Letter: Engels (2026)

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

Engels

Hello

There’s a certain irony in being accused (Pathfinders, February) of not having read Engels when my point (very much a side point) was that Engels’ arguments were based on no evidence of how people organised themselves in prehistory. My main point was that no, prehistory was not a feminist utopia, but there was a huge diversity of relations between men and women of which, until recently, we were completely ignorant. My reason for not including Engels in Further Reading was not that it was old hat, though perhaps even the author of this piece would agree that Engels’ ideas have been around a while, but that the rule for that particular section of The Guardian’s books pages is that it should be inspired by recent thinking and recent books – which are then cited in Further Reading. If this author were himself better read, he would know that I’ve written on this subject in greater depth, with a less restrictive word count, for New Scientist – written and he would, I hope, feel a little ashamed of his groundless (rather like Engels’) statements.

Best wishes,

Laura Spinney

Reply from the writer

As a New Scientist subscriber for twenty years I’ve appreciated many of your interesting articles, but I must have missed the one you wrote on Engels. You say there’s no evidence for his hypothesis on the subjection of women (actually derived from pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan), even calling it ‘groundless’. This seems a little harsh given that whole theoretical edifices are sometimes constructed based on one finger bone. The evidence of patriarchy is all around you and everywhere in history. Is the alternative origin story simply that ‘it’s complicated?’ To discuss Engels’ argument while omitting the crucial role of emerging property relations is a bit like discussing gravity without mentioning mass, or Newton, or relativity. That’s why your representation of Engels came across as woolly, hence the speculation that you might not have gone to the source. Angela Saini, as the article points out, instead takes the argument and runs with it in a way that sheds further light rather than confusion on the subject.

PJS

Letters: SDP rewrites D of P (1987)

Letters to the Editors from the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

SDP rewrites D of P

Dear Editors.

As a committed and active Social Democrat, you may think that I have nothing to offer the socialist debate. On the contrary, socialism is seen by many to be out of date and out of touch, and ripe for extinguishment by Mag T. In a true democracy. this should not be allowed to happen.

I offer a Social Democratic alternative to your Declaration of Principles. Make of it what you will.

1. The ownership of the means of living is not in the hands of a human master class, but in the jaws of a faceless machine enslaving even those who believe they control it.
2. The antagonism of interest lies between those who collaborate with this machine, and those who do not.
3. The antagonism cannot be solved by the emancipation of particular collaborating classes, but only by abolishing those classes and enabling those trapped within to escape. The renewed vigour of those freed, working co-operatively for the benefit of each other, will lead to the downfall of the machine.
4. The “working classes" are being corrupted and abused by the machine which created them. True emancipation can only occur by relinquishing all class distinctions.
5. Every single person has the capacity to emancipate themselves by relinquishing his or her class, and recognising the common humanity of all.
6. The wealth and power of Government, when controlled by those who have relinquished class, will no longer maintain and serve the machine, but will exist to protect all people and to enhance their lives.
7. Political parties serving the interests of the collaborating classes are themselves bound together to the machine, and should be opposed as one.
8. The SDP of Great Britain therefore exists to create and defend an open, classless and more equal society which rejects prejudice based on sex. race, colour or religion.

I look forward to the day when my party and yours can stand against each other at an election. Until then. I hope your readers will vote for our Alliance.

Yours sincerely.

Jeremy Morfey

Bromyard.

Hereford

Reply:

We do welcome all contributions to the debate about socialism, especially from people who express thoughtful concern for democracy and an "open, classless society". Incidentally, the debate has been going on for well over a hundred years and countless politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, have dismissed the subject as closed, irrelevant or out of date. Yet it will not go away because it inevitably springs up again and again out of the conditions under which we live.

Our correspondent tackles the question head-on by arguing with our Declaration of Principles and substituting eight principles that he considers to be more true to reality. Let us examine these. The crucial clause in the alternative D of P is number Five, which says that it is possible to escape from ones class position by “relinquishing'' it. Well, it may be possible for an individual capitalist to relinquish their wealth. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us cannot relinquish our poverty. We may not all be starving or destitute but we cannot live on our wealth. However wishful our thinking we shall still be forced by our economic circumstances to sell ourselves to employers throughout our useful lives. This is what determines our class. Our function in society, and hence the pattern of our lives, will be as workers, whether we work in overalls or lounge suits; whether we are bossed around by others or are part of the management hierarchy ourselves. We are unable to relinquish our class position while capitalism lasts because our wage enslavement is the necessary condition for its continuing. It is out of the wealth that we produce, collectively as a working class, that the capitalist class in every country goes on expanding its wealth and the power of its state.

One of the ways of ensuring that virtually all society's wealth remains firmly in the hands of this minority is to keep the majority confused about it — ideally to persuade the working class that there is no capitalist class. All the major political parties are devoted to this objective. In this the SDP is in resolute agreement with Margaret Thatcher's party, as well as with the Labour and Liberal parties. They are unanimous in trying to deny the incontrovertible fact that society is forcibly divided into two unequal and inevitably conflicting sections of people.

Mr Morfey acknowledges that all is not well and offers his own explanation. In six of his clauses he refers to a "machine" — a machine with jaws but no face; a machine with which some people collaborate. and which others are "trapped within". but which can also have a "downfall". Obviously this is a metaphor; but metaphors should correspond closely with the reality they denote. Otherwise they lead to very faulty thinking. We use a metaphor in our Clause Six — the word "machine" to refer to the combination of people, organisations and equipment used by the state to defend and further the interests of the ruling class — this is the "state machine".

No one would claim that it is easy to understand. let alone describe accurately, the way modern society functions and is structured. Socialists rely heavily on earlier writers and thinkers, especially Marx and Engels. But we examine all ideas, even theirs, with ruthless scepticism. We try to make sure that the ideas correspond with our real, everyday experiences. Although our D of P was written in 1904, and its language shows this, it provides the basis for understanding what goes on in the modern world far more consistently and accurately than the theories which are produced with money provided by government or capitalist sponsors. We understand quite well why political parties such as the SDP hope to become involved in an interminable merry-go-round of forming governments. being thrown out. becoming a vociferous Opposition, campaigning to get back into office — and all the time real life for the great majority of us. the working class, is almost totally unaffected by it. A look at the government's own statistics about the ownership of wealth in Britain shows that our Clause One gives the facts, as opposed to expressing concern about a vague threat. This applies all through Mr Morfey's Declaration, but that is not good enough. The "political arena" is far too dangerous a battle ground to enter without knowing precisely what is happening and what is at stake.

Editors.

Scepticism is dangerous

Dear Comrade,

In New Scientist (16 April page 51) Ian Anderson reports on the annual meeting of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal or SCICOP for short. The following is a quotation from his report which itself is a quotation from the meeting.

Polls have shown consistently that a majority of American teenagers believe in pseudoscience. Fifty-five per cent believe in astrology, for example. But reaching young people means changing the education system and Carl Sagan, in his talk, noted how hard that was going to be:

If we teach school children the habit of being sceptical, they may start asking awkward questions about economic, social. political and religious institutions. Scepticism is regarded as dangerous. It is the business of scepticism to be dangerous. That is why there is a great reluctance to teach it in schools.

This interesting comment by Carl Sagan (a well known American astronomer) on education in capitalist sodety I feel certain would be of interest to readers of the Socialist Standard.

Best wishes.

Bill Williams

Wood Green

Monkey Business (2005)

From the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the New Scientist (5 November) some monkeys can be taught to be captivated by capitalism. The research is gleefully popularised in the Daily Mail (3 November). The reports don't actually talk about capitalism but the message is clear — the money system is not only embedded in human nature, it also goes back to monkey nature.

Apparently scientists at Yale University conducted experiments on capuchin monkeys showing that they can be taught how to use money and even master the art of shopping for bargains. They learned to use silver discs as coins to buy pieces of apple and cucumber from the researchers. When the apple slices were made "cheaper" than cucumber — meaning more apple was offered for the same amount of money — they opted for the better-value apple.

The monkeys then resorted to underhand tactics to hold on to their cash — by hiding the real coins and offering up "counterfeit" coins made of cucumber. They also showed a gambling streak. enjoying a game which enabled them to win or lose prized grapes on the flip of a coin.

Fascinating stuff. But the New Scientist report didn't tell the whole story. Some of the more intelligent monkeys went on to figure that they were living in an animal class society The human experimenters possessed all the means of production and distribution: the laboratory, the stockpile of silver discs, the food rations for the workers. All the monkey-workers could do was earn a precarious living by doing various tricks to please their masters in return for food portions.

So the class-conscious monkeys got together and decided the only way to achieve their emancipation was to mount a revolution. They conveyed to the researchers where they could put their silver discs. Instead of access to the means of life only by earning discs, they decided to build a new and classless animal society in which all monkeys and researchers would stand equal in regard to the means of wealth.

The experimenters didn't like the prospect of being dispossessed of their wealth and privilege. They threatened to use armed force to put down the revolution. Fortunately this turned out to be an idle threat. Although a few lumpen-monkeys briefly took the side of the experimenters, the vast majority saw that the new system of production for use and free access was in the best interests of all animal-kind.

Stan Parker

Pathfinders: Odds Uneven (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Centre for Economics and Business Research is predicting that there will be a million millionaires in Britain within a decade, leading to a bonanza in economic growth, marketable wealth and house prices (The Business, 13 August). “The think tank is forecasting a 71 percent rise in house prices over 2006 to 2020…” 

Whoa, whoa, stop! Stop right there. That’s it. Enough predictions already. There is something fundamentally wrong with this sort of news reporting, even though the papers are full of it and we base our lives on it.

Whether it’s future prosperity, the price of oil, life on Mars, England’s chances in the next World Cup, the winner of Big Brother XXXXVIII, or tomorrow’s weather, the only really reliable prediction that anyone can make is that the predictions will probably be wrong. And there is a good reason why that is.

Statisticians refer to ordinary random events, such as the exact number of cornflakes that fall in your bowl, or the precise time that your bus turns up, as Type 1 events. The randomness of Type 1 events tends to disappear when you average them out over time, which means that they are measurable, and thus amenable to prediction with an acceptable margin of error. You can predict that your bus will turn up at exactly 8.31 if that’s what it does on the average, and you won’t be far wrong. But applying this predictive logic to complexities like the climate, science, the future or the economy just doesn’t work, because when you introduce greater levels of complexity, or even if you extend the time frame, you inevitably introduce Type 2 events. 

A Type 2 random event is a unique incident which it is not possible to foresee, and one which can cause seismic changes in the daily routine. Being run over is one such event, as is a lightning strike, a win on the lottery, or falling in love. There is no mechanism for predicting such events because the margin of error would be laughably gigantic, and history is littered with unprecedented events, such as the telephone, the computer, the internet, AIDS, economic crashes, and many wars. History, the economy, and society, are crammed with so many Type 2 random events, argues the statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that it is sheer self-indulgent folly by anyone, government politician or horizon-tech scientist, to imagine they can predict anything at all (New Scientist, 1 July). Worse, he says, we are not smart enough to realize how dumb we are, and we – or rather governments – persist in basing all kinds of plans and policies on these bogus social predictions, sometimes with disastrous effects.

So why do we like to imagine that the world is a predictable place, even though we walk about with expressions of amazement permanently pasted to our faces? The explanation, he thinks, is that we can’t stand randomness, so we try to create meaning out of randomness by revising the past with invented and deterministic narratives. Instead of admitting that, ‘bugger, we never saw that coming’, we pretend that ‘all the signs pointed to this happening, it’s obvious with hindsight’. We comfort ourselves with our own cleverness, after the event, forgetting that we were jumping like jackrabbits just before it.

This may sound like another application of that popular game of applying the logic of one scientific principle to fields outside its domain, in this case chaos theory. However there are useful nuggets to be mined from this perspective, especially by socialists.

One is the undoubted fact that capitalism does indeed represent itself as a stable and predictable process when in fact it isn’t, and that people need to be aware of the illusion of permanence in which it wraps itself, like the Emperor’s new clothes. If people understood that social change could be minutes, rather than millennia away, the motivation to get up and do something might be a lot stronger in a working class presently browbeaten into submission by the weight of history and the endless blank horizon of the present.

The other point relates once again to Pathfinder’s own favourite theme, which is the easy assumptions that scientists themselves often make, especially in fields outside their own area of expertise. Are wars really Type 2 random events, ‘black swans’ so bizarre and unexpected that they boggle the mind as they appear out of nowhere? Do we really overlay an essentially chaotic world with a veneer of rationalized narrative, merely to comfort ourselves that there is an underlying logic when in fact there is none? Physicists have wrestled for years with the desperate and intractable problems of uniting all the known laws of cosmology and quantum mechanics under one roof to create a single, elegant Theory of Everything. They clearly believe that there is an underlying logic, even if they are buggered if they know what it is. Meanwhile in the external earthly realities of economics and social change we are expected to heed the post-modernists and the chaos statisticians, and abandon any thought of a grand narrative, an intrinsic pattern that makes sense of much, if not all, that goes on around us.

In fact, when you look at it like that, far from being a scientific proposition, this appeal to chaos seems like an unhealthy invitation to return to a world where gods and goblins roamed the earth and ideas of social progress could not begin to gain a foothold. If scientists believe that the great developments of history, both bad and good, were entirely unpredictable and that the human condition is a random cacophony of the cosmic absurd, Pathfinders suggests that they have been spending altogether too long staring down the microscope, and ignoring the elephant standing in the room next to their elbow.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: Dangerous jobs (1981)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Whilst I would not take issue with your reply to Mr. Arthur Spender (April 1981), I feel that one of his points, how we get people to perform tedious and dangerous jobs without “the wage incentive", has perhaps been better answered by certain scientific journals (eg. New Scientist). There we read of the technology which is supplying the means to relieve mankind of many such occupations, by means of robots and computers. Moreover, capitalism often fails to use these opportunities to the full since often it is “cheaper" to use human labour. Perhaps the inclusion of reports of certain technological advances, particularly those not fully exploited by capitalism, in tire pages of the Standard. would help to show that many unpleasant jobs existing under capitalism, need not be performed by people and that, with full automation of our factories etc., the remaining work, when “shared out" as it could be under socialism, might become pleasurable for its own sake.

At present, such benefits merely result in unemployment for some with no corresponding reduction in work load for the rest; plus increased profits for those who own the factories. 

Martin Cook

Oxford

Reply:

Martin Cook makes a valid point; capitalism itself develops the means whereby human society can produce the abundance of wealth which is essential for socialism but also hampers this process because its priority is profit, not human satisfaction. The Socialist Standard sometimes deals with this but of course not to the extent of other magazines, for which it is a specialism. It is no quibble to point out that it is incorrect to say that capitalism’s developing technology results in unemployment. In the interests of a brief reply we shall not discuss this popular misconception here: it is an issue often dealt with in this journal.

Editors.

Pathfinders: The Price of Everything (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year, you will not be astonished to learn, a great many peer-reviewed research papers on Covid-19 were published. Upwards of 75,000, to be exact, with another 10,000 or so available on pre-print servers, i.e. awaiting peer review (New Scientist, 16 December). Great, you might think. The brainiacs of the world rolling up their sleeves and getting down to business on a somewhat pressing matter. The world of science should be delighted.

Er, not exactly. Papers are being shunted out at the rate of 4,000 a week, and who can possibly read all that? Scientists say they’re not reading but drowning, and they want new smart tools to wade through it all (bit.ly/3bNJIGD).

But still, it’s been an unusual year, so you’d expect a tsunami of research papers, wouldn’t you? Actually, this is no different from any other year. Scientists have for a long time been decrying their ‘attention decay’ in the midst of an ever-increasing flood of academic studies (Independent, 11 March 2015). And their libraries need a lot of magazine subscriptions too. No one knows how many scientific journals there are, but several estimates point to around 30,000, with close to two million articles published each year (bit.ly/2OrH4h4).

Alright, but presumably all this stuff must get read eventually?

Again no. A 2007 study estimated that half of all academic papers are read by only three people, their author, and two journal editors (Smithsonian Magazine, 25 March 2014 ).

Yes, but all the same, it’s all worthwhile research, isn’t it?

You’d presume so. But a recent discussion with a friendly in-house editor in the field of epidemiology sheds a somewhat different light on things. It seems that much of what gets sent to high-impact journals is, basically, pretty low grade. An editor’s job is to decide which papers are worth sending out for peer review, but this editor says that 85-90% of the papers she receives effectively ‘go in the bin’, with only around 10-15% going out to peer review. Some journals save money by not bothering with an in-house sifting process, and send everything straight out to review, but this inevitably creates a bottleneck. And reviewers, it needs to be borne in mind, don’t get paid, their motivation being assumed to be keeping abreast of new developments in the field. If they have to provide detailed recommendations on papers that should have been ‘binned’ by the journal’s editor, that’s less overall incentive for the reviewer and more useful research time wasted.

That might just be one overworked and jaded view though?

Not according to psychologist Stuart Ritchie: ‘We think of science as being this objective thing that […] produces all these scientific papers, which are almost sacred things. But a lot of people don’t see how the sausage is made. […] In a lot of cases, the science is useless, not worth the paper it is written on’ (New Scientist, 19 August 2020). In his view, the review system isn’t up to much either. Even if reviewers try to check, they usually can’t get access to the raw data, so they can’t really verify what they’re reading. And on top of that, they can often guess where a paper has come from, despite the supposed anonymity, so bias can creep in.

But even so, it can’t be right that people are writing useless papers, surely? What incentive is there to do that? Are they simply incompetent? Here the in-house editor becomes especially illuminating. To paraphrase the conversation: ‘You have to understand how the system works. The way academics are judged is in terms of publications. These days, most staff in university departments don’t have tenure, they have to write funding bids to cover their wages. If they are managing research projects, they have to write even more extravagant funding bids to cover their workers’ wages as well as their own. Funding agencies get their money ultimately from the government, and they are also under the cosh to justify what they have funded. How do they do that? By promising the government ‘deliverables’. What are these deliverables? Generally, academic papers. Government bean-counters aren’t best placed to tell good papers from bad, so it becomes a matter of ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’. The upshot is that researchers pay the rent by writing vast numbers of papers, many of which will never be read. The whole thing is a funding merry-go-round, driven not by the needs of science so much as the needs of people to chase their next pay cheque.’

To make matters worse, there’s ‘a growing trend in doctoral education […] to dispense with the traditional PhD dissertation and replace it with the requirement for doctoral students to publish several articles based on their research in academic journals, in effect moving responsibility for evaluating doctoral research from university committees to journal editors and reviewers’ (bit.ly/2OwkAv6). So much for the appliance of science.

Well ok, but papers are at least reliable because they’re full of citations of other work, right? Right, but 90 percent of papers are never cited at all (Smithsonian, above), so citations tend to come disproportionately from a very few papers. Then these citations in turn spawn further citations, in an ever lengthening and uncritical chain, until the original paper can end up all but forgotten.

To give one example, low-fat diets have been a nutritional shibboleth for decades, yet when the lo-carb craze kicked off a few years ago and sent seismic shocks through the weight loss industry, some researchers actually looked again at the published research on dietary fat. It turned out that all the established ‘knowledge’ about fats in diets, and the official advice given by the US and UK for decades, stemmed from just 6 studies in the 1970s. Even those studies were heavily qualified by the researchers at the time, with some saying dietary advice based on them should never have been issued (bit.ly/2NilfzI). What everyone assumed was rock-solid science in reality stood on very shaky foundations.

Wasted effort is bad enough at the best of times, but when humans are faced with a crisis on the scale of the Covid pandemic, capitalism’s cash-fixated approach to science reveals itself as hopelessly inept. It’s a no-brainer to say that researchers should not write bad papers in the first place. But for that to happen, the pressure for funding would have to come off, so that they could stop chasing their own tails. Could capitalism do this? Unlikely. It hates unquantifiable returns. As they say about cynics, it knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. But socialism, by making everything free, would do it at a stroke, scrap the entire byzantine funding hierarchy, from government down, and scrap the capitalist money system that engenders the whole ludicrous business. Then researchers would be able to focus on the real work of expanding our knowledge, instead of churning out sops to fulfil the next funding bid.

Paddy Shannon

It may indeed! (1972)

From the March 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unhygienic, cumbersome, expensive to renew, money is rapidly going out of fashion. The credit card, that magic wand of purchasing power is taking over, bringing with it new problems. A Stanford Research Institute economist believes that thefts and other forms of misuse could drive the credit card companies into bankruptcy within 10 years unless they install equipment to stop the abuses. In New York a stolen card now sells for anything from $75 to $200 depending on its status. The typical loss on a card known to have been stolen is somewhere between $5000 and $7000. To foil the thieves will require devices that can link a document with its true owner by voice, fingerprint or some other physical characteristic. The economist sees nothing for it but to set up a nationwide computer system to check every purchase against the card-holder’s normal spending pattern—and. of course, how much he’s got in the bank. The bewildering assortment of hardware required (including new microwave or satellite networks to transmit the data over long distances) could produce a new industry to handle it. And it isn’t as if that will be the end of it. We shall have to guard against the crooks who invade the computerised hierarchy to funnel off private fortunes from so many credit sources at once that no one will know where the money has gone. How absurd the whole business has become. “To each according to his needs . . ." may yet be the only answer.

Ariadne, The New Scientist, 13 January, 1972.

Pathfinders: "We won’t be back" (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

"We won’t be back"

Browsing through the science pages of any newspaper or online journal is to take an entertaining flight of fancy through the world of journalistic prediction. That is not to say, wild stories dreamed up by journalists and fed to a credulous public, but wild stories dreamed up by scientists and fed to a credulous press.

Some of these are just harmless fun, like the evergreen notion of life on other planets, (Galaxy has billions of Earths, BBC Online, 15 February). Harmless fun, and like as not hopeless fantasy, based as it is on the formulation known as the Drake Equation, a well-known exercise in piling unknown suppositions upon each other and arriving at a number. With just over 300 exoplanets now discovered, and all of them gas giants that could kick sand in Jupiter’s face, there is no particular reason to predict thousands of intelligent civilisations in our galaxy, but that doesn’t stop scientists with one eye on the telescope and the other eye on the tabloids. (Our advice, by the way, if there happen to be any alien civilisations reading this column, is to stay the fuck away from this planet until we’ve sorted ourselves out, or we’re likely to be a very bad neighbour.)

Ray Kursweil is another respectable scientist with a penchant for grandstanding, and his prediction that humanity is approaching a technological singularity figures prominently on his site Kursweil.net and is regularly dredged up by newshounds on a sensation-hunt. A singularity is a point beyond which it is not possible to make any prediction whatsoever, and according to him, this event horizon will be reached when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence, perhaps 30 years from now.

Since human intelligence has got us where we are today, some might see this as a pretty good thing. However one can’t really blame hacks like Ed Howker of the Independent (4 February) for instinctively conjuring up images of Skynet, Cyberdyne Systems, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the box-office hit Terminator. After all, the work is being developed today and as the director of Michigan’s AI laboratory frankly admits “Our noses are too firmly pressed into our work for us to ask, to really ask, should we be doing what we’re doing?”

One only has to watch state-of-the-art robots whizzing round the lab floor trying not to bang into things to realise that the Terminator isn’t going to kick our front door in just yet. The concept of inorganic evolution – your toaster will inherit the earth – is a pretty old and abused notion. It’s not that we could never build something which could destroy us. After all, look at the weapons industry, or even the car industry. It’s just that, when it comes to Terminating ourselves, we don’t need artificial intelligence to do it for us. We’ve got capitalism. That’s all the prediction you’ll ever need.

Fancy a round of proton smashing?

You have to feel sorry for the nerds at CERN. Not only were their confident predictions about discovering the fabled Higgs Boson drowned last year in a media frenzy about high-energy particle physics being the death of us all.

When they turned the damn thing on, it broke. And now, months and millions later, they still haven’t got it off the starting blocks, and their rivals at the Chicago Fermilab Accelerator are laughing up their labcoat sleeves, predicting that they’re going to find the Higgs first (Race for ‘God particle’ heats up, BBC Online, 17 February).

It’s all getting rather competitive, but then, it’s a nice kind of competition, the kind we’d want to encourage in socialism, rival scientific teams racing to the truth. After all, there’s no money in the Higgs. It won’t change anything. It won’t even prove anything, apart from showing that the standard model of physics still holds up. If the nerds at Fermilab pull it off, CERN will be red-faced, but science will benefit either way. There is such a thing as healthy competition. The mistake of capitalism is to apply it where it does damage.

Socialism would cooperate over what mattered, like world production and distribution, and keep the competition for the fun things, like football and particle physics.

 

How wasps got their sting.

Curious that David Attenborough, who is to natural history TV what David Dimbleby is not to politics, should agree to produce the recent BBC programme Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, just around the same time that New Scientist led with a cover-story specifically refuting the notion of a Tree, and to the rage of Dawkins, Dennett and others, proclaiming that ‘Darwin Was Wrong’ (24 January).

Work in genomics has revolutionised the understanding of evolution, and has called into question what is meant by the word ‘species’. Up to fifty  percent of genes, it is estimated, are not passed along any linear tree of descent at all. They pass horizontally between related and sometimes unrelated hosts, usually in the form of a virus. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is now thought to account not only for some of the most bizarre biological hybrids, but also for such commonplaces as a wasp’s toxic sting. This constant ‘viral rain’ may also account for anything up to ninety percent of the human genome and some of our most basic biological functions,such as placental development, immune-response and gene expression (New Scientist, 28 August 2008). Thus many if not most evolutionary biologists now think the idea of a family ‘tree’ is obsolete. If there are any structures that look like a tree, they are local outgrowths of a general evolutionary ‘web’. But does that make Darwin wrong? Maybe, maybe not. New Scientist, with an apparently airy disregard for the slavering orcs of the Discovery Institute over in creationist Mordor, has gone for the controversial sell.

“You have made a lot of extra, unpleasant work for the scientists whose work you should be explaining to the general public”, fumes Dawkins et al (New Scientist Letters, 21 February), concerned that this ‘goof’ gives the god squad useful ammunition. Let’s not use the creationists as an excuse to make programmes so science-lite that they misrepresent the state of knowledge. If we, the general public, can cope with hierarchical trees, we can surely cope with HGT and webs. Socialists never had much use for hierarchies anyway.

Paddy Shannon

Environmental disasters ahead (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

At election times it often suits politicians to make sympathetic noises about environmental issues, but after the elections are over the same politicians can usually find "practical considerations" that make them have "re-appraisals" of previous "policy statements". This cynical manipulation is rife throughout the capitalist world, but it is doubtful if any of the political con-men could beat President Bush for the rapidity of his volte-face on the environment.

"In a letter to Republican Senators, Bush reversed his election campaign promise to limit C02 emissions from coal-fired plants, saying a new study shows it would be too expensive. He also reiterated his opposition to the Kyoto protocol, a 1997 agreement which aims to reduce greenhouse gases in the industrialised countries by 5.2 per cent by 2012" (New Scientist, 15 March).

This is of course, the crux of the matter—cost. We live in a capitalist world based on commodity production with the aim of obtaining a profit. In competing with other capitalists, both nationally and globally, it is necessary to drive down costs in order to grab a bigger share of the market. In such a cut-throat society environment considerations count for little, except perhaps a little electioneering rhetoric. With the USA putting the interests of their capitalist class before the needs of the planet the future looks grim indeed.

"The reversal was a blow to Kyoto supporters, since limits on power plants are probably necessary for the US to reach the goals. Christopher Flavin, President of the WorldWatch Institute says: 'It is essential since those plants are one of the main reasons for the recent sharp increase in US C02 emissions. In the last two years, the US has passed China to be the world's number one coal burner'" (New Scientist, 15 March)

Pathfinders: Capitalism’s Bond Villains (2018)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Political theatre turned to Hollywood farce last month as PM Theresa “Mousey” May squared off against Vlad ‘The Impaler’ Putin over the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury. Called upon by the media to flex her non-existent muscles over Russia’s blatant attempts to murder one of the entries on its oversees shit-list, she immediately pressed the Maximum Response button by expelling a few token diplomats. Putin predictably expelled the same number of Brit Dips in retaliation, leaving the two leaders looking like kindergarten kids having a spat. Such was the damage to the Russian pin-up’s political reputation that he went straight on to win a fourth term as president by a landslide, helped no doubt by the fact that he’d banned his chief rival from contesting. May’s international standing didn’t suffer either, as it was already non-existent.

Russia’s overseas assassination programme has used increasingly baroque methods to supposedly hide its state involvement over the years, in marked contrast to its prosaic internal policy of shooting regime critics in the head in lifts (Anna Politkovskaya, 2006) or in drive-bys (former deputy prime minister Nemtsov, 2015). From ricin in the 1978 Markov hit they progressed to sarin for the 2002 take-down of Chechen leader Khattab, then a failed 2004 dioxin attack on pro-western Ukrainian lead Yushchenko, to polonium in the 2006 Litvinenko murder. Mercury was implicated in an attack on human rights lawyer Karinna Moskalenko in 2008, while in 2012 exiled Russian businessman and police informant Alexander Perepilichny dropped dead in London with a dose of the rare toxic flower gelsemium. 2013 must have been an off-year, as Putin-critic Boris Berezovsky was found merely hanged in Berkshire.

So no big surprise that they’re at it again, but using a nerve agent invented and produced only in Russia seems like a downright giveaway, notwithstanding the Russian ambassador’s chutzpah in accusing the UK of trying to bump off its own spy by pointing out that ‘Porton Down is only 8 miles down the road’ from the crime scene. For once Boris ‘Ballsack’ Johnson seemed to have the measure of the situation: ‘The obvious Russian-ness of the weapon was designed to send a signal to anyone pondering dissent amid the intensifying repression of Mr Putin’s Russia. The message is clear: we will hunt you down, we will find you and we will kill you – and though we will scornfully deny our guilt, the world will know that Russia did it.’

The world seems increasingly controlled by cartoon Bond villains, as witness the toxic poisoning of already-unhealthy democratic systems by the manipulation and exploitation of big data to influence and perhaps swing popular votes. In the frame lately has been the British firm Cambridge Analytica, implicated in the shock Trump and Brexit votes. Perhaps more credence has been put on behind-the-scenes skulduggery because both these votes returned shock and unexpected results, but even so there’s little doubt that skulduggery is at work, and not just by Cambridge Analytica. Unless you live completely off-grid with no computer, phone or any other digital device, deal only in cash and wear a facemask when you go out, the capitalist data machine is constantly hoovering up information about you which private firms can then use to target you with profiled advertising or political messaging. Such brainwashing, as it’s also known, is likely most effective with right-wing voters and others whose brains probably don’t require that much detergent, however it’s an alarming sign for state regimes when the power of manipulation they used to call their own can now be hired out to the highest bidder. In an astounding display of vapid bravado the UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham demonstrated her complete failure to ‘get it’ by announcing to Channel 4 News she intended to seek a warrant to access Cambridge Analytica’s data files, a statement which has no doubt alerted the company to the need to delete anything incriminating. Or maybe it was a deliberate move to give them the heads-up today, prior to employing them tomorrow for the hapless May’s next desperate electoral attempt to stay in power.

North Korea / Trump talks not hot air, just gas

Mysteriously absent from most media reports about the surprise talks mooted between North Korea and the USA is the proposed Sakhalin gas pipeline running from Russia’s gas fields to South Korea and Japan via… North Korea. The pipeline has been on the drawing board for years, but the changing Asian energy market, with coal and nuclear out and gas in, has given the project a new lease of life. Russia is also keen to use South Korea’s shipbuilding capabilities to create a huge commercial fleet that can ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) and exploit the opening Arctic sea lanes. Russia has lately sweetened the deal by cancelling 90 percent of North Korea’s huge Cold War debts. But what’s in all this for Trump? Maybe nothing but face-saving. The US failed despite sanctions to stop Europe from buying Russian gas, so it has little chance of stopping a deal involving Russia, China, Japan and the two Koreas. No daylight between South Korea and the US? Think again!

Thinking Outside the Boss

Prominently displayed on the Letters page of New Scientist recently (3 March) was an epistle, the authorship of which may be divined by regular readers of this column, which challenged the magazine to ask the following question: ‘has the capitalist system finally passed its sell-by date?’ This was in response to the magazine’s somewhat self-righteous justification of its own frequent forays into the world of political commentary, on the grounds that science doesn’t live in a political vacuum. Quite so, the letter pointed out, and politics doesn’t live in a science vacuum either, therefore since the evidence of capitalism’s many iniquities is overwhelming, shouldn’t the search for an evidence-based alternative social model be a legitimate line of scientific enquiry?

Not a bad question, you may agree, but questions of methodology aside, the likely answer running through the minds of any scientist or journalist reading the question will be: ‘Yes, but my boss won’t let me.’ This probably explains the loud silence that has ensued since the letter was published.

Paddy Shannon

Odds and Ends: The Workers’ Paradise in Russia (1957)

The Odds and Ends column from the May 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Workers’ Paradise in Russia

When a Communist or Communist-dominated delegation visits the Soviet Union they generally publish a report containing much praise and wonderment at the marvels of the Moscow Underground, the Kremlin Palace, the Church of St. Basil, and the new Moscow University building; but they say very little about the life—and living conditions—of the ordinary workers and peasants of Russia. When a non-Communist delegation visits the Soviet Union the position is often reversed.

Last year an official Mineworkers’ delegation went to Russia. They have just published their report, summarised in the Manchester Guardian (15/3/57). They visited Moscow and a number of other towns, where they found that “an average of sixteen people are housed in a living space equal to a British council house.”

They report that hours of work exceed those worked in the mining industry in Britain; and “women in the Soviet Union are in many cases required to do work that is the hardest of manual work—to work in the pits, to do the heaviest types of jobs, including the handling of heavy materials and the mixing of concrete on the surface.”

And this the Communists call “Socialism.” Some Socialism!

Smash ’em up!

Socialists have always claimed that things are not produced to satisfy people’s needs, or to last long—if it can be helped. Most things today are cheap and shoddy. But if it was not for the fact that things are produced primarily for profit, some things if desired, could last virtually for ever. For example. The New Scientist (14/3/57) brings us an interesting story about glass—and tableware.

A leading glass manufacturer is producing some tableware which is very strong: plates can be crashed together like cymbals, and nails knocked into wood with the bottom of a glass with little or no damage done. But, continues the New Scientist, even stronger glasses and plates could be produced. But this would be uneconomical for the producers.

During the last war drinking glasses used by the American marines had a life of only seven trips to and from the kitchen. A specially strengthened glass was then produced which lasted nearly one hundred trips. But, alas, the manufacturers found this unprofitable. Eventually, a glass was made toughened only round the rim which lasted an average of twenty-three trips. Such are the workings of our present society. A sane society would produce glassware—and everything else—solely for people's use. because they wanted it; and only the best would be made.

The Perversion of Science

It has often been claimed that scientific discovery and development is misused and perverted in our modern capitalist society. The following passage from The New Scientist (14/3/57) bears this out.

  "In Europe, the search for better navigational methods arose from the desire for trading and from the warfare that ensued. Harrison's famous chronometer, which he perfected in the eighteenth century, was made in order to win an Admiralty prize of £20,000 for a method of determining longitude at sea. Even today progress in navigation is usually to meet military needs, and now it is the development of guided missiles which is throwing up the commercial navigation of the future."

Calypsos Next?

According to the people who are supposed to know—in Archer Street and Fleet Street—Rock 'n' Roll is on the way out, and the Calypso is in. But, so far, those who have cashed in on “Rock”—Tommy Steele, Winnie Atwell and others—are still “coining the loot,” and very few Calypsos have been heard yet on the radio. This writer does not think that the Calypso will be such a money-maker as Rock Y Roll with its simpler beat and lyric, its noise and gimmicks. Anyway, if the Calypso is going to take the place of Rock 'n' Roll it will have to be “cleaned up” a bit, since many of its lyrics are hardly suitable for the B.B.C., or the record companies. For example, “Chinese Children Calling Me Daddy”:—

“Since I am small I am living with women
And all I can get from them is false children.
Some with blue eyes and some like Chinese,
Any kind of child my girl make she stick me.
But I'm waiting on her patiently.
Its about ten months now she aim't kissed me.
And you know the bold-faced woman is telling me.
Any kind of child that born in my house. I'm the daddy.
I'm so ashamed I don't tell nobody
Chinese children calling me daddy.
You know my mother does want to beat me when
Chinese children calling me daddy.
For I black as jet and she just like Tar Baby, still
Chinese children calling me daddy.
Left, right, in front and behind,
Chinese children calling me daddy. ”

For the time being it looks as though we shall be stuck with Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog or Bill Haley's Don't Knock the Rock. There's more money in it; and it won't upset anyone's moral susceptibilities!

The Church and Socialism

In Britain only about 10 per cent. of the population regularly go to Church, although many more say they believe in some sort of a god or Creator, whereas in the United States about 60 per cent. are Churchgoers. The American workers, it seems, are more superstitious than their British counterparts. But even in Britain, one Church—the Catholic Church—claims 3,000,000 members (including the backsliders?). All the various Christian churches and sects oppose Socialism, but the Catholic Church is possibly the most vociferous in its opposition (and misrepresentation) of Socialism.

In a pamphlet called Socialisation, and “published with the authority of the Archbishop and Bishops of the Catholic Church of Australia,” we are told that “Socialism, in its strict sense, is a theory which advocates that the State should take over and operate the entire machinery of production, distribution and exchange.” That this statement is a complete lie from beginning to end does not worry our Catholic Bishops and Archbishops. For the information of any Catholic who may read this column, Socialism means the common possession of the means of life; an absence of a state apparatus, and no machinery, or means of exchange.

Man will no longer pray for his daily bread; he will just make it and consume what he requires!

It is not only the Catholic Church which propagates the figment that State ownership of the means of production is Socialism. Political parties, such as the Labour and Communist Parties, also make the same claim. The Communist Party, which, when it suits, boasts of its support of the theories of Marx and Engels, is perhaps the most shamefaced. For did not Engels explode this hoary old idea for all to read. In his book, Socialism : Utopian and Scientific (which all workers should read), he writes:—

   "But the transformation . . .  into State ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. . . . The modem State, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution” (pp. 71-72)

With the establishment of Socialism the State dies out. “State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the conduct of processes of production” (pp. 76-77).

Peter E. Newell

Pathfinders: The Biggest Question? Don’t Ask... (2015)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Science is good at asking the big questions, the ones that make even Earth's tumultuous politics look trivial. Science journalists are also good at asking big questions, but usually during slow news weeks and usually without any kind of decent answers attached.

New Scientist recently led with a cover article entitled 'Ten discoveries that would transform what it means to be human', featuring ten speculations which would supposedly revolutionise human life on Earth (8 August).

They proceeded as follows. What if we can't know everything (worst case: we're no worse off). What if we could talk sheep, dog or dolphin (worst case: we'd be vegetarians). What if aliens exist (if they're smart they'd avoid us). What if we could upload our brains (a digital copy of you is not you though, is it?). We have no free will (yawn, not that again). We came from outer space (panspermia merely adds a step to the existing origins debate). We could prove God exists (yawn, again) etc etc.

These aren't revolutions, they're fillers dressed up as thrillers. They would not involve any sea-change in social behaviour. At most a few religions would be mildly upset or excited, until they adapted like the oily amorphous creatures they are. For socialists, this is toenail gazing. Meanwhile in the middle of the room, farting gently and wagging its trunk and big ears, a very large question stands quietly waiting to be noticed.

What if we could end conflict and deprivation on planet Earth?

If science is so good at asking the big questions, why doesn't it ask this? Is it perhaps because it's not a scientific question, in some sense? But change the terms to refer to cancer, or wildfires, or global warming, and it's obvious that scientists ask questions like this all the time.

But perhaps it's a different kind of question nonetheless, because unlike cancer, wildfires or global warming, everybody knows that conflict and deprivation are so intrinsic to our global economic system, and to all known preceding systems, that their abolition would clearly imply a set of political changes so radical and so huge that 'revolution' is an entirely appropriate word to use. The very idea is so potent that it makes many people nervous, not just scientists.

So the too-easy answer would be that scientists don't care or dare to ask questions that might annoy their bosses and funding organisations, or that might make them look like loony lefties (although such concerns didn't bother Einstein). This is slightly odd, given that statistically most are liberal or left-of-centre in their thinking, but apparently keeping very quiet about it. Another too-easy answer is that scientists suffer (as all humans do) from group-think, a compulsion to conform to orthodoxy, or fixation error, a tendency not to see the big picture, and of course good old confirmation bias, the tendency to believe what you already think (New Scientist, 15 August). But any argument that puts all the blame on them can't be the whole story.

Why don't scientists ask politically explosive questions? Because, from their point of view, the answers appear to lie outside the domain of science, in the realms of politics or religion, where nothing can be demonstrated with a pie-chart or a meter reading and rhetoric and moral posturing take precedence over empirical fact. In short, political viewpoints including ours are unfalsifiable, i.e. there's no way to prove that they're wrong.

To be falsifiable is, in the Popperian school of thought, to be scientifically valid and thus worthy of scientific attention. To attract that attention, we would have to show by what criteria, and in what circumstances, our case for non-market common ownership and democratic control could be disproven. Which is not as easy as it might sound. It's no good suggesting some giant and unfeasibly expensive study, like running socialism for fifty years inside a sealed bubble in Argentina, and it's no good stipulating vague 'proofs' without saying how they are to be found (eg. 'prove to me socialism can't work and I'll abandon it').

And what would we call 'proof' anyway? Suppose that scientists discovered, say, a gene for aggression. Would we accept that as proof, and abandon our ideas about peaceful coexistence, or would we create a theoretical work-around to accommodate it, as religious people commonly do, or blithely disregard it as Steven Pinker does in The Blank Slate? Suppose that a computer simulation of socialism showed that it always broke down and devolved back into capitalism. Would we accept that as proof, or would we suggest instead that the computer model wasn't sophisticated enough, or possibly that the researchers (no doubt funded by capitalist corporations) had rigged the test? Is there a failure condition which is so comprehensive and unequivocal that, were it met, we could have no possible riposte, no get-out clause, no 'ah, but…'?

Gravity is falsifiable. Just allow yourself to float spontaneously into the air, and the job's done. Evolution is falsifiable. As the biologist JBS Haldane once famously retorted, just dig me up a dinosaur with a fossilised rabbit in its gut. The Periodic Table, electromagnetism, E=MC², all falsifiable, therefore all valid theory. Could socialist theory match that? No it couldn't.

But neither can capitalism, of course, which generates an abundance of evidence of its own failings every minute of every hour of every day, evidence which people are remarkably adept at ignoring or explaining away. So no proposed social system is falsifiable. You can't test socialism in a lab, under randomised double-blind conditions. But does that mean it's unscientific, and that scientists and science journalists are therefore right to avoid consideration of it?

No it doesn't, and here's why. Science can be said to proceed via the dislodging of unsatisfactory theories and their replacement by theories which better account for the observed phenomena and are better able to predict outcomes. In this sense socialism is a valid scientific theory. It is evidence-based, it explains events in capitalism consistently better than capitalist theoreticians can manage, and it predicts long-term outcomes better (eg predicting that Government A will not solve unemployment and Government B will not abolish booms and slumps). It's an effective tool of analysis, but also a compelling tool of change, offering a simple and utilitarian set of knowable and predictable parameters instead of the myriad, volatile and unpredictable parameters which produce chaos, suffering and destruction in money economies. For scientists to ignore such a tool is worse than negligent, it flies in the face of the very principles of scientific enquiry.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Harmony of the Hive Mind (2015)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

When you watch a really good band play a gig, you probably notice the rhythmically and harmonically 'tight' performance, the 100 percent focus and commitment, the way the players proceed in lock-step, almost as one mind. You know of course that this is an illusion created by many hours of painstaking rehearsal during which every element is calculated, measured, argued-over and scripted out, every variable is banished or budgeted for and all the words, chord structures and extempore passages are fixed and memorised. If you pay close attention you can even read the subtle signals passing between the various players who, behind the music, are 'talking' each other through the song.

Imagine for a moment that the players in this band were telepathic, not for show but for real. They wouldn't need to count in, or maintain eye contact, or rehearse endlessly. They wouldn't have to stick to the script in order to play perfectly. They wouldn't even need a script. Each of the players would share the others' thoughts as if present in their heads, though not in words because words take too long to process, but instead in abstract feelings or sensations, perhaps mixed with fragmentary visual images or fluctuations in mood. The effect would not be like a silent negotiation between individual minds but a single 'multi-mind' spontaneously thinking and acting.

Even better, suppose the audience was telepathic as well. Then they could become part of the band, ultimately blurring or abolishing the distinction between listener and performer, singing or creating rhythm or playing their own instruments, the whole consisting of balanced arrangements in controlled volumes without the need for a sound engineer. In short, a telepathic gig would be phenomenally good by anybody's standards. Rolling Stones? Oasis? Arctic Monkeys? Who they?

Well, you guessed it. Scientifically-speaking, something like this may be possible in the future. Recent work with monkeys showed that it was possible to connect the electrical output from the parts of their brains involved in movement so that they were able to move an object on a screen towards a desired goal, in order to get a reward (New Scientist, 18 July). Each of the three monkeys was connected via electrodes to a computer which allowed them to move the screen object in just one dimension. To move it successfully required synchronised thinking from all three monkeys, operating what the researchers dubbed a 'brainet'. Further work with rats showed that they could receive, store and transmit usable information to a computer, functioning as a parallel processing unit or 'hive mind'.

The world is wiring itself together at every level, from rats to neural networks to the 'internet of things'. Human telepathic control over these networks is the ultimate logical goal, albeit on the assumption of future background technology rather less obtrusive than today's clunky electrodes, scanners and wire cables. The description of a musical performance given above, though of course speculative, is meant as an analogue of any human endeavour requiring collective participation. Formal spoken languages would no longer be a barrier, and may for many purposes become redundant. The possibilities for science, engineering, games, learning and the arts are certainly beyond our present ability to predict, and nearly beyond our ability to imagine.

There is one problem with all this, though it's not one that socialists will lose any sleep over.

The ability of humans to think collectively as a group-mind would be catastrophic for capitalism. All workers sharing their ideas, without language, labels, prejudices and egos getting in the way? It must be stopped at once. Divide and rule is what's needed to keep this market economy on the straight and narrow. Cut those monkey scientists' funding immediately!

Cyberspace in black and white

Apparently we're getting less spam in our emails these days, as anti-spam policing has for the first time since 2003 managed to cut it to below 50 percent of all email traffic (BBC Online, 18 July). Or rather the various spammers and phishers have finally twigged that we've all long since twigged, and their nasty little games don't work anymore. The bad news is that malware is on the increase, including the dreaded 'ransomware' (pay up, or never see your files again). So the arms race between the black hats and the white hats (i.e. baddy hackers and goody hackers) continues to escalate in a war which is of course all about screwing money out of you. If you're not paying the black hatters, it's only because you're paying the white hatters. Maybe it's not the most pressing concern for socialism, but the lack of a profit incentive would mean pretty much the end of spam, of malware, even of all those hated passwords.

Why do plutocrats get their wallets out?

From vague pixellated blur to stunning hi-res image, we've all followed with bated breath the passage of the New Horizons probe to distant Pluto to reveal its secrets. And its secret is now revealed – it's a cold, boring planetoid where nobody in their right mind would ever want to go. Still, it's amazing that the first moon probe was launched as recently as 1959, within the lifetime of many of our readers, and now every planet in the solar system has had close-up photo opportunities from the NASA paparazzi. Pluto, though, is about as far as we can realistically go unless someone invents a Star Trek-style warp drive. Even at New Horizon's record speed of 50,000mph it would take 100,000 years to reach our nearest stellar neighbour (New Scientist, 18 July).

Most socialists find science interesting and planetary exploration equally so, but unlike excitable media journalists they are not hopelessly confused about the reasons for it. Talk of public interest and selling science to school kids is all very worthy, but socialists know two things the journalists don't. First, space exploration is not funded by the public out of taxes, because those taxes ultimately derive from the rich, therefore it is the rich who are financing it. Second, the rich are doing it as a speculative investment to see what returns they can get out of it. Think science is purely the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake? Think again. That's not how the rich see it at all. They aim to get more rich, and investing in science – even those avenues that seem to offer no obvious profit potential – is the way to do it. Pluto, if you recall, as well as being the god of the underworld, was also the god of wealth.

PJS

Pieces Together (2009)

The Pieces Together column from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A WORLD WITHOUT LEADERS

"For about 94,000 of the 100,000 years of human history, people lived and organised themselves as hunter-gatherers without a centralized leadership apparatus. Hunter-gatherers began the transition to early chiefdoms and embryonic states between 3,000 and 6,000 years ago. Only in the previous 100-500 years have there been state-level polities. The earliest human societies were acephalous: they existed without formal rulers or leaders. For this reason, they were also probably without heroes, a pattern which is starkly at odds with what has been claimed of human history generally and which also contrasts with the contemporary leadership field." Taken from the inaugural lecture on "Leadership: Its genealogy, configuration and trajectory” by Peter Gronn, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge . (Independent, 17 June)


OWNERSHIP AND KNOWLEDGE

"Ten years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research, every computer program, every last thing that could be made out of digital ones and zeros. The question became not, will nature allow it, but will our legal and economic system ever allow it? This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term ‘intellectual property’. As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity. So will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism?" (New Scientist, 24 June)


CANCER AND THE PROFIT MOTIVE

"Supplies of vital medicines, including those used in the fight against cancer, are running short because UK pharmacies and drug wholesalers are selling them abroad to maximise profits. ... The shortage is being caused by the falling value of sterling which has meant that UK pharmacies and drug wholesalers can earn greater returns by selling medicines to the continent. ... Last night leading cancer charities expressed alarm at the situation. ‘Cancer Research UK urges the Department of Health to ensure that no patient experiences any delay in getting prescription drugs,’ said Hilary Jackson, the organisation's policy manager. ‘We are concerned to hear of cases where patients have been delayed access to prescribed medication or have to find an alternative supplier. This causes extra distress at an already difficult time’" (Observer, 5 July)

Pathfinders: S-C-A-ISM minus O-I-L? (2008)

The Pathfinders column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oil is the super-fuel. Nothing else does all the things oil does, from heating, fuel, plastics, food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and clothing. It has the highest energy conversion rate of any fuel and it constitutes 40 percent of global traded energy and 90 percent of transport (Financial Times, 4 January, 2004). But aside from its contribution to global warming, it's also running out.

Or so we are told. Despite the record rise of oil recently, this is mainly speculator-driven and not due to any real shortage of oil. What is running out is cheap oil. In fact the world has only used 15 per cent of known reserves, with at least another 20 per cent recoverable by today's technology (BBC Online, 21 April 21, 2004). Though pundits talk about hitting peak oil, estimates for this turning point range from already to as far away as 2050. As supply diminishes and prices rise, more expensive options like the Canadian and Venezuelan tar sands, with capacities rivalling Saudi Arabia, will become profitable to extract. But the rise in costs will be mirrored by a rise in the price of everything dependent on oil, and for the world's poorest billion people, this could be a sentence of death by starvation, with a likely proliferation of food rioting, instability in liberal democracies and an upsurge in the ruling class's faithful stand-by, fascist repression. Meanwhile, as the stakes rise, so do the international tensions. Oil is already determining many countries' domestic and foreign policy, and few people doubt its role in recent wars. Governments are increasingly jumpy. Oil production plants, and bottleneck sea-lanes, are particularly susceptible to guerrilla attack, and with no in-house reserves Europe or America could be reduced to chaos in weeks (New Scientist, 28 June). Worse still, the ruling elites' increasing inability to keep their oil-starved military up to scratch may make wars more likely rather than less, as weakened capability could provoke opportunistic pre-emptive attacks by rivals.

Socialism faces a rather different problem. It is predicated on communal sharing and participation, which in turn rely on the fact of material sufficiency. Should anything threaten this sufficiency, the basis of socialism itself would be threatened. Today, for example, over 50 percent of world rural populations have no access to electricity (UNDP World Energy Assessment, 2000). Though not a problem to capitalism, which doesn't care about non-effective, i.e. non-paying demand (for more on this see page 19, this will be of the first importance in socialism. Even allowing for waste reduction in the west, that electricity must be found.

There is no single alternative to oil, so a suite of alternatives will have to be employed. Of the non-renewables, gas won't last much longer than oil, and coal, the chief source of electricity globally, though there is up to 250 years worth at present usage, is dirty stuff to burn. Carbon capture technology may mitigate this, but is at an early stage.

The main problem with renewables is that the oil-addicted capitalist economy has hitherto starved them of funds, because set-up costs are prohibitive and returns long-term. This is true of geothermal heating systems, but also of wind and tidal systems, ocean thermal electricity, biowaste to oil reconversion plants, solar thermal and solar photovoltaic technology. Only nuclear fission, with its potential for weapons, has found success, though its waste problem remains intractable, and biofuels, though their impact on food crops and deforestation is well known. Nevertheless, so-called 2G biofuels that use waste feedstocks of lignin and cellulose are beginning to put in an appearance (New Scientist, 21 June), while algal fuels are also showing some promise, though expensive in land area (New Scientist, 16 August). The central problem of collection and conversion in solar energy is being addressed with 3G tech involving plastic panelling which can be printed cheaply on any surface and may offer up to a 60 percent conversion rate. Hydrogen, much vaunted in the press as a cheap fuel, is really an energy vector not an energy source, being only as clean as the energy used to create it, currently coal-fired electricity, and the problems of storage and distribution are enormous. Currently there are a small handful of hydrogen filling stations in the whole of Europe (EurActive.com, 4 September)

There is some hoopla about the renaissance of the electric car (New Scientist, 20 Sept ember) with its macho speed and mileage performances, but aside from the £100,000 price tag, there is something about the electric car that utterly misses the point.

Probably the biggest difference between socialism and capitalism as regards energy would not be how we produce it but how we consume it. Instead of developing electric cars that do 0 - 60 in 4 seconds, socialism would be developing ways of getting cars off the road altogether, because abolishing paid employment and the need to make a living would also abolish the commuter madness on the roads and motorways. Homeworking, or just doing something useful in one's immediate local area, would be a much more practical solution than hi-tech boy-racing.

Similarly, there's no need and no point having, as a norm, private kitchens all cooking the same food at the same time, when socialising the process in the form of volunteer-run restaurants could cut energy hugely and save on waste as well as time. Many people detest cooking anyway and eat pre-packaged and expensive rubbish as a result. There's no need either for each household to possess identical music or DVD collections, books, clothes, tools or any other item that could be shared via public library systems. The life-span of a domestic power-tool in use, from purchase to a 10,000 year career in landfill, is estimated at just 10 minutes (New Scientist, 6 January 2007). Waste is simply energy misused, and capitalism does a lot of that because privatised materialist consumption is how it makes its money.

Then there is what we literally consume. Socialism has to feed everybody and it is obvious it won’t be able to do so on a western-style meat diet. Even now we are starting to be told to reduce our reliance on the meat industry not simply because of its clear link to obesity, or to rainforest clearance, or greenhouse gas emissions (18 percent - more than transport, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation - BBC News Online, 7 September) but also because of its global impact on water and oil usage. Aside from any ethical considerations, meat is simply too expensive a way of feeding people when for every kilo of meat protein you need approximately 8 kilos of grain protein (New Scientist, 14 June)

If capitalism really uses up the obtainable oil in its customary spendthrift way, then socialism is going to have to employ a suite of solutions, both in means of supply and modes of consumption. Whether this will involve a generation without coffee, or cricket fields under cloches, a communally-managed planet is going to be better placed to deal with these issues than the privately-owned one we have. Socialism will do whatever works, and whatever it takes. Capitalism just does whatever pays, and devil take the consequences. Only one of these systems has a future.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Upload, download, freeload! (2007)

The Pathfinders column from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine a wall that reaches to the sky and stretches to both horizons. You are standing on one side of it. On the other side is Everything. Everything humanity can produce, its food, its art, its society. There is only one way through that wall, through a tiny hole. You move closer. The hole in the wall is a cash-machine. On the screen it says 'Entry Option 1: Pay Cash'. You have no cash. You press Cancel. The screen says 'Entry Option 2: Build Wall.'

The people who put that wall in place are the builders of capitalism, which claims to provide but really deprives. What choice do you have? You help them build their wall.

From paranoid Pink Floyd, let's cut to an upbeat children's TV favourite, only this time with a Marxist makeover. Enter Bob the Unbuilder. Bob is going to show us a clever trick with capitalism, aren't you Bob? Can we wreck it? Yes we can! And how does Bob unbuild the wall? Obviously, by taking away the bricks. And he's doing a very good job of it, in the one sector of capitalist wealth and endeavour that is hardest to build a wall round - commercial information.

A digital book, a CD, a software program or a movie, unlike chocolate cake or gold bullion, can be 'stolen' an infinite number of times without ever disappearing from the owner's table. In UK law, the act of theft involves an intention to deprive the former owner permanently, but in duplicating data this clearly cannot apply. Thus, for those with a vested interest in depriving us of access, this strange theft /non-theft creates a special category of problem, one which they struggle to make the rest of us take seriously.

The information revolution has given rise to a debate about what it is reasonable to 'protect' - that is, build a wall round, and what ought on the other hand to be free. At one extreme we find the film and music industries, whose main argument is that 'stealing' their produce reduces the population of potential buyers, thus 'permanently depriving' them of revenue. But is that true? At the other end, Bob and his little army of anonymous software diggers and rippers, while busily exposing every encryption key the capitalists can come up with, will argue just as cogently that most of these so-called potential buyers are not really buyers anyway because they don't have £13.99 to waste on a stupid film they'll only watch once in any case. Who is right? Nobody knows. Nobody has ever done an economic study which proved it either way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection). However, producers are only taking the same line as supermarkets, which are well known for pouring bleach on their skips of discarded fresh fruit and vegetables, to prevent poor people eating for free.

And why should anything be free, after all? This is a world where everyone pays. Would you agree to forgo the money from your magnum opus or your hit single? Well, it's a circular argument. We all want money because everyone wants money from us. That's why capitalism has to be abolished all at once, or not at all. But it's very strange that, while baked beans are even cheaper than chips, you don't see people vehemently debating that they ought to be free, as of 'right'. Yet in the parallel universe of information technology, we see precisely that debate. If software is useful everywhere, say the cybercommunists, it ought to be free everywhere. And Bob and his hackers, not waiting for the gainsayers to be won over, dig in and make it so.

In reality, what is going on is not a moral debate about rights but a digital class war. Those who own and control - or try to control - the means of production and distribution of information, software and entertainment, are doing everything they can to prevent the rest of us getting our hands on it for free. And they would succeed easily, but for Bob the Unbuilder, an unpaid amateur computer nerd who sees any copy-prevention system as a challenge to his ingenuity. System after system has been hacked, broken or reverse-engineered. The industry-standard system for videotape copy-protection was defeated by the sublimely simple act of passing a magnet over the cassette spine. The 40-bit encryption Content Scramble System for DVD was meant to be unbreakable, but was broken within three years, while the industry has been chained to producing the same unmodified system for the following decade for fear of customer backlash from existing DVD player owners. The very latest high definition DVD encryption system has been broken in just three months, with the code-keys published everywhere on the internet and even being sported on t-shirts (New Scientist, June 9).

But in case one is tempted to laugh at their incompetence, the boffins of Digital Rights Management think-tanks have a serious set of problems to face. They can't block data-copying completely because of the many legitimate purposes copying might have. If they do make copying too difficult or the authentication procedure too arduous, they can end up encouraging consumers to prefer no-effort cracked copies over the 'genuine' paid-for article. There can be legal and political objections too, if the barriers created prevent free trade or transgress a nation's own laws, a situation which arose with the film industry's practice of 'region coding' and which was challenged in the Australian High Court in 2005, where it was ruled that "modification of devices to circumvent region lockout is allowed under Australian law" (http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki /Regional_lockout).

Ultimately the wall-builders are up against the irreducible problem of the 'analog hole'. No matter what the encryption system used, at some point the film, or song, has to be decrypted before it gets to your eye or ear, otherwise you won't understand it. All a hero of the free-entertainment movement has to do is intercept that signal after it has been decrypted, at the weakest point of its security, its 'analog hole'. This interception can be very ingenious or it can be very simple, as simple as taking a videocam into a cinema and then uploading the result to the internet.

The reason why all this is such a problem now is because the internet has changed the rules of engagement. Thirty years ago, even if you copied a film on video or an album on tape, who could you send it to? Now, with fast broadband connections, clever compression technology and the widespread use of peer to peer file-sharing, which speeds up traffic by taking the strain off central server points, 'freeloading' has gone global. And on the other side of the wall, the telecoms companies have gone global too, merging with the entertainment industry to create a new media mega-sector whose common interests are in beating the freeloaders.

It would be ironic if the freeloading bonanza became a victim of its own success, and the sheer volume of traffic brought the internet crashing to its knees, as some pundits are indeed predicting (BBC Online, June 15). Catastrophic network overload would be followed, one presumes, by a dull cyber-winter in which we rediscover books and boardgames.

A sense of futility seems to hang over the film and music industry in their attempts to stop illicit copying. Many companies have just given up, considering the game not worth the candle. Others are hanging in there, launching new UK commercials aimed at making video pirates look like sad and pathetic losers. "We want to create a social stigma. It's been done before, with drinking and driving," says one such champion of Hollywood's deprived millionaires, "We want to make people feel grubby" (New Scientist, June 9). It won't work though. There is a world of difference between drink-driving and copping a quick freebie off Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Besides, anyone who reads stories about the growing rich and poor divide (Daily Mail, June 21), or the fact that of the hundreds of people in Britain on salaries over £10m a year., only 65 are paying any income tax (BBC Online, June 21), is not going to feel too guilty about their own peccadilloes. In capitalism, most people know who the real 'grubby' thieves are.

The really dazzling question a starry-eyed socialist futurologist might like to contemplate is this: what if, with advances in nanotechnology, we could copy real-world goods, like food, using waste materials? And then what if Bob and his Unbuilders got their hands on the copy-prevention systems?

Paddy Shannon