Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo! column from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

You can’t say that! There’s lots of things wrong with wanting and attempting to police language. Something guaranteed to shock and surprise is saying: I’m a socialist; I’m an atheist, I like churches. Oh, and cathedrals. Chapels not so much. Too functional, too severe.

Socialist says, I like mosques, synagogues and temples too but they’re not so easily accessible. Now obviously it’s not the reason for their existence that one likes, they are, after all, brainwashing centres and indoctrination edifices for despots. No, it’s the aesthetic qualities, the enduring link to the class that laboured with their blood, sweat and tears to produce something long-lasting and magnificent in its grandeur and splendour or in its simplicity.

Churches are a bit like pubs, disappearing fast. The headline to a piece in the Mail Online of March 2025 said ‘Britain’s vanishing churches: More than 3,500 have shut in the past decade and been turned into mosques, nightclubs, luxury homes, pubs and even swimming pools as congregations plummet.’ And ‘… the Church of England has seen 400+ closures since 2010, it lacks a specific breakdown for the Catholic Church. The context mentions that the Catholic Church in the UK still has approximately 3,200 churches and that mainstream denominations are facing declines, but it does not provide a five-year sales figure for Catholic properties’.

Once upon a time sold-off churches always seemed to become carpet warehouses.

In Australia, New South Wales, there is an example of a catholic church that, like a battleship, was decommissioned/deconsecrated in the nineteen thirties. Presumably it has, since then been used for capitalist purposes, rental, leasing, making money. It would appear that the church was merely ‘resting’ and was not a dead church. A group of LGBT Australians who had a contract to use the church, sorry, ex-church, were getting kicked out by whoever owns it, because of a lifestyle incompatibility with ‘religious groups’ who objected to the ‘offensive trade’ taking place there. Offence can only be taken, not given.

Perhaps not quite the same as getting thrown out of a bar or public house for causing a disturbance, I’ve been thrown out of better places than this, you cry. Around the same time this LGBT group was being turfed out, the Roman Catholic Church said, “Hold my beer” and excommunicated at least 750 priests because of some malarkey that the Supreme Leader, Pope Leo XIV, didn’t like. Don’t do it, he said, but they did it anyway. It could also affect thousands of worshippers who have not been immediately expelled. The Society of St. Pius X wants to remain traditional but if you piss off the ones in power and they can subject you to sanctions then what are you to do? As the Australian group found out.

A socialist society will not preserve ex-religious buildings solely so that religious mumbo jumbo can take place in them. Instead, community decisions will decide what is the best purpose that these places can be put to for the greater good.

DC

Anti-Zionists (2026)

Book Review from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here Where We Live is Our Country. The Story of the Jewish Bund. By Molly Crabapple. Bloomsbury Circus. 2026.

The Jewish Bund was a Jewish workers’ organisation founded in 1897 in Vilnius (called Vilna in this book), today the capital of Lithuania but then part of the Russian Empire. Its official name in Yiddish, the Germanic language spoken by most Jews in Russia, was the Algemeyner Yiddisher Arbeter Bund (General Jewish Labour Union). It was the largest constituent organisation represented at the later founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), the equivalent of the German Social Democratic Party,

They were known simply as the Bund, its members were Bundists and its doctrine Bundism. They claimed that only they should organise Jewish workers in Russia. Their immediate aim was the establishment of a democratic republic in Russia with cultural autonomy for Yiddish speakers, with socialism as the longer-term aim after Russia had passed through capitalism. Other Russian Social Democrats, including many of Jewish background such as Trotsky and Martov, argued that all workers in Russia, whatever their background or language, should be organised in a single all-Russia party.

When the issue came up at the RSDLP congress in 1903-4 and the Bundists’ claim was rejected, they walked out. This was a fateful decision as it meant that, in the more famous vote on how the party should be organised, Lenin and his supporters won and so got to be called ‘Bolsheviks’ (the majority) as opposed to those who lost the vote who came to be called ‘Mensheviks’ (the minority). The Bundists were opposed to Lenin’s organisational principles, and had they not walked out Lenin’s supporters might have ended up being called the Mensheviks.

The Bund’s policies and tactics were close to those of the Mensheviks and it would not be entirely unfair to describe them as Yiddish Mensheviks. Their mass basis was Jewish workers living within the ‘Pale of Settlement’, the part of the Russian Empire which covered most of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine as well as the whole of what is now Belarus and Moldova and to which ordinary Jews were confined.

After the First World War, when Poland was reconstituted as an independent state and 3.3 million Jews made up about 10 percent of the population, the Bund was active in Polish politics. Its opponents amongst Jews were the religious parties and, above all, the Zionists. In fact they were bitter enemies, the Zionists proposing the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and the Bundists proposing full civil and social rights for Jews within Poland. Hence the Bundists’ slogan — and title of this book — ‘here where we live is our country’. They regarded themselves as Poles who happened to be Jews. Unfortunately for them, as Crabtree recounts, Polish ‘ethno-nationalists’ as they would be called today didn’t agree and by the late 1930s the Polish government was just as officially antisemitic as neighbouring Germany under the Nazis.

As for those who ended up in Russia, the Bolsheviks banned the Bund in 1921. Some Bundists joined the Bolshevik Party but most of them were executed in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.

Crabapple’s book is not a scholarly study of the Bund but an account based on what happened over the years in various places and to various personalities, especially her great-grandfather who had been a Bundist in a small town before emigrating to the United States in 1904. Hence the subtitle of her book, the ‘story’ (rather than the history) of the Bund. It makes for an easy and fascinating read. Disturbing too, in that many Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians joined in the extermination of the Jews in the Second World War.

Crabapple doesn’t disguise her own, left-wing political views and her opposition to what the Israeli state, currently controlled by extremist Zionists, is doing in Gaza. She quotes from Bundist publications predicting what would happen if ever a Zionist state was established in Palestine: the Jews would become the oppressors and the previously established population the oppressed. Which is exactly as it has turned out.

She realises that, with the social basis of the Bund’s support exterminated, after 1945 the Bund had no future and was destined to die out, in fact has aged out with the last surviving militants. Even so, she says it left a legacy. It provides Western Jews with a secular, alternative Jewish tradition to the nasty ethno-nationalism of Zionism. In fact, half the Jews in the world have done what the Bundists advocated: they have regarded where they live as their country. We would justify not being Zionists in a different way: workers should unite with other workers living under the same state to win political control there to dispossess the capitalist class. Where you live is where you should wage the class struggle.

Adam Buick

SPGB Snippets: Hold the tears (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

September 2, 2026

So Starmer is about to resign as an MP. This will allow him to follow the plan he set out after he resigned as PM, i.e.:

“I will now focus on other things and that will be international affairs including defence, security, trade and technology in a fast-changing world.”

A cynic might translate this as:

“I shall reap the dividend of eleven short years in parliament by selling the tiny remnants of my soul to defence corporations, multinationals, big tech, bankers and investors. A quick message to all of you who have worked 40 odd years to gain a pitiful pension to last you through your uncomfortable final years, it appears you joined the wrong pension scheme. So long suckers”

SPGB September Events (2026)

Party News from the September 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.

Spoiling for choice (2026)

Party News from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

WHY WOULD ANYONE BOTHER WITH VOTING?

Can’t be bothered with voting?

Fair enough.

So let’s do this instead!

We know, they’re all rubbish. Red, blue, yellow, green, whatever colour that other lot are this week. They all want the same thing: to keep things ticking along for the people who own everything while the rest of us graft for a living.

Not voting will look like you don’t care and these career politicians will use that as a mandate when the election is over.

Get down to the polling station. Take the pencil. And write SOCIALISM right across the ballot paper.

Why bother? Spoilt ballots get counted and published. Sitting on sofas doesn’t. It tells them you’re not apathetic. It tells them you want the whole lot replaced, not just the faces at the top.

What we actually want: No bosses. No buying and selling of people’s lives. The factories, hospitals, land, the lot; owned by all of us, run for all of us. That’s socialism. Not state control. Not more welfare. Not reformism (tweaking the system) and hoping for the best. Actual common ownership.

None of the parties here are offering it. So don’t pick one. But don’t be silent either!

SPOIL IT PROPERLY. WRITE SOCIALISM.

Leaflet distributed during the election of the new Mayor of Greater Manchester in July.

Action Replay: Get your kit on (2026)

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

Last year an American athlete suffered an unfortunate mishap in a 400 metre race, when his penis appeared from his shorts. He struggled to push it back in, and did indeed win the race. This illustrates the point that sportspeople often need to wear rather brief outfits that do not impede their movements. And, of course, it is mainly women who have to put up with media attention to such matters.

For instance, in the recent Commonwealth Games, there was much hoo-ha about the dresses worn by the Australian netball team. The dresses tended to ride up at the slightest movement and the players had to keep tugging them down. The players, however, seemed more blasé about this than some of the supporters. It has been suggested, though, that girls might be put off playing the sport if it means wearing inappropriate outfits.

A few years ago Norway’s female beach handball team were fined because their players at the European championships had worn shorts instead of bikini bottoms, as specified in the rules. But then the rule book was changed to allow shorts, with no mention of bikini bottoms. Men players, incidentally, had to wear shorts that were at least ten centimetres above the knee.

In Action Replay for June 2011, we commented on similar issues, including the requirement that women beach volleyball players must wear bikini bottoms with a maximum size width of seven centimetres.

These issues have certainly not gone away since then. The European Broadcasting Union recently issued guidance about sexualising images of female athletes. This included avoiding low camera angles that can result in compromising scenes, for instance of long jumpers or pole vaulters, and also slow-motion replays that serve little technical purpose. According to one long jumper, some camera angles may have ‘serious long-term effects on [an] athlete’s mental health’, with abuse on social media taking place.

The incident mentioned in our first paragraph was shown in high-definition replays, but clearly it is women who are subjected to the most unfortunate experiences in connection with sports outfits. A reflection of the sexualisation of women in society, sadly.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: Amin, Africa and the world (2026)

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

The way to stop understanding of events is to show them as resulting from personal misconduct or mismanagement by those in charge. Had Hitler not been mad and bad, the Second World War would never have happened. Stalin’s treacherousness made Russia what it is. But for a succession of weak and untrustworthy leaders, the Labour Party would have brought us all to the Promised Land. This view of history means we are perpetually invited to look at figures idiotic and corrupt, and put all the blame on them. Without doubt they are all as objectionable as stated, but that is not the answer. The high chairs in which these characters sit are provided by capitalism, and at some time of need each appeared to be the ideal occupant.

The special place of buffoon-turned-villain is held at present by President Amin of Uganda. Since his regime began it has been characterized by killings, culminating in the ‘Makerere massacre’ of over 100 students in August this year. It has included the deportation of Asians in 1972, and a series of international incidents; in July there was a confrontation with Kenya, and on the 28th July Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Uganda. There have been attempts at uprisings and to assassinate Amin. On 1st August The Observer had an editorial headed ‘Getting rid of Amin’. (…)

The balance of power in Africa is between the growing and aspiring ruling classes of the states there, their deals for aid with bigger nations, and the bigger nations’ own need for oil and minerals for commodity production.

In this balance, the grotesque Amin is entirely dependent on his sponsors. The continuation of the Kenyan oil blockade in July could have caused his downfall, and from the viewpoint of his Arab allies he is unreliable and disposable; no doubt their attitude is like Samuel Pepys’s — ‘whether it will be better for me to have him die, because he is a bad man, or live, for fear a worse should come’. Meanwhile, workers in Uganda and countless other countries live not only under tyrannical regimes but have the prospect of being fodder for wars, in which the enemies are a matter of permutation. This is the result of production for profit. It does not have to go on.

[From the article, Amin, Africa and the World, by Robert Barltrop, Socialist Standard, September 1976.]