The late, late capitalism show

A tangle of seemingly disconnected signals emerged from the sequence of elections in 2024, encompassing the dramatic victory of Donald Trump in the United States presidential elections as well as Labour leader Keir Starmer’s landslide in Britain.1 One of the tasks for this journal is to understand how these signals relate to deeper shifts within the political economy of capitalism, and how this can inform socialist practice. This analysis offers some initial thoughts, in the hope of stimulating further discussion.

What was neoliberalism?

One tradition characterising this journal is resistance to nostalgia for earlier periods in capitalism’s history. Our long-standing critique of Soviet bureaucratic state capitalism immunised us against the notion that “statisation” was synonymous with socialism.2 Beyond the Soviet Union, a wider turn towards state capitalist methods began in the first quarter of the 20th century, accelerating during the slump of the 1930s and the Second World War. After 1945, the state continued to play a central role in economic life. Stalinism triumphed in Eastern Europe and, after 1949, China, while various forms of Keynesianism held ideological sway in the west. In what was then dubbed the Third World, developmentalist models, focused on the state and often influenced by Stalinism, held attractions for both rulers and popular movements.

Nonetheless, the notion of a “Keynesian compromise” between labour and capital, even in the advanced capitalist states of the West, is misconceived. Capitalism remained exploitative and founded on competitive accumulation, pitching rival capitals and states against one another. Indeed, as a former editor of this journal, Michael Kidron, showed, the long post-war boom was sustained not by Keynesian fiscal alchemy, but arms expenditure linked to inter-imperialist competition.3 Similarly, the forms of welfare that emerged were not simply reforms wrested from the ruling class, they also helped reproduce the relatively skilled, stable and healthy labour power enabling the boom.4

Those looking back with nostalgia at this era were also prone to regard globalisation or neoliberalism as forces fundamentally transforming capitalism. Such positions are expressed, to varying degrees, by left-wing authors such as Naomi Klein, George Monbiot and David Harvey, and echoed by left-reformist politicians, such as Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell in Britain, and their counterparts abroad, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France.5 Rejecting this meant recognising that the persistent social relations of capitalism generate continuity alongside real changes. In this view, neoliberalism is best seen as a set of policies, ideologies and ruling class strategies that came to prominence in the wake of the crises and stagflation of the 1970s, when Keynesian policies proved ineffective.

That period of crisis was rooted in the post-war decline in profitability across key capitalist states.6 The “permanent arms economy”, identified by Kidron, could slow the tendency Karl Marx had identified for profits rates to decline but not reverse it. Meanwhile, the rise of powers such as Germany and Japan, which benefited from export markets created by the boom without contributing much to armaments spending, threatened US hegemony in the West, further eroding the permanent arms economy from within.7

Ruling classes looking for ways out of the crisis were now forced to come to terms with a world quite different from at the outset of the boom: one dominated by giant firms, pressing against the limited markets provided by individual nation-states, in which finance and trade flowed more freely and extensively and in which key production networks spanned multiple states.8 Unable to compete with the more internationalised economies in the West and glutted with inefficient investment, the Eastern Bloc tipped into stagnation and collapse. In China, internal reforms from the late 1970s restructured state-run enterprises and pushed rural populations into urban areas, offering them up for exploitation by Asian and later Western manufacturing multinationals, paving the way for the country’s export-led boom.9

In the West, politicians groped around for solutions. While the late Neil Davidson rightly stressed that neoliberalism emerged piecemeal and pragmatically, the policies were buttressed by renovated forms “liberal” and neoclassical economic ideas.10 Neoliberal ideology placed at its centre the idea of markets as self-regulating entities, able to distribute goods efficiently if allowed to function unrestricted. Ostensibly, economic policy would now limit itself to achieving fiscal and monetary stability, with old Keynesian goals such as full employment ditched.11 Politicians could proclaim the end of “big government”, planning and industrial policy.

This ideology came to form part of the commonsense in ruling class circles, even if the practice often contradicted the theory. Most obviously, if the liberalism of Adam Smith had preached the importance of a minimalist state, that was never realised. The economic weight of the state in advanced capitalisms stabilised at high levels, rather than declining. Public spending, as a proportion of GDP, remained in the 35-50 percent range across the major economies.12 Indeed, the state was needed to deliver the changes envisaged by proponents of neoliberalism. It forced through privatisations, created new markets in areas such as health and education, deregulated financial flows and, crucially, quelled resistance. Confronting capitalism’s crisis of profitability meant ending a wave of workers’ militancy that had begun in the 1960s—something accomplished by the initial wave of neoliberals, including figures such as Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the US or the dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

The new policy regime was not confined to individual states but seen as part as a global liberal order. The collapse of the Soviet Union offered a brief spell in which the US could claim unprecedented hegemony, buttressed by developments such as Chinese entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001. This new order would extend into the weaker economies of the “Global South”, where the most intense harms of neoliberalism were inflicted. Politicians in more powerful states could pick and choose the elements of the neoliberal package they introduced, adjusting the tempo of change. Those in weaker capitalisms, where they could not be persuaded of the virtues of neoliberalism, found their economies wrenched open to multinationals and unstable financial flows. Often, this took place under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund, operating as part of a “Washington consensus” encompassing the global financial institutions, the US Treasury and Wall Street.

As this suggests, despite an ideology supposedly rooted in individual freedom, neoliberalism was always antithetical to democracy. Prioritising market mechanisms meant insulating technocratic elites from the countervailing pressure of democracy.13 This extended into the heart of economic institutions. For instance, in 1998, the Labour government led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown granted operational independence to the Bank of England, reversing the nationalisation in 1945 and seemingly “depoliticising” control over interest rates. The centrality of figures such as Blair and Brown also shows the importance of politicians associated with social democracy in consolidating neoliberalism, following the “vanguard” represented by the likes of Thatcher.14 Political leaders of all stripes now tended to accept the inadequacy of old state-led forms of development and that globalisation had dramatically limiting their power in the face of markets.

What went wrong?

Whatever popular support the neoliberal consensus might once have enjoyed has now largely evaporated. In part, this reflects its anti-democratic nature, highlighted in Britain by repeated parliamentary expenses scandals or widespread corruption and cronyism revealed during the Covid pandemic.

Such discontent is sharply compounded by the economic failures of neoliberalism. Quelling working-class resistance, constraining wage growth, restructuring industries glutted with obsolete investments and selectively relocating production to countries such as China helped place a floor under profit rates in the major capitalist states, but it did not restore them to the levels seen after the Second World War. Achieving that would require a far greater clear-out of unprofitable capital—the kind that took place in the slump of the 1930s and the war itself. Instead, the growing scale of capitalist firms, and their connections with the financial system and state, increased the temptation of governments to intervene, preventing crisis fully taking hold. The result was to strengthen tendencies towards stagnation in the most advanced economies.

In that context, enrichment of those at the top increasing came to require suppression of those at the bottom. The resulting inequality has been at the heart of rebellions ranging from the Occupy movement of 2011, with its slogan “We Are the 99 Percent!”, to the struggles that erupted in Ecuador, Chile, Haiti, Guinea, Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria and Sudan in 2019.15 Low profitability, combined with the deregulatory thrust of neoliberalism and the integration of capital across borders, also made capitalism much more dependent on credit and speculation to generate any dynamism. When crisis again erupted in 2008, it began in the sphere of finance, even if it reflected the underlying issue of profitability. The response was a series of “financialised bailouts”: central banks propped up economies with ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing, while states granted unprecedented support to financial institutions.16 Such interventions would return on a still greater scale during Covid pandemic.17 They reflect a “pronounced shift in economic policymaking, away from neoliberal orthodoxy and…towards ‘technocratic Keynesianism’, in which central banks essentially assume the responsibility of manging aggregate demand”.18 China, too, adopted aspects of this approach as its export-oriented boom faltered after 2008-9, using credit expansion to prolong its growth at the expense of declining profitability and financial instability.

If China increasingly came to emulate Western capitalisms, the latter in turn began to mirror aspects of former’s political economy. China’s extraordinary growth increased the weight of economies in which the state explicitly sought to direct and orchestrate capitalist production, forcing others to respond in kind, strengthening the capacity of their own states to direct capitalists and project their power abroad. The intersecting forms of economic and geopolitical competition that result from this underly growing inter-imperialist conflict. Imperialist rivalry centres on the US-China Faultline, reflecting both the rise of China and the relative decline of US economic might: the US contributed 40 percent of global GDP in 1960, but just 25 percent today. Amid this high-level rivalry, other imperialisms have asserted themselves. One example is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, met by the Nato powers that funded and armed the Ukrainian response, while expanding their own military alliance. “Regional imperialisms” in the Middle East and elsewhere have also been emboldened. Israel stands among these regional powers; its genocidal assault on the Palestinians is the clearest sign of the reality of imperialism today.19

We are, in other words, a long way from the liberal triumphalism of the 1990s, in which hyper-globalisation theorist Thomas Friedman proclaimed no two countries with a McDonalds would go to war.20

The tensions and confrontations described above are each today interlaced with and exacerbated by ecological crisis. The pandemic, which emerged out of ecologies disrupted by capitalist accumulation, offered a glimpse of how the antagonisms of the system could be sharpened, but far greater horrors lie in store. CO₂ emissions reached record levels in 2024, rising by 0.8 percent. The 1.5 ºC barrier above pre-industrial temperatures will likely be breached by 2030.21 The results are already felt in famines, flooding, wild-fires and calamitous weather events—which deepen the system’s economic woes, and drive class and imperialist conflicts.

The recent COP29 climate summit signalled the abject failure of our rulers to address this. The talks tortuously agreed a “target” of $1.3 trillion in transfers from richer to poorer countries over the next decade to mitigate climate change. This is a fraction of the amount required, even before we note that just $300 billion (0.3 percent of global GDP) has so far been promised in grants and low-interest loans.22

The end of neoliberalism?

The eruptions of crises and the sharpening of imperial tensions are forcing ruling classes to deploy the state more widely and explicitly than neoliberal nostrums might suggest, so it is no wonder commentators have been proclaiming the death of neoliberalism. Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar has been heralding a post-neoliberal world since 2022: “Over 40 years ago, the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was born. Taxes were slashed. Unions were quashed. Markets were deregulated and global capital unleashed. But economic pendulums swing…” She cited corporate leaders asking officials in Joe Biden’s administration for “signals” from government about where to invest and in what industries. She concluded: “the White House has already made the shift to a post-neoliberal era—and many in the business community are preparing for it as well”.23

Joseph Stiglitz, a prominent New Keynesian economist, said in a recent interview: “[I]t is very clear that there’s a consensus that neoliberalism is broken. You see that both Republicans and Democrats…are now advocating industrial policy. That was such a no-no for 40 years”.24 A thoughtful interview by left-wing economist James Meadway argues the pandemic accelerated three existing trends. The first was geopolitical competition with China; the second, the “need to decarbonise”, leading to “state-centric responses”; the third, the prominence of large firms, particularly tech giants, who bend and break the rules of the global liberal order.25 Political economist Dani Rodrik similarly argues that “we are in the midst of a transition away from neoliberalism”, suggesting that a consensus may be emerging around “productivism”, linked to the revival of industrial policy, trade tariffs, the creation of domestic supply chains and attempts at green transition. Unlike Keynesianism, which focused on boosting aggregate demand, this would be based on a new “supply-side” economics, creating the right forms of capitalist production.26

Such comments are echoed by politicians. Outgoing US treasury secretary Janet Yellen used the phrase “modern supply-side” economics to describe the Biden administration’s spending plans.27 In a 2023 speech, Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, explicitly criticised the neoliberal assumption that markets could “always allocate capital productively and efficiently—no matter what our competitors did”. He proclaimed a revived industrial policy, capable of securing the US in the face of financial crises, climate change, inequality and competition with China.28 This side of the Atlantic, Rachel Reeves, now chancellor, offered her own version of “Bidenomics”, dubbed “securonomics”, in her spring 2024 Mais lecture. She too looked to an “active state” to address “supply-side weaknesses”. The challenge was posed in terms of “shifting geopolitical dynamics”, a world in which “China looms large on the world stage”, along with growing disruptions due to climate change.29

What happens next?

We are indeed far from neoliberalism’s “heroic” age. If the neoliberal consensus acted as a glue binding ruling classes together, the glue has largely dissolved, plunging us into a new period of pragmatic attempts to solve systemic problems. That does not presage a return to pre-neoliberal times. Foroohar’s metaphor of a pendulum swinging from Keynesianism to neoliberalism and back is misleading. She herself retreated from her previous confidence about a break with neoliberalism after Trump’s latest election victory: “While some of us had a dream that Joe Biden had ushered in a post-neoliberal era in economic policymaking, it’s now quite clear that the US is, as it has been since the 1980s, all about shareholder ‘value’”.30 The fickleness reflects her conception of post-neoliberalism as a benign, progressive alternative to what came before.

In fact, as Adam Tooze highlights, there are strong parallels between Trump and Biden.31 The first Trump administration pledged to “Make America Great Again”, reshoring US industry in the face of globalisation. However, it was Biden who gave us the CHIPS Act, subsidising semiconductor chip manufacturers, provided they agreed not to fabricate cutting-edge chips in strategic rivals such as China. His Inflation Reduction Act offered hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives to support and subsidise US manufacturing in green energy. The emphasis on green energy was a pragmatic response to the growing market for these technologies, rather than a break with Trump’s disastrous climate policy. Biden inherited the “fracking investments made under both Obama and Trump”, making the US “the largest ever producer of hydrocarbon energy”.32 As Tooze also points out, despite Trump’s mishandling of the Covid crisis, the vaccine programme his administration initiated provided a template for industrial policies later seen as a hallmark of Bidenomics.

It was a Democrat, Barack Obama, who began the “pivot to Asia”, focusing US foreign policy on China. Trump accelerated this, imposing tariffs on the US’s rival and ratcheting up military tensions. However, Biden maintained most of Trump’s tariffs, increasing those on electric vehicles, solar cells and semiconductor chips. While he offered a more multilateral approach to foreign policy, Biden saw China as the main enemy—with conflict in Ukraine or the Middle East secondary to this.33 Trump will continue to focus on China, combining this with his own characteristically transactional approach to geopolitics more generally—and trampling erstwhile allies as well as rivals.34 His plans include 25 percent tariffs of goods from Mexico and Canada, along with 60 percent on those from China and 10 percent everywhere else.

Despite the real shifts underway, there remain three elements of continuity with the previous period. First, the neoliberal sensibilities of the ruling class will not simply vanish. Central bank responses to the inflationary upsurge after the pandemic was straight from the neoclassical toolkit: raise interest rates to constrain wages and spending in the hope of taming price rises. That this was combined with a recognition by some institutions and policymakers that firms contributed to inflation through what Isabella Weber calls “sellers’ inflation”, shows the emerging tensions in this worldview.35

Some leaders will also look for a solution to capitalism’s woes by radicalising the deregulatory elements of neoliberalism in the hope of unleashing entrepreneurial spirits.36 Trump’s election sent stock markets soaring on expectations that he will enact Reaganite plans to lower taxes, extending 2017 cuts, slashing corporation tax from 21 percent to 15 percent, and removing taxes on benefits and tips. How much of this Trump gets through Congress remains to be seen. Even if he overcomes opposition there, he faces other constraints. Reduced taxes combined with tariffs may spark a new bout of inflation, encouraging the Federal Reserve to put interest rates back up. This would risk triggering recession, given the dependence on cheap credit embedded in modern capitalism, as well as increasing the burden of US government debt. The US state benefits from the flexibility that comes from printing the world’s main reserve currency but federal debts approaching record 1945 levels could eventually weaken confidence in its economy.37

This leads to the second area of continuity. The relatively parlous state of the global system limits even the most powerful states’ capacity to intervene. As Tooze points out, the $370 billion Biden found for clean energy, which had been projected to rise to $1 trillion with private investment, “sounds like a lot of money”. Yet, in GDP terms, “it is modest compared to EU subsidy levels or those available for China’s green energy champions”.38 In both Germany and France, it was debates over budgets that precipitated a collapse of the government in late 2024. In Germany, Social Democrat chancellor Olaf Scholz failed to persuade his coalition partners in the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) of the virtues of a budget designed to prop up the stuttering economy with new investment. The FDP argued that a €9 billion hole in the budget needed to be plugged through welfare cuts. In France, Michel Barnier's government fell when plans for €60 billion in deficit reductions were rejected.

Here in Britain, which has since 2008 fallen behind its European peers in productivity, investment and wage growth, Reeve’s securonomics will need to be delivered on a shoestring.39 Meadway’s prediction, in spring 2024, of a “turn against neoliberalism, combined with a worsening of austerity”, with market mechanisms in areas such as the National Health Service alongside an “active state” encouraging “private investment in various favoured sectors, like defence and green technology”, looks pretty accurate.40

Britain will soon have the highest tax take ever seen, breaching records set in 1948. Government borrowing will rise, although Reeves changed how debt is measured giving herself more wiggle room. Spending will also increase—by 3.4 percent a year for two years, significant but hardly enough to dramatically reduce the strain on public services. After that, it will go up by just 1.3 percent, meaning “very tight spending control…some cuts and certainly no scope for growth outside of health, defence and one or two other favoured areas”.41 Even the relatively small bazooka fired by Reeves in her first budget was enough to spook businesses and push up government borrowing rates. As Liz Truss’s ill-fated and brief tenure as prime minister demonstrated, indebted governments are enormously sensitive to the bond markets where they raise funds—a factor reinforced by a large portion of British government debt being held abroad.

This relates to a third area of continuity. The trend for capitalism to internationalise has stuttered, but the long-term changes of the post-war period have not been reversed. Despite flatlining since 2008-9, exports still make up a greater share of global GDP than at any point during the 20th century. Capital flows show a similar trend. Both trade and capital flows have also become more sensitive to geopolitical differences. The tendency for them to become less regional and more global in the run-up to 2008 has ended.42 The internationalisation of capital complicates the relationship between states, the firms operating within them and financial markets over which they exert limited control. The enormous scale of units of capital, and hence their relative power and systemic importance, reinforces the pressure. What Marx called the “concentration and centralisation” of capital has not abated and in some industries has accelerated.43

In this context, a reversion to a pure state capitalist model is not credible. Even breaking up existing global production networks involves huge upheavals. Consider Elon Musk, poised to take up a central role in Trump’s administration. Musk’s electric vehicle firm, Tesla, has received billions in loans, tax breaks and subsidies from China. It uses its Shanghai factory, and local battery suppliers, to produce for international markets and the extremely important Chinese one. Even if such firms withdraw from China, they may simply shift production to neighbouring countries, such as Vietnam or India. During Trump’s first period in office, the US’s trade balance with China improved but that with the rest of the world sharply deteriorated—not much production came “home”.44 Biden’s answer to this was “nearshoring” or “friendshoring”, locating supply chains in Canada and Mexico, and in countries deemed friendly to US interests. However, Trump’s new tariff proposals would disrupt even these networks, imperilling the manufacturing base he has pledged to rebuild. Supply chains for cars marked “made in America” cross the US-Mexican border an average of seven to eight times.45

A new political disorder

The clearest consequence of the crisis of neoliberal centre has been the rise of a far right on a scale unseen since the 1930s. This encompasses elements ranging from neo-Nazi gangs, through fascist groups posing as respectable electoral formations, to the “populist right”, represented by Reform UK or Trump—the figurehead of the global far right.46

One mistake the left can make is to see representatives of the old neoliberal centre as a barrier to the far right. Core sections of the capitalist class cluster around the kind of politics espoused by Biden and Kamala Harris or their traditional Republican counterparts, and it is these forces that have impelled us to the present situation, characterised by multiple crises and polarisation.47 The centre is crumbing for a reason; it is not our job to prop it up.

Of course, while many US capitalists clung to Biden and Harris, others happily embraced Trump. He continues to count on the “lumpen capitalists”, vividly depicted by Mike Davis in the 2020 election:

family dynasties, mainly based on oil wealth…post-industrial robber barons from hinterland places…whose fortunes derive from real estate, private equities, casinos and services ranging from private armies to chain usuary.48

However, this time, significant chunks of Silicon Valley and Wall Street followed Musk in supporting him. Such backing will do little to deter Trump from throwing “red meat” to his grassroots supporters, even at the cost of further destabilising capitalism.

We should also grasp that even the supposed representatives of the neoliberal centre, such as Biden, Harris, Reeves or Starmer, have increasingly been forced to adapt to the new reality, embracing elements of statism. This can take a sharply authoritarian turn. Witness the attempt by the conservative South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, to impose martial law in the face of opposition to efforts to cut taxes and deregulate. Had this not been fought off, it might well encourage other leaders, such as Emmanuel Macron in France or Javier Milei in Argentina, to pursue similar tactics in the face of their own difficulties mounting attacks on workers. However, the explit use of the state can also re-politicise economics in other ways. It is difficult for politicians to tell electorates to leave things to market forces or unaccountable technocrats when trillions of dollars have been expended rescuing the banking system in 2008-9 or enacting furlough schemes during the pandemic.

This opens a space for the left. Unfortunately, much of the radical left remains at the level of criticising neoliberalism, without offering an alternative beyond a reheated post-war social democracy. Leaving aside the long-standing Marxist criticism of reformism, such projects have little hope of succeeding on their own terms in the crisis-prone, internationalised capitalism we confront today. The resulting contradictions helped undermine Jeremy Corbyn as Labour approached power under his leadership. In the US, the Democratic Socialists of America and figures such as Bernie Sanders, lacking a coherent alternative, largely collapsed behind the Democrats lacklustre campaign in 2024. The Greek radical left party Syriza was, once in power, rapidly brought to heel by Greek and European capital, assisted by the institutions of the European Union.

Recent radical political experiments in the Global South achieved their high point with the left nationalist governments swept to power in Latin American by a wave of struggles from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s. However, the ambitious social programmes these governments enacted were sustained by a prolonged commodities boom, the end of which stripped away their pretentions. More recent movements, such as those associated with the Arab Spring, where they successfully replaced existing governments, yielded far less impressive results, despite the dynamism of the mass struggles that brought about such changes.

In this context, it is easy, as Marcel van der Linden does in a recent article, to paint a picture of declining “traditional labour and socialist movements”, evinced by data such as falling US union density or declining support for the French Communist Party.49 Yet, recent struggles also show the possibility of a revival of class struggle among the 1.8 billion or so wage labourers in the world today. These struggles are located not just in the declining industries of yesterday but include new forces of labour being forged by contemporary capitalism. Such forces do not necessarily identify yet with notions such as the need for organs of workers’ self-rule or a strategic focus on confronting the capitalist state. Why would we expect workers in China’s mass factory complexes, logistics workers in Chile or proletarianised “professionals” in Britain, Bolivia or Sudan, to start from a higher political level than the most militant socialists of the French 1968 or Portuguese 1974? The maturation of new class forces is a process, and we stand close to its point of origin not its end.50

The politics available to those participating in the maturation process matters. Van der Linden asks, amid other hypotheticals, what might have been if German social democrats and Communists had “acted together” against Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.51 It is a good question, one Leon Trotsky sought at the time to answer by advocating the united front tactic, through which revolutionaries and reformists could come together in common activity without sacrificing their independence.52 However, it poses a more pressing question: why were the two major forms of left politics available variants of “socialism from above”, one with illusions in the capitalist state the other in state capitalism?53 The decline of these forms of politics at least create the possibility of forging a creative, non-sectarian “socialism from below”, in contact with the stirrings of the forces of labour.

Van der Linden is right when he argues that the left cannot make the mistake of neglecting “gender issues…race and ethnicity, and…ecological and climatic aspects of industrialisation”.54 The crude blend of economic nationalism and “anti-woke” politics offered by figures such as George Galloway in Britain or Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany is a dead end.55 Any genuinely emancipatory vision must insist on contesting every expression of oppression, connecting such struggles to those of the working class. The latter is itself, contrary to the fantasies of Galloway and Wagenknecht, highly diverse, something that can be a source of strength. In the context of Trump’s pledge to deport up to 20 million migrants, it is worth recalling that an earlier racist offensive, during George W Bush’s presidency, was blunted by a strike on May Day 2006 involving millions of migrant workers across the US. Around half a million marched in both Chicago and in Los Angeles, tens of thousands elsewhere.

The role of migration is just one indicator of the global nature of the battle we face. The rise of the racist right, climate change, the threat of major inter-imperialist war—all require a response that goes beyond the national terrain. It was always a myth that socialism could be built in a single country. That is why international is inscribed next to socialism on our masthead. Today that argument is more crucial than ever.

Joseph Choonara is the editor of International Socialism. He is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Marx’s Capital (Bookmarks, 2017) and Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy (2nd edition: Bookmarks, 2017).

Notes