Life and Times: Hoarding – a disorder of our time (2026)

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

Many years ago, when I was a youngster, we were often visited at home by Harry, a relative who had had a difficult upbringing, lived on his own and showed signs of self-neglect. He started to give increasing cause for concern and my parents wondered what could be done. So my father and older brother went to his house to check on how he was managing. On their return I remember my brother saying ‘It’s a rubbish dump with a roof on’. Not long after this Harry was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

How hoarders feel

All this came back to me on reading a recent Big Issue article on hoarding and what causes anyone to adopt a practice so manifestly detrimental to their own wellbeing. It talked about how, though hoarding is generally associated with physical mess, the mess is also in the mind and is likely to have psychological drivers such as trauma, fear of scarcity, or loneliness. It went on to say that, in turn, the consequences of being known to live a hoarder’s life can be shame, fear or reinforced feelings of isolation, but that the intense anxiety felt by hoarders about discarding possessions, regardless of their value, is linked to how ‘objects often carry deep emotional meaning or represent security against loss’.

Hoarding and homelessness

Given its appearance in the Big Issue, the article’s main focus was, perhaps understandably, on how hoarding can lead to eviction or homelessness for those affected and how they suffer a much higher rate of it than for the general population. And it explained that this was the case even though hoarding disorder had been officially recognised as a distinct psychiatric condition and only recently – in May of this year – there was, though little noticed, a National Hoarding Awareness Week. But while drawing attention to the not negligible suffering of people who hoard and to the potential of this condition to lead to even worse consequences, what the Big Issue did not attempt to do was to delve into the reasons why people become hoarders in the first place.

Tendencies triggered

The first obvious thing to consider is that, just as no one is born a thief or a tyrant or a miser, no one is born a hoarder either. It’s generally accepted that human beings are eminently flexible creatures whose behaviour is highly dependent on the society they live in and the conditions in which they grow up. Individuals do of course have differing potential tendencies, capacities and talents, which may or may not be realised depending on the events and circumstances of their lives. For example, therefore, would my relative, Harry, have become a hoarder if the early difficult life circumstances he had experienced had not triggered in him the potential for it? Hard to be sure, and it might be said that many of us have a tendency to accumulate objects of a certain kind, often somewhat irrationally. That’s certainly the case with me personally when it comes to books which I sometimes feel the need to stock my shelves with even if I know at bottom that I won’t read them all. And the same is the case with other people I know when it comes to clothes.

But we can maybe call these minor quirks which may or may not have their origin in some kind of innate tendency in particular individuals but, in any case, are unlikely to have a profound impact on their lives. The same cannot be said of the kind of extreme examples of hoarding that we see depicted in those semi-exploitative TV series on the subject. These are largely the consequence of highly negative situations into which the hoarders have fallen and it seems fair to think that, had circumstances been different for them, their potential for that behaviour may well have remained dormant.

Insecurity

What kind of circumstances are we talking about? Well the Big Issue article talks about ‘trauma, fear and loneliness’ with possessions functioning as ‘emotional anchors’ and representing ‘memories, identity or a sense of security in an unpredictable world’. Of course the majority of us, whose lives are based on the need to work for a wage or salary in order to survive, manage, flexible beings that humans are, to negotiate that ‘unpredictable world’ without falling into some kind of addiction or psychosis. In other words, most of us stay sane despite the uncertainty and insecurity visited upon us by capitalism, where the ups and downs of the market and the needs of the profit system can quickly change the complexion of our lives.

But some of us are more fragile and need something to cling to, something that seems to offer a sense of safety – illusory as that may be – in an uncertain, divisive world. This may be drink, drugs, worship of sports or entertainment heroes, or even, in the case of the hoarding habit, something as seemingly banal as filling your life and space with possessions that serve no apparent purpose.

A cure?

So, is there a ‘cure’ for hoarding? Well, in the alienating, crisis-prone system we live under, probably not, other than a switch to some alternative obsession or addiction. Could there be a cure in a different kind of system, one without the pressure of wages and salaries, one where we have free access to all goods and services and the space to develop our talents and capacities both for our own satisfaction and for the common good? We would have to say yes, definitely. But for this to happen, we first need majority consciousness by wage and salary earners of their plight and then democratic political action to sweep away the profit system and establish the society of togetherness and community that we call socialism – a society based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Lost generations (2026)

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

Like a collective summer madness, the World Cup has passed into memory. While it’s tempting to see such events as a harmless flag-waving celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity, the raising of a Malvinas banner after the England-Argentina semi-final was for many a dump of cold water. Rather than being a source of communal pride, nationalism is a nasty and manipulative ideology used to set the poor against each other in defence of the rich.

As media pundits pointed out before the game, the Falkland Islands have been a source of simmering resentment in Argentina ever since the 1982 war. Possibly the thinking is that because the islands are next to Argentina, they should belong to Argentina and the Brits, being not even in the same hemisphere, should keep their grubby hands off it. Silly argument over a few sheep, perhaps, and on that logic much of the world’s land should not ‘belong’ to the non-contiguous states that claim it, for example Greenland, Hawaii, Gibraltar, Guam, Alaska, Guadeloupe, Kaliningrad and a host of other overseas territories. But silly arguments don’t stop Russia from pulverising Ukraine, Israel slaughtering the population of Gaza, the RSF slaughtering people in Sudan, China waging a grey-zone war against Taiwan, or any of the approximately 130 armed conflicts going on right now around the world.

But never mind sheep or patriotic fervour, the Malvinas thing is more about mineral rights, with possession of the Falkland, South Georgia and South Sandwich group giving the UK – which is to say the British owning class – formal rights over 745,000 square miles of ocean and oil and mineral-rich seabed, much of which overlaps with Argentine claims. And what’s keeping the issue hot is that Argentina’s president Javier Milei is enjoying a cosy ‘bromance’ with Trump, and may conceivably be tempted to ‘do a Galtieri’ on the assumption that a) the US would support him rather than the UK, b) it would reinflate his wilting popularity given his brutal austerity regime at home, c) the UK has virtually no navy left with which to defend such a far-flung territory, and d) the global rules-based order has been ripped up and gunboat (or chainsaw) diplomacy is back in vogue.

Why does nationalism work? Because humans like simple explanations, and we like to belong to a group. This combination makes us rather easy to manipulate. Scientists, who strive after objective truth, are not perceived as offering simple explanations. Instead we go for politicians who spin easy but self-serving us-and-them narratives. They make us feel superior while conveniently obscuring questions about who exactly owns all the power and wealth in ‘our’ country.

Science and rationality are not born human instincts, they’re skills we have to learn, and our education systems are paradoxically lukewarm about encouraging that. Capitalism needs workers to be smart enough to boost productivity, but also dumb enough to be consumers who don’t ask questions. It needs scientists, sure, but it doesn’t need a general population with basic science literacy, who can tell what’s plausibly true from what isn’t. That’s why people believe in cosmic woo-woo, and why some, in the recent heatwaves, forked out up to £120 on hoax air-con systems that supposedly cooled a room in 90 seconds.

On the plus side, scientists are getting media savvy these days. New Scientist is now doing YouTube, presumably for the same reason as the New Statesman, Private Eye and others, to boost paper sales in a shrinking market. Arvin Ash does quantum theory, Sabine Hossenfelder rants against physics and the standard model, and Kurzgesagt does it all as cartoons for kids. Cambridge maths professor Hannah Fry is all over YouTube ‘shorts’, explaining with engaging insouciance how to instantly cool your overheated car, and how we know when modern humans first migrated from Africa to Europe (approx 100-170,000 years ago) by tracing back the DNA of human body lice, which evolved to stick to clothes.

Harvard professor of genetics David Reich, author of the groundbreaking Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018), also has lectures on YouTube. These explain how the new discipline of palaeogenetics has since 2010 shone a new light on the lost generations of prehistory, including a revision of the ‘Kurgan hypothesis’ relocating Proto-Indo-European origins from Anatolia to Iran and Armenia, and the discovery of Sapiens, Neanderthal and Denisovan interbreeding. In ‘Your ancestors aren’t who you think they are‘, he runs through the huge amount of new genetic evidence which reveals that human populations have been in constant flux in time and space, migrating, merging and mixing, such that concepts like ancestry, ethnicity and nationality have no scientific meaning. In short, we are all from everywhere.

But politicians don’t care about any of that. It’s much easier, say in the UK, to blame immigrants for a crumbling infrastructure and falling quality of life than to cite the country’s long-term geopolitical, industrial and economic decline after two ruinous world wars and the loss of a global empire. In today’s miasma of misinformation, bottom-feeding grifters like Farage, Lowe and Robinson can whip up xenophobic paranoia and hope the populist swell carries them into the corridors of power. It’s the same story everywhere, a collective madness that won’t pass.

The price of flag-waving is ultimately blood. The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the First World War and has in some ways recapitulated that ghastly conflict. The survivors at the front – many of them teenagers – now don’t even dare to sit in trenches, but hide in underground dugouts from loitering drones. The war has become ‘gamified’, with competitive points awarded for drone kills. Both states lie about the death rate, but it’s certainly enormous. And this keeps happening. Capitalism, like a crazed psychopath, kills its own children, pouring the flower of youth wholesale into nationalist wars that benefit only the rich. We owe it to these voiceless lost generations, and to our descendants, to abolish this capitalist madness forever.

Paddy Shannon

Zeitgeist: a moneyless society with alienation (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx’s insight in Capital, Volume 1, remains startling in its simplicity. He writes about how spiders spin webs out of instinct, and bees also create architecture in their hives from instinct. He writes about how humans must first imagine what they are to do before making something a reality: the worst architect surpasses the most industrious bee because humans first construct in imagination what they later build in reality. This capacity for conscious, creative design – the ability to envision and reshape our world – defines our species-being. Yet under capitalism, this distinctively human power becomes alien to most humans. Workers execute plans conceived by others, their labour becomes separate from their creativity.

The resulting tragedy is the systematic suppression of human creative potential. Under capitalist production, the worker ‘does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind’ (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). The creative architecture of society – what we produce, how we organise our collective life, toward what ends we direct our energies – becomes the exclusive province of capital accumulation. Profit, not human flourishing, determines the shape of our world.

Marx, of course, wrote about the need for the working class to emancipate itself from the capitalist mode of production by creating a borderless world where money and governments have been abolished. He was very clear about socialism being a moneyless and stateless society: ‘In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated’ (Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 18, Section II), and ‘But the whole programme, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles, or rather, it is a compromise between these two kinds of beliefs in miracles, both equally remote from socialism’ (Critique of the Gotha Program, Section IV). There is also the famous building block for socialist society, ‘From each according to ability; to each according to need.’ This highlights that humans are individuals with unique gifts and talents.

One might expect movements explicitly rejecting capitalism to restore this creative capacity to humanity at large. Yet the Zeitgeist Movement, despite its anti-capitalist rhetoric and vision of a moneyless society, proposed to reproduce the same alienation under different management.

The Zeitgeist Movement proposed a ‘Resource-Based Economy’ where scientific experts and technocrats manage society through rational calculation and technological optimisation. Computers would track resources, engineers would design production systems, scientists would determine social organisation according to ‘the scientific method.’ Money would disappear, but so would democratic participation in the creative decisions that shape collective life.

The structure of alienation remains intact, merely changing personnel.

Under capitalism, creative control flows to those who own capital, justified by property rights. Decisions about production, distribution, and social organisation follow the logic of profit maximisation. Workers execute designs conceived by others in corporate boardrooms and management consultancies.

Under Zeitgeist’s technocracy, creative control flows to those who possess technical expertise, justified by scientific knowledge. Decisions about production, distribution, and social organisation follow the logic of efficiency and resource optimisation. The majority execute designs conceived by others in technical committees and research centres.

In both systems, ordinary people remain alienated from their natural creative capacity. The creative/conceptual moment – that distinctively human capacity to imagine before building – stays concentrated in an elite class. Whether that elite derives authority from property ownership or technical credentials changes the justification, not the fundamental separation of mental from manual labour, of conception from execution.

Marx himself advocated something fundamentally different: democratic planning, not technocratic planning. In his vision, the associated producers would ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’ (Capital, Volume 3, Ch 48). Note the emphasis: ‘collective control’ by the producers themselves, not management by experts on their behalf.

This requires, as Marx understood, abolishing the division between mental and manual labour itself. Not placing mental labour in charge of manual labour, but reuniting conception with execution in the lives of actual people. Education, rotation of tasks, democratic control over technology, genuine participation in social decision-making – these begin to restore human creative capacity.

The Zeitgeist Movement’s failure lay not in its rejection of money, but in its preservation of hierarchy. It promised liberation while maintaining the structure that produces alienation. A moneyless society where technocrats design your life remains a society where you are separated from your creative essence, where the distinctively human capacity to imagine and build your world belongs to someone else.

So the choice between the two moneyless systems lies in what kind of humans we want to be: do we each want to engage in the creative architecture of building our society, or do we just want passively to allow our mental and physical energies to be directed by others?

Dan Mullen

Material World : Reformism in the USA: Bernstein rides again (2026)

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

In an article in Counterpunch in June on ‘What’s Wrong with the American Left’ David Schultz says he is writing in the tradition of ‘the democratic socialism of Eduard Bernstein, who tied the classless society to the ballot rather than the barricade, and of Michael Harrington whose The Other America forced a prosperous country to look at its own poor’.

Bernstein, he says, was ‘betting that universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy’. Bernstein, Harrington and others he mentions ‘believed, as I do, that the point of the left is to assert that capitalism does not get to dictate how democracy operates, but the reverse’. The reverse is of course that democracy gets to dictate how capitalism operates. Which is what Bernstein’s reformism set out to try and do. Whatever else might be said about US self-confessed reformists, they are more theoretically minded than their counterparts this side of the ocean. Ask a reformist here who Bernstein was and they wouldn’t know (unless they had been in some Trotskyist sect when they were a student).

Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) was a member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) who, in exile in London, had worked closely with Engels. He had even written a book in 1895, applying the materialist conception of history to the English revolution, published in English in 1930 as Cromwell and Communism which introduced its readers to the Levellers and the Diggers. At the turn of the 20th century, however, he sparked off a controversy in the German and international Social Democratic movement by suggesting that Marx and Engels had been wrong on certain key points and criticising those who argued that socialism would result from a violent revolution following a catastrophic collapse of capitalism. Instead, it would come about, and was in fact already coming about, as a result of democracy gradually spreading to all aspects of society, including the organisation of the production and distribution of wealth. The book in which he expounded this ‘Revisionist’ position was given the English title of Evolutionary Socialism. Rosa Luxembourg’s pamphlet Reform or Revolution is a polemic directed against Bernstein. We joined in the ‘Revisionist controversy’ with an article in the October 1909 Socialist Standard entitled ‘Bungling Bernstein’.

An article in the January 1956 Socialist Standard on ‘The Fabians, Bernstein and Revisionism’ summarised Bernstein’s views as:

‘That the numbers and wealth of large and small Capitalists tended to increase and society to become more democratic. That class antagonisms were being modified by ethical and patriotic considerations. That crises were decreasing in size and frequency through a process of adaptation largely influenced by trusts, cartels and the like. That the Materialist Conception of History overestimated the economic factor; the influence of the economic factor was diminishing whilst the influence of ideological factors, including the ethical, was increasing. That Capitalism had undergone fundamental changes since the middle of the 19th century when Marx made his analyses, but, though true for the time of which he was writing, they no longer applied. That the theory of surplus value was incomplete and needed the addition of the theory of final utility. That the workers have now become citizens of the country and therefore have a fatherland to defend. That as Germany is becoming more and more dependent upon products from the colonies, these colonies should be developed and protected. Savages have only a conditional right to the land occupied by them; the higher civilization of advanced countries can claim a higher right. That Socialism is a long way ahead and will only come by a process that is gradual and almost imperceptible; consequently we should not worry about the future but concentrate on the present, on the extension of the political and economic rights of the working classes and “In all Advanced countries we see the privileges of the Capitalist bourgeoisie yielding step by step to democratic organisations” (Preface, page XI). That the Social Democratic Party should form alliances with the Capitalist parties nearest to them.’

It is easy to see from this why Bernstein is regarded by Social Democrat reformists as their mentor. He anticipated what after WW1 became the practice of all European Social Democratic parties, including the SPD, despite some of them still being committed on paper to Marxism. It was also the practice of the Labour Party even though they never made a theory of it.

Bernstein’s gradualism has been tried for over a hundred years now. But the result has not been any progress towards socialism. Production is in still the hands of profit-seeking companies and oligarchs. The economy is still driven by the pursuit of profits. There may be a ‘welfare state’ of sorts but that’s being eroded not extended. There is no democracy in workplaces. Rather than the Social Democratic reformists gradually changing capitalism it has been the other way round. Experience of governing under capitalism has changed them into mere managers of the capitalist economic system, accepting and applying its logic that priority must be given to profit-making.

Although Bernstein was not all bad — he did oppose WW1 and he was right about capitalism not collapsing of its own accord — his gradualist reformism must be pronounced a failure. Political democracy has not got to dictate how capitalism operates and never will. It is rather that capitalism dictates how governments act by giving them only the choice of putting profits first. He bet that ‘universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy’ and lost.

Adam Buick

Blood and Cattle (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

How to Save the Amazon: a Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers. By Dom Phillips & Contributors. Ithaca £10.99.

The introduction and first four chapters were written by Phillips, but the book was unfinished when he and indigenous specialist Bruno Pereira were murdered in 2022 (one man confessed to the killings and others have been arrested, but it is not known who was behind them, though they were presumably carried out to silence witnesses). A further six chapters were completed by various journalists on the basis of Phillips’ notes. Phillips was clearly a courageous and painstaking investigator; as the people who assembled the book say in their foreword, ‘these pages have been stained by blood.’

The Amazon rainforest plays a crucial role in stabilising the global climate, storing billions of tons of carbon, among other things. But it is currently under various kinds of threat, most notably deforestation caused by cattle ranching. Fires are used to remove trees and clear land; almost nine-tenths of deforested Amazon land has become cattle pasture. The reason behind this of course is profit, and there are plenty of other attacks on the forest for the same reason, from hydroelectric plants and gold-mining to large-scale fishing and oil exploration. Indeed, the Amazon itself may already be close to a ‘tipping point’, when it no longer produces enough moisture and may change into a semi-arid savannah. All of this is exposed here, with considerable detail and personal stories.

Biodiversity is another crucial aspect of the Amazon. Having large numbers of different plants can help to build fertile soils. Also, the area is likely to contain drugs that can help combat disease, but about which the outside world knows very little. The indigenous people who live in the rainforest have a great deal of knowledge about possible uses of plants, and made use of some of their own remedies to fight Covid. But as deforestation continues, biodiversity will decline and some potentially useful plants may disappear.

The policies of the Brazilian government have had a major impact on the Amazon. The right-wing populist government of Jair Bolsonaro encouraged land-grabbers and illegal miners to invade the forest and extract natural resources. Since the election of left-winger Lula da Silva as president in 2022, things may have improved a bit, and he promised zero deforestation by the end of the decade, but it remains to be seen if anything close to this will materialise.

Defending the Amazon rainforest would contribute to limiting climate change and would also protect the indigenous communities that live there. Rather than the people being a means to the end of defending the Amazon biome, the forest should be saved to prevent indigenous genocide. They are not just hunter–gatherers but also ‘rainforest gardeners and technicians’. Massive construction projects ‘convert self-sufficient forest peoples into the urban poor’ (rather like capitalism originally forcing people off the land to become wage slaves in factories).

The book reminds us how many inhabitants of the Earth view it rather differently from those who live under capitalism.  As an indigenous representative says in the afterword, ‘That land could be owned by a single person is unthinkable to us because everyone’s survival depends on it. We can’t imagine how anyone could pollute, divert or dam water for their own profit.’

Paul Bennett

Tiny Tips (2026)

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

United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres says that 800 million people around the world are living in extreme poverty… [He] had previously stated that nearly three billion people are living in inadequate housing conditions.

[8am media]

In Shanxi, the province that sits at the heart of China’s coal-mining industry, there’s long been a saying: ‘Only go down a coal pit when you have no other way out’. For decades, life in these pits was intertwined with tragedy. It became so common that it gave rise to other sayings: about how miners were ‘exchanging their lives for money’ or ‘staking their lives for tomorrow’ when they ventured into underground tunnels where they died from gas explosions, flooding and shaft collapses. Over the past decade, safety reforms steadily erased the industry’s deadly reputation, and those days were thought to be behind China – until 22 May, when a blast at the Liushenyu coal mine in Shanxi killed 82 people and injured more than 120 others.

[BBC]

A leading Nicaraguan indigenous leader has died after being detained by the ruling authoritarian regime for nearly three years. Brooklyn Rivera, who founded the central American nation’s indigenous movement Yatama, died due to ‘physical and neurological deterioration’ linked to a Covid-19 infection, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health stated on Sunday. The government, headed by President Daniel Ortega, took 15 hours to confirm the death and are refusing to release the 73-year-old’s body to his family, opposition media report. The Nicaraguan government is routinely accused of political oppression, and Rivera is one of a growing number of dissidents to die in custody. 

[BBC]

Greta Thunberg… has said little publicly about the recent protests in Iran. Similar criticisms have been directed at a number of prominent left-wing intellectuals and activists in Europe and North America, including Tariq Ali, Naomi Klein, Alain Badiou, Richard Falk, and others. The pattern extends beyond silence. Judith Butler, the American philosopher and feminist theorist, has previously expressed support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, describing them as progressive social movements that form part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle.

[International Policy Digest]

An elderly man spent days on the floor of his HMO while maggots infested wounds in his legs before he was discovered and later died, a report has found. The 69-year-old from Oldham, named ‘John’ in a safeguarding review, was discharged from hospital just two weeks before the fall that led to his death … The recently published report found the local authority and medical professionals at Royal Oldham Hospital ‘missed opportunities’ to support John. Prior to his death, John was treated for severe malnourishment and an acute kidney injury. At the time, he shared with staff that he ‘did not feel safe in his home’, as he lived in a HMO with five other people, all of whom had serious alcohol and substance abuse issues.

[Oldham Evening Chronicle]

 

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