Cooking the Books: Starmer gets it (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Our job is to work with businesses to create the best environment that allows them to thrive’. So wrote Starmer in an article in the Times (29 January). This describes perfectly one of the key roles of government under capitalism. Since businesses thrive by making profits and since business investment for profit drives the capitalist economy, the government has to do what it can to create and maintain good conditions for profit-making — and to avoid doing anything that might run counter to this.

Starmer understands that this is the logic of capitalism and, in office, is openly striving to apply it. It inevitably means putting profit-making first. Governments have to do this on pain of making things worse. Any party in office has to be the ‘party of business’ that the Labour Party said it was even before it was voted in.

Starmer’s understanding contrasts with the illusions of his left critics inside and increasingly outside the Labour Party. Here, for instance, is what Counterfire (an SWP breakaway) claimed in its January issue:

‘A genuine radical left government could make real changes now, by taking measures that both the centrist establishment and the hard right reject, such as taxing the super-rich, controlling rents and energy prices, and investing in infrastructure. The left can win the argument that society can, and should, do better’.

Of course society can do better, but not as capitalist society. The reference to the continued existence of the super-rich and rents and prices show that Counterfire is assuming that capitalism continues. So, it is in effect arguing that a government can make capitalist society better for workers. The left certainly has not won that argument. Left governments that have tried to do this — to put meeting people’s needs before maintaining the best environment for profit-making — have failed. In fact, they have tended to make things worse, and then be voted out of office.

Taxing just the ‘super-rich’ but not the profits of capitalist corporations, as essentially a tax on the consumption of the capitalist class, need not worsen the environment for profit-making. But if ‘taxing the rich’ extends beyond this to higher taxes on profits, the source of business investment that drives the economy, then the prospect of an economic downturn emerges. This is the point at which most left governments perform a U-turn. Otherwise they crash the economy.

Controlling the price of energy to consumers would bring some respite but, since governments don’t and can’t control the world price of energy, this could only be maintained through subsidies that would have to be paid for by increasing taxes. Whatever the government invests in infrastructure would have to come from taxation too, to repay any money borrowed and the interest on it. The higher taxes on, or passed onto, businesses would worsen the environment for profit-making.

Rent control might not crash the economy but it would create other problems. Businesses and individuals investing in letting houses and flats would invest less and spend less on maintaining their properties, with the longer-term consequence of fewer places to rent and deteriorating accommodation.

The lesson is clear. If you want better, better get rid of capitalism and not try to make it work in a way that it can’t.

The problem is not the Tories . . . . (2024)

From the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘GENERAL ELECTION NOW. TORIES ROBBERS MUST GO’ screamed a recent headline in a Trotskyist paper. It could have been one of many but this one was from the March issue of Counterfire, an SWP fragment.

The article denounced ‘fourteen years of Tory rule’ as ‘fourteen years of austerity, of cuts in our standard of living, cuts to public services, cuts in wages and conditions, cuts in benefits and cuts to the NHS.’

This is a more or less accurate description of what has happened since 2010 when the Tories came into office (with the LibDems as their junior partners for the first five of these years). But correlation is not causation. That the Tories were responsible for all these things is the standard Labour Party line, the suggestion being that they would not have happened had there been a Labour government. But wouldn’t they? These sorts of things have been known to happen when there’s been a Labour government in office; in fact under every Labour government that there’s been.

The cuts to public services, benefits and the NHS since 2010 were imposed by the government as decisions on these are a government responsibility but, in the economic circumstances of the slump that followed the financial crash of 2008, the government had no real choice. The capitalist economy is driven by the quest for profits and any government has to give priority to helping this.

In a slump this means reducing taxes on profits and cutting back on government spending. In theory a government could choose to refuse to do this but that would only make things worse by prolonging the slump. The cuts, then, were forced on the government that happened to be in office at the time by the operation of the coercive economic laws of capitalism. If Labour had been in office for these fourteen years they would have had to have done much the same. In any event, the fall in the standard of living and worsening wages and working conditions are a direct result of capitalism having been in a slump. That’s what happens in a slump and no government can stop this.

Counterfire is of a different opinion. They suggest governments do have a free choice in the matter. The budget, their article stated:

‘is an attempt to con us into believing that there is not enough money to fund the basic services we need, and a decent income for everyone. This is a lie. The truth is that there is plenty of money to go round; the truth is that austerity, the impoverishment of the British people and the devastating cuts to the NHS and public services are a political choice’.

This is left-wing populism as its stupidest — the money is there but the government refuses to spend it to provide ‘a decent income for everyone;’ they are robbers; kick them out. The money — or at least some of it — is there but no government is going to prioritise using taxes to improve public services, even less to provide a ‘decent’ income for everyone. That’s not its remit. Capitalism’s economic laws force governments to give priority to profit-making and conditions for profit-making. As government spending comes from taxes which ultimately fall on profits, governments cannot simply increase taxes to improve living conditions for the population. Under capitalism production is for profit, and must be, not to meet people’s needs. No government can change or even challenge that.

There is reason to be believe that Counterfire know this — some of them have written books which indicate some knowledge of how capitalism works (one by Chris Nineham is reviewed in this issue) — and so are just being populist in a bid to gather a following. This is in the Leninist tradition of contempt for the intellectual ability of the working class. They think that workers are capable only of reaching a trade-union consciousness and so there’s no point in putting before them anything that goes beyond this. Hence the populist rabble-rousing.

The politics of the headline is equally incoherent. They want the ‘Tory robbers’ out and are calling for an immediate general election to bring this about. So they want the Tories to be voted out. In other words, for workers to vote for some other party. But they don’t say which. Their call could be interpreted as saying vote for any party whose candidate has a chance of beating the Tory one; which in practice would mean voting Labour in most constituencies but voting LibDem in ‘blue wall’ seats. It certainly rules out voting for the Greens or any fringe left-wing candidate such as those of Galloway’s Workers Party (which he says hopes to contest every constituency in Britain).

But supposing this happens and the Tories are voted out. That means that there will either be a Labour government or, less likely, some sort of Lib-Lab arrangement. Nothing else changes. The means of life continue to be owned and controlled by private capitalist businesses. The economy remains driven by business investment for profit. Profit, not satisfying people’s needs, is still the aim of production.

In these circumstances the new government won’t be able to behave much differently from how the Tories have been. It too will have to abide by the economic laws of capitalism and give priority to profit-making. It is certainly not going to allocate any of ‘the plenty of money to go round’ to reverse previous cuts. The likely future prime minister has said so in so many words. He told last year’s Labour Conference that a Labour government would not be ‘a cheque-book state’ and declared in December that ‘anyone who expects an incoming Labour government to quickly turn on the spending taps is going to be disappointed’. He at least understands the limitations capitalism places on what governments can do in this respect, even if Counterfire doesn’t (or feigns not to).

So what’s the point of kicking the Tories out (objectionable as they are and happy, as many will be, to see the back of them) just to replace them with others who will have to pursue the same basic policy of prioritising profit?

The problem is not the Tories, it’s capitalism. It’s capitalism that must go.

Adam Buick

Class matters (2024)

Book Review from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radical Chains. Why Class Matters. By Chris Nineham. Zero Books, 2023.197pp.

Recent times have seen much talk of identity politics and sectionalism. Gender, race, and ethnicity among other ‘sectional’ interests create what the author of this book sees as divisions and diversions from the common interest we have in establishing a different kind of society from the existing one. The view he forcefully expresses is that to regard these as groups with different interests has the effect of diverting attention from the shared working-class issue of wage and salary work and the insecurity it brings.

The book’s sub-title, ‘Why Class Matters’ is an uncompromising expression of the Marxist view that there are two main classes in capitalist society, the tiny minority class that owns and controls the Earth’s resources (the capitalist class) and the vast majority (the working class) who, in order to survive, need to sell their labour-power for a wage or salary to that minority. It argues this proposition with informed and incontrovertible clarity and powerfully insists that the effect of ‘identity politics’ is to cause muddle and confusion, nor does it make any sense to split wage and salary earners into a series of different sub-classes (eg, ‘middle class’, ‘upper class, ‘professional class’) with somehow different interests from one another. He dismisses ‘the various attempts to downplay class’ as ‘completely misleading’ and illustrates effectively that, whatever their line of work, all those who live on a wage or salary are fundamentally in the same subordinate position with regard to the system and the class that owns it (ie, the capitalist class).

This message is then connected, in a wide-ranging survey, to the various conflicts, large and small, that have arisen across the globe between subjects and their masters over the last two centuries. Yet here it somewhat loses its way and focus in seeking to see in these conflicts conscious attempts to establish new forms of society rather than largely desperate reactions by downtrodden people against oppression or powerlessness. It starts with the nineteenth-century movements for political change in France and Germany before going on to Russia’s 1905 revolution, and then the taking of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the civil war that followed, with reflection on these events as analysed mainly by Trotsky, Gramsci and Lukacs.

The author then moves on to the Second World War and its aftermath, and later, in a section entitled ‘Dreams deferred’, he takes us through revolts and uprisings in China, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, and Latin America as well as the ‘Arab Spring’ before moving back to Europe with the ‘events’ of May 1968 in France, the opposition to Thatcherism in Britain and the reactions to the ‘neoliberalism’ which it heralded. A broad sweep indeed in which historical development is often encapsulated with verve and economy (eg, the First World War defined as ‘the catastrophic climax of mounting international competition for markets and resources’) but which is tainted by an over-enthusiastic tendency to see events as more driven by class-conscious motives than they were in reality.

Having gone through this history of revolt and struggle, the author’s main message for today is that we must struggle against the current ‘neoliberalism’, which he sees as a new and increasingly exploitative form of capitalism causing ‘an epidemic of workplace insecurity’. He peppers his book with references to it, seeming to consider it as something qualitatively different from the capitalism that existed before over the past two centuries. But is it that much different from capitalism’s business as usual? It’s true that, in the post-Second World War years, free-market capitalism (previously called ‘laissez-faire’) gave way to a new variation widely practised by governments, whereby the state would intervene in the economy more readily than before to try and get the system back working in a less crisis-ridden way (often called ‘Keynesianism’).

But as capitalism went on its merry way creating, as the author himself quoting Marx says, ‘uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions’, the state intervention method was found to be no more effective in ‘taming’ capitalism than what preceded it. It became discredited therefore and governments went back to favouring so-called ‘free markets’ and the relaxation of controls: an old way of running things in fact, even if its critics have attached to it the new label of ‘neoliberalism’. The fact is that governments do not – cannot – control the way the capitalist economy works. It’s the other way round. It’s the operation of capitalism that constrains governments. In fact they can do little more than react to what it throws at them. And the system remains fundamentally the same – something the writer himself, despite his focus on ‘neoliberalism’ seems also to accept when he writes ‘the production of commodities through exploitation remains …the driving force of the system’ and ‘it is still a system with the exploitation of workers at its heart’.

But what is the form of struggle he advocates that we engage in to transcend the capitalist system and establish socialism? At one point he quotes Marx’s view of socialism as being the ‘abolition of the wages system’, talks about ‘liberating society as a whole’ and ‘dissolving classes altogether’ and seems to agree that this should be the ambition of those who oppose capitalism and have a clear view of the class system that characterises it regardless of attempts at obfuscation. And that is very much to his credit.

But the main thing he seems to offer in terms of action is support for ‘struggles over pay and conditions by trade unions’, which, it is claimed ‘have a capacity to generalise into a political conflict between different class organisations’ and ‘at the same time developing the revolutionary consciousness and combativity of all those involved’. We have of course heard this kind of thing many times before from the Trotskyist left and we continue to argue that it’s no substitute for a movement whose aim should be to develop majority consciousness among workers of the need to use democratic means to establish a classless, stateless, marketless, free-access society of democratic cooperation, mutual aid and economic equality based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need.

Howard Moss

Syriza: The return of left-wing reformism? (2015)

From the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Syriza emerged from the recent Greek elections as the party with the most votes. But what is it? And what does it stand for?

Syriza is the acronym of the Greek for ‘Coalition of the Radical Left’ and is made up of various left-wing and Green groups, including a part of the old Communist Party and some Trotskyists. It is a bit like Left Unity in this country which in fact aspires to be like them. Set up in 2004, it already emerged from the May 2012 elections as the main opposition party and topped the poll in Greece in last year’s Euro elections.

At the beginning of the campaign Counterfire (one of the SWP fragments) claimed that ‘Greece could be about to elect the most radical government of the left in Europe since the 1930s.’ This is presumably a reference to the Popular Front government that came to power in France in 1936 but the claim is open to question. If you examine Syriza’s programme it is far less radical than that of the government in Portugal that ruled immediately after the overthrow of the dictatorship there in 1974, than the ‘common programme’ of the PS/PCF government that came to power under Mitterrand in France in 1981, and arguably even than the British Labour Party’s 1945 election manifesto.

What is different is that some of the people who might end up as ministers and their top advisers are not the usual professional politicians and careerists but leftwing intellectuals like those behind Counterfire. Not that that will make any difference as to what they will be able to do in office.

One of them, John Milios, described as ‘chief economist of Syriza’ and one of their MPs, interviewed in the Guardian (23 December), declared ‘I am a Marxist … The majority [in Syriza] are.’ He himself is a Marx-scholar who has written extensively about Marx’s views, including his theory of crises. Presumably, then, he must have some idea of what’s involved in taking responsibility for governing within capitalism. In any event, the programme his interviewer recorded him as outlining accepted that a Syriza government would have to govern in the context of capitalism, and capitalism in a period of economic crisis and austerity:

‘Milios rolls off the party’s priorities one by one. It would make concerted efforts to help those hardest hit by the crisis – free electricity for Greeks who have had supplies cut off, food stamps distributed in schools, healthcare for those who need it, rents covered for the homeless, the restoration of the minimum wage to pre-crisis levels of €750 a month and a moratorium on private debt repayments to banks above 30% of disposable income.’

And, more generally, as he put it in another interview:

‘”We are going to boost growth and combat the humanitarian disaster.” Syriza’s recipe for boosting growth is through a fiscal stimulus, targeted at lower incomes in order to boost their spending power’(http://news.yahoo.com/greek-leftists-wont-run-deficits-policymaker-says-193856885.html).

Syriza is not even promising to run a budget deficit to ‘boost spending power’, only not to run a surplus as the outgoing government was planning. But it’s still based on Keynes’s discredited theory of ‘demand management’ which says that the problem in a slump is not enough spending rather than not enough prospects for profit-making.

A Syriza government might, by taking some of the measures outlined above by Milios, be able to mitigate a little the ‘humanitarian disaster’ in Greece where there’s been a massive increase in destitution leading to, among other things,  an increase in mental ill-health, suicides and the infant mortality rate. But it won’t be able to boost the accumulation of capital.

No Podeis
Meanwhile in Spain a similar party, Podemos (‘We Can’) has gone up in the opinion polls. Its policy is the same as Syriza’s, if perhaps a little bolder as it envisages some nationalisations. What they mainly have in common is a commitment to ‘boost growth’ by government action to boost consumer spending, as described in Left Flank (another SWP fragment):

‘Its analysis is that the crisis is fundamentally one of “under-consumption” (which [Podemos leader] Iglesias agrees is “the problem”) caused by mushrooming socio-economic inequalities under neoliberalism (including a sharp decline in wages’ share of GDP) – a view that overlaps with those of Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. The solution is thus to increase consumer demand through expansionist public spending (àla Keynes). They then neatly tot up how exactly this can be funded though measures such as combating relatively high levels of tax fraud (mostly carried out by the rich), reintroducing inheritance and property taxes, and debt restructuring.’

It is not as if this has not been tried before. The PS/PCF government in France tried to ‘relaunch’ the economy in 1981 by increasing ‘popular consumption’, putting up the minimum wage and other benefits. It didn’t work. In fact it failed miserably, leading to three devaluations in two years and ending in a U-turn to a policy of austerity.

The reason why it failed – and why a Syriza and Podemos government would fail too – is that capitalism is not a system geared to meeting people’s needs, not even those they can pay for. It is a profit-driven system in which priority has to be given to profits and profit-making. Since the government cannot just magic into existence the resources to increase ‘popular consumption’, and that in the end these have to come one way or the other (taxation, borrowing, currency inflation) from profits, such a policy undermines the driving force of the capitalist system, provoking an economic crisis. Which was what happened in France.

There is another aspect to the breakthroughs achieved by Syriza and Podemos. They represent a revival of the old Social Democratic tradition of a reformist party using some Marxist terminology, at least in the two countries concerned. The equivalent of the Labour Party in Spain, the PSOE, is still called, believe it or not, the ‘Socialist Workers Party’ but, like the Labour Party and similar parties in other countries, has long since given up any idea of replacing capitalism and has settled for offering itself as an alternative team for managing capitalism in Spain.

That millions of people in Spain and Greece are prepared to vote again for parties that say they are against capitalism must mean something. Of course these are not explicit and deliberate votes for socialism but only for the parties voted for to do something about the effects of capitalism. This, however, is not something these parties will be able to deliver because it is not in their power to do so. They have been set the impossible task of trying to reform capitalism so as to make it work other than as a system that has to put making profits before meeting people’s needs and which periodically plunges the economy into crisis and depression.

There is no alternative under capitalism. The only way out is to get rid of it altogether and replace it with a system based on productive resources being commonly owned and democratically controlled, so they can be used to provide what people need in accordance with the principle ‘from each according to ability, to each according to needs.’

Adam Buick