Are the Workers Getting Worse Off? (1937)

From the September 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent from U.S,.A. writes: “In discussion, many workers maintain that the condition of the working class is getting worse all the time. They say the ratio which the workers receive in values contrasted with what the capitalists receive in values becomes less and less as capitalism develops, i.e., the workers’ share of new value always grows less. This contention meets with a difficulty. Let us assume that 75 years ago the workers received half of what they produced, and that to-day they receive one-fifth. It is obvious that they are more intensely exploited. On the other hand, it is undeniable that to-day the workers receive more actual goods than they did 75 years ago, i.e., their real wages have gone up. In short, as capitalism develops, the workers are more intensely exploited at the same time that their real wages are increasing. In view of this fact, how can we say that the condition of the working class is getting worse all the time? By saying this, we imply that the workers are getting less and less material benefits, whereas in actuality the reverse is true."

The first point which emerges is that it is not good enough simply to say that the workers are “worse off" or “better off." It depends what you are comparing. As our comrade points out, the workers might be better off in the sense that they have a higher standard of living than formerly, but worse off in the sense that they get a smaller proportion of the wealth produced. We get a smaller fraction of the loaf, but a bigger piece of bread, because the loaf is much bigger.

There is no contradiction in this. The worker must have a rather larger slice of bread if he is to go on producing a much bigger loaf. Intensified exploitation not only takes more energy out of the worker but also requires more skill and knowledge. It is true that mechanisation, rationalisation, and so on, often tend to reduce the skilled craftsman to a machine minder or repetition worker. But machines which abolish skill require skill to produce; rationalisation requires brains to think the schemes out and operate them; large-scale production, keener competition, urbanisation, trustification and trade unionism, government and local government legislation—acting and reacting upon one another—progressively increase the complexity of the whole social organisation of which this large-scale production is the heart. Education Acts, Public Health Acts, Insurance Acts, are required to prevent deterioration and to produce a cleverer and fitter worker to run a mightier and more intricate system.

There is no doubt that at least the lower grades of the workers are fitter than they were 75 years ago. The incidence of the more outrageous diseases of gross malnutrition, such as infantile rickets, has been halved and halved again. Dairy products, fresh fruit and vegetables, the rare week-end “extravagances" of the harassed housewife, become more commonplace on the kitchen table. Maternal mortality has been greatly reduced. The death rate of young children in Great Britain during the summer months is one-eighth of the corresponding rate 40 years ago. The working class are taller, heavier, and live longer. The continued outcry from medical officers of health that much preventive sickness damages industry and robs children of the benefits of the education available, is well justified, but it does not follow that the worker's health is worse or no better. It means, rather, that the authorities' conception of physical well-being improves along with the needs of the capitalists for a fitter worker to do the work required of him. Similarly, the prevailing notion of what constitutes destitution, or the bare level of subsistence, has changed. As an example, comparison may be made between the diet scales in 1826 and to-day for inmates of Chelsea Institution: —

1826.

Breakfast: Gruel or broth, 1 pint.

Dinner: Meat (three days weekly), 8 ozs.; potatoes, 12 ozs.; bread, 3£ ozs.; beer,

1 pint.

Supper: Bread, 3½ ozs.; cheese, l½ ozs.; beer, 1 pint.

1937.

Breakfast: Tea, coffee or cocoa, 1 pint; Bread, 7 ozs., or porridge, ½ pint; jam or marmalade or syrup, 1½ ozs., or corned beef or sausage or brawn, 2 ozs.

Dinner: Bread, 2 ozs.; meat (various), 4 ozs., of fish, 8 ozs.; potatoes, 6 ozs.; other vegetables (including pickles), 3 ozs.; pudding (various), 8 ozs., or raw fruit; tea, ½ pint.

Tea: Tea, 1 pint; bread, 7 ozs.; margarine, ½ oz.; jam or cheese or cake.

Supper: Tea, coffee or cocoa, ½ pint; bread and margarine, 2 ozs.; cheese or buns or biscuits.

The destitute to-day “enjoy” a standard of dining higher than that of a considerable section of regularly employed workers 75 years ago. And the workers are better off, not only in regard to basic food, clothing and shelter, but also in respect of sanitation, recreation, social amenities, “humanisation" of State relief, public manners and private decency.

There is equally no doubt that the worker is better educated. Public education, popular Press, cinema and radio, though inevitably propagandist, at least provide the bricks and mortar of critical thinking. Churches get emptier. News theatres flash world news across the screen. Even the electoral appeals of our capitalist masters have now become more refined, more factual and more sophisticated. The cynic, the soppy, the shyster, the high-waisted “tough-guy,” are insignificant elements in a working class who are mentally equal to the task of operating efficiently a social system far more complex than Socialism need be.

This rise in the standard of living, physical and mental, is necessitated by the technical requirements of capitalism itself, and in turn it helps those mental changes which will make Socialists of the workers. Capitalism gives the workers a higher standard of living—and a higher standard of indignation. They get a sniff of the good things that might be, in the same breath that the gulf between riches and poverty gets wider, industrial depressions more long-drawn out, war more fantastically ferocious, speeding up more hysterical, insecurity more widespread. The very violence of these contrasts brings them to the attention of the workers: they begin to recognise them as problems. And the same ingenuity which the capitalist requires to solve his problems of profit-making can solve the worker's own problem in the midst of plenty, and economic insecurity in the face of colossal power over nature. Whether the workers are better or worse off is a matter of definition: it is a source of inspiration for the Socialist movement that the workers are better equipped to grasp the Socialist solution to their poverty—common ownership of the means of life.

Frank Evans

SPGB Snippets: Unhealthy Living (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

March 11, 2026

The ONS recently reported that there had been small increases in life expectancy in the UK since the 2019–21 period. However, it also revealed that in 2022–24 there had been decreases in healthy life expectancy (HLE) since the previous period.

HLE is the number of years that people can expect to spend in ‘good’ general health. In the more recent period, HLE at birth was 60.7 years for males and 60.9 years for females. The reductions here are 1.8 and 2.5 years, respectively.

So the chances are that at least a fifth of a person’s life will not be spent in decent health, a situation which is deteriorating. That’s life and health under capitalism!

Pathfinders: Cheating the reaper (2025)

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

Here’s a dark and ghoulish story for your Christmas-time delight. Back in September, just before the wall-to-wall media orgy of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un met up for a big military parade in Beijing, accompanied by their chums Lukashenko of Belarus, Pezeshkian of Iran and Min Aung Hlaing of the Myanmar junta. This self-congratulatory Comic-Con of the Marvel Supervillain Universe was chiefly notable for a ‘hot mic’ moment in which Putin and Xi were overheard talking about the prospects of human longevity. According to reports, the conversation went like this:

Putin (aged 72 at the time): ‘Biotechnology is continuously developing… Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.’

Xi (also aged 72): ‘Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old’.

Ha ha, they wish. One of the few consolations of being an elderly worker in capitalism is that no matter how rich these capitalist bastards are, they can’t cheat death any more than you can. This little soundbite reveals that they are keenly aware of that fact too. It’s just not fair, is it? You go to all the trouble of demolishing democracy, crushing your opponents, cowing your population, and making yourself dictator for life, only to have death pull the rug from under you just like it does for the little people.

It’s not just the autocrats, of course. Donald Trump, while not believing in exercise or healthy food, nevertheless appointed ‘longevity enthusiasts’ including RF Kennedy to key health posts. Rich Silicon Valley tech bros like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos also harbour Methuselah aspirations, reasoning that if there’s any way to extend life, their money will find it . There are individuals like Bryan Johnson who are so obsessed with longevity that they will put themselves through the most punishing and joyless regimes in order to wring life out to the very last drop. Instead they are likely proof of the old joke that renouncing all pleasures doesn’t make you live longer, it just seems like it .

Though it’s still considered ‘fringe of the fringe’, there is a history of research into longevity, from plasma therapy to fusing old and young mice together, and even injecting pureed monkey testicle into the human scrotum. Instead of seeing death as the great leveller, why not treat it as a preventable disease like any other, for which treatments can be found? The Greenland shark can live for 500 years or more, and only starts dating at 150. There must be sound biological reasons for that, aside from living in a perpetual icebox.

The World Health Organization in 2018 included old age as a disease in its 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases, until vigorous protest made them remove it again. For critics, pathologising a universal process involves serious ethical concerns, stigmatising old people as ‘having something wrong with them’ .

And there is the big picture. Death is the reason we exist. If animals didn’t die, there would have been no evolution and therefore no us. If humans became immortal, society might ossify, and you’d have to abolish children. But never mind big pictures and bleeding hearts, think of the profits. ‘They are interested only in the biomolecular and the monetisable… They seemed strangely uncurious [sic] about the enemy they have declared war on. Ageing to them is simply a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed’.

In any case, no one wants to make workers immortal, only the super-rich. Putin, famous for his ludicrous bare-chested-on-a-horse publicity photos, is fixated with being a ‘healthy strongman’, and goes everywhere with ‘an army of doctors’. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and has put billions into anti-ageing research, stem-cell cloning and organ transplant technology. It’s also scurrilously reported that he bathes in deer blood, a traditional Siberian shamanic ‘remedy’. In all this he is no doubt encouraged by his inner circle of hangers-on, who warmly appreciate that keeping him alive is their ticket to staying in power.

What’s the reality behind the hopeful hype? Professor of vaccine immunology John Tregoning points out that you can’t keep swapping out failing organs indefinitely because a) general anaesthetics are a calculated risk that increases with age and each operation, and b) there’s a high risk of MRSA infections, including sepsis, with every transplant op. Putin would be playing Russian Roulette, over and over. Cloned organs are not a thing, so you’d need a lifetime of immuno-suppressants, with an ever-present threat of fatal infections. There is not an endless supply of suitable organs, in fact there’s a world shortage. There is some state-of-the-art work using genetically modified pig organs, but if you survive six months after a transplant, that is considered an ‘amazing feat’.

Meanwhile, Tregoning adds, the rest of your body would still be ageing. The largest organ is your skin, and how would you replace that? ‘Even if you could replace all of the internal organs, you’d need to replace your muscles, your bone, your skin, everything is aging at fairly constant rates…. Just putting a new heart in is like taking a 1980s Ford Cortina and putting a brand new Porsche engine in and expecting it to run fine’.

On top of all that, brain connectivity declines over time too, and there’s no known way to reset that. There is some horizon research into a class of drugs called senolytics, which eat dead cells and scar tissue and may be a way to reboot the human body from the inside out, but for now they only work with fruit flies and nematode worms, and have toxic side effects.

Happily, today’s ruthless autocrats stand no chance of cheating the reaper. But new ones will replace them as long as capitalism survives. The world’s workers need to wield the political scythe where it would do most good.

Paddy Shannon

Dynamite. (1908)

From the November 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jeering at the claims of the Tariff Reformer as the possessor of a nostrum that will alleviate poverty, Burns, at Tynemouth, 14.10,08 (Daily News report) said “I am not a prophet, but I suggest this : If Protection were in existence, it would never see one hard summer because the people would perish.” So. The people who under Free Trade have so great an advantage over the miserable wretches who are forced to exist under Protection, are so strong, so virile, so well nourished after their generations of prosperity, that they would perish in one summer of Protection that the miserable weaklings of Protection manage, somehow, to pull through years of. No, we should not describe Burns as a prophet. A much shorter word will suffice. He doesn’t seem to have sense enough to know when he is giving the game away. Verily, if his salary is to be preserved to him the Lord must make quick and violent incision in him, for he is indeed raw.

* * *

“In Newcastle Mr. Hudson (Labour) was hand in glove with the Liberal candidate at the last (general) election. He was entertained at the Liberal Club less than 36 hours before the election, and he urged his supporters to split their votes between the Liberal and himself, which was very loyally done.” 

Sunday Chronicle, 13.9.08.

* * *

“Mr. Hudson says that he is not going to take a hand in the contest and his attitude is the outcome of his loyalty to the Labour Party. Newcastle is a strong one-man seat for Labour. Two Labour candidates mean that both would be defeated at the next general election.” 

Sunday Chronicle, 20.9.08.

* * *

“The Independent Parliamentary Labour Party which boasts of its independence of either of the old political parties, has refrained from putting up a candidate at Newcastle because Mr. Hudson, the “Labour” member for the double-seated constituency, believes he cannot be independent of the Liberal vote at the next election ; or, at any rate, the leaders of his party believe that . . . Conservatives can afford to smile at the sight of Labour kow-towing to the Liberals who make helots of some state servants.” — Evening Chronicle, 18.9.08.

* * *

“Forty-six deaths from starvation in the county of London for 1907.” 

Home Office White Paper.

* * *

The Registrar General’s analysis of the 1901 census recently published shows that general labourers in industrial centres have an average mortality more than twice as high as the average for all workers, while the mortality among clergymen is less than half the average.

* * *

“The time is fast approaching when the real struggle will be between the man who wields hammer and chisel and the man who holds the cash-box—Capital versus Labour, if you like. Whig and Tory must give place to these.” 

The Business Man’s Magazine.

Whig and Tory know this already. The Business Man’s Magazine’s writer’s point is merely that Whig and Tory will soon be forced to drop the present pretence of political partizanship in the general interest and come out in what the draper would call “fast colours.”

* * *

Since the law came into operation that closed public houses in Scotland all day on Sunday and early on Saturday, the proportion of charges of drunkenness and disorderliness per 1,000 of the population of Glasgow has increased from 17.7 in 1904 to 27.7 in 1907 according to the official figures supplied by the Chief Constable of Glasgow. In 1904 there were 13,850 charges; 1905, 15,263 charges ; 1906, 20,458 charges ; and in 1907, 22,314. This is how the facts support the argument of the temperance crank that the absense of facilities for drinking prevents drinking being indulged in.

* * *

From 1896 to 1905 the total deaths from all classes of accidents in connection with mines in the United Kingdom was 10,202. (Blue Book.)

* * *

The latest report of the General Board of Commissioners states that since 1858 lunacy in Scotland has increased by 202 per cent. as against a population increase of 58 per cent. On the 1st January last the total number of insane person in Scotland was 17,908.

* * *

“According to the Board of Trade ‘Labour Gazette,’ returns from 268 trade unions, having a net membership of 648,585, showed 8.9 per cent. of the net membership as unemployed. According to the report of the New York State Labor Department, out of a total of 387,450 trade unionists reported on, 138,131, or 35.7 per cent., were unemployed on 31 March. The New York correspondent of the Daily Telegraph stated, on 27 April, on the authority of Mr. Herman Robinson, general organiser of the American Federation of Labor, that at least 40 per cent. of the trade unionists of the city of New York were unemployed on 1 April.” 

Morning Leader, 5.10.08.

The slimy trail. (1908)

From the June 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

The flight of the wealthy exploiter into the Tariff Reform camp is causing consternation in Liberal circles. Not because the Liberals are thereby losing brilliant advocates for the forlorn hope, but because they are losing and will lose the funds wherewith to purchase professional agitators from the ranks of the intellectual proletariat which capitalism produces in such large numbers and who are compelled, in order to fill their bellies, to prostitute their talents in aid of any cause the votaries of which are able and willing to pay for their services.

The politically bankrupt Liberal Party, then, finding itself in this position, sets out through its Press, in a series of lachrymose articles, to arrest the stampede and to justify the departure from “Cobdenism” in the “economic sphere” and its unfaltering adherence to the free imports fetish. Says the official organ of the “great party” in a panic screed,

”Mr. Chamberlain used to taunt Liberal Free Traders with inconsistency for accepting Cobden’s fiscal policy but rejecting his policy of laissez faire in matters of factory legislation. Mr. Asquith long ago disposed of this point by showing that the two things are essentially consistent. The object of government in the economic sphere is, he said, to secure the best application and distribution of the productive powers of the country. Fiscal ‘protection’ is opposed by free traders because it interferes with that object. Factory legislation is supported by liberals because it conduces to it, since sweated labour is, in the long run, labour uneconomically employed.” (Italics mine.)

Here the reformer himself points to his cloven hoofs, for, shorn of its euphemisms, the foregoing excerpt exposes the sordid motive that first, last, and always actuates the Liberal wing of the capitalist House of Commons. Laissez faire, in the economic sphere does not pay, so overboard it goes. Cheap bread means cheap wage slaves, so the capitalist will spend the last drop of his apoplectic blood to keep the people’s food untaxed. Sweated labour is labour uneconomically employed, so the Liberals will assist their Tory collaborators in preventing titled owners of chemical factories from importing big, raw-boned sons of Anak, standing six feet three inches in their socks, from Erin, and murdering them inside of twelve months. They must take three years to “do them in.” Hence the agonised tears of the humanitarian over phossy jaw, potter’s rot, wrist drop, baker’s foot, and other loathsome diseases which make up the “majesty of labour.” The less astute capitalist is aghast at seeing his liberty to slay for profit restricted in this manner. He is slow to learn the lesson mastered by successful soap-boilers and cocoa fakers that there is money in applied humanitarianism and cheap and telling advertisement in model villages and garden cities, and so the capitalist hack must perforce point out the real motive for all great reforms and “workmen’s charters.” In effect, he says to his paymaster, “Play the game, old man, play the game. Let the cry of the oppressed go up. Let your Carlyles write their flapdoodle on the ‘condition of England question,’ your Ruskins their ‘Fors Clavigera’ and such-like ‘tripe.’ Weep over the ‘cry of the children’ and the ‘submerged tenth.’ Subsidise all and sundry. But keep the people away from the Socialist. He alone endangers the citadel of King Capital. Keep the minds of the working class diverted from Socialism and all is well for Capitalism.”

It is said that in the Chicago stockyards nothing is wasted except the squeal of the dying hog. The British capitalist politician beats even that. Indeed, he finds a trump card in the groan of the famished, half-naked, shivering child ; in the wail of the widow ; in the suppressed complaint of the scrapped wage slave who is a driveiling old dotard at forty-five, babbling, not of green fields a la Falstaff, but of his exploits when stripped to the waist before retort or furnace. All can be turned to account for the further advancement and consolidation of Capitalism ; all can be used to side-track the working class from the main line to emancipation.

It is suddenly realised that it is unprofitable to wear out the workers so quickly. Immediately the capitalists’ henchman of press, platform and pulpit bellow forth the dawn of a brighter era for the factory slave by adding still another “Workmen’s Charter” to the Statute Book in the shape of elastic Factory Acts. It is found, owing to the starving of the infant proletarian, that a sufficiency of cannon fodder cannot be obtained—the wage slave is degenerate and inefficient, and so the children must be fed. Did not the great white Christ command “Feed my lambs” ? The young idea is so trained that it can draw up false balance sheets and lying prospectuses, tot up accounts and label merchandise with more or less false descriptions. It is taught that the despicable vices of thrift, prudence, and resignation are cardinal virtues, that the more servile he is the better citizen he is, and that the religion of cowardly slaves—Christianity—is the very acme of morality, and if he will only subscribe to it he will one day have a halo round his feet. This is called education. And to achieve its purpose Capitalism astutely enlists in its service all the sentimentalists, freaks, and cranks with which mankind is cursed. All the churches, friendly societies, philanthropists, co-operative societies, trade unions, and pseudo Socialist organisations. The slimy trail of the capitalist serpent is over them all. Tariff Reformer and Free Trader, Home Ruler and Labour Leader, Sacerdotalist and Passive Resister, Malthusian and Mormon, Suffragette and Social-Democrat, Temperance man and Anti-gambler, Secularist-ethicist and morality mongers generally—all are playing the capitalist game, consciously or unconsciously. All are attempting to mould the plastic working-class mind on the potter’s wheel. The one party that stands out in bold relief against them all is The Socialist Party. That alone points the road to emancipation and exposes all reforms for the tinkering ineptitudes they are. Hail the Social Revolution !

W. Watts

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been unmasked as the mystery buyer of one of Washington, D.C.‘s most expensive properties: a $23 million mansion that he quietly paid for in an all-cash deal that was so secretive, the home vanished from view on Google Maps soon after it closed.

                                                                                                                               [Yahoo]

Lenin brought his Bolshevik Party to power on the cresting wave of the democratic workers’ councils, or soviets, in 1917. Then, with a few changes, he essentially restored tsarist autocracy. Freedom of speech, the press, and assembly were again suppressed, and the absolute power of a non-elected monarch, a dictator, reappeared along with a centralized bureaucracy. Under Lenin, the chinovnik-bureaucrat apparatus once more became the master of the land and of thousands of industrial enterprises. It included many tsarist bureaucrats, who, together with a few Bolsheviks, were the bosses in the ministries. Lenin’s bureaucracy blended with the tsarist bureaucracy and quickly adopted the same rules. Everything that upset or challenged the interests of centralized economic and socio-political life was eliminated.

[Canadian Dimension]

A city divided by a 12-year gap in life expectancy… Sally Cartwright, the county’s director of public health at Cambridgeshire County Council, agrees that a lack of access to cheap, nutritious food, expensive gym memberships and insufficient exercise and community facilities in the area have all contributed to the gap in life expectancy…. Differences in wealth affect people’s health, she adds, as well as other triggers such as smoking, heavy drinking and poor diet. 

[BBC]

A veteran financial consultant and insurance executive is warning his fellow capitalists that their commitment to profits and market supremacy is endangering the economic system to which they adhere and that if corrective actions are not taken capitalism itself will soon be consumed by the financial and social costs of a planet being cooked by the burning of fossil fuels. 

[Common Dreams]

Some argue that ecological change has historically posed great challenges to existing systems, and therefore, climate change must do the same to capitalism. This view overlooks a key fact: unlike previous modes of production, capitalism is fundamentally based on change. Then there is the assumption that climate change will create such severe problems — food shortages, infrastructure collapse, mass death — that capitalism simply can’t cope. But capitalism has always been adept at placing death in some corners of the world, so that life – and profits – can continue elsewhere. Mass death has never been a fundamental problem for capitalism; the system itself was built on colonialism, wars, and genocides. 

[Rebel]

A legal team representing Hamas pro bono — since it would be illegal to receive money from the group — claims in its own filing that while Hamas’s actions fit the definition of ‘terrorism’ in British law, so do those of the IDF, the Ukrainian army and even the British military. 

[The Times of Israel]

[These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view].

Pathfinders: Nobel efforts (2024)

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

The Nobel Prize awards have been no stranger to controversy over the years, both for awards they should have given but didn’t, like most famous writers and virtually all women, and awards they shouldn’t have given but did. These included the 1949 Medicine prize for the prefrontal lobotomy, the 2019 Literature prize to a Bosnian genocide denialist and Slobodan Milošević fanboy, and most famously, the 1973 Peace prize to Kissinger, the carpet-bomber of Cambodia, which caused two Nobel Committee members to resign in disgust and prompted the equally famous retort from musician Tom Lehrer that satire had become obsolete.

Media pundits were quick to spot certain oddities about last month’s Nobel awards. Feathers had been ruffled earlier when the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute pointed out that ‘We have now over 50 armed conflicts around the world’ and suggested that perhaps nobody deserved the Peace prize this year (tinyurl.com/4c84a9zp). In the event they gave it to Hiroshima survivors, a clear stand-by choice.

The Physics prize went not to physicists but to two computer scientists for their early work in AI and neural networks. Reasonable enough, one might say, given that computer science didn’t exist in 1896 when Alfred Nobel established the prize topics. A mathematics Nobel might have been nearer the ballpark, but there isn’t one of those either, a fact emphatically not due to the popular gossip that it was revenge for Mrs Nobel having an affair with a mathematician (Alf was never married). In fact, Nobel also ignored dozens of other valid research disciplines, which reflects the deep capitalist truth that the rich always get to dictate to the rest of us what is important, just like today’s vainglorious and increasingly deluded ‘effective altruist’ billionaires.

As for the winning computer scientists, you may remember one of them, Geoffrey Hinton, as a well-known poacher-turned-gamekeeper who resigned from Google in 2023 to renounce AI and warn the world that it was about to kill us all. Given that the prize is awarded to those who, in Alf’s own words, ‘conferred the greatest benefit to humankind’, one might have expect a noble prizewinner to refuse to accept the medal and the money, however Geoff appears untroubled by such qualms.

Still, there must be a lot of physicists out there doing vital Nobel-worthy work, surely? Not according to the popular YouTube doyenne of theoretical physics and clunky jokes, Sabine Hossenfelder, who claims (no joke) that ‘physics is dying’ because it’s become an unfalsifiable pseudoscience whose only purpose is to chunter out meaningless papers in support of funding bids to prop up the physics community’s wage bill (tinyurl.com/5n93hdmb). It might be true that they have a vested interest in stringing us along with string theory, loop quantum gravity, multiverses and endless made-up particles, but perhaps Sabine would say that, as she thinks the idea of an elegant Theory of Everything is a romantic mirage, and besides, popular YouTubers also have a certain vested interest in being controversial, don’t they?

AI had a more direct role in clinching the Chemistry prize, through Google DeepMind and its groundbreaking work on protein folding. Proteins do everything that matters in your body, but there are 100,000 of them and nobody understands how they work. Their exact function depends on what shape they fold into, and working this out for just one protein used to be a 3-year PhD in itself. The DeepMind AlphaFold2 programme can now do it in seconds, triggering a revolution in potential new treatments.

The Medicine prize meanwhile was for work in newly discovered microRNA, which is how genes, when sending messenger-RNA ‘photocopies’ to cells with template instructions for building proteins, effectively Tippex out certain instructions and not others.

What’s called the Economics Nobel is really an ersatz 1968 add-on by a Swedish bank and denounced as a ‘false Nobel prize’ by modern relative Peter Nobel, on the grounds that he considers economics a pseudoscience, a conclusion which will not raise socialist eyebrows. This year’s ‘Economics’ prize was for interesting empirical research into the question why some countries are so much richer than others. ‘Culture’ and geography have been mooted, but these researchers, observing that many poor countries were formerly European colonies, opted to look at ‘settler mortality’ statistics. They concluded that where mortality was low, and Europeans were able to settle and farm (Australia, North America), they also imported their existing social, economic and political institutions, giving the colony a massive head-start. Where mortality was high due to malaria and yellow fever (West Africa, Haiti, etc), they instead kept their distance and imposed vicious, extractive regimes including the slave trade. In sum, liberal democratic institutions are enablers of prosperity, not the other way round. Hooray for liberal capitalism then, which has obviously not resulted in a billionaire elite, global poverty, war and climate change.

Honourable mention ought this year to go to an Ig Nobel prize winner who, instead of discovering something silly about mammals breathing through their anuses, actually found out something useful about centenarians living in so-called ‘blue zones’ of super-longevity, which is that the blue zones don’t exist, neither do most of the centenarians, and the ‘data’ is almost entirely the result of poor, faked or lost records, and pension fraud by relatives (tinyurl.com/4hzna4ka). Many rich capitalists are obsessed with cheating death and living forever. This finding pisses on their chips and allows hard-pressed workers to enjoy some schadenfreude for once.

Would there be Nobel prizes in socialism? Probably not ones named after someone who got rich by blowing things up, including his own brother. And certainly not cash prizes, of course (there wouldn’t be any money). The concept of ‘prize’ is so integral to the fabric of competitive capitalism (prize and price are the same word in several languages) that some will find it hard to imagine a culture that doesn’t need such incentives in order to do worthwhile research. But socialists, who understand the value of intrinsic motivation, won’t have a problem.

Paddy Shannon

Voice From The Back: The Seeds of War (2011)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Seeds of War

Many reasons are put forward for the conflict in Afghanistan. Some would argue it is a conflict over religion, others that it is a struggle for democracy. The following piece of information seems a more likely cause for the hostilities. “Afghanistan and Central Asia are abundant with natural resources worth billions. So far, they are largely untapped but the battle is raging for who will be able to exploit them in the 21st century. In the 19th century it was the Russians and the British who wrestled for influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia in a highly-explosive endeavour known as the Great Game. Today, Afghanistan’s natural resources are estimated to be worth billions of dollars. The resources in the neighbouring Central Asian states are thought to be worth even more – the cake is huge and as yet largely untouched.” (Deutche Welle, 15 July) The seeds of all modern wars has been the rivalries over sources of raw materials, markets and political spheres of interest.

Premature Celebrations                            

The abolition of the hateful system of Apartheid in 1994 was correctly celebrated throughout the world, but capitalism remained intact and as long as capitalism survives it will throw up problems of exploitation and inequality. “South Africa celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 93rd birthday on Monday with songs by millions of children and calls for public service, but the nation he led out of apartheid is divided by poverty and his ANC movement seems to many to be losing its moral compass. … Mandela’s calls for greater access to the economy for the poor black majority have been dealt blows by corruption eating into welfare programmes and entitlements that benefit a sliver of the black elite with close ties to the ANC.” (Reuters, 18 July) .

The Future is Bleak

                              

The illusion that many workers share is that as they reach retirement age they will be able to live in a sort of rocking-chair contentment.  In reality most of us will live even more parsimonious existences than we do at present whilst we are surviving from pay-day to pay-day. “Millions of people face a ‘bleak old age’ because they are falling through the cracks of private sector pension provision, a review suggests. The Workplace Retirement Income Commission says 14 million people are not saving into a workplace pension scheme at all.” (BBC News, 1 August) Working for a wage or a salary as we all have to do is a precarious existence but when we are finally thrown on the industrial and commercial scrapheap the future for most workers according to the Commission is apparently even more awful.

The Perfect Worker                          

Newspaper editors have a difficult task every day – what should be their front page headline? Millions starving in a famine in East Africa? Demonstrators gunned down in Syria? A difficult choice perhaps but the editor of The Times led with a really important headline. “Welfare in chaos as thousands live to 100” (Times, 4 August). In any sane society the news that human beings are managing to live a little longer would be the cause for celebration, but this is capitalism and there will be no dancing in the street at the news. The news that the working class who produce all the wealth of the world are tending to live longer is bad news for the capitalist class who live on the surplus value that the workers produce. To the owning class the perfect worker is one who goes to work after they leave school, works two nights overtime and a Sunday and on the day he retires goes to the Post Office to collect his state pension and drops dead at the counter. No pension, no drain on the owning class’s surplus value. Perfect!

Who Are The "Primitives"?                       

For thousands of years small tribal groups have lived in the forests between what is now Brazil and Peru. They are looked upon by many as “backward” or “primitive”, but nevertheless they have survived in isolation and relative security. The advent of capitalism has changed all that. “The head of Brazil’s indigenous protection service is to make an emergency visit to a remote jungle outpost amid fears that members of an isolated Amazon tribe may have been ‘massacred’ by drug traffickers. …. On 5 August Brazilian federal police launched an operation in the region, arresting Joaquim Antonio Custodio Fadista, a Portuguese man alleged to have been operating as a cocaine trafficker. But after the police pulled out, officers with the indigenous protection service (Funai) decided to return fearing a ‘massacre’. They claimed that groups of men with rifles and machine guns were still at large in the rainforest. Reports suggest the traffickers may have been attempting to set up new smuggling routes, running through the tribe’s land.” (Guardian, 9 August)

Voice From The Back: Behind The Fine Words (2010)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Behind The Fine Words

Recently in a show of strength the USA and South Korea mounted an exercise in and around the Sea of Japan. It consisted of 20 ships, 200 aircraft and 8,000 military personnel and was supposedly a response to the sinking of a South Korean vessel by North Korea. Like all such military displays of power it was accompanied by fine words. They were “protecting the democratic South against the tyranny of the North”. China, an ally of North Korea viewed it as “an intrusion into an area not far from Chinese territorial waters”. It is much more likely that the correspondent Giles Whittell was much nearer the real economic truth behind the fine words when he reported – “The military display that may or may not have struck fear into the hermit dictatorship north of the 38th parallel has angered Beijing as it seeks to assert sovereignty over nearly 1.5 million square miles of the South China Sea, rich in oil and mineral deposits” (Times, 28 July). Behind the fine words, as usual, lurks the profit motive

Progressing Backwards

During the last ninety years or so the working class have been promised by reformist politicians that if only they were in power the working class would enjoy a better standard of living. Foolishly they have swallowed that piece of nonsense and have endured a world war, countless local wars, massive periods of economic slumps, poverty and unemployment. One of the major promises of the reformers was that of improved health care but what is the reality? “The gap between the health of rich and poor is greater now than at any time since modern records began, a study shows. Government initiatives have done little or nothing to close the gap between the life expectancy of poor people and those who are wealthy, researchers from universities in Sheffield and Bristol, writing in the British Medical Journal, said. They looked at deaths between 1921 and 2007” (Times, 23 July). Ninety years of progress according to the reformers – ninety years of futility is more like it!

Bargain Basement Exploitation

“One of Britain’s fiercest and most ostentatiously successful business men has been enlisted to spearhead the Government’s attack on public spending. Sir Philip Green, a man with a reputation for making brutally effective commercial reforms, has been asked by David Cameron to lead a no-holds barred examination of departmental budgets” (Times, 13 August). In his personal life Sir Philip is anything but frugal or economic. He spent £5 million on his 50th birthday party, £4 million on his son’s bar mitzvah and £30 million on his yacht. We imagine what impressed Cameron about Green was his ruthless exploitation of his workers. Here is an example of how fortunes are made in the retail business. “Indian workers are paid just 25p an hour and forced to work overtime in factories used by some of Britain’s best-known high street stores … Some of the biggest names on the British high street are at the centre of a major sweatshop scandal. An Observer investigation has found staff at their Indian suppliers working up to 16 hours a day. Marks & Spencer, Gap and Next have launched their own inquiries into abuses and pledged to end the practice of excessive overtime, which is a flagrant breach of the industry’s ethical trading (ETI) and Indian labour laws” (Observer, 8 August). It is estimated that Green has a fortune of over £4 billion made in such firms as BHS, Topshop, Evans, Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins – that exploitation rather than his personal lifestyle is what has impressed the cost-cutting Cameron.

Half A Million Homeless

Politicians love nothing better than coming up with catchy phrases that they reckon will be taken up by the media. Over the years we have had “The war to end all wars”, “A land fit for heroes”, “You never had it so good”, and more recently Mrs Thatcher’s “A property owning democracy”. The war to end all wars led to an even bloodier conflict, a land fit for heroes turned out be a land where only a bloody hero could survive and Macmillan’s never had it so good only applied to the owning class. Thatcher’s property owning democracy seems particularly ironic when we learn of this prediction. “More than 500,000 people will be added to social housing waiting lists and nearly 300,000 jobs will go under proposals to cut the housing budget by up to 40 per cent, say campaigners. The National Housing Federation says ministers risk “shutting the door on an entire generation of low-income families” by cutting cash for affordable homes” (Times, 26 July). Empty political slogans don’t solve the problems of poverty, unemployment or homelessness – only workers understanding about socialism can do that.

“Humanitarian” Slaughter

Capitalism is a blood-thirsty rapacious society, so it is no accident that its supporters have had to invent euphemisms to cover up its carnage. In recent years we have heard of “collateral damage”. This is used when a school or a hospital is blown up. To cover up the madness that leads to troops killing their own numbers we have “friendly fire”. The Israeli government have sunk to a new level even for them with the following news item. “The Israeli military has imposed restrictions on the use of white phosphorous munitions, which led to civilian deaths and casualties in Gaza last year. Israel told the UN that it would deploy them only when approved by a “humanitarian affairs officer” (Times, 22 July). What would be the job description of a “humanitarian affairs officer”? Someone adept at describing burning to death from white phosphorous as a “pleasant, almost painless termination” perhaps?

The Growth Of Inequality

One of the great illusions of the 21st century is that only in the past had we this awful set-up where “robber barons” intent on grabbing more and more wealth out of the poor exploited masses had their existence. How 19th-century we are led to believe, because we do not live in such a society today. But do we ? “Many of the great fortunes of American history – those of the Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie and the Fords – are now mighty foundations that have long outlasted their founders. Recent years have seen the greatest disparity of wealth in America since the Golden Age of the 1920s. A recent study found that the top one per cent of Americans now receive 15 per cent of the country’s total income – about double the rate of the 1960s and 1970s” (Times, 5 August). Capitalism was based on the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class in the days of Rockefeller and Carnegie – it still is.

Blogger's Note:

The 'Behind The Fine Words' piece was not in the print edition of the Standard but is included in the website edition of the Standard.

Tiny Tips (2023)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

A video has captured the dramatic moment a £300,000 Roll-Royce was hoisted up to a penthouse on request of a billionaire in China. The luxurious Rolls-Royce Ghost was sent up to the 44th floor of a high-rise building after the wealthy businessman decided he wanted his car parked on his balcony (tinyurl.com/3ytvh63e).

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Eswatini heads to the polls soon, with elections scheduled for September. But there’s nothing remotely democratic in prospect. The country remains ruled by King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute monarch, who presides over Eswatini with an iron fist. Mswati dissolved parliament on 11 July, confident there’s little chance of people who disagree with him winning (tinyurl.com/msbaae72).

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‘Legislative protections remain weak across the continent,’ the researchers who collated the results of the survey said in a response to questions. In ‘Somalia, Somaliland, Mauritania and Northern Nigeria homosexuality can be punishable by death,’ they said (tinyurl.com/4buzjv55).

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Disadvantaged Britons are dying 10 years sooner than their wealthier compatriots – victims of what’s become known as the ‘shit life syndrome’ – a life marked by poor living conditions, disease and addiction. The documentary profiles people who have a job but can still afford nothing – from Blackpool in the west, to Ashton-under-Lyne and Cumbria, on the border with Scotland (tinyurl.com/3scyx5a6).

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A Labour government in the UK under Starmer will bring no significant changes in economic or foreign policy and will make no difference whatsoever to the lives of working class people (tinyurl.com/4hw9pey3).

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When I spoke to Cohen [co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream], the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a ‘financial bonanza.’ ‘In the end, money won,’ he said with a resigned tone. ’And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.’ I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in. ‘I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,’ he said. ‘I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war’ (tinyurl.com/2p827284).

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The federal minimum wage in the United States would be $42 an hour today if it rose at the same pace as Wall Street bonuses in recent decades. But it hasn’t. Monday marks 14 years since the last federal minimum wage increase—the longest stretch without a boost since the late 1930s, when the national wage floor was first established. Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour, pay that’s currently not liveable in any state in the US (tinyurl.com/35jebfkm).

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The implication of Kennedy’s statement is that the [Covid-19] disease is a biological weapon created by Chinese researchers and Jewish American scientists to kill Christians (bit.ly/44PAouB).

Who Pays for Health Care? (2008)

From the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year is the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service. Workers like it, but capitalists don’t, at least not any more. Why?

That the NHS became old enough to claim its bus pass last month will be a source of pride to members of the Labour Party – something to hold in their hearts as the gloom gathers around their fading regency over Britain.  60 years of providing health care free at the point of use is something that socialists can acknowledge, albeit with qualification.  Likewise, the continued existence of such a service sticks in the craw of the purist ideologues of capital, and serves as a constant irritant to the rapacious demand of capitalism for profits.  That accounts for why the health service remains at the heart of the political battlefield.

For example, when the Daily Telegraph celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the end of food rationing in 2004 they used it as an excuse to have a pop at the health service.  After all, if rationing – which they claimed was, in effect, a National Food Service, was not needed, then why have a National Health Service? (www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2004/07/03/cmian03.xml). Socialists would, of course, argue the exact opposite – and that is what the Torygraph’s hacks were exactly afraid of, the threat of the good example.

So afraid, that they try to turn it into the bad example.  Following the most energetic proponents of capitalism, they maintain that state run services cannot be efficient.  This is a line that ultimately stems from the Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises, who argued that without markets in capital (i.e. productive goods) rational resource allocation could not be made.  His latter-day followers would argue that the NHS can only function because it can approximate the prices of its goods from general society; but, that in that approximation it still cannot achieve due efficiency.

Others follow the other Austrian economist Freidrich Hayek in asserting that without entrepreneurship, the managers of a state bureaucracy lack incentive and drive, and thus do not serve the customers (i.e. patients) as well they might.  These folk would also argue that information does not flow freely within the NHS, and cannot effectively do so, for much the same reasons.  They point to manipulation of statistics and fiddling to meet central government targets as proof of this.

It has been traditional to use waiting lists as proof of that inefficiency, and Labour has spent the last ten years desperately trying to prove those waiting lists can be eliminated.  These, though, only exist because the NHS is a government bureaucracy that aims to treat everyone – were it a market led system, those lists would become invisible, as those who couldn’t afford to pay would cease to present themselves, and the dreaded rationing would occur unseen.  Indeed, that was the situation at the foundation of the NHS, where the war had seen the state discover just how unhealthy the population was when they were shanghaied into battle.

Another favoured trick has been to compare, say, the number of expensive scanners in the United States to those in the UK.  Although the US does have higher numbers, much of that is driven by different medical priorities, and, more importantly, different donor priorities.  As much medicine in the US relies on charity (itself a sign that markets cannot provide the service required) their funding is subject to potlatching – spectacular donation one-upmanship in which big, shiny projects will be privileged over more mundane treatments.

Of course, the NHS has had serious funding/allocation problems. In its early days demand was much higher than anticipated, and so consequently it cost more. (Link.) Since the 1980’s successive governments have tried to rectify its perceived shortcomings through creating pseudo-markets.  The problem is, however, for the die-hard agents of capital, pseudo markets will never be good enough.

This can be seen from the more recent propaganda.  Following a Office of National Statistics report in April this year the Telegraph proclaimed “NHS gets more money but productivity falls”. They alleged that “billions of pounds of extra investment in the health service has led to a 10 per cent drop in productivity,”  because:

“Although more patients are being treated on the NHS with more operations being carried out, more drugs being prescribed and the population enjoying better health, the rise has failed to match the increase in investment, a report from the Office of National Statistics shows.”

That is, although all of these manifest improvements were occurring, the Telegraph spun it as a decline in productivity which meant that “unless NHS productivity can be improved the principle of a health service funded out of general taxation may become unaffordable, experts warn.”(Link)  All this because the ratio of money spent to the outputs achieved declined (or rather, the outputs did not rise as fast as the increased expenditure)

The cold, cold logic of capital: if the returns aren’t good enough, if the money could be more profitably spent elsewhere, then it should be so.  The actual concrete outcomes become a secondary consideration behind the magnitude of the capital involved.  Another recent government report indicates how this might weigh on the capitalist mind.  The report, the annual “Value added scoreboard” (www.innovation.gov.uk/value_added/default.asp?page=76) looks at company accounts in the UK and across Europe to show which firms have added the most value to the economy.  It defines value added as: Value Added = Sales less Costs of bought-in goods and services:

“Value Added can be calculated from a company’s accounts by adding together operating profit, employee costs, depreciation and amortisation/impairment charges.”

That is, it does not measure value as a ratio of total capital invested, but as a fraction of year on year expenditure.  For the government and for capitalists, it’s a measure of how well firms are meeting peoples’ desires (apparently).  For socialists, this is a very good thing to measure, since, after all, this shows pretty accurately how much workers are exploited for – all that value added is our unpaid labour being realised – something like £646 billion in the top 800 companies.  Of that, £3.5 billion is accounted for by “health care equipment and services.”  Given that the NHS costs an annual £89.7 billion it’s clear that were its services to be made commercially available, then the headline value added figure for the UK would rise, and health care as a sector would leap up in terms of the national league tables.

Capital with its incessant drive – accumulate, accumulate – looks upon all that capital, all those potential profits, all that money pouring into the NHS and dreams of taking it for itself, of taking out its state rival and bringing the riches and all that potential surplus value into its own cold avaricious arms.  It would also mean not having to pay the dreaded taxes that the government snatches.

Although socialists recognise the benefits the NHS brings to workers who otherwise would not have access to healthcare, they are far from the ardent uncritical supporters that the membership of the Labour Party tend to be.  They see that although the NHS suggests possibilities for how a service free at the point of use and based on needs could be organised, fundamentally, it is not free from the market system and a long way from being the fount of joy Labour supporters proclaim it to be.

Although the NHS has to simulate markets internally (much as many big companies do) it actually exists within a market economy.  It competes to buy drugs, materials and even staff.  When the Telegraph bewails that much of the money poured into the NHS over the last ten years went into wages and salaries, it is commiserating over its own basic principle: that people should try to enrich themselves and get the most for their skills and abilities that they can.  NHS workers are compelled by the threat or prospect of poverty to play the market game as best they can.

Likewise, it must buy hospitals and premises from commercial builders and landowners.  It has to pay the form of rent known as a patent to the drugs manufacturers. And it has to have the payroll clerks, the accountants, the procurement officers, the lawyers and the whole array of staff specifically to manage all of this market activity, adding greatly to its cost.

Further, technical innovation comes with a market drive.  As the BBC points out in a special report for the anniversary, “all the new machines and robots that are becoming available for health care cost a fortune, can the NHS afford to keep up with innovation?” (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7477627.stm). As with any other industry, capitalism is constantly revolutionising the process of healthcare.  More and better results can be achieved with more and better machinery – that is with ever greater capital investment.  Personal healthcare has always been relatively labour intensive, and it would be politically inconvenient to try and rationalise staff costs the way that an ordinary capitalist firm would – with wage cuts and redundancies.

This interweaving with the market system also nullifies some of the wilder claims that the NHS is a massive benefit to the working class – many capitalist states manage to exist without such a system.  Health costs are, for the most part, not optional, you either need treatment or you don’t (though the poor are long adept at putting up with ailments it’s too dear for them to pay to relieve).  By hook or by crook, if the employers want to have a workforce fit to perform their role, it’s going to have to pay for health care.  This can either be done through wages directly, or as a workplace benefit or through the state.  If provided as a state or private benefit, it simply has the effect of lessening the upwards pressure of wages by workers who need to pay for their and their loved one’s treatment.  If it was paid directly through wages, employers would have to risk paying those sums to workers who might never need health treatment: i.e. they’d be paying them (in the employers’ eyes) too much.

Let’s be clear, this is an automatic effect of the wages system. The proponents of the NHS are sincere (for the most part) in believing that it brings a massive benefit to society.  Certainly, it helps the Labour Party by being a threatened cherished item to rally their supporters around and with which to beat the Tories.  The wages system, though, which will only return to the workers the price the market will bear for sustaining their ability to work can snatch with one hand what the state gives with another.  Our health and well being only matters so far as it enables employers to use us for profit, as can be seen in those parts of the world where surplus population is left to rot.

The health service, also fails to address that other feature of the market system: inequality.  The figures are quite starkly clear.  For example, in the London Borough of Camden – home to some of the most deprived parts of the country – the difference in life expectancy can be a decade.  A man living in Belsize ward can expect to live to be 80.2 years old, while less than a mile away in Kilburn the life expectancy is 69.9 years.(www.camdenpct.nhs.uk/pages/go.asp?PageID=621).  Just a mile or two more away in Somers Town (the ward which includes Kings Cross station, and St. Pancras International – with the longest Champagne bar in the world) death rates are 35 percent higher than the national average.(Link.)

This is part of a worsening trend:

“During the period 1972-6, the gap in life expectancy between social classes I and V was 5.4 years for men and 4.8 years for women. By the time New Labour succeeded the Tories in government, these gaps had risen to 9.4 years and 6.3 years respectively.” (See tables 1 and 3 in: ‘Life expectancy by social class’, UK Government Statistics.  

 “Kill, kill, kill, killing the poor”, as the Dead Kennedy's sang.  It is clear that the effects of poverty, and the associated lifestyle are deleterious to health, and that simply having the services available of the NHS isn’t sufficient to stop the theft of years from the working and unemployed poor.

Pik Smeet

Material World: Too old to work, too young to die (2023)

The Material World column from the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are all getting older and we will be older for longer. People living longer sounds good. But not for capitalism.

Improvements in healthcare have brought extended longevity and longer lifespans mean there are more older people. The population aged 65 and older is growing faster than all other age groups, especially as the global birth and fertility rates have been dropping. Over the past 50 years, the median age of the world’s population has increased by 10 years, i.e, from 20 years in 1970 to 30 years in 2020. Many countries have attained median ages well above 35 years, such as France at 41 years, South Korea at 43 years, Italy at 46 years and Japan at 48 years. The median ages of the world’s populations are expected to continue to rise, reaching 40 years by 2070. In 1970 China’s population had a median age of 18 years, i.e, half of their population were children. By 2070 the median age of China’s population is projected to triple to 55 with the proportion of children declining to 12. By 2070 the world’s average life expectancy at age 65 will be 21 more years with many developed countries having life expectancies at age 65 of 25 years or more, i.e, people surviving on average to age 90. There is less need for paediatricians and gynaecologists and much more requirement for specialists in geriatrics and care-working. There are not enough nursing home beds to cater for elderly people who need long-stay residential care.

Governments have concerns about the prospect of their populations possessing more grandparents than grandchildren and the burden on pension and healthcare budgets of their ageing populations. An ageing society is viewed as damaging to a state’s economy since it decreases the workforce numbers and increases the costs on social services and health. The need for pensions arises from the fact that as workers get older, they become surplus to requirements for the capitalists. State pensions take up a vast proportion of public spending. The capitalist class has to pay to keep workers alive upon retirement and it is one of the non-productive activities that the State has to undertake.

Within the next few decades, working-age adults will need to support a higher number of elderly people than they do now, putting pressure on welfare systems and taking up much of the future economic growth and output unless offset by increased technology delivering gains in productivity. There is also a need for greater immigration to boost the labour supply to alleviate the adverse effects of an ageing population as new migrants lower the average age of the host nation’s population. The changes in the demographic structure of various societies and the need to replenish the workforce will not be addressed by more older workers (as the evidence is that chronic ill-health is higher with advancing years) and will require a rethink on immigration policies encouraging newcomers from other regions of the world such as Africa.

Government options are to reduce benefits, increase tax revenue or raise the retirement age. Pensions are essentially a tax on the profits of the capitalists, even if ultimately these profits come from what workers produce, and increasing taxes will not be welcomed by businesses. Meanwhile cutting state benefits would only worsen the already existing poverty of old age. So the preferred choice is to make people work for longer by postponing the official retirement age and the payment of state pensions. Similarly, due to mounting costs, employers are currently scaling back their own occupational pension schemes. Pensions and the retirement age are under assault. It has happened in the UK and is taking place nearly everywhere else, despite widespread opposition from working people

Under capitalism the elderly and frail are seen as superfluous, and of little use to employers. Possessing money as consumers in our capitalist society is the only way to maintain any status in one’s old age because money has power no matter what age you are. We are seeing an increasingly unequal society with the elderly among those bearing the brunt. Capitalism leaves its senior citizens unwanted, isolated and invisible.

Growing old is inevitable but the way we get old is not. Although we are living far longer, a significant and increasing proportion of people are managing multiple health conditions and mobility problems from mid-life onwards. Current rates of chronic illness, mental health conditions, disability and frailty could be greatly reduced. The extra golden years of longer life are a gift to enjoy. Socialism will bring forth more social and community networks to build creative relationships, enhancing the quality of life for everyone, both young and old. The contributions of older persons to society are invaluable and cannot be measured in mere material terms. They offer care-sharing and the passing on of knowledge to new generations. The progress of civilisation from our increased lifespan is being squandered by capitalism.

Gulliver’s Travels features the Struldbruggs, a people who appear normal in all respects except one – they don’t die. But their immortality, instead of being a blessing, is a curse because they continue to age:

‘At 90, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue…’

Socialism will not bestow immortality nor eternal youth but it will permit us all to age with dignity.

ALJO

The long and the short of it (2022)

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the great advances in the course of human history has been the increase in life expectancy. It may be argued that life was never quite as nasty, brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes once claimed, but the average human lifespan has clearly increased over the millennia and centuries, having more than doubled in the last two hundred years or so. Moreover, it is a matter of not just living longer but of doing so in a better condition too: people who reach the age of sixty now are likely to be healthier and fitter than their parents, and especially their grandparents, were at the same age. Nevertheless, there is a great deal to be said about the determinants and limits on lifespans under capitalism.

Many figures could be cited to demonstrate the improvements. For instance, in 1820 life expectancy at birth was around 29 globally, and 36 in Europe. By 1970 the averages were up to 60 and over 70 respectively. The global chances of a child dying in their first five years are down from 18 percent in the 1960s to 4 percent now. Improved health care and sanitary conditions have clearly been one of the main reasons for these changes. The germ theory of disease led to big reductions in cholera, for instance, in the nineteenth century, when proper sewage systems also resulted in far fewer deaths from typhoid. Infectious diseases have in the ‘rich world’ become less important as causes of death, while chronic conditions such as heart disease and cancer have become more crucial. In some countries, the improvements have been more recent: life expectancy in India rose from 32 to 51 between 1950 and 1968, partly caused by decline in deaths from cholera (and the figure now is 70).

Yet things are not quite as bright and wonderful as is sometimes suggested. Life expectancy varies greatly across nations, and within countries on the basis of such characteristics as skin colour, education and poverty. In some cases, lifespans have been stagnating or even getting shorter. For instance, between 1990 and 2008, life expectancy for white US men without a college degree fell by three years. In general, better educational qualifications imply more years of life, and poverty of course shortens lives. In the US again, black people live on average fewer years than white people, though the gap is narrowing. Unemployment leads to earlier deaths, even when factors such as smoking and previous health conditions are taken into account.

However, in developed countries there is no simple correlation between life expectancy and average income. The US has a high average income but is near the bottom for life expectancy. People in Sweden are less well-off than those in Norway, but have slightly longer lifespans. In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that the determining factor is inequality, which is associated with lower life expectancy, lower birth-weights and higher rates of infant mortality: more unequal countries have worse outcomes in these (and many other) areas.

In 2006–08, life expectancy at birth was far higher in Kensington & Chelsea than in Glasgow: thirteen years in the case of men and eleven years for women. This figure is taken from Danny Dorling’s So You Think You Know About Britain? where it is suggested that premature death was in 2010 ‘the great measurer of the North-South divide’, which involved a line drawn from just north of the Wash to the Bristol Channel, with Grimsby on the northern side and Lincoln on the southern. Dorling argues that other contributory factors to a longer life include occupation, height, periods of unemployment, sleeping rough, eating fruit every day, amount of exercise, and weight. Personal lifestyle can make a difference, but a person’s social situation is clearly of great importance too.

Of course the largest differences in lifespan on a global scale do depend on how ‘developed’ a country is. According to worldometers.info, the two countries with the highest life expectancy are Hong Kong and Japan, with over 85 years each. Figures descend via the UK (over 81) and the US (over 79) to Afghanistan (just below 66), Haiti (just under 65) to the Central African Republic (54). Countries in Africa cluster towards the bottom of the list. It is hardly controversial to say that living standards, health care and access to adequate food are crucial here.

One point that applies in every country is that women on average live longer than men (just over three extra years in the UK). Quite why this should be the case is not clear. It did not hold in rich countries in the nineteenth century, and the difference in Russia is now a remarkable ten years. Various reasons have been suggested, but probably it is the combination of various factors. More men than women smoke; differences in child mortality between girls and boys may make a small contribution; biological factors can apply, such as men having more fat surrounding their organs, which increases the extent of cardiovascular disease. One interesting suggestion is that ‘women do not live longer than men only because they age more slowly, but also because they are more robust when they get sick at any age’: women spend more time in hospital than men but still live longer (article by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Diana Beltekian at ourworldindata.org).

There can be no doubt that capitalism impacts people’s lives in one of the most fundamental ways, namely how long you will live for. From impoverished countries with short lifespans to places where poverty and living conditions affect a person’s likely years of life, capitalism is simply bad for you. We cannot predict what will happen to life expectancy in socialism, or just what the consequences would be of increasing numbers of elderly people. But we can say that the massive global inequalities will, after a while, cease to exist. Society will be concerned to ensure that everyone leads as long, healthy and rewarding a life as possible.

Paul Bennett

Blogger's Notes:

• Danny Dorling’s So You Think You Know About Britain? was reviewed in the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard.
• Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Inner Level was reviewed in the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard.