Capitalism is not freedom (2026)

From the November 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ideology of capitalism as freedom only ever made sense when it was contrasted with the brutal and oppressive laws found in feudalism or slavery. However, there was no reason why private ownership had to persist as an institution once forms of democracy were accepted and established throughout much of our social organization. But private ownership was confused with invention, entrepreneurship, and innovation. At no point were inventors with capital able to magically realise their dreams by their genius alone, but instead they required an army of workers ready to execute them. This confusion was the beginning of unnecessary complexity in our society, and the perpetuation of a society, as with earlier class societies, that did not prioritise human needs, in contrast with the avowed intentions of scientists.

Although capitalist apologists insist that the market system is best at meeting needs, they are merely persisting in this confusion out of a redundant identification with ideology. For every great idea there is almost never accompanying capital to realise it. Once an idea is married to capital investment, it suddenly takes on a commodified form, owing to its embodiment of not just use-value but also exchange-value, further and further distancing itself from meeting needs. Suddenly, this imagined, drafted, and then built object must be concerned with such features as how to entice consumers, how to package it, how to save money, potentially making it shoddier. Such concerns are not the priority of the innovator or inventor. We live today in a mad society with this increasing distance between needs and commodities which has propped up irrational, wasteful and disquieting complexity. Instead of the aforementioned concerns, production criteria should be asking more rational questions. Will it be safe? Will it be healthy? Will it last as long as possible? Can the parts be recycled? Can the parts be standardised with other producers elsewhere? Might it be both useful and beautiful?

The marriage of industrialism to the market economy led to the continued division of humanity into economic classes. It also condemned industrialism to serving the aims of whatever political regime might develop, such as the destructive goals of its military, which presumably led to scientists abandoning their fields’ hallowed ethical and pro-social standards.

Not all of capitalism exists with a liberal democracy. Much of it has persisted and still persists under autocratic rule, under welfare states with oppressive governments, under religious rulers who continue to keep children believing in the invisible and impossible while at the same time churning out advanced machines such as cell phones and automobiles. Because this society is inherently unstable owing to its market nature, tending to sudden changes in commodity prices, availability, quality, and affordability, it leads political activists of all shades to exploit such instability to further their identified interests. Thus, society at the cusp of developing mass production began also to mass-produce ideologies that have divided humanity to the point at which, today, adherents of one are ready to murder the other either by hand or by vote.

Being wedded to an ideology entails an emotional identity with an idea, doubtlessly constructed out of varied biases and woven pretty tightly into a personality. A liberal, fascist, leftist, theocrat, military ruler, or a conservative is a human being overly identified with values and beliefs that become justified through a delusion of varied intensity. Ideologies are similar on the psychological level to commodities, possessions, inasmuch as they beckon for your consumption, and weave us into complex and appetitive webs from which our own minds and lives will be consumed. They also yearn for exchange. They make it difficult to understand the whole, to follow evidence, or to find the way out.

A human failure to reinforce values of reason, equality, and progress through the community standing together to put industrial civilisation at the behest of all humanity has led today to levels of confusion among workers that are pitiful and depressing to encounter. Just as capitalism led to a vast complex infrastructure that was completely unnecessary for the progress of humanity — its banks, insurance companies, advertisers, state departments, and armies — all of which consume vast planetary resources, so the thoughts and emotions of humankind must also in this era be dominated by highly complex and completely unnecessary political ruminations about ‘preventing the communists,’ ‘protecting the family,’ ‘standing behind God,’ ‘keeping out the immigrants,’ or ‘protecting/dominating pregnant women.’ Ideology has become as significant in our psychology as commodity production. We all take our stances, we all stand for something, we are always angry, we never make things better.

In the United States the worthy goal of fighting racism or sexism on campus must violate free speech and prevent even moderate thinkers from speaking and teaching, with billions of dollars in grants distorting real science to support a social justice ideology. Capitalist ideology is by nature sneaky and divisive, locking our minds into a quasi-reality from which it is difficult to escape, and which always distorts. It has the power to split your family, your sense of belonging to your community, your very mind. Truth itself is under scrutiny by post-modernists. Society finds itself more and more impossible to understand. We live in virtual universes at the very time when we need to more and more defend the earth and all the creatures we share it with. In short, it’s time to get real.

All of this is because of a failure to abolish capitalism in an earlier phase, which was clearly a realisation that entered a vast number of heads in the 19th century, partly in response to the writings of Marx and other anti-capitalists, but also in response to a growing body of workers organising for a new world. Though philosophising about it, they were far too naive about ideology. The socialists of the 19th century did not sufficiently promote the essential features of a socialist society, nor did they rail adequately against the reformist ideas that were to lead to the Australian Socialist Party of 1899, the UK Labour Party of 1906, the French Guesdists of 1902, the Russian Bolsheviks, and so many more pseudo-socialists. Except among a very few small organisations such as the SPGB and some anarchist-communist groups, revolutionary thinking turned reformist, yet still referred to itself as ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ and ‘Marxist’. The rest, we may say, is history. Perhaps there was insufficient history back then to support the hypothesis that all reform would only perpetuate our servitude to power, bosses, money, and the state.

With our planet arguably dying, it is hoped that a new generation will finally put an end to reformist thinking, although there are few solid signs of that at this time. What is required is the formation of groups in every town and city of the world standing for one thing: the ownership of the means of production in the hands of a democratic community, a refusal to reform capitalism, knowing from history that it cannot be reformed, an end to money and exchange, and a replacement of the commodity with objects and services with only use-value. This must be done in a manner that promotes freedom and community, overcoming the hierarchy and rule of despotic governments. We call also to all parties using such words as ‘Worker’, ‘Socialist’, ‘Communist’, and ‘Marxist’ to transform their parties only into organs for the actual abolition of money and the state, for the conversion of their platforms to those advocating the abolition of the wages system. Only its abolition is truly socialist or communist, and only its abolition will deliver humanity from a world in which the community is prioritised, to a world where needs come first. Any other goal makes a mockery of their name.

Dr. Who

Are you . . . part of the system? (1987)

From the November 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Of course, we might have been born this way. Out of the womb, programmed to a kind of madness which makes us into callous competitors in a race which we are unlikely to win. Maybe we are all swines. Perhaps it is punishment for Eve eating that apple. Diseased, rotten bodies of human nature, wandering around looking for ways to express our inherent nastiness. Murder, rape, corruption. dishonesty . . . we should be grateful to the cops, the bosses, the teachers and that overwhelming sense of guilt for the sins which we think we have committed and the worse ones which we are sure that we are on the verge of committing — grateful to these forces of repression for stopping us from being our horribly, humanly natural selves.

Maybe. And maybe Jesus Christ died and was born again. Neil Kinnock is a principled socialist and the Moonies have the answer to all our problems if only we'd open our ears, closely followed by our wallets, and listen to The Truth. Life is too short for maybes. To hell with these creeps who tell children that as humans they are wretched and must repent; to hell with our 'defenders' who tell us that we must have armies and bombs. 'Man being what he is', to hell with the screwed up view of humanity which defines love as being confined to a gymnastic display beneath the sheets. Human nature is not an illness. Human beings can act in many ways, and do. How we behave is not determined by God (who is a figment of the powerless imagination) or by Nature (which is not our mother any more than the virgin Pope is anyone's father). Whatever we are — and we are all kinds of people, from caring volunteers who help the aged to vicious muggers who rape them for kicks — is a product of the society in which we live, learn and create ourselves — or are created by others who have decided what we should be.

Every day of the week Intercity trains travel across the country carrying on them vast numbers of workers who are 'on business' for the company. There can be few tortures worse than sitting next to a troupe of these travelling human calculating machines. They carry files and study graphs and talk with passion about how 'we' could increase sales in Accrington if only R&D would pull their fingers out. What boring lives these salaried servants of another class's parasitism lead. At least the factory worker does not waste time thinking about how to boost profits as he reads the paper on the bus each morning. The system has sucked these workers in: with their travel allowance, annual invitation to the MD's golf club and non-taxable ulcer, they have been swallowed into a world of caring about buying and selling and investing and hiring and sacking — a world where the cash register rings and they feel a tingle right across their soul which is not there.

Every morning on London local radio those who are part of it all are invited to talk all about it on phone-in shows. In case three hours is not long enough there is another three hours every night. Phone-in shows are like Chinese take-aways: eat like Emperors and feel hungry two hours later. But it is worth the effort, for amongst the long hours of bland noise there are those moments when clarity supersedes cliche and you are persuaded that Harry of Hatch End is speaking in a language that his bosses did not want him to learn. But for every conscious Harry there are scores of callers who have been truly sucked in to the rut of the profit system. They spend time working out ways to run it, enforce it, reform it, celebrate it. They are suckers for capitalism. This morning's topic: how to stop so many wicked workers from using the tube without a ticket. On comes Bill from Barking who is barking mad because there are too few ticket collectors; Lil from Tooting reckons that there should be stiffer fines for wage slaves who do not pay their way to work; Jack from Camden is of the view that it is all a sign of the times and nothing can ever be done to defeat the inevitability of the status quo. Meanwhile in the House of Lords a gaggle of half-dead time-wasters debate the best way to preserve badgers. Across the country thousands of reform groups plan ways to preserve red phone boxes and make prisons more humane. It is known as performing a rôle in society.

Children have the right idea. They have better things on their minds than making bosses richer and cheering on Our Boys in the Gulf. But with ''maturity" — that awful descent which marks our graduation out of innocence and into The System — comes the need to think about money and status and who is consuming whom and what and for how much. Society schools children into knowing their places within the vast scheme of things, or rather, into this huge, schemeless mess of uncontrolled relationships called the capitalist system.

In most areas there are people commonly referred to as simpletons. The ones who are not quite all there; misfits, social deviants, the crazy ones. These are the people who. sometimes because of their brains, but more often because of their surroundings, have not been conditioned to standard precision. They are rejects in terms of what the system requires from its subordinate, wealth-producing class. Of course, if society ignores them they will become confused and alienated. They will wander the streets talking to themselves, because sometimes that is the only phone-in show worth being on. They will laugh about jokes which bank clerks and social workers cannot comprehend and perceive visions which only the mad. i.e. not wholly conditioned, could entertain. For many such people life becomes one of frustration: either 'treated' by society's modern witch-doctors, the psychiatrists, with drugs meant to subdue and normalise them, or left alone to ponder the meaningless disorder of a world which appears to have meaning to those who are its tamed beasts of burden. Every so often a deranged wage slave takes a gun and does what medals are awarded for in the army — or stages a siege or frightens a baby. Such actions feed a million prejudices: ah. so this is what humans will do if they are not conditioned to be slaves, economically and culturally.

Socialists never tire of explaining that the working class is exploited: we produce everything that is in and on this earth and what we produce is stolen by the minority who own and control this earth. This is the intolerable inequality of the capitalist system.

But that is not all that is intolerable. It is enough, to be sure, to make workers rise like lions and topple this rotten system once and for all. But. just as bad — some might think even worse — than the economic oppression which this system embodies is the cultural slavery which it requires of its unconscious millions whose non-opposition keeps capitalism alive. That subordination which requires workers to smile blissfully to the latest chart-topping, mind-numbing, consciousness-crushing hit; to dance away the nights to the chat of DJs whose mid-Atlantic drawls confirm that "everything's gonna be alright"; to dream about big cars and big houses and big career opportunities; to choose your fantasy from the impoverished store of images which offer Princess Di or Joan Collins or (for those who are definitely not conversationalists) Samantha Fox. The cultural slavery of Big Mac, Albert Square and Dewsbury parents who must neurotically protect their little Bisto kids from having curry sauce on their school dinners. Is it worth it? If we were born that way life itself would hardly be worth the bother. But human nature has not destined us to be neat little cogs in the dizzying wheel of the system. We are conscious; we can imagine; we can plan together, we can stop being part of it.

Steve Coleman

Society and Morals. Part VII. The Morals of Capitalism. (1918)

From the March 1918 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part VI.

The industrial system which prevails to-day, and which has moulded social institutions along lines rapidly becoming world-wide, is known as “capitalism” because, under this system, the wealth used in production takes the character of “capital.” By “capital” is to be understood wealth which is neither used directly for consumption, nor yet, primarily, for the production of articles for their own sake, but wealth which is specifically employed for the purpose of yielding a profit or interest upon which the owner of the capital can live without necessarily consuming or diminishing the sum of capital itself.

Apart from the undeveloped forms—usurer’s or merchant’s capital which preceded the dominating “industrial capital” of to-day, this process of profit yielding is made possible because, in contrast to the possessors of capital (the capitalists) there exists a far larger class who possess no wealth upon which they can live. These propertyless persons must, therefore, undertake to work with the means of production owned by the capitalists on condition that in return they receive the means to enable them to feed, clothe, and shelter—in a word, maintain themselves.

This transaction between capitalist and worker takes the form of a purchase and sale of the worker’s labouring energy, for upon yielding this power to the capitalist for a stipulated time the worker receives a sum of money or a wage—the price of this energy. This price, whilst varying like that of any other commodity according to the relations of supply and demand, is determined by the cost of producing the commodity—in this case the maintenance of the labourer’s energy, of his life and that of his family at the customary standard of comfort and fitness.

Under capitalism practically everything that is produced is for sale in the markets. The capitalist does not desire to use the goods his employees produce for him ; it matters not to him even what they are, whether they be battleships or bootlaces, so long as he can obtain their equivalent in money by selling them. It is in their sale that he realises the profit he is all along out for. He obtains it from the value given to the goods by the labour of his employees, during their production, in excess of that which merely balances the wages he pays out. Obviously then, under these conditions practically all the benefits of increasing powers of production are reaped by the capitalists, who as a consequence become more wealthy, while the great mass of producers remain in a permanent condition of poverty.

The wage-worker under capitalism, therefore, is in a similar position to chattel-slave and to the serf, whom we have previously dealt with. He is a compulsory worker and he is exploited of the wealth produced by what we have hitherto referred to as surplus energy—that energy resident in man after labouring sufficiently to secure self maintenance.

Such, then, omitting details, are the primary features of the capitalist mode of production, a system which has profoundly modified all human institutions, ideas, and moral relations. To trace these changes it is essential to briefly outline its historical development.

The Coming of Capitalism.

In feudal Society there was no class of labourers who worked permanently for wages. Individuals may have done so, but there was no such class in the sociological sense. As we have seen, the serf, providing he abided by the customs of the age, was, by these customs, guaranteed normally, a secure livelihood. He was not a landowner in the modern sense, but he did possess certain rights in the land. The craftsman too, easily acquired the tools and materials used in his work. Neither, therefore, was under any economic necessity to sell his labour power to an employer for wages. Before such could become a social phenomenon the link which united the producer with the means of production had to be severed. This severance, the historic premise of capitalism, was accomplished in several stages, the details of which can be read in Gibbins’ “Industrial History of England,” or Marx’s “Capital.” Here we need only say in brief that as the old village community was gradually undermined by economic changes, such as the substitution of money rents for feudal services or payment in goods, the landed nobility were enabled by their control of the State to enclose the land of their estates, thus depriving large numbers of the peasantry of their only means of existence by ejecting them from their allotments. Many became petty craftsmen independent of the guilds, others flocked to the towns to form the germs of the urban proletariat.

Capitalist production began when wealthy merchants, instead of buying commodities from independent craftsmen, found it more profitable in order to meet the growing demands of the expanding international markets to gather numbers of these dispossessed workers into factories of their own, providing them with materials and supervising their work. In England many such factories existed in the 16th Century in “industrial villages” outside the Guild towns.

Soon division of labour introduced into the workshops made the workers more and more dependent upon their capitalist employer, a dependence which was made complete towards the end of the 18th Century by the revolution brought about by the advent of steam-driven machinery.

This dependence of the workers upon those who own the gigantic and above all, expensive machine plants, which while increasing their productiveness lessen the skill required of the producer, soon became general because, in the last century and a half, the machine process has been taken up in every branch of production.

In their evolution the capitalist class or bourgeoisie (so called because its first elements were , townsmen, inhabitants of the “bourg”) found it necessary to attack with a view to their abolition, all the institutions reminiscent of feudalism, which were a hindrance to the full satisfaction of their interests.

The merchants, who were the fore-runners of the industrial capitalists, had been materially aided by the favour extended to them by the Crown, to which they were a rich source of revenue and a powerful counterpoise against the baronage, who, with their petty armies and traditional prestige, were always a menace to the supremacy of the king. But after the military power of the nobility had been broken and their descendants had become mere land-owners and courtiers of the king, the growing bourgeoisie were oppressed by all manner of tolls and duties hindering the freedom of trade—Crown monopolies, a heavy taxation, and a political system which excluded them from any share in the government.

Against such conditions the capitalists rebelled. They became revolutionary, that is, they desired the abolition of the social institutions which had been adapted to feudal conditions of production, but which, now that feudalism was a thing of the past, were obsolete and a fetter to industrial progress ; and in their place they determined to establish new institutions suitable to capitalist production and thus to their own interests.

Their intellectual leaders developed new social theories, in which the conditions of the past were condemned as unjust, tyrannical and unreasonable. By contrast, the aspirations of the new class appeared as the very embodiment of Justice, Liberty, and Reason. Their great watchword was “Freedom” : freedom of commercial competition ; a working class “free” to sell its labour-power to any purchaser and to move from place to place with the shifting centres of employment. Previous forms of exploitation, now obsolete and a bar to the free operation of capitalist methods, were condemned. Chattel-slavery became a “crime against humanity.” Serfdom was declared a violation of the “Rights of Man.”

New religious conceptions arose in antagonism to the reactionary Roman Catholicism—the ghost of feudalism, the mental despot. “Freedom of conscience” and of faith were demanded. The “divine right” of kingship was stoutly denied. Puritanism, an extreme reaction against all things “Roman,” became dominant in England. It supplanted the authority of the Church with that of the Bible ; condemned the extravagant, sensual, and gay lives of the aristocracy ; raised to an ideal the miserly, money-seeking habits of the bourgeoisie, and substituted for the many boisterous feasts and holy-days of the past, possible with the agrarian economy of feudalism, the more regular, but meaner and dull, Sabbath.

In France the intellectual movement took the form of a crude but highly critical materialism under Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists. Natural science, discouraged in the feudal period as likely to lead to heretical opinion, was looked on with favour by the bourgeoisie. It aided them both in navigation and in industry.

Many new conceptions of law and morality were formulated. For instance, ancient law says practically nothing in relation to “contract,” which, as everyone knows, plays a great part in modern jurisprudence. In communistic and early feudal times the organisations of production—in agriculture the village commune, in industry the guild—persisted from generation to generation, and the relations of the members of them were fixed by customs often of immemorable antiquity. But with the rise of capitalist production, industry becomes a matter of the private enterprise of individuals. The capitalist set up his factory, purchased hia materials and labour-power, and thus founded a productive organisation which was the result of a perfectly well known agreement between men. Contracts thus became of importance in the basic relations of men, and they were made binding by the “law of contract.” The early bourgeois sociologists, such as Rousseau, regarded “contract” as of such fundamental importance that they accounted for the origin of human society by their theory of the primaeval “social contract.”

Enlisting the support of the discontented peasantry and proletariat by their “democratic” slogans, the bourgeosie at length broke the power of the Crown and the nobility ; capitalist production triumphed ; capitalist ideas and morality became supreme and their tenets were embodied in the law of the State.

In particular was the right of private property elevated to an inviolable position. Whilst, under tribal society, personal ownership of wealth, had been almost negligible and even under feudalism extremely restricted, with the first flush of the bourgeois triumph it became almost absolute. The doctrine was formulated that private property was a “natural attribute” of man and his “eternal right.” Accordingly, infringements of the laws of property, now dominant in the legal code, were severely punished. In England a century ago the death penalty was enforced in cases even of petty theft.

All legal restrictions on trade and production were now abolished—the reign of free competition and free exploitation opened.

Competition and Psychology.

The industrial competition which made capitalistic production and exchange so distinctly different from all previous forms has had a profound influence upon the mental life of Society. It became so intense that Engels likened it to the “struggle for existence” in the biological world. This unremittant war of “each for himself and the devil take the hindmost” fostered to the utmost the natural egoism or selfishness in men, and necessarily hampered the expression of their artistic feelings and social impulses.

The business man who loved “his neighbour as himself,” who cared at all for the welfare of his competitors, would be ruined financially and cast into the proletariat. Even the wage-worker, whose existence depends upon his getting a “job” cannot but fight his competing fellow-worker in the labour market, especially when, as is usually the case, the job-hunters out-number the jobs.

Competitive capitalism weakened social bonds and made men’s actions as anti-social as they well could be and retain their social organisation at all. But so much is the horizon of man’s thought limited by the conditions under which he lives, that competition appeared to the bourgeoisie as the basis of all progress, as the only “natural” condition of production. Any interference with its constant sway was regarded as a calamity. “Individualism,” having the “rights and liberty of the individual” as its dogma and Herbert Spencer as its greatest exponent, became the “philosophy bourgeois” par excellence. That the proletariat never completely assimilated this teaching is due to the fact that, very early, the workers learned the great law that combination, where possible, is more effective than strife—a lesson which the capitalists were not to learn until much later, as we shall see.

The prominence which the capitalist era has given to individual egoism is, no doubt, largely responsible for the general acceptance of the view that selfishness is the natural inclination of man, altruism being super-human, i.e., of supernatural origin—a view which has led to the ethical argument for the existence of God. As we have seen, however, concern for the welfare of others, equally with selfishness, is a product of the animal evolution of man.

The bourgeoisie’s steadfast belief in the gospel of competition was based upon the theory that out of the seeming strife and anarchy of the struggle came order and harmony through the inexorable workings of the economic laws of supply and demand. These laws were supposed to regulate production and distribution with the utmost possible exactness and to apportion the wealth produced with the greatest justice attainable. Consequently the bourgeoisie were bewildered by the periodic crises in history which were due to the over-production largely a result of the industrial anarchy prevailing. Their leaders sought the cause of crises everywhere but in the right place, even in the spots on the sun.

That the owners of capital should receive the largest share of the wealth produced was only “right and natural,” for, reasoned the economists, did they not “risk their capital” ; and was not this, in the first place, the outcome of their thrift and diligent industry ; and further, was not their organising and business ability at the root of the efficiency and success of their productive concerns ?

True, the mere landlords were wealthy also, and these surely enough were social parasites, the useless remnants of a bye-gone age. If the workers were poor, declared their theorists, what was to blame but their own thriftlessness and lack of intelligent effort ; the very laws of the “survival of the fittest” and of the ratio of population to food supply were against any other result.

Such was the tenor of the social theories prevailing during the classical period of capitalism. Translated into the political practice of the “Manchester School,” they meant the non-interference of the State in private industry. The individual capitalist could exercise his boundless avarice unfettered even by the wider interests of his own class. Men, women, and children toiled wearily day and night in the feverish hum of unhealthy factories, workshops, and mines. In Green’s “Short History” we read : “Women toiled in coal-mines, chained like beasts of burden to carts which they dragged on all fours through the long galleries, traversing from seventeen to thirty miles a day. Children from five years old were sent into the darkness of the mines. In the model mill of David Dale children from five to eight worked from. 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., after which they went to school, . . . . Children might be seen lying on the factory floors at night to be ready for work in the morning.” (Page 840.) Such conditions were justified by the morality of capitalism. Verily, in those days, as Marx has put it, “capital celebrated its orgies.”

When laws were passed to ameliorate such frightful conditions of exploitation it was due principally to the political opponents of the manufacturers—the land-owners—who were, of course, uninjured by the restrictions. To these “Factory Acts” the industrial capitalists were doggedly opposed. John Bright, their spokesman, denounced the Ten Hours Bill as “one of the worst measures ever passed in the shape of an Act of Legislature.” (Gibbins’ “Industrial History.”)

Nor were these the only “benefits” which flowed from the reign of free profit competition. As goods were produced, not that they should be used by their producers, but only to be sold at a profit, the quality of the articles was of little concern to the manufacturer so long as the purchaser could be deceived. The sale of adulterated food-stuffs, for instance, spread to proportions which would have seemed incredible in the “simple age” when people prepared food to eat. Bright declared adulteration a “legitimate form of competition.” Rubbish, in our civilised age, is sold as food, poison as drink, and the all-producing proletariat are clad in shoddy clothing and in paper boots. Fortunes are built up by the sale of quack “patent medicines” and “cures” for every imaginable ailment. The advertising of goods has become an art in itself, an art of lying and deceit. Every article is pronounced from a hundred glaring posters to be better than all its competitors. Under capitalism it has become impossible to separate lying from the most every-day economic relations. The worker lies to his boss about his qualifications ; the manufacturer and salesman lies to his customers from the hoarding and the Press, by his agent, or over the counter. The “business lie” has become “not a real lie at all,” a mere convention which everybody expects and everybody sees through.

Such are some of the glorious results of free competition and the “rights of the individual.”

R.W. Housley

(To be Continued.)

Learning for survival (1994)

From the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists tend to emphasize the humanitarian aspects of Socialism. Given that the problems people face are gross and immediate and that they are an endemic part of capitalism, this is not unreasonable. We quote the millions of deaths every year from hunger and its diseases, we spell out the facts of poverty and unemployment, slums and homelessness and the rape of the environment and we try to put into words the horror of unending war and violence that is an ever-present feature of capitalism.

Like other workers, socialists live within the system; we experience these problems but, of course, we are not in a position to quantify them. Ironically, the measures of these appalling miseries that we do use to support our contention that capitalism is a blight on humanity are almost always drawn from the agencies of capitalism itself.

What is not quantified, and cannot be measured (except, perhaps, in terms of crime and other forms of socially-alienated behaviour), is the complex conception of isolation, of not belonging, of being of little or no consequence within society, of not achieving, accepting society’s definition of failure, being socially, physically or financially inadequate. These are among the problems and inevitable uncertainties that, in a competitive world, feed anger, frustration and despair and, against the heightened profile of the “success" culture, increasingly transmute these emotions into forms of depravity that the great majority of people find confusing and frightening.

You do not have to be a psychologist to appreciate that it is these capitalist inputs that cause the myriad conflicts and divisions that categorize people, minimize expectation and induce loneliness and fear. What passes for education, rather than being concerned with the development of knowledge and personality in the individual, to allow him or her a meaningful role in society, is, certainly for the working class, a fear-ridden process of training designed to equip the recipient to sell a major portion of his or her life to an employer (another human being or group of human beings) simply in order to live. The price of failure can be grim and permanent.

Two facts stand out in relation to this usurpation of young lives into the relentless, pressurized process of training that presently masquerades as education. The first is that many of the alleged “educational” facets peculiar to most of capitalism’s specialized functions have little or no value outside the marketing needs of the present system. Most of the training that underpins the legal profession, accounting, financial management and many other of capitalism’s much-vaunted professions, has no educational value in the true sense of the term; their value is solely in the functions they perform within capitalism and, if that system ended tomorrow, the acquired skills of practitioners in these areas would be redundant.

The second point is that because education is budgeted largely against taxation and taxation is ultimately a charge on capital, it has to be cost-efficient. It is this that dictates most of the practices in the schools and it is this that to a large extent determines success or failure because these qualities are determined by time. For working-class children the school programme is scheduled to take place within a given period of years. Wisdom gained after term, after exams or assessments or following the end of schooling doesn’t earn a diploma.

The whole process, rather than being one that integrates the young as caring members of society, is an intensive survival course that engenders the primacy of self. This concept is, of course, in line with the flawed notions of “individualism” that capitalism promotes as an alibi for the ghastly social plunder of the many by the few — within which framework the great majority of individuals have their lives demeaned and circumscribed by the alien interests of those who live on the fruits of their labour. The idea of self is an essential prerequisite of a world of property values.

While these values are unlikely to achieve any great measure of realization or satisfaction for the great mass of people who have no stake in ownership outside that of a few personal effects and, perhaps, a mortgage, they are of use to capitalism because they are the foundation stone of working-class acceptance of that system. The whole structure of capitalism is based on the belief, inculcated from childhood and reinforced in the school system, that every man and woman has the right to accumulate individual wealth even though such wealth is the product of the labour of others. The numerous religions accept this, the educational system generally embodies it in academic studies and, of course, the achievement of wealth, however unscrupulously gained, is a passport to influence, power and esteem.

Such is the credit side, for capitalists. For capitalism, on the other hand, this ruthless conception of self is a basic cause of many problems, not simply among those scrambling for profit but among the masses of frustrated individuals who are wholly or partially denied the realization of even their modest hopes or who are alienated by the denial of hope itself. This frustration, this denial, and the anger, fear and lack of concern it breeds for other individuals is the source of most antisocial behaviour, of crime, aggression and jealousy as well as much of the neurosis affecting society today.

Socialists see the individual truly liberated when human personal attainment is fully separated from the task of procuring the material means of living. In Socialism individuals would act in voluntary co-operation to produce all the goods and services required to provide each individual with the material means of a full life. The cost-factor that plays such an essential part in determining “education”, training, working and planning in capitalist society would disappear, along with the old social relations.

Certainly Socialism will solve the economic problems of society but, in order to appreciate how it will radically change the role of the individual in society, we would contrast the role of the individual in a Socialist society with the cost-efficient wage-slave that is an essential requirement of capitalism.

Socialism will measure efficiency in terms of human happiness. Every single person will have a claim on society for the provision of his or her material needs. Education, in whatever form it takes, will be a process aimed at developing skills and abilities in line with the individual preferences of each person —and, for those who require it, it would be an ongoing process rather than a crammed apprenticeship for work. Primarily, the emphasis will be on the individual but rather than the competitive selfishness which capitalism must inculcate in the individual as survival training for a world that pits student against student, worker against worker and human against human. the student in Socialism will live and study in an ambience of social cooperation. The logic of that co-operation will be evident in every facet of life and it would be no exaggeration to say that many of the anti-social products of our cost-effective grading and assessment system of today would be regarded, in Socialism, as abnormalities that required help.

Of course, our current systems of education have evolved with the present economic system and just as they would be immediately abolished in a socialist world because of their anti-social, even anti-human, nature, so, too, would the values and concerns of socialist education be alien and harmful to capitalism. Imagine an educational establishment turning out individuals today who see their role as actively co-operating with their fellows in the pursuit of the interests of society as a whole. They would quickly be chewed up in the competition and conflict of capitalism, the educational system would have failed them by failing to make them selfish, contending fighters for survival. Imagine the more general application of such a system: capitalism's workforce would refuse to compete with one another; refuse to partake in the exploitation of their fellows; there would be few police and the judiciary would become socially inquisitive. And, of course, who would make munitions and do capitalism’s killing?

As we said at the outset, Socialists usually emphasize the material problems of capitalism and, perhaps, one of the reasons for this is that we feel poverty, world hunger, slums, unemployment etc., are more visual than the mental enslavement of our class. But that mental enslavement is a terrible reality, a reality designed by the political pundits of capitalism and serviced by its system of “education” and conditioning.

Richard Montague

Socialism and the immediate future (1952)

From the April 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

The starting point of any fruitful discussion about the conditions of the immediate future must be found in the present ones. Past revolutionary changes of the economic system have taught us that in any new society there can never be a complete break with the conditions of the immediate past. The physical basis upon which the new society rests is the end product of the development of the economic and political forces within the old society. This is why socialists stress the necessity of understanding how capitalism functions, as a necessary pre-requisite to taking action to replace it by Socialism.

The method and means of production that Capitalism has developed and will develop are the only ones upon which Socialism can be built. As long as thinking about the future takes the form of planning an ideal world, as an architect plans a house, it will remain a dream, unrelated to and without bearing upon the present. One of the chief reasons why those who agree that Socialism is desirable refuse to work for its establishment is that it is regarded as having no connection with what to-morrow is likely to bring. It is important, therefore, to emphasize that the form of society we direct all our efforts towards attaining is possible to institute to-morrow, given the understanding of and desire for it by the majority of people.

What is there about Capitalism that enables it to continue, in spite of the fact that it produces effects which are repulsive to the majority who endure them? The answer is that acceptance of its basic institutions— wage-labour and capital, money, the state—is deeply rooted in most people’s minds. These institutions govern property relationships and their continued existence is, in fact, unchallenged except by socialists, though others may express a desire to modify some of them.

The basis of production under Capitalism is the pursuit of profit and this economic basis creates effects which permeate the whole of capitalist society. It is not just production for sale and profit that is tacitly, if not avowedly, accepted by the majority, but the whole set of ideas, ethics or morals that is in line with it The two-class nature of present society is accepted, not consciously as a scientific theory, but implicitly in all the conventional mental attitudes towards it in practice. Such is the power of tradition that most people invariably expect the continuation of property relationships into the immediate future at any rate and can conceive the possibility of only superficial changes in them.

Having acknowledged the power of tradition let us now look more closely at how it exercises its sway over the minds of all who fail to examine it critically. The class that owns the means of production and distribution also controls the instruments of mass education and propaganda — schools, churches, newspapers, cinemas, radio, etc. Only those ideas and concepts that do not militate against the present order of things are reproduced on any wide scale. In effect there is an even narrower choice of mental diet than that dictated by the requirements of Capitalism as a world system. Periodically the citizens of each nation are inculcated with the ideas needed to ensure their support for the prosecution of a particular war, though not for war in general

The ideas and edicts which make up the moral code (in the widest sense) of the present system must be acceptable to or at least not opposed by, members of both capitalist and working class. In the case of the former, rights connected with property ownership are to be upheld and of the latter their continued acceptance of wage-slavery is required. Although the moral code is interpreted in a different way in each of these rôles, it necessarily has certain feature which are common to both. For example, most workers offer as much resistance to the idea of a world without money as capitalists do, and they have the satisfaction of knowing that this is a “common sense,” i.e. mass produced, attitude. Their explanation of this similarity of outlook is that the basic difference between capitalist and worker is not primarily a political one, but one of relationship to property. An employer stands in relation to his employee as owner of means of production to non-owner and the relationship is accepted, willingly or not, by both.

In order to retain the acquiescence of workers as a whole in this arrangement the capitalist class, through all the media of mass influence, diverts their attention from abolishing it by allowing and often encouraging them to reform it The level of political understanding is prevented from rising by the dominance of the so-called "practical” programmes which involve the continuation of the property system and the consequent need to preserve it in modified or unchanged form.

Thus Capitalism continues because the possessing class uses its control of the means of mass influence to persuade the producing class that no other order of things is possible. It is the task of socialists to point out that there is an alternative which may be put into effect just as soon as the need for it is commonly understood. To hold no opinion about how society is and could be organized is not neutrality but assent to its present form, Capitalism. It is not logical for workers who are capable of achieving Socialism to refuse to work for it because it appears to be out of the question as far as the immediate future is concerned. Once the position is taken up that Socialism is the only solution to our common problems then all political effort should be directed towards bringing the day of its establishment nearer. This involves the rejection of all the ideas and concepts that sustain Capitalism and the adoption of a revolutionary outlook towards all its institutions.

To many workers it may seem a tall order to refuse to swallow the mental dope which is offered on every hand to give the ugly present a roseate hue. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that the routine work connected with capitalist propaganda is mainly carried on by members of the working class themselves, either as their paid job or, in its less obvious forms, as conventional conversation. Unfortunately most minds tend to act only as receivers of ideas, which they repeat to others, and the most powerful transmitters are capitalist controlled. However, once it is realized that their object is to keep the property basis of present society intact then there is a strong incentive to challenge every idea that seeks, no matter how indirectly to prolong it.

Stan Parker

Letter: Marxism and pigeons (2025)

 

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

Marxism and pigeons

I always enjoy grabbing the Socialist Standard from the local radical bookshop, and read with interest the October Life and Times piece, ‘Chasing pigeons in the park’. Here stalwart HKM finds himself in a fractious encounter with a working class mother, and unsurprisingly, comes off worse for it. I would never advise anyone, Marxist or otherwise, to intervene in the parenting of a stranger’s child. It smacks of condescension, and I’m hardly shocked that she went straight for the jugular.

That aside, while I appreciate the article’s humane spirit and its attempt to connect everyday behaviour to the wider social order, I think it falls into certain traps that weaken the socialist case.

As an anecdote and moral exhortation, one small incident, a child chasing a pigeon, is made to carry the burden of a sweeping claim about capitalist society. What’s needed instead is structural analysis, grounded in class relations and historical development. Otherwise the critique risks idealism, as if cruelty will simply vanish once capitalism is abolished, and empathy will bloom automatically.

The piece also overlooks the way ideology and institutions actively reproduce capitalist values. Capitalism doesn’t just ‘promote thoughtlessness,’ it systematically manufactures individualism, competition, and alienation through schools, media, and the daily grind of wage labour. Those habits of thought won’t dissolve on day one of socialism, they will need to be challenged through conscious struggle, education, and organisation.

Under capitalism, ‘competition,’ ‘self-interest,’ ‘private property,’ and even what counts as ‘good parenting’ or ‘normal behaviour’ are all suffused with hegemonic ideas.

Finally, the article sidesteps the harder question of how socialism itself will handle conflict, scarcity, or antisocial behaviour. To imply that a socialist world will be one of effortless harmony is to underplay the ongoing, practical work of building and sustaining solidarity in the face of real contradictions.

In short, the piece has a sound moral impulse, but its reliance on anecdote and lack of class analysis blunt its usefulness as a Marxist critique.

Marx himself could well have been a pigeon fancier, though most likely encapsulated in pastry and well baked in a pie. While I can’t cite a specific reference for that, it is at least recorded that he did enjoy a pork and matzah sandwich when he could.

A.T.

Between the Lines: A very silly season (1986)

The Between the Lines Column from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

A very silly season

The MPs' summer holiday — a modest break of ten weeks or so — is known by the media hacks as "the silly season". Without leaders to observe and interview the TV reporters are traditionally short of "news" to feed the working class. So, when a giraffe gets its neck stuck in the railings in Chessington Zoo or a tramp is found dead with a 1911 copy of The Tatler stuffed down his pants (the best place for it) it is several hundred times more likely to be "news" when the MPs are on holiday than when momentous things are happening in parliament — like when a Welsh Nationalist broke the arm off the Speaker's Chair.

Silliest of the silly TV "news' stories of the summer of '86, far outclassing even the policeman from Shropshire who handcuffed his wife and couldn't find the key to unlock her, or the expert in memory improvement who forgot to turn up for the Wogan show, was the case of the elderly parasite and the fish bone. It was on a Saturday in late August when the news broke: a silly ITN newsreader with a very serious facial expression announced to the nation that "Her Majesty, the Queen Mother has been taken by helicopter from her castle in Ayrshire to a hospital in Aberdeen after complaining of discomfort in the throat caused by what could be a fish bone eaten last night". The bulletins (and they went on throughout the evening and all the next day) went from bad to worse. On were brought throat specialists and fish specialists and bone specialists. Then we were shown a film of that awful, awful occasion only four years ago when the same woman had another fish bone stuck down her gob and had to stay in hospital overnight. It was excruciatingly silly TV, even for the silly season.

Not long after — or was it before? one loses touch the ITN Silly Squad was despatched to film Mrs Thatcher going in and coming out of a hospital, there to have an operation to stop her fingers from pointing in the wrong direction. Oh, where would we be without live TV coverage to keep us so closely informed about such events? While viewers were given minute by minute coverage of the case of the recalcitrant fish bone, no TV coverage was given to a speech delivered by economist, Professor Alan Williams (Guardian, 2 September) in which he stated that kidney patients in need of expensive dialysis treatment should be denied it because hip replacement operations are cheaper to perform and worthier of the money spent by the NHS. "We should not shrink from following where the logic of that approach leads us that hospital dialysis should be restrained and total hip replacement expanded." What sort of social system is it that can allow workers in urgent need of dialysis treatment to suffer and perhaps die while it can glory in the news that when its arch-parasites have a bone in the throat or a pain in the little finger no treatment is too good, no helicopter fast enough, to satisfy their needs. If it was a fiction it would be silly, but as social reality it is sick.

The triumph of scientific analysis

For four weeks Channel Four ran a series (Wednesdays. 8.30pm) entitled The Triumph of Capitalism. Each week a chosen expert (who does the choosing? who does the excluding?) was given thirty full minutes to sit in front of the camera and examine the success or otherwise of the capitalist system. Three out of the four chosen experts were firmly pro-capitalism. This is what is known as balance. Had the three supporters of capitalism presented serious defences of the system as it is. we could have devoted space to examining their talks. In fact, the three defenders of capitalism neither understood the economic laws of the profit system nor attempted to explain how it could ever function without the anarchy and social devastation which it so evidently causes. Perhaps we should have expected nothing more.

The fourth programme in the series (Wednesday. 3 September) was presented by Professor Gerry Cohen, an Oxford Professor of Philosophy whose book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A defence would be of interest to readers. Rarely, if ever, has the case against the capitalist system been presented in so eloquent and logical a manner on British TV. Cohen, through a process of rigorous historical and logical criticism, exposed the system as one of unearned minority privilege and legalised robbery. He pointed out that capitalism, far from setting out to satisfy needs, seeks above all to satisfy profit accumulation and this occurs at the expense of needs. Gerry Cohen did not go on to propose a socialist alternative (fortunately, considering a previous effort by him to do this on a TV discussion programme), but he did deny the alleged inevitability of capitalism and the oft-asserted impossibility of revolutionary social change. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that as far as his analysis went, and with the exception of minor theoretical points (for some reason he began by referring to workers selling their labour and only later used the Marxist term, labour power). Cohen's presentation could have been given by a member of The Socialist Party. Workers could do with more TV education like this — it compensates for the fish bones.

Steve Coleman

Blogger's Note:

A number of Professor Gerry Cohen's books were reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard. To read the reviews, click on the dates below.:

• Aug 1979: Karl Marx’s Theory of History by G. A. Cohen
• Feb 2002: If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? By G. A. Cohen
• Dec 2009: Why not socialism? By G. A. Cohen
• Jun 2011: On The Currency Of Egalitarian Justice. By G.A. Cohen

The capitalist creed. (1916)

From the August 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

Business is power, poetry, pleasure, life—all in one. Business feeds people, clothes them, houses them ; provides their necessities, their amusements, their luxuries. Business has called into being the steamship, the express train, the motor-car ; the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. Business bridges rivers, tunnels through mountains, cuts canals through continent. 

Business is the Atlas of the World. 

There’s no higher profession than business on the big scale. All the other professions live on crumbs from the business man’s table. Law—that’s the safeguarding of business and property at home. The Army—that’s fighting for it abroad. Medicine—that’s making people fit for their job. Politics—that’s altering laws to meet the changing requirements of business.

—”The modern Chesterfield,” Max Rittenberg.

This old money game (2025)

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In December, 2022 a music video entitled Hi Ren appeared on YouTube. The name of the singer-songwriter-guitarist was Ren. The video was over nine minutes long, virtually an epic by music industry standards. It was a live recording made on a shoestring budget. The song vividly dramatised the singer’s mental health issues and state of inner conflict, conditions which many can relate to. Within two months Hi Ren had gone viral, gathering nearly seven million views and coming to the attention of a host of online music reactors – people who post videos of themselves reacting to other people’s music. Few of those reacting to Hi Ren for the first time had ever heard of its creator, and many were clearly unprepared for what they were to witness.

Intrigued and eager for more, they began reacting to Ren’s extensive back catalogue of online music videos, and to new songs that he continued to drop over the following months. It soon became clear to everyone that here was a musician of exceptional skill and versatility. Ren was an accomplished singer, rapper, guitarist, songwriter and keyboard player. He was also a superb storyteller, performer and producer of his own music videos. His songs were never predictable. They broke convention and they defied genre. Musicians, film makers, videographers, and music lovers enthused online about the way he was breaking open the moulds into which commercial interests had been pouring popular music in recent years.

Dirty-grey average

Capitalism is often praised for innovation and choice, yet the logic of its drive to maximise profit induces companies to turn out products with the widest possible appeal, thereby reducing them to a dirty-grey average. In the popular music industry this tendency to sameness has deepened in recent years thanks to the availability of sophisticated data-analysis tools. Recording companies are now increasingly able to identify and predict the kind of hooks and singing styles that make hit songs. Having once established a winning formula, they mobilise teams of in-house songwriters to churn out pattern-book songs which big-name singers and musicians are then contracted to record and convert into cash. New post-production technology is used to ‘optimise’ the product by electronically removing glitches and correcting imperfections in studio performances. It is now possible electronically to adjust a wobbly vocal line, repair an off-key note, or smooth out an uneven beat. The result is another glossily perfect musical product tumbling off the production line. Commercial radio stations help to magnify this tendency to sameness by demanding songs which fit neatly into their time slots, deal with the right kind of easy-going and uncontroversial themes, and have catchy ‘hooks’ designed to snag listeners.

The music industry as a whole is notoriously ruthless and litigious. Capitalism’s property system makes it prone to scams and money grubbing. Often this involves the murky legal world of copyright. Ren appears recently to have himself fallen foul of just such a scam. Typically, he has responded to it by speaking openly online and making a music video about it. Such openness is unusual and has attracted support from other musicians who have suffered in the same way. Uploaded music videos are themselves often targets for online scammers. In one such fraud, recently exposed, scammers have been using a green screen to remove video images of original artists from videos of Britain’s Got Talent and similar TV shows, and then insert video images of themselves lip synching to the vocals. By uploading the manipulated videos onto their own platforms and attracting an audience they are able to obtain money from the advertising revenue generated.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Yet every so often a creative artist comes along who is able to communicate with music of such originality and directness that they can bypass the big companies and attract their own audience. Ten months after Hi Ren went viral, Ren dropped a self-produced album of his own music called Sick Boi. Without corporate backing, with almost no radio exposure, and without the publicity of live shows, the album floated serenely up the British top 40 chart to take the number one position. Ren had arrived – much to his own apparent surprise.

Who is Ren?

So, who is this man? Ren is the professional name of Ren Eryn Gill, an open, generous and appealingly boyish musician, now aged 34, hailing from a remote Welsh village on the Isle of Anglesey. His personal story is studded with drama and tragedy. Signed up to Sony Records at the age of 19, he was forced to abandon the recording of his first album by the onset of severe ill health. He returned home to Anglesey where he became bed-ridden and suffered excruciating pain for eight years. He developed auto-immune disease and experienced a stress-induced psychotic breakdown. During this time, his best friend committed suicide on the Menai Bridge. His illness was repeatedly misdiagnosed until, after years of useless therapy and medication, a private physician in Brussels identified his condition as Lyme disease. Treatment for the disease has now partially restored his health, but having harboured the infection for so long, it is likely that his body will never fully recover.

Convinced that his chance of a major career in music was over, Ren went back to busking on the streets of Brighton, and producing low (or zero) budget videos of his own music. These rapidly gathered a following of loyal fans. And then, in 2022, he dropped Hi Ren and his world exploded. He now has almost 2.2 million YouTube subscribers and Hi Ren has 56 million views worldwide. Those numbers continue to climb.

Ren has taken the experience of his personal tragedy and his struggle to fulfil himself as a creative musician and universalised it into something highly relatable. In his own words, ‘I owe much of my success to the most destructive force in my life, which has been the turbulence of my physical and mental illness’. His music addresses difficult social issues such as mental health, suicide, and the cycle of child abuse. It communicates with raw emotion enhanced by his habit of recording his songs live, in a single take, and with minimal post-production work, a procedure almost unheard of today. Minor glitches in performance are left unedited. This side of his art has touched people of all ages. Comment sections of his online videos are flooded with accounts of how listening to his music has given new hope and even saved lives. Yet, not all of his music deals with difficult subjects. He has a strong sense of humour coupled with an apparent lack of inhibition. His songs vary from the cheeky to the deeply serious. And interwoven into many of them is yet another theme: the nature of capitalist violence and our own complicity in maintaining the system. A trilogy of music videos entitled Money Game, Parts 1, 2 and 3, tackles this theme head on.

Portrait of capitalism

Ren’s music and story-telling skills find particularly powerful expression in Money Game 3, which focuses on the life and career of ‘Jimmy’, who is driven to win his father’s approval by seeking success in business. By his late teens he is already amassing capital. On his way up the financial ladder, he discovers the potency of the lie and the capacity of capitalism’s money game to translate wealth into political power. His business dealings become increasingly risky and illegal. When his father dies of a heart attack his obsessive search for wealth and power become both socially and personally destructive. As the lyrics of Money Game 3 put it, ‘he followed the code in the land of the free: put your hand in the cookie jar and take more than you need’. Jimmy eventually overreaches, is injured in a shootout between drug cartels, and becomes confined to a wheelchair. Too late, he comes face to face with the consequences of his actions and values.

Ren’s exceptional story-telling ability has left a huge impression on his audience. As Money Game 3 tells us, Jimmy is an ‘exaggerated version’ of you and me. He is an Everyman, both complicit with, and a victim of, the system. One reactor responding to Ren’s message nailed it: ‘When you talk to people individually, it seems like everybody gets it, but then we kinda go right back to that lifestyle, because that’s just the way that the world works. It sucks, but it only works that way because of us.’ (Duane Reacts). We are all indoctrinated into the capitalist system and its ideologies from an early age through our parents, through an organised system of schooling which denies children control over their lives, and through the ideologically driven media. The message drummed into Jimmy’s head is that financial success is the only meaningful kind.

Money Game 3 is a punch in the guts, a dramatic piece of musical theatre which won Ren and his friend/videographer, Samuel Perry-Flavey, an award for the best Independent European music video of 2024. Together, the three Money Game videos deal with the violence arising from the profit system, and as well as its impact on attitudes to immigration. They show how we uncritically adopt and reproduce the values promoted by capitalism. It is a fact of life that we can no more stand outside our own society than we can stand outside our own skin, and yet we are not robots: we can step back, reflect on our experience and identify where it clashes with the conventional values and practices of our world. Socialism is, in part, a process of learning to overcome our indoctrination.

The three Money Game videos paint a picture of our world that many recognise. Recognition, however, is insufficient to provide a secure insight into how the system works or how it can be addressed. Ren describes himself as an anti-capitalist, someone who rejects a society that puts profits above people. He has all but denied that he is a socialist. Nevertheless, as socialists we can recognise the portrait of capitalism that he gives us. We can unpack the clues in his work to show that the only way to reject ‘profit over people’ is to reject profit and the money game altogether.

Now that Ren’s star is rising will he continue to resist the blandishments of the music industry or sign up with a record label? If he signs up, he will have greater resources to put into the music he is so passionate about making, but unless he becomes such a highly bankable commodity that he is capable of dictating his own terms it would almost certainly mean a loss of creative freedom. The money game would soon consume him.

At the moment, it looks like he is strongly resisting. True to character, though, he has spoken openly about his own inner conflicts on the matter. We can empathise. These are the inner conflicts and compromises familiar to anyone caught in the contradiction of advocating for a world beyond the destructiveness and repression of the capitalist system, but who, for now, has to live and survive within it. While capitalism persists, however, a socialist perspective helps us to focus on the goal of achieving a world which is more social, more humane and more satisfying than the one we have at present.

Hud.

America . . . Land of the Free (1979)

From the Fall 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

America is the land of the free. Or is it? They certainly taught you at school that you were a free citizen living in a free country. The media screams out the glorious message to you every day: “You are free — now go to work.” Read the American Declaration of Independence; you can’t be freer than that . . . can you?

The definition of freedom adopted by a society determines the degree to which it imagine itself to be free. The Greeks called their society a free one, but it was based upon slavery. Since the Sixteenth Century in Europe individualism has reigned supreme. Liberty, in accordance with this definition, means the liberty of the individual: if you’re a worker you demand the liberty to work; if you’re a landlord you demand the liberty to take rent; if you’re a manufacturer you demand the liberty to make profits. Such is the freedom of individualism.

But what if your freedom is my slavery, if your profit is my unpaid labour, if your luxury is my poverty? Is that freedom Yes, it is the freedom of the individual.

The individualist conception of freedom is a class based one. It works well as long as there are workers willing to pay the price for the liberty of the minority. The working class need a new conception of freedom, a social expression of freedom. This will be in the interest of not just the lucky few, but the entire population of society. The social expression of freedom is socialism. Socialists argue that freedom is not just an abstract notion providing a defence for oppression, but a political necessity arising out of class antagonisms which are caused by property society. The socialist view of freedom is not moral — for morality tends to be simply the defence of established social relations — but practical. We do not say that freedom is desirable, but that it will be inevitable if workers are to bring to an end the oppression which is the product of class society.

Capitalist ideology faces a profound dilemma. Its liberal philosophical origins incline it towards conceptions of liberty and democracy, but its structure causes the system to act against the freedom of the vast majority, the working class. The liberal capitalist’s utopia is the liberal State described by Mill and proposed by the Declaration of Independence, but in practice the State serves as the oppressor of the working class. This must be so for property to be defended and profits to be made. In America and Western Europe the workers have won the right to participate in their own oppression by their possession of the vote. This is a valuable weapon which could be used to win control of the State machine and abolish capitalism. But workers Should be under no liberal illusions: this limited freedom is ever-precarious while the owning class have the upper hand. Legal expressions of freedom are useful, as those who lack them know, but they are no substitute for social freedom itself.

Socialists do not stand for individual freedom. The “right” of the capitalist to exploit the workers is not in our interest and so we oppose it. We will not support campaigns for the “right” of parasites to send their children to better schools than the rest or the “right” of the indolent class to kill animals for entertainment. We want social freedom where there will be no classes, no government, no laws, no social discrimination on grounds of age, race or sex, and free access to all wealth.

Such social freedom implies democratic decision-making. That will not mean simply the act of mindlessly voting for a leader once every few years. It will mean the informed, intelligent, uncoerced organisation of social affairs in which the minority viewpoint will be given the same freedom of expression as that of the majority.

Under capitalism they tell people that they are free and it is because the majority are unfree that they believe it. Let there be no confusion in the minds of the working class about the extent of their freedom.

Ask yourself this simple question: if you refused to sell your mental or physical energies on the labour market for one month how much food would your free society give you to eat? The answer is that under capitalism you can starve to death for all your mythical freedom.

Steve Coleman

Life & Times: To park or not to park? (2024)

The Life and Times column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The street I live on has reserved parking for residents. This should mean there’s a place for me to park my car outside or near my house. Until relatively recently, that was always the case. But lately things have changed and now it can be difficult for me to find a place anywhere on the street meaning that sometimes I have to drive around nearby streets looking for (and not always finding) a space not reserved for residents. What’s going on?

Well, first of all there’s an increasing number of families in the area with more than just one car and then more and more students from the local University living in the area are turning up in cars. In the past they would get booked by wardens for parking outside their rented accommodation, but now they’ve twigged that, if they get their logbook changed to their student address, they’re entitled to a parking permit.

Cars, cars, cars

But over and above all this there’s simply an ever-increasing number of vehicles on the road. That’s a function both of the fact that more and more people find them a convenient way to get from one place to the other and also that they’re being used to transport the increasing number of goods of all description that people are ordering online. How long can this continue?

How many more vehicles can roads, both local and long distance, take before log jams of vehicles become even more frequent than they are already and, as a matter of course, the number of vehicles looking to park exceeds the number of places available. Can anything be done about it? The answer to this question has to be not very much. There have been some attempts by government and other authorities to cope, such as additional motorway lanes or charges for entering certain areas. But measures like these, apart from being limited in scope, often give rise to further problems, for example the obvious danger to road users caused by the removal of hard shoulders to accommodate extra motorway lanes.

I know the objection will be raised that the writer of this article, as a self-confessed car owner, is part of the problem. Which up to a point I accept, but I also know I’d be happier with travel arrangements that didn’t push me to jump into the car to get from A to B but instead provided an easy communal means of transport – something that only exists to a small and erratic extent in the production for profit system we live under.

Growth, growth, growth

In fact, when looked at in the context of how things work in general, the car situation can be seen as something of an emblem of capitalist production as a whole, that is the system’s imperative to produce ever increasing numbers and kinds of goods with a view to profit regardless of social advisability or longer-term consequences. In the recent general election, a watchword of all the major parties was ‘growth’, something always projected as desirable since it evokes an increase in wealth or prosperity that will somehow make people better off or happier. At bottom of course that tends not to happen, since ‘growth’ has no power to overcome or even tame all the other negative factors arising from the unpredictability of the system we live under (eg, inflation, job reorganisation, unemployment, recession, war).

Though, in their everyday lives, most people illustrate in countless ways by their actions and attitudes that they’d rather cooperate with others than compete against them, the pervading dog-eat-dog ethic that informs the way the capitalist system works and dictates the drive for ‘growth’ forces producers to compete against one another to get their products on the market and sold to buyers – very often regardless of any intrinsic necessity.

In the UK, for example, there are more than enough houses and other forms of accommodation to satisfy everyone’s need for shelter and decent accommodation, yet many people go homeless or poorly accommodated while properties are left empty and more houses continue to be built. And, to return to transport, there are large masses of cars that are little used by their owners or lie on garage forecourts, while more and more are produced each year adding, as this article began by saying, to the problem of finding places to park them.

Control?

How can all this be brought under control? Quite simply it can’t – at least not under the buying and selling imperative of capitalism, whose only urge is to continue to produce more so that profit can continue to be made by that tiny minority of people who own the means to produce – we would call them the capitalist class. Or rather, it all could be brought under control, but only, if we, the vast majority forced to sell our energies for a wage or salary to an employer, were to opt via democratic political action to establish a different kind of society – one of voluntary cooperation, of production for use not profit, and of free access to all goods and services based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. Such a society would have and would need – I venture to speculate – far fewer cars than the present one. Nor would there be a shortage of places to park them.

Howard Moss

In Defence of Property. (1907)

Book Review from the March 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Socialism: Its Fallacies and Dangers.” A collection of papers edited by Frederick Millar. Published by Watts & Co. for the “Liberty and Property Defence League.”

“Let us jealously watch the encroachments of the State, and never suffer it to become more than a watchdog.” Such appears to be the political doctrine of the band of belated individualists who are responsible for this book, for they include and condemn under the name of Socialism practically all State activity other than that of the mere policeman. Since, however, the propertied class has in its own interests been compelled to add to the State many other functions than that of the “watch-dog,” it is hardly necessary to consider the question at issue as being individualism versus collectivism at all, but rather as being—the class which lives by labour versus the class which lives by ownership, and whether those who produce should not own and control the product.

To those who seek a clear and useful criticism of Socialist principles the book under review will be disappointing. The facts of industrial evolution are not appreciated. The significance of the huge company and combine, where great and complicated branches of industry are run by hireling workers for absentee shareholders, is not taken into account. Nor is it recognised that industry is developing to the point at which the workers’ choice lies only between the oppressive collectivism of the trust or capitalist State for the profit of a few, and the collectivism of democracy for the benefit of all united in producing. The writers place themselves athwart the economic trend, and though as modern Mrs. Partingtons they may be excellent at a slop or a puddle, yet, trundle their mops as they will, they can hardly succeed in checking the rising Atlantic of economic development.

That there are misrepresentations is to be expected from such a source. Thus on page 17 we meet our old and hoary friend, “Sharing Out,” Socialism being referred to as the “confiscation and division of the national income.” It is also stated that Socialists “maintain that if a man lives in the house of another man, it is an extortion to ask him to pay a rent.” But the scientific Socialist knows that, apart from what is called economic rent, house rent is but the price of a commodity that, like every other commodity, tends to exchange at its value, which already includes its proportion of unpaid labour. The Socialist, therefore, holds that the robbery of the worker really takes place in the factory, not on the market.

Those who go into the highways and byways facing the opposition and abuse of the ignorant and the interested, and who, in their championship of the workers against oppression and robbery, brave the malice and persecution of the defenders of property, are told on page 24 that “The root of Socialism is cowardice. Here is the real source of the whole movement. It is the whine and the dream of the weaklings’ base fear of rivalry, of competition. It is the duty of real men to circumvent and defeat, by war if necessary, by invasion if necessary, by conquest if necessary, by extermination if necessary, the despicable effeminacy of creatures unworthy of the name of men, because they fear to carry on the competitive struggle in which the true life of manhood consists. The Socialist movement is popular because it appeals to these numerous creatures ; panders to their baseness ; promises them what they would be ashamed to desire or seek if they were men.”

Socialism and the Family.

Next comes the war-cry of the pro-property hypocrite,—”Socialism means the abolition of family life.” On this subject the defenders of that class whose heroes fill the divorce courts and whose morals are said to be “of the poultry yard,” have only vague innuendo and misrepresentation to offer. But what are the simple facts ? The family life of the workers is being destroyed by capitalism through the man, wife and child being forced into the factory to earn the daily bread; and where the home life remains it too often spells brutalising drudgery and ill-temper, owing to the poverty of the wage earner and the great waste of labour entailed by the individual household. The tremendous saving in drudgery that the co-operative household under Socialism will allow, the improvement in comfort, health, and happiness that it will bring, leave no room for doubt regarding the future of the home, while should any prefer the greater labour and discomfort of the old style, they would certainly be allowed to please themselves.

But what of the relations of men and women ? The Socialist knows that the methods of obtaining the material living, and the social order essential thereto, form the foundations of the moral and intellectual life of the time; and that with the changing economic foundation, not only must the relations of individuals to each other change, but their ideas also. The history of family life affords a striking example of this. As Prof. Jenks points out, permanent marriage had its origin in patriarchal society, and was due to no improvement in morality, but to the necessities of the pastoral pursuits of the man, and to his desire to secure for himself exclusively the labour of the woman and her offspring. The wife was bought or captured, and the children were valuable articles of merchandise. The very word “family” is derived from an old Italian word, famel, meaning a slave.

From its origin in the institution of property the marriage relationship has reflected the changing needs of property. Children are no longer chattels or assets in the old sense ; they are “encumbrances,” and paterfamilias’ former power of life and death over his household is now restricted to very meagre dimensions. The present marriage contract expresses the needs of the economic dependence of women and children on the man, and becomes an instrument for the control and transmission of property. Mutual affection is quite subordinated to questions of property and income, with the consequent outcrop of hypocrisy, adultery, and unhappiness. While on the one hand the number of men who do not marry is made greater by the insecurity of their lot, on the other hand the number of women who sell themselves on the streets is increased by the inability of many to obtain otherwise even the bare necessaries of life.

But when socialisation ends the reign of capitalist property and insecurity, when woman has economic equality with man, and the fear for the children’s future is ended by communal life, then the relationship between the sexes ceases to be a property one and becomes human ; and who can doubt that modern forms must alter with such change of circumstances, and that the matrimonial market and property contract, with the buying and selling of cohabitation for title and income, must, together with the corollaries of prostitution and domestic misery, become mere memories of a dark past. Who can doubt that the relations between man and woman, when freed of the demoralising influence of economic inequality and vicious social surroundings, will be healthier and purer than ever before being based no longer on a property transaction or economic compulsion, but upon mutual affection. Yet we are told, among much other nonsense on page 29 of the book under review, that under Socialism “the union of men and women would be an affair of the State, not of mutual regard” !

The Intellectual Few.

On page 54 the reader is told, “the more the origin of wealth is enquired into, the more clearly will the truth appear that wealth is caused by the intelligence of the few, as distinguished from the labour of the many.” Now even if this were so it would not bear the inference that the propertied class are the intellectual few reaping the reward of their intellectual labour, for the wealth of the few is accumulated from the purchase and exploitation of both “manual” and “intellectual” workers. But what is the truth regarding the wonderful inventions and improvements which have occurred in industrial processes ? Have a series of supermen arisen to produce at each stroke a great wage-saving improvement ? Herbert Spencer himself has exploded the “great man” theory, and has shown that the great man is the product of his age, whilst the history of industry shows that nearly all improvements have been the result of an accumulation of small inventions which up to a certain point were ignored or despised, in spite of their possibilities, because they were not immediately cheaper to work than the older methods. But a last slight improvement, based upon and supplementing the labour of those who had gone before, rendered the new process more profitable than the former methods, and rapidly the features of that industry became transformed. In 1857, Hodge, before a Commission said : “Present spinning machinery is supposed to be a compound of about 800 inventions. The present carding machinery is a compound of about 60 patents.”

And those who wrought these improvements, were they rewarded ? And were they members of our amazingly intellectual ruling class ? They were, indeed, rawly rewarded, while it is almost entirely from men of the working class that the leading inventions have come. J. Burnley, in “The Story of British Trade and Industry,” says, “It is a notable fact that the leading inventors of the latter half of the eighteenth century were of the artizan class—humble workers who, in their cottages and little improvised workshops, quietly worked out the mechanical problems which achieved so much for the world, if not for themselves.”

John Kay, after inventing the fly shuttle, died a pauper at the end of a few years of ineffectual struggle. Wyatt, who after three years of close effort produced a machine which “spun the first thread of cotton ever produced without the intervention of human fingers,” was poor, and allied himself with Lewis Paul, of Birmingham, who promised to finance the invention. Wyatt, however, never benefited by it, for nothing came of the idea until Arkwright revised it at a later date. Another poor inventor, Crompton, set himself to combine the spinning jenny and the water frame. It took him five years of secret experiment, but he eventually succeeded and for a while quietly used his improvement in his own work. Crompton, however, was asked how he managed to spin such fine yarn ; he then let the manufacturers into the secret on their subscribing about £50. The firm of which Sir Robert Peel, the grandfather of the statesman, was principal, were the first to make big profits out of the invention, making their machines after Crompton’s model. Soon millions of the spindles were working, but Crompton died a few years later in extreme poverty. Such is, indeed, the usual answer of capitalist practice to capitalist theory. The brains of the workers are picked, and their bodily strength exhausted, in order to increase the wealth of those who own the means of living.

The whole argument that “wealth is due to the intelligence of the few” is, in reality, nonsensical. There is no intellectual labour without some degree of manual labour, and no manual labour, however mechanical, that does not imply intellectual labour also. The marketable wealth of the world is not produced otherwise than by labour, intellectual and manual; yet the fact remains that it is a non-producing class who, by their ownership of the means whereby wealth is created, and by their control of political power, are enabled to compel the people to carry on production for them, and to hand over to them all the enormous surplus that remains when the bare necessities of the producers have been grudgingly provided for.

And it is in defence of the title of this owning class to the wealth created by others, that the book under review is published. Well does the League that is responsible for the book deserve to be called, as it is by many working men, the Liberty to Rob Defence League.

F. C.Watts

Blogger's Note:

There isn't a lot of information about Frederick Millar on the net, but he does get a few mentions in Edward Bristow's 1975 article, 'The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism', which was published in The Historical Journal.