Short summary of the current situation of struggles in the UK 1) What major strike movements have there been in the country where you live, in the last 12 months?
There were very few outstanding strikes, primarily smaller disputes for regrading low paid workers within the NHS, such as the 100 day strike of phlebotomists in Gloucester. The main focus for the trade union movement is the bin workers strike in Birmingham against pay cuts, which has been going on since March 2025. There have been several ‘mass pickets’, which mobilised trade union activists and left groups from around the country. The strike becomes a political issue between the left-wing trade union movement and the governing Labour Party, e.g. the striking union Unite has suspended the membership of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayners. The union also voted to “re-examine its relationship” with Labour over the issue, in a sign of growing divide between the union and the party who have historically worked hand-in-hand. The actual strength of the strike is not talked about much, there have been short-term occupations of scabbing temp agencies, but these actions seemed symbolic. A similar bin strike is happening in Sheffield, where Unite represents a third of the workforce.
https://www.angryworkers.org/2025/07/24/short-summary-of-current-situation-of-struggles-in-the-uk/Assembly.org.ua : From Los Angeles to Ukraine: war prolongation brings new horizons for social struggleWith the anarchist movement seemingly completely lost interest in the situation in Ukraine, the May impasse in peace talks has become a catalyst for new things not seen since last year. Following the lull and apathy described in our interview, presented on the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2025, a new wave of public unrest is beginning in the country. Since the evening of July 22, for the first time since 2022, political protests involving thousands of people are taking place in Kiev and a number of regional centers. The reason is the adopted law No. 12414 on curtailing the powers of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, which are being transferred from the control of Western embassies to the subordination of the Office of the Prosecutor General as ordinary bodies of the presidential vertical. At the moment, the regime is quite tolerant of these protests, since the protesters are not encroaching on its pillars – busification, closed borders and foreign funding of the war, but only demanding a more effective policy of using the country as a torpedo for NATO. Although the very fact that the various components of the system born by the far-right coup of 2014 are beginning to devour each other is also not bad. Possible destabilization of the regime may open up more space for anti-militarist activities. For now, such flashes flare up spontaneously and suddenly fade away, under conditions of fear of prison terms and cruel tortures. On July 11, at the entrance to the Southern Railway in Kharkov, a crowd of disgruntled passersby, as the press service of the regional enlistment office claims, “put the life and health of the districtal TRC servicemen at risk.” One of the pixels fell from some slap. The investigative and operational group arrived at the scene. The regional police press service stated the next day that the TRC (territorial recruitment center) employees were escorting a military serviceman to a unit, during getting out of a service car, he began to resist, this attracted the attention of citizens. The 44-year-old participant in the conflict was detained “for causing bodily harm to a TRC employee,” he was notified of suspicion. A month earlier, on the evening of June 11, a 29-year-old previously convicted Kharkov resident, "invited to check the accounting documents" at the Novobavarsky District TRC, locked himself in one of the rooms, set fire to the fabric with a lighter and made his way out of the second-floor window. The area of the fire was 800 square meters. The flames engulfed several floors, and those inside managed to evacuate. The suspect was detained at night, and faces up to 10 years in prison. This is the first and so far the only case in Ukraine of such a building being destroyed by its prisoner during the entire war. Whether this is our influence, we can only guess, as the identity of the suspect is not disclosed.
https://libcom.org/article/los-angeles-ukraine-war-prolongation-brings-new-horizons-social-struggleLeon Trotsky: The Big Lie: The Defence of Small NationsA direct impetus to the immeasurable events of the present war was given by a few Serb youths, almost boys, who killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in July 1914 in Sarajevo. National romantic-revolutionaries, they, least of all, expected the global consequences of what unfolded from their terrorist act. I later met a member of this revolutionary organisation in Paris, in the first months of the war. He belonged to the group that organised the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but he went abroad before the murder and, in the first days of the war, joined as a volunteer in the French navy as a ‘translator’. At that time, the allies organised a landing on the Adriatic coast of Austro-Hungary in Dalmatia(1), having the intention to support an uprising in the South-Slav provinces of the Habsburg monarchy. For this purpose the French warships stocked a Serbian press to print revolutionary proclamations and enrolled dedicated young Serbs who were to make these appeals and generally raise a rebellion for ‘national independence’. Officially, they were known as translators. Since, however, the Serbian revolutionaries on the warships of the Republic were made of far too combustible material, a silver-haired Serb spy was placed on the flagship for ‘internal’ surveillance of the young enthusiasts. It is very likely that this wise foresight should to be attributed to the Russian embassy in Paris, which in general in all such operations has uncontested hegemony [leadership] among the allies. The entire enterprise, as we know, came to nothing. The French ships circled in the Adriatic, came up to Pula, but after several inconclusive volleys returned home. Why? asked the uninitiated with bewilderment. But in French journalistic and political circles the explanation had already been given in private: ‘Italy is against it’. An uprising in the southern provinces of Austria-Hungary could clearly only be under the banner of the national unification of the South Slavs. Meanwhile, Italy considered that Dalmatia should belong to her ‘as of right’ – obviously, by the right of her imperialist appetite – and she lodged a protest against the expected allied landings. At that time it was necessary to pay a price for the benevolent neutrality of Italy, as for its later intervention in the war: that is why the French ships so unexpectedly turned back with their press, Serb ‘translators’ and silver-haired sleuth. “How do you explain this?” the young Serbian revolutionary who I mentioned above, asks me. “It turns out that the allies, without ceremony, are simply selling the Serbs to Italy. Where is the war for the liberation of small nations now? And in that case what are we, the Serbs, dying for? I didn’t volunteer only to facilitate, with my blood, the transition of Dalmatia to Italy. And in the name of what did my friend in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip(2) and others perish?" He was in despair, the young man with a dark, slightly pock-marked face and feverishly glittering eyes. The true background of the war of ‘liberation’ was revealed to them from its Dalmatian angle… From him I learned many details about the internal life of the South-Slav revolutionary organisations and, in particular, about the group of boys who killed the heir to the Habsburg throne, the head of the Austro-Hungarian military party.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1916/small-nations.htm