Away with all national flags! (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bertrand Russell once said ‘Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country’. What, then, should we make of a recent poll carried out by the Daily Express (30 August) that found ‘Nearly three-quarters of Brits unwilling to fight for UK in the event of war’?

If the Express is to be believed, a majority sensibly enough have lost their appetite to fight for ‘their’ country in a war. One should be wary of jumping to hasty conclusions, however. Sadly, unwillingness to ‘fight for the UK’ does not necessarily translate into a decline of patriotism. It doesn’t seem to have dampened nationalist fervour.

In August 2025, a high-profile and, seemingly, widely supported grassroots campaign was launched, dubbed ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, ostensibly to ‘promote patriotism’ by flying flags from lamp-posts or painting the Saint George Cross onto mini-roundabouts.

However, one would have to be politically naïve not to see that the ulterior purpose behind all the flag-waving protests accompanying this bizarre fad has been to promote a far-right agenda. The frankly racist targeting of asylum seekers holed up in migrant centres exemplifies this.

This development is notable for the sheer amount of misinformation it has generated – whether we are talking about the costs of the asylum system, the lavish lifestyle asylum seekers are alleged to enjoy (they get a measly £7 a day), or the actual numbers involved (the UK has below the European Union average for asylum applications).

According to the ‘Hope not Hate’ group, the campaign´s organiser is Andrew Currien (AKA Andy Saxon), an ally of the far-right activist, Tommy Robinson. He was formerly in the English Defence League and now runs security for the far-right party, Britain First.

One theory that has been doing the rounds is that the ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ campaign is a reaction to the widespread display of Palestinian flags at protests against what is happening in Gaza. Whatever the case, as far as socialists are concerned, we would far prefer to see no national flags displayed anywhere. In the words of the novelist, Arundhati Roy: ‘Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.’

Shrink-wrapping people´s minds means, among other things, instilling in them the absurd notion that they possess something called a ’country’ in the first instance. It is not just the usual suspects that are actively engaged in this indoctrination process – the state, the church, the media and so on. In its own way too, the Left, when it talks of ‘nationalising the commanding heights of industry’ or glorifies ‘national liberation struggles’ against ‘imperialism’, reinforces a nationalist mindset and by extension, capitalism. To refer to the Communist Manifesto: ‘The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’.

To those who imagine that ‘Britain’ is ‘their’ country, one might well ask – in what meaningful sense is this true? According to one source, ‘just 0.3% of the population – 160,000 families – own two-thirds of the country, and less than 1% of the population owns 70% of the land’.

Also in Britain, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics (2018), foreign-owned businesses accounted for 13.4 percent of total UK company assets, while foreign buyers account for over 40 percent of London’s prime property market. Most ‘British’ workers don’t even own their own homes, let alone this abstraction called ‘Britain’. A Google Earth photo reveals no borders whatsoever that might delineate those particular spatial units we choose to call ‘countries’. All we see are mountains, forests, farmland, urban settlements, rolling on as far as the eye can see and in every conceivable direction.

Borders only exist in our minds – in our imagination. They are nothing more than social conventions. There is nothing ‘natural’ about them whatsoever, any more than the nation-states they spatially delineate. Our capacity to imagine is part of what makes us human beings. As John Lennon´s song famously put it, ‘Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do.’

Today, the great majority of us are little more than prisoners with shopping rights in this open prison that is called capitalism. In this society, the industrial and natural resources of our planet are monopolised by a super-rich, tiny parasite class. It is in their economic interests –not ours – that wars are fought.

At present, there are literally dozens of armed conflicts going on in the world – from localised insurgencies to full-scale wars. To what end? Where is the sense in workers killing other workers just like them – complete strangers with whom they have absolutely no reason to quarrel – just to ensure one piece of tatty cloth, as opposed to another, gets to be raised on the town hall´s flagpole?

Whatever tatty cloth is raised is not going to affect the basic situation of working class people. The same goes in wars. For example, whether in Ukraine it’s a Ukrainian or, alternatively, a Russian rag on the end of a pole. There are no winners in a war (apart from maybe the undertakers and the weapons manufacturers). Workers on both sides will have lost, having succumbed to the death cult of nationalism, their battered bodies draped in the symbol of what is so detestable about the society they currently live in.

Robin Cox

Flagging politics (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We just kind of thought, why don’t we just go put up some flags down one road, just because we think it’d look nice, and we just made the area look better.’ The words of Joseph Moulton, interviewed by YorkMix Radio. Moulton is credited by YorkMix as the instigator of the widespread appearance of Union and St. George flags along the highways and byways of that city. He conceded that the action was rather more than merely cosmetic.

His political rationale stems from a family background in the mining industry of South Yorkshire, communities, ‘…targeted and destroyed by the government through the closing of communal spaces, high tax on pubs and meeting places, stuff like that’. Self-employed, running websites and online businesses, having been mentored by an unnamed someone in the defence and private security business, Moulton has worked as an independent contractor in that sector. This appears to indicate a vague political awareness of social and economic problems, endemic in capitalist society, filtered through a sector directly involved in profiting from the widespread instability of volatile international politics.

Rather than second-guessing his own politics by attributing far-right motivation to his actions, his flagging campaign rather reflects a confused and superficial political viewpoint: identifying widespread problems without any serious understanding of the root cause. Raising the flag up the local lampposts became the summer trend nationally for a while. This was a popular movement, perhaps inspired by Reform UK, or by even more sinister right-wing groups, a widespread outbreak of xenophobia maybe, people outraged by boatloads of migrants tipping up on the south coast, with governments of either major party unable to repel them. Certainly, along with lamppost-hoisted flags were those carried into battle with the state outside asylum-seeker hotels.

Tripadvisor describes The Bell Hotel, Epping: ‘Plenty of parking and good location… Sadly a lot of the hotel is run down and in need of an urgent refurbishment.’ All the more so, most likely, having been laid siege to by the aggressively discontented. At first the local state authority, via a court ruling, declared the hotel must be closed, without any apparent consideration of what would then happen to those housed in its less than salubrious facilities. Then a legal volte-face resulting in more outraged British (or were they English?) patriots turning up at the hotel, along with counter-demonstrators.

August is often referred to by the news media as the ‘silly season’ with parliament on leave and frequently no British news worth reporting. Not in 2025 though as the battle of Epping featured night after night on broadcasts. The focus was a single asylum seeker arrested and charged with several offences including the sexual assault of a 14 year old girl. He was subsequently convicted. Other asylum seekers housed at The Bell made clear not only their abhorrence of his actions, but their overall dislike of the man for his general behaviour, which they had had to put up with prior to his arrest.

There were obviously political actors at work quite prepared to further exploit the 14 year old victim for their own ends, as was the case with the tragic victims in Southport the previous year. The disaffected meanwhile allowed themselves to become an unreasonable, unreasoning mob, most of whom are usually rational, sociable people in their everyday circumstances, however trying those might be.

As Joseph Moulton identified in South Yorkshire, people nationally and internationally are having to deal with social and economic stresses which politicians will not, or more likely, cannot deal with. Pre-election promises all too readily made are rapidly reneged on.

When people lose faith in politics it doesn’t mean they have no beliefs at all; rather, they can come to believe in almost any ill-founded solutions whose appeal is immediate, without consideration of consequences, and without any analysis of why circumstances are as they are. They identify only symptoms, with no attempt to find causes. It is analgesic politics. It is all too easy to deride those protesting outside asylum hotels. Undoubtedly there will be quite a mix of motives amongst them. Some may well have far-right tendencies, while others genuinely feel threatened and insecure. Many seem to be of the ‘precariat’ strata of the wider working class, those whose immediate economic circumstances make their lives an almost constant struggle. Feelings of vulnerability heighten perceptions of threat and a sense of unfairness. ‘My son can’t get a house, but they get them given!’ is one comment by a protester to a TV news interviewer.

An effect of economic and social pressures is to narrow people’s focus. They don’t look for reasons why refugees risk the treacherous Channel crossing in what are little more than dinghies. The ultimate cause of their own and refugees’ ills lies outside their awareness. The wider world with all manner of disorders caused by capitalism merely enforces a sense of lack of control, a feeling of near powerlessness. So, rather than aspiring to abolish borders the reaction is to make them more clearly defined and secure.

When those who are occupying the moral high ground stage their counter-protests they unintentionally heighten the sense amongst the demonstrators that their concerns are simply being dismissed as those of racist bigots. So when the flag is run up the flagpole (lamppost) people start to salute it and it becomes a trend. When interviewed, some of the more active flag raisers insist their motives are positive, to do with pride and community.

Understandable to a point amidst all the national and international uncertainties. It just makes the task of socialists all the more difficult. As with reformism, it diverts thinking away from what really needs to be done. The media has given the impression that virtually the whole country has been decked out with flags. Online reports carry photographs of lamppost after lamppost sporting the colours. However, the accompanying article reveals that it’s only the same couple of streets being shown. The rest of the town/city being undraped, just as Joseph Moulton indicated in his interview with YorkMix Radio. A few flags, however ill or well-intentioned, will, like closing borders and asylum hotels, change nothing. Within a few weeks, as autumn weather takes hold, those flags will become rain sodden, tattered and faded, hanging limply. An appropriate symbol of capitalist Britain.

D.A.

Reformism, old and new (2007)

Book Review from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Struggling for a Social Europe: Neoliberal Globalisation and the Birth of a European Social Movement. By Andy Mathers. Ashgate.

Mathers begins his book with the claim that “15 June 1997 may prove to be a significant date in the development of the labour movement in Europe”. What, you will be asking, happened that day? Some 50,000 people demonstrated in Amsterdam at the EU Summit that was being held there, including a few hundred who had marched from various parts of Europe to demand “the right to work or a guaranteed basic income”. Nothing very new — or very significant — then. Except for Mathers who had chosen to study these marches for this PhD thesis, but as a “researcher-activist”, i.e. someone who sympathised with their aims but was at the same time studying them like an ethnologist studying a primitive tribe.

He writes as some sort of Trotskyist, so his conclusions are predictable: there is still some mileage to be got from making reform demands on the nation-state (as opposed to the EU), that the trade union movement ought to have involved itself more, etc. He criticises as “the new reformism” those theorists who have written off the working class as an agent for social change and who look instead to some other groups such as students, employed and unemployed graduates, and marginalised youth who make up the bulk of those involved in the so-called “New Social Movements”  (NSMs).

This is in fact an interesting discussion since the “official” labour movement — trade unions and Labour and Social Democratic parties — have given up any idea of changing society, even gradually through a series of social reform measures voted by parliaments. They have abandoned this and now settle for getting the best they can out of the present social system, capitalism. This is a significant development that does need analysing.

The “Labour Movement” essentially only embraced a section of the working class properly so-called – only those who worked in industry and transport whereas the working class is comprised of all those who are forced by economic necessity to sell their ability to work in order to live, so including the so-called “middle class” too.

Mathers does in fact conclude that the non-industrial workers involved in the NSMs are workers, even if they don’t yet recognise it. But his criticism of the “new reformism” is not made from a revolutionary socialist standpoint, but from that of “old reformism”, as can be seen from his description and endorsement of the programme proposed by leading SWP theoretician, Alex Callinicos:

“In An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, Callinicos outlined a set of measures which he argued combined ‘immediate remedies’ to the consequences of neoliberal policies with a ‘different social logic’ (p. 132). These demands included those prominent in the European Marches such as the Tobin Tax, the universal basic income, the reduced working week, the defence of public services, and the redistribution of wealth and income. It also included those arising from the broader movement like the abolition of immigration controls and third world debt, the defence of civil liberties, and measures to ensure environmental protection (pp. 132-9).”

Some of these are not even palliatives led alone remedies, but they are all reforms to capitalism.

As it happens, I was myself present in Amsterdam on that 15 June (with my trade union) and witnessed one of the incidents mentioned by Mathers: the reception by the Dutch riot police of a group of masked demonstrators who had travelled from Italy by train (p. 62). Both groups were lined up outside the railway station facing each other, with ordinary passengers walking between then. Apparently, later there were some clashes as the police forced them back on to a train for Italy. What the point was I don’t know.

Adam Buick

Hong Kong: Extraditing Extradition (2019)

Hong Kong protests

From the August 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

People Power in Hong Kong

On 9 July, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam declared that a widely unpopular extradition bill, which had already been suspended by the Hong Kong government, was ‘dead’ – albeit not formally withdrawn, as most of the protestors against it had been demanding.

And what a protest it has been. Over recent months, hundreds of thousands of people (nearly two million on 16 June) have regularly swelled the streets of Hong Kong in opposition to the legislation, which amongst other things would make it easier for crime suspects to be removed to the mainland. The mostly non-violent demonstrators have faced rubber bullets, batons, pepper spray, water cannons and tear gas from the police, as well as opposition from counter-protestors.

Hong Kong has long been a place of refuge for dissidents and activists fleeing persecution in China. These fugitives include some rich Chinese capitalists who have fled to Hong Kong in fear of losing their wealth. But they also include many political activists. The concern is that those extradited to China could disappear or be subject to vague or trumped-up charges and unfair trials.

Such fears are well-founded. Recently, university students from Peking University who tried to link up with workers have disappeared, a fate that regularly befalls workers and students deemed a threat to China’s authoritarian state. To take another example, in 2015 five booksellers specialising in publications critical of the (so-called) Communist Party disappeared. And Hong Kong activists have been detained upon crossing the border. It is unsurprising that many young people fear for their futures.

We can see in these protests an impressive display of people power. With limited electoral means, protests and occupations of public spaces and buildings are the only way that many locals feel they can express their opinions. They are participating in a long tradition of civil protest in Hong Kong. In 2003, for example – just six years after the formal handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China – an anti-subversion bill, Article 23, was withdrawn after half a million people took to the streets. But many of those involved in the recent protests are too young to remember this event or even to have been involved in 2014’s ‘pro-democracy’ Umbrella Movement.

Clearly, these protests – and Lam’s apparent inability to contain them – have rattled Beijing. The Chinese government will be deeply concerned that the unrest might spread across the border to Shenzhen or other Chinese cities and connect with the struggles of industrial workers. Predictably, media coverage of the protests in China has been minimal and propagandistic. After all, Chinese state media ruthlessly suppress public discussion of events such as the 1989 massacres of students and workers in Beijing and other Chinese cities or the recent, massive anti-pollution protests in Wuhan. When Hong Kong has been mentioned, Chinese media have described the mainly non-violent protests as an outbreak of criminality and an affront to public opinion. As is usual in authoritarian states, the media have also blamed the disturbances on foreign meddling. But while there is no doubt that foreign powers are using the situation in Hong Kong as a political football (particularly in the context of the ongoing US-China trade war), the suggestion that such massive protests are the result of Western manipulation is absurd.

There is no doubt, however, that many of the protestors harbour illusions in nationalism. Surveys show that most people in Hong Kong, especially younger age groups, proudly identify as Hong Kongers rather than Chinese. Some protestors are driven by nativist resentment, blaming mainlanders for rising living costs. Others want to take Hong Kong back in time: some of those who stormed the Legislative Council building on 1 July (the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty) even carried Union Jack flags. Politicians and other nationalists in the UK have made the most of this regressive nostalgia. The British Foreign Secretary even threatened China with ‘serious consequences’ if Hong Kong’s ‘freedoms’ are not protected.

Of course, the freedom that capitalists are most concerned about in Hong Kong is the freedom to continue exploiting the working-class. The small minority of socialists and anarchists on Hong Kong’s streets know that working-class people in Hong Kong (and elsewhere) cannot be truly free in a capitalist society. The removal of the extradition bill may prevent some of the repression faced by activists, but the basic problems faced especially by younger workers in the region – such as unaffordable housing, falling real-terms wages and relentless gentrification – will not be solved either by ‘independence’ or a return to the colonial past.

These protests, which are still ongoing, do not express a socialist perspective. But we do not dismiss the participants as naïve idealists, or worse still, as the ‘useful idiots’ of Western imperialism, as Stalinist organisations like the CPGB-ML do in a direct echo of Chinese state propaganda. We admire the determination of the mainly working-class protestors to stand up to the system. Being ‘leaderless’, mostly non-violent and massive in scale, these demonstrations display some of the features that will be required of the socialist revolution.

SH

Reformist dead – end (1) (2002)

Book Review from the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sovereign States or Political Communities? Civil Society and Contemporary Politics. By Darrow Schecter. Manchester University Press. 224 pages.

German philosophy is still alive and, judging by this book, is just as impenetrable as it ever was. Schecter's basic argument is that while Marx was right to see that capitalism is based on the exploitation of wage-labour and right to say that a real democracy – what Schecter calls “a self-governing civil society” – is only possible on the basis of the abolition of both capitalism and the state, Marx was wrong to say that socialism would involve the end of politics.

This is largely a question of definition. Marx thought that socialism would mean the end of politics because he associated politics with the state and of course there would be no state – as a public institution having a monopoly of the means of legitimate violence within a given part of the globe – in socialism. Schecter, basing himself on various 20th century German political philosophers, comes to exactly the opposite conclusion. Defining politics as the disinterested pursuit of the common good, he argues that it cannot co-exist with the state as states are bodies which, besides being influenced by the most powerful interest groups, seek to contain and manage the various conflicts of material interest and competition for money that go on within capitalist society.

Thus, what is called “politics” today is merely competition between rival parties of professional politicians seeking state power on the basis of promising to improve the material position of those who vote for them. This reduces so-called democratic choice to giving electors the chance of saying yes or no every few years to whether an outgoing government should continue in office. Most people realise this and is what they consciously do when they vote, if they bother to vote at all. It also explains why they see politics as marginal to their lives.

Real democracy, says Schecter and we would agree, involves people actively participating in decision-making about general issues; which assumes that meeting their material needs is no longer an issue since these are adequately met by other means – which can only be on the basis of socialism. Which is why a real democracy can only exist in socialism.

Schecter also investigates how such a desirable situation could be brought about. At one time the working class movement – the trade unions, a mass party calling itself socialist – was seen as the instrument of this but now, says Schecter, this movement has accommodated itself to capitalism seeking only better conditions within the system and even being integrated into the state administration of labour and welfare matters. He sees a potential replacement in what have been called the “New Social Movements” – “feminist, peace, ecological, gay rights, indigenous peoples' rights” groups – though only insofar as these pursue politics (in his sense) by seeking to represent, not the sectional interests of their constituencies within the state, but the whole of “civil society” against the state.

Although he realises that these NSMs (as, apparently, we have to call them) are just as liable to accommodate themselves to capitalism and to be co-opted and integrated into the state as the Labour Movement was, he vastly underestimates this. In fact he seems to ignore the extent to which this was essentially all these movements ever wanted and indeed the extent to which it has already happened (women can now become trained killers in the armed forces, open gays can sit as Tory MPs, and in America they've got a black Secretary of State).

What is disappointing (if only because Schecter was for a short while a member of the Socialist Party and so should know better) is that he calls the regimes such as used to exist in Russia “state socialism” rather than state capitalism. He also (p. 52) misquotes Marx. Marx did not write in connection with the 1871 Paris Commune that “the working class cannot lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”. What he actually wrote was “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machine and wield it for its own purposes” (Address of the General Council of the IWMA on the Civil War in France, 1871, beginning of section 3, in Marx The First International and After, Penguin Books, 1974, p. 206, emphasis added).

In other words, the working class can lay hold of the existing state machine but not “simply”, i. e. it must first change it by, in the occurrence, lopping off its militaristic, bureaucratic and other undemocratic features before wielding it to abolish capitalism thereby making itself redundant.

Adam Buick

Radical history (1984)

Book Review from the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Charles Poulsen, The English Rebels (Journeyman, 1984)

This book is a commemoration of popular radical movements and a celebration of the spirit and ideals underlying those movements. It begins with the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and plots history through the Lollards, Jack Cade, Kett's Rebellion, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the Naval Mutinies of 1797, the Luddites, the Trade Unions, the Reform Bill, Chartism and the Emancipation of Women. It is intended as a popular history, redressing the balance from a consideration of the antics of Kings and Queens to an analysis of movements arising out of the discontent of ordinary people.

This is a useful history although it is remarkably brief. What is does emphasise is the role of violent insurrection as part of the fabric of British historical development. Poulsen says of British history that

it is one of a long, almost a continual series of risings, rebellions, revolts, riots and direct actions that have wrung from the nation's rulers the sequence of reforms and changes that have resulted in today's society. (p.45)

To this might be added the history of violent reaction from governments in response to the radical movements, even though many of these were reformist in nature and held allegiance to long and/or parliament.

Given that six hundred years of history are dealt with in some two hundred pages it is little wonder that much of what is discussed is almost shorthand. At times this reads more like a dictionary of radical ideas. Tom Paine is dispatched in four pages and Robert Owen only merits three passing references. As for William Morris, he does not appear. As much of the work is descriptive we are left asking questions of the text. Poulsen says of the demands of the Peasants' Revolt that "this is not the place to subject these demands to close political analysis" (p.24). This is a stance that is maintained throughout the work but it is a political analysis that is essentially required. It is not sufficient to describe a history of idealism. Radical ideas must be subjected to analysis in order to understand why they should have arisen and to what extent they are feasible. We need also to understand the implications of those ideas. Any history of radical thinking ought not to be restricted simply to an examination of English radical thought. Marx and Engels are mentioned fleetingly but it is important to understand the part they played in contributing to the radical argument. What tends to happen is that Poulsen's shorthand confuses where it should elucidate, as when he cross refers "what the Bible calls 'love', the trade unions 'solidarity', the socialist 'fraternity'" (p.198). This does not explain what each of these concepts demands or the essential differences understood by these concepts. It is also simplistic to conclude that "socialism" means "fraternity" and again this emphasises the need for a greater analysis within the book. In his epilogue Poulsen argues that radicalism is an ongoing process in which we are all engaged but this theme is not developed sufficiently within the book and the reader is left making what connections he can. Poulsen argues that there is still a need for a "new" society and says:

this desired society has been known by many names over many centuries: the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, the New Jerusalem, the Rule of the Saints, the Digger Republic, the Co-operative Commonwealth, and so on. These early concepts, often associated with religious movements, remained unattainable ideals. It is no longer so. (pp.198-199)

We are not told what conditions have changed to enable the now attainability of these aims. Poulsen's history ends with the emancipation of women but if he really wishes to argue that the common ownership proposed by John Wycliffe can now be achieved he ought to have extended his analysis to a consideration of the debate as it now exists. In this he is guilty of ignoring the work of the Socialist Party of Great Britain which actually does argue the case for the establishment of common ownership as a practical possibility rather than as a moral ideal. At the same time Poulsen's own commitment to radicalism and revolutionary change can be questioned when he argues that at present the prominent radical change required is "the right to work, to practice one's skill or profession, to support oneself and one's dependents by one's labour and thereby make a contribution to the national well-being" (p.198). The perpetuation of capitalism is at odds with a society that can work in the interests of the majority. It is capitalism, for all the reforms that have been achieved, that alienates the working class from the means of production. Poulsen may argue that the "ideal society . . . can only be achieved after a radical reorganisation of our present economic economic and social relations" (p.199) but this is not explained. What form will that reorganisation take and how will it be achieved?

Poulsen's book is a valuable, though brief, introduction to some of the major radical ideas that have developed within society. At the same time it is a reminder of the need for a radical alternative to overcome prevailing ideologies as when he says of the suppression of trade unions that "the defence of freedom became a catchword to perpetuate poverty and exploitation" (p.157). The freedoms that are enjoyed are those of the capitalist class while poverty and exploitation are the lot of the majority. Poulsen ends with a moral imperative of the need for change rather than suffer nuclear annihilation. If he holds to this perspective then he ought to have analysed how the ideals of Ball, Kett and Winstanley have been developed and the contribution that they have made to the ongoing debate. Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. They are not simply an historic anomaly but a continuum which requires an understanding of the conditions that have given rise to those ideas and an appreciation of how they have matured in response. The history of radicalism is not a series of snapshots but a continuous refinement. The work of the Socialist Party of Great Britain has helped to transform the notion of an ideal into a practical and feasible alternative in which the needs of all society's members are the pre-requisite modus operandi of society.

Philip Bentley 

Dancing with dynamite (2010)

Book Review from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dancing with dynamite. Social movements and the State in Latin America. By Benjamin Dangl. AK Press. $12.

Anarchists and anti-parliamentarists are always pointing to the overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1973 as an example of how the ruling class will not accept defeat at the polls, not even by leftwing reformists let alone by the election of a majority of socialist MPs.

They are behind the times. The last 15 or so years have seen the election and survival of leftwing presidents in a number of South American countries (Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay and even Paraguay), some of them with programmes more radical than Allende’s. There was indeed an attempt to overthrow one of them (Chavez in Venezuela in 2002) but this failed due to popular resistance and the refusal of the armed forces to back it.

Of course this doesn’t show that the ruling class might not stage a coup in the event of a socialist election victory, but it does rather undermine the argument that elections can never be a way to win control of political power.

In this book, brought out by an anarchist publishing house, Dangl examines the relationship – the “dance” – between “social movements” (in favour of land rights, legalising factory occupations, getting amenities in shanty towns) and the elected leftwing governments. He argues that the social movements should not put up candidates themselves nor let themselves be dominated by leftwing parties; instead, they should maintain their independence and continue to employ “direct action” to try to get what they want.

However, he is unable to take up a strict anti-parliamentarist stance because he can’t deny the logic of the movements preferring a government that will help them to leaving political power in the hands of those opposed to their aims. None of the movements have, as Dangl is obliged to record, adopted this stance but have voted and even campaigned for the leftwing presidents.

The case for a mass socialist movement not taking electoral action is just as weak since this would be to leave the apparatus of the state in enemy hands. A socialist movement is no more likely to do this than the present-day social movements in South America have.

Adam Buick