Another Australian ghost town (1965)

From the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Geoffrey Blainey briefly traces out the history till 1959 of the lead, silver and copper mines of Mount Isa in his book, Mines of the Spinifex. These are located in the north west of tropical Queensland. Blainey outlines the incredible number and forms of hazards that had to be faced and subdued before the mines could be opened and operated. Among these were swarms of flies, red choking dust, persistent high temperatures, scurvy, malaria and thirst. Also, hostile Aborigines, apparently fearing for their own tribal future, never hesitated to spear or club to death all surveyors and prospectors they could. Isolation, and therefore transportation, was and still is a large factor in end costs. Westwards from Townsville, its nearest port, Mount Isa lies 600 miles across plains of red dust and prickly spinifex.

Yet so promising were the chances of fortunes to be made from mining in this savage, desolate waste land that investors Australian, English, Russian and now predominately American were persuaded to advance capital to develop the mines and reduce the environment to conditions of European habitation and modern industry. Dams were built large enough to impound tropical rains and supply the needs of both town and mines for years ahead. Even the dread of medical isolation was removed with the advent of the John Flynn Flying Doctor Service. 

Capital, superb as it is in solving these massive problems of nature, must always falter and fail when confronting social problems peculiarly of its own creation. Indeed, as wild nature is tamed, in like proportion there emerges the destructive force of the class war which is an impediment to wealth production just as much as wild nature. That wary London publication. The Economist of July 9th, 1927 (writes Blainey) “prophetically warned investors that (a) metal prices could easily fall and that (b) labour conditions in Australia were onerous and (c) that the cost of equipping the mine could far outstrip the estimates,” (Mount Isa paid outfits first net profits in 1936-37 — after 13 years of sporadic operations). “It admitted that Mount Isa might become great.” Mount Isa became the largest single industry in the State, employing over four thousand workers and each week paying out £100,000 wages and "earning” over one million pounds revenue.

Commodity prices, (rising or falling), and labour problems: how these two factors have repeatedly flawed and fractured the apparently smooth and polished surface of modern society everywhere.

The first Mount Isa strike was in protest over the high price of beer. The next, 1933, closed down the mine for months. Prophetically, the miners would not return to work unless two of their sacked mates were re-employed. The prophesy of the Economist re-appears and rapidly assumes a more substantial form from December, 1963 onwards.

It was then that, theoretically, the present Mount Isa dispute began, when the Australian Workers Union (A.W.U.) representing the Mount Isa miners lodged claims for £4 per week pay rise and improved conditions. In April 1964 these were refused on the legal quibble that the £4 per week was a bonus and not a wage claim. To the mineowners, either way, the claim clearly represented an encroachment on their profit. And this is something the investors seek to avoid, even if straining of legal subtleties and cynical evasions do insult the intelligence of the workers. After another four months of apparent deliberations, in August 1964 the miners decided to ban contract labour and to revert to day wages, and to stay this way until their claims were granted. This continued for four more months, during which time the weekly wage was less than half contract rates and mine production had fallen steeply.

This was a period of fermentation. The employers declared that the contract ban by miners was a strike. Branch unions defied parent bodies. Local labour leaders emerged, more representative and knowledgeable of local affairs and tempers. Then the combustible element of victimisation was cast into this tropical furnace of class war. The popular and able leader of the contract banning miners, Pat Mackie, was sacked by the company for attending union affairs during working hours Mackie’s objection to dismissal was legally over-ruled. A few days later he was expelled by the A.W.U. (This seems to be always the weakness of the One Big Union ideal—the parent body upon formation begins again to disintegrate into hostile local factions, at odds both among themselves and against the central union authority. At Mount Isa this became very much in evidence.)

On December 10th the Queensland Government declared the area to be under Emergency Regulations and moved in extra policemen. The Mount Isa miners were ordered to resume contract work and the penalties for refusing can be One Hundred Pounds fine or six months in jail or both; in addition daily penalties can be imposed. Thus, if refusal continues for 50 days, each miner who holds out could be jailed for 25 years, be fined five thousand pounds, or both.

All this, naturally, resulted in fanning the live coals of class war. There was a quickening of union activities. More meetings, more defiance and still more Emergency Regulations and conferences. Then on December 24th, the original legal quibble of April was suddenly set aside and a £3 increase was granted. By mid-January 1965, improved conditions and contract rates were also agreed upon.

Marx, in Capital Vol. 1, Chapter VI informs us that, as distinct from other commodities, “ . . . there enters into the determination of the value of labour power a historical and moral element." (See footnote) “Moral” considerations, so dear to the hearts of our masters, now proved to be the major hindrance to immediate settlement of the Mount Isa dispute when they revealed a leaning towards working class interests. The original dispute in the material and economic sense has ended. But others took its place. These were over the re-employment of Pat Mackie by the mining company and the company recognition of the Mount Isa T. & L. C. as a future negotiating body for Mount Isa employees. With both of these Union requests the company refused to comply. And so the dispute became a strike, on the issues of victimisation and union representation, with all their implications.

While these issues were still smouldering, the Queensland Government inflamed the entire Labour Movement of Australia by yet another Emergency Proclamation which transformed Queensland into a Police State. Meetings of protest were being organised all over Australia together with pledges of moral and financial support: indeed as noted by an Age leader:

The Queensland Government in its desperate effort to check the disastrous Mount Isa strike, seems to have injected more fuel into a highly inflammable situation, which now threatens to explode into a State-wide and perhaps a Nation-wide industrial upheaval.

Not entirely surprising was the news that all the Emergency Police powers had been suspended. Premier Nicklin contrary to his earlier declared purpose for invoking these powers (“gangsterism strong-arm tactics etc., among the miners") suddenly revoked them. However, these Regulations in practice and intent were still less savage than those put into operation by the Federal Labour Government during the 1949 strike which “ . . . included freezing of union funds to prevent sustenance payments to workers, the forbidding of credit to the strikers and the use of troops to mine coal and transport it." (Herald 10.2.65)

Through February the miners firmly continued the strike, while the mining company and Arbitration Commission issue orders and counter order on the closing or non-closing down of the mine. Meanwhile hundreds of miners and their families, each week, moved outwards from this strike-bound and blighted Central Queensland Township, seeking employment elsewhere. From the other side of the world came this clear comprehending and candid appraisal of Australian affairs:

The strike is more than a local labour dispute. It is contributing to a sharp rise in world copper prices which had been falling this month.

It is infecting the whole of the Australian labour relations. The elements of legal compulsion that once seemed to be such an admirable feature of the Australian arbitration system has not been able to cope with the refactory labour force in a low-wage area like Queensland at a time of generally full employment, (The Times 10.2.65.).

Finally, Prime Minister Menzies, returning from overseas, said “ . . . its terrible that the Mount Isa works could be snuffed out by a curious character, (Pat Mackie, who by the way volunteered to withdraw from Mount Isa once the Miners’ pay and other demands were settled), who is not even an Australian.” Just how irrelevant can a person be? As though the nationality of the victimisation issue is of importance, any more than is the issue as to whether these mines are owned and controlled by Australian or “Foreign’’ capital.

Mr. Calwell, leader of the Aus. L.P., on this point declares: “What is needed above all in this Mount Isa situation is compassion for the people of Mount Isa, compassion for the families of the miners and of the shop-keepers, compassion for the men (i.e. the international investigators), who have planned great schemes of expansion only to see them frustrated . . . The dignity of the Labour movement is expressed when it takes full responsibility for everything it does.” (Age 23.2.65.)

Yet only four days earlier he supported the use of Australian troops in Borneo, indicating thereby a direct denial of compassion for “ the people, the families of peasants and soldiers, shopkeepers etc.,” on both sides who suffer the horrors of S.E. Asia warfare. Both the open class war of Mount Isa and the war in the jungles of Asia are but two warring aspects with a common origin.

Where now is the dignity of the Australian Labour Movement?

Peter Furey.

George Brown in Cloud Cuckoo Land (1965)

From the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. George Brown, Minister of Economic Affairs, is convinced that there are such things as “fair" and prices, and has got the employers’ and employees’ organisations to agree to attempt to regulate prices and incomes. He knows “his people” so well to be sure that when the instructions get to the individual worker and capitalist they will make them work.

Briefly, the Prices and Incomes Policy is to regulate the growth of all incomes at the rate of three and a half per cent per year, whilst keeping prices stable. George Brown hopes that public opinion will influence capitalists to keep prices down when they could put them up, and that it will restrain workers’ wage demands.

This policy will fail for exactly the same reason as “free” enterprise regulated by the price system. Brown seems to forget that capitalism is a competitive class society and that the economic forces acting upon capitalists and workers are stronger than all the moral suasions and judgements. In fact already there are many claims by sections of the working class aiming to get on to a “platform of equality” with other workers, e.g. doctors, teachers, farmers, before the growth rate commences. Further, there are many workers, some recognised by George Brown as being lowly paid, who will have to press for increases considerably greater than three and a half per cent.

The big laugh is that if by some fluke George Brown were to succeed and peg wage growth rates at three and a half per cent, we may all be like Alice—running faster and faster to stay in the same place. There is not much point in having three and a half per cent increase in wages if you have to pay three and a half per cent more for the things that you require to get the health and strength to increase your productivity by at least three and a half per cent.

But then who are we to laugh at George? We can’t solve his problem either. In fact, within capitalism the problem is not soluble. If we widen our terms of reference however, the whole aspect takes a rosy, instead of blue, hue. The world has enough resources to satisfy the needs of man—we have the population capable of exploiting those resources, of producing the goods where man needs them—only capitalism, with its production for profit, stands in the way.

Rachman, Bloom, Ferranti are a natural part of capitalism. George Brown cannot change a society in which the hall mark, and professed route to efficiency, is competition, into one wherein co-operation prevails, without changing the economic basis of society; and we can rest assured that he cannot do that.

Ken Knight

50 Years Ago: Origin of the idea of justice (1965)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Locke, who, like the philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, used the deductive method employed in geometry, came to think that private property engendered the idea of justice. In his “Human Understanding” he expressly says that “Where there is no property there is no injustice, is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to anything, and the idea to which the name injustice is given being the invasion or violation of that right . . .”

If the idea of Justice, as Locke thought, can only appear after and as a consequence of private property, the idea of theft, or rather the tendency to take unthinkingly what one needs or desires, is on the contrary, well developed, before the institution of private property. The communistic savage and barbarian behave in regard to material goods as our savants and writers do in regard to intellectual goods: whenever they find them they take them, to use Molière’s expression. But this natural custom becomes theft, crime, from the time when common property is replaced by private property.

Into the head and heart of savages and barbarians common property put ideas and sentiments which bourgeois Christians, those sad results of private property, will find very strange.

Heckwelder, a Moravian missionary who in the 18th century lived fifteen years among North American savages, not yet corrupted by Christianity and bourgeois civilisation, said:

“The Indians believe that the Great Spirit created the world and all that it contains for the common good of men; when he stocked the earth and filled the woods with game, it was not for the advantage of some, but of all. Everything is given in common to the children of men. Everything that breathes on the earth, everything that grows in the fields, everything that lives in the rivers and waters, belongs jointly to all, and everyone has a right to his share."

[From a lecture by Paul Lafargue on Idealism and Materialism, Socialist Standard, May 1915.]

SPGB Meetings (1965)

Party News from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

Sam Orner and Len Fenton were both longstanding members of the World Socialist Party of the United States, who were obviously paying a fraternal visit to the comrades in Britain. For more background on them both, their obituaries give some flavour of their contribution to the cause:

• Sam Orner (October 1973 Socialist Standard)
• Len Fenton (World Socialist Review #21)

Manchester (1965)

Party News from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Meeting has been arranged at Chorlton Town Hall  (Committee Room), Cavendish Street, All Saints, Manchester, 15, on Sunday, 9th May, 2 pm.—4.30 p.m. 

Central Branch members and sympathisers are invited to attend. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss ways and means of improving Socialist propaganda in the North West, particularly in and around the Manchester area, and the possibility of holding public meetings with the help of Party speakers and the co-operation of the Party Propaganda Committee.

It is appreciated that the date and time of the meeting will not be convenient to everybody, but the arrangement of the meeting has been rather difficult because of the shortage of suitable halls in Manchester. It is however, hoped that all those interested will do their utmost to attend and make the meeting a success.

Any further enquiries should be made to the Manchester Group Secretary, 4 St. Martins Road, Ashton-on-Mersey, Sale. Cheshire, (Phone: Pyramid 2404).

Life and Times: Follow the money (2025)

The Life and Times column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent BBC investigative programme (File on Four) focused on the financial crisis in British universities, revealing how most of them are urgently trying to make savings by cutting staff numbers and courses on offer. It showed how one of the underlying factors is the falling numbers of students from abroad who pay higher fees than domestic students and on whom many universities have become reliant. The result, so the programme disclosed, was desperate attempts by some institutions to recruit overseas students, even to the extent of overlooking poor qualifications or poor knowledge of English, which may lead to cheating in exams and other assessment exercises and which is then also often overlooked.

The customer is right

But, as I frequently hear from friends in my own local university, the reverberations of the funding problems are more wide-ranging and are causing considerable stress and insecurity to those employed there. One of the greatest concerns for academic employees, apart from the ever-present risk of being pressured into ‘voluntary’ severance or simply declared redundant, stems from the fact that the customer (ie the student) is now very much ‘in charge’. Gone are the days when universities were largely funded by government and regarded by most as places of ‘higher learning’ which didn’t need to be too concerned about where the money was coming from. Gone are the days when students, apart from not being charged for the tuition they received, received local authority grants to cover their living expenses. And gone too are the days when students would look up to their lecturers and see university education as a bonus that would serve them in all manner of useful ways in the years to come. Now that governments no longer fund universities to any significant degree and students have to pay for both living expenses and tuition out of their own (or their parents’) pockets, the tables are well and truly turned.

The anxiety of universities to attract students and then keep them happy when they get there has meant that the students now largely regard their lecturers as servants and are ready to complain and demand redress when things (even small things) don’t go entirely to plan for them – for example if they don’t feel sufficiently well instructed (or even ‘entertained’) by a lecturer or are given lower exam marks than they hoped for or expected. And such complaints are taken deadly seriously by the university authorities themselves with lecturers required to explain themselves and a student’s dissatisfaction not infrequently resulting in a rap over the knuckles for their lecturer or even a formal disciplinary process. And the students’ assessment of their lecturers’ ‘performance’ and the ‘scores’ they are asked to give to them at the end of each module will feed into the university’s decision about whether, for example, a lecturer passes probation, is promoted, or is made redundant if reductions in staff costs are deemed necessary. And though campus trade unions rail against this, they are, so I’m told, rarely successful in achieving any relaxation of these policies or reversal or mitigation of penalties imposed on individual union members who go to them for help.

Obedient zombies

The other thing my university friends tell me is that those who manage to negotiate the hurdles and achieve promotion to higher posts are then required to administer the above processes. In other words, they are required to put the fear of god into their ‘lower level’ colleagues. And just like most others detailed to do ‘the dirty work’ in the repressive regime that employment represents, they usually agree to it and so accept the role of (as one of my University friends puts it) ‘obedient zombie’, even if some at least carry out the tasks required of them with some reluctance but maybe justifying it to themselves on the grounds that they are somehow acting in everyone’s collective interest.

The student-as-paying-customer model that now prevails is also backed up by government policy whereby anyone dissatisfied with the service they have received from their university has the choice of two different bodies they can complain to – either the Office for Students or the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. They can claim redress either in the form of changes to their grades or financial compensation from their University. But, over and above this, universities run scared that such complaints, if upheld, may be made public and so risk damaging their reputation and discouraging future students from applying, which would adversely affect their already precarious financial position. This of course increases the pressure put upon staff and departments within the university to make sure that, if complaints are made to them by students, ‘satisfaction’ is given, so that such complaints do not risk being taken outside the University with the possible consequences of that. Hence the prevailing mentality of ‘the student is always right’.

Money, money, money

What does all this mean for university staff in the current system? It means, for one thing, long hours to fill in for the work of staff who have left via ‘voluntary’ severance or redundancy. It means that other aspects of their work, in particular their research, that they may have been hoping would give them satisfaction and inspiration and increase the sum of human knowledge in their discipline takes second place to something that may seem to have become a meaningless and alienating grind. And it means more stress and insecurity of not knowing if their job will be safe come the next money-saving operation – whichever euphemism is used for it (take your pick between ‘reorganisation’, ‘review’, ‘restructuring’, ‘redesign’, or anything else). The undeniable reality is that the system we live in, in employment and much else, dictates that money shall be the ultimate arbiter. In extreme cases it may decide whether people live or die. In others – and this applies to university employees – it will decide whether they feel relatively comfortable with their life on a day-to-day basis or whether they lead an anxious and insecure existence sweating on their employer’s judgement about whether there is enough money in the coffers to continue employing them.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Without distinction of race or sex (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the USA, Trump’s MAGA gang is ruthlessly savaging everything they don’t like, including climate science, Ivy League universities which they see as being hotbeds of radical leftism, and diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). Their DEI bête noire is what’s called ‘affirmative action’, which they take to mean promoting ethnic candidates over more talented white ones, in defiance of the principle of meritocracy.

This presupposes that a white-dominated ‘meritocracy’ is ever genuinely capable of being ‘colour blind’, in the sense that it doesn’t notice whether a person is white or black. Critical race theory, which the MAGA gang also loath, mocks this self-serving pretension and argues that disadvantaged groups will never get a fair shake unless a little positive discrimination is introduced into the mix. As things stand, the system will always promote whites over more talented ethnic candidates.

Logically speaking, discrimination is not in the interests of employers, if through their own prejudice they are reducing the pool of talent they can draw from. But prejudice is not logical. Moreover, economically disadvantaged whites may not see or admit that there is a racism problem in the first place. To them, any positive discrimination in favour of other disadvantaged groups, together with talk of ‘white privilege’, will seem like a wholesale liberal attack on their ‘rights’. Populists like Trump are experts in exploiting such concerns.

During the USA’s infamous Jim Crow era, segregation required race-defining laws to determine who was black and who was white. The concept of ‘race’ has no scientific basis, so the laws were inevitably arbitrary, leaving some white-appearing people designated black, and vice versa. This legal nonsense imposed an artificial binary categorisation on what in reality is a spectrum, in order to enforce an iniquitous social oppression.

Constitutional lawyers teach that ‘parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman’. In its judgement last month the UK Supreme Court seemed to agree but they were making a purely legal ruling. They were not seeking to reflect the scientific view which is much more nuanced.

‘Most traits ascribed to males and females fall along a spectrum that has two peaks. One is the average for females. The other is the average for males […] But almost nobody fits in the peak for their sex on all of those measures.’.

As molecular evolutionary biologist Nathan Lents puts it, ‘How we define sex really depends on what we’re talking about. We want this to be a nice, neat, two-bucket category system where there’s no grey area, but unfortunately biology doesn’t traffic in binaries very often’. He describes a huge range of sex-related cardiovascular functions, hormone levels, blood, liver and brain conditions and disease dispositions, which don’t necessarily correspond to the external visible anatomy, or what’s called the phenotype. ‘While it’s very understandable to want to collapse all of this diversity into very simple categories, it really misses a lot of important biology. Life is complicated, life is messy, life is multi-dimensional’ .

He goes on: ‘We have anatomy all throughout our body that shows sex differences, but those differences are overlapping, and the variation within the sexes is larger than the difference between them’.

He concludes: ‘We’ve invented categories such as male and female, we invented these words, we invented these labels and we created the definitions, which means that they’re not necessarily a biological reality’.

For instance, women typically have two X chromosomes, and men have an X and a Y chromosome. But this is far from being universal. Around 1.7 percent of babies are born as ‘intersex’ or as having ‘differences of sexual development’ (DSDs), meaning they have traits of both sexes. This is about the same proportion as those who have red hair, or globally, around 110 million people. 1 in 650 newborns assigned male at birth have two or more X chromosomes and one Y (Klinefelter syndrome). 1 in 1000 newborns assigned female have just one X chromosome (Trisomy). In some cases, the SRY gene, important for male sex development, jumps out of the Y chromosome and bonds to an X instead. In others, X and Y have genes which prevent bodies from responding to testosterone and other male sex hormones (androgens), so that their bodies develop as female while having testes inside their abdomens.

Stigma surrounding such conditions often led to surgery at birth that was kept secret by the child’s parents, leading to severe mental health problems for the child later in life, in particular gender dysphoria, in which the person’s perceived gender does not align with their assigned sex.

Some of us may have mismatched sexual traits and not even know about it. In 2014, a 70-year-old father of four seeking treatment for a ‘hernia’ turned out to have a uterus with fallopian tubes (youtu.be/kT0HJkr1jj4).

The Supreme Court ruling is likely to have heartrending repercussions for transgender women, and will no doubt be contested. It’s a political ruling that will allow one large oppressed group to feel a measure of protection at the cost of another, far smaller one. But it is not based on science, which has nothing to say on wider questions about sports or hospital beds or prisons. And it allows politicians to ‘dodge responsibility over one of the most contentious and toxic debates of our age’.

In socialism, ‘legal’ definitions will be irrelevant. Equality doesn’t mean we all have to look or be the same. What it does mean is that we will cooperate, practically, ethically, and creatively, to build a post-capitalist society of common ownership for the emancipation of the whole of humanity, in the words of clause 4 of our Declaration of Principles, ‘without distinction of race or sex’.

Paddy Shannon

Just Stop Oil: the failure of a tactic (2025)

From the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just Stop Oil was set up at the beginning of 2022 as an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion (XR) which had been launched four years earlier. The disagreement was over tactics not strategy. Both were committed to the strategy of getting 3.5 percent of the population to engage in non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience, the minority considered sufficient to spark off a popular movement to topple a government and impose a new policy. This figure was based on calculations by Erica Chenoweth, an American academic.

XR say on their website that they are committed to:‘mobilising 3.5% of the population to achieve system change – using ideas such as “momentum-driven organising” to achieve this’.

At one time they had added: ‘The change needed is huge and yet achievable. No regime in the 20th century managed to stand against an uprising which had the active participation of up to 3.5% of the population (for Erica Chenoweth’s research, see bit.ly/3Gn0NoV)’.

Roger Hallam, the driving force behind JSO, has put it this way: ‘You can basically save the next generation with 2 per cent of the American population mobilised, engaged in an intense intra-relationship between high-level disruption and intense mobilisation’ (Times, 24 October 2022).

And in his book Common Sense in the 21st Century (subtitled Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown And Social Collapse) he writes:

‘We should not make the mistake of thinking “the people have to rise” in the sense of the majority of the population. We need a few to rise up and most of the rest of the population to be willing to “give it a go”.’

‘Momentum-driven organising’

The formal aim of XR was a non-violent rebellion to get a government that would adopt measures to achieve net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2025. Hallam, one of XR’s founders but more hard-headed and a more experienced agitator than the others, considered this too remote an aim to mobilise the 3.5 percent minority. In his view, the aim needed to be more concrete, but also one that was more immediately achievable. Initially, he chose ‘Insulate Britain’, to get the government to insulate every home in the country, as the immediate mobilising aim. Then at the beginning of 2022 he switched to stopping further drilling for oil in the North Sea.

His thinking was the opposite of the Trotskyists. They put forward demands that they know can’t be achieved under capitalism in the expectation that those they get to support the demand will, when the campaign fails, turn to them for leadership to overthrow the capitalist state. Hallam’s view was to put forward a demand that could be achieved and that, when it was, could be presented as a victory for the movement, giving it self-confidence to carry on struggling for more, and more ambitious, objectives, eventually the toppling of the government and its replacement by one seriously committed to reaching zero net carbon in a few years.

We don’t have to judge whose tactic — Hallam’s ‘momentum-driven organising’ or the Trotskyists’ ‘transitional demands’— is the less realistic since we reject the basic assumption of both self-appointed vanguards of a leadership manipulating followers. If there is going to be successful and lasting system change a majority must want and understand what it involves and actively take part in bringing it about.

Self-delusion

At the end of March Just Stop Oil announced that it was disbanding. The formal reason given for this was that its goal had been achieved. Oil had been Stopped. The current government had suspended giving further licences to drill for oil in the North Sea. Their website proclaims that ‘we have kept 4.4 billions of oil in the ground’ and that this was ‘one of the world’s most effective climate campaigns’ (juststopoil.org). This is just bombast and self-delusion.

The suspension of licences to drill in the North Sea had nothing to do with their campaign of disruptive civil disobedience. If anything, that was counter-productive as the stunts they pulled inconvenienced and annoyed people. It was in fact brought about through the ballot box when a new government, committed to suspending new drilling, was elected. That said, should the ‘economic headwinds’ prove too strong the government could easily reverse its position and may well.

In any event, JSO’s self-proclaimed ‘victory’ did not give the movement the momentum anticipated and so, from their own point of view, they failed. Their only achievement has been 15 of their members in prison under legislation brought in by the government to counter their actions. That includes Hallam himself who is serving four years, though he probably thinks that having martyrs is part of ‘momentum-driven organising’. That will prove to be a delusion too.

Their disbanding statement does, however, say that ‘nothing short of a revolution is going to protect us from the coming storms’. This is a change from previous statements whose language suggested that they would be satisfied with a change of government or of governance or even just of government policy. But what kind of revolution — minority-led or majority — and with what aim — a change in the basis of society from class ownership to common ownership or something less?

Adam Buick

Material World: Has capitalism become financialised? (2025)

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

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 triggered by the large-scale collapse of mortgage-backed securities in the United States was an important catalyst in promoting the view that capitalism has become ‘financialised’. Financial speculation has come to be seen not only as something increasingly autonomous with respect to the real economy (based on the production of commodities), but also as increasingly dominant in determining what happens in the latter.

The crisis was looked upon as being essentially a product of the short-sighted and irresponsible shenanigans of the financial community, aided by the New Financial Architecture (NFA) instituted in previous years and the radical financial deregulation this all entailed. In short, it was said to be the outcome of a steadily intensifying process of ‘financialisation’.

Fictitious capital

Financial speculation grew out of the traditional credit system centred on banking and became more prominent with the rise of the joint stock company. Financial securities initially took the form of stocks and bonds but in the last few decades have proliferated into a bewildering array of financial products. They are all examples of what Marx called ‘fictitious capital’, a future income stream converted into a notional lump sum. A share certificate, for instance, exists largely as a paper claim on future profits to be paid out in the form of dividends.

There is a difference between fictitious capital and an interest-bearing loan provided by a bank to an industrial capitalist to purchase means of production. In the latter case this money capital is incorporated or utilised within the process of the expanded reproduction of capital. The bank takes a cut in the form of interest payments from the increased value – or surplus value – generated at the point of production.

This is not the case with fictitious capital for the simple reason that this does not actually function as capital. That indeed is the reason why it is called fictitious capital. It is not implicated in the expanded reproduction of capital.

Because the stock market comprises a separate market for the circulation of fictitious capital this encourages the illusion that such capital is somehow independent of the real economy – or even that it constitutes ‘real capital besides the capital or claim to which they may give title’ (Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, ch.29. Penguin translation). Obviously, if fictitious capital was qualitatively identical to real capital and able to interact with the latter on equal terms, so to speak, it would then be able to generate real wealth – real profits – all by itself and would cease to be dependent on the real economy for any income it lays claim to.

But, of course, this cannot be the case for the reason so succinctly spelt out by Marx, namely that a capital cannot exist twice ‘once as the capital value of titles of ownership, the shares, and then again as the capital actually invested or to be invested in the enterprises in question’. The problem is that this is precisely what much recent commentary on the subject of crises would seem to imply.

If these ‘financialisation theorists’ are correct in what they say then this would suggest, as Stavros Mavroudeas has pointed out, that ‘financial profits are not a subdivision of surplus-value’ (and) ‘the theory of surplus-value is, at least, marginalised’ (and that) ‘consequently, profitability (…) loses its centrality and interest is autonomised from it’ (quoted in tinyurl.com/2rafv87w ).

Needless to say, if true this would have certain practical implications.

Are we debt peons?

It would seem to suggest, for instance, that more importance ought to be attached to the problem of so-called ‘secondary exploitation’ rather than the primary exploitation that occurs in the workplace (and manifests itself in the production of surplus value). In other words, according to this way of thinking, workers are to be looked upon more as debt peons than wage slaves and, consequently, more attention should be paid to measures such as keeping interest rates down, rent controls, improved trading standards and so on as a way of alleviating their situation.

It is quite true that many workers do indeed qualify as ‘debt peons’, burdened with a variety of debts such as student loans, personal loans, and mortgages. However, their status as debt peons is essentially a derivative one stemming from the economic precariousness they experience as wage workers. It is because of this that they fall into debt. They don’t become wage slaves in order to pay off their debts as debt peons. If anything, it is often the other way round.

In any event, the basic premise of the financialisation theorists is questionable. The illusion that financial gains can somehow become autonomous with respect to the real economy can only be sustained if you focus on the micro-level – the individual investor of fictitious capital.

If an investor sold their shares on the stock market then, of course, they might very well realise a capital gain and be able to purchase tangible goods – real wealth – with the money they received. Their fictitious capital would not have been implicated in the production of real wealth and yet would have resulted in an augmentation of the investor’s own real wealth.

However, if every other shareholder followed suit and simultaneously sought to dispose of their shares as well then the price of these shares would plummet to zero thereby demonstrating their essentially fictitious character. Of course, this hypothetical scenario is inherently absurd – after all, to sell your shares you need someone to buy them – but it does bring out the point that fictitious capital is not about value creation at all. It’s at least partly about speculation and this was spectacularly demonstrated in the case of the 2007-8 financial crisis when the fictitious value of certain financial securities simply evaporated.

Robin Cox

Small is … small

From the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

LETS, or local exchange trading systems, boil down to being localised barter clubs each of which has its own purely digital or recorded currency or credit system. Participants keep their own individual accounts which are, in effect, a register of the credits they earn or spend depending on the goods or services exchanged.

An important difference between this and a conventional money system is that we are not talking about a quid pro quo exchange being effected between participants. In some ways it resembles or aligns with a model of generalised reciprocity which lies at the heart of a socialist society but there are important differences as well.

Timebanks, unlike LETS schemes, do not have their own local currencies as a metric for keeping tabs on transactions. The only metric used is time spent in making a labour contribution. Moreover, and again unlike LETS schemes, the way in which labour time is evaluated is strictly egalitarian. Thus, one hour of labour performed will equal one ‘time credit’, regardless of the type of service performed.

By contrast, in the case of LETS schemes, there is some scope for negotiation over the price of the service or good offered in terms of the local currency (and hence, also, the possibility of a degree of transactional inequality). This makes such an arrangement somewhat closer in certain respects to a conventional market economy than is true of Timebanks.

Both LETS schemes and Timebanks are examples of highly circumscribed, or localised, ‘exchange rings;’ by their very nature they cannot be implemented on the large-scale society-wide basis. What that means, in the case of both LETS schemes and Timebanks, is that they will be rather restricted with regard to the range of activities individuals can engage with these arrangements.

Since they basically involve face-to-face interactions, this suggests that the forms of activities this might entail would be more along the lines of some form of personal service such as repairing someone’s car or computer or tidying up their garden. Obviously, you could not really operate a modern railway system or a power station on the basis of a LETS-type arrangement.

However, this is not to detract from the value of such arrangements as a means of coping within existing capitalist society. There are also certain benefits to be gained in terms of fostering a kind of outlook more conducive to a post-capitalist society. In these cases, the emphasis is very much on forging relationships with other individuals and building local communities. Thus, the underlying logic is radically different from that pertaining to market transactions which are quid pro quo by nature and socially atomising in their consequences.

Workers’ co-ops

Most of the advocates of so-called ‘market socialism’ have seen its basis as the state ownership of the means of production. However, that particular version needs to be distinguished from earlier versions, such as ‘Proudhonian socialism’ or ‘mutualism’, that go back to the 19th century and which have enjoyed somewhat of a revival following the collapse of Russian state capitalism

These versions envisage a role for the market in ‘socialism’ but emphasise, instead of state ownership, various kinds of worker-owned institutions – such as co-operatives and credit unions – as the instruments through which such a system of ‘market socialism’ would operate.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to see quite how they connect with the basic ideas of socialism as a post-capitalist society. The classical or Marxian concept of socialism derived from the observable fact that the process of production was becoming increasingly socialised. There is nothing that is produced today that does not involve, directly or indirectly, the labour inputs of countless numbers of workers right across the world. Hence socialism – at least as it was traditionally conceived – entailed bringing the pattern of ownership of society´s productive resources into line with the character of modern production itself.

In other words, social ownership of the means of production is the logical expression of the social character of production. But social (or common) ownership also, of course, logically entails the complete exclusion of buying and selling since the latter implies private, or sectional, ownership of these means.

It does not matter that the members of a co-operative, say, might own it in common amongst themselves (and hence, to the exclusion of everyone else). It is still a form of sectional ownership. The relationship of such a co-operative to the world around it is, essentially, a capitalist one since it has to purchase its inputs and sell its outputs – not to mention, generate profits in order to effectively compete as well as compensate its workforce in the form of wages. These are all, needless to say, the tell-tale indicators of a capitalist mode of production.

In effect, what the exponents of this form of ‘market socialism’ advocate is the continuation of private, or sectional, ownership of the means of production as far as the wider world is concerned — even if one might grant that, internally, the set-up pertaining to a co-operative, say, may well be a lot more equitable compared to a conventional business and that working for such an institution may likewise be a lot more congenial.

There is also the point to consider that the scope for co-operatives is quite limited in the context of the pattern of capital ownership within the larger capitalist society and may even diminish should the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few giant corporations become more pronounced than it already is.

Robin Cox

Nature (2025)

Book Review from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Nature of Nature. The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change. By Vandana Shiva. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2024. 162pp.

This is a wonderfully eloquent treatise on the human relationship with food and how that relationship is being disrupted by the despoiling of the earth and biosphere that is taking place and by the earth being treated as ‘raw material for industrial production’. In essence, it echoes the famous line from Rousseau: ‘You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’ It imparts with the utmost urgency messages such as ‘biodiversity erosion has now become an extinction emergency’ and ‘the climate crisis has become a climate emergency’, not simply stating them as unevidenced opinion but backing them up with research and evidence gathered over decades from the most well-informed scientific sources.

The author is particularly scathing about ‘agribusiness’ (also referred to as ‘the chemical and industrial food corporation’ and ‘the Poison Cartel’) and the alarming rate at which it is not only destroying biodiversity and the environment with its methods of cultivation and extraction but is now also, in response to criticism of its activities and consumer concern, pretending to ‘decarbonise’ its industrial food chain by what it falsely calls ‘regenerative agriculture’. Even its investment in meat (and dairy and egg) substitute products as a supposed replacement for intensively produced food is, she argues, a way of bamboozling consumers into thinking switching to such products (referred to here as ‘fake food’) somehow helps to lessen degradation of the biosphere and pressure on natural resources. Most of it, she claims, even when plant-based, is in fact just as ultra-processed, chemically and resource intensive and harmful to health as food produced and marketed through the conventional industrial food systems and just as, if not more, wasteful of the earth’s natural resources. The result, she states, is that it ‘ignores our relationship with nature’ and ‘reduces the bio-diverse, self-organised, living earth to raw material for the money machine’.

All of this of course means that the author is profoundly opposed to the so-called ‘deep green’ agenda of renewability, regarding it as no more than a sop to the growth mantra of industrialised production. She sees the complex infrastructure needed to set up, deal with and maintain ‘renewable’ activities and technologies as both continuing to rely on fossil fuels and involving at least as much savage exploitation of the earth‘s fragile resources, both biological and geological, as in ‘non-green’ methods of production. So she is intensely critical of apparent environmental champions such as George Monbiot, referring to him as one of ‘the messiahs of fake food’ for his claim that ‘lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’. Such a view she dismisses as ‘false at every level’, since ‘being energy, resource and capital intensive, the lab food and fake food economy is highly non-sustainable’. A ‘greenwashing operation’ pure and simple and a massive fraud is the way this book’s author sees all this – at best an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs. But, even worse, it is, she tells us ‘a fully fledged counterfeiting operation that aims to gain control over our diets by making food ever more dependent on the multinational companies that produce and patent it’.

All this constitutes a searing indictment of capitalist industrial production, even though the author does not once in this book use the word ‘capitalist’ or ‘capitalism’, preferring instead to use terms such as ‘maldevelopment’ or ‘the economy of greed’. This may be a deliberate choice on her part so as not to lay herself open to any accusation of political partisanship as opposed to following the evidence of facts and science. Nevertheless, it is still clear that she is describing what socialists call commodity production, i.e. the production of goods for sale on the market with a view to profit for the tiny minority class who own the means to produce them. And she does show that she knows of the existence of this class (she mentions ‘the 1%’ on several occasions), that they are ‘predatory’ and that their activity ‘places profits above nature and people’. Yet there is no evidence in her book to indicate that she is looking outside the framework of commodity production for a different way of doing things.

At the same time, she has ‘an alternative path’ to propose to the current system’s ‘chemically grown and highly processed’ methods of food production. This consists of methods of production that would be ‘ecological not industrial … conserving and regenerating the earth’s biodiversity’, and these would involve ‘following the ecological laws of the earth – the law of diversity and the law of return, shortening the distance between producers and consumers, deindustrialising and deglobalising food systems to reduce emissions and enhance health’, thus offering ‘solutions to the climate crisis, the extinction crisis and the hunger and health crises, because the health of the planet and our health are interconnected’. It must be said that this is nothing if not an admirable vision. The snag, however, is that the author seems to see it as achievable within the framework of the present system of buying and selling and production for profit – and this by means of social pressure and the goodwill and actions of governments. Unfortunately this ignores the reality that all governments of all kinds and stripes are servants of that system (i.e. the capitalist system) and their role is one of oversight and of attempting to make it run in the least worst way. They are not in the business of overthrowing it or regulating it for the common benefit – or indeed for anyone’s benefit other than that of the small minority who already monopolise the planet’s wealth.

The existing method of production and distribution, with its growth imperative and its commodification of everything, has, as this book so trenchantly informs us, seriously damaged and may well be on the way to completely destroying the natural environment. How can we prevent this going any further and reversing it? Not via tweaks to the way the current system works but by a democratic political movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people to cooperatively organise a leaderless, stateless society without governments, without markets, without buying and selling and with free access to all goods and services – a society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole biosphere, the whole environment of which we are a part – the real ‘economy of care’ that Vandana Shiva so passionately advocates for but offers no realistic path to.

Howard Moss

What’s the deal with Greenland? (2025)

From the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Six months ago nobody would have imagined Greenland making headlines. Almost the only things most people know about the place is that it’s not as big as it looks on maps, and it is covered in ice that’s melting due to global warming.

Then came US Vice-President Vance’s unwelcome and controversial visit to the island in late March. The ensuing furore fortuitously diverted media attention from ‘Signalgate’, the disastrous security blunder which made Trump’s senior appointees look like fools. Democrats furiously demanded the resignation of Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, who inadvertently included a journalist in top-secret discussions about bombing the Houthis in Yemen, and Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, who blithely joined in the chat from his – possibly monitored – hotel room in Moscow. Russia, be it noted, is friends with Iran, who are friends with the Houthis. Republicans too must have been quietly alarmed at such blithering incompetence on the part of people put in charge of US national security. Trump’s self-estimation as a genius clearly depends on him surrounding himself with loud-mouthed buffoons. His protégés duly followed Trump protocol – lie, deny, and go on the offensive – but he probably realised that he ought to sack them and hand the Democrats a big win, because covering for them would undermine his own credibility. But as we later saw with his astounding tariffs and subsequent craven roll-back, he believes his credibility is indestructible.

A handy diversion

In the event, Vance’s impromptu and perhaps calculated excursion to the Pituffik airbase in Greenland provided a useful distraction from the Signalgate fiasco. Vance publicly hectored Denmark for its supposedly poor stewardship of the island, reinforcing Trump’s claim that a US takeover was not just desirable but inevitable. Not surprisingly the Danes were politely enraged, saying ‘this is not how you talk to your allies’ and calling the move Trump’s ‘Crimea script’. Even Pituffik’s own commander tried to distance herself from Vance’s remarks, promptly earning herself the sack. The Greenlanders were also not best pleased. In polls, 80 percent of them want independence from Denmark, but 85 percent of them do not want to be annexed by the USA. What they do want, one can only imagine, is some sort of unworldly solution in which they no longer have to scrape by on Danish subsidies yet somehow manage to prosper as a lone island state the size of western Europe, with no industry or infrastructure, or even roads, and a population only one third the size of the Isle of Wight’s.

There is zero chance of that happening, because Greenland is just too important to major powers. Trump has been wanting Greenland since his first Presidency in 2016, and the US, for various reasons, has been wanting it since 1867. That was the year the US bought Alaska off the Russians for $7m. The US Secretary of State William H Seward, who oversaw the Alaska purchase, was also keen on buying Greenland and Iceland at the same time, in order to wedge Canada in on three sides and force it eventually to become part of the US. Trump may well be aware of this Seward plan, which would add context to his comments about annexing Canada. In 1868 Seward began negotiations with Denmark to buy Greenland. But Congress failed to ratify his similar plan to purchase the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands), and the Greenland plan was dropped.

Following a wartime occupation from 1941 to 1945 to stop a German invasion of Greenland, in 1946 the US secretly offered to buy it. Denmark refused, but did allow the US to build air bases there, as both countries were in the process of founding NATO. US interest in Greenland was now mainly military, as the island sits in the middle of the shortest missile flight path to Russia. It’s also part of a crucial choke point in the North Atlantic called the GIUK Gap, between Greenland, Iceland and the UK. Were Russia inclined to attack the US east coast using its Northern Fleet, based at Murmansk on the Barents Sea, its forces would have to pass through the gap. At the same time, a good reason not to press the Danes too heavily on the issue would have been that Denmark sits across the mouth of the Baltic Sea, meaning it could potentially bottle up the Russian Baltic Fleet at Kaliningrad.

Cold war refreezes

US interest cooled somewhat after the Berlin Wall fell and relations with Russia temporarily became less frosty. But now Russia has remilitarised all its old Soviet naval bases in the Arctic, heavily outnumbering equivalent NATO bases, with increasing Russian submarine patrols around the GIUK Gap. The global internet has also intensified concerns over this gap, as critically important undersea data cables pass right through it, or just south of it, making them vulnerable to submarine sabotage. This could potentially blind the USA and cripple its ability to respond in the event of any future Russian incursion into, say, the Baltic States or Finland.

In addition, the US needs ground stations for its military satellites, including in the Arctic Circle. Two of these are in Alaska and Svalbard, but the main base is Pituffik, scene of Vance’s recent outburst against Denmark. And the US very likely wants many more such bases on the island. As things stand, Greenland is terra incognita, a ‘security black hole‘ that’s impossible for Denmark’s meagre forces – mostly one aeroplane and some dogsled teams – to effectively monitor.

Not just wargames

There are also pressing non-military considerations. As the Arctic melts and the sea lanes open up permanently, Greenland could come to dominate global shipping, due to the fact that the two trans-Arctic routes, the Canada-hugging Northwest Passage (NWP) and Russia-adjacent Northern Sea Route (NSR) have the potential to cut 4,000 km off the Panama route and make the Suez Canal largely redundant. Just as the US wants back control of the Panama Canal, it will also be keen to control this polar traffic. Annoyingly for the US, in 1985 Canada claimed sovereignty over the NWP, while the US insists it is an international waterway. That might be another reason why Trump wants to annex Canada.

Then there are the untapped resources. Greenland could be the key to breaking China’s near global monopoly on producing rare earth elements (REEs) and critical minerals, as the biggest deposits of these outside China are in, you guessed it, Greenland. It is thought to have the 6th largest deposit of uranium in the world, and to be very rich in lithium, REEs, graphite, iron, nickel and copper. There is also gold, along with diamonds, rubies, sapphires and a host of other quartzes and gemstones. It has 43 out of the 50 critical minerals needed for the US economy, in particular green tech and electric vehicles. Elon Musk and the other tech bros have declared an interest for this and other reasons, including the fact that the vast territory and freezing temperatures are ideal for server farms, of which an order of magnitude more may be required to enable the AI revolution. And then there are the estimated reserves of oil and gas, which put Greenland on a par with Nigeria and Kazakhstan, and superior to Qatar.

What’s in it for the Inuit?

Almost certainly nothing. The local population doesn’t have the people, money, skills or infrastructure to exploit any of this stuff themselves, so Greenland is a sitting duck for whichever major power acquires it, either through a business deal or by military action. What could very well happen if these resources are exploited in an unregulated way by a ruthless foreign power is that Greenlanders could suffer the notorious ‘resource curse’ of places like the Congo, with the country becoming a corrupt rentier state whose ruling elite siphon off the wealth and defend their position by becoming more repressive and authoritarian (youtu.be/x8j2uWw3WfU). Faced with this awful prospect, the idealistic islanders may realise that their best chance is to do some kind of mutual back-scratching deal with the US, while retaining a fig-leaf of independence.

Deals under the table

After the Vance visit, Russia’s Vladimir Putin told journalists that relations between the US and Greenland were nothing to do with Russia, and that he had no interest in the place. This blithe response strains credulity, given Russia and China’s keen interest in the NSR, and given that a US takeover of Greenland would be as much of a strategic threat to Russia as Ukraine being in NATO, if not more so. Missiles based in Greenland, especially hypersonics, could take out Moscow, St Petersburg and Murmansk before the Russians could even react. And that’s beside the fact that Russia is – since the Ukraine invasion – now hemmed in with the addition of two new NATO members, Finland and Sweden, as well as NATO Norway.

One possible explanation for Putin’s professed indifference is that Transactional Trump has offered a private deal in which Trump takes Greenland and Russia gets to keep its captured territory (and the largest European gas reserves outside Norway) in Ukraine.

Is a similar Trumpian quid-pro-quo over Taiwan possible, making for a three-way neo-colonial carve-up? On the face of it, no. Hegseth continues to sabre-rattle at China by reiterating US backing of Taiwan, and Vance is also waving his stick at China for wanting to expand operations in Greenland. But China has operations almost everywhere, and anyway rejects any comparison with Taiwan, arguing that Greenland is a sovereign foreign state whereas Taiwan is China’s intrinsic territory. Why would they do a deal over what they see as already theirs?

Even so, TSMC and other Taipei chipmakers are racing to set up shop in Texas, California and Arizona in an energetic US bid to make Taiwan less of an Achilles heel for western tech industries. Should this attempt succeed – and there are wage-rate, skill-set and supply-chain reasons why it might not – US support for Taiwan could evaporate.

Take the money and run?

It seems hard to believe that the US would actually invade Greenland by force. But given its tiny population of around 56,000, one intriguing possibility is that the US could wait until the expected declaration of independence from Denmark, and then offer to pay the entire Greenland population $1m each to buy the place. $56bn might sound like a lot but it’s approximately what the place is valued at in potential revenues, and it’s only 1/15th of the planned 2025 US military budget, or about 1/8th of the US annual debt-servicing bill. That way, Greenlanders could all be millionaires and retire to beach houses in Bali. But would they take the payout and emigrate, or opt to stay poor for the sake of patriotism? It’s hard to say. Nationalism is powerfully embedded in capitalism’s ideology, and objective logic often plays very little part.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: The King of Tariffs (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Trump often cites the “gilded age” of William McKinley, the late 19th-century president, who imposed tariffs at an average rate of 50 percent to protect the domestic farming sector from foreign competition’ (Times, 4 April).

Actually, it was the manufacturing sector that McKinley wanted to protect. When he was a congressman for Ohio he drew up the Tariff Act of 1890 that came to be known as the McKinley Tariff. Trump calls him the ‘Tariff King’, a crown he himself clearly wants to wear.

In 1888, with the campaign for tariffs in America in full swing, Engels published an English translation, with his introduction, of a talk on free trade that Marx had given in French in Brussels in 1848. Engels quoted Marx as saying (in chapter 31 of Capital) that historically protectionism had been ‘an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers’. In his talk Marx criticised free trade too but came out in favour of it because it would hasten the development of capitalism and so bring on the final confrontation between the working class and the capitalist class. As he put it:

‘The free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade’.

Engels’s introduction provided a useful historical survey of protectionism — including which sections of the propertied classes in different countries had benefited from it and which had not at various times — and some background on what led to the McKinley Tariff, but also made some points about the effect of tariffs on different sectors of capitalist business which are still relevant today.

One difference he mentioned was between those sectors which relied on imported materials and those which didn’t. Manufacturers who obtained within the country the materials to transform into what they sold welcomed a tariff on imports of their product as protecting them from outside competition. On the other hand, those manufacturers who relied on imported materials did not want a tariff on them as this would increase the cost of producing their product. Nor did importers want tariffs generally.

This was seen today in the immediate reaction to Trump’s 2 April ‘Liberation Day’ on Wall Street, where share prices reflect traders’ views on the future profit prospects of the quoted firms. Shares in Apple whose smartphones are manufactured in Asia fell by 9 percent and ‘Big multinational consumer groups were heavily in the red, reeling from tariffs on Asian production hubs. Nike slumped 14 per cent’.

Exporters are not keen on tariffs either as their products are likely to be targets of any retaliatory action taken by other countries. America doesn’t export much manufactured stuff (except weapons of war and pharmaceuticals). Apart from oil and gas, its main exports are agricultural products. Sure enough, this is what China’s retaliatory tariffs, announced two days later, were aimed at. ‘The latest measures are likely to have the most impact on US agricultural exports, including soya beans, wheat and corn’ (Financial Times, 4 April).

In short, not all its business sectors benefit when a country imposes tariffs. America today is no exception. Some capitalist businesses are in favour of Trump’s policy but some will be lobbying for exemptions, even campaigning against him. Not that there is any guarantee that his protectionism will succeed in ‘manufacturing manufacturers’ in America, or, rather, in raising them from the dead.

In any event, as Engels noted:

‘The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system.’

McKinley was elected president in 1896 but was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901.

The end and the means (2025)

From the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The SPGB has a single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources (land, water, factories, transport, etc.) are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants. This aim is central to the SPGB’s view on the role of ‘the party’.

The abolition of private property in the productive resources will be mirrored by free and equal access for all to the wealth (food, clothing, housing, telecommunications, health and education services, entertainment) that can be produced socially. Its abolition will also be mirrored by democratic control of those productive resources – there will be a need, for example, for informed decision-making about how much effort is to be expended on the consumption goods and services mentioned above and how much effort to expend on production goods (like machinery and new factories). This would take place on a local, regional or wider level, depending on the scale of each issue.

Clearly, such a society will not build a completely new system of production from scratch. In fact, it depends for its establishment on the existence of the productive capacity that wage workers have developed under the rule of capital. It will inherit, or more precisely, appropriate the existing system of production, which is, of course, an interconnected worldwide system. This of course means that the new society must be worldwide.

Considered from the perspective of the current situation, where a minority own and/or control almost all of the productive resources, where production is determined solely by the need for profit, realised by the production and sale of commodities on a world market, we can describe the key aspects of the socialist (for us, socialist and communist mean the same thing) society that the SPGB advocates as one that is without classes, without money or any other form of economic exchange, with neither states nor frontiers. And one in which people work collectively and co-operatively to meet society’s material and psychological needs.

It’s not for us to describe in detail how people will choose to organise their lives once a socialist form of production has been introduced: the different resources, technology and mindsets which will exist then are difficult (impossible?) for us to empathise with now. But there is one very important fact of which we can be sure, and it this: where there is free access to socially-produced wealth, there will be no connection between what an individual consumes and the amount or type of work that they do or don’t do at any given time in their life. The lash of poverty, or threat thereof, that the owning class currently wields over the wage-earners to coerce them into work, will no longer exist.

Yet the natural circumstance that we, as a species, need to work in order to survive (and also, we would argue, to fully realise ourselves as human beings) will remain, despite the utopian nonsense about fully automated luxury communism.

 

So, throughout and after the revolution, the majority will have to be ready to be act as proactive participants in the socialised system of production, and have the confidence that a socialist form of production will better serve their various needs and wants than the capitalist system ever could.

For the SPGB then, the role of the revolutionary party in the present non-revolutionary situation is to put forward the case for a socialist system and against the capitalist system, to help our fellow workers to understand why, as wage earners, they can never be free from economic insecurity and exploitation, and to understand that the threats of war and environmental devastation have their roots in the capitalist system of production.

Obviously, we must seek to attract members to share the work of developing and spreading socialist ideas, but we have never tried to do so by promoting reforms of capitalism – nor will we do so in future. Experience has shown that the dynamics of capitalist economics turn reformism into an eternal misery-go-round that might catch a few crumbs as they fall from capital’s table during a boom, only to have many of them sucked away again in the inevitable succeeding slump.

For this reason, when the SPGB stands candidates in general and local elections, we make clear our stance against reformism, as opposed to all reformist parties left or right. We stand candidates in capitalist elections in order to make use of what passes for ‘democracy’ to promote socialist ideas until such a time that enough socialists are voted in to power over the state machine in order to abolish it, as part of the revolutionary process, and establish an administration of things rather than a government over the people.

If we are to establish the non-coercive, non-hierarchical, classless society, the majority will have to understand, want and be actively involved in the attainment of the objective. Given that mass socialist understanding, the political vehicle the socialist majority choose to win control of political power must be fully democratic, reflecting the sort of society they are seeking to establish.

So, the mass socialist party must not be a vanguard party controlled by a leadership, but a democratic party controlled by its members; in fact there must be no leaders or leadership, just administrative bodies carrying out the democratically-arrived at decisions of a membership that wants and understands socialism. When there is a mass socialist party with aligned parties across the world, the revolution will be a more readily-achievable goal, and so the party should have practical proposals for how the means of production will become owned in common.

The party in a pre-revolutionary climate, such as now, has to primarily work to attract support to grow the movement. It should be organised in a way which puts the principles of democracy, equality and co-operation into practice as far as possible. This demonstrates that people can work together in ways which go beyond what is demanded by capitalist organisations with their hierarchies, to get as close as we can now to unalienated labour. To this aim, the SPGB is organised through branches, which nominate delegates to various committees to carry out party work, with some roles and decisions agreed through majority vote of the membership as a whole. This framework isn’t intended as a blueprint for how organisations should be run in socialism, and it would also likely have to be adapted to suit the circumstances and size of a mass socialist party, but what would remain constant are the socialist values underpinning the organisation.

(Originally published in Prometheus in response to a request to contribute to a discussion there on the nature of a workers’ party.)