07.05.2026

Socialism requires democracy

We on the left are a minority, we Marxists are a minority of that minority and we partyists are a minority of that minority. How do we change that? Not, argues Mike Macnair, by silencing ourselves through factional bans and speech controls

Last week in the first part of this series I looked at three articles directed against ‘factionalism’. Firstly, former MP Claudia Webbe’s defence of the Corbynista leadership of Your Party’s decision to adopt a regime of bans and proscriptions of far‑left groups.¹ Secondly, Tristan Colum on the Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century website, criticising the (in his view) excessive pluralism of Die Linke and of leftists in the party’s allegedly excessive attention to debating with other party members.² Thirdly, Duncan Chapel on his Red Mole Substack site, polemicising specifically against the CPGB (and me individually) and our advocacy of ‘permanent factionalism’.³

I suggested that the partial coincidence of the appearance of these arguments reflected the fact that the UK left’s ‘common sense’ of anti‑factionalism is beginning to be called into question.

There is a common problem that emerged for me from reading Webbe, Colum and Chapel; but not one explicitly addressed (except in a partial and indirect way by Webbe). This is that the left is a minority; the self-identified Marxist left is a minority of this minority; and, I can add, ‘partyists’ - including the CPGB, but also some others - are a minority of this ‘minority of a minority’.

Of course, the working class as a class is a majority, both globally and in the UK.⁴ But that is not at all the same thing as the left being a majority. This is why I say that Webbe addresses the issue in a partial and indirect way: when she argues: “… a socialist movement could not succeed through the imposition of a pre‑formed programme on communities - even communities experiencing acute exploitation and oppression. It had to meet people where they were, develop their political voice from within their own experience, and build power that was genuinely theirs.”

This point is a recognition, of a sort, that leftwing ideas are minority ideas; but Webbe’s conclusion is that what has to be done is to self‑silence the leftwing ideas in order to “meet people where they were, develop their political voice from within their own experience”. The practical result of policies of this sort is that, while the leftist minority silences itself, the capitalist minority continues to dispose of mass-circulation, advertising-funded media (‘new media’ as well as ‘old’) and the left, therefore, has to become a political tail to ideas promoted by the capitalists: either liberal (as remains the case of Podemos and Die Linke) or nationalist/social-conservative (as is an aspect of La France Insoumise (seen in its title) and was the character of Sahra Wagenknecht’s Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) which failed to get into the German Bundestag at the last elections.

The far-left alternatives offered by Colum and Chapel actually have the same character as Webbe’s argument. The essence is the idea that the masses are to come to socialism “from within their own experience” (Webbe) or through “a successful campaign run or a strong local organisation built” (Colum). Chapel argues that “the correct response to a limited programme in a broad formation is to argue within it, to win people through the experience of struggle …” The demand in all cases is for self‑silencing for the sake of breadth in mobilisation. The expectation is that “struggle” will solve the problem of the left being a minority. Or, maybe, that “struggle” is enough and socialist/communist ideas should be altogether discarded (the argument of a good many former Eurocommunists).

Another symptom of the same phenomenon is the fear of using the names, ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’. The Mandelites are particularly striking in this respect (given their Trotskyist past). “Ecosocialists” (a very ill‑defined idea) for their internal/theoretical project, they are publicly named in Britain Anti‑Capitalist Resistance, in France the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (L’Anticapitaliste), in Spain Anticapitalistas, in Italy Sinistra Anticapitalista … These are small‑scale imitations of the larger‑scale Podemos, La France Insoumise, Your Party and other attempts to rebrand the left as not socialist.

These are recognitions that socialism/communism are minority ideas; but they represent a belief that by disguising ourselves as something else, socialists/communists can overcome the problem through “the experience of struggle”. This approach is one I have in the past characterised as the idea that it is necessary to “lead workers by the nose” to make revolution.⁵ Put another way, it is to try to scam the masses into revolution.

The blunt fact is that socialism and communism are (fairly small) minority ideas, because we still live in the shadow of Stalinism. The generation who were adult and active before 1989-91 are now getting elderly, and there is a certain revival among a small minority of the young of using the communist name and Soviet imagery to épater les bourgeois; but every schoolchild is taught the calamitous history of the USSR and its fall. The large majority view among all classes, outside (perhaps) China,⁶ is that socialism is either undesirable, because it is tyrannical, like the Soviet and east European regimes; or infeasible, because economically radically inefficient, again like the Soviet and east European regimes.

It is nonetheless objectively necessary to promote socialism and communism. And it is true, first, that the working class needs socialism in order to defend its elementary interests. Second, society needs socialism - and this needs to be what Marx called in 1871 “la domination politique du prolétariat”: the political dominance of the working class over the other classes and in particular management and the state apparatus. And, third, this is only possible with radical democracy and unrestricted freedom of speech, communication and association, and transparency of information.

Working class

The working class needs a socialist project.⁷ The starting point for this is that ‘the working class’ means, as I have argued before, the whole social class - in and out of work, home‑makers, elderly, adults and children - which lacks property in the means of production and in consequence is dependent on the wage share of total output: either directly through wage‑work, indirectly through dependence on a wage‑earner, or on the ‘social wage’ (state benefits and charities).

This class is driven towards collective action for two-sided reasons. The first is that the individual bargaining position of wage-workers, faced with the capitalists who own the means of production (and retailers, and landlords …), is weak. This is not an absolute truth: capitalist development may throw up skills bottlenecks that allow individuals to negotiate for high wages (IT specialists for a period of time were in this position, able to just walk out and into a better job); but such circumstances strongly incentivise capitalists to automate/de‑skill the work in question.

The second side is that the competitive structure of capitalism drives capitalists to attempt to force down the wage share. Not only capitalists proper, but also middle class ‘savers and strivers’ saving through financial markets, need to earn an average return on investments if their relative value is not to fall. Since the average can only be known after the fact, the only way to earn an average return is to seek an above‑average return. Productive firms, which need capital, need to offer to pay their lenders (whether lenders in the strict sense, or shareholders) the going rate and not less.

The result of this competitive dynamic, which operates globally, is that capitalists can never be satisfied with the existing wage share. It is always necessary to attempt to reduce it: whether by direct wage cuts (including below‑inflation ‘wage increases’) and job cuts, or by pushing in politics for reductions in the ‘social wage’ to allow tax cuts. The global wage share cannot permanently fall below the global aggregate cost of reproduction of labour‑power; and local wages cannot fall below what is necessary to supply 2,500 calories a day, plus the most basic possible accommodation and clothing (because without this workers cannot actually keep working). But that still leaves a lot of scope for a falling wage share in most countries.

The result is that workers need trade unions - and cooperatives and renters’ organisations, etc - for defensive struggles to maintain their elementary position. Karl Marx characterised the necessary strikes and other actions as “guerrilla struggles”.⁸ Through these struggles it is possible for some sections, who for one reason or another have particular economic leverage, to win sectional gains from capital. In particular, under boom conditions more concessions may be made; though the competitive pressure to push the wage share down persists, and concessions generally need to be extorted. In the slump phase of the business cycle the pressure is intensified.

Sectional gains are always vulnerable to being taken back - precisely because they are sectional, and capital can manoeuvre around them (as, for example, replacing British-mined with imported coal and with gas-fired power stations). And capital can politically attack the sectional gains as unfair to other workers. This was how the 1978‑79 ‘Winter of discontent’ was used to bring in Thatcher’s government; and similar ideological offensives about supposed unfairness to other workers are under way now, in relation to disability and sickness benefits and public-sector pensions.

This problem creates an objective dynamic towards what Marx calls “political action” of the working class: that is, struggles for general legislation, like the Ten Hour Day Act in 1847. That, in turn, has a logic that leads to the creation of workers’ political parties - whether socialist or merely ‘labour’.

As long as the workers’ movement accepts the notion that capitalism will always exist, it also inherently accepts that at the end of the day the wage share must fall. This is true if the point is to preserve the competitiveness of the firm (if, like the 19th century workers’ free trade advocates and today’s ‘Atlanticists for Workers’ Loyalism’ (Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), you accept the Ricardian case for free trade⁹). It is true if it is to preserve the competitiveness of the nation in international trade and in the competition to attract investment capital (the common argument of centre‑left and centre‑right politicians). And it is true if it is to pay for armaments: Adam Smith’s 1776 “defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence”, or Herman Goering in 1936 (following US policy debates in 1916‑17) arguing for guns to take priority over butter: an argument currently revived.¹⁰

The working class’s alternative needs to involve democratically organised planning of production in kind. At one level this should be obvious from the fact that the Ten Hour Day Act, public education, and so on, are already interferences with the market allocation of resources to secure goods identified in kind (more free time; the actual education of children whose parents cannot afford to pay …) rather than money for free choices.

At another level, suppose there is a ‘market socialism’ of worker cooperatives linked by money and markets: each cooperative would be driven by market imperatives to self-exploit, to attempt to drive down the wage share. This was part of Karl Marx’s arguments against the ‘mutualism’ of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and it is empirically confirmed by the effects of marketisation in Yugoslavia in the 1960s-70s.¹¹

The result is that ‘labour’ parties and ‘broad left’ coalitions’ that do not pursue the strategic goal of socialism - the conscious replacement of market society by common ownership and planning in kind - inevitably fall in behind one of the two political parties that are inherently thrown up by capitalism: free-market liberalism or patriarchalist nationalism. Both turn out to be scams when they get into, or close to, government office. The result is demoralisation and yet another step in the ratchet movement towards the right in politics that has been going on for the last 60 years (eg, Heath to the right of Macmillan, Thatcher to the right of Heath …) and has merely become more obvious in the last 20 years.

Planning

It is not just the working class that needs socialism. At a superficial level of analysis, since the ‘neoliberal turn’ in the later 1970s‑80s, in the ‘west’ we have been living through an experiment in testing whether (as the neoclassical economists claim) free markets can deliver superior outcomes through financial engineering to the partial planning in kind, which had in fact characterised earlier capitalism, and had intensified after the failure of free markets to deliver in war conditions in 1914‑16.¹² The neoliberal experiment has, in fact, resulted in systematically more expensive outcomes in health and other areas, and worse outcomes in public education, housing and transport infrastructure maintenance. The last of these affects everyone (potholes in Britain are a minor example), the first three affect everyone except the top 5% of the income distribution.

Equally, politico‑legal free markets in public regulation now transparently support what has been called the ‘Epstein class’ - that is, practical immunity of the rich from the operation of laws. Put another way, the free market in legal services amounts to the sale and denial of justice, in violation of chapter 29 of the Magna Carta; Epstein is merely a single illustration of a general principle, also illustrated in Britain in the inability of the state to hold the water companies to account, the Grenfell Tower story, and the spectacular cronyism and sleaze of 21st century UK governments. Overcoming these dynamics requires at least partial de‑marketisation of politics, media and law; and these in turn require explicit rationing in kind of access to decision processes, as opposed to price rationing. Again, these problems affect everyone except a very small minority (considerably smaller than the top 5%) who are not ‘priced out’ of justice and political access.

More fundamentally, avoiding catastrophic consequences from human-induced climate change is quite unavoidably going to involve extensive planning in kind. We need to reduce carbon emissions to avoid climate change accelerating to the point of human extinction. That is a choice in kind, even if it is to be achieved by ‘market’ mechanisms of ‘carbon markets’. In fact, it is perfectly clear from the last 10 years that it will not be achieved by ‘market mechanisms’ - these are at most creating forms of ‘greenwashing’. We also need a mass of measures for mitigating consequences that are already unavoidable - which will again involve planning in kind to deal with population movements due to changes in sea level, in fresh water availability, in land fertility, and so on, which are all already visibly in progress.

The inability to get anywhere with international conventions to deal with climate change reflects another side of the problem. The money system entails the state and the regime of many states, geopolitics and the drive towards war.

There is insufficient gold, silver and copper in the world for the transaction needs of money exchange in a moderately complex market economy. Hence already in the later middle ages credit money shows up. But credit money depends on state enforcement of debts; and state enforcement of debts depends on the ability of states to discriminate against foreign debtors.

Hence, in turn, capitalist states are driven towards competition in a semi‑stable hierarchy. The process throws up a hegemon state, whose currency is the global reserve currency: Britain in the 19th century, the USA since 1945. But the position of being the hegemon state leads to inward investments that push up housing costs and in consequence wages, undermining industrial competitiveness, leading to offshoring, and the relative (not absolute) decline of the hegemon.¹³

Britain managed relative decline through expanding its empire and ‘non‑tariff barriers’ on trade with its colonies, and from around 1900 a policy of aggressive encirclement of Germany. This issued in 1914-18 and 1939-45: and with 1939-45, the destruction of British military power radically reduced British financial parasitism and allowed a new ‘long boom’ in 1950‑70.

The USA has managed relative decline since the 1970s by exporting simple destruction: in Mozambique, Angola, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria … and also since around 2000 pursuing a policy of aggressive encirclement of China, which has driven the current wars in Ukraine and on Iran. This drive to war is not a false policy choice by US leaders: it results from the inherent dynamics of the USA’s position as a (relatively) declining world hegemon.

This too affects all of us. If we do not break with the money mechanism, the logic forces more and yet more destructive wars; and in the end the choice between human extinction through generalised nuclear exchange, or the ‘Somalification’ of the whole world outside the USA (leading, in turn, to the collapse of the USA itself).

Overall then, the point is that society needs to shift sharply into planning in kind of major productive activities, because the continuation of capitalist rule and decision-making through money and markets threatens us not only with worsening immediate conditions, but also with human extinction - either through runaway climate change or generalised nuclear exchange.

USSR

But - as I argued above - socialism is unpopular, because we still live in the shadow of the disastrous Soviet experience.

We have to recognise that the Soviet regime began with an attempt to construct socialism and continued to ideologise itself as ‘socialist’. It was not capitalism. If it had been capitalism, its fall in 1989‑91 would not have dealt such a body-blow to the idea of socialism as, in fact, it did. The USSR (perhaps more than the eastern European satellites) did aspire to planning of productive activities in kind. It failed.

This failure is partly the product of the siege warfare conducted by the capitalist powers against the Soviet regime between the failure of open warfare in 1921 and 1941, and between 1946 and 1991. The actual survival of the USSR under this siege warfare reflected partly the support of the USA and British empire in 1941‑45 and the ability to take equipment from eastern Germany in 1945‑50. It reflected partly the fact that this was never socialism in one country, but socialism (of a bureaucratic sort) in one of the great European empires, including both an industrial core and a large agricultural periphery. This made siege warfare (‘sanctions’) less immediately effective than they have been in other cases. The lesson from this circumstance is that socialism needs, for us in Britain, to be posed on a European scale.

The second element, however, was the absolute dominance of falsehoods in Soviet ‘planning’. This flowed from the career interests of managers, party bosses and other full‑time officials, in pretending success in order to keep their jobs or obtain promotion. The result was ‘garbage in, garbage out’ in the planning process, and a dynamic towards the Soviet workers’ joke: ‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’.

Now, incentives for managers and bureaucrats to lie, and pretend things are going better than they are, are not in the least unique to the USSR. They are perfectly visible in ordinary western business management and the state bureaucracy. They can be seen even in the small‑scale bureaucratic hierarchy of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. The ideologues of capitalism tell us that markets provide the necessary consumer feedback to control managers’ lies. This is at most a partial truth: while small businesses collapse rapidly if their business models fail, established firms can go on losing money for decades before collapse. Checks on managerial lies and self‑deceptions are nonetheless essential to any rational decision‑making.

The problem is that the essence of private ownership is monopoly control over decision-making in relation to the asset that is said to be owned. This was already recognised by Bartolus of Saxoferrato (1313‑57) in his widely adopted definition of ownership as ‘the right of free disposal of a thing, unless prohibited by statute’. The converse of this, however, is that monopoly control of decision‑making is ownership (even if it is not juridically recognised as such).

The effect of the regime of career managers and bureaucrats without anyone to whom they were effectively answerable was thus to make each manager owner of ‘his’ factory, or whatever, each regional party boss owner of ‘his’ region, and so on - subject only to the occasional arbitrary interventions of the Renaissance court-style cliques at the centre. The result is what American property lawyer Michael Heller in 1998 called an ‘anticommons’ (though he did not apply it to the Soviet regime itself, but to the transition in the 1990s): the excessive proliferation of ill‑defined property rights paralyses economic decision‑making.¹⁴ Marx already identified the issue in 1843-44 in his critique of Hegel’s idealisation of the Prussian state bureaucracy: state bureaucrats do not express the ‘general interest’, but their particular turf interests.¹⁵ Bureaucratic or managerial socialism thus turns into the opposite of genuine socialism; and tends towards capitalism - either by way of collapse, as in 1989‑91, or by way of the managed expansion of capitalism, as in China.

Answerable

To whom are the bureaucrats and managers to be answerable, if they are not to be Soviet‑style informal owners, or answerable to capital (as western bureaucrats and managers are)? They can for some purposes (in relation to local decisions) be made accountable to those immediately below; but this does not solve the problem of planning as coordination on a national and international scale, which we need to solve (at least to some extent) in order to get beyond market ordering. Local answerability alone winds up as (at best) market‑linked co-ops or Yugoslav‑style ‘self‑management’ under marketisation; and, as noted above, this fails.

The answer is that the bureaucrats need to be answerable to the working class as a class: as I already said, to the whole social class - in and out of work, home-makers, elderly, adults and children - which lacks property in the means of production and in consequence is dependent on the wage share of total output: either directly through wage-work, indirectly through dependence on a wage‑earner, or on the ‘social wage’ (state benefits and charities).

That the proletariat is in charge and subordinates the middle classes (including management and state bureaucracy) to itself is what Marx meant in 1871 by “la domination politique du prolétariat”, proletarian political rule, which is more commonly called among Marxists “the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

And again, as I already said, this class is driven to collective activity - trade unions, cooperatives, collectivist political parties - because its separation from the means of production means that organised collective action is its only strength. It is this proletarian drive to collective activity that is the ground of the Marxist wager on the working class. It is not, contrary to the ideas of the revolutionary syndicalists (who imagine that they are Trotskyists), the employed workers’ strength at the point of production, which can always be dislocated by capitalist manoeuvres.

Proletarian political rule thus implies everyone gets one vote, one voice, freedom of access to information and communication, and freedom of association. Freedom of association is critical. It is critical precisely because collective action is the indispensable weapon of the working class as a class. And, conversely, socialism - getting beyond capitalism - means conscious collective action to take control of the major means of production, through at least partial planning in kind. The rejection of freedom of association is fatal to the project of socialism.

Meaning

The consequence is that the meaning of anti-factionalism is, necessarily, to tell the broad masses that you intend to repeat one of the fundamental reasons for the failure of Soviet planning. What you are offering may be obvious Stalinism - as is true of the SWP and a lot of the far‑left groups.

Or the message may be merely that there is no alternative to the capitalist managerialist regime under which we live. This is the meaning of proprietary branding operations like Momentum, like La France Insoumise, and like what the Corbyn leadership is attempting to do.

It is also the meaning of the idea common to a lot of the left, which is committed to codes of conduct and speech controls. These express the popular-front alliance with the corporate and governmental Human Resources departments that has characterised the ‘intersectionalist’ left since before the term ‘intersectionality’ was coined.

In this context, no amount of rebranding - as ‘anti‑capitalists’, as Podemos, as La France Insoumise, as Your Party, and so on - can prevent the message getting through, that what the left really stands for is just more of the same crap - or something worse.

Rejecting anti‑factionalism and bureaucratic speech controls, and so on, in the workers’ movement is not at all a secondary question, compared to ‘political line’. It is the absolute core of the question: do you stand for working class rule to break beyond capitalism? Or are you for a futile attempt to re-run Stalinism or a managerialist project, in which nothing much will change, and at the end of the day the victors will be the far right? It is radical democracy that can enable workers’ rule and socialism; and it is radical democracy within the movement that can make the idea of socialism a believable alternative to broader forces.

In this article I have focussed on fundamentals. In the third and final part next week, I will return to the Mandelites’ ‘soft’ version of anti‑factionalism and the balance sheets of their own disastrous policies towards ‘broad‑front’ parties.

1. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/your-party-what-kind-socialist-party-does-british-working-class-actually-need-2026.↩︎

2. revsoc21.uk/2026/04/08/the-charms-and-pitfalls-of-extreme-pluralism-lessons-from-die-linke.↩︎

3. redmole.substack.com/p/flat-pack-leninism-why-mike-macnair.↩︎

4. On the working class being a majority in the UK, see M Macnair, ‘Class composition in a snapshot’ Weekly Worker August 21 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1549/class-composition-in-a-snapshot) and August 28 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1550/class-composition-in-a-snapshot). Globally a 3.73 billion labour force (data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN) of the total global population of around 8.3 billion (www.worldometers.info/world-population), which, with a global age dependency ratio of 58% (40% children, 14% elderly - data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.DPND), yields around 67% working class. The point that the working class is more in the ‘global south’ is made by several authors: eg, R Munck, ‘Class, labour and the global working class’ in M Atzeni et al (eds) Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Cheltenham 2023 chapter 1.↩︎

5. ‘Spontaneity and Marxist theory’ Weekly Worker September 5 2007: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/687/spontaneity-and-marxist-theory. The following article is headlined ‘Leading workers by the nose’ (September 12 2007 - weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/688/leading-workers-by-the-nose, but is actually mainly about how far the question of power was or is actually posed. (More context of these arguments available at communistuniversity.uk/mike-macnair-programme-and-party-articles).↩︎

6. I take it that there is probably considerable mass support for ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, which is highly economically successful, though the workers are savagely oppressed and exploited. Compare E Griffin in Liberty’s dawn: a people’s history of the industrial revolution (New Haven CT 2014), arguing from autobiographies, diaries, etc that, in spite of the awful conditions in 18th-19th century British industry, working there was perceived as an emancipation from the petty tyrannies and worse material conditions of village life. On the other hand, North Korea, Vietnam or Cuba may well display the fragile political consensus of late Soviet society.↩︎

7. Here and below I use ‘socialism’ as we do in the CPGB (and as Leon Trotsky did in his 1907 Results and prospects, to mean what immediately follows the overthrow of capitalist rule: that is, a contradictory society under workers’ rule on the road to communism as a stateless, classless society.↩︎

8. Value, price and profit (1865) chapter 14 (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm); ‘Trade unions: their past, their present, their future’ (Geneva Congress of the First International, 1866): www.themilitant.com/2012/7632/763249.html.↩︎

9. See ‘Free trade tailism’ Weekly Worker November 22 2018: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1228/free-trade-tailism. (More argument in ‘Free-trade illusions’, December 13 2018 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1231/free-trade-illusions), and ‘Working class trade policy’, December 20 2018 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1232/working-class-trade-policy).↩︎

10. Wealth of Nations book IV, chapter 2: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book04/ch02.htm (defending the English Navigation Acts as a defence measure); Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model) summarises the history of ‘guns or butter’. Current: see, for example, ‘Cabinet ministers back welfare cuts to fund defence’ Telegraph April 16; ‘Badenoch and Starmer clash over welfare spending at PMQs’ BBC News April 29 (www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ce35dwddevwt). For the current political dynamics of the issue in Europe see, for example, S Sacchi, G Buzzelli and C de la Porte, ‘“Guns versus butter” in public opinion: the politicization of the warfare-welfare trade-off’, Journal of European Public Policy Vol 33 (2026), pp1199-1225.↩︎

11. See C Samary, Le marché contre l’autogestion: l’expérience yougoslave La Brèche 1988; also Plan, market and democracy (wwwiire.org/node/663), lectures 2 and 3.↩︎

12. For the characterisation of earlier capitalism, see J Guldi Roads to power: Britain invents the infrastructure state Cambridge MA 2012 (18th century Britain); DF Noble Forces of production New York 1984 (19th century USA). World War I: see JE Hutton Welfare and housing: a practical record of war-time management London 1918.↩︎

13. More elaboration on these points and supporting references in M Macnair, ‘Imperialism and the state’, four-part series of Weekly Worker supplements, March 17 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1387/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-i); March 24 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1388/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-ii); April 7 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1390/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-iii); and April 14 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1391/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-iv).↩︎

14. ‘The Tragedy of the anticommons: property in the transition from Marx to markets’ Harvard Law Review Vol 111 (1998), pp621-88, available at scholarship.law.columbia.edu/context/faculty_scholarship/article/1323/viewcontent/111_Harv_L_Rev_621_Heller.pdf. Heller’s argument is an inversion of the ‘Tragedy of the commons’ proposed by neoclassical economist and ecologist’ Garrett Hardin in 1968 (Science Vol 162, pp1243-1248 - available at math.uchicago.edu), that the absence of ownership creates overgrazing, but which empirical studies have shown merely to drive customary or explicit rationing agreements. More recently see W Li and C Kerven, ‘Between commons and anticommons: a nested common-private interface framework’ Humanities and Social Sciences Communications Vol 11 (2024): www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02992-9.↩︎

15. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch03.htm.↩︎