MORE and more activists within our labour, international justice and social movements have begun to acknowledge that we are living through a global economic, social and political crisis on a scale unprecedented in many of our lifetimes.

These are reflected deeply here in imperialist Britain, where the country’s historic economic decline continues.

On the economic front, millions are suffering more and more from the cost-of-living emergency, having already suffered for decades.

As a recent London School of Economics report put it, “15 long years of stagnation have left their mark on our economy and our living standards. If wages had continued growing on the same trajectory they were following before the financial crisis, British workers would be earning an additional £10,700 a year, on average.

“And because the UK is the most unequal major economy in Europe, its middle-income and poorer households are worst hit by our stagnation.”

This economic crisis and decline is the result of decades of failed neoliberalism. It is illustrated by news stories daily about the disastrous effects of privatisation and deregulation of key industries, including water and energy, as part of a decades-long drive to ever-increasing amounts of profit for the ruling class at the expense of the working class.

The parasitic British ruling-class has overseen low levels of investment for decades, instead always chasing the fast buck.

This is illustrated today by the example of United Utilities — a company recently engulfed in a massive sewage spill into Lake Windermere in Cumbria, has reported a 17.5 per cent rise in underlying operating profits to £517.8 million for the last financial year. 

People suffering from what is regularly termed “the cost-of-greed crisis” aren’t mugs. All polling suggests the majority of people understand public services and utilities need to be run for people not profit.

In this, they clearly display a greater understanding of the crisis than any of the programmes being put forward by the main contenders in the current general election.

Alongside the economic crises continuing to ravage the working class not only of Britain but also other imperialist heartlands, including France and Germany in Europe and beyond, we have the ever-present climate crisis, caused again by the ruling-class’s insatiable drive for profit, which doesn’t stop even with the very future of our planet at risk.

We have seen first-hand the impact of this climate crisis, with the Met Office reporting that Britain has faced a record-breaking amount of rainfall since 1,695.9mm in the last 18 months, marking the highest amount since records began in 1836. When asked in a recent Guardian survey where the blame for this climate crisis fell a “lack of political will was cited by almost three-quarters of the respondents, while 60 per cent also blamed vested corporate interests, such as the fossil fuel industry.”

They were right — the polluters and profiteers are causing the global climate catastrophe, and their representatives in the Labour and Tory parties continue to facilitate the raping of our planet’s resources to satisfy corporate greed.

The economic — and increasingly the climate — crisis also fuel the drive of the ruling-class in the US and weaker imperialist counties (including Britain) towards an era of permanent wars. 

This relentless drive to war can be seen most clearly in the horrifying events in Gaza since October, which has seen at least 34,568 Palestinians killed in Gaza with 77,765 injured. Nearly 26,000 of those who have been killed or injured have been children, which is just over 2 per cent of Gaza’s child population in 2024.

Alongside these casualties we have seen up to 80 per cent of civilian infrastructure severely damaged including homes, hospitals, schools and sanitation facilities.

All of this is enabled by weapons from the US, Britain and elsewhere — again fuelling super-profits for arms manufacturers and other parts of the capitalist class.

This assault has been responded to by massive movements across the world, and is a lightning rod for anger at the whole system.

As recently noted by the Labour and Palestine platform, “we have seen demonstration after demonstration nationally for Palestine on an unprecedented scale. There have been 13 national marches since October, with a total attendance of over four million.

“This is a movement we should be proud of, and which continues to shake up the system here and internationally.”

The demands for an end to arms sales to Israel — and for a boycott of companies such as CAT, JCB and Barclays that profit from the oppression of the Palestinian people — show (like the aforementioned catastrophe) that millions here and around the world understand the roots of the Israeli aggression, and its imperialist nature.

Even when not taking place in direct “regime change” wars — as we have seen in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere — the US, Britain and other imperialist powers fuel coups, sanctions and other interventions, as has been seen dozens of times in Central and Latin America, for example.

The movements against these interventions have also understood these are driven by the wish to make more profit, as exemplified by the 2003 anti-war movement’s call for “No blood for oil.”

This is sometimes the direct theft of natural resources (as happened with Iraq’s oil) or by installing compliant regimes that will not challenge their countries’ semi-colonial status and subordination to one or more imperialist master.

As natural resources become more scarce due to the climate crisis — and demand emerges from the imperialist heartlands for different resources — we will see more such wars and interventions. Indeed the temporarily successful coup in Bolivia in 2019 was openly referred to by Elon Musk as a global corporations’ coup for lithium.

If we as a movement are to tackle each of these areas of crisis which are plaguing not only the British working class but the global working class, we must actively seek to understand the world we live in, and help the millions who support our labour, social, climate, peace and justice movements in their bid to do the same.

As already noted, millions here and around the world understand that one or all of the economic crisis, climate catastrophe and spread of war are linked to the capitalist system, and the quest for profit.

This is especially the case among younger people, who are the backbone of the Palestine movement.

This was illustrated even before this movement’s mushrooming by a 2023 poll from the Fraser Institute, that found nearly a third of younger people here (aged 18-34) think that “communism is the ideal economic system.”

Additionally last year, YouGov surveyed views on well-known figures, including Lenin.

Astonishingly — when considering how he is demonised and his ideas wildly falsified by the media, historians and politicians across much of the world — the Russian revolutionary is popular among 40 per cent of millennials (those born between 1981-96) here in Britain.

Within this context, the vital task presents itself for the left of engaging with, learning from and developing socialist theory — as part of assimilating the experiences of past struggles against war and capitalism, and for socialist change.

If we are to apply socialist theories to our present conditions, when the issue of imperialism and war is top of our agenda, then learning from Lenin is an essential ingredient of this.

To give just one example, his seminal work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written as he with others including Luxemburg, Liebknecht, MacLean and Trotsky took the brave stance of opposing their “own” governments in World War I — remarkably illuminates economic processes such as monopolisation, which continues and intensifies today.

In it, he writes: “Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations — all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.”

It also teaches us why and how the conclusion millions are drawing that capitalism inevitably leads to wars and interventions is correct and essential to effective opposition to these wars. 

He also understood how the working class in imperialist countries must ally itself with those internationally fighting against domination by “their” ruling class, including in Britain, through giving full support to Irish liberation and opposing the wars of our ruling class.

As Lenin put it, “Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations.”

To aid with this process of developing socialist political education, a series of events has been organised under the banner of Lenin 100 in Britain which has been organised to commemorate the real ideas of Lenin in the centenary of his death. 

This series of events begins on July 7 2024 and will include a variety of speakers and topics ranging from socialist historian Paul Le Blanc on Lenin Lives! The Struggle for Socialism 100 years on: to Marxist economist Michael Roberts on Lenin as an Economist; to socialist author and Sinn Fein activist Joe Dwyer on Lenin on Ireland: The decisive blow against English imperialism and, former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn Steve Howell on 100 years on — what would Lenin make of the world today, plus acclaimed economist and activist Grace Blakeley on what we can learn from classical theories of imperialism today.

100 years on, the struggle for “peace, land and bread” is needed more than ever. Join us for these vital discussions!

Logan Williams is one of the volunteers for the Lenin 100 series of events.

Follow on X at https://twitter.com/lenin100Britain.

Register for the ‘Lenin 100’ series at bit.ly/Lenin100Tickets.