50 Years Ago: I.S. stand for – confusion (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Socialist Worker”, the weekly paper of the International Socialists, regularly publishes a statement of their main principles called “What We Stand For”. We would expect this organization to stand for Socialism. Surprisingly, Socialism is nowhere defined in the statement and it only appears as a word upon which various people and organizations have placed many different interpretations. Still it is possible to get some idea of what IS stand for by a careful reading of their statement. It is also possible to get very confused. For instance, the statement starts off:

“We believe that socialism can only be achieved by the independent action of the working class.”

Whereas, the last part says they are:

“For the building of a mass workers’ revolutionary party . . . which can lead the working class to power . . .” (our emphasis both times)

Now, unless the workers are supposed to be getting power for something other than Socialism, it is simply ridiculous to say that someone who is being led is taking independent action. Could IS tell us which statement they stand for and which is this week’s deliberate mistake? It would also be interesting to know just how large a “mass” the workers of this “revolutionary part y” are to be. Presumably, if it attracted too many workers the working class would be leading themselves!

The second part of the statement reads:

“We believe in overthrowing capitalism, not patching it up or gradually trying to change it. We therefore support all struggles of workers against capitalism and fight to break the hold of reformist ideas and leaders.”

We would wholeheartedly agree with this although we wonder if they only mean reformist leaders in the last bit. However, IS don’t appear to agree with this part of the statement themselves. Later on they say they are:

“Against unemployment, redundancies and lay-offs. Instead we demand five days’ work or five days’ pay, and the 35-hour week. For nationalization without compensation under workers’ control.”

What is this if it is not an appeal to patch up capitalism? No form of nationalization ever has or could solve the problem of unemployment in capitalism. This is a strange way to fight reformist ideas.

[From the article, I. S. stand for - confusion by Con Friel,  Socialist Standard, December 1974]

Blogger's Note:

Apologies for the end of the year SNAFU. Rather than this being a 50 Years Ago column, it is in fact a 51 Years Ago column. It happens. No worries, as it is a good article by Con Friel. The confusion may have arisen because there was an I.S. article which appeared in the December 1975 Socialist Standard.

Muddled Ideas about Inflation (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chief reason why inflation is so widely misunderstood is that it is hidden in a fog of erroneous ideas put forward partly in ignorance and partly because the employers and the Government have an interest in obscuring it. A recent addition to confusion is an article “Why Money is Shrinking” by John Palmer, business editor of the Guardian, which appeared in Socialist Worker (4th August 1973), the journal of the “International Socialists.”

It dismissed the real explanation in a single paragraph which contained the following:

  But Enoch Powell says it is all the fault of the government printing too much money. This is an illusion even shared by some on the left.

No attempt was made to examine and refute the case carefully argued by Marx to show that if an inconvertible paper currency is issued in excess it will have the effect of correspondingly sending up prices. (Capital Vol. I. Allen & Unwin edition: Chapter on Money, or the Circulation of Commodities, particularly pages 108-9.) Indeed, the writer appears not to have heard of Marx and what Marx wrote on this and other questions dealt with in the article.

Marx was not alone in recognizing the direct relationship between an excess note issue and the price level, though he differed from other economists in basing his exposition on a logical application of his labour theory of value. When it was a question of explaining the price rise in, for example, the great German inflation of the nineteen-twenties, most economists had no difficulty in relating cause and effect, the cause being that the German government met its expenditure by printing notes; but faced with a situation in which an indirect method is employed, many of them cannot see the connection.

F. W. Paish in Benham’s Economics (Pitman 1967, p. 465) is one economist who sees that it is a difference of method with no real difference as to results.

  In some circumstances it [the Government] might simply print more notes and use them to pay for its expenditure. Nowadays, in a country such as Great Britain, the Government would borrow from the banks, printing more notes to enable the banks to maintain their cash reserves.

When the banks have lent to the government by buying government securities and thus have run down their cash they replenish it by calling in short-term loans, and the Bank of England in effect makes good the deficiency in the money market by printing more notes against government securities presented to it.

The article in the Socialist Worker (presented in the form of question and answer) deals with such topical matters as whether wage increases cause price increases, and whether wages should be related to the retail price index — all of it marked by contradiction and confusion. It' rejects the myth “spread by the Tories” that “inflation is caused by wages”, then lets it in again by a back door:

  But surely wages must have some effect on prices? Of course they do. Quite simply, business raises its prices when increases in costs threaten its profit margins.

(No mention of the fact that the myth of wage increases causing price increases is not a Tory monopoly but has been shared by the Labour Party, the party IS tells the workers to vote for.)

Here again the writer of the article makes no attempt to meet the case argued by Marx in Value, Price and Profit: that since the capitalist always puts his prices up to as much as the market will bear, he cannot at will put them still higher because his costs (including wages) have gone up. We are asked by John Palmer to accept a mythical capitalist who works to a kind of “ideal” or “reasonable” profit margin which he will try to maintain but not exceed—promptly contradicted elsewhere in the article where we are told that “the banks, for instance, are reporting 60, 75 and even 90 per cent increases in profit and some property sharks’ profits . . . up 300 per cent”.

We are also told that prices go up because the bosses push them up, but “no one likes that, not even the ruling class”. Are we to suppose that the bosses and the ruling class are different people?

The writer discusses whether the workers ought to go for so-called “threshold agreements” which would relate wages to the rise of the retail price index. Instead of giving the simple answer, that the workers should always try to get wages as high as circumstances permit, he gives as a reason that the retail price index underestimates the real rise of prices — implying that if it were statistically accurate the workers should accept such agreements. His reason for believing the index to be faulty is that it “includes the cost of Ted Heath’s yacht, Lord Lambton’s champagne”. If it did, this would surely be a reason for supposing that the index overstated the rise of the workers’ costs. Actually of course it doesn’t include the cost of Heath’s yacht and Lambton’s champagne. It isn’t based on “costs” at all but simply on percentage variations of prices. As the Department of Employment insists, it isn’t what is meant by a cost-of-living index at all: that is to say, it is not based on the total cost of a given standard of living.

If John Palmer does not understand the retail price index he also is not very good at arithmetic. He tells us that a 50 per cent. rise of prices is the same as a 50 per cent. fall in the purchasing power of money. On this faulty arithmetic the 100 per cent, rise of prices in the past few years would mean a 100 per cent fall in the value of money, meaning that money has no purchasing power at all. The correct figure for a 50 per cent. rise of prices is a 33⅓ per cent fall in the value of money.

Edgar Hardcastle

The International Socialists and Parliamentary Action (1975)

From the December 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “International Socialists” and their journal Socialist Worker declare that “There is . . . no parliamentary road to Socialism”. (See “What We Stand For” in any issue of Socialist Worker.) They use several different arguments to support their position. One of them was put in an article by Paul Foot published in The Times of 14th August 1975.

Mr. Foot’s theme was that “the parliamentary road to Socialism has turned into another blind alley”. To support this argument all that he had to do was to give us his example of a socialist working class having tried to use the parliamentary road to achieve Socialism and having failed. But Mr. Foot and I.S. do not know of any such example. What he did give was the British Labour Government, that is to say a party which rejects Socialism and tries to run capitalism. In his typically confused way Mr. Foot is half aware of this, because his description of Labour ministers and their supporters is that they are people “who have imagined that capitalism could be reformed by the periodical election of Labour governments”. But what has reforming capitalism got to do with Socialism?

In another muddled passage Mr. Foot wrote that these are dreadful times “for socialists who put their trust in Labour governments”; but Socialists did not and do not put their trust in Labour governments. It isn’t Socialists who have been led “down another blind alley” but the unfortunate workers who are bamboozled by Foot and is into voting for the Labour Party at each General Election.

But I.S. has another case against the parliamentary road. It was set out in Socialist Worker (21st July 1973) in an attack on another organization which, like I.S., urges the workers to vote for the Labour Party — the Communist Party of Great Britain. There it was argued that the working class cannot gain control through parliamentary elections because the working class is only a minority.

A majority of workers may want a complete transformation of society . . . but in parliamentary elections, with the middle class and ruling class voting against them, they would lose.

This is of course a nonsensical statement. The working class consists of all who get their living by selling their mental and physical energies, their labour-power, for a wage or salary. With dependents and working-class pensioners they constitute at least 85 per cent. (34 million) out of the 40 million electors on the parliamentary register; and on the same percentage basis they constituted about 25 million out of the 29 million who used their votes at the last General Election. (The remaining 4 million voters consisted of capitalists, the “self-employed”, and their dependents.)

So how did 4 million outvote 25 million? Even if we assumed that all of the 11½  million electors who voted Labour were working-class (and that is certainly not true) it would mean that more working-class voters (over 13 million) voted Tory, or Liberal or for the Welsh, Scottish and Irish Nationalist parties, than voted for the Labour Party. (To avoid possible misunderstanding, all of these 29 million supported private capitalism or state capitalism.)

Ruling out the possibility that I.S. cannot count, the basis for their peculiar conclusion appears to be the probability that for them “working-class” means only those workers actually producing goods, to the exclusion of the big majority of workers not so employed. (On this basis of course Mr. Foot and many of the members of I.S. would not be working-class.)

However, what is of most importance is the conclusion that follows from the I.S. view of “working class”. It is that is I.S. consciously basing its case on minority action, the forcible imposition of the will of the minority on the majority. This is carried a stage further in the I.S. declaration “What We Stand For”, where it is stated that the achievement of Socialism is to be by the organization in a revolutionary socialist party of “the most militant sections of the working class” — in other words, a minority of a minority. It is significant that “What We Stand For” never once uses the words “democracy” or “democratic”.

I.S. has in fact largely taken over from the Communist Party what was that party’s position half a century ago. Like the Communist Party then and now, the objective of I.S. is not Socialism but a variety of state capitalism. It differs from traditional Labour Party ideas on state capitalism, the nationalized boards, in that I.S. lays emphasis on workers’ councils — capitalism run by shop stewards.

Edgar Hardcastle

Clear confusion (1985)

From the July 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

No socialist could support the Labour Party because it is a capitalist party. When in government it runs the profit system at the expense of the working class, for that is the only way it can be run. In every election since 1906 the Socialist Party, which was formed two years earlier, has opposed Labour: we have shown consistently that a vote for Labour is a vote for capitalism.

Those who urge workers to vote Labour are anti-socialists who deserve our unreserved hostility. The pseudo-Communist Party of Great Britain has repeatedly told workers to waste their votes on Labour mis-leaders and are partially responsible for the suffering which resulted. The so-called Militant Tendency encourages workers to vote for and join the Labour Party.

The Socialist Workers' Party is also not slow when it comes to confusing workers at election time. In 1974, when Harold Wilson was offering to do a better job of looking after the interests of the bosses than Edward Heath, the SWP ran the following message in their pre-election issue of Socialist Worker:

. . . every socialist, every worker must spend all the days before the polling day shouting two simple slogans, at work, in the home, and whenever anyone will listen: DEFEND UNIONS - VOTE LABOUR 

The striking firemen, NUPE workers, Grunwick pickets and numerous other trade unionists who came into conflict with the viciously anti-working-class 1974-9 Labour government can judge for themselves the wisdom of the SWP's advice.

But did the SWP learn the lesson? On 4 June 1983, just before the last general election. their leading confusionist, Alex Callinicos, made a prediction about the election result with which socialists could agree (we assume he arrived at the conclusion by accident and will endeavour to avoid such clarity in future): "Labour in office would attack the living standards of its own supporters in an effort to restore profits".

The headline of Socialist Worker the following week stated: "STOP THE TORIES — VOTE LABOUR".

Although the various Leftist sects all urge workers to vote for capitalism at election time, they all claim to be divided from one another by deeply held principles. The Communist Party calls the SWP and the Militant Tendency "ultra-Left" and the latter two groups have spent years telling those who will listen how wrong the other is. Now, the SWP has decided that it is time to patch up its differences with the Militant crowd (differences which are invisible to the clear eye) and in Socialist Worker of 11 May a full-page "open letter" is addressed to the editorial board of Militant. (Note that it is not addressed to the Militant followers, but to the leaders.) Now, socialists do not give a damn whether these two anti-socialist Leftist sects remain apart or unite; the only benefit to the workers would be if they ceased to propagate their confused ideas altogether. But we are sure that readers will want to study this rare gem of political stupidity:

  Our attitude is clear. We are for a Labour government. Not because we believe it will be a government in the interests of workers, but precisely to test in practice again the reformist road.
   We believe a future Labour government will not act in the interests of the working class. On the contrary, it will act like every previous Labour government — in the interests of the bosses' class.
   And. since the crisis of British capitalism is deeper now than in the seventies, a new Labour government will be more vicious, and more reactionary, than the Wilson-Callaghan governments — the first since 1945 to succeed in cutting wages, while increasing unemployment and savaging the welfare state. (Their emphases.)

Their attitude is clear, alright — clearly round the bend. Vote Labour in the next election in order to test the reformist road? And then they go on to tell workers, on the basis of previous test-runs, precisely what damage a Labour government would do.

The trouble with the SWP is that they treat politics as a game and waste the time of those who take them seriously by offering half-baked riddles rather than the clear advice socialists give: do not vote Labour because "it will act like every previous Labour government — in the interest of the bosses' class”.

Steve Coleman

International Socialists . . . the Tripe Factory (1974)

From the April 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The crisis which we have been predicting for the last 20 years is now upon us . . . Every single area of the organisation needs to be strengthened if we are to reply to Heath, Wilson and the union leaders with real Socialist answers” (Socialist Worker 5 January 1974).

Not at all a bad idea! If by “real” Socialist answers is meant sound, correct Socialist answers.

Unfortunately the International Socialists are not giving “real” Socialist answers; but very unreal mistaken ones.

Socialist Worker for 12 January includes a whole page of “replies to readers’ queries”, headlined by the statement that "the only answer” is not “Socialism” but “Workers' Control”.

Now the first point about so-called “Workers’ Control” is that there ain’t (and can’t be) any such animal. Workers’ control is a simple contradiction in terms. Those “in control” can never be the workers. Control of society comes from ownership backed by a Parliamentary majority. Even Chris Harman is forced to admit this. Lower down answering somebody else he writes: “What is needed is a mass movement of workers prepared to fight for control of every pit, dock, factory and office, replacing the present system by one run democratically by elected workers’ delegates.” But he adds (ruefully) “such a really massive movement does not yet exist. Most workers continue to take the existing system for granted and only want small gradual changes in it.” (Socialist Worker 12 January 1974).

Too true — only too true, Chris. But even supposing that friend Harman’s idea actually worked and a "massive movement” of workers fought for control of every factory — AND WON IT — WHAT THEN? Would it be Socialism? NO! On the same page we are told that the "problem of shortages” would be transformed by "dividing up the immense wealth in very few hands; enough to give the six million lower paid workers an extra ten pounds a week.”

Is this Socialism? NO! It’s the same old wages system. All it could do would be to perpetuate the same old class struggle. Even if every worker got ten pounds extra next Friday, nothing would be fundamentally changed. Capitalism would go its own sweet way and whittle away the "increases” by inflation, speed-up and all its other devices. As Tony Cliff rightly says (misquoting Lenin) "Capitalism always has a way out of the crisis if the workers are ready to pay the price” (Socialist Worker 5 January 1974).

The Socialist Worker actually writes that this "dividing up” would "pay the miners a decent wage so that they saw no reason to strike”. (What is a "decent” wage?)

This is definitely comical, seeing that the International Socialists spend most of their time fomenting strikes for political ends. Of course we are not quite so naive as not to know that the object of all the International Socialists’ hysteria about the present crisis is simply "the mixture as before”. It is a reprint of the old outmoded and discredited Communist Party tactics — calls for a Labour Government, new versions of the election of Soviets by the Trades Councils and establishment of "dual power” on the Petrograd model.

Its support of any and every strike, or potential riot, its absurd idea that any crowd breaking a few windows is preparation for the "revolutionary situation” and slavish idolatory of the Leninist “tactics” is the real reason for the formation of Rank and File (T.U.) movements, organization of fractions in the Trade Unions and factory branches. It’s all been tried before, ending with the virtual non-existence of the CPGB.

Behind the organization of strikes to overthrow Governments is the idea of seizure of power by “Workers’ Committees” backed by mutiny in favour of the workers by the armed forces! What a hope!

By their rejection of Parliamentary methods International Socialists show that they are confused on the method of establishing Socialism because they do not understand Socialism itself. Socialism is NOT control by the workers. Socialist society concerns every citizen in his capacity as a human being, not as a miner, bank clerk or whatever.

Cannot International Socialists see that if the massive movement they envisage was Socialist it would inevitably express itself politically at elections, capturing political power in the only way possible (which is not street fights or riots) by a majority vote?

By their hysterical and unthinking fomenting of disorder they discredit and besmirch Socialism, reducing it to the level of hooliganism and street brawling.

Will they never learn? It’s all been tried before and is foredoomed to disaster.

Horatio

I. S. STAND FOR - CONFUSION (1974)

From the December 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Socialist Worker”, the weekly paper of the International Socialists, regularly publishes a statement of their main principles called “What We Stand For”.(1) We would expect this organization to stand for Socialism. Surprisingly, Socialism is nowhere defined in the statement and it only appears as a word upon which various people and organizations have placed many different interpretations. Still it is possible to get some idea of what IS stand for by a careful reading of their statement. It is also possible to get very confused. For instance, the statement starts off:

We believe that socialism can only be achieved by the independent action of the working class.

Whereas, the last part says they are

For the building of a mass workers’ revolutionary party . . . which can lead the working class to power . . .

(our emphasis both times)

Now, unless the workers are supposed to be getting power for something other than Socialism, it is simply ridiculous to say that someone who is being led is taking independent action. Could IS tell us which statement they stand for and which is this week’s deliberate mistake? It would also be interesting to know just how large a “mass” the workers of this “revolutionary party” are to be. Presumably, if it attracted too many workers the working class would be leading themselves!

The second part of the statement reads:

We believe in overthrowing capitalism, not patching it up or gradually trying to change it. We therefore support all struggles of workers against capitalism and fight to break the hold of reformist ideas and leaders.

We would wholeheartedly agree with this although we wonder if they only mean reformist leaders in the last bit. However, IS don’t appear to agree with this part of the statement themselves. Later on they say they are:

Against unemployment, redundancies and lay-offs. Instead we demand five days’ work or five days’ pay, and the 35-hour week. For nationalization without compensation under workers’ control.

What is this if it is not an appeal to patch up capitalism? No form of nationalization ever has or could solve the problem of unemployment in capitalism. This is a strange way to fight reformist ideas. As another example, at the two general elections this year they have supported the return of a Labour government. This is despite acknowledging (although their election posters made no mention of the fact) that such a government would be anti-working class and reformist. This is another strange way of supporting all struggles of workers against capitalism and fighting reformist ideas. Again, perhaps IS could explain?

The fifth part of the IS statement at least gives us some idea of what they stand for. It contains the sentence:

The experience of Russia demonstrates that a socialist revolution cannot survive in isolation on one country.

This holds the definite implication that a Socialist revolution took place there. So, we must go back to the Russia of 1917 to find out what they mean by a Socialist revolution. There, in a backward, predominantly agrarian country which was collapsing under the strains of a modern twentieth century war, the Bolsheviks took power in a minority insurrection. They did so on the promise that they would provide “Peace, Bread and Land” and not Socialism. The Bolsheviks had also expressed the wildly optimistic hope that the workers of other countries would follow their example and take power also. When these workers, who at the time were butchering each other in defense of their masters’ interests, did not do so any hope of establishing Socialism was obviously futile. In this situation, which could have been predicted from the start, the Bolsheviks consolidated their position by establishing a dictatorship which suppressed all opposition and under Lenin’s guidance, embarked on a program me of state capitalism.

If this is the IS idea of a Socialist revolution it is easier to understand their opposition to parliamentary democracy with an almost universal franchise and their preference for soviets (or “councils of workplace delegates” as they put it) which have at best only a haphazard democracy. Their stated reasons are that

The state machine is a weapon of capitalist class rule and therefore must be smashed. The present parliament, army, police and judges cannot simply be taken over and used by the working class.

True, the state machine is a weapon of the ruling class but there is little logic in saying that because someone uses something as a weapon then nobody else can use that weapon. And of course the present parliament, army, etc. cannot simply be taken over and used by the working class. In the words of Engels:

. . . the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralized state power before it can use if for its own purpose . . .(2)

The IS preference for soviets may also be due to the fact that they are less representative and thus provide a better opportunity for a minority to come to power as the Bolsheviks did. It is to be hoped that IS have a greater love for democracy than their counterparts of 1917 who dissolved the first and last completely democratically elected Russian assembly (the Constituent Assembly of 1918) when they found they were in the minority.

To return to the point about “the independent action of the working class”. The statement also says that

To achieve socialism the most militant sections of the working class have to be organized into a revolutionary socialist party . . . 

Taken in conjunction with the apparent endorsement of the Bolsheviks’ tactics this would seem to indicate that IS hold the Leninist “vanguard” theory. This theory says that far from taking independent action for Socialism, the mass of the present working class will never understand Socialism anyway and will have to be led by professional revolutionaries who will introduce it from above. Whatever way you look at it, the IS statement is either confused or dishonest. Quite possibly it is a mixture of both as any "vanguard" can only survive on the confusion of its followers.

The Socialist Party, in contrast to IS, has a clear line on what Socialism is, and how it will be achieved. Socialism will be a society in which all the means by which wealth is produced and distributed will be under the common ownership and democratic control of the whole community. Of necessity, it will be a worldwide system because the means of production and distribution are worldwide. There will be no wage or price system as things will be produced solely for use and not for sale. People will work to the best of their ability and take according to their needs. The nature of Socialism shows that it can only be achieved by the conscious and independent action of a clear majority. It is the job of Socialists to help build that majority. We do not deprecate the struggles of workers but we insist that they must understand the class basis of those struggles. Without that consciousness all their efforts will eventually be futile.

Once Socialists are in the majority they will have to get hold of the state machinery to prevent it being used against them. Socialist delegates elected to the various assemblies of the capitalist nation-states by a Socialist working class would have this control, and would leave any recalcitrant capitalists in a virtually helpless position. The capitalist class only maintain their order with the active support or acquiescence of the workers. Once they lose this and are faced with an organized, uncompromising working class it will be plain to all what they are—a socially useless, parasitic minority living off the backs of the workers.

Con Friel

(1) The quotations in this article are taken from the statement as it appeared on 24 August, 1974.

(2) Extract of a letter from Engels to Bernstein on 1 January, 1884.