Trump: Winners and Losers.
On the 6th November Donald Trump became the 47th President of the United States. Who are the winners and losers?
The foremost winner is the billionaire Elon Musk. The Guardian reported that: “Tesla’s market value breached the $1tn mark in a sharp rally on Friday, on growing bets of a favourable treatment for CEO Elon Musk’s companies in return for his support for President-elect Donald Trump in his poll campaign” (Guardian 8 November 2024).
Another winner is Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon. He saw his net worth rise by $7 billion to $223.5 billion, maintaining his position as the world’s second-wealthiest person behind Musk. And Larry Ellison, the chair of the software company Oracle, also a Trump supporter, increased his wealth by nearly $10 billion to $193 billion.
According to Forbes the 400 richest people in America are having a splendid time in the roaring 2020s. In all, they are worth a record $5.4 trillion, up nearly $1 trillion from last year. A dozen have $100 billion-plus fortunes, also a record. And admission to this elite club is pricier than ever: A minimum net worth of $3.3 billion is required, up $400 million since 2023. Despite the high bar, 23 newcomers managed to break into the ranks, having grown their fortunes in everything from mundane plastic pipes to cutting-edge artificial intelligence.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated that ten richest people in the world gained nearly $64 billion the day after the election, the largest daily increase since the index began in 2012. (‘The New European’14th November 2024).
Another winner is the Republican Party free market think tanks particularly the Heritage Foundation. They published a 900-page document, Project 2025, setting out a free-market agenda incorporating a small and minimal State along with cuts in taxation. The document proposed slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy and for the President to “stop the war on oil and natural gas”. The
President should also slash corporate and income taxes, abolish the federal Reserve and return to a gold-backed currency.
The third winner is the gas and oil industry. Trump has political disregard to anything “green” including a disbelief in climate change. According to the ‘Guardian’ (18 October 2024) Donald Trump raised more money from the oil and gas industry than at this stage of his previous campaigns for the US presidency, with a surge of fossil fuel funding coming in the six months since he directly requested $1 billion from oil executives and then promised he would scrap environmental rules if elected.
If these are the winners then who are the losers?
The losers are the working class in the United States; those who did not vote and those who misleadingly voted for Trump or Harris It is the working class, those who have to sell their ability to work in exchange for a wage or salary who are the losers. The workers votes were cast to support the politicians of capitalism and not used in their own revolutionary class interest.
The working class are the losers because Trump cannot alleviate the economic and social problems associated with their class position in society. Capitalism is based on the class ownership of the means of production and the accompanying exploitation of the workers.
Take the case of poverty. In one of the richest countries in the world the U.S. rates of poverty are substantially higher and more extreme than those found by the OECD in other 25 nations like the UK, Australia and Japan (OECD https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserve 2019). The overall U.S. rate stands at 17.8 percent, compared to the 25-country average of 10.7 percent. The Scandinavian and Benelux countries tend to have the lowest rates of poverty. For example, the overall rate of poverty in Denmark is only 5.5 percent. President Biden could not solve the poverty problem effecting millions of workers and neither will Donald Trump.
Of course, all the working class in the United States are in poverty, whether their income is high or low, because workers cannot just produce what they need or directly take to feed, clothe and educate their families. Under capitalism workers are locked into the wages system. What their wages are and what they need to exist are two entirely different things.
Trump claims his presidency will mean a golden age for United States capitalism. That is a golden age for the capitalist class. However, capitalism always has a sting in the tail. Despite politicians claiming to control capitalism, it is the other way round, capitalism controls politicians who cannot do anything about the innate economic laws of capitalism which are dependent on commodity production and exchange for profit. Marx showed, and subsequent events have confirmed his analysis of capitalism’s economic laws, that arising from capitalism’s anarchy of production, there is an economic cycle from moderate expansion in production and sales, then boom, then crisis then depression. here is Marx.
“The Golden Age of capitalism” never lasts just as a previous generation found out in 1929 with the Great Depression followed a few years later with the Second World War and its 55 million deaths.
MARX’S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY(1)
What is Wealth? Wealth is a product of human labour power, acting upon nature-given materials that satisfies human needs. This relationship identifies wealth with use-value. However, capitalism is a society where wealth becomes a commodity having exchange value. Capitalism also has use-values peculiar to it such a nuclear weapons.
What is value? Value is a social relationship between people which expresses itself as a material relationship between things. Value is often seen as something intrinsic to commodities, but from a socialist perspective it is a transitory economic category of the worker and capitalist relationship peculiar to capitalism.
The value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary abstract labour required for its production, and in these terms, it is an absolute magnitude.
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CHINA IS A CAPITALIST COUNTRY
October 2024 saw the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Along with the Russian revolution and subsequent coup d état by the Bolsheviks, China presented two of the major capitalist revolutions in the 20th century. The state capitalism which came out the Bolshevik’s seizure of power only lasted 74 years but the Chinese dictatorship has lasted longer. More’s the pity since it traduces and misrepresents what socialism means.
It’s leaders and supporters in Britain and elsewhere describe China as having “socialist characteristics’ but from the working class and socialist perspective it is wholly capitalist. The major characteristic of Chinese capitalism, as it is in every other capitalist country, is the profit motive; that is production for profit. Unlike capitalist liberal democracies in the West, the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party controls society through dictatorship and a secret police which comes down hard on any dissent.
China is never looked at from the position of the working class, those who are forced to sell their ability to work for a wage or a salary. Little is said on how workers in China are denied the right to set up independent trade unions, more so to establish a principled and democratic socialist party.
Why do socialists describe China as a capitalist country? Simply because its state and private sectors of the economy exploit the working class; a class who produce all the wealth. The working class in China do not have direct access to what they and their families need to live on because in the production process what commodities workers produce are taken as private property to be sold on the world market. An exploited class in China shares the same subservient position as workers elsewhere in the world.
Chinese capitalism from the perspective of the working class in China
Chinese capitalism from the perspective of the working class is one of class struggle. The class struggle found in China conforms to the point expressed by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto that: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’. Marx and Engels later qualified this to refer to written history in order to take account of early primitive communist societies in which class divisions had not yet emerged. However, class struggle exists in China.
The class struggle is the dynamic of history since the rise of private property. The class struggle in China is the conflict of material interests existing between the capitalist and working-class giving rise to strikes and lockouts, trade unions, employers association and the political parties like the Chinese Communist Party who side with employers in the class struggle. The Chinese dictatorship might prevent other political parties existing, more so a principled and democratic socialist party, but is riven through with conflict as different ruling class interests try to take power.
And even in a closed dictatorship where the government has control of communication, strikes still take place. 2023 marked a new peak in strikes by workers in China since 2016. Workers were still able to push for higher wages and better working conditions by using the strike weapon.
According to’ Asian Labor Review’ (4 June 2024):
“The number of factory strikes increased notably, and most strikes happened in the coastal regions, especially in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta.. there were 434 factory strikes in 2023, compared to 37 in 2022 and 66 in 2021. Among the 434 cases, about 80 percent were in the southeast coastal region”.
And went on to say:
“China’s strike wave, driven by both factory and platform workers in 2023, provides both inspiring and sobering lessons. As the economic downturn severely affected workers’ livelihoods in various ways, workers demonstrated a strong resolve to fight back and demand what they deserved. But at the same time, the power of workers’ struggles – which remain more or less sporadic and improvised – was constrained by bosses’ manoeuvres, the government’s actions, and structural changes in the economy. To counteract these barriers would require more elaborate and sustainable ways of organizing and a stronger and broader sense of class solidarity. How to achieve these within a fiercely anti-organizing political environment stands out as a pressing question for Chinese workers”.
And workers in China could do no worse than read the works of Marx notably, ‘Value Price and Profit’ (1865) in which he explains that the class struggle between the capitalist and working class goes on each and every day over the intensity and extent of class exploitation. However, he said that the terrain in which this struggle takes place is wholly controlled by the capitalist class due to the private ownership of the means of production and distribution protected by the capitalist state machine. The class struggle only ends with the abolition of the wages system.
Chinese capitalism from the perspective of socialists
We do not know if there are any socialists in China. No socialist political party exists with a principled political programme and socialist object. China has the largest working class in the world many, mostly women, living and working in conditions described by Engels in his book ‘The Conditions of the working Class in England’ (1845). This is from War on Want, albeit written over a decade ago:
Trying to escape from extreme poverty, rural migrant workers find themselves trapped in appalling working conditions. Most of these workers are women earning extremely low wages – the average monthly salary including overtime is CNY 1,690 (£150).Migrant workers endure long working days, work seven days a week, many without an employment contract and face constant discrimination. Living conditions are poor with up to six people sharing small, cramped dormitories. Women migrant workers, who are primarily employed in factories, rarely get maternity leave, and with no childcare facilities and working weeks of more than 70 hours many are forced to send their children to live with family in the countryside.
There is no freedom of association to form trade unions and non-governmental labour organisations are closely monitored by the Government who carry out regular crackdowns. Multinational corporations and national factory owners take advantage of the anti-union climate, the workers’ lack of awareness of their own rights and the Chinese government’s unwillingness to address the abuse of migrant workers’ rights (10 December 2009).
A more recent report ‘Labour Conditions in China’s Consumer Electronics Sector’ (Labor News, November 13th, 2013) indicates that little has changed. The report identified deep rooted problems, which for socialists, two of which are the absence of free trade unions and more importantly a socialist movement, both extremely difficult under a dictatorship. The report does conclude that the problems facing workers in China derive from the pattern of production in China which centres on making profit not meeting human need. Major problems cited in the report include:
- Low basic wages and long working hours.
- Dispatch workers are denied the right to rest, lack access to social benefits, and face increasing vulnerability to wage theft.
- Illegal use of student interns who are required to work overtime and do work unrelated to their studies.
- High labour intensity that includes long hours of constant standing at some positions, night shifts, lack of break time during work, short meal breaks, and high assembly speed and production quota.
- Workplace bullying and verbal abuse by line leaders.
- Discrimination in recruitment, especially based on age and ethnicity.
The problem for the working class in China, as it is for workers elsewhere in the world is that they do not own and control the means of production and distribution. On the contrary socialism will be a social system in which the means of production and distributing wealth will be owned by society as a whole. The means of life will be held democratically by the whole community.
Socialism will be a classless society in which a coercive state and class exploitation will have been abolished. There would be no, ‘Communist’ Party. Chinese capitalism along with other capitalist countries would no longer exist. Global socialism would replace global capitalism. There would be the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
What will happen to the Chinese communist Party?
The Communist Party in China is not a solidified political structure. It is transient. It had a beginning as China came out of feudalism and by the time of Mao internal Party conflicts led to the Cultural revolution in the 1960s and the expulsion of the gang of four a decade later.
Political power under capitalism is unstable and fluid. It is dominated and influenced by the economic laws of capitalism. The Communist Party dictatorship may believe they have a grip on power but that power is fluid. As Marx said in the ‘Communist Manifesto’: “All is solid melts into air”.
Who in the first decade of the 1980s believed that the Russian Communist Party along with the Soviet Union would dissolve at the end of the decade? And China is not immune to economic crises and trade depressions with its bankruptcy and periods of high unemployment. War with the United State could be another trigger that ends the Chinese dictatorship.
And the end of the Chinese Communist Party might, through the working class taking political and democratic action, occur through a growing socialist movement maybe in China or somewhere else in the world
This is what the Socialist Party of Great Britain said of Russia in 1942 when Stalinism was at its height and was being feted by the USA and it is equally applicable to the Chinese dictatorship:
“A socialist movement will grow in Russia, but it will come from the workers, not from the Russian dictators. The revolutionary fervour, as in past revolutions, has a tendency to work itself out as time goes on. The revolutionisers of the beginning are followed by waves of more and more reactionary successors…The Bolshevik attempt to usher in Socialism by “legal enactments” and by “bold leaps” before the economic conditions were ripe, and before the mass of the population desired socialism, has been a total failure. In course of time that failure will become obvious to the workers inside and outside Russia”
(“The Russian Dictatorship, Questions of the Day”, Socialist Party of Great Britain 1942).
For workers in China, as it is for workers elsewhere in the world, the only way forward is the establishment of socialism.
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RIOTING FOR WHAT?
During the summer of 2024 there were riots in many cities of England following the violent stabbings of three children in Southport. Angry workers were manipulated into believing the attacker had come over on the boats, was an “illegal” immigrant (he was born in Wales) and was Muslim (in fact he was a Catholic). Those egging on the rioters from the safety of their bedroom and through the transmission of deliberate disinformation on social media, wanted a “race war”. They wanted one group of workers to attack – even kill -another group of workers. This is what nationalism means, class division and class hatred. As the journalist James Ball pointed out:
“In 2024, the UK now has something resembling the Infowars to Fox News to the Republicans pipeline. The infrastructure is in place: there are numerous far right blue tick accounts on X with large, credulous followings. There are GB News pundits happy to lend “mainstream” credibility to the rumours they peddle. And Farage and his party will jump on dangerous misinformation for votes” (The New European November 2021-2027)
One of the chants by the crowd was “We want our country back”. This is pure ignorance. The chant was similar to the egregious and politically illiterate slogan “British jobs for British workers” used by the former Labour Prime Minister, Gorden Brown. The crowd, made up largely of white male workers, has no country “to get back” just as they have no ‘right’ to employment or housing. They own no means of production and distribution. Their problems derive from capitalism not other workers. Even if British capitalism had no blacks, Asians or, Chinese workers, indigenous workers would still be exploited, still receive second best and live volatile and unpredictable lives. Angrily waving the union jack or flag of St George gets you nowhere. Only democratic and political action as a socialist movement can make any fundamental and revolutionary change for the better.
In Rotherham, protesters chanted “get them out” at the Holiday Inn Express hotel in which refugees had been housed. Windows and doors were smashed at the hotel, and a large bin was set alight just outside the building with scant regards of those working or living inside. Here we have members of the working-class attacking members of the working from other countries. The only winner is the capitalist class.
The extreme right believe they are “patriots” defending English history, traditions and way of life of the “indigenous population”. Nothing of the sort. They are not “patriots” but racists. They do not understand the social system in which they express their irrational anger and hate. Nor do they recognise that their leaders are using them to divide the working class into “us and them” when workers, instead, should be united towards establishing world socialism. Their patriotism is xenophobic and a historical fantasy which only divides our class. Workers do not share in the same history as the capitalist class; the history of the working class is class struggle not kings and queens, the Lives of Stateman, wars and Empire. “Patriotism”, as Johnson once remarked, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Workers have been coming to England for centuries to live and work. One asylum seeker who did so much to explain capitalism to the working class was Karl Marx.
It was Marx who showed that capitalism can never be run in the interest of the working class. With no direct access to the means of production and what workers produce being the private property of the employers, workers are contained and rationed within the wages system. Workers will always get second best or not at all, whether it be health, education or housing. The trade cycle means that workers are vulnerable to losing their jobs. And they will always be prey to snake oil salesmen like Nigal Farage and Tommy Robinson.
The snake oil salesmen sell the working-class powerful myths about national identity and who is to blame for their problems. History shows that at points of industrial change, unemployment, destruction of communities and failure of governments to address these problems. Demagogues have been very adept at manipulating worker’s unease, fear and vulnerability.
Socialists do not divide or rank the working class by ethnicity. There is only one working class all sharing the same class interest whether they are aware of this or not. The working class is the last class to achieve political freedom from class exploitation and as the SPGB’s Clause 4 states “…the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex”.
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NATIONALISM OR SOCIALISM?
Socialists reject Nationalism
One of the unique aspects of the socialist case against capitalism is that socialists reject nationalism, nationalist struggles and national identity. For socialists, nationalism is bound up with the historical development of capitalism during the 19th century. Capitalism is made up of competing capitalist states each with a capitalist class and working class. The capitalists own the means of production and distribution to the exclusion of the working-class majority. It was Marx and Engels who, in the ‘Communist Manifesto’ of 1848, stated that workers “have no country”. They wrote “We cannot take from them what they have not got” (Communist Manifesto).
Increasingly, those who believe that capitalism can be regulated and reformed, left wingers and social democrats, have courted nationalism to gain support from the conservatives and populist politicians. The Labour Party now wraps itself up in the Union Jack, claiming they are “proud patriots” to show that Labour was just as nationalist as the Tories. It should be remembered that the Labour Party has a history of propagating and supporting capitalism’s wars.
Labour has been helped in this embrace of nationalist politics by journalists who should know better. Socialism puts the class struggle first and last. Nationalism is a barrier to socialism. Socialism is a global social system or it is nothing. There will be no nation states in socialism, no boundaries, no borders or barriers preventing people moving across the world.
Nationalism does not “trump” class struggle
So, who are these journalists claiming nationalism trumps class struggle and that to get the better of the Tories we all have to become ‘patriots’? Regrettably one of the leading advocates of “Left-wing nationalism”, someone who should know better, is Patrick Cockburn, a journalist at the inewspaper.
In an article, “How to stop populist leaders exploiting patriotism” (January 1st, 2022), Cockburn wrote that “nationalism, national identity and national self-determination are three main driving forces of modern history”.
Contrast this with the statement in the ‘Communist Manifesto’ made by Marx and Engels that the class struggle is “the motor force of history”. Nationalism and nationalist struggles change very little: usually one ruling class by another. The class struggle – the working-class struggle over the intensity and extent of class exploitation – has revolutionary potential; the end of buying and selling, labour markets, class exploitation, employers and its replacement with production solely and directly for use. In short, with class struggle pushed to its final limit with the establishment of socialism, we will have:” … an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Communist Manifesto).
Cockburn went on to write that these three nationalist driving forces of history:
“..remains the primary focus of communal loyalty – something demonstrated decisively by the response worldwide to the Covid-19 pandemic. The lack of international co-operation when the chips were down has had destructive consequences and this has been the repeated pattern in the past two years”.
Really? Did the working-class form government policy on the Covid -19 pandemic? It was the Tory government who refused to give vaccines in any great number to poor countries because it wanted to keep the working class in the UK fit and healthy for class exploitation. And what of “communal loyalty”? Capitalists like Dyson have no compunction to move their operations abroad to tap into cheaper labour markets or to stash their profits in offshore tax havens.
And despite the nationalist platform given to politicians like Nigel Farage and the millions the capitalist class spend on class division in the media there was mass support for the RNLI saving lives of desperate men, women and children coming over in boats from France.
It is class solidarity which should be aimed at not class division through nationalism and nationalist struggles.
Cockburn goes on to say:
“The priority should be not to deride the patriotic card with the aim of discrediting it, which seldom works, but to take it away from those who exploit it”.
Cockburn criticises those who believe nationalism:
“… is largely a mask for racism and imperialism”.
While he chides “progressives” who once supported:
“…national liberation movements in Vietnam and Algeria… and faces on the placards they carried during demonstrations were those of patriotic heroes”
And he concludes:
“…for good or ill, the basic building blocks of international co-operation are the nation states and the idea of a truly global response to anything has always been wishful thinking”.
How does a socialist respond for this nationalist apologetics from the capitalist left?
For a start if you do not want the corrosive and divisive politics of nationalism then socialism is the only answer. The “patriotic card” should be replaced by the acknowledgement that the working class do not have the same interest as the capitalist class. We do not share their history. And class, class interest and class struggle trump the “patriotic card”, no matter who holds it.
Bin the “patriotic card” and become a socialist
Under Starmer, the Labour Pary wants to be seen as more nationalist than the Tories. Missives made from Downing Street from Starmer to the electorate always have the Union Jack flags in the background.
A war led by Sir Keir Starmer is just as repugnant as one led by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak. Starmer has no difficulty supporting Isreal’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Starmer still takes Ukraine’s side in its war with Russia. He celebrates the Atlee Labour government for promoting the NATO military alliance. And Starmer would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons.
Workers have no interest in wars led by a Labour government anymore than they have for ones led by a Tory, Green of SDP government. There is a world working class with identical interest in replacing the profit system with socialism.
Second, nationalism is a mask for racism and imperialism. Behind the mask is class division and British exceptionalism. Behind the mask there is contempt for “the other” and pride in Empire with its genocide, slavery, plunder and colonialism. Take the mask off and deal with the politics behind it. Socialists have to confront class division to make a socialist case for class unity.
What of socialist support for “nationalist movements” in the 1960s and 1970s. There was none. The Socialist Party of Great Britain rejected the politics associated with nationalist movements. The working class has no interest in disputes between the capitalist class over raw resources, land, sphere of interest and trade routes. We opposed the IRA and Irish nationalism and we opposed the Nationalists in the North during the Vietnam War. We had no placards with “patriotic heroes” since socialists reject political leadership and political heroes. Facts, evidence and reasoned argument to support the socialist case against capitalism is what socialists care about.
This is what socialists said about the Vietnam War and “patriotic heroes”. On the front page of the Socialist Standard (October 1968), we said: “Vietcong, No!, Mao, No!, Che, No!: Socialism, Yes!”
And inside the issue we reminded readers what the Socialist party of Great Britain had said at the outbreak of the First World War:
“Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our good will and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of Capitalism and the triumph of Socialism”
And third what does “international co-operation” under capitalism amount to. We live in a capitalist system where capitalist states are in conflict with each other. War over oil, gas, land, spheres of political influence and trade routes is the reality of “international co-operation”. Does Cockburn not read his own articles where he has shown “International co-operation” to be a mirage”? What about his articles on the Civil war in Syria and Libya?
Socialists do not take sides in capitalisms wars. We do not take the side of Ukraine or Russia in war that has entered is 1000th day of conflict. Nor do socialists take sides in the conflict between the State terrorism of Isreal and the nationalist terrorism of Hamas; a conflict which has seen 35,000 deaths in which more women and children have been killed by Israeli military than any other recent conflict in a single year (Oxfam November 2024). Socialists do not demonstrate, as thousands of misguided workers do, for a Palestinian state but instead we work for the abolition of all states and the establishment of world socialism.
The basic building block is not “international co-operation” but the formation and movement of a world socialist movement with its only goal being the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. And that co-operation starts with rejecting the “patriotic card” and its class division.
MARX’s CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY (2)
What is Exchange Value? Exchange value is a relative magnitude which expresses the relationship between two commodities; twenty metres of linen = I coat, for example. Nevertheless, a commodity has as many exchange values as there are other commodities for which it can be exchanged.
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THE WORLD’s RICH AND POOR
The world’s population is divided into two classes: a capitalist class and a working class.
The capitalist do not have to work because they own the means of production and distribution protected by the police and armed forces of the State as private property. The capitalists, by their shareholding, are the owners of raw resources, the land, transport, communication systems and so on.
The workers – all those who are dependent for their existence on the sale of their labour-power (their mental and physical abilities to work) are a propertyless class. And it is by being propertyless that they live in poverty or varying degrees of poverty. Their poverty arises because they do not have direct access to what they produce and are prohibited from using production as a means to directly meet people’s needs.
The workers produce wealth for the capitalists and not for themselves. Out of the social wealth produced, the capitalists return to the workers in the form of wages and salaries, an amount which is sufficient to maintain them in a state of reasonable health and to reproduce future workers. The surplus produced by the workers, after meeting the expenses of production, distribution and the State machinery, is kept by the properties class.
Capitalism is the cause of the social and economic problems that face the working class today. Under the profit system the workers are, in the strictest sense, poor, that is, workers and their families lack the means to afford the best that is available.
This is not the case for the capitalist class.
The wealth held by the richest strata of the capitalist class runs into trillions of dollars, if you can imagine that figure. According to Forbes’s list there are in 1924 a record 2,781 billionaires with a total net wealth of $14.2 trillion. This is an increase of 141 members and $2 trillion from 2023, which held the previous record for the highest net worth gain on the list, surpassing the $900 billion record set in 2022. Two-thirds of the list members are wealthier compared to the previous year, including Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth increased by $112.6 billion.
What of the poor, those who are living in extreme poverty. According to the latest poverty statistics (World Bank, November 2024) approximately 9.2% of the global population, or about700 million people, live in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is defined by the World Bank as someone living on $2.15 per day. Most people living in extreme poovery are found residing in sub–Saharan Africa and South Asia.
In addition to those living in extreme poverty, about 26% of the global population, or about 2.1 billion people live in what is referred to as “moderate poverty”. Moderate poverty is defined by the World Bank as someone living on less than $6.85 per day.
Poverty disproportionately affects children, with half the world’s poor being children under the age of 18. Roughly 1 billion children worldwide experience multidimensional poverty – meaning they lack necessities like food, water, shelter, education and health care (UNICEF 2024).
Here are some statistics from the Word Bank for October 2024
“Global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020-2030 set to be a lost decade.
8.5 percent of the global population – almost 700 million people – live today on less than $2.15 per day, the extreme poverty line relevant for low-income countries. Three-quarters of all people in extreme poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa or in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
44 percent of the global population – around 3.5 billion people – live today on less than $6.85 per day, the poverty line relevant for upper-middle-income countries. The total number of people living under this poverty line has barely changed since 1990 due to population growth.
Progress on shared prosperity has stalled since the pandemic, due to slow economic growth and a divergence in mean incomes. Today, incomes around the world, on average, would have to increase five-fold to reach the level of $25 per person per day, the minimum prosperity standard for high-income countries.
Around one-fifth of the world’s population lives in economies with high inequality, concentrated mostly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Only 7 percent of the global population lives in countries with low inequality.
Climate change poses a fundamental risk to poverty and inequality reduction. Nearly 1 in 5 people globally are likely to experience a severe weather shock in their lifetime from which they will struggle to recover.
Climate change also threatens to increase global inequality, as poorer countries and people are likely to suffer more from the negative consequences”.
Although the World Bank and the United Nations are useful for showing the global poverty inflicted onto the working class, these organisation carry a failure of all reformist organisations in believing that poverty can be resolved while keeping the profit system, It cannot be done for capitalism needs the working class to be poor and dependent on daily employment for most of their lives in order to live. If workers could exist without having to sell their mental and physical ability to work to the capitalists, then the profit system would not function and the capitalist class and the billionaires within this class would not get their unearned income of rent, interest and profit.
Socialists look on global destitution of our class with dismay. What a waste of human potential. What a loss of skills to create a global system of production directly to meet human needs like housing, food and communication. To solve poverty and other problems cause by capitalism like war and climate change, the global working class must abolish capitalism and replace the profit system with socialism. This will involve a social revolution, changing the basis of society from class to common ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution.
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POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE ‘IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY’
There are many books which came out of the Cold War which were published to show Marx was “wrong”, “utopian” or, worse, led to Lenin / Stalin / Mao, etc. Many are still in circulation, published by conservative think tanks, if that is not a contradiction in terms. Mises (Marxism Unmasked), Hayek (Individualism and Economic Order) and Popper (The Open Society and its Enemies) lead the field in anti-Marxist texts followed by Lord Acton (Marxist Ethics) and Issiah Berlin (Karl Marx0.
Another less known, but still widely circulated anti-Marxist author is Robert Michels. His best-known work, still on many academic lists for sociology undergraduates, was Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, published in 1911. He might be a third-division anti-Marxist, principally on the grounds that he eventually joined the Italian Fascists, but his pernicious ideas are still in circulation and still being used against socialists.
Did Michels influence socialists?
What was his alleged influence on socialists? Since Michels’s Political Parties was not published until seven years after the Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded, it clearly did not and could not have been an early influence. This Party was established in 1904 by workers, without leaders and without a bureaucracy. The SPGB was from the start a repudiation of Robert Michels’s argument. The Party was controlled by its members and was focussed on making socialists
If you look at the Contents page of the Michels book, you find near the end a section on the “Oligarchal Tendencies of Organisation” and a chapter on the “iron law of oligarchy” (pp.342-356 of Eden and Cedar Paul translation 1962). The supposed conservatism of “the masses” and their assumed need for leadership are often cited in academic attacks on Marx, and the ability of the working class to establish socialism without leaders is denied.
Michels was originally a member of the Social Democrats in Germany which did have a leadership, a reform programme and a cloying bureaucracy.
The Social Democratic Party was originally radical, paying lip-service to the ideas of Marx, but became a reform party to attract a non-socialist membership, and in 1914 voted for war credits. Post-war, the SDP helped form an openly capitalist government in 1919 and was instrumental in putting down the Spartacist uprising leading to the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Socialist it was not.
Michels argued that any social or political organisation of any size is bound to have a bureaucracy and leadership, and he also picked up the phrase “political class” and adopted this concept too. Today that phrase is commonplace in the mass media ‘commentariat’.
But to a Marxist, the term class is a fundamental economic category: – it has to do with the ownership and control, or lack of it, of the means of production and distribution, which is miles away from the ideological world of the political commentators and the politicians that they comment on.
From Michels to Lenin
Michels’s ignorance of Marxism is clear, and of course he cited the Critique of the Gotha Programme, which Lenin later leaned on and distorted in his book The State and Revolution (1916-1917). Indeed, in “What is to be done?” (c. 1902), Lenin had much earlier argued for a pyramid-style of political organisation, led by a ‘vanguard’, a leadership, analogous to the army with its General Staff, officers, NCOs and other ranks. We tell you what to think and say, when and where to have a revolution, and you, the masses, will follow our inspired leadership, and do as you are told. That is how a vanguard party works.
That was not Lenin’s own original idea (it is really hard to find any idea he advocated which actually was original, not borrowed) but an idea common among some other Russian revolutionaries of that period, especially Tkachov. It is known that Lenin had read Tkachov, and that he strongly recommended his work and his ideas to fellow-Russians that washed-up as exiles in Geneva.
Nevertheless, it was this Leninist idea of a vanguard party which left an evil legacy in the Bolshevik principle of ‘the leading role of the party’, which meant the domination by Party apparatchiks of every sphere of life in the Soviet Union. This political idea is still prevalent in China, North Korea, Belarus, and other regimes who follow Lenin.
As the Socialist Party of Great Britain argued for decades, the Soviet Union was a dictatorship of the party, not of the proletariat. In fact, from the start it was a dictatorship over the working class in Russia by the Bolsheviks, one which did not allow workers to form independent trade unions, did not tolerate independent publications, or a free and independent socialist party. Terror was used against opponents. In Russia, the ‘leading role of the party’ has even outlived Lenin’s party, and its legacy is still omni-present, for instance in Putin’s control over the mass media.
Michels, Bakunin and Fascism
Michels’s dishonesty – or was it just ignorance? – is revealed in his reference to Bakunin as “Marx’s pupil”. Anyone who knew of the way Bakunin deliberately set out to destroy Marx’s reputation, including splitting the First International, could never have written that.
Contrary to Bakunin’s smear, Marx was no “statist”. From the start, he and Engels argued that the state was a coercive class institution and saw – as Bakunin did not – the need to take political action so as to end the class system and, with that, the existence of the state. Bakunin only willed the end – he failed to see the means and, as a result, the various rash revolts he backed all failed.
What of Michels’s flirtation with fascism? Decades later, the Socialist Party of Great Britain in the inter-war years was arguing there were two dictatorships, both to be opposed – “the dictatorship associated with fascism” and the dictatorship associated with Stalin’s state capitalism. So far as we know, the SPGB was the only political party to take up this position. The Left were relaxed about Stalin’s dictatorship – and utterly opposed to fascism. They still are. After the disaster of the Soviet Union, particularly
for the working class, there are still today some who support Stalinism, just as there are those who follow the ideas of Trotsky. They learn nothing from history. The Tories, Liberals and others took the opposite line – opposing Stalin, but easy about fascism, from the Nazis and Hitler, from Italy’s Mussolini to Spain’s Franco and the Portuguese Falangist, Salazar, and so on.
The many military generals and juntas who have ruled in South America, Africa, the Middle East, etc. as dictators are all heirs to this legacy of fascism, as are many modern authoritarian states like Hungary, Turkey and Egypt, etc. To the extent that the US’s politics are dominated by the influence of the MIC, the powerful ‘military-industrial complex’, the US too can be said to be a de facto authoritarian state. How authoritarian we will soon know with Trump’s presidency.
Ironically, British capitalism and Russian capitalism formed an alliance with the United States during the Second World War, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Attlee becoming uneasy bedfellows with Stalin. Again, this was a war that the Socialist Party of Great Britain opposed on grounds of working-class interest. The working class had no interests to defend – no colonies, no trade routes, no oilfields or gold mines, and spheres of influence.
War also meant increased nationalist propaganda, further dividing the working class. But from the start, it was known that the world’s working class needed to unite, as Marx and Engels had argued in the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains – you have a world to win!”
Why did the Socialist Party of Great Britain reject the capitalist political concept of leadership? We doubt if it was only because of the autocracy and authoritarianism of Hyndman. Indeed, it is hard to find any Continental socialists or social democrats of that period with an egalitarian outlook. Even those who later opposed Leninism as undemocratic – e.g. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky– were not opposed to leadership.
No Leadership as a socialist principle
On the question of leadership, it is possible that the SPGB founder-members may well have been influenced by earlier English – and Scottish – writers, e.g. men like Tom Paine (in “Commonsense” he argued against a monarchy, especially the idiotic and dangerous idea of a hereditary monarch) and Robert Burns (“a man’s a man for all that”).
Generation after generation, working people have held onto the principle of equality. In England, the 19th century movements for an expanded suffrage were founded on strongly held ideas about equality: ‘Orator’ Hunt, the radical speaker at Peterloo in 1819, argued, well ahead of his time, not only for universal male suffrage, even for the poorest, but also for women to have the vote.
Look too at the history of the commons and popular resistance to enclosures. Look too at the 17th century Civil War period – and movements like the Diggers and the Levellers. When Gerrard Winstanley and Everard, met General Fairfax to discuss the Digger community at St George’s Hill, near Weybridge, they refused to remove their hats for, to them, Fairfax was “but their fellow creature” (Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials, Oxford 1853 p. 18).
In medieval England there was the so-called Peasants’ Revolt, and the popular rhyme “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” was passed down the generations, an heirloom.
Much later, a refusal to “doff the cap” would then be natural for those in 1904 aiming to overthrow this class exploitation system. And of course, they could look at the leadership of the SDF as something to avoid.
For our predecessors, those founder-members of the SPGB, another source would have been Marx’s revolutionary proposition that socialism/communism must be the work of the working class themselves – “…the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority” (Communist Manifesto). This statement precludes leadership or the emergence of an elite or controlling ‘vanguard’.
That workers should establish socialism by themselves and no one else is a central socialist principle.
Marx made this point most forcibly in the “Rules of the First International”. He said: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
And it is echoed in the fifth principle of the SPGB’s Object and Declaration of Principles where it is stated: “That this must be the work of the working class itself” emancipation”
It is a critically important principle, and it points to the democratic nature of the socialist movement.
What does Marx and we mean by “self-emancipation of the working class? Simply that socialist political action must be participatory, democratic and non-coercive. Socialism can only be established globally by a world working class majority.
We have long held that “democracy” is not something we can be given – it is something we do. Democracy – as something socialists do – became apparent in the Party from the start in our organisation, and in all our social and political interactions and practices. Hence, however knowledgeable, eloquent or charismatic, none of our members was ever seen as a leader of the party. For that, there would have had to be socialists willing to be the led, rather than working together as comrades.
With any sort of democratic practice, there has to be not just the idea but the reality of equality. In ancient Athens, eisonomie – which means “equal status” – was the principle underlying the idea of a fair trial.
And that same ancient principle is at the heart of many social, and even many political, institutions, even now. But under capitalism that principle is inevitably flouted and trampled on.
There is sometimes talk in Labour Party circles about ‘social justice’. But we argue that you can never have socialist distribution while you retain the private ownership and control of the means of production and distribution.
In the hands of the Labour Party, ‘egalitarian’ social and economic reforms can never succeed. Capitalism simply cannot be reformed in our interests.
To the extent that workers fail to object and resist when this system brings injustice, they will continue to be burdened with the chains and shackles of class exploitation. We experience these whenever we have to pay for what we produce – paying for food and housing, etc. We experience these too in the poverty we experience in our everyday life.
If you read up on the history of workers’ struggles or the struggle for slave emancipation – “Am I not a man and a brother?” – this theme of egalitarianism and equality is always there. As in the slogan of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, equality and fraternity are inextricably linked to the fight for freedom.
The SPGB founder-members clearly understood that socialism as a social system based on common ownership and democratic control would have to operate on the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” – and that must imply an egalitarian system, without any hierarchy. The point was well put by Marx’s friend and co-worker for socialism: Fredrick Engels:
“The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses. When it gets to be a matter of complete transformation of social organisation the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they are to act. That much the history of the last fifty years has taught us. But so that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is required” (Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, 1848-5” 1895)
As a result, the party they founded has lasted – for over a century – without any leaders or leadership, and without any bureaucracy emerging. Power has remained in the entire membership. Something Robert Michels and his latter-day followers, and modern Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, etc. would no doubt find utterly incredible.
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Celebrating Winston Churchill?
Royal Mail is issuing a set of stamps to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill. Each stamp in the collection features photographs of Churchill during his life. On each stamp there are quotations from his books, letters and speeches.
What you will not see on the stamps is his conspiratorial and racist view of history. All part of the conservative conception of history: the lowest form of thought and the highest form of ignorance.
Talking of “schemes of the international Jews”, Churchill claimed that from the:
“days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Klun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing”.
He also blamed the Jews for “the tragedy of the French Revolution” as well as for “every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century” (Winston Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism” Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), February 8, 1920) quoted from W. A. Pelz: “A People’s History of the German Revolution”, Pluto Press 2018 p xvii-xviii).
Of course, there is little chance of Marx and his celebrated quotations appearing on Royal Mail Stamps any time soon.
Here are three quotations from “The Communist Manifesto” (1848) he wrote with Frederich Engels:
“…every class struggle is a political struggle”
“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”.
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WHAT IS SOCIALISM?
You read a lot about socialism in the media. Bernie Sanders is supposed to be a socialist, so is Jeremy Corbyn. We were recently told on the front page of the Sunday Times that the EU was “socialist” (17 November 2024) Although it is fashionable again to be a called a socialist socialism is all too often confused with the failed nationalisation plans of the Labour Party and the economic inefficiency of the totalitarian states in what was once the Soviet Empire.
Socialism is none of these things. Socialism is not nationalisation; it does not mean a one-party state. In fact, we say socialism has never existed. There are socialists but no socialism. Socialism is the only system within which the social problems which now face workers, such as poor housing, not having enough to live on, inadequate health care and other hardships can be resolved.
So what is socialism? Briefly it is a system of society based on the common ownership of all the means of production and distribution democratically controlled by and in the interests of the whole community. In other words, oil, gas, minerals, land, factories, as well as transport distribution and communication systems, and so on will be owned in common – worldwide – by the whole community.
Whereas capitalism is a society based upon the class exploitation of the working class by a capitalist minority, socialism will be a classless society of free men and women, no longer forced upon the labour market and the wages system.
And socialism will be democratic where the whole of society will determine directly or through delegates what is produced, for whom, how and where. Socialism will be a society of social equals, freely able to co-operate in the running of social affairs.
Socialism will be a world-wide social system without borders and nation states. Under capitalism our world is divided and competing national interests meaning all too often conflict and wars. Socialism will be a society based on co-operation, not competition and it will mean an end to capitalism’s endless conflicts.
Socialism will be a system of production and distribution where there will be direct access to what people need to live worthwhile lives. Socialism will be run in the interest of the great majority. Work will be voluntary and the organising principle will be:
“…from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs”
Before rejecting this as too utopian, just think a bit. Does this system – does capitalism – really work? If it does – it doesn’t work in our interests. Most workers are struggling to make ends meet. When we go shopping, we look at the prices first. We are constantly struggling for higher wages and salaries. If we are in need of housing, it’s because we can’t meet the prices asked. And this is a world where children starve because there’s a price tag on every loaf of bread and bowl of rice. How can anyone say this system really works?
In a socialist society production will take place solely and directly to meet social need not profit. There will be no wages, labour markets, employment, and the buying or selling of commodities.
At present, socialists are a minority so we do not offer detailed plans for a future socialist society. What we do say is that socialism cannot be established without first there being a socialist majority. To that end we need to build-up a world-wide and democratic socialist movement. A socialist majority will send socialist delegates to parliament or its equivalent for just one purpose -to gain control of the machinery of government. This will ensure the peaceful revolutionary change from capitalism to socialism.
Many people coming across socialism for the first time believe it to be idealistic, utopian or a “nice idea”. Maybe it is a nice idea but it is not merely that, and we say it’s certainly not utopian. Socialism is a practical proposition – the only way to deal with the many problems caused by capitalism. For instance, we have the potential to end starvation and to build decent housing. Capitalism prevents this from happening because its guiding principle is profit-making and capital accumulation. Social and co-operative labour already exists and has the potential to build a world fit for human beings.
The only real barrier preventing the establishment of socialism is the support capitalism enjoys from the millions of us who support the profit system. The barrier is not insurmountable despite the capitalist class and their politicians and mass media who are opposed to socialism. Socialism is within the grasp of any reasonable worker prepared to think for themselves. The barrier is only a lack of imagination and the will to make the seemingly impossible possible. Socialism is only ever a vote away.
MARX’S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY (3)
What is Surplus Value? Surplus value is that part of labour of the workers which is unpaid. This is the key to exploitation. The bundle of commodities workers buy with their wages and salaries must be compared with the bundle of commodities that they produce in their work. The difference between the two is the source of surplus value.
Think about it this way. What you can buy with your wages or salary represents the value of your labour power, but your employer buys your labour power or ability to work and receives the full product of your labour as a result of the wage bargain you must make.
In part, the class struggle is over the relative surplus value (speeding and increasing output), and absolute surplus value (the lengthening of the working day).
How is surplus value split up? In a typical example from manufacturing industry the industrial capitalist will pay rent to the owner of the land where the factory is built, will pay interest to the financiers and will be left with some profit. This division of surplus value is known as the capitalist trinity – rent, interest and profit.
The many forms of interest that abound in modern finance are surplus value variously transformed.
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CAPITALISM: A FETTER ON PRODUCTION
There is a problem with the word overproduction. Marx cautioned:
“The word overproduction in itself leads to error. So long as the most urgent needs of a large part of society are not satisfied, or only, the most immediate needs are satisfied, there can of course be absolutely no talk of over-production of products – in the sense that the amount of products is excessive in relation to the need for them. On the contrary, it must be said that on the basis of capitalist production, there is constant underproduction in this sense. The limits to production are set by the profit of the capitalist and in no way by the needs of the producers. But over-production of products and over-production of commodities are two entirely different things” (Theories of Surplus Value, Part II, p. 527).
Capitalism shapes production and distribution to the limitations imposed by the market not by what people actually need. And because of their wealth and privilege the capitalist class can source the best housing, food and lifestyle. Workers, on the contrary, are constrained by what they can and cannot buy by the wages system. The wages system is a form of rationing. What workers receive in wages and salaries and what they need as human beings to live creative and fulfilled lives are two entirely different things.
Under capitalism there is constant underproduction of goods and services. Capitalism is, what Marx called, “a fetter on production” restricting what can be produced by the imposition of the private ownership of the means of production and the profit motive. Even in a period of economic boom when wages are rising the real needs of the working class go largely unmet. Free creative labour producing useful things is impossible when labour is tied to capital.
Marx was well aware of the glaring contradictions in capitalism as a result of commodity production and exchange for profit.
In The Communist Manifesto Marx wrote:
“The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered…” ( p28)
While In the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he wrote:
“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production…From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters” (SW1, pp. 362-4).
Capitalism as a fetter on production is brutally illustrated during the world economic down-turn in the European Union.
Eurostat (2024) estimates that 13,042 million persons in the EU, of whom 10.884 million in the EU area, were unemployed in September.
This is a complete waste of resources. If Socialism existed then this vast pool of social labour would be used to make useful things for people.
However, under capitalism the means of production are privately owned and production only takes place if there is to be a profit.
The contradiction in capitalism between the profit motive and unmet human need can be seen in another statistic by the World Bank (2024) where they state that the number of people living on less than $2 a day -$1.90 is the World Bank’s international poverty line – is over 700 million persons.
These workers are in extreme poverty but the means exist to feed and house them adequately but capitalism prevents resources from being used directly to meet human need. Only the anti-social pursuit of capital accumulation and profit-making count.
This is why there is an urgent need for the working-class majority to consciously and politically organise to establish common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
