Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ukraine is being devastated… The threat of escalation to nuclear war intensifies. Perhaps worst of all, in terms of long-term consequences, the meager efforts to address global heating have been largely reversed. Some are doing fine. The US military and fossil fuel industries are drowning in profit, with great prospects for their missions of destruction many years ahead… Meanwhile, scarce resources that are desperately needed to salvage a livable world, and to create a much better one, are being wasted in destruction and slaughter, and planning for even greater catastrophes’.

[CounterPunch]

‘We really don’t have time for the Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Spartacists, Revolutionary Communists or whatever sect in Your Party to get their shit together in order to take on the challenges we face – they might never overcome their miniscule differences or the battle of the £1 newspapers,’ Mish Rahman, a former Labour politician-turned-Your-Party-insider who defected to the Greens last month, told Novara Media. Rahman said he doubts the differences between the two camps are as substantive as they’re made out: ‘[Sultana and Corbyn] are not far off each other [politically], it’s just a proxy war for control’. 

[NovaraMedia]

‘”They say they don’t have enough homes, but look at how many empty ones there are – [the council] just doesn’t want to fix and repair them,” says mother-of-one Vanessa. She lives on Central Hill estate in Lambeth but only in temporary accommodation and says she’s been left “in limbo”. Dozens of properties on the south London estate are unoccupied, one for eight years, and yet the borough has the third-highest housing waiting lists in the capital – something that Vanessa, who has been waiting for a social home for three years, describes as “outrageous”’. 

[BBC]

Los Angeles spent about $418 million on homelessness programs in 2025, yet only a small share went toward helping people leave the streets for good, according to the New York Post. A recent City Hall report suggests most of the money supports short-term services that manage homelessness rather than resolve it. 

[ZeroHedge]

In 2021, there were only two diagnosed silicosis cases in California. In 2025 there were 214. ‘The number of cases is rising rapidly’ Dr. Michaels wrote to me, ‘That’s the important point’. Here’s the more tearful description from Dr. Michaels..: The hallmarks of the disease: shortness of breath and diminished exercise capacity that progresses to an inability to climb even one flight of stairs. A short walk that should take just 20 minutes can take an hour. Working is difficult or impossible. People cough incessantly. They can’t sleep because it is difficult to breathe and they are kept awake coughing. Over time, people with more advanced silicosis require supplemental oxygen and can’t leave home without an oxygen tank. And they are at increased risk of dying from lung cancer. The crime behind this slaughter is that safer, profitable substitutes are available. 

[Common Dreams]

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

Pathfinders: Regreened and pleasant land (2025)

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

In what may be an omen of the new Trump incumbency, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket underwent a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ last month. In a similarly unpromising start to the MAGA 2.0 regime, large areas of Los Angeles also underwent their own version of a rapid disassembly as winter wild fires raged along the beachfronts and through the Hollywood hills. When even millionaire celebs’ houses are burning down, you know the world is in crisis.

The LA fires were particularly devastating because of the ‘weather whiplash’ effect. Global warming is disrupting weather systems and rainfall patterns, making wet events in Southern California wetter, and dry events longer. Heavy rain a year or so back resulted in a profusion of new foliage, which then dried out during the subsequent and prolonged drought, creating a mass of kindling just waiting for the next lightning strike or discarded cigarette butt (tinyurl.com/vp6fd9jv).

This weather whiplash effect is being felt around the world, leading in many places to increasing floods and desertification, aided and abetted by human activity including deforestation, industrial farming and overgrazing, soil degradation, building, mining and pollution. It’s estimated that 25 percent of global land will be under threat by 2050. The Gobi desert in Mongolia and China is expanding by around 6,000 square kilometres a year, causing tens of thousands of migrants to flee to the cities. The Sahara, a desert the size of the United States, is advancing by around 48 km a year, exacerbating land conflicts in already poverty-stricken areas. The Thar desert in north-west India, for centuries held back by the natural barrier of the Aravalli mountains, is now blowing dust storms across croplands and into cities as the government have failed to prevent illegal mining of those same mountains.

Capitalism, which cares nothing for consequences, is the real ‘tragedy of the commons’, in which Earth’s common resources are owned and controlled privately and for private gain, to the impoverishment of all. In socialism, where resources would be commonly owned and managed, this unnecessary tragedy could be shunted into reverse. We don’t even need new technology to do it. We can simply apply ancient techniques used by the Egyptians and the Inca to create artificial water-harvesting structures to regreen the land.

Some of this is already happening. One famous regreening project is in the Sahel, the wide strip of semi-desert that borders the southern edge of the Sahara. Contrary to popular belief, it does rain in the Sahara, but rarely, and the water runs off the dry and impermeable ground in violent flash floods, leaving nothing behind. But since 2007, locals have been digging crescent-shaped depressions in the ground to catch the run-off, with deep sinkholes to permeate the sub-soil. The result has been a return of trees – a natural barrier to Saharan dust storms – and lush vegetation. The ‘Great Green Wall’ project runs right across Africa from coast to coast, involves 22 countries, and aims to restore 100 million hectares of marginal land by 2030 (youtu.be/udaihhReGAA).

Look online for stories about regreening deserts. They’re everywhere. Take Ethiopia, birthplace of coffee and once a ‘garden of Eden’ with at least 66 percent forest and woodland cover, reduced by human activity to 3.1 percent by 1982. It stopped raining and the wells dried up, causing droughts and biblical famines. But local community projects have been building micro-watersheds consisting of terraces, deep trenches, check dams and percolation ponds. Since these started, 13 streams have returned, of which 6 now flow throughout the year. Project lead Tony Renaudo put it plainly: ‘If you give nature a chance it will heal itself’ (youtu.be/RBP2uRQk5pQ).

China’s Kubuqi desert project is one of the world’s most successful, where desertification expanding at a rate of 10,000 km2 per year in 2000 has been reversed, leading to a re-greening of 2,000 km2 annually, using only local rainfall.

Also in China, the Loess Plateau had been stripped bare by overcropping and overgrazing, causing soil erosion, flooding, desertification and dust storms. The 35,000 km2 project was explained to local volunteers this way: you need to ‘dress’ the landscape – the hilltops need to wear hats (trees), the hills need to wear belts (terraces), and the valleys need shoes (dams). They regreened the entire area in a decade.

In India, monsoons come for just 3 months, giving farmers a fleeting window to produce just one annual crop, before 9 months of drought. The Paani Foundation project in India’s Maharashtra region hosts an annual Watercup competition to see which village can install the most water-harvesting structures within 45 days. Thousands of villages have participated since 2016, replenishing the water table in just one season and saving an estimated 145 billion gallons of water in 4 years, enabling 2 or more crops a year, creating food security, and ending migration to cities.

The Arvari river in north-west India had been dry for 60 years, with monsoon water simply running off the dry earth. In 1986 they started building water-harvesting crescents as in the Sahel, and by 1995 had restored the river year-round. They’ve since done the same thing with four more dry river systems (youtu.be/Tpozw1CAxmU).

Saudi Arabia has used subterranean water for crop irrigation but this is not sustainable as low rainfall can’t replenish the water table. The west-coast Al Baydha project, begun in 2010, built dams, channels and ditches to direct the floodwater into long-term storage areas, with the result that local vegetation was able to survive a 30-month drought without artificial irrigation (youtu.be/D6Kz_OcOgvE).

These and many other projects are being done now, not thanks to capitalism but in spite of it. What they mostly require is simply the cooperative labour of vast numbers of local people who understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It’s a tantalising foretaste of what socialism could achieve on a world scale, once the barriers of private ownership and profit-seeking are torn down, and more of us start rolling our sleeves up.

Paddy Shannon

50 Years Ago: Los Angeles Erupts (2015)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

For a few days the spotlight was switched from the ever present horror of Vietnam and focussed on the United States itself.

Los Angeles, that most modern of cities – if such an outdated word as city can be used to describe a sprawl of over 452 square miles – erupted into violence. In an orgy of looting, arson and killing the Negro population, so often the victims of mob violence, themselves became the mob. The savage details were too well reported to need repeating, but many thousands of troops were needed to crush what amounted to a rebellion. When it was over, needless to say the Negroes were the worst-hit victims.

The suppression of the Negro, lasting for a hundred years after their “liberation,” ranging from murder to petty discrimination, and running through all strata of society, has produced a distrust and hatred that will take a very long time to overcome. At every moment and in every possible way, the Negro is made to feel inferior.

Such a situation, and the fact that it could be changed, must lead to an explosion. Los Angeles has been a modern legend, that personifies the so-called affluent society, the world of mass-produced commodities in profusion. Brash and ugly, a mass of sprawling suburbs and six-lane freeways where public transport has practically disappeared, the Watts-Willowbrook area where the explosion occurred is known as the Black Ghetto. Can anything illustrate the plight of the American Negro more than the use of this medieval word to describe the conditions of workers in an ultramodern city?

The riot was crushed, but as long as hatred between workers remains on such a scale and is added to the normal tensions and frustrations of capitalism, such eruptions will continue.

(from News in Review, Socialist Standard, October 1965)

Funerals on H.P. (1959)

From the December 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers, we hope, will forgive us for writing about death, funerals, and cemeteries. Let us assure them that we have no morbid interest; we are not avid readers of certain Sunday papers whose function is to dwell in the graveyards elaborately reporting exhumations, inquests. opened coffins, and desecrated tombs.

We are, however, very much interested in the big-business commercial aspect of cemeteries and funerals. The dictum of Capitalism is that the worker should not only not live above his means, as if this were possible, but should not die beyond his means. The funeral should, of course, be up to standard. The final resting place of the average worker, apart from those who are cremated, is the Municipal Cemetery. Hunks of marble, rotten sculpture, decaying flowers, praying parsons looking for a few shillings from the relatives; a few hurried meaningless words and the proletarian funeral is all over.

Our sudden interest in this sordid matter was reawakened by the recent death of Mr. Errol Flynn, a film actor. Mr. Flynn, a wealthy individual, was not buried in a Municipal Cemetery. His place of burial was Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Los Angeles. California. It is impossible for a visitor to Los Angeles not to know Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Large hoardings (floodlit at night) show the green lawns round the waterfall in the rose-strewn gardens, an idyllic spot. These hoardings. rather similar in size and character to our familiar Guinness stout signs, tell us largely that burial at Forest Lawn Memorial Park is good for you. The slickness of the advertising makes you wish to die in order to take advantage of it.

The Daily Mail 119.10.59) gave us some details of Mr. Flynn’s last resting place. We learned that the bill for the funeral was about £1,200. Also that the Company owning the cemetery had invested more than 100 million dollars (about £35 million) in it. There is a Hall of the Crucifixion seating 1,400 people, used also for Symphony concerts as well as for other sacred money-making occasions. High on the hillside stands the Little Church of the Flowers, a copy of Stoke Poges church where Gray wrote his Elegy in a Country Churchyard. To the East lies the Wee Kirk among the Heather, with real heather imported from Scotland, mark you. On the hill crest is the Church of the Recessional, an exact reproduction of Rottingdean, Sussex, Saxon Church. Throughout the cemetery piped stereo music is played. Mortuaries, courts of freedom, gardens of peace, crematoria, columbarium, all add to the variety.

Do not think the practical aspect is neglected, for in the vast, administrative block of buildings, to the strains of "Sheep may safely graze," visiting families are urged "Buy your grave on the never-never plan.” "Choose your casket now." Balanced comment on this state of affairs is impossible.

When three years ago the shareholders closed a Nottingham cemetery because it was no longer making a profit, there was a public outcry. The dead could not be buried unless it was profitable. We were not surprised. Apart from public health considerations, cemeteries are run on the same basis as any other business—no profit—no production or service.

The workers should not worry too much about the high cost of dying and respectable burial, but concentrate on doing a little real living instead. Socialist ideas open up the vista of a new world, and provide a new healthy outlook. Until Socialist ideas are accepted and acted upon, the human intellect will accept as normal the depraved morality of this sick society.

Jim D'Arcy

LA Law or class war? (1992)

From the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Riots and anger on the streets of LA. What ignited the flame? The frustration of poverty. In the USA today one in five families live below the official poverty line; the majority of these are non-white. The American Constitution claims that all men are born equal but in 1992 black workers stand more chance of being in prison than in college. In Washington DC 42 per cent of blacks between the ages 18 and 35 are either in prison or on parole. In Harlem, New York City, the life expectancy of a black male is lower than in Third World Bangladesh.

The riots have added fuel to various spurious theories about violence in society. White socio-biologists, wedded to outdated notions of human nature as determinants of anti-social behaviour, have argued that rioters are over-endowed with violent genes. For example, Mark and Ervin Violence and the Brain published with the support of the US Law Enforcement Assisance Agency argue that:

The kind of violent behaviour related to brain malfunction may have its origins in the environment, but once the brain structure has been permanently affected the violent behaviour can no longer be modified by manipulating psychological or social influences.

 Perhaps the authors of this crass rationalisation can explain why such violent brain cells seem to evolve amongst poor unemployed hopeless wage slaves and not amongst the rich people, both black and white, in Beverly Hills, Greenwich Village or Knightsbridge.

The long-held racist ideology of the USA is a reflexion of the fact that chattel slavery ended in the 1860s but that wage slavery persists in the 1990s. The brutality of the plantation owner has given way to the profit-grabbing claim to inherent superiority by the capitalist owners and controllers of the means of wealth production and distribution. Capitalism does not have inequality and divisiveness as an accidental and eradicable feature. Inequality and division are endemic to all class societies.

Some black political activists have seen the division in American society in terms of race or skin colour rather than class and in doing so they are avoiding the root cause. As early as 1865 a black convention in Charleston formulated an "Address to the White Inhabitants of the State of South Carolina" which called for an elusive equality amongst all men:

We simply ask that we shall be recognised as men; that there be no obstruction placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white men shall govern black men; that we have the right of trial by jury of our peers; that schools be established for the education of coloured children as well as white; and that the advantages of both colours shall, in this respect, be equal; that no impediment be put in the way of our acquiring homesteads for ourselves and our people; that, in short, we shall be dealt with as others are—in equity and justice.

This statement assumes that there is one human race rather than that society is divided into antagonistic interests on the basis of property possession. In 1965 the Watts riots in Los Angeles shattered the self-deception of American ideologists who thought that they lived in a land of equality where the wretchedly impoverished would never embarrass them by resisting publicly. Vincent Harding describes the Watts riots:

For five days fighting went on; blacks attacked police, firemen, white stores—but no white civilians. The flames from dozens of fires lighted the nighttime sky; bullets, tear gas shells, screaming sirens, shouting of men and women poured out a cascade of sounds closely approximating those of battlefields and it was. When police and 13,000 national guardsmen finally quelled the uprising 34 persons were dead, more than 1000 wounded and nearly $40 million of property had been destroyed.  (The Other American Revolution).

The then President, Lyndon B. Johnson, responded to the display of working class indignation by making pious reformist noises about The Great Society which would be created out of so-called equal rights legislation. The exhibition of police and court racism in LA is proof that the Great Society was a fiction utterly unrealisable within a system which creates economic waste and an environment unfit for human habitation.

The Bush government will not learn from the LA riots nor can it learn except how to contain its subjects more successfully. The rioters will have gained little from the riots but for some looted cheap goods and a sense of being noticed. And the results of the riots are more working class wounds; the enmity of wage slaves against wage slaves, many left dead. Workers will get nowhere fighting each other and calling for capitalist justice. What we must do is unite anger with understanding and turn these upon the real enemy: those who rob us of the fruits of our labour.

Steve Coleman