Pathfinders: Bad apples (2025)

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

There’s a popular saying, origin uncertain, that ‘America innovates, China imitates and Europe regulates’. That’s not true anymore in the case of China, which is leading from the front these days in AI and green tech. But Europe continues to live up to its reputation, last month by fining Apple and Meta €500m and €200m respectively for certain dubious business practices deemed to be in breach of the 2022 Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU’s attempt at levelling the online playing field. The European Commission declared that Apple was guilty of anti-competitive behaviour with its App Store, specifically by ‘restricting app developers in their ability to inform customers of alternative offers or marketplaces that could be found outside its own and steer them towards purchases.’ Meanwhile Meta had erred by introducing a ‘consent or pay’ model which invites users to take out a monthly subscription or else let Meta hoover up all their Facebook and Instagram user data for sale to third parties (BBC news, 7 July).

The Meta model is a typical example of how firms exploit audience capture. They’ve got their customers hooked, so now’s the time to take the piss out of them with extra charges. It’s a bit like what the big streaming services have been doing lately by introducing adverts into paid subscriptions, and then inviting subscribers to pay extra to go ad-free, all in the name of ‘choice’. But is Meta really offering a choice? One might suspect that the real deal is ‘pay up and we’ll plunder your data anyway.’

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. Under the pressure of competition, each developer adopts a walled-garden approach, for the sole purpose of protecting future profits. Most will eventually fail, and the few successes which do emerge are of course incompatible with each other. Producers have every incentive to maintain this incompatibility, make their products impossible to repair, lock in customers, and oppose any move towards component standardisation. In the ensuing market battle, the ultimate victor may not be the best technical product but the one with the biggest marketing muscle. When you decide to ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’, you can end up with a cactus instead of an orchid.

Take electric cars, for instance. What’s deterring buyers, apart from up-front cost, is range anxiety related to lack of charging infrastructure, and long charge times. The real problem is the vast range of models, sizes and batteries being produced. Logically, producers could have cooperated in the first place to produce just one standard battery for all cars, together with standardised quick-replacement mechanisms, so you could swap them out at any garage in mere minutes. But capitalism doesn’t do logic. That’s not to say that EV battery standardisation won’t ever happen, but the battle for profits comes first, and never mind the waste.

Recent EU regulations have been an attempt to override the jarring contradiction between what producers do for profit and what people actually want. So for example, there are regulations to ban designed obsolescence, ban greenwashing, and enforce a ‘right to repair’. These are all worthy enough measures from an environmental perspective, but they are likely to damage the bloc’s overall competitiveness with the less scrupulous USA and China. The Wall Street Journal tartly responded with a 2024 article entitled ‘Europe Regulates Its Way to Last Place‘.

So it was that in 2022, in an effort to reduce much electronic waste due to the multiplicity of different charging cables, the EU put a stop to Apple’s proprietary Lightning port and forced the firm to change its Euro-market products to use the industry-standard USB-C charging port. Now Apple are hopping mad about the new DMA fine over its restrictive App Store, and have lodged an appeal. Perhaps they will argue that if the ruling were applied to offline traders, Tesco would be legally bound to advertise Sainsbury’s products, Asda to advertise Aldi, and so on.

Apple boss Tim Cook reportedly got on the whine-line to US President Donald Trump to complain about all this, presumably in the hope that Agent Orange would put the squeeze on the EU mandarins via more tariff threats. Trump might be less than enthusiastic though. He is thought to be greatly dischuffed at Cook’s polite but steadfast refusal to cave in to his demand that Apple ‘reshore’ all its production facilities to the US. From Cook’s perspective, this would be an utterly bonkers move which would cut a gigantic hole in Apple’s profits, given that US workers cost a lot more than Chinese or Indian ones. Moreover, it would require several years of intense planning, making it scarcely worth consideration given that Trump’s effective time in office could expire as soon as November 2026 with the US mid-term elections. So, appeal or not, Apple may decide to suck it up and pay the fine. €500m is a drop in the bucket to Apple, and a lot cheaper than eviscerating a $3tn empire just to give Trump a few good headlines.

If capitalism really worked in humanity’s benefit, there wouldn’t be any need to keep making laws to curb its natural tendencies. All capitalist producers are bad apples in this sense. Meanwhile attempts at regulation can often mean states or trading blocs are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of global competitiveness. The world has long since socialised production. What it now needs to do is socialise ownership and control of that production too. If it doesn’t, the spiralling chaos will continue, with disastrous prospects for humanity and the planet.

Paddy Shannon

What is 'post-scarcity'?

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A post-capitalist society has to be, by its very nature, a ‘post-scarcity’ society. It has to be a society technologically capable of adequately meeting the needs of its people. This capacity constitutes the material foundations upon which the kind of social outlook and values indispensable to the very existence of such a society can arise and truly flourish. Without it, without an ample supply of the goods and services we all need to enjoy a reasonably decent standard of living, a debilitating and scarcity-driven competitive scramble will inevitably set in, undermining our willingness to cooperate with each other and sapping our desire to work for the common good.

But what exactly does an ‘ample supply of goods and services’ mean in practical terms? Obviously, what is ‘ample’ is dependent on how much we are able to produce in the first place, but it is also crucially contingent on what we ourselves consider to be ‘ample’ – our cultural values. That is to say, it is culturally conditioned.

Consumerism

In a capitalist society, your status correlates positively with how much you conspicuously consume in the form of material wealth. This is what makes consumerism such an integral aspect of our way of life under capitalism.

The point about consumerism is that there is technically no upper limit to the quantities, or money values, of goods and services you could strive to consume. Hence the emphasis on it ‘always’ being a desirable goal that one should consume more – a suggestion that conveniently chimes with the commercial interests of businesses wanting to increase their sales. More is always better. That there is no limit on how much you should consume stems from the fact that status competition itself is essentially a zero-sum game. I can only boost my social status within a status hierarchy at your expense (and vice versa).

According to the argument, it is not just that your sense of well-being and happiness is said to grow in line with your rising level of material consumption; crucially, it is also because this rising level of material consumption works to enhance your status in the eyes of others. The corollary of this is that those lower down this status hierarchy must therefore feel, to that extent, a little less satisfied and less happy with life — at least according to consumerist ideology. The only way in which they might mitigate this relative sense of dissatisfaction or deprivation is by striving to consume more – not just more but relatively more than others around them are consuming.

Our capacity to consume more is, however, dependent on us improving our economic circumstances and increasing our purchasing power, in comparison with others. But, of course, this cannot logically happen for most people in a capitalist society since the very mechanism of capitalist incentivisation itself depends on the systemic entrenchment, and even deepening, of economic inequality. Capitalism needs us to feel dissatisfied with our lot in life, by comparison with others, so we can all the more enthusiastically buy into, and embrace, what it is (literally) attempting to sell us. And, of course, work harder to achieve it.

This is an example of contrived or artificial scarcity. It is contrived because what the system is attempting to implant in us are what Marcuse called ‘false needs’.

Produce more stuff?

What can we do about it? It cannot be emphasised too much that ‘scarcity’ in this sense will not diminish and disappear simply by augmenting or adding to our capacity to produce yet more stuff – that is, by further expanding the already formidable forces of production at our disposal.

The problem is not that we lack the technological wherewithal to make a post-scarcity and post-capitalist society feasible. The problem is, rather, that we allow a system of profit-oriented and market-based production to continue to exist and to fundamentally get in the way of fully realising the productive potential we already possess.

A post-capitalist society, while it is not a recipe for a kind of stoical belt tightening is, on the other hand, not an excuse for some sort of turbocharged consumerism. The grounds for rejecting the latter are as compelling as the grounds for rejecting the former

Instead, there is a middle way, if you like. According to this approach the technological potential to meet humanity´s basic requirements for food, shelter and so on, to a reasonable level, should be looked upon as providing us with the means and the opportunity to better accommodate, or attend to, those other (and often neglected) needs we all have as human beings quite apart from our physical or material needs.

Lifestyle changes?

One thing is for certain: just privately reflecting upon the subject of consumerism and consciously seeking to adjust your own consumer behaviour, however much this might be welcomed, is not going to be enough. Not nearly enough. ‘Consumerism’ as it has been defined here is fundamentally a social phenomenon.

This is the problem with much of the currently burgeoning literature on the theme of a post-growth – and even, post-capitalist – society, awash, as it often is, with informative and penetrating insights into the negative social and environmental consequences of ‘consumerism’. The focus is too much on the particular lifestyles of particular individuals.

With some notable exceptions, there seems to be little in the way of a well-grounded analysis linking this phenomenon we call consumerism with the underlying socioeconomic relations that define our existing capitalist social order. The general tenor of the approach is essentially moralistic in tone and, ultimately, the solutions offered seem to hinge more on reforming or tinkering around with the system than getting rid of it.

Of course, changing values is undeniably important if we are to fundamentally change the nature of the society we live in. The point is simply that we cannot just rail against the ‘consumerist values’ of this society, as we see it, without understanding where they originate from, the material circumstances out of which they have arisen. Criticism has also to be coupled with a clear commitment to changing these circumstances.

Not just subjective

We need also to look at the supply side of the equation as well – not just the demand side. We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society where we can just go out and kill an antelope or gather roots whenever the hunger pangs prompt us to do so. We depend instead on a highly developed system of food production linking the farmer and the consumer through a complex chain of intermediate stages.

In other words, ‘artificial scarcity’ has an ‘objective’ dimension, aside from being rooted in an ideology. It would be absurd, for instance, to accuse a starving person or a homeless person of ‘consumerism’ because they wanted food or shelter. The scarcity they experience is real enough, but the point is that the reason for it occurring is both contrived – artificial – and inexcusable. Quite simply, people should not have to go without in this day and age. Yet they do.

One very obvious reason why this happens is the enormous diversion of human and material resources away from socially useful production into socially useless forms of economic activities. The purpose of such activities is not to meet human needs but to keep the capitalist system ticking over on its own terms.

Keeping the capitalist money system ticking over involves quite literally reducing the human and material resources available for meeting human needs. These are the very real opportunity costs of propping up a system of capitalist production, which cannot be denied or just brushed under the carpet. There are other, more direct and visible, ways in which human needs are blatantly disregarded and ignored as well. Thus, while we talk of starving and homeless people, we surely cannot be unaware of the grotesque spectacle of millions of empty homes languishing in the face of a growing problem of homelessness or food being destroyed in the face of hunger for no better reason than to push up prices or keep them high.

Such scarcity is ‘artificial’ in the sense that there is no logical reason whatsoever why it should exist other than the fact that it arises from the nature of the society we happen to live in. It will not cease to exist until this society ceases to exist and replaced by one in which meeting human needs is the sole concern.

Robin Cox

Cooking the Books: Axe the rich (2025)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the measures being urged on the government to solve its ‘fiscal problem’ is ‘tax the rich’ by means of a levy on the personal wealth of some capitalists.

‘Advocates of a UK wealth tax, including Lord Kinnock, have proposed an annual 2% tax on wealth above £10m. Wealth tax campaign group Tax Justice UK has calculated this would affect about 20,000 people — fewer than 0.04% of the population — and raise £24bn a year’ (Sky News).

According to the latest figures (for the period 2020 to 2022) from the Office for National Statistics, ‘The wealthiest 1% of households had wealth of at least £3,121,500’.

So, the proposal would only affect some of the super-rich, not even all of the ‘top 1 percent’, let alone the whole of the capitalist class.

The ‘fiscal problem’ facing the British capitalist state, which Labour currently has responsibility for running, is how to pay for its essential spending on such things as the military, education and health for the working class, ‘benefits’ for those not in work, as well as its own administration. This can only be covered by money raised from taxes or through borrowing. The government doesn’t want to borrow more since this risks raising the rate of interest it has to pay lenders; which in turn increases the amount of tax it would need to raise, since taxation is the only source it has of money to pay the interest on its debts (the so-called ‘National Debt’).

The irony is that all taxes already fall in the end on property and property income, irrespective of who pays them in the first instance. Obviously corporation tax, income tax on dividends, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, and employers’ national insurance do so directly. But other taxes do so indirectly.

To be able to work efficiently workers require a given standard of living and an adequate money income to pay for this. By and large, though not automatically, what workers are paid goes up in line with the cost of living. If this rises, so sooner or later will wages. Taxes such as VAT on what workers need to buy to maintain their working skills are in effect passed on to employers. Similarly with a direct tax on wages; this too gets passed on. In fact, with PAYE, workers never even see the tax part of their nominal wages; what counts in terms of maintaining a standard of living appropriate to their working skills is their take-home pay and what it will buy.

Arguments about taxation are essentially arguments about how much in taxes particular sections of the property-owning class should pay. Taxes on wages and on what workers consume fall on employers. A wealth tax would be a tax on what capitalists consume in extravagant living and would enable part of the burden of taxation to be shifted from employers on to the super-rich. It wouldn’t make any difference to workers.

A wealth tax also implies the continued existence of the super-rich. One of their arguments against it is precisely that one effect of such a tax would be to drive some of them out of the jurisdiction of the British capitalist state.

Socialists don’t want to maintain the rich so that the state can milk them. Nor do we want to redistribute their wealth amongst the rest of the population so as to try to achieve a more equal society contrary to capitalism’s nature. We want the means for producing wealth to be commonly owned by society as a whole so that they can be used, under democratic control, to directly provide what people need. We don’t want to tax the rich. We want to abolish the division of society into the rich and the rest.

The state of the state’s finances (2025)

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politicians love talking big numbers: ‘We’re spending £5 million to stop The Thing.’ Or ‘We will spend an additional £20 million to increase The Pittance by a penny.’ When Starmer and his chums came into office they mummered and howled over discovering the astronomical £22 billion ‘fiscal black hole’ left in the public accounts by the Tories. Of course, for the majority of people living on pennies at a time, such figures represent unimaginable amounts. Eking out a few quid from week to week and making every pound work is the lot of most people, so such sums seem like an unforgivable profligacy.

Everyone in politics knew there was a gap in spending plans, and that Labour, despite all its promises not to increase taxation, would have to find a way to close this spending gap. The Tories had arguably laid a trap for Labour, in the form of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), a supposedly apolitical authority that marks the UK government’s financial homework. The problem is, if politicians and press just ignore it, it doesn’t do much good.

It does provide useful data, though. Its Brief Guide to the Public Finances provides a lot of the clarity regarding government spending that is missing from much of the daily rhetoric. The key piece of data is the total spend by the government: ‘In 2024-25, we expect it to spend £1,278.6 billion, equivalent to around £45,000 per household or 44.4 per cent of national income.’ Against that background, £22 billion is a rounding error that could easily be sorted by knocking a few invoices into the next financial year.

The issue is that the income for the state is expected to be ‘£1,141.2 billion, equivalent to around £40,000 per household or 39.7 per cent of national income.’ This is the infamous deficit of £137.3 billion. This means adding to a rising national debt: ‘in 2024-25, we expect debt to be equivalent to 95.9 per cent of national income. It is equivalent to around £2.8 trillion or £98,000 per household’. This is significant, because the government has to pay interest on that debt: ‘Net interest payments on the national debt are expected to cost £105.2 billion in 2024-25’.

To put that in perspective: ‘The biggest items [of public spending] are health £193.3 billion, education £89.2 billion and defence £37.6 billion.’ Whilst, in theory, the state is immortal and need never pay back its total debts (when particular debts fall due, it can just roll them over and borrow more money to pay its creditors), servicing the interest bill can become expensive, especially if confidence in any particular government falls and creditors demand higher interest rates to cover their risks. This means the government has to manage the size of its debt: this is why deficits become such an all-consuming obsession.

Politicians, however, point to the difference between capital spending and current spending. The government invests ‘£146.1 billion – 11 per cent of the total – on capital investment such as roads and buildings and on loans to businesses and individuals’. This spending is backed by physical infrastructure and leads to ownership of assets. On top of that it spends ‘£450.7 billion on the day-to-day ‘current’ running costs of public services, grants and administration. This is 35 per cent of public spending’. Additionally, the government spends £313.0 billion on welfare payments (£150.7 billion of which is pensions).

The government thus prefers to look at the current deficit which: ‘counts all receipts and all current spending, but excludes spending on net investment’. The current deficit stands at £60.7 billion.

This accounts for why Labour made politically disastrous decisions, such as freezing winter fuel payments and cutting Personal Independence Payments (for a paltry £5 billion in savings, which is tiny compared to overall spending, but one twelfth of the current deficit).

They can, if they are lucky, rely on economic growth (which raises tax receipts, and lowers welfare costs) to cover much of the gap: but the plan is to have a current surplus, which gives the Chancellor of the Exchequer space to either cut taxes or increase spending in fresh areas. The expectation is to have £9.9 billion of such headroom by the next election: so the strategy is pain today and jam tomorrow.

As the OBR notes in its Economic and Fiscal Outlook – March 2025:: ‘The tax-to-GDP ratio is forecast to increase to a post-war high of 37.7 per cent of GDP in 2027-28. Part of this increase is driven by the policies announced at the previous Budget, including the increase in employer National Insurance Contributions and increases to capital taxes’. From the point of view of the capitalist class, in general, that money going to taxation comes from their available profits and lowers the amount of money available for their profitable capital investment. A record high tax rate, especially one fuelled by an effective employee tax (National Insurance employers’ contributions) will be concerning for them in terms of international competitiveness.

In their eyes, then, government indebtedness is preferable, as it forms a means of funding the state under the control and discretion of the rich, with interest rates being a kind of vote of confidence in the way a government handles the debt. The money from interest payments is also welcome to those of them who lend the government money.

The March report also notes that the government is committed to ‘increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP over the next Parliament, which would be equivalent to £17.3 billion in 2029-30’. This would in part be paid for by a £6.8 billion cut in overseas development spending (this simply represents a change from soft to hard power). This unplanned shift in spending priorities shows how the government’s carefully laid plans to generate a current surplus can easily be thrown off course.

All this wealth, though, was originally produced by the efforts of the working class. How much better and more efficient would it be if that effort was directly focused on human needs, instead of producing taxable money?

Pik Smeet

Waking up (2025)

Book Review from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the common jibes directed at the Socialist Party is that, though we have been in existence well over 100 years, we have made little or no progress in garnering support for the system we advocate to replace capitalism. We’re talking here about a stateless, moneyless, marketless society of common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – one that will be organised democratically on the basis of from each according to ability to each according to need. Our response to the jibe has always been that what we are at least doing is keeping the idea of that society alive and it will be there for the majority to establish once social consciousness has developed sufficiently for them to see the necessity of it.

Positive signs?

And we do see some positive moves in that direction, evidenced by the idea of a moneyless, borderless world society being advocated from a variety of quarters, often quite independent of any contact with or knowledge of the Socialist Party. In recent times, for example, we have reviewed books such as Beyond Money: A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson from Australia and Description of the World of Tomorrow: A World Without Money or Barter or Exchange: a Civilisation of Free Access by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal from France. A couple of years ago, in the United States, we had Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution from Matthew Holton, founder of the ‘Moneyless Society’ Facebook site, which boasts 20,000 members. Earlier this year, Justin Fairchild, also from the US, brought out Unchained: Living Without Money, advocating a society in which ‘cooperation replaces competition, access replaces ownership, purpose replaces profit’. And now, from Harald Neslein Sandø, a Norwegian living in Spain and writing in English, we have Waking Up. A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, whose subject of exploration is unmistakeably the kind of society we have always advocated, even though he does not call it, as we do, ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’.

Exploring possibilities

Sandø ‘s book also differs from the others in that it is a work of fiction, science fiction in fact. In his introductory note, the author describes science fiction as ‘a canvas for exploring possibilities’ and his book as ‘an invitation to imagine, question and reflect’. It chooses, in fact, to tell the wholly imaginary story of an individual, Benjamin, who, having been cryogenically frozen when about to die from cancer in 2015, is brought back to life 100 years later after a new society has been established. This is a society based no longer on money but on ‘community effort’, where, as Benjamin is told by one of the first characters he meets, there is ‘shared stewardship’ of the planet and ‘no one owns it – we belong to it’, and there is ‘no money, no ownership, no competition’.

We get little explanation of how this new state of things was brought about, apart from asides such as ‘the planet was about to collapse due to climate change and pollution’, ‘the need for a completely different system became clear’, ‘the monetary system was killing the planet as it demanded a constant overconsumption of resources’, ‘it was a global, democratic decision’, and ‘this transformation has been made possible through a new mindset – a mindset of trust and respect’. We are, however, supplied with intricate details about how the society operates via Benjamin’s discovery of the new way of living people have and the unimaginably advanced forms of technology that challenge everything he once knew. He finds a sustainable world in which human beings collaborate with one another, innovation thrives, mutual support has taken the place of conflict, and there are ‘no supervisors, no bosses, no payroll, no urgency’. And he is told: ‘For the first time in the written history of mankind … we have evolved to a stage where we can look at this planet as a whole, see humanity as one family, and live without borders. This is a world where we all coexist peacefully, without war.’ He also learns that ‘through the efficient management of resources, we have achieved a relative abundance that allows everyone to live comfortably in their own way, regardless of where they are in the world’. It has also become a world of regenerative agriculture where ‘rewilded landscapes flourished’ and which ‘thrived not on domination but on unity’. One of the characters Benjamin meets tells him: ‘We take care of each other, and in doing that, we take care of ourselves. There’s no struggle, no scarcity. Just collaboration.’ The same character goes on: ‘Human nature turned out to be not only selfish and violent. You can choose and, you choose friendliness, which I’m very happy for’.

Human interest

A bit of a fairy tale, a pipe dream, some might say. But it is made less of one – and given a certain plausibility – by the author’s continual explanation of how it works in practice, how the highly advanced technology used to make it operate has been developed and keeps developing. This plausibility is enhanced – and the reader is drawn into the narrative – by the ‘human’ story it tells of how the individual who has been brought back to life adapts to the new world he finds. The book had begun by painting a picture of Benjamin’s former existence when he was a billionaire capitalist driven entirely by the need he felt to accumulate wealth. Now on waking up to find that money plays no part in anyone’s existence, he first feels out of place, ‘obsolete’, ‘not knowing where he belongs’, as he puts it, and he (and we) wonder whether he will cope mentally, how he will accept and adjust to the completely new system and mindset he finds all around him..

As a way of trying to comfort Benjamin and ease his integration into the new world, the guide assigned to him puts an ingenious twist into what he is finding by saying ‘We are all capitalists, as we are living off the shared capital of the planet and universe’. He is then pulled into the drama of a small group of ‘renegades’ who seek (unsuccessfully) to sabotage things and return the world to its old competitive ways, but he comes out the other side in clear opposition to this and in support of a ‘borderless globe’, where, in words that he himself now utters, there is ‘seamless harmony between humans and nature’, where everyone leads ‘their own versions of a good life, respecting each other and the planet’. All this lends some genuine ‘human interest’ to what might otherwise be an accumulation of dry technological detail and, in fact, manages to make the book something of a page turner, its 200-odd pages having been devoured by the current writer in a single sitting.

How do we get there?

There is clearly some comparison to be made here with other attempts at depicting life and organisation in a future non-market society of voluntary cooperation and free access. For many it will bring to mind, for example, William Morris’s late 19th century News from Nowhere, Robert Llewellyn’s News from Gardenia from 2012, and, in particular, the very recent attempt by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass (Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics) to provide a kind of day-to-day outline of what a future society ‘without money or a market’ might be like, something they call ‘a total alternative to capitalism’ and offering, as the authors put it, ‘everything from a plan for resource allocation to an outline of what life will feel like’. The main difference between this book and Sandø’s, however, is that, while Vettese and Pendergrass’s depiction is founded on profound knowledge of and reflection on the scientific and technological problems that a marketless society would need to deal with and overcome, Sandø’s vision, while also technological, is far more ‘imaginative’, fantasy-laden one might say. At the same time, it must be said, this is a factor that contributes to its readability.

From a socialist point of view, the main problem that arises from Sandø’s book – and indeed the others mentioned here, including William Morris’s classic – is that none of them deal effectively with the ‘how’, ie, how we get there. None of them specify the spreading of consciousness by the vast majority of workers as the prime condition – the sole condition – under which a socially conscious working class can, by democratic use of the vote, take the power necessary to abolish capitalism and set about organising a genuine socialist society of the kind looked forward to by all these sources – even if they do not all necessarily use the term ‘socialism’ to describe it.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

A number of the other books mentioned in this review have themselves been reviewed in previous Socialist Standards:

• Oct 2022: Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson
• Oct 2022: Description of the World of Tomorrow by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal
• Jan 2023: Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holton
• Mar 2023: Half-Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergras

Economics Reworked (2025)

Book Review from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Economy of Want. Economics Reworked. By Donald Power. ISBN 978-1399985888. Also available free from Amazon as an e-book.

This self-published book starts off well enough. That, like all other animals, humans survive by applying their natural energy to obtain from the rest of nature what they need. Thanks to humans’ particular anatomy, their needs — or ‘wants’ as Power calls them — have become immensely greater than those of any other animal, as have the ways of obtaining from nature the means of satisfying them. How they obtain them has been the basis of the economic system of every human society.

Present-day society, he points out, is one where a minority owns most natural resources and instruments of production, fashioned and refashioned from materials that originally came from nature, while the rest have nothing but their natural ability to work. The latter have to work for the former and provide them with the means to satisfy their wants. This means, Power claims, that the economy is driven by what the owners ‘want’ in order to satisfy their needs. They pay workers to produce these and so provide workers with the money to satisfy some of their own ‘wants’ even if not much more than enough to maintain their particular ability to work.

That is alright as far as it goes, but the assumption is that what drives the economy today is the consumption wants of the owners. Power explicitly states this and it is the basis of his argument against the dominant school of economics that teaches that the free market system tends to lead to full employment and also of his explanation of booms and slumps. According to him, the level of employment depends on what the owners want (desire) to consume, so it is entirely possible that they might not want enough to bring about the full employment of the whole workforce. Booms are explained by the owners coming to want more and slumps by their coming to want less after the bubble bursts. He would seem to be saying that the economy is driven by the arbitrary desires of business owners.

He is, however, on the right track in that how today’s economy moves does depend on what the owners do with the surplus that the workers provide them with. But it is not what they want to consume that drives the economy but what they re-invest — or don’t. Power is well aware that they seek profits but gives the impression that this is something they decide to do when they desire to consume more. In reality, it is something that is forced upon them by the workings of the competitive struggle for profits, which is part of what capitalism is; they have to give priority to re-investment in more modern machinery and methods just to survive as a business concern. The capitalist economy is not driven by consumption, not even the consumption of the capitalists. It is driven by business owners’ market-imposed quest for profits, not their own consumption. What we have today is not so much an Economy of Want as an Economy of Profit.

Power’s main concern is to save the planet. Because he thinks that the economy is driven by wants rather than profits, he thinks that it can be reformed — ‘redesigned’ is a word he uses — to work differently by measures to change what people want to buy or use. He proposes to limit the consumption of the owners and, through taxes and subsidies, to re-direct the population towards wanting goods and services whose production and use don’t harm the rest of nature. This is a desirable goal but is incompatible with the present economic system which is driven by profits not wants and so requires its abolition.

Having said this, the book is written in simple, easy-to-read English. It is also refreshing to read a book from a critic of the way capitalism works who doesn’t repeat nonsense about banks having the power to create money from thin air. He accepts that work is the basis of wealth-production. In fact, he uses a labour theory of value, even though he doesn’t realise that Marx was as aware as he is that this doesn’t explain the price of land, paintings or the high income of talented footballers and other artists (demand in relation to unique supply does; the labour theory only applies to what can be reproduced).

Adam Buick