Life and Times: My friend Phil (2024)

The Life and Times column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent issues of this journal have contained obituaries for several longstanding members of the Socialist Party who dedicated themselves with passion and understanding to the cause of a classless, leaderless society of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – the society we call socialism. They did this not because they were convinced that socialism would be established in their lifetime (though of course they fervently hoped that would happen), but because of the benefit they themselves gained from being a socialist, from an understanding, an ability to make sense, of what was happening in the world around them.

On a personal level, however, it made me sad that we should lose such dedicated advocates of the society we are looking for and it also took me back to the loss a good many years ago of a member (I’ll call him Phil) who had been one of the founders of my own local branch of the Party well before I came into contact with socialist ideas. He was outgoing, ebullient and energetic and never tired of questioning and challenging – and always with a terrific sense of humour. He understood that life was not just a random set of happenings over which it was impossible to have any control but that, if – and hopefully when – enough workers espoused the socialist idea, we could transcend capitalism and establish a new world of what he called ‘economic equality’. This understanding gave him an inner serenity enabling him to live a better and more balanced life within the confines of the present society – capitalism. Phil used to say that even before he came into contact with the Socialist Party, his own experience of life and work had led him to the moneyless, wageless, frontierless ‘one world’ idea. And nationalism in particular he saw as a monster that set people against one another when what they needed was to be brought together.

Phil’s funeral was conducted by a Humanist celebrant, who, in her farewell speech, described him as ‘a socialist atheist’ and, among other things, outlined his life and activity in the Socialist Party and how, as far as it was possible, he sought to live out and be the embodiment of his political convictions in his own life. Above all she pointed out how he believed in the potential of human beings to do good and to create a better society, one free from the iniquities surrounding money and the nation state. This world-wide outlook, transcending race and nation, reflected his concern – always optimistic – for the whole of humanity and led the celebrant to mention a favourite book of Phil’s, Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future, which he was fond of quoting from. This brought to my own mind some of those passages where that author took daring leaps into what humanity might be capable of and, in the words of the celebrant, ‘imagine the unimaginable’.

Finally mention was made of one of Phil’s favourite forms of activity – writing letters to newspapers and magazines to communicate his views on current matters from a socialist perspective. One of these, published in the Western Mail, was read out as being typical of the way he would encapsulate the socialist case in a few short paragraphs. The letter began by pointing out that our social and economic problems are not caused by governments, either national or otherwise, but, as it said, ‘by our present social and economic system which for want of a better word can be called “capitalism”.’ It went on to say that the state capitalism in Eastern Europe which went under the name of socialism or communism ‘was doomed from the start’, yet that the private capitalism of the West had ‘equally failed to solve the problem of poverty amid potential plenty’.

It then moved on to demolish nationalism stating the following: ‘The identity of the British is made up of a mix of descendants of Celts, Saxons, Picts, Scots, Romans, Vikings, as well as more recently Huguenots, Jews, Irish and arrivals from the old British colonies. Before and since the Industrial Revolution, people have moved all over Britain seeking work. It is effectively impossible to accurately differentiate between them on any kind of “national” basis’. Nationalism, Phil insisted, ‘divides people, while socialism means people coming together’. The letter ended with a plea to people everywhere ‘to organise to introduce a new kind of society where there will be no frontiers and where each will produce or service according to ability and take according to need’. It would be, it concluded, ‘a society where there will be free access to everything and there will be no leaders and no led’.

Which takes me back to something else the humanist celebrant said to those gathered to wish goodbye to Phil. She reminded us of something Phil knew which is relevant to us all – that death is as natural as life, that all that has life has its beginning and end, and that only Nature is permanent. But at the same time, she told us, we were right to be concerned with the death of any individual, since we are all members of one human community, and in that sense no one of us is independent or separate. At the same time – and this is my own conclusion – we all have a personal contribution to make to humanity in the way we spend our own lives, a contribution my friend Phil made in spades. He never saw socialism but his influence lives on in so much that flowed from his life and character, as testified to, for example, by his remaining in my own reflections so many years later and my continuing to be inspired by him, as by those other members of the Socialist Party who have died more recently but whose lives have been so well lived.

Howard Moss

Virtual reality (1993)

From the April 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Virtual reality won’t merely replace television. It will eat it alive”. That is the aggressive prediction of Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer. But what is virtual reality (VR) and why should we be concerned about it?

VR is in its infancy so there isn't any general agreement about what it consists of or how fast and in what ways it will grow. Historians of the technology trace its origins back a century or so, to the first explorations of the principle of stereoscopy, or three-dimensional vision. Some decades ago cinema audiences were introduced to 3-D viewing of films, but the novelty didn’t catch on and wasn't developed. In the last decade or so VR has come on the scene in the USA. It has done so in the form of a computer-generated apparent, or virtual, world.

Like many inventions developed in capitalist society, VR benefitted from its military applications. This is how a writer in Business Week (5 October 1992) described a simulation at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency:

 Instantly, you're transported inside a tank rolling across the Iraqi desert. You are performing the same maneuvers as a unit ... in the Persian Gulf war. The graphics on the screens are only video-game quality. Yet the illusion works. You duck as shells scream toward you and explode in ear-splitting fury.

That simulation was achieved by three five-foot screens. A more advanced form of VR is projections on stereoscopic lenses moulded inside helmets that participants wear. Multiple sensory information is conveyed. In some systems, a viewer wearing a sensor-laden glove manipulates objects in the computer. In others, images on the screen or a viewer’s perspective are manipulated with a mouse or joystick. Howard Rheingold, in his book Virtual Reality sums it up:

  A virtual world is a computer that you operate with natural gestures, not by composing computer programmes, but by walking around, looking around, and using your hands to manipulate objects.

VR is a technology, that is, an applied science or way of achieving certain physical ends. Socialists are interested in technology from three different perspectives: as part of a critique of capitalism, as part of the case for socialism, and (controversially) as a feature of socialist society. These three perspectives will be considered one by one. although over time they may be seen as making up a single socialist perspective on the world.

Distorted technology

Technology is used by capitalism mainly to make more profits for the few rather than to improve conditions of life for the many. The extraction of surplus value from workers has been possible since they were first compelled to sell their labour to owners of capital (employers). In the early days of capitalism, productivity was low because there were few machines, or only primitive machines, to make labour more productive. As capitalism developed, the process of exploitation remained essentially the same, but the means of wealth production and distribution became vastly more efficient. The wealth produced is grossly unequally distributed, both between nations and between rich and poor in each nation. And more goods and technological developments sometime have calamitous effects: cars and planes that crash, thalidomide children, nuclear power station disasters, oil tanker spillages, among many others.

VR is a typical example of the way capitalism distorts the development of a technology that has great potential for enhancing the quality of life. So far, most of the development has been for military purposes. Rheingold confidently predicts that “the two largest blocs of users of new information and communication technology in the 1990s will be the global finance and global entertainment industries”. VR might become as addictive, energy-sapping and intelligence-dulling as television, the “plug-in drug” which now requires the average abuser to consume seven hours a day.

Part of the case for socialism is that technology can be used directly for need—meeting and not profit—making purposes. Even with capitalism, technology can and is being used for life-enhancing as well as life-harming purposes—medical technology that saves lives (often after other technologies have imperilled them), environmental measures that increase crops rather than poison them, machines that reduce drudgery rather than killing or maiming workers. Socialism would mean using technology only for human purposes, not balancing those purposes against the pursuit of profit.

The electronic media—of which VR is the latest development—have been used thus far by a few to manipulate the desires of the many, resulting in huge profits for the successful entrepreneurs. With socialism, the really life-enhancing potentialities of VR can be developed, and the capitalist uses put in the history box alongside Cinerama.

Democratic control

With the establishment of socialism, democratic decisions can be made about the appropriate levels and types of technology to meet different needs in different environments. It is utopian in the bad sense to try to predict the future in any detail, except perhaps for fun. But we do need some general principles, today, to help us move towards more detailed principles and their application tomorrow. Marx quite sensibly refused to “write recipes for future cookshops”, but Morris envisaged a basically simple, low technology socialist society in News From Nowhere. Socialists this century have from time to time shown interest in the subject. In the 1950s some Socialist Party members expressed views generally sympathetic to a Morris-type socialist future, though with a critical reaction from most other members who felt there were advantages in retaining at least some hi-tech methods of production and distribution.

At this stage we can only speculate on how and to what extent socialist society will use VR or whatever future refinements of it may be invented. We can say with certainty that, since there will be no buying and selling and no rival nation states to prepare for and engage in war, VR will not be used for business or military purposes.

Three probable areas of VR application may be summarized as medical, industrial and political. The minimal physical activity required to participate in VR may enable the minds of severely physically disabled people to be liberated from the prisons of their bodies. Much work that is now tedious could be made more interesting by simulated realities that enable technical problems to be solved more easily.

The political applications are perhaps the most challenging. Electronic media have so far been controlled by capitalist government and business, whose electors and customers have been mere listeners or viewers. VR experts like to talk of “participants”, and there is scope for interaction between the providers of the virtual worlds and those who experience them. The technology will be there for people in socialist society to use for democratically-decided purposes.

Stan Parker

Socialism and scientific advance (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

What has been called “the problem of production”— how to produce enough to satisfy the needs of every man, woman and child—was solved by about the turn of the century. From then on scientific knowledge and technological ability could have banished for ever all human misery resulting from a lack of material resources: starvation and malnutrition, unhealthy living conditions, disease and ill-health, ignorance and superstition.

This knowledge and this ability has not however been applied to benefit Mankind in this way. Instead, production has remained geared to profit-making and the accumulation of profits as capital. The result has been not only continuing material poverty and misery but two world wars— and many lesser ones—during which millions of human beings have been massacred and mutilated. As the problem of production had already been solved all this human suffering was unnecessary and could have been avoided. It is the price Mankind has paid for the maintenance of capitalism into the Twentieth Century.

Scientific advance did not, of course, stop in 1900 but has continued ever since, making the production of enough wealth to adequately feed, clothe and shelter the whole of the world’s people ever less of a problem. In 1900 electricity was only beginning to be applied to production and the internal combustion engine and aeroplanes were just about to be developed. Since then we have seen the coming of (and we make no apologies for this list, as we hope it will help to ram home the extent to which the problem of production has been solved): radio, plastics, TV, jets, radar, rockets, electronics computers. nuclear power, transistors, artificial satellites, men on the Moon.

Every scientific advance makes capitalism even more obsolete and socialism even more practicable. But there are more advances to come in the near future. The popular science and science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, in his book Profiles of the Future (reprinted by Pan books last year), mentions as the next two major technological advances: the application of nuclear fusion to produce electricity and the invention of an efficient system of electrical storage.

At the moment there are a number of ways of generating electricity but not of storing it efficiently. Today's batteries are clumsy and so prevent the development of clean, electrically-powered vehicles. Existing petrol- and diesel-burning internal combustion engines continually pollute the atmosphere and would be phased out as rapidly as possible in a rationally-organised society. This lack of an efficient way of storing electricity is also holding back the development of solar and other clean sources of energy like wind-power, although the latter have the disadvantage of dependence on natural conditions. But this would not matter so much if an efficient system of storing electricity existed since the electricity generated on sunny, or windy, days could be stored for later use; the electricity generated in summer could be stored for use in winter.

Clarke gives the 1980s as the date for the invention of an efficient system of electrical storage. Fusion power he puts in the 1990s. Existing nuclear power stations are based on nuclear fission. On splitting atoms of heavy elements like uranium. In this process a radioactive “waste” is produced. Society may well eventually find a way of using the energy this radio-activity represents; it will then cease to be waste and become a “by-product”. At the moment, however, it is dangerous waste which no one knows what to do with. People are right to be concerned about this; the priority capitalism gives to making profits leads to the adoption of inadequate safety measures.

Nuclear power is an obvious future source of energy, helping replace the relatively wasteful burning of non-renewable fossil fuels. Arthur C. Clarke puts this well:

  Today, there can be little doubt that the long-term (and perhaps the short-term) answer to the fuel problem is nuclear energy. The weapons already now stockpiled by the major powers could run all the machines on earth for several years, if their energies could be used constructively. The warheads in the American arsenals alone are equivalent to thousands of millions of tons of oil or coal.
   It is not likely that fission reactions (those involving such heavy elements as thorium, uranium and plutonium) will play more than a temporary role in terrestrial affairs: one hopes not, for fission is the dirtiest and most unpleasant method of releasing energy that man has ever discovered. Some of the radio-isotopes from today's reactors will still be causing trouble and perhaps injuring unwary archaelogists, a thousand years from now.
   But beyond fission lies fusion—the welding together of light atoms such as hydrogen and lithium. This is the reaction that drives the stars themselves; we have reproduced it on earth, but have not yet tamed it. When we have done so, our power problems will have been solved for ever—and there will be no poisonous by-products, but only the clean ash of helium. Controlled fusion is the supreme challenge of applied nuclear physics: some scientists believe it will be achieved in ten years, some in fifty. But almost all of them are sure that we will have some fusion power long before our oil and coal run out, and will be able to draw fuel in virtually unlimited quantities from the sea.

Deuterium, the isotope of hydrogen which is a raw material for the fusion reaction, exists in the sea in the proportion of 1gm per 30 litres. So much, then, for the dire predictions of the scaremongers about running out of resources and the sick justification of poverty as the result of inevitable scarcity.

Society has not yet mastered the technology of nuclear fusion but is on the way to doing so. Its coming won’t lead to the breakdown of capitalism as the wages-prices-profits system becomes clogged up by an abundance of very cheap goods, as is sometimes suggested. But it might lead to people realising that capitalism is an utterly irrational way of organising the production and distribution of the world’s wealth. For, once nuclear fusion has been shown to be a practical and efficient way of generating electricity—once society has acquired the practical ability to apply it to the production of wealth—it will be more than ever obvious that poverty, misery and deprivation are quite unnecessary. We must move on to socialism.

With the means of production the common heritage of all the people of the world, the scientific knowledge and technological skill which society now possesses can be used for the one purpose of satisfying human needs in accordance with the long-standing socialist principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Adam Buick