Trotskyism regurgitated (2025)

Pamphlet Review from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why you should be a communist. By Fiona Lali. Wellred Books. £2. 2025.

Fiona Lali is a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (ex-Socialist Appeal, the section of the Militant Tendency that stayed in the Labour Party after most left in 1991 until they were themselves finally expelled in 2021). She stood as their candidate in last year’s general election and has become their poster girl (literally as she appears on many of their posters). This pamphlet has been written as part of a recruitment drive by the RCP, at the moment the Trotskyist group that seems to have been the most successful in recruiting young people.

The pamphlet starts off with an attack on capitalism and is aimed at young people who realise that something is wrong with the world and want to do something about it. There is not much that can be objected to here. It’s the second part — about what is to replace capitalism and how — that is open to criticism. It starts off with the absurd claim that ‘the Russian Revolution of October 1917 — led by Lenin and Trotsky — was the greatest event in human history’. An important event in 20th century history perhaps, but in the whole of human history?

We are told that the regime it ushered in, while far from perfect (due to Stalin being in charge), was able, thanks to its ‘nationalised planned economy’, to industrialise the country and provide the workers with ‘extremely low rents’ that included ‘energy and phone services’ and retirement at age 55. The implication is that what happened in Russia in the last century is something to be emulated. But what the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 led to was a form of state-run capitalism that left the workers propertyless wage-workers, indeed forcibly changed the peasantry into these. It had nothing to do with communism or socialism. Lali is deceiving herself and misleading others in suggesting otherwise. It is not the path to go down.

She presents the Bolshevik seizure of power as the model for the future. In a section headed ‘need for a revolutionary party’, she tells us that ‘what is required is a party of trained class fighters — cadres — who dedicate themselves to the study of the class, its history, and the theory needed to liberate us’ and that:

‘In the not too distant future, Britain will be convulsed by revolutionary upheavals. It is essential that we build a revolutionary party in advance of these titanic events. This is what we are doing. And we appeal to you to join us in this effort.’

Apparently, hundreds of young people, of which Lali is one herself, have responded to this appeal. It’s the classic formula, successfully applied in the 1960s and 1970s by the founders of Trotskyist groups, to attract young people discontented with capitalism — promising them exciting times of ‘revolutionary upheavals’ and ‘titanic events’ in ‘the not too distant future’.

There are good opportunities to advance the socialist cause at the moment but to make extravagant promises like these can only lead to disillusionment when they don’t materialise. The only positive outcome would be that some will be able to sort the Marxist wheat, which they will have had to study, from the Leninist chaff.

Adam Buick

Oh no, another vanguard (2024)

Journal Review from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first issue of The Communist, subtitled ‘Towards A Revolutionary Communist Party’ appeared on 24 January, the day Lenin died a hundred years ago.

A picture of Lenin appears on seven of its 16 pages. There are also articles by and about him. Trotsky gets only one mention and no picture. It is not clear on what basis they have calculated that they will do better calling themselves ‘communists’ with Lenin, hammer and sickle and the rest rather than posing as left-wing ‘socialist’ members of the Labour Party from which they were expelled – against their will – in 2021. Their paper used to be called Socialist Appeal.

Strange, because their origin is the part of the Militant Tendency that stayed in the Labour Party when the other part left and tried to steal our name but ended up being known as SPEW. Their late leader, Ted Grant, had always taught that Trotskyists should stay in the Labour Party until the revolution started as that’s where workers would, apparently, turn when they began to become more radical.

Maybe his successors feel that ‘the revolution’ is imminent. Some of the articles and headlines suggest that they might.

We are told:

‘It is becoming increasingly clear that capitalism has reached its limits … the deepening crisis of world capitalism …Under capitalism we are heading for disaster.’

‘Capitalism is in a profound crisis. Millions of workers and young people are drawing revolutionary conclusions, and are looking to the ideas of communism.’

Millions?! Nobody else seems to have noticed this and they themselves claim only 1,100 members.

The editorial ends:

‘We need a fighting communist leadership in the working class. That is what we are building.’

No thanks. The working class needs that as much as a hole in the head.

Cooking the Books: The Recession that Roared (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘It’s official: the Great Recession has ended. Growth set to match record peak of 2008’ was the front page  headline in the Times of 9 May, anticipating the publication of figures which would show that in April GDP had reached the same level as in March 2008. This, after six years: ‘The British economy shrank 7.2 per cent in the 15 months from April 2008, before suffering the slowest on record’.

This was always going to happen sooner or later but the terminology is interesting. ‘Recession’ was a word introduced by economists in the 1950s and 60s to describe the small, short-lived reductions in production which occurred during the long post-war boom. It was meant to suggest that ‘depressions’ as larger, longer-lasting reductions had become a thing of the past. In this sense a ‘great’ recession should be an oxymoron, but bourgeois economists still cannot bring themselves to use the D-word.

The course of capitalist production is upward but in cycles: a boom ending in a ‘crisis’, followed by a ‘slump’, followed by a recovery, followed by another boom and so on. There is no such thing as a permanent boom as boom conditions inevitably lead to overproduction in one key industry in relation to its market and to this having a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy.

Equally, there is no such thing as a permanent slump. That’s because what happens during a slump (clearance of stocks, devaluation of capital, falling real wages, lower interest rates) creates the conditions for a restoration of profitability and so, in the profit-driven economy that capitalism is, for a recovery, however long this might take.

That is why, throughout the depression, we were always careful not to say that capitalist production would not be able to recover; in other words, that  the capitalist economy had broken down and/or entered a period of permanent stagnation. Others were not so careful. A case in point being the Trotskyist group around the paper Socialist Appeal whose editor, Adam Booth, wrote in its 26 November 2013 issue an article entitled ‘The permanent slump – an organic crisis of capitalism’. This, he claimed, would have happened thirty years ago had workers not been lent money to buy things. He went on:

‘The use of credit to artificially maintain demand and avoid a crisis is a symptom of the contradictions of capitalism itself: primarily the contradiction of overproduction, due to the nature of capitalism as a system whereby production is in private hands and is only for profit, which means that – since profit is nothing but the unpaid labour of the working class – the working class (as a whole) can never afford to buy back (with wages alone) all that they produce. The current crisis is a reflection of this contradiction unravelling itself on a global scale. All the chickens have come home to roost for the capitalists, and now they – and society as a whole – are faced with an organic crisis of capitalism and a new normality.’

The fallacy here is that the market for goods under capitalism is confined to what workers can buy. But what workers can’t buy, capitalists can, not necessarily or even primarily consumer goods but the elements of production (raw materials, machinery, energy, factories, etc); in a word, investment.

The boom/slump cycle is in fact a reflection of the fluctuations in what capitalist firms chose to invest in the light of the prospects for making a profit.