Whoever has will be given more
The Socialist Party’s Summer School
The Socialist Party’s Summer School.
A weekend of talks and discussion on the theme of Populism
21st – 23rd August 2026, Worcester
Summer School 2026 – The Socialist Party of Great Britain
Sleeping on the street
The government has just repealed the Vagrancy Act of 1824, which made rough sleeping a crime. There are about a million empty homes in England alone with more than a quarter of them empty for more than six months. So there is absolutely no need for anyone to sleep rough.
In London, there are over 47.000 homes that have been empty for more than six months, enough to house the estimated 13,000 people sleeping rough there each year, and the 200,000 living in temporary accommodation.
In this supposedly relatively wealthy country, the possibility of providing decent homes for everyone is perfectly feasible, but capitalism’s profit motive prevents it from happening.
July 2026 Socialist Standard Now Available OnLine FREE
Conscription and German Youth
A tweet on X made us aware that Germany is determined to continue its preparation, like several other Western European and Baltic states, to engage in a military conflict with Russia.
The tweet was in relation to the German volunteer military join up. Soymb posted about this in July 2025. https://soymb.com/2025/07/06/militarism/
Well ‘wer hätte das gedacht! The volunteer scheme has bombed because in first five months of 2026 only 530 applied. The German state was hoping that, from the potential 300,000 Jugend, many many more would rush forward to fight for Germany’s capitalists against Russia’s competing capitalists.
Long story short, Germany says it has twelve months in which to decide whether to bring back a compulsory military draft.
You can bet your bottom Deutschmark, sorry Euro, that the attempt to force German youngsters to sign up, or else! will be made sooner rather than later.
To German youth, and to youth everywhere, there’s only one war war worth fighting and that’s the class war!
Beyond Socialism: Meeting
BEYOND SOCIALISM: CONTRIBUTIONISM AND THE WORLD AFTER MONEY (ZOOM)
Guest Speaker: Justin Fairchild
Justin Fairchild — founder of the Contributionist movement — argues that socialism and Contributionism share both a diagnosis of capitalism’s failures and a vision of a world beyond scarcity and hierarchy. The difference is in the approach.
To connect to a Zoom meeting, click https://zoom.us/j/7421974305
The merry-go-round
So Keir Starmer has resigned and Andy Burnham is likely to take over. Will it make any difference? It probably will to Labour’s standing with the electorate. For most people, perception of a leader’s personality seems, unfortunately, to be the key element in what passes for political thinking.
But will a new leader be able to do anything different to resolve the problems of the crisis-ridden system we live under? The answer to this has to be a resounding no. There will only be any difference to speak of when we decide collectively to scrap that system and replace it with an entirely different one that uses the abundant resources that already exist to satisfy all our needs the world over.
Burnham
The same difference
So Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, has won the Makerfield by-election and can now challenge Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party. If he wins, he will become new Prime Minister. So what?
Marx famously pointed out that governments were ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. In Britain the Prime Minister is the chairperson of this committee which doesn’t have to be composed of actual capitalists. In Marx’s day most British Prime Ministers were not capitalists but landed aristocrats but this was acceptable as long as they managed things in the general interest of the capitalist class. In the course of the last century committee members and chairs came to be drawn from a pool of professional politicians who could come from any background. This, too, was acceptable and is the norm today.
All the governments there have been in Britain, whether Conservative or Labour or, earlier, Liberal, or a coalition of two or all three of them, have managed the common affairs of the owning class in the interests of that class. The first duty of any government is to guarantee and enforce the ownership rights of capitalists over the means of production. The second has been to ensure that priority is given to the making and accumulation of profits. These — class ownership and production for profit —are the basis of capitalism and no government has ever challenged them.
Governments have a free hand on narrowly political matters such as the structure of the state machine or what is a crime but, when it comes to the economy, its power is limited by the nature of the capitalist economy as one that runs on profits. If, in its taxation or trade or tariff or employment policies, it goes against this, then sooner or later it will provoke an economic downturn and the risk of the resulting popular discontent leading to it being voted out of office and a rival set of politicians taking over. This is enough to keep governments in line with the general capitalist interest. The Labour Party learned this the hard way while the Conservative and Liberals didn’t need to be taught it. The Green Party has yet to learn it.
If the government has to respect and apply the economic laws of capitalism then it is not all that important who is the chairperson of the board of directors of UK Capitalism PLC. It is true that there can a bad government from a capitalist point of view — one that doesn’t competently manage the common affairs of the capitalist class — and an incompetent chairperson, such as the over-confident Truss or the bumbling Starmer, can contribute to this. But that’s a problem for the capitalist class, not the workers.
Whether Starmer or Burnham is Prime Minister is not going to make the slightest difference to the workers’ subordinate position in society nor solve the problems this brings them.