Common ownership: Our last chance (2006)

From Issue 20 of the World Socialist Review

A recent episode of the PBS program Now, broadcast nationwide in most states on 4/22/2005, announced gravely not only that “scientists are convinced our Earth is warming, and with scary consequences,” but also and even more gravely that “meanwhile industry funds a campaign to do nothing.” The program quoted Dr. Richard Alley, professor at Penn State University, a paleo-climatologist, one who studies the Earth utilizing data from glacier ice and ice sheets. According to Dr. Alley, our planet has on numerous occasions previously experienced a phenomenon known as “abrupt climate change.” His concern, and that of scientists whom the program referred to as “the best minds on the planet,” is that human society is so altering the atmosphere and the climate that it may trigger such an abrupt, indeed possibly catastrophic, transformation of the climate.

A visit to the "Web site of the environmental think-tank EcoBridge lists hefty references suggesting indisputable recent changes in our atmosphere, including increases in carbon dioxide and methane, more frequent extreme weather, disappearing glaciers, melting arctic sea ice, Greenland’s ice sheet melting, tropical diseases spreading, and oceans warming with accompanying coral bleaching and disintegration. Paralleling such dire developments are other examples of human society’s significant transformation of the planet from its condition even a century ago, including enormous deforestation rates (discussed in impressive detail in the article “Destroying the World’s Forests” on the Web site of the World Socialist Movement [WSM]) and the introduction of vast quantities of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that are contributing to ozone layer depletion (also discussed on the WSM Web site in an article entitled “Profit Enhancing Chemicals”). Vast research-based evidence thus appeared to support the hypothesis that the planet is warming and becoming increasingly less hospitable for humans and other animal fife.

Does the future have a future?

What is presumably of greatest concern to those of us who work for a living is the total lack of apparent control that we may exert at present upon the corporations, media and governments whose practices exist to serve the interests of a small percentage of the population. The great historical question is going to be: are we just going to stand around amidst alternating storms of doomsday prophecies and media coverage minimizing the magnitude of the problem, and not take matters into our own hands, even at the risk that our and our children’s future may be horrendously bleak, even non-existent?

For example, according to the above mentioned Now television show, in Congress the House has just approved an energy bill which promises tax breaks and subsidies to coal, oil, and gas companies — the companies most responsible for the mess in the first place! Furthermore, those most opposed to theories of global warming are those such as Senator Inhofe who represent the economic interests of the magnates of his oil-producing Oklahoma. He is ironically the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee’s biggest recipient of contributions from oil and gas companies. He says global warming is a hoax.

Ross Gelbspan, a former editor of the Boston Globe, was described in the Now program as having devoted many years to reporting the ways in which the energy industry has attempted to cover up the scientific warnings about global warming. For example, in 1989 the disinformation campaign began when representatives of the petroleum, automotive and other industries formed the Global Climate Coalition, and later the Information Council on the Environment, which was funded by the Western Fuels Association, mostly representing coal interests. The strategy for that campaign, according to Mr. Gelbspan, suggested their drawing on several prominent global warming skeptics, scientists who argue that global warming is mired in unknowns. Mr. Gelbspan found that energy industry leaders had paid those scientists hefty fees and compensations amounting to more than half a million dollars between 1991 and 1995. Some of these scientists, who had engaged the media in interviews to suggest global warming was an unsupported theory rather than a strongly supported hypothesis, reemerged some years later in videos distributed by yet another group, the Greening Earth Society, a group also supported by the coal industry.

In 1997 the Global Climate Coalition appeared in a multimillion dollar campaign to persuade the public that the science behind the international Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gases was shaky. One of those ads stated: “Countries responsible for almost half the world’s emissions won’t have to cut back. Check it out for yourself, it’s not global and it won’t work.” Then President George Bush, former oil man himself, pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Treaty, claiming that “the targets themselves were arbitrary and not based upon science.” According to the Now program, a 2001 memo by Frank Luntz, a well-known Republican consultant, may have played its part in affecting Mr. Bush’s decision, when it advised the White House that the best way to “address the global warming” problem is to “continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

The May/June 2005 edition of Mother Jones suggested that Exxon Mobil alone contributes to more than 40 policy groups that seek to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

Welcome to Hell

According to a citation in a January 13, 2000 CNN Web site article about scientific experts discussing the overwhelmingly strong evidence for global warming, a conference of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) comprising over 2,500 scientists, was quoted as having reached a near-unanimous conclusion that global warming was at least partially the result of human activity — primarily the burning of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide, methane, and others gases into the atmosphere, forming a global “blanket” that traps heat near the Earths surface. The IPCC predicted an increase in global temperatures of between 2 and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. The panel also predicted the expansion of warming oceans and calculated that the melting of land-based ice formations would combine to add between one and three feet to the existing sea level. The IPCC projected sharp increases in the frequency and intensity of storms and droughts, in the spread of tropical diseases, in coastal flooding and in accelerated waves of extinctions of plant and animal species which fail to adapt to the changing climate.

As suggested earlier in this article, large countries such as the United States may choose to put profits before people in refusing to cooperate with Kyoto Accord limits to greenhouse gas emissions, while other developing nations such as China, a coal-based economy, are likely to vastly surpass the greenhouse emissions of the United States by 2025.

Such is the anarchic nature of the capitalist system. It is comprised in part of vast corporations with vested economic interests to broadcast disinformation to the public and to influence governments to steer policy away from potential threats not to our well-being but to their profit-making. It is also made up of rival nation-states each attempting to care for the economic interests of their own internal capitalist class. Finally, it is characterized by billions of workers whose receipt of information is heavily influenced by the capitalist media over which they have no control.

In other words, even rational decisions by governments, such as those pronounced in the Kyoto Accords, may be thwarted and never realized because of the needs of the few rather than the needs of us many. While some or even many capitalists predictable phenomenon not caused by the negative side effects of industrial society, humans may still need to find a solution to keep themselves and future generations from destruction in droughts, floods, or plagues.

Such complex solutions are not likely to be effectively realized in an intrinsically competitive and undemocratic society, in which the resources we will desperately require are owned by the planets private owners or by rival nation-states. In such a preliminary social order as we presently live under, the economic costs of dollars and cents will likely play a major part of any such grandiose scheme, as there is only so much money to go around. Furthermore, in this hierarchical, class-based society, the major decisions will be made by those with power and privilege, and not by those of us who must work to live and who remain relatively powerless players in the machinations of national or global politics.

Good Decisions Will Require Common Ownership

Or we could decide to take matters into our own hands. By democratically taking over the means of production, to be thereafter considered subject to the common ownership of the whole human species, any drastic solutions that may need to be made by and in the interest of even the entire human race could more readily be achieved, as decision-making over the use of resources will be entirely ours. Whatever we decide, such decisions will be made in harmony with the findings of the scientific community, and we will be able to act upon our decisions immediately, without the endless walls of bureaucracy, finance, politics or power murderously standing in the way of our lives as they are at present with regards to an issue such as global warming that could potentially alter the course of human history.

At what point do humans decide that sustaining the interests of a small gang of owners — whom working-class humans have thus far decided have every right to own the planet and enjoy the fruits and luxuries that workers provide — is not worth the imminent threat of an Earth no longer able to sustain human fife? Scientists are warning us that the point of no return is close by or has already been passed. Do we pretend the problem is not really that bad? Do we passively resign ourselves to a pessimism that announces it is too late to act so why not just embrace a selfish consumerist individualism? Do we continue to trust our politicians to represent our interests even though they have always failed to do so since they are unable to alter and control the laws of the capitalist economy in the interests of us hard working folk?

The barrel of the gun is pointed right now between your eyes. What are you going to do?

— Dr. Who

SPGB January Events (2026)

Party News from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Strangers in our home world (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are alienated creatures living in our very own home world. That alienation stems from workers’ relationship to both the product and the process of their work, and has a wide range of unpleasant effects. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Marx stated eloquently that: ‘The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien’.

In the very first page of Capital, Marx begins to analyze the nature of our capitalist society, and he does this in terms of the commodity, the source of our alienation. We live in a planet-wide dictatorship of the commodity. This means that whether, as workers, we live in a liberal capitalist society or a modern authoritarian state of the left or right makes no difference. The commodity is capitalism’s most defining feature, transcending the varied political forms it might take. Our labour power which produces commodities has itself been turned into a commodity and is sold in the marketplace like any other. Although we live in a world where political ideologies battle it out with each other, capitalism is a global system. It is not defined by those political differences but by its having historically superseded slavery and feudalism.

The commodity is king

The commodity society is a world system in which the working class (that includes you, even if you see yourself as middle-class and educated) must sell its ability to work and produce objects or services in the marketplace for those who own and control the factories, offices, mines, etc. Alienation exists in modern liberal regimes, in the former USSR, in modern China, in the world’s many Muslim theocratic states, and in nations run by either left-wing military juntas or right-wing dictators. Alienation transcends all political boundaries, all political differences, and it ravages the minds of all populations of working people without distinction of national or other origin and regardless of the colour of their collar.

As soon as we step into our place of employment, our time is no longer ours. Nor is the object that we produce. Ours is a world where the needs of society are secondary, even though it is one where the ideology of our rulers maintains that the laws of supply and demand exist to meet them. Ideology is always an upside-down version of both our own experience and the truth. We work because we must earn money to buy the commodities required for our survival, so we sell the only commodity in our possession — our talents, skills, and energies known as labour-power. We do this because everything else is walled off from us: food, clothes, books, medications, offices, factories, land. We live in a prison while desperately believing we are free. Without that belief we would not be able to tolerate our imprisonment.

As prisoners, we live dispossessed of the world we inhabit. We walk streets that are not ours, lined with shops that invite us in to part with our limited money. Shops compete with each other to grab those pieces of paper we carry and to rinse those plastic cards. These pieces of paper and those cards mean everything to them, while we mean nothing. We may be treated like friends by workers trained to provide ‘customer satisfaction’ but we are really strangers. Here too, appearances are deceptive. They are the mirror image of reality. You walk into a shop where everyone smiles at you, but no one cares about you or, even if they do care, they remain shut in a fake reality, putting on an act that encourages you to spend your money on their owners’ wares. Their care is limited by the hope that their boss will sell enough to keep them employed. These workers are pressured by their bosses to entice you to spend, and with your restricted means you feel pressured having to resist that pressure. There would be no need to tempt anyone if these objects were already ours. There would be no need to feel any pressure at all if all we had to do was to walk into a store and take what we need. In a commodity world, however, we must suffer a psychological stress, and that stress is a key symptom of our alienation. As workers we have only one marketable commodity, labour-power, so the capitalists don’t need to coax us to sell it; we’ll have to sell it sooner or later if we don’t want to starve or become homeless. The community and the commodity are always at odds, each challenging the reality of the other. The days of emperors and feudal landlords have been replaced by the rule of the commodity; tomorrow we hope the community takes its place.

Come Monday

Every Monday, and every morning of the work week, we experience that dreaded anticipation of one more day selling our commodity, our labour power. This is another sign that our work is alien to us. Movies are made about alien invasions which humans join up to resist, but they don’t match in scope the reality of the planetary domination of the commodity today as it gobbles up your time, your energy, your health, and the natural world of which you are a part. The Matrix may be the best cinematic metaphor for this. Your labour-power, while it is your commodity, is worth nothing to you until you sell it: you are a slave of your very own commodity. It is attached to you like so much dead weight around your ankles. Monday morning blues is the sense of dread that comes with our recognition that we are living the lives of modern slaves. And just as those workers in the shops must feign interest in you with their eyes, and smile as you walk in, you too must work, cognitively feigning harmony amidst disharmony.

You must pretend to fit in, to look happy, to look like you are free, when really only capitalist employers are free. Your band t-shirt, your new shoes, your sharp jacket are all desperate attempts to feel cool, to foster the illusion of your freedom and individuality, even though you know that t-shirt, those shoes, and that jacket are mass-produced. If you recognised your true status and your true predicament, you would find your life just as intolerable as it is to those of us who yearn for freedom now.

Just as you blot out the truth of your mortality, you invest hefty psychological energy in your own personal lie. You work hard to pretend that your work is freely chosen, and you live in a community that is meeting its needs, when the reality of your status and predicament is never far away from your nose. You get a glimmer of that reality each time you pay your rent or mortgage, each time you calculate your savings, each time a country wages war, each time worsening climate change or environmental destruction hits you in another headline, each time the political clowns who run for office beg for your vote. You need to keep this reality firmly out of your awareness for as long as possible. It’s depressing (a word that means to push down, as your life is being pushed down or depressed.) So you get lost in your video games and in social media chats, in sport and shopping and other entertainments. Amusements and life are mirror images of each other just like the commodity and the community are. The less real life you live, the more entertainment you feel you need (or are force fed). You know that life is not just breathing, eating, and digesting, that there must be more, but entertainment seems the only way you have of filling up that hole inside, at least temporarily, like a drug.

Everywhere

There is almost nowhere to go in our modern world in which the needs of the commodity do not take priority. You can try to get away to a quiet park for a few hours to enjoy the natural world (itself a vast artificial amusement park created by employed gardeners). You can enjoy a good read, but even then you can’t quite forget that you are only temporarily escaping the world outside, a world that is not yours. It’s a failed escape, and you are now a failure. Even in that green place, your daily worries about the life you lead, the life of work, bills, prices, savings, are never far from your mind. You are nothing, and the commodity is everything.

You must cope with this alienation. The commodity world tells you that you must be a rugged individual. It tells you, don’t be a ninny who complains, who bursts their bubble; you must be tough; you must not let your alienation bother you or anyone else; stop thinking another world is possible; stop feeling as though this isn’t the best possible way for humans to live. Despite everything the commodity world tells you, you are a person with many potentialities, including a potential to create a human-centred world. That is within your power even if you don’t identify yourself as a socialist, as a few of us currently do.

In a world of alienation, we have no control over our environment. Commodity society is by nature wasteful. Vast amounts of wealth are extracted from us workers. This is wealth that needs to be banked, sold, exchanged, advertised, invested, and protected. And all that requires a mountain of organisations that each consume precious planetary resources. The gangs who run these rackets in every country also hire workers to protect their fiefdoms. They employ militaries who contribute hugely to environmental despoliation through their waste of resources and their bloody wars.(According to an article from 2022 published in Inside Climate News, the US military alone contributes as much to climate change as entire countries the size of Denmark). If we allow ourselves to think about this, it may upset us, but we have no direct control over the problem. Commodity society doesn’t care about us or what we think; it only cares about our precious labour-power and what we can produce for our employers with it. Many of us protest commodity society’s destruction of nature, and murder of humans, but we only protest because we are powerless and dispossessed. Instead of protesting, it is time for us to build a society of which we feel we are a part, not outsiders as we do now. Such a world is not dedicated to serving the commodity; it is not a world of alienation; it’s a world of community, of voluntary action, and one with the simple aim of meeting our needs.

DR WHO

Thoughts on the future (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Humans are both magnificent creators and problem-solvers as well, obviously, as beings capable of incredible stupidity and ignorance and, to quote the title of a New Order album, of power, corruption and lies. We cry at the folly of the human race, which has achieved so much in technological and scientific achievement, as it has in the arts, and yet which still continues to treat humans and the natural world as so much gunpowder to shoot out of the cannon of profit or power.

It is difficult to understand why humans put up with the resulting stress, the inefficiencies, the deprivations, the downright failures. It is as though most people view themselves as passive agents who can, at most, protest the system’s injustices in the hope that the powerful will respond, vote for what they believe to be the best alternative or at least the less offensive, and trust that the leaders and experts know what they are doing and will ensure their welfare. However, reality does not seem to conform to such expectations when it comes to protesting, voting and trusting. Instead, the system seems an inherently unstable structure, with its economic booms and depressions, its constant eruption of wars somewhere around the world, its inability to care about or effect sufficient environmental restoration, and the constant explosions of pseudoscience and misinformation that accompany cultural movements and fads, which are like commodities in the realm of ideas.

We are clearly not going to have the better world that the scientific and democratic revolutions promised us. This is because the voices of those who rightly insisted upon our release from the rule of aristocrats and the church ignorantly associated the rise of capitalist production with liberty. There is very little in capitalism to support that contention, even though those democratic revolutions released commodity production from the clutches of feudal privilege. Peasants were also released from the landlords of the ancient regime, and then fell into the equally ruthless hands of the bourgeoisie.

Change of masters

In this new world based on factory production, only the masters changed. The new ones introduced a form of ‘freedom’ without the prior obligations of the landlord. Living in slums, dressing in rags, suffering fatal industrial accidents, and being paid the least that the capitalists could get away with became the new normal, just as being owned by a master or living off one’s master’s land were the previous normal. Much of the world still resembles this embryo of a society based on greed and exploitation. Unionisation, technological advances and a degree of trickle-down economics improved the material lot of a greater percent of workers than our ancestors experienced in prior centuries, but the values that govern our system have not changed. We remain, most of us, essentially slaves to a system prioritised not to meeting the needs of the community but to making a profit.

It is amazing that the human spirit persists through this horror show that we live in. Doctors and nurses do incredible work to help the ill by putting the person first and the cost second, but health outcomes remain predicted by poverty and stress. I offer emotional support to local nursing home residents for a half a day per week, and their greatest complaint is not their medical conditions or loss of their home, although these are traumatic and depressing, but just the fact of residing somewhere that is understaffed. In such a nursing home, the residents wait long periods of time to be changed when they soil their bed. They wait hours for someone to notice they have turned on the light outside their room indicating a request for help. The food is almost inedible, after a life of homemade meals. The few activities offered hardly fill an expanse of time with nothing to do except watch TV. Muscles weaken and stiffen, and bodies waste away because physical therapy is too infrequent to make a difference.

That example is symptomatic of our entire economic system. While yes, bridges and buildings are somehow maintained, and supermarkets for most of us in the western world are stocked plentifully; the entire economic system of capitalism seems to hop along on one leg into an insecure, unstable future because one cannot predict the economy, the availability of jobs, the unemployment ahead, whether the mortgage will be paid without fail over a thirty year period, whether war will strike us, whether our planet will worsen, and how much social services will or won’t be financed based on the ideology of the constantly changing governments.

Meanwhile, our system is like a bus being driven by a thousand drivers each tugging in different directions. Because in capitalism all goods and services are commodities, thousands of companies use up human and natural resources with no intelligent oversight and with no regard for the living planet that is our home. Even the governing bodies that do exist to monitor and make recommendations about health, the environment, poverty, literacy, or other human needs, can only advocate, can only raise so much money, and must always fight cost-cutting priorities, varying ideologies, and think tanks that promote business interests by fighting activism with pseudoscience and misinformation. The needs of business and the needs of the community and of all living beings are almost always antagonistic.

A world without commodities

The one change that could definitively solve many of these intractable capitalist problems is the end of commodity production. The commodity is a feature of all shades of capitalism: moderate welfare state capitalism, state capitalism governed by autocratic left-wing or right-wing parties, or dictatorships run by charismatic narcissists, generals and religious extremists. Every government, whatever its political flavour, revolves around capitalism’s defining entity, the commodity. That institution allows the propertyless to survive only by selling their commodified skills. It allows economic production to be defined by the selling of goods and services. It limits access to society’s benefits based on priorities such as price, cost, profit and loss. It encourages thousands of companies to strip the planet like so many piranhas in the quest for profits. And its products are not produced primarily with quality, durability, or even need in mind, but mass-produced for cheapness and marketed through advertising to maximise persuasion and create false needs and wants, with oftentimes ill effects on human health, emotional wellbeing, financial security, the living planet, and other ‘externalities’ that profit cares nothing about.

A world without commodities would be one in which the priority of production would be the meeting of human needs. This would likely incentivise humans to work, to do their best, to maximise their knowledge, education, and skills, and to reduce the endless negative repercussions of the acquisitive nature of capitalism, which often brings out the worst in people. The liberty that capitalism claims to offer, which is really the liberty of capitalists to produce with minimal legal or political restrictions, comes hand-in-hand with all those externalities which erode human liberty: crime; violent gang or cartel shootings; corruption at all levels of the society; the drug trade; wars, unpleasant workplaces and work itself; rampant pseudoscience and misinformation; a worship of individualism that breeds narcissism; the widespread destruction of our oceans, lakes, rivers, forests, air, soil quality, species, and weather; the huge waste in human energy and resources that goes into managing commodities (banks, advertisers, traders, investors, insurers, ticket inspectors, sellers, buyers, exchangers, the machinery of war, and much more). All these side effects mean that capitalism erodes human liberty more than it promotes it, even in those countries fortunate enough to have some degree of freedom of speech and movement.

A world without commodities will require production under different rules. Production in the modern world merges many sciences, and so the research, planning, and execution of how best to meet human needs is essentially a scientific project. Money too often distorts this. Money is not real, but an entirely cultural and psychological phenomenon that evolved with power and property. Money does not belong in science, in the same way that political ideologies in university settings should not distort the practice and results of science. Our own world community should make use of productive machinery to meet our material needs, allowing us the freedom and liberty to live our own lives as we choose and according to our own values and interests. ‘Freedom’ will no longer be just an ideological soundbite used to con voters, but a reality, for the first time in human history.

The desire to build a world without commodities goes with the desire to live sustainably, both individually and as a culture. Capitalism, and its repressive antecedents (feudalism and slavery), distorted our concept of nature, essentially objectifying it. The rise in environmentalism represents a fairly recent development in our understanding of nature, even though it often fails to identify the economic culprit behind the objectification of living beings, namely commodity production. Socialists strive for the abolition of commodities, including the wages system, which reduces people to machines who sell their abilities to employers. Technical social questions will then be rid of financial considerations, which are not part of nature, or of our nature.

Such questions could be: Where do I want to live? What kinds of work would I find satisfying? What are the most pressing local needs that I wish to help meet? What can I do to help beautify my city? Are there realms of knowledge that I wish to contribute to? These, and many more personal questions, may finally be answered by self-knowledge, adventure, imagination, and a profound sense of serving other humans that religions can only fantasise about. A society in which our needs are in harmony with the needs of society as a whole. A society in which the purpose of production and of administration is the meeting of needs, in which we no longer fear poverty, starvation, war, or oppressive state ideologies and their henchmen. These are permanent and durable solutions to the problems that we face today, that may yield a sense of comfort and belonging that we are entitled to as humans who show our giving side each day when serving employers, families, and neighbourhoods.

We should feel that our world is ours. We are for the most part good, though imperfect, beings, who deserve a world in which our built-in, vulnerable fears of being emotionally damaged and eradicated by death should be matched by a sense that our community exists as much for us as we do for it. The eradication of the commodity, and its replacement by goods and services produced for free with the aim of meeting our needs, will bring out the best in the human animal, intellectually, emotionally, socially, and in terms of physical and emotional health.

There is no need for a world that encourages violence, competitiveness, ideological rivalry, ruthlessness and greed. Because we are imperfect beings with the potential for both good and evil, it behoves us to establish a social system that will be more likely to bring out the good than the bad. We owe that to ourselves, so that we can continue to evolve emotionally and psychologically, having finally conquered the most basic material needs of existence.

Once we have met those basic needs without unnecessary complication, stress and waste, we may continue to evolve more important qualities that today’s social system frustrates or prevents, and which our children deserve to be raised by: generosity, kindness, aesthetics, reason, gratitude, wisdom and, as beings on possibly the only planet that sustains any degree of complex life, awe at life itself, from the quantum level to the breathtakingly huge and beautiful universe, that the consciousness inside our humbly small heads allows us to marvel at.

Dr Who

Thoughts on art and artists (2025)

From the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the market system, art is often a commodity like any other. Art, as a skill, expression of an idea, attempt to move others, or simply a means to create beauty for its own sake, is in constant friction with commercial values.

On the one hand, art happens all the time outside of the market system. It is often not sold. Millions take part in creating tapestry or in knitting for gift-giving, in painting or making music as a hobby, in acting in local drama productions where payment will be minimal or totally absent, and so on. Thus, art seems almost a central characteristic of the human animal, even when money is not involved.

Likely, much art created by homo sapiens has been lost, which is understandable given it was created with natural substances that could decompose without trace. However, art from about forty to sixty thousand years ago has been found, such as Venus figurines worn as necklaces; Lion Man, the first figurine with animal features; the Borneo cave paintings depicting cattle, cupules (or cup-like indentations in rocks) which anthropologists have suggested may have served in a game or been used like musical instruments; and beautiful ostrich eggshell engravings, to name just a few of many other key discoveries. Humans from the earliest days possessed aesthetic sensibility, and may have worked to produce items that were intrinsically beautiful, or which possessed magical or other symbolic value. These were made by humans who lived in freedom, before the rise of states, exchange, and private property, and whose creative talents were developed in tandem with the development of tools and language.

Today, much art serves the needs of power and commerce. Students in art and design today will typically not be spending their lives beautifying our world, but rather living as workers to develop the design of packaging, posters, graphics, signage, fashion, animation, makeup, interiors, textiles, websites, and industrial goods, among other applications. Art today is therefore a prized skill that millions study for the purpose of serving industry. One could imagine many of these in use in even a classless society, but this also means that today’s art expresses the ideas, needs, and values of the rich. Our entire culture is based on appealing to the spending habits of the working class, or of the elite, to realise profits for the owning class. Most of what you see, touch, and use in your human world has been designed with money in mind. To that extent, our culture is creatively shaped by the needs of money itself. This is not simply a world designed according to techno-industrial development, rather it is a world designed by the needs of impersonal profit-making. We, flesh and blood humans of passion, emotion, aesthetic sense, and inspiration, live in a world in which art is distorted to serve the coldness of buying and selling.

Art is the expression of life, and you as a blue- or white-collar worker as well have been designed by our culture to live a particular one serving the unique needs of the owners. You have been moulded like so much plastic, thanks in fact to your neuroplasticity, into shapes that will feel excited by all the rubbish that the capitalist class sees fit to sell you. You have been designed as a worker who can fit into a corporate culture for five days of the week; you have been forged to consume commodities rather than live a true, authentic life of freedom and creativity. Despite such programming, it is in your nature to seek out and enjoy beautiful music, colourful paintings in the museum, and objects whose sleek, tainted, smooth, and sexy designs you covet. Meaning has been reduced to consumption. Not just that, but the artists involved have themselves been turned into machines whose creative spirits serve the capitalists in the attractive display of their goods.

In pop music, just as an example, the need to sell often leads to crass conventionality for no other reason but the hope of selling. Thus, after the first hits of Merseybeat, a hundred bands from around the world reproduced the identical style, especially with major labels courting anybody who could sound like the Beatles or Gerry and the Pacemakers. The same was true with almost any popular musical style: the rock’n’roll blues revivalists, folk-rock, psychedelia, hard rock, singer-songwriter, prog, metal, punk, dance, post-rock, and the list goes on. Many of these styles involved incredibly talented musicians, but they also inspired a generation of mediocre copyists. This was all due to a culture based on monetary values which distorted musical talent as it distorts everything to its image.

The music papers and radio stations also distorted talent by endlessly hyping one bad band after another as the greatest, latest, thing. Musicians are often evaluated by both the media and consumers according to how much they sell or to meaningless features of their personalities or lifestyles. While some famous bands were indisputably great, many famous acts remain indisputably have-beens. But even within the world of music, styles are themselves commodified, with fans devoted to classical competing with rock enthusiasts, who must then compete with followers of jazz, and so on. The reality is that all styles contain both a minority of the brilliant and a majority of the less inspired or inspiring. Many of the musicians were themselves aware of this, sampling the best of every genre even while the media were busy putting them into a box.

Conformity replaces individuality, artists who simply want to create what their heart dictates, although most artists who make no money probably don’t care about the marketplace and just continue according to their creative desire. It is often argued that capitalist competition was required to inspire the greats, however the reality is more likely the opposite, that many great artists failed to see the light of day, that competition generated commonness as much in art as in all commodities, that excessive resources were spent promoting rubbish, but that even the character of the art, for instance endless love songs about how much you want or need someone, was determined by what was viewed as sellable, as opposed to having reinforced originality and brilliance. Standards remain poor, everything produced is just ‘good enough’ for the masses.

Art in the service of commerce exists primarily to take your cash. It is impossible to even imagine what our world could look like without this distortion of our aesthetic sense serving the needs of the rich. Our cities serve the appearance and necessity of power, although they remain exciting places in which to live. There is just as much likelihood that a democratic society would have created futuristic cities far ahead of today’s capabilities that are limited by cost, than that it would have decentralised our living spaces so that we reside much closer to the living world. When the needs of human beings and the natural world come first, art will express freedom, community, nature, the universe, and those existential concerns that remain after the endless problems of a money society have been resolved.

Freed from today’s slavery in which we are required to serve the master class for most of our lives, perhaps more time will be spent in creativity. Perhaps even work will become more creative. Organisation will become more creative. How people may live together to establish the greatest joy will become a central creative venture. Art, in such a world, would not be expressed only in the artefacts or designs produced by artists, although those would also presumably continue to be valued, but art may be redefined as the creative life itself, as William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and many others have speculated.

In such a world, art will hold hands with science, and everyone’s life will be a form of art.

Dr. Who

Thoughts on money (2025)

From the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money has been around for thousands of years but only in capitalism, which overcame prior feudal and slave relationships, has it come to dominate all human and natural life.

Money exists in the modern world as a means of rationing the wealth available to most people while allowing it to exist in hyper-abundance for the few. On a planet with finite resources, approaching minimalism in our ownership of possessions may be a treasured ideal, however the rationing imposed by money on the majority does not derive from such idealism or concern. The very focus of the minority making money is to monopolise as much of the wealth as possible from the majority, and to exploit the natural world far beyond not just what is sufficient to meet our needs, but beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. The money system works hard to convince working people that it promotes freedom, liberty, and incentive, but this ideology is always the exact mirror image of the truth. It is the thinking of the rich, its liberty to exploit the majority and the planet with impunity, with minimal legal obstructions. But for those whose meaning in life is to provide that leisure class with a life of indolence and obscene indulgence, life is the very opposite of liberty, and can best be described as a modern form of subservience and oppression.

History illustrates powerfully the impressive creativity, imagination, reasoning, and persistence of the human species. It is therefore a great insult to the human race that most of it must spend its life with the primary objective of sustaining the elite’s extravagant lifestyles. The rich will hire this ingenuity, problem-solving and perseverance for its own ends, but these are wasted, when they could have served humanity as a whole. Money is without doubt a form of power. Today, money’s empire greatly rivals those of the kings of Versailles. It has found its way into all corners of the earth, leaving no stone untouched.

Money has also destroyed the family, sending adult offspring far from their original homes to find jobs, and financial worries fuel the mental ill health of both workers and the instability of their marriages. Once in place, the market system’s wheels just turn, blindly, irrespective of the damage they do in grinding up human lives and relationships, regardless of the dying planet they spin upon. Money, representing the commodity in which the value of all others is reflected, possesses no human values. We have surrendered and entrusted our entire lives and our living world to an institution that is the least responsible, the least flexible, the least stable.

Because the accumulation of money is an impersonal motive for production, it leaves a mountain of waste in its trail. Companies attempt to seduce demand by tempting people into oftentimes useless objects through vast expenditures of resources in advertising. Buildings, equipment, land, and professions require a massive infrastructure of insurance, which as with advertising firms, globally taking up millions of workers, energy, equipment, office and parking space, all for a completely unproductive cause. The same is true for professions devoted to buying and selling stock, to opening doors or sitting at reception desks, to assisting administrators, and such entire professions as lawyers, lobbyists, ticket sellers, marketers, and the military. These agencies, departments and professions, listed in Bullshit Jobs (2018) by anthropologist David Graeber, but also by socialists for over a century, illustrate the unnecessary complexity of a system based on money, one marked by an eye-boggling degree of waste of human lives and precious energy and resources.

Money also brings out the worst sides of human beings. By offering temptation, since it has the power to satisfy needs and wants, it invites built-in corruption in companies and governments everywhere, requiring vast policing resources to monitor and arrest a minority of offenders. Drug-dealing and theft are themselves primary examples of how a money system can trigger leeches at best, and potential murderers at worst, depriving society of even the best minds and bodies of a generation who turn into addicts, career criminals, and prison inmates.

Most people, even economists, cannot even imagine a world without money. Professionals whose specialty is the monetary system insist that incentive, entrepreneurship, and meeting a seemingly endless rainbow of needs, requires a monetary system. However, psychology knows otherwise. Our needs and wants are not infinite and, if anything, are artificially enhanced by the monetary system.

The complexity of the money system boggles the imagination. Right now, every individual and family in the tall building in which I live must spend time shopping for items that could easily be shared among a few hundred people. We all go out to shop because a money society has destroyed our collective natures and lifestyles (which were quite evident even in late feudalism, in which humans enjoyed, on average, rich relationships with extended family and other town residents). We must all do our food shopping even though in one go we could procure sufficient ingredients to cook a meal for a room of several dozen residents or neighbours. We look at any city street and see a long line of unused cars.

A human world consisting of billions of citizens should probably encourage a minimalist home, especially if the well-studied factors that most determine our happiness and meaning are such psychological variables as freedom, work, health, relationships, solitude, creativity, feeling part of the community. Without doubt hobbies require resources and possessions (musical instruments, books, screwdrivers) but it is not clear what little we could get by with if most items were shared and our lives could return to the collective form which is our archaic nature.

Our economists are failing us if in the face of today’s problems, including a dying world, they are not devoting their science (if it is one at all) to devising improved economic systems in which humans and the living world might thrive.

The money system has its obvious problems for those of us who must work in the Western world for an employer, but the system did not evolve similarly throughout the world. The institution of money is even more brutal in countries which still have theocracies, military juntas, one-party governments, or autocracies. Wars over resources or the competing ideologies and sense of entitlement of power-hungry rulers, starvation, extreme poverty, cartels, and environmental despoliation, are the symptoms of a monetary institution that fails because it is not based on meeting needs, although its ideology insists it does. It is time for economists to devise outlines of possible non-monetary systems that might better meet our needs. Until such a time, it is down to ordinary citizens such as ourselves to keep promoting such a vision. It may be hard to imagine such a future at this time; we may even at times feel crazy doing so. But our world is so rife with insecurities that alternatives are desperately needed.

Dr. Who

SPGB March Events (2025)

Party News from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

It’s the system! (2007)

From the August 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard 

To many the socialist criticism of the capitalist system may seem like a crude act of oversimplification, if not a type of scapegoating.

If social ills are always blamed on the capitalist system, our critics complain, then there is no room for intelligent discussion about the varied reforms, leaders, governments, nations or policies that appear to be meeting people’s needs in quite radically distinct ways around the globe or at different times in the same country.

However, what the socialist is attempting to demonstrate is that the varied threads of social experience are intimately woven together in such a manner that they constitute aspects of a vast system that operates by particular laws and so is incapable of adequate reform. To perceive such a web of interrelationships is not at all a bad case of oversimplification. Rather, it represents an attempt to understand social and economic phenomena, much as natural phenomena are comprehended, as interactive parts of a system, which may be observed wherever the system exists, and predicted given certain defined conditions.

To understand social experience in socialist terms is to notice that all humans have certain requirements for food, shelter or safety, and that the varied ways in which they meet such needs produce different systems of relationships among them. This is often a difficult theory for many, especially for those used to comprehending social phenomena the way they were taught history in school, or the way events are reported in the media – in terms of distinct leaders, competing economic theories or degrees of corruption.

When material needs were met by ownership of people by other people (slavery), it followed necessarily that laws were required to protect that ownership, and that the fruits of the labour of slaves would be enjoyed by their owners. It also follows from this that with control of many slaves came accumulations of wealth that led some to live in abundance in palaces and others to be coerced to build and maintain these palaces at threat of death. Customs evolved in slave or feudal systems that led most humans to accept the legitimacy of this very unequal distribution of wealth and power. The experience of being dispossessed also inevitably led the majority to feelings of resentment, anger, helplessness, apathy, devotion, revolution, or ambivalent combinations of these at the same time or throughout the course of their lives.

To say that we all live in a system, the present one being capitalist, is in a sense to deconstruct the customs that we were all brought up to accept as normal, and by attempting to understand them, to open up the possibility that we may reject them. To comprehend all social appearances in terms of a system is also to remove the temptation to support another initially promising leader who everyone will hate a few years later, and to blame our problems on one who was found to be lacking intellectually, or morally, or found to be emphasising inadequate economic priorities.

When socialists seek to blame the capitalist system, they are promoting an important hypothesis that all social problems derive from the fact that a few individuals or states own the means of producing the things we require to live, which implies that the majority of us do not. It is, in the socialist’s mind, this fact of ownership that leads to war, to world poverty and hunger, to excessive stress, to murderous wastes of planetary resources and animal habitation destruction, or to our feelings of alienation that are often accorded psychiatric diagnoses.

Is it not obvious to most of you? If the metals were owned and controlled by the community, which of us would truly be mad enough to squander them to make tanks and bombs to blow up innocent children on the other side of the planet because of the industrial need for petroleum? If we all owned the farms together, do you think we would decide it reasonable to produce food packed with artificial preservatives and colourings, or to condemn millions of children to starve? I have never seen a parent of right mind consciously decide to let his or her children get sick — have you? Do you see people in your workplace regularly killing each other over a disagreement? Of course not. Wars are very well planned murders by those quite prepared to squander the planet’s population, clean air and topsoil to do the government’s bidding, and able at least during execution of the plan to tolerate gnawing sentiments that their behaviours may be morally reprehensible but extraordinarily rationalised as “in the national interest”.

Even when workers intellectually understand that they are part of a worldwide system, committing themselves to a radical alteration in the means of production guaranteed to provide a more enduring security to their lives has been difficult. This is due to the false perception that the greater possibility of a small change is preferable to the small possibility of a more significant change (even knowing that the small change may not be realised or may not last as long as a structural alteration). This type of cognitive bias has long been known to psychologists under the title of “hyperbolic discounting,” which produces a greater preference for an immediate payoff than a later payoff, even when it is not certain that either may be obtainable. In short, it is understandable for workers to put on hold any commitment to such a desirable end as socialism when the latter presents as likely yielding longer-term results (the achievement of a socialist majority). This is in contrast to working crazy hours now to achieve more tangible but lesser results such as saving up for a holiday or paying off the family home’s mortgage. Apolitical choices toward somehow improving the here and now likely play their part in competing with political ones toward the betterment of the future.

Scientific thinking over the course of the past few centuries has tended to encourage more systemic thinking. Medicine or ecology are examples of disciplines based on understanding phenomena as part of a holistic system. We use the word “system” all the time when we speak of the solar system, a grouping of planetary bodies and their satellites revolving around a sun. The same applies when we talk about our “computer system,” a collection of hardware and software that operate as one unit (and indeed, we become quite indignant when a new program will not be accepted into the system we are expecting it to become a part of).

What socialists are urging people to do seems at times like the impossible. We are asking you to put down preset assumptions about the way the world operates and urging you to do so in order to help create a new global system that will be as vastly preferable to what we have now as modern surgery seems over prayer, or psychology seems over phrenology. But to help realize such a world of freedom and security will require understanding all social phenomena that confront us today as inevitable effects of a capitalist system.

Let us list a handful of social problems that any of you are likely to consider in need of remedy: war, starvation, poverty, excessive stress, ecological destruction, worrying constantly about how we are going to make financial ends meet, the high prevalence of such emotional troubles as depression and anxiety, such medical problems as diabetes and cancer, or such lifestyle problems as addiction or obesity, or subjecting our children to this sickeningly violent and gadgety culture.

Socialists argue that a system of ownership of the means of life by individuals, corporations and states directly causes such problems, and also therefore that your continued political support of such a system will necessarily and inevitably support the continuation of such ills, and the unthinkable suffering that accompanies them. Have you not wondered why your experience of the society you live in, and the news on television about it, tend to repeat with predictable nausea, like a bad dream?

Socialists are not urging you to believe us uncritically, either. We are confident that overwhelming evidence will be found in both the experience of the day-to-day for most working people as well as in a study of history, to support the claim that today’s major problems are the results not of efficient versus inefficient politicians or policies, but rather of a worldwide system based on minority ownership of the productive machinery, and on production for sale.

To understand modern society as a system that operates by certain laws (for example, the laws of exploitation and profit-making) is not an academic pursuit but a way of empowering ourselves as members of the employed class. It is easy to feel helpless in our society, to feel that there is nothing we can do to make a better world for ourselves and for our children. But to understand that we live in a system is to give rise to a different behaviour than we have been accustomed to (voting for parties that support the wages system, voting for more progressive politicians, getting more leftwing, voting with our purse, and so on). It is also to generate an unbridled determination to fight for the better world now, for a different system which works in our favour (production for need and an all-inclusive democratic form of decision-making).

Change the system!

DR WHO 

(World Socialist Party of US)

Letters: Punk rock (2002)

Letters to the Editors from the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Punk rock

Dear Editors,

When I began reading the article on Punk rock in the June issue, I wondered if I had got the date wrong and it was one of those April 1st spoofs beloved of the Guardian. I was surprised to see so much valuable space devoted to so much pretentious twaddle. It’s bad enough to read this sort of pseudo intellectual rubbish in the Daily Telegraph, least of all in the Socialist Standard.

Denham Ford, 

Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex

Reply: 

We can understand that punk music can’t be everybody’s cup of tea but it was a significant social phenomenon in its time and its jubilee was certainly worth commenting on more than the other one—Editors.

Capitalism defined

Dear Editors,

Capitalism has been defined as a political economy based on commodity exchange and surplus value. Thus under capitalism economic production portrays the implicit class interests of the bourgeoisie and not the satisfaction of general social needs as such.

Commodity production alienates the working class from the physical objects of their labour. Their social essence as members of civil society comes to be determined by the money wages obtaining under existing conditions. The working class’s engagement in economic production ends in the creation of commodities.

The realisation of surplus value thus becomes the major factor motivating economic production under capitalism. Commodities and social goods are created not for unrestricted consumption but for sale.

The nature of the working class social deprivation under capitalism warrants no further elaboration other than the sanctification of unemployment, inflation and social poverty in every capitalist society. Because economic production is undertaken in order to realise surplus value the full satisfaction of the basic social needs shall always remain unrealised under capitalism.

Scientific socialism aims to change the fetishistic economic framework of capitalism. The eradication of capitalism will entail a class war between the state and civil society that can only be realised through a working class inspired socialist revolution.

The illusory projection of political and economic freedoms under abstract and fictitious entities abstracted from the immediate reality of civil society has led to the blind acceptance of the political state as a universalisation of human freedoms. The political and economic interests of civil society come to depend upon the arbitrary whims and fancies of political elites. The political state illuminates the unrealised political and economic freedoms that cannot be realised under the intrinsic economic relations based on competition.

The division of labour has suppressed labour’s potentialities for individualised self-realisation by subjecting its mental and physical potentialities to the limiting conditions of the commodity market. The division of labour is a fetter upon labour’s physical and mental potentialities and limits its self-realisation. Thus the eradication of capitalism will liberate labour from its restricted social conditions under the division of labour.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed and formulated their systematic and dialectical premises of dialectical materialism while domiciled in England. Their critical analysis of capitalism was heavily influenced by political and economic transformations taking place in the 19th century. Thus the scientific and dialectical assumptions of Marxism are open to further historical development that may transcend the predictions of Marx’s own theories.

Kephas Mulenga, 

Kitwe, Zambia

Katrina: the poor suffer more (2005)

From the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recently sickening ravages of property and life wrought by Hurricane Katrina have been extensively covered by the media, but with some rather glaring omissions.

The first was that a society based on the rights of property over life had a great deal to do with exacerbating an already traumatic situation. What we witnessed the most on television were pathetic yet stark scenes of poor people huddled in a sports stadium, homes lost forever, awaiting supplies and aid that took endless days to arrive. During this time more people died, the ill were uncared for, and conditions of existence plummeted to unsanitary levels often associated with the shanty towns of South America or Turkish prisons, but not with the United States of America. While these already traumatised people had to endure an additional trauma of abandonment and lack of the basic wherewithal to survive, millions of homes and offices unused and awaiting buyers sat empty around the country. But they were not available to the million homeless of New Orleans, whose life savings had been lost in homes rendered rubble, or who simply never had the savings to invest in their own house.

Nobody on television asked the most salient question of all: “should people struck by terrible tragedy be victims of charity at all, or should they instead be automatically entitled to society’s wealth simply by demonstrating clear-cut needs for homes, hygiene, food, clothes, and comfort?” Society as presently constituted is not geared toward the satisfaction of our needs, but rather to the sale of commodities to yield profits, and such a society proved itself demonstrably incapable of meeting needs of the dire and desperate kinds that followed on the heels of Katrina. But hey, there are already millions of homeless and poor people in the United States who are not entitled to those vast numbers of empty homes awaiting purchase, so why should these victims of extreme weather be any more fortunate?

Had you or I decided to by-pass the sleeping government and simply pick up a couple of homeless individuals and drop them off in another town, we would have had to do so only by taking time off work. Most of us, as workers, have commitments to our employers that may not be so casually by-passed. And in capitalism, even relief efforts are subject to the welfare agencies’ budgetary constraints. Ever heard of the tens of millions of starving and ill children who die each and ever year around the world for whom there is simply not enough money to go around? While relief for those left in New Orleans was certainly offered by the Red Cross and eventually by the state, few asked whether it is sane or even effective to meet critical human needs depending upon how much money or how many volunteers may be assembled. What if those of you donating a few dollars at supermarkets for Katrina victims simply don’t raise enough? Does that mean that the plight of those struck by disaster is entirely the result of your personal failures, or of a society in which wealth is produced only to be sold, and not to meet our needs? We socialists think the latter.

Nobody on television asked whether by rights the wealth of society should not be automatically due to all individuals. Thus, the million New Orleanians with homes tragically destroyed suddenly enter into that category of “homeless,” those without the monetary means to buy or rent. Nobody on the idiot box asked the most obvious question: “why shouldn’t homes be available to anybody who needs them?”

A further question never raised in recent television coverage was about the severity of the storm itself. Many scientists around the world are now convinced that the ecological devastation wrought by modern society has played its part in altering global weather patterns, even while conservative politicians and owners of polluting industry deny such hypotheses and try hard to keep them from being discussed in the media. Tropical forests are vanishing at the rate of city sizes per day, ice is melting at the polar caps, storms are increasing and worsening, temperatures are rising, ozone levels are diminishing. Quite a few scientists have made calculations that if present levels of ecological destruction continue unabated for the next ten, twenty or thirty years, then catastrophic alterations in weather will no longer be avoidable, even if pollution were stopped after such a date. While it is difficult to be certain if the damage to the planet caused by capitalist production has been responsible for recent changes for the worse in weather, one thing is clear – such dire warnings from the scientific community are not going to be taken seriously. This leaves us rightly concerned whether we are heading into an era in which such similarly devastating phenomena as Hurricane Katrina will not be exceptions, but the rule. What are you all going to do about it? When will citizens take control, and stop leaving critical decision making to leaders of all parties led by the supremacy of corporate interests. What are you personally going to do to render this planet a joy to share, to create a society for you and your children that meets our needs?

The World Socialist Party of the United States is a companion party of the World Socialist Movement. It aims to bring about a non-violent revolution in the ownership of the means of production from private or state to common. In such a society, money will no longer be necessary, as the things and services we require to live fully (food, clothes, medical services, homes, transportation, and other modern human needs) will be freely available to all. This is because the means of production will be owned in common by the entire community, and will be democratically controlled by that community as well, a society in which leaders are replaced by truly democratic decision making of all citizens.

In a society of common ownership, all war in such a nationless world will be immediately abolished, while the end of starvation and dire poverty will quickly follow suit. Without the barriers of economic cost holding back human progress, more ecologically sustainable ways to provide energy and production for ourselves will be immediately planned and created on a global basis. We will become for the first time in history a truly human family looking after itself.

Dr. Who 

(World Socialist Party of US)

Real Therapy (2004)

A Short Story from the April 2004 issue of the World Socialist newsletter

Please, psychotherapist, I am tired of talking, talking, talking about my problems, about my narcissistic father, and about my feelings. What I want is to have more fun in my life. What I want is to take off some time to see the world. What I want is to be sitting in your chair telling you for a change what would really make a change!

For a start, it gets really depressing living in this world. You cant turn on the damn TV without hearing about more people dying in wars abroad and in our inner cities, about kids cruising their territories guns in hand waiting to blow the brains of other kids in the wrong place at the wrong time, about young women too young to even know about sex prostituting themselves or getting raped by their step-fathers. You can’t even go for a walk without smelling foul rivers too filthy to fish in and without guiltily admiring gorgeous sunsets painted by the refractions of light in poisonous gas. And that doesn’t even touch upon how depressing it is to go to work let alone just sit in traffic going to work. Who can rest from the year of working in weekly chunks of two days each, and annual chunks of two weeks each?

Who would not be sad? Who would not get anxious? Who would not feel angry? Who would not find it really hard to concentrate, to focus in class, to keep your mind on the job, who would really be brimming with joy? I mean, joy comes in little places in the modern world, doesn't it? We look for fun in our sex lives (although the stress of society reduced to couples raising the worlds children can take a toll on that sex life), in escapist movies and video games, in lucky getaways for a few hours or days from the congestion of the city and the congestion of our lives. But that is the whole point, isn't it? We try to find meaning and joy elsewhere , in a splitting off of our life, not in the entity of the life itself. And here you are teaching me to cope better with all this crap. And there what can you do, therapist? I mean, here you are trying to change my feelings, as though they were disconnected from my being. If life is depressing, violent, disturbing, imposed, ordered, priced, frightening, lonely, then why are you trying to change me, and not change how we live?

And yet, my life is not much different from yours. We live in the same city, we eat the same food, we visit the same parks, our kids go to the same schools, we read the same papers. Yet here I am sitting in front of you. I am talking to you because you got a degree in therapy. You studied psychology, social work, counseling.You are allowing me to bathe in your understanding and your empathy at a price. Would you be as empathic for free? Would you work with me to make this a better world or would you simply give advice and your listening time for the price the insurance company is willing to pay? How empathic can it really be if this is your job ?

Psychotherapist, what I really want you cant really give, can you? I want freedom. I want to feel that this neighborhood is really mine. I want a world in which there are no wars, no prices, no people bossing me around, no children dying for lack of food, no traffic jams, no junk food, no boxes they call homes, no homeless, no lack of anything for lack of money.

I don't want to think different, feel different; I want to stay just the way I am until the world is better. And when the world is better, then maybe I wont have to feel this way again.

Dr. Who, 

Chicago

Greasy Pole: The mass debaters (2008)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who will win the race? Which horse is your money on? Will we notice when they win?

The excitement is killing me. Who has seen whiter, glossier, teeth and lies whiter and glossier still than those that were bared on television during the recent debates between Democrats and Republicans? The race culminating in the presidential trophy in late 2008 is solidly on, with these wealthy members of the capitalist class vying for leadership of the world’s most prosperous land, brought to them by the generous contributions of our dear readers’ unpaid surplus value.

These sellers of capitalist reforms are so impeccably dressed and groomed, so charming and witty, so passionate in their determination to give a structurally exploitative society a new lease on ideological life, that it might well take an Odyssean resistance to temptation on your part to keep from falling for their well-oiled sell, written and rehearsed with a large team of marketing professionals from behind the curtains.

Obama

Senator Obama, for all his oozing liberal rhetoric and strong likeability factor, while an Illinois Democratic senator has always supported a free market system. Isn’t that the one in which most of us must work so hard to produce free surplus value for our employers that we don’t even have enough free time to ourselves? One of the most popular bills that he signed in 2007, the Shareholder Vote on Executive Compensation Act, also known as “Say On Pay,” allowed shareholders to limit the inflated salaries of corporate CEOs but while this was easily and incorrectly perceived as a Robin Hood move, the reality was that studies in the Wall Street Journal had previously demonstrated that poorer CEO performance was correlated with more inflated salaries, and also that in economically troubled companies, worker morale suffered the most when CEOs were receiving pay of exceptionally bloated dimensions. In short, fiscal policies and laws must attempt to look after the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, even at the minor expense of individual capitalists. Behind each liberal dream sits a wallet somewhere waiting to bulge.

Obama was further criticized and praised last year for spending $18 billion on promoting merit pay of the nation’s teachers by cutting costs from the NASA Constellation Program, delayed now by 5 years. On the surface, noble and caring, no? Well, in capitalism the only nobility are the ones who still own parts of the land, and even the most caring sentiment finds a way out of the heart and into the coffers of the rich. His plan to improve merit pay for teachers was harshly criticized by the National Education Association (the largest labour union in the U.S.), the Urban Institute and the Cato Institute, on the grounds that merit pay could actually end up favouring schools in better neighbourhoods whose track records were stronger as a result of the inflow of local resources, could lower the morale of teachers owing to the resulting competition between them, and could create a new expensive bureaucratic superstructure overseeing the programme itself. Isn’t it sickening that in capitalism resources cannot be directly accorded to those who deserve it the most, our children’s teachers, without producing such negative consequences upon the institutions and atmosphere in which our children are learning?

Obama is also on record for stating that he is not opposed “to all wars, only dumb wars” (famous Fall 2002 speech at the anti-war rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza). While urging for a date by which de-escalation of the militarization of Iraq should begin, Obama has also consistently refused to actually cut funding for the Iraq War. Capitalism makes it hard for seemingly honest, intelligent and good-intentioned politicians such as Obama to take a solid stance against the murder of the innocent (who are always the ones in war to die in greater numbers than the intended targets), even for those politicians who would likely come across as largely anti-war in a private conversation (if they too openly challenge the status quo, they may be attacked for undermining the war on terrorism – and as a result of their careful public manoeuvring, their platform always seems unpredictable and inconsistent).

Clinton

Hillary Clinton lost the Iowa caucus but won the Democratic Party primary in New Hampshire. She is thus very much in the race to become her party’s presidential candidate at this time, with the biggest next date that may tip the scales in favour of Clinton or Obama what is dubbed by the press Big Tuesday on February 5th (something to get so excited about when we get home from work that day). Clinton is garnering a lot of support for her life-long struggle to medically insure all Americans, however she no longer advocates a single-payer insurance system as she once did and as all other capitalist nations around the world presently provide. Another example of the compromise she had to make to remain a viable leader of the Democratic Party, and a perfect example of how the needs of capitalism so taint the original ideals of those running for big offices that by the time they arrive there, they look, smell and sound like anyone else in the White Lie House. Indeed, the only Democratic Party candidate who does presently advocate a single-payer insurance plan is John Edwards, who is presently tailing significantly behind the other two in the race.

Hillary Clinton is assuredly not going to be making the world any safer from war, either. It is true that she has worked to improve the medical and psychiatric treatment benefits available to veterans, thus leading one to assume that she is more willing to improve in the patching up of those who fought abroad than in preventing their being massacred physically and emotionally there in the first place. However, as the potential leader of one of the world’s great powers, her job will be to make sure that she protects the economic interests of this country’s industries and their standing in the marketplace as a whole. Rather than attempting to make the world safer from war, her own website recites the same sort of patriotic dribble one finds frothing out of the mouths of every other leader running for president, in her case: “every member of our armed forces will receive a fair shot at the American dream when their service is over.” We all know, of course, how “fair” the American dream is, especially the millions of American presently failing to pay off their mortgages at a landslide rate, and the volunteers at the 51,000 food pantries across our “fair” land that are presently providing food assistance to the millions of extra customers turning up at food banks in recent years (according to America’s Second Harvest “2006 Hunger Study”).

Ron Paul

Ron Paul, a Republican presidential candidate, actually came out in the recent debates the strongest opponent of the Iraq War. His opposition seemed partially fiscal in nature, as he deplored the $300 billion spent on it thus far. But it was also ideological, as he felt the arming of groups who later turn against the United States (e.g., the Kosovars who aided Islamic terrorists, or the Afghan jihadists themselves, and their friend Osama bin Laden) had acted to fuel increased national insecurity rather than security, and increased terrorism rather than less. And of course, Ron Paul is probably right on this score, surprisingly coming from a member of the Republican Party, the party that always advocates small government but seems in each office hell-bent on creating a bureaucratic gigantean proto-fascistic war economy state.

However, Ron Paul, like the rest of the Republicans or Democrats, feels that capitalism can somehow behave more rationally than it does – or at least they want us to believe that with our vote they can transform its foul waters to fine wine. The reality is quite the opposite, as history shows again and again. Tensions between nations are always present over shifts in political allegiances between countries that may benefit some better than others. Global politics is a macrocosm of the local economy, with each company vying to get as much of the business as it can, such as trade, material resources and opportunities for future economic growth. From the perspective of a capitalist enterprise or a nation, the planet is a great big hamburger to chow on, with the unneeded parts thrown away on the landfill – children, nature, women, the elderly, education, health, and common sense. It is, at the bottom-line, a violent and wasteful way for humans to treat both each other and their world. It benefits only those in control of the resources and keeps the rest of us in a state of emotional tension about the relative lack of security that exists around the planet, at any time potentially plunging us all into another world war or terrorist attack. It is a world gone mad.

Daniel Vogel,

WSPUS