Fascism seeks to annihilate working class organisation and obliterate any sort of genuine democracy. But in order to attract supporters it always puts forward a fake revolutionary veneer.

It denounces the present set-up as corrupt, elitist and dominated by “unpatriotic” elements.

Its solution is usually to use racism as a pathway to a “purified” state purged of foreigners and scapegoats such as Jews or Muslims or Roma or disabled people.

The German revolutionary Clara Zetkin summarises fascism as “an amalgam of brutal, terrorist violence together with deceptive revolutionary phraseology, linking up demagogically with the needs and moods of broad masses of producers”.

At a time of deep social and economic crisis, fascists advance by offering a critique of what exists at the top.

The clearest example is how the Nazis built their organisation in the 1920s and 1930s.

They denounced the parliamentary set-up as rotten and deceitful and promised a better future for the German worker.

One wing of the Nazis, grouped around Gregor Strasser, took this further.

In a speech to the German parliament in 1925 he said, “We National Socialists want the economic revolution involving the nationalisation of the economy.

“In place of an exploitative capitalist economic system a real socialism, maintained not by a soulless Jewish-materialist outlook but by the believing, sacrificial, and unselfish old German community sentiment.”

This “anti-capitalism” was always false. Historian Robert Paxton highlights that “even at their most radical, early fascist programmes and rhetoric had never attacked wealth and capitalism”.

What future does capitalism offer young people? The chasm of wealth inequality grows by the day, as the wealth of the billionaires soars, while wars and climate change inflict misery and threaten the futures of billions of working-class and young people across the globe.

We’re worried about how to make ends meet, and the state of our public services. Travel fares are sky high, while public transport routes have been cut, meaning many of us have to walk for hours to get home from work and college.

Our NHS has been cut to the bone, making it harder than ever to simply get an appointment. The housing crisis makes it impossible for us to live fully independent lives. No wonder 1 in 4 students now face mental health issues.

Our schools, colleges and universities have gone massively underfunded for years. Students used to get grants, not high-interest loans. Now we have our services and courses cut, while greedy bosses make hundreds of thousands of pounds off our education.

Why is this happening? It’s because the system we live under – capitalism – is organised around creating profit for a tiny handful at the top of society over improving the lives of ordinary people.

It’s time to get organised and fight back.

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A word from me- comrade Squid:

hi community, Last week, I had the opportunity to lead off a discussion at a socialist party meeting on the crucial role of student movements and their political awakening. To summarize:

Socialism is born from the seeds of political imagination, and students are full of imagination. We witness their energy in the anti-war movements and in student unions, the EMA protests, where they fought tirelessly against the injustices of our society and government.

These students are on the brink of entering a world burdened by debt, working 8-hour days, 5 days a week, just to maintain a shred of dignity. Many will see their passions fade, the fire within them dimming, as narcissistic elites hoard the collective wealth of the world.

As socialists, it is our duty to reach out to this new generation, to struggle alongside them before they too lose that spark—the spark that can ignite a brighter future for our society.

In May, members of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) elected a campaigning National Executive Committee (NEC) – a coalition for change. But this new NEC majority has so far been blocked by the general secretary and president, both of whom are in the misnamed Left Unity group.

At an emergency NEC on 27 August, the NEC majority submitted the motion below, rejecting the government’s 5% pay remit and preparing a strategy to campaign.

At the meeting, yet again, the national president, Martin Cavanagh, ruled out the motions and amendments from the NEC majority coalition. This is an outrageous abuse of presidential powers, which has again prevented full open and democratic discussion at the leading elected lay body of the union.

This is why there are growing calls for a Special Delegate Conference to allow reps and members to debate the way forward on vital issues such as pay, jobs, pensions and cuts, and to reassert democratic lay control over the union leadership.

The Teledyne Four, who targeted an arms company near Bradford, spoke to Socialist Worker

Four Palestine campaigners walked free from Bradford Crown Court on Friday after a jury failed to reach a verdict.

The group—known as the Teledyne Four—were released on bail and face a retrial on 9 February 2026.

The prosecution charged Laila Gao, Ruby Hamill, Daniel Jones and Najam Shah with causing £571,383 of damage to the Teledyne factory.

The plant in nearby Shipley supplies surveillance and targeting technology to the Israeli military.

Build the socialist opposition

As the Socialist goes to press, Keir Starmer faced a ‘showdown’ in parliament as the hated cut to the winter fuel payment for pensioners went to a vote.

It is being dubbed as his ‘first political crisis’. 53 Labour MPs didn’t vote with the government.

The government has little regard for the crisis facing the 10 million people who will no longer get the £300 fuel payment from this winter.

The real ‘difficult decision’ being made, is by the millions of older people who were already struggling to pay their bills, now having to calculate which, if any, rooms they can afford to heat.

Starmer is now governing a country with the sixth biggest economy in the world, and 165 billionaires. What does it say about in whose interests Labour is governing, when they decide we can’t afford to heat older people’s homes?

No one is fooled by the crocodile tears of cabinet members lining up to back Starmer’s claim that they ‘have no choice’. Deaths among the elderly fell by 10,000 following the introduction of the Winter Fuel Payment.

The BBC has revealed that the biggest landlord in parliament, Labour MP Jas Athwal, has tenants in some of his 15 properties that are battling mould and ant infestation. He has since thrown his property manager under the bus, who tenants reported threatened them with eviction when they complained. And to top it off, the properties aren’t even on the landlord register – something he introduced as leader of Redbridge council!

People up and down the country will have similar stories to the tenants in Athwal’s properties – but without the extra public scrutiny to shame their landlords into acting.

Keir Starmer’s Labour cannot be relied on to fight for people struggling with sky-high rents, dodgy landlords and unsafe properties – over 40 of his MPs make over £10,000 renting properties they own.

We need a new mass workers’ party – one that will fight for a mass council house building programme and end the housing nightmare.

Complicit in war crimes

Liberal commentators have been quick to conclude that Britain is experiencing some kind of ‘Damascene conversion’. Starmer’s Labour, they believe, has finally realised that the UK might be complicit in Israeli war crimes!

Seemingly, unlike the previous Tory administration, who made it their business to show total disregard for international law (over the Rwanda deportation scheme, for example), ‘Sir’ Keir’s Labour is willing to take a brave stand against Netanyahu’s slaughter.

Not quite so. As Labour Party hacks have hastily made clear, this move does not amount to anything that could be considered an ‘arms embargo’.

To eliminate any doubt, Lammy went further: the decision by the British government was “a forward-looking evaluation, not a determination of innocence or guilt”.

Like the true snakeoil statesman that he is, Lammy is trying to have it both ways: admitting the likelihood of serious offences by Israel, but administering nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

The Tory government, Kensington and Chelsea council and cladding bosses ‘all contributed’ to the disaster The Grenfell inquiry’s final report paints a detailed picture of the corruption, greed and lies that murdered the 72 residents of the west London tower block.

The report into the 2017 fire, published on Wednesday, highlights who’s guilty. “The simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable and those who died in the fire were failed over a number of years and in a number of ways,” it says.

The Tory government, Chelsea and Kensington Borough council, the Tenant Management Organisation (TMO) and building bosses all have blood on their hands.

Inquiry chair Martin Moore-Bick said that all “contributed in one way or another”. He added that it was mostly through “incompetence”, but also through “dishonestly and greed”.

A word from Squid:

Apologies for mainly posting news from my affiliated party. As a member, it’s difficult to find stories from other groups like the SWP, RCP, and so on. I will make an extra effort to post from more sources, as I don’t believe focusing on a single party aligns with our ideals.

The 1917 revolution in Russia was not solely born from the Bolsheviks, but from many socialists, anarchists, libertarians, and non-political workers. In this way, I hope to help members of our federverse find a place for themselves—whether with the SP, SWP, RCP, or even unions and smaller groups.

It’s all well and good to be a socialist online and in our homes, but what difference can we make with all this knowledge if there’s no action?

I also hope this does not take away from the article above that has been written SWP.

All the best and solidarity.
Squid

CrossCountry train guards (train managers/senior conductors) in the RMT rail union are currently being balloted for strike action and action short of strike, due to managers working trains with hugely inflated payments for doing so.

Over the last two years, CrossCountry recruited large numbers of ‘contingency guards’ to work trains when a guard is not available. A problem caused by not recruiting enough guards to cover the service needed in the first place! A few of these contingency guards have been guards before becoming managers. Others are office-based, with little experience of working trains.

They are being offered payments of up to £650 to work a shift at weekends with lesser, but still inflated, amounts during the week. This is in addition to their normal pay.

This is many times more than guards are offered to work overtime. Rather than negotiate reasonable enhancements for overtime work with experienced guards, the company wants to take this course of action.

Guards currently only get paid normal time for any overtime and the company’s approach is therefore causing much anger and making guards feel completely undervalued.

The ballot closes on 12 September and we need to push for a large ‘yes’ vote. The company cannot get away with treating its staff this way!

The first possible date for any strike is 26 September.

Keir Starmer has said ‘there is a deep rot in the heart of British institutions’. I assumed he meant the Labour Party and the fact that its MPs have declared tens of thousands of pounds of donations from energy companies since the election, the government subsequently hiking households’ energy bills by £149 a year on average.

As recently as 2023, Labour pledged an immediate freeze on prices. That’s changed now they are in office getting their MP’s salary of £91,000 plus travel, living, eating, heating and office costs covered, with cabinet ministers earning £158,000, also with cushy expenses.

MPs should take the average wage of a skilled worker, like Militant MP, now Socialist Party National Committee member, Dave Nellist did in the 1980s. We need a workers’ MP on a workers’ wage, not fat cats in suits who laugh in our faces every time they go to the bank at our expense.

To add insult to injury, last year the eye-watering bonuses of the ‘big six’ energy bosses totalled enough to power 23,000 homes for an entire year! By cutting CEO’s pay, companies like Shell and Paypoint could save money, they could also spend less paying for the breaking and entering of 4,000 homes to install prepayment meters.

And when they’re found to have broken so-called market rules on competition set by ineffectual government regulator Ofgem, they are told to donate a few million quid to Ofgem’s ‘voluntary redress fund’.

At 3am bank holiday Monday, a major fire consumed another London tower block covered in flammable cladding.

Residents pounded on their neighbours’ doors to get them to flee, reporting that no fire alarms could be heard.

80 people fled into the street in Dagenham, east London, relying on each other for their safety. Firefighters risked their own lives to save 20 more survivors from the seven-storey building. Many have lost all their possessions, their children traumatised for life.

The London Fire Brigade shed 27 fire appliances, closed ten fire stations and cut 552 firefighters when Boris Johnson was London Mayor. Labour’s Sadiq Khan has not reversed these cuts during his time in office, vital response times have increased to a record high.

One month after Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party was ‘swept to power’ by a paltry 20% of the electorate – the lowest support base of any government since the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1918 – violent protests and riots, instigated by far-right groups, broke out across the country. For those trapped in asylum-seekers’ hostels or mosques under brutal attack from gangs of rioters, the experience was terrifying. More generally, many Black, Asian and Muslim people feel that their safety is increasingly under threat. Tell Mama, a monitoring group tracking Islamophobic hate crimes, reported a five-fold increase in threats to Muslims compared to the same time last year.

The absolute numbers involved even peripherally in the riots were small, probably less than 15,000 nationwide. This is far fewer than those who came out on the streets in counter-protests or – for example – the many tens of thousands who peacefully marched for Gaza on the same Saturday as the right-wing riots started to spread, or the 50,000 who took part in Trans Pride the week before. Not one word, however, of the Gaza demo featured in the capitalist media; whereas the riots were at the top of the news bulletins every day for a week, adding to their momentum.

Unusually, however, the large anti-racist counter-protests on 7 August did top news reports, with overwhelmingly positive coverage, even from the most rabidly right-wing capitalist newspapers. In a total volte-face the headline on the front page of the Daily Mail, for example, was the ‘Night Anti-Hate Marchers Faced Down Thugs’. (8 August) This, of course, from the rag which, alongside numerous Tory politicians, has routinely referred to the overwhelmingly peaceful mass protests against the slaughter in Gaza over the past ten months as ‘hate marches’.