Life and Times: Running scared (2025)

The Life and Times column from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’m one of those people who has sympathy for those human beings who have left one country with a view to settling in another – migrants. It doesn’t matter to me whether they’re fleeing from war or persecution or just looking for a better life for themselves. My view is that that human society everywhere would be much enhanced by people being able to move around the world freely. It would give increased satisfaction with life to those doing the moving and also confer advantages on the cultures receiving them, opening these up to different ideas and different ways of doing things.

Keeping out the foreigner

I could only be dismayed therefore – even if not surprised – at the action of the newly elected Labour government in ramping up the previous administration’s policy of hostility to migrants, in particular by introducing new rules for linguistic competence. This will mean that foreigners, whether asylum seekers, ‘legal’ migrants, students or anything else will not be able to live or work in the UK unless they are able (in the words of the government) ‘to express themselves fluently and spontaneously’ in English, and speak it ‘flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes’. How it might be possible to assess such skills is one matter and is anyone’s guess (and many native English speakers would find them problematic), but the idea that that kind of knowledge of English is essential for participating in work or social life is plainly absurd.

So why is the Labour government taking this action as well as laying down other strictures to make it more difficult for people from other countries, whether refugees or otherwise, to live in the UK? The plain and simple answer is that they are running scared. They have only been in office a short time, yet they have tumbled in the polls, performed spectacularly badly in local council elections and already feel beleaguered by the challenge they are facing from that new group of political opportunists, Reform UK, who are banging the racist, anti-foreigner drum as loud as possible with, so it seems, significant success. They seem to be managing to convince large numbers of workers that the real problems they face – for example insecure employment, making ends meet, fear of crime – are primarily attributable to the relatively small proportion of the population that happens not to have been born in this country. Nothing of course could be further from the truth, but the xenophobic scapegoating of small groups with small differences seems to work well on people who feel under particular economic and emotional pressure.

Uncontrollable system

Add to this the inevitable problems faced by any government trying to control the uncontrollable system that is capitalism – the task the Labour Party has been landed with – and you have the perfect storm. Having placed restrictions on winter fuel payments and made other welfare cuts in the name of ‘making ends meet’, it is now having to row back on some of that so as not to fall uncontrollably behind in the polls, and is hoping that its anti-migrant stance – craven sop to Reform UK that it is – will somehow help it make up the ground. But there too it is facing opposition – not just from anti-racists but from other perhaps unexpected sources too. We are talking here, for example, about the CBI and other employer bodies who are worried that their members might not be able to recruit workers for ‘lower level’ employment of various kinds (eg catering, care work, delivery jobs), about the NHS, and about universities who fear the dire financial straits they are already in will be made worse by further difficulties in enrolling foreign students. ‘They can’t do right for doing wrong’ seems the appropriate adage. But this applies to all governments who undertake the task of running a show that, by its inbuilt chaotic nature, pulls them in multiple different directions. Any principles they may profess before entering office, any ‘good intentions’ they may have go right out the window once they win power and are faced with the need to keep that show – the anarchic system of capitalism – afloat.

Profit or free access?

As for the plight of migrants, finally I have to declare a personal stake in this. My own forebears were foreigners. My grandparents arrived in this country over 100 years ago, probably speaking no English. But they became part of British society, as my parents were too, with English as their first (and only) language. And the picture has been the same with very many migrant minorities and, regardless of government regulations, will continue to be. But what will also continue, both in this country and across the world, is that migrants and ‘native’ inhabitants alike will be subject to the contradictions and uncertainties of a system whose prime purpose isn’t the wellbeing of the majority of its inhabitants – those who have to work for a wage or salary to survive. Its purpose rather is the production and distribution of goods and services for the profit of the tiny minority who own the means of production and distribution, which process governments have the job of overseeing. The system in question, based as it is on buying and selling, wages and salaries and the market, is by its nature full of unpredictability and is bound to leave flailing any government charged with trying to run it. It needs to be replaced by a different system – a moneyless, wageless, frontierless society of free access based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. That’s what we call socialism, but neither the Labour Party, nor any other party claiming to be aiming for social justice within the framework of the current system, can ever be an instrument for achieving it.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Dark factors and dodgy populists (2025)

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

With all the far-right demagogues, mad dictators and murderous wars in the news, people may be inclined to lean into their own confirmation bias and say ‘What do you expect? People are just evil’. You can’t make a silk purse or a functional liberal democracy, much less world socialism, out of a sow’s ear. But a new Copenhagen study of nearly 2 million people across 183 countries, as well as all 50 US states, concludes that people are more likely to be nasty, or in the terminology, display ‘aversive, “dark” personality characteristics such as selfishness or spitefulness’ if they happen to live in ‘prior aversive societal conditions’ (ASC), which is to say ‘societies characterized by corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence’.

According to the research authors, there has been a lot of previous work on the various types of aversive behaviour, and ‘Recent advances in personality research have provided strong evidence for the existence of a single disposition underlying all aversive traits.’ They define this disposition, which they call ‘The Dark Factor of Personality’, or ‘D’ for short, as ‘the general tendency to maximize one’s individual utility—disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others – accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications’.

Thus, D is ‘the essence of aversive (“dark”) personality traits such as narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism’, so the study looked at data from multiple countries and states in combination with individual behavioural questionnaires. It found higher ‘D’ levels in high-ASC countries, ie, ‘in societies where rules are broken without consequences and where the conditions for many citizens are bad’, such as Indonesia and Mexico, and interestingly also Louisiana and Nevada. D was correspondingly lower in countries or states perceived to have better societal conditions, for example Denmark and New Zealand, and US states such as Utah and Vermont.

They go on to discuss the various ways that this correlation reinforces itself, through ‘customs, daily practices, norms’, ‘situational affordances and demands’, and ‘state-behaviour feedback loops that reinforce or discourage certain behaviors’.

So the society you grow up in is a strong influential factor on your character. Well, ‘duh’, you might say. Everyone knows that a badly treated dog is more likely to be savage and dangerous than a well-treated one. Even those hippy chimps, bonobos, have been known to turn violent when confined in zoos. But from a socialist perspective, this study is worth noting. Last month’s Socialist Standard cover feature dealt with that favourite go-to of the anti-socialist, human nature, and the received wisdom that the human ‘inner demon’ is only kept in check by authoritarian rule. If that were really true, socialism would be impossible.

What the Copenhagen study shows is that humans have what it calls ‘adaptive phenotypic plasticity’, which is to say that we model our behaviour on our social surroundings. So the correlation of high state-level ‘corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence’ with high individual levels of anti-social traits must be largely causative too. Individuals wouldn’t be antisocial if the society they live in wasn’t also antisocial. Even so, couldn’t the causation be the other way around, ie, that antisocial people make for an antisocial society? This hardly seems likely, given that antisocial personality disorders are estimated to affect only around 1-4 percent of the population . Mind you, the capitalist rich elite are probably only 1-4 percent of the population, and they are a walking, talking antisocial disorder.

None of this constitutes empirical proof, of course. The problem with personal questionnaires is that one can’t be certain how truthful the respondents are being. Are people in ‘nasty’ cultures generally more prone to being nasty, or are they simply less inhibited about admitting it, compared to ‘nice’ cultures where such behaviour is presumably frowned upon and thus potentially more covert? This is the same subjectivity problem that plagues ‘Happiness Index’ and many other such lists. A 2016 list of the 63 most and least empathetic countries, based on the same kind of personal questionnaires, revealed that Ecuador was the most empathetic, and Lithuania the least. This is bafflingly counter-intuitive. Ecuador has experienced years of ‘iron fist’ authoritarianism, and high levels of drug-related gang violence, whereas Lithuania has low crime, affordable living costs and a high standard of healthcare. Even stranger is the fact that Saudi Arabia, notorious for public executions and judicial maimings, scores second place, and the UAE, another authoritarian monarchy with no democracy and little press freedom, scores fifth. One might attempt an intellectual contortion by proposing that workers in violent or repressive states are more likely to stick together. But Denmark, once again near the top at number 4, is very hard to explain, while its not wildly dissimilar neighbours Sweden, Norway and Finland wallow deep down in the low forties and fifties, along with the UK. Can one really learn anything useful from such studies?

Perhaps more encouraging for socialists and others is a recent Basel study which looked at 30 years of data from 26 European countries to determine the stability or otherwise of populist governments, or those including a significant populist element. They focused on governments whose ‘term of office ended prematurely’, interpreting this ‘as a sign of instability.’ The study found ‘that cabinets with populist parties break up more often and sooner—regardless of the type of coalition’ and that ‘The probability of early government dissolution is about 60% to 65% higher for alliances involving populist parties than for those without.’ This wasn’t about the specific left or right-wing ideologies though, it was about how populists tend to operate. They have a strong centralised leadership, with little internal democracy, and they adopt radical and uncompromising positions that no other groups can work with. ‘Populism proved to be a constant indicator of government breakdown throughout the study period, irrespective of other influencing factors such as economic crises’.

To sum up, there is evidence that a prosocial society like socialism fosters prosocial behaviour, and that populist governments tend to collapse. Take that, Nigel Farage.

Paddy Shannon

Bolshevising the Red Flag (2025)

Book Review from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Raising the Red Flag. Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism 1884-1921. By Tony Collins, Haymarket Books.

In his 1969 pioneering work The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-1921: The Origins of British Communism (reviewed July 1969), Walter Kendall advanced the view that Bolshevism-Leninism was something that was alien to the formally democratic traditions of the working class movement in Britain, introduced from an economically and politically backward part of the world where conditions were quite different. Collins, writing as a Leninist, argues that in fact those who founded the British Communist Party were all too much in the tradition of reformist labourism. Both views have some merit.

The main constituents of the CPGB when it was founded in January 1921 were the British Socialist Party (BSP), part of the De Leonist Socialist Labour Party (SLP), Workers Dreadnought (Sylvia Pankhurst), and some from the Shop Stewards Movement and the left-wing of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

The British Socialist Party was the name the Social Democratic Federation adopted when it amalgamated with some branches of the ILP in 1911. It was essentially the same organisation from which the SLP and the SPGB broke away in 1903 and 1904 respectively over its lack of democracy, and its reformism and opportunism. It was to provide the bulk of the original membership of the CPGB and, Collins argues, its political approach too of seeing itself as the left wing of the Labour movement.

Collins examines the origin and practice of the founding factions and finds them all wanting in one way or another from a Leninist point of view. The defect they all (except the Shop Stewards Movement) share, he says, is what he calls ‘abstract propagandism’ as opposed to seeking to lead a discontented but non-socialist majority in an insurrection against the capitalist state. The Shop Stewards Movement is criticised for restricting itself to purely industrial matters and the 1911 pamphlet The Miners Next Step for advancing the slogan of ‘no leaders’. His view is that, on the contrary, new leaders were required, but the leaders of a vanguard party of dedicated revolutionaries. In fact, he argues that it was the absence of this ‘subjective’ factor that was the reason why there was no workers’ revolution in Britain just before and just after the First World War.

Tendentious

Explaining his criticism, Collins writes:

‘The SLP’s answer to the syndicalists was that a party was necessary to win a parliamentary majority which would then support the workers as they took over industry, whereupon parliament would hand over state power to the industrial unions. … Shorn of its industrial militancy, this was not very different from the SDF or the SPGB, who believed in the manner of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists that the working class would come to socialism through being educated about its benefits and thus vote for socialists in parliamentary elections’ (p. 58).

‘The Bolshevik conception’, Collins goes on to bemoan, ‘… did not exist in Britain’.

His criticism is a caricature, and tendentious in suggesting that ‘education’ meant something other than the action of workers, who had become socialist through their experience of capitalism, persuading their fellow workers to realise, on the basis of the same experience, that socialism was the only solution. It was true, though, that the implication was that a majority of workers who wanted and understood socialism was needed before socialism could be established and that, if that majority existed, workers should, among other things, vote for it. The Bolshevik conception rejects the principle that a socialist majority is necessary, indeed even possible, as it teaches that workers can only reach a trade-union consciousness and so require a vanguard party to lead them politically.

Although the SPGB is mentioned in passing a number of times, as here, only one short paragraph is devoted to our political position:

‘By this time the SDF leadership had completed its purge of leftists with the expulsion of the leaders of the London opposition, who formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. Once out of the SDF, its leftism proved to be a chimera. The SPGB declared its object to be ‘the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery [of government] including [those] armed forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation’, and pursued a grim messianic parliamentary reformism for the next hundred years and more’ (pp. 30-1).

None of our opponents at the time (and even our honest opponents today) would have accused us of ‘parliamentary reformism’, as what characterised us was a refusal to advocate reforms to capitalism (called ‘palliatives’ at the time). We did advocate using parliament but not to try to reform capitalism but to deprive the capitalist class of their ownership of the means of production and their ability to use the armed forces of the state to maintain it.

Collins’s accusation is outrageous, obviously biased and possibly dishonest. It is also ignorant. The term ‘instrument of emancipation’ was consciously taken from the preamble to the 1880 programme of the Parti Ouvrier Français, a preamble that Marx himself had drafted and which speaks of the working class needing to form themselves into a political party which should use ‘universal suffrage which will thus be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation’ (tinyurl.com/bdf7vmj8). Clause Six of our Declaration of Principles which Collins is misinterpreting is saying the same — that to end capitalism the workers need to gain control of the machinery of government (state power) which currently upholds capitalist ownership of the means of production. It is a call for the revolutionary, not the reformist, use of parliament.

It also makes Collins a bad historian as the views of the SPGB are just as relevant, if only in terms of the numbers who held them, to his subject of Marxism during the period he is studying as are those of the SLP, John Maclean and Sylvia Pankhurst. In fact, five of the people mentioned by him either were to become or had been members of the SPGB (Jack Fitzgerald, E. J. B. Allen, T. A. Jackson, Valentine McEntee and George Hicks).

Because he didn’t bother to go into the matter in detail, Collins seems to think that the SPGB favoured participation in elections and nothing else. Actually, like the SLP, the SPGB was (and still is) in favour of industrial as well as political action, the difference being over which was the more important. The SLP said industrial, we said political. Ironically, this is the position Collins himself takes up in criticising The Miners’ Next Step and the Shop Stewards Movement, though, as a Leninist, by political action he envisages a vanguard party staging an armed insurrection to seize state power in a period of acute industrial unrest.

He doesn’t list the Socialist Standard as among the contemporary publications he looked at. Which will explain how he missed that in March 1915 we published an anti-war statement by the Bolshevik representative in Britain, Maxim Litvinov, when he couldn’t find anyone else prepared to do so . He also ignores, while noting that the BSP, the SLP and Keir Hardie wobbled on the outbreak of the war, that the SPGB immediately denounced it in a manifesto dated 25 August 1914. Nor does he mention that our members were among those imprisoned or going on the run for refusing to be conscripted.

Two issues

The groups which founded the CPGB initially disagreed on two issues which Collins examines in detail — affiliation to the Labour Party and participation in elections. The BSP was in favour of both. Sylvia Pankhurst was against both, while the SLPers favoured electoral action but not affiliation (which would have been our position but we are proud to have had nothing to do with the founding of the CPGB). In the end Lenin and the Communist International decreed that the new party should accept both, which was easy enough to ensure as the bulk of its members had come from the BSP (born SDF).

Collins’s point about the early CPGB being a continuation of the reformism of the SDF/BSP is valid, as we recognised at the time from having opposed for the previous sixteen years the views and actions of those involved. However, in the mid-1920s the Communist International decided to ‘bolshevise’ the CPGB and imposed on it a strictly Leninist organisational form with a leadership that told its members what to do and which way to turn (and which itself took orders from the rulers of state-capitalist Russia). This was, as Kendall had pointed out, quite alien to the traditions of working-class organisations in Britain. Unfortunately, it resulted in the ‘Bolshevik conception’ getting established here and in Leninist theory and tactics passing as Marxism and revolutionary socialism, as Collins’s book itself bears witness. It was left to us, alone for most of the time, to keep the standard of anti-Leninist Marxism flying high.

Adam Buick

Material World: Trade deals – and artful dealers (2025)

The Material World column from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Noel Edmonds has much to answer for. His TV game show ‘Deal or No Deal’ popularised the idea of ‘deals’ as being one-time games. Each contestant had a box, which ‘The Banker’ would offer them money for, based on seeing the contents of other player’s boxes. The aim was to either have the £250K prize ticket in the box, or get The Banker to offer more money than the ticket in the box.

Most deals, though, are part of ongoing relationships: especially deals between enduring entities like countries. They are capable of constant and infinite revision. Good contracts allow the parties to vary the terms by agreement, rather than go to the palaver of completely striking a new arrangement. Edmonds, though, was an entertainer, and so could be forgiven for putting drama first; for politicians it is a different story.

Keir Starmer has been making hay out of having signed three trade deals with significant partners: USA, EU and India. Obviously, such agreements are complex, the result of many hours of hard work by professional negotiators and trade experts, and require the key role of a Prime Minister to choose winners and losers. It is right that in a democratic society such arrangements are made available for serious scrutiny and widespread deliberation, since the effects of trade deals are so far-reaching for so many people.

We do not, though, live in a properly democratic society: we live in a propagandised one. The party in government tries to spin complicated deals and draw our attention to what’s being won, while cannily hiding what’s being lost. They like to big-up the leader, ignoring the officials and their work. In these cases, the trade deals have often been commenced under the previous government and concluded under the current one. It would be interesting to see what difference the change of regime made: Starmer himself brayed in the House of Commons that he had struck deals where the Tory Party could not.

This hoopla is an interesting post-Brexit effect. Over the years, opponents of the EU tried to rein in the power of the government to strike deals through diplomacy, and the EU itself removed a lot of what goes on in trade deals from the back room and made it part of a public process via the EU Commission and Parliament.

Now that is all over, trade becomes an exclusive province of the executive: all relevant treaties are signed under Royal Prerogative. Other polities require treaties to be approved by their legislature, but there is no such requirement in the UK. Our democratic (such as they are) organs will only be involved in any legislation required to give effect to the agreement. This, in part, makes sense of the desire of the Prime Minister to make a big thing of it: this is an area where he alone can decide and give effect to such deals.

If we look, we can see that the UK actually has formal arrangements with most of the countries in the world. Even for those that it does not have a direct deal with, the World Trade Organisation rules are in place so trade can take place. So, in effect, so-called ‘Trade Deals’ are just a variance of existing relationships, and the relative formalisation or extension of existing rules .

The UK, its citizens and companies are currently the second biggest holder of US government debt . So, there is a natural intertwining of interest between the two economies, and British Prime Ministers love to talk about ‘the special relationship’, although it is not clear whether it is reciprocated.

‘The United States intends to provide certain key UK imports with modified reciprocal tariff treatment, based on our balanced trading relationship and shared national security priorities. Any such modifications will be consistent with those shared national security priorities’ .

So it is clear that joint military relations play a big part of the deal.

It should be noted, even if not written into the deal, that the US signed off on the Chagos Island deal around the same time as making the trade agreement again. Secret diplomacy is back, and great power politics has its part to play in the trade deals. Diego Garcia helps the US project its force over Pacific maritime trade, and the UK is in a position to assist that.

Shortly after Brexit, then Prime Minister Theresa May hinted darkly that Britain remains a military power. Clearly the UK government is leaning into that, using ‘security co-operation’ as part of its trading negotiation stance. This can be seen in the UK/EU agreement, where Starmer has been trumpeting getting UK access to the €150 billion Security Action for Europe (SAFE) fund: this will be used to support the UK’s armaments industry, which will doubtless, in turn, be used to fuel arms exports for both profit and strategic interests. Likewise, the deal will enable more top-level engagement between British and EU leaders for security co-operation.

The headlines of that agreement revolved around extending EU fisheries’ access to UK waters. This is an example of the government picking winners and losers. UK fishers could have had exclusive access to all the fish, but the UK government traded that for giving agricultural UK products easier access into Europe via the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regime of the EU. This gives the lie to the so-called national interest: it is the particular interest of specific industries.

Hence, the India deal involves improved tariff terms for luxury goods like whisky and gin, hardly worthwhile to most people, but a significant gain for whisky distillers and distributors.

Trade deals are the way that capitalism tries to plan the world economy. If we lived in a democratic society, such arrangements would be subject to extensive public deliberation rather than the fiat of one man. We owe Starmer a debt of sorts: his hoopla shows how the system is run in the interest of war and profit rather than human need.

Pik Smeet

Freedom as non-domination (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The historical influence of republicanism upon socialist thinking has been somewhat obscured, though recent works such as William Clare Roberts’ Marx’s Inferno and Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx have done much to help bring this relation back into the light. What is distinctive about the republican tradition is its conception of freedom, which differs from the one most commonly used today. Republican ideas about freedom were picked up and adapted by early socialists.

Freedom from and freedom to

Introductions to political or social freedom often start with Isaiah Berlin’s essay Two Concepts of Liberty. This article will follow the convention and begin here, not because there is anything uniquely faultless about Berlin’s essay, but because it has become the paradigmatic statement of the modern view of liberty. Berlin distinguishes between two ways of thinking about freedom, which he labels ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. In secondary texts this distinction is sometimes explained as being the difference between ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’, but this does not really capture two distinct concepts just two different ways of talking about the same thing – for example, the ‘freedom to’ enjoy a quiet space is also at the same time the ‘freedom from’ the interference of noisy neighbours.

While freedom in the negative sense can straightforwardly be understood as an absence of constraint or interference, Berlin’s positive freedom is a little harder to pin down. If we think of positive freedom as being about self-mastery of our internal life, we still have something that can be collapsed into negative freedom. The mastery of physiological compulsion can still be thought of as the overcoming of interference or constraints, and so a type of negative freedom. Instead of being about self-mastery we can think of positive freedom as being about self-realisation and self-perfection. Positive freedom can be understood as overcoming the constraints or barriers that obstruct us from the realisation of our own full potential. Only by living the most fulfilling version of ourselves do we become truly free. On this account, freedom is not an absence but an end-state or achievement. As summarised by Quentin Skinner in A Third Concept of Liberty:

‘… what underlies these theories of positive liberty is the belief that human nature has an essence, and that we are free if and only if we succeed in realising that essence in our lives. This enables us to see that there will be as many different interpretations of positive liberty as there are different views about the moral character of humankind. Suppose you accept the Christian view that the essence of our nature is religious, and thus that we attain our highest ends if and only if we consecrate our lives to God. Then you will believe that, in the words of Thomas Cranmer, the service of God “is perfect freedom”. Or suppose you accept the Aristotelian argument that man is a political animal, the argument restated as a theory of freedom by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961). Then you will believe that, as Arendt maintains, “freedom . . . and politics coincide” and that “this freedom is primarily experienced in action”.’

Berlin, who was writing during the Cold War and in opposition to Stalinism, highlights how this positive conception of freedom could be open to abuse. It leaves itself open to paternalistic and authoritarian interpretations. If freedom amounts to the achievement of our true potential or real interests, the question arises as to what these ‘real’ interests really are. If real interests do not have to be something that an agent is conscious of then the coercive interference from a higher social power could be a way of forcing people to be free. Says Berlin:

‘… George Orwell is excellent on this. People say “I express your real wishes. You may think that you know what you want, but I, the Fuhrer, we the Party Central Committee, know you better than you know yourself, and provide you with what you would ask for if you recognised your “real” needs.’

This is not to say, as is sometimes claimed, that Berlin thought that every use of the concept of positive freedom was a concealed attempt at manipulation and that we should therefore only use the negative conception. His claim was that historically the positive conception had been misused more often and with more devastating results. The negative conception of freedom was also open to misuse:

‘…Negative liberty is twisted when I am told that liberty must be equal for the tigers and for the sheep and that this cannot be avoided even if it enables the former to eat the latter if coercion by the state is not to be used. Of course unlimited liberty for capitalists destroys the liberty of the workers, unlimited liberty for factory-owners or parents will allow children to be employed in the coal-mines. Certainly the weak must be protected against the strong, and liberty to that extent be curtailed. Negative liberty must be curtailed if positive liberty is to be sufficiently realised; there must be a balance between the two, about which no clear principles can be enunciated. Positive and negative liberty are both perfectly valid concepts, but it seems to me that historically more damage has been done by pseudo-positive than by pseudo-negative liberty in the modern world.’

Ancient Rome

Having a grasp of these two common ways of thinking about freedom we can now introduce a third conception, which is commonly referred to as ‘republican’ or ‘neo-roman’ freedom. This way of thinking about freedom has been bought back into the public consciousness largely thanks to the work of historian of ideas Quentin Skinner and the political philosopher Philip Pettit. It can be thought of as ‘freedom as non-domination’ or ‘freedom as independence’. This republican concept of freedom can be directly tracked back to the Digest of Roman law. Here it is stated that ‘the fundamental division within the law of persons is that all men and women are either free or are slaves’ and that ‘Slavery is an institution of the law of nations by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominion of someone else’. From this we can get a definition of what it means to be a free person within a society. A free person is someone who is not under the dominion of anyone else and can act on their own accord. As Livy, the Roman historian who served as an inspiration for Machiavelli and other 16th century Florentine republicans, put it – to be free was ‘to be in your own power’ and not dependent on the will of anybody else.

The key difference between republican and negative freedom can be illustrated in this way: On the negative conception of freedom a slave who is not interfered with, and left to do as they please, is free. While on the republican conception what makes someone free is not the absence of interference but the absence of domination. Even though a slave may be left to go about as they please, at any point they could be interfered with according to the arbitrary whims of their master. The knowledge that arbitrary interference can be applied at any point is enough to be a restriction to liberty, behaviour and comment must continually be self-monitored so as to avoid the sanction of the master. On the republican account, freedom is a status relation within a society that makes it impossible to be the helpless victim of arbitrary interference. As Sidney wrote in his 1698 Discourses Concerning Government, ‘he is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands, and depends upon his will.’

In the English Civil War, disputes between Crown and Parliament drew upon this language of dependency and dominion, drawing upon common-law texts which had their basis in the Roman Digest. The effect of Royal prerogative was that those living under the king were reduced to a state of servitude. This was not because of any actual or threatened interference, but because the continuation of rights and freedoms was dependent on the goodwill of the King, and this could be withdrawn at any point. It was this state of dependency, of being under the dominion of the King, that was the threat to freedom. When King Charles was executed, the charge was that he had ruled arbitrarily and so tyrannically. The Act that abolished the monarchy declared that the effect of prerogative had been ‘to oppress and impoverish and enslave the subject’.

As well as being central to the English revolution, these ideas would surface again a century later in the French and American revolutions. The central idea was that it was only possible to have individual freedom through being a citizen of a self-ruling republic. To live under the dependence of a monarch, or in the American case under a colonial power, is to be reduced to the status of a slave. This understanding of freedom as being a state of independence left some controversy as to the normative status of industrial production and wage labour in the early years of the American republic. Wage labour was seen as being a state of dependency and so a form of unfreedom which was degrading to the moral health of the nation. ‘Free labour’, either in the form of small-scale production where the producers also owned their means of production or that of independent homesteaders was seen as being more conducive to building a strong and resilient nation.

Freedom as emancipation

Reaction against revolutionary and democratic movements in France and America saw the development and spread of the idea of freedom as non-interference. This, together with the irresistible rise of international commerce with its permanent dependence on wage labour, saw a decline in republican ways of thinking about freedom by the late 18th century. The concept of negative freedom, in the form of voluntarist ideas about freedom of contract, was one that was more suitable for the needs of the capitalist class. Though republican ideas about freedom would continue to persist in the labour and nascent socialist movements.

‘Something of slavery still remains… something of freedom is yet to come’ wrote the labour republican Ira Steward in 1873. Early socialists would continue to use the language of ‘wage-slavery’, ‘self-emancipation’ and other tropes drawn from radical republican heritage.

But they did not just adopt republican ideas wholesale; they responded to and critiqued them. Republican language focussed on an undifferentiated ‘people’ as the basis for a self-governing republic, socialist language on the proletariat as the group-agent capable of changing society. The first English translation of Communist Manifesto was in a newspaper entitled The Red Republican, and here the difference between radical republican and socialist ideas can be seen in contrast side by side. Labour republicans, such as the Knights of Labor, sought to lessen the dependence of the working class through the development of workers co-ops, etc. Marx’s Capital can be understood as an intervention within the labour movement against the prominence of such ideas. Socialist critique argued that it was not enough for individual groups of workers to separately own their own enterprises, market competition would still present itself as a form of impersonal domination.

Understanding freedom as non-domination provides a rich foundation for criticising capitalist society. The formally ‘free’ contract that the wage labourer enters into turns out to be a one-way ticket into a relation of dependency. Employers impose the same kind of arbitrary interference upon workers as kings on their subjects. The importance of non-domination in the foundations of socialism is why it has to be a movement for collective self-emancipation and why authoritarian attempts to impose it on an unwilling or passive population would be doomed to failure. Rather than being the ‘real interests’ of the proletariat imposed by an authoritarian state, freedom as non-domination is a collective good. The extent to which it is achieved depends on the extent to which it has been secured for others.

DJP

Labour in sickness and health (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are told the NHS is a ‘national treasure.’ That it was built by socialists. That it belongs to us. That if we just had the right funding and the right managers, it could be restored to its former glory.

But we know better. The NHS is often cited, especially by those still enthralled by the Labour Party, as an example of ‘socialist’ legislation passed during the 1945–1951 Attlee government. Even people who now admit Labour is not socialist cling to the NHS as proof that it once was.

Let’s be clear: the NHS was never socialist. It wasn’t created to empower workers or take profit out of care. It was built to keep the workforce functional – to patch us up and send us back to work. A healthy worker is a productive worker – and a productive worker generates value for the boss. That’s why the capitalist class signed off on it. Not out of compassion. Out of calculation.

Sure, there was high-minded rhetoric at the time. Aneurin Bevan, considered the founder of the NHS, said: ‘No society can call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means’. And William Beveridge, architect of the welfare state, said: ‘A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolution, not for patching’. Later he stormed the barricades of the House of Lords as he became a Liberal peer.

The real context was fear. The ruling class had just dragged us through mass unemployment and a world war, and it now faced an angry, armed working class returning home. It saw what had happened in Italy. Reforms were made not to end capitalism but to save it from social and industrial unrest.

Bevan once asked: ‘How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political power to keep wealth in power?’ He blamed the Conservatives, calling them ‘vermin’. But take the party labels off, and the question becomes sharper. The problem isn’t just the Tories. It’s a system that ensures poverty exists in the first place.

Bevan couldn’t see that. For him, the enemy wore a blue rosette. For us, the enemy is the wages system, the class system, the profit system. That’s what’s killing the NHS. That’s what’s killing us.

Now, 75 years on, they’re not even pretending. The NHS has become a marketplace. Drugs are bought from profit-hungry pharmaceutical firms. Cleaning is outsourced to contractors who cut wages and corners. Just this month, a scandal was revealed over botched cataract operations performed by private clinics cashing in on NHS contracts.

We used to joke the NHS was held together with duct tape and goodwill – now they’ve outsourced the duct tape and privatised the goodwill. They say this is a Tory problem. But what has Labour done?

Wes Streeting – dubbed ‘Wes the Rat’ by campaigners – is Health Secretary and says he’s ‘not ideological,’ which is odd for a politician. He wants to ‘use spare capacity in the private sector’. He calls patients ‘customers.’ He says the NHS is no longer ‘the envy of the world’ – not because it’s been gutted, but because it hasn’t been modernised. That’s code for markets, contracts, fragmentation. The same failed model, just rebranded.

Starmer campaigned in 2020 on ending NHS outsourcing. That pledge disappeared like a junior doctor’s lunch break. Now it’s all about ‘outcomes,’ ‘efficiency,’ and ‘value for money’. In his worldview, health is a product, not a right.

He’s cited NHS England as an example of excessive bureaucracy, duplications, and inefficiency. NHS England’s functions are now being absorbed into the Department of Health and Social Care. The transition will take about two years – less time than it takes many trans people to get a first appointment on the NHS waiting list.

Around 9,000 jobs are being axed in the process, as AI systems take over. One of the main tech firms involved is Palantir, a data analytics and armaments contractor with deep ties to the American MAGA state.

Palantir’s NHS involvement began with a £1 (one pound) trial contract in March 2020, part of the pandemic response. Then came:

• July 2020: £1 million contract
• December 2020: £23 million, two-year deal
• June 2023: £25 million contract
• November 2023: £480 million for the Federated Data Platform (FDP)

Now, the NHS is locked in.

Palantir was co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump backer who once called the NHS a ‘monstrosity’. The company built software for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), the CIA, and for predictive policing systems. Its platforms – Gotham and Foundry – have been used for deportations, drone strikes, and surveillance. The CEO, Alex Karp, bizarrely refers to himself as a ‘socialist’ and a ‘neo-Marxist,’ despite running a firm helping military and police forces worldwide. He studied the Frankfurt School and Marxian philosophy but now says Western tech should serve national power and defence. In his book The Technological Republic, Karp argues that declining interest in Western civilisation has left tech without ‘patriotic duty’. Palantir, in contrast, builds tools for ICE and the US military – showing where its duty lies.

This company now runs NHS data infrastructure. There was no public debate. No vote. Just a quiet, technocratic handover, sold as ‘integration’ and ‘efficiency’. It sounds like an IT upgrade. In reality, it’s a power shift – from public stewardship to corporate control.

Palantir claims it doesn’t own the data. Maybe not. But it owns the system. The architecture. The infrastructure. That’s vendor lock-in – like getting a free coffee machine and finding the pods cost £12 each and are only sold in Texas.

This isn’t reform. It’s enclosure. The same old privatisation, dressed up as innovation. And the outcome? A two-tier system. A burnt-out workforce. A public service run like a business where care takes a backseat to cost-cutting.

They say the NHS is free. But people pay for it – with taxes when they pay them, with our labour and with our time. It’s not free. We are. Free to wait. Free to suffer. Free to die while shareholders get dividends and algorithms determine care.

The Socialist Party stands for more than better management or fresh branding. We advocate the abolition of the wages system. The end of profit in care. A world where there are no customers, no contracts, no markets – just people, meeting each other’s needs.

Health is not a service. It’s a condition of freedom. The NHS can’t be saved. It must be superseded – by a system where care is not rationed, outsourced, or monetised. Where no one waits, no one pays, and no one profits. That’s not utopian. That’s socialism. And we’re not asking for it. We’re organising for it.

A.T.

Cooking the Books: The spending revue (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Governments can’t control the way that the capitalist economy works. They can, however, decide how they are going to spend the money that they have or plan to have. This is the annual budget. From time to time, in Britain, the government takes a longer view and sets out their spending plans over a period of three or four years.

One such event occurred on 11 June when the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves stood up in the House of Commons and delivered a ‘spending review’, a ‘comprehensive’ one, no less, as it was broken down by government department. For weeks before, the media had been speculating which departments would be favoured and which would suffer cuts.

She announced that the total amount to be spent over the next three years or so was to be £2.2 trillion, a figure that the Times (12 June) commented ‘may be so large as to be meaningless’. Yes, what is a trillion? A million million? A thousand billion? Anyone know off-hand?

It’s the same every time. The Chancellor’s statement is followed by the Shadow Chancellor getting up and accusing the government of double counting or complaining that not enough is being spent on this or too much on that. And asking where’s the money coming from (a good question). From time to time MPs join in, cheering or booing.

A spending review, as its name suggests, only covers spending not where the money to spend is going to come from. Since governments as such don’t generate any income or wealth, their income has to come from elsewhere, the two sources being taxation and borrowing. This is where the workings of the capitalist economy come in.

Taxes ultimately fall on profits and profits are what drive the capitalist economy. This places limits on what the government can raise without provoking an economic downturn. Governments borrow from capitalist financial organisations at home and abroad and are competing with other capitalist states for loans from these speculators. Any hint that the government may be planning to spend money without credible funding from taxation is seen as increasing, however slightly, the risk of the speculators not getting their money back. This leads to an increase in the rate of interest they charge a government for lending it money. This, in turn, will mean that the government has to allocate more of the money it raises in taxes towards paying the higher interest payments. Another restriction on how much a government can spend.

Reeves is always tweeting that she is ‘fighting to put more money in the pockets of working people’ (though not of non-working people; she wants to stop money going into the pocket of many of them). She seems to mean increasing take-home pay.

Nothing in her spending review does this. That’s because it’s not from the government that she expects the money to come but from employers once the economy is growing. There is an element of truth in this in that, as Marx pointed out at the end of Wage Labour and Capital, ‘the rapid growth of capital is the most favourable condition for wage labour’ as the employers’ increased demand for labour power bids up its price. The trouble for Reeves is that the rapid growth of capital is not something that a government can engineer. It is just something that happens from time to time as capitalism moves through its regular boom-slump cycle.

Letter: Just Stop Oil (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just Stop Oil

Arising out of the article in our May issue on Just Stop Oil ((‘Just Stop Oil: The failure of a tactic’), we received two emails from Tony Marone, XR Public Engagement Working Group, which we have combined into one.

The subtext of the disbanding of Just Stop Oil was that their aim had been achieved. If it was misrepresented as them having achieved their aim through their own actions alone, then that of course is not correct. However, you surely have to allow for a little self-encouragement in a world that is unremittingly bleak?

The conflation of JSO and XR through the involvement of Roger Hallam in both movements is poorly judged. The actions of JSO were neither overtly supported nor overtly denounced by XR – XR is XR, JSO is JSO.

Roger Hallam left XR in 2021 when he set up Insulate Britain (which still exists) and then moved on to set up JSO. It has been 4 years since Roger Hallam has been considered anything other than a founder member of XR. He holds no position in XR now.

The 3.5 percent minority theory was something that is closely associated with Roger Hallam, but was based in empirical research done by Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) on political campaigns from 1990-2006.

Roger was a high profile advocate of this theory when he was with XR, however it does not inform our current strategy.

You can read more about it (including links to the Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) paper) here:

I personally hold the SPGB in some regard for their educational work. However I am in constant wonder and puzzlement over how all organisations of the left seem to prefer criticising Fellow Travellers to attacking the pillars of neo-liberal capitalism.

As the saying has it, “the Right looks for Converts, The Left looks for Traitors”. Isn’t it past time to abandon ideological purity?

Reply:

We never claimed that Roger Hallam was still connected with XR and can understand why XR should want to dissociate itself from him. We did, however, say that both he and XR were committed to the theory and tactic that a minority of only 3.5 percent should try to bring about system change.

We say this is mistaken and undemocratic and that a majority of the population must be in favour of socialism before it can replace capitalism.

Thanks for the link to that article about the misuse of the 3.5% rule. We note that this rule no longer informs XR’s strategy. In which case, your website need updating as it still states:

‘We have a shared vision of change: Creating a world that is fit for generations to come.

We set our mission on what is necessary: Mobilising 3.5% of the population to achieve system change – such as “momentum-driven organising” to achieve this.’

In passing, your vision of ‘a world that is fit for generations to come’ is a bit vague. So vague in fact that everybody – and every organisation – will share it. Who wouldn’t want that? ‘System change’ is a bit vague too; from what system to what other system?

There may be a case for the multitude of reformist organisations to get together instead of criticising each other. That’s up to them. But there is no case for us, as an organisation that campaigns for socialism and nothing else, to join them or not to point out their inadequacies. 

Editors.

Letter: ‘White privilege”? (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘White privilege”?

This letter is in response to the Pathfinders article in the May Socialist Standard, titled ‘Without Distinction of Race or Sex‘.

Firstly, I’m against the author’s argument that the capitalist system will always promote whites over more talented minority-ethnic candidates; it’s in the best interest of enterprises to hire the most talented worker for the job. Poor white people don’t see talk of ‘white privilege’ as an attack on their ‘rights’, they see it as being an attack on them due to their skin colour.

We shouldn’t fall into the bourgeois trap of fighting for equality among the proletariat (based on skin colour, etc), not that that’s achievable anyway. While certain groups of people (on average) and individuals undoubtedly have harder lives under capitalism than others, the entire capitalist class oppresses the entire working class. Our enemy is the capitalist class (they screw us all over, though some more than others).

None of us are free until we are all free.

Matthew Shearn

Reply:

The article was not advocating but explaining the critical race theory argument that ‘disadvantaged groups will never get a fair shake unless a little positive discrimination is introduced’ and that ‘as things stand, the system will always promote whites over more talented ethnic candidates’. It then goes on to make your exact point, that discrimination is not logical for employers, before adding that ‘prejudice is not logical’, a view with which you will hardly disagree.

The article refers in passing to ‘talk of “white privilege”’, but we ourselves don’t use the term as it could imply that all ‘white’ workers discriminate against all ‘non-white’ workers whereas such discrimination is an historical left-over from colonialist times which many workers today emphatically do not endorse. Much violence is perpetrated by workers scapegoating other workers, and there’s nothing ‘bourgeois’ about saying so. If, as we argue, the route to class emancipation is class solidarity, then the question is how best to achieve that solidarity. So we call out worker-against-worker discrimination and violence for what it is, in effect class betrayal. 

Editors

Farage — opportunist supreme (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘That means less money to cover rent, the weekly shop or a pint down the pub’ (Nigel Farage on the Labour government).

Last month’s Socialist Standard carried an article on May’s local election results which saw Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party win hundreds of seats and perhaps present a serious future threat to the traditional two-party Labour-Tory dominance of UK politics. At the same time the article pointed out that this might just be a flash in the pan, and that come the next parliamentary election Reform’s star may have waned, as has happened in the past with other seeming new pretenders to power.

Nevertheless, it also drew attention to the particularly distasteful nature of Reform’s political agenda, with its open and unashamed promotion of xenophobia, calculated to embolden those with racist outlooks and other particularly obnoxious agendas. And though the Socialist Party is not in the business of focusing its criticism on specific capitalist politicians, preferring to see individuals in that role as instruments of the system they are committed to, it would be at the very least disingenuous of us not to put some focus on the politician who is the embodiment of Reform UK and its policies. We are of course talking about Nigel Farage who is the face, we can say the inventor, of that party, without whom it is hard to imagine it could continue being any kind of force in British politics.

In this perspective it is probably useful to point to some aspects of Farage’s previous political attitudes and activities, which led up to and form at least part of the policies now being embraced by his party. We can find the following:

• In the early 1980s, when a student at Dulwich College, he is on record as voicing admiration for Hitler and was reportedly a vocal supporter of the National Front.
• When this was put to him later by a journalist, he admitted to having said ‘some ridiculous things’, but, when asked if these were racist, replied, ‘it depends how you define it’.
• Standing for UKIP at a 1994 by-election, he sought to enlist the support of the figure he called his political hero, Enoch Powell, who had become infamous for his racist ‘rivers of blood’ speech.
• In the years that followed he was associated with figures from the BNP.
• As leader of UKIP from 2006, he advocated dismantling the NHS, declared opposition to gay marriage and made numerous appearances on the Kremlin-run RT television channel, expressing admiration for Vladimir Putin and his take-over of Crimea in 2014.
• He has consistently voiced support for Donald Trump, referring to him as his ‘pal’, defending his use of misogynistic language (‘grab ‘em by the pussy’) and, in the run-up to the 2020 American elections, making a speech at a rally in Arizona in which he described Trump as ‘the single most resilient and bravest person I have ever met in my life’.
• He presented himself, in a column in The Sun newspaper in April this year, as a modern-day Keir Hardie, stating that ‘when Keir Hardie founded the Labour Party in 1893, he declared it existed to give the working man and woman a voice’, but that now ‘Keir Hardie would be turning in his grave and ‘Labour no longer represents hardworking Brits’.

So now, with characteristic opportunism, Farage, sniffing political power, is seeking to present himself as the leader of a kind of neo-Labour Party who will fix everything Labour has always promised to fix for workers but never has. Statements he has made in the past about privatising the NHS and cutting welfare benefits have ceased, and his focus is on how his party would run things, as he put it in his Sun column, ‘in the interests of the working man and woman’.

In reality, he would be no more able to do this than Labour, which, when in power, has always simply carried out the task of administering capitalism in the interests of those who monopolise society’s wealth – as any government must. So the idea that, if elected, Reform would do anything different is manifest tosh. But tosh that, currently at least, seems to be having significant purchase on workers, judging by that party’s recent local election successes.

And another button that Farage is pressing harder than ever in his courtship of voters is the crude nationalism that, as we have seen, has been present in him since an early stage. In ramping up his longstanding scapegoating of foreigners and minority groups of various kinds, he is blaming them for multiple problems suffered by ‘British’ workers which he says the current government is not taking drastic enough steps to remedy. ‘Labour’s biggest betrayal of the Red Wall is immigration’, is how he expressed this in his column in The Sun.

From what we have seen, the description of Farage as ‘xenophobic and pandering to racism’ and ‘a disingenuous grifter’ contained in a leaked memo from the Coutts’ bank he was recently and publicly in dispute with really does seem to fit the bill. But we know of course that in the end Farage is only an extreme example of the opportunism inherent in all capitalist political leaders as they seek to control a system that breeds economic chaos, poses the constant threat of war and environmental degradation and can only ever offer workers at best a few crumbs from the table of the rich.

If workers continue to follow the likes of Farage (or any other leader), it will be a long wait before we get the new system we need where the sole motive of production will be to meet the reasonable needs of all in a world society without borders or states or classes. And, of course, before that can happen, workers will also need to throw off their own sense of powerlessness and the illusion that change can only be brought about by certain exceptional individuals.

Howard Moss

Proper Gander: Being informed about informers (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was probably a coincidence that a BBC documentary about the tyrannical Russian state was released on the same day as the government’s Defence Secretary John Healey announced increased investment to move the UK to ‘war-fighting readiness’, especially against Russia. While its timing gave the programme a propagandist tinge, it doesn’t consider how the Russian state may be a danger to those of us in the UK, but rather how it oppresses those living under its rule.

The threat of being ‘denounced’, to the extent it exists in Russia, isn’t something easy to empathise with elsewhere. Aspects of what it means to be ‘denounced’ are found in any country, as all have legislation covering what politically-motivated acts are deemed unacceptable, and anyone risks the consequences for their employment, for instance, of being publicly ‘shamed’. However, in Russia, the laws are especially strict and the state monitors dissent from its decrees closely, and so to be ‘denounced’ for transgressing them can mean particularly harsh punishments. One way which supposedly subversive activities come to the state’s attention is through informers. The two featured in the documentary Informers: Hunting The Enemy Within aren’t employed in this role, which they’ve taken on like an enthusiastically-pursued hobby. They gather up information online and in the media about would-be dissenters and often alongside targeting them directly, notify the state regulator, who may then further investigate and prosecute.

One of the informers is Valentin Botzvin, an armed forces veteran who has become ‘self-appointed guardians of Russia’s soul’, as the narration puts it. He targets those who he says ‘are forming an anti-peace system with different values’, including Alisa Gorshenina, who contributed to the design for a video by activist band Pussy Riot. The other snout featured in the programme – Anna Korobkova – is more prolific, claiming to have written 1,000 denouncements. One victim was Alexandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist at a Russian university. In 2022, Anna sent Alexandra’s employers a letter about her ‘immoral act’ discrediting the military through her academic work, and some of her friends and colleagues were also similarly accused. Alexandra fled to France and began investigating Anna’s real identity, such as by looking for patterns in their style of writing and comparing them with other texts. The camera used for photos on Anna’s Wikipedia entry was tracked to a man called Ivan Abaturov. Alexandra found a written denouncement signed by Ivan which resembled one sent by Anna, and both were traced back to one computer IP address. When challenged, Ivan replied denying he was Anna, in the same writing style. He is described as having been a troublemaker while at university and as himself has posted on social media talking about denouncements.

While revealing ‘Anna”s true identity gives the documentary a narrative and an air of espionage, Valentin the veteran is quite open about informing. As a member of Russia’s military, he had already developed a loyalty to the state, which no doubt gave him the drive to snitch in his retirement. That there are younger people, such as Ivan, who are as keen to denounce others shows how this creed has permeated out. While they may sincerely believe that what they are doing is morally right, this is because they have adopted a belief system which just so happens to align with that of the ruling elite, even if it is against their class interests.

The mindset of those who are at risk of being informed upon is different. As Alisa explains, the threat of retribution for expressing nonconformist views makes her fearful and paranoid. Alexandra felt she had to leave Russia, as did Noize MC, a rapper who was being monitored for his ‘sharp, socially conscious lyrics’, with some of his gigs being cancelled by officials. Alisa chose to remain in Russia, saying that to leave would be to have something else taken away from her, along with her rights. A caption at the end of the programme says that she was arrested, detained and found guilty of displaying an ‘extremist’ rainbow emoji and insulting the army, for which she was fined. We’re also told that by the end of 2024, almost 3,000 critics of the war against Ukraine were being prosecuted, while almost 300,000 denunciations were registered with the state regulator in the first year of the conflict.

When a state criminalises disagreement with its ideology, this shows a weakness in any arguments for it. But this weakness is eclipsed by the strength wielded by the state through its legislation and punishments. These are applied randomly in Russia, as Alexandra explains, in that one person may avoid any sanctions for writing a provocative social media post, while others may get prosecuted just for clicking ‘like’ on one. This may be due to gaps in the resources available to the state, but as Alexandra says, this inconsistency contributes to the threat. For those who question the way they have to live, anxiety about being denounced adds pressure to self-censor. Music acts such as Pussy Riot and Noize MC bravely attempt to express some anti-state sentiment, which represents a little optimism. Unfortunately, at the moment, state oppression and limited class consciousness would make any movement for genuine change in Russia difficult to establish.

According to its iPlayer page, the BBC Eye strand offers ‘high-impact investigations and in-depth reporting from our award-winning World Service team’. With a running time of only 22 minutes, there’s a limit to how in-depth Informers: Hunting The Enemy Within could be. So the documentary doesn’t consider the context much beyond saying that denouncers threaten to ‘bring back ghosts from Russia’s past’, particularly during Stalin’s rule. Throughout the decades between then and now, the state has remained, and even when it has been less autocratic it has still enforced and engendered acceptance to maintain itself. These ‘ghosts’ may now be more active, but they’ve always haunted those living under the regime.

Mike Foster

Thoughts on the future (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Humans are both magnificent creators and problem-solvers as well, obviously, as beings capable of incredible stupidity and ignorance and, to quote the title of a New Order album, of power, corruption and lies. We cry at the folly of the human race, which has achieved so much in technological and scientific achievement, as it has in the arts, and yet which still continues to treat humans and the natural world as so much gunpowder to shoot out of the cannon of profit or power.

It is difficult to understand why humans put up with the resulting stress, the inefficiencies, the deprivations, the downright failures. It is as though most people view themselves as passive agents who can, at most, protest the system’s injustices in the hope that the powerful will respond, vote for what they believe to be the best alternative or at least the less offensive, and trust that the leaders and experts know what they are doing and will ensure their welfare. However, reality does not seem to conform to such expectations when it comes to protesting, voting and trusting. Instead, the system seems an inherently unstable structure, with its economic booms and depressions, its constant eruption of wars somewhere around the world, its inability to care about or effect sufficient environmental restoration, and the constant explosions of pseudoscience and misinformation that accompany cultural movements and fads, which are like commodities in the realm of ideas.

We are clearly not going to have the better world that the scientific and democratic revolutions promised us. This is because the voices of those who rightly insisted upon our release from the rule of aristocrats and the church ignorantly associated the rise of capitalist production with liberty. There is very little in capitalism to support that contention, even though those democratic revolutions released commodity production from the clutches of feudal privilege. Peasants were also released from the landlords of the ancient regime, and then fell into the equally ruthless hands of the bourgeoisie.

Change of masters

In this new world based on factory production, only the masters changed. The new ones introduced a form of ‘freedom’ without the prior obligations of the landlord. Living in slums, dressing in rags, suffering fatal industrial accidents, and being paid the least that the capitalists could get away with became the new normal, just as being owned by a master or living off one’s master’s land were the previous normal. Much of the world still resembles this embryo of a society based on greed and exploitation. Unionisation, technological advances and a degree of trickle-down economics improved the material lot of a greater percent of workers than our ancestors experienced in prior centuries, but the values that govern our system have not changed. We remain, most of us, essentially slaves to a system prioritised not to meeting the needs of the community but to making a profit.

It is amazing that the human spirit persists through this horror show that we live in. Doctors and nurses do incredible work to help the ill by putting the person first and the cost second, but health outcomes remain predicted by poverty and stress. I offer emotional support to local nursing home residents for a half a day per week, and their greatest complaint is not their medical conditions or loss of their home, although these are traumatic and depressing, but just the fact of residing somewhere that is understaffed. In such a nursing home, the residents wait long periods of time to be changed when they soil their bed. They wait hours for someone to notice they have turned on the light outside their room indicating a request for help. The food is almost inedible, after a life of homemade meals. The few activities offered hardly fill an expanse of time with nothing to do except watch TV. Muscles weaken and stiffen, and bodies waste away because physical therapy is too infrequent to make a difference.

That example is symptomatic of our entire economic system. While yes, bridges and buildings are somehow maintained, and supermarkets for most of us in the western world are stocked plentifully; the entire economic system of capitalism seems to hop along on one leg into an insecure, unstable future because one cannot predict the economy, the availability of jobs, the unemployment ahead, whether the mortgage will be paid without fail over a thirty year period, whether war will strike us, whether our planet will worsen, and how much social services will or won’t be financed based on the ideology of the constantly changing governments.

Meanwhile, our system is like a bus being driven by a thousand drivers each tugging in different directions. Because in capitalism all goods and services are commodities, thousands of companies use up human and natural resources with no intelligent oversight and with no regard for the living planet that is our home. Even the governing bodies that do exist to monitor and make recommendations about health, the environment, poverty, literacy, or other human needs, can only advocate, can only raise so much money, and must always fight cost-cutting priorities, varying ideologies, and think tanks that promote business interests by fighting activism with pseudoscience and misinformation. The needs of business and the needs of the community and of all living beings are almost always antagonistic.

A world without commodities

The one change that could definitively solve many of these intractable capitalist problems is the end of commodity production. The commodity is a feature of all shades of capitalism: moderate welfare state capitalism, state capitalism governed by autocratic left-wing or right-wing parties, or dictatorships run by charismatic narcissists, generals and religious extremists. Every government, whatever its political flavour, revolves around capitalism’s defining entity, the commodity. That institution allows the propertyless to survive only by selling their commodified skills. It allows economic production to be defined by the selling of goods and services. It limits access to society’s benefits based on priorities such as price, cost, profit and loss. It encourages thousands of companies to strip the planet like so many piranhas in the quest for profits. And its products are not produced primarily with quality, durability, or even need in mind, but mass-produced for cheapness and marketed through advertising to maximise persuasion and create false needs and wants, with oftentimes ill effects on human health, emotional wellbeing, financial security, the living planet, and other ‘externalities’ that profit cares nothing about.

A world without commodities would be one in which the priority of production would be the meeting of human needs. This would likely incentivise humans to work, to do their best, to maximise their knowledge, education, and skills, and to reduce the endless negative repercussions of the acquisitive nature of capitalism, which often brings out the worst in people. The liberty that capitalism claims to offer, which is really the liberty of capitalists to produce with minimal legal or political restrictions, comes hand-in-hand with all those externalities which erode human liberty: crime; violent gang or cartel shootings; corruption at all levels of the society; the drug trade; wars, unpleasant workplaces and work itself; rampant pseudoscience and misinformation; a worship of individualism that breeds narcissism; the widespread destruction of our oceans, lakes, rivers, forests, air, soil quality, species, and weather; the huge waste in human energy and resources that goes into managing commodities (banks, advertisers, traders, investors, insurers, ticket inspectors, sellers, buyers, exchangers, the machinery of war, and much more). All these side effects mean that capitalism erodes human liberty more than it promotes it, even in those countries fortunate enough to have some degree of freedom of speech and movement.

A world without commodities will require production under different rules. Production in the modern world merges many sciences, and so the research, planning, and execution of how best to meet human needs is essentially a scientific project. Money too often distorts this. Money is not real, but an entirely cultural and psychological phenomenon that evolved with power and property. Money does not belong in science, in the same way that political ideologies in university settings should not distort the practice and results of science. Our own world community should make use of productive machinery to meet our material needs, allowing us the freedom and liberty to live our own lives as we choose and according to our own values and interests. ‘Freedom’ will no longer be just an ideological soundbite used to con voters, but a reality, for the first time in human history.

The desire to build a world without commodities goes with the desire to live sustainably, both individually and as a culture. Capitalism, and its repressive antecedents (feudalism and slavery), distorted our concept of nature, essentially objectifying it. The rise in environmentalism represents a fairly recent development in our understanding of nature, even though it often fails to identify the economic culprit behind the objectification of living beings, namely commodity production. Socialists strive for the abolition of commodities, including the wages system, which reduces people to machines who sell their abilities to employers. Technical social questions will then be rid of financial considerations, which are not part of nature, or of our nature.

Such questions could be: Where do I want to live? What kinds of work would I find satisfying? What are the most pressing local needs that I wish to help meet? What can I do to help beautify my city? Are there realms of knowledge that I wish to contribute to? These, and many more personal questions, may finally be answered by self-knowledge, adventure, imagination, and a profound sense of serving other humans that religions can only fantasise about. A society in which our needs are in harmony with the needs of society as a whole. A society in which the purpose of production and of administration is the meeting of needs, in which we no longer fear poverty, starvation, war, or oppressive state ideologies and their henchmen. These are permanent and durable solutions to the problems that we face today, that may yield a sense of comfort and belonging that we are entitled to as humans who show our giving side each day when serving employers, families, and neighbourhoods.

We should feel that our world is ours. We are for the most part good, though imperfect, beings, who deserve a world in which our built-in, vulnerable fears of being emotionally damaged and eradicated by death should be matched by a sense that our community exists as much for us as we do for it. The eradication of the commodity, and its replacement by goods and services produced for free with the aim of meeting our needs, will bring out the best in the human animal, intellectually, emotionally, socially, and in terms of physical and emotional health.

There is no need for a world that encourages violence, competitiveness, ideological rivalry, ruthlessness and greed. Because we are imperfect beings with the potential for both good and evil, it behoves us to establish a social system that will be more likely to bring out the good than the bad. We owe that to ourselves, so that we can continue to evolve emotionally and psychologically, having finally conquered the most basic material needs of existence.

Once we have met those basic needs without unnecessary complication, stress and waste, we may continue to evolve more important qualities that today’s social system frustrates or prevents, and which our children deserve to be raised by: generosity, kindness, aesthetics, reason, gratitude, wisdom and, as beings on possibly the only planet that sustains any degree of complex life, awe at life itself, from the quantum level to the breathtakingly huge and beautiful universe, that the consciousness inside our humbly small heads allows us to marvel at.

Dr Who

Family History and Beyond (2025)

Book Review from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remembering Peasants: a Personal History of a Vanished World. By Patrick Joyce. Penguin £10.99.

The author was ‘the London-born child of Irish rural immigrant parents’, and here he examines the history and current situation of peasants, concentrating not just on Ireland (where he discusses his own family history) but also Poland, and in addition with some attention to Italy. It is an eloquent and wide-ranging account, supported by a range of photographs, the earliest dating back to the late nineteenth century.

One chapter deals with the problem of defining who counts as a peasant, but there is no simple answer to this. Peasants are not necessarily serfs; they consume (part of) the products their work creates, with the family and its economy having a central role. They do not seek to maximise their income, and either owned the land they worked or had long-term tenancies. They may produce for the capitalist market, but the extent of this varies according to time and place. They live in ‘cultures of scarcity’, where prosperity for one person means another going without. Any money earned was not re-invested but kept at home or lent at very low interest rates. And ‘peasant societies are societies of the gift, not the commodity … What is given should be given freely: that which is given without expectation of return feeds the giver again and again.’ (The different tenses in this paragraph reflect those in the book.)

Religion often involved various traditional beliefs being incorporated into christian world-views, but ‘Religion usually had the law on its side, and so it also had the support of those who upheld the law, the landowners and state.’ There was a great deal of ‘everyday suffering’, and in some places it was the best of the crop that was surrendered in rent. Most years there would be ‘pre-harvest famine’ from spring onwards.

A powerful chapter deals with peasant revolts and rebellions. Peasants could feud with and even kill each other. There was a code of behaviour, which even the powerful had to recognise, and minor acts of revolt, such as quiet sabotage, could be used to get even. Sometimes this could escalate to violence and murder. In Ireland in 1882, for instance, a land agent was killed after many hundreds had been evicted and an estate converted to a place for fishing and wildlife shooting. There were larger peasant uprisings, such as the German Peasants War of 1524–5, the Romanian rebellion of 1907 and the Tambov Rebellion in Russia in 1920–1. The twentieth century indeed saw much violence inflicted on peasants: ‘These barbarities were foundational for the emergence of modern states.’ Most of those imprisoned in Soviet gulags were peasants.

Depending on the terminology used, peasants have now largely been replaced by small farmers, and globally over a billion people still do agricultural work, mostly in India and China. But whichever labels are employed, it is clear that peasant history was largely one of struggle, poverty and repression.

Paul Bennett