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 ...

The organisations of the International Socialist Tendency were saddened to learn of the death at the age of 80 of the French revolutionary leader Alain Krivine. For us he always represented the indomitable spirit of the great revolt by French workers and students in May-June 1968. See the tribute from the British Socialist Workers Party here

Despite disagreements between the IST and the Fourth International, we had the opportunity to work together on many occasions. Alain was in London in 1968 actively supporting the LSE occupation and building the movement against the Vietnam war alongside IS comrades. Many decades later, we marched together in the streets of Genoa building the new anticapitalist movement.

But above all we are in debt to Alain and his comrades in the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire – the starting point of the LCR and now the NPA – for leading the way in reviving revolutionary ...

1. 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.

2. The inter-imperialist character of this conflict is confirmed by the policy of the Kyiv government, which is to draw the West into the shooting war. This is, ...

1- The crisis over Ukraine has brought Europe closer to a terrifying war. In its essence it is a conflict between the most powerful imperialist bloc in the world, the United States and its European allies, and Russia, a weaker but still vicious imperialist power. For both sides, Ukraine is merely a pawn. Working-class people have no interest in the victory of either side in this conflict. Revolutionary socialists in the states involved in this dispute must give priority to opposing their ‘own’ governments.

2- This particular crisis was sparked by the decision of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to concentrate troops on the border with Ukraine. He justified this threatening move partly by appealing to Great Russian nationalist mythology about the historic links between Russia and Ukraine and partly by repeating his long-standing grievances about the US policy of expanding NATO and the European Union eastwards. He ...