Labour didn’t fundamentally reform capitalism. Instead, capitalism reshaped Labour, gradually pulling it away from egalitarian ideals toward embracing profit-driven policies and business-friendly governance.

Originally formed in 1906 as a trade union pressure group in parliament, in 1918 the Labour Party adopted as its long-term aim a nationalised economy. This, together with a redistribution of wealth to create a less unequal society, was to be achieved gradually by measures taken by a succession of Labour governments.

This strategy — Labourism — failed, and how! Instead of Labour gradually changing capitalism, it was capitalism that gradually changed Labour. Learning from the experience of being in government, that the only way capitalism can run is as an economic system driven by profit-making and that this has to be given priority, Labour gradually evolved from an alleged labour party into an avowed capitalist party.

Here is how it happened.

Taken from the September 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

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Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

We love watching cop shows. The bad guy gets caught, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and law and order are secured for another day, again. The detective’s a heavy drinking, chain-smoking, emotionally wrecked mess, but somehow they get the bad guy. Usually some rich, powerful bastard who almost gets away with it, but justice wins in the final act. We get to feel good. Satisfied.

But that’s not how it works in real life. For the working class the justice system doesn’t exist to deliver truth or fairness. It’s a system: a system under capital, a system that serves capital. It protects property, not people. It punishes survival. It targets the working class, the dispossessed, the traumatised, those who’ve already been hurt by other material conditions this system throws at them.

Written by AT and taken from the September 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

or, for a free three-issue subscription to The Socialist Standard: spgb.net/podcast

Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

A short story about planned obsolescence, free market ideology and everyday interactions. Written by Hud and taken from the September 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

or, for a free three-issue subscription to The Socialist Standard: spgb.net/podcast

Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

The Socialist Party and the World Socialist Movement affirm that capitalism is incapable of meaningful change in the interests of the majority; that the basis of exploitation is the wages/money system. The Socialist Standard is proud to have kept alive the original idea of what socialism is -- a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless society or, defined positively, a democracy in which free and equal men and women co-operate to produce the things they need to live and enjoy life, to which they have free access in accordance with the principle ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

or, for a free three-issue subscription to The Socialist Standard: spgb.net/podcast

Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Taken from the July 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard.

Walter Kendall advanced the view that Bolshevism-Leninism was something that was alien to the formally democratic traditions of the working class movement in Britain, introduced from an economically and politically backward part of the world where conditions were quite different. Collins, writing as a Leninist, argues that in fact those who founded the British Communist Party were all too much in the tradition of reformist labourism. Both views have some merit.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

or, for a free three-issue subscription to The Socialist Standard: spgb.net/podcast

Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Capitalism is not just a class war; it is a war of the mind. It demands conformity, punishes difference, and uses trauma as a tool of control. Still, resistance keeps bubbling up. Neurodivergent people often develop ways of thinking that refuse to follow capitalist logic, question authority, and imagine new ways of living.

Taken from the August 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

or, for a free three-issue subscription to The Socialist Standard: spgb.net/podcast

Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Apple have always been known for being control freakish and attempting to lock their customer base into their own exclusive ecosystem, including a special patent-protected charging cable that no one else is allowed to make and which doesn’t work with any third-party device.

People say that capitalism drives brilliant technical innovation, but when you look at the way this happens, ‘brilliant’ is not the word that comes to mind. It is chaotic, spontaneous, unplanned and secretive, with profligate waste and duplication.

Taken from the August 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

or, for a free three-issue subscription to The Socialist Standard: spgb.net/podcast

Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

The Spending Revue:

Governments can’t control the way that the capitalist economy works. They can, however, decide how they are going to spend the money that they have or plan to have. This is the annual budget. From time to time, in Britain, the government takes a longer view and sets out their spending plans over a period of three or four years.

Did Marx respect the rich?:

‘Even Marx respected the rich more than Reeves’ was the headline of an article by Sunday Telegraph columnist Michael Mosbacher (18 May). He accused Reeves of putting up taxes on the rich because she believes it immoral to be too rich. And quoted Marx as having written in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 that ‘the bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together’.

Taken from the July 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

or, for a free three-issue subscription to The Socialist Standard: spgb.net/podcast

Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0