Zhao Dingqi: You have been a member of the British Labour Party since 1961 and have long been involved in political activities and parliamentary elections as a member of the party, but you left 2004. Why did you choose to leave the party at that time? What do you think of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” and his “Third Way”?
Dave Hill: Yes, I was a Labour Party member for a long time, since my sixteenth birthday in 1961. I was a member between 1961 and 2004. In the 1960s and before then, the Labour Party was widely viewed among the populace and in the media as the party of the working class, the party that fought for social justice and redistribution of wealth and income. It was a classic social democratic party.
I was from/part of a working-class family—my dad was a carpenter; my mum a factory worker, dressmaking; and my two brothers, carpenters. After my parents’ divorce, when I was 13 or 14 we became poor, a poor, single-parent family: my mum and us three teenage boys.
For most of the twentieth century voting patterns in Western Europe were strongly related to social class. So, in the UK, most, but not all, working class families voted Labour.1 As a Labour Party activist from the age of 16, I fought many elections for Labour: two Parliamentary elections, one European Parliamentary election, and many municipal/Council elections. As for my theoretical and ideological trajectory, through the 1960s and ’70s I was a left social democrat, a “Tribunite,” interested in and influenced by Marxism, but not yet a Marxist.2
However, by the early 1980s—influenced by Marxist comrades and the milieu within my local Labour Party (it was pretty much controlled by the “Militant” tendency in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s) and by Margaret Thatcher and her clear, procapitalist, class consciousness and policies (mass privatization and the weakening of trade union rights), I became a Marxist.3 I was a Marxist within the Labour Party, though not a member of any organized Marxist “entryist” group within Labour, which was, as I said, the major working-class party in Britain.4
In the early 1980s, I was leader of a group of nineteen Labour councilors on the East Sussex County Council.5 On the council Labour Group of Councilors, the two comrades who repeatedly, determinedly stood up for the working class were the two comrades who were members of Militant. Although I was never a member of Militant, I read Militant (the newspaper) and its successors for fifty years.6 I worked with them and admired their class-conscious policies such as “a Workers’ MP [Member of Parliament] on a Worker’s Wage”; indeed, that is the basis on which I fought the Parliamentary elections of 2010 and 2015. I very much supported Militant policies of nationalization of companies, with compensation to be paid only on the basis of proven need. The wealthy owners, major shareholders of privatized industries had “milked” those formerly private industries and grown fat on their profits for long enough at the expense of workers. So, I was quite happy with—and still support—that policy of expropriation with compensation paid only on the basis of “proven need.”
To return to the two Militant comrade councilors, I admired their zeal and commitment. For example, Militant members were prominent in supporting the coalminers in the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985, collecting money for the Miners’ Support fund and having coal miners who were picketing the local Shoreham Power Station and docks—harbor—stay over/lodge in their houses in Brighton.7
Members of Militant were expelled from the Labour Party in 1982 and in the years following.8 Now, forty years later, I still work politically with some of the same comrades who were expelled or suspended from the Labour Party in the 1980s. We work together in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) campaigning for socialist/Marxist candidates in municipal and national—Parliamentary—elections.9 In fact, I stood for Parliament for TUSC in 2010 and 2015 in my home city of Brighton and Hove and, a number of times, as recently as 2023, in local city council (that is, municipal) elections.10
I am currently involved in trying to bring together Marxists and left social democrats in United Front electoral formations, active in TUSC, in the Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party (CMWP), local (Brighton) United Front campaigns, WhatsApp groups. Most recently, I was one of the organizers of the general election campaign for a socialist pro-Gaza ceasefire for Tanushka Marah, an anti-austerity candidate in my city, working with comrades from various small Marxist parties plus activists from campaigns such as Stop the War, Sussex Defend the National Health Service, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and other smaller informal groupings of socialists and activists—as well as many individuals never before involved in campaigning.
Incidentally, I am also involved—minimally—in Greek revolutionary Marxist politics. I am a member of the Central Athens branch of OKDE-Spartakos, part of the wider revolutionary Marxist coalition, Antarsya.11 I work in Greece regularly and give talks there at trade union and Marxist political groups, as well as academic groups and conferences.
So, why did I wait so long before leaving the Labour Party? Good question!
With the election of right-wing (in Labour Party terms), public schoolboy, pro-United States Blair, as Labour Party Leader in 1994 and his adopting the label of “New Labour,” the Labour Party was clearly moving in a more and more right-wing direction.12 Of course, it has always been a social democratic party—that is, a party devoted to managing capitalism, rather than replacing it. And the Labour Party leadership and most Labour MPs have always been pro-NATO and pro-American. The Labour Party was always a party with socialists and Marxists and Trotskyists and Communists in it; there have always been a number of socialist MPs in the Parliamentary Labour Party.13 But it was always a gradualist, Fabian Society-type social democratic party that would distribute largesse in times of plenty, and take away that largesse in times of capitalist crisis. 14
The actual issue over which I resigned was the Iraq War and the lies told by Blair and his Press Advisor Alistair Campbell, over the nonexistent “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which they claimed were held by Saddam Hussein. In the first Gulf War in 2003, the mass annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis was sickening—eight hundred thousand were killed, including in the carpet bombings of retreating Iraqi troops. Two million of us marched in London against the Iraq War in February 2003, the biggest ever demonstration in London.15
Blair’s “buddiness,” personally and politically, with U.S. President George W. Bush felt revolting, especially given the horrors of the Iraq War. Blair’s wars were not restricted to Iraq, the United Kingsom also participated in the U.S. wars on Serbia and Afghanistan for example, in compliant lockstep with the United State. UK governments have always been a loyal, even slavish, follower and participant in U.S. foreign Policy (with one partial exception: Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused in the 1960s to send British troops to Vietnam, even though he provided other support to the United States). There was huge opposition to the U.S. war on Vietnam in the 1960s, much like there is in 2023–2024 current huge opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, funded and armed by the United States and armed by the United Kingdom, Germany, and other NATO states. Since autumn 2023, there have been regular, huge pro-ceasefire, pro-Palestinian marches in London and other cities.16
Despite around 70 percent of the British public opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire, both major parties—as in the United States—are vehement in their support of the Israeli government and its war on Gaza.
I was sick of the Labour Party’s wholehearted adoption of U.S. imperialist, deadly foreign policy, as well as Blair’s “New Labour” neoliberal policies. He enthusiastically acquiesced in Thatcher’s trade union reforms, privatizations; indeed, he extended privatization through the Private Finance Initiative. Blair was not only in government, but he was also actually in power. He could have done so much to reverse Thatcherism—to reverse privatizations, to abolish Thatcher’s anti-trade union legislation. But he did not. Truly, Margaret Thatcher spoke when she described her greatest achievement as “New Labour.”
I had always been on the left of the Labour Party, even as a teenage schoolboy. At the age of 16 I had organized my first ever public protest/demonstration. It was against the United States over the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As for New Labour and the theoretical justification for New Labour as the “Third Way,” socialists and Marxists like me thought it was many steps too far in embracing capitalism. The Third Way clearly a rejection of the idea that the Labour Party would ever bring about socialism (to repeat, this is a description used in the United Kingdom to describe left social democracy). Blairism and the Third Way resulted in opening up the National Health Service (NHS) to more privatization, and restrictions on local government spending led to the Private Finance Initiative scheme, which encouraged private companies to build public services such as schools and hospitals, with the companies taking large profits from the public purse.17
One of Blair’s first actions as Party Leader was to remove Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution, which stated an aim of the Labour Party: “to secure for workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their labor.” It was printed on my Labour Party card every year through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, until Blair secured its removal in 1995—a clear signal that the Labour Party no longer had even a rhetorical commitment to socialism.18
Concerning the Labour Party, I want to make a theoretical point here, about “Reform or Revolution,” to quote the title of Rosa Luxemburg’s famous pamphlet of 1900. For Luxemburg, reform and revolution had never been opposites: they complemented each other. But she stressed that the aim must be to reach beyond the existing social order. The same with Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who in The Communist Manifesto call on Communists to fight for “the momentary interests of the working class,” but also the (communist) future.19
I want to emphasize here that social democratic parties and politicians are reformist—and that applies as well to the “Left” social democrat parties, with their proclaimed “socialism.”
They do not want to go beyond reforms into what Marx described as socialism, the stage before communism. The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and Podemos in Spain, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and Syriza in Greece, O Bloco Esquerda in Portugal, Die Linke in Germany, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the majority of the Labour Party membership in the United Kingdom, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States, Jen-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise in France do not want and have never wanted to replace capitalism. They just want to manage it better, to regulate it, to reform it—to make it work better, with more “social justice,” and with what V. I. Lenin called “trade union demands” for increasing the social, individual wage, collective wages of workers, with “better management of capitalism” understood to mean the more equitable distribution of surplus value.
For reformists, the struggle is over the distribution of surplus value. In What Is To Be Done?, Lenin characterizes this as a trade-unionist struggle.20 For Communists and for revolutionary Marxists, the struggle more broadly is over ownership of the means of production.21 That is a key point.
So, my critique of the Labour Party, whether in its Blairite New Labour/ current Starmerite Labour incarnation or in Corbyn’s left social democratic Labour, is that they are reformist and opposed to going further into socialism.22
ZD: In 2015, 66-year-old Corbyn was elected as the new leader of the Labour Party, beating three other candidates and winning nearly 60 percent of the vote. After Corbyn was elected as the leader of the Labour Party, you chose to return to the Labour Party. In your opinion, what were the reasons for Corbyn’s election at that time? Why did you choose to return to the Labour Party?
DH: Corbyn’s election as Leader of the Labour Party was an accident; a mistake, as far the most Labour MPs were concerned. The Labour MPs—they were the ones who could nominate an MP to be party leader—assumed that the left (left social democrat) candidate for the party leadership would get trounced, hugely defeated, when the party membership had the vote, the choice between the various candidates nominated by Labour MPs. They were so wrong! And they were so horrified at the election by party members of Corbyn as Labour Party leader. Horrified!
I was one of literally—literally—many hundreds of thousands who joined, or (as in my case, re-joined) Labour once Corbyn became a duly nominated candidate for the Labour Party leadership in the Labour Party leadership election of 2015. At that time, only Labour MPs could nominate a fellow MP to be party leader, with the mass membership of the party doing the voting for leader, selecting from those who had been duly nominated by MPs. This was new; in previous decades, the Leader of the Labour Party had been elected solely by Labour MPs, or by a system in which the membership did not, until 2015, have the sole vote.
With Corbyn being the new leader of the Labour Party, membership jumped from 190,000 in May 2015 to 515,000 in July 2016.23 It became the biggest political party in Europe. With such rampant enthusiasm and almost delirious hope, Corbyn was met at hundreds of meetings and demonstrations with crowds singing “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” He was treated—and still is by many—like a rock star, or, more aptly, as a savior—the savior of the hopes of socialism (by which, to repeat, most people in the United Kingdom mean left social democracy, not the Marxist concept of socialism as a stage before communism).
Corbyn was a long-time critic of NATO and the United States and a major contributor in speeches to the Stop the War Coalition, long-time anti-apartheid and antiracism activist. He was in some ways, almost a saintly figure—a principled, incorruptible, visionary in terms of equality, anti-imperialism and anticolonialism. He was the archetypal left social democrat. To repeat, he was, however, never a Marxist or Communist. He was, in the 2019–2024 parliament, one of the around thirty-two Labour MPs (out of around two hundred Labour MPs) who were on the left, members of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs. I should add that most of these “socialist” MPs would not describe themselves as communist or Marxist, other than perhaps a couple of them.
After all the disappointments with Blairism and The Third Way—which angered so many—to have a “left” candidate for party leadership was almost like “manna from heaven.”
Left-wing activist groups sprang up within the Labour Party, such as Momentum (whatever its subsequent dubious role re Corbyn’s defenestration). Following Corbyn’s election as Labour Leader in 2015, Momentum was set up as a left-wing, “socialist,” pressure group within the party.24 It soon reached 40,000 members.
For the first time for perhaps decades, there were large-scale left activist meetings, and even “educationals.” I became a member of Momentum (one of many thousands of Marxists who did so) went to Momentum meetings in my city. The meetings were full of young people eager and desperate to learn (and in some cases, teach about and discuss) workers’ rights, developing socialist policy, encouraging a “bottom-up” democratic party where leadership had to be responsive to the membership, saving the NHS, class law, organizing inside the Labour Party for Socialism, and the nefarious role of the capitalist media.
We actually had Marxist discussion groups organized by Momentum and for comrades within the Labour Party. At the very local (ward) level—a typical ward has around six thousand voters—attendance at Labour Party meetings expanded considerably. My own ward, where I was political education officer when Corbyn was leader—had meetings of up to fifty members. Prior to Corbyn, the typical attendance was a third of that. For a time, the meetings were very feisty and argumentative between Corbyn supporters (“Corbynistas”) and the old right wing of the Labour Party. This was the case up and down the country: fierce factional battles.25
After the disappointments (for the Left) of Blairism, “the Third Way,” and despair at the new “shiny suited and booted’ Blairite MPs, and party apparatchiks at local and national level, to have the massive influx of new young workers and students, and the return of older socialist comrades with decades of experience—it was thrilling, it was exciting. Unlike the Blairites, the left was never (to quote Peter Mandelson, one of Blair’s closest aides) “extremely relaxed about the filthy rich.” The Left of the Labour Party believes in redistribution and good public services, in “Regulation Capitalism.” I’ll repeat that: regulating capitalism—but not replacing it.
ZD: After Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, what attacks did the right-wing forces inside and outside the Labor Party make against him? What political activities did you carry out within the Labour Party?
DH: The right wing of the Labour Party (and most of the Labour MPs were on the right wing of the Labour Party) were “gobsmacked.” They were absolutely horrified, dumbfounded, and disbelieving, as captured on television the night that the election results rolled in, when Corbyn’s Labour Party came so close to winning the 2017 general election on a left-wing policy platform. They were in shock, and disbelief. They believed their own propaganda, that left-wing policies and Corbyn in particular, personifying these policies, were unpopular, dead, relics of a bygone age.26 Corbyn’s 2017 general election manifesto was more left-wing than any Labour Party general election manifesto since 1945, even more so than the 1983 manifesto.27 It called for renationalization of the railways, gas, water, and electricity industries; increased trade union rights; increased taxation of the rich; and scrapping student tuition fees—a return to free university tuition.28
Accusing Corbyn of being a socialist, a communist, “a friend of Hamas and the IRA [Irish Republican Army],” or an agent for the Czech Secret Service clearly did not work in discrediting him. So began one of the most shameful and dishonest media campaigns of the modern era in Britain—casting Corbyn as antisemitic. Of course, media lies and campaigns against the left against anything that threatens the power and privilege of the capitalist class that they represent are nothing new. The campaign against Tony Benn, leader of the left MPs within the Labour Party through the 1970s until 1981, and against Michael Foot, left-wing Labour Leader between 1980 and 1983, were both personalized and relentless. Those (billionaires) who own the press control the press!
For day after day, week after week, year after year, the mass media and the right-wing and the very many pro-Zionists within the Labour Party (members of the “Labour Friends of Israel”) in Parliament, many Labour MPs—both Jewish and non-Jewish, smeared Corbyn as an antisemite; as anti-Jewish.29
They also smeared his supporters. This major campaign of vilification was directed at Corbyn, but has also been directed at socialist members of the Labour Party, including, bizarrely enough, many Jewish Labour Party members, with socialists and pro-Palestinian comrades and activists being accused of being extremists, as “the enemy within.” The expulsions and the witch-hunt against, for example pro-Palestinian, anti-state of Israel, anti-Israeli genocide comrades continue. It really was, and continues to be, a systematic McCarthyite campaign. These smears and daily media attacks on Corbyn were successful enough to cost the Corbyn-led Labour Party votes at the 2019 general election in Britain, It was enough to stop the United Kingdom having a left-wing prime minister—under whom, incidentally, Brexit would have been much softer and less confrontational with the European Union.
As another example of media disinformation, Corbyn’s 2017 election result is cast as an electoral disaster for Labour. In fact, the Labour vote in that election, following Corbyn’s winning the Labour Party leadership election, increased by 10 percent over the 2015 general election result.30 His Labour Party won more votes in the 2017 general election (12.9 million votes) and the 2019 general election (10.3 million votes) and the than did Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the July 2024 general election (9.7 million votes). However, Starmer achieved a huge majority in the House of Commons because the right wing and far-right votes were split between the Conservative Party and the noisily anti-immigrant, anti-liberal party, Reform.
As for my own local activities while in the Labour Party between 2016 and 2019, I joined in campaigning, leafleting, and making speeches at strike and other public meetings, taking part in many meetings and demonstrations, and joining Labour Against the Witch-Hunt, a group seeking to oppose the witch-hunt of socialists and Marxists and other within the Labour Party.
When the right-wing bureaucracy of the Labour Party began suspending many local constituency Labour Parties—stopping them from functioning, or selecting council/municipal or parliamentary election candidates instead of allowing the local party members to select their candidate, and investigating, suspending, and expelling thousands of members who were opposing the witch-hunting of Corbyn, some comrades set up the Labour in Exile Network, which I also joined. They subsequently merged as the Socialist Labour Network.31
At a very local level, of the dozen or so socialist (left-wing social democrat) and Marxist members of my own branch of the Labour Party, all but four have been suspended from, expelled, or have resigned from the Labour Party). At a national level, a number of Labour MPs have also been suspended from the Labour Party. As one recent example of the ludicrous, dangerous, and effective means of removing left-wing Labour MPs is the case of Kate Osamor, who was suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party in January 2024 over comments about Israel, pointing out that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is genocide.32 With around forty thousand Palestinians in Gaza slaughtered in seven months by the Israeli government, it is hard to disagree with calling it a genocide.
Her reference to genocide in Gaza drew huge criticism, with the Board of Deputies of British Jews, one of Britain’s leading Zionist organizations, issuing a statement saying it “unreservedly condemn[s] the attempts by Kate Osamor to link the Holocaust to the current situation in Gaza.” The Jewish Labour Movement also condemned the “inappropriate and offensive” remarks. These two organizations, together with Labour Friends of Israel, wield absolutely enormous influence in the media and within both major political parties. These organizations have led attacks on socialists, academics, students, and performers whom they accuse of being anti-Zionist. They regularly persuade venues from hosting pro-Palestinian, pro-ceasefire meetings—regularly. It happens all the time.
One of the greatest successes of the Zionists in Britain, in the media and in the Labour Party, has been the widespread adoption of the International Holocaust Memorial Association’s definition of antisemitism. It appears to conflate anti-Zionism and criticism of the State of Israel with antisemitism.33
Note that here I am criticizing Zionists, not Jews. Many of my comrades are Jewish anti-Zionists. Zionism is a recent creation, dating primarily from the late nineteenth century, from the works of Theodor Herzl. It is a racist, ethnoreligious supremacist creed.34
ZD: What is the current state of the workers’ and socialist movements in Britain? What difficulties and resistance do they face?
DH: In Britain since the Conservatives returned to power in 2019 (they won the 2010, 2015, and 2017 general elections as well, governing in alliance with the Liberal Democrats 2010–2015 and alone following the 2015 and 2017 general elections), there has been and is now a resurgence of mass-strike action and mass action by trade unions at national and at local levels. Doctors, nurses, communications workers/postal service workers, teachers, and railway workers are among many who have gone on strike. The strike wave, wave of workers’ actions is unprecedented in recent decades.35
There is very good reason for this! There has been a savage intensification of class war—class war from above. For tens of millions in Britain, there is a cost-of-living crisis—prices of energy, food, have increased far more than workers’ incomes. There has been a savage cut in the standard of living of the poorest in Britain. Four million people in the United Kingdom are now living in poverty. There are around one million children experiencing destitution—their families unable to afford to properly feed, clothe, or clean them, or keep them warm.36 Millions more live in difficulty, daily made very aware of their loss of spending power and slump in living standards. Living in poverty, by definition, means unable to afford one or more of the following: sufficient food, sufficient heating, or adequate clothing. There has been an explosion of extreme poverty, an explosion of what we should term “a social counterrevolution” against the wages and conditions of millions of workers. There has been a huge transfer of wealth from the poor and other strata of the working class to the rich, to the billionaires and multimillionaires.
This makes me very angry indeed. I thought that the poverty I experienced as a teenager, and saw as a young schoolteacher, had diminished. In my own case, in the 1950s and early ’60s I received free school meals, municipal vouchers for my school vests and underpants, rarely had new clothes, and never had my own pair of football boots—I was not bad at football. Every week, I had to go to the lost property office at school to borrow a pair of football boots, different pair every week. Sometimes they fitted, sometimes they did not. As an inner-city schoolteacher, I never forget knocking on the door of one of my 12-year-old pupils to see why they were not coming to school, and the mother coming to the door and saying, “Ah, Mr. Hill. I know why you are here. But it’s OK, Linda will be coming to school next week. We get ‘the Social’ [social security benefit check] through on Friday, so we can buy her a pair of plimsolls [shoes].”37
I thought those days, of poverty, of kids not having shoes, were over. But they are not. They are back with a vengeance. Not as “an act of nature,” but as an act of deliberate government policy, making the poor pay for the crisis.
The capitalist class and their Conservative Party representatives—the Conservative government and MPs—live in a privileged world or their own, a world in which they are enriching themselves through tax breaks, finance policy, and corruption. In terms of corruption, they reward their friends and donors to the Conservative Party with honors, knighthoods, membership of the House of Lords, medals, and “fast-track” contracts for Covid equipment. There is the case of Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband, friends of those in high places (Tories), who took £60 million by overcharging for personal protective equipment during the COVID pandemic.38
The rich have stuffed their own pockets, aided by their representatives in government by picking the pockets of the poor. I think those profiteers, those sharks, those entitled and well-connected racketeers should be put on trial. If found guilty, they should be punished and imprisoned for fraud, corruption, and “picking the pockets of the poor.” The famous quote from Marx in Capital is: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is…at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery…at the opposite pole.”39
On a theoretical point, rarely has it been so obvious in the last century that the capitalist state is, as Marx put it, “the executive committee of the ruling class.”40 In the postwar decades, in what some call “les trentes glorieuses” (the thirty glorious years) after the end of the Second World War, the state—in particular, social democratic and Labour parties in Western Europe and North America, Australia, and New Zealand, could afford to disburse “goodies,” to engage in increased protective (for labor) regulations for workers, and some redistribution of wealth and income. They were responding to the increased strength of working-class organizations and consciousness partly resulting from the role of organized labor during the Second World War. These reforms were not a “gift.” They were fought for, in particular by trade unions and the trade union movement.
The Tories and capitalist governments throughout the West are, to greater or lesser degrees, guilty of what Engels called “social murder”: of conscious cruelty; of punishing the poor; of, over a long period, cutting the value of various social and welfare benefits. Examples include the two-child policy.
So many things are now becoming clear, brutally clear that “key workers” are cleaners, porters, care workers, supermarket workers, and delivery drivers. These are now regarded widely as essential workers—not the billionaire tax exiles, the company bosses dismissing workers, the financial profiteers, or the hedge fund investors.
This crisis is absolute proof that it is the labor power of workers that drive the economy, not the braying captains and “giants” of industry. Without workers, they are nothing. As one of the posters in France from the 1968 uprising put it: “the boss needs you. You don’t need the boss” (“Le patron a besoin de vous. Vous n’avez pas besoin de lui”). We are seeing a greater awareness that, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, “Our epoch…has simplified the class antagonisms into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”41 This is the objective analysis of Marxism. For increasing numbers, it is now, crucially, the subjective awareness and understanding of class society, capitalism, and of the labor-capital relation.
To return to your question, “What is the current state of the workers’ and socialist movements in Britain? What difficulties and resistance do they face?”:
As for the state of the workers’ and socialist movement in the Labour Party, it is crushed—inside the Labour Party, that is. The resistance they face is expulsion from the party by the party bureaucracy acting on behalf of the party leadership. As I said earlier, hundreds of thousands of leftists (left social democrats/Corbynites) and Marxists have left the party.
At parliamentary level, the right-wing juggernaut within the Labour Party deselected (sacked) popular left-wing Labour MPs such as Faiza Shaheen and, in my city, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, and imposed Starmerite parliamentary candidates in their place at very short notice, and with no local party membership involvement.
But in the wider society, the current state of the workers’ and socialist movements in Britain is a bit like a powder keg, an explosion waiting to go off, with mass anger, mass marches, and mass disgust with, in particular, the Conservative Party and government, as expressed in the huge decline in Conservative Party votes, from 14 million in 2019 to 6.8 million in 2024. Will this disgust, this anger, be dampened? Will it be controlled by new, repressive legislation? Will it result only in passivity and attended on by small groups of communists and Marxists? This is possible. Will it develop into disappointment and anger at the incoming Labour government? We do not know. It is more likely than not. But we know what we communists and Marxists must do our historic task.
The project of any Marxists and left social democrats now is the creation of a new mass workers’ party bringing together trade unions and organized trade unionists; radical supporters of social movements such as the pro-Palestinian, environmentalist, and Black Lives Matter movements; and Marxists and communists in a United Front.42 Within that (hopefully mass movement and party), we must work for Marxism and communism as an organized grouping and as an organized revolutionary group.
ZD: Britain is one of the origin places of global neoliberalism. What have been the effects of the neoliberal policies pursued by the British bourgeois parties since Thatcher? What are the consequences for the lives of the working class?
DH: I have written extensively about this; for example, a multi-country analysis and commentary I coordinated for the International Labour Organization, which I extended, through collaborative writing, into four books. The impacts of neoliberalism have been one of the main foci of my writing and of the academic journal that I edit, The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies.43
The impact of neoliberalism, since Thatcherism of the 1980s, has been government austerity and local government austerity, immiseration, impoverishment, and the pauperization of millions. I have already commented on this pauperization and immiseration.
What is notable is not just the impact of Thatcherism on individuals—millions of individuals—but on shared and public spaces and facilities, including public and municipal services: cuts to and closures of libraries, swimming pools, services to the disabled, youth clubs, and the care and upkeep of municipal parks and gardens.
Local government is no stranger to budget cuts—austerity has shrunk town hall spending by approximately 40 percent over the past twelve years. A decade of cuts has reduced local authorities’ ability to deal with key long-term issues, from child protection to an aging society. This is also true of local government services such as social work for child protection, mental health support, children’s homes, adult social care (Council Day Centers and, for the elderly, Old People’s Homes), youth clubs, repairs to council housing, building new council housing, paying for temporary housing accommodation for the homeless.44 I could go on.
The cuts and austerity also apply to what has been described as the nearest thing the British have to a religion—the NHS. This has deteriorated markedly in the last few years. For example, one in seven people in the United Kingdom. are waiting for NHS medical treatment.45
At the local and national levels, the Labour Party has bought into and adopted Thatcherite neoliberal policies. At national level, Starmer was newly elected in the July 4, 2024, general election as a Labour prime minister, but there is very little enthusiasm for him or for Labour. He (and Labour) will win the next election by default. He is promising very little, and is offering not even a center-left, classic social democrat program or vision. The Labour Party is now so clearly the alternative party of capital, another conservative party, a Tweedeldum to the Conservatives’ Tweedledee, like the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. We on the left despise Starmer—despise him as a class traitor, as a stooge of Capital, and as a pliant tool of the UK and U.S. “Secret State.” My comrade Roger Silverman talks of the duopoly of the twin-headed Tory/Starmerite dictatorship.”46
I’m involved locally in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition campaign against the £33 million of cuts in the Brighton and Hove City Council budget for the year April 2024–April 2025., which would come on top of the year (on year, on year, on year) of cuts to local government funding from the national government.
What party, then, is in power in Brighton? It is the Labour Party! They loyally, if with sad faces and wringing their hands—which they say are tied—carry out the diktats of capital.
I want now to make some political and theoretical points about capitalism, class, and immiseration.
When I make speeches on strikers’ picket lines and rallies or demonstrations, I place the immediate cuts to a service, or an attack on workers’ rights and pay, within the global context of neoliberal capitalism. Many—most—speakers at these rallies do not. They speak from a reformist perspective. They do not link the immediate issue with Marxist analysis of capitalism, class conflict, or the declining rate of profit. Some do, but very few. Most speakers are particularistic and coming from a liberal or left social democratic background, unaware of Marxism other than through the skewed lens of the capitalist media. Even many left speakers just restrict themselves to denouncing the latest cuts and putting forward perfectly rational alternatives or reasons why the cuts should not be made.
The better informed comrades, who are aware of/within the Marxist and Communist tradition, rely on news outlets such as the Morning Star (close to the Communist Party of Britain), Counterfire (run by the Socialist Workers Party [SWP] split-off called Counterfire), The Socialist (run by the Socialist Party), Socialist Worker (run by the SWP), Socialist Alternative (run by Socialist Alternative, a splinter group from the Socialist Party), The Communist (run by the new Revolutionary Communist Party, formed in 2024 as a continuation of Socialist Appeal), The World Socialist Website (run by the Socialist Equality Party), and specifically online magazines such as The Canary and Squawkbox, plus U.S.-based online publications such as Counterpunch and Truthout.
But they—the boss class, the capitalist class—are not listening.
Of course, numbers of speakers are members of, or have come through Marxist organizations such as the Communist Party of Britain; SWP and its split-offs such as Counterfire, Revolutionary Socialism21), or the Socialist Party (SP), the latter with its own split-offs such as Socialist Alternative and International Standpoint, and other, smaller groups do have a Marxist analysis. There is permanent Marxist analysis in the ubiquitous newspapers the SP and the SWP bring to demonstrations, such as Socialist Worker, The Socialist, and, more recently, Socialist Alternative, ever present at political rallies and meetings, large or small.
But at many rallies, such as anti-austerity, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and pro-Palestine demonstrations, most—virtually all—speakers do not express openly Marxist or communist analysis. So, while the level of anger against specific cuts in services (such as a particular school being closed) and against the genocide and Israeli land-grab in Gaza are very strong, the current level of political, class, or Marxist analysis is not.
I see my task, my political task, and the task of my comrades—such those in as the Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party and Socialist Labour Network (and, in Greece, OKDE-Spartakos)—is to develop class-consciousness; to transform mass consciousness from an objective class position, the position of being in a similar type of job (wage labor) as millions of others, into subjective class position, a position in which workers are aware of and understand that they are members of the working class and that we live in a capitalist society in which there is a permanent struggle between the capitalist class and the working class.
This is, of course, classic Marxism, to develop what Antonio Gramsci called “good sense,” as opposed to “common sense”; to enable workers to change from their objective class position—that is they are, economically, workers, selling their labor power—to a subjective appreciation and understanding of their class position in a class-divided and exploitative capitalist society.47 The classic task of communists and revolutionary Marxists is to assist, enable, guide, and lead to that subjective consciousness, to class consciousness, and to the activist agency that goes with it.48 After all, philosophers have only interpreted the world. Our task is to actively change it.49
ZD: “Brexit” is a “black swan event” that has shocked the world. How did the left wing in Britain evaluate Brexit? How did it affect the economy, society, and working class in Britain?
DH: The Marxist left in Britain was split over the Brexit vote. I actually voted “Lexit,” that is, for a “Left Brexit,” one that was not racist/xenophobic or wanting to restore “glories” of “British history,” empire, and sovereignty. That was the Conservative vision, the vision of the Brexit Party—of a United Kingdom free from the regulatory mechanisms of the European Union in terms of workers’ rights, health, food standards, and human rights, harkening back to a nationalistic world of “Rule Britannia.” No, instead, we in Lexit wanted to exit the European Union because it is an essentially authoritarian neoliberal bankers’ setup. Look at the way it treated Greece. The Troika, that is, the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, enforced awful austerity on Greece after the 2015 Greek referendum treachery by Alexis Tsipras. As I have said before, I am involved, in a very minor way, in Greek politics—I go there to give academic lectures, but also to speak to Marxist political and trade union groups including, in 2014, the annual national conference of the Greek secondary (high school) teachers’ union. There, I was involved in what I regard as a prerevolutionary situation, being teargassed, together with comrades in OKDE-Spartakos and Antarsya, by Greek riot police while protesting against austerity with comrades in Syntagma Square, Athens, in the hot summer of 2011. I had an apartment Athens at them time for the spring semester to teach at the main university there.
So, Lexit was supported by many Marxist organizations in Britain. I stood in 2009 as a Lexit candidate for the Southeast of England, for the No2EU Yes to Democracy campaign backed by the Communist Party of Britain, SP, and by the Railway Workers and Seafarers Trade Union (RMT), the leader of which at the time, Bob Crow, was close to the Communist Party of Britain.
As far as the impact of Brexit: Brexit has made most people poorer. There is now widespread disenchantment with Brexit. Many feel that they were fooled by the pro-Brexit propaganda campaign, fooled into believing that it would lead to more money for the NHS. For those who were, or who are anti-immigrant, they feel fooled by the claims that Brexit would lead to a reduction in immigration. People are not better off. People feel worse off, the NHS is crumbling, and immigration has increased, not decreased.50
It is now, in 2024, widely recognized that Brexit was a mistake. For those who voted Brexit for racist, anti-immigrant reasons (a major part of the Brexit Party’s election campaign, further magnified by much of the right-wing media), the result has not even led to a decline in legal or illegal immigration.
ZD: You are a Marxist educator who has long analyzed the capitalist education system from a Marxist perspective. In your opinion, what are the problems of the current Western education system? What impact has neoliberalism had on the Western education system?
DH: So how does, and how has, the neoliberal capitalist system—ideology translated into policy—impacted on the school system in Britain?51 There are very pronounced similarities between U.S. UK, and, indeed global, education policies. The neoliberalization of education is global, as is the accompanying conservatization.52
In England, Thatcher’s (1979–1990) policies, continued by her Conservative successor (John Major, 1990–1997) and intensified by the Blair (1997–2007) and Gordon Brown (2007–2010) “New Labour” governments, as well as Conservative governments since 2010 (the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition of 2010–2015), have to a large extent destroyed the (already flawed) system of all-ability, mixed social class, state comprehensive schools in England and Wales.
From my childhood and until the late 1980s, 93 percent of schools in England and Wales were run by the local state. They were run and controlled by local education authorities, which, as part of local County Council or Unitary Authority Councils, were democratically elected. The state system ran side by side with a private school system catering for 7 percent of the population. You had to pay for private schooling. So only people with money—people with wealth or a high income, or both, could afford to send their children there—mainly the capitalist (upper class) and upper-middle class (the higher paid managerial and professional strata of the working class).
In Britain, around 7 percent of the children in the country have privilege, or at least privileged education bought for them in private schools—and it is not cheap. Typical fees for nonresidents, non-boarders, are around £12,000 per annum. Alpesh Maisuria has shown that the annual costs for a child at Eton (the most famous private school in England) are £76,000 a year.53 That is more than I have ever even earned in a year as a full professor, and four times as much as the minimum wage in Britain, which is £11.44 per hour, equivalent to £364.72 per week for a thirty-five-hour work week, or £20,822.90 per annum.
Then came Thatcher, Major, and all, with their policies to destroy left-wing and liberal democratic (child-centered) ideology in schools and schools’ relative autonomy. There was no national curriculum before 1988, and we teachers (I was a schoolteacher from 1967 to 1973) could very substantially design our own courses and lessons. Then in they came with neoliberal marketization; competition; semiprivatization; and a tightening of their grip on schools, teachers, and universities; and the attempt to create an uncritical workforce for the hierarchically tiered and differentially rewarded labor market.
I will pick out six aspects of neoliberal and neoconservative schooling: social class differentiation and reproduction, control of schools, funding of schools and teachers, the curriculum, surveillance, and managerialism.
First, we have social class. Western education systems have become increasingly differentiated in terms of social class. The differences in England and Wales are now starker than before the Education Reform Act of 1988 and ] subsequent legislation.
In the competitive market system of schooling in England, where schools are ranked on published “league tables” of SATs and the sixteen-plus exam of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) attainments, “rich” schools have gotten richer, and so called “sink schools” have sunk further. Those schools become more “middle class,” and low-performing schools more “working class.” Private, expensive schools, with their smaller class sizes, better facilities in general, and resulting higher exam pass rates, remain for the rich in a system of social apartheid.54
The attainment map (of results for SATS and GCSEs) in Britain mirrors the social class map. For example, the map of social deprivation—more specifically, the map showing the percentage of students receiving free school meals (which I received as a school student) varies from school to school, from local education authority (or “school district” in U.S. parlance) from virtually zero percent to schools where most—a majority—of students are poor enough to qualify for and receive free school meals. In Britain, around a quarter of school students receive these meals, that is, 2.1 million pupils.
These different types of schooling serve to reproduce existing social class inequality and preparation for the hierarchically tiered and rewarded labor market. Only 4 percent of students at Russell Group universities (the twenty-four elite universities in England and Wales) provided free school meals, yet nearly a quarter of children in England and Wales qualify. They are the poorest strata of the working class. That is social class reproduction. Of course, not all the sons and daughters of the upper class go to university and subsequently take up jobs with high social status, a high degree of power over others, and a high income—but most do. In the economic and social relations of production, they are the top dogs. They win. They win money and they win power. Others, the bulk of the working class—especially the unskilled, semiskilled, and skilled strata of the working class—lose.
Second, privatization and semiprivatization: much of state schooling has become semiprivatized and not subject to democratic oversight or control. Who controls, or “owns,” schools? Academies are a set of schools with greater autonomy over admissions, the curriculum, teachers’ pay, the school workforce skill mix, and the budget. These schools are taxpayer funded but outside the control of the democratically elected and accountable local education authority. The U.S. equivalent of “academies” are charter schools.
This is outrageous. State schools, that is, schools that continue to be funded with public money, are handed over to businesses—secondhand car dealers, carpet manufacturers, religious organizations, and Tory Party donors—to run, to manage, to control, to decide on curriculum, ethos, and staffing. Moreover, it is not just a few schools. A majority of high schools in England (where the students are between 11 and either 16 or 18 years old) and many primary schools (schools for 5- to 11-year-olds) are handed over to these businesspeople. Many of them—for example, the head teacher, the chief executive of a particular chain of academies—pay themselves enormous salaries, for some, more than the prime minister. That is public money that should be being spent on teachers, support staff, teaching equipment, and school trips.55
Third, funding: State schooling and other sectors of education have become more underfunded. Like all public sector services, workers’ pay has been cut, along with funding for books and support staff such as teaching assistants. Funding per pupil in state schools has also been cut back.56
Fourth, the curriculum: the curriculum of state schools has become narrow, uncreative, and increasingly nationalistic and conservative. I have written quite a lot on this the conservatization and deradicalizing and control of the schools’ curriculum, and about how Thatcher herself became involved—personally—in the design of the (new) National Curriculum for schools when the Education Reform Act of 1988 was being discussed. For example, she herself edited, amended, deleted sections of the (already conservative) advisers for the science and geography curricula.57 The Thatcher and, subsequently, Major, Conservative governments also brought teacher education—preparation for teaching—curricula under strict control, pretty much removing of sociology and politics from the curriculum. Incidentally, they also got rid of radical lecturers in those subjects, such as me. There were many “redundancies.”58
Fifth, surveillance: schoolteachers—and university teachers—are under greater surveillance and control, and suffer more denigration. A feature of neoliberal capitalist discourse (and resulting policy) on education is that it is the teachers who are blamed for low attainment/exam rates and absences from school, rather than the high-stakes testing, the competitive education system itself, and its structural discrimination against the working class and ethnic minorities.59
Finally, managerialism: the system of managerial control has become New Public Managerialist, that is, authoritarian rather than collegiate. This importation of private managerial styles into the public sector, such as the management style and culture of schools, colleges, and universities, is now overwhelmingly authoritarian, with top-down control from head teacher, and university principals being given a far higher salary and more power than used to be the case when I was a teaching, before the Thatcher-era so-called reforms.60 At one of the elementary schools I spent time teaching in the mid-1980s, the staff, including the head teacher, would sit in a circle and discuss curriculum matters and vote on, for example, which reading scheme to adopt. There is no such circle time today.
That is quite a list of problems, specifically in England and Wales but also globally, regarding the impact of neoliberalization and neoconservatization of schooling across the Western world. Aspects and effects such as low teacher pay, the degrading and intensification of teachers’ work lives and working conditions, the resulting burnout among teachers, the censorship or removal from the curriculum of “radical” or “socialist” books in some U.S. states, poor quality equipment and buildings, pupil/school student disenchantment with “Basics Education” (for working-class kids) are reported regularly by teacher trade unions such as the National Education Union in England and Wales, and by diverse magazines, newspapers, socialist websites, and academic journals, such as Forum for Promoting 3–19 Comprehensive Education, the Guardian newspaper, the World Socialist Website, The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, WorkPlace: A Journal for Academic Labour, and Cultural Logic—A Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice. There is for school students (though not for those in elite private schools) a relentless concentration on exams, on a slimmed down “basics” curriculum with fewer and fewer students studying art, music, drama, and sport.
As Marxists, we must not only deconstruct, but must also develop and suggest guidelines to reconstruct. That is, we must suggest socialist and Marxist education policies.
Broadly speaking, there are three major perspectives, policy directions, regarding formal education—education to conform, education to reform, and education to transform. Conservatives want an education for conformity, (“centrist”) social democrats want to reform education (to make it a bit fairer, more meritocratic, with some positive discrimination on behalf of working-class kids and ethnic minority groups). Meanwhile more left democratic socialists/left social democrats also want to reform education to remake it, but much fairer, with pronounced positive discrimination to help so-called underachieving groups.
The role of organic Marxist public intellectuals is crucial. Marxist public intellectuals—such as the “political” shop steward or union organizer; the member of a socialist/Marxist party or group; the teacher, the teacher educator, or the youth worker; the community activist; the food bank organizer—intellectualize and explain social, political, cultural, and economic matters from the standpoint of what, as I mentioned earlier, what Gramsci termed “good sense,” from a class-conscious perspective, or, to refer to a classical Marxist injunction from The Communist Manifesto, that the key political task facing communists is “the formation of the proletariat into a class,” that is, a “class for itself,” a class aware of itself as a class in the capital-labor relation.
This is our role and our potential importance as Marxists and communists: the pedagogical importance of party, organization, leaflets, newspapers, booklets, books, and social media.
Here, as well as in the classroom, in conversation, and in rhetorical speeches, we carry out the roles of socialist analysis, of revolutionary pedagogy; of connecting the here and now of a pro-Palestinian or an Extinction Rebellion march or demonstration, a rent strike, a pro-immigrant rally, an anti-austerity march, a picket line of a zero-hours contract employer, or an occupation of a tax avoiding multinational company owned shop. Here is essential Marxist pedagogy.
Marxists are necessary in leading and developing changes in consciousness, a change in class consciousness, and in playing a contributory role organizing to replace capitalism. At the level of education, revolutionary Marxists—that is to say, Marxists who wish to replace capitalism with socialism—want an education critical of capitalism. This would be an education for social, political, and economic transformation Into a socialist economy and society. My own writing, much of which is online, is from a revolutionary Marxist and a classical Marxist perspective. I, along with other comrades, of course, argue for a Marxist education policy.61
ZD: In recent years, along with the intensification of the crisis of capitalism, a wave of right-wing populism has arisen globally, such as former U.S. President Donald Trump, France’s National Front Party, and the Alternative for Germany. Do right-wing populist parties or political forces exist in the United Kingdom? What political activities have they carried out and what impact have they had?
DH: There is no need for a new xenophobic, nationalist, antiliberal, anti-immigrant, far-right party in England. We already have one. It is called the Conservative Party. It is, in 2024, edging closer and closer to the more overtly racist and xenophobic and authoritarian politics of the Reform Party (in effect, the successor to the UK Independence Party) and the Brexit Party. Reform, led by Nigel Farage, received over four million votes in the 2024 general election, returning five MPs. Reform is a party with links to far—right groups and policies throughout Europe, and to Donald Trump. But then, leading Conservative MPs in the 2019–2024 Parliament, such as Liz Truss (prime minister for thirty-seven days), Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, and many other leading Conservative MPs are clearly very happy with such xenophobic “culture war,” “anti-woke” (that is, antiliberal on social and sexual matters), and Islamophobic speeches. For example, Braverman, who had served as Home Secretary (the UK term for Minister of the Interior) in 2022 and 2023, attacked “Cultural Marxism,” claiming that, in Britain, the Islamists, extremists, and antisemites are in charge.62
Other than its commitment to elections—and even here, the Conservative government is making it harder to actually cast a ballot by insisting on photo identification for voters—there are striking similarities between the policies and rhetoric of today’s Conservative Party and the fascist National Front of the 1970s and ’80s. The recent inflammatory rhetoric by Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his parliamentary and media cheerleaders about “Stop the Boats” (referring to the small boats carrying immigrants from northern France across the English Channel to England) and about transporting “illegal” immigrants to Rwanda, as well as criticisms of Muslims in Britain and the marches and demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza, are simply the most recent of violent government rhetoric and policies of the last decade at least. Examples include the Empire Windrush scandal: the government vans in British cities inviting the public to report illegal immigrants, promoted by the then Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, creating a “hostile environment” for immigrants.
Regarding trade union and workers’ rights, the Conservative government has built on Thatcherite restrictions by undermining the right to strike and passing legislation demanding that even during a strike the unions must provide “minimum service levels.” The law stipulates that when workers in certain sectors lawfully vote to strike, they can be forced to attend work—and sacked if they do not comply.63 This rather defeats the purpose of a strike. This new anti-union law affects one in five workers.
The more right-wing populist party is Reform, and its most prominent member—a regular guest on British television shows and a darling of the (right-wing) media—is Farage, former leader of the Brexit Party, and a friend and admirer of Trump. He and his party are ferociously anti-trade union and, equally ferociously, anti-immigrant. There is very little difference between Reform and Farage and perhaps a majority of Conservative MPs. The difference between the Reform Party and the Conservative Party is that the Conservative Party in Parliament contained. In the 2019–2024 parliament, there were around one hundred so-called “One Nation” MPs, described by the media as “centrist.” There is repeated chatter in the media about Farage rejoining the Conservative Party and becoming its next leader. Indeed, a recent deputy chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, has recently defected to the Reform Party. He expects other Conservative MPs to join him. There is to-ing and fro-ing of candidates and members from between the Conservative Party and Reform.
In answer to your question, “What political activities have right-wing populist parties and forces carried out and what impact have they had?”: They have been in government—the Conservative government. While right-wing populists such as, now, Javier Milei in Argentina, and, formerly, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, speedily laid waste to social, environmental, and labor protections and regulations. In the United Kingdom, this has taken place over a longer period of time. Brexit was and is their dream. To leave the European Union and to get rid of all EU legislation, all regulatory environmental, health, social, labor, and judicial regulations emanating from the European Union. A bonfire of all EU regulations is still the dream of those in the Conservative Party further to the right than Sunak, people such as Truss, who had hoped to once again become leader of the Conservative Party; Kemi Badenoch; and what are called “the five families” on the right of the Conservative Party. Recently (January/February 2024), they were joined by a group led by the disastrous Truss, the Popular Conservatives.64
Altogether, these very right-wing, “small state,” “tax-cutting” (mainly for the wealthy), “benefits-cutting: MPs numbered around 100 out of the 348 Conservative MPs in Parliament from 2019 to 2024.
Popular the Conservatives certainly are not. The Conservative Party’s result in the 2024 general election was their worst in two centuries; their worst since the Conservative Party was founded in 1834.
This does not betoken an enthusiasm for Labour. There is hostility to both major parties. Between them, Conservative and Labour secured their lowest joint total of votes, the lowest combined party share for the paries since 1945. Voter turnout was at under 60 percent, the lowest since 2001.
ZD: China and its rise have increasingly become the focus of world attention and discussion. In the West, what are the respective evaluations of China by the left, center, and right? How do you evaluate these views?
DH: I will address these in order: What do these different views, perspectives, and evaluations say? First, I will discuss the right; second, the Critical Left; and third, the Supportive Left.
The Right in the West
From the right and the center, there is hostility. There is a combination of ignorance—silence—about the gains made within China and globally by the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party of China (CPC). Not only is there ignorance and hostility, there is also an often expressed fear of China’s economic and growing military strength.
The U.S. “War on Terror” was replaced in 2011 by a “Pivot to Asia,” with China as the demonized “global enemy.” Hillary Clinton, for example, in 2011 proclaimed that the twenty-first century will be “America’s Pacific Century.” The United States surrounds China (and Russia) with military bases, armadas of floating bases, and “treaty” control of small states (such as Tuvalu, to take one example). China has not surrounded the United States with military bases. There are no Chinese warships off the coast of New York, no Chinese bases or nuclear missiles in Cuba or Nicaragua.
There is a lack of knowledge. Western Media tend to publish stories about what they describe as “human rights abuses”—for example, in Szechuan with reference to the Uighurs, and in Hong Kong, with reference to what it calls the “pro-democracy” demonstrators. These are the predominant analyses by the imperialist-capitalist leadership, governments, and media of the United States and its allies and client states, both conservative and neoliberalized social democratic parties. They view China as a dictatorial and authoritarian, a global threat. They criticize its policies regarding its friendship with Russia and claim its Belt and Road Initiative is exploitative.
To summarize, the right and the right of center in the West view China as a geopolitical, military, and diplomatic rival. With the rivalry, there are attempts to develop an anti-China hysteria and witch-hunt, constituting an intensification of hostility toward China. Relations are seen in zero-sum terms, rather than complementarity. The Western media and government view is that if one side wins, the other side must lose. There are also occasional and minor rhetorical pleas for more economic cooperation made by some sections of capital and their representatives.
Less publicized, China (and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics) are seen as a threat to the largely laissez-faire Anglo-Saxon economic and fiscal model of capitalism that is enriching the superrich and immiserating and pauperizing the working class. Any downturns or problems in the Chinese economy are gleefully trumpeted and repeated by the Western media, while immiseration under Western capitalism is very largely ignored or downplayed.
The United States and its allies try to destroy any socialistic, redistributive alternative. There is the sixty-year economic blockade of Cuba with its semisocialist, semicommunist economy; the attempted overthrow of the Hugo Chávez-Nicolás Maduro government of Venezuela; the destruction and mass murder of many pursuing redistributionist, welfare, and state control/nationalization models of socialism or socialist democracy—one of the most notable being the overthrow of the Salvador Allende government in 1973 by Augusto Pinochet aided by the CIA. Another infamous example is the mass slaughter of one million communists in Indonesia after the U.S.-sponsored Suharto putsch in 1965–1966.
Again, less publicized, China is seen as a threat to Anglo-Saxon ideological political representational model of capitalism (and Western capitalism) in its political form of electoralist, bourgeois parliamentary democracy, “representative democracy.”
As I say, this is far less publicized—and hypocritical, given the U.S. support for far-right, fascist, and dictatorial regimes and counterrevolutions. U.S. governments are happy with state corporatist and other dictatorial, laissez-faire, anti-working class, and anti-trade union models such as that in Chile (under Pinochet) and during dictatorships in Argentina in 1964–1985, 1973–1990, and 1976–1983, which suppressed “bourgeois democracy.”
The U.S.-Europe alliance of NATO acts as a self-righteous hegemon, justifying its bombings and billions of dollars spent on subversion in self-righteous terms of democracy and liberty while profiting through its military-industrial complex and its “rebuilding” of countries it has destroyed.
The fetish of bourgeois parliamentary democracy is hugely embedded within Western populations, even where the choice at elections is so clearly, now, in these crises of Western capitalism since 2008 and since COVID, a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee—a pair of almost identical glove puppets, between Joe Biden and Trump, both completely controlled by capitalist oligarchs, or the Conservatives and the Labour Party in Britain.
In Britain, both major parties accept “fiscal responsibility”; that is, a continuation of austerity. Both accept and back U.S. military and diplomatic global power. Incidentally both accept, support, and are complicit in the mass murder of over forty thousand Palestinians in Gaza while, hypocritically, calling for more food aid there, meaning U.S. food aid to a Palestinian population that is being massacred at the very same time by U.S. bombs and arms.
To repeat what I said earlier about reform and revolution, there are some differences between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, between conservative and social democratic/labor parties. As Marxists we accept and indeed work for the reforms sometimes discussed and implemented by social democratic and labor parties. But the differences between parties in the bourgeois parliamentary systems of the West, and those between parties and coalitions, are within strict limits favorable to the capitalist class. Those limits show long-term austerity under Western capitalism for the working class.
The Left in the West
Attitudes towards China on the left in the West (comprising North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) are split between two groups, types of response, and types of evaluation. First=, those welcoming social, economic, and diplomatic advances in China, but who are critical of various aspects. Second, Western communist/Marxist theorists such as myself and political organizations, who are broadly supportive of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and associated developments such as China’s Global Civilization Initiative.
The “Critical” Left
First on the left, there are Western Marxist and socialist groups who recognize the gains made by the CPC in reducing poverty and in its building global infrastructures via the Belt and Road and other initiatives, but which have various critiques of and concerns about Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. This group includes theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Richard Wolff.65 Piketty, for example, is full of praise for China’s economic growth—and, importantly, the immense increase in per capita income and huge increase in living standards for the people of China. But he is worried about increasing levels of inequality. The same goes for Wolff, who writes of “a stalled transition” to a postcapitalist society in China.
Political parties on the Marxist and Trotskyist Left, such as the SWP and SP typically criticize China as state capitalist. These Marxists point to the Soviet Union under Stalinism, where the state took the position of the capitalist class, directed by the party.66 SP, for example, in common with other Marxist parties in Britain such as the SWP, Anti-Capitalist Resistance/ Fourth International, and Socialist Appeal (now recently renamed the Revolutionary Communist Party), calls for democratic control and management of the economy and the renationalization of elements of the privatized economy.67
The “Supportive” Left
Second on the left, Western communist and Marxist theorists such as myself and political organizations broadly supportive of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and associated developments, such as China’s Global Civilization Initiative. This includes organizations/parties such as the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and its daily communist newspaper, The Morning Star.
In some sections of the organized Marxist and Communist left in the United Kingdom and United States, there is support for the achievements of the CCP in recent decades, for example, the CPGB (Marxist-Leninist), New Communist Party, and the CPB. But these are very small (unlike in France and Italy, the UK has never had a mass Communist Party). The New Communist Party and the CPGB (Marxist-Leninist) are absolutely tiny; the CPB is larger, and more influential. Its paper, The Morning Star, has some hundreds of members, but probably totaling less than a thousand. The Morning Star is read by tens of thousands of left activists. Including me. Some of these Marxist parties have influence on some trade unions, for example, the CPB has some influence in the RMT.
In the United States, the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is very supportive of the Chinese road to communism and its current stage, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
Many Western and global Marxist intellectuals applaud China’s road to socialism, including renowned Marxist scholar Vijay Prashad. Prashad notes that since 1949, the Chinese people have gone through a lot of ups and downs—and, he argues, in all the ups and downs, the goal has always been to establish socialism.68
There is a debate, globally and within China, of course, as in any leadership body.69
We who give support to Socialism with Chinese Characteristics recognize and are not uncritical, but we also recognize and applaud in particular the following eight achievements:
- The astonishingly successful fight against poverty: lifting of 770 million people out of poverty and the effective governance which had led this.
- The immense economic growth in China that has benefitted the Chinese people: stunning economic development, social transformation, and improved social and public services as well as increased life expectancy and infant mortality rates—life itself!
- The Belt and Road Initiative: whereby China builds bridges and hospitals and roads, while United States/NATO bombs them.
- Associated initiatives from China: calling for global cooperation and noninterference, seeking “a pivot to peace” as opposed to permanent war, and working towards combating climate change.
- The drawing back under President Xi Jinping from some excesses of “billionaire capitalism” and his anti-corruption campaigns at national and local level (very different from the promotion of lobbying, corruption, flagrant and open and exhibitionistic self-enrichment by the West’s 0.1 percent, who are “the masters of the universe”): In the West, we see immiseration and impoverishment on a scale not seen for one hundred years, with intensification of the extraction of surplus value from the labor power of workers accompanied by mass destitution.
- The ethical morality of community well-being and community consciousness of China’s ideology. This is taught throughout the ideological state apparatuses of schools, universities, and media, as opposed to the selfish antagonistic anti-human, egotistical, ultra-individualism of the West.
- The key role of party, program, and leadership in leading China ands controlling ultracapitalist/individualist and anti-worker tendencies and ego-enrichment, characterized by attempts at encouraging internal party debate.
- Finally, and hugely importantly for Western Communists and Western anticapitalist Revolutionary Marxists such as myself, the hope that Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is a stage on the path to the communism that Karl Marx described in his writing, for example in Grundrisse and in The German Ideology, where the root of real individualism, freedom, and emancipation—as opposed to the fake one that is constantly preached in bourgeois ideology—is a situation where all of our needs are taken care of through collective action, so that we only have to work six hours a day, and we can use the rest of the time, our humanity, exactly as we please.70
ZD: How do you see China’s role and function in the current world?
DH: I am not sure. Any governing party, any government, incorporates a variety of perspectives, beliefs, policies, and hopes. Clearly, as a Marxist—as a communist—I want to see China progress over time from a socialist into a communist society, and not into a more and more capitalist, more unequal society. I want to see a society and economy where there are not such huge differences between the richest and the poorest; in other words, there should be controls on the wealth and the power of the billionaire and multimillionaire class. If this were so, it could have enormous impact on world populations and on leftist parties, their memberships, and their supporters.
That is for the future. In Marxist terms, I am a communist working for a transition from socialism to communism. So, what is China’s role and function in the current world?
Currently it is a model of a great power that does not seek to bomb its rivals into submission. It is a model that seeks global cooperation rather than great power conflict. It is a model for taking millions out of poverty, as opposed to pushing millions into poverty.
We recognize that socialism in China is a work in progress with tremendous accomplishments. The hope of anticapitalist revolutionary classical Marxists such as myself is that in China, and globally, capitalism will be replaced by socialism, and then communism.
This may take many decades or longer, and there will be ups and downs. Progress will sometimes be stalled, and at other times advance notably. There will be struggles and contradictions. There is no blueprint, or even a “redprint.” But there is a direction, and there are theoretical tools to analyze the directions—Marxist theory, which is developing not static. In this global development, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics will play a major role. It is a major hope for humanity.
We affirm and welcome the undoubted economic, social, technological, and diplomatic successes of the leadership and policies of President Xi and the CCP, both within China and globally and express our hopes about the egalitarian social, economic and political development and future of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and its development into communism.
Notes
1. I am using “working-class” here in a nonbinary sense, not in the classic Marxist sense of two great opposing classes, capitalists and workers. In my own theoretical writings and in my speeches, I advance a binary notion of class: that there are two great classes, those of us who sell our labor power to capitalists or to those apparatuses that keep capitalism running—health and education apparatuses and so on—that is, the working class. Conversely, there is the capitalist class, who buy our labor power. See Dave Hill, “Class, Capital and Education in This Neoliberal/Neoconservative Period,” Information for Social Change 23, (2006); “Marxist Education Against Capitalism,” in Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Theory and Action, Lotar Rasinski and Dave Hill, eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 2018): 181–208; “Capitalism and Inequality: Schooling and Education in Neo-Liberal, Neo-Conservative and Neo-Fascist Covid Times: A Classical Marxist Critical Analysis and Activist Programme,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 19, no. 3 (2022): 56–111; “Classical Marxism, Ideology and Education,” Critical Education 13, no.1 (2022): 70–82; Deb Kelsh and Dave Hill, “The Culturalization of Class and the Occluding of Class Consciousness: The Knowledge Industry in/of Education,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 4, no. 1 (2006). I set out a Marxist, binary class analysis, a “relational” classification, contesting Weberian derived “gradational” lifestyle classifications of social class, such as those used for government and advertising classifications. For a very brief and punchy binary definition/discussion of social class, see Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “ABC of Class,” Red Critique, 2002.
2. “Tribunite” refers to a supporter of the views of Tribune, a weekly, left social democrat (in English terms, “socialist”) newspaper/magazine. It was influential on the left in the 1960s through the late twentieth century.
3. Militant was founded in 1964 and renamed itself Militant Labour in 1991, when they left the Labour Party and again renamed themselves as the Socialist Party of England and Wales in 1987. Peter Taaffe, the Leader of the Socialist Party from 1997–2020, wrote: “Militant was able to draw on the support of rank-and-file activists in the 1970s and 1980s. In September 1982, Militant organized a 3,000-strong rally at the Wembley Conference Centre in opposition to threats of expulsions. The conference included 1,622 delegates from Constituency Labour Parties, 412 trade union delegates and almost 1,000 visitors. As right-wing News of the World reported: “By any yardstick yesterday’s rally by supporters of the Militant Tendency was menacingly impressive.… Almost as big as the Labour Party itself could muster’” (Peter Taaffe, “Labour’s Militant Witch-hunt: Forty Years Since Expulsion of Militant Editorial Board,” Committee for a Workers’ International, October 4, 2023. Taaffe continues, writing about the expulsion of the Militant Editorial Board from the Labour Party: “The expulsion of the board did not stop Militant from building mass support for its ideas in Liverpool. The book Liverpool: A City that Dared to Fight details the heroic struggle which took on Thatcher and won £60 million. During its time in office, the council created more than two thousand jobs, built five thousand council homes with front and back gardens, seven sports centers, and may new parks, as well as promoting better conditions for council workers and other workers locally. “At the peak of the movement, March, 29 1984 [Liverpool] saw a citywide general strike in support of the city council’s stand against Tory cuts. 50,000 workers and youth demonstrated outside the budget-setting meeting. Later, the city’s trade union movement seriously discussed taking all-out strike action in defence of the council against the government attacks—7,200 workers voted in favor of such action, including the majority of the manual workers.” Here, Taaffe refers to Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: City That Dared to Fight (Liverpool: Fortress Books, 1998). See also Peter Taaffe, Rise of “Militant” (London: Militant Publications, 1995).
4. Entryism refers to the tactic of a small group/party/organization “entering” a major political party or organization in the hope of influencing it or taking it over. In British political history, the most well-known and successful example was the (Marxist/Trotskyist) Militant-tendency entryism inside the Labour Party between the mid-1960s and mid-’80s. The history of the Labour Party has a number of instances of entryism. For example, the Socialist Labour League (which subsequently became the Workers’ Revolutionary Party) was expelled in the 1960s, Militant was expelled in the ’80s and Socialist Appeal (a split off from Militant that decided to continue entryist work within the Labour Party) in July 2021. Some micro-organizations of the Marxist left still attempt this entryist approach.
5. The population of the administrative county/local government administrative unit covered by East Sussex County Council is around one million.
6. Militant newspaper is now The Socialist.
7. The Great Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985 was the most notable and historic strike in the United Kingdom since the 1926 General Strike. It was characterized by police brutality. As such, it has been the subject of many books, such as Francis Beckett and David Hencke, Marching to the Fault Line: The Miners’ Strike and the Battle for Industrial Britain (London: Constable, 2009) and Seamus Milne, The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (London: Verso, 2014). My own role was as part of a picket line at Shoreham Docks to stop coal being shipped in from abroad. At the time, I was leader of the Labour Group of Councillors on East Sussex County Council. See this recent article on the yearlong strike: John Hendy, “Miners’ Strike 40th Anniversary: The Neoliberal Backdrop to the Miners’ Strike,” Morning Star, March 6, 2024. Hendy notes that “the strike was ultimately defeated and the consequences have been disastrous both for the mining communities and for the British working class. After the strike, Thatcher was able to continue the neoliberal agenda, including passing anti-union legislation to reduce union power. In consequence, today less than 25 per cent of workers have their terms and conditions set by negotiations between unions and employers (one of the lowest levels in Europe). But in the 1970s over 80 per cent of UK workers were covered by a collective agreement. That drop is the reason that real wages have not risen since 2007 and that half the UK workforce now earn less than £27,588 pa (and one quarter earn less than £16,068). More people are on benefits in work than those on benefits out of work. Some 14.4 million of our citizens live in poverty and 3.8 million in destitution.”
8. Militant-tendency members were expelled from the Labour Party in 1985. See Taaffe and Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight; Roger Silverman, “The CWI: A Balance Sheet: Reflections on the History of the CWI (1997),” Roger Silverman (blog) rsilver100.wordpress.com.
9. See the TUSC website: tusc.org.uk.
10. The city of Brighton and Hove has a population of approximately three hundred thousand. It is a unitary local authority, which means that it has responsibility for all local government services in its area—including schools, social care and social services, housing the homeless, building and repairing council housing (social housing), youth clubs, parks and gardens, libraries, and waste disposal, among other services. Local government spending accounts for around a quarter of all public spending in England. Local authorities are funded through a combination of business rates (local business taxes), central government grants and council tax. They also generate income through rents, fees and charges, sales, investments and contributions. In 2019–1920 (the last year before emergency COVID funding), local authorities in England received 22 percent of their funding from government grants, 52 percent from council tax (that is, local taxation), and 27 percent from retained business rates. See Institute for Government, “Local Government Funding in England,” Institute for Government, March 10, 2020).
11. The Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party is a tiny group supported by the Workers International Network. See Roger Silverman, Labour’s Coming Split, Workers International Network, March 2023, for the argument that following the landslide election of a Labour government under Starmer in the July 2024 general election, the Labour Party will continue neoliberal policies and alienate much of the Labour Party and trade union movement, resulting in a likely split from Labour to the left, and the possible subsequent formation and development of a mass working-class party. There are, currently in spring 2024, many different attempts to unify, or at least, bring together, different left organizations in Britain. Some are distinctly (left) social democratic or Corbynite, such as Transform. Others, such as TUSC, tried—and, following the July 2024 election, will continue to try—to play a role in bringing together different revolutionary Marxist and assorted left labor groups and parties to fight future elections. The theoretical basis for the TUSC program is the Transitional Program developed by Leon Trotsky. A brief explanation of the Transitional Program is Callum Joyce, “Trotsky’s Transitional Method,” Socialist Party, February 21, 2024, socialistparty.org.uk. The fuller, original, writing is at Leon Trotsky, “The Transitional Program (1938),” Marxist Internet Archive, marxists.org.
Other groups formed since the defenestration of Corbyn in 2019 include Collective, associated with Andrew Feinstein; the Workers’ Party, led by George Galloway and Chris Williamson, both former Labour MPs; and Ken Loach’s “For the Many Network.” What is notable is that in July 2024, Corbyn, still wildly popular among many socialists and left social democrats, is not setting up a party in opposition to Labour, even though he was expelled by Starmer from the Parliamentary Labour Party.
In different parts of the United Kingdom there are left social democrat/socialist, pro-Gaza, pro-ceasefire candidates being selected by ad hoc coalitions of various groups to stand against Labour and the Conservatives, since both parties are austerity parties, and both are supporting the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza. In my own city, a meeting of around 150 assorted leftists from various political traditions, and many of those new to politics, selected a candidate (at a meeting that I co-organized and also chaired in March) to fight the 2024 parliamentary election against the other parties—but also, in particular, against the Hove and Portslade MP, Peter Kyle, who is a right-wing social democrat and pro-Zionist.
12. Blair was elected Leader of the Labour Party in 1994, and was Labour Prime Minister between 1994 and 2007, when he handed over the Labour Party Leadership and Prime Minister post to his deputy, Gordon Brown.
13. There were, in the 2019–2024 parliament, approximately thirty-two Labour MPs in the Socialist Campaign Group, which is the left grouping of MPs within the Labour Party. The number of Labour MPs elected to the House of Commons in the 2019 general elections was 202. The other major parties were the Conservatives, with 365 MPs elected; the Scottish National Party with 38 MPs; and the Liberal Democrats with 11.
14. The Fabian Society is a long-established reformist, right-wing social democratic pressure group/organization within the Labour Party. It is gradualist, anti-Marxist, and on the right of the Labour Party.
15. There were demonstrations globally, including three million in Rome.
16. This is much like the situation in 2023–2024, with current huge opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza that is funded and armed by the United States and supported by the United Kingdom, Germany, and other NATO states
17. For “The Third Way,” the seminal document was Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder, Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte (Johannesburg: Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 1998). At the time, I critiqued the Third Way with regard to education in Dave Hill and Mike Cole, “‘New Labour,’ Old Policies: Tony Blair’s Educational Vision,” Education Australia 37 (1997): 17–19; Dave Hill, New Labour and Education: Policy, Ideology and the Third Way (London: Tufnell Press, 1999); “New Labour’s Neo-Liberal Education Policy,” Forum for Promoting 3–19 Comprehensive Education 42 (2001); Dave Hill, “The National Curriculum, The Hidden Curriculum and Equality,” in Schooling and Equality: Fact, Concept and Policy, Dave Hill and Mike Cole, eds. (London: Kogan Page, 2001), 95–116; “Critical Teacher Education, New Labour in Britain, and the Global Project of Neoliberal Capital,” Aula Critica: Revista Educativa de La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogia Critica (2006). With regard to the Public Finance Initiative (PFI), see Margot Miller, “Money for War but No Money for UK’s Crumbling Schools,” World Socialist Web Site, January 29, 2024. Miller explains that “PFI contracts were introduced under the John Major-led Conservatives (1990–97) and expanded by Labour under Blair (1997–2007). Private companies built schools, hospitals and roads and were repaid over up to 30 years, robbing the taxpayer. Companies and the banks made huge profits. According to an NAO report, schools cost 40 percent and a hospital 70 percent more than had they been built by a public body. PFI projects will cost the taxpayer approximately £199 billion by 2040.”
18. The Labour Party Constitution of 1918 included Clause 4, which stated that the aim of the Labour Party was “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each.
19. Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution (1900),” Marxists Internet Archive. She opened this major pamphlet with the paragraph: “Can we counterpose social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, is for social democracy indissolubly tied to its final goal. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its goal.” Foreseeing the transition from socialism—for example, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics—into communism, Luxemburg called for “The union of the broad popular masses with an aim reaching beyond the existing social order, the union of the daily struggle with the great world transformation.” The full quote is from Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto is: “The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marxists Internet Archive).
20. V. I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done? (1902),” Marxists Internet Archive.
21. See Ebert and Zavarzadeh, “ABC of Class”
22. Ernest Mandel, “The Nature of Social-Democratic Reformism (October 1993),” Marxists Internet Archive.
23. See Monica Poletti, Tim Bale, and Paul Webb, “Explaining the Pro-Corbyn Surge in Labour’s Membership,” London School of Economics (blog), November 25, 2016. There was an influx of 325,000 new members between May and July 2015.
24. “Socialist Organizing in a New Era,” Momentum, March 9, 2021. On its website it proclaims three aims: (1) Elect socialists and win the radical policies the current moment demands; (2) support struggles in our communities and workplace; and (3) scale up political education in our movement and across the country.
25. A national press report about Momentum and the Labour Party in the city of Brighton and Hove is Dan Sabbagh, “Brighton: Well-Organized Momentum Group Shifts Focus to Local Elections,” Guardian, March 19, 2018.
26. Benjamin Kentish, “Footage Shows Anti-Corbyn Labour MPs’ Exit Poll Reactions as They Realise He Has Increased Vote by 10 Percent,” Independent, November 20, 2017.
27. Corbyn’s “radical” (hat is, left social democrat) election manifesto can be found as the Labour Party Manifesto 2017 (London: Labour Party, 2017). A summary, in the liberal center-left newspaper The Guardian, is at Alan Travis and Philip Inman, “Labour Manifesto 2017: The Key Points, Pledges and Analysis,” Guardian, June 1, 2017. Another summary is at BBC News, “Labour Manifesto At-a-Glance: Summary of Key Points,” BBC, May 16, 2017.
28. That election was with Michael Foot as Labour Leader. He was a left social democrat—in fact, he was a former editor of left social democrat weekly newspaper, Tribune. The manifesto is the Labour Party Manifesto 1983 (London: Labour Party, 1983). As with all left-wing leaders of the Labour Party, Michael Foot—the Corbyn of a previous generation—was vilified, mocked, by the press. The capitalist press is far kinder to those leaders of the Labour Party who are not left-wing. Blair and the current Labour Leader, Keir Starmer, are both given a very easy ride by the capitalist media, print media, and TV media. Indeed, the Rupert Murdoch-owned right-wing tabloid newspaper, The Sun, called for a vote for Labour during the July 2024 general election campaign.
29. Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimized as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate, and even more so after he was elected as party leader with a strong mandate. This process of delegitimization occurred in several ways: 1) through omission or distortion of Corbyn’s voice; 2) through ridicule, scorn, and personal attacks; and 3) through association, mainly with terrorism. Some of the newspapers’ front pages are at Bart Cammaerts, Brooks DeCillia, João Magalhaes and César Jimenez-Martinez, Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2024), available at lse.ac.uk. See also Ollie McAnnch, “Jeremy Corbyn Is the Most Smeared Politician in History,” Canadian Dimension, July 31, 2019.
30. As Silverman (see note 16) puts it: “The media still to this day peddle the lie that Corbyn’s policies were unpopular. On the contrary! In 2005 Labour had won the election on a vote of just nine and a half million; in 2010, this had shrunk to eight and a half million, and in 2015 it was still only nine and a quarter million. In 2017, under Corbyn’s leadership, its vote shot up to almost thirteen million! Even in 2019, when Labour suffered a serious setback due to its confused Brexit policy, Labour under Corbyn still won substantially more votes than under Miliband in 2015, or Brown in 2010—or even Blair in 2005, when Labour won! And opinion polls show that Corbyn’s policies of renationalisation of the energy companies, railways, water, postage and telecoms are still overwhelmingly popular.”
31. I am on the Socialist Labour Network National Steering Committee. was expelled from the Labour Party, proscribed, in 2022. See Sienna Rodgers, “Labour NEC Bans Three More Groups ‘Not Compatible’ with Party Rules or Values,” LabourList, March 29, 2022. Another group banned is the Labour Left Alliance. I was on its national organizing group for a while. Now it is primarily a Marxist discussion group.
32. Kate Osamor, the Labour the MP for Edmonton in London had written: “Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day, an international day to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the millions of other people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Gaza.: See Tom Belger, “Kate Osamor Suspended and Apologises for Gaza ‘Genocidep Claim in Holocaust Memorial Day Comments,” LabourList, January 29, 2024.
33. This is the International Holocaust Memorial Association’s definition of Anti-Semitism. It appears to conflate anti-Zionism and criticism of the state of Israel, as antisemitic. A recent and very thorough demolition of Zionism is Tony Greenstein, Zionism during the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation (Brighton: Tony Greenstein, 2023). See also Asa Winstanley, Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (New York: OR Books, 2023).
34. See, for example, Greenstein, Zionism during the Holocaust. At the end of the nineteenth century, Herzl popularized what was then a minority view among European Jews that there should be a Jewish “homeland” in the form of a Jewish state in Palestine.
35. Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data, “The UK Strike Wave: ‘The Genie Is out of the Bottle’?,” May 16, 2023.
2023 brought a new wave of strikes following six months of increasing industrial action across the country. More and more workers, including those in key public sector roles, voted for industrial action often with huge majorities and mostly comfortably clearing the high ballot turnout threshold imposed by government legislation aimed at making strikes more difficult. While pay is undoubtedly at the heart of these disputes, workers also cite deteriorating conditions of work and their determination to protect the services they provide as core motivations for their decision to strike.
Throughout the second half of 2022 the upsurge in strike activity was largely led by three unions—Unite in the broader private sector, the RMT on the railways and the CWU in post and telecoms. By the end of January 2023, teachers, civil servants, ambulance staff, nurses, train drivers, physiotherapists, midwives, university staff and workers across different parts of the private sector had all voted for strike action. In January there were 282 different strikes across the UK and on 1 February there were half a million on strike and on 15 March 700,000 took coordinated action.
The scale and scope of industrial unrest in 2023 is distinctive and demands our attention. For example, the vote for strike action by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is the first in Britain in its entire 106-year history. Similarly, for the first time ever, the First Division Association in the Civil Service Fast Stream—the senior civil servants of the future—voted to strike. Even Amazon is now facing the company’s first strike by its workers—700 of whom have joined the GMB Union in Coventry—and had a 98 percent vote in favour of strike action when balloted. This is in marked contrast to spontaneous walkouts of the past.
See also Joseph Choonara, “The Ebb and Flow of Britain’s Strike Wave,” International Socialism 11 (2023).
36. See Patrick Butler, “More than 1 Million UK Children Experienced Destitution Last Year, Study Finds,” Guardian, October 24, 2023; Patrick Butler, “From Social Care to Homelessness, What Are the Cost Pressures Facing English Councils?,” Guardian, January 28, 2024; Patrick Butler, “Gordon Brown Slams ‘Obscene’ Levels of Destitution in the UK,” Guardian, February 8, 2024. Simon Whelan, “Millions of Working-Class UK Households Suffer 18 Percent Cut to Incomes in Space of Five Years,” World Socialist Web Site, February 14, 2024, reports that “Research by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) finds Britain’s poorest tenth of households have suffered an 18 percent, almost one fifth, reduction to their incomes since 2019. The removal of thousands of pounds from the spending power of the poorest working-class families, after the previous decade of austerity is devastating and is bringing about an explosion of absolute poverty. Millions of families cannot make ends meet. In their winter 2024 UK Economic Outlook, NISER noted how living standards for the poorest tenth of UK families have fallen most sharply since the beginning of the cost-of-living crisis. When adjusting for inflation, their incomes remain 18 percent below 2019–20 levels. According to the think-tank, this is a loss of “about £4,500” even after additional government one off cash support payments are taken into account.”
37. My first teaching job, as a schoolteacher, was as a “Social Education” teacher at Stockwell Manor Comprehensive School, a comprehensive (that is, open to all levels of attainment) school that served Brixton, a deprived and multi-ethnic area of South London. It was an inner-city comprehensive school.
38. For the details of Mone’s high-level corruption, see David Conn, “Michelle Mone: Leading Entrepreneur or Lucky Baroness?,” Guardian, January 25, 2024. Mone is facing a criminal investigation into allegations of bribery and fraud in their securing of £200 million in government contracts for a company, PPE Medpro.
39. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1999), 449. The full quote is: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.” Harvey Thompson points out that in the decade and a half since 2010, the gilded elite has amassed more wealth than ever before: “In 2010, there were 53 billionaires in the UK (in 1990 there were just 15). By 2022 this super-wealthy category had mushroomed to 177 billionaires with known accumulated wealth of £653 billion (an increase in billionaire wealth of well over 1,000 percent since 1990)” (Harvey Thompson, in “UK Workers Suffer Massive Income Losses since 2010,” World Socialist Web Site, February 18, 2024).
40. The actual quote is, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
41. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Engels’s term “social murder” is from Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Marxists Internet Archive.
42. See note 11 with reference to the development of the many and varied Marxist and left social democrat new formations.
43. For my report for the International Labour Organization, see Dave Hill, “Education Services Liberalization,” in Winners or Losers? Liberalizing Public Services, Ellen Rosskam, ed., (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2006), 3–54. The four books that resulted from that report are: Dave Hill, Contesting Neoliberal Education: Public Resistance and Collective Advance (New York: Routledge, 2009), The Rich World and the Impoverishment of Education: Diminishing Democracy, Equity and Workers’ Rights (New York: Routledge, 2009); Dave Hill and Ellen Rosskam, eds., The Developing World and State Education: Neoliberal Depredation and Egalitarian Alternatives (New York: Routledge, 2009); Dave Hill and Ravi Kumar, eds., Global Neoliberalism and Education and Its Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2009). Much of my writing is on the effects of Neoliberalism globally and nationally. See, for example, Nigel Greaves, Dave Hill, and Alpesh Maisuria, “Embourgeoisment, Immiseration, Commodification—Marxism Revisited: A Critique of Education in Capitalist Systems,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 5, no.1 (2007): 38–72; Andrea Beckmann, Charlie Cooper, and Dave Hill, “Neoliberalization and Managerialization of ‘Education’ in England and Wales: A Case for Reconstructing Education,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 7, no. 2 (2009): 311–45; Dave Hill, “State Theory and the Neo-Liberal Reconstruction of Schooling and Teacher Education,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 22, no. 1 (2001): 135–55; Dave Hill, “Global Neo-Liberalism, the Deformation of Education and Resistance,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 1, no. 1 (2003): 1–50; Dave Hill, “Educational Perversion and Global Neo-Liberalism,” Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice 7 (2004): 1–42; Dave Hill, “Books, Banks and Bullets: Controlling Our Minds—the Global Project of Imperialistic and Militaristic Neo-Liberalism and Its Effect on Education Policy,” Policy Futures in Education 2 (3–4) (2004): 504–22; “Globalisation and Its Educational Discontents: Neoliberalization and Its Impacts on Education Workers’ Rights, Pay, and Conditions,” International Studies in The Sociology of Education 15, no. 3 (2005): 257–88; Dave Hill, “Class Struggle and Education: Neoliberalism, (Neo)-Conservatism, and the Capitalist Assault on Public Education,” Critical Education 4, no. 10 (2013).
I founded the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies in 2003 and funded it out of my own salary for most of the time since then. As the website states: “The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS) seeks to develop Marxist and other Left analyses and critiques of education. JCEPS seeks and publishes articles that critique global, national, neo-liberal, neo-conservative, neo-Fascist, New Labour, Third Way, postmodernist and other analyses of policy developments, as well as those that attempt to report on, analyse and develop Socialist/Marxist transformative policy for schooling and education from a number of Radical Left perspectives, including Freirean, Communist, Marxist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic perspectives. JCEPS addresses issues of social class, ‘race,’ gender, sexual orientation, disability and capital/ism; critical pedagogies, new public managerialism and academic/non-academic labour, and empowerment/disempowerment.”
44. See Michael Goodier, Carmen Aguilar García, and Richard Partington, “How a Decade of Austerity Has Squeezed Council Budgets in England,” Guardian, January 29, 2024. They report that in England, “between 2010–11 and 2022–23, net spending per person on cultural services was cut by 43 percent in real terms, on roads and transport spending by 40 percent, on housing by 35 percent.… Spending on community centres and public halls was cut by 39 percent and library spending has halved since 2010–11. Museum and gallery spending was cut by two-fifths, while spending on theatres and other public entertainment was cut by 38 percent. Since 2010, over 1,400 children’s centres have closed and more than 17 percent of public libraries (773). Almost 400 swimming pools have been closed. The GMB general union reported in 2019, five years ago…across the UK, an estimated 876,000 jobs have been lost in local government since June 2010—a reduction of 30 percent due to the austerity drive.”
45. Nicola Davis, Rachel Obordo, and Carmen Aguilar García, “‘Huge Human and Economic Toll’: One in Seven People in England Waiting for NHS Treatment,” Guardian, February 8, 2024. They report that “there were more than 7.6 million cases in England (relating to 6.37 million patients on the NHS waiting list in December, latest NHS England data shows, with two in five of them (3.3m) waiting for more than four months and one in 20 (337,450) having to wait longer than a year.”
46. Silverman’s conclusion in Labour’s Coming Split is that “two antagonistic classes can’t share one party forever. The Labour Party currently straddles two diametrically opposite interests. The tensions compressed within it can no longer be reconciled. It’s time for a clean break.” He continues: “The Labour movement will create its own party; it will formulate its own programme; it will appoint its own leaders. Within that party socialists will be patiently explaining the need for a decisive break with capitalism and a clear socialist programme.” An editorial in Morning Star described Starmer’s speech to the 2021 Labour Party Conference as “continuity capitalism” (“Editorial: Keir Starmer’s Speech—Continuity Capitalism,” Morning Star, September 28, 202). It went on: “The problems in Starmer’s speech are familiar. Labour is no longer challenging the ownership and control of the British economy. It is ‘back in business’— or back in big business’s pocket.”
47. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
48. For Marx, class-consciousness does not follow automatically or inevitably from the fact of class position. “The Poverty of Philosophy,” Marx distinguishes a “class-in-itself” (class position) and a “class-for-itself” (class consciousness). In The Communist Manifesto, they explicitly identify the “formation of the proletariat into a class” as the key political task facing the communists. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx observes: “In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their cultural formation from those of the other classes and bring them into conflict with those classes, they form a class. In so far as these small peasant proprietors are merely connected on a local basis, and the identity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a political organization, they do not form a class.”
49. This famous quote is from Karl Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach (1845),” Marxists Internet Archive. A very good elaboration of that is John Molyneux, An Introduction to Marxist Philosophy: The Point Is to Change It! London: Bookmarks (London: Bookmarks, 2012).
50. A recent opinion poll showed 57 percent of respondents saying Brexit has been a failure, with only 13 percent saying it has been a success. See Jack Kessler, “Brexit Four Years on: Going Badly, and People Are Starting to Notice,” Evening Standard, January 31, 2024: “Bloomberg last year put the sterling loss at £100 billion annually. A recent Cambridge Economics report estimated the hit to the economy to be closer to £140 billion a year, leaving the average Briton nearly £2,000 worse off in 2023. Little wonder, perhaps, that an exclusive Ipsos poll for the Evening Standard of 31 Jan. 2024 finds that 57 per cent of adults believe Brexit has been more of a failure, with 13 per cent saying more of a success. More notably still, 46 per cent say Brexit has hit their family’s standards of living, compared with 11 per cent stating it has improved it.”
51. Terry Edwards and Carl Parsons, How to Dismantle the English State Education System in 10 Easy Steps (London: Zero Books, 2020) is very useful. The tongue in cheek blurb for the book is: “Terry Edwards and Carl Parsons tell the story of the takeover of England’s schools by the super-efficient, modernising, academising machine, which, in collaboration with a dynamic, forward-looking government is recasting the educational landscape. England’s school system is turbo-charged into a new era and will be the envy of the world, led by Chief Executives of Multi Academy Trusts on bankers’ salaries, imposing a slim curriculum, the soundest of discipline regimes and ensuring that highest standards will be achieved even if at the expense of teacher morale, poor service to special needs, off-rolling of students and despite an absolute lack of evidence that this privatised system works.”
52. Some of my earlier writing (cited above) includes “Global Neo-Liberalism, the Deformation of Education and Resistance”; “Books, Banks and Bullets”; “Globalisation and Its Educational Discontents.” Some of my most recent works include Dave Hill, “Neo-Fascismo, Capitalismo e Educadores Marxistas,” Educacao e Realidade 46, no. 3 (2021): 1-22; and Hill, “Classical Marxism, Ideology and Education.” Many of the (currently) thirty-four books in the Routledge’s series “Studies in Education, Neoliberalism and Marxism,” for which I am editor, are concerned with this. The series blurb is:
Neoliberalism is degrading and destroying public education systems globally. The local characteristics may vary, the results are common—increased inequalities in schooling, vocational and higher education, inferior work conditions for teachers and faculty, and detheorized and technicized delivery systems of increasing conservative curricula at all levels of education. Neoliberalism—marketization, privatization, pre-privatization, commodification—is increasingly accompanied by forms of authoritarian conservatism—secular in some countries, religious in others—with increased control, surveillance, and forced abandonment of critique. Such neoliberal and conservative assaults on public education and on broader aims than those which are couched purely in terms of economic/human capital—meet with increased resistance by students, teachers, communities, social movements, and in some countries, political parties.
The Routledge Studies in Education, Neoliberalism, and Marxism series features books by new as well as established scholars that throw a harsh spotlight on the conditions under which education currently labors and offers analysis, hope, and resistance in the name of more collective, egalitarian education for social and for economic justice.
53. There is a hierarchy of esteem and cost in the private sector of education.
54. See Greaves, Hill, and Maisuria, “Embourgeoisment, Immiseration, Commodification”; Hill, “Global Neo-Liberalism, the Deformation of Education and Resistance”; Hill, “Educational Perversion and Global Neo-Liberalism”; Hill, “Education Services Liberalization”; Wayne Ross and Rich Gibson, eds. Neoliberalism and Education Reform (New York: Hampton Press, 2006); and, more recently, Dave Hill, “Marxist Education Against Capitalism,” in Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Theory and Action, Lotar Rasinski and Dave Hill, eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 160–82. For the different pedagogies and hidden curricula of schools serving different social class areas, see Jean Anyon, Marx and Education (London: Routledge, 2011).
55. For data and Marxist analysis of the neoliberal and neoconservative education, such as the Academies (Academy schools and chains of schools) in England, see, for example, Dave Hill, Christine Lewis, Alpesh Maisuria, Patrick Yarker and James Hill, “Conservative Education Policy Reloaded: Policy, Ideology and Impacts in England,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 14, no. 3 (2016): 1–42.
56. In January 2023, Luke Sibieta in his article “What Has Happened to Teacher Pay in England?,” reports that, ‘Salaries for more experienced and senior teachers have fallen by 13 percent in real terms since 2010. Teachers in the middle of the salary scale have experienced cuts of 9–10 percent since 2010” (Luke Sibieta, “What Has Happened to Teacher Pay in England?” Institute for Fiscal Studies, January 11, 2023). On spending per pupil, Sibieta notes that “Following a substantial rise over the 2000s, total school spending per pupil fell by 9 percent in real terms in England between 2009–10 and 2019–20. This fall in school spending per pupil represents the largest and most sustained cut in school spending per pupil in England in at least 40 years, and probably a lot longer” (Luke Sibieta, “The Latest Picture on School Funding and Costs in England,” Institute for Fiscal Studies, March 1, 2024.
57. For the conservatization and controlling of the school curriculum, see Hill, “The National Curriculum, The Hidden Curriculum and Equality”; Hill, “State Theory and the Neo-Liberal Reconstruction of Schooling and Teacher Education”; Dave Hill, “Theorising Politics and the Curriculum: Understanding and Addressing Inequalities through Critical Pedagogy and Critical Policy Analysis,” in Equality in the Primary School: Promoting Good Practice across the Curriculum, Dave Hill and Leena Robertson, eds. (London: Continuum, 2009), 293–319.
58. Some of my writing criticizing the radical right and teacher education is Dave Hill, Charge of the Right Brigade: The Radical Right’s Attack on Teacher Education (Brighton: Institute for Education Policy Studies, 1989); Dave Hill, “Teacher Education and Training: A Left Critique,” Forum (for Promoting 3–9 Comprehensive Education) 6, no. 3 (1994:): 74–76; Hill, “State Theory and the Neo-Liberal Reconstruction of Schooling and Teacher Education.” More recently, my writing on Marxist teacher education policy proposals can be found at at Edwards, Hill, and Boxley, “Critical Teacher Education for Economic, Environmental and Social Justice.”
59. On surveillance of teachers, see Dave Hill, “The Role of Marxist Educators against and within Neoliberal Capitalism,” Socialist Resistance (2012). See also Hill, Lewis, Maisuria, Yarker, and Hill, “Conservative Education Policy Reloaded,” for some teacher testimony.
60. For Marxist analysis of managerialism in education, see Beckmann, Cooper, and Hill, “Neoliberalization and Managerialization of ‘Education’ in England and Wales”; Greaves, Hill, and Maisuria, “Embourgeoisment, Immiseration, Commodification”; Hill, “Education Services Liberalization.”
61. I develop this in Hill, “The Role of Marxist Educators Against and Within Neoliberal Capitalism,” and in Hill, “Neo-Fascismo, Capitalismo e Educadores Marxistas.” On socialist education policy, also see Dave Hill, “A Socialist Manifesto for Education,” Socialist Resistance (2010); and in Edwards, Hill, and Boxley, “Critical Teacher Education for Economic, Environmental and Social Justice.”
62. On her website, Suella Braverman, a very right-wing former member of the Conservative cabinet, wrote: “We need to wake up to what we are sleepwalking into: a ghetto-ised society where free expression and British values are diluted; where Sharia law, the Islamist mob and anti-semites take over communities” (Suella Braverman, “Islamists Are Bullying Britain into Submission,” February 22, 2024). She went unrebuked for this blatantly Islamophobic speech. See Carl Parsons, “A Curriculum to Think with: British Colonialism, Corporate Kleptocracy, Enduring White Privilege and Locating Mechanisms for Change,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 18, no. 2 (2020): 196–226; and Mike Cole, Racism and the Tory Party: From Disraeli to Johnson (London, Routledge, 2023) for analysis of racism within Conservative government policy and rhetoric. Cole is reviewed at Susan Nelson and Jesus Jaime-Diaz, 2023. “Book Review Symposium: Mike Cole, Racism and The Tory Party,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 22 no. 3 (2023): 246–58.
63. See Public and Commercial Services Union, “PCS Supports Campaign to Make Councils Minimum Service Level Law-Free Zones,” news release, Public and Commercial Services Union, March 5, 2024. The union supports campaign to make councils minimum service level law-free zones. See also Gwyn Topham, “Why Is Minimum Service Law Not Being Used for England Train Strikes?,” Guardian, January 30, 2024. Topham testifies to the power of the trade unions: “One train operator, LNER—one of four now under direct state control—is understood to have taken clear steps towards using MSLs during the planned rolling strikes by train drivers. The drivers’ union Aslef responded by calling five additional days of strikes, instead of the originally planned 24-hour action. LNER backed down and Aslef called off the extra strikes.”
64. See Rachel Cunliffe, “Liz Truss Reaches New Levels of Delusion,” New Statesman, February 6, 2024; Morning Star, “Editorial: Popcon Shows Tory Future,” Morning Star Online, February 6, 2024. Truss went on to lose her seat at the UK general election of July 4, 2024, in the largest anti-Tory swing toward Labour in any constituency.
65. See Richard Wolff, “Socialist or Capitalist: What Is China’s Model, Exactly?,” Asia Times, August 22, 2020; Thomas Piketty, Lee Yang, and Gabriel Zucman, “Capital Accumulation, Private Property and Rising Inequality in China, 1978–2015,” American Economic Review 109, no. 7 (2019): 2469–96; Thomas Piketty, Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Inequality (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2022).
66. A summary of state capitalism is presented in Orlando Hill, “How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution: Reviving Socialism after the Collapse of the Soviet Union—Book Review,” Counterfire, March 7, 2024. Hill writes, “According to this view, production is not controlled by the workers but by a bureaucratic ruling class (the nomenklatura) who follow the instructions of the Party.”
67. The SWP’s analysis is that “workers, in other words, had no more control over the process of production than they do in Western societies. But economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of the party-state bureaucracy surrounded by the CPC” (lex Callinicos, “Will China Abandon Its State Capitalism?,” Socialist Worker, no. 2379 [November 12, 2013]). The SWP also regularly attacks the Chinese government for “repression” of, for example, strikes. The Socialist Party calls for democratic control and management of the economy and the renationalization of elements of the privatized economy’ and notes that “many of the capitalist class have links to the state itself and maintain their wealth and privileges through its protection” (see Nick Chaffey, “China at the Crossroads: 70 Years since the Declaration of the People’s Republic of China,” Socialism Today, October 23, 2019).
Ernest Mandel, a key historic figure in the Fourth International, critiqued bureaucratism and the concept of “the iron law of oligarchy.” Charlie Post, in his article “Ernest Mandel and the Marxian Theory of Bureaucracy” (International Viewpoint, July 26, 2005) notes that “for Mandel, the necessary condition for the development of class consciousness is the self-activity and self-organization of the workers themselves” and continues the “officialdom of the mass workers organizations can separate themselves from the rest of the working class.” For Mandel, summarized in the same article, “the bureaucracy’s organizational fetishism (giving priority the survival of the apparatus over new advances in the struggle) grows into a substitutionism that demands the workers’ unquestioning obedience to leaders who claim they know ‘what is best for the workers.’”
68. For the PSL position on China, see Ken Hammond and Sheila Xiao, “Book Launch: China’s Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future,” YouTube video, 1:55:14, Critical Theory Workshop, April 5, 2024. Marxist scholar Vijay Prashad praises China, for example: “it’s the highest ethic of the modern world to eradicate poverty,” and what China has done in this regard is “incredible.” Prashad’s analysis can be found here: Vijay Prashad interviewed by Global Times, “China’s Role in Building Global Democracy a Shining Light for Developing Countries,” Global Times, July 19, 2022: “Since 1949, the Chinese people have gone through a lot of ups and downs. And in all the ups and downs, the goal has always been to establish socialism. What Chinese President Xi Jinping put on the table is the importance of the principles of socialism. And young people need to engage both the principles of Marxism creatively and experimentation.” Communist Party USA, for example, publicizes Prashad’s positive analysis of China and his comparison of India’s and China’s economies and records on poverty. See, for example, Communist Party USA, “China: A Marxist Analysis,” November 2, 2020. See also Vijay Prashad interviewed by Qiao Collective, “‘We Are Trying to Build Humanity’: Vijay Prashad on Chinese Socialism and Internationalism,” Qiao Collective, May 5, 2020.
69. Prashad, “We Are Trying to Build Humanity” describes how, with respect to China, “we are trying to build humanity” through Chinese socialism and internationalism, and how there is “a debate in the Communist Party…. They debate with each other. Cheng Enfu, a scholar of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, identifying the different schools of thought in China…Maoists…neoliberals, there are even Jeffersonian liberals…there’s a debate.”
70. Looking at an imaginary communist society, Marx in the Grundrisse writes: “Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time…but rather disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.” For a fuller quote from Marx and Engels, see The German Ideology (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology [1846], Marxists Internet Archive): “For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”