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Former member (now back in the CPB) Andrew Northall replied in last Thursday’s Weekly Worker to Robin’s letter. He puts the best case a Leninist can — that socialist minority seizes power and then uses its control of political power to educate the working class into becoming socialists and that when a majority have become socialists then socialism can be established.
It’s what the pre-Marxist Communists thought but which Marx moved beyond,insisting that the working class would have to emancipate itself — that a majority of the working class would have to want and understand socialism before political control could be successfully exercised to replace capitalism with socialism.
Anyway here’s his letter:
To give them their due, a revolt by a large number of Labour MPs did force the government to water down and postpone — but not abandon — its plan to cut disability benefits.
Meanwhile it appears that a majority of Labour Party members want the government “to move to the left”. But when have Labour Party members decided what the government does?
https://labourlist.org/2025/06/news-labour-polling-survation-left-move/
Another letter from a Party member in this week’s Weekly Worker:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/letters/
Also, mention of us three or four times in Conrad’s attack on TAS:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/one-step-back/
For example:
“In fact, as I feared, comrades Wrack and Potts have done little more than produce a soft-focus, banal, incoherent parody of the maximalism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s ‘What we stand for’.The TAS duo hate my coming out with any such a description. It is one of those ‘bad words’ they cite to excuse their break with FCU. Pathetic. The comrades plead that they do not reject reforms per se – indeed they don’t. Nor for that matter does the SPGB.”
I haven’t been able to find the alleged “soft-focus, banal, incoherent parody” of our “maximalism”, if anybody can.
The Daily Mail today is reporting
“a poll last week found that a new Left-wing party led by Mr Corbyn would attract 10 per cent of voters and pose a fresh challenge for Sir Keir Starmer.
The survey by More in Common showed, if the ex-Labour leader were to front a new party, it would be backed by one in 10 voters.
At the same time, Labour’s share of the vote would drop from its current 23 per cent to 20 per cent – leaving Sir Keir’s party on the same level of support as the Tories.
In a further split on the Left of British politics, the Greens would drop from 9 per cent to 5 per cent if Mr Corbyn took the helm of a new party.”Polls are what they are worth and generally come up with the answer those who commission them want but this doesn’t seem unreasonable, i.e., 10 percent and that support from such a party would come from people who currently would vote Labour or Green.
Of course the new party has not yet been formed and Sultana has only announced that she will “co-lead” moves to form such a party. If formed, it will have to work out how to deal with the Trotskyist groups who will “enter” it en masse. See how the SWP has reported it:
Andrew Feinstein announces left alternative at Marxism Festival
As to the Greens, it will depend on who wins the leadership election there and whether it’s the leftwing candidate Zach Polanski who claims that the Green Party already is a “socialist party” (some Trot groups are already in it). My guess is that he won’t as the Greens have more in common with the Liberals and won’t want to alienate voters in the ex-Tory seats they won in the general election. They are pathetic wishy-washy lot anyway. We’ll see.
Let’s hope that the new leftwing reformist party doesn’t include the word “socialist” in its name.
I know it’s a bit like kicking an opponent when they’re down but here’s another everyday routine acceptance that banks need deposits to function.
It’s from today’s Times and is about a government plan to reduce “cash ISAs” (savings with banks, etc whose interest is tax-free) to encourage savers to instead gamble on the stock exchange by getting tax-free dividends.
According to the news item, building societies (which are banks specialising in lending money to people to buy a house), “which rely on cash ISAs as an important source of funding, have also warned restrictions could affect lending”.
If, as banks, they could lend without funding how come that this could affect their lending?
It would be nice to think that this was the beginning of a wider movement against the Starmer governments war-mongering:
The trouble is that the man behind it, Steve Hedley, the union’s assistant general secretary, is an unreconstructed Stalinist who is still pro-Russia even though it doesn’t even claim to be socialist any more. (He once publicly denounced us as “Mensheviks”. See here:
But at least the sentiment is ok if not the motivation. Which cannot be said of the Trotskyist “Workers Liberty” which openly calls for more arms for Ukraine side.
“Both a rebuilt welfare state and arms and aid for Ukraine can be won by taxing the rich. In any case, the amount spent on arms or aid for Ukraine is tiny compared to the shortfall in hospitals, schools, and the benefits system.”
(https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2025-05-26/editorial-ukraine-and-ukraines-workers)Tax the Rich to pay for arms for Ukraine, that’s a new one.
I didn’t know that the new head of MI6 is the grand-daughter of a Ukrainian Nazi. Can’t held that against her I suppose. I’m not responsible for what my grandfathers were or did. But even so, in present circumstances. A propaganda gift to the Russian rulers and a reminder that Ukrainians weren’t always the “goodies”.
Latest news: TAS break off the “unity” talks with the WW group. Not surprising really in view of the latter’s rigid Bolshevik-Leninism.
Another letter from us in this week’s Weekly Worker, on our attitude towards reforms:
Elected governments staging false flags so they can start a war to increase their chances of staying in office! It looks as if all those tendentious videos you watch are having a bad effect on you and have infected you with a dose of conspiraloonism.
More on him here:
https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-nyc-mayoral-election-win
These “socialists” who have “entered” the Democratic Party are only what — a long time ago – the Labour Party in Britain and Social Democrat parties in Europe used to be: common or garden reformists.
Here’s their website:
Still, I suppose it shows that “socialist” is no longer a dirty word to many in America.
The article doesn’t say that Trump “decides to give Ukraine Patriot missiles”. Even the headline says that he will only “look at” this.
Actually, on re-reading his manifesto I see he does touch on this problem;
“Integral functions by tracking voluntary labor contributions through time credits, which are not spent like money but act as symbolic tokens of one’s participation. These credits entitle individuals to access the outputs of other cooperatives within the network.
Labor is valued dynamically using AI-guided cybernetic feedback, which adjusts credit weighting in real time based on urgency, scarcity, and skill need—so if a task is highly demanded (like childcare), it earns more credit value. This motivates labor redistribution without money, wages, or central planning.”This raises other problems. He says here that “time credits … act as symbolic tokens of one’s participation” (in producing useful things or providing useful services). But they do more than this as they also determine how much you can access of what is produced. In his example someone working on childcare would get more credits than someone working in some less demanded line of activity and so be entitled to access more goods and services than the other person. If it didn’t there would be no particular advantage, in his blueprint, to switch to childcare.
They got plenty of money for some things:
Joseph seems to have regressed. After advancing beyond Technocracy and the Venus Project to Zeitgeist he has now regressed from educational consciousness-raising to something-now gradualism. At least he hasn’t gone reformist but he is advocating organising now on the economic field to try to gradually (“incrementally”, as he puts it) replace capitalism.
It does seem like a modernised version of the idea that was around in Marx’s day of organising cooperative workshops that would use labour notes (based on working time), both internally and externally, and which would gradually spread and replace capitalist production based on wage-labour until a complete “cooperative commonwealth” was established.
This assumes that such cooperative productive units would be able to outcompete capitalist enterprises but that was never on and is even less realistic today than it was in the 1840s and the 1860s.
In any event, they would have to operate within an overall capitalist environment from which they would be unable to escape or isolate themselves.
It sounds like a non-starter and that Marx was right — before socialism can become constructive the working class need to win political control and abolish the capitalist environment.
There are also problems with using time worked to access what you need. What about those who can’t work or for not as long as average (and those who can work more and so get more)? I am sure Joseph will have worked some way out to deal with this but it’s not in his initial manifesto.
