No let up (2025)

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

So what’s happened over the globe in the year just gone by? It’s certainly been full of news. But same old, same old. Wars, economic crises, climate mess, insecurity, poverty, homelessness, hunger, starvation. No let up. And by some measures even worse than in previous years.

In a country like Britain which has a milder version of most of these ills, even those who suffer the most tend to count themselves lucky. They may be suffering from being hard up, poorly housed, unemployed or precariously employed, but at least they’re not being bombed to smithereens or, except in very rare cases, actually starving to death. Whether managing to cope by selling their energies to an employer day by day to keep their heads above water or suffering trauma and worse from not finding a way to do this, very few look for the real cause, the root cause, of the problems that beset the society they’re obliged to live in.

Very few understand that the present society is based on class division – between the tiny few who own the means of living and enjoy an unearned income as profit and don’t need to work as wage slaves, and the vast majority who have no choice but to hawk their skills around the job market to earn a living.

Not that the people who have to do this – the working class – don’t complain about the way things are run and the organisation of the world around them. They do. But they tend to complain about each issue individually as though it’s a series of unconnected phenomena with no underlying common cause. They don’t connect the dots, which, if they did, would lead them to that root cause, which is not bad or inappropriate government policies but the whole social and economic system we live in, capitalism.

So what can be done? Well, definitely not the kind of flip from Tweedledum to Tweedledee that we saw in last year’s general election. We saw how as soon as the new administration came to power, it was beset with similar problems to the old one and is proving no more adept at dealing with them. By definition, in fact, they can’t be dealt with, since governments don’t control the system they’re supposed to govern. The system with its unpredictable, uncontrollable market forces controls them. And this forces them – whether they like it or not – to take measures which cause discontent among both workers and, as we’ve seen, even among sections of the owning class on whose behalf they operate.

The alternative? Mass global consciousness of what capitalism – the market and profit system – means in any of its forms. Mass global consciousness of the need for a different way of organising human affairs – moneyless, wageless and leaderless – based on production for use not profit, on voluntary cooperation, on free access to all goods and services, on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. If we get in any way closer to that consciousness by the end of 2025, then something at least will have been achieved.

Action Replay: Fifteen to One (2025)

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

In December last year Tom Ilube stepped down as chair of the Rugby Football Union (RFU) for England. He said that this was because ‘recent events have become a distraction from the game’. Some rugby fans thought he kept rather a low profile as chair, but there was more to these recent events than that.

The RFU chief executive Bill Sweeney was paid £742,000 for the year to June 2024, plus a bonus of £358,000, intended to make up for salary cuts during Covid. But all was not well in the governing body or in the sport more widely. The RFU had operating losses of nearly £38m and proposed to make over forty staff redundant as part of ‘restructuring’ (a standard employers’ euphemism). There have been plenty of calls for Sweeney to resign too, and some member clubs tried to call a special general meeting with a vote of no confidence in him. This was declared invalid on bureaucratic grounds, but the RFU later changed their position and agreed to hold the special meeting, but not until March at the earliest.

The RFU’s income derives from match day and event income at the England home ground of Twickenham, plus broadcast revenue, and now a massive amount from insurance company Allianz for naming rights at the stadium. But World Cup years mean fewer matches there, so smaller income.

And lower levels of the game are suffering. The Community Clubs Union says there has been a big increase in walkovers, where one club is unable to field a team, and a lack of match officials. Lost financial support from the centre plays a large part in these problems. The CCU says it intends to be ‘an independent voice of the clubs and community game’. This would mean, for instance, more equitable funding between professional and community rugby.

Back in December a BBC reporter visited Finchley Rugby Club in North London. They run three teams, fewer than in previous years, and, like other similar clubs, they play a major role in introducing young people to play the sport. As the chair says, ‘the support base for national rugby is at grassroots clubs. They’re the people who will get the international tickets and watch it on TV. This is where kids fall in love with the game.’ Grants from the RFU have been cut, and the fear is that redundancies at the centre will have a big impact on local clubs. At Finchley most of those who help out are volunteers and sponsorship is mostly in kind, rather than financially.

As so often under capitalism, those at the top do very nicely, while those lower down, whether at the centre or at local level, struggle to get by and exist on precarious terms.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: Who is Mao Tse-Tung? (2025)

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

It is the purpose of this article to show what Mao really stands for by examining The Thoughts of Chairman Mao (‘The Little Red Book’). This Chinese Bible contains extracts from Mao’s voluminous writings. There are quotes from his early works written when as a guerrilla leader, Mao (and his Red Army) were such a thorn in the side of the Chiang-Kai-Shek regime, right through to the 1960s. Now Mao’s ideas are so influential in China that they actually do serve as the equivalent of religious dogma. (…)

Mao’s own words show that he is in favour of keeping the Chinese workers in poverty. In 1958 (nine years after the revolution!) he wrote:

‘Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank’. This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing‘ (p. 36 — our emphasis).

It must be such a comfort for the poverty-stricken Chinese to know their leader thinks it is good for them to be poor. Mao does not make it clear that he thinks it is good for the leaders to be poor! (…)

In order to ensure that the workers are kept down, Mao can’t resist urging on them abstinence and sacrifice:

‘To make China rich and strong needs several decades of intense effort, which will include, among other things, the effort to practise strict economy and combat waste ie, the policy of building up our country through diligence and frugality’ (p.186).

If those words had been spoken by Wilson or Heath in crisis-ridden Britain you would not have been surprised.

The similarity between Mao and other capitalist politicians is so striking as to make one rub one’s eyes in disbelief at the sight of people in the West waving banners with Mao’s picture on them and proudly calling themselves ‘Maoists’. Mao is just as much an anti-Socialist as his one-time hero Stalin was. They both have in common the fact that they successfully exercised a dictatorship over the proletariat in their own country. When workers throughout the world learn to examine the contents of the packet and refuse just to accept the label, the fraud of Mao Tse-Tung will also be a ‘Museum piece’.

[From the article, 'Who is Mao Tse-Tung?' by Ronnie Warrington, Socialist Standard, February 1975]

Editorial: Trump – what now? (2025)

Editorial from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 20 January Donald Trump officially became president of the United States, much to the consternation of almost 50 percent of the US electorate, and many others around the world. When Trump lost the 2020 election, much relief was expressed by those who feared that he would have established some kind of dictatorship, stamping on all dissent and taking draconian measures against all ‘progressive’ forces. Similar fears are now being expressed.

He says he knows how to quickly resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict (even if he seems to have moved away from his earlier ‘single phone call’ boast). He has promised mass deportations of ‘unregistered’ people. He has vowed to counter attempts to limit fossil fuel and carbon emissions. He has proposed heavy taxes on imports from foreign countries, especially China. And he wants Greenland and the Panama Canal.

Will any of this happen? Whoever has to run the capitalist system in any country often sees their ‘best laid plans’ go awry, because capitalism cannot be controlled by governments. Trump’s desire to take over those other territories could only come to fruition if other global players inexplicably chose not to resist. And his mass deportation plans are likely to meet obstacles at local, state or international levels, making them no more successful than his previous plan to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.

His promotion of the fossil fuel industry may have earned him votes in the ‘rust belt’, but – with climate change implicated in multiple disasters including the recent Los Angeles fires – it could end up losing him support. If his confidence over the Russia-Ukraine war is based on cutting off weapons to Ukraine, he might find that Ukraine manages to get its weapons elsewhere, making him look impotent.

What would he say if such failures, or one of capitalism’s periodic downturns, lose him support? Some say he won’t care, because he will have established a police state that lets him rule unhindered. But advanced capitalist democracies like the US, and others such as the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Holland, Sweden, South Korea, etc, have well-entrenched mechanisms for preventing dictatorships. That’s true even if the would-be dictator surrounds himself, as Trump seems to be doing, with a cohort of compliant disciples who compete to express the most extreme views.

Examples of Trump’s puerile narcissism abound, for example, pinning the blame for the Los Angeles fires on the state governor, Gavin ‘Newscum’ Newsom. Expect further vilification of opponents by him and his best bro, the increasingly preposterous billionaire Elon Musk. Journalist Patrick Cockburn in the i Paper calls it ‘the most crazed administration in US history’. Another commentator calls it ‘the power of dumb’. Even so, it will still have to play by capitalism’s rules.

What has happened in the US seems aeons away from the kind of society we advocate – leaderless, moneyless, wageless, frontierless and entirely democratic. But even if the US election had voted in the ‘lesser evil’ (ie, the Democrats), that party would still have been obliged to run the system in a business-as-usual way, ie, in the profit-seeking interests of the tiny minority who monopolise the majority of the wealth. And so it will continue as long as most wage-slaves continue to support, or at least acquiesce in, capitalism and the profit-seeking force that drives it.