Cooking the Books: ‘Raise everyone’s wages’ (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Cut bills and raise everyone’s wages’ promised the Green Party in a leaflet put out for elections earlier this year (‘Stop Reform. Replace Labour. Vote Green’). Wage increases all round is more typical of Trotskyist candidates trying to get workers to follow them by dangling impossible ‘transitional demands’ in front of them. In this case it was an example of Polanski’s professed ‘ecopopulism’ which consists of making attractive promises on bread-and-butter issues to gather votes, in particular from those who normally vote for the Labour Party. But it is just as unobtainable as any Trotskyist carrot.

If ever the Green Party came to form the government and decreed that all employers should pay their workers more, the result would be an immediate financial and economic crisis since everyone’s wages could only be increased at the expense of overall profits and profits are what drive the capitalist economy. A lower economy-wide rate of profit would mean less investment and so a drop in production.

Derek Wall, a one-time speaker for the Green Party (before they had a Leader) and still a Green Party activist, described in 1990 what he expected to happen if a Green government came into office on a programme of putting the environment before profits:

‘A Green government will be controlled by the economy rather than being in control. On coming to office through coalition or more absolute electoral success, it would be met by an instant collapse of Sterling as “hot money” and entrepreneurial capital went elsewhere. The exchange rate would fall and industrialists would move their factories to countries with more relaxed environmental controls and workplace regulation. Sources of finance would dry up as unemployment rocketed, slashing revenue from taxation and putting up social security bills. The money for ecological reconstruction — the building of railways, the closing of motorways and construction of a proper sewage system — would run out’ (Getting There. Steps to a Green Society, p. 78).

As the Green Party accepts the ownership of the means of production by private corporations and individuals and doesn’t even have any state-capitalist pretensions, it is fair to assume that they would come into office, if ever they did, under capitalism as it is today. So Wall’s scenario is entirely plausible.

Wall envisaged this happening if the Green government was elected on the basis of implementing far-reaching measures to protect the environment. The Green Party doesn’t seem to say much these days about protecting the environment (the leaflet in question doesn’t mention it at all) but the same would happen if a Green government were elected on a pledge to make all employers pay their workers more. In fact, the immediate crisis would be economic and not just financial as Wall envisaged. Some employers would go bankrupt immediately. Others would lay off workers. Unemployment would soar. Production would slump.

The Greens are taking workers for fools, though we doubt many were fooled into voting for them because they believed that the Greens would, or even could, bring about a general increase in wages. Increased wages for everybody sounds good but is too good to be possible under capitalism.

Blogger's Note:

Derek Wall's 1990 book, Getting There. Steps to a Green Society, was reviewed in the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard.

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

Party News: Local Election results (2026)

Party News from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here are the results in the wards of the London Borough of Lambeth which we contested:

Brixton North: Labour: 1415, 1365, 1189; Green: 1388, 1304, 1169; Independent (Shake It Up): 372; Conservative: 261, 252, 167; LibDem: 215, 200, 186; Reform: 189; SPGB: 77; TUSC: 53.

Clapham Common & Abbeville: LibDems: 1331, 1195; Labour: 1116, 789; Green: 441, 423; Conservative: 347, 331; Reform: 194, 173; SPGB: 14.

Stockwell West & Larkhall: Labour: 1438, 1301, 1244; Green: 1234, 1211, 1098; Conservative: 420, 358, 265; LibDems: 377, 348, 273; Reform: 374; Independent (Shake It Up): 351; TUSC: 72; SPGB: 68.

The Greens replaced Labour as the largest party and are likely to be running the council for the next four years. They are making ambitious promises. Here is the new leader of the Green group on the council:

‘We will put power in the hands of residents, workers and the community. Things can, and will, get better.’

And one of his deputy co-leaders:

‘Again and again, residents told us the same story – a political elite, locally and nationally, is prioritising the needs of developers, big business and themselves over the needs of people and planet. We will do things differently’.

Power in the hands of workers; not giving priority to the profits of big business. They sound like Labour politicians in the olden days before they learned the hard way that under capitalism priority has to be given to profits and not to making things better for workers.

Cooking the Books: All workers’ parties now? (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We’re now the workers’ party’ proclaimed the headline of an article by Nigel Farage in the Times (10 May) following his party’s gains in the local council elections. A week or so earlier on May Day, Zack Polanski had declared that ‘the Greens are the new workers’ party’.

So, who are ‘the workers’? Capitalist society is divided into two basic classes: a class that owns the resources needed to produce what the members of society need to survive, and a class, without such ownership, whose members are obliged to try to sell their working skills to obtain money to buy what they need to survive. The vast majority of the population are members of this working class, irrespective of what job they do or whether they work in an office or an industrial unit.

Farage wrote about ‘guys wearing orange jackets working for local councils, paid-up trade union members, or the self-employed’, which suggests he is thinking more of manual and industrial workers. That is certainly a common usage of the term ‘working class’, defined by occupation rather than exclusion from ownership of productive resources. There is evidence that many such workers who traditionally supported Labour have switched to Reform.

But if a party is to be judged a workers’ party because of the number of workers who vote for it, any party which has substantial support would be a ‘workers party’ as the vast majority of voters are workers. The Tories, the Liberals and the Scots and Welsh Nats would be workers’ parties too.

Polanski’s claim that the Greens are now the workers’ party is based on promising measures to benefit workers in the workplace. He sounds like a Labour politician of yesteryear:

‘The reforms introduced by Margaret Thatcher nearly half a century ago began the long march downwards in the balance of power and wealth in our country — from those who produce and do the work to those who profit from it …. We will address the massive imbalance in our workplaces and give control back to workers’.

His claim that the Greens are the new workers’ party is in effect a claim that Greens are the new ‘Labour’ party. But why does he think that the Green Party would be any more successful in shifting the balance of power and wealth in favour of those who produce the wealth? Why does he think that the Labour Party failed to do this? And, incidentally, when did workers ever control their places of work?

The Labour Party started off as a trade union pressure group to get legislation passed that would benefit workers. At best it could be seen as a party that aimed to improve the position of workers within capitalism but, although some reforms can do and have done this, capitalism can never be made to run in the interest of the working class, because it is a profit-making system and profits come from the unpaid labour of those ‘who produce and do the work’. It is an anti-worker system and no government can change that.

Farage’s claim that his party is a workers’ party is laughable in view of its openly pro-capitalist policies. Polanski’s claim can be dismissed as vote-catching rhetoric by an opposition party that has no chance of being called to honour its promise — and, if ever it was in that position, it would fail just as the Labour Party has done and for the same reason. Capitalism simply cannot be made to work for the workers.

A real workers’ party is one that advocates political action to bring about the immediate common ownership and democratic control of productive resources.

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

All socialists now? (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

That august publication the Daily Mail recently ran the headline ‘Another Day in Starmer’s Socialist Utopia. When Did Britain Become North Korea?’. It reported that Starmer was ‘hiring a raft of high tax fanatics’, was ‘threatening ‘ID cards for all’, and that ‘fury erupted’ when armed police arrested the writer of Father Ted ‘over online comments about transgender activists’.

It goes without saying that no one with the slightest good sense or judgement could fail to see this for what it was – a pile of breathless and exaggerated bilge. The comparison to the repressive, authoritarian dictatorship that is North Korea was particularly ludicrous, as was the assumption that that regime is somehow ‘socialist’. Equally mind-boggling was the notion that Starmer’s government is socialist too (a ‘socialist utopia’ in fact) and thus to be equated to North Korea, when neither set-up has anything to do with socialism.

Socialism: what does it mean?

What gives impetus to such sneering declarations, intellectually empty as they are, is the fact that Labour and its supporters are themselves fond of talking about themselves as socialist, even though the real task they are involved in is finding ways of running capitalism. It’s true that Starmer himself has not uttered the ‘s’ word for some time, but others in his party have, and do so continually. The Labour MP Dawn Butler, for example, recently stated that ‘the Labour Party is a socialist party’ and that ’socialism isn’t a dirty word’. That moved this writer to email her and ask the question ‘Since socialism can be such a confusing word, can you please explain how you see it?’ Receiving no response at all, I thought I would try putting a similar question to another ‘socialist’ MP, Zarah Sultana, who had actually just left Labour to join Jeremy Corbyn in the setting up of a prospective new party (currently calling itself ‘Your Party’). I wrote: ‘I very much sympathise with what you say, in resigning from the Labour Party, about the failure of governments to deal with poverty and inequality and note your point that the issue at the next election will be “socialism or barbarism”. But, since socialism can be such a confusing word, can you please explain what you mean by it?’ I did at least get a response from her, but only the standard acknowledgement of receipt (‘Thank you for contacting me. Please read this automated response to your email, which confirms that I have received your correspondence’) and nothing thereafter.

The unfortunate thing is that, whether in the Labour Party or outside, MPs and others throw the ‘s’ word around without having a clear notion – and sometimes no notion at all – of what it means other than a vague wish for wealth to be spread more evenly and reforms to be brought in which will make life easier and less uncomfortable for those lower down the earnings scale – all with a view to somehow making things more ‘equal’. It rarely if ever crosses their minds that such changes, even if they were possible or feasible, would not change the basic structure of the system we live under which determines that production and distribution of goods and services takes place for profit not need, with overall dependence on money and buying and selling.

‘Your Party’

But despite getting no meaningful answer from the MP calling herself a socialist who had defected to Corbyn’s party-to-be, when I found out that there was to be a local gathering, open to all, to discuss the nature and setting up of the new ‘Your Party’ organisation, I decided to go along to observe, to listen, and maybe to speak. The turnout was 60-70 people, biased towards the older age group but in gender terms pretty much even. Yet if I was expecting to hear talk of socialism, in any of its possible conceptions, that’s not what I got. Most of the hands that shot up were from members of small left-wing groups or parties damning the current Labour government and seeming to envisage some kind of ‘entryism’ into the new party. There were also some non-affiliated attendees with apparently good intentions and maybe looking to find a home in a new ‘caring’ party. But what virtually all the contributions from the floor had in common was talk of the need to press for reform measures of various kinds: eg, nationalisation, higher taxation for the wealthy, expansion of the NHS, more funding for education and other services, ending of anti-protest measures, action against pollution and climate change. Only one speaker stood apart in saying that the main problem was that most young people nowadays have no idea what socialism means and a priority should be to fix that. I agreed with this, even though I doubted whether that person’s conception of socialism coincided with mine.

As for a contribution of my own, my hand wasn’t among those pointed to by the chair and I had to accept that. But had I been chosen, I would have said that I agreed with the idea that a clear view needed to be established of what socialism means. I would have added too that, as far as I was concerned, socialism didn’t mean ways of ‘fixing’ capitalism (impossible anyway) or trying to make it more palatable. Instead, it meant getting rid of the whole system of production for the market and buying and selling and replacing it with a moneyless cooperative society of voluntary work, free access and democratic control worldwide. I would have also said that, short of this, the ‘real change’ Jeremy Corbyn has said his new party will bring is destined to be the same mirage as all previous attempts at radical reform of capitalism have been, ending up as a predictable recycling of the status quo.

HKM

Zarah Sultana spoke at a meeting in Raynes Park (South West London) on 10 September. She said that the new party’s aim was to ‘materially improve people’s lives’. The Labour Party, she said, had betrayed its past principles and was ‘dead’; Starmer should be sent to the Hague for trial as a war criminal. She was in fact surprisingly radical for someone selected and elected as a Labour candidate, calling for the new party to support demonstrations and strikes as well as to get MPs and councillors elected. She favoured the new party being called ‘The Left’ and said it should be organised democratically with provisions for One Member One Vote.

She also said the new party should be ‘proudly socialist’, and that she wanted to ‘bring our country to socialism’ and that the election of local councillors would ‘pave the way to the socialist challenge’. But she didn’t explain what she envisaged socialism as being. The rest of her speech suggested it would be capitalism reformed into a less unequal society with properly funded public services and state-owned utilities and that put people before profit. As she was pretty approachable after the meeting, I could have asked her about it but she was surrounded by people wanting to take selfies with her.

ALB

I went along to a Your Party meeting at a pub in my local seaside town, to find around 40 people, a few youngish but most of retirement age. Many of them were undoubtedly keen for a left alternative to what they saw as a right-wing Labour government. Quite a few others, like wolves at a Bambi picnic, were predatory undercover Trots keen to get themselves on the group’s steering committee. Two facilitators spoke at length, one in an inaudible drone, the other in a grating whine, to the effect that this was to be a workshop event, in which small groups would discuss and then feed back their responses to the questions: (a) what the priority of the new party should be, (b) what name it should have, and (c) what the immediate focus of the local group ought to be. It occurred to me that my answer to all three questions would be the same, and very likely not appreciated by anyone present: abolish capitalism.

The assembled gathering dutifully knuckled down to the task, while I fell into conversation with an enthusiastic ‘socialist’ who believed that China and Russia had a thing or two to tell us about how to run an economy, and wasn’t our government just as fascistic as them nowadays anyway? He left before the end, to catch the football, but accepted a leaflet and promised to look us up. I also bailed out, having regretfully concluded that no open debate was likely, that reformism was the only item on the agenda, and that this new left surge was history repeating itself in a kind of desperate and perpetual amnesia.

PJS

The Greens too?

The Green Party has just elected a former LibDem candidate as their leader. He too says he’s a bit of a ‘socialist’, as this report of the launch of his leadership campaign recorded:

‘One member asked whether Polanski thought the Green Party was “explicitly a socialist party”. His response was, “On a personal level I agree with the majority of socialist principles”, and said that, “we are a left wing, left of centre party”. But he also clarified, “The reason why I wouldn’t say explicitly, yes, we’re a socialist party kind of in public and as a slogan is I think that’s going to unnecessarily put people off”. He went on to argue that in defining the Greens as a socialist party there would be a need to, “appeal to all the socialists and kind of struggle with all the people who are anti socialist who might have voted Green if we didn’t say we were socialists.” Instead of describing the Green Party in this way, Polanski instead argued that Greens should be talking about a “fair, equitable society where we make sure that everyone is looked after”, and advocating policies like a Universal Basic Income.’

He is in fact on record as having described the Green Party explicitly in public as a ‘socialist party’. In a video debate in February this year he argued that there was no need to set up a new left party as ‘there is, after all, a socialist party in the UK already: it’s the Greens’ .

He doesn’t say what he means by ‘socialist principles’ but it is certainly not a socialist principle to not say you are a socialist in case you lose votes or to seek the votes of anti-socialists. He does, however, give a hint as to what he thinks ‘socialism’ is when he mentions a ‘fair, equitable society where we make sure that everyone is looked after’. That’s probably what he said was his aim when he was a candidate for the LibDems. Which party doesn’t promise that? More important is how such a desirable if rather vague end is to be achieved — by trying to reform capitalism or by making the means of wealth production the common ownership of society under democratic control?

Polanski has also described himself as an ‘eco-populist’. That sounds about right.

ALB

Party News: three leaflets (2024)

Party News from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

To end the rage, end capitalism

The media love it when racists riot, because disaster sells.

There’s less interest in the real story, of cooperation, of solidarity against racism, of mutual support, shown by the vast majority of people.

People like you, here at this event.

There are those who say that humans are by nature greedy, selfish and cruel, and that peaceful and cooperative co-existence will never be possible.

That’s nothing but an excuse to justify a violent, warring system that, deep down, we all hate, in which billionaires lounge on their yachts while the rest of us scrape by, obey their stupid laws, and do all the hard work of running society.

It’s capitalism that drives many to a nameless rage they take out on innocent people around them through racism, homophobia and domestic violence.

And it’s capitalism that has become, to quote campaigner George Monbiot, ‘a weapon pointed at the world’, a system of runaway profiteering that is threatening our collective survival.

It’s time to declare we’ve hit peak capitalism.

We can do so much better.

We have the tech and the know-how to upgrade to a sustainable world of democratic common ownership, with no nation states, leaders, rich elites or money.

Making everything free will make everyone free.

Making everyone free will end the rage.

If you want this, say so – tell people you want to move beyond capitalism, because you’ll be surprised how many agree with you.

And contact us to help get the message out.

– Leaflet handed out at ongoing anti-racism events.

Green capitalism? No chance!

We need rational stewardship of the biosphere for our survival.

But the world is in the hands of a tiny capitalist minority, all in furious competition with each other to stay ahead of the pack.

All their grubby investment decisions are taken in private and only for profit. There’s no overall rationality, no ‘grand design’. It’s a crazy casino.

Environmentalists say you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, and that’s true. So can we tame the casino? Can we magically rig capitalism so it pursues only modest or even zero growth?

That would be a feat for the ages, like turning a tiger vegetarian, or convincing a Great White shark to give back to the community.

Capital only wants to do one thing, make a profit, faster and faster, on and on, and bugger the externalities. You’ll never make it change. You’ll never make it green.

The only way to get rational stewardship is to get rid of capitalism.

We need to take the world into collective democratic ownership, with no market system or production for profit, and no rich class of irresponsible gamblers to ruin it for the rest of us.

– Leaflet handed out at Green Party Conference in September.

Against all capitalism’s wars

Why this war with all the death and destruction wars bring? It’s not, as it might seem, another example of an undying enmity between two groups – Jews and Arabs – but a fight between different capitalist factions over land, resources and strategic routes. And not just between the government of Israel and the Hamas regime in Gaza. The greater issue is who controls the oilfields in the Persian Gulf and the trade route out of it, with Israel being supported by the West to counter the threat from Iran and Iran promoting militant Islamism to undermine Israel.

In Gaza, the Hamas organisation, who are both anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic, came to power via elections in 2007 with the stated aim ‘to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’. But that was the end of any form of democracy there and, in their time in office, they have crushed multiple protests by rivals, expelling their officials to make sure there would never be a round of elections and killing dozens of their own people, many of them civilians. During that time the people of Gaza have been plunged increasingly into poverty with, for example, 40 percent unemployment, with their leaders enriching themselves assisted by backers from other Arab countries and enjoying multi-million-dollar land deals, luxury villas and black market fuel from Egypt.

The continuing oppression by Israel (a country by the way where 25 percent of households live on the poverty line) has also of course been a significant factor, as its government has sought to facilitate the enrichment of its own capitalist class by grabbing land and keeping a tight lid on protest. Now the lid has come off- and in the most horrific way.

There is no excuse for the horrors unleashed on innocent people by Hamas nor for Israel’s savage retaliation, killing thousands, attacking hospitals, depriving a land of food, water and power and flattening its infrastructure regardless of what may happen to the inhabitants in the short and long term. No wonder there are calls for a ceasefire to alleviate the sufferings of the people of Gaza.

Of course Israel’s government will support its own capitalist class to the hilt – after all that is its role. And it is all part of a playbook, which we see played out time and time again as governments representing their capitalist classes fail to resolve conflicts by diplomacy and resort to horrifying violence. We can only repeat the same thing we have always said when this has happened – that workers (in this case Arab and Israeli ones) have no interest in fighting one another but have a common interest in uniting with workers throughout the world to abolish capitalism and establish socialism, a world without borders where the Earth’s resources will belong to all humanity and are used to produce what people need, not profits for the few who currently own and control these resources.

– Leaflet handed out at anti-Gaza War protests.

Letter: Living wage or . . . (2010)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Living wage or . . .

Dear Editors

I must declare from the outset that I am a fellow traveller with the SPGB in as much as seeking the abolition of the wage system, but in the Socialist Standard’s recent Cooking the Books column ‘What’s a “Living Wage”?’ (June), I was left disappointed by the way in which the living wage was represented.

The first problem with the article is where (discussing the Green Party’s flagship policy of raising the National Minimum Wage to £8.10/hour) it states that £16,848 pa. ‘hardly qualifies as an adequate “living wage”.’ This feels a little disingenuous.

Let’s be honest about this: of course £16.8k a year is not comfortable, and it is certainly not fair. It is still several thousand shy of the current national average, but it is also several thousand closer. However, the difference it would make (before we get onto potential wider economic repercussions of the wage rate) to those currently on NMW would be phenomenal.

This is a difference not only of nearly £5k a year but has a multitude of knock-on benefits the article neglects to mention, the most important and obvious being the positive impact on health (one of the key grounds for the living wage) due to reduced stress levels.

This leads me comfortably into my next point. As a seasoned London-based organiser around the London Living Wage, one of the most uncomfortable facts I’ve had to deal with in campaigning for the living wage is that paying the London Living Wage has been good for employers; it is good management of capitalism.

A better wage rate (albeit still suitably low) means fewer employee sick days taken and a much lower turnover in employee numbers. The former relates specifically to the aforementioned health benefits, the latter relates often to simple time-management.

So many NMW workers have to work multiple jobs to make up enough hours in order to gain enough money to cover rent and provide the cheapest meal for their families. Staff turnover can be high for NMW employers due to employees taking up work at sites marginally closer to home, etc. In many respects the living wage can be more about time rather than money.

The article states that the first effect of legal living wage rate would be that “some employers would go bankrupt.” Of course this is a definite possibility in the current economic crisis with many employers already teetering on the edge.

On the other hand, however, the kind of employers most likely to be adversely affected would (obviously) be those dependent on super-exploitation: I’m thinking especially of cleaning, security and catering agencies.

But the roles employers for these firms provide are those which are, broadly speaking, already exploited to saturation point, i.e. there is scarcely a surplus of workers (or at least not a surplus of work-hours – admittedly something different). These are by no means the only NMW job types, but they constitute a significant proportion and are (at our current level of technology) extremely difficult to substitute for any kind of improved machinery. We aren’t yet at the stage where robotic androids could perform all the tasks a security guard or cleaner does.

If these agencies – subcontractors, beneficiaries of privatisation – were to collapse under wage bills, this does not therefore necessarily mean mass unemployment (except possibly on a very temporary basis) as the roles require being re-hired for as immediately as they are lost.

In a lot of cases this would presumably take the form of these out-sourced services being brought back in-house to the sites on which they are employed. This can be and often is in fact cheaper for site-owners as it cuts out duplicate management posts between the site-company and the outsourced company (both of which are paid for by the site-owner).

In short, it can work out cheaper in more ways than one to pay workers more. It is not necessarily as straight-forward as the article suggests. A living wage can be as much ‘living’ for the employee as it is for the employer.

Finally, and in my eyes most importantly, the article ends that ‘workers should replace the green demand for a “Living Wage” by the revolutionary demand for the “Abolition of the Wages System”.’ As I mentioned, in principle I agree. However, this simple sentence does injustice to the value living wage struggles have.

For myself the main and most important benefit of the London Living Wage is that it lifts workers and their dependents not only out of the deeper throes of poverty (though not completely altogether) but that it also lifts them out of the harshest insecurity and psychological vulnerability imaginable.

It is not a coincidence that those on the NMW are among the least likely to be unionised. I’m certain the SPGB understands the mechanism used by bosses in holding workers down through the wage system. In London, living wage struggles have galvanised workers’ organisations (especially grassroots unionisation), and have recently begun to really politicise workers. It instils consciousness.

If the wage system can be represented by the image of a boss stamping on a worker’s face, then the living wage might be removing the boss’s foot from the worker’s neck. She’s still going to get stamped in the face, but she’s a little freer to start fighting back.

The demand to abolish wage-slavery is certainly the most important one. However, in our current situation it is only through living wage struggles that any kind of meaningful revolutionary discourse can exist. The living wage question is the first line in this discussion which, if followed to its natural conclusion, ends by agreeing to overthrow exploitation altogether.

An interesting question Cooking the Books should ask is where, if at all, in this discussion the ‘transitional demand’ for a National Maximum Salary might be.

Joseph Robertson, 

London

Reply: … abolition of the wages system?

Let’s get one thing clear from the start. We have nothing against workers struggling for and getting higher wages if they can. We favour this, even if we think that ideally this should be tied to struggling to abolish the wages system altogether. Our members, as workers, join trade unions. So, we hope your campaign to get London employers to pay some of their workers more succeeds, even if we don’t like the term “living wage” any more than “fair wage”. There’s nothing fair about the wages system and we’re against people having to work for a wage to live.

Wages (and their other name, salaries) are a price – the price of the labour power, or working skills, that workers sell to an employer. Most people are forced by economic necessity to do this to get a living, to obtain the money to buy the things they need to live.

The wages system implies the division of society into those who own and control the means for producing wealth and who need to employ people to operate them and those who, owning no means of production, have to sell their working skills to them. It implies a class divided society. But more. Employers are not philanthropists. They only employ workers if they think there’s a profit in it for them. The source of their profits is the difference between what they pay their workers as wages and what they receive from the sale of what their employees produce. So, the wages system also implies exploitation, the extraction of unpaid labour from the workforce. That’s why there is not, and cannot be, any such thing as a fair wage.

The abolition of the wages system involves abolishing the class division of society by making the means of production the common property of everybody under democratic control. Then nobody will be obliged to work for someone else for a wage. Instead, the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” will apply. People will co-operate to produce what is needed and then everybody will have free access to it to satisfy their needs, without having to pay. In fact money will have become redundant.

What we were criticising in the article was the proposal of a political party to increase the present legal minimum wage by over 40 percent and call the result a “living wage”. We pointed out that this was just another empty vote-catching promise which, even if implemented, wouldn’t have had the expected effects. We would have thought that it was generally accepted that higher wages do lead employers to introduce labour-saving machinery. An example of this in reverse would be how many garages have abandoned car washing machines as hand washing done by asylum seekers (probably getting less than the minimum wage) has become cheaper. You yourself concede that an imposed increase of the order proposed by the Green Party – by nearly £5k a year – could lead to an increase in unemployment for the lowest-paid, even if you think this would only be temporary.

We do not agree that “in our current situation it is only through living wage struggles that any kind of meaningful revolutionary discourse can exist.” These probably are producing an increased trade union consciousness among a section of the working class, but the struggle for higher wages and better working conditions (better conditions for the sale of labour-power) is not the same as socialist understanding of the need to get rid of the wages system altogether by bringing the means of production into the common ownership and democratic control of the whole population. That does not rise spontaneously out of the mere struggle for higher wages but requires the presence and activity of socialists to point this out directly.

Incidentally, for what it’s worth, Marx didn’t think much of such demands as “fixing the minimum wage by law”, which was one of the reform demands of the French Workers Party he had a hand in helping to set up in 1880. He wrote, referring to the proposer of this: “I told him: ‘If the French proletariat is still so childish as to require such bait, it is not worth while drawing up any program whatever.’” (Letter to Sorge, 5 November 1880, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/letters/80_11_05.htm)

As to the demand for a “National Maximum Salary”, we don’t think that this is something that those who want to abolish the wages system should get involved in. The bloated “salaries” received by many top business people and government officials are not really the price of their labour power but a disguised way of getting a share of the surplus value extracted from the unpaid labour of the workers.

Editors.

Letter: Missing something here (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Re the editorial in the April issue. I assume that the vague reference to "the Green movement" gaining power refers to the Green Party.

What is your evidence for alleging that the Green Party is pro-capitalist? Which part of the Green Party manifesto opposes, or is incompatible with, “the common ownership and democratic control of the means for producing and creating wealth"? I may be missing something here. 

K. A. Gilchrist, 

Canterbury

Reply:

The Green Party’s general objective of a “sustainable society" is not at all incompatible with the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources. In fact it could only be achieved on this basis. The Green Party, however, does not stand for common ownership and democratic control, but for the retention of private ownership, profit-making and the market on a small-scale—in other words, for small-scale capitalism, involving small firms producing for local markets, instead of the Big Business capitalism geared to the world market that we have today.

Among the passages you have missed in the Green Party’s Manifesto for a Sustainable Society is the following on “Monetary Policy": 

"In a Green society the informal sector will eventually gain in significance so that formal transactions and money generally will have a lesser role than at present. There is however no reason why a financial system cannot be made to work in the interests of the community . . . The place of the commercial banks in financing enterprise will gradually be taken by mediating, non-profit local community banks providing low-cost finance, both at district and regional levels" (EC 640 and EC 642. 1993 edition).

Have a look too at the sections on taxation and Basic Income which also assume the continued existence of the market and monetary economy. Such an economy, even if reduced to a local scale, is incompatible with common ownership and democratic control. This is because if productive resourcesarc owned in common so is the social product and the problem then becomes not how to sell it but how to share it amongst the community on a non-monetary basis.

The market, banks, money, taxes, etc. disappear as meaningless. Instead, the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" applies where each person contributes what they can to production and then has free access according to their self-determined needs to what they require to lead an enjoyable life.

Editors.

Sting in the Tail: Money-grubbing Olympics (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money-grubbing Olympics

Some people who watched the recent Olympic Games were interested less in the prowess of the athletes than in their potential for advertising endorsements.

Advertisers are looking for athletes with sales-appeal—no charisma, no contract, and one ad-man predicted that Carl Lewis’s ninth gold medal wouldn’t help him because “He's won before and no one liked him ’’(New York Post, 31 July).

And athletes should know when and when not to shed a tear:

“They're allowed to cry for joy when they win, but any athlete who cries because they've lost can forget about endorsements. ”

But patriotic tears could be more rewarding than mere tears of joy:

“The guy who won the high jump came close to crying during the National Anthem, but he held back, one tear could have been worth tens of thousands of dollars. ”

Maybe the next Olympics will see medals for those athletes who land the most lucrative advertising contracts.

Marriage of convenience

The decision by Boeing, the world’s biggest maker of civilian aircraft, to buy Rockwell, the aerospace and "defence” company, for three billion dollars, is more bad news for America's European competitors.

A spate of similar take-overs in America has produced a handful of industry giants and put European rivals at a competitive disadvantage because they have remained independent—and relatively small.

“But this attitude may be changing—Efforts to create a pan-European aerospace industry capable of matching US rivals gathered pace yesterday when the new chairman of Aerospatiale called on his fellow industrialists to “regroup” their interests ” (Guardian, 9 August).

For any industry' to survive in today’s capitalism it must “regroup” into bigger but fewer economic units—witness what’s happening in banking, insurance, car manufacturing, brewing, retailing, etc., and Europe’s fragmented aerospace and defence industry is belatedly catching on.

Hard Times Down-Under

We have received a pile of newspaper cuttings from a sympathiser in New Zealand which tell some familiar stories.

They tell of strikes involving teachers, telecom workers, air-traffic controllers, and many others, the health service is collapsing, one-fifth of the population lives below the poverty line, pay and benefits have been cut, etc.

A less familiar story concerns an employer who has ordered his workers to have their “bowel movements ” in their own time only:

“It's a completely reasonable request. It's a personal discipline" (Sunday Star Times, 7 July).

Presumably, this superman has disciplined himself to crap on cue, but for mere mortals it’s a case of “When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go!”

Workers in New Zealand are clearly having a tough time, but for some the screw has been turned just that little bit tighter.

Orwell’s “Lesser Evil”

The revelation that George Orwell named “crypto-communists” and “fellow travellers” to the British secret service drew noteworthy comments form some prominent left-wingers.

For example, Christopher Hill, the communist historian, claimed that Orwell’s writing was always ambiguous, and added that “Animal Farm was precisely an attack on communism. ” How an “ambiguous” writer could write “precisely” Hill didn’t say, but presumably he still defends the “communism” which Orwell so brilliantly attacked.

And Tony Benn curiously excused Orwell’s act on the grounds that “the biggest terrorists in the world are states”, possibly forgetting that he had been part of the British state when he was a Labour cabinet minister.

Orwell’s denunciation of the Russian dictatorship was wholly admirable, but in naming names he sided with one bunch of exploiters in its sordid quarrel with another, and that was utterly deplorable.

Big-time con-artists

A vicar at the C of E’s General Synod speaking on Camelot’s running of the National Lottery, described the lottery as evil, and added that “Punters are being deceived on a grand scale. ”

Yes, this is the same C of E which has for centuries been telling folk that after they die they will live on in one place or another., that once upon a time a luckless Israelite got himself done-in as payment-in-advance for their sins, that the meek shall inherit the earth, etc., etc.

When it comes to deceiving punters “on a grand scale” then Camelot has got nothing on the C of E.

Naive Greens

Anyone who wonders why we are so critical of the “Greens” should consider the following.

The United Nations commissioned a group of international economists to advise on the best way of achieving a sharp reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (Big Issue, 4 August).

Aubrey Meyer, a Green activist, discovered that the economists are working only on the cheapest way of tackling global warming:

"Their task was to work out the slowest rate of increase in emissions that the world could afford. It was putting economics before lives."

And yet Greens remain convinced that this problem can be solved within the capitalist system which creates it.

Major Douglas rides again (2003)

From the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the course of our nearly one hundred years of socialist activity, one of the ideas that we have had to deal with from time to time has been currency crankism – the idea that economic and social problems are caused by some flaw in the monetary system and that what is required to put things right is not to get rid of the profit system that is capitalism but mere monetary reform (of one kind or another, depending on which particular school the currency crank belongs to).

Between the wars the most popular school of currency crankism in Britain was Social Credit, based on the ideas of Major Douglas (as he was known). His explanation for the slump – of poverty amidst potential plenty, of unmet needs alongside idle factories and widespread unemployment, of piles of unsold goods being destroyed – was simple, not to say simplistic: it was due to a lack of purchasing power, to people not having enough money to buy what they needed or to constitute a market worth catering for. The solution, too, was simplistic: distribute purchasing power free to people in the form of a “social dividend” paid by the government.

Douglas believed that banks could “create credit” by the mere stroke of a pen, but that they deliberately kept money scarce so as to be able to charge a higher rate of interest. Hence his solution that the banks should be taken over by the government and their supposed power to create credit exercised but in the general interest, as “social credit”.

In fact, there is no chronic shortage of purchasing power. Sufficient to buy the product is generated as wages and profits in the course of production; slumps are not caused by an absolute shortage of purchasing power but arise when, because of falling profit prospects, capitalist firms choose not to spend all their profits on fully renewing or on expanding production. Nor can banks “create credit”; they are essentially only financial intermediaries, borrowing money at one rate of interest from people with cash to spare and lending this at a higher rate to those needing money to spend or invest, their profits coming from the difference between the two interest rates.

This being the case, the main result of applying “social credit” would be roaring inflation. All the other problems of capitalism, including periodically re-occurring “poverty amidst plenty”, would continue unabated. They will only end when the means of production are brought into common ownership and democratic control so that they can be oriented towards directly satisfying people’s needs – when banks, money and all the rest of the buying and selling system will have become redundant.

Normally, lack-of-purchasing power currency crank theories flourish in times of slump. However, according to an article by Derek Wall, “Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools”, in the September issue of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, the modern-day followers of Major Douglas are well ensconced in the Green Party:

“Brian Leslie, whose parents were members of the Social Credit Greenshirts during the 1930s, chairs the Green Party Economics Working Group. The newsletter, Sustainable Economics, is almost entirely concerned with social credit and Party economics speaker Molly Scott Cato advocates monetary reform . . . Frances Hutchinson, a former member of the Green Party left grouping, the Association of Socialist Greens, has revived the Douglas Social Credit Secretariat . . . Wilfred Price, a member of the Greenshirts in the 1930s, joined the Ecology Party (now the Green Party) in the early 1980s and powerfully spoke for social credit as a form of green politics.”

Currency cranks find it easy to infiltrate the Green Party because of the tendency amongst its members and supporters to blame “big banks” and international financial institutions for ecological problems and the ravages of capitalist globalisation. The Green Party has, for instance, lined up alongside the Tories, the UKIP and other reactionaries in the “defend the pound” camp because it sees the euro as an international (in the sense of anti-national) currency.

Derek Wall’s article concentrates on the political side of Social Credit rather than on its economic fallacies (though he recognises these), in particular on the anti-semitic position it took up between the wars. The title of his article is taken from August Bebel, a pre-WWI German Social Democrat, who once quipped that “anti-semitism is the socialism of the fool”, by which he meant the anti-capitalism of the fool. And it is, of course, a short step between denouncing “global finance” for causing problems to blaming “international Jewish bankers” or some other supposed international conspiracy or cabal. It was a step that Douglas himself took. Wall quotes him as writing in Social Credit (1933):

“In a remarkable document which received some publicity some years ago, under the title of ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’, a Machiavellian scheme for the enslavement of the world was outlined. The authenticity of this document is a matter of little importance; what is interesting about it, is the fidelity with which the methods by which such enslavement might be brought about can be seen reflected in the facts of everyday experience.”

Wall – a Green Party member who describes himself as an “eco-Marxist” – recognises that Social Credit doesn’t have to be anti-semitic and that its supporters in the Green movement (with one exception) are not. His concern is to warn the Green Party and the anti-globalisation movement against embracing monetary reform as a quick-fix solution but also of the dangerous company they risk falling into if they continue down the road of blaming “global finance” for ruining “national” – and local – economies.

Adam Buick

The Passing Politicians’ Show: Uxbridge and Ulez (2023)

From the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip in July, caused by Boris Johnson jumping before he was pushed, provided a chance to observe conventional politics at work and to confirm how empty and irrelevant it is.

Labour’s plan

In his manifesto the unsuccessful Labour candidate said ‘the Tories have crashed the economy’ and that ‘since the Conservatives came to power in 2010 real wages have fallen so far that we are now worse off by £1,373 a year’. Labour, he said, ‘has a plan to put money into the pockets of local people.’ Who wouldn’t want that? But when you look closely at how this is to be done it turns out to be a plan not to actually give people more money but to stop them having to pay out so much. ‘A Labour government,’ he promised, ‘would bring your energy bills down by £1,400 by fast-tracking home-grown renewable energy’. Even on their own figures, this would only restore the situation to what it was in 2010, but there is no guarantee that it will happen.

Labour Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had already rowed back on Labour’s ‘fast tracking’ promise. The Guardian (9 June) reported this under the headlines ‘Labour postpones £28bn green plan as it seeks to be trusted on public finances. Rachel Reeves says fiscal rule is priority as she delays start of promised investment in eco-friendly industry.’

‘Labour would now build up to the annual £28bn plan by halfway through a first parliament. The party had promised to spend £28bn a year on green investment until 2030 from the first year after coming to power. However, Reeves said she could not have predicted the market crash caused by the former prime minister Liz Truss’s plans for unfunded borrowing for tax cuts last autumn, which created the difficult economic conditions including higher interests rates affecting the cost of debt repayment’ (tinyurl.com/4ha669wh).

But that’s precisely the point. No government can predict what the vagaries of the capitalist economic system are going to throw at them. Out of office they can make all sorts of plans and promise all sorts of things, but when in office they can only react to the unpredictable workings of capitalism. Sometimes they might be lucky (and claim this as their own work). More often than not, they will be faced with some economic or financial crisis and then have to impose cutbacks and austerity in order to save profits by not taxing them too much.

Reeves as much as said so when she stated ‘I will never play fast and loose with the public finances.’ Now that’s a promise you can believe.

The Tories

The Tory candidate didn’t promise anything. How could he? He couldn’t play the anti-immigrant card in this constituency with its large number of voters from the Indian subcontinent and their descendants. Instead he chose to challenge Labour’s claim that it would put more money into people’s pockets. On the contrary, he argued, the London Labour mayor’s decision to extend from the end of August the ultra-low-emission zone from central London to the whole of Greater London would take money out of people’s pockets. ‘No to Labour’s £4,550 ULEZ expansion tax’ was his line. It worked.

Owners of more polluting pre-2006 petrol and pre-2016 diesel vehicles will have to pay £12.50 for every day they use their car or van. This will, the Tory leaflet went on, ‘hit the poorest in our communities the hardest’. Although it’s a bit disingenuous of the Tories to say they are concerned about the poorest, they had a point. Most owners of pre-2006 petrol cars will be people who bought one second-hand because they couldn’t afford a new car. Others will have bought diesel cars after Gordon Brown, when Chancellor in 2001, reduced the tax on diesel. As usual under capitalism, it is the poorest who suffer the most from the extra cost of measures like providing for a less polluted environment.

The Greens

Which brings us to the Green Party. Basically, they want a return to the small-scale capitalism that once existed and from which present-day corporate capitalism evolved. And would again if it was possible to turn the clock back (but of course it isn’t).

Their candidate’s manifesto called for ‘Public Money to be spent on Public Good not profits for the few’ and stated that the ‘economy is not working for most people’. That’s true but the capitalist economy cannot be made to work in any other way. It is a profit-making system that can run — and be run by governments— only in the interests of the profit-takers. It is based on ‘profits for the few’ and there’s nothing that can be done about it except getting rid of the system as a whole and replacing it by one based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources. This would allow these resources to be used to directly turn out and distribute what people need to live a decent and satisfying life.

The Greens promised to ‘introduce universal basic income to reduce dependency on economic growth.’ But how would UBI do that? The relationship would seem to be the opposite as the economy would have to grow to provide the extra things that the basic income would be used to buy (assuming that the level will be somewhat higher than the current poverty line, which is not immediately evident or likely given the constraints and priorities of capitalism).

The Green candidate was again right when she said:

‘We all see the global environmental crisis that, if not tackled, will destroy the only known living planet in the Universe. Yes, change is needed on a Planetary scale.’

Indeed it is, but the small-scale changes under capitalism that the Greens promise are quite inadequate even if the workings of capitalism allowed them to be given priority over the ‘profits for the few.’

Mistaken assumption

Although the Lib Dems had a candidate he was nowhere to be seen as they were concentrating on trying to win another by-election the same day. Their promises would also have been based on the same, mistaken, basic assumption that governments can control the way the capitalist economic system works and so could reform it to serve, as the Greens put it, the ‘Public Good’.

Experience over the years, under various different governments, has repeatedly shown that this cannot be done, with all governments ending up putting profits first. Yet the conventional parties still make promises to do this, blaming, when not in office, the government of the day rather than capitalism for problems — Labour is doing it now with its mantra of ‘thirteen years of Tory failure’ — and promising that this wouldn’t happen if they were in office. But it always does. The problem is not the Tories (or Labour), it’s capitalism.

Adam Buick

The Passing Politicians’ Show: Somerset and Frome: A socialist elector writes (2023)

From the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

This by-election in Somerton & Frome was triggered by the resignation of the Conservative MP (David Warburton) over allegations he took cocaine (which he at first denied, then later confessed) and sexually harassed a number of women (which he still denies). This is an almost pointless election because the constituency is to be abolished at next year’s general election.

There were 8 candidates to be Somerton & Frome’s final MP. Below are some of their election promises and what I, as socialist elector in the constituency, make of them:

Sarah Dyke (Liberal Democrats) There’s not much to write about this one. She blames the cost of living crisis and the NHS crisis on the Conservative government, not the capitalist system. Didn’t they make massive cuts to the welfare state during the Conservative/LibDem coalition government? Despite this she got elected.

Faye Purbrick (Conservatives) Again, there’s not much to write. There’s just the usual phony promises about: securing more investment in transport and better broadband; protecting ‘our’ green spaces; building more ‘affordable homes’; etc., etc.

Bruce Evans (Reform UK) This is a great party to vote for, if you think the Conservatives are too left wing! They want to: lower taxes; ‘utilise the UK’s fossil fuel supplies’; ‘end the costly Net-Zero plans [what Net-Zero plans?] that make our (!) economy uncompetitive’; ‘oppose a cashless society and central bank digital currency’; and ‘implement a voucher scheme to provide timely healthcare treatment and eliminate waiting lists [that sounds an awful lot like NHS privatisation]’.

Peter Richardson (UKIP) Basically the same as Reform UK.

Neil Guild (Labour) Starmer must be doing a great job of purging Labour of the Left, because the candidate here for the last two elections was a leftist, but they now have a rightist. Of the usual vague promises on his election leaflet, two contradict each other: ‘Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7,’ and ‘Make Britain a clean energy superpower to create jobs’. He is also a trade union official (though it’s not clear which union), which goes to show you can’t necessarily trust trade union officials.

Lorna Corke (Christian People’s Alliance) This is a conservative Christian party that are for ‘promoting different points of view in schools’, which they feel has been abandoned by ‘new age liberalism’ which they define as ‘promotion of LGBT and the sexualisation of young children’. They have a novel policy on ending corporate tax avoidance, which is to: ‘introduce a turnover tax (5 percent initially), which is a seller’s VAT’. Two ways they want to use the ‘£40.5 billion’ raised from this tax is to: ‘support marriage and the family with significant grants’, and ‘guarantee everyone sleeping rough a night shelter and free meal’. How generous of them to want make the lives of homeless people slightly less horrible (instead of getting rid of the system that causes homelessness)!

Rosie Mitchell (independent socialist) A member of the Labour Left from 2016-2020, so at least her vague promises on improving society are sincere. She says she is committed to: ‘a fairer, less profit driven system that works for society and for the planet’. Which makes me wonder how socialism went from meaning ‘a classless, stateless, moneyless global community of common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources, where people live by the principle of: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ to ‘a less profit driven system’. She got 635 votes.

Martin Dimery (Green Party) Firstly, I personally knew Martin from my time in the Green Party (before becoming class conscious). The Greens are by far the most reformist party, so their policies deserve more attention than the others. They want to:

• Quickly process refugee applications in France (as is permitted). Nothing wrong with that. Although, what to do with refugees isn’t the problem. The problem is that world capitalism causes people to become refugees.
• Build more affordable and council housing, using environmentally sustainable methods. Homelessness will always be an issue as long as homes are built for profit instead of solely for use. Case in point: the homelessness charity Shelter was set-up in the 1960s when there was a lot more council housing than today. Also, where is the money going to come from to make these homes ‘environmentally sustainable’?
• Create local not-for-profit banks, that will [apparently] re-generate town centres. This goes to show they don’t understand how banks work, or that town centres face a lot of competition from cheaper online retailers.
• Nationalise ‘our’ water and energy companies, who have seen bills go up and standards go down. Firstly, nationalisation won’t end the energy crisis. Secondly, it would be much easier to regulate the water companies, forcing them to spend part of their profits to responsibly dispose of sewage (instead of using tax money to do that, which would eat into the profits of the UK’s capitalist class as a whole).
• Re-join the European Single Market and Customs Union because [apparently] ‘our’ industries and agriculture have suffered enough. Why don’t they just call a spade a spade and say they want to re-join the EU?

To be fair, they do say where they would get the money from. They would:

• Introduce a “Robin Hood tax” on financial transactions. Please read this excellent article on what’s wrong with that.
• Reduce loopholes to stop the super-rich from avoiding paying taxes. They don’t say how they would do this; perhaps they should copy the Christian People’s Alliance’s policy.
• Generate bigger windfall taxes from the oil companies. If the oil industry aren’t making higher than usual profits, how can they windfall tax them? This shows that they don’t mind the oil industry making profits, as long as they pay high taxes.

None of them got my vote. I wrote ‘Socialist Party of Great Britain. One World –One People’ on my ballot paper.

The sources for this article were the election leaflets and this piece from the Frome Times.

Matthew Shearn

The Uxbridge by-election: The Green Party (2023)

From the SPGB Discussion Forum

More leaflets were distributed on Friday. And more discarded leaflets from other parties collected. This time the manifesto of the Green Party candidate (who, appropriately enough, is actually called Green). She confirms that the Green Party wants to return to the small-scale capitalism (from which present-day corporate capitalism evolved):

“Vote Green Party for a Well Being Economy.

Public Money to be spent on Public Good not profits for the few.

The economy is not working for most people (. . .)

Society needs to transition to a sustainable economy urgently.

Introduce universal basic income to reduce dependency on economic growth. Revive and support the local economy, home based enterprises, local food production and reskilling.”

She is right that the economy is not working for most people, but that’s the nature of the capitalist economy. It cannot be made to work for most people, not even by the reforms proposed by the Green Party. It is a profit-making economy that can work only in the interest of the profit-takers.

Just how universal basic income will “reduce dependency on economic growth” is not explained. You would have thought, rather, that it would be the other way round — that economic growth would be needed to sustain UBI. But we shouldn’t expect clear thinking on economic matters from the Green Party which believes that banks can and do create money from thin air.