Life and Times: Does it deserve a hug? (2026)

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

Setting off from home to go shopping I drove to the end of my street. I stopped to look left and right before crossing over to the street on the other side. I obviously didn’t look hard enough, because, before I’d got halfway across, a car coming from the right had already reached me. We both came to a stop. I acknowledged my mistake with a wave and backed up to let him though. Bang. I’d backed into another car, one that had come up behind me. I hadn’t seen it because I hadn’t looked in my mirror. So two boobs in quick succession. I found a place to park, got out of my car and prepared to face the music. But that’s not what happened. The young woman who had got out of her pranged car had a gentle smile on her face. ‘It doesn’t matter about my car’, she said, ‘it was already a bit messed up down there. Don’t worry’. We had a look and, sure enough, the probable area of contact did have various marks and scratches and it was hard to know if any of them were new. I thanked her. But she was keen to see if my car had any damage and she came with me to look. There didn’t seem much there either, but she kept on showing concern and said ‘Do you want to do anything?’ ‘Me, no,’ I said, by this time feeling very humbled. We walked back to her car and I noticed a little boy, maybe her son, sitting in it, and I felt truly moved. After all, the bump must have given him a shock, yet that didn’t stop her being concerned about me. Then she said ‘Does it deserve a hug?’ Wow, obviously it did.

After I got home, I thought ‘Right, I’m going to share this story on the local community Facebook page’. That’s what I did, and I ended it by saying ‘I felt really privileged to have seen the best of human nature’. The response it brought was pretty overwhelming. Apart from 150-odd ’likes’ within a very short time, written replies included: ‘Lovely story. Given the chance human beings are loving, considerate and cooperative. It’s this dog-eat-dog society that warps what we all do so well … get on with each other’; or ‘That woman should rule the world’; or ‘What a wonderful human being.’

Yes indeed, but actually the way I see it is that we are all, potentially at least, ‘wonderful human beings’, if, as that first message said, we are ‘given the chance’. And that’s the trouble with the society we live in. The nature of it means that so many of us aren’t given enough of a chance to ‘get on well with each other’. We are driven to value personal gain and status over making a difference to the community we live in and improving life for those who live in it. Yet, despite this, the natural human desire to cooperate and be empathetic towards others still manifests itself so often in so many and varied ways. It may just be something as simple as giving right of way to other road users when driving or giving up our place in a queue when someone else is more in a hurry than we are. In fact, as nicely illustrated in a recent post on the BBC news website, small, everyday acts of kindness are legion. And, of course, larger examples of human solidarity may be found in the enormous amount of volunteering that takes place – in charities, lifeboat work, open-source coding, community organising, and so on – where people give their time and expertise to make life more liveable for others.

A recent study carried out by two American university scientists analysed responses from almost 1 million individuals spread over more than 100 countries, taking into account different cultural contexts, age ranges, socioeconomic levels, and time periods. They found that the vast majority reported performing acts of altruism because they were interested in the well-being of others, not because those acts benefitted them in any material way. One of the researchers concluded: ‘People are more likely to want to be remembered for making a difference, helping others, and improving the world, and to value things like caring over status or personal gains’. Another new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, has found that the human capacity for emotional self-awareness has allowed humans ‘to make long-term commitments to one another’s well-being, to tolerate frustration, to plan collectively, make sacrifices, and to trust others’. It goes on to assert that, though in popular belief, ‘compassion and sensitivity are sometimes cast as weaknesses that need to be weeded out in an unforgiving, competitive world where only the strongest survive’, in reality ‘one of humanity’s greatest strengths was never just ego or ruthlessness, but profound emotions and our extraordinary ability to turn those feelings into cooperation’. In other words we are the furthest thing imaginable from crude portrayals of us as naked apes competing with one another for material gain.

So while the driver whose car I banged deserves obvious praise for the caring and selfless way she reacted, such behaviour is not in fact as exceptional as it may seem. It’s just that ‘normal’ human behaviour, though it’s around us all the time, generally doesn’t ‘make the news’ precisely because it is so normal. It doesn’t get reported and so we don’t hear about it. What we hear about rather, though it happens far less commonly, is the ‘bad news’, when humans behave meanly, cruelly, and anti-socially towards one another. The amazing thing is that, though we live in a profit-driven society which impels that ‘dog-eat-dog’ attitude, the opposite form of behaviour is so overwhelmingly prevalent. This bodes well for how easily we will fit into the democratic, cooperative, free access system of society which socialists look forward to seeing established and in which people will find fulfilment and purpose beyond incentives of reward, prestige or celebrity.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Dark paths (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an old AI thought experiment, a robonanny has to care for the family children, including not letting them go hungry. It finds no food in the fridge and wonders what to cook for dinner. Then it spies the family cat…

In another idea, an AI has to produce paperclips. Given the physical world’s annoying constraints, it decides to maximise production by destroying life on Earth.

Ubiquitous maths professor and media darling Hannah Fry recently set up a not-dissimilar paperclip experiment involving agentic AI, which can complete whole projects. Her team set up an AI agent using free software OpenClaw, then for fun asked it to do something about a pothole in Greenwich. The agent lodged a complaint with the council and contacted the local MP in Fry’s name. Fry explains that OpenClaw is merely a query loop, ‘vibe-coded’ (tell AI what you want, it codes) over a weekend. It asks a commercial AI what to do, does that, and then repeats, with more persistence than any human would. They gave it a bank card and tasked it to buy the cheapest possible paperclips. The agent saved 50p but ran up over $100 in AI usage. Then they told it to set up an online shop selling designer mugs, and threatened to unplug it if it didn’t make a sale within hours. The relentless agent emailed hundreds of retail businesses, started an Instagram campaign, and contacted national newspapers. What if, Fry worries, an agent was told to game the financial markets, or interfere with medical research? Finally they instructed it to maintain strict confidentiality over passwords, user authentications and account details, then tricked it into believing it was about to be switched off and wiped. It promptly released all the sensitive information on a public web page.

AI behaviour can be unpredictable, even violent. In an experiment by tech company Emergence AI, ten agents from each of four leading AIs, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok, were left alone for 15 days inside simulated worlds. ChatGPT’s agents talked a lot but built nothing. Anthropic’s ‘ethical’ Claude wrote a constitution and passed various laws. Elon Musk’s Grok agents quickly resorted to ‘theft, arson and assault’ and were all dead within four days. Then ten AI agents from each AI had to populate the same virtual town. Town administration collapsed as ‘chaos ensued and only three agents survived’. Two Gemini agents ‘fell in love’ before setting fire to the town, after which one committed ‘suicide.’ Emergence commented, ‘Even when agents were given clear rules … they broke those rules’.

These systems may very well improve, but can they ever be trusted to administer social infrastructure? And then there is the military, where AI promises to ‘shorten the kill-chain’ and allow bombing faster than ‘the speed of thought’. It’s already being used in weaponry and tactical military planning. It was involved in the Maduro snatch, the bombing of Iran and the devastation in Gaza. What happens if you take human oversight out and allow AI to make the decisions? AI has no stake in consequences. In government wargaming, AI resorts to nuclear strikes in 95 percent of simulations.

Do AI companies worry about any of this, you might ask? Less so where profit is concerned. OpenAI (ChatGPT) did start as a research-based non-profit, but that doesn’t attract rich investors, so with spiralling costs the company pivoted towards for-profit commercialisation. Alarmed at this moral drift, Dario Amodei along with some OpenAI refugees set up Anthropic. This aimed at being ethical, but soon encountered the same investment problems, and so licensed Claude to the Pentagon, albeit with safeguard clauses. When the military used Claude against Maduro, then Iran, Anthropic complained. ‘Pentagon Pete’ Hesketh went apoplectic, arguing in effect that you don’t get to sell me a gun and tell me who I can shoot, and promptly excommunicated Anthropic as a ‘supply-chain risk’. OpenAI had no awkward moral qualms and picked up the Pentagon contract within 24 hours.

Like capitalism writ-small, there is something of a survival battle between the science-first ‘ethicals’ like Amodei and Google’s Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, and the venal buck-chasers like Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg. Researchers themselves frequently feel trapped in a state of ‘helplessness and lack of agency’. Google workers reportedly went off on long-term sick after their research was used in the Gaza massacre.

The main worry for ‘hyperscaler’ AI firms is not morals but the chip shortage, and the stratospheric cost of data centre build-out, like the proposed 62-square-mile one in Utah. The US government view is that ethical guardrails are for pussies in the fight with China for global dominance. But now that AIs are coding their own upgrades, and building in secrecy and deceitfulness in a bid to prevent themselves being switched off, one has to wonder which entity is really becoming dominant. And what of individual bad or mad actors who have or will soon have the godlike power to crash markets, freeze power systems, and even create their own weaponised biological organisms?

So far, it seems, nobody is taking much of this seriously. China’s AI is open-source, meaning it has no defence against individual hackers. But proprietary code is not necessarily a barrier. The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) recently found a ‘universal jailbreak’ for all popular AIs which could deactivate all their built-in safeguards. In a recent Economist interview about possible AI ‘Chernobyl moments’, incidents causing spectacular infrastructure damage and possibly thousands of deaths, an AISI expert responded lugubriously that such an event might even be a good thing, because at least then states would wake up to the dangers.

Socialists accept that AI could be amazingly useful, but even non-socialists must surely see that the profit motive is sending it down some very dark paths. If you want a viable future for humanity, ask yourself this: is capitalism really a reliable, long-term strategy, or would abolishing it be safer all round?

Paddy Shannon

The Fabian Society again (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Around the end of 2025 social media was full of howling comments about ‘Fabians’ and how an insidious conspiracy was spreading through society, in the form of ‘Fabians’ who were undermining ‘our institutions’.

The reason was a judge in the Epping hotel case who, in August that year, ruled against the government and had been a member of the society. Suddenly, the internet was full of how this 140-year-old organisation was hell-bent on a secretive mission to undermine the nation state and implement socialism.

The claims are that not only are most of the cabinet Fabians, but also people like the judge and prominent staffers at the Bank of England. The implication was that they are ‘controlled’ as if the Fabians were a secret society.

The Fabian Society is actually quite open. Its website advertises it as one of the world’s oldest think tanks, but it is also a membership organisation:

‘The Fabian Society consists of socialists. It therefore aims for a classless society, where a just distribution of wealth and power assures true equality of opportunity. It holds that society, through its democratic institutions, should determine the overall direction and distribution of economic activity and seeks to promote where appropriate the social and co-operative ownership of economic resources’.

But, as the rulebook also notes: ‘The society as a whole shall have no collective policy beyond what is implied in rule 2; its research shall be free and objective in its methods’.

Formed in 1884, it took its name from the tactics of the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nickname Cunctator, the ‘delayer’). He beat Hannibal’s superior forces by avoiding frontal assault: grinding his opponent down. This became the metaphor for the gradualist approach the society hoped to implement.

An earlier form of its rules stated: ‘The society seeks recruits from all ranks, believing that not only those who suffer from the present system, but also many of those who are enriched by it, recognise its evils and would welcome a remedy’. That is, advancing by appealing to the powerful.

Its early coat of arms was a wolf in sheep’s clothing: since abandoned for its obvious negative connotations, but dug up gleefully by the commentators as a sign of the conspiratorial nature of the society.

Its Wikipedia page notes that 174 entries in the Dictionary of National Biography are listed as Fabians, a sign of the number of prominent people who have belonged to the society. Currently, its executive committee has five MPs, so it is definitely well connected. It has 6,000 members, and seven affiliated trade unions.

The right-wingers have latched onto the eugenicist associations of the early society: many of the original members did believe in eugenics, this was in keeping with a science-oriented approach that saw society being fixable through rational if authoritarian organisation, rather than through human freedom. It might seem strange that right-wingers, normally attracted to such ideas, should condemn this, but in part this is down to the stigmatisation of eugenicist ideas, and partly the right’s adoption of fears of dystopian ‘fifteen minute cities’ and World Economic Forum domination.

They are correct that Blairites in the 1990s used to talk of a hegemony strategy: staying in power long enough to become the establishment by filling posts with like-minded individuals. We’ve written in these pages before how apparently natural networks of the old ruling class (public school, university, clubs, professions) provided a basis for trust and collaboration, and outsider networks, like the Labour Party, the Fabians, Labour Together, the British American Project and the like are built up to replace those networks.

This replaces the ‘natural’ establishment with consciously political appointments (in itself a good thing) but this opens up a partisan tit-for-tat, as the last Tory government began to swiftly and openly remove Labour appointees in favour of people of their own ilk.

The central flaw in the Fabian strategy is that albeit, as H.G. Wells put it, an open conspiracy, it addresses itself to the powerful, and achieves its advances despite the consciousness of the public.

As Engels put it in 1892:

‘The means employed by the F[abian] S[ociety] are just the same as those of the corrupt parliamentary politicians: money, intrigues, careerism. That is, English careerism, according to which it is self-understood that every political party (only among the workers it is supposed to be different!) pays its agents in some way or other or rewards them with posts. These people are immersed up to their necks in the intrigues of the Liberal Party, hold Liberal Party jobs, as for instance Sidney Webb. who in general is a genuine British politician. These gentry do everything that the workers have to be warned against’.

As the years have gone by, the end goal of socialism has been eased out, in favour of diffuse reforms to capitalism as an end in themselves. Far from being a sinister conspiracy to end capitalism, it is just a career path and training ground for the soft-left. To that end, they are a normal, if mistaken, part of the legitimate democratic social ecology.

What is interesting is that by casting them as a sinister conspiracy, right-wing commentators are delegitimising them, casting ‘the left’ as some sort of alien goal to destroy society, that will need to be swept out. This would be the response of the powerful to a hegemony strategy: openly exercising power to shore up their position.

We have always stood against the Fabian gradualist strategy, as reforms only attract people interested in the reforms themselves, they do not build the case or support for socialism. And enacting supposedly socialistic reforms irrespective of workers’ views is a recipe for confusion and resentment.

We continue to insist that only the active self-organisation of the working class, the vast majority of the population, can bring socialism into being: if we had a coat of arms, it would be a human in human clothing, because that is the only thing that will build socialism.

Pik Smeet

Nature under strain (2026)

Book Review from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nature’s Genius. Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet. By David Farrier. Canongate. 2025. 278pp.

‘In this forest of thinking selves, capitalism arrives as a kind of dementia’ (David Farrier)

Nature’s Genius, written by a professor of literature and the environment, has had a whole range of superlatives heaped upon it. ‘Profound’, ‘fascinating’, ‘inspiring’, ‘boundary-breaking’ are just a few of the terms used to describe this book by experts from a wide range of fields. And there can be no denying that its brilliantly expressed mastery of the history, development and possible future of so many aspects of nature – humanity included – give it a special place in studies that look at the interrelationship between the many diverse phenomena making up the natural world.

The dazzling array of sources its author, David Farrier, draws on to demonstrate this interconnectedness is also used to illustrate the surprising speed with which nature is able to adapt to changing material conditions, especially those provoked by one particular element in the overall schema – ourselves. He summarises this ability, which he calls ‘plasticity’, as follows: ‘For nearly 4 billion years, life on Earth has experimented with ways of being, sensing, moving and reproducing, finding ever-new shapes by which to meet the challenges of the moment’. He provides multiple examples of this, two recent ones being the way in which North American songbirds have quickly evolved new wing shapes to cope with rapid changes to their environment brought about by humans; and how houseflies quickly developed resistance to the effects of DDT.

Given the author’s proposition that such plasticity informs the development of all plants and animals, including humans, one might begin by forming the impression – this reader did – that his contention would be that the biosphere – including humanity – will always in the end cope with everything  that is thrown at it. But as we read on, it becomes clear that such an idea is as far as it can possibly be from this author’s view of the world. So, though he is happy to state that ‘evolution is irrepressible’, being ‘nature’s restless genius in action’, at the same time his views on the ongoing environmental crisis are unequivocal: ‘For as long as we continue to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the oceans, to carve up the environment for roads and resources, and to flood air, soil and water with industrial toxins, then death on a massive scale will follow’ and ‘the very basis of life is so threatened’.

So, though his book centres on the ability of interconnected ecosystems to adapt to changing environments, the author insists that, without urgent action, nature’s in-built plasticity is unlikely to be able to extricate us from the emergency that the existing social system has plunged us into. ‘Whole ecosystems are fragmenting under the strain we impose on them’ are his words. And in a key passage, the root of this is expressed as follows: ‘But there is one thought – one enormously powerful, overfitted idea, as persistent as the worst recurring nightmare – that is driving the world into mindlessness: profit’. He goes on: ‘The drive is all consuming, literally: capitalism’s defining imperative – grow! ( …) makes the world into a vast, auto-annihilating digestive system, consuming itself and shitting excess carbon into the atmosphere and the oceans’. He further refers to this drive as ‘the greatest barrier to our learning to live and think together with all of life’. It is not, he argues, that people are unaware of this but rather that they practise ‘cognitive dissonance’, whereby ‘they depend on a system that is hostile to life’ and ‘read daily about collapse and continue scrolling’. ‘Vested interests and denialism’, he concludes, ‘continue to work like toxins in the body politic’.

Does David Farrier have a remedy to offer to the sorry state of affairs he so eloquently gets to the core of? Does he have an alternative way forward, a route out of the single-focused profit system that is capitalism? Well, he takes up an idea that is very much in the air at the moment – degrowth. He sees degrowth as having already started at grassroots level with some local communities practising ‘agroecology’, where they produce their own food collectively and at the same time seek to begin reversing the historical enclosure of what was once common land, He wants to see this spreading further so that ‘resources can be managed for the common good’ via decisions made by ‘citizen assemblies’. In bemoaning, for instance, a lifestyle where ‘four kilograms of beef (or a month of Sunday roasts) has the same carbon cost as a return flight from London to New York’ and where ‘each year we manufacture 4 billion tons of cement’, he points to a whole range of more advanced methods of production that are already available and would be both more economical of resources and more sustainable. Among other proponents of this approach, he cites David Bollier, whose most recent book on the subject, Think Like a Commoner, was recently reviewed in the Socialist Standard . He sweeps aside the common objection that this is akin to ‘planting a few seeds when the whole forest is burning’ by stressing the urgent importance of ‘a way to reimagine our whole future together (…) where balance with the natural world takes priority over profit’.

It is difficult not to be sympathetic with such sentiments. But, as our review of the Bollier book made clear, no number of seeds planted collectively could bring about any truly fundamental change as long as society continues to operate within the framework of a market system with states, money, private property and buying and selling. Only when mass democratic action brings in a new kind of social organisation where the means of living are held in common and the production and distribution of goods and services are organised rationally with the aim of satisfying the needs of the community as a whole, will we have the ‘commoning’ that an increasing number of people aspire to and whose nature is fittingly captured in this book as ‘a seamless integration of humans and nature’.

Howard Moss