Pathfinders: Lost generations (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like a collective summer madness, the World Cup has passed into memory. While it’s tempting to see such events as a harmless flag-waving celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity, the raising of a Malvinas banner after the England-Argentina semi-final was for many a dump of cold water. Rather than being a source of communal pride, nationalism is a nasty and manipulative ideology used to set the poor against each other in defence of the rich.

As media pundits pointed out before the game, the Falkland Islands have been a source of simmering resentment in Argentina ever since the 1982 war. Possibly the thinking is that because the islands are next to Argentina, they should belong to Argentina and the Brits, being not even in the same hemisphere, should keep their grubby hands off it. Silly argument over a few sheep, perhaps, and on that logic much of the world’s land should not ‘belong’ to the non-contiguous states that claim it, for example Greenland, Hawaii, Gibraltar, Guam, Alaska, Guadeloupe, Kaliningrad and a host of other overseas territories. But silly arguments don’t stop Russia from pulverising Ukraine, Israel slaughtering the population of Gaza, the RSF slaughtering people in Sudan, China waging a grey-zone war against Taiwan, or any of the approximately 130 armed conflicts going on right now around the world.

But never mind sheep or patriotic fervour, the Malvinas thing is more about mineral rights, with possession of the Falkland, South Georgia and South Sandwich group giving the UK – which is to say the British owning class – formal rights over 745,000 square miles of ocean and oil and mineral-rich seabed, much of which overlaps with Argentine claims. And what’s keeping the issue hot is that Argentina’s president Javier Milei is enjoying a cosy ‘bromance’ with Trump, and may conceivably be tempted to ‘do a Galtieri’ on the assumption that a) the US would support him rather than the UK, b) it would reinflate his wilting popularity given his brutal austerity regime at home, c) the UK has virtually no navy left with which to defend such a far-flung territory, and d) the global rules-based order has been ripped up and gunboat (or chainsaw) diplomacy is back in vogue.

Why does nationalism work? Because humans like simple explanations, and we like to belong to a group. This combination makes us rather easy to manipulate. Scientists, who strive after objective truth, are not perceived as offering simple explanations. Instead we go for politicians who spin easy but self-serving us-and-them narratives. They make us feel superior while conveniently obscuring questions about who exactly owns all the power and wealth in ‘our’ country.

Science and rationality are not born human instincts, they’re skills we have to learn, and our education systems are paradoxically lukewarm about encouraging that. Capitalism needs workers to be smart enough to boost productivity, but also dumb enough to be consumers who don’t ask questions. It needs scientists, sure, but it doesn’t need a general population with basic science literacy, who can tell what’s plausibly true from what isn’t. That’s why people believe in cosmic woo-woo, and why some, in the recent heatwaves, forked out up to £120 on hoax air-con systems that supposedly cooled a room in 90 seconds.

On the plus side, scientists are getting media savvy these days. New Scientist is now doing YouTube, presumably for the same reason as the New Statesman, Private Eye and others, to boost paper sales in a shrinking market. Arvin Ash does quantum theory, Sabine Hossenfelder rants against physics and the standard model, and Kurzgesagt does it all as cartoons for kids. Cambridge maths professor Hannah Fry is all over YouTube ‘shorts’, explaining with engaging insouciance how to instantly cool your overheated car, and how we know when modern humans first migrated from Africa to Europe (approx 100-170,000 years ago) by tracing back the DNA of human body lice, which evolved to stick to clothes.

Harvard professor of genetics David Reich, author of the groundbreaking Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018), also has lectures on YouTube. These explain how the new discipline of palaeogenetics has since 2010 shone a new light on the lost generations of prehistory, including a revision of the ‘Kurgan hypothesis’ relocating Proto-Indo-European origins from Anatolia to Iran and Armenia, and the discovery of Sapiens, Neanderthal and Denisovan interbreeding. In ‘Your ancestors aren’t who you think they are‘, he runs through the huge amount of new genetic evidence which reveals that human populations have been in constant flux in time and space, migrating, merging and mixing, such that concepts like ancestry, ethnicity and nationality have no scientific meaning. In short, we are all from everywhere.

But politicians don’t care about any of that. It’s much easier, say in the UK, to blame immigrants for a crumbling infrastructure and falling quality of life than to cite the country’s long-term geopolitical, industrial and economic decline after two ruinous world wars and the loss of a global empire. In today’s miasma of misinformation, bottom-feeding grifters like Farage, Lowe and Robinson can whip up xenophobic paranoia and hope the populist swell carries them into the corridors of power. It’s the same story everywhere, a collective madness that won’t pass.

The price of flag-waving is ultimately blood. The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the First World War and has in some ways recapitulated that ghastly conflict. The survivors at the front – many of them teenagers – now don’t even dare to sit in trenches, but hide in underground dugouts from loitering drones. The war has become ‘gamified’, with competitive points awarded for drone kills. Both states lie about the death rate, but it’s certainly enormous. And this keeps happening. Capitalism, like a crazed psychopath, kills its own children, pouring the flower of youth wholesale into nationalist wars that benefit only the rich. We owe it to these voiceless lost generations, and to our descendants, to abolish this capitalist madness forever.

Paddy Shannon

Party News: Durham Miners Gala - Part 1 (2026)

Party News from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘It’s not bloody ‘gah-la’, they call it ‘gay-la’ round here.’

‘No it’s not, it’s ‘gah-la’, I’ve heard people say that.’

‘For cryin’ out loud, it’s both. And it’s your round.’

The important thing you learn from the Durham Miners Gala is that, contrary to dismal impressions, radical left politics in the UK is not dead, but alive and well and willing to celebrate the fact every July. The Gala has been going since 1871, and attracts around 200,000 people, making it the world’s biggest such event, and jamming Durham’s small historic streets with crowds, performers, party-heads and the inevitable brass bands.

The enormous Gala field looked like a rock festival, with marquees, food kiosks, a bar with a very long queue, and a funfair. Pop and folk acoustic bands played on a big sound stage, in between impassioned speeches about union solidarity, including the fact that when the Reform-controlled council defunded Durham Pride, Durham Miners stepped up to support the event, recalling the support given to them by Pride members in 1984.

Our members were everywhere, discussing politics at our marquee stall, or out in the field, or on the way in. We dished out hundreds of leaflets, and distributed a lot of books and pamphlets, though we underestimated how much material we needed, forgetting that last year our stall was cleaned out.

All in all, a terrific event and one worth getting involved in for any member who can make the time to come along. We’ll be doing it again next year, for certain!

PJS

SPGB July Events (2026)

Party News from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

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Pathfinders: Moon madness (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to media hoopla last month, the NASA Artemis 2 flight round the Moon generated enormous public interest around the world. Did it really? Anecdotal evidence seemed pretty thin on the ground.

Okay, so maybe those old enough to remember the first-time round weren’t impressed. A fly-by is not a landing, after all. Back then the Apollo programme really did look like something out of science fiction and seemed to herald a new era of space conquest. Never mind that it was all blatant anti-Soviet swagger, after the US had been humiliated by first Sputnik and then Yuri Gagarin. Some things are bigger than politics.

The fascination was huge. The few state TV and radio channels were awash with space updates for weeks. Poor kids watched it all through snowy static on monochrome TV sets, while kids with rich parents played with plastic Saturn V model rockets with real detachable launch stages, plus model Moon landers on cratered terrains, crewed by Action Man astronaut dolls. Every magazine had special issue pull-out posters to plaster across bedroom walls. And then the landing. Neil Armstrong’s crackly, matter-of-fact voice held the world in breathless thrall as, between technical beeps, he announced the legendary step. Nobody used the word ‘singularity’ back then, but it felt like one. And that wasn’t even the greatest drama. Candlelight rallies and school assemblies across the world offered up fervent prayers during the hour-by-hour knuckle-gnawing crisis of Apollo 13. For a time it seemed like there was no another topic of conversation to be had. The world was of a single mind.

The illusion couldn’t last, of course, and neither could the budget. The Soviets had been bested, the world lost interest, and Apollo was cancelled. The space age failed to materialise and the notion of colonising other planets evaporated from the world’s travel plans. If today’s oldies are unimpressed, it won’t just be that humans have ‘been there, done that’, but rather that FA resulted from it. This time round the political swagger is aimed at China, which has announced that it intends to have a crewed moon-base by 2030. To any US president and especially King Donald, now modestly lecturing the Pope and presenting as Jesus, such an upset is beyond unthinkable.

Compared to the steely-eyed Cold War of the Apollo era, today’s world looks positively unhinged, with infantile megalomaniacs in charge of infantilised populations, and god-knows-what disaster right around the corner. If the Moon was habitable, perhaps we’d all be queuing up. As it is, opinions on Artemis among younger generations seem divided. Some argue on Reddit that they have enough to worry about ‘down here’ as it is, though one commentator makes a despairing case for distraction: ‘I (like most people) need something to be excited about right now. I refuse to not be excited for this just because life fuckin sucks at the moment lol’.

Recent YouGov polling finds that ‘57% of Britons feel returning to the Moon is of little to no importance for humanity’ and only ‘37% of Britons believe it’s likely that humans will land on Mars in their lifetime’. This appears to reflect a reasonable sense of priorities rather than any profound loss of interest in science, with ‘just 21% of Britons believing it’s of little to no importance for humanity to explore space for scientific purposes’.

Maybe the UK perspective is not representative, given that Britain never really had a dog in the space race, but opinions across the pond also seem divided. According to one source, ‘most polls show that as many as 90 percent of Americans don’t care about returning to the Moon or establishing a presence there’.

This however is in sharp contrast to a recent Ipsos poll which found that 62 percent of US adults thought sending people into space was worth the money (though interestingly the percentage dropped by 20 points when the phrase ‘billions of dollars’ was mentioned), with NASA earning 80 percent approval, a rating which Trump himself, currently on 38 percent, probably thinks he shares.

You might expect scientists devoted to popularising science to be in favour, at least. But astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson is scathing in his dismissal of the Artemis programme as a waste of time and money, and future Mars expeditions as ‘vanity projects’. Then there’s Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal, who argues that in the age of AI and robotics there is simply no point in humans running the considerable risks of interplanetary spaceflight except possibly as ‘an ultra-expensive sport’ for billionaires.

NASA knew, of course, that they faced a potential public engagement problem, especially during a cost-of-living crisis, so they embarked on an extensive PR campaign in order to justify the $100bn+ budget which, though only a fraction of the US defence budget, could still fund ten years of the UN World Food Programme that feeds 150 million people across 120 countries. Thus, NASA devoted much time to workshopping ‘ethical and social considerations’ in a bid to persuade voters that the whole venture was a worthwhile expense. As NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville put it, ‘This program will be over if people don’t buy it and they don’t come with us’.

Capitalists and state politicians do have ulterior motives though for Earth’s ‘eighth continent’. The great powers will happily ignore the Outer Space Treaty if they can feasibly extract the mineral deposits thought to be there. And with water now believed to exist at the poles, nuclear-powered crewed bases are viable, which could serve as low-gravity launch stations to Mars using electrolysis to generate oxygen rocket fuel. But in true Cold-War MAD style, these bases could also bristle with hard-to-hit nuclear missiles, as well as being out of range of prospective satellite wars. That, in short, is how capitalism on Earth could turn the Man in the Moon into our collective nemesis.

Paddy Shannon

World Socialist Radio - David and Goliath. Competition and “Enshitification” (2026)

Adapted from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

David and Goliath. Competition and “Enshitification” by The Socialist Party of Great Britain

In modern capitalism, so-called “Davids” (like startups) often win by using strategies backed by huge financial power, such as venture capital. Companies deliberately sell at a loss to undercut competitors, drive them out, and dominate the market—after which they worsen their service or raise prices, a process described as “enshittification.” These outcomes aren’t exceptions but built into capitalism itself: success tends to come not from better products but from access to capital and market control. What looks like an underdog victory is often just another form of concentrated power, meaning consumers and workers ultimately lose out as competition disappears and conditions deteriorate.

Taken from the April 2026 edition of The Socialist Standard.

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Pathfinders: David and Goliath (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Possibly one of the least attractive neologisms of the modern tech era is the word ‘enshittification’. But its coiner, science fiction author and post-scarcity activist Cory Doctorow, doesn’t much care. It’s an ugly word for an ugly thing. And once you are aware of it, you can’t unsee it, because it’s everywhere.

It all starts with a basic and age-old capitalist conundrum. How, as a manufacturer or service provider, can you come to dominate the market and crush all the competition? If you are hopelessly naïve, you might plan to do it by having the best quality product. An easier way, as practised by the likes of Amazon, Uber, Shein, Temu, and many others, is to borrow vast amounts of venture capital (VC) in order to sell at a loss, for long enough to undercut and wipe out the opposition. Then, when you’re the last company standing, the fun can really start.

Your VC-funded product doesn’t need to be perfect, just better and cheaper than the rest. People will flock to it, never suspecting a thing. After all, don’t we live in a world of limitless improvement? That’s how capitalism works, right?

And thus, you conquer the market by making your customers 100 percent happy. You’ve hit peak product. Nothing to change. Nothing more to do. Just sit back and watch the direct debits roll in.

In theory, anyway. Degrowthers and Doughnutters argue that the finite planet can’t afford infinite growth, but what if the economy could achieve a ‘sweet spot’, neither growing nor shrinking, that observes environmental boundaries? All manner of sustainable social benefits could flow from that. It’s a seductive idea. But capitalism is not a static system. It has its own laws of motion. Nobody has the choice to stand still. If you’re not racing ahead, you’re losing ground to the competition. Eat their profits, or they’ll eat yours. If the system isn’t racing ahead, there are no new profits to attract new investments. It either grows, or it withers.

And let’s not forget that you achieved peak product and market dominance at a loss. First you need to claw back those losses, and then your Silicon Valley VC investors will want a big fat return on top. But you’ve already maxed out the market. Where do you go from there? The answer, the only possible answer, is enshittification. Here’s how it works.

You’ve locked in your customers and killed the competition, so now you can price-gouge them. But it doesn’t stop there. Instead of one-off sales, you force subscription models on them so that they have to keep paying forever. If you run a streaming service, open up new income by riddling it with adverts your customers have to pay extra not to see. If it’s a social media platform, collect oceans of personal data to sell to third parties. If you own a phone product, issue updates that make it progressively ‘laggy’ until the customer surrenders and buys a newer model. If you own an electric car company, entice buyers in with fancy software services and then save money by shutting them down. If you own an operating system, design a new version that won’t work on existing computers, forcing everyone to chuck theirs in landfill and buy a new one. Cram it with unremovable resource-draining bloatware and charge extra for a ‘premium’ clean version. Build in intrusive and interfering AI that nobody asked for, with forced logins for simple desktop tools. Add a handy ‘Recall’ function that photographs their desktop every second, including all their passwords, website visits, personal messages, Tinder profiles and online banking details, and stores that information in your company servers where it’s a target for hackers. Ignore the protests. You know what your customers need better than they do. And besides, you’ve fired all your human customer service reps so now the whingers and wailers have to navigate a tortuous odyssey through concentric rings of automated responses and AI chatbots. In short, start with customer satisfaction, end with customer extraction, which Chinese scammers call ‘pig-butchering’. Lock in the suppliers too, and repeat up the chain.

Windows 11 is getting furious blowback for being enshittified. Users are turning in disgust to Linux, which is free, has no viruses and runs on any old machine with a fraction of the resource requirements. Others are resurrecting the antiquated Windows 7, now topping lists on pirate bittorrent sites. Piracy itself, once neutralised by the ease and reach of ad-free Netflix, is now resurging as the streamer market has fractured into a proliferation of platforms, each demanding your money while thrusting ads at you. The subscription model backfires as customers adopt the same cynicism as the corporations: ‘If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing’. The double standards are obvious to many: ‘If people downloading a song are criminals, what are the CEOs of AI companies using the entire internet to train their LLMs?’.

Last month the Norwegian Consumer Council released a video of someone cutting holes in socks, and sawing legs off tables to make them wobbly. The video was part of a global campaign to draw attention to the ‘deliberate degradation of a service or product’, urging politicians to take action against enshittification, including enforcing data protection, breaking digital monopolies, and giving consumers ‘more power to control, adapt, repair and alter the products they already own’. The council admits it’s a David and Goliath battle, ‘but… David won in the end, right?’.

Doctorow isn’t claiming he’s discovered some new phenomenon. He’s savvy enough to know how the world works. Enshittification is not just about how profit sabotages tech development, making things worse instead of better. It’s really a metaphor for capitalist production itself, which has generated eye-watering wealth yet imposes poverty on billions. In this version of the bible story, David is the bad guy, the tiny rich elite, while Goliath is the world working class, the sleeping giant that needs to wake up.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Big Red Button (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year Hollywood director Kathryn Bigelow caused a minor stir with A House of Dynamite, an earnest and compelling warning against nuclear war in the tradition of Fail Safe (1964), or its comedy twin Dr Strangelove (1964). Unlike her other films it probably won’t win any gongs though, because it annoyed a lot of people.

Note, this paragraph contains spoilers. Critics complained that the film wasn’t a ‘proper’ story, with a beginning, middle and end, but instead was a looping repeat of the same chain of events from different character viewpoints. Nor did it have an ending. The viewer is just left hanging. Does the missile blow up the city? Does the US launch a retaliatory strike, and against whom? We don’t find out. But that’s ok, because the ending wasn’t the point.

The point of Dynamite is how we got ourselves into this situation in the first place. ‘We all built a house filled with dynamite… and then we just kept on livin’ in it,’ says one character. Jacobin magazine sniffily objected that the film doesn’t really say anything, and is essentially an ‘impotent and unserious exercise in handwringing’. We might sniffily object in turn that anyone who doesn’t advocate the immediate abolition of capitalism is also merely handwringing. Which would include all of the left including Jacobin magazine.

Because while capitalism has done a lot of good things for humanity, it’s also an out-of-control profit-making machine that comes with some catastrophic downsides. Runaway global warming isn’t even the worst of these. We can probably survive that, as a species. But who would survive nuclear Armageddon? Who would even want to?

For all the Boomer generation’s supposed privileges, like free higher education, affordable houses, job security and career advancement, they still had to grow up in the Cold War under the shadow of the Bomb, not knowing whether each day would be their last. Now Gen Z and Gen Alpha, on top of their other problems, may come to know what that feels like. ‘On January 27, 2026, the Doomsday Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history’.

Who’s got nukes?

Nine countries today have a total of around 13,000 weapons, down from the Cold War’s 60,000, but arsenals are increasing again. You can see the distribution at a glance at armscontrol.org. Most belong to Russia and the US, but China is fast playing catch-up. These are not just nukes, but BIG nukes. ‘For example, the warheads on just one US nuclear-armed submarine have seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And the United States usually has ten of those submarines at sea’ (ucs.org).

Who wants nukes?

Basically, every country’s ruling elite, following the National Rifle Association’s argument that in an armed society, you’re safer if you’re packing heat too. Ukraine gave up its nukes in 1994 and what happened? It got invaded. Iran keeps being bombed by Israel, but who dares bomb nuclear North Korea? The lesson is obvious and unavoidable. Disarmament is for losers. To paraphrase Mark Carney at Davos, if you’re not at the nuclear table, you’re on the menu.

There are fewer total nukes than in the Cold War era, so why is the threat worse today? Because treaties are easier when there are only two sides to negotiate. After the panic of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War finally settled into stasis with arms control treaties. Now there are three major nuclear powers, and more on the way. In February this year the 2010 START nuclear non-proliferation treaty expired, and no nuclear power shows any interest in reviving or replacing it. Instead, with Russia fighting in Ukraine, China threatening Taiwan, India and Pakistan having cross-border skirmishes, and the US under Trump threatening to remove the ‘extended deterrence’ umbrella from its own NATO allies, the gloves are off. Any country that can get its hands on nukes and more nukes is going gangbusters to do just that, and never mind other internal costs like health and social welfare.

The upshot is proliferation. Now even America worries that, despite its gigantic arsenal, it won’t have enough to go round if adversaries like Russia and China decide to join forces. There is a terrifying escalatory logic at play, as the Economist points out. A country may opt for ‘minimal deterrence’, having just enough nukes to survive a first strike and still deliver unconscionable devastation on enemy cities. But beyond minimal deterrence, military planners aim for ‘damage limitation’, which means having enough missiles to take out all the other side’s nuclear silos, submarines and mobile launchers. If this capacity is achieved, it only drives the other side to acquire further weapons, and so on indefinitely (‘Nukes of Hazard‘).

Even if war is not the immediate result, this multi-sided arms race makes the prospects of any binding arms treaty look more remote, and the chances of a Fail Safe-like accidental launch greater than ever. But we, the vast majority of the world’s people, didn’t do this. We are merely the grunts who do all the work of maintaining what we like to call civilisation. It’s the rich who have built a world of dynamite and are sitting on top of it, smoking fat cigars. Our only mistake is continuing to support and vote for the market system which created the rich, and their nukes, in the first place.

J Robert Oppenheimer, the self-styled ‘destroyer of worlds’, was along with Einstein a founder of the Doomsday Clock that now ticks perilously close to midnight. There’s still time for humanity to claw its way back from the brink, and use its miraculous science and technology purely for the collective benefit, but only if it stops deluding itself. Capitalism is not sustainable, nor our best option. It’s a death cult with a Big Red Button.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: Engels (2026)

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

Engels

Hello

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

Best wishes,

Laura Spinney

Reply from the writer

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

PJS

Pathfinders: Human factories (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

With cinema takings falling in recent years due to online streaming, Hollywood has resorted to transparent attempts to lure in the lucrative female demographic through ‘girl-boss’ films, which show women in history dramas wielding huge swords and beating up men twice their size, outshining, outsmarting and indeed humiliating them at every turn. This has been widely derided as ‘wokism’, but women are unlikely to be fooled by such patronising efforts to ’empower’ them for the sake of box-office revenue. Unlike media executives spinning fantasies, they know what reality looks like in capitalism, where the pay gap is as wide as ever and domestic violence against women is at epidemic levels.

Late last year a Cornell University study looked at why so few women were found in senior job roles, and suggested that women had two strategies or ‘pathways’, one that gave them status, and the other that gave them power. The study concluded that women achieved status but not power through ‘gender-congruent’ behaviour (ie, being ‘ladylike’ and nice to men), whereas ‘gender-incongruent’ behaviour (ie, being assertive like men, aka ‘pushy’), might achieve power but was less likely to succeed.

Small wonder, perhaps, that writers from Charlotte Perkins Gilman onward have speculated about past or future feminist utopias. Back in October science writer Laura Spinney authored a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Guardian piece entitled ‘Was prehistory a feminist paradise?‘ Predictable answer: no. She discusses the ‘Marxist idea’ that the roots of patriarchy lay in the agricultural revolution, without once mentioning the word ‘property’, and with a hand-wavy vagueness that suggests she’s never read Engels on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, or possibly even heard of it. That might be why the book does not appear in her ‘Further reading’ section.

One book that does appear, however, is The Patriarchs, by Angela Saini (2023) reviewed last January. This author clearly has read Engels, though initially she seems oddly dismissive. Some property-based communities in India and China, she points out, are known up to comparatively modern times to have been matrilineal (inheritance via the female line) and matrilocal (brides staying at home, husbands relocating). In these communities, women knew each other whereas the men didn’t, giving women the greater collective influence, and girls tended to be taller than in patrilocal groups, suggesting they were better fed. Given these examples, Saini proposes that Engels overstated the crucial importance of the property mechanism in bringing about the ‘world historic defeat of the female sex’. Essentially, she says, it was never that fast or that simple.

It becomes clear, in the second half of the book, that far from dismissing Engels, she is seeking to further develop the implicit consequences of his argument. Property may have provided the mechanism for this historic defeat, she says, but it wasn’t initially decisive. What was decisive was the growth of the ‘state machine’. Power, she argues, relies on a big army, and this in turn depends on population size. To increase the one, you need to increase the other. How to achieve this? Ruthlessly enforce strict gender roles, as either soldier or mother. Use disposable males for farm labour and the military, and turn women into baby factories and stay-at-home textile workers. Ancient wars, Saini says, were as much about grabbing extra women as extra land. Women were the first known slaves in Mesopotamia, and obedience to men was baked into ancient cultures and religious texts, including the Bible and Koran.

There is a contemporary resonance. Population size today may not equate to military might as it once did, but it’s still important to capitalist states. More workers, potentially, equal more productivity and more profits, properly staffed infrastructures, healthy tax-funded governments, thriving towns and small businesses, high house prices and high demand for construction, transport systems, energy use, and so on.

Globally, the opposite is happening. Almost everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa, birth rates are well below replacement levels and falling. While voters in many countries are hypnotised by the populist fever-dream of the ‘immigration problem’, the better-informed know the truth. Capitalism is facing a demographic crisis. When population falls below a certain critical mass, things start to fall apart. Profits shrink, offices are deserted, whole towns are abandoned. Pension and health costs rise inexorably with the median age, paid from a shrinking tax fund and understaffed via a shrinking workforce. The European Commission predicts that by 2070 there will be barely two working-age people for every one person over 65 (Economist). China is thought to be massaging its official figures to disguise a catastrophic population decline. The reasons for all this are well known, to do with better education and access to contraception, and the rising costs of living, housing and parenthood. And states have begun to fight back.

The USSR in 1920 was the first country in the world to legalise abortion, but Stalin reversed the ruling just sixteen years later, when birth rates started falling. Now pressure is being applied to women in many countries to have more children. The right wing is morphing in sinister and cult-like pro-natalist and Christian trad-wife directions. In 2022 the US Supreme Court reversed the Roe vs Wade ruling, effectively banning abortion in many states. In 2024, US republicans voted against contraception as a federal right. China’s president Xi Jinping ‘told a meeting of the All-China Women’s Federation in 2023 that women should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and child-bearing”’.

If Saini’s historical analysis is right, the global outlook for women is not encouraging. Capitalist states need more babies, and never mind what women want. And never mind what men want either. The market system makes everyone suffer. For socialists, there’s really only one way to permanently destroy the forces that make us all into human factories, of one kind or another, for the benefit of the rich. And that’s by joining forces to bring down, not just glass ceilings, but ruling class power.

Paddy Shannon

Blogger's Note:

Laura Spinney replied to this article on the SPGB website.

World Socialist Radio - The Magic Gadget IRL (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

The Magic Gadget IRL by The Socialist Party of Great Britain

This episode reflects on life before smartphones and social media, describing how children in the 1990s experienced the world directly, without digital pressures such as FOMO (fear of missing out), sexting, cyberbullying, and addictive “attention economy” features designed to maximize engagement. It highlights growing concerns about the mental health impacts of ubiquitous device use among young people and discusses recent policy responses such as Australia’s ban on major social media platforms for under-16s and widespread bans on phone use in schools, though evidence of real benefits remains mixed. It also notes how pervasive smartphone ownership even among very young children blurs safety with surveillance, and that regulatory efforts may simply push kids toward less regulated, potentially worse online spaces.

Taken from the January 2026 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

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To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

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Featuring music: ‘Pushing P (Instrumental)’ by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

SPGB February Events (2026)

Party News from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Pathfinders: The magic gadget IRL (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

30 years ago in 1996, some were learning to use email, home computers and the embryonic worldwide web, but most families still shopped in the high street, looked up numbers in the phone book and watched ‘terrestrial’ telly together in the sitting room. Kids who wanted alternative amusement ended up hanging out with mates on park benches or outside supermarkets in the winter cold. Gay teens had no local community of peers to turn to. Neither did those with hobbies, or growing-pain problems. For them, the world in real life (IRL) was limited and limiting.

But, IRL, there was also no FOMO, no sexting, no doxing, no doomscrolling, no cyberstalking or cyberbullying, no revenge porn or ‘nudifying’ of classmates, and no pro-suicide chatrooms. Smartphones and social media (SM) have revolutionised the childhood experience, and not necessarily in a good way, as BBC Radio 4 reported (7 December): ‘Alongside the widespread adoption of smartphones has come a tidal wave of adolescent anxiety, depression, loneliness, and a spike in suicides’. Now Australia has banned access to ten of the biggest SM sites for under-16s. Communications Minister Annika Wells explains: ‘Teenage addiction was not a bug, it was a design feature, and on 10 December there are going to be withdrawal symptoms. […] With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the men who created the feature as “behavioural cocaine”‘.

Many countries now ban phone use in schools. Australia started doing this back in 2020, with support from teachers and parents alike. All claimed a degree of success. However the bans were not well coordinated, and subjective reports of greater engagement and improved mental health may be the placebo effect at work. A Birmingham University study looking at 1,227 students in 30 secondary schools found no evidence of changes in grades, amount of sleep, class behaviour, or even time spent on phones.

Australia’s latest action, with popular support, could trigger a global cascade of similar legislation. SM firms already face a landmark US trial this month. China, with basilisk totalitarian vigilance, uses spyware to restrict SM use and game playing by its youth, with a 40-minute daily limit for SM and 3 hours gaming per week. The UK 2023 Online Safety Act (OSA) instead demands that SM companies take ‘reasonable steps’ to protect children. Good luck with that. SM lawyers will have a field day.

It’s not just teens. Ofcom estimates that 1 in 4 UK children aged between 5 and 7 have a smartphone. Parents say they buy these phones for safety reasons to do with the child being contactable and trackable. But satellite-tracking a five-year-old is not the way to keep them safe. In truth, overworked adults managing multiple jobs and kids may well find the magic gadget of infinite games and videos hard to resist, given that it shuts their child up like nothing else and besides, if all the other kids have one, their child runs the risk of being victimised for looking poor.

Radio 4 interviewees speculate that the Australian ban could be a useful research opportunity. That’s if it works, but it probably won’t. One 13-year-old got round the ban in less than five minutes. And if one kid can do it, they all will, because of peer pressure, and because the industry wants to lock them in, not out, and because it will regard regulatory fines as the paltry cost of doing business. The new OSA age-verification rules for porn sites are also probably doomed. There has been a huge increase in downloads of VPN apps which hide the user’s IP address. With a conservatively estimated 240,000 online porn sites, Ofcom regulators face an uphill struggle to ensure compliance. So far they’ve taken action against just 70, leading insiders to argue that the new rules are effectively unenforceable.

And then there is the law of unintended consequences which produced this generational mental health crisis in the first place. Regulating the top SM sites might end up funnelling users to even worse places, like regulation-exempt gaming chatrooms, notorious as extremist rabbit-holes.

But, one might argue, why pussyfoot around imploring SM firms to take responsibility, why not just ban smartphones for kids altogether? The UK’s Education Select Committee last year recommended exactly that. But capitalist governments have bigger things to worry about, and unlike China, are generally leery of voter blowback for ‘nanny-statism’.

Even so, some young self-styled neo-Luddites are opting to downsize to ‘dumbphones’ that have no social media, with a view to clawing back their free time. As one manufacturer puts it, SM entrepreneurs are obsessed with monopolising their users’ engagement time, whereas users should be saying ‘What about me? What about my time?’ He continues: ‘The problem is not the device, it’s the business model: the attention economy. Every free app, every social media platform, every browser, is trying to maximize engagement so they can make money collecting data and categorizing people into different groups so they can sell it to advertisers’.

Unfortunately for neo-Luddites, dumbphones offer a near-zero margin, so tech firms ‘have little incentive to cater to dumbphone users, whose revenue potential is relatively miniscule – that is, if they can even make the economics of manufacturing the devices work at all’.

It’s a tragic indictment of capitalism that social media started by connecting people, and is now arguably complicit in global disinformation and child abuse. Now, encouraged by Trump, SM firms are even ditching their fact-checkers. Perhaps Gen Z parents, having seen the damage for themselves, will refuse to allow their Gen Alpha kids to go through it. The bigger long-term tragedy for Gen Alpha, whether they’re on social media or not, is that their future IRL will be one of relentless capitalist exploitation and wage slavery. If we really want to stop not just child abuse, but human abuse, abolishing capitalism IRL is the only way.

Paddy Shannon

(Facebook review, page 20)

Careless Society (2026)

Book Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Careless People: Power, Greed, Madness. A story of where I used to work. By Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025, 4th Estate)

Remember the Metaverse? Funny that you don’t hear much about it these days. This was going to be the Next Big Thing, the fully immersive virtual reality (VR) heaven where we all spent every waking moment, in our aspirational avatar forms, shopping, meeting people, swanning around in flying cars, and never going outside to see the real sky, or indeed talk to a real person. Unappealing as all this might sound to jaded old cynics and doubters, Mark Zuckerberg was so excited by his own visionary virtual universe that he changed his company name from Facebook to Meta, hired thousands of engineers and invested $36bn in development. As might be expected, tech firms chucked in plenty of money too, just in case it ever took off, and even manufacturers and high-street businesses like HSBC, Skechers, Bosch, Next and Heineken. Seoul City Council even went so far as to build a VR community space where people could ‘take advantage of public services 24/7 all year round and even visit the virtual mayor’s office and library’, as well as availing themselves of ‘various administrative services such as economy, education, and tax affairs’.

It’s hard to imagine a duller advertisement for the Metaverse than, ‘Hey, you can use it to pay your taxes!’ For once, the doubters were on the money. It turned out people didn’t want to spend their lives indoors wearing silly Oculus headsets. Sales flopped, followed by investments, until Zuckerberg quietly dropped the whole project.

One indication of how preposterous the whole thing was, and also why apparently nobody told Zuck this at the time, is the fact that in her tell-all exposé of her five years as a top Facebook executive, Sarah Wynn-Williams doesn’t bother to mention the Metaverse once. But she does have plenty to say about Facebook’s dirty off-book activities. One of these, which Facebook publicly denied to the consternation of their own marketing teams who were using it as a selling point, was to target vulnerable teenagers who had just deleted a selfie by thrusting beauty ads at them, on the assumption that they must hate the way they look. Though often funny, the darkest part of the book is where Zuck finally realises how the Trump campaign has used Facebook’s comprehensive data tools in an ingenious and targeted misinformation offensive in order to win the 2016 election. What’s dark about this is that Zuck and the other FB execs are not horrified, they are impressed. Zuck allegedly even begins to form his own plans to use the same techniques to run for president himself. After all, he’s so rich he wouldn’t even need to fund-raise.

The take-home gist is that, whereas FB starts off as a maladroit mix of idealists and nerdy technicians with no concept of the political reverberations they are about to unleash on the world, the more wealth and power they acquire, the less they give a damn about anyone or anything, a point rammed home by their casual indifference to the FB-driven massacres in Myanmar. Nobody comes out of this book looking good, including in some ways the author. The corruption, hypocrisy, sexual harassment and megalomania are laid bare for all to see. Some of these people would probably have been jailed, except that capitalism doesn’t jail people this stupendously rich. Zuckerberg, increasingly isolated in a protective shell of fawning sycophants, comes across as having had any trace of humanity surgically removed. He is never told that any of his ideas (like the Metaverse?) are just dumb and won’t work, because FB ‘ices out’ and then fires anyone who dares. He’s actually tried to have this book banned in the USA, a truly stupid move because of the ‘Streisand effect’, where attempts to suppress tend to backfire in spectacular fashion. To no one’s surprise, the free-speech champion’s attempt at censorship has sent the book to the top of the bestseller list.

But in truth, apart from showing how dysfunctional the business is, there are no real revelations that weren’t already out there. Yes, Zuck lied to Congress. Yes, FB are manipulative bastards out to make money out of your data. No, they have no scruples whatsoever. We knew or could guess all that. It’s a fun read, but socialists won’t be surprised by any of it. It’s just the reality of capitalist business with the veneer removed.

Paddy Shannon

Obituary: Ric Best (2026)

Obituary from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kenneth Alaric Best, who has died after a short illness, joined the Party in 1972 and soon after became a self-described hooligan in Bolton branch, after which he was a founder member of Lancaster branch. His merciless wit as a speaker, honed at a time when adversarial debate was considered a martial art, often left opponents feeling like they’d been machine-gunned. A smart and iconoclastic thinker, he ranged restlessly into all areas of socialist theory. People who spent time with him needed to stay on their toes, because he had little patience for those who couldn’t keep up.

But he also knew how to put the ‘social’ into socialist, with ganja-fuelled parties at his house after every public meeting, which is undoubtedly the reason why Lancaster meetings were so well-attended in the 1980s and 90s. He was an entertaining raconteur with a natural comic timing, and could make even young children laugh. He had a never-ending store of very funny and often salacious stories, sometimes at the expense of other Party members.

Bolton-bred, he spent his formative years in the fire brigade, then later became a computer engineer who embodied the Silicon Valley philosophy of ‘move fast and break things’, running several successful computer businesses. These commitments sadly caused him to drift away from Party involvement in his later years.

Our sympathies go to his wife Kay and children Jo, Jamie and Bill.

PJS

DAP adds:

Ric Best was the first Party member I ever met – it was early 1987 and a meeting in The Liverpool Pub in the business district of the city where what was to become Merseyside Branch gathered. Ric was studying for his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at the University as a mature student, and I was a young politics undergraduate. We were different but got on, as we both liked debating. Ric told me he had joined the SPGB as the Party case was the best means he’d ever come across for winning arguments. I can testify that this is something he pursued with great vigour as many other students at the University at the time still vividly remember (as would our political opponents).

Ric was also a great advocate of democratic participation and all it implied. He claimed many times that the best weapon the Party had in its armoury was that it was scrupulously democratic and could – and should – attract people on that basis, being the most democratic political organisation in existence.

There is little doubt Ric was one of the Party’s great ‘characters’ – an overused word perhaps, but rarely more appropriate, and those who knew him will miss him and the energy he somehow imparted wherever he went.

Party News – YP conference (2026)

Party News from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

YP- Labour 2.0?

Just to demonstrate our northern hardiness, members went out in uninviting November weather to Manchester and Liverpool to dish out 500 leaflets on the occasion of the first national conference of Your Party (now its official moniker). Previously, other members had done likewise at YP events in Huddersfield, Bolton, Preston, Stroud, Swansea, Cardiff, Newport, Brighton, Oxford, Gillingham, and London (all compass points).

The Liverpool conference was hastily convened to thrash out questions like its name, its constitution, its aims, and in particular who was going to be in charge of it. All this amid breathless drama after Corbyn’s faction summarily expelled Trot entryists from the SWP, on the (actually incorrect) argument that they were registered as a different party with the Electoral Commission and therefore ineligible for membership. At this, Zarah Sultana promptly boycotted the first day of the meeting, which does not bode well for the future of YP but must have tickled Zack Polanski, the Greens’ new ‘socialist’ snake-oil salesman, who is seeing a significant bump in membership as a result of these antics.

Our leaflet was called ‘YP – Labour 2.0?’ and argued that even if Your Party was ever able to form a government, it would inevitably suffer the same fate as the original Labour Party, meaning that YP would not change capitalism, capitalism would change YP. It’s quite possibly no coincidence that we handed Zarah Sultana a leaflet in person, after which a YouTube video appeared in which she specifically denied that Your Party would turn into Labour 2.0.

One resentful but revealing comment heard from a conference participant was ‘SPGB? Oh yes. None of us are ever good enough, are we?’ This must have been a reference to our so-called ‘purist’ reputation among the left, in contrast to their customary ‘pragmatic’ approach. But we’re not purist, just principled. We’ve been telling the left for generations not to keep doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result, but they keep doing it, and now they’re doing it again with Your Party – trying to reform capitalism into something that works for humanity instead of against it. It drives them mad when we tell them that they’re wasting their time trying to fix the unfixable. It must drive them madder still that we’re always somehow proved right when their strenuous efforts fall apart. We wish it wasn’t so, but it will continue to be so until the left, and workers in general, acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is that capitalism needs to be abolished, and replaced with a democratic system of free access for all and collective ownership and control of the Earth’s resources.

PJS

Pathfinders: Cheating the reaper (2025)

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

Here’s a dark and ghoulish story for your Christmas-time delight. Back in September, just before the wall-to-wall media orgy of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un met up for a big military parade in Beijing, accompanied by their chums Lukashenko of Belarus, Pezeshkian of Iran and Min Aung Hlaing of the Myanmar junta. This self-congratulatory Comic-Con of the Marvel Supervillain Universe was chiefly notable for a ‘hot mic’ moment in which Putin and Xi were overheard talking about the prospects of human longevity. According to reports, the conversation went like this:

Putin (aged 72 at the time): ‘Biotechnology is continuously developing… Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.’

Xi (also aged 72): ‘Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old’.

Ha ha, they wish. One of the few consolations of being an elderly worker in capitalism is that no matter how rich these capitalist bastards are, they can’t cheat death any more than you can. This little soundbite reveals that they are keenly aware of that fact too. It’s just not fair, is it? You go to all the trouble of demolishing democracy, crushing your opponents, cowing your population, and making yourself dictator for life, only to have death pull the rug from under you just like it does for the little people.

It’s not just the autocrats, of course. Donald Trump, while not believing in exercise or healthy food, nevertheless appointed ‘longevity enthusiasts’ including RF Kennedy to key health posts. Rich Silicon Valley tech bros like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos also harbour Methuselah aspirations, reasoning that if there’s any way to extend life, their money will find it . There are individuals like Bryan Johnson who are so obsessed with longevity that they will put themselves through the most punishing and joyless regimes in order to wring life out to the very last drop. Instead they are likely proof of the old joke that renouncing all pleasures doesn’t make you live longer, it just seems like it .

Though it’s still considered ‘fringe of the fringe’, there is a history of research into longevity, from plasma therapy to fusing old and young mice together, and even injecting pureed monkey testicle into the human scrotum. Instead of seeing death as the great leveller, why not treat it as a preventable disease like any other, for which treatments can be found? The Greenland shark can live for 500 years or more, and only starts dating at 150. There must be sound biological reasons for that, aside from living in a perpetual icebox.

The World Health Organization in 2018 included old age as a disease in its 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases, until vigorous protest made them remove it again. For critics, pathologising a universal process involves serious ethical concerns, stigmatising old people as ‘having something wrong with them’ .

And there is the big picture. Death is the reason we exist. If animals didn’t die, there would have been no evolution and therefore no us. If humans became immortal, society might ossify, and you’d have to abolish children. But never mind big pictures and bleeding hearts, think of the profits. ‘They are interested only in the biomolecular and the monetisable… They seemed strangely uncurious [sic] about the enemy they have declared war on. Ageing to them is simply a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed’.

In any case, no one wants to make workers immortal, only the super-rich. Putin, famous for his ludicrous bare-chested-on-a-horse publicity photos, is fixated with being a ‘healthy strongman’, and goes everywhere with ‘an army of doctors’. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and has put billions into anti-ageing research, stem-cell cloning and organ transplant technology. It’s also scurrilously reported that he bathes in deer blood, a traditional Siberian shamanic ‘remedy’. In all this he is no doubt encouraged by his inner circle of hangers-on, who warmly appreciate that keeping him alive is their ticket to staying in power.

What’s the reality behind the hopeful hype? Professor of vaccine immunology John Tregoning points out that you can’t keep swapping out failing organs indefinitely because a) general anaesthetics are a calculated risk that increases with age and each operation, and b) there’s a high risk of MRSA infections, including sepsis, with every transplant op. Putin would be playing Russian Roulette, over and over. Cloned organs are not a thing, so you’d need a lifetime of immuno-suppressants, with an ever-present threat of fatal infections. There is not an endless supply of suitable organs, in fact there’s a world shortage. There is some state-of-the-art work using genetically modified pig organs, but if you survive six months after a transplant, that is considered an ‘amazing feat’.

Meanwhile, Tregoning adds, the rest of your body would still be ageing. The largest organ is your skin, and how would you replace that? ‘Even if you could replace all of the internal organs, you’d need to replace your muscles, your bone, your skin, everything is aging at fairly constant rates…. Just putting a new heart in is like taking a 1980s Ford Cortina and putting a brand new Porsche engine in and expecting it to run fine’.

On top of all that, brain connectivity declines over time too, and there’s no known way to reset that. There is some horizon research into a class of drugs called senolytics, which eat dead cells and scar tissue and may be a way to reboot the human body from the inside out, but for now they only work with fruit flies and nematode worms, and have toxic side effects.

Happily, today’s ruthless autocrats stand no chance of cheating the reaper. But new ones will replace them as long as capitalism survives. The world’s workers need to wield the political scythe where it would do most good.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Basic skills (2025)

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

A recent YouTube essay argues that modern literature is poor quality because young writers don’t know how to write. This is because they don’t really know how to read, and this is because the US abandoned the century-old and evidence-backed phonics reading system in favour of something called ‘critical literacy’, which supposedly prioritises personal interpretation over text analysis. Thus, goes the narrative, literary comprehension has cratered, offset by a skyrocketing tendency to react subjectively to texts instead of objectively analysing their meanings. In conclusion, this is what’s behind the modern epidemic of cancel culture, where words mean whatever you want them to mean, and anyone is entitled to be ‘triggered’ by anything.

25 percent of US adults have only a kindergarten reading age, the video says, and 60 percent have that of a 10 year old. This is broadly verifiable. The essayist believes that abandoning phonics was a deliberate strategy to dumb people down and thereby make them more compliant. But this overlooks a contradiction. While politicians might love dumb voters, and advertisers love dumb consumers, any industry report will show that capitalist employers want the opposite, smart and productive workers with industry-relevant skills, because their labour is what produces profits. And taxes on those profits finance governments. Worker, voter, consumer, same person.

Conspiracy explanations are lazy. Better to apply the principle of Hanlon’s Razor: ‘Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.’ Capitalism is chaotic, contradictory and incompetent all the way down, including its education systems. Unlike the US, the UK never abandoned phonics. In fact it’s a statutory requirement. Even so, ‘the average reading age of adults in the United Kingdom is typical of a child in UK education at 9 years old’ while ‘some have a much lower reading level’.

Social media means many young people don’t read books. Reading test scores have been declining across OECD countries since 2012. Worse, AI provides a ‘frictionless’ user experience which is proving addictive, and some evidence suggests that AI-reliant students are losing the ability to learn or retain information.

Sourcing a quote provides an example of this frictionless user experience in action. Back in the 18th and 19th century, some intellectuals did indeed view the education of workers with abject horror. One remarked that teaching workers to read was ‘to tie firebrands to foxes and set them loose amid the standing corn’. Who was it? Google’s AI Overview answered at once: ‘The quote is by the Russian anarchist Emma Goldman. She wrote, “To teach the masses in a compulsory fashion is to tie firebrands to foxes and set them loose amid the standing corn,” in her 1911 essay “The Americanization of the American Girl“‘.

Er, no. The idea of Emma Goldman deprecating widespread worker education is preposterous. The essay title also looked dubious, and hyperlinked to this: ‘The phrase “The Americanization of the American Girl” is likely a misremembering of the title “The Americanization of Emily,” a 1964 British-American romantic comedy film starring James Garner and Julie Andrews.’

Well, the film is real, but otherwise, nul points so far for Google Overview. Why not ask the AI to check its own answer? ‘Did Emma Goldman write an essay called The Americanization of the American Girl“? It flashed back: ‘No, there is no evidence that Emma Goldman wrote an essay with that exact title […] “The Americanization of the American Girl” does not appear in her known works or bibliographies.’

You don’t get internal consistency because current generative AI doesn’t remember what it last told you. Next we got: ‘The quote is from the conservative politician Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said teaching workers to read was “to tie firebrands to foxes [etc]” to express her view that it would lead to “radical, anti-American, anti-God, and anti-police sentiment”.

A gargling MAGA nutjob could hardly have authored an 18th century quotation. Time for some ‘prompt engineering’, ie, rephrase question, get different answer: ‘Who opposed general education on the grounds that teaching workers to read was ‘to tie firebrands to foxes and set them loose amid the standing corn”?

This time Google Oversight gave a more plausible response: ‘The phrase was not used to oppose general education, but was a popular quote attributed to the English politician and magistrate Sir Thomas Bernard, who opposed the teaching of reading to the poor in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He feared that educating the working class would lead to unrest and was quoted as saying, “to tie firebrands to foxes… [etc].’ The AI further assured us that Sir TB, ‘a prominent 18th-century English politician and magistrate, was a vocal opponent of educating the poor’ who highlighted ‘the dangers of educating the poor, suggesting it would lead to social chaos and unrest’.

It seemed prudent to ask ‘Who was Sir Thomas Bernard?’ In a flash, the multi-hundred billion dollar oracle responded:

‘Sir Thomas Bernard (1750–1818) was an English lawyer, philanthropist, and social reformer, best known for … founding the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor… he […] dedicated much of his life to improving the lives of the poor and working children.’

Could this philanthropist have worked to improve the lot of the poor while emphatically against educating them? Not unless he was very confused. A clarification then: ‘Did Sir Thomas Bernard oppose educating the poor while campaigning to improve their conditions?’

‘No, Sir Thomas Bernard did not oppose educating the poor; in fact, he was a strong advocate for their education and included it as a key part of his efforts to improve their conditions.’ 

Acres more text in the same vein.

So, bright, shiny, and useless. ‘Frictionless’ learning is a delusion. The mind needs friction like the body needs fibre. Reading, writing and critical thinking are vital for workers. They’re the basic skills of revolution.

Many expect the AI bubble to burst, as the rampant spending shows derisory returns. The result could be a cold shower all round.

Paddy Shannon

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