Tyranny (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Tyrants are surely not difficult to spot. A Hitler or a Stalin are, in hindsight, ludicrously obvious. Yet, in their own time, they garnered popular support, even as their excesses were becoming evident. Even with the clarity of history exposing their misdeeds, there are those who look back on them with political affection.

It is more difficult to evaluate the tyrannous potential of an individual who is in the process of emerging. Especially to those who are looking for, craving for, a leader to cure their individual and national ills.

Take the near veneration of Winston Churchill, despite his political record of disasters such as the Dardanelles campaign in the First Word War. It was, of course, his war leadership in the 1940s by which his political sins were largely, if not universally, absolved. Can he be cited for any actual acts of tyranny though? The deaths of an estimated 3 to 4 million Bengalis due to Churchill diverting food supplies makes an argument, especially in Bengal.

A strategic decision in wartime circumstances it might be argued by those more sympathetic. But tyrants usually claim their decisions are strategic, in the best interests of their people. The need to crack eggs to make omelettes.

The point though is not that this or that person is a tyrant. Such would be to identify tyranny solely with individuals. A problem solved by the expedient of choosing leaders who are not tyrants. Tyranny as a personality disorder.

However, if it’s the whole political, economic and social system that is tyrannous, then a tyrant is an individual expression, the figurehead of that tyranny. Hitler and Stalin had whole coteries around them as complicit as those individual leaders. The death of Stalin did not lead to the dismantling of the tyrannous regime in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Stalin period was the continuation of that established by those who assumed power along with Lenin. It is arguable that the Bolsheviks, for all their communist posturing, merely adapted the previous Czarist methods to their own ends. The present Russian incumbent is a continuation barely veiled by a very dubious and threadbare ‘democratic’ cloak.

Over 2300 years ago Aristotle commented at length on the subject of tyranny, identifying its main features. Tyranny is often the manifestation of political turmoil, unstable government and a disaffected people. It reflects deep social and institutional issues caused by economic disparities and political dysfunction. People begin to look for a solution in the form of a leader who seems to embody the promise of resolution. Such an individual though will be looking to exploit these disruptive features for their own political or economic (or both) ends. Tyrants will impoverish their subjects to the point they feel they cannot resist. Aristotle was, of course, addressing individual rule in the political circumstances of his own time. It is feasible to consider his principles of tyranny in the broader context of society at large. In our time this is the continuing predominance and rule of capitalism.

Instability

Instability is a fundamental feature of a system posited on the principle of ruthless competition. The accruing of profit is the motor driving the system and this is achieved at the expense of the wealth creators, the workforce, and competitors.

To best serve capitalism’s requirements the workforce is stratified economically by a variety of remuneration levels. Economic disparity between workers creates sectional interests that divide rather than unite workers in the face of the real schism, between workers as a class and capitalists. Political dysfunction then arises when workers begin to identify with different political parties purportedly serving their particular interests, while actually administering the system on behalf of capitalism. This enables the capitalist system, in its role of tyrant, to use these disruptive features for its own economic and political ends. Capitalism’s subjects, the workers, are impoverished to the extent of being wholly dependent economically upon capitalism.

Even the seemingly well paid rarely, if ever, achieve economic security that might allow them to feel independent of capitalism. A seemingly luxurious lifestyle can quickly dissipate if the ‘generous’ salary disappears. Impoverishment is certainly more obvious to those on or near the minimum wage end of the pay spectrum. They are so insecure and drained by their circumstances they are rendered seemingly powerless to resist. Nor do they readily recognise common cause with those who are financially more comfortable, even (erroneously) called middle class. Indeed, it is this sector of the working class that becomes an object of their dissatisfaction. They feel diminished by the ‘middle class elite’, readily portrayed in the media dedicated to serving the interests of capital, as espousing ‘liberal’ or ‘lefty’ notions from their detached estates. This can manifest as mass street demonstrations against supposed ‘middle class’ shibboleths such as immigration, even socialism, as ineffective reformism is often misidentified. Would-be tyrants emerge to offer leadership that is actually misleadership.

There are actual tyrants heading brutal regimes as well as those who aspire to being tyrants with their own brutal regimes. These are often not as useful to capitalism as freer societies more compatible with free markets and flexible workforces. The democratic, or at least seemingly democratic, political model largely seems most suitable for capitalism to flourish, or deal with social unrest when flourishing periodically gives way to economic crisis. Should the democratic model become undermined by ineffective governance, with none of the established political parties able to maintain stability, then the implicit tyranny of capital can find explicit form through an insurgent political force.

The only antidote to the tyranny of capitalism, implicit or explicit, is socialism. Until workers can look beyond the immediate circumstances of their particular strata and identify themselves as a class they will remain as subjects of that tyranny. Socialism is the way workers can take real democratic possession and control of the means of life, where use and the meeting of all needs, not profit, is the motive force of society. Then the tyranny will have been truly toppled.

Dave Alton

What if there’s a shortage? (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

For a socialist post-capitalist society to come about presupposes two basic things. In the absence of either of these (and, even more so, both), this society would not be realisable.

Firstly, you have to have a majority of people who want it, understand what it entails and are committed to seeing it flourish and succeed. It cannot be imposed from above by a minority, however enlightened or well-meaning.

Secondly, you have to have in place an advanced technological infrastructure that has at least the potential to enable us to adequately meet the reasonable needs of the population. In other words, to more or less ensure ‘plenty’. The more output were to fall below the level required to meet these needs, the greater the strain that would be imposed upon the particular kind of social arrangement that defines a post-capitalist society – a society characterised by the free distribution of goods and services provided by the voluntary work of its members.

What is plenty?

Of course, what is meant by ‘plenty’ is something relative; it depends not just on physical output but, also, on our values. When we talk of ‘plenty’ the question always arises – ‘in relation to what’?

If what you deem to be minimally acceptable as a standard is something so extravagant as a sprawling multi-bedroomed mansion set in its own spacious grounds along with a fleet of luxury cars parked in the garage and outbuildings for the servants then, very clearly, in per capita terms, we are not going to achieve ‘plenty’ by this yardstick, in a post-capitalist society.

You can therefore forget about achieving such a society in that case. However, by the same token, you can also forget about ever extricating yourselves from the circumstances you find yourself in today which for a great many people are grim and precarious. In short, you will be lumbered with capitalism for the foreseeable future.

To achieve ‘plenty,’ then, will require us to lower the bar to something rather more realistic. This is precisely why the first of these preconditions of a post-capitalist society cannot be separated or considered in isolation from the second: to some extent they mesh together.

In principle, achieving and maintaining a state of ‘plenty’ would eliminate the need for any form of rationing – money, of course, being the means by which goods are rationed today under capitalism. However, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility of some shortages arising in a post-capitalist society, whether in the early days or from a natural disaster. That being the case, we cannot rule out some form of rationing in the sense of restrictions on the consumption of some goods.

Prior to the 20th century it probably would not have been feasible to establish such a society given that the means of production would not yet have been sufficiently developed to materially support it. This is no longer the case. Indeed, it has not been the case for quite a long time now. As a generalisation, one can say that it is fairly indisputable that the technological potential to satisfy most, if not all, of the needs of the population, globally speaking, exists today.

Not erased overnight

The legacy of capitalism’s self-inflicted shortcomings would not be able to be erased overnight. We cannot expect universal ‘plenty’ to suddenly materialise the ‘day after the revolution,’ so to speak. The apparatus of capitalist production is geared to creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. It will take some time, however short, to restructure and reorganise industry to fully meet human needs as well as ensure it is effectively managed in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

This means that at the beginning, post-capitalist society is likely to have to contend with some shortages of one kind or another for a while. However, this should not present too great an obstacle to such a society functioning properly as intended.

The reorganisation of productive capacity to realise its full potential to meet the reasonable demands of people everywhere would be happening under new conditions in that effective market demand would no longer be the determinant of what gets to be produced, as it is today under capitalism.

In a post-capitalist society, the relationship between our subjective preferences and the products we desire would be a direct one – not one mediated by money or, for that matter, labour vouchers. Insofar as comparisons need to be made between products in terms of their value to us, this would be effected entirely according to our preferences, which would simply be ranked.

Productive activity would be guided by a flexible hierarchy of production priorities, responding to shifts in the pattern of supply and demand. Our values would thus be able to directly engage with, or find expression in, the process of material production itself – by continually informing and guiding it rather than production being dominated or regulated by the impersonal laws of the capitalist market economy.

The single most important way in which productive capacity to meet human needs can be rapidly increased in a post-capitalist society is to convert that large chunk of existing productive capacity currently having nothing to do with directly meeting these needs and diverting enormous quantities of resources and labour away from those needs. This means progressively eliminating the enormous legacy of capitalism’s structural waste.

As a result a lot more in the way of socially useful output could be produced while, at the same time, the amount of resources needed overall or in the aggregate would decline significantly by comparison with what is required today. This will alleviate the unsustainable pressures currently being exerted on our global ecosystem.

In post-capitalist society we will see a dramatic shrinkage in the extent of the social division of labour, with many of the socially useless jobs we are obliged to do today no longer being required. This will allow much more labour and resources to be redirected towards socially useful production. The resultant increase in socially useful output will have obvious implications for the question of any shortages.

Dealing with shortages

Given that some shortages are likely to remain in the beginning – even if to a steadily diminishing extent, how would we deal with these shortages under the very different set of circumstances of a post-capitalist society?

In considering what form of limitation on the consumption of some goods might be most appropriate in a post-capitalist society, the possibility, however remote, needs to be taken into account that it might lend itself to the re-emergence of some form of market exchange through the back door, as labour vouchers might. Any system that would need to be implemented in a post-capitalist society would need to be scaled down to only what it was absolutely necessary to limit. It would need to be, in other words, a limited, partial system, targeting only those goods that are clearly in short supply.

What kind of goods are we talking about whose consumption might require limitation in the early years of a post-capitalist society? These would be goods that figure rather low down in our hierarchy of production goals – most notably, inessential or luxury goods. The objective would be to strictly limit or restrict only those goods subject to shortage. This would minimise the adverse psychological, cultural, and administrative costs that any system of restricting consumption unavoidably entails.

Targeting only some goods is exactly what a system of labour vouchers disallows; by its very nature, it is a universalistic form of rationing. However, the need to restrict the consumption of some good arises only in the case where there is a shortage of the good in question. Consequently, a universal system of rationing, which is what a system of labour vouchers amounts to, would therefore seem to imply, on the face of it, a condition of generalised or widespread scarcity applicable to each and every good.

But how can this be reconciled with the claim that a communistic post-capitalist society is firmly predicated on the real prospect of material abundance? How can we even envisage that such a society might be possible if all around us we see, not the portents of post-scarcity, but a chronic and all-pervading shortage of everything?

While there might well be some shortages in the very early stages of a post-capitalist society, the idea that there will be shortages of everything – universal or generalised scarcity – is hardly credible. Even today under capitalism this is not the case, as for example in food production and housing.

For a system of ‘free distribution’ to come about, people need to be mature and adult enough to recognise what is and what is not possible. They also need to feel confident that, broadly speaking, all their reasonable requirements for food, shelter, clothing, medical attention and so on are capable of being satisfactorily met under this arrangement, allowing for the occasional shortage of some items.

Robin Cox

Change the World (2025)

Book Review from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Replace the State. How to Change the World when Elections and Protests Fail. By Sasha Davis. University of Minnesota Press. 2025. 175pp.

A book with a title like Replace the State cannot but catch the eye of an organisation like the Socialist Party that advocates a stateless system of society. Appearances can be deceiving of course. So to what extent does this book live up to the promise of its title?

The first thing to say is that, for the author of this book, replacing the state does not mean establishing a society without a state or states. What it means is small groups taking ‘direct action’ to manage or take over ‘contested sites’ where the existing system may be oppressing local communities and causing societal or environmental damage. Many of these sites referred to in this book are ‘indigenous’, that is to say they are what remains of the local original communities there before they were taken over by governments for use as part of the state and the capitalist juggernaut. The kind of action the writer is talking about is occupation of spaces (the term he uses for this is ‘counteroccupations’) in which, for example, excluded people can be offered sanctuary, or people can demonstrate their opposition to unwanted local projects (eg military or nuclear bases) and in so doing engage in mutual aid and what he calls ‘participatory governance’ and ‘inclusive and sustainable practices’. Specific examples of this would be, in his own words, ‘worker-run cooperatives, community land trusts and farm spaces dedicated to sustainable food systems and social justice’. And examples he gives of successes in this area are the civil rights movement in the US and the stopping of military training and bombing on one of the small islands of Puerto Rico. ‘Relational governance’ is the umbrella term used here to identify this way of operating, which, the author states, ‘arises from a worldview that recognises the fundamental interconnected and interdependent nature of our societies, ecologies, economies, political systems, bodies and minds’ and ‘contrasts sharply with the view many modern states conceptualize the world and act towards it’.

In terms of ‘worldview’, there is little here we would disagree with. But, given the overwhelming planetary presence of the capitalist system and the power of the national states that exist to administer it, we would have to regard the kind of action the author advocates as a drop in the ocean. He seeks to make a clear distinction between the activities and campaigns he would like to see undertaken and those protest movements that demand social change or reforms via petitions or demonstrations or support for one party considered more ‘progressive’ than others in elections. He refers to such activities (and quite rightly in our view) as ‘chasing our tails’ since, though they may sometimes have the effect of making life a little more bearable for wage and salary earners, they cannot change the fundamental nature of the system of massive wealth inequality we all live in. But it is hard to see how the kind of activity he does recommend – carving out small spaces in the existing system where he hopes things can be run more fairly, more justly and more sustainably – can make a great deal of difference either, or how any benefits arising from it can be more than short term. The writer himself seems to recognise this at one point when he states that, though in many places activists have managed to carve out ‘spaces of self-determination’, it is a strategy that rarely works meaningfully in the long-term and rather, as he puts it, ‘frequently succeeds only for a short period of time and/or in a relatively small space’. Even so, seeming to share the playbook of Trotskyist groups, he insists that workers’ experience of such struggle and striving is essential as it will build to a point of consciousness which will lead them to revolt and to bring in wholesale changes of a radical kind. It can cause, so the author tells us, ‘alternative ways of life to be practiced, modelled, and disseminated’. Yet nothing of this, it must be said, is borne out by examples of this happening in the real world.

We would not, of course, want to seem to be pouring cold water on what are clearly genuine and long-term efforts on the part of the author to propose and encourage ways of changing the world for the better in the face of what he rightly describes as ‘the cascade of catastrophic problems coming at us from every direction’ and of seeking the achievement of what he refers to as a system of ‘equality, inclusion and environmental protection’. He shows clearly too that he recognises the class-divided nature of capitalist society (‘owner vs wage earner’) and the role the state plays in preserving it (‘The State Won’t Fix Our Problems’ is the title of one of his chapters) and sees no mileage in trying to address social ills through the institutions that have caused them. But we would have to ask him to consider whether activity to secure real, widespread – in fact global – social change which he would no doubt wish to see doesn’t rather reside elsewhere. To be precise, whether it doesn’t reside in campaigning to change the outlook of the majority who, the world over, have to work for a wage or salary to survive, and to bring them round to the self-emancipatory consciousness that impels them to vote for an equal, inclusive and environmentally sustainable society of common ownership and democratic control, a society that will genuinely ‘replace the state’ and enable all to fulfil their potential both individually and collectively.

Howard Moss

Yes in My Back Yard (2025)

Book Review from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundance: How We Build A Better World. By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. ISBN 9781805226055

This book has caused quite a stir. It has even made Chancellor Reeves’ summer reading list, and been cited – in passing – by Robert Peston. It is part of the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) trend. Its central theme is that government regulation is choking the capacity for effective action to generate wealth, and that instead the liberal left has been concentrating on the parcelling out of scarcity, rather than trying to improve the overall material wealth of society.

The authors mention the expensive failure to build a high-speed railway in California, citing environmental laws and litigation as the reason: alongside the excessive bureaucracy to plan the route. They also note California has higher rates of homelessness than comparable cities in Texas, and attribute the blame to zoning and to authorities loading environmental, building and labour standards into permissions, making building uneconomic for developers.

In their narrative, they do discuss the nature of landholding and the fact that residents’ houses are also financial assets, only to skip blithely over them to discuss bureaucratic complexity again. In so doing, and returning to their theme that it was the failure of efforts to restrict the power of public authorities that is to blame, they ignore the role of private property.

The state is restricted in order to secure the power of private property. The litigation is there to protect property rights. It’s there to protect economic interests (and some firms do benefit from regulation). The complex funding arrangements and financial regulations are there precisely to keep the interests of wealth superior to state power. This is a political choice, and one that those who fund the political parties will continue to demand.

At points, the authors seem to indicate that it would be better to allow constructors to build slum housing than to continue allowing homelessness. They also suggest reducing quality controls and demands on construction: in essence, they are allowing that the working class cannot afford decent housing. Although their ‘lens’, as they say, is increasing supply, they ignore the lack of effective demand for the majority.

They find time in their conclusion to reference Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto talking about unfettering productive forces to produce abundance. But they ignore what those fetters of capitalist society are: the law of no profit – no production, and the law of no profit – no employment. The growth of income streams alongside the capacity to produce so much that profit margins would be reduced to zero.

Absent an understanding of the role of private property and the class struggle from their narrative, they are reduced to a simple call for de-regulation coupled with bold state action. They do not see that the litigiousness they decry is meant to exclude a thorough-going democratic control that includes all voices. The abundance they seek can only come from the common ownership and democratic control of productive wealth.

Pik Smeet

The Doughnut revisited (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last month’s Socialist Standard we discussed Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics. As it happens, on 1 October Raworth and co-author Andrew Fanning published an online paper ‘Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance’ in the journal Nature. This updates and widens the scope of previous work in this framework.

Things have not improved since the original work was done: ‘Billions of people are falling short of meeting their most essential needs, whereas humanity’s ecological imprint on the living planet is now overshooting at least six of the nine planetary boundaries’. Previously four of the boundaries had been crossed, ecological limits which it was essential to keep within.

The boundaries are measured in terms of indicators, with more than one indicator for some boundaries. Ozone-layer depletion has been stable since the early 2000s, but the other indicators for which information over time is available show a worsening of conditions. For instance, four indicators have more than doubled the extent to which they exceed acceptable limits: CO2 concentration and radiative forcing (both of which relate to the climate change boundary), and hazardous chemicals and phosphorus (relating to chemical and nutrient pollution).

The inner ring of the Doughnut deals with meeting people’s needs. Here two indicators have deteriorated significantly, food insecurity and the existence of autocratic regimes. Others have improved, but only slightly, with 10 percent of the world’s population being undernourished in 2021–2, compared to 13 percent in 2000-1. A rapid improvement would be needed to eliminate this problem by 2030. The proportion lacking access to safely managed drinking water only went down from 39 percent to 37 percent over the same period.

Has there been progress overall? Global GDP doubled between 2000 and 2022, but ‘only modest improvements were achieved in reducing social shortfalls worldwide, whereas ecological overshoot increased rapidly, disrupting the critical planetary processes on which all life depends’.

So the Doughnut’s method of examining whether society is coping with meeting everyone’s needs while keeping the planet in a sustainable condition shows very clearly that the present system, capitalism, is unable to meet either goal. A system based on profit cannot solve these problems, and only a change to a world based on production for use will be able to do so.

Paul Bennett

Rights – a movable feast (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, recently announced that her Party will take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights if they win the next election. A big ‘if’ obviously, but, in stating at the same time that such a move was ‘necessary to protect our borders, our veterans, and our citizens’, it’s clear that what she was trying to do was to steal the clothes of her dangerous competitor on the right wing of British capitalist politics, Reform UK. She was giving a nod towards the extreme nationalism that currently seems rampant and gets expressed most virulently in the call to ‘stop the boats’.

Whether any such move would actually curb immigration is of course open to question, but, if what would seem to be the most overarching of rights – human rights – can be removed at a stroke by a government with a parliamentary majority, is there anything permanent or consistent in the notion of rights at all?

How many rights?

We certainly hear much noise about rights, both from those who want to do away with or weaken them and from others who oppose their removal or weakening. What kind of rights are we talking about? Well, to give a few examples, there are workers’ rights, pension rights, women’s rights, property rights, gay rights, the right to free speech, the right to family life, the right to privacy, the right to strike, the right to peaceful protest, the right to education, the right to a fair trial, and so on. A short time ago I found myself attending a lecture given by the Older Persons’ Commissioner for Wales on the subject of ‘How we move from principles to practice to make rights real for older people’. There are also some ‘rights’ which, while often talked about in the past, little is heard of these days – for instance, ‘the right to work’ or ‘ the right to rest and holiday’. There are also some bizarre ‘twists’ on the rights agenda, such as ‘the right to bear arms’ (usually with reference to the US), and ‘the rights of the unborn child’ (insisted on by opponents of abortion).

Looking at the broad historical context, rights are a feature of the fact that the system we live under has found ways of becoming more benign and less repressive. The overriding reason for this has been the perception by governments and wealth owners that those in society who have to work for a wage or salary to survive are more likely to do that readily and acceptingly and at the same time be more productive and efficient in their work if their lives are made not altogether uncomfortable. And indeed one of the effects of having the various ‘rights’ conferred has been to make us feel more comfortable in our position as wage slaves. But it took a long time. Most of today’s ‘rights’ would have been considered unthinkable not just in pre-modern times, where the ‘divine right of kings’ prevailed, but even in the early years of industrialisation and capitalist development. In the nineteenth century, for example, talk of, say, ‘women’s rights’ or the ‘right to education’ or ‘pension rights’ would have been unlikely to say the least. And, until well into the 20th century, even the notion of ‘workers’ rights’ was much contested, and only in recent times has ‘gay rights’ become part of the vocabulary of English. This kind of thing is of course still very much the case in many ‘less developed’ parts of the world where dictatorial or repressive regimes hold sway. Examples such as North Korea, Myanmar, China, Belarus and some countries in Africa and the Middle East come to mind.

Different ‘rights’ in different places

But, despite the existence of many kinds of ‘rights’ in most of Europe and North America, it would be mistaken to regard these as necessarily permanent or consistent features. They can easily be watered down or removed by the governments that oversee the system of production for profit and buying and selling that we live in (ie, capitalism), if it seems to them to be in the interest of the continued smooth running of that system to do that. A British government deciding to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, as the Tory leader has promised to do if her Party comes to power, would be an example of that. A recent example of this actually happening has been the watering down of the right to peaceful protest by the ban on demonstrations by supporters of the Palestine Action group. As for ‘the right to strike’, it still exists of course, but it has been chipped away at by various different governments, with the overall effect of making striking today markedly more difficult for workers than at times in the past. I have testified to another instance of the watering down of ‘rights’ in my own place of work, where the contracts signed by employees have moved from specifying a ‘maximum’ of 35 hours as the standard working week in recognition of ‘The European Working Time Directive’, to now specifying a working week of ‘at least’ 35 hours.

And there can also be striking differences between the most economically advanced countries in the rights they accord. The most ‘generous’ in this domain tend to be the Scandinavian countries, while in the United States, despite its being the hub of world capitalism, ‘workers’ rights’, for instance, are all but non-existent. To give an example, in Sweden parents are eligible for up to 480 days of paid parental leave from their employment, a policy driven by the idea that children well looked after by their parents are likely to be more productive and better socially integrated later in life when they enter ‘the world of work’. In the US, where a different ethic (more of a dog-eat-dog one) prevails, there is no statutory ‘right’ to paid leave, such being entirely at the employer’s discretion. This can create situations, as one commentator has put it, where ‘American parents scramble back to work days after giving birth’. To add to this, employment practice in the US regards work as a voluntary contract which can be dissolved at any time by either party without the mandatory right to redundancy pay for the employee.

A slippery concept

The reality is that ‘rights’ (like reforms) are very much a movable feast easily or not so easily granted but then rowed back on as convenient and also sometimes differing drastically even from one economically advanced country to another. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted everyone’s right to an adequate standard of living, including the right to food, public services and social security. But everyone knows that, in a world where people may be poorly paid, unemployed or homeless, this is no more than an unattainable wish list. What price such people’s right to an ‘adequate standard of living’ or their ‘property rights’? Again, while very few would disagree that people should have the right to free speech and the right to be free from arbitrary arrest or imprisonment, how does that square with the reality of a system where the accumulation of wealth for the already wealthy few dominates and allows authoritarian regimes (Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, etc) to fly in the face of that?

In the kind of world socialists campaign to see established – marketless, moneyless, wageless, leaderless, and based on voluntary work, democratic organisation and free access to all goods and services – the slippery concept that is ‘rights’ will not enter into the equation. Instead, in a classless society of human freedom, needs, both practical and social, will be satisfied as a matter of course. Above all, the productive machinery of society and the goods and services it produces will belong not to one class, but to everyone as an automatic and inalienable ‘right’.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: Woolly thinking (2025)

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

‘The money is there to make a better society and economy — it’s just in the wrong hands. We need to raise taxes on the wealthiest in society, and on those corporations who make record profits while our members struggle to put food on the table. That wealth should then be invested back into our communities — in housing, in health, in education, and in an industrial strategy that creates secure, unionised jobs. And investment must go hand in hand with a just transition that puts public need before corporate greed.’ So wrote Sarah Woolley, the general secretary of the bakers’ union, in the Morning Star (27 September).

By money she presumably means the monetary value that is attached to wealth produced in a capitalist society. Money, in this sense, comes into being when the wealth workers produce is sold. This is initially divided into wages and ‘surplus value’ as the part of what workers produce over and above their wages which is appropriated by the business corporation that employs them. The surplus value then comes to be divided into profits, ground-rent and interest. These are taxed by the government to get money to spend. What is left is accumulated by capitalists as more capital, with some spent to fund a privileged lifestyle.

So, at the end of a year a given amount of wealth, as measured in terms of its monetary value, is produced. There are also wealthy individuals and corporations who own previously produced wealth.

Woolley seems to accept this set-up and wants the government to change how what is produced under it is distributed. Some of the wealth appropriated by capitalists in the course of a year is to be taxed as well as some of the wealth accumulated by them in previous years. This ‘money’ is to be spent on better health, housing and education for the wage workers and their dependants and re-invested in providing secure and better paid jobs. She doesn’t put a figure on this but presumably the amount the government would spend would be much more than it now does.

She doesn’t seem to have taken into account what would happen if this was attempted. Remember we are talking about this happening in a capitalist economy where decisions about wealth production are in the hands of profit-seeking corporations.

So what would happen? First, the profits that corporations get to keep will be smaller. Since profit-making is what motivates them that incentive will be reduced. Less profit will mean less investment, resulting in less wealth — less money in her sense — being available to tax in the following year. Less investment would also mean fewer jobs, and so less paid out in wages. In short, there would be an economic downturn.

The fact is that a government cannot simply take money from the capitalist class and spend it to improve things for the working class. It cannot put ‘public need’ before ‘corporate greed’.

Woolley could come back and say that in that case the government would have to use some of ‘the money’ taken from the wealthy and their ‘greedy’ corporations and itself invest it. That would create other problems as the state investment would also have to yield profits to be sustainable. Maybe she does envisage a state-run capitalist economy as the way out, but it’s more likely to be a typical example of the confused rhetoric employed by left-wing trade union leaders — and by the left-wing politicians behind the new Corbyn party — which reflects a lack of understanding of how capitalism works.

Proper Gander: Anti-social media (2025)

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

With all the opportunities which social media offers us in the ability to communicate instantly with people anywhere, it’s depressing how much it is used to harm others. ‘Sextortion’ is one example, being a type of online blackmail which is the ‘fastest growing scam affecting teenagers globally’. The number of instances reported to the FBI in America had more than doubled in three years to 55,000 in 2024. In the UK, the National Crime Agency receives 110 notifications each month. In a case of sextortion, someone creates a fake profile on a social media platform such as Snapchat or Instagram and uses it to contact their target, often a teenage boy. Thinking they are communicating with an interested girl, the victim is manipulated into sending naked photos of themselves. Then, the scammer drops the pretence and threatens to share the pictures with the boy’s family and friends unless they send money. One victim was 16 year-old Evan Boettler, who was driven to end his own life by the pressure. His story was the focus of BBC Three’s documentary Blackmailed: The Sextortion Killers. Reporter Tir Dhondy meets Evan’s parents in Missouri, America, devastated by his loss. The identity of the person who scammed Evan isn’t known, although the IP address of the phone they used is found, located in Nigeria. Tir travels to the country, which we are told is the main source of cybercrime in Africa.

In Nigeria, online scammers are known as ‘yahoo boys’, who operate in groups under a leader, some of whom have become very rich. Their workplaces are ‘hustle kingdoms’, a grandiose name for what we see as just a sparse room in a grim hut. Here, the aspiring ‘gang-stars’ as one of them calls himself, sit with mobile phones, messaging duped teenagers thousands of miles away. Several ‘yahoo boys’ agree to speak with Tir, and are surprisingly open about their methods and dismissive of those they con. One says he doesn’t feel bad because he needs the money, and he and others think that the people they target in the West can spare the funds demanded. The scammers are distanced from their victims in several ways: by communicating by phone across continents, through the disparity in wealth, and also by how they are alienated enough to see others just as sources of money, without considering the impact of being blackmailed. While the actions of the ‘yahoo boys’ are reprehensible, these can be explained by how their mindsets and attitudes have been shaped by their circumstances and their culture. Tir accompanies one of them when he visits a priest to buy a ritual which he hopes will bring him more income. This involves him killing and eating a pigeon, one of six or seven rituals the priest says he performs each day, for a price. The priest’s lack of enthusiasm in the ceremony could suggest he doesn’t believe in it himself, meaning he would be scamming a scammer.

The programme doesn’t analyse the conditions in which sextortion arises, dwelling more on the institutions which are supposed to deal with the issue. The representative of the Nigerian state’s fraud and cybercrime police who Tir meets downplays the extent of sextortion and admits that investors are less likely to be attracted to the country if it’s thought of as having high rates of such offences. Tir doesn’t find the person who blackmailed Evan Boettler. Nigeria’s telecommunications provider Glo says they no longer have records of their phone number, and the police’s investigation is slow. Evan’s parents are frustrated by Instagram’s owner Meta not releasing more details which would help with inquiries without a court order, which they believe is convenient for Meta because it would be incriminated by this information. Brandon Guffey, who lost his son Gavin to suicide in similar circumstances to Evan, says Meta has acted negligently and is cynical about its head Mark Zuckerberg’s apology and the ‘PR stunt’ of it pulling 63,000 ‘sextortionists’ accounts on one day. Brandon tried to sue Meta but was scuppered by the law. In the United States, Section 230 is a piece of legislation which generally means that platforms which host online content aren’t held responsible for material posted on them by other people. Arturo Bejar, an ex-employee of Meta, says that the company doesn’t want to know about the extent of sextortion because it doesn’t want to deal with the matter. Social media companies, reluctant to add more safeguards, are ‘unwilling to act because it would harm profits’. Brandon says it’s ‘ridiculous’ that the world’s richest companies aren’t accountable, but the economic weight of these entities gives them this power, backed up by the state through regulations such as Section 230.

The documentary describes how social media companies avoid addressing and highlighting sextortion because this would adversely affect their own interests (a similar attitude to that of the Nigerian authorities). Text statements from Snapchat and Meta at the end of the programme attempt to rebuke some of the criticisms, perhaps recognising that sextortion could damage their profitability. Even if social media platforms introduced more safeguards, or if Section 230 was repealed, this wouldn’t remove what causes sextortion and other fraud. Money compels the issue, most obviously in the amounts demanded by scammers, and behind this is the poverty which contributes to them using this approach for an income. Money, ultimately in the guise of profits, also motivates the owners of the social media companies, with the laws they are supposed to work within being shaped by what is deemed financially advantageous. As with everything it underpins, the money system has tainted social media, creating problems like sextortion which the institutions around it aren’t in a position to resolve.

Mike Foster