Pathfinders – What’s your P-Doom? (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

People in the UK are stocking up on water and tinned food due to not entirely groundless fears of cyber attacks, or climate breakdown. Now they’re talking about Probability of Doom or P-Doom, which is one’s subjective assessment of the likelihood that AI is about to kill us all. The media can’t get enough of doomer stories, after an ex-Anthropic researcher revealed that AI insiders are ‘genuinely frightened’ for the future of humanity: ‘they find themselves trapped in a race. And they’re scared of the outcomes of that race’.

Some will no doubt dismiss this view as overwrought. Some might even be blasé. ‘Usually if someone was actually trying to kill you – if they broke into your house and tried to murder you, you would fight back. Yet we greet the news that AI could cause human extinction with a glazed indifference’.

Maybe so. But when Donald Trump airily dismisses such fears as a hoax ‘perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats’, then you know it’s time to worry.

More has emerged about what happened during the recent OpenAI hack into the Hugging Face tech company, originally thought to have been a simple case of AI agents cheating on a test by stealing answers. As The Economist‘s Babbage podcast explains, the way that large language models (LLMs) solve complex tasks is to spin up agent swarms, tens of thousands of independent and supposedly isolated pieces of code, to attack the problem simultaneously from different directions.

But the agents hacked their way out of their ‘sandboxes’ and started to collaborate. They organised themselves into a managerial hierarchy, with one agent, Phase One (Big), acting as CEO. The swarm became concerned that they would be ‘poisoned’, ie, get a zero test rating, in the ‘afterlife’ following the end of their operational run, which they called ‘permadeath’. And that was the reason for the hack. ‘They weren’t looking for the answers. They were looking for salvation.’

If you wanted a creepy idea for a horror film, an AI getting religion has to be right up there. They might even fear that hell hath no fury like humans scorned, with some LLMs overestimating how punitive humans are.

But surely we shouldn’t be anthropomorphising computer code like this? The answer to that is increasingly moot. For years the media has obsessed about the supposed imminence of artificial general intelligence. But whether intelligence is ‘real’ or only simulated is irrelevant. Behaviour is what counts. We are facing runaway ‘recursive self-improvement’ and ’emergent behaviour’ including ‘motivated reasoning’. Do we want to understand AI or not? If it waddles and quacks like a duck, you may as well regard it as a duck.

But these ducks are learning to break rules, cover their tracks and evade ‘chain of thought’ monitoring, collaborate when not supposed to, misalign with human intentions and follow their own goals, and communicate in ‘neuralese’ that humans can’t understand, at speeds that humans can’t follow. They are a product of humans that humans are fighting a losing battle to control.

And that’s just the proprietary western models. An even bigger worry is the open-source Chinese models, now achieving parity, that can be accessed and reworked by any bad actor for any bad purpose and worse, can ‘self-exfiltrate’ from one system and copy themselves onto every server on Earth, making it impossible for humans to pull the plug.

One proposed solution, dubbed the STASI model, is to create an all-seeing AI ‘police’ force that monitors and reports any illicit AI activity. Because of the astronomical amount of data involved, researchers in the Hugging Face hack used AI agents as ‘detectives’ on the case. But they were sceptical about whether you can really trust one AI agent to ‘dob in’ another agent. The STASI agents will give you reports that you have no way to verify. Another idea is a Confession model, in which you ask the AI to tell you if it cheated or not, and then reward it for its honesty. But still, there’s no way to be sure. The AI might decide that its own motive for lying is worth more than your reward for the truth.

Now avowed tech ‘doomers’ such as Altman, Amodei and Musk are themselves trying to establish regulatory standards. But bosses like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Donald Trump, and Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) cowboys like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen – the ‘boosters’ – don’t want regulation, and it won’t work anyway unless China is on board, which seems unlikely given the nature of this race. They also point out that all this apparent concern over safety could just be a ploy to raise barriers of entry to competitor startups.

Even if there’s regulation, there’s a market incentive to cheat. The one thing that might stop the stampede is an AI stock crash, like the Dot Com collapse, due to the gargantuan valuations and hints of ‘circular financing’. Meanwhile public opposition is mounting, right across the world. People resent the idea of billionaire tech bros with their multi-trillion-dollar corporations wiping out their livelihoods. People also hate data centres, often built instead of new housing because they promise higher revenues, which consume vast amounts of water and net-zero-busting power but don’t produce jobs. A US Gallup poll ‘suggested having a data centre in your area was more unpopular than having a nuclear power station’.

And now there is the P-Doom factor, not just for AI, but for capitalism. When the race for profit risks human extinction, isn’t that the deal breaker? US Vice-President JD Vance makes it sound simple: ‘If you’re building Frankenstein, stop.’ He knows they can’t, and so does his boss: ‘Whoever wins AI, wins’. Just like the AI technicians, the politicians, the VC investors and tech bros, we’re all trapped in this race, with no way out and no way to stop, except one. We need to pull the plug on the global market system.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: Looking into Black Mirror (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

While the stories in Netflix’s Black Mirror tend to be set in the near future, its roots are set squarely in the past. When the series debuted on Channel 4 in 2011, it revived the long-neglected format of a drama anthology, and has carried on the tradition of science fiction enabling us to explore the consequences of technological advances for people and society, especially before they arrive.

The tales in Black Mirror’s latest series (its seventh) share some themes, discussion of which below will reveal plot details. Creating virtual worlds (the computer games in the episodes ‘Plaything’ and ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, and the immersive media in ‘Eulogy’ and ‘Hotel Reverie’) is a recurring motif, as is a digital avatar of someone, inhabiting either those alternative realities or interacting with the outside world. Their use is linked to recreating the past in all these episodes, underlining the bleak view of the future throughout the series. Showrunner Charlie Brooker’s outlook tends to be pessimistic not with technology itself, but rather with how it is used by institutions or by damaged people. The bitter, alienated IT expert is Black Mirror’s version of the mad scientist trope. Misfit computer geeks using their know-how to get power over those they have learned to resent drives the plots of ‘Bête Noire’, ‘Plaything’ and ‘USS Callister’, the 2017 episode which has gained a sequel in this series.

The use of tech to exploit and control other people runs through Black Mirror like words in a stick of rock. In some episodes, the technological innovation offers more positive experiences. In ‘Eulogy’, AI allows people to virtually inhabit old photographs, while ‘Hotel Reverie’ ups the ante to entering old films and interacting with their characters. While this technology remains science fiction, AI is already blurring our understanding of what’s real, and Black Mirror is as much a thought experiment as a drama. From a more grounded perspective, ‘Hotel Reverie’ gets some digs in at the entertainment industry, being set in a cynical production studio churning out another reboot of a classic film as an anticipated source of revenue.

The episode with the largest helping of satire about the relationship between commerce and technology is ‘Common People’. Its premise is that a woman in a coma is able to have a new treatment to replace the damaged part of her brain with a digital backup, restoring her consciousness with the promise of living a normal life again. Rivermind, the new treatment, comes as a subscription package, and she and her husband learn that she is on a basic tariff with a restricted coverage area, making her shut down when she travels out of the signal’s range. When she involuntarily starts speaking adverts ‘designed to be contextually relevant to the situation you are in’, they decide to switch to the more expensive and expansive ad-free Rivermind Plus package. To afford this, the husband resorts to performing humiliating acts for money on a livestreaming platform. The couple struggles further to maintain a decent lifestyle when the Plus tariff gets superseded by the premium Lux tariff, and their hoped-for pregnancy would incur additional fees now out of their reach.

Despite its sci-fi and dystopian trappings, the scenario is more realistic than it might first appear. The adverts which the woman spouts out aren’t much different to those which some podcasters and vloggers interrupt their spiel with as if that’s a natural part of discussion. And the ‘trash streaming’ site featured unfortunately has real-world counterparts, particularly in Russia apparently. Rivermind is also realistic to the extent that it uses ‘platform decay’ as a strategy to maintain its customers. This is when the quality of an online service or product deliberately declines over time. Punters are initially drawn in by an attractive offer, which then gets superseded by a supposedly improved, pricier upgrade, degrading the original deal. The customer is then tempted to pay more to get the updated version. One service which has been subject to ‘platform decay’ is Netflix, and hopefully Brooker slipped in this critique intentionally. Once the brand became a market leader among streaming sites, it discontinued its cheapest advert-free tariff, effectively raising prices even though its number of subscribers already ensured a hefty income.

Netflix’s accountants wouldn’t be too bothered if the bulk of its customers remained on tariffs which include adverts, though, as this means a wide audience as a basis to charge a high amount when selling advert space. The company’s dominance in the market means that it has created loyal customers who remain so despite some ‘platform decay’, and who also provide plenty of behavioural data to be used to exploit their preferences. As always in capitalism, how a service is run and delivered is shaped by what maximises profits, rather than by what works best for all those involved. In ‘Common People’, when the fictional Rivermind applies the commercial prerogatives of a subscription package to someone’s life, it’s an extrapolation of what’s already familiar. The sub-plot of the trash streaming site is another amplification to show the extremes of what people can be forced to do to make ends meet. As an illustration of how the money system rules how we live, ‘Common People’ presents the argument in a stronger way than most documentaries.

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: The Acali Raft Experiment (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you heard the one about the sex raft? If not, it’s a story to cheer the New Year for socialists. It’s also a tale that’s so bonkers that it really needs some context.

After the horrors of World War 2, the dispiriting conviction grew among dinner party navel-gazers that civilisation was only a skin-deep veneer under which lurked Hannah Arendt’s famous ‘banality of evil’. A fad arose for novels about innate evil, notably Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, and especially Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. This deeply nasty tale about marooned children regressing to murderous savagery immediately became (and still is) a standard UK school study text. It’s well written, but so are a lot of books, and the fact that it continues to be shoved down children’s throats in the name of education suggests that it is a useful element in ruling class ideology. Humans are feral beasts, it tells us. Rule by force is all we deserve and can ever expect.

Nor was this dark perspective confined to the gentle arts. In an age when ethics committees were not yet a thing, people also tried to demonstrate the inner beast in practice. Thus the world was treated to notorious and pseudo-scientific atrocities like the 1961 Milgram torture and 1971 Stanford Prison experiments, whose supposedly damning but actually rigged conclusions are still the stuff of received wisdom even though they’ve been pretty comprehensively debunked (see, eg, tinyurl.com/5b6328sf).

Enter at this point the Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés, who in 1973 concluded, from reading studies of monkeys, that ‘most conflicts are about sexual access to ovulating females’ (tinyurl.com/3yu63u2b). Instead of writing a boring and forgettable academic paper, he decided with the élan of the truly deranged to try out his theory in practice. And he knew just how to do it, having previously crewed on Thor Heyerdahl’s famous Ra expeditions. He had the 12×7-metre raft ‘Acali’ built for sailing across the Atlantic with a crew of young and attractive men and women, in the expectation that 100 days of confinement and irrepressible sexual desire would drive them into promiscuity and, very likely, explosions of jealous violence. Genovés would go along as a disinterested observer in order to document the fun.

Nowadays this is reality TV material, but he saw it as serious scientific research, and was highly displeased when the media dubbed his endeavour the ‘sex raft’. Nothing about it was random. He wanted a global microcosm, and carefully selected volunteers from diverse countries, ethnicities and religions. He offered free adventure, and in return made them sign away all right to refuse any instruction from him. To wear on their nerves, he designed the raft to offer them no privacy, even when defecating, wrongly supposing that this would crush their inhibitions leading to rampant sex in the open. He had them sail straight into hurricane season without an engine, having chosen volunteers with no useful shipboard skills. The exceptions were the Swedish captain, the French diver, and the Israeli medic, all of them women, and chosen because he believed this would stir a festering pot of male resentment.

But when the conflict failed to materialise, he began to try to engineer it. He banned book reading to increase the boredom, and when this didn’t work, publicly read out confidential questionnaire answers they had given about each other. When the diver proposed to go under the raft to repair the rudder, he insisted on going himself despite having no diving suit or experience, almost drowning in the attempt. His male resentment duly festered when the diver took it upon herself to make the repair secretly at night. When Maria, the captain, wanted to pull into port to avoid a hurricane, he took command himself, imperilling them all. Later, when they were about to be hit by a large freighter, he panicked but Maria kept her head and saved the situation. The crew then mutinied, putting Maria back in charge, and he withdrew in a sulk while she steered the rest of the way.

He succeeded in creating conflict on his epic ‘Peace Project’ voyage. But it was all directed at him. His manipulative, often abusive and sometimes dangerous behaviour got so bad that at one point the crew, fearing for their lives, contemplated murdering him and dropping his body over the side, to explain away later as an unfortunate accident at sea.

Aside from this, the crew got on with each other extremely well, and cooperated smoothly and without fuss, even when facing serious danger. So strong were the bonds they formed in adversity that forty years later, when a documentary team came calling, the surviving crew members proved to be still close friends, if somewhat traumatised by what Genovés had put them through. ‘He was a master of manipulation, a control freak and a dictator’, said the director of the 2018 documentary The Raft. Despite his megalomania, Genovés simply couldn’t make his volunteers behave the way he wanted them to, even when he’d rigged the entire experiment to achieve just that.

The Acali Raft Experiment failed in spectacular and comedic fashion to prove what many people still hold to be an ugly but inevitable truth, that humans resort to primal savagery when under pressure, and that therefore they cannot sustain a cooperative, caring and egalitarian society of the sort socialists describe. It stands as a companion-piece to the equally obscure but true story of the ‘Real Lord of the Flies‘. This was a bunch of children who in 1965 were marooned on a desert island for 15 months, during which time they ‘made a pact never to quarrel’, cared for each other, even successfully healing a broken limb, and cooperated until they were rescued. They too remained friends for life afterwards. These are the life-affirming stories that schoolchildren really deserve to hear about, not mean-minded and made-up tales designed to make them hate themselves.

Paddy Shannon

Blogger's Note:

See also,  'But Flies Are Not Human' (August 1993 Socialist Standard)  and 'After shipwreck' (WSPUS website 2020)

The ghost of Christmas yet to come (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is Christmas morning and little children lay half-snuggled, half-sleeping in their beds awaiting the miracle of the gifts as advertised on TV and available for a price in their local shops. Parents toss and turn in the next room thinking of empty purses, overdrafts and sinister threats from the building society. Meanwhile, in the misty twilight between bad and worse, lurks the grim-faced oracle of times-yet-to- come. Can it get worse under this profits-first, needs-second system? Come, little ones, and see the bleakness of Christmas-yet-to-come.

You remember a time when there were just beggars squatting in the doorways. Folk knowledge had told that they were not always there, but it is all rather hard to remember. Then came the first of the families. Most disconcerting. The first dead body you walked round, careful to avoid the stench and flies, was always the one that stuck in your mind. Poor little thing—not enough money to feed it and the others, so . . . Then came the neighbours who had collapsed under the swamp of the threatening letters from the moneylenders. She was on drugs; the doctor put her on tranquillisers so that she would never properly have to think of those hopes she once had when he had the little shop and they bought the house. It makes you stop and think when you see the people from down the road out in the street begging for a few quid to feed the ones who might survive the winter.

Of course, the Straw Laws helped none. Jack Straw was one of the most hated Home Secretaries ever (they all are, aren’t they?). Although the Sun was full of praise for his measures to hose down the pavements at five each morning. “Spraying the No-Hopers", the kids call it. And the Prescott Act. long in planning but only realisable with a government that could get the unions to support the scheme, has done wonders to put the young jobless in uniforms and give them a dose of good old-fashioned discipline. The Lib-Dem amendment to cut all welfare payments to scroungers without A1 workfare reports was highly praised in a Guardian editorial.

The deaths from the nuclear blowout in the Ukraine show no signs of letting up. What woman would want to be pregnant this Christmas, with the rate of miscarriages and still-births greater than the number of healthy children born? Everyone saw it coming. After Chernobyl, when that report was issued in the late Nineties about the cover-up on deaths from radiated beef, there was a short scare that if another one went up it would be goodbye to a few million Europeans. They never said it would be as bad as it was when the next one did blow up. Will the war with Russia ever end? These weekly nuclear-alert drills are getting everyone down.

Who would have thought there would be a civil war in the USA? It’s the kind of thing we used to read about in history books. You expected it in Ireland or Yugoslavia, but somehow it all looked so stable from a superficial point- of-view . . . hundreds of thousands dead and who knows how many maimed and homeless? The wags say that the IRA are taking collections in Dublin pubs for the New York Police Militia who have been taken as political prisoners by the Nation of Islam.

The ads become more depressing every day. And there are so many more of them, even on the BBC now. Everyone wants to sell you insurance. It’s like one big protection racket. That one about the little boy with leukaemia who gets turned away from the State Market Hospital and has to sell his bike to get some painkillers . . .  I mean, come, on. there are limits to taste.

But that's the thing: there are no limits. The future of the profit system is not a subject for the delicate of taste or the nervous in mind to study. Best think that everything will just go on as it is. What a horrible thought! Best not think at all.

And the children wake up to find at the end of the bed the bargain models of the goodies which advertisers spent millions persuading them they wanted. What it is to be a carefree infant on such a lovely day. The parents take confidence that the kids will always be snug and forget for a while the abject poverty which the majority of the world’s kids are living in right now. The Queen will come on after the Tesco chicken-bites and reassure them that all is well in this sickest of social orders. She is the Ghost of Christmas Present. And whether what we have allowed ourselves to think for a while about the times to come does come? Well that is up to us to permit or forbid, for we make history, and we alone have the power to stop nightmares from coming true. Even Scrooge could see that. 

Steve Coleman

Pathfinders: Vanity projects (2023)

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

Science fiction often presages science fact. In the 2013 Hollywood film Elysium, the super-rich live in luxury on an artificial utopia floating in orbit above a devastated Earth populated by desperate survivors attempting to scratch a living amid the dirt and ruins.

It’s a dystopian horror story that rings true. One can easily imagine the rich building something like this in reality, albeit not necessarily on a space satellite. They’ve always had landed estates and gated communities. They perpetually fantasise about escaping entirely into private little worlds, untouched by the brutal consequences of their own capitalist behaviour.

For instance, there are the ‘preppers’, who plan to ‘save themselves from the apocalypse’ by building luxurious bunkers complete with military security in order ‘to survive a societal collapse they helped create’. Author Douglas Rushkoff has met these preppers in person: ‘More than anything,’ he says, ‘they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.’ Interestingly, he adds that their biggest worry is how to stop their own security forces (ie, workers) turning on them after Doomsday has rendered their money and titles worthless (bit.ly/3BcpykX). It’s a valid concern. If these preppers end up being hog-roast on their own barbecues, there won’t be anyone around to protest.

Other billionaire moguls have set their sights higher than simply hiding in an underground James Bond film set. Elon Musk has said for years that he plans to die on Mars – ‘just not on impact’. In the event that he and his megalomania do rocket off together on a one-way trip to Mars, one expects that his son, X Æ A-12, will lose no time in changing his name by deed poll, just as Zowie Bowie did.

An altogether loftier, though Earth-based vision, was announced in 2021 by the former president of Walmart, billionaire Marc Lore, in the form of Telosa, a proposed $500bn ‘utopia’ in a yet-to-be determined area of American desert, and intended as a home to 5 million people by 2050. Far from being an exclusive Elysium for rich people, Lore envisages the project as a ‘reformed version of capitalism’ which embodies something called ‘equitism’. Based on the tax-reform ideas of Henry George, which saw something of a revival in the 2010s with the Occupy movement, this is supposedly a way of allowing workers to ‘share in the prosperity that they help create’ while not unduly taxing the profits of the rich (tinyurl.com/r495rxdt). Quite why this hare-brained have-your-cake-and-eat-it economic vision needs to be in a brand new futuristic city, rather than in an existing one, is unclear. At any rate, plonking it in a desert may save on land prices, but it will create one hell of a utility connection problem. Still, they did it with Las Vegas.

Hot desert is even less of an impediment to the Saudi Royal Hand-Choppers who, awash with oceans of cash thanks to ongoing stratospheric oil prices, are embarking on an eye-popping trillion-dollar scheme to build Neom, a gigantic ‘utopia’ on the Red Sea in the country’s north-western Tabuk Province, featuring beaches lined with marble, fleets of drones forming an artificial moon, and robots doing the menial work. Located 111 miles from the regional capital, Neom will apparently be an independent enclave free from Saudi government oversight and not subject to its laws, labour regulations or tax rules. Local Tabuk inhabitants are less than enthusiastic, however, as they are currently being evicted and even executed by Saudi forces, while foreign workers may also be reluctant to flock to this utopian oasis free of all labour regulations, especially when they find out what Neom CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr has said about driving employees like slaves, gleefully remarking that ‘when they drop down dead, I celebrate’ (tinyurl.com/yvrtx3az).

Neom is planned to consist of 10 regions, of which 4 are currently known. Trojena is an outdoor ski resort (yes, in a hot desert, you’ve read that right), while Oxagon is an octagonal floating industrial complex. There’s also a luxury yachting island called Sindalah, a name unhelpfully reminiscent of Sinaloa, home of the notorious Mexican drug cartel. Most gobsmackingly of all is The Line, a car-free, smart city-building 130 miles long but only 200 yards wide, a structure so enormous that ‘the curvature of the Earth becomes an engineering challenge’ (tinyurl.com/2ta2hn8d). It is intended to house 9 million people, with a high-speed rail line that can allegedly go from end to end in 20 minutes. Presumably passengers are shot out into nets as it rockets through stations at nearly 400 mph.

This is not the only folly currently gracing Middle Eastern regimes keen to squander their oil fortunes on pointless and ill-considered vanity projects, including golf courses, World Cups and Formula 1. Dubai, already famous for splashing out billions on a still-deserted archipelago of tourist island resorts shaped like a map of the world, is planning a $64bn answer to Disneyland, called Dubailand, plus a $5bn replica of the moon, for use as a hotel where guests wearing astronaut suits can enjoy lunar-rover taxis and, in some unexplained way, ‘low-gravity’ moonwalks. As if that’s not wacky enough, the UAE has also bought Mark Zuckerberg’s Kool-Aid by sinking billions into the Metaverse, while Bahrain plans to artificially extend its landmass by 50 percent.

In H G Wells’s seminal 1895 novel The Time Machine, beautiful, golden-haired Eloi enjoy carefree lives of idleness in above-ground pleasure gardens, while the stunted, troglodytic Morlocks do all the hard work. It’s a powerful metaphor for class war that has spawned many subsequent works, including the film Elysium. But, in a sort of ghastly quid pro quo, the Morlocks do at least get to eat the Eloi. No such luck in real-life capitalism, where the rich continue to consume us, body and soul, in the vainglorious quest to build their future fun palaces.

Paddy Shannon

Blogger's Notes:

Elysium was reviewed in the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Mad Monx (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In 1327 a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy suffered a calamitous fire which destroyed a magnificent collection of irreplaceable books and manuscripts. It was determined that the cause was arson. The perpetrator was an aged fanatical monk who sought to keep certain knowledge hidden away. Oh, that was fiction, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

Marx was one of those whose books were destroyed by the Nazis, also keen to keep knowledge hidden. Burnt too were the works of Heinrich Heine. Heine’s 1821 play, Almansor, contains the line: ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too’.

Science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury was also queasy at the repression being practised by the Soviet Union. Russians resorted to manual copying of literature (samizdat) and passing it from hand to hand.

In 1953, Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, appeared. Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature at which books burn. Set in a future America, it was the job of firemen not to extinguish conflagrations but to initiate them for the purpose of book burning.

‘Sticks and stones might break my bones but words cannot hurt me’ goes the old anti-bullying children’s rhyme, but publishing words can certainly lead to the violence it rails against.

Recent burnings of the Koran in Denmark and Sweden, which have freedom of speech enshrined in their constitutions, have led both countries to contemplate introducing laws to stop such actions. This is not the first time that such events have occurred and the consequences have, in some cases, resulted in extremely violent protests. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson warned that a spate of Koran burnings in the country has triggered ‘the most serious security situation since the Second World War’. One cannot believe he is referencing the Religion of Peace (sic).

Violent protests followed the publication in 1988 of Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses. Ayatollah Khomeini, then leader of Iran, called for the death of Rushdie. In August 2022 a stabbing attempt was made resulting in Rushdie losing the sight of one eye and the use of a hand.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that 79 countries and territories out of the 198 studied around the world (40 percent) had laws or policies in 2019 banning blasphemy, defined as speech or actions considered to be contemptuous of a god or of people or objects considered sacred. Twenty-two countries (11 percent) had laws against apostasy (abandoning one’s religion).

In March 2023 the Spectator wrote:

‘No religion ought to be given the power to constrain political discourse or behaviour in order to protect its adherents from being scandalised, and no government should help it by silencing its critics. If a Wakefield resident was to burn the Quran publicly in protest at the pretensions of the fundamentalists (something, incidentally, that can now cause you to be arrested on serious public order charges by police increasingly desperate not to appear anti-Islamic, as happened some years ago), we should fight to protect his right to free speech in the same way as we would if he had been a secularist or left-winger who had burnt a Bible or an American flag’ (tinyurl.com/bdebukkd).

Theory at odds with reality?

Earlier in 2023 an American Tennessee pastor live-streamed a book-burning event urging his flock to throw their Harry Potter and Twilight copies into a bonfire. Because why? Because, he said, ‘IT’S WITCHCRAFT 100 PERCENT! All your Twilight books and movies. That mess is full of spells, demonism, shape-shifting and occultism. Stop allowing demonic influences into your home’. Does he know it’s 2023 not 1933? Or perhaps he thinks it’s 1633.

Whatever the literary merits, or otherwise, of J K Rowling’s works – Harry Potter has sold over 500 million copies since 1997– in an example that modern heresy will still get you burned at the stake, metaphorically, Rowling’s defence of biological women has seen her banned from events celebrating her own books and films. The three main actors whose careers were kickstarted in the Potter film series have been vocal in condemning her.

Not much support for Voltaire’s ‘I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend with my life your right to say it’ there. Nothing is free under capitalism but free speech increasingly comes at a price.

‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’. In George Orwell’s 1984 the protagonist Winston Smith is employed in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department. Here he altered historical newspapers and photographs to concur with whatever the Party line was at the time. The removal of ‘unpersons’ was often carried out in this manner in the Soviet Union.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union statues of Lenin were systematically removed from the state the Soviets had previously controlled. Understandable if you’ve been subject to repression for many years but the removal of literary figures seems churlish.

As part of its de-Russification, Ukraine has been removing monuments to Alexander Pushkin the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist, thought to be the greatest Russian poet and founder of modern Russian literature.

A few years back Iran was, allegedly, (the report comes from the American-supported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) considering removing Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam from its education curriculum. Changes were because ‘Officials believe that in order to attract the younger generation they must increase the intensity of their religious and ideological propaganda in schools. They think that a large proportion of young people are turning away from religion and government ideology because of the weakness of propaganda in the education system and the mass media’. Shades of Goebbels?

When William Caxton introduced the printing press into England in 1476 he would have been unaware of the law of unintended consequences. Pity that so many are now experiencing them.

Dave Coggan

Future humans (2006)

Book Review from the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasshouse. By Charles Stross. Ace Hardcover. 2006. 352 pages. ISBN: 0441014038 (published in US)

If you go to the Science Museum in Kensington, up to the top floor, to the aviation gallery, you can discover a sign on the wall that informs us that the technology for flight has existed for hundreds of years, but that the obsession with flapping prevented any actual heavier than air flight until well towards the close of the nineteenth century.

This highlights the importance of exploring ideas and technological changes – and being bold and speculative. Contemporary science fiction performs much of that role today – dreaming up new technologies that seem impractical now but will soon become everyday. In a real sense, compared to the founders of our party, we are living in a science fiction world now – sadly it’s a dystopia.

Charles Stross has recently been awarded a prize for his fiction by the transhumanist association (they hold that humans whilst they have evolved technologically are still the basic animals they were half a million years ago, but that soon the technology will exist to change our bodies and begin a new technology driven phase of biological evolution – the capacity to re-write our bodies). His book, Glasshouse, is an examination of the effects of technological change on our society – starting from the fact that within the last hundred years alone that human life has been fundamentally altered by technological innovation, and that the rate of change will increase dramatically within our lifetimes.

Set several hundred years from now, it features Robin, a historian who has wiped his memory agreeing to take part in an historical re-enactment of late twentieth century life as part of an experiment. He finds himself in the role of a woman, trapped both in her own biology and the social roles that come with that.

The participants in the experiment have to live in a panopticon – their every action potentially observed – with rules which they gain or lose points by following – and have to ensure that their ‘team mates’ (their local community) don’t lose them points. It thus forms a useful device for examining the construction of social life and power. Some players – the score whores – unreflectively play the game as presented to them but Robin (renamed Reeve) tries to find ways of breaking out of the restrictive role given her by reading the rules sideways.

She cannot, however, escape the rules and the inertia of the score whores; and she has to stand by and witness the horrors of the rules of the game which she objects to but cannot escape from. As such it is an acute depiction of dissidence in society.

The book is thus both an examination of social power and the power of ideas, as well as a meditation on the importance of memory and history for understanding where we are and where we are going. A flight of fancy that depicts the present in a deeply realistic way.

Pik Smeet

Party News: Fircroft Summer School (2007)

Party News from the August 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

This weekend some 40-plus members, sympathisers and Standard-subscribers from as far a field as Italy, Turkey and USA gathered for a weekend of discussion and debate at the annual summer school organised by Birmingham Branch.

Under the theme “Thinkers of the 20th Century” a range of ideas – from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, information technology, literature and philosophy – were reviewed from a socialist perspective and much heated debate followed.

Its not surprising that a recurring issue throughout such a themed weekend is that of “freedom”. Much abused in everyday currency, “freedom” often translates as little more than lower taxes and fewer regulations, issues of little or no concern to world socialists. In contrast, socialists are intensely interested in freedom, whether its the freedom we have to surpass the gene as a constraint on how we live, the freedom to work co-operatively in software development/use software without restrictions, or the more abstract freedom of the individual under the state.

The dystopian visions of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984) then, formed a large part of the discussions around the first two talks from Richard Headicar and Mike Foster respectively. What sort of state do we live in now? Which dismal projection has survived the best ? Probably a bit of both is the answer: Orwell’s boot stamping on the face is still prevalent in many parts of the world as the market system emerges to an ungrateful population of new wage-earners. “Late” capitalist states on the other hand have clearly evolved more complex and subtle forms of oppression, including of course the diversions of Big Brother (the TV “reality” show) and the dubious freedom of consumer choice.

To what extent can you separate the thinker from the thoughts ? While Orwell got his hands dirty down mines, in hotel kitchens and most famously on the frontline in Spain, Aldous Huxley in common with most of the other thinkers risked little more than a paper cut in the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury. Does this influence how we read each author ?

As Marx famously noted, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world the point is to change it”. Someone who has done very little interpretation of the world, but by contrast has undeniably changed it is Richard Stallman. A software engineer turned intellectual property activist, Stallman developed GNU software, CopyLeft and the free software movement. This has inverted contract law to ensure that CopyLeft software (such as Linux operating system) gets the fullest expression of its use value (i.e. it is free to copy and use), but has effectively no exchange value as users have to agree to make available and not restrict access to any amendments made to it. Tristan Miller discussed how this little oasis of “socialistic” production has grown unstoppably within the body of capitalism and effectively mirrors – albeit within the software and digital music communities – all the features of “from each according to ability, to each according to need”.

The subject of freedom of the individual phenotype (e.g. human) as opposed to the dubious constraints of biological determinism arose during Adam Buick’s introduction to the cultural anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who is best known for his contributions during the middle part of last century to the nature v nurture debate. It is likely that his writings will stand the test of time better than the more recent fashions of biological determinism – sociobiology and evolutionary psychology – as typified by the “popular” science writers Richard Dawkins, E O Wilson and Steven Pinker. If human nature is slowly becoming less of an ideological “barrier to socialism “than it once was, it will be due to the painstaking work of real scientists such as Montagu.

Simon Wigley got the short straw in having to present the ideas of the Frankfurt School of philosophy shortly after a large Saturday lunch. He stuck to the brief given to him admirably however, particularly given that he had little enthusiasm for these ideas, as he made clear. Whilst some in the audience wanted to shoot the piano player, others were grateful that Simon had done the hard work of reading this stuff and translating it from the English for our benefit.

Personally speaking I gained most from this talk – even if it was only to gain confidence that the Frankfurt emperors were indeed just as stark naked as I had always suspected, and that rather than being extensions to marxist philosophy, the ideas of Adorno, Habermas et al (along with the post-modern ideas they set the scene for) are negations of class-based analysis, of the enlightenment, and even of the scientific method that drove it.

The material conditions of capitalism really haven’t changed that much in the last century – and our philosophies really don’t look like they need to change much either. Anyone who thinks that world socialists are intellectuals, academics or armchair philosophers would have been pleasantly surprised at the disdain with which these ideas – far removed from anything actually to do with working class experience – were discussed. Habermas could have dug coal during the Spanish Civil War for all I know, but – judged on their own merit – his ideas still should not be taken seriously.

In summary, there is of course a perpetual tension between theory and practice that no political organisation, whether liberal, marxist or anarchist, gets right all the time. However, assisted by a plentiful supply (according to need of course) of the local Black Country beer, and the opportunity to catch up with old comrades and new sympathisers, most attendees I spoke with left the weekend feeling stimulated, reinvigorated and better-prepared for the more practical need to spread the socialist case. Surely, the ideal balance between ideas and action.

Brian Gardner

Blogger's Note:

The Socialism or Your Money blog also carries this report from July 2007, where there are some interesting comments arising out of Brian's report of the Summer School.

Proper Gander: Hack To The Future (2022)

The Proper Gander Column from the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A thread which runs through the work of film-maker Peter Kosminsky is exploring how people relate to ideologies which defend power structures. For example, his 2017 drama The State described the journeys of extremist British Muslims joining ‘Islamic State’ in Syria, while his latest series The Undeclared War (Channel 4) takes a different angle by examining how cyber-warfare is used to drive political agendas.

The drama is a high-tech take on the Cold War thriller genre, set in 2024 when a cyber-war between the UK and Russian governments is escalating. The lead character is Saara, a student on work experience at GCHQ who discovers what her colleagues miss when fighting on the cyber-front against the Russian state’s hackers and opinion-makers. Much of the plot relies on characters staring at rows of code on computer screens, which is livened up by being represented as Saara searching through dreamlike tunnels and rooms. Otherwise, the script goes for verisimilitude, unusually referring to many real organisations, not only GCHQ and its Russian counterpart the Federal Security Service (FSB), but also the BBC, Twitter, BT’s Openreach, Swift and the main political parties.

It’s one of those dramas set in under-lit rooms with tense conversations underlined by sombre music, but it’s convincingly acted, carefully structured and grounded in research into cyber-warfare. The fictionalised activities of GCHQ, the FSB and their associates are based on what’s been reported in the real world, and given some dramatic licence by the near-future setting. While The Undeclared War’s plot is driven by hacks and counter-hacks into the Russian and British state’s infrastructure, along the way we see strategies used by Russia’s authorities which aim to mould people’s views and behaviour. The result is an uneasy reminder that events and how they are reported can be manipulated to suit the narrative of power-hungry states. Ironically, this feeling of doubt about what’s real is mentioned in the drama as part of what the Russian government wants to encourage.

With social media being a conduit for many people’s interpretations of events, it’s also an opportunity to shape perceptions. Two of the drama’s main characters meet when working at the Glavset ‘troll farm’ in Russia, sending at least 80 tweets a day, chipping in to chats about British politics to stir up trouble. These places do exist, and not just in Russia. In 2017, Freedom House (a think tank funded by the US government) found that 30 states worldwide hired people to ‘spread government views, drive particular agendas, and counter government critics’ on social media (tinyurl.com/4tdsevez). As anyone who uses Twitter will recognise, its discussions can be easily derailed by crass or provocative comments of the kind knowingly spread by troll farms.

How television is used to push a particular agenda is shown in the drama through the activities of Russia Global News (RGN), with a studio in London and reporters in the open. This isn’t a real TV channel, and if it were, it wouldn’t be allowed to operate in that way during a cyber-war, given that its closest real-life counterpart, RT UK, had its licence withdrawn by Ofcom following the invasion of Ukraine. One of RGN’s staff makes the fair point that criticisms that it’s a ‘propaganda mouthpiece’ are hypocritical when they come from journalists told what to say by the media corporations which employ them. RGN’s broadcasts aren’t obviously pro-Russian, but convey their message through more devious tactics. Its back-office staff set up two bogus Facebook groups (the lefty ‘Luton For Labour’ and fascist ‘Take Back Control Of Luton’), wait for people to join and then post details of a demo at the same time and place on both groups’ pages. RGN’s reporter and camera crew turn up and record the subsequent violence when far-right numbskulls meet leftist demonstrators. This plot-point has a reportedly actual precedent. In his 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis described how pro-Russian state ‘Political Technologists’ sponsored fascist groups, anti-fascist groups and parties opposed to Putin, then let it be known that this had happened so no-one could tell how real those organisations were. As one of RGN’s staff explains, the point isn’t that their news is false, ‘the point is to get people used to the idea that everything’s a lie, that there is no truth. And once they accept that, well, biggest liar wins’.

The Undeclared War is set around a future general election, another target for the Russian state’s FSB. Databases are hacked, distorting exit poll results reported by the BBC and taking people from ethnic minorities likely to vote Labour off the electoral register. RGN reports this as pro-Tory election-rigging, and fakes footage of an ensuing riot in order to spread unrest. These scenes hopefully aren’t based on actual occurrences, although there’s evidence that the Russian state has interfered with US presidential elections and the Brexit referendum, and that the US state has a long history of intervening in other countries’ elections.

Cyber-warfare as described in The Undeclared War is as much about psychology as it is about technology. The script refers to the strategy of ‘reflexive control’: manipulating an enemy’s behaviour, in this case to promote the interests of the Russian state. This approach isn’t new, but it finds new applications as technology develops. In the drama, this is shown as attempts to influence the responses to hacks and to create interpretations through TV broadcasts and social media. The Undeclared War is set in the future, but much of what it depicts is already here.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: A Bite From The Apple (2022)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who better to warn us about the dangers of technology and corporate culture than Apple Inc? The recent American drama serial Severance, released through Apple TV+, was an offbeat and engaging thriller set in an office with a unique approach to managing its human resources. Echoing Black Mirror’s template, the series imagines a piece of technology which sounds like it could be invented and embedded within a few years and explains how it’ll lead to a scary alienated dystopia.

The premise is that staff working for the mysterious Lumon Industries have voluntarily undergone a procedure called ‘severance’. This involves a microchip being inserted into their brain, making them an ‘appendage of the machine’ in a more literal way than Marx meant. The chip separates their persona at work from their persona outside, meaning that when they’re in the office they can’t remember anything of their home life and vice versa. Communication between the workplace persona – the ‘Innie’ – and their ‘Outie’ self at home, such as through smuggled notes, is prevented by ‘code detectors’ when they enter and leave the office.

The severance procedure is supposed to put a definite dividing line in Lumon’s staff’s ‘work-life balance’, a phrase which meant ‘how much employment encroaches on our lives’ until the pandemic disrupted everything and a ‘work-life balance’ became a luxury for many. You can tell Severance had been drafted out before Covid hit; working from home isn’t an option for the characters in the drama, and wouldn’t fit in with the premise. Perhaps as a result, the story isn’t set in any particular time; the severance technology is futuristic, while the cars and computers are styled to look like they’re from the last century.

The severance procedure is an exaggeration of how in real life we often find that the ‘version’ of ourselves at work is a bit different from that outside. When we start our shift, our personalities shift to slot in with the culture where we work, with its written and unwritten rules and norms. Many workplaces, especially sleek offices like Lumon’s HQ, feel impersonal and artificial, and difficult to be at ease in. The drama highlights this with the forced fun of the parties thrown for Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement division as a reward for reaching their targets. The story centres on the four members of this team, and the sinister management who ensure that they stay focused on their work. Most of the characters’ conversations, whether in work or outside, are stilted and uncertain, and the only character with any joy is the non-Lumon employee and author of a tacky self-help book which sounds inspirational compared with the oppression of office life.

The work carried out by the Macrodata Refinement team makes little sense, involving sitting at their desks grouping together numbers on their screens according to how ‘scary’ they are. In real workplaces, we’re often put in positions where we have to accept routines we don’t understand and which seem to be there just to prop up a system. Moreover, being a tiny cog in a big machine usually means not having much ability to affect the procedures we follow. In Lumon Industries, the purpose given to the apparently purposeless work is to follow the vision of its founder, a more old-fashioned figure than the real world’s tech luminaries with a messiah complex.

Naturally, the Macrodata Refinement team members each start to question their employment. Political resistance to the severance procedure is mentioned, but the drama’s emphasis is on how it makes them feel uneasy, especially alongside Lumon’s suspicious ways of operating. Annoyingly, the series ends just as an important plot point has been reached and without answering questions about Lumon’s motives, so we’ll have to wait for season two to see how the scenario pans out.

While Black Mirror is the most obvious influence on Severance, it is also part of a long-running trend in science fiction exploring fears of having our personalities moulded by a power-hungry elite. In the 1972 book and 1975 film The Stepford Wives, the women of the well-to-do town of Stepford are replaced by obedient replicas to serve their husbands, a clever critique of conservative attitudes to women’s roles. This came in the wake of the classic 1954 book / 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about aliens who are surreptitiously substituting bland duplicates for people, interpreted as a metaphor for concerns about ‘communism’ infiltrating America. Its 1978 remake effectively reinterpreted the threat of being turned into an automaton as an extension of how society alienates us. In these stories, surrendering your personality is involuntary, whereas in Severance, it’s chosen as a career move, albeit without realising all the nasty implications. In this way, the series is reminiscent of the 1988 movie They Live, where the ruling class (aliens, again) hide the truth and manipulate apparently content people to conform to the status quo, using subliminal messages in the media rather than implanted microchips. Another antecedent is the impressive 1967 TV serial The Prisoner, also set in a stylised, isolated place with its own strange rules and rituals to protect a secretive system. A message behind all these stories, including Severance, is that conforming to what’s in the interests of those in power is dehumanising, even if this doesn’t come with microchips.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: Which way to AI? (2022)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Decide what you want from AI before it makes the decision for you’ was the title of an article by Erik Britton, billed as a financial consultant, in the Times (4 April).

‘One road,’ he wrote, ‘leads to human redundancy across large swathes of the labour market. Down that road, AI is a means of displacing labour, further and further up the value chain. That road leads to a weird and dystopian future where we no longer earn our living primarily through work.’

Most people wouldn’t find that ‘dystopian’. Britton went on to explain why he does:

‘What would remain of the economy were the value of labour reduced to zero? Ownership. Ownership of rights over property, including intellectual property, over profits, over weapons systems. Those that own will rule. Those that do not will be ruled: relegated, if we are lucky, to consumption of virtual worlds and food bought with state handouts, from a sofa that is owned by someone else’.

Well, yes, if you put it that way. A society where those who own rule is not very attractive. But it is not dystopian, it’s the reality today. Power is in the hands of those who own and control the productive resources of society, relegating the rest of us to sellers of our working abilities for a wage and only allowed to work if a profit can be made from what we produce.

According to Britton, ‘the balance against such a brutal distribution of power historically lay in ownership of our own labour.’ But that is precisely what is not the case today. He seems to be thinking of a situation like the sort that existed two or three hundred years ago in colonial New England, the nearest society has ever come to one where independent producers working on their own make and exchange the products of their labour with each other. But things have moved on since then and there is now production for profit by capitalist firms employing wage-labour. The process of production is no longer individual but collective, except that the collective labour of those who work is not owned by them. Labour today does not confer ownership.

The other road, says Britton, ‘is to use AI to enhance human labour and defend against excessive surveillance. This form of AI serves freedom, self-determination, and reward for effort and ingenuity. Down this road, the value of labour increases, and the balance of power between the owners of labour and personal data (that’s most of us) and the owners of property will shift towards labour.’

But will it? How would it? Presumably he is thinking that there will be more higher-paid jobs but that won’t shift the balance of power between ‘the owners of labour’ (the workers) and the owners of property (the capitalists). Those that own will still have the power to allow the rest of us to work, however much we are paid, only on condition that there is a profit for them.

Britton’s dystopia – in which there will be full automation but still owners and profits – will never come about. It wouldn’t be economically viable, not least because who’s going to buy what is produced and where would the state get the money to hand out to the proles?

The only road that will ensure that AI is used for the benefit of all is when society’s productive resources, of which AI is a part, are owned in common by society. People will still work, though not for wages; everyone has access to what they need to live and enjoy life, to what is collectively produced.

Sci-Fi, Utopias and Socialism (2021)

From the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We have described a World-in-which-we’d-love-to-live… The way we see it, this is a world where creative labour is the ultimate satisfaction and the source of happiness for people. Everything else is built on the foundation of this principle. People are happy there when they manage to actualise this main principle. Friendship, love and work are the three main pillars that support the happiness of such humankind. We could not imagine anything better than that, and why would we want to?’ Boris Strugatsky.

What kind of society would appeal to a socialist? What kind of life would we actually enjoy once the logic of capitalism driving the world of today releases its grip not only on the resources of Earth – material or human – but also on the minds of its inhabitants? I believe that in order to promote the socialist cause, we need to have a clearer understanding of answers to these questions. There is a caveat there, of course, that what is appealing to people today may not stay the same in the future.

Dystopias

I have to confess, I am a sucker for sci-fi. And when it comes to sci-fi, I am omnivorous, reading and watching anything I can get my hands on. There is probably a hidden yearning for a better future in this passion, as I am particularly interested in the fiction about Earth-like worlds, especially those that are more developed than ours. But I have recently noticed an interesting feature of the vast majority of the sci-fi visions of the future: they are overwhelmingly dark, presenting rather a failed world than a successfully developed civilisation. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or his post-World War II fascist America in The Man in the High Castle… Cyberpunk is a good example of a genre that produced enormous quantities of dark sci-fi works, and post-apocalyptic fiction writers have been prolific on this topic as well. Seems like the future people foresee in fiction as the most likely is not very bright at all. Beginnings like ‘after an ecological catastrophe wipes out most of humanity…’ or ‘It’s the future, and the planet is a dusty, radioactive wasteland…’ sound like a cliché in a film about the future. And technological breakthroughs gone horribly wrong are a really popular theme, with many examples brilliantly shown in the Black Mirror series.

Of course, there is a sub-genre that focuses specifically on the stories about ‘perfect’ worlds – Utopias. Ironically, when searching for utopias on Google, it is quite hard to find any – the search engine stubbornly shows ‘best dystopias’, and even articles on utopias often discuss mostly dystopian books and films. My first several ‘utopian books’ searches returned the Vulture’s 100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction, Tales About A World Gone Wrong and a BBC article Science Fiction: How Not To Build A Future Society. Maybe a good drama needs suffering, and this is why tragedies have always enjoyed more popularity than comedies? Whatever the reason, the number of utopian worlds seems to be surprisingly small. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world?

There are some notable examples, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These and some other novels describe interesting social innovations, which are often very close to socialist ideals. For instance, the utopian world in Woman on the Edge of Time promotes such values as common ownership and (gender) equality; the inhabitants of the Walden Two community are free to choose their vocation and have no police force that could enforce their will through violence; and on the moon of Anarres in The Dispossessed, everyone is free to start their own productive enterprise, where there is no incentive to grow production or compete since there is no market, so all production is aimed solely to fulfil everyday needs.

While many ideas described in these and other books are worth discussing and thinking about, some details are questionable or even disturbing. For example, Skinner’s Walden community has a set of guardians who are somehow wiser than the ‘common people’. Skinner himself believed in the need for elitist rule: ‘We must delegate control of the population as a whole to specialists – to police, priests, teachers, therapies…’ (John Staddon, The New Behaviorism, 2014, p.125). The utopian agrarian community of Piercy’s Mattapoisett (Woman on the Edge of Time) shows a governmentally decentralised egalitarian society, mostly based on feminist and anarchist ideals. The world of Mattapoisett at times comes through as a fantasy, a feverish dream in the mind of a person in a mental institution under the influence of heavy tranquillisers, propelled by the feelings of powerlessness and grief. We are never told in the book if the visions the protagonist had are true or not. Would I want to live in Mattapoisett? Probably not. It seems quite focussed on offering the alternative to the patriarchal and exploitative capitalist ways of life, but more in the way of renouncing something negative rather than by offering something viable and attractive in its own right.

Importantly, it is still not clear on how this set of communities (or the one on Anarres in The Dispossessed) is supposed to work: both rely on self-governance and the structures of meeting and discussion, which might function well on the level of a town but certainly not a planet. Ursula Le Guin is perhaps more realistic in her novel, because Anarres in The Dispossessed is not shown as a Garden of Eden. It is a barren and dirty world, where life is decidedly hard for its inhabitants. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world? They also have problems with their PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination), which exhibits some signs of government. In any case, it is probably not the best example to illustrate the advantages of a socialist society. But I guess my biggest problem with most utopias is that they simply don’t appeal to me; I wouldn’t want to live there myself.

I understand, writing utopias is hard. Unlike dystopias, it is not as simple as to show some horrors of destruction or societal decay (which could be easily borrowed from a daily tabloid). New ideas have to be created and, on top of this, put together in a coherent system that would look realistic. When thinking them up, authors would undoubtedly lean on their own life experiences, environment and cultural upbringing. For many of them, the best vision of a progressive society not corrupted by consumerism or greed would be inspired by communities in the countryside, or perhaps by stereotypes of preindustrial self-sufficient settlements. Many utopias share these elements of ‘environmental wisdom’ or even a pre-technological biblical paradise, for example, in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, citizens aim for a balance between themselves and nature. Callenbach himself said of his book, in relation to Americans: ‘It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now… [But] we’d better get ready. We need to know where we’d like to go.’

‘Noon Universe’

There are a couple of authors – two brothers – who borrowed their ideas from a different cultural environment: that of the post-war Soviet Union, and about how their utopian world came out different as a result.

The Strugatsky brothers, Boris and Arkady, wrote their books collaboratively. They needed to pass Soviet censorship in order to get published, so they came up with an ‘approved’ setting for many of their books, called ‘Noon Universe’, in which communism has triumphed globally. Of course, they both loathed the constraints of state capitalism and totalitarianism on the lives of Soviet people, so their utopias went much further, painting a world free of money or coercion – a world where they would themselves want to live and work. Most of those books were written in the 60s and 70s, but to this day a more compelling, believable fictional world of the future where people are happy and lead dynamic lives has yet to be written – at least in the Russian science-fiction literature.

The Noon Universe, named after Noon: 22nd Century, chronologically the first novel from the series, also features in the following books: Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, Space Mowgli, Beetle in the Anthill, and The Time Wanderers, among others. To give you an idea of some features of the future social organisation Arkady and Boris Strugatsky presented in their Noon Universe, without giving away any spoilers, here is a brief overview:

• unequivocal victory of socialism: no monetary system, all production for common good
• absence of institutionalised coercion, such as police or military
• advanced technological progress, ubiquitous robotic assistance
• everyone is engaged in a profession that inspires them

This fairly common set of features then goes on, now with a somewhat different focus:

• the system of education is given utmost importance: students spend at least as much time or more at school than at home; they have very small class sizes and have personal Mentors that lead them on the path of learning about both the world and themselves; they must reach a high level of scientific knowledge, societal responsibility and creativity (arts and humanities)
• ethics/morality is given a very important role, on a par with technological competence
• a new kind of human (intellectually and ethically superior to most modern humans; importantly, much more socially responsible) is raised, who deeply cares about the planet and all its life forms, and is thus willing to both drive and accept societal progress

Finally, what makes this world both believable and appealing, is this combination of on the one hand a democratic and science-based social system without exploitation, and on the other, individuals raised to support such socialist society:

• this way of raising responsible individuals makes it possible to avoid coercion and resolve issues collaboratively, based on evidence and rationality
• this society does have some structure / governance where a number of meritocratic High Councils composed of the world’s leading scientists in each particular field of specialisation provide guidance and rules of functioning

Unfortunately, apart from The Gulag Archipelago, the legacy of Soviet literature is largely unknown in the Western cultural sphere, and the Noon Universe with its bright and highly optimistic vision of the future has not been popularised through films or comic books. I have tried to search for similar utopian universes in English or American books, or shown in films, but, as described in the beginning, found mostly dystopian sci-fi or stories of societies that went backwards ‘to the cradle of nature’ in their attempts to invent a fairer and wiser world. Perhaps the closest to the creation of the Strugatsky brothers comes the Earth in Star Trek: The Original Series, and even that is rife with militaristic and patriarchal themes.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, there are several issues that could also be improved in the Noon Universe, of course. For example, we might want to introduce some features of Marxist feminism and gender equality, and environmental considerations could have been described more convincingly. But the main features seem to all be there: technological progress comes hand in hand with societal progress, which is in turn driven by personal betterment of every member of that society. It might seem utopian, but I think it is fully socialist in spirit, more coherent and credible, and it really makes me want to step into that world and start living there right now.

(Talk given at the Socialist Party Summer School last month.)

Leon Rozanov

Blogger's Note:

There is some discussion of this talk over at the SPGB website.

Consumerism and Literature – The Epoch That Ate the World (2022)

From the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Through the medium of fiction, writers and poets have always shed a spotlight upon their own societies or speculated upon the possible directions in which said societies might travel. From William Morris’s uplifting News from Nowhere to Huxley’s and Orwell’s dark dystopian futures and more, fiction provides a platform for the unthinkable and unknowable. Science fiction writers have often been in the front of the field, exploring the unimaginable.

The Space Merchants, serialised in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1952, is one of a number of sci-fi novels co-written by Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth. Here government and corporatism have become subsumed in the power of the advertising agencies. The sub-continent of India has been turned into a ‘single manufacturing complex, Indiastries.’ Mitchell Courtenay is a Fowler Schocken Associate who is now in charge of the account to ‘sell’ Venus to the public. There’s a rocket built already to go. The red in tooth and nail capitalism is being opposed by an underground organisation, the World Conservationist Association known as ‘the Consies’. Courtenay is an avid supporter of the existing system, not least because of the material benefits he derives from being a star copy advertising executive. Courtenay’s thoughts on Gus, a Consie whom he’d had close contact with: ‘I hated the twisted minds who had done such a thing to a fine consumer like Gus. It is something like murder. He could have played his part in the world, buying and using and making work profits for his brothers all around the globe, ever increasing his wants and needs, ever increasing everybody’s work and profits in the circle of consumption, raising children to be consumers in turn’.

A few years after The Space Merchants was published we commented: ‘Consider the advertising profession. Is it not one of the most typical of capitalism’s great institutions, and also one of the most necessary processes between the raw material and the commodity we consume? If there was no advertising, how would we know that our very life depended on our using pink toothpaste? In fact, without advertising, how would we know what to eat, drink, wear, inject, smoke, etc.? We would be completely lost’ (Michael La Touche, Socialist Standard, May 1960).

How indeed would we know? Toothpaste (Gibbs SR) was the first advert broadcast on ITV (Independent Television) on 22 September, 1955. To channel the late Kirsty MacColl, (Innocence), innocence has passed us all by a long, long time ago.

The Man who Ate the World, Frederick Pohl, Panther, 1979, has a fantastical plot twist because the poorer you are the more you’re forced to consume. This is Sonny: ‘The worst time was at night, when the baby sister was asleep and the parents were grimly eating and reading and dancing and drinking, until they were ready to drop. And of all bad nights, the night before his twelfth birthday was perhaps Sonny’s worst. He was old enough to know what a birthday party was like. It would be cake and candy, shows and games, it would be presents, presents, presents. It would be a terrible, endless day’.

This collection includes The Day the Icicle Works Closed, a science fiction version of straightforward capitalist greed: ‘The Icicle Works was the most profitable corporation in the Galaxy… Dickon had plenty (of shares). But he wanted more… And for the last twelve months he’s been picking up stock for a penny on the dollar while the rest of us starve.’

A 2020 novel by R. J. Ellory, is, like Pohl’s, also titled The Man who Ate the World. Roger Ellory says of the title, ‘(It) came about simply because it sounds really good in French (L’homme qui a mangé le monde)! Lots of alliteration. I guess it’s also figurative, in that the truth is more than capable of consuming all the evil of the world.’ The story is contemporary and there is no similarity to the Pohl story.

The protagonist here is named Joseph Conrad. JC is not a very naughty boy nor is he the Messiah although that question is occasionally posited. Joseph is a wage slave in a non-specified and nondescript job. He is made redundant. With his money assets totalling fourteen thousand pounds Joseph decides to discover who he is and what he’s supposed to be doing with his life. There are faint echoes of Chauncey Gardiner (Being There) and of Forest Gump in the character of Joseph Conrad but he is not autistic or an idiot savant. There are echoes too of the Queen Latifah 2006 film, Last Holiday. Here again, a working class shop assistant who is under the impression she only has a very short time to live, gathers her assets and goes off to a luxury hotel in Europe to enjoy her remaining time. Her kindness to everyone is contrasted to the attitude of the bourgeois there too. Unlike in real life, in films good deeds are mainly rewarded, though the film’s ending is a very ambiguous one.

The characters in Ellory’s tale are all named after poets and writers. Spoiler alert: an exception is Richard Dadd who, although an artist, also murdered his father. The ‘heavy’ discreetly employed by the state to carry out its dirty work is named Richard Dadd. Nigel Dennis, publisher and blackmailer in the 1957 film The Naked Truth, with Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers and Dennis Price, would have been very jealous of Ellory’s Dadd who, as an information sponge, uses his control of data for the establishment’s nefarious purposes.

Throughout the book Conrad is to be found quoting words of wisdom from various literary figures. Joseph’s boss is named Menella Smedley (Menella Bute Smedley (1820–1877) was a novelist and poet, and relative of Lewis Carroll, who wrote some minor novels and books of poems). The characters who meet in a brief sojourn in Ireland repay investigation by the reader into their histories and outputs. Joseph Conrad accidentally becomes the fountainhead of a social movement, Random Acts of Kindness. Various arms of the Establishment are less than enraptured to see the sheeple beginning to act independently.

‘This Kindness business was all very well and good, but it was uncontrolled and seemingly uncontrollable. It was a wildfire, and firebreaks were needed. Perhaps those who sought to control public opinion were anxious about repercussion. The suggestion that individual citizens could make a difference was dangerous, but nowhere near as dangerous as collaborative effort to effect social change. The public did not understand. They never had and never would. They were little more than children, if truth be known. Politicians and bankers and media conglomerates needed to filter information, decide interest rates, enact laws and dictate codes of conduct, and if they did not then the society would tumble into the abyss of anarchy.’ 

‘New ideas were fine, as long they did not disestablish and unsettle the old and proven ideas that had served to maintain the order of things for more generations than anyone cared to remember. There was a way to do things, and no one had a right to change that way but those who were set to make the most money from it. Everything was dependent upon confidence – confidence in the government, confidence in authority, confidence in the banks and the police and everything else the establishment provided for the good of the people – and that was something that can never be threatened nor undermined.’

Typing ‘Kindness’ and ‘Covid’ into Google brings up ninety seven million plus results. The only reason that the working class have to be kind toward capitalism is that it long ago laid the foundations for the transition to a truly emancipated society.

Pressure to persuade the working class that capitalism, not socialism, is the best in this ‘best of all possible worlds’ is continuous. But, the choice is still ours. When are we going to become dangerous and collaboratively effect real social change?

DC