GENERAL ELECTION STATEMENT JULY 2024.
The Revolutionary Use of the Vote
The working class makes up a clear majority under capitalism. A member of the working class is someone who either has to sell their ability to work for a wage or salary or is dependent on someone who does have to work for a living. The working class has one powerful political weapon: the vote.
However, workers are understandably unclear and confused about their own political interests. Generations of propaganda has led most to believe that there is no alternative to the profit driven social system of capitalism. They erroneously believe that in voting for any of the political parties standing in the forthcoming General Election, all of whom ardently support capitalism, that their quality of life and standard of living, will benefit from a future successful British capitalist class.
Workers do not have a shared interest with the capitalist class who actually own the earth’s resources. Instead, they have a diametrically opposite class interest of their own. And this distinct interest arises out of workers not owning the means of production. The means to life is privately owned by the capitalist class with a view to profit, not to meet human need. As a class of non-owners, workers are forced into employment where they have to struggle, in or out of trade unions, for higher wages and better working conditions.
In the productive process, workers create all the social wealth. As a consequence, capitalists are forever trying to increase the intensity and extent of exploitation. They can never leave the workers alone. Capitalists make their profits by exploiting the working class. Workers produce more wealth than they receive in wages and salaries. And the capitalist class live off this surplus as the unearned income of rent, interest, and profit.
Cynicism and Satire Change Nothing
Workers are constantly being let down by politicians and this is hardly surprising. Politicians have to defend or pursue the interests of the capitalist class and not the interest of workers. As a result, a sizable minority of workers no longer bother to vote. Others use their vote as an act of revenge against the failed policies and promises of the present government. Others believe there is no alternative to the main parties but vote anyway under misplaced duty and abject resignation that nothing can be fundamentally changed.
For many workers, voting at elections is often their only involvement in politics. After the election, it is back to moaning or laughing at the antics of the government and the opposition through watching or reading programmes such as ‘Have I got News For You’, and ‘Private Eye’. Satire, though, changes nothing. Some workers take part in protest politics. At the moment workers are wanting the Israeli genocide to stop in the Gaza Strip. Others take direct action against the Government’s environmental policies. All without success. Workers also, join organisations like Greenpeace and Oxfam and sign petitions to be ceremoniously handed into Downing Street all in the belief that pressure groups, demonstrations and petitions will change politics for the good of everyone. They do not. A million people, for example, marched against the War in Iraq but the war, based on the lies and deceit of the then Labour government, took place anyway. The mistake, made by workers, is to believe that politicians and governments are representatives of all society. Workers ignore and some are unaware of British involvement in the Ukraine war. Those aware mostly give silent support by doing nothing.
Political commentators like D J Taylor are worried about the cynicism that exists between the voters and MPs. He wants “some way of strengthening the mechanism that connects, or is supposed to connect, the average elector with the person who does (or doesn’t) represent them” (Independent on Sunday 27.12.09). However, no such mechanism exists because there can be no real connection between the working class and politicians. This should come as no surprise. Over 150 years ago Marx and Engels pointed out in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ that the State was merely “the Executive of the Bourgeoisie”. This fact has not changed despite the growth of State education, health provision, and social security.
Yet since the franchise was extended to the working class following the Representation of the People Act 1918 (men over 21 and women over 30) politicians have had to pander to the electorate promising everything just to get their vote. However, when in power decisions are constantly taken by government Ministers against the interest of the majority who voted them into power. This political contradiction is at the heart of capitalist politics.
As governments and politicians have increasingly failed to deliver their promises to the working class so they have become more evasive, dissembling and expert at keeping what they really believe below the water line, a disreputable iceberg of deceit. Information is controlled, spun, buried, or craftily packaged by politicians to mean something else. Contempt for politicians has never been higher yet a majority of the working class are still prepared to waste their vote against their own class interest by voting for the Labour Party, as shown recently.
Some workers, for example, vote for the Labour Party because they hate the Tories for the wealth and privilege they represent. “Anything is better than the Tories” they say. It is the politics of ignorance. Keir Starmer offers six pledges. What is a political pledge worth? Absolutely nothing. He claims in one of his pledges to improve productivity. He has no power to improve productivity as it is only when capitalists believe there is profit in investment that productivity will improve. All the political parties; Labour, Greens, Liberal Democrats, the Tories and others, are the Parties of the rich. When in power or in opposition they seek to express the political interests of those who privately own the means of production to the exclusion of the rest of society, usually around questions of taxation, interest rates, subsidies, the budget, all issues of no interest to the working class. Is a Labour government going to war and using troops to break strikes “better” than the Tories following the same policies?
Failure of the Political Parties of Capitalism
What of the failure of the main political parties? Workers with long memories will recall why the Labour Party was elected in 1997. Then it was a result of the failed policies of the Tory government. Their “popular capitalism” had become very unpopular. Over 3 million workers had been made unemployed in the depression under John Major. It was not a society at ease with itself. Workers in privatised industries lost their jobs and were forced to sell their shares. Workers who used their redundancy money to set up as the self-employed went bankrupt and lost their homes. There was no “property owning democracy”. The capitalist class still owned the means of production and the Tories had been corrupted by years of power, sleaze, and scandal.
In short, the Tory Party had failed to meet the interest of the working class just as the Labour government did when they were last in power. All capitalist politicians fail to deliver its promises. They came into power with the pop anthem “Things can only get better” It didn’t. Take Labour’s empty boast of ending boom and bust. It was a myth. 2.5 million workers were made unemployed and other workers were forced to take pay cuts, forced into part-time working, or forced to take long periods of “leave”. Capitalist governments cannot prevent the economic destruction and the subsequent social pain of the trade cycle. Unemployment exists while capitalism exists.
Then there is war. Workers are now well aware that the Labour Party will prosecute wars to defend or further the interest of the capitalist class just as ruthlessly as the Tories did when they were in power. The Labour Party has a history of supporting capitalism’s wars; wars which are never for “democracy and freedom” but, instead, for the protection of trade routes, securing raw resources like oil and protecting spheres of strategic influence. It is the working class who do the killing and the dying not the politicians and the capitalists they serve.
And then there are Labour’s failed reform policies. Labour said they were going to abolish child poverty but it did not happen. The elderly remained vulnerable; many cold, living in poor housing and cut off from the wider society often living in lonely, degrading, and debilitating circumstances. Labour supported the interests of the rich. Now elected they will do so again.
At a recent Business meeting Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer gave fulsome praise to the interests of capitalism. The in-line business magazine, ‘Business Matters’ said:
“Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor, has pledged that a future Labour government will adopt a more pro-business stance than Tony Blair’s administration” (Business Matters 24 April 2024).
And this is what Reeves said in her speech:
‘What Labour offers is a genuinely pro-business tax plan, founded on a fair contract between a pro-business government and great British business’.
And
‘We’ll be the most pro-business government ever, vows Reeves” (‘Times’ 24 April 2024)
That is who the Labour Party identify with: the capitalist class.
Labour could never solve the problem of poverty because it is a problem that flows from the private ownership of the means of production. And the Labour Party, despite its rhetoric about “social justice” has to support the private ownership of the means of production – the cause of poverty. Labour is faced with the insurmountable contradiction of wanting to solve the problems of capitalism while retaining, supporting, and pursuing the capitalist cause of these social problems.
What of the Liberal Democrats and Greens? They are also political parties who represent the interests of the capitalist class. They are the recipients of the protest vote and a lack of political imagination of those voting for them. They exist to continue the system of profit and private ownership of the means of production. Their pet policies will go the way of all idealistic reforms once they get elected or share power in a hung parliament. They can never solve the problems of unemployment, poverty and war facing the working class. The protest vote is a lost vote; a lost opportunity of making a real political difference by changing society in a revolutionary way, from one producing for profit, to one producing to meet human need.
There is also the utter irrelevance of the capitalist Left, e.g. the SWP, and extreme Right, e.g. Reform Party. The Left have still not recovered from the collapse of state capitalism in the Soviet Union, the failure of Labour’s old nationalisation and Keynesian policies and the complete disintegration in 1989 of the anti-working-class ideas associated with Lenin and Trotsky. They are trapped in a time warp playing out a childish politics like Private Eye’s Dave Spart, singing the Red Flag on protest marches and wearing Che Guevara T shirts. The capitalist Left have nothing important to say except to carp on at the antics of the Labour Party leadership but later on in their political careers, many former Trotskyites are found advising Labour cabinets or actually becoming Ministers of State to use troops to break strikes, engage in war and retire to the House of Lords – behaving more Tory than the Tories. It is no use to complain that the Labour Party leadership administer capitalism against the interests of the working class. That is their job.
And then there is the bogyman: the extreme right like ‘Britain First’. The creation of the failed policies of the Labour and Tory parties many of which the extreme right, have embraced to mask their racism. Pauk Golding is no Adolph Hitler; more of a Roderick Spode, who, from the pen of P. G. Wodehouse, drilled his Black Shorts and pursued a barmy policy of nationalistic root vegetables and knee measurements. But Golding is needed by the capitalist Left to justify their failed politics. When the capitalist Left and Right violently clash on the streets it is difficult to tell them apart. And a SWP leadership in power is just as frightening a prospect as the ‘Britain First’ in power. One politics leads to gulags the other to concentration camps.
The Socialist Alternative
What of the real political alternative to the parties of capitalism? What of the socialist alternative? The Socialist Party of Great Britain established in 1904 and reconstituted in June 1991 has a revolutionary view of politics completely different from the Tories, Liberal Democrats and Labour Party. We state that capitalism can only be run in the interest of the capitalist class.
The social and economic problems which the working-class face, first require capitalism being replaced with Socialism. Workers have to take conscious and political action without leaders to establish common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. World capitalism has to be replaced with World Socialism. That is the Socialist message to the working class at this election. Social reforms cannot prevent war, unemployment, and end poverty. Social reformers have been passing social reform legislation for over two hundred years and the problems facing the working class still remain.
Socialists mean what we say. Until socialism is established by the world’s working class, capitalism’s social, problems will persist. There is no hidden agenda. We do not hide our political programme and Socialist objective We say that a class majority of workers must organise consciously and politically to replace the profit system with one based on production for use. This political act must be through the ballot, using the vote for Socialist ends.
The working class, in order to establish Socialism, must conquer the powers of government. Socialist delegates have to be sent to Parliament so that the machinery of government “…may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation…” (Clause 6 of the SPGB’s Declaration of Principles). With the Socialist Party of Great Britain what you see is what you get; a political party organised to pursue the class struggle with a singular Socialist object; Socialism and only Socialism.
Socialists view the revolutionary use of the vote as being of the utmost importance to the working class. The vote is like a sharp razor blade; it can either be used to cut through the dense political forest of capitalist politics, privilege and power and establish Socialism or, as it has been used by workers in the past; to cut their own throats. Socialists are currently very few on the ground. But we have a sound and valid Socialist case against capitalism. From the failure of capitalism to meet the needs of the majority of society come questioning, dissent, political understanding, and socialists. This is the future; one where enlightened workers begin to read our literature, discuss with us socialist ideas and become socialists, to create a Socialist revolution and a classless society.
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The Materialist Roots of Religion and Socialism.
In the letter pages of the ‘Observer’ (16.05.2024) Christine Crossley, a religious studies teacher from Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, claimed that socialism is rooted in Christian Socialism and chapel and also rooted in Marx.
The first root she claims, “tends towards a dignity of the individual bound together in society and working towards the kingdom of god here on earth”. The second Marxian root, she believes, tends towards “a totalitarian collectivism inherently hostile to religion”.
It is true that Marx was critical of religion. In his essay “Towards a Critique of the Philosophy of Hegel”, Marx argued that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed soul, it is the emotion of an emotionless world, and, in the same way that it is, as it were, the spirit of a spiritless system, so religion is the opium of the people”.
Here, Marx uses the metaphor of drug addiction to show that religion possesses the important social function. Religion provides for believers an empty consolation similar to addicts who find their “fix” as an escape from the real-world which they find harrowing, brutal and bleak.
Religion lets capitalism off the hook. Instead of understanding that the problems of poverty, poor housing and health, war, discrimination and social alienation derive from the private ownership of the means of production and distribution by a minority class of exploiters, religious believers look to heaven and God.
In other words, Marx meant that people who were unable to cope with the exploitation, competition, violence and sheer unpleasantness of capitalism looked towards an afterlife where these oppressive conditions no longer existed and all was “milk and honey”. Religion was a form of childish escapism rooted in material reality.
Crossley is also wrong to conceive the Marxian roots leading to totalitarianism. The root of socialism and socialist ideas is the condition of the working class under capitalism. A working-class majority who are
forced to sell their ability to work for an employer. Workers are exploited in the productive process producing what Marx called “surplus value” from which the unearned income of rent, interest and profit derives.
Marx’s critique of capitalism gives a clear understanding to the working class that they have no interest in commodity production and exchange for profit and that politicians can never make capitalism work for workers and their dependents.
Marx was for working class freedom not totalitarianism.
He gave three guiding libertarian principles with respect to revolutionary socialism:
1). “…we shall have an association [in socialism], in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (‘Communist Manifesto’).
2). ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ (Critique of the Gotha Programme).
3. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system’ (Value, Price and Profit).
As for religion, ‘Christian Socialism’ is a contradiction in terms. Christianity is not rational but faith based where people cravenly worship a god and have religious leaders telling them how to think and what to do. Socialism, on the other hand is the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
Socialism has no leaders nor a group of people who wish to be led. Workers who become socialists are expected to think for themselves. Marx said, ‘question everything’. Workers should reject the leadership principle found in capitalism and uncritically accepted across the capitalist political spectrum., question everything and reject the capitalist leader principle.
Marx was for working class freedom: freedom from the labour market, freedom from buying and selling of the commodity labour power, freedom from employers and the capitalist class and freedom from the coercive state whose principal function is to defend private property ownership.
There will be no coercive state in socialism, instead there will be an administration of things not people The attributes of the dignity of the individual based together in society is nearer Marx than Crossley imagines.
However, to realise freedom from capitalism requires the working class to take democratic and political action to establish global socialism the common ownership, etc. rather than the mysticism of the kingdom of God.
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Obituary: Doug Ayers
It is with sadness we announce the death of our comrade Doug Ayers at the age of 96. Comrade Ayers was the last member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain who became a convinced socialist during the economic depression of the 1930s. He refused to fight in capitalisms’ wars and was forced to go down the mines working for a pittance in dangerous circumstances.
Doug had no hesitation in joining those sound and principled socialists “expelled” in 1991 for continuing to take political action in the full name of the party as required by clause 8 of the spgb’s Object and Declaration of principles. Comrade Ayers often attended our meetings joining in discussion by relating his knowledge of engineering to the party’s case against capitalism.
We offer condolences to his family and he will be missed by his socialist comrades.
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VALUING THE COMMONS
As Marx and Engels saw it, the enclosures and loss of common land were not just a land grab. The basis of agricultural capitalism meant the destruction of an independent and largely self-sustaining rural lifestyle as working people were turfed out of their villages, to become a new class of rootless drifting proletarians, driven to seek jobs in factories, mines and even in the colonies.
While the main wave of enclosure acts took place in the 1750-1850 period, there were enclosures already taking place even in the 13th century, in the Tudor period, through the 16thand 17th centuries, in the latter part of the 19th century – and some are still going on even now. Around the world, as capitalism has advanced globally, traditional lifestyles have been losing out, and former peasants and subsistence-farmers have become proles, part of the global working class, mere hands.
An ancient Charter and the people’s rights
In his recent book Plunder of the Commons (Pelican, 2019), Guy Standing examined the 1217 Charter of the Forest and proposed this as a model for a new form of ‘public ownership’. His subtitle “A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth” suggestedhe had some idea of common ownership but that is misleading.
While he rightly points to the basic idea of the old Charter of the Forest as guaranteeing a right of subsistence – “the poor man’s overcoat” as it used to be called, when you look at what he proposes you see only tired old Labour/reformist proposals e.g. “ownership of all land in Britain should be registered with the Land Registry” (p350).
His proposed new charter would include a list of Labour’s good causes, including environmental issues. It would not demand common ownership and democratic control of all means of producing wealth. Socialists argue for democratic control by and in the interest of the whole community but he offers only a set of state bureaucracies, Non-government organisations (NGOs) and quangos.
However, his book is of some value in that he reminds us that, along with Magna Carta, the 13th century brought in the Charter of the Forest which in common law guaranteed to commoners a number of important rights. As Richard Mabey saw it, ‘common ground’ was protected by ancient custom-sanctioned rights of usage:
It is now generally accepted that the rights that began to be defined in the 11th century represented the relics of a much wider network of unrecorded customary practice… a very old system that predates the Norman Conquest of 1066.
It was a system of “land tenure … in which one party may own the land but others are entitled to various rights in it such as grazing or cutting firewood.”
Peter Linebaugh in Stop, Thief! – The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance (US, 2014,p151, citing Richard Mabey’s The Common Ground – A Place for Nature in Britain’s Future?(1980) had a wealth of detail about the commons and enclosures, and he also had a wider view. His book covered the historical process of land enclosures in Britain, and Linebaugh also saw similar processes happening in other countries.
Everywhere you look in the world you can discover traces of a world where communities once co-owned the land, co-operating in its use. He also described a variety of types of “commoning”.
Even now when you walk along a footpath or canal towpath, in town or country, your ‘rights of way’ are examples of these old rights, still surviving except where the property system has robbed us of them.
Linebaugh’s book while it proposed no panacea, no quack reform or new charter, which is a mercy, was impressive in his accounts of how the working people resisted this historic land grab.
The real value of the ‘waste’
In England, even largely barren heathlands, moors, marshes and fells had many uses. Until the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, villagers were able to graze cows and sheep on the common; to keep pigs (e.g. the right of pannage is still used in the New Forest); to collect wood for building, fencing, tool-making; to cut peat or furze for fuel; to cut reeds for thatching, or birch twigs for besoms; to cut bundles of rushes to make
rush candles, etc. There was also the right of ‘lop and top’ in woodland
areas (in Epping Forest still practised in the 19th century), fishing rights, coastal foreshore rights, and so on.
Several writers in the past gave detailed accounts of how using their ancient commons supported the villagers. These include Hampshire’s pioneer naturalist, Gilbert White (The Natural History of Selborne, 1795); William Cobbett from Farnham, the farmer-radical who travelled over southern and Midlands England (Cottage Economy, 1821-1823, and Rural Rides, 1830); Farnham’s George Sturt (Change in the Village, 1912), and J Alfred Eggar (Life & Customs in Gilbert White’s, Cobbett’s & Kingsley’s Country, c.1925). Between them they covered the main period of the enclosures, seen close up, intimately.
The useful commons and forests
Gilbert White was clear about the economic importance for the villagers of their commons, such as Wolmer Forest and Alice Holt:
Such forests and wastes … are of considerable service to neighbourhoods that verge upon them, by furnishing them with peat and turf for their firing; with fuel for the burning their lime; and by maintaining their geese and their stock of young cattle at little or no expense. Natural History of Selborne, Letter VII
Later Cobbett, who as a practical farmer really hated the barren heaths, praised some new enclosed and productive farmland:
The fields on the left … certainly are the most beautiful tract of fields that I ever saw. Their extent may be from 10 to 30 acres each. Divided by quickset hedges, exceedingly well planted and raised. The whole tract is nearly a perfect level. The cultivation neat and the stubble heaps… giving proof of great crops of straw, while, on land with a chalk bottom, there is seldom any want of a proportionate quantity of grain.
That said, Cobbett was angry at how enclosures had harmed the villagers:
Labouring people … invariably do best in the woodland and forest and wild countries. Where the mighty grasper has all under his eye, they can get but little. Rural Rides, 1830
He also pointed out with anger that farmworkers were paid starvation wages – a fraction of what the lowest paid soldier would get, and even less than was paid to men in jail.
Social and economic change
When George Sturt later wrote of the Bourne villagers, a small hamlet a few miles south from Farnham, his older neighbours told of how in the past their lives had been very different:
The impoverished labouring people … were born in a self-supporting peasantry… I heard of the village cows, which used to be turned out to graze on the heaths, and had been told how fir-timber fit for cottage roof-joists could be cut on the common, as well as heath good enough for thatching and turf excellent for firing; and when to this was added the talk of bread-ovens at half the old cottages, and of little corn-crops in the gardens, and of brewing and wine-making and bee-keeping …
Change in the Village, 1912 (Caliban Books, 1984)
It was not just the materials got from the commons but their use in country crafts, as seen by both Cobbett (Cottage Economy) and Sturt, a century later:
But it was the common that made all of this possible. It was only by the spacious ‘turn-out’ which it afforded that enabled the people to keep cows and get milk and butter; it was only by the turf-firing cut on the common that they could smoke their bacon, hanging it in the wide chimneys over those old open hearths where none but such fuel could be used; and, again, it was only because they could get furze from the common to heat their bread-ovens that it was worth their while to grow a little wheat at home and have it ground into flour for making bread. Sturt, Change in the Village, 1912, Chap. 9
With enclosures had come concentration of land ownership and with it, pauperism, plus workhouses. By 1873, a government survey of land ownership found a quarter of the whole country was owned by just 710 aristocrats and their friends, and half of it was owned by just 4,000 families, and this was mostly the best land, seen as profitable to enclose.
That government report was hastily suppressed – its findings were too embarrassing. And no government since has repeated such a survey.
Guy Standing Plunder of the Commons, 2019
Enclosures as a historic land-grab
In her recent study of the enclosures in South Cambridgeshire, Alison Wittering showed how this legal process guaranteed that the rich and powerful got the lion’s share of the ‘allotments’, as Parliamentary Commissioners carved up local commons.
In one village in South Cambridgeshire the records showed how in 1814 the Commissioners charged the rich much less than the poorer bidders for both the cost of the land and for the, compulsory, fencing. One man who was allotted over 100 acres paid less than £3 per acre. The Church’s parson got over 40 acres and paid nothing! But a man who got only1.5 acres had to pay over £20 per acre – plus over £13 per acre for fencing.
Shirley Wittering Ecology and Enclosures, p95
Another source recorded that in Wakefield, Yorkshire, 100% of the common lands were allotted to the Duke of Leeds, whose sole concern was for the coal below ground. Land allotted to the benefit of the poor: a generous 0%!
In many areas local people fought against enclosures. The long and often violent struggle in Otmoor near Oxford went on for decades. Local histories record many such struggles and conflicts. Everywhere such enclosures happened the effects for local people were disastrous.
A man-made famine
In the south of England there was such hunger that in 1795 there were food riots, led by women, and often supported by the soldiers, even in towns like Guildford.
In The Village Labourer 1760-1832 (1911), the Hammonds described the many effects of losing the commons: without somewhere to graze a cow, people were unable to have milk, and so children died from hunger. Fuel also was a problem, so home-made bread was replaced by shop bread. As a man in Bedfordshire put it:
“I kept four cows before enclosure, and now I don’t keep so much as a goose, and you ask me what I lose by it!”
The Village Labourer, Chap. )
With enclosures also came a loss of old lanes, footpaths and shortcuts, so that people were forced to walk a long way round to get to the fields or markets. And their small communities became increasingly isolated from what was going on in the outside world.
In a few decades, from the 1760s to 1842, when over 2000 Enclosure Acts were passed (even more Enclosure Acts came later), over 4m acres of common land became enclosed. The new landowners now controlled much larger estates, employing say 4 or 5 tenant farmers where before there had been 20 independent farmers or smallholders.
In Tilford, a Surrey village near Farnham, the medieval map showed 20 ‘bondholders’ with holdings of either 15 or 30 acres, but its 1840 tithe map and other records showed only 3 major landowners, owning 80% of the allotted land (John Franklin, The Story of Tilford, 2000).
Tilford was surrounded by commons in every direction, heathland with soil too poor and arid to encourage enclosure.
Probably these extensive commons explain why in the late 18th century, when 40% of people in the Farnham area were paupers, in that village only 1 in 6 were paupers. Access to the commons meant villagers could still be largely self-sufficient.
Whose land?
Recently a systematic effort has been made by Private Eye to discover the dark secrets of modern landownership. In Who Owns England? (2019), Guy Shrubsole has attempted a listing of all the major landowners, including the many whose identities are ‘unknown’ or listed only in secretive offshore tax havens. The subtitle of his book was How We Lost Our Green & Pleasant Land & How to Take It Back, which sounded promising. He found that land ownership inequality is:“…staggering. We can conclude… that 25,000 landowners – less than 1 per cent of the population – own half of England”. (p268).
Shrubsole’s proposal – ‘an inspiring manifesto’ – is for a Land Reform Act and a Commission, to prevent any more privatising of state sector land, to increase the land available for council allotments, to control the market, to prevent land being used for tax avoidance/evasion, and so on. All that may be worthy but is hardly revolutionary. Reform is rarely ‘inspiring/.
Nowhere does he urge that we should act collectively and politically to end both the private and state ownership of land, let alone argue that land like all means of production should become owned or co-owned in a social system based on the common ownership of all the means of production and distribution.
The modern capitalist era with the wages system and commodity production was historically founded on the expropriation of our rural ancestors. True, the old medieval and feudal system had its faults but the new capitalist system was and is uniquely ruthless. After all, the medieval manors had allowed the ‘waste’ to be used by the common people for grazing cows, getting fuel and building materials, and so much else.
But with the capitalist system poverty and pauperism grew and with unemployment, desperate hunger drove many to the harsh hospitality of the newly invented workhouses. And their orphaned children were then farmed out as ‘apprentices’ to local farmers or faraway factories. Today, the ‘safety net’ of the modern ‘welfare state’, with its humiliating, degrading and bureaucratic system of inadequate and stingy ‘benefits’, is a very poor substitute for those “age-old” custom-sanctioned subsistence rights of the commons, seen for so long as “the poor man’s overcoat”.
A new class system
Historically, the capitalist system required a servile working class, utterly destitute of its own independent resources. How else could a class of exploiting factory-owners have managed to draw so many millions of unfortunate wage-slaves into the voiceless misery of the factories and mines, and stinking city slums?
Legalised theft of the village commons was an important fulcrum, a lever used to detach the new class of now rootless proletarians from their old neighbourhoods and villages, as mere wage-slaves. This was a part of the process that Marx described as the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’.
The timid voices of such as Shrubsole and Standing with their very limited reform proposals are far too feeble to challenge the basics of this system, one whereby legal chicanery, by theft and fraud and brutal force, a new class was created, driven off from the newly enclosed commons, in order to be exploited as factory wage-slaves, at the mercy of factory and mill-owners, and their successors, the modern multinationals.
It may be impractical to go back to a time when cottagers could keep a cow, grazing on the common and producing milk for the family. In an age of electricity and electronics, we would not wish to go back to flickering dim candles and rush-lights. The crofter lifestyle can hardly be sustained today.
But our reliance now is on commodities produced for profit, for the markets. This is a competitive system, geared to causing poverty, famine and wars, and it is highly wasteful.
As Socialists we argue there is another possible way of life: one based on having the land and other means of producing wealth owned in common and democratically managed “by and in the interest of the whole community”. But since the enclosures, we and our predecessors have been alienated from the land which once gave such a variety of everyday provisions, a right of subsistence, strongly defended for generations.
However, it is still possible for the working class to take back the land and build a better world – not just to reform this cash-nexus class exploitation system but to remove it altogether.
The fact that we know that the self-governing commons lasted for so many centuries is proof that there is nothing in so-called ‘human nature’ to prevent people from co-operating as a community, and devising and agreeing sensible, practical rules to avoid the over-exploitation of the commons.
Capitalism’s anti-social greed
The so-called ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ was a myth based on the individualistic greed and competitive self-interest which are the key features of capitalism. The Charter of the Forest and the various rules about the governance of commons, recorded in so many places, prove this myth to be an ideological lie.
Garret Hardin’s argument naively assumed that, unless land was privately owned, it would inevitably become over-grazed with an irresponsible free-for-all. This was widely held to prove that common ownership could not be sustainable. But the answer to his argument is that historically the use of the commons was always carefully managed, not by the state or the lord of the manor, but by the commoners – the local community – themselves.
For instance, the number of sheep or cattle grazing on the moors, fells or commons was controlled by practical rules such as ‘stinting’. These rules could be detailed and specific e.g. in South Cambridgeshire, (see Shirley Wittering The Ecology of Enclosure… South Cambridgeshire 1798-1850, 2013). The rules were always practical, rooted in the needs of the community and of the land, e.g. after a corn harvest, first the cattle were turned out to pasture and later the sheep.
Landowners who even now try to close ancient paths and rights of way often come up against determined resistance by local people. Even now, when Trump declared in 2019 that he intended to buy Greenland, there was a unanimous howl of protest and outrage. “Greenland is ours! It is not for sale!”
In J Alfred Eggar’s book (Life & Customs…, c. 1925), he described several such conflicts, sometimes a legal challenge, sometimes by fisticuffs, and usually – but not always – successful. A useful shortcut was not given up lightly, and country people in many areas showed they had an attitude. Even Eggar – himself a farmer and surveyor – showed sympathy for the villagers as against the gentry.
Consistently, from the late 18th century to the early 20th, local writers such as Gilbert White, Cobbett, Sturt and Eggar and many others, argued for the old ‘Cottage Economy’, the many skills and country crafts that were disappearing, and which depended on the village having access to a piece of common land. #
Reading through these old eye-witness accounts is to rediscover a now largely lost way of life, one of production for use, creating use-values – not commodities. As socialists we argue for a new social system based on common ownership, soundly rooted in the historic realities of recorded community co-operation which in the past thrived for generations on those now stolen commons. That is why historical studies of those commons – and of the enclosures – are so important.
We are all too often accused of being impractical – mere Utopian dreamers. But in reality, our demand for common ownership is justified and rooted in the reality of generations of people, in many parts of the world, where common ownership and democratic control has been successfully practised for centuries.
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WHAT MAKES SOMEONE A SOCIALIST?
What makes someone a socialist? According to the Times (18 June 2024) the Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer is a socialist. Is he?
Starmer has his name to a General Election Manifesto full of ideas of improving capitalism not abolishing it.
He is a supporter of NATO
He has no second thought in given orders for the use of nuclear weapons.
He supports the capitalist political principle of leadership
He supports commodity production and exchange for profit
He would use troops to break strikes
A socialist Sir Keir Starmer is not.
So, what does make someone a socialist?
Foremost a worker who acknowledges that capitalism is a social system with a beginning and an end in class struggle.
It is someone who understands that the working class are exploited in the productive process producing more social wealth than they receive in wages and salaries.
It is someone who does not need leaders to tell them what to do and how to think
It is someone who agrees that capitalism cannot be made to run in the interest of the working class
And it is someone who works with other socialists to create a socialist majority to replace the profit system with world-wide system of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
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CAPITALISM: THE SURVEILLANCE STATE
The state under capitalism is a coercive state. The state exists to protect the private ownership of the means of production and distribution by the capitalist class to the exclusion of the rest of society. It exists to conserve for the ruling class the private ownership to the means of life from external capitalists and an internal working class.
The government, the executive of the bourgeoisie, has at its disposal physical force, violence, imprisonment and death. It controls the machinery of government including the armed forces and the police. The police constitute law and enforcement but the state also has a secret police force – in the UK MI5, MI6, GCHQ, Special Branch and other sub-groups – who spy on the activities of foreign government and internal agitators, whether peaceful or violent.
Many people associate secret police with authoritarian states and dictatorships. Elizabeth the First had her secret police to spy on would be traitors. Those who were believed to be a threat to the Tudor state were imprisoned and had confessions wrung out of them. Many an innocent prisoner went to the scaffold.
Napoleon and all dictators have a long history of using spies to infiltrate and suppress the opposition. As developed by Napoleon for dictatorial control over the French Empire, the administration was interwoven with a national police structure led by Joseph Fouché for purposes of political surveillance and repression.
Lenin, following Napoleon, set up The Cheka. This organization was the Bolshevik security force or secret police. It was formed by Vladimir Lenin in a December 1917 decree and charged with identifying and dealing with potential counter-revolutionaries. Cheka agents operated on their own accord, carrying out arrests, detention and executions. This laid the basis for the KGB and Putin’s Federal Service [of] Safety’
Then there was the Stasi. Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people in an effort to root out the class enemy. In 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 people full-time, including 2,000 fully employed unofficial collaborators, 13,073 soldiers and 2,232 officers of GDR army, along with 173,081 unofficial informants inside GDR and 1,553 informants in West Germany (Wikipedia). It was estimated that at the end of the regime there were 500,000 informants in East Germany. A lot of good it did them.
As with all dictatorships, China has its secret police force for surveillance and the crushing of dissent. Since 2019, it is estimated that 200 million monitoring CCTV cameras of the “Skynet” system have been put to use in mainland China, four times the number of surveillance cameras employed in the United States. By 2020, the number of surveillance cameras in mainland China is expected to reach 626 million. China wants to control the working class and prevent any dissent against the capitalist regime. It is a tall order. Capitalism does not give them that luxury. Capitalism calls the shots. Governments are controlled by the profit system not the other way round. That is their Achilles heel.
Dictators and authoritarian states do not last forever. Secret Services, like the KGB, did not prevent their fall. Napoleons’ reign lasted fifteen years. The Soviet Union lasted 69 years from 1922 to 1991. The East German secret police, the Stasi, despite the wide-spread control over the country was still unable to prevent the collapse of the regime, an event not anticipated neither by the CIA nor MI6.
British capitalism has a long history of spying on what the government and its agents believe to be an internal threat. Louis XVI’s ex-ministers and police officers exercised an important influence on William Pitt and his ministers, an influence that encouraged the introduction of a French-style secret police within Britain against those agitating for suffrage, Jacobin sympathisers and those involved in the London Corresponding Society (LSC) who wanted the democratic reform of Parliament (see Elizabeth Sparrow, ‘Secret Service under Pitt’s Administrations’, 1792–1806, History, Vol.83, No. 270, April 1998). Pitt’s Gagging Acts: the 1795 Seditious Meetings Act and the Treason Act along with the use of paid spies and informants may have broken the LCS but did not stop the working class getting the vote: a vote that could be used in a revolutionary way to establish socialism.
Special Branch was established in March 1883 to combat the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Its remit was increased to cover all areas of “subversion” and “political extremism”. The Secret Service Bureau was founded in 1909 with MI5 and MI6 being formed during the First World War. With the Russian coup led by the Bolsheviks, the secret service was used to spy on “Communists” supporting state capitalism in Russia. Then this was extended to the Trotskyists, anarchists, CND, and other groups whose “subversion” was considered a threat to the state.
Of course, in recent years the police have increasingly spied on non-violent groups like environmental protestors and those seeking to address global warming. They have used undercover officers some of whom have deceived women protestors into long-term intimate relationships. In a landmark judgement in September 2021, the judges in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled that the Metropolitan police had violated the environmental protestor’s human rights including inflicting degrading treatment on several women. For The Metropolitan Police it will be just water under the bridge. After all they shot and killed Jean Charles da Silva e de Menezes in July 2005 at Stockwell station with impunity believing he was a terrorist. State violence in British capitalism is very cavalier.
Government legislation which activates spies is so wide it encompasses groups who do not believe they warrant being spied upon. The UK government currently defines extremism as, “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. (www.publishing.service.gov.uk). This net would bring into it someone who saw current usage of “democracy” as wholly deficient since it did not include the means of production and distribution. The definition of extremism is abstract enough to include socialists who want to replace capitalism with socialism (See Professor Chris Allen, Extremism in the UK: new definitions threaten human and civil rights, The Conversation March 29, 2021).
In October 2018 The Guardian published a data base of political surveillance and infiltration over a 37 year period. Undercover officers spied on 22 leftwing groups, 10 environmental groups, nine anti-racist campaigns and nine anarchist groups, according to the database. They also spied on campaigns against apartheid, the arms trade, nuclear weapons and the monarchy, as well as trade unions. Among those spied on were 16 campaigns run by families or their supporters seeking justice over alleged police misconduct. According to the database, police spied on 12 animal rights groups and eight organisations related to the Irish conflict.
Can the state become so powerful through surveillance and undermining dissent that socialism is impossible? Can the will of a socialist majority be permanently thwarted by surveillance and infiltration? It is an easy mistake to give our political enemies so much political power that they can arrest a growing socialist movement.
In Britain, Parliament has a complete and secure grip upon the forces of the state, including the secret service, and government interventions in the strikes, demonstrations and pressure groups of recent years have shown on whose side they act. These are a forceful illustration of how necessary it is for the workers to obtain control of Parliament before attempting to replace the profit system with common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by all of society. They further show that the only way to obtain control of the machinery of government is by a socialist majority sending socialist delegates to Parliament to form a majority there.
An open and democratic political party, with no leadership and controlled by its membership, is difficult to undermine and infiltrate. We survived the political discomfort of both the First and Second World Wars. Socialists have nothing to hide. We exist “to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist”. We are a consequence of the class struggle over which the capitalist state and its agents cannot prevent or destroy.
What about socialism, the state and surveillance? There will be no coercive state in socialism. The state is a class instrument used to prevent production and distribution for direct social use and direct access to what people need to lead worthwhile lives. There will be no politicians, government officials, police, armed forces and police spies in socialism. It will be “an administration of things not people”. The surveillance state is only associated with capitalism.
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SOCIALISTS DON’T TAKE SIDES IN CAPITALISM’S WARS
Capitalism causes war
The socialist’s opposition to wars is on the grounds of class. Socialists argue that workers should not let themselves be involved in wars caused by disputes between different sections of the capitalist class. As we stated in the 1936 pamphlet on ‘War and the Working Class’:
“The Socialist Party of Great Britain, like voice crying in the wilderness, has always maintained that capitalism and warfare are inseparable. There can be no capitalism without conflicts of economic interest. From these arise the national rivalries and hatreds, the fears and armaments which may at any time provoke war on a terrifying scale”
War and capitalism will always go together. War has continued into the Twenty First century particularly in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. The Ukraine conflict, the first land war in Europe since 1939, is just one of many now taking place throughout the world.
War is not a series of ‘out-of-the-blue’ episodic events. War and conflict derives from the competition of capitalism. All countries prepare for war. War is part and parcel of capitalism, like economic crises and poverty. Wars take place because of the competitive struggle over raw materials, strategic spheres of influence, land and trade routes. The world divided into competitive nation states is about winners and losers; between those who have political and economic power, those who want power and those who have little or none at all and have to do as they are told.
Socialists oppose capitalism’s wars because they are not in the interest of the working class to fight and get killed in. Workers have no interest in capitalism wars. Workers do not own the means of production and distribution. Workers do not own land, strategic points of influence, raw materials and trade, shipping and communication routes. Workers only own their ability to work, their labour power which they are forced to sell on the labour market in exchange for a salary or a wage.
As Marx and Engels famously wrote “Workers have no country. You cannot take from them what they do not own” (Communist Manifesto).
The working class has no interest in war
The working class form a majority throughout the world. They face the world capitalist class over the ownership of the means of production and distribution. Workers face capitalists and their political representatives over the ownership of land, factories, communication and transport system and distribution points. Workers have no interest in the profit system because they cannot just take what they produce nor have direct access to what they and their families need.
The interest of the working class is to become socialist, form a majority within principled socialist political parties and democratically and politically replace capitalism with socialism: replace the anti-social drive to make profit with the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. The interest of the working class is to win the class war.
It is not for workers to take sides in capitalism’s wars. It is not for the working class to show “patriotic duty” and support the killing of workers by other workers. Nor is it to fly the Ukrainian flag from cars or flag poles. Nor is it to uncritically support politicians who urge war, death and destruction from the safety of their political offices. And it is not for workers to “get behind” the politician s like Starmer, Truss and Johnson in arming Ukraine and imposing economic sanctions on Russia in order to pursue the narrow interests of their own capitalist class.
Is war about good and evil?
The media and politicians present war in moral terms of good and evil. “We” are good the “enemy is “bad”. Napoleon was considered a monster. In the First World War it was the “Kaiser” who should be hanged from the nearest lamp post. In the Second World War it was “Hitler” who was the personification of evil and in league with the devil. Then, more recently, there has been Saddam Hussain in Iraq, and Colonel Gaddafi in Libya who have been singled out for their nasty and brutal regimes. The British Prime
Minister, Anthony Eden, once described Colonel Nasser during the Suez Canal in 1956 as a “new Hitler” labelling him both a “fascist” and a “communist”. Eden said nothing about Britain’s imperialist interests.
More recently we have been told by the capitalist media and politicians that the war in Ukraine has been the result of “evil” Mr Putin”. If only someone else was in power instead of nasty Mr Putin. The journalist, Ben Macintyre, recently ran an article “Could we kill Putin? Possibly/ Should we?” (Times June 4, 2022). Macintyre was of the belief that by taking out Putin through assassination it would resolve the conflict.
Macintyre retold the (mainly failed) attempts by the CIA to take out political leaders like Castro. Macintyre reminded us that the killing of Reinhardt Heydrich in 1942 led to the killing of every inhabitant in the Czech village of Lidice. And that between 2000 and 2018 Israel has conducted some 1800 killings of Palestinian leaders and activists. The Second World War did not end with the killing of Heydrich, nor the “Final Solution” which he had instigated at the Wannsee conference a few months earlier. There is still violent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Macintyre concluded that assassinations are “Tricky to recruit and extremely problematic to deploy”.
In the media there is a torrent of articles, telling readers that Putin does this, Putin does that, as though Putin is this all-powerful figure in the Kremlin. This is the baseless “evil man theory of history” first articulated against Marx by Isaiah Berlin in his lecture on “Historical Inevitability” given at the London School of Economics in May 1953.
History, for Berlin, was not about why and how one social system changes to another. Berlin was not interested in the economic changes in society which cause change or in the class struggle as “the motor force of history”. As a defender of privilege and wealth Berlin had no interest about where we are now, how we got here and where we’re going next. He saw the job of historians to deliver judgemental moral sermons against “Charlemagne or Napoleon, or Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin for their massacres” (p 76). His was a morality of history: praise for the good: damnation for the bad. It was a religious conception of history.
In a letter to the ‘Times’ (24 June 2024), Professor Nick Megoran of New Castle University reminded us that in 1997 the diplomat George Kennan argued that Bill Clinton’s policy of endorsing NATO expansion “would be the most fateful error of America policy in the post-Cold War era” It would, he cautioned inflame “nationalistic anti-western and militaristic tendencies” in Russia, hinder nuclear weapons control, return us to Cold War-style east-west relations and impel “Russian foreign policy in directions not to our liking “.
However, all politicians have to work within the limits imposed by capitalism. Capitalism controls politicians not the other way round. To understand politics and politicians you first have to understand capitalism and the forces that act on the profit system. And this applies to political leaders as it does to anybody else.
Do not take sides
To begin a critical analysis of the Ukrainian conflict requires a dispassionate analysis which the capitalist politicians of NATO will not allow to take place. They have gone out of their way to stifle debate using the ad-hominem argument of any criticism of NATO being seen as support for Russia even if socialists go out of our way to state that we condemn both sides.
We oppose Putin’s Russian invasion of Ukraine with its indiscriminate killing, rape and brutality of civilian populations, we oppose the killing of the working class by other workers no matter what uniform they are wearing and we oppose NATO as an aggressive force protecting the interests of Western capitalism, notably the United States. Socialists have not forgotten NATO’s war in Serbia in 1992-1995 nor the invasion of Iraq on the spurious grounds of Hussain supposedly having “weapons of mass destruction”.
This is so convenient. It lets the US, Britain and NATO off the hook. They can do no wrong. They are innocent parties in the conflict. Yet no one asks what would happen if someone else was in charge in Russia. If Putin was replaced by someone else, Russian policy against NATO expansion would still remain the same, antipathy against Ukraine joining the EU would still exist and the pursuit of Russian power and strategic dominance, once enjoyed by the USSR, would still be entertained. All capitalist countries want to be top dog.
In capitalisms wars, socialists do not take sides. We neither support Ukrainian nationalism, NATO expansionism nor Russian imperialism. What we do support are the interests of the working class in its class struggle against the capitalist class. We do not give support to workers when they display sentiments of nationalism or patriotism, or argue for
“my country right or wrong”, or enlist in the armed forces to kill for the interests of another class. We do not support workers in uniform or those supporting them killing other workers.
The Tory Manifesto included a policy for the-introduction of conscription. Conscription should be resisted. The conservatives have set out a mandatory plan to require 18-year-old under pain of some unspecified penalty to join the military for 12 months. Earlier in the year the head of the British Army called for a ‘citizen army’ to prepare for a future land war with Russia. The Labour leader Keir Starmer never rejected the Tory proposal. It was the Labour government that introduced conscription after the Second World War with workers forced to fight in capitalism’s wars notably in Indo-China, Indonesia and in Greece. If Blair’s labour government is remembered for the war in Iraq what war will Starmer be remembered for?
The support of socialists for the working class is qualified. Workers should become socialists not soldiers. Workers should not support the interests of another class. They should be struggling to establish a world without war, not getting involved in one which is of no interest to themselves or their families. Workers in Britain and Russia have the same class interests and same objective of replacing the profit system with its wars, with socialism. Workers face the same economic and social problems no matter where they live and have the same interests in solving them.
The working class can replace capitalism and its wars with global socialism – a social system of society based on co-operation, not competition, on common ownership of the world’s resources democratically controlled by the whole community; a society with production directly for use – not profit; a classless society where wars will be a thing of the past.
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THE STRIKE WEAPON IN THE CLASS STRUGGLE
In response to numerous potential strikes this summer the Tories recently passed emergency regulations to allow employers to recruit agency workers to cover official industrial action. Unions, opposed to the anti-working-class legislation claimed that it would worsen industrial disputes, concerns largely echoed by employers in the recruitment sector.
In many respects it is knee-jerk reaction by a government who has no interest in the day-to-day struggle of workers trying to improve their wages and working conditions. The Act is in a long line of anti-trade union legislation dating back to the 1960s when the Wilson Labour government unsuccessfully tried to impose its “In Place of Strife” legislation followed by the Tories Industrial Relations Act of 1971. The “In Place of Strife” legislation would have imposed settlements where management and unions could not agree and would have implemented a ‘conciliation’ pause of 28 days before a strike could take place. The Industrial Relations Act created the National Industrial Relations Courts (NIRC) with the power to call strike ballots and order a “cooling off” period. Any union failing to comply with the Court would be fined.
Anti trade union legislation continued during the 1980s and 1990. The Tony Blair Labour government embraced this anti working-class legislation and tried, unsuccessfully, to impose a partnership between employers, trade unions and the State.
The trade unions’ weapon for bringing pressure to bear on the employer is the strike, by means of which production is halted. Train drivers, for example are going to refuse to work on the railways over a number of days in July and August after successfully balloting members. Strikes, though, are only effective when market conditions are such that an employer does not want to lose profit if the service is curtailed or that production is stopped. At such times the employer will either make concessions to avoid a strike or quickly settle if a strike is declared.
So, what is the socialist position of the strike weapon? Unlike the capitalist Left we do not see the strike as a harbinger of revolution. Nor do we see it as a litmus test of the class struggle which goes on all the time whether there are strikes or not. We do not parasitically feed off non-socialist discontent to lead striking workers anywhere. Only a socialist majority taking democratic and political action can establish socialism.
Socialists see the usefulness of the strike weapon to gain temporary improvementbut are also aware of its limitations. These limitations come out of the reality of capitalism and the fact that the capitalist not only own the means of production and distribution but also enjoy the protection of the machinery of government including the armed forces. The disadvantage faced by many service workers is that the type of job they do – driving ambulances, fire engines or trains – makes it a practical possibility for the government to use temporary contract workers or troops for strike breaking.
Socialism sees democratic practices as being indispensable in the conduct of trade unions and in particular strike action. No strikes should be started without a ballot and no settlement should be accepted without one. Trade unions should not have leaders and the union should be in the control of the whole membership who then makes decisions. In no way should unions be affiliated to anti working-class political organisations like the Labour Party.
In the main, antitrade union legislation will be enforced against trade unions including breaking strikes and imprisoning trade unionists. In some parts of the world trade unionists are tortured and killed. Trade unions also come up against the trade cycle where the union’s ability to halt production is of little use during an economic depression when employers are reducing production or going bankrupt. And in taking strike action workers are confronted with employers who have greater financial resources than those of the unions.
The financial power of employers during strikes can be seen in the disastrous monthslong strike of the miners in 1926, the strike of firemen (1977-80) when the Labour government used troops as strike-breakers and again in the ill-considered miners’ strike of 1984 which saw miners forced back to work after a year as the employers not only had the forces of the state using violence against them, but, the resolve of the Thatcher government to see the strike defeated. Long strikes also have the disadvantage of weakening the unions as they deplete their funds so any increase in pay won, has to be off-set against the loss of wages lost during the strike.
Under capitalism, with or without the strike weapon, trade unions and workers generally are faced with extreme limitations imposed on them, of what they can do due to their class position. Something Marx wrote about the imitation of trade union action, is as true now, as was over a hundred years ago:
“The working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects…that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady.” (Value, Price and Profit)”
Marx went on to say:
“Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s pay fair a fair day’s work” they ought to inscribe on their banners the revolutionary watchwords: “Abolition of the wages system”
