Rootless (2026)

From the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Grassroots Left, one of the factions within new leftist political grouping Your Party, says in the programme for the central executive committee of the party: ‘Our goal is to bring an end to capitalism, a socially and ecologically destructive system driven by the profit motive and private ownership of the means of production, and replace it with a socialist society organised to meet people’s needs, not generate profit’ (tinyurl.com/ysjhycp9).

Wonderful, they want to bring an end to capitalism! Well…. no, they are regurgitating Old Labour nonsense from decades ago because they go on to say that they want to have ‘key sections of the economy owned and democratically controlled by the people who work in them and depend upon them’.

We wonder what those key sections are. Shipbuilding? Steel? Textiles? Nah, too late mate, all gone. According to current UK government figures, service industries (care homes, education, estate agents, advertising, and of course banks and insurance companies, the latter four being of sod all use except in a capitalist society) account for 81 percent of total UK economic ‘output’.

And if they did get their way, given they are talking about the UK only, how do they intend to manage the interchange of wealth between this services economy with the world capitalist economy, ever hungry for profits? We don’t have a clue, and neither do they.

Then what happens when the capitalist economy goes into recession, as it inevitably will? Which of these geniuses will have the task of wringing their hands as they take the so sad decision of cutting services and jobs?

How many workers are going to fall for such tripe? Probably not many, but it will help capitalism as it will sow even more confusion in workers’ minds as to the real meaning of socialism.

Budgie

Cooking the Books: Wages for housework? (2026)

The Cooking the Books Column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The BBC News website carried an article on 9 December headed ‘A wage for housework? India’s sweeping experiment in paying women’ which described schemes in various Indian states under which some poorer women were given a regular monthly payment by the state. The International Wages for Housework campaign trumpeted this as a victory for their campaign, issuing a media statement that ‘after more than 50 years of campaigning, wages for housework is becoming a reality – in India and elsewhere’.

They date the beginning of their campaign to when Selma James raised their demand at a women’s liberation conference in Manchester in March 1972 but went further back to ‘the work of Eleanor Rathbone, the Independent MP who won Family Allowances (now Child Benefit) in the UK’. The payments under the Indian schemes are not ‘wages’ at all but, like family allowances and child benefits, a handout from the state. The whole ‘wages for housework’ campaign is basically a campaign for this social reform; not necessarily a bad reform, as paying the money directly to the woman rather than her husband is an advance. Even so, it is still a social reform and, as with all reforms that involve the state paying workers money, one that has unintended consequences.

When, during the last world war, a scheme for family allowances became practical politics thanks in large part to Eleanor Rathbone, the Socialist Party brought out a pamphlet Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis which argued that ‘family allowances will lower the workers’ standards of living instead of raising them’. This was based on what wages are and what ultimately determines their level.

Wages are a price of what workers have to sell: their mental and physical energies. Their amount reflects the cost of buying the goods and services required to produce and reproduce this. In the days before family allowances, this included an element to raise future workers and so covered, at least partially, the cost of maintaining a ‘housewife’ and bringing up children. The economic effect of paying family allowances would be to reduce the amount that the employer needed to pay workers to reproduce their labour power and raise a family. As the pamphlet put it:

‘Once it is established that the children (or some of the children) of the workers have been “provided for” by other means, the tendency will be for wage levels to sink to new standards which will not include the cost of maintaining such children’.

Thirty years later we made the same point in commenting on James’s pamphlet Women, the Unions and Work. Her demand for ‘wages for housework’, the May 1973 Socialist Standard said, ‘seems a little naive’:

‘Wages are the price for which workers sell their labour power. That price will be generally sufficient to keep a worker, and his family, at a socially accepted standard. Payment made for housework, like family allowances or free transport, would act as a brake on wages’.

The payments to poor women in India are likely in time to put a brake on wages too, even if, through being paid directly to women, they represent an improvement for the women concerned in making them less dependent on a man.

Selma James had been a Trotskyist (though of a group that recognised that Russia was state capitalist) and quoted Marx, but Marxian economics was not her strong point. Marx would have advised her to change the reformist slogan ‘Wages for Housework’ to the revolutionary watchword ‘Abolish The Wages System’. Then both men and women would have access on the same basis to what they needed to live and enjoy life.

Obituary: Malcolm Rae (2026)

Obituary from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Malcolm (Mac) Rae, who has died at the age of 95, had been a member of the Socialist Party since 1982. He had been an apprentice car mechanic and later a colliery plant fitter, who could ‘fix’ anything (vacuum cleaners, electrical appliances, furniture) and would do it not just for his own family but for friends and neighbours too.

He always had a scientific mindset with no truck for religious ideas, and his experience of work and looking at the world around him convinced him as a young adult that the way society operated was not in the interest of the vast majority of people. So when he came into contact with the Socialist Party, he quickly found agreement with our case for a completely different way of organising social and economic affairs which would assure equality and security for everyone instead of poverty and insecurity for so many.

From then on, as a member of South Wales (previously Swansea) Branch of the Party, he became an active advocate himself for our ideas with wide personal knowledge and understanding that made him an acute and an astute participant in any kind of discussion or debate. His ongoing wish was to see the vision he supported live on until its aims are achieved.

Our sympathies to his son Ian, daughter Kim, and their families.

South Wales Branch

50 Years Ago: Who likes facing Labour’s future? (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A generation of workers have placed their trust and wasted their lives on the pie-crust promises of ambitious politicians. More than thirty years have passed since the Labour Party issued its post-war election manifesto: Let us Face the Future. People like Barbara Castle, who were rising ‘stars’ of the left, when Aneurin Bevan was chief demagogue, have lived to stand in the crumbling ruins of all the misguided hopes which they themselves helped to build. Once again the ludicrous spectacle is one where the reformers proposed and capitalism disposed. We are now living in their future.

Every group of workers in the NHS has been (and will continue to be) ruthlessly exploited by their Labour government overlords. (Yes, we know and by the Tories.)

The nurses, whose devotion to their patients has been mercilessly used by successive governments, were forced to organize, demonstrate and threaten strike action. Then the ambulance crews were pushed into the same position. The ward orderlies and laundry workers caved in under the weight of increasing drudgery and near starvation wages. The extreme reluctance of any of these workers to add to the suffering of the sick and aged, has been cynically played on by the Tory and Labour governments.

The latest miserable episode is that of the junior doctors. Driven by being on duty or on stand-by for as much as one hundred hours per week and working for as many as eighty hours with virtually unpaid overtime, they banned overtime. This brought about the closing down of wards, casualty departments and even entire hospitals. If this reads like a nightmare, that is what capitalism does to dreams of reformers. (…)

Aneurin Bevan once said the Tories were ‘lower than vermin’. What does that make the Wilson, Castle and Foot mob? Regretfully, calling names however well deserved, does little to raise the level of class-consciousness. When the working class wake up, they will contemptuously brush aside these petty upstarts and, in fact, dismiss all leaders. Ultimately the responsibility rests with the workers. Their political maturity (or lack of it) is reflected in how they vote. The power to continue the agony of capitalism derives from the votes of the workers. The power to end it will come from the same source.

[From the article, 'Who likes facing Labour’s future?' by Harry Baldwin, Socialist Standard, February 1976.]

Action Replay: Both sides now (2026)

The Action Replay column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the attractions of watching sport is that of giant-killing, where an underdog defeats a far more powerful or wealthy club or player. This can be even more surprising and satisfying than a long-priced winner in a horse race.

Cup competitions, in football and elsewhere, can throw up encounters between mismatched opponents which sometimes do lead to a giant-killing. In this season’s Carabao Cup, League 2 Grimsby Town beat Manchester United, and in 2000 in the Scottish FA Cup Inverness Caledonian Thistle defeated Celtic. One of the classic cases was in 1972, when non-league Hereford United beat First Division Newcastle United, which included an iconic goal from Ronnie Radford. And in this year’s third round, non-league Macclesfield Town beat the holders Crystal Palace, in what has been described as ‘the biggest upset in Cup history’. Comparable victories can happen at international level, too, such as Iceland’s win over England at the 2016 European Championships.

Similarly, sometimes, in individual sports. Boris Becker won the Wimbledon tennis men’s singles title in 1985 when unseeded, and in 2021 Emma Raducanu won the US Open title after having to play three qualifying matches to get into the main draw.

The opposite to giant-killing can be unequal and so uncompetitive events or tournaments, and anything too one-sided can be unappealing to spectators. At the time of writing, Wolverhampton Wanderers are adrift at the bottom of the Premier League, having had to wait till their twentieth match for their first win. The Italian national rugby union team had won just sixteen matches in the Six Nations tournament since joining it in 2000, and lost 112.

The recent Ashes Test Matches between Australia and England looked like being very ill-matched, with Australia winning the first three tests rather easily, the first being over in just two days. But then England got their own back, winning the fourth test in two days, before losing again in the fifth.

Contests between unequals can take place in boxing too, such as the recent fight between former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua and ‘social influencer’ Jake Paul. Joshua was much the heavier, in addition to being far more experienced, and he won by knockout, with Paul suffering a broken jaw. The purse for the fight was reportedly to be $184m. The recent ‘Battle of the Sexes’ tennis match between Nick Kyrgios and Aryna Sabalenka may have been similar. It’s not clear how much they got paid, but both happen to be represented by the same sports agency. The match was much criticised as being unexciting, and also not helpful for women’s tennis, but no doubt it created a lot of publicity.

Maybe giant-killing gives workers the idea of ‘rags to riches’ social change, as very occasionally happens under capitalism.

Paul Bennett

SPGB February Events (2026)

Party News from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

Editorial: Iran’s cry of the oppressed (2026)

Editorial from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

People, shot by live ammunition, too terrified to go to hospital for fear of being arrested. Body bags spilling out of mortuaries onto the street. ‘Security’ forces extorting the equivalent of 6 years labourer’s annual wage to return the dead to their families. 18,000 protesters arrested, some facing summary execution. A total communications blackout, forcing some to walk hundreds of miles to border areas to get information out.

As this goes to press the Iranian government, undaunted by Donald Trump’s bluster, says it has killed around 2,500 protesters, but if they’re admitting to that figure, the real toll might well be far higher.

Some protesters were apparently hoping for the return of the monarchy under Reza Pahlavi, son of the hated former shah, who had been energetically trying to stir up Iranian public opinion from his safe home in Washington DC. That was seen by most media pundits as an unlikely, even farcical proposition, and one too monstrous for anyone who remembers the brutal repression of the shah, before the advent of the mad mullahs. But the alternatives, civil war or else a military coup, didn’t look attractive either.

The Iranian people only want what anyone wants, to be free to live decent lives. In pursuit of that modest aspiration they have repeatedly shown a level of personal bravery that commands a heartrending respect. ‘Sometimes parents go to the protests and don’t come back,’ explained one mother to her two young children, shortly before she too was killed by police gunfire. ‘My blood, and yours, is no more precious than anyone else’s’.

They have never stopped fighting the theocracy, and they probably never will. Within just two weeks of the 1979 revolution, women were out on the street protesting against the new mandatory hijab, which followed ‘a ban on alcohol; the separation of men and women in universities, schools, pools and beaches; and limitations on broadcasting music from radio and television.’ More protests came in 1992, ’94 and ’95, then a massive one in 1999 following closure of a liberal newspaper, then in 2007 because of petrol rationing, and again in 2009-10 due to what many saw as a rigged election. More protests followed in 2011 in solidarity with Arab Spring uprisings elsewhere, and later in 2017 over the cost of living, and 2018 over water shortages. Most recently in 2022, months of protest followed the alleged judicial murder of Mahsa Amini, arrested by the ‘morality’ police (as if they knew the meaning of the word) for failing to wear a headscarf. In all these protests, the police went in with guns blazing. Hundreds were killed, thousands arrested, and many executed, including by hanging from cranes in public places ‘to deter others’.

The regime may cling on for now, and the more it crumbles, the more viciously it will oppress its own people. Its leaders – and its army of police thugs – know what will happen to them if they finally lose control. They won’t expect mercy, and they damn well won’t deserve any.

Slaughter in Gaza, slaughter in Ukraine, slaughter in Sudan, in Myanmar, and now in Iran. Dozens of armed conflicts elsewhere. When does it ever stop, in capitalism? The tragedy is that it never will, until we bring an end to the competitive market system which sets humans forever against each other, just so that a tiny few can profit.