Labour, Tory . . . Same Old Story (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can you spot the difference? Which is the party of Law and Order, Family Values, Prudent Public Spending, the Market Economy: Labour or the Tories? Such is the public confusion over this that even the Tories have thought of exploiting it:

“Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor, and other key members of the Cabinet favoured attacking Mr Blair as a pale copy of the Tory party. This is called ‘the Coke option’ by researchers who say the Tories represent ‘the real thing'” (Independent, 26 July).

Since Blair became Leader in July Labour’s strategy has been to criticise the Tories on their terms –as incompetent managers of the economy and unable to implement tough policies against criminals, single mothers and other scroungers. Guided by their marketing advisers, Labour politicians don’t attack the Tories’ policies but only the incompetent and ineffective way in which they are carried out. Vote for us, Blair is saying, and we’ll carry out these policies better than the Tories. The aim is to attract enough ex-Tory voters for him to be able to enter Number Ten as Britain’s next prime minister.

Labour being the vote-catching party it always has been, it had to come to this sooner or later: the end of Labour as a party of radical reform of capitalism. Labour never was a socialist party but it did once see its role as trying to shift the balance of power and wealth under capitalism in favour of working people. They never did do this of course nor, given the nature of capitalism, could they have done so. But this was what they said and this at least showed that they thought capitalism was far from being the acceptable economic system they now think it is.

Incredible as it might seem today, Denis (now Lord, of course) Healey told a cheering Labour Conference in 1973 that he was going to squeeze the rich till the pips squeaked:

“Our job is to get power, and we join battle armed with the most radical and comprehensive programme we have had since 1945. Its aim is honestly stated, to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families . . . We are going to introduce a tax on wealth. We are going to turn the estate duty into a real tax… I warn you, there are going to be howls of anguish from the 80,000 rich people. “

Labour got to power, but it was working people who ended up getting squeezed till the pips squeaked. The result was a massive wave of strikes in the public sector over the winter of 1978/9 – and the election of the Tories under Thatcher pledged, as she openly boasted, to undo everything Labour claimed to champion. Which, as demanded by capitalism’s worsened economic conditions, she did and, spiteful woman that she was, with glee. State industries were privatised, council houses sold off, local services axed, welfare payments slashed and the health service subjected to market forces.

Power for what?

Today all that Labour has retained of Healey’s rhetoric are the first six words: “our job is to get power”. Since radical phrases, indeed any definite policies, are now perceived to be a drag on this drive to get power they have been ruthlessly abandoned. Just attack the Tories as incompetent and clapped out, the marketing team advise, and, anxious for power, the Labour politicians oblige.

But power for what? In the end, since they are only projecting themselves as better and more competent managers of the status quo, it amounts to power for its own sake. The Labour leaders want power because they are professional politicians and the ambition of every professional politician is to become a government minister.

Is this being too cynical? Can they be that bad? Perhaps not, but it doesn’t really matter since even if they were sincere (and, on the law of averages, some of them must be) they still wouldn’t be able to make the capitalist market economy work other than as a system that puts profits first and so as a problem-ridden system incapable of meeting human needs properly.

In so far as they might have a theory of what they would do if they get power it will be no different from that behind the failed policies of ail previous Labour governments : trying to redistribute profits towards socially desirable projects such as a better health service, better education and better housing.

This involves accepting the profit system – not a problem of course for Blair and company – and allowing firms to make the maximum profits, justified on the grounds that this also supposedly maximises the resources available for social spending.

The trouble is this makes what a reformist government can do depend on the profitability of capitalist industry. As Richard Crossman, a Labour politician who was to become a senior Cabinet Minister in the 1964 Wilson Labour government, wrote following Labour’s defeat in the 1959 election on such a classic reformist programme:

“A Socialist Government, it is often argued, would be able to finance the huge extension of welfare, education and other pubic services by encouraging a much faster rate of development in the private sector of industry and then taxing away a sufficient amount of the profits. This was the policy put forward by the Labour Party at the last election and in the short run any Labour Government would to attempt it. But experience should have taught us that the run might be very short indeed. In the Affluent Society no Government is able to give orders to Big Business. After one budget a Labour Chancellor who tried to squeeze private industry too hard would soon discover that he was not master in his own house and that there is a relatively low level above which taxation rates, whether on the individual or the company, are only raised at the cost of provoking tax evasion and avoidance so widespread that revenue is actually reduced. If the motive of your economy is the profit-making of large-scale modem private enterprise, a Labour Government must be prepared to allow very large profits indeed and to admit that the number of golden eggs he can remove is extremely limited. ” (Labour in the Affluent Society, 1960)

His answer was that Labour should therefore seek to establish an enlarged state sector so as to give a Labour government more room to manoeuvre. The present Labour leaders would recoil in horror at such as suggestion, not that anyway it would have worked to protect a Labour government from the economic pressures of capitalism to keep costs down and profits up. Nor that the Labour governments of which Crossman was subsequently a member made any real attempt to do it.

Profits first

In fact Labour ministers ended up making speeches accepting that profits should be encouraged. Here is how one of them (Harold Lever who, like Healey was later ennobled) put it:

“Labour’s economic plans are not in any way geared to more nationalisation; they are directed towards increased production on the basis of the continued existence of a large private sector. Within the terms of the profit system it is not possible, in the long run, to achieve sustained increases in output without an adequate flow of profit to promote and finance them. The Labour leadership know as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot be made to move faster without extra fuel.” (Observer, 3 April 1966).

This could be Blair or Gordon Brown or any of the other Labour leaders speaking and well sums up what will be the only economic policy that a future Labour government will be able to pursue. Profits First, that’s the economic law of the capitalist system, which all governments of capitalism have to accept and apply.

If you accept the profit system, then you have to accept that profits have to be made and all that this implies, including opposing strikes, restraining wages and keeping taxes on Big Business low. Labour does accept the profit system, much more openly than they have done in the past, to the extent that today they are even prepared to advocate these things while still in opposition.

Nobody who is against the profit system has any place in Tony Blair’s bland new Labour Party. If you want more Law and Order, more Family Values, more blurred nothingness you might as well join Labour as the Tories or Liberals. But if you are a Socialist and want to get rid of the profit system you should be in a democratically-organised socialist party campaigning for socialism and nothing else.

Adam Buick

The Rise and Fall of Clause Four (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1918 the Labour Party transformed itself into a national organisation. At the same time it adopted a list of Party Objects, the fourth of which read: ‘To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.”

This was the nearest the Labour Party ever came to committing itself on paper to Socialism, since this could be interpreted as a somewhat wordy definition of real Socialism not all that different from the Object we in the Socialist Party adopted when we were founded in 1904: ‘The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.”

However, since it was drawn up by the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and since the Fabians stood for a state capitalism run by an educated elite, it was meant to be understood as a reference to state ownership, or nationalisation, i.e. state capitalism.

This was confirmed when in 1929, as a result of left-wing pressure to commit the Labour Party to the nationalisation of the banks, the words “distribution and exchange” were added after “the common ownership of the means of production”. This made it absolutely clear that what was envisaged was not real socialism but state capitalism.

To talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange is a contradiction in terms. Where there is common ownership there can be no exchange since exchange can only take place between separate owners, i.e. where private ownership not common ownership exists. In a socialist society based on common ownership goods are simply distributed not exchanged, so there is no need for money, banks and the rest of the financial system.

After Labour lost the 1959 election the then leader Gaitskill tried to get rid of Clause 4 on the grounds that it was an electoral liability, but had to back down in face of the opposition. Now Tony Blair is going to try again, with more chance of success it appears.

In a sense he his right: Labour does not stand for state capitalism – it stands for working within the present profit-driven market system dominated privately-owned companies. It stands for capitalism pure and simple. The dropping of Clause 4 will merely make this absolutely clear.

Pressures in the Ivory Towers . . . (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

As ever when the A-level results appear in the middle of August, there was a mad scramble by would-be students to get onto the university course of their choice, or at least the best compromise between what they wanted to do and what their exam results would enable them to do. But this year it wasn’t just a matter of students fighting to find a university and department that would accept them. Universities, too, were desperate to attract enough students to get the maximum income from their paymasters. From newspaper and TV adverts to teletext announcements, universities vied to publicise themselves and those of their courses that still had vacancies.

The government boasts about the expansion of university education, but as usual what lies behind such assertions is more revealing than the claim itself. In part the “expansion” has been achieved by simply renaming polytechnics and some colleges as universities. The growth in numbers of students to over a million (double the figure 15 years ago) has not been matched by increases in university funding, meaning accommodation shortages, larger classes and overcrowded libraries. Most significant of all, student grants, which were never exactly generous, have been replaced by a mixed system of grants and loans. With the recession meaning that vacation jobs have all but dried up, and with restrictions on the claiming of benefit, students are now in a really precarious financial situation. Half finish their courses with a debt of £4,000, while one-in-five have considered giving up their courses because of financial problems. One-in-four take part-time jobs during terms, which is bound to affect their academic performance

About one student in eight now fails their course or drops out “voluntarily”. This is due in part to financial pressures, and in part to the increased staff-student ratio, which means less individual attention. Also many students end up in the rush for a degree place by taking courses in which they have little interest but which still have vacancies. In the recession a degree is no guarantee of a job ( not that it ever was) but it is still a qualification that many employers demand. One simple sign of the extent to which job requirements have invaded the university system is the number of courses with “Applied” in their titles: everything from Biology to French or Social Sciences can now be “applied” (to the real world of profit-making, of course).

The government decision to expand higher education was intended to provide a supply of trained graduates for a technological society demanding a high level of scientific and managerial skills. As we just said, this was to be done on the cheap, with the cost per student being drastically reduced. The teaching year is gradually being increased, and the pressure for two-year degrees is mounting. Universities were instructed to pile-’em-high, with financial penalties for not reaching their quota of students. The high drop-out rate is a complete waste as far as the government is concerned. The recession put paid to the need to carry on increasing the supply of graduates, but student demand for university places continued to rise. This seems now to have reached its peak at 400,000 applications for 270,000 places.

Since they ceased to be privileged enclaves where the sons of the ruling class could study Classics, universities have never been ivory towers. Rather they have come more and more to resemble factories with production lines and quotas. Money and the demands of capitalism are the vital criteria, while educational considerations take a back seat. 

Paul Bennett

Life and Times: Decline (and fall?) (2026)

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

The other day I walked down what used to be the main shopping street of my city centre. When you drive down it, as I frequently do, you don’t take in too much of what’s around you. But on foot I had a close-up view of the stretch that, not so long ago, had some of the best known and most popular shops and businesses in town. What did I see? As I walked along from one end of the street to the other, these were the establishments on view:

1. T’s Nail and Spa (operating)
2. Flamingo’s Vintage (closed and to let)
3. Shaw’s Drapers (closed and to let)
4. The Hanbury Pub (open – having closed and reopened several times)
5. Winning Post Betting Office (operating)
6. Della Cura Authentic Italian Restaurant (closed and not operating)
7. Info Nation NHS Health Board Support (closed and not operating)
8. Chic and Elegant Bridal Wear (open)
9. Ali’s Barbers (open)
10. Greyhound Rescue Charity Shop (open)
11. Warhammer Shop (open)
12. RSPCA Charity Shop (open)
13. Kings Mart Convenience Store (open 6am till late)
14. Brides Bridal Wear (open)

What did this tell me? Firstly, it told me the obvious thing – that this city centre like so many others across the country has taken a hit as a place for people to come and do their shopping, to mingle and maybe to socialise over a drink. It also told me that shops that close are likely to stay closed or, at best, be turned into charity shops, barbers or open-all-hours convenience stores. All of which gives the place a bit of a run-down, derelict look. But, as well as this, walking along that stretch also made me think of the loss of livelihood and perhaps way of life for the people who’d previously worked there, whether as bosses or employees. Some of them at least (for example, the women who’d worked in Shaw’s Drapers for years and I’d got to know a bit from going in there) would have had their existences upended. True, some may have found opportunities or jobs elsewhere, but others may not and the very process of needing to look would have been likely to cause worry, anxiety and maybe even deprivation, all of course hidden from public view. Not that what I saw on that street is unique to this particular location. A similar situation is to be found across many towns and cities in this country and others with bleak effects both on the urban environment and on the people who worked in it.

How much does it matter? After all, people can still obtain most of the goods or services those shops once provided either online or from those large, if usually soulless, edge-of-town or out-of-town stores and supermarkets. And the chances are that most of the people working in the establishments that have gone will have found other work that enables them to make ends meet. As for the visual decline, if the loss of shopping outlets means that people have little or less need to frequent city centres, then they will rarely even come into contact with that.

But isn’t there another side to it? The degeneration of town and city centres has not just lessened their attraction as places to shop but has also meant the diminution of a communal environment for people to meet and fraternise with others and generally feel part of a wider community. Such closeness to fellow human beings has been a fundamental feature of human societies over the 300,000 years that the species has existed, even if it’s something that today’s capitalist’s society militates against. With profit as its mainspring, human togetherness and community hardly feature among its priorities.

And in fact, apart from the demise of community, what we are seeing on my High St with the disappearance or at best rapid turnover of small businesses, is the tireless, unrelenting mission capitalism imposes on all who live under it. It is a system that simply can’t keep still. It ducks, dives and twists at every moment as the market dictates and in pursuit of financial returns. The system’s very nature allows nothing else and at its sharp end are those who do all the work, be they self-employed business owners or, more overwhelmingly, wage and salary workers.

But isn’t there a bright side? On the one hand we have the competitive dog-eat-dog mentality that the system’s money-driven, growth-at-all-costs logic drives and that some say is just part of ‘human nature’. Yet, on the other, the fundamentally friendly, cooperative and empathetic nature of human beings never ceases to shine through in the countless exchanges that take place between people every day and everywhere. It may be in the concern for the welfare of others to be seen in charity and other voluntary activities or just the simple everyday exchanges between vehicle drivers as they slow down or stop to let others pass and are acknowledged with a wave. This gives us hope that, whatever the fate of the High Street shops and businesses in my own city or elsewhere, the basic ineradicable feeling of fellowship that characterises humans will eventually be fully activated and be part of what drives workers to unite to replace the current production for profit society with a quite different one of production for need.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: David and Goliath (2026)

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

Possibly one of the least attractive neologisms of the modern tech era is the word ‘enshittification’. But its coiner, science fiction author and post-scarcity activist Cory Doctorow, doesn’t much care. It’s an ugly word for an ugly thing. And once you are aware of it, you can’t unsee it, because it’s everywhere.

It all starts with a basic and age-old capitalist conundrum. How, as a manufacturer or service provider, can you come to dominate the market and crush all the competition? If you are hopelessly naïve, you might plan to do it by having the best quality product. An easier way, as practised by the likes of Amazon, Uber, Shein, Temu, and many others, is to borrow vast amounts of venture capital (VC) in order to sell at a loss, for long enough to undercut and wipe out the opposition. Then, when you’re the last company standing, the fun can really start.

Your VC-funded product doesn’t need to be perfect, just better and cheaper than the rest. People will flock to it, never suspecting a thing. After all, don’t we live in a world of limitless improvement? That’s how capitalism works, right?

And thus, you conquer the market by making your customers 100 percent happy. You’ve hit peak product. Nothing to change. Nothing more to do. Just sit back and watch the direct debits roll in.

In theory, anyway. Degrowthers and Doughnutters argue that the finite planet can’t afford infinite growth, but what if the economy could achieve a ‘sweet spot’, neither growing nor shrinking, that observes environmental boundaries? All manner of sustainable social benefits could flow from that. It’s a seductive idea. But capitalism is not a static system. It has its own laws of motion. Nobody has the choice to stand still. If you’re not racing ahead, you’re losing ground to the competition. Eat their profits, or they’ll eat yours. If the system isn’t racing ahead, there are no new profits to attract new investments. It either grows, or it withers.

And let’s not forget that you achieved peak product and market dominance at a loss. First you need to claw back those losses, and then your Silicon Valley VC investors will want a big fat return on top. But you’ve already maxed out the market. Where do you go from there? The answer, the only possible answer, is enshittification. Here’s how it works.

You’ve locked in your customers and killed the competition, so now you can price-gouge them. But it doesn’t stop there. Instead of one-off sales, you force subscription models on them so that they have to keep paying forever. If you run a streaming service, open up new income by riddling it with adverts your customers have to pay extra not to see. If it’s a social media platform, collect oceans of personal data to sell to third parties. If you own a phone product, issue updates that make it progressively ‘laggy’ until the customer surrenders and buys a newer model. If you own an electric car company, entice buyers in with fancy software services and then save money by shutting them down. If you own an operating system, design a new version that won’t work on existing computers, forcing everyone to chuck theirs in landfill and buy a new one. Cram it with unremovable resource-draining bloatware and charge extra for a ‘premium’ clean version. Build in intrusive and interfering AI that nobody asked for, with forced logins for simple desktop tools. Add a handy ‘Recall’ function that photographs their desktop every second, including all their passwords, website visits, personal messages, Tinder profiles and online banking details, and stores that information in your company servers where it’s a target for hackers. Ignore the protests. You know what your customers need better than they do. And besides, you’ve fired all your human customer service reps so now the whingers and wailers have to navigate a tortuous odyssey through concentric rings of automated responses and AI chatbots. In short, start with customer satisfaction, end with customer extraction, which Chinese scammers call ‘pig-butchering’. Lock in the suppliers too, and repeat up the chain.

Windows 11 is getting furious blowback for being enshittified. Users are turning in disgust to Linux, which is free, has no viruses and runs on any old machine with a fraction of the resource requirements. Others are resurrecting the antiquated Windows 7, now topping lists on pirate bittorrent sites. Piracy itself, once neutralised by the ease and reach of ad-free Netflix, is now resurging as the streamer market has fractured into a proliferation of platforms, each demanding your money while thrusting ads at you. The subscription model backfires as customers adopt the same cynicism as the corporations: ‘If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing’. The double standards are obvious to many: ‘If people downloading a song are criminals, what are the CEOs of AI companies using the entire internet to train their LLMs?’.

Last month the Norwegian Consumer Council released a video of someone cutting holes in socks, and sawing legs off tables to make them wobbly. The video was part of a global campaign to draw attention to the ‘deliberate degradation of a service or product’, urging politicians to take action against enshittification, including enforcing data protection, breaking digital monopolies, and giving consumers ‘more power to control, adapt, repair and alter the products they already own’. The council admits it’s a David and Goliath battle, ‘but… David won in the end, right?’.

Doctorow isn’t claiming he’s discovered some new phenomenon. He’s savvy enough to know how the world works. Enshittification is not just about how profit sabotages tech development, making things worse instead of better. It’s really a metaphor for capitalist production itself, which has generated eye-watering wealth yet imposes poverty on billions. In this version of the bible story, David is the bad guy, the tiny rich elite, while Goliath is the world working class, the sleeping giant that needs to wake up.

Paddy Shannon