Are the Managers Really in Control? Part Two (1981)

From the February 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1. 

In Part One (Socialist Standard, January 1981 ) we discussed James Burnham’s clearly expressed  argument that class society could exist without property titles vested in individuals. He was of course proved wrong by events: industrial managers have not replaced private capitalists as the possessing, ruling class, on the basis of the state ownership of the means of production (for Burnham never expected the managers to come to power within the legal framework of private capitalism).

Burnham gave as the reason why the “managers”, by which he meant those who actually managed the process of production, would be the new ruling class the alleged fact that a ruling class must have some function in the process of production :

“Social rule . . . depends on de facto control of the instruments of production—the means whereby society lives; and such control can be held only by some group which plays a direct and integral role in production” (The Managerial Revolution, p. 232).

In the past when the means of production were small-scale and scattered this was so. At that time the various means and instruments of production could be, and were, controlled individually. But today, due precisely to the development of modern industry brought about by capitalism, this is no longer so; the production of wealth has become socialised. The wealth of modern society is produced by the co-operative labour of those who work. In this sense the point of production is not the individual mine or factory, but society. Thus it is those who control society, not those who manage production at factory level, who are really in a position to control the use of today’s means of production.

It is the state which is the centre of social control so that whoever controls the state controls society and so, potentially at least, the means of production. This is so even in Western capitalism with its legal property titles. The private capitalists of the West, just as much as the possessing class in Russia (which in fact is also a capitalist class), now possess the means of production because they control the state rather than vice-versa. They use this control to back up their historically-inherited legal property titles, having long ceased to have any necessary productive function. Whereas in Russia the possessing class own the means of production directly through the state, in the West this is done indirectly through individual property titles ultimately enforceable by the state. In the end this amounts to the same thing: today’s socially-operated means of production are possessed and controlled by a minority class socially, through the state, the centre of social control.

Actually, Burnham himself unwittingly recognisedthat access to the modern means of production can only be controlled socially when he argued that managerial rule would be based on the state ownership of the means of production. For, on the basis of state ownership, any group which established its exclusive stable control over the state would become a collective possessing class precisely because it would therefore control the use of the means of production. If industrial managers were to organiseas a group, win popular support or acquiescence, and come to gain control of state power they would indeed become the ruling and possessing class—but  by virtue of controlling the state not of being managers.

Burnham was wrong, then, in assuming that the managers’ technical function in production was a compelling reason why they should emerge as such a group whereas in fact they were no more, or less, likely than any other group to do so.

State Capitalism

Both Rizzi and Burnham (and, indeed, Wittfogel also) rejected the view that Russia could be described as state capitalism. Both of them regarded Russia as a new class society: “bureaucratic collectivism” for Rizzi and “managerial society” for Burnham. This rejection of a state capitalist analysis of Russia was an inheritance from their Trotskyist past where they had learned to identify capitalism with private capitalism. For Trotsky, capitalism could not exist without private property titles vested in individuals; for him “state capitalism” was state control of private capitalist industry.

Capitalism, however, is not characterised by the legal form that class possession of the means of production takes, but by the social fact that those who “possess” the means of production exploit wage-labour and accumulate the surplus-value thus obtained as capital. An examination of “the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers” in Russia shows this to be the case there. The excluded majority live by selling their labour-power to various state enterprises; the products of these enterprises are sold on the market with a view to profit; and the difference between the wages of the producers and the value of what they produce is surplus value which is used for capital accumulation and the consumption of the privileged class. Russia is thus capitalist and its possessing, ruling, privileged class a capitalist class.

Russia can be described as state capitalist in order to distinguish the form of capitalist class possession of the means of production there from the legal property-holding of the West. It should not be forgotten, however, that private property titles do still exist in Russia (though, admittedly, not as the predominant form) and that this could grow in the future. Equally, elements of non-legal de facto class possession through the state exist in Western countries, though the capitalist title-holders are able through their control of Parliament to prevent politicians and state officials gaining a permanent and widespread privileged consumption at their expense.

We see, then, that in East and West alike control of the use of today’s socially-operated means of production rests ultimately in the hands of those who control the state. It is clear that on the basis of class possession of the means of production a variety of such forms—both with regard to control of production and to the allocation of consumer goods among the privileged class—are possible. Each particular case needs to be examined on its own in the light of the historical and social facts. It is not possible to lay down a priori, as Burnham tried to do, which particular group would be most likely to emerge as the ruling class on the basis of state-owned industry. Nor can it be said that there is any particular reason why there should be any tendency for individual property titles to be abolished and replaced by de facto possession through the state.

Classless Society

The above analysis has certain practical implications. Since the state is the organ of social control, and since it is through controlling this organ that the capitalist class, East and West, is able to maintain its possession of the means of production, it is clear that the excluded producing class of wage and salary earners must, in order to establish a classless society, begin by gaining control of the state. Not, be it quickly added, to form a “socialist government” or a “workers state” (both absurd contradictions; when there is socialism there will be no state and where there is a state there is no socialism), but simply and solely to take state power out of the hands of the capitalist class, so removing the last obstacle to society establishing common ownership and democratic social control over the means of production. This presupposes both a widespread desire and understanding among the working class to establish a classless, socialist society and that the working class have democratically organised themselves, without political or industrial leaders, to carry out this desire. In the absence of such majority socialist understanding any attempt to establish socialism would inevitably fail and most probably lead to the sort of state capitalist society, based on de facto class possession of the means of production which we have been discussing.

The essence of class possession is precisely control over the use of the means of production by a section only of society. Once the use of the means of production is under the democratic control of the whole of society then “class possession”, “private property”, “class ownership”, call it what you will, has been abolished. The means of production could still be said to “belong” to those who controlled their use—in other words, to be “commonly owned” by the democratically-organised community.

But to talk of “common property”, “social property”, and the like can be misleading in that these terms do not fully bring out the fact that the transfer to society of the power to control the production of wealth makes the whole concept of “property” redundant. The question “who would own the means of production in socialist society?” can be answered just as correctly by saying “nobody” as by saying “everybody”, or “society”, or the “community”.

What social control over production will mean in practice is that every member of society will be free to take part, on equal terms with every other member, in deciding how the means of production should be used. As Burnham put it:

“For society to be ‘classless’ would mean that within society there would be no group (with the exception, perhaps, of temporary delegate bodies, freely elected by the community and subject always to recall) which would exercise, as a group, any special degree of control over access to the instruments of production; and no group receiving, as a group, preferential treatment in distribution” (The Managerial Revolution, p.55).

Society’s power to control production would be embodied in various democratic institutions. “Common ownership” and “democratic social control” of the means of production are merely, as we have said, two different ways of describing the same situation. This is why discussion as to whether one could exist without the other is quite meaningless.

Socialism is democratic or it is not socialism. A society where the means of production were formally the common property of society but where only a minority took part in deciding how they should be used would be one in which “common property” was merely a fiction since in practice the means of production would be the sectional possession of the decision-making minority.

In the end the only guarantee in socialist society against the emergence of a new ruling class which would negate the common ownership of the means of production is people using the democratic institutions—the actual democratic participation of all the people in the running of society. This is why it is absolutely essential that those who establish socialism—the majority working class who will constitute also the major part of the people of socialist society—must be fully aware of its implications, being prepared and organised to participate not only in its establishment but also in its subsequent running.

Adam Buick

Indo-European (2026)

Book Review from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Proto. How One Ancient Language Went Global. By Laura Spinney. William Collins. 2026. 342pp.

‘Migration has been a constant, “indigenous” is relative’ – Laura Spinney.

This is a book about the ancient language commonly known as Proto Indo-European which, starting around 5,000 years ago, began to spread beyond its home territory in the west Eurasian steppe (modern Ukraine, Moldova, southern Russia) in various different directions. As it did so, it gradually evolved into many different languages according to where the people speaking it went and settled.

Modern research has shown that today approximately half the world’s population speak a variant of that ancestral language in places as far apart as, for example, India and Britain, Iran and Iceland, Russia and the United States. What kind of research are we talking about? Archaeological, linguistic and, most recently, genetic. As the book’s author puts it, ‘the new tools of archaeology and genetics [largely via DNA] have opened our eyes to our past’. And she shows a breathtaking panoply of knowledge in these fields as well as a profound and detailed understanding of historical developments across the world since the earliest times. Furthermore, while producing a work of consummate scholarship, she manages to communicate her material with a reader-friendly lightness of touch and a style which, much of the time, is downright entertaining.

So, as the original Indo-Europeans moved east, west and south from their homeland, they came into contact with other peoples speaking other languages. Sometimes they ended up adopting the languages they came into contact with, but more often they carried on speaking a form of their original language modified by the different forms of speech of those they interacted with. To such an extent in fact that, over a period of time, many of the languages deriving from Indo-European became mutually incomprehensible – as is the case today between, say, Hindi and English or Russian and French or Welsh and Kurdish, all of which are of Indo-European origin.

The story of the spread of the common ancestor of many of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken around the world today is also part of the story of the wider inbuilt ability of the human species to adapt to changing circumstances of life – referred to by some writers as ‘plasticity’. We are talking here about human behaviour more generally and the truth that the way a human group organises itself in a given physical or social environment context has never been eternal but rather is subject to change according to conditions and circumstances and has been ever-shifting over history.

In its own way, therefore, the story so eloquently told in this book serves as an object lesson to opponents of the idea that there is no alternative to the kind of society we live in and that other different social arrangements, such as the free-access society advocated by socialists, are impossible or ‘utopian’. Those who maintain that we must continue to accept and live in a society divided by class and wealth would do well to heed the fact, made abundantly clear by Laura Spinney, that, in the less than 2 percent of the whole of human history she covers in her book (ie 5,000 years out of 300,000), we have undergone and adapted to multiple changes both linguistically and in a host of other domains. And there is certainly more of this to come. Just as, in Spinney’s words, ‘throughout humanity’s long existence, languages have never ceased to absorb and change each other’, we look forward to changed social arrangements in the future which will allow humans to move from the realm of oppression and necessity to that of cooperation and abundance.

Howard Moss

“The Third Way” by Wilfred Wellock. A Review (1948)

Pamphlet Review from the May 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

This topical pamphlet accepts the common outlook to-day that the people of Britain must choose between “Russian Communism,” the “American way of life,” or “a third way,” and Mr. Wellock gives us directions so that we may go with him along his “third way.”

In the present state of world affairs, Mr. Wellock realises that the policies of the great powers in scrambling for export markets is a hopeless solution to their national problems and that when the markets of the world are again glutted a slump will occur. He also realises that the logical end of such policies is a third world war, complete with atomic atrocities.

He also mentions the point that many countries which previously were good markets for the older established producers are now producing many things within their own frontiers which hitherto they have purchased. The extension of this process makes it much more difficult for the, older nations to export more than they used to.

In order to gain the support of the workers for their programme of increased production the Labour Government has produced its version of the old illusion that only by this means can they raise their standard of living. Mr. Wellock, although an ex-Labour M.P., disagrees with this policy, but from a peculiar point of view.

He is much concerned with the spiritual uplift of the people. “The unbalanced economics of to-day are the product of greed and naked power politics, have wrought untold economic and spiritual harm, and must he superseded by an economy that is based on human need, spiritual and economic.” (P. 23.)

He appears to think that an increase in the standard of living will simply result in the workers spending more money on beer, cigarettes, football pools, and other frivolous pleasures and pastimes. The development of mass production has produced the “mass mind and the mass man.” Is the drive to increase the standard of living worth while, then? Mr. Wellock does not think so, unless we change entirely our scale of values, and in doing so revise entirely our concept of the meaning of “standard of living.”

“Our job, in fact, is to find that better way of life for which the whole world is looking, and not- east the people of Britain. That ‘way’ will place in their right order material and spiritual factors so that both may make their maximum contribution to the achievement of that abundant life which the human soul in its silent and better moments knows to be within man’s reach.” (P. 24.)

Following such a “change of heart,” society would demand, according to Mr. Wellock, a reversion to decentralised small-scale economy in which each individual could feel he had a responsible place. Machines would be put to “their right use which is to assist man in making things of the highest quality and beauty.” Consequently, Mr. Wellock visualises a return to an economy of craftsmen and craftsmanship, and his “way” calls for nothing less than the rebuilding of civilisation on new foundations, which are, he believes, the creative and social values of Christianity.

Like the bulk of these petty reformists, Mr. Wellock has a totally false conception of the world in which we live. Whilst he is able to see a lot of the evils which exist, on the surface, they are the results of causes which he has not yet grasped, causes of which he has no knowledge.

All the evils which Mr. Wellock criticises—modern war, dictatorship, “money values,” monotonous labour, etc.—arise from the kind of society in which we live, capitalism. These evils arise from certain material causes, e.g., war from national capitalist rivalries over sources of raw materials, markets, trade routes, etc. ; “money values” from the production of commodities for sale at a profit; monotonous labour from the introduction of machinery for the purpose of cheapening prices. These bad things do not exist because man is bad. These bad things are the normal workings of capitalism. Neither are these bad things bad for everybody. There is no doubt they are had for the workers, the vast majority of the people—not because workers have bad thoughts but because they have no property. Conversely these things are good for the capitalist class, or sections of it, because they serve a purpose in protecting private property and profits.

Mr. Wellock has no knowledge, or studiously avoids disclosing it, of the division of society into two classes, propertyless workers and propertied capitalists, or of the historical development of human society from primitive communism through chattel slavery and feudalism to capitalism, otherwise he would not be wastiug his time advocating a return to the conditions of a mediaeval economy.

His pamphlet bears the hall-mark of the well meaning social reformer who, failing to understand the material causes which underlie the great and grave problems confronting the working class, takes refuge in the worn-out belief that only by retreating to pre-capitalist conditions will these problems be solved.

Far from it—the clock cannot be put back.

The “way” lies forward, along paths not yet trodden by the foot of man, but clearly marked on the map for those willing to read, “To Socialism.”

N.S.

Wage-labour v. Capital (1952)

From the April 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was once a story in circulation of Siamese twin brothers who hated one another from birth. Inseparably joined together, their hatred became deeper and more bitter with each inconvenience they caused one another. Either could have willingly killed his brother, but they were joined in such a manner that the death of one would mean the death of both. One could not exist without the other.

Thus it is with wage-labour and capital. Born together, they are inseparable yet they are antagonistic. They are complementary yet they are perpetually in opposition to one another. They strive strenuously against one another but the abolition of one means the end of both. Neither can exist without the other.

Capital is wealth that is invested for the purpose of producing further wealth with a view to profit. The process requires the bringing together of raw material, machinery and human effort. The capitalist owns the raw material and the machinery but the human effort he must obtain from the workers. He needs to obtain and use it in a particular manner—a manner known as wage-labour.

There have been other forms of labour in the past. There was once free labour, then slave labour and serf labour. These different forms served certain conditions but are useless to capital.

In very distant times men lived under social conditions now known as Primitive Communism. Under those conditions they worked with their very primitive tools to produce things in order that the whole community might use them. There was no question of profit, no question of some working to produce for the benefit of an idle section of the community. All who were capable assisted in the tasks of obtaining and preparing the things that were necessary to feed, clothe, house and maintain them all. They thought not of things as “Mine” or “Yours” but as “Ours—the property of us all.” Those conditions of labour were free. They are obviously useless to the capitalist who seeks only profit and relies on others to produce it.

Slave labour followed. This was a system where one section of the community owned, body and soul; lock, stock and barrel, a number of others—owned them and worked them as slaves. They had to feed them, clothe them and shelter them, whether they were working or not. Such conditions required, for the slave owners, that as far as possible there should be regular and constant work to be done so that they did not have to maintain slaves who were idle and temporarily useless to them. Their main problem was whether it was better to get slaves and work them to death and then get others, or whether it was cheaper to treat their slaves with some little consideration so that they had a long working life.

To the capitalist this form of labour is equally useless. He requires to be able to employ his labourers and dismiss them just when he has need. The wealth that his workers produce for him must go to a market and the condition of that market is unpredictable. The capitalist may have orders to fulfil to-day that may be doubled or may cease altogether to-morrow. He needs to get his labourers to suit his orders, some to-day, maybe more to-morrow and perhaps sack the lot the next day. He wants his labour power in the same way that he wants his electricity, switch it on when required and off when not required. He does not want the expense of wasted electricity, neither does he want the expense of maintaining labourers for whom he cannot find work.

The capitalist does not want the initial expense of buying his labourers, as slaves were bought. It would enormously increase his capital outlay, and replacement would be a costly business. This point is adequately illustrated by the story of a man who paid £100 for a negro slave and sent him to work painting a roof. The slave turned to his master and said, “ Massa, if you send me on to that roof and I fall and break my neck you will be £100 out of pocket, but if you go to the city and get some of that white trash for sixpence an hour and he falls and kills himself, all you have to do is go and get another one without losing a penny.”

The capitalist does not want to be bothered with the carcasses of his employees, all he wants is the energy that they contain and he only wants that when there is profit to be made.

Serf labour is of a different order. The serf is not bound to his master but to the soil that his master owns. The serf has his piece of land, no matter how small or poor, and he produces things for use, a little for himself and family, and the rest for his overlord. He may also give his overlord some of his working time to till the lord's crops or to defend his domain. The serf owns some of the tools that are needed to produce his food, clothing and shelter, and he owns a little raw material—the land on which he works. But he is chained to the soil. A change of overlords leaves him on the same ground working on behalf of the new lord. To the overlord the land is useless without the serf and he assumes certain obligations to his serfs, as they assume certain others to him. The lord, of course, gets the fatter living whilst the serf struggles in poverty.

This, likewise, is useless to the capitalist. He does not want his workers chained to any particular place. They must come to the work, he cannot take the work to them. The factory, the mine, the workshop, the garage, the depot, the dock, the warehouse or whatever sort of place the capitalist owns is the spot to which the worker must be free to come.

Neither does the capitalist want his workers to have the slight amount of independence that a piece of land, such as the serf had, would give them. The capitalist cannot afford to have his machinery held up because some of his workers have taken time off to get in their hay or their potato crop or to thatch a roof. The worker must be entirely dependant on the capitalist for his livelihood so that he can be disciplined into punctuality, regular attendance at the place of work when required, and respect for his employer’s wishes. He must be conditioned by the job without outside interference. Absenteeism and insubordination that might flow from a little independence are a curse to the capitalist. So serfdom does not suit capital.

The capitalist needs wage-labour. He wants not the worker’s body but his energy, mental and physical. Mental and physical energies are inseparable. There is no physical work that does not call for thinking and no mental work that does not entail some physical effort even if it is only pushing pen over paper. The capitalist wants this energy on tap and he wants it to be completely at his disposal. Wage-labour offers him all that. The worker seeks employment, he offers for sale his bodily and mental energies for a price. That price is the wage. It may be called a salary, an income, a fee, a stipend or what you will, it is the same thing. The capitalist can employ the wage-labourer or not, employ him today and put him on part time or sack him tomorrow; tell him what time to come to work and what time to go; tell him how the work shall be done and take from him the wealth that he produces.

The capitalist also likes to have a reserve of labour power from which he can draw when his business requires it. If there is no such reserve and he needs extra wage-labourers he must compete with his fellow capitalists for workers by offering higher wages, a process that is distasteful to the capitalist class. Efforts are made to create a larger army of wage workers or build a reserve in some way.

When capitalism first appears in any part of the world wage-labour appears with it. One of the capitalists’ first worries is the creation of a reserve of wage-labour. In most countries this problem was originally solved by taking away from the serf, or the peasant, the land that he owned. This made him propertyless—-a proletarian, and drove him into the ranks of the wage-labourers to seek employment from those who did own property. The hundreds of enclosure acts on the statute book of this country are evidence of the ruthless process of dispossessing the English serfs and peasants. Their land was taken and enclosed by fences to be used largely as sheep grazing land, large hunting parks or for large scale agriculture. The poor landless families wandered to the towns where the factories were, there to operate machines that made woollen goods from the sheep that now wandered over the site of their late homesteads. The reserve army of wage labour, in those days, included small children, the aged and the infirm, as well as women.

The reserve army now-a-days is maintained by drawing more and more women into the wage-labour category. Labour saving machinery is introduced to enable one man to do the work that was previously done by two. The redundant men help to fill the ranks of the reserve of wage-labour, to be drawn on when occasion may demand.

If capitalists have to compete with one another for a limited supply of wage-labour and the price tends to rise, they howl “blue murder.” They will use their political power to freeze wages, bind the worker to his job or direct him to another. They have even conscripted women to the wage-labour ranks. The competition between capitalists for the limited markets wherein to sell the goods that the workers make, results in the accumulation of capital into fewer and fewer hands and the bankruptcy of the weaker capitalists, who then go to join the swelling ranks of the wage-labourers.

If capital needs wage-labour, so does wage-labour need capital. Whilst there are men and women who own nothing but the energy contained in their bodies, they must, in order to live, have access to the tools of production and the raw materials to work on. Whilst these things are in the hands of capitalists the workers must go to them for permission to use them. Unless the capitalist is prepared to invest these things in some profit making enterprise, the workers can starve.

Yet, despite needing one another so desperately, wage-labour and capital fight tooth and nail. The capitalist seeks always to increase his profit which means that, out of the total wealth that the workers produce, he seeks to increase his share. The larger the capitalists’ share, the smaller the workers portion.

To increase his profit the capitalist tries to cheapen the price of wage-labour, increase the price of goods to be sold or reduce the amount of wage-labour used. All three of these methods are detrimental to the wage worker. In the first instance he gets lower wages, in the second his wages will buy less because the price of commodities will be higher and in the third case, the introduction of labour saving machinery or the reorganisation of an industry will cause some workers to have their work intensified whilst others can be idle if they cannot find another employer. So the wage-labourers resist the capitalist’s attempts to increase his profit.

The wage-labourer also seeks to increase his part of the total wealth produced. He strives for higher wages. Things that were originally luxuries become comforts and finally necessities. To be able to read and write was once an accomplishment for the wealthy only, now it is a necessity for the humblest wage-worker. A Sunday suit of clothes, holidays, passenger transport were once luxuries and are now very essential needs. Radio has passed the luxury stage and can be considered a comfort, in time to be a necessity. These things become essential for the workers who seek to increase their wages to enable them to acquire these new needs. Variations in the price of things that have long been established as essential needs—food, houses and clothing, cause the worker to seek to adjust his wages whenever the variation is upward. The capitalist will put on the pressure to cheapen the price of labour-power when the variation is downwards.

So the two, wage-labour and capital, are continuously locked in a ding-dong struggle. The worker will find the capitalist’s discipline irksome and he will organise in a Trade Union in an endeavour to have a say in the conditions under which he is to work. The capitalist will have to resist again. The capitalist will jealously guard his trump card, the political weapon, and use it when the workers become a little too audacious.

The worker sells his labour power either by time or by amount. When he sells it by time he receives a wage rate calculated by the hour, day or week. He strives to reduce the amount of time over which he sells it by struggling for a shorter working day or shorter working week, whilst maintaining his total wage at the previous level. The capitalist, on the other hand, endeavours to increase the working time without a wage increase, thus gaining for himself a larger share in the total wealth. When labour power is scarce he will increase the total time by demanding overtime work and he will pay for such time at special rates, still ensuring himself a profit.

When the worker sells his labour power by the amount it is known as piece work. Here he is paid, not by the measure of time but by the quantity of wealth produced in a given time. This urges him to intensify his work by working as hard and as fast as he can in order to increase his total wage. Now-a-days piece work is referred to as "payment by results" or "incentive bonus.” The effect is to squeeze the maximum amount of energy out of the worker in the minimum amount of time. This is most useful to the capitalist when the market is good and orders are flowing in rapidly, when he is competing with other capitalists to get goods to the market in the shortest possible time. Piece work is often a prelude to a re-adjustment of time rates. Having enticed the worker to betray just how fast he can work he is then called upon to work at that pace for a time measured wage.

All these points are the issues which keep wage-labour and capital perpetually at war with one another.

There are some features of wage-labour which resemble slave-labour. So much so, in fact, that it is often referred to as wage-slavery. Although the capitalist only requires the workers energies he cannot have them separate from the body which generates them. The worker cannot rise in the morning, extract a quantity of labour power from himself, wrap it and send it to his employer with a stamped addressed envelope, then return his body back to bed with a pipe and a book. The worker must, himself, go to his place of employment and have his labour power extracted by the day, hour or contract. So, during his periods of work, the wage-labourer appears to be owned by the capitalist.

In this relationship of wage-labour and capital the advantages are all with the capitalist. He gets the wealth and the privileges whilst the worker's lot is one of continual work in order to live, coupled with which are his poverty and the insecurity of livelihood. Capital is his enemy. If he destroys capital he destroys wage-labour also, but he does not destroy himself or his ability to labour.

The problem has a simple solution. Having no property the worker must work for a wage in order to live. The capitalist has the property and can employ the worker. Take away the capitalist's property and place it in the possession of the whole of the people and there will be neither propertyless wage workers nor property owning people who can command the labour power of others. Labour remains; so do the raw materials and the machines, but the labour becomes free—free to produce wealth in order that everyone may enjoy it. No wage-labour, no capital, no profits, no markets, no wars to capture markets, no class domination, no classes. Instead, a classless society working to produce the needs, comforts and luxuries of life and having all things available when produced.—Socialism.

One thing is clear. Where there is wage-labour there is capital, and where there is capital there is capitalism. Some would have us believe that capitalism has been abolished in some parts of the world. To test the truth of this is easy. Do the people work for wages? If so, there is capital, and capitalism is the same all the world over. Society will be well rid of both wage-labour and capital.

W. Waters

Escape from capitalism? (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 13 February Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviewed Clara Mattei for Channel 4 News to discuss her book Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention which later circulated as a podcast.

In the interview Mattei argued that people are taught that capitalism is an economic system that arose spontaneously out of humans’ supposed natural propensity to barter, but in fact it is of relatively recent historical origin and was brought into being through violence and coercion. The state forced people off the land who, no longer able to meet their needs from directly working land, had no alternative but to work for wages.

Wage-labour, said Mattei, with workers creating more value than what they are paid as wages, is one of the two basic features of capitalism. The other is what she called ‘private investment’ for profit controlled by and for a privileged few; nothing is produced except in the expectation of ending up with more money than invested at the beginning. This means that ‘austerity’, in the sense of restricting how much people as wage-workers get to consume, is a structural feature of capitalism; it is not merely a policy pursued by some governments or the system not working properly but is the basis of the system. The logic of profit required that workers be denied direct access to what they need to live so obliging them to sell their ability to work for money to buy it; the money they are paid was never going to be enough to enable them to live without having to continue working for wages. Austerity, she concluded, was necessary for the system.

Good stuff. Questioned by Guru-Murthy, Mattei agreed that she was in the ‘Marxian tradition’ (she seemed to have deliberately used this adjective rather than Marxist, which is fair enough). What she particularly liked was Marx’s criticism of earlier writers who thought that capitalism was the natural economic system for humans; wage-labour and production for profit were parts of a system constructed by humans and so could be replaced by human action.

How, then, did she propose that people escape from capitalism? As well as being a professor of economics at Tulsa University in Oklahama, she is also the director of its ‘Forum for Real Economic Emancipation’. Here, she explained, she is running a pilot project to test on the ground an alternative. This involved encouraging people to take part in collective decision-making on economic matters, along the lines of ‘participatory budgeting’ practised in a number of cities in Brazil. Under this the local population are involved in deciding how money raised through local taxes should be spent. The implication is that in an alternative society to capitalism all economic decisions would be taken in this way, including in workplaces.

This brings out the ambiguity of the term she used to describe the second basic feature of capitalism, ‘private investment’. This could suggest that what is wrong with investment (as money used to initiate production) is not that it is money invested in production with a view to making more money but that it is controlled by a few at the top rather than democratically by all involved. What she seems to have in mind are factory councils as envisaged at one time by Gramsci (who she name-checks) and assemblies; these should decide democratically how the money obtained from sales should be allocated between individual workers, social amenities and new investment. In other words, a form of what has been called ‘market socialism’.

However, this wouldn’t be an escape from the logic of profit; it would mean that this logic would be applied by workers themselves rather than by their bosses as now. Escaping from capitalism has to mean escape from production for the market and the economic pressures this exerts on whoever actually takes the decisions at workplace level.

Adam Buick

Marx and a Professor. (1932)

Book Review from the April 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

The critics of Marx are many and varied. Chiefly they belong to two camps: those who are completely ignorant of his life and writings, and those who, though acquainted with both, misrepresent them deliberately, or do not understand them.

Of this latter kind of critic a correspondent drawn our attention to an effort to dispose of Marx by Professor Hearnshaw of the London University, in a book called “A Survey of Socialism.”

The professor’s criticism is levelled chiefly at the Materialist Conception of History and the Labour Theory of Value. The crux of his criticism of the latter is the so-called contradiction between the theory of value as outlined in Vol. I of “Das Capital,” and the theory of the price of production in Vol III. As this was dealt with in the March S.S., this article will be mainly confined to the Materialist Conception of History.

Concerning this, the professor cannot discover any contradictions from Marx’s own writings. Instead, he finds that it has been “exploded,” “abandoned,” and “explained away” by its adherents, among them the “faithful Engels.”

Engels is quoted on page 238 as follows : 

"Marx and I are partially responsible for the fact that the younger men have sometimes laid more stress on the economic side than it deserves.”

This is described as a recantation from Marx. But why? Engels says, “The younger men laid more stress on the economic side than it deserves.” He did not say, as Mr. Hearnshaw would have his readers believe, that the economic side deserves no stress.

Mr Hearnshaw displays great ability in quoting extracts from the writings of Marxists, most of them dragged from their context, to show that Marx has been abandoned. One example is the following extract from page 282 of Mr. Hearnshav/’s book. He says :

“In particular, the Marxian eschatology is as completely discredited and derelict as is the mediaeval hell. “History,” confessed Engels in 1895, “proved us wrong and showed the views which we then held to be illusions.” O shade of Marx ! What will not the injudicious Engels confess now you are no longer-near him to impose discretion ?”

The quotation from Engels, ” History proved us wrong” . . .,” is from his introduction to Marx’s “Class Struggles in France,” and is trickily used to imply that the illusions were the Materialist Conception of History and the Labour Theory of Value. Whereas, students of Marx know that Engels was writing of the tactics to be pursued by the workers, the question of constitutional methods versus the barricades. The illusions referred to were the barricades !

And, be it remembered, Mr. Hearnshaw is not a political peddler, but a professor of the London University.

Two extracts are taken from E. Belfort Bax’s book, “Outlooks from the New Standpoint,” and quoted on p. 239 of Hearnshaw’s book.

The first is : —

“Although economics are the basis of human existence, they are the basis merely and not the complete whole.”

The use made of this by Mr. Hearnshaw is such as to convey to the superficial reader that Marx’s case is that economics are the whole of existence. In reality, however, this particular quotation, though weakly stated, says nothing that Marx did not say. It is a Marxist truism. The second quotation is :

“There are certain human interests whose development cannot be interpreted economically.”

With regard to this quotation we do not attempt to defend Belfort Bax’s position.

It would be as well, before proceeding further, to state what is the working basis of the Materialist Conception of History. It is, as stated by Engels in the preface to the Communist Manifesto :

“That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch.”

In much of his writing on the Materialist Conception of History Bax diverged from the Marxian view. He says, for example, in the book from which Mr Hearnshaw quotes, “Outlooks from the New Standpoint” (p. 132).

“It would be difficult to deduce the Cruades from the conditions of the mediaeval manor of the eleventh century.”

Again :

“There is much in the history of the first two centuries of the Christian era which cannot be directly referred to economical courses.”

It will be noticed that Belfort Bax does not say that the underlying causes of events are not economic, but merely that he finds certain events “difficult to deduce'” and others which “cannot be directly referred to economical causes.” This does not dispute the fundamental Marxian proposition that the intellectual and political history of an epoch are to be explained in the mode of production then prevailing; a proposition |which Belfort Bax emphasises repeatedly. It is, however, his obscure and ambiguous use of English (unusual with Bax) that gives Mr. Hearnshaw the opportunity to accuse him of making a “tolerably complete evacuation from Marx.”

Mr. Hearnshaw gives a typical illustration of his inability to understand the Materialist Conception of History or of his deliberate misrepresentation of it on page 105. He says that it does not take into iaccount “sex attraction and religious aspiration . . . they cannot be interpreted as consequences of economic antecedents.” It might surprise Mr. Hearnshaw and Marx’s critics to know that it does take these into account; that it does not interpret them as “consequences of economic antecedents.” What the Materialist Conception of History does say is that the forms which “sex attraction and religious aspiration” take change from age to age; and that these forms can only be explained and understood in the light of the mode of production and consequent social organisation of the age in which they exist.

Mr. Hearnshaw summarises his arguments on page 241:

“The Materialist Conception of History may partially explain the evolution of primitive barbaric society which was wholly engrossed in the struggle for the means of existence, but it does not explain the evolution of civilised society in which other and higher interests prevail ; it leaves out of account—unexplained and wholly inexplicable—religion, patriotism, devotion to ideal causes, martyrdoms, spiritualities; it does not explain Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Luther, Tolstoi; nay, it does not explain Marx himself. For Marx, assuredly, was not moved by economic considerations.”

It will only be possible to deal with a few of the points raised here.

That primitive society was “wholly engrossed in the struggle for the means of existence” can only be wholly explained—not partially—by the fact that the means of production were primitive and had not developed to the point where it was possible to produce wealth easily, giving time for leisure, making it possible for any to live without working, or of living on the products of another class. In order to survive its struggle with nature the primitive social organisation demanded equal co-operation between its members. This equality was not an ethical creed, but a necessity which arose from the struggle. Class society emerged from primitive society when a mode of production had developed which destroyed this co-operative character of primitive society. It could not arise before. Nomadic tribes following their flocks and herds discovered a new method of production in agriculture, and laid the foundation of a new form of private property. The process was a gradual one, spread over a long period before society based on private property became clearly formed. The important point is that the change was determined by a change in the mode of production. The final result was class divided society, which gave leisure to, and made it possible for, certain classes to be other than “wholly engrossed in the struggles for the means of existence.”

Professor Hearnshaw refers also to patriotism. According to the dictionary patriotism means the “pride and love for one’s own country.” Not only does the Materialist Conception of History explain it, but nothing else can. In feudal society modern productive forces did not exist. Economically, the manorial village was almost a complete and self-sufficing unit in itself. It needed little or no intercourse with the outside world. When it did that intercourse was often “unfriendly.” Feudal history is one long record—so far as the nation is concerned—of internal conflicts. The conception of patriotism and nationalism did not come into existence until developments and changes in the methods of production were taking place, which gradually undermined the economic basis and social organisation of Feudalism. “Patriotism” and “England” grew simultaneously with the extension of the market. Mr. G. B. Shaw illustrates this point in his play, “St. Joan,” which was cast in the 15th century. He makes one of his characters, an English nobleman, say :

“A Frenchman ! Where did you pick up that expression? Are these Burgundians and Bretons and Picards and Gascons beginning to call themselves Englishmen? They actually talk of France and England as their countries. Theirs, if you please ! What is to become of me and you if that way of thinking comes into fashion ? Men cannot serve two masters. If this cant of serving their country takes hold of them, good-bye to the authority of their feudal lords, and good-bye to the authority of the church. That is, good-by to you and me.”

The rising capitalist class were a “patriotic” class at the same time that they were a revolutionary class. It was this patriotism which gave expression to the aspirations of the growing capitalist class that Dr. Johnson, the famous defender of waning feudal privileges, referred to when he said that “patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

Changes in the mode of production have broken down the economic unity of the village, have made nations—and empires. Patriotism and Nationalism reflect this development and correspond to it.

Marx, Christ—and other matters.

When the learned professor speaks of explaining Christ and Marx he obviously means the ideas for which they stood in their time.

The basis of Christ’s teaching, i.e., the idea of the “One God,” reflected social forms that then existed. The ground for this conception had been prepared by the dissolution of tribal life, and the destruction of the tribal gods which synchronised with the growth of the Roman Empire. Christ came (or the Christian teaching arose) after the zenith of the Roman Empire had been passed and decay was setting in. The conditions of the slave-classes in the Empire were at their lowest. Appalling poverty, social disintegration and oppression. Christianity blessed the poor and cursed the rich; extolled poverty and promised riches—in heaven. It did not promise recompense on this earth. The economic conditions of the time did not make possible any proposal that would remedy their slavery on this earth. It was perfectly natural then that deliverance from these conditions should take the form of a belief that promised recompense in a “life to come.” This belief fostered—and taught—a tolerance of the conditions of this world, and submissiveness to slavery. The ruling class discovered this and adopted Christianity. Subsequent ruling-classes also recognised it and made use of it; at the same time adapting its theological aspects to suit changing conditions, and their class interests. Hence the changing form of Christianity, from Catholicism to Protestantism, and to the modern abstract forms which have abandoned some of the crudities that were originally attached to it.

There is some similarity in the misery and poverty of the slaves in Ancient Rome and those of the modern proletariat. There is this difference, however, capitalism suggests an alternative on this earth. The tendency which characterises the modern proletariat is not, therefore, like that of the slaves of Rome, to give expression to their discontent by embracing a creed which “despairs of this world,” but it is to express its discontent politically. This it does by supporting, and in withdrawing its support from one political party after another. Sooner or later, knowledge, and the lessons that come from experience, will lead to an understanding of the present order of society. When that point is reached the working class will fulfil its historic mission, gain political power, and establish Socialism. Thus the conditions of capitalism drive the workers to give expression to their discontent in material forms and away from religious forms. Hence, the growing irreligion of the workers.

One of the easiest (and very common) methods of argument is to state what it is thought an opponent’s views are, and then proceed to demolish them. Mr. Hearnshaw (wittingly or not) has used this method. Though Mr. Hearnshaw’s book has over four hundred pages and contains nearly five hundred quotations, there is not one quotation which clearly states Marx’s view on the Materialist Conception of History. Instead, there are hundreds of quotations from books written mostly by anti-Socialists which purport to state Marx’s view. And this, despite the fact that the fundamental principles of the Materialist Conception of History which are outlined in the preface to Marx’s “Critique of Political Economy” could be stated in a few pages. In view of this, the following from page 230 of Mr. Hearnshaw’s book is just cheek :

“The second thing to be considered is this : that the Marxian system, since its formulation in 1894, has been entirely shattered by criticism, so that it is now a moral and intellectual ruin which no impartial thinker professes to regard is an intact structure.”

And nearly forty years after 1894 the learned professor and “impartial thinker,” regardless of the fact that the “Marxian system has been shattered” finds that it is necessary to do so again. There is an endless procession of those who add their “mite” to the shattering of the “Marxian system”; though it might be thought that having once shattered it into a “moral and intellectual ruin” it would, be unnecessary to do so again. But, alas ! the problems of capitalism arouse ever fresh interest in the “Marxian system” and prove the logic of its analysis. Where capitalism appears, there translated into every language, appears the “Marxian system” also. And it will be so until capitalism is abolished.

Further points from our correspondent’s letter dealing with other aspects of socialist criticism will appear in a subsequent issue.

Harry Waite

Human behaviour (2002)

Book Review from the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect’. By Paul R. Ehrlich. Island Press.

This is the same Paul Ehrlich who, thirty years ago, irritated Socialists by his shrill claims that it was “overpopulation”, rather than capitalism’s production for profit, that caused environmental deterioration and other ecological problems. However this, his latest book, will go a long way to restoring his reputation.

He sets out his intention without ambiguity in the preface. It is to refute

“the erroneous notion that people possess a common set of rigid, genetically specified behavioral predilections that are unlikely to be altered by circumstances. ‘After all’, we’re often told, ‘you can’t change human nature’. The notion that there is one such nature to change allows us to be painted in the popular mind as instinctively aggressive, greedy, selfish, duplicitous, sex-crazed, cruel, and generally brutish creatures with a veneer of social responsibility. Our better selves are seen to be in constant battle with a universal set of unchanging, primitives ‘drives’, which frequently break through the veneer and create many of the serious ills that afflict humanity. It is a view as dismal as it is wrong, considering what is actually known about our behavior”.

The basic answer he gives to the “human nature argument” is that there is no such thing as a single, unchanging human nature but, insofar as behaviour is the public display of our nature, there are and have been many different human natures (hence the book’s title) which change over time. This is a different approach from ours which distinguishes between a more or less unchanging biologically-determined human nature and human behaviour which is socially and culturally determined and which can, has and does vary depending on the type of society people were brought up in or live in. But this is essentially only a different of terminology to arrive at the same conclusion that our behaviour is not narrowly determined by our genes but that, on the contrary, one of our biologically-inherited characteristics is precisely the capacity, as a species, for behavioral flexibility and adaptability.

Ehrlich sets out the current state of scientific understanding of the issue which confirms that our behaviour is predominantly determined not by our genes but by our cultures (“socially transmitted behaviors, beliefs, institutions, arts, and so on”). Culture is transmitted by non-genetic means, basically by learning (which assumes of course a genetically-inherited capacity to learn), and is different at different times and in different places. Hence the great variety of behaviors exhibited by humans. Such complicated and changing behaviours, says Ehrlich, could not possibly be governed by our genes since aren’t enough of them. Writing before the first results of the human genome project Ehrlich quotes a figure of 100,000 for the number of human genes. The human genome project suggests a figure less than half this, so reinforcing Ehrlich’s “gene shortage” shortage argument against biological determinism.

Ehrlich writes as a member of the American school of “cultural evolutionists” which is not too far from Marx’s materialist conception of history. In fact, he refers at one point to “the great political economist Karl Marx”. He also takes a materialist approach to the mind: “consciousness, thinking, reasoning – activities of the ‘mind’ – are all centred in the brain and are phenomena as natural (and as material) as the legs’ actions of standing, walking, running, and kicking”.

So, a very useful book, even if Ehrlich does ramble on a bit in the last few chapters.

Adam Buick

The Capitalist Class. By Karl Kautsky. (continued) (1909)

From the March 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

[Continued from January issue]

Specially translated for the Socialist Party of Great Britain and approved by the Author.

8.—The Economic Crisis.

Although the general insecurity of both classes is under ordinary conditions already great, it is enormously aggravated by crises, which the production of commodities from a certain point of development necessarily calls forth from time to time.

Considering the importance which crises have in the last few decades assumed in relation to our economic conditions, and in view of the want of understanding of the causes of crises on the part of a great many persons, we feel justified in entering further into the question.

The great modern crises, which now rule the world market, arise from over-production, and are the consequence of the anarchy necessarily connected with the production of commodities.

Over-production in the sense that more is produced than is required can take place under any system of production. But, of course, it can do no harm if the producers produce for their own use. If, for instance, a primitive peasant-family harvest more corn than they require, they store up the surplus for times of bad harvest, or in the case of their barns being full, they feed their cattle with it, or at the worst leave it on the field.

It is different in the case of the production of commodities. This production (in its developed form) presupposes that nobody produces for himself, but everybody for others. Everybody has to buy what he requires. But the entire production is by no means organised according to a plan; on the contrary, it is left to each producer to guess the extent of the demand for the goods he produces. On the other hand no one under commodity production (so soon as it has gone beyond the first stage of exchange) can purchase until he has sold. These are the two causes from which crises arise.

Let us for the purpose of amplification take tie simplest case. On one market there meet together a possessor of money—say a gold-digger with a pound’s worth of gold—a wine-grower with a little barrel of wine, a linen-weaver with a piece of linen, and a miller with a sack of flour. Let each of these commodities be of the value of one pound—a different supposition would make the case only more complicated without in any way affecting the result. Let those four commodity-owners he. the only ones on the market. Let us now suppose that each has calculated the requirements of the others correctly: the wine-grower sells his wine to the gold-digger, and buys with the pound which he receives for it, the piece of linen from the linen-weaver. Finally, the latter uses the proceeds of his linen for acquiring the sack of flour, and each one returns contented from the market.

In a year’s time the four again came together, each one expecting. to dispose of his commodity as before, and while the possessor of money does not despise the wine of the wine-grower, the wine-grower, unfortunately, has no need for linen, or perhaps requires the money for the payment of a debt, and therefore prefers to go about in a torn shirt rather than purchase linen. The wine-grower keeps the pound in his pocket and goes home. The linen-weaver now waits in vain for a buyer, and the miller waits likewise. The family of the weaver may be hungry and covet the sack of flour, but the weaver has produced linen for which there was no demand, and as the linen was not required, there is no call for the flour. Weaver and miller have no money, and hence cannot buy what they want; and what they have produced is now “over-produced,” as is also what has been produced for them, for instance—in order to continue with the example—the table which the cabinet-maker expected would be purchased by the miller.

The most significant phenomena of an economic crisis are already given in the foregoing illustration. Of course, it does not take place under such simple conditions. At the beginning of commodity production each establishment still produces more or less for its own consumption: commodity production with each family forms merely part of its entire production. The linen-weaver and the miller we referred to for example possess each a piece of land and some cattle, and are both in a position to complacently wait until a buyer for their commodities puts in an appearance. If it comes to a pinch they can live without him. But in the beginning of commodity production the market is still small and easily surveyed, and production and consumption, and the entire social life, move, year in and year out, in the same rut. In the small communities of olden times one knew the other, his needs and his purchasing power, quite well. The economic fabric scarce changed the number of producers : the productivity of labour, the amount of products, the number of consumers, their needs, the sum of money at they; disposal, all changed but slowly, and each change was immediately discovered and taken into account.

But things take a different form with the advent of commerce. Under its influence production for self-consumption decreases continually, the individual producers of commodities, and still more the dealers in commodities, are getting ever more exclusively dependent upon the sale of their commodities, and particularly upon the quickest possible sale. Delay in or prevention of the sale of a commodity becomes ever more fatal to its owner, and may in certain circumstances lead to his economic ruin. At the same time the possibilities for depressions in commerce increase.

Through commerce the many different markets lying apart from each other are brought into communication; the entire market is thereby greatly extended, but also made less accessible to survey. And that development is furthered still more by the appearance of one or several intermediaries between producer and consumer, commerce making this necessary. At the same time it becomes easier to move commodities because of commerce and the development of the system of transit, and a small incentive suffices to concentrate them on one spot in large quantities.

An estimation of the demand for, and the existing supply of, commodities now becomes ever more uncertain. The development of statistics does not remove this uncertainty : it only makes it possible to estimate at all, which, from a certain stage of commodity production, would be impossible without statistics. The entire economic life becomes more and more dependent upon commercial speculation, which becomes ever more venturesome.

The merchant is a speculator from the start: speculation has not been invented on the Exchange. And speculating is a necessary function of the capitalist. By speculating, that is to say, by estimating the prospective demand; by buying his commodities where they are cheap (that is, where they are plentiful) and selling them where they are dear (that is, where they are scarce), the merchant helps to bring order into the chaos of the planless production of the private concerns which are independent of each other. But in his speculation he may also make mistakes, the more so as he has not much time for reflection, not being the only merchant in the world. Hundreds of thousands of competitors are waiting, like him, to make use of every favourable opportunity : whoever gets the first glimpse of it reaps the greatest advantage. That means one has to be quick, not to ponder long, not to make many enquiries, but to venture—nothing venture nothing have! But he may also lose. If on any market there is a great demand for a commodity, large quantities of it scon accumulate there, until there is more of it than the market can digest. Then the prices fall, the merchant has to sell cheap, and often with a loss, or to find another and better market for his goods. His losses at that game may be so great that they may ruin him.

Under the domination of developed commodity production on a market there are always either too many or too few commodities about. The bourgeois economists declare that to be a very wise and admirable ordinance, but we think differently : anyhow, it is inevitable,so long as commodity-production, from a certain stage onwards, exists. But this wise ordinance may in certain circumstances, and in the event of an exceptionally strong incentive, mean that the overloading of a market with commodities becomes so uncommonly great, that consequent losses of the merchants assume large proportions, and a great many of their number cannot meet their liabilities and become bankrupt. That means already a commercial crisis in its best form.

The development of the system of transit on the one hand, and of the system of credit on the other, facilitates the sudden flooding of a market with commodities, but in doing so it also furthers crises, and enhances their devastating effect Commercial crises had always to be limited in extent so long as petty enterprise was the prevalent form of production. It was not possible that under the influence of any incentive the amount of products produced for the entire market rapidly increased. Production under the domination of handicraft, like petty enterprise, is not capable of rapid extension. It cannot be enlarged by an increase in the number of workers, as at ordinary periods it already employs all the efficient members of the grade of population devoted to it. It can only be extended by adding to the labour-burden of the individual by prolonging the hours of labour, encroaching on Sunday rest, etc. But in the good old times the handicraftsman or peasant working on his own account, when he had not yet to contend with the competition of the large concern, showed no liking for such extension. Even if he consented to work overtime that was of little use, as the productivity of labour was not considerable.

That productivity changes with the advent of capitalist large concerns. As a means of enabling commerce to rapidly flood the market with commodities, it develops a hitherto unthought of capacity, not only extending the market to a world market, embracing the entire globe and increasing the number of intermediaries between producer and consumer, but also enabling production to follow every incentive of commerce and to expand by leaps and bounds.

Already the circumstance that the workers are now completely at the mercy of the capitalist; that he can increase their hours of labour, and interfere with their Sunday (and night) rest, enables the capitalist to extend production more quickly than was possible before. But one hour of surplus labour signifies to-day, with the great productivity of labour, quite a different extension of production to that at the time of handicraft. And the capitalists are also able to extend their concerns rapidly. Capital is a very elastic, pliable quantity, especially owing to the credit system. Flourishing conditions of business increase confidence, induce investments, shorten the period of circulation of a part of capital, and thus increase its scope and power. But the most important fact remains that there is always an industrial reserve army of workers at the disposal of capitalism. In that way the capitalist is in a position to extend his concern at any time, to engage new workmen, to increase production rapidly, and to make thoroughly good use of a favourable state of the market.

[To be continued]

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

Avoiding the elephant (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Invisible Rivals. How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World. By Jonathan R. Goodman. Yale University Press. 2025. xv+236pp.

This is a wide-ranging book. Written in a jargon-free and eminently accessible style, it is basically a work of evolutionary psychology, but it also steps into a number of other fields of knowledge and investigation, for example biology, anthropology, history, politics and economics. Its fundamental themes, as suggested in its title, are cooperation and competition and the part they play in human society.

As the author points out, this has been a hot topic of study for specialists in various fields over many years, and even more so in recent times. For most of these, the old idea of humans as red in tooth and claw, deep-down selfish and wicked and with social interaction dictated by an ethic of everyone for themselves has been superseded by an understanding that homo sapiens is capable of a wide range of behaviours according to the life conditions and experience of each particular individual and social group.

Many recent studies have emphasised that, if circumstances and social environment allow, human beings are likely to behave in generous and empathetic ways towards others, since we are essentially flexible creatures with behaviour shaped by the society into which we are born and become part of. It follows from this that, if life takes place under adverse systems and conditions, this can provoke negative reactions in which communities are divided among themselves and people may be inclined to seek their own advantage at the expense of others. Some studies stress the ‘positivity’ element more strongly and see human beings as an instinctively kind and associative species, ‘pro-social’ or ‘super-cooperators’, whose default, whose natural inclination is to share and be cooperative and mutually supportive. In this view, only when conditioned from the earliest years to compete and pursue personal ‘success’ and reward, as in today’s capitalist system, do humans shift away from sharing and towards selfishness and personal gain. But both these positions espouse the idea of humans as eminently flexible and adaptable creatures and often draw on evidence that, for the vast majority of the 300,000 years or more of human existence, we lived in sharing egalitarian societies with no rulers or ruled, no resource domination and relatively little conflict. That was when we were hunter-gatherers, and the argument continues that, only when that lifestyle was replaced by one of settled agriculture starting around 12,000 years ago, (the ‘tiny speck in our history’ referred to in this book) did hierarchies and states come into being and result in struggles for power, development of classes and the existence of rulers and ruled, provoking predatory behaviours and setting people against one another.

All this of course fits in nicely with the socialist advocacy of an egalitarian society, which, via modern technology, could guarantee a more secure level of existence than hunter-gatherer societies and could be based on free and equal access to all goods and services, with no buying and selling, no wages or salaries with cooperative endeavour aimed at satisfying human needs rather than seeking profit. So nothing in ‘human nature’ would prevent this. Indeed, if human beings are either ‘naturally’ cooperative and inclined to share or even sufficiently flexible to welcome such a lifestyle as being in both the collective interest and their own, then surely it will fit them like a glove.

However, the author of this book sees things rather differently. He presents what one commentator has called ‘a highly nuanced account of human competition and cooperation’. According to this, though we are capable of being either selfish or altruistic, the selfish side tends to prevail, something we may not even always be aware of ourselves. In other words, in most of our dealings, the motives we present to others may be different from what they believe and indeed from what we ourselves believe. In this view, a human tendency for self-interested manipulation is seen as fundamentally present. As the author puts it, ‘selfishness and double dealing are basic human traits to be found in everyone, including themselves’ and ‘deception and exploitation are deeply rooted in our natures’. So selfish goals are seen to be hidden under a cloak of apparent altruism or selflessness. Thus the ‘invisible rivalry’ of the book’s title.

But what about humankind’s approximately 290,000 years of apparently egalitarian and conflict-light hunter-gathering? The writer does not neglect this but argues that, in terms of equality and conflict, things were more nuanced and not necessarily as one-sided as presented by many studies of anthropology and palaeontology, pointing rather towards his more ambiguous take on ‘human nature’. His verdict is that, though we commonly share and reciprocate, this does not make us innately cooperative. It just makes us ‘animals capable of cooperation’. Here it is noticeable, however, that, though he draws on a wide range of sources which point in favour of his thesis, other key sources providing widely recognised evidence for the ‘highly flexible’ or ‘ultra-cooperative’ idea, some of which have been reviewed in this journal, are notably missing. There is no mention whatever, for example, of the work of widely recognised experts in this field such as John Gowdy or R. Brian Ferguson. So it is difficult not to see a certain amount of ‘cherry-picking’ in what is presented here.

As for the writer’s take on the current state of humanity and the economic system that dominates it – capitalism -, he clearly does not consider that the equivocal view of humanity he presents prevents change or improvement and he does acknowledge the possibility and importance of cooperation. He states unequivocally in fact that human society could not have survived ‘without intense cooperation, and this is implicit in the support he expresses for what might be called ‘progressive’ social policies and developments, ie, more openness, democracy and equality. He refers to a need for ‘the political will to enact policies that upend the modes of exploitation we have normalized and the cultures of inequality we allow to thrive’ and for this to happen via ’cooperation at the local and global levels’. But he sees any such changes entirely in the context and through the lens of the existing system, thereby avoiding the elephant in the room, ie, that system’s imperative to keep on existing and producing for the profit of the tiny minority. We, on the other hand, would regard any attempt to bring about change or improvement within its framework as tinkering at the edges, a sort of ‘moving the deckchairs on the Titanic’.

Howard Moss