By John Pickard
So what was notable about 2024, and what can we expect this year? It is has almost become a commonplace among socialists to say that we now live in a period of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions.
But nonetheless, we should not take such words for granted or become complacent, because many activists will these days be witnessing events that they have never before seen in their lifetime. Moreover, that trend is set to continue in 2025.
There looks like there will be no let-up in the genocidal assault by Israel on the population of Gaza in the coming months, although it is a war – combined with Israeli expansion into Lebanon and Syria, and its consolidation of apartheid on the West Bank – has huge implications for Israel and the coming Arab revolution.
The wars in Sudan, Central Africa and the Sahel get far less publicity, and the first of these has produced a horrifying death toll, with perhaps as many as 20,000 killed. In just under two years, eight million people have been internally displaced and three million have fled to other countries.
In less developed countries, there is an increasing tendency for states to ‘fail’ and disintegrate in the face of corruption and insoluble economic problems, most notably unpayable debts to the main imperialist countries.
One of the few places where war may come to a temporary halt is in Ukraine, where those western powers which have armed Ukraine, notably the USA, may change tack this year and push Kyiv into an unsatisfactory ‘compromise’ with Moscow, leaving Russia in control of much of Ukraine, but at least leaving the rest of Ukraine to be plundered by the West.
Globally, one in eight people were affected by violent conflict in 2024
ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) is an organisation which monitors violent conflicts and it reports that in 2024 one in eight people on the planet were exposed to conflict. They list fifty countries in which levels of conflict are rated “extreme”, “high” or “turbulent” and there is a general increase of 25% in “political violence”.
Last year saw an unusually large number of presidential or legislative elections, which gave workers the chance [although not always a free and fair one] to give their verdict on their governments. Although it will not be seen in these terms by the commentators in the capitalist media, the overwhelming pressure to assert democratic political rights by ordinary people is a reflection of the social weight of what is for socialists the most important class in society – the working class.
The presence of democratic ‘norms’ on a global scale is not automatically guaranteed for all time, but for the moment, it is an indication of the dormant and actual power of the labour movement across the world.
Every continent and country has its own particular history, traditions and political characteristics. But these elections have demonstrated important processes in politics and economics that are international, with common roots and similar outcomes, even if details are shaped by national peculiarities.
An international system in crisis
They have shown that there is an international system in crisis and that it is affecting the political consciousness of hundreds of millions of workers. Despite the fact that the planet’s resources, and its scientific and technological potential ought to be able to provide all the basic necessities of life for the whole population, there is hardly a corner of the world where living standards are stable.
Workers everywhere are being asked to make sacrifices, while the rich and super-rich accumulate ever more wealth. [See the 2025 review by Marxist economist, Michael Roberts, here]. A Bank of England report noted that the poorest half of the World’s population owns only 2% of total global wealth. At the other end of the scale, the richest tenth owns over three-quarters of all wealth. If we were to focus on only the super-rich, like billionaires, the top 1 percent own 43 percent of all global financial assets (according to Oxfam).
Although mainstream media in most countries do their best to hide the real truth of how the system is loaded against workers and the poor, in the world of instant communication, data is ubiquitous and the truth, in the growing disparities of wealth, for example, is often hard to hide.
Boiling discontent in all parts of the world
The result? – growing anger on a mass scale, against the whole rotten economic system. In the advanced countries of capitalism, the anger is includes more of the ’middle classes’, like doctors, lawyers and teachers, who were in the past more insulated from economic hardships, and who have now, as a result, drawn closer to the labour movement.
There is boiling discontent everywhere at the unbridled and self-satisfied opulence of a few, alongside the growing insecurity of the many, like pictures from the days of the Roman Empire or pre-revolutionay France.
If Luigi Mangione is a household name in the USA (and his alleged victim is not), it is because there is so much empathy for the man accused of murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO. Once a genie is out of the bottle, it is hard to get it back in, and that murder opened up a furious debate in the US about the rapaciousness, greed and callousness of health care insurers.
In a more general sense, the economic and political crisis has caused a global rupture in what were accepted political norms as hundreds of millions of workers are shaken out of their former lethargy. In elections across the globe, mainstream politicians and incumbents have been hammered. In its review of the year, the Financial Times (December 30) noted that “The incumbent in every one of the 12 developed western countries that held national elections in 2024 lost vote share at the polls, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of modern democracy”.
“Incumbent or otherwise”, the review continued, “centrists were frequently the losers as voters threw in their lot behind radical parties of either flank. The populist right in particular surged forward, fuelled in significant part by a rightward shift among young men”. There is a growing perception “that democracy is no longer working, with the younger generation, many voting for the first time, delivering some of the strongest rebukes against the establishment”.
“democracies struggling to govern…”
Little wonder that one of the FT’s regular columnists, Gideon Rachman, complained that “The world’s leading democracies are struggling to govern”. Politics is becoming polarised as never before, at least in modern times, and a growing part of the electorate are even disenchanted with the whole idea of ‘democracy’ – and why would they not be, when they see that most political elites are in the pockets of business and the wealthy? Then along comes a ‘strong man’ from the right, lying through their teeth, but claiming to be ‘different’ from other politicians.
We can see the growing support for right-wing ‘populists’ in electoral backing for Donald Trump, Reform UK, the AfD in Germany, Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale in France, and so on. This tide of support for ‘populist’ right wing parties is not only linked to the growing insecurity among workers, but to the perception – fed by these far right parties – that migration is the main cause of social problems.
Migration is an important economic and political driver at the present time, and it should not be ignored. According to a Paris-based monitoring organisation, “Roughly 6.5mn people moved to the 38 countries that make up the membership of the OECD through permanent migration routes last year. That was an almost 10 per cent increase on the previous record of 6mn who moved in 2022… The greatest surge was in the UK, which for the first time became the biggest recipient of migrants after the US, with net immigration of 750,000 driven by recruitment to the care sector”. (Financial Times).
It matters little that the migration to more economically developed countries has served to increase the economy – what little growth there has been can be attributed to inward migration, even in the USA – because the demagogues on the right, helped by most of the media, use migrants as a scape-goat for all social ills. It is an issue that is not going to go away in the foreseeable future. Indeed, with increased economic dislocation likely and the effects of climate change making flooding and other natural disasters more common, migration will be a growing issue.
It is not migrants causing social and economic problems
It is incumbent on socialists to vigorously fight the scapegoating of migrants in the coming years. To begin with, it is not migrants who have caused social and economic problems in the health and education systems, or housing shortages: it is the profit system itself. Secondly, no-one uproots themselves without some measure of fear and desperation about their circumstances, and elementary humanity demands they be supported.
If workers feel increasingly precarious in all aspects of their lives, it is not the fault of migrants, it is the fault of the capitalist system, one based on greed and exploitation. The answer to the populists on the right is for the labour movement to spell out a bold alternative – a socialist programme based on the ownership and planning of the main levers of the economy in the interests of working people.
If workers increasingly feel that they have no real ‘control’ on how society is run (despite elections), it is time to advocate the democratic management of industry, finance and all the main resources of the economy. That was the original meaning of social democracy – public, democratic ownership and planning of the economy, in which workers can play a full role.
The workers’ movement across the globe has enormous potential power – but it is not yet conscious of that power and it is the role of socialists to provide that subjective element in the many class battles that will unfold in 2025. The working class movement needs, yes – organisation, but it also needs an understanding of where it needs to go, and how and why it will get there.
The global outlook for 2025 is not a pleasant one. Apart from social upheavals and ongoing wars, there is little impact being made by governments and business to shift the economy away from carbon. We can expect more startling figures about world temperature rises, more dramatic climatic effects and more ‘green-washing’ from those who have trashed the planet.
Nationalism on the rise in many countries
But if nothing else, this outlook should remind us that socialism is internationalist in its outlook, perspectives, programme and methods. Nationalism may be on the rise in many countries, as it was in the interwar period. But the world situation is different to the 1930s in one important respect: the working class has far greater social weight and is far stronger than it was then.
Even if right-wing governments did come to office, and ‘strong’ right-wing populists tried to limit the powers and scope of the labour movement – and such developments are likely in the coming years – they will fail, at least in the short term, to critically limit, much less destroy, the workers’ organisations.
We are entering a period of great storms and stresses and of rapid political swings to the right and left. None of this removes from us the obligation to try to understand what is going on around us, to gauge the mood of workers – including women and young people – in every nation, and to analyse processes, shifts and the tempo of events.
The job of Marxists is always to orientate towards workers organisations and participate in the struggles of all sections of the class, and Left Horizons will continue trying to provide that analysis as best we can and, in our modest way, to prepare as many people as we can reach for the struggles that lie ahead.
[Picture of Luigi Mangioni from Wikimedia Commons, here]
