Green battle (2026)

Book Review from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Green Socialist. Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future. By Russell Warfield. Pluto Press, October 2006.

It is an odd title since Polanski does not claim to be a socialist, at least not openly. Warfield’s justification for calling him one is that the policies Polanski supports are the same as those advocated by others who do claim to be socialists, such as taxing the rich to pay for measures to benefit the mass of the population, public control of utilities, and rent controls. Polanski himself claims only to be a left-winger who wants the Green Party to be a left-wing party rather than the centrist party prioritising reforms to protect the environment that it has historically been.

Warfield is unstinting in his praise for Polanski and the ‘ecopopulist’ platform on which he stood to win the contest last September to become the Leader of the Green Party which, he says:

‘involved communications which foregrounded policies that spoke to people’s immediate, material needs; acknowledging and feeling the public’s justified anger but directing it towards hope; shaping strong narratives with clear enemies; and building a mass party which was powered by a broader social base of vibrant movements’.

What, you might ask, has blaming the super-rich and taxing them to pay for meeting people’s ‘immediate, material needs’ better got to do with the environment?

Warfield argues that this always was the vocation of the Green Party, describing how it always did have a policy on social and economic matters as well as on the environment. It is true that on paper it did, but its main plank was always the environment; that was why it was set up, why people voted for it and why people joined it. Its other policies, which Warfield tries hard to interpret as prefiguring ‘a principled left-wing offer which transcended narrow environmental interests’, have varied over the years from advocating self-sufficient regional communities to local currencies to protect local businesses. It went into the 2015 general election promising bank reform based on the currency crank idea that banks create money from thin air (it wanted to prevent them from supposedly doing this). In the 2024 general election it promised a Green New Deal which, Warfield says, ‘called for Keynesian investment to stimulate the economy through the creation of green jobs across renewables, home insulation and so on’, as if Keynesianism hadn’t been tried and failed.

Warfield himself does claim to be a socialist, an ‘ecosocialist’, but is pretty vague as to what this means. He seems to envisage ‘democratic control of the economy’ that would give priority to producing and selling what people needed rather than being oriented towards ‘perpetual economic growth’. In any event, the book does show the illusions held by those within the Green Party who call themselves socialist.

Adam Buick

Revving a car with a dead engine (2026)

From the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Vote for hope’, proclaimed an election leaflet distributed in Lambeth for the council elections in May, ‘and elect Green councillors who will stand up for our communities, challenge decisions that don’t work for residents, and push for a fairer, greener future across Lambeth.’ In the event, enough did to allow the Green Party to assume control of the council. Martin Abrams, who had been elected a Labour councillor in the 2022 elections but defected to the Greens over Gaza, became the Council Leader.

The Greens have a chance here, then, to put into practice Zack Polanski’s eco-populism, with its promises to increase wages for everyone, reverse the ‘march downwards in the balance of power and wealth from those who produce the wealth and do the work to those who profit from it’, and ‘address the massive imbalance in our workplaces and give control back to workers’. If not all that, at least some move in that direction locally.

On being elected leader of the group of Green councillors, Abrams declared:

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

This echoed an election promise made on Instagram that: ‘We’ll fight to reverse austerity, empowering workers and the community we serve.’

What power? 

These are extravagant promises. The trouble is that local authorities don’t have much power to give to ‘residents and workers’. They are branches of the central government with severely limited powers, and with councillors being essentially elected civil servants.

Local councils are charged by the central government with collecting waste, providing library services and being responsible for public health and some areas of transport, housing and education, and with caring for children and adults who can’t cope on their own (which in fact makes up more than two-thirds of their current spending). The money to pay for all this comes from central government grants, council tax and business rates.

Councils are obliged to balance their budget and can’t borrow money to finance current services. They have no control over what the central government gives them and can’t fix or change business rates. They can’t increase council tax by more than 5 percent unless authorised to do so by a referendum. They can raise some money from fees and fines, from parking, yellow box junctions and dropping litter, which is what they have been increasingly doing to try to compensate a little for the lack of income from other sources.

Basically, then, if the central government is forced to pursue a policy of austerity — as giving priority to profit-making compels them to, especially in periods of low capital accumulation — local councils have to accept this and apply it at local level. In this sense, running a local council is a poisoned chalice for any party promising to improve the material conditions of its residents.    Rather than ending austerity, they have to apply it. Lambeth residents and workers can’t be expected to regard as a benefit being empowered to share in making decisions to impose austerity on themselves, as that’s what the ‘participatory budgeting’ mentioned in passing by the Greens would amount to.

The Greens haven’t had much experience of running councils but in Lambeth they are about to find out what this involves, as in other London boroughs such as Hackney and Lewisham where there are Green elected mayors.

Empty promise

The promise to ‘reverse austerity’ is an empty one as no local council has the power to do this, either legally or economically. The Greens’ defence could be, if they were quibbling lawyers, that they didn’t actually promise to reverse austerity but merely to ‘fight to reverse’ it. Which is not the same. All this ‘fight’ would amount to is set out in the council Leader’s responsibilities on the council website:

‘Councillor Abrams will stand against austerity, campaigning for increased funding for local authorities to arrest the ongoing decline in services and provide better outcomes for Lambeth residents’.

The remit of one of the council’s cabinet, councillor Michael Chessum, the member for ‘Economy, Cost of Living and Empowered Communities’, is set out as:

‘Spearheading the council’s campaign to restore funding from central government and reverse austerity’.

Anybody can say they ‘stand against’ austerity and that they will lobby for more money from the central government (all councils and the parties running them are doing this), but such a campaign is up against the fact the central government has to limit its spending so as not to cut into profits or worsen the conditions for profit-making. In short, such a campaign has no chance of success. To give the impression that it might succeed is to encourage illusions about what is possible under capitalism. The Green councillors may well be sincere in their belief but that just means that they are deluding themselves.

Losing battle

At least one of them, Councillor Chessum, seems to realise that the council on its own cannot do much to get the central government to pay more to local councils. He only joined the Green Party in June last year. Previously he had been active in the Labour Party as a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, having been for a while the treasurer of Momentum, the leftwing ginger group within the party. In his announcement last June ‘Why I’m joining the Green Party’ he wrote:

‘The biggest challenge, however, is not in the electoral sphere – or rather, it is about how the electoral sphere connects to the real world. Strikes, protests and community campaigns are the raw material for political change. Attempting a radical breakthrough without them is like revving a car with a dead engine. (…)  Social and industrial struggle must be viewed as a primary method for doing politics. Without a mobilised local community, left wing councillors will be fighting a losing battle. Without a mass movement engaged in something other than electioneering, electoral projects lack a legacy’.

Whether or not he expected that, within a year of writing this, he would find himself a local council cabinet member charged with ‘spearheading’ a campaign ‘to restore funding from central government and reverse austerity’, he is now in that position. If he still agrees with what he wrote then, he is committed to the view that merely lobbying the government for more money won’t get anywhere. In his words, it would just be ‘revving a car with a dead engine’, a good description of reformist activity generally.

Logically, too, he ought to use his official position to mobilise workers and residents to back up with strikes the council’s campaign to get the central government to pay the council more so that it can ‘reverse austerity’. Both — the council encouraging strikes and workers prepared to go on strike for this — are highly unlikely, not to say pie in the sky. Workers realise, even if left-wing activists don’t, that they do not have the power to force the government to grant councils more funding. If the rate of abstention from voting in local council elections — on average some two-thirds of those entitled to vote — is anything to go by, many also realise that local councils don’t have the power to do this either. That leaves Councillor Chessum ‘fighting a losing battle’.

The way out

But even if there was a mass movement behind the council’s lobbying for more funding, that wouldn’t increase the prospect of success. The central government wouldn’t make more money available as that would mean having to cut into profits and risking an economic downturn that could lead to them being voted out of office. The fact is that, if the functioning of the capitalist profit economy at a particular time requires austerity in terms of limiting government spending, nothing can reverse this, not even the overthrow of the government by a general strike or mass uprising, as those further to the left than the Greens advocate. The new left-wing regime would still have to maintain austerity.

Leftists, which the Greens under Polanski are aspiring to be, mislead workers when they say that the government or local council can make them better off. They can’t reverse austerity and they can’t empower communities. As the saying has it, changing governments changes nothing.

There is a way out but not within capitalism (and certainly not state capitalism). It’s to end the minority ownership of productive resources and production for profit. A framework of common ownership and democratic control is the only way to directly satisfy people’s needs. Socialism is the only hope of the workers, indeed of humanity.

Adam Buick

Letter: Distortions of Private Property (1994)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following letter was sent to one of our members by Dick Frost, who was the Green Party's candidate for Cumbria and North Lancashire in the recent Euro-elections. We publish it, with his permission, together with our comments. We have also received a letter from the Green Party Local Support Coordinator, to which we reply, too.

Distortions of Private Property

Dear Mr Cummings,

Thank you for your letter and the material with it. I have had a quick read (knowing something about the subject already) and it is clear that we have much in common. I fear you over estimate the degree of anarchism in the Green Party: I am one and I can assure you I belong to a very small minority.

I read the review of the Pepper book (Socialist Standard, September 1993) and the interview with Jonathon Porritt and both raised some valuable points. One area of dispute between us might well be on the appropriate level of political and administrative organisation for a good world: the reason I am now an extreme de-centralist (in fact, I advocate the autonomy of any group in any and every area in which it claims competence) is that every social organisation must be consciously and directly controlled by every person who belongs (by choice) to it and who is subject to its decisions. To my mind, that places a low maximum size on social organisation. I do not accept that politicians, bureaucrats or representatives have a place in democracy; once they exist, democracy is dead. Administration has to be equally democratic.

Of course, I envisage the cooperation and federation of small autonomous communities; I also envisage a statute of universal human rights to which all communities would have to subscribe and consequently, an enforcement agency. However, everything I suggest has to be placed in the context of economic adequacy (not mere subsistence) which I believe is the normal condition in which our species would live had the distortions of private property etc. not intruded (Rousseau. Marx etc) and that adequacy is available to us now; it requires us to bring it into reality. The ordering of economic life has to be in the hands of people in small communities, directly, to ensure that they know immediately the effects their actions have on their environment and on themselves, though I do not mean lots of tennis ball-type organisations, rather a complex of Russian dolls; or better, an eco-system.

I am not concerned with the existence or not of money, but cannot see why the communities I envisage would require it

I reject Marx's class analysis, not because I can’t see class differences in our society, but because I don't think people exist, existentially or subjectively. in classes and the proletariat is not. therefore, going to act as a class “for itself'. I do not agree with Marx's historical analysis of human life and do not consider it is important because I believe the objective conditions for human economic freedom have always existed and the need to realise that freedom by destroying oppression in all its forms has not varied significantly from epoch to epoch. It has not been necessary to wait for the triumph of capitalism.

I also reject revolution because revolution cannot but be autocratic and establish a new autocracy. From my understanding of sociology, I think you and Jonathon Porritt do not take into account the essential conservatism and conformity of our species, traits which lead to masses of people accepting dreadful repression, for which they find innumerable excuses. From Roemer's Law, however, change comes about by species attempting to maintain a given way of life in changed conditions; revolution is likely when the changes are frustrated by a powerful minority.

The point I make is Jonathon Porritt’s: there have to be interim steps which allow of interim achievement; hence I am odds with the Green Party because I believe it should be fighting for democratic advance at low levels of government now, as well as seeking elected power. It should be campaigning against loss of residual local democracy, both by working on elected authorities and in community groups.

Dick Frost, 

Orton, Cumbria

Reply:

Dick Frost and other members of the Green Party are quite right to emphasise the importance of local democracy. However, your idea that the modern world could be run on the basis of local production for local consumption by a collection of autonomous local communities is not only impractical, it is not even desirable.

For a decent quality of life we depend upon machinery, equipment, energy, goods and services which are produced throughout the world. This includes materials such as metals and oil which are found in particular locations and a wide range of foods which require different climates for their cultivation. The technical division of labour which makes up modern production extends throughout a world-wide network of links and can give us the benefits of consumer goods and the pleasures of leisure equipment. To give some examples, it would be impossible for every local community to produce its own refrigerators, televisions, radios or music equipment.

And how would they deal with facilities and services concerning regional populations such as airports, transport systems, universities, specialised health services, energy supply, use and development of land? On a bigger scale, surely it is vital that we establish a world energy authority and other world agencies to co-ordinate action on the threats to the planet from pollution, and to continue such things as the investigation of space, the running of world communications for telephone links, and the celebration of such festivals as the Olympic Games.

We should certainly get rid of the State with its tentacles of power that keep us all in its centralised grip. But the answer is not to replace it with an idea of local autonomy which has no practical connection with the conditions of modern life.

What is needed is to replace the State with an integrated system of democratic organisation which would be adaptable for use at local, regional and world levels. Local communities, however we might define them, could be the basic unit of organisation but these should also be associated as regional populations which in their turn would be associated as the world community. Such a system of world democracy could be established, by a majority of socialists, from the existing structure of local and national government and such bodies as the United Nations Organisation.

You want to define the size of your autonomous local community by the maximum number who could consciously and directly control it. and say "that places a low maximum size on social organisation". Indeed it does and wouldn’t they all be busy! Even for a small community they would be so involved in day-to-day affairs they will hardly have time for their personal lives.

Fortunately, democracy does not require that every person should be directly involved in all decisions. The important thing is that every individual, institution, production unit or council should be accountable. The practice of delegated function would allow people to get on with their jobs. We do not anticipate that in a socialist society they would act against the policies laid down by the majority. Nevertheless, the community would retain procedures whereby the decisions and actions of people could be challenged and reversed if circumstances required it.

It is surprising that you say you are not concerned with the existence or not of money, even though you add that you cannot see why the communities you envisage would require it. In fact, the use of money or not is of fundamental importance. The use of money means the production of goods for exchange and this means the operation of the market. Production for sale on the markets inevitably sets up a range of constraints on social action because it limits what can be produced to what can be sold and puts profit before need as a motive of production. It also follows that all the corrupting features of property relations will operate.

Members of the Green Party seem to place too much emphasis on the scales of social organisation whilst neglecting the fundamentally important question of the kinds of productive relations we should have. If they think through how best to achieve the kind of better world they undoubtedly want, they will surely conclude that common ownership of the earth's natural and industrial resources is the key, together with democratic control at regional and world levels as well as at local level as appropriate.

Editors.

Letter: Talking About Greens (1994)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Talking About Greens

Dear Editors,

Adam Buick ("Why the Greens are Wrong", June Socialist Standard) is not. in my opinion, correct about the Green’s analysis of contemporary society. He asserts that we are not against the market and not against profit-making, and that our political strategy begins and ends with the election of a Green government.

This is not the case. The paragraphs in which he says “businesses only take account of their own narrow financial interest, ignoring wider social or ecological considerations . .. the result is an economic system governed by uncontrollable market forces which compel decision makers to plunder, pollute and waste" could come from any Green Party publication. As our political analysis deepens and matures (although the Green movement has deep roots, the Green Party’s history is rather briefer than your own 90 years) the thinking of Greens like Derek Wall (whom you quote approvingly) has become widely accepted. We know ourselves now to be anti-capitalist, and have long been anti-statist, seeking a shift to self-managing, self-reliant communities. Our vision of a green economy is one in which money is local and impossible to accumulate (witness our support for Local Exchange Trading Systems), in which all stakeholders and not just shareholders participate in the running of an enterprise, in which long-distance trade is regulated for fairness, sustainability and need and in which banking is democratic and community-based (note our participation in Credit Unions).

LETS and Credit Unions are only two ways in which we are putting this into practice directly. Our recently-adopted strategy was clear that elections are only one democratic opening available to us — Greens are active in community initiatives, nonviolent direct action and green economics. Our attitude to elections is clearly based on building local support first — earning the support of the community for Green action in local government, and seeking to build direct democracy through "town meetings" and referenda.

Of course, the Green Party has plenty of points of disagreement with the Socialist Party — we’d be discussing merger if we didn’t We do believe in a libertarian, rather than a planned economy — we believe that given control over their lives, people do act responsibly and morally. We believe that much of the “means of production" are not simply misused and monopolised, but destructive in their very design — we call for a retooling of society. We are not so certain that the working class will be the last to achieve emancipation — what about woman, subsistence farmers, the unemployed, or even other species? It is not your class background that determines your revolutionary potential, but your actual lifestyle or aspirations. And we do believe that important as community and workplace action is. change across the whole of society must be facilitated by Greens in every level of government

I hope these real points of difference will be dissected in your pages in the future — as the old saying goes, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Alex Begg, 

Green Party Local Support Coordinator, 

Leeds

Reply:

We’re sorry, but the Green Party does accept the market and it does accept profit-making. Not. it is true, in their present form but as modified by the legislation to be enacted by a Green government.

The “Green economy" that the Green Party wants seems to be a small-scale, localised economy but still one in which the market and profit-seeking firms have a place. You yourself mention that this will still involve money, banking and shareholders. But shareholders draw an unearned income from the firms they invest in, so these firms will have to make profits in order to be able to pay this out. Interest-free banking under capitalism is conceivable as a remote possibility, but not profit-free firms — even small ones.

If we had to put a name to it, we would say that this "Green economy" would be a small-scale, modified capitalist economy. The main objection to it is that it is never going to happen. Capitalism has a built-in tendency to the concentration and centralisation of industry and, with this, of government and the population as well.

Capitalism runs on profits. Under the competitive pressures of the market, most of these have to be re-invested in new and cheaper methods of production which are generally “capital intensive” and so large scale. This "accumulation of capital” (as Marx put it) is an economic law of the system which cannot be reversed by the action of any government. Still less by the sort of self-help action at local level (LETS, credit unions, housing associations, allotments, etc) that you say the Green Party is now into as well as trying to get a Green government elected.

We are not saying that a more decentralised decision-making and administrative structure with more local democracy is not desirable. What we are saying is that it is impossible to achieve within the context of capitalism. In fact the only framework within which it could be achieved is that provided by Socialism: a world in which the natural and industrial resources of the planet have ceased to be the private property of individuals, firms and states, and in which market forces have ceased to operate because production is carried on directly to meet needs.

The same goes for the problems faced by the groups you mention — women, subsistence farmers and the unemployed (most of whom, by the way, are members of the working class, properly understood as the vast majority in society who are excluded from the ownership and control of productive resources). Their problems, too, can only be solved within this framework.

Where this points is towards our policy of trying to get people to concentrate on working to establish this framework rather than diverting their energies into trying to get a few minor — and precarious —improvements within the present system. This is the real difference between the Socialist Party and the Green Party — and all other parties.

Editors.

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.