Tiny Tips (2026)

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

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

[CounterPunch]

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

[NovaraMedia]

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

[BBC]

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

[ZeroHedge]

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

[Common Dreams]

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

Minority Rule (2025)

Book Review from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Minority Rule. Adventures in the Culture War. By Ash Sarkar, Bloomsbury, 2025. 310pp.

This is a book that takes down with panache and enthusiasm the myths of race, nation and gender that are used to divide the class of wage and salary earners, the vast majority in society. Blending personal anecdote and lived experience with hard and well-documented fact, Ash Sarkar, journalist, broadcaster and social and political commentator, exposes the multiple ways in which the so-called ‘culture wars’ have been stoked and fostered by those with retrograde views who have been successful in spreading false notions about how groups such as anti-racists, immigrants, trans-activists and ‘Marxists’ are taking over the public platform, preventing free speech and thereby oppressing and silencing the majority.

She is clear that the system we live under (capitalism) is ’a product of economic interests, not abstract ideas’ and that this divides society into two main classes — workers (the vast majority) and capitalists (the tiny minority) – whose interests are diametrically opposed. She explores how this tiny minority (‘the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations’), who have control over ‘a planet-spanning and tightly interconnected system’, are, via the media and others with influence, happy to engage in a ‘misdirection of blame’, inflating minor issues and distracting workers from the real causes of the poverty, inequality, insecurity and lack of community that keep the majority divided among themselves. She is scathing about how ‘identity’ causes (race, gender, climate change, etc.) are blown up and labelled ‘culture wars’, putting barriers in the way of ‘a united working class’. This, she goes on, works ‘to inhibit, splinter and weaken class consciousness based on economic status and steer resentment instead towards an extreme fixation on culture and identity’. It makes scapegoats of minorities and directs ‘horizontally and downwards’ the anger of those ‘who have to live off wages and not asset wealth’. It thus encourages a view of the world as competing interests among groups of workers rather than in terms of a collective class interest. As she puts it, ‘division among identity lines is more useful to the ruling class – it keeps people from recognising their majority class status and shared material interests’. All this, she insists, serves the purpose of ‘keeping us divided and competing against one another’ and of ‘preserving an economic system that is destroying your well-being, your community and the very planet you live on’.

She is scathing too in her characterisation of some of the aspects of that system. She paints pictures such as ‘rough sleepers (…) curled up against storefronts, unsheltered and freezing on some of the most valuable real estate in the world’ and condemns the dehumanisation of asylum seekers whipped up by ‘press and political collusion’, causing ‘a frenzy of racist and indiscriminate loathing’. She reserves particular condemnation for social media and its effects, which she sees as part of the way in which ‘capitalism, in commodifying every aspect of our waking lives, has managed to come up with a form of leisure that’s even more alienating than labour’. And, as a media ‘insider’, she puts particular emphasis on what she sees as the media’s noxious role and, in particular, on its most recent iteration, social media. In a chapter entitled ‘Talk is Cheap’, she condemns, with a plethora of examples, the absurdly inflated focus on the ‘microevent’ (eg, a well-known actor slapping a well-known comedian at the 2022 Academy Awards), the misleading nature of many news headlines calculated to spread xenophobia, and social media’s ‘infinity pool of people posting nuts things’ where real news often gives way to ‘trivial, identity-driven controversies’. ‘The media machine that drives Minority Rule’, she concludes, ‘works by turning citizen against citizen; we’re more inclined to mistrust someone who shares our material conditions, than those who are in charge of shaping them’.

Overall this book, written with wit and brio, offers a sound, wide-ranging and well-informed analysis of the wrongs of capitalism, of the ongoing inability of the majority class in that society to see how they are being manipulated and of their failure to come together to do something about it. But it also has a disappointing aspect. The author calls herself a Marxist and her class analysis based on relationship to the means of production is consonant with Marxism. But her proposed solution for removing the minority class’s stranglehold over society strays far from this. She presents herself rather as a left Labourite critical of Keir Starmer’s current Labour government and its way of running capitalism but favourable to Jeremy Corbyn’s kind of Labourism, which, after the result of the 2017 General Election, she tells us she thought might herald a new era of Labour coming to power and bringing in massive pro-worker reforms. But if she is a Marxist, she should know that reforms any government can bring in are limited by the needs of capitalism and anyway are not capable of seriously redistributing wealth and bringing about economic equality – this is what the followers of Corbyn would have found if he had come to power. After all, in Marx’s own formulation, the state is the executive committee of the ruling class. Only the moneyless, stateless, classless society of free access based on from each according to ability to each according to need can achieve the economic equality which to be fair to Ash Sarkar is no doubt what she would like to see. But it is an illusion to think it can be achieved outside of such a society.

Howard Moss

GB News and Gary’s Economics (2022)

From the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent slot for the Socialist Party on a GB News chat show (bit.ly/3Umo53W) revealed an interesting thing about what socialists are up against: not only do people not agree on what socialism is, they don’t agree on what capitalism is either. So when we’re arguing with a pro-capitalist, we should not make the mistake of thinking that we know what they’re defending, or that even they know what they’re defending. They might be talking about something else entirely.

The pro-capitalist on the show seemed to be arguing that the less-developed, 19th century ‘small-business’ economy was ‘real’ capitalism, in which the population supposedly shared in the general wealth and welfare to a far greater degree than today, when the world has been taken over by a hideous monster known as ‘corporatism’. As if to emphasise how terrible our modern corporate affliction is, he was perhaps tempted to overegg the pudding in relation to the Victorian incarnation of the profit system. Incredibly, he even summed up the conditions of workers in that age of slums, workhouses, TB, cholera and child labour as ‘they’d never had it so good’.

Which all goes to show, as regular readers know very well, the importance of precise definitions. It’s such second nature to us that it comes as a surprise to find that other people don’t operate that way. ‘Socialism’ in many people’s minds is just this cloudy amorphous notion that can easily mean anything to anyone. And apparently ‘capitalism’ too can mean anything.

For the record, you can see our definition of socialism in the Declaration of Principles, on page 23 of this issue, or on the website here (bit.ly/3Umo2Fi). And equally for the record, here is our definition of capitalism: a system of society based on the production of wealth for sale on a market for a profit. Things that are produced for sale are called commodities. Other societies had commodities, but their economies weren’t based on commodity production. Other societies produced things (of course they did), but those things weren’t produced primarily for sale so they weren’t commodities. Other societies had markets, but the markets weren’t the main reason for the production.

From this clear and straightforward definition it follows that any society which is based on production for sale on a market is a capitalist country, regardless of what that society might say about itself, eg. North Korea, Venezuela, etc. Many other consequences can also be logically derived, including the drive for perpetual growth, the super-concentration of capital, wildly increasing inequality, the tightening stranglehold of the rich on the machinery of power and propaganda, national and world wars, and global environmental devastation. Without that core definition, the architecture of economics falls apart into a miasma of vagueness and a tendency to discuss each issue in isolation, as if it was unrelated to the others.

An example of this kind of vagueness was evident in a recent Novara Media video (bit.ly/3TkQJBo) where Aaron Bastani, author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (reviewed here – bit.ly/3UlGI8m) and sporting a funky MarxTM t-shirt, interviewed hip street economist Gary Stevenson, whose own YouTube channel Gary’s Economics (bit.ly/3tdDtE8) has been getting a lot of favourable attention lately, including from mainstream media.

Stevenson is a likeable, articulate and clearly passionate man who, having previously made a pile as a former top Citibank trader, is now on a mission to explain to ‘ordinary working-class people’ why it is that they are getting poorer while the rich are getting richer, and that, contrary to what they themselves pontificate about, ‘economics experts’ in universities and in the media don’t know or indeed care why this is. His jargon-free and swear-word rich elucidations of interest rates, inflation, gilt trading and national deficits feel like a breath of fresh air. He is motivated by an obviously sincere conviction that the poor are allowing themselves to be impoverished mainly because they don’t understand how economics works, which to an extent is self-evidently true, even if his trader’s take on it is not the same as ours.

One of his arguments is that governments make a fatal mistake simply handing money to the rich without having any means to tax it back again. This is a rather more sophisticated argument than the morally-motivated populist Tax-the-Rich agenda we’ve seen from groups like Occupy or individuals like US Democrat Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. He’s quite right to point out that governments in general struggle to get money back from the rich through tax. Indeed that’s why governments rely largely on stealth-taxing the rich indirectly through the wages they pay to workers. He wants to tax them directly, though, because even though some flight of capital might occur, landed assets don’t move, and those assets can be taxed regardless of who owns them. Would the working class benefit if the state taxed the rich a lot more? In the short term perhaps in some ways through more public spending, but not in any way that would significantly transform their lot in life as wage slaves. And the rich would fight such taxes with every influence they can muster, because quite apart from financial considerations, big taxes make for a big state and they don’t want a state that’s rich and powerful enough to keep siphoning off their profits and interfering with their dodgy dealings.

So what’s the vagueness referred to earlier? Bastani, possibly somewhat overwhelmed by Stevenson’s charisma and fast-talking economic chops, seemed rather to have forgotten to get to the nub of what, for a Marxist, the conversation really ought to have been about. At one point Stevenson almost invites him to, when he says that, where he comes from in Ilford, people’s idea of capitalism is that’s it’s supposed to be a fair system where hard work, thrift and merit are ultimately rewarded, and they can’t understand why this doesn’t seem to happen in reality. That should have been the moment to nail down definitions, to identify exactly what capitalism was, and thereby to confront the question that was waiting all along like the elephant in the room – never mind trying to fix the unfixable, Gary, why don’t we talk about superseding the capitalist system itself, and having a society with no rich and poor, and no inequality in the first place?

Paddy Shannon

The Virus Media Perspective: Televisual Tripe (2020)

From the May 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Covid-19 and the Media: Myths and Mystifications

Perhaps I’m not the best person to be writing this article. Quarantined at home for the last few weeks, my media consumption has mainly revolved around my three-year-old son’s favourite TV animations. But in between episodes of Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig, I’ve been watching the Covid-19 news narrative unfold. Every crisis brings opportunity for a few and recently the news media have benefitted big time from a locked-down public hungry for information. The audience for television news, especially on BBC, has skyrocketed. And while their print circulations have been in long-term decline, the big newspapers have also strongly influenced public debate about the pandemic, providing many of the stories we access through social media.

Much of the mainstream coverage of this emergency has been informative and it’s not necessarily true that journalists have simply been fuelling panic or fear about the coronavirus. There is some room for debate about how much ‘overreaction’ there might have been to Covid-19 and experts are far from unanimous on this question. But this is a genuine crisis, if only because the capitalist states it is impacting have been so badly prepared for it: placing profits before people, they completely failed to invest in the scientific research and healthcare equipment needed to cope with this widely foreseen pandemic.

Nevertheless, there’s much to criticise in the media coverage of the emergency. After all, a media system owned and directed by the exploiting class is bound to discuss Covid-19 in ways that reflect capitalist interests and ideologies. Here are just a few of those ways.

Fighting Talk

Many media and political discussions of this crisis have been wrapped in the language of patriotism and war. Trump called Covid-19 the ‘invisible enemy’ and across the major media outlets, journalists have routinely talked of the ‘fight’ or ‘battle’ against the virus. ‘WAR ON CORONA’ went the headline of Scotland’s Sunday Mail on 15 March. Other British papers have praised the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of the population. Of course, war metaphors are always popular among politicians and journalists seeking dramatic effect, especially when the state perceives a threat to its authority (British newspapers were full of them during the 2011 riots) and no doubt Boris Johnson talked about ‘beating’ the enemy of Covid-19 in order to project his strength and ‘leadership’ skills at a time when even other members of his class were questioning his abilities.

All this war talk may have distorted public perceptions of the crisis, however. In one of their online broadcasts in March, Novara media showed footage of an elderly Londoner (a woman clearly in the ‘high risk’ category) declaring that she would not stay at home to curb the spread of infection because that would be ‘giving in to the virus’ – as though Covid-19 were a group of jihadists hell-bent on destroying ‘our way of life’! Presenting the coronavirus crisis as a ‘war’ also conditions the public to accept the tougher new policing and surveillance measures being put in place by governments across the world and which many people fear will continue after the lockdown has ended.

Finally, militarist language tends to channel workers’ dissatisfaction with capitalism into admiration for the nation state. Before the first ‘Clap for our Carers’ event which swept across Britain on 26 March (and which then became a weekly occurrence), Leo McKinstry of the right-wing Express came over all Churchillian, asking readers to ‘salute our NHS heroes in this their finest hour’. And after the event, the front page of the left-leaning Mirror newspaper was given over to photographs of smiling NHS workers being publicly applauded. ‘Your country LOVES you, gushed the newspaper, along with ‘NATION SALUTES VIRUS HEROES’. Not to be outdone, the BBC’s Breakfast programme started a daily Hero Half Hour segment, in which viewers were invited to share praise for key workers ‘on the frontline’.

But there’s something fishy about this newfound love for often low-paid workers and as for NHS ‘heroism’, perhaps we should recall Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, whose central protagonist, a doctor called Bernard Rieux, states that his work ‘is not about heroism’, but about doing what’s necessary in an absurd situation. In fact, ‘Clap for our Carers’ has been a well-camouflaged propaganda campaign. It has certainly tapped into positive public feelings of solidarity with hard-pressed healthcare workers who are saving lives under difficult circumstances; however, those circumstances are due in no small measure to healthcare cuts imposed by successive governments, including the present one. The media’s militarist and nationalist framing of the event has tended to obscure such facts, deflecting any criticism of the state with the feel-good message ‘we’re all in this together’.

China Crisis

Britain’s tabloid newspapers have a global reputation for sensationalism and racism and they have not disappointed during this emergency. Back in January, for example, the Daily Mail and other mainstream media sources published lurid images of a Chinese woman eating a bat in what some claimed was a Wuhan restaurant, although the pictures turned out to have been taken in 2016 in a restaurant in Palau and were therefore not connected with the recent outbreak. But that did not matter. The ‘fake news’ story went viral, no doubt because it appealed to racist Western stereotypes of exotic Orientals with bizarre habits.

It’s hard to prove that the media affects attitudes or behaviours in the real world, but it seems likely that the anti-Chinese messaging of the tabloids has contributed to the present climate of xenophobic hostility towards East Asian people. This has led to harassment and sometimes brutal physical assaults. On the 3 March a Singaporean student was left needing facial reconstructive surgery after being attacked in London. And on 14 March an Asian-American family, including a two-year-old girl, were stabbed in a retail outlet in Texas by a man who apparently feared that the victims were infectious. Being the cynics that they are, politicians such as Johnson and Trump, who has referred to Covid-19 as the ‘Chinese virus’, might be hoping to benefit from this popular anti-Chinese sentiment, as they try to sidestep responsibility for their failures in handling the outbreak by shifting the blame onto China – even to the point of asking for ‘reparations’.

In parts of the left-leaning media, meanwhile, the China card has been played in a very different, but equally dishonest way. During an interview on the Kremlin-supporting Russia Today television news channel, Stalin enthusiasts George Galloway and Ranjeet Brar heaped praise on the efficient and organised Chinese response to the outbreak. This is reasonable up to a point. After all, a case could be made that China marshalled its immense state apparatus to deal with the coronavirus outbreak more effectively than many other countries and it seems to have kept its death toll low. Then again, we surely ought to be suspicious of health-related statistics reported by the authoritarian Chinese state. And Galloway and Brar conveniently forgot that the Chinese government had initially tried to suppress the warnings of medical professionals about the spread of the virus. None of this has stopped left-wing ‘anti-imperialist’ publications from praising the glorious People’s Republic. The People’s Dispatch even published an article with the title ‘How Chinese Socialism is Defeating the Coronavirus Outbreak’. I can only recommend that the authors of this piece actually visit China to witness its obscene wealth gap, rural poverty and hyper-exploited workers. Some socialism!

Corona Communism

Some very odd ideas about socialism have also been aired in more mainstream media. On 20 March, in the right-wing Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard urged that ‘Boris must embrace socialism immediately to save the liberal free market’. But this only shows the capitalist press’s confusion about the meaning of socialism. For Evans-Pritchard, socialism means the state taking over control of the economy from private industry. This has of course happened with dizzying speed in recent months, with the nationalisation of the hospitals in Ireland and the suspension of the rail franchise system in the UK, to give just two examples. Genuine socialism, however, means a world without classes, commodities, money and borders. What we have been seeing over recent weeks is not socialism, but the capitalist state putting in place measures to cover a proportion of workers’ wages, bail out businesses and keep key services running. The state is simply doing what it must in order to head off any ‘social unrest’ that might arise during the epidemic and to ensure that the wheels of production can grind back into motion afterwards. To a limited extent, governments have been ‘putting their arms around workers’ – but only so that they can get their hands back around our necks when normal business resumes.

Another, particularly daft media myth has been that the virus is a social leveller. This idea gained some traction in the major media when, on 25 March, the British public learned that the virus had pulled off its most audacious stunt so far, shamelessly infecting the first in line to the throne, Prince Charles. In the Express, Dr Hilary Jones was quoted as saying that the virus ‘is a great leveller’ that is ‘just as virulent for politicians and celebrities and the monarchy as it will the homeless and destitute’. A few days later, Clare Foges of The Times waxed lyrical on the theme, writing: Coronavirus: the great leveller. Infecting princes and prime ministers, making hermits of most, hushing the concrete council estate and the millionaires’ leafy square’.

Fortunately, not many people seem to have been fooled by this sort of twaddle. Sceptics on social media have argued that Prince Charles, who had shown only minor symptoms of C-19, had ‘jumped the queue’, having been given a coronavirus test despite NHS guidance that only hospitalised patients could receive one. The public have also given short shrift to celebrities claiming to be ‘just like us’ when faced with the threat of the virus. Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot’s attempt to prove that ‘we’re all in this together’ by leading a star-studded singalong to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ was widely ridiculed on social media. And megastar Madonna, the world’s wealthiest female musician, was mocked for an Instagram video in which she called Covid-19 ‘the great equaliser’ while sitting in a petal-filled bathtub.

Far from thrusting us towards socialism or uniting the celebs with the plebs, the corona emergency has brought the savagely class-divided nature of our world into sharp focus. While it is true that anybody can catch the virus (this is surely one reason why the capitalist class is taking it very seriously), this has been a tale of two pandemics. On the one side, the super-rich have headed for their disaster bunkers in private jets; on the other, workers on temporary or insecure contracts have faced destitution (by early April in Britain there had been a staggering one million new registrations for Universal Credit), while the most vulnerable groups in society, such as refugees, homeless people, those with pre-existing conditions, or the many low-paid key workers who cannot simply ‘stay at home’, are widely exposed to the virus.

Their Media and Ours

Despite all of these myths and mystifications, the mainstream media are not entirely bad. Tough questions have sometimes been asked of the government. For example, on 26 March the editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, appeared on the BBC’s Question Time discussion panel, condemning Britain’s unreadiness for the pandemic as a ‘scandal’. And at the time of writing in mid-April, much of the British media has spent weeks castigating the government’s inability to guarantee adequate testing and protective equipment for NHS workers. But it has been primarily through the social media that working-class people have found solidarity via community information and support groups. And only socialist publications such as our own have managed to cut through the nationalist claptrap and geopolitical blame games of the mainstream media to expose the underlying problem: the global capitalist system, which exists to protect profits rather than human life.

S.H.

Seeing Visions (2019)

From the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

What comes to mind when you think of the word ‘revolution’? A spinning vinyl disc, a marketing cliché, heroic Bolsheviks clambering over iron railings, or queues of innocents being lined up for the firing squad?

The reason why more people don’t consider revolution as a serious political option is because their thoughts are instantly derailed by the mental pictures that this conjures up. Either revolution is meaningless because everything nowadays is a ‘revolution’ of some sort or other, or it is a blood-soaked Armageddon where nobody wants to go, no matter how desperate things get.

Arguably the lack of a mainstreamed, coherent vision of revolution, or of the society made possible by it, is what holds people back more than anything else. People already know that capitalism is a miserable system that’s rigged by and for the rich, and they don’t need to be told over and over again. But who’s offering a clear, understandable alternative, with a roadmap for how to get there?

The Socialist Party has, over the years, attempted to fill in this blank, however, we’ve always been reluctant to speculate too wildly, for several reasons. First, technology changes almost by the day, and what’s possible changes along with it. If we’d cared to describe our vision of a future socialist society, when we started out back in 1904, we would no doubt have been thrilling at talk of gas lamps in every street and a telephone in every town hall. Second, taste is a very time and culture-specific thing. What appeals to you might be off-putting to someone else, and there’s no point deterring people from building a free society simply because of idle speculation about what some of the furniture might look like. Third, and most importantly, it’s not up to us anyway, it’s up to the people who will establish socialism, which is you and people like you. If you want to live in bucolic forested idylls, as William Morris supposed back in the industrial 1890s, then doubtless you’ll make the arrangements. If you hanker for futuristic circular cities and gadgets galore, as Jacque Fresco and Zeitgeist imagined ten or so years back, then you’ll do what’s necessary to make it so. Or perhaps you’ll do both.

Not everyone shares our reservations about building castles in the air. In this issue, we consider two other images or ‘models’ of non-market socialism, which come at the subject from very different perspectives. First, there is the notion of fully automated luxury communism (FALC) devised by Aaron Bastani and James Butler of the alternative news outlet Novara Media. The idea of this is simple: machines are going to do all the work so we can just kick back and relax – once we’ve relieved the capitalist class of global control, that is.

Without rehearsing any of the criticisms that follow, or rehashing earlier ones (see Pathfinders, May 2015), it’s worth asking ‘is this the right strategic vision to put to workers’? FALC is a very clever approach in that it challenges head-on the idea of inevitable scarcity which is drilled into us today as part of capitalism’s manufactured artificial reality, and thus informs people’s too-ready assumptions about revolution as a time of misery, shortages, hard work and self-denial. Moreover, it imparts an appealing tongue-in-cheek humour to a subject more often plastered with a po-faced puritan frown. It feels young and fresh, and new, and now, in a way, no Marxist tract ever seems to. Trouble is, it might be going too far to the other extreme and risk looking like a Pollyanna paradise that’s got drunk on its own optimism. Workers might be seduced by a vision of luxury communism that makes it all sound easy and fun, but on the other hand, they may recall that if a thing sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Are they going to gamble everything on an idea of revolution that doesn’t seem to have considered all the externalities?

Externalities are also a problem in the second view, the model of ‘Walmart-socialism’. This is the idea that if a huge global company with hundreds of thousands of staff can operate perfectly well without its own internal market, then so could the entire planet, and that large global companies are in fact leading the way towards this new social reality. Leaving aside the whole question of central planning which we look at elsewhere, one or two obvious differences between a capitalist megacorp and socialist society present themselves. In the first place, capitalist companies are not democratic but autocratic, even if some limited decision-making is distributed through the system. ‘Citizens’ (ie workers) are not free not to do as they’re told, or free to do something else, or free to change their mind or walk off the job. No matter how managers like to pretend otherwise, a coercive element runs through capitalist companies like Brighton through a stick of rock. This is in stark contrast to socialist society which is predicated on the idea of nobody being anybody’s boss. Secondly, companies like Walmart are not obliged to factor in their wider impact on society, people, or the environment, when devising their future growth strategies. The only thing that really counts in a capitalist business is money, and how much they are going to make over their overheads. What this means is that people, society and the environment are inevitably pushed down the list of priorities, and they suffer accordingly. That’s why we have global warming, and the ‘bottom billion’, and famines and wars. In this sense using a capitalist enterprise as a model of a kind of proto-socialism seems more than bizarre, it’s a travesty.

All in all though, it’s good that people are discussing visions of the future, even if they can’t always agree on the details. Despite the risks inherent in such speculations, workers arguably have to see the goal before they can kick the ball in that direction. Hopefully, this discussion will help to focus minds, without moving the goalposts too often.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Immaculate conceptions (2015)

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

What’s been happening lately with the people from Occupy, UK Uncut and the rest of the rebellious ‘noughties’ crowd? Whatever activity there is has sunk below the media horizon and therefore dropped off the political agenda, while the restless radical pool continues to evolve into new forms and outgrowths, clustering, merging and diffusing in ways that seem more organic than organised. The big splashes in the morning papers have given way to a grey drizzly afternoon of self-doubt, boredom and endless questions.

What is one to do with a world ‘absolutely in thrall to capitalism’, where most radical groups ‘coalesce around a hollow capitalist meliorism’ or else focus on the bogus rhetoric of having no leaders at the expense of any real strategy, democratic oversight or ability to adapt to changing circumstances?

Thus speaks Novara Media, an ‘outgrowth’ of this very milieu and a sort of alternative online news service cum political analysis show aimed at the young radical, non-state anticapitalist sector. Its founders are a likeable and highly articulate pair of young postgrads/postdocs by the name of Aaron Bastani and James Butler, and five minutes of their quick-fire patter is enough to make your head spin.

What does Bastani say about non-state communist strategy in the 21st century? That the 20th century of mass one-way communication was the great outlier and that today’s pathways of communication through disparate and affinity-based back-channels is more akin to the 18th century. What does Butler say about the activist’s disavowal of theory? He explains that doers are always suspicious of thinkers: ‘there’s a history of people thinking that thinking means that one should be in charge of things and lead things, and movements led by thinkers and intellectuals is [sic] always a bad thing and tends to lead to paranoia and narcissism and overidentification’. They observe that protest should be offensive not defensive because defensive strategies become conservative and ‘fail to stake a claim on the future’, and they make clear that ‘people argue about political power needing to be purified, but it doesn’t, it needs to be overthrown’. Butler adds poignantly ‘we have been losing for so long that we’ve forgotten to ask how do we win, and what would winning look like?’

Well, what would winning look like for Novara Media? It would look like something called fully automated luxury communism (FALC). The argument is simple enough. Machines are taking all the jobs, so the future should be one of luxury and leisure. People have said this before but Messrs B&B don’t make the elementary mistake of thinking that this will happen without a revolution to overthrow the powerful elites. What’s appealing about their argument is that it emphasises what you can have tomorrow rather than what you have to put up with today. Communism for them is a glittering prize and an orgy of abundance, not an exercise in hair-shirt asceticism.

Do they mean non-state communism the same way we do? Oddly, Bastani mentions a ‘living wage’, which doesn’t fit the picture. Wages and money presuppose property relations and markets, which inevitably give rise to states. Leaving that to one side, are they anyway overegging the pudding? When talking about post-scarcity socialism we tend to talk about sufficiencies, not luxury. We do sometimes speculate about shortages in the short term as farmers switch from cash crops to subsistence, the ‘bottom billion’ are prioritised for food and healthcare, and the world productive system learns to readjust. Is it realistic and in fact responsible to promise luxury as standard?

As is common with future-gazers, Novara may have been seduced by their own vision. One only has to recall the utopian predictions of early advocates of nuclear power to remember that technology is always rosiest at dawn.

When considering anything to do with automation, indeed any machinery, one shouldn’t ignore that unwritten rule of the universe, Sod’s Law. If it can go wrong, it probably will, and just when you least expect it.

People who can only afford to drive old cars will have noticed that the more sophisticated the technology, the more unfixable and often disastrous it is when it ages and breaks down. It may be that the rate of development of complex systems always outstrips our ability to diagnose failures within those systems or, in the vernacular, we’re too clever for our own good. Why might this be so? Because as you add new features, sensors, cruise controllers, drop-down displays and so forth in arithmetical fashion into a closed network, the number of potential failures and multiple-node failures tends to increase in geometrical fashion.

In the immaculate world of the futuretopians, nothing ever goes wrong and everything always works at its optimum. If you ask what happens when the system breaks you get the response given out about the Titanic and Chernobyl: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got a system to cover that’. There is just now a debate in airline circles about whether to develop fully-automated planes without pilots, controlled just by their on-board computers. This is how capitalism drives technology - the purpose is simply that the airlines would save a pilot’s wage. Would socialists be interested in this too? Opponents will point out that a driverless car which fails can just stop, whereas a driverless plane that fails has no good outcome.

How much complexity is too much? What is so endearing about clunky, old-fashioned, non-electronic cars is that there’s not so much to go wrong, and not much you couldn’t fix yourself given a shed, a few tools and a basic grounding in car maintenance. Socialism would have production plants and factories for the sake of economy of scale, but not to the exclusion of local, small-scale production and maintenance.

Socialist production, being non-market and not for profit, would work quite differently from the capitalist market process. If you’re giving up your time to build a bus, a power station or a piano, you don’t want to have to put in further work repairing it, nor create work for others by making it difficult to repair. You would use standardised and recyclable parts which could be swapped out easily. You would not bother adding features which looked impressive but didn’t do anything. You would only use quality components, not cheap ones intended to fail. And you’d keep it simple. But simple doesn’t have to mean plain, or plain ugly. Taking a cue from William Morris we could stipulate that beautiful things should be useful, and useful things should be beautiful.

Fully automated luxury communism is a vision based on two assumptions, that people want luxury and that they hate work. We suggest that neither of these is correct. Sufficiency is sufficient for security, and security is what people really want, not to live like Roman emperors, even if today capitalism makes people fantasise about getting stuff for the sake of having stuff. Second, there is the obvious fact that labour, even quite hard manual labour, can be a huge pleasure when freely and cooperatively engaged in. If that were not so there would be no art, no hobbies, and no sport. Full automation, where machines do everything, is probably more a fantasy of capitalism’s stressed-out wage-slaves than a healthy aspiration of free people. And let’s remember to ask, what if it breaks down?

Novara is keen to stress that their ideas are negotiable and do not come fully formed and fixed. It is a fact to gladden the hearts of socialists that people like Butler and Bastani are out there keeping revolutionary ideas alive and fresh, but when concocting revolutionary recipes we would always counsel a pinch of salt.

Paddy Shannon