Sean Figg, Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI)
This year the CWI, the socialist international the Socialist Party is affiliated to, will hold its 14th World Congress in Berlin, Germany. Delegates will attend from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America. This crucial meeting is tasked with grappling with a rapidly changing world. Donald Trump’s return to the White House brings dramatic headlines every day as his administration turns the capitalist world order on its head. The crisis of the global profit system, of which Trump 2.0 is both a symptom and an accelerator, is deepening at an alarming speed.
The ground is being prepared for dramatic escalations in the class struggle in the months and years ahead. Take, for example, how Forbes magazine’s ‘Billionaires List’ has revealed the sickness of the profit system by introducing the new category of the ‘superbillionaire’. Just 24 of these superbillionaires have a combined net worth of $3.3 trillion. Concentrated in the US and mostly linked to ‘big tech’, the accumulation of phenomenal wealth has fuelled appetites for accumulating political power, as the spectacle of the chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk has made clear.
The Congress will debate and discuss the world situation and develop a political perspective for the unfolding of the class struggle. In this uncertain and rapidly changing world, the best workers and young people will strive to understand what is happening and what can be done to ensure the future is not as bleak as the present can appear. The Congress will work to clarify the way forward for working-class struggle, enriched by CWI members’ on-the-ground experiences in the class struggle on every continent, and the tasks this poses for the CWI, its sections and its members.
While politically crucial, the World Congress will add enormous pressure to the finances on the CWI in 2025. We are determined that delegates attend in person. But this will cost money. The Socialist Party, the CWI in England and Wales, is campaigning to raise £25,000 to ensure that the World Congress is a success and to support the political work of the CWI over the remainder of 2025.
Alongside the Congress, we need to continue the work of positioning the CWI as a reference point for all those questioning capitalism and looking for an alternative. Over the last months, the CWI has demonstrated that we continue to be a reference point. We are currently involved in discussions with socialists and working-class activists from Sweden, Romania, Israel-Palestine, Indonesia and Kazakhstan, exploring the principled political and programmatic agreement that, if achieved, could in time allow organisational unity. We have also had a number of people rejoin the CWI in Austria, Ireland and Nigeria, after parting ways in 2019. Where others have succumbed to the hostile class pressures of this period and stepped away from Marxism and a revolutionary socialist programme, the CWI has remained resolute and this gets noticed. The numbers involved are small at this stage but anticipate what is possible in this period if we work correctly.
Alongside efforts to reach activists in new countries and expand the reach of the CWI, the important task of political support to the existing sections of the CWI must continue. This is the core of the day-to-day work of the International Centre based in London. We continue to defend the idea of a unified world party of socialist revolution and take the struggle to build it seriously. This includes important solidarity work supporting CWI members in Nigeria being prosecuted by the government for their political activity. This year’s finance appeal is crucial to help us play our part in gathering the best class fighters around the banner of working-class struggle and socialism and find their place in the ranks of the CWI.
