Life and Times: A letter to my son (2025)

The Life and Times column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ‘Life and Times’ column I wrote for this year’s April Socialist Standard had the title Horror in the Middle East. Choosing Sides and talked about the support that has built up for the Palestinians in the Gaza conflict and the widespread condemnation of Israel for its role in the fighting. It asked whether this could be attributed to the oldest hatred – antisemitism. Its conclusion was that it was not antisemitism that underlies it but rather the association of Israel with the United States and ‘the anti-Americanism on the left of Western politics which dates back a long way’.

The column gave rise to discussion, disagreement and controversy on the Socialist Party’s various online forums and, when I showed it to my son, not a member of the Party, he didn’t have an entirely positive reaction either. He attributed the sympathy and support the Palestinians are getting not mainly to anti-Americanism but rather to the vast amount of media coverage being given to this particular conflict. We discussed this and agreed to disagree. But then a little later I was going through some papers of my own, and I came across a copy of a letter I had written to him over 20 years ago, shortly after the 9/11 attack. It struck me how related what happened then was to what is happening now, even if in different countries and with different protagonists. What do I mean by this? This may become clear if I reproduce parts of that letter:

‘Since you brought up the present world political situation yesterday, just an amplification here.

The virulent anti-Americanism that is prevalent on the left has a historical, if entirely irrational, origin. When Russia emerged as the champion of ‘socialism’ after the Russian revolution, throughout the world those who were on the left supported it. So bewitched were they by what was largely rhetoric that, even when Stalin murdered millions in the 30s, made a pact with Hitler at the beginning of the second world war and later set up ruthless dictatorships in all the countries of Eastern Europe, in those peoples’ eyes Russia still remained the ‘homeland’ of socialism, to be supported at all costs. The consequence was that, when, after the second world war, the world divided into two capitalist camps, led by Russia (state capitalist) on one side and America (private capitalist) on the other (the so-called ‘Cold War’), the great villain for the left was America. In an unshakeable double standards mentality, the Russian abuses were ignored or apologised for (eg invasion of Afghanistan, setting up of client dictator states elsewhere – Korea, Syria, Angola, etc.), and all similar actions by the Americans were seen as evil rapacious acts designed to extend and further American power, which they of course were. So strong was the emotional attachment to Russia that even those left-wing people and groups who criticised it in various ways and even in some cases recognised it as a form of capitalism still hung on to it at bottom as fundamentally being on the right side. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the left no longer has a country to cling on to (unless Cuba or, for some, China), but what has remained as a legacy of former times is the hatred of America as the symbol of world capitalism (not that most of them even know what the word means) and the epitome of evil.

The other things that have remained among left-wingers is a continuing opposition to those regimes or countries that America backed during the Cold War, especially Israel, and support for those countries that Russia backed during that period, especially those that have one-party states (eg, Syria, Palestine, Cuba). Ironically that rhetoric has now been bent to the service of fundamentalist Islam. If, historically, wars in the modern world have been struggles for markets, raw materials, trade routes and strategic positions, what you have here, in fundamentalist Islam, is the ideological product of ‘normal’ wars fought in the past and, in fact, much more difficult to fight than a normal war. In his writings Marx continually talked about ‘the contradictions of capitalism’. He usually meant phenomena like the existence of poverty among plenty, or of opposing factions within the owning class of a country causing political instability. And here is another (though obviously unforeseeable in Marx’s time) ‘contradiction of capitalism’, the military power that usually goes with economic power having difficulty in prevailing over the force of a religious ideology which should belong to previous centuries. Though nothing can justify the plane bombing in New York, it’s fatal to get drawn in and say you support one side or another.

At bottom it’s probably not a problem that can be solved, at least not in the short term, and even if it somehow does get solved or alleviated, it will tend to create further unforeseen problems. So whatever people say, it is in the end a problem for those who have created the breeding ground for it in the first case, those who rule.’

So how is what happened in 2001 (and the period immediately following) related to what is happening in the Middle East today? Well, these events show us how phenomena in capitalism have a habit broadly of repeating themselves. It shows the tendency the system engenders in people to take one side against another in a conflict failing to recognise the underlying causes of the conflict. Then there is also that ‘instinctive’ reaction of opposition by the left and other so-called ‘progressive’ forces to any association with the United States. And there’s also the inevitable failure of that reaction to result in any positive outcome for any of those caught up in the conflict. So the massive demonstrations we saw following 9/11 against the Western policy of invading Iraq and Afghanistan had not the slightest impact on events, and, once the invasions had taken place, the opposition to them faded into the background. In the same way, the current large-scale movements in Western countries in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel will die down as the conflict there takes its course and the outcome is decided by the governments that manage the capitalist system, an outcome which will be largely dependent on the economic and military strength of the different sides.

For this reason, were I to write another letter to my son now about the current conflict in the Middle East, the points I would make would be oh so similar to those I made 20+ years ago when yet another of capitalism’s crises had exploded and people were being drawn into the futile activity of supporting one side against the other.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: The next big thing (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mainstream news stories are an endless diet of misery which activists seem to force-feed themselves, under the highly contestable assumption that bad news motivates people to action, rather than into depressed fatalism. If you feel the need for an injection of positivity this January, you ought to try the many free science news websites.

The reason science stories are often positive is because science is about solving problems instead of despairing over them. Now it is true that sometimes those problems are ones that science itself accidentally created. Nobody’s perfect. The law of unintended consequences is always at work, so we ended up with lead in petrol, CFCs in fridges and ‘forever chemicals’ in Teflon. Worse, because science is forced to obey the capitalist prime directive of profit, too often these unintended consequences become ‘unattended externalities’.

Even so, reading science news is a good way to maintain a ‘can-do’ perspective on the world. And socialists have another reason to be interested, because science can offer glimpses of emerging tools and techniques that global socialism might, just might, be able to use in the future, even if they are deemed uneconomical in the present.

Take the current anxiety about micro and nanoplastic particles now being found in almost every animal cell on Earth, together with those forever chemical compounds which don’t break down naturally and have been found in human blood, organs and breast milk. The long-term consequences of all this are unknown, and mainstream news treats it as an unmitigated disaster. But new research has shown how to remove up to 94 percent of nanoplastics from water by just using carbonised epoxy, while a team in China have developed a sponge filter that they say can remove 99.9 percent of microplastics. Forever chemicals can be broken down using expensive high-energy processes, but new light-powered catalysts are thought do the same job at a fraction of the energy cost.

As is well known, renewable energies are intermittent and require back-up storage, generally in the form of lithium-based batteries. But lithium mining or via brine extraction is energy intensive and environmentally destructive. A new study suggests that half of all lithium requirements could actually come out of wastewater instead while an alternative approach offers a low-energy and sustainable means to extract it directly from seawater.

Socialist society will most likely pivot away from the unsustainable capitalist-era obsession with private car ownership, towards comprehensive public transport, but there will still be a role for electric vehicles. At present the battery is the most expensive and least durable part of an EV, but a new type of single-crystal electrode lithium-ion battery could outlast the vehicle it’s in, and then see a ‘second-life’ usage as grid energy storage. Lithium is used because it’s light, so it has an optimal power to weight ratio, but the heavier sodium has similar properties and is 500 times more abundant, so sodium-ion batteries are under development for grid storage, which doesn’t need to move. Problems to date have been low power and slow charging times, but a high-power sodium-ion battery is in development that can charge in seconds.

Battery life and weight currently make long-distance aviation infeasible, but what about old tech in the form of airships? Sustainability concerns are changing attitudes to next-gen air transport, and multiple airship models are in development, including the carbon-fibre and all-electric Pathfinder 1 (no relation), the hydrogen H2 Clipper and the helium Flying Whales, with the UK Airlander 10 expected to be in commercial service by 2026. Helium is hard to get, but the manufacturers point out that airships don’t consume it, they store it, and only need occasional top-ups. If capitalism can do airships, why not socialism?

For short hops, some European companies are developing electric vertical take-off and landing (EVTOL) craft for use as low-cost, noiseless and emission-free air taxis. But they’ve run into funding problems recently as investors are sceptical of getting a good return on investment (ROI). That’s one problem the technology wouldn’t face if a democratic socialist society was, for some reason, smitten with the idea of roof-hopping public transport systems.

In other tech news, AI is an order of magnitude greater consumer of electricity than conventional computing, and an important question is where all the electricity is going to come from. One team believes they can cut AI power consumption by 95 percent simply by rejigging some algorithms. Global warming is creating a global water crisis, and desalination plants are power hungry, but a new method promises zero-electric solar desalination. There’s a plan to stop millions of tons of e-waste by printing circuits onto tree leaves. And self-heating concrete is a thing, if you mix it with paraffin, and could be used for de-icing roads.

In health news, a new biomaterial can regrow cartilage in old joints, meaning no more knee replacements. A twice-yearly injection reduces HIV risk by 96%, more effective than PrEP pills which have to be taken daily. Asthma research has seen the first breakthrough in 50 years with a monoclonal antibody treatment that isn’t a steroid so it doesn’t lead to osteoporosis. And a raft of new research confirms what we already suspected, that nature is good for us. Studies show that time spent in woods, fields or gardens – especially if you get mud on your skin – seems to realign your body’s microbiome with ‘good’ bacteria that are lost through urbanisation and are now believed to inhibit a colossal range of gut-implicated ‘urban’ illnesses (Good Nature, Kathy Kelly, Bloomsbury, 2024).

This only scratches the surface, and of course not all developments will pan out. But the key takeaway from science news is the awareness that the next huge breakthrough, the discovery or invention that changes everything, is just as likely to happen tomorrow as in a hundred years. If that’s not a reason for optimism, we don’t know what is.

Paddy Shannon

Big Tech and the state (2025)

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is Big Tech? How did it get so big? Has Big Tech got too big for the rest of the capitalist class?

Big Tech is a loose definition to describe the largest digital technology-based enterprises – it always includes Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Amazon and Apple. Microsoft is usually included now, sometimes Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, and Nvidia, the semiconductor manufacturer, and some perspectives will include the Asian firms: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi – who by their nature and size fulfil a similar role.

As socialists we understand the integral role of technology in capitalism. In the Socialist Standard No 9 in 1905 we said:

‘The capitalist-class, the most revolutionary class that has ever oppressed human society, cannot increase its riches but by incessantly revolutionising the means of production by the never-ending introduction of new applications of the mechanical, physical, and chemical sciences to the industrial tool. Its thirst for inventions is so insatiable that it has created factories of inventions.’

Whilst most employees in Big Tech are supporting existing products rather than being inventors – factories of inventions seems like a suitable description of commercial research departments or startup companies.

And of course many years earlier Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto wrote:

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.’

Marx also wrote at length about Machinery and Modern Industry in Capital Volume 1.

Whilst many analysts of the left and right sides of capitalism have defined capitalism in our current era variously as platform capitalism, the app economy, surveillance capitalism, and techno-feudalism. The fundamentals of capitalism in terms of social relations are the same and the driving forces are the same, but they are right to recognise that capitalist enterprises have organised themselves differently from other eras.

Technology in perspective

We are not living in a world where most of society is working in information technology, but many use it as part of their jobs.

The Office for National Statistics report UK Digital Economic Research: 2020 showed that using the OECD’s ‘narrow’ definition of the digital economy, digital products accounted for 5 percent of Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2020. Using the wider OECD definition, products significantly affected by digitisation accounted for up to 20.7 percent in 2020, down from a revised figure of 21.2 percent in 2019. This report showed that research, health, finance, retail, manufacturing and real estate industries are all larger than the digital products sector in terms of GVA.

You can’t eat technology for dinner, it doesn’t keep the rain off and you can’t ride it into town, but technology helps produce food, houses and transportation – more and more efficiently with every iteration. The massive amounts of quantitative analysis, the number crunching, and instant communication, has enabled production at scales and efficiencies not seen before.

Productivity figures from sweatshops in Cambodia, for instance, can be analysed in air-conditioned offices in California and decisions made and responses delivered in a matter of seconds.

Some of the Big Tech enterprises are in direct competition: Google and Facebook (which includes Instagram and Whatsapp) are selling ads, giving opportunities to platforms that want to gather information about you to puts ads right in your face. Google and Facebook are said to share a duopoly in online advertising.

Amazon is mainly known for its online retail and delivery business, but most of its operating profit is in ‘the cloud’ (tinyurl.com/yc2j3s4h) – that is data centres where it rents out disk space and computing power. Second in the data-centre business is Microsoft (MS), which is primarily about business software and operating systems (OS), and Google is also pushing into the data centre market.

Apple is primarily in consumer hardware including iPhones, iPads, laptops and desktop computers. In the developed world the iPhone is the dominant mobile phone technology. In the less developed world, Google’s Android OS dominates but the hardware comes from different suppliers.

How did big tech get so big?

Analysts have identified four phenomena that allowed Big Tech to emerge: deregulation, financialisation, globalisation and technological convergence.

Often cited as the key piece of deregulation that paved the way for social media was Section 230 of the 1996 US Telecommunications Act which stated:

‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider’.

Social media sites, it can be argued, are fulfilling the same role as paper publishers who are responsible for what they publish, but for social media after Section 230 it was considered that anything posted on them was ‘user-generated content’ – and users were responsible, not publishers.

Software rarely has the regulatory safeguards that physical products have – think of trying to sell a car with no brakes or a kettle that catches on fire. Fujitsu has paid private compensation for its part in the UK Post Office scandal and, unusually, is also facing criminal proceedings (tinyurl.com/u2xz9zx7). In July this year 8.5 million MS Windows servers were made inoperable due to a faulty software update from an anti-virus company. Delta Airlines, whose operations were massively disrupted, are suing the anti-virus company claiming the outage cost them $500 million, with 1.8 million passengers affected (tinyurl.com/4kaj3s2x). Only those who can afford to sue them will get any money back.

Perhaps ‘lack of regulation’ is a better term – it’s largely a case of legislation not being able to keep up with the rapid innovation of digital services.

The expectation of profits means big tech firms don’t have to look far for sources of investment, which means they can expand in-house, or alternatively acquire smaller firms to increase market share either by embracing or extinguishing a rival technology. A current example is OpenAI, owners of ChatGPT, with an estimated $2 billion in revenue in 2024, though yet to turn a profit due to the huge cost of training AI models (tinyurl.com/2cub8my8). Twitter, for example, made profits in 2018 and 2019, the first since its inception in 2012. Since Elon Musk took over and renamed it, revenue has fallen sharply and ‘X’ has massive debts (tinyurl.com/rbtsh74f).

Globalisation allowed Big Tech companies to minimise their tax burden and move production to places with lower wages. They often have European headquarters in low-tax Ireland. Many consumers are familiar with Microsoft’s Indian Tech Support call centre, while the Foxconn City Factory complex in Shenzhen, China, makes parts for Apple products, and a global army of content moderators work for Facebook and ChatGPT in less developed parts of the world.

Technical convergence basically means devices doing more and more and being linked over the internet. Whilst a telephone handset makes calls, a camera takes pictures, a torch shines a light and a computer runs apps, in a smartphone these roles are combined into one device. These hardware functions rely on software to work, providing apps through app stores, and gateways to other services such as shops, entertainment and games. Both Google Play Store and Apple App Store charge a fee to stock software in their stores, and up to 30 percent commission on app sales and in-app purchases. This is a part of what is known as platformisation (tinyurl.com/5ybrxmdv).

Too big?

Any casual follower of the industry will have noticed that the tide seems to be turning. The section on the Wall St Journal website providing advice for potential investors warns that:

‘Governments around the world are evaluating the impacts that massive tech platforms and social networks have on businesses and consumers. In the coming months, regulations in the European Union and the United States will likely take effect, pushing tech companies to prioritise data protection, harm reduction, the ethical use of AI, and commitment to sustainability goals.’

Over the years there have been a number of skirmishes but the 2023 EU Digital Markets Act, and the EU Product Liability Directive currently being revised to include digital technology, are more significant. A US federal judge ruled in August that Google had violated US antitrust (anti-monopoly) law by maintaining an internet search monopoly. In October the US Department of Justice said in a petition to the court that it may recommend dismantling Google’s core businesses, writing that:

‘That would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features — including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence — over rivals or new entrants.’

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is an EU regulation that aims to make the digital economy ‘fairer’ and more contestable. It became applicable in May 2023. The DMA aims to ensure a higher degree of competition in European digital markets by preventing large companies from abusing their market power and by allowing new players to enter the market.

Twenty-two services across six companies – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft – were identified as ‘core platform services’ by the EU in September 2023. The companies are known as ‘gatekeepers’ due to the ‘durable market position in some digital sectors’ and because they also meet certain criteria related to the number of users, their revenue, or size.

However, there have been accusations from US-based commentators that the rules were carefully constructed so as not to affect European companies and that it is purely about protectionism. As one example, Spotify, a Swedish company which trades on the New York Stock Exchange via a company in Luxembourg, could well have been on the list.

Almost 40 years after it came into force, the European Union is undertaking a major revision of the Product Liability Directive (Directive 85/374/EEC). The aim of this reform is to adapt ‘the standards to the conditions and needs of the digital single market’. To this end, software will in future be considered as a product.

The UK government prior to the general election this year also passed the Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumers Act (DMCC), a similar piece of legislation which surprisingly is the only one to include some protection for consumers, specifically for mis-selling and secondary ticket-pricing, such as the recent fiasco with the tickets for Oasis concerts.

We know there is a to and fro that goes on between lawmakers and Big Tech whilst the laws are being drafted, as Big Tech tries to make sure the legislation, if it has to exist at all, isn’t too damaging.

What’s in store for Big Tech in the future? Will we see monopolies destroyed, and how much will that affect the working class as a whole? Of particular interest to us is, how will it affect us as socialists?

Does it matter?

So in the current era of capitalism we have seen the immensely innovative system undergo great changes in the forces of production, and these changes are ongoing. Perhaps monopolies in certain markets will be broken, or perhaps it is a tendency for states always to be reactive and too slow.

As socialists the monopoly we are mainly concerned with is the monopoly that the capitalist class has over the means of producing wealth, and creating a socialist society where no such monopoly is possible, as everything in and on the world will be owned in common and managed democratically.

Here and now our job as socialists is to make socialists, and digital technology is a major method of promoting socialist ideas – so with changes in the platforms and networks we use there could be profound effects for spreading socialism. There might be profound effects if and when the socialist movement gets big enough to become a threat to capitalism, and when we do win there might be big consequences in having forces of production so complex and powerful at our disposal. Then the factories of invention will go from merely servicing the capitalist system to becoming communities for finding creative solutions to fulfil human needs.

PDH