Life and Times: Do I know you . . .? (2026)

The Life and Times column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’m standing on the concourse at Swansea station. Someone comes up to me. A fellow probably in his forties. He’s friendly. ‘Hi, how’s it going?’, he says, ‘I haven’t seen you for a bit’. I feel embarrassed, slightly panicked in fact. It happens to me a lot. I’m greeted by someone who obviously knows me, but my memory for faces (and names) has become terrible and I can’t for the life of me remember who they are. When this happens, what I can’t do of course is say something like ‘Do I know you?’ And sometimes, once we get talking, they say something that reminds me who they are and that I do know them, even if I still can’t recall their names. But this fellow, I’d swear I don’t know him from Adam – though surely I must.

Anyway I try not to look surprised. ‘I’m okay. How are you?’, I say. He nods and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ I reply that I’m waiting for my son and grandson who’ve gone into Costa Coffee to get a sandwich for their journey home. ‘Are you going somewhere?’, I ask, as a way of finding something to say. ‘No, I’m in a mess’, he replies. ‘My wife has left me and I’m out of the house. I’m on the street.’

What now? I’m supposed to know him and he’s obviously asking for help. So, I need to do something. I need to give him some money. But how much? When someone asks me for money on the street – it seems to happen a lot – I usually give them a pound coin if I’ve got one in my pocket. But can I give this fellow just a pound? After all he’s someone I apparently know- and he’s in a real mess, So one pound just doesn’t feel right. How much then? If I have notes on me, they’re usually in my wallet not my pocket, but somehow I don’t want to get my wallet out. But then I remember I do actually have a ten pound note in my pocket – change from something I bought earlier. I feel in my pocket, pull it out and hand it to him. ‘Hope this helps’, I say. He thanks me and asks me where my son is. I see that they (he and my little grandson) have just come out of Costa Coffee and are waiting for me further down the concourse. I wave in their direction. ‘They’re there’, I say. And I start to walk towards them. He walks with me for a few steps, but then veers off in a different direction. I get to my son and tell him what’s happened. ’My memory’s getting worse’, I say. As my ‘friend’ vanishes from sight, my son, with an amused look on his face, says ‘you’ve been conned’. It takes a few seconds for the scales to fall from my eyes. He then adds jokingly: ‘I saw you hand the money over. I thought you were doing a drugs deal’.

We both laugh, but how do I actually feel? Well, despite having being conned, I don’t actually feel annoyed. I feel a bit sad in fact. Why? Well, though my pretend friend has put one over on me, it won’t cause me any great hardship and I can’t help feeling sorry for him. Even though most people would probably regard him as at least a bit of a villain, my thinking is that you have to be pretty much on your uppers and probably at your wit’s end to do that kind of thing. I couldn’t know of course what his real story was and no doubt I wasn’t the only one he’d tried the same trick on that day. But how desperate does someone have to be to resort to that kind of deception all the while knowing he’s likely to suffer one rebuff after another but just hoping he’ll manage to take in the odd unsuspecting fool?

And what might have been this fellow’s story? Perhaps he’d had a particularly difficult upbringing he’d been unable to shake off and the only thing he’d known was a life of surviving by one trick or another? Or had he just fallen on hard times, things having come apart for him as happens to a fair number of people in the wage-slave society we live in – people who maybe lose their jobs and then can’t keep up with housing and other costs? Or did he have a mental health problem which prevented him from living most people’s 9 to 5 life and getting by on what they earned? Or maybe something else? A recent report from the Centre for Social Justice think-tank found that around 13.4 million people in the UK were living lives ‘marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime’. Whatever the case, he wasn’t one of the many millions of us who manage to keep their heads above water by having a paying job, even if at the cost of keeping the lid on, never being truly free of potential financial insecurity and often paying a high price in terms of self-fulfilment and quality of life. That’s the best in fact that the system we live in of buying and selling, monetary exchange and monopoly of wealth by a tiny minority can offer to the vast majority who have to sell their energies for a wage or salary in a society in which everything’s for sale. A wageless, moneyless society of cooperative work and free access to all goods and services – ie, socialism – is what we urgently need to cure all those maladies.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: The magic gadget IRL (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

30 years ago in 1996, some were learning to use email, home computers and the embryonic worldwide web, but most families still shopped in the high street, looked up numbers in the phone book and watched ‘terrestrial’ telly together in the sitting room. Kids who wanted alternative amusement ended up hanging out with mates on park benches or outside supermarkets in the winter cold. Gay teens had no local community of peers to turn to. Neither did those with hobbies, or growing-pain problems. For them, the world in real life (IRL) was limited and limiting.

But, IRL, there was also no FOMO, no sexting, no doxing, no doomscrolling, no cyberstalking or cyberbullying, no revenge porn or ‘nudifying’ of classmates, and no pro-suicide chatrooms. Smartphones and social media (SM) have revolutionised the childhood experience, and not necessarily in a good way, as BBC Radio 4 reported (7 December): ‘Alongside the widespread adoption of smartphones has come a tidal wave of adolescent anxiety, depression, loneliness, and a spike in suicides’. Now Australia has banned access to ten of the biggest SM sites for under-16s. Communications Minister Annika Wells explains: ‘Teenage addiction was not a bug, it was a design feature, and on 10 December there are going to be withdrawal symptoms. […] With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the men who created the feature as “behavioural cocaine”‘.

Many countries now ban phone use in schools. Australia started doing this back in 2020, with support from teachers and parents alike. All claimed a degree of success. However the bans were not well coordinated, and subjective reports of greater engagement and improved mental health may be the placebo effect at work. A Birmingham University study looking at 1,227 students in 30 secondary schools found no evidence of changes in grades, amount of sleep, class behaviour, or even time spent on phones.

Australia’s latest action, with popular support, could trigger a global cascade of similar legislation. SM firms already face a landmark US trial this month. China, with basilisk totalitarian vigilance, uses spyware to restrict SM use and game playing by its youth, with a 40-minute daily limit for SM and 3 hours gaming per week. The UK 2023 Online Safety Act (OSA) instead demands that SM companies take ‘reasonable steps’ to protect children. Good luck with that. SM lawyers will have a field day.

It’s not just teens. Ofcom estimates that 1 in 4 UK children aged between 5 and 7 have a smartphone. Parents say they buy these phones for safety reasons to do with the child being contactable and trackable. But satellite-tracking a five-year-old is not the way to keep them safe. In truth, overworked adults managing multiple jobs and kids may well find the magic gadget of infinite games and videos hard to resist, given that it shuts their child up like nothing else and besides, if all the other kids have one, their child runs the risk of being victimised for looking poor.

Radio 4 interviewees speculate that the Australian ban could be a useful research opportunity. That’s if it works, but it probably won’t. One 13-year-old got round the ban in less than five minutes. And if one kid can do it, they all will, because of peer pressure, and because the industry wants to lock them in, not out, and because it will regard regulatory fines as the paltry cost of doing business. The new OSA age-verification rules for porn sites are also probably doomed. There has been a huge increase in downloads of VPN apps which hide the user’s IP address. With a conservatively estimated 240,000 online porn sites, Ofcom regulators face an uphill struggle to ensure compliance. So far they’ve taken action against just 70, leading insiders to argue that the new rules are effectively unenforceable.

And then there is the law of unintended consequences which produced this generational mental health crisis in the first place. Regulating the top SM sites might end up funnelling users to even worse places, like regulation-exempt gaming chatrooms, notorious as extremist rabbit-holes.

But, one might argue, why pussyfoot around imploring SM firms to take responsibility, why not just ban smartphones for kids altogether? The UK’s Education Select Committee last year recommended exactly that. But capitalist governments have bigger things to worry about, and unlike China, are generally leery of voter blowback for ‘nanny-statism’.

Even so, some young self-styled neo-Luddites are opting to downsize to ‘dumbphones’ that have no social media, with a view to clawing back their free time. As one manufacturer puts it, SM entrepreneurs are obsessed with monopolising their users’ engagement time, whereas users should be saying ‘What about me? What about my time?’ He continues: ‘The problem is not the device, it’s the business model: the attention economy. Every free app, every social media platform, every browser, is trying to maximize engagement so they can make money collecting data and categorizing people into different groups so they can sell it to advertisers’.

Unfortunately for neo-Luddites, dumbphones offer a near-zero margin, so tech firms ‘have little incentive to cater to dumbphone users, whose revenue potential is relatively miniscule – that is, if they can even make the economics of manufacturing the devices work at all’.

It’s a tragic indictment of capitalism that social media started by connecting people, and is now arguably complicit in global disinformation and child abuse. Now, encouraged by Trump, SM firms are even ditching their fact-checkers. Perhaps Gen Z parents, having seen the damage for themselves, will refuse to allow their Gen Alpha kids to go through it. The bigger long-term tragedy for Gen Alpha, whether they’re on social media or not, is that their future IRL will be one of relentless capitalist exploitation and wage slavery. If we really want to stop not just child abuse, but human abuse, abolishing capitalism IRL is the only way.

Paddy Shannon

(Facebook review, page 20)

Careless Society (2026)

Book Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Careless People: Power, Greed, Madness. A story of where I used to work. By Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025, 4th Estate)

Remember the Metaverse? Funny that you don’t hear much about it these days. This was going to be the Next Big Thing, the fully immersive virtual reality (VR) heaven where we all spent every waking moment, in our aspirational avatar forms, shopping, meeting people, swanning around in flying cars, and never going outside to see the real sky, or indeed talk to a real person. Unappealing as all this might sound to jaded old cynics and doubters, Mark Zuckerberg was so excited by his own visionary virtual universe that he changed his company name from Facebook to Meta, hired thousands of engineers and invested $36bn in development. As might be expected, tech firms chucked in plenty of money too, just in case it ever took off, and even manufacturers and high-street businesses like HSBC, Skechers, Bosch, Next and Heineken. Seoul City Council even went so far as to build a VR community space where people could ‘take advantage of public services 24/7 all year round and even visit the virtual mayor’s office and library’, as well as availing themselves of ‘various administrative services such as economy, education, and tax affairs’.

It’s hard to imagine a duller advertisement for the Metaverse than, ‘Hey, you can use it to pay your taxes!’ For once, the doubters were on the money. It turned out people didn’t want to spend their lives indoors wearing silly Oculus headsets. Sales flopped, followed by investments, until Zuckerberg quietly dropped the whole project.

One indication of how preposterous the whole thing was, and also why apparently nobody told Zuck this at the time, is the fact that in her tell-all exposé of her five years as a top Facebook executive, Sarah Wynn-Williams doesn’t bother to mention the Metaverse once. But she does have plenty to say about Facebook’s dirty off-book activities. One of these, which Facebook publicly denied to the consternation of their own marketing teams who were using it as a selling point, was to target vulnerable teenagers who had just deleted a selfie by thrusting beauty ads at them, on the assumption that they must hate the way they look. Though often funny, the darkest part of the book is where Zuck finally realises how the Trump campaign has used Facebook’s comprehensive data tools in an ingenious and targeted misinformation offensive in order to win the 2016 election. What’s dark about this is that Zuck and the other FB execs are not horrified, they are impressed. Zuck allegedly even begins to form his own plans to use the same techniques to run for president himself. After all, he’s so rich he wouldn’t even need to fund-raise.

The take-home gist is that, whereas FB starts off as a maladroit mix of idealists and nerdy technicians with no concept of the political reverberations they are about to unleash on the world, the more wealth and power they acquire, the less they give a damn about anyone or anything, a point rammed home by their casual indifference to the FB-driven massacres in Myanmar. Nobody comes out of this book looking good, including in some ways the author. The corruption, hypocrisy, sexual harassment and megalomania are laid bare for all to see. Some of these people would probably have been jailed, except that capitalism doesn’t jail people this stupendously rich. Zuckerberg, increasingly isolated in a protective shell of fawning sycophants, comes across as having had any trace of humanity surgically removed. He is never told that any of his ideas (like the Metaverse?) are just dumb and won’t work, because FB ‘ices out’ and then fires anyone who dares. He’s actually tried to have this book banned in the USA, a truly stupid move because of the ‘Streisand effect’, where attempts to suppress tend to backfire in spectacular fashion. To no one’s surprise, the free-speech champion’s attempt at censorship has sent the book to the top of the bestseller list.

But in truth, apart from showing how dysfunctional the business is, there are no real revelations that weren’t already out there. Yes, Zuck lied to Congress. Yes, FB are manipulative bastards out to make money out of your data. No, they have no scruples whatsoever. We knew or could guess all that. It’s a fun read, but socialists won’t be surprised by any of it. It’s just the reality of capitalist business with the veneer removed.

Paddy Shannon

A confused professor (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vivek Chibber is a well-known figure on the American left. A professor of sociology at New York University, he regards himself as a Marxist and is seen by some as an important social theorist. The April 2023 edition of the Socialist Standard carried a review of a book he had recently published with the ambitious title Confronting Capitalism. How the World Works and How to Change It. The review recognised the author’s clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works. In particular it endorsed the book’s explanation of capitalism’s relationship with the state and the struggle it inevitably generates between the two classes in society – capitalists and workers – and how it dictates that governments, no matter what their stated ideology, cannot have a mediating role between workers and capitalists but have no choice but to govern on behalf of the capitalist class and in their collective profit-making interest. In the same way, the review approved the book’s further observation that individual capitalists, regardless of their personal character or values, are compelled by the nature of the system they operate in to minimise costs and seek profit, wherever possible and whatever the consequences, the result being that a tiny minority of the population are able to live in luxury while billions struggle to keep their heads above water and experience life as a daily grind.

Chasing reforms

So far, so good, and, as explanations of capitalism go, pretty lucid. But, as the review then went on to point out, Chibber’s prescription for remedying the situation he correctly analyses was not to get rid of the capitalist system and replace it with a different one but rather to chase reforms of various kinds to try and make that system more palatable. And this, puzzingly, after having told us that the imperatives of capitalism make that impossible. Arguably even more puzzling then was his final call to ‘start down the road of social democracy and market socialism’, even though, by any standards, ‘market socialism’ is a contradiction in terms.

Since all book reviews that appear in the Socialist Standard are sent to the book’s author, Chibber should at least be aware of the Socialist Party’s view and criticisms of his ideas. So when an extended interview with him appeared recently in the Jacobin magazine on aspects of his Confronting Capitalism book, it could only be of interest to see whether he seemed to have taken on board any of the points raised in our criticism of his ideas.

Though it’s clear from the start of that conversation both interviewer and interviewee see themselves as Marxists and socialists, there is virtually no reference made to what socialism might mean and nothing at all is said about the kind of socialist society that Marx advocated – one based not on the market and buying and selling but on the abolition of the money and wages system and free access to all goods and services. There is, however, an approving reference to two major 20th century practitioners of authoritarian state capitalism, Lenin and Mao, which seems to echo the line taken in Confronting Capitalism about a Leninist party model with a centralised leadership. So no change here then. But what about his book’s advocacy of reforms of various kinds within capitalism – ‘non-reformist reforms’, as he calls them? Well nothing seems different here either. He refers to struggles for ‘workplace rights, a universal basic income grant, or pensions’ echoing the need expressed in his book for ‘a combination of electoral and mobilizational politics’ and ‘a gradualist approach’.

How many classes?

To be fair, however, the main focus of the Jacobin interview is not how capitalism could be improved or what comes after it but rather its class structure. And here, initially at least, Chibber seems to be living up to the Marxist analysis of class explained in Confronting Capitalism, ie, the existence of two classes in society – capitalists (a tiny minority) and workers (the overwhelming majority) – with irreconcilable interests, and the state being not some kind of mediating body but rather an instrument of support for the capitalist class. But then, in the second part of the interview, what can be described as a variation on this perspective emerges. Here he moves from seeing capitalism as a two-class structure to stating the existence of a third class, a ‘middle class’. This of course is a term commonly used by social analysts seeking to categorise workers in terms of such things as their backgrounds, outlooks, living styles or levels of pay. But should such a ‘third’ category have a place in any claimed Marxist analysis of class? Well, it didn’t in Confronting Capitalism, but now, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it does here. To be precise, Chibber has this to say: ‘So the two “fundamental” classes, workers and capitalists, account probably for around 75 percent of the labor force. What’s the other remaining 25 percent? That’s what we call the middle class.’ But who are this ‘middle class’? According to him, they fall into two groups – the self-employed (‘owner operators, the traditional petty bourgeoisie’, he calls them) and ‘the salariat’.

What to respond to this? Well, we can accept – because it corresponds to observable reality – that in capitalism there has always been a small minority of individuals, who wish ‘to be their own boss’ and to set up their own small businesses of one kind or another. A small proportion of these turn out to be lucrative and may result in their creator becoming rich to the point of not having to work, But the vast majority of them are not particularly successful. Sometimes they procure a precarious living for those who run them, but more often they fail and plunge their owners into the world of seeking to sell their energies to another employer for a wage or salary. Of course, such people, at least for as long as they are in business, can be categorised as wannabe-capitalists, but the vast majority of them (those, for example, that Chibber calls ‘owner-operator shopkeepers’) still have to carry out labour on a daily basis themselves in order to survive and to support their families. So it can’t be meaningfully maintained that the existence of small ‘entrepreneurs’ somehow means that there are three classes in society rather than two.

Still less can it be said that there is, in Chibber’s words, ‘a second group’ helping to make up that ‘middle class’, consisting of those he calls ‘the professional classes and the managerial classes’. An example he gives of this is ‘a mid-level manager’ to whom certain duties are ‘outsourced’. ‘What do they do?’, he goes on. ‘They’re keeping the books, they’re designing the labor process, but they’re also managing and supervising labor. Managers are workers but who carry out the functions of capital and whose own well-being depends on the successful exploitation of labor. So they are caught between the two worlds. That’s why they’re middle class.’ He goes even further, including in this middle class ‘sections of the professoriate and the professional strata’, those with ‘a lot of autonomy’, or ‘salaried people in the professions’, though ‘some are shading into the working class: same occupation, different classes’ (eg, teachers or ‘a professor working at a community college’). To this we would have to respond that all those in Chibber’s ‘second group’, though they may have more autonomy and more pay than other workers, are no less members of the working class for their position of subordination to a system that makes them dependent on the wage or salary they receive. In addition, despite the greater security their role may appear to give them, they can never be sure that the stresses and strains of the capitalist system will not make them just as expendable in the future as workers in other occupations, ie that capitalism’s constant need for cheapness and reorganisation will not make them just as insecure in their jobs or just as surplus to requirements as any other workers.

In short the ‘Marxist’ theorist and professor not only seems not to have taken on board any of the points made in this journal’s review of his book about what replacing capitalism means and about the futility of reformist activity, but to have now rendered his previously ‘clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works’ distinctly less clear and less accessible.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: The best laid schemes (2026)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before the budget on 26 November speculation was rife as to what might be in it. In opposition Rachel Reeves, as Shadow Chancellor, had promised that the priority of a future Labour government would be growth, growth, growth.

But what is ‘growth’? She seems to mean a growth in Gross Domestic Product which is a measure of the inflation-adjusted price of all the goods and services produced in a year. The trouble is that this is not something that a government can bring about. As she herself pointed out in her budget speech, ‘private investment is the lifeblood of economic growth’. So, her plan is to create the best conditions for private investment for profit, one of which in her view is government investment in infrastructure projects. This, however, has to be paid for. As she doesn’t want to rely too much on borrowing she has had to increase taxes. Not that increased government investment will necessarily encourage more private investment; it might for a short while but in the end the only encouragement is the prospect of making a profit.

Capitalism is a system of production for profit where the aim is not growth as such but making profits which, when reinvested, bring about an increase in the production of wealth. It is a result of what Marx called ‘the accumulation of capital’.

Marx himself pointed out that, when it occurs, the more rapid the accumulation of capital, the more jobs there are and the higher are wages due to employers competing for workers. These days, it would also mean an increase in tax income for governments. Reeves seemed to be making the same point when she described ‘economic growth’ as ‘the best means to improve wages, create jobs, and support public services’.

But there is a difference. Marx never expected the accumulation of capital to be continuously onwards and upwards. He saw the process of capital accumulation as ‘a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation’ (Capital, vol 1, ch. 15, section 7). Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Reeves believes — and not only her but all the parties that aspire to manage capitalism — that, if the government gets it right, there can be a permanent boom.

A government might be lucky and be in office during the ‘prosperity’ phase of the cycle but not even the government’s own advisers at the Office for Budgetary Responsibility are predicting that. They are currently estimating that ‘growth’ over the next four or five years will be only 1.5 percent a year. Which is slow by previous capitalist standards and won’t bring about many more jobs or higher wages or enough tax revenue to honour Labour’s promises to improve public services.

In any event, the OBR forecasts are little more than a guess. The fact is that economic forecasts, especially over a longer period, are hardly worth the paper they are printed on as nobody can foretell how the capitalist economy will move. If they turn out to be correct, it will have been a lucky guess.

What will happen in practice over the next few years is that the government will merely react to whatever the workings of capitalism present it with. They will just be muddling through, or, to use the nautical language governments do when they seek to explain their failure by having to ‘face strong headwinds’ or being ‘blown off course’, they will just be navigating by sight.

Letter: Are business and trade inevitable? (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are business and trade inevitable?

Dear Editors

I liked the short story (Socialist Standard September) even if it was a bit contrived. What this was called in other places in the world before and the decade after the war was industrial sabotage and the offenders would be given a safe passage to a labour camp or shot as an example. Now it’s approved government policy in certain countries.

What this does is waste material and man power/labour. It is a pointless activity. What we need are businesses that produce goods to last and to sell other types of goods so that they are never short of work. Also profit by whatever support service is necessary to maintain product longevity. There is competition and there is just plain stupidity.

Business or trade will not and cannot cease whatever type of government we choose to have or win by armed force. It’s a matter of maximising trade within countries and between countries, maximising the general benefits. Business must never again run its own affairs. It should have a non-cabinet minister within the wider Trade and Industry Department. Government has a wide range of responsibilities. It isn’t only business that serves the people and country. Finance and Taxation and Regulation and everything in fact is to serve not dictate to government. Government is the servant of the whole people.

Elijah Traven, 

Hull

Reply: 

You appear to believe that business and trade are inevitable. This is a common view and understandable given that our entire experience today is one of buying and selling (trading). This assumption, however, is only true of societies which organise themselves around certain private property relations. And these private property relations are not inevitable. Given our modern technological ability to provide for the world’s needs they are not even currently necessary.

In modern capitalist societies we have to engage in buying and selling to satisfy most of our needs. This is a recent development over the last few hundred years. Not so long ago buying and selling formed only a small part of most people’s economic activity. The majority of those who lived by their work were self-sufficient, and only traded their small surpluses for a few items they did not themselves produce. Neither, at this time, did most people sell their labour power to others in return for a wage. To be sure, trading has existed in many societies since states first appeared some six millennia ago, but not in all. Many societies before and since have existed without private property relations and therefore without any buying and selling. These societies had quite different forms of organisation from those we are familiar with in our own world.

The way forward for the working class today is not private property which produces a multitude of problems for the majority, but common ownership and the free association of all people. Only in these circumstances can we eliminate the negative consequences that capitalism so reliably produces and which are so often mistakenly assigned to ‘human nature’. Without capitalism, our current experience of conflict, exploitation, economic instability, the enormous waste of both resources and human labour, the multitude of insecure, unfulfilled lives, the ever present threat and actuality of mechanised warfare and the inability to solve our common problems as one global people, could all become things of the past.

You mention labour camps and the practice of shooting people for engaging in the production of goods designed to have a restricted lifespan – planned obsolescence. You seem to be referring here to states such as the Soviet Union and China which were or are ruled by authoritarian political parties calling themselves socialist or communist. Societies of this kind, just like those in the West, are founded on private property relationships. They trade internally and on the world market. Their goal, like that of Western capitalist societies, is to accumulate capital. While it is true that countries with authoritarian governments and with state control of capital are more directly able to suppress destructive business practices such as the use of planned obsolescence, we see no evidence that this kind of society is sufficient to overcome the multitude of pressures that capitalism imposes on the working class or upon humanity. Indeed, they add problems of their own. Moreover, as the EU is currently demonstrating, Western style capitalist governments are capable of suppressing these practices, at least in part, whenever they threaten to harm the future of capitalist interests more generally.

Capitalism is capable of functioning under a variety of governmental types. Eliminate capitalism however, and government loses its primary function. There is no need for it to continue to exist. So we don’t start by asking what kind of government we want. We start by asking how we want to relate to each other as human beings, and how we want to produce the things we all need. We can then ask: given our current circumstances, what kind of society can we create to meet our needs? The answer is that we can do a lot better than what we have at present.

We are glad you liked the article. You say, though, that you found its short story form ‘a bit contrived’. We can agree. All prose forms are contrivances of one kind or another, including those of conventional articles in magazines like the Socialist Standard. In this respect, the difference between them is that we are more familiar with some written forms than others and take their contrivances for granted. The short story form of the article in question was in fact based on an incident and two conversations that took place in the real world. The article was, in fact, a slice of real life. The virtue of this kind of storytelling is that it allows us to connect the way a capitalist economy actually works with everyday life as we experience it. This is part of the Socialist Standard’s purpose: to witness and explain the often less obvious workings of a capitalist economy, its businesses and its trading economy, for those of us who currently have to sell their labour power for a wage or a salary – Editors

Socialism cannot come from the barrel of a gun (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The news cycle has recently thrown fresh attention onto the ‘Socialist Rifle Association (SRA)’, an American organisation advocating firearms training and ‘training working-class armed self-defence.’ A Democratic Party Senate candidate in Maine was criticised for old posts encouraging people to join the group. Graham Platner had posted on Reddit in 2020 with the handle ‘Antifa Supersoldier’, encouraging users to join the SRA. Now reports suggest LGBTQ and left-liberal Americans are increasingly turning to gun ownership out of fear of political repression.

The Cato Institute (a free-market libertarian think-tank based in Washington) found via a freedom of information request to the FBI that the SRA appears to be the active target of an ongoing investigation. The Trump administration’s proposed ‘trans gun ban’ was only one example of the orange man’s Second Amendment rollback.

The SRA flips the American script: guns on the left rather than the right. Its message, community defence, resistance to authoritarianism, and the right of ordinary people to defend themselves, and it appears on the surface to be a working-class concern.

The rise in left-wing gun interest however is less an ideological shift than a symptom of a deeply anxious and alienated working class. When one section of the population arms itself, others feel compelled to follow. Capitalism created the conditions of this insecurity: economic instability, political polarisation, violent policing, and the billion dollar security industry that keeps you safe but only if you can afford it.

The SRA itself frames gun ownership as an answer to these concerns.

The phrase, ‘Any attempt to disarm workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary’, is used on SRA merchandise, patches, t-shirts, coffee mugs… a misquote from Karl Marx’s address to the Communist League in March 1850. What doesn’t fit on a t-shirt is the full quote:

‘Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organise themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary’ (Marx, 1850).

What Marx was speaking of was a specific political moment in 1850, during a faltering bourgeois revolution, not of the general conditions of working class life under capitalism, or of a popular democratic working-class revolution.

We can assume many SRA supporters cite Lenin, who wrote at a time of underdeveloped material conditions in Tsarist Russia, and leaned heavily on Marx’s early writings from the 1850s, written before the bourgeois revolutions had run their course. In those texts, Marx had argued that workers should support the bourgeoisie (emergent capitalist class) in overthrowing autocratic rule while pressing for full democracy. Only after the bourgeoisie attained political power he believed should workers organise politically against them.

Marx’s later position was that the emancipation of the working class must be the conscious act of the working class itself, democratically organised, not the work of a professional armed minority or vanguard.

Capitalism, not the lack of firearms, is what makes the working class vulnerable. It is capitalism that pits factions of the workers against one another: nationalist movements, strongman posturings, racism, gender-based violence. Against these systemic woes the possession of rifles is no more a solution than the ownership of a fire extinguisher is a solution to arson.

The SRA’s rhetoric makes much of ‘community defence’ and the image of the armed worker resisting oppression. Historically, this imagery is lifted from episodes of class conflict eg. Paris 1871, Russia 1917, Spain 1936, and further romanticised by those who confuse coups with socialism. As the Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s Association put it: ‘The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ That means consciously organising for political control, not relying on paramilitaries or armed minorities acting ‘on behalf of’ workers.

Socialism cannot be imposed by force, nor defended by pockets of armed militants. The failure of the USSR shows this to be true. A society based on common ownership and democratic control requires an active majority to be politically convinced and politically organised, not a vanguard with guns, bombs and bullets.

Armed groups, whether on the left or right, reflect capitalism’s logic of coercion, alienation and the struggle for dominance. The SRA rejects right-wing gun culture, but it mirrors it and as such it remains bound within capitalism’s framework. It’s a consumerist solution – buy a gun, get training – to combat a structural problem. But, as the Libertarian Socialist Organisation (LSO) in Australia pointed out in 1979 in an essay against anarchist terrorism, ‘You can’t blow up a social relationship’.

Socialism cannot be created by armed vigilantes because socialism is not a change of rulers but a transformation of society. The revolution must be conscious, majority-led, democratic and international. No amount of gun owners can substitute political consciousness and political will.

King Capital will not be dethroned by an armed militia, but by a working class organised consciously and democratically to remove the master class from control of the state.

The SRA is not a revolutionary awakening, but a reaction to a society that offers people no security except what they can buy and carry.

A.T.

Material World: Paycheck to paycheck (2026)

The Material World column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’re used to hearing that the overall standard of living in the West is significantly higher than in the countries that make up what used to be known as the ‘Third World’ but are now commonly referred to as the ‘Global South’. For many of these, most sources indicate progress in expanding access to basic necessities such as water, sanitation and health facilities. Yet a recent joint report by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that approximately 1 in 4 people globally, or close to 2.1 billion, lack access to clean drinking water and that this contributes to roughly 3.5 million deaths per year, nearly 400,000 of these children under five.

More broadly, according to an Oxfam International report from June 2025, 3.7 billion of the world’s population, or around 45 percent, live in conditions of moderate or severe food insecurity with over 700 million living on less than 2.15 dollars per day and 3.4 billion living on less than 5.50 dollars per days. This means that many are unlikely to have the money to eat regularly and so will often skimp on food or skip meals. In addition, the business data website Statista has reported on a United Nations estimate that around 1.1 billion people worldwide, including around 50 percent of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are living in slums, described as ‘areas of self-built, unsanitary housing where extreme poverty is rife’.

How does all this compare to the standard of living in what is seen as ‘the richest country in the world’, the USA? We would expect it to be a lot higher overall, and indeed it is. But what are things actually like? Wildly differing figures on living standards, poverty and deprivation are to be found depending on the sources you consult. For example, the CNN Business website recently reported on a Bank of America analysis which estimated that around 1 in 4 (24 percent) of American households are barely getting by – living ‘paycheck to paycheck’, as they put it.

The bank’s statisticians combed through data on millions of customers to track how much they spent on basics such as housing, groceries, childcare and utilities and found it constituted over 95 percent of their income ‘leaving little to nothing left over for the “nice-to-have” things like going out to dinner or taking a vacation, let alone saving’. One of their interviewees who had a degree but was working in a construction business about to shut down is quoted as saying ‘to be 34 and living paycheck to paycheck with no savings, things are pretty crappy right now’.

However, a different survey came up with a quite different result, which was that the proportion of workers living paycheck to paycheck was not 24 percent but 67 percent. This figure emerged from the Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report by the PNC Bank, based on workers aged 21 to 69 working full time at companies with more than 100 employees. It painted a picture of workers struggling to cover everyday expenses, especially with cost of living currently outpacing wage growth. A Newsweek report on this survey quoted Taylor Nelms, vice-president of research and insights at the Financial Health Network, as saying: ‘The percentage of U.S. households that say they spend more or the same as they bring in has been remarkably consistent, hovering around 50 percent over the past several years but right now it’s compounded by high housing costs, insurance premiums, and the return of student loan payments. These are the areas where households feel most squeezed’.

There’s clearly a big difference between these survey results, but whichever figure you take as reliable, it’s clear that many millions of people in the world’s ‘richest country’ are not only not rich but are materially insecure and struggling to keep their heads above water, with some in particularly straightened circumstances. The CNN report highlights some of the typical symptoms of this – people falling behind on their bills, minimum credit card payments being made, an increased percentage of borrowers late on their car loans (referred to as ‘a clear sign of financial distress, especially since car loans are historically the last payments Americans are willing to miss’), and people filing for bankruptcy having incurred large medical debts while ill. Nor does any of this take into account the undoubtedly worse conditions of those who have no employment at all or are homeless or not registered to work. The current estimate of the number of unemployed people is 4.4 percent of the workforce, so 7.6 million people living in even worse circumstances than those ‘just getting by’.

What conclusions can we draw from this? First and foremost that, though wage and salary workers in what is usually considered the most advanced part of the Western world are undoubtedly better off on the whole than their counterparts elsewhere, this does not prevent many of them from suffering poverty and insecurity. And this in a world which, if it were organised rationally (ie, with a system aimed at catering for the needs of all and not the profits of a few), could provide abundantly for all of its 8.3 billion population. Already in fact the world possesses enough productive capacity to eliminate global poverty many times over. Yet this can never happen as long as we have a system – the market system – which ensures vast wealth inequality between the tiny minority of people who own most of the resources and the large majority who own little more than their skills and energies and their ability to sell these for a wage or salary.

It is no kind of aberration, therefore, that the USA has, according to Forbes Magazine, 905 billionaires with a combined wealth of 7.8 trillion dollars and that, according to Federal Reserve data, the top 1 percent of households in the United States hold 30.5 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent. Rather it is the inevitable consequence of a system (production for profit) that has no mechanism for meeting the basic needs of the whole of humanity and will always fail to do that. This being the case, it is as clear as it can possibly be that the majority of the world’s workers need to take collective and democratic political action to bring that system to an end and replace it by one that will be cooperative, moneyless, wageless and based on free access and production for use.

Howard Moss

Proper Gander: The luxury gap (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s a hint of pornography about Channel 4’s documentary series Inside The World’s Most Luxurious… in that it presents an idealised version of something in order to titillate. The first three episodes each show off the highest of high-end vehicles: cruise ships, motor-homes and yachts. These are the most extravagant and technologically advanced ways of getting from A to B available, albeit only to those who can fork out £8,000 a night for a voyage on a liner. On the Seven Seas Grandeur, this would get you one of their ‘most exclusive’ suites, which comes with its own butler. The ship boasts seven restaurants (with Versace-designed crockery), a 470-seat theatre and an art gallery containing 1,600 exhibits, including a doted-on Fabergé egg. More compact are the motor-homes featured in the second episode. These are ‘jaw-dropping palaces on wheels’, one of which even includes a garage in which you can park your Ferrari. A hi-tech cockpit leads on to a sleek seating area, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, even a roof terrace. The Element model of motor-home sells for over £2 million, although this sounds like a bargain compared to the £12 million cost for a flat of the same size (732 square feet) in Knightsbridge, London. The third episode showcases ‘the super elite’s ultimate status symbol’: yachts. We’re told that ‘these floating palaces redefine the meaning of opulence’, with one example being the £80 million Titania, which runs to 73 metres long and has six decks (containing a massage room, jacuzzi, gym and grand piano) joined by a glass lift. This ‘pinnacle of bespoke luxury’ is only rarely used by its owner, the billionaire founder of Phones4U John Caudwell, and otherwise can be hired out for £600,000 per week.

The series describes rather than attempts to analyse the extravagances, not that this means it gives an objective or neutral account, as illustrated by the gushing adjectives used in the narration. While the monetary value of the vehicles is often mentioned, more emphasis is placed on the attention to detail and the skills involved in manufacturing them. The motor-homes and yachts are made to order, with the specifications chosen by the beaming couples who commission them and built by hand by specialist firms. The talents of the designers, welders, plumbers, electricians, and hundreds of others are evident, and the yachts and motor-homes are certainly inspiring as technical achievements. The positive impression the programme engenders also extends to the owners, who seem personable enough, and the creators and crews who want to do a good job in making and running the craft. We are only shown the staff while they’re on duty and on camera, though, so we don’t hear if their opinions are always so committed. Despite the occasional wry inflection in the voice over, the programme’s affirming tone doesn’t encourage us to question the context in which these lavish objects exist. Still, it’s obvious that the lifestyles depicted in the programme don’t bear much relation to those of its audience. The extraordinary feats of design and engineering are tainted by the elitism which the vehicles represent.

In a socialist world, maybe more people will want to live in yachts or motor-homes or their future equivalents? Without the financial and bureaucratic constraints which in capitalism usually tie us to a particular location whether we want to be there or not, the freedom to travel around would be one of the principles of a socialist society. Some people, groups or communities may prefer to spend time travelling with or without a fixed home, and why not do this in the most comfortable way possible? This leads to the familiar argument against socialism that it is unrealistic and unsustainable because ‘what if everyone wanted their own luxury yacht or motor-home?’. An assumption behind this is that given the opportunity, people will tend to choose the most full-on option. Personal greed is an attitude encouraged by the relative scarcities of capitalism, whereas socialism wouldn’t create the conditions for an outlook as narrow. Wanting better isn’t necessarily the same as wanting more, and even in capitalist society, our aspirations are varied. If an individual or group in a socialist world wanted to produce a top-notch yacht or motor-home, they wouldn’t be able to make this happen through financial clout, but only by engaging the cooperation of many others. With resources and manufacturing capabilities owned and run in common, people will have to decide how to allocate them using whatever decision-making processes are most democratic, representative and practical. Without the wasteful production which comes with propping up capitalist infrastructure, a socialist society would be able to focus on satisfying people’s needs and wants. Whether or not this would involve behemoths like those featured in the documentary would depend on what provision and motivation are available at the time. A socialist society’s early period would have to prioritise ensuring the global population’s basic needs are met in a sustainable way. Maybe motor-homes and yachts or their future equivalents could be available on a pool-type basis, with people booking them to use for a while and then being available for someone else. This kind of arrangement would no doubt be alongside networks of more communal travel by land, sea or air. The technology and skills to create efficient, pleasurable means of transport are already here, as demonstrated by Inside The World’s Most Luxurious…, even if our current society limits this to the super-rich, as the programme also reminds us.

Mike Foster

Why we can’t support Your Party (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the weekend of 29-30 November some 2000 attendees at a conference in Liverpool founded a new political party called simply ‘Your Party’.

After Labour lost the 2019 General Election long-time left-winger Jeremy Corbyn resigned as leader and was succeeded by the man who is now the Prime Minister. During the four years during which he was leader Corbyn had tried to steer the Labour Party towards the left. Starmer decided not just to reverse this but to turn the Labour Party into a mainstream capitalist party, even to the extent of describing itself as a better ‘party of business’ than the Tories.

Corbyn himself was suspended as a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party (though not of the Labour Party itself). Starmer could have let him stay a member (as Corbyn would have wanted) but he and those around him were adamant. They wanted to completely change the Labour Party by in effect lopping off its leftwing. Corbyn’s supporters were expelled. Corbyn himself was not allowed to stand as a Labour candidate in the 2024 general election. They put up a candidate against him; which meant that as he stood against a Labour candidate he was automatically expelled from the Labour Party. He won, easily, as an Independent.

From that point on, there were calls for Corbyn to support the formation of a new left-of-Labour party which would in effect be the Labour Party’s former leftwing as a separate political party. Whatever the reason Corbyn dithered and another suspended Labour MP, Zarah Sultana, precipitated things by announcing in July that she was resigning from the Labour Party to co-lead a new leftwing party with Corbyn. This was an announcement that a lot of people had been waiting for and up to 800,000 were said to have expressed an interest in the new party, though by the time of the conference only some 53,000 had actually joined.

Sortition

A new party cannot be created just like that. It has to have a statement of what it stands for and a constitution. Corbyn and his advisers drew up a plan which, in theory, seemed reasonable enough (as long as the provisional committee played fair).

A provisional committee is set up to draft a statement of aims and a constitution both to be put to a founding conference. These would be subject to amendments suggested by meetings of members. Those attending the conference are to be chosen by lot (now called sortition) from the membership. Conference will debate the finalised documents and selected amendments. These will be voted for or against online, not just by those chosen to attend the conference but also by the rest of the membership on the basis of one member one vote.

This — including sortition — seems a democratic way of going about founding any new party whatever its aims. Choosing those attending a founding conference by lot should ensure that they will be a representative cross-section of the membership and reflect the views of the average member and not just of an activist minority. More generally, it is an alternative to election but still a democratic way of choosing people to carry out particular tasks (as it already is today for choosing trial juries) and could have a wider use in a classless socialist society.

This, however, did not go down well amongst the activist minority made up of the various Trotskyist groups that had decided to ‘enter’ the new party (as in the past they had ‘entered’ the Labour Party). They argued that this would exclude experienced activists like, er, themselves.

In the event, it didn’t exclude them. It just ensured that they were represented in accordance with their proportion of the new party’s members. The Trotskyist groups were pleasantly surprised that quite a few of their militants were chosen to attend, even some from the more obscure grouplets

Do as I don’t

The Trotskyists also objected to a provision in the proposed constitution barring dual membership with another political party. This was in fact already in the application form to become a member and take part in the founding process. This, however, wasn’t enforced and members of the SWP, the old Militant Tendency (now calling themselves SPEW) and most lesser Trotskyist groups joined and participated freely in the pre-conference Your Party meetings.

One objection to Trotskyists being in the new party was set out by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, Robert Griffiths, in an article in the August issue of their paper Unity, where he criticised ‘the readiness of the ultra-leftist sects to infiltrate broad-based mass movements in order to divide them, pose as a “left opposition” to the leadership and recruit from those they influence and mislead’.

Which is indeed what Trotskyists plan, though it’s a bit of a cheek coming from the CPB as it’s what its antecedents used to be good at. (Incidentally, the CPB position is not to join the new party but to vote and campaign for its candidates under certain circumstances).

The Trotskyists lost no time in forming a ‘left opposition’ and campaigning to make the constitution of the new party as democratic as possible. This was not because they believe in democratic organisation but because it would give them a wider opportunity to work and recruit within the new party. They joined a ‘Socialist Unity Group’. One of its constituents calls itself the ‘Bolshevik Tendency’; which would have been a better name for their faction.

They are hypocrites because their own organisations are not organised democratically. Take the SWP, for example. It is run by a Central Committee which is chosen in this way:

‘The outgoing Central Committee selects and circulates a provisional slate for the new CC at the beginning of the period for pre-Conference discussion. This is then discussed at the district aggregates where comrades can propose alternative slates. At the Conference the outgoing CC proposes a final slate (which may have changed as a result of the pre-Conference discussion). This slate, along with any other that is supported by a minimum of five delegates, is discussed and voted on by Conference’.

What this means is that the SWP is run by a self-perpetuating group that in effect renews itself by co-option. The slate ‘selected’ by the outgoing committee is virtually assured of winning. It was how the Politburo of the CPSU was chosen in the old USSR. Their constitution also states that ‘permanent or secret factions are not allowed’.

When the SWP led a move to ‘seize control’  of the conference agenda by means of an emergency resolution, the conference organisers took this literally as a call to storm the platform and invoked the paper ban on dual membership to expel the leaders of the SWP (and hire a security firm to guard the platform).

In the end, the conference voted not to endorse a complete ban on dual membership but to make acceptance of being in another party more difficult. So the Trotskyists are still there.

What does the new party stand for?

Before adopting a constitution the conference also adopted a Political Statement setting out its general aims. This began:

‘Your Party is a democratic, member-led socialist party that stands for social justice, peace and international solidarity. Our goal is the transfer of wealth and power, now concentrated in the hands of the few, to the overwhelming majority in a democratic, socialist society’.

This is rather vague and says nothing about how quickly — or how slowly — this ‘transfer of wealth and power’ is to take place nor what the end result will be like. It is what the Labour Party promised in its election manifesto for the February 1974 general election. In fact, it is even rather less radical in terms of rhetoric as that manifesto talked about ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’.

The Statement doesn’t go into what they envisage this ‘transfer of wealth and power’ as involving but it will be much the same as Attlee set out in 1932 (Will and the Way to Socialism, p. 42):

‘A Labour [read: Your Party] government, therefore, not only by the transference of industry from profit-making for the few to the service of the many, but also by taxation, will work to reduce the purchasing power of the wealthier classes, while by wage increases and by the provision of social services it will expand the purchasing power of the masses’.

So, different private profit-making sectors of the economy are to be gradually brought into some form of ‘public ownership’; taxes on the rich increased; services provided by central and local government expanded and improved, and money wages increased. All this to take place initially within the framework of the existing mixed private/state capitalist economy. The end result — several decades down the line — would be a society where people’s incomes and what they owned would be more equally distributed than now and in which they would be working for some ‘public enterprise’ paying them a good wage and be provided with well-funded public services and amenities.

This is the old Fabian dream of the gradual transformation of capitalism into a more equal society by means of nationalisations and social reforms. It’s not as if it has not been tried, and failed. It always was impossible because it involves trying to make capitalism work in a way that it cannot.

What drives the economy under capitalism is the pursuit of profits to be accumulated as more capital invested for more profit. If a government interferes with this, the result will be a slowdown in the economy depriving the government of the tax revenues to proceed further towards a more equal society. Based as it is on profit-making, the capitalist economy cannot tolerate a growing increase in the purchasing power of workers and their families at the expense of what is the source of the purchasing power of the rich, profits.

The last time it was tried

All reformist governments with such a programme have failed everywhere, the most recent, spectacular one being the Syriza government in Greece in 2015. This failure is particularly significant as Your Party has a lot in common with Syriza, whose name is an acronym in Greek for ‘Radical Coalition of the Left-Progressive Alliance’ and which included Trotskyist groups as constituent parts.

Leftists explain the failure of Syriza either by a lack of determination or by a sell-out. In fact, it failed because the leftwing government came up against how capitalism works and realised that if it continued to try to apply its policy it would make things worse (they reasoned that if things were going to get worse it would be better that this should be managed by them, who had some sympathy for the working class, rather than by their political opponents who didn’t). A Your Party government would face a similar dilemma.

It is all very well Zarah Sultana saying, as she did in her closing speech to the Conference:

‘We are not here for tweaks of a broken system. We are not here just to lower some bills and sprinkle a wealth tax. We are here for a fundamental transformation of society’.

It got her a standing ovation and it will on May Day and at the end of the next Conference and similar ceremonial occasions but, in practice, in between, Your Party will be campaigning just for ‘tweaks’ and ‘sprinkles’ and seeking votes and popular support on this basis. It will be yet another reformist party. Support built on that basis will be of no use in furthering the cause of socialism. Which is why we cannot support the reformists who have formed what we can only call ‘Their Party’.

Adam Buick

Classic Reprint: Income tax and the wage struggle (2026)

A Classic Reprint from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Given the recent budget from Rachel Reeves and the debate about income tax rates and thresholds, we reprint this article as it will have some resonance.

It is popularly supposed to be a virtue in a government not to impose income tax on low-wage workers. So each government tries to claim credit for having made alterations in the income tax which have the effect of freeing some workers from tax liability entirely, or at least of reducing the amount of it. This claim was made by the Labour Party following its six years in office after 1945 and was repeated by the Conservatives at the 1959 election.

Both the claims are so framed as to be distinctly disingenuous.

It was quite true, as the Conservatives claimed, that the raising of the tax allowance exempted millions of people from tax, but it was equally easy to see that, as wages rise, the exempted millions came into tax range again. And when the Labour Party Handbook 1951 claimed that a youth earning £3 a week in 1951 was paying less income tax than would have been levied on a wage of £3 in 1938 it would have been appropriate to point out that £3 in 1951 would buy only about half what it would have bought before the war.

And both governments refrained from stressing the fact that since the war income tax (Pay As You Earn) has been brought down to lower pay levels to take in millions more wage and salary earners than before the war. The number of people paying tax was under four million in 1938, 12 million in 1945, over sixteen million at the end of Labour’s term of office, and up to nearly twenty million in 1961-2. The Tory budget of 1963 removed nearly four million from liability but with every wage increase some will be coming into the range again.

So if it is a merit not to make workers pay income tax neither the Labour Party nor the Tories can match up to the performance of the National Government in 1938; and none of them can compare with the governments in the nineteenth century which exempted practically the whole of the industrial workers and clerks from liability. An article in the summer number of Public Administration, by Mrs. Olive Anderson, shows that in the middle of the century the minimum level of pay liable to tax was about £3 a week, while the wages of even the most highly skilled craftsmen were under 30s. a week, and clerks’ wages were under 40s. a week.

Interest attaches to the comparison because during the Crimean War tax reformers campaigned to get the taxable level brought down so that the mass of workers would be brought in, one suggestion being to make the tax payable on all wages of 6s. a week and over. One of the arguments was that as it was the town workers who were so keen on the war, why shouldn’t they help to pay for it through income tax?

The proposed changes were not adopted, chiefly because of the difficulty and cost of collecting small amounts of tax from millions of individuals, many of whom often changed their jobs and moved to different towns. Below a certain level the tax costs more to collect than the yield to the government.

Later on tax collection became more efficient and more and more people were brought into tax liability by the twofold movement of the lowering of the exemption limit (from £160 in 1899 to £130 in 1915) and the upward movement of prices and wages.)

But what is there in the common belief that the working class as a whole gain from a lowering of income tax and would gain still more if they were entirely exempt? The answer is, nothing at all! The condition of the working class, apart from possible short term effects when changes are introduced, is not the result of taxation whether in the form of income tax or the so-called indirect taxes, Purchase Tax, etc.

To start with, were the working class better off in 1938 when most of them were exempt from income tax and the rate was only five shillings (1s. 8d. on the first £135), than they have been since the war when nearly all of them are within the tax range and tax is at a higher rate? The evidence points to the fact that as a class they were rather worse off in 1938. And to go further back, were they better off in 1900 or 1850 when they paid no tax at all? Again, the answer is No!

In the latest year for which figures are available there were about 23 million wage and salary earners (including company directors) whose total income was about £14,000 million and who paid a tax of £1,200 million. If we take the industrial workers and shop assistants only, with a total wage bill of about £9,000 million a year, the amount of tax might perhaps be in the region of £300 million to £400 million a year.

Of course those who now have tax deducted would find their take home pay correspondingly increased when the deduction was reduced or ceased, and would for a while be better off; but in the general struggle between workers and employers over wages, this reduction of tax would be a factor in stiffening the attitude of the employers. In the situation of recent years, with fairly continuous low unemployment and increasing prices, such a reduction of tax would operate like any slackening in the rise of prices, it would make it that much more difficult for wage claims to make headway against the employers’ resistance.

Conversely, changes which have brought more and more workers into the tax range, or have increased their rate of tax. had consequences similar to rises in the cost of living: they have stiffened the pressure of the workers for higher wages especially when unemployment has been low. In other words now that millions of workers have tax deducted they have come to think in terms of ”take home pay” and to struggle for the maintenance or increase of that, rather than to look at the wage before deduction.

Mrs. Anderson, whose article has already been referred to, has found that a similar situation may have existed during the Crimean War. One of the reasons why income tax was not then extended to take in wage earners was that with the shortage of labour caused by the war it was feared that to whatever extent tax was levied on the workers the employers would be forced to raise wages to keep take home pay at its former level.

In short, struggling to raise wages is in line with working class interests, campaigning over taxation is not.

H. (November, 1963)

Obituary: Ric Best (2026)

Obituary from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kenneth Alaric Best, who has died after a short illness, joined the Party in 1972 and soon after became a self-described hooligan in Bolton branch, after which he was a founder member of Lancaster branch. His merciless wit as a speaker, honed at a time when adversarial debate was considered a martial art, often left opponents feeling like they’d been machine-gunned. A smart and iconoclastic thinker, he ranged restlessly into all areas of socialist theory. People who spent time with him needed to stay on their toes, because he had little patience for those who couldn’t keep up.

But he also knew how to put the ‘social’ into socialist, with ganja-fuelled parties at his house after every public meeting, which is undoubtedly the reason why Lancaster meetings were so well-attended in the 1980s and 90s. He was an entertaining raconteur with a natural comic timing, and could make even young children laugh. He had a never-ending store of very funny and often salacious stories, sometimes at the expense of other Party members.

Bolton-bred, he spent his formative years in the fire brigade, then later became a computer engineer who embodied the Silicon Valley philosophy of ‘move fast and break things’, running several successful computer businesses. These commitments sadly caused him to drift away from Party involvement in his later years.

Our sympathies go to his wife Kay and children Jo, Jamie and Bill.

PJS

DAP adds:

Ric Best was the first Party member I ever met – it was early 1987 and a meeting in The Liverpool Pub in the business district of the city where what was to become Merseyside Branch gathered. Ric was studying for his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at the University as a mature student, and I was a young politics undergraduate. We were different but got on, as we both liked debating. Ric told me he had joined the SPGB as the Party case was the best means he’d ever come across for winning arguments. I can testify that this is something he pursued with great vigour as many other students at the University at the time still vividly remember (as would our political opponents).

Ric was also a great advocate of democratic participation and all it implied. He claimed many times that the best weapon the Party had in its armoury was that it was scrupulously democratic and could – and should – attract people on that basis, being the most democratic political organisation in existence.

There is little doubt Ric was one of the Party’s great ‘characters’ – an overused word perhaps, but rarely more appropriate, and those who knew him will miss him and the energy he somehow imparted wherever he went.

Exhibition Review: Manchester and the world (2026)

Exhibition Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The John Rylands Library in Manchester was founded on the basis of profits made from the cotton industry. It is currently staging an exhibition, ‘Cottonopolis: the Origins of Global Manchester’, on until May. A number of books, letters and samples of cloth are displayed (one of the books being Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England).

The population of Manchester grew massively in the 19th century, to over ninety thousand, this increase being mainly in workers in the cotton industry. There were massive increases in production of calico and fustian, especially in the twenty years from 1790, and cotton cloth became Britain’s most valuable export. Inventions by Arkwright, Compton and others increased productivity enormously, and there was sizeable growth in companies that made machines, as well as in companies that output the cotton cloth. Steam power resulted in mechanical mills, and new ways of printing cloth were also developed. Mass production meant that the British weaving industry was able to out-compete manufacturers in India.

But, of course, weaving was only part of the story, as the raw cotton came from plantations worked on by slave labour, in the Caribbean and the American South. Some of the cloths manufactured were poor quality ‘Africa goods’, produced for sale to slave traders to clothe the slaves. One suggestion made in the displays is that the creation of a captive workforce in the colonies changed ideas about how workers in Britain could be exploited under the same industrial machine.

Nor was it just Manchester that profited from the enormous expansion of the cotton trade. Liverpool became an important port for imports and exports, and new canals were built, partly to transport food, coal and so on to the growing industrial hub in the city and its surroundings.

Not a large exhibition, but an informative and interesting set of displays.

Paul Bennett

Socialist Sonnet No. 218: These Old Men (2026)

    From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

 

These Old Men

 

Such are the old men. It is their thinking,

Not accumulated years, make them so,

These holders of office, presidents who

Have become too addicted to drinking

The elixir of power, or theocrats,

Even now, claiming divine appointment

For what is really their corrupt intent,

Reacting violently to perceived plots

In any opposition. Whether god

Or Mammon is promoted or cited

Is of no relevance to those slaughtered,

Supposedly for the national good.

There’s no proper accounting because

Theirs’s is the profit, the people the loss.

D. A.  

Editorial: Much Ado About Nothing. (1909)

Editorial from the January 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

We refer, of course, to Mr. Asquith’s speech of the eleventh of December, at a dinner given in commemoration of a Liberal defeat. “We are met,” said the Premier on that auspicious occasion, “to celebrate a failure.” The Lords had inconsiderately slaughtered a Liberal licensing bill, and sour-faced Nonconformity had in consequence been cheated of its sop. Weeks had been spent by the Commons in dreary talk in the passing of that measure, and tons of unreadable printed matter had been issued, but this had not prevented it going the way it had been expected it would, and perhaps intended it should, go—apparently to the relief of the majority outside. The bill, indeed, was utterly worthless to the workers, and quite hopeless in the promotion of temperance : its only function seems to have been to square the electoral account for nonconformist and teetotal support.

The collapse of the so-called Education Bill, added to the violent death of the licensing measure, had depressed the Liberal party and made many of its supporters discontented, and it became incumbent on Mr. Asquith to give a rallying cry to decaying Liberalism, and revive the drooping fortunes of his party. And to the accompaniment of loud and prolonged cheering the anxiously awaited pronouncement was made public. “I invite the Liberal Party from tonight,” said the hero of Featherstone, “to treat the veto of the House of Lords as the dominating issue in politics.” Hardly inspiring, this, as a rallying cry, even if it were not mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. Indeed, what did the Premier propose to do to make his dominating issue a reality ? Was the party to go to the country forthwith upon the issue and fight the Lords ? No, quoth Mr. Asquith, that would be to admit the right of the Lords “to dictate both the occassion and the date of a dissolution.” So the Liberals were going to be brave—and to submit. The hollowness of Liberalism hardly needed further demonstration. “Down with the Lords” is again to be its empty rallying cry ; and although the House of Lords, has not yet gone to Jericho, still its walls are expected to crumble at a shout, for certainly the Liberals are prepared to do nothing more.

It cannot be denied that there exist powerful constitutional weapons against the Lords which the Liberals could use were they sincere, but wherever capitalist interests are endangered Liberal and Tory have two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one. In view of working-class unrest, does not the second chamber offer a possible barrier to working-class advance should other obstacles not suffice ? And does not this account for the tenderness with which the Lords are treated by the Liberals, and partly, also, for the enormous number of peers which the latter create ? Not, however, that we are enamoured of a reform of the House of Lords, for the reform of a rotten institution simply serves to perpetuate that institution, and a House of Lords reformed would undoubtedly be a House of Lords strengthened as a weapon against the workers. Nevertheless the fatuity of Liberalism in this respect, as in regard to their projected Land Tax, cannot escape recognition. The fiscal reform of the Liberals, indeed, is at least as futile as the fiscal reform of the Tories, as far as working-class interests are concerned. So, also, with that other measure which collapsed of its own weakness—the “Education” Bill. There, also, we have an example of Liberal futility. Though called an Education Bill, this measure had nothing whatever to do with the improvement of education, but was solely a faction squabble between sections of the capitalist interest as to which particular brand of Christianity should be forced down the throats of the children. In other words, since the particular form of superstition to be taught is but the outward and visible sign of the interests of one section or other of the ruling class, so the squabble over religious education was really to decide which section of the ruling class the children were to be taught to look to for guidance. To capitalist parties this religious squabble may be vital. Mr. Hill, “Labour” M.P., may claim that “the Bible is still his best book,” and that he believes “in simple Bible teaching.” But from the working-class point of view the fact remains that the worker’s interest is foreign to all this Labour cum-Liberal twaddle.

Moreover, the Liberal-Labour bankruptcy on the question of unemployment could hardly be made clearer. Along with the boasted avalanche of Liberal measures—all conceived in the interest of the ruling class —the position of the worker has been steadily growing worse. Statistics convey a quite inadequate idea of the extent of dumb suffering and poverty that exists among the workers from this cause. Mr. William Redmond, M.P., is moved to remark in Reynold’s that “there is no part of the world where the contrasts between luxurious wealth and miserable poverty are so marked as in England, and particularly in London.” And he further adds,

“We have in Ireland suffering and unemployment enough. But the humblest labourer in his cottage in the country is to be envied in comparison with the workman in the great cities who finds himself without employment. Bit by bit the little articles of the home are sacrificed. The pawnshop stretches forth the only hand of assistance often to be found. The home goes, and there is nothing left but the streets. Far preferable is the lot of the poorest dweller is the countryside to this.

England has been glorified because of her great industrial progress, her mighty factories, and her great hives of industry. But when the depression of trade brings with it the discharge of workmen and the hopelessness which that entails, it is futile to talk of the glory of England’s progress. She then presents a spectacle which is unparalleled in the history of the world, of the most boundless wealth on the one hand, and the direst poverty on the other.”

But to these sufferings of the working class the Liberals, like the Tories, are cynically indifferent, and are, in fact, only likely to move when the workers start acting for themselves. So bad is the state of affairs, indeed, that the Labour Party, that docile tail of the Liberal bow-wow, is even moved by the callousness of the Government to murmur a faint protest. We quote from the daily paper of December 12th.

“Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., secretary of the Labour Party, speaking at Coventry last night, said deliberately (according to the Central News Agency) that unless the Government turned over a new leaf and observed more sympathy, initiative, and determination in dealing with the serious problems of unemployment it would find the Labour Party before long in violent conflict with it.”

Things must be bad indeed, when the Labour Party threatens to be in conflict with the Government ! In fact, we cannot believe that it will ever come to that. The faithfulness to the Government that has hitherto characterised the “Labour” members is not likely to be disturbed. As we have been reminded on more than one occasion, they find their seats too comfortable.

For the working class, however, groaning under their increasing burden of misery, only the policy of hostility can be of use. They must, as distinct from the Labour Party, find themselves all the time in violent opposition to the capitalist Government. They must democratically champion their own interests against all sections of the capitalist party, and realise to the full that the rallying cries and faction fights of Liberals versus Tories are in very truth rightly said to be “much ado about nothing.” Indeed, if the workers are not prepared to take a stand with their comrades in the Socialist Party and fight their own battles, then there is no power can save them from the deepening misery that threatens.