The Parkrun – an Inkling of socialism? (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 13 June this year, the 13 runners and 5 volunteers who set up the first parkrun ever in 2004 at Bushy Park, London, celebrated one million parkruns worldwide since then. On that day runs were taking place in 2,800 places across 23 countries. In an interview with the i newspaper, one of the original parkrun organisers, Paul Sinton-Hewitt, said that the success of the event was ‘clearly down to the simplicity … the fact it is for everybody, inclusivity, the nature of that, the fact that it’s free’. Another of the founders, Andrew Lane, said he’d originally predicted that, if the event got going, participation would peak at 200 runners per time, otherwise the course would be too crowded. But at the 1,000th Bushy Park run in 2024, there were over 6,000 participants.

Clearly people didn’t mind being crowded together with others and, since they weren’t competing with one another as in a conventional race, getting a clear unimpeded run wasn’t a priority for most. At best if people were there to compete, it was against themselves, ie, trying to improve their personal best time. Lane went on to say that he’d also predicted, wrongly again, that there would be a lack of volunteers coming forward to do the organising and this would hold growth back. But, as he put it, ‘I failed to realise … how much volunteering would become a great pleasure and destination in itself’.

Interesting words

There are some interesting words here: ‘inclusivity’, ‘free’, ‘volunteering’, ‘pleasure’, for example. Interesting because they describe a voluntary, cooperative, communal kind of activity enjoyed by large numbers of people and going directly contrary to the ethic of a society, the one we live in, based on me-first competition, beggar thy neighbour and the gaining of personal wealth and status. A society too in which we often hear of how people have become alienated, disconnected from one another (‘atomised’ is the word often used) and bereft of any clear sense of purpose. In the parkrun, however, we have an activity that is entirely cooperative and purposeful, where money doesn’t enter into any part of the equation and which is pursued by increasingly large numbers of people, whether as run participants or organisers. And clearly the ‘non-runners’ too experience a sense of community as well as a perception that they’re doing something useful, as well, no doubt, as enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.

Social animals

Should we be surprised? Well probably not, because regardless of the way current society is organised with its massive economic inequality, its ever-present wars, the stresses and frustrations of its employment system, human beings are fundamentally social animals who, given even small opportunities, are ready and willing to work together to carry out activities and achieve ends they consider worthwhile. Apart from our common everyday experience where, in a whole host of situations and pursuits, humans display cooperation and empathy with one another, a plethora of studies, sociological and anthropological, many of which have been discussed in the pages of the Socialist Standard  continue to illustrate and confirm this.

This year’s World Happiness Report by Gallup, which rates countries according to the level of ‘happiness’ of their citizens, concludes unequivocally that what makes individuals feel most happy is ‘being generous and volunteering’, since it gives ‘a feeling of belonging and sociality’. A recent discussion on the Gallup report on BBC radio reiterated this, with the broadcaster Evan Davis, one of whose specialities is business and economics, stating that ‘money matters to a certain extent for the agency and control it gives you’, but that ‘the main individual thing is to be generous to other people and to volunteer [and] you will make yourself happier’.

Another recent study carried out by a team of scientists from American and Australian universities entitled ‘Altruistic, not reputational concerns, drive human prosociality, values and aspirations across the world’, studied anonymous survey responses from almost 1 million individuals spread over more than 100 countries, taking into account different cultural contexts, age ranges, socioeconomic levels, and time periods. The researchers found that the vast majority of people reported performing acts of altruism because they were interested in the well-being of others, not because these acts benefitted them directly. They concluded that people are more likely to want to be remembered for making a difference, helping others, and improving the world, and to value things like caring over status or personal gains. The way a review of this study put it was ‘people really want to be good’ .

Cooperation or ego?

Another new piece of research, this time from the fields of archaeology and anthropology and published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, provides evidence that it has been humans’ ability to empathize and relate to one another that has allowed our species to thrive and build complex cultures over the whole planet. It points to how the archaeological record illustrates the capacity of early humans to make long-term commitments to one another’s well-being, to tolerate frustration, to plan collectively, to make sacrifices, and to trust others. In many instances, for example, archaeologists have unearthed remains of disabled and elderly humans who could not possibly have survived alone.

A review of this study on the IFL Science website concludes that yet again we have evidence that ‘one of humanity’s greatest strengths was never just ego or ruthlessness, but profound emotions and our extraordinary ability to turn those feelings into cooperation’. Of course we see ‘ego’ and ‘ruthlessness’ around us too, we see displays of non-cooperation and lack of sympathy and understanding for others. But, perhaps contrary to appearances, we see this much less frequently than the opposite. But precisely because it is less common, it attracts greater attention and becomes more ‘newsworthy’.

Purpose and enjoyment

What has all this got to do with socialism? Put quite simply, socialism – the moneyless, wageless society of common ownership and voluntary work with free access to all goods and services which we campaign to see established – can only work if human beings are able to cooperate freely and willingly to produce and distribute everything that is needed to provide a comfortable, purposeful life for all. And what we learn from the kinds of research mentioned above, from everyday experience and from voluntary on-the-ground activity such as the parkrun is that we are geared, we have the capacity, to organise ourselves and our society in that way.

We learn too that the dog-eat-dog mentality that we also see around us and can set people against one another, often in ugly and irrational ways, arises not from any ‘natural’ human inclination but from the conditions of life in the society we live in, from the very nature of the competitive, profit-driven system we call capitalism – a system effectively described by one commentator as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’. We draw from all the evidence that such behaviour and such conditions can be overcome if we are willing to take the bull by the horns and decide, via collective and democratic political action, to establish and organise a society in which volunteering and cooperative, communal activity is the norm in every facet of life. Of course, despite the constraints of capitalism, a vast amount of such activity already takes place, not only in parkruns but across a whole range of endeavours. But socialism will provide the opportunity for us to fulfil our potential for cooperation not just in our spare time but as a way of organising the whole of society efficiently and effectively and giving us all lives that are enjoyable, meaningful and fulfilling and satisfy our deep-seated need for social interaction.

Howard Moss

Trouble at ‘t mill (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Trouble at ‘t mill’ has become a kind of cliché to refer to problems individuals or groups of workers may be having in their place of work. Workplaces are not mills today of course, but the basic ruler-ruled relationship between employer and employee that existed at the time of the mills still applies today. And the same ‘trouble’ still continues to arise, more often than not associated with money and working conditions.

University cuts

And it’s happening currently in what many people might consider an improbable place – institutions of higher education – i.e., universities. Traditionally, work in universities, whether as a teacher, researcher, administrator or anything else, has been considered a relatively secure form of employment. Until 1988 in fact academics had what was known as ‘tenure’ whereby, barring some form of gross misconduct, they could not legally be sacked from their jobs. And even after this, the likelihood of university lecturers losing their jobs remained relatively small for a long time, at least compared with most other areas of employment. But more recently all this has changed. What university employees are now finding is that, as for most other fields of work, they are at significant risk of being declared redundant as their institutions struggle to stay solvent and look to make savings.

In the last couple of years in particular, a whole swathe of universities, from those lower down the pecking order that were once called polytechnics to historic and well-established institutions higher up the scale, have begun declaring deficits – referred to sometimes as ‘black holes’. They are forced, they say, to drastically reduce regular expenditure in what they see as the only effective way – by shedding staff. The term they often use to describe this is ‘reducing the head count’, clearly an attempt to mask the personal impact on the individuals whose lives are suddenly turned upside-down. The main pressure on universities to do this has been the downturn in the number of young people entering into higher education as well as the shortfall of overseas students coming to study in the UK, so denying universities the necessary level of tuition fees to keep them solvent. Examples of institutions currently engaged in making staff cuts and declaring people redundant are Teesside University, Sheffield Hallam, Swansea, Leicester, Nottingham, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

Strike action?

Some universities have done U-turns on declaring redundancies due to the threat of strike action by the lecturers’ union (the UCU – University and College Union), but others have ignored such threats and have gone ahead with dismissing staff despite industrial action. Clearly they view their financial situation as so dire that cutting their long-term wage bill seems more important than the consequences for their reputation of students complaining about not being taught or not receiving their degrees on time. And, at times, universities have openly declared that failing to lower their costs will threaten their very existence. A good example here of how trade unions can sometimes succeed in taming to some extent the imperatives of the financial compete-or-die system all workers (and their employers) live under, but also of the limits of trade union action with the employer simply holding out in the expectation (often realised) that workers are only likely to stay out on strike for as long as they are able to hold out financially themselves.

In the same boat

It also offers a prime example of how the system we live under inevitably threatens with insecurity all those obliged to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary – so the vast majority of any population. Such is the case whichever rung of the salary scale a worker happens to be on. The current crisis in universities provides a suitable microcosm of this. Whether someone works as a porter, a secretary, a technician, an ordinary lecturer or a professor, all are equally likely to find themselves out of a job and having to scramble around to find alternative employment. And for academics in particular finding such employment at the moment is unlikely given the current job market in higher education. As a volunteer union representative in my own institution, I have recently seen a science professor of 22 years standing and international reputation break down in tears and state that his life is destroyed. He had been subjected to a humiliating process of ‘pooling’ and then being informed that, after comparing him with his colleagues, it had been decided that his role was to be ‘deleted’. I have been assisting another colleague who, fearing redundancy and having applied for a job in another institution, received a stock response informing her that they had received over 500 applications to their job advert and that she might hear nothing further regarding her application. She did not.

Legal action?

A common reaction from staff hearing that their employment is to be terminated is to talk about taking legal action via an employment tribunal on grounds of unfair dismissal. But if they go to their trade union for assistance in this, they are likely to be told that, if the employer has taken the necessary steps laid down in law – and they usually have – then their dismissal is unlikely to be considered ‘unfair’. The reality, of course, is that, regardless of any tweaks made to employment regulations by governments (something that is happening currently), the system will continue to be weighted in favour of the employer and to give them the upper hand, as it must in the wage-slave society we live in. So unless the employer makes a mess of things by not going through the right motions, then any legal appeal against redundancy is likely to fail. And even if such an appeal is successful, the court will not order reinstatement but only financial compensation, which is often a dismal amount and in any case cannot in law exceed a maximum of the claimant’s annual salary. If legal action is attempted, furthermore, any claimant can expect to wait a long time indeed for their case to be heard. One of the criticisms of the employment tribunal system recently highlighted by the Institute of Employment Rights was that people bringing unfair dismissal claims are waiting up to five years for their case to come to court.

Employment insecurity

Finally, in the higher education sector at least, a further negative consequence of the redundancy exercises employers go in for to reduce their costs is that these inevitably signal a deterioration in working conditions for those employees still in post. Despite the terminology of ‘deletion of role’ that employers often use, everyone who works in universities knows that the work (or at least some of the work) of staff who have been dismissed will still need to be done, which inevitably means longer hours and increased pressure for the remaining staff. Though these staff will be breathing a sigh of relief that they still have their jobs, nevertheless they know they will be called upon to work longer hours and more intensively to cover that work. And they know that, if they don’t come up to the mark in this, they may well be the ones for the high jump next time the employer sees it as necessary to embark upon ‘reducing the head count’.

What’s for sure, finally, is that no solution to this kind of merry-go-round in any sector of employment is to be found in seeking to change employment law or giving employees more ‘rights’ – or anything like that. This is the case whether it’s a sector focused directly on realising profit for its owners or shareholders or one that is part of the infrastructure of the profit-making system, such as education. All forms of employment are locked into the system of buying and selling and production for profit, together with the insecurity and upsets it causes for workers through its constant need to reorganise in order to adapt to capitalism’s economic conditions. And this will continue until those workers decide collectively to do away with that system and replace it with one of common ownership, voluntary work and free access to all the goods and services they produce – what we call socialism.

Howard Moss

Prosocial (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Conflict Resolution. By Douglas P. Fry. Edward Elgar. 2026. 121pp.

‘Nomadic foragers, as we all used to live, were socialist, prosocial, egalitarian societies’ (Douglas P. Fry).

In this distillation of long years of fieldwork and scholarship, the world-leading anthropologist Douglas Fry draws upon his knowledge and experience to propose means of resolving conflicts between individuals or groups as they might arise in contemporary contexts. Its analysis and recommendations are underpinned by the author’s accumulated understanding of how human beings have related to one another throughout the 300,000 years of our species’ existence. And it is precisely this that makes it of particular interest and relevance to socialists.

To be specific, a central plank of his arguments is how entirely fallacious are the oft-repeated claims that war, aggression and greed are rooted in the human psyche. All the evidence, he insists, is that such forms of behaviour, far from being somehow embedded in our nature, are, when they occur, an outcome of social conditioning and that our evolutionary history shows that we have just as much potential for, and indeed a much more natural bent, towards attachment, caring partnership and cooperation.

Drawing on decades of his own research and with evidence from various different fields of study, he demonstrates how over the approximately 290,000 years of prehistory (the Palaeolithic era), the overwhelming principle of existence among human groups was (and still is today among indigenous populations he has investigated across the world) non-violence, cooperation and egalitarianism, characterised by sharing food, caring for the vulnerable and maintaining social bonds. This the author sums up as ‘community solidarity and harmony’, reinforced by ‘socialization and social control mechanism geared toward promoting prosocial values and behaviors’. Not that violence, greed or attempts to monopolise necessities would never have occurred in Palaeolithic societies or never occur in modern indigenous cultures, but in such circumstances ways are usually found to resolve the conflicts caused via ‘restorative’ methods or by reconciliation, eschewing violence and seeking to practice ‘fairness’ in the eyes of the individuals most directly affected and of the collectivity. But in the rare cases where this is not possible, it may be necessary to apply sanctions to ‘wrongdoers’, probably via some form of social ostracism or banishment. As for large-scale organised killing, the author echoes the now widely accepted view that this has been largely a feature of the last approximately 10,000 years. Starting then, hunter-gatherer life (referred to in this book as ‘nomadic foraging’) gave way to settled agriculture with social hierarchies and control and domination of wealth by small groups of people developing and eventually becoming the norm. Later, of course, the industrial production of capitalism took over from agricultural society, but that society continued to manifest, as it still does, those same basic features: power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, leaders and led, and a willingness of the many, via social conditioning, to sacrifice themselves in the interests of the privileged few.

This book is one of many in the field of anthropology, archaeology and a gamut of other disciplines which have contributed to exploding the enduring myth that violence, competition and selfishness are somehow ‘locked into’ human interaction, that there exists inevitably some kind of ‘war of all against all’. Douglas Fry’s stark opposition to that idea is summed up in his statement that ‘on the basis of cross-cultural data … humans have a universal inclination to resolve conflicts and restore normal patterns of harmonious social interaction’ and that ‘the normal state of social affairs is to exchange good deeds, to feel gratitude, to be generous and appreciate the generosity of others. Overall, people strive to maintain positive interpersonal relations with others through mutually beneficial exchanges’.

All this is serious grist to the mill for socialists, providing as it does a powerful response to those who argue that the cooperative society of voluntary endeavour and free access to all goods and services which we call socialism is impossible because it is against what is usually referred to as ‘human nature’. We cannot but agree with the author’s plea that ‘the human potential for resolving conflicts without violence should be fully acknowledged, nurtured, and further elaborated by the people sharing one small planet in the vastness of space’. At the same time, however, though this plea is expressed, as all else in this book, in truly engaging fashion, it is difficult to see how its substance can be realised within the framework of the current social system of class division and production for profit. Rather, the environment for it to come to fruition has to be a society of economic equality and production for need.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: Detectorists and grave robbers (2026)

The Life and Times column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

I recently tuned in to two investigative series on Radio 4. Though they told what on the surface seemed quite different tales, they were linked by an important, in fact fundamental feature of the society we live in. They both equally vividly illustrated the hold that money has on us and the lengths to which some of us will go to obtain it. The first one told the story of two metal detectorists who stumbled upon a hoard of ancient Anglo-Saxon coins and decided not to follow the legal requirement to surrender them to the Treasury but to keep them and try to sell them secretly. The series was aptly entitled ‘Fool’s Gold’, since, in the end, the ‘gold’ they found had disastrous results for them. The second one, ‘The Grave Robbers’, investigated the fraudulent methods used by a covert group to claim the estates of people who die without leaving a will.

Detectorists declaring their discovery of ancient coins or artefacts are entitled to 50 percent of what the Treasury deems to be their value, the other 50 percent going to the owner of the land on which they were found. That value, however, is usually only a fraction of what collectors will pay on the black market. In this case the ‘official’ value of the coins in question was likely to be up to £12m. But the 50 percent of that amount the discoverers would have been eligible to receive was not enough for them and they chose to try to sell the coins themselves. It didn’t work, since, as the series told us, in the close-knit detectorist community secrets don’t stay secret for long, especially as, when some of the coins started appearing at a Mayfair auction house, rumours of an undeclared hoard begin to spread. The upshot was that the detectorists were exposed and went on the run, but finished up in the dock accused of theft and given prison sentences. However, hundreds of the coins remained unaccounted for, and still do.

The other series, ‘The Grave Robbers’, investigated a different kind of fraud, one where a ‘crime group’ uses forged wills to claim ownership of houses when people who lived in them on their own die without leaving a will. The ‘gang’ forges wills, as the programme put it, ‘to take the homes of the dead’, with the result that any genuine heirs that might exist are left with nothing. The series found that the group in question, based in Eastern Europe, was also involved in cannabis farms, money laundering and the sale of fake UK work visas. We hear from neighbours of a deceased man how the gang, using false but legally approved documents, had taken possession of his house, selling everything of value and using the property for whatever purpose they saw fit.

Both these stories illustrate the rampant hold that money or the prospect of it can have on human actions. And they are of course just the tip of the iceberg. We know that every day multiple attempts of all description are made to carry out what has come to be called ‘scam’ activity at the expense of both individuals and institutions, facilitated of course by the tools of electronic media.

Should we be surprised at this? Probably not, since the class-divided system we live in, where a tiny minority own most of the wealth and the vast majority own little but their ability to work for that majority in order to keep their heads above water, is by its nature a dog-eat-dog affair. Though vast wealth rarely brings meaningful satisfaction to the minority who have it, they do have praise and privilege heaped upon them, creating the temptation among others to look for ways of becoming part of that, to ‘get rich’, even at the expense of others who have little themselves. There is much talk of guarding against scams, but, within a system ruled by money, profit and wealth accumulation, such activities cannot be controlled. There may be attempts, via legislation or policing, to curb their extent, but, as with the other multiple problems the system throws up, it is unlikely to end up as anything more than tinkering at the edges.

Having said this, we must also observe that, though few people would mind having more money or being rich, the vast majority of us would not stoop to cheating or deceiving other individuals to achieve that purpose. At the same time, it cannot be denied that, while we are essentially cooperative creatures, we are also capable of a wide range of non-cooperative behaviours according to the situations we find ourselves in or are imposed on us. So, in some of us, the competitive nature of the society we live in can trigger anti-social forms of behaviour – the so-called ‘worst instincts’. Yet we all know from personal experience and on a day-today basis that most of those around us, far from seeking to make gain at the expense or disadvantage of others, are more likely to go out of their way to come to their assistance. It is, in fact, no exaggeration to say that even the very system we live in, competitive though it is at the core, depends on us cooperating with one another on a day-to-day basis in order for it to operate. The remarkable thing is that, though ‘money rules’ is the bane of most people’s existence, dictating actions and priorities and often causing hardship and suffering, this does not prevent so many of us from behaving generously towards others even if it means financial loss or inconvenience for ourselves. The recent World Happiness Report by Gallup, after carrying out exhaustive research, concludes that a key source of human happiness is being generous to others and engaging in volunteering activity. This writer can only reflect on how much more effectively human cooperation and generosity would flourish in the moneyless society based on voluntary work, democratic organisation and free access to all goods and services that we call socialism.

Howard Moss

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

Letter: Animal liberation and socialism (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Animal liberation and socialism

As a member of the organisation Socialism for Animal Liberation referenced in Howard Moss’s article ‘The Annual Vegan Fair’ (Socialist Standard, May 2026), I would like to make the following response.

SAL was formed in the summer of last year with three very clear goals. The first being to campaign for an end to all forms of animal abuse. The second being to bring anti-capitalist ideas into the animal rights movement. The third being to bring animal liberationist arguments into the movements of the left. We also understood SAL to be an emerging coalition of individuals and groups and welcomed participation from all different revolutionary traditions, whether they be socialist, anarchist, communist or radical green.

Bearing this in mind, I was a bit surprised by some of Howard’s comments.

For starters, Howard doesn’t seem to think that SAL is as committed to socialist politics as we are to animal liberation and feels that the organization will end up concentrating on individual acts of animal abuse to the neglect of systemic change. To be blunt, I really don’t know where this comes from since in all our literature and in all our presentations we make it crystal clear that it is only with socialism and socialism alone that we will end not just the exploitation of people by capital but also of animals and the natural world that we share the planet with. The modern-day animal rights movement, by contrast, often neglects the need for political change, focussing instead on personal outreach around veganism, on boycott, on direct action and on lobbying, all of which have their role but which ultimately cannot deliver animal liberation.

Howard makes the comment that SAL doesn’t appear to have a clear understanding of socialism and then lists some of the indices of what constitutes a post capitalist society such as its being moneyless and leaderless. I’d personally consider many of these criteria to be more indicative of a communist society than of a socialist state but I’ll agree to disagree with Howard on that one, as I do with anarchist comrades in SAL! If Howard means that not everyone would sign up to the SPGB definition then he’s completely correct, SAL being a coalition of shared concerns rather than a political party.

Some of Howard’s remarks unfortunately read along the lines that everything will be ok come the revolution, something more than problematic on several counts. The history of women’s relationship and socialist revolutions shows that if the left don’t take on demands in the here and now they are highly unlikely to be realised in the future. Likewise, does the Socialist Party of Great Britain have a formal commitment to animal liberation? If it doesn’t, and I’m fairly sure it doesn’t, then why should we see the end of the meat and dairy industry, of vivisection and of all bloodsports come socialism? Securing animal liberation means transforming human society in its entirety, hence the reason why comrades of SAL in other countries have spent so much time developing a programme that is both revolutionary and transitional.

Ultimately with its emphasis on ending profit-based relationships, on social ownership and a planned economy, SAL remains convinced that it is only in the context of a socialist society that animals will achieve true liberation. However, whilst we see that socialism as laying the material basis for animal liberation, there is no inevitable relationship between the two unless we consciously choose to develop one.

Finally, I’m not sure I was present at the online meeting that Howard attended but, like all organisations, when we come together to discuss action, the nature of that meeting will be determined by who attends and by what the agenda is. One month, much of the discussion might centre on how best to support the recent Beagles campaign, understandably so. Another month, most of the meeting might concentrate on discussing the finer points of Marxist theory and how it does, and doesn’t, fit into animal liberationist narratives. In other words, had Howard attended another meeting he might have come away with a totally different impression.

For the liberation of all,

Steven Andrew, 

Salford

Reply:

The article about Socialism for Animal Liberation (SAL) in the May Socialist Standard was largely sympathetic to that group’s analysis of society and its statement of intent. However, it did pick up on the contradiction between calling for complete ‘system change’ and at the same time seeming to focus on reforms to deal with particular problems within the current system. It made the point that focusing on single issues (animal abuse in this case) simply pushes real system change into the background. There is also the fact that any apparent progress via reforms can be – and often is – easily reversed by a mere change of government. A current example of this is the declaration by Nigel Farage that there is nothing wrong with fox-hunting and his suggestion that, if his Party came to power (something not entirely unlikely), the ban on it could be relaxed.

So while history has shown that single-issue campaigns and reforms can achieve a small degree of progress for both humans and animals, it is clear that they cannot lead to real revolutionary change. In other words, contrary to what our correspondent says, it is impossible to be both ‘revolutionary and transitional’ at the same time. The second of these simply precludes the first.

In addition, there is a manifest difference between what he means by socialism and what the Socialist Party means. While, like him, we work for a society without ‘profit-based relationships’, such a society could only come about through doing away with money, buying and selling and leaders and led, something he seems to reject – perhaps because he cannot imagine it. Nothing short of that could give us the ‘post-capitalist’ society he says he is looking for. Anything else would still be some form of capitalism – perhaps state capitalism – which would be unlikely to be a significant improvement for people (or for animals) on what we have now. Above all it would be a ‘state’ system, and, though he uses the term ‘socialist state’, that is in fact a contradiction in terms, since, if socialism is anything meaningful, it is a stateless and borderless society. Moreover, contrary to the distinction our correspondent wants to make between ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, we’re perfectly happy for such a society to be called either. Like Marx, we consider the two terms to be synonymous and both to mean a society of free access to all goods and services where both humans and animals will be most likely to live decent, comfortable and unexploited lives. – Editors.

Life and Times: The Annual Vegan Fair (2026)

The Life and Times column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Vegan Fair I went to near where I live was quite an event. People milled around outside the hall where it was being held and on either side of the entrance there were queues at the two food-to-go stalls, one of them offering Persian vegan mezze and the other vegan American-style burgers. I’d arranged to meet my friend Jane, an enthusiastic anti-vivisection campaigner, and when I arrived, she was already outside the hall handing out leaflets and asking people for petition signatures. I greatly admire her dedication and share her concern for the suffering that vast numbers of animals are subjected to in the millions of experiments on them every year – many for no faintly useful purpose. And I’m sympathetic to the vegan cause more generally and to those who put the case for it, though I also think that such things as the food people eat and the clothes they wear must in the end be a matter of personal choice.

Entrance to the hall itself was free and the place was packed. There were stalls and tables of various kinds selling a variety of different types of food as well as jewellery, clothes and ornaments. People seemed most interested in the food and I suppose I was too. What caught my eye among all else was, of all things, a stall offering a wide selection of different types of olive. I liked the look of one particular kind and the young woman at the table selling them told me they were ‘a special olive’. So I asked for some. They turned out be a special price. Too late. I should have asked about that first. But never mind.

Later on, I sat down with Jane and one of her fellow campaigners at the large dining table in the centre of the hall. We’d bought coffee and snacks and, as we ate and talked, I also began looking at the various leaflets and flyers scattered across the table. One in particular caught my eye. It was headed ‘Socialists for Animal Liberation (SAL)’. I read what it had to say and was definitely impressed. One of its paragraphs went as follows: ‘Capitalism is a highly destructive system that drives inequality, war, famine and environmental collapse in order to concentrate wealth and extreme power in the hands of the few. The need for a new economic system is clear. But if we want a future that’s sustainable and one that is not predicated on violence or exploitation, then we must reject capitalism and simultaneously reject all forms of animal exploitation’. It went on to outline aspects of the suffering inflicted on animals by factory farming, adding that ’no amount of suffering is too much for a system which cares only about maximising profit’ and concluding that ‘a post-capitalist society will inherently end the exploitation of animals’.

Later, I used the email address on it to write for further information, outlining what it seemed to me SAL had in common with the Socialist Party but also mentioning that many socialists could only see decent treatment for animals as a pipe dream under a system that set so little store by decent treatment for humans. I amplified this by saying that I thought we should therefore put our energies into campaigning for ‘system change’ (ie a new democratic, marketless, leaderless world system of production for use, without buying and selling or wages and salaries and based on free access to all goods and services) rather than focusing on issues within capitalism that we might consider ‘immediate’ and ‘priority’. I expressed the view that to do otherwise could only have the effect of postponing real system change until the first of never. I nevertheless stressed my personal sympathy with the concerns of the group and asked for more information about SAL and its activities.

I got a quick and friendly reply from their organiser, Claire, together with a copy of the SAL manifesto, which, as well as calling for involvement in ongoing issues of ‘animal rights’, stated: ‘With its emphasis on ending profit-based relationships, on social ownership and a planned economy, SAL remains convinced that it is only in the context of a socialist society that animals will achieve true liberation’. I couldn’t disagree with this or with their statement that they welcomed ‘any reduction, big or small, in the abuse that animals suffer’. Claire also invited me to the group’s next online meeting the following week, which I attended and found interesting, even if I wasn’t convinced that everyone there had a clear notion of what socialism meant. Since then, I’ve been invited to other meetings, one of which was a ‘reading group’ to discuss an article entitled ‘The Case for Socialist Veganism’ from an American journal, Monthly Review. I wasn’t able to attend but, since I’d a written a piece on that very article in a recent issue of the Socialist Standard, I drew Claire’s attention to it and she replied that she would circulate it among the group. I don’t know if she did and, if so, what they made of it, but I couldn’t help thinking that it might well be submerged in discussion of what could be done to alleviate the plight of animals here and now.

Perhaps that’s being unfair, but when, at the vegan fair that day, I drew the attention of Jane, my anti-vivisectionist friend, to the SAL leaflet, she showed little interest, focused as she was on her own immediate mission. And I couldn’t help feeling that, despite the SAL group’s stated desire for a ‘post-capitalist’ society, their overwhelming focus too would be on the various reforms they were chasing in the current system and which, even if achieved, would bring us no nearer the aim stated in their leaflet of ‘a future that works for people, planet and animals’.

Howard Moss

Moral stories (2026)

Book Review from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Moral Ambition. Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. By Rutger Bregman. Bloomsbury. 2025. 283pp.

‘Humans are social creatures through and through’ (Rutger Bregman)

This is the third of Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s books to have garnered attention and praise from a wide range of quarters. His theme is, as before, the need for large-scale social change, and on a planetary scale. Described on the book’s dust cover as ‘the internationally bestselling author’, Bregman proposes morally founded activities that people can become involved in to ‘start making a difference’ and help bring about such change. One of the impressive endorsements by various writers and commentators in the book’s opening pages describes it as ‘packed with powerful insights, inspiring stories, and data to back it up’. Another refers to it as ‘a true bible of realistic idealism’. And it is definitely an invigorating and thought-provoking read.

It focuses in significant part on the work of a number of individuals who, by virtue of their dedication and determination to certain causes, have ‘made a difference’, either historically or more recently, to the lives of large numbers of people. Examples of such individuals, some of them little known, include:

• Thomas Clarkson, who, from the age of 24 in 1785, dedicated his life to campaigning against slavery at a time when, as the author points out, the very notion of abolishing slavery seemed unthinkable;
• Arnold Douwes, the Dutchman, who, in the Second World War and at enormous risk to himself, devoted himself to finding shelter for Jews who otherwise would have been transported to concentration camps;
• Ralph Nader, who over very many years campaigned indefatigably in the US against the advertising and sale of manifestly dangerous products and managed to recruit a whole ‘brigade of Davids’ who ‘combined moral indignation with laborious research’ and eventually become known as ‘Naders Raiders’;
• Rosa Parks, the black woman in Alabama who wouldn’t give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus and lit the spark for the civil rights movement;
• Rob Mather, the British business executive, who, in the early 2000s, inspired voluntary and charitable activity among thousands for the purpose of raising money to combat the world’s single largest killer of children, malaria, and up to the present day is estimated to have saved over 100,000 lives;
• and Joey Savoie, a Canadian would-be psychology student who instead dedicated himself to intensive charitable work and founded a school of ‘Charity Entrepreneurship’ whose graduates then set up projects such as Fortify Health that teaches local millers in India to enrich wheat flower with iron, folic acid and vitamin B2 as a way of reducing iron deficiency anaemia among millions there and protecting against congenital defects like spina bifida.

Bregman also gives space to philanthropists such as Katherine McCormick, whose sponsorship of research into female contraception resulted in the pill and so gave millions of women a new kind of control over their lives, and to campaigning scientists like Joseph Salk and Viktor Zhdanov whose dedication and determination brought crippling and deadly diseases like polio and smallpox under control. And he tells all sorts of other quite fascinating tales of people who have dedicated themselves to ‘making a difference’, some much against the odds of their upbringing, education and the society around them. He frames these with the consideration that ‘a small group of determined individuals can have enormous influence’.

Such stories make this a truly compelling book, as also does its manifest ambition to contribute to improving the lives of humans. So is there anything not to like? In the course of the recent Reith Lectures which its author delivered for the BBC on the subject of ‘moral revolution’, he described himself, on more than one occasion, as ‘an old-fashioned social democrat’. And the trouble is that, just like so many others who call themselves ‘social democrats’, he confines himself to seeking to solve or alleviate the world’s problems within the confines of the existing system, capitalism. His abiding focus is on how to make that system better.

With this book, therefore, he has produced a kind of guide to reformism, novel and very readable, but never seeking to peer outside of the constricting framework of existing society, based as it is on monetary exchange, buying and selling and production for profit. This means that, despite the fact that certain problems may be capable of alleviation or even solution through devoted campaigning or pressure on governments, in the final analysis the anti-human needs of the market and its profit imperative will never allow continuing and widespread scourges such as poverty, insecurity, oppression and unfulfilling work to be consigned to history, and tragedies such as wars and environmental degradation will ever lurk and sometimes pounce. In other words, while admirable in so many ways, this book fails to engage with the real reason that renders necessary all the campaigning and dedication its author records and recommends to others.

That is not to say that the kind of campaigning activity recommended by Bregman – radical, persistent and confident in its ideas – is not necessary. However, it needs to be focused not on ‘morality’ but on challenging the system at source and creating a society capable of offering to everyone a share of the potential wealth and abundance that capitalism – with its interconnected production across the globe, its robots, 3-D printing and digital media – has made possible. Currently all this is being held back by the artificial scarcity and oppression associated with the market, money and production for profit and will only be achievable on the basis of common ownership, the abolition of the market and free access to wealth.

Howard Moss

Work: Paid and unpaid (part 2) (2026)

From the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part 1 of this article last month considered how people react to work according to whether it is paid or unpaid and how hierarchised and authoritarian work structures are increasingly affecting their lives. This second part looks at the feasibility of attempts to ‘humanise’ work under the current system of production for profit and points to how such humanisation is only truly feasible in the context of a different social system.

Together with the intensification of the employment process previously discussed, in recent years there has also been considerable discussion about whether there might be more effective and efficient, and at the same time more humane, ways of organising work – even within the existing system of production for profit.

Hierarchy challenged

There are examples of companies instituting freer, less rigid work structures and even more ‘equal’ pay. One of the most striking instances has been the American ‘Valve’ video game company where the owner decided to establish a ‘flat’ non-directive structure based on the conviction that people work better and more efficiently when they’re relaxed and don’t feel they’re being surveilled and constantly judged. Another example is the financial services company Gravity Payments. Here the CEO decided to pay all his staff a minimum wage of $70,000, that being the amount he decided was necessary to live what he called ‘a normal life’. This compared with the previous average salary of $48,000. At the same time, he slashed his own salary of $1.1m to the same $70,000. Then a recent programme in the ‘Analysis’ series on BBC Radio 4 asking the question ‘Does Work Have To Be Miserable?’, included the boss of the Howorth Air Tech company in Salford explaining how he had moved strongly in the direction of putting resources into helping to bring out his employees’ latent talents and not simply regarding them as ‘factors of production’.

Other reactions to hierarchy and authoritarian work practices in capitalism have included a beneath-the-radar move among some workers away from the conventional jobs market – a rejection, partial at least, of the normally life-sapping existence of wage and salary work to lead what has been called ‘a low-desire life without gruelling competition’. Those who choose this path still do of course need to carry out some paid work and to participate in the buying and selling system, but what they are seeking is an existence that offers them more freedom and less stress. This kind of choice was recently highlighted in the BBC radio series ‘The Digital Human’ where the presenter, Aleks Krotosky, talked about how, unexpectedly, in China, a country she referred to as ‘the most competitive society on earth’, a good number of young people were managing to ‘opt out’ from full-time paid work and attempt to lead that ‘low-desire life’.

Reorganising capitalism?

The more radical view, such as espoused by the Socialist Party, that the nature of work can only be fundamentally altered by a new social system, also has advocates in a significant number of quarters. In a ‘Ted Talk’ from the University of Edinburgh given by Jade Saab in 2018 and called ‘A World Without Money’, the speaker includes a section entitled ‘Why and how we work will be different’. On social media too there are groups hosting similar discussions with names that speak for themselves, for example ‘Moneyless Society’, ‘World of Free Access’, and ‘A group around the world where we are all anti-capitalist’. This is matched in book publication by more than just a few writers proposing various different kinds of non-hierarchical work organisation.

Some of these proposals, when closely scrutinised, amount to suggestions for reorganising capitalism, which we would regard as utopian, since it would be impossible in reality for the capitalist system, given its profit-seeking basis, to implement them. We would agree with Anitra Nelson, in her book Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy, that ‘modified forms of money and markets … are bound to fail’ with the vast majority being ‘unable to enjoy the full benefits of their everyday work and have little say in how they live or work’. Her conclusion is that we cannot ‘tweak the system to overcome its weaknesses’.

Such flaws as pointed to by that writer are also to be found in otherwise perceptive books about work such as Daniel Susskind’s A World Without Work. Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond (2020) and Michael D. Yates’s Work, Work, Work. Labour, Alienation and Class Struggle (2022). But even if the conclusions of those writers fall short of advocating a completely different social order or of being convinced that this may be possible in the foreseeable future, they can still have a lot of powerfully relevant things to say about work and its meaning in human society. Susskind, for example, while in the end not venturing beyond the idea of buying and selling, describes work as ‘a source of meaning, purpose and direction in life with community recognition of that work rather than wages fulfilling the human longing for personal fulfilment and social interaction’. Yates, for his part, states: ‘Regarding work (…) we should strive for a society in which this word is no longer used except to describe the past. What we are, as human beings, is a species that can thoughtfully produce what is needed for survival and enjoyment (…) only cooperative and beneficial production, with substantive equality in all aspects of life’.

Work in a non-market society

But others go further in seeing as a practical possibility a society where work in exchange for payment would not need to take place at all – and this within the framework of a completely different social system than the one that dominates the world at present. Recent examples of this outlook are to be found in Matthew Holten’s book, Moneyless Society. The Next Economic Evolution, in Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work, and in Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass. These writers stress the downsides of employment for money with its imposition of a daily stretch of work, lack of variety, hierarchical organisation, and the potential precariousness of keeping your job. And they are generally keen to point to the fact that, in a future post-capitalist, non-market society, non-socially productive activity (e.g armaments, insurance, banking, sales promotion, taxation, legal contracts, etc) will disappear and all the work that takes place will have a useful and necessary function with no stigma attached to any of it.

As to specific details of how work could be organised in a non-monetary society and the nature it would take, it is probably Benanav who puts his finger on it most tellingly. In his final chapter, entitled ‘Necessity and Freedom’, he argues for ‘the abolition of private property and monetary exchange in favor of planned cooperation’, and ‘a world of fully capacitated individuals … in which every single person could look forward to developing their interests and abilities with full social support’ and which will be ‘the first time in their lives that they could enter truly voluntary agreements – without the gun to their heads of a pervasive material insecurity’. He goes on to say that ‘we would divide up responsibilities while taking into account individual aptitudes and proclivities’ with some tasks needing to be performed locally, but many capable of being ‘planned on a regional or global scale, using advanced computer technologies’. And finally: ‘The realm of freedom would be the one giving rise to all manner of dynamism: that is where human beings would invent new tools, instruments, and methods of accounting, as well as new games and gadgets, rapidly reallocating resources over time and space to suit changing human tastes (…). The world would then be composed of overlapping partial plans, with interrelated necessary and free activities, rather than a single central plan’.

Commentators such as these are clearly not talking here about strategies within capitalism for dealing with problems thrown up by that system, for example climate change or environmental degradation. They are not looking for more ‘sustainable’ ways for production, consumption and work to continue much as before, for ‘green deals’ or for ways of finding replacement work for those who lose their jobs through automation. They are talking rather about a society in which people will no longer have to do jobs they do not necessarily like (or may even hate) just for the money but will be able to do work they want to do and ideally enjoy doing. And for any ‘less popular’ jobs, there would be a focus on automation and the use of robotics to give assistance.

Above all one of the first things that will end in the kind of society being envisaged, which we would call socialism, is the link between work and consumption: what people will consume will not depend on the amount of work they do. Above all people will cooperate to do the work that makes society function and they will make decisions democratically – in workplaces, in their local communities, in their regions and, in some overarching cases, no doubt even globally. Above all there will no longer be top-down control by leaders, governments and bosses and no more money controlling people’s lives, wasting so much of our time and energy. There will be no useless toil, only useful work.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

The following books that were mentioned in the article have been previously reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard:

• Mar 2020: A World Without Work. Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind
• Feb 2021: Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav
• Oct 2022: Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson
• Jan 2023: Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holten
• Mar 2023: Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass
• Oct 2023: Work Work Work. Labor, Alienation and Class Struggle. By Michael D. Yates

Life and Times: Decline (and fall?) (2026)

The Life and Times column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The other day I walked down what used to be the main shopping street of my city centre. When you drive down it, as I frequently do, you don’t take in too much of what’s around you. But on foot I had a close-up view of the stretch that, not so long ago, had some of the best known and most popular shops and businesses in town. What did I see? As I walked along from one end of the street to the other, these were the establishments on view:

1. T’s Nail and Spa (operating)
2. Flamingo’s Vintage (closed and to let)
3. Shaw’s Drapers (closed and to let)
4. The Hanbury Pub (open – having closed and reopened several times)
5. Winning Post Betting Office (operating)
6. Della Cura Authentic Italian Restaurant (closed and not operating)
7. Info Nation NHS Health Board Support (closed and not operating)
8. Chic and Elegant Bridal Wear (open)
9. Ali’s Barbers (open)
10. Greyhound Rescue Charity Shop (open)
11. Warhammer Shop (open)
12. RSPCA Charity Shop (open)
13. Kings Mart Convenience Store (open 6am till late)
14. Brides Bridal Wear (open)

What did this tell me? Firstly, it told me the obvious thing – that this city centre like so many others across the country has taken a hit as a place for people to come and do their shopping, to mingle and maybe to socialise over a drink. It also told me that shops that close are likely to stay closed or, at best, be turned into charity shops, barbers or open-all-hours convenience stores. All of which gives the place a bit of a run-down, derelict look. But, as well as this, walking along that stretch also made me think of the loss of livelihood and perhaps way of life for the people who’d previously worked there, whether as bosses or employees. Some of them at least (for example, the women who’d worked in Shaw’s Drapers for years and I’d got to know a bit from going in there) would have had their existences upended. True, some may have found opportunities or jobs elsewhere, but others may not and the very process of needing to look would have been likely to cause worry, anxiety and maybe even deprivation, all of course hidden from public view. Not that what I saw on that street is unique to this particular location. A similar situation is to be found across many towns and cities in this country and others with bleak effects both on the urban environment and on the people who worked in it.

How much does it matter? After all, people can still obtain most of the goods or services those shops once provided either online or from those large, if usually soulless, edge-of-town or out-of-town stores and supermarkets. And the chances are that most of the people working in the establishments that have gone will have found other work that enables them to make ends meet. As for the visual decline, if the loss of shopping outlets means that people have little or less need to frequent city centres, then they will rarely even come into contact with that.

But isn’t there another side to it? The degeneration of town and city centres has not just lessened their attraction as places to shop but has also meant the diminution of a communal environment for people to meet and fraternise with others and generally feel part of a wider community. Such closeness to fellow human beings has been a fundamental feature of human societies over the 300,000 years that the species has existed, even if it’s something that today’s capitalist’s society militates against. With profit as its mainspring, human togetherness and community hardly feature among its priorities.

And in fact, apart from the demise of community, what we are seeing on my High St with the disappearance or at best rapid turnover of small businesses, is the tireless, unrelenting mission capitalism imposes on all who live under it. It is a system that simply can’t keep still. It ducks, dives and twists at every moment as the market dictates and in pursuit of financial returns. The system’s very nature allows nothing else and at its sharp end are those who do all the work, be they self-employed business owners or, more overwhelmingly, wage and salary workers.

But isn’t there a bright side? On the one hand we have the competitive dog-eat-dog mentality that the system’s money-driven, growth-at-all-costs logic drives and that some say is just part of ‘human nature’. Yet, on the other, the fundamentally friendly, cooperative and empathetic nature of human beings never ceases to shine through in the countless exchanges that take place between people every day and everywhere. It may be in the concern for the welfare of others to be seen in charity and other voluntary activities or just the simple everyday exchanges between vehicle drivers as they slow down or stop to let others pass and are acknowledged with a wave. This gives us hope that, whatever the fate of the High Street shops and businesses in my own city or elsewhere, the basic ineradicable feeling of fellowship that characterises humans will eventually be fully activated and be part of what drives workers to unite to replace the current production for profit society with a quite different one of production for need.

Howard Moss

Work: paid and unpaid – Part 1 (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of my working life was spent teaching in a university. I consider myself to have been reasonably well paid for the work I did. And the superannuation scheme I paid into has yielded a reasonable pension. The same applied to my workplace contemporaries, fellow wage-slaves who started and finished their careers at more or less the same time as me. But, if I look at them, they’ve not all had identical reactions to ending their paid employment.

‘Bored out of my skull’

Some of them have carried on with a particular aspect of the work they did before – their academic research – but independently. And even though they’re no longer paid for it, they seem reasonably content. Others have been less happy. They’ve found themselves at a loose end with no teaching or associated work, and see no point in carrying on with any research given that it’s no longer connected to a day job. They see working in isolated fashion as no longer affording them the recognition and approbation of their colleagues and of their wider academic community. I found an example of this when I ran into a former colleague some time ago, several months after he’d retired in his early 60s. I asked him how things were going. He seemed pretty miserable and replied: ‘I’m bored out of my skull’. He sounded and looked angry and frustrated. I didn’t know what to do other than wish him well.

Volunteering

So these are a couple of the kind of reactions that workers in what was my own line of work may have in response to no longer doing paid work. But there’s also a third category – those who, having finished their paid employment, feel they’ve been set free, and this has made them decide to involve themselves in activities which are usually unpaid and often quite different from the paid work they did. Sometimes it’s a continuation of things they devoted a certain amount of time and energy to in their spare time before, such as looking after family members, for example grandchildren, or involvement in political or social activity such as campaigning or charity work, or participation in a voluntary group of some kind. In my own case, for instance, I agreed to be recruited to a committee of volunteers who run my local Community Centre. Once there, I found that two of my former work colleagues, now retired like me, were also active there and in the community more widely. One of them was heavily involved in helping to organise a local food bank of the kind that has sprung up in increasing numbers in recent times. A common factor in this kind of activity is the obvious personal satisfaction people who engage in it derive from their new unpaid, ‘non-professional’ work. And it is of course a form of work, in that it involves expending mental or physical energy, even if many people wouldn’t necessarily think of it as such, since there’s no suggestion of any financial recompense from it. But, however they regard it, the motivation, rather, is the perception that they’re doing something useful, experiencing a sense of community, and also enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.

As well as this, two other activities have absorbed my own time and energies in a practical and satisfying way since retirement. The first has been increased activity in the trade union that, though retired from work, I’m still a member of. With the forbearance of my former employer, I’m still able to handle personal cases or pension matters for members, as I did when I was employed. And I have more time to do this than those colleagues who also volunteer for union work but still have paid jobs. The second has been playing an increased part in Socialist Party activity – helping to organise my local branch, giving talks, going to events to try and spread the socialist message, writing columns, articles and book reviews for this journal.

Hierarchical work

Some of the reviews have actually been of books on the subject of work in its various different aspects. This seems, in fact, to be an area in which there’s a good deal of interest at present – interest stimulated by the fact that, in recent times, say over the last 30-40 years, the face of employment has changed in a number of noteworthy ways. In particular, it has become increasingly what may be called ‘hierarchised’. The ‘flat structures’ in the workplace that were being talked about and to a certain extent practised in the 1960s and 70s and seen as the way of the future began to fall out of favour and to give way to more rigid, authoritarian line management systems, so that most workers effectively had someone ‘higher up’ breathing down their necks, assessing them, judging their work or productivity – and sometimes intimidating them.

I saw that in my own field of employment, where it was accompanied by the invention of various terms, such as ‘lean production’ or ‘agile working’, to try and give a benign, softening impression to a more rigid form of workplace organisation. Critics of this new form of work discipline gave it other names such as management by stress or managerial feudalism (or even managerial fascism). The way American mathematician and political activist Eric Schechter characterises it in his video ‘Only Revolution Can Save Life on Earth’ is brutally simple: ‘workplaces are dictatorships’. Certainly, in many cases, the process consists of workers’ performance being subjected to close surveillance, with their efficiency or productivity judged on a regular basis via performance targets, sometimes referred to as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). And this with the shadow of a possible ‘capability process’ hanging over them, which can potentially lead to dismissal.

An irony here of course is that the manager conducting the KPI operation is usually her or himself subject to the same process at the hands of the person who is their manager. It’s hard not to be reminded here of Oscar Wilde’s famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, where he writes: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it and degrades those over whom it is exercised’.

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone, authors of the book Wageless Life, are just as uncompromisingly critical. They describe work of whatever kind under capitalism as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’, describing it as ‘a war of profit against life on earth’, in which workers are denied the ability to control how they work and so suffer a disconnection that ‘separates them from the material conditions that allow humans to flourish’. Capitalism, they go on to say, fosters ‘the utter worship of paid work’ and in so doing ‘thrives on producing docile subjects who are alienated from their surroundings’. One of their conclusions is: ‘We live in a world sculpted by money but populated by the moneyless.’ Very much akin to this, if expressed in milder language, is Martin Luther King’s well-known maxim: ‘profit forces people to be more concerned with making a living than making a life.’ A similar more recent characterisation says: ‘the greatest prison has no bars, just a paycheck, a routine and weekends off’.

Not all ‘bullshit jobs’

While we would broadly endorse such an analysis, it is also necessary to point to the fact that not all paid work is equally dispiriting, unsatisfying and alienating. So while it’s surely true, for example, that, if they didn’t need a wage to survive, no man or woman would willingly choose to sit at the entrance to a supermarket all day looking at a screen to check if anyone is stealing or looks as though they might steal, at the same time there’s no doubt that some paid work, even if accompanied by conditions of insecurity or duress, can give significant pleasure or satisfaction to those who carry it out. And while that supermarket guard job is one of the many millions that exist across the planet in the system we live under (so-called ‘bullshit jobs’), constituting a colossal waste of talents, energies and resources, in some cases even the rigid and unforgiving employment practices already mentioned can be offset to an extent by an individual’s passionate interest in the work they are engaged in – maybe for example as a naturalist, a scientist, a computer programmer, or as a gardener or a builder.

It’s only fair to point out too that some challenges have arisen to the hierarchy and intensification of employment practice in recent years, and from some quarters there have also emerged striking (sometimes revolutionary) ideas and recommendations concerning work organisation. These are the areas that Part 2 of this article next month will discuss before going on to look at ways in which work might be organised in the different, non-coercive, moneyless production for need society that socialists campaign to see established.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone's 'Wageless Life. A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism' was reviewed in the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Potential abundance (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundance. How We Build a Better Future. By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Profile Books. 2025. 289pp.

The August 1970 edition of the Socialist Standard was a special issue with the phrase ‘A World of Abundance’ emblazoned across its front page. It featured a series of articles seeking to demonstrate how humankind already had the knowledge, the resources and the technology to produce an abundance of the things needed by all the people in the world but how their use and development were being held back by the economic and social restrictions of our present profit-based system of society – capitalism. How much truer this is now – more than 50 years on – given the vast further advances in knowledge and technology. Yet the same system still grinds on failing to use its potential and resources to satisfy everyone’s needs and instead condemning vast swathes of people to live in poverty, most others to get by on the insecurity of one month’s pay to the next, while permitting a tiny minority to enjoy untold amounts of wealth which they will always seek to increase.

So any discussion of this phenomenon or proposal to remedy it, such as promised by the title of this book by the two well-known American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, can only be welcomed. This is especially the case as the book’s back cover is unequivocal in the view it expresses: ‘We have the means to build an equitable world without hunger, fuelled by clean energy. Instead, we have a politics driven by scarcity, lives defined by unaffordability.’ What’s not to like about such a statement?

More specifically the book’s authors allow themselves to imagine a breathtaking future in which, for example, climate change can be reversed by removing carbon dioxide from the air, overuse of land for growing crops and feeding animals can be remedied by ‘vertical greenhouses which feed far more people while using far less land’, and technology will permit ‘an economy with robots that build our houses and machines that take on our most dangerous and soul-draining work’. They consider furthermore that, with appropriate and effective use of sun and wind in particular, humanity has ‘the gift of abundant energy’ and, contrary to advocates of ‘degrowth’, is capable, if it uses that gift correctly, of supporting its current population (and more) without exacerbating ecological breakdown.

August 1970 Socialist Standard

Yet, despite such radically invigorating leaps of the imagination and the words ‘abundance and ‘better future’ in the title of this book, anyone thinking that the authors’ proposals for building that future will involve radically changing the society that currently exists so as to make that abundance available to all is in for a disappointment. That is not what they are calling for. Their quest rather is to explore the ways in which what they see as the bureaucratic excesses of capitalism can be reduced to make that system run more efficiently and less wastefully and thereby provide a somewhat better, somewhat less unequal system for most people.

They back this up with an admirable wealth of information, evidence and documentation. They have thoroughly immersed themselves in the details of capitalist organisation (especially in the US), thereby putting themselves in a knowledgeable position to critique its waste and inefficiencies on what might be called a micro level. But it is not their purpose to go any further than this, for example to challenge the system’s underlying profit imperative or to consider whether the best (or only) way of realising the potential for equality and abundance is a complete change of social organisation.

To be fair, however, the authors’ efficiency and anti-waste agenda is at least aimed at suggesting ways in which the existing system can, at least as they see it, be made ‘more equal’. So they are writing from what might be called a humanitarian perspective, looking for what they see as practical forms of adjustment to the system – ways, for example, of providing homes for the homeless, of making poor people less poor and of providing easily accessible healthcare. Most of this they consider achievable through state intervention in the economy, which they hope can lead to a fairer distribution of wealth and to more people having decent living standards, even if this means ‘fettering’ some producers’ ‘obsession with profit’.

The trouble is that experience in many different countries has shown that governments cannot ignore or overcome the economic laws of capitalism and its market and, if they try, via reforms of one kind or another, the success they have is limited. And if they go too far, this can trigger reduced investment leading to economic crises, recession and unemployment, leading them to change policies or be voted out of office. The simple fact is that, however governments may try to release the potential abundance that technology promises, the system presents them with insurmountable obstacles, since by its nature it cannot be redirected from profit-seeking to meeting people’s needs.

So, the limits of this book’s ambitions are clear to see, shot through as it is with acceptance of the status quo, of the system of working for wages and salaries, of buying and selling, of governments and governed, and of division of the world into those competing economic units known as nations. In stating that they would like to see us ‘align our collective genius with the needs of the planet and each other’, Klein and Thompson are certainly proposing an admirable goal. But it is one that can only be achieved after capitalism has been abolished and society reorganised on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the earth’s natural and industrial resources.

Howard Moss