The Catholic Church and the Spanish Workers (1936)

From the October 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the civil war drags on through its third month, many things stand out even more clearly than at the beginning. The rebels lack popular support in most parts of Spain but the outcome does not depend on popular support. It is fighting strength that counts. Correspondents of several British newspapers, including the Times (August 26th and September 4th), have reported that a majority of the conscript soldiers in the rebel armies, and the mass of workers and peasants behind the rebel lines would be . disposed to desert to the Government side if given the opportunity. The rebel commanders, however, take care not to let the opportunity arise and when, as happened in the Alcazar at Toledo, rebel men, women and children tried to give themselves up, the rebel commanders did not hesitate to slaughter them, women and children as well as men—“a fusillade from the insurgents cut them down”—so wrote an eyewitness, Mr. Harold Pemberton, correspondent of the Daily Express (September 21st). The rebels dare not rely on conscripts but they can rely on their mercenary Moorish troops for as long as the money lasts. The position, therefore, is that the Government forces are being slowly strangled under the combined pressure of foreign Governments, mercenary troops, and lavish supplies of money and munitions. If the money and the munitions continue then the rebels will prove, as has been proved before, that a military force can, for a time at least, dragoon a hostile civil population by sheer ruthlessness. How ruthless the Military-Catholic rebels are has been exposed in an earlier despatch from Harold Pemberton, published in the Daily Express on August 27th.

Basing his statements on what he had actually seen with the rebel armies, he wrote: —

While the Communists are committing atrocities, the rebels are killing wholesale, mathematically and methodically—as a military expedient. No one must be left alive as a possible threat to the rear of their motorised columns. There is no attempt at a trial. Killings in Seville average 30 to 40 a day. After Merida was captured 1,000 were killed. Village killings average 10 to 15 a day—until the supply of victims is exhausted. It is estimated that there will be half a million deaths before peace comes . . . On leaving Merida with Photographer Tovey we were offered “Communist ears” as souvenirs.

It is no wonder that the rebels in due course expelled a number of British journalists, including the correspondents of the Times, Morning Post and Daily Express. They were anxious that the world should not know how they carried on their fight for “ patriotism and religion.”

It is well that workers should take notice of this further example of the ruthlessness of a propertied class fighting to retain its privileged position. The lesson to be learned from it is not that workers should try to emulate their savagery but that we should realise that while power is in the hands of a panic-stricken ruling class they will stop at no atrocity to gain their ends.

The Catholic Church Commits Suicide

Forefront among those who glory in the rebellion, justify the rebel atrocities, or seek to blacken the Government with misrepresentations are the Catholic Church in Spain, the Pope, and the bulk of the prominent Catholics in England along with their Press. The Universe has vied with the Daily Mail in gutter journalism. The Catholic Bishops, like Bishop Amigo of Southwark, have assisted in a widespread campaign to whitewash the rebels. Bishop Amigo was able to discover that they and their Moorish mercenaries “are fighting for God and their country” to prevent its “total destruction" (Manchester Guardian, September 4th). The Catholic Tablet, wholeheartedly on the side of the rebels but above the disreputable behaviour of such papers as the Universe, was nearer the truth when it admitted (August 1st) that the rebellion was begun by the rebels for “economic and class reasons ” and could be broadly described “as a class war.” The Tablet, however, was more far-seeing than Bishop Amigo, and has backed the rebels with a certain amount of misgiving: fortunately, a well-founded misgiving, for the civil war is going to do the Catholic Church in Spain more harm than 30 years of propaganda. Whether the rebels win or lose there are millions of Spanish workers and peasants who will never forget that when they tried to climb out of hideous poverty the Catholic Church helped the landowners and military leaders to grind them down again, by force of arms and with the aid of Moorish troops and every device of modern warfare. For every Spanish worker who hated the Catholic Church before the rebellion for its century-long exploitation of the poor and defence of oppression, there will be ten in future.

One Catholic and Protestant lie needs to be nailed down, that is that the Government forces wantonly organised attacks on non-combatant Priests and Nuns. The Catholic Church right from the beginning openly sided with the rebels and gave them every material and other support in its power. Does the Catholic Church, in face of that, really expect to enjoy the rights of a neutral? And having taken the side of the rebels against the Government and its working-class supporters, does the Catholic Church expect to be received everywhere with open arms? Nevertheless there has not been a scrap of published evidence that the Spanish Government encouraged or condoned any such attacks. Where attacks were made they were the actions of individuals or groups, blindly hitting out at those whom they regarded as their enemies.

One argument used by the defenders of the Pope is that he protests always and everywhere against attacks on Priests. It is only a pretence, as can be shown from very recent history. Where and when did the Pope ever protest against the killing of Abyssinian Christian Priests by the Pope’s friends, the Government of Italy? It was reported in the Daily Telegraph on September 2nd that the Bishop of Dessie “has been shot by a firing squad on the market-place, the chief square of Addis Ababa.” His crime was precisely that of many Spanish Priests, “inciting a group of Abyssinian warriors ” to resist the Italians. When and where did the Pope protest? Or the Universe? Or the Daily Mail?

Before leaving the subject of the Catholic Church it must be said that a minority of Catholics in this country who saw the economic and class character of the Spanish conflict have resisted the mass pressure of the Catholic authorities and have continued to stand on the side of the republicans. In view of the difficulties of their position the fact that they stood their ground deserves recognition.

A wider problem, of which the reactionary nature of the Catholic Church is only a part, is the power of the capitalist Press and political parties to stampede large numbers of workers whenever an issue affecting property rights arises.. The trade unions which voted money for the relief of the victims of the rebellion were immediately faced with opposition from members misled by the Rothermere newspapers and others of like character. In passing, it is important to notice that condemnation of the Daily Mail did not come only from sources sympathetic to the Spanish Government but also from the Conservative Spectator, which charged the Mail with exhibiting ”a colour-blindness which leaves atrocities invisible except when Reds commit them.”

There is only one remedy for the evil of lying, propaganda. Changing the policy of those who control the Press is out of the question. All that can be done is the slow work of enlightening the workers, teaching them to discriminate and apply their own critical judgment to everything presented to them. Only when the workers are immune to the effects of lying propaganda—and not before— will the evil cease.

One lesson taught again by the events in Spain, that can never be emphasised too strongly, is the danger of going ahead in advance of what is justified by the degree of understanding and unity achieved by the mass of the population. The Spanish workers were, and still are, divided by their outlook, and by their allegiance to rival organisations. This encouraged the rebels to begin the rebellion and now, day by day, it enables them to win battles owing to the terrible lack of co-ordination among the Government militias, born of mutual mistrust as well as of inexperience. One ominous feature is that the Spanish Fascists are now setting out to win over the Syndicalists to their side. Imitating Mussolini, who successfully won over thousands of Syndicalists to the Fascist ranks in Italy, the Spanish Fascists are calling their Movement a National Syndicalist one, and giving it aims such as those Hitler used with big effect to gain working-class support in Germany. They appeal, particularly, to the Syndicalists’ traditional opposition to Parliament and political action. Should this succeed, Spain may sooner or later go Fascist with the backing of large numbers of workers, as did Italy and Germany. Here, again, the only remedy is the slow one of Socialist education, and until the necessary preparatory work has been performed any attempt to force the pace spells reaction—on top of failure—from which it may take years to recover.

Edgar Hardcastle

Here and There: "Socialism’’ in Russia (1936)

The Here and There column from the October 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Socialism’’ in Russia

 

Mr. Maisky, the Russian Ambassador, recently addressed the Liberal Summer School on Russian foreign policy. In the course of his lecture he said: —

But at the same time we fully realise that we are still very far from our achieving our goal. We are only half way there, and it will take decades and decades to complete the construction of the Socialist society, which at a later stage will be transformed into Communist society. This is a very long development which will absorb the efforts of more than any generation.—(Manchester Guardian, August 3rd.) 

Communists and others who expected the millennium in Russia after the successive Five-Year Plans might note.

 

Britain for the British

 

A newspaper comments:—

British Equity, the actors' Trade Union, has won a big victory in the case of an American show which is shortly to open in London.

Equity insisted that an equal number of English girls be put into the show. Failing that, the permits would be opposed.

At the present time, when there are so many people out of work in the theatres, the action of Equity and its result cannot be too highly commended. 

The newspaper was the Daily Worker (August 10th, 1936).

There is a much bigger victory awaiting the workers of all countries, and when there are fewer misguided reformers to over-emphasise the importance of minor things, such as this, the workers will begin to understand why and how they should obtain it.

Straws in the Wind

Sir Abe Bailey, one of the principal Transvaal (S. Africa) mine owners, is a staunch patriot and imperialist—which, in the circumstances, is not very surprising. He writes to The Times (August 6th): —

I should like to see our National Government still further strengthened by the inclusion of the best elements of the Liberal and Labour parties and of some of those distinguished supporters of the present Government who are not members of the Cabinet. Such a Government, pinning its faith to the patriotism of its people, would be strong enough to tell the truth to' Englishmen (always at their best when up against it) and to take those measures—I believe conscription should be one of them—which will alone give security to this island and its oversea communications.

Sir Abe Bailey sees the rise of other imperialist powers in Africa, where he has immense industrial and financial interests, and is obviously nervous. We do not doubt that if the Empire were faced with an international crisis the “ best elements ” of the Liberal and Labour parties would show their willingness to join and support the Government in defending capitalism.

Communists in Canada

According to the Winnipeg Free Press (July 30th), Manitoba has had the honour of electing the first Communist M.P. on the American continent. The newspaper report says: —

Litterick became the first Communist to be elected to a provincial or state assembly on the American Continent and the second member of the party to become a member of parliament or legislature in the British Empire.

Should the illusion prevail that Communists abroad differ from those in England in their methods of vote-catching we quote from Mr. Litterick’s election programme.

• Provision of work for unemployed at trade union rates of pay.
• Clearance of slums, home construction and other necessary work.
• Abolition of the two per cent. wage tax.
• Extension and more rigid enforcement of the Minimum Wage Act.
• Provincial Health Act to cover all with incomes under 12,000 per year.
• Old Age Pensions of $50.00 per month, payable at 60.
• Extension of municipal franchise to all residents over 21 years.
• Extension of municipal democracy—abolition of municipal administrators.
• Adequate system of vocational and technical training.
• Provincial grants for scholarships and subsidies for needy students.
• Opposition to all attempts at railroad amalgamation.
• Five year moratorium on interest and principal of all provincial indebtedness.
• A steeply graduated increase in the corporation income tax.
• A steeply graduated increase in the income tax on all incomes over $2,000 per year, with adequate exemptions for all dependents.
• Capital levy on surplus reserve funds of corporations and banks.

There is no mention in it of Socialism or Communism—of course; nothing which the average supporter of capitalism, with very little adjustment, would oppose; and much which has already been applied by Mussolini and Hitler, such as the “ Capital Levy . . .” and “ A steeply graduated increase in the income tax. . . .”

Harry Waite

New Premises Fund (1936)

Party News from the October 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

Again we have to remind readers that we need money urgently for our New Premises Fund. When the present renewal runs out, in about six months, we shall be faced with the need to secure other and larger headquarters. Our freedom of choice will be strictly limited by the amount of money we have in hand to enable us to meet removal and furnishing costs, and to pay the higher rent until our extended activities make it possible to pay the higher rent out of current income.

Send your donations to the Treasurer, 42, Great Dover Street, S. E. 1.

A list of donations is printed below: -

Meetings, Lectures, etc. (1936)

Party News from the October 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outdoor Propaganda Meetings (1936)

Party News from the October 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

Green battle (2026)

Book Review from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Green Socialist. Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future. By Russell Warfield. Pluto Press, October 2006.

It is an odd title since Polanski does not claim to be a socialist, at least not openly. Warfield’s justification for calling him one is that the policies Polanski supports are the same as those advocated by others who do claim to be socialists, such as taxing the rich to pay for measures to benefit the mass of the population, public control of utilities, and rent controls. Polanski himself claims only to be a left-winger who wants the Green Party to be a left-wing party rather than the centrist party prioritising reforms to protect the environment that it has historically been.

Warfield is unstinting in his praise for Polanski and the ‘ecopopulist’ platform on which he stood to win the contest last September to become the Leader of the Green Party which, he says:

‘involved communications which foregrounded policies that spoke to people’s immediate, material needs; acknowledging and feeling the public’s justified anger but directing it towards hope; shaping strong narratives with clear enemies; and building a mass party which was powered by a broader social base of vibrant movements’.

What, you might ask, has blaming the super-rich and taxing them to pay for meeting people’s ‘immediate, material needs’ better got to do with the environment?

Warfield argues that this always was the vocation of the Green Party, describing how it always did have a policy on social and economic matters as well as on the environment. It is true that on paper it did, but its main plank was always the environment; that was why it was set up, why people voted for it and why people joined it. Its other policies, which Warfield tries hard to interpret as prefiguring ‘a principled left-wing offer which transcended narrow environmental interests’, have varied over the years from advocating self-sufficient regional communities to local currencies to protect local businesses. It went into the 2015 general election promising bank reform based on the currency crank idea that banks create money from thin air (it wanted to prevent them from supposedly doing this). In the 2024 general election it promised a Green New Deal which, Warfield says, ‘called for Keynesian investment to stimulate the economy through the creation of green jobs across renewables, home insulation and so on’, as if Keynesianism hadn’t been tried and failed.

Warfield himself does claim to be a socialist, an ‘ecosocialist’, but is pretty vague as to what this means. He seems to envisage ‘democratic control of the economy’ that would give priority to producing and selling what people needed rather than being oriented towards ‘perpetual economic growth’. In any event, the book does show the illusions held by those within the Green Party who call themselves socialist.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Blowing up the global financial system (2026)

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

On 24 July US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the US  would be taking measures against any individual, bank or organisation that helped Iran engage in international trade but also secondary sanctions against any state that continued to trade with Iran. Asked why these measures weren’t going to be applied immediately, Bessent replied ‘Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?’. It was a good question, but an evasive answer even if it did at least show an understanding of what might happen if secondary sanctions were strictly enforced.

Capitalism depends on international trade, and international trade requires a generally accepted means of payment. Originally gold was this ‘universal equivalent’ that could be exchanged against any other product of labour of equivalent value. The pound sterling, the dollar and the currencies of the other major states trading and investing internationally were convertible on demand into a fixed amount of gold.

This Gold Standard was suspended in 1914 and never fully recovered, with Britain going off it in 1931 and the United States in 1933. It was revived after the Second World War in a modified form known as the Gold Exchange Standard where national currencies were tied to a fixed amount of a national currency that was convertible into gold at a fixed rate. That currency was the US dollar and was convertible at a rate of 1 ounce of gold = 35 dollars. It meant that a unit of a national currency could be expressed as a fixed amount of gold.

This system ended in 1971 when the United States stopped agreeing to buy gold at a fixed rate. However, the dollar remained the main means of international payment and the world’s main reserve currency, which central banks hold for international payments for trade and investment, and which they can use to buy their own currency to try to maintain its rate of exchange.

This puts the United States in a privileged position. Other states’ dollar reserves are held in the form of interest-bearing US Treasury Bills, which means that those states are in effect lending money to the US. In fact it is said that these loans not only cover the US’s trade deficit but also provide it with the money to sustain its military might.

It also puts the US in a position to use sanctions as a foreign policy tool, penalising or threatening to penalise individuals, businesses, and other states by excluding them from dollar transactions if they fail to comply. Trump evidently thinks that it is a good idea to use this power even though it undermines the dollar’s reliability. Whether he will use it to impose secondary sanctions against China for refusing to stop trading with Iran remains to be seen. Banning China from paying with dollars really would ‘blow up the global payments system’.

Other states are taking note of how, from their point of view, the US is abusing its position in the global payments system and have been taking precautions, such as by paying with other currencies and by holding more of their reserves as gold.

Goldman Sachs noted (28 August) that ‘central banks have been diversifying their holdings using gold; which is considered less likely to be frozen than reserves held in foreign currencies’.

Gold may no longer be the money-commodity but it is still a store of value because it’s a product of labour. No interest is paid on gold reserves and gold is not a stable store of value since its price fluctuates up and down as a result of capitalists speculating in it, but at least it is not an asset that another state can stop you using or use to exact compliance.

Material World: Chairman Gonzalo: Leader and Butcher (2026)

The Material World Column from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month a forum for ‘socialists’ asked you to light a candle. ‘5 Years Ago Today, Chairman Gonzalo of the Communist Party of Peru Died In State Custody’. Died in state custody. The way it’s framed you’d imagine a prisoner of conscience, a man punished for loving the workers too much.

Five years after Abimael Guzmán died in a prison cell, his followers want you to remember him as a martyr.

The Workers?

Start with Lucanamarca. April 3, 1983. A Quechua-speaking village of about 2,600 people in the Andes, mostly farmers. Shining Path fighters descended on Lucanamarca and surrounding settlements with machetes, axes, knives and guns, and killed 69 people. More than twenty of them were children. The youngest was six months old.

One witness, Orfelinda Quincho, lost nine relatives that day, including her mother and son. Another woman, Heraclides Misaico, lost her husband and four children aged nine, seven, five and four. Families were so terrified of reprisals they would only formally report the massacre to Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación or CVR) eighteen years later, in 2001.

When his party’s leadership were confronted with the massacre, Guzmán didn’t denounce it. He called it bad politics, said it could have ‘grave political consequences’, and disgustingly ‘Excesses can be accepted’. Dead children are an excess.

Lucanamarca was not an aberration. It was the method. The CVR found that fighters were ordered to hack victims to death with machetes to save ammunition. It found the movement deliberately provoked state reprisals against the very population it claimed to be fighting for, without caring what that suffering cost. It found proclamations calling for a ‘blood toll’, talking about ‘inducing genocide’, and announcing in 1988 that ‘the triumph of the revolution will cost a million deaths’.

The toll, in the end, came to an estimated 69,280 dead and disappeared. Seventy-five per cent of them spoke Quechua or another indigenous language. The Shining Path killed more of them than anyone else: the CVR attributed 54 per cent of the deaths reported to it to Shining Path, the largest share of the killing, ahead even of the state’s own counter-terror. Around 600,000 people were driven from their homes.

The poorest people in Peru, indigenous peasants, the constituency a people’s movement claims to speak for, were murdered in greater numbers by the self-proclaimed vanguard than by the army. The CVR stated: Shining Path ‘sees classes, not individuals’ and this led to ‘its absolute lack of respect for the human person and for the right to life, including that of its militants’.

This vanguard ate its own children. In the CVR’s words, it had ‘contempt for life, punished differences, and demanded full submission’. Young people who joined out of genuine revulsion at Peru’s injustice were locked into a vertical, totalitarian structure. Many of them died ‘uselessly and cruelly’.

A plague on both their houses

In 1986, the government of Alan García sent troops into Lima’s prisons and massacred hundreds of Shining Path prisoners. Torture and disappearances were routine. The army would answer village massacres with village massacres of its own: 123 indigenous peasants were killed at Putis in 1984. Both forces competed to terrorise the same countryside.

Guzmán did die in state custody. But the Leninist tradition he claimed, the tradition that says the workers’ movement must seize the state, has no retort, because the state is also the problem. Guzmán spent his life building a state of his own. The whole tragic logic of vanguardism, the party, the chairman, the militarised elite claiming to act on behalf of a working class deemed too backward to act for itself, reproduces the division between rulers and ruled inside the revolutionary movement itself. And movements built on that division end as rulers, every time.

Peru’s government cremated his body in secret and scattered the ashes, fearing a pilgrimage to the shrine of a monster.

Let’s remember. Remember Lucanamarca. Remember the six-month-old baby and the woman whose five-year-old was killed alongside her father. Remember the 69,280 dead. And when someone tells you a chairman is coming to set you free, remember what the chairmanship actually costs and who pays.

A.T.

Revving a car with a dead engine (2026)

From the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Vote for hope’, proclaimed an election leaflet distributed in Lambeth for the council elections in May, ‘and elect Green councillors who will stand up for our communities, challenge decisions that don’t work for residents, and push for a fairer, greener future across Lambeth.’ In the event, enough did to allow the Green Party to assume control of the council. Martin Abrams, who had been elected a Labour councillor in the 2022 elections but defected to the Greens over Gaza, became the Council Leader.

The Greens have a chance here, then, to put into practice Zack Polanski’s eco-populism, with its promises to increase wages for everyone, reverse the ‘march downwards in the balance of power and wealth from those who produce the wealth and do the work to those who profit from it’, and ‘address the massive imbalance in our workplaces and give control back to workers’. If not all that, at least some move in that direction locally.

On being elected leader of the group of Green councillors, Abrams declared:

‘We will put power in the hands of residents, workers and the community’, adding ‘things can, and will, get better’.

This echoed an election promise made on Instagram that: ‘We’ll fight to reverse austerity, empowering workers and the community we serve.’

What power? 

These are extravagant promises. The trouble is that local authorities don’t have much power to give to ‘residents and workers’. They are branches of the central government with severely limited powers, and with councillors being essentially elected civil servants.

Local councils are charged by the central government with collecting waste, providing library services and being responsible for public health and some areas of transport, housing and education, and with caring for children and adults who can’t cope on their own (which in fact makes up more than two-thirds of their current spending). The money to pay for all this comes from central government grants, council tax and business rates.

Councils are obliged to balance their budget and can’t borrow money to finance current services. They have no control over what the central government gives them and can’t fix or change business rates. They can’t increase council tax by more than 5 percent unless authorised to do so by a referendum. They can raise some money from fees and fines, from parking, yellow box junctions and dropping litter, which is what they have been increasingly doing to try to compensate a little for the lack of income from other sources.

Basically, then, if the central government is forced to pursue a policy of austerity — as giving priority to profit-making compels them to, especially in periods of low capital accumulation — local councils have to accept this and apply it at local level. In this sense, running a local council is a poisoned chalice for any party promising to improve the material conditions of its residents.    Rather than ending austerity, they have to apply it. Lambeth residents and workers can’t be expected to regard as a benefit being empowered to share in making decisions to impose austerity on themselves, as that’s what the ‘participatory budgeting’ mentioned in passing by the Greens would amount to.

The Greens haven’t had much experience of running councils but in Lambeth they are about to find out what this involves, as in other London boroughs such as Hackney and Lewisham where there are Green elected mayors.

Empty promise

The promise to ‘reverse austerity’ is an empty one as no local council has the power to do this, either legally or economically. The Greens’ defence could be, if they were quibbling lawyers, that they didn’t actually promise to reverse austerity but merely to ‘fight to reverse’ it. Which is not the same. All this ‘fight’ would amount to is set out in the council Leader’s responsibilities on the council website:

‘Councillor Abrams will stand against austerity, campaigning for increased funding for local authorities to arrest the ongoing decline in services and provide better outcomes for Lambeth residents’.

The remit of one of the council’s cabinet, councillor Michael Chessum, the member for ‘Economy, Cost of Living and Empowered Communities’, is set out as:

‘Spearheading the council’s campaign to restore funding from central government and reverse austerity’.

Anybody can say they ‘stand against’ austerity and that they will lobby for more money from the central government (all councils and the parties running them are doing this), but such a campaign is up against the fact the central government has to limit its spending so as not to cut into profits or worsen the conditions for profit-making. In short, such a campaign has no chance of success. To give the impression that it might succeed is to encourage illusions about what is possible under capitalism. The Green councillors may well be sincere in their belief but that just means that they are deluding themselves.

Losing battle

At least one of them, Councillor Chessum, seems to realise that the council on its own cannot do much to get the central government to pay more to local councils. He only joined the Green Party in June last year. Previously he had been active in the Labour Party as a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, having been for a while the treasurer of Momentum, the leftwing ginger group within the party. In his announcement last June ‘Why I’m joining the Green Party’ he wrote:

‘The biggest challenge, however, is not in the electoral sphere – or rather, it is about how the electoral sphere connects to the real world. Strikes, protests and community campaigns are the raw material for political change. Attempting a radical breakthrough without them is like revving a car with a dead engine. (…)  Social and industrial struggle must be viewed as a primary method for doing politics. Without a mobilised local community, left wing councillors will be fighting a losing battle. Without a mass movement engaged in something other than electioneering, electoral projects lack a legacy’.

Whether or not he expected that, within a year of writing this, he would find himself a local council cabinet member charged with ‘spearheading’ a campaign ‘to restore funding from central government and reverse austerity’, he is now in that position. If he still agrees with what he wrote then, he is committed to the view that merely lobbying the government for more money won’t get anywhere. In his words, it would just be ‘revving a car with a dead engine’, a good description of reformist activity generally.

Logically, too, he ought to use his official position to mobilise workers and residents to back up with strikes the council’s campaign to get the central government to pay the council more so that it can ‘reverse austerity’. Both — the council encouraging strikes and workers prepared to go on strike for this — are highly unlikely, not to say pie in the sky. Workers realise, even if left-wing activists don’t, that they do not have the power to force the government to grant councils more funding. If the rate of abstention from voting in local council elections — on average some two-thirds of those entitled to vote — is anything to go by, many also realise that local councils don’t have the power to do this either. That leaves Councillor Chessum ‘fighting a losing battle’.

The way out

But even if there was a mass movement behind the council’s lobbying for more funding, that wouldn’t increase the prospect of success. The central government wouldn’t make more money available as that would mean having to cut into profits and risking an economic downturn that could lead to them being voted out of office. The fact is that, if the functioning of the capitalist profit economy at a particular time requires austerity in terms of limiting government spending, nothing can reverse this, not even the overthrow of the government by a general strike or mass uprising, as those further to the left than the Greens advocate. The new left-wing regime would still have to maintain austerity.

Leftists, which the Greens under Polanski are aspiring to be, mislead workers when they say that the government or local council can make them better off. They can’t reverse austerity and they can’t empower communities. As the saying has it, changing governments changes nothing.

There is a way out but not within capitalism (and certainly not state capitalism). It’s to end the minority ownership of productive resources and production for profit. A framework of common ownership and democratic control is the only way to directly satisfy people’s needs. Socialism is the only hope of the workers, indeed of humanity.

Adam Buick

Welfare? (2026)

Book Review from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

No More Deaths by Welfare. By China Mills. Pluto Press, 2026

We’ve long argued two things that liberal society finds unbearable: capitalism will not be reformed into decency, and the Labour Party is and always has been a party of capitalism. China Mills does not set out to confirm our case, but confirm it she does, with forensic force.

The book’s subject is the lethal machinery of Britain’s social security system, which Mills shows is ‘violent by design’, a department whose founding logic is the policing of who is and is not deemed deserving. For decades, reformists of every stripe have assumed the welfare state was a fortress to be defended, and that its cruelties were aberrations to be lobbied away. Mills demolishes this. The system’s violence is not a malfunction but its function: to discipline the working class and enforce the labour market. A machine built to do that will not be petitioned into kindness, and whatever the author’s own politics, the book lands at a conclusion that socialists have long drawn: that begging for reforms is a dead-end, and a drain on working-class energies.

This is most visible in the people Mills documents. The book draws on more than a decade of activism led by disabled people and bereaved families: the Deaths by Welfare Project, DPAC, the Black Triangle Campaign, benefits defence workshops and campaigns like Joy Dove’s fight for an inquiry into her daughter Jodey’s death. What unites them is a hard learned realism. These are people who know that the state is not a neutral arbiter to be reasoned with. Sanctioned, assessed, driven to despair, many of them have neither the health nor the illusion necessary for reformist lobbying. Survival itself, mutual aid practised from bed, keeping each other alive, naming the dead, is their politics. In class terms, this is the working class relying on itself rather than on its alleged representatives. Yet self-organisation that stays within capitalism can at best hold the line, it cannot end the conditions that make welfare a weapon.

The book’s condemnation of the Labour Party is unsparing and correct. The sharpest edges of this regime have repeatedly been delivered not by Tory ‘villains’ but by Labour governments and Labour ministers, administering the demands of capital while wrapping them in the language of compassion. Mills situates this in its global context: the book documents how South American countries, as conditions of international loans, were forced to liberalise and open up their social security systems to private profit, using the same structural adjustment playbook that has handed British welfare functions to private contractors.

So read No More Deaths by Welfare as what it is: documentary evidence of a class war that never ends, being fought on the battlefield of assessment centres and computer terminals, by agents of the state, the DWP, private contractors, and the governments of both parties who enabled them. Mills ends by calling for the collective imagination of ‘welfare justice’. The disabled activists in these pages, who learned through bitter experience that they cannot rely on the state or its parliamentary managers, are closer to that understanding than any reform movement. Our task is to finish the argument.

A.T.

Letter: State Capitalism (1960)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

State Capitalism

After coming into contact with the SPGB through the pages of the American Western Socialist, I am left with the following doubt. Does the SPGB wish to see a regime of full scale nationalisation (i.e.. State Capitalism) instituted, or would industries be controlled by workers’ soviets?

As an anarchist, I cannot see that a centralised state bureaucracy can ever give true public control. Industry must be organised and run by elected workers' councils. What is the SPGB's attitude to this?

J. A. D.

Darlington. Co. Durham.

Reply:

Our correspondent correctly points out that full scale nationalisation is capitalism directly organised by the state machine. Socialists are opposed to capitalism in any form, including state capitalism. The method of controlling industries is determined by the type of ownership to which they are subject. Thus, it is of little importance whether privately owned industry is organised by private companies, as in many cases in this country, or by a central bureaucracy through so-called workers’ soviets, as in some cases in the USSR. Both types of organisation administer privately owned industries in the interests of their owning—or capitalist—class.

When Socialism is established, the control of industry will still be in line with its ownership. It is impossible, at the present, to give a detailed picture of the organisation which a Socialist community will use for controlling industry. That will depend upon the conditions prevailing at the time. But, because the means of wealth production will be commonly owned, we can say that they will be democratically controlled in the interests of the whole of mankind.

Editorial Committee.

Letter: Seamen and Socialism (1960)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Seamen and Socialism

It is long since I troubled you with any screed of mine, but 1 feel impelled to break a restraint of several years by making some comment upon your bewildering illogicality, as it seems to me, in certain directions.

Under the heading “Seamen on Strike” you write “One simple method of safeguarding the community’s welfare, keeping the ships sailing and making everybody happy, is to grant the seamen’s wage demands.” Indeed! But is this recipe for everybody’s happiness not a little naive, encouraging “demands” on the parlour-game principle “Think of a number (or demand) and then double it." Since when has it been good Socialism to accept the view that any good, let alone universal happiness, can come out of a wages system?

On the very same page you say that “ not so long ago " a farthing would buy a pocket-full of sweets. So it would, if not a pocket-full, a fist-full. Sweets— and food—was incredibly cheap before the first great war, and so was labour. You make the point that a worker’s wage today in command of real wealth remains much about the same. This, in spite of the precarious outcome of “full employment” in so-called key industries, overtime, and married women’s labour. Plainly, “demand” for anything less than Socialism is “not enough.” Then why confuse the issue merely to satisfy that class-war feeling? It’s phoney! As for the £40 a month and all found, I can only speak of the stewards you mention, but I have just come off a liner (an exploiting passenger, of course) considerably lighter in pocket. Why should you expect me to fall for that fudge? The workers, like everyone else (and who are they?) want all they can get and I don't blame them—or us—but don't ask me to idealise the ”gi-me" game. I gave all to a cause once, with no personal expectations. So did many pioneers of the SPGB. We didn't moan.

Now, isn't it about time the SPGB told the world what it means by Socialism? Yes, I know all about the statement of Principles, I had it in draft in my own hands some 50 years ago. But what does it mean? I ask modern artist friends of mine what their apparently crude abstract designs mean and they fob me off with jargon and more jargon. I ask you for details of how each takes from the common store without money and without price. Must the answer be the same? Just how, is all I want to know, but don’t misunderstand me. I, too, believe it possible to really socialise the main things of life gradually and I do not rely on any “ dawn ’’ appearing or the “ setting up'' of specialised and centralised bureaucracies for the purpose. I could develop the theme with plenty of early Socialist literature to my aid. Believe me, I do not propose to present every worker with a Jaguar on “ demand ’’—the problem disturbs me, for why not a helicopter apiece? 1 can “ visualise ” some “ store." Treat this as a little pleasantry if you like, but what do you really mean? No jargon, mind!

Lord Amwell.

Belsize Park, N.W.3.

Reply:

In the first chapter of our pamphlet “ Questions of the Day " we have told in some detail what Socialism is. Lord Amwell asks “for details of how each takes from the common store without money and without price.” We are puzzled at his difficulty. In a family, for example, each takes what he needs of what is there without either money or price. Likewise, from what is produced today each could take what he needs of what is available for each without having to pay for anything, providing it was all commonly owned.

As the question comes from Lord Amweli there are certain things we can take for granted. For instance, that we are concerned with a society in which everything that is in and on the earth is the common possession of all mankind. and each stands on an equal footing with regard to what is produced and distributed.

Before such a society can come into being the vast mass of the people must understand what Socialism signifies the kind of society that they are bringing into being. Hence they will know that the greater the quantity and variety they can produce the more in quantity and variety will be available to each.

The same kind of hands and brains that are concerned with production and distribution today will be available in the new society—but with greater freedom and opportunities. Consequently the provision of the necessary productive and storage facilities to meet society's needs in the requisite places will present less difficulties than they do today, where the profit consideration enters into the problem. Thus people will go to the appropriate stores and take what they need of what is there, in accordance with assessments of needs and the means to fulfil them—problems which are within the capacity of human brains that have been able to devise gigantic buildings, faster than sound planes, radar and space rockets. For instance, people go to super stores today, take what they need and pay for what they have taken. Tomorrow they will go similar places, take what they need and walk out.

Those who bring the new society into being will be reasonable enough not to expect more than society is capable of producing. Likewise, they will only want what they need, not what will be the envy of their neighbours. A person can only eat one meal at a time, sleep in one bed, sit in one car. The multiplicity of these things would only be a nuisance and a sign that the accumulator needed the attention of a doctor. Helicopters have been mentioned. It is surely obvious that everyone would not want a helicopter, a motor car, a racing stud, a yacht, a TV set, a private radar, a trip to the moon, a private salmon river, or a house papered with gold leaf and diamonds. People yearn for these things today because they signify security and importance, in the eyes of their fellows. In the new society such an outlook would be meaningless. The members of it would want comfort, happiness, the pursuit of occupations that gave them pleasure, and the harmonious co-operation of their fellows. A helicopter would not be needed as a possession, but as a means to get from place to place in a hurry. Today a man calls a taxi if he wants to get to a friend or the station in comfort and quickly. Would it not be possible to arrange to call a helicopter tomorrow? Members of the new society would not be unreasonable in their demands, harmonious co-operation would assure this, and unlimited human ingenuity would be used to solve any problems that arise.

In the beginning, before society has settled down in the new form, there may be those who, unable to throw off the heritage of the past, may want to satiate themselves with possessions. But what of it? They will gain nothing by it except satiation and will soon get tired of useless accumulation, like the child gets tired of a surfeit of toys.

With reference to the remarks about the seamen's dispute, the sentences quoted have been taken too literally—in a sense that the context shows was not intended. They were just flippant digs at the arguments put forward by the employers and their supporters.

Editorial Committee.

Letters: Crypto-Leninistic? (1970)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crypto-Leninistic?

It is difficult to avoid the impression that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is Crypto-Leninistic when it claims that capitalism was necessary to build up the organization of production until it could be replaced by democratic control of society. If people are inadequate to develop their economy communally and co-operatively, then by what means does competence magically descend on them after elitist-controlled growth. It takes blindness to ignore the achievements in voluntary collectivization (free sharing of talents and resources) of the Spanish anarchists in the 1930’s and to disregard the potential of the Mahknovites in the Russian Revolution. Again on what grounds does the SPGB condemn the Bolshevik usurpations when it alleges that capitalism is necessary in primitive countries (see p.45 Russia 1917-1967). I am very disappointed in the Companion Parties (WSP. SPGB. et al). This lack of faith in the ability of the people to control their own destiny was certainly not shared by Rosa Luxemburg who is otherwise favourably regarded by the WSP. 1 regret having to be so critical and I hope this disagreement is based on a misunderstanding.

Yours for Socialism.

Roger Lee.

Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A.

Reply: 

Roger Lee will be pleased to know that he has misunderstood us. When we say that the development of capitalism was necessary before Socialism could be established, we are thinking in world terms. By the end of the last century capitalism had performed this task of building up the material basis for Socialism. From then on it has been a reactionary system everywhere. We reject the view that the coming of capitalism to the backward countries now (or to backward Russia after 1917) is necessary before Socialism can be established.

When we wrote on page 45 of our pamphlet Russia 1917-1967: “That Russia had to follow the capitalist road and employ capitalist methods was inevitable”, we meant this to be understood in the context of the conditions then existing, i.e., that Russia was economically backward and that a majority of the workers both there and in other countries of the world did not want or understand Socialism. In fact we specially spelt this out on the previous page of the same pamphlet:

  . . . in the conditions that existed in Russia and the absence of a strong world socialist movement no other development was possible. Russia had to go through the stage of capitalism (emphasis added).

The land area of Russia and its people could have formed part of a world socialist community after 1917 had there been a majority of Socialists in the industrialised parts of the world. The brutal Bolshevik industrialisation of Russia was not historically necessary, whatever “crypto-Leninists" might say (if that is what they do say).

We are aware that throughout the history of capitalism there have been examples of workers (and peasants) organising themselves democratically to produce wealth. These however were not examples of Socialism but they do confirm that ordinary people can run society's affairs without a boss class — an argument we have always put forward.

Editorial Committee.

Letter: Workers and wages (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers and wages

"We . . .  do not . . . exhort workers to try to attain 4y wages where before they only had 3y wages. An above average wage in one industry necessarily implies a below-average wage in another”.

This seems to suggest that the Socialist Party of Great Britain does not urge workers to struggle for higher wages on the grounds that a wage increase for one group of workers necessarily involves a wage decrease for another.

The Socialist Party has always urged workers to try to get the highest possible price for the sale of their labour-power. And Marx long ago exposed, in Value Price and Profit, the "wages fund” theory accepted by the Owenite Weston that, as the amount that could be paid out in wages was limited, one group of workers could only obtain a wage increase at the expense of the rest of the working class, and that therefore trade union action was to be opposed. As Marx showed, it was sometimes possible for workers to take advantage of favourable labour market conditions to obtain a real wage increase, even if only a temporary one, at the expense of the profits of the capitalists and without harming other workers. For Marx Socialists had not to oppose the struggle for higher wages, but rather to point out its severe limitations and to urge the adoption of the revolutionary, socialist slogan “Abolish the wages system”. Marx also made the point that workers have to struggle for higher wages, even if they don’t obtain them, just in order to realise the value of their labour-power. Workers should struggle to get 4y wages in place of 3y because if they don’t they won’t even get paid 3y.

A. Buick

Brussels

Reply:

The interpretation placed on this extract by A. Buick appears to have been an over-reaction to what was stated. The term “above average wages” derives from the IPC statement itself and it should be remembered that this is a statistical concept. It should also be remembered that the statement relates to a specific company and those workers within it. This is not meant to imply that because it is a specific company, that we take no interest in the workers concerned, but more to mean that we do not approach these workers and their part both in the class struggle, and in their understanding of Socialism, exclusive of all others.

As was pointed out in the article, Mr. Roberts (the Managing Director of IPC Newspapers Ltd.) refers his employees to their high standing in the “Pay relativities League Table.” The graph (re-printed from the Financial Times) represents the average rates of pay throughout many industries, and Roberts is telling IPC employees: Look how much higher up this scale are your wages compared to those of other workers. This is a blatant appeal to his men to be thankful, for what are in the end, extremely small mercies. It is relevant however, to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that if Roberts pays his workers wages which are above a norm, then those of other workers must be below it. Clearly not all workers can obtain “above average wages,” for an average is necessarily the mean between high and low.

This reference was made to point out the limitations of Robert’s own emphasis on above-average wages as an indication of “success” and to remind IPC workers that they should not consider being “above-average” as a satisfactory position. In short, “above average” as a class view. It was certainly not intended to endorse the theory that there is a given pool from which wages are drawn, and consequently one man’s wage increase, is another’s decrease. The clause A. Buick has omitted from the extract quoted in fact points to the source from which an increase in wages would come i.e. the capitalist’s profit.

As A. Buick says, it is quite possible for a group of workers to achieve a wage increase without affecting the amount of wages received by other workers Their relative positions on a statistical graph will of course change, but as was pointed out, these relative differences will not change the basic class position of workers, or their problems. It is worth bearing in mind that there have been a considerable number of strikes in post-war years over wage relativities. As such we cannot be expected to approve a claim by any group of workers that at all times they must have more than some other group of workers.

A. Buick’s letter states “For Marx Socialists had not to oppose the struggle for higher wages . . ." and so on. However it seems a somewhat large (and inaccurate) mental leap to conclude from the passage quoted, or the article as a whole, that we were advocating opposition to workers struggling for higher wages. The class struggle between worker and employer results from the capitalist system, and wage claims are manifestations of this struggle. It would indeed be contradictory to claim that the SPGB represents the political interests of the working class on one hand, while actually advocating opposition to intelligent efforts aimed at improving or maintaining standards under Capitalism by struggles in the industrial field. The article did not put forward this point of view, and Marx explains fully why this would be a contradictory position:

(Writing about the tendency for the average standard of wages to fall)

. . . is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation . . .  they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiation of any larger movement.

(Wages, Price & Profit. Chapter 14).

In practise, where gains are made by workers in industries, generally it is due to these “occasional chances” and not to the number of strikes they engage in.

Regarding A. Buick’s opinion of how our case should be expressed in relation to the struggle for higher wages, it would not be true to claim that the SPGB is better placed than the workers, or Trade Unions involved, to identify such "occasional chances” for improvement, or to usurp their particular functions in this respect. It would be a considerable and alien extension of our own function to assume that we should act either as some form of Advice Bureau, or Clearing House for various wage claims. Such a conclusion would be hard to avoid were we to blandly assert that all those IPC workers receiving (in the article’s terms) 3y wages, should be taking action to attain 4y wages.

Apart from elementary considerations such as the likelihood of such a claim being met or not, or to what extent and duration of industrial action can be taken, it should be remembered that workers (not the SPGB) advance wage claims in terms of £’s and pence. Apart from these other considerations it would be unrealistic to prescribe the numerical formula put forward by A. Buick to the IPC workers, and even more so, to all workers at all times. The extract complained about was expressly inserted to make clear to the reader that we are not able to give specific advice on the formation of particular wage claims. We certainly do not exhort workers to act in such a way, we exhort workers to achieve Socialism.

Although Mr. Roberts might view such a formula as an attempt to be “realistic”, if a little immoderately, the SPGB would take a view which he, and millions of workers at present regard as “un-realistic,” namely, if we are to talk in terms of figures, why just struggle for 4y, why not 5 or 6 or 10y ?

It is possible that A. Buick means his formula to be interpreted in a more general way to read that workers should continue to struggle for higher wages. If this is so, he is acknowledging what is occurring daily under capitalism. The SPGB has frequently put forward the view that workers generally (not just Trade Unions) should recognise the need to achieve not only the best wages, but also the best conditions that they can, although we have not always seen as beneficial some of the methods employed in this respect: For example, the use of industrial action to preserve the “Closed-shop,” inter-unions disputes, or racially motivated strikes etc., because their result has been to further divide and embitter sections of the working class. If A. Buick is concerned lest the IPC workers, or other workers, become unaware of increasing costs of daily necessaries, or of greater exploitation by the capitalist class, his reminder is timely.

While recognising that the capitalist class will constantly seek to lower wages to the minimum level required to ensure the maintenance and reproduction of a work force, and pointing out to the working class that this is a most undesirable tendency, which, if not resisted, will result in a fall of their standards, the SPGB’s task is to urge workers (employed or not) to recognise their class position, and, as Marx points out in his following paragraph from Wages, Price & Profit (Chap. 14).

not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the cause of those effects.

Our exhortation must be therefore for workers to adopt a class view and establish a system of society in which high, low or average wages will only be sought and found in history books.

Letter: Could do better? (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Could do better?

There are some cases where workers have got out of the position of being workers and made a bit of a fortune by some means or the other — hook or by crook — and Socialists are the first to oppose them doing this! Namely because Socialists give no incentive to workers in getting out of the position of being workers.

What comments have you to make on this ? Don’t be aloof and good. What are your comments, in detail ?

F. S. Steele 

London N.4.

Reply:

Have you confused us with someone else ? If we should hear of any working men or women making “a bit of a fortune” and escaping from wage-slavery, we don’t oppose it: we (individually) wish them luck

However, the belief that anyone can do it or have it happen to him is part of the mythology which sustains capitalism. Anyone cannot; very few can. If you were thinking of football pools the chances of a quarter - million - pound win are statistically about the same as those of being struck by lightning. If you were thinking of famous men who have “advanced by their own efforts”, such stories have practically never been true.

Our case is simply that workers who think on these lines are like the beast of burden following a carrot on a stick in front of it. Escaping from wage-slavery is a most desirable aim, and the only way for the great majority — with exceptions so rare that they don’t matter — to achieve it is by abolishing the wages system, i.e. establishing Socialism.