Opposing the capitalist Israeli state is not antisemitism
Defend the right to debate the way forward in the Middle East
Socialist Students steering committee
Socialist Students sends our solidarity to members of Linksjugend [‘solid] – the youth section of the German left party Die Linke – who have been subjected to vicious public attacks for their criticism of the Israeli state.
Shamefully, these attacks have come not just from the capitalist media in Germany, but also from the leadership of Die Linke itself.
At the federal conference of Linksjugend in early November, delegates voted in support of a motion on the Middle East that referenced the “colonial and racist character of the Israeli state project… from its beginnings to the present day”.
If anything, this characterisation is vague on the policies of mass expulsion, occupation, and state terror carried out by Israeli capitalist governments ever since the foundation of the Israeli state.
But the motion was still seized upon by the billionaire-owned press in Germany to spread accusations of antisemitism, in an attempt to defame Die Linke and its youth wing, and the global movement in solidarity with the Palestinians that has resurged in the past two years.
Unfortunately, the Die Linke co-leaders have responded by assisting in a witch hunt of its own young members in Linksjugend. They have asserted that “one cannot question the protection of Jewish life” – in other words, claiming that by opposing the Israeli capitalist state, Linksjugend members are undermining the safety of Jewish people.
But the opposite is true. It is the Israeli ruling class, and their staunch defence of an unequal capitalist system based on exploitation and oppression for private profit, which poses the biggest threat to the lives of Jewish people in Israel.
By ramping up war throughout the Middle East, the Netanyahu government has only increased fears and unease of most people living in Israel. Currently one-in-five Jewish Israeli children grow up below the poverty line. That’s before mentioning the genocidal policy of the Israeli government in Palestine, which in two years has claimed over 60,000 Palestinian lives and laid waste to Gaza – intensifying the national conflict and Palestinian suffering, and not bringing greater security to Israelis.
Socialist Students believes that the building of a movement for socialist change in Israel – which would include replacing the current capitalist Israeli state with a democratic workers’ government – will be a key part of the struggle for a socialist Middle East. That is the only way to finally end poverty, war, and oppression in the region. In opposing the current Israeli state in this way, socialists are the foremost defenders of the right of Jewish and all people to a genuinely safe and decent life.
As a socialist youth organisation, Socialist Students defends the right of all young people to discuss and debate a way out of the horror that capitalism means for billions around the globe. That includes the right to debate how the current nightmare in Palestine and the Middle East could be ended. We send solidarity to members of Linksjugend who, by adding to this debate, have faced vicious smears by agents of the capitalist class in Germany, both inside and outside Die Linke.
Hertfordshire Socialist Students is campaigning for action and funding from university management and the student union to end sexism and violence against women on campus.
In April, Student Council passed a motion unanimously, mandating Herts Students’ Union to pressure the university to improve incident-reporting systems, introduce prevention and education campaigns, provide consent and anti-harassment training for all students, and consult students and staff on these changes.
But since launching the campaign, Socialist Students has faced delays, silence, and contradictory statements from both the student union and university, especially over the rollout of mandatory consent and anti-harassment training.
The national Office for Students introduced new requirements in August. Despite repeated assurances from the Dean of Students at Herts that training had been delivered, evidence gathered by Socialist Students showed inconsistent implementation, poor-quality material, and many students who had not received any training.
After months of ignored emails, minimal communication to staff, and attempts by the university to evade responsibility, students are escalating pressure. Socialist Students has collected evidence of inaction, raised the issue in every available forum, and run mass email and social media campaigns, with other societies.
This pressure has now forced the university to commit to holding an open student forum in December. The Dean of Students and senior management will attend to answer for the failed rollout of training, and wider inaction.
Who stands up for us?
Once the highest democratic student body passes a motion, students should be able to trust that those elected and employed to represent their interests will lobby the university to make urgent changes to defend student safety. Instead, this struggle has exposed how compromised Herts Students’ Union, beholden to university management, and reliant on maintaining the institution’s public image, is often unwilling to fight for students’ interests, when those interests do not align with management priorities. Socialist Students has been working to re-politicise Herts Students’ Union, pushing it to become a fighting, democratic body, unafraid to challenge cuts, closures, and managerial overreach.
Socialist Students has also communicated our campaign’s concerns to staff and members of the University and College Union (UCU), who share frustrations over the university’s failure to protect students. We will continue building a united movement of students and workers to hold the uni accountable, especially since the Student Council’s democratic mandate has been ignored. Backed by staff, Student Council, and requirements set by the regulator, Socialist Students demands an overhaul of the uni’s approach to sexual harassment and misconduct.
Our campaign is part of a wider struggle for a socialist alternative to the capitalist system that fuels sexism and misogyny, and for free, fully funded education – starting with building a strong democratic student union that promotes a political voice for students.
UCU members in Sheffield, including a list of student signatures gathered by Socialist Students in support of the strikes
Sheffield Socialist Students supports UCU strikes
Joseph McHale, Sheffield Socialist Students
17 November was the first day of joint strike action by the University and College Union (UCU) at both the University of Sheffield (UoS) and Sheffield Hallam University. Hallam had also gone on strike a week earlier.
After a busy first morning of picketing – at least ten buildings at UoS – UCU members and supporters converged outside the City Hall for a joint union rally. Socialist Students members were in the crowd supporting the speakers.
The UCU strike action is happening due to the shocking cuts both universities are aggressively pursuing. UoS has over £200 million in reserves but is pursuing £50.7 million in cuts for the 2025-26 year!
Socialist Students at UoS has worked with the university’s anti-cuts coalition to make students aware of strike action, petitioning over the last three weeks. We continued our support on the picket lines.
The rally included speeches from both UoS and Hallam staff and a student, all highlighting the dire conditions that have forced staff to take this action.
Many of those speeches mirrored Socialist Students demands for fully funded and free education that is democratically run. This is imperative to improving the experience for both staff and students, which was well received at the rally.
The failed experiment of marketisation of our universities is acknowledged in the UCU bulletin. These cuts treat students as customers and staff as service providers, rather than appreciating the true value that they bring to education.
We need a fully publicly funded and democratically run university system, putting both the staff and students at the heart of it rather than soulless management and business interests. This is what Socialist Students will continue to fight for.
Socialist Students campaigning in support
A Socialist Students meeting was addressed by UCU branch officers recently, and members have already been out campaigning in support of the UCU. Socialist Students is part of the anti-cuts coalition which pushed for a student referendum last academic year, in which students overwhelmingly voted in support of staff strike action (83%) and for ‘no confidence’ in the University Executive Board (89%).
Socialist Students is linking the fight to their Funding Not Fees campaign – exposing the broken market-based higher education funding model which allows Hallam to borrow huge to build a satellite campus in London, and UoS to pay its vice chancellor £330,000 a year, while both universities cut courses and staff.
There are nearly 5,000 fewer international students across Sheffield than two years ago, causing budget deficits. UoS’s dependence on arms manufacturers has been highlighted by Palestine campaigners, and now Hallam is accused of trading one of its professor’s academic freedom (research into forced labour in China) for access to the Chinese student market. The need for full funding and an end to marketisation couldn’t be clearer.
Fighting course closures and redundancies at Leicester uni
Alanah Carey Peacher, Leicester Socialist Students
At the beginning of the summer, University of Leicester (UoL) management announced that they would be slashing the staffing budget at the university by £11 million. Several courses, including Environmental Sciences and Chemistry, are under threat as well as many jobs.
Since then, the university bosses have revealed phase one of their cruel redundancy programme. Modern Languages is being shut down, and a whole series of departments are being merged, which will threaten further courses. A total of 160 redundances are planned.
On 12 November, the University and College Union (UCU) held a rally in the city in protest at the cuts. Over 300 staff, students and UCU members from around the country, as well as Unite members and other trade unionists and supporters, marched up to the university campus to hear speeches from staff and students affected by the cuts.
Staff members from Geography expressed their heartbreak upon hearing the news and their concern for the current and future students. The chair of UoL UCU explained that there is no transparency about the cuts. The university has the funds to create a campus in Dubai but not to fund the education of students in the city where the university was founded!
Members asked all in attendance to vote no confidence in the governance of the university. Socialist Students members will continue to build solidarity.
Sofia Pandolfi, college student and Socialist Students member, gave an inspiring speech at Socialism 2025. Read what she had to say here!
Young people today have grown up in a world of crisis. We’ve seen governments increase university tuition fees, cut our youth services, attempt to strip away disability benefits for young people, and propose a future which gives us no hope.
Internationally, we’ve watched our government support the brutal genocide in Palestine, claiming it has no money to invest in our education and services.
Living under a system devoid of opportunities, and dependent on international exploitation, has fuelled anger and frustration.
But if we young people are to have a real future to look forward to, we need to transform our anger into action – by getting organised for a socialist alternative to capitalism, and the war, exploitation and oppression that this system produces.
That is what Socialist Students did when Donald Trump, an embodiment of capitalism in crisis, came to visit the UK on the invitation of Keir Starmer in September.
Socialists Students organised a campaign of youth walkouts against Trump to get young people organised against Trump and Starmer’s politics of war and division. To build for the walkouts in London, I helped to give out hundreds of leaflets, put up posters, and met with students to share ideas on how to protest against Trump’s visit.
Hundreds of students across the country, standing up to Trump and the brutal system he represents, walked out of their schools, colleges, and universities on the 17 September – the day Trump was in Windsor Castle feasting on a state banquet with Starmer, the King, and a guest list of billionaire tech CEOs.
It wasn’t easy. At one school in South London, we watched the headteacher rip leaflets out of students’ hands. At another school in East London, the management called the police to intimidate students into not protesting.
The youth walkouts against Trump were a chance to show that young people can fight back when we get organised. Socialist Students is now following up the walkouts with a campaign to get students in schools, sixth forms and colleges building our own students’ unions, as a way for young people to have an organised voice. Not just for one day, but always.
By getting organised as students, we can more effectively link up with the workers who keep our education and society running and build a united movement for the socialist change that we all need.
For that, young people also need a political voice through which we can fight alongside the organised working class. Your Party is an opportunity to do that.
Your Party could give a voice to young people’s anger by demanding fully funded free education, mass building of council houses and rent controls, as part of a socialist programme to transform the lives of working-class and young people.
Why not take that first step by having Zarah Sultana, Jeremy Corbyn, and other Your Party MPs in the Independent Alliance proposing an amendment to the upcoming budget – instead of Labour’s plans for more tuition fee rises, calling for the total abolition of fees, as well as the cancellation of student debt, and the immediate reintroduction of maintenance grants for all students?
Socialist Students members have joined Your Party and are fighting for socialism and working-class struggle to be at the heart of it.
In universities across the country, we’ve organised dozens of meetings discussing how Your Party can be a democratic voice for students. As a next step to building the party we need on campus, we will be inviting Zarah Sultana, Jeremy Corbyn and the other Independent Alliance MPs to be part of a Your Party speaking tour of universities and colleges.
If you want to help build a political voice which can help unite students and young people with the powerful struggles of the working class, then join Socialist Students at your school, college or university to help build the fightback.
Climate change has got the world hurtling towards disaster. The disarray flowing from capitalist governments across the globe has left a trail of destruction, with wildfires raging, sea levels rising, and a potentially very bleak future for young people on the horizon.
The internationally agreed target of capping global warming at 1.5% above preindustrial levels, deemed essential by climate scientists to prevent the worst effects of climate change, is looking dangerously out of reach, with the effects of climate change being no longer predictions of the future, but current events. In early 2025, the LA wildfires burned over 40,000 acres of land, resulting in the loss of the homes of tens of thousands of people. Around 40% of glaciers are already beyond saving and doomed to melt, which will have a massive impact on the billions of people reliant on glaciers to regulate the water used to grow food.
We have also been feeling the effects of climate change in the UK. The summer of 2022 saw temperatures hitting 40 degrees in the UK for the first time in history, leading to rail lines buckling, 20% of hospital operations being cancelled during the peak of the heatwave, and over 3000 people dying prematurely due to the heat. Following this, at the start of July 2023, the planet endured the two hottest days ever recorded.
No Climate Justice Under Capitalism
There is no solution to the climate crisis under capitalism. Capitalism, driven by competition and big business profits before all else, cannot deliver the coordinated, long-term planning required to address the climate crisis. In fact, 71% of all global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 can be traced to just 100 fossil fuel producers.
This Labour government defends the interests of capitalism, and has demonstrated its lack of willingness to fight the climate crisis head-on. Even before the election, Keir Starmer abandoned Labour’s policy of investing £28 billion into green investment funds, despite the ongoing climate crisis.
The same unwillingness to act can be seen in country after country, where capitalist governments prioritise the profits of ‘their’ capitalist class over the needs of ordinary people and the environment.
While many may hope that international climate agreements may offer a step in the right direction, this has been demonstrated to not be the case. Even if every commitment made at the 2016 Paris Agreement was met, global warming would still go beyond the 2-degree limit that the summit declared as an essential cap. Furthermore, not a single industrialised country is even on track to meet the commitment that it made in 2016.
Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is a clear indication that capitalist politicians are willing to abandon climate targets in favour of national interests and short-term profit motives. The US is a massive contributor to climate change, ranking second in the world after China, with the US still having a higher rate of emissions of planet-warming gases per capita.
Rather than attempting to tackle this problem, Trump is ignoring the scientific evidence and encouraging further acceleration of fossil fuel and oil extractions as part of his ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ pledge! The Trump administration has also launched attacks on universities, pulling funding from diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes, many of which are based around climate change, which will limit further research into environmental studies.
At a time when global cooperation to end the climate crisis is needed more than ever, Trump’s divisive politics and use of trade tariffs globally make him a clear example of the unplanned chaos that capitalism means for the world today.
Clearly we can’t trust our planet in the hands of the capitalists and their politicians. By fighting to take big businesses into public ownership, including nationalising polluting oil and gas companies under democratic workers’ control and management, the working class could run these industries for social need not profit, and focus on taking co-ordinated steps to make the switch towards environmentally friendly energy sources.
If workers had a democratic say in how society is run, a planned ‘green transition’ away from fossil fuels and towards environmentally friendly alternatives could be achieved without mass job losses for workers in those industries.
Workers’ control
The ‘Lucas Plan’ in the 1970s gives a glimpse of how workers currently employed in environmentally harmful industries could redirect their skills and expertise to lead the charge for a green transition.
Over fifty years ago, workers at Lucas Aerospace – a company making electronic systems for missiles – were threatened with mass redundancies due to deindustrialisation. Instead of accepting these losses, the workers, organised in trade unions, proposed a shift in production from military manufacturing to socially useful goods.
Over 150 ideas with detailed technical designs were included in the plan, offering a glimpse into the opportunities that can arise when workers are given the chance to repurpose their technical expertise into socially useful goods.
Tragically, due to resistance from the management and the lack of workers’ control in the company, the plan was ultimately blocked. Nonetheless, the Lucas Plan is perhaps relevant now more than ever before. It highlights why we need democratic, fighting trade unions to play a central role in the fight against climate change and towards a sustainable future.
The impact of war
This era of capitalist crisis means horror on end – not just seen in the deepening climate crisis, but also in increasing wars, including the genocidal horrors suffered by the Palestinians in Gaza.
War not only displaces millions of people and causes devastating loss of life. It also wreaks havoc on the climate. Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example, has severely damaged biodiversity and inflicted lasting harm on Ukraine’s natural environment.
Examples of capitalist war’s devastating effects on the climate can also be seen throughout history. During the Vietnam War, over 5 million acres of forest and 500,000 acres of farmland were destroyed, with over 400,000 tons of the toxic chemical Napalm being sprayed over the Vietnamese countryside by the US. In Iraq, marshlands were reduced by 90% after President Saddam Hussein ordered major rivers be stopped in order to crush an uprising. Furthermore, Afghanistan has lost nearly 95% of its forest cover in recent decades.
Even during ‘peacetime’, militaries use vast amounts of dirty energy. For example, the US Department of Defense’s 566,000 buildings make up 40% of its fossil fuel consumption. These structures include training centres, dormitories, factories, and other facilities across the department’s nearly 800 bases worldwide. As nations continue to boost military spending in an increasingly multipolar and unstable world, the climate continues to bear the consequences.
Youth vs climate chaos
The message is clear: young people aren’t willing to pay the price for capitalism’s exploitation of the climate, and failure to give us a future. The climate crisis is pushing more and more students and young people into action. As well as countless grassroots youth-led campaigns taking shape in various communities, the ‘School Strike for Climate’ movement saw millions of students across the globe mobilise in protest against climate change, demonstrating that a new generation of young people have been pushed into action. After all, young people are now entering into a world of climate breakdown, increased militarisation, and vast economic inequality. Now, more than ever, young people are seeking an alternative system which can provide a genuine way forwards.
While many young people may have looked to the Green Party, hoping that they may provide an alternative, their actions have fallen short. For example, the party voted through £51 million in cuts to Bristol City Council, a move defended by Green council leader Tony Dyer as a necessity, as he explained in a BBC interview that they were simply having to “work within the constraints that are placed upon us.” This just exposes the Greens’ lack of a clear, transformative vision for a socialist society, which is vital for any party looking to stand up to the capitalist system and its demands that the working class pay for the bosses’ climate catastrophe.
As Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto included a £250 billion green transformation fund, a commitment to a publicly owned national grid, and for the “supply arms of the big six energy companies to be brought into public ownership”. His manifesto, which also included other bold policies such as the scrapping of tuition fees, electrified millions of young people.
Now Corbyn has joined Zarah Sultana in pledging to build a new party to take on Starmer’s Labour. Socialist Students welcomes this as a potential major step forward in fighting climate change and capitalism. As a bare minimum, Corbyn’s green policies from 2019 would be a starting point, from which a mass movement for socialist change, not climate change, could be built.
Under a socialist system, the banks and major industries – including the major energy companies – would be placed in the hands of workers, not the capitalist bosses. By cooperating and discussing together, it would be possible to democratically draw up a plan of production based on human need, including the need for a healthy environment. The world’s massive wealth, resources and technology could be steered towards ensuring we live sustainably. Millions of high-quality, eco-friendly jobs would be created as societies shift rapidly towards green energy. Decisions about where to locate renewable energy production could be made democratically, with proper community consultation.
Socialist Students campaigns at schools, colleges, and universities across the country – to allow young people to make their voices heard in the fight for a viable socialist future, in which the needs of people and the planet which we live on are no longer secondary to profit. If you agree, then join us this term.
Donald Trump has been ever-present in US and world politics for over a decade. Despite losing an election in 2020 he just refused to go away. Why is this? What does Trump represent within American society? And the inevitable question for socialists all around the world – how can Trump be defeated?
The capitalist system is deep in crisis – economic, social, political and environmental. Capitalist leaders across the world, from Trump to Starmer, look to make workers and young people pay for this, and they are hated for it. In the US, Biden’s administration represented price rises and falling wages. Voters rejected that – either by not voting or voting Trump to beat Biden.
Trump has not gone away because he is currently able to capitalise on the problems within American society. What are those problems? America is a society divided by class. Even though he presents as anti-establishment, Trump is a representative of the capitalist class of exploiters, a billionaire son of a millionaire property tycoon. On the other side sits the working class, whose interests are the opposite of the private profit-prioritising capitalist class – but who have no party of their own who can answer Trump’s division and build a united fightback against all his attacks.
Living standards are falling, and people do have a right to be angry because of this. For example, it was estimated by CBS News in August 2024 that 27.1 million have no healthcare coverage. 27.1 million people. This is larger than the population of 22 of the 27 EU member states and not far off 40% of the entire population of the UK.
The American working class has never had a mass party to lead it with a programme representing its needs, such as free healthcare and education. Amid this vacuum today, Trump, despite representing American capitalism, finds an echo among workers looking for an alternative to the current status quo. He does so partly by expressing rage against the establishment but links that with populist, reactionary messaging to divert the rightful anger of millions of Americans about their dire standards of living.
Trump promised American workers that he would improve their living standards, but his measures will not end the crisis of the capitalist system. In fact, he will accelerate the crises. For example, his tariffs have the aim of increasing America’s share of the world’s wealth, but they will increase the costs of goods for US workers. Tariffs and other policies will also ratchet up tensions and crisis across the world.
Trump blames immigrants, LGBT+ people and any other marginalised groups he can think of for the problems of American capitalist society. His mantra is to divide and rule to sow division within the working class so that he and his billionaire friends can continue to exploit without a fightback.
Trump does not answer the anger and frustrations millions of working-class Americans have. His programme of privatisation and tax cuts for the mega-rich only makes things worse.
Whereas former Democratic Presidents such as Obama and Biden would performatively act as ‘progressives’ while bombing innocent people in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., or enabling the genocide in Gaza, Trump and his acolytes will happily boast about turning Gaza into a ‘riviera’.
Role of the Democrats
The Democrats are no alternative within American society. They also aided the genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people. They had a majority in both branches of Congress (the Senate and House of Representatives) from 2020-2022, and have held similar majorities many times previously. What have they delivered for the American working class? No universal, nationalised healthcare system. No codified abortion rights. No enshrined rights for all LGBT+ people. They bailed out the corrupt banks after they crashed the world economy in 2008 while workers faced job losses and poverty pay. Remember Kamala Harris had more billionaires supporting her (83) than Donald Trump (52) according to Forbes and the Independent. The Democrats are deeply wedded to the exploitation of the working class and poor both at home in the US and abroad.
Should socialists support the Democratic party as a lesser evil? It is understandable when faced with the stark reality of a Trump presidency many will say “vote the lesser evil.” But this is not a solution for the American working class. What is needed is the building of a party of the working class, which gives people something to actively want to support.
Self-described socialists have run within the Democratic party in the past, most famously Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and now Zohran Mamdani. Sanders in 2016 and 2020 ran for the presidential nomination and saw mass enthusiasm for his programme of free healthcare and education and a $15-an-hour minimum wage. What was the response of the Democratic party? To block him from being the presidential challenger who could have beaten Trump, and put up an establishment representative in Hilary Clinton instead.
Mamdani
It is important that the lessons are learned by the supporters of Zohran Mamdani. Zohran won the Democratic nomination for the Mayor of New York City in June 2025 with an incredible 570,000 votes.
Mamdani’s programme promises reforms that are hugely popular: a rent freeze, building public housing, a $30-an-hour minimum wage by 2030, free buses, free childcare, city-owned grocery stores with price caps, and increasing taxes on the rich. He has also been a prominent opponent of the Israeli state’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Significantly he won the votes in some districts that voted for Trump in last year’s presidential election, indicating the potential for socialist candidates to cut across support for Trump in the working class.
Since then, many high-profile Democratic party stalwarts have refused to endorse him. His main competitor in the primary Andrew Cuomo – a former Democratic Governor of the state of New York mired in scandal but still backed by a $25 million ‘super PAC’ and endorsed by Bill Clinton and hedge fund billionaires – has announced he will run as an independent candidate.
Yet again we see the capitalist establishment in the Democratic party attempting to sabotage anyone who dares to mention the word socialism. The capitalist establishment, including Trump, will do all in its power to prevent a radical reformer winning control of the biggest city in the US, the seat of all the main capitalist institutions – Wall Street and the financial centre. While many sections of big business have accommodated to Trump and his unorthodox approach, despite backing Harris in the election, the situation is very different when the anti-establishment challenge comes from the left.
This must be a fight for the building of an political voice of the working class, independent of big business interests. The pro-capitalist Democratic leadership will aim to either neutralise him by watering down his programme or will outright sabotage him.
Mamdani must mobilise the local workers’ movement in New York in support of this programme. This is crucial as the trade unions are the principal organisations of the working class. If elected, they have the ability to help carry out Mamdani’s programme by, for example, withdrawing their labour to emphasise their support for Mamdani.
An example for Mamdani is in Liverpool, when socialists led the city council in 1983-85 and fought Thatcher for millions of pounds to fund what the Liverpool working class needed – including 5,000 council homes, nurseries, sports facilities, and apprenticeships. The struggle included strikes as well as trade union and community delegates being central to determining council policy.
Workers fighting back
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are 14.3 million workers in trade unions in the US. Imagine the power of a party which brought together the millions of organised workers across the unions, giving them a unified political voice.
Even before Trump’s re-election there has been positive developments within the organised workers’ movement. In workplaces there have been strike action and trade union campaigns across the country in recent years. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in its most recent reports from the year 2023, 477,900 US workers took strike action, the largest number since 2018. This included a strike movement in Starbucks, which is still ongoing with Starbucks refusing to recognise the workers’ right to unionise; the SAG-AFTRA strike of film and TV workers in July-November 2023; and the September-October 2023 strike movement of the United Auto Workers against the three largest automaker companies: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.
It is significant that a number of workers in the US, before Trump’s re-election, took strike action for the first time. The consequence of this will be the development of new working-class organisers in union branches, workplaces and communities, and a greater confidence in the ability of the working class to fight independently in its own interests. A stronger basis exists therefore with these new working-class, battle-hardened activists to combat the attacks of the Trump government. The potential for victories can be seen with a January-February 2025 strike of the Oregon Nurses Association, with the workers there winning a 22% pay increase alongside better terms and conditions for employment.
In addition, on the streets we have seen three particularly noteworthy events in the only seven months since Trump’s inauguration. On 5 April 2025 there was a synchronised ‘day of action’ in all 50 states, comprising 1,300 demonstrations and events protesting the anti-working-class policies of the Trump administration. The ‘No Kings’ demonstrations (so titled because of Trump’s increasing use of executive power to push through legislation) on 14 June included 2,100 events and demonstrations, with an estimated five million taking part. There was also the uprising in California against ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) on 6 June amidst raids against people of both legal and illegal migrant status in Los Angeles. All of this without an existing political party that can pull together all of the struggles of the working class! Imagine the potential if such a force, armed with a socialist programme, was able to lead the way.
The importance of the trade unions, and the millions they represent, is that they are the main organisations of the working class. A collective voice for the trade unions in a new party would put the working class in the driving seat.
The job of socialists in America is to fight for a mass party of the working class, which would be capable of providing the leadership to the millions of angry working class people in the US. We as socialists internationally can aid this fight by building mass parties of the working class in each of our respective countries, in doing so providing a potential model for US workers to follow.
In addition we can stand up against Trump by protesting him and the capitalist system in decline that he represents. Socialist Students is leading such a campaign across the country with our walkout and protest campaign against Trump’s September UK visit (see next page). The building of mass workers’ parties, the arming of the trade unions with a fighting strategy, and building an international socialist movement is what is necessary to defeat the barbarism of Trump and the chaos of capitalism that he represents.
Starmer’s Labour government has confirmed its plans for university tuition fees to go up every year. Left up to Labour, our fees will rise to well over £10,000 by 2029. That’s after fees have already gone up this term – the first rise in almost a decade.
Meanwhile, cuts to our education keep coming. Over half of universities are set to record ‘deficit budgets’ this year. Uni bosses have announced 15,000 job cuts in the last year, destroying thousands of courses and even entire departments in dozens of universities.
Why should we pay the price, at a time when the rich have never been richer? The FTSE 100 biggest corporations in Britain have been paying out around £85 billion annually to their shareholders. Students and staff need to unite in a movement that could put that wealth in our hands in order to fully fund education. That would include making education free for all, by abolishing tuition fees and providing maintenance grants that actually cover students’ living costs.
Socialist Students initiated the Funding Not Fees campaign as a means to get students organised alongside staff in a movement for fully funded, free education. As well as holding protests on dozens of campuses, and supporting workers striking back, a key part of the campaign has been lobbying MPs – fighting for our movement to have a political voice.
That fight could be massively boosted by the existence of Your Party, launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. Over 800,000 signed up to find out more within a week of its announcement.
When Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, his anti-austerity, anti-war policies enthused hundreds of thousands of young people. A major reason for that was his policy for free education in the 2017 and 2019 general elections.
Now students have the chance for there to be a mass party that will fight fees and cuts, and fund education by making the super-rich pay.
Just the prospect of a new party fighting ‘for the many, not the few’ has Labour under pressure. At the same time as raising fees, the government has been forced to announce the reintroduction of maintenance grants for tens of thousands of students. While this is far from adequate, it is nonetheless a concession to the anger of millions of working-class and young people, who are desperately looking for a political alternative to Starmer’s war and austerity agenda.
Socialist Students members are joining Your Party and will do all we can for it to fight for free education, and a real socialist alternative to the misery that capitalism means for working-class and young people.
Build ‘Your Party’ to fight for free education and socialism
Starmer’s Labour government has confirmed its plans for university tuition fees to go up every year. Left up to Labour, our fees will rise to well over £10,000 by 2029. That’s after fees have already gone up this term – the first rise in almost a decade.
And what do students get? Not only are we set to graduate with even more student debt, our maintenance loans don’t even cover the cost of housing, let alone other essentials. Even those receiving the maximum maintenance loan this year would need to take 20 hours of paid work per week just to reach a basic standard of living.
Some vice chancellors are even looking at ‘mergers’ with other universities. But why should they get to decide this over the heads of thousands of students and staff? Their record is one of running our universities into the ground, in collaboration with successive Tory and Labour governments. We can’t trust any of them with our education, because they all accept a capitalist system that puts the profits of the super-rich before the needs of the vast majority – including the right to a decent education.
Workers have fought back – students can organise too!
By taking strike action last year, university workers were able to halt planned cuts in several universities. In Scotland and Wales, staff also won millions of pounds in extra government funding through their strikes.
Imagine how much more funding could be forced from the government if there was strike action on all campuses across the country! That’s why Socialist Students supports university workers taking strike action, including supporting a vote to strike in the current UK-wide strike ballots by four campus unions (UCU, Unison, Unite, EIS).
Socialist Students members will be on the picket line supporting staff in our shared struggle for funding, not fees and cuts. We campaign for student unions to be democratic, fighting organisations that give us a voice – including committing to building student solidarity whenever staff take strike action for better pay, conditions and funding.
As a step towards the national representation students really deserve, even a handful of SUs linking up nationwide to coordinate campaigns for proper funding – not more fees and cuts – could have a big impact.
We won’t accept their crisis
The university sector is in a deep funding crisis. But the only ‘solution’ offered by this pro-big business Labour government is to raise fees and encourage even more cuts, pushing the burden even further onto staff and students.
Why should we pay the price, at a time when the rich have never been richer? The FTSE 100 biggest corporations in Britain have been paying out around £85 billion annually to their shareholders. Students and staff need to unite in a movement that could put that wealth in our hands in order to fully fund education. That would include making education free for all, by abolishing tuition fees and providing maintenance grants that actually cover students’ living costs.
If education was fully funded, university managements would not be incentivised to invest our tuition fees in arms manufacturers and other shady companies in order to boost income. They would have no justifications for making cuts. Student housing could be massively expanded and improved, with rent controls introduced to ensure no student is paying the majority of their income on a place to live.
Your Party must seriously fight for free education
Socialist Students initiated the Funding Not Fees campaign last year, as a means to get students organised alongside staff in a movement for fully funded, free education. As well as holding protests on dozens of campuses, a key part of the campaign has been lobbying MPs – fighting for our movement to have a political voice.
When Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, his anti-austerity, anti-war policies enthused hundreds of thousands of young people. A major reason for that was his offer of free education in the 2017 and 2019 general elections.
Now students have the chance for there to be a mass party that will fight fees and cuts, and fund education by making the super-rich pay.
Just the prospect of a new party fighting ‘for the many, not the few’ has Labour under pressure. At the same time as raising fees, the government has been forced to announce the reintroduction of maintenance grants for tens of thousands of students. While this is far from adequate, it is nonetheless a concession to the anger of millions of working-class and young people, who are desperately looking for a political alternative to Starmer’s war and austerity agenda.
Socialist Students members are joining Your Party and will do all we can for it to fight for free education, and a real socialist alternative to the misery that capitalism means for working-class and young people.
For a mass weekend demonstration against Labour austerity
Socialist Students is supporting trade union activists calling on the TUC (the organisation bringing together 5.5 million trade union members) to name the date for a mass weekend demonstration against Labour austerity – ideally Saturday 22 November, just before the Autumn Budget on Wednesday 26 November.
We think Corbyn, Sultana and Your Party members should amplify the call for such a weekend demonstration, which could act as a launchpad for sustained trade union action in defence of workers and young people – including against tuition fee rises and cuts to university jobs.
What better way to announce Your Party as force through which young people could fight for a real future, a week before the founding conference on November 29-30?
Build a movement for:
No fee rises! Scrap tuition fees and cancel student debt
Bring back maintenance grants for all students, rising with inflation
Stop all cuts and closures on campus
Rent controls in student accommodation
End low pay and precarious employment
Divestment from arms and big business – no place for profiteers from war and exploitation on our campus
A political voice for students that fights to take the wealth off the 1% and for socialism
Zack Polanski addressed a meeting at the student fringe of the World Transformed event at Manchester Students Union on 11 October.
Manchester Socialist Students member, Robbie Davidson was able to ask a question in the discussion:
“Hi, I’m Robbie from Socialist Students. We welcome many of the things you’ve said Zack. But the Green Party has over 800 councillors across the country. Unfortunately, where the Greens have control of the councils, like in Bristol, they’ve carried out £50 million worth of cuts whilst simultaneously adding £60 million to the council reserves.
“The Green Party has the opportunity to implement a no-cuts budget in Bristol, by using those reserves, alongside the council’s borrowing powers, to fight austerity, not in words, but in action. Building council houses, funding local services, then fighting central government to restore the money. This approach of setting legally balanced no-cuts budgets is in line with the official policies of the local authority trade unions: GMB, Unite and Unison.
“Zack, will you instruct your over 800 councillors across the country, to fight for these no-cuts budgets?”
Polanski’s response: “If councils do no-cuts budgets, lets talk about Bristol in particular, what happens is, they effectively down tools, and then the government comes in and then do all the cuts anyway.
“And the councillors actually have nothing to do about it, and it can be even worse than actually making the cuts in the first place.”
Ultimately, Polanski’s response of hiding behind the threat of government commissioners, is an excuse not to fight back. Why should democratically elected councillors follow orders from unelected commissioners anyway?
Councils defying government austerity, funding services and building council homes, would be hugely popular. That would make it very difficult for the government to get away with taking over the council and ‘doing the cuts anyway’.
Bristol’s Green leader of the council told the BBC last year that “the reality is we have to work within the constraints that are placed upon us.” Why accept the ‘constraints’ of a capitalist system that forces the working class to pay? The Greens’ inability or refusal to fight for an alternative to capitalism will lead to them holding back working-class struggle.
Socialist Students members prepared for the meeting by drawing up a model question that we shared among those of us in attendance to increase the chances of it being asked. This ended up being the correct tactic as, of the six questions asked, only three were taken from the floor. The other three were prepared questions from the chair of the meeting.
Adam Powell-Davies, Socialist Students national organiser
The Labour government has announced that it will bring back maintenance grants for tens of thousands of students from ‘low-income backgrounds’ who opt for so-called ‘priority courses’.
Labour has not yet announced how much grant money students would receive, nor whether the grants would be paid on top of the existing maintenance loan allowance. But if the introduction of grants means that some of the poorest students have more money in their pockets, and leave university or college with less debt, then that is a victory.
Reintroducing maintenance grants, even in this very limited current form, was mentioned nowhere in Labour’s general election manifesto last year. This latest announcement has to be seen as a concession to the widespread anger that has developed against Labour since then, as millions of working-class and young people correctly see Starmer’s government as doing nothing but continuing the Tories’ war and austerity agenda.
Jeremy Corbyn
Labour’s hand has also been forced by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ announcement. As leader of the Labour Party, Corbyn inspired millions of young people with his offer of free education: scrapping tuition fees and introducing maintenance grants for all. A new party fighting for free education as part of a socialist programme to transform young people’s lives today would gain massive youth support – and Labour knows it.
Just the prospect of a new party fighting ‘for the many, not the few’ has Labour under pressure. At the same time, there is the prospect of a new round of national strike action in further and higher education, as the University and College Union (UCU) launches ballots this month. Now is the time for students to join the fight – to go on the offensive and fight for what we need by making the super-rich pay, not workers and young people!
We could start by demanding the government rolls out its maintenance grant plans immediately, rather than waiting until ‘the end of the Parliament’ as is currently planned. We should also demand that grants are made available for all courses, not just so-called ‘priority courses’ deemed most important by big business and their politicians.
Another important battleground will be the level of grants paid to students. The current level of maintenance support for students is woefully inadequate, whether that comes in the form of a loan, or as a mixture of a loan and a grant (as is the case for Welsh students studying in Wales, for example). A student receiving the maximum maintenance loan would still need to work 20 hours per week to meet a “basic standard of income”, according to the Higher Education Policy Institute.
Explaining the targeted rollout of maintenance grants at Labour conference, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson declared: “Students’ time at college or university should be spent learning or training, not working every hour”. Great! In which case, let’s make sure that maintenance grants are made available to all students.
Let’s also make sure these new grants cover the full cost of living and studying. That would also stop student loans saddling us with a lifetime of debt after we graduate.
The shareholders of the FTSE100 companies get payouts of around £85 billion every year. Instead of charging a levy on international fees to provide grants to a fraction of ‘home’ students, students should unite in a mass movement to demand free, fully funded education for all, paid for by taking the wealth from the super-rich.
Funding Not Fees
These are the kinds of ideas Socialist Students societies will be fighting for on campus with the ‘Funding Not Fees’ campaign this term. As part of this, we will be organising lobbies of MPs ahead of the 26 November Budget, for them to raise an amendment calling for free, fully funded education, including the introduction of living maintenance grants for all students.
We will also be raising the campaign in Your Party meetings between now and the founding conference, to make sure the call for free education forms a key part of a new mass socialist party giving a voice to young people and the working class.
Socialist Students 