ALB
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https://www.ft.com/content/83d1ff43-27ee-464b-ad9a-3155a526f799
I wonder what sort of capitalism Burnham is selling from his stall.
By the way, this could be last entry on this thread as it looks as if we will have to start a new one on the Burnham Labour Government to record its failures and anti-working class measures.
Let’s face it, “degrowth” under capitalism is a bonkers idea. The driving force of the capitalist economy is growth in the form of capital accumulation out of profits. This can’t be stopped without upsetting the whole economy. Which is what any attempt to do would result in.
Since “growth” is measured as an increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which itself is measured in terms of money, “degrowth” won’t make sense this as there won’t be a general unit of account such as money and so no GDP to aim at reducing.
This said, the production of some things will of course be decreased but that of others will be increased.
More (from another site) on the other candidates:
LAMBETH LBC; Clapham Park (Grn resigned)
Candidates:
AMOS, Ben (Liberal Democrat)
BALL, Michael Sherif (Green)
FORRESTER, Joshua Jack (Conservative)
JEHWO, Susanna Kehinde (Christian Peoples Alliance)
KRYCEK, Anya (Socialist Party (GB))
READ, Martin Lester (Reform UK)
SOMERVILLE-SUTHERLAND, Louie (Labour)2026: Lab 1285, 1158, 1117; Grn 1154, 1033, 938; LD 364, 312, 262; Con 308, 259, 205; Ref 235; Ind 202; SDP 38
2022: Lab 1545, 1416, 1361; Grn 574, 424, 405; Con 303, 286, 231; LD 239, 207, 186Louie Somerville-Sutherland was the unsuccessful Labour candidate here in May, whilst Ben Amos was the top Lib Dem and Martin Read was the Reform candidate. Read was also the 3rd Conservative here in 2022. Michael Ball (Grn) stood in Kennington in May (also in 2022), Joshua Forrester (Con) in Clapham Town and Anya Krycek (SPGB) in Brixton North.
The 3000 election leaflets arrived yesterday. Distribution began today.
Here is what it says:
A WORD TO THE ELECTORS OF CLAPHAM PARK
You are being asked to vote in yet another election. The other parties will come to you with lists of promises: more housing, safer streets, better parks, protection for LGBTQ+ people. They will tell you that if you elect them to the council, they will manage capitalism a little more humanely.We say: we have all heard these promises before. Labour, Lib Dem, Green, they have all sat in the council chamber. The housing crisis has deepened. Rents have soared. Our parks have been fenced off for private profit. And still they ask for your vote on the promise that this time it will be different.
The SOCIALIST PARTY does not make promises we cannot keep. We do not ask you to vote for us in order to administer capitalism more efficiently. The other candidates will tell you they can make Lambeth “better.” We tell you the truth: Lambeth cannot be made better while capitalism remains. The council, whatever its political colour, is an administrative body of a class state. It manages the affairs of capital in our locality. It cannot abolish the profit motive. It cannot communalise housing. It cannot de-commodify our parks. It cannot produce safety without force.
Only the conscious, organised working class can do these things. Only when the majority of people understand their interest in the abolition of capitalism and act upon that understanding can we move beyond the endless cycle of reform and reaction.
Your vote for the ANYA KRYCEK is not a vote for a councillor. It is a vote for socialism. It is a declaration that you refuse to be bought off with promises of “affordable” rents and “community” policing. It is a recognition that the problems of Clapham Park are the problems of the capitalist world system and that their solution lies not in the council chamber but in the abolition of that system and its replacement by one based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.
We now know who our opponents are: the Gang of Five and the Christian Peoples Alliance
The nomination papers for our candidate were handed in at Lambeth Town Hall and accepted this afternoon. We won’t know who the other candidates are till after nominations close on Friday at 4pm.
So far only the Greens and Labour have named their candidates. The Greens have already started canvassing.
The Executive Committee has given London Branch the go-ahead to contest the Clapham Park by-election on Thursday 9 July. We have completed the nomination papers except for the signature of one of the two electors nominating our candidate; the sympathiser prepared to sign is currently out of the country but will be back on Tuesday. After they have signed we will formally hand the papers in to the Returning Officer by the deadline of 12 June.
There is by-election in another ward on the same day which we will not contest but, if we have time, we might leaflet suggesting that those who want socialism write this on their ballot paper.
These will be hotly contested by-elections, especially in Clapham Park where two of the three councillors elected in May were Labourites. The Greens have put out an appeal to Green Party members in the rest of London to come and help, as here:
“Dear London Greens, Lambeth Council hangs by a thread. The Greens, on 27 councillors, have a majority of just ONE over the Labour Group. Two by-elections on 9 July will decide the fate of the council for the next 4 years. We cannot do this alone. Green Party Lambeth.”
If nothing else, this will mean more local and even London coverage and more political activity in the two wards, with being in a position to make our voice heard at least in Clapham Park.
Councillor Chessum has just been appointed Cabinet member for “Economy, Cost of Living and Empowered Communities”. It’s going to be interesting to see how he handles this and instructive to see what happens.
Meanwhile London Branch are considering standing a candidate in one of the by-elections the date for which has now been fixed as Thursday 9 July. It would be the one in Clapham Park which is next door to one we contested on 7 May and a part of which is within walking distance of our Head Office.
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.”
