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).

Letter: Min or max? (2024)

From the 30th May 2024 issue of the Weekly Worker

Mike Macnair tries to argue that Karl Marx “advocated, wrote and defended the revolutionary minimum programme” (‘Minimal symmetrical errors’ Weekly Worker May 23). Marx certainly had no objection to a socialist workers’ party having a programme of immediate demands, but he wasn’t so illogical as to describe these as “revolutionary”.

A “revolutionary minimum programme” is in fact a contradiction in terms. The “immediate demands” (the term used in the 1880 programme of the French Parti Ouvrier) that constituted the minimum programme of the pre-World War I social democratic parties were all measures to be implemented within capitalism, even if (some of them) would strengthen the hand of the working class in the class struggle. Only the maximum programme can be described as revolutionary.

Mike Macnair argues (not very convincingly, since in practice the emphasis was placed on the social and economic, rather than political, “immediate demands”) that the essence of a minimum programme is a demand for complete - “extreme” - political democracy. He describes this as “revolutionary”, as it makes it easy, even inevitable, for the working class to win political control. But this, of course, presupposes a socialist-minded working class. It is the absence of this, not of “extreme democracy”, that is currently the barrier to socialism - as a society of common ownership and democratic control of the means of living, with production directly to satisfy people’s needs, not for profit.

In any event, it would take as much time and energy to get the working class to organise and vote for “extreme democracy” as it would to get them to organise and vote for socialism.

It is true that some degree of political democracy does make it easier for the working class both to organise for socialism and to wage the trade union struggle, but it doesn’t need to be perfect or “extreme”. In countries like Britain is it really necessary to set aside the revolutionary, maximum programme to demand, for instance, the abolition of the monarchy as a step towards “extreme democracy”?

The limited political democracy that exists today is enough to enable a socialist-minded working class majority to transform universal suffrage - in the words of the maximum programme of the Parti Ouvrier, “from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation” - by using it to win political control and introduce socialism, including full democracy. This should be the “immediate demand” of socialists, not a list of reforms to capitalism, whether attractive or not. It’s what socialists today should be campaigning for, not chasing reforms.

Adam Buick 

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Letter: Never understood (2024)

From the 30th May 2024 issue of the Weekly Worker

Mike Macnair makes the point: “What full communism will look like will depend on choices made over decades by the working class ruling on a global scale. The minimum programme is a programme for working class rule right now. It is for this reason that it combines a platform for political democracy with some economic measures - ones that are immediately posed.”

I have never really understood how anyone seriously interested in promoting the idea of a communist (aka socialist) alternative to capitalism can make this sort of argument. Never mind what Marx may or may not have said. Marx was fallible, as are we all, and there is enough of an unhealthy tendency to invoke the ‘argument from authority’ as it is when it comes to quoting Marx in leftwing circles. All that is needed is a bit of basic common sense and logic.

Look, we can all surely accept the premise that capitalism as a socioeconomic system can only really be run and managed in one way - in the interests of capital. As ‘Marxists’ we can all surely agree that capitalism´s driving force - the competitive accumulation of capital out of surplus value - is absolutely dependent on the systemic exploitation of a majority working class by a tiny class that owns and controls the means of production in de facto terms.

But here’s the point - the very existence of these (capitalist) class categories - implies the existence of this exploitative system of capitalism. Consequently, arguing for a “minimum programme” based on “working class rule” (moreover, “over decades” and “on a global scale”) is in effect arguing for the retention of an economic system that requires the existence of this class as the object of a process of exploitation. In effect, it is proposing that the slaves should continue to be slaves, while being in charge of a system that can only be administered in the interests of the slave-owners.

This is simply not credible. One can sort of understand why Marx and Engels felt the need to resort to such logically dubious concepts as the “dictatorship of the proletariat” back in the mid-19th century. Objectively speaking, communism was not on the cards. Hence their advocacy of the 10 state-capitalist reforms in the 1848 Manifesto to help grow the productive forces (though they later distanced themselves from these reforms, as can be seen if you read the 1872 preface to the Communist Manifesto).

But we don’t live in the year 1848. Today, we live in 2024. We don’t need the forces of production to be “further developed” to establish a communist society, What accounts for the persistence of poverty is not the fact that we don’t have the technological capacity to make communism completely feasible. On the contrary, material deprivation continues only because we allow capitalism to continue.

Capitalism has become the most grotesquely wasteful socioeconomic formation in human history, with the majority of its human and material resources being devoted solely to keeping the money system ticking over on its own terms. This in itself represents a truly massive diversion of resources away from meeting human needs and it will continue for as long as we allow the capitalist buying-and-selling system to continue,

This is why I find all this talk of transitional societies and minimum programmes so archaic and off-putting. It’s not at all relevant to the world we live in today. The transition period is what we are living through now. It is not something we need to initiate, once a communist majority has politically captured the capitalist state - and set about immediately abolishing that state, along with the system that necessitates it. Surely, at that point - if it ever happens - all this would be pretty much universally understood by everyone.

The only remaining precondition we need to fulfil in order to establish a communist society is the realisation of communist consciousness on a mass scale. At the end of the day, the SPGB is completely correct in emphasising this. It is a thankless and difficult approach that it has adopted and one that routinely prompts the scorn of others, but, at the end of the day, it is the only approach that makes any sense. If you want a communist society you have to advocate it and spread the idea. What else is possibly required?

Advocating a minimum programme in this day and age is a sure-fire way of setting yourself up for failure and mass working class disenchantment, with a so-called working class government having been put in power to implement this programme. Any government that tries to take on the administration of a system that is intrinsically predicated on the exploitation of the working class will inevitably transmogrify into a capitalist government.

Surely as materialists, we can all accept this all-too-obvious point?

Robin Cox 

email

Letter: Min or max? (2024)

From the 16th May 2024 issue of the Weekly Worker

Min or max?

Mike Macnair, in his analysis of the results of the elections to the Greater London Assembly, notes that they “show TUSC polling in the same range as the SPGB” (‘Local election barometer’, May 9).

In other words, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, appealing to trade union-conscious workers with a programme of attractive-sounding reforms (what used to be called ‘the minimum programme’), polled more or less the same as the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which was standing on a straight platform of socialism - the common ownership and democratic control of the means of living, with production directly to meet people’s needs, not profit - and nothing but (what used to be called ‘the maximum programme’).

But what’s the point of standing on a minimum programme when you are not going to get more votes than if you stood on the maximum programme? Workers who just want reforms understandably prefer to vote for reformist parties they consider have a chance of being able to implement some.

Seeking support on the basis of reforms to capitalism confuses the issue, by encouraging workers to continue to think in terms of getting a better deal under capitalism rather than to get rid of it. The time and energy spent on this could be more fruitfully spent in campaigning directly for socialism. After all, what is needed is more socialists.

Adam Buick 

SPGB

Trotsky in Euroland (2002)

From the September 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have always argued that Trotskyism and Leninism is a non-revolutionary current, part of the extreme left-wing of capitalism. This was demonstrated at a fringe meeting during the SWP's annual Marxism event.

This meeting involved an internal debate between three of the organisations comprising the "Socialist Alliance", concerning the issue of the euro. Two broad viewpoints were expressed: those firmly in the "No" camp and others who took an arguably more pragmatic approach.

First up was the International Socialist Group (ISG) whose speaker argued that opposition to the euro (and the EU in general) is where class politics should start. As the EU was a "Bosses Club", socialists should naturally oppose it and given the "monetarism" of the convergence criteria/stability pact, we should realise that this will mean increasing attacks upon the working class.

This position was attacked by both the other groups, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL) and the Leninist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). They argued that this logically leads to "little Englandism" even if this was not the intention.

The CPGB speaker proposed an "active boycott" of any forthcoming referendum arguing that class struggle would be more effective given an integrated European working class. So for the CPGB, Euroland offers reluctant possibilities.

It was interesting watching these pseudo-revolutionaries trying to come up with the correct tactical formula and giving a "working class" spin to what is an internal capitalist class debate.

I publicly ventured an alternative: tell us workers the truth! Tell us that global capitalism is our enemy, whether one group of capitalists support the euro or not. Tell us that class struggle and democratic organisation are prerequisites for the revolution which will abolish private property, wages and money itself (including the pound and the euro). Naturally, this got the usual looks of incredulity and a pleasing nod from the AWL speaker who mistakenly thought I was echoing his earlier point about "independent working class action".

I added for the benefit of the ISG supporters that even if Britain did stay outside the eurozone, the pound would still be affected by European Central Bank decisions and any subsequent machinations on the foreign exchange markets. As for the austerity measures, these would happen anyway because of the need to reform the European "social democratic model" so as to better compete with the likes of USA and Japan.

What this all shows is that despite their militant phrase-mongering these people will lead the working class up yet another reformist dead-end — if given an opportunity. Their politics falls safely within capitalism.

Dave Flynn 

Moscow's orphans (1998)

Book Review from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The British Communist Movement and Moscow’, by Mike Mosbacher. Libertarian Alliance, 1997.

Have you ever wondered what became of the Communist Party after the collapse of state capitalism in Russia and East Europe? This short pamphlet will tell you.

The official Communist Party – or Communist Party of Great Britain, to give its full name, by which it was only known on formal occasions and in an international context – in effect dissolved itself in 1991 when it changed its name to Democratic Left and became a trendy left green-feminist-gay pressure group. Its previous policies, however, were kept alive by the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) which broke away in 1988 and which still publishes the Morning Star. In Scotland another group of ex-CPers set up the Communist Party of Scotland in 1992. An earlier breakaway in 1977, the New Communist Party, still exists but has become, according to Mosbacher. little more than a group denying the atrocities that occurred under Stalin in the same irrational way as Nazis deny those that occurred under Hitler.

Immediately after the CPGB changed its name to Democratic Left in December 1991 this name was taken up by a group which had no historical, political or, for that matter, legal right to do so. The organisation that goes under this name, and publishes the Weekly Worker, is in fact a super-Leninist sect, apparently originating as a splinter from the Turkish Communist Party, which employs the same unscrupulous tactics of infiltrating other organisations (at the moment Scargill’s SLP) as the Trotskyists; indeed, according to Mosbacher, it does have Trotskyist members.

Mosbacher, surprisingly perhaps for a supporter of the mad free market ideas of the Libertarian Alliance, has produced a useful and well-informed little pamphlet. He gets our position right too when he states:

  “The Socialist Party of Great Britain takes the view that the Soviet Union never was socialist in the first place. This has been its position since 1917. In a way this party goes further than any other on the revolutionary left in criticising the Soviet Union, in that it views Leninist principles and modes of organisation as non-socialist, indeed anti-socialist”.

Adam Buick 

It's capitalism (2019)

Letter to issue 1280 of the Weekly Worker

Dave Vincent returns to the issue of foreign workers, claiming that nobody has answered his arguments against controlled immigration (Letters, December 12). I refer readers to only some of my own letters on migration and let them judge: March 20 2014; April 17 2014; June 18 2015; June 22 2017; July 6 2017.

Dave asks, “Do indigenous peoples worldwide have any rights at all over unprecedented numbers of those coming into their country without their agreement?”

Competition under capitalism leads to false ideas about the burden of newcomers to native-born workers, who claim first pick on ‘our’ hospitals, ‘our’ housing, ‘our’ social security benefits. In fact, bad housing, hospital waiting lists, low pay and bad working conditions are universal problems. They are a consequence of the essential poverty of all people who depend on being employed in order to live. There was never a time when life was easy. Migrants did not create the problems. They arrive here with the false hope of escaping the same misery in their home countries, but find when they arrive here they have to share it and take the blame for it.

Since its inception, capitalism has drawn workers from poorer parts of the country and from abroad to more developed regions in order to satisfy its labour needs. And, as Marx said, capitalists require to also build up an industrial reserve army for the bosses to maintain their dominance in the job market and to control wage levels. All those people migrating are simply obeying the imperative that they must try to find a place to work. No amount of restrictions will change that fact.

The resentment against migrants is a class matter and such prejudice is inflamed by the many sections of the ruling class. Capitalism has sometimes been against immigration restrictions by promoting the free movement and availability of wage labour. But, at the same time, the capitalist social system is a fertile breeding ground for anti-foreigner policies. This may seem like a contradiction, but that is how it is, for capitalism is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. It cannot be a system of human harmony - division and conflict are in its very nature. Capitalism is a ‘dog eat dog’ world and will remain so until it is abolished.

The solution to the immigration crisis lies not with building fences, but with creating the conditions that do not necessitate people leaving their homes, their family, their friends and neighbours. The reality is that the solution is socialism. In the meantime, instead of undermining the ability of migrant workers to cross borders in search of work, migrants need to be unionised, uniting migrant workers alongside local workers in a collective struggle to maintain and improve upon wages and conditions. As long as workers are viewing migrants as the cause of their problems, they leave themselves divided and distracted.

The concern of working people over wages, unemployment, welfare and public services is totally legitimate. However, placing the blame on migrants does not address the causes of these problems or bring improvements to the situation. The problem is the capitalist system itself. The path to beginning to solve these problems is workers’ unity across ethnic, religious and national lines. It is vital that the trade unions make the recruitment of migrant labour a top priority.

There is your answer, Dave, as painful as it is. No worker, solely by birthright, has a guarantee to a secure, decent life under capitalism. It is wishful, utopian thinking to believe otherwise.

Alan Johnstone 

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Cooking the Books: Mises is Irrelevant (2016)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 'Weekly Worker' (28 April) carried an interesting article by the Trotskyoid Hillel Ticktin which, unusually for someone from his political background, gave a good description of socialism which (also unusually) he called socialism:

‘A distinguishing mark of socialism is that distribution would operate according to need, rather than input … people will be able to walk into a distribution point and pick up what they need.’‘In a socialist society you would expect workers to work in the way that they judge is correct. Since a worker’s incentive under socialism is not money, they work as best they can in order that they not only fulfil what they are doing for the collectivity, but for themselves. You would expect that they would work as well as they can, without any need for discipline from outside.’

Curiously though, at one point he says ‘von Mises was right’. Mises, the arch-advocate of the dystopia of a free market capitalism, argued that in a socialist society, with common ownership and no free market in means of production, rational economic calculation would be impossible and that such a society would not last for long but would eventually break down in economic chaos. This was a circular argument in that he defined rational economic calculation as calculation based on prices set by the free play of market forces.

Ticktin was accepting Mises’s argument that in a situation where productive capacity is not enough to satisfy people’s needs, calculation in some general unit of account such as money or labour-time would be necessary. He speculates that Marx’s ‘period of the revolutionary transformation’ of capitalist into communist society during which he says this would have to be the case could last ‘let us say anything between 10 and 50 years.’

Ten years is one thing but fifty is another. Maybe in Marx’s day, in 1875, any such period might have been nearer to the fifty end. Today, however, in view of the tremendous development of the forces of production since then, even ten years seems on the long side for a period in which to re-orient production so as meet people’s needs, especially as, unlike Mises’s followers, Ticktin rejects that humans needs are infinite:

‘The bourgeois concept of the human being having infinite needs is ridiculous, but it is the basis of bourgeois economics. … In fact there is a limited amount that needs to be produced for a given society and consequently under socialism we will be able to identify the limited areas in which increased production is needed.’

Also, Ticktin accepts that there is an enormous amount of wasted production under capitalism whereas in socialism:

‘Obviously there will be no such thing as finance, and whole sections of economic activity will no longer exist because they are completely wasteful and unnecessary. There will be no arms production, no advertising and, of course, no City of London – you can go through the different wasteful forms that will cease to exist. It is quite clear that the standard of living could very quickly be raised if such waste is removed.’

So, once this waste is ‘very quickly’ removed, we would already have a situation of relative abundance and so should be able to move equally quickly to socialism and free access to available goods and services.

So, why would we need to go to the trouble – and waste – of setting up a vast bureaucracy to measure the labour-time content of everything with a view to reducing it to a minimum and an individual’s input to production with a view to calculating their entitlement to goods and services, when the supposed need for this is not going to last for long? Even Mises conceded that socialism could continue for a while without having recourse to his ‘rational economic calculation’.

Between the Lines: Timewasters 1 & 2 (1992)

The Between the Lines Column from the January 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Timewasters: I

This year will see another gang of Labour fakers doing the rounds of kissing babies and promising the moon. Those who recall the records of past Labour governments will be insulted by such appeals; those who do not will be massively disillusioned if they place faith in Kinnock and Co. to build the New Jerusalem (or even a few more council flats) for them.

Those who fall for Major's smooth-talking deception about the creation of a classless society will be no less betrayed. Michael Cockerell's four part Class Rule (BBC2, Tuesdays, 9.50 pm) was a series which made great use of the archives to show how since 1945, British governments have repeatedly appealed to workers on the basis that they would abolish class, and have consistently confined such hopes to the empty realm of rhetoric.

After the Second World War Attlee defeated Churchill on what seemed to be a genuine tide of working-class desire for a more equitable society. When Labour won Hartley Shawcross is supposed to have said that "We are masters now", and Ministry of Information propagandists were paid to make films about how Britain belonged to everyone. Of course, the harsh reality of who owned Britain intervened and the Attlee government ended up using troops to smash strikes and telling the wage slaves to accept austerity for the sake of economic success -  for their bosses. Attlee was voted out and there then followed the thirteen wasted Tory years during which the aristocratic slob Churchill was removed and Macmillan, born into inherited class parasitism, posed as being an ordinary chap. The Macmillan Tories appealed to the One Nation fraud that Britain belongs to us all.

Cockerell's programme (number two in the series) showed how the Tories used sociologists to tell them that they needed to win over the skilled, aspirant workers if they were to hold on to power. In the "never had it so good" fifties the Tories built council estates for "respectable" wage slaves who would be bribed into submissive contentment. Tory MP's adopted proley tones for broadcasts which sought to depict them as just one of the lads - like vicars talking at youth clubs or Maxwell addressing his ex-employees at the pension fund meeting. It was all a disgraceful fraud. Unlike Maxwell, who had the fortune to drown before he was caught out as a transparent crook, the Tory Ministers were caught while still in office, and after Profumo the "we're all in it together" rhetoric of One-Nation Tories had an altogether hollow ring to it. In a desperate bid for sympathy the Tories appointed an unelected Prime Minister called Alec Douglas Home who did not know that feudalism had ended.

Home's undisguised condescension towards the lower orders was exploited fully by the super-opportunist Harold Wilson, a Labourite con-man who got to power by telling lies about the hardship of his miserable northern youth. (In fact, the liar had been an economics don at Oxford before taking up major criminal fraud in Westminster).

It is easy to forget that Wilson won the 1964 election on an appeal to working-class sentiments of wanting to do away with the rule of chauffeur-driven Lords and rich men. Today Wilson is a rich Lord and so is the fraud who followed him, Jim Callaghan. These lying tricksters perpetrated every known Tory stunt in their bid to run British capitalism on behalf of the minority owning class - yet it is a fact (not reported by Cockerell) that when Wilson beat George Brown for the Labour leadership in 1963 he was sent a telegram by the Central Committee of the Communist Party stating that at last a genuine socialist had become Labour leader!

Another fact missed by Cockerell, in an otherwise well-made series, was that Major was not saying anything different from Thatcher when he made his hollow promise about creating a "classless Britain". Often forgotten by political observers is a radio interview given by Thatcher in 1985 in which she said:

"I want people to have the right to property, the right to occupational pensions, the right to shares; the right to be the same as everyone as everyone else because they have that independence. That is my dream . . . Like Karl Marx, I want to get totally rid of class distinctions."

(Quoted in The Times, 6 May 1985).

Under Thatcher the number of people living in official poverty more than doubled. Major's efforts will be no different from that of Thatcher or of Macmillan; and who but the most naive expects the future Lord Kinnock to be any different from Messrs Wilson and Callaghan? The lesson of the Cockerell series is that this century has been one of broken political promises and shattered working-class dreams of equality. It is time for a change.

Timewasters: II

But still the pseudo-socialists emit their poisonous ideological gas. On Question Time (BBC1, 5 December) a faceless, nameless (at least, I have forgotten) Labour MEP spewed out the same old Labour cliches about how they would re-organise capitalism. On the panel with her was Tony Benn, who thinks that it is still 1945 and that what Attlee said he was doing was true. The MEP looked at Benn like something you scrape off your shoe; he sneered at her undisguised Toryism. While Labour's soul was being fought for all whispers of a socialist revolution were strictly off the menu.

Not so the following night when Timewaster III, Anne Murphy, appeared as one of the guests on the appalling midnight Channel Four phone-in show, Ring My Bell. Murphy is a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain -  that's right, the one that folded its tents and agreed to die of shame. Murphy's crowd want to hang on to the ghost of the old Stalinist monster, and in so doing she did more harm to the case for socialism in her replies to callers than MI5 could wish to do unaided. Murphy told callers that "under" socialism workers would be paid more and that, while we might be "critical" of Ceausescu, he was the leader of a good socialist country. Murphy plans to stand against Ken Livingstone in the next General Election as a Revolutionary Communist. Perhaps the workers of Brent East can hold a competition to decide which of them comes from a more dishonorable, detestable and failed tradition.

Steve Coleman 

Cooking the Books: Has Money Gone? (2012)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article “The decline of money” (Weekly Worker, 9 March) Hillel Ticktin argues that money did not exist in the USSR, does not exist in China and that fiat money issued by governments even in the West isn’t really money.

Marx saw money as having two basic functions: (1) a medium of exchange or circulation, i.e. the means through which articles produced for sale get bought and sold; and (2) a measure of value, i.e. a common unit in which the value of articles produced for sale can be expressed as a price, and is thus a standard by which they can be compared.

“The natural form of money”, Ticktin writes, “would be a commodity that could itself be produced with labour-power and would therefore have its own value.” This was certainly the typical form of money in Marx’s day and the form he discussed the most. This money-commodity (usually gold or silver) does not have to circulate itself and be used for payments. It can be replaced in circulation by tokens, including paper ones issued by the government.

Marx identified two kinds of paper token money: tokens that were convertible on demand into a fixed amount of the money-commodity and tokens which were not. The former created no problem. The latter, however, could create a problem if they were issued in a greater amount than the amount of the money-commodity that would otherwise circulate. In this case, if they circulated alongside gold or silver, the value of the tokens would depreciate, i.e. they would buy less than their face-value. If they were the only currency (as is the case today) this would result in a rise in the general price level, i.e. in a change in the standard of price.

An inconvertible paper currency has to be managed by the government or some state institution such as a central bank which, to avoid depreciation or inflation, has to calculate the correct amount to issue. In Marx’s day the case where the only currency was paper token money was a hypothetical one which he only discussed in passing. He was rather sceptical that it would work, on the grounds that it would not be possible in practice for a government to get the amount right and so there would be no stable standard of price.

Marx scepticism proved to be misplaced. He was right that there was likely to be a changing standard of price, but not that capitalism would be unable to cope with this. It has, and in fact this has become the norm, with most governments aiming at a price level rising at 2-3 percent a year.

The difference between a money-commodity and paper money, says Ticktin, is “that paper money is issued by governments and controlled by governments. It is effectively a nationalised form of money. It is not a spontaneous form, as with gold.” That is so, but Ticktin goes on to claim that “this nationalised form means that money is not really money as we understood it. One cannot say that £1 is equal to so much abstract labour. It is decided by governments and whomsoever is actually dealing with the money supply.”

It may not be the form of money Marx knew, but it is still money. It is still the medium of exchange and still a measure of value and standard of price even if a changing one. Ticktin is concerned that this “nationalised money” is controlled by ruling class technocrats instead of democratically in the interests of the working class. As if it could be.

We want, like Marx, a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources and production directly to meet people’s needs instead of for sale and profit and where money would therefore be redundant.

Who are the Socialist Alliance? (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Yet another set of dishonest politicians will be after your vote at the general election. However, in this case they are calling themselves 'socialist'. But they are anything but.

The Socialist Alliance intends to field up to a hundred candidates in the forthcoming election, specifically targeting disaffected Labour voters who feel 'betrayed' by Tony Blair and may want a 'socialist alternative'.

Rag bag

So who are the Socialist Alliance? They are an eclectic rag bag of Trotskyists, former Stalinists, various other groupings and assorted individuals. The main organisations involved include: Socialist Workers Party, Militant (now calling itself Socialist Party of England and Wales, or SPEW), Alliance for Workers Liberty, Communist Party of Great Britain, International Socialist Organisation and Workers Power. The SA are also supporting the 72 (former-Militant) Scottish Socialist Party candidates. Previously, the SA have stood in the 1998 Euro elections and last year's Greater London Assembly elections, with limited success. The general election will be their most ambitious adventure to date. So, unfortunately, we will undoubtedly be hearing more about them.

In any case, it is interesting to learn how such a disparate collection of former enemies could have come together in the first place. It does not seem so long ago that the AWL were accusing the SWP of 'violent thuggery' against some of their own members (see AWL pamphlet Why the SWP Beats Up Its Socialist Critics), and surely the former Stalinists of the CPGB would have balked at the prospect of talking to Trotskyists, let alone organising with them. But whatever particular ism each of these leftist sects subscribe to, they all represent the left-wing of capitalism's political apparatus, and thus are the enemy of the working class.

Left opens up

But with New Labour's victory in May 1997 and flirtations with Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party notwithstanding, these leftist group's orientation to Labourist policies had to be re-evaluated. Many of these groups have been hoisted with their own petard: telling workers to vote Labour only to scream 'betrayed' when they discovered Blair and Co were anti working class. We didn't vote for this! screamed Socialist Worker. Oh yes you did! is our response.

Subsequently, a rightwards shift into the area vacated by Labour has become the order of the day. Just how far this shift should be and, moreover, the very content of the cynical reform package being offered to the working class has tested the very foundations of the alliance and caused much acrimony among the groups themselves. The SA is very much a marriage of convenience.

Leninist duplicity

All Leninist/Trotskyist organisations start from the premise that workers are too stupid to understand or want socialism by their own volition. Therefore, revolutionary ideas have to be introduced from outside the working class by all-knowing 'professional revolutionaries' who will lead workers to the promised land. It's worth pointing out that the Leninists themselves do not want socialism because they do not know what it is. For Leninists and Trotskyists, socialism is what you get when they run the government and nationalise the commanding heights of the economy in a pathetic attempt to centrally plan production. This is not socialism, it is capitalism. Or, more precisely, state capitalism—whether the Leninists consciously realise it or not.

For this end, a minimum—or transitional—programme is adopted. Since workers are unlikely to be turned on to what the Leninists really stand for, a plethora of unworkable reforms is served up for the working class's edification. For instance, here are some of the SA's 'priority pledges' from their website:

• Tax the rich to pay for the welfare state
• Raise the minimum wage to £7 an hour
• Cancel third world debt
• For the right to work -- 35 hour week now
• Raise pensions and restore the link with earnings
• Fully funded comprehensive education and NHS

Commenting upon the SA's 'tax the rich and spend' budget proposals, Dave Nellist, the SA leader, said:

“If you tried to enter our budget into the Treasury computer model of the UK economy, it would reject it. It breaks all the rules.” (SA press release, 4/3/01)

As Nellist admits, the SA's capitalist reform proposals would not work as capitalism is based upon capital accumulation and production for profit. So, Mr Nellist, why the need to lie?

Within the SA, groups such as the SWP, Militant and the AWL have been 'out-lefted' by the likes of the CPGB and WP who argue that the former are 'economistic' and 'centrist'—Leninist speak for lacking revolutionary vision. The others have retorted by accusing the CPGB and WP of 'ultra-leftist posturing'. According to Weekly Worker, the journal of the CPGB, reporting on the recent National Policy Conference of the SA:

“The SWP consciously and openly argued that in order to make a real impact in the election and attract non-revolutionary workers and Labourites, we must not stand on 'too radical' [sic] a platform. The most important thing is to form a pole of attraction one step to the left of New Labour—in effect, the old Labour model is the safest and most viable.”

Furthermore:

“Amendments from the CPGB and WP called for opposition to the standing army and police and their replacement by working class militia and 'community self-defence organisation' [sic]. The SWP's Kambiz Boomla strode to the microphone to admonish the left for wanting to 'put off' [sic] people such as 'Sister Christine', a catholic nun who was on the point of being recruited into the alliance in east London.” (Weekly Worker, 15 March)

Yes, this is real revolutionary politics: do we demand a 'workers militia' or will that frighten off the nuns? It's difficult to know whether to laugh or cry.

Even our Leninist friends have been forced to admit that this charade is based upon a tissue of lies. Here's one member of the International Socialist Group:

“Do we want a revolutionary programme or a programme that challenges capitalism and can reach out to significant forces to our right? We 'don't always have to tell the truth' [sic] about our revolutionism.” (Weekly Worker, 15 March)

SWP's about turn

Our old friends in the SWP, which is infamous for changing its line, or 'bending the stick', whenever it suits them, have done exactly this in the case of the SA. For years, the SWP has proclaimed itself as the de facto revolutionary party and denigrated the efforts of other left groups that it is now in partnership with. It has always been fiercely against standing in elections, as such activity was considered tantamount to reformism. This, of course, never prevented them from telling workers to vote Labour at every election or from jumping on every reformist bandwagon in town. Indeed, its 'Where We Stand' column, printed in every issue of Socialist Worker, clearly states:

“There is no parliamentary road. At most parliamentary activity can be used to make propaganda against the present system. Only the mass action of workers themselves can destroy the system.”

Also:

“The present system cannot be patched up or reformed as the established labour and trade union leaders say. It has to be overthrown.”

Rest assured that none of the above will appear in bold print in the SA election manifesto. After all, think of the nuns! It is reasonable to assume that the core of the SWP remains the same although its auto-Labourism has been thrown into confusion since the victory of new Labour. In 1998, the SWP produced an action programme of minimalist reformist demands which signalled a rightwards shift. Despite criticisms from the more left-leaning CPGB and WP that the SWP has become too reformist, this has been the logical political trajectory of all the groups comprising the SA.

In particular, the CPGB and the AWL appear to be interested in taking the SA to its logical conclusion—the formation of a new party. Of course, a prerequisite for such a development would be an SA paper, and, as leading CPGB theoretician Jack Conrad has argued:

“such a political paper represents the starting point, the first step towards creating a genuinely socialist party in Britain . . . is the overriding goal to which everything else should be subordinated." (Weekly Worker, 25 January)

However, it is unlikely that the largest organisations in the SA—the SWP and Militant—would ever countenance such a development. As things stand, the alliance project has deeply divided Militant, leaving themselves with one foot in and one foot out with a possible split on the cards. Experience tells us that the SWP would only ever be interested in anything they could completely dominate, and such behaviour has already been implicitly noted in the pages of Weekly Worker.

Our analysis of the SA is not based upon some narrow sectarianism—it's based upon principle. We do not, nor have we ever, supported capitalist parties, especially those that dress up in revolutionary garb in order to hoodwink the workers. The SA is an expression of all the political mistakes made by the working class last century—from the Labour Party to the Soviet Union. We do not doubt that well-meaning individuals get caught up in such chicanery for no other reason than a desire to see a better world. However, sentiment can never be a substitute for the class struggle.

Dave Flynn