Cooking the Books: ‘Raise everyone’s wages’ (2026)

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

‘Cut bills and raise everyone’s wages’ promised the Green Party in a leaflet put out for elections earlier this year (‘Stop Reform. Replace Labour. Vote Green’). Wage increases all round is more typical of Trotskyist candidates trying to get workers to follow them by dangling impossible ‘transitional demands’ in front of them. In this case it was an example of Polanski’s professed ‘ecopopulism’ which consists of making attractive promises on bread-and-butter issues to gather votes, in particular from those who normally vote for the Labour Party. But it is just as unobtainable as any Trotskyist carrot.

If ever the Green Party came to form the government and decreed that all employers should pay their workers more, the result would be an immediate financial and economic crisis since everyone’s wages could only be increased at the expense of overall profits and profits are what drive the capitalist economy. A lower economy-wide rate of profit would mean less investment and so a drop in production.

Derek Wall, a one-time speaker for the Green Party (before they had a Leader) and still a Green Party activist, described in 1990 what he expected to happen if a Green government came into office on a programme of putting the environment before profits:

‘A Green government will be controlled by the economy rather than being in control. On coming to office through coalition or more absolute electoral success, it would be met by an instant collapse of Sterling as “hot money” and entrepreneurial capital went elsewhere. The exchange rate would fall and industrialists would move their factories to countries with more relaxed environmental controls and workplace regulation. Sources of finance would dry up as unemployment rocketed, slashing revenue from taxation and putting up social security bills. The money for ecological reconstruction — the building of railways, the closing of motorways and construction of a proper sewage system — would run out’ (Getting There. Steps to a Green Society, p. 78).

As the Green Party accepts the ownership of the means of production by private corporations and individuals and doesn’t even have any state-capitalist pretensions, it is fair to assume that they would come into office, if ever they did, under capitalism as it is today. So Wall’s scenario is entirely plausible.

Wall envisaged this happening if the Green government was elected on the basis of implementing far-reaching measures to protect the environment. The Green Party doesn’t seem to say much these days about protecting the environment (the leaflet in question doesn’t mention it at all) but the same would happen if a Green government were elected on a pledge to make all employers pay their workers more. In fact, the immediate crisis would be economic and not just financial as Wall envisaged. Some employers would go bankrupt immediately. Others would lay off workers. Unemployment would soar. Production would slump.

The Greens are taking workers for fools, though we doubt many were fooled into voting for them because they believed that the Greens would, or even could, bring about a general increase in wages. Increased wages for everybody sounds good but is too good to be possible under capitalism.

Blogger's Note:

Derek Wall's 1990 book, Getting There. Steps to a Green Society, was reviewed in the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Obituary: David Gluck (2026)

Obituary from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

My brother David (who was a member of the Socialist Party, London Branch) passed away aged 91 on the 8th of July 2026. Dave was a long time member active as a speaker, correspondent and unofficial security worker from the late fifties.

David spent his early childhood in Whitechapel around the Brick Lane area and carried the roots of the old East End culture until the day he died. The family moved to Adelaide Road in leafy Primrose Hill at the end of the Second World War; we were a bit like the local ‘Beverly Hillbillies’.

David’s dad Jack was a SPGB member as are his brothers Tony, Graham and as was their late sister Sandra. Having experienced the anti-semitism of the post war years David took up boxing and was good enough to be selected to represent the ABA versus the Met Police, which was filmed at the Albert Hall. Dave stopped boxing after being disheartened by the accidental death of a club mate. He later took up Olympic wrestling and in his best year defeated two national champions (Abdul and Joseph).

My brother was widely travelled, serving in the merchant navy in his early twenties, then working in Israel and as a Gastarbeiter in Germany. Dave finally retired to Poland living on his pensions from Germany and the UK. Besides his interest in politics David was quite expert in jazz, sport and history. He was a tall, athletic man with a commanding and knowledgeable presence. David Gluck is survived by his brothers Tony, Graham and Harry and by his daughter Fiona.

Graham Gluck

Feasible (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Make Capitalism History. A Practical Framework for Utopia and the Transformation of Society. By Simon Sutterlütti and Stefan Meretz. Palgrave McMillan.

The authors state that one reason for writing their book (which first appeared in German in 2023) was to get those engaged in various struggles to try to make things better under capitalism to seriously consider (rather than just in ‘late night pub talks,’ as they put it) what a feasible, rationally justified alternative society might look like.

Starting from the basic position that humans naturally want to satisfy their needs as they themselves define them, they argue that a free society can only be one where people are no longer forced to work by economic necessity and where people have secure, open access to what they require to satisfy their needs (they mention ‘places resembling modern-day supermarkets but without checkout’); work has to be freely chosen and people must be free to use productive resources to both produce and consume what they need; private ownership has to be replaced by ‘collective disposition’ (they prefer ‘disposition’ as ‘ownership’ has connotations of exclusion whereas productive resources and their products will belong to nobody but just be there to be used ). They call the new society ‘commonism’, but it is obviously socialism.

They are opposed to any form of central planning, on the grounds that it wouldn’t work and that attempting it would give power over people to the central planners. In fact, they are opposed to any central administrative body, even if unarmed and selected democratically. What they envisage is production and distribution taking place through ‘stigmergy’ (communication by signs) which apparently is how termites communicate to build their constructions. Capitalism does this without central planning with prices as the signs; ‘commonism’ would do it through (non-monetary) signals about needs.

They describe well that under capitalism the aim of production is that ‘money must be invested as capital in order to multiply itself’ (‘valorisation’)    and that this is ‘not the result of the greed of managers or shareholders’ but ‘derives from a structural compulsion to valorise that is built into the system’ and enforced through competition: ‘if producers display inferior valorisation, therefore less profit than their competitors, they will be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis advertising, the development or acquisition of new machines, the design of new products and so on. That is why, in the short or long-term, they will be defeated in competition and disappear from the market.’ The state has some autonomy to resist this as it acquires money not by exchange but through taxation; this autonomy, however, ‘remains relative, as state taxes in turn depend on a functioning economy … Therefore, the economy is the dominant sphere encompassing the state’.

They don’t regard state-dominated economies, such as the former USSR, as capitalist — in fact they follow the annoying practice of Continental academics of referring to them as ‘Real Socialism’ in the sense of a ‘socialism’ that really existed— but as being subject, through participation in the world market, to the same economic compulsions; also that state ownership is still a property form, excluding the majority.

The second part of the book is devoted to discussing how to get to ‘commonism’. Here, they insist, a free society can only be established by people who want it and freely choose to establish it; people cannot be forced to be free; a free society cannot be introduced from above by the state, as envisaged by gradualist reformists as well as by violent insurrectionists. Beyond not taking this route, the authors are fairly agnostic, though they also rule out the idea that worker cooperatives could outcompete capitalist corporations on the market or that voluntary communes (‘commons’, they call them) could spread by-passing the market. They seem to envisage as most likely the ‘transvolution’ (their alternative word for revolution) being set off by some catastrophe such as an economic collapse of capitalism or an ecological collapse.

In the last chapter they relent a bit on their opposition to political action and concede that it is conceivable that the state could support the spread of ‘commonist forms’ before dissolving itself — they write of a ‘suicide state’ — giving the movement for a free society a leg-up, or as they put it ‘a stirrup holder, an accomplice to emancipation’.

Adam Buick

The Socialist Party's 2026 Summer School: Populism

Party News from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

If ‘populism’ is taken to mean politics popular with the majority pitched against an elite minority, should socialists aim to make socialism ‘populist’? Certainly socialists work to make socialism popular globally with the majority, but without pandering to notions that would negate its revolutionary goal. This means being opposed to ideas that might attract wide support in the short term yet actively undermine the socialist case. Because ‘populism’ remains ill-defined, it gets applied to a right wing group such as Reform UK, or a left wing organisation like Your Party. In the USA, Donald Trump’s Republican Party can be termed ‘populist’ as might Bernie Sanders’ variety of leftism, and similar examples are found in Europe and elsewhere. Is ‘populism’ simply reformism repackaged for the 21st century?

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion will explore how the concept of ‘populism’ has developed, why it attracts support and what this tells us about capitalist society.

Residential bookings for Summer School have now closed, but the talks will also be run on Zoom.

Friday 21 August 7.15pm—8.45pm Populism As A Keyword 

Speaker: Bill Martin

Saturday 22 August 10:00am—11:30am Rage Against The Dying Of The Right

Speaker: Brian Gardner

2.00pm—3.30pm In Search Of Left-Wing Populism 

Speaker: Paul Bennett

7.15pm—8.45pm Red-Brown Politics In Russia And Beyond

Guest speaker Edmund Griffiths

Sunday 23 August 10.00am—11.30am Should / Could Socialism Be Populist?

Speaker: Paddy Shannon

To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/j/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Proper Gander: Stepping on the platform (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

As anyone with a social media account knows, a price we pay for being able to share our thoughts with a global audience is being open to insults and abuse in reply. People with a prominent online presence, such as influencers and vloggers, attract attacks through making more of their lives available for comment. The messaging forum Tattle Life has threads about various influencers where opinions about them can be posted anonymously. One subject of a thread is GK Barry, who has branched out from running a sex-themed podcast into other media, now including presenting a documentary about Tattle Life for the BBC. GK Barry: Toxic Gossip starts with Barry reading some of the puerile slights written about her on the website, with other people having been victim to worse abuse. She speaks with loved ones of two people who had a presence on Instagram. Richard Davies ran the ‘bowelbro’ video diary of his struggle with cancer, which posters on Tattle Life accused of being faked, even after his death. Princess Dickson took her own life aged 16 after insulting comments about her appearance were repeatedly made on the forum. Her mother, Sophie, and Lisa, Richard Davies’ widow, tried to contact Tattle Life’s moderators about the messages and their impact, with no response.

Tattle Life was launched in 2018, and for many years its owner wasn’t known publicly. In 2023, entrepreneurs Donna and Neil Sands began legal proceedings against the website, claiming libel, harassment and breach of privacy, with the defendant’s identity not disclosed to the Sands. So, they hired a private investigator who discovered the person behind Tattle Life to be Sebastian Bond, later revealed in the press. Before Tattle Life, Bond ran a blog about veganism, whose demise, suggests Barry, made him jealous of other people’s success as influencers. Tattle Life now has nearly 375,000 registered users, with millions more people who just browse its threads. They aren’t only an audience for gossipy messages but also the adverts cluttering up the site. These have generated around £1 million in advertising revenue, according to the documentary. As Lisa says regarding the thread about her husband ‘the footfall to those pages was immense, and for them, that’s money’. So, it is in the site’s financial interest to have contentious threads.

Unfortunately, slurs grab the attention in a more immediate way than a reasoned critique does. It’s doubtful that those who post the most offensive messages on Tattle Life’s threads would repeat them face-to-face with their target. Communicating virtually and anonymously enables people to stir up trouble and cause upset without any personal comeback. Tattle Life’s defenders would say that it holds influencers to account and upholds free speech. In the abstract, this sounds reasonable, but in the real / virtual worlds the context shapes the matter. ‘Free speech’ in capitalism is defined by a legal framework which reflects the prerogatives of the status quo. As Tattle Life is a business, there is a separation between who owns the platform and who uses it, which complicates who owns and is responsible for the content posted there. Even when laws aim to prevent or protect victims, they are only attempts to patch up a system which encourages such problems as defamation and threats. The need to make money is, as always, a factor; here, represented by the site’s income from hosting adverts, which can increase if shocking content attracts more viewers. That a supposed platform for free speech has been mired in secrecy and is driven by money is one of the consequences of the market system.

Recruiting Barry to present a documentary about Tattle Life and the realm of influencers comes across as an attempt by the BBC to court the younger demographic more likely to be scrolling through social media than watching TV. According to Ofcom’s 2025 Media Nations report, only 45 percent of people aged between 16 and 24 switch on any broadcast television in an average week. GK Barry: Toxic Gossip comes across like a primer to introduce this cohort to the documentary format. It follows the usual template of interviews with victims and experts, text of quotes, facts and figures, and the presenter poring over screens between their segments of spiel. Each component is brief so everything fits into the show’s half-hour running time, and perhaps the audience’s expected attention span. Where the format requires a confrontation with the villain of the piece, it ends up as looking quite desperate. The narrative through the programme is Barry’s search for Bond, which includes tracing a location from details in a photo and speaking with his previous neighbours, and culminates with Barry sitting in a car outside his parents’ house and then delivering a letter to them. She doesn’t receive a response from Bond, although Tattle Life’s moderator says ‘for the BBC to include door-stepping harassment of pensioners in the documentary is abhorrent’ in a statement on the forum. They add ‘almost all articles on Tattle Life are misinformation and heavily biased by influencers and their PR who wish to shut down all opinions they dislike’ .

Tattle Life is just one website, which reflects wider issues with the culture of online communication. Social media platforms are run to make money for their owners, who are distanced from those who use or are affected by them. This is built into how they need to operate, which the legal framework tries to facilitate. Ideals of ‘free speech’ have to fit in with this context. The motivation to post ‘toxic gossip’ doesn’t come from social media itself, but from how people are socialised. Having the kind of mindset to want to do this is a result of living in an alienating, divisive environment: hurling insults is an attempt to express some power when someone has little else in their lives. The impact of online abuse on people already vulnerable can be devastating, as the documentary illustrates.

Mike Foster

Trouble at ‘t mill (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Trouble at ‘t mill’ has become a kind of cliché to refer to problems individuals or groups of workers may be having in their place of work. Workplaces are not mills today of course, but the basic ruler-ruled relationship between employer and employee that existed at the time of the mills still applies today. And the same ‘trouble’ still continues to arise, more often than not associated with money and working conditions.

University cuts

And it’s happening currently in what many people might consider an improbable place – institutions of higher education – i.e., universities. Traditionally, work in universities, whether as a teacher, researcher, administrator or anything else, has been considered a relatively secure form of employment. Until 1988 in fact academics had what was known as ‘tenure’ whereby, barring some form of gross misconduct, they could not legally be sacked from their jobs. And even after this, the likelihood of university lecturers losing their jobs remained relatively small for a long time, at least compared with most other areas of employment. But more recently all this has changed. What university employees are now finding is that, as for most other fields of work, they are at significant risk of being declared redundant as their institutions struggle to stay solvent and look to make savings.

In the last couple of years in particular, a whole swathe of universities, from those lower down the pecking order that were once called polytechnics to historic and well-established institutions higher up the scale, have begun declaring deficits – referred to sometimes as ‘black holes’. They are forced, they say, to drastically reduce regular expenditure in what they see as the only effective way – by shedding staff. The term they often use to describe this is ‘reducing the head count’, clearly an attempt to mask the personal impact on the individuals whose lives are suddenly turned upside-down. The main pressure on universities to do this has been the downturn in the number of young people entering into higher education as well as the shortfall of overseas students coming to study in the UK, so denying universities the necessary level of tuition fees to keep them solvent. Examples of institutions currently engaged in making staff cuts and declaring people redundant are Teesside University, Sheffield Hallam, Swansea, Leicester, Nottingham, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

Strike action?

Some universities have done U-turns on declaring redundancies due to the threat of strike action by the lecturers’ union (the UCU – University and College Union), but others have ignored such threats and have gone ahead with dismissing staff despite industrial action. Clearly they view their financial situation as so dire that cutting their long-term wage bill seems more important than the consequences for their reputation of students complaining about not being taught or not receiving their degrees on time. And, at times, universities have openly declared that failing to lower their costs will threaten their very existence. A good example here of how trade unions can sometimes succeed in taming to some extent the imperatives of the financial compete-or-die system all workers (and their employers) live under, but also of the limits of trade union action with the employer simply holding out in the expectation (often realised) that workers are only likely to stay out on strike for as long as they are able to hold out financially themselves.

In the same boat

It also offers a prime example of how the system we live under inevitably threatens with insecurity all those obliged to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary – so the vast majority of any population. Such is the case whichever rung of the salary scale a worker happens to be on. The current crisis in universities provides a suitable microcosm of this. Whether someone works as a porter, a secretary, a technician, an ordinary lecturer or a professor, all are equally likely to find themselves out of a job and having to scramble around to find alternative employment. And for academics in particular finding such employment at the moment is unlikely given the current job market in higher education. As a volunteer union representative in my own institution, I have recently seen a science professor of 22 years standing and international reputation break down in tears and state that his life is destroyed. He had been subjected to a humiliating process of ‘pooling’ and then being informed that, after comparing him with his colleagues, it had been decided that his role was to be ‘deleted’. I have been assisting another colleague who, fearing redundancy and having applied for a job in another institution, received a stock response informing her that they had received over 500 applications to their job advert and that she might hear nothing further regarding her application. She did not.

Legal action?

A common reaction from staff hearing that their employment is to be terminated is to talk about taking legal action via an employment tribunal on grounds of unfair dismissal. But if they go to their trade union for assistance in this, they are likely to be told that, if the employer has taken the necessary steps laid down in law – and they usually have – then their dismissal is unlikely to be considered ‘unfair’. The reality, of course, is that, regardless of any tweaks made to employment regulations by governments (something that is happening currently), the system will continue to be weighted in favour of the employer and to give them the upper hand, as it must in the wage-slave society we live in. So unless the employer makes a mess of things by not going through the right motions, then any legal appeal against redundancy is likely to fail. And even if such an appeal is successful, the court will not order reinstatement but only financial compensation, which is often a dismal amount and in any case cannot in law exceed a maximum of the claimant’s annual salary. If legal action is attempted, furthermore, any claimant can expect to wait a long time indeed for their case to be heard. One of the criticisms of the employment tribunal system recently highlighted by the Institute of Employment Rights was that people bringing unfair dismissal claims are waiting up to five years for their case to come to court.

Employment insecurity

Finally, in the higher education sector at least, a further negative consequence of the redundancy exercises employers go in for to reduce their costs is that these inevitably signal a deterioration in working conditions for those employees still in post. Despite the terminology of ‘deletion of role’ that employers often use, everyone who works in universities knows that the work (or at least some of the work) of staff who have been dismissed will still need to be done, which inevitably means longer hours and increased pressure for the remaining staff. Though these staff will be breathing a sigh of relief that they still have their jobs, nevertheless they know they will be called upon to work longer hours and more intensively to cover that work. And they know that, if they don’t come up to the mark in this, they may well be the ones for the high jump next time the employer sees it as necessary to embark upon ‘reducing the head count’.

What’s for sure, finally, is that no solution to this kind of merry-go-round in any sector of employment is to be found in seeking to change employment law or giving employees more ‘rights’ – or anything like that. This is the case whether it’s a sector focused directly on realising profit for its owners or shareholders or one that is part of the infrastructure of the profit-making system, such as education. All forms of employment are locked into the system of buying and selling and production for profit, together with the insecurity and upsets it causes for workers through its constant need to reorganise in order to adapt to capitalism’s economic conditions. And this will continue until those workers decide collectively to do away with that system and replace it with one of common ownership, voluntary work and free access to all the goods and services they produce – what we call socialism.

Howard Moss

What we want (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What we want. A moneyless, stateless, classless society of common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources. Production solely for human need, not profit. No wages, no money, no markets, no governments as we know them.

How we get there. Not through vanguards, coups, or insurrection. Through a majority of the working class consciously choosing socialism. Where parliamentary democracy exists, we’ll use it but Parliament isn’t the goal, it’s the mechanism. The working class takes control of the state machinery, converts it from ‘instrument of oppression’ to ‘agent of emancipation’, to abolish it.

What we reject.

• Reformism: no palliatives, no ‘making capitalism nicer’. Every reform leaves the system intact.
• Leninism: no vanguard party, no dictatorship of the proletariat, no ‘transitional period’.
• Nationalisation: state ownership isn’t socialism—it’s just state capitalism.
• All other parties: Labour, Greens, Communists, Trotskyists—all aim to administer capitalism in one form or another.

Our core insight. Capitalism cannot be reformed into socialism. You can’t regulate greed into generosity. The system’s basic drive—accumulation of capital—makes ecological destruction, inequality, and war inevitable. Only abolishing the system itself works.

Our method – education and publicity. No stunts, no violence, no shortcuts. We believe workers must understand and want socialism before it can work. A socialist society run by people who don’t understand socialism would collapse or be captured by authoritarians.

Our slogan – world socialism or nothing. The SPGB founded in 1904 is Marxism with none of the 20th-century add-ons: no Lenin, no Trotsky, no Stalin, no reformist gradualism. Just the original recipe: common ownership, majority consciousness, democratic revolution, then freedom.

Mud slinging (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you ever go on social media sites that discuss Marx, it’s likely that you’ll come across a post that claims to refute/debunk his ideas. One of the common charges against Marx is that his theory of value, based on labour-time, is untenable because not all labour produces value. The evidence for this? The mud pie.

Now it’s true that, however many mud pies you make, however much labour-time you expend on that task, you won’t create any value. So surely, Marx got it wrong…. And if his theory of value falls, so does the entire edifice of Marx’s economics.

But here’s why the mud pie argument doesn’t work. References below are to Capital Volume 1.

First, we ought to remind ourselves that, at root, Marx is dealing with an issue that is key to human existence: the labour process, by which ‘Nature’s material [is] adapted by a change of form to the wants of man’ (chapter 7 section 1), a process which creates useful things, otherwise known as use-values. At a certain time in human history the results of this process take the form of the commodity.

To drive home the point, a commodity is ‘an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another’ (chapter 1, section 1).

When the commodity appears in history, so too does value and ‘Value is independent of the particular use-value by which it is borne, but it must be embodied in a use value of some kind’ (chapter 7 section 2).

Lastly, from chapter 8 ‘Value exists only in articles of utility, in objects’.

The takeaway message: Marx’s theory applies to human beings carrying out productive activity to satisfy real needs and wants, not to a child making mud pies (or sandcastles).

By the way, the people who put forwards the mud pie argument have plainly never even opened a copy of Capital, let alone read or understood it. The only reason for dealing with this infantile guff in the Socialist Standard is that the argument re-appears regularly online, presumably on the assumption that if you keep throwing mud, some of it will stick.

Budgie.

Workers don’t control political power (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The state presents itself as a neutral arbiter, a set of institutions that balances competing interests, responds to democratic pressure, and governs in the common good. This is an illusion.

 The state is not neutral. It is the organised power of the ruling class. Its courts, police, military, and legal apparatus exist primarily to protect property relations, to guarantee that those who own the means of production continue to own them, and that those who don’t must continue to sell their labour-power to survive.

The wage system: concentrating wealth and power simultaneously

This is the mechanism at the heart of everything. Workers are paid less than the value they produce, the difference is appropriated by those who own the means of production. This isn’t occasional exploitation or the result of individual greed. It’s how the system functions by design.

And here’s the critical point: wealth and power are not separate things. Money is power, directly and immediately. Accumulated capital buys political influence, funds media outlets, finances lobbying operations, endows universities, and shapes the terms of public debate. Every pound extracted from the wage relationship doesn’t just enrich an owner, it widens the power gap between owner and worker. Wealth concentrates, and with it the ability to shape society in the interests of the wealthy.

The wage system therefore performs a double function simultaneously: it extracts wealth upward and concentrates political power upward at exactly the same rate. These are not two separate processes. They are one process with two consequences.

The anger this produces

Most working-class people don’t articulate this in political terms. But they feel it, viscerally, daily, in ways that produce real rage.

The nurse who works twelve-hour shifts and can’t afford to heat her home properly while energy company executives collect eight-figure bonuses. The warehouse worker tracked by an algorithm, disciplined for toilet breaks, earning just enough to survive while the company posts record profits. The young person who does everything right, works hard, studies, plays by the rules and still cannot afford to rent a decent flat, let alone buy one. The family that chooses between food and bills at the end of the month while being told the economy is performing well.

This is not bad luck. It is the system working exactly as intended.

The frustration deepens when people turn to politics for relief and find the same story. A new government arrives promising change. Within months it is managing the same constraints, making the same concessions to capital, explaining why things cannot move as fast as promised. The cycle repeats. The sense that the game is rigged, that no matter how you vote, nothing fundamental shifts, is not cynicism. It is an accurate reading of how power actually works.

When anger is misdirected

That anger is real and legitimate. But without a clear analysis of where it comes from, it gets captured and redirected. At migrants. At benefit claimants. At a remote cultural elite. At any target that doesn’t threaten the underlying system.

The worker who resents his neighbour for claiming housing benefit while a landlord extracts half his wage in rent has had his anger pointed in exactly the wrong direction. The voter who turns to a nationalist strongman because mainstream politics has failed them is expressing genuine grievance through a vehicle that will deepen their exploitation while appearing to challenge it.

This misdirection isn’t accidental. Concentrated wealth funds the media, the think tanks, and the political movements that perform this redirection. It is one of the functions that money-as-power performs most effectively.

The vote and its limits

Workers can vote. In many countries they won that right through bitter struggle. But voting periodically for competing sets of managers of the capitalist system is not political power. Governments change; the underlying economic structure does not. Whichever party takes office inherits the same constraints, bond markets, capital flight, corporate lobbying, and the basic requirement that the economy remains profitable for investors. Policy operates within those limits or faces immediate economic punishment.

The wealthy don’t need to buy every politician or rig every election. They don’t have to. When economic power is sufficiently concentrated, the range of politically possible options narrows automatically. The system polices itself.

The structural problem

Economic power can precede and shape political power. Those who control investment, production, and employment set the terms within which governments operate. A government that seriously threatens property rights finds capital withdrawn, currency attacked, and media turned hostile almost immediately. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s the structural logic of a system where production is privately controlled.

Reform and its ceiling

Reforms, like better healthcare and labour protections, can sometimes be won. These matter. But they are concessions extracted under pressure, not transfers of power. And they are reversible, as decades of austerity have demonstrated. The ceiling on reform is the point at which it begins to threaten profitability. Beyond that point, the state’s coercive functions become more visible.

The conclusion

The anger felt by working people is not irrational. It is the rational response to a system that extracts their labour, concentrates the proceeds as wealth and power in a minority’s hands, offers them a vote every few years as a substitute for genuine agency, and then blames them when they lose faith in the process.

Real political power for workers would mean controlling the conditions of their own lives, the economy, production, distribution. That requires not managing capitalism better but replacing it with common ownership and democratic control. As long as the wage system stands, wealth will continue to flow upward and power with it. Everything short of abolishing that relationship leaves economic power, and therefore real political power, in the hands of a minority.

Jake Ambrose (Australia)

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