Against technocracy (Part 1) (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a scene in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), where Captain Jean-Luc Picard comments: ‘The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money does not exist in the 24th century…The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity’.

Such sentiments draw on a long tradition of utopian thinking. A common feature of such thinking is the idea of material abundance. Abundance is what renders money obsolete.

In the painting The Land of Cockaigne by the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567), a trio of figures is depicted dozing beneath a tree, their tools of the trade lying unused beside them. This is a magical world in which a cooked goose makes itself available on a platter and a roasted pig trots past with a carving knife stuck in its flank. No need to lift a finger to satisfy one´s hunger pangs.

The painting has attracted different interpretations. For some, it represents a moralising critique of the spiritual emptiness associated with sloth and gluttony (‘consumerism’); for others, the wistful dream of a world beyond grinding labour and material deprivation.

The Cockaignian tradition can be traced to the folk utopias of early medieval Europe and even earlier. What is striking about it is the relative lack of emphasis on technology as the means of achieving abundance. Mother Nature, not human ingenuity, was the provider of plenty.

This began to change over time, Bacon´s scientific utopia, The New Atlantis (1627), being an early example. From the mid-18th century, small-scale cottage industries gave way to the factory system. This was the first industrial revolution based on steam power and mechanisation. We have since had a second industrial revolution, commencing in the late 19th century (Fordist mass production and electrification), a third in the late 20th century (automation and digital electronics) and are currently in the throes of a fourth, featuring such cutting-edge innovations as AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, advanced robotics and biotechnology.

Marx and Engels

When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, the Second Industrial Revolution had not yet begun (the first patented electric light bulb was still decades away). They held that socialism depended not only on a majority wanting it and understanding what it entailed, but also on the productive apparatus being sufficiently developed to ensure the reasonable needs of the population could be adequately met.

In the mid-19th century, this was not possible. For this reason, the Manifesto called for the ‘centralisation of all instruments of production in the hands of the State, ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible’. State ownership was thought to be a more effective way of achieving this by capitalising on economies of scale.

However, by the late 19th century, there was a clear shift in their thinking. Thus, their 1872 Preface to the Manifesto stated that, because of the advances of modern industry since 1848, the state capitalist transitional measures they earlier proposed had become ‘antiquated’ and that ‘no special stress’ should be laid on them.

Interestingly, in 1878, we find Engels writing: 

‘The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here’ (1878, Anti Dühring, Part 3).

New thinking about how to expedite a post-capitalist society was certainly required (and Marx and Engels were moving in this direction), but sadly, many supposed ‘Marxists’ today seem to be trapped in a time warp, their vision limited to nothing more ambitious than the nationalisation of the ‘commanding heights of industry’.

Edward Bellamy

Back then, socialists were not alone in recognising the growing technological potential to supersede the capitalist money-based economy. A foretaste of a non-Marxian technocratic version of this was provided by the American journalist, Edward Bellamy, in his fictional work Looking Backward (1888).

This was an enormously influential book, particularly in America, selling over a million copies shortly after publication. In it, Bellamy described the huge economic benefits that would result from dispensing with money:

‘Another item wherein we save is the disuse of money and the thousand occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an army of men was formerly taken away from useful employment’.

However, his vision of a future moneyless society was a statist one, the ‘nation’ being deemed ‘the sole employer and capitalist’ (reminiscent of Lenin’s later description of ‘socialism’). Production was organised under the aegis of a ‘General Council of the Industrial Army’.

There was limited political democracy insofar as the government was elected, with this kind of society enjoying broad support, but practical decision-making itself was generally top-down and paternalistic. Labour would take a compulsory, quasi militaristic form (unlike Marx´s idea of ‘freely associated labour’) with individual consumption being rationed via a credit card scheme.

Bellamy saw this future moneyless society as being technically advanced and exhibiting a high degree of automation. This was not a vision that appealed to everyone, however. William Morris, who likewise wrote about a future moneyless society in News from Nowhere (1890), was critical of Bellamy´s outlook – in particular, its negative depiction of work as a coerced activity requiring extrinsic incentives to motivate individuals to work.

The idea of work being intrinsically undesirable is also implicit in some contemporary representations of a moneyless future. One example is the concept of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ (FALC), associated with writers such as Aaron Bastani.

Automation will undoubtedly play an important role in a post-capitalist society, particularly when it comes to work deemed dangerous, dirty or monotonous. However, we would surely not want to eliminate all work and the potentially enormous creative pleasure to be derived from working. It is the terms and conditions under which we currently work that are the problem, not necessarily work itself.

All too often, work is unthinkingly equated with waged employment. These are not the same. In fact, even today under capitalism, most work is performed outside the money sector, not within it (María Ángeles Durán 2012, ‘Unpaid Work in the Global Economy’, Fundación BBVA).

We need work, or labour, as a form of creative self-expression. In hunter-gatherer societies, the distinction between work and play tends to be blurred. Much the same approach to work is found in Marx´s description of a higher phase of communist society in which ‘labour has become not only a means of life, but life’s prime want’ (1875, Critique of the Gotha Programme).

The Technocracy Movement

Bellamy´s futuristic society has been interpreted to represent a proto-technocratic utopia. However, the term ‘technocracy’, denoting governance by technical experts, was only coined somewhat later, in 1919, by an engineer, William Smyth. The basic idea behind this subsequently found expression in the rise of a movement in the 1930s in America (also in Canada and parts of Europe), bearing that name: the ‘Technocracy Movement’.

Though Howard Scott and Marion King Hubbert founded this movement, the individual thought to have first clearly set out the basic principles of technocracy was the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in 1921, in an article titled ‘Engineers and the Price System’.

Veblen saw technological development as paving the way to the reorganisation of the economy, leading automatically to the gradual disappearance of money. Technological innovation followed its own developmental trajectory. The price mechanism was regarded as simply a wasteful and unnecessary encumbrance on production. It did not so much ‘guide’ technological development as follow it (and profit from it).

Veblen envisaged the decline of business culture and its replacement by a more technically-minded society in which people like scientists and engineers would lead the way. There was, he suggested, a built-in or deep-seated antagonism between the pecuniary values promoted by financiers and businesspeople and the industrial values embraced by the technicians and skilled workers.

The economist J M Keynes later said something similar in his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Keynes suggested that within a century, technological progress and rising affluence would cause our obsession with money to die out. At the same time, the working week would contract to a mere 15 hours on average.

During the Great Depression, interest in the Technocracy movement grew rapidly, and the movement became quite popular for a brief period (at one point attracting hundreds of thousands of adherents) before going into steep decline following the implementation of Roosevelt´s New Deal reforms that drew support away from the movement.

Among the various ideas it advanced was the suggestion, grounded in Scott´s ‘Energy Theory of Value’, that energy units (joules) should replace money as the unit of accounting in the production and distribution of goods, with citizens being allocated ‘energy certificates’ to regulate consumption. What lay behind this was the belief that the money system was something inherently wasteful and oriented towards the perpetuation of needless scarcity. As one contemporaneous article noted:

‘Technocracy states that price and abundance are incompatible; the greater the abundance, the smaller the price. In a real abundance, there can be no price at all. Only by abandoning the interfering price control and substituting a scientific method of production and distribution can an abundance be achieved’ (Sept 1937, “What is Technocracy”, The Technocrat).

Jeremy Rifkin and Zero Marginal Cost

The claim about increasing abundance brought about by the price-collapsing effect of technological innovation is the stuff of much recent sensationalist speculation. According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of the best-seller The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2015), the ‘emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services, precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism’.

However, Rifkin´s thesis is based on a flawed understanding of marginal cost pricing. Even if the marginal cost of producing some item (the cost of producing one additional unit of this item) fell to zero, there are still fixed costs to account for. Information goods, for example, may be ‘non-rivalrous’ in the sense that if I use the internet to do a Google search, it doesn’t prevent you from doing the same. But, internet-based corporations like Google or Meta still have enormous fixed costs to pay for. They still have to generate revenue to cover these costs and realise the huge profits they make in the process.

For the same reason, the prognosis of people like the billionaire, Elon Musk, about AI eliminating all jobs within two decades is fanciful in the extreme. Remarkably, someone who has profited so much from capitalism seems to know very little about how it actually works.

Capitalist production presupposes sufficient ‘effective demand’, such that a business can expect to realise a profit meeting this demand. Without the prospect of profit, even essential needs will remain unmet. To satisfy them, workers depend on paid employment in a capitalist, money-based economy.

How would this be possible if no one had a job? Living labour, not machinery, is the source of capitalist profit. In theory, if all work were automated, the rate of profit would fall to zero, and capitalism would cease to exist.

However, this is not remotely likely to happen. Well before that, Marx’s famous ‘counteracting tendencies to the falling rate of profit’ would kick in. For instance, growing technological unemployment would depress wages, thereby paradoxically making it more profitable once again to employ more labour.

Thus, there are self-correcting mechanisms that pre-empt the sort of scenario that people like Musk have in mind. Indeed, some studies suggest AI will lead not to a reduction but to an increase in jobs overall, with its main impact being to transform the nature of work under capitalism.

We cannot depend on technological innovation alone to transcend capitalism. This is a major weakness of the technocratic paradigm, which we will examine in Part 2.

Robin Cox

Link to Part 2.

Blogger's Note:

Star Trek: First Contact was reviewed in the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Against Technocracy (Part 2) (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

According to Jason Crawford:

‘The 19th century was dominated by a belief in the power of human reason and its ability to advance science and technology for the betterment of life. But after World War I and the Great Depression, it got harder to believe in the rationality of humanity or in the predictability and controllability of the world’ (The lure of technocracy).

As Crawford notes, in the 1920s, a ‘democratic realist’ school of thought emerged, exemplified by individuals like Walter Lippmann. The masses were viewed as fundamentally irrational and uninformed. Their role in public life should be limited, with fundamental decisions affecting the future of society being entrusted to a tiny, informed elite. Democracy should be redefined as ‘rule for the people but not by the people’.

The elitist assumptions behind such thinking found expression in the 1930s in such forms as Stalinism, the growth of fascism, and the rise of the Technocracy Movement itself.

During the early post war boom, increasing living standards and low unemployment shaped the optimism conveyed in books like Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958). In his subsequent work, The New Industrial State (1967), sometimes called a ‘blueprint for technocracy,’ Galbraith argued that a corporate ‘technostructure’ of experts and managers had come to dominate businesses, eclipsing owners and shareholders – an argument anticipated by James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941).

In this ‘affluent society,’ Galbraith argued, the ‘technostructure’ should shift its focus from just economic growth to broader social goals, including more public investment and reducing inequality. His position overlapped with elements of the pre war Technocracy Movement, particularly its emphasis on scientific, centralised economic management.

However, there were also differences in that the latter opposed the capitalist market and money. The existence of money was deemed incompatible with abundance because of the way the price system worked.

Paradoxically, the growing prosperity that many workers experienced in the early post-war years provided the conditions out of which a broad counterculture movement emerged. This called into question the idea of top-down, expert-led coordination of society, as well as the basic direction in which technological development was heading. The hippies of the 1960s were perhaps the vivid example of this, representing a confluence of tendencies opposed to militarism, environmental destruction in the name of progress and the threat to individual freedom posed by an increasingly oppressive and intrusive technology.

As post war prosperity faded and capitalism entered recession in the 1970s, these conditions that had sustained the counterculture weakened. The downturn exposed the limits of Keynesian demand management, whose reliance on deficit spending failed to overcome the built-in capitalist trade cycle of boom and slump. In response, Keynesianism gave way to a more market oriented policy framework –monetarism – the cornerstone of the emerging neoliberal order.

The Technocracy Movement, having peaked in the 1930s, declined sharply thereafter. Some of its core ideas were simply absorbed into wartime economic planning, making the movement somewhat redundant. Later, in the context of the Cold War, its anti market and central planning orientation fell out of favour because of the perceived resemblance to Soviet state planning. At the same time, the technocratic approach to problem-solving was subjected to mounting criticism from a countercultural (and particularly environmentalist) perspective.

For technocracy as a concept to survive, it had to adapt. One interesting example of this was the Venus Project (TVP).

The Venus Project

TVP´s origins can be traced back to the 1970s, though it officially began life in 1995. Its founders were Jacque Fresco, a structural engineer, industrial designer and futurist author who had been involved in the Technocracy Movement in the 1930s, and Roxanne Meadows, an illustrator, designer and architect. They established a research centre at a place called Venus in Florida (hence the name) and published material promoting their ideas.

From a socialist standpoint, TVP unquestionably represented an advance over the old Technocracy Movement. Whereas the latter proposed a system of rationing in the form of ‘energy certificates,’ TVP advocated, instead, a ‘free access’ model for the distribution of goods and services. This required making the industrial and natural resources of the planet the common heritage of all humanity. All forms of sectional or private ownership (including state property) of the means of production would cease to exist.

Thus, a resource-based economy (RBE) would mean goods and services being freely available to individuals to take for themselves, with cybernetic feedback and automated resource management working to ensure adequate real-time availability.

Another breakthrough was TVP´s rejection of the concept of a single universal unit of accounting (money, labour-time or energy units). The need for this only arises in a system based on quid pro quo exchange, where you have to ensure that what is being exchanged is equivalent. This requires commensurability.

However, commensurability becomes irrelevant in a non-exchange, free-access model. Accounting, according to TVP, would be based on purely physical metrics, dubbed ‘resource-based accounting.’ This resembles the socialist idea of calculation-in-kind, but the emphasis is more on resource flows and biophysical limits (an example of technocracy´s adaptation to environmental criticism).

However, there are also serious flaws in TVP´s outlook. One is its attitude towards democratic decision-making. Fresco´s approach differed from that of the top-down approach of the Technocracy Movement. He was wary of entrusting scientists with excessive power to make decisions affecting others. He preferred a decentralised system based on collaborative design and making extensive use of automated AI-optimised feedback systems.

In fact, the socialist principle of free access endorsed by TVP is precisely what would pre-empt the possibility of concentrated or asymmetrical power emerging in a post-capitalist society. It removes any leverage that any group or individual could exercise over any other, and thus, is the ultimate guarantor of any truly ‘free’ society.

However, to go further and assert, as TVP does on its own website, that ‘it is doubtful that, in the latter part of the twenty-first century, people will play any significant role in decision-making’ is absurd.

As individuals, we will continue to play a decisive role in the choices we make concerning what we consume and what we contribute. This is implicit in the old socialist slogan, ‘from each according to ability to each according to need.’ An algorithm in a computer programme may facilitate (even anticipate) our choices, but they will still be ours to make. Otherwise, we are looking at some anti-humanistic dystopia where the machines have taken over.

Importantly, there will also be joint decisions to be made that, by their very nature, (inevitably) impact multiple individuals who, accordingly, should have a say in making them. Joint decisions will need to be made at different spatial levels – local, regional and even global – examples of which are literally countless.

You cannot depend on a machine, however sophisticated, to make these decisions for you. This is because they involve human values and human interests. The sociological naiveté of the technological determinists, in that respect, is truly remarkable.

Fresco himself argued ‘Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution’ (2002). Democracy may well be a ‘con game’ in a plutocratic capitalist society, but that is definitely not because there is too much of it but rather, too little!

Another serious flaw in TVP´s approach is its repudiation of economic classes and class struggle. On its website, it states, ‘In no way does The Venus Project advocate this approach to social change. In contrast, The Venus Project approaches social change as a process of guided evolution and a problem of engineering to produce a working alternative.’

This immediately prompts the question – if TVP advocates for the common ownership of the industrial and natural resources by humanity as the material basis of the moneyless post-capitalist world it desires, how is this to be realised without first removing the possibility for a tiny owning class to monopolise these resources at the expense of the rest of humanity? In short, how can you possibly avoid ‘class’? ‘Classlessness’ is implicit in the very way TVP frames its vision of a post-capitalist society, so achieving it, almost by definition, has to involve confronting this vexed question of class.

Broligarchy

Technology is not neutral; it is fundamentally conditioned by today´s class ownership and control of the means of production. This is becoming increasingly apparent in the light of recent developments.

There has been much talk recently about the rise of ‘techno-fascism,’ a dangerous new force, particularly visible in American politics, representing a ‘broligarchy’ of far-right tech billionaires bent on seizing power and reshaping the body politic to suit their interests and ideological inclinations, technology being the means by which they aspire to realise this elitist vision.

In truth, American politics has always been deeply plutocratic, with only the merest paper-thin claim to being a functioning ‘democracy,’ while being constantly subjected to the enormous power of lobby groups and political donations (bribes). Indeed, some argue that the Founding Fathers themselves framed the Constitution precisely this way to guarantee this outcome – ensuring that the interests of the rich and powerful would be perpetually protected.

However, recent developments, particularly since Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, suggest a turn for the worse. It has prompted some to ask whether, given the inordinate influence now being exercised by people like Peter Thiel (aided and abetted by the far-right blogger, Curtis Yarvin), Elon Musk and others, this does indeed represent an attempt on the part of these tech billionaires to ‘seize power’ and dismantle what little there is of democracy in America.

Some commentators suggest that these people see themselves as some kind of Übermensch, superior to everyone else. They resent any barrier in their path or any constraint that would rein in their wealth or power. An example is Thiel, a venture capitalist with a current (2025) personal worth of approximately $22 billion:

‘In a 2009 Cato Unbound essay, Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” That wasn’t just a provocation, it was a programmatic declaration that aligns him with authoritarians both abroad and at home — culminating in a second Trump administration that daily tests the limits of US constitutional democracy. Climate change, racial justice, and economic inequality all become “distractions” in this framework as they demand collective effort and overlapping interests’ (Christopher Marquis, Jacobin, 6 Oct 2025).

If nothing else, this should serve as a salutary reminder of the risk of relying too much on ‘techno-fixes’ that can sometimes have unintended, and even runaway, negative consequences. Of course, there should always be scope for technological innovation and progress. But innovation should be adapted to, and informed by, the needs and concerns of society in general, and that is simply not possible in a society based on minority class ownership of the means of production.

This is what fundamentally obstructs the implementation of a resource-based economy. Failure to acknowledge this in a bid to appear less ‘partisan’ condemns TVP to promoting an approach that can only depict a future that might be called a ‘nice idea’ but one incapable of being realised.

The Zeitgeist Movement

TVP gave rise to a spin-off called the Zeitgeist Movement (TZM), dubbed the ‘activist arm’ of TVP. It was founded in 2008 by Peter Joseph, a filmmaker, and rapidly expanded to the point of having up to 250 local chapters worldwide, attracting many thousands of supporters. Whereas TVP focused more on blueprints and designing sustainable structures, such as ‘circular cities,’ TZM emphasised grassroots activism and cultural transformation. Underlying tensions arising from these differences in approach resulted in TVP and TZM drifting apart in 2011.

As with TVP, there is much in what TZM says that socialists can endorse, but there are also fundamental, even irreconcilable, differences, particularly over the question of class and the need for democracy.

Nevertheless, any attempt to transcend the rigid barriers a money-based mindset imposes on our thinking is welcome and a step forward. The point is, surely, to take serious steps further in that direction.

Robin Cox

Potential abundance (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

August 1970 Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

Howard Moss

Beyond the state (2026)

Book Review from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radical abundance: how to win a green democratic future. By Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell. Pluto Press, 2025. ISBN 9780745351353

This is an interesting attempt to consider the transition to a society of common ownership in a concrete and practical fashion. The authors identify what they call the two invariant aspects of transition: ‘popular protagonism’ and ‘contested reproduction’, and these are necessary to overcoming the ‘metabolic control of capital’. That is, changes to formal ownership and state control are insufficient means for dealing with what they call the dialectic of ‘bullshit abundance’ (ie the abundance of pollution, authoritarianism, inequality, etc.) and artificial scarcity (the failure to meet real human needs) of commodity society.

As suggested by the title, this book is partly a rebuttal to the ‘Abundance’ deregulation theme that has emerged in the United States (as exemplified by the book of that name by Klein and Thompson, which we reviewed in our November 2025 issue). What they propose though, is something they call ‘Public Common Partnerships’. This is a riff on public private partnerships, or what they identify as the process of the state de-risking capital investment as a means of promoting economic growth. In their version, assets and enterprises that are otherwise unprofitable for capitalists can be taken over by tripartite bodies, made up of representatives of the workforce, representatives of the public authorities and a community trust. The last of these has a responsibility for distributing any surplus generated by the enterprise: either as a return to workers, further investment, or support for other such partnerships. As such, these bodies bring in those more broadly concerned with the reproduction of society, eg those engaged in child rearing or caring, rather than those directly employed. The surplus is in the hands of the community.

They argue that these bodies would enable ‘contested reproduction’ and ‘popular protagonism’ fulfilling community needs while also being an educational tool for increased popular participation in the economy. The authors are clear they do not consider this a magic bullet, but rather a practical tool for spreading de-commodified practice and an educational experience. They pose it, rather, as a political wager, that might move things in the right direction. As they note, they are not calling for the abandonment of other forms of struggle, but adding this into the mix.

They do, in one chapter, though, speculatively examine how a network of these PCPs could plan food production across an entire country. They look to leveraging ‘Council Farms’ which, despite decline, cover thousands of hectares in the UK. They look to movements in Brazil, Venezuela and Kerala as examples to follow.

The authors themselves work on such structures as practitioners, and they point to a number of examples of where such models have been implemented: including a take-over of an in-door market in Tottenham and a pharmaceuticals plant in France.

This does come close, though, to the islands of socialism suggestion that is frequently put to us: the idea that socialism can be created in bits, rather than as a hard change-over from capitalism, which can simply ‘outcompete’ capitalist methods.

The issue is that their examples come from taking on peripheral parts of the capitalist system, bits that it no longer finds productive, which means that these PCPs mostly survive precisely because they are not a threat to the metabolic control of capital. Should they ever become so, the state would be called in to intervene. As the authors note, by the 1970s, in the UK, around a third of housing was council housing: Margaret Thatcher disposed of that with the stroke of a pen, and there is no reason to suppose that a ‘self-expanding commons’ of PCPs could not meet the same fate.

While the authors might well in fact relish such a contest as an opportunity to expand the contestation of reproduction, it seems likely that the result would be the same as the outcome of the Thatcher era: state power would prevail.

Particularly, as the authors claim it doesn’t require political organisation to set up PCPs, but rather public agitation (although how political/governmental bodies come to be involved other than through sympathetic politicians getting involved seems to be a question). If political organisation becomes required, then why go the roundabout way of challenging capital through these bodies, rather than striking at the legal and political structures that sustain it?

This then brings us back to the problem of using PCPs as some sort of educational tool. The working class already manage capitalism from top to bottom, we just do not do so in our own interest. There is no reason to suppose that those, like the Tottenham traders, who engage in a PCP to save their local market or bottle plant, or whatever, will have a desire or interest in challenging the ‘metabolic control of capitalism’. As with any reform-minded movement, the majority of those attracted will be for the immediate goal itself, and they would balk at going further, or even be actively opposed.

This leads us to suggest that there may be a third invariant aspect of transition: consciousness. Unless there is a conscious desire to do away with capitalism, and at least some idea of what is supposed to replace it, there cannot be meaningful popular protagonism, much less contested reproduction.

This book raises important issues around the way in which transition to a non-commodity society can be achieved. The proposed PCPs are at worst harmless, and at best could form a part of the way that the working class can defend its own interests within capitalism (or, maybe, even organise society post-capitalism).

The authors are correct that a wider network of activity is required beyond the state, but for us that is the conscious mass movement for socialism that must include taking political control of the state as a minimum to stop it being used to prevent the spread of a self-managed and co-operative way of organising society from emerging.

Pik Smeet

The Passing Show: The fruits of leisure (1961)

The Passing Show Column from the January 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fruits of leisure

There was an interesting interview with Professor J. D. Bernal in the last issue of the Sunday Empire News before it joined the ranks of those fallen in the newspaper war. “Properly developed and properly utilised, the world can amply support its people”, said the Professor. There could be an “abundant” society, with working time reduced to four hours a day, three days u week. The Professor went on :

“There would have to be a change in culture. People will be educated, fully or part-time, up to the age of 30. Probably they will retire at 45. If they wanted, they could take months or even years off work.

In fact, people who didn’t want to wouldn’t necessarily have to work. Five per cent of the population could produce all the food that was needed for the rest, and another 10 per cent could produce all the goods that were necessary.

They could explore all the fruits of leisure, the arts, the crafts, music and painting. In space exploration there would be all the adventure for the people who wanted adventure. And equal scope to grow roses or something for the people who did not want adventure.”

Professor Bernal was simply giving facts which support our contention that the productivity powers developed within capitalism have now reached the stage when an abundant non-coercive society is possible—what we call Socialism. Unfortunately, however, instead of devoting his efforts to work for this new society, Professor Bernal continues to give his support to the Communist Party and the Eastern bloc—which are dedicated to state capitalism. Some of those supporting state capitalism may do so partly because they do not realise that a Socialist society is possible. Professor Bernal, though, clearly has not got this excuse.

Property

Jesus is reported to have told one man who wanted to join his band of disciples “Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor” (Luke, 18, 22). However, it would be unwise to assume that those who claim to be Christians have got any great desire to follow this advice, as one old woman found out recently. A widow of 71, she “was sentenced to seven years’ preventive detention at London Sessions . . . for stealing two brass ornaments from St. John’s Church, Islington. It was stated that she had 16 previous convictions, nine for stealing ornaments from churches” (The Guardian, 12/11/60). This unfortunate perhaps doesn’t realise that whatever the Bible may say, in a capitalist society the Christian churches hang on to their property as tightly as, if not more tightly than, anyone else.

In sentencing the woman, the Chairman of the Sessions remarked: “You have lived a drab life. I suppose you have no ambition except to go back to prison and indeed I am told you would prefer to go there as you have no home outside. It is probably the best place for you.” If this is true, it means that one of our fellow members of the working class prefers the inhumanities of jail to the joys of the “free” life outside it. This will take some explaining away by the advocates of our supposedly “never had it so good” society.

Substantial number

Sir Roy Welensky, the Rhodesian Federal Prime Minister, recently defended the present Rhodesian set-up in the Federal Parliament. As part of a list of advances towards “multi-racialism” which he claimed had been made, he said “In private life there are already a few African professional men operating under European conditions in cities and there is a substantial number of successful African businessmen.” But Sir Roy was wide of the mark in giving this as a reason why the existing settlers’ government should be left in undisturbed control of Rhodesia. The “substantial number of African businessmen”, the developing African capitalist class, is in fact the main reason why the days of the settlers’ government are numbered. A government based on landed interests can hold on for a certain time in certain conditions when capitalism is expanding in a country. It may lean over backwards, as it thinks, in its efforts to be fair to the growing capitalist class. But when a country’s capitalist class comes to maturity, then nothing will content it but the full control of political as well as economic power. Welensky and his settlers, in fact, as the rulers of Rhodesia are doomed.

Alwyn Edgar

What if there’s a shortage? (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

For a socialist post-capitalist society to come about presupposes two basic things. In the absence of either of these (and, even more so, both), this society would not be realisable.

Firstly, you have to have a majority of people who want it, understand what it entails and are committed to seeing it flourish and succeed. It cannot be imposed from above by a minority, however enlightened or well-meaning.

Secondly, you have to have in place an advanced technological infrastructure that has at least the potential to enable us to adequately meet the reasonable needs of the population. In other words, to more or less ensure ‘plenty’. The more output were to fall below the level required to meet these needs, the greater the strain that would be imposed upon the particular kind of social arrangement that defines a post-capitalist society – a society characterised by the free distribution of goods and services provided by the voluntary work of its members.

What is plenty?

Of course, what is meant by ‘plenty’ is something relative; it depends not just on physical output but, also, on our values. When we talk of ‘plenty’ the question always arises – ‘in relation to what’?

If what you deem to be minimally acceptable as a standard is something so extravagant as a sprawling multi-bedroomed mansion set in its own spacious grounds along with a fleet of luxury cars parked in the garage and outbuildings for the servants then, very clearly, in per capita terms, we are not going to achieve ‘plenty’ by this yardstick, in a post-capitalist society.

You can therefore forget about achieving such a society in that case. However, by the same token, you can also forget about ever extricating yourselves from the circumstances you find yourself in today which for a great many people are grim and precarious. In short, you will be lumbered with capitalism for the foreseeable future.

To achieve ‘plenty,’ then, will require us to lower the bar to something rather more realistic. This is precisely why the first of these preconditions of a post-capitalist society cannot be separated or considered in isolation from the second: to some extent they mesh together.

In principle, achieving and maintaining a state of ‘plenty’ would eliminate the need for any form of rationing – money, of course, being the means by which goods are rationed today under capitalism. However, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility of some shortages arising in a post-capitalist society, whether in the early days or from a natural disaster. That being the case, we cannot rule out some form of rationing in the sense of restrictions on the consumption of some goods.

Prior to the 20th century it probably would not have been feasible to establish such a society given that the means of production would not yet have been sufficiently developed to materially support it. This is no longer the case. Indeed, it has not been the case for quite a long time now. As a generalisation, one can say that it is fairly indisputable that the technological potential to satisfy most, if not all, of the needs of the population, globally speaking, exists today.

Not erased overnight

The legacy of capitalism’s self-inflicted shortcomings would not be able to be erased overnight. We cannot expect universal ‘plenty’ to suddenly materialise the ‘day after the revolution,’ so to speak. The apparatus of capitalist production is geared to creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. It will take some time, however short, to restructure and reorganise industry to fully meet human needs as well as ensure it is effectively managed in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

This means that at the beginning, post-capitalist society is likely to have to contend with some shortages of one kind or another for a while. However, this should not present too great an obstacle to such a society functioning properly as intended.

The reorganisation of productive capacity to realise its full potential to meet the reasonable demands of people everywhere would be happening under new conditions in that effective market demand would no longer be the determinant of what gets to be produced, as it is today under capitalism.

In a post-capitalist society, the relationship between our subjective preferences and the products we desire would be a direct one – not one mediated by money or, for that matter, labour vouchers. Insofar as comparisons need to be made between products in terms of their value to us, this would be effected entirely according to our preferences, which would simply be ranked.

Productive activity would be guided by a flexible hierarchy of production priorities, responding to shifts in the pattern of supply and demand. Our values would thus be able to directly engage with, or find expression in, the process of material production itself – by continually informing and guiding it rather than production being dominated or regulated by the impersonal laws of the capitalist market economy.

The single most important way in which productive capacity to meet human needs can be rapidly increased in a post-capitalist society is to convert that large chunk of existing productive capacity currently having nothing to do with directly meeting these needs and diverting enormous quantities of resources and labour away from those needs. This means progressively eliminating the enormous legacy of capitalism’s structural waste.

As a result a lot more in the way of socially useful output could be produced while, at the same time, the amount of resources needed overall or in the aggregate would decline significantly by comparison with what is required today. This will alleviate the unsustainable pressures currently being exerted on our global ecosystem.

In post-capitalist society we will see a dramatic shrinkage in the extent of the social division of labour, with many of the socially useless jobs we are obliged to do today no longer being required. This will allow much more labour and resources to be redirected towards socially useful production. The resultant increase in socially useful output will have obvious implications for the question of any shortages.

Dealing with shortages

Given that some shortages are likely to remain in the beginning – even if to a steadily diminishing extent, how would we deal with these shortages under the very different set of circumstances of a post-capitalist society?

In considering what form of limitation on the consumption of some goods might be most appropriate in a post-capitalist society, the possibility, however remote, needs to be taken into account that it might lend itself to the re-emergence of some form of market exchange through the back door, as labour vouchers might. Any system that would need to be implemented in a post-capitalist society would need to be scaled down to only what it was absolutely necessary to limit. It would need to be, in other words, a limited, partial system, targeting only those goods that are clearly in short supply.

What kind of goods are we talking about whose consumption might require limitation in the early years of a post-capitalist society? These would be goods that figure rather low down in our hierarchy of production goals – most notably, inessential or luxury goods. The objective would be to strictly limit or restrict only those goods subject to shortage. This would minimise the adverse psychological, cultural, and administrative costs that any system of restricting consumption unavoidably entails.

Targeting only some goods is exactly what a system of labour vouchers disallows; by its very nature, it is a universalistic form of rationing. However, the need to restrict the consumption of some good arises only in the case where there is a shortage of the good in question. Consequently, a universal system of rationing, which is what a system of labour vouchers amounts to, would therefore seem to imply, on the face of it, a condition of generalised or widespread scarcity applicable to each and every good.

But how can this be reconciled with the claim that a communistic post-capitalist society is firmly predicated on the real prospect of material abundance? How can we even envisage that such a society might be possible if all around us we see, not the portents of post-scarcity, but a chronic and all-pervading shortage of everything?

While there might well be some shortages in the very early stages of a post-capitalist society, the idea that there will be shortages of everything – universal or generalised scarcity – is hardly credible. Even today under capitalism this is not the case, as for example in food production and housing.

For a system of ‘free distribution’ to come about, people need to be mature and adult enough to recognise what is and what is not possible. They also need to feel confident that, broadly speaking, all their reasonable requirements for food, shelter, clothing, medical attention and so on are capable of being satisfactorily met under this arrangement, allowing for the occasional shortage of some items.

Robin Cox

Yes in My Back Yard (2025)

Book Review from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundance: How We Build A Better World. By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. ISBN 9781805226055

This book has caused quite a stir. It has even made Chancellor Reeves’ summer reading list, and been cited – in passing – by Robert Peston. It is part of the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) trend. Its central theme is that government regulation is choking the capacity for effective action to generate wealth, and that instead the liberal left has been concentrating on the parcelling out of scarcity, rather than trying to improve the overall material wealth of society.

The authors mention the expensive failure to build a high-speed railway in California, citing environmental laws and litigation as the reason: alongside the excessive bureaucracy to plan the route. They also note California has higher rates of homelessness than comparable cities in Texas, and attribute the blame to zoning and to authorities loading environmental, building and labour standards into permissions, making building uneconomic for developers.

In their narrative, they do discuss the nature of landholding and the fact that residents’ houses are also financial assets, only to skip blithely over them to discuss bureaucratic complexity again. In so doing, and returning to their theme that it was the failure of efforts to restrict the power of public authorities that is to blame, they ignore the role of private property.

The state is restricted in order to secure the power of private property. The litigation is there to protect property rights. It’s there to protect economic interests (and some firms do benefit from regulation). The complex funding arrangements and financial regulations are there precisely to keep the interests of wealth superior to state power. This is a political choice, and one that those who fund the political parties will continue to demand.

At points, the authors seem to indicate that it would be better to allow constructors to build slum housing than to continue allowing homelessness. They also suggest reducing quality controls and demands on construction: in essence, they are allowing that the working class cannot afford decent housing. Although their ‘lens’, as they say, is increasing supply, they ignore the lack of effective demand for the majority.

They find time in their conclusion to reference Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto talking about unfettering productive forces to produce abundance. But they ignore what those fetters of capitalist society are: the law of no profit – no production, and the law of no profit – no employment. The growth of income streams alongside the capacity to produce so much that profit margins would be reduced to zero.

Absent an understanding of the role of private property and the class struggle from their narrative, they are reduced to a simple call for de-regulation coupled with bold state action. They do not see that the litigiousness they decry is meant to exclude a thorough-going democratic control that includes all voices. The abundance they seek can only come from the common ownership and democratic control of productive wealth.

Pik Smeet

Letter: Do we need vouchers? (2024)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

Just one note on what seems to be the main disagreement with my article [Cooking the Books 2, August 2024 Standard]:

‘He does mention the argument that “since we have seen significant increases in productive capacities since the nineteenth century, during which Marx was writing, perhaps the token system is already outdated”. This is precisely a point we have made but Dapprich dismisses this, rather too offhandedly, as “unconvincing” without saying why.’

I do address this point in the article:

‘I am not convinced by this line of thought though, since the token system is perfectly capable of adapting to increases in productivity. As productivity increases one of three things (or any combination of these) can be done. First of all, the increased productivity can be used to produce more goods using the same labour. This means more consumer products could be afforded by consumers with their tokens. Secondly, the same amount of consumer products could be produced while lowering labour time, meaning that workers would have more free time while being able to enjoy the same material standard of living. Thirdly, the resources dedicated to public expenditure could be increased to improve sectors like healthcare, education or provisioning for those unable to work. No matter which of these measures, or combination of measures, is taken, increases in productivity are no problem in the lower stage at all, in fact they would improve people’s living conditions without any need to fundamentally overhaul the token system of the lower stage.’

Philipp Dapprich

Reply:

We understood your point to be that Marx was mistaken to envisage the non-circulating voucher system that he mentioned in 1875 eventually giving way, when productivity had increased enough, to distribution on the basis of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ where everybody could take freely what they needed. This, you say, on the grounds that the voucher system could be adapted to distribute goods and services according to an individual’s needs.

Our argument is that, in view of the ‘significant [in fact enormous] increases in productive capacities since the nineteenth century’, it is now possible for a socialist society to introduce free access fairly quickly.

Assuming that you accept that the capacity to produce now available to society is sufficient to satisfy the needs of everyone, the question is: why, then, would a voucher system be necessary which after all is a form of rationing, even if at a generous level?

We wouldn’t deny that in theory a voucher system could be devised to take into account increased, and increasing, productivity in the ways you suggest. But a voucher system would involve using up a considerable amount of resources to administer (recording the time worked by each individual of working age, calculating and adjusting the ‘price’ of the goods and services to be redeemed, etc), which would be wasteful as well as not needed.

The only objection to free access would be that it wouldn’t work because people would take more than they needed. But why would they? People don’t even do that today under capitalism when certain things are lastingly free to take and use. Surely not because it is human nature to be greedy? 

Editorial Committee.

Cooking the Books: Should tokens make the world go round? (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 2022 Jan Philipp Dapprich, a researcher at a German university, published a paper entitled ‘Tokens make the world go round: socialist tokens as an alternative to money’ in which he argued that ‘non-circulating tokens should be used as an alternative to money for distributing consumer products to the population in a socialist economy’.

That he is talking about a socialist or communist society (terms which he says can be used interchangeably) is clear from how he envisages the production of all goods taking place. The places where they are produced ‘are collectively administered by the people or by institutions accountable on their behalf. Since all firms would share the same owner, there is no need for firms to exchange goods, as the general public would remain the owner of those goods either way’; ‘production units would simply receive raw materials and pass on their finished products, as specified by the plan without paying or receiving payment. There would thus be no need for money as a medium of exchange within the realm of production’; ‘The constraints, benefits and costs of production are to be evaluated in purely physical terms.’

So, he is recognisably talking about what we (and Marx) mean by socialism.

Marx, writing 150 years ago in some private notes published after his death as The Critique of the Gotha Programme, did discuss the possible need for a system of non-circulating tokens (vouchers that would be cancelled after being used to redeem some product) to distribute consumer products in the early days had socialism been established at the time, though he envisaged it eventually being abolished in favour of distribution according to self-determined needs.

Marx may have had a point had socialism been established in 1875 but it wasn’t, so this could be regarded as an academic issue. Dapprich, however, thinks that some token system (not necessarily the one mentioned by Marx) would still be required if socialism were to be established today; in fact he thinks that this should be a permanent feature of a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. He goes so far as to describe free access as envisaged by Marx as ‘pie in the sky’.

His argument is that this is unnecessary anyway ‘because the ‘needs principle’ of the higher phase can be sufficiently realised within the token system’. This can be done, he suggests, by the wider provision of free services such as health care and by giving tokens to those unable to work or to work fully. But why? His hidden assumption is that, with free access, there might not be enough to go round and that therefore the consumption of some will need to be limited, even if at a generously high level, so as to ensure that more urgent needs of others are met.

He does mention the argument that ‘since we have seen significant increases in productive capacities since the nineteenth century, during which Marx was writing, perhaps the token system is already outdated’. This is precisely a point we have made but Dapprich dismisses this, rather too offhandedly, as ‘unconvincing’ without saying why.

But whether or not society has the capacity to produce enough consumer products to satisfy likely self-assessed needs is the crux of the matter at issue. If it has, as we contend, then the case for a permanent non-circulating token system falls.

In any event, once common ownership and production directly for use have been established, should there arise some temporary shortage of some products it would be up to those around at the time to settle how to deal with it. Drawing up a blueprint for this now, without knowing the exact circumstances or the preferences of people then, is literally academic.

Cooking the Books: Free is good (2009)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Journalist, broadcaster and author Libby Purves chose the day that the London Evening Standard became a free, give-away paper to launch an attack on the whole idea of people having free access to things. Under the headline “If the future’s worth having, it won’t be free”, she laid into the “internet generation” which “has grown up believing it can enjoy other people’s hard work for nothing. This has got to stop” (Times, 12 October).

We socialists would say that, on the contrary, “if we’re going to have to pay for everything, the future is not worth having”. The resources exist today to produce enough food, clothes, housing, transport and health care so that no one on the planet needs to starve or be malnourished, or go without clean water, or live in slums, or not have access to the medicines and treatment they need. Society could go over to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”, with everybody having access to what they need without having to pay in return for contributing what they can to the work of producing what is needed.

This, surely, is a better future than the continued application of the opposite principle of “can’t pay, can’t have” ? Which means that in some parts of the world people die from starvation or easily preventable disease, or exist in shanty towns on the outskirts of big cities. And that, all over the world, most people are deprived of something which would improve their lives and which could easily be provided. Where we can’t build adequate public infrastructures or install anti-pollution technologies because it would “cost too much”.

And what is wrong with the “internet generation” taking for granted that “music, films, news, photographs, cartoons and carefully researched or creative prose” should be available for free? Isn’t this a sign that the money-wages-profit system that is capitalism has outlived its usefulness and perhaps also a sign of the beginning of a consciousness that it needs to be replaced by a system in which people have free access to what they need?

Purves is defending her vested interest as a royalty-reaping author. That’s understandable as, under capitalism, people need money to live and that’s how she gets hers. It might be thought, though, that as a public intellectual she’d be more broad-minded than to judge an economic system by whether or not it ensures her her chosen source of income.

In pleading her cause she goes back to the labour theory of property first put forward by John Locke in the 17th century:

“Content is not cost free. Writing is work. Musicianship involves cost and labour, art is not innately free, nor the infrastructure of news reporting. Until food, clothes, housing and transport are doled out free, content-makers need to be paid”.

And, according to her, the way to ensure this is through “intellectual property rights”, even if these are difficult, not to say impossible, to enforce in some cases.

But she does at least concede that if “food, clothes, housing and transport” were free – which will be the case in socialism – so should watching films or listening to music or reading a book, on the internet. As these will be too in socialism. The future is free.

Free (2009)

Book Review from the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free. The Future of a Radical Price.  By Chris Anderson. Random House. 2009. £18.99.

“What happens when advances in technology allow many things to be produced for more or less nothing? And what happens when those things are then made available to the consumer for free?” asks the publicity for this (paying) book by the editor of Wired. His answer is not that this is the beginning of some sort of transition towards a system where eventually all goods and services will be available free of charge (which it isn’t anyway). It’s that profit-seeking enterprises involved in these things have to adopt, have adopted and will increasingly adopt, a different marketing strategy.

Thus, enterprises in that line of business can choose to give away free DVDs and charge for DVD-players or they can give away free DVD-players and charge for DVDs, in either case covering their costs and making a profit.

It is, as Anderson explains, a modern version of the strategy adopted by saloon owners in New Orleans in the 1880s. They offered customers free lunches banking on them buying drinks priced so as to cover the cost of the lunches. Hence the saying “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”. Today – and it will be the case as long as capitalism lasts – there’s no such thing either as a free DVD or a free paper or a free mobile. Those giving them away will be recuperating the cost from something else that they are selling.

Still, it can’t be bad that there are books discussing things being free.

Adam Buick

Moneyless or not (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

“While there is money, there is scarcity”. “. . . Work itself becomes voluntary. The new incentives will be pleasure, pride and social responsibility”

These are among the ideas expressed in the final chapter of the book Play-power by Richard Neville, one of the editors of OZ convicted of producing what the Law regards as an obscene publication.

Quite true; men could use modern technology to design and construct machines to do the boring and repetitive jobs involved in the production of wealth, thus freeing human beings to engage in interesting, creative work of their choice. Employment could be abolished and work become voluntary.

But before this could be done the machines and the other means of production must have ceased to be the property of a privileged minority and have come instead under the democratic control of all the people. Only then could they be used to turn out an abundance of good-quality consumer goods and services which people could use to satisfy their needs. Money would become redundant.

There is no doubt at all that in writing about “a moneyless society” Neville was directly influenced by the ideas of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. For he was quoting with approval from one of a number of articles that have appeared in OZ written by a Socialist (‘The Food Explosion” OZ 19 and 26. See also “Smash Cash” OZ 17).

The only trouble is that Neville isn’t consistent and so gives the impression of having used our arguments merely to justify shoplifting and fare-dodging. People who do this, he says “are training themselves for a moneyless society”. There is of course nothing “immoral” in these practices but they have nothing to do with a moneyless, socialist society, and are practised by many others besides Socialists and those Neville calls “drop-outs”.

Neville’s inconsistency comes out on the very next page where he uses a quite different argument to justify the practice of non-employment (what is sometimes called “refusing to work”). He conjures up the vision of a society where, in order to maintain consumer demand in the face of growing unemployment caused by automation, the State pays everybody a guaranteed income. This would presumably be paid in money, so what became of the moneyless society Neville was supposed to be training for?

We can only say that, if Neville really does believe in a State guaranteed income, he is way behind the times. In this age of potential abundance nothing short of free access to wealth will do. He was right the first time: future society will have no need for money. Today’s notes and coins—dollars and cents, pounds and pence, roubles and kopecks—can be relegated to the museums alongside the Romans’ coins and the South Sea Islanders' cowrie shells.

Pathfinders: Bread and butter issues (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The proposal to upgrade capitalism to socialism, a global system of common ownership where everything is free at the point of use, is based on materialist arguments, not moral judgments about good and bad, right and wrong, fair and unfair, motivating though such considerations can also be. And this proposal stands or falls on a key question: can a world socialist society actually deliver what it promises?

People sometimes ask this in relation to the politics of socialism, for example querying whether, despite socialism’s egalitarian ethos, informal hierarchies might nevertheless emerge. Or they might claim ‘unintended consequences’, such as the idea that science could be retarded by the absence of the capitalist lash of competition. Or that certain antisocial tendencies and attitudes are to some extent genetically built in and will therefore persist. We argue not, in all these cases, but it’s not possible to give definitive answers to everything, and in any event we don’t claim that socialism is a ‘perfect’ society, whatever that means, only one that is considerably better and more efficient than capitalism.

One issue however cannot be up for debate, and that is food, the most basic human need. Capitalism depends for its existence on scarcity, whereas socialism presupposes a society where there’s enough for everybody. If people don’t have enough to eat, the assumption is that the fabric of socialist society might break down in civil strife, spawning some retrograde form of private property society, with all its attendant features including war, oppressive hierarchies, rampant inequality and the like.

There is some reason to think this doomsday view is itself a product of the capitalist mindset, and that historically, and prehistorically, people’s response to crisis was often one of cooperation, not mutual fighting. It is well known that people help each other after major disasters (tinyurl.com/37k6s86r) in what has been termed ‘catastrophe compassion’ (tinyurl.com/2s46p56t). In studies, one-year-old human children display empathy towards other children in distress (tinyurl.com/5d5e6nj4). Prehistoric human societies were largely cooperative and egalitarian (tinyurl.com/mrxcs3sc), but even the Neolithic farming revolution, itself very likely a response to climate catastrophe, depended on large-scale cooperation. Socialism could well be a far more robust and durable society than even socialists imagine.

Nevertheless, food security is not negotiable, and we have often described socialism as a ‘world of abundance’. But the word ‘abundance’ might conjure up fantastical notions, like the medieval tales of the Land of Cockaigne, where the rivers flowed with wine, the skies rained cheese and ready-to-eat roast chickens flew through the air. A better term might be ‘sustainable sufficiency’, which suggests the idea of enough without implying an infeasible cornucopia, though this consideration clearly did not worry the people behind the notion of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

The matter of food would be fairly straightforward were it not for two factors. One is the widely held ‘common sense’ view that there are too many people, a subject often refuted in this magazine (eg, Baby Bust, December 2022). The other is the confusing statements coming out of various UN food-related bodies. Last year, as reported by the Food and Agricultural Organization, the chair of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) declared that ‘we have enough food to feed 10 billion people’ (tinyurl.com/yejhc3wk). But the FAO has previously stated (2009) that ‘feeding a world population of 9.1 billion in 2050 would require raising overall food production by some 70 percent’ (tinyurl.com/27sxk4tv). So which is it? Is there enough or isn’t there?

The crucial factor in such projections is the model used, whether business-as-usual (FAO) or paradigm shift (CFS). If humans want to carry on as they are, with all the wasteful characteristics of capitalism, a huge increase in food output may very well be necessary. But there is growing awareness that the current state of things is unsustainable, and basically self-destructive. 30 percent of all food is wasted, much of it before it even reaches the end consumer, because of lack of refrigerant facilities in developing countries to preserve crops which tend to harvest all at once, creating gluts. Plastic packaging also reduces food waste by up to 75 percent, but companies use cheap plastics which maximise their profits but are not biodegradable, causing massive pollution through the food chain and inspiring a self-defeating popular backlash against the use of any and all plastics. Meanwhile, food grown is not necessarily food directly intended for humans to eat. 60 percent of European wheat is fed to animals, as is 80 percent of the world’s soya crops. 40 percent of US maize goes into cars, while 23 percent of global palm oil is used for diesel (tinyurl.com/3rd4285j). All this on a minority of the world’s agricultural land, while the other 60 percent is used for livestock grazing to supply the rich world’s meat diets (tinyurl.com/3ew7ncub). And that’s to say nothing of the heavy fertiliser use, involving nitrogen run-offs that pollute rivers, cause algal blooms, and exacerbate climate change.

A recent Paris study found that sustainable nitrogen-free organic farming could feed between 3 and 14 billion, depending on the degree to which meat and dairy farming were reduced. Conversely, it concluded that if everyone insisted on a Western diet, consisting of around 55 percent animal protein, feeding 9 billion people would be impossible even with increased nitrogen use and the conversion to agriculture of an extra swathe of grassland the size of Russia (tinyurl.com/bdf6b9kx).

So is there enough food for socialist sufficiency? The answer is yes, but not necessarily without some hard trade-offs. Socialism is a materialist proposition, not a magical fairyland. But if today’s exploited and oppressed workers get the opportunity to choose between wage slavery or a truly free life in socialism, we think they’re more than capable of weighing up the pros and cons and deciding where their best interests lie.

Paddy Shannon