No let up (2025)

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

So what’s happened over the globe in the year just gone by? It’s certainly been full of news. But same old, same old. Wars, economic crises, climate mess, insecurity, poverty, homelessness, hunger, starvation. No let up. And by some measures even worse than in previous years.

In a country like Britain which has a milder version of most of these ills, even those who suffer the most tend to count themselves lucky. They may be suffering from being hard up, poorly housed, unemployed or precariously employed, but at least they’re not being bombed to smithereens or, except in very rare cases, actually starving to death. Whether managing to cope by selling their energies to an employer day by day to keep their heads above water or suffering trauma and worse from not finding a way to do this, very few look for the real cause, the root cause, of the problems that beset the society they’re obliged to live in.

Very few understand that the present society is based on class division – between the tiny few who own the means of living and enjoy an unearned income as profit and don’t need to work as wage slaves, and the vast majority who have no choice but to hawk their skills around the job market to earn a living.

Not that the people who have to do this – the working class – don’t complain about the way things are run and the organisation of the world around them. They do. But they tend to complain about each issue individually as though it’s a series of unconnected phenomena with no underlying common cause. They don’t connect the dots, which, if they did, would lead them to that root cause, which is not bad or inappropriate government policies but the whole social and economic system we live in, capitalism.

So what can be done? Well, definitely not the kind of flip from Tweedledum to Tweedledee that we saw in last year’s general election. We saw how as soon as the new administration came to power, it was beset with similar problems to the old one and is proving no more adept at dealing with them. By definition, in fact, they can’t be dealt with, since governments don’t control the system they’re supposed to govern. The system with its unpredictable, uncontrollable market forces controls them. And this forces them – whether they like it or not – to take measures which cause discontent among both workers and, as we’ve seen, even among sections of the owning class on whose behalf they operate.

The alternative? Mass global consciousness of what capitalism – the market and profit system – means in any of its forms. Mass global consciousness of the need for a different way of organising human affairs – moneyless, wageless and leaderless – based on production for use not profit, on voluntary cooperation, on free access to all goods and services, on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. If we get in any way closer to that consciousness by the end of 2025, then something at least will have been achieved.

Action Replay: Fifteen to One (2025)

The Action Replay column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In December last year Tom Ilube stepped down as chair of the Rugby Football Union (RFU) for England. He said that this was because ‘recent events have become a distraction from the game’. Some rugby fans thought he kept rather a low profile as chair, but there was more to these recent events than that.

The RFU chief executive Bill Sweeney was paid £742,000 for the year to June 2024, plus a bonus of £358,000, intended to make up for salary cuts during Covid. But all was not well in the governing body or in the sport more widely. The RFU had operating losses of nearly £38m and proposed to make over forty staff redundant as part of ‘restructuring’ (a standard employers’ euphemism). There have been plenty of calls for Sweeney to resign too, and some member clubs tried to call a special general meeting with a vote of no confidence in him. This was declared invalid on bureaucratic grounds, but the RFU later changed their position and agreed to hold the special meeting, but not until March at the earliest.

The RFU’s income derives from match day and event income at the England home ground of Twickenham, plus broadcast revenue, and now a massive amount from insurance company Allianz for naming rights at the stadium. But World Cup years mean fewer matches there, so smaller income.

And lower levels of the game are suffering. The Community Clubs Union says there has been a big increase in walkovers, where one club is unable to field a team, and a lack of match officials. Lost financial support from the centre plays a large part in these problems. The CCU says it intends to be ‘an independent voice of the clubs and community game’. This would mean, for instance, more equitable funding between professional and community rugby.

Back in December a BBC reporter visited Finchley Rugby Club in North London. They run three teams, fewer than in previous years, and, like other similar clubs, they play a major role in introducing young people to play the sport. As the chair says, ‘the support base for national rugby is at grassroots clubs. They’re the people who will get the international tickets and watch it on TV. This is where kids fall in love with the game.’ Grants from the RFU have been cut, and the fear is that redundancies at the centre will have a big impact on local clubs. At Finchley most of those who help out are volunteers and sponsorship is mostly in kind, rather than financially.

As so often under capitalism, those at the top do very nicely, while those lower down, whether at the centre or at local level, struggle to get by and exist on precarious terms.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: Who is Mao Tse-Tung? (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is the purpose of this article to show what Mao really stands for by examining The Thoughts of Chairman Mao (‘The Little Red Book’). This Chinese Bible contains extracts from Mao’s voluminous writings. There are quotes from his early works written when as a guerrilla leader, Mao (and his Red Army) were such a thorn in the side of the Chiang-Kai-Shek regime, right through to the 1960s. Now Mao’s ideas are so influential in China that they actually do serve as the equivalent of religious dogma. (…)

Mao’s own words show that he is in favour of keeping the Chinese workers in poverty. In 1958 (nine years after the revolution!) he wrote:

‘Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank’. This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing‘ (p. 36 — our emphasis).

It must be such a comfort for the poverty-stricken Chinese to know their leader thinks it is good for them to be poor. Mao does not make it clear that he thinks it is good for the leaders to be poor! (…)

In order to ensure that the workers are kept down, Mao can’t resist urging on them abstinence and sacrifice:

‘To make China rich and strong needs several decades of intense effort, which will include, among other things, the effort to practise strict economy and combat waste ie, the policy of building up our country through diligence and frugality’ (p.186).

If those words had been spoken by Wilson or Heath in crisis-ridden Britain you would not have been surprised.

The similarity between Mao and other capitalist politicians is so striking as to make one rub one’s eyes in disbelief at the sight of people in the West waving banners with Mao’s picture on them and proudly calling themselves ‘Maoists’. Mao is just as much an anti-Socialist as his one-time hero Stalin was. They both have in common the fact that they successfully exercised a dictatorship over the proletariat in their own country. When workers throughout the world learn to examine the contents of the packet and refuse just to accept the label, the fraud of Mao Tse-Tung will also be a ‘Museum piece’.

[From the article, 'Who is Mao Tse-Tung?' by Ronnie Warrington, Socialist Standard, February 1975]

Editorial: Trump – what now? (2025)

Editorial from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 20 January Donald Trump officially became president of the United States, much to the consternation of almost 50 percent of the US electorate, and many others around the world. When Trump lost the 2020 election, much relief was expressed by those who feared that he would have established some kind of dictatorship, stamping on all dissent and taking draconian measures against all ‘progressive’ forces. Similar fears are now being expressed.

He says he knows how to quickly resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict (even if he seems to have moved away from his earlier ‘single phone call’ boast). He has promised mass deportations of ‘unregistered’ people. He has vowed to counter attempts to limit fossil fuel and carbon emissions. He has proposed heavy taxes on imports from foreign countries, especially China. And he wants Greenland and the Panama Canal.

Will any of this happen? Whoever has to run the capitalist system in any country often sees their ‘best laid plans’ go awry, because capitalism cannot be controlled by governments. Trump’s desire to take over those other territories could only come to fruition if other global players inexplicably chose not to resist. And his mass deportation plans are likely to meet obstacles at local, state or international levels, making them no more successful than his previous plan to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.

His promotion of the fossil fuel industry may have earned him votes in the ‘rust belt’, but – with climate change implicated in multiple disasters including the recent Los Angeles fires – it could end up losing him support. If his confidence over the Russia-Ukraine war is based on cutting off weapons to Ukraine, he might find that Ukraine manages to get its weapons elsewhere, making him look impotent.

What would he say if such failures, or one of capitalism’s periodic downturns, lose him support? Some say he won’t care, because he will have established a police state that lets him rule unhindered. But advanced capitalist democracies like the US, and others such as the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Holland, Sweden, South Korea, etc, have well-entrenched mechanisms for preventing dictatorships. That’s true even if the would-be dictator surrounds himself, as Trump seems to be doing, with a cohort of compliant disciples who compete to express the most extreme views.

Examples of Trump’s puerile narcissism abound, for example, pinning the blame for the Los Angeles fires on the state governor, Gavin ‘Newscum’ Newsom. Expect further vilification of opponents by him and his best bro, the increasingly preposterous billionaire Elon Musk. Journalist Patrick Cockburn in the i Paper calls it ‘the most crazed administration in US history’. Another commentator calls it ‘the power of dumb’. Even so, it will still have to play by capitalism’s rules.

What has happened in the US seems aeons away from the kind of society we advocate – leaderless, moneyless, wageless, frontierless and entirely democratic. But even if the US election had voted in the ‘lesser evil’ (ie, the Democrats), that party would still have been obliged to run the system in a business-as-usual way, ie, in the profit-seeking interests of the tiny minority who monopolise the majority of the wealth. And so it will continue as long as most wage-slaves continue to support, or at least acquiesce in, capitalism and the profit-seeking force that drives it.

Life and Times: A letter to my son (2025)

The Life and Times column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ‘Life and Times’ column I wrote for this year’s April Socialist Standard had the title Horror in the Middle East. Choosing Sides and talked about the support that has built up for the Palestinians in the Gaza conflict and the widespread condemnation of Israel for its role in the fighting. It asked whether this could be attributed to the oldest hatred – antisemitism. Its conclusion was that it was not antisemitism that underlies it but rather the association of Israel with the United States and ‘the anti-Americanism on the left of Western politics which dates back a long way’.

The column gave rise to discussion, disagreement and controversy on the Socialist Party’s various online forums and, when I showed it to my son, not a member of the Party, he didn’t have an entirely positive reaction either. He attributed the sympathy and support the Palestinians are getting not mainly to anti-Americanism but rather to the vast amount of media coverage being given to this particular conflict. We discussed this and agreed to disagree. But then a little later I was going through some papers of my own, and I came across a copy of a letter I had written to him over 20 years ago, shortly after the 9/11 attack. It struck me how related what happened then was to what is happening now, even if in different countries and with different protagonists. What do I mean by this? This may become clear if I reproduce parts of that letter:

‘Since you brought up the present world political situation yesterday, just an amplification here.

The virulent anti-Americanism that is prevalent on the left has a historical, if entirely irrational, origin. When Russia emerged as the champion of ‘socialism’ after the Russian revolution, throughout the world those who were on the left supported it. So bewitched were they by what was largely rhetoric that, even when Stalin murdered millions in the 30s, made a pact with Hitler at the beginning of the second world war and later set up ruthless dictatorships in all the countries of Eastern Europe, in those peoples’ eyes Russia still remained the ‘homeland’ of socialism, to be supported at all costs. The consequence was that, when, after the second world war, the world divided into two capitalist camps, led by Russia (state capitalist) on one side and America (private capitalist) on the other (the so-called ‘Cold War’), the great villain for the left was America. In an unshakeable double standards mentality, the Russian abuses were ignored or apologised for (eg invasion of Afghanistan, setting up of client dictator states elsewhere – Korea, Syria, Angola, etc.), and all similar actions by the Americans were seen as evil rapacious acts designed to extend and further American power, which they of course were. So strong was the emotional attachment to Russia that even those left-wing people and groups who criticised it in various ways and even in some cases recognised it as a form of capitalism still hung on to it at bottom as fundamentally being on the right side. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the left no longer has a country to cling on to (unless Cuba or, for some, China), but what has remained as a legacy of former times is the hatred of America as the symbol of world capitalism (not that most of them even know what the word means) and the epitome of evil.

The other things that have remained among left-wingers is a continuing opposition to those regimes or countries that America backed during the Cold War, especially Israel, and support for those countries that Russia backed during that period, especially those that have one-party states (eg, Syria, Palestine, Cuba). Ironically that rhetoric has now been bent to the service of fundamentalist Islam. If, historically, wars in the modern world have been struggles for markets, raw materials, trade routes and strategic positions, what you have here, in fundamentalist Islam, is the ideological product of ‘normal’ wars fought in the past and, in fact, much more difficult to fight than a normal war. In his writings Marx continually talked about ‘the contradictions of capitalism’. He usually meant phenomena like the existence of poverty among plenty, or of opposing factions within the owning class of a country causing political instability. And here is another (though obviously unforeseeable in Marx’s time) ‘contradiction of capitalism’, the military power that usually goes with economic power having difficulty in prevailing over the force of a religious ideology which should belong to previous centuries. Though nothing can justify the plane bombing in New York, it’s fatal to get drawn in and say you support one side or another.

At bottom it’s probably not a problem that can be solved, at least not in the short term, and even if it somehow does get solved or alleviated, it will tend to create further unforeseen problems. So whatever people say, it is in the end a problem for those who have created the breeding ground for it in the first case, those who rule.’

So how is what happened in 2001 (and the period immediately following) related to what is happening in the Middle East today? Well, these events show us how phenomena in capitalism have a habit broadly of repeating themselves. It shows the tendency the system engenders in people to take one side against another in a conflict failing to recognise the underlying causes of the conflict. Then there is also that ‘instinctive’ reaction of opposition by the left and other so-called ‘progressive’ forces to any association with the United States. And there’s also the inevitable failure of that reaction to result in any positive outcome for any of those caught up in the conflict. So the massive demonstrations we saw following 9/11 against the Western policy of invading Iraq and Afghanistan had not the slightest impact on events, and, once the invasions had taken place, the opposition to them faded into the background. In the same way, the current large-scale movements in Western countries in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel will die down as the conflict there takes its course and the outcome is decided by the governments that manage the capitalist system, an outcome which will be largely dependent on the economic and military strength of the different sides.

For this reason, were I to write another letter to my son now about the current conflict in the Middle East, the points I would make would be oh so similar to those I made 20+ years ago when yet another of capitalism’s crises had exploded and people were being drawn into the futile activity of supporting one side against the other.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: The next big thing (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mainstream news stories are an endless diet of misery which activists seem to force-feed themselves, under the highly contestable assumption that bad news motivates people to action, rather than into depressed fatalism. If you feel the need for an injection of positivity this January, you ought to try the many free science news websites.

The reason science stories are often positive is because science is about solving problems instead of despairing over them. Now it is true that sometimes those problems are ones that science itself accidentally created. Nobody’s perfect. The law of unintended consequences is always at work, so we ended up with lead in petrol, CFCs in fridges and ‘forever chemicals’ in Teflon. Worse, because science is forced to obey the capitalist prime directive of profit, too often these unintended consequences become ‘unattended externalities’.

Even so, reading science news is a good way to maintain a ‘can-do’ perspective on the world. And socialists have another reason to be interested, because science can offer glimpses of emerging tools and techniques that global socialism might, just might, be able to use in the future, even if they are deemed uneconomical in the present.

Take the current anxiety about micro and nanoplastic particles now being found in almost every animal cell on Earth, together with those forever chemical compounds which don’t break down naturally and have been found in human blood, organs and breast milk. The long-term consequences of all this are unknown, and mainstream news treats it as an unmitigated disaster. But new research has shown how to remove up to 94 percent of nanoplastics from water by just using carbonised epoxy, while a team in China have developed a sponge filter that they say can remove 99.9 percent of microplastics. Forever chemicals can be broken down using expensive high-energy processes, but new light-powered catalysts are thought do the same job at a fraction of the energy cost.

As is well known, renewable energies are intermittent and require back-up storage, generally in the form of lithium-based batteries. But lithium mining or via brine extraction is energy intensive and environmentally destructive. A new study suggests that half of all lithium requirements could actually come out of wastewater instead while an alternative approach offers a low-energy and sustainable means to extract it directly from seawater.

Socialist society will most likely pivot away from the unsustainable capitalist-era obsession with private car ownership, towards comprehensive public transport, but there will still be a role for electric vehicles. At present the battery is the most expensive and least durable part of an EV, but a new type of single-crystal electrode lithium-ion battery could outlast the vehicle it’s in, and then see a ‘second-life’ usage as grid energy storage. Lithium is used because it’s light, so it has an optimal power to weight ratio, but the heavier sodium has similar properties and is 500 times more abundant, so sodium-ion batteries are under development for grid storage, which doesn’t need to move. Problems to date have been low power and slow charging times, but a high-power sodium-ion battery is in development that can charge in seconds.

Battery life and weight currently make long-distance aviation infeasible, but what about old tech in the form of airships? Sustainability concerns are changing attitudes to next-gen air transport, and multiple airship models are in development, including the carbon-fibre and all-electric Pathfinder 1 (no relation), the hydrogen H2 Clipper and the helium Flying Whales, with the UK Airlander 10 expected to be in commercial service by 2026. Helium is hard to get, but the manufacturers point out that airships don’t consume it, they store it, and only need occasional top-ups. If capitalism can do airships, why not socialism?

For short hops, some European companies are developing electric vertical take-off and landing (EVTOL) craft for use as low-cost, noiseless and emission-free air taxis. But they’ve run into funding problems recently as investors are sceptical of getting a good return on investment (ROI). That’s one problem the technology wouldn’t face if a democratic socialist society was, for some reason, smitten with the idea of roof-hopping public transport systems.

In other tech news, AI is an order of magnitude greater consumer of electricity than conventional computing, and an important question is where all the electricity is going to come from. One team believes they can cut AI power consumption by 95 percent simply by rejigging some algorithms. Global warming is creating a global water crisis, and desalination plants are power hungry, but a new method promises zero-electric solar desalination. There’s a plan to stop millions of tons of e-waste by printing circuits onto tree leaves. And self-heating concrete is a thing, if you mix it with paraffin, and could be used for de-icing roads.

In health news, a new biomaterial can regrow cartilage in old joints, meaning no more knee replacements. A twice-yearly injection reduces HIV risk by 96%, more effective than PrEP pills which have to be taken daily. Asthma research has seen the first breakthrough in 50 years with a monoclonal antibody treatment that isn’t a steroid so it doesn’t lead to osteoporosis. And a raft of new research confirms what we already suspected, that nature is good for us. Studies show that time spent in woods, fields or gardens – especially if you get mud on your skin – seems to realign your body’s microbiome with ‘good’ bacteria that are lost through urbanisation and are now believed to inhibit a colossal range of gut-implicated ‘urban’ illnesses (Good Nature, Kathy Kelly, Bloomsbury, 2024).

This only scratches the surface, and of course not all developments will pan out. But the key takeaway from science news is the awareness that the next huge breakthrough, the discovery or invention that changes everything, is just as likely to happen tomorrow as in a hundred years. If that’s not a reason for optimism, we don’t know what is.

Paddy Shannon

Big Tech and the state (2025)

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is Big Tech? How did it get so big? Has Big Tech got too big for the rest of the capitalist class?

Big Tech is a loose definition to describe the largest digital technology-based enterprises – it always includes Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Amazon and Apple. Microsoft is usually included now, sometimes Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, and Nvidia, the semiconductor manufacturer, and some perspectives will include the Asian firms: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi – who by their nature and size fulfil a similar role.

As socialists we understand the integral role of technology in capitalism. In the Socialist Standard No 9 in 1905 we said:

‘The capitalist-class, the most revolutionary class that has ever oppressed human society, cannot increase its riches but by incessantly revolutionising the means of production by the never-ending introduction of new applications of the mechanical, physical, and chemical sciences to the industrial tool. Its thirst for inventions is so insatiable that it has created factories of inventions.’

Whilst most employees in Big Tech are supporting existing products rather than being inventors – factories of inventions seems like a suitable description of commercial research departments or startup companies.

And of course many years earlier Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto wrote:

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.’

Marx also wrote at length about Machinery and Modern Industry in Capital Volume 1.

Whilst many analysts of the left and right sides of capitalism have defined capitalism in our current era variously as platform capitalism, the app economy, surveillance capitalism, and techno-feudalism. The fundamentals of capitalism in terms of social relations are the same and the driving forces are the same, but they are right to recognise that capitalist enterprises have organised themselves differently from other eras.

Technology in perspective

We are not living in a world where most of society is working in information technology, but many use it as part of their jobs.

The Office for National Statistics report UK Digital Economic Research: 2020 showed that using the OECD’s ‘narrow’ definition of the digital economy, digital products accounted for 5 percent of Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2020. Using the wider OECD definition, products significantly affected by digitisation accounted for up to 20.7 percent in 2020, down from a revised figure of 21.2 percent in 2019. This report showed that research, health, finance, retail, manufacturing and real estate industries are all larger than the digital products sector in terms of GVA.

You can’t eat technology for dinner, it doesn’t keep the rain off and you can’t ride it into town, but technology helps produce food, houses and transportation – more and more efficiently with every iteration. The massive amounts of quantitative analysis, the number crunching, and instant communication, has enabled production at scales and efficiencies not seen before.

Productivity figures from sweatshops in Cambodia, for instance, can be analysed in air-conditioned offices in California and decisions made and responses delivered in a matter of seconds.

Some of the Big Tech enterprises are in direct competition: Google and Facebook (which includes Instagram and Whatsapp) are selling ads, giving opportunities to platforms that want to gather information about you to puts ads right in your face. Google and Facebook are said to share a duopoly in online advertising.

Amazon is mainly known for its online retail and delivery business, but most of its operating profit is in ‘the cloud’ (tinyurl.com/yc2j3s4h) – that is data centres where it rents out disk space and computing power. Second in the data-centre business is Microsoft (MS), which is primarily about business software and operating systems (OS), and Google is also pushing into the data centre market.

Apple is primarily in consumer hardware including iPhones, iPads, laptops and desktop computers. In the developed world the iPhone is the dominant mobile phone technology. In the less developed world, Google’s Android OS dominates but the hardware comes from different suppliers.

How did big tech get so big?

Analysts have identified four phenomena that allowed Big Tech to emerge: deregulation, financialisation, globalisation and technological convergence.

Often cited as the key piece of deregulation that paved the way for social media was Section 230 of the 1996 US Telecommunications Act which stated:

‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider’.

Social media sites, it can be argued, are fulfilling the same role as paper publishers who are responsible for what they publish, but for social media after Section 230 it was considered that anything posted on them was ‘user-generated content’ – and users were responsible, not publishers.

Software rarely has the regulatory safeguards that physical products have – think of trying to sell a car with no brakes or a kettle that catches on fire. Fujitsu has paid private compensation for its part in the UK Post Office scandal and, unusually, is also facing criminal proceedings (tinyurl.com/u2xz9zx7). In July this year 8.5 million MS Windows servers were made inoperable due to a faulty software update from an anti-virus company. Delta Airlines, whose operations were massively disrupted, are suing the anti-virus company claiming the outage cost them $500 million, with 1.8 million passengers affected (tinyurl.com/4kaj3s2x). Only those who can afford to sue them will get any money back.

Perhaps ‘lack of regulation’ is a better term – it’s largely a case of legislation not being able to keep up with the rapid innovation of digital services.

The expectation of profits means big tech firms don’t have to look far for sources of investment, which means they can expand in-house, or alternatively acquire smaller firms to increase market share either by embracing or extinguishing a rival technology. A current example is OpenAI, owners of ChatGPT, with an estimated $2 billion in revenue in 2024, though yet to turn a profit due to the huge cost of training AI models (tinyurl.com/2cub8my8). Twitter, for example, made profits in 2018 and 2019, the first since its inception in 2012. Since Elon Musk took over and renamed it, revenue has fallen sharply and ‘X’ has massive debts (tinyurl.com/rbtsh74f).

Globalisation allowed Big Tech companies to minimise their tax burden and move production to places with lower wages. They often have European headquarters in low-tax Ireland. Many consumers are familiar with Microsoft’s Indian Tech Support call centre, while the Foxconn City Factory complex in Shenzhen, China, makes parts for Apple products, and a global army of content moderators work for Facebook and ChatGPT in less developed parts of the world.

Technical convergence basically means devices doing more and more and being linked over the internet. Whilst a telephone handset makes calls, a camera takes pictures, a torch shines a light and a computer runs apps, in a smartphone these roles are combined into one device. These hardware functions rely on software to work, providing apps through app stores, and gateways to other services such as shops, entertainment and games. Both Google Play Store and Apple App Store charge a fee to stock software in their stores, and up to 30 percent commission on app sales and in-app purchases. This is a part of what is known as platformisation (tinyurl.com/5ybrxmdv).

Too big?

Any casual follower of the industry will have noticed that the tide seems to be turning. The section on the Wall St Journal website providing advice for potential investors warns that:

‘Governments around the world are evaluating the impacts that massive tech platforms and social networks have on businesses and consumers. In the coming months, regulations in the European Union and the United States will likely take effect, pushing tech companies to prioritise data protection, harm reduction, the ethical use of AI, and commitment to sustainability goals.’

Over the years there have been a number of skirmishes but the 2023 EU Digital Markets Act, and the EU Product Liability Directive currently being revised to include digital technology, are more significant. A US federal judge ruled in August that Google had violated US antitrust (anti-monopoly) law by maintaining an internet search monopoly. In October the US Department of Justice said in a petition to the court that it may recommend dismantling Google’s core businesses, writing that:

‘That would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features — including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence — over rivals or new entrants.’

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is an EU regulation that aims to make the digital economy ‘fairer’ and more contestable. It became applicable in May 2023. The DMA aims to ensure a higher degree of competition in European digital markets by preventing large companies from abusing their market power and by allowing new players to enter the market.

Twenty-two services across six companies – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft – were identified as ‘core platform services’ by the EU in September 2023. The companies are known as ‘gatekeepers’ due to the ‘durable market position in some digital sectors’ and because they also meet certain criteria related to the number of users, their revenue, or size.

However, there have been accusations from US-based commentators that the rules were carefully constructed so as not to affect European companies and that it is purely about protectionism. As one example, Spotify, a Swedish company which trades on the New York Stock Exchange via a company in Luxembourg, could well have been on the list.

Almost 40 years after it came into force, the European Union is undertaking a major revision of the Product Liability Directive (Directive 85/374/EEC). The aim of this reform is to adapt ‘the standards to the conditions and needs of the digital single market’. To this end, software will in future be considered as a product.

The UK government prior to the general election this year also passed the Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumers Act (DMCC), a similar piece of legislation which surprisingly is the only one to include some protection for consumers, specifically for mis-selling and secondary ticket-pricing, such as the recent fiasco with the tickets for Oasis concerts.

We know there is a to and fro that goes on between lawmakers and Big Tech whilst the laws are being drafted, as Big Tech tries to make sure the legislation, if it has to exist at all, isn’t too damaging.

What’s in store for Big Tech in the future? Will we see monopolies destroyed, and how much will that affect the working class as a whole? Of particular interest to us is, how will it affect us as socialists?

Does it matter?

So in the current era of capitalism we have seen the immensely innovative system undergo great changes in the forces of production, and these changes are ongoing. Perhaps monopolies in certain markets will be broken, or perhaps it is a tendency for states always to be reactive and too slow.

As socialists the monopoly we are mainly concerned with is the monopoly that the capitalist class has over the means of producing wealth, and creating a socialist society where no such monopoly is possible, as everything in and on the world will be owned in common and managed democratically.

Here and now our job as socialists is to make socialists, and digital technology is a major method of promoting socialist ideas – so with changes in the platforms and networks we use there could be profound effects for spreading socialism. There might be profound effects if and when the socialist movement gets big enough to become a threat to capitalism, and when we do win there might be big consequences in having forces of production so complex and powerful at our disposal. Then the factories of invention will go from merely servicing the capitalist system to becoming communities for finding creative solutions to fulfil human needs.

PDH

Cooking the Books: A fuss about NICs (2025)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the week before the budget last October the i paper carried an article headlined ‘Reeves warned NI business tax will hit workers’ pay’ with the subheading ‘Experts say the comments by the Office for Budget Responsibility show increasing employer NI is a tax on “working people”’.

In the event Chancellor Rachel Reeves did increase employer National Insurance Contributions (NICs), which led the media and opposition parties to claim that the government had reneged on its promise not to increase taxes on ‘working people’ (defined, in the end, as those in employment). We are far — very far — from holding a brief for the government, but the claim that the increase in employer NICs will push down wages doesn’t hold water.

In its comments for Reeves’s budget, the OBR repeated:

‘The specific changes to employer NICs increase the costs of employment for firms which is mainly assumed to be passed on to employees through lower real wages, and which also reduces employment.’

So, they weren’t actually saying that the increase would lead to this but that, in their calculations, they had assumed that it would. However, they didn’t explain why they assumed this.

As a measure that increases labour costs, it could be expected to have some effect on employment, but the assumption that it would lower ‘real wages’ (the amount wages can buy in relation to prices) is unwarranted. The OBR seems to have meant that it would result in employers increasing the price of what they are selling, resulting in workers being able to buy less with their wages. But this assumes that, faced with an increase in costs, employers can simply pass this on to consumers through increasing the price of their product, which is not the case.

The TUC understood the situation better. Employers, they pointed out, will:

‘have a range of options on how they can cover these increases. They can absorb the costs and many will choose this option. They could also raise productivity by investing in their business, raise the prices they charge customers, or seek to suppress wage growth in their organisation. It can be difficult to predict what balance of these approaches employers will opt for and it will vary greatly between firms and industries.

‘Workers will be particularly interested in the extent to which employers seek to shift the burden onto them by holding down wages. One thing is for certain – there is no automatic link between business tax and worker wages (…) how the costs are shared will depend on the growth trajectory of the business and economy and on the bargaining power of workers.’

This is substantially correct, although they could have also pointed out that the price increase option would only be open if any increase was ‘what the market will bear’.

It’s not true that a tax that increases employer labour costs would inevitably lead to lower pay. You can see this where labour costs are increased through workers obtaining a wage increase.

The employer would have the same options that the TUC mentions. If, as the OBR assumes, an increase in labour costs leads to ‘lower real wages’, then so should such an increase due to higher wages. It amounts to the old fallacy that an increase in wages is pointless as it merely leads to an increase in prices which nullifies it, a fallacy exposed by Marx in 1865 in his lecture to British trade unionists, later published as Value, Price and Profit.

Poetry (2025)

Book Review from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poetry for the Many. Compiled by Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey. (O/R Books. 2024.)

‘Poetry tells truths that often cannot be expressed in discourse or prose. It gives meaning to the inner-self and allows for people to think freely.’ So says Jeremy Corbyn in his opening remarks. He goes on to state ‘It can be just an expression of thoughts that may at first appear as random but, when written down on paper or screen, can become more coherent and take on a deeper meaning’.

Socialists are surely in favour of any means by which people are engaged in a process of deeper consideration of the world in which they live. Anything that challenges individuals to look beyond the glossy blandishments of the mass and social medias must be regarded as positive.

I first became actively involved with poetry as a writer and performer 50 years ago with the Tyneside Poets. The stated aim of the group was to encourage a widespread appreciation of poetry outside the walls of academia and the classroom. Through its regular meetings, readings and publications the Tyneside Poets group pursued its aims in a wide variety of settings and locations, giving opportunities for people, who otherwise would have been denied such, to publish and publicly read their own poems.

In the late 1970s I co-edited with Gordon Phillips (a fellow Tyneside Poet) two anthologies of poems by young people. Looking for a title for the collection we were inspired by a line in a letter accompanying one submission. Having expressed his wish to have his poem published he then pleaded ‘please don’t tell my friends’. This poignant request became that title.

In a world of rap and poetry slams it may be difficult to appreciate how poets and poetry were regarded by many back then. Tyneside Poets was not unique as similar groups flourished around Britain. The small press became a movement in its own right, a sort of democratisation of the word.

So, ‘Poetry for the Many’ is by no means a novel notion. But the title implies a certain difference. However unintentionally, it, implicitly at least, suggests a notion that is fundamental to reformist politics.

That is the idea of something of benefit being given to those who are presently deprived of it by circumstance. The many are passive recipients rather than active agents on their own behalf. That it is an anthology compiled by two well-known public figures invites the question whether it would have found a publisher had it been by A. Non and A. N. Other.

This is not to question the motives of Corbyn and McCluskey, but to reflect on the very nature of how capitalism influences all aspects of society. The back cover quotes Robin Campbell of UB40 fame, ‘Poetry and music for the many!’… ‘encouraging the working class to embrace and enjoy culture’.

This suggests a rather restricted view of what constitutes the working class. If we are using the socialist definition, the 99 percent or so who depend on the sale of their labour power for their means of life, then there is already a large number of that class who ‘embrace and enjoy culture’.

‘For the many’ was the slogan promoted by Jeremy Corbyn, his allies and supporters, during his ill-fated tenure as leader of the Labour Party. An apt comment on leadership is chosen, perhaps knowingly, by Len McCluskey, a poem by Roger McGough:

The Leader 

I wanna be the leader

I wanna be the leader

Can I be the leader?

Can I? I can?

Promise? Promise?

Yippee I’m the leader

I’m the leader

OK what shall we do?

It’s almost possible to hear this in the voice of Lenin following the storming of the Winter Palace. Or maybe Corbyn after his surprise election to the Labour Party leadership. Perhaps it’s any leader confronted by the reality of administering capitalist society.

Compiling any poetry anthology is a subjective process. If the selected criterion is poetry for the many then questions of accessibility and obscurity come into play. After all the objective is to encourage through engagement rather than possibly discourage due to difficulty. Consequently, many of the poems included here are well known, Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely…’, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and others similarly popular. If the purpose is to engage a new audience for poetry then these are good inclusions.

All the poems are prefaced with an introduction by whoever did the choosing. Reasons for the choice of poet and poem are given, along with the significance to each individual. This is the case for approximately three quarters of the poems. The final quarter is given over to choices by such as Ken Loach, Maxine Peake, Michael Rosen and Alexei Sayle amongst others.

The political ethos underpinning this anthology can be traced to its foundation. This was a gathering for the Politics and Poetry Event in Liverpool’s CASA club, October 2021. Karie Murphy in the anthology’s introduction sets the scene. ‘On the stage is a trio of stalwarts of the Left: Jeremy Corbyn, Len McCluskey and Melissa Benn.’

Thus the somewhat washed out and limp red flag is nailed to the mast. We do not doubt the sincerity of Corbyn and McCluskey in their love of poetry and their wish to bring others, undoubtedly many, to a similar appreciation.

However, from a political point of view, this is still poetry as a commodity people can, literally, buy into. Their role is that of consumers, guided by ‘…stalwarts of the Left’ a self-selected poetic vanguard.

A mitigating reply might be that as stated on the cover ‘All royalties from sales of Poetry for the Many will be donated to the Peace and Justice Project’. No matter how worthy a cause it does not confront the actual issue that peace and justice can only be achieved through abolishing capitalism, and not fine words.

To paraphrase Marx, ‘The poets have only interpreted the world…The point, however, is to change it’.

Dave Alton

How we live and how we might live (part 5) (2025)

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

Previously we looked at how we live under capitalism. It’s now time to change tack and consider how we might live in a socialist future. This does two jobs: it clarifies many confused issues about what socialists are proposing. It also provides a useful platform from which we can look back at our current capitalist society with greater objectivity, highlighting its many antisocial characteristics.

Human societies, like individuals, are adaptive. They are not completely uniform. So along with a rich legacy of cultural differences, socialist communities are likely to organise themselves differently from region to region. We are a practical species, and we develop our institutions to take advantage of local features like resources, topography, climate, etc. And societies don’t stand still. Regional variations will themselves evolve over time as communities try out new solutions to emerging problems. In a world of variety and change it is impossible to be specific about the detailed institutions a future society would develop. We are free to speculate on them, of course, but we should not become too wedded to our conjectures.

Peering into the future

We also need to remember that purely speculative conceptions of a post-capitalist world will always be influenced by our own perspectives. They will include elements of wish-fulfilment, or assumptions derived from our lives within capitalism. No one, no matter how creative or perceptive, can stand outside their own society any more than they can stand outside their own skin. As is often observed of speculative fiction, our projections of the future are often no more than elaborations of the present. Our imaginations, it seems, do not stretch far beyond what will comfortably fit into our familiar framework of ideas. One of the biggest difficulties many people have when first approaching the idea of socialism is that they try to imagine a post-capitalist society through capitalist spectacles. Inevitably they end up constructing impossible hybrids in their minds, like Dr Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu animal with a head at each end, one peering forward, the other, back. So, it is worth reflecting on the fact that any society built on a rejection of capitalism’s defining features would necessarily appear unfamiliar to us, so unfamiliar, in fact, that it might even strike us as incomprehensible or self-contradictory, just as traditional, non-western societies appeared to the first anthropologists.

Peering into the future is a tricky business. Certainly, there are trends and regularities we can extrapolate from, a few things we can infer and some others that we can guess at, but none of us has a crystal ball. To some extent we all go into the future blindly. And that’s particularly true when it comes to predicting the course of events. We know from the science of complex systems that detailed historical movements cannot be known in advance. This doesn’t mean, however, that we can say nothing at all about the future. Far from it. Socialists like William Morris living in the Victorian era admittedly had no ability to predict the path that capitalism would travel over the next 150 years, and they may well have been astonished at the legal forms and institutions it developed along the way. It is extremely unlikely, however, that they would have been surprised to learn that 20th century capitalism has been marked by poverty, war and even the threat of human-induced climate change, or that economic booms and slumps, unemployment, waste, homelessness, corruption, and much else has marked its progress. The historical details may elude us, but once we have an understanding of a society’s foundational structure then its general features become relatively easy to predict.

So, if we are to draw confident conclusions we must dive deep beneath the superficial features of a society. And that seems possible. Societies are not random assemblages of people living arbitrary lives. Each one is built on definite foundations which determine much about its general character, and influence the kind of institutions and practices it can sustain and develop. A society’s foundations set the conditions that motivate people and give meaning to their lives. They determine that some behaviours and choices are socially possible while others are not. They determine how individuals relate to each other, the values they hold, and the kind and extent of freedoms available to them.

Earlier in this series we showed how a society’s foundations are grounded in our biological nature, which requires that we must actively produce the things we need to survive. All human societies, past or present, have had to organise themselves in some way to produce for their collective needs. We saw, for instance, that capitalism organises production upon the basis of the employer/employee property relationship. We saw that this relationship has definite consequences for those living under it. It ensures that we relate to one another as isolated property owners; that we experience competition and conflict at every level of society; that the majority live with personal insecurity; that they spend much of their time acting under the direction of others with little say in how their work or communities are organised; that a significant proportion of them live in poverty, unable to participate fully in their communities; and that all are in danger of suffering intermittently from the many horrors of national and international conflict.

We can predict with considerable confidence that while capitalism persists these miseries will continue into the future without relief. The only way to rid ourselves of them, therefore, is to replace capitalism with something else. But how? And by what means? And how can we ensure that what replaces capitalism will provide a better life for us in the future?

Life after capitalism

In his 1884 talk, ‘How we Live And How we Might Live’ William Morris explored one way of conceiving life after capitalism. He asked his audience to consider what it might mean to live in a world lacking the employer/employee relationship and therefore the vast apparatus of capitalist profit-making. He traced out a society stripped of capitalism’s multiple antagonisms, property-based hierarchies and hard-wired competition. Analyses of this kind are eye-opening and useful, but they are not in themselves sufficient. We need to go further, to analyse socialism in the same way that we previously analysed capitalism by identifying its productive relationships. The best way to do this is to consider how we can make an effective transition between the two.

Today, there is no necessary or objective reason why capitalism should continue to exist. It drags on only by the inertial agreement of the vast majority of people whom it employs. It can be terminated the moment they collectively withdraw their consent to capitalism’s employer/employee relationship. As the roles of employer and employee are mutually dependent, the withdrawal of support for one necessarily means the disappearance of the other. And because ownership of the means of production (the factories, machinery, materials, transport systems, etc) is currently invested in employers, their disappearance requires that it is transferred to new owners.

Socialists argue that ownership of these essential elements of society should fall to the community as a whole. Anything else would be to reintroduce some form of the employer/employee relationship and the capitalist market in which it is embedded. With the means of production taken into common ownership, the products society creates then need to be distributed according to some method. We argue that they, too, should be owned in common and distributed according to need. There are various ways this might be achieved. We propose that access to the products of society should be open and free to all. There are two reasons for this. First, no one is in a better position to assess an individual’s needs than that individual. Second, having open access to the means of production has enormously beneficial consequences for society which we will examine next month.

So, in place of the competitive employer/employee property relationship, socialism’s central productive relations as identified here are common ownership, free association and free access. As we will see, even before we start thinking about the decisions people need to make in a socialist society or what institutions they would need to develop to organise it, these fundamental structures will have a profound effect on how it functions. The board is now set up and we can start to see how the game proceeds.

As a first observation, we can sketch out one difference between capitalism and socialism that immediately appears. This is the amount of social control that a socialist society would have over what is produced. It reveals that there is a straightforward relationship between production and consumption, one which is obscured by capitalist relations. Given any level of production, society can, for instance, choose to produce more and therefore consume more. Or it can produce less and consume less. If we produce less then we have more time to pursue other personal and social interests. So, there is a choice to be made between consuming more and doing more. In capitalism, by contrast, the link between production and consumption is broken by the huge apparatus of profit-making which squats between them, determining and distorting both. The drive it sets up to accumulate capital for the employers of labour overrides and eradicates any preferences a community might have. In socialism this juggernaut is removed, social control is set free and social choices expand dramatically.

Unreasonable fears

But what of the reservations many people have about the whole idea of socialism? As Morris observed, a lot of us shy away from change even when our welfare depends upon it. And having an unclear conception of the future naturally raises not-unreasonable fears. We can, however, address those fears by putting them in context and considering how realistic they are in relation to a future communitarian world. Three great fears regularly strike people when introduced to the idea of socialism, and they are embodied in three human stereotypes which haunt our imaginations like Dickens’s three Christmas ghosts. The first two appear in the guise of the greedy person and the lazy person. The third is supposedly embodied in all of us and summed up in the question, ‘who will do the dirty work?’

These figures are raised up as convenient defeaters whenever the proposal is made that we take personal responsibility for making a real change to our world. We are quick to insist that they make a harmonious world impossible, so there is no point in even thinking about it. It’s an understandable reaction. Greedy people, for instance, are real, aren’t they? The guy in the sharp suit manipulating markets and people from behind their massive desk at company head office. The rumpled politician leaning over the members’ bar in the House of Commons, scheming to feather their own nest. The greedy person is everywhere, feeding at the trough, taking too much of everything and leaving too little for others. That’s the stereotype. But how real is it? Is greed inbred in our human personalities or is it an adaptive behaviour to the deeply competitive social world we currently inhabit? Are any of these figures really a thing?

Next month we will start to confront these three ghosts, and lay them to rest. In the process, we will dismiss a number of misconceptions about the socialist case and reveal much about the means by which it can overcome the inevitable miseries of capitalism.

Hud.

Material World: Will capitalism implode? (2025)

The Material World column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing quite so vividly demonstrated the absurdity of existing society and that it had run well past its sell-by date than the phenomenon we call a depression. By what insane topsy turvy logic could it be that the very abundance of goods that industry churned out should become the source of intense misery to those who had produced this abundance? How absurd that with technology having been developed to the point where human want could be eliminated, this very want should become magnified.

Glutted markets meant mass layoffs, the indignity of the dole queue and the desperation of trying make ends meet. Even in a boom time, needs go unmet; now in a depression the perceptible gap between what people have to put up with and what is materially possible, widened as never before.

It is facts like these that should prompt us to reconsider whether, in the kind of society we live in today, technology or technological innovation can actually deliver ‘abundance’. But delivering abundance doesn’t seem to be the real purpose behind such innovation — making our lives more secure, happy, and content. Behind the smoothly executed fakery of the advertisers, the dissimulation of the pasted-on smiles of the actors who perform in these adverts, another ulterior motive is at work —making a profit by meeting paying demand which, for most people, is limited.

Some argued that crises and depressions were becoming, if not permanent then, at least, progressively worse. Even the Communist Manifesto (1848) had contended that whatever existing measures might be undertaken to overcome such crises this simply meant, ‘paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented’.

However, a quick comparison of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the 2008 global crisis should dispel any such notion. The former event was, by most standards, far more destructive and socially disruptive than the latter, thus refuting the claim that there is some built-in tendency for crises to get progressively worse. As an article in the Economist (10 December 2011) pointed out:

‘The shock that hit the world economy in 2008 was on a par with that which launched the Depression. In the 12 months following the economic peak in 2008, industrial production fell by as much as it did in the first year of the Depression. Equity prices and global trade fell more. Yet this time no depression followed. Although world industrial output dropped by 13% from peak to trough in what was definitely a deep recession, it fell by nearly 40% in the 1930s. American and European unemployment rates rose to barely more than 10% in the recent crisis; they are estimated to have topped 25% in the 1930s.’

Even when the idea was mooted that the working class would act consciously, and in a united fashion, to deliver the coup de grâce to a demonstrably dying system it was assumed that the desire to do so could only have arisen out of the intense hardship workers experienced within a capitalist society in its apparent death throes. That in itself is a highly questionable thesis. The ‘absolute immiseration’ of workers is, if anything, more likely to impede, than promote, the kind of mindset it will take to get rid of capitalism.

In any event, the very fact that capitalism is still very much alive (if not exactly well) should make us think twice about all such prognoses concerning the ‘impending collapse of capitalism’ — irrespective of the particular route by which it is supposed to reach this point. What needs to be questioned is the very notion of ‘collapse’ itself with all its unfortunate mechanistic and millenarian overtones.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s when many on the Left believed fervently in the imminent collapse of capitalism, we in the Socialist Party brought out a landmark pamphlet called Why Capitalism will not Collapse (audio version here). The pamphlet pointed out that previous crises, going back to the early 19th century, had all likewise prompted predictions of apocalyptic collapse on much the same grounds yet these had all proved unfounded. There was no compelling reason for thinking that things would be any different in the future. Capitalism would only disappear if and when workers clearly wanted that to happen and that was something that could not be imposed on them from above – or, indeed, behind their backs.

Apart from anything else there is no ‘internal’ mechanism one could identify that would mechanically cause the system to collapse. Of course, it is conceivable that capitalism could be brought to a shuddering halt as a result of some ‘external’ factor intervening — such as a global ecological catastrophe or a nuclear war — but that is a different argument and, in any case, it is not quite consistent with what the term ‘collapse’ conveys, which would suggest some kind of systemic or internal implosion.

Robin Cox

What is socialism? (2025)

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the years, the word ‘socialism’ has been used to mean many different things – in particular to describe the aims and principles of many different organisations and the policies of many different governments and regimes. Nowadays, in the UK, socialism is associated in most people’s minds with small left-wing organisations or at a stretch even the Labour Party, or with countries like China, Cuba, Venezuela and the former Soviet Union.

We have always denied that socialism means any of these things. Since our foundation in 1904, we have always defined socialism as a world-wide, democratic, moneyless society in which everyone will have free access to all goods and services according to their needs. We have further maintained that socialism can only come about through a majority of people consciously choosing it, ideally through voting at the ballot box.

However, before our definition of socialism and the way it can be achieved can be meaningfully understood, we must explain our view on the present system of society and why we consider it must be abolished and replaced.

Present-day society

The present system of society, based on minority ownership and buying and selling, is commonly known as capitalism. It exists all over the world, in China, Cuba, Venezuela and Russia for example, as well as in the UK, America and Europe. It has not always existed, and it will not exist for ever. It is not an evil conspiracy but a type of social order which has been necessary for the progress of mankind. It has developed science and technology to a previously undreamed-of degree, done wonders for global health, united the world in communications and educated more people than ever before to a high degree of knowledge and adaptability.

But capitalism has not fully applied its advances for the full benefit of the majority of the population, and it cannot. It has not united the world politically. Wars go on all the time essentially due to the competition within or between nations over resources, raw materials and trade routes. The threat of a big war which would wipe us all out still remains. Nor has it used the sophisticated knowledge and technology it has created to ensure useful, dignified and happy productive activity for the majority. In fact it has put a curse on work. Work for most people is equated with something unpleasant in life.

What capitalism has done is to create a potential abundance of wealth capable of satisfying everyone’s needs, but without being able to realise that potential. This is because it is not geared to distributing wealth freely but to the rationing of it by means of the market and the wages system.

It operates by exploiting the majority of the population. By exploitation we do not mean that the majority earn starvation wages or live in 19th century conditions, though some do, especially in the global South. What we mean is that those who work are a source of wealth that is taken from them, that they produce a greater amount of wealth than they get back in wages or salaries. Unfortunately, most people do not see this, misled as they are by the culture of acceptance in which they grow up, their education and the media they are exposed to. They tend to see the world as a place in which we should all count ourselves lucky if we are given a chance to earn enough to enable us to exist from day to day.

The fact is that the world’s wealth is produced but not owned by that large majority who, in order to live, are obliged to hire themselves to an employer for a wage or salary. So while no one would deny that, in most countries, conditions of life have vastly improved over the last century, it is still, for example, the case that millions of children live in poverty even in 40 of the world’s richest countries.

The working class

This large majority of people who produce most of the wealth but own none of it to speak of we refer to as ‘the working class’. To many people class is defined by such things as upbringing or education or occupation. These may be useful classifications for some purposes, but to socialists the working class is composed of all those who through economic necessity are obliged to sell their energies to an employer in order to live, ie, the vast majority of the population. The working class is therefore a class of wage and salary earners and as such includes not only manual workers but also people who are often referred to as ‘middle class’ such as office workers, civil servants, engineers, doctors, teachers, etc.

The interests of the working class are diametrically opposed to the interests of the other class in society, the employing or capitalist class, comprising those who own enough to live (land, shares in companies, farms, offices, etc.) without needing to sell their energies to an employer. Another possible arrangement for capitalism is one in which the state, via its bureaucrats, takes over capital, wholly or in part, in order to exploit workers. This can consist either in selective nationalisation of certain industries or complete state control. We call this state capitalism.

Socialists have no personal grudge against capitalists either as individuals or as a class. We simply point out that their interests will always be opposed to the people they employ. In short, society today is a class-divided society.

Reforms

Apart from the continual battle inherent in the capitalist system between employee and employer over pay and working conditions, capitalism also produces a host of other intractable problems. Among these are wars and the threat of war, unemployment, poor housing, homelessness, anxiety, loneliness and unsatisfying work, all of which add up to a society in which there is much strife and dissatisfaction and, for many, a generally insecure and frustrated existence. Suggestions for reforms to improve things come continually from the political parties involved in running the system. But once brought in, reforms rarely have the beneficial effect claimed. At best they tinker at the edges of problems and can even create new problems requiring further reform. And of course they may be reversed when a new party comes to power.

Well-meaning individuals often say that you can have socialism as your long-term aim but still campaign for reforms in the meantime. We say that this is merely putting off the day and channelling energies that could be usefully employed in bringing socialism nearer into activities whose results are uncertain and which may have the effect of bolstering capitalism rather than help get rid of it. So we do not consider it our function to campaign for reforms or seek support on the basis of reforms.

So far it has been comparatively easy for the dissatisfaction of workers to be channelled in a reformist rather than a socialist direction. Some people might even say that there is not that much dissatisfaction among workers at all, that on the whole they are quite happy with things as they are. But perhaps what they should say is not ‘happy’ but ‘resigned’. What most people want is a quiet secure life for themselves and their families, but capitalism tends to deny them this. Their plans are constantly being put in jeopardy by crises, job reorganisations, new government policies, disruption of various other kinds, and, depending on which part of the world they live in, wars and day-to-day violence.

Socialism comes from capitalism

What makes us think workers will ever take action? Well, there is certainly no guarantee, but capitalism has already created a large, organised, highly trained working class which carries out by itself all essential productive, administrative and educative activity throughout most of the world and which has an increasing interest, because of its subordinate social and economic position and its conditions of work, in challenging the status quo. Capitalism has also produced, and carries on producing, the material conditions necessary for the establishment and practical organisation of a united world-wide society, ie, rapid world-wide communications and a potential abundance of goods and services. In addition many of the problems of modern capitalism (pollution, climate change, threat of war, terrorism, recessions, etc.) are world problems that can only be approached on a world scale even within the present system and that tend therefore to spread a consciousness of the need for world solutions generally.

We know that none of this means socialism is just around the corner. And socialists at present are a tiny minority. But, as we have pointed out, capitalism is a system of constant agitation and rapid change in which nothing is constant or sacred and which itself has provided, and will continue to provide, fuel for the spreading of socialist ideas.

How to get socialism

Because socialism will be a fully democratic society in which the majority will prevails, though with full rights of dissent for minorities, it follows that socialism can only be set up democratically, ie, when a majority have come to want and understand it. Socialism cannot be handed to people by an elite which thinks it knows what is good for them. Such a minority revolution could only fail and lead to minority rule, as happened in Russia, China and those other countries which are often called socialist (or communist), but which we call state capitalist.

And being a majority revolution, socialism has no need to initiate violence. The street-fights-and-barricades vision of revolution belongs to a romantic past and anyway could not possibly stand up to the might of the modern state. In any case, in most of the economically advanced countries of the world where workers are the most numerous and highly trained, capitalism has been forced to give them certain elementary political rights, in particular the vote. This means that, when a majority decide they want socialism, they can organise themselves as a leaderless democratic political party and use the ballot box to send their delegates to legislative assemblies with a mandate not to form a new government to oversee the capitalist system but to abolish capitalism and its whole machinery of minority rule.

Sceptics may ask: will the capitalist class allow this to happen? Our reply is: what can they do against a politically conscious majority from all sections (including police, army, etc.) of the working class?

What socialism will be like

What will socialism be like once established? Well, we obviously cannot provide a blueprint for it, as the precise details of its organisation will be democratically worked out by the majority who decide to establish that society and to live in it. But we can make certain general statements about its nature.

We can say that it will mean the end of buying and selling and of all the other financial and commercial institutions like money, prices, wages, banks and insurance.

We can say that, with the disappearance of such factors as financial cost and competition, it will mean people planning production democratically and using the highly sophisticated technology in existence to provide for their wants and taking freely what they need from the abundance of resources made available by that technology.

We can say that it will mean voluntary cooperation, work as pleasure not toil, and all human beings as social and economic equals.

We can say that it will mean complete democracy in all departments of life with freedom to choose one’s activities and occupations and without people being pushed around by decisions from above or by any kind of arbitrary authority.

We can say that socialism will be world-wide – it cannot be anything else. ‘Socialism in Britain’, for example, is a contradiction in terms, and anyway the world is now so closely united in terms of communications, fashions and the rapid flow of ideas that, if people in one country were ready for socialism, the rest of the world could not be far behind.

The establishment of this world community founded on common ownership and democratic control is the only solution to the major problems of modern life. It may seem some way off, but if you agree with us and help spread socialist ideas, you will bring it nearer. And if you join the Socialist Party, you will find yourself a member of a unique political organisation, one which is completely democratic, has no leaders and no secrets, and in which all members have an equal say; one, in other words, that foreshadows the way in which socialist society itself will be organised.

South Wales Branch

Fake socialism (2025)

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In October there was a by-election to elect a new ward councillor in South Acton, London borough of Ealing. One of the 8 candidates was David Hofman standing for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). Though TUSC is nominally an umbrella organisation of various unions and small left political groupings, it is in fact dominated by the ‘Socialist Party’, the organisation that arose in 1997 when the so-called ‘Militant Tendency’, which operated within the Labour Party to try and push it to the left and then renamed itself ‘Militant Labour’, was effectively expelled by Labour together with its members. It initially called itself the ‘Socialist Party of England and Wales’ (SPEW), but later dropped the ‘England and Wales’, effectively hijacking the commonly used name of our own Party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

But what kind of organisation is this so-called ‘Socialist Party’, which campaigned for election in South Acton under the name of TUSC? Is it a socialist organisation in the sense that we understand socialism, ie, a moneyless, wageless society of common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services? Or is it something different?

In an interview with Ealing News, the TUSC candidate for South Acton, David Hofman, outlined its aims and objectives. Having pointed out that he had been one of those expelled from the Labour Party in the 1990s, Hofman explained that among his recent political activities had been ‘the campaign to retain Ealing libraries, and other campaigns to save local services’ and that he had been involved in assisting and participating in various trade union activities. The main issues he said he was campaigning on were restoration of the winter fuel allowance, recently removed from some pensioners by Keir Starmer’s new Labour government, and the need to ‘tackle the housing crisis’. If elected he would campaign on Ealing Council to give emergency heating grants to pensioners in need so that they did not have to choose whether ‘to heat or eat’, and he would campaign for the Starmer government to return to Ealing funding ‘stolen’ from it by Westminster via austerity policies since 2010. This, he continued, would allow the Council ‘to start addressing the housing and other local service issues and to avert ‘further rounds of cuts, closures, redundancies, and outsourcing of services’, via ‘a no-cuts needs budget’. The candidate’s election leaflet contained a further ‘wish list’ of reforms including mass council house building, a £15 an hour minimum wage, well-paid jobs for all, free public transport and an end to privatisation of utilities.

It would be churlish in a way to argue with such aspirations, especially those such as helping pensioners to keep warm that might be achievable, even if in fact most of the candidate’s proposals for reforms are probably not achievable within the framework of the system we live in. But even if they were, they would remain just that – reforms. They would be relatively small tweaks to how the buying and selling system operates, the system that inevitably means vast disparity of wealth between those who own the means of living and those who are obliged to sell their energies to produce goods and services for sale on the market. David Hofman did show an awareness of this disparity in talking about wealth being ‘concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority’, but that was combined with a failure to appreciate that this cannot be rectified by what are small – and possibly short-term – reforms which leave the basic blocks of the system in place – money, wages, buying and selling, production for profit not need. In other words, it would be no more than tinkering at the edges. As a sage once said, ‘The system cannot fix the system’.

In the end, the TUSC grouping that Hofman stood for in that by-election, though claiming to be socialist, is not socialist at all. Like so many left-wing groups, it is a reformist alliance that not only never says a single word about socialism in its genuine sense, as the candidate never did in his interview, but in sticking to advocacy of reforms, leads people to think that this is what socialism is, so causing confusion.

In his interview the candidate did talk about the need to ‘help bring a new workers’ party into existence’, but our news for him is that one already exists, the Socialist Party (of Great Britain). Of course, we remain to be recognised as such by the vast majority of workers. But the plain fact is that only when the message we exist to propagate gains that recognition, will we be on the way to the real societal change that is socialism. At the same time we recognise that the social consciousness on the part of the majority of workers needed for this is not something that can be rushed or conjured into existence. It can only develop at its own pace and the single purpose of the SPGB is to assist that process as much as possible by helping to spread the idea of what socialism really is.

David Hofman, despite the attractive package of reform measures TUSC was advocating, got only 18 votes, quite possibly fewer than would have gone to a candidate presenting a straight socialist programme of abolition of capitalism and its buying and selling system and a society of free access based on from each according to ability to each according to need.

Howard Moss