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Here is an example of a war-mongering trot group in Argentina:
“From the beginning of the invasion, the Marxist International raised the slogan “arms for the Ukrainian people!”, because in war and revolution, it is more dangerous for the proletariat and revolutionaries to take a pacifist stance than a defensive military one…”
(https://www.revolucion.org.es/l/dos-politicas-en-la-izquierda-mundial-para-cuba-y-venezuela2/)
Of course they all supported the war of the Argentine state under General Galtieri against the British state over the falklands, even calling on the trade unions to turn their offices into recruitment centres.
Real enemies, then, in practice as well as theory, of the working class.
One of the newly-elected Green councillors is Michael Chessum who describes himself as a “socialist writer and activist”. He is the author of a book called This is Only the Beginning. The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn.
In this Lambeth Green Party election video on Instagram he says (he’s the last one on):
“We’ll fight to reverse austerity, empowering workers and the community we serve.”
(https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXuCReljFxt/ )
Of course fighting to reverse austerity is not the same as actually reversing it. In fact in his book he describes the fight to reverse austerity in the period 2010-15 and writes of “the defeat of the anti-austerity movement” (p. 104). He attributes this to the movement not having an effective political expression because the Labour Party and the TUC didn’t take up the fight. Presumably he now thinks that the Green Party will. He doesn’t consider the possibility that “austerity” is necessary and even built in under capitalism and that’s why the movement against it failed.
In his statement last June announcing that he was joining the Green Party he wrote:
“In the coming years, there will be mass movements against austerity and the wider policy of the Labour government. The Greens’ strong internal democracy will be a boon, allowing movements to shape and own the Greens from the bottom up. Social and industrial struggle must be viewed as a primary method for doing politics. Without a mobilised local community, left wing councillors will be fighting a losing battle. Without a mass movement engaged in something other than electioneering, electoral projects lack a legacy.” (https://leftfootforward.org/2025/06/michael-chessum-why-im-joining-the-green-party/)
It looks as if we are going to have a ring-side seat, from Head Office in Lambeth, to see an attempt to mobilise “the local community” here “to fight to reverse austerity”.
Mind you, the first thing Councillor Chessum will have to do is to convince his fellow Green councillors who don’t regard themselves as “socialists” to go along with this. Otherwise, on his own admission, he will be fighting a losing battle. Not that he won’t be anyway.
He didn’t need to apologise as he was telling the truth — the money spent on employing workers is a part of the capital invested in a business. So referring to workers as “human capital” is accurate enough. The term Marx used was “variable capital”.
Of course the Winters character was never going to be that accurate as that would be to
let the cat completely out of the bag. Marx called the part of capital invested in employing workers “variable capital” because, unlike the other parts of capital — plant, machinery, materials, power, which only passed their value on to the product unchanged — the part invested in employing workers increased its value, the surplus being the source of profit and other property incomes.Since the election two councillors elected as Greens have resigned, one accused of anti-semitism by the police, the other probably because she never expected to get elected.
The upshot is that there will two council by-elections in the near future, one next door to one of the wards we contested. It is unlikely that we will stand a candidate but the branch will certainly take this opportunity to follow up our election campaign.
That article argues that Bregman “is not a leader of a revolutionary party whose aim is to seize power and expropriate the bourgeoisie; no, she is an honest, combative leader who defends just causes and who may be perceived as Trotskyist, but discursively and programmatically she is, at most, a left-wing Peronist.”
The Latin American Trotskyists (like most other leftists there) are ultra-nationalists, “sovreignists”, defined as ie “a political advocate who campaigns for a nation or region to maintain or regain full autonomy and self-determination. They generally seek to protect their country’s political, economic, and cultural independence from external governance, globalization, and supranational unions”. Which, in the context of Latin America, is ridiculous as the various states are obvious artificial entities descended from provinces of the old Spanish empire as adjusted by wars between them.
The Trotskyists there take up the same position on this point as the Maoists in this part of the world. Here Trotskyists are basically militant Guardian-readers defending “just causes” (rather than leftwing Faragists) but, even here, most Trotsky groups were ardent Brexiteers.
Actually, there’s quite a good summary there of what Sutterlütti and Meretz have in mind, except I think “work units” would be better than “enterprises”:
“Meretz and Sutterlütti developed this model on the basis of commons research. The abolition of all compulsory labor and distribution “according to need” is central to this model; only in this way, the authors claim, could the problems of ‘actually existing socialism’ be avoided. In terms of coordination, the approach is very decentralized, there is no central authority and the enterprises organize themselves autonomously. Various committees and locations work out solutions to conflicts, but no institution has the power to enforce them; instead, the enterprises and associations decide on solutions. Furthermore, there is no central calculation parameter, but a multitude of indicators (required work/products, labor hours, ecology, job satisfaction, etc.) allow the enterprises to operate coherently.”
TUSC have published the results of the votes obtained by all their candidates despite this making them a laughing stock. Only a handful got into triple figures with quite a few not reaching even double figures. One got as much as 4 votes.
We know that had we contested the same sort of wards our results would have been similar but we don’t have pretensions at being a serious reformist party with a detailed programme of reforms and a plan for how councils could balance their budgets. We know the current low level of support amongst the working class for socialism and are contesting as part our general policy of using every opportunity to put across the case for socialism.
Anyway, here are the TUSC results:
https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-Results-report.pdf
They publish the results of other left of Labour parties and candidates. These are rather better including those standing as Your Party.
Thankfully we are not counted as such a party. In fact we are not counted by them as a party at all but are recorded, in the 2 wards, where we went head to head with them as “Ind”. They must know that this is untrue but they are following the practice that the mainstream media used to of referring to us as “Independent”. In previous years they did record us as “SPGB”.
I have finally finished reading the ‘Make Capitalism History’ book. It’s heavy going but the practical alternative to capitalism they outline (and which they call “commonism”) is similar to what we mean by socialism.
They also argue that such a society cannot be established for people as both gradualist reformists and insurrectionary Leninists envisage but can only be brought about by a majority who want and understand it acting for themselves.
They dismiss ‘central planning’ as unworkable and envisage production and consumption taking place in response to various non-monetary ‘signals’. I am not sure why orthodox Council Communists chose to take them on over this, putting the same arguments as orthodox economics and Leninists. A more pertinent criticism would be of their opposition to delegate democracy and to any central administrative body even an unarmed one. Their argument against this is tired old anarchist one that ‘power corrupts’. But what power could anyone exercise over anyone else where everybody has free access on the same terms to what they need?
The Greens have just elected the new leaders of their group on Lambeth Council. Their leader is to be Martin Abrams, who was elected as a Labour councillor in 2022 but left over Palestine. As the Greens are the biggest party on the council he is likely to be the new Leader of the Council too.
Here is one of the things he is promising:
“We will put power in the hands of residents, workers and the community. Things can, and will, get better.”
And what one of his deputy co-leader, Ciara Alleyne, is:
“ Again and again, residents told us the same story – a political elite, locally and nationally, is prioritising the needs of developers, big business and themselves over the needs of people and planet. We will do things differently.”
Martin Abrams elected Leader of Lambeth Green Group: official statement
Bold words. Putting powers into the hands of workers and not prioritising the needs of big business. Let’s see how they get on.
There are various ways of counting the percentage of votes cast for each candidate. The easiest is the number of votes cast for a candidate divided by the total number of votes cast (bearing in mind that each voters can have 2 votes or 3 votes but doesn’t have to use them all). That is the method used on Lambeth Council website rounded up or down to the nearest whole number (which means that if it’s less than 0.5 percent the figure is recorded as 0 percent). Wikipedia does the same but rounds up or down to the nearest first decimal point. This gives, for instance, our candidate in Brixton North 0.8 percent.
To work out how many individuals voted for a particular candidate you would divide the number of votes for a candidate by the number of ballot papers. This is what they appear to have done here:
https://www.mylondon.news/news/south-london-news/lambeth-election-results-full-2026-33916540
This gives 2.4 percent in Brixton North, 2.0 percent in Stockwell West, and 0.5 in Clapham Common.
The figures for the 9 TUSC candidates (showing how badly they did from their own point of view) are: 2.1 (Stockwell West), 1.6 (Brixton North), 1.4, 1.4, 1,2, 0.9, 0.9, 0,9, and 0.7. Which are ridiculous for a party offering reforms — if you want reforms you might as well vote for a party that has a chance of getting elected and so in a position to implement some. Which is what those attracted by reforms did.
As to how many voted just for our candidate, I can’t say regarding Brixton North as I was at the table for Stockwell West. The way they counted the ballot papers of those who didn’t vote for all 3 candidates of one party enabled you to see how these had scattered their votes. My impression is that not many voted only for us (in fact not many used only one of their votes). Most of our voters also voted for one or more other candidates but not randomly, for instance for us and/or a Green or the ShakeItUp candidate or a Labourite or, quite often, the TUSC candidate. We might not like this but it at least showed that those who did vote for us did so deliberately, probably on the principle of voting the furthest “left” that you can.
The other thing to note — Professor Curtice continues — is that we do better in “Labour” wards and constituencies. Stockwell West was a clean sweep for Labour, Brixton North elected 2 Labour and 1 Green. (Clapham Common elected 2 LibDems).
Maybe next time we should field the full number of candidates. We did that in 2010. Here are the results (scroll down):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferndale_(Lambeth_ward)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larkhall_(Lambeth_ward)
The percentages are 1.0 and 0.8.
Any idea why ‘Shake It Up’ polled so well? . . . in relative terms, I mean.
Yes they did relatively well, averaging about 5 percent and sometimes outvoting the Tories and/or LibDems. Limited confirmation of Roger Hallam’s approach: find a well-known enthusiastic local community activist to be candidate, campaign continuously canvassing door to door, regular weekly meetings, posters everywhere. On a radical-democratic localist programme.
It remains to be seen if they will be a permanent feature of the political scene in Lambeth.
Did Michael Chessum get elected for the Greens?
Yes. So at least one self-declared “Marxist” councillor.
It looks as if the Greens will be running Lambeth Council from tomorrow, maybe with LibDem support if needed, as the result is:
Greens 29
Labour 26
LibDems 8Going to be interesting to see first hand how the Greens will manage capitalism at local level and whether our future slogan can be:
Labour, Green, Same Old Scene.
The result of the election at Stockwell West & Larkhall has just been announced:
Labour: 1438, 1301, 1244
Green: 1234, 1211, 1098
Conservative: 420, 358, 265
LibDems: 377, 348, 273
Reform: 374
Independent (Shake It Up): 351
TUSC: 72
Socialist: 68Four of us were at the all-day count at the Oval cricket ground yesterday. The results of two of the three wards we contested are:
Brixton North (3 councillors)
Labour: 1415, 1365, 1189
Green: 1388, 1304, 1169
Independent (Shake It Up): 372
Conservative: 261, 252, 167
LibDem: 215, 200, 186
Reform: 189
Socialist: 77
TUSC: 53This is the first time that TUSC have fallen below us.
Clapham Common & Abbeville (2 councillors)
LibDems: 1331, 1195
Labour: 1116, 789
Greens: 441, 423
Conservative: 347, 331
Reform: 194, 173
Socialist: 14This is the most prosperous ward in Lambeth (and the last one to have had a Tory councillor) and confirms that we do better in terms of votes in (now one-time) “Labour” areas.
There is a recount in the third ward — Stockwell West & Larkhall which is taking place this morning. We know how many votes we got but it is against the law to reveal it and, besides, it might be different after the recount.
To return to whether or not our candidates could sign the Vote Palestine pledge, we said we couldn’t because it implied some “right of nations to self-determination”.
Despite most Green candidates having signed up to this pledge, they have just been disavowed by their Party Leader who has stated that “no country has a right to exist”.
