Socialist Sonnet No. 195: Victims (2025)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog  

 

Victims

Refugees in their own homes shot and shelled.

Young men and women in battle fatigues,

Their own lives imperilled by the intrigues

And ambitions of those who feel impelled,

By destiny or profit, to fabricate

Self-serving, spurious justification,

Such gold braided vain glorification

Of leaders in a belligerent state.

War’s irony is its inanity,

The crass and brutal way it insists

In transforming mere men into rapists,

To deny women their humanity.

The world’s changed, or so politicians claim,

But for victims it is always the same.

D. A.

Russia and Democracy (1946)

From the June 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

On March 23rd, under the title “True Democracy,” the Manchester Guardian opened a discussion on democracy when reviewing a recently published lecture by Professor E. H. Carr. This review was followed by contributors from Lord Lindsay, Mr. Laski and Mr. Bertrand Russell on April 20th and May 4th respectively.

The striking thing about all the contributions was that they distinguished an entirely different outlook on democracy between Russia and the Western Countries, but, to all of them, the Russian outlook is accepted as a sincere one, tied up with the view that the Russian rulers are acting on behalf of one section of society alone, the workers, and that their dictatorship signifies the rule of the workers. This, the writers agree, explains the difference between “Proletarian Democracy” and “Bourgeois Democracy.” This, for instance, is the reviewer puts it:-

“It is important, as Professor Carr points out, to realize that the Russians are just as sincere in their use of the word democracy as we and the Americans are in ours.”

We have not the space to examine the many misleading ideas that are foisted upon the Marxian point of view by these writers, but must confine ourselves to the alleged basic difference between the Russian and the Western definition of democracy.

Cutting away all trimmings, democracy simply means a state of affairs in which the will of the majority of a group, a nation, or an international society, shall always prevail. The will of the majority cannot prevail unless circumstances exist which make it possible to know at any time what the will of the majority really is and whether, for any reason, it has changed. This cannot be known unless there is at least freedom of discussion and means existing for this purpose; freedom of equality of voting; freedom to select those who are to carry out the will of the majority; and equality of electoral conditions.

Although in theory these four fundamental conditions exist in the Western democratic states, in fact there are considerable limitations. One needs only to remember the private and business votes processed by some, the enormous influence of a press owned by a propertied minority, the economic penalties suffered by the workers who express their opinion too freely; and the governments who coalesce instead of dissolving. In spite of the limitations, however, there is sufficient democracy in most of the European states and in America to enable the majority of the people to change the basis of society if, and when, they wish to do so. The point is to get them to wish it. It is therefore to the interest of the workers, who form the great majority in the nations, to use these democratic avenues and not to ignore or destroy them.

The Russian Government was, and is, fundamentally undemocratic, and under its inspiration Communist parties of the other countries have worked to discredit democratic institutions. Sometimes the plea has been that these democratic institutions were barrier to the taking over of power by the working class. In fact, however, they were simply the barrier to the taking over of power by the tiny minority, the Communist Party. The workers did not want to take over power because they had not sufficient confidence in themselves and would not know what to do with power if they got it.

At the time of the Russian Revolution the Bolshevik or Communist Party was a small minority in a largely peasant country. By taking advantage of the favourable circumstances and by carefully planned manoeuvres they succeeded in getting control of government power; every action since that date has had behind it the aim of strengthening the hold on power of the leaders of the Communist Party. Some statements of Marx and Engels on the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” were misused to support the false claim that the workers were in control in Russia. In fact the Russian dictatorship is at present the rule of a small group, with Stalin at their head, who have so tightly organised their autocracy that it is difficult to dislodge them. In this, certain peculiar circumstances have played directly into their hands. From the beginning there was a bitter struggle between members of the ruling clique, and the successful ones imprisoned, deported or executed their rivals. The secret police, as in Germany and Italy, was, and still is, one of the principal of props of power. Lately the church is also taking a hand in the game.

With such background, to write of the Russian idea of democracy as being a sincere one is just nonsense. The rulers of Russia are solely interested in keeping their privileged position as rulers and, like the capitalist rulers here, are only concerned with democracy to the extent that it achieves this object. To write of the Russian dictatorship, as the contributors to the Manchester Guardian have done, as being a dictatorship exercised in the interests of the workers is contrary to the facts. On similar grounds they could as logically argue that Capitalists rule in the interests of the worker.

The business of the Communist parties of different countries has been to serve the interests of the Russian Government, and their “day-to-day” policies have twisted and turned and been reversed merrily in tune with the needs of Russia. On this question of democracy, so far as it concerns the parliament, their somersaults have been particularly spectacular. Starting twenty-five years ago with fierce denunciation of parliament as a sham and a snare, they have alternately denounced and applauded participation in parliamentary action. We will extricate two examples of this lunatic policy:-

In 1932 the Communist Party published a 20-page pamphlet entitled “Report on the Crisis Policy of the Labour Party, the T.U.C. General Council and I.L.P.” This report was submitted to the twelfth Congress of the Communist Party. It repudiates parliamentary democracy in the following manner:-

“Revolution for the Communists means the forceful overthrow of the capitalist and the establishment of the workers’ dictatorship, this to be achieved by the organisation of the daily struggle of the workers as the road to the seizure of power” (p. 17).

Any Party which accepts parliamentary democracy, however revolutionary its phrases is an instrument of the capitalists” (p. 20).

“We must expose the sham of parliamentary democracy, and show the positive results of the workers’ dictatorship based upon the workers’ councils. …” (p. 20).

The Daily Worker of March 6th, 1943, tells an opposite story. It opened its columns to a discussion of the oft-recurring enigma “Communist Affiliation to the Labour Party.” Mr. James Walker put the case of the Labour Party and Mr. William Gallacher replied for the Communist Party. In his reply Mr. Gallacher made the following bland statement:-

“Of course we believe in parliamentary democracy. That is why I am in Parliament. That is why I am such a regular attender, and why the Party is so anxious that I should a good account of myself.”

Could blatant impudence and political perfidy go further? It might, but not very much!

In the West the capitalists find that they can rule under democracy. In Russia the Bolsheviks found they could not do so. To veil their dictatorship and obtain support at home and abroad they rigorously applied the censorship and produced quantities of literature urging the claim that the workers are the real rulers who endow their leaders with supreme power and authority on the ground that the leaders know better than they do themselves what is best to be done. This autocracy was then labelled as a new form of democracy, proletarian democracy, though the proletarians have, at the most, only the influence of the dumb, obstinate cattle who may stray this way and that along the road but are always driven home in the end. In social systems based on chattel slavery the slave either acquiesced in his slavery or went under. In Russia the position of the worker is fundamentally similar. No one before has had the brass to suggest that the slaves participated in democracy. It has been left to the twentieth-century dictatorships, with the unbounded cheek of the confidence man, to foist his fantastic view upon an apprehensive and credulous world.

With an extraordinary tenderness towards Russia the contributors to the Manchester Guardian discussion find a basis for Russian views in an idea that has been revived again. Russia, they urge, has not political democracy, but it has economic democracy. This is how Mr. Laski puts the idea:-

“Soviet Russia is a more democratic society than Great Britain. No special privilege attaches either to birth or to wealth, to race or to creed. There is a wider and more profound attempt to satisfy maximum demand than in this country. … The maddening distinction which we make between the high social prestige attached to intellectual labour and the low social prestige attached to manual labour has no meaning. … Access to the courts is not dependent upon the wealth of the parties to an action.”

Democracy is a term that is used to signify the opposite of privilege. Whatever it is called, political or economic, it either means, in the circumstances that are being considered, that everyone has an equal standing or it is meaningless. Mr. Laski is out of touch with the practical world and, consequently, his description of the economic position in Russia is a travesty of the real position.

What economic equality is there between Soviet millionaires, who can command the best food and everything else, and the average poorly paid Russian worker; between the rich, who can take their holidays in pleasant surroundings, and the poor, who must stew or freeze in the cities; between the wealthy writers and the poor manual workers; between the trembling critic of the Government and the ruling group with its ruthless instruments of oppression; between the rich, to whom all the avenues of divorce are open, and the poor, who cannot afford to pay the court procedure, between Soviet ambassadors giving sumptuous feasts and Soviet workers who can barely get enough to live on; between the prisoners in the labour camps and the Secret Police? If there is economic equality in Russia, why, and for whom, do the black markets flourish? The economic democracy that critics and servile adherents alike admire in an illusion, as the ugly facts testify.

While conditions remain such that modern society is composed of capitalists and workers, two classes with antagonistic interest, then the modern democratic state is the capitalist state, the executive committee of the ruling class, no matter what name is applied to the party in power nor what theory it masquerades under.

But the democratic state has been forced, against its will, to bring into being methods, institutions, and procedure which have left open the road to power for workers to travel upon when they know what to do and how to do it. In this country the central institution through which power is exercised is Parliament. To merely send working-class nominees there to control it is not sufficient. The purpose must be to accomplish a revolutionary reorganisation of society, a revolution, in its basis, which will put everybody on an equal footing as participants in the production, distribution and consumption of social requirements as well as in the control of society itself. So that all may participate equally, democracy is an essential condition. Free discussion, full and free access to information, means to implement the wishes of the majority which have been arrived at after free discussion, and the means to alter decisions if the wishes of the majority change.

Conditions such as these have no room to grow in Russia at present. Those who rule there to-day are essentially anti-democratic. They rule by the secret police, the concentration camp, and the executioner. They hoodwink their subjects into believing that that is the best of all possible worlds.

Gilmac.

Famine in India (1946)

From the June 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

” . . . If this country does not get 4,000,000 tons of grain quickly, anything between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 people are going to die. They will not get that much help, so they will, in fact, starve.” You remember the Bengal famine. This will be worse. Not so spectacular, perhaps, but worse. In this queer land where the few are fantastically rich and the many are unbelievably, grindingly poor, the poor are going to be thinned out this year by something like the population of London. . . . .” (Daily Express, 23/4/46.)

One of Lord Beaverbrook’s team of high-pressure journalists, James Cameron, writing from Madras, makes this prophecy of what is going to happen in India this year, and there seems to be no reason to doubt his words.

Large numbers of Indians have, of course, died every year through starvation or semi-starvation, but the figure this year promises to be so staggering that even the Daily Express cannot tuck the news away in some odd corner, or ignore it entirely. The Daily Express not only records the facts, but on the same page as Cameron’s article tells us the cause. It says :—-

“The world famine has little to do with the war. Real cause, drought; drought last year in Australia, the Argentine, Canada and the United States; drought which brought total supplies in those four wheat-producing countries down to 68,500,000 tons this year from 90,000,000 tons in 1942-43 . . .”

But Mother Nature seems to have been in a selective mood in withholding her bounties in India, for Mr. Cameron notes that it is the “unbelievably, grindingly poor” who are going to starve.

The Daily Express’s ready-made explanation may comfort the complacent, but it fails to deceive those who know that wide-spread famine is one of the perpetually recurring horrors of the present system of society. Millions are going to starve in India this year for the same reason that millions have starved there and in other parts of the world for many years past in peace and war whether the crops have failed or not. They starved during the boom years as well as during the great industrial depression between the wars, when crops were being destroyed in an effort to maintain prices. Millions will starve in the future as long as “the few are fantastically rich and the many are unbelievably, grindingly poor.” A million and a half died of starvation in Bengal in 1943, and the report issued by the Famine Inquiry Commission (reported in Forward, 19/5/45) said: —

“After considering all the circumstances, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it lay in the power of the Government of Bengal, by bold, resolute and well-conceived measures at the right time, to have largely prevented the tragedy of the famine as it actually took place. . . . Enormous profits were made out of the calamity and, in the circumstances, profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much indifference in the face of suffering. . . .”

But starvation is not just an Eastern problem. Sir J. B. Orr’s investigations (“Food, Health and Income,” 1936) showed that no fewer than four and a half million persons in this country existed on a food expenditure of 4s. per week, and there was no suggestion that these went hungry for any other reason than that they were poor. This is the one thing common to all these tales of hunger. The hungry ones are always the poor.

Mr. Cameron savs: —

” …. It has been said that the great expanse of India’s soil, if properly worked, could feed the world. Instead, the world is called on to feed India. The answer, of course, is water. These are not the richly irrigated lands of the Punjab. Here it all must come from the sky, and it has not …. But there again it is not wholly the fault of the drought. Arable land in the South of India has been worked and worked for centuries, till it is worked out . . .” (Daily Express, 23/4/46.)

Why were the fields not irrigated and why has the land been worked out? It must be because there was no profit in vast irrigation schemes and a properly balanced agriculture. It cannot be beyond the powers of industry and science, which produced Mulberry harbours and imprisoned atomic energy, to carry the water of India to the places where it is needed, or restore the fertility of an exhausted soil.

Who cares about the starving Indian poor? Certainly not those, coloured and white, who have built colossal fortunes by the impoverishment of the Indian masses, whose main diet at the best, according to Cameron, consists of “a strange, malleable, doughy lump, in almost every way resembling putty . . . ,” made from seeds seen in England only in a parrot’s tray. He says that these people are unable to digest any other form of food, but we shall examine this extraordinary statement a little more closely if it can be shown that the “fantastically rich” also possess peculiar digestions like these.

We shall not forget this latent crime of capitalism. We know that even if Messrs. Jinnah, Nehru, Ghandi, Cripps and the rest can decide who is to have the privilege of presiding over the miseries of the Indian poor, they will not then proceed to remove the yoke from their necks. Can we, the wage workers in Britain, do anything to help capitalism’s victims in India? Yes, by building up the revolutionary movement of socialism, nationally and internationally, until it is strong enough to take over the powers of government to establish a system of society based on the common ownership of the means, of production and distribution. There is no other road that the world’s workers can take to free themselves from hunger and misery.

GEE.

Editorial: Lord Keynes – Economist of Capitalism in Decline (1946)

Editorial from the June 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the sickness of its declining years capitalism is being nursed by the Labour Party. Lord Keynes, who died on April 21st, was the doctor who prescribed the treatment. His theories, on which rest the belief in the possibility of “full employment” under capitalism, have come to the widely accepted not because of intrinsic merit or originality, but because capitalists and the Labour politicians alike have dire need of a panacea that will, they hope, make capitalism work or at least persuade workers that it will. Faced with mounting unemployment and the political discontent that it causes, many Tory and Liberal politicians had lost confidence in their ability to save capitalism. Lord Keynes promised them another lease of life. The Labour Party, new to power, never had much confidence in its own ability, and the “economic blizzard” of 1931 that wrecked the  Labour Government destroyed even what it had; so Keynes was their hope, too.

He believed that investment and price trends could be made subject to governmental control and thereby booms and slumps could be ironed out and approximately full employment secured. His views found expression in the National Government’s “White Paper on Unemployment Policy” (1944), in which the Government accepted “as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war”. The Labour Government has endorsed this White Paper. Keynes directly influenced the Liberal and Labour programmes.

“It was mainly through his personal influence”, says the Times (April 22nd), “that the Liberal Party adopted as their platform in the election of 1929 the proposal to conquer unemployment by a policy of public works and monetary expansion”. The section of the Labour Party that opposed the MacDonald-Snowden economy cuts in 1931 quoted Keynes in support of their view. The Labour Party’s report on “Full Employment and Financial Policy” (1944) largely rests on Keynes’s theories. It declares that “the best cure for bad trade is to increase purchasing power and to speed up development”. It looks to loans, “compulsory if necessary”, from the Banks to “help the Chancellor to find the purchasing power required for full employment . . .” “If bad trade and general unemployment threaten, this means that total purchasing power is falling too low . . . We should give the people more money, and not less, to spend.”

Socialists have no hesitation is saying that if the Labour Government attempts anything of the kind – it may, of course, get cold feet and scurry to the safety of “orthodox” financial policies, as did Snowden and MacDonald-it will not succeed in avoiding unemployment and crises. Capitalism depends for its relatively smooth functioning on the capitalists’ confidence in their prospect of selling their goods at a profit. By the time that bad trade threatens the capitalists will already be apprehensive and the proposed government policy would sap their confidence still more. It is one thing to propose to increase the workers’ purchasing power but the capitalists (including the Government itself in State industries) are at all times forced by competition to seek to reduce the purchasing power of the working  class in relation to the mass of goods produced for the market. This they do, if not directly, by wage cuts, then indirectly by installing labour-displacing machinery to increase output and lower costs of production.

Always the workers can buy only part of the commodities they produce (but which belong to the owners of the means of production), the part represented by their wages. Keynes and the Labour Party ignored these basic facts of private ownership and the wages system and looked to financial schemes to relieve the disequilibrium when, periodically, it had produced a crisis of bad trade and unemployment. Events will show that unemployment cannot be abolished under capitalism, even though its growth may for a time be masked by war, war preparations and totalitarian controls.

The extent and nature of the dependence of capitalists and the Labour Party on Keynes’s theories was shown by the estimates of his work published by the Herald and the Times on April 22nd. The Herald,  under the heading “The Great Lord Keynes”, by a Labour MP, Mr. Evan Durbin, said that Keynes “more than anyone else .  . . bridged the gap between Liberalism and Socialism”. The Times developed the same idea at length:-

“The Keynesian approach offered a bridge between the academic economists on the side and ‘the brave army of heretics’—Mandeville, Malthus, Marx, Gesell and Hobson (to name only a few)—on the other. This may yet prove to have been Lord Keynes’s most valuable achievement”.

Marx is here put in curious company, but the Times‘ inclusion of him had a reason. The Times thinks that Keynes had found the way to cure unemployment and thus save capitalism from the challenge of Socialists. It quotes him as defending his policy of full employment through State control of investment “both as the only practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety and as the condition for the successful functioning of individual initiative”.

The Times went on to claim that Keynes had shown how to bring about reconciliation between the orthodox political parties and the “growing army of deeply discontented reformers and revolutionaries”. The claim is certainly true of the Labour Party, but woe betide that Party when Keynes’s full employment policy fails them and the bridge he built collapses. Let it therefore be clearly understood that neither Keynes nor anyone else has reconciled the Socialist demand for the abolition of capitalism with the despairing attempt to make the system tolerable by trying to cure unemployment within its framework.

The wrangle over Egypt (1946)

From the June 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let it first of all be made quite clear that in all the deliberations that have taken place, and will take place, over the evacuation of British troops from Egypt, the welfare of the Egyptian worker and peasant has never been an issue. Whether under the domination of British or Egyptian masters, they will not see much difference in their lot. Whether their rulers are British or Egyptian, they will still have to eke out a miserable existence; they will still have to labour from sunrise to sunset in their master’s fields; they will still be riddled with disease; in short, they will still be a subject class, ruthlessly and viciously exploited for profit.

What is, in fact, at issue in Egypt, as is quite openly admitted and taken for granted by both parties, is the preservation of the safety of British capitalism’s lines of communication through the Eastern Mediterranean. Opinions differ, however, as to the best means.

Said Mr. Anthony Eden, for the Conservatives, in the debate in the House of Commons: —

“His first complaint about the Prime Minister’s announcement at this time was that it gave the impression, by the manner in which the withdrawal of troops was referred to, that their purpose in Egypt was something other than it was-- namely, the Defence of the Canal Zone.”

(Times, 8/5/46.)

And Mr. Attlee, for the Labour Party, in the same debate:—

“The Government were as much concerned as anybody else with the security of the communications of the Commonwealth and Empire, with the security of the Canal, and with maintaining the best possible relations with Egypt and her continued alliance with this country, and it was precisely for those reasons that they were making the approach they were making.''

(Our Italics.) (Times, 8/5/46.)

What, then, is behind this, at first sight, rather sudden decision to withdraw troops from Egypt? The reasons are political and also military.

For many years past, the whole of the Middle East, of which Egypt is hut one part, has been the focal point of steadily expanding nationalistic feeling. During the past war, and in the period since, this nationalistic fervour has become even more intense. The recent outbursts in Egypt against British troops are an illustration of the feeling against the foreigner. Although still doing their utmost to retain as much influence as possible in the area, the capitalist Powers concerned have had to take note of this desire for independence.

That Mr. Herbert Morrison fully appreciates this is shown by the following quotation from his speech in the House of Commons: —

“If the British Government had told the Egyptian Government that they would give no undertaking about the withdrawal from Egyptian soil, the negotiations would not have gone on and then the British Government would have had to face certain consequences. There would be sharp antagonism on the part of the Egyptian Government and Parliament; almost certain disturbance and riots, possibly even revolution, and it might have led to British forces being attacked and having to defend themselves.”

(Times, ibid.)

Then there are military aspects that indicate the conceptions on which the new policy is based. The following statement is from an article in the Observer, (12/5/46) : —

”The Canal . . . . can he bombed and made unusable by aerial mining operations. Any Power with the use of air bases in the Eastern Mediterranean and a modern air force can reasonably hope to achieve this. The 10,000 British troops that the 1936 Treaty permits to be quartered in the Canal Zone are no defence against such attack The defence of the Canal itself is largely irrelevant. The vital area is the whole Middle East, with Palestine as its natural centre . . . Now that it is proposed that Egypt . . . . is to be militarily evacuated, there is only one part of the Middle East where the British have retained the right to keep troops: Palestine and the neighbouring State of Transjordan. It is my contention that this limited area can provide an adequate base for a Middle Eastern defence or police force. It has air bases which enable present-day transport aircraft to reach the Canal Zone in an hour, Cairo in less than two hours, and Baghdad in less than three. It has a port at Haifa capable of great development, and it has oil supplies in its immediate vicinity . . . ”

In short, the Labour Government and its advisers are willing to take troops out of Egypt because they believe they will be better placed elsewhere for the defence of the Middle East. Imperial aims have not been dropped, but merely modified. 

The Labour Party is not a Socialist party and was not elected with a mandate for Socialism. It must therefore of necessity administer affairs, whether domestic or foreign, within the framework of capitalism. In its domestic affairs it has already amply demonstrated to the capitalist class that, fundamentally, they have nothing to fear from its administration. In foreign affairs its policy has sometimes even dismayed some of its own members and, on the other hand, has met with warm approval from the Conservative Party. On the Egyptian issue both Parties are concerned with one aim—how best to preserve the security of communications in the Middle East. The Labour Party, no less than the Conservatives, has sought to safeguard the interests of British Capitalism.

Stan Hampson

Professor Laski’s Secret (1946)

Pamphlet Review from the June 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many of the trade union element in the Labour Party dislike Professor Laski’s ideas. To them he is a troublesome interloper, a sort of cuckoo in the nest trying to make them responsible for intellectual progeny that may some day grow up and push them out. Without delving further into the habits of real cuckoos, we do learn from Professor Laski’s Secret Battalion (Labour Party, 2d.) just what happens in the political world when cuckoo number one finds a second cuckoo trying to lay eggs in the same nest; cuckoo number one becomes very indignant and says that cuckoo number two is not playing the game.

In 30 pages of argument Professor Laski tries to convince members of the Labour Party that it would be fatal to their cause to let the Communists become affiliated. With a rich array of facts he shows, that the Communists, while swearing their acceptance of Labour Party methods, are hiding their true aim, which is to capture the Labour Party as a first step towards setting up a one-party dictatorship in this country.

As propaganda to help the Labour Party repel the latest attack of the Communist political paratroopers it may serve its purpose, but as a contribution to Socialist thought it is largely stale and unprofitable. It echoes the 25-year-old controversy between Kautsky on the one side and Lenin and Trotsky on the other, adding nothing of value and enlarging an element of confusion that was already present. The protagonists then, like Laski and Pollitt to-day, were debating whether the working class should soberly use democratic Parliamentary methods or go in for a hectic bout of forcible seizure of power and minority dictatorship. The S.P.G.B., while endorsing Kautsky’s principal arguments – they were those put forward by the S.P.G.B. at its formation nearly 20 years earlier – pointed out that Kautsky the Labour politician was at variance with Kautsky the theoretician, for the politician Kautsky cherished the illusion that Socialism could be achieved by Labour Governments elected on the votes of workers who want reforms of capitalism but do not understand and want Socialism. Our answer to both Kautsky and Lenin was that Socialism cannot be brought about either by Labour Governments or by a Communist Party dictatorship, since its achievement requires that there should first be a majority of convinced and understanding Socialists.

Professor Laski’s pamphlet is liberally sprinkled with Marxist phrases and references to Marx’s views, calculated to give the impression to those who do not know the facts, that the Labour Party is Marxist. He claims (p.16) that the Labour Party “does not deny either the reality of the class-war or the imperative need to change fundamentally the capitalist foundation of society.” This seemingly clear declaration is ambiguous. The Labour Party would certainly subscribe to it, meaning that they do not deny the hostility of workers towards employers and that they favour replacing private capitalism by State capitalism. To Marxists, however, recognition of the class struggle means recognising that the interest of the working class is incompatible with the interest of the class that owns the means of production and distribution and that, the class struggle can be abolished only by dispossessing the capitalist class and introducing a social system based on common ownership and democratic control, involving, of course, the abolition of the system of wage-labour and of the production of goods for sale.

Laski, who makes so much use of Marxist phrases, must know that the Labour Party does not accept the Marxist view. Like Kautsky he is a theoretician who in words propounds one theory, but belongs to a Party that works on a quite different one. If he believed his case to be sound he had a magnificent opportunity to floor the Communists by pointing out that Socialism has not been, and is not being, achieved in Russia after nearly 30 years of dictatorship; and then try to show how Labour government (here or in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere) had introduced or is introducing Socialism. He does neither. On Russian State capitalism masquerading as Socialism he says nothing —how could he without inviting the retort that Labour Government State capitalism is not Socialism either? Instead he gives away his case by trying to justify the Labour Government for its reforms and for its policy of State capitalism. He writes: “Socialism in Britain has …. already secured for the working class of this country great reforms, both in the economic and in the social realm. It has made it possible to place in power a Socialist Government which, also by constitutional methods, moves steadily forward to national ownership and control of the vital instruments of production” (p.17). He must know that Socialism as understood by Marx and other Socialists does, not mean a State capitalist programme of “national ownership and control.” For all their Marxist phraseology, he and the Communists are actually debating whether the workers should seek State capitalism by the Parliamentary road, or seek it by dictatorship. Rejecting both disputants, the S.P.G.B. holds that the working class should certainly use the Parliamentary road – but for Socialism.

One small point of interest. Professor Laski has exposed the secret battalions of Communists. Will he now yield up the secret of why he claims to be a Socialist but does not repudiate the reformism and State capitalist aim of his Party?

Edgar Hardcastle

Life and Times: Socialism: a difficult word (2025)

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

A few months ago I attended a talk at my local university entitled ‘Transitional Justice in the Post-Soviet Space’. The speaker, Anja Mihr, a German academic specialising in International Human Rights Law, attempted an explanation of how and why, after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, some of the former Soviet republics or satellite states quickly became functioning capitalist democracies (eg Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), while others did not and in some cases have remained relative autocracies to this day (eg Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan). Her talk had many thought-provoking facets which gave rise to a lively exchange of ideas in the discussion that followed, but one thing that particularly caught my attention and jarred with me was the speaker’s frequent use of the word, ‘socialism’ to describe the system that had existed in the countries of the former Soviet bloc – a description she usually qualified with the word ‘state’, so ‘state socialism’.

Positive or negative?

I felt that using the word in this way was to perpetuate the mistaken idea that somehow what had existed in the Soviet bloc was something to do with the fundamental idea of socialism as a democratic world society of free access, and production and distribution to meet people’s needs, when in reality in just about every conceivable way it was the polar opposite of that. At the same time, I was aware that ‘socialism’ is a word that’s used in all sorts of different ways to mean all sorts of different things. Some people use it to denote something positive, others to indicate or describe something they find undesirable or dangerous. And even when they declare support for socialism, they are not necessarily all signalling support for the same thing.

So, for example, there are some on the left of the political spectrum who still voice support for the old Soviet Union and similar regimes today (so called ‘tankies’) and are happy to label as socialism what most people regard as authoritarian tyrannies. Others on the left reject the former Soviet system but continue to believe in the existence today of some form of ‘socialism’ in other countries (eg Cuba, China) and are enthused by this. The left-wingers who reject the idea that such countries are ‘socialist’ and consider that the Soviet Union wasn’t either still think that there was an attempt to establish socialism in Russia under Lenin and Trotsky after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution but that it was quashed in the 1920s when Stalin took over and ‘state capitalism’ rather than ‘state socialism’ was established. If we add to this the often expressed idea that the Labour Party and other similar parties in Western countries stand for some kind of socialism or that there is a form of socialism in some of the Scandinavian countries where poverty tends to be alleviated by state support (so-called Nordic socialism), we should not be surprised that, in a recent YouGov poll across the UK, ‘socialism’ was found to be a more popular idea than ‘capitalism’ among a cross-section of people deemed to be representative of the UK population.

57 varieties

Are these ‘57 varieties’ a serious obstacle to the spread of understanding of socialism as defined by the Socialist Party? Well, maybe not necessarily, since the highly variable use of the word gives a ‘handle’ for socialists to use when they hear it used ‘wrongly’. So, in the discussion following Professor Mihr’s talk, I was able to challenge her use of the term ‘state socialism’ and argue that what actually existed – and had always existed in the Soviet era, as far back as Lenin and Trotsky – was state capitalism and that socialism was something decidedly different and should be thought of in entirely different terms. I received a somewhat nondescript answer, but at least I’d made the point and the gathering of people at the talk had heard it, and it perhaps gave them food for thought.

Default to autocracy?

The speaker too offered some food for thought during the discussion period. To a question asking whether the more ‘backward’ ex-Soviet states (ie those that have remained autocratic) would come to be more democratic any time soon, she said she thought that time was the key and that, as the older generations disappeared, those who followed them, coupled with economic forces, would cause the powers-that-be in those countries to move gradually to more democratic forms of government. And she rejected the frequently cited idea of the inevitable permanence of what has been called ‘homo sovieticus’ or, in the words of one commentator, ‘the default to autocracy’ – the idea that Russia and its sphere of influence have some kind of inbuilt tendency to remain authoritarian regardless of changes that are taking place in the wider world.

Not of course that a more ‘democratic’ Russian sphere would alter the fact that capitalism would still be operating. And it would still be exhibiting its characteristic features – poverty amid plenty, a wealthy owning class lording it over a class of wage and salary workers, technological progress perverted by war and waste. But movement to a more democratic form of capitalism would at least lay a better foundation for the spread of real socialist ideas and create the means for majority political action via the ballot box as a route to the establishment of a democratic, moneyless, marketless society once the necessary spread of consciousness has taken place.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: The ‘doged’ pursuit of knowledge (2025)

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

A funny thing about touted scientific breakthroughs is that, just like politicians’ promises, they make a lot of noise at first, but then are apt to quietly fizzle out later when nobody’s looking. So it may have been for the strangely headline-grabbing announcement back in March that a new ‘Dark Energy experiment’ was challenging Einstein’s theory of the universe. Wait, what, they’ve disproved Einstein, you gasp? But no, it’s not quite that big an earthquake. Stargazers at the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory had found a ‘blip’ in the cosmological measurements that suggested that the mysterious dark energy force supposedly driving the expansion of the universe might have slightly weakened over time. Though the key phrase is ‘might have’, this immediately got everyone terribly excited at the prospect of ‘new physics’ and the possible need to rewrite the cosmological standard model. Years of funded research and potential Nobel prizes glistered like the starry firmament, but cosmologists were quick to point out that this was in no way a certain result and would require vital independent confirmation from other sources, notably Europe’s Euclid space telescope and NASA’s forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman space telescope (tinyurl.com/4sv65khx).

So it may be something and it may be nothing, which is fair enough. But then why did it make such huge headlines, as if it was a genuine discovery? Well, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and pretend that we are jaded and cynical observers of capitalism, and ask ourselves what other factors might be at play here. Let’s in particular imagine the following entirely fictitious bit of dialogue: “Trump’s threatening to cut the NASA budget in half!” “Oh shit, we need to big up a breakthrough, pronto!”

Yup, when suddenly you can’t pay your mortgage or bills moments after having a safe and respectable long-term government-funded science career at the National Institutes of Health (proposed to be cut by 37 percent), the National Science Foundation (50+ percent), the Department of Energy (14 percent), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (24 percent), the US Geological Survey (33+ percent), the Department of Agriculture (18 percent), the Environmental Protection Agency (46 percent), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (39 percent), the Forest Service (62 percent), or the innocuous National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services – funding anthropology and archaeology – and the Marine Mammal Commission – saving the whales – (all 100 percent), you know you’ve been ‘Doged’. And few agencies are being hit harder than NASA, with an eye-watering 53 percent cut (tinyurl.com/3crbp648). Obviously all its Earth science climate projects will be the first to go, as the Drill Baby is not interested in those. But one of the other projects which might also bite the dust is the aforementioned Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, now coincidentally being cited as vital for confirming the Einstein-busting dark energy result (tinyurl.com/hejv2ztr).

It’s not that Trump is anti-science per se. He’s all for science as long as it makes him look good. So he was redneck-hot for the Artemis programme to plant NASA astronauts in MAGA hats back on the moon, especially if they could do it before the Chinese got there. President Bush originally also had a moon programme, called Constellation, that Obama subsequently cancelled, and Trump brought back as Artemis. But here, observers say, NASA was its own worst enemy, by being too institutionalised and cavalier about cost overruns, and using legacy suppliers like Boeing, whose own Starliner vehicle turned out to be an embarrassment (Pathfinders, October 2024). Asked to build a new rocket that could get humans to the moon, NASA simply came up with an adaptation of the previous Constellation-era Ares V rocket, rebranded as the Space Launch System (SLS). Despite this now being the era of cheap and reusable rockets, the SLS is a disappointing and hugely expensive replica of the old single-use Saturn V model. The US is now planning to ‘retire’ the SLS, possibly before it’s even launched, instead looking to private capital in the form of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is offering to do the same job for around one fortieth of the SLS cost ($100m versus $4bn).

NASA is more than an agency, it’s an icon, with an almost reverential status in US history for putting Neil Armstrong on the moon. Savaging its funding must seem to many like burning your own sacred temple to spite the priests. But it’s also a monument from another age, when private capitalists were not nearly as rich as they are today, and only governments had the resources to fund space programmes. Now, tech bros like Bezos and Musk are doing their own space programmes, and doing them in some ways better than NASA. This is incidentally rather awkward to explain for those people who think ‘socialism’ is the state ownership of industries and that this is somehow an improvement on private capitalism. It’s not. State and private capitalism are as bad as each other, and both exploit workers and give them no real say.

As far as capitalist science is concerned, the goal is generally profit not the pursuit of knowledge. The rich get to decide what it pursues, either directly through their own purse, or indirectly through their complicit governments. Obama’s 2015 Space Act, cravenly endorsed by 43 countries, is widely seen as the new ‘enclosures’ for legalising space mining for profit (tinyurl.com/3va6mkdf). But once workers recognise their true common interest and abolish capitalism, what would happen to these capitalist-era plans to go to the Moon, or Mars? They’ll probably slide right down the global To Do list, below more pressing priorities like sustainable universal nutrition, health and housing, but possibly not off it entirely. The final frontier is always going to fascinate humans. The key difference is, when a socialist world looks up at the night sky, it will look with eyes of wonder, and not with an eye to plunder.

Paddy Shannon

Material World: Has Walmart laid the foundations for socialism? (2025)

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

In their 2019 book The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argued that, contrary to appearances, modern capitalism is already succumbing to a process of central planning in such varied forms as large-scale businesses, the financial system and the welfare state. This could even imply that the growing dominance of large corporations in the economy, internally organised on the basis of a priori non-market allocation, might somehow herald the decline and, perhaps even, eventual eclipse of capitalism.

In an article in the Jacobin entitled ‘Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work’ they wistfully maintained:

‘Mega-companies like Amazon and Walmart are already using large-scale central planning. We can wield that tool for good. Socialists need to renew our embrace of democratic planning and fight for a real alternative to capitalism’.

And that:

‘We need to use our vast productive resources to better ends – and through politics we can do just that. And as technology allows us to move to a discussion of what sort of planning, instead of whether planning, true democratic control of planning both at the enterprise and government level must be the non-negotiable foundation of our vision’ (tinyurl.com/345jbycw).

However, if a planned economy ‘can actually work’ on their terms, then it would be an economy that has nothing really to do with a post-capitalist society in any meaningful sense of the term.

Essentially, what they advocate is just a sort of democratised version of corporate capitalism. ‘Governments’ and ‘enterprises’ will continue to exist, and business will continue to operate as normal, churning out commodities for sale on a market.

The difference with today is that internally such business will become subject to ‘democratic control’. What enables this is the replacement in such businesses of internal markets by planning – something that Phillips and Rozworski said had already happened to a large extent:

‘Regardless, Walmart engages in large-scale planning without the direct intermediation of markets at scales to make Hayek bristle. Internally, like nearly all firms large and small, it is a dictatorial planned economy: managers tell workers what to do, departments realize goals from on high, and goods flow by fiat. Afloat in the market, Walmart is at once an “island of conscious power,” as Keynes’s collaborator D. H. Robertson put it, and an “island of tyranny,” as the social theorist Noam Chomsky rephrased it.’

According to them, the fact that a business like Walmart, the world´s largest company, operates without an internal market is precisely what makes it relatively more efficient than businesses with an internal market.

Walmart is, of course, a prime example of a large corporation. Its revenue in 2018 was $500 billion – exceeding that of the Soviet Union in 1970 (adjusted for inflation). As an organisation, it makes full use of sophisticated computer systems and comprehensive record keeping, to integrate and manage every aspect of production and distribution amongst its numerous outlets. Using big data analytics, it tracks and targets individual consumers – 145 million in the US alone – identifying patterns of consumer spending and anticipating future trends on the basis of past evidence.

These kinds of developments have been interpreted by commentators like Philips and Rozworski as clear proof that large-scale centralised planning is eminently practicable, contrary to the claims of Mises and Hayek. However, we should be wary of the all too facile way in which these commentators sometimes go about interpreting the evidence. Walmart’s is not an example of central planning in the sense of society-wide planning – obviously. Crucially, as just mentioned, it employs the principle of feedback and of course what Walmart is responding to is the market demand for its products. To its very core, Walmart is a market-based capitalist institution.

Whether a mega-corporation such as Walmart should be held up on purely technical grounds as some kind of template upon which a realisable alternative to capitalism can be built, albeit suitably reconfigured along democratic lines, is highly questionable for many other reasons too. After all, Walmart, like every other such corporation, is essentially a commercial or market-oriented entity and to draw attention to its enormous size and its ability to allocate inputs internally without reference to market principles is, in a sense, a red herring. What such thinking seems to imply is that a post-capitalist alternative will continue to feature something akin to ‘corporations’ – entities legally distinguishable from each other – and under whose aegis production will supposedly be ‘democratically organised’ unlike in capitalism.

This is missing the point completely. There won’t be, and cannot be, such a thing as a ‘corporation’ in a society based on the common ownership of the means of production. The very raison d’être of a corporation derives from its exclusive private or monopoly ownership of the productive assets in its legal possession and, as such, this is wholly incompatible with the very nature of such a society. Meaning it is nonsensical to talk of taking over an institution like a corporation and running it in a different, more democratic, way in a post-capitalist society, when such an institution would simply cease to exist.

Of course, what Philips and Rozworski describe is not society-wide central planning in the sense that Lenin might have had in mind when he talked of turning the ‘whole of society’ into ‘a single office and a single factory’. Nevertheless, just as Lenin´s approach via state capitalism comprehensively failed to deliver socialism in the traditional Marxian sense, there is no reason to think that their approach (via the democratic transformation of big corporations) would fare any better. Of course, one can redefine ‘socialism’ to mean something else, which is what Lenin did – but that doesn’t change anything.

Nevertheless, even granting their description of how Walmart works, we are none the wiser as to how the development of central planning within some corporate behemoth like Walmart is going to assist in laying the ‘foundations of socialism’ any more than the approach advanced by Lenin.

Robin Cox

Blogger's Note:

The People’s Republic of Walmart was reviewed in the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard.