On 28 April last, a giant blackout hit the whole of the Iberian peninsula, suddenly cutting off electricity and paralysing activity for almost eight hours; creating chaos and havoc on the underground, trams and trains as signals broke down; trapping people inside lifts, causing flights to be cancelled at airports; closing shops and creating a real hardship for the whole population

An additional phenomenon...

This spectacular episode is an illustration not only of the fragility of the most powerful states in terms of energy, but also one more symptom of an accumulation of scourges and disasters that are hitting a world that is itself increasingly disordered and chaotic. While this event is ‘unprecedented’ in Spain and Portugal, it is clearly not unique, and we could point out that many other giant power cuts have taken place in different parts of the world before. This was the case, for example, in India in 2012, one of the biggest to date, as was the blackout in parts of the north-east and mid-west of the United States, stretching as far as Ontario, in August 2003.

Although sometimes linked to climatic hazards, such as violent storms, electricity supply problems have often been caused by the failure of outdated or poorly maintained networks suffering from a lack of funding. The deep economic crisis, the lack of investment and growing social unrest, imperialist tensions between states, can only create the conditions for future power cuts with unpredictable but potentially dramatic consequences. Energy, as we can see from the current war between Russia and Ukraine, has become more of a strategic than a commercial issue, a weapon of war in itself[1].

At the time of writing, the causes of the huge blackout in Spain and Portugal (which also partially and temporarily affected France, in the Basque country) have not yet been established. Although network connections have been optimised to regulate electricity distribution, the blackout on the peninsula remains ‘unexplained’ by the authorities. There is no doubt that a cyber attack, even if the hypothesis was quickly ruled out, was a credible possibility given the current deterioration in geopolitical tensions.

In reality, beyond our ignorance of the causes and the need for caution, the ‘technical’ reason for the blackout is less important than outlining a political interpretation of what happened. Taken on its own, the phenomenon of this sudden ‘blackout’ can find a specific explanation. The question that seems most relevant to us is rather to underline the context in which the event occurred, as a phenomenon that sheds light on a system at the end of its tether.

... in the decomposition of capitalism

As with other phenomena that can occur and result in real tragedies, such a blackout must be understood in a context where accidents and disasters are accumulating, and where their rate of appearance, intensity and scale have been steadily increasing for more than thirty years. This is a global situation that Marx could not, of course, have imagined in his time, but which he was nonetheless able to anticipate by revealing the historical dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. In perceiving the internal contradictions of the system and the seeds of its crisis and future decadence, as with any mode of production and exploitation that has become obsolete, Marx noted that capitalism is special in that it gives rise to “an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity”[2]. Of course, the point here is not to attribute the blackout to a purely economic cause. What we want to say here is that the obsolescence of capitalism, a system which has been in decline for over a hundred years because of its chronic economic crisis and, above all, the absence of any prospect other than misery and destruction, is plunging the whole of society into convulsions that are now those of its final phase, its decomposition.

Indeed, “the phase of decomposition appears as the result of an accumulation of all the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a historically condemned mode of production”[3]. With an economic and social crisis plunging proletarians and populations into poverty, heightened war tensions, the multiplication of disasters linked to climate change, industrial accidents and phenomena such as shortages, this power cut remains a symptom which, like others, can only increase dramatically.

That's what we've been pointing out in our articles for over thirty years, when these phenomena were less frequent and more spread out in time and space, allowing the bourgeoisie to better put across its own particular explanations in order to isolate individual cases and exonerate the system as a whole. So, for example, when it came to floods or droughts, the media simply referred to ‘natural disasters’. But as the number of phenomena increased, notably the Covid-19 global disaster, the media were obliged to invoke more clearly the ‘irresponsibility’ of ‘mankind’ or of this or that individual.

These days, apart from laying blame and looking for scapegoats, the bourgeoisie can always come up with a whole host of explanations, as it will probably be able to do at the end of its current investigation into this recent blackout. What it will never be able to tell us, however, is that its system is bankrupt and can only generate new tragedies. The blindness of the bourgeoisie is a reflection of its cynicism and greed, its accelerating descent into barbarity that only the proletariat will be able to overcome by making its revolution.

WH, 30 April 2025

The Labour government is ramping up the defence budget to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, with an ambition to reach 3% in the next parliament. It is set to reach its highest level since the period of the Cold War.

Should we be surprised by the intensification of war preparations by the Labour Party? No, we should not: since the First World War, this party has a long history of supporting and waging imperialist war.

After 1914, an important instrument of Labour’s services to the ruling class was the War Emergency National Workers’ Committee, which started as an anti-war committee, but was quickly turned into a committee to contain workers’ reactions and recruit them for the war effort of their class enemy. In May 1915 the Labour Party even became part of the War Cabinet, participating in the decisions to massacre millions of workers in uniform.

In March 1918 the same government dispatched a small contingent of soldiers to Murmansk to fight against the Germans. But when the Whites in South Russia started an offensive against the Soviet power, Britain fully supported them with a huge amount military material, including British tanks and aircraft. Labour had for the first time, even earlier than the SPD did in Germany, deployed armed violence against the workers’ revolution.

In September 1939 the Labour Party supported the decision of the British bourgeoisie to declare war on the Axis Powers. In May 1940 it joined a coalition government led by Winston Churchill, helping to boost the image of a ‘people’s war’ against fascism.

The post-war Labour government of Clement Attlee dispatched British military forces to Malaysia in 1948 for a “counter-insurgency campaign” against the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). The UK army made a brutal military intervention, herded hundreds of thousands of people into fortified camps and heavily bombed rural areas, with thousands of deaths and injuries as a result.

The Labour government led by Tony Blair joined the US in the Second Gulf War that began in 2003. In the five years that followed this war resulted in the deaths of around a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians and soldiers, while the devastation of the economic and health infrastructure left tens of thousands more victims.

So, ever since World War One, Labour has defended the imperialist interest of the British bourgeoisie in times of war and ‘peace’.

Ukraine war: Britain searches for its lost prestige

It will therefore come as no surprise that this Labour government has decided to increase military spending so drastically today. Labour’s argument that this will lead to the creation of thousands of jobs, rebuilding British industry and boosting the economy, is nothing but a lie. Even if it can lead to an increase of jobs in the short term[1], investment in the war economy is totally unproductive, does not contribute to accumulation, and constitutes a sterilisation of capital.

Either in government or in the opposition, either in war or in peacetime, the warlike language of Labour never abates. Even Corbyn, the representative of the ‘anti-war’ current in Labour, argued that “Britain does need strong, modern military and security forces”[2]. Therefore, he said, “It is vital that [we] keep spending at 2 per cent” [3].

But why does Britain support Ukraine so stubbornly despite the changed policy of the US towards this war and the decision to concentrate its attention more than ever on China? What are British interests in this war and what can it gain from it? The UK has almost no trade with Ukraine. In 2023, Ukraine accounted for less than 0.1% of the total UK outward FDI stock. A comprehensive answer to this question is not possible within the scope of this article. But it is nevertheless important to give some elements of an reply.

First we need to understand that the British bourgeoisie once ruled a world empire, upon which “the sun never set”. As a legacy of this period the British bourgeoisie has maintained a global approach to the imperialist conflicts and wars in the world, not always linked to its immediate interests as a national capital. Britain “is a declining power, one that ruled the world a hundred years ago, one that still has interests worldwide but no longer has the strength to act independently to defend them”[4] .

In the last hundred years, except for the period 1990-2005, the UK considered first the Soviet Union and later Russia as one of its main enemies, if not its main enemy. Already in the 1930s the British conservatives were the fiercest opponents of ‘Bolshevism’. During Chamberlain's premiership, Churchill expressed his hostility towards the USSR in a number of speeches. Characteristic of his ‘anti-Bolshevism’ was the proposal in 1944 to organise an invasion in the Balkans to cut off the advance of the Russians. And then, in March 1946, Churchill made his famous Iron Curtain speech in which he made an appeal to the democratic world to be wary of the threat of the Soviet Union.

When the war in Ukraine started, the Biden administration made it clear that it favoured the escalation in fighting as an opportunity to weaken Russia, a geo-political rival of the US which was also involved in an alliance with the USA’s chief rival, China. The UK was in complete agreement with this policy, and stood with the US at the forefront of the efforts to entrench the conflict. Even today it still wants to see Russia confined to a status of global pariah and has therefore even countered some efforts to start talks with Putin about a truce.

On 24 February 2025, the UK announced its most significant sanctions package since the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The unprecedented package is part of a global policy to bring Russia to the point of exhaustion of its military or economic capabilities, or both. Recently Defence Secretary John Healey declared that the Labour government will not be shy of using nuclear weapons. “We have the power to do untold damage to them [Russia] if they attack us”[5].

So, all the talk of the Labour government about defending democracy and peace is nothing more than empty words. Britain, like all other countries, has its own particular motives for being involved in the war against Russia: the sordid defence of it national interests. And for Britain, regaining its lost prestige since World War Two, especially in the eyes of Eastern European countries, is one of its main motives to support this war against Russia.

Britain straddles a position between the US and the EU

Since the US is governed by a populist president, expressing the tendency towards every man for himself in international relations, the White House has made clear that it will no longer act as the primary guarantor of European security. It insists that the European nations should be responsible for their own defence and, above all, pay for it. But despite Healy’s boastful language, the UK is not able to deploy its full military potential and cannot use nuclear weapons without the backup of the US. Starmer knows that and therefore rushed to the US on 27 February 2025 to get reassurance of continuing American military support.

He actually wanted to know if the UK, because of its supposed “special relationship” with the US and its decision to raise the defence budget to 2.5 per cent of GDP, would be exempt from the Trump’s growing hostility to America’s former allies and could still count on the US nuclear umbrella. Although the US is turning its back on all international alliances, it seems that it will not yet withdraw from NATO. But Trump gave no positive answer to the question posed by Starmer. Without the deterrent of the nuclear arsenal, the UK is a toothless tiger, only able to roar.

In Washington Trump and Starmer also spoke about the tariffs the US intended to levy on British products. During that meeting Trump gave the impression that something could be "worked out" with Britain. But on 2 April the US nevertheless imposed 10% on British products. A decision that would have strengthened Starmer in his conviction that Trump is a president you cannot really rely on, although he refused to actually call him unreliable. The Labour government reacted with the publication of a 417-page retaliation list, slapping tariffs on 8,000 American products if further talks with the US were to fail.

Returning from Washington Starmer immediately decided to call an emergency conference of European states in an attempt to ensure their imperialist ‘defence’ without the military umbrella of the US. The result was the creation of a “coalition of the willing”. But this coalition has been forged in a rush and remains very volatile, i.e. without a solid foundation and far from unified on the strategy to support Ukraine. The only thing that unites the countries is an agreement on the military threat from Russia. So far, only France and the UK have officially committed to contribute soldiers for the “reassurance force” following a putative ceasefire.

Moreover the deployment of such a reassurance force depends on the existence of a US “backstop”. This refers to American air support, logistics, and intelligence. But so far the US has not said that it is ready to provide this. Various military officials have dismissed the initiative as political theatre. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, derided the coalition as “a posture and a pose”. Branding it “simplistic”, he said that European leaders were caught in a “Churchillian fantasy”.

The project has stalled and the initiators have limited themselves to issuing declarations about their commitment to Ukraine. But since his plea for the security of Europe has been turned down by Trump, Starmer needs the platform of the “coalition of the willing”

• to present the UK (instead of the US) as the new leader in the military confrontation with Russia;
• as a lever to “reset” the United Kingdom’s relationship with the Continent;
• to boost its role as advocate for the security of the East European countries.

In 2024, while campaigning in the general election, Labour already made Europe its absolute priority and security in Europe as one of its favoured levers to “reset” the United Kingdom’s relationship with the Continent. “We will begin work with European colleagues on our proposal for a new UK-EU Security Pact, bringing structured dialogue back to the relationship and a common focus on our continent’s security”[6].

Labour's commitment to intensified militarisation will have a considerable impact on the economy. The increase of the military budget will certainly require more sacrifices. In the end it will imply further attacks on the incomes and living conditions of the population and of the working class in particular. The cuts in welfare services today are only a foretaste of what is yet to come: they are being used by the bourgeoisie to get a first impression of how workers will react to more economic attacks after the year-long strike movement of 2022-2023. The working class in Britain as in other central countries retains the capacity to defend itself from these attacks by fighting for its own class demands, and in the longer term to make a clear political connection between the immediate attacks on its living standards and the inability of the capitalist system to offer it any future other than war and destruction.

Dennis

The celebrations for the 80th anniversary of “Victory in Europe” on May 8th, from London to Moscow, are always military parades, lest anyone think that World War 2 (like the one in 1914-18) was a war to end all wars…

No, we are told that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance; therefore, we must be armed to the teeth and always be ready to enlist for the national cause.

We are also told that May 1945 was the victory of democracy over fascism, freedom over tyranny and mass murder. It wasn’t yet Victory in Japan though: the democratic allies still had some of their own mass murdering to do in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was to a great extent a warning to yesterday’s ally, soon to be a new totalitarian enemy, the USSR.  Thus World War 2 was immediately succeeded by preparations for World War 3: a “Cold War” which wasn’t so cold for the millions burned and massacred by endless proxy wars between the two imperialist blocs set up in the wake of the war (this was the real nature of the bloody conflicts in China, Korea, Vietnam, Africa, Middle East over the next four decades).

The “Cold War” ended with the collapse of the “eastern bloc”, of course; but, deprived of a unifying enemy, the western alliance also began to unravel right away. Some of its formal institutions, like NATO, still survive. But the new regime in the White House aims to “tell it like it is”: as Lord Palmerston once put it, there are no permanent friends or enemies: only permanent national interests. So it’s now “America First” and Trump and Co. are busy dismantling the last vestiges of the post-war world order.

In line with the recently launched propaganda war against Europe, Trump wants to rename “Victory in Europe day” “Victory Day for World War 2”, while “Armistice Day” is to become “Victory Day for World War 1”. Trump downplays the contribution of the European powers  in defeating Nazi Germany,  insisting that “We won both wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery or military brilliance,” It’s yet another calculated kick in the teeth for the European powers, those “freeloaders”, who  could only be saved by the  benevolence of the Americans in both world wars (Trump doesn’t mention that US assistance wasn’t exactly free: the British, for example, didn’t finish paying its war debts to the US until 2006, and, more importantly, were obliged to give up their empire to make way for  the new world hegemony of the USA).

For those who reject rituals in honour of the nation state, who still adhere to the maxim that the workers have no country, it makes no difference who claims to have made the biggest contribution to the inter-imperialist butchery of the two world wars or the Cold War. For the working class, 1945 did not mark a victory, but perhaps the lowest point in a profound historic defeat. In 1917-18 workers’ revolutions in Russia, Germany and elsewhere put a stop to the war, and for a brief interlude held out the prospect of a world without competing and warring nation states. But the revolution was defeated by the combined efforts of social democracy, fascism and Stalinism.  

By contrast World War 2 ended with both imperialist camps crushing the least threat of working class opposition to the war. Following the mass strikes in the north of Italy, where slogans against the war were voiced, in 1943 the threat was sufficient for Mussolini to be deposed by his fellow fascists, and for Churchill to pause his army’s advance from the South of Italy to “let the Italians stew in their own juice”, which meant allowing Hitler’s forces to carry out the necessary repression against the workers.

Not long afterwards, “the Red Army, which had called for the Poles to rise up against the Nazis, deliberately held its forces on the outskirts of Warsaw during the uprising of August 1944” [1] This manoeuvre led to the massacre of 15,000 insurgents and more than 200,000 Polish civilians, mostly from mass executions. In the end the whole city was razed to the ground.

The proletariat in Germany itself was decimated by the massive Allied -terror bombing strategy, including the use of incendiary bombs from which no escape was possible. The bombing of Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin in particular was meant to snuff out any danger of proletarian revolt in that country.

Today, the divorce between the US and Europe, and the continuing slaughter in Ukraine, are accompanied by new demands from our rulers to be ready to offer life and labour in the interests of national defence. But they are also aware that they need to keep drumming this into our heads precisely because the working class today has shown itself far less willing to make sacrifices which can never be in its own interests; above all, it has shown it in the great international strike waves launched in May-June 1968 in France and Italy in 1969, culminating in Poland in 1980, and in the less spectacular but still profoundly significant class movements which began with the “Summer of Discontent” in Britain in 2022 and are coming into shape around the world today.

Our only victory will be the overturning of world capitalism!

Amos

Since the beginning of the year, the world has seen a spectacular resurgence of demonstrations, often politically motivated. These movements, the likes of which we have not seen in a long time, are an unmistakeable sign of political and social crises in various countries: South Korea, Serbia, Turkey, Israel and, more recenty, the USA[1] But should we necessarily rejoice at seeing these events unfold around the world? Revolutionaries know that “tout ce qui bouge n’est pas rouge” - "not everything that moves is red’"- and it is important to see what lies behind them and analyse the real political source of these movements.

South Korea

In a country with a large working class which has experienced struggles in the past and where there is a group of the Communist Left, President Yoon Suk-yeol's power grab on December 4th led to major demonstrations, with those on one side defending the president's coup and those on the other side supporting his impeachment and arrest. At the head of the demonstrations, MPs from the main parties in the Korean parliament rallied their supporters, awaiting the decision of the Constitutional Court.

It is clear that theses demonstrations have no relevance to working class interests whatsoever and what we see on either side is nothing more than manoeuvres in support of one bourgeois clique against another. This situation is the result of the political deadlock between bourgeois cliques in the parliament, who have been unable to pass a budget due to a lack of a sufficient majority. It was this that led to the president's attempted coup. The resulting political chaos clearly illustrates the situation of the Korean bourgeoisie, which is deeply divided and fragmented with all parties acting in their own interests, as illustrated by the assassination attempt in January 2024 on the main leader of the opposition party and the coup on December 4th.

The radicalisation of right-wing factions towards a Trump-inspired conspiracy ideology, the grotesque episodes that unfolded during the president's arrest by the police, an episode of presidential impeachment that has already occurred three times since 2004, followed by the dismissal of the interim president due to his lack of cooperation with the parliament, show the weight of decomposition on the ruling class of this country.

“Cooperation with the Democratic Party, a faction of the capitalist class, will only bury the workers’ struggle. Proposing a reform of capitalism through ‘social reform’ without fighting the capitalist system itself obscures the fact that the cause of the current crisis and tragedy is the capitalist system and propagates the illusion of a healthier capitalism” (Internationalist Communist Perspective, “The dismissal of Yoon Seok-yeol is the beginning of a class struggle against the capitalist regime and the capitalist system!”, 04.04.2025)[2].

The challenge for the Korean working class is to not let itself be drawn into defending one bourgeois camp or the other, in a country that will inevitably suffer from the impending recession following the measures taken by Trump and his clique, which could have a particularly severe impact on the South Korean economy.

Turkey

The arrest on 19 March of Ekrem Imamoglu, leader of the opposition to President Erdogan’s Republican People's Party (CHP), and until recently mayor of Istanbul, comes as the culmination of a crackdown on the opposition in the run-up to the next presidential election - Imamoglu having been nominated as a candidate for this election by his party, a member of the Socialist International. There was an immediate reaction in the streets with the largest mobilisation since the attempted destruction of Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013 to make way for property development. But the slogans put forward show that the CHP has control over these demonstrations: they are about “defending Turkish democracy” threatened by an “authoritarian government” that has stage-managed elections in which President Erdogan would choose his opponents after eliminating his most dangerous rivals. They are thus focused on defending the legitimacy of the election process. In response to this, we support the conclusion of Internationalist Voice, a group from the proletarian milieu, which has published a well-documented article on the developments in Turkey: "Only through class struggle, and from the class terrain, can we repel the attacks of the bourgeoisie. We must extend our struggle independently of all bourgeois factions and movements, directly opposing capitalism. Our interest does not lie simply in a change within the ruling class - i.e., in replacing Erdoğan with İmamoğlu - but in the class struggle itself." [3].

Here again, this is a struggle between bourgeois cliques, completely alien to the class interests of the proletariat.  Turkey's catastrophic economic situation is dragging the Turkish working class into a spiral of never-ending poverty, which will in all likelihood be exacerbated by the imperialist conflicts for which the entire Turkish bourgeoisie is preparing: clashes with Israel in Syria, with Russia in the Caucasus and Central Asia, with the Kurds in Iraq and Syria and with Greece in the rivalry for supremacy in the Aegean Sea... The spiral of war in the region and the Turkish bourgeoisie's dependence on its armed forces will not be altered in any way by a democratic change of the faction in power in Turkey; the CHP still sees Kemal Atatürk as its guiding light. So, to fight for one bourgeois clique against another when the capitalist system as a whole is in deep crisis and there is a whirlwind of phenomena linked to the decomposition of the world capitalist order, is to ask the working class to fight over who will lead it into poverty and war!

Serbia

The collapse of the roof of the Novi Sad railway station in Serbia (with 16 dead) on November 1st, a result of major structural defects linked to the corruption that is gripping the country, led to a series of giant demonstrations whose motives were ‘the fight against corruption’ and ‘to live in a country where there is a justice system and it works'. These huge demonstrations, such as the one on 15 March, brought together a large mass of people with diverse political allegiances, ranging from democrats opposed to the authoritarianism of Serbian President Vucic to pro-Russian ultra-nationalists. Farmers even joined the procession with their tractors.

The diverse nature of the participants and the motives behind these protests, as well as the opposition's support for the president's party in the form of actions within Parliament (such as the setting off of smoke bombs in Parliament on March 4th), make it clear that this is not about defending the interests of the working class, which is drowned out by the mass of demonstrators who are in fact defending democracy and demanding a better judicial system for the country. This inter-classist movement at its core is entirely under the control of bourgeois cliques who want to force the president to resign and organise new elections. It is on a terrain that is completely alien and opposed to the struggle of the working class. In a country destabilised by a profound economic crisis and which is the battleground of various imperialist influences - the ultra-nationalists support Russia, the opposition wants to join the European Union, while China is building the new railway line between Belgrade and Budapest - the working class must more than ever defend its own interests, independently of any bourgeois faction. The working class in Serbia will have to break free from this movement as soon as possible: fighting against corruption in the capitalist system means fighting against the side-effects of its bankruptcy, not against the system itself.

The struggles are ahead of us

The proletariat has only its unity and consciousness in the fight against the bourgeoisie. Supporting one bourgeois faction that is more ‘progressive’ than the others was certainly a strategy that Marx and Engels advocated during the 1848 revolution, but the goal at that time was primarily for the national project of the bourgeoisie to be realised and for the working class to develop and unify in a context where capitalism was in its ascendant phase, in its full development. This vision is now completely obsolete in view of the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist system: all factions of the bourgeoisie are now reactionary and the working class has no interest in supporting any one of them against the others. The working class must maintain its political autonomy and defend its own class interests without mixing them up with those of the bourgeois factions whose raison d'être is to prevent any development of the class struggle. In any case, it is illusory to want to fight corruption or demand more ‘democracy’ in a world where the main aim is to maximise profits and where the ruling political power is everywhere a class dictatorship!

In South Korea, Turkey, Serbia and elsewhere, the challenge today is to defend our class interests faced with worsening living and working conditions, redundancies, the drive to re-arm and the ultimate war of each against all. No bourgeois faction is able to defend our interests! The most concentrated and experienced parts of the working class, especially those in western Europe and the USA, must set an example of deciding on our own methods of struggle: uniting around the defence of our living standards and working conditions; fighting against the effects of the economic crisis and the warmongering policies of all the bourgeoisies; organising in demonstrations to build solidarity and engaging in the most widespread strikes possible in order to develop a balance of forces in our favour. Only then will we be able to have a clear understanding of what the stakes really are, who are our friends and enemies, how to be able to push back the state and the ruling class and what are the political perspectives open to the working class. And what is certain is that we will clearly not achieve this by defending the capitalist state and bourgeois democracy!

HG (24 April 2025)