Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo Column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Analogy alert: there’s one coming your way right now

Did you ever do anything that was extremely foolish and dangerous when you were small? Bet you did!

Me too – here’s what happened. When my dad found out, he gave me a right good old-fashioned rollicking for it as I stood there with hands clasped, eyes to the ground, ears burning. And when I could get a word in, I told him that a big boy told me to do it.

Then he asked if I’d jump off a cliff if a big boy told me to. I kept quiet and just thought ‘Don’t be silly, of course I wouldn’t’.

And now I’m all grown up and would never dream of trying such a lame excuse ever again. And we’d all just laugh at any adult who did.

Well….

Just read the news, there are an awful lot of people in the world unthinkingly doing just what a big boy tells them to do. Only the big boy is a Him or one of His reps down here below. And Hims, of one sort or another, have been pulling this trick seemingly forever, usually via a Holy Book. Failing that, via a message on a Holy Piece of Toast, or the more traditional chicken’s entrails. Afraid that disobedience will make their Him fall out with them Forever and Ever, they might even go so far as to terminate anyone who doesn’t unconditionally worship their Him.

Analogy explainer alert: there’s one coming your way right now

Just as I invented a big boy to excuse my actions when I was small, a pre-invented Big Boy up in the sky is often used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for the most heinous of acts.

Bad boys

Talking of things heinous, Richard Dawkins made this comment in The God Delusion: ‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, and more, and more, bully.’

You may have your own least-favourite sky fairy but there’s one thing for sure. These days, they’re all used to keep the plebs in line, fearful and grateful for crumbs that fall from the table of the rich.

DC

Prosocial (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Conflict Resolution. By Douglas P. Fry. Edward Elgar. 2026. 121pp.

‘Nomadic foragers, as we all used to live, were socialist, prosocial, egalitarian societies’ (Douglas P. Fry).

In this distillation of long years of fieldwork and scholarship, the world-leading anthropologist Douglas Fry draws upon his knowledge and experience to propose means of resolving conflicts between individuals or groups as they might arise in contemporary contexts. Its analysis and recommendations are underpinned by the author’s accumulated understanding of how human beings have related to one another throughout the 300,000 years of our species’ existence. And it is precisely this that makes it of particular interest and relevance to socialists.

To be specific, a central plank of his arguments is how entirely fallacious are the oft-repeated claims that war, aggression and greed are rooted in the human psyche. All the evidence, he insists, is that such forms of behaviour, far from being somehow embedded in our nature, are, when they occur, an outcome of social conditioning and that our evolutionary history shows that we have just as much potential for, and indeed a much more natural bent, towards attachment, caring partnership and cooperation.

Drawing on decades of his own research and with evidence from various different fields of study, he demonstrates how over the approximately 290,000 years of prehistory (the Palaeolithic era), the overwhelming principle of existence among human groups was (and still is today among indigenous populations he has investigated across the world) non-violence, cooperation and egalitarianism, characterised by sharing food, caring for the vulnerable and maintaining social bonds. This the author sums up as ‘community solidarity and harmony’, reinforced by ‘socialization and social control mechanism geared toward promoting prosocial values and behaviors’. Not that violence, greed or attempts to monopolise necessities would never have occurred in Palaeolithic societies or never occur in modern indigenous cultures, but in such circumstances ways are usually found to resolve the conflicts caused via ‘restorative’ methods or by reconciliation, eschewing violence and seeking to practice ‘fairness’ in the eyes of the individuals most directly affected and of the collectivity. But in the rare cases where this is not possible, it may be necessary to apply sanctions to ‘wrongdoers’, probably via some form of social ostracism or banishment. As for large-scale organised killing, the author echoes the now widely accepted view that this has been largely a feature of the last approximately 10,000 years. Starting then, hunter-gatherer life (referred to in this book as ‘nomadic foraging’) gave way to settled agriculture with social hierarchies and control and domination of wealth by small groups of people developing and eventually becoming the norm. Later, of course, the industrial production of capitalism took over from agricultural society, but that society continued to manifest, as it still does, those same basic features: power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, leaders and led, and a willingness of the many, via social conditioning, to sacrifice themselves in the interests of the privileged few.

This book is one of many in the field of anthropology, archaeology and a gamut of other disciplines which have contributed to exploding the enduring myth that violence, competition and selfishness are somehow ‘locked into’ human interaction, that there exists inevitably some kind of ‘war of all against all’. Douglas Fry’s stark opposition to that idea is summed up in his statement that ‘on the basis of cross-cultural data … humans have a universal inclination to resolve conflicts and restore normal patterns of harmonious social interaction’ and that ‘the normal state of social affairs is to exchange good deeds, to feel gratitude, to be generous and appreciate the generosity of others. Overall, people strive to maintain positive interpersonal relations with others through mutually beneficial exchanges’.

All this is serious grist to the mill for socialists, providing as it does a powerful response to those who argue that the cooperative society of voluntary endeavour and free access to all goods and services which we call socialism is impossible because it is against what is usually referred to as ‘human nature’. We cannot but agree with the author’s plea that ‘the human potential for resolving conflicts without violence should be fully acknowledged, nurtured, and further elaborated by the people sharing one small planet in the vastness of space’. At the same time, however, though this plea is expressed, as all else in this book, in truly engaging fashion, it is difficult to see how its substance can be realised within the framework of the current social system of class division and production for profit. Rather, the environment for it to come to fruition has to be a society of economic equality and production for need.

Howard Moss

SPGB Tote Bags (2026)

 Party Merchandise advertised in the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cooking the Books: Manchesterism (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Until Andy Burnham, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, re-coined the word, ‘Manchesterism’ meant the economic doctrine of the Manchester and district cotton mill owners who favoured a policy of complete tariff-free trade and opposed state interference in industry, as expressed by Richard Cobden, one of the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League of the 1840s. In England they were known as the Manchester School. On the continent their doctrine was called manchesterisme in French and Manchesterismus in German. It wasn’t that popular there as the local factory owners realised what was behind it — that their British rivals wanted wider access to continental markets for their cheaper goods.

Engels lived and worked in Manchester for over twenty years and was well aware of the views of the Manchester School, if only from socialising with them. Writing in English he used ‘Manchester School’, but in German he used the word ‘Manchesterismus’ as in a note he wrote about a May Day meeting in London in 1890 where he refers to new trade union members wanting ‘no more to do with the Manchesterism of the old Trade Unions’ (‘4 May’, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 27).

When he re-coined the term, Burnham may not have been aware of its previous use and meaning, but others were and asked him if there was any connection. PoliticsHome (15 April) recorded:

‘Asked whether he identifies more with Richard Cobden or Friedrich Engels, he chooses Cobden, the Mancunian Radical and free-trader.’

There is not in fact that much in common between Burnham’s and Cobden’s Manchesterism. Cobden was a free marketeer while Burnham has defined it as ‘business-friendly socialism’. It is, however, revealing that when asked to choose between a capitalist free-marketeer and an opponent of capitalism in all its forms, Burnham identified more with the former.

What Cobden and Burnham have in common is that they both support capitalism. ‘Business-friendly socialism’ is an oxymoron but if you understand ‘socialism’ to mean Labourism then it becomes, like a ‘round circle’, a pleonasm. Starmer and Reeves expressed it more directly when they said that Labour was ‘the party of business’.

Insofar as Burnham’s Manchesterism is more than a populist slogan which sets workers in the North against workers in London and the South East, it seems to mean giving regional authorities more freedom to raise money locally and to attract capitalist investment to their region. In other words, a mere change in the political superstructure in the hope that it will stimulate ‘growth’. But what drives growth is the pursuit, and accumulation as new capital, of profits. If the prospect of a profit is not good, then investment won’t take place, whatever the political arrangements.

But what sort of investment? These days British capitalism lives not so much by producing surplus value directly in industry as by capturing, through selling financial and legal services, surplus value produced elsewhere in the world. Under Burnham, Manchester has been able to divert some of this from London to Manchester, but not everywhere will be able to do this.

The other type of capitalist investment that regional authorities can seek is ‘property development’. In fact the two businesspeople that the Times’s Economics Editor, Meerhen Khan, interviewed (25 June) who had found Burnham ‘business friendly’ were both in the property business. One said that ‘all the evidence suggests that he’s incredibly pro-business’ and that ‘his comments on the excesses of neo-liberalism were also a critique of its social impact on communities in post-industrial cities like Manchester rather than an outright rejection of market capitalism’.

So says a Labour-friendly capitalist.

50 Years Ago: The row about overseas students (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Students who come to the UK from abroad to study make another part of the education pot that is at boiling point. But as with the reasons for the cuts in the education system (discussed last month) so also with the explanation of the row about overseas students. The causes have nothing to do with so-called academic freedom, or colour prejudice, or the duty to help developing countries. The cause of the dispute is within the economics of capitalism itself in one of its periodic crises.

Cuts are demanded in state expenditure by the capitalist class and in education in particular. One of the things which have been cut back on is the “subsidy” to overseas students. This so-called subsidy relates to the fact that the fees paid by all students to universities and colleges of higher education do not in fact represent the true cost of the course they will be attending. The real cost will be many times higher and the balance comes from central and local government grants to the universities and colleges, together with whatever else they can squeeze from private sources. Overseas students (estimated to be about 95,000 for the academic year 1973/4) therefore apparently cost the capitalist class considerable amounts.

For example the “price” of one year of a 3-year course in science at University College London, for the academic year 1975/76 was £157. But this figure probably represents no more than 10 per cent of the true cost of providing the services and equipment available to each student on a science course at UCL. So the call grows from the politicians (the mouthpieces of the capitalist class) and others involved to make students who come here to study from abroad pay the market price.

[From the article, 'The Row About Overseas Students' by Ronnie Warrington, Socialist Standard, August 1976.]

Action Replay: Breaks, shirts and cards (2026)

The Action Replay column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

‘Football unites the world’ is a FIFA slogan, but the recent World Cup tournament did a great deal to point up the divisions which currently exist.

With three host countries and long travelling distances, it was always going to be a complicated enterprise. A total of 48 teams, 104 matches and 52 referees, all far more than previously: just 64 games in recent years and, when England hosted in 1966, 16 teams and 32 matches. There were plenty of complaints about the prices for tickets, food and drink, accommodation and travel. But then the whole thing is largely about money, with an estimate of $80bn being the economic ‘output’ of the whole competition, both qualifying matches and the finals.  A number of games did have quite a lot of empty seats, though.

There was plenty of politics involved too. The Uruguay team had to undergo searches of their luggage when they arrived in the US, and a Somalian referee and some Iranian supporters were denied entry there. Haiti were forced to change their shirts for the finals, on the grounds that their first choice was political, in that it showed a flag which referred to the Haitian ‘revolution’ and the country’s ‘independence’ in 1804. Not that the anthems and ubiquitous flags are in any way political.

Then there was Trump’s intervention. A US player was sent off against Bosnia-Herzegovina, which, according to the regulations, meant he should miss the next match, a last-sixteen tie against Belgium. But Trump has a record of pardoning people, even for serious offences, and he appealed to the head of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, to have the suspension overturned. Infantino is a bit of a lapdog for Trump, having awarded him the fantasy FIFA Peace Prize, and indeed the player in question was allowed to take part against Belgium. Not that it did much good, as Belgium won 4–1, and the shenanigans may even have inspired the Belgian players a bit.

The hydration breaks in each half might be a good idea, given the temperatures at some games. But they have happened on cooler days too, and they are officially Powerade hydration breaks, sponsored by a sports drink. On US TV the breaks are occupied by commercials. There have been claims, too, that the breaks can alter the momentum of a match, giving one or other side an advantage. So a game of two halves may be becoming a game of four quarters.

One thing the competition has shown, though, is the extent of migration and the impact it has on ‘national’ teams. Many squads consist in large part of sons of migrants or of ex-pats, people who moved to another country but whose family still have links of some kind to their original ‘home’. Football may not unite the world, but it demonstrates how the world and its population are changing.

Paul Bennett

Party News: Durham Miners Gala (2026)

Party News from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Party members distributed the 2 texts below at the 2026 Durham Miners’ Gala.

Having a laugh

 

If the tiny minority who claim ownership of the world’s wealth ever stopped to consider their situation, they’d surely wet themselves laughing – because the majority accept their claim, even though it’s the majority who create the wealth in the first place.

And there’s more merriment for the capitalists as most people keep swallowing the line served up by political parties – ‘we promise to make the system work for “hard-working families”‘.

Bullshit of course! The system is and always will be loaded against the majority. It will always keep us on edge, forever worried about making ends meet, about downwards pressure on wages, about losing our job.

Our message: we could all get along fine without capitalists and the SPGB’s aim is to get rid of their stupid system. Please think about joining us. Either that or be one more reason for capitalists to be cheerful.

The next revolution

This Gala celebrates the storied history of working-class resistance against the bosses.

But why do we have bosses?

Because the world’s fabulous wealth is held in private hands.

The rich own the Earth, while the rest of us do all the work.

Do you think the rich are doing a good job looking after the planet?

They’re not, are they?

They would rather see it all burn than give up their wealth.

The next revolution must be to abolish private ownership.

Abolish billionaire elites and their puppet politicians.

Abolish property trading, markets and money.

Abolish poverty, environmental destruction and nationalist wars. And abolish bosses.

We have the technology. We have the wit. We just need the will.

Democratic common ownership. It’s the only future worth celebrating. Join us, and bring it one step closer.

Party News: Durham Miners Gala - Part 1 (2026)

Party News from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘It’s not bloody ‘gah-la’, they call it ‘gay-la’ round here.’

‘No it’s not, it’s ‘gah-la’, I’ve heard people say that.’

‘For cryin’ out loud, it’s both. And it’s your round.’

The important thing you learn from the Durham Miners Gala is that, contrary to dismal impressions, radical left politics in the UK is not dead, but alive and well and willing to celebrate the fact every July. The Gala has been going since 1871, and attracts around 200,000 people, making it the world’s biggest such event, and jamming Durham’s small historic streets with crowds, performers, party-heads and the inevitable brass bands.

The enormous Gala field looked like a rock festival, with marquees, food kiosks, a bar with a very long queue, and a funfair. Pop and folk acoustic bands played on a big sound stage, in between impassioned speeches about union solidarity, including the fact that when the Reform-controlled council defunded Durham Pride, Durham Miners stepped up to support the event, recalling the support given to them by Pride members in 1984.

Our members were everywhere, discussing politics at our marquee stall, or out in the field, or on the way in. We dished out hundreds of leaflets, and distributed a lot of books and pamphlets, though we underestimated how much material we needed, forgetting that last year our stall was cleaned out.

All in all, a terrific event and one worth getting involved in for any member who can make the time to come along. We’ll be doing it again next year, for certain!

PJS

Party News: Durham Miners Gala - Part 2 (2026)

Party News from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

 

As ever a fabulous day out where there is always a real buzz all day. I would recommend it to anyone. What I find really heartening is the number of people who are willing to come over to our stand (and presumably the other political stands) and have an open and straightforward discussion about politics. There was very little rancour in the discussion. We had the opportunity to discuss our case in a degree of depth with many people ranging from anarcho-syndicalists to some older members of a local boy scout group. Wandering around the Gala field is also very interesting. As usual there are the various leftist groups who all hate capitalism, but not quite as much as they hate each other. The Gala organisers either by luck or judgement managed to place the various Trotskyist splinter groups in a way that meant that the Trots were firewalled from each other, usually by some hardline Stalinists or the Labour Party. What becomes apparent when you talk to them about their politics is that generally speaking they just want to cosplay the 1917 October Revolution and that the differences between each group is that their different leaders fell out with each other because they thought it was their turn to wear the Lenin or Trotsky costume. They really should stop referring to themselves as political parties and call themselves what they are: Historical Re-enactment Societies.

T. K.

Editorial: Burnham’s plan to rearrange the chairs

Editorial from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The new Prime Minister seems to have borrowed the argument for his flagship policy from the Welsh and Scots Nationalists. Their mantra is that the problems faced by workers living in their geographical area are due to political decisions being made in London rather than in Cardiff or Edinburgh. Burnham’s variation is that the way to solve the problems that workers in England face is to transfer more decision-making powers from London to regional mayors.

These proposals are based on the assumption that governments are able to control the way the capitalist economy works. All the evidence shows that this is not the case. Governments don’t, and can’t, control how capitalism works. It is, rather, the other way round. The capitalist economy generates economic laws which limit what governments can do in that the only choice they have is between giving priority to profits or provoking an economic slowdown.

If you believe that governments can control the economy you will mistakenly conclude that solving the problems facing workers is a matter of government policy and that the policy pursued by those who decide what governments do is the key factor. But, as in fact governments can’t control the way the economy works — can’t overcome its basic economic law that profits must come first — then who makes or where the decision is made to give priority to profit-making is unimportant. Whether this decision is made in London or Cardiff or Edinburgh or Manchester or Midsomer Norton is not going to make any difference. Capitalism will get its way, and as capitalism is the cause of the problems workers face, wherever they live, those problems will continue.

In any event, most decisions concerning the economy are not made by governments, national or regional, but by private enterprises whose goal is to maximise profits for their owners. None of the conventional parties challenge this. So their policies have to be ‘business friendly’ as it is private enterprises in pursuit of profits that decide what is produced.

Burnham’s claim isn’t even that devolving powers to regional mayors would directly benefit workers. It is only that it would, supposedly, benefit them by promoting ‘growth’ which would provide more jobs and extra tax revenue to improve education, the health services and public amenities (after paying more for ‘defence’). Growth, in the sense of the accumulation out of profits of more capital, is what capitalism is all about but it is not something that a government can make happen. The most that a government can do is to maintain or create favourable conditions for profit-making for whenever those in charge of private enterprises see a prospect of making a profit.

It’s not who makes decisions or where they make them but what they decide that is important, and what they decide is imposed by the economic laws of capitalism. We confidently predict that Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’ won’t work, either to bring about capitalist growth or to solve workers’ problems. It’s no more than rearranging the chairs.

SPGB Snippets: Rough reality (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website 

July 26, 2026

Andy Burnham pledged ‘to finally end long-term rough sleeping across the UK’. He previously aimed to prevent rough sleeping in Manchester by 2020, and in 2019 the Conservative Party manifesto committed to ending ‘the blight of rough sleeping’. Instead, in 2025 the number of people estimated to sleep rough on a single night in England was the highest recorded, at nearly 4,800.

Rough sleeping is not just about housing. Rough sleepers are among the most marginalised and victimised in capitalist society. Support services, however ‘well-funded’, can only ever offer limited palliatives as they are working within a system that pushes people into homelessness – why previous attempts to end rough sleeping have failed, despite Burnham’s ambition.

Are the Managers Really in Control? Part Two (1981)

From the February 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1. 

In Part One (Socialist Standard, January 1981 ) we discussed James Burnham’s clearly expressed  argument that class society could exist without property titles vested in individuals. He was of course proved wrong by events: industrial managers have not replaced private capitalists as the possessing, ruling class, on the basis of the state ownership of the means of production (for Burnham never expected the managers to come to power within the legal framework of private capitalism).

Burnham gave as the reason why the “managers”, by which he meant those who actually managed the process of production, would be the new ruling class the alleged fact that a ruling class must have some function in the process of production :

“Social rule . . . depends on de facto control of the instruments of production—the means whereby society lives; and such control can be held only by some group which plays a direct and integral role in production” (The Managerial Revolution, p. 232).

In the past when the means of production were small-scale and scattered this was so. At that time the various means and instruments of production could be, and were, controlled individually. But today, due precisely to the development of modern industry brought about by capitalism, this is no longer so; the production of wealth has become socialised. The wealth of modern society is produced by the co-operative labour of those who work. In this sense the point of production is not the individual mine or factory, but society. Thus it is those who control society, not those who manage production at factory level, who are really in a position to control the use of today’s means of production.

It is the state which is the centre of social control so that whoever controls the state controls society and so, potentially at least, the means of production. This is so even in Western capitalism with its legal property titles. The private capitalists of the West, just as much as the possessing class in Russia (which in fact is also a capitalist class), now possess the means of production because they control the state rather than vice-versa. They use this control to back up their historically-inherited legal property titles, having long ceased to have any necessary productive function. Whereas in Russia the possessing class own the means of production directly through the state, in the West this is done indirectly through individual property titles ultimately enforceable by the state. In the end this amounts to the same thing: today’s socially-operated means of production are possessed and controlled by a minority class socially, through the state, the centre of social control.

Actually, Burnham himself unwittingly recognisedthat access to the modern means of production can only be controlled socially when he argued that managerial rule would be based on the state ownership of the means of production. For, on the basis of state ownership, any group which established its exclusive stable control over the state would become a collective possessing class precisely because it would therefore control the use of the means of production. If industrial managers were to organiseas a group, win popular support or acquiescence, and come to gain control of state power they would indeed become the ruling and possessing class—but  by virtue of controlling the state not of being managers.

Burnham was wrong, then, in assuming that the managers’ technical function in production was a compelling reason why they should emerge as such a group whereas in fact they were no more, or less, likely than any other group to do so.

State Capitalism

Both Rizzi and Burnham (and, indeed, Wittfogel also) rejected the view that Russia could be described as state capitalism. Both of them regarded Russia as a new class society: “bureaucratic collectivism” for Rizzi and “managerial society” for Burnham. This rejection of a state capitalist analysis of Russia was an inheritance from their Trotskyist past where they had learned to identify capitalism with private capitalism. For Trotsky, capitalism could not exist without private property titles vested in individuals; for him “state capitalism” was state control of private capitalist industry.

Capitalism, however, is not characterised by the legal form that class possession of the means of production takes, but by the social fact that those who “possess” the means of production exploit wage-labour and accumulate the surplus-value thus obtained as capital. An examination of “the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers” in Russia shows this to be the case there. The excluded majority live by selling their labour-power to various state enterprises; the products of these enterprises are sold on the market with a view to profit; and the difference between the wages of the producers and the value of what they produce is surplus value which is used for capital accumulation and the consumption of the privileged class. Russia is thus capitalist and its possessing, ruling, privileged class a capitalist class.

Russia can be described as state capitalist in order to distinguish the form of capitalist class possession of the means of production there from the legal property-holding of the West. It should not be forgotten, however, that private property titles do still exist in Russia (though, admittedly, not as the predominant form) and that this could grow in the future. Equally, elements of non-legal de facto class possession through the state exist in Western countries, though the capitalist title-holders are able through their control of Parliament to prevent politicians and state officials gaining a permanent and widespread privileged consumption at their expense.

We see, then, that in East and West alike control of the use of today’s socially-operated means of production rests ultimately in the hands of those who control the state. It is clear that on the basis of class possession of the means of production a variety of such forms—both with regard to control of production and to the allocation of consumer goods among the privileged class—are possible. Each particular case needs to be examined on its own in the light of the historical and social facts. It is not possible to lay down a priori, as Burnham tried to do, which particular group would be most likely to emerge as the ruling class on the basis of state-owned industry. Nor can it be said that there is any particular reason why there should be any tendency for individual property titles to be abolished and replaced by de facto possession through the state.

Classless Society

The above analysis has certain practical implications. Since the state is the organ of social control, and since it is through controlling this organ that the capitalist class, East and West, is able to maintain its possession of the means of production, it is clear that the excluded producing class of wage and salary earners must, in order to establish a classless society, begin by gaining control of the state. Not, be it quickly added, to form a “socialist government” or a “workers state” (both absurd contradictions; when there is socialism there will be no state and where there is a state there is no socialism), but simply and solely to take state power out of the hands of the capitalist class, so removing the last obstacle to society establishing common ownership and democratic social control over the means of production. This presupposes both a widespread desire and understanding among the working class to establish a classless, socialist society and that the working class have democratically organised themselves, without political or industrial leaders, to carry out this desire. In the absence of such majority socialist understanding any attempt to establish socialism would inevitably fail and most probably lead to the sort of state capitalist society, based on de facto class possession of the means of production which we have been discussing.

The essence of class possession is precisely control over the use of the means of production by a section only of society. Once the use of the means of production is under the democratic control of the whole of society then “class possession”, “private property”, “class ownership”, call it what you will, has been abolished. The means of production could still be said to “belong” to those who controlled their use—in other words, to be “commonly owned” by the democratically-organised community.

But to talk of “common property”, “social property”, and the like can be misleading in that these terms do not fully bring out the fact that the transfer to society of the power to control the production of wealth makes the whole concept of “property” redundant. The question “who would own the means of production in socialist society?” can be answered just as correctly by saying “nobody” as by saying “everybody”, or “society”, or the “community”.

What social control over production will mean in practice is that every member of society will be free to take part, on equal terms with every other member, in deciding how the means of production should be used. As Burnham put it:

“For society to be ‘classless’ would mean that within society there would be no group (with the exception, perhaps, of temporary delegate bodies, freely elected by the community and subject always to recall) which would exercise, as a group, any special degree of control over access to the instruments of production; and no group receiving, as a group, preferential treatment in distribution” (The Managerial Revolution, p.55).

Society’s power to control production would be embodied in various democratic institutions. “Common ownership” and “democratic social control” of the means of production are merely, as we have said, two different ways of describing the same situation. This is why discussion as to whether one could exist without the other is quite meaningless.

Socialism is democratic or it is not socialism. A society where the means of production were formally the common property of society but where only a minority took part in deciding how they should be used would be one in which “common property” was merely a fiction since in practice the means of production would be the sectional possession of the decision-making minority.

In the end the only guarantee in socialist society against the emergence of a new ruling class which would negate the common ownership of the means of production is people using the democratic institutions—the actual democratic participation of all the people in the running of society. This is why it is absolutely essential that those who establish socialism—the majority working class who will constitute also the major part of the people of socialist society—must be fully aware of its implications, being prepared and organised to participate not only in its establishment but also in its subsequent running.

Adam Buick

SPGB Snippets: Football: beautiful or ugly? (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website 

July 22, 2026

Can we separate the skills of the beautiful game from the ugliness of the money machine that drives it and the rivalries and nationalism it thrives on? Should we regard the emotional investment of fans as people being brought together or a reminder of how alienated they are from their own lives and capabilities. Is it, as one commentator stated, people being sold ‘meaningless thrills to patch over the pain’?

Whatever the case, in the society of voluntary cooperative work and free access to goods and services that socialists look forward to, appreciation of the talents of others – including footballers – will still exist, but side by side with each person having the time and space to cultivate their own talents and capabilities.

This Month's Quotation: Karl Marx (1936)

The Front Page quote from the July 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Ignorance never helped nor did anybody any good."

KarL Marx

Does the Navy safeguard our daily bread? (1936)

From the July 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Two opinions about the Navy have been jostling for front place in the past six months. One is that the Navy is rotten: just a lot of old tin-cans waiting for an enterprising dictator to sink them. The dictator, the ex-Labour leader Mussolini, is supposed to have bawled the British fleet off the Western Mediterranean into an Eastern funk-hole, and to have assumed the mastery of the sea. The other opinion is that the fleet retired voluntarily, too proud to fight, or according to some crooked hidden plan of those who decide the foreign policy of the British capitalists.

Which of these is the truth we do not know. Probably the supermen who are in control do not know. Probably the naval experts who advise them, like the professional economists, are all at sixes and sevens, and able to provide every variety of contradictory opinion on demand. As for the theory of a cunning piece of double-dealing, perhaps it is true, as alleged by Continentals who have studied British diplomatic and Governmental methods, that the reputation for cunning enjoyed abroad by the British ruling class is due to pure mischance. The benighted foreigners watch the elephantine blunderings of the British Cabinet and conclude that it must be an elaborate smoke-screen hiding deep-laid plans and plots, simply because it is unbelievable that Baldwin and Co. can really be as silly as they seem.

However, these are realms into which it is profitless for us to go. Instead, let us try to answer another question about the Navy.

What the Navy does for the British Workers

What the Navy does for the British investors who have some £3,000 million invested abroad we know, but what do the workers get out of their masters' expensive little toy? Mr. Kenneth Lindsay, M.P., one of Mr. MacDonald’s ex-Labour Party group, has answered the question. Mr. Lindsay is Civil Lord of the Admiralty and presumably knows all about fighting ships. Speaking in the House of Commons on May 28th, 1936, he told the M.P.s that he identified himself with Mr. Winston Churchill’s statement, “the purpose of the Navy is to ensure the arrival of our daily bread.” He went on to say that “the Admiralty programme was based on months of careful studies. They aimed to make the British Navy 100 per cent, efficient.” (Manchester Guardian, May 29th, 1936.) This should give comfort to us all, the knowledge that the Navy is seeing to it that we are all rightly and adequately fed and that the gentlemen in control have been burning the midnight oil to ensure 100 per cent. efficiency. But not so fast. On turning over the pages of the same newspaper from which that piece of news was taken we find more news about our food. Dr. G. W. Theobald, of the British Post-Graduate Medical School, London, says that at least ten per cent. of our population has to be fed on a weekly budget of 4s. or less for each individual. (Dr. Theobald’s proposal was not more steel for the Navy, but that “every school should instruct girls to take iron for one month in the year to prevent anaemia.”) Another doctor, speaking at the joint conference of the Royal Institute of Public Health and the Institute of Hygiene, where Dr. Theobald made his speech, commented on the inadequate food of working-class mothers: "One finds mothers towards the end of the week living on bread and tea, and saving pennies to buy meat and pies for the boys.” Dr. M’Gonigle and M. J. Kirby, in a recent authoritative study, ”Poverty and Public Health,” have shown that there are 20,000,000 people in this country who are too poor to be properly fed. Mr. Lloyd George, in a speech at the Central Hall, Westminster, on March 13th, 1936, added his testimony (Daily Telegraph, I4th March, 1936):—

We have it on the authority of men of science, who have devoted the whole of their lives to the study of this problem, that over 40 per cent. of our fellow-countrymen are inadequately fed in a land of exuberant plenty and abounding wealth.

There are still millions living in habitations that are unfit for human beings to dwell in, and side by side with these conditions we have statistical and revenue testimony as to the enormous fortunes and huge incomes enjoyed by a few.

We find then that if the Navy’s job really is to ”ensure the arrival of our daily bread,” it falls down badly on the job. Or rather, it ensures that the working class get bread but very little else, for, according to the Medical Officer of Health for Chorley, tea and bread and butter forms seventy per cent. of the breakfast and tea meals of elementary school children in that town, “the term bread and butter” including “bread with margarine and bread dipped and fried in fat.” (News Chronicle, June 13th, 1936.)

What the Navy is really for

Of course there is no need to elaborate the argument. The Navy does not and never did exist for the purpose imagined by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Lindsay. British capitalists might at one time, even if they cannot now, boast of being mistress of the seas, but it was not for the sake of British workers. The purpose of the Navy, as of the rest of the armed forces, is to defend capitalist investments at home and abroad against attacks from all quarters. Mr. Philip Jordan, in an article on ”Empire Defence” (News Chronicle, June 12th, 1936), gives a reasonably accurate account of the reason why the Navy is engaged on keeping open the "pipe-lines” of British commerce: —

”These pipe-lines British naval strategy is concerned to preserve; for upon their unimpeded maintenance depends the ease with which tribute and life flow into imperial Britain: gold and diamonds from South Africa, cotton from Egypt, spices from Ceylon, all treasure from India, tin and rubber from Malay, wool from Australasia; and from all and more of them interest on the loans with which British capitalists dowered them in early and late days.” (Italics ours.)

Among the purposes of the armed forces is defending capitalist property against the working-class. It includes keeping the working-class in perpetual poverty, for only so can they be compelled to submit to exploitation for the good of the class which controls the political machinery, including the armed forces, and through it the accumulated wealth of the country.

What is the moral? An obvious one. The working class must themselves gain control of the machinery of Government and use it, including the Navy, for the purpose of ending capitalism. Then for the first time will the whole population be well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed.

Edgar Hardcastle