No socialism in one country (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is not a collection of separate national systems; it is a global network of production, trade, and competition. Every country is tied to the world market, and survival within that system requires competing for profits, investment, and economic advantage.

Because of this, any attempt to build socialism in one country alone would be forced to operate under capitalist pressures. It would have to maintain wages, compete in international markets, and prioritise economic survival over human need. Step by step, the original goal of a cooperative and democratic society would be pushed aside by the demands of global competition. History shows that isolation does not abolish capitalism — it reshapes it under new management.

Socialism, therefore, is not a national project but a humanity-level one. The working majority everywhere shares the same condition: we produce the wealth of the world yet remain dependent on wages and subject to economic insecurity. Our struggle is not against other nations or peoples, but against a system that divides us while relying on our collective labour.

The necessary conclusion is clear: real emancipation requires conscious, democratic action on a global scale. When people understand their shared interests beyond borders, they can replace production for profit with production for use, competition with cooperation, and economic domination with genuine human freedom. Socialism is not merely an ideal — it is the logical and practical next step in the struggle for a world organised by and for humanity itself.

Global networks

What is often missed in discussions about ‘banana republics’ is that the decisive transformation was not simply political independence but the globalisation of capital itself. In the past, domination appeared visible because it was concentrated in a single corporation or foreign power controlling land, labour, and government institutions directly. Today, control is more diffuse and therefore less obvious. No single company needs to govern a country when financial markets, credit systems, trade dependence, and technological monopolies can discipline entire economies.

Modern states are not passive victims; they actively compete to attract investment, secure export markets, and integrate into global production networks. This creates a situation where governments formally exercise sovereignty while simultaneously adapting policies to maintain competitiveness within the world market. The pressure no longer comes from a colonial administrator but from capital mobility itself — investment can simply move elsewhere.

This helps explain why countries with very different political ideologies often pursue similar economic strategies. Whether governments describe themselves as left, right, nationalist, or progressive, they must operate within the same global framework of profitability, productivity, and trade balance constraints.

In this sense, the historical ‘banana republic’ has not returned, but neither has dependency disappeared. What has emerged instead is a system in which economic power operates structurally rather than territorially. The question today is not who rules directly, but how global economic relations limit the range of choices available to every nation-state.

Structural problem

When reformist governments promise improvements within capitalism, they inevitably collide with economic factors they cannot control — investment decisions, profitability, need for capital accumulation, and global competition. When reforms stall or are reversed, disappointment follows, and many workers understandably turn elsewhere, sometimes towards right-wing populists who appear to challenge the status quo more decisively. This recurring pattern points to a deeper structural problem rather than individual political failure.

Historical examples like the reforms under Lyndon B. Johnson, subsidised education, or public transportation systems in countries such as Brazil show that significant social concessions can exist within capitalism. Free or subsidised services, however, were never simply the result of goodwill; they emerged under specific economic and political conditions — periods of growth, social pressure, or geopolitical competition. When those conditions change, reforms become vulnerable to cuts or restructuring, regardless of which party governs.

This helps explain why debates framed as a struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ administrations miss the underlying issue. Policies may differ, but governments operate within the same economic framework, which ultimately prioritises accumulation and fiscal constraints over permanent social guarantees.

The recurring cycle — reform, limitation, frustration, and political backlash — suggests that the problem may not lie primarily in voter misunderstanding or conspiracies, but in the expectation that lasting social security can be achieved through reforms that leave the basic economic structure unchanged.

Understanding this dynamic may be more useful than attributing political shifts solely to ideology or manipulation, since it highlights why similar outcomes reappear across different countries and historical periods.

Moral denunciations

The controversy surrounding Noam Chomsky and his association with Jeffrey Epstein has generated intense debate within the left, but much of the discussion reveals a deeper political confusion. The focus has largely shifted toward personal morality and individual guilt rather than examining the social structures that allow power, wealth, and influence to concentrate in the first place.

Capitalist society consistently brings intellectuals, politicians, financiers, and academics into overlapping networks because access to funding, publishing, and institutional influence depends on proximity to wealth. This is not primarily a question of individual virtue or hypocrisy, but of how a system organised around capital inevitably connects cultural authority with economic power.

Sections of the left tend to respond to such controversies through moral denunciation, as if removing flawed individuals could purify politics. Yet history shows that replacing personalities does not alter the underlying social relations that reproduce inequality and elite influence. The problem is systemic, not psychological.

A serious socialist perspective therefore avoids both personal hero-worship and moral panic. Intellectual contributions should be evaluated critically and independently of personal reputation, while recognising that meaningful change cannot come from reforming elites but from conscious democratic control of social production by the majority itself.

In that sense, the debate should move beyond personalities and return to the central question: what kind of social organisation continually produces these concentrations of power, and how can society collectively move beyond them?

R.

The hollow cry of ‘self-determination’ in a world of borders (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The air is thick with the rhetoric of ‘self-determination.’ From the hallowed halls of the United Nations to the televised addresses of national leaders, the principle that ‘all peoples have the right to freely determine their political status’ is touted as a moral absolute. Yet, for the global working class, this ‘right’ is nothing more than a cruel joke—a deceptive mask worn by the state to protect the interests of the ruling class.

The hypocrisy of the nation-state

The very states that harp on about self-determination are the ones that have historically opposed it whenever it threatened their own economic or military interests. For example, British imperial history is a masterclass in this hypocrisy; the idea of self-determination was seen as a direct threat to the control of colonies essential for economic benefits, military strategy, and international prestige.

Even today, the nation-state remains a ‘prison house of nationalities’. Leaders preach the moral superiority of national self-determination over sovereignty to justify their own territorial claims or to undermine rivals, yet they remain the routine managers of a capitalist system that thrives on exploitation.

The myth of national interest

Socialists maintain that there is no such thing as a ‘national interest’ that includes both the exploiter and the exploited. The nation-state is a territorial entity that identifies itself with a particular ‘people’ only to better manage them for the benefit of the capitalist class. When workers are told to wave national flags, they are being encouraged to block the path to any higher human synthesis and to ignore the fact that they have no fatherland to defend.

In this elemental chaos, the state uses nationalism and racism as tools to divide the working class, making more privileged groups feel that their interests lie with their masters rather than their fellow workers.

The real victim: working-class self-determination

While leaders argue over where to draw lines on a map, the true self-determination of the working class is systematically trampled. We define real socialism as a society where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and organised for the benefit of all.

Under the current system:

• Freedom is an illusion: workers are forced to sell their labour power for a wage, which entails providing the unpaid labour that forms the basis of capitalist wealth.
• Democratic rights are suppressed: governments and unions often cultivate a myth of an all-powerful government while insisting that nothing can be done about the systemic inequalities of capitalism.
• Solidarity is sabotaged: by emphasising national boundaries, the state ensures that workers of different nations view each other as competitors rather than allies against a common enemy.

A world without borders

We affirm that capitalism is incapable of meaningful change in the interests of the majority. The struggle for national liberation is frequently a trap; when a new national bourgeoisie takes power, the working class finds itself exploited by a new set of masters and mistresses under a new flag.

Our goal is not the ‘self-determination’ of new states, but the abolition of the state itself. We advocate for a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless society – a frontierless world community where men and women cooperate freely to produce what is needed. Only by recognising that they are exploited by the same enemy class in all countries can workers reclaim their true identity and achieve real self-determination through a global democratic revolution.

Jake Ambrose (Australia)

Work: paid and unpaid – Part 1 (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of my working life was spent teaching in a university. I consider myself to have been reasonably well paid for the work I did. And the superannuation scheme I paid into has yielded a reasonable pension. The same applied to my workplace contemporaries, fellow wage-slaves who started and finished their careers at more or less the same time as me. But, if I look at them, they’ve not all had identical reactions to ending their paid employment.

‘Bored out of my skull’

Some of them have carried on with a particular aspect of the work they did before – their academic research – but independently. And even though they’re no longer paid for it, they seem reasonably content. Others have been less happy. They’ve found themselves at a loose end with no teaching or associated work, and see no point in carrying on with any research given that it’s no longer connected to a day job. They see working in isolated fashion as no longer affording them the recognition and approbation of their colleagues and of their wider academic community. I found an example of this when I ran into a former colleague some time ago, several months after he’d retired in his early 60s. I asked him how things were going. He seemed pretty miserable and replied: ‘I’m bored out of my skull’. He sounded and looked angry and frustrated. I didn’t know what to do other than wish him well.

Volunteering

So these are a couple of the kind of reactions that workers in what was my own line of work may have in response to no longer doing paid work. But there’s also a third category – those who, having finished their paid employment, feel they’ve been set free, and this has made them decide to involve themselves in activities which are usually unpaid and often quite different from the paid work they did. Sometimes it’s a continuation of things they devoted a certain amount of time and energy to in their spare time before, such as looking after family members, for example grandchildren, or involvement in political or social activity such as campaigning or charity work, or participation in a voluntary group of some kind. In my own case, for instance, I agreed to be recruited to a committee of volunteers who run my local Community Centre. Once there, I found that two of my former work colleagues, now retired like me, were also active there and in the community more widely. One of them was heavily involved in helping to organise a local food bank of the kind that has sprung up in increasing numbers in recent times. A common factor in this kind of activity is the obvious personal satisfaction people who engage in it derive from their new unpaid, ‘non-professional’ work. And it is of course a form of work, in that it involves expending mental or physical energy, even if many people wouldn’t necessarily think of it as such, since there’s no suggestion of any financial recompense from it. But, however they regard it, the motivation, rather, is the perception that they’re doing something useful, experiencing a sense of community, and also enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.

As well as this, two other activities have absorbed my own time and energies in a practical and satisfying way since retirement. The first has been increased activity in the trade union that, though retired from work, I’m still a member of. With the forbearance of my former employer, I’m still able to handle personal cases or pension matters for members, as I did when I was employed. And I have more time to do this than those colleagues who also volunteer for union work but still have paid jobs. The second has been playing an increased part in Socialist Party activity – helping to organise my local branch, giving talks, going to events to try and spread the socialist message, writing columns, articles and book reviews for this journal.

Hierarchical work

Some of the reviews have actually been of books on the subject of work in its various different aspects. This seems, in fact, to be an area in which there’s a good deal of interest at present – interest stimulated by the fact that, in recent times, say over the last 30-40 years, the face of employment has changed in a number of noteworthy ways. In particular, it has become increasingly what may be called ‘hierarchised’. The ‘flat structures’ in the workplace that were being talked about and to a certain extent practised in the 1960s and 70s and seen as the way of the future began to fall out of favour and to give way to more rigid, authoritarian line management systems, so that most workers effectively had someone ‘higher up’ breathing down their necks, assessing them, judging their work or productivity – and sometimes intimidating them.

I saw that in my own field of employment, where it was accompanied by the invention of various terms, such as ‘lean production’ or ‘agile working’, to try and give a benign, softening impression to a more rigid form of workplace organisation. Critics of this new form of work discipline gave it other names such as management by stress or managerial feudalism (or even managerial fascism). The way American mathematician and political activist Eric Schechter characterises it in his video ‘Only Revolution Can Save Life on Earth’ is brutally simple: ‘workplaces are dictatorships’. Certainly, in many cases, the process consists of workers’ performance being subjected to close surveillance, with their efficiency or productivity judged on a regular basis via performance targets, sometimes referred to as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). And this with the shadow of a possible ‘capability process’ hanging over them, which can potentially lead to dismissal.

An irony here of course is that the manager conducting the KPI operation is usually her or himself subject to the same process at the hands of the person who is their manager. It’s hard not to be reminded here of Oscar Wilde’s famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, where he writes: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it and degrades those over whom it is exercised’.

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone, authors of the book Wageless Life, are just as uncompromisingly critical. They describe work of whatever kind under capitalism as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’, describing it as ‘a war of profit against life on earth’, in which workers are denied the ability to control how they work and so suffer a disconnection that ‘separates them from the material conditions that allow humans to flourish’. Capitalism, they go on to say, fosters ‘the utter worship of paid work’ and in so doing ‘thrives on producing docile subjects who are alienated from their surroundings’. One of their conclusions is: ‘We live in a world sculpted by money but populated by the moneyless.’ Very much akin to this, if expressed in milder language, is Martin Luther King’s well-known maxim: ‘profit forces people to be more concerned with making a living than making a life.’ A similar more recent characterisation says: ‘the greatest prison has no bars, just a paycheck, a routine and weekends off’.

Not all ‘bullshit jobs’

While we would broadly endorse such an analysis, it is also necessary to point to the fact that not all paid work is equally dispiriting, unsatisfying and alienating. So while it’s surely true, for example, that, if they didn’t need a wage to survive, no man or woman would willingly choose to sit at the entrance to a supermarket all day looking at a screen to check if anyone is stealing or looks as though they might steal, at the same time there’s no doubt that some paid work, even if accompanied by conditions of insecurity or duress, can give significant pleasure or satisfaction to those who carry it out. And while that supermarket guard job is one of the many millions that exist across the planet in the system we live under (so-called ‘bullshit jobs’), constituting a colossal waste of talents, energies and resources, in some cases even the rigid and unforgiving employment practices already mentioned can be offset to an extent by an individual’s passionate interest in the work they are engaged in – maybe for example as a naturalist, a scientist, a computer programmer, or as a gardener or a builder.

It’s only fair to point out too that some challenges have arisen to the hierarchy and intensification of employment practice in recent years, and from some quarters there have also emerged striking (sometimes revolutionary) ideas and recommendations concerning work organisation. These are the areas that Part 2 of this article next month will discuss before going on to look at ways in which work might be organised in the different, non-coercive, moneyless production for need society that socialists campaign to see established.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone's 'Wageless Life. A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism' was reviewed in the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Cooking the Books: AI, profits and Engels (2026)

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

City gents reading the business section of their Times (24 February) might have been surprised to come across a photo of Engels. Socialists would have been intrigued more by the caption ‘could AI create a new Engels pause, named after Friedrich Engels’. The term ‘Engels pause’ was not coined by Engels but by an economic historian, Robert Allen, to describe the course of economic development that led to the workers being in the situation described by Engels in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Normally, a period of sustained capital accumulation should lead to some increase in working-class living standards, both because of employers bidding up wages as they compete for workers and because the increase in profits means they can afford to pay more. Allen noted that this had not happened in Britain during the period of rapid industrialisation from 1790 to 1840 as wages had stagnated. As in the period after 1840 wages did increase, Allen called this a ‘pause’ and named it after Engels.

Engels might not have regarded this as a compliment. He might have preferred the term ‘the Engels profit bonanza’ as, if wages stagnate in a period of economic growth, that means that profits will be more than they otherwise would.

The article in the Times, by its former business editor David Wighton, discussed two views of the possible economic impact of AI. He quoted a former Google executive as saying that ‘the most likely outcome is an economy in which corporate profits explode as labour costs fall, while workers’ share of output shrinks’. In short, another ‘Engels pause’. The opposite view was put by Jamie Dimon, the head of the bank JP Morgan Chase, who is quoted as saying that while AI will increase profits, ‘this isn’t like you’re going to build three points of margin and you get to keep it — you don’t’. Competition sees to that.

Who is more likely to be right? Critics of capitalism might be tempted to agree with the one-time Google executive as it would be another good argument against capitalism. However, Dimon has a point. His view reflects more accurately what happens when one capitalist enterprise makes extra profits by reducing its costs through some innovation and outcompetes its rivals.

‘An enterprise or industrial sector with an above average level of productivity (…) economizes in its expenditure of social labour and therefore makes a surplus profit, that is to say, the difference between its costs and selling prices will be greater than the average profit. The pursuit of this surplus profit is, of course, the driving force behind the entire capitalist economy. Every capitalist enterprise is forced by competition to try to get greater profits, for this is the only way it can constantly improve its technology and labour productivity. Consequently all firms are forced to take this same direction, and this of course implies that what at one time was an above-average productivity ends up as the new average productivity, whereupon the surplus profit disappears. All the strategy of capitalist industry stems from this desire on the part of every enterprise to achieve a rate of productivity superior to the national average and thereby make a surplus profit, and this in turn provokes a movement which causes the surplus profit to disappear, by virtue of the trend for the average rate of labour productivity to rise continuously’ (E. Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory.)

That’s the likely outcome of the spread of AI to production and business. A temporary increase in profits for the firms that are the first to use AI in their branch of activity but no ‘profit explosion’ in the sense of a general increase in profits for all firms which eventually adopt it.

Potential abundance (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundance. How We Build a Better Future. By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Profile Books. 2025. 289pp.

The August 1970 edition of the Socialist Standard was a special issue with the phrase ‘A World of Abundance’ emblazoned across its front page. It featured a series of articles seeking to demonstrate how humankind already had the knowledge, the resources and the technology to produce an abundance of the things needed by all the people in the world but how their use and development were being held back by the economic and social restrictions of our present profit-based system of society – capitalism. How much truer this is now – more than 50 years on – given the vast further advances in knowledge and technology. Yet the same system still grinds on failing to use its potential and resources to satisfy everyone’s needs and instead condemning vast swathes of people to live in poverty, most others to get by on the insecurity of one month’s pay to the next, while permitting a tiny minority to enjoy untold amounts of wealth which they will always seek to increase.

So any discussion of this phenomenon or proposal to remedy it, such as promised by the title of this book by the two well-known American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, can only be welcomed. This is especially the case as the book’s back cover is unequivocal in the view it expresses: ‘We have the means to build an equitable world without hunger, fuelled by clean energy. Instead, we have a politics driven by scarcity, lives defined by unaffordability.’ What’s not to like about such a statement?

More specifically the book’s authors allow themselves to imagine a breathtaking future in which, for example, climate change can be reversed by removing carbon dioxide from the air, overuse of land for growing crops and feeding animals can be remedied by ‘vertical greenhouses which feed far more people while using far less land’, and technology will permit ‘an economy with robots that build our houses and machines that take on our most dangerous and soul-draining work’. They consider furthermore that, with appropriate and effective use of sun and wind in particular, humanity has ‘the gift of abundant energy’ and, contrary to advocates of ‘degrowth’, is capable, if it uses that gift correctly, of supporting its current population (and more) without exacerbating ecological breakdown.

August 1970 Socialist Standard

Yet, despite such radically invigorating leaps of the imagination and the words ‘abundance and ‘better future’ in the title of this book, anyone thinking that the authors’ proposals for building that future will involve radically changing the society that currently exists so as to make that abundance available to all is in for a disappointment. That is not what they are calling for. Their quest rather is to explore the ways in which what they see as the bureaucratic excesses of capitalism can be reduced to make that system run more efficiently and less wastefully and thereby provide a somewhat better, somewhat less unequal system for most people.

They back this up with an admirable wealth of information, evidence and documentation. They have thoroughly immersed themselves in the details of capitalist organisation (especially in the US), thereby putting themselves in a knowledgeable position to critique its waste and inefficiencies on what might be called a micro level. But it is not their purpose to go any further than this, for example to challenge the system’s underlying profit imperative or to consider whether the best (or only) way of realising the potential for equality and abundance is a complete change of social organisation.

To be fair, however, the authors’ efficiency and anti-waste agenda is at least aimed at suggesting ways in which the existing system can, at least as they see it, be made ‘more equal’. So they are writing from what might be called a humanitarian perspective, looking for what they see as practical forms of adjustment to the system – ways, for example, of providing homes for the homeless, of making poor people less poor and of providing easily accessible healthcare. Most of this they consider achievable through state intervention in the economy, which they hope can lead to a fairer distribution of wealth and to more people having decent living standards, even if this means ‘fettering’ some producers’ ‘obsession with profit’.

The trouble is that experience in many different countries has shown that governments cannot ignore or overcome the economic laws of capitalism and its market and, if they try, via reforms of one kind or another, the success they have is limited. And if they go too far, this can trigger reduced investment leading to economic crises, recession and unemployment, leading them to change policies or be voted out of office. The simple fact is that, however governments may try to release the potential abundance that technology promises, the system presents them with insurmountable obstacles, since by its nature it cannot be redirected from profit-seeking to meeting people’s needs.

So, the limits of this book’s ambitions are clear to see, shot through as it is with acceptance of the status quo, of the system of working for wages and salaries, of buying and selling, of governments and governed, and of division of the world into those competing economic units known as nations. In stating that they would like to see us ‘align our collective genius with the needs of the planet and each other’, Klein and Thompson are certainly proposing an admirable goal. But it is one that can only be achieved after capitalism has been abolished and society reorganised on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the earth’s natural and industrial resources.

Howard Moss

Land reform in Scotland (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, land reform has been a significant issue. It is widely recognised that there is considerable concentration of land ownership in Scotland. Typically, land reform is an issue in formerly colonised countries, where the occupying power has concentrated land ownership, such as in South Africa and Zimbabwe, to benefit the colonisers and exert control.

The concentration of land in Scotland, through the famous Highland Clearances, was a precursor and a part of the same process, appropriating land for the ruling class and sending people out to colonise other parts of the world.

According to the Scottish Land Commission: 1,252 owners hold 67 percent of privately owned rural land. Of these estates, 87 are estimated to be larger than 10,000 hectares (67 of these are in the Highlands), 667 are 1,000-10,000, and 371 are smaller than 1,000 hectares. There are 5.5 million people in Scotland.

As they note, this is not unusual:

‘Ownership of agricultural land is becoming increasingly concentrated in Europe, with one percent of agricultural businesses controlling 20% of agricultural land in the EU and three percent controlling 50%. Conversely, 80% of agricultural businesses control only 14.5% of agricultural land (European Economic and Social Committee, 2015)’.

Early in the parliament’s existence, the then Labour government passed laws to abolish the last vestiges of feudal land ownership – no longer requiring the payment of feudal duties and creation of outright ownership of land.

The Scottish Parliament took the opportunity to make changes, now it was no longer confronted by the power of landowners in the House of Lords. By 2004, it passed its first Land Reform Act, which included a broader right to roam than in England and Wales, and also introduced community right to buy, where populations up to 10,000 could register a right of refusal on land sales and transfers. This legislation also placed responsibilities on landowners for the management of their property.

The SNP have continued the process by passing further acts in 2015, 2016 and 2025. The 2016 legislation gave Scottish ministers the power to intervene in land sales. Some of this legislation was refinements of the process following human rights cases that upheld the right of private ownership against the provisions of the Land Reform Acts, particularly Salvesen v Riddell.

The 2016 Community Empowerment Act gave communities rights to intervene in disused or neglected land causing harm to communities (including urban properties). The 2025 Act includes a requirement to consider reasonable requests to lease land or convert parts of it into crofting land. This act also requires a plan which will improve biodiversity, adapt to climate change and contribute to net zero.

The large estate owners continue to fight a rearguard action, maintaining that large estates can be run more efficiently and with economies of scale (eg, when a part of the estate has a lean year, they can cross-subsidise from other parts of the estate to continue paying staff for maintenance and other costs).

Campaigners maintain that there is evidence that large estates stifle development, and concentrate power into a few hands:

‘Scotland’s current pattern of landownership frustrates economic development within fragile rural communities. Most of these responses were very general in nature but the overall perception was that because landowners have a very high degree of control over decisions about how land is used, they also have the capacity to either help or hinder economic development. The implication of this is that where local economic development is not regarded as a priority by the landowner, then it will not happen.’

Further, some landowners are perceived as ‘trophy’ owners, holding the land as a status symbol (mostly for shooting); whereas some charities are seen as hindering economic development in the name of conservation. As the land commission notes, ‘This indicates that the issue here is more to do with concentration of power and resources more generally, and that land holdings are acting as an outlet for the exercise of this power rather than its source’.

These frustrations reflect the desire of small-business folk and entrepreneurs who are locked out by their more powerful rivals. Indeed, part of the impetus behind land reform is securing the votes of rural population, including farmers and small-business people. The fact that the legislation is locked in with significant requirements for Scottish ministers to intervene, means that wealth and social connexion may, however, be the real determinant for how much, or how little changes. It will be interesting to see how much this will affect land held by the King in his own right (rather than as Crown land, which itself is managed by Scottish ministers and accounts for 35,000 hectares), such as Balmoral, and if ministers will be willing to impose conditions and lettings on any of his land.

So far, there has been little change in the pattern of land ownership, and sales and transfers of large estates are few and far between. Much as in land reform in many parts of the world, the power and right of property tends to chafe against any attempts to constrain it.

Where land is owned by public bodies, such as ‘Forestry and Land Scotland,’ commercial imperatives still apply, so the logic of capital predominates regardless of titular ownership. It is this logic that will continue to predominate even if the land is parcelled up into smaller lots.

Socialists want to end the private ownership of land and want to see it used rationally to benefit the needs of the whole community. That means, not state ownership or ownership by forestry commissions or trusts, but common ownership and democratic control.

Land being held in common doesn’t mean that people won’t be free to use their initiative to employ the land, but that under properly understood and agreed common and democratic rules, people would be able to co-operate to meet their individual and collective needs without all the layers of complexity and chicanery that come with the private ownership of land.

Pik Smeet

Escape from capitalism? (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 13 February Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviewed Clara Mattei for Channel 4 News to discuss her book Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention which later circulated as a podcast.

In the interview Mattei argued that people are taught that capitalism is an economic system that arose spontaneously out of humans’ supposed natural propensity to barter, but in fact it is of relatively recent historical origin and was brought into being through violence and coercion. The state forced people off the land who, no longer able to meet their needs from directly working land, had no alternative but to work for wages.

Wage-labour, said Mattei, with workers creating more value than what they are paid as wages, is one of the two basic features of capitalism. The other is what she called ‘private investment’ for profit controlled by and for a privileged few; nothing is produced except in the expectation of ending up with more money than invested at the beginning. This means that ‘austerity’, in the sense of restricting how much people as wage-workers get to consume, is a structural feature of capitalism; it is not merely a policy pursued by some governments or the system not working properly but is the basis of the system. The logic of profit required that workers be denied direct access to what they need to live so obliging them to sell their ability to work for money to buy it; the money they are paid was never going to be enough to enable them to live without having to continue working for wages. Austerity, she concluded, was necessary for the system.

Good stuff. Questioned by Guru-Murthy, Mattei agreed that she was in the ‘Marxian tradition’ (she seemed to have deliberately used this adjective rather than Marxist, which is fair enough). What she particularly liked was Marx’s criticism of earlier writers who thought that capitalism was the natural economic system for humans; wage-labour and production for profit were parts of a system constructed by humans and so could be replaced by human action.

How, then, did she propose that people escape from capitalism? As well as being a professor of economics at Tulsa University in Oklahama, she is also the director of its ‘Forum for Real Economic Emancipation’. Here, she explained, she is running a pilot project to test on the ground an alternative. This involved encouraging people to take part in collective decision-making on economic matters, along the lines of ‘participatory budgeting’ practised in a number of cities in Brazil. Under this the local population are involved in deciding how money raised through local taxes should be spent. The implication is that in an alternative society to capitalism all economic decisions would be taken in this way, including in workplaces.

This brings out the ambiguity of the term she used to describe the second basic feature of capitalism, ‘private investment’. This could suggest that what is wrong with investment (as money used to initiate production) is not that it is money invested in production with a view to making more money but that it is controlled by a few at the top rather than democratically by all involved. What she seems to have in mind are factory councils as envisaged at one time by Gramsci (who she name-checks) and assemblies; these should decide democratically how the money obtained from sales should be allocated between individual workers, social amenities and new investment. In other words, a form of what has been called ‘market socialism’.

However, this wouldn’t be an escape from the logic of profit; it would mean that this logic would be applied by workers themselves rather than by their bosses as now. Escaping from capitalism has to mean escape from production for the market and the economic pressures this exerts on whoever actually takes the decisions at workplace level.

Adam Buick

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ukraine is being devastated… The threat of escalation to nuclear war intensifies. Perhaps worst of all, in terms of long-term consequences, the meager efforts to address global heating have been largely reversed. Some are doing fine. The US military and fossil fuel industries are drowning in profit, with great prospects for their missions of destruction many years ahead… Meanwhile, scarce resources that are desperately needed to salvage a livable world, and to create a much better one, are being wasted in destruction and slaughter, and planning for even greater catastrophes’.

[CounterPunch]

‘We really don’t have time for the Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Spartacists, Revolutionary Communists or whatever sect in Your Party to get their shit together in order to take on the challenges we face – they might never overcome their miniscule differences or the battle of the £1 newspapers,’ Mish Rahman, a former Labour politician-turned-Your-Party-insider who defected to the Greens last month, told Novara Media. Rahman said he doubts the differences between the two camps are as substantive as they’re made out: ‘[Sultana and Corbyn] are not far off each other [politically], it’s just a proxy war for control’. 

[NovaraMedia]

‘”They say they don’t have enough homes, but look at how many empty ones there are – [the council] just doesn’t want to fix and repair them,” says mother-of-one Vanessa. She lives on Central Hill estate in Lambeth but only in temporary accommodation and says she’s been left “in limbo”. Dozens of properties on the south London estate are unoccupied, one for eight years, and yet the borough has the third-highest housing waiting lists in the capital – something that Vanessa, who has been waiting for a social home for three years, describes as “outrageous”’. 

[BBC]

Los Angeles spent about $418 million on homelessness programs in 2025, yet only a small share went toward helping people leave the streets for good, according to the New York Post. A recent City Hall report suggests most of the money supports short-term services that manage homelessness rather than resolve it. 

[ZeroHedge]

In 2021, there were only two diagnosed silicosis cases in California. In 2025 there were 214. ‘The number of cases is rising rapidly’ Dr. Michaels wrote to me, ‘That’s the important point’. Here’s the more tearful description from Dr. Michaels..: The hallmarks of the disease: shortness of breath and diminished exercise capacity that progresses to an inability to climb even one flight of stairs. A short walk that should take just 20 minutes can take an hour. Working is difficult or impossible. People cough incessantly. They can’t sleep because it is difficult to breathe and they are kept awake coughing. Over time, people with more advanced silicosis require supplemental oxygen and can’t leave home without an oxygen tank. And they are at increased risk of dying from lung cancer. The crime behind this slaughter is that safer, profitable substitutes are available. 

[Common Dreams]

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