What is socialism? (2025)

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the years, the word ‘socialism’ has been used to mean many different things – in particular to describe the aims and principles of many different organisations and the policies of many different governments and regimes. Nowadays, in the UK, socialism is associated in most people’s minds with small left-wing organisations or at a stretch even the Labour Party, or with countries like China, Cuba, Venezuela and the former Soviet Union.

We have always denied that socialism means any of these things. Since our foundation in 1904, we have always defined socialism as a world-wide, democratic, moneyless society in which everyone will have free access to all goods and services according to their needs. We have further maintained that socialism can only come about through a majority of people consciously choosing it, ideally through voting at the ballot box.

However, before our definition of socialism and the way it can be achieved can be meaningfully understood, we must explain our view on the present system of society and why we consider it must be abolished and replaced.

Present-day society

The present system of society, based on minority ownership and buying and selling, is commonly known as capitalism. It exists all over the world, in China, Cuba, Venezuela and Russia for example, as well as in the UK, America and Europe. It has not always existed, and it will not exist for ever. It is not an evil conspiracy but a type of social order which has been necessary for the progress of mankind. It has developed science and technology to a previously undreamed-of degree, done wonders for global health, united the world in communications and educated more people than ever before to a high degree of knowledge and adaptability.

But capitalism has not fully applied its advances for the full benefit of the majority of the population, and it cannot. It has not united the world politically. Wars go on all the time essentially due to the competition within or between nations over resources, raw materials and trade routes. The threat of a big war which would wipe us all out still remains. Nor has it used the sophisticated knowledge and technology it has created to ensure useful, dignified and happy productive activity for the majority. In fact it has put a curse on work. Work for most people is equated with something unpleasant in life.

What capitalism has done is to create a potential abundance of wealth capable of satisfying everyone’s needs, but without being able to realise that potential. This is because it is not geared to distributing wealth freely but to the rationing of it by means of the market and the wages system.

It operates by exploiting the majority of the population. By exploitation we do not mean that the majority earn starvation wages or live in 19th century conditions, though some do, especially in the global South. What we mean is that those who work are a source of wealth that is taken from them, that they produce a greater amount of wealth than they get back in wages or salaries. Unfortunately, most people do not see this, misled as they are by the culture of acceptance in which they grow up, their education and the media they are exposed to. They tend to see the world as a place in which we should all count ourselves lucky if we are given a chance to earn enough to enable us to exist from day to day.

The fact is that the world’s wealth is produced but not owned by that large majority who, in order to live, are obliged to hire themselves to an employer for a wage or salary. So while no one would deny that, in most countries, conditions of life have vastly improved over the last century, it is still, for example, the case that millions of children live in poverty even in 40 of the world’s richest countries.

The working class

This large majority of people who produce most of the wealth but own none of it to speak of we refer to as ‘the working class’. To many people class is defined by such things as upbringing or education or occupation. These may be useful classifications for some purposes, but to socialists the working class is composed of all those who through economic necessity are obliged to sell their energies to an employer in order to live, ie, the vast majority of the population. The working class is therefore a class of wage and salary earners and as such includes not only manual workers but also people who are often referred to as ‘middle class’ such as office workers, civil servants, engineers, doctors, teachers, etc.

The interests of the working class are diametrically opposed to the interests of the other class in society, the employing or capitalist class, comprising those who own enough to live (land, shares in companies, farms, offices, etc.) without needing to sell their energies to an employer. Another possible arrangement for capitalism is one in which the state, via its bureaucrats, takes over capital, wholly or in part, in order to exploit workers. This can consist either in selective nationalisation of certain industries or complete state control. We call this state capitalism.

Socialists have no personal grudge against capitalists either as individuals or as a class. We simply point out that their interests will always be opposed to the people they employ. In short, society today is a class-divided society.

Reforms

Apart from the continual battle inherent in the capitalist system between employee and employer over pay and working conditions, capitalism also produces a host of other intractable problems. Among these are wars and the threat of war, unemployment, poor housing, homelessness, anxiety, loneliness and unsatisfying work, all of which add up to a society in which there is much strife and dissatisfaction and, for many, a generally insecure and frustrated existence. Suggestions for reforms to improve things come continually from the political parties involved in running the system. But once brought in, reforms rarely have the beneficial effect claimed. At best they tinker at the edges of problems and can even create new problems requiring further reform. And of course they may be reversed when a new party comes to power.

Well-meaning individuals often say that you can have socialism as your long-term aim but still campaign for reforms in the meantime. We say that this is merely putting off the day and channelling energies that could be usefully employed in bringing socialism nearer into activities whose results are uncertain and which may have the effect of bolstering capitalism rather than help get rid of it. So we do not consider it our function to campaign for reforms or seek support on the basis of reforms.

So far it has been comparatively easy for the dissatisfaction of workers to be channelled in a reformist rather than a socialist direction. Some people might even say that there is not that much dissatisfaction among workers at all, that on the whole they are quite happy with things as they are. But perhaps what they should say is not ‘happy’ but ‘resigned’. What most people want is a quiet secure life for themselves and their families, but capitalism tends to deny them this. Their plans are constantly being put in jeopardy by crises, job reorganisations, new government policies, disruption of various other kinds, and, depending on which part of the world they live in, wars and day-to-day violence.

Socialism comes from capitalism

What makes us think workers will ever take action? Well, there is certainly no guarantee, but capitalism has already created a large, organised, highly trained working class which carries out by itself all essential productive, administrative and educative activity throughout most of the world and which has an increasing interest, because of its subordinate social and economic position and its conditions of work, in challenging the status quo. Capitalism has also produced, and carries on producing, the material conditions necessary for the establishment and practical organisation of a united world-wide society, ie, rapid world-wide communications and a potential abundance of goods and services. In addition many of the problems of modern capitalism (pollution, climate change, threat of war, terrorism, recessions, etc.) are world problems that can only be approached on a world scale even within the present system and that tend therefore to spread a consciousness of the need for world solutions generally.

We know that none of this means socialism is just around the corner. And socialists at present are a tiny minority. But, as we have pointed out, capitalism is a system of constant agitation and rapid change in which nothing is constant or sacred and which itself has provided, and will continue to provide, fuel for the spreading of socialist ideas.

How to get socialism

Because socialism will be a fully democratic society in which the majority will prevails, though with full rights of dissent for minorities, it follows that socialism can only be set up democratically, ie, when a majority have come to want and understand it. Socialism cannot be handed to people by an elite which thinks it knows what is good for them. Such a minority revolution could only fail and lead to minority rule, as happened in Russia, China and those other countries which are often called socialist (or communist), but which we call state capitalist.

And being a majority revolution, socialism has no need to initiate violence. The street-fights-and-barricades vision of revolution belongs to a romantic past and anyway could not possibly stand up to the might of the modern state. In any case, in most of the economically advanced countries of the world where workers are the most numerous and highly trained, capitalism has been forced to give them certain elementary political rights, in particular the vote. This means that, when a majority decide they want socialism, they can organise themselves as a leaderless democratic political party and use the ballot box to send their delegates to legislative assemblies with a mandate not to form a new government to oversee the capitalist system but to abolish capitalism and its whole machinery of minority rule.

Sceptics may ask: will the capitalist class allow this to happen? Our reply is: what can they do against a politically conscious majority from all sections (including police, army, etc.) of the working class?

What socialism will be like

What will socialism be like once established? Well, we obviously cannot provide a blueprint for it, as the precise details of its organisation will be democratically worked out by the majority who decide to establish that society and to live in it. But we can make certain general statements about its nature.

We can say that it will mean the end of buying and selling and of all the other financial and commercial institutions like money, prices, wages, banks and insurance.

We can say that, with the disappearance of such factors as financial cost and competition, it will mean people planning production democratically and using the highly sophisticated technology in existence to provide for their wants and taking freely what they need from the abundance of resources made available by that technology.

We can say that it will mean voluntary cooperation, work as pleasure not toil, and all human beings as social and economic equals.

We can say that it will mean complete democracy in all departments of life with freedom to choose one’s activities and occupations and without people being pushed around by decisions from above or by any kind of arbitrary authority.

We can say that socialism will be world-wide – it cannot be anything else. ‘Socialism in Britain’, for example, is a contradiction in terms, and anyway the world is now so closely united in terms of communications, fashions and the rapid flow of ideas that, if people in one country were ready for socialism, the rest of the world could not be far behind.

The establishment of this world community founded on common ownership and democratic control is the only solution to the major problems of modern life. It may seem some way off, but if you agree with us and help spread socialist ideas, you will bring it nearer. And if you join the Socialist Party, you will find yourself a member of a unique political organisation, one which is completely democratic, has no leaders and no secrets, and in which all members have an equal say; one, in other words, that foreshadows the way in which socialist society itself will be organised.

South Wales Branch

Fake socialism (2025)

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In October there was a by-election to elect a new ward councillor in South Acton, London borough of Ealing. One of the 8 candidates was David Hofman standing for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). Though TUSC is nominally an umbrella organisation of various unions and small left political groupings, it is in fact dominated by the ‘Socialist Party’, the organisation that arose in 1997 when the so-called ‘Militant Tendency’, which operated within the Labour Party to try and push it to the left and then renamed itself ‘Militant Labour’, was effectively expelled by Labour together with its members. It initially called itself the ‘Socialist Party of England and Wales’ (SPEW), but later dropped the ‘England and Wales’, effectively hijacking the commonly used name of our own Party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

But what kind of organisation is this so-called ‘Socialist Party’, which campaigned for election in South Acton under the name of TUSC? Is it a socialist organisation in the sense that we understand socialism, ie, a moneyless, wageless society of common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services? Or is it something different?

In an interview with Ealing News, the TUSC candidate for South Acton, David Hofman, outlined its aims and objectives. Having pointed out that he had been one of those expelled from the Labour Party in the 1990s, Hofman explained that among his recent political activities had been ‘the campaign to retain Ealing libraries, and other campaigns to save local services’ and that he had been involved in assisting and participating in various trade union activities. The main issues he said he was campaigning on were restoration of the winter fuel allowance, recently removed from some pensioners by Keir Starmer’s new Labour government, and the need to ‘tackle the housing crisis’. If elected he would campaign on Ealing Council to give emergency heating grants to pensioners in need so that they did not have to choose whether ‘to heat or eat’, and he would campaign for the Starmer government to return to Ealing funding ‘stolen’ from it by Westminster via austerity policies since 2010. This, he continued, would allow the Council ‘to start addressing the housing and other local service issues and to avert ‘further rounds of cuts, closures, redundancies, and outsourcing of services’, via ‘a no-cuts needs budget’. The candidate’s election leaflet contained a further ‘wish list’ of reforms including mass council house building, a £15 an hour minimum wage, well-paid jobs for all, free public transport and an end to privatisation of utilities.

It would be churlish in a way to argue with such aspirations, especially those such as helping pensioners to keep warm that might be achievable, even if in fact most of the candidate’s proposals for reforms are probably not achievable within the framework of the system we live in. But even if they were, they would remain just that – reforms. They would be relatively small tweaks to how the buying and selling system operates, the system that inevitably means vast disparity of wealth between those who own the means of living and those who are obliged to sell their energies to produce goods and services for sale on the market. David Hofman did show an awareness of this disparity in talking about wealth being ‘concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority’, but that was combined with a failure to appreciate that this cannot be rectified by what are small – and possibly short-term – reforms which leave the basic blocks of the system in place – money, wages, buying and selling, production for profit not need. In other words, it would be no more than tinkering at the edges. As a sage once said, ‘The system cannot fix the system’.

In the end, the TUSC grouping that Hofman stood for in that by-election, though claiming to be socialist, is not socialist at all. Like so many left-wing groups, it is a reformist alliance that not only never says a single word about socialism in its genuine sense, as the candidate never did in his interview, but in sticking to advocacy of reforms, leads people to think that this is what socialism is, so causing confusion.

In his interview the candidate did talk about the need to ‘help bring a new workers’ party into existence’, but our news for him is that one already exists, the Socialist Party (of Great Britain). Of course, we remain to be recognised as such by the vast majority of workers. But the plain fact is that only when the message we exist to propagate gains that recognition, will we be on the way to the real societal change that is socialism. At the same time we recognise that the social consciousness on the part of the majority of workers needed for this is not something that can be rushed or conjured into existence. It can only develop at its own pace and the single purpose of the SPGB is to assist that process as much as possible by helping to spread the idea of what socialism really is.

David Hofman, despite the attractive package of reform measures TUSC was advocating, got only 18 votes, quite possibly fewer than would have gone to a candidate presenting a straight socialist programme of abolition of capitalism and its buying and selling system and a society of free access based on from each according to ability to each according to need.

Howard Moss

Proper Gander: The latest celebrity to be accused (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gregg Wallace MBE used to be most well known for presenting BBC One’s MasterChef cookery competition, but now he’s the latest celebrity to be accused of sexual misconduct. By late November, 13 women had made allegations against him, apparently of sexually harassing-type behaviour and inappropriate comments while they were working on various TV shows. Some of these complaints date back years, raising questions about how they were dealt with at the time, and why any abusive behaviour continued.

At the beginning of December, Wallace posted a video on Instagram denying the allegations and saying his accusers were ‘a handful of middle-class women of a certain age’, which surely he didn’t think would calm the situation down. His accusers reacted by criticising him for his dismissive tone, while other journalists and commentators wore the phrase he used as a badge of honour, and also literally on badges, as well as on t-shirts and mugs. Even the government got involved. After Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy met with the BBC’s senior management, a spokesman for the Prime Minister made a statement that Wallace’s comment was ‘completely inappropriate and misogynistic’. Wallace then posted a self-pitying apology for the offence caused by his remarks, technically not apologising for the remarks themselves. Some future editions of MasterChef were dropped from the schedules and Wallace isn’t likely to be getting any other work pending an investigation. Further allegations of groping and indecent exposure followed.

Right-wing pundits such as Simon Webb of History Debunked and Alex Phillips on Talk TV were critical of the importance placed on Gregg Wallace’s actions in the news, above those days’ other events such as Syria’s Assad government losing control of the city of Aleppo. Of course, to complain about the story’s prominence in the news is to add to its prominence. When right-wing commentators criticise the story they are likely to be doing so because they feel that it’s an example of what they would see as the leftist trend of people being overly offended. Leo Kearse’s flippant stance was that targeting Wallace reveals the hypocrisy of left wingers who ignore non-white male perpetrators. Still, you don’t have to be right wing to notice that the story has been especially prominent on the BBC’s news output.

One reason for this is that the BBC wouldn’t want its reputation to be harmed further by giving the impression it isn’t taking seriously allegations against one of its stars. Only a few months earlier, newsreader Huw Edwards, who was usually called on to present coverage of the state’s most prestigious occasions, was convicted of possessing child pornography. Edwards and Wallace have now both joined the list of TV presenters and actors who have been accused of sexually harassing or abusive behaviour to various extents: Russell Brand, Jay Blades, John Barrowman and Noel Clarke, among others. And the BBC – and the media in general – is still shamed by predators such as Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall, Gary Glitter and Jimmy Savile. Residual guilt about some of these abusers being able to continue for years probably also accounts for the BBC appearing to be so open now about accusations against Wallace.

While the actions of these men aren’t equivalent to each other, there is a pattern behind this type of behaviour. Presumably, the high status these people had in TV circles gave them confidence, a sense of superiority over others and the opportunities to act on this. The power imbalance has led to misdemeanours ranging from crass comments to the most abhorrent crimes. The same pattern is found elsewhere in the media, as shown by film mogul Harvey Weinstein being jailed for rape and sexual abuse offences, and the sexism and sexual violence found in some aspects of hip hop and rap culture. Outside the media industry, allegations of sexual abuse by Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed have come to light after his death, having been curtailed during his lifetime by threats of litigation against complainants. He was one of the few rich enough to buy some secrecy, but otherwise, how high profile a perpetrator is tends to equate to how prominently they are reported on, once the story breaks. A famous name attached to sexual misconduct attracts lucrative newspaper sales, social media posts and clicks on websites. The depressingly high number of other instances of sexual harassment and abuse in different workplaces hasn’t been reported on as widely as the scandals in the media industry.

The TUC’s Still Just A Bit of Banter report from 2016 said that more than one in ten women reported experiencing unwanted sexual touching while at work. And in 2020, the government published the Sexual Harassment Survey, which found that 29 percent of people in employment had experienced some form of sexual harassment through their job. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is considering introducing new codes of conduct for people working in the arts in an attempt to address abuse in that industry, but the problem exists across all sectors and runs deeper than reforms can control. The power imbalance which lies behind instances of sexual abuse is a consequence of the hierarchies which come with employment. The structure of workplaces in capitalism puts people on different levels, with those in higher positions having influence over those lower down. This creates the conditions for people with damaged and damaging attitudes towards women, children or other groups to act in an abusive way. Addressing this problem means addressing the structures in society which enable it to happen.

Mike Foster

Hobson’s choice (2025)

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 20 January Donald J Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States of America.

Hopefully, given the American predilection for violence, Donald Trump won’t in the interim have suffered the fate of Caesar, like a lot of other American presidents, political figures, civil rights advocates and so on. We come not to bury him and certainly not to praise him.

‘Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.’ This aphorism seems particularly pertinent given the reaction which the election of ‘47’ seems to have generated. The media, and social media especially, went into paroxysms of rage, frustration and general crazed madness. The meltdown displayed by individuals, who seemed to think that upon being sworn into office Trump was immediately going to pass an Enabling Act, was off the scale. The ire and emotion directed at Donald Trump would be more positively channelled into changing the capitalist system.

Robert Tressell in his book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, gave an example of how those who favour the alternative are treated:

‘At the conclusion of the singing, Bert turned another picture into view. “’Ere we ’ave another election scene. At each side we see the two candidates the same as in the last pitcher. In the middle of the road we see a man lying on the ground, covered with blood, with a lot of Liberal and Tory working men kickin’ ’im, jumpin’ on ’im, and stampin’ on ’is face with their ’obnailed boots. The bloke on the ground is a Socialist, and the reason why they’re kickin’ ’is face in is because ’e said that the only difference between Slumrent and Mandriver was that they was both alike”.’

There’s nothing comic of course about the American adult population voting for the continuation of capitalism. Socialists have to live with the result of this happening time and time again, but socialists don’t throw their toys out of the pram. They just roll up their sleeves and work harder to make socialists.

It’s said if America sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold. One objective the incoming President has declared is the implementation of protectionist economic measures, ie, raising tariffs on foreign imports. This action is intended to have a negative impact on America’s economic rivals and competitors, but it will also damage the economies of ‘friends and allies’ (sic). Is it likely that American workers will see some material benefits in the next four years? Possibly, if only for a while. American capitalists will almost certainly see their wealth and power increase. But what about the working class in the rest of the world? Can they expect a mild dose of flu, or pneumonia? However, as demonstrated by the UK Labour Party’s recent performance, politicians will simply lie in order to gain power, so nothing they say is set in stone.

Thomas Hobson (1544–1631) owned stables in Cambridge, and is said to have told those wanting a horse, take the one in the stall nearest the door or don’t bother taking one at all. ‘Hobson’s choice’ therefore means there is no choice. For voters in the November US election, just as in all states claiming to be democracies across the world, it’s always Hobson’s choice, because whatever inducements are offered the result is always to the benefit of capitalism.

The Scottish stand-up comedian Billy Connolly said, ‘The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one. Don’t vote. It just encourages them’. In socialism we won’t need them and we won’t have them.

But this is not to say that voting and elections are useless. The World Socialist Movement aims to use political means in order to implement the change to a socialist society across the world. As we say in our pamphlet What’s Wrong With Using Parliament?:

‘Control of the state is operated by those who hold political power as a result of being elected via universal suffrage (the vote). This means they have to get the formal agreement, at election times, of the majority of the people. This is not too difficult since most people are imbued with capitalist ideas and see no alternative to present-day, capitalist society with its class ownership, production for profit, working for wages and rationing by money… there is a more positive reason for winning control of political power. The state is an instrument of coercion, but it has assumed social functions that have to exist in any society and which have nothing to do with its coercive nature: it has taken over the role of being society’s central organ of administration and co-ordination. Gaining control of the state will at the same time give control of this social organ which can be used to co-ordinate the changeover from capitalism to socialism’.

Dave Coggan

Origins of patriarchy (2025)

Book Review from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule. By Angela Saini. 4th Estate £10.99.

Friedrich Engels referred to the ‘overthrow of mother-right’ as ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex’, meaning that women became subordinate to men and ‘the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude’. This implied an earlier time where women had far more power and authority, in matrilineal or matriarchal societies. The Socialist Party’s 1986 pamphlet Women and Socialism criticised this account on the grounds that there was no universal stage of matriarchy and that relationships between men and women have changed over time to meet the needs of society.

In this book Angela Saini makes a similar point, that early societies varied greatly, and ‘the emergence of patriarchy could never have been a single catastrophic event’. A lot of material, in different places and at different times, is covered, but often it is hard to draw firm conclusions.

Societies where descent is traced through the female line are found in many parts of the world, though rarely in Europe. The Khasi community in north-east India, for instance, is matrilineal, with a child belonging to her mother, and men do not have rights over property or children. But it is not matriarchal, as family authority rests with the mother’s brother, though this power is not absolute. Some men have objected to this system recently, but others have defended it. In North America the Seneca have adopted a patrilineal naming system, but tribal membership remains matrilineal, despite the efforts of missionaries and government agents to institute a more patriarchal system.

Unfortunately, the book’s main claims are let down by an unconvincing chapter on the status of women in Russia and Eastern Europe under Bolshevism, in what is termed here ‘state socialism’. Abortion was legalised in the USSR in 1920, though this was reversed under Stalin in 1936, in order to boost birth rates, and it was made legal again in 1955. East Germany saw a massive increase in the number of crèche places, and by 1959 almost every pharmacist in the Soviet Union was a woman. On the whole, though, patriarchy was ‘dented’ rather than smashed. Saini does not discuss this, but the division into rulers and ruled was of course not even dented (see chapter 3 of our 1986 pamphlet for more on women in Russia.)

In Iran many women supported the movement against the Shah, but the Islamic Republic clamped down on women’s freedoms, with abortion made illegal and the wearing of the veil being mandatory. As this and other examples show, patriarchy is ‘being constantly remade in the present, and sometimes with greater force than before.’ And patriarchy is not a single phenomenon, rather there are plural patriarchies, existing in different ways in different cultures.

Paul Bennett