MAY DAY 2025 | Capitalist Chaos Confirms Marx’s Analysis

May Day Statement from the Committee for a Workers International

The CWI salutes the workers, young people and poor of the world on May Day 2025. We stand in solidarity with all the struggles challenging capitalism and the countless ways the profit system blights the lives of billions. Many recent struggles have made global headlines. This includes the ongoing global protests and actions against the Israeli state’s slaughter in Gaza, and the mass protests in Greece, in North Macedonia and in Serbia, where 800,000 protested out of a population of just seven million. In Turkey, weeks of mass protests have defied brutal state repression to shake the Erdoğan regime. The “Hands off!” protests have given the first glimpse of the mighty struggles that lie ahead under Trump and his successors in the United States. The anger at the housing crisis gripping the advanced capitalist crisis erupted in Spain, bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets. In Argentina, workers have pushed back against austerity in a series of protests, and in Kenya last year mass protests forced the withdrawal of unpopular tax increases. The masses in South Korea, after defeating the coup at the end of 2024, maintain a vigil, ready to defend hard won democratic rights from those sections of the ruling class that would roll them back. Alongside these major acts in the class struggle, the CWI also salutes the countless struggles, often little known beyond the ranks of their heroic participants, that take place daily in every workplace, education institution and community on every continent.

Trump’s Disruption

This year, May Day takes place as the Trump administration in the United States completes its first hundred days in office. Trump’s initial ‘shock and awe’ barrage of executive orders and wild swings on trade and foreign policy have been enormously destabilising for world capitalism and poured enormous fuel onto the class struggle in the US and internationally. The instability undermining the lives of millions, and the daily fear this provokes about what the future holds, has been dialled up to intolerable levels. In power in the world’s largest economy, and strongest and still dominant imperialist power, his administration’s moves to defend the interests of the US ruling class are reshaping the world and the terrain upon which the class struggle will unfold.

Trump started a new twenty-first century era of trade wars with his 2 April “Liberation Day”, and the partial-retreats and manoeuvres since, injecting massive doses of instability into an already feeble and fragile world economy. This has stoked uncertainty for hundreds of millions of workers, worrying about the impact on jobs, wages, working time and pensions. The events of the past month may yet be the precursor to a major new world economic crisis.

In Gaza, the Netanyahu-regime in Israel has seized the opportunity presented to it by Trump – with his callous nonsense of building the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ atop the smouldering cinders of the strip – to openly pursue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. After unilaterally breaking the ceasefire and restarting its war, the Israeli state has blocked all aid from entering Gaza for more than fifty days. A “voluntary emigration unit” has been created and nearly a third of the strip has been occupied and declared as permanent “buffer zones”. In Yemen, the Trump administration has bombed the Houthis – and any civilians that got in its way – for thirty-seven consecutive days.

Negotiations to end the war in Ukraine are taking place between US and Russian imperialism over the heads of the Ukrainian and Russian people and even the Ukrainian ruling class. The details of the grubby minerals deal the US has demanded from Ukraine are beginning to leak out – revenue from gas, oil and rare earth elements will be deposited into a ‘joint’ investment fund controlled by the Trump administration that will also have the first claim on profits. All of this strips the mask from imperialism, which, at its root, as Lenin explained, is the pursuit of markets and profit via the division, and re-division, of the world amongst the ‘great powers’. New twenty-first century ‘spheres of influence’ are crystalising as the ruling classes of the major powers adjust their policies to the reality of a multipolar world and the opportunities this opens to pursue their interests.

The neo-colonial ruling classes are scrambling not to be left holding outdated rule books in a changed world. The Rwandan regime has seized its opportunity to carve out an expanded ‘sphere of influence’ in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. For its part, the DRC’s Tshisekedi regime has lobbied for its own minerals deal with the US in exchange for protection against the Rwandan-backed and supported invasion threatening its rule. In Sudan, the rival counterrevolutions slugging it out in a brutal civil war are inching closer to the de facto break-up of the country, along the lines of Libya or Somalia, to consolidate the social and territorial bases for their rule at the expense of the Sudanese people.

Capitalist Chaos

All of these developments confirm the crisis ridden character of world capitalism. The divided US ruling class is trapped in the contradictions of the profit system and its multiple crises, of which the Trump administration is both a symptom and an accelerator. Its experimentation with dramatic foreign policy changes to adjust US imperialism to its decline relative to Chinese state capitalism is inadvertently consolidating the multipolar character of world capitalism. A new scramble is unfolding amongst the ruling classes of the world to dominate each region, continent, and ultimately the world. This can only mean increased instability and conflict blighting the lives of workers, young people and the poor.

Taking a longer historical view, the new era is a fundamental confirmation of Marxism’s analysis of capitalism and the conclusion that the only alternative is either socialism or barbarism. The US-dominated unipolar capitalist world order of the 1990s and 2000s faced no obstacles in demonstrating the superiority of the profit system that its representatives claimed – and it failed!

The return of tariffs and trade wars confirms on the most fundamental level the absolute limits imposed by capitalism on the development of society and of humanity. The ruling capitalist classes’ power is rooted in the nation-state and private ownership of the decisive sectors of the economy. They can give these up only with the same consequences as a person who chooses to stop breathing. But the astronomical wealth created by the working class, the vast scale of modern production and the development of new technologies whose potential is yet to be fully revealed, are entirely incompatible with the ruling classes’ source of oxygen.

Karl Marx warned that, “no ruling class exits the pages of history voluntarily”. Rather than do so, today’s ruling classes are prepared to drag the world backwards, and in doing so deepen the contradictions of their system and provoke greater crises. Sharp splits have developed within the ruling classes as their social bases hollow-out after decades of stagnating and declining living standards for the majority. The traditional parties of capitalism stand discredited as never before, leading to a breakdown of consensus withing the ruling classes over the ‘acceptable’ range of parties and politicians that could manage and defend capitalism and on what program they should govern.

Populism

This political vacuum has propelled right-wing populist parties and politicians forward. In many countries these forces are vying for the political leadership of capitalism. Alongside Trump and the MAGAised Republican party in the US, the right-wing populists are in power in Italy, Hungary and Slovakia. In France and Austria they are the largest parliamentary parties, but do not yet control the government. In Germany, February’s elections saw the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) become the second largest parliamentary party. In Britain, the right-populist Reform party is leading in election opinion polls, albeit up to four years before the next national elections. The capitalist state – the executive committee of the ruling class – is contested in a way not seen in generations fuelling instability. Nowhere is the ruling class united behind right-wing populism or all of its policies. Trump himself learned this when the reaction of the financial markets forced a ninety day ‘pause’ on his tariff policies.

It was the weakness of the previous left-populist wave in the wake of the 2008 world economic crisis that ceded the political ground to the right. In disappointment and frustration some workers and young people have looked to the right for solutions. But, ultimately, right-wing populism will disappoint them too. In some countries, often in response to the advance of the right, left-populism has re-gained some ground. The “Fighting Oligarchy” speaking tour of senators Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in the US has filled stadiums and in some states set new records for attendance at a political event. In Germany, the Left Party has gained over 100,000 members, and had a late surge in February’s elections, defying expectations of electoral oblivion to win sixty-four seats. The left New Popular Front also performed better than expected in France’s election last year finishing in second place, and its major component, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, gained 70,000 supporters in twelve months.

Although at an early stage, there are other indications that the swing to right-populism is not a one-way nor stable process. Trump’s approval rating has already declined by thirteen points since taking office so that now a majority polled in the US “disapprove” of him. The right-populist Law & Justice party lost control of the government in Poland last year. Under the pressure of Trump’s threats to make Canada the fifty-first state of the US, the fortunes of the ruling Canadian Liberal Party and the mini-Trump Pierre Poilievre-led Conservative Party flipped, with the latter’s support crashing and Poilievre even losing the seat he held for twenty years. In Finland, in municipal elections the right-populist Finns Party fell to 7.6% of the votes from 20% in 2023 in a backlash against the austerity policies of the governing coalition of which it is part. As long as elections are dominated by parties incapable of offering a fundamental alternative to the crisis of capitalism a certain swinging of the electoral pendulum fuelled by anti-incumbent moods is inevitable alongside deepening social polarisation as right-populists whip-up divisions to defend and advance their position.

It is crucial to learn the lessons of why the previous left-populists failed so that the mistakes are not repeated. A clear socialist program that puts forwards a bold break with capitalism is crucial. The only way for humanity to move forwards is by abolishing private ownership of the decisive sectors of the world economy and introducing democratic international economic planning – in other words by developing a world socialist economy. This will simultaneously eliminate the sources of war, poverty, exploitation and environmental catastrophe in the competition between the ruling classes. Alongside program, the question of organisation is also crucial. A socialist program needs a vehicle and this can only be in the form of a party based on the working class.

Marxism

In capitalism’s broken world, Marxism is the only working compass and it continues to point to socialism as the only possible alternative. The new capitalist world disorder daily confirms the fundamental correctness of the ideas of Marxism and the necessity for socialism. This is the objective foundation for a renewed confidence that both will again chime with the experiences of workers, young people and the poor. Capitalism continues to create its own gravediggers in the form of the working class, for whom experience is always the greatest teacher. Fears will be overcome and conclusions will be drawn in the course of the mighty class struggles ahead. The pace of events, as world capitalism sinks ever deeper into crisis, poses the likelihood of rapid learning curves. This can allow the working class to overcome its crisis of political organisation and program that currently limits the conscious development of struggle in the direction of the world socialist revolution.

What Marxists and revolutionaries do today makes a difference to the speed with which the working class draws revolutionary socialist conclusions. We must act as a lever to develop and link struggles, pointing to the root cause of all the crises facing humanity in the contradictions of the profit system and their solution in the struggle for socialism. Working class internationalism must be the answer to the intensified global competition and conflicts amongst the capitalist classes. On May Day 2025 the CWI reaffirms its commitment to champion working class independence, working class internationalism and a socialist program pointing the workers of the world towards the world socialist revolution.