Party News: The Socialist Party's Summer School (2024)

Party News from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our understanding of the kind of society we’re living in is shaped by our circumstances: our home, our work, our finances, our communities. Recognising our own place in the economy, politics and history is part of developing a wider awareness of how capitalist society functions. Alongside an understanding of the mechanics of capitalism, political consciousness also involves our attitude towards it. Seeing through the ideologies which promote accepting our current social system requires us to question 

and judge what we experience. Realising that capitalism doesn’t benefit the vast majority of people naturally leads on to considering what alternative society could run for the benefit of everyone.

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion explores what political consciousness is, how it arises and what we, as a class and as individuals, can do with it.

Our venue is the University of Worcester, St John's Campus, Henwick Grove, St John's, Worcester, WR2 6AJ.

Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £150; the concessionary rate is £80.

Book online at worldsocialism.org/spgb/summer-school-2024/ or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. Day visitors are welcome, but please e-mail for details in advance. 

Email enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.

Contradiction (2024)

Book Review from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Contradiction Within the Soul of Humanity. By Ernest Dyer. New Generation Publishing. 2023. 83pp.

This book is, by the author’s own admission, his personal journey of escape from the conditioning which society, via conventional upbringing and education system, marks us all with. This journey, he tells us, was triggered by his questioning of why humanity has been plagued by the horrors of war and conflict throughout much of its known history. The book’s title, with its use of the word ‘soul’, may suggest some kind of religious inspiration, but, as he makes clear, even as a teenager he realised that religious explanations made no sense and that, as he puts it ‘God was a fictional construct’. So the underlying reasons for the competition and conflict which seemed fundamental to human society had to lie elsewhere. He proceeds here to identify ‘the evil in humankind’s history’ (his words) as developing from the beginnings of ‘civil life’, referring to the start of settled agriculture and the development of fixed communities around 10,000 years ago with their hierarchies and wealth inequalities.

This is very much in line with much modern thinking about the origins of inequality, inter-group conflict and the challenge to the pro-social behaviour among homo sapiens which had largely characterised its previous 2-300,000 years of existence. That challenge, he argues, has reached its peak in modern society, where the sources of ‘evil’ are not just war and economic inequality but also environmental degradation and the threats posed by artificial intelligence. He does not stint on detailing the horrors which war has brought, and still brings, to humanity and the overwhelming waste of resources occasioned by war and preparation for it. As he rightly points out, war in the modern world is overwhelmingly caused by ‘competition over valued resources such as: water, land, fossil fuels, rare and valued metals and materials’. This, he tells us, results in ‘a mismatch between what we can now do (technologically) and our seeming inability to manage the consequences’. He sees as the driver of all this the interests of what he variously calls the ‘elite class’, ‘elite groups’ and ‘national leaders’, with the vast majority of people being ‘impotent witnesses’. He recognises that these elites are the owners or controllers of the vast majority of society’s wealth, even if he does not explicitly identify them, as we would, as the capitalist class and their representatives.

What is the author’s remedy for this contradiction between human potential and the actual reality of human society? Since, together with war, competition and inequality, the other great ‘evil’ he sees in the world is the modern nation state (described as ‘the most powerful, and currently for the World the most dangerous, entity fostering the identification of differences between peoples’), he calls for ‘world consciousness’, considering that ‘no human is irredeemably beyond the potential for some precocious sense of world-consciousness’. An admirable sentiment definitely, but how is that world consciousness to be achieved? Via some kind of ‘global governance’ body, he suggests, perhaps based on the United Nations, where representatives from different nations will get together and agree on a way of organising the world and its resources so as to eliminate armed conflict and the threat of it. The problem of course is that the United Nations is already meant to do that in theory, but it doesn’t – and can’t –, because the foremost obstacle to it is the very existence of the ‘elites’ the author talks about in each individual country and their monopoly of the wealth that they possess and seek to retain or increase via the working of their national executive committees, ie, governments.

The author does, however, glimpse a solution that could work on a world-scale when he talks about ‘the actual engagement of mass populations as a necessary precondition’ to get rid of ‘hegemonic economic competition’ and achieve ‘co-operation and peaceful co-existence’. But that will involve something this book doesn’t mention, that is an understanding by those ‘mass populations’ of the way current society, capitalism, operates and the need to change that by mass political action, democratically and ideally via the ballot box, to create a moneyless, wageless, stateless society, a society of the ‘inter-group co-operation’ the book advocates. That will truly be ‘world consciousness’ and, no matter what the author of this book, which is well-meaning and for the most part entirely admirable, would like to happen, it cannot come through some kind of moral agreement by some global body within the current system.

Howard Moss

A Search for Truth (2024)

Book Review from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alfred Reynolds / Reinhold Alfred. By Richard Headicar. 2023. ISBN 978-1-3999-6772-3

Alfred Reynolds was a philosopher and poet from Hungary who fled to Britain in 1937 after being arrested for allegedly subversive political activities. A Social Democrat and former ‘Communist’ who was at one point accused of Trotskyism there, he was a radical who was a long-term critic of totalitarian political formations, both Fascist and Leninist.

Because of his linguistic abilities he worked as an interpreter for a time in Britain including for German prisoners of war at the Kempton Park prison camp, before creating a de-Nazification programme that he pioneered at Slemdal Prison Camp in Norway. He received recognition and support from the Labour MP Philip Noel-Baker and after a time with the International Refugee Council eventually became a middle-ranking UK civil servant in London, but it is not that for which he is perhaps most well-known.

After the war, Reynolds created a weekly discussion group that mirrored to some extent one that he had developed in Hungary and another, later, circle of Germans who had been influenced by his tutelage. It was called the ‘Bridge Circle’ and out of this emanated a monthly journal called the London Letter. This had a low circulation but an influence that was disproportionate to its size: over time Martin Buber, J.B. Priestley, TUC leader George Woodcock, Albert Schweitzer and Sir Herbert Read were all contributors. Jomo Kenyatta was another who orbited in this milieu, as was Colin Wilson who described Reynolds as ‘one of the most original minds of the modern world’.

Reynolds went on to found an English Language School in central London, but it is for the Bridge Circle and London Letter that he is probably best known. His philosophy counselled strongly against ‘group think’ and in favour of the search for ‘personal truth’ and arguably veered between liberalism and anarchism (with added influences from the saner writings of Nietzsche among others). In 1982 a number of Reynolds’s articles were published in a volume called Pilate’s Question. This title referred to the eternal conundrum of ‘what is truth?’, though Reynolds was a little frustrated that this was interpreted by some onlookers as being a possible religious tract when it was anything but.

Reynolds was for decades one of London’s characters and it was at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park that he met Richard Headicar in the 1950s, the author of this biography. Headicar was at the time an anti-nuclear speaker with anarchist leanings and who broadly supported CND. He became heavily influenced by Reynolds who converted from being his critic to mentor, and was a regular attender at the Bridge Circle (later carrying on a similar informal philosophy group in London, including after Reynolds’s death in 1993). Headicar writes:

‘Fittingly the last time I saw Alfred was at Speakers’ Corner. Coincidentally I was speaking for the SPGB of which he claimed he was once a member. I think he may have joined using another of his noms de plume. Spotting him in my crowd I was once more fleetingly visited by trepidation, wondering if he would be disappointed by my new affiliation. When I alighted from the platform he at once approached me, smiled, put his arm around my shoulder and said “Richard, that was pure Bridge”.’

The book is beautifully produced and includes many copies of letters, photos and other artefacts. It also details the more recent resurgence of interest in him in his home country of Hungary, including for his early work Alfred Reinhold’s First and Last Volume of Lyric Poetry. There is a useful chapter on Bridge philosophy too and its relationship with Marx, Nietzsche, the power of human consciousness, technology and creativity among other things. And while Reynolds was sceptical of the ‘group think’ of Marxism, he clearly recognised in the SPGB a more independent and critical spirit than is typical on the self-styled Left – as of course, did Richard Headicar himself, a Party member to this day.

Dave Perrin

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

World’s 5 Richest Men Have Added $14M to Their Wealth Every Hour Since 2020.

[tinyurl.com/bdh2vxyt]

Green capitalism is a con. Only Marxism can save the planet.

[tinyurl.com/mpdpwp54]

A member of the Chinese Communist Party is the second-largest foreign owner of US land, according to the Daily Caller. Billionaire Chen Tianqiao, founder, chairman and CEO of Shanda Group, owns around 200,000 acres of land in Oregon.

[tinyurl.com/2mztxehy]

…the Deng drive produced a de facto capitalist economy presided by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie: ‘As has been true of the histories of all capitalist economies, the power of the state was very much involved in establishing China’s labor market. Indeed, in China a highly repressive state apparatus played a particularly direct and coercive role in the commodification of labor, a process that has proceeded with a rapidity and on a scale that is historically unprecedented’.

[tinyurl.com/yc44v6sw]

Since gaining power five years ago, the civil-military-religious alliance headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, has waged two major wars against its citizens.

[tinyurl.com/43tkkrej]

Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, spoke… to extol the “outstanding” performance of the Israeli military in Gaza.

[tinyurl.com/yss442ke]

Some of the riches that these countries and companies seek include rare-earth metals and the isotope helium-3, which, while rare on Earth, is abundant on the moon and can theoretically be used to power nuclear fusion reactors.

[tinyurl.com/3j84pnu5]

It can be argued that Lenin only followed a pattern set by the Tsars, whose ruthlessness and autocratic rule had defined and despoiled Russia for centuries. Yet sitting in his seat at the British Museum, Lenin had fancied he could fashion a better, more peaceful, more equal Russia – only for the reality of exercising power in that vast country and his determination to force a reluctant population into line, whatever the cost, to turn him into a tsar in all but name and every bit as terrible as his predecessors.

[tinyurl.com/52b2sf7f]

Life expectancy for a Russian man is only 65. Mr Putin’s regime is trying to turn getting killed into an economically rational choice.

[tinyurl.com/49hfwte2]

In Pretoria… President Cyril Ramaphosa was seen warmly shaking the blood-soaked hand of Hemedti, a one-time leader of the Janjaweed, which holds the dubious distinction of carrying out the first genocide of the 21st century in Darfur.

[tinyurl.com/bdf87ucw]

Homeless rise sees young person become destitute every four minutes, research finds.

[tinyurl.com/nusjjuw3]

The specific piece of equipment, a plug door that broke off a Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft during Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 from Portland on Friday night, in fact illustrates many of the broader trends in the airline industry today: the desire to cram more passengers into finite space, the standardization of production across outsourced subcontractors, and the lack of oversight from federal regulators into these increasingly dangerous schemes.

[tinyurl.com/bhsjrwd2]

As MAGA devotion to Donald Trump grows within the evangelical community, once politically powerful religious leaders are losing sway over followers who have convinced themselves that Trump is the new savior.

[tinyurl.com/2p8xesnz]

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sun, 28 January, had American Christians seeking both to propagate creationism and coin a few dollars – more than a few as two million visitors a year at fifty quid a throw for adults were expected to visit a creationist museum in Kentucky which features a five-hundred-foot-plus model of an Ark based upon the ‘Noah and the flood’ fairy tale. A hundred million dollars to build allegedly. Sure they could have got some cheaper wood from somewhere. It doesn’t say whether that figure is inflation-adjusted from the time of the event which supposedly took place a few thousand years ago. In the real world it’s generally agreed that dinosaurs became extinct sixty- five million years ago. Inside there are models of dinosaurs because dinosaurs and humans apparently existed side by side.

If you can believe that someone in the sky was responsible for making the Universe and everything in it then you can believe any old twaddle.

#    #    #    #

Another American group of similar ilk aims to ‘open people to the gospel by revealing God in science’. ‘Do Extinctions in the Fossil Record Undermine Creation?’ (Reasons to Believe, 31 January). Guess what their ‘scientific’ conclusion is. They conclude, ‘It means that mass extinctions and mass originations were part of a divinely orchestrated natural history.’ It’s a heads I win, tails you lose sort of thing. Can’t argue with the ‘science’!

#    #    #    #

There’s a painting in a church in the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia, of Lenin being cast down into ‘hell’. A futile gesture but given its history under the Soviets it’s probably the equivalent of a traditional British ‘up yours’. Whatever makes you happy. Have the Georgians consigned Stalin to the same ‘fate’ or are they still proud of one of their own?

#    #    #    #

James Joyce’s 1916 novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, contains a sermon, delivered by a Catholic priest, on the subject of hellfire and damnation. It’s a powerful piece of writing and may have come from Joyce’s own experiences within the Catholic church. Is hellfire still a tool to keep the sheep under control? Perfectly normal to have depictions of the savage Roman method of execution, crucifixion, looming over them?

#    #    #    #

‘You couldn’t make it up’ news that a man in Iowa, USA, is facing criminal charges for beheading a statue. Where was it? In a Satanic Temple. Apparently, Satanism is designated an ‘official religion’ which makes the vandalism a ‘hate crime’.

#    #    #    #

‘Liberation Tarot seeks to serve as a tool for those inspired towards revolution in the face of the able-centered, capitalist, hetero-cis-normative, white-supremacist patriarchy. Tarot helps us rewrite the vocabulary of power, and with it, to strengthen our muscles of radical, revolutionary, and abolitionist dreaming. The deck eschews conventional tarot cards. Figures in the deck have bodies of all shapes and sizes, colors, genders, ages, and abilities—together, elaborating a vision of collective liberation and co-resistance.’ Whatever. Bargain at fifty dollars. Sarcasm redundant…

DC

Nordic socialism: is it a thing? (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Joining the Socialist Party is straightforward. You have to understand and accept the Party’s view of the system of society we live in – capitalism – and want to replace it with a different system of society – socialism. By capitalism we mean the current world system of producing goods and services for sale on the market and for profit rather than directly for use – something involving money and wages, buying and selling, a small number of humans owning most of the Earth’s resources and a vast majority of non-owners having to sell their energies for a wage or salary to survive. By socialism we mean the direct opposite of this. We mean a new world-wide system of producing goods and services cooperatively and democratically for use not profit, free access to all those goods and services and so no need for money or wages.

Socialist states? This should be pretty clear from even a cursory reading of any edition of the Socialist Standard or from looking at the wide range of information available on the Party’s website. Yet, among those interested enough to apply for membership, there are some who express the view that that there’s such a thing as ‘Nordic Socialism’, that somehow countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark or Finland, have a system of society that is different from other Western countries and that can be called ‘socialism’. This emerges in particular when applicants applying to join online fill in the website questionnaire, one of whose questions is ‘Has socialism been established in any part of the world?’. This is in no sense meant as a trick question but is simply a request for applicants to affirm that they understand that socialism is essentially a world system or it is nothing.

But what is the rationale some people find for considering the Nordic countries as somehow ‘socialist’? After all, if you’re prepared to apply to join an organisation which holds that socialism must be a world-wide system, then it should be clear that the idea of a socialist ‘country’ or ‘socialist countries’ is a contradiction in terms. Yet the ‘socialist’ label for the Nordic ‘bloc’ has clearly found a place in some people’s minds. So where does it come from?

Social democracy

Well, it isn’t that unusual to find references (confused in our view) to ‘Nordic socialism’ in both political discussion and in written sources, as a simple Google search will evidence. This arises, among some of those who put forward the idea and so contribute to its spread and acceptance, from the fact that the term ‘social democratic’, which is often used to describe Nordic societies and has connotations of benevolence, tolerance and progressiveness, is easily confused with ‘socialism’. It is true that, in terms of social development and organisation, the Nordic countries are more advanced than most. Their democratically elected governments have on the whole managed to run their market and buying and selling system more smoothly and with relatively less conflict than many other similar countries. They have managed to do this in a way that has produced profits for the class that monopolises the wealth – the capitalist class – while at the same time allowing that vast majority of workers who need to sell their energies for a wage or salary a somewhat more benign and less precarious existence than experienced elsewhere. Their relatively advanced systems of universal health care and social security reflect the need for a capitalist economy to have a relatively healthy workforce in order for the capitalist system in those countries to function as efficiently as it can.

Not that this removes in any substantial way the fundamental wealth inequality between the two classes in society – capitalists and workers -, nor indeed does it eliminate the usual ills of capitalism – poverty, unemployment, crime, nationalism (eg, current United Nations figures show one in 10 children living in poverty in Finland). But it does create a social situation that generally appears more stable and less volatile than in other advanced Western capitalist countries. Having said that, of course, in no shape or form can it be called socialism. More correctly, as someone has written, ‘the misinterpretation of the Nordic model as socialist stems from a superficial analysis of its welfare policies’ and what, in the words of another commentator, we have in reality is ‘a blend of free-market capitalism and an extensive welfare state’.

Socialism anywhere?

So if, to the question on the online joining page ‘Has socialism been established anywhere in the world?’, someone wishing to join the Socialist Party answers along the lines of ‘Yes, in the Nordic countries’, we would want to discuss that with the applicant and ask them to have a rethink in the context of what we mean by socialism. We would also want to emphasise, in order to avoid any possible misunderstanding, that we would be equally averse to the label of ‘socialism’ being applied to states of any kind, including those state capitalist dictatorships, such as Cuba, China, Vietnam or North Korea, which only too readily give themselves that name.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: Two questions answered (2024)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

An enquirer from Vietnam has asked us (and others) a couple of questions on Marxian economics. Here they are with our reply.

1. Does the commodity value come mainly from demand, market evaluation and utility, not from labor? (explain labor theory of value v/s marginal value theorem)

A commodity (as a product of labour produced to be sold) does have to be useful to sell but its price is not related to its usefulness. Water, for instance, is more useful than gold but this is not reflected in their respective price. Nor could a commodity’s price be determined solely by the paying demand for it as supply conditions have also to be taken into account. A stable price for a commodity arises when supply and demand are equal, as Marginalist theory notes, but this tells us nothing about what that price will be. For this we need to look at what it costs to produce the commodity.

No capitalist enterprise is going to produce something to sell unless it recovers the commodity’s money cost of production plus a mark-up for profit. The cost of production to a capitalist enterprise is the labour embodied in the materials and machines the enterprise has to buy to produce it and the wages paid to those working at the final stage of its production. These wages, however, represent less labour than the labour the workers add through their work. The part of the added labour that is not paid for – the surplus value – is the source of the capitalist enterprise’s profit.

So, a commodity’s value, reflected in its price, does depend on labour. It is not quite as direct as that, though, as a commodity’s market price will not normally be an exact reflection of its value due to the averaging of the rate of profit (see the answer below to your second question) but it is still related to the labour required to produce it. Gold is more valuable than water because it needs more labour to produce it.

2. Do employers, business owners, corporation boss… (capitalist class) earn money and create profits from their efforts in marketing and managing their companies… (choose market output with great needs), from the difference in value and price of goods (increased due to consumer demand after being marketed by the boss). Therefore, the capitalist class gets rich on its own merit, not through the exploitation of surplus value by the working class (workers) and the workers’ wages are fair for their labor.

No, the source of profits is surplus value created by workers, not necessarily by the workers that a particular capitalist enterprise employs but from that created by the working class as a whole. Capitalist enterprises compete to obtain a share of this in the form of profits on the capital they have invested. Competition has brought about a situation where each capital ends up tending to make the same rate of profit through capital having moved from less profitable to more profitable fields of activity.

Some capitalist enterprises can make more profits than others depending on how astute they are in anticipating trends, cutting costs and marketing their products. To this extent, the actual profits a particular enterprise makes can reflect the knowledge and experience of its managers (these days capitalists themselves don’t normally manage their business themselves) but the source remains surplus value created by the working class. The managers can justly claim that their skills have brought in more profits, but the skill is in capturing a share of surplus value not creating it. The capitalist class as a whole does not get rich from this; in fact could not as there are losers as well as winners — some individual capitalist enterprises get more in this way but at the expense of others.

Compulsion (2024)

Book Review from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. By Søren Mau. University of Southern Denmark. 2019

Mau was interviewed by Jacobin in February 2023. In it he confirms the summary of his argument in the introduction to the interview, headlined ‘Capitalism Makes Everyone Bend to Its Will, Rich and Poor Alike’:

‘In his new book Mute Compulsion, Søren Mau argues that to understand and end capitalism, we need to analyze how it not only subordinates the poor to the rich but in fact exerts economic power over everyone — including capitalists themselves’ (tinyurl.com/et7m8vp8).

Mau argues that what maintains capitalist rule is not just physical force (threatened or actual) and ideology (brainwashing) but also ‘economic power’. He sees this as an impersonal form of power, an expression of the logic of capital that every market agent (not just workers but capitalists too) in capitalism is subjected to through the impersonal operation of market forces.

This of course is something we have long said and is in fact the basis of our case that capitalism cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the majority class of wage workers. Not only capitalist firms but governments too are subject to the ‘logic of capital’ enforced through market competition which dictates that priority must be given to profits and the conditions for profit-making. That reformist governments can’t escape this ‘mute compulsion’ has been confirmed time and time again.

Despite the jargon (it’s based on his PhD thesis) it’s actually quite a good read (tinyurl.com/6h2xw5y6).

Oh no, another vanguard (2024)

Journal Review from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first issue of The Communist, subtitled ‘Towards A Revolutionary Communist Party’ appeared on 24 January, the day Lenin died a hundred years ago.

A picture of Lenin appears on seven of its 16 pages. There are also articles by and about him. Trotsky gets only one mention and no picture. It is not clear on what basis they have calculated that they will do better calling themselves ‘communists’ with Lenin, hammer and sickle and the rest rather than posing as left-wing ‘socialist’ members of the Labour Party from which they were expelled – against their will – in 2021. Their paper used to be called Socialist Appeal.

Strange, because their origin is the part of the Militant Tendency that stayed in the Labour Party when the other part left and tried to steal our name but ended up being known as SPEW. Their late leader, Ted Grant, had always taught that Trotskyists should stay in the Labour Party until the revolution started as that’s where workers would, apparently, turn when they began to become more radical.

Maybe his successors feel that ‘the revolution’ is imminent. Some of the articles and headlines suggest that they might.

We are told:

‘It is becoming increasingly clear that capitalism has reached its limits … the deepening crisis of world capitalism …Under capitalism we are heading for disaster.’

‘Capitalism is in a profound crisis. Millions of workers and young people are drawing revolutionary conclusions, and are looking to the ideas of communism.’

Millions?! Nobody else seems to have noticed this and they themselves claim only 1,100 members.

The editorial ends:

‘We need a fighting communist leadership in the working class. That is what we are building.’

No thanks. The working class needs that as much as a hole in the head.

Action Replay: Hitting the spot (2024)

The Action Replay column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Darts received a great deal of publicity recently when 16-year old Luke Littler came second in the world championships, something hard to imagine in other sports. But, as always, there is a lot more to be said about the background to this.

Officially it is the Paddy Power World Darts Championship, and it’s held in front of a loud boozy crowd at Alexandra Palace. It is run by the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC), a name which certainly makes clear its status as a capitalist business. The PDC emerged back in the 1990s after a dispute between a number of professional players and the British Darts Organisation. Its chair is Eddie Hearn, who also chairs Matchroom Sport, which in addition promotes golf and table tennis, among others. Mind you, there’s also a separate world championship run by the World Darts Federation.

There may be around fifty full-time professional darts players, who can make substantial earnings via prize winnings, exhibitions and sponsorship; Littler received £200,000 for second-place in the PDC championship. But many would-be professionals really struggle to make ends meet. Owen Slot (Times 23 December) spoke to a number of players at the PDC championships. One was a plumber: he ‘fixed a burst pipe and repaired a kitchen sink in the morning, then won his match in the evening’. If you’re well down the pecking order, say the world number 100, you might earn £25,000 over two years, so it’s hardly surprising that many keep their day job as well as trying to make it in darts. One man decided to return to Australia after losing in the second round, as he just could not pay the bills.

Quite apart from the meagre returns to most, darts involves a great deal of stress, with each game being a one-to-one contest, requiring masses of concentration and mental strength. No wonder so many fail to make it. As Slot says, ‘you only need to fall slightly off the edge to find yourself tumbling back to your job’.

So the darts world is almost as insecure as employment generally under capitalism.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: Tory and Labourite agree (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Simpletons in the Labour Party who take at its face value what the Party says about the Tories and about itself will expect the outcome to be, on the Tory side, a publicity campaign to prove that capitalism is really quite all right as it is, and, on the Labour side, a promise to end capitalism. Barbara Castle tried to comply a few months ago by asserting that Labour was the only party “committed to remove capitalism” (Times, 3rd July 1973). But the reality is quite different, as will be seen from two speeches by party leaders published in The Times and the Financial Times on 2nd February. One speech (Times) was by the Tory, Mr. Peter Walker, Secretary for Trade and Industry. The other (Financial Times) was by Mr. Edward Short, deputy leader of the Labour Party.

The interesting thing about the speeches is that most of Walker’s speech could have been put over by Short, and vice versa. The speeches have a common theme — a promise to keep capitalism but to give it a facelift. First the Tory:

“A transformation of the capitalist system in the next 25 years was forecast yesterday by Mr. Peter Walker. Secretary for Trade and Industry . . . He said that in Western Europe a big part of the system consisted of free enterprise and private capital. A dramatic period of change was beginning. In Britain, the government had done much already to transform the basis of capitalism, yet it had passed almost unnoticed.”

Now the Labourite:

“He warned that the next Labour administration must arm itself ‘to act decisively’ when any company or industry fell short of what the national interest demanded and this would involve ‘a major change in the capitalist system’.”

The two had no disagreement about the method. “Much greater public control over industry would be necessary’’ (Short). “We are doing this . . . by the power of the State — a new kind of interventionism’’ (Walker).

Both indicated that there was no intention to end capitalism, but with subtle differences of emphasis. Walker intends to make capitalism “more responsible, more responsive, and therefore stronger”, while Short said that “the assertion of control would be partly by an extension of public ownership where it was absolutely necessary . . . and by planning agreements between the Government and some of the major companies”. Lest this should sound rather too drastic, Mr Short reassured his listeners by explaining that the latter means “a system which has been very successful in France”, and that “most industrialists [are] public-spirited people who would co-operate”.

[From the article, 'Tory and Labourite agree' by Edgar Hardcastle, Socialist Standard, February 1974]

SPGB March Events (2024)

Party News from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

SPGB contesting the Greater London Assembly elections (2024)

Party News from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is planning to contest two seats in the elections to the Greater London Assembly on 2 May – Camden & Barnet and Lambeth & Southwark. Together, they have an electorate of over 870,000.

The campaign – leafleting. hustings, etc – will be in April. Offers of help to spgb@worldsocialism.org or London Branch, Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 UN

George Galloway’s ‘Workers Party’ (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rochdale by-election on 29 February was prompted by the death of the previous Member of Parliament for that constituency. From 1972 onwards the seat had a mix of Liberal and Labour MPs. Labour no doubt expected an easy win there, which they may have achieved under pressure, even though a previous Labour MP, expelled from that party and then representing Rochdale as an Independent was standing for the Reform party. Their slogan is ‘Let’s Make Britain Great’, an obvious nod to Trumpism.

Also standing was George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain (WPB), formed in 2019 by himself. Their slogan is ‘Building a New Working Class Politics in Britain’. Galloway was a Labour Party member for thirty-six years, and while presenting himself as radically left he is essentially a Fabian.

We write this before the result of the by-election is known but the odds on Galloway winning did shorten a little after the official Labour Party candidate got himself into trouble with his own party for remarks he made.

Based on media coverage it did appear that Galloway was concentrating on canvassing support based upon his long-standing support for the Palestinian cause and his complete antagonism toward Zionism.

The WPB Manifesto says:

‘The Workers Party of Britain is a socialist party but we are not Utopian, nor are we bound by abstruse theory. We have a common-sense analysis and a practical mission. The Workers Party is committed to the redistribution of wealth and power in favour of working people’.

Not the abolition of capitalism, note, but change within capitalism.

Their Manifesto goes on to list ‘some things we can do immediately’.

‘We will immediately increase the personal tax threshold for the poorest paid, removing tax entirely from the first £21,200 of wages for two million low-paid workers, and at the same time we commit to a one-off wealth tax on all estates valued fairly at over £10 million to make a start on redressing the colossal gap between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population.’

Yup, truly revolutionary. Amongst other irrelevances to the working class:

‘Rebuild British industry… to provide useful secure jobs for all…’

‘We support campaigning to preserve the right to use cash.’

‘We will ensure working-class representation throughout the governance of the Bank of England.’

So much for the claim to be ‘a socialist party’ and the commitment ‘to offer a long-term and well-organised socialist alternative to the corrupt Labour Party…’

Despite all the firebrand rhetoric Galloway just wants to reform capitalism, which is no doubt trembling in its boots at the thought of him being a Member of Parliament.

Dave Coggan

Blogger's Update:

Galloway did indeed win last night's bye-election. 

Editorial: The coming change of office-holders (2024)

Editorial from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

For those who follow what is called ‘politics’ — what goes on at Westminster — times must be interesting. The Labour leaders are expecting to become ministers before the end of the year. The Tories seem to be in meltdown. The SNP are in difficulty. The Brexit Party is reviving as Reform UK. Pro-Palestine Muslims are planning to stand candidates to take votes from Labour. Who will win or lose and where?

This is not real politics. Real politics is the perpetual conflict between the state-backed wealthy class who own and control the means of living and the majority working class who don’t. Westminster politics is a side-show about which individuals and groups of individuals get elected to parliament to run the central administrative structure of capitalism, though you wouldn’t think it was just this from the extravagant claims made about how they can also control the way the capitalist economy operates.

Both in theory and in practice, governments cannot do this. Capitalism can only work in one way: as a profit-making system in which the aim of production is to make a profit, an aim enforced on both enterprises and governments through unpredictable and uncontrollable market forces which they can do nothing about except comply with.

Westminster politics is just about individual politicians successfully climbing the greasy pole, or sliding down again, and about which group of careerists gets the juicy government jobs.

Parties have to convince people to vote for them. As part of the game, they make various promises about how they will manage the capitalist economy.

But this economy moves through continuous cycles of expansion and stagnation or contraction. If a party happens to be in office during a period of expansion it claims that this was due its policies or its competence at managing the economy. If, on the hand, it happens to be in office during a period of stagnation or contraction it claims to have been ‘blown off course’ and the opposition party blames the situation on the mistaken policies and incompetence of the governing party.

This latter is the position today with the opposition Labour Party banging on about ‘14 years of Tory misrule’. The Tories have indeed shown an obvious degree of incompetence (from a capitalist point of view) but this is not the reason why real living standards have stagnated over the period. Even if they had displayed competence this would still have happened.

It’s not the Tories that are the problem. It’s capitalism itself. And it is certainly not Labour that’s the solution — their plan to make capitalism work as they promise is destined to fail too. What is required is not a change of office-holders but a complete change of society from one based on class ownership and production for profit to one based on common ownership and production directly to meet people’s needs, from capitalism to socialism.