Life and Times: 4-Wheel Drive Toyota Tundra (2024)

The Life and Times column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s Bolton Central Library on an evening in late November 1984. The large meeting room is full for a debate between myself representing the Socialist Party and the local Tory MP, Tom Sackville. The subject is ‘Is socialism compatible with freedom?’ and a well-known local cleric is in the chair. We both have 20 minutes to put our respective cases and another 10 minutes to respond. We do that, and then it’s thrown open to the floor. The hands go up for questions and observations and we both respond. I’m gratified that a lot of the discussion focuses on the definition and description of socialism I’ve tried to communicate – a democratically run society of voluntary cooperation, a moneyless, wageless, stateless world of free access to all goods and services based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need.

I was worried that we might get bogged down in discussing the old 57 varieties of ‘socialism’ (Russia, China, Cuba, Scandinavia, social reform, etc.), so I did my best to dismiss all that quickly at the beginning. And it seems to have worked, since hardly anyone – not even my Tory opponent – is trying to tar socialism with any of those brushes. I’m pleased too that it’s all calm, civil and good-natured, since those are always the best conditions for rational argument and useful exchange of ideas. At the end it probably can’t be said that anyone is the winner, but importantly, from my point of view, the socialist case has been aired clearly and unambiguously in front of a large audience. As an enthusiastic member of the Party’s local branch says to me afterwards: ‘I’ve never been to a meeting of this kind where the constant focus was on our view of socialism.’

That was a long time ago. Yet we’ve not stopped debating, since debating is our life blood as socialists. We’ve been doing it for the whole 120 years of our existence. But, apart from hustings at election times, face-to-face debate has become more and more difficult to organise in recent years, as discussion of all kinds increasingly takes place online. But though this lacks the immediacy (and often the politeness) of face-to-face exchange, it does not prevent discussion from continuing and, in fact, can reach far wider and more faraway audiences than is possible in a debating hall. The Socialist Party has adapted to this by having its own website and Facebook page and its members often participate in discussion and debate taking place on other sites organised by groups in various parts of the world with similar or closely allied ideas.

One of these is Moneyless Society, whose aim is ‘obsoleting money’, so sharing a key element of the society we are looking to see established. To give an example, a recent discussion on the Moneyless Society site involved a range of people, including SPGB members, debating with a distinctly non-socialist contributor. Casey began by quoting approvingly words from early 20th century free-market theorist, Ludwig von Mises, and then argued that we should be pleased with the market economy because it ‘puts the common man in the driving seat’ and ‘we average Joes get to enjoy luxuries not even conceived of 100 years ago thanks to the innovation capitalism breeds’. He added that he’d ‘like to hear from socialists in this bunch what’s wrong with this statement’. So not just an echo chamber, and a provocative start which sparked quick responses. The first one in fact was from me, stating: ‘The main thing to be said about the “average Joe” is that, far from being “in the driving seat”, he spends most of his life hanging on to the job he’s got (if he’s got one) and hoping and praying that the market system he lives in doesn’t determine he’ll lose it.’ Casey’s not ill-considered response was: ‘So society should allow Joe to continue working an obsolete job that no longer serves a purpose?’ At this point someone called David intervened to comment on how technology, both before and during the capitalist era, has made it possible to produce more with less work. And then it got a little tetchy when Casey mentioned, as evidence of the success of the market system, that he has a ’four-wheel drive Toyota Tundra with tons of features’ and so ‘capitalism for the win’. David’s sarcastic reply was: ‘I humbly suggest that we disband this list. After all, Casey says he drives a Toyota Tundra. What possible argument in favor of socialism could ever top that?’

But then it became more serious with Casey putting the argument that modern-day vehicles have many features that previous ones didn’t have and that make them more appealing. This has been achieved by competition, and so, ‘because of that we all benefit’. A further contributor, Michael, then intervened to dispute Casey’s earlier assertion that ‘capitalism breeds innovation’, arguing that ‘collective ownership’ can innovate just as well as ‘private ownership’. At this point it wasn’t clear whether for Michael ‘collective ownership’ meant state ownership (ie nationalisation) or socialism in our terms (ie, a common ownership and free access society). But Casey seized on this anyway to bring up the Soviet bogeyman and suggested a comparison between ‘the US and the USSR and the advancement of everyday life for everyday citizens’, together with a story about Boris Yeltsin being amazed as he toured a grocery store in Houston.

At this stage I felt obliged to jump in again myself and say: ‘What on earth has Yeltsin got to do with socialism? Absolutely nothing.’ The closing ‘speeches’ had Casey stating that ‘we are all better off for Bill Gates becoming a billionaire, not the other way round’, and two late contributors weighing in, the first one, Paul, saying that, in capitalism, ‘people are forced to buy not what they want but what they can afford, even if it’s cheap and nasty, out of what it’s profitable for companies to produce’, The second, Steven, on a slightly different tack: ’Less than 100 […] people in the world today own the equivalent of that owned by the poorest 50% – that’s 4 billion people. If that doesn’t tell you something is wrong, what will it take?’

All this is a far cry from Bolton Central Library in 1984. But what it shows is that debate still goes on, argument still goes back and forth and, if anything, now that most of it is online, it has a potentially bigger, more receptive and geographically wide audience than in the pre-internet days of outdoor platforms in town centres or parks or draughty meeting rooms in libraries or halls.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Nobel efforts (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Nobel Prize awards have been no stranger to controversy over the years, both for awards they should have given but didn’t, like most famous writers and virtually all women, and awards they shouldn’t have given but did. These included the 1949 Medicine prize for the prefrontal lobotomy, the 2019 Literature prize to a Bosnian genocide denialist and Slobodan Milošević fanboy, and most famously, the 1973 Peace prize to Kissinger, the carpet-bomber of Cambodia, which caused two Nobel Committee members to resign in disgust and prompted the equally famous retort from musician Tom Lehrer that satire had become obsolete.

Media pundits were quick to spot certain oddities about last month’s Nobel awards. Feathers had been ruffled earlier when the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute pointed out that ‘We have now over 50 armed conflicts around the world’ and suggested that perhaps nobody deserved the Peace prize this year (tinyurl.com/4c84a9zp). In the event they gave it to Hiroshima survivors, a clear stand-by choice.

The Physics prize went not to physicists but to two computer scientists for their early work in AI and neural networks. Reasonable enough, one might say, given that computer science didn’t exist in 1896 when Alfred Nobel established the prize topics. A mathematics Nobel might have been nearer the ballpark, but there isn’t one of those either, a fact emphatically not due to the popular gossip that it was revenge for Mrs Nobel having an affair with a mathematician (Alf was never married). In fact, Nobel also ignored dozens of other valid research disciplines, which reflects the deep capitalist truth that the rich always get to dictate to the rest of us what is important, just like today’s vainglorious and increasingly deluded ‘effective altruist’ billionaires.

As for the winning computer scientists, you may remember one of them, Geoffrey Hinton, as a well-known poacher-turned-gamekeeper who resigned from Google in 2023 to renounce AI and warn the world that it was about to kill us all. Given that the prize is awarded to those who, in Alf’s own words, ‘conferred the greatest benefit to humankind’, one might have expect a noble prizewinner to refuse to accept the medal and the money, however Geoff appears untroubled by such qualms.

Still, there must be a lot of physicists out there doing vital Nobel-worthy work, surely? Not according to the popular YouTube doyenne of theoretical physics and clunky jokes, Sabine Hossenfelder, who claims (no joke) that ‘physics is dying’ because it’s become an unfalsifiable pseudoscience whose only purpose is to chunter out meaningless papers in support of funding bids to prop up the physics community’s wage bill (tinyurl.com/5n93hdmb). It might be true that they have a vested interest in stringing us along with string theory, loop quantum gravity, multiverses and endless made-up particles, but perhaps Sabine would say that, as she thinks the idea of an elegant Theory of Everything is a romantic mirage, and besides, popular YouTubers also have a certain vested interest in being controversial, don’t they?

AI had a more direct role in clinching the Chemistry prize, through Google DeepMind and its groundbreaking work on protein folding. Proteins do everything that matters in your body, but there are 100,000 of them and nobody understands how they work. Their exact function depends on what shape they fold into, and working this out for just one protein used to be a 3-year PhD in itself. The DeepMind AlphaFold2 programme can now do it in seconds, triggering a revolution in potential new treatments.

The Medicine prize meanwhile was for work in newly discovered microRNA, which is how genes, when sending messenger-RNA ‘photocopies’ to cells with template instructions for building proteins, effectively Tippex out certain instructions and not others.

What’s called the Economics Nobel is really an ersatz 1968 add-on by a Swedish bank and denounced as a ‘false Nobel prize’ by modern relative Peter Nobel, on the grounds that he considers economics a pseudoscience, a conclusion which will not raise socialist eyebrows. This year’s ‘Economics’ prize was for interesting empirical research into the question why some countries are so much richer than others. ‘Culture’ and geography have been mooted, but these researchers, observing that many poor countries were formerly European colonies, opted to look at ‘settler mortality’ statistics. They concluded that where mortality was low, and Europeans were able to settle and farm (Australia, North America), they also imported their existing social, economic and political institutions, giving the colony a massive head-start. Where mortality was high due to malaria and yellow fever (West Africa, Haiti, etc), they instead kept their distance and imposed vicious, extractive regimes including the slave trade. In sum, liberal democratic institutions are enablers of prosperity, not the other way round. Hooray for liberal capitalism then, which has obviously not resulted in a billionaire elite, global poverty, war and climate change.

Honourable mention ought this year to go to an Ig Nobel prize winner who, instead of discovering something silly about mammals breathing through their anuses, actually found out something useful about centenarians living in so-called ‘blue zones’ of super-longevity, which is that the blue zones don’t exist, neither do most of the centenarians, and the ‘data’ is almost entirely the result of poor, faked or lost records, and pension fraud by relatives (tinyurl.com/4hzna4ka). Many rich capitalists are obsessed with cheating death and living forever. This finding pisses on their chips and allows hard-pressed workers to enjoy some schadenfreude for once.

Would there be Nobel prizes in socialism? Probably not ones named after someone who got rich by blowing things up, including his own brother. And certainly not cash prizes, of course (there wouldn’t be any money). The concept of ‘prize’ is so integral to the fabric of competitive capitalism (prize and price are the same word in several languages) that some will find it hard to imagine a culture that doesn’t need such incentives in order to do worthwhile research. But socialists, who understand the value of intrinsic motivation, won’t have a problem.

Paddy Shannon