Spoiling for choice (2026)

Party News from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

WHY WOULD ANYONE BOTHER WITH VOTING?

Can’t be bothered with voting?

Fair enough.

So let’s do this instead!

We know, they’re all rubbish. Red, blue, yellow, green, whatever colour that other lot are this week. They all want the same thing: to keep things ticking along for the people who own everything while the rest of us graft for a living.

Not voting will look like you don’t care and these career politicians will use that as a mandate when the election is over.

Get down to the polling station. Take the pencil. And write SOCIALISM right across the ballot paper.

Why bother? Spoilt ballots get counted and published. Sitting on sofas doesn’t. It tells them you’re not apathetic. It tells them you want the whole lot replaced, not just the faces at the top.

What we actually want: No bosses. No buying and selling of people’s lives. The factories, hospitals, land, the lot; owned by all of us, run for all of us. That’s socialism. Not state control. Not more welfare. Not reformism (tweaking the system) and hoping for the best. Actual common ownership.

None of the parties here are offering it. So don’t pick one. But don’t be silent either!

SPOIL IT PROPERLY. WRITE SOCIALISM.

Leaflet distributed during the election of the new Mayor of Greater Manchester in July.

Party News: Durham Miners Gala (2026)

Party News from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Party members distributed the 2 texts below at the 2026 Durham Miners’ Gala.

Having a laugh

 

If the tiny minority who claim ownership of the world’s wealth ever stopped to consider their situation, they’d surely wet themselves laughing – because the majority accept their claim, even though it’s the majority who create the wealth in the first place.

And there’s more merriment for the capitalists as most people keep swallowing the line served up by political parties – ‘we promise to make the system work for “hard-working families”‘.

Bullshit of course! The system is and always will be loaded against the majority. It will always keep us on edge, forever worried about making ends meet, about downwards pressure on wages, about losing our job.

Our message: we could all get along fine without capitalists and the SPGB’s aim is to get rid of their stupid system. Please think about joining us. Either that or be one more reason for capitalists to be cheerful.

The next revolution

This Gala celebrates the storied history of working-class resistance against the bosses.

But why do we have bosses?

Because the world’s fabulous wealth is held in private hands.

The rich own the Earth, while the rest of us do all the work.

Do you think the rich are doing a good job looking after the planet?

They’re not, are they?

They would rather see it all burn than give up their wealth.

The next revolution must be to abolish private ownership.

Abolish billionaire elites and their puppet politicians.

Abolish property trading, markets and money.

Abolish poverty, environmental destruction and nationalist wars. And abolish bosses.

We have the technology. We have the wit. We just need the will.

Democratic common ownership. It’s the only future worth celebrating. Join us, and bring it one step closer.

Party News – YP conference (2026)

Party News from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

YP- Labour 2.0?

Just to demonstrate our northern hardiness, members went out in uninviting November weather to Manchester and Liverpool to dish out 500 leaflets on the occasion of the first national conference of Your Party (now its official moniker). Previously, other members had done likewise at YP events in Huddersfield, Bolton, Preston, Stroud, Swansea, Cardiff, Newport, Brighton, Oxford, Gillingham, and London (all compass points).

The Liverpool conference was hastily convened to thrash out questions like its name, its constitution, its aims, and in particular who was going to be in charge of it. All this amid breathless drama after Corbyn’s faction summarily expelled Trot entryists from the SWP, on the (actually incorrect) argument that they were registered as a different party with the Electoral Commission and therefore ineligible for membership. At this, Zarah Sultana promptly boycotted the first day of the meeting, which does not bode well for the future of YP but must have tickled Zack Polanski, the Greens’ new ‘socialist’ snake-oil salesman, who is seeing a significant bump in membership as a result of these antics.

Our leaflet was called ‘YP – Labour 2.0?’ and argued that even if Your Party was ever able to form a government, it would inevitably suffer the same fate as the original Labour Party, meaning that YP would not change capitalism, capitalism would change YP. It’s quite possibly no coincidence that we handed Zarah Sultana a leaflet in person, after which a YouTube video appeared in which she specifically denied that Your Party would turn into Labour 2.0.

One resentful but revealing comment heard from a conference participant was ‘SPGB? Oh yes. None of us are ever good enough, are we?’ This must have been a reference to our so-called ‘purist’ reputation among the left, in contrast to their customary ‘pragmatic’ approach. But we’re not purist, just principled. We’ve been telling the left for generations not to keep doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result, but they keep doing it, and now they’re doing it again with Your Party – trying to reform capitalism into something that works for humanity instead of against it. It drives them mad when we tell them that they’re wasting their time trying to fix the unfixable. It must drive them madder still that we’re always somehow proved right when their strenuous efforts fall apart. We wish it wasn’t so, but it will continue to be so until the left, and workers in general, acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is that capitalism needs to be abolished, and replaced with a democratic system of free access for all and collective ownership and control of the Earth’s resources.

PJS

Newport Rising? (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Last month’s Socialist Standard contained a listing for an event taking place as part of the Newport Rising festival. It’s held every year to commemorate the Chartist uprising of 1839, a large-scale rebellion by workers against their exclusion from the political process and a demand for the right to vote and to have their voices heard. This event was the Newport Radical Bookfair at the Riverfront Theatre and Arts Centre, where the Socialist Party had booked a stall. Unfortunately, just a matter of days before it took place, we were informed by the organiser that our booking had been revoked owing to a ban imposed on stalls for political organisations. We were told that this was due to the event being held in a publicly managed establishment. However, when we enquired further, we were given a different reason, which was that Newport Rising was a registered charity and to allow political organisations to have stalls at its bookfair would compromise its charitable status. When we pointed out that we had been allowed a stall at last year’s event, we were told that ‘it shouldn’t have happened’.

Party members nevertheless attended the bookfair as individuals and, when they did, they found several stalls of a political nature: one, for example, run by the Socialist Medical Association, which is affiliated to the Labour Party; and another seemingly promoting ‘trans’ ideas but offering a selection of anarchist leaflets and pamphlets, one of which contained the following statement: ‘For far too long the masters have convinced us that violence is exclusively their domain, and we have cowered and accepted this as truth. It’s about fuckin’ time we fight back, and I’ll sing the praises of anyone who kills a cop or a military jarhead. Those who end the lives of oppressors should be held in the highest regard as liberators’. So much for the exclusion of politics. We intend to pursue this further with the Newport Rising charity and, if necessary, with the Charity Commission.

Despite this our members who were present on the day were able to hand out some of our leaflets to those entering and leaving the bookfair and to participants on the traditional Torchlit March through the city in the evening which is the culminating event of the celebration of the Chartist uprising of 186 years ago. The text of the leaflet we gave out is reproduced below.

Labour has failed: Give Socialism a chance

 The Chartists recognised the importance of political power and universal suffrage to enact social change. They rightly saw the vote as the way to political control. Once the workers had the vote, they reasoned, they could use it to send delegates to parliament who would pass laws to improve their social and economic situation. But they soon found, as everyone has found since, that the vote alone cannot alter the capitalist system. It can’t change the way the capitalist economic system works, based as it is on minority class ownership of resources and wealth and production for profit.

The last 150 years  

For over 150 years now, a majority of the electorate in Britain has been made up of workers in the sense of those who, excluded from ownership of the means to produce wealth, are forced by economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer for a wage or salary in order to live. From time to time, as at present, voters have elected Labour governments but, when in office, those governments have always accepted capitalism, at best trying to reform it in various ways. The theory of some who supported Labour was that a series of successive Labour governments would gradually transform capitalism into a more equal society. But this has not happened and Labour is now an avowedly capitalist party, in fact proclaiming itself a ‘party of business’.

The Corbyn/Sultana party 

Understandably, many who have supported Labour up to now no longer have any faith in it and a new left-wing party is apparently being set up, with Jeremy Corbyn as figurehead. But if ever it was in government, it would face the same problem as Labour – that of needing to administer a system that exists not to satisfy human needs but to generate profit for the tiny minority. The plain fact is that capitalism just cannot be made to work in any other way than according to its own economic laws that impose themselves on those who run governments as well as on those who run businesses. It is a profit-making system that can only run in the interests of the profit-takers and never in the interests of workers whose labour is the source of profits. No government can overcome these laws and all governments have to apply them or risk provoking economic chaos.

The task now 

What is needed is an understanding that capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority. That understood, it follows that the only political party worth supporting is one based not on a strategy of trying to tinker with capitalism’s effects but on a commitment to abolish it altogether and replace it, in one go, by a society of the common ownership and democratic control of resources with production directly to meet people’s needs and not for profit. In a word, socialism.

Once a majority want this, they can use the vote to win political control with a view to carrying out this revolution in the basis of society. The urgent task of socialists is to convince more people that that there is a viable alternative to capitalism – socialism as described above. Hence the need to work to educate and mobilise public support for it. This is the policy we in the Socialist Party have been pursuing since our foundation in 1904.

Interventions: Leaflets (2001)

Party News from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Party members have been present at ant-war demonstrations. Here are two examples of the leaflets we handed out there

Against war—against capitalism

It was good to hear of the anti-war demonstrations that took place recently in cities around the world, including Washington. It is heartening that many workers are refusing to accept this latest march towards bloodshed, despite the war propaganda blitzkrieg we have been subjected to.

However, we would say that slogans like “no more killing, no more war, no more violence any more” (though wholly admirable) do not go to the root of why war is such an ever-present feature of life. War does not occur because of “world leaders” being misguided or evil (though they may be these things), but because of the ruthless competition inherent to capitalism.

War is “business by other means” as they say. This war (whatever form it takes) will have its roots in the ongoing scramble for Middle East oil.

War is the inevitable result of world capitalism and the conflict between competing powers over markets, raw materials, trade routes and strategic territory – quite simply, war will not be banished from our lives until we have banished capitalism from our lives.

The companion parties of the World Socialist Movement have opposed every single war. We call on our fellow workers to reject and oppose all capitalist violence and bigotry, as we do. But it is also essential that our class understand the cause of war – the outdated capitalist system – and organise to abolish it.

www.worldsocialism.org

 

Another War – Another Tragedy For Humanity

The bombing of Afghanistan has begun. The alleged “war on terrorism” against America’s former islamic fundamentalist allies in Afghanistan is under way.

It will really be aimed at installing another regime more favourable to US and other “great powers” interests in a region strategically important with regards to oil (the reason for the previous financial and military support for the fundamentalists).

The cause of this war, like all others, is the profit system and its inherent vicious competition, which constantly finds expression in war and destruction. And like all wars, this war has nothing to do with the interests of the global working class.

The interests at stake are the interests of the competing national sections of the capitalist class and hence at odds with the real interests of us, the workers of the world, whose exploitation is the source of capitalist power and profit. The killing of our fellow human beings runs counter to the interests of humanity, full stop.

As ever, the companion parties of the World Socialist Movement call on our fellow workers to stand with us in opposing both this war, and the anti-human capitalist system which has spawned it. We must reject all attempts to divide the working class into national camps, whether our class enemies use the ideologies of “democracy” or of “islam”.

We simply cannot afford to repeat the carnage of the Twentieth Century in the Twenty First. The potential for a united world society based on the common ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole human community has existed for some time now. It is vital for the future of humanity that the useless, war-prone capitalist system is abolished.

How much more blood can we allow to be shed?

Cooking the Books: Death of a currency (2025)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Local currency is retired to end a notable trend’ reported the Times (1 September) about the demise of the Lewes Pound, a local currency introduced 17 years ago in the Sussex town and copied in various other towns and cities in Britain.

We mentioned its launch at the time (Socialist Standard March 2009) and the extravagant claims made for the local currency by George Monbiot: ‘It by-passes greedy banks. It recharges local economies and gives local businesses an advantage over multinationals’ .

The aim was to encourage people to spend their money locally by using a currency that could only be spent and circulated in the town concerned. If people used the local currency to buy from a local shop, it was argued, it would stay in the town, but that if they used ordinary money to buy from a national supermarket the chances are that it would end up being spent elsewhere.

Local currencies didn’t replace ordinary money. In fact, they had to be backed pound for pound by an equivalent amount of ordinary money deposited in a bank. The Times refers to this in its report when it says that, now that the scheme is being wound up, ‘the backing money will be donated to four local charities’.

As we mentioned at the time:

‘The Lewes Pounds get into circulation by people buying them for ordinary pounds and are convertible back into pounds on demand. In answer to the question “What happens to the sterling pounds that are taken when people buy Lewes Pounds?” the organisers explain: “All Sterling pounds are held in a safe deposit box with a local bank, so that we can access them at any time should people wish to trade their Lewes Pounds back into Sterling”’.

So no by-passing of ‘greedy banks’. Nor any extra purchasing power introduced to boost the local economy. It was just one piece of paper being replaced by another of equal spending power. Since people wanting to use the local currency had to buy it, those doing this were likely to have been enthusiasts who would have bought things locally anyway using ordinary money; the same goes for those accepting it in change (which people couldn’t be obliged to do). It is unlikely, then, that local businesses benefited — except the scheme itself by selling Lewes Pounds to collectors. How multinationals lost out remains a mystery.

The scheme failed in the end due to the nationwide trend to pay by card rather than cash. In Brixton the organisers of the local currency there tried to get round this by introducing an electronic Brixton Pound  but this too was overtaken by smartphones with their electronic wallets, and the Brixton Pound too was wound up.

When the Brixton Pound was introduced in 2009 our South London branch commented in a leaflet distributed in the area:

‘What’s the point (apart from helping local shopkeepers)? What difference does it make what coloured pieces of paper we have to use to get the things we need to live? The real problem is that in present-day, capitalist society we have to use money at all to obtain these, and that the amount of money we have will always be rationed by what we get as wages or as benefits. That restricts and distorts our lives’ (Th£ Brixton Pound — What For?).

The sad fact is that all the enthusiasm, time and voluntary work that went into devising and running local currencies led nowhere. This particular ‘notable trend’ to do ‘something now’ to try make things better under capitalism made no difference whatsoever.

Capitalism: Rotten, Dangerous, Obsolete. (2025)

This leaflet popped up on the SPGB's discussion list. It was distributed at the Durham Miners' Gala this past weekend by Socialist Party members.

I have to be honest that it is, perhaps, a bit too short and snappy for my liking. I understand it's 2025, and it's all about people in receipt of such leaflet making use of the leaflet's QR code, so I will hold my judgement at the moment. Hopefully, it will result in people checking out the SPGB website for more information.

Photographs and illustrations from the 70th anniversary issue of the Socialist Standard (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

This special 70th anniversary issue of the Socialist Standard carried a number of historical photographs within its pages. Some of the photographs tied in with specific articles, but a number appeared as standalone images illustrating aspects of the history of the SPGB. I thought it best to place all the images in one separate post. For certain images that tie in with a text, I've provided a link to the article where they originally appeared.

The handbill below was issued by the Watford Branch of the SPGB in 1905. This image appeared within Robert Barltrop's article, "Seventy Years for Socialism".

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The undated photograph below is of the party headquarters in Great Dover Street, which was located in the Southwark area of South East London. This was the party's head office from 1929 until it was hit by a bomb - and partially destroyed - in 1941.

'Gilmac' mentions Great Dover Street in his September 1954 article, "Our Many Head Offices":

In 1927 Fitzgerald, with the aid of map and compass, succeeded in proving to a majority of the E.C. members that the Elephant and Castle was really in the centre of London. Anyhow we moved over near there to 42, Great Dover Street. We took an old house with three floors and a basement. One of the members made fittings for keeping the S.S. and literature in proper order in one basement room. The other basement room ( a very small one) had tables and chairs, and a stove on which a woman member cooked for those who wanted a meal. The smoke and heat in the little place was stifling, and getting out when one had finished was a problem.

The ground floor front room was used for selling literature and packing. There was a small shop front in which literature was displayed. The first floor consisted of one good sized room in which meetings were held as well as an occasional social—when the place shook as if it was about to collapse. E.C. meetings were also held in this room. Here we had some interesting discussions on the Spanish Revolt and at the beginning of the last war. In the room above lectures were given on many subjects during the winter months.

I know 'Gilmac' mentions 1927 in the excerpt above but Great Dover Street is first listed in the Standard as the Party's Head Office in its June 1929 issue.

I've always wondered if the young woman front and centre in the photograph was May Otway. I guess I'll never know.

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The text accompanying the photograph below from the Standard was 'Conference photograph, 1928. at Fairfax Hall. Harringay, where Party Conferences were held from 1910 to 1936.' 

There's a strong chance that the bald man holding the board at the bottom centre of the photograph was Ted Kersley.

 

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The text accompanying this photograph was 'No leaders: The Executive Committee in session, 1956.' It was part of the article "This is Socialism !'" I believe the younger man with the darker hair in the right of the photograph was Robert Barltrop, and the older, bald man to his left was Harry Young. ('Horatio')

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Clifford Groves contested the Paddington North constituency for the SPGB at the 1945 General Election. He also stood in the same seat in the 1946 by-election. The July 1945 issue of the Standard carries the Party's election manifesto.

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Both the photograph of Jack Fitzgerald and the cartoon caricature of Charlie Lestor were part of the "Some Members" article. I'm guessing that Robert Barltrop drew the image of Lestor.

 

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The Metropolitan Theatre was located in Edgware Road, and was used on many occasions in the 1940s and early 1950s when the SPGB were contesting parliamentary seats in Paddington, but also when the Party held mass rallies. By all accounts these mass meetings had upwards of two thousand people in attendance. This photograph accompanied the "Early Election Campaigns" article.

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No name for speaker on the platform. This photograph illustrated the "On the Platform" article.

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Sadly, no names are listed but members of Walthamstow Branch in the late 1920s included, amongst others, Mr and Mrs Francis Brooks, Maurice Cole, Thomas Davis, C. Elliott, A. J. Godfrey, A. McDermott, May Otway, L. Otway, Jane Robinson, Frederick Wellavise, J. Wilkinson, S. E. Williams, Byron Young and Percy Young.

Surely May Otway is in this photograph? I know I keep mentioning her but she was one of my favourite Socialist Standard writers in the interwar years.

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So, here's the conundrum: The June 1974 Socialist Standard states that the Conference photo below dates from 1950 but when it was included in the June 2004 Socialist Standard, the text said the photo was from the 1951 Annual Conference. I demand a recount.

As a point of interest, the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a letter from Richard Botterill, identifying two of the delegates from Dartford Branch in the photo. (Spoiler alert: one of them was his dad.)

With regards to the June 2004 Standard already mentioned above, that was also a special anniversary issue  and it also carries a number of photographs relating to the history of the SPGB. I recommend you check it out. It serves as an excellent companion to the June 1974 issue.

London By-election' Write In' (2025)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Below is the text from leaflets that The Socialist Party will be distributing in three London local by-elections.

On this occasion The Socialist Party will not be putting up candidates but is encouraging voters to cast a ‘write in’ vote.

What matters – profits or people?

All the parties standing in this by-election support capitalism (the profit system) and are squabbling over which of them should run the administrative side of it here at local level. So, there’s no real choice.

They think the profit system can be made to work in the interests of the majority. But it can’t, and they end up having to do the system’s dirty work of saving money on public services so that taxes on profits can be kept down.

Profits first, people second, that’s the way the profit system works. It’s the only way it can work. Which is why Socialists say it must go. Support for any of the parties that want to run the profit system is a vote for more of the same: more insecurity, hardship and cuts, while the rich can afford the best of everything.

What’s the alternative?

If we are going to put an end to this we must act for ourselves, without professional politicians or leaders. We’re going to have to organise ourselves to bring about a society geared to meeting people’s needs – without a price tag – not profits.

But the only basis on which this can be done is common ownership and democratic co-operation. In a word, socialism.

The Socialist Party is not contesting this by-election but you can still say NO to a system based on profit, privilege and competition and YES to one based on equality, co-operation and meeting needs by writing “I vote for socialism” on your ballot paper.

Party News: three leaflets (2024)

Party News from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

To end the rage, end capitalism

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

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

People like you, here at this event.

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

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

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

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

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

We can do so much better.

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

Making everything free will make everyone free.

Making everyone free will end the rage.

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

And contact us to help get the message out.

– Leaflet handed out at ongoing anti-racism events.

Green capitalism? No chance!

We need rational stewardship of the biosphere for our survival.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Leaflet handed out at Green Party Conference in September.

Against all capitalism’s wars

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

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

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

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

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

– Leaflet handed out at anti-Gaza War protests.

Diggers Festival in Wigan (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Diggers Festival in Wigan

‘True commonwealth’s freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth‘ (Gerrard Winstanley 1652).

Stripped of his religious, patriarchal views, Winstanley is still relevant today. He saw that:

Freedom has an economic basis and is impossible in a property-based society.

Society is structured to maintain the privilege of a few. Laws are made essentially to defend property and official religion is designed to terrify us into submission.

Buying/selling causes war and keeps us poor.

Winstanley’s answer was much like ours. A society where things are produced purely to meet human need (no form of exchange), where production and distribution are based on democratic, informed consent, and everyone can achieve their full potential.

This is what we mean by socialism. Everyone can have a life of material security – provided the majority takes control of the world’s resources from the capitalist minority.

Even if you came today just for a pint and the music, you might want to consider joining with us to put things right at last.

Leaflet to be distributed at this year’s Diggers Festival in Wigan in September.

Only Socialism Will Abolish War (1945)

From the August 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nazis Gone But War Not Abolished

Weeks have passed since Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered yet Europe is not at peace. The newspapers are full of reports of friction between the Allied Governments at San Francisco, and trouble over the settlement of Poland, Yugo-Slavia, Austria, Syria, Greece and other countries. Mr. Anthony Eden returned from San Francisco to report in the House of Commons : “with regard to the general international situation, there is a number of serious and disquieting issues, some of them urgent.” (May 18th). Some British and American newspapers are already talking about the need to take a strong hand with Russia. The war with Germany ended on the 8th May. Within just over a week the Daily Mail which dubbed the San Francisco Conference “San Fiasco,” reported from U.S.A. that some newspapers were talking of “ultimate conflict between Russia and the Anglo-American Allies.” The Daily Mail correspondent said: “It is an astonishing phenomenon that this sort of controversy should be going on only eight days after the surrender of Germany. But it has to be faced.”—(Daily Mail, May 17th.)

In any future war, as the Minister of Production, Mr. Oliver Lyttelton, pointed oat in the House of Commons on March 22nd, 1945, it is obvious that V weapons, now in their infancy, will become more effective and more devastating. “You may be sure,” he said, “that all parts of the United Kingdom, every nook and cranny of the country, will be within range of those weapons when they are more highly developed.”

So little confidence is there that war has been abolished that there is actually discussion about the safest place to locate the new World Peace Organisation. A writer in the Daily Telegraph says: “The safest place in Europe for the World Organisation headquarters would probably be some city in the United Kingdom, not necessarily London. They would be vulnerable there to attack from the air, but less liable to capture than they would be on the European Continent.”—May 25th.. 1945.

THE CAUSE OF WARS IS CAPITALISM

The fundamental cause of wars in the modern world is the economic rivalry of the Powers, and this exists because capitalist industry in all countries has as its aim the making of profit. Manufacturers in every country are striving all the time to capture markets from each other. Governments try to gain an advantage in the trade war by taking colonies as sources of raw materials and as places where the capitalists can invest their surplus wealth. Armies, Navies and Air Forces are built up to control trade routes and strategic points all with the same purpose in view. When the French Government fought to suppress the native population in Morocco their Marshal Lyautey, who commanded the French troops, made no secret of their aim : —

“French soldiers are fighting in Morocco to acquire territory in which rise rivers capable of supplying power for electrification schemes which will prove of great advantage to French trade. . . .

“Our object is commercial and economic. The military expedition in Morocco is a means, not an end. Our object is the extension of foreign trade.”—Star, October 31st, 1922.

In the years when the present war was brewing trade rivalry was everywhere in evidence. Mr. W. M. Hughes, Australian Minister for Health, saw clearly what the outcome would be. Speaking at Brisbane in July, 1936, he said: —

“The increasing intensity of competition for economic markets must lead to armed conflict unless an economic settlement is found. This, however, is hardly to be hoped for. Talk about peace in a world armed to the teeth, is utterly futile.”—News-Chronicle, July 25th, 1936.

The London Times, October 11th, 1940, saw the same forces at work behind Germany’s aggressive policy.

“Beyond doubt one of the fundamental causes of this war has been the unrelaxing efforts of Germany since 1918 to secure wide enough foreign markets to straighten her finances at the very time when all her competitors were forced by their own war debts to adopt exactly the same course. Continuous friction was inevitable.”

SOCIALISM THE ONLY SOLUTION

The Great War, 1914-1918, was to be a war to end war. So was the present war. But the threat of war is still hanging over us. Unless capitalism is abolished and socialism established internationally in its place the same rivalries will produce further wars. All the victorious Powers are now preparing for the trade war as soon as the fighting stops. Sir Frank B. Sanderson, M.P., was only stating what is known to everyone when he said in 1941: “Britain must plan now for the post-war export trade. Peace will bring in its train fierce competition in the world’s markets and it was only by planning in advance that we should be able to hold our own.”—Daily Telegraph, July 17th, 1941.

If you want capitalism and capitalism’s wars you will vote for the capitalist candidates. If you understand that the immediate need of the human race is the establishment of socialism, under which the means of production will cease to be owned by the capitalist class and become the property of society as a whole, you will vote for the candidate of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Capitalism will produce war no matter whether the Government which administers it is Tory, Liberal, Labour, Communist or any other party.

Socialism and the Housing Problem (1945)

From the August 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bomb Damage and The Housing Shortage

Several million houses have been damaged by bombs and rockets during the war. but the problem of slums and overcrowding did not begin with the war. There was vast overcrowding and housing shortage between the war, and before 1914. Under capitalism there has always been a housing shortage for the poor—but not for the rich. The Earl of Shaftesbury, nearly 100 years ago, was carrying on a campaign to “solve” the working-class housing problem. Speaking in the House of Lords in April, 1851, he gave figures about the deplorable housing conditions in London.

Starting in 1851, Acts of Parliament were passed and succeeding governments repeatedly inquired into the problem and promised to deal with it: but it has never been solved. A well-known housing authority, Mr. Harry Barnes, in his book, “Housing” stated that in 1911 he found “the housing position worse than at any time since 1801.”

Writing of the position in 1923. after the Great War, he said : —

“The housing shortage of to-day is not something that comes like a bolt from the blue . . . but is rather the slow accumulation of a century, suddenly and terribly increased by the conditions arising out of the war.”

The governments went on promising to build houses, but still the problem was not solved. Sir E. Simon, former Lord Mayor of Manchester, and Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health, stated in 1931 that the shortage was getting worse.

“According to all the available evidence there has on the average been no reduction whatever in the terrible overcrowding in the slum areas; the houses are steadily deteriorating; the position of the slum dwellers is worse than it was 10 years ago.” (Letter to the Times February 12th, 1931.)

PIGS BETTER HOUSED THAN WORKERS

It was in 1936, before the bombing of the present war. that Sir Benjamin Dawson, Chairman of the Bradford Central District Conservative Association, declared that his pigs were better housed than some of the workers. He examined the houses in his constituency and declared :—

“When I had finished my tour, I felt thoroughly ashamed of my country, thoroughly ashamed of the National Government, and thoroughly ashamed of the Conservative Party.

“The pigs on my farm are better housed and fed than some of the people I saw that day.”

Make no mistake about it, none of the parties of capitalism (Tory, Liberal, Labour) can solve the housing problem of the workers

LIBERAL, TORY AND LABOUR PROMISES

Since 1851, when the first Housing Act was passed, many other Acts have been introduced by Liberal and Tory Governments and by the Labour Governments which were in office 1923-24 and again in 1929-31. None of these measures have done more than touch the surface of the problem. The workers’ housing problem is not due to shortage of building materials or shortage of building workers. In 1933, for example, a quarter of the building workers were out of work. The workers endure slum dwellings, overcrowded houses, houses badly equipped and unhealthy, because they are too poor to afford anything better. The housing problem is a poverty problem. The rich are not victims of the housing shortage. All through the years of insufficient accommodation for the workers, the rich have been able to afford their spacious and luxurious houses, often having a town house and a country house as well.

RENTS AND WAGES

There is much talk of building houses to be let at rents low enough for the workers to afford, though Mr. Charles Boot, President of the Federation of Master Builders, declared early this year that houses will never again be built at pre-war prices and that rents will go up (News-Chronicle, January 12th, 1945). Even if rents do not go up, but go down, the problem will still remain. Rents fifty years ago were much lower than they are now, but there was just the same overcrowding and slums. Under capitalism the pressure of unemployment enables employers to keep wages down to the amount just about sufficient for the workers to live on. If rents are reduced, wages will fall also and still the workers will be unable to afford decent and spacious accommodation; quite apart from their worsened position when unemployed.

PREFABRICATED HOUSES

One of the remedies now offered for the housing shortage is the building of small and cheap “prefabricated” dwellings—as a temporary measure. “Temporary” is likely to become permanent and it is only the workers who are to have the “benefits” of these houses. The rich will continue to get what they can afford to pay for, as soon as the wartime control over private building is relaxed.

SOCIALISM IS THE ONLY REMEDY

Under capitalism the best housing, like the best of everything, is within the reach only of the propertied class, the owners of the land, factories, railways, etc. The working class, who own little or nothing and have to live by selling their mental and physical energies to the employers for wages, will continue to live in poor houses, and suffer discomfort and ill-health through overcrowding. Only Socialism will remedy this by making the means of production and distribution the common property of the whole community. Only then will resources be made available for building decent accommodation for all. Houses will no longer be built for profit, but solely for use.

There is no other way of solving the housing problem.

Capitalism Cannot Cure Unemployment(1945)

From the August 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you vote for the Tories, the Liberals, the Labour Party or any Party which is prepared to continue the capitalist system, you are voting for unemployment, along with the rest of the ills of capitalism.

It is an insult to your intelligence to ask you to believe that any of these Parties can cure unemployment. If they could, why haven’t they done so before?

Except during wars there never has been a time when there was not unemployment, and every time capitalism lurches into one of its periodic industrial crises, unemployment mounts to staggering proportions.

Under the Liberal and Tory Governments which were in office during the nineteenth century, unemployment was continuous and at times of crisis it got worse. They always promised to abolish unemployment, but all they ever did (and that very tardily) was to make mean provision through Unemployment Insurance Acts to prevent the unemployed from starving.

Unemployment increased after the last war. It will increase again after this war.

HERE ARE THE FIGURES

Here are official figures of unemployment under various governments after the last war.

In 1921, under Lloyd George’s Tory-Liberal Coalition Government, unemployment rose to over 2,500,000. Nearly one in four of the insured workers were out of work.

In January, 1924, under MacDonald’s Labour Government, unemployment was 1,374,206.

Under the Tory Government in January, 1928, it was 1,260,503.

Under the Second Labour Government, in January, 1931, it rose to 2,662,842.

In January, 1933, under the National Government, it was 2,955,448.

PLENTY OF WORK AFTER THE WAR

The spokesmen of the capitalist parties tell you there won’t be unemployment because of the need to repair the destruction caused by the war. They told you the same after the last war.

Speaking about the period after the present war, Mr. A. S. Comyns Carr, K.C., made the following pronouncement: —

“He believed that the problem of post-war unemployment did not exist. On the contrary, the problem of employment after the war was going to be how to find enough people to do the work.” (Speech reported in the Times, March 8th, 1943.)

Exactly the same fallacious promise was made after the last war by Mr .J. R. Clynes, one of the Labour leaders, who was a Minister in the Lloyd George war-time Coalition Government. He said : —

“If there ever was a risk of over-production, causing unemployment, there is none now. For at least a dozen years there must be conditions of shortage which, with the best energy and effort, cannot be removed. We are in arrears. We need have no fear of the supply exceeding the demands.”—(Reynolds Newspaper, November 30th, 1919.)

At the time Mr. Clynes made his statement, unemployment was 500,000. By the middle of 1921, less than, two years later, it was over 2,000,000. Then it declined but remained well over 1,000,000 until the crisis of 1931 when it slumped to record levels.

This will happen again if the working class continues to vote for the candidates of the capitalist parties.

WHY UNEMPLOYMENT

Under capitalism, goods are not produced solely for use (as they will be when you decide to vote for Socialism). They are produced for profit. If the manufacturer cannot make a profit, he curtails production or else he tries to cut his costs by reducing wages or installing “labour-saving” machinery. Either way the result is the same—unemployment. The capitalists of all countries are always striving to capture markets from each other. It is impossible for them all to sell their products at a profit because the wages received by the workers are not sufficient to buy the great quantities of goods produced by modern mass-production methods.

RAISING WAGES IS NO SOLUTION

The Labour Party claims that higher wages is the solution (though when they were in office in 1931 they cut the wages of government employees and allowed employers generally to do the same). The Tory Lord Beaverbrook now puts forward the same empty policy. His newspaper, the Sunday Express, May 27th, 1945, reports him as follows: —

“His policy for the abolition of unemployment was to raise the standard of living in every country in the world by international agreement, so as to increase the consumption of goods.”

In the first place, there is not the slightest possibility of effective international agreement to raise wages. Even the Allied Governments, within a week of the ending of the war with Germany, were demonstrating their inability to agree with each other on all sorts of problems about European governments and frontiers. Even if they did put their signatures to some pions declaration, it could never he enforced. Every worker knows that in times of bad trade many employers are able to force individual workers to accept less than agreed rates of wages, even in industries such as agriculture where the minimum is supposed to lie enforced by law. In face of an international agreement to enforce higher wages, some countries would simply ignore it and employers everywhere would protest that they could not afford it. International agreement to reduce wages is a much more likely eventuality.

Note, too, that Lord Beaverbrook, who for years opposed any kind of international agreements and backed his policy of Empire isolation, now talks of international action !

But the basic fallacy of the whole policy is that agreements about wages leave untouched a major cause of unemployment, the introduction of labour-saving machinery. At all times, employers are scheming to get the same output with fewer workers, by introducing new machinery and more efficient methods. During the war this has been enormously speeded up. Coal, cotton and agriculture are three of many industries in which new machinery and methods are going to displace hundreds of thousands of workers. It is estimated that “British agriculture should have no difficulty in producing half as much again as it did before the war with a substantially smaller labour force paid at twice the pre-war rates.”—Manchester Guardian, May 15th, 1945.

How will international wage agreements find work for these armies of redundant workers?

SOCIALISM THE ONLY REMEDY

Capitalism cannot exist without unemployment, without the exploitaion of the workers and without trade rivalry with foreign capitalists. Capitalism will go on producing unemployment, crises and wars. It makes no difference whether the Government which administers capitalism is Tory, Liberal, Labour, Common Wealth or Communist. Only Socialism will solve the problem. Through the international action of the working class of all lands capitalism must be abolished and Socialism established in its place. Then the means of production will be owned and democratically controlled by the whole community. Production for profit, trade rivalry and unemployment will be no more. Goods will be produced by the co-operative efforts of all the able-bodied population and will be available freely to meet the needs of all.

Increased production will result not in unemployment, but in increased consumption and greater leisure.

Levellers or Diggers? (1995)

From the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of April a few hundred demonstrators occupied the site of the old Wisley airfield near George’s Hill, in Surrey. This was where, in 1649, the Diggers had set up a communist community with the aim of starting a movement to make the Earth “a common treasury for all” again. The demonstrators called themselves the “New Levellers”. this was appropriate because, like the original Levellers (but unlike the original Diggers), they were demanding a reform of the laws governing land ownership and use rather than the abolition of private property, as the leaflet we distributed pointed out.

Many of the Levellers of the 1640s, being inexperienced in rebelling against the injustices of the market, and yet to recognise the incompatibility between FREEDOM and PROPERTY, sought to reform and make just property relationships. For example, the Leveller leader, Lilburne, in March 1648 wrote that the Levellers had “been the truest and constantest asserters of liberty and property (which are quite opposite to communitie and levelling)”.

THE TRUE LEVELLERS were the Diggers. Their ideas can serve as an inspiration to those of us in the 1990s who detest and reject the iniquities of the commercial system. The Diggers stood not for state ownership but COMMON OWNERSHIP: “The earth with all her fruits of Corn, Cattle and such like was made to be a common Store-House of Livelihood, to all mankinde, friend and foe, without exception” (A Declaration From the Poor Oppressed People of England).

Where all wealth is commonly owned there will be no need for money. In the above-quoted Declaration the Diggers proclaimed that “we must neither buy nor sell. Money must not any longer . . . be the great god that hedges in some and hedges out others . . .” Production must be solely for use and all people able to take from the common store on the basis of FREE ACCESS. As Winstanley explained in his Law of Freedom: “As everyone works to advance the Common Stock so everyone shall have a free use of any commodity in the Storehouse for his pleasure and comfortable livelihood, without buying and selling or restraint from any”. This is a wonderful and compelling socialist vision of a society where all things in and on the Earth are the common property of all; where all people give according to their abilities and take freely according to their needs; where money and other time-wasting features of property relationship are done away with. It is a practical alternative to capitalism’s property mania.

Modern Tory defenders of property assert that owning things makes us free. This false equation between liberty and property was spread by the 17th defenders of property power, and was also accepted by several well-intentioned Levellers, just as it has been by subsequent leftists who have feared to break with the ideas of THE MONEY SYSTEM. In truth, property and money make us unfree. As Winstanley stated: “True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the Earth”. Those in Britain living beneath the poverty line and the millions in the world dying from starvation should see the sense of that.

Socialists must learn from the wisdom of our Digger predecessors and have the boldness to state the case for A MONEYLESS WORLD SOCIETY – a case now more materially feasible and globally urgent than ever.

Life and Times: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (2022)

The Life and Times column from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A group of us recently did some leafleting in my part of the world. We were putting a leaflet through people’s doors entitled ‘A Different Way of Looking at Things’. It suggested that, though the word ‘socialism’ might conjure up ideas the recipients did not share, if they took up the leaflet’s invitation to click on its QR code and look at the Socialist Party’s website, they might find the ideas we were putting across sensible and attractive.

At one house, just as I was about to put a leaflet through the letter box, an elderly man came out and took the leaflet from me. He glanced at it and said: ‘The trouble with you lot is that all you see is what’s bad, you just don’t see the good things. You don’t see how much things have improved since I was a kid. You don’t know how lucky you are’. I told him I understood what he was saying but thought it would still be useful for him to read the leaflet and, if he could, to look at the website. But going on to the next house, what he had said started to give me food for thought, since I couldn’t deny that at a very basic level he was right. Most people’s standard of living is definitely higher than it was, say, in the 1930s, 40s or 50s. Most people have a lot more of the everyday things that make life more comfortable now compared to then.

The Good

And there have been a lot of what might be called ‘social’ improvements too. I’d recently read, for example, that the Championship football team, Watford, had players of 10 different nationalities in their team. It’s surely a step forward for people from so many different backgrounds to be cooperating as a team and idolised by the team’s largely British supporters. I’d also just listened to an episode of ‘Desert Island Discs’ with ‘The Repair Shop’ man, Jay Blades, talking movingly about the open, unabated and taken-for-granted racism he suffered as a boy – something dramatically less in evidence now. Again a famous footballer has recently been on trial for allegedly exercising ‘coercive control’ over his partner, a trial that would have been unimaginable in the 40s, 50s or 60s. And, just recently too, ecclesiastical child abuse from the 1960s and 70s has been exposed rather than ignored as it would have been in the past. And there is today, as never in the early lives of many receiving our leaflet, widespread and open coverage of LGBT matters. Who could have imagined all these things?

And yet, and yet … Well, there are also so many things which are not right in the world around us and which could not exist in the world of common ownership and free access that socialists advocate and want to see.

The Bad

In Britain today, for example, according to a recent Money Advice Trust report, people are skipping meals ‘just to keep the lights on’, and around 20 percent of adults, or 10.8m people, are behind on one or more household bills. A survey by Opinium found that 5.6m people have gone without food in the last months as a result of the cost of living crisis, nearly 8m have ‘sold a personal or household item to help cover bills’, and there has been a massive increase in the number of people forced to use food banks.

In the USA, the most economically advanced country in the world, 3.5m people are homeless, while 18.6 million homes stand vacant, and the number of Americans dying while homeless has risen dramatically (by 77 percent) in recent years from a variety of causes, but many just succumbing to the cold. The situation is even worse in less ‘advanced’ parts of the world. In Nigeria, for example, 82m people live on less than a dollar a day, and in Lebanon electricity, clean water, medicine and fuel are in short supply and the currency has lost 90 percent of its value with inflation in triple digits and more than 80 percent of the country’s population living below the poverty line.

The Ugly

But small beer this compared with the suffering in Yemen, where, according to the UN, 8 years of civil war have killed over 150,000 people, with more than 227,000 others having died as a result of famine and lack of healthcare facilities. Then there’s the drought in Somalia where the BBC News website reported that ‘young children are dying in growing numbers’ and told harrowing stories of suffering in which almost two-thirds of young children and pregnant women were suffering from acute malnutrition with the food situation being aggravated by a complex war between the militant Islamist group, al-Shabab, and the government. A 32-year-old mother of four living in a camp is quoted as saying: ‘No water, no food, a hopeless life. Above all, my children are starving. They are on the verge of death. Unless they get some food, I’m afraid they will die.’

More broadly, as reported by a network of charities from 75 countries in an open letter to coincide with the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, in the world as a whole ‘1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing (slum conditions) and 100 million are unhoused, a full third of the human population does not have reliable drinking water… and a staggering 345 million people are now experiencing acute hunger, a number that has more than doubled since 2019’. And all this without going into the ongoing and unpredictable effects of climate change, the persistence of deadly diseases such as Covid 19, and the untold terror and suffering caused by wars such as the one in Ukraine.

The Alternative

One of the signatories to the charities’ letter mentioned above, Mohanna Ahmed Ali Eljabaly of the Yemen Family Care Association, wrote: ‘It is abysmal that with all the technology in agriculture and harvesting techniques today we are still talking about famine in the 21st century.’ Though that is absolutely true, the charities’ proposed solution (‘Those with the power and money to change this must come together to better respond to current crises and prevent and prepare for future ones’), is a hopeless one. While the techniques and resources are indeed available to prevent famine and satisfy all reasonable needs, in the profit-driven society (capitalism) that exists throughout the world today, human welfare can never be a priority. In the socialist society of free access based on the principle of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ which we urgently need, any failure of crops, for example, through drought or any such natural calamity will be dealt with by food being made available to those who need it where they need it rather than people being left to die horrific deaths from starvation.

I could not of course say all this to my interlocutor on the doorstep, but I suppose I could hope that he clicked on the leaflet’s QR code and read all about it in the Socialist Standard.

Howard Moss

General Election, 1931. (1931)

From the November 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

[The announcement that the General Election was to be held came too late for us to publish a statement of our views in the October issue. For the information of new readers and for purposes of record we reproduce below the leaflet which we distributed during the election.]

You are baffled and confused. You are asked to vote, but you do not know what to do. You have voted before and have waited in vain for results. You had faith in your leaders, and you believed them when they told you that you were on the eve of better days. You have been deceived, not once but many times. Government after government has come and gone, but they have failed to improve our conditions. Again and again you have been assured that the remedies were being applied, but all to no purpose. Your pressing problems are still unsolved. When you are in work your health and vitality are sapped by overstrain, the happiness of your dependants is marred by poverty. Your peace of mind is fretted away by the fear that you will be the next to lose your job. You had faith in the integrity of Baldwin, the ability of Lloyd George, or the loyalty of MacDonald. But experience has taught you that none of them can give you what you seek. In the days before the War the Liberals failed utterly to keep their promise to abolish want from this land of plenty. You have had years of suffering under Tory governments. But you reaped your most bitter disillusionment when the Labour Government, instead of easing, aggravated your distress. You then realised that the Labour leaders and the Labour Party are no better than their predecessors. Now you are getting mistrustful of parties and politicians. In your disappointment you ask whether there is any road left that is worth travelling.

The Problem Stated.

There is no lack of statesmen, journalists, and business men telling you the cause of your troubles. But their explanations do not ring true. They tell you things that in your own knowledge and observation you recognise to be false. You have lived under Free Trade and you know that it does not mean “peace and plenty.” You or your parents can recall the pitiable poverty of the years before the War. You can assert, therefore, that the workers’ troubles did not begin with the War and the War debt. You have read of the huge armies of unemployed in the tariff countries such as Germany and the United States. You have been told that industrial efficiency and rationalisation are the cure for unemployment and low wages ; but your own experience teaches you that “labour-saving” machinery does not give you ease and prosperity. Again, during recent weeks, you have been asked to believe that “going off the gold standard” will bring you relief. But when you recall the wage-reductions, the trade disputes, and the heavy unemployment of the years between the Armistice and 1925—years when, we are told, we were “off the gold standard”—you will see through that deception. You must go more deeply into the question if you wish to understand what is wrong. There is something rotten at the root of things. It is that the greater number of us have no “stake in the land of our birth.” In this country that we call ours, the fields, the factories and work shops in which we toil, the railways and steamships, even the places of amusement and recreation, are not ours at all. They do not belong to the workers who constructed them and work them. Nor do they belong to society as a whole. They are—stop and consider the importance of this—they are private property under the private control of a small class of people. Because of that our lives are not our own. We produce wealth for others. We produce it in abundance so that the world groans under the burden of what is called overproduction. But all that we get out of industry is a wage just sufficient to provide a working-class family with the cheapest food, cramped quarters, and the least attractive clothes. After paying all the expenses of production, the goods left in the hands of the propertied class are in quantities so vast that they can not all be disposed of at a profit. The workers have not the money to buy more than a modest amount, and the rich, living in luxury, yet spend only part of their enormous incomes. The result is stagnant trade, closed factories, idle shipping, abandoned mines, neglected farms, and everywhere strife and instability. For millions the consequence is semi-starvation and unemployment.

There is only one remedy for this chaotic and avoidable state of affairs. The means by which we all live must belong to society as a whole; to be used and controlled democratically for the common good. Production for use, not for the profit of a propertied class.

The Labour Party is not a Socialist Party.

One popular error must be corrected at this point. Nationalisation, or State-controlled capitalism is not Socialism. The Labour Party is not a Socialist Party. Whether in this country or abroad Labour Governments have always and everywhere failed to justify themselves. In the 1929 General Election the Labour Party roused your hopes with promises of better times. In office they did not redeem their promise. On the contrary they brought ridicule upon themselves and destroyed the enthusiasm of their supporters. Propped up on Liberal votes in the House of Commons, for two years they staggered from one political crisis to another. Reluctant to give up office they prolonged the miserable life of their Ministry by secret bargaining with the Liberal Party. Instead of using Parliament as an arena in which to wage a fight for the workers, they earned by their spineless conduct the contemptuous sneer of Winston Churchill that there was “no fight” in progress, “only a lot of politicians leaning up against each other.”

In the present election the Labour Party have the support of the notorious anti-socialist, Mr. Lloyd George ; again showing that they do not intend any fundamental social change. Mr. Henderson had a private meeting with the Liberal leader on Saturday, October 10th (“Reynolds’s,” October 11th), and the Carnarvon Boroughs Labour Party has decided not to oppose his candidature.

The “Daily Herald” (October 10th) says :—

“Mr. Lloyd George’s manifesto gives a lead to Liberals to vote Labour.”

The Labour Government failed to stop wage reductions in the textile mills, on the railways and farms, and in the co-operative stores. They reduced still further the miserable pittance of their own lower-grade post office and other employees. While they were in control unemployment rose to a record figure. Finally, when there developed one of the periodic crises which are the inevitable outcome of our present social system, they rushed into the economy campaign which the National Government has carried on. Except for the 10 per cent. reduction in unemployment pay, against which a minority of the Labour Cabinet made a belated stand, the whole of the National Government’s economy programme had been agreed to “provisionally” by the Labour Government. In 1929 they promised the workers improved social services; in 1931 they were demanding “sacrifices.”

That ignominious collapse was not merely the failure of individuals. It was the Labour Party and its programme which had been tried and found wanting. They claimed to make capitalism run smoothly and in the interests of the workers; but capitalism can not be made to run smoothly. Socialist policy is the direct opposite. The Socialist Party of Great Britain stands for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism. Not to patch or prop up capitalism, but to abolish it.

The National Parties—Defenders of Capitalism.

The parties led by Mr. MacDonald stand frankly as defenders of capitalism. They say that they represent the forces of order and stability, and Mr. Snowden has inferred that all those who oppose the National Government are parties of destruction and disorder. That is not true of the Socialist Party. Just as the capitalist parties claim to stand for capitalism, conducted as well as they know how, so the Socialist Party stands for a speedy but ordered change-over to a new system on the basis of common ownership. Mr. MacDonald is asking for a free hand for any measures, including tariffs, that the National Government may decide are necessary. But there are no measures that can solve the problem of the workers except measures to establish Socialism. Do you suppose that the politicians and parties which separately have let you down will serve you better in combination?

The Road to Socialism.

There can be no Socialism until a majority of the electors have been won over. The workers form the great majority of the population. Organised in the Socialist Party they have but to use their votes in order to place themselves in control of the machinery of government and of the armed forces by which society is dominated. The urgent task of to-day is to spread knowledge of Socialist principles so that the workers may fit themselves for the winning of power and for Socialism. There is no other way. The Labour Party has preached the policy of pleading for social reforms as steps towards Socialism. But recent events have shown that that road leads only to failure and despair.

To achieve Socialism, elections must be fought, not on a programme of reforms to catch non-socialist votes, as is the practice of the Labour Party, the I.L.P., and Communists, but on the simple, straightforward issue of Socialism versus Capitalism. Beware, then, of those, like Mr. Maxton, who condemn the Labour Party and its programme of reforms of capitalism, but who for years have told you to put your faith in the Labour Party candidates. They told you to trust MacDonald. Now they advise you to trust Mr. Henderson, one of the men who betrayed the workers’ interests in the Great War. They are asking you to enter on a further period of wasted effort and lost time, leading surely to yet another betrayal.

Dangerous advice is given by the Communists. They contest elections but tell you that Parliament is futile. They preach disorder and advocate, armed revolt, thus playing into the hands of the most reactionary section of the ruling class. For their own ends they exploit the miseries of the unemployed. Yet eight years ago they were compelled to admit the ineffectiveness of their mass demonstrations. The “Workers’ Weekly,” the official organ of the Communist Party, wrote as follows in 1923 :—

“The unemployed have done all they can, and the Government know it. They have tramped through the rain in endless processions. They have gone in mass deputations to the Guardians. They have attended innumerable meetings and have been told to be ‘solid.’ They have marched to London, enduring terrific hardships . . .

“All this has led nowhere.“

—”Workers’ Weekly,” February 10th, 1923. (Italics ours.)

Remember that it is only a few years since the Communists, too, were telling you to vote for MacDonald !

What to do with your vote.

If you support one or other of the parties of capitalism, including those parties of reform, the Labour Party, the I.L.P., and the Communists, you will help to prolong your troubles. If you are convinced of the truth of the Socialist case you will not vote for any of these parties. You will realise that the SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN is the only party in this country that works on sound lines for the emancipation of the workers. Consistently since its formation in 1904, the Socialist Party has maintained the straight fight for Socialism, at all times giving our present warning that the parties of reform block the road to Socialism.

Unfortunately there are not yet a sufficient number of the working class who desire Socialism, to make it possible for us to run candidates in this election. We call, therefore, upon all those who want Socialism to express their determination by going to the poll and writing “Socialism” across the voting paper. Among other things this will help to advertise the number of those who have made the final decision to have done with capitalism and its defenders. The use of the vote to support any of the candidates in the present election is a vote for capitalism.

Study Socialism. Become Socialists. Resolve that you will help to make the Socialist Party strong enough to run candidates at the next election.

The Executive Committee,

The Socialist Party of Great Britain,

42 Great Dover Street, London, S.E.1.

October, 1931.