The Fabian Society again (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Around the end of 2025 social media was full of howling comments about ‘Fabians’ and how an insidious conspiracy was spreading through society, in the form of ‘Fabians’ who were undermining ‘our institutions’.

The reason was a judge in the Epping hotel case who, in August that year, ruled against the government and had been a member of the society. Suddenly, the internet was full of how this 140-year-old organisation was hell-bent on a secretive mission to undermine the nation state and implement socialism.

The claims are that not only are most of the cabinet Fabians, but also people like the judge and prominent staffers at the Bank of England. The implication was that they are ‘controlled’ as if the Fabians were a secret society.

The Fabian Society is actually quite open. Its website advertises it as one of the world’s oldest think tanks, but it is also a membership organisation:

‘The Fabian Society consists of socialists. It therefore aims for a classless society, where a just distribution of wealth and power assures true equality of opportunity. It holds that society, through its democratic institutions, should determine the overall direction and distribution of economic activity and seeks to promote where appropriate the social and co-operative ownership of economic resources’.

But, as the rulebook also notes: ‘The society as a whole shall have no collective policy beyond what is implied in rule 2; its research shall be free and objective in its methods’.

Formed in 1884, it took its name from the tactics of the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nickname Cunctator, the ‘delayer’). He beat Hannibal’s superior forces by avoiding frontal assault: grinding his opponent down. This became the metaphor for the gradualist approach the society hoped to implement.

An earlier form of its rules stated: ‘The society seeks recruits from all ranks, believing that not only those who suffer from the present system, but also many of those who are enriched by it, recognise its evils and would welcome a remedy’. That is, advancing by appealing to the powerful.

Its early coat of arms was a wolf in sheep’s clothing: since abandoned for its obvious negative connotations, but dug up gleefully by the commentators as a sign of the conspiratorial nature of the society.

Its Wikipedia page notes that 174 entries in the Dictionary of National Biography are listed as Fabians, a sign of the number of prominent people who have belonged to the society. Currently, its executive committee has five MPs, so it is definitely well connected. It has 6,000 members, and seven affiliated trade unions.

The right-wingers have latched onto the eugenicist associations of the early society: many of the original members did believe in eugenics, this was in keeping with a science-oriented approach that saw society being fixable through rational if authoritarian organisation, rather than through human freedom. It might seem strange that right-wingers, normally attracted to such ideas, should condemn this, but in part this is down to the stigmatisation of eugenicist ideas, and partly the right’s adoption of fears of dystopian ‘fifteen minute cities’ and World Economic Forum domination.

They are correct that Blairites in the 1990s used to talk of a hegemony strategy: staying in power long enough to become the establishment by filling posts with like-minded individuals. We’ve written in these pages before how apparently natural networks of the old ruling class (public school, university, clubs, professions) provided a basis for trust and collaboration, and outsider networks, like the Labour Party, the Fabians, Labour Together, the British American Project and the like are built up to replace those networks.

This replaces the ‘natural’ establishment with consciously political appointments (in itself a good thing) but this opens up a partisan tit-for-tat, as the last Tory government began to swiftly and openly remove Labour appointees in favour of people of their own ilk.

The central flaw in the Fabian strategy is that albeit, as H.G. Wells put it, an open conspiracy, it addresses itself to the powerful, and achieves its advances despite the consciousness of the public.

As Engels put it in 1892:

‘The means employed by the F[abian] S[ociety] are just the same as those of the corrupt parliamentary politicians: money, intrigues, careerism. That is, English careerism, according to which it is self-understood that every political party (only among the workers it is supposed to be different!) pays its agents in some way or other or rewards them with posts. These people are immersed up to their necks in the intrigues of the Liberal Party, hold Liberal Party jobs, as for instance Sidney Webb. who in general is a genuine British politician. These gentry do everything that the workers have to be warned against’.

As the years have gone by, the end goal of socialism has been eased out, in favour of diffuse reforms to capitalism as an end in themselves. Far from being a sinister conspiracy to end capitalism, it is just a career path and training ground for the soft-left. To that end, they are a normal, if mistaken, part of the legitimate democratic social ecology.

What is interesting is that by casting them as a sinister conspiracy, right-wing commentators are delegitimising them, casting ‘the left’ as some sort of alien goal to destroy society, that will need to be swept out. This would be the response of the powerful to a hegemony strategy: openly exercising power to shore up their position.

We have always stood against the Fabian gradualist strategy, as reforms only attract people interested in the reforms themselves, they do not build the case or support for socialism. And enacting supposedly socialistic reforms irrespective of workers’ views is a recipe for confusion and resentment.

We continue to insist that only the active self-organisation of the working class, the vast majority of the population, can bring socialism into being: if we had a coat of arms, it would be a human in human clothing, because that is the only thing that will build socialism.

Pik Smeet

The Rise and Fall of Clause Four (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1918 the Labour Party transformed itself into a national organisation. At the same time it adopted a list of Party Objects, the fourth of which read: ‘To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.”

This was the nearest the Labour Party ever came to committing itself on paper to Socialism, since this could be interpreted as a somewhat wordy definition of real Socialism not all that different from the Object we in the Socialist Party adopted when we were founded in 1904: ‘The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.”

However, since it was drawn up by the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and since the Fabians stood for a state capitalism run by an educated elite, it was meant to be understood as a reference to state ownership, or nationalisation, i.e. state capitalism.

This was confirmed when in 1929, as a result of left-wing pressure to commit the Labour Party to the nationalisation of the banks, the words “distribution and exchange” were added after “the common ownership of the means of production”. This made it absolutely clear that what was envisaged was not real socialism but state capitalism.

To talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange is a contradiction in terms. Where there is common ownership there can be no exchange since exchange can only take place between separate owners, i.e. where private ownership not common ownership exists. In a socialist society based on common ownership goods are simply distributed not exchanged, so there is no need for money, banks and the rest of the financial system.

After Labour lost the 1959 election the then leader Gaitskill tried to get rid of Clause 4 on the grounds that it was an electoral liability, but had to back down in face of the opposition. Now Tony Blair is going to try again, with more chance of success it appears.

In a sense he his right: Labour does not stand for state capitalism – it stands for working within the present profit-driven market system dominated privately-owned companies. It stands for capitalism pure and simple. The dropping of Clause 4 will merely make this absolutely clear.

Letter: "Three clarifications" (2004)

Letter to the Editors from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Three clarifications"

Dear Editors,

The August issue stated in the article ‘Why socialism is still relevant’ that: “Our party was formed to oppose the Labour party.” This raises three clarifications. Firstly, as the writer makes clear earlier in the article,”‘in short, the cause of our Party’s formation, capitalism, continues”, thus, reiterating the point that socialists are opposed to capitalism full stop. Secondly, whereas our opposition to the individual political parties of capitalism is merely incidental to the cause for our formation in 1904 we can only voice this opposition once they are actually formed, or in the process of being formed. Historically, the Labour Party was formed in 1906, two years after the SPGB – though even before its formation socialists were opposed to its reformist predecessor, the Labour Representative Committee. Thirdly, we are opposed to all other political parties regardless of whatever name they happen to go under and not just the Labour Party For they all stink of dishonesty, opportunism and quick-fix solutions and are so steeped in corruption they can only be obliterated by the conscious decision and concerted activity of a majority of the working class.

Brian Johnson, 

Pontypridd.

Wasting time at the seaside (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is very considerate of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative Parties to hold their annual conferences in the autumn.

At any rate, the seaside hotel keepers must think so, because the conferences bring them some welcome business just as the season is dying; and so must all those seaside landladies, who can keep the secret machines which put lumps into the porridge and burn the toast in profitable operation for another week or so. There is even the sea, which everyone expects to be cold in the autumn, allowing politicians to prove what lovable eccentrics they are by having themselves photographed taking a dip.

It is all good fun, although since the object of it is to win the game of power politics it can hardly be described as clean. But more than other any other reason for feeling grateful for the autumn conferences is that they provide us with something to chuckle over in the long, dark evenings ahead.

There are two types of annual conferences. One sort is run by the parties which are out of power; a certain amount of freedom is allowed here. In most cases—although there have been some famous exceptions, of which more later critics can be treated indulgently, as living proof of ruthless self-criticism, a restless drive for new ideas and a young, zestful heart.

When, for example, Edward Heath was asked on television what he thought about the prospects of receiving a lot of criticism of his leadership at this year’s Tory conference he replied, with a huge grin, that he enjoyed conferences and would be there all the time. Jo Grimond, far from being upset at the noisy activities of the Young Liberals at their conference, went out of his way to praise them and was photographed having an amiable drink with some of them.

There is no such carefree goodwill towards the rebels in a party which is in power. At their conferences the leaders on the platform, are trying to justify broken promises, to explain away diametrical changes in policy and, above all, to convince everyone that, although the present times are hard, with patience and support and unity all will be well. In this situation, critics are not welcomed as a stimulus; they are condemned—sometimes outlawed—as traitors to their party and to what politicians like to call the country.

There are many weary hours to be spent in the conference hall, and it is common for the newspaper men to try to brighten these up a little by fastening their attention upon some so-called personality of the conference. This usually means a lot of publicity for someone who, although he does no more than repeat the same weary platitudes and misconceptions which have been heard so many times before, wakes everybody up by sounding as if he actually believed what he says.

So it was this year with the Young Liberals, who came storming down to Brighton to demand all sorts of reckless things like “workers control” in industry (the inverted commas are intended, and necessary). These young people laid about them and one of them went so far as to shatter the peace of the conference by swearing—or at any rate he said “bloody” and “damn”, which in this age of Kenneth Tynan probably no longer rate as swear words.

The newspapers loved it and decided that no title would be appropriate for the Young Liberals short of Jo Grimond’s Red Guards. It is interesting to wonder what the fanatical young hooligans in Peking would think about being compared with a few hysterical students daring to say “bloody” to an assembly of Liberals on an autumn afternoon at an English seaside resort.

Such, however, are the ways of the press, which also has a liking for putting the finger on what they consider to be political stars of the future who enter the limelight at a conference. This is what the papers did some years back to Ray Gunter, who has now risen so far and so fast that he has the important job of implementing the very policy on wages which his party once scorned. This year, at the TUC, some reporters decided that Leslie Cannon, President of the Electrical Trade Union, showed by his speech that he is a future MP, perhaps even a Minister.

It is hardly necessary to point out that to win this nomination for future stardom a man has to agree with official policy. No member of the Labour Party has ever been selected as a rising leader after making an attack, no matter how capable, on his party’s line on wages or nuclear armaments; Frank Cousins, the most prominent of the critics on those issues, has always been regarded as something of a joke. Still less would a person be noticed for attacking the fundamentals of the Labour Party—its capitalist policies, its obsession with leadership, its unavoidable failure. The newspapers have their own standards of success and they are sticking by them.

Behind all the ballyhoo and the alleged drama and excitement what are conferences for? Every man in the street knows that they are supposed to lay down their party's policy and to take decisions based on that policy. A simple man in a backward street may even think that, because the capitalist parties profess to be democratic, the decisions taken by their conference delegates are binding.

The first thing to say about this is that some of the delegates’ votes are cast in ways which are anything but an expression of their members’ opinions. At this year’s Labour conference the voting policy of the Amalgamated Engineering Union changed suddenly from support of the government to opposition. This was not because the AEU delegates had received different instructions from their members. It simply happened that their leader, Bank of England director Sir William Carron, who is an unmovable supporter of the government, left Brighton for a meeting of the board of the Fairfield shipyard.

This apparently left the AEU delegation floundering, until a series of other absences gave the leadership to Hugh Scanlon, who is generally critical of the government. The result of this was that the AEU, voting as whoever was their leader at the time wished, was one day for the government and another against it.

Yet even without this sort of maneouvering, the votes of a conference are anything but decisive. Labour this year declared several times in favour of the government—on wage freezing, Rhodesia, foreign policy. But when the conference went the other way on other issues—redundancy, Germany and support for America over Vietnam—Ministers made it plain that they would take no notice. It was all summed up by Harold Wilson himself, in one word, when he asked what he intended to do about the famous Cousins victory over work sharing—“Govern”.

This has of course happened before. In 1959, when Labour was licking its wounds after Macmillan had thrashed them at the polls, they decided at one of their rowdiest conferences not to follow Hugh Gaitskell’s advice to delete Clause Four from their constitution. So in theory, and by conference decision, the Labour. Party stands for the sort of capitalism where all the means of production, distribution and exchange are nationalised. But of course they have not the slightest intention of doing anything about it.

Poor Gaitskell had a knack of infuriating his party’s conferences. Another example of a refusal to accept inconvenient decisions was when, after the 1960 vote in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, he declared his intention to “fight, fight and fight again” and, because on that occasion some of the big unions had voted against him, questioned the morality of the block vote which had always been accepted as long as it docilely accepted the policy of the platform:

I sometimes think, firmly, that the system we have by which great unions decide their policy before even their conference can consider their executive's recommendation is not really a wise one or a good one.

It is clear that when a conference agrees with its leaders it is the authentic voice of democracy, rich in wisdom. When it disagrees it is irresponsible and treacherous. The peculiar thing is that, although the members of the capitalist parties must know this very well, they are still prepared to be delegates to their conferences, they still work for their party, they still welcome its taking power.

The plain fact is that whatever a conference may decide, a party’s policy is already fixed. No matter how bloodthirstily the Tory hangers and floggers pursued their prey at conference, Conservative Home Secretaries stuck out for penal reform. No matter what support the Rhodesia lobby gathers, the Conservative leadership must agree that the Smith regime should be brought to an end.

Similarly, even if the 1960 vote on nuclear weapons had not been reversed, no Labour government would have surrendered the British Bomb simply because their conference had told them to. Whichever way the vote went on this year’s battle over incomes, the government's mind was made up and the more coercive Part IV of the Prices and Incomes Bill was ready to be brought into operation.

And while we are on the subject, there is something which we should notice about the Prices and Incomes Bill. It is the first openly anti-trade union legislation for something like 40 years—and it is the work of a party which came into existence as a result of a conference decision of February, 1900, to establish

a distinct labour group in Parliament . . . which must embrace a readiness to co-operate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour and . . . with any party in opposing measures having an opposite tendency.

What, we asked, are conferences for? Even if their decisions can be, and are, ignored they are often an opportunity for a party to pronounce on its policy. Perhaps some people may prefer to describe this as warning the working class what to expect, or as making the promises the breaking of which later conferences will have to explain away. In 1963, for example, Labour was hypnotised by the Wilson vision of a technological Britain, with a wise government guiding massive investment into the “science based” industries, with technicians enthusiastically at work in their laboratories and at their drawing boards and with everyone’s wages going up in a nice, steady, organised curve. It was all very good for the headlines, for the electoral image and all the other political public relations man's obsessions.

It usually happens that at such times there is so much concern with a party’s public image that nobody notices the policies which are being expounded from the platform do not amount to much. Consider George Brown’s unoriginal idea of settling the Vietnam war by recalling the Geneva conference—the very conference which first set up the division of the country and so played its part in bringing about the present war there.

At other times the publicity a conference receives can be disastrous for the party, like the 1960 Labour uproar over CND and the public spectacle of Tory leaders savaging each other as they clawed for the place left vacant by Macmillan’s retirement during the 1963 Blackpool conference.

Or a conference can be an outlet for a party's donkey workers. It can give them a break from the hard slog of committee work, canvassing, addressing. They can come to express their doubts and disappointments, to wonder what happened to the visions they once had, Then they can stifle their doubts, admire their leaders and finally submerge themselves in what they call loyalty, but for which there is an unkinder if more accurate name, at a mass rally. Then they can go back to the donkey work with renewed energy.

No conference ever probes, or even discusses the facts. No resolution ever says that the parties of capitalism exist to run the social system which oppresses and degrades millions of human beings, that this system can only be run in the interests of a minority and to the detriment of the majority. Labour’s “left wing” come to their conferences convinced that they are looking for the lost soul of their party—none of them points out, perhaps none of them realises, that a capitalist party is bound to deceive, to override its members’ wishes and to disappoint its followers by pushing through unpleasant and inhuman measures.

Conferences make a lot of noise, exhale a lot of hot air, attract a lot of publicity. But when it is all over, when the delegates have gone home and the hall has been cleared and the seaside has sunk back into its out-of-season doze, one thing is abundantly clear.

It was all a waste of time.

Ivan

Have pity on them (1947)

From the November 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

At times the many-sided interplay of World Affairs presents a confused and complex character that does not permit of ready and facile interpretation. To admit that often we are only wise after the event is not necessarily a confession of a lack of one’s powers of perception or a deficiency in native intelligence.

It may also be that in this process of becoming wise after the event there are some who take longer than most. It may even be that there are others who never become wise about events at all.

Which brings us to Mr. Clynes’ article, “When Crisis comes to the Cabinet.” (News of the World, l4/9//47.) Mr. Clynes also sketches there what, for him, were apparently the essential features of the 1931 economic crisis. That crisis happened sixteen years ago, a fair period you will agree for cogitation and reflection on what it was all about. After reading Mr. Clynes’ article we can only conclude that sixteen years has not been long enough for him to have become really wise after the event.

Mr. Clynes, who was Home Secretary in the 1929-31 Labour Government, says that during crises he has been behind “closed doors.” He means 10, Downing Street, of course. With such qualifications he offers the newspaper’s readers “a picture of what happens.”

Perhaps the ”negative” of the picture has remained in “the dark-room” of Mr. Clynes’ memory too long. For, to use a slightly technical term, the picture is sadly lacking in definition and detail. Instead of a clear-cut impression of the real political significance of the events produced by and associated with, the 1931 crisis there is merely a confused blur of disconnected incidents and trivial political minutiae. Thus we get a presentation of “day by day Cabinet meetings, of men with white strained faces, going painfully over one scheme after another to meet a frightening situation.” Of strained nerves and tempers. The sudden bitter enmity of life-long friends. A broken-hearted and bewildered Cabinet deserted by their leader, Ramsey MacDonald, and so on. Touching, no doubt, but scarcely enlightening as a piece of political history.

Neither does any word issue from the lips of the chief characters in the picture to indicate in the slightest what the real nature of the Cabinet Crisis was. Indeed, so far as the understanding of events being gathered from what at the time was said, its significance apparently is to be found in what was not said. For Mr. Clynes’ tells us that not only was MacDonald reticent to the Cabinet concerning a visit to him in the early crisis days by the private secretary of King-George V, but, moreover, he refused to disclose to them what had passed between the King and himself at a Buckingham Palace interview. One could comment that MacDonald’s preference for a silent part in “the picture ” was indeed a rare choice for perhaps the most garrulous politician of the age.

In spite of the apparently crucial importance which Mr. Clynes rather obscurely attaches to MacDonald’s silence in the matter of the crisis, we could assure him—if that were needed—that whatever passed between King and Premier in the crisis talk would not have materially affected the nature of the 1931 economic crisis or the main trend of events which resulted from it.

The fact that MacDonald refused to spill the beans on what was said is open to the more charitable suggestion that so far as any concrete proposals about the handling of the crisis was concerned he had no beans to spill. It may even be that he didn’t discuss the crisis with the King at all. After all it is Secret History and our guess might be as good as anybody’s in the matter.

Mr. Clynes does, however, inform us that MacDonald and the Cabinet had agreed on matters which it seemed were regarded as unalterable; although about the question of what these matters were, Mr. Clynes himself is highly reticent. Albeit MacDonald altered the unalterable by the simple device of continuing his Premiership with the aid of the Tories instead of that of the Labour Party.

Mr. Clynes, anxious perhaps to cushion any criticism of his party’s failure to effectively deal with the problems of Capitalism in so far as they affect the workers’ interests, assures us that Ministers are fallible human beings. We, of course, have never said anything to the contrary. To which he further adds a somewhat tearful, spare a kind thought for the poor politician plea, by exhorting us “in our own worry and uncertainty to have Pity on them.”

It would seem that only at Election Times does the cloak of Papal infallibility fall upon the shoulders of political spokesmen. Only then, with much fingering of their political rosaries, do they proclaim with almost divine assurance to the electorate that “They are the Way, the Truth and the Light.” Only then does isome leader take on the role of a political Moses whose mission it is to lead the workers into “The Promised Land.”

It is only when political parties have become the Government of the country that they discover they are liable to be the prey of the mysterious and malignant economic visitations popularly known as “Blizzards,” “Catastrophes” and “Disasters” and for whose coming they assume no responsibility or claim any real control. It is these things which it seems set to nought their good intentions and bring to dust their political programmes and promises. In this manner do “our statesmen” translate the economic contradictions of Capitalism into librettos for the eternal political theme of the struggle between the Forces of Good and The Powers of Darkness.

Mr. Clynes tells us that Ministers “are, perhaps, family men each with domestic worries and as deeply involved as the rest of us in the common disaster which threatens our common citizenship.” No doubt this touching spectacle of the domestic worries of Ministers, such as paying the rent, meeting the milk bill or the uncertainty of the next meal, getting all mixed up with the affairs of State, is a sombre reminder of the price that has to be paid for “Democracy.” Whether the Fascist Dictatorship can be explained by the fact that Hitler was a bachelor up to the last few days of life and presumably had no family responsibilities, might engage the attention of those “psychological gentry” who are always trying to explain social and economic events by processes which have nothing to do with them. Nevertheless both Goebbels and Goering were family men and for that matter, so was Mussolini.

Doubtless, the raising of families by our Ministers is a worthy and human concession to the democratic notions of our age, but what precisely its connection is with the objective cause of the economic crises of Capitalism, Mr. Clynes fails to explain.

Mr. Clynes then tells us that “as the result of an half-an hour’s angry disagreement we were going out into the desert deprived of four-figure salaries, secure positions, the confidence of bewildered supporters and indeed of any political future for which we had painfully given our working lives.” This, indeed, must have been the supreme moment “When Crisis comes to the Cabinet.” In view of all this it will not perhaps come as a surprise when he informs us that among the varying emotions experienced by some of his colleagues, avarice was one of them.

And if the gentle reader impatiently asks what has all this to do with the political and economic events of the 1931 period, we can only say that it is Mr. Clynes’ article on the crisis and not ours.

Nevertheless Mr. Clynes does make some attempt to more realistically portray how the crisis came to Britain. For instance we are informed that foreign countries’ confidence in Great Britain was shaken—a not altogether unknown phenomenon in this country’s history. As a result of this lack of confidence “shipload after shipload of gold was loaded at the docks and passed overseas.” “At every bank queues of people tried to draw out silver and notes. Business almost stopped.” Again, £10,000,000 in gold was withdrawn and the Bank of England was by an emergency Act relieved of the necessity to pay out gold on demand. To remove any possible misapprehension these shiploads, of gold were not the nest-eggs of the working class becoming an article of export. Neither were the bank queues those of workers trying to draw out their “savings” as a preliminary to departing to sunny climes. The “going off the Gold Standard” in this country was of no vital concern to the workers because they had never been on it. Indeed the only standard the working class have ever been on in the present system is, a “Copper” one and that will remain their money evaluation as a class, whatever financial arrangements the capitalist class come to in times of crisis.

For Mr. Clynes, however, the cessation of the normal functions of The Bank of England indicated that “Britain shivered on the verge of catastrophe”.

To cap it all that other great working class institution, The Stock Exchange, closed down temporarily. However, those other working class institutions, the Labour Exchange and the Public Assistance Committee, were very much open and marked by a continuous and feverish activity.

“Then,” says Mr. Clynes, continuing his crisis theme, “for no apparent reason confidence returned.” “At mid-day Treasury officials felt a degree of terror. By the afternoon speculators were buying instead of selling . . . the tide had turned … a great crisis was weathered.” Such a description of the nature of the crisis strongly suggests a marked affinity with that vague and unaccountable phenomenon called an Act of God.

At a less sensational level we could offer the somewhat more accountable explanation, that the year 1931 was witnessing one of those familiar trade cycles which Capitalism is periodically subject to. Also the fact of going off the Gold Standard was merely an effect—not a cause of the crisis. Capitalists all over the world, faced with glutted markets and unsaleable stocks, were not only anxious to cut their commitments but were demanding gold as the means of payment in any transaction that occurred. Other Capitalists and their financial institutions were busily trying to call in loans, in view of the slump. Faced then, with the catastrophic decline of international trade it was inevit able that the creditors of British Capitalism should seek bullion as the only means for liquidating debts incurred. Thus a heavy drain on the Bank of England’s gold reserves was an automatic consequence of the conditions brought about by general and chronic “overproduction.”

To explain a capitalist crisis of “overproduction” in terms of financial panics and stringency is like attempting to explain Delirium Tremens by the patient’s shudders and shivers. Although Mr. Clynes tells us “that the crisis in money was passed” a few incidental features of the crisis, like nearly 3,000,000 unemployed, economy cuts, falling wages, distressed and devastated areas and the general intensification of poverty, remained for some years. Such crisis events, however, are not the best kind of reminiscences to keep for one’s political old age. Neither perhaps do they constitute the best form of Sunday afternoon reading for the working-class readers of the News of the World.

We have, of course, on other occasions dealt with some of Mr. Clynes economic fallacies, as far back as 1919 and as recently as the June Socialist Standard of this year. Undoubtedly Mr. Clynes’ consistent propaganda in “more production” campaigns has revealed him as an untiring advocate of harder work for other people.

But Capitalism is a profit-motive economy and it is profit anticipation which not only determines how wealth is produced but in the final analysis how much is to be produced. Thus with every increase in wealth-producing efficiency a greater quantity of goods are enabled to be thrown on to the market. Workers’ wages constituting but a fraction of the wealth they produce, it is insufficient to absorb the ever greater amount of the goods turned out by them. In the case of the Capitalists their effective ability to consume the products of labour is fixed by the limits of their personal and physical capacities. Hence a greater portion of their “surpluses” tend to go into greater investments of those industries which turn out productive goods,. The contradiction between the expanding forces of production and the limited class income distribution inherent in Capitalism is thus intensified. It is this which finally leads to glutted markets. Effective demand ceases, or to put it another way, a condition is reached where no purchasers can be found. Profit anticipation then declines or disappears. Production is, then curtailed; plants close down; workers are dismissed and all the familiar conditions of a slump make their appearance.

Thus Mr. Clynes’ sovereign remedies—greater productive output on the part of the worker—for dealing with unemployment and low wages, provide the very means for bringing about in a shorter time those very conditions which he seeks to obviate.

It would appear that Mr. Clynes has been so busy during his life, assisting or seeking to assist in the administration of Capitalism that he has never had time to acquaint himself with a few simple facts about the system he has, helped to run. Thus do “Practical Politics” keep our statesmen, so far as the understanding of this present system is concerned, in a perpetual economic “Egyptian Darkness.”

Should we then include Mr. Clynes among those politicians he asks us “to have pity on?”

Ted Wilmott

Profits of doom - capitalism’s left wing (1982)

From the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The advent of capitalist production in sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Britain was marked by the transformation of the peasantry into wage-workers. Peasants had been isolated, and concerned with increasing their individual land holdings. But as workers, forced off the land into the workshops, survival necessitated some kind of association. The revolt of workers against the conditions they were forced into went through certain phases. At first machinery was destroyed. Riots and arson were, however, easily crushed since they were isolated and unorganised. Destruction proved counter-productive. Then trade unions were formed to ease the downward pressure on wages which resulted from competition between workers. The unions aimed to establish uniform wage scales, to regulate apprenticeships and also, often, to oppose the introduction of machinery. Their role was of necessity contradictory' and sectional. The kind of political association which could potentially overcome this problem of division appeared for the first time on a large scale in the form of Chartism. This was the first attempt by workers to gain direct access to the state through extending the franchise.

The response of the ruling class to previous waves to discontent among their workers had consisted mainly of vicious and brutal oppression to outlaw trade unions and democratic association. The Combination Acts, the Tolpuddle martyrs and Peterloo are the British equivalent of the killings in recent times in Gdansk and other parts of Poland. In the late nineteenth century they began to fear how workers might react to this once they could vote. This fear had a very long history. Two hundred and fifty years earlier, at the time of the English Revolution, the aptly named Colonel Rich had said:

You have five to one in this kingdom that have no permanent interest . .  if the master and servant shall be equal electors, then clearly those that have no interest in the kingdom will make it their interest to choose those that have no interest. . . there may be a law enacted, that there shall be an equality of goods and estate. (Quoted in The Century of Revolution, Christopher Hill. p. 120.)

In addition, employers faced the problem, after the Education Act of 1870, of increasing literacy among their workers which posed the threat of growing knowledge and understanding. So in place of violent suppression, there evolved the idea of social reform. According to many liberal capitalists of the late nineteenth century, the discontent of workers could be placated without revolutionary change, provided their employers were prepared to make minor concessions. This idea was sold to the capitalist class over a period of time by politicians like Joseph Chamberlain, with his question: “1 ask what ransom will property pay for the security it enjoys” (at an 1885 Liberal Party meeting discussing the financing of social services — Life, J. L. Garvin, 1932, Vol. I. p. 549).

The experiences of workers continued to show that the fetters of capitalism prevented their needs from being met. The question of getting rid of capitalism arose, but was drowned by the clamour for piecemeal reform of the system. The formation of employers’ federations in the 1890s and the anti-trade union court rulings around the turn of the century led to the formation of the Labour Party, which then grew from a trade union pressure group to an alternative capitalist government to the Liberal Party, out of which it had in part grown. The lip-service paid by the Labour Party after 1918 to nationalisation is now frowned on by many workers, particularly those who have worked in state-capitalist industries and found it no better than working in the private sector. The Tory statesman. Peel, had already proposed the nationalisation of the railways half a century earlier as a threat against private monopolies, so the idea had a long, respectable history within capitalism.

From the start, the Labour Party was not united on any principle and attempted to catch votes by empty promises which had nothing to do with the self-emancipation of workers. Labour governments have smashed strikes, supported wars, passed racist immigration legislation, presided over soaring unemployment, cut medical and social services, wages and housing programmes. In fact they have done everything the Tories do, and anything which has been demanded of them by the present, capitalist system which they say we “have to work within”. The last Labour government, for example, imposed a five per cent limit on wage rises through the “social contract”, and at the 1975 Labour Party conference called for wage restraint with the exercise of the "socialist imagination” — in other words, take less but imagine you're getting more. Jack Jones of the TGWU justified his support for these measures with the assertion that "Socialism means being able to take part now and not just dream dreams”.

Alternative Economic Strategy 

At the moment the Labour Party, the Communist Party, the Liberal Party and the SDP are all proposing to deal with the 14 per cent rate of unemployment by the Keynesian policy of increasing public expenditure. Keynes saw himself as the saviour of capitalism; he hoped to prove Marx wrong by showing that the profit system could work in the interests of all. He hoped for 5 per cent unemployment as a "natural” stable level. But the policies of all the governments since World War Two have followed Keynes without success. For example, during the seventies, annual government spending was increased about four times over, and unemployment shot up from under half a million to over two million. This was simply the outcome of one of the periodic trade slumps of capitalism.

But according to the Labour Party we should not yet reject the whole system, for they have a few more policies for us to try. Have we tried them all before? Well, yes, they say. but why not try again, after all. Labour MPs might join the dole queue otherwise. The rest of the "Alternative Economic Strategy” consists of import controls, and controls on wages and other prices. That these measures cannot serve the interests of the majority has been amply illustrated by our own experience.

The situation which an incoming Labour government would face is probably comparable to that of Mitterand in France. The same kind of promises about public expenditure and expansion were dropped very quickly, as the PSF government introduced its austerity programme and wage freezes. The nationalisation they introduced, does not particularly affect the interests of the capitalist class, as was made clear in this announcement in French newspapers. with the heading: Nationalisation. An exchange of holdings.

If you are a shareholder in one of the companies which was nationalised on 11 February 1982, your shares will be exchanged freely for guaranteed state bonds, with variable rates of interest, on 13 April 1982.

The ideals of "industrial democracy” and "workers control" within the capitalist system are simply modern replacements of the older. Tory defence of property as based on freedom and enterprise. They lead to exploitation supervised by the exploited themselves, masking the fundamental class division of capitalism.

Why, then, do the so-called revolutionaries of the Left still involve themselves in the Labour Party? It used to be because it was the "mass Party of the working class”, even though numerically you might just as well describe the Nazi Party in Germany in the thirties in that way. But recently the Labour Party has been in decline, with its individual membership falling by hundreds of thousands. The reason for the Left’s continuing involvement is their sticking to the old-fashioned idea of secret infiltration rather than open persuasion. Leninist groups such as Militant Tendency and the SWP think workers are incapable of understanding socialism — even though their own conception of it is at best vague and often oppressively anti-working class and dictatorial. Because of this arrogant belief that they have understood something which others cannot, the attitude of these groups has been somewhat contradictory. For example, in the February 1974 election the manifesto of the International Marxist Group said "VOTE LABOUR — but rely on your own struggles". Then in their Red Weekly (now Socialist Challenge) of February 22 they said:

Labour's attitude to the working class involves outright lying . . . the (Labour) programme is a big con. designed to trap the working class movement into accepting further cutbacks in its standard of living while prices soar.

On 23 February, 1974. the SWP’s Socialist Worker advised that "every socialist, every worker must spend all the days before polling day shouting two simple slogans at work, in the home and whenever anyone will listen: DEFEND UNIONS — VOTE LABOUR”. A few months later, on 6 July 1974, the same journal slated:

Wilson’s wage cuts will have to be fought with stronger organisation and stronger industrial action — stronger even than the action that booted out Heath and the Tories.

Leninism

These U-turns are made because these parties blindly accept as a dogma the statement made by Lenin in a pamphlet at the turn of the century, that "The working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness”. (What is to be Done?) Poles who know the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto have recently been saying that a spectre is haunting Leninism — the spectre of trade-union consciousness. The irony really is complete, because Leninist groups insist on the need for a leadership to take workers beyond the trade-union struggle, and yet spend much of their time talking about the trade-union struggle, even when the workers they are "organising" find that reformist campaigns which fail to touch the root of the problem cannot be in our interests as the majority class in society. As the “vanguard" repeat their circular slogans and arrogant dogmas and the rest of us find more and more evidence that we must get rid of the system they say we must work within, it is not hard to see why Marx spoke of the need to educate the educators. In the early days of the Russian Revolution, Lenin declared that to establish state capitalism would be a victory (The Chief Task of our Times), and he has been quoted:

If socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permitted it. then we shall not see socialism for at least five hundred years. (Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed. p. 263)

There is in fact no reason at all why the majority of workers could not easily understand that the present system of production for profit must be replaced by production for use, and private and state property replaced by democratic control and common ownership. The abolition of the world market system does require the full development of socialist political consciousness on the part of a majority of workers. We are quite adequately equipped, biologically and socially, for this task of taking political action on the basis of understanding, in order to transform society.

The organisation of the Leninist left epitomises the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, and the deadening nature of capitalist hypocrisy. Much genuine and potentially revolutionary discontent is absorbed and channelled into the kind of rebellion against fragments and details of the system which proves ultimately innocuous. These basic assumptions lead to the state capitalist regimes such as Russia — however much the Trotskyists may try to deny this by dating the beginning of oppression in modern Russia from the time when Lenin died and Stalin took over. And Russia, with its concentration of most industry in the hands of the state and the suppression of trade union activity, is basically a capitalist state:

During the first year of transition to the new system industrial enterprises obtained 3500 million roubles extra profit. The level of profitability rose from 13 per cent in 1965 (in industry as a whole) to 22.5 per cent in 1969 (for enterprises transferred to the new system). (Labour Remuneration, Labour Incentive Funds and Soviet Trade Unions, Novosii Press Agency, Moscow, 1972.)

No Socialism without Socialists

Militant is now in a state of panic over the dreaded Labour Party "Register”. In the end. they will either be kicked out or accommodated. Their history of a reformist leadership holding back the rank and file is an unfounded myth. To support the principle of leadership signifies lack of socialist consciousness. Leaders like Wilson and Foot were regarded as being on the Left at one time. The successive movements of politicians across the wings of the Labour Party merely reflects their stagnating acceptance of capitalism. Society will change through conscious desire, not the eighteenth-century Jacobin tactics of secret conspiracy and infiltration, or through the manipulations of self-styled vanguards. The limited way in which both the Left and Right wings of capitalism define what is “possible” and what is not crushes any real dissent from the prevailing form of society. They are ideological harnesses, holding back uncertain workers from developing the confidence necessary for self-emancipation, as advocated by Marx. The capitalist system has produced four tons of nuclear explosives (TNT-equivalent) for every man and woman on earth, but still leaves an average of one person to starve to death each second. Only a conscious majority of workers, organised democratically, can take the political action necessary to end this tragedy, by sending delegates to take over and dismantle the state machine. Before this can happen we must rid ourselves of any illusions about the outdated and destructive system we live in at the moment.

Clifford Slapper

That Party and its Promises! (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

By “that party” we mean of course the Labour Party, sometimes called the Socialist Party, but which does not stand for Socialism.

In the opinion of Ron Hayward — and he should know — the Labour Party stands for “equality in education”. At least that’s what he told the writer on an LBC phone-in. Whether “equality in education” is feasible or not, desirable or not, is hardly worth investigating. The dole queues are full of graduates, and millions of well-educated women find themselves reluctantly at the kitchen sink. Let us, however, take a good look at what the Labour Party in office has done about education and compare its record with its promises.

The Labour Government has been proposing cuts in local authority spending, and as the biggest share of local authority spending goes on education, the schools are going to take the brunt. Surrey County Council is reported (Guardian, 5th July) as planning to cease all nursery education, to increase class sizes in the schools and to raise the fees for higher education courses. This is a pattern which we can expect to see followed by most other education authorities.

Let us compare this situation with the picture presented in Labour’s 1959 manifesto — The Future Labour Offers You. Under the heading “Our Children”. Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan and Co. told us:

The worst handicap a child can face at school is the oversize class. Overcrowding in the schools is a nightmare to teachers and to parents. That is why our first task must be to cut classes in primary as well as secondary schools to a maximum of thirty.” (our emphasis.)

Contrast this “first task” brainwave with the actual reality. Many children going through what the state calls “education” have done so, even in the good years and “good” areas, in classes of 35, some rising to 40 or more. Now the size of classes is likely to rise again, not from a real shortage of qualified teachers, but because there is not enough money forthcoming from the Treasury to pay the teachers.

In 1959, Labour also told us: “Most important of all, our plans will require many more teachers. We shall launch a big drive to recruit and train them as swiftly as possible.” Well, at least one of our recent governments has done that. And the result is that with the present Labour Government saying “less money for education”, a large proportion of these expensively-trained teachers are experiencing the frustration of joblessness. While the classes get bigger and bigger. Talk about waste!

Returning to 1959 we find the Labour Party declaring : “The main fault with our present State education is that there is not enough of it. In order to give every child a fair chance to choose a career and to train for it, we must be prepared to spend more.”

Exactly the opposite of what they are doing now. The fact is that the political parties’ manifestoes are like the apples the greengrocer puts in his front window. They look mouthwatering! So you go inside on the promise of all that lovely, glossy, sound-looking fruit, only to get sold wrinkled, bruised, unsound fruit that the greengrocer dredges up from under the counter or some dark corner that you can’t quite see.

The professional reformist politician is like the most unscrupulous greengrocer you could ever have the misfortune to meet! You even become so carried away in your enthusiasm that you don’t stop to ask the vital question “Can he produce the goods?”

If you did ask, you’d get no meaningful answers out of him, but only specious assurances. Here’s a sample from that 1959 Labour manifesto: “A programme for one Parliament is not a blueprint for Utopia. What we have summarised here can be done in that limited time. We can make such great social advances as bringing real security into old age through our National Superannuation scheme. We can cut down the size of school classes. We can turn shabby old houses into modern homes. So this is a practical assessment of the jobs to be done, and a realistic account of the way we propose to do it.”

Which means that they want to do these things and hope we’ll take their word for it that they can. To which we reply: if it could be done, why wasn’t it? And conversely, if it was not possible except when the economic climate was right, why claim so confidently that it could be done? This charge of making promises that cannot be carried out is one that can equally be levelled at the Tories, the Liberals, and other assorted reformists, including the Nationalists among those who have swindled the electorate.

The moral of the story is this. A political party without principles is merely a vote-catching machine, governed by expediency. Its soup-kitchen philosophy of being kind to the kiddies is easily ditched whenever it should appear to be in conflict with the short-term economic interests of capitalism.

Capitalism just does not work for our benefit: it’s the bosses’ benefit show, not ours. There is only one way we can use our votes in line with our economic and social interests as workers. And that is by voting and working for Socialism and the end of this wages, waste and want system.

Charmian Skelton

How Labour changed (2025)

From the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Originally formed in 1906 as a trade union pressure group in parliament, in 1918 the Labour Party adopted as its long-term aim a nationalised economy. This, together with a redistribution of wealth to create a less unequal society, was to be achieved gradually by measures taken by a succession of Labour governments.

This strategy — Labourism — failed, and how! Instead of Labour gradually changing capitalism, it was capitalism that gradually changed Labour. Learning from the experience of being in government, that the only way capitalism can run is as an economic system driven by profit-making and that this has to be given priority, Labour gradually evolved from an alleged labour party into an avowed capitalist party.

Here is how it happened.

1. 1906. 29 trade unionist MPs elected with Liberal support constitute themselves as the parliamentary Labour Party.
2. 1918. The party adopts a new constitution, Clause Four of which reads: ‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service’.
3. 1929. An amendment added ‘distribution and exchange’, spelling out that nationalisation (state capitalism), not socialism, was what was envisaged. (Link)
4. 1935. ‘A Labour government, therefore, not only by the transference of industry from profit-making for the few to the service of the many, but also by taxation, will work to reduce the purchasing power of the wealthier classes, while by wage increases and by the provision of social services it will expand the purchasing power of the masses’ (Clement Attlee, Will and the Way to Socialism, p. 42).
5. 1945. General election manifesto: ‘The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain.’
6. 1956. Labour intellectual Anthony Crosland published The Future of Socialism in which he argued that the aim of a more equal distribution of wealth did not require the nationalisation of industry.
7. 1959. Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell proposes to abandon Clause Four but this is turned down by the Labour Party conference.
8. 1974. February general election manifesto: ‘It is indeed our intention to (a) bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’.
9. 1995. New Clause Four adopted: ‘A dynamic economy, serving the public interest, in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper with a thriving private sector and high quality public services where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them’.
10. 2024. ‘Labour is the party of business’ (Starmer). ‘Be in no doubt, we will campaign as a pro-business party — and we will govern as a pro-business party.’ (Link )

Socialism and the Co-Operative Movement (1935)

From the August 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Report of an address by an S.P.G.B. speaker on July 9th at Co-operative Hall, Seven Sisters Road to members of the Islington Co-operative Guild) 

S.P.G.B. address: There is to-day a crying need for Socialism. In the depressed areas of northern England, in the heavy industries, such as coal, iron and shipbuilding, we behold the usual scene of the wholesale dismissal of workers under capitalism. Coal miners with no work while mines stand idle; textile workers unemployed while mills are closed; shipwrights despairing for the future while many ships ply the seas in a state of disrepair, and with the minimum of comfort for the crew. Men and women are denied all these, as well as other means of living, though they could themselves produce their own means of existence if allowed access to the means of production.

These facts were observed by Utopian Socialists more than a century ago. But they were groping in the dark; they did not fully understand the working of the capitalist system. Fourier, for example, was very enthusiastic over a system of co-operative colonies, which, he said, would grow with great speed. Robert Owen also confidently expected that co-operative productive societies would sweep the country within his own lifetime. Why, then, is it that more than a century after co-operative productive and distributive societies began to work, no great impression has been made on the capitalist system?

After one hundred years of striving, the Co-operative Societies employ only a quarter of a million people in their productive concerns, where the average wage is a mere £3 per week. In the distributive side of the Co-operative Societies the average wage of employees is even less—£2 15s. per week. The Co-operative movement has departed from the ideals of Fourier and Robert Owen, and as its supporters themselves admit, it has to I compete with other firms run on capitalist lines. That is why Co-operative employees have to strike against bad conditions of employment, taking part in the class struggle just as workers in other firms do. Many Co-operators still believe that the Co-operative Societies will be the means of emancipating the working class. But the conditions prevailing in the Co-operative Societies expose this hope as baseless. The facts go to show that the Co-operative movement is perfectly content to run on capitalist lines. For that reason its directors invested large sums in War Loan, and helped the capitalist class to continue the Great War, though it probably meant the murder or maiming of Cooperative members in the fighting forces. In spite, however, of the Co-operative Societies' willingness to be patriotic, people like Lord Beaverbrook attacked them. Therefore, the Co-operative movement, in self-defence, set up its own political party to make itself a political force in the country. Not with a view to getting rid of the wage-slave system, but only to continuing capitalism—and the Co-operative Societies. This is made dear by their statement (in the People's Year Book, 1932), that their Party will strive for more Public Utility Boards, such as the London Passenger Transport Board—which was recently faced with a strike of thousands of its *bus drivers and conductors.

The action of the Co-operative Societies in trying to get political power is an admission of the supreme importance of that power, and shows that the Co-operative movement is beginning to realise that the working class cannot get its emancipation while the Government is in the hands of the capitalist class.

(This concluded the address.)

Many questions were asked and apparently almost every member of the audience wanted to take part in the discussion, but the divergence of opinion shown within this Co-operative Guild is astounding in an organisation which claims that it will transform society. One member said that Parliament was no good; another said that the Co-operative Societies must seek protection in Parliament. It was maintained, on the one hand, that the Co-operative Societies would expand and overthrow the capitalist system; while another member declared that big finance was the greatest power in the world, and admitted, when questioned, that it could destroy the Co-operative movement. Another participant in the discussion said that it was not true that the members of the Cooperative Societies were interested only in the dividend; but went on to say that though possibly most of their members did buy at Co-operative stores because of the “divi," that was because we were living under capitalism.

Many other mistaken ideas were expressed, as for example, that the S.P.G.B. is in opposition to Trade Unions. As regards the Trade Unions, we point out that the working class must organise to resist the encroachments of their masters, but that such organisation cannot achieve Socialism.

D. S.

Editorial: Marx, Methodism and the Labour Party (1950)

Editorial from the July 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Morgan Phillips, Secretary of the Labour Party has caused a stir by the way he has restated the outlook of his Party. In a speech to a gathering of European Labour Parties at Copenhagen he elaborated the proposition that the philosophy and method of the British organisation is “Methodist rather than Marxist.” Here are some of his statements.

“British socialism owes little to Karl Marx, either in theory or practice, or in its methods of organising the working classes. Marx’s economics as well as his politics were challenged and finally renounced by the founders and teachers of the British Labour Party.” 

“Marx’s conception of the political organisation required for waging the class war was not accepted by the British Labour movement.”

". . . Marxism as a philosophy of materialism, as an economic theory, and as a form of political organisation with revolutionary intention and aim, is historically an aberrant tendency in the development of British Socialism.”

“British Socialists do not consider it at all a reproach or a source of weakness in their intellectual and political positions that their movement has been profoundly influenced by religious thought. The very organisation of our British working-class movement embodies methods we have taken over from religious institutions.” (Manchester Guardian, 3/6/50).

Among the religious influences he mentioned particularly is Methodism. There is nothing new in this. It was said by many of the early leaders of the Labour Party and was a commonplace criticism of them in S.P.G.B. propaganda forty years ago.

In 1922 the late Phillip Snowden wrote of his Party:—“The British Labour Party is certainly not Socialist in the sense in which socialism is understood upon the Continent. It is not based upon the recognition of the class struggle; it does not accept the teachings of Marx.” (Manchester Guardian Reconstruction Supplement, October 26, 1922).

But though it is not new it has a significance now that it did not have years ago. When the British Labour Party was younger, before it had had experience as a government, and before the Communists seized power in Russia, the lead among the Labour Parties of Europe was taken by the German Party. It was the German Social Democratic Party that was largest and seemed to be most successful and nearest to becoming the government. The future of Labourism throughout Europe was thought to be bound up with the fate of the German party. Like all of the continental parties the German S.D.P. was traditionally hostile towards religion and the church and paid lip service to Marxism.

Now several new factors have brought the British Labour Party into greater prominence and influence. The German S.D.P. was greatly weakened by the war and by the rise of the Communists; Marxism has been brought into popular disrepute by the distortion of it associated with the Russian dictatorship; the new balance of world capitalism has produced the line-up of America, Britain and Western Europe on the one side against Russia and her satellites on the other; and lastly the British Labour Party is now almost alone among the Labour parties of Europe in holding governmental power. In these circumstances the lead among the Labour Parties has been taken by the British Party, and the prospect is that the traditional lip service paid to Marxism by the Continental parties will be allowed to fall into the background.

This development represents a certain change; but no progress towards a greater understanding of socialism. It exposes the fundamental lack of socialist principle that characterises all the Labour parties, and shows the extent to which their policies are in fact bound up with the requirements of capitalism in the various countries. It needs to be studied in relation to another pronouncement made by Morgan Phillips at the same conference. Because the West European Trade Unions and Labour parties are now backing Marshall Aid and the tie-up with U.S.A., and the American trade unions play an increasingly influential role in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in its fight with the Communist World Federation of Trade Unions, it becomes expedient to whitewash American capitalism, hence the following from Mr. Phillips: —

“Socialist prejudice against the United States must be exposed as out of date. For more than two decades the United States has been the most progressive country in the world outside Britain and Scandinavia. . . . At present most European Governments are less progressive than the Truman administration. I hope you will forgive me if I say that we must not be too smug about European traditions. It must not be forgotten that in the period between the two world wars America reacted to the world crisis by producing Roosevelt and the New Deal while Europe produced Hitler and Mussolini. Totalitarianism is in fact a European product.”

(Manchester Guardian 5/6/50).

There is nothing at all illogical in the British Labour Party, which stands for the reform of capitalism, looking with a sympathetic eye on Roosevelt’s and Truman’s reforms of American capitalism. It does not surprise Socialists though it may be a bitter pill for those Labourites to swallow who have liked to cherish the delusion that the Labour Party stands for something distinctive. Like Morgan Phillips they will seek comfort in the notion that at least they have been consistent in abhorring totalitarianism. But even here they are doomed to disappointment. Just now Mr. Phillips is asking them to admire the progressiveness of democratic American capitalism under Truman but not so long ago—before the opening of the “cold war”—Mr. Phillips was equally admiring of totalitarian capitalism in Russia., He visited Russia in 1946 and wrote up his observations in the Daily Herald (20 August, 1946). This is one of his remarks: —

“In Britain we are only just beginning our Socialist planning; in Russia it has been going on for 28 years. In some ways British social standards are well ahead of the Russian, and in others the Russians can teach us a lot.”

Before leaving Mr. Phillips and his views on Socialism we may usefully quote what he has to say of the aim the British.Labour Party sets before itself:—“It promises . . .  the attainment of a planned economy in which proletarian exploitation is not tolerated, and where the fundamental freedoms of the individual citizens, worker and wage-earner are safeguarded ” Marx showed conclusively that the exploitation of the working class cannot be ended while the workers continue to be a wage-earning class, hence his insistence that the unions should see the need to aim at the abolition of the wages system. Morgan Phillips, lacking Marx’s understanding of capitalism and socialism, cannot even perceive that the continued existence of the wages system in Russia and Britain makes nonsense of the claim in both countries to have ended exploitation and introduced socialism. He glories in the fact that the Labour Party rejected Marxism but cannot see that in so doing it was rejecting Socialism.

Letter: 'Do you maintain . . . ' (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Do you maintain . . . '

Dear Editors,

Of course you are correct: ultimately workers have no state. However, until that reality is widely appreciated, it is surely necessary to rely upon workers’ identification with their (familiar) place of nurture, and “natural” abhorrence to the occupation of “their” land by an invading force – e.g. as in WWII, when many were happy, and proud, to enlist under the Union Jack.

There is, surely, every distinction to be drawn between patriotism and bigotry; the first can incorporate pride in, e.g., Shakespeare, whilst the second may involve the idea that no other nation or country could have “produced” Shakespeare or his equivalent.

Your principles include that “the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party”. Yet you must surely acknowledge that organised workers (trade unions) formed the Labour Party (including Clause 4) precisely because the Liberal MPs vacillated in the degree to which their policies fostered the welfare of the working class/es?

Do you maintain that Labour’s occasional landslide votes had nothing to do with the perception that political support should not be squandered on dilettante, fair-weather or eclectic “supporters” of ordinary people’s interest?

Do you maintain that the election of Labour governments did not directly result in better conditions, social welfare, trade union legality, a minimum wage, the NHS, compulsory free primary and secondary education?

D. Shepherd, 

London NW4

Reply: 

1. We can see why the ruling class in the various different capitalist states into which the world is divided find it necessary to rely on “workers’ identification with their (familiar) place of nurture and ‘natural’ abhorrence to the occupation of ‘their’ land by invading forces” – it helps them build up popular support for their rule and their foreign policy aimed at protecting their interests abroad. But we can’t see why Socialists need to. On the contrary, political nationalism is something we need to combat as it is an obstacle to the understanding that the problems faced by workers all over the world cannot be solved within a national framework but only on a world scale, on the basis of a world without frontiers where the resources of the whole planet have become the common heritage of all humanity.

We can see why, too, ruling classes prefer moderate nationalism to bigotry – yesterday’s enemy can become today’s ally. Thus, the “Huns” and “Japs” of yesterday are now our rulers’ allies and workers who continue to believe what they were told when these countries were our rulers’ enemies are an embarrassment.

Socialist opposition to political nationalism does not challenge cultural diversity. English speakers can appreciate Shakespeare, Dickens, etc without thereby ceasing to be socialists. Again, people living on the big island off the north-west coast of the Eurasian land mass can like warm beer, and fish and chips, pork pies and roast beef, without being nationalists. Maybe they’ll still like these things in Socialism.

2. Yes, we do acknowledge that the Labour Party was originally set up by the trade unions as a parliamentary pressure group to try to get a better deal within capitalism for trade unionists and workers generally. In other words, its aim was not to seek working class emancipation from capitalist exploitation but merely to lessen that exploitation a little. While not of course being opposed to exploitation being lessened, we regarded this as a mistaken political (as opposed to trade-union) aim and so opposed the Labour Party and this reformist tactic from the start. It is true that in 1918 the Labour Party did adopt Clause 4 (nationalisation) as its policy, but this was still not socialism, merely state-run capitalism.

The experience of the last century has confirmed the soundness of the position we took then. Far from gradually changing capitalism, the experience of governing capitalism changed the Labour Party into a party that merely seeks to administer capitalism, into in fact the modern equivalent of the old Liberal Party that used to alternate with the Tories in governing capitalism and which the unions set up Labour to replace.

In fact, we are not sure whether your description “dilettante, fair-weather or eclectic ‘supporters’ of ordinary people’s interest” is meant to apply to the modern Labour Party or the old Liberal Party since it would seem to apply to both.

Nationalisation has been and gone without making much difference to the workers affected.

Some measures, such as trade union legality and free education and health care, can benefit workers under capitalism even if they were introduced for other reasons (such as ensuring capitalist employers with a trained and healthy workforce). And, yes, some such measures were introduced under some Labour governments (though others were introduced under Liberal or Tory ones). However, these governments by no means governed in the interest of the workers. They were governments of capitalism and had to run capitalism in the only way it can be – at a profit – making system in the interests of those who live off profits rather than those who work for wages. So the 1929 Labour government reduced civil servants’ wages and fell over a proposal to reduce unemployment pay. The 1945 Attlee government kept the wartime ban on strikes and used troops to break them. The Wilson and Callaghan governments of the 60s and 70s also imposed wage restraint and clashed with strikers. And we all know about the Blair government elected in 1997—Editors

Socialism's deadly foes (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

It used to be an axiom of Party speakers that if the Labour Party did not exist the capitalist class would have to invent it. The same is true of the so-called Communist Party, though in a different historical context.

The Labour Party throughout its vile and bloody history has stood ever ready to serve British capitalism, as government, loyal opposition, and in coalition with Tories and Liberals. Bloody history? Yes. Did they not support and help organize the slaughter of millions of workers in two world wars? Did they not endorse the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were they not the government when the Korean war started in 1950? Did they not support and aid the American butchery in Vietnam? All this is viciously anti-working class. Yet these are only some major crimes that spring to mind. The catalogue is a long one.

While their cloth-capped pacifist Keir Hardie was playing recruiting-sergeant during World War I, the SPGB was opposing the war and propounding Socialism. While one-time conscientious-objector Herbert Morrison was in the Churchill War Cabinet during World War II, the SPGB was arguing the common interest of the world’s workers.

The post-war Labour government started Harwell and the development of nuclear weapons in this country. They fostered the lunatic justification: “They’ve got them — so we must have them”. It was Aneurin Bevan, the darling of the mutton-headed left, who did not want to go “naked” to the world’s conference chambers. “Negotiation from strength” meant being “clad” in nuclear armoury. They hold the distinction of being the first government in this country to carry on conscription in peacetime.

They used troops to break strikes. Their Attorney-General (now Lord Shawcross) prosecuted dockers in April 1951. Seven dockers had been charged under the Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order. Shawcross is recorded in Keesing’s Contemporary Archives (May-June 1951) giving a warning to strikers generally that, if there were no trade dispute involved, a strike which was calculated to cause a breach of contract, or so interfere with the course of justice, or affect the policy or interests of the state, “might constitute a grave criminal offence”. Bevan then had the job Foot now holds as Minister of Labour (members of NALGO please note).

At every election since the war, including 1945, the Communist Party has worked for the return of Labour governments, supported Labour candidates and urged workers to vote Labour. They are equally guilty. It is manifestly absurd to work for the return of Labour governments and then disclaim responsibility for what those governments do.

The guilt of the “Communist” Party goes deeper than supporting the Labour Party. As mouth-piece of Soviet state capitalism they too support wars. They supported the atom-bombing of Japan. They applauded the development of the atomic bomb in Russia because it broke the American monopoly, saying it “will encourage peace-loving people everywhere” (Daily Worker, 24 September 1949). Two years later when the British bomb was announced they called it: “A cowards’ weapon, designed for the unrestrained massacre of the civilian population” (Daily Worker 18 February 1952).

After Russia was attacked in 1941, nobody was more in favour of fighting for capitalism in World War II. They even supported the return of Tory candidates in by-elections to better prosecute the war. For more than 50 years they have slavishly followed Russian foreign policy; even stooping to support Stalin’s pact with Hitler, calling it a “victory for peace and socialism” (Daily Worker 23 August 1939).

They also supported the wars in Korea and Vietnam though, being motivated by the interests of Russian capitalism, they were on the other side to their Labour buddies in these two bloodbaths.

Flash back

How did all this come to be? How can it happen that these two parties which use Socialist-sounding phrases and (in the case of the Labour Party with the support of millions of workers) come to be buried in the dirty business of maintaining capitalism? The answers are to be found in fundamentally wrong assumptions right from their beginnings. It is a long story and from the standpoint of working-class interests and Socialism a sad and futile story.

The Labour Party in 1906 and the “Communist” Party in 1920 embarked upon the day-to-day struggle to do “something now”. The former being a native product of British capitalism in the quest for reforms, the latter taking its cue from their masters in the Kremlin. They are both the heirs to the fallacy of the old Social Democrats that Socialism can be an ultimate objective, while “in the meantime” they build a movement to seek votes on the basis of a list of reforms.

The false assumption behind this idea is that the working class cannot understand Socialism; they have to be baited by reforms. Above all, workers cannot consciously organize and free themselves, they must have leaders. So the trap is set. The trap is capitalism and the quarry is reformist.

Starting out on the wrong foot and facing the wrong way all subsequent developments were inevitable. Instead of being stepping-stones, reforms became the only attainable ends. Their spurious socialism is reforms and nationalization. As if to rub salt into the wounds of mockery, they used to say they were in a hurry and could not wait for the SPGB and workers’ understanding.

Given a working class who are overwhelmingly non-socialist, the Labourites and Communists have to appeal to the same politically ignorant electorate as the avowedly capitalist parties. If you play their game, “you” must have a policy for everything they have a policy for. To get votes you must do what they do. No use talking about the abolition of the wages system, common ownership and production solely for use. Talk about pensions and housing. Make promises. Outbid the Tories and Liberals. Sound plausible. Promote leaders. Be British. Be concerned about the nation and British interests. Their game is running capitalism. To sound plausible means you must convince millions of workers that you can run capitalism better than they can. Though all your policies pre-suppose the continuation of capitalism, you must foster the illusion of attacking the system and being indignant.

How many times during the seventy years of the Socialist Party of Great Britain have we been asked : “Where have you got? What have you achieved?” While the clamour for popular demands has become a way of life the voice of Socialism has remained small. In fact, the two things go together. The massive proportions of the one presuppose the relative smallness of the other. The point is that for all their mass appeal the Labour Party and the CP have solved not a single problem.

Despite many years of Labour government, capitalism is still here. They are a living demonstration of the futility of reformism. There has been continuous legislation of reforms concerning every aspect of capitalism. The only argument advanced has been that the reforms were necessary to solve problems. History is littered with the wreckage of their useless enactments.

Look where you will, there have been no solutions. Health and welfare, Act piled upon Act while the chaos gets worse. The wages struggles of doctors, nurses and welfare workers run parallel with the continuing poverty of the workers who need health and welfare services. Instead of ending poverty, the chief function is to administer it.

Pensions? Despite all the reforms, wretchedness and misery continue to the accompaniment of sentimental slush from the hypocrites in government getting £16,000 per year who think £10 per week is enough for one and £16 enough for two old workers.

Education. Another sorry story. While newspapers carry headlines about “class-room jungles” the reform-mongers reach for their bottomless bucket to start another round of bailing-out operations.

Rents and mortgages make the bitterest mockery of all. Nothing screams more loudly the irrelevance of reformism. From the first Housing Act in 1851, every government has been going to solve the housing problem.

The post-war Labour government was finally going to banish it in five years. In 1948 Aneurin Bevan promised : “When the next election occurs there will be no housing problem in Great Britain for the British working class”. (Hansard 14 July 1948). They were going to clear away the slums. Now, nearly thirty years later, the present Labour government blandly informs us the slums are here to stay. A report by the National Economic Development Office calling for the clearance of 380,000 slums was rejected as being against the policy of both this government and the last one. The Daily Mirror (11 April 1974) which supported the return of the Labour government quotes a spokesman for the Department of the Environment as saying: “Demolition is a dirty word now. Renovation is the best thing for slum areas”. By their own criterion of “something now” they are abysmal failures.

They were going to abolish the House of Lords and tax the rich out of existence. The rich and the Lords are still on our backs and the party which in 1945 used the catch-phrase “Fair shares for all” is still talking nonsense about “fairness” in a society that rests upon legal robbery.

Nationalization was to be the way to run industry and transport as public services not for profits. Millions of workers were kidded to regard nationalization as the answer to social problems in general and to maldistribution in particular. This was how the Labour Party was able to exploit the misguided loyalties of the workers. The economics of capitalism made short work of their silly schemes.

The bitterness and disillusionment that followed did more than give the Tories thirteen years in power. It caused many workers to regard Socialism as a failure and to become suspicious of politics generally. The fact is that the policies of the Labour Party are conceived for the running of capitalism, not its abolition. They are ignorant of or indifferent to what Socialism means. When this is coupled with the cynical quest for power by the shabby upstarts who lead this blind mass it is easy to understand how damaging to the cause of Socialism the whole futile exercise has been.

The Tories have been able to poke fun at the founderings of the Labour Party and, by misrepresentation, to discredit Socialism. In the same way they are able to point to the tyranny of capitalist Russia. Socialism suffers on the one hand because of the distortion of those who control the mass-media, and on the other hand because the great majority of the working class have so far accepted those falsehoods.

Our main indictment of the Bolsheviks is not that from 1917 they have built up capitalism in Russia. Given the historical conditions of the time — industrial backwardness, a largely illiterate peasant population and a working class outside Russia not yet ready for Socialism — capitalism was the only possible outcome. This is what the SPGB said at the time. The fact that they have passed off a million outrages as Socialism — this is our indictment. They have twisted Marxism into its opposite for more than half a century. Marxism demands the abolition of the wages-system, so the political frauds in the Kremlin invent “socialist wages”. Marx saw the state as a product and instrument of class society, so the Leninists invented a contradiction in terms called the “workers’ state”. Marx wanted a conscious majority of the working class (see The Communist Manifesto) to gain control of political power for the purpose of ending class society, so the Bolsheviks called their minority seizure of power “the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Their brutal hierarchy is worthy of comparison with the medieval Papacy. Their terrorist secret police. The purge trials and slaughters of their own comrades. Their deals with Hitler and later with Churchill. Their vast military machine. The use of military might to crush workers’ risings in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Their commodity production and rivalry with western capitalists for world markets and investments, all carried on to the accompaniment of propaganda calling it Socialism.

These are just headings under which their deeds may be listed. The reality in human suffering is incalculable. Can there be any wonder that the progress of Socialist understanding has been slow?

For a generation they worshipped Stalin and his “greatness” while millions lived in fear of his secret police. All criticism was brutally crushed. New crimes were invented to cover any rivals for power. To be denounced as a Trotskyist or a Titoist meant that you were an enemy of the state. (Those who were shot were spared years of degradation as political prisoners.) During this period meetings of the Socialist Party of Great Britain were disrupted by members of the Communist Party who would tolerate no criticism of their Soviet Fatherland. Three years after Stalin’s death some of those who had served him denounced him, and the faithful were thrown into confusion.

It is impossible to estimate the harm all this has done to the spread of Socialist ideas. At every meeting someone asks “What about Russia?” We have to waste time debunking myths before we can expound the positive Socialist case of the SPGB.

Understanding as we do the realities of capitalism, we know that our fellow-workers in this country, as in Russia and throughout the world, are confronting similar problems. We are as confident as ever that the world’s workers will come to reject the spurious palliatives of Labourites and “Communists” and will achieve their own emancipation by establishing Socialism. Working to this end has always been the sole commitment of the SPGB. There could be no task more worthwhile.

Harry Baldwin