Word Socialist Radio (2025)

Party News from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Word 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.

The podcast has new episodes every Monday morning. All episodes, and platforms where people can subscribe, are listed here: www.worldsocialistradio.com

Blogger's Note:

The RSS link for the podcast is available at the following link. This gives you further details of where you can listen to it. (I listen to the podcast on Spotify.)

Palestine: the failure of Jewish nationalism (2025)

From the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

What’s happening in Gaza and Palestine today shows the failure of the Zionist project, conceived of towards the end of the 19th century, to set up a separate state for Jews.

The Zionists preached that what Jews, including Jewish workers, should do is not simply integrate into the states in which they found themselves but agitate for a separate Jewish state — somewhere, anywhere. Uganda and Madagascar were considered at one point. In the end, on religious and ancient historical grounds, the Zionists decided that this should be Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire.

Arguably, it was a crazy project from the start. To settle people from Europe in another part of the world, where the people and their rulers were unlikely to accept this, was a recipe for trouble. But at the time — the end of the 19th century — this would not have seemed so crazy, as it was common practice for European states in a position to do so — Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and belatedly Italy and Germany — to settle Europeans in various other parts of the world, mainly Africa, on land traditionally occupied by locals.

The idea of a separate state, to be a safe home for Jews, seemed particularly attractive after the experience in WW2. Israel was to be that safe home. But it could never be. Israel was established as a recognised separate state in 1948 but was opposed by the local rulers who immediately went to war to try to prevent it but lost, resulting in hundreds of thousands of the local population being expelled from where they lived.

Ever since, Israel has sought ‘secure frontiers’. After winning the Six-Day War In 1967, again initiated by the rulers of surrounding states, Israel annexed the Golan Heights from Syria and East Jerusalem from Jordan and occupied the rest of Palestine including Gaza and also Sinai. They later withdrew from Sinai but kept ‘security control’ of the rest, creating a sort of Greater Israel. Following the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria last December Israel has occupied more of that country.

The Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023 confirmed that Israel was not in fact a safe place for Jews. And Israel’s response — not an eye for an eye, but 40 eyes for one eye and rising — has made things more insecure, through the growth of anti-semitism, for those Jews who choose not to settle in Israel (most Jews in fact).

So, in terms of providing a safe home for Jews, Zionism has been a complete failure. Jews living outside Israel (most of these are in the United States, as many in fact as are in Israel) are in a much safer position.

Israel may well reconquer Gaza but history suggests that in the long term its present government’s policy of trying to hold down a hostile population larger than the number of Jews living there cannot succeed. It is bound to fail, just as apartheid did in South Africa.

What this shows is that socialists were correct in opposing from the start Zionism and its project. Socialism, not a separate Jewish state, was the solution to problems Jewish workers faced. In the meantime, Jewish workers should integrate into the workers’ movement in the state where they lived. Many did — more in fact than went to live in Israel — and took part not just in the workers’ movement but also in politics generally. Some of the key figures involved in current discussions and decisions about the Gaza war chose this sensible path. For instance, Trump’s special envoy Witkoff, the French President Macron, and Ukraine President Zelensky.

Most of the Leninist left enthusiastically support armed action to abolish the state of Israel. That would just be to continue the senseless cycle of massacres and counter-massacres that have gone on since the first Jews arrived from Europe. Today Israel is where 70 to 80 percent of the Jews living there were actually born. More than half have no family connection with Europe but rather with the Middle East and North Africa, so can hardly be called colonists. It is now just another state, which like all states needs to be captured by the working class to establish socialism and then abolished along with all states, not singled out for abolition under capitalism while all other states remain.

Most of those on the marches — and probably of those expressing support for the banned Palestine Action group — will basically just want an end to the daily killing and destruction in Gaza and are understandably frustrated that nothing is being done about it. For them, ‘free Palestine’ will mean simply that the population there and in the West Bank should be free from the political oppression by the Israeli state that it undoubtedly is suffering. Naturally those oppressed want it to end and socialists obviously sympathise with this. But how to bring it to an end?

Most governments say they favour the setting up of a separate Palestine state alongside Israel. That would certainly end political oppression by the Israeli state for the new state’s subjects but, a relief as that would be, it would not end capitalist exploitation; from that point of view, it would just be another capitalist state and a different ruling class.

In any event, a two-state solution doesn’t seem practicable in present circumstances as, to work, it would require a change of attitude by the rulers — and indeed of most of the Jewish population — of Israel. That is not impossible, but the effort required to bring this about would be better employed in convincing all sections of the working class living in the historic territory of Palestine that they have a common interest in ending their exploitation by uniting to bring capitalism to an end. Even within capitalism they have an interest in there being political democracy, which includes the equal treatment of all the subjects of a state (and indeed of non-citizens living there too).

In the end, the only effective and lasting way out is going to be the ‘no state’ solution, the abolition of capitalism on a world scale and the establishment of a classless, stateless world community based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Corbyn’s crumbs of comfort (2025)

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

‘We will only fix the crises in our society with a mass redistribution of wealth and power. That means taxing the very richest in our society’, tweeted Corbyn on 24 July announcing the launch of a new political party.

That sounds radical but a ‘mass’ redistribution of wealth is not the same as a ‘massive’ redistribution, only a redistribution to some mass of people. Interpreted literally, it would mean that some of the wealth of the very richest is to be taken from them through taxation and distributed amongst a large number of individuals. Let us say from the top 1 percent to those in the bottom 50 percent.

According to the Office for National Statistics, ‘In the April 2020 to March 2022 period, the wealthiest 1% of households held 10% of all household wealth in Great Britain, which was the same as the proportion held by the least wealthy 50% of households combined’.

The wealth tax proposed by former Labour leader Neil (now Lord) Kinnock and others of 2 percent of wealth holdings of over £10 million has been estimated to raise £24 billion a year. The total number of households in the UK is about 28 million, so 50 percent is 14 million. £24 billion divided by 14 million is about £1,714 (£33 a week) per household. No doubt a welcome amount for the families concerned but hardly enough to bring about any permanent improvement in their condition. Even if it is used to improve services rather than as a cash payment, £24 billion divided amongst 14 million is not going to be able to provide much of an improvement.

But perhaps the ‘mass’ that is to benefit from this redistribution is not to be as large as that. In an article in the Guardian (30 July) introducing the new party, Corbyn wrote that one of its policies would be to make ‘the wealthiest in society pay a bit more in tax to ensure that everyone should live in dignity’. About 20 percent of the population are considered to live in poverty. If the £24 billion were to be divided only amongst the bottom 20 percent, some 5.6 million, the amount per household would be £4,286, or an extra £82.42 a week. This would certainly help but whether it would be enough to allow them to live in dignity is another matter.

The original tweet went on to say the ‘mass redistribution of wealth and power’ intended to ‘fix the crises in our society’ would mean ‘bring[ing] energy, water, rail and mail into public ownership’. But what about the rest of production? Seemingly that is to rest in private capitalist hands, so the ‘our society’ the new party is talking about is present-day capitalist society of minority class ownership and production for profit.

Creating an egalitarian society through a redistribution of wealth within capitalism is a pipe-dream as it goes against the logic of the system. Capitalism is based on a minority owning the means of wealth production and on these being used to generate profits that are accumulated as more wealth for the owners. Inequality of wealth ownership and the tendency for the wealthy to get wealthier are built into the system.

Attempting to counter this will mean that the new party will end up being a mere party of protest, spending its time criticising the government for not doing what it ‘demands’ and ‘resisting’ when the workings of the capitalist economy force the government to make things worse.

Under-population? (2025)

Book Review from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire. By Henry Gee, Picador, 2025. 279pp.

This book takes a long view of human history. Going back to the very dawn of hominid existence, it charts the rise of one species of human – our own – among many and looks ahead to where the current slowing down of population growth and the widely expected future decline in population may lead us. Extinction, in fact, is what the author thinks is our likely destination, since smaller populations will find it difficult to summon up sufficient expertise to manage the challenges of an inimical environment and shortage of core resources. The only long-term solution to avoid extinction, he argues – and he doesn’t do it jokingly – is to branch out into space. He insists that, unless we are able to do this, the end for humanity will come within 10,000 years at the most.

As for the present and the less far-flung future, Gee, senior editor at Nature magazine and author of the prize-winning A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, has what can be regarded as an enlightened take on many facets of social organisation, in which, as he puts it ‘homo sapiens faces a series of political, social, biological and environmental crises unique in its evolutionary history’. For example, he kills stone dead the myths of current over-population and never-ending population rise and at the same time welcomes migrations of people seeking better lives elsewhere (‘the natural state of humanity’, as he puts it). This is not only for their own well-being but also because of the likely benefits for the places they migrate to, since ‘technological advancement requires a substantial resource base in the form of human brains’ and ‘fewer brains mean technological stagnation’. He celebrates too ‘the reproductive and educational empowerment of women’ that has spread to significant parts of the world. Nor does he fail to point out that the way society has been organised for the past 10,000 years (ie settled agriculture, private property, states, rulers and ruled) constitutes a tiny time period in the 315,000-year history of modern humans, little more than 3 percent in fact. And before that settled agriculture period, humans lived without leaders, states, private property and material inequality.

In addition to his view that ‘humans are running out of genetic resilience’ (ie, there won’t be enough of us), another reason he looks at space migration as a future recourse for humanity is that, in his view, climate change will bring upsets such as flooding, storms and droughts that will become increasingly difficult to deal with and are likely to cause high levels of food insecurity. He points to some food insecurity existing already, but he sees it as having ‘more to do with such human foibles as poor governance, corruption and warfare than crop failure per se’. This is undeniable, since, as multiple indicators show, there already exists enough potential food (and all the other necessaries of life) to satisfy the current population, and probably a far larger one. If it does not seem like that, this is because, as this book glimpses but does not delve into, the world’s money economy (and the rationing and conflict over resources that go with it) denies reasonable access to the means of living to a significant proportion of people. So if, as Gee has it, ‘famine is riding down hard on us, faster than ever’, this is not for lack of food or the means to produce and distribute it. It’s to do with the economic system – capitalism (a word never mentioned in this book) – that currently rules the world and causes so many ‘to starve at the banquet’. Unfortunately, this book’s unspoken assumption is that we are stuck with the form of social organisation that causes this.

For all that, however, it remains a fascinating and immensely readable piece of work, wearing its expert and up-to-date knowledge lightly over a wide range of scientific fields. It is written with verve, brio and no little humour. Particularly fascinating to some will be its depiction of a possible space settlement in the far-flung future where a hollowed asteroid is the habitat of a city or cities transported from the earth’s surface and ways have been found of creating artificial gravity – a project described by the author as ‘not insuperable’ with people by then having come to think of it as ‘entirely natural’. Who knows?

But what about the nearer future, ie, before the time comes when we, according to the author, will have to make a choice between reaching for space or becoming extinct? Well, despite his ultimate pessimism about life on earth, he does have some clear ideas about how he would like to see things pan out in the meantime. He suggests, for example, that the strain on the planet’s biological diversity could be reduced by the use of hydroponic farming, so cutting back on the need for farmland. He also recommends reducing ‘meat on the hoof carnivory’, since ‘by eating plants directly, rather than eating animals that eat plants’, humans would use ‘less of the earth’s natural bounty’ and more people could be fed.

But could they? While it’s true that the system we live under has allowed a far greater proportion of the planet’s population to live more comfortably than at any time in the past 10,000 years, that system is, by its very nature, always going to give priority to profit-making over meeting people’s needs. The author perceives quite rightly that homo sapiens has a knack ‘for getting himself out of trouble’, but surely this lies in the more ’united earth’ that Henry Gee says he wishes for rather than in humanity seeking refuge in space. Yet a ‘united earth’ will only be truly possible once we reject the profit system that currently rules humanity and in its place establish a society of common ownership and cooperative organisation with free access for everyone to the ‘earth’s natural bounty’.

Howard Moss

Material World: Standing by your trained killers (2025)

The Material World Column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 2020, the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force published its long-awaited findings on the behaviour of the nation’s special forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. It became widely known as the Brereton Report, after Major General Paul Brereton, the investigation’s lead.

Its findings were simple: Australian special forces had committed murder in Afghanistan. Thirty-nine cases were identified. The report found evidence of collusion to cover the atrocities up. Troops carried ‘throw down weapons’ to plant on their victims, to claim they were actually insurgents and the slaying was within the terms of engagement. New recruits were ‘blooded,’ ordered by their officer to kill prisoners to get their first kill. The report identified 25 individuals responsible, and stated that no-one above the rank of sergeant was involved or had knowledge of these atrocities.

So far, only one man has even been charged with murder, and is still awaiting trial. The Office of The Special Investigator, set up by the Australian Government, has noted the difficulty in reliably investigating the incidents, especially with the Taliban in power.

It is likely that only political obsessives in Australia, let alone around the world, will have even heard of the very serious findings of the report. It is unlikely that the culture of the Australian forces evolved on its own.

The British government, for its part, sprang into action and passed The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021, which created a

‘presumption that it is to be exceptional for a prosecutor to determine that a Service person or veteran should be prosecuted for alleged offences on operations outside the UK […] These measures do not apply to allegations of sexual offences, torture, crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes’.

(Although the law as originally drafted would have included them – tinyurl.com/spgbBRE3).

The BBC has been picking up stories of abuses by British forces. The 2022 Panorama programme, ‘SAS Death Squads Exposed: A British War Crime?’ observed that: ‘British special forces killed hundreds of people on night raids in Afghanistan’, and asked, ‘but were some of the shootings executions?’ More recently, the episode ‘Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes’ (May 2025) relayed stories from service personnel:

‘Killing of detainees “became routine”, the veteran said. “They’d search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them”, before cutting off the plastic handcuffs used to restrain people and “planting a pistol” by the body, he said’.

And:

‘The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.’

The story sounds almost exactly the same as the Australian one.

The BBC has, inevitably, received pushback for this reporting from the usual ‘support the troops’ types, usually of the ‘so what, war is hell’ variety, or ‘who are we to judge the actions of soldiers under pressure’. But the main response has been crickets. There has been no full bore coverage or outrage on the front pages of the national press. The stories have been simply left to sink down into the archives to be quietly forgotten.

This is the propaganda tool of ‘worthy versus unworthy victims’: the crimes of the British state will receive less attention than the crimes of official enemies. A genuinely democratic press interested in holding authorities to account for the citizenry would operate on the opposite principle.

This is hardly new. In her book Legacy of violence Caroline Elkins explores what she calls ‘legalized lawlessness’ which involves ‘legalizing, bureaucratizing and legitimating of exceptional state-directed violence when ordinary laws proved insufficient for maintaining order and control.’

One example she gives is of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in India in 1919. The event saw Brigadier General Dyer order his troops to open fire on a crowd, killing around 400 and wounding around three times as many. Despite the outrage around the world, Dyer stood by his actions, as producing a salutary terror to prevent an uprising.

His only punishment was dismissal (though the press and well-wishers raised a substantial sum of money for him). In a debate in the House of Commons on the incident, Winston Churchill depicted it as ‘a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’, that is, as an exceptional one-off, out of character with the spirit of the British army.

The House of Commons passed a resolution of censure of Dyer, but the House of Lords passed a motion condemning the lower house’s resolution. In that debate, Elkins quotes one noble peer, Viscount Finlay stating:

‘One of the mainstays of our Empire has been the feeling that every officer, whose duty it was to take action in times of difficulty, might rely, so long as he acted honestly and in the discharge of his duty, upon his superiors standing by him’.

Looking at Elkins’ narrative, this is a recurring theme: violent excesses by imperial forces are met with official investigation and sanction, only for the perpetrator to be let off after a vociferous public campaign. The most recent example of this being Sergeant Blackman, who was convicted of murder in Afghanistan.

After a strenuous campaign, the charge was downgraded to manslaughter, and he was released after serving four years in prison. Appeal judges accepted he had a stress-related mental illness leading to diminished responsibility.

The British state has opened a public enquiry under Justice Haddon-Cave. This will likely be a full and conscientious enquiry that will shed some light on the operations of the British forces in Afghanistan. The most likely outcome will be that junior heads will roll (gently), and the report will join others on the shelf, forgotten except by historians

The interests served by the British state create a need for killers, and it is unsurprising when they cross the line. What is harder to understand is the minds of people who will determinedly keep violence and slaughter available as a policy option.

Pik Smeet

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The latest Oxfam report which was released at 4th UN Financing for Development meet in Seville, Spain, shows that since 2015 the top 1% people in the world have amassed US$ 33.9 trillion in new wealth which is enough to end annual poverty 22 times over. 

(Scoop Independent News)

In some cases, health professionals perform FGM [Female Genital Mutilation] secretly in exchange for payment, turning the practice into a commercial enterprise, 

(People Daily)

The island is currently facing its worst economic crisis since the 1959 revolution. Long and daily power cuts, scarce internet connection, food and medicine shortages, and high prices are the realities of present-day Cuba. Some staple items like beans are nowhere to be found; rice production has declined and much is now imported. Sugar, too, has become an import in Cuba, which, until recently, was the leading sugar exporter in the world. People cannot make ends meet with their meager incomes — a doctor’s monthly salary is approximately $50. Even by conservative World Bank estimates, 72 percent of all Cubans live below the poverty line. Beggars seem to be everywhere, with the African community descendant from slavery being the most economically victimized. 

(Consortium News)

The entire political and intellectual machinery of the French ruling class is now moving in this direction. That includes the miserable little left, led by the Socialist Party, who bark at us from morning to night. They don’t realize that they’re participating in a broader establishment strategy: acting as the left-wing auxiliary of the right. They live in a dreamworld, wanting France to be like Germany, with a grand coalition of the centre: Social Democrats who are indistinguishable from liberals, Greens who are always clamouring for war. These people are doing the work of dividing us every day while pretending to be for unity.

(Portside)

One recent survey discovered that 70 percent of Americans are the most financially stressed that they have ever been in their entire lives. That figure alone tells us that we have a major economic crisis on our hands. The cost of living has been rising much faster than paychecks have been, and most of the country is just barely scraping by from month to month. Anyone that attempts to deny this is simply not living in reality. 

(Zero Hedge)

Donald Trump styled himself as a populist, ‘anti-establishment’ president. But look at what he has actually done in office, and you see he’s a status-quo politician with nothing to offer working Americans.

(Jacobin)

Will voters finally stop both blaming politicians for their troubles and depending on them to end them? Will voters—and non-voters—transform themselves into people who act for themselves, in their own interests, instead of allowing others to act for them? That would be what social change looks like. The survival of the human race may well depend upon it. 

(The Brooklyn Rail)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Public and private (2025)

From the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent scandals involving the once public, and now privatised, utility businesses such as those of water, rail and gas/electric have once again reopened the age-old debate between those on the left who favour public ownership of the utilities (and much else) and those on the right who think that privatisation is the only answer to the continuing travails of these services. Perhaps it might be in order to take a deep breath and look at the historical, ideological and even psychological origins of these unlikely political allegiances.

Human beings have long loved dualities in the attempt to understand the world and private/public takes its place alongside capitalist/socialist, worker/capital, reform/revolution, democracy/autocracy among countless others within polemical discourse. It is only recently that I’ve encountered any objection to this intellectual tradition courtesy of a young relative of mine claiming that she is ‘non-binary’ in her sexuality. Having long thought that man/woman was never a satisfactory duality in the first place I was not surprised by this revelation but it does serve to show the lasting power of this ideological mechanism to both inform and provoke. I won’t go into the historical origins of left and right ideological designations but their lasting allegiance to public or private capitalist economics respectively is surprising.

Nationalisation (state ownership) has a long history and we can be certain that the rich and powerful would not put their hands deep into their pockets to pay a tax that made this possible unless they could see some financial advantage. In 1858 the British state took over the East India Company to save it from the disastrous implications of the Indian Rebellion of the previous year which endangered British imperialism and the massive profits that it made for the parasite capitalist class.

In 1871 that well-known ‘socialist’ Otto von Bismarck embarked on massive state investment and control of many industries including railways, mining, agriculture, road building and, of course, the military. Needless to say that this was done, not to improve working conditions, but to accelerate German industrial development so that it might compete on the international stage both economically and militarily whilst simultaneously making unimaginable profits for his Junker supporters. Ironically Bismarck was also known as a ‘state socialist’ as well as a ‘state capitalist’ because of his introduction of a ‘welfare state’ which was supposed to blunt the increasing popularity of socialism. To do this he consulted the traitor Ferdinand Lassalle who had come up with the crackpot theory that the bourgeois state was politically neutral and could be used by the proletariat to reform capitalism until socialism was achieved. To this day leftists still use this as a programme for socialism, conveniently forgetting that it was instigated by one of socialism’s greatest enemies.

Because of these historical contradictions we have ended up with an unholy mess of Orwellian definitions of what socialism, capitalism, state capitalism, state socialism, democracy, public, private, etc. really mean. In the popular mind we can safely say that many believe socialism to be state ownership of industry and that capitalism represents ‘private’ ownership. The fact that sometimes the exact opposite is true represents the internal contradictions of capitalism and its subsequent ideological claims which, in our tabloid sound-bite media, is way too complex for their narrow political agendas. Remember that mainstream political parties are effectively PR organisations for the continuation of capitalism and have no interest in historical, economic or political truth. To celebrate the meaninglessness of it all we have two wonderful British examples: public schools are private schools and companies that go ‘public’ are secretive private enterprises with a veneer of public transparency.

The concepts of public and private predate, of course, the vicissitudes of contemporary political debate. The right to a ‘private life’ is a rather new social concept given that our species is intensely social and has lived communally for aeons. There have been many who have had to operate under secrecy for religious and ideological reasons but this is rather different since all those in power suffer from degrees of paranoia and are always suspicious of privacy in others. Hypocritically these same people are always the first to claim the right to privacy and secrecy under the name of national security.

So what does privacy really mean? Is it the need to separate yourself from others due to the shame that accompanies sexual preference or corruption or criminal intent or is it a basic human need for occasional solitude so that the contemplation of the ‘self’ can occur? True introspection is rare so it’s reasonable to suspect that the right to ‘private property’ and the bourgeois cult of individuality lie more at the heart of the contemporary concept of privacy. Your wealth is due to your own efforts and has nothing to do with the exploitation of the labour of others. This is the lie at the centre of the concept.

Privacy, with its modicum of ‘control’, militates against the reality of interdependence, the recognition of which is our only hope as a species. Individuals and their families locked up in their mortgaged jerry-built houses with security cameras and an inbuilt fear of ‘the other’ are infinitely more insecure than those who live in communities of mutual aid and respect. Divide and rule is one of the strongest propaganda tools available to the tiny parasitic elite that rule us so don’t be fooled that state ownership is public ownership because the state only exists to prevent those who create wealth from accessing it. Any state-owned business will be systematically underfunded to keep the taxes of the rich at a bare minimum with all of the subsequent industrial unrest that this inevitably causes.

We are sometimes told that ‘socialist sects’ should all join up in a mass coalition to have more power but it doesn’t matter a jot how much power you have if you are ignorant of the origins of your ideologies and the true nature of capitalism whether it’s in traditional bourgeois form or of the state capitalist incarnation – neither can, or will, improve your life.

Wez.

Just another day (2025)

A Short Story from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘You know that’s bullshit, right?’ Kelly looked up from his coffee and gave me a hard stare across the kitchen table.

I closed my eyes. I wanted sympathy, not a political debate.

‘Actually, no. I don’t think that at all,’ I said. And damn! I sounded querulous.

Kelly and I had been mates from childhood, messing around together, and propping each other up through life’s inevitable traumas. He was funny and loyal and caring, always willing to lend a hand. He was the brother I never had. And yet, at times like this, I didn’t actually like him much. We had never been on the same page politically but in the last five years he’d become a convert to so called “libertarianism”, and turned starry-eyed by the so-called magic of the market. Whenever he got political these days, he showed a callous streak, and it always came as a shock when I saw it. People have more defensive layers than there are geological strata in the Grand Canyon – layers cemented together by the anxiety of living in an unnecessarily insecure and unsociable world. It seemed to me that Kelly had grown to be at odds with his own nature.

I hadn’t intended to call on him that morning. After breakfast I’d headed into town on foot on a mission to replace my old, and now defunct, washing machine. Did I say, ‘old’? I’d bought it eight years ago and I wasn’t happy that it had died already. My previous machine had lasted me 35 years with barely a hitch.

It was a drizzly Saturday in February, the sort of day that makes you feel bleak inside. Passing the corner shop at the entrance to Kel’s road, I remembered that his wife, Margaret was up in Aberdeen for the week helping her sister care for an elderly father with dementia. Kel would probably be at home on his own. I turned aside and headed downhill towards his house. When he opened the door he was looking tired. We went through into the kitchen where he’d been working. He swept aside a pile of paperwork on the table and closed his laptop. We sat down.

‘Tax returns?’

He pulled a face.

We drank coffee, and talked of personal issues, of music and motorcycles and eventually of washing machines. I tried to avoid the topic, but you know how it is. It was like suffering a state of general inflammation. The topic emerged as a moan, the moan hardened into a rant, and I was soon well into it. The machine had broken down at a bad time. Only a month earlier I’d forked out a lot of cash to replace my failed boiler. Now there was this.

When it broke down at first, I wasn’t too bothered. I called Frank. He came over later that afternoon wearing the same tool belt he’d had for decades. He pulled the machine out from under the counter, prodded inside for a bit, grunted and then gave me a sympathetic look.

‘It’s the…X’ He said,

‘What’s an X?’ I had no idea.

It turned out to be something small but vital. The crucial detail however was that it was sealed inside the drum. That meant the whole drum assembly would have to be replaced as a unit, and that was going to cost me an arm and a leg. It would be more economical just to replace the whole machine. I trusted Frank. He’d been doing jobs for me for decades. He leaned up against the counter with a cup of tea and launched into a well-rehearsed diatribe.

Thirty years ago, he told me, manufacturers of domestic appliances made available a full range of replacement parts through their own repair people and through independent businesses. These days, once a new model went on sale, replacement parts for the old one became rare as hen’s teeth. Not that it often made any difference. In washing machines, it was common practice, these days, to spot-weld the drums, sealing components inside them and making them inaccessible when they failed. Customers were forced to buy new machines while their existing ones were still largely in good working order. Frank looked me straight in the eyes and grimaced. I nodded. I’d heard a depressingly similar story from the Gas Safe engineer who had been unable to source parts for my boiler.

After I’d shown Frank out, I got online and checked out a number of consumer magazines and independent repair companies. I was soon scribbling away in a notebook. The average life of a washing machine these days is seven years. Seven! Apart from the expense to the customer this represented immense wastage of resources and employees’ labour when they could have been doing something more useful. ‘Criminal!’ Frank had called it. Independent maintenance companies were reporting components designed to break down after a certain number of washes (a remarkably small number in some cases).

Kel sat listening while I spilled all this out across the table. He looked increasingly sceptical. This was going to result in an argument, but I was too far gone to stop.

‘Planned obsolescence is everywhere these days’ I said.

My words worked on him like some kind of dark magic.

‘C’mon, that’s left-wing bullshit,’ he said. He was trying hard to keep his tone moderate but there was a snarl in his voice.

We had hit a familiar impasse. Kel wore Free-Market Economic Theory like a cloak of invulnerability. I often wondered in these moments how our friendship survived. I gave him a crooked look.

‘It makes no sense,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘Why would a business do that? Companies aren’t stupid. If something ends up being a piece of junk, who’s going to buy it again?’ He stopped and stared at me. ‘We’ve been through this before…’

‘Yes we have.’ I sighed. ‘There’s no point pretending it doesn’t happen when it plainly does. What about the Phoebus Cartel.’

‘Not that again! Socialists always trot that one out.’

‘And that kinda means it didn’t happen?’

‘It only lasted a few years’.

‘That’s not true!’

The doings of the Phoebus Cartel are well recorded and it’s an often quoted example of ‘planned obsolescence’. In 1925 light bulb manufacturers across America, Europe and Japan got together and agreed to make bulbs that lasted a maximum of 1,000 hours, despite their having lasted up to 2,500 hours before that time. The cartel was intended to last 30 years, but was forced to break up in 1939 at the onset of war. For a long time after the war, however, manufacturers continued independently to produce bulbs designed to fail after 1,000 hours. Even without the discipline of the cartel, they realised it was both individually and collectively in their interests (and very much against the interests of their customers) to carry on doing this. An individual company might win more customers by doubling the life of its bulbs, but they would sell only half the number they had before, not just to new customers but to their existing ones as well. And if one company did it, capitalism being a competitive system, other companies would be forced to follow suit. Kel’s idealised formula for how perfectly the market works in the customer’s interest failed to represent reality.

He scowled at me. ‘Washing machines don’t last as long these days because customers want cheaper products, so that’s what they get. What do they expect?’

‘Well that’s true, but people have limited incomes,’ I said. ‘They have always wanted cheaper products. So why weren’t they being produced cheaper before? And besides, how does that explain the use of sealed units’.

Washing machines are cheaper today for a variety of reasons, all to do with the profit motive and market economics: technology has advanced and the costs of manufacture have fallen. The market for white goods has become hotly competitive in recent years, which is driving down prices. And many of the components used are now being outsourced to low-wage economies.

In Kel’s ideological world customers control the market. Companies, it is argued, only produce what customers want. It follows, in theory and in Kel’s mind, that if washing machines don’t last as long as they used to, then it must be the working-class consumer’s fault for demanding cheaper goods. What a surprise. It is extraordinary that no matter how free-market economics theorises a problem, by some magic it invariably turns out to be working people’s fault.

‘C’mon Kel. Major companies have even admitted introducing all kinds of ways to limit their product’s lifespan, or making them unrepairable. Apple and Samsung for instance.’

‘Apple and Samsung don’t make washing machines,’ he snapped.

I threw up my eyes. It was Kel now who was sounding querulous.

‘We’re not just talking about washing machines. Obsolescence is widespread. It’s a consequence of the capitalist market system. There have been lawsuits taken out against companies in the EU for it. Against Epson, for instance. You’re clinging to a theory that justifies your belief in capitalism but doesn’t represent reality. Competition is built into the system, which means that if one company introduces a degree of planned obsolescence, they all have to.’ He said nothing, just pulled a face to show how stupid I was to believe anything so irrational.

There are multiple ways manufacturers have of manipulating consumer purchases. Back in the day Henry Ford figured out that by bringing out new models of cars regularly, he could stimulate public desires for novelty and get them to dump their old machines before they needed to. Mobile phone companies do the same today, producing new models every year, often with only minor improvements, or with a ‘new’ look which gets marketed as the latest must-have item. Newness is sexy. At the same time as new models appear, companies flood the market with adverts extolling their virtues, and people start to notice their existing phones are running unaccountably slow. Owning glitzy new things indicates status. It fills the emotional hole left inside us by the loss of community and closeness.

Kel stood up abruptly and left the room. I stared at the rain running down the windowpane and sighed. No matter how hard we tried to avoid these confrontations, they kept occurring. It was a couple of minutes before he came back. He stood in the doorway. His frown deepened for a moment, but then he exploded into laughter. I smiled and shook my head.

‘Sounds tough. Do you need some cash,’ he asked? ‘I’m not badly placed at the moment.’

I looked down at his tax returns. Even if true, I knew it was a half-truth at best. His work was seasonal. This was not his best time of year.

‘I’ll get by. I’ll need to economise for a while. No extras. Right now, though, I need to go and buy this bloody machine or else I shall start to stink.’ I got up, and we walked to the front door.

‘Give my love to Margaret’ I said when we reached the hallway. ‘When is she due back?’

He sighed. ‘Depends how long she’s needed. Her sister is pretty exhausted looking after their dad. He wandered out of the house by himself last week and got lost. They had to call the police.’

‘Ouch!’ I knew that situation from personal experience.

He shrugged and then nodded. ‘It is what it is! We cope.’

I said goodbye, pulled up my hood and walked down his path into a February drizzle. For a while my head was full of messy thoughts and feelings. Money, property, competition: they screwed up all our relations. Capital value dominated our lives. Kel, though, was a good friend, whatever differences we might have. That was something of real value to hold on to. I pulled myself back to the here and now. The road on either side was lined with a jumble of small businesses, pubs and tiny Victorian terraces built originally for railway workers. They looked shabby now. I skirted a few gathering puddles, dodged some pedestrians hurrying towards the station, and prepared myself mentally to do battle with sales staff eager for a sales commission.

Hud.

Moving Around (2025)

Book Review from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China. By Yuan Yang. Bloomsbury £10.99.

The author was born in China but moved to the UK with her parents. She worked as a journalist for the Financial Times in London and Shanghai, and is now a Labour MP. Here she looks at the lives of four women born in China in the 1980s and 90s, their struggles with traditional ideas and the changes in Chinese society. In this review we will focus on the general points made, rather than discussing the individual cases.

One important issue is the hukou system, a household registration system related to a person’s place of birth. This enables them to access local services, such as education and healthcare, but without a local hukou they can face real problems. They may have difficulty getting their children into a suitable middle school, but can try relying on ‘friends of friends’ to influence headteachers to relax the rules. This system is presumably intended as a way of controlling workers, especially, but not only, those who move from the countryside to cities in search of work. Children are often sent to live with their grandparents and so gain access to a school that way.

The possibility of factory work did lead to many people migrating from rural areas, but the numbers often exceeded the jobs available and working hours could be very long. One factory was seen as improving conditions by capping overtime to 9pm and guaranteeing one day off a week. Many migrant workers preferred short-term contracts so they could avoid abusive bosses. But, partly because of Covid, the job market contracted, and by the middle of 2020 one-tenth of urban residents had lost their jobs. Yang says that southern China had industrialised and then de-industrialised within four decades.

The most common problems workers faced were ‘too much overtime, unpaid wages, workplace injuries and being without a labour contract’. There were no effective trade unions, but there were community-based ‘labour NGOs’, providing legal assistance and so on. But such NGOs could find themselves evicted from their offices, and activists were sometimes arrested; some responded by going abroad to study.

For a while, the online forum Utopia (sometimes seen as part of the Chinese ‘New Left’) supported the system under Mao Zedong, before the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping, a time when the welfare system was allegedly better. In 2018 fifty students who had supported workers in an electronics factory who wished to organise their own union were arrested: ‘China’s biggest student crackdown since Tiananmen Square’.

The book provides both general and particular views of what one document on social media in 2012 quoted here described as ‘China’s path towards globalised capitalism’.

Perhaps publishers these days find it hard to provide helpful things like a table of contents.

Paul Bennett

How Labour changed (2025)

From the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

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.

1. 1906. 29 trade unionist MPs elected with Liberal support constitute themselves as the parliamentary Labour Party.
2. 1918. The party adopts a new constitution, Clause Four of which reads: ‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service’.
3. 1929. An amendment added ‘distribution and exchange’, spelling out that nationalisation (state capitalism), not socialism, was what was envisaged. (Link)
4. 1935. ‘A Labour government, therefore, not only by the transference of industry from profit-making for the few to the service of the many, but also by taxation, will work to reduce the purchasing power of the wealthier classes, while by wage increases and by the provision of social services it will expand the purchasing power of the masses’ (Clement Attlee, Will and the Way to Socialism, p. 42).
5. 1945. General election manifesto: ‘The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain.’
6. 1956. Labour intellectual Anthony Crosland published The Future of Socialism in which he argued that the aim of a more equal distribution of wealth did not require the nationalisation of industry.
7. 1959. Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell proposes to abandon Clause Four but this is turned down by the Labour Party conference.
8. 1974. February general election manifesto: ‘It is indeed our intention to (a) bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’.
9. 1995. New Clause Four adopted: ‘A dynamic economy, serving the public interest, in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper with a thriving private sector and high quality public services where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them’.
10. 2024. ‘Labour is the party of business’ (Starmer). ‘Be in no doubt, we will campaign as a pro-business party — and we will govern as a pro-business party.’ (Link )

Proper Gander: Heading down stream (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two reports published around the start of August described troubles for the BBC, while also highlighting the trajectory television in general is following. The BBC itself didn’t draw attention to figures which show that for the first time, BBC News has lost its place as the most-watched news channel in Britain. According to the official ratings collator Barb, GB News had a higher share of viewers across July than BBC News (with Sky News trailing not far behind). Although both only had just over 1% of the audience share, reaching this point is a symptom of the increased popularity of right-wing media overall. Switch over to GB News and there’s likely to be content about immigration, ‘wokeism’ or ethnicity and crime, its tone not-so subtly reinforcing patriotism and nationalism, reflecting the uglier effects of alienation. The channel has more pundits and panel discussions than BBC News does, and because their banter seems more authentic than the comparatively staid tone of the BBC, the channel has more ‘personality’, even though the main trait is self-righteous smugness.

Another threat to Auntie Beeb comes from a different direction, as described in Ofcom’s annual Media Nations report. Google-owned YouTube has become the second most-watched media service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV. The video-sharing platform’s popularity is not only due to its smorgasbord of vlogs and clips, but also because it has adopted formats from traditional TV: half its top-trending videos comprise long-form interviews and game shows. YouTube’s success lies partly in how it morphs itself into whatever is most appealing to each of us. Its algorithms create what looks like a personalised channel, with often eerily accurate recommendations based on what we’ve each previously viewed. One search for a Duran Duran video may also prompt suggestions of Spandau Ballet and lists of ‘80s fashion disasters. The data about our preferences gathered along the way is of use to advertisers in particular, to know the audiences at which to target their products. Much of YouTube’s revenue comes from the adverts which interrupt its videos at annoyingly random points, which on old-fashioned commercial TV channels are at least inserted more predictably so we know when to put the kettle on. Paying for YouTube’s Premium service avoids its adverts, but otherwise once you’ve got online YouTube is free to access. There’s still a price, of course: ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’, as said by technology ethicist Tristan Harris in the 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma, referring to the wealth of data captured about people.

The Social Dilemma was broadcast on Netflix, which like other streaming channels such as Amazon Prime and Disney+ has a different business model, requiring viewers to pay for a subscription alongside some income from adverts. Advertising funds most of the traditionally broadcast channels, while the BBC has a subscription of sorts in its state-enforced licence fee, although its BBC Studios division is profit-driven. While the BBC tries to move with the times (such as with its iPlayer), its infrastructure, having been established long ago, is less adaptable to the modern climate compared with the newer channels more aligned to newer trends. Despite this, broadcast TV still makes up most of what people watch, at 56% overall according to the Media Nations report, although younger viewers tend to prefer streaming services. The trend is nearing a tipping point of streaming becoming dominant.

Perhaps the growth of streaming services helps explain why, despite encroaching on the BBC, GB News isn’t profitable, having lost more than £105m since its launch in 2021. Its revenue from advertising was reduced after campaigns by groups such as Stop Funding Hate prompted brands including Ikea and Specsavers to withdraw from using the channel to promote their wares. To try and increase income, membership and branded tat can be purchased from GB News’ website, and presumably chasing the American dollar is motivating plans to launch a programme based in Washington DC. Its owners, Dubai-based investment firm Legatum and hedge fund tycoon Sir Paul Marshall, have propped the channel up with millions of pounds, which they would only do if GB News was aligned to their interests. While GB News may be a challenge to the BBC on one level, the bigger picture is that both are being overtaken.

The shift in viewing habits away from traditional broadcast media with a schedule you have to follow, and towards pick-and-choose streaming services is made possible by advances in technology, from cathode-ray tube all the way to YouTube. These developments aren’t driven by what is best or most popular, though. Because tech and media companies are owned by the capitalist class (or, as with the BBC, by the state which represents them) they are run to further their privileged position. So, advancements in technology and media come through what is most profitable for capitalists. To some extent profitability is connected to popularity, in that more viewers equals more market share. To attract and hold on to audiences, data is harvested and used to manipulate our choices through adverts and algorithms. So, at every step, what we watch is moulded by money.

The wide choice of channels available disguises how ultimately they are run in the interests of a tiny minority. The gradual decline of the BBC demonstrates that other models are becoming more promising for the capitalist class. Streaming channels commodify television in a different way, made more intrusive by how our preferences are turned into market research. There’s room for a little optimism, though, in that there’s something socialistic about streaming’s potential for quick access to any programme, without the constraints and dictates of the capitalist system. And even now, platforms such as YouTube can be used by anyone to broadcast their views, including us.

Mike Foster