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

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

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

Pigeon feeding and chasing

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

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

Facebook support

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

Empathy or rivalry?

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

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Withdrawal symptoms (2025)

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

Socialism, a sophisticated global society of cooperative common ownership, would face a number of urgent legacy problems if established today.

One of these is world hunger, with its related diseases, from which around 10,000 children and 15,000 adults die every day. Globally some progress has occurred, but almost one in ten people remain undernourished.

Weirdly though, more children are obese today than underweight. According to a UN report covering 190 countries, whereas in 2000 almost 13 percent were underweight compared to 3 percent obese, today the figures are respectively 9.2 and 9.4 percent.

Global obesity levels have tripled since 1970, with most commentators attributing the problem to the widespread post-war production of cheap and ultra-processed food, though it may have begun even earlier. Diets have become progressively less healthy since the Industrial Revolution, when toxic compounds like red lead and green arsenic were used as factory food colourings.

Profits flow from making us fat, even while obesity is stigmatised. Eight of the ten most obese countries are in the South Pacific, possibly implying a genetic element. But the rest of the world is not far behind. Generally speaking, the only places not obese are those starving.

Modern capitalism is a smorgasbord of high-calorie fast food which, along with sedentary online living, constitutes what are called ‘obesogenic environments’. But personal choice is also involved. Sugar isn’t addictive as such, but does induce a dopamine hit that can be. How would socialism deal with addictions? The need to solve hunger is a no-brainer, but lifestyle choices are more ethically tricky. If our collective behaviour is making us ill, then it places a load on health services. One way to think about a socialist ‘economy’ is to ask, not ‘shall I have X’, but ‘are other people prepared to put in labour so that I can have X?’ Lifestyle isn’t just personal, it’s political.

Nutrition is a difficult subject. We’re not even sure how our own metabolism works. In the 2010s, evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer set out to study metabolism in hunter-gatherers, specifically the Hadza of Tanzania, to see how their active lifestyles burned up calories. His findings rocked the scientific world. It turned out that, though tribal males might walk or run around ten miles a day, or maybe six for women carrying children, they burned off no more calories than a desk-bound clerk in Manhattan or Manchester. Convinced this had to be a mistake, Pontzer repeated the study with other groups, in other countries, and got the same result. The implications for the global diet industry, worth hundreds of billions, and the global sports fitness industry, worth trillions, are devastating. If Pontzer is right, diet and exercise are not linked but independent processes, so you can’t just trade off the one against the other, that is, you can’t run three miles and then allow yourself a doughnut. His ingenious working theory, as explained in a recent Babbage interview for The Economist, is that organisms don’t just go about doing their random daily thing and then pay off the calorie bill afterwards, somewhat like capitalist consumers. Instead they’re more like capitalist investors, looking for a long-term payoff in terms of reproductive success, and ‘fronting up’ the calorie investment in advance. Thus, we have a daily ‘calorie budget’ which we can invest wisely or poorly. We’ll certainly allocate 300 calories, the equivalent of a 5k run, for our large human brains. If we don’t spend our remaining budget on physical activity, it will end up being spent on other internal processes which also use energy, like the endocrine system (hormone production, for example testosterone or cortisol) or the immune system. With excess ‘fuel’ at their disposal, these systems may go into dangerous overdrive, producing auto-immune inflammations, stress-related diseases and cancers prevalent in urban western societies but unknown among the Hadza.

All of which brings new resonance to the phrase ‘armchair socialist’. How exactly a democratic global cooperative society would deal with addiction-related health problems is not really for us to say today. What it wouldn’t do is make the problem worse. In capitalism, all industries exist to make profits, even at the expense of killing us. State governments try to impose legal limitations, but vested interests and regulatory capture make this a permanent arms race.

The food industry is hardly alone in treating your body as a rubbish dump. Other industries have bequeathed us microplastic-polluted brains, ‘forever chemicals’, and the US opioid epidemic, to name just three. To see the ultimate direction of travel for unfettered capitalist markets, just look at organised crime. Take ‘kush’, for instance (or rather, don’t). Kush is a highly addictive and dirt-cheap synthetic opioid several times stronger than fentanyl, and now rampant across West Africa.

Quite apart from causing delirium and psychosis, it suppresses the appetite, lowering the body’s ability to fight off diseases and results in flesh-eating sores, and swollen limbs. It also results in STDs that women get by selling sex to pay for the kush. It involves no expensive opium or cannabis plantations, but instead uses cheap synthetic compounds (sources: China, Netherlands, UK) which you can cook for next to nothing in a garage. It’s also a cinch to transport because it doesn’t smell and just a tiny amount is needed to knock people brainless. The drug producers are no doubt delirious with joy at making such a killing, which they are doing, literally by the thousand: ‘It’s killing so many people that the mayor of Freetown [Sierra Leone] has had to set up a dedicated burial team to pick up abandoned bodies in the streets. These mass burials and cremations have been going on since 2022’ (Economist podcast).

Socialism’s legacy problems might be tricky where personal choice is involved. Without the profit motive though, there’ll simply be no point in producing foods and drugs that kill people, even if that could involve some withdrawal symptoms.

Paddy Shannon

Reformism (2025)

Book Review from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Equality. What It Means and Why It Matters By Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel, Polity, 2025. 119pp.

‘‘Why should a hedge fund manager make 5,000 times more than a teacher or nurse, or for that matter a physician?’ (Michael Sandel)

This short book is the record of a public discussion between two well-known ‘left’ academics. Social and economic historian Piketty is author of the much discussed Capital in the Twenty-First Century (see review in this journal), while Sandel is a prominent ‘public intellectual’, who has written books on what may broadly be called political philosophy. The book is divided into a number of chapters with titles such as ‘Why Worry About Inequality?’, ‘Should Money Matter Less?’, ‘The Moral Limits of Markets’, ‘Globalization and Populism’, ‘Meritocracy’, ‘Borders, Migration and Social Change’ and ‘The Future of the Left: Economics and Identity’.

Though presented as a kind of debate, both participants tend to agree on most things. In particular, they both seem convinced that the current social and economic system, capitalism, can be reformed in such a way as to make things significantly more ‘equal’ than they are at present. Piketty points to how, over the history of capitalism, vast swathes of people have seen their conditions of life greatly improve. And we can agree: even in the nineteenth century, in the system’s relatively early stages, this is something which Marx, for all his insistence on capitalism’s inevitable inequalities, observed as an ongoing reality. In this connection Piketty mentions, for example, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, decolonisation, increasing gender and racial equality, the welfare state, and higher living standards for many.

The way forward from this, according to both discussants, is even greater equality. They do not view this as lying in the ‘neoliberal’ turn capitalism has taken since the 1980s which has seen an increased proportion of total wealth owned and controlled by the richest, but in governments levying swingeing taxation rises on the wealthiest (‘80-90% on income and profits’) and being more active in implementing ‘a fuller development of the welfare state’. This, rather than ‘uncritically embracing the market faith’ as they see recent Western governments as having done, will assure a more equal (or at least less unequal) distribution of wealth and give more people access to the goods and services which will allow them to have comfortable living standards. The aim, Piketty argues, should be an economy that is ‘99% decommodified’, by which he means extensive government ownership and control of the means of living, and one which, Sandel asserts, will also lead to ’greater equality of recognition, honor, dignity and respect’.

It would be churlish not to acknowledge the well-meaning nature of the two commentators’ wish lists, their support, for example, for ‘more investment in health and education, higher progressive taxation, curbing the political power of the rich and the overreach of markets’ (Sandel). Unfortunately, however, these do not stand up to close scrutiny. While capitalism, with its ‘growth at all costs’ compulsion, may continue to improve living standards for many on the planet overall, governments simply cannot create anything resembling equality among those who live under that system, since their prime purpose is to manage it in the overall interest of the minority who monopolise the wealth. Different governments may of course have different approaches to this, in the degree of central control they exercise, for example, but, so long as the overall framework of money, wages and salaries, and buying and selling exists, they will always – and inevitably – find themselves trying to keep afloat a system founded on producing goods and services for a profit.

At one point, one of the discussants (Piketty), who claims to stand for ‘democratic, federalist, and internationalist socialism’, seems to come close to suggesting the society of free access that socialists advocate. He talks about a situation in which ‘99% of goods and services, like education and health, are freely accessible’ and ‘you only have 1% left commodified’, advocating ‘a system outside monetary logic and the profit logic’. Yet he comes out the other end still failing to see beyond a monetary economy, and in the end it becomes clear that what he is hoping for is a form of capitalism with a less unequal distribution of wealth and income and a more extensive welfare state (or ‘social state’, as he calls it) than exists at present. It also becomes clear, in the end, that the discussion between the two figures is one about old-fashioned reformism, about the extent to which it is possible for capitalism to ‘narrow’ the pay gap between one worker and another and the wealth gap between workers and capitalists. It is not about achieving the absolute economic equality that will characterise a society of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – the society of the future that we call socialism.

Howard Moss

All socialists now? (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

That august publication the Daily Mail recently ran the headline ‘Another Day in Starmer’s Socialist Utopia. When Did Britain Become North Korea?’. It reported that Starmer was ‘hiring a raft of high tax fanatics’, was ‘threatening ‘ID cards for all’, and that ‘fury erupted’ when armed police arrested the writer of Father Ted ‘over online comments about transgender activists’.

It goes without saying that no one with the slightest good sense or judgement could fail to see this for what it was – a pile of breathless and exaggerated bilge. The comparison to the repressive, authoritarian dictatorship that is North Korea was particularly ludicrous, as was the assumption that that regime is somehow ‘socialist’. Equally mind-boggling was the notion that Starmer’s government is socialist too (a ‘socialist utopia’ in fact) and thus to be equated to North Korea, when neither set-up has anything to do with socialism.

Socialism: what does it mean?

What gives impetus to such sneering declarations, intellectually empty as they are, is the fact that Labour and its supporters are themselves fond of talking about themselves as socialist, even though the real task they are involved in is finding ways of running capitalism. It’s true that Starmer himself has not uttered the ‘s’ word for some time, but others in his party have, and do so continually. The Labour MP Dawn Butler, for example, recently stated that ‘the Labour Party is a socialist party’ and that ’socialism isn’t a dirty word’. That moved this writer to email her and ask the question ‘Since socialism can be such a confusing word, can you please explain how you see it?’ Receiving no response at all, I thought I would try putting a similar question to another ‘socialist’ MP, Zarah Sultana, who had actually just left Labour to join Jeremy Corbyn in the setting up of a prospective new party (currently calling itself ‘Your Party’). I wrote: ‘I very much sympathise with what you say, in resigning from the Labour Party, about the failure of governments to deal with poverty and inequality and note your point that the issue at the next election will be “socialism or barbarism”. But, since socialism can be such a confusing word, can you please explain what you mean by it?’ I did at least get a response from her, but only the standard acknowledgement of receipt (‘Thank you for contacting me. Please read this automated response to your email, which confirms that I have received your correspondence’) and nothing thereafter.

The unfortunate thing is that, whether in the Labour Party or outside, MPs and others throw the ‘s’ word around without having a clear notion – and sometimes no notion at all – of what it means other than a vague wish for wealth to be spread more evenly and reforms to be brought in which will make life easier and less uncomfortable for those lower down the earnings scale – all with a view to somehow making things more ‘equal’. It rarely if ever crosses their minds that such changes, even if they were possible or feasible, would not change the basic structure of the system we live under which determines that production and distribution of goods and services takes place for profit not need, with overall dependence on money and buying and selling.

‘Your Party’

But despite getting no meaningful answer from the MP calling herself a socialist who had defected to Corbyn’s party-to-be, when I found out that there was to be a local gathering, open to all, to discuss the nature and setting up of the new ‘Your Party’ organisation, I decided to go along to observe, to listen, and maybe to speak. The turnout was 60-70 people, biased towards the older age group but in gender terms pretty much even. Yet if I was expecting to hear talk of socialism, in any of its possible conceptions, that’s not what I got. Most of the hands that shot up were from members of small left-wing groups or parties damning the current Labour government and seeming to envisage some kind of ‘entryism’ into the new party. There were also some non-affiliated attendees with apparently good intentions and maybe looking to find a home in a new ‘caring’ party. But what virtually all the contributions from the floor had in common was talk of the need to press for reform measures of various kinds: eg, nationalisation, higher taxation for the wealthy, expansion of the NHS, more funding for education and other services, ending of anti-protest measures, action against pollution and climate change. Only one speaker stood apart in saying that the main problem was that most young people nowadays have no idea what socialism means and a priority should be to fix that. I agreed with this, even though I doubted whether that person’s conception of socialism coincided with mine.

As for a contribution of my own, my hand wasn’t among those pointed to by the chair and I had to accept that. But had I been chosen, I would have said that I agreed with the idea that a clear view needed to be established of what socialism means. I would have added too that, as far as I was concerned, socialism didn’t mean ways of ‘fixing’ capitalism (impossible anyway) or trying to make it more palatable. Instead, it meant getting rid of the whole system of production for the market and buying and selling and replacing it with a moneyless cooperative society of voluntary work, free access and democratic control worldwide. I would have also said that, short of this, the ‘real change’ Jeremy Corbyn has said his new party will bring is destined to be the same mirage as all previous attempts at radical reform of capitalism have been, ending up as a predictable recycling of the status quo.

HKM

Zarah Sultana spoke at a meeting in Raynes Park (South West London) on 10 September. She said that the new party’s aim was to ‘materially improve people’s lives’. The Labour Party, she said, had betrayed its past principles and was ‘dead’; Starmer should be sent to the Hague for trial as a war criminal. She was in fact surprisingly radical for someone selected and elected as a Labour candidate, calling for the new party to support demonstrations and strikes as well as to get MPs and councillors elected. She favoured the new party being called ‘The Left’ and said it should be organised democratically with provisions for One Member One Vote.

She also said the new party should be ‘proudly socialist’, and that she wanted to ‘bring our country to socialism’ and that the election of local councillors would ‘pave the way to the socialist challenge’. But she didn’t explain what she envisaged socialism as being. The rest of her speech suggested it would be capitalism reformed into a less unequal society with properly funded public services and state-owned utilities and that put people before profit. As she was pretty approachable after the meeting, I could have asked her about it but she was surrounded by people wanting to take selfies with her.

ALB

I went along to a Your Party meeting at a pub in my local seaside town, to find around 40 people, a few youngish but most of retirement age. Many of them were undoubtedly keen for a left alternative to what they saw as a right-wing Labour government. Quite a few others, like wolves at a Bambi picnic, were predatory undercover Trots keen to get themselves on the group’s steering committee. Two facilitators spoke at length, one in an inaudible drone, the other in a grating whine, to the effect that this was to be a workshop event, in which small groups would discuss and then feed back their responses to the questions: (a) what the priority of the new party should be, (b) what name it should have, and (c) what the immediate focus of the local group ought to be. It occurred to me that my answer to all three questions would be the same, and very likely not appreciated by anyone present: abolish capitalism.

The assembled gathering dutifully knuckled down to the task, while I fell into conversation with an enthusiastic ‘socialist’ who believed that China and Russia had a thing or two to tell us about how to run an economy, and wasn’t our government just as fascistic as them nowadays anyway? He left before the end, to catch the football, but accepted a leaflet and promised to look us up. I also bailed out, having regretfully concluded that no open debate was likely, that reformism was the only item on the agenda, and that this new left surge was history repeating itself in a kind of desperate and perpetual amnesia.

PJS

The Greens too?

The Green Party has just elected a former LibDem candidate as their leader. He too says he’s a bit of a ‘socialist’, as this report of the launch of his leadership campaign recorded:

‘One member asked whether Polanski thought the Green Party was “explicitly a socialist party”. His response was, “On a personal level I agree with the majority of socialist principles”, and said that, “we are a left wing, left of centre party”. But he also clarified, “The reason why I wouldn’t say explicitly, yes, we’re a socialist party kind of in public and as a slogan is I think that’s going to unnecessarily put people off”. He went on to argue that in defining the Greens as a socialist party there would be a need to, “appeal to all the socialists and kind of struggle with all the people who are anti socialist who might have voted Green if we didn’t say we were socialists.” Instead of describing the Green Party in this way, Polanski instead argued that Greens should be talking about a “fair, equitable society where we make sure that everyone is looked after”, and advocating policies like a Universal Basic Income.’

He is in fact on record as having described the Green Party explicitly in public as a ‘socialist party’. In a video debate in February this year he argued that there was no need to set up a new left party as ‘there is, after all, a socialist party in the UK already: it’s the Greens’ .

He doesn’t say what he means by ‘socialist principles’ but it is certainly not a socialist principle to not say you are a socialist in case you lose votes or to seek the votes of anti-socialists. He does, however, give a hint as to what he thinks ‘socialism’ is when he mentions a ‘fair, equitable society where we make sure that everyone is looked after’. That’s probably what he said was his aim when he was a candidate for the LibDems. Which party doesn’t promise that? More important is how such a desirable if rather vague end is to be achieved — by trying to reform capitalism or by making the means of wealth production the common ownership of society under democratic control?

Polanski has also described himself as an ‘eco-populist’. That sounds about right.

ALB

Labour’s Department of War (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people are surprised and disappointed by Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Yet, it is a typical Labour government. Fundamentally, it is a belief in state action to co-ordinate the market economy that characterises them in power. Thankfully, any association between this belief and socialism has long since been dispelled.

Indeed, to their credit, this government is faithfully carrying out the objects set out in the Labour Party’s rulebook, which commits the Party to work for:

‘A DYNAMIC ECONOMY, serving the public interest, in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and cooperation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper with a thriving private sector and high-quality public services where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them’ (Clause IV.2.A).

And:

‘Labour is committed to the defence and security of the British people and to cooperating in European institutions, the United Nations, the Commonwealth and other international bodies to secure peace, freedom, democracy, economic security and environmental protection for all’ (Clause IV.3).

No-one can pretend that the present Labourites have not been up-front with this commitment, at least: anyone voting for them without illusions should have known.

We can see this in action in the way that Downing Street announced the UK taking part in the NATO agreement to spend 5 percent of GDP on Defence.

‘Marking a step change with the approach of previous governments, the National Security Strategy directly answers to the concerns of working people, aligning our national security objectives and plans for economic growth in a way not seen since 1945’.

The reference to ‘working people’ is labour-washing this strategy, which will be about making phenomenal amounts of profit for defence contractors and arms manufacturers. As the NATO press release on the agreement notes:

‘Research and development (R&D) costs are included in defence expenditure. R&D costs also include expenditure for those projects that do not successfully lead to production of equipment’.

This is the NATO agreed definition of defence expenditure. The agreement is for this figure to reach 3.5 percent of member states’ GDP, with an additional 1.5 percent of GDP to be spent:

‘annually to inter alia protect critical infrastructure, defend networks, ensure civil preparedness and resilience, innovate, and strengthen the defence industrial base’.

So, NATO states are preparing to fiddle the figures by defining as much as they can as defence expenditure (see for example rumours Italy is looking at designating a transport bridge as defence expenditure).

Of course, the US has long done this, with a substantial veterans benefit system: spending about $300 billion annually, 90 percent of which is split between income support for veterans (including pensions) and medical costs. This is itself part of the economic conscription of workers to fight in the armed forces for the people who own the country.

Starmer’s government wants to use its military spend as part of its drive to generate planned profits for capitalists through that ‘dynamic economy.’ According to the MOD 463,000 jobs (about 1 in 60) are supported by the defence industry (that includes 272,000 jobs supported by military spending – 151,000 directly and 121,000 indirectly) on top of the 181,890 serving military personnel.

However, as the Institute for Government notes:

‘The single largest cost to the MoD is the Defence Nuclear Enterprise, which is responsible for the procurement, maintenance and disposal of the UK’s nuclear submarine fleet. This was allocated 38% of the 2023-2033 Equipment Plan, or 20% of total defence spending’.

That is, maintaining the UK’s capacity to launch a nuclear device at any nation in the world. Interestingly, they also note that:

‘Most additional UK defence funding between 2015/16 and 2023/24 was allocated to capital spending, to acquire or maintain fixed assets like equipment and land. This element of spending increased by 95.5% in real terms over this period’.

Depending on how you count it, the UK is the 5th or 6th biggest-spending military country in the world. This expenditure is necessary to give continued diplomatic clout.

This comes at a cost. Those tens of thousands of service personnel are removed from the workforce and from doing any potentially useful work (neither generating profits for capitalists, nor creating use values for the community).

The jobs and industries supported by defence spending do produce profits for the companies involved, but those profits are essentially transfers from elsewhere, as they are paid for by taxes extracted from the profits of other capitalists.

Defence does bring in some profit. ‘UK arms exports: Statistics’, a House of Commons report from July this year notes that ‘the UK won defence orders worth £14.5 billion in 2023. This is a 39 percent increase in real terms on the previous year’. Over 50 percent of this was aerospace. This would represent a poor return on all that defence investment, but in fact it also reflects the UK geostrategic interests, as shown by where the sales went to:

‘Europe was the largest market for UK defence exports, accounting for 34% of total exports over this period, followed by the Middle East (32%), North America (18%), the Asia Pacific (7%), Latin America and Africa (both 1%). The remaining share (8%) was exported to a mixed or unidentified region’.

There are other defence spin-offs in terms of new technologies. The recently published government document, ‘Defence industrial strategy: making defence an engine for growth’ notes: ‘The Spending Review confirmed that MOD’s research and development budget will be over £2 billion in 2026-27 and will rise each year’. This includes a mandate to spend 10 percent of the MOD’s procurement on novel technologies, including AI-driven solutions.

Finding new and inventive ways to kill people seems a very roundabout way of creating wealth, but it is a way which has to exist in a society characterised by a tiny minority controlling the productive resources at the expense of the majority.

Pik Smeet

Letter: Conditions for socialism (2025)

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

Conditions for socialism

Dear Editors,

I am sympathetic to the politics of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and share its aim of a socialist society established by a conscious and democratic working class majority. What follows is written in that spirit, as a contribution to the discussion on how we prepare for such a transformation.

Capitalism cannot transform itself into socialism. That conviction lies at the heart of socialist thinking and aligns with the principle of establishing a system where the means of production are owned and democratically controlled by the community as a whole. Socialism must be the conscious act of a working class armed with knowledge, organisation, and power.

It is often argued that when the working class is ready for socialism it will vote for it. That rests on two essential truths. First, socialism can only be achieved by a large conscious majority acting democratically and intentionally. Second, the existing machinery of parliamentary democracy, limited though it may be, contains within it the possibility for a peaceful and organised transition, provided the working class understands how that machinery works.

Capitalism thrives on keeping the population politically subdued and misinformed. A poorly informed electorate is an easily ruled one. That is why the working class must be educated, not only in the theory of socialism, but also in how decisions are made, how budgets are set, how law functions, and how representatives can be held accountable. Knowing the rules is the first step to changing the game altogether.

Real democracy begins in our communities, workplaces, housing estates, and union halls, places where working people already share their lives and struggles. Those local assemblies could form the foundation of socialist organisation. On that base, regional workers’ councils could coordinate action on health, housing, transport, and workplace democracy. Delegates to such councils would remain at the service of their community, recallable, rotating, and bound by the decisions they carry.

Above these regional councils, a national workers’ convention could bring together delegates answerable to their base, constrained by short terms, public transparency, and salaries no higher than a worker’s wage. Such a structure could make use of the ballot box while grounding representation in a democracy strengthened from below.

This approach does not reject parliamentary activity. Parliamentary work could serve to spread clarity, to win small improvements, and to reinforce struggles beyond the ballot box. Democracy, limited though it may be, can be an instrument of socialist transformation, but only when matched with organised, politically educated working class action.

If capitalism falls, socialism must stand ready. A revolution of words without preparation, or the destruction of the old system without having built the tools to replace it, will only lead to chaos. Education, organisation, clarity of purpose, and collective democratic structures matter as much as any vote.

Capitalist institutions will call this vision naive or impractical. That reveals their fear. They would rather manage anxiety than meet a working class that knows its power, acts together, and understands both the potential and the limits of parliament.

Socialism requires no saviours. It requires citizens who understand how power works, believe in collective solutions, and organise from the ground up. This is not a utopian fantasy. This is the practical road to a democratic and equitable society.

Pablo Wilcox

Reply:

We agree. Obviously, socialism cannot be introduced by a simple parliamentary vote. It requires, as you put it, ‘a large conscious majority acting democratically and intentionally’ and, also, organised outside parliament in the sort of ways you outline. We would add that, to win control of political power, it will also require a mass socialist party, organised in the same sort of democratic way and without leaders, to contest elections and send mandated delegates to the parliament and regional and local councils. The socialist majority needs to win control of political power to take it out of the hands of those who control it on behalf of the capitalist class and to use it to end their ownership of the resources on which society depends. This has to be done before current problems can be solved in an effective and lasting way.

Three different situations need to be distinguished: (1) what exists today when only a relatively tiny minority want socialism; (2) what will exist when a substantial minority and eventually a large majority want socialism; (3) what will exist when socialism has been established.

On (1), we draw the conclusion that the urgent priority is to help the emergence of more and more socialists by spreading the view that capitalism can never be reformed to work in the interest of the majority and that bringing the means of wealth production into common ownership under democratic control is the only way out. Today, then, socialist activity as such is essentially educational and consciousness-raising.

On (2), we can’t predict and don’t want to lay down how a socialist minority in the course of becoming the majority will or should act. That will be for it to decide, but we can expect that it will try to extract what concessions it can, by organising in the ways you suggest as well as in a mass socialist party. Hopefully, the mass socialist party will pursue the same policy that we do and not make the mistake of deciding to itself seek support on the basis of being able to extract such concessions rather than exclusively for abolishing capitalism. That can be left to trade unions and other popular organisations. No doubt, on the eve of the winning of political control, plans will have been drawn up to be implemented once such control has been won. But, again, we can’t usefully predict or lay down now what they should be. That will be for those around at the time to decide in the light of then existing conditions.

On (3), socialism will have a democratic decision-making structure but again, we don’t want to be too prescriptive, and it may be, for example, that delegates could be sent to local councils and even a central decision-making body on the basis of where people live rather than just on where they work. 

Editors.

Material World: Looking inside the doughnut (2025)

The Material World Column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kate Raworth’s 2017 book Doughnut Economics has three main themes: the Doughnut itself, the shortcomings of mainstream economics, and reformist proposals about how society should be organised. We will discuss these in reverse order, finishing with the one that offers the most interesting ideas about humanity and the world we live in.

Most of the ideas in the book about how society should be organised are fairly standard left-wing reformist fare, such as firms being owned by their employees. In the peer-to-peer economy, everyone can become both a maker and a user. There should be community currencies, alongside national currencies. Rather than commercial banks creating money when they offer a loan (a claim which misunderstands how banks function), central banks can issue new money to every household. Tiered pricing, whereby the more people consume, the more they pay, will ration use of resources and benefit the less well-off. Economies should be regenerative by design, recycling carbon, water and so on. These schemes, however, leave capitalism in place and so will not solve current problems.

Tomelilla, a small town in Sweden, is attempting to apply some of the principles of Doughnut Economics (Guardian, 17 July). This includes, for instance, revamping an existing building rather than building a new ice rink. This is an example of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (doughnuteconomics.org), which has several hundred member organisations across the world, and is intended to put the Doughnut ideas into action. The trouble is that it all assumes the continuation of capitalism and so will not be able to go beyond a system which prioritises profit over caring for the planet and its inhabitants.

Raworth argues that economics as taught nowadays is rooted in the mindset of the 1950s and even the 1850s, with little or no discussion of what the aims of the economy should be. In reality, the free market has never existed, as markets are strongly shaped by laws, institutions, cultures and so on. Nor is there such a thing as free trade: power relations always influence cross-border flows. Unpaid labour is ignored, as is the fact that the economy exists within society and the living world. At the heart of economic theory is Homo economicus, ‘solitary, calculating, competing and insatiable’, whereas humans are in fact reciprocating, interdependent and ‘deeply embedded in the web of life.’

The book’s subtitle is Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, which would involve, for instance, acknowledging an embedded economy with social, adaptable humans which is distributive and regenerative by design and agnostic about growth. There are some good points here, but humanity would still be stuck with capitalist economics.

As for the Doughnut, this is ’the space in which we can meet the needs of all within the means of the planet.’ It is shown via a diagram of a doughnut, with two rings and an empty interior. Its inner ring sets out the basic requirements of life, including sufficient food, water, sanitation, energy, education, housing, all achieved with gender equality, peace and justice. But these are not currently being met, as millions ‘lead lives of extreme deprivation’. One person in nine, for instance, does not have enough to eat, and millions of children die each year from easily preventable illnesses. And the richest 1 percent of the world’s population own more than the other 99 percent put together.

The outer ring relies on the notion of planetary boundaries proposed by Earth-system scientists, an ecological ceiling that humans need to keep within: these include climate change, ocean acidification, chemical and air pollution, freshwater withdrawals, and ozone layer depletion. Most of these are associated with specific levels that should not be crossed. But at least four of them have already been transgressed: climate change, land conversion, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, and biodiversity loss. Biodiversity loss, for instance, is at least ten times the recommended rate, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is above what should be aimed at.

The idea behind the Doughnut is to meet everyone’s basic needs while keeping within the planetary boundaries that will prevent environmental catastrophe. ‘Raworth’s fundamental assertion is that a sustainable and just society can be realized only if a global economic system can be put in place that will allow as many people as possible to thrive in the space between these upper and lower boundaries’ (Kohei Saito: Slow Down).

As an illustration of the problems faced by humans, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently moved its Doomsday Clock to just 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. This was partly because of the war in Ukraine and the risk of nuclear war, but it was also on account of climate change, emerging and re-emerging diseases, and so on.

Raworth uses an Embedded Economy diagram to illustrate how energy plus living matter and materials are employed within Earth and society, while heat and waste matter are output within the market, the state and finance. But more constructive is the idea of a butterfly economy, whereby renewable materials are used and the two wings involve regenerating and restoring (repair, recycle etc). An economy cannot be completely circular as it is not possible to re-use all materials, so speaking of a cyclical economy is more helpful. The latest Circularity Gap Report argues that the global economy is in fact becoming less circular than it was a few years ago.

The Doughnut is not a solution in itself but a framework for examining some possibilities and looking at how a system designed to meet people’s needs could work while remaining inside the limits that have been identified. A socialist world, without classes or borders or the profit motive, would be by far the best way of addressing these issues and achieving the goal of, as Saito says, thriving within the boundaries.

Paul Bennett

Blogger's Note:

Kohei Saito's Slow Down was reviewed in the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Nationalism and capitalism (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pedants like to distinguish between ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’. The former signifies love for one´s country; the latter, while meaning that too, also means not being particularly tolerant of other countries (or cultures). In practice, though, ‘patriots’ can very easily become ‘nationalists’ even without knowing it. These are just two points along the same spectrum.

What that spectrum is based upon is an emotional attachment to the rather fuzzy concept of ‘national identity’. This is supposed to provide a kind of social glue that holds together large-scale, culturally diverse societies and allows them to function reasonably well.

National states

Benedict Anderson´s seminal work, Imagined Communities (1983), discusses the way ‘print capitalism’ and the growth of literacy aided the spread of national consciousness. Other factors, like improvements in transport and increased mobility, also helped to widen the social horizons of what were once relatively isolated communities that characterised a feudal society.

Before the rise of capitalism, nation-states did not really exist. Though there are strong grounds for saying that capitalism originated in England (specifically, in the English countryside, where the practice of wage labour became universalised), the first prominent individual to put nationalism on the map was, arguably, a Frenchman – Napoleon. Napoleon explicitly appealed to the idea of the nation as the basis of legitimate political power, where his predecessors had relied instead on such arcane notions as the ‘divine right of kings’ to govern.

However, we should not infer from this that nationalism is the indispensable precondition for a large-scale society to exist. Long before the nation-state existed, large multi-ethnic empires with extremely porous borders existed in the ancient world.

In Europe in 1500, there were approximately 500 more or less autonomous political units – an intricate patchwork ranging from Italian city states (many of which subsequently fell victim to conquest) to numerous principalities (often themselves the product of dynastic quarrels within aristocratic families) and a scattering of relatively consolidated kingdoms. Some of these were nominally part of one or other, much larger, ramshackle, sprawling entities, such as the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire once scornfully remarked, was ‘neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire’.

By 1900, however, the political landscape looked very different indeed. The number of self-governing units involved had been drastically whittled down to a mere twenty-odd nation-states having jurisdiction over the entire European landmass. Napoleon´s armies, which conquered much of Europe in the early nineteenth century, contributed to this development in the sense that they helped to create circumstances that eventually led to the rise of nationalist movements later on in that century.

Pseudo-traditions

Then there is the thorny question of nationalism and cultural diversity. Though it is claimed that nationalism enabled the emergence of large-scale culturally diverse societies, the fact of the matter is that cultural or ethnic differentiation has often presented a serious challenge to the nationalist project. If anything, the rise of nationalism has brought about the erosion of local cultures and languages and, in general, has had a flattening effect on the cultural landscape.

What is called the ‘national culture’ is not always what it seems. In The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, the claim that certain national traditions or institutions have their origins in some mist-enveloped remote past (something that is supposed to invest a tradition with more authenticity) was critically scrutinised and found to be often false. Many of these traditions are pseudo-traditions only recently invented for the express purpose of trying to fashion a national identity – in more concrete terms to facilitate nationalist sentiment.

In short, the basic thrust of nationalist ideology tends towards cultural homogenisation. The more culturally homogenised a population is, the easier it is for the state to manipulate it and elicit its support. Standardisation also enables more effective bureaucratisation.

Taken to an extreme, this homogenising thrust can manifest itself in the form of genocide. As Ernest Gellner points out, where ethnic pluralism exists, ‘a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homogeneous… if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all non-nationals’ (Nations and Nationalism, 2009).

However, one should note that this is only a tendency within nationalist ideology; in the real world, most nationalisms have had to opt for some kind of pragmatic or more inclusive compromise in the form of ‘multiculturalism’.

Globalisation

Factors curbing nationalism´s tendency towards cultural homogenisation within the confines of a given nation-state include not only the resilience of ethnic subcultures and the inward migration of ‘foreigners’, bringing with them their own cultural beliefs and practices, but also the impact of what might be called ‘global culture’:

Back in 1848, the Communist Manifesto had something to say about that:

‘In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature’.

Big business is, today, a major purveyor of this global culture. One thinks of the role of big tech companies in providing social media platforms or the impact of global chains like McDonald’s in shaping our culinary tastes. Wherever you go in the world, cities are getting more and more alike with the same monotonously predictable selection of High Street stores.

There is a certain irony in all this. Capitalism, which gave birth to the ideology of nationalism, has also unleashed powerful forces that tend towards the erosion of national distinctiveness.

Backlash

In some ways, this contradiction has brought us to the fraught times we are living in today. The unravelling of the Neoliberal project that has been the dominant paradigm since the 1970s has prompted a backlash against globalisation and the resurgence of virulent nationalism. Far-right movements are on the rise in many parts of the world. Their animus is mainly directed at that most emblematic aspect of globalisation – the movement of migrants across those imaginary borders that define the capitalist nation state.

Such migrations are often fuelled by wars and the devastation inflicted by military action undertaken by the very countries which now have some citizens bitterly complaining about the ensuing blowback in the form of desperately impoverished boat people arriving on their shores.

It’s not just war that is to blame; there is also the economic devastation wrought on people´s lives and livelihoods. For instance, the traditional Senegalese fishing industry has been virtually decimated by overfishing and the use of destructive methods, like bottom trawling, by industrial fleets from Europe and China. This has been a major factor in the increase in Senegalese migrants risking their lives to reach the Canary Islands in the hope of being relocated to mainland Spain.

Robin Cox

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In spite of momentous historical changes, the fundamental patterns of inequality reemerge across the centuries with remarkable consistency, the patterns of extreme wealth concentration, class immobility, surplus value extraction, special privilege, and ideological systems capable of masking the contradictions. This suite of social traits seems almost constant. 

(CounterPunch)

Write, but do not offend. Speak and comment, but do not divide. Observe cruelties, barbarities and murder, yet refrain from having an opinion. This is the constipating, stifling regime being put in place via suggested codes of conduct for organisers of writer events in Australia. The object of this intellectual veiling: discussing the exterminating war in Gaza. Across the country, the straitjacket of forced social harmony is being applied. 

(Dissident Voice)

Vietnam raises over $13 million for Cuba in historic charity drive. 

(Vietnam Net)

Asked whether Gazans would be allowed to leave, Al-Hayek was unequivocal. “The Palestinian people do not want to leave Gaza,” he told The Media Line. “We repeat each time: We will remain in Gaza until Judgment Day. Here we were born, and here we shall die.” 

(The Media Line)

Hotel accommodation benefits large contractors like Clearsprings, Serco and Mears, while Britannia Hotels made over £150 million in profit since it started to accommodate asylum seekers in 2014. Such contracts even brought the founder of Clearsprings to the Sunday Times Rich List. This company provides housing services to the Home Office that were associated with the highest mortality rate among resident asylum seekers between 2020 and 2023. 

(Counterfire)

Ah, those pro-lifers. Walking, talking, shooting oxymorons. You can tell the pro-life extremists. They’re the ones who want their enemies – the women and men who support a woman’s sovereignty over her own body – dead by any means at their command. Hard to get more pro-life than that. Mike Lee, the brilliant Republican US Senator from Utah, went on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, and posted about the fatal shooting of Democratic politicians in Minnesota, that, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way”. 

(CounterPunch)

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Wednesday that the United States has seized nearly US$700 million in assets connected to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Confiscated property includes multiple luxury homes in Florida, a mansion in the Dominican Republic, two private jets, a horse farm, nine vehicles, luxury yachts, jewelry, watches, and cash. 

(Dominican Today)

This is the humanist vision of Alien: Earth, which recognizes our distinctiveness is not in the power of our minds or the machines that we produce. Rather, it is found in humanity’s ability to transform itself, to create and recreate its own internal nature for new conditions, including those yet to come. In doing so, the show goes beyond mere anti-corporate sentiment and instead asks if we can create a new purpose for ourselves, unburdened by the demons of our past and the demons that our future might hold.

(Jacobin)

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

Cooking the Books: Death of a currency (2025)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Local currency is retired to end a notable trend’ reported the Times (1 September) about the demise of the Lewes Pound, a local currency introduced 17 years ago in the Sussex town and copied in various other towns and cities in Britain.

We mentioned its launch at the time (Socialist Standard March 2009) and the extravagant claims made for the local currency by George Monbiot: ‘It by-passes greedy banks. It recharges local economies and gives local businesses an advantage over multinationals’ .

The aim was to encourage people to spend their money locally by using a currency that could only be spent and circulated in the town concerned. If people used the local currency to buy from a local shop, it was argued, it would stay in the town, but that if they used ordinary money to buy from a national supermarket the chances are that it would end up being spent elsewhere.

Local currencies didn’t replace ordinary money. In fact, they had to be backed pound for pound by an equivalent amount of ordinary money deposited in a bank. The Times refers to this in its report when it says that, now that the scheme is being wound up, ‘the backing money will be donated to four local charities’.

As we mentioned at the time:

‘The Lewes Pounds get into circulation by people buying them for ordinary pounds and are convertible back into pounds on demand. In answer to the question “What happens to the sterling pounds that are taken when people buy Lewes Pounds?” the organisers explain: “All Sterling pounds are held in a safe deposit box with a local bank, so that we can access them at any time should people wish to trade their Lewes Pounds back into Sterling”’.

So no by-passing of ‘greedy banks’. Nor any extra purchasing power introduced to boost the local economy. It was just one piece of paper being replaced by another of equal spending power. Since people wanting to use the local currency had to buy it, those doing this were likely to have been enthusiasts who would have bought things locally anyway using ordinary money; the same goes for those accepting it in change (which people couldn’t be obliged to do). It is unlikely, then, that local businesses benefited — except the scheme itself by selling Lewes Pounds to collectors. How multinationals lost out remains a mystery.

The scheme failed in the end due to the nationwide trend to pay by card rather than cash. In Brixton the organisers of the local currency there tried to get round this by introducing an electronic Brixton Pound  but this too was overtaken by smartphones with their electronic wallets, and the Brixton Pound too was wound up.

When the Brixton Pound was introduced in 2009 our South London branch commented in a leaflet distributed in the area:

‘What’s the point (apart from helping local shopkeepers)? What difference does it make what coloured pieces of paper we have to use to get the things we need to live? The real problem is that in present-day, capitalist society we have to use money at all to obtain these, and that the amount of money we have will always be rationed by what we get as wages or as benefits. That restricts and distorts our lives’ (Th£ Brixton Pound — What For?).

The sad fact is that all the enthusiasm, time and voluntary work that went into devising and running local currencies led nowhere. This particular ‘notable trend’ to do ‘something now’ to try make things better under capitalism made no difference whatsoever.

Proper Gander: Crafty cover-ups (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘This strange thing is flying very fast but erratically … We didn’t see a cockpit. We didn’t see windows. And it moved in ways that we didn’t understand’ says Alex Dietrich, a former pilot with the American military, of her encounter with an unidentified flying object. The case was featured in BBC4’s documentary What Are UFOs?, which described current interest among scientists of reports of ‘strange things’ in the sky, with a potted history of the UFO phenomenon as context.

In the documentary, astrophysicists, witnesses and researchers discuss Dietrich’s sighting from 2004, which became known as the ‘tic tac’, and the so-called ‘gimbal’, observed in 2015. Both were oddly-shaped and oddly-behaving objects seen by pilots and tracked on radar, with footage recorded and subsequently pored over without universal agreement on what it shows. As some of the experts featured in the programme explain, ordinary objects may seem to have unusual shapes and move in unlikely ways because of how they appear on screen. Infra-red cameras are sensitive to heat, so an object will be more prominent the hotter it is, meaning that an aeroplane could look like a blob because the camera will only pick up the area around the engine. Another effect of this is that an object may seem to vanish if its temperature becomes close to that of what’s behind it. Also, the way that cameras on planes move in relation to other objects can make them misleadingly appear to travel in improbable ways. Recordings on modern equipment can be scrutinised much closer than in the past and, as repeated in the documentary, unexplained aerial phenomena are now investigated scientifically chiefly by analysing data, rather than relying on the veracity of observers’ testimony.

Scanning footage on computers doesn’t explain everything about all sightings, particularly when objects have been witnessed directly as well as through equipment. And some sightings may still be of craft which the state wants to keep top secret. As the programme demonstrates, the explanation that this cover-up has been of earthly tech rather than of extra-terrestrial spaceships seems more substantial now than when UFOs have previously been in vogue. The UFO phenomenon as we now know it began in 1947, not long after the Second World War cemented an association between objects in the sky and threats. Wreckage was recovered from a field near Roswell, New Mexico, which the army initially claimed was of a crashed flying disc, then a weather balloon. The subsequent saga of this being a captured alien ship (with aliens) drew attention away from the explanation that the debris was really from a balloon launched from a nearby military airbase. However, the balloon wasn’t for measuring weather patterns but was developed through the top secret Project Mogul to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The Roswell Incident coincided with a widely-publicised sighting of UFOs over Washington by pilot Kenneth Arnold. The United States Air Force responded to the subsequent wave of other reports of aerial oddities by investigating them under ‘Project Blue Book’, no doubt looking out for incoming Russian craft.

From the 1980s, reports of traditional saucer-shaped UFOs were often superseded by sightings of triangular objects. The shape was similar to that of experimental American fighter jets tested from Area 51, the research base in Nevada which the CIA only admitted existed in 2013. Restricting information is a prerogative of the military and governments, although they’re more interested in keeping their technological advancements secret from rival states than from the general public. If the issue gets blurred by focusing on aliens, then all the better. As researcher Jacob Haqq-Misra and astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi tell us in the documentary, the gap created by the absence of an official, public explanation for UFOs has been filled to some extent by Hollywood, which has reinforced the assumption that extra-terrestrial spacecraft are involved. 1950s science fiction movies played with the notion of alien invaders symbolising commie infiltrators undermining The American Dream. In its early years, the UFO phenomenon was moulded by the tensions and divisions of the Cold War, and has been a more bizarre effect on people’s consciousness than anxieties about the nuclear bomb.

The end of the Cold War didn’t mean the end of UFOs, which were even more prominent in the culture of the 1990s, when TV hit The X-Files emphasised how the UFO phenomenon is intertwined with conspiracy theories. Running through this is a mistrust of the government and military, concentrating on shadowy cover-ups of captured alien tech rather than of new fighter jets. The more zealous UFO researchers have tended towards the approach of trying to demonstrate something is alien, rather than starting enquiries in a more grounded way. A wilder, interplanetary explanation is more attractive in the sense of being attention-grabbing, and therefore has potential for financial exploitation which more mundane explanations lack. UFOs have been commodified particularly enthusiastically in the sci-fi films of the 1950s and the ‘grey’ alien tat and contactee books of the 1990s. These issues were raised in What Are UFOs?, but predictably the documentary didn’t follow them through. The UFO phenomenon has manifested itself in the way it has because it has been shaped by capitalist concerns: nation states, imperialism, military technology, secretive elites, profitability. This is why the emphasis on gathering data to explain each sighting voiced by some of the featured experts isn’t enough to explain the phenomenon itself. This requires an understanding of the societal conditions which have created it.

A good deal of the ufology phenomenon appears to be driven by capitalist concerns, not from another planet. Perhaps any real would-be extra-terrestrial visitors have been put off from landing by seeing the state of capitalist society (and how it has shaped our impression of them)?

Mike Foster

Irish presidential election (What’s the point?) (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A presidential election is looming in the Republic of Ireland with the election date set for 24 October this year. While most elections under capitalism result in negligible meaningful change to peoples’ lives, the Irish presidential election, which takes place every 7 years, is an exceptionally good example of a purely ritualistic exercise in democracy. The socialist view is that elections in capitalism, no matter where they occur, are really just exercises in ‘rearranging the deck chairs’ as all that happens is a change in the personnel who administer the same social system. This is not to disparage democracy as a process but just to highlight the pointless nature of many elections. This is certainly the case for this election.

Decorative

The office of the Irish President dates from 1937 and the role essentially mimics the position of the monarch in the UK. It is mostly ceremonial such as receiving foreign ambassadors, attending significant sporting and cultural events, signing some official documents, representing the country abroad, etc. It does have a specific political role in terms of deciding the process of government formation in the event of a hung parliament where a government has lost its majority. One other duty (with nothing equivalent in Britain) is the power the President has to refer any law passed by the Irish parliament to the Supreme Court to have its compatibility with the constitution tested. Historically both these latter two tasks have rarely been exercised.

The constitution too makes clear that the office of president is almost entirely decorative; subservient to that of the Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) and is not an independent branch of government (as in the United States). It has no role in making or executing public policy. So why would anyone be interested in running for it? Well it does have some obvious attractions; high pay (€332,000 per annum) with lots of expenses thrown in and no specific list of mandatory duties apart from the two mentioned above. There’s no boss checking on your productivity or your schedule. So if the President decides he/she is going to work a 3-day week, sleep in most mornings or take plenty of long weekends, so be it.

The origins of the office lie in the secession of the Republic from the UK in 1921. There was a transition period from that date up to 1937 where the British monarch remained as the titular head of state of southern Ireland until this role was superseded by the creation of the office of President of Ireland. From its inception up until 1990 the contest for the office was mainly a tribal competition between the two large Irish political parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael with the former always winning because of its greater popularity with the electorate. The office became a desirable retirement home for elderly Fianna Fail politicians who were beginning to find the stress of day-to-day politics excessively taxing. Considering the first three presidents, Douglas Hyde was 85 when he left office. Sean T. O. Kelly was 79 and Eamon De Valera was 90 when their terms finished. These three were followed by two more party stalwarts whose terms were cut short by a death and resignation respectively and the next Fianna Fail incumbent, Paddy Hillary, was younger than his elderly predecessors and was noted for his enthusiasm for the game of golf. He actually won a prestigious amateur golf competition in Ireland while President, presumably thanks to having plenty of time to practise. In the words of one acerbic commentator at the time ‘Paddy Hillary used the post to get his golfing handicap back in shape’. This pattern suggested to the public that either the role was quite undefined (and the holder could selectively undertake whatever duties they personally warmed to) or that the duties of the office itself were very light. Both views were correct. This in turn prompted people to wonder what the real point of the office was, because the performance of many of the incumbents to date had been perceived as lacklustre and uninspiring.

Reboot

The office got a notional reboot in 1990 when Mary Robinson won and her election was portrayed as heralding a new Ireland with a more energised presidency, although the job description remained exactly the same. She promised to be more active in the position and to speak out for sections of Irish society that previously had not had their voices heard. Mary Robinson, although effectively elected on the Labour ticket, with wider left-wing support, was in fact a classic middle- class liberal coming from a wealthy background. In her earlier days she played a significant role in the process of liberalising Ireland from the oppressive dictates of the Catholic Church which particularly negatively affected women’s lives. She subsequently resigned the Presidency to become a UN High Commissioner. Before becoming President, she had been a law professor and since leaving the UN has had prominent roles with a number of international quangos and think tanks. In fact, like many of the other presidents, she’s an example of the kind of ‘important’ person in the superstructure of capitalism who moves from one ‘important’ job to the next. Her two successors, Mary McAleese and then Michael D Higgins (the outgoing President) have tended to follow her example, speaking out in general terms about disadvantage in society, the future of the planet and other worthy (and wordy) matters. Most of their pronouncements are purely rhetorical, unobjectionable in terms of content but empty in terms of any substance.

The runners

There are three candidates in the field. Two are ‘centrists’, from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, The fact that these parties are in a coalition government together means that the government has two candidates going forward sharing an almost identical world view. The ‘left-wing’ candidate in the race is Catherine Connolly. She has the formal support of various left parties in the Dail including Labour, the Social Democrats, People before Profit-Solidarity and some left-leaning independent parliamentarians. Sinn Féin too is supporting Connolly and this should be a very significant boost to her, given the electoral heft of Sinn Féin.

One of her prominent supporters has described her as a ‘principled, left socialist’. She is from a long-established tradition in Ireland going back to her namesake (but no relation) James Connolly; her politics are a blend of ‘socialism’ with nationalism. The latter means she is a proponent of a United Ireland. She stresses the maintenance of Irish neutrality in international affairs and has a long-held opposition to any Irish involvement with NATO. In the past she has adopted what her opponents may portray as an ‘anti-western’ agenda, being moderately Eurosceptic and having a somewhat uncritical attitude to the current and previous regimes of Venezuela, Ecuador, Syria and Russia. She has long been vocal in her criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and this has become more pronounced since the Gaza war, though of course the depth of her feelings on this are no longer restricted to the Left. In her campaign she says that she will present herself as a voice for the community, a voice for peace and a voice for tackling climate change. The brutal truth is that, if elected, she can talk all she wants about these matters but can do nothing of substance.

The non-starters

A mainstream conservative candidate, barrister Maria Steen, to represent the socially conservative section of the electorate, failed at the last moment to obtain enough nominations. Her platform was based on her history of opposing the liberalisation of society from Catholic moral values over the last 10 years or so. In that sense, she’s the complete antithesis of Mary Robinson and if elected (which was never likely) would have represented a 180 degree turn on the part of the electorate.

There were the many micro candidates running campaigns to a lesser or greater degree to be nominated, some of them having no platform at all and others having agendas that can only be described as bizarre and/or pointlessly idiosyncratic. Many of these ‘campaigns’ were just publicity stunts. Names here included a former TV weather presenter, a former professional dancer (Michael Flatley), the aged pop star Bob Geldof (who hasn’t lived in Ireland for years), Conor McGregor, a mixed martial artist (and found guilty of rape in a civil court and currently being investigated for some dubious behaviour during that same trial), Gareth Sheridan, a very young entrepreneurial whizzkid, who felt that the office of president could do with the vim he feels he could provide. There was also a far-right activist who’s worried (as all of that ilk are) by immigration and the lack of respect for ‘our’ national flag. These all dropped out because of lack of nominations, with some of them attempting to save face by claiming they were just ‘testing the water’.

The election campaign proper began at the end of September. Because the President has no real political power, the candidates campaign on personality and character and what values or ethos they will bring to the post of representing the nation. Success or failure can depend on whether embarrassing or uncomfortable incidents can be found in a rival’s past to indicate they are not of a suitable calibre. Also given Ireland’s PR system of voting, the winning candidate has to be vote-transfer friendly. This is usually achieved by making positive but bland statements on every issue that arises and not engaging with vehemence in any matter that could mean you are portrayed as being excessively negative or partisan. In that sense, appearing to be ‘nice’ and not having strong opinions on any political matter is a definite advantage. The Irish presidential election, like the office itself, is purely ceremonial. Real change must come from a different perspective and approach to politics.

Kevin Cronin

An Alternative Reich? (2025)

Book Review from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alt Reich. By Nafeez Ahmed. Byline Books 2024. £12.99

This is a book about the challenge to conventional liberal bourgeois democracy posed by a network of far-right populists, ‘nativists’ and neo-nazis that appear to be in the ascendancy in many parts of the world, including the United States. They locate society’s problems not in the inability of the market economy to provide for people’s physical and psychological needs, but in the inability of the established systems of political democracy to deliver ’change’ to those who appear disgruntled with it.

Ahmed is a good researcher and he traces the way in which a relatively small number of multi-billionaires have set up or founded think tanks and pressure groups that have spread these far-right viewpoints over decades: most notably organisations like the Henry Jackson Society and the Heritage Foundation. Their reach has been deep and profound – into the heart of the media, and politically into the Trump administration, the Boris Johnson and Truss governments, and others in Western Europe and beyond.

The phenomenon is undoubtedly real and it is chronicled in detail here, but like others out to make a distinctive point, he can sometimes overstate his case. In the Conclusion, he seems to recognise this himself, saying:

‘The fascism of the Alt Reich is … a contradictory amalgamation of shifting white supremacism, extreme nativism and anti-globalist nationalist corporatism, which inherently pines for deregulated private capital to be backed by an authoritarian state reliant on unitary military power merged with techno-corporate autocracy. This is hardly a coherent worldview; rather it is an evolving mishmash of contradictory and competing worldviews’ (p.379).

Indeed, and this can be seen by the way in which some of its major players (like Trump and Musk) can fall out so easily, or why Reform UK has become a by-word for political resignation in more ways than one.

That the market fails to deliver on people’s expectations of it (and seems to have been doing so increasingly over the last 20 or so years) is at the root of why this rather incoherent set of viewpoints has gained such traction . . . the popular narrative is that all governments fail to deliver and they’re fundamentally all the same. As Mark Twain said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes and so it’s almost a minor variation of the old anarchist slogan about the futility of elections, in that whoever you vote for the government always gets back in.

And allied to all this there are worrying undercurrents – the blaming of immigrants as a source of society’s problems in a way not seen since the 1970s, an unshakeable belief in capitalism as a system but not its obvious and inevitable consequences, and a leader-loving authoritarianism that underpins a not-so-sneaking admiration for dictatorial abominations like Putin, Orban and Modi.

So Ahmed’s book is worth reading for these reasons alone. It’s just worth bearing in mind that the fascism of which he writes is not really the fascism of the 1920s and 30s, and while the ‘Alt Reich’ book title is a clever one it is, in this respect, not entirely accurate. Another caveat is that it seems odd that a book of this nature (around 400 pages) does not have an index. Perhaps it’s just the sort of left-field, unconventional, liberal approach the alt-reich themselves would decry. But without having an obsession with tradition and procedure, it might just, actually, have been rather useful . . .

DAP