Fighting global capitalism

In the US, Black Friday is the Friday following Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November). The day revolves around large discounts in shops. Black Friday sales are notorious for the levels of chaos or even violence that occur as crowds pour into the shops and scramble for the discounted goods. To take an extreme example, in 2008 a stampede of shoppers on Long Island, New York, trampled a Walmart employee to death. Although Black Friday as a long-running annual tradition is specific to the United States because of its relationship to the holiday of Thanksgiving, retailers in other...

Photos: Rocío Almuna Morales On Wednesday October 30, "Chilean students, academics and workers in Bristol" held a "Candelight gathering" in support of the general strike in Chile, on the same day. Around fifty people, mostly left-wingers of Chilean origin, gathered and chanted to show support for the strike's demands. This followed a similar sized demo a week prior. Three demands that the Bristol demo was raising of the Chilean government were: 1. Against the military on the streets, the "state of constitutional exception" (martial law) and the restriction of civil, political and social...

Socialism: where has it actually worked? Momentum and their hot new video are here to explain. You Are A Socialist Where has socialism ever worked? ? Posted by Momentum on Thursday, 9 May 2019 And where has socialism worked? Everywhere! Everywhere? Yes, that’s right everywhere! Doesn’t it seem a bit weird that socialism has worked everywhere and everything is still so shit? And what are fighting for now? I’m pretty sure the video has got some details wrong here. We probably should have been warned when socialism as “pooling our resources” and “working together” was illustrated by Momentum with...

Extinction Rebellion (XR) started their “International Rebellion” on Monday 15 April, with thousands of people participating in road blocks across central London: Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Waterloo Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, and Parliament Square. There were hundreds in each location, with festival-like atmospheres, and people staying overnight in some. At the time of writing, Tuesday lunchtime 16 April, there are still some active blockades with hundreds of people. Participants are mostly a mixture of pensioners and people in their early 20s or younger. The police have reported over 100...

Mark Fischer in his book Capitalist Realism outlines the titular concept, summed up in the phrase “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. In a recent Twitter outburst, this is the concept Novara co-founder Aaron Bastani reached for in retort to people reacting to his tweet about trade under a Corbyn-led Labour government: “Bilateral trade deals under a Corbyn government: Brazilian food & coffee; Cuban healthcare workers; Venezuelan gas. All while helping them in value-added areas like pharma, hi-tech manufacturing & aviation. Cheap mojitos, a well staffed NHS...

This week [November 1918] marks a century since the end of world war one. A conflict in which 70 million people were thrown into uniforms, given guns, gas, bayonets and bombs, and ordered on pain of execution or imprisonment to shoot, gut and poison each other. 10 million of them were butchered at each other’s hands and a further 8 million civilians died too. Why? What for? These millions were fed into a meat-grinder. Not for freedom, justice or democracy, but because the European capitalists of their respective nations were competing to carve up the rest of the world for their own profit...

The emergence of Extinction Rebellion is a good thing. After a long period where there has been very little mass environmental activism, it is good to see someone doing something. However, if this new movement is going to develop into something worthwhile, it will need to confront the problems faced by similar movements that have gone before. In 1999, after the J18 Global Day of Action (where anticapitalists protested in the City of London), a series of articles were published on the state of the anticapitalist movement. One article, “Give Up Activism”, generated a great deal of discussion at...

July saw the one-man circus that is President Donald Trump smear its rancid trail across Europe. Most eye-catching was Trump’s support for the anti-immigrant racism of the European populist right. He re-told the standard cultural racist narrative to the Sun, saying that immigration had “changed the fabric” of the continent “I think you are losing your culture.” Trump also continued his ongoing attacks on London Mayor Sadiq Kahn saying, “Take a look at the terrorism that is taking place. Look at what is going on in London. I think he has done a very bad job on terrorism”, with the clear...

Just under 200 people attended Ideas for Freedom 2018, a weekend socialist summer school organised by Workers’ Liberty on 23-24 June in London. The title of the school this year was “Socialism Makes Sense”, and sessions aimed to make the basic case for a revolutionary socialist transformation of capitalist society. Another main theme was “challenges of a Labour government”, looking at the difficulties likely to be faced by a left-Labour government, for example in confronting the state, and the challenges for class-struggle socialists in relating to such a government and attempting to...

The thermometer-busting moment of the 2008 economic crash was the collapse on 15 September 2008 of Lehman Brothers, then the USA’s fourth-largest investment bank. It was the biggest bankruptcy in US history. After it, it seemed doubtful for a while whether the other big investment banks could survive without drastic reshaping. By 2017, so the Financial Times reports (12 June 2018), “group-wide profits last year of $78.4 billion across the top nine investment banks — excluding the much-changed Bank of America — were higher than the $75.4 billion recorded in 2007”. Investment banks are...