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Some more publicity for our campaign, in a local online news site:
Myatt’s Fields by-election: seven candidates confirmed for 8th October
“Perhaps our contribution is simply to keep asking the fundamental question and passing it on”. Yes, Roberto, that is one way of looking what we are doing.
Our declaration of principles (which are actually quite general) summed up the experience of the working class up to the beginning of the 20th century. As humans don’t just learn from their personal experience but also from learning what previous generations had experienced, that means that workers don’t have to reinvent the wheel each generation.
Of course what socialists say has to be related to our fellow workers’ personal experience but things haven’t changed basically since then — workers still experience problems arising from their being excluded from owning and controlling the means of producing what they need to live or, to put it the other way round, of these being owned and controlled by a minority within society.
So, yes, we are involved in passing on the lessons learned from the past experience of previous generations of workers. Present generations would eventually learn this without a group of organised socialists passing this on, but the growth of the understanding of what needs to be done would be slower.
Roberto, you say,
“So perhaps our response to the growth of the Right should not be: “How do we get these workers back to the Left?”
It should be: “How do we get workers to stop looking to either side of capitalist politics and begin thinking in terms of their own class interests?”No “perhaps” about it ! That’s what our response should be.
800 or so leaflets distributed so far. This might be considered early but both the Greens and the Labour Party have already been out. We met one Labourite canvasser.
The area has been upgraded since we last time we contested a local election here, in 2013. Then large parts of it were a building site. Now it is this:
https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/better-fairer-lambeth/projects/myatts-field-north
The medium-rise blocks all have outside letter boxes which makes leafletting easier.
We now know who are opponents are: the usual suspects plus the Christian Peoples Alliance:
Reese is not very convincing as a writer on economics. He thinks that the absolute limit of capital accumulation has been reached and so capitalism is about to collapse. Scroll down to the review of his book The End of Capitalism here:
The stuff he writes in the Weakly Worket isn’t up to much either.
Here’s a passage from that article in the Financial Times of 29 August:
“Imagine then a super-AI armed with access to all the data we let our devices record for every transaction we enter into, and much more besides. Such an AI would surely bury Hayek.
Indeed, a big motivation for the socialist calculation debate was that market prices get a lot of things wrong. People don’t always know enough to choose the best goods; they get addicted, defrauded or bankrupted. Consumption and production have spillover effects on third parties — “externalities” — that pricing decisions do not capture; so we get pollution, resource depletion and climate damage. Price adjustments do not stabilise the macroeconomy; so we get business cycles, bubbles and busts. These shortcomings of the price mechanism were easy to grasp in the wake of the Great Depression. The same realisation may be gaining strength again, given the disenchantment with capitalism expressed by so many young people in particular.
Against this background, it beggars belief that once a super-AI was asked to advise on the allocation of resources, it would merely follow the outcome of the highest bids in free markets, rather than calculate the most efficient allocations it could find by itself. Why on earth would AI agents abdicate from central planning?”Of course it assumes that the means of production are no longer owned and controlled by a minority.
Three thousand copies of our manifesto have arrived. Here is what it says:
The Greens or Labour can’t reverse austerity!
The only hope is socialism
In May the Green Party promised to ‘reverse austerity’. It won them control of Lambeth council. It was an empty promise. No council has the power to do this, legally or economically. In office, the promise shrank to ‘campaigning to restore funding from central government’. Not the same. Austerity isn’t a political choice. It’s an economic necessity under capitalism. Councils and governments must limit spending to protect profits. The Greens’ campaign will fail.
Labour is no different. Labour ran Lambeth for years: protesting against cuts in opposition, making them in office. Labour’s answer tax the rich, spend more won’t work either. Corporate profits are the economy as far as capitalism is concerned. Tax them and investment and jobs dry up. Every Labour council ends up administering capitalism on capitalism’s terms. Whether Greens or Labour win the Myatts Field by election on 8 October, both will manage capitalism and capitalism means cuts.
The problem is the wages system itself. Workers are paid less than the value of what we produce; that difference is profit. Meanwhile food is destroyed while people go hungry, and houses stand empty while people sleep on the streets because production serves profit, not need. Unemployment, crisis, poverty and war are not accidents. They’re the inevitable product of a system where the means of living belong to a minority.
Socialism is something different: common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. No owners, no employers, no profit no wages, money or buying and selling. People contributing according to their ability, taking according to their needs, with production organised democratically to meet human needs in balance with the planet.
That can’t be handed down from above or voted in by one party. It needs a majority of workers understanding socialism and taking democratic control of production. That’s why the Socialist Party contests elections, not to manage capitalism, but to argue the socialist case.
Vote for the SOCIALIST PARTY candidate Anya Krycek on 8 October.
More about the candidates declared so far, including us miscalled “the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain” (we’re getting that corrected).
Myatt’s Fields by-election confirmed for Thursday 8th October 2026
The Greens have chosen their candidate — another defector from Labour over Gaza.
Sonia Winifred selected as Green candidate for Myatt’s Fields by-election
The nomination papers were handed in to the Returning Officer at noon today and accepted.
We won’t know who our opponents are till nominations close on Friday. But we can expect at least the gang of five — Labour, Green, LibDem, Tory and RefUK.
Another local by-election near Head Office has been called. It’s in Myatt’s Fields ward in Lambeth on 8 0ctober. This ward is next door to Brixton North which we contested in the May council elections.
London branch will be putting up a candidate.
The by-election has been caused by the death of the long-standing Labour councillor. It has two council members. In May 1 Green and 1 Labourite were elected. Both Shake-it-up contested last time. Turnout was 37.1 percent.
Leaflet issued by Argentine Trotskyists during the Falklands War calling, among other things, on the trade unions to set up recruitment centres for workers to join the armed forces under General Galtieri to kill and be killed to defend the “national sovereignty” of the Argentine ruling class.
This article describes the situation at the northern end of the Persian Gulf up to 1990:
