Cut and thrust (2026)

Book Review from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tory Cuts. By David Connolly. Self-published. 2026.

This has been advertised in the classified section of Private Eye and is clearly aimed at the sub-section of society that is actively critical about the way UK society and its economy operate. It is at times amusing and frustrating, the latter mainly because of the large number of editing errors and the rather scattergun approach to structure – there is an underpinning narrative thread, but it really does test the patience of the reader as it often meanders off on tangents. At root, it needed a much finer editorial hand.

The over-arching theme is that the approach to economic management favoured by the Conservative Party in recent decades (and to some extent Labour) is a form of neo-liberalism that has only served to damage the UK economy, engender class division and infect the UK public sphere. Connolly’s solution seems to be Social Democratic Party-style economic interventionism allied with aspects of social conservatism. In some ways it is a ‘back to the future’ scenario as all this has been tried before and the social democratic economies of Europe (Scandinavia in particular) that he lauds have now been beset by similar issues. Indeed, pretty much all of them have seen falls in their growth rates like the UK and their halcyon days seem well and truly over, with resulting social discontent which hasn’t been seen in decades and a concomitant rise of the populist right.

It should be added that there is some very selective use of statistics in this book and some of them could be questioned too (including the over-stated claim that workers in the UK are losing 10 percent of our wages for every 10 years of neo-liberalism). But it is entertaining in parts and brings out the class divide at the heart of society well enough.

The solution to the problems Connolly identifies lies not in a return to a mythical social democratic past though – a past, after all, that was perceived as being so glorious the working class elected Thatcher and her successors in gratitude. Furthermore, much of what Connolly blames on neo-liberalism and monetarist economics – such as the decline in UK manufacturing – is really much more a product of the shift in world capitalism away from many of the traditional metropolitan centres of capital in Western Europe to China, India and the Far East instead, where labour costs are lower. For instance, while it is true that the proportion of UK jobs in manufacturing fell from around 25 percent of the workforce in 1980 to about 8 percent now, in Germany it fell from around 40 percent to about 19 percent, France from 25 percent to under 12 percent and Spain from about 20 percent to 10 percent. There has been a big fall in the neo-liberal US economy too, of course, though actually less than any of these European countries, many of whom use the same type of broadly social democratic approach he favours.

Ultimately, the underlying cause of the issues Connolly is rightly concerned about is not the actions of Tory governments and those who wish to copy them like Blair and Starmer – it is the way society is organised. Class division, economic instability and an uneven, antagonistic system of income distribution are at the very heart of all market economies, irrespective of political colours. Top-down, class-divided, based on entitlement and exclusion, with untold riches for a tiny minority and salary slavery for everybody else – that’s the capitalist way and it will need a lot more than a modification of personnel at the top to make it history.

DAP

Cooking The Books: Capitalism to blame not ‘neoliberalism’ (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Adnan Hussain, MP for Blackburn, one of the four pro-Gaza MPs who are allied with Corbyn in the Independent Alliance parliamentary group, was as such one of the provisional leaders of Your Party. He subsequently quit Your Party but is still a member of the Independent Alliance and he still agrees with the new party’s basic position that capitalism can be reformed so as to benefit the many.

The Socialist (the paper of one of the remnants of the Militant Tendency) reported that he told a meeting in Blackburn on 30 August:

‘“Neoliberal policies have destroyed the unity of communities”, creating loneliness, isolation, and mental ill-health. He said that the new party will fight for the funding needed for housing, health, education, and transport, and to reopen youth clubs and community centres’.

Normal reformist rhetoric, encouraging the mistaken belief that capitalism could be made to provide adequately these essential services that people need.

That it is ‘neoliberalism’ that is the problem has been a constant theme of his tweets. For instance, this on 23 October:

‘Capitalism, unrestrained, measures everything, even human life, by its economic yield. Neoliberalism then sanctifies this as “freedom.” The result? A society where dignity is traded for productivity and compassion is seen as inefficiency’.

This suggests that it is neoliberalism — unrestrained capitalism, or giving capitalist enterprises freer rein to pursue profits as they see fit — that results in this, and that state intervention to restrain capitalism could prevent it. But it wouldn’t.

All the things he criticises — communities destroyed, people treated as things — have happened, but because of capitalism. Governments have had to give priority to profit-making as that is what drives the capitalist economy. Public services and amenities are paid for out of taxes and taxes fall in the end on profits. So, after the post-war boom came to an end in the mid-1970s, governments had to decide between maintaining these services and encouraging profit-making. It wasn’t a real choice as, capitalism being what it is, a system driven by profit, they had to give priority to profit-making.

Corbyn himself always criticises neoliberalism rather than capitalism itself. But it is not the ‘neoliberal capitalist order’ that is the problem. It is the capitalist production-for-profit system as such. Neoliberalism is not a system but a policy forced on governments, particularly since the 1980s, of reducing state intervention in the economy. A return to more state intervention won’t prevent capitalism measuring everything by its ‘economic yield’ or putting productivity before dignity and efficiency before compassion. No action by a reformist government can change that. In fact, any serious attempt to restrain capitalism from giving priority to profit-making and to spend more on meeting people’s needs would provoke an economic downturn as the search for profits is what drives the economy.

Reformism (2025)

Book Review from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Equality. What It Means and Why It Matters By Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel, Polity, 2025. 119pp.

‘‘Why should a hedge fund manager make 5,000 times more than a teacher or nurse, or for that matter a physician?’ (Michael Sandel)

This short book is the record of a public discussion between two well-known ‘left’ academics. Social and economic historian Piketty is author of the much discussed Capital in the Twenty-First Century (see review in this journal), while Sandel is a prominent ‘public intellectual’, who has written books on what may broadly be called political philosophy. The book is divided into a number of chapters with titles such as ‘Why Worry About Inequality?’, ‘Should Money Matter Less?’, ‘The Moral Limits of Markets’, ‘Globalization and Populism’, ‘Meritocracy’, ‘Borders, Migration and Social Change’ and ‘The Future of the Left: Economics and Identity’.

Though presented as a kind of debate, both participants tend to agree on most things. In particular, they both seem convinced that the current social and economic system, capitalism, can be reformed in such a way as to make things significantly more ‘equal’ than they are at present. Piketty points to how, over the history of capitalism, vast swathes of people have seen their conditions of life greatly improve. And we can agree: even in the nineteenth century, in the system’s relatively early stages, this is something which Marx, for all his insistence on capitalism’s inevitable inequalities, observed as an ongoing reality. In this connection Piketty mentions, for example, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, decolonisation, increasing gender and racial equality, the welfare state, and higher living standards for many.

The way forward from this, according to both discussants, is even greater equality. They do not view this as lying in the ‘neoliberal’ turn capitalism has taken since the 1980s which has seen an increased proportion of total wealth owned and controlled by the richest, but in governments levying swingeing taxation rises on the wealthiest (‘80-90% on income and profits’) and being more active in implementing ‘a fuller development of the welfare state’. This, rather than ‘uncritically embracing the market faith’ as they see recent Western governments as having done, will assure a more equal (or at least less unequal) distribution of wealth and give more people access to the goods and services which will allow them to have comfortable living standards. The aim, Piketty argues, should be an economy that is ‘99% decommodified’, by which he means extensive government ownership and control of the means of living, and one which, Sandel asserts, will also lead to ’greater equality of recognition, honor, dignity and respect’.

It would be churlish not to acknowledge the well-meaning nature of the two commentators’ wish lists, their support, for example, for ‘more investment in health and education, higher progressive taxation, curbing the political power of the rich and the overreach of markets’ (Sandel). Unfortunately, however, these do not stand up to close scrutiny. While capitalism, with its ‘growth at all costs’ compulsion, may continue to improve living standards for many on the planet overall, governments simply cannot create anything resembling equality among those who live under that system, since their prime purpose is to manage it in the overall interest of the minority who monopolise the wealth. Different governments may of course have different approaches to this, in the degree of central control they exercise, for example, but, so long as the overall framework of money, wages and salaries, and buying and selling exists, they will always – and inevitably – find themselves trying to keep afloat a system founded on producing goods and services for a profit.

At one point, one of the discussants (Piketty), who claims to stand for ‘democratic, federalist, and internationalist socialism’, seems to come close to suggesting the society of free access that socialists advocate. He talks about a situation in which ‘99% of goods and services, like education and health, are freely accessible’ and ‘you only have 1% left commodified’, advocating ‘a system outside monetary logic and the profit logic’. Yet he comes out the other end still failing to see beyond a monetary economy, and in the end it becomes clear that what he is hoping for is a form of capitalism with a less unequal distribution of wealth and income and a more extensive welfare state (or ‘social state’, as he calls it) than exists at present. It also becomes clear, in the end, that the discussion between the two figures is one about old-fashioned reformism, about the extent to which it is possible for capitalism to ‘narrow’ the pay gap between one worker and another and the wealth gap between workers and capitalists. It is not about achieving the absolute economic equality that will characterise a society of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – the society of the future that we call socialism.

Howard Moss

Nationalism and capitalism (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pedants like to distinguish between ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’. The former signifies love for one´s country; the latter, while meaning that too, also means not being particularly tolerant of other countries (or cultures). In practice, though, ‘patriots’ can very easily become ‘nationalists’ even without knowing it. These are just two points along the same spectrum.

What that spectrum is based upon is an emotional attachment to the rather fuzzy concept of ‘national identity’. This is supposed to provide a kind of social glue that holds together large-scale, culturally diverse societies and allows them to function reasonably well.

National states

Benedict Anderson´s seminal work, Imagined Communities (1983), discusses the way ‘print capitalism’ and the growth of literacy aided the spread of national consciousness. Other factors, like improvements in transport and increased mobility, also helped to widen the social horizons of what were once relatively isolated communities that characterised a feudal society.

Before the rise of capitalism, nation-states did not really exist. Though there are strong grounds for saying that capitalism originated in England (specifically, in the English countryside, where the practice of wage labour became universalised), the first prominent individual to put nationalism on the map was, arguably, a Frenchman – Napoleon. Napoleon explicitly appealed to the idea of the nation as the basis of legitimate political power, where his predecessors had relied instead on such arcane notions as the ‘divine right of kings’ to govern.

However, we should not infer from this that nationalism is the indispensable precondition for a large-scale society to exist. Long before the nation-state existed, large multi-ethnic empires with extremely porous borders existed in the ancient world.

In Europe in 1500, there were approximately 500 more or less autonomous political units – an intricate patchwork ranging from Italian city states (many of which subsequently fell victim to conquest) to numerous principalities (often themselves the product of dynastic quarrels within aristocratic families) and a scattering of relatively consolidated kingdoms. Some of these were nominally part of one or other, much larger, ramshackle, sprawling entities, such as the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire once scornfully remarked, was ‘neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire’.

By 1900, however, the political landscape looked very different indeed. The number of self-governing units involved had been drastically whittled down to a mere twenty-odd nation-states having jurisdiction over the entire European landmass. Napoleon´s armies, which conquered much of Europe in the early nineteenth century, contributed to this development in the sense that they helped to create circumstances that eventually led to the rise of nationalist movements later on in that century.

Pseudo-traditions

Then there is the thorny question of nationalism and cultural diversity. Though it is claimed that nationalism enabled the emergence of large-scale culturally diverse societies, the fact of the matter is that cultural or ethnic differentiation has often presented a serious challenge to the nationalist project. If anything, the rise of nationalism has brought about the erosion of local cultures and languages and, in general, has had a flattening effect on the cultural landscape.

What is called the ‘national culture’ is not always what it seems. In The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, the claim that certain national traditions or institutions have their origins in some mist-enveloped remote past (something that is supposed to invest a tradition with more authenticity) was critically scrutinised and found to be often false. Many of these traditions are pseudo-traditions only recently invented for the express purpose of trying to fashion a national identity – in more concrete terms to facilitate nationalist sentiment.

In short, the basic thrust of nationalist ideology tends towards cultural homogenisation. The more culturally homogenised a population is, the easier it is for the state to manipulate it and elicit its support. Standardisation also enables more effective bureaucratisation.

Taken to an extreme, this homogenising thrust can manifest itself in the form of genocide. As Ernest Gellner points out, where ethnic pluralism exists, ‘a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homogeneous… if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all non-nationals’ (Nations and Nationalism, 2009).

However, one should note that this is only a tendency within nationalist ideology; in the real world, most nationalisms have had to opt for some kind of pragmatic or more inclusive compromise in the form of ‘multiculturalism’.

Globalisation

Factors curbing nationalism´s tendency towards cultural homogenisation within the confines of a given nation-state include not only the resilience of ethnic subcultures and the inward migration of ‘foreigners’, bringing with them their own cultural beliefs and practices, but also the impact of what might be called ‘global culture’:

Back in 1848, the Communist Manifesto had something to say about that:

‘In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature’.

Big business is, today, a major purveyor of this global culture. One thinks of the role of big tech companies in providing social media platforms or the impact of global chains like McDonald’s in shaping our culinary tastes. Wherever you go in the world, cities are getting more and more alike with the same monotonously predictable selection of High Street stores.

There is a certain irony in all this. Capitalism, which gave birth to the ideology of nationalism, has also unleashed powerful forces that tend towards the erosion of national distinctiveness.

Backlash

In some ways, this contradiction has brought us to the fraught times we are living in today. The unravelling of the Neoliberal project that has been the dominant paradigm since the 1970s has prompted a backlash against globalisation and the resurgence of virulent nationalism. Far-right movements are on the rise in many parts of the world. Their animus is mainly directed at that most emblematic aspect of globalisation – the movement of migrants across those imaginary borders that define the capitalist nation state.

Such migrations are often fuelled by wars and the devastation inflicted by military action undertaken by the very countries which now have some citizens bitterly complaining about the ensuing blowback in the form of desperately impoverished boat people arriving on their shores.

It’s not just war that is to blame; there is also the economic devastation wrought on people´s lives and livelihoods. For instance, the traditional Senegalese fishing industry has been virtually decimated by overfishing and the use of destructive methods, like bottom trawling, by industrial fleets from Europe and China. This has been a major factor in the increase in Senegalese migrants risking their lives to reach the Canary Islands in the hope of being relocated to mainland Spain.

Robin Cox

Polycrisis (2025)

Book Review from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Insecurity Trap. A Short Guide to Transformation. By Paul Rogers, with Judith Large. Hawthorn Press, 2024. 92pp.

The main author of this book, Paul Rogers, Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies, sees the world as being in a ‘polycrisis’, whose principal features are wars, right-wing populism, poverty and environmental breakdown. He refers to it as an ‘insecurity trap’, in that the disruption caused by these factors makes everyone’s life prone to uncertainty and instability. Viewing the factors in question as planetary and often interdependent, his declared purpose is to suggest ways in which we can set about ‘navigating’ them on that same planetary level. In her Foreword, the book’s co-author sees humanity as having the technology and productive capacity to achieve world-wide security for all as long as these are not perverted in the service of, for example, fomenting hatred between peoples or producing increasingly sophisticated weapons of war.

One of the major obstacles to this, according to this book, is the free market, or ‘neoliberalism’ as it is referred to, which it sees as beginning seriously in the 1980s, in the era of Thatcher and Reagan, and having intensified since (though it is also recognised as a way of running capitalism that dates back to the 19th century). It is a way of organising things, the authors tell us, that focuses on ‘the prioritisation of private enterprise in place of state ownership’. It also, they go on, eschews ‘cooperative intergovernmental action’ and turns its back on the environmental and military drivers of migration, pushing ‘the richer states to close the castle gates and concentrate even more than at present on looking after themselves’. This in turn makes them ‘terribly ill-suited to responding to global challenges’, such as pandemics and climate breakdown and much more suited to encouraging the arms industry to supply weapons for use in the wars easily prone to breaking out. ‘Now thrive the armourers’, as they put it.

So, what is the solution Professor Rogers and his co-author have to offer to these ongoing and interlocking problems which affect the whole of humanity? First and foremost, they see ‘the need for cooperation at every level from neighbourhoods right through to intergovernmental level’, especially in view of increasing climate breakdown which ‘an economic model rooted in competition cannot cope with’. In support of this they provide a long list of ‘small steps’ people could take to ‘cooperate’ with one another on a daily basis (eg, use of cloth or paper bags rather than plastic ones, conserving water, using chemical-free products, car sharing, volunteering to help in food banks). They also suggest involvement in support of production of local food, sustainable energy, ‘ethical’ banking and campaigns such as against the arms trade and against fossil fuels, and in favour of, for example, Amnesty International. They advocate all of this, and much more – and this is where the problems arise – within the framework of the existing system of buying and selling and dependence on money and the market. In addition, they want to skew the system as it currently exists by having a much larger degree of state ownership of industry and services, arguing that, if governments have more control, they can control ‘market fundamentalism’, introduce more regulation and reform that will make things less unequal, and can also, for example, tax the wealthy, bring in carbon reduction programmes, invest in electrification, and adopt ‘green’ policies generally.

But what all of this fails to reckon with is that, with all such change – if it were possible – we would still be left with capitalism with its market and its money system. Nor would anything of what is proposed change the profit imperative that drives it. At best it would amount to a tinkering at the edges of that system and would certainly not have the effect of mending the inequality that characterises it. Above all, it would do nothing to create the more ‘sharing’ system the authors wish for, nor to remove the ‘insecurity trap’ which the authors’ well-meaning aim is to do away with. Above all, whatever individuals or individual governments may do to attempt to ease the burden on the most deprived, what cannot happen in a world of competing national economic interests is the ‘intergovernmental cooperation’ that this book advocates for. That is an illusion, because all governments are an expression of the interests of the owners or controllers of wealth in their country – whether that wealth is state managed or privately owned – and will only cooperate with other governments to the extent that those interests are not unduly affected. They cannot act against the profit motive and they do not possess the power to regulate the profit system as they wish. That is the bleak truth of the world we live in and the kind of ‘small steps’ advocated by these authors are destined to remain just that and not to lead to any larger change or a different kind of society.

It is in fact a failure of the imagination not to look beyond ‘small steps’ and to a completely different kind of world (a moneyless, stateless, leaderless one with free access for all to all goods and services) – one which is eminently realisable once majority consciousness of the need for it spreads and leads to democratic political action to bring it about. It will be a society of planned cooperation which takes advantage of existing technologies in a sustainable way and in which everyone can develop their interests and abilities with full social support and live without the ever-present threat of the pervasive material insecurity the authors of this book rightly perceive and are so keen to see removed.

Howard Moss

The Invisible Doctrine (2024)

Book Review from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life). By George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison (Allen Lane)

This small book embraces some pretty big ideas, of interest to socialists. It’s a collaboration between US radical filmmaker Peter Hutchison (whose past work ranges from Iron Man to the Noam Chomsky documentary Requiem for the American Dream) and journalist George Monbiot. Monbiot’s trajectory is also of interest for socialists. From run-of-the-mill environmental reform campaigner in the 1990s his writings over the last 20 years detail a growing revolutionary political consciousness.

The objective of the book is to shed light on the significant political changes – ‘capitalism on steroids’ as the authors put it – that have occurred in the last 50 years and understand the extent to which these are predictable consequences of a concerted ideological offensive by the ruling class.

The book traces the intellectual origins of neoliberalism back to Hayek and von Mises. These ideas (privatization, cut taxes, deregulation etc) originally confined to academia were nurtured, funded and propagated by US business interests. (Monbiot has previously done much to shed light on the murky business origins of all the impressive-sounding institutes, thinktanks and lobbyists that actively try and manage political debate).

The authors make an attempt to argue that neoliberalism is distinct from classical laissez-faire liberalism, in that it emphasizes economic freedoms but pays less attention to the philosophical liberties of the individual that are usually bundled in. Adam Smith may have felt it necessary to expound on the benefits to society of the ‘invisible hand’; in contrast neoliberals don’t really care what the consequences are – the free market is the objective. For our part we have to be hopeful that workers increasingly see an invisible hand that gives them a very visible ‘two-fingers’. I’m not sure whether neoliberalism merits its own chapter in any political history of exploitation and oppression, but socialists would perhaps see it as a more honest philosophical rationale for capitalism. Either way the authors don’t get lost in the angels-on-pins philosophy, and are pretty explicit: ‘Neoliberalism is class war’.

The authors argue that neoliberalism’s disdain for anything beyond the market means that democracy is being degraded globally. We used to be told that capitalism and democracy were ideologically intertwined in a glorious revolutionary project. That was nonsense of course (the vote was just a necessary concession made by capitalists to keep workers on-side) but nevertheless democracy is a pretty heavyweight argument, one worth trying to have on your side. Harder to argue though in an era when free-market ideology appears to travel hand-in-hand with openly authoritarian demagogues; the recent Elon Musk/Donald Trump interview is a clear example (but perhaps not so much ‘hand-in-hand‘ as just two hours of mutual rimming – apologies to Socialist Standard readers for the mental image invoked).

World socialists are arguably unique as a political movement in how explicit we are in our confidence in the capacity of our species to understand the world we live in (given a chance) and act in our collective interests to create a democratic, participative and conscious revolution. We are therefore very interested in the spread of political ideas, including pro-capitalist ones. The ideas of von Mises and Hayek have clearly had impact. It helps to have a billionaires’ blank cheque of course, but the story of neoliberalism lends strength to the argument that ideas, particularly if they can be framed in a coherent narrative, actually matter. The unopposed march of neoliberal ideas has partly been because the left has been unable to adequately create its own narrative. World socialists would argue that this is because so much of the left are in denial; deep-down they are actually wedded to capitalism.

Many supposedly ‘anti-capitalist’ books end with a whimper as the author provides a list of reforms, a mild wish list. Monbiot and Hutchison end their book more substantially, suggesting the potential for some sort of alternative narrative, a ‘politics of belonging’. This involves acknowledging the remaining non-market commons around us that we share, and interesting concepts such as private sufficiency/public luxury are discussed that should be of interest to world socialists. There are glimpses of how this may be pre-figured and developed within the capitalist state (a contentious point for most world socialists) but don’t let this put you off. In the final chapter the authors make a strong and refreshing argument, that every world socialist will echo, against reformism:

‘Far from being a shortcut to the change we want to see, it is the morass into which ambition sinks. System change as the neoliberals and the new demagogues have proven is, and has always been, the only fast and effective means of transformation’.

Brian Gardner

Class matters (2024)

Book Review from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radical Chains. Why Class Matters. By Chris Nineham. Zero Books, 2023.197pp.

Recent times have seen much talk of identity politics and sectionalism. Gender, race, and ethnicity among other ‘sectional’ interests create what the author of this book sees as divisions and diversions from the common interest we have in establishing a different kind of society from the existing one. The view he forcefully expresses is that to regard these as groups with different interests has the effect of diverting attention from the shared working-class issue of wage and salary work and the insecurity it brings.

The book’s sub-title, ‘Why Class Matters’ is an uncompromising expression of the Marxist view that there are two main classes in capitalist society, the tiny minority class that owns and controls the Earth’s resources (the capitalist class) and the vast majority (the working class) who, in order to survive, need to sell their labour-power for a wage or salary to that minority. It argues this proposition with informed and incontrovertible clarity and powerfully insists that the effect of ‘identity politics’ is to cause muddle and confusion, nor does it make any sense to split wage and salary earners into a series of different sub-classes (eg, ‘middle class’, ‘upper class, ‘professional class’) with somehow different interests from one another. He dismisses ‘the various attempts to downplay class’ as ‘completely misleading’ and illustrates effectively that, whatever their line of work, all those who live on a wage or salary are fundamentally in the same subordinate position with regard to the system and the class that owns it (ie, the capitalist class).

This message is then connected, in a wide-ranging survey, to the various conflicts, large and small, that have arisen across the globe between subjects and their masters over the last two centuries. Yet here it somewhat loses its way and focus in seeking to see in these conflicts conscious attempts to establish new forms of society rather than largely desperate reactions by downtrodden people against oppression or powerlessness. It starts with the nineteenth-century movements for political change in France and Germany before going on to Russia’s 1905 revolution, and then the taking of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the civil war that followed, with reflection on these events as analysed mainly by Trotsky, Gramsci and Lukacs.

The author then moves on to the Second World War and its aftermath, and later, in a section entitled ‘Dreams deferred’, he takes us through revolts and uprisings in China, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, and Latin America as well as the ‘Arab Spring’ before moving back to Europe with the ‘events’ of May 1968 in France, the opposition to Thatcherism in Britain and the reactions to the ‘neoliberalism’ which it heralded. A broad sweep indeed in which historical development is often encapsulated with verve and economy (eg, the First World War defined as ‘the catastrophic climax of mounting international competition for markets and resources’) but which is tainted by an over-enthusiastic tendency to see events as more driven by class-conscious motives than they were in reality.

Having gone through this history of revolt and struggle, the author’s main message for today is that we must struggle against the current ‘neoliberalism’, which he sees as a new and increasingly exploitative form of capitalism causing ‘an epidemic of workplace insecurity’. He peppers his book with references to it, seeming to consider it as something qualitatively different from the capitalism that existed before over the past two centuries. But is it that much different from capitalism’s business as usual? It’s true that, in the post-Second World War years, free-market capitalism (previously called ‘laissez-faire’) gave way to a new variation widely practised by governments, whereby the state would intervene in the economy more readily than before to try and get the system back working in a less crisis-ridden way (often called ‘Keynesianism’).

But as capitalism went on its merry way creating, as the author himself quoting Marx says, ‘uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions’, the state intervention method was found to be no more effective in ‘taming’ capitalism than what preceded it. It became discredited therefore and governments went back to favouring so-called ‘free markets’ and the relaxation of controls: an old way of running things in fact, even if its critics have attached to it the new label of ‘neoliberalism’. The fact is that governments do not – cannot – control the way the capitalist economy works. It’s the other way round. It’s the operation of capitalism that constrains governments. In fact they can do little more than react to what it throws at them. And the system remains fundamentally the same – something the writer himself, despite his focus on ‘neoliberalism’ seems also to accept when he writes ‘the production of commodities through exploitation remains …the driving force of the system’ and ‘it is still a system with the exploitation of workers at its heart’.

But what is the form of struggle he advocates that we engage in to transcend the capitalist system and establish socialism? At one point he quotes Marx’s view of socialism as being the ‘abolition of the wages system’, talks about ‘liberating society as a whole’ and ‘dissolving classes altogether’ and seems to agree that this should be the ambition of those who oppose capitalism and have a clear view of the class system that characterises it regardless of attempts at obfuscation. And that is very much to his credit.

But the main thing he seems to offer in terms of action is support for ‘struggles over pay and conditions by trade unions’, which, it is claimed ‘have a capacity to generalise into a political conflict between different class organisations’ and ‘at the same time developing the revolutionary consciousness and combativity of all those involved’. We have of course heard this kind of thing many times before from the Trotskyist left and we continue to argue that it’s no substitute for a movement whose aim should be to develop majority consciousness among workers of the need to use democratic means to establish a classless, stateless, marketless, free-access society of democratic cooperation, mutual aid and economic equality based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need.

Howard Moss

Globalisation: the left on the coat-tails of liberalism (2003)

Book Review from the January 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two recent books, Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses by Robert Went and The Twilight of Globalization: Property, State and Capitalism by Boris Kagarlitsky highlight the long-standing history of globalisation of trade, changing imperial relations and the failure of the modern left to come to any effective strategy to combat its renewed assertive neo-liberal ideology. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century the left was able to delineate a clear position between its own anti-imperialist stance and the pro-imperialist and apologist liberal positions. By the second half of the twentieth-century, however, after the experience of running capitalism (with its consequent disillusioning impact on principles) and the disorientating policies of supporting “progressive” struggles over “reactionary” ones, the left is in a muddle. For example, a significant section of the British left backed the NATO bombing of Serbia and the support of the Labour Party for the hegemonic ambitions of the US shows how much politics has seemingly changed in the course of a century.

Or does it? The tradition of leftism in Britain, rather than being an alternative to capitalism has, when negotiating for political power been liberal rather than anything approaching socialist. The 1945 “settlement” was not based on the ideas of the Labour movement but on a programme of social-security and nationalisation that had long been part of the liberal agenda, being synthesised in the 1942 Beveridge Report (which was also incidentally supported by the Communist Party). During the twenty years following the second world war the “social-compromise” of the welfare-state and Keynesianism become the accepted centre ground of British politics.

However, following the long-term decline in economic growth liberal opinion swung away from the Keynesian orthodoxy to a new one based in classical economic theory. The left, increasingly isolated from mainstream economics, first led a failed counter-attack in the early 1980s and then slowly surrendered on all fronts under Neil Kinnock and finally the right-wing bully Tony Blair. There is and always has been, it is true, a radical left aiming at arriving at state-capitalism through the Labour Party but the “socialising” impact of the post-war nationalisations was virtually non-existent. Such measures were not accepted by the political centre as necessary on the grounds of radical social and economic ambition but because it could be defended – to an extent – in terms of the overall efficiency of capitalism.

Privatisations, pursued ideologically against perceived excess government economic activity, have generally failed and sometimes cost business more than the old nationalised equivalents. The state remains, despite globalisation, a strong social, economic and political force, which is no doubt why transnational corporations spend billions of pounds globally in influencing their decisions. This despite the continuing ideological attack on the state even to the point of damaging the stability of the capitalist state itself. Privatisation has seen the domination of ideology over pragmatism for capitalist government. A European Commission report of 1992 (quoted by Kagarlitsky) failed to find any advantage and in fact an additional cost to be borne for capitalism. The reason given, to reduce the economic role of the state and thus to reduce state expenditure has singularly failed to occur; in Russia, for example, it was said that a reduction in the state economic sector of one-tenth required an increase of the state apparatus by one-third. States are not reducing in size or reducing their role but are merely changing with an increase of unaccountable quangos and so on. Similarly the increasing role of international organisations have not been met by a reduction in the role of national governments. The situation may be summed up with the phrase “freer markets and more rules”. Thus the use of the state is open to a different approach and is open to the left, which is currently unwilling to use it.

Further, the social inequalities engendered by neo-liberal capitalism can threaten to undermine the basis of capitalist government itself. A strong state involvement in the economy has historically been a boon for, rather than the bain of, capitalism. It is essential for the creation of a social consensus for capitalist relations:

“Because the capitalist market cannot get by without non-market institutions, the state as a non-commercial entity plays a key role, not only financing public bodies but also overseeing the interaction between the development of the economy and that of the various structures of the social sphere… Without a certain consent by the governed, the state could hardly perform its class function. But this means that the state system, as an instrument of the ruling class, cannot fail to take account of the interests of other social layers as well. When the institutions of power prove incapable of this, the state system enters into crisis” (Kagarlitsky, The Twilight, p.8).

Increasing inequalities are likely to lead, if not to outright conflict, then to tensions and an increasing political demand and therefore political will, where representative democracies exist, to a likely challenge to the unapologetic inegalitarian capitalism of recent decades. Robert Went reveals that the ratio of income between the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent of the world population was 60:1 in the early 1990s and predicted to decline to 50:1 by 2010 if all went well with the world economy; given the crises of the 1990s the ratio is far likely to increase rather than decrease. Went argues that the prospects for workers globally of the continuation of current trends is bleak indeed:

“there will be a greater and more dominant dictatorship of the markets, particularly over countries that wish to attract capital; greater social inequality as a result of a dual process of polarisation, within countries and on a world scale, among countries; progressive levelling down of wages, working conditions and social security; ecological destruction and deterioration; a greater role for unaccountable international institutions and blocs; and a further undermining of democracy” (Went, p.108).

The state has also tended to be a great source of innovation in the field of technology, which is not, as widely reported, the cause of globalisation but merely facilitates it. Not least of these developments was the internet, which originated in the 1960s in the US Defence Department but also includes space technology, infrastructure and education.

The confidence of global finance capital was somewhat shaken by the capital-flow and currency crises in Mexico in 1994 and Asia in 1997, which produced several calls for international regulation of global capital flows. Further crises are likely to induce regulation if severe enough. Current actions to solve financial crises are tied to austerity packages, which avoid the global impact of such incidences but create problems of development for those countries which are subject to them. While the share of world trade of developing countries has increased from 20 per cent to 30 per cent in the post-war period, economic growth has in the main been restricted to the EU, US and Japan. The imposition of export-led growth on the resource rich developing countries means that to develop a break with neo-liberalism is needed. A degree of protectionism is needed for national capitalist economies to prioritise industrial development. Such a growth, of course, could well be a stimulus for the global economy were it not geared to the interests of finance capital in the developed world.

Successful development has generally taken place in countries or regions where the interventionist state is the norm and not under conditions of anything approaching free-trade. Selective intervention in the world economy has been the basis of most industrial growth, from the British cotton-trade to South Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s who, without government protection of the domestic market tied to export performances of amongst others the clothing industry, would still be exporting rice as its export mainstay. Protectionism then most probably must play a prominent part in any meaningful economic growth in the non-western world – the west of course being still well acquainted with it, despite its rhetoric.

In the light of the utter failure of the Kyoto agreement to result in meaningful regulation it is also clear that for any serious recognition of environmental sustainability there must be a proliferation of regulation and state-led implementation of clean-technologies and the innovation of new ones. If humans are to survive on the earth then this must be done. If ecological disaster is not to be averted by socialism then capitalism must clearly adopt such an approach.

What then is to be done? Went is clear that capitalist relations are flawed:

“It is not possible within the existing economic logic, in which profit maximization comes first, to solve the most important problems that humanity faces. Under capitalism, the individual interests of speculators, employers or investors determine what they do. The partial rationality of their actions clashes with the general social interest of present and future generations.

In fact, capitalism is becoming more and more irrational. The discrepancy between what is economically and socially possible and what is actually happening has never been greater than it is today” (Robert Went, Globalization, p.121).

Kagarlitsky is also clear that the old state driven approaches to the problems of capitalism are also little hope for the future:

“The old Big Brother is dead, meet the New Big Brother. Now Big Brother is global or multinational, but even more faceless and even less accountable than before. It is no surprise that after experiencing what globalization has in store, so many people world-wide are becoming nostalgic for the old Big Brother” (Boris Kagarlitsky, The Twilight, p.2).

It seems strange then that despite the attention that both Went and Kagarlitsky pay to the need for an adequate response to capitalism and its current ideology that both see the answer in progressive reforms, or what Kagarlitsky calls “revolutionary reforms”. Following the massive defeat of leftism across the world, it is clear that socialist revolution can well do without the pursuit of reforms. Such an attitude also ignores the extent to which any challenge to neo-liberalism will most likely be led by an ideological shift back to liberal social-pragmatism – in other words, a shift motivated not in the interests of labour but of capital.

Colin Skelly

Cooking the Books: Nothing to offer (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“People in general have lost faith in the free-market, Western, democratic order,” lamented Daily Telegraph columnist Charles Moore (22 July). “They have not yet, thank God, transferred their faith, as they did in the 1930s, to totalitarianism. They merely feel gloomy and suspicious. But they ask the simple question, ‘What’s in it for me?’, and they do not hear a good answer.”

They certainly don’t. The mad-marketeers who ruled the roost at the time of Thatcher and Reagan didn’t have anything to offer, but at the time many people thought they did. Thatcher openly proclaimed that she intended to destroy “socialism”, by which she meant everything associated with the post-war Labour government (nationalisations, NHS, council housing) and her government went a long way towards doing so, even if she was only doing what the economic circumstances of British capitalism required her to do.

Then, in 1991, the USSR collapsed. The partisans of “the free-market, Western, democratic order” were elated. They proclaimed the “end of history” and that “socialism is dead”. But what had died was state-monopoly capitalism not socialism (which had never existed in Russia). A “peace dividend” was promised. It never materialised. Instead, there was the First Gulf War, to be followed by the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by the Western capitalist countries. In 2007 the biggest slump since the 1930s broke out. We’re still in it.

Wars, slumps, capitalism as usual. No wonder the likes of Charles Moore are disoriented and disillusioned. He even entitled his column “I’m starting to think that the Left might actually be right”, explaining:

“One of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls ‘the free market’ is actually a set-up. The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.”

What Moore was lamenting was that the Right (to accept his term) has no answer to this criticism (only slightly caricatural) of the private corporation capitalism they uphold and promote. And they haven’t. Capitalism is now more intellectually bankrupt than ever. It has no inspiring vision to rally people, not even “freeing” people from state capitalism. As a result of the way it inevitably works, capitalism has become a dirty word again.

But what is the answer? By “the Left” Moore probably means the supporters of state capitalism (he explicitly states that “the Right” includes “the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown”), but the above is a criticism of capitalism which we in the Socialist Party could broadly share, even though we don’t consider ourselves a part of the Left precisely because they stand for state capitalism.

We are opposed to private corporate capitalism and to state capitalism, both of which have failed. The answer is a classless society without rich or poor where productive resources have become the common heritage of all so that the production and distribution of the things we need to live and enjoy life can be carried out in accordance with the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. It’s the original meaning of socialism before the experience of Russia and Labour governments made it a dirty word. It’s high time it became respectable again.

Reformism, old and new (2007)

Book Review from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Struggling for a Social Europe: Neoliberal Globalisation and the Birth of a European Social Movement. By Andy Mathers. Ashgate.

Mathers begins his book with the claim that “15 June 1997 may prove to be a significant date in the development of the labour movement in Europe”. What, you will be asking, happened that day? Some 50,000 people demonstrated in Amsterdam at the EU Summit that was being held there, including a few hundred who had marched from various parts of Europe to demand “the right to work or a guaranteed basic income”. Nothing very new — or very significant — then. Except for Mathers who had chosen to study these marches for this PhD thesis, but as a “researcher-activist”, i.e. someone who sympathised with their aims but was at the same time studying them like an ethnologist studying a primitive tribe.

He writes as some sort of Trotskyist, so his conclusions are predictable: there is still some mileage to be got from making reform demands on the nation-state (as opposed to the EU), that the trade union movement ought to have involved itself more, etc. He criticises as “the new reformism” those theorists who have written off the working class as an agent for social change and who look instead to some other groups such as students, employed and unemployed graduates, and marginalised youth who make up the bulk of those involved in the so-called “New Social Movements”  (NSMs).

This is in fact an interesting discussion since the “official” labour movement — trade unions and Labour and Social Democratic parties — have given up any idea of changing society, even gradually through a series of social reform measures voted by parliaments. They have abandoned this and now settle for getting the best they can out of the present social system, capitalism. This is a significant development that does need analysing.

The “Labour Movement” essentially only embraced a section of the working class properly so-called – only those who worked in industry and transport whereas the working class is comprised of all those who are forced by economic necessity to sell their ability to work in order to live, so including the so-called “middle class” too.

Mathers does in fact conclude that the non-industrial workers involved in the NSMs are workers, even if they don’t yet recognise it. But his criticism of the “new reformism” is not made from a revolutionary socialist standpoint, but from that of “old reformism”, as can be seen from his description and endorsement of the programme proposed by leading SWP theoretician, Alex Callinicos:

“In An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, Callinicos outlined a set of measures which he argued combined ‘immediate remedies’ to the consequences of neoliberal policies with a ‘different social logic’ (p. 132). These demands included those prominent in the European Marches such as the Tobin Tax, the universal basic income, the reduced working week, the defence of public services, and the redistribution of wealth and income. It also included those arising from the broader movement like the abolition of immigration controls and third world debt, the defence of civil liberties, and measures to ensure environmental protection (pp. 132-9).”

Some of these are not even palliatives led alone remedies, but they are all reforms to capitalism.

As it happens, I was myself present in Amsterdam on that 15 June (with my trade union) and witnessed one of the incidents mentioned by Mathers: the reception by the Dutch riot police of a group of masked demonstrators who had travelled from Italy by train (p. 62). Both groups were lined up outside the railway station facing each other, with ordinary passengers walking between then. Apparently, later there were some clashes as the police forced them back on to a train for Italy. What the point was I don’t know.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Things can only get worse (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although Labour was elected to office in 1997 to the sounds of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’,  Blair is now singing a different tune. In the past the Labour Party used to argue that the state could, and should, be used to protect people from the worst effects of world market forces, through such measures as import controls, tariffs and subsidies to protect home industries and the employment they provided, and bans on the export of capital so that it was invested at home. Such views are still held by trade unionists, Leftwing reformists and the Green Party (which has taken over the Labour Party’s discarded policies in this area).

Blair now derides this as “the European social model of the past” and is actively campaigning to get other EU governments to abandon it too. In his Leader’s speech to the annual Labour Party Show in Brighton he told the audience (they can hardly be called delegates since the resolutions they pass count for nothing):

“In the era of rapid globalisation, there is no mystery about what works: an open, liberal economy, prepared constantly to change to remain competitive. The new world rewards those who are open to it. … The temptation is to use government to try to protect ourselves against the onslaught of globalisation by shutting it out – to think we protect a workforce by regulation, a company by government subsidy, an industry by tariffs. It doesn’t work today. Because the dam holding back the global economy burst years ago. The competition can’t be shut out; it can only be beaten” (Guardian, 28 September).

In other words, as the other member of the Thatcher-Blair Mutual Admiration Society used to put in: TINA. And, given capitalism, they are right; there is no alternative. What Marx called the “coercive laws of competition” can’t be overcome; they have to be applied, not just by capitalist enterprises but by governments too.

But at what cost to workers and society in general? It means running fast – in fact, running faster and faster – just to stand still, continually introducing new methods of organisation and production so as to be able to keep down costs and ward off or beat the competition. It’s a race to the bottom, involving, for those who actually produce and distribute the wealth of society, speed-ups, stress, precarious contracts, deregulations, redundancies, retraining, changing jobs – and the scrap heap for those who can’t keep up.

And, despite Blair’s optimism, there is no guarantee that, even with these changes, British capitalism will come out on top – who says competition, says losers as well as winners. Capitalism really is a rat race, or rather a treadmill, from which there’s no relief.

The Truth about Globalisation? (2003)

Book Review from the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Open World: the Truth about Globalisation. By Philippe Legrain. (Abacus £7.99.)

This book has been touted as the definitive response to the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement and writers such as George Monbiot and Naomi Klein (author of No Logo). Essentially, Legrain argues that globalisation is A Good Thing, delivering jobs and a better standard of living to poor countries and cheaper goods to the developed world. Coupled with free trade, and appropriate government action to prevent any unwanted side effects, it can benefit everyone.

Legrain begins by arguing that globalisation has not proceeded as far as many people may feel. For instance, three-quarters of the goods in British shops are made in the UK, and most people work for British companies; in the US, the corresponding figures are around 90 percent in both cases. He also has a genuinely useful chapter on the history of globalisation, suggesting that it was already well under way when the Industrial Revolution started.

But he then goes on to claim that workers in poor countries benefit from globalisation. In Vietnam, for instance, foreign-run factories pay around double the average local wage, and technology and management skills are transferred inwards. Yet sometimes he is astonishingly naive: he visits a Nike contract factory there, and describes it as “bright, airy, clean and safe”, but says nothing about the many other reports of low wages and appalling working conditions in sweatshops. He justifies the vast difference between what the workers earn per shoe ($2) and what the shoes sell for ($72) by noting all the other costs and the need for Nike to make a profit. In fact, this is his general argument: though he hardly uses the word “capitalism”, he is really defending globalisation as part of capitalism, and on the same grounds that capitalist supporters defend the profit system.

Nor, he claims, do brands really rule the world, as Naomi Klein implies. Rather, consumers hold the whip hand, as the brands have to cater to their whims. We still have a choice: if we don’t like Nike, we can buy Adidas (some choice!). Klein is described as virtually fascist for suggesting that ordinary people are manipulated into buying things they don’t really want, while she of course is intelligent enough to see through it all. It is true that people cannot be manipulated in any simplistic way, but they can certainly be influenced, which is why the global brands spend millions on advertising. Legrain also blithely ignores advertising to children, who are clearly far more manipulable than adults.

Equally, companies are supposedly not all-powerful, being at the beck and call of those who buy their products and call the shots. Some of Legrain’s arguments here are just plain silly. For instance, he states that Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation programme was introduced because she thought it made economic sense, “not because she was taking handouts from big business”. But capitalist politicians do what seems to be good for capitalism, and to suggest that such actions would only be taken if they were corrupt is missing the point completely.

Basically, Legrain’s book is a hymn to capitalism and to profit-making. If you think that capitalism is basically a nice, friendly system—though it may need a bit of adjustment from time to time—then it may well be logical to support its globalising aspect. After all, it means more customers, more profits. But the anti-capitalist or anti-globalisation movement, for all its confusions, is a sign that increasing numbers of people are rejecting the idea that profit is good for everyone and that a small number of parasites should control the Earth’s resources. Open World may make the capitalists and their supporters happy about what their system is doing to the world, but in truth it is no more convincing than any other attempt to defend the profit system.

Paul Bennett

Labouring in Vain (1995)

David Lange in 1984.

From the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the benefit of those who might not have experienced a Labour
 government, last month we published an article on the record of the 
various Labour governments that have been in office in Australia 
since 1984. This month we look at what the Labour government 
that ruled New Zealand between 1984 and 1990 put the workers
 there through.

The New Zealand Labour Party came to power in 1984 and stayed there until 1990. Labour shocked its supporters, party members and most of its voters by following a path of financial market deregulation, cutbacks in public services, sales tax, users pay, corporatization and privatisation of a large portion of the state, removing industrial and agricultural subsidies, removing trade barriers, import restrictions, import tax and duties. None of which was outlined in its pre-election campaigns. By the end of Labour's 6-year rule, unemployment was at catastrophic levels, record numbers of businesses had failed, the state had been turned upside down, and many of Labour’s traditional supporters and party members had left the party in droves. The only people happy were NZ Treasury, richer capitalists and the National Party (NZ Tories).

Prior to the Labour Party victory in the snap general election of 1984, Robert Muldoon had been both Prime Minister and Finance Minister for all of the nearly nine years of National Party government in New Zealand. Due to the screwed up concepts of socialism many people have, Muldoon has gone down in “history'” as having instituted or continued so-called “socialist” policies in his time as Prime Minister and the Labour Government of 1984—1990 has been labelled “right-wing free marketeers”.

The “socialist” label attached to Muldoon is of course nonsense but used by some to describe Muldoon’s policy of reenforcing the state’s role as provider of support through social welfare, subsidies to exporters, tariff walls to protect inefficient local industries, and the investment of huge amounts of state capital in ambitious energy projects named “Think Big”. “Think Big” was aimed at making NZ at least 60 percent self-sufficient in energy and was largely motivated by the oil shocks of the 70s. It is worth noting that NZ enjoyed a prosperous period post second world war with England guaranteeing a market for NZ produce (meat, butter, wool) and high wool prices generated by the likes of the Korean war. It was the entry of England into the EEC, and an international decline in agricultural produce prices that resulted in successive NZ governments giving subsidies to farmers and borrowing overseas in the hope of riding out the unfavourable market conditions.

When it came to the snap election in 1984, NZ was under a wage freeze (a price freeze had just been lifted), inflation ranged from 6.1 to 15 percent during the year, the economy was described as “one of the most regulated, protected and subsidised in the developed world” (Europa World Year Book), unemployment stood at 66,500, public debt stood at $21.88 billion. The fixed exchange rate was clearly overvalued while politically government unity was disintegrating as Muldoon’s autocratic style drew fire from within and without, and the economic position of the country worsened.

The 1984 election was more than anything focused on Muldoon, and the cry from the as usually confused “left” was “out with Muldoon”, never giving a thought to what was to replace Muldoon. Not only the “left” wanted rid of Muldoon, feminists, homosexuals, liberals, civil right activists to name a few wanted him out. None gave a moment’s thought as to what actually made capitalism tick—or were the least interested in how the system operated. A significant portion of the capitalist class wanted Muldoon out as well, having their eye on the international investment capital that would flow in once financial deregulation occurred.

Power for power’s sake

Labour came to power in July 1984 with a 17-seat majority and total share of the votes of 43 percent (NZ operated a First Past the Post electoral system until recently). Its election policies centred on health, housing, employment, education, the economy, overseas debt and an anti-nuclear stance (though Labour leader David I.ange had opposed the anti-nuclear position when it came up for formal endorsement at the Labour Party conference, he later championed it as Prime Minister as if it were his own brain-child). The Labour Party had a great deal of assistance in the 1984 election victory from the newly formed New Zealand Party who had one of New Zealand’s wealthiest capitalist’s as its leader: Robert Jones, property tycoon. By drawing the protest vote with its so-called “traditional National Party policies”—votes that would otherwise have remained with National— Robert Jones helped achieve his objective—a Labour government and promptly wrapped the New Zealand Party up to the immense chagrin of its officials, This if anything should have given an unsuspecting public a clue as to what the new Labour government would be all about.

Even before the fourth Labour government resumed office it was confronted with a major balance of payments crisis and had to agree to a 20 percent devaluation of the NZ dollar. This decision was made on the advice of the NZ Treasury and Reserve Bank economic advisers where the Chicago School of Economic thought already dominated. (The Chicago School advocated removing state intervention and instituting laissez faire type economics). This set the tone for the rest of the Labour government term and was quickly followed up with abolition of exchange controls, deregulation of finance, abolition of subsidies and incentives and the floating of the NZ dollar. Within days, Lange was announcing the "cupboard was bare” and everybody should look to "tightening their belts ”. It soon became clear who was to be doing the belt-tightening and who would be letting the belts out. As the international capital flowed in, the local pigs were gorging themselves at the trough in a speculative frenzy that was to end up with the largest share-market and property crash in the history of the country in October 1987. Inflation was to peak at close to 20 percent in 1987.

Before and during the run up to the election in 1984, there was no indication from Labour that it would adopt such policies and its official economic policy was not much different from the conventional Keynesian style economics that both National and Labour had been following for decades. The Labour government therefore deliberately deceived the electorate and its own party supporters. Mike Moore—a cabinet minister and later Prime Minister told the Auckland Press Club that “had we talked about some of the things we did in 1984, we would never have got there (elected )”. A post-election remit of the Labour Party opposed free market policies; this made no difference to the course pursued by the Labour cabinet. So much for Labour Party democracy. There is little doubt that the Labour Party wanted power for power’s sake, and the conservative nature of the election campaign they waged reflected that.

Rogernomics

The Labour government finance minister Roger Douglas along with associate finance ministers Caygill and Prebble took on board the advice of Treasury. The economic policy enacted by the Labour government quickly became known as “Rogernomics” in the same vein as “Reaganomics”. The cabinet argued as a justification for their actions that their economic reforms would allow the fulfilment of the Labour Party’s social goals, even though no one ever defined the nature of these social goals. A similar argument is contained in the Treasury document Economic Management. “Users Pay” was a term that suddenly started slipping from Labour Ministers’ mouths and was meant to signify a new approach to providing services by the state, where the user of the service would be charged for at least part of the cost of the service.

In 1986, the State-Owned Enterprises Bill was passed through parliament. Lange and Palmer (deputy prime minister) denied when challenged that corporatization of many government departments would involve job losses and was a prelude to privatisation—they already had an eye to the approaching 1987 general election. Corporatizing government departments had never been a Labour Party policy. At the head of the new SOEs, the government placed leading business figures, many of whom were friends of the finance ministers. The SOEs’ boards of directors were supposedly accountable to Ministers (in a directors-shareholders style of relationship) and although the SOE Bill contained a section which enabled the Crown to pay the SOEs for non-commercial services this rarely occurred. The result of the implementation of the SOE Act was the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. With Alan Gibbs (businessman well known for his cabinet connections and backer of the New Right think-tank—the Centre for Independent Studies ) as chairman, ForestCorp (formerly the Forest Service) sacked the forestry work force and took some back as independent contractors.

The previously state owned Bank of New Zealand which has the largest share of retail banking in New Zealand had been partly sold (33 percent) by the Labour government in June 1989 amid pathetic cries of “they’re selling the family silver” from the likes of Pat Kelly—a long time trade unionist and Labour Party member.

By October 1990, $NZ13.7 million had been paid out by the government to private sector advisers employed in connection with sales of crown businesses.

The Lange Labour government introduced a supertax on the elderly. Extra income earned from savings or investments meant the old age pension was severely eroded by a surcharge tax. Of course while ordinary workers were being sacked in their thousands, mortgage interest rates at more than 20 percent, and workers were being asked to tighten their belts, parliamentary Labour in collusion with their fellow gutters in the opposition voted themselves a nice fat golden retirement package.

Government debt grew from $NZ21 billion in 1984 to nearly SNZ44 billion in 1991 despite state asset sales. Debt servicing grew from 10.6 percent of Government spending in 1980 to 15 percent in 1991. So much for the miracles of Rogernomics.

Unemployment over Labour’s term of office grew from about 60,000 to over 160,000 registered as officially unemployed. This had a particularly marked affect on female workers, despite the election of the Labour government being supported by feminists and the setting up of a Women’s Ministry. Unemployment figures are misleading, particularly in periods of high unemployment, as many married women or women living in partnerships are forced out of the workforce to be dependent on their partner, and so don’t show up in the official figures.

Labour disintegrates

Despite a show of unity during the first term of office from 1984 to 1987, and subsequent re-election on the back of a very slick TV campaign funded by taxpayer money and their nuclear ship ban (National was still opposed to the ban), Labour began to slowly fall apart.

The prime minister’s office in New Zealand has quite extraordinary powers and past Prime Ministers have used these powers to manipulate cabinet, sack hostile ministers and appoint friendly ministers without any endorsement needed from either cabinet or caucus. Lange was pretty much driven by cabinet and Treasury during the first term, in the second term, he opposed aspects of Roger Douglas’s budget that led to a falling out and eventual sacking of Douglas by Lange using the dictatorial powers of his office. Lange replaced Douglas with Caygill. Prebble was to follow soon after when he publicly criticised Lange’s ability as a Prime Minister.

A concerted campaign by Lange’s opponents led by Douglas and Prebble and ill health eventually resulted in Lange’s resignation. The deputy prime minister, Palmer replaced Lange as Prime minister but only for a few months before resigning in favour of Mike Moore. Moore and Labour lost the 1990 general election to the National Party (National had by then decided being anti-nuclear was a good idea) in what was a landslide victory, ending 6 years of Labour reign, a reign that devastated the very workers that Labour purportedly represented. National turned around and followed exactly the same economic policies only with more vigour, breaking virtually every single promise made during the election run-up. What Labour started, National finished.

Why did all this happen? And under a Labour government? Very logically. Property institutions under capitalism ensure that democracy can only be a veil, while underneath the vested interests that arise inevitably from a system of society based on production for profit, minority ownership and control of the means of production and distribution ensure that the interests of the majority—the workers— come last. The undemocratic nature of political parties such as Labour, government, companies and corporations are a reflection of this system and its need to subjugate workers in order to carry on fleecing them. Labour when faced with running capitalism became the manipulated.

The incredible thing is that rather than having learnt their lesson, many former Labour supporters have deserted the Labour Party to a party called New Labour— part of the Alliance (a political alliance of New Labour, Manu Motuhake, Green, and other minor parties)—with the same old failed formula, the impossible task of trying to run capitalism in favour of the workers.

Having become totally disillusioned with politics and politicians in general after being lied to and deceived, voters when faced with the choice of continuing with the First Past the Post electoral system and a Mixed Member Proportional system similar to the electoral system in Germany, turned to MMP. MMP means larger and fewer electorates, and a party list vote and is said to favour coalition style of government. Many workers are hopeful that this will result in fairer government. There is no evidence to support this, and the capitalist class and overseas investors seem far from concerned. Capitalism will merely adjust to the situation and workers will continue to suffer insecurity, pollution, poverty, violence and a life of drudgery and uncertainty. 

Dave Tildesley

Goo (2023)

From the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty years ago, in 2003, our new and glorious King warned us of the potential of a ‘grey goo’ catastrophe, from new technological and social developments running out of control and devouring the planet.

How right he was.

The modern period has been characterised by massive structures. Physical, economic, and social structures. There were the massive engineering projects of the advancing capitalist age, building railways, dams, factories, and megastructures, finally outshining the Egyptians and their pyramids. Then the great power blocs of Entente, Alliance, and Axis, fielding armies that finally surpassed those of Alexander and Genghis Khan, and ending with the stasis of NATO versus the Soviet Union, where the whole world was threatened with annihilation from a general nuclear exchange. And socially there has been the erection of Democracy, as a temple of classless worship, an ever-expanding sphere where the rich and the indigent supposedly had the same access: the same access to information with the BBC, and press regulation: the same access to physical citizenship via palliatives and doles, above all the NHS; to education via free schools and university tuition even for the working class; political equality via the franchise, regulated by the Electoral Commission. Over all this stood a civil service that was no respecter of persons, administering the whole system, and a broad political consensus between all political parties and classes that this was a Good Thing and should continue.

Respectable working class

One of the most important structures resulting from this was the respectable working class. A class with reforming, not radical chains, that voted Labour but looked down on subversive ideas. The class that fought for a fair day’s wage, not the abolition of the wages system, that traded its birthright for a mess of pottage consisting of an 8-hour working day, a manageable mortgage, and pensioned retirement.

The other blocs also had their different systems, and similar social contracts, explicit or implicit, as to the relationship of worker to capital, and of capital to the state. While each bloc would berate the others as to their barbarity, in practice within the limits of available wealth and level of development their structures were remarkably similar. Free market, mixed, or state capital were points on a scale.

Now of course what is order for the spider is chaos for the fly. Those outside of the blocs, or who fell through the gaps of the system, were fair game. A corporation could outflank a minimum wage and other controls by setting up shop in the global South, or by employing transient labour, or underpaying women (stamping out child labour, within the state’s confines, was a universal boast). Imperialism abroad became neo-imperialism, its victims now crushed under debt rather than the boot heel. All’s fair, and you can work yourself out of poverty. Supposedly.

It was in Britain that all this first fell. New class war economic experiments, first tried out in post-coup Chile, were brought to these shores by an insurgent Conservative government in 1979. A convenient military victory provided the political capital for a triumphant second election, while a manifesto to swing the pendulum in the other direction was described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Across the 1980s, while the rest of what was rather optimistically called civilisation continued its sclerotic social compromise, the moles burrowed under, waging war at all points at home and abroad with no purpose but chaos that would fell the existing order, bringing more profit to capital and thus less to labour, while destroying the international order and baring the Soviet’s throats to their gnawing teeth. In the decades since the fall of the Soviets, their tunnelling has borne fruit, and structure after structure has come crashing down.

This is the grey goo that we were warned about. Describing it as an intelligent system is something of a reach: it is entirely instinctive, yet assimilates an entire society, destroying its existing systems, and turns it into a formless slurry that can be consumed for a profit. The career and pension is a distant dream, as is housing or even feeding your children. Voting is under attack at the polls, but far more importantly the recent campaign to define almost any and all social democracy as antisemitic has turned the BBC, the media bulwark against the billionaire media barons, into a firehose of servile bullshit.

There is no democracy without debate. Education standards are now those of the psychotic billionaire hobbyists who purchase academies. Our foreign policy is no longer part of the NATO structure, with a legacy of Empire structure, but chasing the Americans’ heels to hear their commands of the day, in the new US-UKA ‘alliance’. And the social fabric of imperialism has broken down: where the city was supposed to shower its brutal trading wealth onto the country from above, as a substitute for native manufactures, now the Square Mile acts as a jet engine firing the misery of billions towards the bank accounts of hedge-fund billionaires at supersonic speeds, bypassing the North which is scheduled for managed demolition. And recently of course we had the ultimate political Punch and Judy show, of the Truss ‘administration’, along with the first budget to open with the line ‘Everybody be cool, this is a robbery’. A man who seemed to be wholly owned by Crispin Odey, a currency speculator, wrote a budget that put billions in the pockets of the likes of Crispin Odey through currency and bond market speculation, while we all suffer, and no-one can talk about it because the first structure to be dissolved was our own backbones. As someone once said, the British are finally going to find out how it feels to be ruled by the British.

Reasons to be cheerful? 

As Ash from Alien might say to the working class facing this onslaught, ‘You have my sympathies’. But from a revolutionary perspective there are possibilities. The problem is, the Western working class had succumbed to victory disease. The social contract was the social stasis, that stopped anything from moving. Workers had systems, such as (but not only) unions, to maintain their position as a class of capital, rather than being a revolutionary class. Their chains were reformist chains, and a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work seemed a logical demand for the working class, and they rightly looked askance at the dangerous nutters that wanted to pull it all down. At the same time the capitalists of various persuasions were locked into sclerotic and inefficient systems that gave them an average rate of profit and kept them from the guillotine, and they could at least take pride in the empire-building nature of their enlightened taxes.

But now this is going. Out with a working class who do not directly own capital but do have rights and privileges, pensions funded on the stock market, are consulted, are offered routes out of their class however tenuous and individual, in short are a class of capital. Their party is the Labour Party, as subordinate and loyal partners of the manufacturers in their battle against landowners and financiers, and those members of the working class who drifted further leftwards so often had reasons other than their class position, whether personal, quixotic, hobbyist, or just falling through the cracks. Through the classic period of capital, revolutionary politics has not, arguably, been economic but millenarian and historical class politics. But now that working class is becoming a memory. The revolutionary proletariat is not just about the people who work. The proletariat is not a class so much as the dissolution of all classes: and workers are, in these last days of capital, once again proletarian. In times of madness, the nutters are finally the voice of sanity they should always have been.

Lenin asked, ‘What is to be done?’ – this is the question posed by the vanguard of the organised working class in capitalism. It is a question that demands order, an end to the chaos, the fly trying to take over the spider’s web or at the very least come to a modus vivendi with the spider. And it is a cry that has socialism of a particular kind as its object, the ‘socialism’ of increasing wages and regulated working days and pensions and swimming pools.

The cry of the proletariat, the dissolution of all classes, is different. Its cry is ‘I am nothing and should be everything!’ As Durruti said:

‘We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.’

A world of goo is the legacy of Capital, as the fabled scorpion that stung the frog mid-river, not due to its advantage but due to its nature. It is a world that the established working class must fear, and is warned against. But it is a world that the proletariat can rule without any instruction from a vanguard or obedience to an overseer, every step better than their last, and a world so debased that no treasured structures need to be preserved. As even the American bulwark falters into farce, a ringmaster lashing out at the lions that have seen their military failure and now are coming to see them less as tormentor and more as meat, threatening world nuclear war to obscure the corruption on a single corrupt scion’s laptop but more just to seek oblivion over their inevitable decomposition: the international nature of the working class starts to make more practical, rather than oratorial, sense.

A world of ruins, not just of the physical but the political, the religious, the economic, where all that is solid melts into air, is a world where the proletariat can survive and flourish but the bourgeois worker cannot: to survive collapse, to survive shame, and prosper, you must become a cockroach, and the prideful cannot make the transition. A world of goo is a world of possibilities, but the working class must first go under the yoke of shame; fortunately, our capitalists are lashing us in that direction. But then, in some ways capitalists have always been the better Marxists.

Hobgoblin.