Workers don’t control political power (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The state presents itself as a neutral arbiter, a set of institutions that balances competing interests, responds to democratic pressure, and governs in the common good. This is an illusion.

 The state is not neutral. It is the organised power of the ruling class. Its courts, police, military, and legal apparatus exist primarily to protect property relations, to guarantee that those who own the means of production continue to own them, and that those who don’t must continue to sell their labour-power to survive.

The wage system: concentrating wealth and power simultaneously

This is the mechanism at the heart of everything. Workers are paid less than the value they produce, the difference is appropriated by those who own the means of production. This isn’t occasional exploitation or the result of individual greed. It’s how the system functions by design.

And here’s the critical point: wealth and power are not separate things. Money is power, directly and immediately. Accumulated capital buys political influence, funds media outlets, finances lobbying operations, endows universities, and shapes the terms of public debate. Every pound extracted from the wage relationship doesn’t just enrich an owner, it widens the power gap between owner and worker. Wealth concentrates, and with it the ability to shape society in the interests of the wealthy.

The wage system therefore performs a double function simultaneously: it extracts wealth upward and concentrates political power upward at exactly the same rate. These are not two separate processes. They are one process with two consequences.

The anger this produces

Most working-class people don’t articulate this in political terms. But they feel it, viscerally, daily, in ways that produce real rage.

The nurse who works twelve-hour shifts and can’t afford to heat her home properly while energy company executives collect eight-figure bonuses. The warehouse worker tracked by an algorithm, disciplined for toilet breaks, earning just enough to survive while the company posts record profits. The young person who does everything right, works hard, studies, plays by the rules and still cannot afford to rent a decent flat, let alone buy one. The family that chooses between food and bills at the end of the month while being told the economy is performing well.

This is not bad luck. It is the system working exactly as intended.

The frustration deepens when people turn to politics for relief and find the same story. A new government arrives promising change. Within months it is managing the same constraints, making the same concessions to capital, explaining why things cannot move as fast as promised. The cycle repeats. The sense that the game is rigged, that no matter how you vote, nothing fundamental shifts, is not cynicism. It is an accurate reading of how power actually works.

When anger is misdirected

That anger is real and legitimate. But without a clear analysis of where it comes from, it gets captured and redirected. At migrants. At benefit claimants. At a remote cultural elite. At any target that doesn’t threaten the underlying system.

The worker who resents his neighbour for claiming housing benefit while a landlord extracts half his wage in rent has had his anger pointed in exactly the wrong direction. The voter who turns to a nationalist strongman because mainstream politics has failed them is expressing genuine grievance through a vehicle that will deepen their exploitation while appearing to challenge it.

This misdirection isn’t accidental. Concentrated wealth funds the media, the think tanks, and the political movements that perform this redirection. It is one of the functions that money-as-power performs most effectively.

The vote and its limits

Workers can vote. In many countries they won that right through bitter struggle. But voting periodically for competing sets of managers of the capitalist system is not political power. Governments change; the underlying economic structure does not. Whichever party takes office inherits the same constraints, bond markets, capital flight, corporate lobbying, and the basic requirement that the economy remains profitable for investors. Policy operates within those limits or faces immediate economic punishment.

The wealthy don’t need to buy every politician or rig every election. They don’t have to. When economic power is sufficiently concentrated, the range of politically possible options narrows automatically. The system polices itself.

The structural problem

Economic power can precede and shape political power. Those who control investment, production, and employment set the terms within which governments operate. A government that seriously threatens property rights finds capital withdrawn, currency attacked, and media turned hostile almost immediately. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s the structural logic of a system where production is privately controlled.

Reform and its ceiling

Reforms, like better healthcare and labour protections, can sometimes be won. These matter. But they are concessions extracted under pressure, not transfers of power. And they are reversible, as decades of austerity have demonstrated. The ceiling on reform is the point at which it begins to threaten profitability. Beyond that point, the state’s coercive functions become more visible.

The conclusion

The anger felt by working people is not irrational. It is the rational response to a system that extracts their labour, concentrates the proceeds as wealth and power in a minority’s hands, offers them a vote every few years as a substitute for genuine agency, and then blames them when they lose faith in the process.

Real political power for workers would mean controlling the conditions of their own lives, the economy, production, distribution. That requires not managing capitalism better but replacing it with common ownership and democratic control. As long as the wage system stands, wealth will continue to flow upward and power with it. Everything short of abolishing that relationship leaves economic power, and therefore real political power, in the hands of a minority.

Jake Ambrose (Australia)

The hollow cry of ‘self-determination’ in a world of borders (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The air is thick with the rhetoric of ‘self-determination.’ From the hallowed halls of the United Nations to the televised addresses of national leaders, the principle that ‘all peoples have the right to freely determine their political status’ is touted as a moral absolute. Yet, for the global working class, this ‘right’ is nothing more than a cruel joke—a deceptive mask worn by the state to protect the interests of the ruling class.

The hypocrisy of the nation-state

The very states that harp on about self-determination are the ones that have historically opposed it whenever it threatened their own economic or military interests. For example, British imperial history is a masterclass in this hypocrisy; the idea of self-determination was seen as a direct threat to the control of colonies essential for economic benefits, military strategy, and international prestige.

Even today, the nation-state remains a ‘prison house of nationalities’. Leaders preach the moral superiority of national self-determination over sovereignty to justify their own territorial claims or to undermine rivals, yet they remain the routine managers of a capitalist system that thrives on exploitation.

The myth of national interest

Socialists maintain that there is no such thing as a ‘national interest’ that includes both the exploiter and the exploited. The nation-state is a territorial entity that identifies itself with a particular ‘people’ only to better manage them for the benefit of the capitalist class. When workers are told to wave national flags, they are being encouraged to block the path to any higher human synthesis and to ignore the fact that they have no fatherland to defend.

In this elemental chaos, the state uses nationalism and racism as tools to divide the working class, making more privileged groups feel that their interests lie with their masters rather than their fellow workers.

The real victim: working-class self-determination

While leaders argue over where to draw lines on a map, the true self-determination of the working class is systematically trampled. We define real socialism as a society where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and organised for the benefit of all.

Under the current system:

• Freedom is an illusion: workers are forced to sell their labour power for a wage, which entails providing the unpaid labour that forms the basis of capitalist wealth.
• Democratic rights are suppressed: governments and unions often cultivate a myth of an all-powerful government while insisting that nothing can be done about the systemic inequalities of capitalism.
• Solidarity is sabotaged: by emphasising national boundaries, the state ensures that workers of different nations view each other as competitors rather than allies against a common enemy.

A world without borders

We affirm that capitalism is incapable of meaningful change in the interests of the majority. The struggle for national liberation is frequently a trap; when a new national bourgeoisie takes power, the working class finds itself exploited by a new set of masters and mistresses under a new flag.

Our goal is not the ‘self-determination’ of new states, but the abolition of the state itself. We advocate for a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless society – a frontierless world community where men and women cooperate freely to produce what is needed. Only by recognising that they are exploited by the same enemy class in all countries can workers reclaim their true identity and achieve real self-determination through a global democratic revolution.

Jake Ambrose (Australia)

Material World: A Socialist Future: How it works and how society is organised (2026)

The Material World column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism is not a reform of capitalism nor a system of state management exercised by a minority. It is a fundamentally different form of society based on common ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth, democratic control by the whole community, and production carried out directly for use rather than for sale and profit.

At the centre of this vision is the principle articulated by Karl Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875): ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’. This is not an ethical command enforced by authority, but a description of how social relations can function once class divisions, markets, and material insecurity have been overcome.

How the socialist system functions

In a socialist society, land, industry, transport, and infrastructure are held in common by society as a whole. No individual, corporation, or state body owns productive resources as private property. As a result, the wages system disappears, along with money, buying and selling, and the accumulation of profit.

Production is organised solely to meet human needs. The immense productive powers already developed under capitalism—science, technology, automation, and global logistics—can be consciously redirected toward ensuring that everyone has free access to food, housing, healthcare, education, and cultural resources. Freed from the constraints of profit, production becomes rational, sustainable, and humane.

Individuals contribute according to their abilities and inclinations. Work is no longer forced by economic necessity but becomes a cooperative social activity. Distribution is based on need rather than purchasing power, reflecting the real material requirements of human life.

Democratic organisation and coordination

Socialist society is organised democratically from the bottom up. Communities and workplaces collectively decide priorities and communicate their needs and capacities. These decisions are coordinated at wider levels to ensure efficient use of resources and to avoid duplication or waste.

This is not rule by planners standing above society. It is society consciously planning itself. Modern information systems already demonstrate the technical feasibility of coordinating complex production on a global scale. In socialism, such coordination is transparent and accountable, serving human needs rather than profit or power.

Political structure and the end of class rule

Because socialism abolishes class ownership, it also abolishes the political structures designed to maintain class power. The state, understood as an instrument of coercion and domination, becomes unnecessary. What remains are administrative and coordinating bodies tasked with carrying out collectively agreed decisions.

Delegates are elected, mandated, and recallable. They do not rule; they serve. There is no permanent political elite, no professional governing class, and no separation between those who make decisions and those who live with the consequences. Political activity becomes an aspect of everyday social life rather than a specialised career.

The Paris Commune: A historical example

A glimpse of this kind of organisation was seen in the Paris Commune of 1871. For a brief period, working people took collective control of the city and replaced the existing state machinery with directly accountable institutions. Officials were elected and recallable, paid workers’ wages, and combined legislative and administrative functions rather than standing above society as a separate authority.

Although the Commune existed under extreme conditions and did not abolish capitalism, it demonstrated essential socialist principles in practice: popular control, the dismantling of hierarchical state power, and the replacement of rule by administration. Its significance lies not in its limitations, but in showing that ordinary people can organise society themselves without a ruling class.

Freedom, equality, and human development

Socialism expands freedom by removing the economic compulsion that dominates life under capitalism. With secure access to the means of life, individuals are free to develop their abilities, participate meaningfully in social decision-making, and shape their own lives. Equality means equal access to resources and equal standing in society, not enforced uniformity.

In such a society, politics and economics are no longer separate spheres. Society consciously regulates its productive activity, its relationship with nature, and its social priorities. Cooperation replaces competition, and production for use replaces production for profit.

Socialism, understood in this way, is not imposed by leaders or institutions. It can only be created by a conscious majority acting in its own interests. It represents the collective self-emancipation of humanity and the practical realisation of a society guided by the principle: ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’.

Jake Ambrose, 

Australia