Against the Stream

War between India and Pakistan. Revolutionary crisis in Serbia. Escalation of the genocide in Gaza. These are just a few of the mighty events piling up on one another at a breathtaking pace. Against the Stream is here to help revolutionaries navigate these tumultuous events. In Kashmir, India and Pakistan – both nuclear powers – once again briefly went to war. The countries have been in conflict s...

Last week's byelections in the UK were an earthquake in British politics. For the first time since the rise of the Labour Party 100 years ago, the two-party system has been upended. Now, a new contender for power has decisively entered the race: Reform. It has been less than a year since the last general election in Britain. Since then, the Labour party has collapsed in popularity as a result...

Since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine three years ago, a flood of lies has gushed forth from western governments and the billionaire press alike to obscure the real nature of this war. [Click here for a comprehensive reading list on the background to the Ukraine war: https://marxist.com/top-reads-on-the-ukraine-conflict-war-and-imperialism.htm] Painting it as a simple battle between good and evi...

For the last century, the USA has been the undisputed master of the capitalist world. Now, all that is changing. Today, America is in decline and facing a new contender: China. Over the last 30 years, China has exploded from an underdeveloped country, exploited by western capitalists for its cheap labour, to a cutting-edge capitalist power in its own right. Today, it accounts for 18 percent of the...

Articles mentioned: “I’ve seen many phoney trade wars come and go. This is the real thing” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/09/trade-war-donald-trump-us-china “‘The Tsunami Is Coming’: China’s Global Exports Are Just Getting Started” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/business/china-manufacturing-exports-trump-tariffs.html “On the Question of Free Trade” https://www.marxists.org/...

Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements have set the cat amongst the pigeons in the world market. In France, the hypocritical establishment is celebrating the sentencing of right-wing demagogue Marine Le Pen in court on flimsy charges. Meanwhile in the Middle East, the leader of the PKK has called on its Kurdish guerilla fighters to lay down their arms. Globalisation is now rapidly unravellin...

Articles mentioned: https://meduza.io/feature/2025/03/17/otsyuda-vyhod-odin-trista-ili-dvesti https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-resumes-gaza-bombing-one-most-terrifying-nights-war https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/03/23/starmer-ukraine-peacekeeping-plan-political-theatre/ https://marxist.com/netanyahu-resumes-genocide-to-cling-to-power-2.htm ______ In Gaza, Netanyahu has restarted...

Trump’s dramatic return to the White House has thrown the liberals into complete panic and confusion. They have been accusing Trump of being responsible for every ill in the world, and have flung whatever insults they can at him: from semi-fascist, to fascist, to neo-fascist. Shamefully, the perennially alarmed so-called 'Lefts' are dragging like a tail behind the liberals, spreading the s...

The world capitalist system is beset on all sides by crisis. Debt is sky-high, economies are stagnating and society is more polarised than ever. To add to this mess, the tapestry of world relations – the ‘rules-based order’ – is unravelling. Tit-for-tat tariffs that seek to export the crisis threaten to turn into trade wars that will tear up world trade. The liberals see Trump as the wrecking ball...

This week's row in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelensky served to dramatically underscore the fact that we are passing a seismic shift in world history. The old alliances and institutions are breaking down, and a realignment, reflecting the changed balance of forces, is taking place for all to see. The biggest losers of this transformation are the Europeans, who are gradually sobering up...

This week, after claiming victory in the German election, Friedrich Merz declared that Germany would now stand up to the USA, Russia and China and make the EU into a ‘great power’.  Similarly, Keir Starmer declared that Britain would stand by Ukraine for 100 years and threatened to put British troops on the group as a ‘peacekeeping force’, while Macron travelled to the White House in a ‘show of st...

This week, Trump went over the heads of Zelensky and the European leaders to embark on peace talks with Russia. At a stroke, the western order that has prevailed for over half a century has fractured. This has major implications for Europe in particular. For decades, Europe has based its policy on its partnership with the undisputed imperialist master of the planet: the USA. But Trump’s latest mov...

Lenin once said that there are decades where weeks happen, and weeks where decades happen. We are living through the latter. A new era has begun, one characterised by capitalist crisis, imperialist war, immense turbulence in world relations and revolutionary upheavals. On Against the Stream, the weekly current affairs podcast of the Revolutionary Communist International, Hamid Alizadeh and Fred We...

Trump has been in power for just over two weeks and already he has started to upend the liberal world order. With tariffs, deportations, the halting of all foreign aid, and his plan to turn Gaza into a “Rivera of the Middle East”, ‘allies’ and rivals alike have been thrown into panic.  With breathtaking speed, the ‘rules-based order’ is being dynamited and destabilised, and the policy of ‘America...

Storm clouds are gathering over the world economy. Already, it is faced with slowing growth, rising interest and inflation rates, and astronomical debts. Now Trump’s ‘America First’ policy and his promise of tariffs threaten to make all of that worse. As America wanes as the undisputed, dominant world power, the epoch of globalisation that it policed is coming to an end. Instead, an era of intense...

This week’s episode of Against the Stream was recorded just days after Trump was inaugurated as US president. For some, this represents the triumph of fascism, a fear that was stoked by Elon Musk’s Nazi salute at the inauguration ceremony. However, as Hamid Alizadeh and Jorge Martín from the International Secretariat of the Revolutionary Communist International explain, this is not the case. The v...

With just days until Trump returns to power, Hamid Alizadeh and Jorge Martín from the International Secretariat of the Revolutionary Communist International met for another episode of Against the Stream to break down the news of the world from a Marxist perspective. This episode, they discussed the recent announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza. With Biden, Starmer and the Arab regimes celebrating thi...

With just two weeks before Trump re-enters the White House, the outgoing Democrats are doing everything they can to undermine the next president. In Ukraine in particular, where they fear a drastic change of course in the policy of US imperialism, they are funnelling in as much money as they can get away with, as well as escalating the war by allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with US bom...

Defined by political crises all over the world, spiralling tensions between the imperialist powers, and revolutions in Bangladesh and Kenya, 2024 was an historic year in the crisis of the capitalist system. But now, with Trump days away from power, Ukraine headed unavoidably towards a humiliating and bloody defeat, and with no end in sight to the complete destabilisation of the Middle East, this n...

2024 has been a year of war, revolution and crisis on every continent. From the horrors of the Gaza genocide, to the revolutionary summer in Kenya and Bangladesh; from viral assassinations, to to the re-election of Donald Trump. The communists have been offering analysis and perspective at every step of the way, and now: it’s time to put this dramatic twelve months in review with 2024 WRAPPED! The...

Once again, this week has been defined by sharp turns in world politics. In Syria, the Assad regime collapsed after a sudden offensive by Islamist groups, taking the whole world by surprise. In the US, the assassination of a US healthcare CEO was met with an enormous outpouring of sympathy for the killer, in a clear expression of the simmering class rage beneath the surface. In Ukraine, it is beco...

This week has been full of sharp and sudden turns. The Syrian civil war has suddenly reignited due to the shock advance of a Turkey-backed rebel group. The French president was forced to resign after trying to force through an austerity budget. Joe Biden has used his last few weeks in power to pardon his corrupt son. And, to top things off, the president of South Korea declared martial law, only t...

This week, the Middle East has once again dominated the news, with the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as the announcement of a supposedly ‘lasting’ ceasefire in Lebanon. In Europe, meanwhile, explosive events are being prepared in France, as the tottering National Assembly is set to face off against a rising tide of cl...

In this episode of Against the Stream, Hamid Alizadeh and Niklas Albin Svensson, from the International Secretariat of the Revolutionary Communist International, discussed the reckless escalation of the Ukraine war by Biden, Trump’s controversial picks for his administration, and the death of the American Dream. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind in world politics. As the hosts of Against th...

This week on Against the Stream, Hamid Alizadeh and Jorge Martin from the International Secretariat of the Revolutionary Communist International sat down once again to discuss the implications of Trump's victory on the class struggle in America, the Ukraine war, and the floods in Valencia, Spain, which have led to protests of hundreds of thousands of people against the regime. Every week, members...