The Life and Times column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
I’ve always watched football, but I hadn’t been to a match for quite some time when a friend told me he’d managed to get tickets for Liverpool playing Manchester United. Did I want to go? Though I don’t support either team I couldn’t resist. So on a balmy spring evening I found myself at Anfield, Liverpool’s famous ground, among 70,000 other fans of both teams. People milled around everywhere outside the stadium, and when we got in we found ourselves high up in a stand above the pitch looking a long way down. Impressive to say the least. I had a good look around and, among the banners on display, a particularly huge one stood out. It was, being held up by quite a large group of people and it said FOOTBALL IS OUR LIFE. Another banner some way away had the words WE LIVE FOR LIVERPOOL FC.
People’s priorities
I couldn’t help but feel a little sad about this. I appreciate and to a large extent share the love and enthusiasm so many people feel for ‘the beautiful game’ and I can see that it also helps to create the sense of community that may be missing in many people’s lives. But for football or one of its teams to become so all-consuming a part of some people’s existence seems to me a reflection, an admission, of their underdog role, acceptance of a life that does not give them adequate opportunity to develop their own individual talents and capacities and to make their own unique contribution to a common social end.
I am reminded of this too when I go on the website of my local newspaper. Down the side there’s an invitation to click on a choice of three categories of article – ‘Latest’, ‘Most Commented’, and ‘Most Read’. If I click on ‘Most Read’, I know that top of that list will be news of sports stars, actors, singers or other celebrities who are in the news rather than more ‘serious’ matters or events that should be of wide human interest. So, as I write, the biggest audience on this site is not for events in Gaza or Ukraine or how people may be affected by the latest proposed government policy changes, but rather for news of, say, the football transfer market deadline and the pay the stars involved will be receiving.
Media priorities
I was also reminded of my Anfield trip by the recent sad death of one of Liverpool’s star players in a road accident. Diego Jota had died together with his brother when the car he was driving came off the road during an overtaking manoeuvre. Tragic of course, yet the overwhelming grief depicted in the media as being experienced by Liverpool fans brought into sharp focus the phenomenon of mass idolisation of celebrated individuals by people who don’t know them personally. This contrasts with the almost routine acceptance of the fate, whether accidental or not, that may befall ‘ordinary people’ and was illustrated by the tragedy which happened to coincide with the footballer’s death. Dozens of people, many of them young children, died in flash floods in Texas. It was reported on, yes, and words of sorrow and regret were expressed, but in that week’s media coverage this ‘act of god’ in which many ‘ordinary’ people died always took second place to the death of the millionaire footballer whose handling of his Lamborghini may have contributed to the accident that killed him. And the Texan tragedy was also subordinated in many places to coverage of a pop music event – the ‘second coming’ that was the Oasis reunion concert.
Worship and idolisation
Of course, there’s no reason why people shouldn’t take pleasure in and appreciate the skills of talented sports people or the artistry involved in producing music. But is it not a sad commentary on the lives so many lead that this should take the form of displays of near fanatical passion or worshipful admiration – an exhilaration not normally available in the existence they are tied to? Is this not a substitute for the lack of interest, meaning and satisfaction workers experience in the employment activities they’re obliged to engage in to survive and that consume most of their waking hours? Does it not stand as some kind of replacement for the lack of opportunity to express their own talents freely in their daily lives? Is it not a patch of colour in drab lives?
And is it not a pity that so many are unable to see beyond this and seem to place so little value on the everyday heroism of those people who spend much of their time not worshipping heroes but helping others, often those at the very bottom of the social pile?
Meaningful lives
The system we live in spurs us to see certain rich or powerful individuals as more important than and superior to others and to almost merge our own identity with them (think the ‘Swiftie’ fans of Taylor Swift). Is this anything other than a denial of their own uniqueness, a rejection of themselves as meaningful individuals in their own right? As an alternative to this, the society of common ownership of all resources and free access to all goods and services which socialists work to see established will surely be one in which each individual is able to develop their own particular talents to the full, achieve personal satisfaction via meaningful activity and in so doing be recognised and valued for the contribution they make to the social effort. In that society every individual will be their own hero.
From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
In December, 2022 a music video entitled Hi Ren appeared on YouTube. The name of the singer-songwriter-guitarist was Ren. The video was over nine minutes long, virtually an epic by music industry standards. It was a live recording made on a shoestring budget. The song vividly dramatised the singer’s mental health issues and state of inner conflict, conditions which many can relate to. Within two months Hi Ren had gone viral, gathering nearly seven million views and coming to the attention of a host of online music reactors – people who post videos of themselves reacting to other people’s music. Few of those reacting to Hi Ren for the first time had ever heard of its creator, and many were clearly unprepared for what they were to witness.
Intrigued and eager for more, they began reacting to Ren’s extensive back catalogue of online music videos, and to new songs that he continued to drop over the following months. It soon became clear to everyone that here was a musician of exceptional skill and versatility. Ren was an accomplished singer, rapper, guitarist, songwriter and keyboard player. He was also a superb storyteller, performer and producer of his own music videos. His songs were never predictable. They broke convention and they defied genre. Musicians, film makers, videographers, and music lovers enthused online about the way he was breaking open the moulds into which commercial interests had been pouring popular music in recent years.
Dirty-grey average
Capitalism is often praised for innovation and choice, yet the logic of its drive to maximise profit induces companies to turn out products with the widest possible appeal, thereby reducing them to a dirty-grey average. In the popular music industry this tendency to sameness has deepened in recent years thanks to the availability of sophisticated data-analysis tools. Recording companies are now increasingly able to identify and predict the kind of hooks and singing styles that make hit songs. Having once established a winning formula, they mobilise teams of in-house songwriters to churn out pattern-book songs which big-name singers and musicians are then contracted to record and convert into cash. New post-production technology is used to ‘optimise’ the product by electronically removing glitches and correcting imperfections in studio performances. It is now possible electronically to adjust a wobbly vocal line, repair an off-key note, or smooth out an uneven beat. The result is another glossily perfect musical product tumbling off the production line. Commercial radio stations help to magnify this tendency to sameness by demanding songs which fit neatly into their time slots, deal with the right kind of easy-going and uncontroversial themes, and have catchy ‘hooks’ designed to snag listeners.
The music industry as a whole is notoriously ruthless and litigious. Capitalism’s property system makes it prone to scams and money grubbing. Often this involves the murky legal world of copyright. Ren appears recently to have himself fallen foul of just such a scam. Typically, he has responded to it by speaking openly online and making a music video about it. Such openness is unusual and has attracted support from other musicians who have suffered in the same way. Uploaded music videos are themselves often targets for online scammers. In one such fraud, recently exposed, scammers have been using a green screen to remove video images of original artists from videos of Britain’s Got Talent and similar TV shows, and then insert video images of themselves lip synching to the vocals. By uploading the manipulated videos onto their own platforms and attracting an audience they are able to obtain money from the advertising revenue generated.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Yet every so often a creative artist comes along who is able to communicate with music of such originality and directness that they can bypass the big companies and attract their own audience. Ten months after Hi Ren went viral, Ren dropped a self-produced album of his own music called Sick Boi. Without corporate backing, with almost no radio exposure, and without the publicity of live shows, the album floated serenely up the British top 40 chart to take the number one position. Ren had arrived – much to his own apparent surprise.
Who is Ren?
So, who is this man? Ren is the professional name of Ren Eryn Gill, an open, generous and appealingly boyish musician, now aged 34, hailing from a remote Welsh village on the Isle of Anglesey. His personal story is studded with drama and tragedy. Signed up to Sony Records at the age of 19, he was forced to abandon the recording of his first album by the onset of severe ill health. He returned home to Anglesey where he became bed-ridden and suffered excruciating pain for eight years. He developed auto-immune disease and experienced a stress-induced psychotic breakdown. During this time, his best friend committed suicide on the Menai Bridge. His illness was repeatedly misdiagnosed until, after years of useless therapy and medication, a private physician in Brussels identified his condition as Lyme disease. Treatment for the disease has now partially restored his health, but having harboured the infection for so long, it is likely that his body will never fully recover.
Convinced that his chance of a major career in music was over, Ren went back to busking on the streets of Brighton, and producing low (or zero) budget videos of his own music. These rapidly gathered a following of loyal fans. And then, in 2022, he dropped Hi Ren and his world exploded. He now has almost 2.2 million YouTube subscribers and Hi Ren has 56 million views worldwide. Those numbers continue to climb.
Ren has taken the experience of his personal tragedy and his struggle to fulfil himself as a creative musician and universalised it into something highly relatable. In his own words, ‘I owe much of my success to the most destructive force in my life, which has been the turbulence of my physical and mental illness’. His music addresses difficult social issues such as mental health, suicide, and the cycle of child abuse. It communicates with raw emotion enhanced by his habit of recording his songs live, in a single take, and with minimal post-production work, a procedure almost unheard of today. Minor glitches in performance are left unedited. This side of his art has touched people of all ages. Comment sections of his online videos are flooded with accounts of how listening to his music has given new hope and even saved lives. Yet, not all of his music deals with difficult subjects. He has a strong sense of humour coupled with an apparent lack of inhibition. His songs vary from the cheeky to the deeply serious. And interwoven into many of them is yet another theme: the nature of capitalist violence and our own complicity in maintaining the system. A trilogy of music videos entitled Money Game, Parts 1, 2 and 3, tackles this theme head on.
Portrait of capitalism
Ren’s music and story-telling skills find particularly powerful expression in Money Game 3, which focuses on the life and career of ‘Jimmy’, who is driven to win his father’s approval by seeking success in business. By his late teens he is already amassing capital. On his way up the financial ladder, he discovers the potency of the lie and the capacity of capitalism’s money game to translate wealth into political power. His business dealings become increasingly risky and illegal. When his father dies of a heart attack his obsessive search for wealth and power become both socially and personally destructive. As the lyrics of Money Game 3 put it, ‘he followed the code in the land of the free: put your hand in the cookie jar and take more than you need’. Jimmy eventually overreaches, is injured in a shootout between drug cartels, and becomes confined to a wheelchair. Too late, he comes face to face with the consequences of his actions and values.
Ren’s exceptional story-telling ability has left a huge impression on his audience. As Money Game 3 tells us, Jimmy is an ‘exaggerated version’ of you and me. He is an Everyman, both complicit with, and a victim of, the system. One reactor responding to Ren’s message nailed it: ‘When you talk to people individually, it seems like everybody gets it, but then we kinda go right back to that lifestyle, because that’s just the way that the world works. It sucks, but it only works that way because of us.’ (Duane Reacts). We are all indoctrinated into the capitalist system and its ideologies from an early age through our parents, through an organised system of schooling which denies children control over their lives, and through the ideologically driven media. The message drummed into Jimmy’s head is that financial success is the only meaningful kind.
Money Game 3 is a punch in the guts, a dramatic piece of musical theatre which won Ren and his friend/videographer, Samuel Perry-Flavey, an award for the best Independent European music video of 2024. Together, the three Money Game videos deal with the violence arising from the profit system, and as well as its impact on attitudes to immigration. They show how we uncritically adopt and reproduce the values promoted by capitalism. It is a fact of life that we can no more stand outside our own society than we can stand outside our own skin, and yet we are not robots: we can step back, reflect on our experience and identify where it clashes with the conventional values and practices of our world. Socialism is, in part, a process of learning to overcome our indoctrination.
The three Money Game videos paint a picture of our world that many recognise. Recognition, however, is insufficient to provide a secure insight into how the system works or how it can be addressed. Ren describes himself as an anti-capitalist, someone who rejects a society that puts profits above people. He has all but denied that he is a socialist. Nevertheless, as socialists we can recognise the portrait of capitalism that he gives us. We can unpack the clues in his work to show that the only way to reject ‘profit over people’ is to reject profit and the money game altogether.
Now that Ren’s star is rising will he continue to resist the blandishments of the music industry or sign up with a record label? If he signs up, he will have greater resources to put into the music he is so passionate about making, but unless he becomes such a highly bankable commodity that he is capable of dictating his own terms it would almost certainly mean a loss of creative freedom. The money game would soon consume him.
At the moment, it looks like he is strongly resisting. True to character, though, he has spoken openly about his own inner conflicts on the matter. We can empathise. These are the inner conflicts and compromises familiar to anyone caught in the contradiction of advocating for a world beyond the destructiveness and repression of the capitalist system, but who, for now, has to live and survive within it. While capitalism persists, however, a socialist perspective helps us to focus on the goal of achieving a world which is more social, more humane and more satisfying than the one we have at present.
The Pathfinders Column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
There’s a popular saying, origin uncertain, that ‘America innovates, China imitates and Europe regulates’. That’s not true anymore in the case of China, which is leading from the front these days in AI and green tech. But Europe continues to live up to its reputation, last month by fining Apple and Meta €500m and €200m respectively for certain dubious business practices deemed to be in breach of the 2022 Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU’s attempt at levelling the online playing field. The European Commission declared that Apple was guilty of anti-competitive behaviour with its App Store, specifically by ‘restricting app developers in their ability to inform customers of alternative offers or marketplaces that could be found outside its own and steer them towards purchases.’ Meanwhile Meta had erred by introducing a ‘consent or pay’ model which invites users to take out a monthly subscription or else let Meta hoover up all their Facebook and Instagram user data for sale to third parties (BBC news, 7 July).
The Meta model is a typical example of how firms exploit audience capture. They’ve got their customers hooked, so now’s the time to take the piss out of them with extra charges. It’s a bit like what the big streaming services have been doing lately by introducing adverts into paid subscriptions, and then inviting subscribers to pay extra to go ad-free, all in the name of ‘choice’. But is Meta really offering a choice? One might suspect that the real deal is ‘pay up and we’ll plunder your data anyway.’
Apple have always been known for being control freakish and attempting to lock their customer base into their own exclusive ecosystem, including a special patent-protected charging cable that no one else is allowed to make and which doesn’t work with any third-party device.
People say that capitalism drives brilliant technical innovation, but when you look at the way this happens, ‘brilliant’ is not the word that comes to mind. It is chaotic, spontaneous, unplanned and secretive, with profligate waste and duplication. Under the pressure of competition, each developer adopts a walled-garden approach, for the sole purpose of protecting future profits. Most will eventually fail, and the few successes which do emerge are of course incompatible with each other. Producers have every incentive to maintain this incompatibility, make their products impossible to repair, lock in customers, and oppose any move towards component standardisation. In the ensuing market battle, the ultimate victor may not be the best technical product but the one with the biggest marketing muscle. When you decide to ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’, you can end up with a cactus instead of an orchid.
Take electric cars, for instance. What’s deterring buyers, apart from up-front cost, is range anxiety related to lack of charging infrastructure, and long charge times. The real problem is the vast range of models, sizes and batteries being produced. Logically, producers could have cooperated in the first place to produce just one standard battery for all cars, together with standardised quick-replacement mechanisms, so you could swap them out at any garage in mere minutes. But capitalism doesn’t do logic. That’s not to say that EV battery standardisation won’t ever happen, but the battle for profits comes first, and never mind the waste.
Recent EU regulations have been an attempt to override the jarring contradiction between what producers do for profit and what people actually want. So for example, there are regulations to ban designed obsolescence, ban greenwashing, and enforce a ‘right to repair’. These are all worthy enough measures from an environmental perspective, but they are likely to damage the bloc’s overall competitiveness with the less scrupulous USA and China. The Wall Street Journal tartly responded with a 2024 article entitled ‘Europe Regulates Its Way to Last Place‘.
So it was that in 2022, in an effort to reduce much electronic waste due to the multiplicity of different charging cables, the EU put a stop to Apple’s proprietary Lightning port and forced the firm to change its Euro-market products to use the industry-standard USB-C charging port. Now Apple are hopping mad about the new DMA fine over its restrictive App Store, and have lodged an appeal. Perhaps they will argue that if the ruling were applied to offline traders, Tesco would be legally bound to advertise Sainsbury’s products, Asda to advertise Aldi, and so on.
Apple boss Tim Cook reportedly got on the whine-line to US President Donald Trump to complain about all this, presumably in the hope that Agent Orange would put the squeeze on the EU mandarins via more tariff threats. Trump might be less than enthusiastic though. He is thought to be greatly dischuffed at Cook’s polite but steadfast refusal to cave in to his demand that Apple ‘reshore’ all its production facilities to the US. From Cook’s perspective, this would be an utterly bonkers move which would cut a gigantic hole in Apple’s profits, given that US workers cost a lot more than Chinese or Indian ones. Moreover, it would require several years of intense planning, making it scarcely worth consideration given that Trump’s effective time in office could expire as soon as November 2026 with the US mid-term elections. So, appeal or not, Apple may decide to suck it up and pay the fine. €500m is a drop in the bucket to Apple, and a lot cheaper than eviscerating a $3tn empire just to give Trump a few good headlines.
If capitalism really worked in humanity’s benefit, there wouldn’t be any need to keep making laws to curb its natural tendencies. All capitalist producers are bad apples in this sense. Meanwhile attempts at regulation can often mean states or trading blocs are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of global competitiveness. The world has long since socialised production. What it now needs to do is socialise ownership and control of that production too. If it doesn’t, the spiralling chaos will continue, with disastrous prospects for humanity and the planet.
From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
A post-capitalist society has to be, by its very nature, a ‘post-scarcity’ society. It has to be a society technologically capable of adequately meeting the needs of its people. This capacity constitutes the material foundations upon which the kind of social outlook and values indispensable to the very existence of such a society can arise and truly flourish. Without it, without an ample supply of the goods and services we all need to enjoy a reasonably decent standard of living, a debilitating and scarcity-driven competitive scramble will inevitably set in, undermining our willingness to cooperate with each other and sapping our desire to work for the common good.
But what exactly does an ‘ample supply of goods and services’ mean in practical terms? Obviously, what is ‘ample’ is dependent on how much we are able to produce in the first place, but it is also crucially contingent on what we ourselves consider to be ‘ample’ – our cultural values. That is to say, it is culturally conditioned.
Consumerism
In a capitalist society, your status correlates positively with how much you conspicuously consume in the form of material wealth. This is what makes consumerism such an integral aspect of our way of life under capitalism.
The point about consumerism is that there is technically no upper limit to the quantities, or money values, of goods and services you could strive to consume. Hence the emphasis on it ‘always’ being a desirable goal that one should consume more – a suggestion that conveniently chimes with the commercial interests of businesses wanting to increase their sales. More is always better. That there is no limit on how much you should consume stems from the fact that status competition itself is essentially a zero-sum game. I can only boost my social status within a status hierarchy at your expense (and vice versa).
According to the argument, it is not just that your sense of well-being and happiness is said to grow in line with your rising level of material consumption; crucially, it is also because this rising level of material consumption works to enhance your status in the eyes of others. The corollary of this is that those lower down this status hierarchy must therefore feel, to that extent, a little less satisfied and less happy with life — at least according to consumerist ideology. The only way in which they might mitigate this relative sense of dissatisfaction or deprivation is by striving to consume more – not just more but relatively more than others around them are consuming.
Our capacity to consume more is, however, dependent on us improving our economic circumstances and increasing our purchasing power, in comparison with others. But, of course, this cannot logically happen for most people in a capitalist society since the very mechanism of capitalist incentivisation itself depends on the systemic entrenchment, and even deepening, of economic inequality. Capitalism needs us to feel dissatisfied with our lot in life, by comparison with others, so we can all the more enthusiastically buy into, and embrace, what it is (literally) attempting to sell us. And, of course, work harder to achieve it.
This is an example of contrived or artificial scarcity. It is contrived because what the system is attempting to implant in us are what Marcuse called ‘false needs’.
Produce more stuff?
What can we do about it? It cannot be emphasised too much that ‘scarcity’ in this sense will not diminish and disappear simply by augmenting or adding to our capacity to produce yet more stuff – that is, by further expanding the already formidable forces of production at our disposal.
The problem is not that we lack the technological wherewithal to make a post-scarcity and post-capitalist society feasible. The problem is, rather, that we allow a system of profit-oriented and market-based production to continue to exist and to fundamentally get in the way of fully realising the productive potential we already possess.
A post-capitalist society, while it is not a recipe for a kind of stoical belt tightening is, on the other hand, not an excuse for some sort of turbocharged consumerism. The grounds for rejecting the latter are as compelling as the grounds for rejecting the former
Instead, there is a middle way, if you like. According to this approach the technological potential to meet humanity´s basic requirements for food, shelter and so on, to a reasonable level, should be looked upon as providing us with the means and the opportunity to better accommodate, or attend to, those other (and often neglected) needs we all have as human beings quite apart from our physical or material needs.
Lifestyle changes?
One thing is for certain: just privately reflecting upon the subject of consumerism and consciously seeking to adjust your own consumer behaviour, however much this might be welcomed, is not going to be enough. Not nearly enough. ‘Consumerism’ as it has been defined here is fundamentally a social phenomenon.
This is the problem with much of the currently burgeoning literature on the theme of a post-growth – and even, post-capitalist – society, awash, as it often is, with informative and penetrating insights into the negative social and environmental consequences of ‘consumerism’. The focus is too much on the particular lifestyles of particular individuals.
With some notable exceptions, there seems to be little in the way of a well-grounded analysis linking this phenomenon we call consumerism with the underlying socioeconomic relations that define our existing capitalist social order. The general tenor of the approach is essentially moralistic in tone and, ultimately, the solutions offered seem to hinge more on reforming or tinkering around with the system than getting rid of it.
Of course, changing values is undeniably important if we are to fundamentally change the nature of the society we live in. The point is simply that we cannot just rail against the ‘consumerist values’ of this society, as we see it, without understanding where they originate from, the material circumstances out of which they have arisen. Criticism has also to be coupled with a clear commitment to changing these circumstances.
Not just subjective
We need also to look at the supply side of the equation as well – not just the demand side. We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society where we can just go out and kill an antelope or gather roots whenever the hunger pangs prompt us to do so. We depend instead on a highly developed system of food production linking the farmer and the consumer through a complex chain of intermediate stages.
In other words, ‘artificial scarcity’ has an ‘objective’ dimension, aside from being rooted in an ideology. It would be absurd, for instance, to accuse a starving person or a homeless person of ‘consumerism’ because they wanted food or shelter. The scarcity they experience is real enough, but the point is that the reason for it occurring is both contrived – artificial – and inexcusable. Quite simply, people should not have to go without in this day and age. Yet they do.
One very obvious reason why this happens is the enormous diversion of human and material resources away from socially useful production into socially useless forms of economic activities. The purpose of such activities is not to meet human needs but to keep the capitalist system ticking over on its own terms.
Keeping the capitalist money system ticking over involves quite literally reducing the human and material resources available for meeting human needs. These are the very real opportunity costs of propping up a system of capitalist production, which cannot be denied or just brushed under the carpet. There are other, more direct and visible, ways in which human needs are blatantly disregarded and ignored as well. Thus, while we talk of starving and homeless people, we surely cannot be unaware of the grotesque spectacle of millions of empty homes languishing in the face of a growing problem of homelessness or food being destroyed in the face of hunger for no better reason than to push up prices or keep them high.
Such scarcity is ‘artificial’ in the sense that there is no logical reason whatsoever why it should exist other than the fact that it arises from the nature of the society we happen to live in. It will not cease to exist until this society ceases to exist and replaced by one in which meeting human needs is the sole concern.
The Cooking the Books column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
One of the measures being urged on the government to solve its ‘fiscal problem’ is ‘tax the rich’ by means of a levy on the personal wealth of some capitalists.
‘Advocates of a UK wealth tax, including Lord Kinnock, have proposed an annual 2% tax on wealth above £10m. Wealth tax campaign group Tax Justice UK has calculated this would affect about 20,000 people — fewer than 0.04% of the population — and raise £24bn a year’ (Sky News).
According to the latest figures (for the period 2020 to 2022) from the Office for National Statistics, ‘The wealthiest 1% of households had wealth of at least £3,121,500’.
So, the proposal would only affect some of the super-rich, not even all of the ‘top 1 percent’, let alone the whole of the capitalist class.
The ‘fiscal problem’ facing the British capitalist state, which Labour currently has responsibility for running, is how to pay for its essential spending on such things as the military, education and health for the working class, ‘benefits’ for those not in work, as well as its own administration. This can only be covered by money raised from taxes or through borrowing. The government doesn’t want to borrow more since this risks raising the rate of interest it has to pay lenders; which in turn increases the amount of tax it would need to raise, since taxation is the only source it has of money to pay the interest on its debts (the so-called ‘National Debt’).
The irony is that all taxes already fall in the end on property and property income, irrespective of who pays them in the first instance. Obviously corporation tax, income tax on dividends, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, and employers’ national insurance do so directly. But other taxes do so indirectly.
To be able to work efficiently workers require a given standard of living and an adequate money income to pay for this. By and large, though not automatically, what workers are paid goes up in line with the cost of living. If this rises, so sooner or later will wages. Taxes such as VAT on what workers need to buy to maintain their working skills are in effect passed on to employers. Similarly with a direct tax on wages; this too gets passed on. In fact, with PAYE, workers never even see the tax part of their nominal wages; what counts in terms of maintaining a standard of living appropriate to their working skills is their take-home pay and what it will buy.
Arguments about taxation are essentially arguments about how much in taxes particular sections of the property-owning class should pay. Taxes on wages and on what workers consume fall on employers. A wealth tax would be a tax on what capitalists consume in extravagant living and would enable part of the burden of taxation to be shifted from employers on to the super-rich. It wouldn’t make any difference to workers.
A wealth tax also implies the continued existence of the super-rich. One of their arguments against it is precisely that one effect of such a tax would be to drive some of them out of the jurisdiction of the British capitalist state.
Socialists don’t want to maintain the rich so that the state can milk them. Nor do we want to redistribute their wealth amongst the rest of the population so as to try to achieve a more equal society contrary to capitalism’s nature. We want the means for producing wealth to be commonly owned by society as a whole so that they can be used, under democratic control, to directly provide what people need. We don’t want to tax the rich. We want to abolish the division of society into the rich and the rest.
From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
Politicians love talking big numbers: ‘We’re spending £5 million to stop The Thing.’ Or ‘We will spend an additional £20 million to increase The Pittance by a penny.’ When Starmer and his chums came into office they mummered and howled over discovering the astronomical £22 billion ‘fiscal black hole’ left in the public accounts by the Tories. Of course, for the majority of people living on pennies at a time, such figures represent unimaginable amounts. Eking out a few quid from week to week and making every pound work is the lot of most people, so such sums seem like an unforgivable profligacy.
Everyone in politics knew there was a gap in spending plans, and that Labour, despite all its promises not to increase taxation, would have to find a way to close this spending gap. The Tories had arguably laid a trap for Labour, in the form of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), a supposedly apolitical authority that marks the UK government’s financial homework. The problem is, if politicians and press just ignore it, it doesn’t do much good.
It does provide useful data, though. Its Brief Guide to the Public Finances provides a lot of the clarity regarding government spending that is missing from much of the daily rhetoric. The key piece of data is the total spend by the government: ‘In 2024-25, we expect it to spend £1,278.6 billion, equivalent to around £45,000 per household or 44.4 per cent of national income.’ Against that background, £22 billion is a rounding error that could easily be sorted by knocking a few invoices into the next financial year.
The issue is that the income for the state is expected to be ‘£1,141.2 billion, equivalent to around £40,000 per household or 39.7 per cent of national income.’ This is the infamous deficit of £137.3 billion. This means adding to a rising national debt: ‘in 2024-25, we expect debt to be equivalent to 95.9 per cent of national income. It is equivalent to around £2.8 trillion or £98,000 per household’. This is significant, because the government has to pay interest on that debt: ‘Net interest payments on the national debt are expected to cost £105.2 billion in 2024-25’.
To put that in perspective: ‘The biggest items [of public spending] are health £193.3 billion, education £89.2 billion and defence £37.6 billion.’ Whilst, in theory, the state is immortal and need never pay back its total debts (when particular debts fall due, it can just roll them over and borrow more money to pay its creditors), servicing the interest bill can become expensive, especially if confidence in any particular government falls and creditors demand higher interest rates to cover their risks. This means the government has to manage the size of its debt: this is why deficits become such an all-consuming obsession.
Politicians, however, point to the difference between capital spending and current spending. The government invests ‘£146.1 billion – 11 per cent of the total – on capital investment such as roads and buildings and on loans to businesses and individuals’. This spending is backed by physical infrastructure and leads to ownership of assets. On top of that it spends ‘£450.7 billion on the day-to-day ‘current’ running costs of public services, grants and administration. This is 35 per cent of public spending’. Additionally, the government spends £313.0 billion on welfare payments (£150.7 billion of which is pensions).
The government thus prefers to look at the current deficit which: ‘counts all receipts and all current spending, but excludes spending on net investment’. The current deficit stands at £60.7 billion.
This accounts for why Labour made politically disastrous decisions, such as freezing winter fuel payments and cutting Personal Independence Payments (for a paltry £5 billion in savings, which is tiny compared to overall spending, but one twelfth of the current deficit).
They can, if they are lucky, rely on economic growth (which raises tax receipts, and lowers welfare costs) to cover much of the gap: but the plan is to have a current surplus, which gives the Chancellor of the Exchequer space to either cut taxes or increase spending in fresh areas. The expectation is to have £9.9 billion of such headroom by the next election: so the strategy is pain today and jam tomorrow.
As the OBR notes in its Economic and Fiscal Outlook – March 2025:: ‘The tax-to-GDP ratio is forecast to increase to a post-war high of 37.7 per cent of GDP in 2027-28. Part of this increase is driven by the policies announced at the previous Budget, including the increase in employer National Insurance Contributions and increases to capital taxes’. From the point of view of the capitalist class, in general, that money going to taxation comes from their available profits and lowers the amount of money available for their profitable capital investment. A record high tax rate, especially one fuelled by an effective employee tax (National Insurance employers’ contributions) will be concerning for them in terms of international competitiveness.
In their eyes, then, government indebtedness is preferable, as it forms a means of funding the state under the control and discretion of the rich, with interest rates being a kind of vote of confidence in the way a government handles the debt. The money from interest payments is also welcome to those of them who lend the government money.
The March report also notes that the government is committed to ‘increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP over the next Parliament, which would be equivalent to £17.3 billion in 2029-30’. This would in part be paid for by a £6.8 billion cut in overseas development spending (this simply represents a change from soft to hard power). This unplanned shift in spending priorities shows how the government’s carefully laid plans to generate a current surplus can easily be thrown off course.
All this wealth, though, was originally produced by the efforts of the working class. How much better and more efficient would it be if that effort was directly focused on human needs, instead of producing taxable money?
Book Review from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
One of the common jibes directed at the Socialist Party is that, though we have been in existence well over 100 years, we have made little or no progress in garnering support for the system we advocate to replace capitalism. We’re talking here about a stateless, moneyless, marketless society of common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – one that will be organised democratically on the basis of from each according to ability to each according to need. Our response to the jibe has always been that what we are at least doing is keeping the idea of that society alive and it will be there for the majority to establish once social consciousness has developed sufficiently for them to see the necessity of it.
Positive signs?
And we do see some positive moves in that direction, evidenced by the idea of a moneyless, borderless world society being advocated from a variety of quarters, often quite independent of any contact with or knowledge of the Socialist Party. In recent times, for example, we have reviewed books such as Beyond Money: A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson from Australia and Description of the World of Tomorrow: A World Without Money or Barter or Exchange: a Civilisation of Free Access by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal from France. A couple of years ago, in the United States, we had Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution from Matthew Holton, founder of the ‘Moneyless Society’ Facebook site, which boasts 20,000 members. Earlier this year, Justin Fairchild, also from the US, brought out Unchained: Living Without Money, advocating a society in which ‘cooperation replaces competition, access replaces ownership, purpose replaces profit’. And now, from Harald Neslein Sandø, a Norwegian living in Spain and writing in English, we have Waking Up. A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, whose subject of exploration is unmistakeably the kind of society we have always advocated, even though he does not call it, as we do, ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’.
Exploring possibilities
Sandø ‘s book also differs from the others in that it is a work of fiction, science fiction in fact. In his introductory note, the author describes science fiction as ‘a canvas for exploring possibilities’ and his book as ‘an invitation to imagine, question and reflect’. It chooses, in fact, to tell the wholly imaginary story of an individual, Benjamin, who, having been cryogenically frozen when about to die from cancer in 2015, is brought back to life 100 years later after a new society has been established. This is a society based no longer on money but on ‘community effort’, where, as Benjamin is told by one of the first characters he meets, there is ‘shared stewardship’ of the planet and ‘no one owns it – we belong to it’, and there is ‘no money, no ownership, no competition’.
We get little explanation of how this new state of things was brought about, apart from asides such as ‘the planet was about to collapse due to climate change and pollution’, ‘the need for a completely different system became clear’, ‘the monetary system was killing the planet as it demanded a constant overconsumption of resources’, ‘it was a global, democratic decision’, and ‘this transformation has been made possible through a new mindset – a mindset of trust and respect’. We are, however, supplied with intricate details about how the society operates via Benjamin’s discovery of the new way of living people have and the unimaginably advanced forms of technology that challenge everything he once knew. He finds a sustainable world in which human beings collaborate with one another, innovation thrives, mutual support has taken the place of conflict, and there are ‘no supervisors, no bosses, no payroll, no urgency’. And he is told: ‘For the first time in the written history of mankind … we have evolved to a stage where we can look at this planet as a whole, see humanity as one family, and live without borders. This is a world where we all coexist peacefully, without war.’ He also learns that ‘through the efficient management of resources, we have achieved a relative abundance that allows everyone to live comfortably in their own way, regardless of where they are in the world’. It has also become a world of regenerative agriculture where ‘rewilded landscapes flourished’ and which ‘thrived not on domination but on unity’. One of the characters Benjamin meets tells him: ‘We take care of each other, and in doing that, we take care of ourselves. There’s no struggle, no scarcity. Just collaboration.’ The same character goes on: ‘Human nature turned out to be not only selfish and violent. You can choose and, you choose friendliness, which I’m very happy for’.
Human interest
A bit of a fairy tale, a pipe dream, some might say. But it is made less of one – and given a certain plausibility – by the author’s continual explanation of how it works in practice, how the highly advanced technology used to make it operate has been developed and keeps developing. This plausibility is enhanced – and the reader is drawn into the narrative – by the ‘human’ story it tells of how the individual who has been brought back to life adapts to the new world he finds. The book had begun by painting a picture of Benjamin’s former existence when he was a billionaire capitalist driven entirely by the need he felt to accumulate wealth. Now on waking up to find that money plays no part in anyone’s existence, he first feels out of place, ‘obsolete’, ‘not knowing where he belongs’, as he puts it, and he (and we) wonder whether he will cope mentally, how he will accept and adjust to the completely new system and mindset he finds all around him..
As a way of trying to comfort Benjamin and ease his integration into the new world, the guide assigned to him puts an ingenious twist into what he is finding by saying ‘We are all capitalists, as we are living off the shared capital of the planet and universe’. He is then pulled into the drama of a small group of ‘renegades’ who seek (unsuccessfully) to sabotage things and return the world to its old competitive ways, but he comes out the other side in clear opposition to this and in support of a ‘borderless globe’, where, in words that he himself now utters, there is ‘seamless harmony between humans and nature’, where everyone leads ‘their own versions of a good life, respecting each other and the planet’. All this lends some genuine ‘human interest’ to what might otherwise be an accumulation of dry technological detail and, in fact, manages to make the book something of a page turner, its 200-odd pages having been devoured by the current writer in a single sitting.
How do we get there?
There is clearly some comparison to be made here with other attempts at depicting life and organisation in a future non-market society of voluntary cooperation and free access. For many it will bring to mind, for example, William Morris’s late 19th century News from Nowhere, Robert Llewellyn’s News from Gardenia from 2012, and, in particular, the very recent attempt by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass (Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics) to provide a kind of day-to-day outline of what a future society ‘without money or a market’ might be like, something they call ‘a total alternative to capitalism’ and offering, as the authors put it, ‘everything from a plan for resource allocation to an outline of what life will feel like’. The main difference between this book and Sandø’s, however, is that, while Vettese and Pendergrass’s depiction is founded on profound knowledge of and reflection on the scientific and technological problems that a marketless society would need to deal with and overcome, Sandø’s vision, while also technological, is far more ‘imaginative’, fantasy-laden one might say. At the same time, it must be said, this is a factor that contributes to its readability.
From a socialist point of view, the main problem that arises from Sandø’s book – and indeed the others mentioned here, including William Morris’s classic – is that none of them deal effectively with the ‘how’, ie, how we get there. None of them specify the spreading of consciousness by the vast majority of workers as the prime condition – the sole condition – under which a socially conscious working class can, by democratic use of the vote, take the power necessary to abolish capitalism and set about organising a genuine socialist society of the kind looked forward to by all these sources – even if they do not all necessarily use the term ‘socialism’ to describe it.
Howard Moss
Blogger's Note:
A number of the other books mentioned in this review have themselves been reviewed in previous Socialist Standards:
Oct 2022: Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson
Oct 2022:Description of the World of Tomorrow by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal
Jan 2023:Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holton
Mar 2023:Half-Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergras
Book Review from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
An Economy of Want. Economics Reworked. By Donald Power. ISBN 978-1399985888. Also available free from Amazon as an e-book.
This self-published book starts off well enough. That, like all other animals, humans survive by applying their natural energy to obtain from the rest of nature what they need. Thanks to humans’ particular anatomy, their needs — or ‘wants’ as Power calls them — have become immensely greater than those of any other animal, as have the ways of obtaining from nature the means of satisfying them. How they obtain them has been the basis of the economic system of every human society.
Present-day society, he points out, is one where a minority owns most natural resources and instruments of production, fashioned and refashioned from materials that originally came from nature, while the rest have nothing but their natural ability to work. The latter have to work for the former and provide them with the means to satisfy their wants. This means, Power claims, that the economy is driven by what the owners ‘want’ in order to satisfy their needs. They pay workers to produce these and so provide workers with the money to satisfy some of their own ‘wants’ even if not much more than enough to maintain their particular ability to work.
That is alright as far as it goes, but the assumption is that what drives the economy today is the consumption wants of the owners. Power explicitly states this and it is the basis of his argument against the dominant school of economics that teaches that the free market system tends to lead to full employment and also of his explanation of booms and slumps. According to him, the level of employment depends on what the owners want (desire) to consume, so it is entirely possible that they might not want enough to bring about the full employment of the whole workforce. Booms are explained by the owners coming to want more and slumps by their coming to want less after the bubble bursts. He would seem to be saying that the economy is driven by the arbitrary desires of business owners.
He is, however, on the right track in that how today’s economy moves does depend on what the owners do with the surplus that the workers provide them with. But it is not what they want to consume that drives the economy but what they re-invest — or don’t. Power is well aware that they seek profits but gives the impression that this is something they decide to do when they desire to consume more. In reality, it is something that is forced upon them by the workings of the competitive struggle for profits, which is part of what capitalism is; they have to give priority to re-investment in more modern machinery and methods just to survive as a business concern. The capitalist economy is not driven by consumption, not even the consumption of the capitalists. It is driven by business owners’ market-imposed quest for profits, not their own consumption. What we have today is not so much an Economy of Want as an Economy of Profit.
Power’s main concern is to save the planet. Because he thinks that the economy is driven by wants rather than profits, he thinks that it can be reformed — ‘redesigned’ is a word he uses — to work differently by measures to change what people want to buy or use. He proposes to limit the consumption of the owners and, through taxes and subsidies, to re-direct the population towards wanting goods and services whose production and use don’t harm the rest of nature. This is a desirable goal but is incompatible with the present economic system which is driven by profits not wants and so requires its abolition.
Having said this, the book is written in simple, easy-to-read English. It is also refreshing to read a book from a critic of the way capitalism works who doesn’t repeat nonsense about banks having the power to create money from thin air. He accepts that work is the basis of wealth-production. In fact, he uses a labour theory of value, even though he doesn’t realise that Marx was as aware as he is that this doesn’t explain the price of land, paintings or the high income of talented footballers and other artists (demand in relation to unique supply does; the labour theory only applies to what can be reproduced).
From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
‘Football belongs to everyone!’ So says the voiceover to a trailer on BBC1 showing a video montage of goals being scored and shots saved by men and women, girls and boys. Exemplary diversity and equality. The only problem is the statement is patently untrue. Even a cursory acquaintance with the Premier League is sufficient to become all too aware that football is securely in the deep pockets of capital. Clubs are owned by the international mega-rich, some linked to regimes with records on human rights that are dubious at best.
August and it’s back! As if it ever went away. The summer break just means footballers play in competitions other than the main season. The transfer market has also opened and assets, footballers, are traded for tens, even hundreds of millions of pounds. Regular contenders for winning the Premier League and then contesting the European Championship are those that have access to seemingly bottomless coffers. There is absolutely no acknowledgement that those coffers are kept generously topped up by wealth created by the working class and then appropriated by the few, 1 percent or so, who constitute the capitalist class around the world.
The Premier League was created in the early 1990s to serve the requirements of satellite broadcasters. Those who own the game could profit by selling it through the media directly to fans at home who outnumber by huge numbers those who actually attend matches. There was a notion that supporters might be allowed into games at reduced prices, perhaps for free, to provide the atmosphere. However, clubs found that there were still fans who prefer to go to games, making them a further source of revenue. Apart from the actual football there is a huge trade in replica shirts and other merchandise.
Football is a commodity, a product that has value produced through the labour power of workers, including the footballers. While some of those workers are apparently generously paid, this merely reflects the far greater income they generate, realised through streaming services, tickets sales and club shops. For all the glamour football is no different to any other commodity, being produced for profit. While a club is successful no one questions the ownership. Declining prowess or relegation can lead to one set of owners having to sell to another. This may involve financial shenanigans such as leveraged buyouts when a club is purchased using its own assets.
This though is just the modern iteration of the way it’s been since league football began in the late Victorian period. The 12 original founders were clubs formed by local capitalists in the English economic powerhouses of the day.
Football will belong to everybody when the world belongs to everybody. As long as the profit motive is the only motive for producing anything, the game must remain a spectator sport, not the spectators’ sport. Just as there can’t be socialism in one country, fans becoming owners of their clubs would change little. Unless those fans were super-rich capitalists, their club would remain vulnerable to takeover and ultimate economic failure.
Until there is a worldwide embracing of socialism as the game changer around the world, football, like every other commodity, will belong to the minority who exploit it for their own ends. Whatever the BBC says. What about another sport? Cricket was once a major alternative during football’s more rigorously observed close season.
Just as the Premier League was developed for television, so cricket has undergone changes driven by the same imperative. The most obvious example of this is the twenty-20 format. A game played within a time period that suits media scheduling. It has also proved popular with spectators who can attend and see a complete game in an evening.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) has become the leading version, attracting players from all the major cricketing countries. With a potential home audience drawn from a billion-plus population already wedded to the game over generations it has proved a fecund money tree. As with the English Premier League (EPL) in football, television delivers cricket into the homes of viewers around the world. Such is the profile of the IPL it became an issue during the recent border conflict between India and Pakistan.
Matches were left unplayed and players instructed to return to their own countries for their safety. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had only suspended remaining fixtures that were eventually played and the competition concluded as the crisis simmered down. The financial strength of the IPL is indicated by its being the second largest money generator in sport, only exceeded by the USA’s National Football League (NFL). This not only allows it financial influence in other cricketing nations, but political as well.
The Caribbean Premier League has six Indian owners involved and South African SA20 has major Indian investment. While back in England the chief executive of Lancashire County Cricket club, Daniel Gidney, has been reported as suggesting the Hundred competition should sell a stake in itself to the BCCI. The sport’s governing body is the International Cricket Council (ICC) whose present chairman is Jay Shah. Jay is the son of Amit Shah, a long-time political ally of Narendra Modi, leader of India’s governing party, the BJP.
It seems more than likely that closer examination of any popular international sport would reveal financial and political ties and influences. For example, the estimated cost of staging the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024 was $9.5 billion. The revenue generated by staging the games was around $12 billion.
It’s not the winning, but the taking part, was the old mantra. Perhaps that should be amended to, it’s not just the winning, but the taking the cash. Every activity, while capitalism continues, is ultimately driven by the profit motive. It has to be. It cannot be otherwise unless, of course, the working people of the world cease being merely spectators. By forming a worldwide league dedicated to their own interests the vast majority could step over the boundary, blow the whistle on capitalism and win the race for socialism.
The Material World column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
The article on Venezuela published in last June’s Socialist Standard referred to the upcoming presidential election there as ‘unlikely to be free and fair’ and likely, whatever the real outcome, to result in Nicolás Maduro declaring himself ‘the winner’. And that’s exactly what happened. Maduro’s opponent, Edmundo González, produced figures to show that he had won around 67 percent of the votes compared to Maduro’s 29 percent. But this did not prevent Maduro from shamelessly declaring victory though not providing any supporting data as no official results were ever published. Previously he had banned his chief opponent, María Corona Machado, from standing, blocked her proposed replacement, and then adopted various other tactics to manipulate the vote.
Repression
Maduro responded with brutal repression against the thousands who took to the streets to protest, calling it a ‘fascist outbreak’. Since then Human Rights Watch has documented widespread violence against opponents by the Venezuelan authorities and by pro-Maduro armed groups known as ‘colectivos’, including killing of protestors and bystanders, ‘disappearances’ of opposition party members, arbitrary detentions and torture and ill-treatment of detainees. Protestors are often charged with broadly defined offences such as ‘incitement to hatred’, ‘resistance to authority’, and ‘terrorism’, with possible penalties of up to 30 years. Before the election, close to 8 million people had left Venezuela, an exodus constituting one of Latin America’s largest mass population movements in history. Since then, many more have fled, including elected officials, local authority workers, polling station workers, human rights advocates and journalists, and it is being projected that 2 to 3 million more will leave in the foreseeable future. This is being driven not just by the existence of a full-blown authoritarian regime, where the last shred of popular legitimacy – properly democratic elections – has vanished, but also by dire economic conditions including reliably reported frequent power failures, lack of basic foodstuffs, and sky-high crime rates partly associated with gang warfare and drug trafficking.
The intolerance of opposition was confirmed during the period of Maduro’s official ‘self-inauguration’ in January of this year when, things having ‘gone quiet’ in the outside world and with little media attention on the country, he announced plans for constitutional changes to further consolidate his power. He declared the beginning of what would be a more entrenched phase of authoritarian rule based on a strong alliance between civilian authorities, military forces, the police and the intelligence apparatus. On the day of the inauguration itself, widespread and ultra-expensive precautions were taken to counter the possibility being mooted that the opposition could somehow carry out its declared intention to return its president-elect, González, to the country from exile in Spain and hold a parallel counter-inauguration.
USA sabotage?
Outside Venezuela, Maduro enjoys the backing of some other authoritarian states – for example Cuba and Nicaragua in the Americas, and Russia, China and Iraq beyond. The USA is Maduro’s chief opponent having put up a reward of 25 million dollars for information leading to his arrest. This gives Maduro and his supporters both inside and outside Venezuela ammunition to attribute to American actions (eg, economic sanctions and CIA sabotage activity) the decline in the country’s economy, the poor state of its health care and education systems and its inability to feed large numbers of its people. This also gives Maduro the opportunity to portray the country as a beleaguered socialist enclave oppressed by, but standing up to, a bullying capitalist power. Not that this has prevented him from cooperating with Donald Trump in agreeing to accept back into Venezuela thousands of the desperate refugees who had left for the USA and who Trump is now having deported.
Predictably, the parliamentary and local elections held in May of this year again saw Maduro declaring overwhelming victory, this time with a claimed 82.68% of the votes cast and governorships in 23 out of the country’s 24 states. On this occasion, however, it seems likely that he did have a genuine majority given that the main opposition parties boycotted the elections and urged voters to do so on the grounds that they could not be free and fair. The turnout was said to be as low as 25 percent.
Not socialist
A recent report on the deportations in the Washington Post, while correctly describing Venezuela as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘repressive’, also referred to it as ‘Marxist’ and ‘Socialist’, neither of which labels is correct. While it’s true that both these terms are much debated, they are often abused and there is absolutely no warrant in Marx for the form of state-run capitalism that exists in Venezuela to be called ‘socialism’. In fact, the system there, based as it is on the market and buying and selling, is the very antithesis of socialism, which is a world society of common ownership and democratic control. Maduro’s regime may pose as ‘socialist’, but it is no more socialist than those other state capitalist regimes such as China and Cuba that support it. Yet the fraudulent use and circulation of the term allows those on the political right of the capitalist spectrum to point to the ‘failure of socialism’ for the poverty, tyranny, population flight and legalised violence that are its salient features. At the same time left-wing supporters of the Maduro regime blame the USA for stifling a valiant ‘socialist’ experiment by starving the country of resources and fomenting discontent among its population. The essence of a socialist society is a moneyless, stateless system with free access to all goods and services and based on voluntary cooperation and economic equality. Nothing of this is even close to existing in Venezuela or any of the countries that support it.
The future?
So what is the future for Venezuela? Maduro’s regime has been described as ‘a criminal mafia gang with the trappings of governmental power’. Can he hold on to power indefinitely, despite the minority support he has among the population and an economy that continues to be run into the ground, leaving most people struggling just to survive? For now Maduro seems to have the loyalty of the military, with its high-ranking officials being generously rewarded and the support of special police units, militias and intelligence facilities backed by Cuba’s secret service. But will this patronage allow him to survive, especially in the face of what still seems to be a widely supported opposition, peaceful yet determined?
If Venezuela proves capable of moving to the kind of liberal democracy that capitalism can offer, limited as that is, then this will create an environment where genuine socialist ideas will have a better chance of being put forward, and hopefully spreading.
From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
Tony Blair emerged from his coffin recently to declare ‘We’ve got to get the younger generation back to work’ and ominously warned against ‘medicalising the ups and downs of life. You’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life’.
Anyone who’s been through a challenging period knows that of course it can impact your mental health. Yet Blair insists that too many young people are ‘choosing not to work,’ and calls for benefits reform. Now, Labour wants to cut Personal Independence Payments and has signalled it’ll tighten eligibility rules, with shadow ministers suggesting PIP ‘is not working as it should.’
Starmer’s proposed reforms to cut disability benefits provoked a rebellion by well over 100 Labour MPs who argued the plan would strip support from up to 800,000 people, deepen poverty for 300,000–700,000 more (including 50,000 children), and create a two-tier welfare system that abandons the most vulnerable. Critics, including grassroots movements like Disabled People Against Cuts and disabled constituents, warn this is a continuation of austerity, with MPs likening it to ‘the biggest attack on the welfare state since George Osborne’. Charities insisted cuts wouldn’t boost employment and demanded a pause, transparency, and genuine consultation with disabled people. Labour MPs were pledging to vote against and calling for alternative reforms like taxing the super rich instead of penalising those in need.
Since then, following public backlash and intervention by the UN, Parliament voted on 1 July to remove the clauses tightening PIP (formerly Disability Living Allowance) eligibility. These measures are now to be deferred pending a review led by ‘Sir’ Stephen Timms, expected in autumn 2026. Existing PIP claimants are said not to be affected by the current legislation. However, changes to Universal Credit remain in place: from April 2026, new claimants of the Limited Capability for Work Related Activity element will receive reduced support. Existing recipients will continue receiving full payments, adjusted for inflation through 2029.
The Rosenhan experiment
The Rosenhan experiment (1973) exposed flaws in psychiatric diagnosis. Psychologist David Rosenhan and seven others feigned auditory hallucinations to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals. Once admitted, they acted normally, but doctors still diagnosed them with serious mental illnesses and kept them institutionalised for weeks.
The study highlighted the subjectivity and unreliability of psychiatric labels, showing that once someone was labelled as mentally ill, even ‘normal’ behaviour was interpreted as pathological. In a follow-up challenge, a hospital claimed it could spot fake patients and identified several, only for Rosenhan to reveal he had sent none.
Colonisation of the mind
This is not just about a few misguided doctors. The Western medical model has long been, in part, a tool of oppression. Colonisers have always arrived with missionaries, medics, mercenaries, and merchants. Psychiatry was part of that arsenal, often pathologising indigenous cultures, crushing resistance, and justifying forced assimilation. Traditional beliefs and ways of life were conveniently labelled as madness.
Psychiatry helped run residential schools, enforced sterilisation, and packed institutions, all aimed at breaking indigenous communities. On occasion, psychiatric diagnosis was used to pathologise cultural difference, frame indigenous resistance as insanity and justify colonial policies of confinement and re-education. The same logic still operates today. Psychiatric labels are often used to control people rather than help them.
‘Mad bints’
Women have always been prime targets for psychiatry’s controlling hand. Those who refused to fit into patriarchal roles were labelled hysterical or locked away in asylums. Psychiatry became a handy tool to silence women who challenged capitalism, patriarchy, or both.
Colonisation made this worse for indigenous women who were branded insane for practising traditional healing or resisting colonial authority. Today, women—especially those who are neurodivergent or marginalised—are still dismissed, misdiagnosed, and overmedicated. Psychiatry continues to treat women’s distress as personal pathology rather than a response to social and economic oppression.
A true alternative would focus on community care, autonomy, and dismantling the structures that create suffering in the first place. But when the profit motive comes into play it stops being about helping and about making people useful.
Adaptive response to capitalism?
Humans are nothing if not adaptive; that’s how we’ve survived this long. Under capitalism’s relentless pressure, people, especially those who are marginalised, develop ways of thinking and acting that do not fit into narrow boxes labelled normal.
Neurodivergence is not purely created by capitalism; it has always existed and would exist under other systems. But the way it manifests today is shaped by the demands and pressures of this system.
Traits like hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and creative thinking can help people resist the nonsense of capitalism. Yet capitalism only values these traits when they increase productivity. Difficulties with executive function or sensory processing become disabling because of rigid, noisy, and punishing environments.
If we lived in a society structured differently—one that prioritised people instead of profit—neurodivergence might look very different, both in how common it is and how it is understood.
Class war in our minds
Capitalism is not just a class war; it is a war of the mind. It demands conformity, punishes difference, and uses trauma as a tool of control. Still, resistance keeps bubbling up. Neurodivergent people often develop ways of thinking that refuse to follow capitalist logic, question authority, and imagine new ways of living.
The pushback against capitalism is in many ways also a neurodivergent pushback—one that questions authority, re-imagines community, and refuses the dehumanisation that capitalism enforces.
Capitalism will always find new ways to divide us, control us and blame us for the suffering it creates. The only real cure is to get rid of the system making us sick in the first place.
The fight against capitalism must also be a fight for neurodivergent liberation. We need to see the links between capitalism, trauma, and neurodivergence if we want a world where all minds are valued, not just those that keep the profit machine running.
Book Review from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
Borderlines: a History of Europe in 29 Borders. By Lewis Baston. Hodder Press £10.99.
This is a combination of history, contemporary politics and a travelogue. The author records his travels around parts of Europe, from Ireland to Finland and Romania, especially the border areas, reflecting on linguistic and cultural issues over the centuries. His account is supplemented by a number of photos and some helpful maps.
Prior to 1500 or so, there would have been no checkpoints at boundaries, and people could cross them as they pleased. Many borders nowadays are completely arbitrary, often going through the middle of fields and roads. There are over two hundred border crossings between Northern Ireland and the Republic, for instance. The Large Hadron Collider at Geneva in Switzerland is partly in France, and when it is operating a proton will cross the border 20,000 times a second. But perhaps the most extreme example is the town of Baarle, which is split between the Netherlands and Belgium: the border sometimes runs through the front doors of houses, and the Belgian part of the town consists of twenty-one enclaves surrounded by parts of the Netherlands. But at least the local fire brigade is cross-border, as ‘fires do not recognise international borders’.
The Sudetenland (the pretext for the Munich crisis of 1938) ‘did not exist before about 1930’. Kaliningrad (formerly called Königsberg) is in an exclave, a part of Russia enclosed by Poland and Lithuania; it was wanted by the Soviet Union as a year-round port on the Baltic. It was tightly controlled under Bolshevik rule, but now it is apparently ‘reclaiming its Prussian heritage’. The town of Chernivitsi is currently in Ukraine, but previously it was at various times in the USSR, Romania and Austria-Hungary.
People often talk about ‘historic boundaries’, as if they automatically have some legitimacy or justification. But borders change so often and so much over the years that they just reflect a particular moment or the balance of power at some period. In the case of Poland, for instance, borders have been altered many times, with partitions, annexations and people being forcibly relocated. After 1945, the German population of around eight million on the Polish side of the Oder–Neisse line was expelled, mostly to West Germany. This was ‘radical ethnic cleansing’, largely because Stalin saw this as a suitable border.
Borders are often a convenient place for smuggling, and also for taking advantage of differences in prices. Several million Russians cross into Finland each year to buy white goods of supposedly superior quality. But more often borders are heavily-policed places of suspicion, where mixed communities suffer and are oppressed. This book gives a vivid account of what borders, boundaries and frontiers can do to humans.
