Life and Times: Detectorists and grave robbers (2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howard Moss

Life and Times: The Annual Vegan Fair (2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howard Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howard Moss

Life and Times: Scumbag or not? (2026)

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

‘He’s just a scumbag.’ That’s what my neighbour said to me about a local landlord who’s bought up literally dozens of properties in the areas and is letting them to students room by room. The neighbour doesn’t like to be surrounded by students since she sees them as potentially rowdy and trouble-makers. But she’s also indignant that, whenever this landlord purchases a property, he puts up one of his ‘To Let’ boards at the front. In our street there are currently seven houses in succession with those signs on them. In her estimation it makes the place look untidy – ‘like a slum’, as she puts it. And even when a property is let and people are living there, the board stays up – presumably for publicity purposes.

As for myself, though I don’t mind the students and don’t find them troublesome, like my neighbour I’m not particularly happy about all those boards up there permanently. I contacted the landlord’s letting company and actually spoke with him. He’s a young chap called Nick who I’ve known since he was little when his father ran the now defunct shop at the corner of the street. We had an entirely friendly conversation in which he said that it was ‘letting season’ at the moment but assured me that the boards would come down at the end of the month when that period was over. But the boards stayed up and, when I tried to contact him again, I couldn’t get hold of him personally and was told by people in his office that they’d pass on the message. Nothing happened and I’ve sort of given up on that.

Since his boards are not just in my street but on properties all over the area (there are literally dozens and dozens), I asked one of the local councillors whether landlords were entitled to keep their boards up long-term like that. He told me they weren’t and that local regulations state they should be taken down once properties have been let. But the rub, he told me, was that, since it would take too much in the way of time and resources for the council to go round checking and enforcing, all it would do was to inform landlords of their legal duty but with no follow up.

So is Nick a scumbag for what he’s doing? In fact, are all landlords scumbags, as a friend of mind once suggested, since what they’re doing is exploiting the very basic need people have for shelter and, if they (be they students or anyone else) don’t have the money to pay for it, then tough? But there again isn’t that how the money and buying and selling system works more widely, ie, if you can’t pay, you can’t have? In a conversation I once had with a different landlord about this very thing, he expressed the view that someone who grasps opportunities to make money is doing nothing wrong but simply being enterprising and deserves to be rewarded for, as he put it, ‘showing good judgement’.

Actually, looking around my area there’s a whole range of types of landlords. Some of them own just a single property or maybe two and use the income from that to supplement what they earn from working for an employer or from small-scale self-employed activity. Others, like Nick, make it their living, become small-scale capitalists, and are always looking to expand. Other properties still are bought by large private equity companies who spend significant time and expense improving them before letting them out and don’t need to get back the money they’ve spent on them in the short term, since they’re regarded as long-term investments which will ultimately turn a profit for the companies’ shareholders. Of course, there are also landlords (or would-be landlords) who come a cropper in all this in not being able to find tenants at all. The property or properties they own, and on which they may have taken out mortgages, become an albatross around their neck rather than a source of profit and they end up having to sell, so incurring a loss rather than any kind of profit.

But then that’s the way the dog-eat-dog, anarchic system we live in works at so many different levels. It creates winners and losers even among would-be capitalists. Of course, being a winner or loser in quite that way doesn’t apply to the majority of people, those who are members of what we would call ‘the working class’ and who have to sell their energies to an employer day by day in order to provide for themselves and their families. Some do it fairly comfortably, others a lot less so, but there are very few who don’t live with insecurity about whether their wage or salary will be enough to satisfy their material aspirations and indeed, in many cases, whether the employment that brings in that wage or salary will itself continue to be secure.

But coming back to Nick, is it fair to call him a scumbag? What he’s done is to inherit the couple of properties his father owned and taken things, as another neighbour put it, ‘to a new level’. He’s seen opportunities and grabbed them. Can we blame him for that? Probably not, after all making money is what capitalism invites us all to do if we can. And that will carry on until the majority of us collectively decide to get rid of it and bring in a new society of free access to all goods and services where we’re not constantly pitted against one another but follow the more natural human path of cooperation. Then we’ll truly be able to satisfy all our needs, for shelter as well as for life’s other necessities. In the meantime, no one would object if Nick took down those boards.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: The World Unspun (2026)

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

Ever since I can remember I’ve had a subscription to the New Internationalist magazine. Its watchword, ‘The World Unspun’, marks it out as a campaigning publication which aims to present matters of both local and global importance in as direct and straightforward a way as possible. Its main focus has always been what used to be called the Third World, now more commonly known as the Global South, but it also ranges more widely across issues it sees as vital to humanity as a whole. Its stance is supportive of what it sees as ‘progressive’ movements reflecting a will to see humans across the globe live in a more peaceful and united fashion than at present.

Even if I don’t always necessarily share its analysis of situations and developments, I’ve never found it anything less than a refreshing read with a lively Letters page that’s ready to publish readers’ views, even if in disagreement with its own stance. Over the years some of these letters have come from members of the Socialist Party, including myself. Its 80-odd pages always range widely over a variety of themes, normally of a topical nature, with a layout, presentation and illustrations which are always of the very highest professional standard.

The current edition (Jan-Feb 2026) has as its ‘Big Story’ a series of articles on nuclear weapons and the arms trade, while several short pieces look at, for example, the effects of Hurricane Melissa in Haiti, Malaysia’s round-ups of Rohingya refugees, plans to reinstate the death penalty in Kyrgyzstan, and Trump’s deportation drive in the US. There are reports from Ethiopia, Venezuela, Iran, Peru and India, and its ‘View from Brazil’ is an example of how, while broadly supportive of the more liberal government that recently came to power there, it does not fail to analyse and be critical of how the authorities’ war on drug gangs has led to the deaths of many innocent and poverty-stricken people. Its longest single feature, entitled ‘Neocolonialism in Gaza’ refers to what is happening there as ‘repackaged neocolonialism’ and provides powerful and dramatic descriptions of a war that has not yet fully abated and where ‘365 square kilometers … has been subjected to the equivalent of six times the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima’ and ‘the bodies of thousands of slain Palestinian are yet to be recovered’. It warns chillingly of a future in which ‘a site of mass killing’ is turned into ‘a stage for profit’.

And there is much else. For example, an informative and extremely well-formulated and designed 4-page ‘cartoon history’ of Christopher Columbus depicts the horrors that the explorer’s ‘discoveries’ inflicted on countless indigenous people. And there are several pages of book, film and music reviews, and even an ‘Agony Uncle’ column, which, in the current issue, tries to answer in an entirely serious and balanced way a reader’s ‘ethical’ dilemma about cat ownership in the face of the mass killing of birds and other mammals by domestic cats. The regular two-page ‘country profile’ in this issue is on Iran and provides a highly informative and objective sweep of that country’s history and its current situation complemented by interesting and statistical analysis, none of which is complimentary to the current regime there. The magazine also contains a certain amount of advertising, mainly for ‘ethically’ produced goods and services, some of them coming from the New Internationalist cooperative itself.

While the overall thrust of the New Internationalist is what socialists would see as reformist in its support for political and social reforms and gradual improvements in economic conditions for the working majority, it does not seem entirely antagonistic towards the more ambitious objectives of the Socialist Party. This is as instanced by its willingness to publish letters our members have sometimes sent pointing towards a more profound, indeed revolutionary, kind of social change, where the current system of individual states and production for profit would be replaced by a united world society of common ownership, democratic control and free access to all goods and services.

Indeed, I am waiting to see whether a letter I myself have recently sent to the magazine will be published. In it I’ve replied to another reader’s letter which expressed dissatisfaction with the suggestion made in an article that governments throughout the world could be divided into two types: ‘authoritarian regimes’ and ‘liberal democracies’. The reader saw that division as over-simplistic and suggested rather that states should be divided not into two types but into seven according to their political complexion. What I have suggested in my response is that, although such distinctions might be useful for some purposes, what’s far more significant – at least for those of us looking forward to fundamental social change – is not what divides countries and nations according to type of regime but rather the overarching economic system they are all part of (ie capitalism), with its characteristics of wage labour, buying and selling, and tiny minorities owning or controlling the vast majority of the wealth. And this was the case, the letter goes on, whether countries are run along totalitarian lines, or as so-called liberal democracies, or anything in between. It concludes that it’s the economic system as a whole that needs to be got rid of via majority global consciousness and democratic political action and replaced by a society of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and production solely for need.

As I’ve said, the New Internationalist is pretty good at publishing letters that don’t align with their own preoccupations. Will they publish this one? Let’s see.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: Do I know you . . .? (2026)

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

I’m standing on the concourse at Swansea station. Someone comes up to me. A fellow probably in his forties. He’s friendly. ‘Hi, how’s it going?’, he says, ‘I haven’t seen you for a bit’. I feel embarrassed, slightly panicked in fact. It happens to me a lot. I’m greeted by someone who obviously knows me, but my memory for faces (and names) has become terrible and I can’t for the life of me remember who they are. When this happens, what I can’t do of course is say something like ‘Do I know you?’ And sometimes, once we get talking, they say something that reminds me who they are and that I do know them, even if I still can’t recall their names. But this fellow, I’d swear I don’t know him from Adam – though surely I must.

Anyway I try not to look surprised. ‘I’m okay. How are you?’, I say. He nods and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ I reply that I’m waiting for my son and grandson who’ve gone into Costa Coffee to get a sandwich for their journey home. ‘Are you going somewhere?’, I ask, as a way of finding something to say. ‘No, I’m in a mess’, he replies. ‘My wife has left me and I’m out of the house. I’m on the street.’

What now? I’m supposed to know him and he’s obviously asking for help. So, I need to do something. I need to give him some money. But how much? When someone asks me for money on the street – it seems to happen a lot – I usually give them a pound coin if I’ve got one in my pocket. But can I give this fellow just a pound? After all he’s someone I apparently know- and he’s in a real mess, So one pound just doesn’t feel right. How much then? If I have notes on me, they’re usually in my wallet not my pocket, but somehow I don’t want to get my wallet out. But then I remember I do actually have a ten pound note in my pocket – change from something I bought earlier. I feel in my pocket, pull it out and hand it to him. ‘Hope this helps’, I say. He thanks me and asks me where my son is. I see that they (he and my little grandson) have just come out of Costa Coffee and are waiting for me further down the concourse. I wave in their direction. ‘They’re there’, I say. And I start to walk towards them. He walks with me for a few steps, but then veers off in a different direction. I get to my son and tell him what’s happened. ’My memory’s getting worse’, I say. As my ‘friend’ vanishes from sight, my son, with an amused look on his face, says ‘you’ve been conned’. It takes a few seconds for the scales to fall from my eyes. He then adds jokingly: ‘I saw you hand the money over. I thought you were doing a drugs deal’.

We both laugh, but how do I actually feel? Well, despite having being conned, I don’t actually feel annoyed. I feel a bit sad in fact. Why? Well, though my pretend friend has put one over on me, it won’t cause me any great hardship and I can’t help feeling sorry for him. Even though most people would probably regard him as at least a bit of a villain, my thinking is that you have to be pretty much on your uppers and probably at your wit’s end to do that kind of thing. I couldn’t know of course what his real story was and no doubt I wasn’t the only one he’d tried the same trick on that day. But how desperate does someone have to be to resort to that kind of deception all the while knowing he’s likely to suffer one rebuff after another but just hoping he’ll manage to take in the odd unsuspecting fool?

And what might have been this fellow’s story? Perhaps he’d had a particularly difficult upbringing he’d been unable to shake off and the only thing he’d known was a life of surviving by one trick or another? Or had he just fallen on hard times, things having come apart for him as happens to a fair number of people in the wage-slave society we live in – people who maybe lose their jobs and then can’t keep up with housing and other costs? Or did he have a mental health problem which prevented him from living most people’s 9 to 5 life and getting by on what they earned? Or maybe something else? A recent report from the Centre for Social Justice think-tank found that around 13.4 million people in the UK were living lives ‘marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime’. Whatever the case, he wasn’t one of the many millions of us who manage to keep their heads above water by having a paying job, even if at the cost of keeping the lid on, never being truly free of potential financial insecurity and often paying a high price in terms of self-fulfilment and quality of life. That’s the best in fact that the system we live in of buying and selling, monetary exchange and monopoly of wealth by a tiny minority can offer to the vast majority who have to sell their energies for a wage or salary in a society in which everything’s for sale. A wageless, moneyless society of cooperative work and free access to all goods and services – ie, socialism – is what we urgently need to cure all those maladies.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: Bob Dylan in Swansea (2025)

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

I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan for a long time. His music is top of my list, as it is of many people’s. I’ve seen him perform live a number of times – in London, Manchester, Cardiff and Birmingham. So why wasn’t I jumping for joy when my local newspaper carried the story that the 84-year old legend was soon to do three concerts (not one but three) in my own little home town – and at a venue a walking distance from where I live? In fact, not only was I not jumping for joy, I didn’t even want to go. Why not? Well, because, as I see it, Dylan has been going downhill musically for a long time – since the late 1990s in fact. The bits and pieces of some of the recent live performances by him I’ve seen on the web have seemed especially dire. So why would I risk spoiling the fond memories I had of him at his best? Don’t get me wrong. He’s still one hell of a wordsmith and, though there was much questioning of his award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, I was less surprised than many. But my perception was that the current package couldn’t be anything but a disappointment – even if the many confirmed ‘bobcats’ attending wouldn’t see it like that.

I relayed news of the concerts to my son, a great Dylan enthusiast too. His quick reply was ‘We’re going and I’ll pay’. So I relented, and on an evening in early November we left the house and walked the relatively short distance along the sea front to see the first concert of the Swansea Arena leg of Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ tour.

What was it like? To be frank, better than I expected. ‘Mixed’ might be the right word – and in more senses than one. Firstly, because he mixed songs from his most recent album (ie ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’) with a selection from previous albums. Secondly because most of the songs he performed from that latest album could, in my view, only be described as dirge-like (and to make it worse some of them seeming to go on forever), while his earlier numbers were well performed on the whole, even if with almost unrecognisable arrangements compared to the original versions. But then Dylan has always been known for going against the grain, despite the fact that, in the content of his songs, any explicitly anti-establishment or ‘protest’ matter is way back in the past. And it must be said that his voice is still strong and that he was, as always in his concerts, backed by a group of exceptionally good musicians. The other thing is that the sell-out audience of 3,000 – to me a surprisingly diverse gathering in terms of age (teenagers to aged hippies) and gender (very much a 50-50 split) – absolutely loved it. ‘What an amazing evening’, one of them who’d come all the way from West Yorkshire posted on a Facebook page the following day. And a good many others had clearly come from afar. Before the start, on our row alone, we chatted with fans from Wrexham, Plymouth, Bristol and Milford Haven. Then at 8 o’clock sharp Dylan and his band walked on, the music started and, after performing for a full two hours, with no breaks or banter between songs, they stood up and walked off. The crowd stood up too and clapped and cheered and shouted for more. But they didn’t get it and the lights came on.

The show over, the question I had to ask myself was whether this, at bottom, was just another example of the way the entertainment industry sells us thrills (often meaningless) to patch over the uniformity and stress of the wage and salary system most of us are compelled to spend our lives in? Was it part of that alienation from mutually cooperative activity which is inherently an obsession with celebrities (people we do not know personally and we may have little in common with) and which is the direct opposite of a constructive use of the power and potential we all have to think and create for ourselves and to work usefully and collaboratively with others?

There’s no doubt that Dylan is some kind of hero to many of those who go to his concerts. And it must be said that he has something unique to offer that makes people listen to him and want to go. Many of his lyrics present ideas and images which, while often anything but immediately decipherable and sometimes downright puzzling, do at least give food for thought and reflection. But it’s the worship of the man rather than of his work that, like celebrity worship in general, I see as questionable and as a symptom of the underlying follow-your-leader mentality that capitalism instils and educates people for. You can like (or love) the music and the lyrics, yes. But to put the individual who produces it on some kind of rarified pedestal seems to me part of that ‘superior being’ idea, which is seen at its worst in the kind of cult worship to be found around ‘charismatic’ figures, whether in entertainment, in sport or in politics.

What’s for certain, however, is that in the kind of world socialists campaign to see established – one without leaders or led, governments or governed and based on common ownership of resources and democratic organisation and decision making – each individual will have the time and space to cultivate their own talents freely and, while no doubt admiring the talents and achievements of others, will be unlikely to see them as heroes. Rather in fact each person will have the confidence to be their own hero.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: Way back when (2025)

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

There was a ring on the bell. When I opened the door, a smart looking young man wearing suit, collar and tie and carrying a brief case told me he was selling insurance (those were the days when insurance was still sold door to door), but then he quickly added that what he was really interested in was the Socialist Party of Great Britain. He was very polite and said he knew about the SPGB and had found my name as a contact. I was surprised but also pleased to have someone actually coming round to the house to find out about socialism. So I invited him in and we sat down in the front room. He asked me to tell him about the Party and I tried to sum it up as quickly as possible. I said we stood for a moneyless, wageless democratic world of free access to all goods and services, without leaders or led, based on the idea that this will happen when the majority class in society – all those who had to work for a wage or salary – develop the consciousness necessary to democratically take power from the tiny minority in society who own and control the wealth and to establish the new society. Or something like that.

Andrew – that was his name – seemed enthusiastic and I showed him some of the Party’s leaflets and pamphlets. He appeared particularly interested in certain ideas and positions – for example our attitude towards the use of violence as a political instrument (I told him we were opposed to it) and what was going on in Ireland at the time (it was the period of ‘The Troubles’). He appeared satisfied with this and asked if he could become a member and he would pay the subscription there and then. I told him there wasn’t a joining subscription and I couldn’t enrol him, but, if he came to our next branch meeting at the Swansea Central Library, he could apply to join then. He kept apologising for being an insurance salesman while patting his briefcase and telling me he needed to do that to keep the wolf from the door for himself and his family. I said I understood and he left, telling me he’d see me at our next Monday evening branch meeting.

I felt somehow exhilarated about this – until, that is, my wife emerged from the adjacent room, where she’d been listening to everything that had gone on. ‘He’s a policeman’, was the first thing she said. Wow! It took a moment to sink in, but then it dawned on me that his coming to the house and asking questions in particular about violence and Northern Ireland had to be a bit peculiar. It dawned on me that I’d been naïve. But maybe that was to the good, because, if he was a policeman – an undercover policeman – he might have had a weapon in that briefcase for if and when he might be challenged. And that felt a bit scary.

But was that over-dramatic? Well, I never really found out because Andrew never came to one of our meetings. But I did see him again – about a year later when I attended an indoor public meeting in Swansea put on by the organisation called the International Marxist Group. A group of us were selling our magazines and handing out our leaflets before we went in. As we did, I found myself faced with a casually dressed man who seemed to be one of the organisers. He wasn’t someone I recognised but he said hello to me, looked embarrassed and then sort of blurted out that he was out of the insurance game now and how was I? I realised it was Andrew and reciprocated his ‘hello’ before sitting down.

Make of that what you will. Was I (am I) being paranoid in regarding this as confirmation that he was a police spy? Maybe. But when in 2022 I read and reviewed for the Socialist Standard a book entitled Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century by David Caute, my mind went back to that time. The book’s author had drawn on official but publicly available documents which gave startling insights into the enormous efforts (and massive resources) put into tracking the activities and affiliations of an extraordinarily wide range of people and organisations suspected of being subversive, of constituting a possible ‘threat to national security’.

All this was brought back to me by a recent investigative series on BBC Radio 4 presented by Mark Steel and entitled Shadow World. The People Versus McDonald’s. It was largely about the so-called McLibel case in the 1990s when two anti-McDonald’s Greenpeace campaigners were pursued through the courts by that company for making claims about their activities and methods which McDonald’s said were libellous. The series was an interesting one in itself, but one of the things that emerged from it was the discovery by one of the campaigners that a member of her group she’d engaged in a two-year relationship with was a police infiltrator. He then vanished, but when she later tracked him down, it emerged that, while he was with her, he was married to someone else. She also discovered that other undercover policemen had had relationships with other female activists (over 60 of them in all) from small ‘suspect’ groups. One of these policemen had been involved with four different women, with one of whom he fathered a child. Finally, Mark Steel revealed that, as a member of one such ‘suspect’ group himself in the 1980s, his local branch of the Socialist Workers Party had discovered that one of their members was a police infiltrator, and that records now available showed that, from 1968 to 2008, Special Branch oversaw what he called the ‘massive expensive palaver’ of spying on more than 1,000 different organisations in Britain.

So why not the SPGB as part of that? Just in case. After all it would only be a small part of the massive expensive (and wasteful) palavers of every description that capitalism is full of.

Howard Moss

Letter: Marxism and pigeons (2025)

 

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

Marxism and pigeons

I always enjoy grabbing the Socialist Standard from the local radical bookshop, and read with interest the October Life and Times piece, ‘Chasing pigeons in the park’. Here stalwart HKM finds himself in a fractious encounter with a working class mother, and unsurprisingly, comes off worse for it. I would never advise anyone, Marxist or otherwise, to intervene in the parenting of a stranger’s child. It smacks of condescension, and I’m hardly shocked that she went straight for the jugular.

That aside, while I appreciate the article’s humane spirit and its attempt to connect everyday behaviour to the wider social order, I think it falls into certain traps that weaken the socialist case.

As an anecdote and moral exhortation, one small incident, a child chasing a pigeon, is made to carry the burden of a sweeping claim about capitalist society. What’s needed instead is structural analysis, grounded in class relations and historical development. Otherwise the critique risks idealism, as if cruelty will simply vanish once capitalism is abolished, and empathy will bloom automatically.

The piece also overlooks the way ideology and institutions actively reproduce capitalist values. Capitalism doesn’t just ‘promote thoughtlessness,’ it systematically manufactures individualism, competition, and alienation through schools, media, and the daily grind of wage labour. Those habits of thought won’t dissolve on day one of socialism, they will need to be challenged through conscious struggle, education, and organisation.

Under capitalism, ‘competition,’ ‘self-interest,’ ‘private property,’ and even what counts as ‘good parenting’ or ‘normal behaviour’ are all suffused with hegemonic ideas.

Finally, the article sidesteps the harder question of how socialism itself will handle conflict, scarcity, or antisocial behaviour. To imply that a socialist world will be one of effortless harmony is to underplay the ongoing, practical work of building and sustaining solidarity in the face of real contradictions.

In short, the piece has a sound moral impulse, but its reliance on anecdote and lack of class analysis blunt its usefulness as a Marxist critique.

Marx himself could well have been a pigeon fancier, though most likely encapsulated in pastry and well baked in a pie. While I can’t cite a specific reference for that, it is at least recorded that he did enjoy a pork and matzah sandwich when he could.

A.T.

Life and Times: Chasing pigeons in the park (2025)

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

I’m fortunate to have two rather nice parks close to where I live. One of them is small but especially picturesque with a lake that previously was used for fishing. One trouble with that was that you couldn’t walk around it without the fishermen (they were all men) telling you to hush so as not to scare the fish away. Things improved when the Council transferred the fish to another lake and the water became populated by ducks of various kinds and visited by a variety of other birds, some of them pretty unusual – herons, cormorants, sand martins for example. But it’s always the pair of large beautiful swans living on the lake that attract most attention. This is mainly because of their annual breeding routine which sees them bring into the world as many as seven youngsters at a time that soon become as big as they are while still having the dark plumage of cygnets.

Pigeon feeding and chasing

And, of course, there are the pigeons – the dozens of pigeons, which get well fed by visitors with seed available from the park’s food and drinks kiosk. The visitors often come to the park with their families to walk round and maybe use the other facilities like the children’s play area or the small community centre. As for the pigeon feeding, it’s in the area around the kiosk, close to the water’s edge, that most of it takes place. It’s mainly peaceful with some of the pigeons tame enough to perch on people’s arms or shoulders (if you like that kind of thing). But in that area, walking round I’d also sometimes notice a young child or two chasing pigeons and causing them to fly off in fright – something I didn’t like. But, a short time ago, something happened that moved me to do more than just observe. On a warm summer’s day a child of perhaps 3 or 4 years old was going after pigeons with a stick in his hand frightening them and causing them to hop off or fly away. He was largely unsuccessful in his efforts to use the stick on them, but I noticed that one of them had a bleeding wound and was having more trouble escaping than the others. I asked the child to stop, telling him it was cruel and he wouldn’t like to be chased. He stopped but at the same time looked at me in a bemused fashion and this drew the attention of a group of adults nearby.

One of these turned out to be the child’s mother, who then addressed me saying something like ‘he’s only little’. ‘Okay’, I replied, ‘but that’s when they learn and it’s not right for them to chase and scare the birds’. The situation then escalated. She took a hostile stance, started to walk towards me and shouted ‘f… off’. I felt I needed – on reflection – to say something in reply. So I retorted ‘You’re a very rude woman’. ‘I’ll be even ruder’, she said and got her phone out, made as though to make a call while calling me a ‘nonce’ and saying I liked hanging round children. She and the group she was with then walked away. But as they did, it looked as though she was using her phone to take photos.

Facebook support

I have to say that this (ie the phone use) bothered me and, when I got home, I thought I’d better ‘get in first’ – just in case. So I put a post on the local community Facebook page recounting what had happened and ending it with ‘So just to let you know the kind of thing you may face if you’re inclined to try and stop kids being cruel to animals’. A shoal of responses from people on the site followed, the vast majority supportive. Examples were: ‘Animal cruelty – psychopathic behaviour’; ‘You should have taken a video of the woman … she was obviously acting in a threatening way and slandered you too’; ‘How your child treats other people and animals says a lot about how they’re treated at home … because kids reflect what’s poured into them’; ‘Her behaviour explains the child’s behaviour – mean, uneducated and unnecessary’; ‘I’m sorry you were targeted like that and threatened for trying to do the right thing for the poor pigeons. People like that mother ruin the park for others’; ‘Calling someone a nonce is absolutely disgraceful and infuriating. I wish I’d been there to defend you.’

Empathy or rivalry?

Needless to say, I was touched by many of these. They made me feel that, despite the fact that so much of what goes on in the society we live in to promote thoughtlessness and cruelty towards others, be they humans or other living things, there is in most people a core of empathy that emerges when the situation requires it. Given the chance, people will almost instinctively choose an ethic of compassion and mutual aid rather than the one of rivalry and competition that is promoted by the economic basis of the society we live in with its money system. How much more likely is it then when we choose a different kind of social and economic set-up – a socialist world of common ownership and free access to all goods and services – that human beings, as the eminently flexible creatures we are, will choose as a matter of course to act in the interests of the community as a whole … and in so doing act in their own interests too.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: You park, we charge (2025)

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

Parking fines have been in the news lately, especially those levied by private parking companies and technically called ‘parking charges’. A large number of car parks are owned by or outsourced to these companies. They go by various names, for example Euro Car Parks, Excel Parking, Parking Eye, Total Parking Solutions, Britannia Parking, National Car Parks. The first you know you’ve been fined (or charged) by one of them is when you receive a letter in the post giving you details of what you’ve done wrong and instructing you to pay them an amount of money – usually £100 but £60 if you pay within 14 days. They make payment simple – by phone or online. You’re also given the option of appealing the charge, but, as everyone who’s ever tried that knows, appeals are rarely successful.

Eternity

This came close to home for me recently, when a friend asked me if I could help her appeal against a charge for not parking her car entirely within the confines of a parking bay. It was unfair, she said, since her limited personal mobility meant she needed extra space on the driver’s side to get out of the car and this caused her to park just over the line on the passenger side. And as she’d parked in the last bay of the row – the only one available – and the other side was just empty space, she was not occupying part of another bay or causing any other obstruction. It seemed cut and dried to me that the charge was unfair and unreasonable and that it would be overturned, especially given my friend’s disability.

But that’s not what happened. Her appeal was rejected by the parking company (Eternity Fire and Security), the reason being given that ‘the vehicle was not parked correctly within the markings of a bay or space’, meaning that ‘the terms and conditions of the car park were not followed’. It was also stated that ‘parking out of marked bays can cause obstruction, inconvenience and safety hazards to other users of the car park’. So no account whatever was being taken either of the fact that my friend was disabled (her car was displaying a blue badge) or of the fact that, since the bay in question was the last one in a row, she could not have been causing ‘obstruction, inconvenience or safety hazards’. She was invited, if not satisfied, to appeal further to what was called an Independent Appeals Service, POPLA (Parking on Private Land Appeals).

POPLA

I advised her to do this. If POPLA was independent, surely it would see sense and reject Eternity’s decision? But no. It came back with confirmation of the decision on the grounds that ‘POPLA cannot allow an appeal based on mitigating circumstances’. I found this astonishing and my obvious question was on what basis could they ever allow an appeal? But it was sort of answered when I typed POPLA into the internet. I found its average score of 1.3 out of 5 on the Trustpilot site together with a profusion of negative comments. One of them said ‘private parking companies are the scum of the earth’, and another effectively summed things up by writing: ‘Comes across as heavily weighted towards the operator rather than a proper appeals process. They rejected my appeal on the basis of claims provided by the operator’. That said it all, so I wasn’t surprised when my friend received a further letter from POPLA telling her that she must pay without delay and it had now gone up from the original £60 to £100.

DCBL

We both agreed that she shouldn’t pay and wrote back to Eternity explaining again why and basically saying ‘see you in court’. Their response was yet another demand for payment and, after a further reply from us, a ‘Notice of Debt recovery’ letter from DCBL (Debt Collection Bailiffs Ltd) arrived threatening court action. This, it was stated, could lead to consequences like ‘further fees and costs’ and ‘prevention of future lending’. The amount demanded was now £170. Our further response was that we were sure that a court would see the reasonableness of our mitigation and throw out their case, probably with costs to us.

We couldn’t be sure of this of course, but there had been a recent case in the news where a company who took someone to court claiming over £11,000 had their case thrown out and were ordered by a judge to pay over £10,000 themselves to a charity. I duly drew DCBL’s attention this (tinyurl.com/4uranrzz), but their only response was to send me a ‘final reminder’. Another ‘final reminder’ has arrived since. We have ignored both. Will they take us to court? Well, I obviously can’t be sure they won’t, but I sort of doubt it, especially in view of the recent publicity about such cases, the obvious weakness of trying to rely entirely on formal ‘terms and conditions’ without attempting to consider other relevant factors, and also the fact – which I also made sure was drawn to their attention – that, under the Equality Act 2010, ‘reasonable adjustment has to be made for disabled people’. So watch this space.

Money and profit

What to make of all this? Well, first of all, the very existence of a plethora of parking companies whose purpose is to make money for landowners or investors either by charging people to park their cars or fining them for not carrying out the operation correctly is a prime example of how the system we live in is ruled by money and profit and not by human need. Secondly the practice of issuing fines (or ‘charges’) and pursuing people for payment, of appeal processes, of debt collection and then maybe court hearings are among the many examples of the enormous waste of human energy and resources inherent in the system we live under. It is a prime example of how that system spawns vast amounts of socially unproductive activities resulting in complex bureaucracies that need servicing and in large numbers of people doing jobs that they themselves can take little satisfaction from rather than being able to exercise their talents and capabilities in cooperative and socially productive ways.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: Football Is Our Life (2025)

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

I’ve always watched football, but I hadn’t been to a match for quite some time when a friend told me he’d managed to get tickets for Liverpool playing Manchester United. Did I want to go? Though I don’t support either team I couldn’t resist. So on a balmy spring evening I found myself at Anfield, Liverpool’s famous ground, among 70,000 other fans of both teams. People milled around everywhere outside the stadium, and when we got in we found ourselves high up in a stand above the pitch looking a long way down. Impressive to say the least. I had a good look around and, among the banners on display, a particularly huge one stood out. It was, being held up by quite a large group of people and it said FOOTBALL IS OUR LIFE. Another banner some way away had the words WE LIVE FOR LIVERPOOL FC.

People’s priorities

I couldn’t help but feel a little sad about this. I appreciate and to a large extent share the love and enthusiasm so many people feel for ‘the beautiful game’ and I can see that it also helps to create the sense of community that may be missing in many people’s lives. But for football or one of its teams to become so all-consuming a part of some people’s existence seems to me a reflection, an admission, of their underdog role, acceptance of a life that does not give them adequate opportunity to develop their own individual talents and capacities and to make their own unique contribution to a common social end.

I am reminded of this too when I go on the website of my local newspaper. Down the side there’s an invitation to click on a choice of three categories of article – ‘Latest’, ‘Most Commented’, and ‘Most Read’. If I click on ‘Most Read’, I know that top of that list will be news of sports stars, actors, singers or other celebrities who are in the news rather than more ‘serious’ matters or events that should be of wide human interest. So, as I write, the biggest audience on this site is not for events in Gaza or Ukraine or how people may be affected by the latest proposed government policy changes, but rather for news of, say, the football transfer market deadline and the pay the stars involved will be receiving.

Media priorities

I was also reminded of my Anfield trip by the recent sad death of one of Liverpool’s star players in a road accident. Diego Jota had died together with his brother when the car he was driving came off the road during an overtaking manoeuvre. Tragic of course, yet the overwhelming grief depicted in the media as being experienced by Liverpool fans brought into sharp focus the phenomenon of mass idolisation of celebrated individuals by people who don’t know them personally. This contrasts with the almost routine acceptance of the fate, whether accidental or not, that may befall ‘ordinary people’ and was illustrated by the tragedy which happened to coincide with the footballer’s death. Dozens of people, many of them young children, died in flash floods in Texas. It was reported on, yes, and words of sorrow and regret were expressed, but in that week’s media coverage this ‘act of god’ in which many ‘ordinary’ people died always took second place to the death of the millionaire footballer whose handling of his Lamborghini may have contributed to the accident that killed him. And the Texan tragedy was also subordinated in many places to coverage of a pop music event – the ‘second coming’ that was the Oasis reunion concert.

Worship and idolisation

Of course, there’s no reason why people shouldn’t take pleasure in and appreciate the skills of talented sports people or the artistry involved in producing music. But is it not a sad commentary on the lives so many lead that this should take the form of displays of near fanatical passion or worshipful admiration – an exhilaration not normally available in the existence they are tied to? Is this not a substitute for the lack of interest, meaning and satisfaction workers experience in the employment activities they’re obliged to engage in to survive and that consume most of their waking hours? Does it not stand as some kind of replacement for the lack of opportunity to express their own talents freely in their daily lives? Is it not a patch of colour in drab lives?

And is it not a pity that so many are unable to see beyond this and seem to place so little value on the everyday heroism of those people who spend much of their time not worshipping heroes but helping others, often those at the very bottom of the social pile?

Meaningful lives

The system we live in spurs us to see certain rich or powerful individuals as more important than and superior to others and to almost merge our own identity with them (think the ‘Swiftie’ fans of Taylor Swift). Is this anything other than a denial of their own uniqueness, a rejection of themselves as meaningful individuals in their own right? As an alternative to this, the society of common ownership of all resources and free access to all goods and services which socialists work to see established will surely be one in which each individual is able to develop their own particular talents to the full, achieve personal satisfaction via meaningful activity and in so doing be recognised and valued for the contribution they make to the social effort. In that society every individual will be their own hero.

Howard Moss

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

Life and Times: Socialism: a difficult word (2025)

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

A few months ago I attended a talk at my local university entitled ‘Transitional Justice in the Post-Soviet Space’. The speaker, Anja Mihr, a German academic specialising in International Human Rights Law, attempted an explanation of how and why, after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, some of the former Soviet republics or satellite states quickly became functioning capitalist democracies (eg Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), while others did not and in some cases have remained relative autocracies to this day (eg Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan). Her talk had many thought-provoking facets which gave rise to a lively exchange of ideas in the discussion that followed, but one thing that particularly caught my attention and jarred with me was the speaker’s frequent use of the word, ‘socialism’ to describe the system that had existed in the countries of the former Soviet bloc – a description she usually qualified with the word ‘state’, so ‘state socialism’.

Positive or negative?

I felt that using the word in this way was to perpetuate the mistaken idea that somehow what had existed in the Soviet bloc was something to do with the fundamental idea of socialism as a democratic world society of free access, and production and distribution to meet people’s needs, when in reality in just about every conceivable way it was the polar opposite of that. At the same time, I was aware that ‘socialism’ is a word that’s used in all sorts of different ways to mean all sorts of different things. Some people use it to denote something positive, others to indicate or describe something they find undesirable or dangerous. And even when they declare support for socialism, they are not necessarily all signalling support for the same thing.

So, for example, there are some on the left of the political spectrum who still voice support for the old Soviet Union and similar regimes today (so called ‘tankies’) and are happy to label as socialism what most people regard as authoritarian tyrannies. Others on the left reject the former Soviet system but continue to believe in the existence today of some form of ‘socialism’ in other countries (eg Cuba, China) and are enthused by this. The left-wingers who reject the idea that such countries are ‘socialist’ and consider that the Soviet Union wasn’t either still think that there was an attempt to establish socialism in Russia under Lenin and Trotsky after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution but that it was quashed in the 1920s when Stalin took over and ‘state capitalism’ rather than ‘state socialism’ was established. If we add to this the often expressed idea that the Labour Party and other similar parties in Western countries stand for some kind of socialism or that there is a form of socialism in some of the Scandinavian countries where poverty tends to be alleviated by state support (so-called Nordic socialism), we should not be surprised that, in a recent YouGov poll across the UK, ‘socialism’ was found to be a more popular idea than ‘capitalism’ among a cross-section of people deemed to be representative of the UK population.

57 varieties

Are these ‘57 varieties’ a serious obstacle to the spread of understanding of socialism as defined by the Socialist Party? Well, maybe not necessarily, since the highly variable use of the word gives a ‘handle’ for socialists to use when they hear it used ‘wrongly’. So, in the discussion following Professor Mihr’s talk, I was able to challenge her use of the term ‘state socialism’ and argue that what actually existed – and had always existed in the Soviet era, as far back as Lenin and Trotsky – was state capitalism and that socialism was something decidedly different and should be thought of in entirely different terms. I received a somewhat nondescript answer, but at least I’d made the point and the gathering of people at the talk had heard it, and it perhaps gave them food for thought.

Default to autocracy?

The speaker too offered some food for thought during the discussion period. To a question asking whether the more ‘backward’ ex-Soviet states (ie those that have remained autocratic) would come to be more democratic any time soon, she said she thought that time was the key and that, as the older generations disappeared, those who followed them, coupled with economic forces, would cause the powers-that-be in those countries to move gradually to more democratic forms of government. And she rejected the frequently cited idea of the inevitable permanence of what has been called ‘homo sovieticus’ or, in the words of one commentator, ‘the default to autocracy’ – the idea that Russia and its sphere of influence have some kind of inbuilt tendency to remain authoritarian regardless of changes that are taking place in the wider world.

Not of course that a more ‘democratic’ Russian sphere would alter the fact that capitalism would still be operating. And it would still be exhibiting its characteristic features – poverty amid plenty, a wealthy owning class lording it over a class of wage and salary workers, technological progress perverted by war and waste. But movement to a more democratic form of capitalism would at least lay a better foundation for the spread of real socialist ideas and create the means for majority political action via the ballot box as a route to the establishment of a democratic, moneyless, marketless society once the necessary spread of consciousness has taken place.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: Follow the money (2025)

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

A recent BBC investigative programme (File on Four) focused on the financial crisis in British universities, revealing how most of them are urgently trying to make savings by cutting staff numbers and courses on offer. It showed how one of the underlying factors is the falling numbers of students from abroad who pay higher fees than domestic students and on whom many universities have become reliant. The result, so the programme disclosed, was desperate attempts by some institutions to recruit overseas students, even to the extent of overlooking poor qualifications or poor knowledge of English, which may lead to cheating in exams and other assessment exercises and which is then also often overlooked.

The customer is right

But, as I frequently hear from friends in my own local university, the reverberations of the funding problems are more wide-ranging and are causing considerable stress and insecurity to those employed there. One of the greatest concerns for academic employees, apart from the ever-present risk of being pressured into ‘voluntary’ severance or simply declared redundant, stems from the fact that the customer (ie the student) is now very much ‘in charge’. Gone are the days when universities were largely funded by government and regarded by most as places of ‘higher learning’ which didn’t need to be too concerned about where the money was coming from. Gone are the days when students, apart from not being charged for the tuition they received, received local authority grants to cover their living expenses. And gone too are the days when students would look up to their lecturers and see university education as a bonus that would serve them in all manner of useful ways in the years to come. Now that governments no longer fund universities to any significant degree and students have to pay for both living expenses and tuition out of their own (or their parents’) pockets, the tables are well and truly turned.

The anxiety of universities to attract students and then keep them happy when they get there has meant that the students now largely regard their lecturers as servants and are ready to complain and demand redress when things (even small things) don’t go entirely to plan for them – for example if they don’t feel sufficiently well instructed (or even ‘entertained’) by a lecturer or are given lower exam marks than they hoped for or expected. And such complaints are taken deadly seriously by the university authorities themselves with lecturers required to explain themselves and a student’s dissatisfaction not infrequently resulting in a rap over the knuckles for their lecturer or even a formal disciplinary process. And the students’ assessment of their lecturers’ ‘performance’ and the ‘scores’ they are asked to give to them at the end of each module will feed into the university’s decision about whether, for example, a lecturer passes probation, is promoted, or is made redundant if reductions in staff costs are deemed necessary. And though campus trade unions rail against this, they are, so I’m told, rarely successful in achieving any relaxation of these policies or reversal or mitigation of penalties imposed on individual union members who go to them for help.

Obedient zombies

The other thing my university friends tell me is that those who manage to negotiate the hurdles and achieve promotion to higher posts are then required to administer the above processes. In other words, they are required to put the fear of god into their ‘lower level’ colleagues. And just like most others detailed to do ‘the dirty work’ in the repressive regime that employment represents, they usually agree to it and so accept the role of (as one of my University friends puts it) ‘obedient zombie’, even if some at least carry out the tasks required of them with some reluctance but maybe justifying it to themselves on the grounds that they are somehow acting in everyone’s collective interest.

The student-as-paying-customer model that now prevails is also backed up by government policy whereby anyone dissatisfied with the service they have received from their university has the choice of two different bodies they can complain to – either the Office for Students or the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. They can claim redress either in the form of changes to their grades or financial compensation from their University. But, over and above this, universities run scared that such complaints, if upheld, may be made public and so risk damaging their reputation and discouraging future students from applying, which would adversely affect their already precarious financial position. This of course increases the pressure put upon staff and departments within the university to make sure that, if complaints are made to them by students, ‘satisfaction’ is given, so that such complaints do not risk being taken outside the University with the possible consequences of that. Hence the prevailing mentality of ‘the student is always right’.

Money, money, money

What does all this mean for university staff in the current system? It means, for one thing, long hours to fill in for the work of staff who have left via ‘voluntary’ severance or redundancy. It means that other aspects of their work, in particular their research, that they may have been hoping would give them satisfaction and inspiration and increase the sum of human knowledge in their discipline takes second place to something that may seem to have become a meaningless and alienating grind. And it means more stress and insecurity of not knowing if their job will be safe come the next money-saving operation – whichever euphemism is used for it (take your pick between ‘reorganisation’, ‘review’, ‘restructuring’, ‘redesign’, or anything else). The undeniable reality is that the system we live in, in employment and much else, dictates that money shall be the ultimate arbiter. In extreme cases it may decide whether people live or die. In others – and this applies to university employees – it will decide whether they feel relatively comfortable with their life on a day-to-day basis or whether they lead an anxious and insecure existence sweating on their employer’s judgement about whether there is enough money in the coffers to continue employing them.

Howard Moss