Party Notes. (1907)

Party News from the November 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Quarter ending September saw a record in the number of new members. It is scarcely to be hoped that the winter quarter can see that record broken, but the opportunity of the winter season should be taken advantage of to inaugurate branch discussions and thus assist in turning out new speakers for next year.

* * *

On October 8th the E.C. passed the following resolution : That this meeting of the Executive Committee of The Socialist Party of Great Britain, in view of the public pronouncements of the British Constitution Association hereby challenges that body to appoint a representative to meet a representative of this, the only Socialist party in this country, to publicly debate the following proposition : That as Capitalism involves the exploitation and economic subjection of the working class, the only necessary and useful section of the community, it is necessary and desirable to speedily attain the Object of The Socialist Party of Great Britain, viz., the establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community.

* * *

As yet no reply has been received from the champions of capitalism.

* * *

Since this resolution appeared in the Press, Mr. H. M. Hyndman has written to the Daily Telegraph that the S.D.F. is the “only international Socialist Party in this country.” So that, not satisfied with their own brand new name, the S.D.F. wish to annex ours, and also our reputation.

* * *

An enquiry was received from Brighton, on the attitude of the S.P.G.B. to the question of National and Imperial Defence.

* * *

The reply contained the following: The object of the S.P.G.B. implies the assumption of political authority by the working class. Until that object is attained, the capitalist class will control the armed forces of the nation for the defence of capitalist interests. The attitude of the Socialist working class when politically supreme on the question of national defence (should such a question then remain for solution) will depend upon the deliberations of the Socialist Commonwealth in the circumstances of the time.

* * *

The Watford Branch of the S.P.G.B. questioned E. E. Hunter while speaking for the S.D.F. and challenged him to debate with a representative of this Party. He agreed, but referred us to the Watford S.D.F., who have not up to the present replied to our request.

* * *

It is surprising how the “sweet reasonableness” of those who are not “impossiblists” is sometimes manifested !

* * *

The speaker for the Wood Green I.L.P. was also challenged in a similar way. Again we are referred to the local branch, with, as .yet, a similar result.

* * *

Matters are shaping well in Burnley, and before the next issue is published, no doubt the branch will have been officially formed. Meanwhile sympathisers should communicate with C. H. Schofield, 77, Parliament St., Burnley.

Adolph Kohn

____________

“Art, Labour, and Socialism” should sell well. It can be obtained by branches and other bodies in the ordinary way on the usual terms : 9d. per 13. Half gross orders carriage paid.

A Clarion Vanner Takes the Socialist Platform. (1907)

From the November 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Sunday, September 15th, while Comrade Fitzgerald was speaking at our Finsbury Park meeting, a member of the audience asked “was it a fact that the Clarion Van speakers had instructions from the London Van Committee to refuse to answer questions put by members of The Socialist Party of Great Britain ?” He put the question, he said, because he was informed that a Clarion Vanner was in the audience, and he wished to give him the opportunity to deny the allegation if he could do so. The questioner was, further, anxious to know why the Clarion Van Committee would not allow their speakers questions from the Socialists. Thereupon Mr. Fred Bramley, late Clarion Van speaker, asked for the platform and his request was, of course, acceded to.

Mr. Bramley said he had never refused to answer questions from anyone, and had always preached the principles of unadulterated Socialism. By Socialism he meant the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Nationalisation or municipalisation were not Socialism, but simply exploitation in another form. He then asked for questions from members of the S.P.G.B., and upon it being pointed out to him that he was not there to ask for questions, but to deny, if he could, the statement that Clarion Van speakers were instructed to refuse to answer questions from Socialists, Mr. Bramley replied that he held the platform, and all the ordinary rules of procedure went by the board.

Comrade Fitzgerald then pointed out that Mr. Gavan Duffy admitted, at Wood Green, that he had received instructions from the Clarion Van Committee not to accept questions from Socialists. Fitzgerald also stated that questions had been refused at Clapham and Wimbledon, and. also by Mr. Hartley at Willesden, and he drew Mr. Bramley’s attention to the fact that Mr. Howard, of the Clarion Van Committee, had openly stated from our platform in Finsbury Park that Mr. Gavan Duffy was not to blame, as he was only acting under instructions from the Van Committee. Our comrade then dealt with Mr. Bramley’s definition of Socialism, and showed the unsoundness of the phrase “the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange ” ; the means of exchange being money, which is only necessary under a system of private ownership. Under Socialism, production being no longer carried on for exchange, and the products being owned collectively by the whole of the people, the means of exchange will become superfluous, yet he (Mr. Bramley) talked of socialising it. The Clarion advocated nationalisation and municipalisation, and was therefore a misleading organ, contrary to the principles of Socialism. Moreover, the success of the Clarion Vanners depended upon the number of Clarions sold at the meetings, and seeing that the Clarion advocated nationalisation and municipalisation, Mr. Bramley could not but admit that he assisted in anti-Socialist propaganda. If it was not a personal question why was he not now a Clarion Vanner, seeing that they were advertising for speakers.

Mr. Bramiey, replying, said the questions were not on Socialism. The reason he was not now a Clarion Vanner was a personal one. It was a suggestion of impure motives, he said, to say that the success of a Clarion Vanner depended upon the number of Clarions sold, but it is noticeable that he did not deny the statement. Mr. Bramley still insisted upon having questions upon the principles of Socialism. He was asked if he advised the workers to avoid the I.L.P., S.D.F. etc., as non-Socialist organisations, and to join the S.P.G.B. and replied that he preached the principle of Socialism and left the people to judge for themselves as to which political party to join. Did he advise the workers to avoid the Liberal and Tory parties was the next question given to the ex-Vanner, and the answer being in the affirmative, Bramley was then called upon to explain why he did not preach Socialism and advise the workers to avoid the I.L.P. and S.D.F. as supporters of capitalism. The cases were not parallel, be declared, but he could not show wherein the divergence lay. Mr. Bramley, in answer to a question, said that he believed organisation to be necessary for the attainment of Socialism, and explained his inconsistency in advising the workers to join such anti-Socialist organisations as the S.D.F., and the I.L.P. by saying that he did not agree that they were anti-Socialist. Nevertheless he had to admit that we were the only pure organisation. He agreed that an organisation advocating the support of capitalism was acting contrary to the principles of Socialism, and to the interest of the working class. Having denied that the I.L.P. supported capitalism, Mr. Bramley was asked whether Mr. Ramsay MacDonald at Leicester, Mr. James Parker at Halifax, and Mr. Fred Jowett at Bradford supported capitalism when they entered into a compact with the Liberals. Amidst roars of laughter he attempted to repudiate the action of these individuals as not representing the policy of the I.L.P., which, he said, was settled at their Annual Conference. Asked was he not aware that Mr. Keir Hardie at the York Conference of the I.L.P. admitted that this policy had been followed with the object of keeping out the Tories, he answered that he was not aware of this fact. Mr. Bramley was then shown a leading article in the Labour Leader stating that the I.L.P. supported the Liberal candidate at Bury, and he could not deny that as this had never been repudiated it stood as their policy. Was the I.L.P. a Socialist organisation was then submitted, and elicited the reply that it was an organisation that would fulfil a need for a considerable time. (Oh, oh ! from the crowd). The questioner refused to accept this answer and he was then told that the I.L.P. is a Socialist organisation, and amidst interruption and laughter Mr. Bramley said that he had been a member of it for twelve years.

The ex-Vanner was now called upon to show how we can socialise capital. “I cannot tell you,” he said, “the socialisation of capital is an impossibility.” Asked now why he was a member of an organisation the object of which was an impossibility, he denied that the object of the I.L.P. was to socialise capital, and asserted that it was “the socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” He was then informed that a perusal of the I.L.P. literature would show him that the object of the I.L.P. was “socialisation of land and capital,” so that he was a member of an organisation yet at the same time ignorant of its object. Mr. Bramley had by this time had enough of it and he religuished a platform that for him had proved a pillory.

THE CHIEL.

SPGB Meetings. (1907)

Party News from the November 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

Party News from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transformism (2025)

Book Review from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Transformative Adaptation. Another world is still just possible. By Rupert Read and Morgan Phillips with Manda Scott. Permanent Publications. 2024. 102pp.

This is a collection of short essays written by the editors, Rupert Read and Morgan Phillips, and by other contributors – with titles like ‘Transformative Adaptation as Part of the Emerging Climate Majority’, ‘How we will Free Ourselves – Together’, and ‘Thrutopia: Creating a New Story for a World Undergoing Transformation’.

So what do these writers mean by ‘transformative adaptation’? Most of them talk about a wide variety of what they see as ecologically beneficial initiatives and activities, for example restoration of wetlands, ‘agroforestry hubs’, biodiverse planting schemes, community food-growing sites, and use of green technology. Among specific ideas put forward are ‘autonomous community-led centres focused on meeting local needs and building local resilience’. They give examples of this kind of thing they see as taking place in various parts of the world, for example Nepal, Kurdistan, and more locally in, for instance, the ‘Talking Tree’ project in Staines and the ‘Zero Carbon Guildford Climate Hub’. They see transformative adaptation as going beyond efforts to simply cut down on carbon emissions and be generally more environmentally conscious (they describe that as ‘mitigation’) and characterise it as part of the need to ‘work with nature not against her’ so that ’ecological breakdown can be reversed’. Above all they stress that, if the world carries on along its current anti-ecological track (COP, for example, is seen as a failure and a fraud, ‘a surrender to the forces of big energy and big capital’), it will quickly lead to a situation where ‘the very habitability of our earth teeters’.

But what does this book have to say about the political dimension of climate change and global warming and efforts to curb or reverse it and protect the environment? It says a certain amount. It refers to what is happening as ‘a crisis of political economy’, whereby we all live in a system that demands continuous economic growth’ and creates ‘dire levels of inequality that would have made Roman emperors blush’. It further states, that ‘climate stability and capitalism – in any form – are not compatible’, that ‘unimaginable “profits” continue to be made, as capital attempts to commodify life itself’, and that to remedy this we need ‘societal transformation’.

So far so good, except that it seems to think that all this can somehow happen within the system of capitalism and its buying and selling imperative and talks about ‘exerting pressure on government’ and ‘on decision makers’, as though governments were somehow neutral and their purpose was something other than managing the capitalist system in the interests of the tiny minority who monopolise the wealth of society. So the book states the undeniable truth that ‘the solutions are available, we just need to take collective action and implement them in our communities’.

If ‘collective action’ simply means local planting schemes, ‘green’ technology and the like, clearly this will do little more than scratch the surface of the problems of the environment and inequality they point to. So, though we cannot blame the advocates of transformative adaptation for wanting to do something practical to rescue an overheating planet from the ills of capitalism, it cannot in itself feasibly be seen as a wider effective solution.

However, to be fair this book does end up going somewhat further, and that’s mainly thanks to its final chapter contributed by the novelist Manda Scott, who talks about the need to imagine ‘how our lives would look and feel if we let go of our encultured drive to engage in a market of goods and services’ and states flatly that ‘capitalism is not compatible with a flourishing web of life’.

Groups and movements that offer examples of self-organisation, democratic cooperation and sharing of resources and goods, which this book wants to see a spread of, offer something of an antidote to those single-issue campaigns calling on government to bring in various reforms which, even if enacted, rarely do more than tinker at the edges of the massive problem constituted by the whole system of production for profit. But the most radical of the ideas put forward here, that of a ‘parallel government’ possibly leading to a more democratic system and even perhaps to some form of non-monetary economy, seems unnecessarily complicated compared to using simple democratic political action via the existing system of elections as a route to the establishment of a democratic, moneyless, marketless society of common ownership and production for direct use. In Manda Scott’s words, ‘a system designed to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet’ and ‘a world that is fully connected, where we are not born to pay bills and then die’.

Howard Moss

Halo, Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, now hopefully coming to an end, the Russian Orthodox Church had 300 military clergy there with the Russian armed forces.

A metropolitan high-ranking bishop was concerned that this number was far too low. 1,500 priests controlling the ‘sinful spirit of revenge’ that apparently soldiers are heir to having seen their comrades killed and mutilated in front of their eyes is a moral and spiritual challenge that the priests are there to rectify. As Thomas Hobbes said in another context, the life of a combatant in any conflict can be short, brutish and nasty.

Apparently ‘neo-paganism’ is viewed by the Church as a serious issue because this stimulates ‘animalistic qualities’. In other words, they commit atrocities, we commit atrocities. Anyone who condemns war would agree that horrible things shouldn’t happen but conflicts don’t occur using Queensbury rules.

The Orthodox church is more concerned that such actions put those committing them into a state of ‘sin’. Here’s the cruncher: ‘A believer finds it easier to face the line of fire and defy death’ (Kommersant).

Monty Python famously lampooned religious fanaticism in their film, Life of Brian, as well as their sketch in which ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition’. The Inquisition, established by Catholic Pope Gregory IX in 1231 initially authorised Dominican and Franciscan friars to investigate and suppress heresy. From 1252 torture was used to extract confessions, This was licenced by Pope Innocent IV. A misnomer as innocents who chose to have different beliefs were tormented into accepting the status quo.

The Roman Inquisition formed in 1542 is said to have been less violent, concentrating on suppressing ideas which the Church did not like. In 1633 Galileo was forced to retract his work which disproved the orthodoxy that the Earth was the centre of the universe. The Spanish Inquisition, founded in 1478 by Ferdinand and Isabella, is well known historically for its extreme violence toward those who came under its influence.

Protestantism had its own unhealthy obsession – witches. The 1968 film, Witchfinder General, based upon the activities of Matthew Hopkins, offers none of the light relief of Monty Python. It is a horror film which depicts the fearfulness that arises when power, allied to religious zealotry, impacts the lives of those who just want to be left in peace. It is believed that over a three-year period Hopkins was responsible for the deaths of around 300 people. These were mainly women. It’s estimated that perhaps eighty percent of witch-trial victims were women. Misogyny looms large in religions.

In Africa, the senseless behaviour of centuries ago is still being enacted. Once, so-called witches were dunked under water and if they survived were presumed guilty, but innocent if they drowned. In Angola, in 2024, people were forced to drink poison in order to prove their innocence of witchcraft accusations made against them. 50 people died.

Who says that religion is about love and peace?

DC

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) is a deeply entrenched cultural practice that affects around 200 million women and girls. It’s practised in at least 25 African countries, as well as parts of the Middle East and Asia and among immigrant populations globally. It is a harmful traditional practice that involves removing or damaging female genital tissue. Often it’s “justified” by cultural beliefs about controlling female sexuality and marriageability. 

(The Conversation)

. . .  “the ELN claims to follow Karl Marx, but it seems to me they believe more in Pablo Escobar.” Indeed, drug trafficking helps explain why, after more than 60 years of armed conflict, peace continues to elude Colombia. The violence briefly diminished after the country’s largest guerrilla group, known as the FARC, disarmed in 2016, but the government failed to take control of coca fields and drug trafficking routes that were abandoned by the FARC. And now ELN rebels and a new generation of criminal groups are fighting over this territory. 

(KAXE)

Representatives for the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant declined to comment on how the pause could impact the plant and jobs. …The plant ‘is not the largest employer by any stretch,’ said Bob Durkin, president of the non-partisan Scranton Chamber of Commerce. ‘But it’s a very important employer. The jobs are really high-quality jobs. They are well paying, family sustaining jobs’. 

(BBC)

In a staggering display of police callousness, the South African government has caused one of the worst mining disasters in the country’s history…. The Stilfontein massacre, which left almost ninety dead, has split the South African opposition and exposed a ruling bloc corrupted by mineral wealth. At its heart, it is a story of the contradictions of politics in an extremely unequal extractive economy. 

(Jacobin)

James Schneider, Jeremy Corbyn’s former Director of Comms, argues for a new party…. Zack Polanski, Deputy Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, says we don’t need anything new. There is, after all, a socialist party in the UK already: it’s the Greens. 

(Novara Media)

. . . William Morris . . . believed that the creation and enjoyment of pre-industrial arts and crafts could undo the assumptions about natural inequality that were baked into capitalism. Influenced by both Karl Marx and John Ruskin, he demanded that works of art should actually embody the equality and freedom that had disappeared in an age witnessing the rise of mass production and excessive consumption on the one hand and widespread poverty and drudgery on the other. In News from Nowhere — his novel-length description of an egalitarian, anti-consumerist society — he aimed at nothing less than rewiring his readers’ minds and hearts. 

(Los Angeles Review of Books)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Who are the ‘Middle Class’? (2025)

"Man the barricades, Jerry."

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Autonomous Voice, a contributor to the Facebook site ‘A Global Group Where We Are Active Against Capitalism’, recently put up a 15-minute YouTube clip, entitled ‘The Middle Class: a Working Class Anarchist Perspective’. The speaker attempts to define and analyse what he refers to as ‘the intermediate position’ in capitalist society’ held by ‘middle-class people, particularly those in professorial, managerial or small business roles’ (youtu.be/AZl55qEWILk). While his illustration points to the same ultimate goal as proposed by the Socialist Party, the analysis of how that can be achieved is very different.

In particular there are indications of a need for ‘violent uprising’ and of this needing to come from the ‘working class’, seen as those who do forms of manual work in society. This concept, outdated as it is, is still clung to by many, but it fails to appreciate that all those who need to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary and so remain dependent on their next wage or salary payment are in the same fundamental economic position. This means not only manual workers, tradespeople, nurses, service workers, etc., but also so-called middle-class workers such as teachers, administrators, engineers, medics, tech workers, and others, all those in fact who are often described as ‘professionals’. All these workers, whether considered working class or middle class, have a common interest that is diametrically opposed to that of the other small class of people in society (we would call them the capitalist class) who own enough wealth not to need to sell their energies in order to survive. And this is the case even if, as things stand, the vast majority of wage and salary earners of all descriptions fail to perceive their subjugation to the system they are tied to.

So while ‘Autonomous Voice’ is quite correct in stating that the role of many ‘professionals’ is ‘to administer the system of exploitation and keep it running smoothly’ and that they have an attitude of complicity towards that system, he is quite wrong to suggest that this somehow takes them out of the game and that they are not themselves exploited and entirely dependent upon the ups and downs of the economic forces of capitalism. True, they – or many of them – may have conventional, indeed docile, attitudes towards capitalist society and the way it works and may seem to be, as the video puts it, ‘a buffer preventing radical change’. But the same also applies to the vast majority of those the video sees as members of the ‘working class’. All in fact are locked into the wages system and have to live with the insecurity of the monthly pay slip.

So while we would agree with the need for the kind of society advocated by this video, it confuses and derails the argument by suggesting that some workers have different interests to others. Whatever their line of work, all workers scramble to sell their energies under conditions of duress, and are usually denied the ability to control how they work and whether that work – and pay – will continue. There is a global division between the vast majority, who need to sell their energies for a wage or salary, and the tiny minority that choose to buy those energies. In the end all members of that vast majority have the same class interest – to establish a wageless, money-free society that the Socialist Party exists to campaign for and that will provide the means for all to live free and autonomous lives.

Currently very few wage and salary earners are contemplating being part of any such movement. Yet, it is the only way to transcend the capitalist system that dominates all our lives, and it can be readily voted into being if enough of us want it. It will provide a means whereby democratic associations of women and men will be able to organise on the basis of voluntary work and have free access to whatever goods and services they need, because the whole society will then collectively own and control all the resources that provide these. People will no longer have to do jobs they do not enjoy – or even hate – just because they need money. They will be able to do work they want to do and enjoy. People will cooperate to do the work that makes society function and they will make decisions democratically – in their workplaces, local communities, regions and, if circumstances require, globally. Above all there will be no more top-down control, no leaders or governments, and no more money controlling people’s lives. Only when this happens will we have a society where the freedom to develop and express our needs and potential is equal for all kinds of workers and where the material needs of all are satisfied.

Howard Moss

“Bots batter Boffs” (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

As an avid sci-fi fan I just couldn’t resist the front cover of a recent Daily Star (24 February) with its picture of a killer robot and the headline BOTS BATTER BOFFS, especially as a textbox promised the ‘Full Story’, written by no less than the chief reporter.

So, dear reader, I bought a copy and, rushing to page 9, I learned that software development jobs are now about 30 percent fewer than five years ago, and that tech workers are afraid of redundancy because AI is now able to do some entry-level programming.

The whole tone of the piece seems to be about smarty pants nerds getting their come-uppance. And those smarty pants must be pretty dumb after all, because they didn’t realise that their own efforts would put their livelihoods at risk. Maybe some of the Star’s readers even found it funny or comforting to know that other workers have shitty lives too.

Unsurprisingly, the chief reporter’s ‘Full story’ was nothing of the sort. He forgot to draw his readers’ attention to the fact that he was describing one of the glaring contradictions of the capitalist system. By which we mean that the advance in industrial technology that AI represents, in one way is very positive, as it increases productivity in a whole range of applications.

But for us, the workers, in economic terms, it becomes a negative. It will tend to result in (1) deskilling, which in turn will put pressure on wages, and (2) a reduction in the demand for labour power (while conversely, by throwing people out of work, increasing its supply), which will also tend to force wages down.

And this is a feature that affects all industries and all workers all around the world. It has done so ever since the capitalist form of production came into existence. Because lower production costs, including wages, are for the capitalist, the key aim when introducing new technologies and techniques as they give (at least) a temporary advantage in the cut-throat competition between capitalists.

By the way, these advances are almost always the combined results of the efforts of workers, not the capitalists. Just one more good reason, if you needed it, for getting rid of the entire rotten system.

Budgie.

Special Supplement on Marx (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

One hundred years ago this month, Karl Marx died. In a speech at his graveside, Engels said that “the greatest living thinker” had “ceased to think”. Since 1904, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has kept alive the socialist analysis of Marx’s thought, and exposed its distortions by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. We are marking the centenary of Marx’s death with the publication of this 24-page special supplement in the Socialist Standard.

• Marx the Revolutionary: 100 Years of Development and Distortion
• "Interview With Marx"
• Historical materialism
• [Invitation to “public figures” to give their views on Marx] 
• Tony Benn on Marx, with reply
• Marx: a critical view by Brian Crozier, with reply
• Applying Marx: economics
• Lenin's Legacy
• Marx the journalist
• Marx's partner: Engels
• Marx and Darwin
• Engels' review of Capital 

Applying Marx (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are now in the heaviest trade depression since World War II, with little expectation that recovery will take place in the near future. This has caused dismay and confusion among the economists, dividing them into half a dozen groups each with its own remedy and denouncing their rivals. Not only did they not foresee the depression but nearly all of them denied that it could happen. They had accepted the belief that it is possible for a government to prevent unemployment if it wishes to do so.

First in the field was the Labour Party. In its Election Programme. 1918. Labour and the New Social Order, it stated: "It is now known that the Government . . . can arrange the public works and the orders of National Departments and Local Authorities in such a way as to maintain the aggregate demand for labour in the whole kingdom”. (While they were the Government, 1929-1931, unemployment rose by 1½ million.)

By 1944. under the influence of J.M. Keynes, the three parties. Tory, Labour and Liberal (and the TUC), had all accepted the commitment to maintain "full employment”. It was set out in a document Employment Policy issued by the three parties represented in the war-time national government. Confidence in the policy was confirmed by the Committee on the Working of the Monetary System in a Report in 1958. In Paragraph 484 they said: "When discussing with witnesses the impact of restrictive monetary measures we have been constantly reminded that, as compared with earlier decades, restrictive developments have a much less frightening aspect now that Governments are always committed to full employment policies”.

Commenting on this. Professor F.W. Paish wrote: “This belief springs directly from the expectation that no government will in future allow any really substantial amount of unemployment to appear, even temporarily”. (The Banker, October 1959.) Actually, at the time the Committee published their report, unemployment was already on an upward trend after the very low levels of the ten years after the war. Unemployment rose again while the Labour Party was in office from 1964-1970, though they declared they would not let this happen, and it more than doubled under the Labour government of 1974-1979.

Towards the end of that government's office Prime Minister Callaghan and Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey began to question the validity of the Keynesian “full employment” doctrine. Later, for the first time since the war. a government — under Thatcher — formally repudiated it. But they still claimed to be able to deal with unemployment, firstly by curbing inflation and secondly by reducing taxation: “The State takes too much of the nation's income; its share will be steadily reduced. When it spends and borrows too much, taxes, interest rates, prices and unemployment rise”. (The Conservative Manifesto — 1979.) After four years of office unemployment has risen from 1,300,000 to over 3 million.

The one economist who comes well out of this confusion is Marx. He showed that, in competition with each other to gain a larger market share, capitalists are always seeking to reduce prices by means of labour-displacing machinery and that inevitably depressions occur from time to time: "Capitalist production moves through certain periodical cycles. It moves through a state of quiescence, growing animation, prosperity, overtrade, crisis and stagnation". He never accepted that unemployment and depression could be avoided by some change of government monetary, taxation or investment policy. Nor did he accept the validity of the argument that unemployment would fall and depression be avoided by putting up wages. (The policy which the Independent Labour Party sought to popularise in the 1920s.) Marx showed that not only do wages rise in every boom, but at that time the working class “actually get a larger share of the annual product intended for consumption”. (Capital Vol. Ill. Kerr Edition, p. 474.) Far from remedying the situation this is, said Marx, "always . . . a harbinger of the social crisis".

Marx showed the limitations of the trade union struggle for higher wages. The aim of the capitalist in carrying on business is "the augmentation of his capital”. Wages can therefore go on rising only as long as the rise “does not interfere with the progress of accumulation". (Capital Vol. 1, p. 678 in the Kerr edition). Beyond this, accumulation slackens, "because the stimulus of gain is blunted", in other words, the employer does not for long employ workers out of whom he cannot make profit. Marx saw as inevitable a fall of the workers’ standard of living in depressions when, owing to heavy unemployment, the supply of workers overshoots the demand. Though he did suggest that “it might in such circumstances be necessary to test the real state of demand and supply by a strike, for example, or other method". (Value Price and Profit).

After Marx's death, Frederick Engels put forward the idea that Marx's cycle no longer applied, and had given way to "permanent and chronic depression”, but events soon showed that he was wrong and he returned to Marx's “cycle” theory. In the depressions of the 1880s and between the wars, a considerable number of workers and even some economists became convinced that Marx was right about unemployment and depressions. Then Marxist theory was pushed into the background by Keynes. John Strachey, who had claimed to be a Marxist, told how reading Keynes’ book General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money made him change his views. (He became a Minister in the Attlee Labour government). Richard Crossman. Minister of Housing in the 1964 Labour government, said that Keynes demonstrated that capitalism is not "an inherently unworkable system” and, by so doing, undermined “the old economic case for socialism". (The Times, 24 February 1956)

Even before Keynes dominated the scene most economists rejected Marx's labour theory of value, including the few who looked favourably on other parts of Marx's writings. It is interesting to notice the irrelevance of some of the more common objections to the labour theory, clearly the result of not troubling to understand it.

Marx explained carefully that he was dealing with commodities, articles regularly produced for sale and capable of reproduction. Because Marx showed that commodities have a value and a price the critics assumed, without any justification, that Marx must also be saying that everything which has a price had to be a commodity and have value. They have instanced the enormous prices paid for old master paintings, forgetting that these are incapable of reproduction and are therefore not commodities.

Marx answered the critics:

Objects that in themselves are not commodities. such as conscience, honour etc. are capable of being offered for sale by their holders and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence the object may have a price without having value. (Capital Vol. I p. 115. Kerr edition).

The late Harold Laski. who wrote quite sympathetically about Marx, gave an astonishing interpretation to the labour theory, in his book Communism (Home University Library 1927, p.95):

Thus we can measure the amount of labour-power in each man's effort, and so determine scientifically how he ought to be paid.

Laski borrowed this from A.D. Lindsay's book Karl Marx’s Capital (page 61). Lindsay wrote “The Labour Theory of Value is misleading. It is primarily interested in what a man ought to get in reward for his labour”. Both Lindsay and Laski were quite wrong. No such idea entered Marx's head and it is impossible even to guess what can have given Laski and Lindsay this strange notion.

Much has been made by critics of the allegation that in Volume I of Capital Marx put forward the theory that commodities exchange at value and then changed his mind and concluded in Volume III that some commodities permanently sell above their value and others below their value. The critics failed to notice Marx’s explanation in Volume I that he was first dealing with value and would later deal with its price form and that they were not identical. There was, for example, the footnote on page 244 of Volume I (Kerr edition):

The calculations in the text are intended merely as illustrations, and in them, therefore. it is assumed that prices are equal to value. In Book Three we shall learn that even in the case of average prices no such simple assumption can be made.

As for the critics' assumption that the alleged change of mind took place later, Louis Boudin pointed out that "most of the third volume, and particularly those portions of it which are supposed to modify the first Volume, were actually written down by Marx in its present form before the publication of the first Volume". (Theoretical System of Karl Marx, page 133.)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

Mention has already been made of the way in which the emergence of Keynes as the leading economist pushed into the background what Marx had written about unemployment and depression. The reason for this was obvious: if, as was almost universally believed, “full employment” was guaranteed for all time, theories about unemployment and depressions ceased to be of interest.

The almost total disregard of what Marx had to say about inflation is less easy to explain. That it should have been disregarded in this country in the period of nearly 100 years before 1914 when the gold standard operated is understandable, because there was no inflation. Why then has there been no interest in Marx’s explanation in the nearly forty years of continuous inflation since World War II? One reason is that, while much has been written about other aspects of Marx's writing, his economics have stayed out of favour even among many people who profess to be Marxists. A second reason is that many of the latter appear to be unaware that Marx had something to say about inflation. A third reason has been that when Keynesian doctrines began to fall into disrepute because of the failure of the “full employment" policy, attention went to the monetarists led by Professor Milton Friedman, who added to the confusion with his absurd remark that Marx, too, was a monetarist.

It is beyond dispute that the policies of Labour and Tory governments have led to the present price level being at least ten times what it was in 1945. (Prices have risen by over 50 per cent under the Thatcher government). It is also beyond dispute that all the governments up to 1979 have claimed to be following Keynesian policies; yet the Keynesian document, the 1944 Employment Policy endorsed by the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties in the national government, proclaimed the intention of seeking to maintain a “more or less stable price level". It is also true that while Keynes himself advocated short term use of inflation to reduce real wages in certain circumstances, his long-term aim was “allowing wages to rise slowly while keeping prices stable" (General Theory page 271). It is at least arguable that if Keynes had lived to see what was being done in his name he would have disowned it.

Why then have prices been rising continuously for over forty years? Marx’s answer would have been that it became a possibility with the abandonment of the gold standard in 1931, and became an actuality through the increase of the currency (notes and coin) in circulation with the public, from under £500 million in 1938 to nearly £11,000 million. The gold standard background is important. While the gold standard operated the pound sterling was. by law, a fixed weight of gold (about a quarter of an ounce). The effect was that the notes could never deviate, except marginally, from the value of the legally fixed equivalent weight of gold. As it was said at that time, "a Bank of England note is as good as gold", and it was everywhere accepted as such. Now the notes are “inconvertible" and their purchasing power steadily declines through excess issue.

Marx defined it as follows:

If the quantity of paper money issued were double what it ought to he, then, as a matter of fact. £1 would be the money-name not of a quarter of an ounce of gold but of one-eighth of an ounce of gold. The effect would be the same as if an alteration had taken place in the function of gold as a standard of prices. Those values that were previously expressed by the price of £1 would now be expressed by the price of £2. (Capital. Vol. I page 144 in the Kerr edition)

Several points have to be noted. What Marx meant by "what it ought to be" was the total quantity of gold that would circulate with a wholly gold coin currency. It was an application of his labour theory of value, gold having value like all other commodities. He was not saying (as did some quantity theorists) that any increase of inconvertible paper currency causes prices to rise. The rise occurs only to the extent that the quantity of notes is in excess of “what it ought to be". If, for example, production and population increase, the "necessary" amount of gold in circulation would increase. Other factors also affect this, including the tendency for the “necessary" amount of currency to decline with the development of transport and the banking system.

Marx also pointed out that there are other, "non-currency" factors, which affect prices, including changes in the value of commodities and the rise of prices in a boom and fall in a depression. (Also, while the gold standard operated, a fall in the value of gold would raise prices and a rise in the value of gold would reduce prices.) Marx made another valuable contribution to the whole issue of inflation and deflation. In accordance with his labour theory of value wages too are prices, the price of labour-power. So inflation which raises prices also raises wages. And deflation, which lowers prices, also lowers wages. Both situations are however affected by whatever ability the workers have to gain wage increases beyond the rise of other prices, or to prevent wages falling as much as other prices.

Some people have been misled by Milton Friedman's talk of controlling “money supply" into believing that he and Marx were thinking on similar lines. This is not so. Marx was talking about "currency", notes and coins, while Friedman’s doctrine is concerned with bank deposits, based on an old fallacy that the price level is related to the rise and fall of bank deposits. Keynes held the same view. In his Monetary Reform (1923 p. 128) he wrote: "The internal price level is mainly determined by the amount of credit created by the banks, chiefly the Big Five . . . The amount of credit, so created, is in its turn roughly measured by the volume of the banks’ deposits"

One last word about Keynes. Now that the Keynesians are in disarray perhaps some of them will look again at Keynes’ statement that Marx’s Capital was “an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be scientifically erroneous and without interest or application for the modern world".

Do they still find that convincing?

Edgar Hardcastle

Lenin's Legacy (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is irrelevant that in Russia the means of production are (mostly) not privately owned. Capital can be owned collectively: "the capitalists as a whole take direct part in the exploitation of the total working class by the totality of capital". [1] Bukharin emphasised the "class monopoly in the means of production", when "vulgar economists” had eyes only for private capitalists. [2] Engels wrote:

State ownership of the productive forces is not the answer . . . neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital . . . The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians”. [3]

Russian economic and political conditions differ from the West in that the means of production and distribution are formally owned by the state, and that there is a monopoly of political power by one party which consequently exercises monopolistic control over the means of production and distribution. Inequalities arising from the Party’s dictatorship have created a new exploiting class, powerful and privileged. "The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians."

Lenin preached and practised what Marx condemned. Lenin, a product of the Russian "intelligentsia", was caught up in the struggle against feudalism when the Russian proletariat was still only a fraction of the workforce. His policy was to control workers’ organisations by setting up secret cells. “The Party must be the vanguard, the leader of the broad mass of the working class”, he wrote. [4] Marx however declared: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves". [5]

Engels considered that in Russia "both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie exist only in sporadic form and have not passed beyond the inferior stage of development" Against Tkachev's view that Russians were "the chosen people" who could bypass capitalism altogether, he argued: "the existence of the bourgeoisie is . . . as necessary a condition for the socialist revolution as the proletariat. A person who maintains that this revolution could be carried out more easily in his country because it has neither proletariat nor bourgeoisie proves by his statement that he has understood nothing of socialism”. [6]

Marx held that Russia was not yet capitalist: “if Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation . . . she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians’’. [7] Fifty years later, Stalin presided over the ruthless process of primitive accumulation when

great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled as free and "unattached" proletarians on the labour-market . . . And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. [8]

In 1918, the Socialist Party of Great Britain declared: "there is no ground whatever for supposing that (the peasants) are ready or willing to accept social ownership of the land". Could Russia be ready for socialism? “Unless a mental revolution such as the world has never seen before has taken place, or an economic change has occurred more rapidly than history has ever recorded, the answer is ‘No'.” [9]

Since the essential preconditions for a socialist revolution did not exist, the irony of history changed Lenin and his successors into midwives of capitalism, not socialism. The “vanguard party” with its "advanced theory” had to follow the bloody path of primitive accumulation, to clear the way for the capitalism they had willed to destroy.

Lenin gained power in a backward country whose economy had collapsed. The European revolutions he confidently expected failed to occur, and no class in Russia supported socialism. “The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme Party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe", wrote Engels.[10] Since neither the economic nor the political conditions for socialism existed, any attempt to introduce socialism by abandoning the market economy and commodity production was utopian and doomed to disaster.

The Vanguard Party

Lenin claimed that "by its own forces the working class can only arrive at a trade union consciousness . . . the workers can acquire class political consciousness only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers".[11] This view did not come from Marx but from the Narodnik tradition “Neither now nor in the future is the people, left to itself, capable of achieving the social revolution. Only we. the revolutionary minority, can". wrote Tkachev. [12] In 1891 Axelrod argued that the workers' struggle was industrial, not political: “in the struggle for political freedom. the advanced sections of the proletariat follow the revolutionary circles and the fractions of the so-called intelligentsia". [12]

Lenin believed in this leadership role: “the intellectuals are good at solving questions ‘of principle'. They are good at drafting plans and supervising the execution of plans". [12] His view reflected the undeveloped state of the Russian working class. It was not held by Marx who, while recognising the importance of theory, also recognised the workers’ ability to organise themselves without the leadership of a self-appointed élite. The early utopian socialists, he wrote, saw in the proletariat only "the most suffering class . . . incapable of any historical initiative"; to them "the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat" was inconceivable. [13] These comments apply equally to Lenin.

Marx's view of the socialist revolution was that it will be achieved by the working class — "the only really revolutionary class”. They will organise themselves. Vanguardism is a denial of Marx's most basic proposition.

The Dictatorship of the Party

On leaving Switzerland, Lenin wrote: "the Russian proletariat is less organised, prepared and class-conscious than the proletariat of other countries . . . Russia is a peasant country and one of the most backward of European countries”. [14] He seized power knowing this, and knowing the Bolsheviks were a minority. To retain power he established a dictatorship.

Within weeks he created the Cheka, an “absolutely independent organisation . . . with power to carry out searches, arrests and executions". [15] Dzerzhinski. the head of the Cheka, was to become head of the VSNKh, set up to control the economy. The Constituent Assembly was dissolved, and trade unions were under the control of the Party.

Tackling starvation in the cities, Lenin declared the problem “has to be solved by military methods, with absolute ruthlessness". [16] Terror was not ruled out. “The dictatorship is a rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws", he wrote. [17] Forget democracy: "no essential contradiction can exist between the Soviet, that is, the socialist democracy, and the exercise of dictatorial power by a single person”. [18]

Marx wrote of “the dictatorship of the proletariat" meaning the organisation of the proletariat as the ruling class, as exemplified in the democratic Paris Commune. Lenin, latching on to the phrase, interpreted it to mean instead dictatorship by the vanguard with himself at the head. He echoed the Blanquist theory of "a dictatorial power, whose mission it will be to direct the revolutionary movement . . . to be strong, to act quickly, the dictatorial power will have to be concentrated in as small a number of persons as possible". [19]

Rosa Luxemburg protested:

the historical mission of the proletariat . . . is to create, in place of the bourgeois democracy. a Socialist democracy, and not to destroy democracy altogether . . . The dictatorship of the proletariat consists in the manner of application of democracy, not in its abolition . . . this democracy must be the work of the class and not of a small minority in the name of the (working) class.

She was particularly opposed to “the abolition of the most important guarantees for a healthy public life and for the labouring masses — the freedoms of the press, of association and of speech”. [20]

Marx loathed press censorship: "the censored press . . . is a flabby caricature without liberty, a civilised monster, a horror even though sprinkled with rosewater". [21] Lenin’s dictatorship demanded it.

The Missing Link

Lenjn argued that “socialism" was a transition stage to “communism”. During this "rather lengthy process”, when "all citizens would be converted into workers and employees of one huge ‘syndicate' — the whole state”, the state would wither away. [22] This confused theory is contrary to the views of Marx and Engels, who both used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably.

Lenin asserted that "the first fact that has been established with complete exactitude by the whole theory of development, by science as a whole . . . is that, historically. there must be a special stage or a special phase of transition from capitalism to communism”. [22] “Science as a whole" had nothing to do with this “fact”: believing that the workers were not ready for socialism, since their class-consciousness had to be taught them by intellectuals, he did not accept that they could make "complete communism" work. That was "utopian” — so in the meantime, the aim had to be the “transition” stage.

In this "first phase” he decreed: “all citizens (would be) transformed into the salaried employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers . . . the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory . . . escape from national accounting and control will inevitably become incredibly difficult, a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by swift and severe punishment". [22] Russia did indeed become one vast labour-camp, but it differs from what Lenin claimed for his “socialism". Bureaucracy multiplied instead of disappearing, "equal pay" was soon abandoned, and "strict accounting and control" was replaced by widespread corruption.

The unpleasant reality of the totalitarian state was masked by theories about a "socialist state” — a contradiction in terms. The existence of the state ("the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” [24]) implies and reflects the existence of an exploiting class. The state in Russia has the same function as in any other country: "the main object of the state has always been to secure, by armed force, the economic oppression of the labouring majority by the minority which alone possesses wealth”. [25]

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Marx’s conception of socialism means that, as Engels explained, “with the disappearance of an exclusively wealth-possessing minority there also disappears the necessity for the power of armed suppression. or state power”. [25] Since the state in Russia has not disappeared, after more than sixty years, we must conclude that its existence is proof positive of the existence of “an exclusively wealth-possessing class”, and exploiting class.

Ironically, Lenin in 1917 wrote opposing "the widespread view that . . . state monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can already be termed "state socialism’.” [26] However regulated and planned, he argued, the system remained capitalism. On this, at least, he was in agreement with Marx and Engels.

Charmian Skelton

References:

1. Capital Vol. Ill, chap. x.

2. The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 1914.

3. Anti-Dühring

4. Quoted by Rudolf Sprenger. Bolshevism.

5. Inaugural Address to the International Workingmen’s Association.

6. Social Problems in Russia (1874), quoted by Daniel Norman, Marx and Soviet Reality.

7. Letter, 1877.

8. Capital Vol. I. chap. xxvi.

9. Socialist Standard, August. 1918.

10. The Peasant War in Germany.

11. What Is To Be Done? 1902 .'

12. Quoted by Sprenger, Bolshevism.

13. Communist Manifesto.

14. Quoted by R. Payne, Lenin.

15. Decrees of 20 Dec, 1917, and 26 Sept, 1918.

16. Speech of 2 Feb, 1920, quoted by Alec Nove, An Economic History of the Soviet Union.

17. The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1919.

18. Speech 28 April 1918. quoted by Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

19. Quoted by Martov, The State and Socialist Revolution. 1919.

20. The Russian Revolution, quoted by D. Norman. op. cit.

21. Quoted by D. Norman, op. cit.

22. The State and Revolution, 1917-18.

23. Left-wing Childishness and Petty Bourgeois Mentality, 1920.

24. Communist Manifesto.

25. Engels, letter to van Pappen, 1883.

26. The State and Revolution.

Marx's partner (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists cannot pay tribute to Marx without at the same time noting the role of his comrade and collaborator, Engels. It was Engels’ financial support which enabled the penurious Marx to carry out his researches into political economy.

But this financial support was not the least of Engels’ contributions. It is reckoned that about 1500 letters passed between Marx and Engels. They thought along the same lines, they spoke the same language, yet their life-experience was different. For Engels, there was the practical world of the Manchester cotton trade, he read widely, keeping himself fully informed of the latest developments in physics, chemistry and other sciences, with a special interest in comparative physiology and the controversies surrounding Darwin’s theory of evolution.

To Engels we owe volumes II and III of Marx's unfinished Capital, which he completed with difficulty from quantities of rough drafts and notes. After Marx’s death. Engels continued to publish translations and new editions of Marx’s works, providing prefaces in many languages. Yet it would be wrong to regard Engels only as Marx's editor, publisher and lifelong friend. His contributions to the socialist movement stand in their own right.

Many of the issues he discussed in his early work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, were taken up again by Marx in volume 1 of Capital. Engels' passionate indictment of slums, and the diseases and deformities of children at sweated labour (as in his analysis of the real cost of lace for fashionable ladies), such themes permeate his book. Yet there is more in it than indignation at the social evils of industrial capitalism.

Engels described how new technology and the division of labour were accompanied by the emergence of a new class, the urban proletariat. He posed the fundamental question: "What is to become of these propertyless millions who own nothing and consume today what they earned yesterday?’’ Industry, he wrote. ". . . regards its workers not as human beings but simply as so much capital for the use of which the industrialist has to pay interest under the name of wages”. Describing how competition affected the level of wages, he also emphasised the "cycles of boom and slump”; the Malthusian "surplus population” was the reserve army of the unemployed, available for industry's booms, and condemned to destitution and the Poor Law workhouses between-times.

Discussing both the value and the limitations of trade unionism (a theme to which he returned in some later writings [1]), and the main working class movements of the time. Engels criticised the English socialists for being metaphysical, lacking awareness of the significance of historical development. It seemed to him that they preached "philanthropy and universal love . . . the improvement of humanity in the abstract". He reiterated this criticism in his preface to the 1892 edition:

And today, the very people who. from the ’impartiality' of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes — these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers — wolves in sheep’s clothing.

This first socialist examination of the effects of industrial capitalism, written from the standpoint of historical materialism, touched on many issues later developed in other works by Marx and Engels. Written in Germany on Engels’ return from two years in Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class has some faults. He was not able to check all of his quotations, and some are inaccurate; later, he acknowledged that his prediction that with the next crisis would come the revolution was “youthful ardour”.

Although the Communist Manifesto was published as their joint work, Engels himself expressly stated:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto — that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the w'hole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggle — this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx. [2]

One persistent criticism of Marx is that human behaviour is said to be influenced exclusively by class interests and material factors and nothing else. This is a gross distortion and Engels explicitly argued against such nonsense:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I has ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic role is the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. [3]

In much of Engels' writing, we find the dialectical method explained. He considered phenomena as evolving through often complex interactions. His conception of history was not a simplistic model of a superstructure of laws, religions, ideologies and dogmas perched on top of a separate economic base, with something like a damp course separating one from another. On the contrary, the various elements of the superstructure "also exercise their influence upon the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form"'. [3]

Criticisms of Marx as an "economic determinist” arise from "the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction. These gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once a historic element has been brought into the world by other, ultimately economic causes it reacts, can react upon its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it" [4]. In Anti-Dühring Engels showed that science had revealed just such a dialectical process in nature. There are no absolute truths, everything is changing: "motion is the mode of existence of matter".

Anti-Dühring supplies a thorough grounding in dialectical materialism, applied not only to science and philosophy (attacking with gusto the nonsense about "eternal truths" propounded by metaphysical thinkers), but also to the development of socialist theory from "Utopian" socialism to "scientific” socialism. Some chapters from Anti-Dühring were soon republished as a pamphlet, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, and the central section of the book ("Political Economy”) serves as a helpful introduction to Marx’s Capital. Both the book and the pamphlet had an immediate and lasting influence in many countries.

In his next book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). based on Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, Engels analysed the way civilised, class-divided society had evolved from barbaric and savage societies, and how property relationships changed family relationships. Engels also showed how the changing division of labour, with the introduction of herding, "forced women into second place": mother-right gave place to father-right. He showed how the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, so that the state "is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class". It follows that the socialist has no choice but to emphasise that every class struggle is a political one.

The superficial objection to socialism — that it is against "human nature” — is based on ignorance of the fact that civilised society, with its class divisions and state coercive institutions, "has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it (the state), that had no conception of the state and state power". Engels described primitive societies which managed their affairs democratically and without the coercion that is considered right and natural today. Such societies demonstrate that it is not "human nature" which requires humanity to be divided into nation-states and opposing classes, or which would make socialism impossible.

This article has only discussed Engels's main works. There were others which are both readable and helpful. How far was the theory of "Marxism” his work? His own view was emphatic and consistent:

What I contributed — at any rate with the exception of a few special studies — Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved . . . Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name. [5]

Charmian Skelton

References:

1. Cf. The Wages System (Progress Publishers)

2. Preface to the German edition. 1883

3. Letter to Bloch, 1890 (Marx and Engels — basic writings ed. Feuer, Fontana)

4. Letter to Mehring, 1893 (Feuer)

5. Ludwig Feuerbach, 1886 (Chap. IV. footnote)

Proper Gander: Realistically altruistically (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage has clocked up 32 series of ‘witty, irreverent’ conversations on science-related subjects, helmed by physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince. A recent edition asked ‘How selfish are we really?’, although the panellists focused on the flipside of selfishness: altruism, discussing the notion through the frameworks of psychology and evolutionary biology. Psychologist Matti Wilks and comedian Jo Brand give our usual definition of altruism as someone making an effort to be kind to another person with no expectation of anything in return.

Steve Jones, a professor of genetics, defines it in a more Darwinian way as an act which reduces someone’s fitness to survive (by using their time and energy on something they don’t directly gain from) and which increases someone else’s fitness. Superficially, it could seem counter-intuitive to do this, but as Steve clarifies, our genes will spread if we benefit our group overall, and our brains are wired to get a positive feeling when we behave in a nice way. In day-to-day life we don’t tend to think about altruism like this, and run with a general inclination to be helpful with a background assumption of ‘reciprocal altruism’, that if we act altruistically towards someone, then in future they will act similarly.

The panel ponders the extent to which this exists across the animal kingdom, particularly among our distant relatives. Steve says chimps engage in reciprocal altruism by picking lice off each other, although they also fight more than homo sapiens, which is why we’ve had the evolutionary advantage. Our ancestors went from living and collaborating in extended families to larger groups, and he adds that reciprocal altruism was later embedded by religions which have ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ among their principles, with problems arising because as he says wryly, religions hate each other. He mentions that the structure of The Bible and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species are ‘remarkably similar’, both starting with describing origins and ending with ‘mysterious stuff which you don’t understand’.

Psychologists have aimed to explain altruism through research into our views and behaviour. Matti refers to studies which found that people are prone to empathise with and be altruistic to those they feel akin to, such as Americans giving money to victims of the California wildfires rather than to people in need elsewhere. Children have been understood to also be ‘parochial’ in their ethical outlook, although Matti’s own research has shown they can be more likely than adults to say we should help people in faraway places. This may be because they haven’t yet been socialised to see some people as ‘other’.

The programme doesn’t consider how the type of society we live in shapes relations between people and therefore how we behave altruistically, although it gives numerous examples of this happening. There is the ‘identifiable victim effect’, shown in tests when people gave more money to a charity which used a picture of one person in need than when a picture of several people was shown. While this ostensibly demonstrates that we find it easier to be empathetic and altruistic to individuals rather than groups, the effect depends on there being a context of scarcity and charity, and possibly notions of ‘otherness’ too. Any conclusions drawn about altruism in these studies only apply to this societal situation, rather than necessarily being basic truths of what it is to be human. Further research has found that we’re less altruistic towards large groups, and this could also be socially conditioned. When Matti is asked how altruism expands from small groups (where its benefits are most obvious) to bigger ones, she replies that psychology hasn’t done a good job of illuminating this. To give a socialist perspective not explored in the programme, perhaps wide-scale altruism happens when people see through the divisions between groups which capitalism encourages and recognise our common humanity. This may also explain something else which Matti says psychologists haven’t been able to sufficiently account for: ‘extraordinary’ altruists, those who are exceptionally altruistic to strangers without expectations of reciprocity, such as kidney donors.

Steve cites blood donation as a familiar example of a ‘purely’ altruistic act, at least in the UK, where the only payment the donor receives is a cup of tea and a biscuit. In America, people receive money for their blood, and commodifying the process at this point has meant that to minimise additional costs to profit-hungry healthcare companies, inadequate checks have been done to avoid infected blood being passed on. Matti says that elsewhere, introducing payments to donors has led to a reduction in people coming forward, as the ‘intrinsic motivation’ for doing so had gone when it became monetised.

Economic considerations with altruism are also acknowledged by Matti when she says that it’s a ‘position of privilege’ to be altruistic, meaning that people often can’t afford to give to others if they lack enough goods themselves. This isn’t a blanket rule, though, as levels of trust and compassion in a group affect the extent that altruism is the norm. To try and measure how much altruism there is, researchers have compared which groups have more or less expansive ‘moral circles’, which contain things considered to have moral concern. Trying to quantify these qualities is ‘not as pure a metric’ as comparing countries on their GDP, as Matti says. Asked which country is the most altruistic, Steve jokes that it might be Norway because there’s nothing else to do there.

Steve’s contributions from the perspective of evolutionary biology tell us that we’re primed to act in an altruistic way because this has been evolutionarily advantageous. Some sort of altruism is essential for us to be able to live in groups, especially harmoniously. How altruism is manifested, and how psychology attempts to explain it, are moulded by society’s structures. In capitalism, we are conditioned to view some groups as ‘other’, and behaving altruistically happens through the constraints which a market-driven, divisive society imposes.

Mike Foster

How we live and how we might live - Part 8 (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

‘[The claim] that every individual is required to work is a social convention and disciplinary apparatus rather than an economic necessity’ (Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work).

The post-capitalist society being argued for here is one where productive activity is taken up voluntarily by individuals, and access to the social product is open and free. Last month we showed how an objection often made that members of such a society would prefer to lie down and starve rather than do anything to meet their needs was unfounded. We can now look at the many immediate benefits that the structure of such a society would bring even before it developed more elaborate institutions. We have already seen how a system of free access would render ‘greedy’ behaviour pointless or counterproductive. We can now show that the same system of society would undermine the lazy-person argument.

The most immediate impact a free-access society is likely to have on its members would be a huge reduction in the amount of effort they would need to put in to sustain it. Capitalism is immensely inefficient in its use of human labour. Its system of corralling individuals, families and businesses into independent and competing property units, and then routing production through the profit motive, requires a gigantic social apparatus to sustain it. Not only does it force capitalism to maintain an elaborate monetary mechanism, it also requires a means of managing the resulting inefficiencies. Moreover, the competitive nature of the system creates much duplicated effort, and results in a great deal of labour being devoted to the production of useless and shoddy goods.

Wasted labour

In almost all capitalist states large numbers of jobs are dedicated to the management of a central banking system which, besides making valiant attempts at stabilising capitalism’s financial system, concerns itself with the production and issue of money. Upon this foundation whole industries have developed to finance business operations and to service the system’s property relationships. The pensions, insurance and brokerage industries are three of the largest of this kind. Out of a total UK working population of 43 million people well over one million are employed in this sector alone.

The property system also requires capitalist governments to employ armies of civil servants and local government officers to devise and administer welfare and unemployment payments to maintain the workforce through periods of unemployment, to provide for those unable to work, and to top-up the incomes of those whose wages are inadequate. Governments also employ workers to register ownership of land and property, assess and collect taxes, enforce weights and measures, etc. These systems require not only labour for direct planning and administration but also for the production and development of equipment such as computer hardware and software, buildings, stationery products, transport systems and sources of energy.

The bulk of capitalism’s legal systems, its judiciaries and police forces, is dedicated overwhelmingly to adjudicating property contracts, property disputes, and property transgressions, along with crimes against people motivated by monetary gain. Businesses based on gambling like casinos, amusement arcades, bookies, betting shops and stock exchanges flourish in the win-lose system that is central to capitalism. Capitalist states consume labour in the production of armaments and military hardware, for sale to others as well as for their own use. They maintain military personnel to further the interests of businesses within their territories in the international competition for markets, resources, trade routes, and the ability to project power and manoeuvre strategically to secure these essentials. In the aftermath of conflict labour is then deployed for rebuilding what has been destroyed.

Monetary tasks

In the world of business, firms of all kinds must dedicate labour resources to monetary tasks such as bookkeeping, accounting and debt collecting, while the demands of profit maximisation through competitive sale on the market forces them to devote huge labour resources to the advertising and marketing of brands and products. Companies work ceaselessly to bombard us with advertising online, in newspapers and magazines, on TV, at the cinema, on roadside hoardings, on the sides of lorries and buses, on bus shelters and railway platforms and on every available space. Capitalist companies employ labour to research and implement sophisticated psychological techniques for creating artificial wants in consumers. We are pressurised into buying by limited time offers, or into believing we are getting a bargain by supposed discounts, or into purchasing a lifestyle or an identity through branded items. In-store lighting, music, shelf placement and shelving layouts are designed to exploit our instincts and vulnerabilities. ‘Product placement’ on our favourite video channels keeps goods relevant to our interests in the forefront of our minds. Online ‘organic communities’ built around brands proliferate to keep us talking about a company’s products. PR consultants like the notorious Frank Luntz gleefully explain in their writings the techniques used to manipulate the public by a careful choice and placing of words and images.

And we submit to all of this because capitalism’s restless search for profit has uprooted or unsettled our communities. It has isolated us emotionally and economically. We buy stuff to fill up an emotional void. A halo of excitement surrounds each new product on the shelf or online platform and entices us to buy. At home, the excitement persists for a few days or weeks, but then fades and the exciting object becomes just one more thing we have. Our new possession morphs into junk or household clutter, or it falls apart or goes out of fashion. Still hungry, still unsatisfied, we dispose of it to make room for more. And more labour is then eaten up in transporting and disposing of the waste.

Planned obsolescence

Since the 1950s capitalism’s drive to maximise profit by ramping up sales has increasingly taken on various forms of planned obsolescence, so much so that it is now a regular sales strategy. Companies produce cheap products that soon fall apart and have to be quickly replaced. Parts or whole products are entombed in plastic or in spot-welded metal casings rendering them inaccessible and unrepairable. Companies use screws with proprietary heads that cannot be removed with an ordinary screwdriver. Spare parts are quickly withdrawn from sale, or they are sold at exorbitant prices that make it cheaper to replace the whole item. New components are designed to be incompatible with old ones. White goods that once were built to last 30+ years now break down in six or seven. Fashion houses rush out new fashions weekly or even daily. Smart phone manufacturers introduce new designs every year, simultaneously swamping public spaces with advertising, while about the same time punters begin to notice that their old phones are unaccountably starting to go slow.

A great deal of labour in capitalism’s competitive society is mopped up in the production of consumer goods that originate not in the spontaneous wants and demands of the population but in the requirements of profit making. In the mid-20th century, pundits predicted that rapidly advancing technology would result in a rise in the productivity of labour. As a result, they believed we would have to work fewer hours in the future. As early as 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes declared that by the millennium, when his generation’s grandchildren had grown to adulthood, no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week. Keynes was right about capitalism’s drive towards increased productivity. He was wrong, however, about the forces that drive capitalism. In a profit system capital takes on a life of its own. It becomes ravenous. It must constantly seek out new outlets for investment, new ways of creating ever more capital. Inevitably this means that new products, new services are constantly being puffed into existence. Instead of reducing the work needed by society, the profit motive keeps us at work generating ever more ephemeral stuff. So we get not just the kind of unproductive work that the late anthropologist David Graeber referred to as ‘bullshit jobs’, but jobs dedicated to producing bullshit products, and then to marketing them to the ‘consumer’.

Eliminating the profit system

By eliminating capitalism’s class system together with its profit motive, huge amounts of unnecessary labour and whole industries would cease to exist. In the same move, the direct connection between production and consumption would be restored. The quantity of social effort required to meet social need would plummet, and the population would gain a new level of social control over its labour time. It would be free at last to decide how much effort it wanted to expend on production and how it wanted to use it.

Eliminating the profit system would transform the whole nature of work. When society is founded on common ownership and free access, work ceases to be ‘work’: the sale and exercise of labour power on behalf of an employer, and becomes productive activity, a voluntary social act, undertaken by individuals for social purposes. The aim of production would no longer be maximisation of profit by competing firms, but the meeting of social needs. And social needs include those of the producer as well as the consumer. Under capitalist conditions, unpleasant, mindlessly repetitive work often conducted in unhealthy conditions, with unsociable hours and overseen by a harsh disciplinary regime, is the product of the individual capitalist firm’s need to minimise costs. With the profit system removed like a glitch in software, only one social purpose for productive activity remains: the meeting of social needs.

Social psychology has known for decades that extrinsic ‘rewards’ or ‘incentives’ like wages and salaries are poor motivators for action. And to say this is already to miss something important. To a large extent, wages and salaries in capitalism are not primarily rewards or incentives. For the majority of the population they are an imposed necessity. The motivation for doing a task – any task – comes principally from intrinsic rewards, that is, from the rewards which arise out of doing the task itself. Human beings are primarily motivated by three things: by the ability to control their own lives; by the desire to master skills; and by social belonging. These are incentives that capitalism is very bad at providing. As we argued earlier, it provides intrinsic incentives only occasionally and only in certain industries where profits are temporarily above average and where there are shortages in the labour market.

In a post-capitalist world of common ownership and free access where class conflicts of interest are eliminated, communities engaged in productive activities can organise their work to meet those human needs for control, for mastery and for community. They can provide themselves with conditions of work that maximise their own satisfaction, and not the profits of their employers. Under these conditions productive activity becomes not a sacrifice of time and effort for an extrinsic wage, but a collective activity carried on for collective ends and as a seamless part of a community’s social life.

The final article in this series next month will dive deeper into what motivates human beings and answer the question of who will do the dirty work.

(A representative list of tasks required by capitalism’s money system is given in Chapter 3 of the SPGB’s pamphlet: ‘From Capitalism to Socialism: How we Live and how we Could Live').

Hud.