Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

They say one million dollars can barely get you anything these days, which seems true, since someone just shelled out $904,500 for a century-old cork-stuffed life vest.   Yes, it was a life vest worn by a survivor of the RMS Titanic. Still! That’s a lot of money for something that, notably, never had to do its job. The vest was worn by Laura Mabel Francatelli, a secretary traveling first class to Chicago with her boss, fashion designer Lucy Duff Gordon, and her boss’s husband. Famously, the ship did not have enough lifeboats for its 2,200 passengers (only about 700 people were saved), but these three snagged a seat on lifeboat No. 1—one of the more controversial boats since it left the ship only partially filled.

[Jezebel]

A certain Sayo Masuda (1925-2008) was sold at age 12 by her impoverished family to a geisha house. In 1957 she published ’Autobiography of a Geisha,’ which Hastings, the historian, quotes. The female parliamentarians leading the drive for the Prostitution Prevention Law roused Masuda to bitter sarcasm: ’All done up in their finery, mincing about so proudly on their tour of the red-light district.’  ’Among those making the laws,’ she demands, ’were there any women like us who couldn’t have survived if they hadn’t prostituted themselves?’  

[Japan Today]

One homeless advocacy group said the bill, which would require homeless people to perform unpaid labor to pay for involuntary treatment, ’evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow’ .

[Common Dreams]

The MAMDANI Act enacts sweeping immigration law changes that would deport, denaturalize, deny U.S. citizenship, or entry to any alien who is a member of a socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.

[Chip Roy]

Today, our understanding of inheritance has moved far beyond Mendel, and insights from genomics refute the prejudiced idea that racial inequality is determined by genes. Even so, many believe that inequality is genetic because they are biased by an inaccurate conception of race called ’genetic essentialism’ . We present data from a randomized trial to argue that if teachers move genetics instruction beyond Mendel and toward more complex genomics concepts—what we call ’humane genomics education’—they can protect students from believing in unscientific notions of genetic essentialism and support their scientifically accurate understanding of race as a social construction.

[Science]

The book plausibly argues that while anti-racist, feminist, ecological, or solidarity-based practices within everyday life are important, they do not, on their own, create a new form of social mediation. A new society does not emerge through a mere shift in values. It requires different social conditions of reproduction. This, too, represents a significant step forward compared to that left-wing moral politics which tends to reduce questions of social form to matters of attitude.

[Left wing communism NOT an infantile disorder,]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money may not grow on trees, but according to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), it appears to be growing exceptionally well for a tiny fraction of Americans. In a recent post on X, Sanders renewed his long-running criticism of wealth concentration in the U.S. ‘Never before have we had so much income inequality’, he wrote. ‘Last year, the bottom 50% saw their income go down by $27, on average, while the top 0.01% gained $2.9 million’, Sanders continued. ‘And the top 0.001%? They saw their income go up by $20 million. In a single year. “Yes. We must tax the rich,”’ 

[Yahoo]

‘“Democratic Socialist” is to the Communist what “National Socialist” was to the Nazi’, reality TV star and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt [sic] posted on X. 

[Fox News]

Zinn expressed the source of his motivations. ‘I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing’, he said. ‘I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers’. 

[Portside]

… Petrograd’s local Soviet government and Bolshevik Party organizations struggled to implement the Bolshevik Party program, fight domestic and foreign counterrevolutionaries, quiet labor unrest, and provide food, fuel, and education to the local population. The methods and strategies used by the government and party organizations to organize public life and fight enemies, domestic and foreign, not only preserved the infant Soviet regime but proved to be the first manifestation of what would become the one-party authoritarian Soviet political system. 

[The Bolsheviks Survive. Petrograd 1919. By Alexander Rabinowitch]

We emphasized, with Marx, that the proletarian revolution is not only necessary to overthrow capitalist rule but also to change the proletarians, so that they become fit to transform the world. Through the experience of prolonged collective struggle and being forced to reinvent their social practices to survive, proletarians throw off ‘the muck of ages’ as Marx put it, the weight of capitalist and pre-capitalist ideology and practices. Fredo thinks it is utopian to put that much ‘faith in revolutionary transformation of attitudes’. But isn’t it utopian to think that the revolution can succeed without attitudes and social practices being thoroughly transformed? 

[Internationalist Perspective]

The fear of acting incorrectly, of causing harm, or of being criticized by others can become politically paralyzing. One interviewee captured this dynamic succinctly when she explained that she would rather refrain from acting than risk doing something wrong. Such statements reveal an important contradiction. The ethical demand to act responsibly can, under certain conditions, undermine political action itself. This is not because ethical concerns are inherently conservative. Nor is it because criticism lacks political value. The problem is rather that individualized responsibility offers a weak response to problems that are fundamentally collective.

[Jacobin]

(These links are provided for information, target sites don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Global real worker pay fell 12 percent while real CEO pay surged 54 percent between 2019 and 2025. At least four CEOs of major corporations each pocketed over $100 million in pay and bonuses last year. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan led the pack at over $205 million. Billionaires were paid $2,500 per second in dividends in 2025. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and Oxfam are calling for urgent action to rein in extreme wealth, including higher, fairer taxes on the richest and binding limits on CEO pay.

[Common Dreams]

In 2011, he spent 81 days detained in China for criticizing the government following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which 90,000 people died. Ai Weiwei worked with hundreds of anonymous volunteers to identify and publish the names of more than 5,000 children who died under the rubble of poorly constructed schools, information that the government sought to censor. 

[El Pais]

…. the Housing and Land Rights Network, have argued that the real numbers are significantly higher and estimate at 3 million…Shelters, where available, are frequently inadequate, overcrowded, unsanitary, unsafe for women, or located far from work opportunities. Instead of treating shelter as a right linked to dignity, many city administrations treat it as temporary charity. During mega-events such as the Commonwealth Games 2010 or the G20 Summit gatherings hosted in India, homeless people are often subjected to eviction drives in the name of beautification. Pavements are cleared, encampments removed, and poverty hidden so that cities may appear modern to visitors.

[Countercurrents]

The right to life in Kenya is often treated as if it begins at conception and ends at birth. As in much of the world, self-described ‘pro-lifers’ claim to defend life at all costs – yet too often stop short of defending the lives already being lived, and those cut short too early.

[openDemocracy]

…the central question of his book, which is built around a concept Marx called ‘disposable time’—the time left over after workers have completed the labor necessary to sustain themselves and their families. Marx traced this idea back to an obscure 1821 pamphlet he discovered in the British Museum, in which the author argued that a nation’s true wealth lies not in gold or goods but in free time: ‘Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more’.

[People’s World]

The communist revolution, if it arrives in the nick of time to prevent humankind’s suicide, is a seismic event that changes everything. It is difficult to imagine it but it will leave nothing untouched. People will change. In the heat of the struggle for survival, proletarians will come together and become the self-conscious collective worker, which he/she already was but didn’t know it. All human relationships (between producers, family members, men-women, young-old, teachers-students and more) change in the process. The entire way in which society reproduces itself changes. Work changes. It no longer means labor.

[Internationalist Perspective]

(These links are provided for information, Target sites don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Another world war? (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Economic Foundations of Capitalism’s Rise and Decline. Communist Workers Organisation. 2026.

‘For global capitalism the devastation of world-wide imperialist war is the solution to its ineluctable profitability crisis’. This — that a third world war is needed for capitalism to continue — is the position that this 100-page book seeks to defend.

The argument starts from the view that under capitalism there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as capital accumulation proceeds, due to an increasing proportion of capital being invested in plant, machinery and materials rather than in employing workers (whose labour is the only source of profits). This was something noted by Marx but he also noted other tendencies, arising too from capital accumulation but conversely tending to raise the rate of profit, such as plant, machinery and materials becoming cheaper and increasing surplus value per worker. So, what happens over any given period — which tendencies prevail and so whether the rate of profit does actually fall — is unpredictable. There are also other factors that reduce profitability, such as overproduction in an important industry having a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy resulting in a general slump in production.

The book hopelessly mixes up all the various tendencies, elevating a theoretical slow long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall into ‘the drive towards the collapse of the capitalist system’. The authors also see this as, in the shorter term, the cause of slumps but to do that there would have to have been a fantastically rapid increase in mechanisation and productivity. They are correct, though, that an important way out of a slump is the restoration of the rate of profit due to devaluation of the capital invested in the plant and machinery.

According to the CWO, a new factor entered into the equation at the beginning of the 20th century: capitalism, after coming to dominate the whole world and creating the basis for a world socialist society, passed its peak and entered into a period of decline which they call ‘decadence’. In this period, the boom/slump cycle continues but:

‘Capitalist competition is no longer a purely economic battle between firms but imperialist rivalry between “great powers”; where, in short, the massive devaluation of capital required to assuage the crisis of low profitability and achieve a new round of accumulation is obtained by the destruction of capital values via war’.

‘The history of capitalism since the start of the twentieth century’ we are told, ‘has been this cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction’. That the First World War was caused by imperialist states being driven to war as the only way out of a fall in the rate of profit doesn’t hold. Conflict between the ‘great powers’ over sources of raw materials, markets and investment outlets makes more sense. Replacing the destruction caused during the Second World War will have been one explanation for the resumption of capital accumulation in the postwar period but by no means the only one and would have been completed within a decade or so. Another, more significant factor will have been the expansion of the world market as more and more parts of the world were industrialised.

Whether or not the rate of profit has fallen since the 1970s is a moot point since it is not easy to calculate. On some assumptions it has; on others it hasn’t. In any event, a hard-to-calculate and unknown average rate of profit will not have been a factor influencing decisions to invest by those in charge of capitalist enterprises; shorter-term and particular sectoral considerations will have been the deciding factors.

The question also arises as to why the long gap between the end of reconstruction and the outbreak of the Third World War. The authors provide an economic history of the period since the 1970s but don’t answer this question. They describe well enough the extent of the non-productive, financial sector that has grown on the basis of the real, productive sector of the capitalist world economy, but can’t explain away the real capital accumulation that has taken place.

When they write that, if socialism is not established, ‘capitalism could continue on its demented course for centuries’, it is not clear what they mean. Is it that capitalism could continue after a nuclear world war or that capitalism might not lead to one for centuries?

In short, the CWO have not proved their claim that present-day capitalism must, for capital accumulation to continue, lead to a Third World War (they are suggesting it’s going to be between China and the US). As long as capitalism continues, there will be wars but there is no compelling reason why there should be another world war, this time between states armed with nuclear weapons. It is not entirely impossible of course, but it wouldn’t be to restore the rate of profit.

Adam Buick

Old Fallacies — A Look at the International Communist Current

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The organization called International Communist Current is a mixture of perceptiveness towards some aspects of capitalism, blindness to others, and a belief in long-exposed fallacies. It recognizes that nationalization is state capitalism, that the so-called national liberation movements are anti-socialist and that Russia, China, Cuba, etc. are “just so many capitalist bastions” — “There are no socialist countries on this planet”.

ICC claims to be Marxist but shows no appreciation of Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s economic laws. Politically it belongs to the early 19th-century world of Louis Blanqui (originator of ICC’s slogan “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”) and the young and inexperienced Marx and Engels. It rejects the mature Marx’s view of the necessity to gain control of “the machinery of government, including the armed forces”, and offers instead confrontation with the state power and “world civil war” to be waged by “armed workers’ councils” (see ICC pamphlet Nation or Class).

A basic difficulty about establishing Socialism is that such a social system, involving as it does the disappearance of buying and selling, wages and prices, and the coercive state, could only be operated if the mass of the population understood and wanted it and were ready to accept all the new responsibilities of voluntary co-operation that would rest on them. If the working class as they are at present, most of them attached to capitalism, preoccupied with wages and prices, wage differentials and trade-union demarcation lines, and dependent on management direction and trade-union leadership, were suddenly faced with Socialism there would be chaos and no alternative but to return to capitalism.

Two solutions were offered. One was the Blanquist and early Marxist view—a transition period during which the mass of the population would be “educated to Socialism”. This is the ICC policy. The other, the mature Marxist, view was stated by Engels in his 1895 Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France:

“The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses. When it gets to be a matter of the complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they are to act. That much the history of the last fifty years has taught us.”

And again, referring to France:

“Socialists realize more and more that no durable success is possible unless they win over in advance the great mass of the people, which, in this case, means the peasants. The slow work of propaganda and parliamentary activity are here also recognised as the next task of the party.”

ICC rejects the Marxist idea of socialists gaining control of Parliament on the ground that Parliament is nothing but “mystification of the working class”. Of course defenders of capitalism use Parliament to mislead the working class, just as they use religion, sport and the bogus economic theories of J. M. Keynes. They can do this only because the workers lack socialist understanding—which fact ICC fails to see. It thinks that if non-socialist workers spontaneously throw up workers’ councils these can’t be “mystified”. Experience has shown how wrong ICC is. Lenin, in State and Revolution, complained that his political opponents had

“managed to pollute even the Soviets, after the model of the most despicable middle-class parliamentarians, by turning them into hollow talking shops.”

ICC greatly admire the Workers’ Councils set up in Germany after the first world war. At the Workers’ Councils National Congress in 1918, and again in 1919, they were bamboozled by Social Democratic politicians into voting their support for the Social Democrat Government, which government then sidetracked the Councils and used state forces to crush resistance.

The argument that because the franchise has been used to trick the workers they should not use it was sensibly answered by Marx in the preamble he wrote for the French Workers’ Party. In it, he commended transforming the vote “from a means of duping, which it has been hitherto, into an instrument of emancipation”.

As ICC are not going to wait until there is a socialist majority, they have to find some other spur to working-class action. Like the young Marx and Engels, and like the British Communist Party in the 1930s, they find it in capitalism’s periodic crises and depressions which stir up discontent about unemployment and falling living standards. But, as Engels pointed out in a letter to Bernstein (25th January 1882), when the depression passes and production and employment expand again “returning prosperity also breaks the revolution and lays the basis for the victory of reaction”.

Are depressions permanent?

ICC think they have an answer to this. They say that the present depression is permanent, that it throws up problems the capitalists are impotent to deal with, and that capitalism cannot afford any more concessions to the workers. The great changeover is supposed to have happened in 1914, after which capitalism became “decadent”, ICC evidently does not know that all these themes are almost as old as capitalism itself.

In every one of capitalism’s depressions there have been people, capitalists as well as workers, who have been convinced that it would be permanent. In the “Great Depression” of the last quarter of the 19th century, which lasted for twenty years, it was widely believed. Lord Randolph Churchill, shortly before he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared in 1884: “We are suffering from a depression of trade extending as far back as 1874, ten years of trade depression, and the most hopeful either among our capitalists or our artisans can discover no signs of a revival . . . Turn your eyes where you will, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease.”

Even Engels in 1886 temporarily abandoned Marx’s view of crises and announced a theory of “permanent and chronic depression”. Marx’s own view was tersely summed up in his statement: “There are no permanent crises.”

ICC’s example of the supposed impotence of the capitalists to deal with a problem relates to inflation. In International Review No. 10 (page 10) ICC says that “the bourgeoisie” is equally terrified of more inflation and of ending inflation by “restriction of credit”. From which it is evident that ICC does not understand the cause and purpose of inflation, rejects Marx’s demonstration that inflation is the result of excess issue of inconvertible paper currency, and has—like the Labour Party—fallen for the Keynesian nonsense about the supposed consequence of expanding or contracting credit. Inflation, like free trade, is just a way of operating capitalism. It suits some capitalists and not others. Inflation serves the interests of borrowers, including industrial capitalists, who take up loans and repay them later in depreciated currency.

Inflation and Credit

Inflation, at least for a considerable period, also enables many employers to get away with paying reduced real wages. Deflation, on the other hand, suits financial interests and lenders. If and when inflation reaches dangerous levels, or when those who favour deflation get their way, inflation will be curbed or ended as it has been on scores of occasions in the past, in this and other countries.

Marx showed what he thought of the people who held ICC’s superficial view about credit.

“They looked upon the expansion and contraction of credit, which is a mere symptom of the periodic changes in the industrial cycle, as their cause.” 

(Capital Vol. 1, p. 695, Kerr edn.)

To show that capitalism is not what it used to be before 1914, ICC points to recent falling production and living standards, and rising unemployment, but this is what has taken place at the beginning of every depression for nearly two hundred years.

Capitalism did indeed change in 1914. As Professor E. H. Carr puts it, up to 1914: “Britain was the pre-eminent Great Power, and the directing centre of the worldwide capitalist economy.” Now the industrial and military centres of power have shifted to New York, Moscow and Brussels; but this has not altered capitalism’s economic laws or introduced a new “decadence”.

ICC’s belief that since 1914 capitalism cannot afford to make concessions to the workers is belied by the facts, and betrays a failure to understand the economics of capitalism. The capitalists (supported by ignorant or servile academics) have always “proved” that they could not afford to concede anything, as for example giving up the twelve-hour working day and the employment of small children: but the concessions have continued since 1914 as before, and particularly since the second world war.

As output per head of the workers increases (a process speeded-up during the present depression) of course the capitalists can afford to let the workers have some of the increase—as ICC will discover when the depression lifts and in the programmes at the next General Election.

Regarding “the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, ICC admit that during their prolonged “transition period” the dictatorship will be operating capitalism all over the world (see Nation or Class). They have, however, not seen its implications. How will the dictatorship deal with the next normal capitalist crisis and the strikes that will accompany it? Will they have an “incomes policy”? or suppress the unions?

The peasants are not to be allowed to share in governmental power. What if they seize the land? And what will the ICC dictatorship do when workers, discontented with the effects of capitalism, carry on ICC policy and set up “armed workers’ councils” to fight the dictatorship?

All of ICC’s assumptions about capitalism are wrong; but let us suppose that they are right. Suppose that a minority of workers sets up armed councils all over the world, and suppose (absurd as it is) that they could win against the massive combined armed forces of all the world’s governments, and suppose they succeeded in setting up their world dictatorship—what would have been gained? The problem of winning over the mass of the population before Socialism could be established would still be there, its completion put back a few more years by ICC’s unnecessary and useless war.

Edgar Hardcastle

Blogger's Note:

In the original issue of the October 1977 Socialist Standard, this article had a notice attached below it advertising a cassette tape recording of a recent debate between the ICC and the SPGB. Though the SPGB and the ICC debated each other twice in 1977 - once in Leeds and once at the SPGB's Head Office - my guess is that the advertised recording is of the debate in London between Alan Ward of the ICC and Edgar Hardcastle ('E. Hardy') of the SPGB. That recording of the London debate is available on the SPGB's website at the following link:

Debate with the I.C.C.  – Which way Socialism? 

Debate at Head Office with the International Communist Current; Hardy (SPGB) v. A. Ward (I.C.C.)

Date: 20th August 1977

Letter: Airbrushed (2014)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Airbrushed

Dear Editors

On 12th July at Sheffield Anarchist Bookfair the Communist Workers Organisation (CWO) held a meeting titled ‘The only war which is worth fighting is the class war’. The subject was the First World War and at 8 minutes 21 seconds in, the speaker representing the CWO stated ‘I won’t go into the various British ones today but the only group – and it was a group rather than an organisation – that can claim to have had any real anti-war policy completely was the Socialist Labour Party’.

In Revolutionary Perspectives issue 4 (Journal of the CWO) dated Summer 2014, the article ‘Social Democracy, the First World War and the Working-class in Britain’ starting on page 14 discusses ‘The Response of Socialists in Britain’ even discussing the Socialist Labour Party (De Leonist) on page 18.

For all the CWO airbrushing of consistent SPGB opposition to the First World War, it is ironic the same CWO speaker once debated the SPGB accusing the SPGB of being ‘schooled in Stalinism’.

Jon D. White 

(by email)

Reply:

Strange indeed, and for two reasons. The first being the clear and principled opposition to the war from the SPGB (on the basis that it was a capitalist war and not in the slightest about the interests of the working class).  Second, the SLP was split into two factions, one pro-war, the other anti-war (with articles in their paper The Socialist reflecting this division at the start of the conflict). It was only some months into the war that the anti-war faction won out and the SLP clearly stated its opposition to the slaughter. We know that the CWO as ‘left communists’ venerate the SLP because after the conflict the majority of its membership left to join the pro-Bolshevik Communist Party of Great Britain at its foundation, but the SLP’s attitude to the war has been well documented and there is no excuse for such shoddy historical revisionism. – Editors.

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kylie Jenner, the 27-year-old billionaire and car enthusiast, was recently spotted with her sister Kendall Jenner driving her $3 million Bugatti Chiron in Beverly Hills. Known for her impressive car collection, Kylie gave fans a rare glimpse of herself behind the wheel rather than posing next to her fleet. 

(Yahoo)

‘Everything outside the Christian framework — including secular music, television, and books — was discouraged. Just as I signed multiple purity pledges throughout my preteen and teen years, promising to avoid not just sex, but even impure thoughts, we were taught to practice absolute abstinence from dangerous ideas’. 

(AlterNet)

While official data is still somewhat sketchy, it’s estimated that 12,000 illegal transplants are performed annually, about 10% of the total number of transplants conducted each year. The organ trade is immensely profitable, generating between $840 million to $1.7 billion in revenue for a relatively small number of traffickers, according to estimates compiled in 2017. Organ trafficking survives, in part, because the demand from affluent consumers in the advanced capitalist West is so high and the legal supply of organs – primarily (about 80%) kidneys, but also lungs, livers and cornea – barely keeps pace. Many people wait at least two years to qualify to receive an organ transplant legally and thousands die every year – about 25 daily, according to the World Health Organization – because no organ becomes available in time to save them. Where do the illegally harvested organs come from? Primarily from North Africa and South Asia. Organ traffickers prey on poor and vulnerable rural dwellers, offering cash in exchange for an organ, usually a kidney. 

(Counterpunch)

This is about the Arctic. You have Russia that is trying to become king of the Arctic with 60-plus icebreakers, some of them nuclear-powered. Do you know how many we have, Jesse? We have two, and one just caught on fire. This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources. This is about, as the polar ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and pushing up there as well. So, it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security. It’s critical minerals. 

(Common Dreams)

The response provided by South Africa’s elected officials has so far been both lacking and sinister. It targets migrants with few political allies in the country’s fractured political scene, increasingly characterized by populism, highlighting problems without solutions. 

(Geopolitical Intelligence Services AG)

As long as the capitalist system continues, we will never be able to escape from the shackles of economic crisis, war and massacre, ecological destruction, and workers’ sacrifice. The only solution is the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement with communism, a society in which the means of production are no longer in the hands of capitalists or the state, but are socialised, in which production and distribution are in harmony with humanity and nature. 

(Controversies)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Left currency crankism (2025)

Book Review from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time to Get Rid of Money. It’s just not worth it. By Phillip Sutton. Old Moles Collective. 60 pages.

This booklet is a classic example of being right for the wrong reason. It starts off well enough by saying that ‘it has been said that money is the root of all evil but this is wrong; it is class society’ and that ‘getting rid of money can only happen when the working class takes power and gets rid of capitalism’. After that, it’s downhill all the way as the author, strangely from someone who has emerged from the Left Communist milieu, embraces a currency crank theory of banking and money.

We are told that:

‘It is a total myth that banks need or use savings in order to lend out money. This monetary system is what Aaron Sahr has called “Keystroke Capitalism” ie, money is quite simply a product of using a keyboard as the banks create money by making and recording loans on their computer!!’ (his emphasis).

and that:

‘… the whole financial system is based on creating money out of thin air … The whole financial industry really is just based on creating electronic assets (ie, virtual money) that are loans on which interest can be charged. What a system — an electronic data entry costs virtually nothing but earns interest for the bank!’

To back up this incredible view Sutton cites a 2014 article from the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin. Although this does state that banks create money when they make a loan, this is just a definition and does not imply that they do this from thin air. This said, the article’s authors have only themselves to blame when ignorant or naive people take their words literally.

Sutton writes that:

‘In modern capitalism it appears that in the money creation process, it is the borrowers that determine the money supply, and the only restriction on this credit is the ability, or perhaps the willingness, of borrowers to put forward existing assets as collateral against a loan’.

If you think that banks can simply create money to lend at interest by a few keyboard strokes, this is a logical deduction — the only limit to what banks could lend would be the amount requested by credit-worthy borrowers.

In an appendix Sutton reproduces a long section from that Bank of England article which includes this passage which contradicts his claim above:

‘Although commercial banks create money through lending, they cannot do so freely without limit. Banks are limited in how much they can lend if they are to remain profitable in a competitive banking system’.

If he read, beyond the introductory summary, the part where the authors expand on this he would find it is not ‘a total myth’ that banks need funds to back up a loan. The article explains what happens after a bank has used its keyboard to record a loan when the borrower then begins to spend the money.

When the borrower does this, most of it is likely to go to people who bank with other banks; so the lending bank will have to transfer money to another bank (if some of the recipients bank with the same bank that will go towards reducing its outgoings). What happens is that at the end of the day (literally) banks clear what they owe each other. If a bank has more money going out than coming in it covers this by drawing on its reserves. But this cannot continue indefinitely as at some point its reserves would be exhausted. The article goes on:

‘Banks therefore try to attract or retain additional liabilities to accompany their new loans. In practice other banks would also be making new loans and creating new deposits, so one way they can do this is to try and attract some of these newly created deposits. In a competitive banking sector, that may involve increasing the rate they offer to households on their savings accounts. By attracting new deposits, the bank can increase its lending without running down its reserves. Alternatively, a bank can borrow from other banks or attract other forms of liabilities, at least temporarily. But whether through deposits or other liabilities, the bank would need to make sure it was attracting and retaining some kind of funds in order to keep expanding lending’ (their emphasis ).

So much, then, for the idea that banks don’t need to fund the loans they make. The article then explains what does limit bank lending:

‘And the cost of that [attracting funds] needs to be measured against the interest the bank expects to earn on the loans it is making, which in turn depends on the level of Bank Rate set by the Bank of England. For example, if a bank continued to attract new borrowers and increase lending by reducing mortgage rates, and sought to attract some new deposits by increasing the rates it was paying its customers on their deposits, it might soon find it unprofitable to keep expanding its lending. Competition for loans and deposits, and the desire to make a profit, therefore limit money creation by banks’.

Sutton’s misunderstanding of the nature of money and banking leads him down the same road as other adherents of the Thin Air School of Banking — that debt is the problem.

‘… it is the super-rich which owns the majority of debt in the world whereas the working class, which suffers most from the burden of debt, actually owns very little of that debt … Given the level of debt today, it would have to be one of the first tasks of the working class to cancel all debts even if it cannot completely eliminate money quite so easily’.

This makes the booklet a curious combination of Left Communism and currency crankism. But, to be fair, the author does want to see the working class eventually establish ‘a society of abundance in which people are rewarded for their contributions by the free provision of their personal needs’.

Adam Buick

Letter: Capitalism’s Endgame: a reply to our review (2023)

Letter to the Editors from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Socialist Standard,

I’m writing in reply to your recently published review of Capitalism’s Endgame. We all appreciate the time you have taken to read the book, and on the whole – given our political disagreements – it is a fair and balanced review.

There are nonetheless a few points which we would like to take issue with.

Your first two paragraphs read to us more like a settling of accounts with specific groups in the UK rather than a response to the book itself, or indeed to the historical Left Communist tradition which is a far broader current than you seem to suggest. Individually we may have been members of the ICC at different times but we hold no brief for this or any other group.

As for their ‘minuscule size’… in the grand scheme of things (a world population of 8 billion) the SPGB is equally insignificant. I would even hazard a guess that there are more model railway enthusiasts in Britain than there are members of the SPGB, but I would hardly draw any conclusions from that as to the SPGB’s political importance, or indeed the quality of its writing.

Where we do stand four-square with the whole Left Communist tradition, is in the intransigent defence of internationalism and the refusal to sanction imperialist war under any circumstances, including in Ukraine. You say that ‘capitalism’s massive and continued expansion in recent decades… has not plunged humanity, as predicted, into another barbarous world war’. Whether or not war actually breaks out will be determined by a multitude of factors, including whether or not the workers are prepared to fight in it. However, anyone who cannot today see the dangers arising from the growing military tension between the USA and China – which incorporates the Ukraine war – is either naive or asleep at the wheel.

You say that the book is ‘not an easy read’, and this may be true – but is it relevant? Anyone who wants an easy read can buy a potboiler in the best-seller section. We’ve tried to avoid unnecessary jargon but nobody should expect it to be easy to understand capitalism today. Nor do we subscribe to the often popular idea that difficult questions need to be ‘pre-digested’ for the benefit of workers – we prefer to rely on workers’ intelligence and appetite for understanding.

Your reference to ‘dead Russians and Germans’ is merely a cheap jibe, unworthy of a serious review. Have physicists stopped using Hooke’s Law or Maxwell’s Equations just because their authors are no longer in the land of the living?

We make no apologies for trying to ground ourselves in Marx. As we state explicitly in the Introduction, ‘If we cite Marx extensively it is simply because on almost any subject of social evolution, Marx has thought about it already, and in impressive depth, if only still in outline’. Nonetheless, ‘while the immense fertility of this most powerful of social thinkers gives us our starting point, we have no qualms in trying to push his premises further or even in contradicting them should this seem necessary’; we go on to identify three aspects of Marx’s premises which seem to us to be inadequate. This, for us, is an integral part of any theoretical, or indeed historical, approach: to build critically on what has been handed down by previous generations. As Newton said, if we can see further it is only because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

You claim to be ‘in the Marxist tradition’. Perhaps a little more ‘poring over Capital and The German Ideology’ would do you good.

You consider the last chapter, ‘Imagining the Future’ to be the weakest, and you may well be right. As the author, I take full responsibility for this; perhaps it was a mistake to try to combine a summary of the previous chapters and what is intended to be essentially an introduction to a more future-oriented effort to come.

That said, I disagree profoundly with what seems to be your approach to how we can envisage a future communist (or socialist, as you prefer) society. While you are absolutely right to insist on the importance of the ‘interconnected world-wide division of labour’, you seem to think that in the end it all comes down to technology (3D printing, AI or what have you), and that ‘mass sufficiency’ and ‘free access’ can be taken for granted.

This seems to me to be grounded in the assumptions common to socialists at the beginning of the 20th century when the world’s population was 1.6 billion. Today, with a world population approaching 8 billion and projected to rise to 10 billion and in a situation where – as Phil Sutton’s chapter on the environment makes abundantly clear – human society is pushing beyond the boundaries of the planet’s physical capacity to sustain it, the whole notion of ‘abundance’ needs to be called into question and rethought.

In two famous and oft-quoted phrases, Marx described communism as a world where ‘society would at last inscribe upon its banners “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”’, and where ‘the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all’. This may seem like ‘philosophical meandering’ to you. To me, it is a good starting point.

In capitalist society, the sole aim behind the development of technology is to increase profit (or to make war). In communism, it will be to satisfy human need, but this immediately poses the question of what exactly human need is. This in turn is a social not a natural question.

Any discussion about the nature of communism which hopes to go beyond science-fiction, or Utopian dreaming à la William Morris, must therefore begin by laying a theoretical, materialist foundation which alone can make such discussion possible. And such a discussion would have to engage not just with ‘luxury communism’, but with the arguably far more popular and influential ‘degrowth socialism’.

The chapter as a whole apparently fails to make this point sufficiently comprehensible. We hope to do better in a forthcoming, more developed volume.

Communist greetings

Lars Torvaldsson.

Reply:

We will let the debating points stand and comment on the more substantial points.

The way we express ourselves is important as the point of it is to communicate clearly and effectively to aid understanding. The idea that Marxists can only do this with quotations from selected texts on almost every other page is a failure of communication. Marxism is a method for understanding the world and acting on it, not a catechism with sacred texts that are regurgitated, interpreted and reinterpreted endlessly. And we are far from alone in making this criticism of Left Communism generally and the ICC in particular.

We do not accept the view, inherited from the ICC, that capital accumulation has only been possible since 1914 to replace physical means of production destroyed in world wars nor the implication that sooner or later another one will be needed if capitalism is to continue. This flies in the face of the facts. Capital accumulation has expanded immensely since 1914 and has continued now for nearly 80 years without a world war. As long as capitalism lasts there will be wars but a third world war is not inevitable for capitalism to survive economically.

We look forward to seeing how you develop the view that ‘mass sufficiency’ and ‘free access’ cannot be taken for granted and what you are going to propose in the event of them not being possible. — Editors

Checkmate? (2023)

Book Review from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism’s Endgame. By Mark Hayes, Phillip Sutton and Lars Torvaldsson. Old Moles Collective. 2023.

This is by three writers who stand in the Left Communist tradition, the main organisations of which in the UK are the International Communist Current and the Communist Workers Organisation. They tend to agree with us that socialism or communism means a society of common ownership and free access to wealth without wages, prices, markets etc and also oppose reformism, state capitalism, nationalism and so on. Both groups are very small and they have a tendency (particularly the ICC) to express themselves using difficult, abstract terminology that found its height during the Third International period. It doesn’t make for an easy read and it’s equally easy to come to the conclusion that their minuscule size is as much to do with their inability to move beyond archaic language and formulas as it is about the substance of their political ideas.

Interestingly, this book seems to be an attempt to move a little beyond their established political positions and draws on the ideas of both groups while indicating that their previous formulations might be in need of some revision. Left Communists (like many Trotskyists) tend towards catastrophising – capitalism is forever in its death throws because of its internal contradictions and all that remains is for the proletariat to raise its combat to the level that the vanguard party can guide the revolution towards communism – indeed this is one of their key points of difference with the SPGB. The ICC has long held the view of Rosa Luxemburg that capitalism cannot meaningfully expand once it has integrated all the previously non-capitalist areas of the world economy (such as peasant economies) because in ‘pure capitalism’ the workers and capitalists combined are unable to buy back all the products of industry. This means external markets are necessary and once these have been exhausted then capitalism will enter a period of glutted markets and permanent crisis (said to have been around the time of the First World War). The authors dismiss this erroneous theory as we have done, as it simply does not correspond with the facts – and as we have demonstrated previously, it is also flawed at a theoretical level. They also take issue with the alternative theory adopted by the CWO and originally developed by Grossman and Mattick that the falling rate of profit (and eventually, falling mass of profit) due to technological innovation is the key reason why capitalism is fatally flawed, leading to the need to purge excess capital from the system in destructive wars.

To the credit of the authors, they are at least living in the real world when they realise there is a need to account for capitalism’s massive and continued expansion in recent decades and that it has not plunged humanity, as predicted, into another barbarous world war (though periodic economic crises and more localised wars have continued). They note that the genuine globalisation of capitalism (markets, financial superstructures, the labour market, etc) has underpinned periodically strong growth rates. They also note the massive and related expansion of energy usage, which has risen exponentially since the 1950s and led to a mass of climate change issues.

Indeed, it is here, more than in the pure economics, that they seem to locate capitalism’s potential ‘endgame’, as the competitive drive to accumulate profit leads to ever more environmental destruction. These sections of the book are good and worth reading. This comes with a caveat though – like many of those in the broad Marxist tradition that may be seen to be developing or applying ideas in a slightly different way, there’s a sense that they feel the need to justify everything they write with near constant reference to dead Germans and Russians. This, for instance, leads to endless poring over Marx’s German Ideology, Capital, Communist Manifesto and other texts – the sections where they have more obviously extended their reading a little beyond this tend to be the best. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the Marxist method – we sit in that tradition ourselves of course – but it’s not entirely helpful if it turns into the political equivalent of an autistic tic.

There is another caveat too. We would agree with them that capitalism is a decadent social system in that it has long outlived its usefulness. By this we mean that by creating an interconnected world-wide division of labour and raising the forces of production to unparalleled heights, capitalism has created the conditions of mass sufficiency necessary for the construction of a socialist society to replace it. The last chapter of the book is called ‘Imagining the Future’ and it could reasonably be expected that the contents would be reflected by the title, but it is a disappointing chapter and a missed opportunity, being mainly philosophical meanderings about the revolutionary process and the ‘realm of freedom’ beyond the ‘realm of necessity’. There is nothing about the recent growth of the Fully Automated Luxury Communism idea, and certainly nothing on how 3D printing, digitalisation or even AI can help underpin a society of sufficiency and free access, which seems odd. However, the authors do say another, follow-up volume is being prepared, on ‘the nature and perspective of communism’. We just hope they put down the German Ideology for a minute, reflect on their more recent reading and let their imaginations take over for a while.

DAP

Saving graces (2020)

Book Review from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Science and Passion of Communism. Selected Writings of Amadeo Bordiga. Edited by Pietro Basso. Brill. 540 pages,

Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970), the first leader of the Italian Communist Party who later became a prominent figure in the Left Communist opposition to Stalin, was a super-Leninist. Not only did he hold that under capitalism the working class was incapable of understanding socialism but that (for this reason) the working class should not be consulted by the vanguard party as to what to do; this party should seize power as a minority in an armed uprising and then rule on behalf of the workers. So why should he be of any interest to socialists?

After the Second World War Bordiga resumed activity (during the fascist period he had remained in Italy), which for him was mainly a question of developing a correct understanding of Marx. This led to his two saving graces – his analysis of the USSR as capitalist and his view that communist society had to be a society from which production for the market, working for wages, and using money (even as an accounting unit) had disappeared.

According to him, Russia had never ceased to have a capitalist economy. In this he followed up Lenin’s view of the ‘New Economic Policy’ that the Bolsheviks were forced to adopt in 1921 and which Lenin described as the development of capitalism under the auspices of the ‘proletarian state’ (i.e, a state controlled by a vanguard party claiming to have socialism as its aim). For Bordiga, at some point during the 1920s the ‘proletarian state’ ceased to exist but capitalism continued. He preferred to call Russia simply capitalist rather than state capitalist, on the grounds that production was in the hands of enterprises as separate accounting and capital accumulating units producing for the market. Even though he exaggerated the degree of autonomy of state enterprises, he was to be proved right to the extent that, with the collapse of Bolshevik rule in the 1990s, many of the oligarchs who emerged as open capitalists did come from the ranks of those who had managed state enterprises.

To illustrate Bordiga’s view of communism (which we call socialism) the editor has chosen an article written in 1958 entitled ‘The Revolutionary Programme of Communist Society Eliminates All Forms of Ownership of Land, the Instruments of Production and the Products of Labour’. In it Bordiga starts from a criticism Engels made of the agrarian programme adopted by the French Workers Party in 1894 which came out in favour of peasants owning the land they worked even those employing workers. Engels saw this as ‘opportunism’ in the sense of adopting a policy to attract votes that contradicted the socialist aim of common ownership by society of land. This aim, says Bordiga, rules out both peasant cooperatives and either municipal or state ownership of land.

He doesn’t object so much to the word ‘nationalisation’ (also used by Marx) as this implies that the land belongs to the people rather than to a political institution. He ends up rejecting the word ‘property’ – even as ‘common property’ – altogether as it still implies ownership by a restricted group, even if this group is the whole human population alive at a particular time. In communism the existing population would not have exclusive rights over the land to do with it as they pleased, as this would be to exclude future generations. What they will have is the use of the land which they will have to care for and hand down to future generations in the same or better state that they found it. Bordiga quotes Marx:

  ‘Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias’ (Capital, Volume 3, chapter 46).

The words in Latin are from Roman law (which Marx started to study in university) meaning literally ‘good heads of family’. Today, we would use a more familiar form of words such as ‘good stewards’.

This introduces what would now be called an ecological dimension to socialist society as envisaged by Marx. Bordiga, writing in the 1950s as a Marxist, took up this point and developed it in other writings, long before ecological movements got off the ground.

Bordiga goes on to apply this not just to natural resources but also to the instruments of labour made by humans and to the products of their work (hence the article’s title). None of these will be ‘owned’ but will simply be there to be used by good stewards. The concept of ‘property’ and ‘ownership’ is replaced by that of ‘stewardship’ though the word Bordiga uses is ‘usufruct’ (use without ownership).

Bordiga’s brand of Left Communism gave rise to various groups in the 1970s which inherited his (and Marx’s) view of communism as a worldwide society from which classes, private property, the coercive state, markets, money, wages and profits had disappeared. So he deserves some credit for keeping alive, as we have done, the original idea of socialism/communism.

Priced at over £50 this book is mainly for university libraries not the general public. Bordiga’s article is available, though in a different translation, in the Libcom online library.

Adam Buick

The British Communist Left (2005)

Book Review from the September 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British Communist Left by Mark Hayes (International Communist Current, 2005) £5.00

This is a history of the so-called ‘Communist Left’ in British politics from 1914-1945, published by one of the main, contemporary organisations of this tradition and written by one of their sympathisers.

It is a largely accurate account of those identified with the left-wing of Bolshevik politics in this era, a political tendency chastised by Lenin in his famous ‘Left-wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder’. Over a long period this tendency gradually struggled towards taking up socialist positions on the nature of the future society, reformism, the state capitalist nature of Russia, China, etc while also developing a virulent hostility to ‘bourgeois democracy’ and trade unionism. As this pamphlet unwittingly shows, it was a political current which made some serious errors during its political evolution too – and continues to do so, largely because of its adherence to the vanguard politics of Leninism.

The left communists in Britain were small in both number and influence compared to their counterparts in continental Europe, specifically the German, Dutch and Italian lefts. While elements in the Socialist Labour Party and British Socialist Party held views associated with left communism for a short time after the Bolshevik takeover, the most significant left communist organisation in Britain emerged out of the radical suffragette movement led by Sylvia Pankhurst during the First World War and was grouped around the paper Women’s Dreadnought, which by 1917 had been renamed the Workers’ Dreadnought.

This became the paper of the Workers’ Socialist Federation, a group dominated by Pankhurst and with support drawn from political activists mainly in the East End of London. The WSF never numbered more than about three hundred members at the very most and, after eventually being subsumed within the Communist Party of Great Britain in January 1921, vanished as a group or faction by 1924. Pankhurst had been expelled from the CPGB within a year for her criticism of the official Party line, before moving on to other, more eclectic (and openly reformist) causes. Although Mark Hayes doesn’t mention it, what is clear from this and every other related study is that while it would be an exaggeration to say that the Workers’ Dreadnought group was a one woman show, it would not be that much of an exaggeration. When Pankhurst moved on, the group collapsed and the paper – always owned and largely financed by Pankhurst herself – ceased publication.

Small organisations around the idiosyncratic Glasgow anarchist Guy Aldred such as the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation also came and went in this period, veering between left communism and anarchism, but none of them amounted to much. And that in essence is it: left communism in Britain until its re-appearance with the ICC itself and one or two other tiny groups in the 1970s.

After interesting beginnings, the ICC has mutated into an organisation regarded by virtually all other political groups (including those on the communist left previously well-disposed towards it) as a paranoid sect, and its treatment of the SPGB here is an interesting one, not least because we are the one workers’ political organisation discussed still in existence and thereby the most obvious target for its spleen.

The key ‘class frontier’ for the ICC and other left communist groups is whether a political organisation takes sides in a capitalist war or not. Yet, despite our impeccable record of actively opposing both world wars and all other wars too, this book gives the SPGB short shrift. It claims, “in practice” that in 1939, just as supposedly in 1914, “the SPGB made no attempt to oppose the war” (p.101). What it means by this is that we did not raise the ICC’s suicidal slogan of ‘turn the imperialist war into a world wide civil war against capitalism’.

The Socialist Standard is criticised for not publishing openly anti-war articles for part of the Second World War because of the strict Defence Regulations relating to seditious printed matter which caused the suppression of the Daily Worker, but no mention is made of the Party’s open anti-war propaganda by other means or the way in which the SPGB sought to prevent mere pacifist opponents of the war from becoming members. Presumably never having been sent to prison himself for his political beliefs, Mark Hayes also sneers at the SPGB members who applied during the world wars to be conscientious objectors, scores of whom were imprisoned by the British state for refusing to kill their fellow workers.

Quite why the ICC thinks that a few hundred political activists starting a civil war against the might of the capitalist state is a sensible socialist tactic is anyone’s guess. The SPGB members who successfully applied to be conscientious objectors or went ‘on the run’ were at least able to work for socialism and keep the organisation alive, whereas if the ICC was ever crazy enough to put its own tactic into operation it would soon cease to exist organisationally. That the ICC is not really serious about this type of abstract sectarianism though can be seen by the fact that “in practice” (to use its own phrase) there has not been one single occasion when any of its sections across the world has ever tried to do anything other when faced with a war than what the SPGB did in 1914 or 1939, i.e. denounce it as a capitalist conflict not worth the shedding of a drop of blood.

The ICC do exist in something of an unusual – not to say unique – political bubble, as this book repeatedly demonstrates. While the SPGB is lambasted for its insufficient opposition to wars and for betraying the future moneyless commonwealth by opposing the misguided tactics of the Bolsheviks (at least until the early 1920s when the ICC retrospectively thinks this became respectable), the Trotskyists – who then as now took sides in ‘national liberation’ struggles and wars, were reformist, advocated state capitalism, supported the Labour Party, etc – are regarded with some affection, until they finally ‘betrayed’ the working class by taking sides in World War Two. For sheer illogicality and inconsistency there can be little to beat this.

When it is filtered for its Leninism and sectarianism, the British Communist Left is not all bad as it is a useful historical account in parts. While it is a short book it is nevertheless a bit of a trying read, best characterised as a largely academic piece infused with heavy doses of the ICC’s somewhat tiresome political liturgy. If page after page of references to ‘centrism’, ‘opportunist currents’, the ‘proletarian terrain’ and ‘ambiguous swamps’ are your thing then go out and buy it immediately. It’s not too unkind to say you are unlikely to be killed in the rush.

DAP

Liverpool Marxist Book Fair (2020)

Party News from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Saturday 23 November the first ever Marxist Book Fair was held in Liverpool, with various denizens of what the press likes to call the ‘ultra-left’ in attendance, by invite only. The venue was a largish back room in a fairly up-scale pub close to the University, and members of our Lancaster and Manchester branches turned up in the morning to crew a stall for the day. We were rather lucky to be given a large table in a good position in front of the band stage, which meant we were able to mount an SPGB banner on two speaker stands on the stage behind us. This formed an impressive backdrop to our display of literature, t-shirts, badges, and a laptop running the Party whiteboard video on permanent loop. Pretty groovy, we thought, except that the banner rather dominated the room while other stall displays were somewhat more modest, contrary to our expectations. What we also didn’t realise was that when the scheduled talks began, people would be using the stage area, so every speaker had to deliver their talk in front of our SPGB banner. Oops, our bad. It looked uncomfortably like something the SWP would do. They are notorious for trying to hijack events, which may have been why they hadn’t been invited.

There was a curiously eclectic mix of groups there, including the Merseyside Socialist Theory Study Group, Socialist Appeal, the CPGB, Liverpool’s ‘News from Nowhere’ radical bookshop, the CWO, and ex-Militant (nowadays calling themselves Socialist Party of England and Wales – SPEW – with a kind of self-hating disregard for the power of acronyms). We had a nice long chat with the people on the IWW stall next to us. We couldn’t really figure out the logic by which some groups were invited or not invited, but anyway it was a pleasant day and everyone was very civil and polite, which makes a nice change considering how left groups have been known to treat each other in the past.

The talks said much about the politics of the groups involved. Instead of giving a lecture we chose a bit of audience participation, and we were grilled on our parliamentary politics (left communists, like anarchists, tend to be very against using parliament as part of the revolutionary process, while the IWW – aka Wobblies – are syndicalists who are also sceptical). Quite why this is such a big issue for left groups is a bit of a mystery to us. Our Material World column this month (page 9), writing on Hong Kong, makes a very good point about whether or not people in revolutionary situations would use the ballot box – just you try and stop them!

Some of the other speakers talked in impassioned tones about the urgent need to ‘get the Tories out’. We’ve been hearing this same rallying cry for decades and it’s amazing that such groups have got the energy to keep banging that drum. Leaving aside the politics of favouring one capitalist party over another, there’s something hugely dispiriting about such calls. It’s bad enough when you can’t get workers to consider the idea of taking the whole world into common ownership, without governments, frontiers, the rich, money, banks or bosses. But at least that’s an ambitious goal. How much worse must it be when you can’t get recruits for your group when the only thing you are asking them to agree with is ‘get the Tories out?’

One or two other speakers talked about the need for socialist ‘leadership’, which made us feel slightly uncomfortable and reminded us we were in the presence of a lot of Leninists. The thing about people on the left who believe in this is that they’re not necessarily in love with the idea of having bosses and having to take orders, it’s just that they can’t imagine a group getting anywhere without leadership. The fact that we have no leaders and are also the second oldest political party in Britain may prove that it is possible to have a sustainable and long-lived leaderless group, but that’s not the point as far as they’re concerned. What is the point is that we haven’t achieved our aim of world socialist revolution, so in their minds this proves that leaderless groups don’t get anywhere. But in a classic case of confirmation bias, they tend to overlook the fact that they haven’t got anywhere either! As we pointed out in our contribution to the gathering, we’re all in the same back room of an obscure Liverpool boozer, not hosting rallies in football stadiums.

The only group which chose not to give a talk was SPEW. In fact they didn’t look like they enjoyed being there at all. They didn’t seem to talk to anyone at other stalls, pointedly carried on conversations between themselves when other people were giving talks, and then packed up abruptly and noisily in the middle of one of the talks. We wondered if they’d been getting bad hex vibes from the other stallholders. We tend to forget that, while we’re not keen on Leninist ideas in general and we do have an enshrined commitment in our Declaration of Principles to be ‘hostile to all other parties’, in practice we’re fairly easy-going and tolerant compared to Leninist groups themselves, who frequently hate each other with a vengeance.

There were a fair number of visitors, and quite a good crowd for the talks, considering that advertising for the event had probably been modest (there was no poster on the railings outside the pub, which seemed like an unfortunate oversight, or it may have been a pub prohibition). We sold a bit of stuff and made a few contacts. The general idea is to hold this Book Fair every November, and we’ll be happy to go along again if asked. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years, and whether groups who are historically so divided over their revolutionary approaches will remain enthusiastic about the idea of sharing an annual space, especially if the SWP get involved. Dislike of the SWP is probably the only thing all left groups have in common.

How to keep the event sustainable in the long term is a particularly relevant question given what’s happened lately to the long-established London Anarchist Book Fair, which seems to have (perhaps temporarily) died a death. This event managed quite successfully for the most part and over many years to accommodate a variety of perspectives within the general anarchist movement. But then a catastrophic Trans-Terf confrontation in 2017 caused it to go into melt-down. The organisers, facing a barrage of unjust criticism and abuse (being called ‘fascists’, etc), understandably lost the will to organise a further event so there hasn’t been one since, although some regional bookfairs have gone ahead. Let’s hope the organisers of the Marxist event don’t end up in a similar situation. As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished . . .

Paddy Shannon

“World Revolution”: another confused group (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent years have seen the emergence of groups who recognise that by socialism Marx meant a society in which goods would no longer be produced for sale and in which people would no longer work for wages. They have not, however, acknowledged that the Socialist Party of Great Britain has been pointing this out for over seventy years. In fact they have some harsh things to say about us. The journal World Revolution, for instance, which styles itself “the British group of the International Communist Current” is on record as describing us as “a completely degenerate bourgeois organisation which can only play a counter-revolutionary role within the working class” and as “a parliamentarian leftist sect renowned for their Menshevism” (WR3). Recently, however, they seemed to have had second thoughts and have upgraded us from “a completely degenerate bourgeois” organisation to a “confused proletarian” one:

  The SPGB has survived since 1904 as a proletarian organisation. While its rigid sectarianism from the beginning tended to inhibit any real contribution to the clarification of the tasks of the working class, it nonetheless stood against both world wars, attacking them as capitalist wars in which the working class had no interest, and denouncing anti-fascism for the anti-working class movement it was. The SPGB also recognises Russia and China as state capitalist, and sees parties of the left and extreme left as parties of state capitalism. But against these class positions it also holds to the view that the working class can only come to power through Parliament and that it can defend itself through trade unions. It is even confused about who the working class is – for example, it sees the repressive arms of the state, the police, as members of the working class simply because they are paid wages (WR11).

The so-called “International Communist Current” is an organisation with supporters in North America and a number of European countries, centred on the French journal Révolution Internationale which has tried to combine the Italian and German “leftwing communist” traditions, both dogmatically anti-parliamentary, attacked by Lenin in 1921 in his pamphlet Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

WR holds that capitalism is, and has been since the first world war, in a state of economic collapse due to its inability to find new markets on which to sell its products at a profit. This view is based on an uncritical acceptance of the analysis made by Rosa Luxemburg in her book The Accumulation of Capital first published in 1913. We are told: “As Rosa Luxemburg showed, surplus value cannot be realised within the context of a purely capitalist economy” (WR1).

Rosa Luxemburg did indeed try to demonstrate this, but her argument was based on a simple fallacy. According to her, under “pure” capitalism (an economy where there are only capitalists and wage workers) market demand was determined by consumption (what the workers spend on consumer goods plus what the capitalists spend on consumer goods). If the capitalists were to consume all their surplus value, so her argument ran, there would be no problem, but as soon as they re-invest a part of it – which, the accumulation of capital, is after all the purpose of production under capitalism – market demand is no longer equal to what has been produced. For, the consumption of the capitalists having been reduced, so, according to Luxemburg, has market demand. The result, she concluded, was that there was nobody to buy the products in which the re-invested profits were embodied (new machinery, raw materials and consumer goods for the extra workers taken on).

This argument makes accumulation impossible under “pure” capitalism and Luxemburg did not shrink from this conclusion. In fact it led her to the basic theme of her book: that for capital accumulation to take place there must be non-capitalist areas to buy the part of the surplus product not consumed by the capitalists. It followed for her that capitalism would collapse at the point when there were no more non-capitalist areas left in the world. It is WR’s contention that precisely this collapse began to occur at about the time of the first world war.

Luxemburg had the intellectual honesty to admit that this theory conflicted with the rough notes Marx had made at the end of Volume II of Capital which implied that long-term growth (accumulation) was possible under “pure” capitalism. She therefore tried to show where Marx had gone wrong, but only succeeded in exposing her own utter confusion about economics. She made the silly mistake of assuming that the level of market demand was determined exclusively by consumption (the spending of workers and capitalists on consumer goods) whereas in fact it is determined by consumption plus investment (capitalist spending on new means of production). Thus, when a part of the surplus value is re-invested rather than consumed, market demand is not reduced; it is merely re-arranged: what the capitalists formerly spent on consumer goods they now spend on means of production. Marx had made no mistake.

Of course, to say that capitalism could in theory exist without external non-capitalist markets is not to say that it always has done. External markets did play a key role in the birth and early growth of capitalism. Similarly, to say that there is no permanent underconsumption built-in to the capitalist system is not to say that there is therefore always a smooth crisis-free accumulation of capital. Far from it. Accumulation under capitalism proceeds by fits and starts, but these crises are caused by other reasons than underconsumption: by disproportions between the different branches of production leading to a fall in the rate of profit or, at times, to a temporary retraction of the market demand for consumer goods. Finally, to deny that capitalism is in a state of collapse through inability to find new external markets is not at all to deny that, since about the turn of the century, it has been a reactionary, “decadent” system with no further positive role to play in the history of mankind. By that time, it had already built up the material basis for a world socialist society and so had fulfilled its historic role.

According to WR theory, the period after the first world war was one of imminent “proletarian revolution” sparked off by the collapse of capitalism. In fact, however, capitalism was not collapsing nor were the workers revolutionary in any meaningful sense of the term, that is, imbued with socialist understanding. They were merely discontented with the terrible conditions they had to endure. A minority were indeed prepared to take violent action to try to rectify the situation, but this did not mean they were revolutionary in the sense of wanting and understanding socialism. The great majority of workers, however, as the results of elections held in Britain, France and Germany at the time showed, remained loyal to the political parties which openly upheld capitalism, including by now the Labour and Social Democratic parties.

Lenin too made the mistake of assuming that a socialist revolution in the West was imminent. His justification for the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 was that it was the first step in the world proletarian revolution, a breakthrough by the working class where the link in the imperialist chain was weakest, to be followed fairly rapidly by revolutions in the other countries of Europe and in particular in Germany. In reality the Bolsheviks’ coming to power was nothing of the sort, but was rather the seizure of power by a determined group in the conditions of chaos following the collapse of the Tsarist State under the impact of the war. Certainly, the Bolsheviks claimed to be socialists, but their support amongst the workers had been built up not for socialism but on the slogans “Peace, Bread and Land”. Once in power they never had any choice but to develop capitalism in Russia which they proceeded to do in the form of state capitalism as Lenin was to frankly admit. Thus their coup d’état was essentially only a point in the process of the development of capitalism in Russia, Russia’s equivalent of the French bourgeois revolution of 1798 or rather of the coming to power of Robespierre and the Jacobins in 1793.

WR, however, and the “International Communist Current”, reject this view and proclaim that the Bolshevik seizure of power was a “proletarian revolution” which later “degenerated” into the state capitalism we see in Russia today:

  Its [the Bolshevik Party’s] coming to power in October was one of the highest moments of the proletarian revolution” (WR1). 

  With the recognition of the proletarian character of the October Revolution must come the realisation that the Bolshevik party . . . was a proletarian party of the revolutionary wave” (International Review No.3, p. 1).

The fact that WR regards the Bolshevik seizure of power as a “proletarian revolution” and the Bolshevik vanguard party as (at that time) a “proletarian party” reveals a lot about their own conception of majority, conscious revolution (as WR claims), yet points to the Bolshevik coup (where an unconscious majority was manipulated by a conscious minority as in all previous bourgeois revolutions) as an example of the sort of revolution they have in mind, then their claim, or their understanding of its implications, must be open to serious question. That, despite what they say, they don’t really stand for a majority conscious revolution will be confirmed when we examine their attitude to Parliament and elections.

WR is vehemently opposed to Parliament describing it as a “circus” and us as “parliamentary cretins” for saying that the working class can make some use of it. They favour instead “workers councils” in which their organisation would play a “vanguard” role. Once again this results from the fascination the Bolsheviks have for them.

Tsarist Russia was a political autocracy which did not permit the organisation of normal political parties or trade unions. Thus when it collapsed in March 1917 there were no mass parties or trade unions, or even local government bodies, through which the workers and soldiers could express their views. To fill this gap they formed make-shift representative bodies called “soviets” (which is merely the Russian word for “council”) as they had done before in 1905. The fact that these bodies were make-shift without any formal democratic structure (though there is no reason to believe that they were not more or less representative till the Bolshevik coup) made it easier for them to be manipulated by a determined minority such as the Bolsheviks were.

Lenin cynically proclaimed these councils as a superior form of democracy to Parliament just because their unstructured nature had made it easier for a minority calling itself revolutionary to come to power by manipulating them. WR has inherited this tradition and has not entirely freed itself from the Bolshevik tactic of organising as a “vanguard” to manipulate the “workers councils” they want set up.

On the other hand, socialists reject all forms of minority action to attempt to establish socialism, which can only be established by the working class when the immense majority have come to want and understand it. Without a socialist working class, there can be no socialism. The establishment of socialism can only be the conscious majority, and therefore democratic, act of a socialist-minded working class.

In these circumstances the easiest and surest way for such a socialist majority to gain control of political power in order to establish socialism is to use the existing electoral machinery to send a majority of mandated socialist delegates to the various parliaments of the world. This is why we advocate using Parliament; not to try to reform capitalism (the only way Parliaments have been used up till now, which has inevitably failed to do anything for the working class since capitalism simply cannot be reformed to work for their benefit), but for the single revolutionary purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism by converting the means of production and distribution into the common property of the whole of society.

No doubt, at the same time, the working class will also have organised itself, at the various places of work, in order to keep production going, but nothing can be done here until the machinery of coercion which is the state has been taken out of the hands of the capitalist class by political action.

In the passage from WR11 quoted at the beginning of this article we are criticised for saying that the working class “can defend itself through trade unions”. We do indeed say this. The existing trade unions are certainly not perfect – they are bureaucratic, they often collaborate with employers and governments, they engage in reformist politics – but at the moment, given the existing low level of consciousness among the working class, they are all workers have to defend themselves. Actually, we do not support the existing trade unions as such; what we say is that we are in favour of workers organising democratically and taking industrial action to defend their wages and conditions, and where possible improve them, against the encroachment of capital, an activity that has in the past sometimes brought them into conflict with the existing trade unions.

And it is not socialists who are “confused about who the working class is”. We say that the working class is composed of all those who are excluded from ownership and control of the means of production and who are consequently forced, in order to live, to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary, irrespective of the job they do. The working class thus includes office workers and civil servants as well as factory workers and miners and, yes, policemen and members of the armed forces. Indeed, it is partly because we know that the state machine is manned largely by members of the working class that we are confident that the socialist working class majority will be able to establish socialism peacefully. For, when socialist ideas begin to spread among the working class it is most unlikely that those in uniform will remain unaffected. When a majority of workers generally are socialists, so will most of their fellow workers in the armed forces be.

Adam Buick