Labour’s Department of War (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people are surprised and disappointed by Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Yet, it is a typical Labour government. Fundamentally, it is a belief in state action to co-ordinate the market economy that characterises them in power. Thankfully, any association between this belief and socialism has long since been dispelled.

Indeed, to their credit, this government is faithfully carrying out the objects set out in the Labour Party’s rulebook, which commits the Party to work for:

‘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 cooperation 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’ (Clause IV.2.A).

And:

‘Labour is committed to the defence and security of the British people and to cooperating in European institutions, the United Nations, the Commonwealth and other international bodies to secure peace, freedom, democracy, economic security and environmental protection for all’ (Clause IV.3).

No-one can pretend that the present Labourites have not been up-front with this commitment, at least: anyone voting for them without illusions should have known.

We can see this in action in the way that Downing Street announced the UK taking part in the NATO agreement to spend 5 percent of GDP on Defence.

‘Marking a step change with the approach of previous governments, the National Security Strategy directly answers to the concerns of working people, aligning our national security objectives and plans for economic growth in a way not seen since 1945’.

The reference to ‘working people’ is labour-washing this strategy, which will be about making phenomenal amounts of profit for defence contractors and arms manufacturers. As the NATO press release on the agreement notes:

‘Research and development (R&D) costs are included in defence expenditure. R&D costs also include expenditure for those projects that do not successfully lead to production of equipment’.

This is the NATO agreed definition of defence expenditure. The agreement is for this figure to reach 3.5 percent of member states’ GDP, with an additional 1.5 percent of GDP to be spent:

‘annually to inter alia protect critical infrastructure, defend networks, ensure civil preparedness and resilience, innovate, and strengthen the defence industrial base’.

So, NATO states are preparing to fiddle the figures by defining as much as they can as defence expenditure (see for example rumours Italy is looking at designating a transport bridge as defence expenditure).

Of course, the US has long done this, with a substantial veterans benefit system: spending about $300 billion annually, 90 percent of which is split between income support for veterans (including pensions) and medical costs. This is itself part of the economic conscription of workers to fight in the armed forces for the people who own the country.

Starmer’s government wants to use its military spend as part of its drive to generate planned profits for capitalists through that ‘dynamic economy.’ According to the MOD 463,000 jobs (about 1 in 60) are supported by the defence industry (that includes 272,000 jobs supported by military spending – 151,000 directly and 121,000 indirectly) on top of the 181,890 serving military personnel.

However, as the Institute for Government notes:

‘The single largest cost to the MoD is the Defence Nuclear Enterprise, which is responsible for the procurement, maintenance and disposal of the UK’s nuclear submarine fleet. This was allocated 38% of the 2023-2033 Equipment Plan, or 20% of total defence spending’.

That is, maintaining the UK’s capacity to launch a nuclear device at any nation in the world. Interestingly, they also note that:

‘Most additional UK defence funding between 2015/16 and 2023/24 was allocated to capital spending, to acquire or maintain fixed assets like equipment and land. This element of spending increased by 95.5% in real terms over this period’.

Depending on how you count it, the UK is the 5th or 6th biggest-spending military country in the world. This expenditure is necessary to give continued diplomatic clout.

This comes at a cost. Those tens of thousands of service personnel are removed from the workforce and from doing any potentially useful work (neither generating profits for capitalists, nor creating use values for the community).

The jobs and industries supported by defence spending do produce profits for the companies involved, but those profits are essentially transfers from elsewhere, as they are paid for by taxes extracted from the profits of other capitalists.

Defence does bring in some profit. ‘UK arms exports: Statistics’, a House of Commons report from July this year notes that ‘the UK won defence orders worth £14.5 billion in 2023. This is a 39 percent increase in real terms on the previous year’. Over 50 percent of this was aerospace. This would represent a poor return on all that defence investment, but in fact it also reflects the UK geostrategic interests, as shown by where the sales went to:

‘Europe was the largest market for UK defence exports, accounting for 34% of total exports over this period, followed by the Middle East (32%), North America (18%), the Asia Pacific (7%), Latin America and Africa (both 1%). The remaining share (8%) was exported to a mixed or unidentified region’.

There are other defence spin-offs in terms of new technologies. The recently published government document, ‘Defence industrial strategy: making defence an engine for growth’ notes: ‘The Spending Review confirmed that MOD’s research and development budget will be over £2 billion in 2026-27 and will rise each year’. This includes a mandate to spend 10 percent of the MOD’s procurement on novel technologies, including AI-driven solutions.

Finding new and inventive ways to kill people seems a very roundabout way of creating wealth, but it is a way which has to exist in a society characterised by a tiny minority controlling the productive resources at the expense of the majority.

Pik Smeet

Letter: Conditions for socialism (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conditions for socialism

Dear Editors,

I am sympathetic to the politics of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and share its aim of a socialist society established by a conscious and democratic working class majority. What follows is written in that spirit, as a contribution to the discussion on how we prepare for such a transformation.

Capitalism cannot transform itself into socialism. That conviction lies at the heart of socialist thinking and aligns with the principle of establishing a system where the means of production are owned and democratically controlled by the community as a whole. Socialism must be the conscious act of a working class armed with knowledge, organisation, and power.

It is often argued that when the working class is ready for socialism it will vote for it. That rests on two essential truths. First, socialism can only be achieved by a large conscious majority acting democratically and intentionally. Second, the existing machinery of parliamentary democracy, limited though it may be, contains within it the possibility for a peaceful and organised transition, provided the working class understands how that machinery works.

Capitalism thrives on keeping the population politically subdued and misinformed. A poorly informed electorate is an easily ruled one. That is why the working class must be educated, not only in the theory of socialism, but also in how decisions are made, how budgets are set, how law functions, and how representatives can be held accountable. Knowing the rules is the first step to changing the game altogether.

Real democracy begins in our communities, workplaces, housing estates, and union halls, places where working people already share their lives and struggles. Those local assemblies could form the foundation of socialist organisation. On that base, regional workers’ councils could coordinate action on health, housing, transport, and workplace democracy. Delegates to such councils would remain at the service of their community, recallable, rotating, and bound by the decisions they carry.

Above these regional councils, a national workers’ convention could bring together delegates answerable to their base, constrained by short terms, public transparency, and salaries no higher than a worker’s wage. Such a structure could make use of the ballot box while grounding representation in a democracy strengthened from below.

This approach does not reject parliamentary activity. Parliamentary work could serve to spread clarity, to win small improvements, and to reinforce struggles beyond the ballot box. Democracy, limited though it may be, can be an instrument of socialist transformation, but only when matched with organised, politically educated working class action.

If capitalism falls, socialism must stand ready. A revolution of words without preparation, or the destruction of the old system without having built the tools to replace it, will only lead to chaos. Education, organisation, clarity of purpose, and collective democratic structures matter as much as any vote.

Capitalist institutions will call this vision naive or impractical. That reveals their fear. They would rather manage anxiety than meet a working class that knows its power, acts together, and understands both the potential and the limits of parliament.

Socialism requires no saviours. It requires citizens who understand how power works, believe in collective solutions, and organise from the ground up. This is not a utopian fantasy. This is the practical road to a democratic and equitable society.

Pablo Wilcox

Reply:

We agree. Obviously, socialism cannot be introduced by a simple parliamentary vote. It requires, as you put it, ‘a large conscious majority acting democratically and intentionally’ and, also, organised outside parliament in the sort of ways you outline. We would add that, to win control of political power, it will also require a mass socialist party, organised in the same sort of democratic way and without leaders, to contest elections and send mandated delegates to the parliament and regional and local councils. The socialist majority needs to win control of political power to take it out of the hands of those who control it on behalf of the capitalist class and to use it to end their ownership of the resources on which society depends. This has to be done before current problems can be solved in an effective and lasting way.

Three different situations need to be distinguished: (1) what exists today when only a relatively tiny minority want socialism; (2) what will exist when a substantial minority and eventually a large majority want socialism; (3) what will exist when socialism has been established.

On (1), we draw the conclusion that the urgent priority is to help the emergence of more and more socialists by spreading the view that capitalism can never be reformed to work in the interest of the majority and that bringing the means of wealth production into common ownership under democratic control is the only way out. Today, then, socialist activity as such is essentially educational and consciousness-raising.

On (2), we can’t predict and don’t want to lay down how a socialist minority in the course of becoming the majority will or should act. That will be for it to decide, but we can expect that it will try to extract what concessions it can, by organising in the ways you suggest as well as in a mass socialist party. Hopefully, the mass socialist party will pursue the same policy that we do and not make the mistake of deciding to itself seek support on the basis of being able to extract such concessions rather than exclusively for abolishing capitalism. That can be left to trade unions and other popular organisations. No doubt, on the eve of the winning of political control, plans will have been drawn up to be implemented once such control has been won. But, again, we can’t usefully predict or lay down now what they should be. That will be for those around at the time to decide in the light of then existing conditions.

On (3), socialism will have a democratic decision-making structure but again, we don’t want to be too prescriptive, and it may be, for example, that delegates could be sent to local councils and even a central decision-making body on the basis of where people live rather than just on where they work. 

Editors.

Material World: Looking inside the doughnut (2025)

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

Kate Raworth’s 2017 book Doughnut Economics has three main themes: the Doughnut itself, the shortcomings of mainstream economics, and reformist proposals about how society should be organised. We will discuss these in reverse order, finishing with the one that offers the most interesting ideas about humanity and the world we live in.

Most of the ideas in the book about how society should be organised are fairly standard left-wing reformist fare, such as firms being owned by their employees. In the peer-to-peer economy, everyone can become both a maker and a user. There should be community currencies, alongside national currencies. Rather than commercial banks creating money when they offer a loan (a claim which misunderstands how banks function), central banks can issue new money to every household. Tiered pricing, whereby the more people consume, the more they pay, will ration use of resources and benefit the less well-off. Economies should be regenerative by design, recycling carbon, water and so on. These schemes, however, leave capitalism in place and so will not solve current problems.

Tomelilla, a small town in Sweden, is attempting to apply some of the principles of Doughnut Economics (Guardian, 17 July). This includes, for instance, revamping an existing building rather than building a new ice rink. This is an example of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (doughnuteconomics.org), which has several hundred member organisations across the world, and is intended to put the Doughnut ideas into action. The trouble is that it all assumes the continuation of capitalism and so will not be able to go beyond a system which prioritises profit over caring for the planet and its inhabitants.

Raworth argues that economics as taught nowadays is rooted in the mindset of the 1950s and even the 1850s, with little or no discussion of what the aims of the economy should be. In reality, the free market has never existed, as markets are strongly shaped by laws, institutions, cultures and so on. Nor is there such a thing as free trade: power relations always influence cross-border flows. Unpaid labour is ignored, as is the fact that the economy exists within society and the living world. At the heart of economic theory is Homo economicus, ‘solitary, calculating, competing and insatiable’, whereas humans are in fact reciprocating, interdependent and ‘deeply embedded in the web of life.’

The book’s subtitle is Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, which would involve, for instance, acknowledging an embedded economy with social, adaptable humans which is distributive and regenerative by design and agnostic about growth. There are some good points here, but humanity would still be stuck with capitalist economics.

As for the Doughnut, this is ’the space in which we can meet the needs of all within the means of the planet.’ It is shown via a diagram of a doughnut, with two rings and an empty interior. Its inner ring sets out the basic requirements of life, including sufficient food, water, sanitation, energy, education, housing, all achieved with gender equality, peace and justice. But these are not currently being met, as millions ‘lead lives of extreme deprivation’. One person in nine, for instance, does not have enough to eat, and millions of children die each year from easily preventable illnesses. And the richest 1 percent of the world’s population own more than the other 99 percent put together.

The outer ring relies on the notion of planetary boundaries proposed by Earth-system scientists, an ecological ceiling that humans need to keep within: these include climate change, ocean acidification, chemical and air pollution, freshwater withdrawals, and ozone layer depletion. Most of these are associated with specific levels that should not be crossed. But at least four of them have already been transgressed: climate change, land conversion, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, and biodiversity loss. Biodiversity loss, for instance, is at least ten times the recommended rate, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is above what should be aimed at.

The idea behind the Doughnut is to meet everyone’s basic needs while keeping within the planetary boundaries that will prevent environmental catastrophe. ‘Raworth’s fundamental assertion is that a sustainable and just society can be realized only if a global economic system can be put in place that will allow as many people as possible to thrive in the space between these upper and lower boundaries’ (Kohei Saito: Slow Down).

As an illustration of the problems faced by humans, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently moved its Doomsday Clock to just 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. This was partly because of the war in Ukraine and the risk of nuclear war, but it was also on account of climate change, emerging and re-emerging diseases, and so on.

Raworth uses an Embedded Economy diagram to illustrate how energy plus living matter and materials are employed within Earth and society, while heat and waste matter are output within the market, the state and finance. But more constructive is the idea of a butterfly economy, whereby renewable materials are used and the two wings involve regenerating and restoring (repair, recycle etc). An economy cannot be completely circular as it is not possible to re-use all materials, so speaking of a cyclical economy is more helpful. The latest Circularity Gap Report argues that the global economy is in fact becoming less circular than it was a few years ago.

The Doughnut is not a solution in itself but a framework for examining some possibilities and looking at how a system designed to meet people’s needs could work while remaining inside the limits that have been identified. A socialist world, without classes or borders or the profit motive, would be by far the best way of addressing these issues and achieving the goal of, as Saito says, thriving within the boundaries.

Paul Bennett

Blogger's Note:

Kohei Saito's Slow Down was reviewed in the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Nationalism and capitalism (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pedants like to distinguish between ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’. The former signifies love for one´s country; the latter, while meaning that too, also means not being particularly tolerant of other countries (or cultures). In practice, though, ‘patriots’ can very easily become ‘nationalists’ even without knowing it. These are just two points along the same spectrum.

What that spectrum is based upon is an emotional attachment to the rather fuzzy concept of ‘national identity’. This is supposed to provide a kind of social glue that holds together large-scale, culturally diverse societies and allows them to function reasonably well.

National states

Benedict Anderson´s seminal work, Imagined Communities (1983), discusses the way ‘print capitalism’ and the growth of literacy aided the spread of national consciousness. Other factors, like improvements in transport and increased mobility, also helped to widen the social horizons of what were once relatively isolated communities that characterised a feudal society.

Before the rise of capitalism, nation-states did not really exist. Though there are strong grounds for saying that capitalism originated in England (specifically, in the English countryside, where the practice of wage labour became universalised), the first prominent individual to put nationalism on the map was, arguably, a Frenchman – Napoleon. Napoleon explicitly appealed to the idea of the nation as the basis of legitimate political power, where his predecessors had relied instead on such arcane notions as the ‘divine right of kings’ to govern.

However, we should not infer from this that nationalism is the indispensable precondition for a large-scale society to exist. Long before the nation-state existed, large multi-ethnic empires with extremely porous borders existed in the ancient world.

In Europe in 1500, there were approximately 500 more or less autonomous political units – an intricate patchwork ranging from Italian city states (many of which subsequently fell victim to conquest) to numerous principalities (often themselves the product of dynastic quarrels within aristocratic families) and a scattering of relatively consolidated kingdoms. Some of these were nominally part of one or other, much larger, ramshackle, sprawling entities, such as the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire once scornfully remarked, was ‘neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire’.

By 1900, however, the political landscape looked very different indeed. The number of self-governing units involved had been drastically whittled down to a mere twenty-odd nation-states having jurisdiction over the entire European landmass. Napoleon´s armies, which conquered much of Europe in the early nineteenth century, contributed to this development in the sense that they helped to create circumstances that eventually led to the rise of nationalist movements later on in that century.

Pseudo-traditions

Then there is the thorny question of nationalism and cultural diversity. Though it is claimed that nationalism enabled the emergence of large-scale culturally diverse societies, the fact of the matter is that cultural or ethnic differentiation has often presented a serious challenge to the nationalist project. If anything, the rise of nationalism has brought about the erosion of local cultures and languages and, in general, has had a flattening effect on the cultural landscape.

What is called the ‘national culture’ is not always what it seems. In The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, the claim that certain national traditions or institutions have their origins in some mist-enveloped remote past (something that is supposed to invest a tradition with more authenticity) was critically scrutinised and found to be often false. Many of these traditions are pseudo-traditions only recently invented for the express purpose of trying to fashion a national identity – in more concrete terms to facilitate nationalist sentiment.

In short, the basic thrust of nationalist ideology tends towards cultural homogenisation. The more culturally homogenised a population is, the easier it is for the state to manipulate it and elicit its support. Standardisation also enables more effective bureaucratisation.

Taken to an extreme, this homogenising thrust can manifest itself in the form of genocide. As Ernest Gellner points out, where ethnic pluralism exists, ‘a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homogeneous… if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all non-nationals’ (Nations and Nationalism, 2009).

However, one should note that this is only a tendency within nationalist ideology; in the real world, most nationalisms have had to opt for some kind of pragmatic or more inclusive compromise in the form of ‘multiculturalism’.

Globalisation

Factors curbing nationalism´s tendency towards cultural homogenisation within the confines of a given nation-state include not only the resilience of ethnic subcultures and the inward migration of ‘foreigners’, bringing with them their own cultural beliefs and practices, but also the impact of what might be called ‘global culture’:

Back in 1848, the Communist Manifesto had something to say about that:

‘In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature’.

Big business is, today, a major purveyor of this global culture. One thinks of the role of big tech companies in providing social media platforms or the impact of global chains like McDonald’s in shaping our culinary tastes. Wherever you go in the world, cities are getting more and more alike with the same monotonously predictable selection of High Street stores.

There is a certain irony in all this. Capitalism, which gave birth to the ideology of nationalism, has also unleashed powerful forces that tend towards the erosion of national distinctiveness.

Backlash

In some ways, this contradiction has brought us to the fraught times we are living in today. The unravelling of the Neoliberal project that has been the dominant paradigm since the 1970s has prompted a backlash against globalisation and the resurgence of virulent nationalism. Far-right movements are on the rise in many parts of the world. Their animus is mainly directed at that most emblematic aspect of globalisation – the movement of migrants across those imaginary borders that define the capitalist nation state.

Such migrations are often fuelled by wars and the devastation inflicted by military action undertaken by the very countries which now have some citizens bitterly complaining about the ensuing blowback in the form of desperately impoverished boat people arriving on their shores.

It’s not just war that is to blame; there is also the economic devastation wrought on people´s lives and livelihoods. For instance, the traditional Senegalese fishing industry has been virtually decimated by overfishing and the use of destructive methods, like bottom trawling, by industrial fleets from Europe and China. This has been a major factor in the increase in Senegalese migrants risking their lives to reach the Canary Islands in the hope of being relocated to mainland Spain.

Robin Cox

Tiny Tips (2025)

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

In spite of momentous historical changes, the fundamental patterns of inequality reemerge across the centuries with remarkable consistency, the patterns of extreme wealth concentration, class immobility, surplus value extraction, special privilege, and ideological systems capable of masking the contradictions. This suite of social traits seems almost constant. 

(CounterPunch)

Write, but do not offend. Speak and comment, but do not divide. Observe cruelties, barbarities and murder, yet refrain from having an opinion. This is the constipating, stifling regime being put in place via suggested codes of conduct for organisers of writer events in Australia. The object of this intellectual veiling: discussing the exterminating war in Gaza. Across the country, the straitjacket of forced social harmony is being applied. 

(Dissident Voice)

Vietnam raises over $13 million for Cuba in historic charity drive. 

(Vietnam Net)

Asked whether Gazans would be allowed to leave, Al-Hayek was unequivocal. “The Palestinian people do not want to leave Gaza,” he told The Media Line. “We repeat each time: We will remain in Gaza until Judgment Day. Here we were born, and here we shall die.” 

(The Media Line)

Hotel accommodation benefits large contractors like Clearsprings, Serco and Mears, while Britannia Hotels made over £150 million in profit since it started to accommodate asylum seekers in 2014. Such contracts even brought the founder of Clearsprings to the Sunday Times Rich List. This company provides housing services to the Home Office that were associated with the highest mortality rate among resident asylum seekers between 2020 and 2023. 

(Counterfire)

Ah, those pro-lifers. Walking, talking, shooting oxymorons. You can tell the pro-life extremists. They’re the ones who want their enemies – the women and men who support a woman’s sovereignty over her own body – dead by any means at their command. Hard to get more pro-life than that. Mike Lee, the brilliant Republican US Senator from Utah, went on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, and posted about the fatal shooting of Democratic politicians in Minnesota, that, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way”. 

(CounterPunch)

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Wednesday that the United States has seized nearly US$700 million in assets connected to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Confiscated property includes multiple luxury homes in Florida, a mansion in the Dominican Republic, two private jets, a horse farm, nine vehicles, luxury yachts, jewelry, watches, and cash. 

(Dominican Today)

This is the humanist vision of Alien: Earth, which recognizes our distinctiveness is not in the power of our minds or the machines that we produce. Rather, it is found in humanity’s ability to transform itself, to create and recreate its own internal nature for new conditions, including those yet to come. In doing so, the show goes beyond mere anti-corporate sentiment and instead asks if we can create a new purpose for ourselves, unburdened by the demons of our past and the demons that our future might hold.

(Jacobin)

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

Cooking the Books: Death of a currency (2025)

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

‘Local currency is retired to end a notable trend’ reported the Times (1 September) about the demise of the Lewes Pound, a local currency introduced 17 years ago in the Sussex town and copied in various other towns and cities in Britain.

We mentioned its launch at the time (Socialist Standard March 2009) and the extravagant claims made for the local currency by George Monbiot: ‘It by-passes greedy banks. It recharges local economies and gives local businesses an advantage over multinationals’ .

The aim was to encourage people to spend their money locally by using a currency that could only be spent and circulated in the town concerned. If people used the local currency to buy from a local shop, it was argued, it would stay in the town, but that if they used ordinary money to buy from a national supermarket the chances are that it would end up being spent elsewhere.

Local currencies didn’t replace ordinary money. In fact, they had to be backed pound for pound by an equivalent amount of ordinary money deposited in a bank. The Times refers to this in its report when it says that, now that the scheme is being wound up, ‘the backing money will be donated to four local charities’.

As we mentioned at the time:

‘The Lewes Pounds get into circulation by people buying them for ordinary pounds and are convertible back into pounds on demand. In answer to the question “What happens to the sterling pounds that are taken when people buy Lewes Pounds?” the organisers explain: “All Sterling pounds are held in a safe deposit box with a local bank, so that we can access them at any time should people wish to trade their Lewes Pounds back into Sterling”’.

So no by-passing of ‘greedy banks’. Nor any extra purchasing power introduced to boost the local economy. It was just one piece of paper being replaced by another of equal spending power. Since people wanting to use the local currency had to buy it, those doing this were likely to have been enthusiasts who would have bought things locally anyway using ordinary money; the same goes for those accepting it in change (which people couldn’t be obliged to do). It is unlikely, then, that local businesses benefited — except the scheme itself by selling Lewes Pounds to collectors. How multinationals lost out remains a mystery.

The scheme failed in the end due to the nationwide trend to pay by card rather than cash. In Brixton the organisers of the local currency there tried to get round this by introducing an electronic Brixton Pound  but this too was overtaken by smartphones with their electronic wallets, and the Brixton Pound too was wound up.

When the Brixton Pound was introduced in 2009 our South London branch commented in a leaflet distributed in the area:

‘What’s the point (apart from helping local shopkeepers)? What difference does it make what coloured pieces of paper we have to use to get the things we need to live? The real problem is that in present-day, capitalist society we have to use money at all to obtain these, and that the amount of money we have will always be rationed by what we get as wages or as benefits. That restricts and distorts our lives’ (Th£ Brixton Pound — What For?).

The sad fact is that all the enthusiasm, time and voluntary work that went into devising and running local currencies led nowhere. This particular ‘notable trend’ to do ‘something now’ to try make things better under capitalism made no difference whatsoever.

Proper Gander: Crafty cover-ups (2025)

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

‘This strange thing is flying very fast but erratically … We didn’t see a cockpit. We didn’t see windows. And it moved in ways that we didn’t understand’ says Alex Dietrich, a former pilot with the American military, of her encounter with an unidentified flying object. The case was featured in BBC4’s documentary What Are UFOs?, which described current interest among scientists of reports of ‘strange things’ in the sky, with a potted history of the UFO phenomenon as context.

In the documentary, astrophysicists, witnesses and researchers discuss Dietrich’s sighting from 2004, which became known as the ‘tic tac’, and the so-called ‘gimbal’, observed in 2015. Both were oddly-shaped and oddly-behaving objects seen by pilots and tracked on radar, with footage recorded and subsequently pored over without universal agreement on what it shows. As some of the experts featured in the programme explain, ordinary objects may seem to have unusual shapes and move in unlikely ways because of how they appear on screen. Infra-red cameras are sensitive to heat, so an object will be more prominent the hotter it is, meaning that an aeroplane could look like a blob because the camera will only pick up the area around the engine. Another effect of this is that an object may seem to vanish if its temperature becomes close to that of what’s behind it. Also, the way that cameras on planes move in relation to other objects can make them misleadingly appear to travel in improbable ways. Recordings on modern equipment can be scrutinised much closer than in the past and, as repeated in the documentary, unexplained aerial phenomena are now investigated scientifically chiefly by analysing data, rather than relying on the veracity of observers’ testimony.

Scanning footage on computers doesn’t explain everything about all sightings, particularly when objects have been witnessed directly as well as through equipment. And some sightings may still be of craft which the state wants to keep top secret. As the programme demonstrates, the explanation that this cover-up has been of earthly tech rather than of extra-terrestrial spaceships seems more substantial now than when UFOs have previously been in vogue. The UFO phenomenon as we now know it began in 1947, not long after the Second World War cemented an association between objects in the sky and threats. Wreckage was recovered from a field near Roswell, New Mexico, which the army initially claimed was of a crashed flying disc, then a weather balloon. The subsequent saga of this being a captured alien ship (with aliens) drew attention away from the explanation that the debris was really from a balloon launched from a nearby military airbase. However, the balloon wasn’t for measuring weather patterns but was developed through the top secret Project Mogul to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The Roswell Incident coincided with a widely-publicised sighting of UFOs over Washington by pilot Kenneth Arnold. The United States Air Force responded to the subsequent wave of other reports of aerial oddities by investigating them under ‘Project Blue Book’, no doubt looking out for incoming Russian craft.

From the 1980s, reports of traditional saucer-shaped UFOs were often superseded by sightings of triangular objects. The shape was similar to that of experimental American fighter jets tested from Area 51, the research base in Nevada which the CIA only admitted existed in 2013. Restricting information is a prerogative of the military and governments, although they’re more interested in keeping their technological advancements secret from rival states than from the general public. If the issue gets blurred by focusing on aliens, then all the better. As researcher Jacob Haqq-Misra and astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi tell us in the documentary, the gap created by the absence of an official, public explanation for UFOs has been filled to some extent by Hollywood, which has reinforced the assumption that extra-terrestrial spacecraft are involved. 1950s science fiction movies played with the notion of alien invaders symbolising commie infiltrators undermining The American Dream. In its early years, the UFO phenomenon was moulded by the tensions and divisions of the Cold War, and has been a more bizarre effect on people’s consciousness than anxieties about the nuclear bomb.

The end of the Cold War didn’t mean the end of UFOs, which were even more prominent in the culture of the 1990s, when TV hit The X-Files emphasised how the UFO phenomenon is intertwined with conspiracy theories. Running through this is a mistrust of the government and military, concentrating on shadowy cover-ups of captured alien tech rather than of new fighter jets. The more zealous UFO researchers have tended towards the approach of trying to demonstrate something is alien, rather than starting enquiries in a more grounded way. A wilder, interplanetary explanation is more attractive in the sense of being attention-grabbing, and therefore has potential for financial exploitation which more mundane explanations lack. UFOs have been commodified particularly enthusiastically in the sci-fi films of the 1950s and the ‘grey’ alien tat and contactee books of the 1990s. These issues were raised in What Are UFOs?, but predictably the documentary didn’t follow them through. The UFO phenomenon has manifested itself in the way it has because it has been shaped by capitalist concerns: nation states, imperialism, military technology, secretive elites, profitability. This is why the emphasis on gathering data to explain each sighting voiced by some of the featured experts isn’t enough to explain the phenomenon itself. This requires an understanding of the societal conditions which have created it.

A good deal of the ufology phenomenon appears to be driven by capitalist concerns, not from another planet. Perhaps any real would-be extra-terrestrial visitors have been put off from landing by seeing the state of capitalist society (and how it has shaped our impression of them)?

Mike Foster

Irish presidential election (What’s the point?) (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A presidential election is looming in the Republic of Ireland with the election date set for 24 October this year. While most elections under capitalism result in negligible meaningful change to peoples’ lives, the Irish presidential election, which takes place every 7 years, is an exceptionally good example of a purely ritualistic exercise in democracy. The socialist view is that elections in capitalism, no matter where they occur, are really just exercises in ‘rearranging the deck chairs’ as all that happens is a change in the personnel who administer the same social system. This is not to disparage democracy as a process but just to highlight the pointless nature of many elections. This is certainly the case for this election.

Decorative

The office of the Irish President dates from 1937 and the role essentially mimics the position of the monarch in the UK. It is mostly ceremonial such as receiving foreign ambassadors, attending significant sporting and cultural events, signing some official documents, representing the country abroad, etc. It does have a specific political role in terms of deciding the process of government formation in the event of a hung parliament where a government has lost its majority. One other duty (with nothing equivalent in Britain) is the power the President has to refer any law passed by the Irish parliament to the Supreme Court to have its compatibility with the constitution tested. Historically both these latter two tasks have rarely been exercised.

The constitution too makes clear that the office of president is almost entirely decorative; subservient to that of the Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) and is not an independent branch of government (as in the United States). It has no role in making or executing public policy. So why would anyone be interested in running for it? Well it does have some obvious attractions; high pay (€332,000 per annum) with lots of expenses thrown in and no specific list of mandatory duties apart from the two mentioned above. There’s no boss checking on your productivity or your schedule. So if the President decides he/she is going to work a 3-day week, sleep in most mornings or take plenty of long weekends, so be it.

The origins of the office lie in the secession of the Republic from the UK in 1921. There was a transition period from that date up to 1937 where the British monarch remained as the titular head of state of southern Ireland until this role was superseded by the creation of the office of President of Ireland. From its inception up until 1990 the contest for the office was mainly a tribal competition between the two large Irish political parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael with the former always winning because of its greater popularity with the electorate. The office became a desirable retirement home for elderly Fianna Fail politicians who were beginning to find the stress of day-to-day politics excessively taxing. Considering the first three presidents, Douglas Hyde was 85 when he left office. Sean T. O. Kelly was 79 and Eamon De Valera was 90 when their terms finished. These three were followed by two more party stalwarts whose terms were cut short by a death and resignation respectively and the next Fianna Fail incumbent, Paddy Hillary, was younger than his elderly predecessors and was noted for his enthusiasm for the game of golf. He actually won a prestigious amateur golf competition in Ireland while President, presumably thanks to having plenty of time to practise. In the words of one acerbic commentator at the time ‘Paddy Hillary used the post to get his golfing handicap back in shape’. This pattern suggested to the public that either the role was quite undefined (and the holder could selectively undertake whatever duties they personally warmed to) or that the duties of the office itself were very light. Both views were correct. This in turn prompted people to wonder what the real point of the office was, because the performance of many of the incumbents to date had been perceived as lacklustre and uninspiring.

Reboot

The office got a notional reboot in 1990 when Mary Robinson won and her election was portrayed as heralding a new Ireland with a more energised presidency, although the job description remained exactly the same. She promised to be more active in the position and to speak out for sections of Irish society that previously had not had their voices heard. Mary Robinson, although effectively elected on the Labour ticket, with wider left-wing support, was in fact a classic middle- class liberal coming from a wealthy background. In her earlier days she played a significant role in the process of liberalising Ireland from the oppressive dictates of the Catholic Church which particularly negatively affected women’s lives. She subsequently resigned the Presidency to become a UN High Commissioner. Before becoming President, she had been a law professor and since leaving the UN has had prominent roles with a number of international quangos and think tanks. In fact, like many of the other presidents, she’s an example of the kind of ‘important’ person in the superstructure of capitalism who moves from one ‘important’ job to the next. Her two successors, Mary McAleese and then Michael D Higgins (the outgoing President) have tended to follow her example, speaking out in general terms about disadvantage in society, the future of the planet and other worthy (and wordy) matters. Most of their pronouncements are purely rhetorical, unobjectionable in terms of content but empty in terms of any substance.

The runners

There are three candidates in the field. Two are ‘centrists’, from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, The fact that these parties are in a coalition government together means that the government has two candidates going forward sharing an almost identical world view. The ‘left-wing’ candidate in the race is Catherine Connolly. She has the formal support of various left parties in the Dail including Labour, the Social Democrats, People before Profit-Solidarity and some left-leaning independent parliamentarians. Sinn Féin too is supporting Connolly and this should be a very significant boost to her, given the electoral heft of Sinn Féin.

One of her prominent supporters has described her as a ‘principled, left socialist’. She is from a long-established tradition in Ireland going back to her namesake (but no relation) James Connolly; her politics are a blend of ‘socialism’ with nationalism. The latter means she is a proponent of a United Ireland. She stresses the maintenance of Irish neutrality in international affairs and has a long-held opposition to any Irish involvement with NATO. In the past she has adopted what her opponents may portray as an ‘anti-western’ agenda, being moderately Eurosceptic and having a somewhat uncritical attitude to the current and previous regimes of Venezuela, Ecuador, Syria and Russia. She has long been vocal in her criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and this has become more pronounced since the Gaza war, though of course the depth of her feelings on this are no longer restricted to the Left. In her campaign she says that she will present herself as a voice for the community, a voice for peace and a voice for tackling climate change. The brutal truth is that, if elected, she can talk all she wants about these matters but can do nothing of substance.

The non-starters

A mainstream conservative candidate, barrister Maria Steen, to represent the socially conservative section of the electorate, failed at the last moment to obtain enough nominations. Her platform was based on her history of opposing the liberalisation of society from Catholic moral values over the last 10 years or so. In that sense, she’s the complete antithesis of Mary Robinson and if elected (which was never likely) would have represented a 180 degree turn on the part of the electorate.

There were the many micro candidates running campaigns to a lesser or greater degree to be nominated, some of them having no platform at all and others having agendas that can only be described as bizarre and/or pointlessly idiosyncratic. Many of these ‘campaigns’ were just publicity stunts. Names here included a former TV weather presenter, a former professional dancer (Michael Flatley), the aged pop star Bob Geldof (who hasn’t lived in Ireland for years), Conor McGregor, a mixed martial artist (and found guilty of rape in a civil court and currently being investigated for some dubious behaviour during that same trial), Gareth Sheridan, a very young entrepreneurial whizzkid, who felt that the office of president could do with the vim he feels he could provide. There was also a far-right activist who’s worried (as all of that ilk are) by immigration and the lack of respect for ‘our’ national flag. These all dropped out because of lack of nominations, with some of them attempting to save face by claiming they were just ‘testing the water’.

The election campaign proper began at the end of September. Because the President has no real political power, the candidates campaign on personality and character and what values or ethos they will bring to the post of representing the nation. Success or failure can depend on whether embarrassing or uncomfortable incidents can be found in a rival’s past to indicate they are not of a suitable calibre. Also given Ireland’s PR system of voting, the winning candidate has to be vote-transfer friendly. This is usually achieved by making positive but bland statements on every issue that arises and not engaging with vehemence in any matter that could mean you are portrayed as being excessively negative or partisan. In that sense, appearing to be ‘nice’ and not having strong opinions on any political matter is a definite advantage. The Irish presidential election, like the office itself, is purely ceremonial. Real change must come from a different perspective and approach to politics.

Kevin Cronin

An Alternative Reich? (2025)

Book Review from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alt Reich. By Nafeez Ahmed. Byline Books 2024. £12.99

This is a book about the challenge to conventional liberal bourgeois democracy posed by a network of far-right populists, ‘nativists’ and neo-nazis that appear to be in the ascendancy in many parts of the world, including the United States. They locate society’s problems not in the inability of the market economy to provide for people’s physical and psychological needs, but in the inability of the established systems of political democracy to deliver ’change’ to those who appear disgruntled with it.

Ahmed is a good researcher and he traces the way in which a relatively small number of multi-billionaires have set up or founded think tanks and pressure groups that have spread these far-right viewpoints over decades: most notably organisations like the Henry Jackson Society and the Heritage Foundation. Their reach has been deep and profound – into the heart of the media, and politically into the Trump administration, the Boris Johnson and Truss governments, and others in Western Europe and beyond.

The phenomenon is undoubtedly real and it is chronicled in detail here, but like others out to make a distinctive point, he can sometimes overstate his case. In the Conclusion, he seems to recognise this himself, saying:

‘The fascism of the Alt Reich is … a contradictory amalgamation of shifting white supremacism, extreme nativism and anti-globalist nationalist corporatism, which inherently pines for deregulated private capital to be backed by an authoritarian state reliant on unitary military power merged with techno-corporate autocracy. This is hardly a coherent worldview; rather it is an evolving mishmash of contradictory and competing worldviews’ (p.379).

Indeed, and this can be seen by the way in which some of its major players (like Trump and Musk) can fall out so easily, or why Reform UK has become a by-word for political resignation in more ways than one.

That the market fails to deliver on people’s expectations of it (and seems to have been doing so increasingly over the last 20 or so years) is at the root of why this rather incoherent set of viewpoints has gained such traction . . . the popular narrative is that all governments fail to deliver and they’re fundamentally all the same. As Mark Twain said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes and so it’s almost a minor variation of the old anarchist slogan about the futility of elections, in that whoever you vote for the government always gets back in.

And allied to all this there are worrying undercurrents – the blaming of immigrants as a source of society’s problems in a way not seen since the 1970s, an unshakeable belief in capitalism as a system but not its obvious and inevitable consequences, and a leader-loving authoritarianism that underpins a not-so-sneaking admiration for dictatorial abominations like Putin, Orban and Modi.

So Ahmed’s book is worth reading for these reasons alone. It’s just worth bearing in mind that the fascism of which he writes is not really the fascism of the 1920s and 30s, and while the ‘Alt Reich’ book title is a clever one it is, in this respect, not entirely accurate. Another caveat is that it seems odd that a book of this nature (around 400 pages) does not have an index. Perhaps it’s just the sort of left-field, unconventional, liberal approach the alt-reich themselves would decry. But without having an obsession with tradition and procedure, it might just, actually, have been rather useful . . .

DAP

World Socialist Radio - Nationalism and Capitalism (2025)

Adapted from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nationalism and Capitalism, written by Robin Cox

Nationalism is a product of capitalism: it emerges to glue culturally diverse societies under a shared identity, but in fact tends to erase local diversity and enable state control. This episode traces nationalism’s rise alongside capitalism’s growth (via literacy, print culture, mobility), shows how “traditions” are often artificially invented to bolster national identity, and highlights the tension between nationalism and globalising forces (e.g. big business, migration) which capitalism also fosters. The result is a backlash: as neoliberal globalisation falters, resurgent nationalism—often reactionary and exclusionary—becomes a rallying point against the perceived threats of migration and cultural dilution.

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

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