WORKERS are looking at the world from Cop29 to Gaza, from the US and Europe to Britain’s streets and the corridors of Whitehall and asking: where do our voices get a hearing?

It’s also an urgent question for communists and progressive activists everywhere as governments — hell-bent on economic growth at any cost — prioritise the interests of monopoly capital over the collective needs of those who elect them. This enables the political right and far right to make gains with their offer of a return to “national greatness,” itself supposedly founded on self-help, a small state and popular consensus.

Looming large over current geopolitical affairs is the US, as the world holds its collective breath in anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Why did he win?

First, the US middle and working classes feel left behind in one of the world’s most unequal societies. Second, many believe that nobody speaks for them.

The irony is that in voting for Trump, they have elected a product of the very inequality they thought they were voting against, falling for his promise of national greatness, his anti-immigration rhetoric, and his appeal to the vehement patriotism instilled in Americans from birth.

In reality and for some time, the US has been in decline economically and in its influence abroad. This trend will continue.

Trump knows this and, as in his first administration, we can anticipate an overarching policy of “America first.”

But for Trump, “America first” means whatever is in his own interests.

Already, we see the elevation of Trump uber-loyalists to important offices of state and the inclusion in government of others whose political influence arises from their personal wealth.

We might say, like Rufus Wainwright in his song Going to a Town, that we are “so tired of America.” But the US still demands attention because there is a contradiction: while it declines in influence, its response to that decline has implications for the Middle East, Ukraine, China, the environment and, for Britain, the so-called “special relationship.”

Raising the stakes

This month, the Ukraine war passed its 1,000th day. Russia continues its inch-by-inch advance into southern and eastern Ukraine despite the latter’s incursion into the Kursk region.

President Joe Biden has finally authorised Ukrainian forces to use US ATACM missiles to attack targets in Russia, and inevitably, the British government has followed suit by allowing the use of Storm Shadow cruise missiles. Russia has responded by lowering its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

This represents an alarming rise in the military stakes, increasing the danger of a direct Nato-Russia confrontation.

Why Biden’s change of mind now, when Volodymyr Zelensky has been asking for many months to use Nato weaponry in Russia?

Perhaps in a last hurrah, Biden is trying to strengthen Ukraine’s negotiating position for when Trump is back in office. Zelensky will have to get around the table to bring the conflict to an end — as Britain’s communists have demanded since day one of the Russian invasion.

Self-defence or genocide?

In the Middle East, the US and Britain maintain their shameful support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and its attacks in Lebanon, Iran and the West Bank.

By ending their supply of military hardware, Western powers could stop Israeli aggression at a stroke.

PM Keir Starmer’s every utterance on the conflict begins with his government’s support for “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Thus, he closes his eyes to the inescapable fact that any notion of self-defence has long since disappeared.

Clearly, Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawks believe that the US — despite a few feeble calls for restraint — won’t stop arming them, and so they don’t care what anyone thinks of their actions.

Meanwhile, South Africa continues to present its case of Israeli genocide to the International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court has now issued arrest warrants for PM Netanyahu and the former defence minister Yoav Gallant — drawing the predictable US response that the warrants are “outrageous.”

The British government has quietly conceded through gritted teeth that it is duty-bound to give effect to the warrants should the opportunity arise.

Furthermore, a UN special committee this month found that Israel’s policies in Gaza are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide” and that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war.

The Communist Party of Britain reaffirms its place in the struggle for justice for the Palestinian people and for a just peace in the region.

In both Ukraine and the Middle East, the burden of suffering is borne by the workers, the children and the old — in other words, by the innocent. Who speaks for their interests as governments jostle for geopolitical advantage and the arms industry wreaks havoc, despoiling the environment while banking huge profits for shareholders?

As always, after the warmongers, the politicians, the generals and their tame media pundits have spoken, the last voices to be heard are of those who suffer the most. The last consideration is the welfare of the people.

Finger-wagging

One effect of the US election may be to hasten an end to the Ukraine war. But we can expect the new cold war against China to continue.

Massive US and Western military involvement ensures that Taiwan and the South China Sea remain among the world’s major flashpoints. Here again, Trump’s shadow looms large.

While President Xi Jinping vowed after meeting Biden in Peru to work with the new US administration, the noise in the US is that China is still a communist country, which threatens the US’s economic health and standing in the world. Where the US leads, Starmer follows.

Last week, he held his own meeting with Xi at the G20 summit in Brazil. Britain’s Prime Minister said he wanted a serious and pragmatic relationship with China while engaging “honestly and frankly” with China’s policies on Ukraine, human rights and Hong Kong.

Earlier, the British government had condemned the jail sentences given to protesters in Hong Kong, claiming that China’s National Security Law was being used to criminalise dissent. In a self-righteous, finger-wagging style, China was told that all states should uphold their international obligations to protect the rights of assembly, political participation and freedom of speech.

Over the last year or so, several climate activists in Britain have been jailed for up to five years for exercising those same rights. The longest sentence was imposed for merely attending a Zoom meeting to discuss protest action.

Britain needs to take a hard look at its supposedly “special relationship” with the US. The argument that they share common interests and common ground will be even more unsustainable once Trump is back in the White House with his “America first” programme.

Will a Starmer government pay more attention to what the people of Britain think about Gaza and the rights of the Palestinians? About the environment, if Trump again withdraws the US from the Paris Agreement? About the NHS, where people don’t want creeping US-style privatisation? About public ownership of the big public utilities, which once belonged to the people and not to shareholders?

The voice of the people must be heard, not the voice of capital.

COP29 COP-OUT: Sit-in protest in Lisbon protest at the conclusions of the Climate Summit

A Cop-out?

October and November saw torrential rain in southern and eastern Spain, causing devastating floods in which over 200 people were killed, bringing the sharp end of climate change closer to those in the global North who were most responsible for causing it.

In other parts of the world, many millions of people live daily with the consequences of post-industrial global warming: floods, fire, drought and food shortages.

The planet is approaching key “tipping points” such as the melting of the west Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the movement of ocean currents, and the release into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide until recently sequestered in the now-melting Arctic tundra.

With no serious measures to interrupt these processes, the UN’s Cop29 climate change conference has been meeting in Azerbaijan, whose president has described oil and gas as “a gift from God” — and after the Cop29 chief executive had been covertly filmed offering oil and gas contracts to undercover journalists.

Hundreds of fossil fuel, carbon capture and industrial farming lobbyists were also there in Baku, whereas the leaders of most of the world’s largest economies were not.

Hence, the growing feeling that Cop has outlived its usefulness.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other bodies repeatedly report that not enough is being done by governments, business and agriculture to limit the world’s temperature to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, and preferably to 1.5°C or below.

After a rise of more than 1.5°C last year, many climate scientists believe that the 1.5°C target is no longer achievable, and we can expect one of 2-4°C by the year 2100.

But Cop does provide a platform for those worst-affected by climate change — most starkly in Baku, where the prime minister of Barbados challenged Trump to a face-to-face meeting to agree measures to save people’s livelihoods and the planet.

The stand-out issue at Cop29 and the Cop16 Biodiversity conference in Colombia has been support and reparations for those countries — mostly in the global South — most affected but least responsible for the rise in world temperatures.

The annual cost of assistance needed by developing countries to cut their carbon emissions and withstand the impact of climate change has been revised up from $500 billion to more than $1,000bn. So far, there has been no rush by the developed industrialised countries to pay in.

Together with agencies such as the World Bank, they are now pledging $300bn (£238bn) a year by 2035 in grants and loans from public and private-sector sources. Much of the shortfall, it is hoped, will be made up by private capitalist investment in the developing countries themselves.

Cop15 Biodiversity proposed a similar fund to preserve 30 per cent of land and sea biodiversity by 2030. But it failed to nail down who was going to contribute, and so the project has yet to get off the ground. Should Cop29 likewise fail to specify who pays, it could meet a similar fate.

If capitalism and its political functionaries are unable to act on climate change — and they aren’t — the impetus must come from below.

Education by communists and others must form the basis for building climate and class consciousness, developing a mass movement that makes an irresistible demand for action.

Richard Hebbert is the convener of the environment commission for the Communist Party of Britain. This article is adapted from his most recent report to its executive committee.