Life and Times: Do I know you . . .? (2026)

The Life and Times column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’m standing on the concourse at Swansea station. Someone comes up to me. A fellow probably in his forties. He’s friendly. ‘Hi, how’s it going?’, he says, ‘I haven’t seen you for a bit’. I feel embarrassed, slightly panicked in fact. It happens to me a lot. I’m greeted by someone who obviously knows me, but my memory for faces (and names) has become terrible and I can’t for the life of me remember who they are. When this happens, what I can’t do of course is say something like ‘Do I know you?’ And sometimes, once we get talking, they say something that reminds me who they are and that I do know them, even if I still can’t recall their names. But this fellow, I’d swear I don’t know him from Adam – though surely I must.

Anyway I try not to look surprised. ‘I’m okay. How are you?’, I say. He nods and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ I reply that I’m waiting for my son and grandson who’ve gone into Costa Coffee to get a sandwich for their journey home. ‘Are you going somewhere?’, I ask, as a way of finding something to say. ‘No, I’m in a mess’, he replies. ‘My wife has left me and I’m out of the house. I’m on the street.’

What now? I’m supposed to know him and he’s obviously asking for help. So, I need to do something. I need to give him some money. But how much? When someone asks me for money on the street – it seems to happen a lot – I usually give them a pound coin if I’ve got one in my pocket. But can I give this fellow just a pound? After all he’s someone I apparently know- and he’s in a real mess, So one pound just doesn’t feel right. How much then? If I have notes on me, they’re usually in my wallet not my pocket, but somehow I don’t want to get my wallet out. But then I remember I do actually have a ten pound note in my pocket – change from something I bought earlier. I feel in my pocket, pull it out and hand it to him. ‘Hope this helps’, I say. He thanks me and asks me where my son is. I see that they (he and my little grandson) have just come out of Costa Coffee and are waiting for me further down the concourse. I wave in their direction. ‘They’re there’, I say. And I start to walk towards them. He walks with me for a few steps, but then veers off in a different direction. I get to my son and tell him what’s happened. ’My memory’s getting worse’, I say. As my ‘friend’ vanishes from sight, my son, with an amused look on his face, says ‘you’ve been conned’. It takes a few seconds for the scales to fall from my eyes. He then adds jokingly: ‘I saw you hand the money over. I thought you were doing a drugs deal’.

We both laugh, but how do I actually feel? Well, despite having being conned, I don’t actually feel annoyed. I feel a bit sad in fact. Why? Well, though my pretend friend has put one over on me, it won’t cause me any great hardship and I can’t help feeling sorry for him. Even though most people would probably regard him as at least a bit of a villain, my thinking is that you have to be pretty much on your uppers and probably at your wit’s end to do that kind of thing. I couldn’t know of course what his real story was and no doubt I wasn’t the only one he’d tried the same trick on that day. But how desperate does someone have to be to resort to that kind of deception all the while knowing he’s likely to suffer one rebuff after another but just hoping he’ll manage to take in the odd unsuspecting fool?

And what might have been this fellow’s story? Perhaps he’d had a particularly difficult upbringing he’d been unable to shake off and the only thing he’d known was a life of surviving by one trick or another? Or had he just fallen on hard times, things having come apart for him as happens to a fair number of people in the wage-slave society we live in – people who maybe lose their jobs and then can’t keep up with housing and other costs? Or did he have a mental health problem which prevented him from living most people’s 9 to 5 life and getting by on what they earned? Or maybe something else? A recent report from the Centre for Social Justice think-tank found that around 13.4 million people in the UK were living lives ‘marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime’. Whatever the case, he wasn’t one of the many millions of us who manage to keep their heads above water by having a paying job, even if at the cost of keeping the lid on, never being truly free of potential financial insecurity and often paying a high price in terms of self-fulfilment and quality of life. That’s the best in fact that the system we live in of buying and selling, monetary exchange and monopoly of wealth by a tiny minority can offer to the vast majority who have to sell their energies for a wage or salary in a society in which everything’s for sale. A wageless, moneyless society of cooperative work and free access to all goods and services – ie, socialism – is what we urgently need to cure all those maladies.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: The magic gadget IRL (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

30 years ago in 1996, some were learning to use email, home computers and the embryonic worldwide web, but most families still shopped in the high street, looked up numbers in the phone book and watched ‘terrestrial’ telly together in the sitting room. Kids who wanted alternative amusement ended up hanging out with mates on park benches or outside supermarkets in the winter cold. Gay teens had no local community of peers to turn to. Neither did those with hobbies, or growing-pain problems. For them, the world in real life (IRL) was limited and limiting.

But, IRL, there was also no FOMO, no sexting, no doxing, no doomscrolling, no cyberstalking or cyberbullying, no revenge porn or ‘nudifying’ of classmates, and no pro-suicide chatrooms. Smartphones and social media (SM) have revolutionised the childhood experience, and not necessarily in a good way, as BBC Radio 4 reported (7 December): ‘Alongside the widespread adoption of smartphones has come a tidal wave of adolescent anxiety, depression, loneliness, and a spike in suicides’. Now Australia has banned access to ten of the biggest SM sites for under-16s. Communications Minister Annika Wells explains: ‘Teenage addiction was not a bug, it was a design feature, and on 10 December there are going to be withdrawal symptoms. […] With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the men who created the feature as “behavioural cocaine”‘.

Many countries now ban phone use in schools. Australia started doing this back in 2020, with support from teachers and parents alike. All claimed a degree of success. However the bans were not well coordinated, and subjective reports of greater engagement and improved mental health may be the placebo effect at work. A Birmingham University study looking at 1,227 students in 30 secondary schools found no evidence of changes in grades, amount of sleep, class behaviour, or even time spent on phones.

Australia’s latest action, with popular support, could trigger a global cascade of similar legislation. SM firms already face a landmark US trial this month. China, with basilisk totalitarian vigilance, uses spyware to restrict SM use and game playing by its youth, with a 40-minute daily limit for SM and 3 hours gaming per week. The UK 2023 Online Safety Act (OSA) instead demands that SM companies take ‘reasonable steps’ to protect children. Good luck with that. SM lawyers will have a field day.

It’s not just teens. Ofcom estimates that 1 in 4 UK children aged between 5 and 7 have a smartphone. Parents say they buy these phones for safety reasons to do with the child being contactable and trackable. But satellite-tracking a five-year-old is not the way to keep them safe. In truth, overworked adults managing multiple jobs and kids may well find the magic gadget of infinite games and videos hard to resist, given that it shuts their child up like nothing else and besides, if all the other kids have one, their child runs the risk of being victimised for looking poor.

Radio 4 interviewees speculate that the Australian ban could be a useful research opportunity. That’s if it works, but it probably won’t. One 13-year-old got round the ban in less than five minutes. And if one kid can do it, they all will, because of peer pressure, and because the industry wants to lock them in, not out, and because it will regard regulatory fines as the paltry cost of doing business. The new OSA age-verification rules for porn sites are also probably doomed. There has been a huge increase in downloads of VPN apps which hide the user’s IP address. With a conservatively estimated 240,000 online porn sites, Ofcom regulators face an uphill struggle to ensure compliance. So far they’ve taken action against just 70, leading insiders to argue that the new rules are effectively unenforceable.

And then there is the law of unintended consequences which produced this generational mental health crisis in the first place. Regulating the top SM sites might end up funnelling users to even worse places, like regulation-exempt gaming chatrooms, notorious as extremist rabbit-holes.

But, one might argue, why pussyfoot around imploring SM firms to take responsibility, why not just ban smartphones for kids altogether? The UK’s Education Select Committee last year recommended exactly that. But capitalist governments have bigger things to worry about, and unlike China, are generally leery of voter blowback for ‘nanny-statism’.

Even so, some young self-styled neo-Luddites are opting to downsize to ‘dumbphones’ that have no social media, with a view to clawing back their free time. As one manufacturer puts it, SM entrepreneurs are obsessed with monopolising their users’ engagement time, whereas users should be saying ‘What about me? What about my time?’ He continues: ‘The problem is not the device, it’s the business model: the attention economy. Every free app, every social media platform, every browser, is trying to maximize engagement so they can make money collecting data and categorizing people into different groups so they can sell it to advertisers’.

Unfortunately for neo-Luddites, dumbphones offer a near-zero margin, so tech firms ‘have little incentive to cater to dumbphone users, whose revenue potential is relatively miniscule – that is, if they can even make the economics of manufacturing the devices work at all’.

It’s a tragic indictment of capitalism that social media started by connecting people, and is now arguably complicit in global disinformation and child abuse. Now, encouraged by Trump, SM firms are even ditching their fact-checkers. Perhaps Gen Z parents, having seen the damage for themselves, will refuse to allow their Gen Alpha kids to go through it. The bigger long-term tragedy for Gen Alpha, whether they’re on social media or not, is that their future IRL will be one of relentless capitalist exploitation and wage slavery. If we really want to stop not just child abuse, but human abuse, abolishing capitalism IRL is the only way.

Paddy Shannon

(Facebook review, page 20)

Careless Society (2026)

Book Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Careless People: Power, Greed, Madness. A story of where I used to work. By Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025, 4th Estate)

Remember the Metaverse? Funny that you don’t hear much about it these days. This was going to be the Next Big Thing, the fully immersive virtual reality (VR) heaven where we all spent every waking moment, in our aspirational avatar forms, shopping, meeting people, swanning around in flying cars, and never going outside to see the real sky, or indeed talk to a real person. Unappealing as all this might sound to jaded old cynics and doubters, Mark Zuckerberg was so excited by his own visionary virtual universe that he changed his company name from Facebook to Meta, hired thousands of engineers and invested $36bn in development. As might be expected, tech firms chucked in plenty of money too, just in case it ever took off, and even manufacturers and high-street businesses like HSBC, Skechers, Bosch, Next and Heineken. Seoul City Council even went so far as to build a VR community space where people could ‘take advantage of public services 24/7 all year round and even visit the virtual mayor’s office and library’, as well as availing themselves of ‘various administrative services such as economy, education, and tax affairs’.

It’s hard to imagine a duller advertisement for the Metaverse than, ‘Hey, you can use it to pay your taxes!’ For once, the doubters were on the money. It turned out people didn’t want to spend their lives indoors wearing silly Oculus headsets. Sales flopped, followed by investments, until Zuckerberg quietly dropped the whole project.

One indication of how preposterous the whole thing was, and also why apparently nobody told Zuck this at the time, is the fact that in her tell-all exposé of her five years as a top Facebook executive, Sarah Wynn-Williams doesn’t bother to mention the Metaverse once. But she does have plenty to say about Facebook’s dirty off-book activities. One of these, which Facebook publicly denied to the consternation of their own marketing teams who were using it as a selling point, was to target vulnerable teenagers who had just deleted a selfie by thrusting beauty ads at them, on the assumption that they must hate the way they look. Though often funny, the darkest part of the book is where Zuck finally realises how the Trump campaign has used Facebook’s comprehensive data tools in an ingenious and targeted misinformation offensive in order to win the 2016 election. What’s dark about this is that Zuck and the other FB execs are not horrified, they are impressed. Zuck allegedly even begins to form his own plans to use the same techniques to run for president himself. After all, he’s so rich he wouldn’t even need to fund-raise.

The take-home gist is that, whereas FB starts off as a maladroit mix of idealists and nerdy technicians with no concept of the political reverberations they are about to unleash on the world, the more wealth and power they acquire, the less they give a damn about anyone or anything, a point rammed home by their casual indifference to the FB-driven massacres in Myanmar. Nobody comes out of this book looking good, including in some ways the author. The corruption, hypocrisy, sexual harassment and megalomania are laid bare for all to see. Some of these people would probably have been jailed, except that capitalism doesn’t jail people this stupendously rich. Zuckerberg, increasingly isolated in a protective shell of fawning sycophants, comes across as having had any trace of humanity surgically removed. He is never told that any of his ideas (like the Metaverse?) are just dumb and won’t work, because FB ‘ices out’ and then fires anyone who dares. He’s actually tried to have this book banned in the USA, a truly stupid move because of the ‘Streisand effect’, where attempts to suppress tend to backfire in spectacular fashion. To no one’s surprise, the free-speech champion’s attempt at censorship has sent the book to the top of the bestseller list.

But in truth, apart from showing how dysfunctional the business is, there are no real revelations that weren’t already out there. Yes, Zuck lied to Congress. Yes, FB are manipulative bastards out to make money out of your data. No, they have no scruples whatsoever. We knew or could guess all that. It’s a fun read, but socialists won’t be surprised by any of it. It’s just the reality of capitalist business with the veneer removed.

Paddy Shannon

A confused professor (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vivek Chibber is a well-known figure on the American left. A professor of sociology at New York University, he regards himself as a Marxist and is seen by some as an important social theorist. The April 2023 edition of the Socialist Standard carried a review of a book he had recently published with the ambitious title Confronting Capitalism. How the World Works and How to Change It. The review recognised the author’s clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works. In particular it endorsed the book’s explanation of capitalism’s relationship with the state and the struggle it inevitably generates between the two classes in society – capitalists and workers – and how it dictates that governments, no matter what their stated ideology, cannot have a mediating role between workers and capitalists but have no choice but to govern on behalf of the capitalist class and in their collective profit-making interest. In the same way, the review approved the book’s further observation that individual capitalists, regardless of their personal character or values, are compelled by the nature of the system they operate in to minimise costs and seek profit, wherever possible and whatever the consequences, the result being that a tiny minority of the population are able to live in luxury while billions struggle to keep their heads above water and experience life as a daily grind.

Chasing reforms

So far, so good, and, as explanations of capitalism go, pretty lucid. But, as the review then went on to point out, Chibber’s prescription for remedying the situation he correctly analyses was not to get rid of the capitalist system and replace it with a different one but rather to chase reforms of various kinds to try and make that system more palatable. And this, puzzingly, after having told us that the imperatives of capitalism make that impossible. Arguably even more puzzling then was his final call to ‘start down the road of social democracy and market socialism’, even though, by any standards, ‘market socialism’ is a contradiction in terms.

Since all book reviews that appear in the Socialist Standard are sent to the book’s author, Chibber should at least be aware of the Socialist Party’s view and criticisms of his ideas. So when an extended interview with him appeared recently in the Jacobin magazine on aspects of his Confronting Capitalism book, it could only be of interest to see whether he seemed to have taken on board any of the points raised in our criticism of his ideas.

Though it’s clear from the start of that conversation both interviewer and interviewee see themselves as Marxists and socialists, there is virtually no reference made to what socialism might mean and nothing at all is said about the kind of socialist society that Marx advocated – one based not on the market and buying and selling but on the abolition of the money and wages system and free access to all goods and services. There is, however, an approving reference to two major 20th century practitioners of authoritarian state capitalism, Lenin and Mao, which seems to echo the line taken in Confronting Capitalism about a Leninist party model with a centralised leadership. So no change here then. But what about his book’s advocacy of reforms of various kinds within capitalism – ‘non-reformist reforms’, as he calls them? Well nothing seems different here either. He refers to struggles for ‘workplace rights, a universal basic income grant, or pensions’ echoing the need expressed in his book for ‘a combination of electoral and mobilizational politics’ and ‘a gradualist approach’.

How many classes?

To be fair, however, the main focus of the Jacobin interview is not how capitalism could be improved or what comes after it but rather its class structure. And here, initially at least, Chibber seems to be living up to the Marxist analysis of class explained in Confronting Capitalism, ie, the existence of two classes in society – capitalists (a tiny minority) and workers (the overwhelming majority) – with irreconcilable interests, and the state being not some kind of mediating body but rather an instrument of support for the capitalist class. But then, in the second part of the interview, what can be described as a variation on this perspective emerges. Here he moves from seeing capitalism as a two-class structure to stating the existence of a third class, a ‘middle class’. This of course is a term commonly used by social analysts seeking to categorise workers in terms of such things as their backgrounds, outlooks, living styles or levels of pay. But should such a ‘third’ category have a place in any claimed Marxist analysis of class? Well, it didn’t in Confronting Capitalism, but now, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it does here. To be precise, Chibber has this to say: ‘So the two “fundamental” classes, workers and capitalists, account probably for around 75 percent of the labor force. What’s the other remaining 25 percent? That’s what we call the middle class.’ But who are this ‘middle class’? According to him, they fall into two groups – the self-employed (‘owner operators, the traditional petty bourgeoisie’, he calls them) and ‘the salariat’.

What to respond to this? Well, we can accept – because it corresponds to observable reality – that in capitalism there has always been a small minority of individuals, who wish ‘to be their own boss’ and to set up their own small businesses of one kind or another. A small proportion of these turn out to be lucrative and may result in their creator becoming rich to the point of not having to work, But the vast majority of them are not particularly successful. Sometimes they procure a precarious living for those who run them, but more often they fail and plunge their owners into the world of seeking to sell their energies to another employer for a wage or salary. Of course, such people, at least for as long as they are in business, can be categorised as wannabe-capitalists, but the vast majority of them (those, for example, that Chibber calls ‘owner-operator shopkeepers’) still have to carry out labour on a daily basis themselves in order to survive and to support their families. So it can’t be meaningfully maintained that the existence of small ‘entrepreneurs’ somehow means that there are three classes in society rather than two.

Still less can it be said that there is, in Chibber’s words, ‘a second group’ helping to make up that ‘middle class’, consisting of those he calls ‘the professional classes and the managerial classes’. An example he gives of this is ‘a mid-level manager’ to whom certain duties are ‘outsourced’. ‘What do they do?’, he goes on. ‘They’re keeping the books, they’re designing the labor process, but they’re also managing and supervising labor. Managers are workers but who carry out the functions of capital and whose own well-being depends on the successful exploitation of labor. So they are caught between the two worlds. That’s why they’re middle class.’ He goes even further, including in this middle class ‘sections of the professoriate and the professional strata’, those with ‘a lot of autonomy’, or ‘salaried people in the professions’, though ‘some are shading into the working class: same occupation, different classes’ (eg, teachers or ‘a professor working at a community college’). To this we would have to respond that all those in Chibber’s ‘second group’, though they may have more autonomy and more pay than other workers, are no less members of the working class for their position of subordination to a system that makes them dependent on the wage or salary they receive. In addition, despite the greater security their role may appear to give them, they can never be sure that the stresses and strains of the capitalist system will not make them just as expendable in the future as workers in other occupations, ie that capitalism’s constant need for cheapness and reorganisation will not make them just as insecure in their jobs or just as surplus to requirements as any other workers.

In short the ‘Marxist’ theorist and professor not only seems not to have taken on board any of the points made in this journal’s review of his book about what replacing capitalism means and about the futility of reformist activity, but to have now rendered his previously ‘clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works’ distinctly less clear and less accessible.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: The best laid schemes (2026)

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

Before the budget on 26 November speculation was rife as to what might be in it. In opposition Rachel Reeves, as Shadow Chancellor, had promised that the priority of a future Labour government would be growth, growth, growth.

But what is ‘growth’? She seems to mean a growth in Gross Domestic Product which is a measure of the inflation-adjusted price of all the goods and services produced in a year. The trouble is that this is not something that a government can bring about. As she herself pointed out in her budget speech, ‘private investment is the lifeblood of economic growth’. So, her plan is to create the best conditions for private investment for profit, one of which in her view is government investment in infrastructure projects. This, however, has to be paid for. As she doesn’t want to rely too much on borrowing she has had to increase taxes. Not that increased government investment will necessarily encourage more private investment; it might for a short while but in the end the only encouragement is the prospect of making a profit.

Capitalism is a system of production for profit where the aim is not growth as such but making profits which, when reinvested, bring about an increase in the production of wealth. It is a result of what Marx called ‘the accumulation of capital’.

Marx himself pointed out that, when it occurs, the more rapid the accumulation of capital, the more jobs there are and the higher are wages due to employers competing for workers. These days, it would also mean an increase in tax income for governments. Reeves seemed to be making the same point when she described ‘economic growth’ as ‘the best means to improve wages, create jobs, and support public services’.

But there is a difference. Marx never expected the accumulation of capital to be continuously onwards and upwards. He saw the process of capital accumulation as ‘a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation’ (Capital, vol 1, ch. 15, section 7). Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Reeves believes — and not only her but all the parties that aspire to manage capitalism — that, if the government gets it right, there can be a permanent boom.

A government might be lucky and be in office during the ‘prosperity’ phase of the cycle but not even the government’s own advisers at the Office for Budgetary Responsibility are predicting that. They are currently estimating that ‘growth’ over the next four or five years will be only 1.5 percent a year. Which is slow by previous capitalist standards and won’t bring about many more jobs or higher wages or enough tax revenue to honour Labour’s promises to improve public services.

In any event, the OBR forecasts are little more than a guess. The fact is that economic forecasts, especially over a longer period, are hardly worth the paper they are printed on as nobody can foretell how the capitalist economy will move. If they turn out to be correct, it will have been a lucky guess.

What will happen in practice over the next few years is that the government will merely react to whatever the workings of capitalism present it with. They will just be muddling through, or, to use the nautical language governments do when they seek to explain their failure by having to ‘face strong headwinds’ or being ‘blown off course’, they will just be navigating by sight.

Letter: Are business and trade inevitable? (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are business and trade inevitable?

Dear Editors

I liked the short story (Socialist Standard September) even if it was a bit contrived. What this was called in other places in the world before and the decade after the war was industrial sabotage and the offenders would be given a safe passage to a labour camp or shot as an example. Now it’s approved government policy in certain countries.

What this does is waste material and man power/labour. It is a pointless activity. What we need are businesses that produce goods to last and to sell other types of goods so that they are never short of work. Also profit by whatever support service is necessary to maintain product longevity. There is competition and there is just plain stupidity.

Business or trade will not and cannot cease whatever type of government we choose to have or win by armed force. It’s a matter of maximising trade within countries and between countries, maximising the general benefits. Business must never again run its own affairs. It should have a non-cabinet minister within the wider Trade and Industry Department. Government has a wide range of responsibilities. It isn’t only business that serves the people and country. Finance and Taxation and Regulation and everything in fact is to serve not dictate to government. Government is the servant of the whole people.

Elijah Traven, 

Hull

Reply: 

You appear to believe that business and trade are inevitable. This is a common view and understandable given that our entire experience today is one of buying and selling (trading). This assumption, however, is only true of societies which organise themselves around certain private property relations. And these private property relations are not inevitable. Given our modern technological ability to provide for the world’s needs they are not even currently necessary.

In modern capitalist societies we have to engage in buying and selling to satisfy most of our needs. This is a recent development over the last few hundred years. Not so long ago buying and selling formed only a small part of most people’s economic activity. The majority of those who lived by their work were self-sufficient, and only traded their small surpluses for a few items they did not themselves produce. Neither, at this time, did most people sell their labour power to others in return for a wage. To be sure, trading has existed in many societies since states first appeared some six millennia ago, but not in all. Many societies before and since have existed without private property relations and therefore without any buying and selling. These societies had quite different forms of organisation from those we are familiar with in our own world.

The way forward for the working class today is not private property which produces a multitude of problems for the majority, but common ownership and the free association of all people. Only in these circumstances can we eliminate the negative consequences that capitalism so reliably produces and which are so often mistakenly assigned to ‘human nature’. Without capitalism, our current experience of conflict, exploitation, economic instability, the enormous waste of both resources and human labour, the multitude of insecure, unfulfilled lives, the ever present threat and actuality of mechanised warfare and the inability to solve our common problems as one global people, could all become things of the past.

You mention labour camps and the practice of shooting people for engaging in the production of goods designed to have a restricted lifespan – planned obsolescence. You seem to be referring here to states such as the Soviet Union and China which were or are ruled by authoritarian political parties calling themselves socialist or communist. Societies of this kind, just like those in the West, are founded on private property relationships. They trade internally and on the world market. Their goal, like that of Western capitalist societies, is to accumulate capital. While it is true that countries with authoritarian governments and with state control of capital are more directly able to suppress destructive business practices such as the use of planned obsolescence, we see no evidence that this kind of society is sufficient to overcome the multitude of pressures that capitalism imposes on the working class or upon humanity. Indeed, they add problems of their own. Moreover, as the EU is currently demonstrating, Western style capitalist governments are capable of suppressing these practices, at least in part, whenever they threaten to harm the future of capitalist interests more generally.

Capitalism is capable of functioning under a variety of governmental types. Eliminate capitalism however, and government loses its primary function. There is no need for it to continue to exist. So we don’t start by asking what kind of government we want. We start by asking how we want to relate to each other as human beings, and how we want to produce the things we all need. We can then ask: given our current circumstances, what kind of society can we create to meet our needs? The answer is that we can do a lot better than what we have at present.

We are glad you liked the article. You say, though, that you found its short story form ‘a bit contrived’. We can agree. All prose forms are contrivances of one kind or another, including those of conventional articles in magazines like the Socialist Standard. In this respect, the difference between them is that we are more familiar with some written forms than others and take their contrivances for granted. The short story form of the article in question was in fact based on an incident and two conversations that took place in the real world. The article was, in fact, a slice of real life. The virtue of this kind of storytelling is that it allows us to connect the way a capitalist economy actually works with everyday life as we experience it. This is part of the Socialist Standard’s purpose: to witness and explain the often less obvious workings of a capitalist economy, its businesses and its trading economy, for those of us who currently have to sell their labour power for a wage or a salary – Editors

Socialism cannot come from the barrel of a gun (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The news cycle has recently thrown fresh attention onto the ‘Socialist Rifle Association (SRA)’, an American organisation advocating firearms training and ‘training working-class armed self-defence.’ A Democratic Party Senate candidate in Maine was criticised for old posts encouraging people to join the group. Graham Platner had posted on Reddit in 2020 with the handle ‘Antifa Supersoldier’, encouraging users to join the SRA. Now reports suggest LGBTQ and left-liberal Americans are increasingly turning to gun ownership out of fear of political repression.

The Cato Institute (a free-market libertarian think-tank based in Washington) found via a freedom of information request to the FBI that the SRA appears to be the active target of an ongoing investigation. The Trump administration’s proposed ‘trans gun ban’ was only one example of the orange man’s Second Amendment rollback.

The SRA flips the American script: guns on the left rather than the right. Its message, community defence, resistance to authoritarianism, and the right of ordinary people to defend themselves, and it appears on the surface to be a working-class concern.

The rise in left-wing gun interest however is less an ideological shift than a symptom of a deeply anxious and alienated working class. When one section of the population arms itself, others feel compelled to follow. Capitalism created the conditions of this insecurity: economic instability, political polarisation, violent policing, and the billion dollar security industry that keeps you safe but only if you can afford it.

The SRA itself frames gun ownership as an answer to these concerns.

The phrase, ‘Any attempt to disarm workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary’, is used on SRA merchandise, patches, t-shirts, coffee mugs… a misquote from Karl Marx’s address to the Communist League in March 1850. What doesn’t fit on a t-shirt is the full quote:

‘Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organise themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary’ (Marx, 1850).

What Marx was speaking of was a specific political moment in 1850, during a faltering bourgeois revolution, not of the general conditions of working class life under capitalism, or of a popular democratic working-class revolution.

We can assume many SRA supporters cite Lenin, who wrote at a time of underdeveloped material conditions in Tsarist Russia, and leaned heavily on Marx’s early writings from the 1850s, written before the bourgeois revolutions had run their course. In those texts, Marx had argued that workers should support the bourgeoisie (emergent capitalist class) in overthrowing autocratic rule while pressing for full democracy. Only after the bourgeoisie attained political power he believed should workers organise politically against them.

Marx’s later position was that the emancipation of the working class must be the conscious act of the working class itself, democratically organised, not the work of a professional armed minority or vanguard.

Capitalism, not the lack of firearms, is what makes the working class vulnerable. It is capitalism that pits factions of the workers against one another: nationalist movements, strongman posturings, racism, gender-based violence. Against these systemic woes the possession of rifles is no more a solution than the ownership of a fire extinguisher is a solution to arson.

The SRA’s rhetoric makes much of ‘community defence’ and the image of the armed worker resisting oppression. Historically, this imagery is lifted from episodes of class conflict eg. Paris 1871, Russia 1917, Spain 1936, and further romanticised by those who confuse coups with socialism. As the Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s Association put it: ‘The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ That means consciously organising for political control, not relying on paramilitaries or armed minorities acting ‘on behalf of’ workers.

Socialism cannot be imposed by force, nor defended by pockets of armed militants. The failure of the USSR shows this to be true. A society based on common ownership and democratic control requires an active majority to be politically convinced and politically organised, not a vanguard with guns, bombs and bullets.

Armed groups, whether on the left or right, reflect capitalism’s logic of coercion, alienation and the struggle for dominance. The SRA rejects right-wing gun culture, but it mirrors it and as such it remains bound within capitalism’s framework. It’s a consumerist solution – buy a gun, get training – to combat a structural problem. But, as the Libertarian Socialist Organisation (LSO) in Australia pointed out in 1979 in an essay against anarchist terrorism, ‘You can’t blow up a social relationship’.

Socialism cannot be created by armed vigilantes because socialism is not a change of rulers but a transformation of society. The revolution must be conscious, majority-led, democratic and international. No amount of gun owners can substitute political consciousness and political will.

King Capital will not be dethroned by an armed militia, but by a working class organised consciously and democratically to remove the master class from control of the state.

The SRA is not a revolutionary awakening, but a reaction to a society that offers people no security except what they can buy and carry.

A.T.

Material World: Paycheck to paycheck (2026)

The Material World column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’re used to hearing that the overall standard of living in the West is significantly higher than in the countries that make up what used to be known as the ‘Third World’ but are now commonly referred to as the ‘Global South’. For many of these, most sources indicate progress in expanding access to basic necessities such as water, sanitation and health facilities. Yet a recent joint report by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that approximately 1 in 4 people globally, or close to 2.1 billion, lack access to clean drinking water and that this contributes to roughly 3.5 million deaths per year, nearly 400,000 of these children under five.

More broadly, according to an Oxfam International report from June 2025, 3.7 billion of the world’s population, or around 45 percent, live in conditions of moderate or severe food insecurity with over 700 million living on less than 2.15 dollars per day and 3.4 billion living on less than 5.50 dollars per days. This means that many are unlikely to have the money to eat regularly and so will often skimp on food or skip meals. In addition, the business data website Statista has reported on a United Nations estimate that around 1.1 billion people worldwide, including around 50 percent of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are living in slums, described as ‘areas of self-built, unsanitary housing where extreme poverty is rife’.

How does all this compare to the standard of living in what is seen as ‘the richest country in the world’, the USA? We would expect it to be a lot higher overall, and indeed it is. But what are things actually like? Wildly differing figures on living standards, poverty and deprivation are to be found depending on the sources you consult. For example, the CNN Business website recently reported on a Bank of America analysis which estimated that around 1 in 4 (24 percent) of American households are barely getting by – living ‘paycheck to paycheck’, as they put it.

The bank’s statisticians combed through data on millions of customers to track how much they spent on basics such as housing, groceries, childcare and utilities and found it constituted over 95 percent of their income ‘leaving little to nothing left over for the “nice-to-have” things like going out to dinner or taking a vacation, let alone saving’. One of their interviewees who had a degree but was working in a construction business about to shut down is quoted as saying ‘to be 34 and living paycheck to paycheck with no savings, things are pretty crappy right now’.

However, a different survey came up with a quite different result, which was that the proportion of workers living paycheck to paycheck was not 24 percent but 67 percent. This figure emerged from the Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report by the PNC Bank, based on workers aged 21 to 69 working full time at companies with more than 100 employees. It painted a picture of workers struggling to cover everyday expenses, especially with cost of living currently outpacing wage growth. A Newsweek report on this survey quoted Taylor Nelms, vice-president of research and insights at the Financial Health Network, as saying: ‘The percentage of U.S. households that say they spend more or the same as they bring in has been remarkably consistent, hovering around 50 percent over the past several years but right now it’s compounded by high housing costs, insurance premiums, and the return of student loan payments. These are the areas where households feel most squeezed’.

There’s clearly a big difference between these survey results, but whichever figure you take as reliable, it’s clear that many millions of people in the world’s ‘richest country’ are not only not rich but are materially insecure and struggling to keep their heads above water, with some in particularly straightened circumstances. The CNN report highlights some of the typical symptoms of this – people falling behind on their bills, minimum credit card payments being made, an increased percentage of borrowers late on their car loans (referred to as ‘a clear sign of financial distress, especially since car loans are historically the last payments Americans are willing to miss’), and people filing for bankruptcy having incurred large medical debts while ill. Nor does any of this take into account the undoubtedly worse conditions of those who have no employment at all or are homeless or not registered to work. The current estimate of the number of unemployed people is 4.4 percent of the workforce, so 7.6 million people living in even worse circumstances than those ‘just getting by’.

What conclusions can we draw from this? First and foremost that, though wage and salary workers in what is usually considered the most advanced part of the Western world are undoubtedly better off on the whole than their counterparts elsewhere, this does not prevent many of them from suffering poverty and insecurity. And this in a world which, if it were organised rationally (ie, with a system aimed at catering for the needs of all and not the profits of a few), could provide abundantly for all of its 8.3 billion population. Already in fact the world possesses enough productive capacity to eliminate global poverty many times over. Yet this can never happen as long as we have a system – the market system – which ensures vast wealth inequality between the tiny minority of people who own most of the resources and the large majority who own little more than their skills and energies and their ability to sell these for a wage or salary.

It is no kind of aberration, therefore, that the USA has, according to Forbes Magazine, 905 billionaires with a combined wealth of 7.8 trillion dollars and that, according to Federal Reserve data, the top 1 percent of households in the United States hold 30.5 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent. Rather it is the inevitable consequence of a system (production for profit) that has no mechanism for meeting the basic needs of the whole of humanity and will always fail to do that. This being the case, it is as clear as it can possibly be that the majority of the world’s workers need to take collective and democratic political action to bring that system to an end and replace it by one that will be cooperative, moneyless, wageless and based on free access and production for use.

Howard Moss