Material World : Reformism in the USA: Bernstein rides again (2026)

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

In an article in Counterpunch in June on ‘What’s Wrong with the American Left’ David Schultz says he is writing in the tradition of ‘the democratic socialism of Eduard Bernstein, who tied the classless society to the ballot rather than the barricade, and of Michael Harrington whose The Other America forced a prosperous country to look at its own poor’.

Bernstein, he says, was ‘betting that universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy’. Bernstein, Harrington and others he mentions ‘believed, as I do, that the point of the left is to assert that capitalism does not get to dictate how democracy operates, but the reverse’. The reverse is of course that democracy gets to dictate how capitalism operates. Which is what Bernstein’s reformism set out to try and do. Whatever else might be said about US self-confessed reformists, they are more theoretically minded than their counterparts this side of the ocean. Ask a reformist here who Bernstein was and they wouldn’t know (unless they had been in some Trotskyist sect when they were a student).

Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) was a member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) who, in exile in London, had worked closely with Engels. He had even written a book in 1895, applying the materialist conception of history to the English revolution, published in English in 1930 as Cromwell and Communism which introduced its readers to the Levellers and the Diggers. At the turn of the 20th century, however, he sparked off a controversy in the German and international Social Democratic movement by suggesting that Marx and Engels had been wrong on certain key points and criticising those who argued that socialism would result from a violent revolution following a catastrophic collapse of capitalism. Instead, it would come about, and was in fact already coming about, as a result of democracy gradually spreading to all aspects of society, including the organisation of the production and distribution of wealth. The book in which he expounded this ‘Revisionist’ position was given the English title of Evolutionary Socialism. Rosa Luxembourg’s pamphlet Reform or Revolution is a polemic directed against Bernstein. We joined in the ‘Revisionist controversy’ with an article in the October 1909 Socialist Standard entitled ‘Bungling Bernstein’.

An article in the January 1956 Socialist Standard on ‘The Fabians, Bernstein and Revisionism’ summarised Bernstein’s views as:

‘That the numbers and wealth of large and small Capitalists tended to increase and society to become more democratic. That class antagonisms were being modified by ethical and patriotic considerations. That crises were decreasing in size and frequency through a process of adaptation largely influenced by trusts, cartels and the like. That the Materialist Conception of History overestimated the economic factor; the influence of the economic factor was diminishing whilst the influence of ideological factors, including the ethical, was increasing. That Capitalism had undergone fundamental changes since the middle of the 19th century when Marx made his analyses, but, though true for the time of which he was writing, they no longer applied. That the theory of surplus value was incomplete and needed the addition of the theory of final utility. That the workers have now become citizens of the country and therefore have a fatherland to defend. That as Germany is becoming more and more dependent upon products from the colonies, these colonies should be developed and protected. Savages have only a conditional right to the land occupied by them; the higher civilization of advanced countries can claim a higher right. That Socialism is a long way ahead and will only come by a process that is gradual and almost imperceptible; consequently we should not worry about the future but concentrate on the present, on the extension of the political and economic rights of the working classes and “In all Advanced countries we see the privileges of the Capitalist bourgeoisie yielding step by step to democratic organisations” (Preface, page XI). That the Social Democratic Party should form alliances with the Capitalist parties nearest to them.’

It is easy to see from this why Bernstein is regarded by Social Democrat reformists as their mentor. He anticipated what after WW1 became the practice of all European Social Democratic parties, including the SPD, despite some of them still being committed on paper to Marxism. It was also the practice of the Labour Party even though they never made a theory of it.

Bernstein’s gradualism has been tried for over a hundred years now. But the result has not been any progress towards socialism. Production is in still the hands of profit-seeking companies and oligarchs. The economy is still driven by the pursuit of profits. There may be a ‘welfare state’ of sorts but that’s being eroded not extended. There is no democracy in workplaces. Rather than the Social Democratic reformists gradually changing capitalism it has been the other way round. Experience of governing under capitalism has changed them into mere managers of the capitalist economic system, accepting and applying its logic that priority must be given to profit-making.

Although Bernstein was not all bad — he did oppose WW1 and he was right about capitalism not collapsing of its own accord — his gradualist reformism must be pronounced a failure. Political democracy has not got to dictate how capitalism operates and never will. It is rather that capitalism dictates how governments act by giving them only the choice of putting profits first. He bet that ‘universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy’ and lost.

Adam Buick

Feasible (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Make Capitalism History. A Practical Framework for Utopia and the Transformation of Society. By Simon Sutterlütti and Stefan Meretz. Palgrave McMillan.

The authors state that one reason for writing their book (which first appeared in German in 2023) was to get those engaged in various struggles to try to make things better under capitalism to seriously consider (rather than just in ‘late night pub talks,’ as they put it) what a feasible, rationally justified alternative society might look like.

Starting from the basic position that humans naturally want to satisfy their needs as they themselves define them, they argue that a free society can only be one where people are no longer forced to work by economic necessity and where people have secure, open access to what they require to satisfy their needs (they mention ‘places resembling modern-day supermarkets but without checkout’); work has to be freely chosen and people must be free to use productive resources to both produce and consume what they need; private ownership has to be replaced by ‘collective disposition’ (they prefer ‘disposition’ as ‘ownership’ has connotations of exclusion whereas productive resources and their products will belong to nobody but just be there to be used ). They call the new society ‘commonism’, but it is obviously socialism.

They are opposed to any form of central planning, on the grounds that it wouldn’t work and that attempting it would give power over people to the central planners. In fact, they are opposed to any central administrative body, even if unarmed and selected democratically. What they envisage is production and distribution taking place through ‘stigmergy’ (communication by signs) which apparently is how termites communicate to build their constructions. Capitalism does this without central planning with prices as the signs; ‘commonism’ would do it through (non-monetary) signals about needs.

They describe well that under capitalism the aim of production is that ‘money must be invested as capital in order to multiply itself’ (‘valorisation’)    and that this is ‘not the result of the greed of managers or shareholders’ but ‘derives from a structural compulsion to valorise that is built into the system’ and enforced through competition: ‘if producers display inferior valorisation, therefore less profit than their competitors, they will be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis advertising, the development or acquisition of new machines, the design of new products and so on. That is why, in the short or long-term, they will be defeated in competition and disappear from the market.’ The state has some autonomy to resist this as it acquires money not by exchange but through taxation; this autonomy, however, ‘remains relative, as state taxes in turn depend on a functioning economy … Therefore, the economy is the dominant sphere encompassing the state’.

They don’t regard state-dominated economies, such as the former USSR, as capitalist — in fact they follow the annoying practice of Continental academics of referring to them as ‘Real Socialism’ in the sense of a ‘socialism’ that really existed— but as being subject, through participation in the world market, to the same economic compulsions; also that state ownership is still a property form, excluding the majority.

The second part of the book is devoted to discussing how to get to ‘commonism’. Here, they insist, a free society can only be established by people who want it and freely choose to establish it; people cannot be forced to be free; a free society cannot be introduced from above by the state, as envisaged by gradualist reformists as well as by violent insurrectionists. Beyond not taking this route, the authors are fairly agnostic, though they also rule out the idea that worker cooperatives could outcompete capitalist corporations on the market or that voluntary communes (‘commons’, they call them) could spread by-passing the market. They seem to envisage as most likely the ‘transvolution’ (their alternative word for revolution) being set off by some catastrophe such as an economic collapse of capitalism or an ecological collapse.

In the last chapter they relent a bit on their opposition to political action and concede that it is conceivable that the state could support the spread of ‘commonist forms’ before dissolving itself — they write of a ‘suicide state’ — giving the movement for a free society a leg-up, or as they put it ‘a stirrup holder, an accomplice to emancipation’.

Adam Buick

Are the Managers Really in Control? Part Two (1981)

From the February 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1. 

In Part One (Socialist Standard, January 1981 ) we discussed James Burnham’s clearly expressed  argument that class society could exist without property titles vested in individuals. He was of course proved wrong by events: industrial managers have not replaced private capitalists as the possessing, ruling class, on the basis of the state ownership of the means of production (for Burnham never expected the managers to come to power within the legal framework of private capitalism).

Burnham gave as the reason why the “managers”, by which he meant those who actually managed the process of production, would be the new ruling class the alleged fact that a ruling class must have some function in the process of production :

“Social rule . . . depends on de facto control of the instruments of production—the means whereby society lives; and such control can be held only by some group which plays a direct and integral role in production” (The Managerial Revolution, p. 232).

In the past when the means of production were small-scale and scattered this was so. At that time the various means and instruments of production could be, and were, controlled individually. But today, due precisely to the development of modern industry brought about by capitalism, this is no longer so; the production of wealth has become socialised. The wealth of modern society is produced by the co-operative labour of those who work. In this sense the point of production is not the individual mine or factory, but society. Thus it is those who control society, not those who manage production at factory level, who are really in a position to control the use of today’s means of production.

It is the state which is the centre of social control so that whoever controls the state controls society and so, potentially at least, the means of production. This is so even in Western capitalism with its legal property titles. The private capitalists of the West, just as much as the possessing class in Russia (which in fact is also a capitalist class), now possess the means of production because they control the state rather than vice-versa. They use this control to back up their historically-inherited legal property titles, having long ceased to have any necessary productive function. Whereas in Russia the possessing class own the means of production directly through the state, in the West this is done indirectly through individual property titles ultimately enforceable by the state. In the end this amounts to the same thing: today’s socially-operated means of production are possessed and controlled by a minority class socially, through the state, the centre of social control.

Actually, Burnham himself unwittingly recognisedthat access to the modern means of production can only be controlled socially when he argued that managerial rule would be based on the state ownership of the means of production. For, on the basis of state ownership, any group which established its exclusive stable control over the state would become a collective possessing class precisely because it would therefore control the use of the means of production. If industrial managers were to organiseas a group, win popular support or acquiescence, and come to gain control of state power they would indeed become the ruling and possessing class—but  by virtue of controlling the state not of being managers.

Burnham was wrong, then, in assuming that the managers’ technical function in production was a compelling reason why they should emerge as such a group whereas in fact they were no more, or less, likely than any other group to do so.

State Capitalism

Both Rizzi and Burnham (and, indeed, Wittfogel also) rejected the view that Russia could be described as state capitalism. Both of them regarded Russia as a new class society: “bureaucratic collectivism” for Rizzi and “managerial society” for Burnham. This rejection of a state capitalist analysis of Russia was an inheritance from their Trotskyist past where they had learned to identify capitalism with private capitalism. For Trotsky, capitalism could not exist without private property titles vested in individuals; for him “state capitalism” was state control of private capitalist industry.

Capitalism, however, is not characterised by the legal form that class possession of the means of production takes, but by the social fact that those who “possess” the means of production exploit wage-labour and accumulate the surplus-value thus obtained as capital. An examination of “the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers” in Russia shows this to be the case there. The excluded majority live by selling their labour-power to various state enterprises; the products of these enterprises are sold on the market with a view to profit; and the difference between the wages of the producers and the value of what they produce is surplus value which is used for capital accumulation and the consumption of the privileged class. Russia is thus capitalist and its possessing, ruling, privileged class a capitalist class.

Russia can be described as state capitalist in order to distinguish the form of capitalist class possession of the means of production there from the legal property-holding of the West. It should not be forgotten, however, that private property titles do still exist in Russia (though, admittedly, not as the predominant form) and that this could grow in the future. Equally, elements of non-legal de facto class possession through the state exist in Western countries, though the capitalist title-holders are able through their control of Parliament to prevent politicians and state officials gaining a permanent and widespread privileged consumption at their expense.

We see, then, that in East and West alike control of the use of today’s socially-operated means of production rests ultimately in the hands of those who control the state. It is clear that on the basis of class possession of the means of production a variety of such forms—both with regard to control of production and to the allocation of consumer goods among the privileged class—are possible. Each particular case needs to be examined on its own in the light of the historical and social facts. It is not possible to lay down a priori, as Burnham tried to do, which particular group would be most likely to emerge as the ruling class on the basis of state-owned industry. Nor can it be said that there is any particular reason why there should be any tendency for individual property titles to be abolished and replaced by de facto possession through the state.

Classless Society

The above analysis has certain practical implications. Since the state is the organ of social control, and since it is through controlling this organ that the capitalist class, East and West, is able to maintain its possession of the means of production, it is clear that the excluded producing class of wage and salary earners must, in order to establish a classless society, begin by gaining control of the state. Not, be it quickly added, to form a “socialist government” or a “workers state” (both absurd contradictions; when there is socialism there will be no state and where there is a state there is no socialism), but simply and solely to take state power out of the hands of the capitalist class, so removing the last obstacle to society establishing common ownership and democratic social control over the means of production. This presupposes both a widespread desire and understanding among the working class to establish a classless, socialist society and that the working class have democratically organised themselves, without political or industrial leaders, to carry out this desire. In the absence of such majority socialist understanding any attempt to establish socialism would inevitably fail and most probably lead to the sort of state capitalist society, based on de facto class possession of the means of production which we have been discussing.

The essence of class possession is precisely control over the use of the means of production by a section only of society. Once the use of the means of production is under the democratic control of the whole of society then “class possession”, “private property”, “class ownership”, call it what you will, has been abolished. The means of production could still be said to “belong” to those who controlled their use—in other words, to be “commonly owned” by the democratically-organised community.

But to talk of “common property”, “social property”, and the like can be misleading in that these terms do not fully bring out the fact that the transfer to society of the power to control the production of wealth makes the whole concept of “property” redundant. The question “who would own the means of production in socialist society?” can be answered just as correctly by saying “nobody” as by saying “everybody”, or “society”, or the “community”.

What social control over production will mean in practice is that every member of society will be free to take part, on equal terms with every other member, in deciding how the means of production should be used. As Burnham put it:

“For society to be ‘classless’ would mean that within society there would be no group (with the exception, perhaps, of temporary delegate bodies, freely elected by the community and subject always to recall) which would exercise, as a group, any special degree of control over access to the instruments of production; and no group receiving, as a group, preferential treatment in distribution” (The Managerial Revolution, p.55).

Society’s power to control production would be embodied in various democratic institutions. “Common ownership” and “democratic social control” of the means of production are merely, as we have said, two different ways of describing the same situation. This is why discussion as to whether one could exist without the other is quite meaningless.

Socialism is democratic or it is not socialism. A society where the means of production were formally the common property of society but where only a minority took part in deciding how they should be used would be one in which “common property” was merely a fiction since in practice the means of production would be the sectional possession of the decision-making minority.

In the end the only guarantee in socialist society against the emergence of a new ruling class which would negate the common ownership of the means of production is people using the democratic institutions—the actual democratic participation of all the people in the running of society. This is why it is absolutely essential that those who establish socialism—the majority working class who will constitute also the major part of the people of socialist society—must be fully aware of its implications, being prepared and organised to participate not only in its establishment but also in its subsequent running.

Adam Buick

Another New Left (2026)

Book Review from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is Only the Beginning. The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn. By Michael Chessum. Bloomsbury. 2022. 230pp.

After the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the 1990s ‘socialism’ became discredited. It had supposedly been tried and had failed. Apologists for capitalism proclaimed that capitalism was the only game in town and even the end-point of history. After the financial crash of 2008 the tide began to turn and ‘capitalism’ came to be unpopular.  An anti-capitalist movement of sorts arose, demanding that people should come before profits. Chessum was himself involved in this, both as a student activist and later as a Corbynite (he was a treasurer of Momentum).

The decade began with student fury at the breaking by the Liberal Democrats of their election pledge to abolish student tuition fees, when they entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives after the 2010 General Election. Universities up and down the country were occupied and the Tory party’s HQ in London ransacked. Then there was the campaign of direct action by UnCut against the premises of firms that were avoiding paying UK taxes by operating from tax havens. Then the campaign against the austerity measures imposed by the Coalition government. The movement had been given a boost by the Occupy movement of 2011 which identified a more general enemy than the government: the ‘top 1%’, the super-rich.

Chessum concedes that none of these campaigns was a success and writes of ‘the defeat of the anti-austerity movement’ (p. 104). What, for him, was positive were the new organisational form and methods of these movements: anti-hierarchical with actions being decided by groups of activists on the ground themselves and not directed by some leadership. This meant that not just the Labour Party but also the Leninist groups had no attraction for them and both stagnated.

Ironically, the second half of the decade saw the entry of many of the ‘anti-capitalists’ into the Labour Party, to elect Corbyn as Leader (twice) and then to try to change the Labour Party. That didn’t work out partly because, as Chessum himself experienced, the approach of those around Corbyn was also top-down. Corbyn resigned as Labour leader in 2020 following Labour’s poor showing in the 2019 general election and his opponents took back control of the party. So, another defeat. That’s where the book ends, but with Chessum confidently predicting that the anti-capitalist movement would find political expression in some other way. Hence the book’s title.

Obviously, it is a good thing that these days there are more people than there were in a recent past who recognise that capitalism puts profits before people and that something should be done about it. But what? Most anti-capitalists seem to think that, with enough pressure from below and with enough determined political will, people can be put before profit; that in effect capitalism can be reformed to allow this. But the experience of past attempts to do this have shown that it can’t be. Attempts to do this from below will fail just as surely as past attempts from above have done. It’s not a question of the method used but the fact that it is economically impossible to make capitalism put people before profit. Capitalism is driven by profit-making which must — and in the end always does — come first.

Chessum’s prediction that the movement would not die with Corbynism has since been borne out. When last July Sultana and Corbyn announced the launch of a new leftwing party, 800,000 expressed an interest. But the two made a mess of it and in the end most went on to join or support the Green Party. Chessum himself was among these and is now a Green Party councillor and Council Cabinet member for ‘Economy, Cost of Living and Empowered Communities’. Let’s see how he does.

Adam Buick

SPGB June Events (2026)

Party News from the June 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.

Blogger's Note:

Justin Fairchild's book, Unchained. Living Without Money, was reviewed in the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Back to the USSR (2026)

Book Review from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Marxist Analysis of the Soviet Economy. By Erwan Moysan. Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy.

At one time ‘the nature of the USSR’ was a burning issue. That was before 1991, while it still existed. The regime itself and its supporters in other countries claimed that it was ‘socialist’, a view that had to be refuted. The Trotskyists couldn’t decide whether it was a ‘degenerate workers state’ or a new class society of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ or a form of ‘state capitalism’. Eventually they split into rival factions over the issue. Today the question is largely of academic and historical interest. However, there is one aspect that can usefully be addressed: why did it collapse?

Our view was that the USSR was capitalist because the defining features of capitalism (class property, wage-labour, production for the market, and capital accumulation) all existed there and that, given that most industry was state-owned, ‘state capitalism’ was the best description. Moysan has essentially the same position and, like us, notes that ‘Marx and Engels’ understanding of socialism as a worldwide society without classes, state, wage labour, commodity production, value and surplus-value, money, or competition of capitals is directly in contrast to the Stalinist view’. Chapter 1 is a very good description of the ‘capitalist mode of production’.

The view that the USSR was socialist or that it was a ‘degenerate workers state’ is easily disposed of. Unless you redefine socialism (as the ‘Stalinists’ did) then the existence of widespread (and spreading) wage-labour was proof that it wasn’t socialist; while the fact that the workers there were oppressed and exploited refuted the claim that it was a place where the workers ruled. Little wonder then that more independent-minded Trotskyists came up with the idea that it was either a new class society or a form of state capitalism.

The collapse of the economic system in the USSR was not something that the alternative Trotskyists expected; they — those who talked of ‘state capitalism’ as well as those who saw a new class society — thought that the system was more advanced than classical capitalism. Some of them saw that this was where the rest of the capitalist world was heading.

Moysan rejects this — which in any event was disproved by events — and argues that the USSR was less advanced and that the greater role of the state in the economy was a sign that ‘the Soviet economy was a catch-up economy’, writing that ‘countries that develop later must, in order to compete with countries with a high organic composition of capital, “catch up”, and this entails brutal state-led accumulation of capital’ (p. 111).

His explanation for the collapse of such state-led capital accumulation was that in the USSR it led to a ‘crisis of absolute overproduction of capital’ — and so to a slowing down of capital accumulation — due to a labour shortage caused by agriculture being so backward that not enough workers were being released to work in industry.  The only way out was abandonment of the type of state capitalism that existed in industry there and a move towards the sort of capitalism that existed in the other capitalist countries.

We get a brief mention in a footnote referring to a debate at our conference in 1969 about the nature of the ruling class in the USSR. During the debate, Moysan notes, some members argued that ‘the private sector was more important than commonly thought, and that the Soviet Union was going towards a Western-style capitalism’, which turned out to be what happened.

Adam Buick

What happened at the Brixton Hustings at St Mathews Community Centre – Mon 27th April (2026)

Blogger's Note:

Another piece from Brixton Buzz website, in connection to the SPGB contesting the local election in Lambeth. This light-hearted 'sketch' of a local hustings actually dates from the 28th April.

LAMBETH COUNCIL / NEWS

What happened at the Brixton Hustings at St Mathews Community Centre – Mon 27th April

Tue 28th April, 2026 - by Contributor - 6 Comments.

Yesterday, a Brixton Hustings was held at St Mathews Community Centre, and local writer The Back Row sent Brixton Buzz his report:

“No-one there from Lib Dems (surprisingly – they’ve got a load of ‘real’ candidates in the Brixton wards), Conservatives or Reform. Loads of current Labour councillors from across the wards in the audience.

Some dispute over there being 2 independents under the ‘shake it up’ alliance on the panel. “We’re not a party, but we’re working together”.

Didn’t really make it a lot clearer. (Issue for me is they don’t have any policies – you literally don’t know what you’re voting for. What they support will come down to their assemblies on every issue, but how are they going to run those? )

The Socialist woman was great value. Under the socialists housing will be free for all, you’ll be able to shoplift food again, and we’ll solve deaths on the roads by scrapping salaried jobs so eliminating commute traffic.

She absolutely passed the ‘would you go for few pints with this candidate’ test. A few drinks would turn into an all nighter in no time.

The Trade Union & Socialist candidate was straight out of central casting. 1980s Liverpool will be the model for Lambeth apparently (he disputed the shout from the audience that “they’re all in prison”).

Of all the topics discussed the Christian Alliance guy got most animated denying there was a genocide in Gaza and espousing just how pro-Israel he was (to the extent of getting into some back and forth with the (Kiwi/Jewish) Socialist candidate who was rightly pointing out that you could be proudly jewish without being Zionist).

Unsurprisingly the CA view was not especially popular with the audience. He’d also scrap all the LTNs and decision making would be led by the churches.

Other than incumbent Labour Councillor David Bridson they were all weak on the questions about specific local issues – the stuff that they’d actually be dealing with and have some influence over. Which was disappointing.

Green candidate (ex Labour, Corbynite) was a dramatic speaker but tried to ‘both sides’ questions on both LTNs/Road safety (whereas Green policy is pretty clear) and Brockwell Park Festivals which doesn’t really work whichever side you stand on these issues.

The ‘shake it up’ independents just want to have a citizens assembly on every issue.

Which is both expensive to do properly (DB pointed out Lambeth have done a Climate Assembly) and is going to make any sort of decision making incredibly slow. It’s also not going to lead to ‘consensus’ – you get a view but it’s not one that everyone is going to agree with (the councils current climate/transport/etc policies came out of that assembly).

There was a question about councillors being kicked out for racist/otherwise unacceptable behaviour/statements where most of the candidates were saying they should be kicked out as councillors not just their party.

(Scarlet O’Hara pointed out from audience that there was no way of legally doing that – would require a national change in law but that didn’t stop most on the panel just repeating the same point).

Someone turned up to be shouty and angry about LTNs. That she came from Streatham rather than any of the Brixton wards is probably a strong sign that the anti LTN crew really are shouting into the void now.

And her idea that it’s not safe to walk home from the bus stop without rat running traffic has never made any sense and is counter to all evidence.

The Chair did a good job of keeping people in line, to time, and staying neutral.”

Additional blogger's note:

A link to this report of the hustings was posted on the SPGB's discussion forum with the additional comments by 'ALB':

"We went to the hustings yesterday evening organised by the Brixton Neighbourhood Forum for parties standing candidates in Brixton. Represented were us, the Greens, Labour, Christian People’s Alliance, TUSC and Shake It Up (two — they pulled a fast one as both are technically “Independents”). The Tories, Reform and the LibDems sent no one (the last perhaps because of some deal with the Greens not to try hard in this part of the borough in return for the Greens not trying in another).

There were about 120 present.

The debate was organised fairly which each candidate being given exactly the same opportunity and time to answer questions. From a conventional party political point of view the main contest here is between Labour (representing by an outgoing councillor seeking reelection in Brixton Acre Ward) and one of the Greens standing in the same ward — Michael Chessum, leftwing journalist and activist, who switched from Corbyn to the Green Party. He claims to be a socialist (and confided to our candidate, who was sitting next to him, that he was a “Marxist”). Here is his arguments as to why “revolutionaries” should join the Green Party . . . "

Your Party hits the rocks (2026)

From the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month the Central Executive Committee, the ‘collective leadership’ of the (ridiculously named) Your Party, decided to enforce the condition for joining that you should not be a member of any other political party. Up to then such ‘dual membership’ had been tolerated and the condition was only applied to some of the top leaders of the SWP and to candidates seeking election to the CEC. Members of Trotskyist groups, including the SWP, continued to be active and hold office in YP’s ‘proto-branches’.

Actually, the resolution passed at YP’s founding conference in November did not completely ban being a member of another political party as it allowed this subject to CEC approval. What the CEC decided on 12 April was that members of a certain type of political organisation can no longer be YP members or join, the type which it said ‘operates as a democratic centralist party or organisation, maintains its own national political membership structure, and requires political discipline and accountability to an external leadership or programme’.

Clearly what they had in mind were Leninist would-be vanguard parties. In fact a list circulating ahead of the CEC meeting named as examples ‘the SWP, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Socialist Party, Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Equality Party and Revolutionary Communist Party’.

The ‘Socialist Party’ is not a reference to us but to a section of the old ‘Militant Tendency’ which since 1997 has been trying to usurp our name. The full name they have given themselves is ‘Socialist Party of England and Wales’, or, appropriately enough, SPEW. The list wouldn’t have needed to include us of course since we are opposed to Your Party as we are to all other political parties that support capitalism in one form or another. The inclusion of the SEP (one of the fragments of the once premier Trotskyist organisation in Britain, the Workers Revolutionary Party) seems unnecessary as it opposed YP from the start, denouncing it as a joint Corbyn/SWP plot to divert the working class from revolutionary action (ie following the lead of the SEP).

The two biggest Trotskyist ‘entryist’ groups, the SWP and SPEW, took the ban graciously and instructed their members to withdraw from YP. Some of the smaller ones may decide to practise ‘deep entryism’ by remaining secret members of their vanguardist group.

So, where does this leave YP and the groups that have been excluded? For the latter, it’s back to what they used to do (and what they would have continued to do had they been allowed to stay in) — exploiting any discontent to try to build up a following for their particular, vanguard proto-party, through taking over existing protest groups or setting up their own front organisations such as Stand Up to Racism, Stop the War and ‘Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition’. In fact, the last, which is a front organisation for SPEW, nominated candidates for this month’s local elections even before the ban was enforced.

YP’s attempt to be a strong left-of-Labour electoral force hasn’t taken off and it looks like it never will. It was bad luck for them that, as they were preparing to launch themselves as such a party, the Greens elected an eco-populist as leader who stole the clothes they were about to put on    — tax the rich, renationalise the utilities, improve social services, rally to beat the Reform party. It is clear that most of the 800,000 who expressed an interest in the idea of forming a new leftwing party have come to see the Greens as this. Since the Green Party does not even claim to be a socialist party, this shows that most of the 800,000 didn’t want a new system to replace capitalism but merely the implementation of ‘progressive’ reforms and policies within it.

If it had taken off, YP would only have been a Labour Party 2.0. Now, it won’t even be that but a party whose MPs will mainly be pro-Gaza local Muslim dignitaries (denounced by the Trotskyist ex-entryists as ‘landlords’) and whose councillors will be representatives of localist ‘independents’ engaged in pot-hole politics.

Had Sultana’s ‘Grassroots Left’ rather than Corbyn’s ‘For the Many’ won a majority on the CEC, the Leninists would have been allowed to stay in as ‘factions’ and the party would have been advocating policies without much electoral appeal, such as ‘Smash Israel’, ‘Leave NATO’ and ‘Abolish the Monarchy’. In other words, a small party similar to previous attempts to unite ‘the Left’ including the Trotskyists in a single electoral party such as ‘Socialist Alliance’, Respect and Left Unity and which are now just history and where YP is heading too.

What is required is a mass working-class party dedicated to the establishment of a genuine socialist society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production so that production directly to meet people’s needs can replace production for sale on a market with a view to profit. A party that avoids advocating reforms to capitalism in order to avoid attracting the support of those who only want that; a democratically organised party in which vanguardist factions would not be welcome.

Adam Buick

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

Escape from capitalism? (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 13 February Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviewed Clara Mattei for Channel 4 News to discuss her book Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention which later circulated as a podcast.

In the interview Mattei argued that people are taught that capitalism is an economic system that arose spontaneously out of humans’ supposed natural propensity to barter, but in fact it is of relatively recent historical origin and was brought into being through violence and coercion. The state forced people off the land who, no longer able to meet their needs from directly working land, had no alternative but to work for wages.

Wage-labour, said Mattei, with workers creating more value than what they are paid as wages, is one of the two basic features of capitalism. The other is what she called ‘private investment’ for profit controlled by and for a privileged few; nothing is produced except in the expectation of ending up with more money than invested at the beginning. This means that ‘austerity’, in the sense of restricting how much people as wage-workers get to consume, is a structural feature of capitalism; it is not merely a policy pursued by some governments or the system not working properly but is the basis of the system. The logic of profit required that workers be denied direct access to what they need to live so obliging them to sell their ability to work for money to buy it; the money they are paid was never going to be enough to enable them to live without having to continue working for wages. Austerity, she concluded, was necessary for the system.

Good stuff. Questioned by Guru-Murthy, Mattei agreed that she was in the ‘Marxian tradition’ (she seemed to have deliberately used this adjective rather than Marxist, which is fair enough). What she particularly liked was Marx’s criticism of earlier writers who thought that capitalism was the natural economic system for humans; wage-labour and production for profit were parts of a system constructed by humans and so could be replaced by human action.

How, then, did she propose that people escape from capitalism? As well as being a professor of economics at Tulsa University in Oklahama, she is also the director of its ‘Forum for Real Economic Emancipation’. Here, she explained, she is running a pilot project to test on the ground an alternative. This involved encouraging people to take part in collective decision-making on economic matters, along the lines of ‘participatory budgeting’ practised in a number of cities in Brazil. Under this the local population are involved in deciding how money raised through local taxes should be spent. The implication is that in an alternative society to capitalism all economic decisions would be taken in this way, including in workplaces.

This brings out the ambiguity of the term she used to describe the second basic feature of capitalism, ‘private investment’. This could suggest that what is wrong with investment (as money used to initiate production) is not that it is money invested in production with a view to making more money but that it is controlled by a few at the top rather than democratically by all involved. What she seems to have in mind are factory councils as envisaged at one time by Gramsci (who she name-checks) and assemblies; these should decide democratically how the money obtained from sales should be allocated between individual workers, social amenities and new investment. In other words, a form of what has been called ‘market socialism’.

However, this wouldn’t be an escape from the logic of profit; it would mean that this logic would be applied by workers themselves rather than by their bosses as now. Escaping from capitalism has to mean escape from production for the market and the economic pressures this exerts on whoever actually takes the decisions at workplace level.

Adam Buick

Another world war? (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Economic Foundations of Capitalism’s Rise and Decline. Communist Workers Organisation. 2026.

‘For global capitalism the devastation of world-wide imperialist war is the solution to its ineluctable profitability crisis’. This — that a third world war is needed for capitalism to continue — is the position that this 100-page book seeks to defend.

The argument starts from the view that under capitalism there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as capital accumulation proceeds, due to an increasing proportion of capital being invested in plant, machinery and materials rather than in employing workers (whose labour is the only source of profits). This was something noted by Marx but he also noted other tendencies, arising too from capital accumulation but conversely tending to raise the rate of profit, such as plant, machinery and materials becoming cheaper and increasing surplus value per worker. So, what happens over any given period — which tendencies prevail and so whether the rate of profit does actually fall — is unpredictable. There are also other factors that reduce profitability, such as overproduction in an important industry having a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy resulting in a general slump in production.

The book hopelessly mixes up all the various tendencies, elevating a theoretical slow long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall into ‘the drive towards the collapse of the capitalist system’. The authors also see this as, in the shorter term, the cause of slumps but to do that there would have to have been a fantastically rapid increase in mechanisation and productivity. They are correct, though, that an important way out of a slump is the restoration of the rate of profit due to devaluation of the capital invested in the plant and machinery.

According to the CWO, a new factor entered into the equation at the beginning of the 20th century: capitalism, after coming to dominate the whole world and creating the basis for a world socialist society, passed its peak and entered into a period of decline which they call ‘decadence’. In this period, the boom/slump cycle continues but:

‘Capitalist competition is no longer a purely economic battle between firms but imperialist rivalry between “great powers”; where, in short, the massive devaluation of capital required to assuage the crisis of low profitability and achieve a new round of accumulation is obtained by the destruction of capital values via war’.

‘The history of capitalism since the start of the twentieth century’ we are told, ‘has been this cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction’. That the First World War was caused by imperialist states being driven to war as the only way out of a fall in the rate of profit doesn’t hold. Conflict between the ‘great powers’ over sources of raw materials, markets and investment outlets makes more sense. Replacing the destruction caused during the Second World War will have been one explanation for the resumption of capital accumulation in the postwar period but by no means the only one and would have been completed within a decade or so. Another, more significant factor will have been the expansion of the world market as more and more parts of the world were industrialised.

Whether or not the rate of profit has fallen since the 1970s is a moot point since it is not easy to calculate. On some assumptions it has; on others it hasn’t. In any event, a hard-to-calculate and unknown average rate of profit will not have been a factor influencing decisions to invest by those in charge of capitalist enterprises; shorter-term and particular sectoral considerations will have been the deciding factors.

The question also arises as to why the long gap between the end of reconstruction and the outbreak of the Third World War. The authors provide an economic history of the period since the 1970s but don’t answer this question. They describe well enough the extent of the non-productive, financial sector that has grown on the basis of the real, productive sector of the capitalist world economy, but can’t explain away the real capital accumulation that has taken place.

When they write that, if socialism is not established, ‘capitalism could continue on its demented course for centuries’, it is not clear what they mean. Is it that capitalism could continue after a nuclear world war or that capitalism might not lead to one for centuries?

In short, the CWO have not proved their claim that present-day capitalism must, for capital accumulation to continue, lead to a Third World War (they are suggesting it’s going to be between China and the US). As long as capitalism continues, there will be wars but there is no compelling reason why there should be another world war, this time between states armed with nuclear weapons. It is not entirely impossible of course, but it wouldn’t be to restore the rate of profit.

Adam Buick

Human behaviour (2002)

Book Review from the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect’. By Paul R. Ehrlich. Island Press.

This is the same Paul Ehrlich who, thirty years ago, irritated Socialists by his shrill claims that it was “overpopulation”, rather than capitalism’s production for profit, that caused environmental deterioration and other ecological problems. However this, his latest book, will go a long way to restoring his reputation.

He sets out his intention without ambiguity in the preface. It is to refute

“the erroneous notion that people possess a common set of rigid, genetically specified behavioral predilections that are unlikely to be altered by circumstances. ‘After all’, we’re often told, ‘you can’t change human nature’. The notion that there is one such nature to change allows us to be painted in the popular mind as instinctively aggressive, greedy, selfish, duplicitous, sex-crazed, cruel, and generally brutish creatures with a veneer of social responsibility. Our better selves are seen to be in constant battle with a universal set of unchanging, primitives ‘drives’, which frequently break through the veneer and create many of the serious ills that afflict humanity. It is a view as dismal as it is wrong, considering what is actually known about our behavior”.

The basic answer he gives to the “human nature argument” is that there is no such thing as a single, unchanging human nature but, insofar as behaviour is the public display of our nature, there are and have been many different human natures (hence the book’s title) which change over time. This is a different approach from ours which distinguishes between a more or less unchanging biologically-determined human nature and human behaviour which is socially and culturally determined and which can, has and does vary depending on the type of society people were brought up in or live in. But this is essentially only a different of terminology to arrive at the same conclusion that our behaviour is not narrowly determined by our genes but that, on the contrary, one of our biologically-inherited characteristics is precisely the capacity, as a species, for behavioral flexibility and adaptability.

Ehrlich sets out the current state of scientific understanding of the issue which confirms that our behaviour is predominantly determined not by our genes but by our cultures (“socially transmitted behaviors, beliefs, institutions, arts, and so on”). Culture is transmitted by non-genetic means, basically by learning (which assumes of course a genetically-inherited capacity to learn), and is different at different times and in different places. Hence the great variety of behaviors exhibited by humans. Such complicated and changing behaviours, says Ehrlich, could not possibly be governed by our genes since aren’t enough of them. Writing before the first results of the human genome project Ehrlich quotes a figure of 100,000 for the number of human genes. The human genome project suggests a figure less than half this, so reinforcing Ehrlich’s “gene shortage” shortage argument against biological determinism.

Ehrlich writes as a member of the American school of “cultural evolutionists” which is not too far from Marx’s materialist conception of history. In fact, he refers at one point to “the great political economist Karl Marx”. He also takes a materialist approach to the mind: “consciousness, thinking, reasoning – activities of the ‘mind’ – are all centred in the brain and are phenomena as natural (and as material) as the legs’ actions of standing, walking, running, and kicking”.

So, a very useful book, even if Ehrlich does ramble on a bit in the last few chapters.

Adam Buick

Zackonomics — how green can you be? (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In their party political broadcast on 22 January, the Greens’ new eco-populist leader Zack Polanski ran through the various problems people face and pointed out that a lot of the wealth they create ends up in the pockets of the super-rich. But went on: ‘This isn’t just an economic failure. It’s a failure of leadership. The people we elected choose to serve the wealthy. And, yes, that is obscene. Good leaders put people before profit’.

Self-styled good leaders

So what does Polanski, as a ‘good leader’, propose that a Green Party government would do? Its manifesto for the 2024 general election promised ‘the public ownership of public services’ and talked about ‘taxing wealth fairly and borrowing to invest’, in particular ‘a Wealth Tax of 1% annually on assets above £10 million and of 2% on assets above £1bn’. This is the sort of thing the Labour Party used to advocate and will be one reason why the Greens have had some success in winning over people disillusioned with the Labour Party after Starmer (with a little help from Peter Mandelson) axed its leftwing.

In this sense, the Green Party is reviving the illusion that the Labour Party once entertained that capitalism could gradually be changed, through ‘public’ ownership, tax changes and social reforms, into a less unequal society. The only difference is that the Greens think that ‘good leaders’ should put the environment as well as people before profit (and sometimes before people). All the arguments that socialists have made against Labour Party reformism apply equally against the Greens. Capitalism is an economic system driven by firms, whether private or state (or cooperatives), seeking to make a profit and to accumulate this as more capital to be reinvested for more profit. Putting profit-making first is imposed on those making economic decisions, including governments, as an external coercive force that they ignore at their peril.

Polanski and the Greens, if ever they got to form the government and tried to put people before profit, would be ‘bad leaders’ as far as capitalism was concerned. They would put a spanner in the way capitalism works and provoke an economic downturn, forcing them into a U-turn, as has happened many times to Labour and similar governments in other parts of the world — punished for refusing to put profits before people.

What this means is that, contrary to what Polanski claims, a ‘good leader’, for capitalism, is someone who does put profits before people, someone who applies rather than challenges the economic laws of capitalism. Those individuals who workers elect to govern have no alternative. The nature of capitalism, as a profit-making system that can only work for the profit-takers, obliges them to do this on pain of provoking an economic slow-down.

Replacing them with self-styled ‘good leaders’, like he imagines himself to be, won’t change things despite good intentions. They, too, would end up having to serve the wealthy as that’s the only way that the system can work. What is needed is not a change of leaders, but a change of system. But that’s not what the Greens want.

Cranky economics

The Green Party accepts capitalism. It doesn’t challenge the ownership of the means of life by a minority nor that goods and services are produced primarily for sale on a market with a view to profit. At most, it seems to want to go back to an earlier stage of capitalism in which production was in the hands of small and medium-sized enterprises.

To tell the truth, the Green Party is all over the place when it comes to economics which, anyway, is not the primary interest of most of its members. That — and it’s a perfectly legitimate concern — is to protect and save the environment, which they imagine can be done by pursuing policies and passing laws without changing the basics of the present, capitalist economic system.

The Greens’ relative lack of interest in economics has left them open to all sorts of cranky theories. For instance, their manifesto for the 2015 general election declared that ‘the power to create money must be taken out of the hands of private banks’ and that ‘commercial banks should be no more than the custodians of publicly created money in current accounts’. This reflected a resolution on ‘monetary and financial reform’ carried at their 2013 Conference:

‘97% of the money circulating in the economy takes the form of credit that is created electronically by private banks through the accounting processes they follow when they make loans … The 1844 Bank Charter Act will be updated to prohibit banks from creating national currency in the form of electronic credit. To finance their lending, investment or proprietary trading activities, banks will have to borrow or raise the necessary national currency from savers and investors’.

This would considerably limit what banks would be able to lend, even to individuals let alone to business. But loans to profit-seeking firms are essential to the workings of capitalism as it means that capitalist entrepreneurs do not have to have accumulated all their own money before they can start a business. The role of banks is to make available money for investment that would otherwise lie idle or be scattered in small amounts.

To make up for the fall in bank lending that their scheme would bring about, the 2013 resolution proposed that ‘all national currency (both in cash and electronic form) will be created, free of any associated debt, by a National Monetary Authority (NMA) that is accountable to Parliament’ and that ‘any new money created by the NMA will be credited to the account of the Government as additional revenue, to be spent into circulation in the economy in accordance with the budget approved by Parliament’.

Imagining that banks create money out of thin air and wanting to devise a debt-free money is classic currency crankism. Banks don’t create new money when they make a loan; they lend out money that they have (from deposits and loans) or can quickly acquire (from the money market or the Bank of England) and the interest they receive comes from the future profits of loans to business and from the future wages of those to individuals. The 2013 Green Party resolution and 2015 Green Party general election manifesto were proposing an imagined solution to a false problem, a solution which if applied would lead to financial chaos and roaring inflation.

These days the Green Party does not push this policy much. It wasn’t in their 2019 or 2024 general election manifestos. However, it remains part of their official policy and is included in their Policies for a Sustainable Society. Polanski, who knows a thing or two about selling false remedies and so about what sells and what doesn’t, doesn’t mention the banking reform part and talks only about some National Monetary Authority providing the government with whatever money it needs to pay for a Green Deal and social services.

Magic Money Theory

This has led some, such as Jonathan Prynn, business editor of The Standard (formerly Evening Standard), to accuse Polanski of embracing another mistaken monetary theory  — self-styled ‘Modern Monetary Theory’, or MMT (which also, appropriately enough, stands for Magic Money Tree). This teaches that the government doesn’t need to borrow money but can simply create the money it needs and spend it; this will stimulate the economy and the government will eventually recover the money as increased tax receipts.

It is not clear that Polanski has embraced MMT. He may just be using the naive (and therefore good populist) argument that if the resources are there to save the environment or eliminate poverty (as they are) and the government has the power to create as much money as it wants (as it does), why does the government not simply create the money to use the resources? If it did this, it wouldn’t need to worry about borrowing money and so wouldn’t be in thrall to international speculators. Which is essentially what Polanski and the Greens are saying.

The trouble is that this ignores the way the capitalist economic system works. Wealth is produced in the profit-seeking sector of the economy in response to the prospects of making a profit. Governments as such produce no wealth; to get the money to buy what they need to carry out their activities they have to resort either to taxation of the profit-producing sector or borrow from those who have acquired money from that sector. When the government creates money it is not creating any new wealth, only claims on existing wealth. It can create as much of these claims as it likes but, if it creates more than the economy needs for its buying and selling and other monetary transactions, then the result will be a fall in the purchasing power of the claims and so a rise in the general prices level, or inflation.

If a Green government were to simply create and spend the money to protect the environment or to eliminate poverty or to improve living conditions generally, the most likely result is that there would be a one-time spurt in economic activity but in time there would be an inflation which could get of hand. Apologists for capitalism, such as Prynn, happen to be right when they point this out.

The conclusion to be drawn is not to accept that profits have to come before people, but that it is futile, and even counter-productive, to try to prevent this under capitalism. What is needed is to get rid of the profit system altogether and to use resources to simply and directly produce what people need. But this is only possible on the basis of the common ownership of the world’s productive resources. It would then no longer be a question of what should come first — profits or people? — because profits wouldn’t enter into it at all.

Adam Buick

Roger Hallam’s new plan (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Roger Hallam, the man behind the failed Just Stop Oil campaign, has emerged from prison a reformed character. He has now abandoned civil disobedience as a way of trying to change things and has embraced electoral action. He is not, however, in a position to say what he really thinks as, if he did continue to advocate breaking the law, he’d be sent straight back to prison to serve the rest of his 2025 four-year prison sentence.

In January he brought out a three-hour video and podcast called How To Start a Revolution in 2026, subtitled ‘ordinary people can run society — but only if we build the structures to let them’. The subtitle gives a clue to what he means by ‘revolution’ — a radical change in the way political decisions are made.

He proposes that elected local councillors should be answerable to and overseen by citizens’ assemblies selected by lot. It’s basically a scheme for a functioning participatory democracy. It’s not necessarily a bad proposal in itself. The trouble is that Hallam envisages it being implemented under capitalism. What he is in effect proposing is a reform of the political superstructure of capitalism while leaving its social and economic base untouched.

But it is not a lack of democracy that causes the problems that the non-owning majority face today. It’s the capitalist system of minority ownership of the means of life and production for profit. Not even the most radical democratic decision-making structure can change or overcome the basic economic law of capitalism that making profits must come before all other considerations. Given capitalism, citizens’ assemblies would be no more able to solve the problems the majority face than existing governments or local councils. His proposed new democratic and community-led political structure could only work on the basis of the common ownership of the means of life. That is the only basis on which there would be neither vested interests nor coercive economic laws standing in the way of gearing production to meeting people’s needs.

So much for the goal but what about the means to get there? Here Hallam has drawn up a detailed plan of how to mobilise people at local level to put up their own candidates and win, involving regular weekly door-knocking, postering, telephoning, targeting non-voters (over 60 percent in most local council wards), meet-ups, and fund raising. He is prepared to put his money where his mouth is and try out his plan. The chosen place is Lambeth in London, currently controlled by an unpopular Labour council. He intends to organise candidates in all 25 wards and expects, even promises, that if his plan is carried out Labour will be kicked out.

Hallam may have embraced electoral action but he hasn’t changed his view from his Extinction Rebellion days that only a minority is needed to bring about political change. He still says:

‘Mass movements don’t grow by persuading everyone. They grow by activating a specific minority — roughly five per cent of the population — who are alienated, capable, and waiting for something credible. Most people will never mobilise’.

Lenin thought much the same. The results of the elections in Lambeth in May will show how large a following Hallam’s vanguard can get. But it would only be to reform the political set-up not for a social revolution to end minority ownership of the means society needs to survive.

Adam Buick

Finance and Industry: Controlling unemployment (1965)

The Finance and Industry column from the March 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Controlling unemployment

We have referred many times in these columns to the fact that American academic economists are seriously questioning the adequacy of traditional Keynesian policies to deal with unemployment. One leading American economist wrote in 1963: “Our problems of unemployment have seemingly become chronic.” But it is precisely chronic unemployment which Keynesian policies are supposed to prevent.

In his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money which appeared in 1936, Keynes set out to show how it was that capitalist economies of the free enterprise variety did not automatically lead to full employment. He said that unemployment and stagnation were caused by a lack of “effective demand.” Keynes went on to suggest a number of ways of dealing with such “demand deficiency” unemployment: stricter control of investment, a redistribution of income in favour of the poor, budget deficits and various other fiscal and monetary measures to encourage effective demand and investment. This is the so-called Keynesian revolution, the application of deliberate fiscal and monetary policies by the government to try to affect the workings of free enterprise capitalism.

From 1958 on, unemployment in America has averaged 6 per cent despite the application of Keynesian policies. It is this that has started economists questioning. Consider the views of Robert Lekachman expressed in a book published last year. Of the advanced countries he writes,

“The original simplicities of keynesian policy prescriptions have been overtaken by the actual complexities and contradictions of applying monetary and fiscal techniques to situations simultaneously subject to inflation and unemployment, or high interest rates and gold outflows, or falling demand and rising prices. The dilemmas of recent American economic policy exemplify this point. President Kennedy’s major response to unsatisfactory rates of unemployment was the 1963 program of tax reduction and tax reform. Now if simple Keynesian fiscal policy were enough, such a program would dependably stimulate aggregate spending, diminish unemployment, and restore the economy to some approximation of full-capacity operation. Yet even Administration spokesmen hive made comparatively cautious claims for the spread and the adequacy of this policy, and few economists indeed believe that by itself tax policy is capable of reducing unemployment to tolerable levels. It is a sign of the times that this tolerable level has itself shown a secular tendency to rise from 2½-3 per cent to 4-5 per cent. For the sad, uncomfortable fact may be that just about the time that some version of the simplest Keynesian revelation has at last won the hearts of businessmen and politicians, the nature of the economic problem has sufficiently changed to require different remedies and different theoretical justifications to support them (Keynes’ General Theory: Report of Three Decades).

It is true that the American economy did show signs of increased activity in 1964 but unemployment was still around five per cent with four per cent as the “tolerable level” as Lekachman suggests.

Capitalism will not break down in depression and stagnation as a result of the inability of the working class to buy back what they produce, as has sometimes been suggested. If this were so, the Keynesians would have some justification for their claim to have found an alternative to socialism. In fact, the capitalist system will continue until the working class organise to end it. In the meantime its growth will be accompanied by a trade cycle involving periods of unemployment and prosperity. So the shoe is on the other foot. It is we Socialists who are in a position to point out that the Keynes theory on its own admission has proved incapable of dealing adequately with the problem of chronic unemployment in America.

African capitalists

The capitalist system is still spreading rapidly throughout the world turning peasants and tribesmen into wage-workers. In Asia, Africa and Latin America new capitalist states are emerging. Some of these, as in Cuba or Ghana, are totalitarian state-capitalist regimes in which the emerging working class is subjected to an industrialising elite. In others like India and Nigeria the emergence of capitalism is not forced and controlled to such an extent.

It is under such regimes that from the motley collection of shopkeepers, traders and contractors a more substantial group of big capitalists is allowed to evolve. A recent supplement to the international edition of the New York Times introduces some of the new capitalists of Africa to American businessmen. In Nigeria there are Sir Mobolaji Bank-Anthony and Chief Shafi Lawal Edu. Sir Mobolaji is, we are told, “either owner, chairman or director of 10 large corporations.” His compatriot is “chairman of the African Alliance Insurance Company, and serves on the boards of several companies.” In Somalia there is fish-processing magnate Abdullahi Omar who:

“… for several years operated his own general store in Hargeisa, and then moved to Mogadiscio, Somalia, in 1960 after independence. He established a wholesale import agency and interested himself in the fishing potential of his country. He recently established Somalia’s first steel and wood furniture factory and is negotiating with American interests for the opening in June of a pickled-skins plant.”

In Uganda there is Jayant Madhvani who is supposed to be the wealthiest man in East Africa. He:

“. . . heads the Madhvani group of companies based on Jinja. These include sugar, tea, coffee, textiles, steel, paper and more than a dozen other companies operating in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. In Uganda alone, Madhvani enterprises account for more than 10 per cent of total product.”

At present this group of “non-European” capitalists is only small in number but as capitalist development proceeds more can be expected to appear. The working class in Africa has the choice of being exploited by and subjected to such a group of wealthy magnates or to an industrialising elite of nationalist political leaders. Either way they suffer. Either way the fact is brought out that the important social division in these newly emergent capitalisms is that of class, not race or colour.

Adam Buick