Cooking the Books: Capitalist musings on money (2026)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some capitalists have been philosophising recently on their favourite subject — money. One-time investment banker Matt Levine titled his ‘Money Stuff’ column in Bloomberg News (24 November) “Leave the Gold in the Ground”.

Gold is no longer used as the currency — what Marx called the ‘money commodity’ — as it was for millennia. It is, however, still a store of value. ‘Even now’, Levine pointed out, ‘gold is an important reserve asset, and people hold it in their financial portfolios in the form of gold futures, gold exchange-traded funds, etc’. What is being traded are titles to the ownership of gold. Those who buy and sell these are speculating on how the price of gold will move in the future. The gold itself is stored underground in a safe vault. When these titles are exchanged what happens is just that an entry of who it belongs to is changed in a database. The gold stays where it is.

Levine discusses the case of a group of capitalists who, noticing this, have come up with the idea of selling titles to gold that is still in the ground. They are either fools or knaves as they are assuming that unmined gold in the ground is as valuable as gold bars in a vault. But, of course, it is not. Unmined gold has no value precisely because it hasn’t been mined, though the land under which it lies will have a price based on what royalties might be received were it to be mined. Gold bars in an underground vault have value only because they have been mined, refined, made into bars and transported, their value reflecting the amount of labour that has had to go into doing all this.

What is perhaps surprising is that this is the explanation put forward in a news site for capitalists, surprising because it is an application of the labour theory of value that pro-capitalist economists teach is nonsense. After noting that ‘that modern finance creates layers of abstraction on top of real-world activity, and sometimes those abstractions become unmoored from the reality’, Levine applies this not just to titles to gold but to the shares in any business. As an example he takes Amazon:

‘A share of Apple Inc. stock encapsulates all of the labor and creativity that went into inventing the iPhone and manufacturing it and selling it and building app stores and everything else; all the factories and offices and decades of decisions are all reflected in the tradeable electronic token that is a share of stock’.

Another capitalist who has been philosophising on money is the richest person in the world himself, Elon Musk. Fox News reported him as telling a business forum on 17 November:

‘“If you go out long enough, assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely, the money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,” Musk said. He added there will still be constraints on power, such as electricity and mass. “The fundamental physics elements will still be constraints, but I think at some point currency becomes irrelevant,” Musk said’.

Musk seems to be embracing here the FALC — Fully Automated Luxury Communism — thesis. Improvements in AI and robotics will certainly make socialism easier but it is not that which will make money irrelevant. What will is only the conversion of the means of production from the private property of the few into common property of all. And that doesn’t have to wait for ‘full automation’, nor will it come about automatically through advances in technology.

Pathfinders: The ‘doged’ pursuit of knowledge (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A funny thing about touted scientific breakthroughs is that, just like politicians’ promises, they make a lot of noise at first, but then are apt to quietly fizzle out later when nobody’s looking. So it may have been for the strangely headline-grabbing announcement back in March that a new ‘Dark Energy experiment’ was challenging Einstein’s theory of the universe. Wait, what, they’ve disproved Einstein, you gasp? But no, it’s not quite that big an earthquake. Stargazers at the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory had found a ‘blip’ in the cosmological measurements that suggested that the mysterious dark energy force supposedly driving the expansion of the universe might have slightly weakened over time. Though the key phrase is ‘might have’, this immediately got everyone terribly excited at the prospect of ‘new physics’ and the possible need to rewrite the cosmological standard model. Years of funded research and potential Nobel prizes glistered like the starry firmament, but cosmologists were quick to point out that this was in no way a certain result and would require vital independent confirmation from other sources, notably Europe’s Euclid space telescope and NASA’s forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman space telescope (tinyurl.com/4sv65khx).

So it may be something and it may be nothing, which is fair enough. But then why did it make such huge headlines, as if it was a genuine discovery? Well, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and pretend that we are jaded and cynical observers of capitalism, and ask ourselves what other factors might be at play here. Let’s in particular imagine the following entirely fictitious bit of dialogue: “Trump’s threatening to cut the NASA budget in half!” “Oh shit, we need to big up a breakthrough, pronto!”

Yup, when suddenly you can’t pay your mortgage or bills moments after having a safe and respectable long-term government-funded science career at the National Institutes of Health (proposed to be cut by 37 percent), the National Science Foundation (50+ percent), the Department of Energy (14 percent), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (24 percent), the US Geological Survey (33+ percent), the Department of Agriculture (18 percent), the Environmental Protection Agency (46 percent), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (39 percent), the Forest Service (62 percent), or the innocuous National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services – funding anthropology and archaeology – and the Marine Mammal Commission – saving the whales – (all 100 percent), you know you’ve been ‘Doged’. And few agencies are being hit harder than NASA, with an eye-watering 53 percent cut (tinyurl.com/3crbp648). Obviously all its Earth science climate projects will be the first to go, as the Drill Baby is not interested in those. But one of the other projects which might also bite the dust is the aforementioned Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, now coincidentally being cited as vital for confirming the Einstein-busting dark energy result (tinyurl.com/hejv2ztr).

It’s not that Trump is anti-science per se. He’s all for science as long as it makes him look good. So he was redneck-hot for the Artemis programme to plant NASA astronauts in MAGA hats back on the moon, especially if they could do it before the Chinese got there. President Bush originally also had a moon programme, called Constellation, that Obama subsequently cancelled, and Trump brought back as Artemis. But here, observers say, NASA was its own worst enemy, by being too institutionalised and cavalier about cost overruns, and using legacy suppliers like Boeing, whose own Starliner vehicle turned out to be an embarrassment (Pathfinders, October 2024). Asked to build a new rocket that could get humans to the moon, NASA simply came up with an adaptation of the previous Constellation-era Ares V rocket, rebranded as the Space Launch System (SLS). Despite this now being the era of cheap and reusable rockets, the SLS is a disappointing and hugely expensive replica of the old single-use Saturn V model. The US is now planning to ‘retire’ the SLS, possibly before it’s even launched, instead looking to private capital in the form of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is offering to do the same job for around one fortieth of the SLS cost ($100m versus $4bn).

NASA is more than an agency, it’s an icon, with an almost reverential status in US history for putting Neil Armstrong on the moon. Savaging its funding must seem to many like burning your own sacred temple to spite the priests. But it’s also a monument from another age, when private capitalists were not nearly as rich as they are today, and only governments had the resources to fund space programmes. Now, tech bros like Bezos and Musk are doing their own space programmes, and doing them in some ways better than NASA. This is incidentally rather awkward to explain for those people who think ‘socialism’ is the state ownership of industries and that this is somehow an improvement on private capitalism. It’s not. State and private capitalism are as bad as each other, and both exploit workers and give them no real say.

As far as capitalist science is concerned, the goal is generally profit not the pursuit of knowledge. The rich get to decide what it pursues, either directly through their own purse, or indirectly through their complicit governments. Obama’s 2015 Space Act, cravenly endorsed by 43 countries, is widely seen as the new ‘enclosures’ for legalising space mining for profit (tinyurl.com/3va6mkdf). But once workers recognise their true common interest and abolish capitalism, what would happen to these capitalist-era plans to go to the Moon, or Mars? They’ll probably slide right down the global To Do list, below more pressing priorities like sustainable universal nutrition, health and housing, but possibly not off it entirely. The final frontier is always going to fascinate humans. The key difference is, when a socialist world looks up at the night sky, it will look with eyes of wonder, and not with an eye to plunder.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Boeing: out in the cold (2024)

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

After nearly three months on the International Space Station, two astronauts are to be marooned there until next February as their proposed transport home, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, remains out of service after a host of thruster failures, software glitches, parachute problems and helium leaks. The astronauts are being philosophical about it, but Boeing will be aggrieved at losing credibility points to its arch-rival NASA co-contractor, the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, which will now take on the responsibility for bringing the astronauts home (tinyurl.com/3bj3ua2t).

Boeing is fast becoming a byword for ‘omnishambles’ with a recent history that showcases just how capitalist competition and corporate profit-chasing can result in highly uncreative destruction.

When Boeing swallowed up the last of its US aviation rivals in the 1990s, it saw the chance to adopt a less product-oriented and more shareholder-focused and monopolistic approach which sought to maximise returns by outsourcing not just part production but the cost of part development too, while also extorting price reductions. This put the squeeze on suppliers, who were faced with a Hobson’s Choice of a bad deal or no deal at all. But outsourcing creates complexity, and this compartmentalised approach on the wide-bodied 787 Dreamliner resulted in delays and overruns and never delivered the savings expected (tinyurl.com/fsmbd8mz).

While Boeing wrestled with a problem of its own making, its major European rival, the joint venture Airbus, announced the re-engined narrow-body A320neo, which it claimed could cut fuel use by up to 35 percent. This caused consternation at Boeing, whose 50-year-old 737 had previously dominated the core-segment single-aisle market. To compete, Boeing really needed a brand new plane, but the lead-time to mass production of an all-new design, outsourced or not, would be far too long, and Boeing were already haemorrhaging buyers to Airbus. So bosses resorted to the least-worst option, to re-engine the 737. Morgan Stanley said of this ‘reactionary’ solution, ‘Boeing’s hasty decision to re-engine the B737 is a clear indication of the success and strong competitive positioning of the A320neo’ while another business analyst was ‘astounded at the Airbus smackdown’ (tinyurl.com/36rkdsrr).

Enter the 737 MAX. But when you put new and bigger engines on a 100-ton aircraft they alter its centre of gravity and flight characteristics. Normally this would necessitate costly flight simulator retraining and recertification of pilots. Instead Boeing used a background software fix known as the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which altered the plane’s rear flaps in response to sensor signals. As long as it worked properly, they reasoned, the pilots didn’t need to know about it. So Boeing did not tell them about MCAS or include it in the pilot manual. The Federal Aviation Administration wasn’t too worried, despite whistleblower allegations of its regulatory capture by Boeing, and agreed with the company to give pilots just an hour of training on an iPad, without mentioning MCAS. Boeing weren’t worried either. They had calculated the likelihood of a ‘major failure’ (one not resulting in the loss of a plane, which is termed ‘catastrophic’) as once in every 223 trillion flight hours – around 2 billion years of annual MAX fleet service (tinyurl.com/549z2ahj).

In the event they had two catastrophic failures in less than 6 months. The sensors and control panel light didn’t work properly, and pilots did not know about MCAS or how to override it when it malfunctioned. In October 2018 a Lion Air 737 MAX 8 crashed in the Java Sea, killing all 189 people. Airily dismissing this as ground crew and pilot incompetence, Boeing announced record $100bn earnings the following January. But in March 2019 an Ethiopian Airlines MAX 8 also fell out of the sky, killing all 157 on board. Clearly this was no coincidence, and Boeing immediately saw its orders, stock prices and reputation plummet. Its CEO promptly resigned, though with a cosy retirement package of $80m in stock options (tinyurl.com/498cvau4), and the new CEO issued a mea culpa to the US Senate, accepting the company’s responsibility for the deaths and agreeing to pay compensation and submit to regulators.

And then, despite all the regulation, a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines flight in January this year, because bolts were missing. How could this happen? Multiple whistleblowers had faced company reprisals after drawing attention to falsified inspection reports and a string of unsafe practices due to cost-cutting and inadequate staff training. In July Boeing pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy after being found to violate the terms of the regulatory agreement, meaning the company now has a criminal record (tinyurl.com/mv4av7m2).

On top of that, Boeing workers have been on strike against a union-busting and bullying culture, pay rates that have not increased in 16 years as the cash-strapped company grinds down on its own workforce, and ‘panic mode’ as managers hound staff to keep quiet over quality concerns (tinyurl.com/ysjh9mnc).

Now Boeing has $60bn of debt and is ‘one level above being potentially downgraded to non-investment grade status – junk status’. But nobody wants Boeing to collapse, not the airlines, who are faced with a global shortage of aircraft and fear an Airbus monopoly even more than the current Boeing-Airbus duopoly, and not the US government, which relies on Boeing’s aerospace defence arm and fears market capture by a major Chinese competitor like Comac (Economist, 20 June).

Airbus has seen A220-300 engine failures, diversions, groundings and supply chain problems but no crashes, and its stock has gone up, not down. The story of Boeing shows what can happen when market competition tightens the screws, and things like quality control, adequate training, product performance and company honesty begin to crack and splinter. Accidents will still happen in non-market socialism, but not because someone is eyeing the balance sheet instead of the safety inspection reports.

Meanwhile the astronauts continue to float in the ISS, patiently above it all. Compared to what many others have suffered at Boeing’s hands, they might consider themselves lucky only to be left out in the cold.

Paddy Shannon

Billionaires behaving badly (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet, has decidedly and publicly embraced right-wing ideologies. Not only does he wield significant influence in media, but he now owns Twitter, which he has skewed to the right. He reactivated several right-wing accounts, such as those of Tommy Robinson, and even before purchasing Twitter, Musk publicly stated that he would reinstate Donald Trump’s account.

One of Musk’s more baffling decisions was to ban the use of the biological term ‘cisgender’ as hate speech while simultaneously allowing a surge of actual hate speech on the platform. This coincided with his dismantling of the reporting system, which had functioned relatively well before the media platform acquisition.

Musk’s shift to the right has become increasingly overt. He recently hosted a chaotic Twitter rally for Trump, where the two billionaires discussed various topics, with Musk noticeably struggling with the very technology he paid $44 billion for. From this semi-candid discussion, socialists can discern the deepening ties between these two cheerleaders of capital.

Trump’s attacks on trans people have escalated, as seen in his comments during a rally in Bozeman, Montana. in his usual stilted delivery he made slights about transgender athletes in the Olympics and pledged to strip funding from any school that promotes critical race theory or ‘transgender insanity.’ Trans media commentator Erin from Erin in the Morning noted that Trump is ‘doubling down’ on his anti-trans rhetoric.

Musk’s alignment with right-wing politics wasn’t a road to Damascus revelation. While dating Grimes, mother of his trans daughter Vivian, Elon would espouse his trans-humanist ideas, a kind of utopian technocrat dream. Grimes herself, famously photographed with the Communist Manifesto, claimed to subscribe to ‘Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism’ while Elon described himself in the vaguest of terms as an anarchist despite the anarchists denouncing his claim at the time, citing his emerald mine owning and anti-union activities.

It was by May 2020 that Musk signalled his alignment with alt-right ideas and their misinformation by tweeting, ‘Take the red pill.’ This phrase, from the film The Matrix, has been adopted by reactionary groups as a metaphor for rejecting leftist views in favour of alt-right narratives.

Vivian Wilson describes her father as ‘[throwing] me to the wolves in what was one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life’. Vivian herself made tongue-in-cheek posts in response to Musk’s comments, where he described her as ‘killed’ and ‘dead.’ She wrote, ‘Last time I checked I am, indeed, not dead,’ and ‘I look pretty good for a dead b**ch’. Vivian publicly refuted Musk’s claims that she was influenced by a ‘woke mind virus,’ highlighting his absenteeism and criticising his need for validation from ‘red-pilled’ right-wing supporters.

Musk is more interested in mining space gold and creating an off-planet capitalist fiefdom than in solving the pressing ecological problems we are facing on Earth. His silence on climate change during his Twitter conversation with Trump is very telling. Instead of addressing these challenges head-on, Musk seems to believe that becoming a MAGA technocrat wizard priest is the path to becoming the first Martian king.

As socialists we understand that what snake-oil Musk is selling is the extension of capitalism into space but we advocate for a society where all individuals, regardless of their gender identity, are treated with dignity and respect. It is imperative to challenge the harmful ideologies perpetuated by those in power. We stand in solidarity with Vivian and transgender individuals facing similar struggles, while emphasising the urgent need for a socialist revolution and a society free from the capitalist magnifying glass that uses misogyny as a tool to fracture our class.

A. T.

Material World: Who voted for Elon Musk? (2024)

'Am I even in this article?'

The Material World column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to mainstream economic theory as taught in schools and universities, the capitalist is fully entitled, by definition, to whatever they receive, be this modest or spectacularly large; they bore the risk by investing ‘their’ capital and so fully deserve the return it yields – a risk, nonetheless, that they can mitigate by expanding their already diverse investment portfolio and by taking considerable comfort in the legislative convenience afforded by the Law of Limited Liability.

The risk to the worker, on the other hand – whether we are talking about death or injury as a result of industrial accidents or the prospects of being made unemployed should the business close down as a consequence of entrepreneurial miscalculation – may not even be acknowledged, let alone ‘rewarded’. Our worker, unable to pay that medical bill or make the next mortgage repayment, might well find themselves, unlike our capitalist, homeless and on the street.

Risk per se may well be part of life but the kind of risks we are talking about here should, you would have thought, be dispensed with or pared down to a bare minimum – not glorified as that mindless machismo or short-sighted and selfish folly we associated with a so-called ‘rugged individualism’. The problem is that this is not possible today. ‘Risk’ in this latter sense is a built-in attribute of a ferociously competitive market economy that is itself simply taken for granted as the necessary context of all entrepreneurial decision-making.

The dogma that the capitalist provided the capital that got the production process going not only fails to address the question of where that capital came from in the first place; it also seeks to justify the return they receive on the grounds that they have to cover the operating costs of their business – unlike their employees who, happily, do not have to bear the heavy burden this entails.

But this overlooks that matter of where our capitalist derives the wherewithal to cover these costs – not to mention the fact that any inventory or equipment they may purchase out of this money remains, legally, entirely theirs. Such inventory or equipment was, needless to say, not produced by them – although at times you might be forgiven for thinking from the pronouncements of apologists for capitalism that that is precisely what happened. The issue, however, is not what contribution our capitalist made to production but, rather, where they got the money to make that contribution in the first instance.

An entrepreneur who owns a business that produces a product for which there is brisk demand, might be said to be ‘rewarded’ by society, according to this argument, in the sense that they are thereby enabled to become extremely rich by attentively responding to, and serving, this demand. Society – consumers in general – as it were, passes judgement on this product in the act of buying it. Their approval in the form of a market purchase is purportedly tantamount to a desire to reward our entrepreneur for making this product available on the market.

However, it is not difficult to see why such an argument (which is raised with surprising frequency) is little more than a specious and self-serving rationalisation. To begin with, the product itself, from its conception and design through to its manufacture, marketing and sale, is likely to involve the labour of a great many workers employed or subcontracted by our entrepreneur. Even so, these, unlike our entrepreneur, are not likely to find themselves suddenly enriched on account of their contribution to making this highly desirable product available to the public.

On the contrary, the entire revenue from the sale of this product will go to our capitalist entrepreneur, in the first instance, simply by virtue of their ownership of the business itself. What they then personally end up with in money terms, after deducting from that revenue all those production costs, including the wages bill, is a residual magnitude which can vary depending on other factors – including, of course, how much, or how little, they pay their workforce.

How the social product comes to be divided up has little or nothing to do with the public’s opinion of our entrepreneur or the putative role they perform. More than likely their existence will be completely unknown to consumers. These consumers are not concerned with ‘rewarding the producers’ for producing this product, let alone the entrepreneur who has employed these producers to produce it. That is a completely unwarranted imputation. All that the public is concerned with is the desirability and price of the product in question.

There is simply no way of effectively testing this proposition anyway, since the very valuations the public are supposedly making with respect to these different occupations in society (and the differential incomes they command) are themselves expressed through, and subject to, the limitations of, ‘effective demand’ – that is, demand backed up by purchasing power.

What this means is that even if we grant the argument that the public are, as it were, ‘voting’ for our entrepreneur, or their business, with each pound, dollar or whatever spent counting as a vote cast, it is still the case (to continue with this metaphor) that some have vastly more votes at their disposal compared to others and, indeed, that many of these others may as well be considered completely disenfranchised as far as a great many products in the market are concerned. That is to say, their ‘economic votes’ are prevented from being expressed in the determination of these products’ prices by their inability to afford these products in the first instance.

In any case, what is being asserted is a completely untestable proposition. Who decided – or voted for – Elon Musk to become the richest individual in the world? The answer is, of course – no one.

Robin Cox

Material World: Shareholder capitalism (2024)

The Material World column from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the last few decades the growth of institutional investors, in particular, in the guise of various kinds of funds – such as mutual funds, pension funds and, more recently, hedge funds – has been a powerful force in shaping the development of financialisation. Their large size has afforded them the leverage to impose a particular kind of financial logic on corporations with the focus very much on maximising ‘shareholder value’.

The CEOs – Chief Executive Officers – of big corporations have emerged as key agents in this trend, their commitment to the interests of shareholders having been firmly cemented and assured by means of such devices as stock options. This has had the effect of more closely aligning the interests of CEOs with those shareholders and is reflected in the astronomical rise in payouts to the former, an increasing proportion of which is, in effect, unearned income. Thus, whereas in the 1960s, America’s CEOs took home roughly 20 times what the average shop-floor worker made, today the figure is about 400 times or more.

Under increasing pressure to prioritise short-term results, managers are more inclined to make decisions that promote increased share value, such as mergers, acquisitions, and stock buybacks, rather than investment in physical production. Compliance is enforced by the threat of shareholders revolts, takeover bids by rivals or leveraged buy-outs by equity funds. The figures speak for themselves; more in the way of shareholder payouts means fewer funds available for investment, relatively speaking. According to Sam Pizzigati:

‘Between 1947 and 1999, non-financial U.S. companies shelled out an average 19.6 percent of their operating cashflow to shareholders, notes economist Andrew Smithers. The second half of that half-century saw stock options become an ever more dominant source of corporate CEO compensation. The 21st-century result? Between 2000 and 2017, the Smithers research finds, the average corporate cashflow to shareholders more than doubled to 40.7 percent’ (Sam Pizzigati, Aug 10, 2023 ‘Have Our Corporate Chieftains Become Expendable?’, Counterpunch).

Investment in physical production often involves certain immediate cost outlays and delayed benefits. That might require the board of directors to approve a request from the executive team to suspend dividend payouts (to the chagrin of shareholders) for the time being in order to finance this investment. Their reluctance to do this is a function of the shrinking time horizons (‘short-termism’) that businesses are subject to in an increasingly competitive world. All this has been aided and abetted by computerisation and the use of algorithms that have greatly speeded up decision making and made it imperative to adopt decisions that benefit a business in the short term with little thought of the long-term consequences.

Investing in the ‘real economy’ has the risk that in building up productive capacity one might exceed what the market is capable of absorbing – not least when your rivals might be wanting to expand output as well. Thus, it may sometimes be more prudent to simply buy up existing production capacity via mergers or acquisitions than increase that capacity yourself.

It is developments such as these that call into question the traditional image of the modern corporation as classically set out in Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means´s 1932 book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property. This seminal work helped to fix the image of the modern corporation in popular consciousness as an entity in which ownership is dispersed among numerous (and relatively inactive or powerless) and often small investors (thanks to the institutionalisation of laws such as those pertaining to limited liability that supposedly encouraged wider investment among the population by mitigating potential losses) with corporate control being decisively wielded in the hands of non-owning managerial elites.

Recent developments closely aligning the interests of CEOs with those of shareholders via the use of stock options and profit-based performance bonuses – major components in the compensation packages of modern-day corporate CEOs – have put the matter beyond doubt. Moreover, some of these compensation packages are on a scale that would certainly place their recipients in the ranks of the capital-owning class, even if only the lower rungs of that class, taking into account that a sizeable and growing chunk of that income is unquestionably ‘unearned’.

CEOs may ‘work’ but the mere fact that one works does not, of course, make one working class – any more than the possession of small amounts of capital makes one a capitalist. There is a certain point at which a change in quantity (in this instance, with respect to how much capital one possesses) translates into a change in quality or kind (from worker to capitalist).

In other words, and contrary to what the managerialist paradigm asserts, what we are seeing here is a convergence, not a divergence, of ownership and control. The top echelons of corporate management are, in effect, being steadily absorbed into the capitalist class. Alternatively, you could also see this as a case of members of that class taking on a more (pro)active managerial role in their companies for various reasons.

An extreme example of this would be someone like Elon Musk who, as well as having a personal fortune of $190 billion to his name, is said to have enjoyed a ‘compensation package’ involving performance-based stock options from the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, (of which Musk is the CEO), exceeding US$10bn in 2021. Clearly, this individual has no need to work whatsoever given the size of his personal fortune. It’s just that he chooses to do so for reasons we can only speculate on but are not, in themselves, important.

In short, then, capitalism has morphed from something like the kind of managerial capitalism that commentators like Berle and Means had in mind back in the early 20th century to today’s full-on ‘shareholder capitalism’.

Robin Cox

Cooking the Books: From Marx to Musk (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his interview with Rishi Sunak on 2 November Elon Musk speculated that the widespread application of AI would usher in an ‘age of abundance where any goods and services that you want, you can have’. People would only need work for ’personal satisfaction’.

Clearly, this wouldn’t be capitalism. It couldn’t be as it would mean the end of working for wages and producing goods and services to be sold. This was understood by, of all people, Jeremy Clarkson in a surprisingly perspicacious passage in his column in the Sun the following day:

‘The fact is, then, that if machines are doing all the jobs, there will be no economy. You won’t be able to buy anything because you won’t be earning anything. And there’s no point going to the government for help because that won’t have any money either. Because machines don’t pay taxes. They just spend all day making stuff. That no one can afford to buy. This means we will need a whole new economy. A whole new system where there’s no such thing as money. And that is the biggest worry of them all because no one has a clue what that might be’.

The last bit is not true. Socialists have long understood that the answer would be a society where productive resources including machines would be commonly owned and democratically controlled and used to produce wealth to directly satisfy people’s needs instead of, as now, to be sold on a market with a view to profit. In such a society there would indeed be no such thing as money.

Clarkson may not have known it but he was describing what has recently been called ‘fully automated luxury communism’. But we don’t have to wait for ‘full’ automation to bring about a society of common ownership, democratic control and production directly for use. The productive forces are already sufficiently developed for this. Making the change is now only a question of political will.

As a matter of fact years ago Marx had anticipated the points made by Musk. Writing in the late 1850s he speculated what would happen if the application of science and machinery to production led to such a high level of productivity that not only the value added by direct human labour to each unit produced was reduced to an insignificant proportion, but so was that transferred to these units from the fixed capital deployed:

‘As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. (…) With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis (‘Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.’, Grundrisse, chapter 14).

In other words, goods and services would be so cheap — each unit would contain so little labour, both new and that transferred by machinery, etc — that the huge amount of them that could be produced could not be priced but might as well be given away or provided free.

Marx did not expect this point to be reached — he expected that the working class would have put an end to capitalism long before — but he realised that, if it were to be, it would mean the end of capitalism. Production for sale would no longer make any sense.

Cooking the Books: Progress and pauperism (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Elon Musk supports capitalism. Well, is the Pope a Catholic? In a tweet on 23 October he recommended a new book called The Capitalist Manifesto. ‘This book’, he tweeted, ‘is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right’. We are not concerned here with the contents of the book, by Johan Norbert, subtitled ‘Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World’ — another time perhaps — but with a passage in the press release the publishers put out:

‘Marx and Engels were right when they observed in The Communist Manifesto that free markets had in a short time created greater prosperity and more technological innovation than all previous generations combined.’

Marx and Engels certainly made the second point, almost textually, writing:

‘The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together’.

But there is nothing in the Communist Manifesto about capitalism creating ‘greater prosperity.’ On the contrary. If anything, Marx and Engels went too far in the opposite direction, ending the same section:

‘The modern labourer (…) instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth’.

The complete pauperisation of the working class did not happen in the long run — at the time Marx and Engels didn’t think that capitalism was going to have a long run — but a growth in workers maintained by the Poor Law was an immediate effect of the Industrial Revolution and an accurate observation of the situation in 1848.

In exile in England in the early 1850s, Marx and Engels came to realise that they had been mistaken in believing that a working-class communist revolution had been likely in 1848. Marx settled down to studying how capitalism worked, the result being the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867.

Nobody who has read Capital, particularly the historical parts, could claim that Marx ‘observed that free markets had … created greater prosperity’. Marx described in detail, on the basis of official government publications, the terrible working and living conditions of workers in a whole series of industries. In section 4 of chapter 25 on ‘Different Forms of the relative surplus population’, he returned to the question of ‘pauperism’.

He now no longer argued that as capitalism progressed all workers would tend to be reduced to below subsistence level, to paupers. However, he still expected that some sections of the working class would be, ‘that part of the working class which has forfeited its condition of existence (the sale of labour power), and vegetates upon public alms’; whose labour power was unsaleable because they were old, sick, disabled or industrially injured, but also because during the slump phase of the business cycle there was no demand for it.

Since capitalism needed a reserve army of labour and ‘pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army’, it ‘forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth’.

Marx has been proved right about this. Ever since his day a section of the working class — at least 1 in 10 — has had to ‘vegetate on public alms’ (until 1948 the Poor Law, later National Assistance, then Social Security, now Universal Credit) — and will as long as capitalism lasts. Technological innovations under capitalism may have solved the problem of how to produce enough wealth for everyone but as a system it is constitutionally incapable of distributing it so that everyone’s needs are even adequately met.

Geopolitics (2023)

Book Review from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World. By Tim Marshall (Elliot and Thompson, 2023)

Marshall has written a few books on geography and politics. In this work he argues that it is helpful to see outer space as a place with geography: it has corridors suited to travel, regions with key natural assets, land on which to build and dangerous hazards to avoid. In the twentieth century, the three main spacefaring nations were the USA, China and Russia. The USA is now the dominant player, with China catching up and Russia falling away. Each has their own version of a ‘Space Force’ to provide military capabilities for their forces on land, sea and air. In 2021 NATO established a Space Centre in Germany. Increasingly important are the capacities to attack and defend satellites which provide those capabilities.

The UK Space Command was created in 2021 and is based at RAF High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. From there it controls their Skynet satellite communications system (not to be confused with the rogue AI system, also called Skynet, in the Terminator series of films). Its commander, Air Vice-Marshall Paul Godfrey, declared that ‘One of our goals is to protect and defend our assets in and through space’.

Since this book was published Brigadier General Jesse Morehouse at US Space Command has claimed that Russian aggression and China’s vision to become the dominant space power by mid-century, had left the US with ‘no choice’ but to prepare for orbital skirmishes. Morehouse said: ‘The United States of America is ready to fight tonight in space if we have to’ (Guardian, 28 May).

Elon Musk’s SpaceX company has Starlink satellites and has distributed more than 10,000 broadband terminals (what Starlink engineers call ‘Dishy McFlatfaces’) to Ukraine and this has proved invaluable in fighting Russian forces. It could be argued that SpaceX was a third party from a country that was fighting a proxy war. If Russia shot down the satellites orbiting over Ukraine would America respond militarily? Nobody is sure what would happen.

The history of capitalism is the history of wars. Specifically, it is competition over markets, sources of raw materials, energy supplies, trade routes and areas of strategic importance. Space is no exception. As Marshall points out, ‘There’s money to be made in space’. As long as capitalism lasts it is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ there will be a war in space. Such a conflict would be unlikely to be confined to space.

Marshall argues that China has asserted ‘the superiority of communism’. He quotes the historian Barbara Tuchman writing in 1972 on the ‘fact’ that China is ‘communist’ and Marshall adds: ‘Tuchman’s words are as true now as then’. China is ruled by a ‘Communist’ Party dictatorship, but neither it nor any other state has claimed to have established a communist society. Marshall is by no means alone in making this error but it is worth emphasising — no country in the world has claimed to have established communism. Ever.

Lew Higgins

Pathfinders: Sky high and ocean deep (2023)

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

Do we really need this? Is it sustainable? Two questions that capitalism never seriously asks. At present the only question that matters is, can we make money out of this? All other considerations currently fall outside the projected calculation matrix, as an average CEO might blandly put it. And two recent news stories offer an illustration of this.

British news media were cock-a-hoop last month to report a home-grown ‘space industry’ story with the planned horizontal launch from Newquay in Cornwall of a suite of satellites via a rocket attached to one of Mad Dick Branson’s old Virgin jumbo jets (bbc.in/3VXUmON). ‘What people have seen is a small team deliver something quite incredible’ puffed the breathless CEO of Spaceport Cornwall, speaking live from the Mission Control shed just before the mission pancaked.

What they were planning on delivering was nine shoebox-sized satellites whose various space-based functions were such that their owners were willing to shell out hefty launch fees. It’s a burgeoning market, and other space freight companies in Shetland and Sutherland in Scotland are also keen to get in on the action. If Elon Musk can send mega-rockets to the moon, they ought to be able to manage a shoebox or two. Sadly the mission to hurl yet more space junk into orbit failed on this occasion, but the heroic British pioneers won’t be deterred from making future attempts.

As of January 2022, there were an estimated 8,261 satellites orbiting the Earth, of which 42 percent are already defunct (bit.ly/3irc1kv). But that’s small potatoes compared to the ‘mega-constellations’ of miniature CubeSats being planned by firms like SpaceX and OneWeb, which intend to upchuck around 65,000 in the next few years. Space tech is ‘dual use’, i,e, civilian and military, and the key military advantages of CubeSats are cheapness (especially when launched via reusable SpaceX rockets), small size, replaceability and proliferation, making them nearly impossible for an adversary to knock out. Elon Musk’s own Starlink system is being relied on by Ukrainian forces, meaning the Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX boss is now also in the war business and with such influence that he has personally vetoed Starlink operations over Crimea (bit.ly/3ZCiPw5).

Being nearer the ground, low-orbit off-the-peg CubeSats mean lower-latency (i.e, faster) connections than high-orbit heavy-duty satellites, while the swarm numbers mean near-comprehensive global internet coverage. A comparatively minor consideration is the predicted increase in visual ‘noise’ for astronomers (bit.ly/3W1baEQ ). But what’s sickening from a socialist perspective is that it’s not just one constellation to be shared by everyone, as would be the case in socialism, it’s multiple duplicate systems, because each competing state wants its own GPS and communications networks in space and does not want to rely on another’s satellites any more than on another’s energy supplies. One of socialism’s medium-term goals will probably be the challenge of hoovering up all this redundant and dangerous space scrap.

Meanwhile, you may be aware that the sea floors of the world are carpeted with small, potato-like polymetallic objects known as manganese nodules, first discovered in the 19th century and in July this year set to become a red-hot-button topic.

Imagine you are out for a walk in the wilds, on a break from your capitalist employment, and you happen across a huge wishing pond that is magically packed with a treasure trove of ancient gold denarii, duckets and dubloons. There is no sign saying Private Property – Keep Out. A quick check on your smartphone reveals not only that this pond doesn’t belong to anybody, but also that there is no mention of it in any statutes or local by-laws. Understandably, you’re keen to fill your boots with as much plunder as you can carry away. In fact, seeing as there are no rules, you might as well hire a mechanical digger to plough the entire pond right up, and make yourself a fortune. But as you start dialling the machine hire number, strong hands grab you by the arms and a voice says ‘Alright matey, not so fast, we were here first’.

Such is the situation with manganese nodules, found in gigantic quantities on sea beds in international waters. They are a potential bonanza for capitalist manufacturing, containing not just manganese, but also nickel, copper, iron, cobalt, titanium, silicon and aluminium among others, elements of immense importance in steel production, EV car batteries and other green tech. Average metallic content varies (15 – 30 percent), and a ballpark valuation for this content is given as $484/tonne (bit.ly/3IOHcAG). The potential global supply of nodules was estimated in the 1980s at roughly 500bn tonnes. At a minimum 15 percent average metal content, one could be talking about an industry worth upwards of $36tn.

Given this, you may wonder how come the gold rush has not already started. In effect, the lack of rules has resulted in a default Hands-Off stalemate as governments and UN regulator the International Seabed Authority have stalled for 20 years over a common regulatory framework, even though a clause in the existing 2000 treaty gave them just two years to create one. Mining companies are slavering to have at the prize, and equally keen to stop each other getting a head start. Now one company, in league with the Pacific island of Nauru, has announced that, if no regulation is in place by the end of the two-year period in July, they are technically entitled to send in the submarine bulldozers, and devil take the hindmost (bit.ly/3X5e7p0). A strip-mine frenzy will then ensue as the sea floors of the world, whose species, habitats and bio-environments are barely known at all, face a holocaust. The effects of this on global oceanic ecosystems together with the irrevocable loss of species and new science cannot even be guessed at. Governments, who have failed to do anything to fix climate change since the first COP in 1995, have until July to fix this. Don’t hold your breath.

This is not to say that a socialist society would never mine seabed nodules under any circumstances, any more than saying it would never launch a satellite. Humans use the resources of nature all the time, and this is an abundant source of extremely useful metals. But first it would ask the two questions we started with. It may be that in socialism we can devise green tech that does not require so much mining, or even devise acceptable social arrangements that don’t require so much green tech. But in capitalism, nobody even asks. If it’s not about the profit, it’s not part of the equation.

Paddy Shannon

Bird’s Eye View: War without end (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

War without end

One hundred years after the war to end all wars (1914-18) started, Russia’s current war against Ukraine began. February’s major escalation has made it the largest war in Europe since the end of WW2. The mass exodus of millions of children, women, and men too old to be conscripted is similarly record breaking. In 1914 we were told that German ‘militarism’ had to be rebuffed and ‘plucky little Belgium’ supported. Today we are told by the US Ambassador to UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, that ‘There can be no fence-sitters in this crisis’ (pl.usembassy.gov, 21 February) and are encouraged to #StopRussia and #StandWithUkraine. But the truth is wars are always and only waged for largely commercial reasons – access to raw materials, markets, trade routes and strategic positions from which to defend them all. ‘Russia’s president knows exactly what he wants, and it’s not eastern Ukraine. His interests are all about oil and gas and supply routes. The rest is smoke and mirrors’ (Daily Beast, 1 March 2015, bit.ly/3M0FAmK). Socialists oppose all capitalist wars, so-called ‘progressive wars’ or struggles for national liberation. Workers have no country. ‘Russia’s 500 Super Rich Wealthier Than Poorest 99.8% ‘ (Moscow Times, 10 June 2021, bit.ly/3M0FAmK). Similarly, ‘in total, the top 100 wealthiest business people in Ukraine control around $44.5 billion, according to Forbes, which accounts for 27% of Ukrainian GDP in September, 2021’ (en.wikipedia.org, bit.ly/3wmpmiz). Indeed elsewhere, ‘since the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020, the combined wealth of the 650 American billionaires has increased by nearly $1 trillion’ (commondreams.org, 30 November 2020, bit.ly/3L4dypj). The overwhelming non-owning majority, those who do the fighting and the dying, effectively get nothing. Would any worker, apprised of this, raise even a paintball gun? Hence the need for Wilfred Owen’s ‘old lie’: ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’.

Class war

‘Would you stay and fight or leave the country? A bare majority, 55 percent, said they would stay and fight, while 38 percent said they would leave. “When confronted with a terrible hypothetical that would put them in the shoes of the Ukrainians, Americans say they would stand and fight rather than seek safety in another country,” said Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy. That’s one way to spin it, I guess. For me, the fact that just under half of my friends and neighbors would hypothetically abandon their homeland and all it stands for in the face of a foreign invader is less than encouraging. Many people don’t even seem to have hypothetical patriotism, let alone fortitude. Further disheartening is that the youngest Americans, those ages 18-34 and most physically capable, were even less likely to stay and fight. Only 45% said they would remain, while 48 percent would flee’ (postbulletin.com, 17 March,).

Less than encouaging? Disheartening? Not at all! We said at the ‘start of WW1 ‘…that no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood’ (Socialist Standard, September 1914). Let the capitalists fight it out themselves:

‘SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is offering to fight Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that if he wins, Putin will have to withdraw his military forces from Ukraine. “I hereby challenge Владимир Путин to single combat,” Musk tweeted, using Cyrillic in an apparent bid to make sure Putin understood him. He added, “Stakes are Україна” — Ukraine’ (dailymail.co.uk, 14 March).

War and want

War is completely unnecessary. We are living in a world that has enough resources to provide plenty for all, to eliminate world poverty, ignorance and disease, to provide an adequate and comfortable life for everyone on the planet. Yet under capitalism resources are squandered on armaments, of individual as well as of mass destruction, and, as now, in actual war. ‘Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Feb 27th proposal to ramp up defense expenditures by tens of billions of euros, spurred by Russia’s war on Ukraine, has defense officials in Berlin scrambling to identify spending opportunities that promise fast results, according to several company officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations’ (yahoo.com, 11 March).

Hypersonic

‘Russia unleashed nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles for the first time ever in combat, obliterating an ammunition depot in western Ukraine, its defense ministry said Saturday, as embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky made an urgent plea for “meaningful and fair” peace talks and the strategic port city of Mariupol was on the precipice of falling to the invaders’ (nypost.com, 19 March).

No WW4

‘”The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ (axios.com, March 14).

Rosa Luxemburg offered us a prescription in 1918: ‘During the four years of the imperialist slaughter of peoples, streams and rivers of blood have flowed. Now we must cherish every drop of this precious juice as in a crystal glass. The most sweeping revolutionary action and the most profound humanity—that is the true spirit of socialism. A whole world is to be changed. But every tear that is shed, when it could have been staunched, accuses us’ (marxists.architexturez.net). 

Rear View: We Come in Peace, Shoot to Kill (2021)

The Rear View Column from the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We Come in Peace, Shoot to Kill

‘Despite the damage coronavirus lockdowns did to the world’s economy, 2020 marked a record high in global military spending, according to a new report. As always, the US was in the lead, accounting for 40.3 percent of the world’s military expenditures at $738 billion. The report, released by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), says total military expenditures added up to $1.83 trillion in 2020, a 3.9 percent increase from 2019 (news.antiwar.com, 25 February). This news comes as no surprise to socialists: we have said for over a century that war is endemic to capitalism. We recall that the Obama–Biden Administration promised to do away with nuclear arms once and for all, but instead committed $1 trillion to building the nuclear stockpile and modernising nuclear production facilities. Commenting on an earlier admininistration, the late Carl Sagan, a visionary and humanitarian scientist, observed: ‘For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock’.

What about life on Earth?

Another (probably) lifeless rock has been invaded by a swarm of robots. Of multiple attempted Mars landings by robotic, unmanned spacecraft, ten have to date been classsed as succesful. Did any science fiction writer envisage a race to Mars? There is, indeed, kudos to all the thousands of workers across the world – these mulitiple landings are collectively an achievement on a par with the launching of Sputnik 1 just forty years after the fall of the Czars. Returning to the present, we are informed: ‘Internet sleuths claim to have decoded a hidden message displayed on the parachute that helped Nasa’s Perseverance Rover land safely on Mars…. They claim that the phrase “Dare mighty things” – used as a motto by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – was encoded on the parachute using a pattern representing letters as binary computer code’ (theguardian.com, 23 February). The phrase is used in an 1899 speech by Theodore Roosevelt, in which he said: ‘Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.’ Oscar Wilde described us ‘poor spirits’ more accurately and succiently when he said : ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all’.

War without end?

‘Humanity is waging a “senseless and suicidal” war on nature that is causing human suffering and enormous economic losses while accelerating the destruction of life on Earth, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has said. Guterres’s starkest warning to date came at the launch of a UN report setting out the triple emergency the world is in: the climate crisis, the devastation of wildlife and nature, and the pollution that causes many millions of early deaths every year’ (theguardian.com, 18 February). Such news would not have surprised the astronomer and Marxist Antonie Pannekoek. Writing in 1909 he observed: ‘Natural resources are exploited as if reserves were infinite and inexhaustible. The harmful consequences of deforestation for agriculture and the destruction of useful animals and plants expose the finite character of available reserves and the failure of this type of economy. Roosevelt recognises this failure when he wants to call an international conference to review the state of still available natural resources and to take measures to stop them being wasted. Of course the plan itself is humbug. The state could do much to stop the pitiless extermination of rare species. But the capitalist state is in the end a poor representative of the good of humanity. It must halt in face of the essential interests of capital’.

Don’t Panic

Commenting on billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starship project which may someday send humans to Mars, Shannon Stirone, in an article titled ‘Mars Is a Hellhole: Colonising the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity’ (theatlantic.com, 26 February), writes: ‘Legitimate reasons exist to feel concerned for long-term human survival. But I question anyone among the richest people in the world who sells a story of caring so much for human survival that he must send rockets into space.’ Neither misleaders nor multi-millionaires can save us. Sagan says : ‘Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.’ Yet more positively he also stated: ‘Humans have evolved gregariously. We delight in each other’s company; we care for one another. Altruism is built into us. We have brilliantly deciphered some of the patterns of Nature. We have sufficient motivation to work together and the ability to figure out how to do it. If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies?’ (Cosmos, Futura, 1987, p. 358). Pannekoek, who died in 1960 just as humanity entered the space age, would concur: ‘It is time for mankind to ensure itself of material abundance by establishing a free, self-managed world-society of productive labor, thereby freeing its mental powers for perfecting its knowledge of nature and the universe’ (A History of Astronomy, 1951).

Cooking the Books: Unfair Shares (2022)

The Cooking the Books Column from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The world’s 10 richest people added $402 billion to their fortunes in 2021’, CNBC reported on 30 December. ‘They were led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who this year became the world’s richest man and briefly saw his net worth top $300 billion. He added $121 billion to his net worth in 2021 — just shy of the $140 billion he added in 2020’ (tinyurl.com/2p9fctc5).

This way of putting it is misleading, though not as bad as saying that these multibillionaires ‘earned’ it. Musk did nothing to add to his ‘net worth’. It just got added as the market price of the shares he owns in Tesla and other companies happened to increase by the end of 2021 compared to what it had been at the beginning. The increase doesn’t necessarily even represent any increase in real wealth as it does not correspond to an increase in anything useful made from materials that originally came from nature.

The Independent (13 October), carried an article, ‘How much does Jeff Bezos make per minute?’ It distinguished between his income and his ‘net worth’ and calculated his total income as $1,691,840 a year, or $3.20 a minute. This is the money Bezos, then the richest man in the world, had in 2020 to spend on his personal luxuries such as a space trip or to invest. The increase in his net worth, however, was calculated as $75 billion, or $142,667 a minute, over 44 times as much (tinyurl.com/a3caa726). Musk’s income in 2020, at $595 million, was rather more but still only a fraction of the $140 billion his net worth increased by that year.

As an individual’s net worth is calculated by multiplying the number of shares they hold by their current market price, what we are talking about here is an increase in the price of the shares these multibillionaires own. A share is principally a claim on the future profits on the capital invested by the business concerned, or, as Marx put it, ‘merely a title of ownership to a corresponding portion of the surplus value realised by it.’

The market price of a share is the income as profit that it is expected to bring, converted into a capital sum. This is brought about by the play of supply and demand on the stock exchange, with demand influenced by possible future profits and so includes a large element of speculation. Marx called the capital sum resulting from converting future profits in this way ‘fictitious capital’, fictitious in the sense that it did not simply represent actual capital invested in exploiting wage-labour for surplus value. It principally represented claims on future wealth; in other words, on wealth that does not exist as yet:

‘Even when the promissory note — the security — does not represent a purely fictitious capital, as it does in the case of state debts, the capital-value of such paper is nevertheless wholly illusory’ (Capital, Vol. 3, ch. 29).

What is ‘illusory’ is not the legal title to a future income stream from surplus value nor its worth, but that the market price of shares represents real wealth in addition to the net value of the capital in the enterprise; even more illusory is the idea that an increase in the market price of these legal titles represents an increase in wealth.

If all stocks, shares and bonds were to disappear the amount of wealth in the world, that is, wealth that can be consumed or used to produce more wealth, would be quite unchanged. Which is what will happen in socialism where the commonly owned means and instruments of production will be used to directly satisfy people’s needs rather than as today to yield a profit.

Proper Gander: Charged Up (2022)

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

Electric cars are still unusual enough that when one glides past, its lack of noise is more unexpected than the roar of a revved-up engine. Around 2 percent of cars on the road run on electricity, and the number will increase as we head towards 2030, when sales of new cars which only run on petrol or diesel will be banned in the UK. Electric-only and (less so) hybrid cars represent the future because they’re seen as playing a vital role in reaching targets to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

A recent brace of documentaries aimed to highlight some of the problems with this growing industry. Channel 4’s Dispatches: The Truth About Electric Cars focuses on some of the practical drawbacks to electric cars, while Panorama: The Electric Car Revolution: Winners And Losers (BBC One) looks at how the materials needed for their batteries are mined.

Both programmes cast doubt on the extent to which electric cars should be deemed as just what we need to save the planet. After all, the energy they use comes from somewhere, so even if emissions don’t come out of an exhaust pipe they instead come from a power station which may or may not use renewables. Hybrid cars run partly from an electric battery and partly from petrol or diesel, and so have some exhaust fumes, less than a traditional car. However, the Dispatches documentary runs a test which reveals that some hybrid vehicles emit more carcinogenic ‘volatile organic compounds’ than petrol and diesel cars, especially when they’re started up. Another problem highlighted is the lack of places to charge batteries. There are currently over 26,000 plug-in charging points in the UK: some are state-funded and most are provided by private companies. Long journeys are stressful because drivers fear not being able to find a working charger when they need a top-up, especially away from London and the South East, where almost half are found. The number of new electric cars rolling off the production line is increasing at a faster rate than the number of new chargers being installed. According to one of the experts interviewed, 35,000 new chargers are needed each year to meet upcoming demand, while only 7,000 a year are fitted at the moment. Another consideration is that the efficiency of batteries gradually declines, and one way to slow this is to awkwardly keep them charged at between 20 per cent (or ideally, 50 per cent) and 80 per cent of capacity.

Any new technology will have teething problems as improvements are made. But, like everything else, the development of the electric car as a replacement for petrol and diesel cars is happening through the framework of capitalism. Its need to generate profits pushes this development, rather than what’s needed or most practical. And coordinating the rollout is going to be hampered because the market relies on competition rather than cooperation, shown in the 60+ companies which operate the charging points. Also, electric cars don’t change the structure of the transport network. More and better trains, trams and buses would reduce both pollution and congestion, although in practice these options tend to be less easy to squeeze a profit from. The profitability of electric cars is shown by the rapid rise of Tesla to being market leaders. It’s now the world’s most valuable car company, worth more than most other big players combined.

Tesla aims to have sold a million electric cars in 2021. Each one’s battery contains on average 3kg of the metal cobalt, so demand for this is rising alongside demand for the cars. Nearly two thirds of the world’s cobalt supplies are mined in the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo, and the town of Kolwezi is on the richest seam. Predictably, the wealth generated by the industry doesn’t reach the miners who live in poverty, often without easy access to water or electricity. The Panorama documentary says that this is due to corruption, although it’s built in to the system that wealth will tend to head towards the elite. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd run a charity to help support the mining community in Kolwezi. They’ve bought shares in Tesla with the aim that this will give them influence at board level to encourage ‘ethical partnerships’ and the redistribution of wealth to the workers. Their attempt at Tesla’s online AGM to have commissioned an independent review of the company’s cobalt supply chain was voted down by other shareholders, likely wary of exposing exactly how cobalt is produced. Most of the mines in Congo are large-scale commercial operations, with up to 30 per cent of cobalt being mined by hand. The camera crew visit one of these ‘artisan’ mines, where hundreds of workers use basic tools to dig out surface seams, without any safeguards or facilities which might eat into profits.

Tesla have a deal with Anglo-Swiss mining company Glencore, which has been suspected of using cobalt from artisanal mines, although Tesla claims that the cobalt used in its batteries is ‘ethically sourced’. Publicly, it ‘aspires to be a ‘do the right thing’ company – in other words, engaging in conduct that your family would be proud of’. Some miners have unsuccessfully tried to sue for damages after incidents in the commercial mines, and Panorama interviews those who have been victims of mine collapses and have reported being shot by mine guards. Tesla, Glencore and other corporations can afford lawyers expensive enough to push these cases in their favour.

Glencore’s operations were also associated with a leak of sulphuric acid into local waterways, which it said it had no concerns about outside the immediate area. It has also been trying to evict thousands of artisanal miners from where they have lived and worked for decades, although Glencore’s interpretation is that the miners are occupying their land. If Glencore replace artisanal mines with modern ones then working conditions may improve, but fewer miners will be needed, driving the others further into poverty. There have also been allegations made against Dan Gertler, to whom Glencore pays more than a hundred million Euros a year in royalties. As ‘one of the most notorious middlemen on the planet’, he is accused of making a corrupt fortune in dodgy deals and secret payments. Glencore is now facing criminal investigations in both the UK and USA, although it maintains it operates lawfully and ethically.

The claims of ‘ethical’ practices in the production of electric cars and their green credentials sound less convincing once the details are looked into. Electric cars have a role to play in reducing damage to the environment, but trying to achieve this in capitalism is skewed by the market’s priorities.

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: Space Race 2.0 (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

You know who the first man on the moon was, right? And the second? Bet you can’t name the third, or the next nine. After the initial feat, and an edge-of-your-seat crisis with Apollo 13, the space race quickly got old, and global interest waned. 50 years ago this month, the crew of Apollo 15 made the fourth landing on the moon and drove the first moon rover, and barely anyone noticed. Not long after this, the huge money sink of the Apollo programme was scrapped. For all the sciency hype, the moon’s only real purpose was as the finishing line in a space race aimed at putting one over on soviet ‘communism’.

Now we’re watching Space Race Reloaded, this time as a multi-player game involving the US, Europe, China, Russia, India and others, and including for the first time large amounts of private capital. What on earth – or off earth – is going on?

Space exploration has attracted its share of eccentrics, like ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes who, in February 2020, launched himself skyward in a steam-powered rocket to prove that the Earth was flat, but died proving instead that it was very hard. If you’re going to be eccentric, it helps to be rich, and the bullish billionaire trio of Bezos, Branson and Musk have not hesitated to vie in what, from a worker’s earthbound perspective, are pointless and ecologically egregious vanity projects involving low-orbital flights for rich tourists. The bulbous head of Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket inspired an inevitably phallic comparison by the Daily Star which talked about the billionaires ‘willy-waving’ with their ‘giant thrusters’.

But it’s more than just boys showing off their toys. In May China parked a rover on Mars, and last month launched a crew up to its new Tiandong space station, as well as announcing plans for a joint Sino-Russian moon base. Meanwhile Nasa’s new director Bill ‘Big Willy’ Nelson has ‘sought to leverage China’s space ambitions as a way to get Congress to fund Nasa’s plans to return to the moon’.

In the 1970s, space programmes relied solely on the resources of national governments. Now things are different. Since 1970 the wealth of the top one percent has grown at 100 times the pace of the bottom 50 percent, creating mind-boggling resources of private capital that can now be invested in the biggest projects. Nasa has contracted part of its operations to Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, including servicing the International Space Station, and that’s only the beginning.

SpaceX also won the contract to supply the moon lander for Nasa’s new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, as part of its Artemis moonshot programme. Disappointingly for space nerds, the SLS is an unimaginative repeat of the old Saturn V burn-and-discard 3-stage system. After some notable successes with reusable rockets, SpaceX did hope to win the contract for a Nasa reusable rocket design but its Falcon Heavy rocket isn’t anywhere near big enough to get to the moon, and its gigantic Starship rocket – billed as a potential Mars crew shuttle – is still in development.

If the moon wasn’t really the point last time, this time it might be. First, there is the matter of helium-3 (see Pathfinders, March 2014), a rare isotope on Earth but abundant on the moon and potentially useful in nuclear fusion that might provide up to 10,000 years of cleanish energy. But it’s still uncertain whether helium-3 extraction would be economic. Second, there is the fact that the moon, as a satellite, will be out of range of the satellite wars which are widely predicted (Pathfinders, November 2020), and which prompted a Nato space war summit just last month (Times, 15 June). Third, Nasa confirmed in 2020 that there was water on the moon, which was a game-changer. In space shuttle days, the cost of lofting a kilo of water to space was $54,000. With SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 shuttle to the ISS, this dropped to $2,720 (Link). Yet a permanent moon base is only really feasible if there’s a local supply. The water concentration Nasa detected in sunlit areas was 100 times less than in the Sahara desert, however the presence of any at all suggests that there may be vast deposits of ice in the dark polar craters. These would not only enable moon colonies but also potentially supply liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuels in order to make the moon a launch point for further space exploration, and as a staging post for Mars.

But it’s not all about ends, it’s also about means. China has been making giant technological strides lately, and this is alarming the Americans, because space technology is also weapons technology – ‘there are no technologies used in space that aren’t dual-use’. The fear is, whoever gets a lead in space has a lead in perpetuity. Moon bases today, missile bases tomorrow, perhaps.

It need hardly be said that socialists deplore the militarisation of space. But billionaires like Musk are motivated by an altogether higher purpose, and that doesn’t include the silly story about him planning to mine a gold asteroid worth $700 quintillion. He is well known for tweeting about potential extinction-level asteroid strikes, and how humans need to colonise other planets so all our eggs are not in one basket. Nasa has pooh-poohed the notion of deadly asteroids, however a darker truth could lie behind the prediction. What if the super-rich suspect that climate change is out of control, and that the Earth is ultimately doomed through its own (i.e. their) folly?

What better use for your billions, and what better legacy, than to initiate searches for a viable replacement planet? In this context, the search for extraterrestrial life takes on a new significance. Nasa has just announced probes to explore the supposedly bio-generated phosphine layer in the upper atmosphere of Venus. And just last month the Juno probe did a flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon and thought to have a liquid iron core, hence magnetic shielding, and more subterranean water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. Next year it will do a flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa, with a thin oxygen atmosphere and, it’s believed, a water ocean 60 miles deep under a 20-mile-thick ice crust. Europa is one of the most promising sources of life, if any, in the solar system. The European Space Agency is planning a trip there in 2022, and Nasa again in 2025.

The idea of the capitalists funding an ‘exit strategy’ to escape the dead Earth they have created is of course the plot of Ben Elton’s 1989 novel Stark. We say, they’re welcome to live on some frozen airless dump, and we hope they rot. But let’s hope we get socialism before that happens, and before any idea of exporting capitalism to other planets really gets off the ground.

Paddy Shannon