"In other words, the same relations of production that exist in every capitalist country underpin “capitalist-socialism with Chinese characteristics” but the surplus value (extracted in China, as everywhere else, from the exploitation of the proletarian labour force) occurs under the control of a Party that purports to be "communist"."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-01-07/a-spectre-of-capitalist-socialism-is-haunting-china

"What a difference a few years makes! The period between 2015 and 2019, despite being one of the worst for wage growth, saw some of the lowest levels of strike action in the UK since records began. The period of the Covid-19 pandemic, despite revealing how deeply the divide has grown between the ruling class and the rest of society, did not elicit a wider fightback then and there. Yet come 2022, strikes became part of everyday life."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-01-11/notes-on-the-uk-strike-wave

"Guy left us on 4 January 2023. He remained throughout his life a revolutionary militant of the working class."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-01-13/guy-sabatier-an-internationalist

"The World Cup may be over but the scandal of how it came about continues to haunt some of our rulers. The latest episode, as the article which follows highlights, is about the bribery of European MPs although the “Qatargate” label is not new. It first surfaced soon after the World Cup was awarded to Qatar in 2010. Within a short time questions were being asked about how such a bid could have succeeded."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-01-16/qatargate-after-the-world-cup-the-scandal-of-a-decadent-spectacle-goes-on

"Ramping up the anti-migrant rhetoric, Sunak has pledged legislation that goes even further to criminalise illegal entry than the recent Nationality and Borders Act. And it’s all for their own good. After all, who would risk their lives crossing the Channel when they can fly in business class if they really have a genuine asylum claim? The reality is that most asylum seekers are not in a position to apply for visas to come to the UK, say as a tourist or a student and then apply for asylum on arrival. For the majority with extremely limited means small boat crossings are the only option as most other avenues have been closed down."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-01-18/the-migration-crisis-stems-from-the-crisis-of-capitalism

"Everyone who has ears and eyes knows the NHS has been in crisis for decades. The lack of investment has left it with a growing shortage of nurses, doctors and other frontline staff. Callaghan began the cuts at the behest of the IMF in 1976, then Thatcher mothballed the beds and Blair got rid of them. Instead, we have had layer upon layer of well-paid managers imposed on a service which increasingly is forced to rely on more expensive agency staff and private health care to cope with the increasing demand of an ageing population. Now the service is crumbling, there are, at the time of writing, over a hundred thousand unfilled vacancies, many employed by the NHS are crushed by the workload and poorly rewarded, hence the current crop of strikes."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-01-24/our-lives-are-not-safe-in-their-hands

"There is no point pretending that the prospect for 2023 is anything other than dismal. Inflation has come back to haunt capitalism and wage workers throughout the world are facing sharp cuts in their standard of living, if not outright penury. As the economic options for capital in general are narrowing, the politicians’ room for manoeuvre is also becoming more limited."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-01-27/the-outlook-for-2023

"The survival of capitalism in the imperialist phase brings its own logic. Moscow, for instance, is driven towards pursuing the establishment of parity between the rouble and gold in an attempt to recover the value of the rouble and thus re-establish a more favourable exchange rate with the dollar. The prospect of a monetary system made up of currencies based on states that produce and control strategic raw materials (such as Russia and China), payable no longer in dollars but in roubles and yuan, is a bit worrying for some. At stake is command (partial or possibly total) over the entire world, provided that the crisis does not overwhelm both."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-01-31/are-they-going-back-to-gold-to-preserve-money-and-the-rouble

"The first meeting of the committee took place in December. 30-35 internationalists met and were able to discuss the drive towards generalised war and our possible responses. The meeting was split into two parts. The first dealt with the international situation, and the second asked what the committee could do about the war."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-02/report-on-nwbcw-paris

"Behind the figures, the implications for daily life are arduous. The health service and the railways are at breaking point. In both cases the pay freeze of the last ten years has produced a massive shortage of nurses (tens of thousands), doctors and train drivers. There are huge shortages of workers in social care and the “hospitality” sectors. Previous shortages were covered to some extent by EU workers but with Brexit many of them have left. Add to this the corruption of billions of pounds’ worth of contracts awarded to government supporters for PPE that never worked or arrived, and the financial meltdown which we have just described, we can see that the economic situation has been made worse by incompetence."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-05/cost-of-living-the-other-war-on-workers

"The UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, set the tone of the conference by announcing “humanity is heading for collective suicide.” This apocalyptic warning, plus the GAP report, were intended to galvanise the COP into decisive action. Did it work? Even asking this question verges on the ridiculous. All previous COPs have failed to deliver any reduction of emissions and this one, far from being “the conference of implementation”, followed the same well beaten path."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-08/capitalism-takes-one-more-step-towards-our-extinction

"Inequality, the rising fortunes of a numerically insignificant elite, the advance in pauperisation, are symptoms of the disease. The disease itself is capitalism. The symptoms cannot be tackled without eliminating the disease. This is what we as serious Marxists propose. Not asking the state to tax the rich, whose control of the political structures of society means such measures will always fall short of the objective of halting the concentration of wealth in the hands of a minority, which is an essential aspect of the capitalist process, but the revolutionary abolition of class society."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-10/inequality-is-a-symptom-capitalism-is-the-disease-revolution-is-the-cure

"The working class is the only force that can stop the war — by ending capitalism, which is the driver of war in the modern world. But at the moment the working class is weak and divided. In much of the world it is — happily or unhappily — tied to the nation, and hardly aware of itself as an international class that has the historic mission to overthrow capitalism and create a worldwide socialist society. In this new situation, revolutionary groups (and ostensibly revolutionary groups) have been casting around trying to understand what is happening, and finding parallels in the history of the workers’ movement."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-13/the-war-in-ukraine-the-working-class-and-the-future-international

"Some might point out that the movement of the continental plates, at the origin of the earthquake, cannot be stopped, which is true, indeed, banal, but, if we cannot completely avoid the consequences of geological movements on people, we can at least also significantly mitigate them. In fact, people live in certain socio-economic and political contexts, and it is these, in the final analysis, which influence, not to say determine, the number of victims and the extent of destruction. The social formations in which "man" lives today are those designed by capitalism, in which the only thing that matters is the accumulation of money, of profit extorted with the exploitation of wage labour, and its metamorphosis into interest and land rent."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-19/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-natural-disaster-in-a-capitalist-world

Today marks 175 years since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. For this occasion, we share here an article written 25 years ago for what was then the 150th anniversary.

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/1996-03-01/is-the-communist-manifesto-still-relevant-today

"The period between the 1830s and the 1880s saw the working class arrive on the historical stage as a class-for-itself properly speaking. This was the era when workers began to successfully form the first political parties and trade unions; this is when the First International was founded in an attempt to unite the political and the economic struggles of the working class. On the other hand, the period between the 1890s and the 1920s, when syndicalism emerged, coincided with the transition towards the imperialist phase of capitalism. This was no accident – the increasing centralisation of capital demanded the increasing centralisation of labour. Syndicalism was inherently associated with the historical process of the centralisation of local trade unions and workers’ societies into federations on the national level."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-23/syndicalism-then-and-now

"One year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine nothing has happened to in any way change our view that this is more than a war over Ukraine. It is the next step in the growing imperialist rivalry for economic control of the resources of the planet which capitalist production has so degraded over the last two centuries. It is a real step towards generalised warfare to add to the myriad of conflicts which have already created 100 million refugees across the world."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-24/one-year-since-the-invasion-of-ukraine-on-the-road-to-world-war-three

"As explained in our previous issue, we have decided to re-issue a serialised and updated version of an article which appeared almost 50 years ago in only the second edition of the first series of Revolutionary Perspectives, when the group that was to become the CWO was setting out its Marxist political analysis. Apart from some additional commentary, mainly to address concerns by contemporary readers, most of the additions are in fact re-insertions of material from the original draft which had at the time been omitted to save space."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-28/capitalism-s-economic-foundations-part-ii

"Only by recognising that capitalist society offers them nothing but increasing exploitation and ruinous conditions of life on behalf of a parasitic class can workers direct their efforts to destroy this murderous system and build a new one in which they alone plan production for their collective needs and not individual profit. However, the current union framework offers no such perspective. By agitating nearly exclusively for wage increases and splintering the class amongst each industry and sector, allowing themselves to be constrained by anti-strike legislation, and making bureaucratic manoeuvres behind their members’ backs, they prevent the workers from becoming a genuinely revolutionary class for itself and discovering the necessary political forms it needs to fight back in this intensifying class war."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-03/unite-the-strikes

"This year, we repeat the fundamental message that the ‘liberation’ of women in general, and working-class women in particular, can only come about with the end of capitalism. It is only through the destruction of this rotten system that the working class as a whole will be able to establish a genuine human community that can allow everyone to be free."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-08/international-working-women-s-day-against-all-oppression-and-exploitation

"On 14 February 2023, the "Charter of Minimum Demands of Independent Union and Civil Organisations of Iran" translated below was published with the signatures of 20 organisations and institutions. We don't know much about the background and history of how this Charter has come about, but we have previously reported on the struggles of three of the signatories – Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Workers’ Syndicate, the Council for Organising Protests by Oil Contract Workers and the Coordinating Council of Trade Union Organisations of Iranian Teachers – and published some of their statements."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-06/iranian-workers-need-an-internationalist-class-programme