Just another day (2025)

A Short Story from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘You know that’s bullshit, right?’ Kelly looked up from his coffee and gave me a hard stare across the kitchen table.

I closed my eyes. I wanted sympathy, not a political debate.

‘Actually, no. I don’t think that at all,’ I said. And damn! I sounded querulous.

Kelly and I had been mates from childhood, messing around together, and propping each other up through life’s inevitable traumas. He was funny and loyal and caring, always willing to lend a hand. He was the brother I never had. And yet, at times like this, I didn’t actually like him much. We had never been on the same page politically but in the last five years he’d become a convert to so called “libertarianism”, and turned starry-eyed by the so-called magic of the market. Whenever he got political these days, he showed a callous streak, and it always came as a shock when I saw it. People have more defensive layers than there are geological strata in the Grand Canyon – layers cemented together by the anxiety of living in an unnecessarily insecure and unsociable world. It seemed to me that Kelly had grown to be at odds with his own nature.

I hadn’t intended to call on him that morning. After breakfast I’d headed into town on foot on a mission to replace my old, and now defunct, washing machine. Did I say, ‘old’? I’d bought it eight years ago and I wasn’t happy that it had died already. My previous machine had lasted me 35 years with barely a hitch.

It was a drizzly Saturday in February, the sort of day that makes you feel bleak inside. Passing the corner shop at the entrance to Kel’s road, I remembered that his wife, Margaret was up in Aberdeen for the week helping her sister care for an elderly father with dementia. Kel would probably be at home on his own. I turned aside and headed downhill towards his house. When he opened the door he was looking tired. We went through into the kitchen where he’d been working. He swept aside a pile of paperwork on the table and closed his laptop. We sat down.

‘Tax returns?’

He pulled a face.

We drank coffee, and talked of personal issues, of music and motorcycles and eventually of washing machines. I tried to avoid the topic, but you know how it is. It was like suffering a state of general inflammation. The topic emerged as a moan, the moan hardened into a rant, and I was soon well into it. The machine had broken down at a bad time. Only a month earlier I’d forked out a lot of cash to replace my failed boiler. Now there was this.

When it broke down at first, I wasn’t too bothered. I called Frank. He came over later that afternoon wearing the same tool belt he’d had for decades. He pulled the machine out from under the counter, prodded inside for a bit, grunted and then gave me a sympathetic look.

‘It’s the…X’ He said,

‘What’s an X?’ I had no idea.

It turned out to be something small but vital. The crucial detail however was that it was sealed inside the drum. That meant the whole drum assembly would have to be replaced as a unit, and that was going to cost me an arm and a leg. It would be more economical just to replace the whole machine. I trusted Frank. He’d been doing jobs for me for decades. He leaned up against the counter with a cup of tea and launched into a well-rehearsed diatribe.

Thirty years ago, he told me, manufacturers of domestic appliances made available a full range of replacement parts through their own repair people and through independent businesses. These days, once a new model went on sale, replacement parts for the old one became rare as hen’s teeth. Not that it often made any difference. In washing machines, it was common practice, these days, to spot-weld the drums, sealing components inside them and making them inaccessible when they failed. Customers were forced to buy new machines while their existing ones were still largely in good working order. Frank looked me straight in the eyes and grimaced. I nodded. I’d heard a depressingly similar story from the Gas Safe engineer who had been unable to source parts for my boiler.

After I’d shown Frank out, I got online and checked out a number of consumer magazines and independent repair companies. I was soon scribbling away in a notebook. The average life of a washing machine these days is seven years. Seven! Apart from the expense to the customer this represented immense wastage of resources and employees’ labour when they could have been doing something more useful. ‘Criminal!’ Frank had called it. Independent maintenance companies were reporting components designed to break down after a certain number of washes (a remarkably small number in some cases).

Kel sat listening while I spilled all this out across the table. He looked increasingly sceptical. This was going to result in an argument, but I was too far gone to stop.

‘Planned obsolescence is everywhere these days’ I said.

My words worked on him like some kind of dark magic.

‘C’mon, that’s left-wing bullshit,’ he said. He was trying hard to keep his tone moderate but there was a snarl in his voice.

We had hit a familiar impasse. Kel wore Free-Market Economic Theory like a cloak of invulnerability. I often wondered in these moments how our friendship survived. I gave him a crooked look.

‘It makes no sense,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘Why would a business do that? Companies aren’t stupid. If something ends up being a piece of junk, who’s going to buy it again?’ He stopped and stared at me. ‘We’ve been through this before…’

‘Yes we have.’ I sighed. ‘There’s no point pretending it doesn’t happen when it plainly does. What about the Phoebus Cartel.’

‘Not that again! Socialists always trot that one out.’

‘And that kinda means it didn’t happen?’

‘It only lasted a few years’.

‘That’s not true!’

The doings of the Phoebus Cartel are well recorded and it’s an often quoted example of ‘planned obsolescence’. In 1925 light bulb manufacturers across America, Europe and Japan got together and agreed to make bulbs that lasted a maximum of 1,000 hours, despite their having lasted up to 2,500 hours before that time. The cartel was intended to last 30 years, but was forced to break up in 1939 at the onset of war. For a long time after the war, however, manufacturers continued independently to produce bulbs designed to fail after 1,000 hours. Even without the discipline of the cartel, they realised it was both individually and collectively in their interests (and very much against the interests of their customers) to carry on doing this. An individual company might win more customers by doubling the life of its bulbs, but they would sell only half the number they had before, not just to new customers but to their existing ones as well. And if one company did it, capitalism being a competitive system, other companies would be forced to follow suit. Kel’s idealised formula for how perfectly the market works in the customer’s interest failed to represent reality.

He scowled at me. ‘Washing machines don’t last as long these days because customers want cheaper products, so that’s what they get. What do they expect?’

‘Well that’s true, but people have limited incomes,’ I said. ‘They have always wanted cheaper products. So why weren’t they being produced cheaper before? And besides, how does that explain the use of sealed units’.

Washing machines are cheaper today for a variety of reasons, all to do with the profit motive and market economics: technology has advanced and the costs of manufacture have fallen. The market for white goods has become hotly competitive in recent years, which is driving down prices. And many of the components used are now being outsourced to low-wage economies.

In Kel’s ideological world customers control the market. Companies, it is argued, only produce what customers want. It follows, in theory and in Kel’s mind, that if washing machines don’t last as long as they used to, then it must be the working-class consumer’s fault for demanding cheaper goods. What a surprise. It is extraordinary that no matter how free-market economics theorises a problem, by some magic it invariably turns out to be working people’s fault.

‘C’mon Kel. Major companies have even admitted introducing all kinds of ways to limit their product’s lifespan, or making them unrepairable. Apple and Samsung for instance.’

‘Apple and Samsung don’t make washing machines,’ he snapped.

I threw up my eyes. It was Kel now who was sounding querulous.

‘We’re not just talking about washing machines. Obsolescence is widespread. It’s a consequence of the capitalist market system. There have been lawsuits taken out against companies in the EU for it. Against Epson, for instance. You’re clinging to a theory that justifies your belief in capitalism but doesn’t represent reality. Competition is built into the system, which means that if one company introduces a degree of planned obsolescence, they all have to.’ He said nothing, just pulled a face to show how stupid I was to believe anything so irrational.

There are multiple ways manufacturers have of manipulating consumer purchases. Back in the day Henry Ford figured out that by bringing out new models of cars regularly, he could stimulate public desires for novelty and get them to dump their old machines before they needed to. Mobile phone companies do the same today, producing new models every year, often with only minor improvements, or with a ‘new’ look which gets marketed as the latest must-have item. Newness is sexy. At the same time as new models appear, companies flood the market with adverts extolling their virtues, and people start to notice their existing phones are running unaccountably slow. Owning glitzy new things indicates status. It fills the emotional hole left inside us by the loss of community and closeness.

Kel stood up abruptly and left the room. I stared at the rain running down the windowpane and sighed. No matter how hard we tried to avoid these confrontations, they kept occurring. It was a couple of minutes before he came back. He stood in the doorway. His frown deepened for a moment, but then he exploded into laughter. I smiled and shook my head.

‘Sounds tough. Do you need some cash,’ he asked? ‘I’m not badly placed at the moment.’

I looked down at his tax returns. Even if true, I knew it was a half-truth at best. His work was seasonal. This was not his best time of year.

‘I’ll get by. I’ll need to economise for a while. No extras. Right now, though, I need to go and buy this bloody machine or else I shall start to stink.’ I got up, and we walked to the front door.

‘Give my love to Margaret’ I said when we reached the hallway. ‘When is she due back?’

He sighed. ‘Depends how long she’s needed. Her sister is pretty exhausted looking after their dad. He wandered out of the house by himself last week and got lost. They had to call the police.’

‘Ouch!’ I knew that situation from personal experience.

He shrugged and then nodded. ‘It is what it is! We cope.’

I said goodbye, pulled up my hood and walked down his path into a February drizzle. For a while my head was full of messy thoughts and feelings. Money, property, competition: they screwed up all our relations. Capital value dominated our lives. Kel, though, was a good friend, whatever differences we might have. That was something of real value to hold on to. I pulled myself back to the here and now. The road on either side was lined with a jumble of small businesses, pubs and tiny Victorian terraces built originally for railway workers. They looked shabby now. I skirted a few gathering puddles, dodged some pedestrians hurrying towards the station, and prepared myself mentally to do battle with sales staff eager for a sales commission.

Hud.

This old money game (2025)

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In December, 2022 a music video entitled Hi Ren appeared on YouTube. The name of the singer-songwriter-guitarist was Ren. The video was over nine minutes long, virtually an epic by music industry standards. It was a live recording made on a shoestring budget. The song vividly dramatised the singer’s mental health issues and state of inner conflict, conditions which many can relate to. Within two months Hi Ren had gone viral, gathering nearly seven million views and coming to the attention of a host of online music reactors – people who post videos of themselves reacting to other people’s music. Few of those reacting to Hi Ren for the first time had ever heard of its creator, and many were clearly unprepared for what they were to witness.

Intrigued and eager for more, they began reacting to Ren’s extensive back catalogue of online music videos, and to new songs that he continued to drop over the following months. It soon became clear to everyone that here was a musician of exceptional skill and versatility. Ren was an accomplished singer, rapper, guitarist, songwriter and keyboard player. He was also a superb storyteller, performer and producer of his own music videos. His songs were never predictable. They broke convention and they defied genre. Musicians, film makers, videographers, and music lovers enthused online about the way he was breaking open the moulds into which commercial interests had been pouring popular music in recent years.

Dirty-grey average

Capitalism is often praised for innovation and choice, yet the logic of its drive to maximise profit induces companies to turn out products with the widest possible appeal, thereby reducing them to a dirty-grey average. In the popular music industry this tendency to sameness has deepened in recent years thanks to the availability of sophisticated data-analysis tools. Recording companies are now increasingly able to identify and predict the kind of hooks and singing styles that make hit songs. Having once established a winning formula, they mobilise teams of in-house songwriters to churn out pattern-book songs which big-name singers and musicians are then contracted to record and convert into cash. New post-production technology is used to ‘optimise’ the product by electronically removing glitches and correcting imperfections in studio performances. It is now possible electronically to adjust a wobbly vocal line, repair an off-key note, or smooth out an uneven beat. The result is another glossily perfect musical product tumbling off the production line. Commercial radio stations help to magnify this tendency to sameness by demanding songs which fit neatly into their time slots, deal with the right kind of easy-going and uncontroversial themes, and have catchy ‘hooks’ designed to snag listeners.

The music industry as a whole is notoriously ruthless and litigious. Capitalism’s property system makes it prone to scams and money grubbing. Often this involves the murky legal world of copyright. Ren appears recently to have himself fallen foul of just such a scam. Typically, he has responded to it by speaking openly online and making a music video about it. Such openness is unusual and has attracted support from other musicians who have suffered in the same way. Uploaded music videos are themselves often targets for online scammers. In one such fraud, recently exposed, scammers have been using a green screen to remove video images of original artists from videos of Britain’s Got Talent and similar TV shows, and then insert video images of themselves lip synching to the vocals. By uploading the manipulated videos onto their own platforms and attracting an audience they are able to obtain money from the advertising revenue generated.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Yet every so often a creative artist comes along who is able to communicate with music of such originality and directness that they can bypass the big companies and attract their own audience. Ten months after Hi Ren went viral, Ren dropped a self-produced album of his own music called Sick Boi. Without corporate backing, with almost no radio exposure, and without the publicity of live shows, the album floated serenely up the British top 40 chart to take the number one position. Ren had arrived – much to his own apparent surprise.

Who is Ren?

So, who is this man? Ren is the professional name of Ren Eryn Gill, an open, generous and appealingly boyish musician, now aged 34, hailing from a remote Welsh village on the Isle of Anglesey. His personal story is studded with drama and tragedy. Signed up to Sony Records at the age of 19, he was forced to abandon the recording of his first album by the onset of severe ill health. He returned home to Anglesey where he became bed-ridden and suffered excruciating pain for eight years. He developed auto-immune disease and experienced a stress-induced psychotic breakdown. During this time, his best friend committed suicide on the Menai Bridge. His illness was repeatedly misdiagnosed until, after years of useless therapy and medication, a private physician in Brussels identified his condition as Lyme disease. Treatment for the disease has now partially restored his health, but having harboured the infection for so long, it is likely that his body will never fully recover.

Convinced that his chance of a major career in music was over, Ren went back to busking on the streets of Brighton, and producing low (or zero) budget videos of his own music. These rapidly gathered a following of loyal fans. And then, in 2022, he dropped Hi Ren and his world exploded. He now has almost 2.2 million YouTube subscribers and Hi Ren has 56 million views worldwide. Those numbers continue to climb.

Ren has taken the experience of his personal tragedy and his struggle to fulfil himself as a creative musician and universalised it into something highly relatable. In his own words, ‘I owe much of my success to the most destructive force in my life, which has been the turbulence of my physical and mental illness’. His music addresses difficult social issues such as mental health, suicide, and the cycle of child abuse. It communicates with raw emotion enhanced by his habit of recording his songs live, in a single take, and with minimal post-production work, a procedure almost unheard of today. Minor glitches in performance are left unedited. This side of his art has touched people of all ages. Comment sections of his online videos are flooded with accounts of how listening to his music has given new hope and even saved lives. Yet, not all of his music deals with difficult subjects. He has a strong sense of humour coupled with an apparent lack of inhibition. His songs vary from the cheeky to the deeply serious. And interwoven into many of them is yet another theme: the nature of capitalist violence and our own complicity in maintaining the system. A trilogy of music videos entitled Money Game, Parts 1, 2 and 3, tackles this theme head on.

Portrait of capitalism

Ren’s music and story-telling skills find particularly powerful expression in Money Game 3, which focuses on the life and career of ‘Jimmy’, who is driven to win his father’s approval by seeking success in business. By his late teens he is already amassing capital. On his way up the financial ladder, he discovers the potency of the lie and the capacity of capitalism’s money game to translate wealth into political power. His business dealings become increasingly risky and illegal. When his father dies of a heart attack his obsessive search for wealth and power become both socially and personally destructive. As the lyrics of Money Game 3 put it, ‘he followed the code in the land of the free: put your hand in the cookie jar and take more than you need’. Jimmy eventually overreaches, is injured in a shootout between drug cartels, and becomes confined to a wheelchair. Too late, he comes face to face with the consequences of his actions and values.

Ren’s exceptional story-telling ability has left a huge impression on his audience. As Money Game 3 tells us, Jimmy is an ‘exaggerated version’ of you and me. He is an Everyman, both complicit with, and a victim of, the system. One reactor responding to Ren’s message nailed it: ‘When you talk to people individually, it seems like everybody gets it, but then we kinda go right back to that lifestyle, because that’s just the way that the world works. It sucks, but it only works that way because of us.’ (Duane Reacts). We are all indoctrinated into the capitalist system and its ideologies from an early age through our parents, through an organised system of schooling which denies children control over their lives, and through the ideologically driven media. The message drummed into Jimmy’s head is that financial success is the only meaningful kind.

Money Game 3 is a punch in the guts, a dramatic piece of musical theatre which won Ren and his friend/videographer, Samuel Perry-Flavey, an award for the best Independent European music video of 2024. Together, the three Money Game videos deal with the violence arising from the profit system, and as well as its impact on attitudes to immigration. They show how we uncritically adopt and reproduce the values promoted by capitalism. It is a fact of life that we can no more stand outside our own society than we can stand outside our own skin, and yet we are not robots: we can step back, reflect on our experience and identify where it clashes with the conventional values and practices of our world. Socialism is, in part, a process of learning to overcome our indoctrination.

The three Money Game videos paint a picture of our world that many recognise. Recognition, however, is insufficient to provide a secure insight into how the system works or how it can be addressed. Ren describes himself as an anti-capitalist, someone who rejects a society that puts profits above people. He has all but denied that he is a socialist. Nevertheless, as socialists we can recognise the portrait of capitalism that he gives us. We can unpack the clues in his work to show that the only way to reject ‘profit over people’ is to reject profit and the money game altogether.

Now that Ren’s star is rising will he continue to resist the blandishments of the music industry or sign up with a record label? If he signs up, he will have greater resources to put into the music he is so passionate about making, but unless he becomes such a highly bankable commodity that he is capable of dictating his own terms it would almost certainly mean a loss of creative freedom. The money game would soon consume him.

At the moment, it looks like he is strongly resisting. True to character, though, he has spoken openly about his own inner conflicts on the matter. We can empathise. These are the inner conflicts and compromises familiar to anyone caught in the contradiction of advocating for a world beyond the destructiveness and repression of the capitalist system, but who, for now, has to live and survive within it. While capitalism persists, however, a socialist perspective helps us to focus on the goal of achieving a world which is more social, more humane and more satisfying than the one we have at present.

Hud.

How we live and how we might live (concluded) (2025)

From the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

In a voluntary society without a monetary incentive, who would choose to do the dirty work? Wouldn’t people avoid it (surely that’s human nature)? And wouldn’t that have serious consequences for society?

Talk to an apologist for capitalism and you will almost certainly be told at some point that the system’s competitive private property structure is well adapted to meet the demands of ‘human nature’. According to capitalist apologists our ‘nature’ is self-interested and competitive. How do they know this? Well, they say, look around at the way people actually do behave. Competitive and self-interested behaviour is to be found everywhere. As socialists, we have no disagreement with that. In property-based societies like our own, selfish and competitive behaviour is ubiquitous.

But does that define our ‘nature’? In reality, we know this simple model of ‘human nature’ leaves a lot out. We can begin by drawing our apologist’s attention to Douglas Adams’s parable of the puddle: one rainy morning a puddle wakes up in a large pothole. It scans the world around it and is delighted to discover that the pothole is exactly the right shape to accommodate it, and the same is true for its companion puddles and their potholes. The puddle therefore concludes that the world has been designed specifically for the needs of puddles. We can apply this analogy to our current society and ask whether capitalism’s private property system has been designed to accommodate an intrinsically selfish and competitive ‘human nature’ as the capitalist apologist claims, or, on the contrary, whether the competitive and selfish behaviour we see around us, is a learned strategy for surviving in capitalism.

Wide range of capacities

If we look at human behaviour with a more inclusive eye, we can see that even in a capitalist society, people’s behaviour is not solely competitive and selfish, but is often deeply co-operative and generous. Modern capitalism itself consists of huge businesses which employ thousands of people all co-operating together. In our domestic lives, family members support each other, they help out friends with time and money, and they give generously to charitable causes at home and abroad. Donald Trump’s withdrawal of USAID, for example, while applauded by his ideological supporters, has also generated a large backlash as evidence builds of the deadly effects of withdrawal on the populations USAID previously supported.

Human beings are capable of self-interested and competitive behaviour, and also co-operation, kindness and generosity. Rather than ‘human nature’, it would be more accurate to speak of a wide range of ‘human capacities’. We then have to ask what determines which of our capacities predominates in an individual or in a particular society, and under what circumstances. Research in social psychology points to the fact that though we have a capacity for both co-operation and competition, both are socially learned behaviours. If a society is organised on the basis of property relations that isolate individuals and set them in competition with one another, then the best way for its members to survive in such a system will be to behave competitively. If society is organised to produce what we need co-operatively and without private ownership or the profit motive, then this is how things get done, and everyone learns and values much more co-operative behaviour.

At this point our apologist will still insist that even if we have a wide range of capacities, without externally imposed incentives like money wages, individuals will ‘naturally’ gravitate to doing pleasant or interesting tasks and to avoid unpleasant ones. If you ask most people would they rather do something they enjoy than something they don’t, we can probably guess the answer. But dirty work is not necessarily unenjoyable. Many people in the UK and elsewhere do dirty jobs for low wages. It is also the case that all actions have consequences. And those consequences may in themselves be pleasant or unpleasant. Very often actions we find pleasant to do have unpleasant consequences that we want to avoid and vice versa. Humans are not robots, but conscious beings that can estimate consequences and judge how they act on that basis.

Psychological needs

According to research in social psychology, humans have three psychological needs which motivate us strongly to act. We have a need for ‘relatedness’ with our fellows, a need for autonomy and a need to obtain mastery over our environment.

Relatedness: Human beings have never lived isolated lives. We are social creatures and we seek to act and live our lives in collaboration with others. Moreover, we commit ourselves to looking after those we identify and bond with. In capitalist society where the property-based employer-employee relationship divides us economically and forces us to compete, we do not go to work to provide for society in general, but for a wage in order to support ourselves and our families. Our ability to expend time and resources to care for others outside our narrow circle of family and friends is necessarily limited, and if it cuts into the time available for employment, comes at a cost to ourselves. In a socialist society of common ownership and free access, productive activity is not carried on directly to meet our own needs. Our needs are met freely, and we freely give our time to meet the needs of the community of which we are a part. In such a society the circle of those we act for and identify with widens dramatically. And because we have free access to the things we need, the time we give to others never affects our entitlement.

Autonomy: We are motivated to seek relatedness, but we are also motivated to seek personal autonomy, the ability within society to freely make our own choices and decisions. Autonomy is different from ‘independence’ which is a powerful buzz-word in capitalist apologetics. ‘Independence’ has to do with not relying on others. This means that autonomy, the freedom to choose, is compatible with our human need for relatedness, but independence is not. Although capitalist ideology often likes to deny it, our lives are wholly dependent on others, from our first breath to our last. Human beings as we know from experience have a capacity to dominate others. But we also have a powerful drive: a capacity to resist domination. We do not feel comfortable when others exercise power over our lives. People can only dominate us, however, if our society is organised in ways that allow some individuals to stand in the way of our access to the means of life, as occurs in capitalism’s wages system. Dominance hierarchies of this kind limit our freedom and control. A voluntarist society like socialism which is organised without a dominance hierarchy allows us much more autonomy (freedom) and relatedness.

Mastery: Human beings in general are strongly motivated to seek mastery. It may be that we want to become a better guitarist, to produce better carpentry joints, to write better poetry, to bake fancier breads, to become a better astronomer, to invent new technologies. Our drive to achieve mastery in our skills and knowledge often provides good illustrations of the activity/consequence relation discussed earlier. In order to achieve mastery of the guitar for instance, many people are prepared to put themselves through hundreds of hours of a monotonous and often frustrating learning process while painfully developing the calluses on their fingertips which allow them to play their chosen instrument. Satisfaction may be the end goal of our activity, but it may not at all be a feature of the activity itself.

Extrinsic motivators like money tend to suppress our intrinsic motivations for relatedness, autonomy and mastery. In a voluntaristic socialist society without dependence on an employer, we become free to make our own decisions about how we act and how we develop our skills. Without the blinkers of the wages system, which subordinates our actions to a narrow self-interest, we develop a much broader concept of our mutual interdependence. To the extent that some work, therefore, remains ‘dirty’, our much-extended sociability and a shared identity allows us to find value and meaning in contributing to the communal process of meeting our collective needs. And because we have much extended choice, there is also much we can do to eliminate ‘dirty’ work altogether or to make it more attractive.

Questions to ask

1. Is the ‘dirty’ activity necessary? Maybe we are happy to live with the consequences of not doing it. The consequences of certain mining activities for precious jewels, for instance, we might choose to live without.

2. If we can’t live with the consequences, is the work really that unpleasant? We often exaggerate how unpleasant some work is. Many people happily do work that others find ‘dirty’. The dirtiness of ‘dirty’ work is often an exaggerated response to a society that identifies ‘cleanliness’ with status so that we respond to this kind of work with exaggerated disgust. Some people find pleasure in hard physical work, even if it is in ‘dirty’ conditions.

3. If we cannot live with the consequences of not doing the work, and the work is genuinely unpleasant, can we do it a different way? In a socialist society, providing for human need means looking after ourselves in all our roles including that of producers.

3a) Can we make the work ‘cleaner’? A significant amount of ‘dirty work’ in capitalism is only dirty because it is more profitable to organise it that way than to clean it up.

3b) Can we mechanise the work, wholly or partly?

3c) Can we make it pleasanter, by providing, for instance, a better environment, better tools or better protective equipment?

3d) Can we share ‘dirty work’ around more, so that no one does it as a full-time occupation unless they want to?

3e) Can we make the task more sociable, obtaining satisfaction through working together as part of a self-managing team for a common social goal.

3f) Can we find resources and means of having fun while doing it? This may seem like a flippant suggestion, but, if so, ask yourself why? Human beings are a playful species. Under capitalism’s system of employment, time and productivity mean money for the capitalist, so we are taught to be serious in our jobs, to work hard, and to keep our heads down. In socialism, we decide how to balance the effort or unpleasantness of production against how much we think we need.

3g) Can we make the work creative or instructive so that those doing it can advance their knowledge and skills?

Capitalism or socialism?

So, what conclusions have we drawn in this series of articles? We have argued that capitalism is a system based on the employer/employee property relationship which isolates individuals economically from one another and forces them to compete at all levels of society, and that competition frequently spills over into all kinds of conflict, from domestic disputes to gigantic, mechanised world wars. It is the source of poverty, climate crisis, pollution and loss of species diversity.

Socialism, by contrast, is a system of free access, free association and common ownership of the means of production by the whole of society. It extinguishes the profit motive and wasteful competition, undercuts the private ownership of capital and releases a vast amount of labour power tied up, for instance, in the management of capitalism’s monetary system. It undercuts the motivation for greedy behaviour, turns work into productive activity, and laziness into leisure. It also eliminates the need for extrinsic incentives such as money and provides genuinely human motivations like relatedness, autonomy and mastery.

Hud.

How we live and how we might live - Part 8 (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

‘[The claim] that every individual is required to work is a social convention and disciplinary apparatus rather than an economic necessity’ (Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work).

The post-capitalist society being argued for here is one where productive activity is taken up voluntarily by individuals, and access to the social product is open and free. Last month we showed how an objection often made that members of such a society would prefer to lie down and starve rather than do anything to meet their needs was unfounded. We can now look at the many immediate benefits that the structure of such a society would bring even before it developed more elaborate institutions. We have already seen how a system of free access would render ‘greedy’ behaviour pointless or counterproductive. We can now show that the same system of society would undermine the lazy-person argument.

The most immediate impact a free-access society is likely to have on its members would be a huge reduction in the amount of effort they would need to put in to sustain it. Capitalism is immensely inefficient in its use of human labour. Its system of corralling individuals, families and businesses into independent and competing property units, and then routing production through the profit motive, requires a gigantic social apparatus to sustain it. Not only does it force capitalism to maintain an elaborate monetary mechanism, it also requires a means of managing the resulting inefficiencies. Moreover, the competitive nature of the system creates much duplicated effort, and results in a great deal of labour being devoted to the production of useless and shoddy goods.

Wasted labour

In almost all capitalist states large numbers of jobs are dedicated to the management of a central banking system which, besides making valiant attempts at stabilising capitalism’s financial system, concerns itself with the production and issue of money. Upon this foundation whole industries have developed to finance business operations and to service the system’s property relationships. The pensions, insurance and brokerage industries are three of the largest of this kind. Out of a total UK working population of 43 million people well over one million are employed in this sector alone.

The property system also requires capitalist governments to employ armies of civil servants and local government officers to devise and administer welfare and unemployment payments to maintain the workforce through periods of unemployment, to provide for those unable to work, and to top-up the incomes of those whose wages are inadequate. Governments also employ workers to register ownership of land and property, assess and collect taxes, enforce weights and measures, etc. These systems require not only labour for direct planning and administration but also for the production and development of equipment such as computer hardware and software, buildings, stationery products, transport systems and sources of energy.

The bulk of capitalism’s legal systems, its judiciaries and police forces, is dedicated overwhelmingly to adjudicating property contracts, property disputes, and property transgressions, along with crimes against people motivated by monetary gain. Businesses based on gambling like casinos, amusement arcades, bookies, betting shops and stock exchanges flourish in the win-lose system that is central to capitalism. Capitalist states consume labour in the production of armaments and military hardware, for sale to others as well as for their own use. They maintain military personnel to further the interests of businesses within their territories in the international competition for markets, resources, trade routes, and the ability to project power and manoeuvre strategically to secure these essentials. In the aftermath of conflict labour is then deployed for rebuilding what has been destroyed.

Monetary tasks

In the world of business, firms of all kinds must dedicate labour resources to monetary tasks such as bookkeeping, accounting and debt collecting, while the demands of profit maximisation through competitive sale on the market forces them to devote huge labour resources to the advertising and marketing of brands and products. Companies work ceaselessly to bombard us with advertising online, in newspapers and magazines, on TV, at the cinema, on roadside hoardings, on the sides of lorries and buses, on bus shelters and railway platforms and on every available space. Capitalist companies employ labour to research and implement sophisticated psychological techniques for creating artificial wants in consumers. We are pressurised into buying by limited time offers, or into believing we are getting a bargain by supposed discounts, or into purchasing a lifestyle or an identity through branded items. In-store lighting, music, shelf placement and shelving layouts are designed to exploit our instincts and vulnerabilities. ‘Product placement’ on our favourite video channels keeps goods relevant to our interests in the forefront of our minds. Online ‘organic communities’ built around brands proliferate to keep us talking about a company’s products. PR consultants like the notorious Frank Luntz gleefully explain in their writings the techniques used to manipulate the public by a careful choice and placing of words and images.

And we submit to all of this because capitalism’s restless search for profit has uprooted or unsettled our communities. It has isolated us emotionally and economically. We buy stuff to fill up an emotional void. A halo of excitement surrounds each new product on the shelf or online platform and entices us to buy. At home, the excitement persists for a few days or weeks, but then fades and the exciting object becomes just one more thing we have. Our new possession morphs into junk or household clutter, or it falls apart or goes out of fashion. Still hungry, still unsatisfied, we dispose of it to make room for more. And more labour is then eaten up in transporting and disposing of the waste.

Planned obsolescence

Since the 1950s capitalism’s drive to maximise profit by ramping up sales has increasingly taken on various forms of planned obsolescence, so much so that it is now a regular sales strategy. Companies produce cheap products that soon fall apart and have to be quickly replaced. Parts or whole products are entombed in plastic or in spot-welded metal casings rendering them inaccessible and unrepairable. Companies use screws with proprietary heads that cannot be removed with an ordinary screwdriver. Spare parts are quickly withdrawn from sale, or they are sold at exorbitant prices that make it cheaper to replace the whole item. New components are designed to be incompatible with old ones. White goods that once were built to last 30+ years now break down in six or seven. Fashion houses rush out new fashions weekly or even daily. Smart phone manufacturers introduce new designs every year, simultaneously swamping public spaces with advertising, while about the same time punters begin to notice that their old phones are unaccountably starting to go slow.

A great deal of labour in capitalism’s competitive society is mopped up in the production of consumer goods that originate not in the spontaneous wants and demands of the population but in the requirements of profit making. In the mid-20th century, pundits predicted that rapidly advancing technology would result in a rise in the productivity of labour. As a result, they believed we would have to work fewer hours in the future. As early as 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes declared that by the millennium, when his generation’s grandchildren had grown to adulthood, no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week. Keynes was right about capitalism’s drive towards increased productivity. He was wrong, however, about the forces that drive capitalism. In a profit system capital takes on a life of its own. It becomes ravenous. It must constantly seek out new outlets for investment, new ways of creating ever more capital. Inevitably this means that new products, new services are constantly being puffed into existence. Instead of reducing the work needed by society, the profit motive keeps us at work generating ever more ephemeral stuff. So we get not just the kind of unproductive work that the late anthropologist David Graeber referred to as ‘bullshit jobs’, but jobs dedicated to producing bullshit products, and then to marketing them to the ‘consumer’.

Eliminating the profit system

By eliminating capitalism’s class system together with its profit motive, huge amounts of unnecessary labour and whole industries would cease to exist. In the same move, the direct connection between production and consumption would be restored. The quantity of social effort required to meet social need would plummet, and the population would gain a new level of social control over its labour time. It would be free at last to decide how much effort it wanted to expend on production and how it wanted to use it.

Eliminating the profit system would transform the whole nature of work. When society is founded on common ownership and free access, work ceases to be ‘work’: the sale and exercise of labour power on behalf of an employer, and becomes productive activity, a voluntary social act, undertaken by individuals for social purposes. The aim of production would no longer be maximisation of profit by competing firms, but the meeting of social needs. And social needs include those of the producer as well as the consumer. Under capitalist conditions, unpleasant, mindlessly repetitive work often conducted in unhealthy conditions, with unsociable hours and overseen by a harsh disciplinary regime, is the product of the individual capitalist firm’s need to minimise costs. With the profit system removed like a glitch in software, only one social purpose for productive activity remains: the meeting of social needs.

Social psychology has known for decades that extrinsic ‘rewards’ or ‘incentives’ like wages and salaries are poor motivators for action. And to say this is already to miss something important. To a large extent, wages and salaries in capitalism are not primarily rewards or incentives. For the majority of the population they are an imposed necessity. The motivation for doing a task – any task – comes principally from intrinsic rewards, that is, from the rewards which arise out of doing the task itself. Human beings are primarily motivated by three things: by the ability to control their own lives; by the desire to master skills; and by social belonging. These are incentives that capitalism is very bad at providing. As we argued earlier, it provides intrinsic incentives only occasionally and only in certain industries where profits are temporarily above average and where there are shortages in the labour market.

In a post-capitalist world of common ownership and free access where class conflicts of interest are eliminated, communities engaged in productive activities can organise their work to meet those human needs for control, for mastery and for community. They can provide themselves with conditions of work that maximise their own satisfaction, and not the profits of their employers. Under these conditions productive activity becomes not a sacrifice of time and effort for an extrinsic wage, but a collective activity carried on for collective ends and as a seamless part of a community’s social life.

The final article in this series next month will dive deeper into what motivates human beings and answer the question of who will do the dirty work.

(A representative list of tasks required by capitalism’s money system is given in Chapter 3 of the SPGB’s pamphlet: ‘From Capitalism to Socialism: How we Live and how we Could Live').

Hud.

How we live and how we might live - Part 7 (2025)

From the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

Among those who criticise the idea of a society of free access and voluntary association are people who insist that human beings are naturally lazy and must be induced to work. Capitalism’s wages system, they say, is just such an inducement. Without it, or something similar, our ‘natural’ preference for leisure would dramatically reduce the time we spent on producing the goods we need, threatening our quality of life, and possibly leading to social collapse.

This reasoning rests on yet another version of our old friend ‘human nature’, which can be adapted, independent of evidence, to justify pretty much any required conclusion. In some versions of this argument we humans are so naturally workshy that without incentives forcing us to produce we would all, in the words of one pundit, rush to the coast, unpack our mats and inflatable lilos, and spend our days lying on the beach. And if we pushed this reasoning to its rarely acknowledged conclusion, it is there that our slowly starving bodies would be barbecued by the sun because no one was at work growing food or manufacturing sun block. These kinds of arguments should lead us to question whether those who champion them have ever bothered to look around themselves at the way capitalist society works. Have they not noticed, perhaps, that the vast majority of working people not only prefer to work rather than starve or live on derisory welfare benefits, but prefer to work even under the oppressive conditions of a capitalist wage relation? Even the least observant are surely capable of realising that if we really were suicidally lazy by nature or preferred penury to work, that introducing a wage or some kind of rationing system would do nothing to alter that.

But let’s stop there and come down to earth. Are human beings genuinely lazy? The answer is, yes, we are. To a degree. Biologists tell us that laziness is part of our evolutionary inheritance. Natural selection has designed us not to squander our energy unnecessarily, so the desire to slouch on a couch or relax on a beach when our other needs have been temporarily satisfied is part of our survival strategy. There is, however, more to survival than conserving energy. Idleness will not feed and clothe us, or keep us safe: threats to our wellbeing produce anxiety; hunger and thirst nag at us to find food; cold drives us to seek shelter; we desire sex and social activities; physical movement is invigorating; success and achievement are exhilarating. And too much of doing nothing is frankly boring. The motivating desires that drive us to provide for our needs are built into us, and no extrinsic social arrangements like wages systems are needed to force us to do what we do naturally. Historically, exchange relations like wage systems did not enter into our societies until about 3,000 BCE. If we needed them to ensure our survival, then our species would have become extinct millennia ago.

What about the free rider?

The viability of a society based on common ownership and free access does not turn on questions of ‘human nature’ but on those of social organisation. Some animals like our evolutionary cousin the orang-utan are solitary and live largely self-sufficient lives. Each animal acquires its own food and consumes only what it has individually acquired. We humans, however, are a social species. We produce what we need collectively and then share it out according to some system. A genuine question therefore arises: if, in a post-capitalist society, work is voluntary, but individuals are free to take from the common store, what is to stop lazy or antisocial individuals among us living off the work of others to some degree, or perhaps even entirely? This is the free rider argument, one that we hear a good deal of from conservative apologists for capitalism. So we have to ask, would socialism encourage free riders? And if so, would it then become unsustainable?

When job seekers apply for capitalist jobs, the wage offered is a definite factor in their calculations. In a society where a worker’s quality of life, status, power and even survival are all closely related to monetary income, then, other things being equal, who would not take a better-paid job over a lower-paid one? Once the job contract is signed, however, and an income is secured, multiple lines of research show that neither the motivation to work nor the quality of the work done bear any relation to the wage paid. In fact, there is evidence to show that when higher extrinsic rewards are offered in the form of bonuses, productivity and the quality of work falls, not rises.

So, what is going on here? It seems that once our basic needs are met and our lives are somewhat secure, at least for the moment, what really motivates our actions are not extrinsic ‘inducements’ like money, but intrinsic rewards that come from engaging in the activity itself and from the pro-social conditions under which it is performed. In the 1990s, for instance, labour shortages in the high tech industries gave workers sufficient bargaining power to determine their own working conditions. They chose to eliminate bonus schemes which set individuals in competition with one another, demanded hands-off management and arranged to work in non-hierarchical, self-organising teams.

And this is entirely in line with the evidence. Research in social psychology has repeatedly shown that what motivates us are tasks that are interesting, that are purposeful and engaging, that give us a significant degree of control over them, and that allow us to apply and master our skills. Beyond a basic minimum, most of us dislike competitive stress, and we resist being controlled by others. These are conditions that, while generally unmet under capitalism’s competitive and profit-maximising property system, are built into the basic structure of a society of free access and free association, or can be easily achieved within it. A self-governing society of this sort therefore has all the qualities required to engage us in productive activity and minimise our resistance to it.

Capitalism: work as sacrifice

Does that mean there will be no ‘lazy’ people or free riders in such a society? Probably not. Research in social psychology also shows us that the capacity for sustained work varies widely between individuals. If this is true, then the question we must ask is this: would supporting a percentage of people who choose to make little or no contribution to society pose a problem?

Even asking this question is likely to raise some hackles. We know how resentment can be stoked by stories of ‘benefit scroungers’, or of individuals who don’t pull their weight and shift the burden of work onto others. Even when complaints of this kind are misdirected, as they can often be, they are psychologically understandable. Humans have very sensitive antennae for what they perceive to be unfair practices or behaviour. Game theory has shown repeatedly that individuals across many cultures will often act against their own best interests in order to punish others whom they believe are acting unfairly.

So why exactly do we become so exercised about free riders? In a capitalist system where everyone is forced to live in economic isolation from one another, each in their individual property bubbles, there is a severely diminished sense of communal purpose and communal achievement. We do not contribute our labour as part of a community of people engaged in community projects. Instead, we compete with one another as isolated individuals to sell our ability to work in exchange for the ability to live. And our ability to work, once sold, is no longer ours. We must relinquish control over it and over our lives to employers whose interests and purposes are not our own and who stand in relation to us, not as an ‘us’ but as a ‘them’.

Under this system our ability to work is equated with money, and money is the necessary means by which, in a capitalist world, we secure not just our survival and that of our family, but also our comfort, our social status, our security (minimal as it often is) and our ability to participate fully in our social world. Capitalism transforms most of the population into employees and turns the expenditure of their mental and physical energies into precisely quantified labour-time. Our individual work ability acquires the status of a valuable commodity to be sold to another in exchange for life. Work becomes a sacrifice. Any loss in our labour power or what we can get in exchange for it compromises our ability to support ourselves and our families. So the idea that other workers are living off our labour is therefore perceived as a threat or as a form of theft. Under capitalist conditions, our resentment of free riders is explicable, but it is not universal.

Everybody entitled to a share

We can gain insight into this by looking at how people relate to one another in societies where there is no property system, no enforced work regime, and no external incentives like wages. Immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are as old as humanity itself. In our remote past, they were widespread and perhaps universal. A few have persisted down to today and have been well studied by anthropologists since the middle of the 1960s. Even though returning to their way of life would be neither possible nor desirable for us today, the structure of their societies has elements of free access, and they can teach us significant lessons about human behaviour under these conditions.

Free riders are not unknown in these societies, but they are few and, more importantly, their existence is neither concerning to them nor is it stigmatised. Everyone has an absolute entitlement to a share of what has been collectively produced irrespective of their individual contribution to producing it. This is a wholly different mindset from the one we find in our own property-directed society. The same attitude can also be seen operating from an opposite perspective. Hunting bands will often include one or two exceptional hunters, who day after day, year after year will bring back a majority of game to the camp where it is shared out among whoever is present. They do this with no discernible sense of resentment or any sense that their work is being exploited by others.

This is partly because among these peoples, work is not a commodity; it is not a bargaining chip to be exchanged for necessities like food and shelter. Hence, they make no distinction between work-time and leisure-time. Their productive and non-productive activities shade seamlessly into one another as constituent parts of their daily life. And because their social lives are not fragmented by isolated and competitive private property relations, their ordinary productive activities are experienced not only as a means to an end, but as social values, worthwhile and enjoyable in themselves.

Next month

Last month we saw that the structure of social relations of a free access society lacks the conditions that tend to promote greedy behaviour. Here we see that the same structure maximises the conditions that make productive activity attractive in its own right and encourages people to act cooperatively in the common interest. Next month we will unpack these ideas in more detail, examining many of the specific ways in which the fundamental structure of a free access society promotes productive activity (‘work’) and turns laziness into leisure and leisure into a social virtue.

Hud.

How We Live and How We Might Live - Part 6 (2025)

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

'Socialism will never work. They [socialists] always forget about human nature!’

Playing the ‘human nature’ card is one of the most common attempts to short-circuit discussion about the viability of socialism. Those who lay it are generally coy about saying what exactly they mean by this phrase. How does ‘human nature’ function? How is it expressed? What – if anything – triggers it? When challenged on these issues, critics generally become vague or inarticulate or wave their hands about a good deal. If pressed further, many of them come up with a vision of human beings as pre-programmed automatons. Others, less reductive, picture us as biological pressure cookers that periodically overheat. Others still, shake their heads and speak of moral degeneracy or believe in something akin to magic or original sin. When, however, they are asked to describe what they believe to be the concrete manifestations of ‘human nature’ they perk up. They become suddenly explicit – and very much more concise. Human beings, they say, are greedy, lazy and violent. And that pretty much settles the matter. ‘Next question.’

Human beings are not born as blank slates. We do have a specific ‘nature’, unique to us, and this has consequences when we interact with the environment. We are a social species, so we have a biological need for human contact and association. It is why we live in communities and have economies. We have autonomic reflexes which protect us from harm. We involuntarily fixate our attention on perceived threats, for instance. Similarly, our nervous systems will remove our bodies pretty sharpish from accidental contact with extreme heat – all without consulting our brains or waiting for us to decide how to act. These reactions seem hard-wired into us, yet even they can be overcome by our conscious awareness or social learning.

Biological mechanisms are complex and subject to ongoing debate among scientists, so few of us are qualified to pronounce upon them. What we can do, however, is to leave ‘human nature’ to one side and turn our attention to something much more graspable: human behaviour. When discussing socialist society, it is human behaviour and the external conditions that influence it that tell us what we need to know. We know, for instance, that, in the scientific jargon, our human behaviour is ‘plastic’: that is, it is extremely variable and adapts itself to different environments, physical and social.

The primary goals of humanity: obtaining food, clothing, and shelter; and finding ways to relax or engage socially with others, are necessary to our survival. They do not change with place or time. The way we organise ourselves to obtain these goals, however, varies considerably from society to society. So, while these goals remain the same, the way we have to act to meet them changes according to the nature of our social environment. The organisation of society is like a maze, and different mazes require us to take different routes to arrive at the same goal. Yet not all of our goals are universal. Some arise out of the particular way a society is organised and are specific to it. The need to accumulate capital, for instance, is an essential goal of capitalism, though one not found in other societies.

Apart from autonomic reflexes and a few other neurological mechanisms, human actions are always purposeful. If a certain course of action fails to deliver our goals, then it will cease to motivate us and lose its value. In this way, changes in forms of social organisation bring with them changes in attitude and values. So, when socialists argue that human beings would think and act differently in a socialist society, they are not imagining humanity has undergone a mysterious change of heart or that some unlikely alteration has taken place in ‘human nature’, but only that people have made a practical adaptation to changed circumstances.

Capitalist apologists who claim that human beings are intrinsically greedy, lazy and violent rarely make much effort to justify their assertions. These claims though are useful. By turning them on their heads, we can use them to explore how a socialist society of common ownership and free access would function and, by comparing it with capitalism, throw light on the functioning of both societies. Last month we made a start by looking at greed. We can now take that forward.

What about the greedy person?

Human lives are mutually dependent. We live in dwellings, eat food, walk pavements, wear clothes, use tools made by hands other than our own. Almost everything we do is made possible by other people’s labour. Yet our direct awareness of this social dependence is obscured by the way capitalism reduces our relationships to the impersonal and seemingly objective business of monetary exchange. In capitalist society the effects of the employer/employee property system ripple out among us, influencing everything we experience and everything we do. Individuals, families and groups locked into their property bubbles are economically isolated from one another and forced to compete on multiple levels. Capitalism’s system of economic isolation divides us, breaks our sense of connection and removes the safety net of communal support. It leaves us insecure. Economic isolation and insecurity together lead us to prioritise our own needs in ways that are careless of the needs of others. The system makes us greedy.

For businesses to survive in a competitive capitalist marketplace they must constantly outguess and outperform one another. Market competition demands ruthlessness, and it ‘rewards’ greed. Competition between businesses for the money in consumers’ pockets results in psychologically sophisticated marketing and advertising campaigns which impose a relentless pressure upon us to buy and consume. As communities break up and human connection dissolves further into the market scrum, an insatiable inner emptiness opens up inside us which we try helplessly to fill with more and more purchases. Greed becomes social, a way of life.

When we think of greedy people, it is often those with an abundance of wealth that we call to mind. And research in social psychology confirms the validity of this perception. Despite all the pressures of capitalism, people with little wealth often find ways of being remarkably generous, a quality rarely included in the list of attributes drawn up by those who promote the idea of ‘human nature’.

A good place to find a capitalist (or wannabe capitalist) in all his unabashed glory is in the world of neoliberal or so-called ‘libertarian’ ideologues. These folk (predominantly male) can be found hovering around the websites of capitalist think tanks like The Mises or Cato Institutes in the US or the Adam Smith Institute in the UK. They will tell you unapologetically that what they want out of life is a 20-bedroom mansion and a luxury ocean-going yacht. (It is nearly always a mansion and a yacht – visible capitalist icons of wealth and status.) They like to ask, mirthfully, how in a society without private property or money anyone would prevent them from simply taking these things for themselves? We could tell them that nobody needs to and that the social relations of a socialist society would do the job for us. We could tell them, but they would be unlikely to listen.

A capitalist society puts no obstacles in the way of anyone who wishes to live in a 20-room mansion – on the sole condition, of course, that they have sufficient wealth to pay for it. In capitalism a poor person can be greedy, just like a rich person, but they have no chance of being greedy on quite such a grand scale. So, let’s for now grant some wealth to our wannabe advocate of greed. And let’s watch as, in a capitalist society and in the full expression of his ambition, he occupies his 20-bedroom mansion. Once installed he immediately uses his wealth to employ others who, lacking any other means of support, must sell their labour power wherever they can. In return for a wage they will work under his orders and act in his interests, maintaining his property, cooking, cleaning, shopping for him, and attending to his every whim in satisfaction of his desire for luxury living.

Who will clean the 20-bedroom mansion?

Now change the social scenery and consider the same individual acting with the same greedy intent in a society of common ownership and free access. In this scenario the capitalist employer/employee property system is now only a historical memory. Our greedy person requires no exclusive wealth to obtain their property, and indeed, they have none. Their aim, though, as before, is to live a luxurious lifestyle in a 20-bedroom mansion. As promised, we will not apply any force to try to stop them.

Almost immediately they notice a difficulty. Their 20-bedroom mansion is rather large with high ceilings and elaborate mouldings and with corners where dust can settle. It requires a great deal of cleaning and tidying and maintenance. So who will do this for them? With all those around them now having open access to what they need, they are genuinely free to contribute their labour only as they choose. ‘Self-interest’ has now given way to personal autonomy. If others are to tend to the greedy person’s needs, they must do so voluntarily. Yet who will volunteer their labour to pander to his or her whims and desires? They no longer possess personal wealth, neither the power, nor the mystique of power, nor the status that goes with it. Without any of these things, they are now a free person with a 20-bedroom-sized headache.

If they cling to their desire for their mansion, it seems that they now have two options. They must spend inordinate amounts of their time performing housework, doing shopping and maintaining their property, or they must live in squalor. Neither of these options we can assume add up to their conception of luxurious living. Nor will their occupancy of a large property bring them new power or status or admiration. Quite the reverse. They may well find that their greedy, and now frankly eccentric, behaviour will win them nothing but laughter and social opprobrium. The same can be said of any other exceptional or ‘greedy’ demands they might wish to make, like wanting to possess several private residences. Perhaps they will still dream of possessing a Jeff Bezos-style ocean-going yacht. Or maybe they will begin to realise that no-one is going to donate their labour to build, crew, maintain and fuel it. Will such a society even build yachts of this kind?

Not an expression of biological programming

Greedy behaviour is not simply a direct expression of biological programming called ‘human nature’. It emerges when the satisfaction of fundamental human needs is thwarted by external conditions. In capitalism, those conditions take the form of economic isolation imposed by the employer/employee property system. When that economic isolation and the insecurity it creates are eliminated and replaced by a system of common ownership, free association and free access the motivation for the kind of greedy behaviour that could endanger the stability of the system, vanishes into thin air.

‘Human nature’-type objections to socialism are almost always based on a poorly conceived notion of what socialism is. More often than not the confusion arises because the critic is projecting onto a socialist society many of the limiting features of capitalism. This may tell us something about our current world, but it tells us nothing about its socialist replacement.

Next month we will continue to explore the nature of socialist relations and address a number of questions that they inevitably throw up.

Hud.

How we live and how we might live - Part 5 (2025)

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

Previously we looked at how we live under capitalism. It’s now time to change tack and consider how we might live in a socialist future. This does two jobs: it clarifies many confused issues about what socialists are proposing. It also provides a useful platform from which we can look back at our current capitalist society with greater objectivity, highlighting its many antisocial characteristics.

Human societies, like individuals, are adaptive. They are not completely uniform. So along with a rich legacy of cultural differences, socialist communities are likely to organise themselves differently from region to region. We are a practical species, and we develop our institutions to take advantage of local features like resources, topography, climate, etc. And societies don’t stand still. Regional variations will themselves evolve over time as communities try out new solutions to emerging problems. In a world of variety and change it is impossible to be specific about the detailed institutions a future society would develop. We are free to speculate on them, of course, but we should not become too wedded to our conjectures.

Peering into the future

We also need to remember that purely speculative conceptions of a post-capitalist world will always be influenced by our own perspectives. They will include elements of wish-fulfilment, or assumptions derived from our lives within capitalism. No one, no matter how creative or perceptive, can stand outside their own society any more than they can stand outside their own skin. As is often observed of speculative fiction, our projections of the future are often no more than elaborations of the present. Our imaginations, it seems, do not stretch far beyond what will comfortably fit into our familiar framework of ideas. One of the biggest difficulties many people have when first approaching the idea of socialism is that they try to imagine a post-capitalist society through capitalist spectacles. Inevitably they end up constructing impossible hybrids in their minds, like Dr Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu animal with a head at each end, one peering forward, the other, back. So, it is worth reflecting on the fact that any society built on a rejection of capitalism’s defining features would necessarily appear unfamiliar to us, so unfamiliar, in fact, that it might even strike us as incomprehensible or self-contradictory, just as traditional, non-western societies appeared to the first anthropologists.

Peering into the future is a tricky business. Certainly, there are trends and regularities we can extrapolate from, a few things we can infer and some others that we can guess at, but none of us has a crystal ball. To some extent we all go into the future blindly. And that’s particularly true when it comes to predicting the course of events. We know from the science of complex systems that detailed historical movements cannot be known in advance. This doesn’t mean, however, that we can say nothing at all about the future. Far from it. Socialists like William Morris living in the Victorian era admittedly had no ability to predict the path that capitalism would travel over the next 150 years, and they may well have been astonished at the legal forms and institutions it developed along the way. It is extremely unlikely, however, that they would have been surprised to learn that 20th century capitalism has been marked by poverty, war and even the threat of human-induced climate change, or that economic booms and slumps, unemployment, waste, homelessness, corruption, and much else has marked its progress. The historical details may elude us, but once we have an understanding of a society’s foundational structure then its general features become relatively easy to predict.

So, if we are to draw confident conclusions we must dive deep beneath the superficial features of a society. And that seems possible. Societies are not random assemblages of people living arbitrary lives. Each one is built on definite foundations which determine much about its general character, and influence the kind of institutions and practices it can sustain and develop. A society’s foundations set the conditions that motivate people and give meaning to their lives. They determine that some behaviours and choices are socially possible while others are not. They determine how individuals relate to each other, the values they hold, and the kind and extent of freedoms available to them.

Earlier in this series we showed how a society’s foundations are grounded in our biological nature, which requires that we must actively produce the things we need to survive. All human societies, past or present, have had to organise themselves in some way to produce for their collective needs. We saw, for instance, that capitalism organises production upon the basis of the employer/employee property relationship. We saw that this relationship has definite consequences for those living under it. It ensures that we relate to one another as isolated property owners; that we experience competition and conflict at every level of society; that the majority live with personal insecurity; that they spend much of their time acting under the direction of others with little say in how their work or communities are organised; that a significant proportion of them live in poverty, unable to participate fully in their communities; and that all are in danger of suffering intermittently from the many horrors of national and international conflict.

We can predict with considerable confidence that while capitalism persists these miseries will continue into the future without relief. The only way to rid ourselves of them, therefore, is to replace capitalism with something else. But how? And by what means? And how can we ensure that what replaces capitalism will provide a better life for us in the future?

Life after capitalism

In his 1884 talk, ‘How we Live And How we Might Live’ William Morris explored one way of conceiving life after capitalism. He asked his audience to consider what it might mean to live in a world lacking the employer/employee relationship and therefore the vast apparatus of capitalist profit-making. He traced out a society stripped of capitalism’s multiple antagonisms, property-based hierarchies and hard-wired competition. Analyses of this kind are eye-opening and useful, but they are not in themselves sufficient. We need to go further, to analyse socialism in the same way that we previously analysed capitalism by identifying its productive relationships. The best way to do this is to consider how we can make an effective transition between the two.

Today, there is no necessary or objective reason why capitalism should continue to exist. It drags on only by the inertial agreement of the vast majority of people whom it employs. It can be terminated the moment they collectively withdraw their consent to capitalism’s employer/employee relationship. As the roles of employer and employee are mutually dependent, the withdrawal of support for one necessarily means the disappearance of the other. And because ownership of the means of production (the factories, machinery, materials, transport systems, etc) is currently invested in employers, their disappearance requires that it is transferred to new owners.

Socialists argue that ownership of these essential elements of society should fall to the community as a whole. Anything else would be to reintroduce some form of the employer/employee relationship and the capitalist market in which it is embedded. With the means of production taken into common ownership, the products society creates then need to be distributed according to some method. We argue that they, too, should be owned in common and distributed according to need. There are various ways this might be achieved. We propose that access to the products of society should be open and free to all. There are two reasons for this. First, no one is in a better position to assess an individual’s needs than that individual. Second, having open access to the means of production has enormously beneficial consequences for society which we will examine next month.

So, in place of the competitive employer/employee property relationship, socialism’s central productive relations as identified here are common ownership, free association and free access. As we will see, even before we start thinking about the decisions people need to make in a socialist society or what institutions they would need to develop to organise it, these fundamental structures will have a profound effect on how it functions. The board is now set up and we can start to see how the game proceeds.

As a first observation, we can sketch out one difference between capitalism and socialism that immediately appears. This is the amount of social control that a socialist society would have over what is produced. It reveals that there is a straightforward relationship between production and consumption, one which is obscured by capitalist relations. Given any level of production, society can, for instance, choose to produce more and therefore consume more. Or it can produce less and consume less. If we produce less then we have more time to pursue other personal and social interests. So, there is a choice to be made between consuming more and doing more. In capitalism, by contrast, the link between production and consumption is broken by the huge apparatus of profit-making which squats between them, determining and distorting both. The drive it sets up to accumulate capital for the employers of labour overrides and eradicates any preferences a community might have. In socialism this juggernaut is removed, social control is set free and social choices expand dramatically.

Unreasonable fears

But what of the reservations many people have about the whole idea of socialism? As Morris observed, a lot of us shy away from change even when our welfare depends upon it. And having an unclear conception of the future naturally raises not-unreasonable fears. We can, however, address those fears by putting them in context and considering how realistic they are in relation to a future communitarian world. Three great fears regularly strike people when introduced to the idea of socialism, and they are embodied in three human stereotypes which haunt our imaginations like Dickens’s three Christmas ghosts. The first two appear in the guise of the greedy person and the lazy person. The third is supposedly embodied in all of us and summed up in the question, ‘who will do the dirty work?’

These figures are raised up as convenient defeaters whenever the proposal is made that we take personal responsibility for making a real change to our world. We are quick to insist that they make a harmonious world impossible, so there is no point in even thinking about it. It’s an understandable reaction. Greedy people, for instance, are real, aren’t they? The guy in the sharp suit manipulating markets and people from behind their massive desk at company head office. The rumpled politician leaning over the members’ bar in the House of Commons, scheming to feather their own nest. The greedy person is everywhere, feeding at the trough, taking too much of everything and leaving too little for others. That’s the stereotype. But how real is it? Is greed inbred in our human personalities or is it an adaptive behaviour to the deeply competitive social world we currently inhabit? Are any of these figures really a thing?

Next month we will start to confront these three ghosts, and lay them to rest. In the process, we will dismiss a number of misconceptions about the socialist case and reveal much about the means by which it can overcome the inevitable miseries of capitalism.

Hud.

How we live and how we might live - Part 4 (2024)

From the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

In his 1884 talk, ‘How We Live And How We Might Live’, William Morris set out to describe what socialism can offer to working people that capitalism can’t. He began by inviting his audience to imagine a world without the miseries of poverty and war, curses that class societies like capitalism inflict upon us. In earlier articles in this series we explored how, in the modern world, the source of those ills lies in the deep structure of capitalism itself. This month we will explore those causes a little further and look at some of their consequences.

At the heart of modern capitalist societies lies a property system of universal competition based on the employer/employee relationship. This is a relatively recent development. Earlier ways of making a living by common access to the land or through small-scale craft work, for example, were largely extinguished as capitalism advanced and came to dominate Western Europe and America, and then later, the world. Today, everyone born into a capitalist society is forced to rely on the market to obtain what they need. According to their circumstances, they are forced into the role of an employer or an employee. If they are members of a cooperative or the owners of a small business, they must take on both roles, and manage the conflict between them.

Maximising profits

The aim of any capitalist business is to make a profit. It uses money capital to purchase materials, part-finished goods, machinery, office equipment, and other physical means of production. Crucially also, it buys human labour-power. It sets this and machinery to work on its purchased materials in order to produce goods for sale on the market. If the business has judged the market correctly, it will receive back from the sale of its products a sum of money equal to the capital sum originally advanced plus an additional amount — its profit — derived from workers’ labour. A portion of this money it will put into a fund for reinvestment in future production. Another portion will be used to pay taxes, rent and overhead costs like insurance. A third portion will be taken as revenue by the owners of the business or allocated as interest to shareholders.

If a business wants to stay in the market it must continuously receive back more money than it initially advanced. This is not just an aim but a necessity imposed by capitalism’s competitive property system. This additional sum, the business’s profit, is what allows it to grow. Growth, like profit, is not a choice, but a necessity enforced by the system. Let’s say our business owner has a very simple, inexpensive lifestyle (just for the sake of argument. Bear with us!). Could they not choose to keep their business small and make a minimal profit? For some small businesses who have found a niche market, that might be possible, at least for a while, but capitalism is a competitive society. Businesses compete for the money in your pocket. They know that if they do not grow by introducing labour-saving machinery, for example, or by taking advantage of economies of scale, then their competitors will, and they will be in danger of being priced out of the market. Competition drives growth in a capitalist economy.

To ensure that businesses stay competitive in the market, they must not only grow, but they must also maximise their profits. If at any time our frugal business-owner needs to replace less efficient or worn-out equipment, their low profit levels could well be a liability. If they need to borrow for this same purpose or simply to bridge the gap between investment and return, they may find themselves in difficulty. Lenders and investors aim, like other capitalists, to maximise their revenue, and will not be attracted to invest in businesses which cannot pay a going rate of interest. Thames Water, in the UK, is currently in just such a quandary. It is in dire need of inward investment, yet its inability to generate sufficient profit in the future has led its potential investors to declare it ‘uninvestable’.

To maximise income, businesses need to minimise their costs. In particular, they need to minimise their labour costs by keeping down their workers’ wages. Capitalist competition tends to result in businesses each making the same average rate of profit with respect to their invested capitals. By lacking direct competition, however, near-monopolies and cartels can often raise their individual rate of profit above the average. Exceptionally innovative businesses like those in the high-tech sector can often do the same, at least temporarily. Raised profits in these industries give their highly trained and creative workers scope for negotiating higher wages, especially, as is often the case, if their skills are in short supply on the labour market.

Below average

The bigger the front, however, the bigger the back. While some businesses can raise their profits above the average, others must operate below it. These need to keep wages down more firmly. Businesses of this sort often rely on a lot of partially skilled labour, which is often more plentiful and cheaper to buy in the market place. To get the maximum productivity out of their workers for minimum cost, their work regimes are often pressured, tedious and exhausting, leaving employees dispirited and lacking in self-esteem. Businesses of this kind tend to rely on a heavy disciplinary management style. They can demand long, irregular or unsocial hours of work. And if the law of the country permits, they tend to provide low levels of sick and maternity leave, and scant holiday pay. They often provide workers with little training or career development, giving them fewer chances to better their situation. When the market is in one of its cyclical declines and profits fall, their workers, being easily replaceable, are quickly laid off and find themselves surviving on minimal state benefits or, in the worst case, unable to pay rent and becoming homeless. And so the downward spiral continues.

Workers living on the poverty line and with few prospects sometimes gravitate towards the informal ‘black’ economy. This consists of businesses often operating in a highly competitive market that are fighting to minimise costs. Under these conditions, operating outside the law becomes a risk worth taking. For workers this has some advantages. If they get paid ‘under the table’ they can avoid deductions for tax and national insurance. The downside is that such companies tend to pay low wages, offer no training or possibility of advancement, and provide no arrangements for holiday or sick pay or other statutory benefits.

Another possibility which has always been an option for those with low skills and poor prospects is the criminal economy. For men, today, this generally means theft or burglary, or selling drugs. Most thieves are young men with few saleable skills. Despite the glamorous image perpetuated by heist films, a life of crime for most has few real rewards and the chances of getting caught are high. Selling drugs on the street is often gang-related and dangerous. And for the average dealer it nets little income. For women, entering the criminal economy generally means sex work or shoplifting where the prospects are even worse. Voluntary sex work is inherently dangerous. It is often illegal and dominated by pimps who skim off significant portions of a woman’s earnings. Shoplifting is stressful, provides low levels of income and again carries a high chance of arrest.

Race to the bottom

Poverty is not an unfortunate accident. It is a built-in feature of capitalism’s competitive property system and its employer/employee relationship. Businesses maximise profits by holding down wages, but they will take whatever means they can find to minimise costs. They will use cheap materials in their products like non-biodegradable plastics, or they will externalise costs by pumping waste into rivers and into the atmosphere. And just as the need to minimise costs drives pollution, so the competitive pressure towards growth fuels climate change. Damage to the human and natural environment is also a built-in feature of the capitalist system.

In 2005, Gordon Brown, then UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, commissioned Nicholas Stern to conduct research and report back on how moving to a low-carbon economy in the UK might be managed. The Stern Review, when it was finally delivered in October of the following year, was a vast, 700-page monster of a document. It has since spawned a significant academic industry. Today, however, its arguments seem ridiculously optimistic. It concluded that if states were to cooperate, the drivers of climate change could be economically managed, and CO2 levels kept below a threshold that at that time was thought to be sustainable. Skimming through its summary today, what stands out is the political naiveté on which it rested, its entire weight pirouetting on one tiny, innocent-sounding word: ‘if’ – ‘If states collaborate…’

Capitalism is not a collaborative system, nor is it designed to solve common problems. It is a system of ruthless competition. In the years before and since The Stern Review it has demonstrated over and again just how impossible it is for capitalist states to achieve the level of international cooperation Stern hoped for. Every year since 1995 thousands of scientists, politicians, and ‘stakeholders’ have sat closeted together in the UN’s COP meetings, thrashing out the issues. The effective outcome of all this activity has been negligible. Beyond a legally binding commitment of each participating country to implement its own greenhouse gas reduction measures, little has been achieved. Globally capitalism is still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere like there is no tomorrow. This year alone, CO2 levels have been soaring.

In 2013, George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Cameron government, summarised the problem in a carefully worded statement: ‘I want to provide for the country the cheapest energy possible, consistent with… playing our part in an international effort to tackle climate change. But I don’t want us to be the only people out there in front of the rest of the world’. And there we have it. Cheap energy is the key to keeping businesses competitive in the global marketplace. In a world of international competition, no country can afford to commit to using more expensive forms of energy unless all do. Finding anything but the loosest and most ineffective agreements on this issue has proven impossible. At the opening of the 29th meeting of COP last month in oil-rich Baku, Azerbaijan, Simon Stiell, the Climate Change Executive Secretary for the UN, made yet another plea for international cooperation to stem the rise in global temperatures. It is a plea that over thirty years has yet to generate meaningful results.

And so, here we are. War, poverty, pollution and climate change are just a few of the features damaging human life and disfiguring our world, all of them rooted in capitalism’s wage-labour/capital relationship which sits like a supermassive black hole at our economy’s galactic core. The only real and permanent solution to capitalism’s woes lies in its elimination. Yet, what kind of a society would that produce? In his talk 140 years ago last month, William Morris considered what kind of a world might result from eliminating capitalism’s class society. Yet we can ask, what would such a world look like in its own terms, and what might we be able to say about it? Is it feasible? How would it operate? These are the questions we will turn to next month in the Socialist Standard.

Hud.

Link to Part 5.