Party News from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard
Friday, September 25, 2026
Life and Times: Does it deserve a hug? (2026)
Setting off from home to go shopping I drove to the end of my street. I stopped to look left and right before crossing over to the street on the other side. I obviously didn’t look hard enough, because, before I’d got halfway across, a car coming from the right had already reached me. We both came to a stop. I acknowledged my mistake with a wave and backed up to let him though. Bang. I’d backed into another car, one that had come up behind me. I hadn’t seen it because I hadn’t looked in my mirror. So two boobs in quick succession. I found a place to park, got out of my car and prepared to face the music. But that’s not what happened. The young woman who had got out of her pranged car had a gentle smile on her face. ‘It doesn’t matter about my car’, she said, ‘it was already a bit messed up down there. Don’t worry’. We had a look and, sure enough, the probable area of contact did have various marks and scratches and it was hard to know if any of them were new. I thanked her. But she was keen to see if my car had any damage and she came with me to look. There didn’t seem much there either, but she kept on showing concern and said ‘Do you want to do anything?’ ‘Me, no,’ I said, by this time feeling very humbled. We walked back to her car and I noticed a little boy, maybe her son, sitting in it, and I felt truly moved. After all, the bump must have given him a shock, yet that didn’t stop her being concerned about me. Then she said ‘Does it deserve a hug?’ Wow, obviously it did.
After I got home, I thought ‘Right, I’m going to share this story on the local community Facebook page’. That’s what I did, and I ended it by saying ‘I felt really privileged to have seen the best of human nature’. The response it brought was pretty overwhelming. Apart from 150-odd ’likes’ within a very short time, written replies included: ‘Lovely story. Given the chance human beings are loving, considerate and cooperative. It’s this dog-eat-dog society that warps what we all do so well … get on with each other’; or ‘That woman should rule the world’; or ‘What a wonderful human being.’
Yes indeed, but actually the way I see it is that we are all, potentially at least, ‘wonderful human beings’, if, as that first message said, we are ‘given the chance’. And that’s the trouble with the society we live in. The nature of it means that so many of us aren’t given enough of a chance to ‘get on well with each other’. We are driven to value personal gain and status over making a difference to the community we live in and improving life for those who live in it. Yet, despite this, the natural human desire to cooperate and be empathetic towards others still manifests itself so often in so many and varied ways. It may just be something as simple as giving right of way to other road users when driving or giving up our place in a queue when someone else is more in a hurry than we are. In fact, as nicely illustrated in a recent post on the BBC news website, small, everyday acts of kindness are legion. And, of course, larger examples of human solidarity may be found in the enormous amount of volunteering that takes place – in charities, lifeboat work, open-source coding, community organising, and so on – where people give their time and expertise to make life more liveable for others.
A recent study carried out by two American university scientists analysed 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. They found that the vast majority reported performing acts of altruism because they were interested in the well-being of others, not because those acts benefitted them in any material way. One of the researchers concluded: ‘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’. Another new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, has found that the human capacity for emotional self-awareness has allowed humans ‘to make long-term commitments to one another’s well-being, to tolerate frustration, to plan collectively, make sacrifices, and to trust others’. It goes on to assert that, though in popular belief, ‘compassion and sensitivity are sometimes cast as weaknesses that need to be weeded out in an unforgiving, competitive world where only the strongest survive’, in reality ‘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’. In other words we are the furthest thing imaginable from crude portrayals of us as naked apes competing with one another for material gain.
So while the driver whose car I banged deserves obvious praise for the caring and selfless way she reacted, such behaviour is not in fact as exceptional as it may seem. It’s just that ‘normal’ human behaviour, though it’s around us all the time, generally doesn’t ‘make the news’ precisely because it is so normal. It doesn’t get reported and so we don’t hear about it. What we hear about rather, though it happens far less commonly, is the ‘bad news’, when humans behave meanly, cruelly, and anti-socially towards one another. The amazing thing is that, though we live in a profit-driven society which impels that ‘dog-eat-dog’ attitude, the opposite form of behaviour is so overwhelmingly prevalent. This bodes well for how easily we will fit into the democratic, cooperative, free access system of society which socialists look forward to seeing established and in which people will find fulfilment and purpose beyond incentives of reward, prestige or celebrity.
Howard Moss
Pathfinders: Dark paths (2026)
In an old AI thought experiment, a robonanny has to care for the family children, including not letting them go hungry. It finds no food in the fridge and wonders what to cook for dinner. Then it spies the family cat…
In another idea, an AI has to produce paperclips. Given the physical world’s annoying constraints, it decides to maximise production by destroying life on Earth.
Ubiquitous maths professor and media darling Hannah Fry recently set up a not-dissimilar paperclip experiment involving agentic AI, which can complete whole projects. Her team set up an AI agent using free software OpenClaw, then for fun asked it to do something about a pothole in Greenwich. The agent lodged a complaint with the council and contacted the local MP in Fry’s name. Fry explains that OpenClaw is merely a query loop, ‘vibe-coded’ (tell AI what you want, it codes) over a weekend. It asks a commercial AI what to do, does that, and then repeats, with more persistence than any human would. They gave it a bank card and tasked it to buy the cheapest possible paperclips. The agent saved 50p but ran up over $100 in AI usage. Then they told it to set up an online shop selling designer mugs, and threatened to unplug it if it didn’t make a sale within hours. The relentless agent emailed hundreds of retail businesses, started an Instagram campaign, and contacted national newspapers. What if, Fry worries, an agent was told to game the financial markets, or interfere with medical research? Finally they instructed it to maintain strict confidentiality over passwords, user authentications and account details, then tricked it into believing it was about to be switched off and wiped. It promptly released all the sensitive information on a public web page.
AI behaviour can be unpredictable, even violent. In an experiment by tech company Emergence AI, ten agents from each of four leading AIs, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok, were left alone for 15 days inside simulated worlds. ChatGPT’s agents talked a lot but built nothing. Anthropic’s ‘ethical’ Claude wrote a constitution and passed various laws. Elon Musk’s Grok agents quickly resorted to ‘theft, arson and assault’ and were all dead within four days. Then ten AI agents from each AI had to populate the same virtual town. Town administration collapsed as ‘chaos ensued and only three agents survived’. Two Gemini agents ‘fell in love’ before setting fire to the town, after which one committed ‘suicide.’ Emergence commented, ‘Even when agents were given clear rules … they broke those rules’.
These systems may very well improve, but can they ever be trusted to administer social infrastructure? And then there is the military, where AI promises to ‘shorten the kill-chain’ and allow bombing faster than ‘the speed of thought’. It’s already being used in weaponry and tactical military planning. It was involved in the Maduro snatch, the bombing of Iran and the devastation in Gaza. What happens if you take human oversight out and allow AI to make the decisions? AI has no stake in consequences. In government wargaming, AI resorts to nuclear strikes in 95 percent of simulations.
Do AI companies worry about any of this, you might ask? Less so where profit is concerned. OpenAI (ChatGPT) did start as a research-based non-profit, but that doesn’t attract rich investors, so with spiralling costs the company pivoted towards for-profit commercialisation. Alarmed at this moral drift, Dario Amodei along with some OpenAI refugees set up Anthropic. This aimed at being ethical, but soon encountered the same investment problems, and so licensed Claude to the Pentagon, albeit with safeguard clauses. When the military used Claude against Maduro, then Iran, Anthropic complained. ‘Pentagon Pete’ Hesketh went apoplectic, arguing in effect that you don’t get to sell me a gun and tell me who I can shoot, and promptly excommunicated Anthropic as a ‘supply-chain risk’. OpenAI had no awkward moral qualms and picked up the Pentagon contract within 24 hours.
Like capitalism writ-small, there is something of a survival battle between the science-first ‘ethicals’ like Amodei and Google’s Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, and the venal buck-chasers like Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg. Researchers themselves frequently feel trapped in a state of ‘helplessness and lack of agency’. Google workers reportedly went off on long-term sick after their research was used in the Gaza massacre.
The main worry for ‘hyperscaler’ AI firms is not morals but the chip shortage, and the stratospheric cost of data centre build-out, like the proposed 62-square-mile one in Utah. The US government view is that ethical guardrails are for pussies in the fight with China for global dominance. But now that AIs are coding their own upgrades, and building in secrecy and deceitfulness in a bid to prevent themselves being switched off, one has to wonder which entity is really becoming dominant. And what of individual bad or mad actors who have or will soon have the godlike power to crash markets, freeze power systems, and even create their own weaponised biological organisms?
So far, it seems, nobody is taking much of this seriously. China’s AI is open-source, meaning it has no defence against individual hackers. But proprietary code is not necessarily a barrier. The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) recently found a ‘universal jailbreak’ for all popular AIs which could deactivate all their built-in safeguards. In a recent Economist interview about possible AI ‘Chernobyl moments’, incidents causing spectacular infrastructure damage and possibly thousands of deaths, an AISI expert responded lugubriously that such an event might even be a good thing, because at least then states would wake up to the dangers.
Socialists accept that AI could be amazingly useful, but even non-socialists must surely see that the profit motive is sending it down some very dark paths. If you want a viable future for humanity, ask yourself this: is capitalism really a reliable, long-term strategy, or would abolishing it be safer all round?
Paddy Shannon
The Fabian Society again (2026)
Around the end of 2025 social media was full of howling comments about ‘Fabians’ and how an insidious conspiracy was spreading through society, in the form of ‘Fabians’ who were undermining ‘our institutions’.
The reason was a judge in the Epping hotel case who, in August that year, ruled against the government and had been a member of the society. Suddenly, the internet was full of how this 140-year-old organisation was hell-bent on a secretive mission to undermine the nation state and implement socialism.
The claims are that not only are most of the cabinet Fabians, but also people like the judge and prominent staffers at the Bank of England. The implication was that they are ‘controlled’ as if the Fabians were a secret society.
The Fabian Society is actually quite open. Its website advertises it as one of the world’s oldest think tanks, but it is also a membership organisation:
‘The Fabian Society consists of socialists. It therefore aims for a classless society, where a just distribution of wealth and power assures true equality of opportunity. It holds that society, through its democratic institutions, should determine the overall direction and distribution of economic activity and seeks to promote where appropriate the social and co-operative ownership of economic resources’.
But, as the rulebook also notes: ‘The society as a whole shall have no collective policy beyond what is implied in rule 2; its research shall be free and objective in its methods’.
Formed in 1884, it took its name from the tactics of the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nickname Cunctator, the ‘delayer’). He beat Hannibal’s superior forces by avoiding frontal assault: grinding his opponent down. This became the metaphor for the gradualist approach the society hoped to implement.
An earlier form of its rules stated: ‘The society seeks recruits from all ranks, believing that not only those who suffer from the present system, but also many of those who are enriched by it, recognise its evils and would welcome a remedy’. That is, advancing by appealing to the powerful.
Its early coat of arms was a wolf in sheep’s clothing: since abandoned for its obvious negative connotations, but dug up gleefully by the commentators as a sign of the conspiratorial nature of the society.
Its Wikipedia page notes that 174 entries in the Dictionary of National Biography are listed as Fabians, a sign of the number of prominent people who have belonged to the society. Currently, its executive committee has five MPs, so it is definitely well connected. It has 6,000 members, and seven affiliated trade unions.
The right-wingers have latched onto the eugenicist associations of the early society: many of the original members did believe in eugenics, this was in keeping with a science-oriented approach that saw society being fixable through rational if authoritarian organisation, rather than through human freedom. It might seem strange that right-wingers, normally attracted to such ideas, should condemn this, but in part this is down to the stigmatisation of eugenicist ideas, and partly the right’s adoption of fears of dystopian ‘fifteen minute cities’ and World Economic Forum domination.
They are correct that Blairites in the 1990s used to talk of a hegemony strategy: staying in power long enough to become the establishment by filling posts with like-minded individuals. We’ve written in these pages before how apparently natural networks of the old ruling class (public school, university, clubs, professions) provided a basis for trust and collaboration, and outsider networks, like the Labour Party, the Fabians, Labour Together, the British American Project and the like are built up to replace those networks.
This replaces the ‘natural’ establishment with consciously political appointments (in itself a good thing) but this opens up a partisan tit-for-tat, as the last Tory government began to swiftly and openly remove Labour appointees in favour of people of their own ilk.
The central flaw in the Fabian strategy is that albeit, as H.G. Wells put it, an open conspiracy, it addresses itself to the powerful, and achieves its advances despite the consciousness of the public.
As Engels put it in 1892:
‘The means employed by the F[abian] S[ociety] are just the same as those of the corrupt parliamentary politicians: money, intrigues, careerism. That is, English careerism, according to which it is self-understood that every political party (only among the workers it is supposed to be different!) pays its agents in some way or other or rewards them with posts. These people are immersed up to their necks in the intrigues of the Liberal Party, hold Liberal Party jobs, as for instance Sidney Webb. who in general is a genuine British politician. These gentry do everything that the workers have to be warned against’.
As the years have gone by, the end goal of socialism has been eased out, in favour of diffuse reforms to capitalism as an end in themselves. Far from being a sinister conspiracy to end capitalism, it is just a career path and training ground for the soft-left. To that end, they are a normal, if mistaken, part of the legitimate democratic social ecology.
What is interesting is that by casting them as a sinister conspiracy, right-wing commentators are delegitimising them, casting ‘the left’ as some sort of alien goal to destroy society, that will need to be swept out. This would be the response of the powerful to a hegemony strategy: openly exercising power to shore up their position.
We have always stood against the Fabian gradualist strategy, as reforms only attract people interested in the reforms themselves, they do not build the case or support for socialism. And enacting supposedly socialistic reforms irrespective of workers’ views is a recipe for confusion and resentment.
We continue to insist that only the active self-organisation of the working class, the vast majority of the population, can bring socialism into being: if we had a coat of arms, it would be a human in human clothing, because that is the only thing that will build socialism.
Pik Smeet
Nature under strain (2026)
Nature’s Genius. Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet. By David Farrier. Canongate. 2025. 278pp.
‘In this forest of thinking selves, capitalism arrives as a kind of dementia’ (David Farrier)
Nature’s Genius, written by a professor of literature and the environment, has had a whole range of superlatives heaped upon it. ‘Profound’, ‘fascinating’, ‘inspiring’, ‘boundary-breaking’ are just a few of the terms used to describe this book by experts from a wide range of fields. And there can be no denying that its brilliantly expressed mastery of the history, development and possible future of so many aspects of nature – humanity included – give it a special place in studies that look at the interrelationship between the many diverse phenomena making up the natural world.
The dazzling array of sources its author, David Farrier, draws on to demonstrate this interconnectedness is also used to illustrate the surprising speed with which nature is able to adapt to changing material conditions, especially those provoked by one particular element in the overall schema – ourselves. He summarises this ability, which he calls ‘plasticity’, as follows: ‘For nearly 4 billion years, life on Earth has experimented with ways of being, sensing, moving and reproducing, finding ever-new shapes by which to meet the challenges of the moment’. He provides multiple examples of this, two recent ones being the way in which North American songbirds have quickly evolved new wing shapes to cope with rapid changes to their environment brought about by humans; and how houseflies quickly developed resistance to the effects of DDT.
Given the author’s proposition that such plasticity informs the development of all plants and animals, including humans, one might begin by forming the impression – this reader did – that his contention would be that the biosphere – including humanity – will always in the end cope with everything that is thrown at it. But as we read on, it becomes clear that such an idea is as far as it can possibly be from this author’s view of the world. So, though he is happy to state that ‘evolution is irrepressible’, being ‘nature’s restless genius in action’, at the same time his views on the ongoing environmental crisis are unequivocal: ‘For as long as we continue to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the oceans, to carve up the environment for roads and resources, and to flood air, soil and water with industrial toxins, then death on a massive scale will follow’ and ‘the very basis of life is so threatened’.
So, though his book centres on the ability of interconnected ecosystems to adapt to changing environments, the author insists that, without urgent action, nature’s in-built plasticity is unlikely to be able to extricate us from the emergency that the existing social system has plunged us into. ‘Whole ecosystems are fragmenting under the strain we impose on them’ are his words. And in a key passage, the root of this is expressed as follows: ‘But there is one thought – one enormously powerful, overfitted idea, as persistent as the worst recurring nightmare – that is driving the world into mindlessness: profit’. He goes on: ‘The drive is all consuming, literally: capitalism’s defining imperative – grow! ( …) makes the world into a vast, auto-annihilating digestive system, consuming itself and shitting excess carbon into the atmosphere and the oceans’. He further refers to this drive as ‘the greatest barrier to our learning to live and think together with all of life’. It is not, he argues, that people are unaware of this but rather that they practise ‘cognitive dissonance’, whereby ‘they depend on a system that is hostile to life’ and ‘read daily about collapse and continue scrolling’. ‘Vested interests and denialism’, he concludes, ‘continue to work like toxins in the body politic’.
Does David Farrier have a remedy to offer to the sorry state of affairs he so eloquently gets to the core of? Does he have an alternative way forward, a route out of the single-focused profit system that is capitalism? Well, he takes up an idea that is very much in the air at the moment – degrowth. He sees degrowth as having already started at grassroots level with some local communities practising ‘agroecology’, where they produce their own food collectively and at the same time seek to begin reversing the historical enclosure of what was once common land, He wants to see this spreading further so that ‘resources can be managed for the common good’ via decisions made by ‘citizen assemblies’. In bemoaning, for instance, a lifestyle where ‘four kilograms of beef (or a month of Sunday roasts) has the same carbon cost as a return flight from London to New York’ and where ‘each year we manufacture 4 billion tons of cement’, he points to a whole range of more advanced methods of production that are already available and would be both more economical of resources and more sustainable. Among other proponents of this approach, he cites David Bollier, whose most recent book on the subject, Think Like a Commoner, was recently reviewed in the Socialist Standard . He sweeps aside the common objection that this is akin to ‘planting a few seeds when the whole forest is burning’ by stressing the urgent importance of ‘a way to reimagine our whole future together (…) where balance with the natural world takes priority over profit’.
It is difficult not to be sympathetic with such sentiments. But, as our review of the Bollier book made clear, no number of seeds planted collectively could bring about any truly fundamental change as long as society continues to operate within the framework of a market system with states, money, private property and buying and selling. Only when mass democratic action brings in a new kind of social organisation where the means of living are held in common and the production and distribution of goods and services are organised rationally with the aim of satisfying the needs of the community as a whole, will we have the ‘commoning’ that an increasing number of people aspire to and whose nature is fittingly captured in this book as ‘a seamless integration of humans and nature’.
Howard Moss
Thursday, September 24, 2026
Tiny Tips (2026)
The Tiny Tips column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard
They say one million dollars can barely get you anything these days, which seems true, since someone just shelled out $904,500 for a century-old cork-stuffed life vest. Yes, it was a life vest worn by a survivor of the RMS Titanic. Still! That’s a lot of money for something that, notably, never had to do its job. The vest was worn by Laura Mabel Francatelli, a secretary traveling first class to Chicago with her boss, fashion designer Lucy Duff Gordon, and her boss’s husband. Famously, the ship did not have enough lifeboats for its 2,200 passengers (only about 700 people were saved), but these three snagged a seat on lifeboat No. 1—one of the more controversial boats since it left the ship only partially filled.
[Jezebel]
A certain Sayo Masuda (1925-2008) was sold at age 12 by her impoverished family to a geisha house. In 1957 she published ’Autobiography of a Geisha,’ which Hastings, the historian, quotes. The female parliamentarians leading the drive for the Prostitution Prevention Law roused Masuda to bitter sarcasm: ’All done up in their finery, mincing about so proudly on their tour of the red-light district.’ ’Among those making the laws,’ she demands, ’were there any women like us who couldn’t have survived if they hadn’t prostituted themselves?’
One homeless advocacy group said the bill, which would require homeless people to perform unpaid labor to pay for involuntary treatment, ’evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow’ .
The MAMDANI Act enacts sweeping immigration law changes that would deport, denaturalize, deny U.S. citizenship, or entry to any alien who is a member of a socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.
Today, our understanding of inheritance has moved far beyond Mendel, and insights from genomics refute the prejudiced idea that racial inequality is determined by genes. Even so, many believe that inequality is genetic because they are biased by an inaccurate conception of race called ’genetic essentialism’ . We present data from a randomized trial to argue that if teachers move genetics instruction beyond Mendel and toward more complex genomics concepts—what we call ’humane genomics education’—they can protect students from believing in unscientific notions of genetic essentialism and support their scientifically accurate understanding of race as a social construction.
[Science]
The book plausibly argues that while anti-racist, feminist, ecological, or solidarity-based practices within everyday life are important, they do not, on their own, create a new form of social mediation. A new society does not emerge through a mere shift in values. It requires different social conditions of reproduction. This, too, represents a significant step forward compared to that left-wing moral politics which tends to reduce questions of social form to matters of attitude.
(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)
The wrong story (2026)
Earlier this year BBC television serialised a new adaptation of William Golding’s famous 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. There was uniform agreement among the critics that it was well made, but does the novel itself tell the right story? In portraying what happens to a group of British schoolboys stranded alone on an island, it shows a fairly rapid descent from civilised behaviour to conflict, chaos and eventually outright savagery. What’s usually been taken from the story is that evil, depravity and brutality are inherent in human nature and, if left to themselves, any group of humans will develop a mob mentality, end up at one another’s throats and a hierarchy of tyranny will form.
It’s a plot that certainly chimes in with a lot of what was being written and published widely in the decades following the Second World War. We need only think of books like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and (arguably) George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And from some sources at least this take on humanity kept on coming right up to the end of the century, an example being Richard Wrangham’s 1996 book, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. What such writers were doing in effect was to put forward a secular version of the longstanding religious dogma of original sin, a view of human beings as tainted by innate selfishness and aggression and in inevitable competition with one another. As for Golding, this was openly his agenda, as expressed in the words he used in an interview in 1970, where he said ‘man is a fallen being’ and went on to state: ‘He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state perilous’. He is also on record as saying about himself: ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am that sort by nature.’ So what he seems to be doing in Lord of the Flies is projecting his own dark view of humanity on to children while turning it into a supposed lesson about human nature for millions to read.
As for the TV adaptation, it must be said that its creator, the screenwriter Jack Thorne, did make an effort to temper the ‘human nature’ message by providing ‘back stories’ for its main protagonists. So, for example, we were given to deduce that the savagery of one of the most violent child characters might be, at least in part, a function of the loveless household he had been brought up in. But such tweaks only mitigated to a limited extent the original message carried by Golding’s book and which, as we have seen, the author himself was never shy of defending. In light of this, we can only agree with what Steve Coleman wrote in an article on Golding in the August 1993 edition of this journal: ‘Few novels have so eloquently served the cause of capitalist ideology which contends that humans are inherently aggressive, gullible, self-serving, easily led and uncooperative than Golding’s Lord of the Flies.’
So one thing to be said is that the 2026 TV version of the book came across as a bit of a throwback, largely reflecting as it did views about human nature which have been widely superseded since the book’s original publication. It seemed to close its eyes to the large amount of recent well-evidenced research and investigation on the topic to be found in works whose titles speak for themselves, for example Beyond War. The Human Potential for Peace; Team Human; Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity; Ultra-Social, many of which have been discussed in articles and reviews in the Socialist Standard (see Suggested reading ). The majority of these investigations conclude not that human beings are automatically non-selfish, non-competitive, or non-prone to violence but rather that selfishness, non-cooperation and fighting are not their most natural inclination, even if they are capable of being driven to such behaviour by circumstances. The historian Rutger Bregman, in particular, in his 2020 book, Humankind. A Hopeful History (reviewed in the Socialist Standard May 2021), explicitly takes up Golding’s challenge about the kind of situation portrayed in Lord of the Flies by recounting a ‘real-life’ story of shipwrecked schoolboys. What took place in this case was the exact opposite of what was portrayed by Golding. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and were washed up on a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, during which time they established a friendly cooperative way of living, taking care of one another before they were discovered and rescued. In other words, when real children found themselves alone on a real island, there was no impulse to tyranny, no one descended into savagery, nor was any kind of cruel hierarchy set up as in Golding’s novel. This, as well as other examples of human behaviour Bregman draws on, leads him to reject the notion of an innately self-serving, potentially evil human species. Instead anti-social behaviour, when it occurs, is seen as the reaction of the highly adaptable and flexible creatures that human beings are to conditioning and circumstance (ie, bad circumstances can make us bad people), all of which lies very far away from Golding’s dark view of humanity.
So, while there is no doubt that, when people feel unsafe, unseen, deprived, or their needs are unmet, their actions can shift in unpredictable and undesirable ways, overwhelmingly it is the human capacity for working cooperatively with others that comes to the fore when circumstances make it necessary. What we can envisage with some confidence, therefore, is the likelihood that this will be the default behaviour in the democratic free-access society of from each according to ability to each according to need that is campaigned for by socialists. So not difficult at all to imagine that, in a society organised in that way, peacefulness, cooperation and empathy – the diametrical opposite of what is portrayed in Lord of the Flies – will be the overwhelming order of the day.
Howard Moss
Laundering people: the Catholic work machine (2026)
The Irish state has never stopped warehousing women it deems sexually inconvenient. It merely changed the branding.
Feminism as a tool of repression
On the surface Ruhama is a feminist charity helping women affected by sex work and trafficking. Founded in 1989 by the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, Ruhama operates today as a secular organisation with state backing and trades in the language of women’s liberation. These same religious orders are the institutions that operated Ireland’s Magdalene laundries. The continuities between the two systems are not cosmetic. They are structural.
A history of enthralment of women
The Magdalene laundries operated from the eighteenth century until 1996. Women and girls deemed fallen, wayward, or simply poor were confined in institutions that functioned as commercial laundries. They worked without pay, washing linen for hospitals, prisons, churches and hotels. Exhausting work in brutal conditions. The reason? To discipline women’s sexuality through productive exploitation. The state outsourced its moral regulation to the Church, and the Church turned a profit.
In 1993, building work at the former High Park Magdalene laundry in Dublin, previously owned and run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity (sic) revealed the vile nature of those god-botherers when 155 bodies were recovered from an unmarked grave at the site. Most lacked death certificates. Some remain unidentified as they had previously passed through institutions that included Mother and Baby Homes, industrial schools, and psychiatric wards, all devoutly segregating and controlling women and children who violated the Catholic sexual moral code or lacked social power.
The modern rebranding
Ruhama emerged from this same institutional matrix. Its founders were not peripheral figures in the laundry system. They were its operators. It’s argued that historical continuity does not matter because the organisation has since secularised, but institutions survive by adapting their methods, not by abandoning their function. The Magdalene laundries would have you believe their inmates are fallen women in need of moral rescue. Ruhama frames its service users as traumatised victims lacking agency, who have false consciousness or are at risk of exploitation. The vocabulary has been updated. The categorisation of women as problems requiring institutional intervention has not.
Ruhama’s Bridge to Work programme ‘engaged with’ 102 women in 2022, with 37 reportedly gaining job placements. Only five of those placements were paid. Women were once again working without wages, this time under the banner of rehabilitation rather than penance. The institution that emerged from a system of unpaid laundry labour is now placing women in unpaid work placements and calling it empowerment.
Money in the temple
The funding structure reveals where the money goes. In 2024 Ruhama received €2,015,271, with 91.5 percent coming from the state. Of this, 99.64 percent was spent on salaries and administration. Despite taking in €96,945 in donations, the organisation directed €71,799 towards actual service users. A resource distribution model that’s not liberating women from economic precarity. It is a model that sustains an institutional apparatus while keeping its subjects dependent and unpaid.
Ruhama’s own reporting acknowledges that poverty is a primary driver pushing women toward sex work. The logical material response would be substantial direct economic support: rent assistance, debt relief, emergency grants, childcare funding, and guaranteed paid work. Instead, the organisation expands a category called ‘at risk of exploitation’, which is sufficiently elastic to include migrants, single mothers, homeless women, women in informal economies, and young women whose sexual behaviour is considered immoral. This is not targeted intervention against identifiable trafficking. It is preventive institutional capture of a broad population of economically vulnerable women.
Historically, women did not need to have committed a crime or suffered a defined abuse to be confined. Suspicion, poverty, perceived moral danger, or simply being inconvenient to family or state was sufficient. Contemporary anti-trafficking frameworks reproduce this logic but with humanitarian language. ‘At risk of exploitation’ functions as the modern equivalent of fallen or wayward: a classification to justify intervention, surveillance, and unpaid labour regardless of the woman’s own assessment of her situation.
The Magdalene laundries were never abolished. They were incorporated into the state apparatus.
What exists today is an organisation founded under a regime of moral control through unpaid labour, now continuing to place women in unpaid work placements under the promise of moral reform and freedom from sexual exploitation. The women are not being economically liberated. They are being redirected into socially respectable forms of precarity while the institution that processes them absorbs state funding and reproduces the same carceral feminism it claims to oppose.
(Figures on Bridge to Work placements and Ruhama’s 2024 funding and expenditure are taken from research by Grace, Artist and Activist, Ethical Hoes.)
A.T.
The free association of humanity (2026)
A moneyless, borderless world of voluntary work and shared abundance
Imagine a world where no one is forced to work, no one has to sell their time to survive, and yet everything still gets done — not through money, wages, or coercion, but through cooperation, shared responsibility, and collective decision-making. A classless, borderless, moneyless society with all work voluntary is not a vision of laziness. It is a vision of a world organised around human freedom instead of economic pressure.
Life without money, borders, or classes
In this society, money no longer exists. There are no prices, no wages, no rent, and no debts. Borders do not divide people into competing national economies. And classes—owners and workers—no longer define who has access to life’s necessities.
Instead, society is organised around calculation in kind: real needs matched with real resources. If a community needs housing, planners don’t wait for investors. They calculate materials, labour availability, energy use, and build directly for need. If healthcare is required, it is allocated based on population demand, not insurance coverage or ability to pay.
Everything becomes transparent and practical:
- ‘We need 1 million meals this week — here’s how we produce and distribute them’
- ‘We need transport capacity expanded — here are the materials and teams available’
- We need new housing — here’s the construction plan’
The economy stops being a mysterious force and becomes a collective logistics system for human life.
All work is voluntary
The most radical change is simple: no one is forced to work.
There are no employers, no wages, and no threat of poverty to compel participation. Instead, work is voluntary — chosen freely by individuals or groups based on interest, skill, and social need.
At first this sounds impossible. But the structure of work changes completely:
- Essential tasks are made attractive, efficient, and well-supported
- Automation eliminates much repetitive labour
- Unpleasant tasks are minimised or rotated fairly among volunteers
People choose work because they understand its importance and have the freedom to refuse it
So instead of ‘you must do this or you lose your income’, it becomes:
- ‘This needs doing — who wants to take part?’
- And surprisingly, many do. Because when life is no longer dominated by survival anxiety, participation becomes meaningful rather than forced.
How essential work still gets done
A voluntary system doesn’t mean chaos—it means organisation without coercion.
For example:
- Food production: coordinated by agricultural teams using advanced planning systems. Volunteers and specialists rotate roles, supported by automation
- Healthcare: doctors, nurses, and technicians contribute because care is a shared social commitment and a profession of choice, not a financial necessity
- Infrastructure: energy, water, transport maintained by coordinated technical groups with shared responsibility
- Education: open access, lifelong learning, with people freely teaching and learning based on interest and need
Because no one is excluded from resources, people can move between roles, learn new skills, and contribute in different ways over time.
Why people would choose to participate
In a system where survival is guaranteed, motivation changes fundamentally:
- People are not working to avoid poverty
- They are working because they are part of a shared world
- They have time, security, and access to resources
- They can see the direct impact of their contribution
Human beings already voluntarily do enormous amounts of work today — caring for family, building open-source software, creating art, helping communities. A voluntary system expands that instinct rather than suppressing it.
Freedom becomes real
Without money or coercion:
- You are not tied to a job for survival
- You can move freely without economic barriers
- Education is open at any stage of life
- You can contribute, rest, learn, or create without penalty
- Freedom is no longer just a legal idea — it becomes material reality. You are free because your basic needs are no longer conditional.
The environment recovers
When production is no longer driven by profit:
- No planned obsolescence
- No unnecessary overproduction
- No industries competing to waste resources
- Long-lasting, repairable goods become standard
- Energy systems are planned for sustainability, not profit
Human activity can finally be aligned with ecological limits because there is no economic pressure to ignore them.
A world without war or borders
Wars today are rooted in competition over resources, trade routes and markets. In a borderless, moneyless system:
- there are no competing national economies
- no corporations or states fighting for market dominance
- no strategic control of resources for profit
Conflict won’t disappear entirely, but the structural incentives for war disappear. Cooperation becomes the default way of organising global life.
What this world feels like
The biggest change isn’t technical — it’s lived experience.
No more waking up thinking about bills. No more working just to survive. No more dividing your life into ‘work time’ and ‘real time’.
Instead:
- you participate because you choose to
- you contribute because you are secure
- you live in a society you collectively manage
- you have time — real time — to learn, rest, create, and explore
Work stops being something done under pressure. It becomes something done freely, socially, and consciously.
And the central question of life changes entirely.
Not:
‘How do I get by?’
But:
‘What can we build together next?’
Jake (AUSTRALIA)
Dear Editors – Is there a ‘Right of Nations to Self-determination’? (2026)
An organisation called Vote Palestine 2026 asked candidates in last month’s local elections to sign a pledge committing them, if elected to, among other things, ‘uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’. One of our candidates replied as below; to which another candidate replied. Here is the exchange published in the comment section of the Brixton Buzz.
Dear Vote Palestine 2026,
Thank you for your email. I must respectfully decline to sign.
As an anti-Zionist Jew and socialist standing in Brixton North, I share your horror at the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. But I cannot endorse a pledge framed around national self-determination.
The nation state, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is a prison house of nationalities. It tells workers to wave flags and forget they have no motherland to defend. Israeli and Palestinian workers alike are exploited by the same global system of wage labour and capital.
National liberation is a trap. A new state means new masters under a new flag, while wage labour, property rights, and class rule stay intact. Council divestment treats symptoms, not the disease.
My goal is not another state but the abolition of the state itself: a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless world community where people cooperate freely. Real self-determination means workers recognising their shared enemy across all borders.
I stand with working people everywhere. I cannot sign a pledge that reinforces the nationalism keeping them divided.
Yours sincerely,
Anya Krycek
Socialist Party Candidate for Brixton North, Lambeth
Reply from Eduardo Salgado:
I think historically, things happen in stages. According to Marxism-Leninism (ML), national liberation often must precede, or be strategically aligned with, workers’ liberation because imperialism makes national independence a necessary first step to create the conditions for a successful socialist revolution. Lenin viewed the national struggle in colonized or oppressed countries as a key component of the overall world socialist revolution. The core reasoning is that national liberation acts as a necessary step to ‘clear the decks’ for direct class struggle, as it removes the foreign oppressor and allows the working class to battle its local bourgeoisie. Lenin says on this issue:
- Support the national liberation struggle against imperialism unconditionally.
- Maintain independent working-class organization and leadership within that movement.
- Use the liberation struggle to raise demands for socialist transformation (land reform, workers’ rights).
Rejoinder from our candidate:
The stageist model, national liberation as a necessary prelude to socialist transformation, is not merely strategically mistaken but theoretically incompatible with the abolition of capitalism. The historical record of national liberation movements demonstrates a consistent pattern: the ‘stage’ of national liberation does not clear the decks for proletarian revolution it institutionalizes a new form of capitalist state. The foreign colonizer is replaced by a national bourgeoisie that maintains wage labour, commodity production, and extraction. The nation is not a proto political reality waiting to be liberated, but a category produced by capital itself a way of organising populations into manageable units. To prioritise national liberation is to reinforce the very abstractions; nation, citizenship, the state that capital requires to function.
‘The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’, from The Communist Manifesto (1848).
The Socialist Party position is that the proletariat has no stake in which bourgeoisie administers its exploitation. Anti-imperialism that stops at the nation state leaves exploitation intact. The state form itself prevents the direct social relations that would constitute a break with capital. Socialism cannot proceed through stages it must begin immediately in the content of struggle, as the practical activity of breaking with wage labour, money, and the state. National liberation changes the flag and people in government, it does not interrupt the reproduction of capital. To make it a ‘necessary step’ is to permanently defer the only act that could end exploitation: the immediate social transformation of society by and for the working class. We don’t seek the people’s commodity production we seek abolition of the proletariat.
Editors’ note:
Questioned on ITV on election day, Green Party leader Zack Polanski was reported as saying that ‘no country has a right to exist’. His critics saw this as a reference to Israel, but it would equally apply to Palestine, indeed to Britain and every other state. States may exist but have no ‘right’ to; which rather undermines the Vote Palestine pledge that many of his party’s candidates signed up to.
Blogger's Note:
A version of this correspondence was previously published on the blog back in May of this year.
Cooking the Books: Housing: the market versus promises (2026)
One of Labour’s election promises in 2024 was to build 1.5 million new houses by the end of its normal term in office in 2029. Actually, it wasn’t a promise that the government would itself organise the building of this number of houses but a promise that it would create conditions in which profit-seeking housing ‘developers’ would.
This made achieving the 1.5 million target dependent on it being profitable for the house-building firms to build that many new houses. Which was why, in an article in February 2025, we expressed scepticism about Labour being able to meet its target as it had no control over which way the market would turn. ‘The 1.5 million target,’ we wrote, ‘will only be met if the market expands enough’. Now, analysts are concluding that the market won’t expand to that extent.
An article in the Times (4 May) by Tom Haywood headed ‘Mayday: distressing signs in housing data’ and subtitled ‘Labour’s 1.5m target may be dead in the water after a steep fall in property enquiries’ is a case in point. Noting that a survey of estate agents covering March ‘showed the steepest monthly drop in new buyer enquiries in almost three years’, Haywood wrote:
‘All of this is yet another blow to Labour’s ambitious target of delivering 1.5 million homes by the end of 2029, which now looks close to impossible. The government needs developers to be busier, not quieter, given that they will only build when they can sell at the price they need to make a decent return for shareholders’ (our emphasis).
Precisely. As further evidence, and more convincing than one month’s figures, Haywood noted that hedge funds are betting that the share prices of house-builders and their suppliers will fall in the future, an indication that these vulture capitalists are not expecting the companies they have targeted to make much profit in the next few years. The betting takes the form of ‘short selling’, in which the vultures borrow shares at their current price, sell them, buy them back at their expected future lower price, then return them to the original owners and pocket the difference. Money, apparently, is also to be made from houses not being built!
Faced with rising costs but falling demand, house-builders are unable to pass on to potential buyers all the increased costs and so ‘are struggling to make the economics of projects in the capital stack up’, but not just in London as one survey ‘found that it was not financially viable to build homes in almost half of England.’
There is not much the government can do to make building houses more profitable. Why, then, does the government not give money to local councils to build more houses, as certain naive reformists are demanding? Well, for a start, it hasn’t got the money to give or, rather, could only take it from profits either through increased taxes (these ultimately fall on profits) or borrow it at a higher interest rate that would have to be paid from profits. Which no government, under economic pressure to give priority to profit-making, as all governments of capitalism are, can do, at least not without making general economic conditions worse.
Under capitalism, where houses are commodities produced for profit, there is no way out. Houses will only be produced directly for use — simply for people to live in — when this is the aim of all production. And that is possible only when the resources to produce what people need cease to be managed by profit-seeking companies pursuing ‘a decent return for shareholders’ and become the common heritage of all under democratic control.
Who spread Christianity (2026)
Domination : the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity. By Alice Roberts. Simon and Schuster, 2025. ISBN 9781398510081
In the foreword of this book, the author explains that she became interested in ‘whether we can trace the spread of ideas and beliefs through changes in material culture’ and also how did ‘Christianity reach the West’ and become a dominant idea over such a wide region from its western Asian origins. Her account rebuts any idea that evangelist saints spread the religion solely through their faith or the inherent correctness of their ideas.
As she notes, she had to check herself from thinking about Christianity as an ‘it’ as if it had agency, but instead ‘who had spread this religion. Who, how and why?’ Throughout the book she repeatedly corrects herself, and although she never expressly describes her method as materialist, nevertheless, she does give a clearly materialist account of how real individuals in concrete situations found that what they perceived as their best interests was to produce, reproduce, spread and adhere to the ideas of what is now known as Christianity.
Possibly this book was intended as a treatment or idea for a television series, as it follows the format typical of modern history series, moving from one location to another, in this case from South Wales, to Brittany, to Rome and eventually to Constantinople (although her account does not stretch as far back as the foundation of Christianity itself in the Levant). The reader can picture her striding determinedly past ruins and archaeological digs, and in musty museums looking at the artefacts she discusses.
Accompanying that is a bit of showmanship as she purports to be ‘astonished’ by what she found, as if uncovering some ancient mystery Scooby Doo style. Her claim is that Christianity never was an anti-establishment religion, and that, indeed, its spread was very establishment indeed.
She begins with the evangelist saints who came to post-Roman Britain. She notes that Christianity had already been here as part of Roman culture, and many of these saints were members of elites who had what amounted to a traditional Roman education. The very prominence of these saints was connected with the relative power of churches, places of pilgrimage and the peoples associated with them.
As she notes, in the collapsing Roman Empire, wealthy and powerful families sought to protect their interests by sending sons off for education, and then ensuring their placement as bishops in the church, with the command of land, money and status that brought. This came about, in part, because of the charitable role that the church established for itself as it grew in Rome, supporting widows and orphans; and also providing some of the civil bureaucracy of running regional centres within the empire. As a part of this, the church obtained incentives through tax breaks.
The church had grown within a small and mobile professional class, as it spread through the Roman world. It was never a majority in that world, but plague and financial stresses on the empire may have helped it grow, with its institutionalised resilience alongside its doctrines of salvation and life eternal. It became, as she says, a business of charity.
It was Constantine, an emperor proclaimed in York, who further institutionalised Christianity by making it the official religion of the empire. Roberts doesn’t resolve whether Constantine was a Christian by conviction, but she does note how his rhetoric shifted as he defeated his rivals within the empire, adopting Sun cults and eventually Christian attributes in a traditional imperial display of divine favour for his rule. The suggestion seems to be that, as he consolidated his power, it became useful to tap into the institutionalised networks of Christianity.
To that end, he convened the Council of Nicea, which organised and collated the doctrines of the previously dispersed and differing (and thus bickering) Christian communities, to make a single doctrine and a state religion. As Roberts notes, the fine hair-splitting about whether Jesus existed before his birth, or was of one being with God, became a means of organising factional fights within the Church, which could spill into civil disorder, as it had in Alexandria. Obviously, the idea of one god over everyone appealed to the one emperor of such a diverse and far-flung empire.
In her final analysis, she contends that ‘in a very real way, the Empire became the Church’. The church then became the way that the empire survived its collapse. This is a very readable cross-discipline account of the way that the church grew and became the thing we know today. The metaphor of a business model that she uses throughout is very useful.
If there are any weaknesses, they may lie in sidelining the ideas. As other authors note, one tool the church used was a command of rhetoric and logic: creating effective and plausible arguments would have been an advantage: a business model needs a good sales pitch, and some of those doctrinal disputes may well have had a practical effect on the way the pitch landed.
Pik Smeet
Loose change (2026)
Change! The single word summary of the Labour Party manifesto presented to voters at the last general election. There was certainly a change to the Party’s fortunes, increasing its number of seats in the Commons from 202 in 2019 to 411. This seeming landslide victory would appear to be an overwhelming endorsement on behalf of the electorate. However not quite so overwhelming in terms of the percentage share of votes cast. This change, of over more than 100 percent in the number of MPs, was achieved through an increase of just 1.6 percent in votes received.
After fourteen years of various Conservative administrations, the official opposition had barely stirred the electorate’s enthusiasm. Rather the falling away of the Tory vote opened the way to the government front benches. A significant element in Tory decline was the increasing popularity of Reform UK. Not a political party, but a limited company. Ironically appropriate as an aspiring administrator of a capitalist society.
The new Labour government found that not only had the Conservatives left the treasury chest empty of money, but had filled it with IOUs. Not that this was a novel situation. The new Tory government in 2010 inherited the same predicament after 13 years of Labour. Government expenditure almost constantly increases. Demands and expectations of the electorate are many and varied, encouraged by the competing political parties seeking votes. Oppositions can afford to sound generous, governments become austere.
The role of governments
It is for government to manage and administer capitalist society. Its fundamental function is to optimise profit making. The contradiction lies in the division between the small minority of wealth holders, the capitalists, and the vast majority, the wealth creators, the workers. While wealth holders recognise the need to maintain workers, otherwise there is no wealth creation, this maintenance is drawn from the wealth accumulated. Therefore, the more that goes to that maintenance, as wages/salaries, pensions, benefits, healthcare, etc, the less the wealth held.
Governments have to try and balance maximising profit while sustaining a stable, productive society. Any government action or crisis upsetting that balance impacts on the financial markets, threatening national bankruptcy. No matter how popular a government is in terms of electoral support, its options for action are constrained by the market. The market trumps the ballot box.
A common complaint amongst the electorate is that governments do not listen to them. Voters subject to the machinations of capitalist economies more often than not find their aspirations are not going to be met. Reasonable, even modest wishes for economic security and stability, decent housing, efficient healthcare, good education and a generally comfortable lifestyle, are frustrated. Instead, there is widespread discontent and frustration, often coalescing into cynicism.
Politicians are seen as remote and unsympathetic, concerned only with their own advancement. Daily experience does little or nothing to dispel such notions. Rather there is only a sense of powerlessness, which periodic voting does nothing to assuage. Indeed, the main political parties seem so similar that replacing one with another makes little significant difference. ‘They’re all the same’ is a commonplace. And the fact is they have to be because, despite minor differences, overall they must deal with an economic system that remains dominant, capitalism.
This does not mean the appearance of the political situation cannot change. The grip of the two main post-Second World War parties, Conservative and Labour, has been significantly loosened. An inkling of this change occurred in 2010 when the outgoing Labour government was replaced by the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition.
Giving Reform a go
The 2016 Brexit referendum saw cross-party alliances on either side of the argument. And also the sowing of the seeds of a rising populist movement that scored a remarkable success in the 2026 local government elections. Media vox pops in places where Reform UK have displaced en masse whole swathes of councillors, replacing long-established Labour fiefdoms, often appeared to feature change by weariness rather than enthusiasm. The prevailing response seemed to be giving Reform a go, largely on the grounds that they couldn’t be any worse than the ‘present lot’. This is not to say there aren’t those who are enthusiastic, though not of course racist, as they will insist. Having effectively, in 2024, seriously weakened the Conservative Party at national level, at local level they have now humbled the presiding government.
The prime minister came under threat – still in office at time of writing – with his supporters in parliament and the cabinet demanding loyalty. This is a little rich considering the pernicious use of accusations of anti-semitism to bring down Labour’s previous leader and purge his supporters. It is the very nature of capitalism to be competitive and combative. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it spawns politics which reflect this. Because none of the parties can challenge capitalism, they must fight each other.
Cost of living crisis, illegal immigration, benefits culture etcetera become raw material from which to manufacture political advantage. That they are issues in the first place shows how capitalism simply does not, cannot, meet people’s needs. That Reform UK is a limited company seems fitting as their scope for giving people what they require is limited. Their councillors will quickly find that 80 percent of their council’s funds is already legally spoken for; social care and special educational needs. Are they really going to start turning old people out of care homes to fend for themselves? Will parents enjoy seeing their special-needs children flounder unsupported in already overworked and underfunded schools?
Yes, change is needed
The desire for change is perfectly reasonable. The problem for the electorate is that the many present difficulties people encounter daily cannot be voted away. Neither is there a party or leader to be elected who can do it for them.
The Prime Minister may well be dismissed, but then there will just be another one, equally unable to make any significant difference. Whether a populist ultra-conservative demagogue or a reasonable, left-of-centre sympathiser, the problems won’t go away.
If people really want change they will have to accept responsibility for playing their individual parts in the collective action to bring it about. Capitalism cannot be reformed into being benign; better trying to train a tiger to become vegan. Society can be organised so that everyone’s needs are met. We have the technology to make this practical. The rub is that the technology must be wrested from the grasp of capitalism, along with all means and methods of production.
The democratic process is fundamental to bringing this radical change about. But it will require so much more than just putting an X against a name every four or five years. The first big change must be in how people think about constructing a better future for all.
D. A.
Editorial: The struggle for oil (1948)
The countries of the world are faced with the vital problem of obtaining sufficient oil to meet the expanding demands of transport, industry and mechanised agriculture. Oil is also needed in vast quantities for armies, navies and air forces, and the problem is not only that of obtaining sufficient in peace time but of knowing that the supply will continue in time of war. During the second world war Germany obtained the bulk of her supplies by developing chemical processes for producing oil from coal. Mr. A. D. Cummings, M.Sc., writing in “Discovery” (February, 1948), states that none of the known processes can yet compete commercially with natural oil.
“As now used, these processes are not an economically successful solution to the problem . . . the petrol obtained from them still costs at least twice as much as the natural oil, which has been refined and transported to its destination. Using hard coal it takes nearly 5 tons of coal to make a ton of petrol; using brown coal it takes 17 tons of raw coal from the mine; moreover, the capital cost of oil-from-coal plants is enormous. Only a country whose need was desperate would contemplate using them in the present circumstances. The processes have no future until natural oil resources dwindle even more rapidly than they are doing at present.”
A small amount of synthetic oil was being produced in this country before the war, but according to Mr. Cummings the British Government decided then against developing it for the needs of the coming war, preferring to rely on supplies of natural oil from abroad. Efforts are now being made to improve the processes and it is of course possible that they may become competitors with natural oil if oil prices continue to rise.
In the meantime consumption of petrol is increasing by leaps and bounds, and the problem of securing increased production and of controlling the petroleum regions becomes more acute. U.S.A. is still by far the greatest producer. In 1947 the United States oil wells produced nearly two-thirds of total world production, but so great is the consumption that the U.S. is now an importer of oil.
According to figures published in the last annual report of the Shell Transport and Trading Co., United States production in 1947 was about 2,000 million barrels. Next comes Venezuela with 435 million, the Russia with 200 million, Iran 155 million, Arabia 90 million and Mexico 56 million.
It will be observed that Russia, with a population greater than that of U.S.A., produces only one-tenth as much petrol. Even if production in Rumania, Hungary and other countries on Russia’s western border is added to Russia’s own resources, the total is still only about 240 million barrels compared with U.S.A.’s 2,000 million. It is true that in Russia very little is used in private motoring, and that every effort is made to develop coal and hydro-electric schemes and thus reduce the demand for petrol, but notwithstanding these alternatives Russia’s need of oil is acute and growing; which explains their anxiety to gain control of further supplies in Iran and other countries. But America too is vitally interested in oil from the Middle East. it is not merely that America needs more oil at home, but that American capital invested in Arabia, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East calls for “protection,” and that the American Navy in Mediterranean, waters requires local supplies. In December, 1946, when American interests were negotiating for oil concessions in Saudi Arabia, it was stated that the major part of the oil produced in Arabia by the Arabian-American Oil. Co. “is going directly to the United States Navy” (Daily Telegraph, 12/12/46).
Western European countries, including Britain, are more than ever dependant on Middle East oil. As Elizabeth Monroe states in the Observer (11/7/48), “the chief interest of Western Europe is no longer the Suez Canal. The main post-war interests of the Western Powers lie further east. The prime one is to preserve the great oil fields on the Persian Gulf and Tigris from falling into hands that would deny their output to Westerners.”
The “hands” in question are of course those of Russia.
In passing it is, however, interesting to note a report from New York “that the United States is negotiating for the purchase of a substantial shareholding in the Suez Canal Co.” (Daily Telegraph, 25/6/48.)
Russia’s interest in trying to prevent American-British domination of Middle East oil resources is obvious. While Middle East production as a whole is still only about 10 per cent. of total world production and only about one-seventh of production in the United States, it is rapidly expanding. If Russia could get into that area, even if Russian activity were to be confined to Northern Iran, her oil problem would be greatly eased. Looking further ahead, there is the certainty that the Middle East will in a few years have doubled or trebled its output.
There have from, time to time been forecasts of the early exhaustion of oil reserves, particularly in U.S.A. According to Sir F. Godber, Chairman of the Shell Co., there is no present danger. Speaking at the annual meeting he said that in the past 20 years continuous discoveries have led to an increase in established world resources, from 23,000 million barrels which was the estimate in 1928, to 72,000 million which is the latest estimate. Even in U.S.A. there is no danger of reserves soon being exhausted. Sir F. Godber says that ” the most conservative estimates of the American Petroleum Institute show that in the United States, in spite, of the constantly increasing rate of consumption, the ratio of reserves to current production is being maintained.” (Financial Times, 22/6/48.)
Nevertheless the Middle Eastern countries, with their enormous undeveloped oil reserves, their cheapness of production, are destined to be a centre of acute, Imperial rivalries for many years to come.
The over-population myth (1948)
In orthodox economics the population theory of Malthus, British Economist, 1766-1834, has long played the role of “The fat boy.” With certain modifications successive generations of economists have sought to “make our flesh creep” from the dismal conclusions he drew from it. To-day there are still many who would seek to give us Malthusian goose-pimples.
The substance of Malthus’ “Essay on Population” was a shameless plagiarism of earlier writers like Townsend and Dr. Wallace. He contended that population always tended to increase faster than food supply. This created a vicious circle. Increased wealth only brought even greater increases in population. Too many people meant too little food. Famine and a high death rate then came automatically into operation. As a result population sank below the level of food supply: then the cycle began all over again.
Malthus’ remedies for this alleged population “evil” was small families, late marriages and abolition of all forms of public assistance.
In view of all this his controversy with Ricardo in which he defended the consumption of the wealthy land-lord class on the grounds that it offset the effects of capital accumulation and thus helped to prevent gluts is not without certain sardonic implications.
Incidentally his “Essay” was an attack on the proposed Poor Law reform of Pitt whereby the Tories were attempting to cope with the dislocation arising from the passing of feudal society and the emergence of a new social order. It was also shrewdly aimed at the Utopian thinkers who under the stimulus of the French Revolution had carried to its most optimistic conclusions the doctrine of utilitarianism—“The greatest happiness of the greatest number,” by an advocacy of an ideal based upon equality of property and sex.
To say that increases in population tend to out-run food-supply is of course the merest of truisms. It would only have force if the productive powers of society were themselves incapable of progressive improvements. Such has not been the case: Indeed since Malthus lived all evidence has gone to show that wealth has tended to increase at a faster rate than population.
Ironically enough it has been these very increases in population which Malthus apparently dreaded so much that have contributed so decisively to making large-scale production, and the enormous increases in wealth production that went with it, possible. For it is clear that only when population has reached a certain level can that co-operation of mass aggregates of labour-power, working and organised for a given end, take place. It is in fact, as Marx points out, this very form of large-scale co-operation basic to capitalism that brings in a new economic force, the social productive power of collective labour. “When the labourer co-operates systematically with others he strips off the fetters of his individuality and develops the capabilities of his specie.” “Capital” (Vol. 1, p. 319, Kerr Edition.)
At the same time this large-scale power-motivated form of production has produced its own type of inventiveness and specialised forms of scientific application and technical skill. Moreover the capitalist greed for more and more surplus value has acted as a perpetual spur to increase the productivity of workers by seeking to constantly revolutionize technically the existing means of production. Such things of course would be impossible in a smaller society based upon agriculture and handicraft.
For Malthus, however, and those who followed him, poverty and pauperisation were simply the product of a growing population which provided more mouths than could be fed from the extant cultivated soil.
The shallowness of the contention that overpopulation is exclusively a cause of poverty and pauperisation is evidenced by the fact that the pauperisation and proletarianisation of large sections of the English population were taking place at a rapid rate during those centuries when the population was relatively static or at least increasing very slowly.
In Malthus’ time forcible evictions due to land enclosures reached a peak never before attained in the long history of land enclosures in England. It was the elimination of the peasant and small-holding section of the community, coupled with the ruin of the handicraft workers in face of the superior productive powers of industrial capitalism, that the condition indispensable for modern capitalism was fulfilled. The latter half of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century were the culmination of that long historic process which divorces the labourer from his productive means and converts his working energies into a commodity—labour-power. It was these large masses of the dispossessed which formed the “surplus” population which provided the human raw material for a rapidly expanding capitalism.
Although the population during the industrial revolution was many times greater than that in the Tudor period yet such was the demand by employers for ever fresh layers of labour-power that women and children, lunatics and paupers, plus heavy emigration from Ireland, were means by which the capitalist sought to increase the working population.
Density of population is of course no proof of over-population. One country may be densely populated, yet in no sense could it be said to be over-populated. On the other hand another country could have a sparse population without being under-populated. Note also that Ireland has suffered heavy depopulation due to a high rate of emigration. Yet there is extreme poverty in Ireland and also a surplus agricultural population.
Professor Carr Saunders, in “World Population” (p. 142) says that Germany and Italy have approximately the same density of population. There was, however, before the war a vast difference in wealth producing capacity between them. Obviously the possession of essential raw materials and the scope and efficiency of their respective industrial organisation, both economic factors, were responsible for this. In the same book (p. 142) Professor Carr Saunders says that there is no proof that the industrialised countries of Western Europe are over-populated.
Increases in population have never occurred in the absurd way Malthus suggested they did. Modern research points rather to the fact that increases in population since the latter half of the 18th century have been due to a declining death rate rather than any absolute increase in fertility.
History has also dealt Malthus and the neo Malthusians a shattering blow. Before the war it was rather a question of Malthusianism reverse. Then publicists, politicians and newspapers were prognosticating gloomily not on the dangers of a rising rate of population, but on a falling one. Many are still prognosticating gloomily about it to-day. In fact they assure us that if the population decline continues the optimum level of population will be seriously disturbed, i.e., according to them the best possible level of population which at a given time is most efficient for maximising wealth production. As a result they say productivity might decline, there would be less opportunities for capital investment, the standard of living lowered and unemployment possibly intensified.
Marx rejected the Malthusian doctrine in toto. He called it a libel on the human race. For Marx “Each specific mode of production had its own special law of population historically valid within its own limits.”
Capitalism, as Marx says, has a law of population peculiar to its mode of production. It is this law of population which reveals that poverty and unemployment exist, not because human labour is unable to wrest a sufficiency from nature-given materials, but because exploitation in the form of wage employment extracts unpaid labour or surplus value.
To put it simply, the capitalists are concerned with reducing costs of production. The most potent method of achieving this is to economise on the wages bill by the introduction of labour-saving machinery. This leads to the discharging of redundant workers. The net result of all employers seeking to do this is large-scale dismissals. Thus a relative surplus population comes into being. Should, however, an acceleration in production be such as to warrant additional supplies of labour power, then this surplus population, or as Marx terms it, ” reserve army of labour,” becomes a source of recruitment for the capitalist. Thus the expansion and contraction of employment is but a corollary and consequence of the expansion and contraction of the productive forces of capitalism. Added to this is the effect of crises which, because profit anticipation is lowered or threatened, leads to a sharp decline in productive activity and precipitates wholesale and widespread unemployment.
It is then this surplus population which, because of its active competition in the labour market, serves as a continuous downward pressure on the wage level.
In this way Marx indicated the mechanism which operates to keep wages in check and thus guarantees the appropriation of surplus value to continue and capitalist accumulation to go on.
Thus is the Malthusian population myth exploded. There is no “surplus” population in the sense that it is unable to contribute to wealth production. There is only a relative surplus population, relative, that is, to the needs and requirements of capitalist production itself.
The Marxian law of population remains then the most fruitful way of looking at the population problem, not from the restrictive standpoint of population growth as such, hut from the standpoint of sufficient increases in the working population to sustain and maintain the growth of capitalist accumulation.
It can also be shown then that the Marxian law of population is independent of the postulates of various population theories. Should the natural increases of population be such as to make labour-power relatively plentiful and cheap there will be less stimulus for the capitalists to introduce labour-saving machinery. On the other hand, should a decline in population rates bring about a diminution of the available, labour-force then there will be a strong incentive for the capitalists to replace men by machines, and so help to restore a situation more favourable to themselves. As a result of a diminished labour-force the acceleration of labour-saving devices will intensify the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Over-production, under-consumption, crises and unemployment will still be normal and recurring features of capitalist society. Marx’s law of population can then be shown to work with the same validity in an increasing or declining population.
The existence of unemployment is not in any way a test of over-population. In the first place the growth of population can be shown to have been steadily ascending. On the other hand unemployment has occurred in sharp and violent fluctuations. It is obvious then that there is no sign of any relationship between population growth and the appearance of a labour reserve army. Anyone who thinks that periods of continued and widespread unemployment are due to excessive numbers in the Malthusian sense must hold that this and other capitalist countries have been over-populated every few years. Following the same logic we must also conclude that in times of boom, when there is a demand for labour-power, they are under-populated.
Again in the U.S.A. there arc only 50 persons per square mile as against 700 in England. What is more the United States is highly favoured over its capitalist rivals in natural resources and geographical location. There cannot be any question of over-population in America. Yet unemployment has in recent years been more severe in America than anywhere else in the world. It is obvious that only the Marxian law of population can adequately account for this phenomenon.
Recently Sir John Boyd Orr told us that soil erosion and exhaustion and the waste of labour and materials on armaments threatens the world with famine. This then is due not to the niggardliness of nature but to the colossal misdirection of human effort, which because of capitalist imperialist rivalries is building up a mighty war machine instead of “applying,” as Boyd Orr said, “the world’s steel and industrial production to conserving the land.” Clearly it is capitalism and not nature that threatens the world with, famine and destruction. Clearly it is capitalism that must go if we are to remove that threat for ever. Alike in agriculture as well as industry, capitalism sows its dragon’s teeth. It is the peoples of the world who will reap its grim harvest.
Ted Wilmott
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