Cancer—A Curse of Capitalism (1976)

From the November 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

It would be foolish to attribute cancer solely to the development of capitalism when evidence is available that cancer has existed at least throughout written history. However there can be no question that only in the present century has it reached such epidemic proportions that it now accounts for 20% of all deaths in Britain (Sunday Times article: “Cancer: How to cut the risk,” 13th June 1976.)

Evidence suggests that most diseases are the result of the environment, and it must be remembered that the environment, especially today, is largely man-made. Consequently it should be within man’s power to alter that environment to one more favourable to good health.

This to a large extent has already been achieved. With better sanitation, nutrition and living conditions (together with antibiotics) the epidemic infectious diseases of the last century have largely been eradicated. It must, however, be remembered that the introduction of these measures was purely for economic expediency, since a healthy work force, being more productive, ensures “healthier” profits. Proof of this can be seen in the underdeveloped countries whose populations are suffering similar diseases only because it is not yet “economically viable”, in capitalist terms, to divert the necessary resources to public health measures. (For a good historical account of this see F. Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.)

Whether a similar change can be effected in the incidence of chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease which have replaced the infectious diseases as the prime killers, depends upon whether other (removable) factors in the environment are to blame.

But before we consider this aspect, we must first dispose of two common beliefs about the reason for the increasing incidence of chronic diseases. These are: (1) That chronic diseases largely affect elderly people and with the increase in life expectancy there has been a consequent increase in the incidence of these diseases. (2) Due to better diagnostic techniques these diseases are more often recorded now.

These ideas are attacked as fallacies by, amongst others, David L. Ledge and Walter T. Martin in their book Social Stress and Chronic Illness — Mortality patterns in Industrial Society, (London, 1970). They claim in answer to fallacy No. 1:

“. . . the variability of chronic disease mortality patterns in the United States suggests causation other than changes in age, or other biological factors.”

And fallacy No. 2:

"While improved training of medical personnel and modern advances in diagnostic technology undoubtedly have had some effect in recorded incidence and prevalence of these diseases, these factors are not regarded as accounting for a significant proportion of the changes or variation observed. For example, how can this explanation account for the fact that death rates for males increased more rapidly than those of females in the case of disease of the cardiovascular system? . . . Are we to understand that physicians are becoming more effective in diagnosing diseases only in the case of males?"

That chronic diseases are engendered by our social and physical environment is beyond doubt: as one microbiologist has said:

Each civilization has its own kind of pestilence and can control it only by reforming itself . . . just as the great epidemics of the nineteenth century were precipitated by environmental factors which favoured the activities of pathogenic microorganisms, so many of the diseases characteristic of our times have their origin in some faulty factor of the modern environment . . . (Rene Dubos, Mirage of Health: Utopias, progress, and biological change. New York, 1959.)

So the question we must now ask is: is there such a “faulty factor” in the modern environment and is capitalism capable of “reforming” it? Scientists who reject the idea that cancer is caused by viruses or is inherited appear to be divided basically into two camps as to what the “faulty factor” is.

The first theory can be best summed up by the report in the World Health Chronicle (No. 3 Vol. 30, March 1976) of a symposium held at Lyons, France, 3rd-5th Nov. 1975.

Addressing the symposium Dr. John Higginson, Director of The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), observed that there is good circumstantial evidence that 80-90% of all cancers are dependent, directly or indirectly, on environmental factors, and that at least 90% of these factors are chemical in nature. For the majority of cancers, racial or hereditary factors are relatively minor compared with environmental factors. Hence the importance of the control or elimination of the latter as a means of primary prevention.

This is based on evidence that many chemicals found in food, for instance, have been proved to be carcinogenic (cancer causing). But many of these chemicals are in the form of additives (“The average Briton eats some 3.2 lbs. of food additives a year — equivalent to about 12 aspirin-sized tablets a day”. Sunday Times, ibid.) and at least half of these additives are used purely to “improve” flavour, and consequently cut costs thereby “improving” profits. Compounding this are the toxic chemicals released into the air by nuclear explosions, factories who “can’t afford” anti-pollution devices, etc.

The other theory is on something more familiar to most people.

Stress increases the amount of corticosteroid hormones (produced by the cortex of the adrenal gland) circulating in the body and this suppresses the immune processes which protect the body. White blood cells circulating through the body kill abnormal cells, which are constantly being formed in the body, before they turn into uncontrolled cancers. This process may be interfered with by the corticosteroid hormones produced under stress.

(Sunday Times, ibid.)

Stress has been defined as the response of the body to any demand made upon it, whether pleasant or unpleasant, that requires it to readjust to an entirely new situation and consequently some degree of stress will always be present. But in today’s industrial capitalist world, stress has become a constant and excessive feature. The “rat-race” by its very nature, the myriad anxieties over money, work, the threat of wars, etc., are all part and parcel of capitalism, and all engender stress. So does the phenomenal increase in noise due to traffic and aircraft.

An illustration of the effect of socially-induced stress on a population is that of Germany during the twenties. Following an abrupt fall at the end of the first world war, tuberculosis mortality increased sharply during the years of inflation and fell again with the stabilization of the currency. (Dubos — Man Adapting.)

Whether capitalism is capable of curing cancer is uncertain. Much research is still being funded by charity and it is one of the more detestable contradictions of capitalism that more resources are spent on finding the most efficient ways of killing people than of preventing their deaths from disease. The two researchers mentioned earlier (Lodge and Martin) who have constructed a theoretical model for predicting the prevalence of socially induced stress, point out that:

"while the overall testing design suggested . . . is theoretically possible, the tremendous costs involved in compiling the necessary data make it unlikely that these tests will be carried out in the near future.”

Capitalism revolves round this nexus of cost and profitability.

Much medicine today reflects acceptance of the framework of capitalism and therefore is, analogous to placing an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff rather than fencing off the top. This was pointed out by the World Health Organisation:

In its preoccupation with the minutiae of diagnosis and the pathogenesis of disease, medicine is in danger of neglecting its most powerful resource — the manipulation of the external environment.

We cannot say that Socialist society will eradicate diseases completely, but we can say that in a society where the “manipulation” of the environment will be on the basis of catering solely for human need, not profit, conditions will be more conducive for the total wellbeing of man than the present, moribund, society.

Paul Moody

These Foolish Things: Lies, damned lies and . . . (1996)

The Scavenger column from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lies, damned lies and . . .

DSS data show: Numbers living below half average income rose from 5 million (9 percent of the population) in 1979 to 14.1 million (25 percent) in 1992-93. Richest tenth of the population had 62 percent rise in income, poorest tenth a 17 percent cut.

But Peter Lilley’s study shows the top fifth of male earners in 1978 enjoyed a 33 percent rise in real earnings by 1992/93. But bottom fifth increased earnings by 42 percent. Guardian, 27 June.

Honey, I shrunk the housekeeping

Nearly 30 percent of workers in the West Midlands have experienced unemployment since the last general election, Margaret Beckett, shadow trade and industry' secretary told a meeting. Addressing the annual lunch of the West Midlands CBI, Mrs Beckett said that 29 percent of the West Midlands work force—579,340 men and 296,980 women—had been out of work at least once in the last four years. Evening Mail, 11 July.

Welsh coolies?

The gusto with which the Government welcomed yesterday’s decision by the Korean electronics firm, LG, to create 6,000 jobs in Wales underlines the ministerial belief that inward investment is the industrial policy of the 1990s . . . Britain is attractive because it is cheap and getting cheaper. Britain is close to the bottom of the European league table for labour costs, which are around half those in Germany or Switzerland, but the recent spate of investment from the dynamic Asian economies such as Taiwan or Korea suggests Britain’s labour costs—in regions such as Wales, at least—are now lower than those on the Pacific Rim. Guardian, 11 July.

Money mad

Mental health services for the severely disturbed are on the point of collapse, with the safety of patients, health staff and the public at risk in some areas because of a lack of beds, the Royal College of Psychiatrists warned yesterday . . . (Professor Thompson said]: “We fully support the principles of care in the community, but this cannot be done if it is not properly resourced and we are in that situation. We are aware of plans to close remaining psychiatric beds in many areas and concentrate on community services. This is no longer an option.” Money from the sale of old asylums had not been put back into psychiatric services, and hospital beds were not available to readmit patients if they relapsed into serious illness. Guardian, 11 July.

Real education

Cadbury Schweppes chairman Dominic Cadbury has told Birmingham businessmen that university students should pay their own tuition fees in order to save taxpayers’ cash . . . And Mr Cadbury questioned the value of arts degrees—unless they armed graduates with skills for the work place . . . Mr Cadbury, who was educated at Eton, Trinity College, Cambridge and Stanford University, said: ‘‘The taxpayer’s investment in university graduates is many times greater than that in the school leaver” Evening Mail, 17 July.

The Scavenger

A Look Round. (1909)

From the October 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “Holloway and Hornsey Press” of Sept. 3rd says “Messrs. J. Keith and Blackham, Ltd., whose works are at the rear of Holloway Hall, advertised for some gas-fitters. They were told to apply at 11 o’clock, but at an early hour crowds began to assemble. They lined each side of Holloway Road and blocked the whole roadway leading to the works. So great was the pressure that the gates leading to the works were forced in, and one man had to be taken to the hospital. As a last resort the police had to be fetched and taken into the works by a side entrance, and the men driven away by the arm of the law.

“Now the great majority of these men were trained workmen, masters of their trade, yet over a thousand turned up when only twenty places were vacant ! Some of these men had been works managers, and they possessed the highest testimonials, and yet they were willing to take a job as an ordinary gas-fitter.”

* * *

The same journal naturally asks “What is the use of repeating the parrot cry that the cause of unemployment is that our lads do not learn a trade, when the fact stares us in the face that over a thousand men fight with one another for work for twenty ?”

* * *

Speaking at Wallsall Wood on Sunday, Aug. 8th, Mr. J. Keir Hardie, M.P. said “They had thirty-four men in the House of Commons, returned there without thanks to the Liberal and Tory parties (cries of ‘Question’ and ‘No’). Those thirty-four Labour Members had been, returned to the House of Commons often in opposition to both Liberal and Tory, and in those constituencies where either one or the other parties did not oppose the Labour Party it was because they knew it was hopeless to do so, and so made a virtue of necessity. (Laughter.)” Labour Leader, August 13th.

What an ungrateful lot to be sure : “returned without thanks to the Liberal and Tory parties” indeed! What will the seven thousand Liberals think who voted for Keir Hardie at the last general election ?

* * *

But the Liberals have the thanks of Keir Hardie after all. At the same meeting he stated that “The present Liberal Government was granting reforms—Old Age Pensions, the Budget, the Miners’ Eight Hours Act and measures of that kind. Credit was due to the Government for these measures.” (Italics ours.)

And why did the Government pass these bills ?: “It was the presence of the Labour Party.”

We leave Keir Hardie to explain the advantages to be derived by the working class from any of the above bills.

* * *

Speaking of the Eight Hours Bill the Sunday Times (August 1st) says “The miners have recently gained the advantages of the Eight Hours Act and ever since the coalfields have been seething with discontent. Prompted, no doubt,, by the consideration arising out of the changed condition established by the Act, the Scottish coal-owners sought a reduction of wages, and the dispute which followed assumed national dimensions.”

Apart from this there has also been an attempt by the masters to compel the men to work the eight hours right off without a stoppage for meals, while we know from past experience that a reduction of hours usually results in an even greater speeding up of the worker, a greater expenditure of energy in the shorter period leaving him at the end of the day in a worse condition, physically and mentally, than when working under the old conditions.

* * *

The Commission in Lunacy in their annual report, show that the number of insane persons has increased from 30,762 in 1849 to 128,787 on January 1st of this year, and recognise the significance of the increase of insanity by their suggestion for the accommodation of a further 15,000 for whom there is no room at present.

Fifty years of progress !

H. A. Young

The architecture of autistic order (2026)

From the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I first got involved in left politics in the early nineties, an older comrade asked me how I thought we’d get to socialism.

I drew a straight line with an arrow.

Socialism was at the end. That was the goal. The arrow might have to move around obstacles but it always pointed in the same direction. Simple. Logical. Honest.

He looked at me and said it wasn’t as easy as that.

I never said it was easy. I just answered the question as clearly as I could. But I knew in that moment I was speaking a different language. So I started adapting. Fitting in. Saying things the way people expected them to be said.

It always felt contrived. It always felt illogical.

The arrow is still pointing in the same direction.

For decades the clinical establishment has looked at the autistic mind and seen deficit. Restricted interests. Social dysfunction. A fragmented internal life.

That is not my experience.

My experience is order. Sometimes relentless order. A mind that looks for the underlying machinery of things, the patterns, the systems, the internal logic that holds everything together or exposes where it’s broken.

What gets called disorder is usually just a different kind of order. One that doesn’t fit the world capitalism built.

In a capitalist world, order is social and hierarchical. It runs on unwritten rules, reading the room, knowing your place. The rules shift depending on who’s speaking, one standard for the CEO, another for the worker on the floor.

For an autistic mind, that’s not order. That’s chaos with a dress code.

My internal logic doesn’t work like that. A rule is a rule. If a standard is valid it applies universally, not selectively, not based on status, not depending on who’s watching.

When I point out a double standard I’m not being difficult. I’m identifying a structural fault. Hypocrisy is a mechanical failure of the truth.

This is why dialectical materialism made immediate sense to me when I encountered it.

Not because it confirmed what I already believed. Because it gave me a framework that actually followed its own logic. It explained injustice through material conditions and power rather than vague appeals to human nature. It replaced the baffling question of why people behave the way they do with a structured analysis of how the system is weighted.

For a mind that struggles with the unspoken and the inconsistent, socialist theory functions as a decoder ring.

It doesn’t ask you to read between the lines. It puts the lines on the table.

The friction is real though.

Capitalism produces chaos, economic, social, psychological. And an autistic mind trying to find logical consistency in a system built on contradiction will burn out. The disability doesn’t come from inside. It comes from the collision between a systematic mind and a society that runs on inconsistency and calls it normal.

That collision is exhausting. I know that from forty years of trying to adapt to it.

What I’m arguing for isn’t a world that accommodates autistic people as a minority group with special needs.

I’m arguing for a world built on consistent principles. Where the rules mean what they say. Where resources are distributed according to logic rather than power. Where the architecture of society actually follows its own blueprints.

That’s not a neurodivergent fantasy. That’s socialism.

The arrow is still pointing in the same direction it always was.

I still think the diagram was right.

Pablo.

Life and Times: Hoarding – a disorder of our time (2026)

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

Many years ago, when I was a youngster, we were often visited at home by Harry, a relative who had had a difficult upbringing, lived on his own and showed signs of self-neglect. He started to give increasing cause for concern and my parents wondered what could be done. So my father and older brother went to his house to check on how he was managing. On their return I remember my brother saying ‘It’s a rubbish dump with a roof on’. Not long after this Harry was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

How hoarders feel

All this came back to me on reading a recent Big Issue article on hoarding and what causes anyone to adopt a practice so manifestly detrimental to their own wellbeing. It talked about how, though hoarding is generally associated with physical mess, the mess is also in the mind and is likely to have psychological drivers such as trauma, fear of scarcity, or loneliness. It went on to say that, in turn, the consequences of being known to live a hoarder’s life can be shame, fear or reinforced feelings of isolation, but that the intense anxiety felt by hoarders about discarding possessions, regardless of their value, is linked to how ‘objects often carry deep emotional meaning or represent security against loss’.

Hoarding and homelessness

Given its appearance in the Big Issue, the article’s main focus was, perhaps understandably, on how hoarding can lead to eviction or homelessness for those affected and how they suffer a much higher rate of it than for the general population. And it explained that this was the case even though hoarding disorder had been officially recognised as a distinct psychiatric condition and only recently – in May of this year – there was, though little noticed, a National Hoarding Awareness Week. But while drawing attention to the not negligible suffering of people who hoard and to the potential of this condition to lead to even worse consequences, what the Big Issue did not attempt to do was to delve into the reasons why people become hoarders in the first place.

Tendencies triggered

The first obvious thing to consider is that, just as no one is born a thief or a tyrant or a miser, no one is born a hoarder either. It’s generally accepted that human beings are eminently flexible creatures whose behaviour is highly dependent on the society they live in and the conditions in which they grow up. Individuals do of course have differing potential tendencies, capacities and talents, which may or may not be realised depending on the events and circumstances of their lives. For example, therefore, would my relative, Harry, have become a hoarder if the early difficult life circumstances he had experienced had not triggered in him the potential for it? Hard to be sure, and it might be said that many of us have a tendency to accumulate objects of a certain kind, often somewhat irrationally. That’s certainly the case with me personally when it comes to books which I sometimes feel the need to stock my shelves with even if I know at bottom that I won’t read them all. And the same is the case with other people I know when it comes to clothes.

But we can maybe call these minor quirks which may or may not have their origin in some kind of innate tendency in particular individuals but, in any case, are unlikely to have a profound impact on their lives. The same cannot be said of the kind of extreme examples of hoarding that we see depicted in those semi-exploitative TV series on the subject. These are largely the consequence of highly negative situations into which the hoarders have fallen and it seems fair to think that, had circumstances been different for them, their potential for that behaviour may well have remained dormant.

Insecurity

What kind of circumstances are we talking about? Well the Big Issue article talks about ‘trauma, fear and loneliness’ with possessions functioning as ‘emotional anchors’ and representing ‘memories, identity or a sense of security in an unpredictable world’. Of course the majority of us, whose lives are based on the need to work for a wage or salary in order to survive, manage, flexible beings that humans are, to negotiate that ‘unpredictable world’ without falling into some kind of addiction or psychosis. In other words, most of us stay sane despite the uncertainty and insecurity visited upon us by capitalism, where the ups and downs of the market and the needs of the profit system can quickly change the complexion of our lives.

But some of us are more fragile and need something to cling to, something that seems to offer a sense of safety – illusory as that may be – in an uncertain, divisive world. This may be drink, drugs, worship of sports or entertainment heroes, or even, in the case of the hoarding habit, something as seemingly banal as filling your life and space with possessions that serve no apparent purpose.

A cure?

So, is there a ‘cure’ for hoarding? Well, in the alienating, crisis-prone system we live under, probably not, other than a switch to some alternative obsession or addiction. Could there be a cure in a different kind of system, one without the pressure of wages and salaries, one where we have free access to all goods and services and the space to develop our talents and capacities both for our own satisfaction and for the common good? We would have to say yes, definitely. But for this to happen, we first need majority consciousness by wage and salary earners of their plight and then democratic political action to sweep away the profit system and establish the society of togetherness and community that we call socialism – a society based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need.

Howard Moss

Sting in the Tail: The common factor (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The common factor

Following the Estonia tragedy:

"Swedish and Finnish ferry lines admitted hushing-up six serious incidents which preceded the Estonia’s sinking ” (Teletext 30 September).

These roll-on roll-off ferries are liable to capsize when even a relatively small amount of water enters the vehicle decks, yet Alan Clark, ex-Tory MP, said on Question Time (29 September) that marine architects can quite easily design ships which prevent this, but, with touching concern for human life asked “would this really be worth all the expense and inconvenience?”

And this is what it is all about:

“The economic reason why vehicle decks are not subdivided to prevent rapid capsize is that this would obstruct bailing, increase turnaround times and reduce the number of cars or lorries a ship should carry. That would mean higher fares, lower profits, or both — and at a time, so far as British operators are concerned, when ferries are facing fresh competition from the Channel tunnel” (Guardian 24 September).

Every disaster which comes along, be it Piper Alpha, the King's Cross Underground fire, the train crash at Clapham Junction or the Herald of Free Enterprise, provides evidence aplenty that capitalism’s remorseless drive to cut costs at the expense of safety is the prime cause of them all.

Healthy profits

Today’s economic climate has seen many employers cut the wages and conditions and increase the workload of their employees.

This often leads to the deterioration of the physical and mental health of the workers involved, but some other employers recognise that this approach is counter-productive and are concerned to protect and even improve the health and well-being of their employees.

Companies such as Grand Met, Glaxo. Sainsbury, Marks and Spencer, IBM and Nestle are participating in the Wellness Forum which promotes preventative health care by health screening along with weight control, anti-smoking and anti-alcohol abuse programmes.

There are sound commercial reasons behind this. A spokesman for the Institute of Personnel and Development told the Independent:

“Employers in their own interests have got to maximise the use of people at work as far as they can. Absenteeism is very expensive ” (9 September).

This absenteeism is estimated by the CBI to cost £13 billion a year, and the Independent adds that the Forum has “a belief in the correlation between a healthy workforce and healthy profits”.

Looking after the goose that lays the golden eggs always made more sense than killing it.

YC’s get KO’d

A new book True Blues, claims that Tory Party membership has slumped from 2.8 million in 1952 to below 500,000 now and is still falling.

Feeling better? Well, there’s more good news, because the Young Conservatives are set for the chop. And no wonder. Having been taken over by the “radical right” in much the same way as Labour's youth wing was by Trotskyists, the YC’s have long been a thorn in the side of the parent party.

There were well-publicised links with the BNP and other racists groups, support for apartheid, jokes about the Holocaust, vicious faction fighting and lots of hooliganism From a peak of 100,000 membership has plunged to around 5,000, so Tory Central Office probably reckons that what’s left isn’t worth the hassle.

A Tory' youth organisation may well continue to exist in one form or another, but the heady days when the YC’s seemed to consist of youngsters all desperately trying to outdo one another in sounding more reactionary and bloodthirsty, are probably over for good.

Heller’s history

Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, published in 1962, was a brilliant and hilarious account of the corruption and insanity of capitalism set against the background of World War Two.

The long-awaited sequel is now ready, so Sally Vincent travelled to interview Heller, and her account of their meeting appeared in Weekend Guardian (24 September).

Heller’s perception of capitalism has not dimmed. According to Sally Vincent he thinks:

“We can produce enough food to feed the world, hut simultaneously can V because there's no profit producing enough food. ”

And he apparently thinks that “Marx was right”, although about what he didn't say, but his perception leaves him when it comes to interpreting history which he thinks is “autonomous and proceeds independently of the people who make it.”

Marx took a very different view: 

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. ” 

As a novelist, Heller takes some beating, but when it comes to explaining history then it has to be Marx.

Doubting Thomas

The sacking of the Sussex vicar Anthony Freeman for revealing that he doesn’t believe in God highlights the problem facing many of these sky pilots.

Take the example of an anonymous Church of Scotland minister, whose dilemma was reported in Scotland on Sunday (14 August):

“Thomas does not believe in God. There was no virgin birth, no resurrection, Jesus was a mere inspirational mortal like Ghandi and there is, most sadly, no life after death. The last bit gets tricky, for he must pretend to believe in some kind of afterlife to soothe many of the pensioners he talks to each Sunday from the pulpit. "

All workers must sell their ability to work for a wage or salary, and these professional holy men are no different. Here is what our reverend gentleman has to say about it:

“To be honest, I've got a family to feed and a career and a pension to think about. I don't think I should put my job on the line just for the sake of discussion of some arcane beliefs and ideas that probably don't really matter anyway. ”

Blogger's Notes: 

• Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was reviewed in the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard.
• The King's Cross Underground fire was covered in the March 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard.
• The Piper Alpha disaster was covered in the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letter: A View from the Hospital Basement (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A View from the Hospital Basement

To the Editors,

I write to you as a 53 year old working class logistics porter for NHS Scotland, and someone who has recently come to terms with a lifelong reality: I am autistic. Having spent my younger years in the frantic ‘activism’ of the far left, I find myself now, in the quiet of my fifties, looking at the world through a lens sharpened by both my diagnosis and the consistent logic of socialism.

For the autistic worker, capitalism is not merely an exploitative system; it is a sensory and social assault. The ‘wages system’ demands a specific type of human raw material, one that is flexible, socially performative, and capable of enduring the chaotic, profit driven environments of modern industry. If you cannot ‘mask’ your traits, if you cannot navigate the arbitrary social hierarchies of management, or if your nervous system recoils at the bright, loud, and disorganised nature of the capitalist workplace, you are branded ‘inefficient’.

In my eighteen years within the NHS, I have seen the machinery of the state attempt to patch up a broken population. We are a class of ‘repair men’ trying to fix the damage caused by a system that prioritizes the accumulation of capital over human well being. My job as a porter relies on lists, logic, and routine, elements that suit my autistic mind. Yet, the overarching system is one of irrationality. We see the ‘crisis’ in our hospitals not as a failure of funding, but as a failure of a system that treats health as a commodity and workers as mere expenses on a balance sheet.

The Socialist Party’s ‘Impossibilist’ stance, the refusal to advocate for the mere ‘crumbs’ of reform resonates deeply with the autistic need for systemic consistency. In my youth, I chased the ‘immediate demands’ of reformism, only to find that every hard won ‘right’ can be stripped away by the next budget or the next shift in the market. For my daughters, one who shares my neurodivergent wiring, I have no interest in fighting for a ‘better’ version of their exploitation.

A socialist society, one based on the common ownership of the means of life and production for use, is the only environment in which the neurodivergent person can truly thrive. Consider the logic:

First, the abolition of the ‘interview’ and the ‘personality test’. In a world of voluntary labour, the social ritual of ‘selling oneself’ to a master disappears. An autistic person’s focus and ‘special interests’ cease to be a commodity and become a direct contribution to the community.

Second, the end of sensory exploitation. Capitalism builds cheap, high stress environments because they are profitable. A society producing for human need would, for the first time, design spaces for human comfort, accounting for the diverse sensory needs of all its members.

Third, the removal of social hierarchy. My alexithymia and my struggle with social cues are only ‘disabilities’ because capitalism demands a specific type of social compliance to maintain the master servant relationship. In a society of equals, where no one has the power to command another’s labour, the ‘unwritten rules’ of the workplace vanish.

I have stopped apologising for the way I am wired. I have realised that my autistic brain, with its preference for facts over rhetoric and systems over leaders. We do not need charismatic leaders to tell us we are exploited; we need only to look at the ledgers of our lives.

Socialism offers a ‘case’ that does not shift with the political winds. It is a list of principles that holds up to the most rigorous logical scrutiny. For the worker in Scotland, for the porter in the basement, and for the autistic child yet to enter the fray, the message must remain clear: the system cannot be mended. It must be ended.

Yours for the Revolution,

Pablo Wilcox

Scotland

SPGB Snippets: Who do Samaritans call? (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

February 25, 2026

Driven to despair by capitalism? UK workers can always call the Samaritans, a help-line run by unpaid volunteers. Sadly, those volunteers also face capitalism’s cruelties, in the form of money-saving cut-backs, office closures and a requirement to work in isolation at home.

‘Having sacked volunteers who dared voice concerns about the proposed closure of half of its branches, the Samaritans’ HQ has slapped them with serious misconduct charges and imposed lifetime bans…’ Whistleblowers speak anonymously, fearing reprisals: ‘Leadership have used the concerns and complaints process like the thought police. They are on career paths, some of them very well paid… most of them will never have had to talk a caller down from suicide…’ (Private Eye, 5 February 2026).

Dynamite. (1908)

From the November 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

* * *

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

Sunday Chronicle, 13.9.08.

* * *

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

Sunday Chronicle, 20.9.08.

* * *

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

* * *

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

Home Office White Paper.

* * *

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

* * *

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

The Business Man’s Magazine.

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

Morning Leader, 5.10.08.

Knock-out drops (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nearly two million people in Britain are addicted to drugs prescribed for them by their doctors. But. unlike the 80,000 heroin addicts who are mostly young and male, most tranquilliser addicts are women and predominantly elderly. Pain, misery, addiction or even death have frequently been associated with legitimately prescribed drugs. In the United States 130,000 deaths occur each year from drugs prescribed by medical practitioners; in Britain nearly one in thirty hospital admissions are due to prescribed drugs and about 2,500 people each year approach the charity Action for Victims of Medical Accidents for help.

With hindsight, some of the mistakes with addictive drugs seem incredible; when heroine was extracted from morphine in 1874 it was hailed as the new "miracle drug" for the safe treatment of morphine and opium addiction because it was considered safe and non-addictive. And it was to take over fifty years before the Rolleston Report identified heroin addiction in 1926. More recently, methadone was used extensively between 1971-1978 to treat morphine addiction and as an analgaesic substitute for morphine but, being itself highly addictive, led to a further spread of addiction.

Psychotropic drugs, prescribed for anxiety and depression, alter the patient's moods or mental processes. These drugs are much more likely to be prescribed for women; and extensive study in Oxfordshire found that psychotropic drugs accounted for one-fifth of all prescriptions and that women received more than twice as many tranquillisers and anti-depressant drugs as men. (Skegg et al British Medical Journal, 1977). The frequency of tranquilliser prescriptions increases with age; women over 75 years of age receive more of these than any other group.

In part, the larger quantities of mood altering drugs prescribed for elderly women can be attributed to the higher incidence of dementia in old age and the fact that most of the more common causes of dementia affect women more than men. But the excessive numbers of prescriptions for tranquillisers are not entirely justified on medical grounds alone. In recent years the closure of substantial numbers of hospital beds has led to increasing numbers of mentally and physically infirm elderly people being "cared for" in the community.

Providing safe care for mentally infirm old people in their own homes causes considerable problems for relatives. All too often tranquillisers have to be used to control the old person's behaviour and. even if the drugs are not addictive, the quality of life for the person is impaired. Caring for a demented person in a family home can prove to be a nightmare. Family life disintegrates due to disturbed nights, incontinence, noisy, aggressive behaviour and the need for somebody to be in attendance at all times. For such families there is no respite: holidays and nights out cannot be taken together and friends are deterred from visiting.

For middle aged women, in particular, caring for an elderly mother causes considerable anxiety because the traditional caring role is reversed and the awareness of the possibility of helplessness and insecurity for themselves in the future becomes all to evident. In such situations the temptation to resort to the use (and often the abuse) of tranquillisers is difficult to resist. Indeed, members of the family providing care may take tranquillisers themselves to cope with the difficult social circumstances forced on them by the lack of provision for care of the elderly. But for both the dependent elderly and their, mainly, female carers, tranquillisers are used as substitutes for social remedies which are not forthcoming under capitalism because workers are viewed as economic units.

The Royal Commission on Population put into perspective the disadvantageous position of the elderly under capitalism:

The burden of maintaining the old does not consist in the money paid out as Old Age Pensions. It consists in the excess of the consumption by the old over their production. It is the fact that (with some exceptions) the old consume without producing which differentiates them from the active population which makes them a factor reducing the average standard of living in the community, (pi 13)

This view of the elderly as redundant economic units has led to inferior standards of accommodation in the majority of hospitals for the long-stay elderly and the mentally ill.

The difficulty of attracting staff-in adequate numbers to work in poor conditions and inadequate facilities can lead to over-reliance on tranquillisers to control the patients as too few staff try to cope with relentlessly increasing numbers of admissions in the drive to make hospitals more "efficient" regardless of the social costs. And in private hospitals and nursing homes there is a greater temptation to resort to the use of tranquillisers to control disturbed elderly residents as trained nursing staff are reduced to a minimum in the drive to make profits.

Capitalist governments operate double standards when confronted with problems of drug abuse. In the past dangerous, addictive drugs have been sold abroad: human misery being an acceptable price to pay as long as profits are made. Drugs of doubtful therapeutic value but which have undesirable or even serious side-effects are produced and, where legislation prevents their use in this country, sold in countries which permit their use. Thus the addiction to tranquillisers and the misery that they cause, like addiction to tobacco and alcohol, only become the concern of the state when the efficiency of the workforce, and consequently profits, is threatened.

In 1987 only £500.000 was allocated to help tranquilliser addicts compared with £24.5 million for the much smaller group of heroin addicts. But. unlike heroin addiction, the use of tranquillisers is legitimate, respectable and widespread, with 14 million prescriptions being dispensed in Britain last year. The enormous profits which the drug industry makes has led to general practitioners being the targets of aggressive advertising campaigns to promote tranquillisers as a panacea for their patients' problems. But for patients who are prescribed benzodiazepine tranquillisers (Lorazepam; Oxazepam; Diazepam. Chlordiazepoxide) for periods of longer than four months physical dependency occurs even at therapeutic dose levels.

Withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, apprehension, tremor, insomnia, nausea and vomiting; in fact, many of the problems for which these drugs were prescribed in the first place.

Sexual dysfunction may be caused by both the phenothiazine group of drugs and the benzodiazepines. The phenothiazines, especially Phenergan, have been associated with cot deaths in infancy. The problems of toxicity and unpleasant side-effects of drugs arise because of the hasty and incomplete research carried out by pharmaceutical companies in their attempts to market their products ahead of their rivals. The continued demand for drugs to relieve anxiety is assured because competitiveness causes fear and insecurity. Capitalism's booms and slumps, wars, alienation at work and impoverishment in old age all generate anxiety for workers. And for women, the problems of isolation within the home for housewives or the stress of the "double shift" for working mothers leads to them consulting their doctors for the relief of tension more often than men.

Women's economic dependence on men (who themselves are economically insecure) has served capitalism's interests by providing future generations of workers within the conventional framework of the family.

Patrick Jenkin when he was Secretary of State for Social Services, stated.

I don't think that mothers have the same right to work as fathers. If the good Lord had intended us to have equal rights to go out to work, he wouldn't have created men and women. (Man Alive, October 1979)

The barriers placed in the way of working mothers by such attitudes; relegation to mostly part-time, unskilled, alienating work; low pay — women earned less than three-quarters of the average wages paid to men in 1982 — have all combined to place a greater emotional strain on women. The operation of factories around the clock to maximise profits leads to shift workers being forced to adopt unnatural life-styles. Insomnia causes some workers to resort to taking sleeping tablets to cope with this. Doctors are helpless to remedy the political causes of all these problems and offer tranquillisers to help patients cope with intolerable social circumstances.

Further abuses of tranquillisers occur in prisons where drugs are used to control prisoners who fail to "adjust" to their environment.

Undeniably, tranquillisers can be of value. Used carefully they can help to relieve distress. But it is the application of drugs under capitalism, which fails to heed the lessons of the past while the present is profitable, which is at fault. Medical advances, in common with all forms of technological advances, will be abused until the workers decide to place human needs before profits.

Carl Pinel

50 Years Ago: Mental Health and Poverty (1956)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

[From the “Socialist Standard," October, 1906]

There were 121,979 persons in England and Wales certified as insane and under care on January 1st. 1906, being 2,150 in excess of the figures recorded on the corresponding day of 1905.

On January 1st, 1906, according to a Parliamentary paper issued by the Local Government Board, there were 926.741 paupers in England and Wales, equal to one in 37 of the population.

#    #    #    #

[The corresponding numbed of persons registered as of unsound mind on January 1, 1955, was 152,144, the increase since 1906 being rather less than proportionate to the increase of population.

In December, 1955, the number of persons receiving weekly allowances from the National Assistance Board was 1,612,000. Including wives, young children and other dependents these assistance allowances “made provision in whole or in part for a total approaching two and a quarter million persons.”—(Report of National Assistance Board for 1955, page 5).

These figures are not comparable with the 926,741 for 1906 because the 1906 figures relate to England and Wales only while the figure 1,612,000 relates also to Scotland and Northern Ireland. A more nearly comparable figure for 1906 is 1,124,421, given in the 16th Abstract of Labour Charities, 1913, page 334, but that figure included Southern Ireland. The population covered by the 1906 figure was about 43. million compared with the present population of 51 million.]

Running Commentary: Catch ’em young (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Catch ’em young

Everyone knows that all state schools are short of resources. Strathclyde Regional Council have found a way to alleviate the problem. Following in the footsteps of national and local press, programmes for charity, sports events or whatever, they are selling advertising space in the exercise books used by their 422,000 schoolchildren. For 500,000 books. £2.250 will buy the back page, inside covers are slightly cheaper, and a bargain £5,400 buys all three covers and a logo on the front.

Of course, not just any advert is accepted. Cigarettes, alcohol, sweets and BMX bikes are out. (So, we are sure, would be The Socialist Party or The Socialist Standard). Road safety and health education are in. So far, so good. "We also want to encourage thrift" said the Head of Public Relations and to this end they have approached banks and building societies.

The report appears in Super Marketing 11 July 1986. It is therefore no surprise to read a little further on that Lyons Tetley are "very happy with results" of their pilot scheme, which was "very cost effective" and intend to take further space. Of course, using exercise books in school at £2,250 a throw to persuade half a million mums to send their offspring to school filled up with Ready Brek is obviously a lot cheaper than those TV commercials where kids light their way through the fog with their Ready Brek induced halos. What better way to condition the workers of tomorrow to be receptive to the siren calls of consumerism — and after all, without those advertisements there mightn't be any exercise books . . .

More on poverty

In the August Socialist Standard we pointed out that at that time the last published official figures for people living at or below the government's poverty line were based on a count taken in 1981. Another count had been taken in 1983 and this should have been published last year but the government were prudently delaying this.

Just as that Socialist Standard was produced the later figures became available; in fact they were placed in the library of the House of Commons, just as the library conveniently closed for the summer. However, details have seeped out and are not comfortable reading for those who think that life in Britain under the Tories is as happy and abundant as we were promised it would be. when the alleged monetarists were let loose in Whitehall.

In 1981, the official figures showed 7.7 million living on or below the poverty line; by 1983 this had risen to 8.8 million. A House of Commons library estimate is that by 1986 this total has risen again, to 11.7 million

This comes at a time when the Child Poverty Action Group are celebrating — or perhaps it should be mourning — their 21st birthday Formed under another name in 1965. at the time they did not bother to arrange to bank any funds because they were sure that their campaign to abolish child poverty would succeed within one year A lot of their hopes rested in the election of the 1964 Labour government, of which one Labour MP (Frank Field, Guardian, 4 August 1986) now says: "At the end of the 1964-70 Labour Government the charge was that the poor had got poorer under Labour' ". The CPAG soon learned a little about the reality of working class poverty and what Labour governments are in power for By the end of their first year they had opened a bank account and had changed themselves from an advisory group into an action group.

Like so many apparently well-intentioned reformist bodies. CPAG have probed, exposed and agitated. But, typically, they overlooked the fact that working class poverty is basic and unavoidable under capitalism, whichever party is in power. When they were formed in 1965 there were less than 400,000 people living on Supplementary Benefit; now there are some thing like eight million dependent on it. The numbers out of work, grappling with the increased burden of poverty which unemployment brings, has risen during this time from 330,000 to over three million.

Working class poverty cannot be dealt with by piecemeal reforms, treated as if it were separate from the other problems produced by capitalism. The facts point to the irresistible conclusion, that the CPAG has devoted a lot of energy and a lot of ingenuity to raising hopes only for them to be clashed against harsh reality. It would have been better for them to have assessed the true nature of the problem they were facing and then campaigned for the abolition of the cause of poverty. For if capitalism is allowed by its poverty-stricken people to continue there will still be a CPAG, or its equivalent, in another 21 years time. And another. And another.

South American headache

"One of our team's first problems there was what to do with almost 100 orphaned children who had been trained in torture. Their speciality was pulling out eyes". These chilling words by Dr Nacho Maldonado Allende. psychoanalyst and co-ordinator of an international team of mental health workers in Nicaragua are reported in the June/July issue of Open Mind, journal of the National Association for Mental Health.

Getting across basic elements of mental health care in Nicaragua is a much more primitive and elementary matter than even the disgracefully inadequate facilities in this country allow. The team exchanged ideas and shared knowledge with the local peasants they were training, rather than trying to impose professional expertise. Alcoholism is a problem in Nicaragua as almost everywhere else. When asked what should be done about it. the locals replied "Do nothing. We are deprived and for the moment we need it to help us ". If they paused to work it out, workless, homeless and at times hungry workers in Glasgow. Belfast and Birmingham would give the same reply.

Dr Allende's team found many Nicaraguans suffering from what he described as "frozen grief". People who had. for instance, suffered the loss of a close relative, appeared cheerful but their suppressed sorrow and frustration surfaced in headaches, insomnia, numbed limbs.

While there are degrees of deprivation and suppression, workers throughout the world face the same problems of capitalism. Those who dispute this might well ask themselves the real reason the next time they suffer a headache or sleepless night.

Letter: Capitalism is mental (2025)

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

Capitalism is mental

Dear Editors,

Thank you for publishing ‘Capitalism is Mental’ (Socialist Standard, August), it’s one of the few pieces I’ve read in a socialist publication that genuinely tries to link mental health, neurodivergence, and class struggle. I agree with much of it, but I’d like to go further.

I’m an autistic, working class man in my fifties. I wasn’t diagnosed as a child we didn’t get diagnosed where I was from. You just got told you were difficult, thick, lazy, or weird. I spent most of my life thinking I was broken. Now I know the truth: I was wired differently, but the world was never built for people like me.

Autism, ADHD, PTSD, anxiety we talk about these things like they’re individual conditions. but they’re shaped by the world we live in. If you take a sensitive, pattern seeking kid and throw him into a world of noise, fear, chaos, poverty, and pressure, what do you think happens? You get trauma. You get shutdowns. You get rage. You get silence.

I don’t think people fully understand how classed this all is. Most working class people don’t have therapists. We have panic attacks on night shifts. We cry in the car outside our work. We get sectioned or sedated or sacked. Our ‘mental health support’ is a bottle of lager and a walk with the dog, if we’re lucky.

I’ve heard much of the left talk about ‘neurodiversity’ like it’s a fashion. They go on about identity and inclusivity, but they rarely ask who’s being left out. I’ll tell you who: lads like me. Men who mask it for 30 years. Women who get called dramatic. Kids who are fobbed off with ‘poor parenting’. We don’t get soft landings we get hard floors.

So yes, capitalism is mental. But it’s also murderous. It strips meaning from life, blames us for not coping, then sells us back the cure in pills, pop psychology, or mindfulness apps. All the while, it’s our nervous systems not theirs breaking under the pressure.

I’m glad your article spoke about neurodivergence as resistance. I’ve come to see it that way too. We’re not broken. We’re canaries in the mine.

Pablo Wilcox

This old money game (2025)

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

Dirty-grey average

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

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

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

Who is Ren?

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

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

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

Portrait of capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hud.

Passing thoughts (1949)

From the August 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

To rebel against convention is a good thing; a sign that the bonds of tradition are loosening. To rebel against wage-labour is a better thing; a sign that the understanding of social bondage is dawning. To rebel against wage-labour and to understand how to end social bondage is the best thing; a sign that comfort and security for the whole of humanity is within measurable distance of accomplishment.

When two young people love one another how sad it is that lack of money so often interferes with their unity. When two young people love one another and unite how still more sad it is that lack of money so often breaks up their unity. What a paradise Britain would be shorn of buying, banks and dividends.

The tragedy of modern war is that thousands upon thousands of bright young lives are snuffed out before they can enjoy to the full their birthright, love and laughter; the essence of the tragedy is “Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.”

A dreamer is a common butt of the stage, the screen and the platform; but when the dreamer keeps his feet upon solid ground and dreams of those things that are possible then his dreams merit serious thought instead of idle laughter. A Socialist is a dreamer, but he dreams of a world that can and will be.

Doctors, psychologists, social workers and government officials speak with smug satisfaction about the modern treatment of mental troubles, and the wonderful hospitals provided for poor mental wrecks. How shocking it is to realise that all their work and satisfaction proceeds from the wrong point of view. The mental sufferer is treated from the individual point of view, striving to adjust him to his surroundings instead of striving to alter the surroundings so that maladjustment cannot occur. Since the upheaval of the industrial revolution and social absorption with speed, with markets, with wars, humanity has been unable to adjust itself fast enough to rapidly changing conditions; it is always mentally behind, and unluckier sections mentally break down. When the world becomes a place of security and happiness by removing the source of these too rapid changes, maladjustment, and the resulting mental disorganisation, will vanish.

Gilmac.

Capitalism is mental (2025)

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair emerged from his coffin recently to declare ‘We’ve got to get the younger generation back to work’ and ominously warned against ‘medicalising the ups and downs of life. You’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life’.

Anyone who’s been through a challenging period knows that of course it can impact your mental health. Yet Blair insists that too many young people are ‘choosing not to work,’ and calls for benefits reform. Now, Labour wants to cut Personal Independence Payments and has signalled it’ll tighten eligibility rules, with shadow ministers suggesting PIP ‘is not working as it should.’

Starmer’s proposed reforms to cut disability benefits provoked a rebellion by well over 100 Labour MPs who argued the plan would strip support from up to 800,000 people, deepen poverty for 300,000–700,000 more (including 50,000 children), and create a two-tier welfare system that abandons the most vulnerable. Critics, including grassroots movements like Disabled People Against Cuts and disabled constituents, warn this is a continuation of austerity, with MPs likening it to ‘the biggest attack on the welfare state since George Osborne’. Charities insisted cuts wouldn’t boost employment and demanded a pause, transparency, and genuine consultation with disabled people. Labour MPs were pledging to vote against and calling for alternative reforms like taxing the super rich instead of penalising those in need.

Since then, following public backlash and intervention by the UN, Parliament voted on 1 July to remove the clauses tightening PIP (formerly Disability Living Allowance) eligibility. These measures are now to be deferred pending a review led by ‘Sir’ Stephen Timms, expected in autumn 2026. Existing PIP claimants are said not to be affected by the current legislation. However, changes to Universal Credit remain in place: from April 2026, new claimants of the Limited Capability for Work Related Activity element will receive reduced support. Existing recipients will continue receiving full payments, adjusted for inflation through 2029.

The Rosenhan experiment

The Rosenhan experiment (1973) exposed flaws in psychiatric diagnosis. Psychologist David Rosenhan and seven others feigned auditory hallucinations to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals. Once admitted, they acted normally, but doctors still diagnosed them with serious mental illnesses and kept them institutionalised for weeks.

The study highlighted the subjectivity and unreliability of psychiatric labels, showing that once someone was labelled as mentally ill, even ‘normal’ behaviour was interpreted as pathological. In a follow-up challenge, a hospital claimed it could spot fake patients and identified several, only for Rosenhan to reveal he had sent none.

Colonisation of the mind

This is not just about a few misguided doctors. The Western medical model has long been, in part, a tool of oppression. Colonisers have always arrived with missionaries, medics, mercenaries, and merchants. Psychiatry was part of that arsenal, often pathologising indigenous cultures, crushing resistance, and justifying forced assimilation. Traditional beliefs and ways of life were conveniently labelled as madness.

Psychiatry helped run residential schools, enforced sterilisation, and packed institutions, all aimed at breaking indigenous communities. On occasion, psychiatric diagnosis was used to pathologise cultural difference, frame indigenous resistance as insanity and justify colonial policies of confinement and re-education. The same logic still operates today. Psychiatric labels are often used to control people rather than help them.

‘Mad bints’

Women have always been prime targets for psychiatry’s controlling hand. Those who refused to fit into patriarchal roles were labelled hysterical or locked away in asylums. Psychiatry became a handy tool to silence women who challenged capitalism, patriarchy, or both.

Colonisation made this worse for indigenous women who were branded insane for practising traditional healing or resisting colonial authority. Today, women—especially those who are neurodivergent or marginalised—are still dismissed, misdiagnosed, and overmedicated. Psychiatry continues to treat women’s distress as personal pathology rather than a response to social and economic oppression.

A true alternative would focus on community care, autonomy, and dismantling the structures that create suffering in the first place. But when the profit motive comes into play it stops being about helping and about making people useful.

Adaptive response to capitalism?

Humans are nothing if not adaptive; that’s how we’ve survived this long. Under capitalism’s relentless pressure, people, especially those who are marginalised, develop ways of thinking and acting that do not fit into narrow boxes labelled normal.

Neurodivergence is not purely created by capitalism; it has always existed and would exist under other systems. But the way it manifests today is shaped by the demands and pressures of this system.

Traits like hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and creative thinking can help people resist the nonsense of capitalism. Yet capitalism only values these traits when they increase productivity. Difficulties with executive function or sensory processing become disabling because of rigid, noisy, and punishing environments.

If we lived in a society structured differently—one that prioritised people instead of profit—neurodivergence might look very different, both in how common it is and how it is understood.

Class war in our minds

Capitalism is not just a class war; it is a war of the mind. It demands conformity, punishes difference, and uses trauma as a tool of control. Still, resistance keeps bubbling up. Neurodivergent people often develop ways of thinking that refuse to follow capitalist logic, question authority, and imagine new ways of living.

The pushback against capitalism is in many ways also a neurodivergent pushback—one that questions authority, re-imagines community, and refuses the dehumanisation that capitalism enforces.

Capitalism will always find new ways to divide us, control us and blame us for the suffering it creates. The only real cure is to get rid of the system making us sick in the first place.

The fight against capitalism must also be a fight for neurodivergent liberation. We need to see the links between capitalism, trauma, and neurodivergence if we want a world where all minds are valued, not just those that keep the profit machine running.

A.T.