Planlessness (2026)

Book Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World. By Philip Coggan. Profile £7.99.

A first reaction to this book is that it was likely to be out of date by the time it was published. Given Trump’s tendency to change his mind, anything said would probably no longer apply after a month or two. The author does indeed record Trump’s decisions about tariffs and his repeated revisions of them, describing him as ‘a man without a plan’ who based the calculation of tariff rates on an absurd formula. But he also notes some ideas that underlie Trump’s policies.

The main reason seems to be the intention to return manufacturing industries (and jobs) to the US, but this is unlikely to be successful. In 2013, as an illustration, Motorola opened a smartphone factory in Texas, but it closed after a year because of high costs. Even when it does pay off, building new factories takes time and the US has a shortage of factory workers; they might come from abroad, but of course Trump is clamping down on immigration. The US will simply not re-enter ‘a golden age of manufacturing employment’.

On the whole Coggan adopts an orthodox economic perspective, arguing, for example, that tariffs interfere with market signals about the causes of rising and falling prices. Tariffs have varied over the centuries and protectionism was more widespread between the two world wars. But since the 1960s tariffs have generally been falling, from a global average of 14 percent then to 10.9 per cent in 2000 and 2.5 per cent in 2021. Free trade, he says, is good for an economy, though there has rarely been completely free trade.

One good point he makes is about the interconnectedness of global production, with long and complex supply chains. An iPhone is based on 187 suppliers across twenty-eight countries, while cars imported to the US from Mexico consist largely of components made in the US. Around eighty per cent of the toys sold in US shops are made in China, so the massive tariffs Trump wanted to impose on imports from China were a non-starter, and they have now been scaled back in a major way. American workers are already complaining about higher food prices as a result of the various tariffs, such as bread doubling in price (Guardian 19 October).

The whole world, Coggan suggests at the end of this short volume, ‘will suffer the adverse economic consequences of Mr Trump’. But really these are the consequences of the capitalist system, not the result of the idiosyncrasies of one man.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: Warming up (2026)

The Action Replay column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The UN has a programme called Sports for Climate Action, described as ‘a global movement harnessing the unifying power of sport to address climate change and build a more sustainable and resilient future’ (unfccc.int). Sport can be adversely affected by climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity, but supposedly it can also be an agent for promoting collective action. Sport, it is claimed, needs to adapt to the impacts of global warming and also to engage its global audience to make their own contribution to fighting climate change.

All very well, of course, but a look at some of the environmental impact of professional sport paints a rather different picture. In motor racing, Formula 1 (F1) will be moving from the use of fossil fuels to an allegedly sustainable fuel from next season, fuel which might then be used in ordinary cars. But, as noted in the November 2025 Science Focus, there are major issues involved here. The new fuels may be low in carbon emissions but still emit many other pollutants, hence not really being sustainable. The synthetic fuels may in fact involve CO2 emissions in the process of producing hydrogen from natural gas, so the overall climate impact is not at all clear. In any case, fuel from races is only a tiny part of F1’s total carbon footprint, with massive amounts of global travel playing a far larger part. Carbon emissions in the logistics side of F1 have already been reduced, but there is still a long way to go to achieve real sustainability.

Another example would be this year’s football World Cup, which will be played in the US, Canada and Mexico, in stadiums from Vancouver to Mexico City, so meaning much long-distance travel. It will involve 48 teams and 104 matches (sixteen more teams and forty more games than previous tournaments). Scotland, for instance, will play their group matches in Boston and Miami, which are well over a thousand miles apart. One estimate is that the tournament will generate over nine million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, almost double what previous ones have produced.

In addition, the heat will mean that many of the venues will be effectively unplayable during the afternoon. Many top players have already suffered while playing in hot conditions in the US, as in last year’s Club World Cup, and also there will be hundreds of thousands of supporters, plus backroom staff and media workers who will have to endure extreme heat at many matches, reaching over thirty degrees or perhaps even forty. FIFA are apparently keeping ‘an open mind’ on all this, which presumably means they won’t be making any significant decisions quite yet, if at all.

So global warming can affect not just people’s living conditions, but various kinds of leisure activity too. And sport can exacerbate climate change, as well as (just possibly) help to combat it.

Paul Bennett

Party News – YP conference (2026)

Party News from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

YP- Labour 2.0?

Just to demonstrate our northern hardiness, members went out in uninviting November weather to Manchester and Liverpool to dish out 500 leaflets on the occasion of the first national conference of Your Party (now its official moniker). Previously, other members had done likewise at YP events in Huddersfield, Bolton, Preston, Stroud, Swansea, Cardiff, Newport, Brighton, Oxford, Gillingham, and London (all compass points).

The Liverpool conference was hastily convened to thrash out questions like its name, its constitution, its aims, and in particular who was going to be in charge of it. All this amid breathless drama after Corbyn’s faction summarily expelled Trot entryists from the SWP, on the (actually incorrect) argument that they were registered as a different party with the Electoral Commission and therefore ineligible for membership. At this, Zarah Sultana promptly boycotted the first day of the meeting, which does not bode well for the future of YP but must have tickled Zack Polanski, the Greens’ new ‘socialist’ snake-oil salesman, who is seeing a significant bump in membership as a result of these antics.

Our leaflet was called ‘YP – Labour 2.0?’ and argued that even if Your Party was ever able to form a government, it would inevitably suffer the same fate as the original Labour Party, meaning that YP would not change capitalism, capitalism would change YP. It’s quite possibly no coincidence that we handed Zarah Sultana a leaflet in person, after which a YouTube video appeared in which she specifically denied that Your Party would turn into Labour 2.0.

One resentful but revealing comment heard from a conference participant was ‘SPGB? Oh yes. None of us are ever good enough, are we?’ This must have been a reference to our so-called ‘purist’ reputation among the left, in contrast to their customary ‘pragmatic’ approach. But we’re not purist, just principled. We’ve been telling the left for generations not to keep doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result, but they keep doing it, and now they’re doing it again with Your Party – trying to reform capitalism into something that works for humanity instead of against it. It drives them mad when we tell them that they’re wasting their time trying to fix the unfixable. It must drive them madder still that we’re always somehow proved right when their strenuous efforts fall apart. We wish it wasn’t so, but it will continue to be so until the left, and workers in general, acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is that capitalism needs to be abolished, and replaced with a democratic system of free access for all and collective ownership and control of the Earth’s resources.

PJS

SPGB January Events (2026)

Party News from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

A nuestros lectores hispanoparlantes (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

¿Sabe que ya existe un sitio web que explica los argumentos básicos en contra del capital y en favor del socialismo mundial? Por favor, consúltelo aquí www.worldsocialist.org/?lang=es-ES.

Cooking the Books: Capitalist musings on money (2026)

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

Some capitalists have been philosophising recently on their favourite subject — money. One-time investment banker Matt Levine titled his ‘Money Stuff’ column in Bloomberg News (24 November) “Leave the Gold in the Ground”.

Gold is no longer used as the currency — what Marx called the ‘money commodity’ — as it was for millennia. It is, however, still a store of value. ‘Even now’, Levine pointed out, ‘gold is an important reserve asset, and people hold it in their financial portfolios in the form of gold futures, gold exchange-traded funds, etc’. What is being traded are titles to the ownership of gold. Those who buy and sell these are speculating on how the price of gold will move in the future. The gold itself is stored underground in a safe vault. When these titles are exchanged what happens is just that an entry of who it belongs to is changed in a database. The gold stays where it is.

Levine discusses the case of a group of capitalists who, noticing this, have come up with the idea of selling titles to gold that is still in the ground. They are either fools or knaves as they are assuming that unmined gold in the ground is as valuable as gold bars in a vault. But, of course, it is not. Unmined gold has no value precisely because it hasn’t been mined, though the land under which it lies will have a price based on what royalties might be received were it to be mined. Gold bars in an underground vault have value only because they have been mined, refined, made into bars and transported, their value reflecting the amount of labour that has had to go into doing all this.

What is perhaps surprising is that this is the explanation put forward in a news site for capitalists, surprising because it is an application of the labour theory of value that pro-capitalist economists teach is nonsense. After noting that ‘that modern finance creates layers of abstraction on top of real-world activity, and sometimes those abstractions become unmoored from the reality’, Levine applies this not just to titles to gold but to the shares in any business. As an example he takes Amazon:

‘A share of Apple Inc. stock encapsulates all of the labor and creativity that went into inventing the iPhone and manufacturing it and selling it and building app stores and everything else; all the factories and offices and decades of decisions are all reflected in the tradeable electronic token that is a share of stock’.

Another capitalist who has been philosophising on money is the richest person in the world himself, Elon Musk. Fox News reported him as telling a business forum on 17 November:

‘“If you go out long enough, assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely, the money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,” Musk said. He added there will still be constraints on power, such as electricity and mass. “The fundamental physics elements will still be constraints, but I think at some point currency becomes irrelevant,” Musk said’.

Musk seems to be embracing here the FALC — Fully Automated Luxury Communism — thesis. Improvements in AI and robotics will certainly make socialism easier but it is not that which will make money irrelevant. What will is only the conversion of the means of production from the private property of the few into common property of all. And that doesn’t have to wait for ‘full automation’, nor will it come about automatically through advances in technology.

50 Years Ago: Enoch Powell & war (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Enoch Powell is no friend of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. His divisive views on race are enough to make any self-respecting Socialist shudder. Yet amongst politicians he is undoubtedly one of the more coherent defenders and theorists of the present social set-up. His opposition to government spending, for example, does not extend to the police or prison services. He is in no doubt that crime is an unavoidable part of competitive society and maintains that economies in this field can only hamper the smooth running of that system. On inflation, too, he is uncompromising. He fully understands that inflation is caused by governments having an excess of paper currency printed, an explanation given (although Enoch may not realise it) by all Socialists since Marx.

In a recent edition of the BBC’S Any Questions Mr. Powell “came clean” once again, this time on the subject of war. He expressed the view that, with nations obliged to defend their interests against possible attack by outsiders, all grandiose, well-meaning schemes to disarm or to abolish war were pie-in-the-sky; the best governments could do was to stave off for as long as possible the wars that were bound to break out sooner or later. This is a bold, objective description of conditions in the world today and we must congratulate Mr. Powell for his frankness and lucidity. (…)

Enoch Powell is simply acknowledging what we have said: in a commercial, nation-divided world, war is inevitable. If the politicians are unable to avert wars, it is quite simply because they are committed to looking after a system that breeds them.

What is our alternative? We suggest a truly united, wholly democratic world with no nations, no money and with the satisfaction of human needs as its first priority. Impossible? We don’t think so. All that is in fact needed to bring it into being is peaceful political action by a convinced majority of ordinary people.

[From ' Enoch Powell & War' by HKM, Socialist Standard, January 1976.]

Editorial: New year, same shit . . . (2026)

Editorial from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year, 2025, could only be considered a success story for capitalism in the sense that the world didn’t end in total destruction. For many though, it was a disaster. Think Gaza, where survivors starve among the ruins after a genocidal slaughter that will only cause further wars. No wonder states don’t want to pay to rebuild Gaza, just to see it levelled again. Think Darfur and South Sudan, with massacres committed by the Rapid Support Force using weapons purchased by the United Arab Emirates from western states including the UK, and allegedly donated as part of an arms-for-gold deal. The gold mines of Darfur have been a ghastly resource curse. The locals have paid with their lives so that capitalist deals get done.

Two corrupt power blocs on the European landmass continued putting human beings into the meat grinder of war, while the very people elected or appointed to serve the Ukrainian people instead trousered over a hundred million dollars intended to protect energy infrastructure and keep the winter lights on. This is what nationalism gets you. Workers die in trenches while the bosses find ways to get rich out of it.

Many other wars got less media coverage, including the ongoing multi-sided slaughter in Myanmar, a real-world example of the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’. When a big earthquake struck the country in March, killing around 5,000 people, some rebel groups called for a ceasefire as they sent aid workers into affected areas. The military junta, according to reports, had no such humanitarian concerns and instead bombed and strafed the aid workers.

Despite glimmers of hopeful news as Generation Z protesters overthrew a brutal regime in Nepal, world politics in 2025 seemed to be all about tearing up of the rules-based order, led with orgiastic zeal by Donald Trump and his coterie of talentless sycophants. Seeing the world’s politicians cravenly kissing this man’s feet in the hope of favours was stomach-turning, and it didn’t work anyway. The far-right in almost every country has been given a huge boost as this deluded Caligula lays waste to every human principle of fairness and decency, merit and reason, equality and environmental safety. No capitalist politician is ever going to ‘fix’ capitalism, but some seem determined to make it worse. The name of Trump may come to be spat on by posterity as a loathsome icon of narcissism, ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ sexism, and kleptocratic greed. He’s already being sued over his stupid ballroom, so maybe that will be demolished too.

But in a way Trump has done the world a favour, by ripping off the civilised veneer and showing everyone what capitalism really is, instead of what it pretends to be. It was never a rules-based order. It’s always been ‘might equals right’ and screw the little guy.

Meanwhile over in the UK, the fractured left try once again to unite around a vague wish-list of reforms aimed at making capitalism just a tiny bit less awful. What they should be doing is calling for the end of capitalism, because that’s the only thing that will work. Instead they clamber back on the carousel horse of reformism to go round one more time, learning nothing, changing nothing, in a perpetual triumph of hope over experience. This year, if you can find a way, help us get the message across: end capitalism, before it ends us.