Life and Times: Detectorists and grave robbers (2026)

The Life and Times column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

I recently tuned in to two investigative series on Radio 4. Though they told what on the surface seemed quite different tales, they were linked by an important, in fact fundamental feature of the society we live in. They both equally vividly illustrated the hold that money has on us and the lengths to which some of us will go to obtain it. The first one told the story of two metal detectorists who stumbled upon a hoard of ancient Anglo-Saxon coins and decided not to follow the legal requirement to surrender them to the Treasury but to keep them and try to sell them secretly. The series was aptly entitled ‘Fool’s Gold’, since, in the end, the ‘gold’ they found had disastrous results for them. The second one, ‘The Grave Robbers’, investigated the fraudulent methods used by a covert group to claim the estates of people who die without leaving a will.

Detectorists declaring their discovery of ancient coins or artefacts are entitled to 50 percent of what the Treasury deems to be their value, the other 50 percent going to the owner of the land on which they were found. That value, however, is usually only a fraction of what collectors will pay on the black market. In this case the ‘official’ value of the coins in question was likely to be up to £12m. But the 50 percent of that amount the discoverers would have been eligible to receive was not enough for them and they chose to try to sell the coins themselves. It didn’t work, since, as the series told us, in the close-knit detectorist community secrets don’t stay secret for long, especially as, when some of the coins started appearing at a Mayfair auction house, rumours of an undeclared hoard begin to spread. The upshot was that the detectorists were exposed and went on the run, but finished up in the dock accused of theft and given prison sentences. However, hundreds of the coins remained unaccounted for, and still do.

The other series, ‘The Grave Robbers’, investigated a different kind of fraud, one where a ‘crime group’ uses forged wills to claim ownership of houses when people who lived in them on their own die without leaving a will. The ‘gang’ forges wills, as the programme put it, ‘to take the homes of the dead’, with the result that any genuine heirs that might exist are left with nothing. The series found that the group in question, based in Eastern Europe, was also involved in cannabis farms, money laundering and the sale of fake UK work visas. We hear from neighbours of a deceased man how the gang, using false but legally approved documents, had taken possession of his house, selling everything of value and using the property for whatever purpose they saw fit.

Both these stories illustrate the rampant hold that money or the prospect of it can have on human actions. And they are of course just the tip of the iceberg. We know that every day multiple attempts of all description are made to carry out what has come to be called ‘scam’ activity at the expense of both individuals and institutions, facilitated of course by the tools of electronic media.

Should we be surprised at this? Probably not, since the class-divided system we live in, where a tiny minority own most of the wealth and the vast majority own little but their ability to work for that majority in order to keep their heads above water, is by its nature a dog-eat-dog affair. Though vast wealth rarely brings meaningful satisfaction to the minority who have it, they do have praise and privilege heaped upon them, creating the temptation among others to look for ways of becoming part of that, to ‘get rich’, even at the expense of others who have little themselves. There is much talk of guarding against scams, but, within a system ruled by money, profit and wealth accumulation, such activities cannot be controlled. There may be attempts, via legislation or policing, to curb their extent, but, as with the other multiple problems the system throws up, it is unlikely to end up as anything more than tinkering at the edges.

Having said this, we must also observe that, though few people would mind having more money or being rich, the vast majority of us would not stoop to cheating or deceiving other individuals to achieve that purpose. At the same time, it cannot be denied that, while we are essentially cooperative creatures, we are also capable of a wide range of non-cooperative behaviours according to the situations we find ourselves in or are imposed on us. So, in some of us, the competitive nature of the society we live in can trigger anti-social forms of behaviour – the so-called ‘worst instincts’. Yet we all know from personal experience and on a day-today basis that most of those around us, far from seeking to make gain at the expense or disadvantage of others, are more likely to go out of their way to come to their assistance. It is, in fact, no exaggeration to say that even the very system we live in, competitive though it is at the core, depends on us cooperating with one another on a day-to-day basis in order for it to operate. The remarkable thing is that, though ‘money rules’ is the bane of most people’s existence, dictating actions and priorities and often causing hardship and suffering, this does not prevent so many of us from behaving generously towards others even if it means financial loss or inconvenience for ourselves. The recent World Happiness Report by Gallup, after carrying out exhaustive research, concludes that a key source of human happiness is being generous to others and engaging in volunteering activity. This writer can only reflect on how much more effectively human cooperation and generosity would flourish in the moneyless society based on voluntary work, democratic organisation and free access to all goods and services that we call socialism.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Helicopters over Helvellyn (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world sees its first paper trillionaire while food prices rocket and existential crises loom on all sides. Have you concluded that capitalism has become a parody of itself, with psychopathic zombies in charge? Yup, and you know what else? You need a break!

If you’re a) reasonably fit and b) have the resources to get out into the countryside, the great outdoors might just save your sanity. It’s not just nature’s quiet grandeur, or the comforting knowledge that it will all still be there when today’s cardboard Caligulas are long gone. If you look closely, you’ll realise something important about people, even when there’s nobody in sight.

You may notice a general absence of litter. There is a thing called ‘broken windows syndrome‘, in which visible signs of neglect, litter and vandalism tend to encourage more of the same. There is a flipside. ‘No Littering’ signs don’t work half as well as there being no litter in the first place. The more pristine the environment, the more people try to keep it that way.

As you meander along your country paths and hilltop trails you will also notice how many have been flagged, stepped, safety-railed, bordered and gravelled. That’s all done to help you, and protect the landscape too, by people you will never meet and never be able to thank. And here’s the thing. They do it for nothing. No wages, no perks, no stakeholder shares or investment opportunities, no title deeds, no face-in-the-paper or picture-on-the-pub-wall. Mountain Rescue, those anonymous heroes of the high passes, rescue people from mountains. These volunteers rescue mountains from people.

For example, volunteers are currently repairing some of the high paths on Helvellyn, in the English Lake District, as part of a three-year project involving helicopters, hard work and hundreds of tonnes of stone. This is necessary because the paths are worn down by up to 19 million visitors a year. Says one local Ranger: ‘We are privileged to have such a great bunch of volunteers who are willing to head out into the hills in all weathers to clear blocked drains, build paths and engage with people all across the Lake District… We certainly couldn’t monitor and maintain all 400 paths each year without this vital contribution’.

You’ve heard that saying, ‘no such thing as a free lunch’. It’s a capitalist saying, which reflects a bitter capitalist mindset. In reality, ‘ordinary’ people are perfectly willing to give their cooperative labour for free if it adds something useful to the general commonwealth. Even when it’s at considerable risk to themselves. Mountain Rescue volunteers jeopardise their own lives because dopey urban types are daft enough to go swanning up a peak without a map, wet weather gear or a compass. Lifeboat volunteers plough grimly through heavy swells to rescue party-boat people who didn’t bother to check tides or a weather forecast. Socialists know all this very well. What we don’t understand is why so many people don’t know this. Instead they believe humans are vile and antisocial, therefore a post-capitalist cooperative society is impossible, and we deserve to be ruled by super-rich tyrants.

Another thing you might spot, on garden walls or gates, are eggs for sale, or jams or chutneys, with a little honesty box next to them. Sure, it’s all a bit twee, and most jam makers aren’t depending on the income. But now a whole cottage industry in baking has sprung up, with cake sheds ‘packed with cookies, brownies, old-school sprinkle cakes or lemon drizzle… for which you are trusted to pay through an honesty box system’. So successful have cake sheds become that local killjoy councils are considering stepping in to insist on trading licences, public liability insurance and health and safety certificates. With some bakers making £1,000 a week, trust has its limits. Those entrepreneurs have installed CCTV.

A recent sciencex.com article has this to say about trust: ‘Social trust is shaped largely by personal experiences of navigating the world, as well as by how strongly people believe others are likely to act honestly or dishonestly in everyday life.’ The article reports a recent Norwegian study of over 8,000 people which ‘shows that we often overestimate others’ dishonesty and that people are more honest than we think.’ Perhaps more surprising is that when study subjects were told that they had identified dishonesty where none existed, many promptly adjusted their expectations accordingly. Mistrust, it seems, is not ingrained. If better evidence comes along, we can change our minds and become more trusting.

Mistrust is the central and irreducible problem, not just in capitalism, but in any property society that relies on trade, even barter. Why? Because private ownership of property introduces a conflict of interests between buyer and seller. The seller has an incentive to rip off the buyer, so the buyer can never really trust the seller. The mistrust at the heart of the trade transaction then scales up to the whole society, rewards the biggest liars and con artists, and reinforces a mutual suspicion that affects and infects all human relations. It’s the broken window syndrome again. Lies and dishonesty beget more lies and dishonesty. Democratic sharing and free lunches? Don’t be so naïve!

In a gift economy, which is socialism, there is no central conflict of interests. The donor gains no material advantage by making the gift, so has no incentive to lie about it. Likewise, the recipient has no reason to distrust the donor. The trust at the heart of the gift economy scales up to the whole society, and reinforces a mutual respect and confidence that pervades everything. Truth and honesty beget truth and honesty. Just like the unspoilt countryside, we will collectively strive to keep it that way.

Still, you don’t have to go yomping up a mountain to see decent, selfless behaviour in action. It’s all around you, every day, in spite of ‘common sense’ and received wisdom. It’s why socialism will work.

Paddy Shannon

1776: Whose republic? (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Republic of Washington will grow and grow, until it makes the whole world tremble’ – Marquis de Sade.

In American schools children are taught to call it the American Revolution. Was it? In Britain we were brought up to refer to it as the American War of Independence. But whose independence?

The man mostly urging the colonial owning classes to declare independence from the British crown was an Englishman: the political reformer Thomas Paine. Largely alone in his zeal for the independence of the American commercial class, he would be resisted by the much more timid George Washington and the latter’s clique of slave-owning mouthpieces for ‘liberty’, who were reluctant to go so far, until forced to by circumstances and the sheer ferocity of the British army.

The colonial gentry had launched the cry against imperial taxation and oppression in 1775 and Paine, for whom dissent, anywhere, was an irresistible magnet, became its most zealous spokesman. In his pamphlet aptly named Common Sense he showed the absurdity of the American colonies being ruled by a tiny island kingdom a gigantic ocean away. When the people of his own roots, the pacifist Quakers, warned the rebels of inviting carnage, Paine told them to mind their own business and not interfere in a ‘just’ war (where have we heard that before?).

Oppression is oppression, regardless of who the oppressor is, and Paine was soon to learn this, with the ingratitude and disdain of his supposed colonial ‘comrades’ after they had at last yielded to his urgings that they replace the British rag on a pole with a republican one.

American farmers and ordinary people bore the brunt of British ferocity as the Quakers’ warning came true.

British ferocity, directly caused by the Washington revolt, did indeed provoke a hatred that benefited those riding it and carried them to victory and the overthrow of British rule. War continued, however, beyond 1782 (its official end), with the British navy attacking towns and shipping and in turn put to flight by an American known (ironically) as Captain Nelson, called a pirate by the British. As late as 1812 Britain launched an invasion of the new United States of thirteen colonies, and hostilities would carry on until into the American Civil War of the 1860s.

During the war the British state used the native American Great Lakes tribes against the colonists in the same way that earlier in the century the Jacobites (the political faction supporting the Stuart monarchy of James II) had done in Scotland. Robert Burns did not like the Jacobites, but he admired the tribal Highland people. As his song Ye Jacobites By Name suggests, they stirred up rebellion, seducing the Highlanders to their cause, then, when it failed, scarpered off to France, leaving the Highland people to suffer the vengeance of the British state.

The Jacobites did this twice in the 18th century, and the last time they scarpered, in 1746, it would result in the destruction of the Highlanders who had followed them. The clearances would have been on the cards anyway at some point, because, like the native Americans and other native peoples around the world, the clans were an obstruction to the development of capitalism.

So who benefited? For all the talk of ‘liberty’, certainly not the United States’ four million African-American slaves, no matter how hoarsely and painfully Tom Paine and others implored. The poor farmers’ subsequent revolt, demanding relief from poverty, and stressing their having fought for the Congress, was ferociously crushed. The British during the war had helped secure the later fate of the native people too, using them against the colonists, teaching the natives about scalping, and ensuring the colonists’ eternal hatred for ‘Indians’.

As for Paine, his dedication to George Washington of The Rights of Man did not help him when arrested for ‘moderantism’ by the French Jacobins. Washington ignored his appeals to save him from the guillotine (for that he had to rely on others) while The Age of Reason – a rational dissection of the Bible –finally sealed his fate where the United States of America were concerned.

In short, 1776 marks yet another murderous squabble between capitalist factions. Revolution – the world revolution of those who actually do all the work in society – is yet to come, and when it does it will be truly democratic and thus will not require violence.

A.W.

American independence and its mythology (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 is upon us, it seems like a good time for socialists to assess this momentous event. Marx, in contrast to his writing on the American Civil War, has little to say about the conflict other than that he saw it as progressive but unresolved until the North’s victory over the South in 1865.

Although we have little interest in the international and internecine struggles between members of the bourgeoisie, what of the claim that these events on the east coast of North America constituted a revolution? If so what kind of revolution and was Marx correct as seeing the transition of 13 colonies into a nation-state as a progressive event in respect of the long-term aim of socialism? A cynic might suggest it was the capitalists of both states and their hatred of paying tax that generated the conflict between them. That the early USA was almost entirely dependent on slave labour for its wealth does make the shouts for liberty and justice rather hollow and hypocritical but then the international bourgeoisie have always been masters of myth creation and, as ever, it falls to Marxist socialists to try and separate myth from reality by stripping away the ideological overgrowth.

By 1763 the British had succeeded in expelling their French colonial rivals from North America but in doing so they had all but bankrupted their treasury. To maintain a series of forts to protect the victory was expensive and Parliament resolved to raise the revenue to pay for this by a series of taxes that regulated overseas trade on the 13 colonies. The colonists, on the other hand, thought that they had done their fair share of fighting to help the British defeat the French and saw no reason to pay for the honour. The climax to this came with the implementation of the hated ‘stamp act’ which was the first direct tax imposed by the British.

In 1763 the British had also forbidden any further expansion west because, for one thing, they feared the cost of going to war with the native Americans. However, the colonists saw the west as ripe for land speculation and they proceeded to create a ‘general assembly’ in the same year to oppose these British measures under the slogan: ‘No taxation without representation’. In response London passed a series of ‘quartering acts’ that imposed British troop garrisons in many of the leading towns with the added insult that the locals should provide them with food and shelter. Boston erupted and British ships were confiscated, whilst embargoes were placed on imports and exports to the ‘old country’. This was an act of rebellion against the crown which resulted in an invasion of Boston in 1768. Boston became a hotbed of rebellion with constant tension and violent skirmishes which in 1770 climaxed with the infamous ‘Boston Massacre’ in which many colonists were killed. Riots followed including the famous ‘Boston Tea Party’ where British ships were looted and their cargoes destroyed. By now the Americans had begun to create armouries for what they regarded as an inevitable war. On discovering the location of one of these a British army marched on Concord to seize the armaments but were confronted along the way at Lexington by a colonial militia and the first battle of the war took place.

The war was to last until 1781 when the British surrendered at Yorktown to the Americans and their French and Spanish allies. The colonists had won their independence but what kind of state would they create and was it in any way ‘revolutionary’? The propaganda against Britain had portrayed it as a feudal autocracy when, in fact, the King and his aristocrats (both old and newly created) had been capitalists for a good 100 years before the rise of merchant capitalism in the new world, and parliament was the final arbiter of policy.

The American economy was mainly based on the labour of chattel slavery and people like George Washington lived like ancient Roman patricians on massive slave estates. So in its formative years the republic saw very little change from the perspective of the black slaves and the poor white farmers. Britain was well into its ‘industrial revolution’ and was a much more progressive state than its new competitor. Most of the signatories of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ were slave owners who, apparently, saw no hypocrisy between the claims of liberty and justice for the white elite and the reality of life within for hundreds of thousands of enslaved inhabitants.

Thomas Jefferson began his political career opposing slavery but ended it as a racist bigot of the worst kind. In North America the conjunction of slavery and skin colour became enshrined in the American psyche and even after the ‘emancipation’ at the conclusion of the civil war many of the formerly enslaved became ‘share-croppers’ – in effect, little better than medieval serfs. America had progressed from chattel slavery to feudal serfdom. This kind of racism was to fuel the genocide of the Native Americans and so preserve the racial and political violence embedded deep within the culture which survives to this day. Of course, socialists are not surprised at the depths of bourgeois hypocrisy but the American oligarchs seem to have taken it to another level claiming that they have no empire and that their state violence was always in ‘defence of democracy’. Perhaps the origin of their state is one of the reasons for the US’s continual political backwardness? If 1781 was revolutionary it was an extremely reactionary revolution more akin to the Third Reich and its genocidal and slave-economy policies than to the English and French revolutions.

Many historians regard the relationship between the founders’ support of slavery and their call for liberty and justice as some kind of paradox; they shy away from the truth of the origin of their country being founded on a lie. It can be said that the absence of any mitigating counterforce to the free market capitalism embraced by the oligarchs made it possible for the northern states to invest millions of dollars into industrial technology and so become one of the most powerful economic powerhouses by the end of the nineteenth century – in that Marx was correct; but what he didn’t foresee was that this extremely technologically advanced country would not also enjoy a commensurable rise in working-class political consciousness. Consumerism, religion and nationalism would prevent any important political evolution and has led to the kind of authoritarian ‘king’ figure that America now endures. The world longs for the end of the murderous American imperialism which seems, at last, to be within sight. Its birth in violence, racism and genocide and the malign shadow that has forever haunted America as a result might finally destroy it. No doubt it will be replaced, in the absence of socialist consciousness, by an equally rapacious capitalist global empire of some kind. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ will have to wait until people realise just how to make what was and is now just a platitude into something meaningful and real.

Wez.

Indo-European (2026)

Book Review from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Proto. How One Ancient Language Went Global. By Laura Spinney. William Collins. 2026. 342pp.

‘Migration has been a constant, “indigenous” is relative’ – Laura Spinney.

This is a book about the ancient language commonly known as Proto Indo-European which, starting around 5,000 years ago, began to spread beyond its home territory in the west Eurasian steppe (modern Ukraine, Moldova, southern Russia) in various different directions. As it did so, it gradually evolved into many different languages according to where the people speaking it went and settled.

Modern research has shown that today approximately half the world’s population speak a variant of that ancestral language in places as far apart as, for example, India and Britain, Iran and Iceland, Russia and the United States. What kind of research are we talking about? Archaeological, linguistic and, most recently, genetic. As the book’s author puts it, ‘the new tools of archaeology and genetics [largely via DNA] have opened our eyes to our past’. And she shows a breathtaking panoply of knowledge in these fields as well as a profound and detailed understanding of historical developments across the world since the earliest times. Furthermore, while producing a work of consummate scholarship, she manages to communicate her material with a reader-friendly lightness of touch and a style which, much of the time, is downright entertaining.

So, as the original Indo-Europeans moved east, west and south from their homeland, they came into contact with other peoples speaking other languages. Sometimes they ended up adopting the languages they came into contact with, but more often they carried on speaking a form of their original language modified by the different forms of speech of those they interacted with. To such an extent in fact that, over a period of time, many of the languages deriving from Indo-European became mutually incomprehensible – as is the case today between, say, Hindi and English or Russian and French or Welsh and Kurdish, all of which are of Indo-European origin.

The story of the spread of the common ancestor of many of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken around the world today is also part of the story of the wider inbuilt ability of the human species to adapt to changing circumstances of life – referred to by some writers as ‘plasticity’. We are talking here about human behaviour more generally and the truth that the way a human group organises itself in a given physical or social environment context has never been eternal but rather is subject to change according to conditions and circumstances and has been ever-shifting over history.

In its own way, therefore, the story so eloquently told in this book serves as an object lesson to opponents of the idea that there is no alternative to the kind of society we live in and that other different social arrangements, such as the free-access society advocated by socialists, are impossible or ‘utopian’. Those who maintain that we must continue to accept and live in a society divided by class and wealth would do well to heed the fact, made abundantly clear by Laura Spinney, that, in the less than 2 percent of the whole of human history she covers in her book (ie 5,000 years out of 300,000), we have undergone and adapted to multiple changes both linguistically and in a host of other domains. And there is certainly more of this to come. Just as, in Spinney’s words, ‘throughout humanity’s long existence, languages have never ceased to absorb and change each other’, we look forward to changed social arrangements in the future which will allow humans to move from the realm of oppression and necessity to that of cooperation and abundance.

Howard Moss

Against technocracy (Part 1) (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a scene in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), where Captain Jean-Luc Picard comments: ‘The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money does not exist in the 24th century…The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity’.

Such sentiments draw on a long tradition of utopian thinking. A common feature of such thinking is the idea of material abundance. Abundance is what renders money obsolete.

In the painting The Land of Cockaigne by the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567), a trio of figures is depicted dozing beneath a tree, their tools of the trade lying unused beside them. This is a magical world in which a cooked goose makes itself available on a platter and a roasted pig trots past with a carving knife stuck in its flank. No need to lift a finger to satisfy one´s hunger pangs.

The painting has attracted different interpretations. For some, it represents a moralising critique of the spiritual emptiness associated with sloth and gluttony (‘consumerism’); for others, the wistful dream of a world beyond grinding labour and material deprivation.

The Cockaignian tradition can be traced to the folk utopias of early medieval Europe and even earlier. What is striking about it is the relative lack of emphasis on technology as the means of achieving abundance. Mother Nature, not human ingenuity, was the provider of plenty.

This began to change over time, Bacon´s scientific utopia, The New Atlantis (1627), being an early example. From the mid-18th century, small-scale cottage industries gave way to the factory system. This was the first industrial revolution based on steam power and mechanisation. We have since had a second industrial revolution, commencing in the late 19th century (Fordist mass production and electrification), a third in the late 20th century (automation and digital electronics) and are currently in the throes of a fourth, featuring such cutting-edge innovations as AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, advanced robotics and biotechnology.

Marx and Engels

When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, the Second Industrial Revolution had not yet begun (the first patented electric light bulb was still decades away). They held that socialism depended not only on a majority wanting it and understanding what it entailed, but also on the productive apparatus being sufficiently developed to ensure the reasonable needs of the population could be adequately met.

In the mid-19th century, this was not possible. For this reason, the Manifesto called for the ‘centralisation of all instruments of production in the hands of the State, ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible’. State ownership was thought to be a more effective way of achieving this by capitalising on economies of scale.

However, by the late 19th century, there was a clear shift in their thinking. Thus, their 1872 Preface to the Manifesto stated that, because of the advances of modern industry since 1848, the state capitalist transitional measures they earlier proposed had become ‘antiquated’ and that ‘no special stress’ should be laid on them.

Interestingly, in 1878, we find Engels writing: 

‘The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here’ (1878, Anti Dühring, Part 3).

New thinking about how to expedite a post-capitalist society was certainly required (and Marx and Engels were moving in this direction), but sadly, many supposed ‘Marxists’ today seem to be trapped in a time warp, their vision limited to nothing more ambitious than the nationalisation of the ‘commanding heights of industry’.

Edward Bellamy

Back then, socialists were not alone in recognising the growing technological potential to supersede the capitalist money-based economy. A foretaste of a non-Marxian technocratic version of this was provided by the American journalist, Edward Bellamy, in his fictional work Looking Backward (1888).

This was an enormously influential book, particularly in America, selling over a million copies shortly after publication. In it, Bellamy described the huge economic benefits that would result from dispensing with money:

‘Another item wherein we save is the disuse of money and the thousand occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an army of men was formerly taken away from useful employment’.

However, his vision of a future moneyless society was a statist one, the ‘nation’ being deemed ‘the sole employer and capitalist’ (reminiscent of Lenin’s later description of ‘socialism’). Production was organised under the aegis of a ‘General Council of the Industrial Army’.

There was limited political democracy insofar as the government was elected, with this kind of society enjoying broad support, but practical decision-making itself was generally top-down and paternalistic. Labour would take a compulsory, quasi militaristic form (unlike Marx´s idea of ‘freely associated labour’) with individual consumption being rationed via a credit card scheme.

Bellamy saw this future moneyless society as being technically advanced and exhibiting a high degree of automation. This was not a vision that appealed to everyone, however. William Morris, who likewise wrote about a future moneyless society in News from Nowhere (1890), was critical of Bellamy´s outlook – in particular, its negative depiction of work as a coerced activity requiring extrinsic incentives to motivate individuals to work.

The idea of work being intrinsically undesirable is also implicit in some contemporary representations of a moneyless future. One example is the concept of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ (FALC), associated with writers such as Aaron Bastani.

Automation will undoubtedly play an important role in a post-capitalist society, particularly when it comes to work deemed dangerous, dirty or monotonous. However, we would surely not want to eliminate all work and the potentially enormous creative pleasure to be derived from working. It is the terms and conditions under which we currently work that are the problem, not necessarily work itself.

All too often, work is unthinkingly equated with waged employment. These are not the same. In fact, even today under capitalism, most work is performed outside the money sector, not within it (María Ángeles Durán 2012, ‘Unpaid Work in the Global Economy’, Fundación BBVA).

We need work, or labour, as a form of creative self-expression. In hunter-gatherer societies, the distinction between work and play tends to be blurred. Much the same approach to work is found in Marx´s description of a higher phase of communist society in which ‘labour has become not only a means of life, but life’s prime want’ (1875, Critique of the Gotha Programme).

The Technocracy Movement

Bellamy´s futuristic society has been interpreted to represent a proto-technocratic utopia. However, the term ‘technocracy’, denoting governance by technical experts, was only coined somewhat later, in 1919, by an engineer, William Smyth. The basic idea behind this subsequently found expression in the rise of a movement in the 1930s in America (also in Canada and parts of Europe), bearing that name: the ‘Technocracy Movement’.

Though Howard Scott and Marion King Hubbert founded this movement, the individual thought to have first clearly set out the basic principles of technocracy was the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in 1921, in an article titled ‘Engineers and the Price System’.

Veblen saw technological development as paving the way to the reorganisation of the economy, leading automatically to the gradual disappearance of money. Technological innovation followed its own developmental trajectory. The price mechanism was regarded as simply a wasteful and unnecessary encumbrance on production. It did not so much ‘guide’ technological development as follow it (and profit from it).

Veblen envisaged the decline of business culture and its replacement by a more technically-minded society in which people like scientists and engineers would lead the way. There was, he suggested, a built-in or deep-seated antagonism between the pecuniary values promoted by financiers and businesspeople and the industrial values embraced by the technicians and skilled workers.

The economist J M Keynes later said something similar in his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Keynes suggested that within a century, technological progress and rising affluence would cause our obsession with money to die out. At the same time, the working week would contract to a mere 15 hours on average.

During the Great Depression, interest in the Technocracy movement grew rapidly, and the movement became quite popular for a brief period (at one point attracting hundreds of thousands of adherents) before going into steep decline following the implementation of Roosevelt´s New Deal reforms that drew support away from the movement.

Among the various ideas it advanced was the suggestion, grounded in Scott´s ‘Energy Theory of Value’, that energy units (joules) should replace money as the unit of accounting in the production and distribution of goods, with citizens being allocated ‘energy certificates’ to regulate consumption. What lay behind this was the belief that the money system was something inherently wasteful and oriented towards the perpetuation of needless scarcity. As one contemporaneous article noted:

‘Technocracy states that price and abundance are incompatible; the greater the abundance, the smaller the price. In a real abundance, there can be no price at all. Only by abandoning the interfering price control and substituting a scientific method of production and distribution can an abundance be achieved’ (Sept 1937, “What is Technocracy”, The Technocrat).

Jeremy Rifkin and Zero Marginal Cost

The claim about increasing abundance brought about by the price-collapsing effect of technological innovation is the stuff of much recent sensationalist speculation. According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of the best-seller The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2015), the ‘emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services, precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism’.

However, Rifkin´s thesis is based on a flawed understanding of marginal cost pricing. Even if the marginal cost of producing some item (the cost of producing one additional unit of this item) fell to zero, there are still fixed costs to account for. Information goods, for example, may be ‘non-rivalrous’ in the sense that if I use the internet to do a Google search, it doesn’t prevent you from doing the same. But, internet-based corporations like Google or Meta still have enormous fixed costs to pay for. They still have to generate revenue to cover these costs and realise the huge profits they make in the process.

For the same reason, the prognosis of people like the billionaire, Elon Musk, about AI eliminating all jobs within two decades is fanciful in the extreme. Remarkably, someone who has profited so much from capitalism seems to know very little about how it actually works.

Capitalist production presupposes sufficient ‘effective demand’, such that a business can expect to realise a profit meeting this demand. Without the prospect of profit, even essential needs will remain unmet. To satisfy them, workers depend on paid employment in a capitalist, money-based economy.

How would this be possible if no one had a job? Living labour, not machinery, is the source of capitalist profit. In theory, if all work were automated, the rate of profit would fall to zero, and capitalism would cease to exist.

However, this is not remotely likely to happen. Well before that, Marx’s famous ‘counteracting tendencies to the falling rate of profit’ would kick in. For instance, growing technological unemployment would depress wages, thereby paradoxically making it more profitable once again to employ more labour.

Thus, there are self-correcting mechanisms that pre-empt the sort of scenario that people like Musk have in mind. Indeed, some studies suggest AI will lead not to a reduction but to an increase in jobs overall, with its main impact being to transform the nature of work under capitalism.

We cannot depend on technological innovation alone to transcend capitalism. This is a major weakness of the technocratic paradigm, which we will examine in Part 2.

Robin Cox

Link to Part 2.

Blogger's Note:

Star Trek: First Contact was reviewed in the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Against Technocracy (Part 2) (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

According to Jason Crawford:

‘The 19th century was dominated by a belief in the power of human reason and its ability to advance science and technology for the betterment of life. But after World War I and the Great Depression, it got harder to believe in the rationality of humanity or in the predictability and controllability of the world’ (The lure of technocracy).

As Crawford notes, in the 1920s, a ‘democratic realist’ school of thought emerged, exemplified by individuals like Walter Lippmann. The masses were viewed as fundamentally irrational and uninformed. Their role in public life should be limited, with fundamental decisions affecting the future of society being entrusted to a tiny, informed elite. Democracy should be redefined as ‘rule for the people but not by the people’.

The elitist assumptions behind such thinking found expression in the 1930s in such forms as Stalinism, the growth of fascism, and the rise of the Technocracy Movement itself.

During the early post war boom, increasing living standards and low unemployment shaped the optimism conveyed in books like Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958). In his subsequent work, The New Industrial State (1967), sometimes called a ‘blueprint for technocracy,’ Galbraith argued that a corporate ‘technostructure’ of experts and managers had come to dominate businesses, eclipsing owners and shareholders – an argument anticipated by James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941).

In this ‘affluent society,’ Galbraith argued, the ‘technostructure’ should shift its focus from just economic growth to broader social goals, including more public investment and reducing inequality. His position overlapped with elements of the pre war Technocracy Movement, particularly its emphasis on scientific, centralised economic management.

However, there were also differences in that the latter opposed the capitalist market and money. The existence of money was deemed incompatible with abundance because of the way the price system worked.

Paradoxically, the growing prosperity that many workers experienced in the early post-war years provided the conditions out of which a broad counterculture movement emerged. This called into question the idea of top-down, expert-led coordination of society, as well as the basic direction in which technological development was heading. The hippies of the 1960s were perhaps the vivid example of this, representing a confluence of tendencies opposed to militarism, environmental destruction in the name of progress and the threat to individual freedom posed by an increasingly oppressive and intrusive technology.

As post war prosperity faded and capitalism entered recession in the 1970s, these conditions that had sustained the counterculture weakened. The downturn exposed the limits of Keynesian demand management, whose reliance on deficit spending failed to overcome the built-in capitalist trade cycle of boom and slump. In response, Keynesianism gave way to a more market oriented policy framework –monetarism – the cornerstone of the emerging neoliberal order.

The Technocracy Movement, having peaked in the 1930s, declined sharply thereafter. Some of its core ideas were simply absorbed into wartime economic planning, making the movement somewhat redundant. Later, in the context of the Cold War, its anti market and central planning orientation fell out of favour because of the perceived resemblance to Soviet state planning. At the same time, the technocratic approach to problem-solving was subjected to mounting criticism from a countercultural (and particularly environmentalist) perspective.

For technocracy as a concept to survive, it had to adapt. One interesting example of this was the Venus Project (TVP).

The Venus Project

TVP´s origins can be traced back to the 1970s, though it officially began life in 1995. Its founders were Jacque Fresco, a structural engineer, industrial designer and futurist author who had been involved in the Technocracy Movement in the 1930s, and Roxanne Meadows, an illustrator, designer and architect. They established a research centre at a place called Venus in Florida (hence the name) and published material promoting their ideas.

From a socialist standpoint, TVP unquestionably represented an advance over the old Technocracy Movement. Whereas the latter proposed a system of rationing in the form of ‘energy certificates,’ TVP advocated, instead, a ‘free access’ model for the distribution of goods and services. This required making the industrial and natural resources of the planet the common heritage of all humanity. All forms of sectional or private ownership (including state property) of the means of production would cease to exist.

Thus, a resource-based economy (RBE) would mean goods and services being freely available to individuals to take for themselves, with cybernetic feedback and automated resource management working to ensure adequate real-time availability.

Another breakthrough was TVP´s rejection of the concept of a single universal unit of accounting (money, labour-time or energy units). The need for this only arises in a system based on quid pro quo exchange, where you have to ensure that what is being exchanged is equivalent. This requires commensurability.

However, commensurability becomes irrelevant in a non-exchange, free-access model. Accounting, according to TVP, would be based on purely physical metrics, dubbed ‘resource-based accounting.’ This resembles the socialist idea of calculation-in-kind, but the emphasis is more on resource flows and biophysical limits (an example of technocracy´s adaptation to environmental criticism).

However, there are also serious flaws in TVP´s outlook. One is its attitude towards democratic decision-making. Fresco´s approach differed from that of the top-down approach of the Technocracy Movement. He was wary of entrusting scientists with excessive power to make decisions affecting others. He preferred a decentralised system based on collaborative design and making extensive use of automated AI-optimised feedback systems.

In fact, the socialist principle of free access endorsed by TVP is precisely what would pre-empt the possibility of concentrated or asymmetrical power emerging in a post-capitalist society. It removes any leverage that any group or individual could exercise over any other, and thus, is the ultimate guarantor of any truly ‘free’ society.

However, to go further and assert, as TVP does on its own website, that ‘it is doubtful that, in the latter part of the twenty-first century, people will play any significant role in decision-making’ is absurd.

As individuals, we will continue to play a decisive role in the choices we make concerning what we consume and what we contribute. This is implicit in the old socialist slogan, ‘from each according to ability to each according to need.’ An algorithm in a computer programme may facilitate (even anticipate) our choices, but they will still be ours to make. Otherwise, we are looking at some anti-humanistic dystopia where the machines have taken over.

Importantly, there will also be joint decisions to be made that, by their very nature, (inevitably) impact multiple individuals who, accordingly, should have a say in making them. Joint decisions will need to be made at different spatial levels – local, regional and even global – examples of which are literally countless.

You cannot depend on a machine, however sophisticated, to make these decisions for you. This is because they involve human values and human interests. The sociological naiveté of the technological determinists, in that respect, is truly remarkable.

Fresco himself argued ‘Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution’ (2002). Democracy may well be a ‘con game’ in a plutocratic capitalist society, but that is definitely not because there is too much of it but rather, too little!

Another serious flaw in TVP´s approach is its repudiation of economic classes and class struggle. On its website, it states, ‘In no way does The Venus Project advocate this approach to social change. In contrast, The Venus Project approaches social change as a process of guided evolution and a problem of engineering to produce a working alternative.’

This immediately prompts the question – if TVP advocates for the common ownership of the industrial and natural resources by humanity as the material basis of the moneyless post-capitalist world it desires, how is this to be realised without first removing the possibility for a tiny owning class to monopolise these resources at the expense of the rest of humanity? In short, how can you possibly avoid ‘class’? ‘Classlessness’ is implicit in the very way TVP frames its vision of a post-capitalist society, so achieving it, almost by definition, has to involve confronting this vexed question of class.

Broligarchy

Technology is not neutral; it is fundamentally conditioned by today´s class ownership and control of the means of production. This is becoming increasingly apparent in the light of recent developments.

There has been much talk recently about the rise of ‘techno-fascism,’ a dangerous new force, particularly visible in American politics, representing a ‘broligarchy’ of far-right tech billionaires bent on seizing power and reshaping the body politic to suit their interests and ideological inclinations, technology being the means by which they aspire to realise this elitist vision.

In truth, American politics has always been deeply plutocratic, with only the merest paper-thin claim to being a functioning ‘democracy,’ while being constantly subjected to the enormous power of lobby groups and political donations (bribes). Indeed, some argue that the Founding Fathers themselves framed the Constitution precisely this way to guarantee this outcome – ensuring that the interests of the rich and powerful would be perpetually protected.

However, recent developments, particularly since Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, suggest a turn for the worse. It has prompted some to ask whether, given the inordinate influence now being exercised by people like Peter Thiel (aided and abetted by the far-right blogger, Curtis Yarvin), Elon Musk and others, this does indeed represent an attempt on the part of these tech billionaires to ‘seize power’ and dismantle what little there is of democracy in America.

Some commentators suggest that these people see themselves as some kind of Übermensch, superior to everyone else. They resent any barrier in their path or any constraint that would rein in their wealth or power. An example is Thiel, a venture capitalist with a current (2025) personal worth of approximately $22 billion:

‘In a 2009 Cato Unbound essay, Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” That wasn’t just a provocation, it was a programmatic declaration that aligns him with authoritarians both abroad and at home — culminating in a second Trump administration that daily tests the limits of US constitutional democracy. Climate change, racial justice, and economic inequality all become “distractions” in this framework as they demand collective effort and overlapping interests’ (Christopher Marquis, Jacobin, 6 Oct 2025).

If nothing else, this should serve as a salutary reminder of the risk of relying too much on ‘techno-fixes’ that can sometimes have unintended, and even runaway, negative consequences. Of course, there should always be scope for technological innovation and progress. But innovation should be adapted to, and informed by, the needs and concerns of society in general, and that is simply not possible in a society based on minority class ownership of the means of production.

This is what fundamentally obstructs the implementation of a resource-based economy. Failure to acknowledge this in a bid to appear less ‘partisan’ condemns TVP to promoting an approach that can only depict a future that might be called a ‘nice idea’ but one incapable of being realised.

The Zeitgeist Movement

TVP gave rise to a spin-off called the Zeitgeist Movement (TZM), dubbed the ‘activist arm’ of TVP. It was founded in 2008 by Peter Joseph, a filmmaker, and rapidly expanded to the point of having up to 250 local chapters worldwide, attracting many thousands of supporters. Whereas TVP focused more on blueprints and designing sustainable structures, such as ‘circular cities,’ TZM emphasised grassroots activism and cultural transformation. Underlying tensions arising from these differences in approach resulted in TVP and TZM drifting apart in 2011.

As with TVP, there is much in what TZM says that socialists can endorse, but there are also fundamental, even irreconcilable, differences, particularly over the question of class and the need for democracy.

Nevertheless, any attempt to transcend the rigid barriers a money-based mindset imposes on our thinking is welcome and a step forward. The point is, surely, to take serious steps further in that direction.

Robin Cox

Exhibition Review: Betrayal? (2026)

Exhibition Review from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Great Betrayal? One Hundred Years On. The lessons of the 1926 strike revisited (Working Class Movement Library)

In May we reviewed an exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester marking the centenary of the General Strike. There are a number of exhibitions on this topic (see generalstrike100.com), including one at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, which is on until December, and focuses more on the strike itself, rather than the years since. It is entitled ‘A Great Betrayal?’, which clearly indicates its main theme.

The display consists of information boards plus some original documents. It is made clear that the government had prepared for a confrontation beforehand, for instance by setting up the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, and it referred to the strike as an attempted revolution. All army officers were required to participate in strike-breaking. The BBC of course did not present the union side of the dispute. The TUC, which apparently turned down an offer of financial support from Russia, voted for a general strike, but as a defensive action, not as a challenge to the authority of the state (though it is not at all clear what that could have involved).   

The information boards are made more personal by including information about individual workers and their treatment. For instance, the miner Bill Muckle spent over two years in prison after helping to derail the Flying Scotsman train, while Jack Forshaw was arrested for distributing a supposedly seditious pamphlet. He was diabetic and died after being mistreated in jail, before being sentenced.

The documents displayed include a booklet on the impact of the strike in Bolton, and also copies of various strike bulletins and of the British Worker and the government propaganda sheet The British Gazette.

An informative exhibition, though naturally rather restricted in its coverage, and also rather optimistic about what might have been achieved.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Human capital (2026)

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

Announcing plans to cut nearly 8,000 jobs by using AI instead, Bill Winters, the CEO of Standard Bank, told reporters:

‘It’s not cost-cutting. It’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in’.

He seemed to have forgotten that he was not addressing a board meeting but the general public. The resulting outrage at him calling his employees ‘lower-value human capital’ forced him to apologise. But he was actually accurately describing a fact.

What a capitalist firm has to set aside to pay its workers is part of its capital. You could call it ‘human’ capital as opposed to the capital invested in plant, equipment, machines, materials and power.  Or, expressed another way, it is the difference between ‘living’ labour and ‘dead’ labour, useful as it brings out that the other factors that capital is invested in have been produced by people working.

The terms Marx used to make this distinction were ‘variable’ capital and ‘constant’ capital, as set out in chapter 8 of Volume I of Capital:

‘The means of production on the one hand, labour-power on the other, are merely the different modes of existence which the value of the original capital assumed when from being money it was transformed into the various factors of the labour-process. That part of capital then, which is represented by the means of production, by the raw material, auxiliary material and the instruments of labour does not, in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration of value. I therefore call it the constant part of capital, or, more shortly, constant capital. On the other hand, that part of capital, represented by labour-power, does, in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and also produces an excess, a surplus-value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to circumstances. This part of capital is continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude. I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or, shortly, variable capital’.

So the money invested in buying the ability to work of employees is indeed a part of capital. Economically speaking, that’s what workers are and that’s what they are treated as.

Winters claimed that it wasn’t about cost-cutting. Of course it was. What would be the point of investing in AI if it wasn’t cheaper than having the work done by humans? What he was probably trying to say was that the board had decided to use a larger proportion of its capital as non-human capital than as human capital and that some of the latter was of ‘lower value’ to his business because it was costing more and so reducing profits.

He would be really ignorant if he thought that human capital in general was of ‘lower value’ to a capitalist business than non-human capital. The source of profits is precisely the extra value over and above its own value that living labour produces, the amount by which such capital ‘varies’ compared to its original value. But perhaps he was misled because he is running a bank and banks don’t actually produce anything but siphon off a part of the surplus value produced in industry.

The indignation of workers at being called ‘human capital’ brings out a key difference between the two types of capital. Humans can think and act and so can get together to end their economic status as a part of a capitalist business’s capital — by ending the whole economic system where production is in the hands of money-investing, profit-seeking businesses.

Letter: Animal liberation and socialism (2026)

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

Animal liberation and socialism

As a member of the organisation Socialism for Animal Liberation referenced in Howard Moss’s article ‘The Annual Vegan Fair’ (Socialist Standard, May 2026), I would like to make the following response.

SAL was formed in the summer of last year with three very clear goals. The first being to campaign for an end to all forms of animal abuse. The second being to bring anti-capitalist ideas into the animal rights movement. The third being to bring animal liberationist arguments into the movements of the left. We also understood SAL to be an emerging coalition of individuals and groups and welcomed participation from all different revolutionary traditions, whether they be socialist, anarchist, communist or radical green.

Bearing this in mind, I was a bit surprised by some of Howard’s comments.

For starters, Howard doesn’t seem to think that SAL is as committed to socialist politics as we are to animal liberation and feels that the organization will end up concentrating on individual acts of animal abuse to the neglect of systemic change. To be blunt, I really don’t know where this comes from since in all our literature and in all our presentations we make it crystal clear that it is only with socialism and socialism alone that we will end not just the exploitation of people by capital but also of animals and the natural world that we share the planet with. The modern-day animal rights movement, by contrast, often neglects the need for political change, focussing instead on personal outreach around veganism, on boycott, on direct action and on lobbying, all of which have their role but which ultimately cannot deliver animal liberation.

Howard makes the comment that SAL doesn’t appear to have a clear understanding of socialism and then lists some of the indices of what constitutes a post capitalist society such as its being moneyless and leaderless. I’d personally consider many of these criteria to be more indicative of a communist society than of a socialist state but I’ll agree to disagree with Howard on that one, as I do with anarchist comrades in SAL! If Howard means that not everyone would sign up to the SPGB definition then he’s completely correct, SAL being a coalition of shared concerns rather than a political party.

Some of Howard’s remarks unfortunately read along the lines that everything will be ok come the revolution, something more than problematic on several counts. The history of women’s relationship and socialist revolutions shows that if the left don’t take on demands in the here and now they are highly unlikely to be realised in the future. Likewise, does the Socialist Party of Great Britain have a formal commitment to animal liberation? If it doesn’t, and I’m fairly sure it doesn’t, then why should we see the end of the meat and dairy industry, of vivisection and of all bloodsports come socialism? Securing animal liberation means transforming human society in its entirety, hence the reason why comrades of SAL in other countries have spent so much time developing a programme that is both revolutionary and transitional.

Ultimately with its emphasis on ending profit-based relationships, on social ownership and a planned economy, SAL remains convinced that it is only in the context of a socialist society that animals will achieve true liberation. However, whilst we see that socialism as laying the material basis for animal liberation, there is no inevitable relationship between the two unless we consciously choose to develop one.

Finally, I’m not sure I was present at the online meeting that Howard attended but, like all organisations, when we come together to discuss action, the nature of that meeting will be determined by who attends and by what the agenda is. One month, much of the discussion might centre on how best to support the recent Beagles campaign, understandably so. Another month, most of the meeting might concentrate on discussing the finer points of Marxist theory and how it does, and doesn’t, fit into animal liberationist narratives. In other words, had Howard attended another meeting he might have come away with a totally different impression.

For the liberation of all,

Steven Andrew, 

Salford

Reply:

The article about Socialism for Animal Liberation (SAL) in the May Socialist Standard was largely sympathetic to that group’s analysis of society and its statement of intent. However, it did pick up on the contradiction between calling for complete ‘system change’ and at the same time seeming to focus on reforms to deal with particular problems within the current system. It made the point that focusing on single issues (animal abuse in this case) simply pushes real system change into the background. There is also the fact that any apparent progress via reforms can be – and often is – easily reversed by a mere change of government. A current example of this is the declaration by Nigel Farage that there is nothing wrong with fox-hunting and his suggestion that, if his Party came to power (something not entirely unlikely), the ban on it could be relaxed.

So while history has shown that single-issue campaigns and reforms can achieve a small degree of progress for both humans and animals, it is clear that they cannot lead to real revolutionary change. In other words, contrary to what our correspondent says, it is impossible to be both ‘revolutionary and transitional’ at the same time. The second of these simply precludes the first.

In addition, there is a manifest difference between what he means by socialism and what the Socialist Party means. While, like him, we work for a society without ‘profit-based relationships’, such a society could only come about through doing away with money, buying and selling and leaders and led, something he seems to reject – perhaps because he cannot imagine it. Nothing short of that could give us the ‘post-capitalist’ society he says he is looking for. Anything else would still be some form of capitalism – perhaps state capitalism – which would be unlikely to be a significant improvement for people (or for animals) on what we have now. Above all it would be a ‘state’ system, and, though he uses the term ‘socialist state’, that is in fact a contradiction in terms, since, if socialism is anything meaningful, it is a stateless and borderless society. Moreover, contrary to the distinction our correspondent wants to make between ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, we’re perfectly happy for such a society to be called either. Like Marx, we consider the two terms to be synonymous and both to mean a society of free access to all goods and services where both humans and animals will be most likely to live decent, comfortable and unexploited lives. – Editors.

Another New Left (2026)

Book Review from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is Only the Beginning. The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn. By Michael Chessum. Bloomsbury. 2022. 230pp.

After the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the 1990s ‘socialism’ became discredited. It had supposedly been tried and had failed. Apologists for capitalism proclaimed that capitalism was the only game in town and even the end-point of history. After the financial crash of 2008 the tide began to turn and ‘capitalism’ came to be unpopular.  An anti-capitalist movement of sorts arose, demanding that people should come before profits. Chessum was himself involved in this, both as a student activist and later as a Corbynite (he was a treasurer of Momentum).

The decade began with student fury at the breaking by the Liberal Democrats of their election pledge to abolish student tuition fees, when they entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives after the 2010 General Election. Universities up and down the country were occupied and the Tory party’s HQ in London ransacked. Then there was the campaign of direct action by UnCut against the premises of firms that were avoiding paying UK taxes by operating from tax havens. Then the campaign against the austerity measures imposed by the Coalition government. The movement had been given a boost by the Occupy movement of 2011 which identified a more general enemy than the government: the ‘top 1%’, the super-rich.

Chessum concedes that none of these campaigns was a success and writes of ‘the defeat of the anti-austerity movement’ (p. 104). What, for him, was positive were the new organisational form and methods of these movements: anti-hierarchical with actions being decided by groups of activists on the ground themselves and not directed by some leadership. This meant that not just the Labour Party but also the Leninist groups had no attraction for them and both stagnated.

Ironically, the second half of the decade saw the entry of many of the ‘anti-capitalists’ into the Labour Party, to elect Corbyn as Leader (twice) and then to try to change the Labour Party. That didn’t work out partly because, as Chessum himself experienced, the approach of those around Corbyn was also top-down. Corbyn resigned as Labour leader in 2020 following Labour’s poor showing in the 2019 general election and his opponents took back control of the party. So, another defeat. That’s where the book ends, but with Chessum confidently predicting that the anti-capitalist movement would find political expression in some other way. Hence the book’s title.

Obviously, it is a good thing that these days there are more people than there were in a recent past who recognise that capitalism puts profits before people and that something should be done about it. But what? Most anti-capitalists seem to think that, with enough pressure from below and with enough determined political will, people can be put before profit; that in effect capitalism can be reformed to allow this. But the experience of past attempts to do this have shown that it can’t be. Attempts to do this from below will fail just as surely as past attempts from above have done. It’s not a question of the method used but the fact that it is economically impossible to make capitalism put people before profit. Capitalism is driven by profit-making which must — and in the end always does — come first.

Chessum’s prediction that the movement would not die with Corbynism has since been borne out. When last July Sultana and Corbyn announced the launch of a new leftwing party, 800,000 expressed an interest. But the two made a mess of it and in the end most went on to join or support the Green Party. Chessum himself was among these and is now a Green Party councillor and Council Cabinet member for ‘Economy, Cost of Living and Empowered Communities’. Let’s see how he does.

Adam Buick

The real state we’re in: a response to the iPaper’s jobs fair propaganda (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vicky Spratt’s glazing dispatch from the Youth Guarantee Jobs Fair at Boxpark Camden reads like a press release from the Department for Work and Pensions (In Camden, I saw the antidote to Gen Z’s endless job rejections). She describes a ‘buzzing’ event where recruiters from Arsenal Football Club to the NHS handed out chocolate bars and baseball caps to smiling young jobseekers. Secretary of State Pat McFadden who was also present waxes lyrical about ‘welfare reform’ that puts ‘work and opportunity at its heart’. It is, by her account, ‘the antidote to Gen Z’s endless job rejections’.

I was there too. And I saw something very different.

I am not a young person. I am in my late 40s, a former events manager who once worked across Europe (bringing revenue into the UK economy), until Brexit devastated the industry I loved. My case manager at the DWP, aware of my age and experience, sent me to this ‘youth’ jobs fair anyway. What I witnessed was not an antidote. It was a symptom.

The fiasco of the ‘Fair’

Let us begin with the basics of event management, a profession I practised for years before this government destroyed my livelihood. A jobs fair is, at minimum, a professional event requiring adequate space, accessibility, and basic dignity for attendees. Boxpark Camden, a street food market, offered none of these.

The DWP, symptomatic of its ‘The Thick Of It’ style corporate culture, decided to go cheap and secure the food hall’s grubby, rickety beer hall tables and bench seating on the second and third levels. There was no space to move. If you used a wheelchair, crutches, or had any mobility impairment, you could not have navigated the space at all. Access was via narrow staircases only. There were no accessible toilets. The noise was overwhelming, a cacophony that made conversation, let alone professional networking, nearly impossible. The food vendors I met weren’t very happy that their tables were occupied all day by companies (and consuming outside food) and the place packed with unemployed youth.

My case manager knows I have ASD and auditory processing difficulties so added a note on my file to say that a quiet space is required for my meetings. This environment was not merely unsuitable; it was actively hostile. I travelled over an hour and a half on two buses to reach it, despite my job coach’s insistence that the journey was shorter. DWP are notorious for this sort of support for disabled jobseekers: sending us to inaccessible, sensory-overloading spaces in the name of ‘opportunity’. I suppose my job coach has quotas to meet lest he end up back in the electronic dole queue behind me.

For a former event manager, the incompetence was staggering. The UK events industry, worth £68.7 billion in 2024, has been battered by Brexit with 82 percent of industry respondents reporting that leaving the EU negatively affected their business, and 67 percent experiencing significant or minor losses.

The damage is documented and severe. A Stanford study estimates that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6-8 percent, investment by 12-18 percent, and employment by 3-4 percent. The events sector saw losses of up to £1 million for individual companies. A major exhibition that drew 45,000 visitors annually moved from London to Barcelona. UK musicians have seen a 27 percent decline in small and medium-sized EU festival bookings, with 95 percent of affected artists experiencing decreased earnings.

The government’s own policies have helped hollow out a sector that once employed people like me. And yet when the DWP needs to organise an event, this is the best it can manage: a chaotic scramble in a food court which they probably got for free on a mid-week day in Camden.

Vicky Spratt writes warmly of hospitality roles ‘with training,’ care work, and paid experience on offer at this ramshackle event. What she does not interrogate is the quality of these jobs.

I spoke to the recruiters. Many of the ‘opportunities’ were barely really jobs at all, just the dregs of the labour market. Dishwashing in basement hotel kitchens. Zero-hour contracts in care. Jobs with such high turnover that employers attend fairs like this not out of social responsibility, but to factory farm disenfranchised young people and process them through. The symptom of an economy that has failed to provide meaningful work.

This is the ‘Youth Guarantee’ in practice: an £823 million scheme that offers employers £3,000 per hire, incentivising them to cycle through the cheapest possible labour rather than invest in genuine skills development. McFadden praises Marks & Spencer for creating 1,000 ‘training roles.’ He does not say what those roles pay, how long they last, or whether they lead anywhere. The structure of the scheme itself, paying employers to take on the long-term unemployed, creates a perverse incentive to treat young workers as subsidised, disposable inputs rather than human beings with futures.

Pat McFadden continues his spiel that ‘the narrative that says young people are shirkers and snowflakes … is wrong’. This is clever positioning. Rejecting the most overtly cruel rhetoric, he presents himself as the compassionate reformer and saviour. Actual policy direction reveals the same old coercion dressed in snake oil language.

McFadden describes hiring incentives and work experience placements as ‘welfare reform.’ He says the ‘best way into welfare reform’ is to ‘put work and opportunity at its heart’. This is not reform. This is the ideological enforcement of wage labour as the only legitimate form of existence.

But the Labour Party and the unions that founded it have always been occupied in trying to solve wages problems within capitalism, never questioning capitalism itself. The result? The problems multiply and become more complex and the armies of ‘solvers’ become larger and larger. There is not the slightest prospect that these people will solve the problems, because it is the very nature of wage-labour itself that causes the problems in the first place.

McFadden’s reform talks of cliff edges where people lose housing benefit if they enter work but his solution is not to question why housing should be contingent on employment at all. He speaks of ‘talking to people and working out how the government can help them to change their lives’ but the only change on offer is insertion into the labour market, on capital’s terms, at wages that do not cover the cost of living.

The right exam question, as McFadden puts it, is not how to assess what benefits people are entitled to. It is whether a system that forces millions to sell their labour power to survive while a tiny minority accumulates wealth from their subsequent labour is worth preserving at all.

Abolition of work

The young people Spratt interviews are not ‘snowflakes’. They are victims of a system that demands their labour while offering them precarity in return. Amina, the law graduate relying on Universal Credit who told the iPaper that ‘nobody replies’ to her applications, is not failing the labour market. The labour market is failing her. Brendan, who calls online applications a ‘black hole,’ is not lazy. He is alienated from a process that treats him as an input rather than a person.

The ‘black hole’ Brendan describes is not a glitch in the system. It is the system functioning as designed. Capitalism requires a reserve army of the unemployed applying for dozens, hundreds of jobs, hearing nothing back, to keep wages low and workers desperate. The DWP’s job fairs, with their chocolate bars and branded pens, are not an alternative to the black hole, they are it. To discipline the unemployed, making them visible, countable, and grateful for whatever scraps are offered

A genuine alternative would begin with the recognition that work as currently organised, serves capital not human need. What would society look like where housing, healthcare, education, or sustenance were not dependent on employment? Where the means of production were collectively owned and managed? Where the purpose of economic activity was the satisfaction of human needs rather than the accumulation of profit?

McFadden will never ask these questions. The Labour Party, committed to managing capitalism rather than transcending it, cannot ask them. But over a million young people classed as NEET, the highest figure since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, are to be herded through food courts and told that their problem is a lack of ‘opportunity’.

What Spratt won’t ask

Spratt’s article is not dishonest, but it is narrow. She does not ask why a jobs fair for young people was sending an experienced professional approaching her 40s to a youth event. She does not ask why the DWP chose a filthy Camden street food market over an accessible conference venue. She does not ask why the jobs on offer weren’t skilled careers but, overwhelmingly, low-wage, high-turnover positions where you’ll still be visiting food banks rather than skilled careers. She does not ask why a law graduate is on Universal Credit after six months of silence from employers. She does not ask why the ‘solution’ to youth unemployment is always more work, never less capitalism.

Spratt does not ask Pat McFadden whether the welfare system he oversees is designed to support people or to discipline them. Whether ‘work and opportunity at its heart’ is a promise or a threat.

In the end, McFadden’s ‘welfare reform’ is nothing more than an attempt to make wage-working seem more palatable, to dress coercion in the language of opportunity.

A.T.