Tiny Tips (2025)

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

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

(CounterPunch)

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

(Dissident Voice)

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

(Vietnam Net)

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

(The Media Line)

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

(Counterfire)

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

(CounterPunch)

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

(Dominican Today)

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

(Jacobin)

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

Tiny Tips (2025)

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

The latest Oxfam report which was released at 4th UN Financing for Development meet in Seville, Spain, shows that since 2015 the top 1% people in the world have amassed US$ 33.9 trillion in new wealth which is enough to end annual poverty 22 times over. 

(Scoop Independent News)

In some cases, health professionals perform FGM [Female Genital Mutilation] secretly in exchange for payment, turning the practice into a commercial enterprise, 

(People Daily)

The island is currently facing its worst economic crisis since the 1959 revolution. Long and daily power cuts, scarce internet connection, food and medicine shortages, and high prices are the realities of present-day Cuba. Some staple items like beans are nowhere to be found; rice production has declined and much is now imported. Sugar, too, has become an import in Cuba, which, until recently, was the leading sugar exporter in the world. People cannot make ends meet with their meager incomes — a doctor’s monthly salary is approximately $50. Even by conservative World Bank estimates, 72 percent of all Cubans live below the poverty line. Beggars seem to be everywhere, with the African community descendant from slavery being the most economically victimized. 

(Consortium News)

The entire political and intellectual machinery of the French ruling class is now moving in this direction. That includes the miserable little left, led by the Socialist Party, who bark at us from morning to night. They don’t realize that they’re participating in a broader establishment strategy: acting as the left-wing auxiliary of the right. They live in a dreamworld, wanting France to be like Germany, with a grand coalition of the centre: Social Democrats who are indistinguishable from liberals, Greens who are always clamouring for war. These people are doing the work of dividing us every day while pretending to be for unity.

(Portside)

One recent survey discovered that 70 percent of Americans are the most financially stressed that they have ever been in their entire lives. That figure alone tells us that we have a major economic crisis on our hands. The cost of living has been rising much faster than paychecks have been, and most of the country is just barely scraping by from month to month. Anyone that attempts to deny this is simply not living in reality. 

(Zero Hedge)

Donald Trump styled himself as a populist, ‘anti-establishment’ president. But look at what he has actually done in office, and you see he’s a status-quo politician with nothing to offer working Americans.

(Jacobin)

Will voters finally stop both blaming politicians for their troubles and depending on them to end them? Will voters—and non-voters—transform themselves into people who act for themselves, in their own interests, instead of allowing others to act for them? That would be what social change looks like. The survival of the human race may well depend upon it. 

(The Brooklyn Rail)

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

Material World: Has Walmart laid the foundations for socialism? (2025)

The Material World column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In their 2019 book The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argued that, contrary to appearances, modern capitalism is already succumbing to a process of central planning in such varied forms as large-scale businesses, the financial system and the welfare state. This could even imply that the growing dominance of large corporations in the economy, internally organised on the basis of a priori non-market allocation, might somehow herald the decline and, perhaps even, eventual eclipse of capitalism.

In an article in the Jacobin entitled ‘Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work’ they wistfully maintained:

‘Mega-companies like Amazon and Walmart are already using large-scale central planning. We can wield that tool for good. Socialists need to renew our embrace of democratic planning and fight for a real alternative to capitalism’.

And that:

‘We need to use our vast productive resources to better ends – and through politics we can do just that. And as technology allows us to move to a discussion of what sort of planning, instead of whether planning, true democratic control of planning both at the enterprise and government level must be the non-negotiable foundation of our vision’ (tinyurl.com/345jbycw).

However, if a planned economy ‘can actually work’ on their terms, then it would be an economy that has nothing really to do with a post-capitalist society in any meaningful sense of the term.

Essentially, what they advocate is just a sort of democratised version of corporate capitalism. ‘Governments’ and ‘enterprises’ will continue to exist, and business will continue to operate as normal, churning out commodities for sale on a market.

The difference with today is that internally such business will become subject to ‘democratic control’. What enables this is the replacement in such businesses of internal markets by planning – something that Phillips and Rozworski said had already happened to a large extent:

‘Regardless, Walmart engages in large-scale planning without the direct intermediation of markets at scales to make Hayek bristle. Internally, like nearly all firms large and small, it is a dictatorial planned economy: managers tell workers what to do, departments realize goals from on high, and goods flow by fiat. Afloat in the market, Walmart is at once an “island of conscious power,” as Keynes’s collaborator D. H. Robertson put it, and an “island of tyranny,” as the social theorist Noam Chomsky rephrased it.’

According to them, the fact that a business like Walmart, the world´s largest company, operates without an internal market is precisely what makes it relatively more efficient than businesses with an internal market.

Walmart is, of course, a prime example of a large corporation. Its revenue in 2018 was $500 billion – exceeding that of the Soviet Union in 1970 (adjusted for inflation). As an organisation, it makes full use of sophisticated computer systems and comprehensive record keeping, to integrate and manage every aspect of production and distribution amongst its numerous outlets. Using big data analytics, it tracks and targets individual consumers – 145 million in the US alone – identifying patterns of consumer spending and anticipating future trends on the basis of past evidence.

These kinds of developments have been interpreted by commentators like Philips and Rozworski as clear proof that large-scale centralised planning is eminently practicable, contrary to the claims of Mises and Hayek. However, we should be wary of the all too facile way in which these commentators sometimes go about interpreting the evidence. Walmart’s is not an example of central planning in the sense of society-wide planning – obviously. Crucially, as just mentioned, it employs the principle of feedback and of course what Walmart is responding to is the market demand for its products. To its very core, Walmart is a market-based capitalist institution.

Whether a mega-corporation such as Walmart should be held up on purely technical grounds as some kind of template upon which a realisable alternative to capitalism can be built, albeit suitably reconfigured along democratic lines, is highly questionable for many other reasons too. After all, Walmart, like every other such corporation, is essentially a commercial or market-oriented entity and to draw attention to its enormous size and its ability to allocate inputs internally without reference to market principles is, in a sense, a red herring. What such thinking seems to imply is that a post-capitalist alternative will continue to feature something akin to ‘corporations’ – entities legally distinguishable from each other – and under whose aegis production will supposedly be ‘democratically organised’ unlike in capitalism.

This is missing the point completely. There won’t be, and cannot be, such a thing as a ‘corporation’ in a society based on the common ownership of the means of production. The very raison d’être of a corporation derives from its exclusive private or monopoly ownership of the productive assets in its legal possession and, as such, this is wholly incompatible with the very nature of such a society. Meaning it is nonsensical to talk of taking over an institution like a corporation and running it in a different, more democratic, way in a post-capitalist society, when such an institution would simply cease to exist.

Of course, what Philips and Rozworski describe is not society-wide central planning in the sense that Lenin might have had in mind when he talked of turning the ‘whole of society’ into ‘a single office and a single factory’. Nevertheless, just as Lenin´s approach via state capitalism comprehensively failed to deliver socialism in the traditional Marxian sense, there is no reason to think that their approach (via the democratic transformation of big corporations) would fare any better. Of course, one can redefine ‘socialism’ to mean something else, which is what Lenin did – but that doesn’t change anything.

Nevertheless, even granting their description of how Walmart works, we are none the wiser as to how the development of central planning within some corporate behemoth like Walmart is going to assist in laying the ‘foundations of socialism’ any more than the approach advanced by Lenin.

Robin Cox

Blogger's Note:

The People’s Republic of Walmart was reviewed in the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Compulsion (2024)

Book Review from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. By Søren Mau. University of Southern Denmark. 2019

Mau was interviewed by Jacobin in February 2023. In it he confirms the summary of his argument in the introduction to the interview, headlined ‘Capitalism Makes Everyone Bend to Its Will, Rich and Poor Alike’:

‘In his new book Mute Compulsion, Søren Mau argues that to understand and end capitalism, we need to analyze how it not only subordinates the poor to the rich but in fact exerts economic power over everyone — including capitalists themselves’ (tinyurl.com/et7m8vp8).

Mau argues that what maintains capitalist rule is not just physical force (threatened or actual) and ideology (brainwashing) but also ‘economic power’. He sees this as an impersonal form of power, an expression of the logic of capital that every market agent (not just workers but capitalists too) in capitalism is subjected to through the impersonal operation of market forces.

This of course is something we have long said and is in fact the basis of our case that capitalism cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the majority class of wage workers. Not only capitalist firms but governments too are subject to the ‘logic of capital’ enforced through market competition which dictates that priority must be given to profits and the conditions for profit-making. That reformist governments can’t escape this ‘mute compulsion’ has been confirmed time and time again.

Despite the jargon (it’s based on his PhD thesis) it’s actually quite a good read (tinyurl.com/6h2xw5y6).

Best regards, but miles apart (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Sometimes people in other groups and countries contact us with a view to some kind of joint venture or activity. As a recent correspondence illustrates, such well-intended invitations can often expose deep and unsuspected difficulties. It would be unfair to quote our correspondent directly without their permission, but you may surmise their arguments from our own responses below.

Hi there,

I’ve just been forwarded your invite, and sure, happy to have a chat online. If you know anything about us though, you’ll know we’re all about global common ownership now, with no money or markets, and we don’t go in for piecemeal progressive reforms, eg, housing, so I don’t know how much you’d get out of our involvement.

Best regards

Hi there,

To be honest I’m reluctant to take part if the purpose is mainly to ‘raise awareness’ about housing issues. The way I interpret this is ‘promoting positive things we can do about housing’, and I’m not convinced there are any. I would be obliged to object that over a hundred years of housing reforms have done nothing to cure the homelessness problem, and in my opinion never will do anything, because housing is like any other commodity that’s produced for profit, not for need, and entirely subject to the laws of the capitalist market. Poor people simply don’t matter in this system, but it’s arguably even worse than that. The more workers are ground down by exorbitant rents and mortgages, the more desperate they get, and the more employers can screw them with low wages, zero-hour contracts and anti-union rules. In this view, homelessness is actually great for capitalism, just like unemployment, and unaffordable health systems. They are not problems it has any intention of solving.

I’m guessing you want to stress the positives, as in these two paragraphs from Jacobin magazine:

‘Certain reform-oriented struggles, especially those around rent control and expanded provision of social housing, offer important opportunities for on-the-ground socialist organizing. But we also shouldn’t be shy about our big-picture diagnosis.

Socialists have to make the case, loudly, publicly, and globally: capitalism can never meet our needs for high-quality, affordable housing. The reason is straightforward: the profit motive’ (jacobin.com/2018/11/capitalism-affordable-housing-rent-commodities-profit).

This is the age-old dilemma of action now or revolution later. It’s always claimed that you can do both, but in practice one is always pursued at the expense of the other. To me it’s like trying to redecorate while your house is on fire. I also can’t go along with the idea that housing reforms could be some kind of step on the way to socialism. You could make the same argument for virtually every charity under the sun, with the result that the steps on the way to socialism rapidly multiply to infinity. And reforms can be undone, and frequently have been, by successive political regimes, so that sadly, reformism is rarely a forward path, more often a circular loop. How many times has Oxfam proposed to eradicate poverty since they were founded in 1942?

I’m replying at some length just so you can see what position I would be obliged to take, which I fear would have the effect of undermining whatever you want to put across. I heartily sympathise with you over the undeniable fact that the working class does not seem interested in socialism right now. But I don’t think the solution is to offer them something else. Part of the reason the working class is not interested in the single socialist step is that they’re too beguiled by the plethora of reformist routes being offered to them.

If you’re happy to proceed on this basis then fine, but I perfectly understand if you don’t think it would be helpful.

Best regards

Hi there,

Based on what you’ve just replied, I’m afraid I have not made myself clear at all. You say you ‘100 percent support radical socialist reforms’. We don’t, because we don’t believe they exist or that they would work. You ask for socialist ideas (I suppose meaning ‘reform measures’) that I support. There are none. You ask what policies I think are best. There are none. Key issues? Just one, getting the world to abolish capitalism. That’s all. No interims, no small steps, no ‘in the meantime’.

Your approach is: the working class won’t listen, so propose progressive things they will listen to instead. In this view, socialism is more of an ongoing process than an end goal.

Our approach is: the working class won’t listen, so make them listen. Socialism is the only goal. There is no process.

You may regard this as an absolutist, rather than a relativist position, and you’d be right. This is not a new debate, it’s as old as the history of socialist thinking, and caused the breakup of the First International. On the one (majority) side, the gradualists, reformists, Fabians and ‘minimalist’ socialists who thought you could introduce socialism by degrees, through progressive government measures. On the other side, the ‘maximalist’ socialists, also called Impossibilists, who demanded the immediate abolition of capitalism, and nothing less.

We are in that maximalist tradition, which is nothing if not uncompromising. We would be the first to admit that we haven’t got what we wanted. But capitalism still exists, and workers are still suffering, with the world possibly on the brink of self-extermination, so we would argue that the minimalists didn’t get what they wanted either. We’re no closer to socialism now than we were a hundred years ago, for all their progressive ideas. In fact, because of all the ‘faux socialism’ being put about, we are arguably even further away.

I admire your energy and initiative in setting up your own political group, obviously in the hope that you can make a difference. The world needs people like you, more than ever. But I would suggest that you take a closer look at these ‘socialist reforms’ you advocate. There are very few genuinely new concepts floating around. Have these reforms been tried before, and if so, what happened? Do they make sense in terms of economics? If you’re not sure, feel free to ask me. If I don’t know, I can find out. A little bit of homework now could save you spending a lot of energy later.

Why not tell me what measures you want to promote, and I’ll tell you what I think?

Best regards

Hi again,

I’m sorry you think I’m being ‘pointlessly hostile’ and wasting your time with ‘idiotic squabbling’. I only wanted you to understand my position and now I guess you do. I suppose you will consider it a waste of time communicating with me, but I will take the trouble to reply anyway. To me, this sort of exchange is not some alternative to the revolutionary process, it’s part of it.

Believe me, I would love nothing better than to get round the table with a united revolutionary socialist movement and form a united plan. If I had the magic power to make that happen I would. I don’t want a divided opposition to capitalism any more than you do.

But if you think that movement is divided by nothing more than petty superficial squabbles, you don’t understand revolutionary politics as well as you think. The divisions go all the way down.

There are two main fault lines:

(1) Minimal versus maximal – the two poles, as already explained. Minimalists are driven by a desperate sense of expediency, but what happens in practice is that they always get drawn into managing capitalism on behalf of the rich. This has happened with every supposedly labour or socialist party that’s ever been in government. In the UK, many of their grandees end up in the House of Lords. What usually happens to the supporters is that, over time, they forget all about socialism and become garden-variety liberals.

(2) Vanguardists versus libertarians – on one side, the Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, etc, who believe the working class is basically stupid and needs an elite revolutionary leadership, who alone are capable of understanding socialist theory. If successful these groups, in the process of imposing their new order, have become a new totalitarian ruling class, very often murderously so. Against them stands an assortment of libertarian socialists, anarchists, syndicalists and some left or council communists, who reject leadership as an inherently weak and undemocratic form of organisation, and insist like Marx that only the whole working class can emancipate itself.

The above presupposes that, at heart, they all want 100 percent socialism, at least at some distant point in the future. Actually, many of the minimalists and vanguardists don’t even want that, or understand what it is. They think socialism is just capitalism managed by the state, or by a revolutionary dictatorship.

I need hardly add that there are other, more minor differences. The vanguardists all hate each other, like the fighting dogs they are. The minimalists (who are often also vanguardists) all promote competing and often infeasible reforms (like UBI) simply to get votes and/or members. Even the libertarians are divided, with most apart from the SPGB being anti-parliament.

I’m not making any of this up. These divisions existed well before you or I were ever born. If you’re going into revolutionary territory, you need to know where the cliff edges are. It doesn’t mean we have to be uncivil with each other, but unity between groups who don’t want the same thing is out of the question. Our solution, whether you agree with it or not, is to specify exactly what we mean by socialism, and then seek out only those people who fully support that aim, so that the revolution can proceed on solid rather than nebulous foundations.

Best regards

PJS

Blogger's Notes:

" . . . and caused the breakup of the First International . . . " I think PJS meant the Second International.

Cooking the Books: Was Marx really a reformist? (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

A controversy has broken out between two reformist groups about reforms. It started with an article by Dylan Riley in the New Left Review in April which criticised ‘neo-Kautskyites’ for advocating a green new deal; this, argued Riley, would come up against ‘the structural logic of capital’ and so wouldn’t work as intended (tinyurl.com/4wy2hc75). Accepting the tag neo-Kautskyite, Seth Ackerman replied in Jacobin magazine to try to show that Marx himself believed that reforms could overcome the ‘structural logic of capital’ and so were worth struggling for (tinyurl.com/5whj5u8p).

Ackerman’s case was based on Marx’s support for the 1847 Factory Act which limited the working day for women and children to 10 hours. This had been opposed, not just by most factory owners but by tame economists one of whom notoriously argued that profits were made in the last hour of a day’s work and that cutting hours would ruin businesses. Marx refuted this by showing that every minute a worker worked was divided into paid and unpaid labour and so the Ten Hour Bill would not result in a total loss of profits (see section 3 of chapter 9 of volume I of Capital). It was also in the longer-term interest of the capitalist class as a whole, as over-working workers threatened their fitness as profit-producers of future generations of workers. In other words, it was not against the ‘structural logic of capital.’

Nevertheless, in his Inaugural Address to the founding congress of the International Working Mens’ Association in 1864 Marx did describe (which Ackerman quotes) the passing of the Ten Hour Bill as the first time that ‘the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class’.

Marx’s strategy at the time was to get a workers’ movement going, even just on a trade union basis, in the expectation that it would later develop into a conscious movement for socialism. So, this was a rhetorical flourish to show that working class struggle, even within capitalism, was not useless. In the event, Marx’s strategy didn’t work. Working class political parties did emerge but turned out to be more interested in obtaining reforms under capitalism than in campaigning for socialism.

In arguing that this meant ‘that Marx knew that the struggle for reforms was part of the struggle for socialism’, Ackerman reads too much into Marx’s rhetoric for the occasion and ignores his insistence in the same speech on the need for the workers to win control of political power (‘revolution’) before anything could be done to end their exploitation. Marx did support certain reforms that benefitted workers, and the Factory Acts did do this, but he never saw campaigns for them (‘reform’) as part of the struggle for socialism, only to try to get a better deal under capitalism.

Ackerman went on to argue that there is no ‘structural logic of capital’ that prevents reforms working but chose an easy interpretation of this logic to refute — that reforms will fail due to ‘the falling rate of profit’. That is not our position. Ours is that capitalism is a profit-driven system and that any reform that impinges on profit or profit-making won’t work as envisaged; the only reforms that are accepted are those that don’t go against this ‘structural logic’, including health services and universal education (which help create and maintain a reasonably educated and fit working class to operate modern industry).

The real argument on reforms is not about the reforms themselves but against reformism, the policy of advocating reforms in the belief that this will somehow help the struggle for socialism. It doesn’t and it can’t and it encourages illusions that divert from the struggle for socialism.

US politics: what to expect from Biden and Harris (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

What can we reasonably expect from the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?

An assessment of the likely policy orientation of the new administration would ideally take into account the record of the political careers of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the sources of finance for their campaign, the appointments that Biden makes to cabinet post, and – last but not least – the political and economic circumstances in which the Biden White House will have to operate.

We do not yet know about appointments. In accordance with customary practice, some key personnel will no doubt be recycled from the Obama administration. However, we do have information about campaign finance. And from the long political careers of Biden and Harris we can learn a great deal about their attitudes and their patterns of behavior. Biden has under his belt 38 years as a senator plus two terms as Obama’s vice president. Harris has had four years as a senator; before that she was District Attorney of San Francisco for seven years and Attorney General of California for six.

A useful account of Biden’s career is provided by Branko Marcetic, a staff writer for Jacobin magazine, in his book Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden (Verso and Maple Press, 2020). In the November 2020 issue of Jacobin the same writer analyses the financing of this year’s presidential election campaigns. Another exposé is that written and published by Chris Aclixia under the self-explanatory title The Biden/Harris Ticket Is The Ultimate in Plutocracy: Screw The Little Guy.

Biden the compromiser 

Two points bear special emphasis. First, Biden has always been a great believer in bipartisanship and consensus. The leitmotif of his recent victory speech, for which he received fulsome praise from the corporate media, was his commitment to national unity and ‘healing’ after the divisiveness of the Trump presidency. Unity presupposes compromise. Biden’s compromises, however, are always with the Republicans to his right. And as the latter are much less willing than he to make concessions, ‘compromise’ generally turns out to be a euphemism for surrender.

Marcetic sums up the sorry result as follows:

‘Biden has spent his career reflexively adopting his right-wing opponents’ position as his own… He has repeatedly worked with Republicans to advance [many of] their political goals, dismantling the legacy of the New Deal in the process… Biden has got swept up in every right-wing panic of the last few decades – crime, drugs, terrorism — often going even further than Republicans in his response’ (p. 6).

This brings us to the second point. Both Biden and Harris have made major contributions to the explosion over recent decades in the size of the prison population – a phenomenon that has led many observers to call the present-day United States a ‘carceral state.’ As district and state attorney in California, Harris was keen to get even non-violent petty offenders locked up and reluctant to agree to their early release, which she opposed on the grounds that they were an important source of cheap labor for the state. But when her subordinates urged her to prosecute a crooked businessman she refused. Later he made a generous donation to her campaign fund.

Who paid the piper?

Now let’s follow the money. Who pays the piper calls the tune.

Trump versus Biden was the most expensive election ever held. The combined spending of the candidates is estimated at $14 billion – over twice the amount spent in the 2016 presidential election.

Many companies gave money to both candidates. Especially firms in the military-industrial complex. They certainly had no reason to be displeased with Trump, but they wanted to hedge their bets.

Mining corporations and the fossil fuel industries (oil, gas, coal) supported Trump. The high-tech firms in Silicon Valley supported Biden.

The financial sector – ‘Wall Street’ – backed Biden, as it had backed Obama and Hillary Clinton. The medical industry gave to Biden, presumably because he has always firmly opposed national healthcare schemes like ‘Medicare for All.’ Show business supported Biden, as did lobbying and law firms.

Overall, more billionaires gave money to Biden (150) than to Trump (108). Most small business owners supported Trump.

Circumstances

In the American political system, the executive branch governs not alone but in collaboration and conflict with Congress and the judiciary. The Democrats are set to retain their control over the House of Representatives, but the Senate hangs in the balance. Which party controls the Senate always has a palpable impact on the effectiveness of a presidential administration.

Whatever happens to the Senate, the Biden administration will be burdened with a conservative Supreme Court that is likely to rule radical new legislation (if there is any) unconstitutional.

We must also take into consideration budgetary and other economic constraints – some flowing directly from the current situation, others imposed by the general requirements of the capitalist system.

Thus one change that does seem likely to occur as a result of this election is the adoption of serious measures at the federal level to bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control. However, similar measures already taken in states with Democratic governors have proven costly enough to jeopardize other state-funded services. The same problem will now arise in the federal government. Even if taxes on the wealthy are restored to pre-Trump levels, it is hard to imagine a fiscal situation less conducive to maintaining – let alone expanding — social provision.

Policy implications

What are the implications of all this for the policies the Biden administration is likely to pursue?

We can expect some reforms, if only for the sake of appearance, but hardly any with real substance. For example, the United States will probably rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change, but there will be no Green New Deal (or at least nothing worthy of such a grand name). In the field of healthcare there may be an attempt to revive Obamacare – nothing more.

Those radicals who seek to ‘push Biden to the left’ under current circumstances have set themselves a truly Herculean task.

Stefan

More FALC: The Walmart hypothesis (2019)

Book Review from the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can Walmart Tell Us Anything About Socialism?

Internationally, there is a resurgence in discussing socialism, not just in the American sense of faintly looking at a welfare state, but credibly and seriously taking on the idea of a co-operative democratic abolition of market allocation of goods and resources. Books like Four futures: life after capitalism by Peter Frase have already lead the way, including among the options a world of abundance without money (although reading the text, it seems the author’s preferred or most likely future was some sort of regulated market in a post-ecological-collapse world). That book sprang from Jacobin magazine, and it seems that other contributors to that magazine are beginning to produce other useful examinations of the way towards a market-free world.

The latest example is Philips and Rozworski’s The People’s Republic of Walmart: how late-stage capitalism gives way to early-stage fully automated luxury communism. This book puts forward the simple case that firms like Walmart are in effect massive planned economies, close to the size and scale of the Soviet Union in terms of the number of products and processes they have to employ to run their enterprise. They also note how 3rd party firms that trade with them are effectively locked into their productive ecosystem.

Much of this is achieved algorithmically, with resources being poured into tracking stock through the system, knowing where it is at all times, and using vast storage capacity. The algorithms calculate what resources are available nearest to the point at which they are required, and how to get them there quickly. The authors give the counter example of Sears, which imploded after implementing an internal market and competition within its firm (under libertarian ideological commitment from its directors).

Of course, Walmart and Amazon are planning to exploit, and get the most out of, their workers and advantages over commercial rivals. It is not so much an example to be emulated, but a living demonstration that wide-scale economic allocation via planned structures works. Further evidence is found in a nuanced description of the history of the NHS, noting how it has gone from an ad hoc replication of existing structures, without conscious planning to serve community needs, to being carved up by an internal market. The authors note that it has always existed as a hybrid between the firms of GPs and the hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry, and that attempts to implement society-wide input and control were stymied at Westminster.

Democracy is seen as an inherent good and a necessity for wide-scale planning in an economy, if it is to serve people’s needs. Phillips and Rozworski note that a significant part of the failure of the Soviet Union’s planned economy was because of dictatorial intervention preventing the free flow of information between productive units, and removing their capacity to respond. The other living example they cite is Project Cybersyne in Chile.

British cyberneticist Stafford Beer was called in to help the Allende government implement a planned economy. Given the state of the country at the time, he had to improvise a system of telex and phone lines. His systems were credited with enabling the government to defeat a crippling lorry drivers’ strike, by routing key resources around disruptions and allocating available lorries. The principles behind Beer’s cybernetics were thus not all about enslaving people to the machine, but allowing distributed horizontal decision-making between relatively autonomous units with oversight and regulation to achieve common ends.

If all of this sounds remarkably familiar, it is because this is what we have been saying in our slightly less fashionably way since we were formed. Indeed, our pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative, largely written by the late Pieter Lawrence, based a description of socialism on using the regulated stock control models already developed by the likes of Walmart, coupled with formation clearing houses to allow communities and groups to work to enable production for needs.

It’s clear, though, that while technology has advanced, along with the experience of wide-scale economic organisation, this is not a prerequisite for socialism. Pencil and paper-based systems could have handled the work (and probably still could), but the fact that machines and computers allow us to do it faster, and are increasingly presenting the possibility of co-ordinated democratic production in people’s minds, is making the topic more popular.

Philips and Rozworski cite the work of Scottish academic Paul Cockshott with his demonstration that an economy-wide plan is computable (especially if we exclude millions of null combinations of goods, arguably Walmart does not compute all the possible combinations of goods, but works with what it has and approximates efficient allocation-adjusting over time). Cockshott is not alone in academia, and he and collaborators have made impressive inroads into the possibilities of computational planning through vertical integration of sub-systems. It would be well to think what would be the result of the combined efforts of the best and brightest computational minds being directed towards co-operative economics and the satisfaction of needs, rather than algorithmic stock trading.

We have discussed in these pages before the types of innovations in thought and process that will enable us to make socialism work on a worldwide scale: Leonid Kantarovich’s linear programming; Gale and Shaply’s stable matching algorithm; Brams and Taylor’s envy-free cake-cutting algorithm, etc. The intellectual progress for the machinery of co-ordinating activity is improving, even if the political co-ordination to pick it up and use it is not yet as developed. It is good that these obscure and complex lines of enquiry are beginning to get serious popular attention.

Some commentators have begun to compare capitalism (and/or corporations) to a vast out-of-control Artificial Intelligence, programmed to maximise profit. This is potentially a powerful way of depicting capitalism: but the risk is, in coming up with algorithms and procedures to create a planned economy, that we would end up replacing capitalism with simply a rival AI, rather than returning to a human-centred system.

Demonstrating that we can plan and rationalise resources in the way that capitalism can and does is not a clincher for socialism: it could be argued that in an ends-based economy, using labour inefficiently could well become a goal (as William Morris pictured in his utopian novel News from Nowhere). The most powerful message we can send is that there is not one way to run an economy, and the only real limit is the power of our imaginations.

The tag-line of ‘fully automated luxury communism’ that is gaining some popularity may help raise the profile of consciously planning the economy co-operatively.

Pik Smeet

Radical politics (2019)

Book Review from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Manifesto. The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. By Bhaskar Sunkara. Verso, 2019.

Sunkara is the founder of Jacobin, the US left-wing magazine, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an offshoot founded by Michael Harrington of the old Socialist Party of America that, when this broke up in 1973, decided to work within the US Democratic Party. His book sets out to explain what he sees as socialism to American readers who up till recently regarded it as a dirty word.

He describes himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ as opposed to a ‘social democrat’, the difference in his mind being that the latter seek to introduce reforms from above while the former want to see them introduced as a result of mass popular pressure. But this is a distinction without a difference. He is, then, a left-wing social democrat. His rather confusing conception of socialism is an economy of worker-run firms producing for the market with a free health service and a basic income scheme.

Despite this, his book makes a good criticism of capitalism and provides a useful history of those who, in the last century, called themselves socialists, the chapter on the German SPD in particular. It could serve as a basic introduction to the background to the debates about the meaning and best way to achieve socialism that we ourselves engage in.

Of course his point of view is not ours, but that of a social democrat who regards himself as a Marxist. He could be worse. He could have been a Trotskyist or some other member of the Russian Revolution re-enactment society. In fact he recognises that it is not possible to establish socialism unless the conditions for it exist, which they didn’t in Russia, China or the other economically backward countries governed at one time by people claiming to be Marxist:

 ‘The Third World’s experience with socialism vindicates Marx. He argued that a successful socialist economy requires already developed productive forces and that a robust socialist democracy requires a self-organized working class.’

He is aware of the criticism we have always made of the Labour Party and its Social Democratic equivalents abroad as, in discussing the failure of the 1929-31 MacDonald Labour government, he quotes both what we said before (‘No matter how able, how sincere, and how sympathetic the Labour men and women may be who undertake to administer capitalism, capitalism will bring their undertaking to disaster’) and after (‘it is not possible for the Labour Party or any other party to administer capitalism in such a way that the workers’ problems can be solved within the framework of the existing system’).

He seems to take this on board as he writes later on that ‘administering a capitalist state requires maintaining business confidence and corporate profits’ and that ‘Social democracy’s dilemma is impossible to resolve: even when nominally anti-capitalist, it is reliant on the continued profitability of private capitalist firms.’ And in his verdict on European Social Democracy:

 ‘Even with the more modest ambition of just humanizing capitalism, no national left government in Europe has been able to carry out its program in at least forty years.’

The one example of success, albeit temporary, he gives is Sweden until the 1970s, where the government and the trade unions reached an agreement with the private capitalists, leaving them to pursue profits in return for them handing over a part of these to be used for welfare and other reforms. With the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s, however, this collapsed.

He still thinks the best way to replace capitalism is via the election of a Social Democrat government, backed by a mass movement which, when the government comes up against the economic constraints of the profit system, can pressure it not to retreat (as all such governments have done) but to go on to break with capitalism. As he puts it, ‘we will probably only be driven down the path to socialism by practical necessity, by the day-to-day struggles to preserve and expand reforms.’ This is the old, discredited theory that socialist consciousness will emerge from the pursuit of reforms.

Sunkara quotes Michael Harrington (who wrote a passable book on Socialism himself) as saying that socialists had to ‘walk a perilous tightrope’ between being ‘true to the socialist vision of a new society’ and ‘bringing ‘that vision into contact with the actual movement fighting not to transform the system, but to gain some little increment of dignity or even just a piece of bread’. True, socialists are on such a tightrope and cannot be indifferent to the sufferings of workers under capitalism. However, history, specifically that of the political perspective Sunkara wants to revive, shows that to pursue reforms leads to falling off into the bog of reformism and forgetting all about socialism.

Adam Buick