The Communist

AI vs state bureaucracy After many hard fought class battles, the workers of Britain are – on paper – supposedly owed many benefits and protections against their employers. But the class struggle never ends. By constructing an intentionally Byzantine bureaucracy, the ruling class has prevented exhausted, confused British workers from claiming up to £20 billion in benefits they are owed each year.

Ask pretty much any worker or young person today if the system is broken – if something needs to fundamentally change – and they will say ‘yes’. Crisis, war, and revolution: this is what defines the period we’re living through. Millions of workers and youth are searching for the answers to how we can change things. With this in mind, the release of the new edition of Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For could not have come at a better time.

It hasn’t been a good summer for Nigel Farage and Reform UK. From riding high in the polls at the start of the year, Reform has now slumped down to around 23 percent – sliding behind Andy Burnham’s Labour, and sitting neck-and-neck with Kemi Badenoch’s Tories. Farage’s party suffered defeat in the bellwether by-election in Makerfield, and received a paltry result in the Manchester-wide mayoral election, where Reform’s hard-right challenger Restore Britain made sizeable gains.

On 28 August, in a social media post, Trump announced what he described as “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” by which the US takes majority control over 65 billion barrels of oil in Venezuela.

In his , Hegel remarked that “it was not so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated.” A similar thing could be said about war, which – for all its horrors and barbarities – has shaped the world in ways good as well as bad. History almost appears to us as an endless series of armed conflicts: wars of imperialist domination; wars of national defence and liberation; colonial and slave wars; and, of course, civil wars.

At the moment, AI is acting as a prism through which all the worst parts of capitalism are concentrated. In the world of art, it is revealing a sharp cultural decline and intensifying feelings of alienation amongst workers and youth. There is a great deal of anger and moral indignation around the question of AI-generated art, which is understandable given its terrible quality, and the threat it poses to the livelihood of artists.

Facebook Twitter/X Reddit WhatsApp Messenger Email Print We started this podcast a year ago and said in our first ever introduction: it’s time to get real and get revolutionary. Demanding the whole earth and striving for the “impossible” is the only realistic way forward for young people today. In this episode, we cover the Gen-Z revolts that took place this summer, why communism isn’t utopian, how the left has failed to capitalise on young people’s anger, and what we intend to build instead.

Last month, 200,000 Unison council and school workers were ballotted for strike action – demanding a 10 percent pay rise (or £3,000, whichever was greater), in addition to a £15 per hour minimum wage. A national action of this proportion could have raised the sights of the whole working class, putting the question of fighting the cost-of-living crisis through methods of class struggle on the agenda.

As thousands of students received their A-level and GCSE results last month – preparing to attend universities and colleges around the country – the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) has also been preparing to make a splash on campus this autumn. Having established ourselves as the foremost political organisation among students, organised on some 48 campuses around the country, we are getting ready to utilise our forces to put communist ideas on the map like never before.

Silvia Federici has become one of the most widely read ‘socialist feminists’ of the last fifty years. But is her explanation of women’s oppression Marxist, and does it work? Sarah Vedrovitch examines Federici’s ideas on housework, social reproduction and the origins of capitalism, comparing them with the revolutionary conclusions of Marx and Engels on freeing women. Frederici imagines she is building on Marx and Engels, looking at capitalism through a lens forgotten by orthodox Marxists.