Life and Times: The Drinks Stop (2026)

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

This column has talked previously about the perils of being your own boss. I focused on a doughnut and coffee shop that had opened in my area and the difficulty it was likely to face in surviving. What happened after that was, following the expected lull in summer trade from its largely student clientele, it closed for a break and then it never reopened. Now, just round the corner from where the doughnuts are no more, a new business has opened up. It’s a sort of general store with the name ‘Drinks Stop’ emblazoned across its front, having taken over what had been a longstanding ironmongers, a shop that was much loved by the community and whose disappearance was much lamented when its owner retired.

The furore

What it would then become was the subject of much local discussion, and that exploded recently when ‘Drinks Stop’ opened. Some on the local Facebook forum have given it approval because it at least meant that the premises were in use again. But the majority have given it a decisive and, in some cases, scathing thumbs down. Partly because much of what it’s selling simply reproduces the stock of another convenience shop barely 50 yards up the road, but mostly because of the new shop’s particular appearance. Its façade is shiny black plastic panelling with bright yellow lettering that completely covers the original corner-shop period frontage with its curved glass windows and ironwork entrance. Comments about it on social media have included ‘ugly and inappropriate’ ‘an ‘eyesore’, ‘a carbuncle’, ‘a blot on the landscape’, ‘an utter abomination’, and – even – ‘it looks like a sex shop’. A more ‘moderate’ objection has been that its appearance is just out of character with the neighbourhood’s traditional architecture, with someone observing ‘it might not be so bad if it were one of a whole stretch of shops with different facades, but, as it stands, it really is an eyesore’.

Success or failure?

Whatever the case, just like the failed doughnut shop, an enormous amount of time, energy and expense has gone into converting the original premises, both inside and out, to what it is now. Yet, if the social media furore is anything to go by and translates into people shunning it, the odds seem to be against it doing enough business to be successful. And if that happens, the family who’ve opened it will see the enormous effort they’ve made to be their own boss come to nothing and they’ll be forced back into the situation of looking for employment and trying to find someone else to be their boss. Which in fact, so the statistics show, is what happens to the vast majority of workers who seek an escape route from the job market and the tyranny of employment by setting up on their own. Even if they undertake market research first and some do – though maybe the ‘Drinks Stop’ proprietors didn’t – that doesn’t remove the risk of their venture failing. In reality, it is impossible for them to know with any kind of certainty whether their new business will ‘pay’, given the uncertainty and unpredictability of the economic system we all live under, which defies the best laid plans of humans and which even governments can do little to control.

So, as things stand, ‘The Drink Stop’ will be competing with the other store we have mentioned just up the road. It may manage to capture some of its business, but, since the clientele overall is unlikely to increase, it seems improbable that both will survive. It‘s not difficult in fact to imagine that the two stores will end up doing each other down with both eventually closing their doors – and this also in view of the additional fact that there are two other supermarkets, big-name ones (Tesco and Sainsburys), less than ten minutes walk away.

Dog-eat-dog or human connection?

Standing in the street looking at these two local shops, the thought that comes to my mind is why do we put up with (and even support, as many do) a system that has at its heart – and on a colossal scale the world over – an ethic of dog-eat-dog competition and whose inevitable outcome is waste and human frustration? After all humans are equipped for cooperation and connection to one another, even though they (we) are currently stuck in a social system that promotes competition and selfishness. Why instead don’t all of us who are forced to sell our energies to an employer for a wage or salary throughout most of our lives get together and act consciously and democratically to put an end to that dysfunctional system and opt instead for the moneyless, wageless society of free association and free access that we call socialism?

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Abolish the trough (2026)

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

Summer droughts, record temperatures and infernal wildfires are fast becoming the new UK normal, as are tabloid splashes during the peak sailing season when overloaded migrant dinghies manage to make it to UK shores. Cue a shrill crescendo of right-wing rhetoric about how immigrants (they mean Muslims) are ruining the country, destroying British culture, raping children and stealing jobs. The ultimate right-wing paranoia is ‘the Great Replacement Theory’, the modern incarnation of 20th century panics about the Jews or Chinese, in which sharia law comes to dominate the West, and democracy and free speech are annihilated.

Socialists have a different frame of reference, which is the urgent need to abolish global capitalism. To us, right-wing fears are misdirected emotional responses to the pressures and stresses of living in capitalism. When the world establishes post-capitalist common ownership, with no markets or rich elites, no states or governments, these worries will evaporate. When everything in the future is free, everywhere in the world, it’s the same as everyone being rich, and then who cares who is a foreigner and who isn’t? Maybe we’ll all choose to migrate, maybe not. It won’t matter.

But when you’re impoverished today with no hope of a decent life, it’s easy to fetishise what little you do have, like your ‘culture’. British culture, as everyone knows, is the mongrel product of scores of migrations and invasions over millennia. We are built from a mongrel mix of genes and we speak a mongrel Indo-European dialect. We enjoy Indian, Japanese, Italian, Malaysian and Caribbean cooking. We like Swiss cheese, Ethiopian coffee, German beer, American fast food with French fries, Swedish saunas and nowadays, Chinese smart gadgets. Most of our classical music heroes are Russian or Polish or German. We hang out in Spanish resorts or the Austrian Alps or Thai beach bars. If anything’s ruining British culture, it’s capitalist McDonaldisation, not our boundless appetite for diversity.

Can Britain do without immigrants? With a declining home-grown population and skill set, there is an ever-increasing list of essential jobs that are in short supply. Do we not need electricians or engineers? How about plumbers, builders, bookkeepers, IT trainers or lab technicians? There’s a shortage of all these. The understaffed NHS has 27 percent of nurses and 35 percent of doctors from overseas. Does the right want a functioning NHS or not? Foreign-born dentists now outnumber native ones. Would the right prefer bad teeth?

Alright, but what about all the Asian grooming gangs and the supposed increase in migrant-related crimes and sex attacks? Certainly there have been some well-publicised cases. Migrant crimes make headlines, equivalent ‘white’ crimes don’t. Migrants are mostly young men, and young men proportionately commit more crimes. The problem is age rather than nationality. If migration causes crime, the two should rise in lockstep. Instead, when migration was rising, overall crime rates were going down. Now both rates are falling. The right can’t support their argument with reliable government data, because there isn’t any. Crimes are not recorded against immigration status, data collection is not consistent across police forces, and age demographics are not factored in. The overall picture is confused, anecdotal and ‘a bit of a bodge’, allowing some to claim that the migrant crime problem is worse than it is. Conversely, ‘if you are a victim of a violent or sexual crime in the UK, the available evidence suggests that the ethnic makeup of the country means that the perpetrator is most likely to be a white man’.

Legal migrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes, because ‘they don’t want to get kicked out of the country’, while second-generation migrants tend to assimilate, and crime rates come into line with that of the general population. According to the Office for National Statistics, (downloadable PDF), ‘MoJ data shows that proportionately fewer foreign nationals end up in prison for sexual offences than British nationals’, despite the fact that ‘Time and time again audits have found that the police in the UK falsely charge foreign nationals at a higher rate’.

What about the Great Replacement Theory? Currently Muslims constitute around 8 percent of UK and European populations. It’s true that rates are rising slightly against a backdrop of declining European birthrates. At current trends and on a reasonable estimate, Muslims would be a UK majority by 2180, in 150 years’ time.

A lot can happen in 15 years, never mind 150. Does anyone remember the hot-button social issues of 1876? Mass Polish immigration, recently a right-wing concern, reversed spectacularly when the Polish economy started outperforming the UK’s. Any number of other reversals could occur. In any case, how do speculations about future demographics help today’s poor, whom the right supposedly cares about?

People who voted for Brexit to stop immigration must be gutted that immigration then went up. They voted for ‘sovereignty’ and to ‘take our country’ back. But if England really is our country, how come we’re only allowed to walk on 8 percent of it? Why isn’t the right angry about that? The rich own all the land because they stole it from our ancestors during the Enclosures and the Highland Clearances, and then passed laws to legalise their own robbery. People complain that foreigners are stealing their jobs. Why aren’t they angry that the rich stole the entire world, forcing the rest of us into centuries of landless wage-slavery? Why does the right despise socialists, the very people who call out this crime against humanity and demand that we take our entire world back?

Could it be that prominent right-wing leaders aren’t interested in challenging the guilty rich, who cause all our working-class misery? Could it be that they hope to join the guilty rich, by whipping up popular unthinking frenzy against hapless scapegoats in order to get their own snouts in the trough? Well, socialists have a simple answer for that. Abolish the trough. Capitalism, not immigration, is humanity’s real enemy.

Paddy Shannon

Why Marx’s critique of capitalism still matters (2026)

From the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx’s Capital is subtitled A critique of Political Economy. ‘Political Economy’ was an attempt to explain how capitalism works and how it might develop over time, Two of its main representatives were Adam Smith and David Ricardo and much of Capital is shaped by and addresses the works of those two thinkers. They shared a fundamental idea that we know as the Labour Theory of Value (LTV), but it had a major flaw: the inability to explain the source of capitalist profit. This flaw was only solved in Marx’s Capital. Below, we discuss issues around the theory.

Part I: The Ricardo problem

To understand Marx’s contribution, you first need to understand the problem he inherited from classical political economy.

The classical labour theory of value

Adam Smith and David Ricardo both worked with versions of the labour theory of value. The basic idea: the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labour required to produce it. The greater the labour-time required, the greater the value of the commodity.

This made intuitive sense and seemed to explain a lot about how markets worked. But it had a fatal flaw that Ricardo acknowledged but couldn’t resolve. By the way, both of them treated ‘labour’ as the only commodity that the worker brings to market.

What Ricardo understood

Labour Theory of Value: Commodities exchange based on the labour time required for their production; labour is the source of value.

Class conflict: He recognised that capitalists, landlords, and workers have opposing interests; rising wages reduce profits and vice versa.

Where Ricardo stopped (and Marx went further)

1. Naturalisation of capitalism

Ricardo: ‘This is how economies function. Labour creates value, always has, always will.’

Marx: ‘Value is specific to capitalism. In other systems like feudalism, labour does not take the form of value.’

Value can be defined as the socially necessary labour-time spent reproducing commodities within the capitalist mode of production.

2. Inability to explain profit’s source

Ricardo’s dilemma: If labour creates all value and workers are paid for for their labour, where does profit arise? He couldn’t resolve this contradiction.

Marx’s solution: Workers are not paid for their labour; they are paid for their labour-power. Labour-power possesses a value, say 10,, reflecting the cost of reproducing the worker (food, shelter, etc.), but normally generates more value, say 12, when consumed. It is the only commodity which can do this, This extra value is the source of profit.

Historical context: Franklin, Smith, and Aristotle

Benjamin Franklin contributed to this discourse by asserting that the value of a commodity derives from the labour hours needed for its production from start to finish. Franklin never developed it into a theory. He was writing about legitimising paper currency.

Adam Smith maintained a contradictory attitude to value, shifting between LTV and a cumulative theory whereby value was determined by wages + profit + rent. He noted that commodities exchanged at equal ratios (one beaver = two deer) but couldn’t explain why this was so.

Aristotle was able to observe the LTV in action – he saw that commodities exchanged at stable ratios (5 beds = one house) but couldn’t explain why this should be so. Marx paid him a compliment writing: ‘Aristotle’s genius is shown by [the fact] that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality’ (Capital volume 1 chapter 1) but the inequality inherent in a slave society blinded him to the source of that equality.

The profit paradox:

Here’s Ricardo’s problem: if, as he argued, commodities exchange at their value (determined by labour-time), and if labour itself is a commodity that exchanges at its value, then ‘where does profit come from?’

Let’s walk through it:

1. A capitalist buys raw materials at their value (say, $50 worth of cotton yarn).

2. The capitalist buys labour from the worker at its value (say, $50 for a day’s work).

3. The worker transforms the yarn into cloth.

4. The capitalist sells the cloth at its value (the combined labour-time of producing the yarn + weaving it into cloth).

Total cost: $100 (materials + labour)

Total revenue: $100 (value of the cloth)

Profit: $0

But capitalists do make profit. So either:

1. Capitalists are systematically cheating (buying below value, selling above value), or

2. There’s something wrong with the theory.

Ricardo couldn’t solve this. He acknowledged the problem but left it as an unresolved contradiction in his system. He died not being able to resolve it. He had his hand on the doorknob, but didn’t turn it and walk through the door. This wasn’t just an academic puzzle – it was the central question of political economy. Without solving it, you couldn’t explain how capitalism actually worked.

The moralistic detour

Some socialist thinkers – particularly Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – seized on this contradiction and concluded: ‘Capitalism is theft’. Workers are being cheated. The solution is to create fair systems of exchange where workers receive the full value of their labour.

Proudhon’s famous declaration – ‘Property is theft!’ – captured this moral outrage. His solution was mutualism: worker cooperatives, mutual credit banks, and systems of direct exchange that would eliminate the middleman capitalist.

But this was a dead end. Why? Because it misdiagnosed the problem. It assumed exploitation happened because of cheating – bad actors violating the principle of equal exchange. Marx would show that exploitation happens within equal exchange, as a structural feature of the system itself. This is the difference between scientific socialism and utopian reformism. Capitalists aren’t villains – they’re playing by the rules. The problem is the rules themselves. But on we go…

Part II: Marx’s breakthrough – Labour vs. Labour-Power

Marx’s genius was in recognising that Ricardo and Proudhon were asking the wrong question. The problem wasn’t that capitalists were cheating. The problem was that labour itself isn’t what workers sell.

The distinction

Marx distinguished between two concepts that everyone before him had conflated:

1. Labour-power: The capacity to work. This is what the worker sells to the capitalist – their ability to perform labour for a certain period of time.

2. Labour: The actual activity of working, which produces value when labour-power is consumed in the production process.

This distinction is subtle but revolutionary. Here’s why it matters:

Labour-power as a commodity

Like any commodity, labour-power has a value – determined by the labour-time required to reproduce it. But what does it mean to ‘reproduce’ labour-power?

It means: ‘the cost of reproducing the worker’.

To show up to work tomorrow, the worker needs: food, shelter, clothing, rest, healthcare, education or training.

The ‘value of labour-power’ is the socially necessary labour-time embodied in these necessities. In other words, it’s roughly the cost of keeping the worker alive, healthy and able to work. There is an additional component too that covers the cost of raising the next generation of workers

Let’s say all this costs $100 per day. That’s what the capitalist pays in wages.

Labour as value-creating activity

But here’s the key: when the capitalist consumes labour-power – when the workers actually work – they produce more value than the cost of their labour-power (Marx lays this out explicitly in Chapter 6 of Capital Volume I).

Let’s say the worker works an 8-hour day and produces commodities worth $200.

The capitalist pays: $100 (the value of labour-power).

The worker produces: $200 (the value created by labour).

The difference: $100 (surplus value, appropriated by the capitalist. It will then be split up into profit, interest and rent, but that is immaterial to the present discussion).

Why this solves the Ricardo problem

Notice what just happened: Exchange occurred at value. The capitalist paid the worker exactly what their labour-power is worth. No cheating. No violation of market principles.

And yet, the capitalist extracted surplus value. This doesn’t come from cheating – it comes from the unique nature of labour-power as a commodity.

Labour-power is the only commodity whose consumption produces more value than it costs.

This is the secret of capitalist accumulation. And it’s why Marx’s critique is fundamentally different from the moralistic critiques that came before. This is why socialists assert that class war originates in the employment process – the less a worker is paid, the more a capitalist accumulates in profit. It’s not about being greedy or evil, or being good or generous. It’s simply necessary to compete in the effort not to go out of business. The capitalist who refuses to extract maximum surplus value doesn’t stay a capitalist for long – they get driven out by competitors who do. The system selects for exploitation.

Part III: Why a moralistic critique is dangerous

Marx didn’t just disagree with Proudhon’s analysis – he considered it dangerous to the working-class movement. Why?

1. It misdiagnoses the problem

If you believe exploitation happens because capitalists are ‘cheating,’ your solution becomes: ‘Make capitalism fairer.’

This leads to reformist dead-ends:

1. Worker cooperatives that still must compete in capitalist markets

2. Ethical consumption campaigns

3. Appeals to capitalist conscience

4. Labour laws that tinker at the margins

These strategies don’t challenge the fundamental structure. Even the nicest, most ethical capitalist must extract surplus value to survive in competition. If they don’t, they go bankrupt.

Bad diagnosis = bad cure.

2. It lets capitalists off the hook

A moralistic critique says: ‘Capitalists are bad people doing bad things.’ This can lead to people organising to use violence and fantasising about using guillotines to get this or that capitalist, which will not solve any problems. The problem isn’t the capitalists themselves, it’s the system’s rules that require the capitalist to behave in a certain way.

A moralistic critique is easy to deflect:

1. ‘I pay above minimum wage!’

2. ‘I offer great benefits!’

3. ‘If you don’t like the wage, don’t take the job!’

Marx’s structural critique is much harder to escape: ‘Even if you’re the most generous capitalist in the world, you are still extracting surplus value. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be a capitalist. The system requires exploitation to function, regardless of your personal morality.’

3. It divides the working class

If exploitation is about bad bosses, workers start thinking:

1. ‘My boss is actually pretty nice. Maybe I’m not exploited.’

2. ‘We just need to replace the greedy CEOs with ethical ones.’

This fractures class consciousness. Workers waste energy trying to find good employers instead of recognising that all wage labour involves surplus extraction.

3. It obscures the source of power

A moralistic critique makes exploitation seem psychological – a matter of individual greed.

Marx showed that it’s structural. Even a worker-owned co-op, operating in a capitalist market, must increase productivity and accumulate capital to survive. The system itself enforces exploitation.

Part IV: Conclusion: Why this still matters

Marx’s labour/labour-power distinction isn’t just an abstract theoretical point. It has profound implications for how we understand the economy and our place in it.

It explains profit without cheating

You don’t need to believe in conspiracy theories about greedy capitalists. The system works exactly as advertised – and still produces exploitation.

It reveals the structural nature of exploitation

This isn’t about bad individuals. It’s about a mode of production that requires the extraction of surplus value to function.

It clarifies strategy

If exploitation is structural, you can’t reform it away. You can’t create ‘ethical capitalism’ or ‘fair trade’ your way out of it. You need to change the fundamental relations of production. In other words, capitalism can’t be made nice – maybe nicer at the margins, but never nice. The extraction is baked into the structure.

It cuts through ideological mystification

When someone tells you ‘the market is fair’ or ‘you’re paid what you’re worth,’ you can ask: ‘Then where does profit come from?’

The labour/labour-power distinction gives you the tools to see through the illusion of equal exchange and recognise the hidden extraction at the heart of the system.

Dan Mullens

Material World: China and capitalist property rights (2026)

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

On 16 July British industrial capital’s representative body, the CBI, gave its somewhat begrudging support to what it had called, on 16 May, ‘an expensive option of last resort’, namely the nationalisation of British Steel. Despite their reservations about potential compensation costs and a (probably) valid fear of a negative impact on future investment, for the moment we can assume that industrial capital is okay with bearing the tax burden of a reported daily subsidy of £1.3m. In the ‘national interest’ of course (tinyurl.com/yc58wxjs).

Nationalisation might be welcome news for British Steel’s 2,700 workers, but it is less than welcome in China, if we are to judge by the 17 July report on the Global Times website, one of the Chinese state’s English mouthpieces.

According to the site, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) is dead against this nationalisation. MOFCOM points out that British Steel is (was) a subsidiary of China’s Jingye Group, and says the British government has undermined Jingye’s ‘legitimate rights and interests’ and is severely damaging Chinese companies’ confidence in investing in the UK’. Somewhat in agreement with the CBI then. MOFCOM is also ‘pledging to take strong measures to safeguard [these] lawful interests’, although they don’t go into details about what these measures might be.

It is clear from the article that the Chinese state supports Jingye’s demand for compensation for its ‘substantial financial investments in continuous operations [and] equipment upgrades’ since 2020. There is also a clear statement that the state will defend the interests of any Chinese company whose UK investments are threatened in future. Again, a position with which the CBI doubtless concurs, and the type of position it would expect the British government to adopt should any of its members be threatened by some uppity foreign politicians.

Let’s pause a minute though. Isn’t the country concerned always referred to as ‘Communist China’ by the capitalist media? Run by the Chinese Communist Party? Filthy Marxists, every last one of them then.

Filthy Marxists pledged to defend the ‘legitimate interests’ of private property – after all, Jingye Group is a privately owned company with 40,000 employees. As it is privately owned, there is no share price but it claims an internationally recognised ‘brand value’ of almost £14 billion, putting it in the top 4 of Chinese steel producers (tinyurl.com/nhe4sv5r).

So ‘Sinified Marxism’, a Marxism tailored to the Chinese context, is defending private property now. Understandable, given that 60 percent of Chinese GDP is created in the private sector. This is why the Private Sector Promotion Law came into effect in May 2025, ‘promoting the private sector […], strengthening legal protections and injecting fresh momentum into a key driver of the world’s second-largest economy’. It ‘aims to optimize the development environment for the sector, ensure fair market competition, and promote the growth of both the private economy and private entrepreneurs’ (Global Times).

We can assume that the CBI would be less begrudging in its support for such a law but it does somewhat contradict the Chinese constitution which tells us that: ‘The socialist transformation of private ownership of the means of production has been completed’. Perhaps steel works aren’t part of the means of production – could this be a case of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’?

Leaving that aside for now, what we can’t quite understand, with all that capital washing about, is how that same constitution can state that ‘the system of exploitation of man by man [has been] abolished’. Nor how, beginning slowly around the time the constitution was published (1982), billions of dollars of private capital have flowed into China in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI), peaking in 2021, when $344 billion was invested. Could it be that the foreign capitalists and their fund managers all failed to carry out due diligence, that none of them had studied the economic situation, that they had no idea that there is no exploitation in China, hence there is no possibility of their capital being able to return a profit, the sole aim of capital?

Answer? No, capital is only attracted to China to buy labour power in the expectation that it will generate surplus value – in other words, it goes only with the idea of exploiting the working class – the constitution is just so much tosh.

Let’s take another example, again from the Global Times (3 March 2026). It discusses the state’s plan to increase ‘support for financial development by optimizing preferential tax regimes for funds and single-family offices, attracting global capital convergence. Hong Kong is projected to become the world’s largest cross-border wealth management center in the coming years’. A single-family office, by the way, isn’t for the average family, it’s just for the ones that have so much money that they can afford to employ their own staff to manage their investments.

In other words, the Chinese state is trying to make it cheaper and more profitable for capitalists to gamble in HK’s stock exchange casinos.

What the ruling clique in China has learned is that they have to do exactly the same as any other government – whether of the left or of the right. That is, create conditions in which capitalists are confident that they will be able to scoop up surplus value to their heart’s content.

Quite how long private capital will put up with the Chinese Communist Party supping at its table remains to be seen.

Budgie.

Cooking the Books: Fully automated luxury capitalism? (2026)

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

Elon Musk has said it again. That money will eventually become meaningless. This time he also gave a date: 2036. In an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes on 20 July, he claimed that in ten years’ time advances in intelligent AI and robotics will have helped usher in an era of ‘such amazing abundance’ that money will have become meaningless. The work of production will be done by robots, leaving humans free to do work they enjoy — he gives gardening as an example — while having access to the abundance of wealth that the robots produce.

There may well be the technological advances he predicts but making something possible does not mean that it will actually happen. Under capitalism technological advances are only applied to production when they become the cheapest way of producing something. The complete robotisation that Musk envisages wouldn’t be cheap. He himself mentioned the cost in terms of electricity usage and computer chips.  As long as paying humans a wage to produce wealth for sale is cheaper, then that is what will happen, as it is now in almost every field of production and, given capitalism continuing, we counter-predict still will be in 2036. In fact, insofar as robotisation did replace human labour and create a large pool of unemployed workers, that would exert a downward pressure on wages that would cheapen the cost of employing humans, so slowing down the application of robotisation to production.

Then there is the problem of how Musk’s vision would come about. Minton Beddoes pressed him on this point, asking if he thought that it would be through the mass of displaced workers electing a left-wing government that would nationalise everything; which she implied was surely anathema to him as it was to the Economist. Musk evaded the question, re-asserting that there would be an abundance produced by AI-driven robots by 2036 and that this would lead to deflation unless something was done to maintain demand, as by the government writing cheques to provide everybody with a Universal High Income.

Quite apart from this meaning that there would still be money, it would require the election of a government that would do this. Unless, that is, he has in mind the cheques being written by him and the other tech bros. The obvious solution, assuming that the predicted robotisation and abundance was to come about, would be either to hand out to people what they needed or (better) let them take it. But that would imply that the robots and the rest of the means and instruments of production had already become commonly owned. A fully automated luxury capitalism is not possible.

However, in suggesting that a fully-automated moneyless society of abundance could come about Musk has undermined the argument that capitalism is the only game in town. As we pointed out on one of our Facebook pages:

‘Has Musk thought through the consequences of his “Money won’t matter in 2036” prediction? With a moneyless free-access society with the ability to produce more than enough of what everyone needs, why should an elite continue to own the means of production and distribution, decide how these are used, retain power over humankind because of this ownership, and continue to enjoy immensely superior living standards compared to everyone else?’

Capitalism’s book-burning machines (2026)

From the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The media ask whether robots will steal your job, because ‘AI apocalypse’ shifts copy. While socialists ask what the machine was for in the first place, who owns it, who tells it what to do, and where the wealth goes.

Marx cared about machinery because he could see what it could do. A machine that handles the grinding, repetitive labour frees human beings from that labour. In a society run for human need, that means shorter hours, less exhaustion, more time to actually live. The technology isn’t the problem but how capitalism applies it.

Capitalism doesn’t use increased productivity to give us more free time. It uses it to produce more cheaply, undercut the competition, and pile up more capital. The contradiction isn’t accidental.

When Marx writes about machinery in Capital, he deals with something far more interesting than its impact on employment. He’s analysing the social relationship around the machine. A lathe or a loom has no innate capitalist purpose. It could serve entirely different social arrangements. What matters is who owns it and why it’s running.

Under the current economic system, machinery becomes a tool for extracting relative surplus value. Technological development gets dragged into the fight over unpaid labour. But the machine isn’t the enemy. The property relation is.

This logic is playing out right now in the second-hand book trade. AI firm Anthropic is one that we know has been buying up millions of physical volumes. Antiquarian books. Foreign-language texts. Out-of-print editions. They feed them into hydraulic guillotines, slice off the spines, scan the pages, and pulp what remains. The operation was called ‘Project Panama’, and they kept it quiet for a reason.

Why? Because the internet is now clogged with ‘AI slop’ – soulless machine generated text that poisons the models if you train on it. So capital has turned to pre-2022 printed books as a ‘clean’ source of human prose. Brokers like ISBNdb now handle bulk orders from a thousand volumes to a million. The books aren’t read. They aren’t preserved. They aren’t shelved. They’re strip-mined.

This isn’t a glitch. It’s exactly how capitalism handles knowledge. The first-sale doctrine and fair use rulings provide the legal scaffolding. Physical carriers of human thought are fed into the inferno. The accumulated intellectual labour of centuries is treated as raw material to be extracted, enclosed, and monetised. Same impulse that cleared forests for timber. Same impulse that pumped the oil dry. The book isn’t valued as culture or understanding. It’s valued as a vector of data that can be fed into a model to generate return on investment.

Marx and the machine

When Marx examined machinery in Capital and in the Grundrisse ‘Fragment on Machines,’ he was describing precisely this. He wrote:

‘The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of the development of capital.’

It isn’t an innocent invention that society happens to pick up. It becomes part of capital’s logic.

In the Grundrisse, Marx sketches a future where human labour increasingly consists of supervising and regulating an immense productive apparatus:

‘Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process.’

That’s a tendency. But under capitalism, the tendency is subordinated to the expansion of value. The machine doesn’t shorten the working day; it intensifies labour and throws people out of work. It doesn’t liberate. It subjects human beings to the pace of the mechanism and the demands of accumulation.

The AI models trained on shredded books are no different. They aren’t being built to reduce drudgery in any rational sense. They’re being built to cut labour costs, automate creative and intellectual work, and secure competitive advantage. Whether they serve human wellbeing is secondary. Whether they serve profit is what counts.

Ownership and control

Socialists are not Luddites. We don’t oppose technology. We oppose the class ownership of technology. Socialism means common ownership of the means of production and distribution. Production for use, not for profit. Under that arrangement, machinery and automation would be directed democratically by the whole community.

The same scanning kit now destroying books could digitise the world’s literature and make it freely available to everyone, without pulping a single volume. The same AI research could genuinely reduce unpleasant labour. But that requires changing the social relationship, not just tinkering with the machine.

Capitalism is structurally compelled to treat every resource, human labour, natural wealth, accumulated knowledge, as fuel for capital expansion. Book becomes data. Data becomes property. Property generates profit. The physical book is just an obstacle to speed.

What is to be done?

Reforms won’t fix this. Tighter copyright law, stricter AI regulation, bigger fines will not alter the underlying compulsion.

The company behind Claude, Anthropic, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright class action brought by authors and publishers. The settlement was finally approved by a US federal judge on 20 July 2026. Reuters describes it as the largest known U.S. copyright settlement of its kind.

So long as the means of production belong to a minority and operate for profit, capital will extract value from whatever is lying around, be it oil, cobalt or the printed word.

The only answer is the one Marx gave: replace capitalist production with socialist production. Common ownership means the machinery, the data, and the knowledge they process belong to society as a whole. Decisions about what to automate, what to preserve, and how to share the fruits of higher productivity would be made democratically, by the people actually affected.

Until then, expect more extraction. More enclosure of creative commons. More destruction of the cultural and material basis of life, all in the name of profit. The machine is not the enemy. The class that owns the machine is.

The task of the working class is to understand this, and to organise for the socialist transformation of society.

A .T.

Spain (2026)

Book Review from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Have You Done For Victory? A Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War. By Jo Labanyi. Reaktion books. October 2026. 490 pages.

This year is the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War when a part of the armed forces under General Franco revolted against the Popular Front government elected earlier in the year. It ended three years later with 600,000 dead and victory for Franco and the rebels.

This anniversary has seen the publication of a number of books on the subject including this, a detailed blow-by-blow account of the culture wars that preceded, accompanied and followed the war. It has a useful introductory chapter setting out the events leading up to and the course and outcome of the war.

The Franco side rested largely on the big landowners and the Church, both of which saw their privileges threatened by the Popular Front government, one of whose declared intentions was to break the landowners’ stranglehold on the countryside. The rebellion was not supported by the capitalists; they also saw the landowners as their enemy. Openly capitalist parties, ‘radicals’, ‘republicans’ and ‘progressives’, were part of the Popular Front.

The government said it wanted a ‘parliamentary democracy’. The ‘Communist’ Party said that that was their aim too but, as supporters of the Stalin dictatorship in Russia, what they were really favouring was state-capitalist Russia’s foreign policy of trying to prevent Germany gaining a foothold in Spain.

The anarchists and the syndicalist trade unions were opposed both to ‘parliamentary democracy’ and to the Stalinists. Their aim was a revolution to destroy the state. Their attempts to organise production without capitalists or money confirmed that this could be done but were never going to last whichever side won.

There never was working-class unity for ‘parliamentary democracy’ and the course of the war brought the bitter antagonism of the rival factions to the surface with mutual charges of murder and betrayal.

In the end the working class lost everything they had before. Franco’s victory ushered in thirty-six years of savage repression of the working class, deprived of elementary political and trade-union rights.

Tiny Tips (2026)

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

Money may not grow on trees, but according to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), it appears to be growing exceptionally well for a tiny fraction of Americans. In a recent post on X, Sanders renewed his long-running criticism of wealth concentration in the U.S. ‘Never before have we had so much income inequality’, he wrote. ‘Last year, the bottom 50% saw their income go down by $27, on average, while the top 0.01% gained $2.9 million’, Sanders continued. ‘And the top 0.001%? They saw their income go up by $20 million. In a single year. “Yes. We must tax the rich,”’ 

[Yahoo]

‘“Democratic Socialist” is to the Communist what “National Socialist” was to the Nazi’, reality TV star and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt [sic] posted on X. 

[Fox News]

Zinn expressed the source of his motivations. ‘I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing’, he said. ‘I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers’. 

[Portside]

… Petrograd’s local Soviet government and Bolshevik Party organizations struggled to implement the Bolshevik Party program, fight domestic and foreign counterrevolutionaries, quiet labor unrest, and provide food, fuel, and education to the local population. The methods and strategies used by the government and party organizations to organize public life and fight enemies, domestic and foreign, not only preserved the infant Soviet regime but proved to be the first manifestation of what would become the one-party authoritarian Soviet political system. 

[The Bolsheviks Survive. Petrograd 1919. By Alexander Rabinowitch]

We emphasized, with Marx, that the proletarian revolution is not only necessary to overthrow capitalist rule but also to change the proletarians, so that they become fit to transform the world. Through the experience of prolonged collective struggle and being forced to reinvent their social practices to survive, proletarians throw off ‘the muck of ages’ as Marx put it, the weight of capitalist and pre-capitalist ideology and practices. Fredo thinks it is utopian to put that much ‘faith in revolutionary transformation of attitudes’. But isn’t it utopian to think that the revolution can succeed without attitudes and social practices being thoroughly transformed? 

[Internationalist Perspective]

The fear of acting incorrectly, of causing harm, or of being criticized by others can become politically paralyzing. One interviewee captured this dynamic succinctly when she explained that she would rather refrain from acting than risk doing something wrong. Such statements reveal an important contradiction. The ethical demand to act responsibly can, under certain conditions, undermine political action itself. This is not because ethical concerns are inherently conservative. Nor is it because criticism lacks political value. The problem is rather that individualized responsibility offers a weak response to problems that are fundamentally collective.

[Jacobin]

(These links are provided for information, target sites don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

SPGB Snippets: Who is in control? (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website 

September 16, 2026

Balaclavaed men attended anti-migrant protests in Dover and Portsmouth claiming to be “patriots” taking back control from a “globalist, Marxist-communist, anti-Christian group that has ruled us for too long”.

Marxist-communists advocating global socialism and opposed to religious superstition would be an accurate description of our party, but to think we have somehow been in control shows confused thinking. Those in control of society are the capitalists, and governments are compelled to prioritise the needs of this asset-owning, profit-taking minority.

Our members are part of the working class majority. The only ‘power’ we have is to express our views and opinions. We condemn global capitalism (the cause of homelessness, poverty etc) while those on the far-right condemn those merely trying to escape from some of its consequences.