John Prescott: a Labour man through and through (2025)

John Prescott in 1966.

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many of the obituarists of the late Lord Prescott quoted him as saying that despite all his achievements, he’d be known for that one punch on a protestor on the campaign trail in Rhyl. The more serious obituaries covered his career as a politician, achieving the high office of Deputy Prime Minister, and alluding to the Jaguars and the affair. Tony Blair himself came out and was full of praise for Prescott, and acknowledged how much his premiership needed its deputy. Corbynites remembered the time he defended their man on Question Time. Above all, though, his Lordship was a man of the Labour Party through and through, and it is worth going back behind the Punch and Judy of high office to the thing that first brought him to prominence: the 1966 seamen’s strike.

The seamen’s strike

Prescott was one of the co-authors of a pamphlet Not Wanted on Voyage: The Seaman’s Reply published by the National Union of Seamen, Hull Dispute Committee, in June 1966. It was written because ‘owing to the biased nature of the Pearson Inquiry Report recently published it is vitally necessary that a counter-balance is put out to put the seamen’s fight into perspective’. They alleged that ‘so biased is the Pearson Report against the seamen’s case that one cannot but feel that it was simply set up to capture public opinion, including trade union and Labour Party opinion – which so far has supported the seamen – and marshal it against us’.

Much of the pamphlet deals with the minutiae of overtime and pay rates, but the core claim for the seamen was for a 40-hour week at £14. As the historian EP Thompson described the strike: ‘The British seamen, after decades of near company unionism had accomplished that most difficult of industrial actions (in an industry whose members may at any point be scattered across the seven seas), a national strike with high morale and solidarity’ (Writings by Candelight, p. 53). The Wilson government infamously alleged that the strike was prompted by Communist Party agitators, claiming ‘The moderate members of the seamen’s executive were terrorized by a small professional group of Communists or near Communists.’ As Thompson notes, there were no Communists on the seamen’s executive.

The authors alleged ‘Our case has not been treated on its merits. Social justice has been overridden by political expediency.’ They claimed that ‘the Government’s obsession with the incomes policy has been evident throughout the strike. We had to be beaten, because our claim was a “breach in the dyke of the incomes policy”’. Hence, although the powers were never used, the Wilson government declared a state of emergency over the strike. ‘There is a wealth of evidence we could produce to show that behind the Government, in its resistance to our just demands, stand the International Banks, the financial powers that really direct the Government’s anti-wage policy.’

Prescott and his co-author went into detail as to how the make-up of the Pearson Commission indicated that the fix was on, in particular, how the appointment of Joe O’Hagan (General Secretary of the furnace maker’s union) to the commission was intended to neutralise any opposition in the TUC, as he held the chair of the General Purposes committee. This is indicative of their approach of looking at the personnel involved in the structures of power. They went into great detail over the personal connexions between shipping owners and the press barons.

They noted of the shipping industry:

‘In the past, British shipping contributed on a major scale to the earning of foreign exchange, but in this field too, its recent record is one of consistent decline. Between 1952 and 1962 shipping’s contribution to Britain’s earnings abroad fell by over £111 million, or by an average of 3½% per year.’

Likewise: ‘Most of our major competitors developed the bulk container transport method during the 1950’s, whilst our shipowners […] did nothing’. This, they alleged, was down to the ‘shipowners’ incompetence’. Their complaint, essentially, was that the wrong people were in charge.

‘This backward, selfish group of owners, through their spokesman, arrogantly claim (ignoring the whole miserable record we have described) that “the national interest” so often thrown at the seamen by Press, TV and Government, IS THE SAME THING AS THE SHIP OWNERS’ INTERESTS’ [emphasis in original].

They urged the nationalisation of the industry but clearly envisaged that as being a mere change in the personnel at the top, and still cast the question of how shipping serves ‘the national interest’ in a world of competing states.

Poacher turns gamekeeper

Prescott and his co-author also alluded to Labour’s previous record, stating:

‘The goodwill of the bankers, the ill-will of the working class. How familiar a story that is of Labour Governments, when we cast our minds back to Ramsay MacDonald and the 1929-31 government.’

Nowadays, we could add a few more Labour governments to that list.

Prescott had first stood for Parliament the same year as the strike. In 1970 he got elected MP for Hull East. By the 1990s, he was the shadow transport spokesman, extolling ‘public private partnerships’ as an alternative to nationalisation and a way of getting the industry to serve the national interest. He would later be part of the Blair government that institutionalised PFI as the default way of funding government projects.

By 2002 he was standing in the House of Commons, updating MPs on the situation with regard to the firefighters’ strike:

‘This Government cannot be asked to find additional money outside the agreed Government spending limits. To do so would risk fundamental and lasting damage to the economy. An inflationary pay rise for the firefighters would lead to inflationary pay rises elsewhere in the public sector, and that in turn would lead to job losses, inflation and mortgage rises.’ (tinyurl.com/PrescottHOC20022226)

He affirmed that ‘The Bain review has proposed a way forward. That is the basis for discussion.’ He clearly learned the lessons of the Wilson government. ‘The goodwill of the bankers. The ill-will of the workers’. An epitaph for Prescott and the Labour Party.

Pik Smeet

Working class China (2025)

Pamphlet Review from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalist China and Socialist Revolution. By Simon Hannah. Resistance Books, 2023. 67pp.

This pamphlet begins with some indisputable truths: ‘The working class in China is massive – the largest in the world. But they often work in terrible conditions with few effective rights and no independent trade unions. They labour under an authoritarian government calling itself “socialist with Chinese characteristics”.’ Its author then goes on to further characterise modern China as a country run by a ‘pro-business’ party, which, while calling itself ‘communist’, is so only in name. Nor is he impressed by those on the political left who defend China simply on the grounds that its government has massively developed the country’s productive forces and in so doing has lifted millions out of absolute poverty. He points out that this process has not been a prerogative of China and that globally capitalism has ‘lifted millions of people out of abject poverty, whilst condemning millions of others to live in misery’. He goes on to say that ‘the Chinese state corresponds to all the definitions of a capitalist state’, in which ‘both the state sector and the private sector follow capitalist imperatives of growth’.

Nothing here at all that socialists would disagree with. But disagreement does start when he asserts that this state of affairs (ie, China being capitalist) only began in 1976 ‘with the economic and political reforms after the death of Chairman Mao’. The author does recognise that things weren’t great under Mao and that the various schemes adopted by his regime such as the ‘five-year plan’ and ‘the Great Leap Forward’ were abject failures that heaped suffering on the people and led to, among other things, mass famine. Yet, at the same time he definitely soft-peddles that disastrous rule, even referring to it at one point as ‘a new course towards socialism’, albeit one that didn’t go to plan. But little is said about that overall, with the main criticism reserved for what happened after Mao’s death when Deng Xiaoping took over leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, as quite rightly observed here, opened up the economy to the world market, something he described, in a supreme exercise of smoke and mirrors, as ‘using capitalism to develop socialism’. The writer then goes into significant detail to show how this process of integration into the world market continued and intensified in the decades that followed continuing to the present day and how it was coupled with increasingly authoritarian political control by the CCP, which has managed, sometimes by brute force, to keep the lid on protest, as, for example, in the slaughter of students and workers at the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989. As for the current situation in China under the leadership of Xi Jinping, he quotes the words of a recent Hong Kong opposition activist: ‘Today’s CCP, with its fusion of both political and economic power, its hostility towards people enjoying basic rights of association and free speech, its xenophobia, nationalism, Social Darwinism, cult of a corporate state, “unification” of thought, etc., is now comparable to a fascist state’. And he points to the fact that China, in its mix of state and private ownership, has more billionaires than any other country in the world, while workers are largely denied independent trade unions and, if they protest, are likely to be arrested or battered into submission by the police.

None of this can be denied, but what is hard to understand is how the author can see redeeming features in what happened previously (ie, under Mao) and can somehow see what is happening now as fundamentally different from – and worse than – the repressive and tyrannical state capitalism that existed then. He correctly points to the fact that ‘state ownership does not equate to socialism’, but it did not under Mao either. Mao’s journey was just as much down ‘the capitalist road’ as that of his successors.

As to how China will develop in the future, the author rightly sees this as unpredictable, but avers that the ruling party may not be ’as homogenous and united as it pretends to be’ and its leader, Xi Jinping, not quite so impregnable as he may seem. So he does not see it as impossible that China may develop into ‘a liberal democratic capitalist state on the model of Western democracy’ or into ‘a Russian style capitalism controlled by a small and powerful aristocracy’. But, as he makes clear, any such arrangement would still be capitalism. As an alternative to this, he calls for a society ‘not based on profit but on need, social development and human capacity’. As to whether this can happen in a single country or whether it must be global, there appears to be some contradiction in his mind. The fact that he sometimes makes reference to ‘socialist countries’ suggests that he does not necessarily see socialism as a world system, as we insist it must be. At the same time he does talk about the need for ‘an international working class movement’, and the ‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’ group under whose aegis this pamphlet is published states its aim as ‘social transformation, based on mass participatory democracy’. Whatever the case, it is clear that socialism, meaning a system of free access to all goods and services based solely on human need, cannot exist in just one country. It must, by definition, be a world society and one that has to be consciously brought into being and then organised cooperatively by a majority of workers who have taken democratic action to opt for it.

Howard Moss

SPGB Meetings (2025)

Party News from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Party News (2025)

Party News from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

London branch stood a candidate in the local council by-election in Junction ward of Islington council on 28 November. It is a ward that we had contested three times before. This time, a candidate endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn, the local MP, stood and mounted an intensive campaign of leafletting and door-knocking, resulting in more local interest than normally in such elections. In private he claimed to be a socialist but, fortunately, did not add to the confusion by repeating this on his leaflets. Not that this prevented the Tory candidate claiming that there were ‘four varieties of socialism on offer’. Apart from the Corbynist and the Labourite, we were the only one of the other five candidates who did any leafletting. Five members distributed some 3000 leaflets, covering every accessible letterbox in the ward. The result, on a turnout of just over 21 percent was: Labour 785; Jackson Caines (Corbynist) 550; Green 219; LibDem 156; Conservative 113; Independent 97; Socialist 22.

There is another council by-election pending, in Lambeth, due to a councillor climbing further up the greasy pole by becoming an MP which the branch is intending to contest when he finally gets round to resigning.

Tiny Tips (2025)

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

We may be much more entertained by charity now. But on account of the Band Aid format, we are now arguably less knowledgeable about why some people suffer terribly around the world – and in no better a position to put an end to it. 

(The Conversation)

Today, political scientists and pollsters use ‘the working class’ to describe members of the work force who do not have a college degree. By that definition, the number of working-class Americans has been declining as the country has grown wealthier and more educated. According to the Census Bureau, nearly 38 percent of Americans had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2022, up from just 17 percent in 1980. There’s a major exception to that common definition, however. Marxist scholars use “working class” quite differently—typically encompassing anyone who depends on wages to survive, regardless of their educational experience. 

(Reason)

In fact, the Democratic Party, the party of the slavocracy, of Jim Crow and of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Vietnam War, has never been a party of the working class. It has, and will always be, a capitalist party. Sanders’ political role…is to use his nominally ‘independent’ designation to provide the Democratic Party with a veneer of credibility in order to contain opposition to the whole capitalist system. 

(WSWS)

What happened during the pandemic especially, was a good tutorial about how to do things. First of all, what pandemic showed us was the Hollywood utopian, you know, imagination of the future of humanity is absolutely bullshit, because when crises happen, people tend to help each other and be in solidarity, and they become even more, even loving, you know, towards each other. So we have to imagine politics as a, you know, natural disaster or like a disaster, like a pandemic, and we have to act like that.

(New Internationalist)

Bregman believes we should be more positive about human potential. ‘We’re at a point in our history where we have such amazing opportunities to make the world a wildly better place’, he says. ‘Our best days are in the future’. 

(Prospect)

A ‘very rare’ 77-year-old slice of the cake served at Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s wedding sold for £2,200 ($2,800) this week, according to auction house Reeman Dansie. The cake, which no longer looks edible, survived for almost eight decades since the wedding day on November 20, 1947.

(CNN)

Yunus’ claims to be overseeing a transition to ‘true democracy’, aimed at realising ‘social justice’ after the increasingly authoritarian rule of Hasina, are belied by the brutal attacks on garment workers

(WSWS)

‘The Turkish police catch 100 to 150 migrants every night. They have no mercy on them. They break their arms and legs. 

(BBC)

I’m all for supporting a new and viable political group but let’s look at what we already have before trying to reinvent the wheel.

(Guardian)

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

Halo Halo! (2025)

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

Bash the bishop

Not going to do a ‘told you so’ but how often have we said, don’t put your faith in leaders? The Church of England was founded by Henry VIII, the serial wife abuser and uxoricide. Mad at the Pope who wouldn’t allow him to divorce his first wife, Henry formed the Church of England, put himself in charge of it and disbanded Catholic monasteries, convents and religious institutions. As is the case up to the present day, a lot of wealth was held by these establishments. So Henry snaffled the lot.

In November 2024 the CEO of the C of E – known as the Archbishop of Canterbury – resigned after it was found that he had failed dramatically to safeguard the victims, young males, of a serial abuser. ‘The Bishop of Birkenhead said she couldn’t guarantee that abuse is not still going on in the Church. “We still have this institutional problem where we are not putting victims and survivors at the centre. In some ways, we are not a safe institution”’. The British monarch is always supreme head of the Church of England. Twenty six bishops including the Archbishop of Canterbury have a seat in the House of Lords and are entitled to vote.

Anime

Anime is animation, hand drawn or computer generated. It originated in Japan.

The Web says that in 2023 the global Anime industry was worth over thirty-one billion dollars. So what does anime have to do with religion?

The Catholic Church is holding a jubilee this year. Designated Pilgrims of Hope, it’s being held apparently as ‘a year of hope for a world suffering the impacts of war, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a climate crisis.’ Sure, that’s going to make a big difference to a world that continues to be beset by all the ills inherent in the capitalism system.

So, the church has, like football teams and various big business and military organisations, got itself a mascot. The mascot is of a young blue-haired, wide-eyed, cross-wearing female named Luce, Italian for light. The word ‘mascot’ comes from the French meaning ‘lucky charm.’ Sounds a bit secular to us. The resemblance to anime characters is unmistakable.

The Vatican said that the mascot was ‘part of the Vatican’s goal to engage with the pop culture so beloved by our young people’. She, Luce, (pronouns not specified), debuted at an Italian comics and games convention in October 2024. One assumes the ad agencies responsible for this are laughing all the way to the bank. Public reaction, as to any form of capitalist or religious propaganda, should be that of The Who – won’t get fooled again.

A more appropriate mascot would have been the Pardoner from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The equivalent of a snake-oil salesman, the Pardoner travelled around swindling folk, persuading them that if they bought his relics they would be absolved from their sins.

DC

Cooking the Books: Einstein got it right (2025)

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

For the first issue of Monthly Review in May 1949 Einstein contributed an essay entitled Why Socialism?. He began by explaining that humans are naturally social animals but that the structure of present-day society prevents this from being properly expressed, leading to the ‘crippling of the social consciousness of individuals’, and that ‘the economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the source of the evil’.

He explained the workers’ situation under capitalism:

‘For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production – although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists’ requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.’

The ideological apologists of capitalism are still trying to refute this as a recent contribution to Mises Wire, entitled ‘Albert Einstein and the Folly of Marxist Sympathies’, shows. The author, Kgatlhiso Darius Leshaba, challenged Einstein’s endorsement above of Marx’s theory of worker exploitation:

‘The first problem we run into is the concept of value. It has been firmly established that economic value isn’t intrinsic, that “The measure of value is entirely subjective in nature.” Value is not transferred somehow from labor to product. In fact, the direction of the imputation of value is exactly the other way around. The economic value of labor is determined by the value of the final product it aids in producing’ (tinyurl.com/bdh7d6je).

Leshaba was quoting Carl Menger (1840-1921), the founder of the so-called Austrian School of economics, who came up with a theory aimed at refuting Marx or, in the words of the Mises Institute, ‘corrected theoretical errors of the old classical school. These errors concerned value theory, and they had sown enough confusion to make the dangerous ideology of Marxism seem more plausible than it really was’ (tinyurl.com/3r7n4wy2).

To say that economic value is ‘entirely subjective’ is to confuse use-value and exchange-value and assumes that production is carried on simply for the use of consumers. Obviously a commodity, as an item of wealth produced to be sold, has to be useful to somebody, otherwise it wouldn’t sell. The demand for it could be said to be ‘subjective’ in the sense that it depends on the buyers’ preferences but this merely explains the pattern of (paying) demand for something. It does not explain the supply.

No firm is going to produce a commodity unless it calculates that the income from selling it will at least (in practice more than) cover the prices of what it had to buy to produce it. So cost of production comes into it and that does not depend on the preferences of consumers. The claim that production costs (including wages) are subjective because their value is derived from being used to produce some consumer good whose value is said to be subjective is just assuming what has to be proved. It doesn’t explain the division of what national income statisticians call ‘added value’ into wages and profits and is not taught these days even in bourgeois economics.

Blog update

I just updated the Film Reviews and Theatre Reviews pages on the blog . . . which is a cheap excuse for me to urge you to check out those pages on the  blog . . . and an even cheaper excuse for me to urge Socialists reading the blog to write more film reviews and theatre reviews for future Socialist Standards.

Film Review: Miracle on 34th Street (1947) (2025)

Film Review from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We deconstruct a ‘classic’ film that is always shown on some TV channel over Christmas.

For those who don’t know, this is a Christmas film about a nice, elderly man – called Kris Kringle – who gets a job as a department store Santa Claus, but thinks he really is Father Christmas. Kringle befriends: a lawyer (whom he later moves in with); his girlfriend (whom he also works for at Macy’s department store); and her little girl from a previous relationship.

The story has two main plots that connect. The first is about a court case in which the lawyer has to prove that Kringle is the real Santa Claus in order to stop him from being put in a mental hospital. The second plot is about Doris (the single mother) who won’t let her daughter believe in Santa Claus or use her imagination in any way, because she wants her to have a realistic outlook on life. It’s not entirely clear why she decided to do this, but it has something to do with Doris’s husband/Susan’s father abandoning them both.

Even though this film is regarded by many as a Christmas classic, from a socialist point of view it’s terrible. Firstly, Kris Kringle is used as a metaphor for God, with the film being an allegory about why it’s important to have faith. In that respect, the famous ending of this film is what Americans would call a giant cop-out. The New York Post Office decides to send Kringle all the letters they get from children addressed to Santa Claus (they do this to cut down on their waste). Because of this, the judge rules in favour of Kringle due to the Post Office (a branch of the US government) recognising that he is Santa Claus.

The ending of the 1994 remake makes a lot more sense. In that version, Kringle is proven to be the real Santa Claus because ‘In God We Trust’ is written on US bank notes, which shows that if the US Treasury is allowed to put its faith in God on the currency – without the requirement of evidence that God exists – then the people of New York should be allowed to believe Santa Claus is real without evidence.

Another reason why this film is bad from a socialist perspective is because of a sub-plot in which Kringle uses his position (as the department store Santa) to advise parents to go to other stores to get what their children want for Christmas if Macy’s doesn’t have it. This leads to a lot of positive feedback from customers, and also to Gimbels (Macy’s main market rival) copying them. And, wouldn’t you know it, this leads to both stores making super profits, therefore, they don’t have to compete with each other anymore. How wonderfully reformist!

In conclusion, it’s not hard to see why this is regarded as a classic. However, it’s very preachy and believes that rival businesses can and should co-operate with each other in order to optimise the interests of both capitalists and customers.

Matthew Shearn

Action Replay: Make sport great again? (2025)

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

There have been many reactions to Donald Trump winning the US presidential election, from concerns about the effects of the introduction of import tariffs to worries about the impact of the proposal to deport millions of illegal immigrants and possible consequences for global climate policies. In addition, some people have wondered what the implications for sport might be, with many power-holders, but by no means all, welcoming his return to office. He has been described as the most ‘sports-focused president’ in US history, though no doubt the interests of the American capitalist class will be at the top of his agenda.

The 2026 football World Cup will be hosted jointly by the US, Canada and Mexico. The FIFA boss, Giovanni Infantino, seems to be very friendly with Trump, and this may help to smooth over problems with visa applications and checks at the border to enter the US for players, journalists and supporters from some countries that could qualify for the tournament (Iran, for instance). The US is also hosting this year’s new 32-team Club World Cup, which has given rise to a lot of complaints about there being too many matches. And the US is preparing a joint bid with Mexico to host the 2031 Women’s World Cup. Trump has fallen out with the US women’s team, though this is unlikely to undermine the bid.

In this connection, Trump has said he would ban all transgender women from female sports, including trans-inclusive teams. But the 2028 Summer Olympics are due to be held in Los Angeles, and the International Olympic Committee lets individual sports determine their own gender policies. The IOC boss, Thomas Bach, is rather less keen on Trump, and (unlike Infantino) did not congratulate him on his re-election. Bach’s term in office ends this year, but in any case, it is not clear whether Trump would have any influence in this area.

Trump’s own sporting connections are most obviously with golf, as both player (though he is notorious for cheating) and owner of courses. It has been suggested that he might be able to end the dispute in the game between the established tour and the Saudi-funded LIV tour (see Action Replay for February 2024), and he claimed he could do this in fifteen minutes. Top golfer Rory McIlroy took Trump’s side on this, but didn’t help his case by describing Elon Musk as ‘the smartest man in the world’.

If Trump can bring an end to the war in Ukraine, then resolving the split in golf should be a piece of cake or, maybe, a six-inch putt.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: The fat of the land (2025)

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

Even a newspaper like The Sun should be asked to explain itself at times. On 22nd November its editorial said: ‘Britain’s future is bleak, sombre and perilous . . . the British are fat, lazy, complacent — and deeply in debt’.

Who are ‘Britain’ and ‘the British’ in this statement? Clearly, The Sun does not mean everyone. Harold Wilson and Edward Heath are both fat, but they are not deeply in debt with bleak futures. Denis Healey is fat. So is Reginald Maudling. The Houses of Parliament are full of fat people, and they are only outweighed by the Institute of Directors. Nobody supposes, however, that these are the target of The Sun’s unkind words and its sombre warning.

What it means is the working class, and it’s a funny thing how the idea of a working man being fat is equated with national disaster. (…) The Sun was in fact commenting on, and supporting, a report on ‘Britain’s plight’ by the Hudson Institute of America: experts say poverty is on the way. (…)

On 5th December similar forecasts and warnings were given in a review by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. According to this, in 1975 prices will rise still higher and unemployment will grow. Both teams of ‘experts’ had plans to urge. The National Institute thought import controls would prove necessary; the Hudson Institute would remedy things by ‘a new national six-year economic policy’ run by ‘Britain’s best economists and administrators’.

The latter scheme is presumably to ensure that, whatever happens, the fat and the thin remain distinguishable. How little use it would be otherwise is shown by one of The Sun’s remarks:

‘Leadership—or lack of it—is one element, of course. We are all of us unfortunate to live in an age of political pygmies. But perhaps we are already beyond the stage where we could be rescued by inspired leadership.’

Which is saying that things have come to a crisis under unimpressive dolts, but would be no better under geniuses.

The fallacy of all this is treating the impending crisis as an abnormality. Words like ‘doomsday’, ‘peril’, ‘saving Britain’ and ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ imply it to be a millennial catastrophe; but that is only a way of calling for more sacrifices from the workers. The reality is that the crisis is a normal phenomenon of capitalism.

[From the article, 'The fat of the land', by Robert Barltrop, Socialist Standard, January 1975.]

Editorial: The change of rulers in Syria (2025)

Editorial from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the brutal 50-year tyranny of the Assad dynasty collapsed last month, people danced in the streets in many parts of Syria as they contemplated an unprecedented new beginning. Joyous crowds looted the Presidential palace, while the titular head of the Ba’ath party dictatorship skulked off to Moscow.

The fall of the secular Arab nationalist dictatorship alters the balance of power between the various states in the region, with Turkey and the United States the winners and Iran and Russia the losers. The winners took quick advantage of the initial power vacuum. Turkey sent its proxies to attack the Kurdish nationalists who control a large part of Syria including the oilfields. Indeed, Turkey must have given the victorious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamists the green light to march on Aleppo and then down to Damascus.

The United States benefits from a weakened Iran, the main threat to its current domination of the wider region and the oilfields and the trade routes out of it.

Israel, too, wasted no time in exploiting this tense, multiplayer Game of Thrones scenario, by bombing Syria’s navy to the bottom of the sea, as well as a host of other targets, and pressing forward in the Golan Heights. Their reasoning is obvious. One or other group is eventually going to take power in Syria. If it’s a group that hates Israel, they can hate Israel without missiles and a navy. In a world where relations between states is based on ‘might is right’, Israel wants another weak neighbour like Lebanon.

What was surprising was the rapidity with which the dictatorship collapsed. Its conscript army was reluctant to fight and the general population, suffering from increased economic hardship due to Western sanctions (the cruel way the West employs to undermine a dictatorship it doesn’t support) was ready to welcome a change of regime

HTS seems keen to solicit international recognition, which means making some concessions to capitalist liberal democracy, but it has been designated a terrorist organisation by the West, and there’s a $10m price on the head of its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Indeed this former al-Qaeda and ISIS fighter has publicly praised the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and faced home-turf protests that his Sharia-law regime in the province of Idlib was as bad as Assad’s. But he has also faced protests by Islamic hardliners who think he’s not fundamentalist enough.

The political direction of travel is not obvious at the time of writing, and any spark could set off civil war. For the sake of the people of Syria, newly released from a tyranny that looked eternal, we can only hope not. As for the long-term future, it would seem almost churlish to point out that, if the country doesn’t go into meltdown, they’ll get the wage-slavery and the limited political ‘rights’ that workers have in many other capitalist countries, while a new privileged Syrian ruling class exploiting them emerges. That, unfortunately, is the best-case scenario, in the absence of an imminent global socialist revolution. The worst-case scenario doesn’t bear thinking about.

Socialist Sonnet No. 175: New Old Year? (2024)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

 

New Old Year?

Backward facing Janus covers those eyes

That cannot look away from the grim sights

Blighting far, far too many days and nights,

The common realisation of lies,

Told about the military murder

Of expendable civilians

For what will prove to be mere pyrrhic gains.

Then those wild firestorms and floods that occur

As climate changes but policies don’t.

And, so it was, yet another year went,

With capitalism seeming content

And secure in its pursuit of profit.

From the threshold of the old and the new,

Does Janus hold a more positive view?

 

D. A.

"In the year 2025, if man is still alive, and if the hard copy of the Standard can survive, they may find* . . ."

First post of the year should be a (brief) look back at the blog in 2024.

Unfortunately, I spread myself a little too thin in 2024. I only put up 1359 posts in 2024 which is not terrible but I was aiming for 1500 posts as a bare minimum. Too much time spent elsewhere on social media, too much time starting mini-projects which have yet to see fruition on the blog. Hopefully some of them will see the light in 2025. There are no excuses if I make the same *cough* excuse come January 1st, 2026.

A milestone of sorts was reached in late December when the blog passed 4 million hits. Two points: 1) The obvious one first: I'm under no illusion that the majority of the hits are bots, etc. However, I do know from the blog's site tracker that the blog continues to receive a healthy audience from around the world. It's pleasing to note that many of those visitors are returning viewers. The blog continues to serve its purpose of providing another online presence for socialist propaganda. (The more the merrier.) And if it's also used as nothing more than a resource for students of working class history, all the better for that. 2) The 'hits' on the blog actually exceed 4 million. When google overhauled Blogger a few years back the stats actually went back to Year Zero.

New pages were added to the top of the page in January of last year for the current regular columns in the Socialist Standard, and there are plans to add more pages in the coming calendar year. I won't say too much right now. Just watch this space.

Now to the meat of the post: the twenty most viewed posts on the blog in 2024. This is only the fourth time that I've done a 'End of the Year Stats' post, which is actually bastard annoying when you consider that 2024 was the 18th year of the blog. Think of all those missing years. 

Nice to see a couple of Ralph Critchfield ('Ivan') pieces in amongst the twenty. He really was a wonderful writer for the Standard over many decades. Interesting to note that a couple of old pieces on Lenin - including Fitzgerald's classic 1924 obituary of Lenin - continue to receive hits year on year.  The video review of the German Industrial Metal band, Rammstein, polled so high 'cos I made a point of seeking out fan pages for the band on social media, and posted the article front and centre on said pages. Steve Coleman's humbug piece probably polled so high 'cos it had Christmas in its title, and I fear it could become the blog's perennial end of the year number one because of that. Lumbered with the impossibilist equivalent of Mariah Carey singing the Declaration of Principles to the tune of 'Little Drummer Boy'.

Anyway, in the spirit of the late and great Johnny Walker, here's the countdown of the twenty most viewed posts on the blog for the year 2024.

20. Taboo (1982)

19. Elections worldwide (2024)

18. “I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him.”

17. Snap, crackle, pop . . . (1987)

16. Confusion on the left (1965)

15. Dropped the ball . . .

14. Zionism – A case study in nationalism (2024)

13. Bird’s Eye View: Howlers (2023)

12. Warnings and alerts (2024)

11. Halo Halo! (2024)

10. Labour landslides: then and now (2024)

9. Tiny Tips (2024)

8. Uncensored News and Views on Russia (1946)

7. The Passing of Lenin. (1924)

6. A plague on both their houses (2024)

5. Lenin's Distortion of Marxism (1983)

4. Historical fascism (2024)

3. New translation of Das Kapital (2024)

2. Video Review: German cultural history and socialism (2024)

1. The ghost of Christmas yet to come (1995)

*Apologies to Zager & Evans.