Futuristic (2026)

Book Review from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What We Can Know. By Ian McEwan. Jonathan Cape. 2025. 301pp.

What a fine novelist Ian McEwan is. Apart from being a superb craftsman of language and plot and a massively perceptive observer of human behaviour, his widely read fiction often contains strong social or socio-political elements offering serious food for reflection. Even more trenchant on this front than others of his novels is his latest, What We Can Know, which also stands out for its strong futuristic content. Yet, set as it is in the year 2119, it also reflects back on the present day at a moment before climate change and nuclear conflict have caused global populations to halve, seas to rise massively and biodiversity to decline. And it offers a constant interplay between the imagined future, which humanity’s response (or lack of response) has shaped, and the world of today.

As it moves between these two time periods, it reveals the details of what is imagined to have happened through human mismanagement of the planet and its resources and technology. So, for example, scores of cities, including Glasgow and New York, have vanished and there is no longer any kind of globalised economy. Yet despite the wars, genocides, floods, famines, viruses, droughts, tsunamis, starvation and disease that have decimated the population, human society has carried on (‘we scraped through’ is the expression survivors use). As for Britain, what is left of it is an archipelago (ie a group of small islands) that is all the remaining population has left following the inundations caused by rising seas, and whose ‘finest achievement was not to be at war’. Though run by corrupt elite ‘Citizens Committees’, there is relative order in society and formal education still takes place. We are told that: ‘Significant parts of the knowledge base were preserved. Many institutions crawled through the gaps between catastrophes. People lived at poverty level but they lived.’

The main character is an academic at the University of the South Downs teaching history (for which he receives half the pay of his science and technology colleagues) and at the same time working on the biography of a poet who lived 100 years earlier. Hence his interest in that (our) era. Could those pre-inundation populations not have done ‘something other than grow their economies and wage war?’, asks one of his students, which makes the teacher himself wonder whether ‘many of humanity’s problems could have been solved’ before planetary havoc set in. But could it have been different? The question is left in the air.

Obviously the precise circumstances laid out as having led up to this future are no more than speculation. Yet it is speculation plausibly depicted, building on the political and environmental instability of the world we live in today, in which, as the author puts it, ‘capitalism… invents furiously and persuades us of new needs’. Not that his well-founded and pungent comments on various aspects of current or recent reality (for example, ‘These were the early Thatcher years, and there was crazy greed in the air’) are accompanied by any proposed solution or clear course of action regarding the problems he perceives. Little more in fact than the kind of wishy-washy statement he made in a recent interview to the magazine Positive News that: ‘We just have to stop doing bad things and do good things’. No recognition, therefore, that those ‘bad things’ come out of a bad system, which, in order to stop those things getting worse, needs to be replaced by a better system.

But it would be wrong-headed not to recognise that What We Can Know is a work of fiction and that, in the final analysis, there is no obligation for fiction to be prescriptive or to propose remedies. The main virtue of McEwan’s writing lies in its power to create believable human character and interaction through effective use of language, so allowing the reader to see truthfulness in what is depicted. It is especially in the clever and nuanced ‘looking-back’ element of his story that the author does this most consistently. He captures some highly recognisable realities of the social and political mores of the current age, while also managing to weave much ‘human interest’ into his narrative, for example a highly sensitive portrayal of early onset Alzheimer’s, a love story or two, and a crime of passion. No short review can in fact do justice to the book’s overall literary merit, but the following passage can be seen as a typical example of its acuteness of perception and mastery of language: ‘Memory is a sponge. It soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question. Its unreliability was one of the discoveries of twentieth-century psychology’.

Howard Moss

What is progress? (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every so often a book comes along that causes us to question something many have considered a self-evident truth. The ‘truth’ questioned by Samuel Miller McDonald in his recently published Progress. A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea by (William Collins, 2025, 424pp.) is that the story of humanity has been one of gradual and, more recently, rapid amelioration in the conditions of life. There has been a growing understanding that the hunter-gatherer period of human existence (i.e. the first 290,000 of the 300,000 years of our species’ existence) was characterised by a egalitarian, non-hierarchical and relatively peaceful lifestyle. At the same time it was a comparatively hand to mouth (‘immediate return’) existence and it might be thought that the increase in wealth brought about by the shift to settled agriculture starting around 10,000 years ago would have improved this – and increasingly as time went by. The author of this book argues that not only was this not the case, but that over the last ten millennia (and especially during the last five) the lives of human beings have actually got worse, even during what is usually seen as the vast leap in living conditions of the last 100 years or so, during which period life is usually seen as having improved beyond all measure for most on the planet. While not failing to recognise such developments as state health services, eradication of many fatal diseases, ability of workers to take industrial action, health and safety laws, advances in gender and race equality, and overall higher living standards, his challenge to this narrative is that some benefits to some humans on the planet have caused untold suffering – and even extermination – to very many others as well as to countless non-human creatures and to the planet as a whole.

Hierarchy and empires

In a work that is widely sourced and painstakingly referenced and, as a comment on its dust cover states, ‘spans cultures, continents and millennia’, MacDonald sets out to illustrate his thesis in two main ways. He does it firstly by pointing to how the coming of agriculture upset the equilibrium of previous human societies bringing with it with hierarchy, domination of the few and unequal access to the means of living and resulted in countless oppressive empires, in untold suffering for millions through the practice of slavery, in destructive wars that killed many other millions and still persist, and in the theft in recent times of the lands of Indigenous populations who were also subjected to indescribable cruelty and, in many cases, extermination. Examples he gives, with significant and vivid detail, are the ruthless Roman rule over its Empire, the Viking invasions of the British Isles with its accompanying plunder and slaughter, the ultra-violent expansion of the Islamic and Mongolian Empires of the Middle and Near East, the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, and the European takeover of the Americas and the barbaric treatment and near annihilation of its native peoples.

He gives particular prominence to this last phenomenon, which he calls ‘the genocide of the Americas’, which, he says, ‘represented potentially the greatest loss of human life and cultural diversity in any single event up to that point, eradicating tens of millions of lives and dozens or hundreds of cultures [and] killing billions of animals in the process’. He also suggests that the attempt to conquer Europe by Hitler’s Nazis and their industrialised murder of those millions regarded as ‘other’ (Jews and gypsies in particular) is likely to have taken its inspiration from the American treatment of the continent’s indigenous peoples, ‘justified’ as it was by the USA’s founding concept of ‘manifest destiny’. In this context he quotes with approval the words of Howard Zinn: ‘Indian removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to the development of the modern capitalist economy.’ It should be added that, at the same time, the author does not fail to draw attention to and condemn what he terms ‘the cults of Stalinism and Maoism’ in the Soviet Union and China which claimed the lives of millions more.

Parasitism vs commensalism

His other principal point of reference concerns the effect of ongoing economic growth by humans on the biosphere. In bringing about apparent improvements in living standards for some, this has, he argues, progressively damaged the ecology of the planet, wiping out species which are part of the natural environment and causing what may be irreparable damage to its necessary biodiversity. He points to the rapid acceleration of this over the past two centuries and to the fact that, despite widespread consciousness of it, there are no signs that it is abating. All this he attributes to what he calls ‘parasitic systems’ (a concept used with great frequency in this book), that is systems whose purpose has been (and continues to be) to extract as much as possible from the biosphere without serious thought for the consequences and which have done this by ‘hijacking human beings’ natural cooperativeness’. The focus of these parasitic systems is, he tells us, ‘growth’, economic growth, the only type of development that human society, and particularly those who currently dominate it, see as ‘progress’. He sees this as a disastrous practice, ‘a mass, collective delusion’, and so, as per the title of his book, ‘humanity’s worst idea’.

The author’s argument that ‘progress’ has inflicted devastating collateral damage on humans, non-human creatures and the environment alike is nothing if not cogent and powerful. But where does he (and we) go from here? What, if anything, does he have to suggest to replace the ‘progress’ mantra, which in the modern world is nothing other than the economic growth every government declares to be imperative? Having hinted in various parts of his book at alternative ways in which human societies might move forward, in a final 40-page section entitled ‘After Progress’, he proceeds to go into this in more detail. Broadly he argues for a society with a ‘mutualistic’ form of relationship between individual humans as well as between human society and the natural environment, one that needs to be ‘non-extractive’ and ‘non-exploitative’ Or, if that is not always entirely feasible, he favours at least relationships he calls ‘commensalistic’, where humans benefit by exchanging their particular skills with one another while being careful that nature should come to no harm.

Better not more

What does this mean in social and political terms? While at one point declaring himself in favour of ‘democratic socialism’ and having made it clear that this has nothing to do with the kind of ‘socialism’ associated with the old Soviet Union, or with China (seen as being ‘state capitalist’ and entirely undemocratic) or with Cuba (described as having ‘welcomed economic liberalisation without any of the apparent benefits of political liberalisation’), he is at pains not to propose any single or existing ‘model’ of society as something to imitate or to build on. And he dismisses any notion that human society should (or could) go back to its earliest stages where the conditions of life and the pro-social nature of humanity combined to provide a self-sufficient, egalitarian existence. However, he does see a future where ‘growth’ and the colossal cost it exacts from both humans and the natural world are replaced by a society that uses the advanced technology now available to create a settled and satisfying existence for all – a society of better rather than more, one perhaps reflecting his description of the earliest human societies as ‘rich in leisure time, generous and egalitarian in its distribution of resources, abundant in communion with people and wildlife’.

Profit – the core of capitalism

How can this be brought about? On this the writer, perhaps understandably, offers guidelines rather than prescriptions or recipes. Broadly he seems to favour not widespread political action but, for example, ‘agro-ecology’, ‘land-based resistance movements’ and pressure for universal basic income, which activities he sees as already taking place on a significant scale and presaging well for the future. He sees no point in pressing governments, growth-obsessed as they inevitably are, to take action to do things such as mitigate climate change, since any such declared ambitions will always be destined to fail or just have the function of political theatre. But while he – understandably – seems, on the one hand, to have no faith in the governments who manage the capitalist system to enact meaningful change, on the other he seems also to see a distinction between different ways in which they might run it. That is to say that he consistently declares abhorrence for what he calls ‘neo-liberalism’, the kind of free-market capitalism he describes as ‘lubricated by relationships based on self-interested transactions’ where the function of the state is the simple one of oversight of the market’s predatory operations. Rather he indicates more of a preference for the kind of capitalism in which there is greater state control both in ownership of industry and surveillance of the privately owned sector.

The trouble here – and this is something that does not seem to be clearly perceived – is that the core of all versions of capitalism is the profit motive, which is inherently extractive, prejudicial to the majority, and unsustainable. Any form of capitalism, with its money system and buying and selling, can only, whatever the preferences or intentions of those in charge of it, to be run along lines of growth and profit. And in all cases the role of a government is to be the executive committee of the owning class. It cannot bring about – or even start to bring about – the production for use society that MacDonald would clearly like to see. It seems futile to argue therefore, as he does, that ‘a guided decline in some forms of production would be helpful’, since such a thing could not happen under any government without the needs of profit and ‘progress’ demanding it.

A total break

So while this book is a powerful indictment of modern capitalism – and of the other hierarchical systems that preceded it – what is far less persuasive about it is how it points forward to a transcendence of it, i.e. how the author proposes to get to a different kind of social arrangements for humanity where we can, in his own words, ‘pursue a non-parasitic mode of human ecology and political economy’ [and] ‘democratic, participatory and community connection’. He states quite correctly that ‘a total break is needed’, that ‘mass, collective delusion must go’, and that ‘we need to have a new conception of our place in our ongoing history’. But for that to happen what is needed is democratic action, ideally via the ballot box, by a socially conscious majority to establish the kind of cooperative society that he is clearly looking for, one of free access to all goods and services where human needs and the health of the planet are the driving force – in other words ‘progress’ in its most positive sense.

Howard Moss

More and Less (2025)

Book Review from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard    

Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth. By Kohei Saito (translated by Brian Bergstrom). Weidenfeld & Nicolson £10.99.

It is well known that Karl Marx never completed his major work Capital. Just the first volume was published in his lifetime, and two further volumes, edited by Friedrich Engels, only appeared after his death. Kohei Saito argues here that Marx did not finish Capital because in his later years he became interested in scientific and what would now be called ecological issues. He did not publish much on these topics, but he left a lot of notes and excerpts from other writers, which are only now being put together as part of MEGA (Marx–Engels Complete Works). Saito’s book was discussed in the November 2024 Socialist Standard.

Saito further claims that Marx turned his back on productivism, the view that under capitalism productivity would continue to rise to bring about socialism (a well-known passage from the Communist Manifesto states that the capitalist class had massively expanded the productive forces). Marx argued, for instance, that capitalist agriculture led to depletion of the soil and disruption of the metabolic interaction between nature and humans, and he later praised communes in non-Western societies, such as Russia. This also involved a break with ‘Eurocentrism’, which supposedly involved projecting European history onto the rest of the world.

Saito criticises what he terms Accelerationism, the idea of completely sustainable economic growth. He associates this view with Aaron Bastani, author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (on which see the June 2019 Socialist Standard). He claims that the improved productivity and replacement of fossil fuels envisaged in FALC would in fact lead to ‘increased plunder of the earth’. His solution is degrowth, which for one thing involves a greater spread of the commons and ‘collective management of productive activity’, thereby reducing the artificial scarcity of capitalism and increasing abundance, while at the same time cutting the hours of work needed. Degrowth is simply not possible under capitalism; rather, a steady-state economy based on sustainability is what is needed.

A chapter entitled ‘Degrowth Communism Will Save the World’ presents the author’s positive proposals, divided into five points. The first of these is the transition to an economy based on use value: fulfilling people’s basic needs would be given priority over increasing GDP. But here we meet the first real problem: it is just not clear whether Saito wishes to do away completely with exchange value and the whole idea of GDP. The second point, already mentioned above, is to reduce work hours, which need not imply increased use of automation. Thirdly, abolish the division of labour, as work will be more attractive if it involves a variety of tasks and activities. Further, the production process must be democratised, which includes the use of open technologies, those which ‘relate to communication and co-operative industry’. Lastly, priority must be given to essential work, labour-intensive activities that cannot be automated, such as care work, in contrast to the meaningless ‘bullshit jobs’ identified by David Graeber. A system built on these lines will be ‘equipped to satisfy people’s needs while also expanding the capacity for society to address environmental issues’.

The author summarises his position as follows: ‘the foundation of communism is the equal, communal management of the means of production as a form of commons – that is, as something distinct from private ownership or ownership by the state’. Socialists would agree with this, but unfortunately, he then goes on to accept the existence of the state as a means of getting things done, such as creating infrastructure. Perhaps he does not mean by this some kind of centralised organisation that enforces the rule and interests of a minority, but he could have been a lot clearer here. In fact, his description of future society is mostly fine as far as it goes, but he does not refer explicitly to three crucial aspects, the abolition of the wages system, the ending of production for sale and the abolition of class divisions. Without these, whatever exists will not be socialism/communism, whether it implements degrowth or not.

Paul Bennett

Transformism (2025)

Book Review from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Transformative Adaptation. Another world is still just possible. By Rupert Read and Morgan Phillips with Manda Scott. Permanent Publications. 2024. 102pp.

This is a collection of short essays written by the editors, Rupert Read and Morgan Phillips, and by other contributors – with titles like ‘Transformative Adaptation as Part of the Emerging Climate Majority’, ‘How we will Free Ourselves – Together’, and ‘Thrutopia: Creating a New Story for a World Undergoing Transformation’.

So what do these writers mean by ‘transformative adaptation’? Most of them talk about a wide variety of what they see as ecologically beneficial initiatives and activities, for example restoration of wetlands, ‘agroforestry hubs’, biodiverse planting schemes, community food-growing sites, and use of green technology. Among specific ideas put forward are ‘autonomous community-led centres focused on meeting local needs and building local resilience’. They give examples of this kind of thing they see as taking place in various parts of the world, for example Nepal, Kurdistan, and more locally in, for instance, the ‘Talking Tree’ project in Staines and the ‘Zero Carbon Guildford Climate Hub’. They see transformative adaptation as going beyond efforts to simply cut down on carbon emissions and be generally more environmentally conscious (they describe that as ‘mitigation’) and characterise it as part of the need to ‘work with nature not against her’ so that ’ecological breakdown can be reversed’. Above all they stress that, if the world carries on along its current anti-ecological track (COP, for example, is seen as a failure and a fraud, ‘a surrender to the forces of big energy and big capital’), it will quickly lead to a situation where ‘the very habitability of our earth teeters’.

But what does this book have to say about the political dimension of climate change and global warming and efforts to curb or reverse it and protect the environment? It says a certain amount. It refers to what is happening as ‘a crisis of political economy’, whereby we all live in a system that demands continuous economic growth’ and creates ‘dire levels of inequality that would have made Roman emperors blush’. It further states, that ‘climate stability and capitalism – in any form – are not compatible’, that ‘unimaginable “profits” continue to be made, as capital attempts to commodify life itself’, and that to remedy this we need ‘societal transformation’.

So far so good, except that it seems to think that all this can somehow happen within the system of capitalism and its buying and selling imperative and talks about ‘exerting pressure on government’ and ‘on decision makers’, as though governments were somehow neutral and their purpose was something other than managing the capitalist system in the interests of the tiny minority who monopolise the wealth of society. So the book states the undeniable truth that ‘the solutions are available, we just need to take collective action and implement them in our communities’.

If ‘collective action’ simply means local planting schemes, ‘green’ technology and the like, clearly this will do little more than scratch the surface of the problems of the environment and inequality they point to. So, though we cannot blame the advocates of transformative adaptation for wanting to do something practical to rescue an overheating planet from the ills of capitalism, it cannot in itself feasibly be seen as a wider effective solution.

However, to be fair this book does end up going somewhat further, and that’s mainly thanks to its final chapter contributed by the novelist Manda Scott, who talks about the need to imagine ‘how our lives would look and feel if we let go of our encultured drive to engage in a market of goods and services’ and states flatly that ‘capitalism is not compatible with a flourishing web of life’.

Groups and movements that offer examples of self-organisation, democratic cooperation and sharing of resources and goods, which this book wants to see a spread of, offer something of an antidote to those single-issue campaigns calling on government to bring in various reforms which, even if enacted, rarely do more than tinker at the edges of the massive problem constituted by the whole system of production for profit. But the most radical of the ideas put forward here, that of a ‘parallel government’ possibly leading to a more democratic system and even perhaps to some form of non-monetary economy, seems unnecessarily complicated compared to using simple democratic political action via the existing system of elections as a route to the establishment of a democratic, moneyless, marketless society of common ownership and production for direct use. In Manda Scott’s words, ‘a system designed to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet’ and ‘a world that is fully connected, where we are not born to pay bills and then die’.

Howard Moss

Polycrisis (2025)

Book Review from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Insecurity Trap. A Short Guide to Transformation. By Paul Rogers, with Judith Large. Hawthorn Press, 2024. 92pp.

The main author of this book, Paul Rogers, Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies, sees the world as being in a ‘polycrisis’, whose principal features are wars, right-wing populism, poverty and environmental breakdown. He refers to it as an ‘insecurity trap’, in that the disruption caused by these factors makes everyone’s life prone to uncertainty and instability. Viewing the factors in question as planetary and often interdependent, his declared purpose is to suggest ways in which we can set about ‘navigating’ them on that same planetary level. In her Foreword, the book’s co-author sees humanity as having the technology and productive capacity to achieve world-wide security for all as long as these are not perverted in the service of, for example, fomenting hatred between peoples or producing increasingly sophisticated weapons of war.

One of the major obstacles to this, according to this book, is the free market, or ‘neoliberalism’ as it is referred to, which it sees as beginning seriously in the 1980s, in the era of Thatcher and Reagan, and having intensified since (though it is also recognised as a way of running capitalism that dates back to the 19th century). It is a way of organising things, the authors tell us, that focuses on ‘the prioritisation of private enterprise in place of state ownership’. It also, they go on, eschews ‘cooperative intergovernmental action’ and turns its back on the environmental and military drivers of migration, pushing ‘the richer states to close the castle gates and concentrate even more than at present on looking after themselves’. This in turn makes them ‘terribly ill-suited to responding to global challenges’, such as pandemics and climate breakdown and much more suited to encouraging the arms industry to supply weapons for use in the wars easily prone to breaking out. ‘Now thrive the armourers’, as they put it.

So, what is the solution Professor Rogers and his co-author have to offer to these ongoing and interlocking problems which affect the whole of humanity? First and foremost, they see ‘the need for cooperation at every level from neighbourhoods right through to intergovernmental level’, especially in view of increasing climate breakdown which ‘an economic model rooted in competition cannot cope with’. In support of this they provide a long list of ‘small steps’ people could take to ‘cooperate’ with one another on a daily basis (eg, use of cloth or paper bags rather than plastic ones, conserving water, using chemical-free products, car sharing, volunteering to help in food banks). They also suggest involvement in support of production of local food, sustainable energy, ‘ethical’ banking and campaigns such as against the arms trade and against fossil fuels, and in favour of, for example, Amnesty International. They advocate all of this, and much more – and this is where the problems arise – within the framework of the existing system of buying and selling and dependence on money and the market. In addition, they want to skew the system as it currently exists by having a much larger degree of state ownership of industry and services, arguing that, if governments have more control, they can control ‘market fundamentalism’, introduce more regulation and reform that will make things less unequal, and can also, for example, tax the wealthy, bring in carbon reduction programmes, invest in electrification, and adopt ‘green’ policies generally.

But what all of this fails to reckon with is that, with all such change – if it were possible – we would still be left with capitalism with its market and its money system. Nor would anything of what is proposed change the profit imperative that drives it. At best it would amount to a tinkering at the edges of that system and would certainly not have the effect of mending the inequality that characterises it. Above all, it would do nothing to create the more ‘sharing’ system the authors wish for, nor to remove the ‘insecurity trap’ which the authors’ well-meaning aim is to do away with. Above all, whatever individuals or individual governments may do to attempt to ease the burden on the most deprived, what cannot happen in a world of competing national economic interests is the ‘intergovernmental cooperation’ that this book advocates for. That is an illusion, because all governments are an expression of the interests of the owners or controllers of wealth in their country – whether that wealth is state managed or privately owned – and will only cooperate with other governments to the extent that those interests are not unduly affected. They cannot act against the profit motive and they do not possess the power to regulate the profit system as they wish. That is the bleak truth of the world we live in and the kind of ‘small steps’ advocated by these authors are destined to remain just that and not to lead to any larger change or a different kind of society.

It is in fact a failure of the imagination not to look beyond ‘small steps’ and to a completely different kind of world (a moneyless, stateless, leaderless one with free access for all to all goods and services) – one which is eminently realisable once majority consciousness of the need for it spreads and leads to democratic political action to bring it about. It will be a society of planned cooperation which takes advantage of existing technologies in a sustainable way and in which everyone can develop their interests and abilities with full social support and live without the ever-present threat of the pervasive material insecurity the authors of this book rightly perceive and are so keen to see removed.

Howard Moss

Editorial: Why we need socialism (1990)

Editorial from the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The case for socialism — a society of common ownership, democratic control, production for use and distribution according to need — rests on the fact that capitalism does not work, and cannot be made to work, in the interests of the majority in society who have to go out to work for a wage or salary.

Capitalism is a class-divided society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by a minority of extremely rich individuals. Goods and services, useful things, are produced not with the intention of satisfying our needs, but with the intention of making a profit for this minority. Production is subject to the profit motive. The economic law of "no profit, no production" rules.

Basically, capitalism can only work as a profit-making system in the interests of those who live off profits. It is because priority must be given to making profits that the needs of the wage and salary working majority are neglected. Profits come first. People's needs come second.

This is why the majority face problems even when it comes to meeting our basic needs. This is why there are problems over the quality of the food we eat. Why there are millions of people living in substandard housing, and why some are completely homeless. Why the health service is run on the cheap. Why there are problems over schools, transport, the environment — in fact why there are all the problems which the politicians promise to solve but never do.

Capitalism is not just a national phenomenon. It exists in all countries including, obviously now, in Russia. It is in fact a world system, and the problems of world poverty, ignorance and disease are to be laid at its door too. The productive forces exist to provide every man, woman and child on this planet with adequate food, clothing and shelter. Yet millions die each year of starvation or starvation-related diseases, while farmers in Europe and North America are paid not to grow food. These people die because they have no money and so don't constitute a market. Which means they don't count for the operation of the capitalist system.

Because capitalism involves a built-in competitive struggle for profits there is also a struggle that from time to time breaks out into actual warfare for sources of raw materials, for markets, for investment outlets and for strategic points and routes to protect these. To be prepared for this, and as a "deterrent" to other states to keep their distance, all of the states into which the world is divided have to maintain the most destructive weapons of war they can afford. So the world spends more on armaments than on dealing with problems like starvation and disease. So, also, the major powers have stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to destroy humanity many times over.

As if the threat of nuclear annihilation was not enough, there is also the threat of ecological disaster — either from global warming or from the hole in the ozone layer, take your pick — caused by industrial processes firms are forced to adopt to remain competitive and stay in the race for profits. So this is capitalism. And this is why we must get rid of it.

We must replace capitalism with socialism. A complete change in the basis of society, from class ownership and production for profit to common ownership and production just for use, must be brought about by conscious democratic political action before anything lasting or constructive can be done to solve existing problems. With common ownership and democratic control we will be freed from the tyranny of the economic laws of capitalism which restrict and distort what is produced to what is profitable. The barrier to us using the means of production to meet our needs will have gone.

Interview with Drew Pendergrass (2023)

From the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Drew Pendergrass, the co-author, with Troy Vettese, of a striking new book entitled Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics (reviewed in the March 2023 edition of this journal) talks to the Socialist Standard to discuss why he thinks both human society and the natural environment can only survive through a new model of social and economic organisation, a moneyless, wageless one of democratic planning, voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services.

In the book you co-wrote with Troy Vettese, you put forward the idea of a world non-market society and outline how you see it as operating in practical terms. What brought you to this idea in the first place?

By day, I am a climate scientist — in my work, I see how incompatible our current economic order is with an ecologically and climatologically stable planet. Even more radicalizing than this, I am a scientist at Harvard University, a place unafraid to take the status quo to its logical conclusion. People at Harvard don’t believe in the possibility of social change, at least not beyond marginal adjustments. However, the scientists there are just as aware as I am about the incompatibility of capitalism and the climate, though they would not use those terms. This is why solar geoengineering, the idea that we could spray particles into the stratosphere to dim the sun and cool the planet, has become a central part of the environmental research and curriculum at this university. Rather than change our society to meet the demands of our planet, it is more realistic to them to change the planet to meet the demands of capitalism. And I think they are right — to keep the status quo, you need geoengineering, even though the risks are profound. I have been a socialist since I was in high school and have no interest in preserving capitalism, so Troy and I wanted to offer an alternative.

There are others who advocate the kind of society you do, but, following Marx, they usually say that you can’t write ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’. Why do think it’s feasible and useful to try to do this?

During and immediately after Marx and Engels were writing, utopia was in the air. Utopian fiction peaked in the 1880s and 90s with books like Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Morris’s News from Nowhere. At that time, even the mainstream thought capitalism really could be supplanted by something new. Although Marx himself does not lay out in one place his vision of a socialist or communist society, this does not mean he didn’t have ideas about what that society would entail: scholars like Bertell Ollman have reconstructed in some detail the outlines of Marx’s utopia. More importantly, workers had clear ideas about what alternatives to capitalism might entail — many had memories of non-capitalist lifeways to draw on, such as the peasantry, and a wide-open sense of possibility catalysed by revolutionary moments like 1848 or the Paris Commune.

Now, alternatives are not self-evident. With the failed utopias in the twentieth century and the rise of the world market in the twenty-first, there is not a sense that an alternative to capitalism lies in wait — many doubt that an alternative exists at all. With this recent history, the nineteenth century advice to avoid ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’ seems outdated. Certainly, when coming up with proposals for how a socialist society might work, one must remain humble. But the concreteness of this exercise is a necessary corrective to a world that has lost its utopian spark. As Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, no social movement exists without a concrete vision for a better future as its north star.

You describe the common idea that the earth is over-populated as ‘dangerously exaggerated’. But wouldn’t some say that there too many people for the resources that the Earth, even in a non-market society, could make available to give everyone a decent, comfortable life? Wouldn’t some also say that this is especially the case for the system that you advocate, one that would see half the Earth (‘Half-Earth Socialism’) being occupied by rewilded ecosystems in order for it to recover and prosper?

One of the exercises we follow in the book is to imagine what it would take to provide the material basis for human flourishing to ten billion people, a fair bit more than live today, while staying within planetary boundaries. We make the point that both sides of this equation — what a ‘comfortable’ life means, and where exactly planetary boundaries lie — are political questions that can only be answered by reference to values. Science cannot tell us what we should or should not do; it can merely advise on the consequences of certain material pressures on the Earth system.

We argue in the book that it is certainly possible with present technology to provide a comfortable life for ten billion people, rewild much of the biosphere, decarbonize the economy, and begin to repair the damage of centuries of capitalism. The trick is what you mean by the ‘comfortable’. If you mean US levels of energy and material use, then you will be dissatisfied by our proposal. Instead, we propose energy quotas and a change in diet towards veganism for most people.

Deep decarbonization is very hard. Fossil fuels are energy dense (lots of energy per unit mass) and can be burned anytime, day or night. Decarbonizing electricity is the easy part, though load management with intermittent renewable sources presents an engineering challenge. Replacing fuels in industrial and transport processes is much harder. Planes, for example, need energy-dense power sources like kerosene so they are light enough to fly. However, replacing fossil fuels with renewable fuels require vast amounts of electricity to transform carbon from the atmosphere into fuels for planes. For example, decarbonizing flights in the UK alone would require more electricity than the entire country generates today. The other option would be biofuels, but these require vast swaths of land to grow; in the UK, for flights alone, this would be two thirds of its croplands. Quotas are the only way to make a world without fossil fuels work for everyone.

Similarly, animal husbandry eats up 77 percent of agricultural land while providing only a fraction of the nutrients people need. The industry emits gobs of greenhouse gases, including vast amounts of the potent short-lived methane; cutting methane rapidly is a useful way to ‘bend the curve’ on climate change, limiting near-term warming as we build up our capacity to replace carbon dioxide emitting infrastructure. Abolishing the meat industry and eating mainly plants instead would clean up the atmosphere and free up lots of land for rewilding. Remember that habitat loss is one of the main drivers of mass extinction, and one of the main drivers of habitat loss is animal agriculture — both fodder (soy and corn) and grazing land.

A life with no meat, fewer flights, smaller homes, limited cars, and reduced consumption may seem intolerable for some. But that does not mean such a life isn’t comfortable. Guaranteed housing, health care, and education in a built environment that prioritizes sharing and community sounds luxurious to me.

You seem very lukewarm about ‘green’ solutions to the environmental crisis. But wouldn’t some people argue that the policies proposed by mainstream advocates of environmentalism at least contribute to offering some partial remedy to the degradation and despoliation of the Earth that you describe in your book?

Certainly we encourage the development of policies and technologies that can repair the damage to the Earth system. For example, in the book we are bullish on hydrogen for electrifying the industrial sector and management in grid load; lots of capitalists like this investment too. I spend much of my day as an environmental activist in Boston, pushing for reforms like strict building energy use codes and decarbonizing municipal buildings. None of these reforms are incompatible with capitalism, although we hope that our movement will grow in strength and demand more. The argument we make in the book is that the unconscious force of capital will always be dominant in a capitalist society, and that this force is incompatible with the flourishing of the biosphere because of its metabolic need to ingest ever-increasing swaths of nature. Reforms and technologies that limit the damage are welcome, but we need to do all we can to align these forces towards a larger social transformation.

How close do you think the biosphere is to the ‘extinction’ you refer to in the title of your book?

Human beings and the biosphere are not in danger of extinction. The extinction in the title of the book refers to the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction event in the nearly four-billion-year history of life on this planet. Life is robust; it will continue, however damaged. Still, we have a responsibility to maintain biodiversity both as an end-in-itself, but also out of self-interest. Healthy ecosystems are robust to disease, maintain productive agriculture, and sequester carbon.

You talk about how we can run things rationally and sustainably without money and the market and instead by democratic planning ‘in kind’. But how do you see this planning taking place? How would you argue against those who might say that a society without monetary accounting would quickly degenerate into shortage and social chaos?

This is a hard question, and certainly I will not be able to answer it to your readers’ satisfaction here. I’ll also note that Troy and I are continuing to think about moneyless planning and are planning a follow-up book on the topic.

In the book, we present a thought experiment about how moneyless planning in a world socialist society might work. A global parliament would create a few coarsely-resolved global plans, reflecting different coalitions in power; these plans might offer proposals about energy quotas, the energy generation system, food production, and material throughput needs. After debate, a plan would be adopted for a period, subject to constant revisions. The implementation of these economic plans would take place at more local levels of government, which would have wide leeway to decide how to govern themselves so long as they fit within the parameters of the global plan. Although there should be considerable flexibility, we think that a global plan is necessary. Because humanity has become a planetary species, able to unintentionally alter the climate and biosphere, we argue that we need a form of government that is commensurate with the scale of our power. We want to consciously debate and control our society, rather than let capital blindly trash the biosphere.

We argue that the algorithms and technologies necessary to plan on this scale already exist; in the book we outline the history of linear programming and other algorithms in the fields of optimization and control theory. The challenge is (1) gathering the necessary information to plan effectively, (2) foregrounding democracy, and (3) ensuring that plans are actually implemented. There were experiments in the Eastern Bloc with algorithmic planning as a reform measure, but they failed in these three challenges. Our argument is that these challenges are intertwined and fundamentally emerge from the need for democracy. If planning is carried out by a richly democratic society, with participatory institutions at every level from the workplace to national and global parliaments, then planning will have a legitimacy that technocracy could never hope to achieve. That legitimacy helps with information gathering, at least with enough quality to create passable plans, and with successful plan implementation. No one will work for a socialism they don’t believe in.

Although there is a lot to say about this topic, I think that there is no reason to believe well-formed institutions cannot operate a complex society without the mediating power of money. However, more utopias and thought experiments would be useful in working out some first principles in designing such a society. Here, again, there is a need for more ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future!’

How would you respond to the argument put forward by some that a society based on voluntary work and cooperation to produce everything humanity needs could not work owing to the frailties of ‘human nature’?

I don’t believe in human nature as some timeless, unchanging category. One of the useful lessons of history is that people in the past are wildly different from people today. Even the Ancient Greeks, who we in the West see as our ancestors, lived by practices and beliefs and motivations that are incomprehensible to us today. However, I do take your point that human nature as it exists today has been imprinted with capitalism. While Margaret Thatcher’s line that “there is no such thing as society” is obviously ridiculous, capitalist social relations make it more and more true each day. Hostility towards strangers, paranoia, and loneliness all are outcomes of capitalism that, while not part of human nature, nevertheless make building solidarity hard. That said, I’ve seen people transform when they are brought into genuinely solidaristic institutions like trade unions or activist groups. Being part of a union myself will always make me hopeful about the possibility of socialism.

For socialism to work, you don’t need to believe human beings are angels. Instead, you need to believe that people are shaped by the institutions and social situation around them, and that those infrastructures can be changed by humans because they were constructed by humans.

As an additional note, socialism need not be entirely voluntary. Abolishing alienation in labor and establishing social control of the economy will both involve vast new democratic institutions, but vaccine mandates, for example, will remain necessary to protect public health. Coercive measures like these are obviously a risk for any society, but I am confident that robust participatory institutions can prevent necessary coercion from expanding beyond its remit into tyranny.

How do you think it’s possible to convince enough people that a world socialist society is possible and feasible? And if that does happen, what practical steps do you think will be necessary to bring that society into being?

I think a great way to convince people that alternatives are possible is to use utopias as a method. Real utopias, in the form of democratic rank-and-file trade unions, show people that participatory democracy can transform lives. Fictional utopias and thought experiments like ours demonstrate that even knotty crises like environmental collapse can be remedied. We even made a video game, available at play.half.earth, that allows people to experience what planning a world economy might feel like. All these things together might convince enough people to form the seeds of a movement, which could grow into a revolutionary moment. Our chances are better if we can unite different splinters on the left into a fighting movement. Of course, the odds are against us, but I think that if we can assemble a large base with a radical imagination, design institutions that prefigure the world we want, and build enough power to achieve real intermediate victories, we will be on our way towards a winning socialist movement.

You seem to see some regimes within capitalism (e.g. Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, Allende’s Chile) as genuine but failed attempts to establish socialism. But do these regimes really have any relationship with the socialism that you describe and advocate in your book?

You are absolutely right that these regimes are not socialist. I am sympathetic to interpretations of the USSR and other similar regimes as ‘state capitalist.’ In particular, I like Moishe Postone’s argument that because these societies are still governed by the law of value they have not overcome capitalism, no matter what the party claimed. However, I think it is also important to remember that the people who built these regimes (here I’m thinking primarily of China and the USSR) really were socialists and really did want to build an alternative to capitalism. It is on us to learn from their failures. We may not have the same youthful optimism as socialists from a century ago, but we do have many examples of how not to do socialism — that’s useful data as we shape our demands and imagined alternatives today. This is why in the book we engage deeply with attempts to reform the Soviet economy, even as we are strongly critical of the USSR.

You favour veganism as a way of feeding everyone while having the smallest environmental impact. But do you think that humanity as a whole, having been omnivorous throughout their existence, will ever accept the total exclusion of animal foodstuffs from their diet? And, more generally, isn’t it hard enough to persuade people to work for socialism without also telling them they may have to give up things they like?

I already detailed why veganism makes sense as an environmental policy, so here I’ll focus on the critiques. First, the amount of meat we in the Global North eat today is historically unprecedented. Our ancestors did eat meat, but only a small fraction of what we do today. As a result, there are cultural resources to draw on in most areas to create meatless dishes. For example, I’m from the South in the US, home of barbeque and fried chicken. But my hometown also hosts a large Seventh Day Adventist community, who do not eat meat for religious reasons; my great-grandfather, who was a farmer, lived basically as a vegetarian because he didn’t like to kill animals. As a vegan myself, my main practice is to show people that meatless food can be delicious and joyful. In Spain of all places, the minister for consumer affairs Alberto Garzon is working to reduce meat consumption with some success. There are ways to build campaigns around this issue, even though I agree it is a hard sell.

If I may, I’d like to expand your question further. Even if your readers disagree with me on the animal question, there are other aspects of socialism which are unpopular on their face. For example, fighting neo-colonial exploitation may not poll well in places like the UK. I like this quote from the first pages of the feminist writer Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family: ‘All of us—even those of us who own no property, who receive no guaranteed care, and who subsist at the blunt end of empire, whiteness, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and class— will have to let go of something as the process of our collective liberation unfolds. If the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also.’ One need not agree with Lewis’s position on family abolition to recognize the truth of her argument. Even if the world we will build is far better than the one that exists, things will be lost in the process. All socialists will need to confront this challenge, even if self-consciously they only demand what is ‘popular.’

Our afterword

Readers will appreciate that many of the ideas expressed in the interview are very much in line with the views the Socialist Party has long been spreading. We would give as examples the fallacy of ‘human nature’, the myth of over-population, and in particular the need for a global, ‘richly democrat’, wageless, moneyless, non-market society using advanced technologies already available. We must, however, also say that we do not see entirely eye to eye with Drew Pendergrass on certain elements of the analysis he puts forwards. In this regard we would highlight in particular: his vision of a future global socialist society as one still to be run by governments, if globally as well as nationally; his view that the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the 20th century constituted, at least in their early stages, an attempt to establish socialism in our terms; and his insistence that, from the point of view of practical resource usage, we can only have socialism if everyone is vegan.

In our view socialism can only be a society without leaders and led and without national boundaries. It follows from this that it must also be free of governments, whether national or global. Its watchword must be administration of things rather than government over people. Of course we accept that the interviewee may be using the word ‘government’ in a wider sense than normal and ‘national’ more in the sense of ‘regional’. If so, then his view may equate closely to ours.

Our less than positive view of his seeing the Russian and Chinese revolutions as attempts at socialism arises from the fact that neither country was anywhere close to the advanced form of capitalism needed for socialism to emerge from them. Lenin famously said that, if the Bolsheviks had to wait for the masses to understand socialism, it would take 500 years (meaning never), while China under Mao was little more than the personal possession of a tyrannical ruler who was prepared to unleash and oversee the most profound atrocities to affirm and consolidate his power.

Pendergrass is open about the need he sees to propose a highly detailed picture of a future non-market society, which he conceives as arising gradually and imperfectly from tendencies within capitalism and being ‘ironed out’ into complete ‘socialism’ with time. We, on the other hand, insist on the need for a majority of workers to first win control of political power, probably via the ballot box, at which point detailed plans for running the new society will have already been made and the passage to it can be relatively seamless. As it will be up to those around when socialism starts to be seriously on the agenda to decide on specific details, we see it as arguably undemocratic and even maybe dogmatic to start proposing detailed plans now (speculative ideas perhaps, but not detailed plans), since we do not know at what point society will then be, in particular technologically.

Blogger's Note:

There is another expanded review of 'Half-Earth Socialism', which goes to into greater detail, at the following link: A plan to save the future (2023).

A plan to save the future (2023)

Book Review from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

An increasing flow of books is being published on the necessity of establishing a real socialist society, moneyless, wageless, leaderless and planetary. This would be a society with free access to all goods and services based on voluntary cooperation and the principle of from each according to ability and to each according to need. Many of these books have been reviewed and evaluated in the Socialist Standard. But now going qualitatively further than all the others, we have a new one proposing a detailed plan of how a world non-market society could operate in practical and organisational terms. Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, Verso, 2022 (see a shorter review in this issue) is founded on profound knowledge of and reflection on the scientific and technological problems that such a society would need to deal with and overcome. As such, it constitutes a thrillingly imaginative leap into the fundamentals of a world organised for the common good of humanity and the natural environment.

What if?

It adopts a novel structure framed by two ‘what if?’ chapters. The first of these is entitled ‘Looking Backwards: 2047’ (à la Edward Bellamy) and describes the ‘dystopian future’ with ‘environmental collapse and feudal levels of inequality’ seen as inevitable if the present system of society, based on the market and ‘price signals’, is allowed to continue. The second of these chapters, entitled ‘News from 2047’ (à la William Morris’), offers a kind of -day-to-day outline of what a future society ‘without money or a market’ could be like and how it could operate once humanity collectively decides to take steps to reverse the decline of the biosphere, to ‘simultaneously create a just society’, and ‘to provide the basis for socialism in our lifetime’. In this the authors consciously eschew Marx’s warning against writing ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’. In fact they attempt to do just that, to describe what they call ‘a total alternative to capitalism’, i.e, how ‘economic co-ordination’ would function in socialism, ‘a society where the economy is consciously and democratically controlled’ – a definition of socialism that we would fully accept. The book offers, as the authors put it, ‘everything from a plan for resource allocation to an outline of what life will feel like’.

Controlling capitalism?

In between these two chapters the authors do a number of other key things. Firstly, they examine some of the major ideas and schemes put forward over the centuries in which capitalism has existed and grown to understand that system and bring it under control. They look at a range of ‘competing philosophies of nature and social and economic developments’: for example Malthus, with his dread of the still commonly held idea of ‘overpopulation’, described here as ‘dangerously exaggerated’; Hegel, with his ‘humanization of nature’ theory; Mises and Hayek who saw the market as the only feasible way to organise an advanced society and as a self-organising system which humans interfere with at their peril; and Marx and Neurath, both of whom see capital as ‘blindly steering the ship of fools towards ecological disaster’ and destroying ‘the world it cannot see’. This part of their analysis leads to the conclusion that what is needed is an end to what they call ‘the capitalization of nature’ and ‘a new relationship between humanity and nature’. Failing this, they see humanity facing a future of ‘ever greater inequality, disease, climatic disaster, and ecological impoverishment’.

They then go on to examine various current solutions on offer, mainly those ‘green’ ones that are presented as ways of stemming the degradation of the environment (eg, geoengineering, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, biofuels). They reject these as feasible remedies in their own right, since their advocates tend to envision their use only within the context of the market and its production and distribution of goods and services as commodities. As the authors put it: ‘Mainstream environmentalists approach the environment crisis as a set of discrete technical problems, addressable through piecemeal reform, while leaving the capitalist foundation of society untouched’. The authors are particularly hostile to animal husbandry, referred to as ‘the Earth-eating livestock industry’, taking up as it does ’40 per cent of earth’s inhabitable land’ and creating ‘massive mammalian extinction’. Their solution, which they start to outline here, is to practise ‘natural geo-engineering’, drawing down carbon and allowing rewilded ecosystems to occupy half the earth’ (hence the book’s title), and so restore biodiversity and create ‘a fully renewable energy system’. They are also advocates of veganism, considering it capable of satisfying ‘the requirement of feeding everyone with the smallest environmental impact’. All of this, however, they see as impossible under the capitalist system, which by its nature produces goods and services for profit.

Is socialist planning possible?

It is in the following chapter, entitled ‘Planning Half-Earth’, that the proposed solution they have already outlined is fleshed out. Details are given concerning how the earth’s resources can be used in a rational and sustainable way under world-wide arrangements that eschew money, the market and exchange and instead use ‘another kind of global model’ based on ‘integrated assessment models’ (IAMs) and ‘linear programming’. These methods, they tell us, already exist but their real potential can come nowhere near to being properly realised within the market system. Referring to their proposals as ‘scientific utopianism’, after the term coined by early 20th century theorist, Otto Neurath, they claim that such a model needs no universal equivalent such as money but can function effectively via in natura’ (ie, ‘in kind’) world-wide planning. This, they contend, can consistently and in an ongoing way ‘combine multiple goals’, pulling together all the necessary information regarding resources, skills and needs to ensure that production and distribution meet all the reasonable democratically agreed requirements of a cooperative planetary population. In this way humanity can ‘provide a good life for our abundant species and still protect the environment’. This is eminently possible, they go on, given that ‘the data density of the contemporary world, paired with the algorithms climate scientists have designed to handle it, greatly expands planning capacities’. Having explained all this in impressive detail, they do then advise that the precise set-up they advocate for a socialist society should at this stage be considered ‘a thought experiment’, but nevertheless one which will ‘allow us to imagine what socialism might look like in practice’.

There is no doubt, however, that this recipe they dare to write for the cookshop of their future is a highly encouraging one, providing much in the way of effective counter-argument to objections that a society without monetary accounting could not be organised efficiently or that it would quickly degenerate into shortage and social chaos. The insights they provide in the ‘Limits of Planning’ section of their ‘Planning Half-Earth’ chapter, and in the day-in-a-life type ‘News from 2047’ chapter, also give helpful and fascinating food for thought about how ongoing democratic choice could take place within a socialist society among a population free to express that choice.

Setting up socialism

All this adds up to a meticulously researched and documented work, which will, in its broad lines at least, convince any fair-minded reader both of the urgent need for a different kind of society and also of a viable way in which it could be organised if workers throughout the world were to take action to establish it. This would be a kind of society organised without money and without the ‘embedded form of coercion’ that is forced employment. Yet, while the book is also effective in debunking, as the authors put it, ‘the delusions of the political centre and Left’, what it is somewhat short on is much to do with the mechanism of precisely how the society they advocate can come about. Yes, socialism will have to be planned in advance, as the authors make clear, but, as the Socialist Party argues, that can only seriously begin once the majority have begun to espouse the concept and can only work if the plans are fully developed before the change takes place. The authors seem to think that it can be sort of half-planned in advance, but that it will take some time after it has been established for it to be fully operative. Yet, once the necessary spreading of consciousness of the need for socialism has been achieved and plans for it have been made, there seems no reason why a democratic, moneyless, marketless society will not be able to be voted in via democratic political action (ie, the ballot box), and then be set up and be operative virtually immediately. The political control needed to coordinate the change will already be there. Yes, some tweaks, some forms of trial and error, some ongoing revisions are bound to be necessary, but none of this will prevent the basic structures of socialism from operating fully both for the benefit of humanity and of the environment. And, who knows, perhaps it will even be along the lines of the ‘integrated assessment models’ and ‘linear assessment’ envisioned by the authors?

Their main objection to socialism being established in this way via the ballot box seems to be that the capitalist class will not allow it. To support this they paraphrase (rather than quote directly) Engels’ 1886 introduction to the first English translation of Volume I of Marx’s Capital as ‘if a dedicated socialist party were to ever win [elections], the ruling class would unleash a “pro-slavery rebellion” against a “peaceful and legal revolution”’. Yet the main evidence they adduce that this would happen, ie, the toppling of the Allende government in Chile in 1973, is hardly relevant, since that regime was in no way socialist in the sense that they (or) we advocate the idea. And, in fact, Marx’s views on this were far more nuanced than the authors suggest and do not exclude a peaceful, democratic takeover by a majority via the ballot box. In addition, they also seem to show a certain naivety in being prepared to recognise recent or current oppressive state-capitalist regimes (eg, Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba) as somehow being attempts at socialism or on the way to it, when any connection of these regimes to socialism is purely rhetorical. Their unfortunate blind spot in this area even leads to them referring to Trotsky and Stalin as ‘20th century socialists’ and the ANC in South Africa as a party of ‘modern, internationalist socialism’.

Humanity and nature

But these are relatively minor points of contention for us in an important book that packs an enormous amount of knowledge and reflection into little more than 200 pages. It advocates basically what the Socialist Party advocates: a wholly democratic society of meaningful work which frees all humans from the threat of poverty and where the government of people is replaced by the administration of things. It also deals convincingly with the ‘motivation’ argument (part of the frequently heard ‘human nature’ objection), characterising socialism as a society in which ‘motivation’ will be provided by ‘positive incentives’ such as ‘social obligation, personal satisfaction, pride’. And, finally, with its strong focus on the ongoing degradation and possible collapse of the natural environment, it emphasises the need for what it calls ‘a new relationship between humanity and nature’ and looks forward, as we do, to ‘the prospect of a unified humanity … with an economy built around, care, health and unalienated labour’.

Howard Moss

Eco-socialism (2023)

Book Review from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Future on Fire. Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change. By David Camfield. PM Press. 2022. xiv+96pp.

This is a strange book which houses apparently conflicting viewpoints by the same author. It begins with a chapter (‘The Path We’re On’) focusing on the threat to life on Earth posed by the climate and ecological crises due to capitalism’s use of fossil fuels, its unstoppable focus on ‘short-term growth of profits’, and its inevitable failure to ensure that the abundance of food produced does not reach all those who need it. The author then goes on in three further chapters to talk about how he considers this threat could possibly be averted or mitigated by various actions within the framework of capitalism. Finally, in a short closing chapter, he explains, in apparent contradiction to what came before, how the only means of averting ‘environmental calamity’ is actually to get rid of capitalism altogether and set up what he calls ‘ecosocialism’, described as ‘an ecologically rational society founded on democratic control, social equality, and the predominance of use value’ and ‘a self-governing society with a non-destructive relationship to the rest of nature’, as well as providing ‘the context for a flourishing of human diversity’. He also points out that such a society has nothing in common with the so-called ‘communism’ of the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, which he describes as bureaucratic capitalist dictatorships with no aim of satisfying human needs, in the same way as all ‘existing states are capitalist states and ‘changing governments may lead to reforms, but it doesn’t alter which class rules’.

We can have no argument with analysis like this, yet, as already observed, it seems, strangely at odds with the rest of the book. Its longest chapter, for example, entitled ‘Mass Movements: Our Only Hope’, talks about how ‘collective action by large numbers of ordinary people’ can force governments into reforms, and ‘prepare people for future struggles’, since ‘the experience of defensive fights can change those who take part in them’. This, it goes on to say, can ‘open up possibilities for more far-reaching societal change’. All this smacks of the Trotskyist mantra that, if you engage people in ‘struggle’, this is likely to make them more radical and the whole thing will tip over into a mass revolutionary movement led by those who sparked the struggle in the first place. There is of course no evidence that engagement in ‘single issues’ struggle actually makes people more radical and prone to look more widely at societal change. The effect is in fact just as likely to be the opposite (i.e, disillusion), especially if the ‘struggle’ is unsuccessful. So, for example, the widespread gilets jaunes protests in France in 2018-19, which the author dwells on as a kind of model that could be followed, seem to have left little trace on the French or the wider political scene. And, in positing a scenario where capitalism completely loses control of the climate situation, he talks about the likely need to fight for reforms such as ‘sharply progressive taxes on profits, savings, and income as well as the expropriation of wealth’.

All this seems a million miles away from the ‘ecosocialist’ society of the author’s final chapter. And this is so, it seems, because the author eschews the possibility of a majority of workers (ie, all who have to sell their energies for a wage or salary) democratically voting capitalism out of existence and bringing in a genuine socialist (or ecosocialist) society. This society can in the end only be a moneyless system of free access without buying and selling. It can be nothing less than a world of planned cooperation which takes advantage of existing technologies in a sustainable way, a society in which everyone has available to them the means to satisfy their needs and contributes freely and voluntarily to the production and distribution of the goods and services necessary for that. And perhaps the key to the apparent gulf between means and ends in this book is to be found in its constant use of the expression ‘just transition’. The author seems to see the ‘ecosocialism’ he would like as something which, if, it ever comes, will be somewhere in the far-flung future. That being the case, it is saying, we may as well try and achieve something in the ‘transition’ period (Green New Deal, ‘direct action’, free access to priority goods, etc). This ‘in the meantime’ approach is of course classic on the political left, but, as experience has shown, it can serve only to prolong the agony of capitalism, a society which, whatever the name it gives to itself, always produces inequality, rich and poor, environmental degradation, and antagonisms of all kinds. And to accept the continuation of this in any form, on the grounds that socialism can only be achieved in the very long term, shows both a failure of the imagination and an unwillingness to engage in the real ‘struggle’ of spreading consciousness of the need for that society the author himself eloquently characterises in his final chapter as ‘self-governing’, ‘ecologically rational’ and ‘founded on democratic control and social equality’.

Howard Moss

Half and Half (2023)

Book Review from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics. By Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, Verso £14.99.

The point of the first half of the title is the idea of rewilding half of the planet in order to preserve biodiversity and the likely massive loss of species in the Sixth Extinction (compare the COP15 target of protecting 30% by 2030).This would help to remove atmospheric carbon and prevent the emergence of new diseases transmitted from animals to humans. The concept originated with the entomologist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (see www.half-earthproject.org) but, as Vettese and Pendergrass point out, it could hardly be introduced, in the face of entrenched economic interests, without a big change in how society is organised.

Their solution is ‘Half-Earth Socialism’, involving ‘natural geo-engineering’, a fully renewable energy system, and widespread veganism (which implies much less land use and emission of carbon). However, their ideas on this are not fully consistent. They refer to Cuba and Chile under Allende, as if these had anything to do with socialism, and appear to think that Eastern Europe pre-1989 was socialist. The last chapter, though, is a kind of homage to Morris’s News from Nowhere, transferred to Massachusetts in 2047. As in the original, William Guest ‘wakes’ in a dream in a new kind of society, the inhabitants of which explain it to him. People’s basic needs (housing, food etc) are all covered, but there are still credits and such perks as priority housing and transport and extra vacation time for those who undertake less pleasant work. There are vague references to ‘a bit of a market socialist system’ involving prices.

A crucial part of the proposed solution consists of a way to plan production without prices, in response to the calculation argument of von Mises. This makes use of linear programming, a method proposed by Leonid Kantorovich in the 1930s; the fact that this was in the context of state-capitalist planning in the USSR does not in itself invalidate it. The 2047 vision has a central planning bureau housing massive supercomputers, which ‘make a series of global plans simulating snapshots of the future’. This supposedly combines ‘the strengths of both democratic and flexible centralised planning’. Regional and local planning offices produce more specific plans, and then people choose: ‘An informed citizenry would be well equipped to choose among the competing plans devised by the planners.’ This is all interesting, and a socialist world would also need plans of various kinds, but we cannot say now whether something along the lines envisaged here would be adopted, other perhaps than to note that this approach seems overly centralised. The Socialist Party pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative offers some ideas on how to plan and organise a world based on production for use.

So a thought-provoking book which contains some misleading ideas about what constitutes socialism and overly-prescriptive ideas about the future society. There is an associated planning game you can play on-line at https://play.half.earth.

Paul Bennett

A more detailed discussion of the authors’ plan can be found in this issue.

50 Years Ago: Is Mankind Doomed? (2022)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

When a religious group predicts the end of the world in the near future very few people sit up and take notice. But what happens when a group of scientists make it clear that they expect the breakdown of present society within the next fifty years? And, that when they are on about the Ecosphere they evince a deep knowledge of their subject and it seems that Man needs to wake up from the present dream and to do some serious thinking indeed. The group have formed a political movement called the Movement for Survival which they hope will become international. They may contest the next General Election. In the meantime they are trying to persuade governments, industrial leaders and trade unions throughout the world to face the facts and to take appropriate action while there is yet time. Their aim, according to their manifesto, Blueprint for Survival, is a new system of society seeking stability rather than expansion. (…)

On pollution the Doomwatchers make out an impressive case. Essential to the environment are such features as stability, organisation and complexity, but present trends suggest that “Industrial Man’’ is counteracting these basic requirements of the ecosphere and is thus bringing about its ruination as a fertile means of life. Marx pointed out the trend years ago and since he wrote pollution has multiplied. But the ecologists mis-state the real cause of pollution, which is capitalist profit-motivated production. Instead, they point to certain characteristics and symptoms of capitalism such as expansion, urban drift, and the increased ratio of capital to labour (here they mean the non-profit-creating to the profit-creating part of capital). (…)

Another result of the ecologists’ failing to face up to capitalist reality is that they appear to believe in miracles. By implication, they wish to retain the fundamentals of the present system; i.e. money, profit-making, capital, a ruled and a ruling class, yet they expect to freeze expansion and to substitute stability under it. They seem to have in mind a form of elitist society in which small self-sufficient and self-regulating communities would take the place of large cities and centralised government. (…)

The sane and sensible method of using the ecological resources to meet the needs of all the people of the world is Socialism.

(Socialist Standard¸ July 1972)

Profit or the environment? (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1992 sixteen hundred scientists warned that humanity was on course for a collision with nature. They predicted an environmental crisis by the year 2020 unless humankind could achieve a change in the nature of its “stewardship” of the environment. While there is much uncertainty about the extent to which humans are “irretrievably mutilating” the Earth, as these scientists claimed, it is clear that radical change is needed.

At present “stewardship” over the Earth is in the hands of a small minority of the world population. Their interests often prove to be irreconcilable with the need to protect the environment from pollution and degradation. Awareness of the damage being done has increased markedly over the last two decades. A growth of pressure groups, non-governmental organisations and international conferences, reports and legislation have at least provided us with ever more information, if little else. Indeed, ever since the first international conference on the environment in Stockholm 1971, there has been no shortage of well-intentioned statements of principle from governments. For example, the Stockholm Declaration stated that:

“Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being.”

In 1987 the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, called for the development of productive activities to become “‘sustainable’, meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It goes without saying that most of us would favour these goals of protecting the Earth’s resources for future generations and preserving the quality of our environment. The question is whether they have any chance of being achieved within a social system where profits come first.

Documents such as the 1987 Brundtland Report and 1992 Agenda 21 which followed the highly publicised Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro do not acknowledge that there is any necessary conflict between making profit and protecting the environment. The goal of “sustainable development” is seen as achievable within the market system. There is no acknowledgement of any conflict between the two supposedly complementary goals.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation have stated that: “The objective is to create an economic environment in which it is more profitable to conserve resources than destroy them” (Long Term Strategy for the Food and Agricultural Sector, FAO Publications).

Again, conservation and profitability are seen as being compatible. Yet experience has shown time and again that these two gaols are incompatible. Only by replacing the profit system with truly democratic organisation can we give the environment the priority it deserves.

Dan Greenwood