Saturday, July 30, 2022

50 Years Ago: This Phoney Election (1995)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Voters who try to interpret the issues in the election by studying the more flamboyant utterances of the Party leaders may well wonder what it is all about.

Mr. Churchill declares that the election is a fight between individualism and Socialism and between his own Party and the "Socialist Party”. By individualism he means capitalism, which has, however, long since got past the stage of a competitive struggle between independent small capitalists and gone over increasingly to giant monopolies.

The Labour Party, equally anxious to misrepresent the situation, accepts Mr. Churchill's “terminological inexactitude" that they are a socialist party and declare in its Election Declaration (“Let us Face the Future”), “The Labour Party is a Socialist Party and proud of it"—and then proceeds to give us a blue-print of the State Capitalism that they propose to retain and develop.

We confidently make one electoral prophecy. Whatever the result capitalism will be safe because the majority of the working class are not yet Socialists.

(From editorial in Socialist Standard, July 1945)

No comments: