Sting in the Tail: Superstition in India (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Superstition in India

Superstition still flourishes in India as elsewhere. Guru Busters (BBC2, 10 September) showed how hordes of self-styled “Gods”, Fakirs, fortune tellers, quacks, etc., hoodwink millions by using simple conjuring tricks, elementary chemistry and seemingly impossible physical feats.

It was amazing to hear wealthy, educated men justifying their allegiance to one God-man, Sai Baba, on the ground that he had given them gold trinkets which he had created “out of nothing”. Strangely, this God’s poorer followers received no gold, only “holy ash”.

Opposing these frauds are the Rationalists who tour the countryside showing audiences how anyone can perform the various “miracles. What they do is worthwhile, but it will be the continuing development of capitalism in India which will most effectively attack the ignorance and backwardness on which superstition feeds.

Meanwhile, our comrades in India get on with the really worthwhile work of spreading the ideas of scientific socialism there.

Must do better, Desmond

So disappointed is Archbishop Desmond Tutu with South Africa’s ANC-led government that he can only award it an alpha minus for its performance so far. (The Herald, 4 September).

The well-publicised scramble by some ANC leaders to climb aboard “the gravy train” was bad enough, but now the government has been caught selling arms to Rwanda through Armcorp, the state arms corporation.

The Archbishop notes that: "Almost everywhere, and certainly in Africa, armies are not for the defence of the citizenry, they are instruments of repression. ”

For this he deserves an alpha plus, but he continues:

“What we want ultimately is to see Africa demilitarised. If you have countries that claim to he democratic, and are friendly with one another, what do you need huge armies for? We should start by dismantling Armcorp. ”

Archbishop Tutu is a humane and well-meaning man, but for being so naive as to imagine that demilitarisation can occur within the conflict-ridden, money-grubbing capitalist system, well, we can only award him a beta minus for that.

Greens in dreamland

Many “Greens” pin their hopes for a greener world on persuading governments to become eco-friendly within the profit- motive economy.

An article in the Observer (17 September) shows what forlorn hopes they are. The British government’s pollution watchdog. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution (HMIP), reports that a severe shortage of inspectors meant that it carried out only 60 percent of scheduled checks on factories during 1994-5, and as a result pollution spills into the air and rivers doubled.

And the government’s response to this? It is to merge HMIP with the National Rivers Authority next year, a cost-cutting measure which is expected to reduce the number of inspectors still further.

The outlook of these Greens surely amounts to the triumph of hope over experience.

Who are they kidding?

Some Labour MPs have been complaining about Tony Blair’s undemocratic style of leadership, but when was the Labour Party ever democratic?

At the top, Labour’s leaders have a long history’ of simply ignoring conference decisions they didn't like, while trade union bosses cynically cast millions of votes at Labour conferences on behalf of their members, many if not most of whom didn't even support Labour.

At local level there are claims that an influx of new Asian members into Govan Labour Party is connected with the ambition of an Asian councillor to replace the present MP as candidate at the next election. A party official explained on TV that nothing unusual was happening as vote-rigging is the norm prior to candidates being selected.

And West Renfrew MP Tommy Graham has been trying to secure his re-selection by

“recruiting pensioners in pubs and at Linwood DayCare Centre. Many did not even know they were joining the Labour Party" (Observer, 3 September).

Those dissident Labour MPs will be well aware that their party is undemocratic from top to bottom.

Tunnel vision

As commuters and lorry drivers race through the tunnels under the Tyne and the Clyde few of them will think about the crippling condition of osteonecrosis. The victims of this condition, who constructed these tunnels in the sixties, can think of little else.

Osteonecrosis is the direct result of working in compressed air pumped into the tunnels when they were built to stop the walls collapsing. The workers were not warned of the dangers and they were not properly decompressed before returning to the open air.

"Hugh Davey, A Tyne tunneler said: There's about 50 of us from the Tyne. We look like a bunch of old men. I'm 56: I look like a man of 70. I've already had one hip done and I’m on constant pain killers. I had to stop work in 1981. We didn't know what would happen. We thought, we can't come to no harm—they must know what they were doing. We thought they’d look after us. It's destroyed my life ’ ” (Observer, 17 September).

The firms did know “what they were doing”. They were producing a commodity as cheaply as possible. Cutting corners on the health and safety of the working class is just “good business practice”. It is not the function of capitalism to “look after” the welfare of the workers—it’s the profits and the shareholders that have to be looked after.

Nature under strain (2026)

Book Review from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nature’s Genius. Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet. By David Farrier. Canongate. 2025. 278pp.

‘In this forest of thinking selves, capitalism arrives as a kind of dementia’ (David Farrier)

Nature’s Genius, written by a professor of literature and the environment, has had a whole range of superlatives heaped upon it. ‘Profound’, ‘fascinating’, ‘inspiring’, ‘boundary-breaking’ are just a few of the terms used to describe this book by experts from a wide range of fields. And there can be no denying that its brilliantly expressed mastery of the history, development and possible future of so many aspects of nature – humanity included – give it a special place in studies that look at the interrelationship between the many diverse phenomena making up the natural world.

The dazzling array of sources its author, David Farrier, draws on to demonstrate this interconnectedness is also used to illustrate the surprising speed with which nature is able to adapt to changing material conditions, especially those provoked by one particular element in the overall schema – ourselves. He summarises this ability, which he calls ‘plasticity’, as follows: ‘For nearly 4 billion years, life on Earth has experimented with ways of being, sensing, moving and reproducing, finding ever-new shapes by which to meet the challenges of the moment’. He provides multiple examples of this, two recent ones being the way in which North American songbirds have quickly evolved new wing shapes to cope with rapid changes to their environment brought about by humans; and how houseflies quickly developed resistance to the effects of DDT.

Given the author’s proposition that such plasticity informs the development of all plants and animals, including humans, one might begin by forming the impression – this reader did – that his contention would be that the biosphere – including humanity – will always in the end cope with everything  that is thrown at it. But as we read on, it becomes clear that such an idea is as far as it can possibly be from this author’s view of the world. So, though he is happy to state that ‘evolution is irrepressible’, being ‘nature’s restless genius in action’, at the same time his views on the ongoing environmental crisis are unequivocal: ‘For as long as we continue to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the oceans, to carve up the environment for roads and resources, and to flood air, soil and water with industrial toxins, then death on a massive scale will follow’ and ‘the very basis of life is so threatened’.

So, though his book centres on the ability of interconnected ecosystems to adapt to changing environments, the author insists that, without urgent action, nature’s in-built plasticity is unlikely to be able to extricate us from the emergency that the existing social system has plunged us into. ‘Whole ecosystems are fragmenting under the strain we impose on them’ are his words. And in a key passage, the root of this is expressed as follows: ‘But there is one thought – one enormously powerful, overfitted idea, as persistent as the worst recurring nightmare – that is driving the world into mindlessness: profit’. He goes on: ‘The drive is all consuming, literally: capitalism’s defining imperative – grow! ( …) makes the world into a vast, auto-annihilating digestive system, consuming itself and shitting excess carbon into the atmosphere and the oceans’. He further refers to this drive as ‘the greatest barrier to our learning to live and think together with all of life’. It is not, he argues, that people are unaware of this but rather that they practise ‘cognitive dissonance’, whereby ‘they depend on a system that is hostile to life’ and ‘read daily about collapse and continue scrolling’. ‘Vested interests and denialism’, he concludes, ‘continue to work like toxins in the body politic’.

Does David Farrier have a remedy to offer to the sorry state of affairs he so eloquently gets to the core of? Does he have an alternative way forward, a route out of the single-focused profit system that is capitalism? Well, he takes up an idea that is very much in the air at the moment – degrowth. He sees degrowth as having already started at grassroots level with some local communities practising ‘agroecology’, where they produce their own food collectively and at the same time seek to begin reversing the historical enclosure of what was once common land, He wants to see this spreading further so that ‘resources can be managed for the common good’ via decisions made by ‘citizen assemblies’. In bemoaning, for instance, a lifestyle where ‘four kilograms of beef (or a month of Sunday roasts) has the same carbon cost as a return flight from London to New York’ and where ‘each year we manufacture 4 billion tons of cement’, he points to a whole range of more advanced methods of production that are already available and would be both more economical of resources and more sustainable. Among other proponents of this approach, he cites David Bollier, whose most recent book on the subject, Think Like a Commoner, was recently reviewed in the Socialist Standard . He sweeps aside the common objection that this is akin to ‘planting a few seeds when the whole forest is burning’ by stressing the urgent importance of ‘a way to reimagine our whole future together (…) where balance with the natural world takes priority over profit’.

It is difficult not to be sympathetic with such sentiments. But, as our review of the Bollier book made clear, no number of seeds planted collectively could bring about any truly fundamental change as long as society continues to operate within the framework of a market system with states, money, private property and buying and selling. Only when mass democratic action brings in a new kind of social organisation where the means of living are held in common and the production and distribution of goods and services are organised rationally with the aim of satisfying the needs of the community as a whole, will we have the ‘commoning’ that an increasing number of people aspire to and whose nature is fittingly captured in this book as ‘a seamless integration of humans and nature’.

Howard Moss

The over-population myth (1948)

From the September 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

In orthodox economics the population theory of Malthus, British Economist, 1766-1834, has long played the role of “The fat boy.” With certain modifications successive generations of economists have sought to “make our flesh creep” from the dismal conclusions he drew from it. To-day there are still many who would seek to give us Malthusian goose-pimples.

The substance of Malthus’ “Essay on Population” was a shameless plagiarism of earlier writers like Townsend and Dr. Wallace. He contended that population always tended to increase faster than food supply. This created a vicious circle. Increased wealth only brought even greater increases in population. Too many people meant too little food. Famine and a high death rate then came automatically into operation. As a result population sank below the level of food supply: then the cycle began all over again.

Malthus’ remedies for this alleged population “evil” was small families, late marriages and abolition of all forms of public assistance.

In view of all this his controversy with Ricardo in which he defended the consumption of the wealthy land-lord class on the grounds that it offset the effects of capital accumulation and thus helped to prevent gluts is not without certain sardonic implications.

Incidentally his “Essay” was an attack on the proposed Poor Law reform of Pitt whereby the Tories were attempting to cope with the dislocation arising from the passing of feudal society and the emergence of a new social order. It was also shrewdly aimed at the Utopian thinkers who under the stimulus of the French Revolution had carried to its most optimistic conclusions the doctrine of utilitarianism—“The greatest happiness of the greatest number,” by an advocacy of an ideal based upon equality of property and sex.

To say that increases in population tend to out-run food-supply is of course the merest of truisms. It would only have force if the productive powers of society were themselves incapable of progressive improvements. Such has not been the case: Indeed since Malthus lived all evidence has gone to show that wealth has tended to increase at a faster rate than population.

Ironically enough it has been these very increases in population which Malthus apparently dreaded so much that have contributed so decisively to making large-scale production, and the enormous increases in wealth production that went with it, possible. For it is clear that only when population has reached a certain level can that co-operation of mass aggregates of labour-power, working and organised for a given end, take place. It is in fact, as Marx points out, this very form of large-scale co-operation basic to capitalism that brings in a new economic force, the social productive power of collective labour. “When the labourer co-operates systematically with others he strips off the fetters of his individuality and develops the capabilities of his specie.” “Capital” (Vol. 1, p. 319, Kerr Edition.)

At the same time this large-scale power-motivated form of production has produced its own type of inventiveness and specialised forms of scientific application and technical skill. Moreover the capitalist greed for more and more surplus value has acted as a perpetual spur to increase the productivity of workers by seeking to constantly revolutionize technically the existing means of production. Such things of course would be impossible in a smaller society based upon agriculture and handicraft.

For Malthus, however, and those who followed him, poverty and pauperisation were simply the product of a growing population which provided more mouths than could be fed from the extant cultivated soil.

The shallowness of the contention that overpopulation is exclusively a cause of poverty and pauperisation is evidenced by the fact that the pauperisation and proletarianisation of large sections of the English population were taking place at a rapid rate during those centuries when the population was relatively static or at least increasing very slowly.

In Malthus’ time forcible evictions due to land enclosures reached a peak never before attained in the long history of land enclosures in England. It was the elimination of the peasant and small-holding section of the community, coupled with the ruin of the handicraft workers in face of the superior productive powers of industrial capitalism, that the condition indispensable for modern capitalism was fulfilled. The latter half of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century were the culmination of that long historic process which divorces the labourer from his productive means and converts his working energies into a commodity—labour-power. It was these large masses of the dispossessed which formed the “surplus” population which provided the human raw material for a rapidly expanding capitalism.

Although the population during the industrial revolution was many times greater than that in the Tudor period yet such was the demand by employers for ever fresh layers of labour-power that women and children, lunatics and paupers, plus heavy emigration from Ireland, were means by which the capitalist sought to increase the working population.

Density of population is of course no proof of over-population. One country may be densely populated, yet in no sense could it be said to be over-populated. On the other hand another country could have a sparse population without being under-populated. Note also that Ireland has suffered heavy depopulation due to a high rate of emigration. Yet there is extreme poverty in Ireland and also a surplus agricultural population.

Professor Carr Saunders, in “World Population” (p. 142) says that Germany and Italy have approximately the same density of population. There was, however, before the war a vast difference in wealth producing capacity between them. Obviously the possession of essential raw materials and the scope and efficiency of their respective industrial organisation, both economic factors, were responsible for this. In the same book (p. 142) Professor Carr Saunders says that there is no proof that the industrialised countries of Western Europe are over-populated.

Increases in population have never occurred in the absurd way Malthus suggested they did. Modern research points rather to the fact that increases in population since the latter half of the 18th century have been due to a declining death rate rather than any absolute increase in fertility.

History has also dealt Malthus and the neo Malthusians a shattering blow. Before the war it was rather a question of Malthusianism reverse. Then publicists, politicians and newspapers were prognosticating gloomily not on the dangers of a rising rate of population, but on a falling one. Many are still prognosticating gloomily about it to-day. In fact they assure us that if the population decline continues the optimum level of population will be seriously disturbed, i.e., according to them the best possible level of population which at a given time is most efficient for maximising wealth production. As a result they say productivity might decline, there would be less opportunities for capital investment, the standard of living lowered and unemployment possibly intensified.

Marx rejected the Malthusian doctrine in toto. He called it a libel on the human race. For Marx “Each specific mode of production had its own special law of population historically valid within its own limits.”

Capitalism, as Marx says, has a law of population peculiar to its mode of production. It is this law of population which reveals that poverty and unemployment exist, not because human labour is unable to wrest a sufficiency from nature-given materials, but because exploitation in the form of wage employment extracts unpaid labour or surplus value.

To put it simply, the capitalists are concerned with reducing costs of production. The most potent method of achieving this is to economise on the wages bill by the introduction of labour-saving machinery. This leads to the discharging of redundant workers. The net result of all employers seeking to do this is large-scale dismissals. Thus a relative surplus population comes into being. Should, however, an acceleration in production be such as to warrant additional supplies of labour power, then this surplus population, or as Marx terms it, ” reserve army of labour,” becomes a source of recruitment for the capitalist. Thus the expansion and contraction of employment is but a corollary and consequence of the expansion and contraction of the productive forces of capitalism. Added to this is the effect of crises which, because profit anticipation is lowered or threatened, leads to a sharp decline in productive activity and precipitates wholesale and widespread unemployment.

It is then this surplus population which, because of its active competition in the labour market, serves as a continuous downward pressure on the wage level.

In this way Marx indicated the mechanism which operates to keep wages in check and thus guarantees the appropriation of surplus value to continue and capitalist accumulation to go on.

Thus is the Malthusian population myth exploded. There is no “surplus” population in the sense that it is unable to contribute to wealth production. There is only a relative surplus population, relative, that is, to the needs and requirements of capitalist production itself.

The Marxian law of population remains then the most fruitful way of looking at the population problem, not from the restrictive standpoint of population growth as such, hut from the standpoint of sufficient increases in the working population to sustain and maintain the growth of capitalist accumulation.

It can also be shown then that the Marxian law of population is independent of the postulates of various population theories. Should the natural increases of population be such as to make labour-power relatively plentiful and cheap there will be less stimulus for the capitalists to introduce labour-saving machinery. On the other hand, should a decline in population rates bring about a diminution of the available, labour-force then there will be a strong incentive for the capitalists to replace men by machines, and so help to restore a situation more favourable to themselves. As a result of a diminished labour-force the acceleration of labour-saving devices will intensify the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Over-production, under-consumption, crises and unemployment will still be normal and recurring features of capitalist society. Marx’s law of population can then be shown to work with the same validity in an increasing or declining population.

The existence of unemployment is not in any way a test of over-population. In the first place the growth of population can be shown to have been steadily ascending. On the other hand unemployment has occurred in sharp and violent fluctuations. It is obvious then that there is no sign of any relationship between population growth and the appearance of a labour reserve army. Anyone who thinks that periods of continued and widespread unemployment are due to excessive numbers in the Malthusian sense must hold that this and other capitalist countries have been over-populated every few years. Following the same logic we must also conclude that in times of boom, when there is a demand for labour-power, they are under-populated.

Again in the U.S.A. there arc only 50 persons per square mile as against 700 in England. What is more the United States is highly favoured over its capitalist rivals in natural resources and geographical location. There cannot be any question of over-population in America. Yet unemployment has in recent years been more severe in America than anywhere else in the world. It is obvious that only the Marxian law of population can adequately account for this phenomenon.

Recently Sir John Boyd Orr told us that soil erosion and exhaustion and the waste of labour and materials on armaments threatens the world with famine. This then is due not to the niggardliness of nature but to the colossal misdirection of human effort, which because of capitalist imperialist rivalries is building up a mighty war machine instead of “applying,” as Boyd Orr said, “the world’s steel and industrial production to conserving the land.” Clearly it is capitalism and not nature that threatens the world with, famine and destruction. Clearly it is capitalism that must go if we are to remove that threat for ever. Alike in agriculture as well as industry, capitalism sows its dragon’s teeth. It is the peoples of the world who will reap its grim harvest.

Ted Wilmott

Blood and Cattle (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

How to Save the Amazon: a Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers. By Dom Phillips & Contributors. Ithaca £10.99.

The introduction and first four chapters were written by Phillips, but the book was unfinished when he and indigenous specialist Bruno Pereira were murdered in 2022 (one man confessed to the killings and others have been arrested, but it is not known who was behind them, though they were presumably carried out to silence witnesses). A further six chapters were completed by various journalists on the basis of Phillips’ notes. Phillips was clearly a courageous and painstaking investigator; as the people who assembled the book say in their foreword, ‘these pages have been stained by blood.’

The Amazon rainforest plays a crucial role in stabilising the global climate, storing billions of tons of carbon, among other things. But it is currently under various kinds of threat, most notably deforestation caused by cattle ranching. Fires are used to remove trees and clear land; almost nine-tenths of deforested Amazon land has become cattle pasture. The reason behind this of course is profit, and there are plenty of other attacks on the forest for the same reason, from hydroelectric plants and gold-mining to large-scale fishing and oil exploration. Indeed, the Amazon itself may already be close to a ‘tipping point’, when it no longer produces enough moisture and may change into a semi-arid savannah. All of this is exposed here, with considerable detail and personal stories.

Biodiversity is another crucial aspect of the Amazon. Having large numbers of different plants can help to build fertile soils. Also, the area is likely to contain drugs that can help combat disease, but about which the outside world knows very little. The indigenous people who live in the rainforest have a great deal of knowledge about possible uses of plants, and made use of some of their own remedies to fight Covid. But as deforestation continues, biodiversity will decline and some potentially useful plants may disappear.

The policies of the Brazilian government have had a major impact on the Amazon. The right-wing populist government of Jair Bolsonaro encouraged land-grabbers and illegal miners to invade the forest and extract natural resources. Since the election of left-winger Lula da Silva as president in 2022, things may have improved a bit, and he promised zero deforestation by the end of the decade, but it remains to be seen if anything close to this will materialise.

Defending the Amazon rainforest would contribute to limiting climate change and would also protect the indigenous communities that live there. Rather than the people being a means to the end of defending the Amazon biome, the forest should be saved to prevent indigenous genocide. They are not just hunter–gatherers but also ‘rainforest gardeners and technicians’. Massive construction projects ‘convert self-sufficient forest peoples into the urban poor’ (rather like capitalism originally forcing people off the land to become wage slaves in factories).

The book reminds us how many inhabitants of the Earth view it rather differently from those who live under capitalism.  As an indigenous representative says in the afterword, ‘That land could be owned by a single person is unthinkable to us because everyone’s survival depends on it. We can’t imagine how anyone could pollute, divert or dam water for their own profit.’

Paul Bennett

The smokescreen of prices (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The prices shown for delivery on online platforms do not tell the full story of the goods and services we buy. The amount we pay for delivery does not tell the tale of low pay for drivers, fragmented work, and daily risks on the road. The visible cost is only the surface: a simple figure that hides the real human and material costs.

Nor is this limited to delivery. More generally, the market price of a good or service rarely includes all the costs of producing it. A significant part is shifted elsewhere: onto the environment, workers, society, or the future.

Many low-cost products depend on production chains that use natural resources with no attention to environmental impact. Deforestation for non-essential goods, intensive use of energy and water, and pollution generated in production have no direct impact on the selling price. The same is true of working conditions – low wages, insecurity, and limited safety – which remain outside the cost on the market.

Another layer of this smokescreen lies in product design. Planned obsolescence and poor reparability, especially in electronic devices, shift costs onto consumers over time and increase waste. The initial price may seem low, but the overall cost—economic and environmental—is much higher.

There are also less immediate effects: impacts on health, as with ultra-processed food; the growing burden of waste that is hard to recycle; and the degradation of ecosystems. These costs are largely borne by society, often through public spending or a loss in quality of life.

This does not result from a single actor deliberately hiding costs. It is a feature of a system in which firms compete to lower prices and raise margins, while many indirect costs—so-called externalities—are not properly accounted for.

The result is a distortion: what is cheap in the market can be costly for society as a whole. Price acts as a smokescreen, simplifying and concealing, and making it harder to judge the real consequences of our choices.

A more radical approach is to question the system itself. If market prices tend to exclude social, environmental, and human costs, then the issue is not only how to correct the system, but whether it should be replaced.

In a system oriented to human needs rather than profit, production will not be driven by returns to investors but by social usefulness and sustainability. This will require forms of planning—more or less decentralised—able to take real costs into account from the start: decent working conditions, environmental limits, durability and reparability, and health factors.

In such a context, price will be abolished as a means of access to goods and services, making them freely available. This would not mean a lack of coordination, but a different kind of coordination. Production and distribution will be organised through planning, shared priorities, and participatory decision-making, giving the ability to deal with both potential abundance and real scarcity. The production of unnecessary or harmful goods will be reduced – not because it is unprofitable, but because it is recognised as socially and environmentally unsustainable.

This raises important questions. How can complex systems of production be coordinated without prices? How can inefficiency, concentration of power, or rigid bureaucracy be avoided? How can innovation and flexibility be maintained? These are not trivial issues. But the tools and knowledge to make costs visible—and to organise production differently—already exist. The issue is not technical, but political and collective. It requires not only awareness, but a conscious and collective decision to reorganise society on a fundamentally different basis. The sooner we begin to take this seriously, the sooner we can stop treating as inevitable what today may appear ‘natural’ but is simply an expression of the way society is organised at this particular point in time.

Gian Maria

Capitalist agriculture . . . the profits of doom (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since Malthus, population growth has been the subject of heated controversy. By and large, disputants in the debate have tended to polarise into two camps.

For the Neo-Malthusian pessimists there is no prospect of an end to world hunger while population growth continues, indeed it could well increase as the latter begins to exceed — and thereby undermine — the carrying capacity of the land.

Then there are the Technological Optimists. For them, the concept of a “carrying capacity” is problematic; it is not something that is fixed but can be enlarged by human effort and ingenuity. Indeed, Ester Boserup has argued in her book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth that population pressure, far from being a harbinger of doom, is a prime stimulus to technological change. Thus, extensive farming practices, which become subject to diminishing returns, are abandoned and more intensive forms of land use are introduced, resulting in an increased “carrying capacity”. In fact, some of the wealthiest parts of the world — like Western Europe — are also amongst the most densely populated.

Where do Socialists stand in this debate? At first glance, we appear to side with the technological optimists in asserting that the world is not overpopulated. We base this claim on an empirical analysis of the relationship between global food demand and the global capacity to satisfy that demand. This suggests that the world could adequately feed its population. According to the World Bank in its 1986 Report Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in Developing Countries, enough grain is already produced to provide everyone with 3,600 calorics per day, well above the recommended 2,400 calories for an adequate diet — though, much of this, it should be said, is (inefficiently) used to feed livestock.

The prevalence in hunger does not arise from any shortfall in agricultural potential but from the operation of economic factors which impede full realisation of this potential for the benefit of all. The objective of capitalist production is not primarily to meet human needs. Instead, human needs are only met to the extent that these are backed up by purchasing power. That is why vast quantities of food are destroyed and why farmers are paid not to produce, while millions starve because they lack the means to buy or grow food. In short, the much-vaunted productivity of capitalism has now reached the point of open and irreconcilable conflict with its social relations of production, its mode of distribution.

There is a further point on which we part company with many technological optimists. This concerns the nature of technology itself. This is not independent of, but is profoundly conditioned by, the social relations of production. In this regard we share the concern of many environmentalists about the impact of modem capitalist agriculture on the environment. It is conceivable that this, rather then pressure of population, may ultimately precipitate the doomsday scenario. Unless, that is, a socialist transformation of society — and thus of its productive methods — can intervene first.

Not neutral

Technological innovation does not occur in a vacuum; it has socioeconomic consequences in a capitalist economy which benefit some but often at the expense of others. An example is the Green Revolution initiated in the 1950s 

This represented a major incursion of an industrialised mode of fanning into Third World countries. Based on the introduction of new high yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereal crops, it sought to increase the productivity of local agriculture. However, this required the application of a whole package of inputs, around which HYVs were specifically designed having in mind, the interests of multinational conglomerates supplying such inputs. This absence of any one of these inputs meant that the expected gains in productivity would not be realised, and HYVs would tend to perform poorly compared with traditional crops. Thus, without irrigation, nutrient uptake would be much reduced, without pesticides, the very inputs, such as chemical fertilisers, that promote crop growth, will encourage a proliferation of weeds, and so on.

It is this in-built complementarity of inputs, not just the costs of individual inputs, which explains why it is mainly richer farmers, particularly in Asia and Latin America, who have benefited from “Green Revolution” technology, accentuating the process of land concentration in these countries at the expense of poorer farmers. It raises the critical threshold at which farmers are able to afford, and make effective use, of such technology.

But what of the long-term productivity of an industrial mode of fanning promoted by capitalism, i.e. its sustainability? To increase output, more land could be cultivated. However, much of this uncultivated land is ecologically marginal and would be highly vulnerable under capitalist industrial farming. Alternatively, cultivated land could be made more productive. Since the 1950s, rapid increases in output — faster than population growth except in Africa — have been based upon increasing applications of four major non-land inputs: artificial fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation. However, there are now growing doubts about the wisdom of such an approach. Since the 1970s, there has been a levelling-off of per capita output.

According to J. Harris in World Agriculture and the Environment, these earlier increases were made possible because they occurred in a world not yet heavily damaged by soil erosion. But today, the current annual rate of topsoil loss — 25 billion tonnes — is such that the world can expect to lose 50 percent of its topsoil by 2050. Since there is a strong correlation between topsoil depth and crop yields, this is an alarming development for the future of fanning.

Soil erosion

Applying yet more fertilisers to compensate for the loss of soil fertility will not solve the problem in long run. Indeed, US agriculture today uses five times more fertiliser than in 1947 to produce the same amount of crop, but it is not clear whether this growing demand for fertilisers — particular phosphates — can be indefinitely met. There are also many minor nutrients and trace elements, lost through harvesting, which are not being replaced by industrial fanning, but which may be essential to long-term maintenance of yields. Furthermore, excessive applications of fertilisers actually exacerbate the problem of erosion by facilitating a breakdown in soil structure — both directly, through its effect on soil chemistry and, indirectly, by allowing farmers to dispense with organic recycling, leading to a decline in humus content which binds the soil together and helps it to hold water and oxygen essential for plant growth.

A similarly worry emerges in the case of other major agricultural inputs. The narrowing down of the genetic basis of farming, typified by HYVs, and the simplification of the agro-ecological landscape associated with market-oriented monocultures, has created ideal conditions for the spread of pests. To counter this threat, chemical pesticides have been applied on an increasing scale. However, it is often the natural predators of pests which are more severely affected by this than the pests themselves which, because of their larger populations, are more easily able to develop mutations giving them resistance to pesticides. This in turn, tempts farmers to apply more frequent, and stronger, doses, but the evidence suggests that, as with artificial fertilisers, this too may be subject to diminishing returns. As a result, farmers find themselves trapped in what is aptly called a “pesticide treadmill” while a significant proportion of output — some 45 percent overall — continues to be lost through pests.

Increased mechanisation and tractorisation too contributed to soil erosion through deep ploughing, a practice that is particularly damaging when applied to the fragile soils of many tropical countries.

Sustainable

Technology, as pointed out, is not neutral; it is conditioned by the economic system in which it is applied. Capitalist agriculture is constrained by the profit system and the need to maximise output in the short-term without regard to wider consequences for the environment and society. The type of technology this entails cans only be modified with extreme difficulty. Farmers must, afterall, seek a financial return on any investment they make.

The trend towards environmental deterioration and social dislocation associated with capitalist agriculture, is likely to gather pace as recent developments in the world economy unfold. An example is the new GATT agreement which covers 90 percent of the world’s agricultural trade which will further strengthen the hand of agribusiness at the expense of many small farmers and undermine much existing environmental legislation. Similarly, structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF on many debtor countries to reduce their debts will increase pressure on them to expand cash crop production and to that end employ industrial methods of farming, despite the fact that the cost of these have risen far more steeply in recent years in comparison with the price of agricultural commodities.

In short, agriculture today stands at a critical crossroad; where we go from here will have profound repercussions for both urban consumers of the products of farming as well as farmers themselves who, lest we forget, still constitute a majority of humankind. We can choose to retain the status quo and risk going down the road of possible, if not probable, ruin. Or we can decide to take Earth, and all that is in and on it, into common ownership and democratic control. By fundamentally changing our relationship to one another, we shall fundamentally change our relationship to nature. You cannot do one without the other.

Freed from the constraints of market competition, we could begin to adapt our technology to suit our needs within limits imposed by nature We cannot predict precisely what this entails but we can tentatively sketch the broad outlines of a new agriculture:

• A scaling-down in the overall use of industrial inputs with some redistribution towards those parts of the world where marginal productivity of such inputs is still relatively high.
• The adoption of a more labour-intensive approach to farming, particularly in the more developed areas, where today the proportion of socially unproductive labour is highest, i.e. occupations essential to the functioning of capitalism which will disappear in socialism.
• Greater emphasis to be placed on small-scale mass-produced “appropriate technology” which would rapidly transform the situation that currently exists in the less-developed areas of the world.
• Selective reversion to traditional farming practices, such as intercropping and agro-forestry, combined with a careful "holistically-oriented” application of useful innovations in the field of biotechnology, e.g. self-fertilising crops.
• Blurring of the distinction between town and country; a huge expansion of small-scale horticulture in and around existing conurbations with the aim of ensuring a substantial and diverse supply of locally-grown food, thus incidentally reducing the costs of transportation.
• Related to the above, a massive phased programme to systematically overhaul existing urban infrastructure to facilitate the return of off-farm wastes to the land.
• Finally, to conserve ecologically marginal land by restricting the use of it to rotational/extensive farming.

To those who dismiss this, our response is quite simple: never has the need for a clear and practical alternative to the chaos of capitalism been more pressing, more vital. Only on this basis can we ensure a fruitful and sustainable future for ourselves and our children’s children. The seeds of that future lie within us; it is up to us to nurture and cultivate them.

Robin Cox

The dictatorship of employment (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a recent article in the Guardian, two of the most active voices in the ‘degrowth’ movement, Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis, argued the need to ‘move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate’. They laid out the paradox of an Earth with the technology to produce everything everyone could reasonably need while at the same time ‘millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation’.

They attribute this to capitalism, which they explain as ‘an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets’. They go on to say that, even in political democracies where the majority can choose which party shall govern, nothing seems to change and the majority who do the producing have no say in ‘what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit’.

What they are saying, in other words, is that the economic system, whichever regime or government oversees it, is the same. And that system has the objective of producing ‘to maximise and accumulate profit’ rather than to satisfy human needs or have regard for the earth’s ecology. This, the writers continue, compels a ‘perpetual growth’ imperative which leads to production being focused on goods and services that are likely to find a market regardless of whether they are genuinely useful. Examples they give of this are ‘massive production of things such as SUVs, mansions and fast fashion’, as well as the use of fossil fuels rather than renewable energy, They point out that, though renewables like solar are much cheaper to produce than fossil fuels, ‘fossil fuels are up to three times as profitable’, causing environmental considerations to be swept aside, ‘even while the world burns’.

The article sums this up in the following resonant fashion: ‘Here we are: trapped in capitalism’s set of priorities, which are inimical to humanity’s. Human ingenuity has bequeathed us splendid technologies and capacities. But, like a cruel divinity, capital not only prevents us from using them for our collective good, but in fact coerces us to deploy them towards our collective doom.’ And in this connection they point to another undeniable and very current reality: how the imperatives of capitalist production lead to violence and wars as advanced economies, via their governments, jostle for advantage over others using tools such as ‘debt, sanctions, coups and even outright military invasions’.

So what is the remedy Hickel and Varoufakis propose for all this? We must, they argue, ‘democratise our economy, so that we can organise production around urgent social and ecological priorities’, since ‘we are the producers of the goods, the services, the technologies’, and it is ‘our labour and our planet’s resources that are at stake’. To achieve this they recommend actions such as an extension of ‘public finance for public purposes’ via ‘a new public investment bank … in association with the central banks’, and an injection of ‘deliberative democracy’ into the economic sphere via a ‘Great Corporate Reform Act’ so that the workplace ceases to be ‘a dead end dictatorship’ and each employee gets to have a say in the operation of the company they work for. ‘We live’, they conclude, ‘in a shadow of the world we could create’, one in which ‘the abolition of economic insecurity, precarity, poverty, unemployment and indignity is possible, while we lead meaningful lives within planetary boundaries’.

A good deal of this is attractive, even inspiring, stuff, laying out an analysis of capitalism and a vision of the future that we could at least partly endorse. Only partly, however, since it fails to take into account certain important considerations, making similar mistakes to a number of recent commentators whose ‘post-capitalist’ ideas have often been discussed or reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard. This lies in the notion – utopian we would call it – that it is possible to have a society of equality, of choice of activity and of workplace democracy while retaining finance, money and governments. Even if governments were to intervene to a greater extent than they do now in the market and the buying and selling economy of capitalism, as these commentators would like, they could not resist that system’s economic laws and, if they tried, would end up triggering financial crises leading to lay-offs, unemployment and the majority of people turning against them.

Other policies ‘post-capitalist’ commentators advocate such as a guaranteed minimum wage or universal basis income would be equally subject to extreme strain under pressure of the need for each company to produce goods for profit in competition with others. And this would be the case even if somehow workers were allowed to have some form of control over the running of production or services in their workplace. As Anitra Nelson in her 2022 book, Beyond Money: a Post-Capitalist Strategy, explains, all attempts, no matter how well meaning, to ‘mould money to progressive ends’ are bound to fail. We simply cannot, as she puts it, ‘tweak the system to overcome its weaknesses’.

So while the world that Hickel and Varoufakis – as well as others with similar views – refer to as ‘post-capitalist’ might, in many of the ways they frame it, seem tantalisingly close to the Socialist Party’s vision, it could only at best amount to a more benign form of capitalism, and at worst lead to economic chaos stemming from the fact that production under the money and buying and selling system cannot, by the very nature of that system, be redirected from profit-seeking to meeting people’s needs. All this would be like trying to build safely on seismic ground. A true ‘post-capitalist’ society can only be established once the current economic system has been abolished democratically (ideally voted out) by a majority of the world’s workers and society reorganised on the basis of common ownership and democratic control of the world’s productive forces – a system of production and distribution for human need where each individual has free and equal access to a common store of goods, services and amenities.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Anitra Nelson's book, Beyond Money: a Post-Capitalist Strategy, was reviewed in the October 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard by the author of this article.

Britain’s energy trilemma (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The approach of the UK government to energy is characterised by a trilemma. It tries to balance out the need to reduce carbon emissions, supporting national energy security and control the costs of the transition. The hidden premise behind all of these, is the class nature of society and the need for the government to negotiate with the owners of energy generating resources, without threatening their control of their property and securing a tribute from them to allow the change.

People speak about the costs of transferring to renewables. Initially this was largely down to the fact that the infrastructure for generating energy through fossil fuels already existed. The cost of energy, like any commodity, depends on how much labour it typically takes to produce it. Capital, that is past labour, reduces the need for fresh effort. So, no good or process has an inherent cost, just the relative cost of how much society is geared towards carrying out the activity.

Renewables and other sources of generation originally appear more costly compared to oil and gas, but that is only because the means of obtaining and using the latter are already in place. To build a renewable energy network within a capitalist society means persuading the owners of capital that there will be profits to be made in carrying out that activity: but the structural advantage fossil fuels have means that the markets, of their own accord, will not promote this change.

UK government has created designed markets. Renewable Obligation Certificates were used, as a means of transferring payments from people who obtain their electricity from fossil fuels to renewable companies. These are still supported by the government, but the scheme is closed, and has been replaced by Contracts for Difference (CFDs): the government auctions off licences to supply energy at a fixed cost, the supplier will repay any excess income, or be paid if market prices for electricity fall below the fixed ‘strike price’. This removes volatility from the market, and allows capitalists to invest with an almost guaranteed rate of return.

Even then, there have been auctions where few firms applied at the stated strike price, and the government has had to raise their offer in order to entice more investment.

Finally, there is a cost of ‘balancing the grid’, paying producers to stop producing or start producing, to offset the unbalanced and intermittent nature of renewables (or if, say, the wind is generating energy too far away from where the grid can carry it to be used adequately). This is expected to reach a cost of £8 billion per year by 2030. Effectively transferring profits to the energy producers via taxation.

The overall market price tends to be set by the most expensive resource, which in the case of energy, is unsubsidised gas on the world market. The loss of Russian gas from the market (and the wider shocks of the Russia-Ukraine war) has pushed the cost of gas up, which means, overall, we have seen significant upward pressure on energy bills, which in the end hit the consumer. Those on fixed incomes will bear the brunt, whilst workers in employment will struggle to pass on the burden to their employers.

This isn’t helped by the anti-democratic approach governments take. In order to hide their powerlessness in the face of the capitalists’ interest, they simply plough on with the policy behind closed doors. The system of subsidy and incentive is opaque (at best) alongside the complicated character of the energy markets that have grown up. Most people will only see the cost of heating their homes going up.

Into that space step voices which claim climate change is a hoax, that subsidies to renewables are making electricity more expensive and that if we just resumed extracting fossil fuels bills would come down. Such voices have the backing of some in the energy industry, or other capitalists who rely on cheap energy for their operations. They would put immediate profits against the cost of the effects of climate change (or even gambling that the costs won’t affect them primarily).

In the meantime, the changes already made have been impressive. In 1991, according to the National Grid, only 2 percent of electricity came from renewable sources compared to over 50 percent by 2023. Coal has been practically eliminated as an electricity generation source. The UK has a target of <50gCO2 per kW hour, in 2023 the average was 140g. Nonetheless, total emissions were 50 percent of those in 1990.

Total renewable energy generation needs to double by 2030 to stay on track. Most of that, apparently, is planned. This will be helped by the tumbling of the costs of renewable generation on a global scale, partly due to China’s massive investment in renewable energy. Although over half of China’s electricity comes from coal, growth of coal generation there is slowing, and renewables are expanding faster. This enables China to export renewable technology. For the first time, this year, less than 50 percent of a growing electricity output worldwide came from non-renewable sources.

This fall in costs, though, presents a problem for the subsidised capitalists, as it means that overall renewable electricity generation will never be as profitable as they would hope.

As we build socialism, we will be confronted by the context of climate change, and will inherit the energy system as it is now. Obviously, we would be able collectively and democratically to discontinue some wasteful branches of energy use, but we would still need to heat homes and provide power for the projects we do want to carry out. The Royal Society has carried out research that suggests all of the UK’s energy needs could be met from wind and solar alone (with sufficient capacity for storage in the form of hydrogen).

The issues of energy generation and climate change are solvable, even within capitalism, but the need is urgent and worldwide democratic co-operation offers us the best and speediest chance and that will require ending the tribute to capital.

Pik Smeet

Letter: Ending the money system can save the planet (2026)

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

Ending the money system can save the planet

Dear Editors,

Money may feel neutral — just a tool for exchange. And environmental destruction is usually framed as a technological problem, a political failure, or a lack of individual responsibility. But the primary driver of ecological degeneration is the system we live under. It requires endless growth, even though the earth itself does not grow – forests regenerate slowly, soils take centuries to rebuild.

In a monetary framework, nature has value only when it can be priced. So, for example, a living forest is ‘unused land’ and a felled forest is ‘economic activity’. Clean air, biodiversity, climate stability, and future generations tend to be ignored by balance sheets. It is more profitable to extract than to regenerate and so what cannot be monetised is treated as expendable, the result often being not stewardship, but liquidation. This doesn’t happen because people are evil. It happens because the system rewards the wrong behaviour.

The result is that total global debt now equals more than three years of the planet’s entire yearly output — everything humanity produces in one year, multiplied by three, already promised away. But growth and the borrowing that goes with it means more extraction and more pressure on land, oceans, climate, and people. We have in effect built a system that treats Earth as an infinite credit card — and even after maxing it out, it demands a higher limit.

That is why we do not have a problem that can be fixed with better regulation, greener growth, or smarter finance. The system that requires endless expansion on a finite planet is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

This brings us to the question of artificial scarcity. Money-based systems depend on scarcity, but not natural scarcity — manufactured scarcity. There is enough food, yet people starve. There are more than enough homes, yet people are homeless. There is an abundance of energy from the sun, yet we burn the planet for fuel. So scarcity is not a condition of nature. It is a condition of design. And scarcity doesn’t just damage ecosystems. It damages people and a wounded humanity consumes to compensate. Much of modern overconsumption is not driven by greed, but rather by emptiness. When work is disconnected from meaning, when time is stolen from life, when worth is measured numerically, people compensate by seeking status, possessions and distractions.

This is a system that erodes human dignity. You are valued only when you are profitable. So rest must be earned, care must be justified, illness is a liability, and ageing becomes a problem. Your right to exist depends not on being human but on being useful.

But ending money would change the questions. Without money, society would stop asking ‘Is this profitable?’ and begins asking questions like ‘Is this necessary?, ‘Is this sustainable?’, ‘Does this improve life for people and the planet?’ When production becomes needs-based, technology serves life, not return on investment, and durability replaces planned obsolescence.

It’s not that people aren’t trying to save the planet within the today’s monetary system — many are. But every serious environmental effort is forced to operate against the system’s underlying logic. Renewable energy must compete with fossil fuels on price. Ecosystem protection must justify itself in economic terms. Climate action must promise growth, jobs, and returns to be considered ‘realistic’. In other words, nature is allowed to survive only if it can be made profitable. And this creates a constant contradiction: we try to heal the planet while preserving the very engine that requires its continued destruction. As long as money, debt, and growth remain the organizing principles of society, ecological protection will always be partial, fragile, and reversible — tolerated only until it threatens profits. That’s why saving the planet without ending the monetary system is not just difficult; it may be structurally impossible.

You may say ‘What can we have instead? This is the only system we’ve got.’ But is it? When land, water, and ecosystems are no longer owned for profit, extraction loses its incentive, care becomes collective, and long-term thinking becomes natural.

Stewardship replaces ownership. The guiding question shifts from ‘How can we extract as much as possible?’ to ‘How do we keep this system healthy for ourselves and future generations?’ Just as a humanity stripped of dignity will compete, consume, and destroy, a humanity that feels safe, valued, and meaningful does not need to dominate its environment.

So while ending the monetary system does not magically save the planet, it does remove the root incentive that is currently destroying it — and it also gives both Earth and humanity a chance to recover. This is the core vision explored in my book, Waking Up – A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, a story that doesn’t ask whether such a new world is perfect, but whether it becomes possible once the old rules are removed. The question is no longer whether we can afford to imagine a world beyond money. The question is whether we can afford not to.

Harald Sandø

Reply:

We broadly agree, though we see the imperative to growth that is built into capitalism as resulting from its economic drive to make and accumulate more profit rather than from having to make money to repay interest on debt – Editors.

Blogger's Note:

Harald Sandø's novel was reviewed in August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard.

What is progress? (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every so often a book comes along that causes us to question something many have considered a self-evident truth. The ‘truth’ questioned by Samuel Miller McDonald in his recently published Progress. A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea by (William Collins, 2025, 424pp.) is that the story of humanity has been one of gradual and, more recently, rapid amelioration in the conditions of life. There has been a growing understanding that the hunter-gatherer period of human existence (i.e. the first 290,000 of the 300,000 years of our species’ existence) was characterised by a egalitarian, non-hierarchical and relatively peaceful lifestyle. At the same time it was a comparatively hand to mouth (‘immediate return’) existence and it might be thought that the increase in wealth brought about by the shift to settled agriculture starting around 10,000 years ago would have improved this – and increasingly as time went by. The author of this book argues that not only was this not the case, but that over the last ten millennia (and especially during the last five) the lives of human beings have actually got worse, even during what is usually seen as the vast leap in living conditions of the last 100 years or so, during which period life is usually seen as having improved beyond all measure for most on the planet. While not failing to recognise such developments as state health services, eradication of many fatal diseases, ability of workers to take industrial action, health and safety laws, advances in gender and race equality, and overall higher living standards, his challenge to this narrative is that some benefits to some humans on the planet have caused untold suffering – and even extermination – to very many others as well as to countless non-human creatures and to the planet as a whole.

Hierarchy and empires

In a work that is widely sourced and painstakingly referenced and, as a comment on its dust cover states, ‘spans cultures, continents and millennia’, MacDonald sets out to illustrate his thesis in two main ways. He does it firstly by pointing to how the coming of agriculture upset the equilibrium of previous human societies bringing with it with hierarchy, domination of the few and unequal access to the means of living and resulted in countless oppressive empires, in untold suffering for millions through the practice of slavery, in destructive wars that killed many other millions and still persist, and in the theft in recent times of the lands of Indigenous populations who were also subjected to indescribable cruelty and, in many cases, extermination. Examples he gives, with significant and vivid detail, are the ruthless Roman rule over its Empire, the Viking invasions of the British Isles with its accompanying plunder and slaughter, the ultra-violent expansion of the Islamic and Mongolian Empires of the Middle and Near East, the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, and the European takeover of the Americas and the barbaric treatment and near annihilation of its native peoples.

He gives particular prominence to this last phenomenon, which he calls ‘the genocide of the Americas’, which, he says, ‘represented potentially the greatest loss of human life and cultural diversity in any single event up to that point, eradicating tens of millions of lives and dozens or hundreds of cultures [and] killing billions of animals in the process’. He also suggests that the attempt to conquer Europe by Hitler’s Nazis and their industrialised murder of those millions regarded as ‘other’ (Jews and gypsies in particular) is likely to have taken its inspiration from the American treatment of the continent’s indigenous peoples, ‘justified’ as it was by the USA’s founding concept of ‘manifest destiny’. In this context he quotes with approval the words of Howard Zinn: ‘Indian removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to the development of the modern capitalist economy.’ It should be added that, at the same time, the author does not fail to draw attention to and condemn what he terms ‘the cults of Stalinism and Maoism’ in the Soviet Union and China which claimed the lives of millions more.

Parasitism vs commensalism

His other principal point of reference concerns the effect of ongoing economic growth by humans on the biosphere. In bringing about apparent improvements in living standards for some, this has, he argues, progressively damaged the ecology of the planet, wiping out species which are part of the natural environment and causing what may be irreparable damage to its necessary biodiversity. He points to the rapid acceleration of this over the past two centuries and to the fact that, despite widespread consciousness of it, there are no signs that it is abating. All this he attributes to what he calls ‘parasitic systems’ (a concept used with great frequency in this book), that is systems whose purpose has been (and continues to be) to extract as much as possible from the biosphere without serious thought for the consequences and which have done this by ‘hijacking human beings’ natural cooperativeness’. The focus of these parasitic systems is, he tells us, ‘growth’, economic growth, the only type of development that human society, and particularly those who currently dominate it, see as ‘progress’. He sees this as a disastrous practice, ‘a mass, collective delusion’, and so, as per the title of his book, ‘humanity’s worst idea’.

The author’s argument that ‘progress’ has inflicted devastating collateral damage on humans, non-human creatures and the environment alike is nothing if not cogent and powerful. But where does he (and we) go from here? What, if anything, does he have to suggest to replace the ‘progress’ mantra, which in the modern world is nothing other than the economic growth every government declares to be imperative? Having hinted in various parts of his book at alternative ways in which human societies might move forward, in a final 40-page section entitled ‘After Progress’, he proceeds to go into this in more detail. Broadly he argues for a society with a ‘mutualistic’ form of relationship between individual humans as well as between human society and the natural environment, one that needs to be ‘non-extractive’ and ‘non-exploitative’ Or, if that is not always entirely feasible, he favours at least relationships he calls ‘commensalistic’, where humans benefit by exchanging their particular skills with one another while being careful that nature should come to no harm.

Better not more

What does this mean in social and political terms? While at one point declaring himself in favour of ‘democratic socialism’ and having made it clear that this has nothing to do with the kind of ‘socialism’ associated with the old Soviet Union, or with China (seen as being ‘state capitalist’ and entirely undemocratic) or with Cuba (described as having ‘welcomed economic liberalisation without any of the apparent benefits of political liberalisation’), he is at pains not to propose any single or existing ‘model’ of society as something to imitate or to build on. And he dismisses any notion that human society should (or could) go back to its earliest stages where the conditions of life and the pro-social nature of humanity combined to provide a self-sufficient, egalitarian existence. However, he does see a future where ‘growth’ and the colossal cost it exacts from both humans and the natural world are replaced by a society that uses the advanced technology now available to create a settled and satisfying existence for all – a society of better rather than more, one perhaps reflecting his description of the earliest human societies as ‘rich in leisure time, generous and egalitarian in its distribution of resources, abundant in communion with people and wildlife’.

Profit – the core of capitalism

How can this be brought about? On this the writer, perhaps understandably, offers guidelines rather than prescriptions or recipes. Broadly he seems to favour not widespread political action but, for example, ‘agro-ecology’, ‘land-based resistance movements’ and pressure for universal basic income, which activities he sees as already taking place on a significant scale and presaging well for the future. He sees no point in pressing governments, growth-obsessed as they inevitably are, to take action to do things such as mitigate climate change, since any such declared ambitions will always be destined to fail or just have the function of political theatre. But while he – understandably – seems, on the one hand, to have no faith in the governments who manage the capitalist system to enact meaningful change, on the other he seems also to see a distinction between different ways in which they might run it. That is to say that he consistently declares abhorrence for what he calls ‘neo-liberalism’, the kind of free-market capitalism he describes as ‘lubricated by relationships based on self-interested transactions’ where the function of the state is the simple one of oversight of the market’s predatory operations. Rather he indicates more of a preference for the kind of capitalism in which there is greater state control both in ownership of industry and surveillance of the privately owned sector.

The trouble here – and this is something that does not seem to be clearly perceived – is that the core of all versions of capitalism is the profit motive, which is inherently extractive, prejudicial to the majority, and unsustainable. Any form of capitalism, with its money system and buying and selling, can only, whatever the preferences or intentions of those in charge of it, to be run along lines of growth and profit. And in all cases the role of a government is to be the executive committee of the owning class. It cannot bring about – or even start to bring about – the production for use society that MacDonald would clearly like to see. It seems futile to argue therefore, as he does, that ‘a guided decline in some forms of production would be helpful’, since such a thing could not happen under any government without the needs of profit and ‘progress’ demanding it.

A total break

So while this book is a powerful indictment of modern capitalism – and of the other hierarchical systems that preceded it – what is far less persuasive about it is how it points forward to a transcendence of it, i.e. how the author proposes to get to a different kind of social arrangements for humanity where we can, in his own words, ‘pursue a non-parasitic mode of human ecology and political economy’ [and] ‘democratic, participatory and community connection’. He states quite correctly that ‘a total break is needed’, that ‘mass, collective delusion must go’, and that ‘we need to have a new conception of our place in our ongoing history’. But for that to happen what is needed is democratic action, ideally via the ballot box, by a socially conscious majority to establish the kind of cooperative society that he is clearly looking for, one of free access to all goods and services where human needs and the health of the planet are the driving force – in other words ‘progress’ in its most positive sense.

Howard Moss

Common ownership: Our last chance (2006)

From Issue 20 of the World Socialist Review

A recent episode of the PBS program Now, broadcast nationwide in most states on 4/22/2005, announced gravely not only that “scientists are convinced our Earth is warming, and with scary consequences,” but also and even more gravely that “meanwhile industry funds a campaign to do nothing.” The program quoted Dr. Richard Alley, professor at Penn State University, a paleo-climatologist, one who studies the Earth utilizing data from glacier ice and ice sheets. According to Dr. Alley, our planet has on numerous occasions previously experienced a phenomenon known as “abrupt climate change.” His concern, and that of scientists whom the program referred to as “the best minds on the planet,” is that human society is so altering the atmosphere and the climate that it may trigger such an abrupt, indeed possibly catastrophic, transformation of the climate.

A visit to the "Web site of the environmental think-tank EcoBridge lists hefty references suggesting indisputable recent changes in our atmosphere, including increases in carbon dioxide and methane, more frequent extreme weather, disappearing glaciers, melting arctic sea ice, Greenland’s ice sheet melting, tropical diseases spreading, and oceans warming with accompanying coral bleaching and disintegration. Paralleling such dire developments are other examples of human society’s significant transformation of the planet from its condition even a century ago, including enormous deforestation rates (discussed in impressive detail in the article “Destroying the World’s Forests” on the Web site of the World Socialist Movement [WSM]) and the introduction of vast quantities of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that are contributing to ozone layer depletion (also discussed on the WSM Web site in an article entitled “Profit Enhancing Chemicals”). Vast research-based evidence thus appeared to support the hypothesis that the planet is warming and becoming increasingly less hospitable for humans and other animal fife.

Does the future have a future?

What is presumably of greatest concern to those of us who work for a living is the total lack of apparent control that we may exert at present upon the corporations, media and governments whose practices exist to serve the interests of a small percentage of the population. The great historical question is going to be: are we just going to stand around amidst alternating storms of doomsday prophecies and media coverage minimizing the magnitude of the problem, and not take matters into our own hands, even at the risk that our and our children’s future may be horrendously bleak, even non-existent?

For example, according to the above mentioned Now television show, in Congress the House has just approved an energy bill which promises tax breaks and subsidies to coal, oil, and gas companies — the companies most responsible for the mess in the first place! Furthermore, those most opposed to theories of global warming are those such as Senator Inhofe who represent the economic interests of the magnates of his oil-producing Oklahoma. He is ironically the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee’s biggest recipient of contributions from oil and gas companies. He says global warming is a hoax.

Ross Gelbspan, a former editor of the Boston Globe, was described in the Now program as having devoted many years to reporting the ways in which the energy industry has attempted to cover up the scientific warnings about global warming. For example, in 1989 the disinformation campaign began when representatives of the petroleum, automotive and other industries formed the Global Climate Coalition, and later the Information Council on the Environment, which was funded by the Western Fuels Association, mostly representing coal interests. The strategy for that campaign, according to Mr. Gelbspan, suggested their drawing on several prominent global warming skeptics, scientists who argue that global warming is mired in unknowns. Mr. Gelbspan found that energy industry leaders had paid those scientists hefty fees and compensations amounting to more than half a million dollars between 1991 and 1995. Some of these scientists, who had engaged the media in interviews to suggest global warming was an unsupported theory rather than a strongly supported hypothesis, reemerged some years later in videos distributed by yet another group, the Greening Earth Society, a group also supported by the coal industry.

In 1997 the Global Climate Coalition appeared in a multimillion dollar campaign to persuade the public that the science behind the international Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gases was shaky. One of those ads stated: “Countries responsible for almost half the world’s emissions won’t have to cut back. Check it out for yourself, it’s not global and it won’t work.” Then President George Bush, former oil man himself, pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Treaty, claiming that “the targets themselves were arbitrary and not based upon science.” According to the Now program, a 2001 memo by Frank Luntz, a well-known Republican consultant, may have played its part in affecting Mr. Bush’s decision, when it advised the White House that the best way to “address the global warming” problem is to “continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

The May/June 2005 edition of Mother Jones suggested that Exxon Mobil alone contributes to more than 40 policy groups that seek to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

Welcome to Hell

According to a citation in a January 13, 2000 CNN Web site article about scientific experts discussing the overwhelmingly strong evidence for global warming, a conference of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) comprising over 2,500 scientists, was quoted as having reached a near-unanimous conclusion that global warming was at least partially the result of human activity — primarily the burning of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide, methane, and others gases into the atmosphere, forming a global “blanket” that traps heat near the Earths surface. The IPCC predicted an increase in global temperatures of between 2 and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. The panel also predicted the expansion of warming oceans and calculated that the melting of land-based ice formations would combine to add between one and three feet to the existing sea level. The IPCC projected sharp increases in the frequency and intensity of storms and droughts, in the spread of tropical diseases, in coastal flooding and in accelerated waves of extinctions of plant and animal species which fail to adapt to the changing climate.

As suggested earlier in this article, large countries such as the United States may choose to put profits before people in refusing to cooperate with Kyoto Accord limits to greenhouse gas emissions, while other developing nations such as China, a coal-based economy, are likely to vastly surpass the greenhouse emissions of the United States by 2025.

Such is the anarchic nature of the capitalist system. It is comprised in part of vast corporations with vested economic interests to broadcast disinformation to the public and to influence governments to steer policy away from potential threats not to our well-being but to their profit-making. It is also made up of rival nation-states each attempting to care for the economic interests of their own internal capitalist class. Finally, it is characterized by billions of workers whose receipt of information is heavily influenced by the capitalist media over which they have no control.

In other words, even rational decisions by governments, such as those pronounced in the Kyoto Accords, may be thwarted and never realized because of the needs of the few rather than the needs of us many. While some or even many capitalists predictable phenomenon not caused by the negative side effects of industrial society, humans may still need to find a solution to keep themselves and future generations from destruction in droughts, floods, or plagues.

Such complex solutions are not likely to be effectively realized in an intrinsically competitive and undemocratic society, in which the resources we will desperately require are owned by the planets private owners or by rival nation-states. In such a preliminary social order as we presently live under, the economic costs of dollars and cents will likely play a major part of any such grandiose scheme, as there is only so much money to go around. Furthermore, in this hierarchical, class-based society, the major decisions will be made by those with power and privilege, and not by those of us who must work to live and who remain relatively powerless players in the machinations of national or global politics.

Good Decisions Will Require Common Ownership

Or we could decide to take matters into our own hands. By democratically taking over the means of production, to be thereafter considered subject to the common ownership of the whole human species, any drastic solutions that may need to be made by and in the interest of even the entire human race could more readily be achieved, as decision-making over the use of resources will be entirely ours. Whatever we decide, such decisions will be made in harmony with the findings of the scientific community, and we will be able to act upon our decisions immediately, without the endless walls of bureaucracy, finance, politics or power murderously standing in the way of our lives as they are at present with regards to an issue such as global warming that could potentially alter the course of human history.

At what point do humans decide that sustaining the interests of a small gang of owners — whom working-class humans have thus far decided have every right to own the planet and enjoy the fruits and luxuries that workers provide — is not worth the imminent threat of an Earth no longer able to sustain human fife? Scientists are warning us that the point of no return is close by or has already been passed. Do we pretend the problem is not really that bad? Do we passively resign ourselves to a pessimism that announces it is too late to act so why not just embrace a selfish consumerist individualism? Do we continue to trust our politicians to represent our interests even though they have always failed to do so since they are unable to alter and control the laws of the capitalist economy in the interests of us hard working folk?

The barrel of the gun is pointed right now between your eyes. What are you going to do?

— Dr. Who