Latest news with #Marxism2025
The National
11-07-2025
- Politics
- The National
Why I plan to join Scotland's new radical left party
It promises to lead – in Scotland, as well as in England and Wales – to the creation of a serious, credible left alternative to the increasingly right-wing Starmer-led Labour Government at Westminster. I was in the audience last Saturday when – due to the sheer numbers cramming into the Protein Studios venue in London – Corbyn spoke to not one, but two packed rallies at the Marxism 2025 festival. The former Labour leader told assembled activists that real social change has always come from outside Parliament. He pledged to 'build an independent political voice' for the left. READ MORE: Inquiry held up as SNP change policy on protected Highlands beach Corbyn was joined on the platform by: Andrew Feinstein (a former ANC MP in South Africa); Birmingham activist Salma Yaqoob; and Michael Lavalette, a Scottish socialist who sits as a left independent on Lancashire County Council. Feinstein – who came second in Keir Starmer's Holborn and St Pancras seat last year, gaining a very creditable 18.9% of the vote – described the current Westminster government as 'the most mendacious, warmongering, benefits-snatching' Labour Government there has ever been. Lavalette warned of the pressure those on the left face to become part of the establishment at parliamentary or, even, council level. Every elected member of the new party should, he said, 'be a megaphone for the communities they represent. They should be there to uplift and deepen the movement of resistance on the streets, the trade union movement and the needs of abandoned communities'. All of which promises a new campaigning and electoral force that stands in the starkest contrast to the Labour Party. Under Starmer, Labour have quickly become an obscene Orwellian subversion of what a party of the supposed centre-left is supposed to be. From aiding and abetting the Israeli genocide in Gaza to Starmer's nauseating sycophancy towards Donald Trump, the UK Government is as far from an ethical foreign policy as any previous Tory government. On the home front, we face an unprecedented assault on civil liberties (not least through the outrageous proscription of Palestine Action as a 'terrorist' organisation) and appalling attacks on migrants, disability rights and the welfare state. Little wonder, then, that the membership of the Labour Party is declining rapidly. Back in February, LabourList (which provides authoritative analysis of the Labour Party) reported that membership had dropped by some 11.4%, a slump from 348,500 to 309,000. The party was, LabourList calculated, haemorrhaging members at the rate of one every 10 minutes. The new left party will provide a natural home for those fleeing Labour. It will be the party, too, of hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people who have been dispossessed by the mainstream political parties. This is as true north of the Border as it is in England. Which is why left-wing activists throughout Scotland are preparing to launch a sister party to the new organisation. READ MORE: Fife company linked to Alexander Dennis enters administration as 81 jobs lost An open letter pledging its signatories' commitment to build a 'working-class left alternative' in Scotland has been signed by many elected representatives, activists and figures in Scottish public life. These include independent councillors Ross McKenzie (Gorgie/Sighthill, Edinburgh) and Bill Shields (Coatbridge North), the acclaimed screenwriter Paul Laverty, and human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar. Crucially, many trade union militants – including Gordon Martin of the rail workers' RMT and activists from the CWU, Unison, Unite, PCS, EIS, EIS-FELA, and UCU – are backing the new party. So, too, are well-known figures in Scotland's anti-racist movement, such as Mohammad Naveen Asif (of the Afghan Human Rights Foundation) and Zamard Zahid. These people share in common an absolute rejection of the pro-Israel, anti-migrant, pro-big business, pro-arms spending, anti-welfare agenda of the Labour Party. However, they also share a belief that Scotland needs an alternative to Labour that is much more radical than the SNP, the Greens or Alba. The SNP's abject failure to lead a rebellion against the UK establishment's blocking of a new independence referendum should not have come as a surprise. The party – which was formed in 1934 through a historic compromise between left-of-centre and Tory pro-independence forces – has never so much as broken a window in the cause of independence. John Swinney's shameful and pathetic denunciation of the pro-Palestinian Irish rap group Kneecap spoke volumes about the SNP's weak-kneed adherence to a supposedly 'moderate' politics. Likewise, their commitment to Nato, the British monarchy and an economic status quo that leaves hundreds of thousands of Scots languishing in poverty. What Scotland's working class and marginalised minorities need is a party that will stand up forcefully and unequivocally for their interests. A party, indeed, that will not make promises about what it will do for the people, but, rather, prioritise the struggles of the people themselves. That means being there on the frontline when it comes to exposing and confronting the far-right racist agenda of Reform UK. It means being at the heart of the movement against the unspeakable, genocidal horrors being committed in Gaza by the Israeli apartheid state. That includes demanding the cutting of diplomatic ties between the Scottish Government and Israel. It means building a party which supports every workers' strike and every community campaign, be it over disability rights, poverty, housing or education. And, yes, it means a new, radical left party that supports Scottish independence. I haven't met anyone who supports the formation of the new party who doesn't believe it should advocate and campaign for independence. No more trying to influence intransigent, 'moderate', 'centre-left' parties 'from within'. The people of Scotland – like their sisters and brothers in England and Wales – need a new, radical left party that will fight inside Scotland's elected chambers but, more importantly, also in our workplaces, communities and streets.
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I'll tell you what we need – Marxism
A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity. Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force. Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces. This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London, and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified. But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them. Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time. Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers. When Marx was 25, he read a book by Otto Bauer, a thinker he respected, making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism. Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer's argument is a sight for sore eyes: 'Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.' The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that. Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today's younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait. In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour, pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them. And if the problem is the weakness of the unions, or fiscal austerity, then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers. Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work. In his words: 'Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. [But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.' Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote – the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he or she owns part of the firm they work for. Last, Marx's freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in. To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc. To see them as a mutation of capital – or 'cloud capital' – that directly modifies our behaviour. To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. Only through Marx's lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I'll tell you what we need – Marxism
A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity. Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force. Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces. This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London, and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified. But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them. Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time. Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers. When Marx was 25, he read a book by Otto Bauer, a thinker he respected, making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism. Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer's argument is a sight for sore eyes: 'Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.' The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that. Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today's younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait. In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour, pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them. And if the problem is the weakness of the unions, or fiscal austerity, then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers. Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work. In his words: 'Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. [But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.' Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote – the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he or she owns part of the firm they work for. Last, Marx's freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in. To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc. To see them as a mutation of capital – or 'cloud capital' – that directly modifies our behaviour. To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. Only through Marx's lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
