Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

They say one million dollars can barely get you anything these days, which seems true, since someone just shelled out $904,500 for a century-old cork-stuffed life vest.   Yes, it was a life vest worn by a survivor of the RMS Titanic. Still! That’s a lot of money for something that, notably, never had to do its job. The vest was worn by Laura Mabel Francatelli, a secretary traveling first class to Chicago with her boss, fashion designer Lucy Duff Gordon, and her boss’s husband. Famously, the ship did not have enough lifeboats for its 2,200 passengers (only about 700 people were saved), but these three snagged a seat on lifeboat No. 1—one of the more controversial boats since it left the ship only partially filled.

[Jezebel]

A certain Sayo Masuda (1925-2008) was sold at age 12 by her impoverished family to a geisha house. In 1957 she published ’Autobiography of a Geisha,’ which Hastings, the historian, quotes. The female parliamentarians leading the drive for the Prostitution Prevention Law roused Masuda to bitter sarcasm: ’All done up in their finery, mincing about so proudly on their tour of the red-light district.’  ’Among those making the laws,’ she demands, ’were there any women like us who couldn’t have survived if they hadn’t prostituted themselves?’  

[Japan Today]

One homeless advocacy group said the bill, which would require homeless people to perform unpaid labor to pay for involuntary treatment, ’evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow’ .

[Common Dreams]

The MAMDANI Act enacts sweeping immigration law changes that would deport, denaturalize, deny U.S. citizenship, or entry to any alien who is a member of a socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.

[Chip Roy]

Today, our understanding of inheritance has moved far beyond Mendel, and insights from genomics refute the prejudiced idea that racial inequality is determined by genes. Even so, many believe that inequality is genetic because they are biased by an inaccurate conception of race called ’genetic essentialism’ . We present data from a randomized trial to argue that if teachers move genetics instruction beyond Mendel and toward more complex genomics concepts—what we call ’humane genomics education’—they can protect students from believing in unscientific notions of genetic essentialism and support their scientifically accurate understanding of race as a social construction.

[Science]

The book plausibly argues that while anti-racist, feminist, ecological, or solidarity-based practices within everyday life are important, they do not, on their own, create a new form of social mediation. A new society does not emerge through a mere shift in values. It requires different social conditions of reproduction. This, too, represents a significant step forward compared to that left-wing moral politics which tends to reduce questions of social form to matters of attitude.

[Left wing communism NOT an infantile disorder,]

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

The wrong story (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earlier this year BBC television serialised a new adaptation of William Golding’s famous 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. There was uniform agreement among the critics that it was well made, but does the novel itself tell the right story? In portraying what happens to a group of British schoolboys stranded alone on an island, it shows a fairly rapid descent from civilised behaviour to conflict, chaos and eventually outright savagery. What’s usually been taken from the story is that evil, depravity and brutality are inherent in human nature and, if left to themselves, any group of humans will develop a mob mentality, end up at one another’s throats and a hierarchy of tyranny will form.

It’s a plot that certainly chimes in with a lot of what was being written and published widely in the decades following the Second World War. We need only think of books like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and (arguably) George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And from some sources at least this take on humanity kept on coming right up to the end of the century, an example being Richard Wrangham’s 1996 book, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. What such writers were doing in effect was to put forward a secular version of the longstanding religious dogma of original sin, a view of human beings as tainted by innate selfishness and aggression and in inevitable competition with one another. As for Golding, this was openly his agenda, as expressed in the words he used in an interview in 1970, where he said ‘man is a fallen being’ and went on to state: ‘He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state perilous’. He is also on record as saying about himself: ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am that sort by nature.’ So what he seems to be doing in Lord of the Flies is projecting his own dark view of humanity on to children while turning it into a supposed lesson about human nature for millions to read.

As for the TV adaptation, it must be said that its creator, the screenwriter Jack Thorne, did make an effort to temper the ‘human nature’ message by providing ‘back stories’ for its main protagonists. So, for example, we were given to deduce that the savagery of one of the most violent child characters might be, at least in part, a function of the loveless household he had been brought up in. But such tweaks only mitigated to a limited extent the original message carried by Golding’s book and which, as we have seen, the author himself was never shy of defending. In light of this, we can only agree with what Steve Coleman wrote in an article on Golding in the August 1993 edition of this journal: ‘Few novels have so eloquently served the cause of capitalist ideology which contends that humans are inherently aggressive, gullible, self-serving, easily led and uncooperative than Golding’s Lord of the Flies.’

So one thing to be said is that the 2026 TV version of the book came across as a bit of a throwback, largely reflecting as it did views about human nature which have been widely superseded since the book’s original publication. It seemed to close its eyes to the large amount of recent well-evidenced research and investigation on the topic to be found in works whose titles speak for themselves, for example Beyond War. The Human Potential for Peace; Team Human; Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity; Ultra-Social, many of which have been discussed in articles and reviews in the Socialist Standard (see Suggested reading ). The majority of these investigations conclude not that human beings are automatically non-selfish, non-competitive, or non-prone to violence but rather that selfishness, non-cooperation and fighting are not their most natural inclination, even if they are capable of being driven to such behaviour by circumstances. The historian Rutger Bregman, in particular, in his 2020 book, Humankind. A Hopeful History (reviewed in the Socialist Standard May 2021), explicitly takes up Golding’s challenge about the kind of situation portrayed in Lord of the Flies by recounting a ‘real-life’ story of shipwrecked schoolboys. What took place in this case was the exact opposite of what was portrayed by Golding. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and were washed up on a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, during which time they established a friendly cooperative way of living, taking care of one another before they were discovered and rescued. In other words, when real children found themselves alone on a real island, there was no impulse to tyranny, no one descended into savagery, nor was any kind of cruel hierarchy set up as in Golding’s novel. This, as well as other examples of human behaviour Bregman draws on, leads him to reject the notion of an innately self-serving, potentially evil human species. Instead anti-social behaviour, when it occurs, is seen as the reaction of the highly adaptable and flexible creatures that human beings are to conditioning and circumstance (ie, bad circumstances can make us bad people), all of which lies very far away from Golding’s dark view of humanity.

So, while there is no doubt that, when people feel unsafe, unseen, deprived, or their needs are unmet, their actions can shift in unpredictable and undesirable ways, overwhelmingly it is the human capacity for working cooperatively with others that comes to the fore when circumstances make it necessary. What we can envisage with some confidence, therefore, is the likelihood that this will be the default behaviour in the democratic free-access society of from each according to ability to each according to need that is campaigned for by socialists. So not difficult at all to imagine that, in a society organised in that way, peacefulness, cooperation and empathy – the diametrical opposite of what is portrayed in Lord of the Flies – will be the overwhelming order of the day.

Howard Moss

Laundering people: the Catholic work machine (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Irish state has never stopped warehousing women it deems sexually inconvenient. It merely changed the branding.

Feminism as a tool of repression

On the surface Ruhama is a feminist charity helping women affected by sex work and trafficking. Founded in 1989 by the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, Ruhama operates today as a secular organisation with state backing and trades in the language of women’s liberation. These same religious orders are the institutions that operated Ireland’s Magdalene laundries. The continuities between the two systems are not cosmetic. They are structural.

A history of enthralment of women

The Magdalene laundries operated from the eighteenth century until 1996. Women and girls deemed fallen, wayward, or simply poor were confined in institutions that functioned as commercial laundries. They worked without pay, washing linen for hospitals, prisons, churches and hotels. Exhausting work in brutal conditions. The reason? To discipline women’s sexuality through productive exploitation. The state outsourced its moral regulation to the Church, and the Church turned a profit.

In 1993, building work at the former High Park Magdalene laundry in Dublin, previously owned and run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity (sic) revealed the vile nature of those god-botherers when 155 bodies were recovered from an unmarked grave at the site. Most lacked death certificates. Some remain unidentified as they had previously passed through institutions that included Mother and Baby Homes, industrial schools, and psychiatric wards, all devoutly segregating and controlling women and children who violated the Catholic sexual moral code or lacked social power.

The modern rebranding

Ruhama emerged from this same institutional matrix. Its founders were not peripheral figures in the laundry system. They were its operators. It’s argued that historical continuity does not matter because the organisation has since secularised, but institutions survive by adapting their methods, not by abandoning their function. The Magdalene laundries would have you believe their inmates are fallen women in need of moral rescue. Ruhama frames its service users as traumatised victims lacking agency, who have false consciousness or are at risk of exploitation. The vocabulary has been updated. The categorisation of women as problems requiring institutional intervention has not.

Ruhama’s Bridge to Work programme ‘engaged with’ 102 women in 2022, with 37 reportedly gaining job placements. Only five of those placements were paid. Women were once again working without wages, this time under the banner of rehabilitation rather than penance. The institution that emerged from a system of unpaid laundry labour is now placing women in unpaid work placements and calling it empowerment.

Money in the temple

The funding structure reveals where the money goes. In 2024 Ruhama received €2,015,271, with 91.5 percent coming from the state. Of this, 99.64 percent was spent on salaries and administration. Despite taking in €96,945 in donations, the organisation directed €71,799 towards actual service users. A resource distribution model that’s not liberating women from economic precarity. It is a model that sustains an institutional apparatus while keeping its subjects dependent and unpaid.

Ruhama’s own reporting acknowledges that poverty is a primary driver pushing women toward sex work. The logical material response would be substantial direct economic support: rent assistance, debt relief, emergency grants, childcare funding, and guaranteed paid work. Instead, the organisation expands a category called ‘at risk of exploitation’, which is sufficiently elastic to include migrants, single mothers, homeless women, women in informal economies, and young women whose sexual behaviour is considered immoral. This is not targeted intervention against identifiable trafficking. It is preventive institutional capture of a broad population of economically vulnerable women.

Historically, women did not need to have committed a crime or suffered a defined abuse to be confined. Suspicion, poverty, perceived moral danger, or simply being inconvenient to family or state was sufficient. Contemporary anti-trafficking frameworks reproduce this logic but with humanitarian language. ‘At risk of exploitation’ functions as the modern equivalent of fallen or wayward: a classification to justify intervention, surveillance, and unpaid labour regardless of the woman’s own assessment of her situation.

The Magdalene laundries were never abolished. They were incorporated into the state apparatus.

What exists today is an organisation founded under a regime of moral control through unpaid labour, now continuing to place women in unpaid work placements under the promise of moral reform and freedom from sexual exploitation. The women are not being economically liberated. They are being redirected into socially respectable forms of precarity while the institution that processes them absorbs state funding and reproduces the same carceral feminism it claims to oppose.

(Figures on Bridge to Work placements and Ruhama’s 2024 funding and expenditure are taken from research by Grace, Artist and Activist, Ethical Hoes.)

A.T.

The free association of humanity (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A moneyless, borderless world of voluntary work and shared abundance

Imagine a world where no one is forced to work, no one has to sell their time to survive, and yet everything still gets done — not through money, wages, or coercion, but through cooperation, shared responsibility, and collective decision-making. A classless, borderless, moneyless society with all work voluntary is not a vision of laziness. It is a vision of a world organised around human freedom instead of economic pressure.

Life without money, borders, or classes

In this society, money no longer exists. There are no prices, no wages, no rent, and no debts. Borders do not divide people into competing national economies. And classes—owners and workers—no longer define who has access to life’s necessities.

Instead, society is organised around calculation in kind: real needs matched with real resources. If a community needs housing, planners don’t wait for investors. They calculate materials, labour availability, energy use, and build directly for need. If healthcare is required, it is allocated based on population demand, not insurance coverage or ability to pay.

Everything becomes transparent and practical:

• ‘We need 1 million meals this week — here’s how we produce and distribute them’
• ‘We need transport capacity expanded — here are the materials and teams available’
• We need new housing — here’s the construction plan’

The economy stops being a mysterious force and becomes a collective logistics system for human life.

All work is voluntary

The most radical change is simple: no one is forced to work.

There are no employers, no wages, and no threat of poverty to compel participation. Instead, work is voluntary — chosen freely by individuals or groups based on interest, skill, and social need.

At first this sounds impossible. But the structure of work changes completely:

• Essential tasks are made attractive, efficient, and well-supported
• Automation eliminates much repetitive labour
• Unpleasant tasks are minimised or rotated fairly among volunteers

People choose work because they understand its importance and have the freedom to refuse it

So instead of ‘you must do this or you lose your income’, it becomes:

• ‘This needs doing — who wants to take part?’
• And surprisingly, many do. Because when life is no longer dominated by survival anxiety, participation becomes meaningful rather than forced.

How essential work still gets done

A voluntary system doesn’t mean chaos—it means organisation without coercion.

For example:

• Food production: coordinated by agricultural teams using advanced planning systems. Volunteers and specialists rotate roles, supported by automation
• Healthcare: doctors, nurses, and technicians contribute because care is a shared social commitment and a profession of choice, not a financial necessity
• Infrastructure: energy, water, transport maintained by coordinated technical groups with shared responsibility
• Education: open access, lifelong learning, with people freely teaching and learning based on interest and need

Because no one is excluded from resources, people can move between roles, learn new skills, and contribute in different ways over time.

Why people would choose to participate

In a system where survival is guaranteed, motivation changes fundamentally:

• People are not working to avoid poverty
• They are working because they are part of a shared world
• They have time, security, and access to resources
• They can see the direct impact of their contribution

Human beings already voluntarily do enormous amounts of work today — caring for family, building open-source software, creating art, helping communities. A voluntary system expands that instinct rather than suppressing it.

Freedom becomes real

Without money or coercion:

• You are not tied to a job for survival
• You can move freely without economic barriers
• Education is open at any stage of life
• You can contribute, rest, learn, or create without penalty
• Freedom is no longer just a legal idea — it becomes material reality. You are free because your basic needs are no longer conditional.

The environment recovers

When production is no longer driven by profit:

• No planned obsolescence
• No unnecessary overproduction
• No industries competing to waste resources
• Long-lasting, repairable goods become standard
• Energy systems are planned for sustainability, not profit

Human activity can finally be aligned with ecological limits because there is no economic pressure to ignore them.

A world without war or borders

Wars today are rooted in competition over resources, trade routes and markets. In a borderless, moneyless system:

• there are no competing national economies
• no corporations or states fighting for market dominance
• no strategic control of resources for profit

Conflict won’t disappear entirely, but the structural incentives for war disappear. Cooperation becomes the default way of organising global life.

What this world feels like

The biggest change isn’t technical — it’s lived experience.

No more waking up thinking about bills. No more working just to survive. No more dividing your life into ‘work time’ and ‘real time’.

Instead:

• you participate because you choose to
• you contribute because you are secure
• you live in a society you collectively manage
• you have time — real time — to learn, rest, create, and explore

Work stops being something done under pressure. It becomes something done freely, socially, and consciously.

And the central question of life changes entirely.

Not:

‘How do I get by?’

But:

‘What can we build together next?’

Jake (AUSTRALIA)

Dear Editors – Is there a ‘Right of Nations to Self-determination’? (2026)

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

An organisation called Vote Palestine 2026 asked candidates in last month’s local elections to sign a pledge committing them, if elected to, among other things, ‘uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’. One of our candidates replied as below; to which another candidate replied. Here is the exchange published in the comment section of the Brixton Buzz.

Dear Vote Palestine 2026,

Thank you for your email. I must respectfully decline to sign.

As an anti-Zionist Jew and socialist standing in Brixton North, I share your horror at the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. But I cannot endorse a pledge framed around national self-determination.

The nation state, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is a prison house of nationalities. It tells workers to wave flags and forget they have no motherland to defend. Israeli and Palestinian workers alike are exploited by the same global system of wage labour and capital.

National liberation is a trap. A new state means new masters under a new flag, while wage labour, property rights, and class rule stay intact. Council divestment treats symptoms, not the disease.

My goal is not another state but the abolition of the state itself: a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless world community where people cooperate freely. Real self-determination means workers recognising their shared enemy across all borders.

I stand with working people everywhere. I cannot sign a pledge that reinforces the nationalism keeping them divided.

Yours sincerely,

Anya Krycek

Socialist Party Candidate for Brixton North, Lambeth

Reply from Eduardo Salgado:

I think historically, things happen in stages. According to Marxism-Leninism (ML), national liberation often must precede, or be strategically aligned with, workers’ liberation because imperialism makes national independence a necessary first step to create the conditions for a successful socialist revolution. Lenin viewed the national struggle in colonized or oppressed countries as a key component of the overall world socialist revolution. The core reasoning is that national liberation acts as a necessary step to ‘clear the decks’ for direct class struggle, as it removes the foreign oppressor and allows the working class to battle its local bourgeoisie. Lenin says on this issue:

• Support the national liberation struggle against imperialism unconditionally.
• Maintain independent working-class organization and leadership within that movement.
• Use the liberation struggle to raise demands for socialist transformation (land reform, workers’ rights).

Rejoinder from our candidate:

The stageist model, national liberation as a necessary prelude to socialist transformation, is not merely strategically mistaken but theoretically incompatible with the abolition of capitalism. The historical record of national liberation movements demonstrates a consistent pattern: the ‘stage’ of national liberation does not clear the decks for proletarian revolution it institutionalizes a new form of capitalist state. The foreign colonizer is replaced by a national bourgeoisie that maintains wage labour, commodity production, and extraction. The nation is not a proto political reality waiting to be liberated, but a category produced by capital itself a way of organising populations into manageable units. To prioritise national liberation is to reinforce the very abstractions; nation, citizenship, the state that capital requires to function.

‘The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’, from The Communist Manifesto (1848).

The Socialist Party position is that the proletariat has no stake in which bourgeoisie administers its exploitation. Anti-imperialism that stops at the nation state leaves exploitation intact. The state form itself prevents the direct social relations that would constitute a break with capital. Socialism cannot proceed through stages it must begin immediately in the content of struggle, as the practical activity of breaking with wage labour, money, and the state. National liberation changes the flag and people in government, it does not interrupt the reproduction of capital. To make it a ‘necessary step’ is to permanently defer the only act that could end exploitation: the immediate social transformation of society by and for the working class. We don’t seek the people’s commodity production we seek abolition of the proletariat.

Editors’ note:

Questioned on ITV on election day, Green Party leader Zack Polanski was reported as saying that ‘no country has a right to exist’. His critics saw this as a reference to Israel, but it would equally apply to Palestine, indeed to Britain and every other state. States may exist but have no ‘right’ to; which rather undermines the Vote Palestine pledge that many of his party’s candidates signed up to.

Blogger's Note:

A version of this correspondence was previously published on the blog back in May of this year.

Cooking the Books: Housing: the market versus promises (2026)

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

One of Labour’s election promises in 2024 was to build 1.5 million new houses by the end of its normal term in office in 2029. Actually, it wasn’t a promise that the government would itself organise the building of this number of houses but a promise that it would create conditions in which profit-seeking housing ‘developers’ would.

This made achieving the 1.5 million target dependent on it being profitable for the house-building firms to build that many new houses. Which was why, in an article in February 2025, we expressed scepticism about Labour being able to meet its target as it had no control over which way the market would turn. ‘The 1.5 million target,’ we wrote, ‘will only be met if the market expands enough’. Now, analysts are concluding that the market won’t expand to that extent.

An article in the Times (4 May) by Tom Haywood headed ‘Mayday: distressing signs in housing data’ and subtitled ‘Labour’s 1.5m target may be dead in the water after a steep fall in property enquiries’ is a case in point. Noting that a survey of estate agents covering March ‘showed the steepest monthly drop in new buyer enquiries in almost three years’, Haywood wrote:

‘All of this is yet another blow to Labour’s ambitious target of delivering 1.5 million homes by the end of 2029, which now looks close to impossible. The government needs developers to be busier, not quieter, given that they will only build when they can sell at the price they need to make a decent return for shareholders’ (our emphasis).

Precisely. As further evidence, and more convincing than one month’s figures, Haywood noted that hedge funds are betting that the share prices of house-builders and their suppliers will fall in the future, an indication that these vulture capitalists are not expecting the companies they have targeted to make much profit in the next few years. The betting takes the form of ‘short selling’, in which the vultures borrow shares at their current price, sell them, buy them back at their expected future lower price, then return them to the original owners and pocket the difference. Money, apparently, is also to be made from houses not being built!

Faced with rising costs but falling demand, house-builders are unable to pass on to potential buyers all the increased costs and so ‘are struggling to make the economics of projects in the capital stack up’, but not just in London as one survey ‘found that it was not financially viable to build homes in almost half of England.’

There is not much the government can do to make building houses more profitable. Why, then, does the government not give money to local councils to build more houses, as certain naive reformists are demanding? Well, for a start, it hasn’t got the money to give or, rather, could only take it from profits either through increased taxes (these ultimately fall on profits) or borrow it at a higher interest rate that would have to be paid from profits. Which no government, under economic pressure to give priority to profit-making, as all governments of capitalism are, can do, at least not without making general economic conditions worse.

Under capitalism, where houses are commodities produced for profit, there is no way out. Houses will only be produced directly for use — simply for people to live in — when this is the aim of all production. And that is possible only when the resources to produce what people need cease to be managed by profit-seeking companies pursuing ‘a decent return for shareholders’ and become the common heritage of all under democratic control.

Who spread Christianity (2026)

Book Review from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Domination : the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity. By Alice Roberts. Simon and Schuster, 2025. ISBN 9781398510081

In the foreword of this book, the author explains that she became interested in ‘whether we can trace the spread of ideas and beliefs through changes in material culture’ and also how did ‘Christianity reach the West’ and become a dominant idea over such a wide region from its western Asian origins. Her account rebuts any idea that evangelist saints spread the religion solely through their faith or the inherent correctness of their ideas.

As she notes, she had to check herself from thinking about Christianity as an ‘it’ as if it had agency, but instead ‘who had spread this religion. Who, how and why?’ Throughout the book she repeatedly corrects herself, and although she never expressly describes her method as materialist, nevertheless, she does give a clearly materialist account of how real individuals in concrete situations found that what they perceived as their best interests was to produce, reproduce, spread and adhere to the ideas of what is now known as Christianity.

Possibly this book was intended as a treatment or idea for a television series, as it follows the format typical of modern history series, moving from one location to another, in this case from South Wales, to Brittany, to Rome and eventually to Constantinople (although her account does not stretch as far back as the foundation of Christianity itself in the Levant). The reader can picture her striding determinedly past ruins and archaeological digs, and in musty museums looking at the artefacts she discusses.

Accompanying that is a bit of showmanship as she purports to be ‘astonished’ by what she found, as if uncovering some ancient mystery Scooby Doo style. Her claim is that Christianity never was an anti-establishment religion, and that, indeed, its spread was very establishment indeed.

She begins with the evangelist saints who came to post-Roman Britain. She notes that Christianity had already been here as part of Roman culture, and many of these saints were members of elites who had what amounted to a traditional Roman education. The very prominence of these saints was connected with the relative power of churches, places of pilgrimage and the peoples associated with them.

As she notes, in the collapsing Roman Empire, wealthy and powerful families sought to protect their interests by sending sons off for education, and then ensuring their placement as bishops in the church, with the command of land, money and status that brought. This came about, in part, because of the charitable role that the church established for itself as it grew in Rome, supporting widows and orphans; and also providing some of the civil bureaucracy of running regional centres within the empire. As a part of this, the church obtained incentives through tax breaks.

The church had grown within a small and mobile professional class, as it spread through the Roman world. It was never a majority in that world, but plague and financial stresses on the empire may have helped it grow, with its institutionalised resilience alongside its doctrines of salvation and life eternal. It became, as she says, a business of charity.

It was Constantine, an emperor proclaimed in York, who further institutionalised Christianity by making it the official religion of the empire. Roberts doesn’t resolve whether Constantine was a Christian by conviction, but she does note how his rhetoric shifted as he defeated his rivals within the empire, adopting Sun cults and eventually Christian attributes in a traditional imperial display of divine favour for his rule. The suggestion seems to be that, as he consolidated his power, it became useful to tap into the institutionalised networks of Christianity.

To that end, he convened the Council of Nicea, which organised and collated the doctrines of the previously dispersed and differing (and thus bickering) Christian communities, to make a single doctrine and a state religion. As Roberts notes, the fine hair-splitting about whether Jesus existed before his birth, or was of one being with God, became a means of organising factional fights within the Church, which could spill into civil disorder, as it had in Alexandria. Obviously, the idea of one god over everyone appealed to the one emperor of such a diverse and far-flung empire.

In her final analysis, she contends that ‘in a very real way, the Empire became the Church’. The church then became the way that the empire survived its collapse. This is a very readable cross-discipline account of the way that the church grew and became the thing we know today. The metaphor of a business model that she uses throughout is very useful.

If there are any weaknesses, they may lie in sidelining the ideas. As other authors note, one tool the church used was a command of rhetoric and logic: creating effective and plausible arguments would have been an advantage: a business model needs a good sales pitch, and some of those doctrinal disputes may well have had a practical effect on the way the pitch landed.

Pik Smeet

Loose change (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Change! The single word summary of the Labour Party manifesto presented to voters at the last general election. There was certainly a change to the Party’s fortunes, increasing its number of seats in the Commons from 202 in 2019 to 411. This seeming landslide victory would appear to be an overwhelming endorsement on behalf of the electorate. However not quite so overwhelming in terms of the percentage share of votes cast. This change, of over more than 100 percent in the number of MPs, was achieved through an increase of just 1.6 percent in votes received.

After fourteen years of various Conservative administrations, the official opposition had barely stirred the electorate’s enthusiasm. Rather the falling away of the Tory vote opened the way to the government front benches. A significant element in Tory decline was the increasing popularity of Reform UK. Not a political party, but a limited company. Ironically appropriate as an aspiring administrator of a capitalist society.

The new Labour government found that not only had the Conservatives left the treasury chest empty of money, but had filled it with IOUs. Not that this was a novel situation. The new Tory government in 2010 inherited the same predicament after 13 years of Labour. Government expenditure almost constantly increases. Demands and expectations of the electorate are many and varied, encouraged by the competing political parties seeking votes. Oppositions can afford to sound generous, governments become austere.

The role of governments

It is for government to manage and administer capitalist society. Its fundamental function is to optimise profit making. The contradiction lies in the division between the small minority of wealth holders, the capitalists, and the vast majority, the wealth creators, the workers. While wealth holders recognise the need to maintain workers, otherwise there is no wealth creation, this maintenance is drawn from the wealth accumulated. Therefore, the more that goes to that maintenance, as wages/salaries, pensions, benefits, healthcare, etc, the less the wealth held.

Governments have to try and balance maximising profit while sustaining a stable, productive society. Any government action or crisis upsetting that balance impacts on the financial markets, threatening national bankruptcy. No matter how popular a government is in terms of electoral support, its options for action are constrained by the market. The market trumps the ballot box.

A common complaint amongst the electorate is that governments do not listen to them. Voters subject to the machinations of capitalist economies more often than not find their aspirations are not going to be met. Reasonable, even modest wishes for economic security and stability, decent housing, efficient healthcare, good education and a generally comfortable lifestyle, are frustrated. Instead, there is widespread discontent and frustration, often coalescing into cynicism.

Politicians are seen as remote and unsympathetic, concerned only with their own advancement. Daily experience does little or nothing to dispel such notions. Rather there is only a sense of powerlessness, which periodic voting does nothing to assuage. Indeed, the main political parties seem so similar that replacing one with another makes little significant difference. ‘They’re all the same’ is a commonplace. And the fact is they have to be because, despite minor differences, overall they must deal with an economic system that remains dominant, capitalism.

This does not mean the appearance of the political situation cannot change. The grip of the two main post-Second World War parties, Conservative and Labour, has been significantly loosened. An inkling of this change occurred in 2010 when the outgoing Labour government was replaced by the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition.

Giving Reform a go

The 2016 Brexit referendum saw cross-party alliances on either side of the argument. And also the sowing of the seeds of a rising populist movement that scored a remarkable success in the 2026 local government elections. Media vox pops in places where Reform UK have displaced en masse whole swathes of councillors, replacing long-established Labour fiefdoms, often appeared to feature change by weariness rather than enthusiasm. The prevailing response seemed to be giving Reform a go, largely on the grounds that they couldn’t be any worse than the ‘present lot’. This is not to say there aren’t those who are enthusiastic, though not of course racist, as they will insist. Having effectively, in 2024, seriously weakened the Conservative Party at national level, at local level they have now humbled the presiding government.

The prime minister came under threat – still in office at time of writing – with his supporters in parliament and the cabinet demanding loyalty. This is a little rich considering the pernicious use of accusations of anti-semitism to bring down Labour’s previous leader and purge his supporters. It is the very nature of capitalism to be competitive and combative. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it spawns politics which reflect this. Because none of the parties can challenge capitalism, they must fight each other.

Cost of living crisis, illegal immigration, benefits culture etcetera become raw material from which to manufacture political advantage. That they are issues in the first place shows how capitalism simply does not, cannot, meet people’s needs. That Reform UK is a limited company seems fitting as their scope for giving people what they require is limited. Their councillors will quickly find that 80 percent of their council’s funds is already legally spoken for; social care and special educational needs. Are they really going to start turning old people out of care homes to fend for themselves? Will parents enjoy seeing their special-needs children flounder unsupported in already overworked and underfunded schools?

Yes, change is needed

The desire for change is perfectly reasonable. The problem for the electorate is that the many present difficulties people encounter daily cannot be voted away. Neither is there a party or leader to be elected who can do it for them.

The Prime Minister may well be dismissed, but then there will just be another one, equally unable to make any significant difference. Whether a populist ultra-conservative demagogue or a reasonable, left-of-centre sympathiser, the problems won’t go away.

If people really want change they will have to accept responsibility for playing their individual parts in the collective action to bring it about. Capitalism cannot be reformed into being benign; better trying to train a tiger to become vegan. Society can be organised so that everyone’s needs are met. We have the technology to make this practical. The rub is that the technology must be wrested from the grasp of capitalism, along with all means and methods of production.

The democratic process is fundamental to bringing this radical change about. But it will require so much more than just putting an X against a name every four or five years. The first big change must be in how people think about constructing a better future for all.

D. A.

Editorial: The struggle for oil (1948)

Editorial from the September 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

The countries of the world are faced with the vital problem of obtaining sufficient oil to meet the expanding demands of transport, industry and mechanised agriculture. Oil is also needed in vast quantities for armies, navies and air forces, and the problem is not only that of obtaining sufficient in peace time but of knowing that the supply will continue in time of war. During the second world war Germany obtained the bulk of her supplies by developing chemical processes for producing oil from coal. Mr. A. D. Cummings, M.Sc., writing in “Discovery” (February, 1948), states that none of the known processes can yet compete commercially with natural oil.

“As now used, these processes are not an economically successful solution to the problem . . . the petrol obtained from them still costs at least twice as much as the natural oil, which has been refined and transported to its destination. Using hard coal it takes nearly 5 tons of coal to make a ton of petrol; using brown coal it takes 17 tons of raw coal from the mine; moreover, the capital cost of oil-from-coal plants is enormous. Only a country whose need was desperate would contemplate using them in the present circumstances. The processes have no future until natural oil resources dwindle even more rapidly than they are doing at present.”

A small amount of synthetic oil was being produced in this country before the war, but according to Mr. Cummings the British Government decided then against developing it for the needs of the coming war, preferring to rely on supplies of natural oil from abroad. Efforts are now being made to improve the processes and it is of course possible that they may become competitors with natural oil if oil prices continue to rise.

In the meantime consumption of petrol is increasing by leaps and bounds, and the problem of securing increased production and of controlling the petroleum regions becomes more acute. U.S.A. is still by far the greatest producer. In 1947 the United States oil wells produced nearly two-thirds of total world production, but so great is the consumption that the U.S. is now an importer of oil.

According to figures published in the last annual report of the Shell Transport and Trading Co., United States production in 1947 was about 2,000 million barrels. Next comes Venezuela with 435 million, the Russia with 200 million, Iran 155 million, Arabia 90 million and Mexico 56 million.

It will be observed that Russia, with a population greater than that of U.S.A., produces only one-tenth as much petrol. Even if production in Rumania, Hungary and other countries on Russia’s western border is added to Russia’s own resources, the total is still only about 240 million barrels compared with U.S.A.’s 2,000 million. It is true that in Russia very little is used in private motoring, and that every effort is made to develop coal and hydro-electric schemes and thus reduce the demand for petrol, but notwithstanding these alternatives Russia’s need of oil is acute and growing; which explains their anxiety to gain control of further supplies in Iran and other countries. But America too is vitally interested in oil from the Middle East. it is not merely that America needs more oil at home, but that American capital invested in Arabia, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East calls for “protection,” and that the American Navy in Mediterranean, waters requires local supplies. In December, 1946, when American interests were negotiating for oil concessions in Saudi Arabia, it was stated that the major part of the oil produced in Arabia by the Arabian-American Oil. Co. “is going directly to the United States Navy” (Daily Telegraph, 12/12/46).

Western European countries, including Britain, are more than ever dependant on Middle East oil. As Elizabeth Monroe states in the Observer (11/7/48), “the chief interest of Western Europe is no longer the Suez Canal. The main post-war interests of the Western Powers lie further east. The prime one is to preserve the great oil fields on the Persian Gulf and Tigris from falling into hands that would deny their output to Westerners.”

The “hands” in question are of course those of Russia.

In passing it is, however, interesting to note a report from New York “that the United States is negotiating for the purchase of a substantial shareholding in the Suez Canal Co.” (Daily Telegraph, 25/6/48.)

Russia’s interest in trying to prevent American-British domination of Middle East oil resources is obvious. While Middle East production as a whole is still only about 10 per cent. of total world production and only about one-seventh of production in the United States, it is rapidly expanding. If Russia could get into that area, even if Russian activity were to be confined to Northern Iran, her oil problem would be greatly eased. Looking further ahead, there is the certainty that the Middle East will in a few years have doubled or trebled its output.

There have from, time to time been forecasts of the early exhaustion of oil reserves, particularly in U.S.A. According to Sir F. Godber, Chairman of the Shell Co., there is no present danger. Speaking at the annual meeting he said that in the past 20 years continuous discoveries have led to an increase in established world resources, from 23,000 million barrels which was the estimate in 1928, to 72,000 million which is the latest estimate. Even in U.S.A. there is no danger of reserves soon being exhausted. Sir F. Godber says that ” the most conservative estimates of the American Petroleum Institute show that in the United States, in spite, of the constantly increasing rate of consumption, the ratio of reserves to current production is being maintained.” (Financial Times, 22/6/48.)

Nevertheless the Middle Eastern countries, with their enormous undeveloped oil reserves, their cheapness of production, are destined to be a centre of acute, Imperial rivalries for many years to come.

The over-population myth (1948)

From the September 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

In orthodox economics the population theory of Malthus, British Economist, 1766-1834, has long played the role of “The fat boy.” With certain modifications successive generations of economists have sought to “make our flesh creep” from the dismal conclusions he drew from it. To-day there are still many who would seek to give us Malthusian goose-pimples.

The substance of Malthus’ “Essay on Population” was a shameless plagiarism of earlier writers like Townsend and Dr. Wallace. He contended that population always tended to increase faster than food supply. This created a vicious circle. Increased wealth only brought even greater increases in population. Too many people meant too little food. Famine and a high death rate then came automatically into operation. As a result population sank below the level of food supply: then the cycle began all over again.

Malthus’ remedies for this alleged population “evil” was small families, late marriages and abolition of all forms of public assistance.

In view of all this his controversy with Ricardo in which he defended the consumption of the wealthy land-lord class on the grounds that it offset the effects of capital accumulation and thus helped to prevent gluts is not without certain sardonic implications.

Incidentally his “Essay” was an attack on the proposed Poor Law reform of Pitt whereby the Tories were attempting to cope with the dislocation arising from the passing of feudal society and the emergence of a new social order. It was also shrewdly aimed at the Utopian thinkers who under the stimulus of the French Revolution had carried to its most optimistic conclusions the doctrine of utilitarianism—“The greatest happiness of the greatest number,” by an advocacy of an ideal based upon equality of property and sex.

To say that increases in population tend to out-run food-supply is of course the merest of truisms. It would only have force if the productive powers of society were themselves incapable of progressive improvements. Such has not been the case: Indeed since Malthus lived all evidence has gone to show that wealth has tended to increase at a faster rate than population.

Ironically enough it has been these very increases in population which Malthus apparently dreaded so much that have contributed so decisively to making large-scale production, and the enormous increases in wealth production that went with it, possible. For it is clear that only when population has reached a certain level can that co-operation of mass aggregates of labour-power, working and organised for a given end, take place. It is in fact, as Marx points out, this very form of large-scale co-operation basic to capitalism that brings in a new economic force, the social productive power of collective labour. “When the labourer co-operates systematically with others he strips off the fetters of his individuality and develops the capabilities of his specie.” “Capital” (Vol. 1, p. 319, Kerr Edition.)

At the same time this large-scale power-motivated form of production has produced its own type of inventiveness and specialised forms of scientific application and technical skill. Moreover the capitalist greed for more and more surplus value has acted as a perpetual spur to increase the productivity of workers by seeking to constantly revolutionize technically the existing means of production. Such things of course would be impossible in a smaller society based upon agriculture and handicraft.

For Malthus, however, and those who followed him, poverty and pauperisation were simply the product of a growing population which provided more mouths than could be fed from the extant cultivated soil.

The shallowness of the contention that overpopulation is exclusively a cause of poverty and pauperisation is evidenced by the fact that the pauperisation and proletarianisation of large sections of the English population were taking place at a rapid rate during those centuries when the population was relatively static or at least increasing very slowly.

In Malthus’ time forcible evictions due to land enclosures reached a peak never before attained in the long history of land enclosures in England. It was the elimination of the peasant and small-holding section of the community, coupled with the ruin of the handicraft workers in face of the superior productive powers of industrial capitalism, that the condition indispensable for modern capitalism was fulfilled. The latter half of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century were the culmination of that long historic process which divorces the labourer from his productive means and converts his working energies into a commodity—labour-power. It was these large masses of the dispossessed which formed the “surplus” population which provided the human raw material for a rapidly expanding capitalism.

Although the population during the industrial revolution was many times greater than that in the Tudor period yet such was the demand by employers for ever fresh layers of labour-power that women and children, lunatics and paupers, plus heavy emigration from Ireland, were means by which the capitalist sought to increase the working population.

Density of population is of course no proof of over-population. One country may be densely populated, yet in no sense could it be said to be over-populated. On the other hand another country could have a sparse population without being under-populated. Note also that Ireland has suffered heavy depopulation due to a high rate of emigration. Yet there is extreme poverty in Ireland and also a surplus agricultural population.

Professor Carr Saunders, in “World Population” (p. 142) says that Germany and Italy have approximately the same density of population. There was, however, before the war a vast difference in wealth producing capacity between them. Obviously the possession of essential raw materials and the scope and efficiency of their respective industrial organisation, both economic factors, were responsible for this. In the same book (p. 142) Professor Carr Saunders says that there is no proof that the industrialised countries of Western Europe are over-populated.

Increases in population have never occurred in the absurd way Malthus suggested they did. Modern research points rather to the fact that increases in population since the latter half of the 18th century have been due to a declining death rate rather than any absolute increase in fertility.

History has also dealt Malthus and the neo Malthusians a shattering blow. Before the war it was rather a question of Malthusianism reverse. Then publicists, politicians and newspapers were prognosticating gloomily not on the dangers of a rising rate of population, but on a falling one. Many are still prognosticating gloomily about it to-day. In fact they assure us that if the population decline continues the optimum level of population will be seriously disturbed, i.e., according to them the best possible level of population which at a given time is most efficient for maximising wealth production. As a result they say productivity might decline, there would be less opportunities for capital investment, the standard of living lowered and unemployment possibly intensified.

Marx rejected the Malthusian doctrine in toto. He called it a libel on the human race. For Marx “Each specific mode of production had its own special law of population historically valid within its own limits.”

Capitalism, as Marx says, has a law of population peculiar to its mode of production. It is this law of population which reveals that poverty and unemployment exist, not because human labour is unable to wrest a sufficiency from nature-given materials, but because exploitation in the form of wage employment extracts unpaid labour or surplus value.

To put it simply, the capitalists are concerned with reducing costs of production. The most potent method of achieving this is to economise on the wages bill by the introduction of labour-saving machinery. This leads to the discharging of redundant workers. The net result of all employers seeking to do this is large-scale dismissals. Thus a relative surplus population comes into being. Should, however, an acceleration in production be such as to warrant additional supplies of labour power, then this surplus population, or as Marx terms it, ” reserve army of labour,” becomes a source of recruitment for the capitalist. Thus the expansion and contraction of employment is but a corollary and consequence of the expansion and contraction of the productive forces of capitalism. Added to this is the effect of crises which, because profit anticipation is lowered or threatened, leads to a sharp decline in productive activity and precipitates wholesale and widespread unemployment.

It is then this surplus population which, because of its active competition in the labour market, serves as a continuous downward pressure on the wage level.

In this way Marx indicated the mechanism which operates to keep wages in check and thus guarantees the appropriation of surplus value to continue and capitalist accumulation to go on.

Thus is the Malthusian population myth exploded. There is no “surplus” population in the sense that it is unable to contribute to wealth production. There is only a relative surplus population, relative, that is, to the needs and requirements of capitalist production itself.

The Marxian law of population remains then the most fruitful way of looking at the population problem, not from the restrictive standpoint of population growth as such, hut from the standpoint of sufficient increases in the working population to sustain and maintain the growth of capitalist accumulation.

It can also be shown then that the Marxian law of population is independent of the postulates of various population theories. Should the natural increases of population be such as to make labour-power relatively plentiful and cheap there will be less stimulus for the capitalists to introduce labour-saving machinery. On the other hand, should a decline in population rates bring about a diminution of the available, labour-force then there will be a strong incentive for the capitalists to replace men by machines, and so help to restore a situation more favourable to themselves. As a result of a diminished labour-force the acceleration of labour-saving devices will intensify the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Over-production, under-consumption, crises and unemployment will still be normal and recurring features of capitalist society. Marx’s law of population can then be shown to work with the same validity in an increasing or declining population.

The existence of unemployment is not in any way a test of over-population. In the first place the growth of population can be shown to have been steadily ascending. On the other hand unemployment has occurred in sharp and violent fluctuations. It is obvious then that there is no sign of any relationship between population growth and the appearance of a labour reserve army. Anyone who thinks that periods of continued and widespread unemployment are due to excessive numbers in the Malthusian sense must hold that this and other capitalist countries have been over-populated every few years. Following the same logic we must also conclude that in times of boom, when there is a demand for labour-power, they are under-populated.

Again in the U.S.A. there arc only 50 persons per square mile as against 700 in England. What is more the United States is highly favoured over its capitalist rivals in natural resources and geographical location. There cannot be any question of over-population in America. Yet unemployment has in recent years been more severe in America than anywhere else in the world. It is obvious that only the Marxian law of population can adequately account for this phenomenon.

Recently Sir John Boyd Orr told us that soil erosion and exhaustion and the waste of labour and materials on armaments threatens the world with famine. This then is due not to the niggardliness of nature but to the colossal misdirection of human effort, which because of capitalist imperialist rivalries is building up a mighty war machine instead of “applying,” as Boyd Orr said, “the world’s steel and industrial production to conserving the land.” Clearly it is capitalism and not nature that threatens the world with, famine and destruction. Clearly it is capitalism that must go if we are to remove that threat for ever. Alike in agriculture as well as industry, capitalism sows its dragon’s teeth. It is the peoples of the world who will reap its grim harvest.

Ted Wilmott

Roundabouts (1948)

From the September 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

Roll up! Roll up! All the fun of the fair! Who can resist the call of the jingling mechanical music, the raucous voices, the gaudy colours, the light-hearted throng of people, the crack of the wooden ball at the “coconut shy,” or, – for the unlucky – the dull thud on the dingy sheet behind the serried ranks. Yes—these are the places to cure the misanthrope, delude the unwary, or entertain the pleasure seekers. How much senseless joy there is in the roundabout ride. On we get, pay our tanner, and away we go.

On the move, faster and faster, the sea of onlookers becomes a hazy mist arid we may indulge in dreamy thoughts of riding through glorious fairylands as though in a magic carpet. The barrel organ blaring at the hub, the weird animal shapes, the pagan designs in gaudy paint all foster our illusions. But, alas! Our sixpennorth is done. Grinding to a stop we find ourselves back where we started!

Back where we started. Ah, yes—that reminds us of politics.

As after the 1914-18 war, there is an opinion gaining support in the minds of numbers of workers that if only they could get back to pre-war years they would be much happier and contented. We do not pretend to be psychologists, but we assume that this frame of mind must spring from man’s fear of the unknown,

The future is unknown and insecure; the past is known and the insecurities of the years forming it are forgotten.

Compared with the instability apparent to-day in economic affairs the years immediately preceding 1939 must seem quite stable to those people who have the happy knack of having a very short memory for the unpleasant realities of a worker’s life under capitalism.

Such a one is Mr. Ernest Bevin, at present Foreign Secretary in a Labour Government. According to The Star (28th May, 1948) Mr. Bevin, speaking at a conference of women trade unionists, said that after four years of Marshall Aid Britain would be back to 1938 standards of living.

“When we emerge from those four years,” he added, “we shall have so closed the gap that we shall have brought up the standard of living not only here but in the 16 or 17 European nations involved.”

So far as the ordinary worker is concerned, with little or no knowledge of the economics of his everyday existence, we can understand his thinking how nice it would be to be transported back to an era of 1938 prices with his pocket containing 1948 wages! But no such illusion should mar Mr. Bevin’s judgment.

For the benefit of our fellow workers (not for Mr. Bevin’s, for at the time he was General Secretary of the T. & G.W.U., and surely must remember the facts) let us re-quote the following: —

“Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, who estimates that at present prices, it is impossible for a family of man, wife and three children to live decently under 55s. a week in a provincial town, estimates that ‘more than 40 per cent. of the adult urban male workers earn less than 55s. per week and over 33 per cent. earn less than 50s’.” (News Chronicle, March 16th, 1938).”

Mr. Rowntree dealt, of course, with workers who had a job—let us not forget those without a job of whom there were approximately 1¾ millions in the middle -of 1938. No one will disagree that there was little difference between conditions in 1937 and 1938, so let us also re-quote from the Socialist Standard (July, 1938) which said when dealing with some aspects of the Report of the Unemployment Assistance Board for 1937 that “half the male applicants declared normal wages of less than 50s. per week,” and also drew attention to the astounding fact that some applicants for unemployment assistance were better off when out of a job !

In four years’ time, with the aid of dollars from capitalist America, the standard of living in “Socialist” Britain will be raised to that of the halcyon days of 1938. “Let us Face the Future” (Labour Party Election Manifesto, 1945) certainly never promised the workers a prospect so, rosy—it certainly looks as though the workers will have something to face in 1952, after seven years of the “future” have elapsed.

It is rather strange that Mr. Bevin should wish to go back to 1938. If we put the roundabout in reverse for a while we land back in 1938 to find a National Government with a large Tory majority in the House of Commons. Strange that Mr. Bevin should want to return to the standard of living provided by a Tory controlled capitalism !

If he wants to send the roundabout gyrating backwards why doesn’t he go back to the Labour debacle of 1929-31 ‘or the “Labour-in-office-but-not-in-power” days of 1924? Surely these times would be much preferable to Mr. Bevin, or—perish the thought—can he believe that by 1952 the Tories will be in power again to provide the workers with his much boosted 1938 standard?

Following most peculiarly on The Star’s report mentioned above came next morning the Daily Herald’s version of Mr Bevin’s address to the women trade unionists.

According to the Herald he told them that “they should keep before the rising generation the knowledge of what things were like between the two wars.” By this, according to the headline over the report, he meant, “Tell the children of the hard times.”

The Star omits mention of this advice on the education of the children to the horrors of the inter-war years, and the Herald blows no trumpets regarding the return to the promised land of 1938. What are we to make of these contradictory reports?

Let us look at Bevin’s second proposition stated in the Herald. Having said that the rising generation should know what things where like between 1918 and 1939 we think he, or the Herald, might have devoted some time and space to this important matter and given us some information. But no, apparently we must seek this for ourselves, if we are interested.

Here again surely it would have been mentioned that between the two wars there was one Labour Government in 1924, and another in 1929/31, followed by a National Government with Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister with a coalition cabinet until 1935. These Labour Governments during their periods of office led the workers through such prosperous and happy times that on each occasion when next they had an opportunity to vote they sacked the Labourites, and reinstated the Tories! This story of the hard times suffered by the workers in between the two wars because of Tory mismanagement of affairs is a line of Labourite propaganda churned out with much repetition and emphasis. It must, however, not be forgotten that for three of these years Labour Governments were in office and for a further four years (1931-1935) the Prime Minister was J. R. MacDonald, the former chosen leader of the Labour Party. He and other ex-Labour Ministers, including Snowden, claimed that they were carrying out Labour Party policy as far as the crisis would allow a plea that the present Government echoes.

Between the two wars the workers have been for many rides on the political roundabout. The man in charge may have been a Labourite at one time and a Tory at another, but the workers have still been taken for the same ride on the same roundabout and every time they have come back to the place from which they started. During the last, war they were still riding on the same roundabout although the hobby horses had given way to tanks and aeroplanes. Now that it has been repainted and the tanks and aeroplanes largely replaced by the old hobby horses again they are still being taken for a ride! What a fascination this roundabout of capitalism has for the workers.

Just as the visitor to the fair is inveigled by the showman to enjoy a ride, so the showmen of capitalism entice the workers to continue supporting them. When the political roundabout stops at election times the music blares forth in the shape of flowery phrases from the lips of demagogues and the gaudy paint bestowed on the capitalist economic machine distracts the eye from its cheap crudity and ramshackle construction likely to result in a breakdown at any moment.

Why, fellow workers, do you find such enjoyment in this deceitful monster? Think, for one moment, that if you walk the other way, away from the dusty and noisy fair ground, along the road to the country there you will find the cool forest glades, the green meadows, or the pleasant river banks. Here is no harshness, no gaudiness, no deceit, no unhappiness; here is happiness and honesty, beauty and serenity.

So, fellow workers, you can turn your back on the rotten, sordid ugliness of capitalism and make your way to the happiness, security and beauty that is Socialism.

Remember next time you cast your vote—will it be for another ride on the roundabout or will it be a sane gesture for a complete change—a real journey under your own initiative, following your own path in the joyful company of fellow Socialists, to a land where things will be produced not for the profit of the few but to satisfy the needs of all, where all shall be free and none be slaves.

N. S.

Foreign trade and the workers (1948)

From the September 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

On every conceivable occasion the Labour Government has urged the workers to work harder to wipe out the gap between imports and exports. “When this gap has been closed,” says the Government, “Britain will again be prosperous; there will be plenty to buy in the shops, and the workers will no longer suffer the shortages and restrictions of the present day.”

A glance at history is sufficient to show the fallacy of these claims as far as better working-class conditions are concerned.

The closing years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth found British capitalism enjoying unparallelled prosperity. Exports, profits on shipping, and returns on foreign investments more than balanced the value of imports. Looked upon as “the workshop of the world” Britain had rich and plentiful rewards for those who invested in her industries. An idea of the wealth being acquired by the British capitalists at that time can be gained by a glance at the estates upon which death duties were levied in 1903. According to the “Daily Mail Year Book” for 1904 (page 270) five millionaires left estates totalling nearly eight million pounds, whilst two hundred and nineteen further members of the comparatively small capitalist class left a total of nearly forty-nine million pounds.

Yes! England was certainly a, rich country at that time—yet, for the workers, where was the freedom from shortage which, according to the Labour Government, comes with this national prosperity?

Let us refer to a writer of the time, Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet. Imbued with immense but ill-founded optimism, Mrs. Bosanquet and other philanthropists mistakenly imagined that help from the rich could reduce the poverty of the workers. Yet, so bad were working-class conditions, that even Mrs. Bosanquet’s great optimism became depleted and we find her writing in her hook, “Rich and Poor” (published 1896) : —

“Of other charities it would take too long to speak. The parish is beset with them at certain seasons of the year; and money is flung in amongst us much as nuts are flung to boys to scramble for. Soup-kitchens, philanthropic societies, country holiday funds, ragged school funds, funds from all the enterprising newspapers, and funds from all the political clubs in the district; church funds and chapel funds, missions and mothers’ meetings, all are engaged in pouring money into a slough of poverty which swallows it up and leaves no trace of improvement.” (Page 37.) (Our italics.)

Let us revert to the “Daily Mail Year Book” for 1904. On page 141 we find that the number of people seeking poor relief in the year 1900 was 1,882,000, and when referring to the unemployed in 1903 Mrs. Bosanquet said :

“They seem to increase year by year, and the next trade depression will probably show them in formidable numbers.” (Page 9.)

Page 246 tells us that a Professor Vort gave the minimum cost of the diet required by an average working man, his wife and three children as twelve shillings to thirteen shillings and sixpence per week. This diet was so stringent that it did not allow for tea or cocoa—only water. Looking then at the wages of agricultural workers (same page) we are informed that in England the average weekly pay was 17s. 1d., whilst in Wales and Scotland the averages were 16s. 5d. and 18s. 2d. respectively.

Eighteen shillings per week in wages when the weekly cost of the barest food necessities for a man, wife and three children was round about thirteen shillings. Five shillings left over for the provision of rent, clothing, insurances, etc. ! And what of those married workers who had more than three children to support?

The “Twelfth Abstract of Labour Statistics,” issued forty years ago by the Board of Trade, gives us further information. It states that “on every day throughout the year 1892 the average number of persons in receipt of poor relief was 953,719, this number rising steadily each year with but very slight fluctuation to 1,103,724 in 1906, being an increase not only in the number, but also relatively to the increase of population.”

Such was the prosperity of many workers during the Golden Age of British Capitalism when the export trade was said to be in a highly flourishing condition.

Experience shows that whilst the capitalist class is endeavouring to sate the world’s markets it will keep wages as low as possible, for only by doing this can commodities be produced at a price that will allow the undercutting of rival competitors.

On the other hand, as soon as the markets are filled and commodities can no longer be sold profitably, production is curtailed and large numbers of workers are thrown out of work. The capitalist class does not employ workers out of benevolence, but for the express purpose of amassing profits from products that will sell. When commodities cannot be sold it is useless, as far as the capitalist class is concerned, to retain workers in commodity production.

Thus it is seen that whether trade is balanced, or whether there is a gap between imports and exports, the lot of the workers, as a class, remains much the same.

Only Socialism will end commodity production with its wage-cutting;, “sweating,” unemployment, and wars over markets, etc. Only Socialism, wherein the means of production and distribution will be commonly owned, will bring production for use and not for sale. Only within Socialism will production bring plenty to every man, woman and child.

F. W. Hawkins