1. The war in Ukraine is a year old. We responded to the initial invasion with this assessment: ‘The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February was an act of imperialist aggression and a violation of the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination. For Ukrainians it is a war of national self-defence. At the same time from the side of Western imperialist powers led by the United States and organised through NATO it is a proxy war against Russia. The war is both an imperialist invasion of a former colony and part of an inter-imperialist conflict between the US and Russia with their allies. We are against both imperial powers. We express our solidarity with the Ukrainian people, supporting their right to resist the invasion. While doing so, we also oppose NATO and its expansion to the East.’ https://internationalsocialists.org/announcements/ist-statement-on-the-war-in-ukraine

2. Developments over the past year have vindicated this analysis. ...

1. We declare our solidarity with all the victims of the terrible earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria on Monday 6 February. This is a huge human catastrophe. The death toll has already reached over 33,000, but insurance companies are assuming as many as 200,000 deaths. But this is not a ‘natural disaster’. Earthquakes are inevitable in regions such as this where they have been taking place since antiquity. The terrible death toll, however, is a consequence of human action and inaction, shaped by a capitalist system based on exploitation and driven by the competitive accumulation of capital.

2. Action – the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, based on the neoliberal Islamist AKP but now in coalition with the fascist MHP, has been in power in Turkey for more than 20 years. The economic growth of which Erdoğan boasts has been driven by a construction boom that has enriched ...

An online event hosted by the International Socialist Tendency. Speakers include:

· Muzan Alneel, Sudan
· Tuna Emren, Turkey
· Camilla Royle, Britain
· Gyekye Tanoh, Ghana

This year the UN’s climate conference COP27 takes place in the luxury resort of Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt and will be chaired by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. Sisi’s counter-revolutionary regime has viciously repressed protesters and activists. His regime helped destroy the Egyptian Revolution which gave millions of people hope when it brought down the dictator Mubarak in 2011.

Delegates will meet in the midst of a deepening climate crisis. From famine in the Horn of Africa, floods in Pakistan and Nigeria to wildfires in Europe and hurricanes in the Americas, 2022 has seen environmental disasters in almost every part of the world, which have hit the poorest people first and hardest, impacting across lines of class, race and gender.

Today, environmental movements cannot have any illusions ...

1. The victory of the parties of the right in the Italian elections means that for the first time since the fall of the dictatorships in the 1970s a fascist party will head a European government. In October 2022, a hundred years after Mussolini’s March on Rome, a fascist will once again be prime minister of Italy.

Giorgia Meloni is a skilful politician but she is no mere ‘conservative’, as the media endlessly describe her. She helped to create the Fratelli d’Italia as a rejection of the old fascist MSI’s evolution towards integration into mainstream bourgeois parliamentary politics. Her speeches are full of classical fascist rhetoric and coded antisemitism – in defence of family and nation against ‘cosmopolitan’ financial speculators.

Responsibility for this frightening development lies firmly at the door of the mainstream parties – notably the centre-left Partito Democratico and the supposedly ‘anti-establishment’ Movimento Cinque Stelle – that ...