The Socialist Party and the General Election (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

A “snap” General Election is disadvantageous to small political parties lacking the resources and paid workers of the major parties. It is the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s policy to put up candidates for Parliament whenever possible. However, on this occasion we had to consider realistically the problems imposed on us, including that with the Election announced on 8th February to take place on 28th the Socialist Standard could not be produced and distributed in time to support a campaign. It should be borne in mind also that candidates of ours are not “gimmicks” hoping to attract impulsive votes but seek serious consideration of the case for Socialism. In these circumstances we have decided not to attempt an electoral campaign but instead to publish statements of the Socialist position in the press; and we present below our attitude in the Election.

The parties of capitalism had some difficulty drawing up their manifestos for this election. As prophecies of total economic blight and national disaster are uttered, politicians cross their fingers and urge the need for greater sacrifice and a return of the “war-time spirit”. The usual vote-catching promise of jam tomorrow being no longer credible, they are offering you continued inflation, severe “wage restraint”, and rising unemployment in as pleasant a manner as possible. In contrast to all other political organizations, the Socialist Party of Great Britain does not form policies designed to tackle economic crises but exists solely to abolish their cause.

That social conflict and disunity characterize Britain today is apparent to anyone who opens a newspaper; what is not realized is that it cannot be otherwise while society is organized on its present basis. Your life and those of the majority of people are spent running a system co-operatively for the benefit of a minority who own the means of living and all that is produced — the capitalists. It is this contradiction between social production and private ownership which gives rise to our problems. While being the creators of all society’s wealth, members of the working class accept as natural the selling of their energies for wages and salaries which are less than what is produced is worth. In short, you wish to be rationed so that a few can enjoy lives of privilege. Industrial strife, war, unemployment, luxury amidst squalor, homelessness, and endless struggle to “make ends meet” are what human beings vote for at elections. The Socialist Party has always maintained that capitalism cannot evolve into something different or better and tries to induce workers not to direct their resentment against trade unions, property speculators, immigrants or politicians, but against a system which demands that priority be given to profit rather than human need and compels them to engage in degrading struggle to decide the level of their own exploitation.

★

There is no “lesser evil” as far as the major political parties are concerned; they all favour your membership of the working class. When capitalism destroys the best-laid plans of governments it can be taken for granted that politicians will offer you excuses and generally resort to deception. Record inflation will be blamed on world prices, as though profits for capitalists overseas as well as at home could make you feel better. The outcome of serious argument concerning the length of time a miner takes to have a bath, you will be told, can influence an economic crisis. Oil sheikhs acting as all good capitalists should will be accused of “blackmail” and members of the working class, who possess nothing but their ability to work, will be told they have a balance of payments deficit of thousands of millions. The only response can be to mind our own business and leave the problems of capitalism to capitalists. The Labour and Communist parties, however, see as part of the solution an extension, of Nationalization, or letting fewer capitalists mind their own business. This entails transfer of control of certain industries to the State but leaves ownership in the hands of capitalists, who simply receive interest from State bonds rather than company shares. For workers nothing is changed. State control of capitalism, whether in Britain, Russia or China, is not Socialism and cannot lead to it. Labour is again seeking to “eliminate poverty wherever it exists”, something which governments have promised to do for decades. Such an objective is rather like wanting to run a car without petrol: capitalism needs the existence of poverty in order to survive and will destroy the noblest of aims. The Liberals, seeking votes from the disillusioned, present themselves as a party above sectional interest and against the “greed of unions and big business”. They promote this “classless” image with slogans such as “Forward with the People!”, “Liberalism is about people”, and “people count”, offering workers “participation” in industry and housewives “community politics”. What should be remembered is that whoever runs capitalism must do so in the interest of the owners of capital, and that this interest is not your own. Liberalism is capitalism, which is only about people as producers of profit. Giving a man a “say” in his own robbery will not bring harmony to social relations and discussion of such issues as efficient garbage removal and more zebra crossings is irrelevant to the fundamental problems from which you suffer.

★

The Socialist Party and its companion parties abroad stand for Socialism, a classless, moneyless world community in which the means of life will be owned and democratically controlled by the whole of society and where the only motive for production will be the satisfaction of human need. With the abolition of money and the wages system millions of workers now engaged in unproductive work such as accountancy, banking, insurance and selling will have the opportunity to develop their potential for their own and society’s good, rather than restricting their lives in the service of profit. People will freely take part in social production and take freely from the social wealth whatever they think they need. Capitalism has developed technology and industry to the point where an abundance of wealth was possible; it cannot be created where production is limited to what can be sold at a profit. In the process of changing society man changes himself and his relationship to his fellow man. Capitalism is not the “natural order of things” and will be abolished when a majority reject the promises and leadership of politicians and understand what Socialism implies. We urge you to read carefully our Object and Declaration of Principles, and if you are in agreement with us we ask you to come and give active help. Capitalism may produce chaos and apathy, but it also creates the Socialists who will finally free and unite mankind.

Smash! (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

A New Election Programme?

The most hilarious buffoonery of the election was the International Marxist Group’s putting up three candidates. At a press conference their representative was reported saying hopefully: “In an atmosphere of confrontation a few hundred votes can turn into tens of thousands” (Times, 13th Feb.). A different view from the one in their leaflet distributed on 1st May last year: May Day — End or New Beginning.

Shorn of all its flowery phrases (like “Mass Action”. “Mobilization”, “Confrontation”, “Counter-offensive” and all the boring old stuff about the failure of the wicked trade-union leaders who won’t “mobilize a united struggle to smash through Phase 2”), what this leaflet does is advise strikers to fight the police. It actually says this explicitly. We quote:

To do this [defend the picket lines] the local Trades Councils have to centralize our resources for fighting the police.

The absurdity of the entire content of this ridiculous document is apparent, for instance, in the first paragraph :

A large majority of the working class are striking work together and coming out onto the streets.

In paragraph 2, however:

Millions of workers feel that this stoppage will have no immediate effect on the Government policies. In this they are correct.

We also would say that the millions of workers are quite right. Not only did the General Council of the TUC know this very well, as they showed by deferring their strike-call date till after the Government had passed the Phase 2 Bill; but we now know that the TUC leaders were having secret meetings with Prime Minister Heath one day before the May-day marches, to be followed by the open meeting to fix a deal.

What concerns us here is the dangerous folly of the baloney being peddled by the IMG. Why on earth they have the insufferable impudence to call themselves “Marxist” only they can know. Everything in this nonsensical and pernicious propaganda is utterly foreign and contrary to all of Marx’s teachings, and especially to his actions in the International Workingmen’s Association, of which he was a founder member and author of its address, or policy statement.

We would highly commend to the IMG the statement by Marx in that address which they would do well to deeply and quietly ponder:

One clement of success they [the workers] possess, that of numbers, but numbers weigh only in the balance if united by combination and led by knowledge.

Is there the slightest sign that, amidst all the hysterical outpourings about “smashing Tory governments” and “treacherous trade-union leaders”, the IMG have given one moment’s serious thought to the meaning of what they are spreading?

Read through their leaflet! The workers must centralize their forces to “develop a General Strike to get rid of the Government itself”. The central task in holding the line is to “prepare the counter-offensive in the autumn" because the Government “presented the leaders with a clear choice, either accept pay restraint, or mobilize a united struggle which would smash Phase 2, bring down the Government and so raise the hopes of the working population that the social order itself would be threatened”.

As was pointed out explicitly in a recent Socialist Standard (and even that was re-quoted from 1919 and has been confirmed by history ever since), in every strike, above all the 1926 General Strike:

The masters are in a far stronger position than the workers on the economic field and will beat them, at will, any time they wish.

This is why Marx wrote in the Inaugural Address of the International Workingmen’s Association that

To conquer political power has become the great duty of the working class.

(Selected Works of Karl Marx, Moscow, p. 440)

As for all the other rubbish about smashing (these idiots are obsessed by the word SMASH; it recurs repeatedly in their manifestoes) Tory or Labour governments, this cannot be done by strike action alone. If a government feels that it has lost popular support, as shown in Italy or Denmark, and estimates that it may lose the next election, it may well resign, go into opposition, and laugh its head off at the troubles of the new government trying to grapple with the problems. So far from being “smashed” by resignation, there is every sign that they positively enjoy it.

As for “threatening the social order”, this probably is the stupidest nonsense of the lot. Trades unions are organized on a job basis: the vast majority of trade- unionists are not Socialists and have no desire whatever to threaten the social order — they uphold it. Neither would “threatening the social order” mean any real progress in changing it in orderly fashion. It could merely lead to chaos.

As for all the other tripe about the naughty, wicked trade-union leaders, we have pointed out repeatedly that they operate by the approval and consent of the members.

Let all strikes be called at the most favourable moment — when the bosses are doing allright-thankyou and don’t want them. Let them be short and sharp; if they are not won quickly they won’t be won at all. Let the members decide by democratic vote and, if things go wrong, democratically decide to retreat back to work in an orderly united fashion.

Above all, ignore and reject the dangerous, meddlesome folly of these academic hot-heads and professional hooligans who run about “smashing” everything and call on trade-unionists to “fight the police”. This plays straight into the hands of the authorities and is in fact all they need to crush strike action. On the industrial field the workers’ strength is in the withdrawal of labour. This may get them a rise in wages; but only political action can control the police (and the army) and establish Socialism.

Horatio.

"Revolutionary" Left unite behind Labour (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sham socialists show their true colours

Ever since the SPGB was founded we have at all times resolutely opposed all other political parties. We maintain that political parties are the expression of class interests and that the party seeking working- class emancipation must organise consciously and politically for the capture of political power for the abolition of capitalism, and its replacement by Socialism. The Socialist Party must work only for Socialism as this is the immediate task facing the world working class. No other political party in this country holds this revolutionary position.

The blood-and-thunder left consistently cloud and confuse the clear-cut issue — capitalism or Socialism. Bitter experience has amply borne out the correctness of our long expressed judgement that the Labour Party is a reformist capitalist party and has nothing to do with Socialism. However the period immediately prior to the February 28 General Election saw pseudo-socialist organizations and parties advocating and encouraging workers to vote for the Labour Party. Examples of this confusing and cynical exercise in political futility are documented below.

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN.

(Aim: to achieve a socialist Britain in which the means of production, distribution and exchange will be socially owned).

‘‘Three aims need to be achieved [says the CP Manifesto]: a Tory defeat, the winning of a Labour Government, and the return of Communist MP's . . We need a different type of Labour government — one that would bite into the power and profits of big business” (Morning Star 14 February 1974).

INTERNATIONAL MARXIST GROUP

(Aim: the overthrow of the capitalist system).

‘‘Of course, in any election called now socialists must argue for a vote for the Labour Party where there is no revolutionary alternative. The victory of the Tories would be seen by the working class as a set back and would decrease confidence and combativity. A victory for Labour would have the opposite effect . . . The slogan ‘Vote Labour but rely on your own struggles’ must be the key one for any election campaign” (Red Weekly 8 February 1974).

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS

(Aim for independent working class action for the abolition of capitalism. ‘‘The struggle for socialism is the central struggle of our time”).

“KICK OUT THE TORIES VOTE LABOUR”

“No worker should have any doubt about what is at stake in the election . . . The working class has to respond [to the Tory campaign] with a massive anti-Tory vote. And that means a Labour vote . . . Labour is as much committed to keeping capitalism intact as the Tories ... So while fighting for a Labour victory, we have to step up our efforts to build a real alternative, a revolutionary worker’s party, by arguing the full-blooded socialist case” (IS National Committee Statement, Socialist Worker 16 February 1974).

WORKERS FIGHT

(Aim: to build a party which stands firmly for the interests of the working class and which preserves its political independence.)

"Until we have the possibility of a genuine, socialist working class government it is in workers’ interests to elect Labour . . . ACTIVE and unconditional support for Labour against the Tories !” (Workers Fight No. 43, 9-15 February 1974).

WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY

(Formerly Socialist Labour League).

“We call on all Labour Party members and trade unionists to vote Labour in constituencies where the WRP is not standing. We call on the electors to return a Labour government. In the struggle to compel the Labour leaders to implement the socialist policies we have outlined, they will be exposed and will be driven out.” (WRP Manifesto).

SOCIALIST CHARTER MOVEMENT

(‘Labour’s Revolutionary Voice’. Aim: to build a new revolutionary leadership in the Labour Movement to defeat the Tories and their system.)

“CAMPAIGN ON A SOCIALIST PROGRAMME”*

“. . . Labour Party leaders must present a programme for their next government which really offers a way forward for society out of its present impasse . . . A production plan based on common ownership . . . For this programme we need look no further than . . . the Constitution of the Labour Party, Clause four, Paragraph four.” (Chartist February 1974).

YOUNG COMMUNIST LEAGUE

“Join in the fight now to rout the Tories and elect a Labour government with Communist MPs to back it up . . . mobilise a great mass movement to sweep away the Tory government and return a Labour government compelled to carry out Left policies . . . This is the great issue of 1974.” (Challenge February 1974).

Gwynn Thomas

Human nature (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It’s a good idea, but it’ll never work. You can’t change human nature, you know.” So runs a common argument against Socialism. A society where people would own the world’s resources in common and work together co-operatively to satisfy man’s needs is frequently rejected on the grounds that man’s nature makes it impossible. Selfishness, greed, aggression, competitiveness, are declared to be inevitable human characteristics which render any form of social organization other than today’s unworkable.

What evidence is advanced to back up this view of man? Usually not very much. Generally, some examples of contemporary human behaviour coupled with the vague assertion that Man “always has been" and therefore “always will be” like this. That so many people hold this view of human nature is a striking commentary on the nature of the education most people receive. It leaves them completely unaware of the findings made in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc., over the last 40-50 years. These all show that “man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of his environment, from other human beings.” (p.9, Man and Aggression, ed. M. F. Ashley Montagu).

Men and women sleep, eat, drink, and reproduce. The relations they enter into to accomplish these ends and the general organization of society, are social factors. When people are born they have the ability to think and act but at that time they have no views or attitudes. These they can only acquire through interacting with their environment: parents, school, the media, other people, etc. As the Open University social science textbook puts it: “To breathe, eat, drink, rest, are inborn drives; to achieve, dominate, submit, acquire, belong are learned or social drives.”

Looking at history we can see how man’s social relationships, have changed tremendously over time. Behaviour which is now considered to be basic human nature at one time was virtually unknown. Tribal societies who lived by gathering and hunting are the first known form of human social organisation. Anthropologists reckon that Man has lived in that way for all but the last 10,000 years of our 1-1½ million-year existence on earth. These societies had very different values from today’s. Their meagre resources were owned communally, there being no privileged class among them who had more power or wealth than the rest. Co-operation rather than competition was the norm, with the tribe having a harmony of interests. However the development of Man’s productive ability (beginning of agriculture, domestication of animals) and the consequent economic surplus led to the formation of privileged ruling classes who expropriated this surplus for their own benefit. The advent of private property changed Man’s social values. The pursuit of riches has bred murder, cruelty, fraud, enmity and other anti-social behaviour.

Private property society has now reached its ultimate in industrial capitalism. In this system the vast majority can only live by selling their ability to work to the few who own and control the factories, land, transport systems, and other means of wealth production. The driving force behind the production of goods is not the meeting of human need but the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few. It is a society of constant conflict. Workers and capitalists are always fighting over wages and conditions. Worker is pitted against worker, first to obtain employment, then in 'the promotion rat-race; rival capitalist firms and countries continually compete against each other for increased power and profits. The organized telling of deliberate lies (advertizing) and the killing and maiming of human beings (the “professionals”) are respected occupations. People tend to be judged by the goods they have managed to accumulate, success being measured in terms of pounds and pence. Greed, selfishness, and ruthlessness are the qualities needed to “get on". Is it any wonder that people, born into such a system and subjected to strong social pressures, should often act in an anti-social manner?

However even under capitalism there are many occasions on which people act in a co-operative, even self-sacrificing, manner. Whenever a natural disaster strikes thousands of volunteers rush to help. People donate blood without monetary reward. And if Man is naturally aggressive its strange that in almost every war conscription has to be used. These examples alone are sufficient to disprove the “Human nature” argument. For if there was a bad human nature as claimed, it would have to apply to all people at all times.

Thus, the Socialist case against the argument that social evils can be explained by some kind of innate depravity or original sin has three main points —

1. Non-Socialist social scientists state that aggression, peacefulness, greed, generosity, etc. are social characteristics and cannot be transmitted genetically.
2. For hundreds of thousands of years Man lived co-operatively and harmoniously with communal ownership of resources.
3. Even under capitalism people continually act in a helpful and co-operative way.

The barrier to a better world lies not in any natural evil of Man, but in a lack of political consciousness which leads the majority to accept today’s private property system. However the contradictions in capitalism — social production and private ownership, great wealth existing alongside miserable poverty — result in more and more of the working class rejecting it and starting to work to establish an alternative.

—From a leaflet.

So They Say: They Pretend Malnutrition, too (1974)

The So They Say Column from the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

They Pretend Malnutrition, too

A new addition to saloon-bar political mythology has arrived. It joins the Man Who Gets Twice as Much on Social Security as he does Working, the Black Man Who Buys Kit-E-Kat for his Sandwiches (yes, my grocer told me), the Eight Workmen Who Came and Lolled About Smoking When All I Wanted was a Screw Tightened on my Cooker, and so on.

This happy arrival is the Family Only Pretending to be Homeless. Its career was launched in the London Evening News on 18th January:

A housing chief has announced a clampdown on the “phoney homeless”. Some families are suspected of faking evictions to gain council homes. Only couples with children, facing complete family breakdown, are now likely to get official help in Hertfordshire.

Presumably you must spend a minimum of three nights on the pavement and get down to six stones per adult member of family; otherwise you’re only pretending. A family with a room to itself that wants a whole council house are sheer Epicureans, and we don’t stand for them in Hertfordshire. Take it from me, councillor, my nephew’s milkman knows this lot

No, it's Different Now

One trouble with the working class is its memory. How can you expect to get on and please the government if you forget the right things, like standing up for the Queen, and remember the wrong ones, like unemployment and politicians’ promises?

Thus, the masses have watching TV films about the war in which the Germans are shown as the hateful enemy. In the last week of January Die Welt published an article by its London correspondent Christian Ferber protesting about this. Sure enough, he was supported. A Reverend, among others, wrote to The Guardian suggesting “restoring the balance” with some programmes about good Germans in the war, specially POWS who “were permitted to visit churches and other organizations”,

People must really arrange their memories better. Saying they had to hate the Germans for six years is no excuse. If villains are shown today they should be Russians. But in the war weren’t they glorious allies or something? There you go again.

Please Spare a Copper . . .

Readers of the financial pages cannot fail to notice that profits and dividends show little sign of wilting because of the crisis. Some companies are doing well out of it. A typical example was shown in The Guardian's business section on 6th February. Under the heading blessing in disguise the buoyant position of Central Wagon, the steel stockholding and hydraulic equipment group, was described:

The company’s sales in January this year are 50 per cent up on the monthly average for the previous year . . . When the 1973 results are announced, the profit is more likely to be around the £900,000 mark—well beyond the company forecast of about £670,000 . . . Central Wagon is confident that it will produce still higher profit in 1974 —even after allowing for the miners’ strike.

But when times are bad, are they not bad for the owning class too? Were there not tales in the nineteen-thirties’ depression of ruined rich men queueing to throw themselves from high buildings? Untrue. Britain in the Nineteen Thirties by N. Branson and M. Heinemann (1972) says:

True, profits fell in the slump years (by 30 per cent at the lowest point, in 1932), but since a higher proportion of profits was paid out in dividends, shareholders’ incomes fell much less than this, while income from rent and fixed interest stocks remained more stable in spite of the fall in prices.

. . . Figures in the British Association’s Britain in Recovery, based on Colin Clark’s estimates, suggest a fall of 9-11 per cent in consumption expenditure of those with incomes over £250, from 1929 to 1933—which was almost certainly less than the fall in prices.

. . . for the Clerical Hat

Reach for your handkerchiefs. The Guardian of 8th February told the harrowing story of Britain’s underpaid vicars.

The [Church] commissioners, in a report to the General Synod, the parliament of the Church of England, say the average pay of the 9,000 vicars last November was about £35 a week. In addition, they are provided with a house free of rent and rates, but many have to meet the expenses of doing their job, which can be as high as £4 to £5 a week.

How sad for the clergy to have to put up with the austerity they urge on others. The world is too materialistic.

Socialism Mondial (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our French-language companion journal published in Quebec, Canada. Number 2/3, Volume I, available now, contains in French: 

• MANIFESTO OF INTRODUCTION TO WORLD SOCIALISM
• IL PROGRAMMA DEL PARTITO SOCIALISTA DEL CANADA (an Italian translation of our Object and Declaration of Principles)
• FROM THE FILES OF WORLD SOCIALISM MAJORITY CONSCIOUSNESS AND VIOLENCE (reply to an article in the French “Lutte de classe”)
• REFORMISM OF THE “PROGRAMME COM- MUN” IN FRANCE (updated version of a recent “Socialist Standard” article)
• OUR DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES (translation of a joint SPC and WSPUS leaflet) 
• THE RISE AND FALL OF SALVADOR ALLENDE
• LETTERS FROM READERS including a letter on the Socialist Labor Party (De Leonist) 
• ARE YOU A WAGE SLAVE?

Special edition on Russia and Bolshevism  

“Socialism Mondial” will publish shortly a special edition containing a translation of the SPGB pamphlet “Russia 1917-1967” (a selection of articles from the “Socialist Standard” over that period) and a biographical article on Julius Martov.

These publications are obtainable from “Socialisme Mondial”, Case Postale 244, Pointe- aux-Trembles, Quebec, HIB 5K3, and from the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

SPGB Meetings (1974)

Party News from the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

There is actually an audio recording of the advertised Annual Conference meeting, featuring Hardcastle and Barltrop, available on SPGB website. Though I believe there are earlier recordings of SPGB meetings out there . . . somewhere, this is the earliest recording on the website. Enjoy!

Letter: Incentive to work (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Incentive to work

In the event of the establishment of Socialism in this country or any country; whereas people would take a job preferential to his ability and aptitude, how would one influence a person to mine coal (taking into account that machinery could not be put to this work) as the work is held in much disfavour, unless incentives were given to do the work?

Yet in a Socialist society, every person would take what he needed to sustain life, including creature comforts. For that matter how would people be encouraged to do any job held in his or her disfavour?

P. W. Ralphs, 

Stoke-on-Trent

Reply

We do not envisage a Socialist society existing solely in any one country. The question of carrying out work which is necessary to society will rest with the members of society. If the supply of coal is considered a necessity, it is logical to conclude that those who have brought Socialism into being will take steps to ensure that the supply of coal is maintained.

Apart from the enormous changes which will become possible to make the physical conditions of labour more pleasant, work will be viewed in the new light of usefulness to society. The incentive to carry out work will therefore lie in the personal knowledge that one’s efforts are meeting a social need. The maintenance of Socialist society where starvation, the threat of warfare, unemployment and poverty with all its implications are things of the past, and where men and women are free to work in harmony for the sole purpose of satisfying their social requirements, will be the over-riding incentive.

The pre-supposition that machinery will not be available to carry out certain work is dubious. Professor Meredith Thring (mechanical engineer at Queen Mary’s Hospital, London) has recently been complaining in the press that his coal-mining machine with caterpillar tracks, television eyes, and diggers, which could be operated from the surface by “a man in an armchair” and could work in currently “unworkable” coal seams, to produce four times the amount of coal now produced, has been rejected by mining engineers [whose] theories, according to Professor Thring, are out of date.

Editorial Committee.

Letter: ". . . enlightened use of the ballot box"? (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

". . . enlightened use of the ballot box"?

I read Socialist Standard No. 832 and although I enjoyed it and learned from it I must say I totally disagree with the “enlightened use of the ballot box” sentence. Unless you mean the MPs etc. are in the public eye hence able to reach the people. Otherwise you must mean that MPs have the ability to change (politically) things which is spurious. Lenin says that the system is such that even if every seat is taken by a socialist-minded person nothing will change. It is fail-safe. However, maybe I misinterpreted the sentence.

Keep up the good work!

Karl Buckie, 

Edinburgh.

Reply

No, we do not propose that “socialist-minded” MPs have the power to change the system. The condition for establishing Socialism is an electorate — i.e. the majority of the working class — that understands and wants it. This is what we mean by “enlightened use of the ballot box”: sending delegates to Parliament with the mandate not to administer capitalism but to abolish it. And this was what Lenin rejected.

Editorial Committee.

Material World: Straits and narrow (2025)

The Material World column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Taiwan is an island about a hundred miles from the Chinese mainland, across the Taiwan Strait, and is officially the Republic of China. Its population is just under 24 million, its land area about the same as the Netherlands, and it is ranked 22nd in the list of the world’s largest economies. In particular it is the leader in the manufacturing of semiconductors, which are used in computers, smartphones and many other products. It is a big trading partner for a number of countries, with exports massively exceeding imports. The US, for instance, has a trade deficit with Taiwan of around $50bn a year. The UK, however, exports about £5bn a year to Taiwan, and imports around £3.6bn; the biggest exports from Britain are beverages and tobacco, also cars, while the imports are headed by office machinery and metal goods, and nearly £2bn of financial services are ‘exported’ each year from the UK.

Taiwan was once joined to the Asian mainland. The so-called indigenous people there, who speak a variety of languages, number around six hundred thousand. Over the centuries Taiwan was visited at various times by people from China and Japan. In the sixteenth century Portuguese sailors termed it Ilha Formosa (‘beautiful island’), and it was sometimes known as Formosa. In the following century the Dutch East India Company controlled part of the island and encouraged Chinese farmers to migrate there and cultivate rice and sugar. Later in the seventeenth century the Qing dynasty rulers of China annexed the island, which was again invaded by Japan in the late nineteenth century. From 1895 Taiwan was ceded to Japan after a war, and much industrialisation took place. In 1949 the Nationalist Party was defeated by the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party in the civil war and escaped to Taiwan.

Nationalist rule was extremely vicious and authoritarian, with martial law in force until 1987 and political opposition suppressed by means of imprisonment and execution. After that a transition to capitalist-style democracy took place, and links with mainland China (the so-called People’s Republic) increased. Taiwan businesses have invested over $200bn in China, and trade across the straits is around $160bn a year, with China being Taiwan’s biggest trading partner. Taiwan has over fifty dollar billionaires, the richest being Barry Lam, who is worth $11.7bn. In 2024 the combined wealth of the top fifty increased from $155bn to $174bn (forbes.com). At the same time, there are officially 400,000 unemployed and a large number of homeless people (drastically undercounted in government statistics).

At the end of last year, China’s leader Xi Jinping said in a speech that ‘The people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family. No one can sever our family bonds, and no one can stop the historical trend of national reunification.’ Over the centuries, the borders of China have expanded massively from the original area around the valleys of the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers. They now include the so-called autonomous regions of Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang (which means ‘new frontier’). But as for the idea of ‘one family’, this is just nationalistic nonsense.

China’s interest in Taiwan is for two reasons. One is financial or industrial, with Taiwan being economically very important in a number of areas, as mentioned above. The other is strategic, with Taiwan an important location in the South China Sea and potentially a significant part of China’s naval empire. The Chinese government views Taiwan as a province of China, which will one day be re-united with it. However, there is a Taiwan independence movement, which believes it should be an independent state, which in effect would be a formalisation of the current situation.

Large Chinese maritime forces have been assembled around Taiwan, and the use of force to achieve unification is still in principle on the table. China’s armed forces are far more powerful than those of Taiwan, though any invasion would be likely to be costly in terms of lives and also expensive in terms of materiel. The US Council on Foreign Relations states that ‘To invade Taiwan, China would have to conduct an extraordinarily complex military operation, synchronising air, land, and sea power as well as electronic and cyberwarfare’. Which does not mean it will never happen, though. The invasion of an offshore island would inevitably be more problematic than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This is clearly a case of a very powerful capitalist country, one that is still expanding its economic and military might, seeking to conquer another territory as a way of increasing its power and influence.

Paul Bennett

How we live and how we might live - Part 7 (2025)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

Among those who criticise the idea of a society of free access and voluntary association are people who insist that human beings are naturally lazy and must be induced to work. Capitalism’s wages system, they say, is just such an inducement. Without it, or something similar, our ‘natural’ preference for leisure would dramatically reduce the time we spent on producing the goods we need, threatening our quality of life, and possibly leading to social collapse.

This reasoning rests on yet another version of our old friend ‘human nature’, which can be adapted, independent of evidence, to justify pretty much any required conclusion. In some versions of this argument we humans are so naturally workshy that without incentives forcing us to produce we would all, in the words of one pundit, rush to the coast, unpack our mats and inflatable lilos, and spend our days lying on the beach. And if we pushed this reasoning to its rarely acknowledged conclusion, it is there that our slowly starving bodies would be barbecued by the sun because no one was at work growing food or manufacturing sun block. These kinds of arguments should lead us to question whether those who champion them have ever bothered to look around themselves at the way capitalist society works. Have they not noticed, perhaps, that the vast majority of working people not only prefer to work rather than starve or live on derisory welfare benefits, but prefer to work even under the oppressive conditions of a capitalist wage relation? Even the least observant are surely capable of realising that if we really were suicidally lazy by nature or preferred penury to work, that introducing a wage or some kind of rationing system would do nothing to alter that.

But let’s stop there and come down to earth. Are human beings genuinely lazy? The answer is, yes, we are. To a degree. Biologists tell us that laziness is part of our evolutionary inheritance. Natural selection has designed us not to squander our energy unnecessarily, so the desire to slouch on a couch or relax on a beach when our other needs have been temporarily satisfied is part of our survival strategy. There is, however, more to survival than conserving energy. Idleness will not feed and clothe us, or keep us safe: threats to our wellbeing produce anxiety; hunger and thirst nag at us to find food; cold drives us to seek shelter; we desire sex and social activities; physical movement is invigorating; success and achievement are exhilarating. And too much of doing nothing is frankly boring. The motivating desires that drive us to provide for our needs are built into us, and no extrinsic social arrangements like wages systems are needed to force us to do what we do naturally. Historically, exchange relations like wage systems did not enter into our societies until about 3,000 BCE. If we needed them to ensure our survival, then our species would have become extinct millennia ago.

What about the free rider?

The viability of a society based on common ownership and free access does not turn on questions of ‘human nature’ but on those of social organisation. Some animals like our evolutionary cousin the orang-utan are solitary and live largely self-sufficient lives. Each animal acquires its own food and consumes only what it has individually acquired. We humans, however, are a social species. We produce what we need collectively and then share it out according to some system. A genuine question therefore arises: if, in a post-capitalist society, work is voluntary, but individuals are free to take from the common store, what is to stop lazy or antisocial individuals among us living off the work of others to some degree, or perhaps even entirely? This is the free rider argument, one that we hear a good deal of from conservative apologists for capitalism. So we have to ask, would socialism encourage free riders? And if so, would it then become unsustainable?

When job seekers apply for capitalist jobs, the wage offered is a definite factor in their calculations. In a society where a worker’s quality of life, status, power and even survival are all closely related to monetary income, then, other things being equal, who would not take a better-paid job over a lower-paid one? Once the job contract is signed, however, and an income is secured, multiple lines of research show that neither the motivation to work nor the quality of the work done bear any relation to the wage paid. In fact, there is evidence to show that when higher extrinsic rewards are offered in the form of bonuses, productivity and the quality of work falls, not rises.

So, what is going on here? It seems that once our basic needs are met and our lives are somewhat secure, at least for the moment, what really motivates our actions are not extrinsic ‘inducements’ like money, but intrinsic rewards that come from engaging in the activity itself and from the pro-social conditions under which it is performed. In the 1990s, for instance, labour shortages in the high tech industries gave workers sufficient bargaining power to determine their own working conditions. They chose to eliminate bonus schemes which set individuals in competition with one another, demanded hands-off management and arranged to work in non-hierarchical, self-organising teams.

And this is entirely in line with the evidence. Research in social psychology has repeatedly shown that what motivates us are tasks that are interesting, that are purposeful and engaging, that give us a significant degree of control over them, and that allow us to apply and master our skills. Beyond a basic minimum, most of us dislike competitive stress, and we resist being controlled by others. These are conditions that, while generally unmet under capitalism’s competitive and profit-maximising property system, are built into the basic structure of a society of free access and free association, or can be easily achieved within it. A self-governing society of this sort therefore has all the qualities required to engage us in productive activity and minimise our resistance to it.

Capitalism: work as sacrifice

Does that mean there will be no ‘lazy’ people or free riders in such a society? Probably not. Research in social psychology also shows us that the capacity for sustained work varies widely between individuals. If this is true, then the question we must ask is this: would supporting a percentage of people who choose to make little or no contribution to society pose a problem?

Even asking this question is likely to raise some hackles. We know how resentment can be stoked by stories of ‘benefit scroungers’, or of individuals who don’t pull their weight and shift the burden of work onto others. Even when complaints of this kind are misdirected, as they can often be, they are psychologically understandable. Humans have very sensitive antennae for what they perceive to be unfair practices or behaviour. Game theory has shown repeatedly that individuals across many cultures will often act against their own best interests in order to punish others whom they believe are acting unfairly.

So why exactly do we become so exercised about free riders? In a capitalist system where everyone is forced to live in economic isolation from one another, each in their individual property bubbles, there is a severely diminished sense of communal purpose and communal achievement. We do not contribute our labour as part of a community of people engaged in community projects. Instead, we compete with one another as isolated individuals to sell our ability to work in exchange for the ability to live. And our ability to work, once sold, is no longer ours. We must relinquish control over it and over our lives to employers whose interests and purposes are not our own and who stand in relation to us, not as an ‘us’ but as a ‘them’.

Under this system our ability to work is equated with money, and money is the necessary means by which, in a capitalist world, we secure not just our survival and that of our family, but also our comfort, our social status, our security (minimal as it often is) and our ability to participate fully in our social world. Capitalism transforms most of the population into employees and turns the expenditure of their mental and physical energies into precisely quantified labour-time. Our individual work ability acquires the status of a valuable commodity to be sold to another in exchange for life. Work becomes a sacrifice. Any loss in our labour power or what we can get in exchange for it compromises our ability to support ourselves and our families. So the idea that other workers are living off our labour is therefore perceived as a threat or as a form of theft. Under capitalist conditions, our resentment of free riders is explicable, but it is not universal.

Everybody entitled to a share

We can gain insight into this by looking at how people relate to one another in societies where there is no property system, no enforced work regime, and no external incentives like wages. Immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are as old as humanity itself. In our remote past, they were widespread and perhaps universal. A few have persisted down to today and have been well studied by anthropologists since the middle of the 1960s. Even though returning to their way of life would be neither possible nor desirable for us today, the structure of their societies has elements of free access, and they can teach us significant lessons about human behaviour under these conditions.

Free riders are not unknown in these societies, but they are few and, more importantly, their existence is neither concerning to them nor is it stigmatised. Everyone has an absolute entitlement to a share of what has been collectively produced irrespective of their individual contribution to producing it. This is a wholly different mindset from the one we find in our own property-directed society. The same attitude can also be seen operating from an opposite perspective. Hunting bands will often include one or two exceptional hunters, who day after day, year after year will bring back a majority of game to the camp where it is shared out among whoever is present. They do this with no discernible sense of resentment or any sense that their work is being exploited by others.

This is partly because among these peoples, work is not a commodity; it is not a bargaining chip to be exchanged for necessities like food and shelter. Hence, they make no distinction between work-time and leisure-time. Their productive and non-productive activities shade seamlessly into one another as constituent parts of their daily life. And because their social lives are not fragmented by isolated and competitive private property relations, their ordinary productive activities are experienced not only as a means to an end, but as social values, worthwhile and enjoyable in themselves.

Next month

Last month we saw that the structure of social relations of a free access society lacks the conditions that tend to promote greedy behaviour. Here we see that the same structure maximises the conditions that make productive activity attractive in its own right and encourages people to act cooperatively in the common interest. Next month we will unpack these ideas in more detail, examining many of the specific ways in which the fundamental structure of a free access society promotes productive activity (‘work’) and turns laziness into leisure and leisure into a social virtue.

Hud.

Film Review: Hacksaw Ridge (2025)

Film Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hacksaw Ridge is a 2016 film about Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who served as a U.S. Army medic during the Second World Slaughter. He saved 75 lives during the Battle of Okinawa and became the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honour (the U.S. version of the Victoria Cross). The title refers to the cliff the U.S. Army climbed over to attack the Japanese during that battle.

Desmond Doss was a Seventh-Day Adventist (a Christian who believes the sabbath is Saturday instead of Sunday) who decides to join the Army as a combat medic (because he wants to save lives instead of take them). However, his training requires him to learn how to use a rifle, which he refuses to do. His refusal to hold a weapon forms the main conflict of the film. This is a spoiler-free review, so I won’t go into the specific reasons why Doss refuses to hold a weapon (although it’s connected to the 6th biblical commandment of ‘thou shalt not kill’).

Firstly, I must mention that the writing, filmmaking, and acting are all marvellous. The violence in this film is gory, but not too gory. Vince Vaughn gives an especially great performance as the sergeant of Doss’s unit (this is helped by the character being semi-comedic). IMO, the best part of the film is when Doss saves the life of a wounded Japanese soldier, because it shows that he regards the Japanese soldiers as human (and not as the ‘enemy’, contrary to war propaganda).

However, there are three quotations from this film that socialists would take exception to:

1. Early on, Doss’s brother joins the army (to serve in WW2) much to the disappointment of their parents; especially their father who served in the First World Slaughter and lost all his friends in that conflict. In that scene, their mother mentions the 6th commandment to his brother, to which he replies: ‘It’s not killing if it’s a war’.
2. When Doss is explaining to his superior officer why he refuses to hold a weapon (because of the 6th commandment), the latter replies: ‘Most people take that to mean don’t commit murder’.
3. Finally, in that same scene, the superior officer says: ‘What we’re fighting is worse than Satan’. A socialist response to the first two quotations is that killing is killing (it doesn’t matter whether it’s sanctioned by the state or not). With regards to the third quotation, I would understand (in a way) where he was coming from if they were fighting against Nazi Germany, but to call the Japanese worse than Satan is blatant brainwashing.

In conclusion, despite the war propaganda, this is a good film about an incredibly brave man who did the right thing but for the wrong reason.

Matthew Shearn

Italian history (2025)

Book Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Shortest History of Italy. By Ross King. Old Street Publishing, 2024. 262pp.

This is the latest in a series of ‘Shortest History’ books with other topics that include Europe, Germany, England, war, democracy, India and Greece. Readers of the Socialist Standard will have seen last November’s review, scathing to say the least, of the one on economics. Is this one any better? The enthusiastic endorsements by various journalists and historians on its back and inside covers certainly make it seem so (‘vibrant’, ‘admirably clear and often wryly amusing’, ‘terrific … a lucid riveting history’, ‘effervescent and entertaining guide’).

Are such comments justified? Well, yes, at least in part. The author’s sparkling prose and his ability to vividly overview tumultuous events and periods in Italy’s history succeed in giving us vivid insights into certain key developments. Examples of this are: the transformation of the city state of ancient Rome into a predatory inter-continental empire; the rebirth in culture, the arts and commerce in the 15th and early 16th century that marked Italy’s rise to European prominence (ie, the Renaissance); the making of Italy as a single nation state in the 19th century, partly at least as a result of the machinations, rivalries and interests of neighbouring European powers; the 20th century phenomenon of fascism that thrust the country into a dictatorship and delayed its growth as the European economic power it eventually became after the collapse of fascism and the unleashing of advanced capitalist development.

But it must also be pointed out that this book does not entirely escape the top down, history-from-above approach that the ‘shortest history’ format lends itself to. This is noticeable here in, for example, the relative lack of examination of the economic forms that drove the machinery of Italy’s various historical stages (ie, slavery under the Roman Empire, feudalism in the Medieval period, and, more recently, capitalism, first mercantile then industrial). Above all it would have been useful for the author to give some prominence to the fact that Italy’s development on the capitalist scene (referred to by another historian as its ‘spluttering bourgeois revolution’), late as it was, was hampered by its division into small independent state units, preventing the development of a national market and militating against advanced, large-scale commodity production. This disunity, reflected as it was in striking language differences across its land mass as well as in political division and economic underdevelopment, only started to be transformed slowly and painfully (and this is covered effectively by the author) by the unification process of the second half of the nineteenth century (the ‘Risorgimento’), which then stretches into the first half of the 1900s, even though there continued to remain a social and cultural gulf between the North and the South of the country (and there still are notable differences), as Italy seriously took on the homogenised, nationalistic model of the Western nation state.

As for the author’s portrayal of today’s Italy, it would have been helpful, from a socialist point of view at least, for him to have explained that the many different governments and parties which have administered the country since the end of the Second World War have all actually been engaged in the same fundamental undertaking – administering and ensuring the continuation of the capitalist system with its mass ownership of wealth by a tiny minority of the population and compulsory wage work for the majority. He might also have mentioned that, though parties calling themselves ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ have had involvement in this, their programmes and policies have borne no resemblance whatever to the concept of socialism (or communism) put forward by the Socialist Party of a moneyless, wageless world society of free access to all goods and services based on from each according to ability to each according to need. But the author would no doubt have considered that to do this would have exceeded his ‘shortest history’ brief. And it may not correspond anyway to the view of the world that he himself holds.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: Starmer gets it (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Our job is to work with businesses to create the best environment that allows them to thrive’. So wrote Starmer in an article in the Times (29 January). This describes perfectly one of the key roles of government under capitalism. Since businesses thrive by making profits and since business investment for profit drives the capitalist economy, the government has to do what it can to create and maintain good conditions for profit-making — and to avoid doing anything that might run counter to this.

Starmer understands that this is the logic of capitalism and, in office, is openly striving to apply it. It inevitably means putting profit-making first. Governments have to do this on pain of making things worse. Any party in office has to be the ‘party of business’ that the Labour Party said it was even before it was voted in.

Starmer’s understanding contrasts with the illusions of his left critics inside and increasingly outside the Labour Party. Here, for instance, is what Counterfire (an SWP breakaway) claimed in its January issue:

‘A genuine radical left government could make real changes now, by taking measures that both the centrist establishment and the hard right reject, such as taxing the super-rich, controlling rents and energy prices, and investing in infrastructure. The left can win the argument that society can, and should, do better’.

Of course society can do better, but not as capitalist society. The reference to the continued existence of the super-rich and rents and prices show that Counterfire is assuming that capitalism continues. So, it is in effect arguing that a government can make capitalist society better for workers. The left certainly has not won that argument. Left governments that have tried to do this — to put meeting people’s needs before maintaining the best environment for profit-making — have failed. In fact, they have tended to make things worse, and then be voted out of office.

Taxing just the ‘super-rich’ but not the profits of capitalist corporations, as essentially a tax on the consumption of the capitalist class, need not worsen the environment for profit-making. But if ‘taxing the rich’ extends beyond this to higher taxes on profits, the source of business investment that drives the economy, then the prospect of an economic downturn emerges. This is the point at which most left governments perform a U-turn. Otherwise they crash the economy.

Controlling the price of energy to consumers would bring some respite but, since governments don’t and can’t control the world price of energy, this could only be maintained through subsidies that would have to be paid for by increasing taxes. Whatever the government invests in infrastructure would have to come from taxation too, to repay any money borrowed and the interest on it. The higher taxes on, or passed onto, businesses would worsen the environment for profit-making.

Rent control might not crash the economy but it would create other problems. Businesses and individuals investing in letting houses and flats would invest less and spend less on maintaining their properties, with the longer-term consequence of fewer places to rent and deteriorating accommodation.

The lesson is clear. If you want better, better get rid of capitalism and not try to make it work in a way that it can’t.

SPGB 2025 Summer School: What is Marxism? (2025)

Party News from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) gave us a method for explaining how society functions, based on materialist principles and analysis of the economic framework within which goods and services are produced. This body of work has been summed up as ‘Marxist’. Since the 19th Century, these theories have been interpreted by countless historians, economists, sociologists, philosophers and political theorists and activists. Their work too has been called ‘Marxist’. Where does an interpretation become a misinterpretation, and how can we judge what’s accurate?

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion considers how Marxism has developed and its influence today, and the extent to which it is an essential part of the case we put for a marketless, stateless society of free access and production for use that we call socialism.

The Socialist Party’s Summer School 22nd-24th August 2025

Our venue is the University of Worcester, St John's Campus, Henwick Grove, St John's, Worcester,WR26AJ.

Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £150; the concessionary rate is £80.

Book online at worldsocialism.org/spgb/summer-school-2025/ or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. Day visitors are welcome, but please e-mail for details in advance. Email enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.