The Proletariat (The Working Class). By Karl Kautsky (1907)

From the November 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 2.

Specially translated for The Socialist Party of Great Britain and approved by the Author.

5. The Industrial Reserve Army.

The introduction of the labour of women and children into industry is, as we have seen, one of the most powerful means for forcing down wages.

But at times other means have an equally powerful effect: the importation of workers from localities backward in economic development, where the population have but few wants, but possess labour-power that has not yet fallen under the ban of industrial enterprise. The development of large industrial enterprise, especially of machinery, not only makes it possible to use unskilled in place of skilled workers, but also affords the opportunity of obtaining them cheaply and quickly. Development of the methods of transit proceeds hand in hand with the development of production ; transit on a large scale develops side by side with production on a large scale, transit not only of commodities but of persons. Steamships and railways, these highly praised bearers of culture, not only carry rifles, whisky, and syphilis to the Barbarians, but they also bring the Barbarians to us and with them their barbarism. The migration of agricultural labourers into the towns is assisted by this development; and from ever greater distances swarm the persevering masses, who have but few needs and little power of resistance. Slavs, Swedes, and Italians go to Germany and drag down wages; Germans, Belgians, and Italians go to France; Slavs, Germans, Italians, Irishmen and Swedes to England and the United States; Chinamen to America and Australia, and perhaps in the not too distant future they will to Europe. On German ships Chinamen and Negroes are already taking the places of white workers.

These foreign workers are, partly, expropriated small peasants and petty bourgeois, who have been ruined and driven from hearth and home by the capitalist mode of production. Gazing at the numberless crowds of imigrants we may well ask the question whether it is Socialism that thus makes them homeless and is responsible for men and women leaving their native land.

By expropriating small peasants and petty bourgeois, by importing crowds of workers from distant countries, by the development of woman- and child-labour, by shortening the term of apprenticeship (which becomes merely a period of initiation) the capitalist mode of production effects an enormous increase in the number of workers at its disposal. Hand in hand with this increase proceeds the ever growing productivity of human labour in consequence of the uninterrupted progress in technical improvements and inventions. And not alone this, but capitalist exploitation increases also the power of utilising the labour-power of the individual to the utmost degree, partly through extending the hours of labour, but also by speeding up the workers, especially in those cases where the organisation of the workers or legislation prevents the former course being pursued.

And at the same time machinery has the effect of reducing the amount of manual labour required. Every machine displaces labour ; if that were not so there would be nothing gained in having the machine. In every industry the change from manual labour to production by machinery causes the greatest suffering among the manual workers affected, who, whether they be handicraftsmen or factory workers, become redundant, and are turned into the street. It was this effect of the machine which the workers felt first of all. The numerous instances of revolt in the first decades of the nineteenth century showed the great suffering and despair which were caused by the introduction of machinery. The introduction of machinery, and every subsequent improvement thereof, is always detrimental to the interests of certain sections of the workers : sometimes, of course, other sections may benefit—as, for instance, those employed in the engineering trade. But this knowledge will hardly be a consolation to the displaced workers faced with starvation.

The effect of the introduction of every new machine is that as much as before is produced with fewer workers, or more than before with the same number of workers. If, therefore, the number of workers employed in one country is not to diminish, in consequence of the growing development of machinery, then the market must be extended in the same proportion in which the productivity of labour increases. As, however, economic development causes at the same time the quantity of labour performed by the worker to grow and the available labour-power to increase rapidly—and much more rapidly than the population—it is necessary, if unemployment is to be avoided, that the market be extended much more rapidly than in a ratio that would merely keep pace with the growing productivity of the workers owing to the introduction of machinery.

Such a rapid expansion of the market has scarcely ever taken place under the domination of capitalist industry on a large scale, certainly never for any considerable period in a large field of capitalist industry. Hence, unemployment is a permanent feature of capitalist industry on a large scale, the one being inseparable from the other. Even at brisk periods, when the market experiences important extension and trade is flourishing, industry has not room for all the unemployed. In periods of slackness, when trade is dull, their number grows immensely. They, together with the workers of the superfluous petty undertakings, form a whole army—the Industrial Reserve Army, as Marx called it—an army of labourers always at the disposal of capital, from which the latter is always able to draw its reserves as soon as the industrial struggle shows signs of becoming animated.

The reserve army is invaluable to the capitalist. It serves him as an important weapon to keep in check the army of the employed and to make them more submissive. Since the overwork of some causes the unemployment of others, the unemployment of these latter becomes the means for sustaining and intensifying the overwork of the former. And yet in face of this fact it is asserted that we are living in the best of all possible worlds!

While the expansion of the industrial reserve army fluctuates with the fluctuations of commercial life, its general tendency is to move in an upward direction; for the technical revolution proceeds ever more rapidly, extending continually to wider spheres, but the expansion of the market on tbe contrary becomes ever more limited. We shall have occasion to refer to this point again in another connection. It suffices here to have drawn attention to it.

But what does unemployment mean ? It not only means want and misery for its victims, not only intensified slavery and exploitation for those in employment, but it means also insecurity of existence for the entire working class.

Whatever the fate of those exploited under former systems of exploitation may have been, they were certain of one thing—security of livelihood. The sustenance of the slave or the serf was assured at least so long as the existence of his master was secure. Only the ruin of his master could deprive him of his security of livelihood.

The misery or want that under any former mode of production was at times experienced by the population was not the consequence of production, but a disturbance of production through bad harvests, cattle plague, floods, invasion by hostile armies, etc.

The existence of the exploiter is not bound up with that of the exploited. The worker and his wife and children can at any moment be turned into the street, with starvation staring them in the face, without causing the slightest change in the position of the exploiter who has fattened on him.

And the misery of unemployment is to-day rarely the consequence of disturbances in production through external, overpowering influences, it is now in fact the natural consequence of production itself. Disturbances in production under present conditions often increase the opportunities for work instead of lessening them: one need only call to mind the consequences of the war in 1870 to the economic life of Germany and France during the immediately succeeding years.

Under the domination of petty enterprise the income of the worker producing on his own account grew larger the more industrious he proved to be. Laziness ruined him and caused his unemployment. To-day the longer the workers work the more unemployment increases. The worker causes his unemployment by his own work. Like many another maxim from the world of petty enterprise, the one that the worker’s good fortune depends upon his being industrious has been changed to its opposite by the large capitalist enterprise. And another maxim still mouthed to-day by many a Philistine, presumably for the benefit of the worker, has become an untruth, namely, that anyone willing to work can find work.

Just as little as a small property is a sure protection against want and misery, so is possession of labour-power. While the ghost of bankruptcy is continually hovering over the peasant owner and the handicraftsman, the ghost of unemployment haunts the wage-worker all his life. This continual insecurity is, of all the evils of the present mode of production, the most tormenting, and also the most atrocious, the evil that stirs up the feeling of the worker unspeakably and scatters completely to the winds all his conservative notions. This eternal insecurity of his own position undermines his belief in the security of the existing state of things and extinguishes his interest in its retention. And he who continually dreads the existing state of things finally loses all fear for new conditions.

The capitalist mode of production brings in its train overwork, unemployment, and dissolution of the family for the working-class, and it has at the same time the effect of forcing proletarian conditions upon further sections of Society, thus visibly making these conditions the general conditions of the great mass of the population.

Blogger's Note:

It was the German SPGBer, Hans Neumann, who translated Kautsky's writings from the German into English for the Socialist Standard.

A Travesty of Socialism. (1907)

From the November 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Undoubtedly one of the greatest hindrances to a clear understanding of Socialism is the misrepresentation to which it is subject, not only from opponents, but also from those who, at times, call themselves Socialists. Here, for example, is Mr. Jas. Parker, Labour M.P. For Halifax, which position he secured by making a compact with the Liberal Party, assuring an audience at Swadlincote Town Hall (on October 8th) that the Army, Navy, and Post Office are Socialistic institutions, and that the last Government decided to socialise the telephones. Did anyone ever hear such twaddle ? What is Socialism ? It is the ownership and control by all the people of all the means of production and distribution of wealth. It is thus the very antithesis of capitalism. How, then, can you have Socialistic institutions in the midst of capitalism ? The Army and the Navy exist for the purpose of protecting the British capitalist class against the capitalist class of other countries and to enable them to extend their spheres of exploitation. Yet these according to our I.L.P. oracle, are Socialistic ! And the Post Office is admittedly an institution where the lower grade of workers are abominably sweated in order to provide a huge profit, which the P.M.G. (Tory or Liberal) may apply to the reduction of taxation. And as taxes do not affect the working class in the least, as their exploitation takes place in the factory—they are robbed at the pay-box—(a fact which even Mr. Victor Grayson has not yet grasped) what does it matter to them whether taxes are high or low ? There is all the difference in the world between State Capitalism and Socialism. In the former the members of the working class are still wage-slaves, even tho’ their conditions may be better than under Private Capitalism, but, as has been proved by recent events at Woolwich, the fear of dismissal always hangs over their heads. In the latter, all will be workers, owning and controlling all the wealth-producing implements that they operate. They will no longer be slaves, subject to be condemned to semi-starvation at the whim or caprice of a master, but free men and free women performing their share of the necessary work and enjoying, as only a free people can enjoy, the good things of life that they co-operate to produce. To argue that certain capitalist institutions are Socialist ones is misleading and those who so argue are either ignorant or fraudulent.

Inventors as Trust Hirelings. (1907)

From the November 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The applications for patents come mainly from professional inventors. The largest number of applications come from the great trusts—the United States Steel Company, the great electrical companies, the harvester trust and the automobile trust. These trusts employ hundreds of inventors to devise improvements of their machinery. They are paid large salaries in many instances, and the business is gradually falling almost completely into their hands.”

Report of Asst. Commissioner of Patents, U.S.A., 1907.

Another solution that won’t solve. (1907)

Pamphlet Review from the November 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Railway Difficulty and How to Solve It” is a penny pamphlet by Thomas Johnston and Hugh Adam. The writers advocate Nationalisation as immediately practicable. But they assert that it would mean a saving of at least 20 per cent. in working expenses. In other words, the Nationalisation of Railways would intensify the unemployed problem, as Mr. Bell, M.P., pointed out at the Annual General Meeting of the A.S.R.S. The authors claim to be “unhesitatingly and uncompromisingly Socialist,” and in their conclusion admit that Nationalisation of Railways would not be of any avail, but we must have Socialism. Why, then, waste the time and fritter away the energies of the working class in going for something that will not affect their position as the subject class in the community ?

Answers to Correspondents. (1907)

From the November 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

A.B. (Portsmouth).—No, we do not get tired of criticising the individuals you name—it is one of the things we exist for.

L. Bourne.—As you say, the conducting of this paper is a matter for the Party members, still we welcome both criticism and suggestions, and will have an article prepared on matter you mention.

E. Elliot.—At some future date.

Socialist Sonnet: No.188 Financial Statement (2025)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Financial Statement

 

The chancellor stands to address the House,

Facing the vehemently disinclined,

Self-righteous, ambitious critics behind,

Knowing this financial statement must douse

Any ambition that needs might be met,

The reform fallacy will be laid bare,

Once again, the money is just not there,

No matter the targets set and reset.

Then some rogue state prepares to hinder trade,

Profits and growth begin to be expunged

And around the world stock markets have plunged,

Negating any financial plans made.

The chancellor, the statement completed,

Sits down again, utterly defeated.

D. A.

Life and Times: Stand up to Racism (2025)

The Life and Times column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Stand up to Racism’ is a South Wales campaign group that organises events and demonstrations against racism. I’m on their mailing list and a recent message told me of a weekend event in Swansea’s Castle Gardens – ‘Love Swansea Hate Racism’. It said: ‘Bring your guitar, beats, banners, brollies, poems, words, friends, and yourself to make our streets buzz with dancing and diversity, not fascist jackboots. Let’s show that hate has no home here!’ I decided to go along and see what was happening.

It wasn’t a good day weather-wise – intermittent rain and a bit of a gale – but still what seemed to me a fairly decent turnout of 100 or so people were gathered in one area of the city centre gardens. A police van was parked nearby and some uniformed officers were hanging about, but it all seemed entirely peaceful. There were plenty of banners and placards if none of the promised poetry or live music. But there were speeches from the platform and from one of them I learned that there was a rival far-right demonstration taking place nearby, which helped to explain the police presence.

A proposal was then made from the platform to march to where the far-right, the so-called ‘Voice of Wales’, were organising their gathering, which they’d called ‘a family fun day’. The idea put forward was not to confront them, but to show them they were outnumbered. And that’s what happened – the demonstration moved out of the gardens, processed along Princes Way and then crossed over one of the city’s main arteries to the Leisure Centre garden, where the Voice of Wales supporters were gathered. The police had accompanied the procession and now made sure that the two groups of demonstrators were kept apart from each other and that the far right could address their own supporters and anyone else who was around and wave their banners. But all this didn’t last long. The Voice of Wales group, who were effectively fewer in number than their opponents and were being drowned out by them, soon decided their ‘family fun day’ was over and packed up, at which the Stand up to Racism people drifted away. And so did I.

What to make of this? Well, I couldn’t but be supportive of the anti-racism demonstrators, for I can only see it as supremely desirable to be accepting of other human beings regardless of their race (in itself a misnomer), background or place of origin. And I can only lament the fact that there are some people who oppose or resent the presence of others in their society on the basis of skin colour, culture or place of birth. As an advocate of a borderless world society, all that makes so little sense to me. However, while being unequivocally opposed to the nationalism, bigotry and manifest racism of the Voice of Wales crowd with their ‘Stop the Boats’ banners and signs, their pictures of Donald Trump displayed on placards and their speakers’ appeals to ‘British values’, I can’t not have some reservations about Stand up to Racism too.

While opposition to racism is to be applauded, unfortunately those who organise such groups tend to use them as a recruiting platform to push a Leninist agenda of the need for a vanguard – themselves – to lead the working class to a society which they may call socialist but in effect would be governed by the vanguard that has ‘led’ it there. No surprise, therefore, that the most stand-out feature of the demonstration in Castle Gardens was an SWP stall, set up in the middle selling its newspapers and other publications and displaying posters with slogans for its latest campaigns. And no surprise either that many of the banners, placards and badges on view said things like ‘Boycott Israel’, ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Stop the Genocide’ and so were not specifically about racism at all but rather about the current conflict in the Middle East, which organisations like the SWP see as one of their ‘causes’.

But what about racism itself? Well, there’s no doubt that, even within the dog-eat-dog society that is capitalism, there has been a significant improvement in attitudes over the years. In this country, for example, the open, unabated, almost taken-for-granted racism (and sexism) that existed just a few short decades ago is dramatically less in evidence now. Who at that time could in their wildest dreams have imagined that, in the not-too-distant future the leader of one of the two biggest political parties would be a woman of colour. This is not of course to say that racist ideas have stopped having purchase over many people, but there has undeniably been what we can reasonably call progress.

Yet, given the divisive attitudes prompted by the conditions of the society we live in, the scourge of racism will always remain a possibility, a frame of mind that people whose lives feel precarious in one way or another (eg, through poverty, unemployment or job insecurity) may turn to. And indeed they may be encouraged to turn to it by leaders or parties that see it as in their interests to sow division among people who have not developed the consciousness to perceive that they have fundamentally the same interests as their fellow workers. This is currently being illustrated by developments in many parts of the ‘advanced’ world, eg, Germany, Hungary, USA.

So stand up to racism, yes, but we are unlikely to see the end of that scourge unless we stand up to capitalism and establish a socialist world of common ownership, democratic control, production for need not profit and free access to all goods and services. In such a society, racism, or any other form of prejudice or discrimination, will have no ground to take root in and no soil in which to flourish.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Dark capitalism (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers may have noticed that phishing emails have increased to almost epidemic rates lately. These are no longer badly spelled with wonky grammar. They are sophisticated efforts with corporate logos and plausible small print, purporting to be from banks or internet service providers, or even from your own club or organisation. Like Dracula, they can’t get into your system unless you invite them across the threshold, in this case by clicking the provided link. Once in, they aim to drain your bank account dry. A simple rule is to assume that anything asking you to click or open something is a scam unless you’re absolutely sure it isn’t. You can find some other good advice here.

There are phone scammers too, who are as annoying as they are persistent. In an effort to fight back, some computer scientists have set up honeytrap accounts, supposedly belonging to innocent and confused old ladies, but really controlled by an AI bot with the sole function of keeping scammers tied up in long phone calls answering silly questions.

But all that is a drop in the bucket compared to what’s really going on in that shadowy criminal dimension of the profit system, which we might call ‘dark capitalism’. Scamming is just one facet of this, but it’s not just a grubby little cottage industry anymore, it’s a multi-billion dollar global industry on the scale, by some estimates, of the illegal drug trade.

A deep and deeply disturbing analysis of this industry was provided recently in an 8-part podcast series called Scam Inc. by the Economist‘s South-East Asia correspondent Sue-Lin Wong. Since most of the series is paywalled it’s worth briefly recapping here. Just as AI can be used to fight scams, it is also being used to create them. There are two main types, love scams and crypto investment scams. Love scams target single, often older people, drawing them into a heady and convincing online or phone relationship until they are completely convinced it is real. AI is used to research and identify likely marks, and then deep-fake face and voice calls, as well as web and social media ‘histories’. The victim is cultivated over months, and then invited to make a small investment which sure enough sees a profitable return, reinforcing their sense of trust. When they are later invited to make a big investment, with huge returns, they have no reason to think it’s not genuine. And then, nothing. All the calls stop, the number is unobtainable, the scammer has vanished and so has the money. This, in the trade, is chillingly referred to as ‘pig butchering’.

Crypto scams target people, perhaps with retirement savings, who are persuaded that they can’t lose. Smart people are often at particular risk, largely because they overestimate their own sceptical faculties and underestimate how devious and tech-savvy the scammers are. One corporate finance manager paid over $21 million of company funds after his board of directors, all of whom he knew personally, told him to in a teleconferencing meeting. What he didn’t know was that the ‘board of directors’ were all deep-fake computer voices, and so convincing that he couldn’t tell the difference. How can anyone defend themselves against that? Sue-Lin Wong’s own solution has been to give all her family members a secret password, so that if ‘she’ ever phoned them asking for large amounts of money, they would have a way to verify it was really her.

You might think, at this point, that these scammers are the amoral jackals of capitalism, the worst of what Marx called the ‘lumpenproletariat’. But the truth is even more horrible than that. Having interviewed one love-scam victim in Canada who lost $75,000, Sue-Lin performed the almost miraculous feat of tracking down the very scammer who did it. And what she found would chill anyone’s blood.

This is where dark capitalism turns darkest of all. The guilty scammer wasn’t some ruthless money-grabbing parasite, she was a helpless kidnap victim terrified for her life. She had applied for what seemed like a promising job in Thailand, on the advice of a supposed friend, then was bundled into a car at Bangkok airport, trussed and blindfolded and driven across the border to a ‘scam compound’ in Myanmar, a barbed-wire fringed mini-city patrolled by dogs and armed guards. Her passport was taken away, and she was ordered to use the phones to scam westerners, on pain of physical beating, or even execution. Only if she scammed enough money would she ever be set free, they told her. In her compound were hundreds of other kidnap victims, all forced to do the same thing. And hers was only one of many such compounds.

Who are the gang lords behind all this? Very likely Chinese former Triad (mafia) bosses, kicked out of China by Xi Jinping’s crackdowns but able to operate scams from anywhere. Under pressure from China, Myanmar’s rebel forces recently broke open some of these scam compounds, releasing hundreds of trafficking victims. But such compounds exist in other places across the world. One was even uncovered on the Isle of Man.

Even socialists, who think they know the depths of capitalism’s depravity, must quail at its darkest criminal side, where no laws inhibit its drive to make a profit no matter who suffers. Here is where you see what money does to people, how low it makes them sink. Here is where the need to abolish capitalism screams, as loud as in any warzone, any overcrowded hospital, any sink estate, any overdose or private numb despair.

And yet, decent humanity shines through even in such circumstances. When told the full story about the Myanmar scammer who took $75,000 from him, the Canadian offered to meet her to assure her that he didn’t blame her for anything, and that he wished her well in the future. She, sadly, was too traumatised to agree to the meeting.

Paddy Shannon

Reforming UK politics? (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party has consistently questioned the efficacy of reform. Capitalise the word and it takes on a specific significance. Reform UK emerged as a political force of note by securing five parliamentary seats at the last general election.

The Green Party increased its representation in Parliament to four, which was impressive considering the difficulties posed by the first-past-the-post-system. Even more remarkable, though, was Reform’s performance. Considered along with its former incarnation as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), its electoral progress is of interest. In the 2015 general election, one seat was won with an overall UK vote share of 12.6 percent. By the 2019 election, standing as the Brexit Party, its vote share had declined to around 2 percent, with no seats gained. This was the time of Boris Johnson’s Tory Party undertaking to ‘get Brexit done!’ The moment and purpose for UKIP/Brexit Party appeared to have passed.

Five years later though, emerging as Reform UK with a political platform expanded beyond just Brexit, came an apparent breakthrough. However, at 14.3 percent of the vote, the improvement on the 2015 performance was less than spectacular. The major factor was not so much the increased Reform vote, but the near collapse of Conservative Party support. In 2015 they took 36.8 percent of the vote, which increased to 43.6 percent in 2019. Five years on they were down to 23.7 percent. This seems to indicate many Conservative voters relocating with Reform, enabling the taking of seats previously denied them. The Tory right split and its largely extra-parliamentary pressure group was able to become in-house (of Commons).

A determining factor in Reform’s rise must be its leader, Nigel Farage. He had founded Reform UK, originally the Brexit Party, two years after he left UKIP following the Brexit referendum. He then effectively left Reform UK and concentrated his political activities around the Trump camp in America. Up to just a few weeks prior to the 2024 general election Reform UK was being led by Richard Tice. Initially Farage declined to advance himself as a candidate, undertaking to proselytise for the Tice campaign around the country.

Who owns Reform UK?

A sudden volte-face occurred when Farage claimed he had a sense of guilt about not stepping forwards and letting his supporters down. In short order, Tice was replaced as Reform UK leader by the apparently selfless Farage. Previously, Tice had been a member, and co-founder with Arron Banks, of the Brexit campaigning group Leave EU. This organisation distinguished itself in 2018 by being fined £70,000 for breaching electoral law during the referendum campaign.

Tice’s tenure as leader of Reform had been marred by fractious personal relations in the party. He had secured, in March 2024, the defection of a former Conservative Party deputy chair and MP for Ashfield, Lee Anderson. This was achieved despite Anderson, just a few months earlier, having referred to Tice as a ‘pound shop Nigel Farage’ who should ‘pipe down a little bit’ so as not to exacerbate tensions between Tories and Reform to the benefit of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

Tice’s response was to tell Sky News, ‘…we’re going to replace the Tories as the main alternative to Labour in those red wall seats.’ As the election turned out, the red wall seats the Johnson Tories took in 2019 largely returned to Labour. It was the Conservative Party that suffered loss of support in 2024.

The relative success of Reform under the renewed Farage leadership has also led to a reorganisation of the Party. Unusually, Reform UK was founded and owned by its leader, Farage, who initially established it as a private limited company in which he was the majority shareholder. Rarely, if ever, has a political party so blatantly reflected the capitalist system it is dedicated to serving. It was this that enabled Farage to simply take over the leadership again. As owner he didn’t require the democratic inconvenience of being voted into position by the membership.

Two months after the 2024 general election, at its Birmingham conference, Reform was informed by its leader that he intended giving up his shares, and thereby his personal ownership. For the first time since its inception, members would be able to vote on party matters. The party leader was, in future, to be elected and could subsequently be removed by a vote of no confidence. However, such a vote would only happen if 50 percent of the membership wrote to the chairman requesting one.

Alternatively, Reform MPs can trigger such a vote if 50 of them, or 50 percent, demand one. This only applies when there is a minimum of 100 MPs. The purpose behind this change is to attract a larger membership, although it does leave the leader in a strong, dominant position.

Companies House records show that Reform 2025 is now the shareholder, and that neither Farage nor Tice continue to hold shares. Reform UK has become a non-profit organisation limited by guarantee. Again, a reflection of capitalist structure is maintained.

Demagogic populism

Unsurprisingly, the policies of Reform, styled as a ‘contract with the people’ are, in many ways, largely indistinguishable from those of the other parliamentary parties, excepting differences of emphasis and nuance.

Policies include immigration and its control, increasing police numbers with more ‘bobbies on the beat’, cutting NHS waiting lists, reducing the tax burden and tweaking various taxes, freeing businesses from red tape, fast tracking brownfield development sites for housing, speeding up development of nuclear energy, increasing defence spending etc.

Education policies do give an insight into the political shading of Reform. They propose to scrap student loan interest (going for the youth vote?), ban teaching critical race theory and gender ideology, fine universities guilty of political bias or cancel culture, offer private school tax relief, re-introduce home economics, double pupil referral units, and make the school curriculum more ‘patriotic’.

There is a pervasive demagogic populism running through Reform UK. This is personified in Nigel Farage who does not typically appear as a fanatical ranter. Rather, his style is that of the plain speaker of common sense, appealing to the interests of various groups of voters.

There are business tax cuts for one section of the Tory-minded, VAT adjustments to deal with the cost of living, anti-woke messaging for the ‘you can’t say anything these days’ brigade and, of course immigration control. It’s pick-and-mix politics, a selection of flavours so nearly everyone’s taste is accommodated.

Underlying it all, as with the other parliamentary parties, is the broad if unacknowledged agreement not to challenge capitalism at all. That leaves the cause of the various concerns afflicting people free to operate as it does, as it must, driven by the absolute unquenchable thirst for profit. Production for profit and not for need would continue unhindered under a Reform administration.

The myriad problems people face in the UK, as around the world, cannot be solved by Reform or any other party committed to capitalism, the very system that is the source of the problems. Voting is important, but voting for another status-quo party, no matter how populist, will solve nothing.

Because the vote is valuable don’t give it away to a party making promises it can’t keep. Like any scam call ask the question, am I going to take what is offered on trust? Or should I take a considered, conscious decision to act in concert with others like me to achieve what will benefit us all?

Regressive mouthpiece

Reform UK has recently begun to show itself, for all its democratic claims, as a party where personal ambition and in-fighting are the order of the day. Rupert Lowe, just 8 months on from the general election, has had the Reform whip withdrawn. Also, the party has referred their MP to the police for threatening Zia Yusuf, the chair. There is also an internal investigation into possible staff bullying. Lowe has responded by appointing his own legal team. Perhaps of greater concern for Reform is that Lowe dominates Reform’s digital-first community with more than 300,000 followers on X. It may well be that Reform UK has had its moment in the political sun.

It is not possible to predict the future for Reform UK. It seems unlikely to garner enough support to amass a parliamentary majority. It may well have significant influence as the repository and mouthpiece of regressive, even xenophobic sectors of the electorate. Unfortunately, those sectors may, at present, constitute a rather greater number of voters than was once the case.

This indicates the importance of socialists continuing to challenge capitalism directly, and not to get drawn into specific concerns about Reform UK or any similar political group that might emerge in the future. Only when the majority of people come to embrace socialism and actively seek to abolish capitalism, will all the present parties, including Reform UK, become wholly irrelevant and disappear from the political sphere. This would be truly ‘reforming’ UK politics.

D. A.

Letter: Not obscure nit-picking (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not obscure nit-picking

Thank you for publishing a review of my pamphlet entitled Time to Get Rid of Money (as are the Old Moles Collective as a whole for the various reviews of our books that you have published).

However I do find it sad that the SPGB needs to criticise in such a petty way. Why cannot you engage in a serious discussion? After all, as the review seems to grudgingly accept, we do both believe that class society and a society based on money must be eliminated. One would think this would be a basis for a more in depth review and some serious analysis and discussion of a complex money system and the way it works eg, its impact on the poor under capitalism, the wealth pyramid, the anarchy of the market, the increase of working class debt and debt generally, let alone the fact that money is purely electronic and that today gold is not used to backup currency.

But no, ALB ignores all these issues to perpetuate a traditional weakness of discussion by the leading figures of the SPGB in favour of the need to score cheap jibes through a mixture of false representation of ideas and a lack of effort. I don’t pretend to have expert, detailed workings of today’s complex financial systems at my fingertips but at least I am trying to explain the essentials and engage in discussion about what it really is. The Old Moles know that we will not convince everybody instantaneously of the absolute correctness of our political positions, so discussion is what we primarily aim to develop with our books.

First of all let us take note of some brief but important facts:

The level of world debt in 2024 is approx $300 trillion yet the level of world GDP for 2023 only equals approx $100 trillion dollars. The total value of gold in mines to 2024 is much less than this and equals only $18.07 trillion (212,582 tonnes of gold have been mined to date at a market price of $85 per gram at end of 2024).

For the UK the economy’s net worth is about £11 trillion (2020) and the level of UK GDP equals £2.5 trillion (2022). Nevertheless, the level of debt in the UK is approximately £5 trillion (2024) and, according to the Bank of England, the level of bank deposits in the UK come to £1.5 trillion (2023). However the amount of actual sterling available comes to only £94b (2022)

Did ALB make any real effort to understand such figures? They are easy enough to find and check online and clearly show that the money in circulation is much less than deposits in the banks and especially of the value of debt that exists. Furthermore, bank reserves are restricted to a small proportion of the deposits held by banks. Where then is the real money that ALB has so much trust in? ALB’s faith in the capitalist banking system is touching but that is what the financial system depends on ie faith and it is sadly misplaced in a socialist.

ALB blithely dismisses the evidence from the Bank of England and the former head of the US Federal Reserve and tries to devise his own better explanation of loans that use reserves and bank deposits, but fails to realise that only 4 percent of deposits is kept as cash by bank, the remaining deposits and reserves are entirely electronic!

Yes, the idea of creating currency ‘out of thin air’ is hyperbole and yes the banks need to make a profit on this activity which may well limit the amount they can create at any given time, but this electronic money is created by computer and cash is printed to maintain this system. This is the money system in today’s capitalist economy.

In every economy, the level of currency is only sufficient to facilitate the circulation of commodities so it does not cover total deposits let alone total GDP and the deposits and reserves held by banks. Moreover there is the fact that the valuation of a currency can change and even collapse — as recently in Argentina.

Any rational interpretation of this situation can only say the money is not worth actually anything. It is backed only by other coins and notes or by electronic records. All currency physical and electronic is only valuable and only works because the state backs it with promises and relies on the population keeping its faith in the money system — and ALB, I’m afraid, does his bit to support that system.

Debt is not the main problem, capitalism and its shit financial system is and perhaps SPGB needs to investigate and discuss how capitalism really works instead of scoring debating points.

Phil Sutton

Reply:

It was the title of your pamphlet and your political background that led us to read and review it. We had expected ‘some serious analysis and discussion of a complex money system’ from a Marxian point of view but were disappointed to find that it endorsed a mistaken theory of the nature of banking that we had been combating for years, viz., that banks can create money ‘by a stroke of the pen’ (as it was put in the 1920s) and generate an income for themselves from the interest they charge for lending it — ‘an electronic data entry costs virtually nothing but earns interest for the bank!’, as you put it.

If this was the case, a bank would be a very special capitalist enterprise, one that could create a part of its capital out of thin air and obtain a profit from it. Every capitalist would want to be a banker. Actually, a bank’s business model is to borrow money at one rate of interest, whether from savers or the money market, and to re-lend it at a higher rate. This ‘spread’ is the source of its income; what is left after paying its costs in terms of buildings, computers and staff is its profit.

You claimed the authority of an article in a Bank of England publication for your view. Nearly one third of our review was taken up with an extensive quote from the article in question which showed that it did not support your view. What you call our ‘own better explanation of loans that use reserves and bank deposits’ was in fact that of the Bank of England article. You now concede their point that the need to make a profit ‘may well’ limit the amount of money banks can lend at any one time. But ‘may well’ is too weak; a bank will stop lending at the point where it costs it more in interest to cover its loans than the rate it could charge borrowers.

You also concede that to say that banks can create money out of thin air is ‘hyperbole’. If banks really did have that power then the labour theory of value would be invalid.

Value is only created in production by workers exercising their physical and mental energies to transform materials that originally came from nature into goods and services for sale. Initially it is divided into wages and surplus value, generating purchasing power. Money measures and circulates value. Originally money was a product of labour with its own value. The precious metals ceased to function as cash ages ago and, since 1971 when the US cut the link between the dollar and a fixed amount of gold, ceased to be the general standard of value as well (even if they remain with other things a store of value). Nowadays what is popularly called ‘money’ are tokens for it, electronic as well the more traditional pieces of coloured paper and metal disks, all of which are, as you point out, intrinsically worthless.

Money has various functions and you are confusing money as a means of payment with money as a unit of account. The fact that GDP (what is produced in a year) is expressed in units of money does not mean that an equivalent amount of money is required to buy it. Money circulates, ie, can be used in any number of transactions. Similarly, it is not a problem in itself that total debt (what businesses, governments and people owe each other), expressed in units of money, is greater than GDP, if only because the same sum of money can be used to make and settle more than one debt. Again, there is no need for a bank to hold the full cash equivalent of what it lends. That would undermine the whole idea of banking which is based on the assumption that those who have lent it money will only want to withdraw an average amount of it at any one time (4 percent seems to be the current norm in Britain), meaning that the rest can safely be loaned out. Thus, the total amount a bank lends is greater than the amount it needs to hold as cash, even if it can’t be greater than the amount the bank originally borrowed or borrows.

Fundamentally, the main point at issue here is not just some academic disagreement about how banks work, but that this has important political implications. It’s not obscure nit-picking. Those who believe that banks have the power to create money by a keystroke (formerly stroke of the pen) advocate that this supposed power should be taken from banks and used by some public body either to finance better social amenities or to pay everyone a ‘social dividend’. It is the theory behind a specious form of reformism. Socialists need to be able to refute it as part of our case that capitalism cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the majority. How can we do this convincingly if we share the same mistaken premise as them?

Editors.

Material World: King Capital’s plunder of the Congo (2025)

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

King Capital’s plunder of the Congo

The brutal conflict in the ‘Democratic Republic’ of Congo is not an ethnic struggle, a failure of governance, or an unfortunate accident. It is the direct consequence of capitalism’s relentless pursuit for profit. The plunder of the Congo’s vast mineral wealth is not a by-product of war, but the reason for it.

Despite being endowed with vast natural resources, the Congo remains one of the most impoverished and most exploited countries in the world. The cause of this paradox lies in the legacy of colonialism combined with modern rulers of capital and the ongoing plunder facilitated by the master class.

‘The colonised can see right away that the coloniser is a thief, a liar, a fraud, a murderer, a torturer, and a hypocrite…’ (Frantz Fanon, the well-known psychiatrist and revolutionary, on the Congo).

Towards the end of the 19th century, King Leopold II of Belgium transformed the Congo into his personal property. He subjected millions of Congolese to forced labour in the extraction of rubber and other resources. Under Leopold’s rule, appalling atrocities were committed with millions dying from violence, starvation, and disease. After international condemnation, Belgium formally took control of the Congo in 1908, continuing the exploitation of its resources while not investing in the country’s infrastructure or development.

Eventually Congo gained independence in 1960, under a rigged system that ensured foreign control over its wealth. Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister, sought to assert national sovereignty. For this affront to King Capital, Lumumba was overthrown and assassinated by Belgian and US interests. The installation of the dictator Mobutu ensured that the Congo’s resources would continue to be funnelled to corporations while the population withered.

Today, Congo remains trapped in a cycle of exploitation. Minerals like coltan, cobalt, and copper, essential to Tesla, iPhones and solar panels continue to benefit capital rather than the Congolese. Neighbouring Rwanda has become a key exploiter.

The European Union’s special representative for Africa’s Great Lakes region, Johan Borgstram, accused Rwanda of violating Congolese territory. Borgstram urged a political solution to the conflict in eastern Congo, noting that Rwanda’s support for the M23 (March 23) rebel group and the presence of its military on Congolese territory constituted a violation of Congolese sovereignty. The M23 movement, which has seized key territories in eastern Congo, claims to be defending the interests of Congolese Tutsis. It has committed horrendous acts including mass killings, sexual violence, and the displacement of civilians, particularly in eastern Congo.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has cited security concerns, pointing to the Congolese government’s alleged lack of political will. M23’s territorial control has caused nearly 80,000 people to flee, many seeking refuge in neighbouring countries like Burundi.

This ongoing cycle of extraction and conflict is not an accident; it is the result of the global capitalist system that continues to exploit Congo’s resources for the benefit of foreign elites, whether they are in the West or in Rwanda. The wealth generated from Congo’s vast resources is largely funnelled to multinational corporations, with little benefit to the local population.

Don’t imagine this is some accidental lapse on capitalism’s part. It is exactly how capitalism functions. The Socialist Party has always argued that capitalism cannot be reformed to serve the majority. It is a system built on exploitation, where wealth is continually extracted, and power remains concentrated in the hands of few. The wars in Congo, like the wars before them, are not by accident or the result of mismanagement; they are the natural outcome of the economic system that demands the subjugation of entire nations for the benefit of King Capital.

Digital book burnings in Trump’s America

When viewing history through the lens of analysis socialists understand that attacks on marginalised groups are likely an early indication of rising authoritarianism. A century ago, the Nazi party of Germany targeted transgender people and the scientists who were pioneers of sexual research, raiding Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, one of the world’s first centres dedicated to the study and care of queer and trans people. The Nazi Party raided the clinic, terrorised the workers, and burned thousands of books, papers and research materials in a public spectacle of hate that foreshadowed the grim horrors to come. Now, today, a modern version of this erasure is also underway. This time, the flames are in the form of a trash folder, as it is a digital erasure, and this horror is unfolding in the United States under the directorship of Donald Trump.

Since his return to political power, the Marmalade Mussolini and his collaborators have systematically erased the existence of trans people from official records. Under his administration, the term ‘transgender’ is being removed from government websites, crucial health data scrubbed, and even references to historical trans activists such as Marsha P Johnson at the Stonewall National Monument eradicated.

Charities and institutions that receive federal funding are being overtly pressured to follow suit, ensuring that the trans community is transported out of public life. The speed and efficiency of this erasure would have made the Nazis envious.

These moves are not happening in isolation. They come after a build up over years of false moral panic stoked by the capitalist press, where trans people are being unjustly smeared as a threat to children, just as Hirschfeld was accused of ‘grooming’ youth in the pages of the Nazi propaganda organ Der Stürmer. The narrative is chillingly familiar: demonisation, exclusion, and then elimination.

The implications however extend beyond just trans rights. Fascist parties who seized the reins of democracy under the gaze of capital would test the boundaries by attacking the most vulnerable, seeing how much liberals of all shades would tolerate. As they succeed today in digitally erasing trans people, they will move on to the next targets. Already, Trump and his axis of tech billionaires have floated the idea of defying court rulings, openly challenging judicial authority in their efforts to strip rights from minorities. The broader working class must recognise that an attack on one group’s liberties is an attack on all.

Just as socialists oppose divisions and discriminations over race and colour, so we commit to solidarity with those workers under the LGBTQIA banner being victimised by this explicitly nasty face of capital.

Socialists are keenly aware that oppression is the tool of the master class, used to divide and distract workers while capitalists consolidate capital. The erasure of transgender people is not only a symptom of this alt-right culture war but is a warning sign of the increasingly authoritarian aspect of the capitalist political order. Socialists that seek to build a truly free, wholly democratic and equal society will not accept these digital book burnings and Trump’s wider assault on humanity. Marx teaches us to look on history scientifically to understand the present condition and in doing so what we are witnessing unfolding under raw capitalism in the US must concern us all.

A.T.

40 years of Red Nose Day (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month was a special celebration for the children’s charity Comic Relief. It marked 40 years since the start of Red Nose Day. In the days leading up to March 21st, you could hardly switch on the radio or TV without being reminded that famous people, mainly showbiz celebrities, were going to disguise their normal features with red noses of various shapes and sizes to remind us that they were collecting money to improve the lives of poor children.

Endemic

And it does seem difficult not to see this as a positive thing given the fact that, as we are told by the charity Shelter, 120,000 children in the UK wake up homeless every day and many thousands more who may not be homeless have to suffer housing and living conditions that make it impossible for them to live comfortable and fulfilling lives. The Labour government’s new Homelessness Minister, Rusharana Ali, has herself referred to this as ‘a national disgrace’, pointing out that last year ‘more than 117,000 households, including over 150,000 children, were living in temporary accommodation’. Shelter also calls this an ‘outrage’, and understandably so, given that when it was founded in 1966, its promise was to get rid of homelessness within 10 years. Since then, organisations dedicated to solving homelessness have proliferated and Shelter now runs its own weekly lottery – a sure sign that the problem it campaigns about is endemic.

A further recent report by the Barnardo’s charity states that ‘more than a million children in the UK either sleep on the floor or share a bed with parents or siblings because their family cannot afford the “luxury” of replacing broken frames and mouldy linen’ and that ‘the rise in “bed poverty” reflects growing levels of destitution in which low-income families already struggling with soaring food or gas bills often find they are also unable to afford a comfortable night’s sleep’. And in a recent article in the Big Issue, John Bird, founder of that magazine and now a member of the House of Lords, summed up the embedded nature of poverty and homelessness by stating that ‘three decades of the same conversation is exhausting’. Other sources have reiterated the same thing. The centre-right think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, found that ‘the most disadvantaged people in Britain were no better off than they were 15 years ago, with around 13.4 million people living lives marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime’. And Greg Hurst of the Centre for Homeless Impact has expressed the view that ‘we are condemned to repeat the cycle of ebbs and flows of homelessness’.

Realm of fantasy

But why? After all, according to official figures, over a quarter of a million homes in England are classed as ‘long-term empty’, meaning that they have been left vacant for more than six months. Yet we all know that the way things work is that parents and children who need homes cannot simply walk into empty properties and live there. The kind of society we live in does not cater for such needs, basic as they may be, of those who do not have the money to pay for them. In the same way, no matter how technologically efficient food production has become, no matter how much food we are capable of producing, only people with enough money in their pockets will have access to it. In the context of capitalism, John Bird got it right, in one of his Big Issue articles, by stating that ‘ideas of ending poverty are stuck in the realm of fantasy’.

Scratching the surface

So can anything be done at all? It’s clear that Red Nose Day, coming back time after time as it does, can help a little but in the end it can do no more than offer a small amount of temporary relief to the poor or disadvantaged children it is aimed at. No matter how much time and energy is put into it by those involved and no matter how well-meaning they may be, their efforts can do no more than scratch the surface of the poverty problem. They can get nowhere near offering any kind of long-term solution. The Oxfam food policy director, Hanna Saarinen, recognised this recently when she stated: ‘We need to reimagine a new global food system to really end hunger; one that works for everyone.’ But the trouble – and the truth – is that such a food system is simply not feasible in the framework of the world we live in, where, at the end of the day, profit must always come before need. That is why, even in a country like Britain where food is manifestly plentiful, many people are still forced to have recourse to food banks, and charities like Comic Relief are still considered necessary. Of course, millions of workers do manage to keep their heads above water, some living reasonably comfortable lives, but even this is usually at the cost of working hard for an entire lifetime, never being truly free of financial insecurity and often at great cost to the quality of their lives.

Need not profit

And so it will remain until we not only, in the word used by Hanna Saarinen, ‘reimagine’ but also implement a wholly different organisation of society, one that is fully cooperative and human-centred and dedicated to catering for the needs of everyone not producing profit for the tiny minority – in other words designed to take care of everyone in a sustainable, inclusive way. Adequate resources to provide a decent life for all are available, but that decent life cannot be realised under the profit system. It can only be possible in the kind of moneyless, marketless society that we stand for, and that will render regular recourse to charities like Comic Relief and events like Red Nose Day unnecessary and superfluous.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

The April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a rather jaundiced article on Comic Relief. "More cold water, comrades . . . "

Capitalism everywhere? (2025)

Book Review from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Profit: an Environmental History. By Mark Stoll. Polity £17.99.

This volume contains a great deal of useful information, not just about the environment and how production has affected it, but also on the history of technology and industry, and there are many pages of references.

Various kinds of pollution are referred to, such as the massive oil spills from the Torrey Canyon supertanker in 1967 and the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in 2010. But environmental impacts go back much earlier. In the Middle Ages, for instance, silver and gold were imported to Italy to be minted into coins, which led to toxic chemicals being washed into streams and rivers near the mines, in Bohemia and other places. Areas near the mines suffered from deforestation. By the seventeenth century sugar refineries and other industries in the Netherlands emitted vast amounts of stinking coal smoke. In the Americas, growing tobacco depleted the soil, but colonists just moved to extensive uncleared land. In the nineteenth century Britain was the largest producer of copper, which meant the emission of poisonous substances such as sulphur dioxide and arsenic. A lot more material along similar lines is surveyed here.

However, the book has some negative points too. For some reason, the author refers several times to the religious views of various individuals. Does it really matter that Rachel Carson, author of the conservationist classic Silent Spring, was a Reformed Protestant or that Bill Gates used to be a Congregationalist?

More significantly, Stoll has a very all-embracing approach to capitalism, which he sees as an economic system where owners of accumulated wealth invest it for profit in extracting raw materials or producing and distributing goods. There have been various forms of it over the centuries, from incipient capitalism to plantation capitalism in ancient Greece to industrial capitalism and present-day consumer capitalism. He writes: ‘we cannot live with capitalism and we cannot live without it. At best, we can work to ameliorate its worst effects.’ And it ‘is rooted in human nature and human history’. Wage labour gets an occasional mention but does not seem to be viewed as an essential part of capitalism. Nor is it recognised that the way most people made their living has varied enormously over the centuries. Furthermore, his idea of profit goes well beyond the notion of surplus value as an intrinsic part of the employment-and-wages system, since he states that forty thousand years ago people made a profit by exchanging tools they had made for other goods they did not have to make themselves.

From the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism has come to be gradually replaced by consumer capitalism, with its emphasis on advertising and built-in obsolescence. In the US, it seems, a piece of clothing is worn on average seven times before being discarded. The biggest companies sell to consumers rather than manufacturing goods (Amazon and Walmart, for instance).

It is not clear, but Stoll appears to see capitalism as more than just islands of commodity production within a wider economy. The book contains much of interest but its approach to capitalism leaves a lot to be desired, not recognising that the drive for profit is an essential part of a system built on wage labour and production for sale.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Guns before butter (2025)

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

‘National security’, admirals, generals and air chief marshals are telling us, is ‘the first duty of any government’. In a sense they are right. The first duty of a government is to ensure security, though not of the population it rules over; it’s the security of its capitalist class, to protect them from being taken over by the armed forces of a rival capitalist state.

To do this, the government has to equip, train and maintain a military force armed with the most up-to-date weapons of individual and mass destruction that it can afford. This has to be paid for out of taxes that ultimately fall on the profits of the capitalist class. As the government’s ’first duty’, such spending takes priority over other government spending, as summed in the saying ‘Guns before butter’.

That was the heading of the editorial in the Times on 19 February. ‘To underpin Europe’s security’, it thundered, ‘Sir Keir Starmer must expand defence spending in a time of economic difficulty. That means taking an axe to the bloated welfare system.’ A week later Starmer announced that the Labour government would increase military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2027 and later to 3 percent. Labour intended to take an axe to the welfare system anyway, so Starmer said that it was ‘overseas aid’ that would be cut to pay for this.

Paul Mason, the former Trotskyist who once wrote a book called PostCapitalism but now works for a thinktank financed by the Ministry of Defence, welcomed this as something he had been calling for. His job requires him to think up reasons why defence spending should be increased and one that he has deployed is that it will stimulate growth. Last July he wrote an article headed Rearm, And The Economy Will Grow (tinyurl.com/mrxezm3j ). His evidence for this was pretty thin:

‘Anecdotally, where defence investment is actually happening it is a major driver of growth. Barrow-in-Furness, according to one senior trade union contact, is starting to boom. The old Debenhams store, which shut down in 2021, is set to reopen as an apprentice training centre; hundreds of apprenticeships a year are being lined up.’

Given the way that GDP is calculated, any increase in government spending will increase GDP but this doesn’t mean that this will lead to growth in the longer term. In another simplistic propaganda piece last July, Defence spending: A waste of money? (tinyurl.com/7p7j7vbe ), Mason attempted to refute the argument that ‘defence spending reduces economic growth’. Since defence spending is paid for from profits and profits are the source of finance for growth in the sense of capital accumulation, it would seem obvious that defence spending tends to reduce growth.

Mason’s counter-argument was that extra defence spending would act as a better ‘fiscal stimulus’ than other forms of government spending but this assumes that the capitalist economy can be stimulated by government spending, as taught by Keynes but refuted in practice. In essence, he is advocating what has been called ‘military Keynesianism’. When he was a Trotskyist he might have called this a ‘permanent arms economy’. Only then he would have opposed it. Now he is advocating it.

Government spending on arms is a drag on capital accumulation but it is a necessary expense, and so not a waste, for capitalism. In that sense capitalism is a permanent arms economy.

Work, free and unfree (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism would seem to be quite exceptional as a social system in unnecessarily burdening us with work that bears little or no relation to meeting human needs (even if such work might be considered necessary from the standpoint of enabling the system to function on its own terms). This is all the more remarkable given the enormously potent technology it has developed to lighten our workload considerably.

The terms and conditions under which we work today, the constant niggling awareness that our livelihood is dependent on our compliance to the arbitrary will of our employers and so forth, corrodes any sense of intrinsic satisfaction we might get from work. Even so, we still need to work despite this — not just for the money but also our own wellbeing notwithstanding the adverse terms and conditions under which we might presently work. Not being able to work at all can make matters even worse for us.

We need ‘work’, but we need also the conditions that will make work more satisfying. Capitalism cannot deliver this because it is not a system oriented to the satisfaction of human needs. It is first and foremost a system based on the blind accumulation of capital out of surplus value. That in itself signifies the alienation of the majority from the productive resources of society that necessarily imposes upon labour the quality of being coerced and unfree and hence undesirable.

The possibility of individuals being able to freely move between jobs according to their own inclinations would help to greatly enrich the entire experience of work as well as help to produce a more rounded person. However, in the capitalist society we live in today we cannot just freely choose to alternate between different kinds of jobs as we might wish. If we do happen to have a job in capitalism we are hemmed in by legal contracts and fixed hours that conspire to bind us to this job and prevent us from adopting a too-flexible or experimental approach to work.

What would the implications be if, in contrast, all work were to become unpaid work – that is, performed on a free and voluntary basis? Obviously, in a capitalist society this is simply not possible. It is incompatible with the existence of capitalism.

If all work were to take the form of free creative voluntary activity then the products of that work – the goods and services we all depend on – would have to be completely free in the sense of being made available without any price tag attached. Money, as a socio-economic phenomenon, would simply cease to exist. After all, if you were not paid to work where would you get the means to buy anything?

So unpaid voluntaristic or self-determined work would imply ‘free access’ to the collective products of such work (and vice versa). Moreover, both of these things imply something else – namely, the common or social ownership of the productive resources of society itself.

This is often misunderstood. Market libertarians in particular, are prone to decry this as a blatant case of ‘theft’. ‘You are going to confiscate my property and make it the property of the community’ they complain. But this is to completely misconstrue what common ownership of society’s productive resources is about.

‘Theft’ simply implies the transfer of ownership of the thing in question from the victim of such a theft to the perpetrator. It thus implies a private property relationship. Common ownership, on the other hand, means transcending the very concept of property itself. You are not losing anything; you are, in a sense, gaining the world instead. But so is everybody else (including also the ex-capitalists). Collectively, you are asserting joint or social ownership over the natural and industrial resources of the planet.

Social ownership of these resources is the completely logical and appropriate response to the plain fact that production today is a completely socialised process. The laptop on which I am typing out this article, is – directly or indirectly – the product of the collective labour of literally millions and millions of workers scattered right across the world.

It is no longer possible for anyone to say of any particular product, ‘I made this, therefore this is mine’. The 18th century philosopher John Locke’s ‘labour theory of property’, on which the market libertarians base their case that common ownership would be theft because the fruits of one’s labour ought to be exclusively appropriated by oneself by natural right, has thus been rendered historically obsolete and completely impracticable. In fact, given that production is now a socialised process, it backfires on them by implying socialised ownership — that what is produced by collective labour should be owned collectively.

Robin Cox