Capitalism’s book-burning machines (2026)

From the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marx and the machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ownership and control

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

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

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

What is to be done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A .T.

Pathfinders: Christmas Crackers (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two of the biggest science news stories of the year, and possibly of the decade, broke in late November. One was the derivation of multi-purpose or ‘pluripotent’ human cells from simple skin (BBC Online, 20 November). Until now, the only known way to extract stem cells, cells which have the capability to turn into any of the 220 cell-types in the human body and thus potentially grow or repair any bodily organ or tissue, was from aborted human embryos. The moral issues around this have mired the science in controversy and, especially in the United States, have all but throttled research. Already a small culture of former skin cells has been grown into heart tissue which has begun beating. The consequences, if this technique works, are hard to exaggerate for many otherwise untreatable conditions, or for those people with little chance of a life-saving transplant, or for those with a successful transplant but facing a lifetime of immuno-suppressants and at risk from the mildest infection.

Of course, it might not work, but if does, it would take the worst kind of Christmas Scrooge to point out that this is rich-country technology to cure rich-country people, and which doesn’t do a whole lot for the several million kids who die every year because their mostly corrupt governments won’t spend one lousy dollar on their healthcare.

The other story concerns a Californian surfer and part-time snowboarding instructor, named Garrett Lisi, whose curious hobby just might make him as famous as Einstein (New Scientist, 17 November). For Garrett, when not surfing in Hawaii, moonlights as a theoretical physicist, and has just come up with an idea that might, from a physicist’s point of view, be the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The ‘standard model’ of physics has for the last thirty years or so made reliably accurate predictions about everything from the minutest particle to the largest galaxies, using its two main propositions, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity. The problem has been that these two propositions have never fitted together. While quantum mechanics describes three of the four fundamental forces in nature, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity is the odd one out, and can only be understood using relativity. Logic dictates that there must be an underlying law which unites the behaviour of these four forces, and intuition suggests they might even be aspects of the same thing, but despite all kinds of highly elaborate ideas, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, nobody has managed to connect them.

What Garrett has done is to take a known, 8-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points, and map all the 40 known particles in their various ‘identities’ to one or other of those points, uniquely including particles representing gravity. Rotating the pattern then gives known and observed relationships between these particles, but also throws light on new unsuspected relationships. In addition, having 20 points left with no particles to put in them, Lisi has posited the existence of 20 new particles which, tantalisingly, might be found next year when the Large Hadron Collider comes online at CERN in Switzerland. If the LHC finds the missing particles, physics will have found its holy grail, a theory of everything, the greatest advance for thirty years, and Lisi, at the very least, will surf his way to the Nobel Prize. Lisi has even devised a curious video animation which you can watch here: http://tinyurl.com/25DPF9. It doesn’t explain anything very well, but it’s quite fun to watch.

Of course, the theory still might be wrong, but if it isn’t, it would take the most miserable seasonal grouch to point out that the greatest advance in physics for three hundred years still wouldn’t mean a damn thing if we’ve killed our planet off because of our collective inability to spend one lousy brain-cell on our social and planetary healthcare. And several YouTube cynics, after watching Lisi’s bizarre ‘confetti’ video, make precisely this point. One particularly concise offering sums them up: “All I want to do is figure out how to make a living without having to go to work. Is that too much to ask?” Well, too much for theoretical physicists, anyway. Pity they aren’t asking socialists that question.

However, 2007 hasn’t been groundbreaking in every department, and there have been a fair collection of silly stories around this year. Two now sadly untraceable stories seen this year involve, on the one hand, the invention of ‘space money’ for all those space tourists of whom the likes of Richard Branson are rubbing their greedy hands together in anticipation, and the intriguing suggestion that NASA’s proposed crewed moon-base, due to be ready in 2020, won’t use money because internal trading would be seen as divisive in the colony. Extreme efforts to locate this story have turned up nothing, so perhaps it was, after all, a figment of a fevered mind.

On firmer ground, there is the continuing argument over online copyright issues. On the progressive side, the band Radiohead recently released an album online with an invitation to ‘pay what you like’. With some paying nothing, but many paying approximately a ‘fair price’ and one clearly disturbed enthusiast paying over £700, other bands are likely to follow this innovation. As this column has previously noted, the fight to preserve copyright online is viewed by many as a lost cause, and many entertainers now seek to recoup through live appearances and promotions instead of through the music. Elsewhere, a wonderful initiative by a Canadian student resulted in thousands of previously unobtainable and out of copyright musical scores being placed online, for any budding pianist to have a go at. But, like the proverbial turd on a bowling green, an Austrian company has appeared on the scene with an international, and unprecedented lawsuit which, on the mere suspicion that there might somewhere be one manuscript still under copyright, has succeeded in closing down this free resource and depriving musicians everywhere of harmless fun (Link.).

Anyone who has ever sworn at a Satnav device will be interested in two conflicting stories, one of which asserts that Satnav is better and safer than using maps (New Scientist, 4 August), the other reporting a litany of building damage and road bridge demolitions resulting from large lorries being sent down totally unsuitable roads by their ‘eye in the sky’ (Link.). It might be wise to see in this perspective the breathless predictions of one robot engineer that humans will be marrying robots within the next 40 years (David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots, publishing date 6 November). Jaded socialists will conclude from the above stories that the human race is going off track in more ways than one.

Lastly, of more interest to those socialists interested in the science/religion debate, the second Beyond Belief conference of concerned scientists has just taken place at La Jolla, California. New Scientist (10 November) takes a surprisingly disparaging view of scientists like Richard Dawkins who refuse to accord respect to religion, and this may of course be due to their high-minded moral impartiality. Or it may be the fact that they have started taking two-page advertisements from the religious Templeton Foundation, that organisation which, as Dawkins has noted, are prepared to pay huge amounts of money to ‘any scientist willing to say something nice about religion’. New Scientist would presumably have no comment to make on what must be the oddest news story of the year (BBC Online, 14 September), in which, after huge protests, the Indian Government withdrew a report to the Supreme Court which dared to claim that a rocky formation lying between the Indian coast and Sri Lanka was not in fact a bridge built by the god Ram and his army of monkeys but was a natural geological feature. Work on the shipping canal project was disrupted for months and the Interior Minister’s resignation was demanded. Who said there’s no fun in fundamentalism?

Paddy Shannon

Voice From The Back: House hunting (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

House hunting

As young working class couples contemplate marriage and start looking for a house or flat that they can afford to buy or rent, it might be worth them considering how members of the capitalist class deal with their “housing problem”:

“This mansion in Surrey cost £70m. It has 30 bedrooms, five swimming pools and its own cinema . . . By American standards, of course, the Surrey mansion is at the mean end of the scale. This is a country where Larry Ellison takes on Bill Gates for the title of top cheese by building a bigger house than him. (Gates recently announced that he was extending his lavish $100m home near Seattle, to which Ellison replied with a $150m Japanese style mansion in California, twice the size of the White House and complete with artificial lakes, waterfalls and 3,750 tons of hand-chiselled Chinese granite for the retaining walls.) The world’s largest private house is believed to be the New York industrialist R.A.Rennert’s mansion Fair Field, which is 100 miles east of Manhattan and boasts 29 bedrooms, 42 bathrooms, a 164 seat theatre, two bowling alleys and an English-style pub.” (Guardian, 15 June.)

A cancerous system

Commenting on an article in a previous issue two letters to the editor in Time magazine (25 June) show that workers as far apart as Istanbul and Massachusetts have a pretty good idea about how capitalism operates :

“If there really is a war against cancer, as you contend then why not attack this disease on the battlefield? Why not go after its supply lines of tobacco, food additives and pollution? The drive for corporate profits generates many of the products that can cause this illness, and even more profits are made in treating it. Meanwhile, cancer victims fall by the wayside as collateral damage. Chris Glover (Istanbul)”. “Finally, the breakthrough in cancer drugs that we have long been searching for! Too bad that few of us will be able to afford them. David Chesterton (Massachusetts)”.

Touchy, feely socialists

We are often accused of class bias, of being nasty individuals who are only concerned about the working class, with never a thought for the plight of the capitalist class. Not so, we were almost moved to tears when we read the following :

“Ronit Lami, a London psychologist who treats people suffering from affluenza or ‘sudden wealth syndrome’, says her patients are highly motivated perfectionists who will do anything to achieve their ends. She says: ‘It doesn’t matter how much money there is in the bank, there is never enough. There is a huge fear of failure. If they suddenly lose their money, they suffer deep depression. Many identify themselves through their possessions, so their whole identity collapses’“ (Sunday Times, 24 June).

This “affluenza” is an awful disorder, one that we fortunate members of the working class will never suffer; so we think it only right to comfort these sufferers with the news that there will be no money or banks inside socialism. Another good reason to organise for socialism, you can relieve these poor souls from their insecurity fears and leave Ronit Lami free to get a real job.

Mao’s afterthought

Chinese state capitalism is desperate for foreign investment; so much so, that at its 80th anniversary celebrations the Communist Party revealed its long held admiration of capitalism :

“Liu Jingfeng, a history professor at the party school, told an on-line forum run by the official People’s Daily newspaper: ‘Mao Zedong did not oppose capitalism all the time. At the Seventh Party Congress, Mao Zedong fully endorsed the idea that China should develop capitalism.’” (Times, 5 July)

Science in fetters

Capitalism was once a progressive force in the field of science. The discoveries of chemistry and physics were essential for the advance of the new society. But now capitalism has entered its restrictive phase, where, because of copyright and information ownership, scientific investigation is being restricted. Immense publishing firms like Reed Elsevier zealously guard the copyrights that earned them profits of £231 million last year :

“More than 800 British researchers have joined 22,000 others from 161 countries in a campaign to boycott publishers of scientific journals who refuse to make research papers freely available on the internet after six months. ‘Science depends on knowledge and technology being in the public domain’, said Michael Ashburner, professor of Biology at Cambridge University and one of the leading signatories of the campaign, the Public Library of Sciences. ‘In that sense, science belongs to the people, and the fruits of science shouldn’t be owned or even transferred by publishers for huge profits’“ (Guardian, 26 May).

It seems that science is now being restricted by the ownership relationships of capitalism. Karl Marx wrote in January 1859 in his introduction to The Critique of Political Economy something that foresaw such a development:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters.”

At the Bottom of the Heap (2006)

From the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chairman of the Bench had wanted to send Chu Hua to prison, so she had been let out of the dock to speak to the duty solicitor in case he could persuade the magistrates to a less vengeful sentence. Now she sat squirming downwards and backwards into her chair, her dull eyes flickering in fear, clutching her threadbare jacket against the chill of the interview room. She did not look like a criminal who threatened to undermine what all right-thinking people – like magistrates – uphold as the basis of civilised society. It was not that she had cloned credit cards, nor dealt in controlled drugs. She had not sexually abused any children, nor deceived impoverished young women in Eastern Europe into coming here only to find that the well paid jobs they had been promised were really as enslaved prostitutes. She had not murdered anyone, nor robbed a bank at the point of a gun. “So why did you” asked the solicitor, “try to sell those counterfeit DVDs?”

It was sad story, eked out with the help of the interpreter. Chu Hua was born in a remote village in North China; the interpreter knew of the area, that it was deeply impoverished, obviously not borne up by the flood of supposed prosperity of supposed “socialist” China. Chu Hua’s parents tried to provide for their family from what little they produced in their vegetable garden. They could not afford to send the children to school so Chu Hua was scantily educated and illiterate, with no prospects of improving in that village. In 2001 she came to England as an asylum seeker, on the grounds that she was a member of the Fa Lung Kung cult. Her application was refused and now she has to report each month to the Home Office Immigration Service, and she is not allowed to take employment or apply for benefit. Sometimes she gets cash-in-hand work as a cleaner but this lasts for only a week or so because she is scared of being reported for benefit fraud. She is reduced to relying on friends and other contacts for food and somewhere to live, sleeping on floors in a roomful of other people. But bad as this is she thinks it is better than her former life in China.

Cult

On the face of it, the Fa Lung Kung seems to do little more than practise slow, hypnotic, Tai-Chi like meditation exercises – like those hardy early morning groups in many an English park. The problem in China was that it developed into a hugely popular movement with a membership large enough, and ardent enough, for the government to outlaw it as a destabilising influence. At some point it wandered beyond meditation, claiming that its followers can see through a “third eye” which protects them and can cure them of diseases. Such preoccupations, on a large scale, can be addictive enough to affect workers’ disciplined acceptance of their role as wage slaves. A ruling class will not be happy to allow too much brainwashing which does not promote their own power and influence over society. At times Fa Lung Kung has been tolerated in China (although it was banned under Mao Zedong’s regime as unhealthy and superstitious) but in recent years there has been a fierce crackdown in which the cult’s followers lost their jobs or were sent to prison where they were beaten or even killed. As might be expected, the movement spawned a considerable media industry and not a few con artists to exploit anyone vulnerable to claims about mystical powers of mental adjustment to social stress. Even so the mere fact of membership of the cult was accepted in the United States as justification for asylum; as Chu Hua soon found out, that did not apply in this country.

So she spends most of her days wandering along the local High Street and it was there, in an indoor market, that a man who must have noticed her vulnerability suggested that she could earn a little money by helping him sell some DVDs. It was not long before the police saw her – and recognised her as someone who had been arrested twice before for the same offence. Her two previous appearances in Court had resulted in her being ordered to do Community Service, which she had completed happily as it was better than the High Street and kept her occupied, scrubbing off graffiti or cleaning school playgrounds. She must have wondered why she was not allowed to do the same kind of work for a wage. But now this was her third such offence in a short period and the Court was running out of patience with her.

Pirates

The recent explosion in the production and sale of pirated DVDs has alarmed the industry, which sees it as a threat to its profits. The biggest operator in this field is HMV, which also trades in CDs and owns the Waterstones booksellers. During the last complete year, HMV recorded a pre-tax profit of ú136.2 million – up by 9.9 percent on the previous year. Not all of this, of course, came from the sale of DVDs; Waterstones is notorious for its ruthless cost cutting war against independent booksellers and makes huge profits from best-sellers like the Harry Potter books. But DVDs are extremely important to HMV’s profits; while the group’s underlying sales were down by 4 percent during the last year the sale of DVDs went up, and with it HMV’s share of the market for them, of which the group claims to have “the lion’s share”. So they are bound to take any threat to their pre-eminent position seriously – and that does not mean they worry about a few school-age computer wizards downloading and writing their own, illegal, copies of DVDs to share with their mates.

The copyright laws, with their harsh penalties, are there to aid HMV in their war against the pirates. One local authority recently decided that pirated DVDs and CDs represented so urgent a threat to their community that they formed an alliance with the local police to hunt down the pirates and close down their factories. On one gloriously successful day for the partnership the local plods and council penpushers seized £30,000 worth of illegal DVDs and CDs from one business, then a few days later went to the place again and took possession of another £20,000 worth. During the past year they have “visited” more than 90 premises, seized over 150,000 items, closed down one DVD factory and launched several prosecutions. These achievements are publicised by the council with such pride that some of their citizens may overlook the fact that they do not have an exactly successful record when it comes to their other responsibilities. Not long ago this council was assessed, in terms of the services it supplies to vulnerable people such as the homeless, the elderly or children in need, as one of the worst in London, to the extent that they were under threat of being taken over by a Whitehall hit squad.

Priorities

But of course that council was utterly correct in its priorities because the realisation of a profit through the orderly, legally controlled process of production for sale must take precedence over any human need. It is the priority of capitalism and when all is said and done it is what people like councillors and MPs are elected for – at least as things are for the present. If we had a society with a different priority wealth would be turned out to meet human needs, so that all people would have unfettered access to it, which would be enough to give any self-respecting councillor a seizure. It would be the end of the social arrangements which made it imperative for Chu Hua to come all that way across the world although when she got here it was made plain to her that she was not welcome. And now she is a threat to a mighty corporation like HMV.

In any event Chu Hua’s fears overcame her; she took her chance to leave the Court and did not come back. Huffing and puffing, the chairman was openly pleased to have his opinion of her so quickly vindicated and readily agreed to the prosecutor’s request for a warrant for her arrest. If she comes up in Court again she will have yet another charge – Failing to Surrender – against her. She is out there somewhere, scraping along somehow, vulnerable to a host of predators. We can only hope she survives.

Ivan

Copyrights expire, humanity gains (2021)

From the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month marks the end of an era. The play, Pygmalion, written and first performed in 1912, goes out of copyright in the United Kingdom, and much of the world. 108 years as intellectual property comes to an end. It joins all of the works of George Bernard Shaw, along, also, with the works of George Orwell, in the expiry. Both men died in 1950. The antiquity of Shaw’s writing is down to his very long life.

At the time both men died, they could have expected their intellectual property, and its income, to live on 50 years after them, however, the law was changed in 1995 to extend copyrights by twenty further years, so that intellectual property had a life of the remainder of the author’s life, plus 70 years.

Copyright asserts that that the author has the right to control their own intellectual creations: initially, as the name suggests, over who had the right to make copies of published books. This later extended to the right to prevent derivative works (using characters and instances from the created work). It also asserts the author’s right to be identified as the creator of the work.

It is, in effect, an intangible property right, that exists only because the state creates and enforces it. The first copyright law in the UK dates back to 1710, “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”. As this title makes clear, the intent was that people could benefit commercially from producing works and publishing them. Initially, this was limited to 14 years.

The reason this sort of protection is necessary is seen in the famous example of Charles Dickens suffering at the hands of literary pirates in America, where his works were not in copyright: within weeks of A Christmas Carol being published, pirate copies were selling freely and lucratively in the United States.

In strict economic terms then, copyright is a species of rent, arising from the artificial monopoly created by the state, hence the interest of rentiers to extend and extend the term of the copyright so that they can keep profiting from the use of the intellectual property.

The sort of value involved can be seen in the 2015 Freedom of Information Act request to the British Museum (one of the beneficiaries of the Shaw estate). That showed that the Museum gained £1.5 million from his estate between 2001 and 2014. It should be noted that this in itself represents less than a third of the income of the estate, split as it was between the National Gallery of Ireland, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the British Museum and – in a final quixotic twist, an endowment towards alphabet reform. True to his form as a challenger of received notions, this last part of his bequest had to be overturned in court by the public trustee, demonstrating the limitations to the absolute right of an individual to dispose of his property as he pleases. A very Shavian outcome to Shaw’s own life.

These fine institutions will now be bereft of considerable income. This is not the first time. In the 1980s Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) lost the income from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan works. This led to campaigns on behalf of the hospital to extend its copyright (no doubt encouraged by less worthy owners of intellectual property). In art, this drove the extension from 50 years after the author’s death to 70, but in addition, GOSH was granted a perpetual interest in the royalties of Peter Pan performances and publications in the UK (but not full copyright control to authorise performances and publications).

Intellectual property is big business. Corporations like Disney spend a lot of time and effort buying up the rights to characters and stories (like their purchase of the Star Wars franchise). Given that corporations don’t die, it is in their interest to keep property rights around for as long as possible. Even more, there is currently controversy, as Disney are apparently maintaining they have gained the benefits of the Star Wars IP, but are trying to avoid paying the author of the novelisations of the films any royalties.

The power of the copyright monopoly came to the fore during the Covid lockdown, as university libraries found that academic publishers were not making electronic copies available (which could, thus, be read by students at home) or were charging very high prices (some publishers did make ebooks temporarily available, but even that generosity could be seen as loss-leading, to get people into the habit of those titles being available). Librarian organisations have called for a review of the ebook market in the UK (academicebookinvestigation.org/).

They note that increasingly the model is for universities to pay for expensive and restrictive licences that have to be bought each year. This is the trend with intangible property, to transform one-off payments into revenue streams. Unlike when you buy a print book, when you buy an ebook you do not own a thing, you are simply granted the right to be able to read a text. This is as true for an ebook on a Kindle as it is for university libraries.

For publishers, the cost of producing a print book and an ebook is pretty much identical (actually printing is a marginal cost in the whole process), but they are struggling to find a business model that allows them to collect revenue whilst at the same time using the infinite reproducibility of electronic distribution of information.

Both Shaw and Orwell claimed to be socialists, and often made useful and important contributions to the debates and arguments for socialism (even if that took the form of needing to disagree with them). Their works becoming more widely and freely available can only be a welcome thing. Humanity gains in general from the increased availability and distribution of ideas and knowledge.

Pik Smeet

Voice From The Back: Growing Old Disgracefully (2005)

The Voice From The Back column from the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Growing Old Disgracefully

A feature often commented upon by historians, is that before private property societies existed the elderly of a kin, clan or tribal group were treated with great respect. Their knowledge of the terrain, animals and availability of food was invaluable to their society. How different today in modern capitalism. “The government is abandoning hundreds of thousands of elderly people to a care system that steals their dignity, denies them meaningful choice and risks endangering their health, according to a hard-hitting report out tomorrow. The report – by the country’s leading independent healthcare thinktank, the King’s Fund – concludes that funding and organisational problems are putting old people at a disadvantage compared with other recipients of care. It also says that untrained, unqualified and overstretched staff are putting them at risk.” The Observer (26 June) Let’s face it inside capitalism old-age sucks. Although all those social workers forced to make these decisions will themselves be old one day.

Moral Considerations

The growing practice of scientific journals to copyright and restrict access to scientific data without cash subscriptions has led Robert Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, to raise a moral dilemma. “Making money out of restricting access to (medical) research is immoral.” The Times (2 July) In fact Mr Smith you are terribly wrong, inside capitalism it is not only moral but good business practice. Only inside a socialist society will we have unrestricted access to knowledge for every human being on earth. People dying because medical personnel couldn’t access the latest scientific knowledge would be unthinkable inside a socialist society. It is quite moral today.

The Grapes of Wrath

In any sane society an abundant harvest from the vineyards would be the cause of celebration and no doubt a little celebratory tipple. But we don’t live in a sane society, we live in capitalism where the whole purpose of production is to make a profit not satisfy a social need. “It may seem heinous to any enthusiastic bordeaux drinker, but the EU has pledged £100m under the common agricultural policy to turn 670m bottles of French and Spanish wine into industrial alcohol to help reduce a surplus caused by competition from the New World.” The Sunday Times (3 July) Inside a socialist society if we produce too much wine we’ll just have to drink it. Terrible prospect, aint it?

An Investment Opportunity

The callousness of capitalism and the cynicism of the capitalist press could hardly be summed up better than this report about the bomb carnage in London that left over 50 dead and scores wounded. “City Index, the financial spreadbetting firm, said that more than 8,000 retail investors had dived into the market on Thursday, correctly backing their hunch that share prices would quickly bounce back. Some will find profiting from horror distasteful. But many in the City applaud the resilience of capitalism.” The Sunday Times (10 July) The editors carried this story under the headline – “Investors made millions amid bombs chaos.” Could anything be more disgusting? We are talking about trauma, amputation, disfigurement and death here not an investment opportunity.

Dare To Think

“A penniless asylum seeker in London was vilified across two pages of the Daily Mail last week. No surprise there, perhaps – except that the villain in question has been dead since 1883. “Marx the Monster” was the Mail’s furious reaction to the news that thousands of Radio 4 listeners had chosen Karl Marx as their favourite thinker.” The Observer (17 July) Many people who read the works of Karl Marx realise that the popular concept that he has anything to do with Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Mao is nonsense, in fact that he was opposed to dictatorship and authority all his life. Start reading what Marx actually wrote and accept his challenge to think for yourself and bugger the Daily Mail.

Pathfinders: Acta of Desperation (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Acta of Desperation

One of the more memorable jokes in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the one about the supercomputer which, on being asked the meaning of life, supplied the answer ‘42’. One of capitalism’s most profound illogicalities is its constant need to render unquantifiable things – like knowledge – in monetary terms so that its bean-counters can do their sums properly. It’s the same joke, only accountants don’t get the laughs.

NASA is pulling out of its agreement with the European Space Agency over the planned ExoMars Rover programme, citing lack of funds. It has already ceased supplying the International Space Station. Given that the ISS is the most expensive thing ever to have been built by human beings, this seems rather like spoiling the spaceship for a ha’porth of tar, but there’s a slump on and the purse-strings are being pulled tight. Science is worth the money, says Barack Obama’s budget, as long as it’s somebody else’s money.

The price of knowledge is being addressed in a different way by the recent signing by 22 countries of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which is the latest international attempt to establish base-line rules for protecting intellectual property rights (IPR). Internet traffic is international but regulations are national, meaning that information – and therefore profit – leaks away everywhere like water from a leaky bucket and national regulators can do nothing about it.

There has been outcry against this agreement, with protests in many European cities. Much of this is youth-based and centred on the idea that information ought to be free. Socialists ought to be sympathetic to this, given that we want everything to be free, but there’s something irritating about people who see no further than the one commodity they’re personally interested in. Instead of being quasi-socialist thinking, it looks like the self-indulgence of privileged young Westerners who don’t know the real meaning of poverty. To someone starving or homeless, they must look like a bunch of rich kids sulking and demanding free sweets.

Despite the surreal appearance of a Pirate Party in Sweden and now in the UK as well, most opposition is not based on some imagined ‘right-to-download’ but on the unarguable truth that, to accommodate the differences between the legislatures of various countries, this agreement is so necessarily general it opens barn-doors to the future enactment of a large array of repressive measures, including those relating to free speech. Pleas by ACTA’s defenders that such measures are not the intention are probably true at this precise moment, but this of course doesn’t guarantee that the thought will never cross their minds in the future. Any legislation which makes repression easier in principle should be opposed on principle.

The ACTA agreement contains provision for the prevention of counterfeit goods too, which, in the case of counterfeit medicines would, in theory, be a very good thing as they are a huge global problem. Whether it is really intended to focus on that market, which largely consists of poor people buying dud drugs because they can’t afford the real thing, or on the lucrative trade in bogus clothing, electronics and DVD brands, which involves flush westerners simply saving a few quid, we leave to the reader’s intelligent guess. It is significant that China doesn’t support ACTA, given that much of this counterfeiting comes from there. China, being a box-shifting manufacturer not a developer, tends to be intensely relaxed about intellectual property laws (see Apple Stuffing).

Against the naive assumption that, alone of all commodities in capitalism, information should be free, should be set the equally naive assumption by ACTA supporters that all ‘stolen’ goods represent a loss of earnings. That piracy costs the entertainment industry money is undoubtedly true, but how do you estimate the value of what people don’t buy? The likelihood is, if piracy were ever truly stamped out, the former pirates would not then happily go out and stump up fifteen quid for a new film or music CD. Instead they’d do without, or wait until it was cheap, and the industry wouldn’t gain much.

What ACTA is really about is not repression but manufacturers desperately trying to raise their profits in the middle of a slump while fending off attempts by poor consumers to undermine them. But other manufacturers can always cash in by doing the opposite. Cheap DVD players are now sold with USB connections, allowing you to play AVI format films from a flash-Rom memory stick. How the film arrived on that stick, and in that format, is a question that we socialists, not being pirates of course, must once again leave to the intelligent reader.

Golden Opportunity

It seems the Tory back-benches are mounting a revolt over the government’s spending on wind energy development, possibly because of the heavy subsidisation costs, or maybe because they don’t want bloody great wind farms all over their Cotswold hunting ranges. The government is committed to increasing wind energy from its present 2.2 percent to 15 percent by 2015, if it’s to keep to its internationally agreed environmental targets. Fat chance of that. More realistically, its keen environmental concern is in not being held to ransom by the Russian gas oligarchs, and there are only so many nuclear power stations it can foist upon us.

Aside from gales-into-gigawatts, alternative energy research is throwing up other possibilities. Interesting research into Microbial Fuel Cells at Bristol UWE recently claimed a world first in proposing urine as a revolutionary new fuel (BBC Online, 9 November 2011). Its stored energy potential may not be particularly high but it is free to collect in large quantities, and may well save on sewerage costs into the bargain. Above all it would then allow us to point out what we’ve known all along, that the state’s environmental energy policy is all wind and piss.

Apple Stuffing

Apple’s trade in China (see this issue) is not without its downside. Apple has just lost a case against the company Proview in a Hong Kong court over the worldwide rights to the name ‘iPad’, which Proview thought of but which Apple claims it bought off them for use in ten countries. Now it is going to a mainland Chinese court, but the Chinese state is going to be nervous about upholding an intellectual rights case on its own turf when it flagrantly violates them over everything else. When you lie down with the dragon you can get your wallet singed.

Paddy Shannon

These Foolish Things: Capital corrupts democracy (1996)

The Scavenger column from the August 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital corrupts democracy
 

Opposition supporters in Tirana, who claim that at least two of their number have been killed by government forces, held the first of a series of nationwide rallies yesterday to press President Sali Berisha to annul Sunday’s poll... The European Commission said yesterday it had received “disturbing reports” about the conduct of the election [in Albania] . . . Diplomats maintain that in spite of his increasingly embarrassing autocratic streak, Mr Berisha is also seen as the man best placed to forge ahead with unpopular market reforms. “What may be best for the region is not necessarily best for the democratic process in this country,” one Western official lamented.

(Guardian, 30 May)

Capital controls countries
  

The United States is confident that the G7 summit in Lyons will give its approval to a proposal to reduce the debt owed by the world’s poorest countries to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank . . . Earlier this year, the IMF granted Moscow a huge $10.2 billion credit to support the reforms pioneered by President Yeltsin and will clearly want to review these arrangements in the light of the outcome of the poll . . . Under the debt reduction plan for the poorest countries . . . the World Bank and the IMF could eventually provide more than $10 billion of debt forgiveness to poor countries like Uganda and Bolivia, which have approved programmes of reform in place. 

(Guardian. 6 June)

Capital games
  

Trebor . . . says the FA sent a solicitor’s letter threatening to sue for infringement of a trade mark over Trebor’s use of pictures of players in England strips [on cards in Candy Stick packets). The FA says that the appearance of its crest on players’ shirts means the shirts cannot be pictured or displayed without its permission nor, possibly, without payment for the use of the trademark. 

(Financial Mail on Sunday, 16 June)

Capital coerces
  

Britain has jumped ahead of its key European partners in the latest league table of competitiveness . . . British bosses . . . find it easier than all but two of their EU partners to hire and fire staff, “restructure” the labour force and avoid the social costs of employment.

(Guardian, 30 May)

Capital copper cock-up
  

World copper prices fell sharply when Yasuo Hamanaka, a trader for the Sumitomo Corporation of Japan, was discovered to have built up a $1.8 billion loss. Copper is heavily used in the telecommunication, electrical and automotive industries. The price reached $2,710 per tonne in May and fell to $1,855 in mid-June. Sumitomo owns 24 percent of the London Metal Exchange’s worldwide copper stockpile. The LME started investigating prices after complaints last November by major consumers. 

(Bloomberg News).

Capital hauls in the Internet
  

The new buzzwords are “branding", “infrastructure” and “gateways” as big business tries to bring about a cultural transplant for the Internet—from a global mutual help society in which hardly anything is paid for into a source of corporate profits for the next generation . . . This week BT and its US partner, MCI, announced their plans to take control of the Internet.

(Guardian, 13 June)

The Scavenger

Action Replay: Playing Partners (2012)

The Action Replay column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Olympics will soon be on us, with their massive TV and press coverage and their never-ending opportunities for sponsorship and money-making, as well as some sporting contests. The International Olympic Committee is a brand in its own right and a very powerful one at that, as it can require host governments to introduce legislation protecting its copyright.

So in 2006 the UK parliament passed the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, which went even further than existing law in preventing companies who have not paid for sponsorship or partnership rights from making any use of Olympic terminology or symbols. Even using ‘Games’ and ‘2012’ together might constitute an offence, unless you’ve paid for permission. So Coke and Adidas (as official sponsors) will be OK, but Pepsi and Nike will have to be very careful about what they say. During the Games themselves, athletes will not even be able to blog about their breakfast cereal unless it’s made by a Games sponsor. A spokesperson for the local organising committee put it bluntly: “Without the investment of our partners, we simply couldn’t stage the Games.”

This is not working as well as those behind it might wish, however, with so-called ambush marketing (where a non-sponsor manages to link itself to an event in some way) proving very effective. Thus Adidas is apparently less associated with the Games in people’s minds than Nike, and British Airways (the official airline partner) less so than Lufthansa.

Just imagine the effort that intelligent and creative people are putting into ensuring that companies keep within the law but exploit the Olympics for their own profit.

Paul Bennett

Voice From The Back: A Fruit And Nut Case (2012)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Fruit And Nut Case

Capitalism is a social system based on class ownership, and sections of the owning class are always in disputes over this ownership. They have legal battles, sometimes leading to military battles, over the ownership and access to sources of raw materials and markets. Recently there has been a legal dispute over the ownership of a particular colour. “Is chocolate the first thing you think of when you see Pantone 2685C? It might be if I tell you that it is the technical name for Cadbury Dairy Milk’s distinctive purple. And it does indeed ‘belong’ to Cadbury, after a decision in the High Court yesterday that the confectioner’s purple packaging constitutes a trademark” (Times, 2 October). This dispute arose over Cadbury’s rival Nestlé’s objection to Cadbury registering the colour as a trademark in 2004. Nestlé had already lost in 2008 but decided to appeal the judgement of the Registrar of Trade Marks. Only capitalism with its emphasis on ownership could have highly trained legal minds battling for years over who ‘owns’ a colour. Madness.

The Whip Hand

Whenever there is a slump and mass unemployment, the employers’ hand is strengthened, as a recent report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development shows: “Millions of workers are ‘too frightened’ about losing their job to take time off work when they are sick, even if they are very ill, a report reveals today. The authoritative report says a culture of ‘presenteeism’ is sweeping Britain as workers decide to come into the office, rather than stay home in bed. A third of bosses have seen an increase in the number of workers ‘who struggle into work when unwell’ over the last year, according to the report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development” (Daily Mail, 9 October).

Some Good News

Every day in the newspapers socialists can read all the bad news that capitalism throws up. Millions starve while food is destroyed; children dying for lack of clean water; and lately a 14-year-old girl shot in the head by some Pakistani religious zealot because she dared to attend a school. So what is the good news? “The number of people with no religious affiliations is growing at an unprecedented rate, according to research. A third of adults under 30 in the US now say they have no faith. …. The US study was undertaken by the Pew Research Centre, a Washington based think tank. According to the latest British Social Attitude Survey, published last month, religious affiliation among Britons has fallen from 68 per cent in 1983 to 53 per cent in 2011” (Times, 10 October).

A Deadly Social System

In its unending drive for more and more profit the capitalist system ruins lives but it also ruins the world’s environment and biodiversity. “Reducing the risk of extinction for threatened species and establishing protected areas for nature will cost the world over $76bn dollars annually. Researchers say it is needed to meet globally agreed conservation targets by 2020. The scientists say the daunting number is just a fifth of what the world spends on soft drinks annually. And it amounts to just 1% of the value of ecosystems being lost every year, they report in the journal Science. Back in 2002, governments around the world agreed that they would achieve a significant reduction in biodiversity loss by 2010. But the deadline came and went and the rate of loss increased” (BBC News, 12 October). Governments can make sympathetic noises and even pass pious resolutions but profit making comes before biodiversity so more and more species of flora and fauna are doomed.

Recession? What Recession?

During the current economic recession it is commonplace to hear of workers being unable to sell their houses because of tumbling prices and difficulties in obtaining mortgages, but one part of the housing market is unaffected by economic difficulties. “An estate agent to the rich and famous is celebrating after selling £3 billion worth of property – on the same London street. Trevor Abrahmsohn has cornered the market on one of the world’s wealthiest roads, The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north London – known as ‘Billionaires’ Row’. Over the last 35 years he has handled 150 house sales on the street at an average value of £20million at today’s prices” (Daily Mail, 12 October). To those members of the owning class who think nothing of spending £20 million on a house there is no economic crisis.

Socialist Party Statement on the Marx Copyright Controversy (2014)

From the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

This spring, London-based publishers Lawrence & Wishart came under fire online and in the leftist press for allegedly trying to ‘privatise’ the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. By now over six thousand activists have signed online petitions demanding that the ‘nasty, capitalistic’ publishers retract their claim of a copyright ‘monopoly’ over the duo’s collected writings. The allegations make for compelling headlines, but in reality the issue isn’t so clear cut.

The works of Marx and Engels are valuable because they systematically document and explain the basic economic processes underpinning class societies. And an understanding of these processes is vital for identifying the problems with our own class society—capitalism—and what needs to be done to rectify them. Of course, countless later writers have helpfully summarised, elucidated, corrected, and interpreted Marx and Engels’s works, though many of the original writings remain relevant and worthy of study today.

Both men having died in the 19th century, the copyrights on their original publications have long since expired. They are now in the public domain, meaning that, as far as the law is concerned, anyone is free to copy and distribute them. However, this status applies only to the works as they were originally published, unannotated and (usually) in German. Under copyright law, whenever someone produces a new version of a public-domain work that extends or transforms it in an intellectually creative way, such as through editing, critical commentary, or translation into another language, a new copyright is manifested in the novel creative elements. British law fixes the term of copyright at 70 years following the death of the creator, so any translations and critical editions produced since 1944 are likely to be proprietary in the UK.

The recent furore over Lawrence & Wishart began when they demanded that the Marxists Internet Archive, a free online library, stop distributing material from a particular modern collection with the title Marx/Engels Collected Works. This collection is a 50-volume scholarly edition and English translation which Lawrence & Wishart had commissioned themselves (in collaboration with two other publishers) between 1975 and 2005. Though as a matter of law the publishers have the right to restrict republication of their own particular edition, their detractors have misunderstood this to mean that Lawrence & Wishart were asserting complete economic control over all of Marx and Engels’s works generally. In reality, the original German texts upon which the Collected Works is based, as well as many earlier English translations and editions of these same texts, remain in the public domain.

Certainly the Socialist Party would welcome a move by Lawrence & Wishart to release their Collected Works into the public domain, or under terms which would permit the Marxists Internet Archive to resume distributing it. But at the same time it is understandable why they have so far opted not to do this. Like any other private enterprise marketing a product, their very existence is predicated on their exclusive control of the fruits of their employees’ labour. It is illogical to attack a single commercial publisher for engaging in business practices which are, by economic necessity, no different from those of every other one.

What we can do, and indeed what we have always done, is to roundly condemn the entire socio-economic system which has led to the repugnant concept of  ‘intellectual property’. Not long ago the notion that anyone ought to be able to claim exclusive rights to the expression of an idea would have been considered absurd. Today, however, legislative and technological measures have enabled and entrenched the commodification of humanity’s intellectual output. While computers and the Internet have long since made it feasible to freely share the totality of the world’s knowledge, the realisation of this has been thwarted at every turn by those whose business models require that information, like physical commodities, remain scarce. In the digital world, of course, information is never scarce—entire libraries can be duplicated a thousand times over with the click of a button. Rather than face up to this fact, publishers have collectively erected artificial legal and technical barriers to the distribution of knowledge. Here, as elsewhere in capitalism, technological progress and social utility take a back seat to the preservation of profits.

The fundamental problem with the removal of Marx/Engels Collected Works from the internet, then, lies not with Lawrence & Wishart’s demand, nor with the bourgeois copyright regime which gave it legal force. Rather, it is with the capitalist mode of production in general, in which nothing—not even scholarly editions of socialist texts—is produced unless it can be sold at a profit. Capitalist businesses which are not willing to take such legally sanctioned but antisocial steps as are required to preserve their profits are doomed to fail, only to be supplanted by competitors with no such qualms. We therefore call on working people everywhere to unite for a single political solution: the abolition of the global capitalist system and its replacement with one based on common ownership and production for use instead of for profit.

Pathfinders: Getting Twitchy about copyright (2019)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s a well-known fact that a new TV or fridge doesn’t spring fully-formed from a hole in the ground but is usually produced in stages, from ore extraction to delivery, with different parts constructed by different people, often on different sites at different times. Thus the UK jobs impact of the recent Airbus decision to stop producing the underselling A380 superjumbo, whose wings (but not the rest of it) are made in Britain.

When describing how capitalism works, Marxists talk about the value of products as containing embodied or ‘dead’ labour which has to be accounted for in the final price. For instance, so much for resource extraction, refinement, power, distribution, parts manufacture and shipping, and so forth. Socialists don’t pretend that you can separate and cost out all these elements of dead labour from the finished product. That would be like trying to unbake a cake back into its starting ingredients. The argument only stipulates that the final price has to reflect all this labour otherwise the continued production and sale of this good, at this price, will not be viable.

Where this gets interesting is new developments in EU copyright law, which is in the process of being revised because of the internet revolution, and specifically the impact of hosting sites like YouTube and the various social media giants.

One element of the proposed EU Copyright Directive, Article 13, has Google positively gargling in horror: ‘Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive states services such as YouTube could be held responsible if their users upload copyright-protected movies and music’ (BBC Online, 14 February). Think how many times (come on, admit it) you’ve wasted hours watching old excerpts of Monty Python, The Good Life, Citizen Smith, Yes Minister and Fawlty Towers on YouTube. All of that stuff, and a billion other things, are of course copyrighted, but so far nobody has raised too much of a stink about it. Article 13 could scupper all that.

But here’s the twister. What if someone films themselves playing a computer game and then uploads the film to YouTube or Twitch as an original publication for others to watch? Yes, people really do that, and they have millions of followers. They own the copyright on their film, but what about the copyright belonging to the game owners? That is embedded or ‘dead’ labour which the EU Directive is expecting to ‘unbake’ and price up, which as we’ve seen above, is going to give EU policy-makers a severe headache.

Technology has so far superseded European law that currently there exists only a state of unofficial consensus whereby copyright is not enforced in cases of what’s considered ‘fair use’ (eg for criticism, reviews, satire etc). But this consensus has no legal status in Europe, unlike in the USA, and so far there have been no court cases to establish a precedent. Hosting companies could be in the situation of having to buy licences for any copyrighted content their users upload, perhaps as well as any other copyrighted material contained within it. No wonder they’re horrified.

The point of all this? Not only is property society a terrible arrangement from the perspective of the 99 percent who don’t own any, it’s sometimes damnably difficult to apply its rules to figure out exactly who owns what and who should be paying whom. That at least is one arcane and intractable problem that socialism could laughingly throw to the winds.

Cause and effect

A recent meta-study has shown a significant link between depression and teenage cannabis use, with ‘robust’ evidence showing that ‘using the drug in adolescence increased the risk of developing depression in adulthood by 37%’ (BBC Online, 13 February). The wording here is, unusually for the BBC, careless and misleading, because it states baldly that the one directly causes the other, which is not shown by the evidence at all, as the article goes on to admit. Tabloid journalists in particular ought to be dragged outside and beaten with the mantra ‘correlation is not causation’. Instead the line should have read ‘using the drug in adolescence is associated with an increased risk of developing depression…’

Anyone alive today in capitalism has multiple reasons to get depressed without even reaching for the Rizlas, and that probably goes double for young people, who generally have a worse time of it economically, socially, psychologically and sexually than older people with settled lives and paid-for houses. Maybe that’s why they say life begins at 40 – because it’s mostly sheer hell until that point, if not after as well.

It certainly could be that cannabis has a deleterious effect on young developing brains. It could also be that depression-prone teens are more likely to resort to cannabis in the first place. Perhaps heavy cannabis use among teens is associated with a raft of other, depression-inducing social behaviours and circumstances. Anyone with long experience of poverty and unemployment knows that skinning up a spliff with mates is a lot cheaper than almost any other social option. Far from causing depression in this situation, cannabis may be the only silver lining in an otherwise black cloud. Ganja-bashing continues to make good headlines, but that doesn’t mean journalists should let their critical faculties go up in smoke.

A recent article in the webzine Dissident Voice also plays fast and loose with causation, when it claims that our serotonin system fuels aggression and so means that a socialist or anarchist non-hierarchical society is impossible. Despite pronouncing in impressively sciencey terms about the metabolic biochemistry of the monoamine neurotransmitter, the author Denis Rancourt (who by the way is not a neurobiologist but a retired physicist) offers not a shred of evidence for his argument that the hormone ‘locks’ humans into either dominant or subservient roles, and indeed his example of dominant social climbers who ‘kiss ass’ to get up the corporate ladder seems to flatly contradict his own case. Too much is wrong with his discussion of serotonin to go into here, but in a nutshell it comes down to correlation and causation again. He cites several academic studies in support of his case, but if you read what they say they don’t support his claim either. In fact one luminary, Robert Sapolsky, is scathing of such thinking in a fascinating YouTube lecture, where he says within the first few minutes that because genetically humans are almost identical with all other animals even including fruit flies, ‘Genetics and neurotransmitters etc tell us nothing about what makes humans humans’. He then drives home the point that we are not genetically fixed by citing his own study of a troop of baboons who, after all the aggressive males accidentally died of TB, exhibited an astonishing change in behaviour, becoming socially friendlier and more affectionate, with males even grooming each other – unheard of for wild baboons. One wonders if Sapolsky and the other cited authorities realise they are being cited in support of an argument they would heartily oppose.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Upload, download, freeload! (2007)

The Pathfinders column from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine a wall that reaches to the sky and stretches to both horizons. You are standing on one side of it. On the other side is Everything. Everything humanity can produce, its food, its art, its society. There is only one way through that wall, through a tiny hole. You move closer. The hole in the wall is a cash-machine. On the screen it says 'Entry Option 1: Pay Cash'. You have no cash. You press Cancel. The screen says 'Entry Option 2: Build Wall.'

The people who put that wall in place are the builders of capitalism, which claims to provide but really deprives. What choice do you have? You help them build their wall.

From paranoid Pink Floyd, let's cut to an upbeat children's TV favourite, only this time with a Marxist makeover. Enter Bob the Unbuilder. Bob is going to show us a clever trick with capitalism, aren't you Bob? Can we wreck it? Yes we can! And how does Bob unbuild the wall? Obviously, by taking away the bricks. And he's doing a very good job of it, in the one sector of capitalist wealth and endeavour that is hardest to build a wall round - commercial information.

A digital book, a CD, a software program or a movie, unlike chocolate cake or gold bullion, can be 'stolen' an infinite number of times without ever disappearing from the owner's table. In UK law, the act of theft involves an intention to deprive the former owner permanently, but in duplicating data this clearly cannot apply. Thus, for those with a vested interest in depriving us of access, this strange theft /non-theft creates a special category of problem, one which they struggle to make the rest of us take seriously.

The information revolution has given rise to a debate about what it is reasonable to 'protect' - that is, build a wall round, and what ought on the other hand to be free. At one extreme we find the film and music industries, whose main argument is that 'stealing' their produce reduces the population of potential buyers, thus 'permanently depriving' them of revenue. But is that true? At the other end, Bob and his little army of anonymous software diggers and rippers, while busily exposing every encryption key the capitalists can come up with, will argue just as cogently that most of these so-called potential buyers are not really buyers anyway because they don't have £13.99 to waste on a stupid film they'll only watch once in any case. Who is right? Nobody knows. Nobody has ever done an economic study which proved it either way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection). However, producers are only taking the same line as supermarkets, which are well known for pouring bleach on their skips of discarded fresh fruit and vegetables, to prevent poor people eating for free.

And why should anything be free, after all? This is a world where everyone pays. Would you agree to forgo the money from your magnum opus or your hit single? Well, it's a circular argument. We all want money because everyone wants money from us. That's why capitalism has to be abolished all at once, or not at all. But it's very strange that, while baked beans are even cheaper than chips, you don't see people vehemently debating that they ought to be free, as of 'right'. Yet in the parallel universe of information technology, we see precisely that debate. If software is useful everywhere, say the cybercommunists, it ought to be free everywhere. And Bob and his hackers, not waiting for the gainsayers to be won over, dig in and make it so.

In reality, what is going on is not a moral debate about rights but a digital class war. Those who own and control - or try to control - the means of production and distribution of information, software and entertainment, are doing everything they can to prevent the rest of us getting our hands on it for free. And they would succeed easily, but for Bob the Unbuilder, an unpaid amateur computer nerd who sees any copy-prevention system as a challenge to his ingenuity. System after system has been hacked, broken or reverse-engineered. The industry-standard system for videotape copy-protection was defeated by the sublimely simple act of passing a magnet over the cassette spine. The 40-bit encryption Content Scramble System for DVD was meant to be unbreakable, but was broken within three years, while the industry has been chained to producing the same unmodified system for the following decade for fear of customer backlash from existing DVD player owners. The very latest high definition DVD encryption system has been broken in just three months, with the code-keys published everywhere on the internet and even being sported on t-shirts (New Scientist, June 9).

But in case one is tempted to laugh at their incompetence, the boffins of Digital Rights Management think-tanks have a serious set of problems to face. They can't block data-copying completely because of the many legitimate purposes copying might have. If they do make copying too difficult or the authentication procedure too arduous, they can end up encouraging consumers to prefer no-effort cracked copies over the 'genuine' paid-for article. There can be legal and political objections too, if the barriers created prevent free trade or transgress a nation's own laws, a situation which arose with the film industry's practice of 'region coding' and which was challenged in the Australian High Court in 2005, where it was ruled that "modification of devices to circumvent region lockout is allowed under Australian law" (http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki /Regional_lockout).

Ultimately the wall-builders are up against the irreducible problem of the 'analog hole'. No matter what the encryption system used, at some point the film, or song, has to be decrypted before it gets to your eye or ear, otherwise you won't understand it. All a hero of the free-entertainment movement has to do is intercept that signal after it has been decrypted, at the weakest point of its security, its 'analog hole'. This interception can be very ingenious or it can be very simple, as simple as taking a videocam into a cinema and then uploading the result to the internet.

The reason why all this is such a problem now is because the internet has changed the rules of engagement. Thirty years ago, even if you copied a film on video or an album on tape, who could you send it to? Now, with fast broadband connections, clever compression technology and the widespread use of peer to peer file-sharing, which speeds up traffic by taking the strain off central server points, 'freeloading' has gone global. And on the other side of the wall, the telecoms companies have gone global too, merging with the entertainment industry to create a new media mega-sector whose common interests are in beating the freeloaders.

It would be ironic if the freeloading bonanza became a victim of its own success, and the sheer volume of traffic brought the internet crashing to its knees, as some pundits are indeed predicting (BBC Online, June 15). Catastrophic network overload would be followed, one presumes, by a dull cyber-winter in which we rediscover books and boardgames.

A sense of futility seems to hang over the film and music industry in their attempts to stop illicit copying. Many companies have just given up, considering the game not worth the candle. Others are hanging in there, launching new UK commercials aimed at making video pirates look like sad and pathetic losers. "We want to create a social stigma. It's been done before, with drinking and driving," says one such champion of Hollywood's deprived millionaires, "We want to make people feel grubby" (New Scientist, June 9). It won't work though. There is a world of difference between drink-driving and copping a quick freebie off Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Besides, anyone who reads stories about the growing rich and poor divide (Daily Mail, June 21), or the fact that of the hundreds of people in Britain on salaries over £10m a year., only 65 are paying any income tax (BBC Online, June 21), is not going to feel too guilty about their own peccadilloes. In capitalism, most people know who the real 'grubby' thieves are.

The really dazzling question a starry-eyed socialist futurologist might like to contemplate is this: what if, with advances in nanotechnology, we could copy real-world goods, like food, using waste materials? And then what if Bob and his Unbuilders got their hands on the copy-prevention systems?

Paddy Shannon