Futuristic (2026)

Book Review from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What We Can Know. By Ian McEwan. Jonathan Cape. 2025. 301pp.

What a fine novelist Ian McEwan is. Apart from being a superb craftsman of language and plot and a massively perceptive observer of human behaviour, his widely read fiction often contains strong social or socio-political elements offering serious food for reflection. Even more trenchant on this front than others of his novels is his latest, What We Can Know, which also stands out for its strong futuristic content. Yet, set as it is in the year 2119, it also reflects back on the present day at a moment before climate change and nuclear conflict have caused global populations to halve, seas to rise massively and biodiversity to decline. And it offers a constant interplay between the imagined future, which humanity’s response (or lack of response) has shaped, and the world of today.

As it moves between these two time periods, it reveals the details of what is imagined to have happened through human mismanagement of the planet and its resources and technology. So, for example, scores of cities, including Glasgow and New York, have vanished and there is no longer any kind of globalised economy. Yet despite the wars, genocides, floods, famines, viruses, droughts, tsunamis, starvation and disease that have decimated the population, human society has carried on (‘we scraped through’ is the expression survivors use). As for Britain, what is left of it is an archipelago (ie a group of small islands) that is all the remaining population has left following the inundations caused by rising seas, and whose ‘finest achievement was not to be at war’. Though run by corrupt elite ‘Citizens Committees’, there is relative order in society and formal education still takes place. We are told that: ‘Significant parts of the knowledge base were preserved. Many institutions crawled through the gaps between catastrophes. People lived at poverty level but they lived.’

The main character is an academic at the University of the South Downs teaching history (for which he receives half the pay of his science and technology colleagues) and at the same time working on the biography of a poet who lived 100 years earlier. Hence his interest in that (our) era. Could those pre-inundation populations not have done ‘something other than grow their economies and wage war?’, asks one of his students, which makes the teacher himself wonder whether ‘many of humanity’s problems could have been solved’ before planetary havoc set in. But could it have been different? The question is left in the air.

Obviously the precise circumstances laid out as having led up to this future are no more than speculation. Yet it is speculation plausibly depicted, building on the political and environmental instability of the world we live in today, in which, as the author puts it, ‘capitalism… invents furiously and persuades us of new needs’. Not that his well-founded and pungent comments on various aspects of current or recent reality (for example, ‘These were the early Thatcher years, and there was crazy greed in the air’) are accompanied by any proposed solution or clear course of action regarding the problems he perceives. Little more in fact than the kind of wishy-washy statement he made in a recent interview to the magazine Positive News that: ‘We just have to stop doing bad things and do good things’. No recognition, therefore, that those ‘bad things’ come out of a bad system, which, in order to stop those things getting worse, needs to be replaced by a better system.

But it would be wrong-headed not to recognise that What We Can Know is a work of fiction and that, in the final analysis, there is no obligation for fiction to be prescriptive or to propose remedies. The main virtue of McEwan’s writing lies in its power to create believable human character and interaction through effective use of language, so allowing the reader to see truthfulness in what is depicted. It is especially in the clever and nuanced ‘looking-back’ element of his story that the author does this most consistently. He captures some highly recognisable realities of the social and political mores of the current age, while also managing to weave much ‘human interest’ into his narrative, for example a highly sensitive portrayal of early onset Alzheimer’s, a love story or two, and a crime of passion. No short review can in fact do justice to the book’s overall literary merit, but the following passage can be seen as a typical example of its acuteness of perception and mastery of language: ‘Memory is a sponge. It soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question. Its unreliability was one of the discoveries of twentieth-century psychology’.

Howard Moss

Letter: A View from the Hospital Basement (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A View from the Hospital Basement

To the Editors,

I write to you as a 53 year old working class logistics porter for NHS Scotland, and someone who has recently come to terms with a lifelong reality: I am autistic. Having spent my younger years in the frantic ‘activism’ of the far left, I find myself now, in the quiet of my fifties, looking at the world through a lens sharpened by both my diagnosis and the consistent logic of socialism.

For the autistic worker, capitalism is not merely an exploitative system; it is a sensory and social assault. The ‘wages system’ demands a specific type of human raw material, one that is flexible, socially performative, and capable of enduring the chaotic, profit driven environments of modern industry. If you cannot ‘mask’ your traits, if you cannot navigate the arbitrary social hierarchies of management, or if your nervous system recoils at the bright, loud, and disorganised nature of the capitalist workplace, you are branded ‘inefficient’.

In my eighteen years within the NHS, I have seen the machinery of the state attempt to patch up a broken population. We are a class of ‘repair men’ trying to fix the damage caused by a system that prioritizes the accumulation of capital over human well being. My job as a porter relies on lists, logic, and routine, elements that suit my autistic mind. Yet, the overarching system is one of irrationality. We see the ‘crisis’ in our hospitals not as a failure of funding, but as a failure of a system that treats health as a commodity and workers as mere expenses on a balance sheet.

The Socialist Party’s ‘Impossibilist’ stance, the refusal to advocate for the mere ‘crumbs’ of reform resonates deeply with the autistic need for systemic consistency. In my youth, I chased the ‘immediate demands’ of reformism, only to find that every hard won ‘right’ can be stripped away by the next budget or the next shift in the market. For my daughters, one who shares my neurodivergent wiring, I have no interest in fighting for a ‘better’ version of their exploitation.

A socialist society, one based on the common ownership of the means of life and production for use, is the only environment in which the neurodivergent person can truly thrive. Consider the logic:

First, the abolition of the ‘interview’ and the ‘personality test’. In a world of voluntary labour, the social ritual of ‘selling oneself’ to a master disappears. An autistic person’s focus and ‘special interests’ cease to be a commodity and become a direct contribution to the community.

Second, the end of sensory exploitation. Capitalism builds cheap, high stress environments because they are profitable. A society producing for human need would, for the first time, design spaces for human comfort, accounting for the diverse sensory needs of all its members.

Third, the removal of social hierarchy. My alexithymia and my struggle with social cues are only ‘disabilities’ because capitalism demands a specific type of social compliance to maintain the master servant relationship. In a society of equals, where no one has the power to command another’s labour, the ‘unwritten rules’ of the workplace vanish.

I have stopped apologising for the way I am wired. I have realised that my autistic brain, with its preference for facts over rhetoric and systems over leaders. We do not need charismatic leaders to tell us we are exploited; we need only to look at the ledgers of our lives.

Socialism offers a ‘case’ that does not shift with the political winds. It is a list of principles that holds up to the most rigorous logical scrutiny. For the worker in Scotland, for the porter in the basement, and for the autistic child yet to enter the fray, the message must remain clear: the system cannot be mended. It must be ended.

Yours for the Revolution,

Pablo Wilcox

Scotland

Letter: Engels (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engels

Hello

There’s a certain irony in being accused (Pathfinders, February) of not having read Engels when my point (very much a side point) was that Engels’ arguments were based on no evidence of how people organised themselves in prehistory. My main point was that no, prehistory was not a feminist utopia, but there was a huge diversity of relations between men and women of which, until recently, we were completely ignorant. My reason for not including Engels in Further Reading was not that it was old hat, though perhaps even the author of this piece would agree that Engels’ ideas have been around a while, but that the rule for that particular section of The Guardian’s books pages is that it should be inspired by recent thinking and recent books – which are then cited in Further Reading. If this author were himself better read, he would know that I’ve written on this subject in greater depth, with a less restrictive word count, for New Scientist – written and he would, I hope, feel a little ashamed of his groundless (rather like Engels’) statements.

Best wishes,

Laura Spinney

Reply from the writer

As a New Scientist subscriber for twenty years I’ve appreciated many of your interesting articles, but I must have missed the one you wrote on Engels. You say there’s no evidence for his hypothesis on the subjection of women (actually derived from pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan), even calling it ‘groundless’. This seems a little harsh given that whole theoretical edifices are sometimes constructed based on one finger bone. The evidence of patriarchy is all around you and everywhere in history. Is the alternative origin story simply that ‘it’s complicated?’ To discuss Engels’ argument while omitting the crucial role of emerging property relations is a bit like discussing gravity without mentioning mass, or Newton, or relativity. That’s why your representation of Engels came across as woolly, hence the speculation that you might not have gone to the source. Angela Saini, as the article points out, instead takes the argument and runs with it in a way that sheds further light rather than confusion on the subject.

PJS

Proper Gander: Reporting on reporting (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Journalist Steve Rosenberg hasn’t chosen the easiest of careers. His appearances on BBC News as their correspondent in Russia raise questions about how free he is to investigate and report on what’s happening there, especially since the war in Ukraine reignited in 2022. The Panorama episode Our Man In Moscow (BBC One) offers an answer by showing what Rosenberg, his producer and camera operator do between the times we see him on air. Their trip to the city of Tver to interview people on the street is interrupted by both the police and state media asking what they’re doing, with the producer saying this could have turned out to be ‘much worse’ than an identity check. The forums and summits which they and other journalists attend are as slickly presented as those anywhere else. Although Rosenberg says that some of the attendees are now reluctant to speak to the BBC, he has put in questions to Putin on a couple of occasions. At an annual press conference, Rosenberg lists some of Russia’s problems then asks Putin ‘do you think you have taken care of your country?’, to which he predictably replies in the affirmative. The following year, Rosenberg asks what future Putin plans for Russia, including militarily, and is told ‘there will be no operations if you treat us with respect’. Rosenberg’s analysis is that the Kremlin’s confidence is fuelled by Europe being weakened because it is distanced from Trump’s America.

Steve Rosenberg became interested in Russian culture and language during his teenage years in Chingford. His first visit to Russia was in 1987, when the Soviet Union was starting to open up more to global markets, and he was there a few years later when it broke up. Having lived and worked as a reporter in Moscow since the mid-1990s, Rosenberg is now the BBC’s Russia Editor. He’s nostalgic for the country he saw when he was younger, which he tells us had more optimism. He describes the time when Putin came to power by saying ‘it felt as if this huge black cloud had come over’. Being a journalist there now is compared to walking on a tightrope: ‘You can’t relax, really, for a second. You want to report accurately and honestly about what’s happening, but you don’t want to fall off the tightrope onto the minefield below, and hit a mine’.

According to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, Russia ranks 171st out of 180 countries, making it among the most restricted places for what news is reported, how and by whom. Virtually all media produced there comes from state-owned or affiliated organisations, with controls on its content increased further due to the war. Military personnel are banned from speaking to journalists, and the dissemination of ‘unreliable information’ about the armed forces is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Dozens of critics of the authorities and the war are currently jailed, some for spying charges, and most foreign reporters have left the country. Rosenberg explains that he’s one of the few western journalists remaining in Moscow, as he walks through an empty office which used to be bustling with colleagues.

Rosenberg and his crew have got used to being monitored by the state, learning that it’s safest to calmly present the required documents when approached by the police while out reporting. They are also followed by plain-clothes agents, one of whom denies this when Rosenberg challenges him. These agents wouldn’t be too concerned that they have been rumbled, for the reason that Rosenberg is likely to be more unsettled and restrained being aware that they’re watching him. The authorities will probably watch the Panorama documentary too, which Rosenberg, his colleagues and BBC executives would realise, and so they wouldn’t have included anything too incriminating.

Rosenberg isn’t popular with the nation’s state-owned media either, which depicts him as an anti-Russian propagandist by selectively editing quotes from his reports. We see some Russian journalists questioning him on his reporting, albeit in their role as state lackeys. Television is more prominent as a source of information in Russia than in western countries: nearly two-thirds of its citizens mainly get their news in this way, according to Reporters Without Borders. We see a clip of an angry TV show host calling Rosenberg a ‘conscious enemy of our country’ and (oddly) a ‘defecating squirrel, constantly surprised by things’. Admirably, Rosenberg perseveres with his job despite the tense position it places him in, walking his tightrope. He comes across as professional and sincere, having developed a personal understanding of Russian culture and politics.

While the context Rosenberg works in is different to that of most reporters, it illustrates how journalism isn’t as simple as a dogged pursuit of the truth. In Russia more than elsewhere, the restrictions and threats hanging over journalists will shape their approaches and the words they use. Many have been silenced completely, further limiting awareness and viewpoints. Alongside this, the Russian state’s media has become even more empowered, dominating the market. Legislating speech is an obvious admission by the state that it wants to control the narrative, skewed to promote both the ruling elite and the system which enables it.

Journalism is moulded not only by regulation, but also by what’s acceptable to the organisations which produce it. Being an employee of the BBC, Rosenberg has to work within the corporation’s frame of reference. This isn’t just its editorial guidelines, but its overall ethos as part of the establishment, creating both conscious and subconscious bias in its news output. So, the war between Russia and Ukraine is analysed only on the surface level of capitalist politics, between rival governments. Mainstream journalism, whether in Britain, Russia or anywhere else wouldn’t examine more fundamentally how the war is between factions of the capitalist class for their economic interests, not those of the working class.

Mike Foster

Better, not more (2026)

Book Review from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier. By Patrick Grant. William Collins £10.99.

In the August 2022 Socialist Standard, we reviewed Phillip Coggan’s More, which deals with the expansion in production over the centuries. Grant’s book is a kind of counterpart to that, advocating the making of fewer things. The author is a fashion designer, business owner and judge on a TV programme to do with sewing. Here we will focus on his general remarks, rather than his account of his own history in business (he is founder of the Blackburn-based Community Clothing, communityclothing.co.uk).

The development of capitalism meant that the interests of business took precedence over everyone else, including those who did the work and produced the goods. Only the rich benefited from this, and the emphasis switched to increasing output and consumption, rather than happiness. The fashion industry in particular grew via social manipulation, with seasonal fashions having a fixed shelf life. Many companies spend more on marketing and selling their products than on making them, and over thirty percent of all the clothing made is never sold, with fast fashion brands such as Shein and Temu leading the way here. Shein’s marketing strategy is simple: ‘make an unfathomable quantity of incredibly low-quality stuff, sell it cheaply, aggressively acquire customers, swamp the competition.’ A new product is launched every three seconds. A mention of Oscar Wilde’s remark that ‘fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months’, would have been apposite here, except that it seems now to be a matter of days rather than months.

The quality of much of what is produced has declined over the last several decades (though cars may well be an exception). Cheaper products usually mean higher profits, of course. Fewer raw materials means clothes are often skinnier, shorter or thinner, and overcoats contain far less wool than they did fifty years ago. From the 60s and 70s, synthetic fibres such as nylon, polyester and acrylic became widely available and many manufacturers of natural-fibre fabrics went out of business, especially as offshoring became more common. The owners of companies that produce poor-quality goods are extremely rich (H&M, for instance). When you buy a garment online, you cannot judge its quality.

Moreover, few people nowadays love their jobs, even though work can contribute to personal happiness. These days far fewer people actually make things for a living, and there is a lack of workers in manual trades, which are not just ‘manual’ as they require a lot of knowledge and cognitive processing. One aim should be the creation of skilled fulfilling local jobs. Clothes, the author argues, can be produced in a way that will ensure that they age so as to provide pleasure to the wearer. Older second-hand goods can still be of high quality, and the better an object is, the more likely it is to be repaired.

There seems to be no mention here of degrowth, but a lot of what Grant advocates would imply a reduction in the amount produced and even an end to the continuous economic growth of capitalism. Much of what he says here could certainly be considered for adoption in a socialist world, but it is hard to see how it could be implemented under capitalism.

Paul Bennett

Throwing custard over the Crown Jewels and shoplifting at Waitrose (2026)

From the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last December a group called Take Back Power made news by throwing apple crumble and custard over a glass case containing the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. Describing itself as a ‘nonviolent civil-resistance group’, Take Back Power, though talked of as a successor to Just Stop Oil which has now dissolved itself, has a new and different agenda focusing on what can broadly be called ‘economic inequality’. Its declared concerns are matters such as the cost of living and, in particular, what it describes as ‘unfair taxation’. To bring attention to such issues, its members are promising mass shopliftings of ‘high-end’ stores such as Waitrose and redistribution of the food removed to those who need it. Such activities are seen as a way of exerting pressure on the government to set up what they call ‘a permanent citizen’s assembly – a House of the People, which has the power to tax extreme wealth and fix Britain’. This echoes the words on the sign carried by those arrested at the scene of the apple crumble and custard event: ‘Democracy has crumbled – tax the rich’.

Daily Mail v Take Back Power

The group was the subject of a predictably derogatory report in the Daily Mail on the occasion of its formal launch in January of this year. One of its founders, Arthur Clifton, was reported as telling the audience at the founding event: ‘We have seen that food is locked behind skyrocketing prices. Less and less people can afford less and less food’. And then the article went on to mention that two of those involved in the ‘custard’ protest were ‘an NHS worker and a former doctor’ and pointed out that Clifton was ‘privately educated’ at ‘one of the country’s top public schools’ and came from a wealthy family. In so doing it lit the blue touch paper for its discerning readers in the comments facility on the website. Typical examples of comments were:

‘Terrorists, by another way and means. They need locking up.’

‘Start prosecuting and imprison these vandals & thieves with long sentences.’

‘Morons and jealous half-wits.’

‘Why do this lot always look like they need a good bath!!’

‘If they hate capitalism why not moving to China or Cuba? or … North Korea?’

‘Anti-capitalist group: the upper-middle class way of saying “’thieves”’.

‘Middle class privileged kids playing at politics.’

‘A few baseball bats and pickaxe handles would soon sort these goons out.’ (from Big Richard of Birmingham)

‘Live rounds, now!’ (from Shampoo Bamboo of Sheffield)

Such comments are of course to be looked upon with the contempt they deserve, but of real relevance to the venture they are commenting on are a number of points made in earlier editions of the Socialist Standard about Take Back Power’s predecessor group, Just Stop Oil.

Single-issue groups

Firstly, single-issue groups, no matter how well supported they may appear to be at a given time, tend to have limited impact, if any, in the longer term. Recent history illustrates this when we think of, for example the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Anti-Vivisection Society, Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, which either become extinct when members tire of working hard for little visible gain or soldier on even when they get overtaken by events and changing conditions make the issue they are campaigning for seem less relevant. In general, it must be said that such organisations are nothing if not commendable for their concern for human welfare and the sincerity of their intentions. And on occasion they can be judged to have had some kind of positive impact on society or on social attitudes. But this is usually because their agenda becomes aligned with the needs of the social and economic system we live in (capitalism), making what they are campaigning for useful or necessary for the continued smooth running of that system. Examples of this are the campaign for a National Health Service in Britain at the end of the second world war (basically a necessary back-to-work scheme for efficient employment), and the Civil Rights movement in the US which was at least partially successful in improving conditions for the black minority. One of its effects was to put them in a less inferior position to the white majority in the labour market and so giving employers a wider pool of workers to choose from. In the end, such ‘successes’ as there have been among single-issue campaigns form part of the list of never-ending reforms that capitalism itself always needs to facilitate its operation.

What does ‘anti-capitalist’ mean?

Secondly, though the Daily Mail article referred to Take Back Power as an ‘anti-capitalist group’ and a number of its readers’ comments picked up on that, when looked at closely the group’s aims and activities are not ‘anti-capitalist’ in any meaningful way. It envisages its ambitions as being achieved within the framework of the current system of money, wages and buying and selling. They involve either influencing existing governments or leaders or somehow having a part in government themselves. There is nothing ‘anti-capitalist’ in this. Anti-capitalism (or ‘socialism’ as we would call it) means a social system without governments or leaders based on common ownership of all goods and services and free access to all the necessities of life for all. Reforms to the current system (even a conglomeration of them) cannot provide that. Nor does anti-capitalism or socialism have anything whatever to do with China, Cuba or North Korea, as suggested by some of the Daily Mail’s keyboard warriors.

Class

Thirdly, some explanation is needed regarding ‘class’, especially given that the protestors in question are referred to in the newspaper as ‘middle-class’ (and therefore not ‘working class’). The important reality to grasp is that there are very few of us indeed who are not ‘working class’. This is in the sense that the overwhelming majority of us need to find an employer to work for in order to have a wage or salary as a means of survival. And that will certainly be the case for virtually all those who gathered on 17 January at Limehouse Town Hall in London to formally found Take Back Power. We can say with a good degree of certainty that very few of them indeed, if any, belong to that small group of people who do not have to sell their energies to an employer day by day because they own enough wealth to be able to live comfortably without doing that, ie, those who belong to the tiny minority of people who own most of the earth’s resources – those we call the capitalist class.

Who pays taxes?

Finally, while the idea that imposing higher taxation on the rich and reducing it for the poor may seem superficially attractive, it is, when examined closely, fundamentally wrong-headed. It’s true that most people have an image of the state and its government as a kind of ‘neutral’ agency standing above society, to which all must contribute. In this view state revenue is the ‘public purse’, which we all have to support through taxation. But the main burden of taxation in fact rests on the tiny minority of people who own the vast majority of the wealth (the capitalist class) and who the government extracts it from in order to maintain the whole machinery on which the system depends for its orderly functioning . And they pay it out of the profit accruing to them from their ownership of the means of production and distribution over the whole of society. If they were prevailed upon to pay even more than they already do, it would have the effect of eating into the profit which is the life blood of capitalism, cause disinvestment, economic decline and possibly worse, and make workers even poorer as wages declined and unemployment rose.

Mirages, dead ends and the real deal

So in all these terms Take Back Power’s aim of a society run by a ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ which would tax ‘extreme wealth’ is nothing more than a mirage. It is a mistaken notion that, within the framework of a society founded on buying and selling, things could be run in a notably more equitable way than at present. If, by some unimaginable quirk, such an experiment did come to be tried, it would quickly become clear that whoever or whichever body was running things, they would quickly have to bow to the dictates of profit and to a similar order of things as exist already for the vast majority (ie the workers) and effectively carry on running capitalism. While we can thoroughly agree with the statement made by Take Back Power that governments ‘serve the super rich’ and ‘do not care about working people’, their plans for somehow reducing the wealth of those they call ‘the obscenely wealthy’ could not possibly be realised within the existing framework of social organisation with its governments and monetary exchange.

The ‘guru’ of Just Stop Oil, Roger Hallam, who has recently served a prison sentence under the British state’s arsenal of repressive laws for involvement in tactics like blocking roads or gluing yourself to paintings, is on record as saying ‘If you don’t upset people, then nothing happens’. It remains to be seen whether Take Back Power will now go in for similar actions to try and attract attention to their cause. But even if they are successful in this, what they will be spreading is attention to what can only be a dead end. What is needed is a wider view of how society works than that adopted by any single-issue campaign. The working class does indeed need to ‘take back power’, but it needs to do that in a way that focuses not on social or economic reform within the framework of capitalism, but on a change from a society of production for profit to one of production for need based on common ownership of the world’s resources and free access to all goods and services.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

The following two articles from previous Socialist Standards go into more detail on Just Stop Oil:

• Dec 2022: Just stop being manipulative by Adam Buick
• May 2025: Just Stop Oil: the failure of a tactic by Adam Buick