‘Socialism’ more popular than ‘Capitalism’ (2025)

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Opinion polls are worth what they are worth. In many cases the answers depend on how the question is framed. And they can’t distinguish between a passing off-the-cuff reply and a deeply-held opinion. Still, within these limitations, they are not entirely useless. Selecting a representative sample to question, if done properly, has been shown to be broadly valid.

In December YouGov published the result of a poll carried out in August to find out what people thought of what it called ‘political ideologies’. A representative sample of 2,127 adults in Great Britain (ie excluding Northern Ireland) were asked ‘Do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the following’ — Liberalism, Conservatism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Nationalism, Feminism, Capitalism, Populism, Anarchism, Environmentalism, and Libertarianism. Those polled could answer ‘very favourable’, ‘somewhat favourable’, ‘somewhat unfavourable’, ‘very unfavourable’, as well as ‘don’t know’.

Since none of the twelve isms was defined, those questioned were in effect being asked to give their reaction just to the word. On average about a quarter replied ‘don’t know’, rising to nearly a half for ‘populism’ and ‘libertarianism’ (not surprising in this case as it is not a commonly used word). Amongst those who did express an opinion, the most favoured were Environmentalism and Feminism. The only others with a positive net favourable opinion (more favourable than unfavourable) were Liberalism and Socialism. The remaining eight all had a net unfavourable opinion, the most unfavoured, by far, being Communism, Anarchism and Fascism.

The word Socialism was more favoured, by quite a margin, than the word Capitalism. 38 percent were very or somewhat favourable to Socialism and 36 very or somewhat unfavourable. For Capitalism the figures were 30 and 45 percent. 10 percent expressed a very favourable opinion of Socialism compared with only 5 percent for Capitalism. For very unfavourable, the figures were 17 and 18 percent.

This echoes the result of other polls, even in the United States, but what does it mean? Obviously those questioned weren’t understanding ‘Socialism’ in our sense (otherwise we’d be well on our way there). So in what sense was the word being understood?

Commenting on the result, the US website, UnHerd, pointed out:

‘Each of the 12 -isms needs to be understood on at least two levels. There’s the academic meaning of the words, of primary interest to political scientists and ideological obsessives, and then there’s how normal people react to them as labels’.

And

‘As for socialism, the public perceptions focus on the social part rather than the -ism. Tony Blair was well aware of that and famously redefined Labour’s creed as (note the hyphen) “social-ism”, by which he meant the “moral assertion that individuals are interdependent”. Actual socialists who believe in a centrally planned economy still exist, of course, but for most people it just means security, solidarity and clapping for the NHS’.

Of course ‘actual socialists’ don’t believe in a centrally planned state-capitalist economy such as used to exist in the USSR, but we do exist. But that those who have a favourable opinion of socialism are really expressing a preference for social-reformism seems reasonable. It is understandable that many should prefer this to letting the market rip.

In any event, it can’t be bad for us ‘actual socialists’ that some 45 percent of those questioned had an unfavourable opinion of capitalism (however understood). That gives us a foot in the door.

One interesting result concerned who had a ‘very favourable’ opinion of the word socialism. The top ones were 28 percent of Green Party voters, 19 percent of those aged 18-24, 18 percent of Labour voters, 18 percent of Remain voters and 18 percent of those in Scotland. Even 7 percent of those who voted for the Liberal Democrats. Since there were over four times as many Labour voters questioned as Green Party ones, in absolute terms most of those who had a favourable opinion of the word socialism were Labour voters.

We already knew this from our own experience of doing better on average in elections when we contest safe Labour constituencies and wards.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: What would ‘good’ capitalism be? (2024)

The Cooking The Books column from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Pet care rip-off is a case of bad capitalism’ ran the headline of Emma Duncan’s column in the Times (15 March), subtitled ‘Profiteering by vet chains and children’s homes will only bolster appeal of socialism to the young’. Let’s hope so.

Earlier that week the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had announced that it had identified ‘multiple concerns’ about what it called ‘the vets market’, including that pet owners were being overcharged and that the concentration of the firms operating in the sector put them in a position to do this.

‘In 2013, around 10% of vet practices belonged to large groups, but that share is now almost 60%, and many of the large groups have expressed an intention to continue expanding their business through acquisition of independently owned practices. To illustrate this another way, since 2013 1,500 of the 5,000 vet practices in the UK have been acquired by the 6 large corporate groups (CVS, IVC, Linnaeus, Medivet, Pets at Home and VetPartners)’ (tinyurl.com/5y4x2xf4 ).

This is a manifestation of the trend that Marx identified under capitalism towards the ‘centralisation of capitals’ — the ‘concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals’ (Capital Vol 1, Ch 25, section 3). In the particular case of the market for pet care this has been facilitated not only by the greater amount of capital needed to invest in advanced equipment but also because of the prospect, as noted by Duncan, of making a bigger profit.

‘The rise in insurance has made pet owners largely indifferent to the prices that vets charge. Private equity firms — companies that buy up businesses they reckon could be more profitable — spotted this, and poured money into buying up individual practices.’

The same sort of situation, she notes, has arisen in the children’s home sector where ‘the CMA has calculated the average profit margin in the sector to be 19.4 per cent — “materially higher than we would expect”.’

Echoing Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath in 1973 who described some shady business practice as ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’, Duncan sees this as ‘bad capitalism’. But is it? Is it not rather capitalism functioning as it is supposed to, with money-capital, such as that gathered by private equity firms, seeking out the most profitable investment outlet and then going for it?

It is all very well for a supporter of capitalism like Duncan to argue that the market ‘works properly only if toughly regulated’, but this is saying that it doesn’t work, in fact can’t work, properly. William Morris once pointed out that laws against adulteration wouldn’t be necessary if there wasn’t an economic incentive for firms to adulterate. Similarly, there wouldn’t need to be regulations to prevent rip-offs by capitalist firms if there wasn’t the incentive to do this.

If she wishes to win over the ‘53 per cent of 18 to 34-year old Britons’ who she cites as regarding ‘socialism as the ideal economic system’ (alright, most won’t know what socialism is but they will know that it’s not capitalism) she will have to come up with a better argument than she advances here.

‘Good capitalism’, apparently, is an economic system that requires (tough) government intervention to try to mitigate the effect of its basic economic imperative to seek and make profits. The ‘acceptable face’ of capitalism would be profit-seeking in accordance with Marquess of Queensberry type rules, rules that wouldn’t be necessary unless there was a tendency not to respect them. Socialists have a better solution. Produce directly to meet people’s needs, not for the market or profit, and there wouldn’t be any need for such rules.

Cooking the Books: What does ‘capitalism’ mean? (2024)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month the BBC released a podcast of Laurie Taylor discussing capitalism with two authors of books on the subject.

The first was Michael Sonenscher, author of Capitalism, The Story Behind the Word (reviewed in the January 2023 Socialist Standard). He told Taylor that the word originated in the 18th century (in France as capitalisme) to refer to the practice of governments borrowing money-capital to finance their activities. Capitalism was the name of this practice and those who lent governments the money were capitalists. He contrasted this with what he called ‘commercial society’ that arose from the division of labour and which made people dependent on each other linked through market transactions.

He pointed out that Marx himself never used the actual word ‘capitalism’ and seemed to suggest that Marx regarded capital as a term of property ownership. In fact, Marx saw capital as the expression of a social relationship rather than as a legal concept. And he did use the adjective ‘capitalist’ to describe a particular ‘mode of production’, one where money was invested in production with the aim of ending up with more money, obtained by the exploitation of wage-labour for surplus value. So ‘capitalism’ would be where money-capital was invested in production rather than lent to governments.

Marx, too, noted the existence of Sonenscher’s ‘commercial society’ which he called ‘civil society’, also translated as ‘bourgeois society’.

Taylor’s second guest was Rainer Zitelmann, author of In Defense of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths in which, according to the blurb on Amazon, he ‘examines the ten most common objections to capitalism: capitalism leads to hunger and poverty, to rising inequality, to unnecessary consumption, to environmental destruction, to climate change and wars. Capitalism, its critics say, prioritizes profits over humanity, creates dominant monopolies, and undermines democracy.’

He is a strident free-marketeer who sees any state interference in the market as ‘socialism’ (so he sees ‘socialism’ everywhere). He defines capitalism as:

‘an economic system based on private ownership and competition, in which companies themselves are free to determine what and how much they produce, aided in their decisions by the prices set by the market’.

This differs from Marx’s definition which sees capitalism as the investment of money-capital in production with a view to increasing its value (making a profit), even if invested by the state. Zitelmann fails to mention profit at all or that it is how much of this that capitalist enterprises expect that determines ‘what and how much [and if] they produce’.

Zitelmann only had time to ‘debunk’ the first two of his ‘myths’ — that capitalism leads to hunger and poverty and that capitalism leads to rising inequality. His refutation of the first was that, as capitalism spread, it vastly reduced ‘absolute poverty’. But the socialist criticism of capitalism on this score is not that it causes world ‘hunger and poverty’ but that, despite the technological means to end it, capitalism can’t solve the problem; hungry and poverty-stricken people, having no money, do not constitute a market and so don’t count as far as capitalism is concerned.

Zitelmann’s response to the charge that capitalism leads to rising inequality was to say that there was inequality in ‘socialist’ countries too, a prelude to a rant against ‘socialism’ (government interference in the market) in general and conditions in Venezuela in particular. Clearly bluster to disguise the fact he couldn’t deny that in a system geared to making and accumulating profit there will be a tendency for the class of those with invested capital to grow richer.

This said, the poll he commissioned about what the word capitalism meant to people in different countries sounded interesting. He mentioned that in Britain only 14 percent thought that capitalism was improving things and that countries with the most positive opinion of capitalism were in order: Poland, the US, South Korea, Japan and Nigeria).

In place of capitalism (2009)

From the January 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently the word ‘capitalism’ seems to be on everyone’s lips. The main reason for this is probably that capitalism – also known as ‘the economy’ or ‘the market system’ is going through a bad patch. The Labour government’s claim to have ended the cycle of boom and bust has been proved disastrously wrong. The last boom, during which food, energy, house and stock market prices rose at unsustainably high rates, has given way to bust.

As usual, workers are the main victims. Many of us have lost our jobs, can’t get new ones or can’t enter the labour force for the first time. We have seen our outgoings soar, our incomes squeezed, even our homes repossessed. Even if we have so far personally avoided the worst of these fates, the worry that we may not continue to do so can be very stressful.

Who or what is to blame for this sorry state of affairs? More constructively, how can it be put right? Only the pitifully small socialist media insist that we need to replace capitalism with socialism. All the other media, which shout so much louder than we can, say things like “We’ve got the wrong kind of capitalism” or “Some people (bankers) have been too greedy.”

There is a widespread and heavily promoted belief that ‘capitalism is the only game in town.’ Anyone who disputes this, for example by advocating that all goods and services should be available on the basis of need, not ability to pay, is dismissed as idealistic or utopian. It is a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy: support (or at least acquiesce in) the way things are organised today and tomorrow will be more or less the same. But it doesn’t have to be.

Socialists urge that it is futile to try to reform capitalism – the whole system needs to be scraped and replaced by something better. As we explain in our pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative, this means being as constructive as possible, not destructive. For example, such bodies as the World Health Organisation and the Universal Postal Union can be adapted for socialist purposes.

We have as our object the establishment of socialism. In a sense this is true, but we also talk about a socialist movement in the here and now. Every month we say in this journal ‘we are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism.’  We distribute paper and electronic publications, give talks, take part in debates, run educational events, make films, and much more.

With more members – and particularly active members – we could do things and on a scale we are prevented from doing for lack of human and other resources. For example, we could set up socialist publishing houses producing, promoting and distributing paper and electronic literature. We could organise socialist educational networks at different levels: schools, colleges, universities, distance learning – for potential socialist citizenship, not capitalist employment. Other activities will no doubt be suggested, tried out and perhaps become widespread – who knows?

The point is that more of us will come to realise that we all live in the real world, not with submission to endure it but with imagination to revolutionise it.

Stan Parker

Cooking the Books: Nothing to offer (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“People in general have lost faith in the free-market, Western, democratic order,” lamented Daily Telegraph columnist Charles Moore (22 July). “They have not yet, thank God, transferred their faith, as they did in the 1930s, to totalitarianism. They merely feel gloomy and suspicious. But they ask the simple question, ‘What’s in it for me?’, and they do not hear a good answer.”

They certainly don’t. The mad-marketeers who ruled the roost at the time of Thatcher and Reagan didn’t have anything to offer, but at the time many people thought they did. Thatcher openly proclaimed that she intended to destroy “socialism”, by which she meant everything associated with the post-war Labour government (nationalisations, NHS, council housing) and her government went a long way towards doing so, even if she was only doing what the economic circumstances of British capitalism required her to do.

Then, in 1991, the USSR collapsed. The partisans of “the free-market, Western, democratic order” were elated. They proclaimed the “end of history” and that “socialism is dead”. But what had died was state-monopoly capitalism not socialism (which had never existed in Russia). A “peace dividend” was promised. It never materialised. Instead, there was the First Gulf War, to be followed by the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by the Western capitalist countries. In 2007 the biggest slump since the 1930s broke out. We’re still in it.

Wars, slumps, capitalism as usual. No wonder the likes of Charles Moore are disoriented and disillusioned. He even entitled his column “I’m starting to think that the Left might actually be right”, explaining:

“One of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls ‘the free market’ is actually a set-up. The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.”

What Moore was lamenting was that the Right (to accept his term) has no answer to this criticism (only slightly caricatural) of the private corporation capitalism they uphold and promote. And they haven’t. Capitalism is now more intellectually bankrupt than ever. It has no inspiring vision to rally people, not even “freeing” people from state capitalism. As a result of the way it inevitably works, capitalism has become a dirty word again.

But what is the answer? By “the Left” Moore probably means the supporters of state capitalism (he explicitly states that “the Right” includes “the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown”), but the above is a criticism of capitalism which we in the Socialist Party could broadly share, even though we don’t consider ourselves a part of the Left precisely because they stand for state capitalism.

We are opposed to private corporate capitalism and to state capitalism, both of which have failed. The answer is a classless society without rich or poor where productive resources have become the common heritage of all so that the production and distribution of the things we need to live and enjoy life can be carried out in accordance with the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. It’s the original meaning of socialism before the experience of Russia and Labour governments made it a dirty word. It’s high time it became respectable again.

Capitalism ‘bad’, socialism ‘good’ (2021)

Frank Luntz with sadness in his eyes.

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of July two openly pro-capitalist think tanks – the Tory-leaning Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) and the free-marketeer Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) – published the results of polls they had carried out on people’s opinion of capitalism. Both indicated that many people don’t think much of it.

The one for the CPS was compiled by US pollster, Frank Luntz:

‘ …Dr Frank Luntz is testing public opinion in Britain to find an alternative to ‘capitalism’, after 170 years of use, because he fears it is becoming a bad word ( … ) Capitalism itself is already a “bad word” in the US and is fast becoming so in the UK too. “It’s one of the key things I am trying to figure out: Does this country need an alternative to the word capitalism? I think it does”’ (Sunday Telegraph, 19 June).

In the event, he didn’t come up with an alternative, merely noting that ‘voters are almost as fed up with business as with politicians – presenting a huge challenge for supporters of capitalism and enterprise’. Those polled were asked to choose from a list four ‘words and phrases they thought of first when thinking about British companies’. The two most chosen were ‘Profits before People’ (47 percent) and ‘They put shareholders first, not ordinary people’ (44 percent). It is not clear why Luntz felt that these factually correct and easily verifiable statements represent a challenge to supporters of capitalism. Normally, its supporters are prepared to defend both as the best way of organising the production and distribution of wealth.

While the CPS poll was concerned with people’s attitude to ‘capitalism’ the IEA one was more concerned with their attitude to ‘socialism’. A representative sample of those aged between 16 and 34 were presented with a number of statements and asked whether they agreed with them or not, without the option of ‘don’t know’. 67 percent said ‘they would like to live in a socialist economic system’ and 75 percent agreed that ‘socialism is a good idea, but it has failed in the past because it has been badly done’. 78 percent blamed ‘capitalism for Britain’s housing crisis’ and 75 percent agreed ‘that climate change is a specifically capitalist problem’.

What are we to make of these results? Opinion polls are worth what they are worth and as Tory Lord Finklestein pointed out in his comments on the CPS one, ‘You can’t just ask consumers, and indeed voters, what motivates them, and trust what you get back’ (Times, 7 July). Those questioned are only being asked to give a fleeting opinion that commits them to nothing. And the questions can be framed to get the answer the pollster wants.

In these two particular polls, ‘capitalism’ was not defined. The tacit assumption of those who drew up the questionnaires (though not necessarily of those who answered the questions) was that capitalism meant production for profit by private capitalist enterprises. Capitalism is certainly a system of production for profit – in fact, the ‘Profit System’ might be the alternative name for it that Luntz is looking for – but ‘private enterprise’ is only one form of this. Capitalism can also take the form of state enterprises producing for the market with a view to profit. In both cases, the profit arises from the unpaid, surplus labour of the wage workers who are employed, whether by a private or a state enterprise, to produce what is to be sold.

The IEA didn’t define ‘socialism’ either, but the question about socialism ‘having failed in the past’ indicates that they think it is what existed in Russia – or, their current favourite, Venezuela. The concept of state capitalism is ruled out, even though the author of its report, Kristian Niemietz, had referred, in a previous report, to this concept and specifically to us:

‘… There are exceptions to this, such as the Socialist Party of Great Britain. They are not, and as far as I know, never were, apologists of Soviet-style socialism, which they describe as ‘state capitalism’. They are among the few socialists who have at least some idea of what they mean by ‘real’ socialism. They use that term to describe a hypothetical system in which working-class people own and control the economy’s productive resources directly, not via the state; a system in which public ownership is not mediated through a government bureaucracy’ (iea.org.uk/has-real-socialism-never-been-tried/).

Once again, it cannot be assumed that those who answered the question meant the same as those who asked it. Had the question been ‘Would you like to live in an economic system where all industries are state-owned?’ the result would have been very different. On the other hand, had the question been ‘Would you like to live in a system where the means of production are commonly owned and democratically controlled and the principle of from each according to ability, to each according to need applied?’ the result could well have been the same. But this wouldn’t mean that those answering ‘yes’ thought that such a system was achievable, only that it was desirable.

In an 80-page booklet analysing the results, Left Turn Ahead? Surveying attitudes of young people towards capitalism and socialism, Niemietz was more realistic as to what this meant:

‘The rejection of capitalism may never have huge real-world consequences. “We should ditch capitalism, and try a socialist alternative” may well be the political equivalent of “One day, I will learn a foreign language, run a marathon, and write a novel”. It may be an idea that is popular as an abstract aspiration, but less so as a concrete action plan’ (p.17).

Unfortunately, this is fair comment.

However, there will be some significance that, amongst younger people today, capitalism has become a ‘bad word’:

‘Young people associate “socialism” predominantly with positive terms, such as “workers”, “public”, “equal” and “fair”. (…) Capitalism, meanwhile, is predominantly associated with terms such as “exploitative”, “unfair”, “the rich” and “corporations”’ (p.7)

That can’t be a bad thing.

Adam Buick