When mass demonstrations erupted across Iran in December 2025, they represented the most profound challenge to the Islamic Republic since the revolutionary upheaval of 1979. This was no "economic riot" staged by foreign actors. It was a revolt against dictatorship in all its forms: a manifestation of the law of uneven and combined development, wherein the most advanced contradictions of global financial capital collide with the archaic, theocratic structures of a semi-colonial state.

In 1979 British trade unions had 13.2 million members, and 29,474,000 working days were lost to strikes. A workplace survey the next year counted 328,000 shop stewards. By 2025, union density was 22.4 per cent, and nobody counts workplace representatives any more: the last survey was in 2011.What the revolutionary left did next is usually explained as a sequence. Rank-and-file organisation is what a rising level of struggle produces, so it cannot be built in a downturn, and revolut...

In the first six months of 2026, employers in the United States named artificial intelligence as the reason for more than a hundred thousand announced job cuts. Almost every argument about what that means takes the same shape, whether it comes from the technology companies, from governments, or from the left: establish what the machine can do, how fast it can do it, and how many jobs it will take, and the politics are supposed to follow.The Fourth International has made exactly tha...

In 1973 the British International Marxist Group issued a forty-pence pamphlet that tried to do something unusually ambitious: not to retell the story of permanent revolution, but to prove it — to derive Trotsky's theory from Marx's own economics of the world market.The result is one of the boldest short statements the Trotskyist tradition produced. Across five tightly argued sections, "John Robens" grounds permanent revolution in the law of uneven and combined dev...