DEMOCRACY AND THE SOCIAL REPUBLIC (ZOOM)
Speaker: Darren Poynton
Some thoughts on the transformation of the state
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Friday, May 16, 2025
SPGB Meeting TONIGHT 16 May 1930 (GMT +1) ZOOM
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Trebles all round
'Capitalism seems to have descended from tragedy into farce. Trump climbs down yet again from adolescent posturing and cuts the China tariff by 115%. Qatar soothes and flatters him with a free 747 ‘flying palace’ for his presidential toy cupboard.
In a craven sop to Reform UK, Labour plans to ‘get tough’ on legal migration, despite its known advantages for the economy, and a looming demographic crisis. Who needs facts and statistics when scapegoats are easier? Starmer and co are pandering to populist dog whistles.
Elsewhere, autocrats offer peace with one hand and lob missiles with the other.
The deaths pile up while the profits roll in, and the rich celebrate with cocktails on their floating palaces.'
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
1926 General Strike
On the 99th anniversary of the 1926 General Strike we look back to the piece below which was published in the May 2016 Socialist Standard on the 90th anniversary of the event.
‘On the 90th anniversary of the 1926 General Strike we look again at its lessons and at the uses and limitations of this class struggle tactic.
The General Strike lasted from 3 to 12 May in an attempt to defend the miners. It has been claimed that a significant proportion of the union leadership actually feared victory. ‘I am not in fear of the capitalist class. The only class I fear is my own,’ said J.R. Clynes of the General and Municipal Workers Union. Trade union leaders were not going to challenge the state even though as the strike continued, more and more control over the day-to-day functioning of society passed into the hands of the strikers. The TUC General Council betrayed every resolution upon which the strike call was issued and without a single concession being gained. The miners were left to fight the mine-owners, backed by the government, on their own.
Most commentators agree that the strength of the strike came from the solidarity of the grass-roots mass support and the weakness from above by an indecisive bureaucracy. ‘There’s never been anything like it. If the blighters o' leaders here dinnae let us down we’ll hae the capitalists crawlin’ on their bellies in a week. Oh boy, it’s the revolution at last,’ said one striker in Glasgow. Revolution was exactly what the trade union leaders didn't want. The General Strike had opened a Pandora's Box and in the words of NUR leader Charlie Cramp — ‘Never again!’ and said Ben Turner of the TUC General Council: ‘I never want to see another.’ The trade union activists' shock at the call-off was only matched by the employers' and government's unexpected surprise. ‘A victorious army disarmed and handed over to its enemies,’ declared another Glasgow striker.
What We Said
The Socialist Party realistically understood that there was no immediate question of revolution. We favoured the general strike for the limited objective of exerting massive pressure upon employers to concede over pay or conditions. We had advocated:
‘. . . combined action by the workers to resist the wholesale onslaught by the masters upon wages and working conditions . . . that the old sectional mode of industrial warfare was obsolete; that, while the development of industry had united the masters into giant combinations, with interests ramifying in every direction, supported at every point by the forces of the State, representing the entire capitalist class, the division among the workers, according to their occupations, led automatically to their steady defeat in detail. The only hope, even for the limited purpose of restricting the extent of the defeat, lay, therefore, in class combination... economic and political ignorance kept the workers divided and the defeats went on. Yet even worms will turn, and rats forced into corners will fight ...There is a limit even to the stupidity of sheep; and not all the smooth-tongued eloquence of their shepherds could prevent the flock from realising that they may as well hang together as hang separately.’
The Socialist Standard (June 1926) lamented the TUC's lack of strike plans:
‘As an expression of working-class solidarity the response of the rank and file was unquestionably unprecedented; but the long months, nay, years of delay found effect in the official confusion between ‘essential’ and non-essential occupations, the handling of goods by some unions which were banned by others and the issuing of permits one day which had to be withdrawn the next. Just prior to the strike the railwaymen were working overtime providing the companies with the coal to run their blackleg trains ...’
In particular, we urged the working class to learn the lessons of the General Strike:
"The outlook before the workers is black, indeed, but not hopeless, if they will but learn the lessons of this greatest of all disasters. ‘Trust your leaders!" we were adjured in the Press and from the platforms of the Labour Party, and the folly of such sheep-like trust is now glaring. The workers must learn to trust only in themselves. They must themselves realise their position and decide the line of action to be taken. They must elect their officials to take orders, not to give them! ... It is useless for the workers either to ‘trust’ leaders or to ‘change’ them. The entire institution of leadership must be swept by the board." At the time we urged workers that they "must organise as a class, not merely industrially, for the capture of supreme power as represented by the political machine... The one thing necessary is a full recognition by the workers themselves of the hostility of interests between themselves and their masters. Organised on that basis, refusing to be tricked and bluffed by promises or stampeded into violence by threats, they will emerge victorious from the age-long struggle. Win Political Power! That is the first step.’
The general strike as a tactic
The possibility of a general strike keeps cropping up within the trade union movement. When we speak of the general strike we are not concerned with the general strike of a single trade union but of all workers. The movement is no longer a trade union movement but has become a class movement. For the general strike to succeed, the working-class must be convinced of the importance of the purpose for which it is declared. It must be shown that the aim is legitimate and victory is possible. The general strike cannot be a disguise for revolution, but simply the exercise of the right to strike on a wider scale and with a more clearly marked class character. The Socialist Party dismisses the idea that the general strike is a panacea for workers.
The idea of carrying through a social revolution by means of a ‘folded arms’ policy is romantic. A stoppage of production and transportation is not enough to bring about the overthrow of a society. Strikers will stand idly outside places of work, and even if the workers occupied and took possession of the factories and offices, it is a pointless exercise for they cannot function while the economy is suspended and production is stopped by the universal strike. So long as a class does not collectively own and control the whole social machine, it can seize all the factories and offices it wants to, but it really possesses nothing. The failure of a general strike involves real suffering, and discouraged and disconsolate, defeated strikers withdraw from the movement into passivity and apathy. A general strike is ‘All or nothing!’ Workers should think twice about supporting such a gamble.
There are some who seek to transform a proposed general strike against austerity, for instance, into a political general strike, using the opposition to the cuts as the slogans to mobilise around. They expect that because of a sustained general strike the normal economic life of the country will be suspended, and there would be a total stoppage in distribution and in production. Naturally, workers would be forced to adopt more forceful methods in order to live. They would seize food and other provisions wherever they could lay hands on them. The ruling class would respond in kind with repression and so the general strike is envisaged to escalate into a revolutionary scenario. That is the idea of the ‘revolutionaries’. But this sort of strategy is a trick to delude the working-class. It proposes to drag them far beyond what was proposed. To imagine that a social revolution can result from misleading workers in such a manner is nonsense.
Although the general strike is quite powerless as a revolutionary means of liberation for the exploited class, nevertheless it is a potent warning to the capitalist class. It tells them if they are crazy enough to make the right to unite in trade unions and the right to strike empty forms, then a general strike may well be the shape that a labour revolt would take. It would be more as a means of damaging the enemy to save ourselves than a means of liberation. The trade union movement has proven itself to be a powerful instrument of a defensive character.
The strike weapon is the workers' only means of defence or attack which it has for the protection of its immediate material interests. Working people are right to jealously guard the right to strike. While the Socialist Party fully supports this right for all workers, it is not our business to incite them to make use of it. It is not for us to urge or discourage strikes. It is for those immediately involved, those who will have to endure the consequences of their decision, to decide without pressure of any kind from outsiders. When those workers whose interests are at stake have decided upon a strike, other workers including socialists ought to aid them to gain every possible advantage from the situation in which they have placed themselves.
That is, generally speaking, what is and what should be the conduct of socialists so far as strikes are concerned. We acknowledge the strike as a weapon, but recognise that its effectiveness should not to be exaggerated and that it possesses limited power. Under favourable circumstances it may compel some employers to yield to union demands but it has never been able to produce any radical change in the capitalist system. Here or there some ameliorations have been achieved but they have not been incompatible with the increasing prosperity of capital.
The political expropriation of the capitalist class today is its economic expropriation tomorrow. To win for socialism the greatest possible number of partisans, that is the task to which the Socialist Party concentrates its efforts. What is necessary is to make socialists, to bring people's wills into harmony with a movement that seeks the election of more and more socialists to our various elective assemblies. The political expropriation of the capitalist class today can be its economic expropriation tomorrow and the transformation of wage labour to the free association of workers and common ownership.’
ALJO
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-general-strike-weapon-of-class-war.html
Monday, May 12, 2025
History lesson
Lessons to be learnt from history.
In November 1912 a piece in the Socialist Standard dealt with conflict in the Balkans.
‘To arms! To arms! Thus once again is the “Eastern Question” answered. Turk and Bulgarian, Mohammedan and Christian, are at one another’s throats in a frenzy of blood-lust. The clash of arms and the roar of guns once more shake the hills and mountains of the near East, and the cries of wounded and dying men fill fair valleys with horror. Montenegro was the first with its declaration of war—a country with under 250,000 inhabitants—not, in that respect, the equal of the London suburb, West Ham—and as poor as the oft-quoted church mouse. Where did she get her armaments? Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, every one of them poor—who backed them and why?
Why did Russia take up the Montenegrin war loan? Why did “The Powers” take up the Bulgarian loan? Were they moved to do so by the promptings of humanity? Read the cynical answer in the story of past wars.
Japan fought Russia for the forests of Manchuria. Korea helped Japan—now Korea belongs to Japan. The United States fought Spain ostensibly on the ground of the Cuban “horrors”, and the Yankee Eagle has his beak in the hearts of the Cubans and the Phillipinos.
The English Government “sought neither gold nor territory” in South Africa, but the Transvaal and the Orange Free State went the way of Zululand and the Basutos’ country—and it was the wrongs of the Uitlanders, who hadn’t got the vote, that justified the war!
Every brutal and bloody gang of rulers, sitting armed on the backs of their groaning, bleeding and starving multitudes, have sobbed and slobbered and shed crocodile’s tears over the suffering subjects of the Sultan. Austria was so shocked by the miseries of the poor people of Bosnia and Herzegovina that she had to soothe her feelings by “annexing” both these countries. Britain also has been sorely troubled over the horrors perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire, so the Cross relieved the Crescent of Egypt and Cyprus. Russia wrung her hands in agony, and then laid them on Bessarabia. That monument to Garibaldi’s genius, A United Italy, itched to stop the villainies of the Porte, so she seized Tripoli at the admitted cost of 9,000 Italian workers’ lives, and goodness knows what cost to “the enemy”, if we are to believe the Italian boasts of slaughter.
Have we answered the question of why this war? It is the old story of Grab! The monopolists of the means of life are out for plunder…
The world’s financiers, the world’s brigands, are seeking wider fields for exploitation. The owners of the New World are grasping at the old. Bulgarian peasants, Servian toilers, Grecian slaves, are to sacrifice their lives to provide plunder for the moneyed tyrannies of Europe. Women of our class are to be widowed, children to be orphaned, homes to be desolated, to make a masters’ holiday. Hence the war fever is aroused, religious rivalries stirred up, racial hatreds and jealousies fanned to fury by judicious but unscrupulous lying—and all that Macedonia may go the way of Persia...The lesson of it all for the workers is that nothing in the world is sacred that stands in the way of capitalist aggrandisement—which is spelt: “Profits”. In pursuit of profits no crime is too stupendous to be undertaken.'
As the French have it, ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’, the more things change the more they stay the same.
Friday, May 09, 2025
WSM New Website
"The World Socialist Movement has a new website that presents the basic argument for world socialism. The site can be accessed at http://www.worldsocialist.org
Currently in English and Spanish, the new site will, in future, include other major languages.
It is designed for newcomers to real socialist ideas.
Could readers please advertise this new site as widely as possible on social media and elsewhere using the link https://www.worldsocialist.org/?mtm_campaign=spgb"
Losing species
A synthesis of a large number of biological studies has shown that humans are responsible for high levels of biodiversity loss (Guardian 26 March).
This decline is driven by a number of factors, namely habitat change, direct exploitation of resources, climate change, invasive species and pollution. This includes use of pesticides, for example.
A Professor of Ecology noted that many species have key roles, such as pollination and seed dispersal. They need larger populations and genetic diversity so they can continue to evolve and perform their functions that keep the ecosystem going.
Of course it is capitalism, with its profit motive and drive to expand, that is responsible for such degradation.
SPGB Meeting TONIGHT 9 May 1930 (GMT+1) ZOOM
THE SUPPRESSION OF THE MARKET? FOOD CONTROL IN WW1 BRITAIN (ZOOM)
Event Details
- Date: –
Speaker: Bill Martin
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