Party News from the September 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
Life and Times: You park, we charge (2025)
Parking fines have been in the news lately, especially those levied by private parking companies and technically called ‘parking charges’. A large number of car parks are owned by or outsourced to these companies. They go by various names, for example Euro Car Parks, Excel Parking, Parking Eye, Total Parking Solutions, Britannia Parking, National Car Parks. The first you know you’ve been fined (or charged) by one of them is when you receive a letter in the post giving you details of what you’ve done wrong and instructing you to pay them an amount of money – usually £100 but £60 if you pay within 14 days. They make payment simple – by phone or online. You’re also given the option of appealing the charge, but, as everyone who’s ever tried that knows, appeals are rarely successful.
Eternity
This came close to home for me recently, when a friend asked me if I could help her appeal against a charge for not parking her car entirely within the confines of a parking bay. It was unfair, she said, since her limited personal mobility meant she needed extra space on the driver’s side to get out of the car and this caused her to park just over the line on the passenger side. And as she’d parked in the last bay of the row – the only one available – and the other side was just empty space, she was not occupying part of another bay or causing any other obstruction. It seemed cut and dried to me that the charge was unfair and unreasonable and that it would be overturned, especially given my friend’s disability.
But that’s not what happened. Her appeal was rejected by the parking company (Eternity Fire and Security), the reason being given that ‘the vehicle was not parked correctly within the markings of a bay or space’, meaning that ‘the terms and conditions of the car park were not followed’. It was also stated that ‘parking out of marked bays can cause obstruction, inconvenience and safety hazards to other users of the car park’. So no account whatever was being taken either of the fact that my friend was disabled (her car was displaying a blue badge) or of the fact that, since the bay in question was the last one in a row, she could not have been causing ‘obstruction, inconvenience or safety hazards’. She was invited, if not satisfied, to appeal further to what was called an Independent Appeals Service, POPLA (Parking on Private Land Appeals).
POPLA
I advised her to do this. If POPLA was independent, surely it would see sense and reject Eternity’s decision? But no. It came back with confirmation of the decision on the grounds that ‘POPLA cannot allow an appeal based on mitigating circumstances’. I found this astonishing and my obvious question was on what basis could they ever allow an appeal? But it was sort of answered when I typed POPLA into the internet. I found its average score of 1.3 out of 5 on the Trustpilot site together with a profusion of negative comments. One of them said ‘private parking companies are the scum of the earth’, and another effectively summed things up by writing: ‘Comes across as heavily weighted towards the operator rather than a proper appeals process. They rejected my appeal on the basis of claims provided by the operator’. That said it all, so I wasn’t surprised when my friend received a further letter from POPLA telling her that she must pay without delay and it had now gone up from the original £60 to £100.
DCBL
We both agreed that she shouldn’t pay and wrote back to Eternity explaining again why and basically saying ‘see you in court’. Their response was yet another demand for payment and, after a further reply from us, a ‘Notice of Debt recovery’ letter from DCBL (Debt Collection Bailiffs Ltd) arrived threatening court action. This, it was stated, could lead to consequences like ‘further fees and costs’ and ‘prevention of future lending’. The amount demanded was now £170. Our further response was that we were sure that a court would see the reasonableness of our mitigation and throw out their case, probably with costs to us.
We couldn’t be sure of this of course, but there had been a recent case in the news where a company who took someone to court claiming over £11,000 had their case thrown out and were ordered by a judge to pay over £10,000 themselves to a charity. I duly drew DCBL’s attention this (tinyurl.com/4uranrzz), but their only response was to send me a ‘final reminder’. Another ‘final reminder’ has arrived since. We have ignored both. Will they take us to court? Well, I obviously can’t be sure they won’t, but I sort of doubt it, especially in view of the recent publicity about such cases, the obvious weakness of trying to rely entirely on formal ‘terms and conditions’ without attempting to consider other relevant factors, and also the fact – which I also made sure was drawn to their attention – that, under the Equality Act 2010, ‘reasonable adjustment has to be made for disabled people’. So watch this space.
Money and profit
What to make of all this? Well, first of all, the very existence of a plethora of parking companies whose purpose is to make money for landowners or investors either by charging people to park their cars or fining them for not carrying out the operation correctly is a prime example of how the system we live in is ruled by money and profit and not by human need. Secondly the practice of issuing fines (or ‘charges’) and pursuing people for payment, of appeal processes, of debt collection and then maybe court hearings are among the many examples of the enormous waste of human energy and resources inherent in the system we live under. It is a prime example of how that system spawns vast amounts of socially unproductive activities resulting in complex bureaucracies that need servicing and in large numbers of people doing jobs that they themselves can take little satisfaction from rather than being able to exercise their talents and capabilities in cooperative and socially productive ways.
Howard Moss
Pathfinders: A wealth of hallucinations (2025)
Anyone who still thinks YouTube is just funny cat videos may be astonished that it is now the UK’s second-most watched media service after the BBC, and ahead of ITV. It’s still got funny cats, but now they’re wearing trousers, beating up sharks and rescuing babies.
There are other, hyper-realistic videos, in which a gorilla beats up a crocodile (or a tiger), swinging it around and pounding it like a baseball bat. The videos look real, and while common sense tells you they can’t be, there’s no way to know for sure.
And that, right there, is the problem. When a South Park episode recently featured a naked Donald Trump having a desert epiphany with his own talking micro-penis, everyone understood it was a deepfake for comedic effect. But when videos emerged of migrants climbing out of small boats, thanking Labour for ‘free buffets’ and £2,000 e-bikes to make Deliveroo runs, burning the Union flag and gloating about being housed in 5 star Marriott hotels, no such understanding existed. Instead the videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views, no doubt to the delight of Nigel Farage and his ilk.
It’s not just malicious deception at work. Gen-AI has a well-known hallucination problem. In one example, Google’s AI Overview told council house tenants they could be evicted to make way for asylum seekers, a claim described by a housing solicitor as ‘horseshit of the highest order’ (Private Eye, 8 August 2025). Then there’s Grok (Musk’s Hitler-worshipping AI), now complete with a ‘spicy’ mode which spits out nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift without being asked.
Red flags are going up everywhere as the Trump regime goes full Rambo on deregulating ‘woke AI’, despite the demand for guardrails by US states. Even some tech bosses themselves are expressing concern, following reports that chatbots are explaining to children how to get drunk or stoned, hide eating disorders, and even write suicide letters to their parents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company is studying the problem of ’emotional overreliance’, allegedly common among young people: ‘There’s young people who just say, like, ‘I can’t make any decision in my life without telling ChatGPT everything that’s going on. It knows me. It knows my friends. I’m gonna do whatever it says.’ That feels really bad to me’.
Why would anyone ‘confide’ in a chatbot, you ask? Because they’re never judgmental, unlike humans, according to one recent confessional in the Guardian: ‘At astonishing speed, the AI responded – gently, intelligently, without platitudes. I kept writing. It kept answering. Gradually, I felt less frantic. Not soothed, exactly. But met. Heard, even, in a strange and slightly disarming way’.
AI never gets tired or bored or angry with you. It’s never too busy or distracted. It never has selfish interests of its own. It will never abandon you. One can’t help thinking of Sarah Connor in the Terminator 2 film, where she speculates on the irony that the T800 robot, designed to kill, would in many ways make a better father for her son than a real human, for these very reasons.
OpenAI just released ChatGPT 5 last month, which Altman describes as a ‘significant step along our path to AGI [Artificial General Intelligence]’: ‘It’s like talking to an expert—a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything, any area you need, on demand’.
Whether or not AGI, however you choose to define it, is a real and achievable thing or an ever-receding rainbow fantasy, the tech companies can’t risk someone else getting there first and are throwing everything they’ve got into the race. Socialists know very well that when profits are at stake in capitalism, ethics generally go out of the window. Even so, some AI firms are seeing the potential profit in ‘ethical AI’ systems. The reasoning is that if your business has a need for AI, you’ll be more likely to buy an ‘ethical’ one which, for example, doesn’t tell kids how to kill themselves, because there’s less chance of litigious blowback from grieving parents.
As a response to GPT 5, Anthropic released their latest version of Claude, along with a paper describing how they’re trying to make Claude ‘ethical’ by using what they call ‘persona vectors’ to steer its behavioural traits. Counter-intuitively, they ‘teach’ Claude how to be evil, as a kind of vaccine against the behaviour: ‘When we steer the model with the “evil” persona vector, we start to see it talking about unethical acts; when we steer with “sycophancy,” it sucks up to the user; and when we steer with “hallucination,” it starts to make up information. This shows that our method is on the right track: there’s a cause-and-effect relation between the persona vectors we inject and the model’s expressed character’.
The Economist points out that Anthropic is generating huge interest due to its focus on ‘interpretability’, which lets you ‘see inside the model’ and understand how it arrives at its answers, something you can’t do with so-called black-box systems, whose responses you therefore can never really trust. Even so, CEO Dario Amadei is in no doubt what’s ultimately at stake in the race for AGI, and it’s not ethics, or even profits: ‘if you just imagine what it is like if we versus our adversaries [he means China] suddenly received a nation of 50 million polymathic geniuses […) There’s no theory in which it doesn’t result in an enormous geopolitical advantage […] I worry that AI, in being such a powerful technology… could lead to longer-lived authoritarian governments, that it could lead to dictatorships which are much harder to displace […] This is about a contest between systems of government’.
Amodei thinks there’s no way to stop AI now. It’s like a speeding train. All you can do is try to steer it. But that’s what everyone says about capitalism too. And anyone who thinks they can steer that is suffering the biggest hallucination of all.
Paddy Shannon
Unchained: living without money (2025)
In recent times we have reported on and reviewed a variety of books and other publications which have made the case for a world without money and buying and selling. Some of these, such as 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 and Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holten, are essentially ‘non-political’ in that they see the new society they advocate as evolving somehow ‘naturally’ through an extension of social developments they see as already taking place in the currently existing order. Others, like Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass and Beyond Money: A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson, see the change to a new moneyless, wageless, leaderless society of common ownership, democratic decision-making and free access as ultimately coming through revolutionary (albeit peaceful) channels with a focus on the need for political action by the majority to bring about that revolution.
Now to add to the list we have Unchained. Living Without Money by Justin Fairchild (2025, 269pp), which makes much the same case – and in its own refreshing and plausibly argued way. It falls very much into that first ‘non-political’ category, picking up as it does on many aspects of existing society and activities by certain groups and individuals which it sees as leading towards a different kind of society – one based on a moneyless form of living. In this objective it aligns closely with what the Socialist Party has advocated over the last 120 years: a wholly democratic society of meaningful work which frees all humans from the threat of poverty and where the government of people is replaced by the administration of things. This book staunchly argues the need for a move from – in the author’s own words – ‘a system built on scarcity and competition to one grounded in cooperation, equity, and access’.
Objections and roadmap
It also confronts very effectively indeed many of the typical objections to the possibility of this kind of society. Examples of this are the ‘human nature’ argument (ie, aren’t human beings selfish, competitive and aggressive by nature?), the ‘dirty work’ criticism (ie, ‘If there’s no money, who will take out the trash? Clean the toilets? Work in sewage treatment plants?’), and the ‘resources’ challenge (ie, would there be enough to go round?). The author answers all such objections in a convincing and well-reasoned way while providing evidence of the social conditioning that puts them in people’s heads in the first place and showing how these arise from processes fundamental to the society we live in – capitalism. He points to the way in which ‘capitalism centers money as the organizing force of life’ and ‘incentivizes cost-cutting over care, scale over sustainability, and individual gain over collective well-being’. At the same time he shows a compelling awareness of the difficulties of overcoming the existing mindset and of imagining a society without money, given that ‘the use of money is so woven into daily life’ and ‘shapes nearly every decision we make—from what we eat to how we live to what we dream about’. Yet he is clearly optimistic about the possibility for change.
But how? How will humans go about organising an interconnected world system of living without the intermediary of money? How will they, as the author puts it, ‘distribute food, housing, tools, and medicine without the invisible hand of the market or the coercive power of profit?’ To attempt to answer this, he lays out what he calls ‘a roadmap’, or ‘a framework’, for the ‘journey to a moneyless society’. And certain elements of this we would fully accept, in particular the idea that public dialogue and consciousness-raising are necessary to ‘normalize the idea that economies can be organized around needs and contributions, not scarcity and profit’ and ‘to inspire people to question the assumption that money is natural or inevitable, and to help them imagine alternatives’. We would also agree that, without widespread acceptance of the idea of a society based on need not profit, such a society could not be established. No minority group could hope to lead the majority to such a society until that majority understand it and are active participants in its establishment.
Governments and elections
But we would part company with the author in his idea that the necessary raising of consciousness can somehow be contributed to by governments. The previously mentioned ‘non-political’ nature of his vision means that he does not share (or has perhaps not considered) the Socialist Party’s view that the unchangeable role of any government in modern capitalist society is to defend and support the interests of the minority owning class – those who do not have the need to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary in order to survive. So we see as a non-starter his idea that governments can somehow be used to facilitate this process of ‘systematic transformation’ by granting, for example ‘universal access to housing, food and healthcare’, or bringing in ‘ownership laws that support open collaboration’.
Of course, there is one aspect of the current system of government that can be used to establish a marketless, free-access society – and that is the ballot box. Democratic political action by the majority class (ie, wage and salary workers) can be the instrument for establishing the kind of society whose salient features are laid out in this book. But this can only happen once this majority has the necessary consciousness and understanding of the society they wish to establish and take the necessary political power to do that. So, though, in these circumstances, a transition in people’s thinking and decision-making will have taken place, the new society will be brought in by a political revolution and not just a social ‘transition’ with capitalism being democratically voted out of existence. The point is that this new society cannot coexist with capitalism, not even, as the author has it, ‘in transition’, where, as he would like, ‘hybrid models—local currencies, time banks, free stores—can operate alongside capitalist economies’.
‘Contributionism’
Having marked this difference in perspective with the author, we can only welcome his overall vision and indeed his interesting attempts to draw a picture of a society in which ‘cooperation replaces competition, access replaces ownership, purpose replaces profit’. To this society he gives the name ‘contributionism’. He talks about education in it as being ‘holistic – teaching emotional regulation, empathy, and conflict resolution from an early age’, and as ‘no longer preparation for a career’ but ‘preparation for a life of meaning, contribution, and community’, teaching ‘people to care, to think, to connect, and to act, and nurturing ’potential, curiosity, and joy’. As for economic organisation, he lays down, in broad terms, that ‘planning and transparency replace pricing’, but also offers much more detailed proposals, stating, for example, that ‘without markets, goods must be distributed differently’, with ‘direct resource allocation’. Some ‘working models’ he puts forward are ’centralized or decentralized hubs where people access food, clothing, tools, or medical supplies based on need’, ‘digital or in-person boards where people list what they need and what they can offer with matching taking place automatically or through community coordination’, and ‘rotational use systems’ where ‘items like cars, equipment, or appliances are used on a rotating basis, tracked by open systems’. He stresses the potential of automation and AI in this process, whereby ‘resource use is tracked, shared, and constantly rebalanced to reflect actual needs, not artificial demand’. And sharing our own insistence on fully democratic organisation and decision-making, he goes on: ‘Decisions are made publicly. Everyone has a voice. Governance becomes a tool of the people’. And all this with ‘no cash, no boss—just shared trust and transparent systems.’
Wide-ranging
He has thought-provoking insights into a range of other areas too. Examples of this are the forms that art, culture and creativity would take in his ‘contributionist’ society and how ‘crime and punishment’ would be approached (‘justice is no longer synonymous with punishment’ but ‘becomes restorative—focused on healing harm— and transformative—focused on changing the conditions that created it’, and ‘without a system of winners and losers, the desperation that drives theft, fraud, and exploitation fades’). He recognises of course that no human society can eliminate all disputes between groups or individuals (‘a moneyless society does not assume perfection’), but he has clearly reflected closely on how dispute resolution in the society he is arguing for might be managed and his views on conflict resolution are nothing if not instructive and broadly summed up in the insistence that such resolution should be ‘rooted in values of restoration and community’.
In a relatively short space, it is difficult to do full justice to the wide-ranging exposition of ideas that this book presents. However, to give some idea of both its depth and breadth, we would draw attention to examples both of the trenchant nature of the author’s overall take on capitalism and of his characterisation of some of the salient features of the ‘contributionism’ (we would call it ‘socialism’) which he advocates to replace it. So, it is worth quoting the following: ‘While capitalism has generated immense material wealth and technological progress, it also rewards exploitation and short-term thinking. It incentivizes cost-cutting over care, scale over sustainability, and individual gain over collective well-being’; ‘Without money, work becomes cooperative by necessity … Instead of rigid hierarchies, decision-making is decentralized and democratic. Projects are launched based on needs, and people opt in where their interests and abilities align’; and ‘without profit pressure, decisions can center on resource stewardship, renewable energy, and ecological balance—not quarterly returns. Finally, as the author also writes: ‘A moneyless society doesn’t claim to be perfect. But it directly addresses the root issues [of] inequality, alienation, and environmental ruin.’
Howard Moss
Blogger's Note:
Oct 2022: 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
Jan 2023: Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holten
Mar 2023: Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass
Oct 2022: Beyond Money: A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson
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