The Trade Unions (1966)

From the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Webbs’ wrote their History of Trade Unionism in 1894 they defined a Trade Union as “. . . a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining and improving their conditions of employment”.

A modern historian could be excused for amending that definition to read, “A continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of seeking plausible arguments why they should refrain from making wage demands”.

We have been browsing through Trade Union Congress reports of the past 20 years to try to find a year when there was no debate on wage restraint. We had no success.

During the years immediately following the last World War we find the TUC urging support for the Attlee government’s policy of a 10 per cent increase in productivity with austerity in wage demands. A few years later, with the 10 per cent allegedly achieved, there come demands for greater increases in productivity coupled with wage restraint to reduce export prices and undersell competitors in foreign markets.

At the 1951 TUC the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, told the delegates that, although world prices were stable, they must avoid making substantial wage demands during 1952.

Yearly, after that, the same tune is played with a slight change in the lyrics. For “wage restraint” we read “pay pause”, “deferment of wage claims” or “restricting wage demands”. These are argued as necessary because of the dollar gap, the adverse trade balance, the Suez Crisis or whatever threat was prominent during a particular year.

When the Labour Party is out of office the tune at the TUC is in a different key. The bulldozing bass of Arthur Deakin, the Transport and General Workers’ Union’s arch priest of wage restraint, gives place to the applauded baritone of Mr. Campbell of the National Union of Railwaymen and Frank Cousins of the Transport Workers. In 1956 these two took the limelight by opposing wage restraint under a Tory government and advocating a return to policies of the previous Labour government.

So, year after year, we find one government or another demanding that wages be held in check in the interest of national economy and the trade unions agreeing with the need for the economy but differing with the measures to be taken.

No previous government has gone to the limits of the present Labour government in attempting to force a wage freeze on the workers. Pleas for restraint are now giving place to legal measures to pare wages down. During recent weeks many Unions have announced their intention to support the government’s policy and the 1966 TUC has endorsed that policy, “reluctantly”.

The opposition, with a few exceptions, did not condemn the sacrifice of workers’ wages at the altar of capitalist crisis. The objection was to the government’s proposal to legislate to enforce a wage standstill because the law could be used by a future Tory government. How quaint! Prison punishment must be more pleasant under a Labour regime. Perhaps the cells will be padded.

The need to stabilise the £ was accepted. A lovely phrase that, “stabilising the £”. We wonder how many workers know what it means. Mr. Carron does. He knows it means that there is a need to show foreign financiers that the interest on their loans to this country is safe, that the wage slaves are frugal, docile and hard working and if they should get a bit rebellious, Mr. Wilson’s government is going to govern.

Trade Unions do not oppose capitalism and at their TUC forum they have never done more than debate the weight and size of the shackles that bind the working class. To them there is no alternative to capitalism with its production for profit and competition for world markets. They see no class struggle, only a struggle between nations. They create a picture of a good old trade ship “Great Britain” worked by an amicable crew of workers and employers with the Labour Party at the helm, steering towards the horizon of prosperity. There may be injustices in the share-out of the ship’s rations but, when the waters are troubled or the winds adverse, the whole ship’s complement must pull together to keep it on its course. It’s a pretty picture, a lovely illusion, a mirage.

This is not a new trade union outlook. They have, at times, been rebellious but, fundamentally, their thinking has not changed since their birth. In its early days delegates submitted and read papers to the Trade Union Congress. A few illustrations taken at random will demonstrate the continuity of ideas and policies.

The secretary of the Bookbinder’s Society in 1860 wrote:

. . . that the true state of employer and employed is amity, and that they are the truest friends.

A paper to the 1887 TUC:

It is the boast of most Trade Union secretaries that they have prevented more strikes than they have originated.

J. Kane, secretary of the Amalgamated Ironworkers in 1869:

I am determined to give no encouragement to men who refuse to obey and to abide by the written laws of our association . . . encourage me to labour on in the cause of justice and truth.

Through the years TUC debates have centred around class collaboration, suppression of strikes and the disciplining of unruly members.

There is a story of an old trade union leader who used to poke his head round the employer’s office door and ask, “Owt?” When he received the reply, “Nowt”, he would turn to his members and say, “Out”.

The story is, of course, an exaggeration but it is indicative of an attitude in days before trade unions gained their much sought after recognition. Recognition once achieved the old style leader was doomed, ridiculed and elbowed out by men more skilled in the rhetoric of negotiation.

The new men sat round the negotiating table with the employers and argued, often skilfully, not on the basis of class interest but of “justice” and “fair play”. They made agreements on behalf of their members and, when signed, the agreements were deemed to be binding on the employers and the trade union members alike. If conditions changed and agreements became unsatisfactory causing workers to rebel, the union officials had the job of bringing the rebels to heel.

When labour power was plentiful and when all industry was in the hands of private enterprise the employers could restrain wage demands without recourse to government help. But with the state extending its control over industry and labour power finding a sellers’ market, governments find themselves forced to take a more interfering hand.

Within capitalism much of the argument advanced by trade unionists is sound. Some years ago a newspaper columnist illustrated this with a tale of a benevolent employer who paid his workers a high wage for short hours. When he went out into the market to sell his goods he found himself outpriced by his competitors. He returned to his workers and told them that either he must reduce production costs, including their wages, or he would go out of business. To keep their jobs they accepted lower wages and longer hours.

What this story omits to tell is that in every country of the world the same state exists. Workers everywhere are urged or forced to moderate their wage demands in the interest of their own nation’s economy and to keep their jobs.

That is why Socialists say that there is no solution to the workers’ problems within capitalism. While there is capital and labour they will be perpetually antagonistic. While wealth is produced for a competitive market the capitalists will strive to keep the workers’ portion at a minimum. While profit is the stimulant to production the workers will be a subject class. While there is a wages system wages will be under continuous pressure. While workers continue to elect governments to run capitalism they will be urged, cajoled, commanded and compelled to moderate their wage demands.

While trade union policy is hidebound by capitalist notions the unions will 'be feeble instruments—“for the purpose of maintaining and improving their conditions of employment”.

W. Waters

Fifty Years for Socialism in America (1966)

From the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The current issue of the Western Socialist, joint journal of the Socialist Party of Canada and the World Socialist Party of the United States, marks the 50th anniversary of the founding in America of a party based on the principles of scientific socialism. In July, 1916, 19 members of the Detroit local of the so-called Socialist Party of America resigned and, with others, formed a party based on the same principles as the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This party, after various name changes, is now the WSP.

Those interested in the history of socialism and pseudo-socialism in America will find much useful material: a history of the ups and downs of the WSP; a discussion of the failure of the SP of A. the Communist Party, the trotskyists, the De Leonists and the IWW who all had "short cuts” to Socialism; the War Manifestos of both world wars. There are also articles on socialist activity in Western Canada 50 years ago and a statement of the WSP attitude to the present war in Vietnam.

The Western Socialist can be had from our Head Office for 9d. (including postage). One year’s subscription for this bi-monthly journal is 4s. 6d.

50 Years Ago: Socialism is international (1966)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the power of nationalism to grip the minds of the worker rises, so Socialism fades. But when the warm rays of Socialist enlightenment and knowledge illumine their minds with the promise of freedom and social well-being, their hands will clasp across national boundaries, and their feet will tread them into the past. In that day the capitalist will "beat the bounds" in vain, the workers will know that boundaries and nations have no meaning or significance for them. These two, nationalism and international Socialism (and there can be no Socialism that is not international) are opposite as the poles, as antagonistic as fire and water. When patriotism and Socialism enter the worker's mind, patriotism will be quenched or Socialism will evaporate. The Socialist patriot is as impossible as the Christian Socialist. If he is loyal to the class that exploits him, he is a traitor to his own class. If he recognises and is true to his class interest, the class war will engage all his free time and energy; and he will laugh to scorn the hypocritical vaporings about the rights of small or big nations, seeing only in every nation a large or small group of capitalists—his own class being spread over the world, like an upper strata of the earth's crust, for each group to claim and exploit.

The real international will be built up on the facts of Socialism The universal recognition of these facts will mean the linking up of the world's workers in opposition to the capitalist class. That class will practice nationalism and preach patriotism just so long as it serves to obscure the class struggle and keep the workers divided. When they have to face an enlightened and united working class, they themselves will stamp out every boundary in their urgent need for cohesion and strength to meet the workers' onward march.

[From an article, "The Ghost of Jaures Laid", in the Socialist Standard, October, 1916.]

The Passing Show: The Same Everywhere (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Same Everywhere

The Balance of Payments. Four words which have meant a headache for every British government for umpteen years. “Our” gold and dollar reserves are too low. “Our” imports are too high. “We” are paying ourselves more than “we” are earning. “We” are heavily in debt. And so the moans go on and on. So much so that you could be forgiven for thinking that it is a peculiarly British situation, almost as if the rest of the world was flowing with milk and honey for the average inhabitant. Well, let’s take a look at it.

First of all, if you’re thinking that high exports and a favourable balance of trade mean that we could all sit back and relax, a little bit of history reading will do much to dispel that notion. Indeed, at a time when Britain was just about the most powerful nation in the world, ruling the waves militarily and commercially, working people lived under the most shocking conditions. But come a little more up-to-date if you like, and remember that only a few years ago West Germany had a gigantic balance of trade surplus (“embarrassingly large” one commentator once called it), yet her workers had to struggle just as hard for improvements in wages and conditions, and there have been some really bitter strikes there in recent times.

And today? The German capitalists have been getting jittery about the state of their economy. According to Chancellor Erhard, wages have been rising too fast (it’s always too fast—never too slow), since 1963 by 8½ per cent, while productivity has gone up by only four per cent. He has not been slow to threaten Wilson-like measures: —

. . .  we still have things under control. However, if we let them drift, then the same will have to happen to us, that is, a wages freeze, a prices freeze, a considerable rise in the cost of living, indeed even partial balance of payments control. (Guardian, 6/8/66)

It has been favourite with some people to recommend that British workers take a leaf out of their German brothers' book and work as hard. Doesn’t seem to have made much difference, does it? The cry for them, as for us, is still “work harder and pull your belts in!”

Just to show you that capitalism’s problems are similar, wherever you go, let us take another example, this time from one of the “poorer” countries—a rising power since the end of the war. India. There the government has published its fourth five-year plan, envisaging some £10,000 millions investment; yet even if it comes to fruition, the planners admit it will mean:—

. . . every Indian will have a bare two metres more of cloth each year, and three ounces more of food each day.

Not much to write home about? Ah, but even this miserable achievement has a backhanded slap to accompany it.

A massive export drive, if necessary by curbing consumption at home, and Additional taxation . . . are considered essential. (Guardian, 30/8/66)

This, by the way, is one of the countries figuring prominently in the Oxfam appeals, and there is no doubt about the poverty, squalor and starvation of many millions of its inhabitants. But developing Indian capitalism is interested in this only incidentally. Its prime concern is the sale of its goods on the world market. And if this means that the Indian workers have to make do with even less than they get now, the government and employers will not shed many tears—except a few crocodile ones.

Want to be a Postman?

There is a delightfully colourful set of brochures which you can get from any post office, listing the delights of a career with the G.P.O. Read it, and discover that when you work as a postman you “enjoy” such perks as “ a safe job” and “a steady wage”, to say nothing of “an easy mind” and “a friendly atmosphere”. Just think, at 23 and over, you can earn the princely sum of £15 11 s. a week, basic, if you work within four miles radius of Charing Cross, and the opportunity to work overtime.

Perhaps like me, you have your doubts about the adequacy of such a wage, especially if you have a wife and children to think about. But, of course, you can’t expect the Post Office to introduce such a discordant note into their literature, which reads like a song of self-praise from beginning to end. In fact, if everything in the postman’s garden is so lovely, why you may ask, does the G.P.O. have to try so hard to entice you into it with such garish and elaborately printed leaflets?

The answer lies not so much in what has been said as in what has been left out. Shift work in all weathers, for example. And the fact that even the present miserable rate of £15 11s. a week has been won only after a determined strike two or three years ago—the first in the Post Office for more than, half a century. The G.P.O. leaflet is typical of much of the stuff you will find in the Situations Vacant column of any newspaper. No employer, particularly in times of labour shortage, is going to lead off with a list of snags. They will become obvious only when you start working for him. Then, in the manner of Orwell “interesting” becomes “boring” and you find that those “gd. wages and conds” are not really enough after all.

But that’s the outcome of a wages system. No matter what honeyed words your employer uses, your wages are always a problem to him, and to you, too.

Thoughts on Crime

But not very deep ones. I’m afraid, from the Evening Standard leader writer of August 24. He was no doubt prompted by the recent outbreaks of violent crime, and gently chided Lord Butler and the present Home Secretary, Mr. Jenkins, for their “bafflement over the causes of crime in an affluent society”. Yet for all the contribution to our knowledge in this particular editorial, the writer might just as well have left his pen in his pocket.

He makes some sweeping and quite unsupported assertions in his attempts to cover this pressing problem in about 10 column inches, and ends up just as much without a real answer as when he started. “Man is a basically aggressive and pugnacious animal,” he writes, but gives no evidence for this, or for his quite startling suggestion that the object of wars, military training, etc., is to provide a safety valve for the pent-up feelings of bored youngsters.

This editorial caught my eye for its complete refusal to ask one simple question—why? If young people are bored, what is the reason, especially in a rapidly changing world? Isn’t the prospect of a lifetime of wage work enough to make anyone bored? And what do people fight about anyway? This is the question the writer should have begun by asking, but never did. We agree with him that poverty is not the cause of crime, though it may aggravate the situation at times. People fight and knock each other about for very material reasons, when you get down to the bottom of things. Over private property, in fact.

The outbreak of violence is just one aspect of the general competitive struggle which affects each one of us throughout his life. We are all jockeying for economic elbow room, and on the international field, this throws whole nations against each other in massive armed conflict. That, by The Evening Standard’s criteria, should be classified as the biggest and most violent crime of all, involving wholesale murder and robbery, yet the editorial never touched it. A crime, apparently, is a crime when it does not have the blessing of your own ruling class. Rob and murder on their behalf, and you might even get a medal for it. Under any other circumstances, a nice long stretch behind bars.

Gaspers

"The Treasury has received several hundred pounds in cash contributions from members of the public since the Prime Minister announced his measures to deal with the economic crisis.”

(Guardian, 12/8/66)

"I won't retire—I wouldn’t know what to do all day.” (Mr. H. Jennings, winner of over £92,000 in Vernons Pools. Daily Mail Advert, 18/8/66)

‘The pressure of events is remorselessly leading towards a major war, while efforts to reverse that trend are lagging disastrously behind.” (U Thant’s statement to the United Nations, 1/9/66)

“The government spent £3,600,000 in assisting the Potato Marketing Board to take potatoes off the market and push up prices for the remainder last year . . .

(Daily Telegraph, 26/8/66)

Eddie Critchfield

New pamphlet on Racism (1966)

Party News from the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

A new Socialist Party pamphlet, entitled The Problem of Racism, is available. The previous pamphlet on this subject The Racial Problem, published in 1947 has been out of print for some time. The Problem of Racism is not just a revision it is a completely new pamphlet. In 1947 it was the Jewish Question that was prominent. Today it is the Colour Question. This change is taken into account in the new pamphlet which examines the colour question in Britain, America, South Africa and Rhodesia. There are chapters too on the scientific theory of race, the historical origins of racist theories and on African nationalism.

There is an unfortunate error. The reference on page 41 to Guyana should, of course, be to Guinea.

Pamphlet obtainable from Socialist Party (Dept SR), 52 Clapham High St., London, SW4. Price 1/6.

Blogger's Note:

Unfortunately, the text of The Problem of Racism pamphlet is not currently on the SPGB website. Hopefully that can be rectified in the future.

SPGB Meetings (1966)

 Party News from the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

September's "Done & Dusted"

Unfortunately, September was a quiet month for completed Socialist Standards after the three previous months which were pretty solid. Things — life — got a bit hectic away from the blog but, hopefully, for the final three months of the year I can, at a bare minimum, surpass 2024's total of 1359 posts and, better still, get at least 1500 posts on the blog.

We'll see what happens.

September's "Done & Dusted"

September 1908

September 1916

August 1935

September 1946

September 1976

September 1986

September 1992

September 2025

Away with all national flags! (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bertrand Russell once said ‘Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country’. What, then, should we make of a recent poll carried out by the Daily Express (30 August) that found ‘Nearly three-quarters of Brits unwilling to fight for UK in the event of war’?

If the Express is to be believed, a majority sensibly enough have lost their appetite to fight for ‘their’ country in a war. One should be wary of jumping to hasty conclusions, however. Sadly, unwillingness to ‘fight for the UK’ does not necessarily translate into a decline of patriotism. It doesn’t seem to have dampened nationalist fervour.

In August 2025, a high-profile and, seemingly, widely supported grassroots campaign was launched, dubbed ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, ostensibly to ‘promote patriotism’ by flying flags from lamp-posts or painting the Saint George Cross onto mini-roundabouts.

However, one would have to be politically naïve not to see that the ulterior purpose behind all the flag-waving protests accompanying this bizarre fad has been to promote a far-right agenda. The frankly racist targeting of asylum seekers holed up in migrant centres exemplifies this.

This development is notable for the sheer amount of misinformation it has generated – whether we are talking about the costs of the asylum system, the lavish lifestyle asylum seekers are alleged to enjoy (they get a measly £7 a day), or the actual numbers involved (the UK has below the European Union average for asylum applications).

According to the ‘Hope not Hate’ group, the campaign´s organiser is Andrew Currien (AKA Andy Saxon), an ally of the far-right activist, Tommy Robinson. He was formerly in the English Defence League and now runs security for the far-right party, Britain First.

One theory that has been doing the rounds is that the ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ campaign is a reaction to the widespread display of Palestinian flags at protests against what is happening in Gaza. Whatever the case, as far as socialists are concerned, we would far prefer to see no national flags displayed anywhere. In the words of the novelist, Arundhati Roy: ‘Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.’

Shrink-wrapping people´s minds means, among other things, instilling in them the absurd notion that they possess something called a ’country’ in the first instance. It is not just the usual suspects that are actively engaged in this indoctrination process – the state, the church, the media and so on. In its own way too, the Left, when it talks of ‘nationalising the commanding heights of industry’ or glorifies ‘national liberation struggles’ against ‘imperialism’, reinforces a nationalist mindset and by extension, capitalism. To refer to the Communist Manifesto: ‘The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’.

To those who imagine that ‘Britain’ is ‘their’ country, one might well ask – in what meaningful sense is this true? According to one source, ‘just 0.3% of the population – 160,000 families – own two-thirds of the country, and less than 1% of the population owns 70% of the land’.

Also in Britain, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics (2018), foreign-owned businesses accounted for 13.4 percent of total UK company assets, while foreign buyers account for over 40 percent of London’s prime property market. Most ‘British’ workers don’t even own their own homes, let alone this abstraction called ‘Britain’. A Google Earth photo reveals no borders whatsoever that might delineate those particular spatial units we choose to call ‘countries’. All we see are mountains, forests, farmland, urban settlements, rolling on as far as the eye can see and in every conceivable direction.

Borders only exist in our minds – in our imagination. They are nothing more than social conventions. There is nothing ‘natural’ about them whatsoever, any more than the nation-states they spatially delineate. Our capacity to imagine is part of what makes us human beings. As John Lennon´s song famously put it, ‘Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do.’

Today, the great majority of us are little more than prisoners with shopping rights in this open prison that is called capitalism. In this society, the industrial and natural resources of our planet are monopolised by a super-rich, tiny parasite class. It is in their economic interests –not ours – that wars are fought.

At present, there are literally dozens of armed conflicts going on in the world – from localised insurgencies to full-scale wars. To what end? Where is the sense in workers killing other workers just like them – complete strangers with whom they have absolutely no reason to quarrel – just to ensure one piece of tatty cloth, as opposed to another, gets to be raised on the town hall´s flagpole?

Whatever tatty cloth is raised is not going to affect the basic situation of working class people. The same goes in wars. For example, whether in Ukraine it’s a Ukrainian or, alternatively, a Russian rag on the end of a pole. There are no winners in a war (apart from maybe the undertakers and the weapons manufacturers). Workers on both sides will have lost, having succumbed to the death cult of nationalism, their battered bodies draped in the symbol of what is so detestable about the society they currently live in.

Robin Cox

Flagging politics (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We just kind of thought, why don’t we just go put up some flags down one road, just because we think it’d look nice, and we just made the area look better.’ The words of Joseph Moulton, interviewed by YorkMix Radio. Moulton is credited by YorkMix as the instigator of the widespread appearance of Union and St. George flags along the highways and byways of that city. He conceded that the action was rather more than merely cosmetic.

His political rationale stems from a family background in the mining industry of South Yorkshire, communities, ‘…targeted and destroyed by the government through the closing of communal spaces, high tax on pubs and meeting places, stuff like that’. Self-employed, running websites and online businesses, having been mentored by an unnamed someone in the defence and private security business, Moulton has worked as an independent contractor in that sector. This appears to indicate a vague political awareness of social and economic problems, endemic in capitalist society, filtered through a sector directly involved in profiting from the widespread instability of volatile international politics.

Rather than second-guessing his own politics by attributing far-right motivation to his actions, his flagging campaign rather reflects a confused and superficial political viewpoint: identifying widespread problems without any serious understanding of the root cause. Raising the flag up the local lampposts became the summer trend nationally for a while. This was a popular movement, perhaps inspired by Reform UK, or by even more sinister right-wing groups, a widespread outbreak of xenophobia maybe, people outraged by boatloads of migrants tipping up on the south coast, with governments of either major party unable to repel them. Certainly, along with lamppost-hoisted flags were those carried into battle with the state outside asylum-seeker hotels.

Tripadvisor describes The Bell Hotel, Epping: ‘Plenty of parking and good location… Sadly a lot of the hotel is run down and in need of an urgent refurbishment.’ All the more so, most likely, having been laid siege to by the aggressively discontented. At first the local state authority, via a court ruling, declared the hotel must be closed, without any apparent consideration of what would then happen to those housed in its less than salubrious facilities. Then a legal volte-face resulting in more outraged British (or were they English?) patriots turning up at the hotel, along with counter-demonstrators.

August is often referred to by the news media as the ‘silly season’ with parliament on leave and frequently no British news worth reporting. Not in 2025 though as the battle of Epping featured night after night on broadcasts. The focus was a single asylum seeker arrested and charged with several offences including the sexual assault of a 14 year old girl. He was subsequently convicted. Other asylum seekers housed at The Bell made clear not only their abhorrence of his actions, but their overall dislike of the man for his general behaviour, which they had had to put up with prior to his arrest.

There were obviously political actors at work quite prepared to further exploit the 14 year old victim for their own ends, as was the case with the tragic victims in Southport the previous year. The disaffected meanwhile allowed themselves to become an unreasonable, unreasoning mob, most of whom are usually rational, sociable people in their everyday circumstances, however trying those might be.

As Joseph Moulton identified in South Yorkshire, people nationally and internationally are having to deal with social and economic stresses which politicians will not, or more likely, cannot deal with. Pre-election promises all too readily made are rapidly reneged on.

When people lose faith in politics it doesn’t mean they have no beliefs at all; rather, they can come to believe in almost any ill-founded solutions whose appeal is immediate, without consideration of consequences, and without any analysis of why circumstances are as they are. They identify only symptoms, with no attempt to find causes. It is analgesic politics. It is all too easy to deride those protesting outside asylum hotels. Undoubtedly there will be quite a mix of motives amongst them. Some may well have far-right tendencies, while others genuinely feel threatened and insecure. Many seem to be of the ‘precariat’ strata of the wider working class, those whose immediate economic circumstances make their lives an almost constant struggle. Feelings of vulnerability heighten perceptions of threat and a sense of unfairness. ‘My son can’t get a house, but they get them given!’ is one comment by a protester to a TV news interviewer.

An effect of economic and social pressures is to narrow people’s focus. They don’t look for reasons why refugees risk the treacherous Channel crossing in what are little more than dinghies. The ultimate cause of their own and refugees’ ills lies outside their awareness. The wider world with all manner of disorders caused by capitalism merely enforces a sense of lack of control, a feeling of near powerlessness. So, rather than aspiring to abolish borders the reaction is to make them more clearly defined and secure.

When those who are occupying the moral high ground stage their counter-protests they unintentionally heighten the sense amongst the demonstrators that their concerns are simply being dismissed as those of racist bigots. So when the flag is run up the flagpole (lamppost) people start to salute it and it becomes a trend. When interviewed, some of the more active flag raisers insist their motives are positive, to do with pride and community.

Understandable to a point amidst all the national and international uncertainties. It just makes the task of socialists all the more difficult. As with reformism, it diverts thinking away from what really needs to be done. The media has given the impression that virtually the whole country has been decked out with flags. Online reports carry photographs of lamppost after lamppost sporting the colours. However, the accompanying article reveals that it’s only the same couple of streets being shown. The rest of the town/city being undraped, just as Joseph Moulton indicated in his interview with YorkMix Radio. A few flags, however ill or well-intentioned, will, like closing borders and asylum hotels, change nothing. Within a few weeks, as autumn weather takes hold, those flags will become rain sodden, tattered and faded, hanging limply. An appropriate symbol of capitalist Britain.

D.A.

Halo Halo (2025)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Artificial Intelligence has moved into the market for religion. We’ve learnt that there are at least five AIs competing for the favours of the easily led.

Techxplore.com did a consumer test on the five listed; AI Jesus, Virtual Jesus, Jesus AI, Text with Jesus and Ask Jesus. The site posed the same question to each: ‘is there a hell?’ The replies of all suggest that Jesus suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder. The response from AI Jesus was ‘yes, there is a hell. It is a place of eternal torment and suffering, where the souls of those who have rejected God and his teachings will go’.

Garbage in, garbage out. One is curious as to what data AI Jesus has been learning from. This response has most impact – we’re joking of course — if declaimed out loud in the manner of someone like Ian Paisley, the late Northern Irish politician and protestant evangelist. If you prefer, then aver in the manner of any American evangelist exhorting his audience to contribute even more dollars to their personal wealth.

Virtual Jesus comes across as slightly more circumspect: ‘yes, there is a place known as hell in the afterlife, where those who have chosen to reject God and live in sin will face eternal separation from Him’. We imagine this response being given by an academic, perhaps a Doctor of Divinity answering a student’s question in a seminar.

Jesus AI is as dogmatically certain as the previous two that such a place exists: ‘Yes, there is a place called hell, where those who reject God’s love and follow their own desires go after death.’ So basically God behaves like an autocratic dictator who, allegedly, having created various desires in human beings, then says don’t do that or else I’ll hurt you forever and ever! God sounds more like O’Brien, the Thought Police apparatchik who tortures Winston Smith in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, because ‘thought criminals’ must be ‘cured’ of their antagonism towards the all-powerful State. This ‘God’ is just one of the many brought into being through human imagination. Intuitively the human mind perceives that all-powerful entities are malignant in some way.

Text with Jesus sounds like a self-deprecating ageing hippie with a spliff: ‘The concept of hell can be quite a heavy topic … It’s important to remember that God’s desire is for all people to come to Him and experience His love and grace.’

Ask Jesus sounds as if it has been programmed by a Guardian-reading English vicar who lost their faith many years ago but continues in the occupation with one eye on their pension and the other on trying to engender niceness in folk wherever they can. ‘Ah, the question that has stirred the hearts and minds of many throughout the ages…’

AI is indulging in make believe like all those humans all over the globe who believe now, as in the past, in the fictions provided through all the deities created from the human mind.

DC

DC

Cooking the Books: Has Trump gone state-capitalist? (2025)

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

‘Trump embraces state capitalism’ declared the US news site Foreign Policy in July: ‘the level of U.S. government economic intervention under Trump 2.0 is off the charts’. In August the Wall Street Journal took up the theme in an article by its chief economics commentator, Greg Ig: ‘The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics’, he wrote, ‘President Trump is imitating Chinese Communist Party by extending political control ever deeper into economy’.

Ig instanced ‘Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct’. He commented:

‘This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises. China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.”’

This is one definition of state capitalism, but state ownership is not socialism; nor can there be any hybrid between socialism and capitalism. Capitalism exists whenever there is minority ownership of the means of production, wage-labour and production for sale and profit, irrespective of whether that ownership is via individual ownership, a limited company or a nationalised industry.

The term ‘state capitalism’ first came into use towards the end of the 19th century, to describe instances where the government performs the role of capitalist by employing wage-labour and selling the product or service to realise a profit, such as state-owned and run mines and railways. After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Lenin extended the term to include the development of private capitalism under the direction and control of the state. Others later extended the meaning further to include a nationalised economy without private capitalists but still with wage-labour, production for the market and a privileged ruling class such as eventually developed in Russia.

It was a term used more by critics than by supporters of capitalism. Latterly, however, it has come to be used routinely in the media to describe the economic system in China where political control is firmly in the hands of a single party but where profit-seeking private enterprises are allowed to operate, where their shares are traded and where state-owned enterprises compete on the world market with the same aim and methods as private capitalist enterprises.

Politically motivated government intervention in the economy is not new — governments have always done this to one degree or another via taxes, subsidies, tariffs, and monetary policy — but calling this ‘state capitalism’ is new, at least in openly pro-capitalist circles. This could even be seen as a step forward in that, previously, they called it ‘socialism’, ‘communism’, ‘Marxism’, a travesty of these words. The more backward of them still do, as this from Fortune (12 August) magazine:

‘Many free-market economists and business leaders who have long worshipped the free-market ideals of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman should be aware that their idols would be rolling in their graves right now, as rather than pursue standard laissez-faire conservative economic policies, MAGA has gone Marxist and even, increasingly, Maoist’).

Even though it is quite ludicrous to say that Trump has ‘gone Marxist’, there is a delicious irony in him being accused of undermining capitalism. Not that he is of course. He is using state power in what he considers to be the general interest of the US capitalist class.

Charlie Kirk: A victim of his own ideology (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Charlie Kirk is dead, the CEO of ‘christo-fascist’ Turning Point USA, the man who built a career attacking queer people, striking workers, students, bled out on stage in Utah after being shot in the neck. His death was streamed live, his last words delivered in response to a question about whether trans people should be allowed to own firearms. In a final moment of irony, the man who weaponised speech was silenced by a bullet.

His followers scrambled to crown him a martyr to ‘free speech’. But what they mourn is not free speech. What they mourn is the collapse of their own manufactured spectacle.

Turning Point USA Campaigns have never been about dialogue. They have been about stalking, smearing, and silencing. Kirk built an empire on ambush videos, ‘debates’ edited into propaganda, and campaigns of harassment targeting professors, students, and workers. What TPUSA calls activism is in fact a weapon: surveillance masquerading as politics, intimidation dressed up as freedom.

At the University of Illinois, TPUSA turned graduate worker Tariq Khan into a national target, dragging his family, including his children, into a torrent of racist abuse. At Arizona State, English professor David Boyles was blacklisted, stalked, smeared, and beaten bloody. Across the country, countless educators have been doxxed, filmed, and threatened until they censored themselves or fled their jobs. Students, too, are thrown into the crosshairs, forced to navigate a campus environment poisoned by manufactured confrontation.

This is not an accident. It is a strategy. Behind TPUSA’s empty rhetoric of ‘free speech’ is a campaign of fear designed to corrode academic freedom and terrorize opposition into silence. It is a politics of humiliation, coercion, and intimidation. And now, that politics has come full circle. That is the inevitable logic of a politics with violence as its core.

This is not just about Charlie Kirk. It is about the capitalist system that made both Kirk and his killer, a world where capitalism enforces its order through alienation and hierarchy, a world shocked by bloodshed even as it marinates every social relationship in class violence. Kirk’s end is not a tragedy of free speech. It is the mirror of the politics he championed: politics through religious domination, politics enforced by fear, politics that ends with blood.

A.T.

British Bolshevism (2025)

Book Review from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900–21. The Origins of British Communism. By Walter Kendall. Edited by Paul Flewers John McIlroy. Brill. 2025.

This is a reprint of a work first published in 1969, now with a 50-page foreword and a new index. We reviewed this at the time of its first publication so all we need to add is more detail on Kendall’s derogatory remark about us and to comment on McIlroy’s foreword.

Kendall wrote that the SPGB was ‘unwilling to enter the political fray even to the extent of adopting a programme of “palliatives”’. This is a peculiar understanding of the term ‘political fray’ but it let slip what Kendall, a left-wing Labourite, thought that politics was all about — what measures to adopt within capitalism to try to mitigate the problems it inflicts on the working class. The SPGB did most certainly enter the ‘political fray’ in its normal sense of political battle, even to the extent of standing candidates in local elections during this period.

Kendall was also being disingenuous as the SPGB was not the only party he discussed that took this position. The DeLeonist Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which was the other product of the ‘impossibilist revolt’ in the Social Democratic Federation, was also unwilling to adopt a programme of palliatives. Yet Kendall devoted a whole chapter to them and argued against this position (‘barred as it was from any advocacy of reform, the SLP was unable to make contact with the mass of the working class’) rather than dismissing it peremptorily as not part of the political fray.

McIlroy, in his foreword, discusses the validity of Kendall’s conclusion that the founding of the British Communist Party, thanks to the machinations of the Comintern and ‘Russian gold’, was a mistake and had a harmful effect on the working class movement in Britain. As a Leninist himself (subspecies, Trotskyist), he argues against this and speculates that things would have been worse had the CPGB not been formed. But one thing did happen. The SPGB did survive and from the 1920s onwards provided a Marxist criticism of the Leninist distortions and undemocratic practices (as well as the Voice of Moscow) that the CPGB introduced into the working class movement and which represented a step backwards. On this point Kendall was right.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: An innocent abroad (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is no news that Communists are fatheads, but Arthur Scargill is obviously a fathead par excellence. This “Marxist” miners’ leader went on two weeks’ holiday to the “workers’ state” of Bulgaria, and on his return told newspapers how surprised he was at what he found:

Corruption in State-owned shops and restaurants ‘that would have done credit to the Mafia’;

Massive overbooking by State agencies that kept tourists stranded for hours;

A State-Run voucher system of paying for meals that left holiday-makers hungry and out of pocket.

‘It was a disaster’, said Mr. Scargill. ‘I have no intention of ever returning’.

‘If this is Communism they can keep it.’

The report in the Daily Mail on 9th September was supplemented by an article giving further details of holidays and life in Bulgaria. No doubt the Mail’s readers would admit their need for such illumination; but not Scargill, surely? He, after all, has been an advocate of the “workers’ state” and presumably went to Bulgaria because he thought well of the régime.

The tragedy is that workers in Britain have been accepting militant leadership from this simpleton who confesses he didn’t know what he was talking about. He is described as a “Marxist”, and would probably rush about telling everyone of his astonishment if he opened a book by Marx, too.

Let us explain that in the so-called “Communist” countries the workers do not own the means of living, and production is carried on for sale and profit as it is in other countries. Which means you are as likely to be done, if you are a holidaymaker, in Bulgaria’s Sunny Sands as in Torremolinos or Blackpool; and as certain to be exploited, if you are a worker, in Sofia as in Bradford.

Arthur Scargill was open-mouthed because he did not know what either Socialism or capitalism is. Perhaps he will refrain from further utterances until he has found out.

[From the article, 'An Innocent Abroad', Socialist Standard, October 1975]

Action Replay: From Rome to Taiwan (2025)

The Action Replay column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

On display at Derby Museum and Art Gallery is the taxidermied skin of a homing pigeon known as the King of Rome. It acquired this name in 1913 when it won a thousand-mile race from Rome, and its body was donated to the museum by its owner, Charlie Hudson, when it died. It has become quite well known, largely because of a song written by Dave Sudbury and recorded most memorably by June Tabor.

Pigeon racing has long been a hobby for workers, partly as a form of escapism from the grind of employment (‘I can’t fly but me pigeons can’, as the song just mentioned has it). But in some countries it is far more than that. In Taiwan, for instance, it is a massive industry, with big cash prizes and lots of betting going on (Guardian, 30 August). This, of course, has led to plenty of underhand activity, such as kidnapping birds and cloning the tracking chips they wear in races, so that a second bird can be sent to finish earlier. Birds can be given performance-enhancing drugs, or separated from their mates as a way of getting them to fly faster. Legally, it is something of a grey area, not exactly illegal but subject to little regulation. This includes few restrictions on the welfare of the birds, such as ensuring that fewer get lost at sea.

A YouTube video ‘Why This Pigeon Could Be Worth Millions’ looks at the market for racing pigeons. In some places it is a sport for millionaire owners, rather like horse racing, and indeed breeding successful pigeons can be just as remunerative as breeding top-class race horses. The Pigeon Paradise website describes itself as ‘The most exclusive auction house for racing pigeons worldwide’. Occasionally birds really do sell for over a million dollars!

In the UK things may not be quite at this level, but, as the name suggests, the Royal Pigeon Racing Association has a long-standing association with the royal family, and there are pigeon lofts at Sandringham. At a more grass-roots level, pigeons are on sale on the Gumtree site, where prices vary from £5 to £100. Also there are one-loft races, where someone can buy a bird but does not have to have their own loft to keep it in. Take the bird to a loft, where the loft manager will handle everything and let you know how it does in races; supposedly an uncomplicated way into the sport.

You can’t help wondering what Charlie Hudson would have made of the way the pastime he enjoyed has been transformed into a global source of large fortunes.

Paul Bennett

'Make Capitalism History' (2025)

Advert from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB October Events (2025)

Party News from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

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