has been an important component in France and other countries – but that would be to miss an even more important factor – the emergence of trade union struggle – as in other countries like Ireland too.

In France, the movement of high school students, first of all in the working-class suburbs of Paris, certainly lit the spark, triggering a movement that then spread to the universities as well. But another key date in the movement was 29 September, the date of a well-supported one-day public sector-strike including teachers, firefighters, healthworkers, and civil servants.

All of these struggles are linked together by their roots in the crisis of French capitalism – reflected in the deteriorating state of underfunded public services, especially in health and education, and with the Government planning a further €54 billion of public sector cuts for 2027. 

The other main factor driving the anger underlying the movement is the high cost of living with the prices of fuel, food and transport rising beyond what many workers and working-class families can afford. Redundancies and lay-offs are also spiralling upwards -with over 300,000 job losses in 2025 alone. Unemployment is also rising, especially for the youth, and what work can be found is often under extremely precarious conditions.

The Youth Movement

The movement began with the high-school students organising protests or ‘blockades’ outside their schools, complaining at crumbling buildings, timetables that forced them to spend exhausting hours at schools, then only to find that the algorithms of the highly selective ‘Parcoursup’ university selection system, leave many without their preferred choice and enrolled on courses that they don’t really want to be on.

It’s not an accident that the movement began first amongst working-class high school students before spreading to the universities themselves, where students are also facing budget cuts, inadequate resources and cuts to student grants. The background of the genocide in Gaza and other international struggles had already politicised many young people too – and is of course the context from which the call for a Europe-wide youth strike on 20 November has also arisen.

High school teachers also played a good role too in many areas, coming out onto the blockades to try and protect their students from heavy-handed police attacks – which have been a feature of the movement from the very start – firing tear gas and riding motorbikes into crowds of youth, with injuries mounting, including young people who have lost hands and eyes as a result.

One of the issues which we are trying to raise amongst the students is that the tactic of blockades – of picketing schools is not sufficient – not all students want to join in actions that end up with confrontations with the police, nor is there an opportunity to meet, discuss tactics and build the movement to involve wider numbers.

We are calling for mass meetings – building on the tradition of General Assemblies – not just organising via WhatsApp – and for the election of action committees that can organise the struggle democratically and build regional and national coordination of the movement.

17 October

Saturday 17 October was another step forward for the movement, when demonstrations were called across France, originally against the cost of fuel, building on the movement of the ‘Gilets Jaunes’/’Yellow Vests’ from eight years ago. But now, thanks to the wider movement that had recently erupted, the demonstrations took on a much wider significance, size and broader demands – from the youth about education, against racism and police violence - and from workers calling for action against price rises and demanding salary increases.

Working-class youth and families turned out in huge numbers – around 800,000 across France – many carrying home-made placards – official trade union delegations still being fewer in number than they should have been.

From the get-go – as I was there to witness – the riot police were clearly determined to attack and provoke – firing volleys of tear gas into the square where the Paris demo. was assembling for example, even into the middle of the orchestra that was playing. Of course, youth did respond with fireworks and some were also clearly intent on getting their own revenge if they could. While the march itself – 100,000s strong marched off peacefully and noisily northwards, some stayed behind – along with anarchist elements – to do battle with the police, and there were running battles in the streets, and some vandalism and looting too – not without the helping hand of agents provocateurs, some of whom who were filmed caught in the act then running back to the police lines from where they had come from.

The politicians had obviously pre-prepared for this with President Macron and the right-populist Le Pen all condemning the violence, blaming it on the left, with a significant element of racism thrown in too, with right-wing politicians blaming Blacks and Muslims for the attacks – which also may have been behind a drive-by shooting in a part of Paris with a large North African community a few days ago.

Repression fails

But the demonstrations on the following Saturday – last Saturday the 24th October – showed that the strategy of police and state repression and divide-and-rule has failed in its objective. Despite many cities banning demonstrations and ongoing police attacks – in some cities like Lyon aided by fascist gangs – a word we don’t use lightly but in this case correctly – attacking demonstrations, again hundreds of thousands marched. The momentum of the movement has not been broken and it is Macron and the French bosses that have been left floundering, trying to find a way to hold back the movement. In the last few days they have announced some small reforms in education that they hope might satisfy the youth – but I think it is too little too late.

Nevertheless, the situation means that there does also need to be a serious discussion about strategy – and to explain to the angriest youth that attacks on the police and shops do not bring forward the movement. In fact, they can risk cutting across it, with many youth and workers wanting to distance themselves from it – however much they hate the police and Macron – because they are struggling to build a united movement for a better world, and  understand that to defeat the capitalists and the ultra-rich will require a serious movement, a victory that cannot be won in street battles with a heavily armed police force. Unfortunately, of course, some of the left groups idealise rioting as a ‘revolutionary tactic’, whereas we understand that the real power to defeat the capitalists comes from the organised power of the working-class, above all through using the weapon of strike action. The responsibility therefore falls on the trade unions – and the left parties which I will come on to – to take a lead and show the way forward with mass strike action – as well as through stewarding marches to defend them against police and fascist attacks and to prevent counter-productive actions, including the efforts of police agents-provocateurs too.

5 November strike

The important news is, with the pressure of the movement building below them, then the trade union leaders have called for what will effectively be a 24-hour general strike on 5 November, with all the different union federations calling on their members in both the private and public sectors to take strike action on that day (and in France, there’s none of the anti-union legislation we face about needing to go through strike ballots and so on).

That date had originally been called as something that was deliberately a little distant but, far from the movement ebbing in the meantime, it has only increased – meaning that 5 November will now be the next significant step up in the movement, again linking workers and youth, but this time with the trade unions taking the lead officially.

Gauche Révolutionnaire, the French section of the Committee for a Workers’ International are using the time before the strike, when schools are on half-term holidays, to try and mobilise the biggest possible turnout on 5 November, both through our own members and by putting pressure on the union leaders to do so themselves. 

Our latest leaflet raises the demands for:

• Higher salaries now: An immediate €300 increase, no income below €1800

• Indexation of wages to prices

• Significant price cuts and price caps.

• No redundancies! A job for everyone!

• For high-quality public services: major investments in all public services (education, hospitals, etc.) including widespread recruitment of new staff

• Enough of capitalist theft: for nationalisation under workers' control of the key sectors of the economy (energy, big supermarket chains, finance, transport)

We are also calling for mass meetings to be called in every workplace to build for the strike, to organise picketing and rallies on the day of the strike, but also to discuss what should follow next – and we are raising that the unions should call for 3 consecutive days of strike shortly after the 5th, to escalate the action further.

The Presidential Elections, Mélenchon and LFI

Of course, the mass movement is also changing political consciousness which, as globally, has been lagging behind the real objective crisis of capitalism. And the main political force on the French left is undoubtedly La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), the movement led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose supporters have been active on the demonstrations and building support for his stand in next April’s Presidential elections.

The French capitalists are growing increasingly concerned that they have no reliable candidate standing with the direct backing of the French capitalist class. Macron is not allowed to stand again and their alternatives Edouard Philippe – a previous PM under Macron, or Glucksmann of the Parti Socialiste – are still under 20% in the polls. The two front-runners are Mélenchon and Le Pen. In the French system, this could lead to a two-candidate run-off between these two in May – although nothing can be taken for granted. Under the pressure of a mass movement, even though le Pen is presently way ahead in the polls, nothing could be entirely ruled out.

The French capitalist class will of course fall behind Le Pen if they have no alternative but a right populist is not a reliable choice for the capitalist class as Le Pen will also come under pressure to be seen to be doing something for the working-class – even if on a racist and divisive basis.

GR, the French section of the CWI, have been active as an organised current within LFI since its inception in 2016. We are calling for LFI to not restrict its activity to just electoral campaigning but for it to use its position to take a lead in building the mass movement.

I deliberately described it as a movement, rather than a Party, because Mélenchon has long organised LFI on a top-down basis with similar methods to that used by some of the other new Left formations like Podemos in Spain, or, in its brief existence, by Your Party in Britain. The movement is run top-down without real democratic elected representative structures in which members can get6 involved and feel part of a genuine workers’ party.

If you have read the articles we have carried in Socialism Today, you’ll know that Mélenchon is undoubtedly politically far ahead of say Corbyn, but still has significant weaknesses. His ‘French’ take on events stresses the ‘people’ rather than the ‘working-class’ – combining the bourgeois demands of “citizens” of the French bourgeois revolution with the ‘postcapitalist’ ideas that the working-class no longer has the power that it had. Of course, it’s true that the hollowing out of industry in much of Europe has helped undermine working-class consciousness and organisation but the working -class retains its potential power to halt capitalist society – as 5 November can help demonstrate.

Mélenchon has the advantage that, for now, his policies have not been tested – unlike say Podemos in Spain oy Syriza in Greece. In fact, there may even be a section of the French capitalists that are willing to see him elected, if only to then take him on through economic sabotage – just as they did with Mitterrand in 1981 – the former SP President elected on a left-reformist program who then retreated and carried out the cuts demanded of him by the bosses. In this scenario, of course, a program for nationalisation of all they key sectors of the economy, including the banks, for workers’ control and management, for the opening of the books of capitalist firms and capital controls, would all be vitally important – and of course these are already issues being discussed by the most politically advanced sections of the movement.

France - a report from the mass demo in Paris on 17 October

French workers and youth take another step forward in their struggle to defeat Macron's attacks

On 17 October, well over 500,000 workers and youth poured onto the streets of towns and cities across France to take their latest step forward in the battle to defeat Macron and the French capitalists’ attacks on workers’ living standards.

The youth were again to the fore, with high school and university students making up a good proportion of the marchers. Workers and their families also came to the demos in huge numbers although official trade union contingents were less visible than they should have been.

In Paris, the march completely filled the streets behind the Place de la République as it made its way north towards the Place de Clichy, often coming to a complete standstill because of the size of the crowds. There were thousands of home-made placards denouncing Macron, budget cuts, police violence, and demanding a decent education and a future for young people. Youth climbed street furniture and scaffolding to wave banners and flags, to enthusiastic cheers. Cries of “Macron Démission!” – Macron Resign! – filled the air, along with other chants against the far-right and the police.

Supporters of La France Insoumise had also mobilised with banners and stickers demanding action on the cost of living and to build support for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s 2027 Presidential campaign. Big business has not yet managed to find a candidate that they can put forward to act reliably in their interests and the prospect of a run-off between Mélenchon and the populist-right’s Le Pen adds to the bosses’ fear at the rising tide of opposition.

From the very start, the riot police were even more aggressive than usual. Volleys of tear gas soon filled the Place de la République forcing people assembling for the march to scatter. Musicians who had gathered there to play protest songs during the march had to flee. Even the fast-food sellers had to drive away, and we also had to temporarily abandon our stall to give our eyes and throats time to recover.

Macron, Le Pen and the right-wing press had obviously decided on a strategy of trying to cut across support for the movement through hypocritical denunciations of ‘violence’. Instead of reporting on the powerful mass demonstrations, media reports have focused on the exchanges of tear gas and fireworks between a minority of protestors and the police, as well as the anger that a minority of alienated youth expressed through acts of vandalism. In the age of smartphones, some of the more obvious examples of police agents provocateurs were filmed, including an attack on firefighters. Their divisive strategy will not succeed, because the growing anger at the attacks on living standards demanded by big business runs very deep.

Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR), the French section of the CWI, intervened energetically with leaflets and newspapers putting forward a programme to advance the movement. In Rouen, a youthful GR contingent, bringing together both existing members and new supporters, formed one of the liveliest sections of their city’s demonstration. In Paris, high school students that I spoke to were keen on the idea that 20 November could be a day for a Europe-wide student strike.

For now, with schools and universities taking a half-term break, the next planned day of action is on 5 November, when the union federations have called another co-ordinated mass one-day national strike. Significantly, for the first time since 2023, this will involve not only public sector workers but private sector trade unionists as well, with the prospect that this could effectively become a 24-hour general strike. This will be an important opportunity for the movement to take a further step forward by building a massive joint strike of both students and workers. GR is proposing that this should be followed by a further escalation to a united two or three-day strike. The trade union and left leaders should take the lead in further strengthening the links between all the different sectors in struggle so as to build a movement that has the power to defeat both Macron and the bosses’ austerity plans.

The National Question - and its part in the fight for Socialism

‘The National Question - and its part in the fight for Socialism’ is the third in a series of books that have been published by Mentmore Press bringing together some of the many articles written by the late Peter Taaffe.

Peter devoted his life to the struggle to build a socialist world, as editor of the Militant newspaper, then as general secretary of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, as well as through being a leading member of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI).

As a Marxist, Peter had full confidence in the will and ability of the working class to struggle for a socialist future. However, he also understood that struggle alone is not enough to guarantee victory. It also needs a leadership that has learned from the past, and is able to apply the method of Marxism to work out a correct programme, strategy and tactics.

The first two books in this series - ‘Great Revolutionaries’ and ‘Collapse of Stalinism’ - are hopefully already helping a new generation of socialists to learn those lessons. This third book focuses on the ‘National Question’ – the approach that socialists should take to the oppression suffered by nations, and national, ethnic or religious minorities, under the rule of global capitalism. 

An incorrect position on the National Question can only too easily cut off revolutionaries from those workers and poor who are seeking to win national liberation, leaving them in the hands of nationalist forces that will seek to divide and mislead, so as to maintain the rule of capitalism. That’s why socialists need to apply the sensitive and flexible approach set out by Lenin, a national policy described by the other main leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, as being “among the eternal treasures of mankind”.

As this book explains, such an approach means opposing all forms of national and ethnic oppression and firmly supporting the right to self-determination for oppressed nations - including the right to full independence where so desired. However, while supporting that right, the aim is to secure the voluntary unity of the working class across borders, and to build a united struggle for a socialist world, as the only way to genuinely guarantee and defend national rights.

Such an approach cannot be learned by rote. There is no ‘one size fits all’ policy. Marxists must take into account the specific complexities of each national question. The book shows how Peter - along with the CWI as a whole - have always sought to do that, including by changing the demands we raise as circumstances change.  Neither has the CWI acted just as onlookers, but we have raised our programme while participating in, and supporting, struggle. 

Focusing on Five National Questions

The collection is drawn from articles written by Peter from the 1970s right up to 2018. For reasons of space, not all his articles on global struggles could be selected. Instead, the book focuses on five specific areas: Scotland, the former Stalinist states, Israel/Palestine, Black Nationalism, and Ireland. To put those articles in context, and also to discuss changes that have taken place since they were first written, each section is accompanied by comprehensive endnotes and an introductory overview. 

An overarching introduction to the whole book, written by Philip Stott of Socialist Party Scotland, explains how bourgeois-democratic revolutions smashed the previous feudal elites, paving the way for capitalist relations. They laid the basis for the development of nation states as we know them today, establishing the national markets needed by each nation’s rising capitalist class. In turn, the new ruling class created a national consciousness to underpin their state. 

Those revolutions included a struggle for land reform, the introduction of limited forms of parliamentary democracy, as well as the establishment of unitary states and language rights. However, as Trotsky explained in his ‘Theory of Permanent Revolution’, the capitalist class, in large parts of the world, have proved unwilling and unable to carry through the historic tasks of their own revolution. Across the neo-colonial world, as a consequence of their weakness and domination by imperialism, they were unable to play the independent role that their counterparts played in Western Europe or the United States. 

This means that today, in nations encompassing billions of people, the bourgeois-democratic tasks have not been completed, including the distribution of land to the peasants, as well as the resolution of numerous national questions and the expulsion of imperialism. Instead, it falls to the working class to lead the struggle to overthrow both landlordism and capitalism, merging these unfinished tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution with socialist tasks as well. Only a socialist society will be able to guarantee the fullest democratic and economic rights for all religious, ethnic and national groupings, and end oppression.

A capitalist world in crisis

As Philip puts it, “in other words, the right of nations to self-determination - and the national question overall - must also be part of the programme of the workers' movement today, as must other crucial democratic tasks that capitalism has been unable to either fulfil or maintain as its rule has entered systemic crisis”. 

But Philip also stresses that we now live in a capitalist world that is in a deep historical crisis. In its decline, capitalism has created generations who suffer unending poverty, increasing inequality, and are threatened by economic destruction and war: “For the masses of the neocolonial world, capitalist crises, and the incapacity of the bourgeois to resolve any of the problems of its rule, has meant burgeoning national, ethnic and religious conflicts”. 

Democratic rights, including the right of nations to self-determination, have been repressed and unfulfilled, as the struggle of the Palestinians for statehood makes so graphically clear. Neither has capitalism been able to resolve the long-standing national question in Ireland, among many other examples.

But the decay of world capitalism has meant that the national question has also reemerged in nations where it appeared to have been pushed into the background. This includes advanced capitalist nations such as the UK and the Spanish state where the ‘glue’ of capitalist economic development has started to come unstuck. Long repressed national tensions also re-emerged with a vengeance following the collapse of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 

In other words, as Philip puts it, “the national question is far more complex today than at any time since the emergence of scientific socialism in 1848. However, our starting point is the same as it was for Lenin and the other great Marxists who developed the fundamentally correct socialist and internationalist approach to the national question: there is no capitalist solution. Only the struggle for socialism, led by the working class, can genuinely liberate the world's peoples from oppression and truly allow for the right to self-determination. … The role of a Marxist programme is to skilfully take up, and to be among the best fighters for, national rights and self-determination where that demand applies. … weaving into our programme demands that reflect those desires, while putting forward slogans that make central the necessity of the working class taking the lead in the struggle to achieve democratic rights - and that only the ending of capitalism can guarantee those rights permanently”.

Scotland

However, truth is concrete. As Peter Taaffe explains in his 1992 article ‘Nationalism, Scotland and the Marxist Approach’, “Abstract propaganda is absolutely insufficient in the sphere of the national question. Of course, Marxists are in general in favour of maintaining the maximum unity and are against the unnecessary ‘Balkanisation’ of formerly unified states. But what is absolutely decisive in deciding our position, is not our wishes but concrete historical circumstances and above all the experience of the masses and their desires.”     

A correct position requires differentiating between the bourgeois nationalism of those, like the Scottish National Party, who reflect the interests of a section of the capitalist class, and the moods and desires of the working class whose nationalism, in the words of Trotsky in his ‘History of the Russian Revolution’, can express “the outer shell of an immature Bolshevism.” 

As Peter’s articles explain, mass deindustrialisation and the brutality of Thatcherism reawakened national consciousness amongst the Scottish working class. Our former slogan for a socialist Britain, with autonomy for Scotland, no longer reflected the outlook of the most conscious workers. So, from 1998, the CWI called for an independent socialist Scotland, as part of a socialist confederation with England, Wales and Ireland. 

In 2014, the accumulated anger resulted in a 45% ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum for an independent state, in the teeth of a ferocious campaign of opposition by the ruling class. Socialist Party Scotland described it as an “electoral uprising against austerity and the political establishment”.

In contrast, as the book explains, the Communist Party of Britain opposed the call for a ‘Yes’ vote, as did the International Marxist Tendency who declared that “Scottish nationalism lacks any progressive element” - before reversing their position after the fact!

The book explains how, frightened by how close they came to defeat in 2014, the British ruling class will do all they can to block a second referendum. Their refusal can only be answered by “mobilising the power of the workers’ movement” to win “an independent Scotland that ends all cuts, poverty and wealth inequality. In other words, a socialist society”.

The former Stalinist states

This section of the book includes articles by Peter Taaffe on Armenia, written while Stalinism was in its final years, and on Bosnia, where that collapse had led to ethnic cleansing and civil war. A third article, from 2014, discusses the military conflict between the two newly formed capitalist states of Russia and Ukraine, a conflict that is, of course, still ongoing.

As the book explains, “instead of being cheerleaders for the reactionary bourgeois nationalism of one or other oligarchical-capitalist regime, a clear, independent class approach is required, one that recognises that only a socialist solution based on working-class unity can resolve these apparently intractable issues”.

Peter contrasts the policies of the likes of Gorbachev, Stalin and Putin with those of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Lenin understood that winning the confidence and support of the oppressed minorities who made up a majority of the ‘prison house of nationalities’ of Tsarist Russia meant guaranteeing their democratic rights to self-determination, up to and including the right to secession. Without this sensitive approach, with no hint of compulsion, there would have been no successful October 1917 revolution. At the same time the Bolsheviks stood unequivocally for the unity of the working class, expressed through the idea of a voluntary socialist federation of states. 

Israel / Palestine

From the 1917 British government declaration of support for establishing a ‘national home’ for Jewish people, to the mass expulsion of the Nakba, right up to today’s genocidal actions, including the outright destruction of most of the Gaza strip, the national oppression of the Palestinians remains one of the most brutal examples of the denial of national rights. 

The book outlines how the CWI, often alone on the left, has stressed the need to build mass workers’ organisations on both sides of the national divide, as the basis of forging a socialist solution to the conflict which, alone, can resolve the national oppression of the Palestinian people. In his articles – stretching from 1973 to 2018 - Peter consistently explains why, without in any way downplaying the difficulties of the task, a successful struggle has to adopt the strategic aim of splitting Israeli workers away from its ruling class. 

Our approach is summarised in the introduction by Judy Beishon in a way that mirrors, although in a very different context, Lenin’s recognition of the need to win workers to the idea of a socialist federation, instead of forcing them into it against their will. Judy writes: “The Israeli state is an oppressor state and the Palestinians are brutally oppressed, but in the situation of today’s national consciousness, a political programme is needed that wouldn’t compel workers on either side to be part of a shared state. Whatever the state forms and boundaries, they will need to be entered into on a fully voluntary basis”.

Ireland

Similarly, the CWI has also held a largely unique position on the Left on how to resolve the sectarian legacy created by the partition of Ireland by British imperialism in 1921. Peter Taaffe made a major contribution to developing a programme that consistently emphasised the need to build working-class unity of Catholic and Protestant workers in a common struggle for a socialist solution to the national question, as well as to class oppression. 

Four of the five articles on Ireland in the book date from the 1970s, when Peter wrote extensively on Ireland, while working to build support for Marxist ideas there. Peter describes how he first visited Derry in 1969, where the Young Socialists were able to put forward arguments for workers’ unity from behind the barricades, and how the supporters of the CWI continued to patiently explain their analysis throughout the years of the ‘Troubles’.

Whilst exact demands always have to reflect concrete circumstances, the core analysis and programme developed by Peter Taaffe and the CWI in Ireland at that time remains valid today.

Black Nationalism

Another section of the book contains two articles by Peter Taaffe written at the start of the 1970s on the Black Panther Party, a movement whose growing strength had alarmed the United States ruling class, who had responded with vicious repression. They explain how the movement, organising in working class urban Black communities against the twin problems of grinding poverty and systematic harassment, was grasping towards a socialist solution.  

Unfortunately, the Panthers failed to recognise the need to build a mass movement of the working class as a whole, especially through the trade unions, as argued for by Peter at the time. Since then, the US ruling class has attempted to promote a new Black middle class, to create a more stable base for its rule. However, as Hugo Pierre explains in his introduction, poverty conditions remain for the majority and: “the declining position of US capitalism will produce new class battles in which these Black workers and youth will play a critical role.”

A Treasure Trove

Just as Philip Stott’s introduction concludes, “Peter Taaffe's immense contribution to defending and advancing Marxist theory and practice on the national question deserves to be studied by the new generation. It is indeed a treasure trove, embedded with sensitivity, flexibility and political clarity that deserves its place alongside the great Marxists who have dealt with this vital question”. 

This book will help that new generation – and the not so new as well – in the task of applying the Marxist approach to the National Question to the struggle for socialism today. It will be officially launched at the ‘Socialism 2026’ event hosted by the Socialist Party in London this November.

Fight for our Futures, Not their Wars

The November 20 Europe-wide International Youth Strike has been called at a time when, for many people – young and old – there is growing anger at governments that are cutting our services while they boost funding on war – and who will willingly send thousands off to their deaths in wars to be fought for their interests – not for ours.

November 20^th was also agreed as the date for the walkouts by the 20 different youth organisations involved – at the suggestion of Socialist Students – because it coincides with the last day of the next round of COP talks – where the global politicians will get together to let off yet more hot air, instead of agreeing on the decisive action needed to stop a climate crisis whose dire effects are now becoming starkly obvious, even in countries that thought it was just somebody else’s problem.

As socialists, we understand that all those issues – war, cuts and climate crisis – are an inevitable result of a capitalist system in terminal decline where, in order to protect their profits, the super-rich want to steal away everything that the working class organised to win from them in the past – like council homes, free education, the NHS and, now latest in their crosshairs, disability benefits.

The capitalist classes of the world act in the interest of their own individual nation states, so they won’t enact the global plan needed to tackle climate change. Instead, they just look to short-term profit, competing with other nations to get a bigger share of the pie. That doesn’t stop at just tariffs and trade wars, now it will increasingly mean actual wars – if not yet nuclear world war - as even they realise that will be the end even for them - but certainly the kind of regional conflicts we already see, and there will be more to come.

Starmer’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review spelt out how, in the view of the military tops, the UK could no longer plan for only having to fight distant overseas conflicts against ‘non-state’ forces – like the Taliban in Afghanistan - but that direct “state-on-state war” was back on the agenda. The war between Russia and Ukraine was, not without justification,  identified as a turning-point pointing the way for the wars to come. The so-called post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ when, after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe, military spending fell, is well and truly over.

That’s the background to why the recent NATO summit agreed to commit its members to boosting military-related spending to 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035 – 3.5% on ‘hard defence’ and another 1.5% on top on military-related infrastructure and ‘civil preparedness’. And Burnham’s government is fully behind that target. In fact, his new Chancellor, John Healey, was one of those that put the final knives into Starmer, resigning as his Defence Secretary, complaining that Starmer’s defence investment plan didn’t go far enough. Now Healey will be preparing for an October Budget that will increase military spending, while making cuts elsewhere.

Even to meet Starmer’s original defence investment plan means finding £6.8 billion from unidentified cuts to other departments’ previously agreed capital budgets and another entirely unfunded £4.7 billion on top. To raise military spending to the full 3.5% of GDP would mean an extra £25 billion a year. Reaching the 5% target would produce a ‘security budget’ of £151 billion in today’s values, bigger for example than the combined government budgets for housing and education from pre-school to university.

How do we stop this drive towards war? Well, working-class struggle can limit what the capitalists are able to get away with. The memories of Vietnam still weigh on even a President like Trump in pulling back from sending ‘boots on the ground’ into Iran. In 2025, Italian dockers took strike action against the Gaza genocide. The Youth Strike is an initial step towards building mass opposition here.

But, in building that movement, whatever the horrors of war, we don’t make just a pacifist appeal for ‘peace’. We understand that war is an inevitable consequence of capitalism and that only a movement that aims at a complete change of system, to win a democratic world socialist planned economy that takes control of society out of the capitalists’ hands across the globe, can really end the threat of war.

But we also recognise that there will be many workers – including even some of the youth we come across at the schools and colleges – who will be swayed by the growing pro-war propaganda that Britain needs to defend itself, with Putin’s Russia being held up as the main threat. Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Putin hasn’t even been able to defeat Ukraine, let alone go further, say into the Baltic States. The war, and the failure of his initial supposedly speedy invasion plans – when the first Russian divisions had dress uniforms packed in their bags ready for their victory parades in Kyiv – has exposed Russia’s weakness, not its strength.

However, that war continues ever on, adding to workers’ fears, ones that are certainly being played on in countries nearer Russia, like Germany, where the government is looking to reintroduce military conscription. That is not yet on the cards here – at least not for the army, perhaps only as unpaid labour for the likes of Sainsburys! Those rising fears also explain the turnaround in public opinion in Finland from opposing NATO membership to overwhelmingly supporting it.

But the UK defence plans require building personnel numbers back up again – there’s now only 74,000 in the British army. Hence, the army recruitment videos and the moves to boost cadets in schools – as well as the “Defence Universities Alliance” being developed to strengthen links between universities and the arms companies.

There will be a mixed consciousness amongst workers we meet, one where we will have to be sensitive to people’s fears. Genuine socialists have always had to do so, especially of course at the start of an actual war, when the general mood will understandably be to fight against an invader. That was the mood of the Ukrainian workers that Putin underestimated when he first sent in his tanks.

Lenin’s position in World War One has often been caricatured as being just one of ‘defeatism’ – using his 1915 quote that “during a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government” – and that military defeats eventually lead to revolutionary upheavals (which did indeed prove to be the case). But this was Lenin bending the stick in speaking to his own Party members, to cut across the tide of wartime patriotism that had already seen Europe’s various socialist parties line up with their own imperialist governments.

In speaking to the wider working class, Lenin took a different approach, one that stressed that, in order to really fight for their freedom, workers needed to fight the capitalists too. And those capitalists couldn’t be trusted to fight the war, they were too busy making profits while sending soldiers to die in the trenches. But if the banks, industry and arms companies were nationalised under workers’ control, then not only would workers be in a better position to defend Russia, they would also be defending a Russia that they owned and controlled - a workers’ state not a bosses’ one – from which they could appeal to the workers of other countries to do the same, and agree a genuine peace.

In Britain in World War Two, the supporters of Trotsky’s Left Opposition in the Workers International League – who played an important role not publicised in our school history books (!) – like campaigning for London Underground stations to be opened as bomb shelters – argued in the same way, that you couldn’t trust a reactionary Tory like Churchill to defeat Hitler and that what was needed was:

·      the arming and organising of the workers under their own control;

·      the election of officers by the workers;

·      control of production by the workers to end the chaos in the war industries;

·      the immediate nationalisation of the armament industry, mines, banks, railways, and big industry;

·      the granting of freedom and self-determination to India and the colonies and a Socialist appeal to the workers of Germany and Europe.

When we were in the leadership of the LPYS in the 1980s, we made similar demands, pointing out that the Tories had been supplying the Argentine dictatorship with arms only 10 days before the Falklands conflict, and calling for trade union rights for servicemen and women; the abolition of Courts Martial; the right to refuse to be used to break strikes; and to leave on contractual notice when you want to – like any other worker.

These are demands that might again be important ones to raise when a layer of young workers are conscripted to the army – not militarily but through having no other job prospects – particularly when, as in the past, they will be called upon to put down the strikes and unrest which will break out in working class communities. And, of course, there will also be workers in the arms industry themselves where the demand to protect jobs through a transition to other skilled work – not least in climate jobs – has to be linked to a demand for workers’ control and nationalisation.

That’s the background to the tumultuous period we are entering – and the November 20 ‘Fight For Our Futures, Not Their Wars’ walkout can be a step in building the forces needed to help fight for such a programme.

See also: 

Resisting the new militarism plans from the latest 'Socialism Today' magazine

and the Socialist Students website.

'Net zero’ is a trade union issue

In Britain and beyond, the summer of 2026 has been marked by record temperatures, deadly wildfires and drought, the inevitable consequences of climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels.

The UK Met Office reported that “daytime maximum temperatures across England and Wales are now roughly 3-4°C hotter than they would have been without human-induced climate change”, adding that “more than 2,700 people are thought to have died from heat-related causes during the May and June heatwaves in England and Wales”.Those figures will have been added to further by the ongoing high temperatures in July and August.

Not surprisingly, the latest IPSOS survey taken in the UK at the start of August found that three quarters of those polled expressed concern about climate change “with the majority of the population reporting personal daily disruption and anticipating recurring extreme weather events”.

Economists are warning of the effect on crop yields across Europe, adding further impetus to rising global food prices. More widely, continual global warming is a growing factor in the forced migration of millions of the world’s poor away from regions where their lives have become unsustainable.

Against this background, alongside the dwindling of North Sea oil and gas reserves, it has dawned on wide sections of the British capitalist class that a change of energy and climate policy is needed. In 2019, the then Conservative prime minister Theresa May first committed the UK to achieving a ‘net zero’ contribution to climate change by 2050. However, five prime ministers later, only limited steps have been taken to achieve this aim, despite even this target being insufficiently urgent given the scale of the global climate crisis.

In this context, the comments made by the leaders of two of Britain’s biggest trade unions, the GMB and Unite, back in June, could seem at odds with growing public concerns about climate change. They both spoke out against the possible appointment of Ed Miliband as chancellor in the new Andy Burnham government, suggesting he was too entrenched in his support for ‘net-zero’.

Gary Smith, GMB general secretary, took particular aim at how Miliband, as Energy Secretary in the Starmer government, had imposed at least a temporary ban on new drilling licences for gas and oil under the North Sea. Smith blamed Labour’s energy policy as being one of the reasons why some of his members were voting for Reform, claiming that “sacking thousands of workers who currently work in the North Sea is economic madness. It’s more akin to Thatcher and what she did to Middlesbrough in the 1980s”.

Sharon Graham, newly re-elected general secretary of Unite, told the Observer newspaper that Miliband “would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs”, adding that “if you’ve got somebody in there close to the decision-making where they’re not pro-worker in their gut, then that’s a problem for a party that’s supposed to be the party of workers. A lot of the left has now become a middle-class project. It now needs to work for the working class”.

In making those comments, both union leaders risk aligning themselves with the pro-fossil fuel sections of big business, including Tony Blair, who have been lobbying for the Burnham government to lift the North Sea drilling moratorium. Their argument, that a drilling ban just means relying on more expensive gas and oil imports instead, is being heavily promoted in sections of the media.

But, as well as just further delaying the urgent action needed on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, in a world market where prices are set globally, allowing the fossil fuel giants to keep drilling under the North Sea will do nothing to bring down workers’ energy bills (see Socialism Today No.299, July-August 2026).

It would temporarily retain some limited employment in the North Sea industries, but these jobs will inevitably continue to decline since the main gas and oil reserves have long since been exhausted. However, millions of well-paid, secure and vitally necessary jobs could be created by mass investment in green energy, transport, insulation and associated manufacturing sectors. That is the investment that trade union leaders should be calling for, and mobilising their members to demand.

It is also wrong to give any credence to the idea that taking action on global warming is somehow being ‘middle-class’ or ‘anti-worker’. It is the working class and poor who will continue to suffer worst from the dire effects of climate crisis. The costs of food inflation will soon be hitting the pockets of union members, to follow the months of summer heat.

It is true that too many environmental campaigners look to individual consumption as being the cause of the crisis. Such an approach puts the blame on working-class consumers who are simply struggling to get themselves to work in their polluting second-hand cars or to heat their poorly insulated homes, despite rising fuel bills.

Instead, the key to action on climate change is winning a change in who owns and controls production. It requires an end to private capitalist ownership governed by short-term profit and the limits of individual nation states, and its replacement by public ownership under democratic workers’ control that would allow a socialist planned global economy where investment could be directed to the millions of ‘climate jobs’ that are so urgently needed.

Trade unionists and socialists shouldn’t be seen to be supporting any of the competing wings of the capitalist class, neither the pro-‘Big Oil’ right populists playing on workers’ fears – like Trump and Farage – nor the supposedly ‘green’ capitalists represented by politicians such as Miliband.

After all, Miliband may have overseen an increase in contracts being issued for renewable energy projects, but only after the Starmer government had halved its initial ‘green investment’ plans. This included slashing plans for a major home insulation scheme which could have directly benefited many working-class families, and the workers implementing the scheme.

Ailing British capitalism, and crisis-ridden world capitalism as a whole, will never be able to provide the planned investment required to repair the catastrophic climate damage that its anarchic production has produced.

In that sense, Sharon Graham was right to criticise Miliband for wanting “to let go of one rope before we get hold of another… Ed only seems to be interested in one part of the equation, which is to reach the target, but doesn’t seem to be interested at all, in any way shape or form, in the jobs that will replace those that go”.

But it would be a mistake to raise any expectations that somehow Burnham will be different and that there is any prospect of a Burnham government being any more ‘pro-worker’ than Starmer’s was. As another pro-capitalist politician, Burnham will end up attacking jobs, pay and conditions at the behest of British big business.

The only way to promote both vital needs – protecting working-class living standards at the same time as protecting the environment – is for trade union leaders to break with all of the pro-capitalist politicians and help ensure that the working class has its own political voice, and can elect workers’ representatives who will demand the socialist plan of production that our future depends upon.

Martin Powell-Davies

Published in 'Socialism Today' Issue 300 September 2026

Also see the accompanying article: https://socialismtoday.org/global-warning-the-environmental-record-of-greens-in-power

The Collapse of Stalinism - Its Causes and Consequences

‘The Collapse of Stalinism – its Causes and Consequences’ is the latest book to be published by Mentmore Press. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the dictatorial, bureaucratic Stalinist regimes of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe foundered, allowing capitalism to be restored. It also explains how that collapse fuelled a global ideological offensive against the ideas of socialism, one that still weighs heavily on working class consciousness and organisation today.

At the time, capitalist journalists, politicians and academics gleefully proclaimed that socialism had been beaten once and for all. The American writer, Frances Fukuyama, declared that it marked “the end of history … the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

However, in today’s unstable world, that capitalist triumphalism has been replaced by pessimism for the future of their system. The task for the world’s working-class is to rebuild the mass parties needed to organise a united struggle for a socialist world. It also requires learning from the horrors of Stalinism, to ensure that capitalism is replaced by genuinely democratic planned economies, this time freed from top-down bureaucratic control.

Stalinism, the negation of Bolshevism

This book is written to help workers learn those lessons. Like last year’s well-received publication ‘Great Revolutionaries’, it brings together a collection of articles by Peter Taaffe, the former general secretary of the Socialist Party. They are presented in three sections, tracing the rise and fall of the Stalinist regimes, before analysing the ‘post-Stalinist’ world of today.

The book’s first section, ‘Stalinism, the negation of Bolshevism’, exposes the brutal character of these dictatorial, bureaucratic regimes. They had nothing in common with the workers’ democracy being built after the victory of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Sadly, in the absence of successful socialist revolutions taking place in more economically developed countries, the Russian workers’ state was left isolated. It was left to try and develop a socialist plan with an already weak economy, one then further weakened by civil war, as imperialism sought to strangle the revolution at birth.

The book outlines how civil war stretched the economy and the Red Army to its limits. It also severely undermined the fledgling Soviet democracy too. With many of its worker delegates killed on the front lines, the soviets – or workers’ councils - were no longer able to keep the officials and bureaucrats in charge of state administration sufficiently in check.

Growing in confidence, the bureaucracy then manoeuvred to ensure the Communist Party met their needs, not those of the workers and poor peasants. In Stalin, they found a leader that would deliver for them.

The book includes reviews of the memoirs of Leopold Trepper and Petro Grigorenko, who both became opponents of the regime. They chillingly spell out how the bureaucracy were so fearful of the working class moving to overthrow them, that anyone suspected of providing even the mildest opposition was brutally suppressed.

Trepper’s memoirs confirm that the remaining genuine revolutionaries, the supporters of Leon Trotsky in the ‘Left Opposition’, “fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did”. But, Trepper adds, “they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism.”

The Revolution Betrayed

The book summarises Trotsky’s analysis of the rise of the bureaucracy, stressing that Stalinism was only able to consolidate its power by purging all traces of genuine Bolshevism. 

In 1936, in ‘Revolution Betrayed’, Trotsky described how “two opposite tendencies are growing up out of the depth of the Soviet regime. To the extent that, in contrast to a decaying capitalism, it develops the productive forces, it is preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration”.

The hopes of socialists basing themselves on Trotsky’s analysis was always that it would be the progressive tendency, towards socialism, that would prove dominant. Indeed, while the productive forces within the Stalinist states still appeared to be growing, it was not just with hope, but with a degree of expectation, that Marxists predicted that the working-class would push aside the parasitic bureaucrats and carry out a political revolution.

Indeed, as the book describes, the workers’ revolt that shook the foundations of the Stalinist regimes in 1989 started by raising demands for democratic reform, not capitalist restoration. That had also been the case in earlier struggles, such as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and those raised at the height of the ‘Solidarity’ movement in Poland in 1980.

However, not least because of Stalin’s mass purges, the forces that could have provided these movements with the necessary revolutionary leadership had been wiped out. As Peter puts it, “the collective memory of the masses and their ability to gather themselves together to challenge the Stalinist regime in a conscious way was eliminated”.

By the 1980s, bureaucratic misrule had brought economic growth in the Stalinist states to a complete standstill. In comparison, the capitalist economies ‘over the wall’, then going through a temporary economic upswing, appeared to a growing layer of workers to offer a better chance of prosperity and freedom of expression. In these circumstances, the opposite tendency identified by Trotsky, towards capitalist restoration, grew ever stronger.

Why did Stalinism collapse?

The articles in the second section, ‘Why did Stalinism collapse?’, describe the growing crisis within the Stalinist regimes and how Mikhail Gorbachev stumbled around to try and find a way of preventing an uprising from below. 

Right up until the 1960s, despite the overheads of bureaucratic mismanagement, the advantages of a planned economy meant that the Soviet Union experienced economic growth that easily outstripped world capitalism.

The main ‘Achilles heel’ of the Stalinist economies was quality. Without workers and consumers being able to influence production through workers’ democracy, substandard goods were churned out. Thanks to the bungling, corruption and bad planning inherent in the undemocratic top-down system of economic management, there was also huge wastage and massive uncontrolled environmental degradation.

Such ‘commandism’ could achieve some success when the main task was to develop an initial industrial infrastructure, but it was impossible to plan and set the prices of thousands of commodities from on high in a more developed economy.

Genuine socialist planning requires genuine workers’ democracy. As Peter explains, “That would mean workers’ control in the factories and workers’ management at national, regional and local levels. This would harness all the talents, ideas and views for the future development of society by the producers, consumers, and by society as a whole.” He adds a telling warning that a top-down approach, borrowed from Stalinism, risked undermining workers’ support for the Chávez government in Venezuela.

The articles also show how, as events developed, Peter, alongside the majority of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), recognised that, rather than events leading to a political revolution to restore a democratically planned socialist economy, there was an increasing danger of capitalist restoration.

For many workers, comparing their lives with what could be glimpsed through the shop windows of the West after the fall of the ‘Berlin Wall’, the attractions of capitalism appeared to be overwhelming. It led to a social counter-revolution with the liquidation of what remained of the planned economies of Russia and Eastern Europe.

The consequences of Stalinism’s collapse

The third section of the book, ‘The consequences of Stalinism’s collapse’, discusses the consequences of this return to capitalism.

For the working class of Russia, what followed was not the improvements that they had hoped for, but an unprecedented economic collapse. Peter’s book explains the ‘gangster capitalism’ that emerged as Putin and other members of the former regime fought with each other for control of the nation’s wealth and natural resources.

The working class internationally also paid a heavy price. The collapse of the planned economies dealt a heavy blow to the idea that society could ever be organised in a different way to capitalism.

Some former ‘lefts’, such as Paul Mason, concluded that Stalinism’s collapse meant the end of any prospect of socialism. One of the articles in the book answers Mason, noting that, yes, the immediate effect had been to strengthen world capitalism, providing new markets and a source of cheap skilled labour. But, as Peter writes, “reality always has two sides. The other side of this development was the enormously increased potential power of the working class, which has already been glimpsed but will be shown dramatically in the mass upheavals to come”.

As is increasingly obvious today, the collapse of Stalinism in no way resolved the crisis facing global capitalism. Nor did workers suffer the kind of crushing defeat inflicted by fascism in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the ideological effects of the collapse of Stalinism still need to be overcome.

The book explains how it led to the wholesale political collapse of the leaders of the workers’ organisations. They abandoned socialism - even as a historic aim - and fully embraced capitalist ideas. Internationally, former workers’ parties imploded into openly pro-capitalist formations. In Britain, that took the form of Blair’s ‘New Labour’.

In the trade unions too, most leaderships sought to accommodate themselves to the system, adopting ‘social partnership’ with the employers, to the detriment of their members. This timidity from the union leaders, together with the abandonment of the historic aim of socialism by the leaders of the workers’ organisations, enormously bolstered the confidence and the power of the capitalists. It allowed them to restrict the share of the world’s wealth going to the working class back to levels not seen since before the first world war.

Peter points out that “It is true, as Lenin argued, that the Labour Party through its pro-capitalist leadership has always been a ‘bourgeois’ party … However, Lenin also emphasised that … through its trade union base in particular, it was also a working-class party. … In office it was subject to the pressure of the unions and therefore could potentially endanger the interests of capitalism”.  He gives the examples of the unions refusing to allow Ramsay MacDonald to impose ‘austerity’ under the 1931 Labour Government and, similarly, preventing Harold Wilson’s 1969 government from introducing the ‘In Place of Strife’ anti-trade union legislation.

Mass workers’ parties bring workers together to build struggles and reach conclusions together. Their absence has made it harder for working-class consciousness to catch up with the severity of today’s capitalist crisis, let alone to understand the need to overthrow it. The kind of mass socialist and communist parties that existed in the 1930s, at least formally standing in opposition to capitalism, do not exist at the present time.

That’s why in the articles in this book, and in the pages of ‘the Socialist’, we have consistently stressed the importance of rebuilding mass workers’ parties, and for them to include a firm Marxist current too. Such a core is vital to provide the theoretical clarity needed to stand up to right-wing leaderships and to oppose the damaging influence that supporters of capitalism will seek to introduce into them.

Peter concludes the introductory article to the book by saying: “As the most optimistic but also the most realistic trend within the labour movement, we recognised what had occurred was a significant setback for the workers’ movement. But we were not thrown off balance. The collapse of Stalinism did not eliminate the inherent contradictions of capitalism … But the very weakness of the labour movement encouraged the confidence, indeed the overweening arrogance of the ruling class, which overreached itself in the bubble economies of the last two decades. …

“1989 did not bury socialism or Marxism. It temporarily blurred the vision of the working class, which is now being cleared through the present crisis and the incapacity of this system to solve even the basic requirements of the mass of the peoples of the planet”.

This book can hopefully play a role in helping to clear that fog.

Great Revolutionaries - socialist ideas for a new generation

Great Revolutionaries by Peter Taaffe

Published by Mentmore Press, 2025, £9.99

Here's my review from this month's edition of Socialism Today:

A search through the back issues of Socialism Today will quickly reveal a huge range of articles written by Peter Taaffe, the former general secretary of the Socialist Party.  

Peter’s writing, over many decades, helped provide theoretical clarity at a time when others were disorientated by the long post-war upswing of capitalism, and again after the collapse of Stalinism. Peter was also adept at explaining revolutionary theory in a way that young workers, new to the ideas of Marxism, could understand.

However, as someone who really understood the ideas of Marx, he also knew that it is never enough for philosophers simply to ‘interpret’ the world, the point is to change it. That’s why Peter always sought to explain how the ideas of Marxism can be applied to today’s world – in order to change it for the better.
Peter sadly died, after a long illness, in April this year. However, his articles and books leave behind an invaluable legacy. That is why Mentmore Press is working on a series of books which will bring together selections of Peter’s writings, beginning with a first collection entitled ‘Great Revolutionaries’, to be released this autumn.

This first book, a compilation of twelve different articles, provides an introduction to the ideas of six great revolutionaries, and explains how they sought to apply them in action. They are: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of ‘scientific socialism’; Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution; and Gracchus Babeuf and Rosa Luxemburg, revolutionaries, like Trotsky, killed for their socialist beliefs.

Marx and Engels developed their ideas by studying the ideas and struggles of previous generations. That included the ideas of the first ‘utopian’ socialists, such as the heroic French revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf, the ‘father of communism’, featured in the first chapter of this book.

The following chapters, on Marx and Engels, explain how they developed the ideas of ‘scientific socialism’, founded on the materialist philosophy that it is ‘conditions that determine consciousness’, and not the other way around.

Their recognition that history has been driven by class struggle, and their exposition of the driving forces and inner contradictions of a capitalist economy, led them to conclude that the organised working class would be capitalism’s ‘gravediggers’. That’s why they also wrote at length on workers’ strikes and on the role of trade unions, an aspect of their writings usually ignored by supposedly ‘Marxist’ academics but summarised in a chapter of this book.

Knowing that any permanent gains could only be won by the working class through socialist change, they also fought for workers to build their own independent mass parties. Marx was instrumental in the construction of the International Workingmen’s Association, the ‘First International’. Again, this revolutionary activity is explained in Peter’s articles.

The chapters on Lenin, Trotsky and the 1917 Russian revolution provide an answer to the many lies and distortions that bourgeois writers and historians have written – and continue to write – to try and conceal the genuine ideas of Marxism from a new generation of socialists, ideas that can arm the working class to clear away their rotting system of capitalism.

Peter sets out Lenin’s ideas on the necessity of building firmly organised but highly democratic revolutionary parties, as well as Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’, still vital in a world where millions of lives remain blighted by landlordism and national oppression. The articles also set out the reasons why Stalinism arose from the isolation of the Russian revolution and the devastation of its already weak economy following the civil war that had threatened to strangle the revolution at birth.

The book also sets out the revolutionary legacy of the heroic Rosa Luxemburg, brutally murdered after the defeat of the January 1919 uprising in Berlin. In this, and other chapters, Peter outlines not just the mass struggles that took place in Germany at that time but also other twentieth century revolutionary events that provide important lessons for today, such as those in Spain, China and Cuba.
A book of this nature can inevitably only be an introduction to the lives and legacy of these great revolutionaries, and to the ideas of Marxism. To help those who want to find out more, detailed endnotes have been added to further explain some of the events and terms referred to by Peter, and also to provide references to the sources of many of the quotations, so that readers can further explore these original works if they so wish.

Peter’s articles show how Marxism, correctly applied, not by rote but as a method of analysis, helps to provide a political compass. For example, in the article on The Communist Manifesto, written in 1998 when it seemed that ‘globalisation’ of the world economy was able to transcend national boundaries, he pointed out, tellingly, that “a serious recession or slump would inevitably result in the introduction of protectionist measures by the different national capitalists, probably on a regional basis through the different blocs”.

Nowhere in the book does Peter present a picture of these great revolutionaries as being infallible leaders ‘deified’ in the sorry traditions of Stalinism. Instead, he explains that “all parties and leaders make mistakes, but the essence of the matter is to learn from them”. Throughout the book, mistakes that may have been made – over timescales, over theory, over organisation – are pointed out, to be evaluated and learned from today.

Some of those mistakes are ones that have direct relevance today. For example, Peter discusses why some of the new left parties that rose in the wake of the 2007-08 ‘Great Recession’, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, also quickly lost support as well. In the chapter on Trotsky’s Life and Legacy, Peter warns about how Podemos was undermined by the top-down methods of its leadership who “deny the right for different trends of opinion to openly and democratically get together, formulate alternative ideas, aspects of the programme, and if necessary, to fight for these ideas within the structures of common organisations”.

Of course, there’s a risk in publishing a book on ‘great revolutionaries’ of giving the false impression that revolutions are made, not by the action of the masses, but through the individual ‘genius’ of charismatic leaders. Not at all. As Trotsky wrote in the preface to his History of the Russian Revolution: “The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny”.

Nevertheless, as discussed in the chapter on Leon Trotsky’s relevance today, revolutionary parties, and their leading cadres, are a vital – and necessary – component in a successful revolutionary struggle. As Trotsky puts it bluntly: “If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October revolution”.  However, Lenin and Trotsky weren’t just accidents of history, but a product of it, gaining their ideas and training through their living experience in the workers’ movement over decades.

As this book sets out, Lenin and Trotsky explained that four key conditions are needed for a revolution to succeed: a split in the ruling class; a determined working class, ready to take decisive action; the middle layers in revolt and looking towards the working class for a way out; and lastly, but in Trotsky’s words “the hardest thing of all” to have in place, a mass revolutionary party with a trained, farsighted leadership that can ensure the movement of the masses succeeds in changing society.

Just as these great revolutionaries studied the struggles of the past to help them try to build such a party in their lifetimes, today a new generation of socialists needs to do the same. The clearly explained ideas of Marxism, and the lessons of workers’ struggles, both successes and failures, that are included in this book can only assist in that process.