How we live and how we might live (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The year is 1884. It is a cold and foggy, late-November night down by the River Thames in London. Groups of people are hurrying along the road towards a tall Georgian building overlooking the river. As they arrive they are shown into an attached coach house, adapted for the occasion as a meeting room. They greet each other familiarly and shake hands with the house’s owner who is to give a talk titled, ‘How we Live And How we Might Live’.

The name of the building is Kelmscott House and its owner is William Morris, a man widely admired as an artist-designer, a publisher, a printer, a founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, a novelist and a poet. To his visitors, however, he is a revolutionary socialist. So, on this evening, Morris rises, and begins his address:

‘The word “Revolution”, which we Socialists are so often forced to use, has a terrible sound in most people’s ears, even when we have explained to them that it does not necessarily mean a change accompanied by riot and all kinds of violence, and cannot mean a change made mechanically and in the teeth of opinion by a group of men who have somehow managed to seize on the executive power for the moment.’

Morris’s opening remarks are not directly connected to his main theme. It seems he is issuing a challenge. He proceeds carefully but uncompromisingly, laying out his views on the nature of revolution. He warns:

‘…people are scared at the idea of such a vast change, and beg that you will speak of reform and not revolution. As, however, we Socialists do not at all mean by our word revolution what these worthy people mean by their word reform, I can’t help thinking that it would be a mistake to use it.’

Revolution or reform? This is the challenge Morris issued to his listeners seated in his coach house that evening. They, like he were members of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), which, only a few months earlier, had declared itself to be a ‘socialist’. Political declarations, however, often ring hollow under examination, and Morris was aware that many of the Federation’s members, including its leadership, were committed not to ‘a change in the basis of society’, but to a programme of government reforms of capitalism.

Morris had recently arrived at a crossroads in his political development. And that was an issue for him. Revolution, he believed, was the way forward, and it was antithetical to reform. So, which route would the SDF take? Did he perhaps intend his opening remarks to sound out the membership on this matter? If he did, then the response came swiftly. In less than a month he and several others severed their connection with the SDF, and founded a new organisation, the Socialist League one firmly committed to the revolutionary aim of bringing about ‘a change in the basis of society’. Morris drew up its constitution.

Palliatives

Morris focused his talk in the coach house on the persistence of working class poverty, which despite some amelioration over the previous fifty years remained starkly visible on the streets of 1884. Why, he asked his listeners, was poverty still a thing? And what was the solution? Revolutionary socialists in late Victorian England commonly referred to government reforms as ‘palliatives’. It’s a term not often heard today in political debate. It cuts through the rhetoric and exposes reforms for the ineffective things they are. At best, they aim to alleviate some particular ill with which capitalism burdens wage or salary workers. Governments announce reforms with great fanfare, especially at election times. Once enacted into law, however, many reforms have a short lifespan. They persist for a few years, until they hit the next cyclical crisis in the economy, or until a new political party is elected with a different agenda. Promises get reneged upon, funding is cut back or withdrawn and eventually the entire programme gets buried under the rubble of the capitalist profit machine and party politics.

What now remains, for instance, of the Labour government’s 1999 pledge to reduce child poverty to below 10% of children? Governments threw a great deal of money at the problem, and despite an initial success, the programme failed to meet its target for 2010. From that time on child poverty began rising again until the programme was abandoned in 2015/6. Now little more than twenty years later, child poverty is worse than ever. Palliatives do not persist. And because they do not attack social problems at their root, problems quickly recur.

We are now 140 years on from when Morris gave his address. Poverty is no longer as visible to us on the streets as it was then. We no longer see people walking the pavements unshod or in torn and filthy clothes. Yet, it is far from invisible. No one can have failed to notice the growing number of homeless people these days on the pavements of British towns and cities. And today a great deal of poverty is hidden away. Yet if we look hard enough, we will find, for instance, that in 2023, three million people in the UK appealed to food banks for food relief. That’s one in twenty of the population who did not have enough to eat for some part of last year. According to UK government statistics, one in five, are in danger of food poverty. In the United States, the world’s richest nation, the number of people visiting food banks last year hit 26 million, one American in 13. Perhaps we should not be too complacent about the ‘progress’ that has been made since Morris’s time.

Taking a longer view, we can look back at the history of the UK. Since capitalism began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, levels of poverty have fluctuated over time. The numbers have sometimes been relatively high or relatively low, yet at no time in those two and a half centuries has poverty been eradicated. It has remained a persistent feature of working class life throughout. And this is the case not only in the UK, but in every developed capitalist nation on earth. Poverty is endemic to the capitalist system, and Morris’s question remains to be answered: ‘why’? Why, despite repeated attempts by governments everywhere to eliminate it is it so persistent and so universal? The literature on poverty and its elimination gives a clue. It is vast and international, yet perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that the solutions it proposes are uniformly superficial and reflect the political dogmas of those with power.

Poverty persists

Neoliberals confidently identify the source of poverty in blockages in the operation of the ‘free’ market. They point the finger at trade union action and large scale industrial bargaining, at minimum-wage legislation and ‘excessive’ welfare payments to the unemployed. If distorting influences such as these were removed they claim, the market would balance itself, and poverty would disappear. Poof! Gone!

For traditional conservatives, the origin of poverty lies in the decline in the family, and (condescendingly enough) in working class culture. Without a stable (heterosexual) family structure children are not properly socialised or educated. This leads to welfare dependency, loss of initiative and self esteem. It leads to crime as an alternative to wage working. And of course it leads to a loss of deference to necessary hierarchical structures.

Labourites and Social Democrats have historically seen poverty as a failure of government to provide sufficient regulation of the labour and housing markets and a lack of spending on public services and benefits. More recently they have ‘discovered’ that the poor lack ‘social capital’. Barriers to upward mobility are to be found in weak community ties and supportive organisations.

Building on these and other superficial analyses, nation after nation has applied sticking plasters on the problem. Yet poverty persists. Decade on decade. Relentlessly. And to the extent that government programmes have brought some relief to working people, their effects have been limited and temporary. The application of such programmes, however, costs money, and in periods of low profitability, they get jettisoned altogether and working people are once again abandoned to the mercy of an unstable market economy.

The Labour Party, which committed itself to eliminating child poverty in 1999, is now back in power. Keir Starmer, in his bid for the party leadership in 2020, declared that he would make tackling poverty a major commitment. By now, however, we know that when put to the test a great many political declarations ring hollow, and Starmer’s ‘commitment’ quickly became buried in the rubble of capitalism’s economic instability and party politics. Right now, British capitalism is sunk in one of its down phases, so it is unsurprising that no renewed commitment to eliminate child poverty appeared in the 2024 Labour Party Manifesto. During the election campaign, few Labour candidates spoke out on the issue. Once safely elected to their seats, however, the indignant voices of Labour back benchers have been raised against the leadership resulting in the first big ideological battle within the new governing party.

Priority for profits

In a delicious piece of political theatre, a brave Tory defender of working class living standards, Suella Braverman, devoted her first speech as an opposition MP, to raising the issue of the two-child benefit cap imposed by her own party in 2019. The aim of this benefit restriction according to Braverman was to ensure that the unemployed ‘make the same choices as those supporting themselves solely through work’. Decoded, this means it was intended to discourage the poor from having children. The policy, she declared had not worked. (Highlighting a Tory failure, it seems, is less motivating than stirring conflict within the Labour Party.) And so, in the name of ‘the family’, that sacred Tory shibboleth, it is suddenly now essential to repeal this wicked policy and – astonishingly! – end poverty in Britain for good! Starmer, however, is adamant that his government’s priority must be to restore profitability in the country before the next palliative is proposed. Why does this sound familiar?

So many social reforms have been introduced over the decades to eliminate the evils of capitalism. Apart from those that have little or no effect on profitability, only a few have proven to be of lasting benefit to workers, some have been detrimental, and almost all have been eventually watered down or abandoned. So Morris’s question returns, again and again: ‘Why’? Why do reforms fail to relieve the strains of working life? Well, here’s a thought. What if the source of these problems lies not in declining family values, in blockages of the ‘free’ market, in the failure of government regulation, in social exclusion, in greed, in self-interested politicians or in anything else of that kind? What if the source of the problem is to be found in something far more fundamental to the capitalist system – something as central to it as the wages system? What if the only solution to the problem of ‘How we Live’ is not reform but, as Morris realised 140 years ago, ‘a change in the basis of society’. Over the coming issues of the Socialist Standard we will dig down into this question.

Hud.

Extreme reaction (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wednesday, 14 August found me on a day’s family excursion to Brighton, particularly to visit the exaggerated opulence of the Royal Pavilion. An edifice, if ever there was one, symbolising the class division of society.

This Regency Pavilion was built in the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time of dramatic economic change in Britain. This early period of the industrial revolution would witness the emergence of the Luddites and a perception by the British state of a danger of insurrection. Machine breaking and mill burning caused the authorities to respond with force and punitive punishments, up to and including capital sentencing. There was much talk of shadowy influences, such as ‘General Ludd’, orchestrating these outrages.

Riots were a feature of affairs in the eighteenth century. Between 1756 and 1757, stores and shipments of food were looted. Again in 1766, poor harvests and the consequent rising price of wheat and corn resulted in riots across England; 131 recorded between September and the following August. The government reacted, in those pre-police force days, by deploying military units. Large numbers of people were arrested and eight shot dead. Special commissions of assizes were set up that imposed sentences including hanging, transportation or imprisonment.

If these sentences were intended to deter future outbreaks they failed. There were further such riots between 1770 and 1774. This was the period just before the building of the Royal Pavilion.

Ready-made headlines

Walking from the railway station I had a brief conversation with a couple who had come into Brighton to visit a particular shop. Originally their intention had been to arrive later in the day, but the shop was planning to close at 3 that afternoon. The rioters, it seemed, were on their way. Not eighteenth century rioters looking for cheaper bread, but twenty-first century malcontents demanding that immigrants and immigration be dealt with. The tragic murder of three young girls in Southport had been hijacked, largely via social media, by malicious individuals and groups.

Immigrants, especially those who had arrived uninvited on England’s shores in inflatable small boats, were extrajudicially condemned by minority opinion of guilt by association with that dreadful murder. That the one arrested was not an immigrant proved immaterial. For nights running, firstly in Southport, then across England more widely, a number of immigrant accommodations were besieged, as also, as in Southport, were mosques; Muslim equals immigrant seems to have been the ‘logic’.

The disturbances gave the media ready-made headlines and stories for the August period traditionally referred to as the silly season by the media. Parliament is not sitting, so while there is terrible news from abroad, domestic issues are in short supply. A few riots provide dramatic footage for the TV news channels, and are a gift for journalists to report and opine about. Watching footage of howling mobs confronting lines of police generates feelings of insecurity and reinforces the notion that society faces perpetual threats.

Far right and far left

Following the recent elections in France in the first round of which populist nationalism triumphed, only to be thwarted in the second by an alliance of convenience of liberals, social democrats and what’s termed the far left, it was inevitable that participants in the riots would be labelled extreme right.

Left and right are exceedingly broad political categories, designations that emerged in the national assembly of eighteenth century revolutionary France. So broad that extreme right easily covers neo-nazis/fascists, demagogic nationalists, racists and such like. Far left encompasses those who adhere to some degree or other of Leninist organisation of which there are many and various. Most claim to be socialist, though not advocates of a post-capitalist worldwide moneyless commonwealth based on the principle of meeting everyone’s needs.

The problem with the left and right designations is that there is no actual intention of ridding society of capitalism, as they are descriptive of relative political positions within capitalism. Left socialist? Right fascist? What about national socialists? Right-wing socialists? Left-wing Nazis?

What comes through is the confusion of ideas, a confusion helping to maintain capitalism by keeping people divided. It has the effect of focusing most political vision myopically on that other political category, the centre, as the alternative. Offering the alternative to capitalism that socialism is demands going beyond these political categories and an engagement by the vast majority of people to consciously challenge and then transcend capitalism, overthrowing by democratic means the apparent necessity of the status quo.

Underlying insecurity

Undoubtedly, those who took an active part in the various disturbances were motivated by a variety of reasons. However, like those in the eighteenth century food riots, the basic cause is economic. In present-day society only a privileged few prosper, most experience financial insecurity and some suffer downright poverty. Those with very little are fearful of losing the little they do have.

Dr Abdul Hamid, chairman of the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque in Liverpool, confronted by demonstrators, recognised underlying insecurity as the basic problem. Then ‘the other’ is perceived as a threat, those who are seen to be outside limited perspectives. Dr Hamid said there is a ‘fear of the unknown’ and ‘if they don’t get answers, they will try to find any excuse to label you’. Adam Kelwick, a mosque volunteer, went on to say of the demonstrators, ‘I don’t think they knew what they were protesting about – I think they’re just angry, fed up.’

Mosque members made a point of meeting rather than confronting those outside. Conversations took place and food rather than half bricks were exchanged. Then, Kelwick went on to point out, ‘Some of the most vocal protesters, after everyone else had gone, came inside the mosque for a little tour’.

Extreme rightists? Or those with ill-defined grievances who got caught up in something that, for a while, got out of control. As Kelwick observed, ‘None of the people I spoke to mentioned Southport’.

The good news

In a Brighton pub for lunch I overheard the manager on the phone confirming they were definitely closing at 6 that evening. Later that afternoon, walking back to the railway station I saw a number of shops being boarded up. That evening it seems there was an outbreak of nothing happening: no riots, no confrontations. The news featured the Prime Minister vowing judicial punishment for all participants in disturbances. He may have to reintroduce capital sentences and transportation to be true to his word, as the prisons, it seems, are already near enough full.

The good news is that very quickly there were far more diverse groups of people declaring their common humanity with migrants, than the very much smaller numbers of antagonists. Although reported, this was nowhere near as big a story. Bad news is more dramatic it seems.

For the immigrants who were targeted it was a highly distressing few days. Those involved in the riots should ask themselves why people put themselves through all the hardships of migration. They might realise that they have more in common economically with migrants than what seems to divide them. Certainly, one overwhelming common interest that all but the privileged few has, migrant, demonstrator and those watching on TV, is in removing capitalism, the insecure society that of itself breeds riot and social disturbance.

Dave Alton

A Special Branch report (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 2014, following a scandal, the government set up an official inquiry into undercover policing. This Undercover Policing Inquiry has been hearing evidence ever since. By 2018 the inquiry had confirmed that undercover police had, over decades, periodically infiltrated the following groups and movements:

‘Anarchist groups, Animal Liberation Front, Anti-Apartheid Movement, Anti-Fascist Action, Big Flame, Black Power movement, Brixton Hunt Saboteurs, Anglia Ruskin Churchill Society (Young Conservatives), Colin Roach Centre, Dambusters Mobilising Committee, Dissent!, Earth First!, Essex Hunt Saboteurs, Friends of Freedom Press Ltd, Globalise Resistance, Independent Labour Party, Independent Working Class Association, International Marxist Group, International Socialists, Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front, London Animal Action, London Animal Rights Coalition, London Boots Action Group, London Greenpeace, Militant, No Platform, Antifa, Operation Omega, Reclaim the Streets, Red Action, Republican Forum, Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation, Socialist Party (England and Wales), Socialist Workers Party, South London Animal Movement (SLAM), Tri-Continental, Troops Out Movement, Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, West London Hunt Saboteurs, Workers Revolutionary Party, Young Haganah, Young Liberals, Youth against Racism in Europe’ (Wikipedia /Undercover_Policing_Inquiry).

Since then, groups like Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Islamist and far-right groups will also have been infiltrated.

We are not on this list. One reason might be that, as all our meetings and records (except the membership list) are open to the public as a matter of principle, a police spy would not need to actually infiltrate us to find out what we were up to. Even so, this has not prevented the police spying on us, as a document published on the Inquiry’s website in July shows.

As can be seen, it’s a report on a debate between us and a well-known Labour Party MP, Ron Brown, in 1988. It happens to be fairly accurate. In fact, the ‘secret and reliable source’, whoever they were, seems to have been impressed by our speaker and the case he presented. The abbreviation ‘(ph)’ stands for phonetic, indicating that the spy wasn’t clear how the name of the person who chaired the meeting was spelt. ‘UI’ means under investigation, indicating that we as a Party were being ‘investigated’ by Special Branch, even if not infiltrated. It is not clear whether the spy was actually a member of the police force or (perhaps more likely) just an ordinary snout, or how much they were paid.

METROPOLITAN POLICE

SPECIAL BRANCH 

9th day of December 1988

1. The following information has been received from a secret and reliable source:-

2. “On Wednesday, 7th December 1988, between 8pm and 10pm, at the Council Chamber, Lambeth Town Hall, a debate was held by the Socialist Party (SP) (aka the Socialist Party of Britain/Great Britain) entitled ‘Which Way Forward for the Working Class?’. Approximately 25 persons attended, which was considered, by the organisers, to be a poor turn-out.

3. The chairwoman, [Privacy] (ph), introduced the two main speakers who were Ron BROWN, Labour Party MP, and Steve COLEMAN of the SP.

4. Steve COLEMAN spoke first, attacking Labour Party policies and accusing it of being a traitor to the ‘working class’ and of being almost as ‘capitalist’ as the ‘Tories’. He quoted, at length, the Labour Party’s past record to back up his allegations. COLEMAN presented himself as a powerful orator who was both amusing and convincing in his argument.

5. BROWN spoke for the next 25 minutes, choosing not to answer COLEMAN’s allegations but presenting Labour Party policy on numerous issues.

6. After both speakers had finished, the meeting was opened up to the floor for debate. The meeting was closed after another hour.”

Endgame? (2024)

Book Review from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Endgame. Economic Nationalism and Global Decline. By Jamie Merchant. Reaktion Books. 2004.

Is globalisation coming to an end and capitalism returning to a period like that between the two world wars of the last century when economic nationalism and beggar-thy-neighbour policies were the norm? Merchant makes out a case for this, starting from basically Marxian premises.

He describes how, from the point of view of actual production, the world is one system involving workers everywhere:

‘Pick a typical product of contemporary globalization — say a laptop computer. The laptop is sold for money by the company that owns it only as the end result of a transnational sequence of extraction, processing, manufacturing, assembly, transportation, and distribution, involving thousands of laborers doing different kinds of work for a range of contractors across dozens of countries’ (pp. 125-6).

In the course of such ‘planetary assemblages’ the world working class, as a class, produce a pool of surplus value from which firms and states compete to draw a share as profits. The profits of capitalist firms do not depend on how much surplus value its workers might be said to produce; in fact some firms, as those in the inflated financial sector, don’t produce any but are very successful in capturing some. The profits a firm makes depends on how well it is organised to draw profits from the world pool of surplus. In this, firms are helped by states.

‘National competition,’ Merchant writes, ‘is competition over the global surplus product. Monetary policies, tax laws, corporate subsidies and trade agreements are some of the measures states take to assist their national corporations in raising profitability, that is, in capturing more of this global surplus’ (p. 98).

He defines ‘globalisation’ as the period when global production, and so the pool of global surplus value, was expanding. The governments of the leading capitalist states favoured the liberalisation of world trade by abolishing or lowering tariff barriers as they believed that this would lead to world trade expanding even more.

Merchant’s basic thesis is that this period is coming to an end because the continuing mechanisation imposed by competition has led to a fall in the rate of profit, resulting in ‘the global pool of surplus value available for redistribution as profits shrink[ing] relative to total capital invested worldwide’ (pp. 153-4).

Competition to capture profits has become more intense — more of a zero-sum game — and states are being compelled to intervene more actively to try to steer profits to enterprises within their boundaries. ‘Global productivity growth’, he writes, ‘appears to be over for the foreseeable future. The result is likely to be a kind of stasis state in which national governments must take ever more extreme measures to compensate for the paralysis of private capitalism’ (p.134). Hence the rise of economic nationalism and of parties advocating ‘national sovereignty’.

Slow productivity growth and slower expansion of world production are plausible explanations for the observable move away from globalisation, as so-called ‘neo-liberalism’ on a world scale, and towards economic nationalism (from governments subsidising selected enterprises as supposed engines of growth to the rise of nationalist and nativist political parties). Whether this is the endgame for capitalism is another matter.

In the final chapter Merchant seems to envisage capitalism being overthrown and the wages system abolished by spontaneous mass rioting. That’s another matter too.

Adam Buick

Letter: Do we need vouchers? (2024)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

Just one note on what seems to be the main disagreement with my article [Cooking the Books 2, August 2024 Standard]:

‘He does mention the argument that “since we have seen significant increases in productive capacities since the nineteenth century, during which Marx was writing, perhaps the token system is already outdated”. This is precisely a point we have made but Dapprich dismisses this, rather too offhandedly, as “unconvincing” without saying why.’

I do address this point in the article:

‘I am not convinced by this line of thought though, since the token system is perfectly capable of adapting to increases in productivity. As productivity increases one of three things (or any combination of these) can be done. First of all, the increased productivity can be used to produce more goods using the same labour. This means more consumer products could be afforded by consumers with their tokens. Secondly, the same amount of consumer products could be produced while lowering labour time, meaning that workers would have more free time while being able to enjoy the same material standard of living. Thirdly, the resources dedicated to public expenditure could be increased to improve sectors like healthcare, education or provisioning for those unable to work. No matter which of these measures, or combination of measures, is taken, increases in productivity are no problem in the lower stage at all, in fact they would improve people’s living conditions without any need to fundamentally overhaul the token system of the lower stage.’

Philipp Dapprich

Reply:

We understood your point to be that Marx was mistaken to envisage the non-circulating voucher system that he mentioned in 1875 eventually giving way, when productivity had increased enough, to distribution on the basis of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ where everybody could take freely what they needed. This, you say, on the grounds that the voucher system could be adapted to distribute goods and services according to an individual’s needs.

Our argument is that, in view of the ‘significant [in fact enormous] increases in productive capacities since the nineteenth century’, it is now possible for a socialist society to introduce free access fairly quickly.

Assuming that you accept that the capacity to produce now available to society is sufficient to satisfy the needs of everyone, the question is: why, then, would a voucher system be necessary which after all is a form of rationing, even if at a generous level?

We wouldn’t deny that in theory a voucher system could be devised to take into account increased, and increasing, productivity in the ways you suggest. But a voucher system would involve using up a considerable amount of resources to administer (recording the time worked by each individual of working age, calculating and adjusting the ‘price’ of the goods and services to be redeemed, etc), which would be wasteful as well as not needed.

The only objection to free access would be that it wouldn’t work because people would take more than they needed. But why would they? People don’t even do that today under capitalism when certain things are lastingly free to take and use. Surely not because it is human nature to be greedy? 

Editorial Committee.

Artificial scarcity (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’re often encouraged to make changes in our personal lifestyle on the grounds that this can help change things or at least do something to help us move in the right direction. We should make sure we know, for example, where the food we eat is grown, how ‘sustainable’ its production and distribution methods are, and, if possible, to ‘buy local’. The idea is that our food buying choices will help reduce carbon emissions and contribute to the battle against ecological deterioration and global warming. It is also suggested that more radical lifestyle choices like vegetarianism or veganism can play a part in this by freeing up for direct food production land currently used for crops to feed the vast number of animals raised and slaughtered everywhere in the world.

And it’s true that, if large numbers of people made such choices, it might indeed lead to different methods and types of food production, reduce the mass slaughter of living creatures and also have some impact on climate change. But none of this would make any appreciable difference to the day-to-day problems faced by many millions of people throughout the world. These are such problems as poverty, homelessness or precarious housing, and, above all, the need for the vast majority of us to sell our energies to an employer for a wage or salary day in day out or find ourselves without the means to live decently. The fact is that, whatever the method of production or the goods produced, so long as this happens with a view to the goods being sold on the market and people needing money to buy them, we will still have the system we call capitalism and all the problems and contradictions it throws up.

The main contradiction is that we now have the means to produce enough food and all else to sustain the whole world at a decent level several times over and to do so without polluting the environment or changing the climate, yet under the capitalist system of production for profit this cannot happen. Instead it creates artificial scarcity, causing millions to go hungry and many more to live insecure or highly stressed existences. A new report by Unicef published in June this year (Child Food Poverty: Nutrition Deprivation in Early Childhood) revealed that around 181 million children worldwide under 5 years of age – or 1 in 4 – are experiencing severe child food poverty, making them up to 50 percent more likely to experience wasting, a life-threatening form of malnutrition. To make things worse, capitalism’s methods of production put massive stress on the ecosystem, fast pushing it, according to some, to the brink of collapse.

Time therefore for workers throughout the world to vote collectively to change that system and move to a moneyless, marketless society of free access and voluntary cooperation – which we call socialism. In that society people will put their natural human capacity for cooperation and collaboration to work and use the resources of the earth to secure a decent life for all while maintaining the environment so as to ensure a steady state of ecological balance.

Howard Moss