The Parkrun – an Inkling of socialism? (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 13 June this year, the 13 runners and 5 volunteers who set up the first parkrun ever in 2004 at Bushy Park, London, celebrated one million parkruns worldwide since then. On that day runs were taking place in 2,800 places across 23 countries. In an interview with the i newspaper, one of the original parkrun organisers, Paul Sinton-Hewitt, said that the success of the event was ‘clearly down to the simplicity … the fact it is for everybody, inclusivity, the nature of that, the fact that it’s free’. Another of the founders, Andrew Lane, said he’d originally predicted that, if the event got going, participation would peak at 200 runners per time, otherwise the course would be too crowded. But at the 1,000th Bushy Park run in 2024, there were over 6,000 participants.

Clearly people didn’t mind being crowded together with others and, since they weren’t competing with one another as in a conventional race, getting a clear unimpeded run wasn’t a priority for most. At best if people were there to compete, it was against themselves, ie, trying to improve their personal best time. Lane went on to say that he’d also predicted, wrongly again, that there would be a lack of volunteers coming forward to do the organising and this would hold growth back. But, as he put it, ‘I failed to realise … how much volunteering would become a great pleasure and destination in itself’.

Interesting words

There are some interesting words here: ‘inclusivity’, ‘free’, ‘volunteering’, ‘pleasure’, for example. Interesting because they describe a voluntary, cooperative, communal kind of activity enjoyed by large numbers of people and going directly contrary to the ethic of a society, the one we live in, based on me-first competition, beggar thy neighbour and the gaining of personal wealth and status. A society too in which we often hear of how people have become alienated, disconnected from one another (‘atomised’ is the word often used) and bereft of any clear sense of purpose. In the parkrun, however, we have an activity that is entirely cooperative and purposeful, where money doesn’t enter into any part of the equation and which is pursued by increasingly large numbers of people, whether as run participants or organisers. And clearly the ‘non-runners’ too experience a sense of community as well as a perception that they’re doing something useful, as well, no doubt, as enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.

Social animals

Should we be surprised? Well probably not, because regardless of the way current society is organised with its massive economic inequality, its ever-present wars, the stresses and frustrations of its employment system, human beings are fundamentally social animals who, given even small opportunities, are ready and willing to work together to carry out activities and achieve ends they consider worthwhile. Apart from our common everyday experience where, in a whole host of situations and pursuits, humans display cooperation and empathy with one another, a plethora of studies, sociological and anthropological, many of which have been discussed in the pages of the Socialist Standard  continue to illustrate and confirm this.

This year’s World Happiness Report by Gallup, which rates countries according to the level of ‘happiness’ of their citizens, concludes unequivocally that what makes individuals feel most happy is ‘being generous and volunteering’, since it gives ‘a feeling of belonging and sociality’. A recent discussion on the Gallup report on BBC radio reiterated this, with the broadcaster Evan Davis, one of whose specialities is business and economics, stating that ‘money matters to a certain extent for the agency and control it gives you’, but that ‘the main individual thing is to be generous to other people and to volunteer [and] you will make yourself happier’.

Another recent study carried out by a team of scientists from American and Australian universities entitled ‘Altruistic, not reputational concerns, drive human prosociality, values and aspirations across the world’, studied anonymous survey responses from almost 1 million individuals spread over more than 100 countries, taking into account different cultural contexts, age ranges, socioeconomic levels, and time periods. The researchers found that the vast majority of people reported performing acts of altruism because they were interested in the well-being of others, not because these acts benefitted them directly. They concluded that people are more likely to want to be remembered for making a difference, helping others, and improving the world, and to value things like caring over status or personal gains. The way a review of this study put it was ‘people really want to be good’ .

Cooperation or ego?

Another new piece of research, this time from the fields of archaeology and anthropology and published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, provides evidence that it has been humans’ ability to empathize and relate to one another that has allowed our species to thrive and build complex cultures over the whole planet. It points to how the archaeological record illustrates the capacity of early humans to make long-term commitments to one another’s well-being, to tolerate frustration, to plan collectively, to make sacrifices, and to trust others. In many instances, for example, archaeologists have unearthed remains of disabled and elderly humans who could not possibly have survived alone.

A review of this study on the IFL Science website concludes that yet again we have evidence that ‘one of humanity’s greatest strengths was never just ego or ruthlessness, but profound emotions and our extraordinary ability to turn those feelings into cooperation’. Of course we see ‘ego’ and ‘ruthlessness’ around us too, we see displays of non-cooperation and lack of sympathy and understanding for others. But, perhaps contrary to appearances, we see this much less frequently than the opposite. But precisely because it is less common, it attracts greater attention and becomes more ‘newsworthy’.

Purpose and enjoyment

What has all this got to do with socialism? Put quite simply, socialism – the moneyless, wageless society of common ownership and voluntary work with free access to all goods and services which we campaign to see established – can only work if human beings are able to cooperate freely and willingly to produce and distribute everything that is needed to provide a comfortable, purposeful life for all. And what we learn from the kinds of research mentioned above, from everyday experience and from voluntary on-the-ground activity such as the parkrun is that we are geared, we have the capacity, to organise ourselves and our society in that way.

We learn too that the dog-eat-dog mentality that we also see around us and can set people against one another, often in ugly and irrational ways, arises not from any ‘natural’ human inclination but from the conditions of life in the society we live in, from the very nature of the competitive, profit-driven system we call capitalism – a system effectively described by one commentator as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’. We draw from all the evidence that such behaviour and such conditions can be overcome if we are willing to take the bull by the horns and decide, via collective and democratic political action, to establish and organise a society in which volunteering and cooperative, communal activity is the norm in every facet of life. Of course, despite the constraints of capitalism, a vast amount of such activity already takes place, not only in parkruns but across a whole range of endeavours. But socialism will provide the opportunity for us to fulfil our potential for cooperation not just in our spare time but as a way of organising the whole of society efficiently and effectively and giving us all lives that are enjoyable, meaningful and fulfilling and satisfy our deep-seated need for social interaction.

Howard Moss

Letter: What about countries without political democracy? (2026)

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

What about countries without political democracy?

We have received the following from a reader . . .

I’ve been wrapping my head around SPGB’s democratic approach. It sounds like SPGB puts itself under the mercy of capitalist democracy. So, when capitalists feel threatened, they will curtail the democratic rights that would endanger their capitalist interests, let alone endangering their class rule. One example of this is from SPGB history itself during WW2, where the state issued the prohibition of anti-war ‘propaganda’ and the SPGB had to comply. Don’t you think that there is a contradiction in this approach and this might be the reason why the SPGB failed to become popular among the workers (thus fulfilling one of its main missions of raising class consciousness that leads to the conviction for the need for socialism among most workers) for over a 100 years?

Also, this democratic approach would also mean that workers in un-democratic countries and regions would have to fight (not in a bloody way under the banner of the capitalists of course, but through protests and strikes) for those democratic rights like free speech, freedom of assembly and universal suffrage. But you know before anyone that not all countries and regions can have such a class structure and the level of the development of the productive forces that would allow them to have a capitalist democracy without having ‘robust’ capitalists at their helm. This case can be clear here from the example of Russia after 1917 or China after 1949, where so-called ‘communists’ had to do the dirty work of capitalists (by being capitalists themselves of course). Transforming these countries from predominantly peasants backward agrarian countries with weak capitalists tied to the landed aristocracy and powerful foreign capitalists (both having interest in the status quo to remain as it is) to predominantly workers industrialized countries ripe for capitalist democracy that SPGB sees as an indispensable tool for socialism. So, wouldn’t that make SPGB’s call for fighting for democratic rights in un-democratic countries and regions ‘utopian’ if taken on a universal basis because the case doesn’t apply everywhere, where the conditions aren’t there yet? Wouldn’t the SPGB be sending a covert message for workers in these un-democratic and unripe-for-democracy countries and regions to wait for ‘the third worldists’ to prepare the ground for capitalist democracy (thus socialism) by rallying the workers behind them, to crush them later and brutally exploit them? Isn’t the crux of the problem the ‘socialism through parliament approach’? Which if it is the case, then that means that capitalism isn’t ripe to be overthrown, not because the development of the means of production didn’t reach the sufficient level for socialism (we both know that it was reached a long time ago) but because the uneven development of capitalism across the national frontiers.

A food for thought: wouldn’t that necessitate the SPGB to change its program to accommodate the fight to erase national boundaries and borders? Wouldn’t that constitute the solution for this uneven development of capitalism? (which in fact would lead to the end of imperialist wars and other calamities that affect the workers around the globe and hinder and divide their struggle for socialism through the democratic approach the SPGB advocates for).

Sem

 

Reply:

You are mistaken in assuming that we think that political democracy is ‘an indispensable tool for socialism’ in the sense that if it doesn’t exist then socialism cannot be established. What is indispensable for socialism is that a majority should be in favour of it. There can be no socialism without a socialist majority. What we say is that, where effective political democracy exists, sending delegates to parliaments and similar bodies or positions is the obvious and most straightforward way to win political control and likely the most effective too. If, or where, this does not exist then the socialist majority would have to find some other way.

We do say that, in non-democratic states, workers are right to struggle for basic democratic practices such as free speech, organisation and assembly, if only to better defend their interests under capitalism. But we don’t presume to tell them how to go about this beyond saying it should be based on a recognition of the class struggle and be organised democratically. Socialists in such states should still campaign for socialism as part of and with help from the worldwide socialist movement. The whole world is ripe for socialism, including where political democracy does not exist. It is not our position, as you seem to be implying, that workers in such places first need to struggle for political democracy and, after that, start struggling for socialism.

Your claim that a capitalist class has the power to close down political democracy at will implies that it is a conspiratorial group that somehow controls state power other than through the election of pro-capitalist politicians and parties. In fact, a capitalist class is not a monolithic group with a single interest but is made up of different groups with differing interests, especially over economic policy. In Britain parliament, elected originally on a franchise restricted to property-owners, evolved as the place where these differences were aired and where the question of which section of property-owners got to control the government was settled.

In the course of the last century the vote was extended to all the citizens of a state, often against the will of sections of the owning class, but the basic situation remains the same. It is through elections that a capitalist class controls the state. Universal suffrage has the added advantage of getting the consent of the governed, which makes a state more governable. A one-party or military dictatorship, even if it supports capitalism, puts political power in the hands of a group that could use this position to line its own pockets at the expense of capitalist profits. Elections keep those who run a state under control. In short, some form of political democracy is the ideal political form for a modern capitalist state.

You envisage a government abolishing this if a capitalist class were under an existential threat from a growing socialist movement. But by the time a majority wanted socialism — which would be reflected in elections — then it would be too late. The boot would be on the other foot. Instead of a minority of socialists having to accept that most people want capitalism (or a war), those who benefit from capitalism and want it to continue would have to accept that a majority wanted socialism and that it was ultimately pointless to try to resist this. If a coup did happen then it would not be able to last for long as a state, with a socialist majority that wouldn’t accept its will being frustrated, would be ungovernable. One way or another a socialist majority would get its way. — Editors

SPGB Snippets: Keep out of the water (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

July 30, 2026

You might expect that a walking trail called the Severn Way would largely be alongside the river from which it takes its name. But in fact most of the section between Shrewsbury and Telford is not along the river at all.

This is just one illustration of the extent to which there is a lack of public access to river banks in England. In almost three quarters of cases, there is no right of way within a hundred metres of the river, with most reservoirs and lakes also being off-limits.

Private ownership of land drastically restricts people’s ability to enjoy the countryside (not just rivers) and seek some relief from the recent heatwaves.

Cooking the Books: ‘Raise everyone’s wages’ (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Cut bills and raise everyone’s wages’ promised the Green Party in a leaflet put out for elections earlier this year (‘Stop Reform. Replace Labour. Vote Green’). Wage increases all round is more typical of Trotskyist candidates trying to get workers to follow them by dangling impossible ‘transitional demands’ in front of them. In this case it was an example of Polanski’s professed ‘ecopopulism’ which consists of making attractive promises on bread-and-butter issues to gather votes, in particular from those who normally vote for the Labour Party. But it is just as unobtainable as any Trotskyist carrot.

If ever the Green Party came to form the government and decreed that all employers should pay their workers more, the result would be an immediate financial and economic crisis since everyone’s wages could only be increased at the expense of overall profits and profits are what drive the capitalist economy. A lower economy-wide rate of profit would mean less investment and so a drop in production.

Derek Wall, a one-time speaker for the Green Party (before they had a Leader) and still a Green Party activist, described in 1990 what he expected to happen if a Green government came into office on a programme of putting the environment before profits:

‘A Green government will be controlled by the economy rather than being in control. On coming to office through coalition or more absolute electoral success, it would be met by an instant collapse of Sterling as “hot money” and entrepreneurial capital went elsewhere. The exchange rate would fall and industrialists would move their factories to countries with more relaxed environmental controls and workplace regulation. Sources of finance would dry up as unemployment rocketed, slashing revenue from taxation and putting up social security bills. The money for ecological reconstruction — the building of railways, the closing of motorways and construction of a proper sewage system — would run out’ (Getting There. Steps to a Green Society, p. 78).

As the Green Party accepts the ownership of the means of production by private corporations and individuals and doesn’t even have any state-capitalist pretensions, it is fair to assume that they would come into office, if ever they did, under capitalism as it is today. So Wall’s scenario is entirely plausible.

Wall envisaged this happening if the Green government was elected on the basis of implementing far-reaching measures to protect the environment. The Green Party doesn’t seem to say much these days about protecting the environment (the leaflet in question doesn’t mention it at all) but the same would happen if a Green government were elected on a pledge to make all employers pay their workers more. In fact, the immediate crisis would be economic and not just financial as Wall envisaged. Some employers would go bankrupt immediately. Others would lay off workers. Unemployment would soar. Production would slump.

The Greens are taking workers for fools, though we doubt many were fooled into voting for them because they believed that the Greens would, or even could, bring about a general increase in wages. Increased wages for everybody sounds good but is too good to be possible under capitalism.

Blogger's Note:

Derek Wall's 1990 book, Getting There. Steps to a Green Society, was reviewed in the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Obituary: David Gluck (2026)

Obituary from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

My brother David (who was a member of the Socialist Party, London Branch) passed away aged 91 on the 8th of July 2026. Dave was a long time member active as a speaker, correspondent and unofficial security worker from the late fifties.

David spent his early childhood in Whitechapel around the Brick Lane area and carried the roots of the old East End culture until the day he died. The family moved to Adelaide Road in leafy Primrose Hill at the end of the Second World War; we were a bit like the local ‘Beverly Hillbillies’.

David’s dad Jack was a SPGB member as are his brothers Tony, Graham and as was their late sister Sandra. Having experienced the anti-semitism of the post war years David took up boxing and was good enough to be selected to represent the ABA versus the Met Police, which was filmed at the Albert Hall. Dave stopped boxing after being disheartened by the accidental death of a club mate. He later took up Olympic wrestling and in his best year defeated two national champions (Abdul and Joseph).

My brother was widely travelled, serving in the merchant navy in his early twenties, then working in Israel and as a Gastarbeiter in Germany. Dave finally retired to Poland living on his pensions from Germany and the UK. Besides his interest in politics David was quite expert in jazz, sport and history. He was a tall, athletic man with a commanding and knowledgeable presence. David Gluck is survived by his brothers Tony, Graham and Harry and by his daughter Fiona.

Graham Gluck

Feasible (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Make Capitalism History. A Practical Framework for Utopia and the Transformation of Society. By Simon Sutterlütti and Stefan Meretz. Palgrave McMillan.

The authors state that one reason for writing their book (which first appeared in German in 2023) was to get those engaged in various struggles to try to make things better under capitalism to seriously consider (rather than just in ‘late night pub talks,’ as they put it) what a feasible, rationally justified alternative society might look like.

Starting from the basic position that humans naturally want to satisfy their needs as they themselves define them, they argue that a free society can only be one where people are no longer forced to work by economic necessity and where people have secure, open access to what they require to satisfy their needs (they mention ‘places resembling modern-day supermarkets but without checkout’); work has to be freely chosen and people must be free to use productive resources to both produce and consume what they need; private ownership has to be replaced by ‘collective disposition’ (they prefer ‘disposition’ as ‘ownership’ has connotations of exclusion whereas productive resources and their products will belong to nobody but just be there to be used ). They call the new society ‘commonism’, but it is obviously socialism.

They are opposed to any form of central planning, on the grounds that it wouldn’t work and that attempting it would give power over people to the central planners. In fact, they are opposed to any central administrative body, even if unarmed and selected democratically. What they envisage is production and distribution taking place through ‘stigmergy’ (communication by signs) which apparently is how termites communicate to build their constructions. Capitalism does this without central planning with prices as the signs; ‘commonism’ would do it through (non-monetary) signals about needs.

They describe well that under capitalism the aim of production is that ‘money must be invested as capital in order to multiply itself’ (‘valorisation’)    and that this is ‘not the result of the greed of managers or shareholders’ but ‘derives from a structural compulsion to valorise that is built into the system’ and enforced through competition: ‘if producers display inferior valorisation, therefore less profit than their competitors, they will be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis advertising, the development or acquisition of new machines, the design of new products and so on. That is why, in the short or long-term, they will be defeated in competition and disappear from the market.’ The state has some autonomy to resist this as it acquires money not by exchange but through taxation; this autonomy, however, ‘remains relative, as state taxes in turn depend on a functioning economy … Therefore, the economy is the dominant sphere encompassing the state’.

They don’t regard state-dominated economies, such as the former USSR, as capitalist — in fact they follow the annoying practice of Continental academics of referring to them as ‘Real Socialism’ in the sense of a ‘socialism’ that really existed— but as being subject, through participation in the world market, to the same economic compulsions; also that state ownership is still a property form, excluding the majority.

The second part of the book is devoted to discussing how to get to ‘commonism’. Here, they insist, a free society can only be established by people who want it and freely choose to establish it; people cannot be forced to be free; a free society cannot be introduced from above by the state, as envisaged by gradualist reformists as well as by violent insurrectionists. Beyond not taking this route, the authors are fairly agnostic, though they also rule out the idea that worker cooperatives could outcompete capitalist corporations on the market or that voluntary communes (‘commons’, they call them) could spread by-passing the market. They seem to envisage as most likely the ‘transvolution’ (their alternative word for revolution) being set off by some catastrophe such as an economic collapse of capitalism or an ecological collapse.

In the last chapter they relent a bit on their opposition to political action and concede that it is conceivable that the state could support the spread of ‘commonist forms’ before dissolving itself — they write of a ‘suicide state’ — giving the movement for a free society a leg-up, or as they put it ‘a stirrup holder, an accomplice to emancipation’.

Adam Buick

The Socialist Party's 2026 Summer School: Populism

Party News from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

If ‘populism’ is taken to mean politics popular with the majority pitched against an elite minority, should socialists aim to make socialism ‘populist’? Certainly socialists work to make socialism popular globally with the majority, but without pandering to notions that would negate its revolutionary goal. This means being opposed to ideas that might attract wide support in the short term yet actively undermine the socialist case. Because ‘populism’ remains ill-defined, it gets applied to a right wing group such as Reform UK, or a left wing organisation like Your Party. In the USA, Donald Trump’s Republican Party can be termed ‘populist’ as might Bernie Sanders’ variety of leftism, and similar examples are found in Europe and elsewhere. Is ‘populism’ simply reformism repackaged for the 21st century?

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion will explore how the concept of ‘populism’ has developed, why it attracts support and what this tells us about capitalist society.

Residential bookings for Summer School have now closed, but the talks will also be run on Zoom.

Friday 21 August 7.15pm—8.45pm Populism As A Keyword 

Speaker: Bill Martin

Saturday 22 August 10:00am—11:30am Rage Against The Dying Of The Right

Speaker: Brian Gardner

2.00pm—3.30pm In Search Of Left-Wing Populism 

Speaker: Paul Bennett

7.15pm—8.45pm Red-Brown Politics In Russia And Beyond

Guest speaker Edmund Griffiths

Sunday 23 August 10.00am—11.30am Should / Could Socialism Be Populist?

Speaker: Paddy Shannon

To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/j/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Proper Gander: Stepping on the platform (2026)

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

As anyone with a social media account knows, a price we pay for being able to share our thoughts with a global audience is being open to insults and abuse in reply. People with a prominent online presence, such as influencers and vloggers, attract attacks through making more of their lives available for comment. The messaging forum Tattle Life has threads about various influencers where opinions about them can be posted anonymously. One subject of a thread is GK Barry, who has branched out from running a sex-themed podcast into other media, now including presenting a documentary about Tattle Life for the BBC. GK Barry: Toxic Gossip starts with Barry reading some of the puerile slights written about her on the website, with other people having been victim to worse abuse. She speaks with loved ones of two people who had a presence on Instagram. Richard Davies ran the ‘bowelbro’ video diary of his struggle with cancer, which posters on Tattle Life accused of being faked, even after his death. Princess Dickson took her own life aged 16 after insulting comments about her appearance were repeatedly made on the forum. Her mother, Sophie, and Lisa, Richard Davies’ widow, tried to contact Tattle Life’s moderators about the messages and their impact, with no response.

Tattle Life was launched in 2018, and for many years its owner wasn’t known publicly. In 2023, entrepreneurs Donna and Neil Sands began legal proceedings against the website, claiming libel, harassment and breach of privacy, with the defendant’s identity not disclosed to the Sands. So, they hired a private investigator who discovered the person behind Tattle Life to be Sebastian Bond, later revealed in the press. Before Tattle Life, Bond ran a blog about veganism, whose demise, suggests Barry, made him jealous of other people’s success as influencers. Tattle Life now has nearly 375,000 registered users, with millions more people who just browse its threads. They aren’t only an audience for gossipy messages but also the adverts cluttering up the site. These have generated around £1 million in advertising revenue, according to the documentary. As Lisa says regarding the thread about her husband ‘the footfall to those pages was immense, and for them, that’s money’. So, it is in the site’s financial interest to have contentious threads.

Unfortunately, slurs grab the attention in a more immediate way than a reasoned critique does. It’s doubtful that those who post the most offensive messages on Tattle Life’s threads would repeat them face-to-face with their target. Communicating virtually and anonymously enables people to stir up trouble and cause upset without any personal comeback. Tattle Life’s defenders would say that it holds influencers to account and upholds free speech. In the abstract, this sounds reasonable, but in the real / virtual worlds the context shapes the matter. ‘Free speech’ in capitalism is defined by a legal framework which reflects the prerogatives of the status quo. As Tattle Life is a business, there is a separation between who owns the platform and who uses it, which complicates who owns and is responsible for the content posted there. Even when laws aim to prevent or protect victims, they are only attempts to patch up a system which encourages such problems as defamation and threats. The need to make money is, as always, a factor; here, represented by the site’s income from hosting adverts, which can increase if shocking content attracts more viewers. That a supposed platform for free speech has been mired in secrecy and is driven by money is one of the consequences of the market system.

Recruiting Barry to present a documentary about Tattle Life and the realm of influencers comes across as an attempt by the BBC to court the younger demographic more likely to be scrolling through social media than watching TV. According to Ofcom’s 2025 Media Nations report, only 45 percent of people aged between 16 and 24 switch on any broadcast television in an average week. GK Barry: Toxic Gossip comes across like a primer to introduce this cohort to the documentary format. It follows the usual template of interviews with victims and experts, text of quotes, facts and figures, and the presenter poring over screens between their segments of spiel. Each component is brief so everything fits into the show’s half-hour running time, and perhaps the audience’s expected attention span. Where the format requires a confrontation with the villain of the piece, it ends up as looking quite desperate. The narrative through the programme is Barry’s search for Bond, which includes tracing a location from details in a photo and speaking with his previous neighbours, and culminates with Barry sitting in a car outside his parents’ house and then delivering a letter to them. She doesn’t receive a response from Bond, although Tattle Life’s moderator says ‘for the BBC to include door-stepping harassment of pensioners in the documentary is abhorrent’ in a statement on the forum. They add ‘almost all articles on Tattle Life are misinformation and heavily biased by influencers and their PR who wish to shut down all opinions they dislike’ .

Tattle Life is just one website, which reflects wider issues with the culture of online communication. Social media platforms are run to make money for their owners, who are distanced from those who use or are affected by them. This is built into how they need to operate, which the legal framework tries to facilitate. Ideals of ‘free speech’ have to fit in with this context. The motivation to post ‘toxic gossip’ doesn’t come from social media itself, but from how people are socialised. Having the kind of mindset to want to do this is a result of living in an alienating, divisive environment: hurling insults is an attempt to express some power when someone has little else in their lives. The impact of online abuse on people already vulnerable can be devastating, as the documentary illustrates.

Mike Foster

Trouble at ‘t mill (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Trouble at ‘t mill’ has become a kind of cliché to refer to problems individuals or groups of workers may be having in their place of work. Workplaces are not mills today of course, but the basic ruler-ruled relationship between employer and employee that existed at the time of the mills still applies today. And the same ‘trouble’ still continues to arise, more often than not associated with money and working conditions.

University cuts

And it’s happening currently in what many people might consider an improbable place – institutions of higher education – i.e., universities. Traditionally, work in universities, whether as a teacher, researcher, administrator or anything else, has been considered a relatively secure form of employment. Until 1988 in fact academics had what was known as ‘tenure’ whereby, barring some form of gross misconduct, they could not legally be sacked from their jobs. And even after this, the likelihood of university lecturers losing their jobs remained relatively small for a long time, at least compared with most other areas of employment. But more recently all this has changed. What university employees are now finding is that, as for most other fields of work, they are at significant risk of being declared redundant as their institutions struggle to stay solvent and look to make savings.

In the last couple of years in particular, a whole swathe of universities, from those lower down the pecking order that were once called polytechnics to historic and well-established institutions higher up the scale, have begun declaring deficits – referred to sometimes as ‘black holes’. They are forced, they say, to drastically reduce regular expenditure in what they see as the only effective way – by shedding staff. The term they often use to describe this is ‘reducing the head count’, clearly an attempt to mask the personal impact on the individuals whose lives are suddenly turned upside-down. The main pressure on universities to do this has been the downturn in the number of young people entering into higher education as well as the shortfall of overseas students coming to study in the UK, so denying universities the necessary level of tuition fees to keep them solvent. Examples of institutions currently engaged in making staff cuts and declaring people redundant are Teesside University, Sheffield Hallam, Swansea, Leicester, Nottingham, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

Strike action?

Some universities have done U-turns on declaring redundancies due to the threat of strike action by the lecturers’ union (the UCU – University and College Union), but others have ignored such threats and have gone ahead with dismissing staff despite industrial action. Clearly they view their financial situation as so dire that cutting their long-term wage bill seems more important than the consequences for their reputation of students complaining about not being taught or not receiving their degrees on time. And, at times, universities have openly declared that failing to lower their costs will threaten their very existence. A good example here of how trade unions can sometimes succeed in taming to some extent the imperatives of the financial compete-or-die system all workers (and their employers) live under, but also of the limits of trade union action with the employer simply holding out in the expectation (often realised) that workers are only likely to stay out on strike for as long as they are able to hold out financially themselves.

In the same boat

It also offers a prime example of how the system we live under inevitably threatens with insecurity all those obliged to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary – so the vast majority of any population. Such is the case whichever rung of the salary scale a worker happens to be on. The current crisis in universities provides a suitable microcosm of this. Whether someone works as a porter, a secretary, a technician, an ordinary lecturer or a professor, all are equally likely to find themselves out of a job and having to scramble around to find alternative employment. And for academics in particular finding such employment at the moment is unlikely given the current job market in higher education. As a volunteer union representative in my own institution, I have recently seen a science professor of 22 years standing and international reputation break down in tears and state that his life is destroyed. He had been subjected to a humiliating process of ‘pooling’ and then being informed that, after comparing him with his colleagues, it had been decided that his role was to be ‘deleted’. I have been assisting another colleague who, fearing redundancy and having applied for a job in another institution, received a stock response informing her that they had received over 500 applications to their job advert and that she might hear nothing further regarding her application. She did not.

Legal action?

A common reaction from staff hearing that their employment is to be terminated is to talk about taking legal action via an employment tribunal on grounds of unfair dismissal. But if they go to their trade union for assistance in this, they are likely to be told that, if the employer has taken the necessary steps laid down in law – and they usually have – then their dismissal is unlikely to be considered ‘unfair’. The reality, of course, is that, regardless of any tweaks made to employment regulations by governments (something that is happening currently), the system will continue to be weighted in favour of the employer and to give them the upper hand, as it must in the wage-slave society we live in. So unless the employer makes a mess of things by not going through the right motions, then any legal appeal against redundancy is likely to fail. And even if such an appeal is successful, the court will not order reinstatement but only financial compensation, which is often a dismal amount and in any case cannot in law exceed a maximum of the claimant’s annual salary. If legal action is attempted, furthermore, any claimant can expect to wait a long time indeed for their case to be heard. One of the criticisms of the employment tribunal system recently highlighted by the Institute of Employment Rights was that people bringing unfair dismissal claims are waiting up to five years for their case to come to court.

Employment insecurity

Finally, in the higher education sector at least, a further negative consequence of the redundancy exercises employers go in for to reduce their costs is that these inevitably signal a deterioration in working conditions for those employees still in post. Despite the terminology of ‘deletion of role’ that employers often use, everyone who works in universities knows that the work (or at least some of the work) of staff who have been dismissed will still need to be done, which inevitably means longer hours and increased pressure for the remaining staff. Though these staff will be breathing a sigh of relief that they still have their jobs, nevertheless they know they will be called upon to work longer hours and more intensively to cover that work. And they know that, if they don’t come up to the mark in this, they may well be the ones for the high jump next time the employer sees it as necessary to embark upon ‘reducing the head count’.

What’s for sure, finally, is that no solution to this kind of merry-go-round in any sector of employment is to be found in seeking to change employment law or giving employees more ‘rights’ – or anything like that. This is the case whether it’s a sector focused directly on realising profit for its owners or shareholders or one that is part of the infrastructure of the profit-making system, such as education. All forms of employment are locked into the system of buying and selling and production for profit, together with the insecurity and upsets it causes for workers through its constant need to reorganise in order to adapt to capitalism’s economic conditions. And this will continue until those workers decide collectively to do away with that system and replace it with one of common ownership, voluntary work and free access to all the goods and services they produce – what we call socialism.

Howard Moss

What we want (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What we want. A moneyless, stateless, classless society of common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources. Production solely for human need, not profit. No wages, no money, no markets, no governments as we know them.

How we get there. Not through vanguards, coups, or insurrection. Through a majority of the working class consciously choosing socialism. Where parliamentary democracy exists, we’ll use it but Parliament isn’t the goal, it’s the mechanism. The working class takes control of the state machinery, converts it from ‘instrument of oppression’ to ‘agent of emancipation’, to abolish it.

What we reject.

• Reformism: no palliatives, no ‘making capitalism nicer’. Every reform leaves the system intact.
• Leninism: no vanguard party, no dictatorship of the proletariat, no ‘transitional period’.
• Nationalisation: state ownership isn’t socialism—it’s just state capitalism.
• All other parties: Labour, Greens, Communists, Trotskyists—all aim to administer capitalism in one form or another.

Our core insight. Capitalism cannot be reformed into socialism. You can’t regulate greed into generosity. The system’s basic drive—accumulation of capital—makes ecological destruction, inequality, and war inevitable. Only abolishing the system itself works.

Our method – education and publicity. No stunts, no violence, no shortcuts. We believe workers must understand and want socialism before it can work. A socialist society run by people who don’t understand socialism would collapse or be captured by authoritarians.

Our slogan – world socialism or nothing. The SPGB founded in 1904 is Marxism with none of the 20th-century add-ons: no Lenin, no Trotsky, no Stalin, no reformist gradualism. Just the original recipe: common ownership, majority consciousness, democratic revolution, then freedom.

Mud slinging (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you ever go on social media sites that discuss Marx, it’s likely that you’ll come across a post that claims to refute/debunk his ideas. One of the common charges against Marx is that his theory of value, based on labour-time, is untenable because not all labour produces value. The evidence for this? The mud pie.

Now it’s true that, however many mud pies you make, however much labour-time you expend on that task, you won’t create any value. So surely, Marx got it wrong…. And if his theory of value falls, so does the entire edifice of Marx’s economics.

But here’s why the mud pie argument doesn’t work. References below are to Capital Volume 1.

First, we ought to remind ourselves that, at root, Marx is dealing with an issue that is key to human existence: the labour process, by which ‘Nature’s material [is] adapted by a change of form to the wants of man’ (chapter 7 section 1), a process which creates useful things, otherwise known as use-values. At a certain time in human history the results of this process take the form of the commodity.

To drive home the point, a commodity is ‘an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another’ (chapter 1, section 1).

When the commodity appears in history, so too does value and ‘Value is independent of the particular use-value by which it is borne, but it must be embodied in a use value of some kind’ (chapter 7 section 2).

Lastly, from chapter 8 ‘Value exists only in articles of utility, in objects’.

The takeaway message: Marx’s theory applies to human beings carrying out productive activity to satisfy real needs and wants, not to a child making mud pies (or sandcastles).

By the way, the people who put forwards the mud pie argument have plainly never even opened a copy of Capital, let alone read or understood it. The only reason for dealing with this infantile guff in the Socialist Standard is that the argument re-appears regularly online, presumably on the assumption that if you keep throwing mud, some of it will stick.

Budgie.

Workers don’t control political power (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The state presents itself as a neutral arbiter, a set of institutions that balances competing interests, responds to democratic pressure, and governs in the common good. This is an illusion.

 The state is not neutral. It is the organised power of the ruling class. Its courts, police, military, and legal apparatus exist primarily to protect property relations, to guarantee that those who own the means of production continue to own them, and that those who don’t must continue to sell their labour-power to survive.

The wage system: concentrating wealth and power simultaneously

This is the mechanism at the heart of everything. Workers are paid less than the value they produce, the difference is appropriated by those who own the means of production. This isn’t occasional exploitation or the result of individual greed. It’s how the system functions by design.

And here’s the critical point: wealth and power are not separate things. Money is power, directly and immediately. Accumulated capital buys political influence, funds media outlets, finances lobbying operations, endows universities, and shapes the terms of public debate. Every pound extracted from the wage relationship doesn’t just enrich an owner, it widens the power gap between owner and worker. Wealth concentrates, and with it the ability to shape society in the interests of the wealthy.

The wage system therefore performs a double function simultaneously: it extracts wealth upward and concentrates political power upward at exactly the same rate. These are not two separate processes. They are one process with two consequences.

The anger this produces

Most working-class people don’t articulate this in political terms. But they feel it, viscerally, daily, in ways that produce real rage.

The nurse who works twelve-hour shifts and can’t afford to heat her home properly while energy company executives collect eight-figure bonuses. The warehouse worker tracked by an algorithm, disciplined for toilet breaks, earning just enough to survive while the company posts record profits. The young person who does everything right, works hard, studies, plays by the rules and still cannot afford to rent a decent flat, let alone buy one. The family that chooses between food and bills at the end of the month while being told the economy is performing well.

This is not bad luck. It is the system working exactly as intended.

The frustration deepens when people turn to politics for relief and find the same story. A new government arrives promising change. Within months it is managing the same constraints, making the same concessions to capital, explaining why things cannot move as fast as promised. The cycle repeats. The sense that the game is rigged, that no matter how you vote, nothing fundamental shifts, is not cynicism. It is an accurate reading of how power actually works.

When anger is misdirected

That anger is real and legitimate. But without a clear analysis of where it comes from, it gets captured and redirected. At migrants. At benefit claimants. At a remote cultural elite. At any target that doesn’t threaten the underlying system.

The worker who resents his neighbour for claiming housing benefit while a landlord extracts half his wage in rent has had his anger pointed in exactly the wrong direction. The voter who turns to a nationalist strongman because mainstream politics has failed them is expressing genuine grievance through a vehicle that will deepen their exploitation while appearing to challenge it.

This misdirection isn’t accidental. Concentrated wealth funds the media, the think tanks, and the political movements that perform this redirection. It is one of the functions that money-as-power performs most effectively.

The vote and its limits

Workers can vote. In many countries they won that right through bitter struggle. But voting periodically for competing sets of managers of the capitalist system is not political power. Governments change; the underlying economic structure does not. Whichever party takes office inherits the same constraints, bond markets, capital flight, corporate lobbying, and the basic requirement that the economy remains profitable for investors. Policy operates within those limits or faces immediate economic punishment.

The wealthy don’t need to buy every politician or rig every election. They don’t have to. When economic power is sufficiently concentrated, the range of politically possible options narrows automatically. The system polices itself.

The structural problem

Economic power can precede and shape political power. Those who control investment, production, and employment set the terms within which governments operate. A government that seriously threatens property rights finds capital withdrawn, currency attacked, and media turned hostile almost immediately. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s the structural logic of a system where production is privately controlled.

Reform and its ceiling

Reforms, like better healthcare and labour protections, can sometimes be won. These matter. But they are concessions extracted under pressure, not transfers of power. And they are reversible, as decades of austerity have demonstrated. The ceiling on reform is the point at which it begins to threaten profitability. Beyond that point, the state’s coercive functions become more visible.

The conclusion

The anger felt by working people is not irrational. It is the rational response to a system that extracts their labour, concentrates the proceeds as wealth and power in a minority’s hands, offers them a vote every few years as a substitute for genuine agency, and then blames them when they lose faith in the process.

Real political power for workers would mean controlling the conditions of their own lives, the economy, production, distribution. That requires not managing capitalism better but replacing it with common ownership and democratic control. As long as the wage system stands, wealth will continue to flow upward and power with it. Everything short of abolishing that relationship leaves economic power, and therefore real political power, in the hands of a minority.

Jake Ambrose (Australia)

Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo Column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Analogy alert: there’s one coming your way right now

Did you ever do anything that was extremely foolish and dangerous when you were small? Bet you did!

Me too – here’s what happened. When my dad found out, he gave me a right good old-fashioned rollicking for it as I stood there with hands clasped, eyes to the ground, ears burning. And when I could get a word in, I told him that a big boy told me to do it.

Then he asked if I’d jump off a cliff if a big boy told me to. I kept quiet and just thought ‘Don’t be silly, of course I wouldn’t’.

And now I’m all grown up and would never dream of trying such a lame excuse ever again. And we’d all just laugh at any adult who did.

Well….

Just read the news, there are an awful lot of people in the world unthinkingly doing just what a big boy tells them to do. Only the big boy is a Him or one of His reps down here below. And Hims, of one sort or another, have been pulling this trick seemingly forever, usually via a Holy Book. Failing that, via a message on a Holy Piece of Toast, or the more traditional chicken’s entrails. Afraid that disobedience will make their Him fall out with them Forever and Ever, they might even go so far as to terminate anyone who doesn’t unconditionally worship their Him.

Analogy explainer alert: there’s one coming your way right now

Just as I invented a big boy to excuse my actions when I was small, a pre-invented Big Boy up in the sky is often used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for the most heinous of acts.

Bad boys

Talking of things heinous, Richard Dawkins made this comment in The God Delusion: ‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, and more, and more, bully.’

You may have your own least-favourite sky fairy but there’s one thing for sure. These days, they’re all used to keep the plebs in line, fearful and grateful for crumbs that fall from the table of the rich.

DC

Prosocial (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Conflict Resolution. By Douglas P. Fry. Edward Elgar. 2026. 121pp.

‘Nomadic foragers, as we all used to live, were socialist, prosocial, egalitarian societies’ (Douglas P. Fry).

In this distillation of long years of fieldwork and scholarship, the world-leading anthropologist Douglas Fry draws upon his knowledge and experience to propose means of resolving conflicts between individuals or groups as they might arise in contemporary contexts. Its analysis and recommendations are underpinned by the author’s accumulated understanding of how human beings have related to one another throughout the 300,000 years of our species’ existence. And it is precisely this that makes it of particular interest and relevance to socialists.

To be specific, a central plank of his arguments is how entirely fallacious are the oft-repeated claims that war, aggression and greed are rooted in the human psyche. All the evidence, he insists, is that such forms of behaviour, far from being somehow embedded in our nature, are, when they occur, an outcome of social conditioning and that our evolutionary history shows that we have just as much potential for, and indeed a much more natural bent, towards attachment, caring partnership and cooperation.

Drawing on decades of his own research and with evidence from various different fields of study, he demonstrates how over the approximately 290,000 years of prehistory (the Palaeolithic era), the overwhelming principle of existence among human groups was (and still is today among indigenous populations he has investigated across the world) non-violence, cooperation and egalitarianism, characterised by sharing food, caring for the vulnerable and maintaining social bonds. This the author sums up as ‘community solidarity and harmony’, reinforced by ‘socialization and social control mechanism geared toward promoting prosocial values and behaviors’. Not that violence, greed or attempts to monopolise necessities would never have occurred in Palaeolithic societies or never occur in modern indigenous cultures, but in such circumstances ways are usually found to resolve the conflicts caused via ‘restorative’ methods or by reconciliation, eschewing violence and seeking to practice ‘fairness’ in the eyes of the individuals most directly affected and of the collectivity. But in the rare cases where this is not possible, it may be necessary to apply sanctions to ‘wrongdoers’, probably via some form of social ostracism or banishment. As for large-scale organised killing, the author echoes the now widely accepted view that this has been largely a feature of the last approximately 10,000 years. Starting then, hunter-gatherer life (referred to in this book as ‘nomadic foraging’) gave way to settled agriculture with social hierarchies and control and domination of wealth by small groups of people developing and eventually becoming the norm. Later, of course, the industrial production of capitalism took over from agricultural society, but that society continued to manifest, as it still does, those same basic features: power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, leaders and led, and a willingness of the many, via social conditioning, to sacrifice themselves in the interests of the privileged few.

This book is one of many in the field of anthropology, archaeology and a gamut of other disciplines which have contributed to exploding the enduring myth that violence, competition and selfishness are somehow ‘locked into’ human interaction, that there exists inevitably some kind of ‘war of all against all’. Douglas Fry’s stark opposition to that idea is summed up in his statement that ‘on the basis of cross-cultural data … humans have a universal inclination to resolve conflicts and restore normal patterns of harmonious social interaction’ and that ‘the normal state of social affairs is to exchange good deeds, to feel gratitude, to be generous and appreciate the generosity of others. Overall, people strive to maintain positive interpersonal relations with others through mutually beneficial exchanges’.

All this is serious grist to the mill for socialists, providing as it does a powerful response to those who argue that the cooperative society of voluntary endeavour and free access to all goods and services which we call socialism is impossible because it is against what is usually referred to as ‘human nature’. We cannot but agree with the author’s plea that ‘the human potential for resolving conflicts without violence should be fully acknowledged, nurtured, and further elaborated by the people sharing one small planet in the vastness of space’. At the same time, however, though this plea is expressed, as all else in this book, in truly engaging fashion, it is difficult to see how its substance can be realised within the framework of the current social system of class division and production for profit. Rather, the environment for it to come to fruition has to be a society of economic equality and production for need.

Howard Moss

SPGB Tote Bags (2026)

 Party Merchandise advertised in the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard