Protest against Mahinda Rajapaksa, keep war criminals out of the UK!

This weekend as part of the Queens diamond jubilee the queen had invited many of her international friends from around the world to her knees up. These are not just ordinary friends though many have very shady records and reputations in the nations they reside from. Just one here Mahinda Rajapaksa, responsible for the murdering of thousands of innocent Tamels is just one on the long list of top brutal, dictators on the guest list for our noble Queen. Apparently these are all well known top world leaders.

Tamils are outraged that Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, has been invited to the queen's diamond jubilee celebrations. His regime is responsible for a genocide war against Tamil-speaking people in the north and east of Sri Lanka. At least 40,000 people were slaughtered in the final weeks before 'victory' was declared on 18 May 2009.
Tens of thousands were rounded up into prison camps, lacking adequate shelter, food and medical supplies, abused by the troops. The orders for these atrocities came from the very top - as numerous reports, including two Channel 4 TV documentaries, have shown.
Yet Rajapaksa will wine and dine with Britain's royals and leading establishment figures. Coming only a fortnight after the emotional commemoration of the end of the war - known as Mullivaikal - it is another kick in the teeth to this long-suffering community.
A placard on the protest outside Downing Street on 26 May put it succinctly: 'Don't shake this murderer's bloody hands.' But the links between Sri Lankan rulers and British capitalism and its state run deep. Sri Lanka is due to host next year's Commonwealth summit, for example.
At the Mullivaikal event, politicians from the main parties promised support for Tamil-speaking people and demanded an international investigation into war crimes.
In practice, successive governments have backed the regime, or looked the other way when the genocide was taking place. This includes New Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, as well as today's Con-Dem coalition.
Not so long ago, Tory MP Liam Fox was defence secretary. His dodgy connections with shady middlemen eventually forced him to resign. His close friendship with Rajapaksa, however, ensured that the interests of the Sri Lankan regime were reflected in Britain's foreign policy.
Collusion
Rajapaksa is due to visit Britain for four days (3-6 June). He is booked to deliver a speech at the Mansion House, in the City of London, on 6 June, reinforcing the ties between his regime and big business.
The continual links between the military top-brass are further proof that it is business as usual between both countries. As are the ongoing deportations from Britain of Tamil-speaking people, back into the hands of the brutal regime. The next charter flight (from an undisclosed airport) is due on 31 May.
The situation throughout Sri Lanka is bleak. The massive arms expenditure has actually risen since the end of the war. Price rises; cutbacks in public services and attacks on trade union and left-wing activists affect all working-class and poor people on the island.
In the predominantly Tamil north and east, conditions are truly horrific. Land has been seized for military use. Tens of thousands of people remain unaccounted for. Workers are super-exploited in so-called free trade zones. The regime is developing Sinhala settlements to divide up the land - copying the Israeli state's carve-up of the Palestinian West Bank.
Tamil-speaking people internationally have a proud tradition of solidarity with their fellow Tamils in Sri Lanka. An important part of the struggle for self-determination is strengthening the links with the organised Sri Lankan working class. Gaining the support of the trade unions, with their huge potential power is now more vital than ever - as is increasing the participation of Tamil workers in union struggle in Britain.
Tamil Solidarity will be joining with others to protest against this visit, including outside the Mansion House on Wednesday 6 June from 9am. Join us there to give Rajapaksa the reception he really deserves.
see www.tamilsolidarity.org

We can’t work any harder!

News today of William Hague telling us that we all need to work harder is quite frankly an insult to all working people. To all those who are working very long working days already 10 or 12 hours at minimum wage . Who does he think he is?

What a disgrace I know people who have 2 or 3 jobs and still struggle to make ends meet and yet this old tory wants us all to work harder.

The Tories as has been known for some time are completely out of touch. With big business sitting on an estimated 750 billion pounds refusing to invest as they do not see a profitable outlet is keeping 2.6 million people on the scrap heap.

The government claim there is nothing they can do but it’s down to the private sector to get us out of this recession. This has not and will not happen as the capitalist system has reached a point of saturation where the possibilities of investment seem very few and far between from a capitalist’s perspective. But this is the reason the government are trying to privatise a large part of the public sector as such as the NHS could be very lucrative for private business to get their teeth in to exploit.

But the outrageous claim that we all need to work harder is an absolute disgrace while the rich sit back and rake in the profits for doing sod all is just not right.

I would suggest the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy and taking these big business’s into public ownership run by the workers for the benefit of the many not just the few. Relaying on entrepreneurs and the like to get us out of this is folly we need a mass creation of socially useful jobs with an emphasis on public works for the benefit of us all not just a minority of very rich people at the top.

Why this weekends Bahrain grand prix should not be going ahead

This weekend to many peoples astonishment the formula one world championship heads to Bahrain. Despite all that has gone on in that country over the last year the boss’s of F1 is still intent on heading to this country with its fair share of issues.

The semi-feudal dictatorship crushed pro-democracy protests last year and has used torture and show trials against its dissidents.
This weekend Bahrain is due to host a F1 motor racing event. F1 teams are participating on the grounds that the event is "safe", and multimillionaire F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone says 'don't mix sport and politics'.
Other reasons might be that the UK based McLaren F1 team is 40% owned by Bahrain's ruling family who also own 50% of the McLaren car group and that the event is worth $25 million to F1.



It is clear to me that the money for this event is far more important to the likes of Bernie ecclestone and the like far more so than the killings of innocent people protesting against their dictatorial government in Bahrain. If the boss’s of formula one had any conscience at all they’d cancel this race and respect the people of Bahrain and not rub salt in their wounds. It is an insult to hold a race like this as if nothing has happened and is still happening today. No doubt the security will be water tight there and the drivers will be safe but that is no consolation to those ordinary Bahrainians on the outside fighting for a better life for themselves struggling to get by day to day.

To me this symbolises everything about capitalists that they value their money and increasing their profits over the safety of others. They don’t care that hundreds and thousands of people in Bahrain have been brutally tortured and oppressed for months on end just as long as their precious GP and money keeps happening.

But hey what are a few people dead they will never have known to a capitalist wanting to increase his profits though

What it will do is show to the world that profits are put ahead of ordinary people even more. Its time that this was stopped and peoples freedom granted once and for all.

Murdoch, the real capitalist media barron

As the Murdoch empire lurch's from one crisis to the next Rupert Murdoch and his cronies invlved at the top of news corp and news international have not learnt their lessons and continue to plague ordinary working people.


The fall-out from the Murdochgate scandal has continued following the arrests of ten top editors and journalists who currently work for or have worked for the Sun newspaper.

These arrests are part of the police investigation "Elveden" into suspected bribery and corruption of police officers. It will come as no surprise to anyone aware of the methods of News International that journalists routinely paid police officers for information. Bribing a public official is a criminal offence, but that never stopped the Sun or the News of the World in the past.

Trevor Kavanagh, the associate editor of the Sun has claimed there is a witch-hunt against the paper and News International. He blames elements of News Corp, who owns News International, for handing over a portion of the 300 million internal company emails to the police that led to the arrests.

There is growing evidence that some within News Corp, who are involved in a power battle with Rupert Murdoch, are looking to get rid of large parts, if not all of the toxic News International.

Kavanagh complained that Sun employees had been subject to dawn raids by up to 20 police officers who went through children's clothes drawers looking for evidence. No doubt the Met police, who lost a police commissioner and deputy commissioner already due to the scandal, are trying to prove their independence from the Murdoch Empire.

However, Kavanagh was not so forthcoming in his criticisms of police methods when socialist Tommy Sheridan was the subject of a widely condemned police and state vendetta. This included having his home raided and young child traumatised. He was arrested outside his place of work and faced years of persecution, not least by the Scottish Sun and the now defunct News of the World, who he defeated in a defamation case in 2006.


The Socialist party continues to call for a genuine democratic public inquiry, involving representatives of the trade union and labour movement, into the actions of the Murdoch empire. This must include the handing over of all documents, emails and other information to allow a full expose of the relationship between News International, the police and the political establishment.



There is no doubt the political elite, the metropolitan police and our cosy media barrons have got far to close in recent years. This is no surprise to me as as a socialsit it is clear to me that the capitalist currently own all of the media, control and influence the police and have a strangelhold over all 3 major political parties. This is no coincidence that Murdochgate flared up to me as there was always dodgy going's on in the media world and the political elite including Tony Blair who chased after Rupert Murdoch for years practically begging him to support his party in their rise to power in the late 90's.

The hypocrisy of Ed Milibanda nd the Labour party to now try to distance themselves from the Murdochs is frankly sickening considering the sucking up they did in their time in government and after. Even untill recently Ed Miliband met with senior representitives of News international. He only opposed and jumped on the phone hacking scandel bandwagon when there was public support for it. Not before. Confirming my thought that the political elite media and police are all in it together with eachother covering eachothers backs whenever there is the need.

It is simply the capitalist world playing its hand.

Lord Ashcrofts millions, how a capitalist hides their dealings

Michael Ashcroft, the billionaire peer who for years bankrolled
the Conservative Party, has been accused of hiding his business
involvement in a Caribbean state whose government was brought down
by corruption scandals.

BBC's Panorama programme alleged last night that Lord Ashcroft was secretly controlling the biggest construction company on the Turks and Caicos Islands, though he claims to have severed his link with the company in 1999.

The islands, a British overseas territory, have been under direct rule by the Foreign Office since August 2009, when the then Prime Minister, Michael Misick, became embroiled in corruption allegations. Panorama reported that one of the allegations being investigated by the police is how Mr Misick could afford a luxury home, valued at $16m, which was built in 2006 by Johnston International.

The programme stated that Lord Ashcroft announced on the London Stock Exchange in 1999 that he had sold Johnston International, and has repeatedly asserted that he has had "no interest whatsoever" in the company since that date. But Panorama showed fax messages which it said were exchanged between Lord Ashcroft and the chief executive of Johnston International, Allan Forrest.

The faxes suggest that Mr Forrest repeatedly sought and got Lord Ashcroft's instructions or advice, despite the peer's denials that he was running the company. One fax said: "Dear Michael, a short note to thank you for the salary increase. Much appreciated."

In another, written after Mr Forrest had visited Belize, where Lord Ashcroft originally made his £1.1bn fortune, refers to Johnston International's parent company, Oxford Ventures. Mr Forrest wrote: "The perception in Belize is that you are still in full control of Oxford's assets (which you are of course)."

Panorama interviewed former employees of Johnston International, who lost their jobs when the firm went bust. When it collapsed, Lord Ashcroft's bank, the British Caribbean Bank, as a secured creditor, took priority over others who were owed money.

Panorama also interviewed Chris Johnson, the liquidator appointed to wind up the affairs of Oxford Ventures, which also went bust. He complained that Lord Ashcroft's bank was refusing to release the information he needed to complete the job, though the bank has said that it cannot give information to an overseas-appointed liquidator until recognised by the TCI courts, which recognition is under challenge.

The programme-makers said that "there is no suggestion that Lord Ashcroft is corrupt", but suggested that the alleged secrecy in which he has wrapped his business affairs is "hardly in keeping with the Government's demand for greater corporate transparency."

Lord Ashcroft's spokesman said yesterday: "No statement is being made because the BBC has not had the decency to tell Lord Ashcroft what is in the programme. They have been at this for two-and-a-half years and have made so many false starts on the way, who knows what they are going to do?"

Michael Ashcroft was made a life peer in 2000 on the recommendation of William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, who was then leader of the Conservative Party. The peer is believed to be one of the biggest political donors in British history, having given around £10m to the Conservatives. During William Hague's leadership, after the 1997 election defeat, he was virtually the only major funder of the Tory party.

Lord Ashcroft is suing The Independent over articles published on 19 and 20 November 2009, about the affairs of the Turks and Caicos Islands.


This programme for me last night highlighted the corrupt nature of the capitalist system where a capitalist invests his or her money in a offshore bank account and starts investing abroad and makes millions. When it doesnt suit in true capitalist style when no more profit is to be made they pull the plug on the funding and workers jobs go down the drain as a result.

The programme to me confirmed much of what i already knew that the tories are a capitalist party acting in the interests of the city and big business. They claims for democracy and transparancy were truely shattered last night with one of their most influencial lords being accused of such high level wrong doing.

For socialists we would say this backs up our idea that a future socialist society needs to be international more than ever as offshore bank accounts are rife with the capitalists and controlling and closing these havans will prevent capital being bunged away offshore where it is no use to the public purse.
The lengths the capitalists will go to cover their tracks is amazing. But when they control the media and the laws it is no wonder they can get away with so much. Having parent companies of parent companies on different offshore islands is designed so no one can find out who really is in control. But as we know there are a minoroty of very rich people out there who control more and more of the worlds wealth.

Much of what Lord Ashcroft had invested for himself has been evaded tax that he gets away with due to offshore accounts and tax fiddling. No doubt if he paid his tax the need for alot of these public spending cuts would not be nessesary!

Contradictions in capitalism part 4 : workers wages

In this 4th piece of my mini series on the contradictions in the current economic system we live under capitalism i have looked at various things that leads capitalism to crisis's and the reasonings behind them.

In this piece we look at workers wages and how they are paid and how the boss's decide how much a worker earns.
“Every upward movement in wages can have no other effect than a rise in the price of corn, wine, etc., that is, the effect of a dearth. For what are wages? They are the cost price of corn, etc.; they are the integrant price of everything. We may go even further: wages are the proportion of the elements composing wealth and consumed reproductively every day by the mass of the workers. Now, to double wages ... is to attribute to each one of the producers a greater share than his product, which is contradictory, and if the rise extends only to a small number of industries, it brings a general disturbance in exchange; in a word, a dearth....
( Karl Marx - povety of phillosophy chapter 2)

The rise and fall of profits and wages expresses merely the proportion in which capitalists and workers share in the product of a day's work, without influencing in most instances the price of the product. But that “strikes followed by an increase in wages culminate in a general rise in prices, in a dearth even” – those are notions which can blossom only in the brain of a poet who has not been understood.

In England, strikes have regularly given rise to the invention and application of new machines. Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labour. The self-acting mule, the greatest invention of modern industry, put out of action the spinners who were in revolt. If combinations and strikes had no other effect than that of making the efforts of mechanical genius react against them, they would still exercise an immense influence on the development of industry.


The price of Labour Power.

Let us take any worker; for example, a weaver. The capitalist supplies him with the loom and yarn. The weaver applies himself to work, and the yarn is turned into cloth. The capitalist takes possession of the cloth and sells it for 20 shillings, for example. Now are the wages of the weaver a share of the cloth, of the 20 shillings, of the product of the work? By no means. Long before the cloth is sold, perhaps long before it is fully woven, the weaver has received his wages. The capitalist, then, does not pay his wages out of the money which he will obtain from the cloth, but out of money already on hand.....Wages, therefore, are not a share of the worker in the commodities produced by himself. Wages are that part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys a certain amount of productive labor-power.....

Now, the same general laws which regulate the price of commodities in general, naturally regulate wages , or the price of labor-power. Wages will now rise, now fall, according to the relation of supply and demand, according as competition shapes itself between the buyers of labor-power, the capitalists, and the sellers of labor-power, the workers. The fluctuations of wages correspond to the fluctuation in the price of commodities in general. But within the limits of these fluctuations the price of labor-power will be determined by the cost of production, by the labor-time necessary for production of this commodity: labor-power.

What, then, is the cost of production of labor-power?

It is the cost required for the maintenance of the laborer as a laborer, and for his education and training as a laborer.

Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital



Wage labour is the mode of production in which the labourer sells their capacity to work as a commodity.

The pre-condition for wage labour is a class of people who have no other way of living, and a class of people who own the means of production as their Private Property. The capitalist who buys the labour power, and pays for it at its value, own the labour process and the product of labour, and can sell the product in order to realise a profit. The worker, on the other hand is alienated from her own labour.

Their commodity, labor-power, the workers exchange for the commodity of the capitalist, for money, and, moreover, this exchange takes place at a certain ratio. So much money for so long a use of labor-power. For 12 hours' weaving, two shillings. And these two shillings, do they not represent all the other commodities which I can buy for two shillings? Therefore, actually, the worker has exchanged his commodity, labor-power, for commodities of all kinds, and, moreover, at a certain ratio. By giving him two shillings, the capitalist has given him so much meat, so much clothing, so much wood, light, etc., in exchange for his day's work. The two shillings therefore express the relation in which labor-power is exchanged for other commodities, the exchange-value of labor-power....

But the putting of labor-power into action -- i.e., the work -- is the active expression of the laborer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labor itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws up the mining shaft, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages ; and the silk, the gold, and the palace are resolved for him into a certain quantity of necessaries of life, perhaps into a cotton jacket, into copper coins, and into a basement dwelling. And the laborer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on -- is this 12 hours' weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking, regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours' work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed. If the silk-worm's object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-worker.

The free laborer , on the other hand, sells his very self, and that by fractions. He auctions off eight, 10, 12, 15 hours of his life, one day like the next, to the highest bidder, to the owner of raw materials, tools, and the means of life -- i.e., to the capitalist. The laborer belongs neither to an owner nor to the soil, but eight, 10, 12, 15 hours of his daily life belong to whomsoever buys them. The worker leaves the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the required use, out of him. But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labor-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class , unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class ; and it is for him to find his man -- i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class.

Karl Marx
Wage Labour and Capital



We conclude this part of this mini series bhy looking at the fact that a capitalist will never pay the worker the true value of his or her labour as then they would be owning the means of production owning their own labour of which they currently do not unfortunatly.
Wages reflect a certain level of work that the capitalist pays for and gets back in the final product which he then sells to make a profit. The worker only recives part of this as Marx tells us. So the contradiction is clear for all to see the capitalist is exploiting the workers to increase his or her profits. That is essentially a capitalist in a nutshell only interested in profits . In times of economic downturn in a capitalist system wages are one of the first things to get cutback this wage is waht the worker lives on and is made to suffer due to the capitalists lack of need for production as he has produced too much that he cannot sell. As i have explained in previous parts in this series there is another contradiction in capitalism that encourages capitalits to over produce in their blind search for profits and more profits. The one who always suffers as a result of this is the poor worker who is left out of pocket and soften out of a job.

In the last part of this mini series i will conclude all the contradictions and look to offer an alternative which of course is socialism. The social centralisation of the means of production in the hands of the working class and a end to wage slavery.

The bourgeoisie and their weakness's

As socialists we fight day to day in the class struggle which i have detailed about previously on this very blog. But the eternal class enemy the rich also known as the Bourgeoisie as Karl Marx taught us are not as strong or united as you are lead to believe.. We as the organised working class also known as the Prolitariat as Marx described have huge power if only we'd realise it. The Bourgeoisie are as i have previously explained only interested in increasing and making more profit. They are as we might call today the 1 % of the population we the workers on the other hand make up the rest which is the 99 %.

But we are lead to believe the rich are a very stable class and are very strong and united. That is very wrong as we see today the coalition government working for the interest of the capitalists with the tories and the lib dems this is not a united strong government at all. Quite the opposite. It is probably one of the weakest governments we have ever had. Certainly the tory governments of the past have been stronger. This one if the working class united could have this government on the run or defeated already if it wasnt for a slow and cautious labour movement cautious not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

It is clear to me that capitalists love their profits and their wealth and wish to hang on to it as best they can. As a result every capitalist is pitched against each other. So even among the 1 % there is competition and increased competition to hord more and more wealth for themselves. They dont really work together as a class like the workers can but they are united in the common thought that the working class must pay for any of their mistakes. Including the current deep economic crisis in 2011.

But my main point i want to get across to you the reader is that the bourgeois class is not as strong or as united as they'd like you to think they are weak and can be brought down and over thrown givven a fight. I am not saying they will give up easily at all but i'm saying they can be got at for certain and we must focus on their divisions and cracks in their armour to exploit and expose their system based on greed and more greed.

Why living standards for the working class will continue to fall post recession

Millions of people on low-to-middle incomes face years of declining living standards and are seeing their hopes of home ownership disappear, a major report will conclude this week.

The study by the independent thinktank the Resolution Foundation questions whether the new phenomenon of falling living standards and lower aspirations will be reversed, even when the UK economy returns to robust health.

The report, entitled Growth Without Gain?, will suggest that those in the "squeezed middle" are losing out in the post-boom era, as the highest earners take more and more from the proceeds of limited growth and so-called "middle-skilled" jobs are replaced by advancing technology.

As a result, the current generation of hard-working individuals is being left dependent on lower-paid jobs in retail, hospitality and care and can no longer expect, as their parents did, to see their living standards rise as output expands.

Writing in the Observer, the thinktank's chief executive, Gavin Kelly, an economist and former No 10 deputy chief of staff, says the assumption that growth will trigger a return to an era of abundant skilled jobs and home ownership for all is at best "contestable" and at worst "risible".

Kelly says politicians have yet to grasp the dangers of the phenomenon, let alone how to address it in the interest of 11 million low-to-middle earners who make up a crucial sector of the electorate. Echoing remarks by the business secretary, Vince Cable, who warned of a severe squeeze in living standards, Kelly says: "As yet there is no emerging political response, nor even a shared sense of which elements of this challenge are reversible and which need to be accommodated. Our political class haven't been here before: none of us have."




This is exactly why we must be concerned by the choices being taken by our capitalist polititians today. Inflicting pain and hurt on the working class will treat them into the ground further resulting in many falling into severe povety.

But as we eventually climb out of this economic crisis as no doubt we will at a huge expense to the working class our living standards will take years if not decades to recover to anything like what they wre pre banking crash.

What is even more concerning is that no one has any idea how long this will last and as always the working class will see its living standards rise the last out of all of us sadly.

They are always the class that gets burdened with bailing out the capitalists and the wealth takers.

So we must be well aware of what is going on now and wise up to the capitalists thinking. As the pressure grows on the working class to pay for the capitalists mistakes the calls will grow for a change in the system no doubt. This is when i am hoping people will start to re think about socialist ideas and the alternative to what we have. To know that there is anotehr way and we do have a choice will be key to the working class finding a way out of this constant cycle of bailing out its masters.

revolutionary ideas

This was a excellent article in issue 147 of socialism today a monthly in depth look at socialist oand trade union matters and matters the world over. This last month Peter Taaffe looks at Eric Hobsbawm recent publications and looks to set the record straight in terms of marxism and socialist ideas.
Marxism as we all know has sadly been rubbished and made out to be something it is not. Hopefully Peter in this article makes it clearer to people what marxism is and what we stand for as marxists. The capitalists have tried to rub the name through the mud but true socialists will know its true meaning even till this day. It is our job to reintroduce those ideas to the mass's.


The relevance of the ideas of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky has been underlined by recent events. Financial crisis, economic recession, savage austerity and waves of revolution are sparking new interest in socialism and Marxism. Left-wing intellectuals are keen to ride this wave. However, as PETER TAAFFE explains in this review, their writings often fall far short of providing real answers to the question, how to change the world?

How to Change the World
By Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown, 2011, £25
ERIC HOBSBAWM IS enjoying a revival of interest in his ideas, particularly through this book in which he sets out to ‘change the world’. This, he freely admits, arises from a growing inquisitiveness in the ideas of Karl Marx. It is a pity, however, that his book could be the first introduction to Marx’s ideas for many. Its subtitle is ‘Tales of Marx and Marxism’. They are indeed tales, because the book’s contents bear very little relationship to what Marx really stood for and how Marxism can change the world in the modern era.

Hobsbawm has a long pedigree as a Marxist academic and theoretician. He appears to recant his former position of slavish support for Stalinism, but he has not yet fully broken with its baleful heritage. He remained within the British Communist Party even after the Stalinist obscenities of the suppression of the Hungarian political revolution in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968.

Even in this book, he continues to employ the term ‘socialist’ in relation to the former Stalinist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe, etc. In reality, these regimes were much closer to capitalism than the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky as to what constituted genuine socialism – even though they did possess the vital elements of a planned economy based on the nationalisation of the main productive forces and, therefore, were relatively progressive. To continue to describe one-party totalitarian regimes as ‘socialist’ will further the aims of bourgeois ideologists in discrediting socialism, in the eyes of the new generation in particular.

It is quite incredible that Hobsbawm relegates Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism to a minor historical role. As Terry Eagleton points out, Hobsbawm consigns "one of the most fertile currents of modern Marxism – Trotskyism – to a few casual asides". (London Review of Books, March 2011) Yet it is absolutely impossible to begin to understand the phenomenon of Stalinism without reading and understanding the works of Trotsky and the Russian and International Left Opposition on this issue. Moreover, it is not possible to approach the struggle for socialism today without clearing out of the way any apology or connection with Stalinism or totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, which are still used as scarecrows by capitalist ideologists to frighten the working class away from real democratic socialism.

This is underlined by bourgeois reviewers of Hobsbawm’s book. While praising him for his erudition, they remorselessly mention his Stalinist past. Hobsbawm "has never convincingly dispelled accusations of being an apologist for the Soviet Union [read Stalinism]", writes Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. (9 January 2011) Geoffrey Goodman, former industrial correspondent of the Daily Mirror, argues, quite mistakenly, that Hobsbawm "offers neither illusions nor excuses for the failure of Soviet communism". (Camden New Journal, 10 February 2011) But even if this were true, he offers no real explanation as to why Stalinism triumphed and effectively strangled all the ideals of the October revolution: workers’ democracy and the international goal of world socialism.

There is no mystery as to why Hobsbawm fails to do this. A rigorous examination, from the Marxist point of view, would lead him back to the analysis and conclusions advocated by Trotsky: that a political revolution against the one-party totalitarian Stalinist regimes could have saved the planned economies and re-established genuine workers’ democracy. The continuation of Stalinism, which Hobsbawm did not do anything to defeat, led to the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes and the liquidation of the planned economies, which was a massive ideological victory for world capitalism.

A revival of interest
IN THE FIRST chapter, Hobsbawm records the revival of interest in ‘Marxism’ in the recent period. Even hedge fund billionaire George Soros has praised Marx. There is no surprise in this; it is connected intimately with the current economic crisis, one of the greatest to affect the system that Soros supports, world capitalism. The capitalists, however, are more interested in Marx now because of his diagnosis of the maladies of their system rather than the remedy he recommends, socialism.

There have been times in history when the bourgeois have similarly sought to use Marx for their own ends. For instance, in pre-revolutionary Russia, bourgeois ideologists attempted to use Marx’s ideas to argue for the ‘inevitability’ of a stage of capitalism to replace tsarism. In this, they garnered the support of the Mensheviks – in the early part of the 20th century, the minority in the Russian workers’ movement – to argue that socialism was the music of the future. Vladimir Lenin and particularly Trotsky, in his famous theory of the permanent revolution, opposed this and argued that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could only be carried through by an alliance of the working class and the peasantry. Once having come to power, this alliance would be compelled to pass over to the socialist stage of nationalising industry, the land, etc. This, in turn, would provoke the international socialist revolution. This is what actually happened in the aftermath of the first world war and the 1917 October workers’ revolution.

But for the betrayal of the social democratic leaders, a European socialist democratic revolution would have resulted. This would have transformed the objective situation in Russia itself and eradicated the backwardness from which Stalinism was a later outgrowth. All of this is absent in Hobsbawm’s analysis.

Hobsbawm, in seeking to account for the renewed interest in Marxism, asserts that there are two reasons for this: "The first is that the end of the official Marxism of the USSR liberated Marx from public identification with Leninism in theory and with the Leninist regimes in practice". Thrown overboard in a single phrase is the colossal contribution made by Lenin, who created and led the Bolshevik party – the most democratic mass workers’ party in history – supplying the necessary ‘subjective factor’ to carry through the greatest single event in history, the Russian revolution. It is a gross bourgeois and Stalinist slander to link Lenin with the subsequent bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution. Lenin and Trotsky stood for socialism – creating the basis for this in the planned economy in Russia – and workers’ democracy.

There is also an airy dismissal of the "official Marxism of the USSR", with which Hobsbawm was identified for a very long time. Again, there is an evasion of any historical analysis of this "official Marxism" which, to give it its real name, was a Stalinist distortion of genuine democratic socialism and the ideas of Marxism. So long as Hobsbawm is imprisoned in this ideological straitjacket he will continue to make some of the political mistakes evident in this book.

Take his remarks on the economic foundations of the Soviet Union: "The claim that socialism was superior to capitalism as a way to ensure the most rapid development of the forces of production could hardly have been made by Marx". This is a quite astonishing admission of this ‘scholar’s’ lack of awareness of the historical schemas traced out by Marx, and developed by the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky and their work in the October revolution and subsequently.

Socialism remains a utopian dream unless it can develop a higher productivity of labour, and is able to develop the productive forces – science, the organisation of labour and technique – onto a higher level. This is necessary, argued Marx, in the very first period of socialism, its lowest level. Its starting point should be on a higher level than the most advanced capitalist economy, for instance, the USA today. Marx summed up this idea in one of his first works, German Ideology. He wrote that, unless the productive forces could develop in a new socialist society, "want would be generalised and all the old crap would reappear". What he meant is that classes, the state, as well as the bureaucratic remnants of the old society, inequality and the rest, would exist and even grow to some extent in the ‘new society’ unless it possessed a higher economic level and productive capacity.

Is this not the reason why Stalinism developed in Russia and elsewhere? The October revolution took place under the signboard of democratic socialism, the abolition of inequality, and of a democratic workers’ state controlled by the masses with workers’ control and management. And this did exist to a great extent in the first immediate period after the October revolution – but in a ‘besieged fortress’. The Bolsheviks never perceived that this could be maintained, particularly in an economically and culturally backward society like Russia, unless the revolution spread to the west – particularly to Germany, which probably had the most industrially developed economic capacity in the world at that stage – and, ultimately, to the whole world. Therefore, all the old ‘crap’ was revived in the growth of the bureaucracy, reflected, unconsciously at first, by Stalin. The working class was elbowed aside and power concentrated in the hands of the greedy and inefficient bureaucracy. Hobsbawm seems to be ignorant of all this, leading him to discard the progressive elements of the planned economy which showed, in practice, what would be possible on the basis of a genuine workers’ democracy.

An eclectic mishmash
HOBSBAWM’S BOOK IS an eclectic mishmash, without a clear idea being pursued to the end. For instance, he states that "the traditional socialist vision of socialism [is of] essentially a non-market society, which probably Karl Marx also shared". There is no ‘probably’ about it. The idea that socialism was the answer to capitalism runs like a red thread throughout Marx’s works. What this comment really indicates is that Hobsbawm, in full flight from his previous, mistaken pro-Stalinist position, is discarding central features of Marx’s analysis, particularly relating to the goal of socialism.

This is not the first time he has engaged in such an exercise. He was the high priest of so-called ‘new realism’, which evolved from the Eurocommunist layer of the Communist Party of Great Britain, around the journal Marxism Today in the 1970s and 1980s. Neil Kinnock drew heavily on Hobsbawm’s ideas to shift the Labour Party towards the right, furnishing the basis for the expulsion of the Marxists around the Militant newspaper (now the Socialist Party) from the Labour Party. This was decisive in the emergence of Blairism, which transformed the Labour Party from a workers’ party at its base into a bourgeois formation.

Hobsbawm and the Eurocommunists saw in the decline of the industrial working class – a product of so-called ‘post-Fordism’ – an overall weakening of the labour movement, industrial militancy and class consciousness. Marxists opposed these ideas, amongst other things pointing to a growing industrial militancy of former ‘white-collar’ workers – teachers, post office workers, technical workers in offices, etc. The bourgeois were forced to attack these layers because of the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s and the need to boost their profits and increase capitalist accumulation. In the process, they undermined their social reserves. The ideas of new realism were themselves products of the overall ideological offensive of neo-liberalism – individualism against so-called ‘statism’ (privatisation, etc) – which came to full fruition after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the liquidation of the planned economies.

Hobsbawm, Kinnock and Blair were not apostles of a new ‘realistic’ adaptation to changing conditions. They represented the liquidation of the combative fighting spirit and programmatic class opposition of the labour movement to all aspects of pro-capitalist ideas and methods. Any real balance sheet of the failure of the ideas of ‘new realism’ is entirely absent from this work. Hobsbawm mentions the opportunist reconciliation of the German Social Democratic leader Eduard Bernstein to capitalism, during a boom period at the end of the 19th century. Yet he and those like him did exactly the same thing in the British labour movement in a similar period – the short economic boom in the 1980s. Moreover, they reconciled themselves to the more sustained boom of the ‘noughties’. We, on the other hand, never ceased to argue that the financialisation of world capitalism was creating massive bubbles, which would end in tears for capitalism. Our prognosis was borne out with the onset of the present devastating economic crisis, from which capitalism is finding great difficulty in extricating itself.

On almost every page, examples of praise for Marx can be found alongside thinly-veiled dismissals of some of his major conclusions. In the chapter ‘Marx Today’, on the one side Hobsbawm believes that Marx’s idea that capitalism would be superseded is "a prediction that still sounds plausible to me". In the next paragraph, he writes: "[Marx’s] prediction that industrialisation would produce populations largely employed as manual wage-workers, as was happening in England at the time… was correct enough as a middle-range prediction, but not, as we know, in the long term". On the contrary, while the industrial working class has declined in the formerly industrialised countries, given the industrialisation of China, India and Brazil, Marx’s ideas still retain their validity, from a world point of view. On a global scale, the industrial working class has probably grown in the past ten to 20 years in numbers as well as in specific weight in society.

Even if this was not the case, the proletarianisation of formerly ‘privileged’ layers means that, today, they form a substantial section of the working class who will be involved in the task of ‘expropriating the expropriators’, democratic socialism. Hobsbawm seeks to sanitise Marx’s more revolutionary conclusions, to make them more acceptable, perhaps to academia and bourgeois and petty-bourgeois public opinion. In the process, this blunts the message for workers, particularly young workers, who are engaged in a mighty struggle against capitalism.

This clearly comes out when Hobsbawm deals with the issue of the state: "The mature Marxian theory of the state was thus considerably more sophisticated than the simple equation: state equals coercive power equals class rule". Contained in these lines is the same opportunistic approach, beginning with the German Social Democratic reformists and their counterparts in Britain and France, etc, towards the problem of the capitalist state. As Hobsbawm concedes, Marx was quite clear that the working class could only take power if it were organised "as a ruling class" through "the dictatorship of the proletariat". This term did not denote, as the detractors of Marx argue, a kind of anticipation of one-party dictatorial Stalinism. Marx’s idea clearly meant what subsequently transpired in Russia in October 1917: a state organised as a ‘workers’ democracy’. For Marxists, this term is preferable today. We do not use the term ‘dictatorship’ because it conjures up visions of one-party totalitarian regimes synonymous with the idea of a socialist society.

Hobsbawm qualifies ‘his’ Marxist definition of the state: "The concept of the state as class power was modified, particularly in the light of the Bonapartism of Napoleon III in France and the other post-1848 regimes which could not simply be described as the rule of a revolutionary bourgeoisie". This is not a valid interpretation of Marx – certainly not a rounded-out one – let alone of Engels, Lenin and Trotsky on the state. Marx brilliantly described the phenomenon of Bonapartism where, because of the deadlock in the class struggle, the state is able to attain a relative independence and balance between the classes. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, it represents the "dominant economic class" which in France post-1848 was the bourgeoisie, who were not so ‘revolutionary’ at this stage. Hobsbawm seeks to water down the Marxist conception of the state in order to smuggle in the idea that the state can in some way be ‘reformed’. The struggle is seen by him as taking power away from the ruling class – the capitalists – and creating a new state. A rupture, a sharp break, is therefore not necessary to establish socialism.

Hiding behind Gramsci
THIS INFORMS HOBSBAWM’S whole approach. This is revealed in the chapter dealing with Antonio Gramsci, leader of the young Italian Communist Party (PCI) after the first world war, who was jailed by Mussolini and died in prison. Gramsci had many fine qualities. Trotsky, for instance, credits him with understanding the character of fascism – that after the victory of Mussolini in 1922, the working class, weakened and scattered, would be in for a lengthy struggle – earlier than others, including Trotsky himself. But Hobsbawm asserts that he was "the most original thinker produced in the west since 1917".

Gramsci, because of his imprisonment, was cut off from developments in Italy and internationally. Therefore, it was not possible for him to form a complete picture of the development of the workers’ movements and, particularly, of events in Russia with the rise of Stalinism. But it is no accident that Hobsbawm lights on the figure of Gramsci. He thinks he has found in some of his prison writings a theoretical explanation for both his own and the PCI’s adaptation to capitalism. Is it entirely incidental that the long-time PCI leader, Palmiro Togliatti, also used the alleged ideas of Gramsci to shift his party to the right? The net effect of Togliatti’s actions and those of his successors was to lead effectively to the disintegration of the once mighty PCI.

Hobsbawm’s attempts to single out the objective conditions of Italy to explain the unique character of the Italian labour movement and the figure of Gramsci are one-sided to say the least. He highlights the character of Italy combining features of backwardness and semi-feudal conditions with the elements of modernity, industry, factories in the north, etc. But Italy was not the only country, even in Europe, where the working class was a minority, with a rural population, the peasantry, together with the rest of the middle-class forming a majority. In Germany and France, the task of winning these intermediate layers to the side of the working class was also posed. Hobsbawm states that Gramsci "pioneered a Marxist theory of politics", regarding "politics as ‘an autonomous activity’." Hobsbawm invokes Gramsci to underline "the autonomous role of the superstructure in the social process, or even the simple fact that a politician of working class origin is not necessarily the same as a worker at the bench". Gramsci also sought to analyse the ideological role of "intellectuals".

Of course there is more than a grain of truth in these ideas. Politics is not an automatic reflection of the economic situation. If that was the case, the politics of the working class today would be clearly revolutionary given the devastating world economic crisis. Consciousness – which is a bedrock for a Marxist’s approach to ‘politics’ – is formed by events, together with the intervention of the organisations of the working class, and develops in a contradictory fashion. An economic crisis does not automatically lead to mass radicalisation and rising consciousness, no more than a boom lowers it. The Russian revolution of 1905-07 was followed by an economic crisis. This did not lead to a radicalisation of the masses because it came after the defeat of the revolution. On the other hand, the boom beginning in 1910, by economically strengthening the working class, laid the basis for a further upswing in the class struggle. Having said this, however, politics is not completely ‘autonomous’. Marxists are not crude reductionists. Politics, like the state itself, can retain a certain relative ‘autonomy’ for a time. But, ultimately, it is dependent on and reflects the economic fortunes of the ruling class and those of the middle class as well as the working class.

Hobsbawm betrays his real intentions in drawing on Gramsci’s alleged ideas: "Italy was a country in which, after 1917, several of the objective and even subjective conditions of social revolution appeared to exist – more so than in Britain and France and even, I suggest, than in Germany. Yet this revolution did not come off. On the contrary, fascism came to power. It was only natural that Italian Marxists should pioneer the analysis of why the Russian October revolution had failed to spread to western countries, and what the alternative strategy and tactics of the transition to socialism ought to be in such countries".

To paraphrase Trotsky, every word here is a mistake and some are two. Different objective conditions were not the primary reason that the revolution did not transpire in Europe – although there were different conditions in all the European countries, particularly compared to Russia. If anything, opportunities for revolution were greater because of the greater strength of the working class and the huge upheavals following the first world war. Nor did the failure of the revolutionary wave lie in the subjective consciousness of the working class who threw themselves against capitalism following the Russian revolution. It was entirely due to the perfidious role of the social-democratic leaders who betrayed the revolution. Hobsbawm indicates his pure Menshevism when he implies that Britain and France were not ready for revolution after 1917, ‘or even Germany’.

The German working-class movement was probably the strongest in the world outside of Russia at this stage. Between 1917-23 the German working class tried again and again to take power, throwing itself against capitalism in mighty mass movements. In 1923, the German workers, faced with a very favourable position, failed to take power because of the fatal prevarication of their leaders at a decisive moment. Hobsbawm does not even mention this. He looks for a different, easier, more ‘objective’ reason. How ironic that this book with this message is published against the background of the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa! The Egyptian and Tunisian masses ignored the nostrums of their ‘Hobsbawms’ in their chosen methods to overthrow their dictators. In the circumstances that obtained, they could take no other road. The weak bourgeois forces in each country and the region had built a brick wall against all attempts to reform the system either from above or below

Hobsbawm’s pessimism
THE CONCLUSION FROM Hobsbawm’s interpretation of Gramsci is that the gradual transformation of the state, the conquering of ‘civil society’ and a kind of ‘long march’ towards ‘changing the world’, is the only possibility for the workers’ movement. This reformist approach, where it was tried, from Spain in the 1930s to Chile in the 1970s, broke its neck against counter-revolution, which is the chosen method of the bourgeois when all else fails. They have no recourse to such methods today because they are not being seriously challenged politically by mass organisations of the working class, which have either been ‘Blairised’ out of existence or, like the trade unions, have been effectively neutered up to now by cowardly and passive leaders.

One of the positive things in the book – few in number it must be confessed – is Hobsbawm’s reference to Engels’s demand for the independence of the working class and the creation of its own organisations: "Never mind how, so long as it is a separate workers’ party", wrote Engels. This is exactly the task which the Committee for a Workers’ International has set itself around the world, in order to politically rearm the working class in the stormy battles to come. One of the reasons why this task is necessary today, 150 years after Engels first made the call, is precisely because independent organisations of the working class disappeared in the ‘noughties’, partly helped by the likes of Hobsbawm, the theoretician of the gravediggers of the old Labour Party like Kinnock.

Gramsci wrote a great deal about the role of ‘intellectuals’. He was dealing primarily with this issue from the point of view of the development of consciousness, including the dominant consciousness or ideology of the bourgeois. This general idea, which has been misunderstood by his latter-day interpreters, is an important one. The labour movement, including the Marxists, wish to influence and win the intellectuals, the best of them at least, to their side. For instance, a struggle is necessary in the state to win over technicians, the middle class in general, and even managers.

Moreover, as the present situation in Britain indicates, savage attacks on state employees – including the police and armed forces – can radicalise layers who have never seen themselves as allies of the working class. Lawyers will protest against the cuts on 26 March. Faced with attacks on their rights and conditions, they can be drawn over to the side of the labour movement. But this will not be achieved by watering down the programme of struggle, solidarity and socialism.

It is only by offering a new vista, the idea of a change in society, that state employees, as well as intellectual ‘brain workers’, will be attracted to the labour movement and, even then, not just by propaganda but by struggle. This has been underlined in all the great social movements seen in Britain, from the poll tax to the miners’ strike, etc. A similar situation can now develop in the anti-cuts movement. It is emphasised by the revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. That part of the intellectuals and youth going through universities and colleges can also be attracted to the labour movement. A significant section can be influenced and won to Marxism.

Hobsbawm writes: "Granted that in Italy and most of the west there was not going to be an October revolution from the early 1920s on – and there was no realistic prospect of one – [Gramsci] obviously had to consider a strategy for the long haul". But Hobsbawm admits that Gramsci was not committed to just this one strategy. He did not rule out a ‘frontal attack’, that is revolution, in the classical sense of October 1917. He feared the ‘integration’ of the revolutionary movement into the capitalist system. He elaborated, in the manner of Machiavelli’s idea set out in The Prince – which, for Gramsci, meant the party – a programme for the working class to establish ‘hegemony’ over other classes in the struggle for power. Ironically, this idea of ‘hegemonism’ has been interpreted in exactly the opposite sense of what Gramsci intended. It is used as a criticism, usually by anti-Marxists, against any attempt to establish the primacy of the working class and its organisations or of Marxists striving in a principled political fashion to win a majority in the organisations of the working class.

Overall, despite the title of the book, Hobsbawm is pessimistic about how to change the world. Surely, the starting point today would be how to face up to the devastating economic crisis afflicting the whole world, the deepest since the 1930s? One indication of this is that, according to the International Monetary Fund, world capitalism lost a total of $50 trillion from 2008-10, through the loss of production and the devaluation of assets – equal to the total output of the world in goods and services in a single year! Yet, Hobsbawm comments: "The socialists, traditional brains-trust of labour, do not know any more than anyone else how to overcome the current crisis. Unlike in the 1930s, they can point to no examples of communist or social-democratic regimes immune to the crisis, nor have they realistic proposals for socialist change".

The collapse of his former idols, the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe and Russia, means for him that there is no traction in arguing for the socialist alternative. However, before the Russian revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union, socialists did argue, and quite effectively, for socialist change – without having a prepared model. Without this struggle over generations, the labour movement would not have been built and the subjective factor necessary for carrying through a revolution and social change would have been absent. There were many periods of disillusionment because booming capitalist economies appeared to be ‘doing the job’ – for instance, between 1896 and 1914. Then, reformists like Bernstein in Germany, Millerand in France and MacDonald in Britain sought to reconcile the labour movement to an inch-by-inch ‘march toward socialism’. The first world war, which signified the absolute impasse of the productive forces under capitalism, put paid to these ideas, although their advocates were not completely defeated politically within the labour movement.

True, the actual creation of a workers’ state in Russia was followed by the terrible historical fact of Stalinism. That is an obstacle to workers easily drawing socialist conclusions today. Stalinism has acted as a blot on the history and the reputation of the labour movement, introducing complications that did not exist prior to the first world war and the Russian revolution. But the only way to overcome this ‘contradiction’ is to have an honest and serious balance sheet of why the revolution in Russia degenerated and how this can be avoided in the future. Hobsbawm is incapable of doing this because of the tawdry political garments of the past he still clings to, the remnants of a much distorted ‘Marxism’ which has not come to terms with the phenomenon of Stalinism.

What has socialism got to do with the cuts ?

In the special edition of the socialist a paper by the socialist party for the 26th march TUC demo ther eis a excellent article relating socialism to the cuts and how socialism can help us to a better world. i've reproduced it underneath. You can join the party at www.socialistparty.org.uk

What has socialism got to do with fighting the cuts?

Socialist Party members sell The Socialist, photo Paul Mattsson

Each week members of the Socialist Party sell copies of the Socialist newspaper at workplaces, colleges, stations, town centres and working class estates all over England and Wales, as well as at protests and meetings. Sellers are often questioned about socialist ideas. Here Tom Pearse records such a discussion.

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Socialist seller (S): Fight the cuts - no ifs, no buts, fight all cuts!

Potential buyer (B): Ok, I'm against the cuts but what is the alternative? The government says there is a massive public sector deficit and, if we don't cut it, then it will grow to unacceptable levels. Then the country will go bankrupt.
S: Well, the first thing I'd say is that we, the working people, who are the majority in this country, didn't create this deficit. The rich and their system of capitalism, particularly the bankers, are mainly responsible for this deficit. The previous government stepped in and bailed them out to the tune of about £80 billion directly, with up to £1 trillion in loan guarantees etc.

Also, because of the crisis of capitalism - which again we didn't create - over 2.5 million people in Britain don't have a job - including a million young people between the ages of 16 and 24.

It's the largesse handed out to the bankers and the increased cost to the state in unemployment and other benefits which accounts for most of the deficit.

B: Yes, yes - but this deficit exists. How are we going to pay for it? How can we ultimately eliminate it?
S: Did you know that the total deficit could be wiped out if the rich paid taxes like ordinary people do? Tax avoidance by the rich, according to the PCS civil service union, comes to £120 billion a year, which is almost equal to the total government budget deficit, £143 billion, to be eliminated over four years.

But the Con-Dems are using this situation to pursue a scorched earth policy against all the historical achievements of working class people, the NHS, pay and conditions etc.

This represents an attempt to turn back the wheel of history to the 1930s and in some senses to the 19th century. Working class people are being made to pay for rescuing capitalism in a severe crisis.

B: But if we try to make the rich pay for the deficit, won't they just take their money out of the country?
S: Yes, they might attempt that. But then they would be openly acting selfishly by seeking to flout the democratic wishes of the majority of the British people. We would therefore have every right to introduce measures to prevent them from doing so.

B: But isn't that to attack the principle of private property?
S: When socialists talk about 'private property' we're not talking about the personal possessions of ordinary people - houses, cars, fridges, etc. The private property of the rich and the super-rich comes through the super-exploitation of us, working class people.

They would argue that their profit, which is what Karl Marx called "the unpaid labour of the working class", is necessary in order to keep the system going. We should never forget that profit is achieved by exploitation - sometimes ruthlessly so in China and elsewhere today - of the labour power of the working class.

B: Don't we need rich people to create jobs and anyway, doesn't competition drive invention?
S: There is a grain of truth in the arguments of the bosses. In the past, by investing this surplus - profits if you like - in industry, they played a role in developing society, providing jobs and increased wealth for a time.

But for the last 20 to 30 years investment in factories, in what we would call the 'means of production' - the organisation of labour, science and technique - and the actual making of real things, has dropped dramatically.

Instead they sought to boost their profits in a massive orgy of 'financialisation', the building up of the financial sector at the expense of real production and the creation of jobs. This created a massive financial bubble which has now burst, resulting in the present devastating crisis.

This is a real indictment of the failure of capitalism. The International Monetary Fund has calculated that during this economic crisis, in 2008 alone, the total loss in assets devalued worldwide came to $50 trillion - roughly equal to the value of one year's global output of goods and services! This wealth is being destroyed because capitalism is a system based on production for profit for the few and not the social need of the many.

B: OK, the capitalists failed. But you still haven't said how you would stop them from avoiding any attacks on their wealth.

Selling The Socialist in Waltham Forest, photo Alison Hill

S: If they tried to continue with evasion, if they tried to take their loot out of the country, then a radical socialist government should introduce state controls of all capital coming in and out of the country.

This would be accompanied by the 'opening of the books'. The accounts of all companies should be inspected by mass committees of workers and consumers. This would be a form of workers' control, which is vital as a means of revealing the real wealth and how it is to be controlled for the benefit of the majority.

B: How can you do this in an open and free economy?
S: By nationalising the banks and finance houses.

B: Didn't the British government try this at the beginning of the financial crisis when they took big stakes in the banks?
S: Up to a point yes. But it was not complete nationalisation. And it certainly wasn't carried out in a way that was beneficial to the majority of the people of this country. New Labour left control in the hands of big business managers.

Even when the banks are nominally under our control - that is the state - they are run by and in the interests of the capitalists. Look at the tops of the majority-nationalised RBS bank - they are paying out millions in bonuses to themselves!

Instead we want real democratic nationalisation, conducted in a socialist manner through workers' control and management. This would involve the workers in the banking and financial sector, together with representatives of workers in general and government representatives, as well as depositors and other users, controlling and managing the banks on behalf of the people as a whole, providing cheap loans, mortgages, etc.

B: Won't big business take fright and sabotage any efforts to rein them in?
S: It is entirely possible that this could happen or be threatened. In the past, when minimal measures were taken against them, the capitalists threatened a strike of capital. When the Labour government in the 1970s - led by Harold Wilson as prime minister - introduced a tax on capital, big business, with the help of the newspapers, conducted a ferocious struggle which resulted in 174 amendments to the bill, and effectively nullified the proposed tax increases against the rich.

B. Well there we go. You can't do anything.
S: Now, I didn't say that. If we, the Socialist Party, have majority support, we could do a great deal to counter the undemocratic defiance by a handful of capitalists, seeking to thwart the wishes of the majority.

Harold Wilson and the Labour government, because they would not go outside the framework of capitalism, bent the knee to the bosses' pressure and capitulated. We would have called their bluff and proposed to Parliament a bill to take over these big companies who were threatening to defy and blackmail the elected representatives of the people.

B: But again, would that not mean violating the age-old principles of private property?
S: To invoke this alleged 'principle' is a smokescreen to mask the colossal and undemocratic concentration of power in the hands of a handful of the rich.

A few figures to illustrate this: of the hundred largest economies in the world 52 are corporations and 48 are countries; the top 500 companies control 70% of world trade; the top 200 companies' combined sales are equal to 28% of world GDP but employ only 0.82% of the world's workforce.

In the US, 2% of companies account for almost 75% of business activity. Here in Britain, the Socialist Party points out that 150 companies control 70-75% of the wealth of this country.

In other words a handful of billionaires control what are, in effect, monopoly concerns, which determine what will and will not be produced. They control who will and who will not work, which party they would like to see elected in which government to best represent their interests.

We do not live in a real democracy. Capitalist democracy is where everybody, at least in theory, can say what they like so long as big business, a handful of monopoly companies, can decide what takes place in practice.

B: But how can you break the power of the rich and the big monopolies?
S: That's a very good question. We will propose that these companies be taken over - nationalised by a socialist government which would then organise a democratic socialist plan of production. This plan would be drawn up through the involvement of working class people, representatives of the middle class, such as small shopkeepers, small businesses etc, the users and customers of industry, etc.

B: Two questions spring to mind. Wouldn't nationalisation be, in effect, 'expropriation' of the assets of people who, through diligent work, have built up this wealth over generations?
Secondly, if you take over industry, don't you also 'nationalise' the savings of many, not necessarily wealthy, people who invested in stocks and shares - for instance trade union members who have their pensions invested on the stock exchange?

S: Firstly this wealth and power of big business has been built up, as we showed earlier, by the exploitation of the labour power of the working class.

In the past there was some justification for this - despite the horrors of capitalism in the Industrial Revolution, the slave trade, etc. This was because it built up industry and was therefore ultimately laying the basis for abolishing shortages and boosting living standards.

But capitalism is a system which cannot fully utilise the full potential of the productive forces, as has been shown by the series of crises throughout its history and particularly the present crisis. Karl Marx pointed out that when it begins to hold back production, to destroy wealth, capitalism betrays its "historical mission", which was to develop production.

When it begins to hold back production it becomes obsolete. This does not mean, however, that capitalism will 'automatically' disappear. It needs to be 'helped' off the stage of history by the actions of the working class and the labour movement. So we need a new social system - one that involves a state acting for the majority and not the privileged minority - which is democratic at every level both in the running of industry and society.

But we, that is the working class and the labour movement, are not impervious to the interests of the small investors. Even to the big investors we will be more generous than they are to the poor, those on benefits, etc. Compensation will be paid on the basis of proven need to all whose assets are being taken over by a democratic socialist workers' state.

B: And the ordinary people?
S: It goes without saying that, of course, trade union members and their pensions will be safeguarded; in fact, pensions will be rapidly increased from the current miserable level which the coalition government intends to cut further. All workers - as well as the unemployed, those on low wages, pensioners etc - will enormously benefit from a socialist planned economy.

B: How can you possibly guarantee that, by waving some kind of magical 'socialist' wand, things will improve in the way you describe?
S: There will be no hocus-pocus; there is no mystery in how a socialist planned economy would be organised and will be superior to outmoded capitalism.

Capitalism is a system which cannot utilise the full productive potential of its own system. The output of the world economy is back to the levels of 1989.

But in the 17 countries forming the eurozone, joblessness among the young now officially stands at over 20% (although it's much higher in many areas) alongside closed factories.

In Ireland we have the phenomena of empty 'ghost estates' while millions throughout the world lack basic shelter. One billion people on the planet go to bed hungry every night, an increase of 150 million compared to 15 years ago.

A planned economy would use all the resources which now lie idle, as well as cutting out the colossal waste from unnecessary advertising, duplication of production, etc.

Instead of the measly growth rate of capitalist economies at present - with Britain not really growing at all - a socialist planned economy could rapidly increase production on an environmentally sustainable basis and generate huge extra resources in Europe and the world.

It would increase the participation of the workforce in running society, including production, as well as consumers - through cutting the working day without any loss in pay. This would not lead to a decrease in production but give an enormous boost to it. In schools, in housing, in education, instead of the current cuts, there would be a big expansion. Undreamed of plenty is possible on the basis of socialism.

B: But didn't 'socialism' fail in Russia? Instead of democracy there was dictatorship by people like Stalin.
S: The Russian revolution, in the period immediately after 1917, when the October revolution took place, established the most democratic state in history. It proceeded to take into public ownership the land, industry and finance.

For the first time the majority - that is the working class and the poor peasantry - were in power. They ruled through a system of workers' and peasants' councils.

There were no privileges for the representatives of the people, who lived on the average wage, were subject to recall, etc. These councils, for the first time in history, raised the working class to power and allowed them to rule.

The Russian revolution was seen as just the beginning of the European and the world revolution. Unfortunately, despite favourable opportunities, this did not transpire because of the betrayal of the workers' leaders in the social democratic parties (like the Labour Party in Britain) in the West at that stage. Therefore Russia was isolated and, on the basis of scarcity, a low cultural level and a privileged elite, the bureaucracy began to emerge, personified by Stalin.

This bureaucratic caste betrayed the ideals of the Russian revolution - although the planned economy was still maintained and therefore the system which remained was still relatively progressive compared to capitalism - and gradually established a one-party totalitarian regime.

B: What guarantee is there that your British version of socialism will not go the same way?
S: This will not happen in a socialist Britain. I know this is a bold assertion but it's based on a sober assessment of the different conditions between Britain today and Russia at the time of the revolution. We live in an advanced industrial country, with a high level of culture, access to computers, the social media, etc. We have a powerful and educated working class with its own organisations, the trade unions.

Once working people here carry through such a big social change they will not allow a repetition of Stalinism, for power and privilege to be concentrated in a few hands.

B: But won't those in power just get greedy?
S: Yes, there is always a danger of a bureaucratic layer seeking to control everything. Look at the trade unions today. There are leaderships sometimes on salaries several times that of trade union members. There are leaderships who fear the active participation of the members, particularly militant fighters like members of the Socialist Party fighting to transform the unions so that they reflect the real will of working people.

The only way to check this bureaucracy is through democracy. Trade union and other officials should be elected subject to recall. Such will be the advantages of socialism, particularly implemented democratically, that there would be no possibility of going back to capitalism. This would be as absurd and as utopian as anybody today hoping to return to feudalism, to the hardship of the middle ages.

B: But do you think that the capitalists will just allow you to go ahead and expropriate them without resistance?
S: We will have a democratic majority and under the rules of democracy a minority should abide by the will of the majority. Of course the rights of minorities would be protected. Not just the working class but the intermediate layers of society can be won to socialist system.

Once the mass of working people come together in struggle, a huge social movement, all of those layers of society who are subject to attack by the system, gravitate to the workers' side. This was shown, after all, in the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and throughout the Middle East.

The Con-Dems are attacking the police by proposing to cut their numbers. Even servicemen, on returning from Afghanistan, could be thrown on the dole. Many then can be open to the idea of fighting the cuts. But also this can open up for them the vista of a new society where all the talents can be used.

Nevertheless we are realistic. History has shown that it is not the left, it is not the working class movement, which resorts to force to attain its ends. We are absolutely opposed to the methods of terrorism. But we're not pacifists; we will defend all democratic rights from any forceful attempt to take them away. We fight with democratic means for a democratic majority. But the ruling class does not always abide by even its own 'rules' when its vital interests are threatened.

B: Ok, you've made the case for a socialist Britain. But what kind of set-up will you have in relations with Europe and the world?
S: We don't believe in socialism in one country. Russia shows that there is no possibility of any one country moving towards socialism by itself. Leon Trotsky, the great socialist theoretician of the workers' movement, continually argued against this idea and he was proved right.

The development of the productive forces has completely outgrown the narrow limits of the nation state. The failed attempt of the capitalists in Europe to come together through the European Union is one expression of this.

If Egypt can detonate and assist the movement in Wisconsin, in the belly of the beast, the US itself, imagine if Britain was to go socialist. It would begin to transform the world. The same would apply in any country in Europe, or for that matter the relatively developed countries in Latin America or Asia.