Material World: Right, left and fake communism (2026)

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

Modern politics is often presented as a battlefield between two irreconcilable forces: the right and the left. However, this opposition is more apparent than real.

Both currents are internal factions of the capitalist mode of production. The right defends the market, private initiative and competition as the engine of the economy; the left, for its part, advocates nationalisation, a regulated economy and state control. Two different paths, yes, but both leading to the same destination: the perpetuation of capitalist relations of production.

Many people, out of ignorance or historical unawareness, believe that nationalisation is equivalent to socialism. They confuse the presence of the state in the economy with the abolition of class struggle. But authentic socialism is not reduced to the state administering companies or nationalising strategic sectors. Socialism implies that workers directly control the means of production, that exploitation disappears and that society is organised consciously and collectively.

In countries that proclaimed themselves socialist — the USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela — what was actually established was state capitalism. There was no disappearance of property or wage labour. Individual private property was replaced by collective ownership by the state bureaucracy, not by direct management by the workers.

The worker continued to sell his labour power in exchange for a wage, while the surplus value was appropriated by the state. The fundamental difference is that, in private capitalism, exploitation is exercised by one individual over another; in state capitalism, exploitation is exercised by the state over the individual.

Lenin himself acknowledged in his pamphlet The State and Revolution that the USSR had not achieved communism, but was in a phase of state capitalism. What was established there was a system where the state absorbed the economy, centralised production and organised exploitation more efficiently, but without abolishing fundamental capitalist relations.

China repeated the same pattern. Under the slogan of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ it merged private and state capital. Today it is a capitalist power that competes in the world market with the same rules of value, competition, and exploitation as any other country.

In Cuba, massive nationalisations created the appearance of a society without a bourgeoisie, but state bureaucrats enjoyed privileges far superior to those of any worker. Centralised planning did not eliminate exploitation, it simply reorganised it under an omnipresent state apparatus.

Venezuela, for its part, used socialist rhetoric as a political banner, while keeping capitalist relations of production intact. Oil, the engine of its economy, was administered by the state as national capital, not as the collective heritage of the workers. Inequality, corruption and dependence on the world market are proof that communism was not built there, but rather a variant of state capitalism.

Authentic communism, understood as the abolition of social classes and the direct management of production by workers, has never existed in these countries. What has reigned is a hypertrophied, cold and bureaucratic state that devours civil society and presents itself as a saviour while perpetuating exploitation. State intervention is not a rationalisation of capitalism, but a manifestation of its decadence. It is a desperate attempt to sustain a system that can no longer spontaneously organise human relations and needs violence and bureaucracy to stay afloat.

In conclusion, the right and the left are two sides of the same coin: one defends the market, the other defends nationalisation. Both reproduce the same exploitative relationships. Countries that proclaimed themselves socialist have never been so; they are examples of how state capitalism can disguise itself as revolution, appropriate symbols and words, and construct one of the greatest mystifications in history. True socialism remains a pending task, yet to be realised in any corner of the planet.

(Translation of an article by Juan Morel Perez published in El Neuvo Diario in the Dominican Republic.)

Venezuela: another failure of reformism (2026)

From the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Venezuela is a petro-state, defined as a country with an economy and government that depend heavily on money from extracting and selling oil and gas. Oil was first extracted there in the 1920s and Venezuela was one of the founding members in 1960 of the oil-producers’ cartel, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), that held the rest of the capitalist world to ransom after the 1973 Yom Kippur War which closed the Suez Canal and led to petrol rationing. The other four founding members were all in the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Venezuela in fact has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia.

Ground rent

The main income of a petro-state is ground-rent rather than profit. Ground-rent is an income that accrues to ground owners because they happen to own land that contains some natural resource. In agriculture this would be land that is more fertile. The price of, say, wheat will reflect the cost of growing it on the land which provides the producer with a normal profit. Wheat grown on land that is more fertile than this will sell at the same price, despite the cost of growing it being less. The difference between the price the wheat sells at and the lower cost of production is ground-rent. In other words, those who own land with a lower cost of exploiting its natural resource than at the margin, whether this be wheat or oil, get an extra income above normal profit.

Saudi Arabia, as the country where the cost of extracting oil is lowest, gets the biggest proportional ground-rent. Other oil-producing countries, except those with the highest production costs, also benefit to a greater or less extent. The amount of oil rent a petro-state receives depends on the price of oil, the higher this is the more the rent (which is the economic logic behind the OPEC oil cartel). But OPEC can’t fix the price of oil at will or forever; other factors are involved such as the demand for oil, which fluctuates up or down depending on whether world capitalism is in the boom or the slump phase of its economic cycle.

The Gulf oil-producers are all dynastic states and a large part of the ground-rent they get goes to the ruling dynasty. The rest of the population, mainly immigrant workers from Asia and other Arab states, as non-citizens have no say in how the rent is distributed. Most of them live in poverty while the kings, princes and sheiks and their families live in the lap of luxury.

Politics and the price of oil

Venezuela was different from the other founder members of OPEC in that it was more developed both economically in already having a capitalist economy and politically in that its population were citizens with the right to vote. Because the government was so dependent on oil rents, the course of the political life of the country reflected changes in the price of oil.

From 1948 to 1958 Venezuela was a dictatorship, backed and brutally enforced by the army. During this period oil prices were high but the benefits went to the US oil corporations that had been granted concessions to extract oil, though some was used on infrastructure projects and to enrich the dictator and his political allies.

In 1958 the dictatorship was overthrown and Venezuela became a formal political democracy with competitive elections between rival parties. Successive governments began to take back ownership of the oil as concessions expired. In 1976 all oil in the ground became government property via a state enterprise, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Things were relatively normal until oil prices fell in the 1980s due to the ‘oil glut’ that came about following the post-1973 energy crisis.

The high price engineered by OPEC after the 1973 Yom Kippur War led other capitalist countries to seek and develop other energy sources (coal enjoyed a bit of a revival) and other sources of oil, leading to overproduction. The result in Venezuela was an economic crisis and in 1989 the government imposed an austerity that led to strikes and riots and attempted coups, including one in 1992 led by Hugo Chávez, a young army officer from a poor background. He was jailed but released after two years. On his release, he turned to conventional politics and won the 1998 presidential election, taking office in 1999. He was re-elected under a new constitution in 2000, then, despite a short-lived coup against him in 2002, again in 2006 and 2012.

There is no reason to doubt that Chávez sincerely wanted to improve the lot of the population of Venezuela, particularly the poorest. He was, basically, a populist Venezuelan nationalist. He didn’t claim to be a socialist when first elected president in 1998, just to be anti-elite and for using oil revenue to help the poor majority. It was only in 2005 that he declared himself an advocate of ‘21st century socialism’. In 2007 the name of his party was changed to the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which is still the ruling party there today.

He was lucky in that soon after he first came to power the price of oil rose, providing his government with funds to pay for improved services for the mass of the population:

‘When Chávez took office in early 1999, oil was trading at less than $15 a barrel, but its price started going up almost instantly. By the time he was elected to his third term, in 2006, it was trading at about $60 per barrel; by the time his presidency ended upon his death in 2013, a barrel of oil was worth almost $100’.

With a healthy income from oil rents, the Chávez government was able to improve the living standards of the mass of the population:

‘Chávez’s government focused its efforts on bringing people out of poverty using the surpluses generated by oil revenue, buffered by high market prices. Social spending per person in Venezuela grew, in real terms, 170 percent from 1998 to 2006 and if we included the social spending made directly by Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) the figure reached more than 200 percent per person. In 2008 education spending was more than double what it had been in 1999. The number of people living in poverty dropped from 55 percent in 1998 to 34 percent ten years later. University enrolment has almost tripled since 2000. (… ). All of the redistributive measures undertaken by the government meant that in 2011 Venezuela was, by Gini coefficient, the least unequal country in Latin America …’.

Pretty impressive, which explains why Chávez was re-elected three more times. Some, particularly leftists from Europe, saw this as a successful move from capitalism towards socialism. The prominent Trotskyist Alan Woods (a leftover from the old Militant Tendency) was particularly impressed and met Chávez a number of times, becoming a propagandist for the ‘Bolivarian revolution’. But he wasn’t the only one. Even today some of those demonstrating against the US attack on Venezuela are doing so to defend the regime there because they believe it to be socialist. ‘The Bolivarian Revolution is committed to building socialism and independence’ declares one group (revolutionarycommunist.org). But it wasn’t socialism or a step towards it; it was an attempt to reform capitalism into a less unequal society which appeared to be working due to a period of high oil prices and rents.

Chávez died in 2013 shortly after being re-elected. In a sense he was lucky again, as oil prices eventually fell as a result of the drop in industrial activity that followed the Crash of 2008. He thus avoided being the head of government in Venezuela during a period of falling oil prices. That poisoned chalice was passed to his successor, Nicolás Maduro, and the Chavista military and political bureaucracy that ruled the country.

Maduro’s poisoned chalice

In 2014 oil prices fell from $100 a barrel to $40 and did not rise much again (even today it’s only about $60). The Maduro government was in an impossible position. Unable to maintain spending to benefit the population at its previous level it was forced to cut back. Popular discontent rose and in 2016 opposition parties won a majority in the National Assembly which went on to refuse to recognise that Maduro had won the 2018 presidential election. The ruling bureaucracy was not prepared to give up power and turned to political manipulation and repression to maintain it. The US and Europe, too, refused to recognise that Maduro had been legitimately elected and imposed economic sanctions on Venezuela which continue to this day.

With less income from oil rents the government had to cut the benefits it handed out, with the result that poverty and inequality grew:

‘According to a quality of life study conducted by a group of universities in the country, the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, reached 56.7 in 2021, surpassing that of Brazil. The research also shows an increase in the income poverty rate, with more than 90% of households living below the poverty line. The most recent data indicate an increase in inequality, with an index of 60.3, and a decrease in income poverty to 80.3% of households, a result of the modest economic recovery of 2022’. (translated from Spanish)

So, while the proportion of people in poverty fell from 55 percent in 1998 to 34 percent in 2008, by 2022 it was up to 80 percent. In 2011 Venezuela had been the least unequal country in Latin America in terms of income. Between 1999 and 2011 the Gini coefficient had fallen from almost 50 to 39. In 2022 it was back up to 60, higher than it had been when Chávez was first elected.

Some of this will have been due to the sanctions imposed in 2019 by the US and Europe but the decline had set in before that. Imposing sanctions is a cruel and cynical policy, arguably worse than military action. Its aim is to make the situation of ordinary people worse in the expectation that they will kick out the sanctioned government. It worked in the sense that it did make people even worse off as the government was forced to cut back yet more on the reforms of the Chávez period, and this did make people more inclined to vote to remove the Maduro government from office. Sanctions do not affect those in charge of the state as they can always ensure that they don’t suffer any personal privations and that adequate resources are attributed in priority to maintaining the state apparatus and its repressive powers.

Capitalist economists say that Chávez should not have distributed so much of the oil rents to improve the position of the poor, but should have instead invested more in developing capitalist industry to provide jobs and incomes to counter what would happen if oil prices and so oil rents fell or oil ran out. This is a lesson that the Gulf sheiks had learned, using their rents not just to lead a personal life of luxury but to convert themselves into capitalists in their own right by investing in industry abroad as well as in their sheikhdoms.

Given capitalism and how it works, there is something in what its economists say, but this is further confirmation that a government cannot continuously redistribute wealth to the poor; this will be unsustainable and lead to economic disaster. To function normally, the capitalist economy requires that even oil rents should be invested in capitalist production, not spent on improving people’s lot.

Living standards in Venezuela fell by 75 percent between 2013 and 2023, driving some 7 million out of a population of 30 million to leave the country to seek a better life elsewhere. Supporters of capitalism gleefully trumpet this as a failure of ‘socialism’. In fact, it was a failure of redistributive reformism that showed both the fragility of reform measures and that no government can keep on redistributing income to the non-owning majority without this eventually ending in economic disaster.

Adam Buick

Venezuela: what has really happened and what may lie ahead (2026)

From the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Venezuela has once again been making headlines around the world. Explosions, military movements, international pressure, mutual accusations and a great deal of confusion. To understand what has happened so far, it is necessary to look beyond the propaganda, both from the Venezuelan government and the US, and from those who defend one gang or the other.

It’s nothing to do with democracy or freedom

The first thing that needs to be made clear is this: the US is not acting out of a desire to defend the Venezuelan people, nor out of love for democracy or human rights. We have seen this many times before in other countries. When a major power intervenes, directly or indirectly, it does so to defend its own economic and strategic interests.

Talk of fighting drug trafficking or restoring democracy serves to justify actions that, at heart, are about political control, natural resources and regional power.

Nor is it about defending ‘sovereignty’

On the other hand, the Venezuelan government and its allies present what has happened as an imperialist attack on national sovereignty. But here is another uncomfortable truth: the Venezuelan state does not represent the interests of the majority of the working class.

For years, millions of people have suffered from inflation, low wages, forced emigration, deteriorating services and repression. All this happened without direct foreign intervention, under a government that claimed to rule on behalf of the people.

Will there be any real change?

There is much talk of ‘regime change’, but in reality what is happening is, at most, a change of administrators within the same system.

As long as there is:

• wage labour,
• production for the market,
• social inequality,
• a state that protects the property and power of a minority,

the lives of the majority will not fundamentally change. Changing a president or a ruling group does not change the system that produces poverty and insecurity.

Will there be more attacks or more pressure?

No one can predict exactly what will happen, but there is a clear logic: as long as Venezuela remains a strategic country because of its oil and geographical position, the pressure will continue, whether military, economic or diplomatic.

This does not depend on whether a government is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but on how states function in a capitalist world in constant competition.

The role of China and other powers

Some believe that China or Russia are a fairer alternative to the United States. But these powers do not act out of solidarity, but out of their own interests. China invests, lends money and negotiates to secure access to resources, economic benefits and international influence.

It is not a struggle between good and evil, but a dispute between great powers, where the workers get caught in the middle.

Internal betrayal?

There is much talk of betrayal, but such language tends to confuse more than it clarifies.

High-ranking officials, the generals and politicians do not betray the people, because they have never governed on their behalf, but rather in accordance with their own interests and privileges. When they switch sides or negotiate, they do so to protect their position, not to improve the lives of the majority.

Who loses out in all this?

The answer is clear: the working class in Venezuela, as well as in the United States and other countries.

Workers do not decide on wars, they do not benefit from sanctions, they do not control resources, and they always pay the price with more insecurity and less of a future.

An uncomfortable but necessary conclusion

What is happening in Venezuela will not be resolved by choosing between Maduro or the US, nor between Washington or Beijing. They all operate within the same system, a system that puts profit and power above human needs. As long as that system remains intact, crises will repeat themselves, with different names and different countries, but with the same losers.

The real solution will not come from leaders, armies or foreign powers, but from the conscious organisation of ordinary people, here and around the world, to build a society where production and wealth are at the service of all and not just a few.

SOCIALISTA MUNDIAL

(Translated from a contribution to a discussion on our Spanish-language Facebook page)

Tiny Tips (2025)

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

The unrest reflected much deeper frustrations, including high unemployment, particularly among young people, growing poverty and anger at corruption and mismanagement. People see public resources channelled into luxury spending and infrastructure deals benefiting a few powerful figures connected to the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), while basic services and jobs are neglected.

[Inter Press Service News Agency]

In 1978, Clive James reviewed the official biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. “I read the whole thing from start to finish, waiting for the inevitable slip-up which would result in a living sentence. It never happened.” James found it so dull that “If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.” 

[MSN]

The announced $7 billion would be the biggest official tranche of funding to Ukraine’s drone industry so far. It’s close to the $6 billion that Ukraine’s defense minister, Denys Shmyhal, has said Kyiv needs to cover this year’s production of first-person-view drones, interceptors, long-range drones, and missiles. While new, Ukraine’s drone industry has increasingly been in the spotlight for producing cheap but effective weapons regularly being used to destroy Russian loitering munitions, armor, artillery, and production facilities. 

[Yahoo]

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this moment is not simply about one man’s death. It is about the world that produced both Charlie Kirk and the man who killed him. It is about capitalism’s ever-present violence, about the state’s monopoly on force, about the way political antagonisms are escalating into open bloodshed. It is about what happens when a society soaks every interaction in hierarchy, coercion, alienation, and humiliation, and then acts shocked when someone pulls a trigger…Wage labour itself is enforced by violence. If you refuse to work, you starve, or you are policed, or imprisoned. The entire edifice of private property rests on threat and force. 

[The Slow Burning Fuse]

North Korea’s Kim vows to build a ‘socialist paradise’ [sic]. 

[Morning Star]

Having a home of our own is essential to leading a dignified life, but in Venezuela, where access to housing is enshrined as a right in the Constitution, renting adequate accommodation is an unattainable luxury for hundreds of thousands of families, and buying property is almost impossible. Not only do market prices far exceed the average household income but inflation has also wiped out home loans, leaving citizens without access to financing. 

[Equal Times]

There is no genetic or biological basis for dividing the human race into distinct “races”. There are just groups of human beings — all of whom came from Africa originally — who developed slightly different physical characteristics over time as they travelled to, and adapted to, different climates and environments. 

[The Conversation]

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

Running Commentary: Human nature (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human nature

We watched them go about their daily affairs as the television narrator quietly described aspects of their way of life. “Here”, we are told, “No man or woman has authority over any other man or woman . . . wealth is shared communally, if one person manages to catch many fish the whole community benefits including those who are not able to work. or who have not worked on that particular day . . . they operate on the basis of 'from each according to his hunting ability, to each according to his hunger' . . . the land, forests and rivers are owned by nobody and no one works for anyone else." Worlds Apart (BBC2 10/9/ 82) was examining the lifestyle of the Panare Indians of Venezuela, with a lot of well presented evidence to repudiate the myth that it is “Human Nature" to be acquisitive, uncooperative and to wish to live in societies with hierarchies of wealth, power and status.

Here were people, physiologically the same as everyone else, who displayed none of the behavioural characteristics which have sometimes been labelled as immutable features of human beings. Through its historical stages, property society has cultivated people to think and behave in selfish and acquisitive ways. Although cooperativeness has always been a striking feature of mankind — as people are social animals and we cannot organise any society without working with each other — in capitalism we have had to cooperate with each other under coercive conditions.

In some parts of modern society with a long history of property, vicious aspects of human behaviour like the barbarism of war are offered as proof of brutal human nature. But war, and people’s behaviour in it, are products of a social environment not a natural propensity to violence. Property society pits people against each other.

An owner can say “This is mine, it is not yours, we have different interests". If the object is a factory the owner can say, “Because this is mine, you will have to spend your life working in it to produce wealth for me, and because the levels of my profits are inversely related, we will be in a constant struggle". The Panare have no notions of property and consequently no notions of competition. They have no competitive sports and those which are played in neighbouring areas, which do put people or beasts against themselves, are looked on as meaningless.

The Panare live in a small tightly-knit community which is a little suspicious of outsiders and does not use much modern medicine or technology. Such communities illustrate the behaviour that homo sapiens are capable of enjoying.

However, civilisation is marching into the forests of Venezuela with its Deeds of Land Ownership in one hand and its police forces and prisons in the other. New roads and a huge bauxite mine will soon disfigure the regions inhabited by the Panare for, as the television narrator observed, “to the investors and entrepreneurs the communities who presently occupy the forests are obstacles to progress". Curiously, in The Investors' Dictionary, the word “progress" is spelt profits.

Parker’s pen

The bookshops will not be troubled by long, disorderly queues of people desperate to buy a copy of Father of the House — the political reminiscences of John Parker, Labour MP for Dagenham. Parker is the longest-sitting Member — he has been in Parliament for 47 years — and that is how he qualifies for this fatuous title. And he has become a strangely tedious man, liable to pass over events of historic importance in some ill-considered laconism.

But it was not always so. Parker was once at the centre of an incident vital enough to reveal the true unsavoury character of the Labour Party. In 1945. Attlee appointed him Under Secretary at the Dominions Office which, as the Secretary of State was in the Lords, put Parker in charge of the affairs in the Commons.

His ministerial career did not last long. Parker refused to intervene over the death sentence passed on a Boer farmer in the (then) South African protectorate of Swaziland who had killed his girl friend. Of course only black people were hanged in South Africa: at that time a white man had not been executed for 15 years. The South African Prime Minister appealed to Attlee to help maintain this racist version of “justice" and the Labour Prime Minister was ready to oblige. Parker was sacked and never offered a job in a Labour government again.

This episode did nothing to reduce Parker’s ardour for the Labour Party. A quirk of his was that he often agreed to take part in public debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain. His defence of the Labour government’s desperate attempts to organise British capitalism was unconvincing but no matter how many times he was floored by the SPGB, Parker persistently got up for more.

In his old age. does he reflect now on these instructive experiences in his political life — on the practical and theoretical destruction of the case for the party to which, through thick and thin, he gave his misguided loyalty?

Jaws

A ten-year-old boy was recently killed by an automatic exit barrier at an underground station in Newcastle on Tyne. It happened very simply and very suddenly. The boy jumped, or tripped, into the barrier, which snapped its jaws about his neck. It took a long time to free him and he was dead by the time they got him to hospital.

Anyone who has had a thoughtlessly trailing piece of luggage bitten by these barriers knows how aggressive they are, with that malevolently watchful eye to trip them into action. The barriers are installed, in places like Newcastle and London, to stop people travelling without paying a fare — to stop them using the railways as a means of travel instead of as a means of yielding a profit to the owners. They are not designed to distinguish between those who are evading paying a fare and those who are just not totally alert to the instantaneous demands of electronic ticket checks.

The cause of profit making is greater than all others, in the morality of private property society. Truly, it is greater than any human being, or of any collection of them. In this cause it is permissible to herd long suffering workers, probably trying to get to and from the places where they are to undergo the indignities of being exploited by their masters, into canyons of electronically controlled discipline. To stray deliberately from the canyon could mean that they are punished — fined, imprisoned — and if they do this by accident they may even be killed.

In many ways — some trivial, some substantial — capitalism informs the working class that they are socially inferior, exploited, degraded. This information is sometimes emphasised in episodes of bitter tragedy, which would not have happened but for the class divide of capitalism, or for the production of wealth as commodities, or for the poverty of the majority of people, or for some other essential feature of capitalist society.

Such an incident was the death of the boy in Newcastle. There will be an inquest, which may decide that it was an accidental death. A better verdict — simpler, straighter, more accurate — would be that Capitalism Kills.

Blogger's Note:

"A quirk of his was that he often agreed to take part in public debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain." 

According to the SPGB debates wiki page, Parker only debated the SPGB once, in June 1948 at Fulham Town Hall. (The SPGB speaker was Clifford Groves.) My guess is that the wiki page is incomplete, and that Parker did debate with the SPGB on more than one occasion. He was a Fabian intellectual in his early political career, and such types had a tendency to debate again and again with the SPGB.

Material World: Venezuela – a year on (2025)

The Material World column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The article on Venezuela published in last June’s Socialist Standard referred to the upcoming presidential election there as ‘unlikely to be free and fair’ and likely, whatever the real outcome, to result in Nicolás Maduro declaring himself ‘the winner’. And that’s exactly what happened. Maduro’s opponent, Edmundo González, produced figures to show that he had won around 67 percent of the votes compared to Maduro’s 29 percent. But this did not prevent Maduro from shamelessly declaring victory though not providing any supporting data as no official results were ever published. Previously he had banned his chief opponent, María Corona Machado, from standing, blocked her proposed replacement, and then adopted various other tactics to manipulate the vote.

Repression

Maduro responded with brutal repression against the thousands who took to the streets to protest, calling it a ‘fascist outbreak’. Since then Human Rights Watch has documented widespread violence against opponents by the Venezuelan authorities and by pro-Maduro armed groups known as ‘colectivos’, including killing of protestors and bystanders, ‘disappearances’ of opposition party members, arbitrary detentions and torture and ill-treatment of detainees. Protestors are often charged with broadly defined offences such as ‘incitement to hatred’, ‘resistance to authority’, and ‘terrorism’, with possible penalties of up to 30 years. Before the election, close to 8 million people had left Venezuela, an exodus constituting one of Latin America’s largest mass population movements in history. Since then, many more have fled, including elected officials, local authority workers, polling station workers, human rights advocates and journalists, and it is being projected that 2 to 3 million more will leave in the foreseeable future. This is being driven not just by the existence of a full-blown authoritarian regime, where the last shred of popular legitimacy – properly democratic elections – has vanished, but also by dire economic conditions including reliably reported frequent power failures, lack of basic foodstuffs, and sky-high crime rates partly associated with gang warfare and drug trafficking.

The intolerance of opposition was confirmed during the period of Maduro’s official ‘self-inauguration’ in January of this year when, things having ‘gone quiet’ in the outside world and with little media attention on the country, he announced plans for constitutional changes to further consolidate his power. He declared the beginning of what would be a more entrenched phase of authoritarian rule based on a strong alliance between civilian authorities, military forces, the police and the intelligence apparatus. On the day of the inauguration itself, widespread and ultra-expensive precautions were taken to counter the possibility being mooted that the opposition could somehow carry out its declared intention to return its president-elect, González, to the country from exile in Spain and hold a parallel counter-inauguration.

USA sabotage?

Outside Venezuela, Maduro enjoys the backing of some other authoritarian states – for example Cuba and Nicaragua in the Americas, and Russia, China and Iraq beyond. The USA is Maduro’s chief opponent having put up a reward of 25 million dollars for information leading to his arrest. This gives Maduro and his supporters both inside and outside Venezuela ammunition to attribute to American actions (eg, economic sanctions and CIA sabotage activity) the decline in the country’s economy, the poor state of its health care and education systems and its inability to feed large numbers of its people. This also gives Maduro the opportunity to portray the country as a beleaguered socialist enclave oppressed by, but standing up to, a bullying capitalist power. Not that this has prevented him from cooperating with Donald Trump in agreeing to accept back into Venezuela thousands of the desperate refugees who had left for the USA and who Trump is now having deported.

Predictably, the parliamentary and local elections held in May of this year again saw Maduro declaring overwhelming victory, this time with a claimed 82.68% of the votes cast and governorships in 23 out of the country’s 24 states. On this occasion, however, it seems likely that he did have a genuine majority given that the main opposition parties boycotted the elections and urged voters to do so on the grounds that they could not be free and fair. The turnout was said to be as low as 25 percent.

Not socialist

A recent report on the deportations in the Washington Post, while correctly describing Venezuela as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘repressive’, also referred to it as ‘Marxist’ and ‘Socialist’, neither of which labels is correct. While it’s true that both these terms are much debated, they are often abused and there is absolutely no warrant in Marx for the form of state-run capitalism that exists in Venezuela to be called ‘socialism’. In fact, the system there, based as it is on the market and buying and selling, is the very antithesis of socialism, which is a world society of common ownership and democratic control. Maduro’s regime may pose as ‘socialist’, but it is no more socialist than those other state capitalist regimes such as China and Cuba that support it. Yet the fraudulent use and circulation of the term allows those on the political right of the capitalist spectrum to point to the ‘failure of socialism’ for the poverty, tyranny, population flight and legalised violence that are its salient features. At the same time left-wing supporters of the Maduro regime blame the USA for stifling a valiant ‘socialist’ experiment by starving the country of resources and fomenting discontent among its population. The essence of a socialist society is a moneyless, stateless system with free access to all goods and services and based on voluntary cooperation and economic equality. Nothing of this is even close to existing in Venezuela or any of the countries that support it.

The future?

So what is the future for Venezuela? Maduro’s regime has been described as ‘a criminal mafia gang with the trappings of governmental power’. Can he hold on to power indefinitely, despite the minority support he has among the population and an economy that continues to be run into the ground, leaving most people struggling just to survive? For now Maduro seems to have the loyalty of the military, with its high-ranking officials being generously rewarded and the support of special police units, militias and intelligence facilities backed by Cuba’s secret service. But will this patronage allow him to survive, especially in the face of what still seems to be a widely supported opposition, peaceful yet determined?

If Venezuela proves capable of moving to the kind of liberal democracy that capitalism can offer, limited as that is, then this will create an environment where genuine socialist ideas will have a better chance of being put forward, and hopefully spreading.

Howard Moss

Tiny Tips (2025)

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

The watch is a limited edition of only 150 pieces that’s already being delivered to customers. The retail price is $330,000…prices on the secondary market will get a bit bonkers. 

[HODINKEE]

Pakistan’s claims to all of Kashmir are driven by the region’s hydrological importance, its majority-Muslim population, and the military’s interest in rallying the nation behind it on these grounds. 

[Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter]

‘That’s where I sleep, under that bridge’ he says, pointing to a nearby cluster of tents beneath a highway overpass. ‘And the dogs are up there with their own private pool. They probably eat more in a day than we do in a month’. 

[NPR]

Underage workers, in some cases, have been hired to kill poultry flocks, handle dead carcasses and clean industrial poultry farms. Workers sometimes lack personal protective equipment or receive damaged gear, despite the risk of the virus jumping from animals to people. Dealing with a federal backlog, some farms have used killing methods considered inhumane, because it can be quicker and cheaper. ‘The biggest factor in agricultural safety is the urgency’ said Bethany Alcauter, director of research and public health for the National Center for Farmworker Health, a Texas-based nonprofit that advocates for worker safety and health. ‘Everything has to get done in a short amount of time, and that really can be problematic because there’s not the same amount of time to adequately train workers’.

[truthdig]

‘Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about—though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to ‘scientific‘ principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an ass of exceptional asininity’. 

[MEDIAITE]

On July 28, 2024, Venezuelans turned out to vote in large numbers despite more than a decade of systematic repression and human rights violations under President Nicolás Maduro. Hours after polls closed, the Electoral Council declared that Maduro had been re-elected, with over 51 percent of the vote. The United Nations Electoral Technical Team and the Carter Center, which observed the elections, said the process lacked transparency and integrity, and questioned the declared result. The Carter Center said that the precinct-level tally sheets published by the opposition, which seemed to indicate that opposition candidate Edmundo González had won, were reliable and ‘authentic’. The Electoral Council failed to release the official tally sheets and did not conduct the required audits or citizen verification processes mandated by law. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in demonstrations, most of them peaceful, demanding a transparent and fair counting of the votes. They were met with brutal repression.

[HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH]

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

Tiny Tips (2025)

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

The top 1 percent in the U.S … had a combined net worth of $49.2 trillion by the end of 2024. The combined value of almost 100 million U.S. homes during the same time was $49.7 trillion. 

(Newsweek)

‘Woke’ is not a precise, scientific term. But it typically refers to the attempt to combat forms of oppression – like racism and sexism – on the basis of identity politics, through means like quotas, changes to language, and raising awareness … ‘woke’ policies seek to ‘fight’ oppression on an individualistic basis, whilst completely jettisoning any idea of class struggle, or seeing oppression as being rooted in capitalist society. 

(The Communist)

Trucks carrying commercial goods, which are later sold in Gaza, are charged at least $20,000…while aid trucks are also subject to extortion before crossing to the enclave. Organi is a Sinai businessman, politician and tribal leader allied with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Organi’s name has become synonymous with unofficial profits made out of the suffocating Gaza blockade, particularly from desperate Palestinians attempting to flee the fighting. MEE last year revealed that Organi made at least $2m daily from Palestinians who left the Gaza Strip via the border crossing point with Egypt . . . 

(MEE)

While his crackdowns provoked outrage around the globe, Duterte and his brand of politics remained popular at home even after he left office. His daughter… riding on her family name, was elected Vice President in 2022 in a landslide victory alongside President Marcos Jr, himself the son of a former dictator who ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. 

(Time)

A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately. An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.

(MEE)

Tren de Aragua’s growth surged as a result of mass incarceration policies that began under Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chávez and expanded under current President Nicolás Maduro. Incarceration rates began to increase in 2009 and were exacerbated by police raids deployed in 2010 in marginalized neighborhoods across the country. Venezuela’s prisons became filled with young, poor men. 

(The Conversation)

The preconditions for a communist or socialist society are (1) the development of a productive potential sufficient to support the reasonable needs of the population and (2) a clear majority who want such a society and understand what it entails. The SPGB’s position is that precondition (1) has been met a long time ago, but we are a long way off from meeting precondition (2). If and when we do have a class-consciousness socialist majority, there is nothing to prevent us from immediately implementing the new society. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to linger on with one or another form of capitalism a moment longer.

(Letter in Weekly Worker)

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

Does socialism exist in Venezuela? (2024)

From the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Commentators on both the right and left of capitalist politics claim that socialism exists in Venezuela. The right gratefully accepts the Maduro regime’s claim to be socialist, pointing to its crackdown on opponents, its increasingly poor economic position and the large numbers of people fleeing to other countries to try and escape poverty and violence. These critics attribute this to the way in which ‘socialist’ countries are run and see the material hardship and lack of democracy as an inevitable consequence of this. Many on the left also see Venezuela as ‘socialist’ but regard this as a reason to rejoice, attributing its troubles not to the way it’s governed but to the fact that the capitalist world outside, in particular the United States, has used all means possible to bring it down, starving it of resources and fomenting discontent among its population.

Where does the truth lie? Well, it’s common for the political right to use ‘socialist’ as a swear word for governments that exercise direct state control over the economy, especially if those governments are intolerant of opposition or call themselves ‘socialist’ or ‘Marxist’. Obvious examples of this are China and Cuba and, in former times, the Soviet Union. As for the left, they are frequently favourable to such regimes on the grounds that their ownership of wealth is not monopolised by a very small number of individuals or companies, as in the openly capitalist West. This is the case even though a small number of powerful people – the political leaders – control the economy and often everything else, and most people remain relatively poor in a kind of ‘equality of poverty’.

From Chavez to Maduro

But what about Venezuela? In 1999 Hugo Chavez, the predecessor to the current president Nicolas Maduro, initiated a policy, which he called the Bolivarian Revolution, of controlling the key elements of the economy, in particular the country’s vast oil resources, and bringing in social reforms, all of which had the effect of making the average worker in the country better off and more content with their lot – very much like the nationalising Labour government in Britain after the Second World War and Allende in Chile before he was deposed in 1973. The measures Chavez brought in, which also included state expropriation of a number of private corporations and trade agreements with various countries such as China and Cuba, were considered by his supporters to be socialism taking over from capitalism, so-called Socialism of the XXI Century, even if what they were in the real world was private capitalism (or at least some of it) being replaced by state capitalism.

But even before Chavez died in 2013 the Venezuelan economy had begun to take a downturn, owing to a drop in the world oil price and US embargos and sanctions and to the fact that, whatever name was given to the system in Venezuela, production there still remained geared to the market, as it is in state capitalism as well as private capitalism. Things then only got worse when Maduro, who had been Chavez’s vice-president, took over, and since then the economy has contracted by around 70 percent. As the crisis escalated, the US sought to re-establish the strong influence it had had in pre-Chavez Venezuela by strengthening economic sanctions, blocking Venezuela’s oil exports, and encouraging opposition forces in the country. But Maduro’s real problem was the same one faced by all governments that attempt to keep the buying and selling system of capitalism on an even keel – the fact that the system has a mind of its own. Governments cannot control the crises that periodically and naturally accompany it. Maduro’s attempts to deal with this consisted of practices like increasing the money supply (thereby causing inflation) and cracking down, often severely, on those who opposed his way of running things. Many of those who have criticised or opposed him have been killed, tortured or abducted, with around 300 currently detained, according to Amnesty International, for supposed political crimes.

Fair elections?

All this has brought both fear and severe economic hardship to many of those who had previously supported Chavez. The acute shortages of basic goods in particular have caused Maduro’s support to plummet and as many as 7 million workers (in a population of around 30 million) to leave the country in the simple hope of finding a living – or just food and drink – elsewhere, mainly Columbia and Peru, or if they can get in, the United States. This constitutes the largest migrant crisis in the world at this moment with the number of refugees greater than from Syria or Ukraine.

Venezuelans who have remained and have dared to protest are treated harshly as a matter of routine and there are even signs that Maduro no longer has the full support of his military and has turned to mafia-type groups to shore up his position. Unsurprisingly in the circumstances, despite the country still having the political trappings of democracy, its upcoming election, scheduled to take place next month (28 July), is unlikely to be ‘free and fair’. Already the previous 2018 election was a manifestly rigged affair with two of the most popular candidates prevented from running. And things are certainly no more ‘democratic’ now. In January of this year, the leader of the opposition and a clear favourite in the polls, María Corina Machada, was banned from holding office for 15 years. In February, a prominent lawyer known for exposing corruption in the army, Rocio San Miguel, was arrested and charged with ‘treason, conspiracy and terrorism’ for her alleged role in a supposed plot to assassinate Maduro. The following month, Ronald Ojeda, a former lieutenant in Venezuela’s military who had protested against the Maduro government on social media was found dead in Chile ten days after he had gone missing. He had previously been seen on social media wearing a t-shirt with ‘freedom’ written on the collar and prison bars drawn on the map of Venezuela.

Not socialism

So, given the desperate measures Maduro is taking, he will probably be the ‘winner’ in next month’s election. But, given the piteous state of the country, the question will be how long he can hold on after that. As one commentator has pointed out, the sort of ‘elected dictator’ Maduro is can, even if highly unpopular, be difficult to dislodge. But whether Maduro hangs on or not, what happens in Venezuela will not be socialism or anything to do with the real meaning or content of the word. That is clearly the case, since socialism is a moneyless, stateless system of society with free access to all goods and services based on voluntary cooperation and economic equality. And it will come through an immense majority of workers in all the industrialised countries developing socialist understanding and organising to win and control political power.

In the modern world, anything other than that is a form of capitalism, whether presided over by an all-powerful state or with the market having free rein. In the case of Venezuela, if Maduro continues to prevail there, it will continue to have the repressive state capitalist regime of the kind that often poses as socialism but does so fraudulently and has as its hallmark the poverty and inequality that make it easy for the political right to say that socialism is an abject failure and for left-wing supporters of Venezuela to blame the US for stifling a valiant socialist experiment.

If Maduro finally goes, what we will have, though it could be something less repressive, is by no means certain to be a lot better in terms of improving the lot of the majority of the Venezuelan people. The country may become what other neighbouring states already are, so-called ‘mixed’ economies with part-state ownership and control and part-private ownership. But, as elsewhere in Latin America and the rest of the world at present, it will be a population divided into two classes, a small minority who own and control the vast majority of the wealth and do not need to work for their comfortable and often luxurious existence, and a vast majority who have to work for a wage or salary to survive, have limited freedom of choice and lack of control over their lives, continuing to be at the mercy of the regular crises and ups and downs of the system – war, recession and constant reorganisation. This is an inevitable consequence of capitalism’s never-ending quest to produce more and to produce more cheaply and more profitably. Whether this takes place in Venezuela, or any other part of the world, it has nothing to do with socialism. None of it will change either until Venezuelans and working people everywhere have ceased to put their faith in governments and charismatic politicians, whatever claims and promises they make.

Howard Moss

‘Defence diplomacy’ (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Christmas Eve the Ministry of ‘Defence’ announced that a Royal Navy warship, HMS Trent, would be deployed to Guyana in South America. Sky News described the ship as one used for ‘defence diplomacy’ (tinyurl.com/cysxnpyf).

What, then, was the diplomacy that required the deployment of a gunboat in support? The one-word answer is ‘oil’. The Harvard International Review (27 September) noted:

‘In 2015, the oil giant Exxon Mobil discovered 11 billion barrels of oil off the coast of the small Latin American country. The discovery promises to change Guyana forever, catapulting the country and its people to new heights of power and wealth. Oil already generates US$1 billion in revenues annually for the government and will produce an estimated US$7.5 billion by 2040. By these forecasts, Guyana—the impoverished, rainforest-covered country of just 800,000 people—will become the fourth largest offshore oil producer in the world.’

The discovery was off the coast of a part of Guyana which has been the object of a territorial dispute with its neighbour, Venezuela, since the middle of the 19th century when Guyana was part of the British Empire. In 1899 an international court of arbitration awarded the disputed area to Britain. It’s an area comprising some 75 percent of present-day Guyana. Venezuela never accepted the decision, alleging that it was rigged, but didn’t insist too much in pursuing its claim until now.

On 3 December the Venezuelan government, under Hugo Chávez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, held a referendum throughout the country about whether or not to reject the 1899 ruling and to incorporate the area as a new province. The result was a huge majority for, but on a low turnout, and the government duly established the new province, on paper.

Venezuela, much as it would like to acquire control of the new oilfield, is unlikely to try to actually annex the disputed area. The referendum had more to do with the presidential elections later this year and as a way of trying to win votes for Maduro by beating the nationalist drum. In any event, it is not the land, mainly tropical forest with a few gold mines, that Venezuela really would like so much as the territorial waters off the area’s coast where the oil is. Diplomatic talks have begun, with the US and Britain backing Guyana. Hence the dispatch of the Royal Navy warship to carry out its role in ‘defence diplomacy’.

Diplomacy is not a matter of working out what is the fair solution to a dispute between states. An important factor affecting the outcome is the relative strength of the two sides. In relations between states might is right. Venezuela may be stronger than Guyana and so could seize the land it claims. But Guyana is backed by the US and Britain, because they don’t want a state with a nationalist anti-American government to control the new oilfield (they want a friendly state to) or to extend its territory (in fact they have been working to overthrow the government there), and Venezuela is in no position to take them on any more than it was to challenge the British Empire in 1899.

The cannons roar

In another part of the world another Royal Navy warship, HMS Diamond, has also been engaged in ‘defence diplomacy,’ in the Red Sea. In fact it actually used its weapons. As the Royal Navy’s website boasted on 19 December:

‘Diamond’s actions in the small hours of Saturday morning is the first time a Type 45’s Sea Viper missile has been used in action and the first such shootdown by the Royal Navy since the 1990-91 Gulf War’.

The British Minister of War, Grant Schapps, later threatened more ‘direct action’ than shooting down a few drones (Daily Telegraph, 1 January). On 11 January Britain carried out this threat by joining the US by bombing Yemen, escalating the war in the region.

What is going on in the Red Sea is an aspect of the question of who controls the Persian Gulf, its oilfields and the trade route out of it. In 1980 President Carter laid down the Carter Doctrine that: ‘Gulf oil reserves were of vital interest to the US and the US would therefore be justified in preventing outside domination of the region by military intervention’. This was invoked against Iraq in 1991 and in 2003. Now the threat is from Iran, with the US relying on Israel to counter this. Indeed Israel has already bombed Iran on a number of occasions.

Israel is currently engaged in a war of revenge against the Hamas administration in Gaza. The West supports this because Hamas is an enemy of Israel, its asset in the region, only cynically advising Israel not too kill too many Gazans.

Iran and its allies and proxies see the Gaza war as a chance to weaken Israel as the West’s asset. The pro-Iran government of Yemen has been attacking ships bound for Israel or owned by Israeli capitalists. This has led major shipping companies to re-route their ships round Africa, with serious consequences for international trade.

As the Royal Navy’s website explained:

‘An estimated 23,000 merchant vessels pass through the Bab-al-Mandeb choke point – with Suez the gateway to the Middle East and beyond for shipping from Europe… and for Europe from shipping from the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. Vice-Admiral Brad Cooper, the US officer commanding the Combined Maritime Forces from their headquarters in Bahrain, underlined that safe passage of the Red Sea was “crucial for the world economy”. He continued: “More than 10% of global trade transits the waters anchored by two globally strategic waterways – the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab-al-Mandeb. Regionally, it has even greater impact, channelling trade across more than half the globe, ranging from Europe to Asia.”’

HMS Diamond’s commanding officer was quoted as saying: ‘The Royal Navy has always been committed to the protection of maritime trade’. By force if necessary. In this case in the context of the wider conflict of economic interest in the Middle East between the West and Iran over who controls oil in the Gulf and the trade route out of it.

Adam Buick

World View: The world crisis spreads (1998)

From the October 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The dominoes are falling all around: Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, Japan, Russia, and now Latin America. “On Wednesday, Colombia became the first Latin American country in the region to devalue its currency following weeks of intensive pressure, sparking a slide in bond and stock markets in Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina. Venezuela, whose currency has been under intense pressure for weeks, launched an immediate round of public spending cuts” (Observer, 6 September).

Venezuela is particularly vulnerable at the present time. It is one of the world’s leading oil producers; it also has vast deposits of iron ore and gold, much of which including other mineral resources have yet to be explored. Twenty years ago, when the price of oil plummeted on the international exchange, Venezuela suffered mass unemployment as well as inflation. In 1988, the price of oil went down further; and in February 1989, the government introduced austerity measures which severely cut working-class incomes. The result was mass rioting, which caused millions of dollars in property damage and the loss of 300 lives.

The 1990s, therefore, opened with Venezuela teetering on the edge of total instability. On February 2 1992, a faction of middle-rank officers tried to overthrow the government in a coup. The army, however, backed the President and soon regained control. On 27 November the same year, another coup was attempted, this time by junior officers of the air force; again it was unsuccessful. Nevertheless, many people wanted change, if only to end the cycle of corruption and instability.

In January I 994, Venezuela’s second largest bank, the Banco Latino, collapsed, and the government had to nationalise it. It had to pump in two billion dollars to cover its losses.The government began an enquiry, but the bank’s assets had been relocated overseas, and it proved almost impossible to get the money back. This caused panic among depositors, and most tried to withdraw their money without success. The effect was to undermine the economy and drain Venezuela’s already dwindling cash reserves. The Venezuelan economy has never really recovered.

What of the working class? It can only get worse for them. And they have always existed in poverty. Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, is a huge city of modern high rise buildings, mixed with many building which are in desperate need of repair. But even the people who live in these dilapidated apartments are “lucky” compared with the people who reside in the ranchos ringing the city, and in the mountains around the city. They only have run-down shacks. As in most of the world, the majority of the people in Caracas are poor.

The present, and the future, is indeed grim unless the workers of Venezuela, as elsewhere, rouse themselves and organise for the replacement of the present system by a new world-wide system of production for use and the satisfaction of individual and social needs. There really is no viable alternative.

Peter E. Newell

Material World: One World, One People (2022)

The Material World column from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ubi bene, ibi patria’ 

‘Where it goes well with me, there is my country’

Millions of vulnerable and damaged people are making perilous, life-threatening journeys to seek a safe refuge.

It was only a matter of a few months ago that some countries were constructing razor-wire fences along their borders to keep out foreigners hoping to reach sanctuary in Europe. Refugees were dying on the frontier from exposure and hypothermia from extreme winter conditions. Many people showed little understanding or support for those asylum seekers and did not want to accept outsiders. Growing xenophobic attitudes have given rise to far-right populism. When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, Nigel Farage spoke of an impending flood of its refugees: ‘You can now see a wave of people leaving Afghanistan, and we already have numbers we quite simply can’t cope with.’

Now, how different is the reception that desperate and vulnerable men, women and children are now receiving. Europe generously embraces Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. Many humanitarian-minded individuals have rushed to do what they can to help Ukrainians, yet, forgetting or ignoring that refugees from elsewhere are still being pushed back or caged in detention camps.

Socialists share the sentiments of the environmentalist movement, Fridays For Future, when it explained, ‘While Ukrainians deserve immediate peace and all our support, so do the people from Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and all war-torn regions. Empathy, justice, and compassion should be for everyone. Refugees should not have to be white to be heard and seen.’ Fridays for Future went on to say ‘People only desire to live and exist safely. Let it become a door-opening moment where we demand justice for everyone independent of their nationality and skin colour.’

Millions of Ukrainians have joined the 84 million other people in need of security around the world (2021 UNHCR data). If they were all to form their own country, it would be the 17th largest on Earth, slightly bigger than Germany. If we were to add to those figures migrants forced by dire economic conditions to cross borders, the number is well over one billion people.

The population of the forcibly displaced is now more than double the number of Europeans driven from their homes by World War Two, six times the number of those displaced by the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, 100-fold more than the number of Vietnamese Boat People following the Vietnam War.

To put it another way, about one in every 95 people on this planet is involuntarily on the move. Add in those driven by economic imperatives and one out of every 30 people on Earth is now a refugee or a migrant.

In contrast to media perceptions it has not been the wealthy developed countries hosting refugees. In 2014, about nine million of the world’s displaced lived in low-income countries. Today, that number stands at an estimated 36 million and is forecast, by the Danish Refugee Council, to increase to 40 million by the end of 2023. The displacement crisis ‘disproportionally affects poorer countries and areas that already have enough on their plate,’ said the Council’s Charlotte Slente.

There are currently 5.7 million registered Syrian refugees stranded in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, 1.2 million Rohingya in the camps at Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, 2.2 million Afghan refugees still in Iran and Pakistan, 2 million South Sudanese, 4 million displaced in Yemen while Honduras has 937,000 displaced people, the highest number in Central America.

Since 2015, a fifth of Venezuela’s population has left, one of the largest displacements in the world. On average, 2,000 Venezuelans crossed into Colombia every day in 2021 which now hosts 1.8 million Venezuelans.

Behind these numbers are people with personal stories of tragic loss and pain, all hoping for a chance at a better future. They think it is worth risking their lives if it leads to an opportunity of a decent life for them and their families.

However, we also witness a UK government passing draconian new nationality and borders legislation to restrict the rights of refugees and for those who endeavour to enter the country ‘unlawfully’, and they will be criminally prosecuted to add to all the other miseries that have already been inflicted upon them.

The UK government has now announced it intends to deport – or should that be ‘transport’? – those accused of ‘illegally’ arriving to claim asylum to Rwanda, in the middle of Africa, 4,500 miles away. How different from the humanitarian welcome being offered to Ukrainians fleeing war in what is now effectively becoming an unequal two-tier refugee policy.

Socialists do not hold with making a ‘league table’ of suffering and to differentiate between the more deserving or the less deserving for our charity and compassion. There should be no competition or contests for our concern. But in today’s world, such a conflict of interests exists when it comes to attitudes and policies in regard to refugees.

The World Socialist Movement’s position is that we are all equal worthy members of the human family and when it comes to looking after ‘our own’, none should be excluded and rejected, no exceptions nor special cases. Humanity is One. We are indivisible.

ALJO

Odds and Ends: Wicked Materialists? (1957)

The Odds and Ends column from the April 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wicked Materialists?

Speaking recently (News Chronicle, 22/2/57), as chairman of the Church Assembly, Dr. Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said: “On so many bodies I belong to, really the business is ruined by these constant discussions about salaries, stipends, and superannuations, and all the rest. . . . I have come to the conclusion that it is an insidious form of pure materialism. It is a disease running through the community.”

Poor Dr. Fisher! He seems so upset at those wicked materialists, i.e. parsons, with average pay, £650 a year: and, of course, all those railwayman, clerks, dockers and the like, who all seem so materialistic in their desire for a better life—in this world. But then our dear Archbishop need not worry himself unduly about his own material well-being. He only receives £7,500 a year as Archbishop of Canterbury.

£400 for a Slave

Fairly recently King Saud of Saudi Arabia visited “the land of the free’’—the United States of America, where he was fêted by President Eisenhower, and other American politicians. Little is known of his country except that there is sand—and more important—oil, in Saudi Arabia. But a recent United Nations report (News Chronicle, 22/2/57) gives us some idea just how “free” and democratic King Saud’s oil-soaked land is. According to the report Saudi Arabia has 450,000 slaves— just 20% of the population. Prices on the Jeddah slave market were said to be between £200 and £400 for a girl under 15; £150 for a man under 40 and £40 for an old woman.

Like Christian Archbishops who also live quite well, Moslem Kings, such as King Saud, do not condemn slavery—chattel slavery in Arabia, and wage-slavery in Britain 1

Human Nature ?

A most startling recent discover was a tribe of Honest Men! It goes without saying that they were not found in Christian lands. They were found in the jungles of Venezuela by Prof. Tenton, an ethnologist. He reports that these uncivilised people never lie, never make war, never kill and never rob.

They have no politicians, no advertisers, no crooks, and are so used to each other’s honesty that they have no locks and keys, no monetary systems and don’t even wear clothes.

All that remains is to protect these Maora Indians from the Christian missionaries, with their civilising influences.” (Freethinker, 14/12/56).

Women in Antiquity

"Women In Antiquity" by Charles Seltman (PAN Books, price 2/6d.), is quite an interesting and provocative little book, although the author has a number of axes to grind. Much of what he has written of women “in antiquity” will be challenged. For example, in his first chapter on Palaeolithic and Neolithic society he sees a situation where from 20 to 50 people live “comfortably” in a cave owned by the biggest male. And, further, after dealing with the activities of the women (such as scavenging for nuts, roots and fruit), he writes:—

“When one tries to imagine the structure of such a cave-family, one can think of two possibilities : firstly, the senior male (whose property the cave was) might have a series of wives from the oldest at twenty-four to the youngest at twelve, among whom there would inevitably exist a kind of harem-like jealousy productive of much unhappiness; secondly, the whole cave-family group may have lived in what zoologists call a 'clone,' in which the women were shared in common by the men." (p. 14.)

Of course, all of this, is purely speculative, and in contradiction to the findings of other anthropologists, who often see an absence of jealousy in primitive communities and who write not of a dominant male but of sexual equality—"sexual communism”—and “group marriage” during this early period of pre-history. Seltman’s ideas on this period seem to be much akin to those of Freud with his dominant father, the jealous sons and the “Primal Horde.” Still, in the main our author is on the side of the women! He generally sees the position of women “in antiquity” as a favourable one compared to their position m some countries today. And he has little sympathy for the Church’s views on women and sexual relations in general. 

“Freedom's Foe—The Vatican"

This book is by a "free-thinking” protestant, and is a counter-blast to Catholic Action. In the main it reiterates the views put forward in greater detail by Avro Manhattan in The Catholic Church Against The Twentieth Century.

Adrian Pigott, the author of Freedom's Foe, deals with the Catholic Church’s alleged former collaboration with Fascism and Nazism, with the “evils of priest craft," the misdeeds of some of the Popes, the "cruelty of the Catholic Church," the extreme poverty to be found in some Catholic countries such as Spain and Ireland (he tells us that “Protestant countries have little discontent or poverty .. ."!!) and the activities of the Church in Britain and the United States.

No doubt many of his criticisms are valid—but what can the Protestant critics of Catholicism, such as our author, offer the working class of Britain and elsewhere? The Church of England, of whom Marx once said, that it would rather give up its Thirty-nine Articles of Faith than give up one thirty-ninth of its property? Neither Protestants nor Catholics, Moslems or Buddhists, have a solution to the problems confronting ordinary people. Only Socialism has an answer to those problems. All the same this little book is worth l/6d.

Freedom's Foe—The Vatican, is published by the Wickliffe Press, Fleet Street.

Are you Fed-up ?

Do you dislike the Foreman or the Chief Clerk? And when you get home from work at night, do you feel tired, frustrated and fed-up?,

Do you find life worrying, insecure and purposeless?

Do you find it a job to "make ends meet" to save enough money for a holiday, or a new suit?

Do you get fed up with the threat of war with the promises of the politicians?

Do you? Well, then, isn’t it about time you did something about it. No!—don’t take ". . .'s ” little liver pills, or "H. . .’s" just before you go to bed, because, ten-to-one, whilst this present system of society remains you will fed much the same the next day. So why not get to grips with society itself ? Begin to study the world m which you live. And when you understand it, your position in it, the causes of the problems that worry you, and make you insecure, join with others who know about our present system—capitalism—and with them help to change it to a society free from insecurity, poverty, the threat of war; to establish a Socialist wood—a classless, moneyless system of society. Why not start now?

Peter E. Newell.

Letters: Wrong about Kenya? (2006)

Letters to the Editors from the March 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wrong about Kenya?

Dear Editors,

We have the following observations on the article “Kenya Referendum farce” (Socialist Standard, December).

The struggle for a new Constitution has been going on since Moi took power in 1978. In 1982, the fear by Moi of the setting up of the Kenya Socialist Alliance led the Moi government to convert Kenya into a one party dictatorship. During the 80s, the struggle around the Constitution mainly focused on changing the document to allow for political pluralism. Moi gave in and allowed alternative parties in 1990. But the struggle for a new Constitution continued as Moi continued to use the document to abuse power.

We agree with much of your views that the Constitution will not put food on the table for the exploited workers and the oppressed in Kenya. Our view within the Kenya Socialist Democratic Alliance and which we have repeated several times in the past is that the Constitution is a piece of paper which will be violated by the ruling class if their interests are at stake.

From a Socialist perspective, the Constitution can only matter if the power to implement it rests on the hands of the working class, not the thieving ruling class. Even if another “democratic Constitution” is drafted and passed, it will not solve the problem of mass unemployment, mass poverty, exploitation of workers and peasants in Kenya, collapsed health care system and other social and economic maladies brought about by the rot and decay of the deformed capitalist system in our country.

The “Yes” and the “No” bandwagons have no political alternative because parties represented on both sides are fundamentally liberal. We take the position that the real solution to the crisis in Kenya rests on the establishment of a “Workers/Socialist Party” in the country. At the moment, the unworkable system of capitalism is not facing any confrontation.

Our support for the “Orange team” was strategic. Kenyans need to do away with “the problem of the Constitution” so that they can realize that a New Constitution is actually not the solution to the political and economic crisis brought about by the thieving ruling class.

You could have come out clearly in the article to assert that Kenya needs a Socialist government or a “Workers Party” armed with a revolutionary socialist Program for change and transformation instead of talking about a “system which has no frontiers”.

Your article is good. But your writer should also have attacked capitalism directly instead of talking about a system “where money is being worshiped”. By leaving out the dimension of “Socialism” and “Capitalism” in the article (referring to them indirectly) your writer squandered an opportunity to pit Socialism as an alternative against capitalism which needs to be overthrown in Kenya.

We believe that it could have been wrong for us to support the “Yes” side or to sit on the fence as your writer did because the struggle for a new constitution is part of the democratic struggle in our country. While participating in the process, we utilized every opportunity to point out that the Constitution is not the answer to the crisis in Kenya while at the same time pointing out the limitations of the Orange camp which will not be able to go beyond the Constitution to challenge capitalism.

Needless to say, our Comrades on the ground managed to introduce “Mapambano”, our Newsletter, as the official slogan of the Orange campaign. Since the Orange leaders will not be able to deliver even if they came to power, a new force will have to come into play and this is the period we are preparing for.

Okoth Osewe, Secretary, 

Kenya Socialist Democratic Alliance (www.kenyasocialist.org )

Reply:

We don’t understand the logic of your position: why vote for something you know is pointless? We suspect, though, that you have a “vanguardist” approach and were just opportunistically using the No campaign to attract a following and that by “socialism” you mean some sort of national state capitalism – Editors.

Right about Venezuela

Dear Editors

I read your November issue about Venezuelan president Chavez. I think the left is wrong to support Chavez. He and his supporters want to keep capitalism but reform it so that the part played by state is increased. Their ultimate goal may be establishing a Cuban-style state capitalism in Venezuela accompanied of course by political dictatorship.

I think socialists should expose this reformist bourgeois leader and his supporters and call for working class power in Venezuela. A multi-party socialist state in which the working class rules over the society and expropriates capitalists and petty bourgeoisie and establishes common ownership of means of production and distribution of wealth is the only revolutionary answer to all the poverty, inequality and political dictatorship that capitalism causes at the present time in all countries of the world.

I also condemn those members of the murderous capitalist ruling class of the United States that plan for terror on Chavez.

Down with capitalism! Freedom, equality, worker power!

Siamak Haghighat (by email)

Reply:

We generally agree except that we wouldn’t talk about a state or the working class existing in socialism – Editors.