The Socialist Party's 2026 Summer School: Populism

Party News from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

If ‘populism’ is taken to mean politics popular with the majority pitched against an elite minority, should socialists aim to make socialism ‘populist’? Certainly socialists work to make socialism popular globally with the majority, but without pandering to notions that would negate its revolutionary goal. This means being opposed to ideas that might attract wide support in the short term yet actively undermine the socialist case. Because ‘populism’ remains ill-defined, it gets applied to a right wing group such as Reform UK, or a left wing organisation like Your Party. In the USA, Donald Trump’s Republican Party can be termed ‘populist’ as might Bernie Sanders’ variety of leftism, and similar examples are found in Europe and elsewhere. Is ‘populism’ simply reformism repackaged for the 21st century?

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion will explore how the concept of ‘populism’ has developed, why it attracts support and what this tells us about capitalist society.

Residential bookings for Summer School have now closed, but the talks will also be run on Zoom.

Friday 21 August 7.15pm—8.45pm Populism As A Keyword 

Speaker: Bill Martin

Saturday 22 August 10:00am—11:30am Rage Against The Dying Of The Right

Speaker: Brian Gardner

2.00pm—3.30pm In Search Of Left-Wing Populism 

Speaker: Paul Bennett

7.15pm—8.45pm Red-Brown Politics In Russia And Beyond

Guest speaker Edmund Griffiths

Sunday 23 August 10.00am—11.30am Should / Could Socialism Be Populist?

Speaker: Paddy Shannon

To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/j/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Action Replay: Breaks, shirts and cards (2026)

The Action Replay column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

‘Football unites the world’ is a FIFA slogan, but the recent World Cup tournament did a great deal to point up the divisions which currently exist.

With three host countries and long travelling distances, it was always going to be a complicated enterprise. A total of 48 teams, 104 matches and 52 referees, all far more than previously: just 64 games in recent years and, when England hosted in 1966, 16 teams and 32 matches. There were plenty of complaints about the prices for tickets, food and drink, accommodation and travel. But then the whole thing is largely about money, with an estimate of $80bn being the economic ‘output’ of the whole competition, both qualifying matches and the finals.  A number of games did have quite a lot of empty seats, though.

There was plenty of politics involved too. The Uruguay team had to undergo searches of their luggage when they arrived in the US, and a Somalian referee and some Iranian supporters were denied entry there. Haiti were forced to change their shirts for the finals, on the grounds that their first choice was political, in that it showed a flag which referred to the Haitian ‘revolution’ and the country’s ‘independence’ in 1804. Not that the anthems and ubiquitous flags are in any way political.

Then there was Trump’s intervention. A US player was sent off against Bosnia-Herzegovina, which, according to the regulations, meant he should miss the next match, a last-sixteen tie against Belgium. But Trump has a record of pardoning people, even for serious offences, and he appealed to the head of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, to have the suspension overturned. Infantino is a bit of a lapdog for Trump, having awarded him the fantasy FIFA Peace Prize, and indeed the player in question was allowed to take part against Belgium. Not that it did much good, as Belgium won 4–1, and the shenanigans may even have inspired the Belgian players a bit.

The hydration breaks in each half might be a good idea, given the temperatures at some games. But they have happened on cooler days too, and they are officially Powerade hydration breaks, sponsored by a sports drink. On US TV the breaks are occupied by commercials. There have been claims, too, that the breaks can alter the momentum of a match, giving one or other side an advantage. So a game of two halves may be becoming a game of four quarters.

One thing the competition has shown, though, is the extent of migration and the impact it has on ‘national’ teams. Many squads consist in large part of sons of migrants or of ex-pats, people who moved to another country but whose family still have links of some kind to their original ‘home’. Football may not unite the world, but it demonstrates how the world and its population are changing.

Paul Bennett

Exhibition Review: Betrayal? (2026)

Exhibition Review from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Great Betrayal? One Hundred Years On. The lessons of the 1926 strike revisited (Working Class Movement Library)

In May we reviewed an exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester marking the centenary of the General Strike. There are a number of exhibitions on this topic (see generalstrike100.com), including one at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, which is on until December, and focuses more on the strike itself, rather than the years since. It is entitled ‘A Great Betrayal?’, which clearly indicates its main theme.

The display consists of information boards plus some original documents. It is made clear that the government had prepared for a confrontation beforehand, for instance by setting up the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, and it referred to the strike as an attempted revolution. All army officers were required to participate in strike-breaking. The BBC of course did not present the union side of the dispute. The TUC, which apparently turned down an offer of financial support from Russia, voted for a general strike, but as a defensive action, not as a challenge to the authority of the state (though it is not at all clear what that could have involved).   

The information boards are made more personal by including information about individual workers and their treatment. For instance, the miner Bill Muckle spent over two years in prison after helping to derail the Flying Scotsman train, while Jack Forshaw was arrested for distributing a supposedly seditious pamphlet. He was diabetic and died after being mistreated in jail, before being sentenced.

The documents displayed include a booklet on the impact of the strike in Bolton, and also copies of various strike bulletins and of the British Worker and the government propaganda sheet The British Gazette.

An informative exhibition, though naturally rather restricted in its coverage, and also rather optimistic about what might have been achieved.

Paul Bennett

SPGB July Events (2026)

Party News from the July 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.

Action Replay: Fifteen to one (2026)

The Action Replay column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have written before about the financial problems of professional tennis players (see Action Replay for August 2024 and May 2025). The question has now arisen again, with some top players demanding a bigger share of the takings at the largest tournaments, the Majors or Grand Slams (Paris, Wimbledon, Melbourne, New York). They have taken the drastic step of cutting short press interviews, and have also threatened a possible boycott. Taking part in interviews is a requirement at Grand Slams.

This may sound a bit over the top, as the leading players are millionaires, but that is not the whole story. The tactic is to limit interviews to 15 minutes, as a reference to the 15 percent of revenue that the big tournaments allocate to prize money. For instance, the All-England Lawn Tennis Club had an income of £427m in the year to July 2025; players have asked for 22 percent of revenue to go to prize money by 2030.

The players also want the Grand Slams to contribute more to pension and maternity funds, and wish to have more of a say in tournament organisation. This would mean less gruelling schedules and fewer late-night finishes. So working conditions are a bone of contention, as for most of those who have to work for a wage.

To illustrate the kinds of problems that players can have, Maja Chwalińska was runner-up in the recent French Open, her first success at that level. Her prize was €1.4 million, which of course is pretty impressive. But she did not receive her earnings until after the tournament ended, so she had problems paying for her hotel in Paris, though a Polish company did step in to cover the costs. Losing in the first round would get €87,000 for a woman player. Aryna Sabalenka, the world number one, said, ‘It’s about the players who are lower in the ranking, who are suffering.’

It has been claimed that to break even as a player you need to be in the world’s top 75, with travel and accommodation costs eating up a large part of a player’s income, together with hiring a coach and a physiotherapist. Players from South America have to pay larger amounts than most to compete in tournaments in other parts of the world. Winning £300,000 in a season probably sounds quite reasonable, but it will probably be just enough to break even. The Grand Slams are the major sources of income for players lower down the ladder.

So what may seem from the outside to be a glamorous way of earning a living can for many be a pretty hard grind.

Paul Bennett

But not fighting capitalism (2026)

Book Review from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fight Oligarchy: Where We Go from Here. By Bernie Sanders. Penguin £9.99.

Oligarchy, the opening sentence states, ‘is a system in which a small number of extremely wealthy individuals control the economic, political, and media life of a nation.’ Plenty of examples are given of inequality of wealth. For instance, Elon Musk is worth nearly $400 billion, more than the bottom half of US households. In Mexico, Carlos Slim is worth over $96 billion, while the Sultan of Brunei has wealth of $30 billion and owns 600 Rolls Royces.

Nor is it just a matter of individuals. Three Wall Street firms, Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street, are major shareholders in nearly all the largest American corporations, including Ford, ExxonMobil and Pfizer. Media ownership is extremely concentrated too: ‘Billionaires own and control virtually every major newspaper and radio network in the country.’ Moreover, there is massive oligarchic influence on politics, with gigantic donations and threats to run candidates against politicians who are the least bit awkward. Super PACs (Political Action Committees) can spend millions of dollars to defeat, for instance, members of Congress who oppose US aid to the Israeli government. The Democratic Party offers little resistance to Trump and the oligarchs, having supposedly ‘turned its back on the needs and suffering of America’s working class’ (but when did it ever support the interests of workers?).

At the same time, American workers are on average less well off than fifty years ago, adjusting for inflation. Eight hundred thousand people in the US are homeless, and over sixty thousand die each year because they cannot get to a doctor on time. Suicide rates have increased, especially among young people.

Sanders, an independent senator who has been involved with the Democrats, presents a vivid and harrowing picture of inequality and poverty in the US. He has been on a Fighting Oligarchy tour around various states, talking to audiences about what can and should be done to fight back. What he advocates is, however, the usual reformist fare: raise taxes on the rich and on large corporations, cut military spending, enact Medicare for all, make housing affordable, raise the minimum wage, improve pensions. But, even if made a reality (which is unlikely, given capitalism’s need for profits), this would leave the class division of society unchanged, with workers still subject to the unpredictability of markets and being exploited by their employers. A discussion of Sanders’ views in the April 2017 Socialist Standard noted that the so-called revolution he stood for then ‘leaves capitalism firmly in place’ . Clearly nothing in his views has changed since that time. The book is also quite expensive for such a slim volume.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: Downhill journey (2026)

Happier times.

The Action Replay column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Participatory sport is about enjoyment and exercise, but the professional version is about financial achievement and the glory of winning. The other side of success is of course failure, and there has been quite a lot of, not just not succeeding, but actually failing in recent weeks.

Leicester City won football’s Premier League in 2016 and the FA Cup in 2021, but they have just been relegated to League One, the third tier of English football. Frequent changes of manager have not helped (a common occurrence in such cases), nor has the death of owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha in a helicopter accident two years ago. The club has been losing money, and relegation is likely to exacerbate this.

Chelsea won last year’s Club World Cup, but lost six consecutive league games and are unlikely to qualify for next season’s Champions League. Their last manager lasted just 23 matches, after being given a six-year contract. Large transfer payments and UEFA financial regulations mean they will have trouble improving their squad of players. Supporters have questioned the competence and commitment of the owners.

Burnley have been relegated to the Championship after just one season in the Premier League. Loans to buy players have created further financial problems, and again the company that owns the club has become unpopular and seems to have little idea of how to turn things round.

It’s not just football. In cricket Middlesex have been embroiled in problems, including legal disputes with previous bosses and, again, several coaches in a season. They won the County Championship most recently in 2016, when they were unbeaten. They are now in the second division, and a group of former players have stated that the club is ‘drifting towards irrelevance’.

Sussex are also having difficulties. They overestimated potential income, and were deducted twelve points in this season’s Championship. With many players likely to leave at the end of the season, their future success is in doubt. Not being in the Hundred competition considerably reduces their income.

In golf, Saudi Arabia will withdraw their funding for the LIV tournaments next season, which means that LIV will be scrambling around looking for potential investors. The sizeable financial losses involved may make this hard, though. It was all sportswashing, of course, but this has not exactly worked out.

You do sometimes wonder how the capitalists that own and control big sporting organisations and so often run them into the ground have managed to make billions from other companies they own. Maybe sport is just even more unpredictable than ‘ordinary’ capitalist markets.

Paul Bennett

Exhibition review: On The Line: 100 years of strikes & solidarity (2026)

Exhibition Review from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A hundred years on the line – People’s History Museum, Manchester

This month is the centenary of the General Strike, which took place from 4 to 12 May 1926. An exhibition ‘On the Line’ is being held at the People’s History Museum in Manchester until November. It consists of banners, photos, pamphlets and leaflets relating to strikes and other workers’ struggles over the last hundred years.

The earliest item on display is a banner ‘Union and Victory’ from the Great London Dock Strike of 1899. There is relatively little on the General Strike itself, but there are photos of soup kitchens, military convoys, and polo players enrolled as special constables policing the streets on horseback. Also, a copy of a pamphlet, written by a barrister, on what to do when arrested.

Among the other disputes covered are the UCS work-in in Glasgow in 1971, Grunwick in 1977, Orgreave in 1984, the ambulance workers’ strike in 1989, and the Liverpool dockers’ strike in 1996. As would be expected, there is a lot of material relating to the miners’ strike of 1984-5. This includes Women Against Pit Closures, with a photo of women in Barnsley supporting the miners, and a T-shirt from Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (‘Pits and Perverts’ is the slogan). A strike at an Amazon warehouse in Coventry from 2023 is recalled with a robot costume: workers felt they were being treated like robots. There is documentation of recent strikes, such as those by couriers and delivery workers, and last year’s strike by resident doctors. From 1972 there is a poster about four workers arrested on a picket line, a reminder of the possible consequences of workers defending their pay and conditions. A 1986 poster ‘Murdoch is bad news’ captures the role of the capitalist media in undermining workers’ struggles.

As noted in the exhibition, Stanley Baldwin, PM at the time, described the General Strike as ‘the road to anarchy and ruin’. The 1927 Trade Disputes and Trades Unions Act, passed in response to the strike, prohibited mass picketing among other forms of resistance. The TUC ended the strike without an agreement; the miners stayed out for another seven months before being forced to return to work.

The June 1926 Socialist Standard responded to the ending of the strike by commenting, ‘The greatest Trade Union action that was ever taken in any country was closed by the most gigantic swindle in the whole history of Trade Unionism.’ It then went on to criticise other organisations’ reaction, such as the ‘Communist’ Party. There was no point, the article argued, in preferring left-wing over right-wing leaders: the very idea of leaders and leadership should be rejected. Trust in leaders was not a good idea: ‘Trust and ye shall be betrayed’. The strike itself was seen as ‘a sham fight’.

The exhibition as a whole is well worth visiting, and gives a good, if necessarily only partial, idea of industrial actions over the last century. Of course, such struggles are still needed, as workers do their best to resist the exploitation and oppression of capitalism.

Paul Bennett

Thought and Contradiction (2026)

Book Review from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mao: Power and Contradiction. By Kerry Brown. Reaktion Books £20.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong, and for over a quarter of a century before then he had been the ruler of China. Here Kerry Brown presents an account of his life, with a great deal of background information on developments in China, including since his death.

Born in 1893, Mao was one of fifteen people who attended the founding meeting of the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party (CCP) in 1921. This was a time when few of Marx’s writings were available in Chinese. The CCP’s first manifesto stated that one of its aims was to eradicate the capitalist system, even though the vast majority of China’s inhabitants were peasants, and capitalism was just getting off the ground. Mao argued that the peasantry would play a crucial role in bringing the CCP to power, though he also accepted the Leninist idea of a centralist, vanguard party. He had very little understanding of capitalism, and sometimes saw class as something that was inherited.

Mao gradually rose to the top of the CCP during its and the Red Army’s fight against the Nationalists, but his life at this time was not easy. In 1927 he narrowly avoided being executed by the Nationalists, and in 1930 his second wife Yang Kaihui was tortured and executed by the provincial government. On the Long March of 1934–5 his two children by his third wife were given up soon after birth to local families, but could not be traced later.

The CCP took power in 1949, after driving out the Nationalists. Brown points out that Chinese society at that time was in a dire condition, after two decades of civil war and Japanese occupation. Average life expectancy was just 35, and the country was worse off economically than it had been in 1820. Land reform and the expansion of state-owned enterprises led over time to much-improved living conditions, but movements such as the Great Leap Forward were the cause of maybe as many as fifty million deaths, by famine and persecution (it is not clear how much Mao knew about the consequences of his policies, or how hard he tried to find out). The Cultural Revolution from 1966 was a power struggle within the ruling class, with Mao turning on anyone he saw as an enemy.

Since Mao’s death China has become the world’s second largest economy, rivalling the US, and a major manufacturing base, also now a hub of technological development. There has been nothing in China like de-Stalinisation in Russia, and Mao is officially viewed in China as a great man who made mistakes. The term Mao Zedong Thought is used, rather than Maoism, and Brown seems to see his ideas as some odd mix of Marxism and Daoism, though this may mean little more than a supposed emphasis on contradiction. There is no recognition here that Mao’s views had little to do with those of Marx, and that he contributed to the spread of capitalism in China: not abolishing the wages system but forcing it on far more of the country’s population.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: War in the Way (2026)

The Action Replay column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sportcity in Manchester is a venue for a number of sports facilities, most notably the Manchester City football stadium, but also the Velodrome and National Squash Centre. This idea of hosting various amenities in one area can of course be applied on a national or international level too, and the Middle East is a prime example.

The Persian Gulf in particular has seen a lot of state and private investment in sport, part of a programme aiming to attract increased tourist and leisure visitors more generally. We have previously examined the role of sportswashing in this (see Action Replay for October 2023 and December 2024). The 2022 football World Cup in Qatar was one of the first instances. Saudi Arabia then took the lead, winning the bid to stage the 2034 World Cup, as part of a Vision 2030, supposedly aiming to ‘diversify the economy and invest locally and internationally’ (pif.gov.sa). The Middle East Sports Investment Forum (mesifglobal.com) holds regular conferences to discuss future opportunities, with a meeting in London scheduled for June; a standard delegate ticket costs just £1500.

But a very big ‘but’ has materialised, the US-Israeli attack on Iran and Lebanon, and the Iranian attacks on neighbouring countries. Bombs and drones have made travel to and from the region difficult and unpredictable, and simply being there became unacceptable for some. The motor racing grands prix due to be held in April in Bahrain and Saudi were called off, as was the MotoGP grand prix in Qatar. Perhaps a hundred events of all kinds had been cancelled or postponed since the start of the war (Guardian 21 March). Sports such as football and motor racing are likely to better protected than tennis and golf, for instance.

The same source quoted a professor of Eurasian sport industry (!) as saying that the Gulf states had placed too much emphasis on events, without diversifying sufficiently. Manufacturing equipment and clothing would have been a good idea too, but it may well be too late to get into that market.

The war shows the unpredictability of capitalism as far as business ventures are concerned. Capitalists don’t take possible wars into account when planning new businesses or expanding existing ones. It remains to be seen what effect the ‘cease-fire’ in operation at the time of writing will have. But that just reinforces the uncertainty surrounding the fighting and its consequences.

‘The war has come at the wrong time,’ the professor mentioned above said, though he presumably wasn’t saying that there is a good time for wars.

Paul Bennett

Pressures in the Ivory Towers . . . (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

As ever when the A-level results appear in the middle of August, there was a mad scramble by would-be students to get onto the university course of their choice, or at least the best compromise between what they wanted to do and what their exam results would enable them to do. But this year it wasn’t just a matter of students fighting to find a university and department that would accept them. Universities, too, were desperate to attract enough students to get the maximum income from their paymasters. From newspaper and TV adverts to teletext announcements, universities vied to publicise themselves and those of their courses that still had vacancies.

The government boasts about the expansion of university education, but as usual what lies behind such assertions is more revealing than the claim itself. In part the “expansion” has been achieved by simply renaming polytechnics and some colleges as universities. The growth in numbers of students to over a million (double the figure 15 years ago) has not been matched by increases in university funding, meaning accommodation shortages, larger classes and overcrowded libraries. Most significant of all, student grants, which were never exactly generous, have been replaced by a mixed system of grants and loans. With the recession meaning that vacation jobs have all but dried up, and with restrictions on the claiming of benefit, students are now in a really precarious financial situation. Half finish their courses with a debt of £4,000, while one-in-five have considered giving up their courses because of financial problems. One-in-four take part-time jobs during terms, which is bound to affect their academic performance

About one student in eight now fails their course or drops out “voluntarily”. This is due in part to financial pressures, and in part to the increased staff-student ratio, which means less individual attention. Also many students end up in the rush for a degree place by taking courses in which they have little interest but which still have vacancies. In the recession a degree is no guarantee of a job ( not that it ever was) but it is still a qualification that many employers demand. One simple sign of the extent to which job requirements have invaded the university system is the number of courses with “Applied” in their titles: everything from Biology to French or Social Sciences can now be “applied” (to the real world of profit-making, of course).

The government decision to expand higher education was intended to provide a supply of trained graduates for a technological society demanding a high level of scientific and managerial skills. As we just said, this was to be done on the cheap, with the cost per student being drastically reduced. The teaching year is gradually being increased, and the pressure for two-year degrees is mounting. Universities were instructed to pile-’em-high, with financial penalties for not reaching their quota of students. The high drop-out rate is a complete waste as far as the government is concerned. The recession put paid to the need to carry on increasing the supply of graduates, but student demand for university places continued to rise. This seems now to have reached its peak at 400,000 applications for 270,000 places.

Since they ceased to be privileged enclaves where the sons of the ruling class could study Classics, universities have never been ivory towers. Rather they have come more and more to resemble factories with production lines and quotas. Money and the demands of capitalism are the vital criteria, while educational considerations take a back seat. 

Paul Bennett

SPGB Meetings (1994)

Party News from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter: Chinese language (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chinese language

Comrade Petter in the February issue seems to be basically in agreement with me: most public works were not managed by government officials (though it is correct to add that a few were), and there was small-scale trading throughout the Empire (again it is correct to add that larger enterprises were mostly to be found in specific areas).

However, although I do not wish to take up the pages of the Socialist Standard with trivia, I must protest about Comrade Petter’s remarks on the Chinese language. To claim that it is “almost devoid of grammar” is complete nonsense, a language with little or no grammar being a contradiction in terms. The case for the subordinate role of the CCP in its early years is surely quite strong enough from an examination of its relationship with the CPSU. To appeal to linguistic “facts” weakens the argument, being erroneous as well as irrelevant.

Paul Bennett 

London, E.2.

Reply:

This matter arose from a reference in our Special Issue on China, October 1974. We cannot pursue a debate on the structure of the Chinese language in the columns of the Socialist Standard, but give the following quotations to show that there is warrant for what was said:

The Chinese written language, composed of characters with rich but shadowy meanings and devoid of grammar in the Western sense, provides the most challenging ground for literary exercise.

(The Ageless Chinese, Dun J. Li. Professor of Eastern Studies, Paterson State College, N.J.)

. . . because of the nature of the Chinese language (ideogrammatic characters, the minimum role of grammar, the natural conciseness of the written language.

(Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, Etienne Balazs)

Broadly, it may be said that a word may do a duty for any part of speech within the limits set by its intrinsic meaning; and. particularly, that what might at first sight seem to be adjectives, are in a very large number of cases capable of use as nouns and verbs, and almost universally used as adverbs. In spite of the opinions of some eminent scholars, the last word on the question probably rests with Dobson: ‘Undifferentiated, a plerematic word might be said to represent a notion undifferentiated by grammatical quality, rather than any inherent grammatical meaning, that invests the word with that quality.’

(The Chinese Language, R.A.D. Forrest, School of Oriental and African Studies.)

Editors. 

R. Ramshaw, F. Ansell, R. Phillips and R. Smith:

Held over, through pressure on space, to next issue.

Preying on others (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World. By Giuliano da Empoli. Pushkin Press £12.99. (Translated by Sam Taylor)

The author was formerly an advisor to an Italian prime minister, a role which gave him the opportunity to meet various powerful people. Here he examines the actions of dictators and technology bosses; he describes many of them as Borgians, resembling Cesare Borgia, the fifteenth–sixteenth century Italian ruler who was renowned for his scheming and plotting. He sees political life as a comedy of errors, like an Armando Iannucci show such as ‘Veep’.

The main autocrat discussed is Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. In 2017 he summoned three hundred rich and powerful men to a posh hotel in Riyadh, where they were held hostage for various periods of time and, among other things, forced to pay a total of $8bn to fund MBS’s plans, which include a massive city powered by renewable energy, and a winter sports resort and floating port. The actions of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador are also discussed, but MBS really does seem to be a bit of a special case.

Da Empoli also sees artificial intelligence as a ‘Borgian technology’, as it can produce shock and awe. It is really a kind of authoritarian intelligence, transforming data into power. AI is not subject to regulatory control and ‘is in the hands of private companies that have elevated themselves to the ranks of nation states.’ Economic elites used to rely on political elites, but the new tech bosses wage war on the old political elites, preferring disruption and chaos. So AI is a political development, not just a technological one, for instance creating massive electoral databases of voters and their likely preferences.

And this is a world of violence, with global military spending increasing by 34 per cent in the last five years. Attack is now cheaper than defence, and an ‘era of limitless violence’ may lie ahead.

The book as a whole contains some interesting observations, but does not provide much by way of conclusions.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: You can’t play here (2026)

The Action Replay column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Probably the best-known example of a sporting boycott was that of South Africa under apartheid, which lasted from 1964 to 1992 and involved not just cricket and rugby tours but also the Olympic Games. As other examples, the US and other countries boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and in 1984 the Soviet Union and others boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

An alternative to a complete boycott has been to allow athletes from specific countries to compete, but as ‘neutrals’ rather than representing ‘their’ country. Russian athletes have only been allowed to compete as neutrals in recent Olympics, so no national anthems if they win a gold medal. Athletes from Russia and Belarus have been barred too, but at this year’s Winter Paralympics they were permitted to compete under a national flag. This is supposedly because there is now less evidence of Paralympic sport being used to promote the invasion of Ukraine.

Suggestions of a boycott have also been raised concerning this summer’s Football World Cup. Iran has been attacked by massive US and Israeli air strikes; their football team was due to play its three qualifying group matches in different US cities, and the head of Iran’s football federation wondered if participation would be possible. Donald Trump has generously said that he doesn’t care if Iran takes part, describing it as ‘a very badly defeated country’. The Iranian Minister of Sport then stated that the country would not be able to take part.

There has also been speculation about countries such as England and Germany not participating because of US global policies, travel bans and the viciousness of ICE. However, it seems likely that there may well be contracts between FIFA and the English FA about taking part, which would mean that a boycott could break any contract and so lead to sanctions.

This year’s cricket T20 World Cup also led to controversies over who should play, and where. The tournament was co-hosted by India and Sri Lanka, and tensions among South Asian countries gave rise to many problems. The Bangladesh Cricket Board said that on safety grounds its team would not travel to India, as it was scheduled to do, and requested that its games all be moved to Sri Lanka. When they refused requests to change their stance, they were removed from the competition by the International Cricket Board.

Then the Pakistan government said its team would not play against India, though it then changed its mind and the match took place. India vs Pakistan is a huge game at any tournament, so big viewing figures and revenue were no doubt a consideration here.

You can’t help wondering if boycotts really have any impact, or whether they mainly occur to make some people feel good.

Paul Bennett

Better, not more (2026)

Book Review from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier. By Patrick Grant. William Collins £10.99.

In the August 2022 Socialist Standard, we reviewed Phillip Coggan’s More, which deals with the expansion in production over the centuries. Grant’s book is a kind of counterpart to that, advocating the making of fewer things. The author is a fashion designer, business owner and judge on a TV programme to do with sewing. Here we will focus on his general remarks, rather than his account of his own history in business (he is founder of the Blackburn-based Community Clothing, communityclothing.co.uk).

The development of capitalism meant that the interests of business took precedence over everyone else, including those who did the work and produced the goods. Only the rich benefited from this, and the emphasis switched to increasing output and consumption, rather than happiness. The fashion industry in particular grew via social manipulation, with seasonal fashions having a fixed shelf life. Many companies spend more on marketing and selling their products than on making them, and over thirty percent of all the clothing made is never sold, with fast fashion brands such as Shein and Temu leading the way here. Shein’s marketing strategy is simple: ‘make an unfathomable quantity of incredibly low-quality stuff, sell it cheaply, aggressively acquire customers, swamp the competition.’ A new product is launched every three seconds. A mention of Oscar Wilde’s remark that ‘fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months’, would have been apposite here, except that it seems now to be a matter of days rather than months.

The quality of much of what is produced has declined over the last several decades (though cars may well be an exception). Cheaper products usually mean higher profits, of course. Fewer raw materials means clothes are often skinnier, shorter or thinner, and overcoats contain far less wool than they did fifty years ago. From the 60s and 70s, synthetic fibres such as nylon, polyester and acrylic became widely available and many manufacturers of natural-fibre fabrics went out of business, especially as offshoring became more common. The owners of companies that produce poor-quality goods are extremely rich (H&M, for instance). When you buy a garment online, you cannot judge its quality.

Moreover, few people nowadays love their jobs, even though work can contribute to personal happiness. These days far fewer people actually make things for a living, and there is a lack of workers in manual trades, which are not just ‘manual’ as they require a lot of knowledge and cognitive processing. One aim should be the creation of skilled fulfilling local jobs. Clothes, the author argues, can be produced in a way that will ensure that they age so as to provide pleasure to the wearer. Older second-hand goods can still be of high quality, and the better an object is, the more likely it is to be repaired.

There seems to be no mention here of degrowth, but a lot of what Grant advocates would imply a reduction in the amount produced and even an end to the continuous economic growth of capitalism. Much of what he says here could certainly be considered for adoption in a socialist world, but it is hard to see how it could be implemented under capitalism.

Paul Bennett

SPGB March Events (2026)

Party News from the March 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.

Blogger's Note:

Kate Raworth's 2017 book, Doughnut Economics, has been discussed/reviewed in two recent issues of the Socialist Standard:

• Material World: Looking inside the doughnut (October 2025)
• The Doughnut revisited (November 2025)

Action Replay: Icy conditions (2026)

The Action Replay column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 2014 Winter Olympics took place in the Russian city of Sochi (see Action Replay for December 2013 and April 2014). There was plenty of controversy attached to them, with environmental problems prominent and up to a third of the cost of staging the Games lost in corruption and embezzlement. Many cities are now reluctant to bid for the Games, because of the costs involved.

This year’s Games were held last month in Milano Cortina, meaning Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo (which, according to Wikipedia, is ‘an upscale summer and winter sport resort’). Again, there were problems with corruption (Guardian 31 January): in October three men were arrested and charged with controlling the distribution of drugs in Cortina, controlling some of the nightclubs and forcing the local council into awarding Games-related construction contracts (the bill for the Games will be well over £4bn). The methods of intimidation allegedly used included threats and beating people up.

The Open Olympics 26 report managed to get the Games’ organisers to publish their financial dealings online (see PDF – tinyurl.com/nczd45hp). This has shown that much of the money being spent will be on road projects which won’t be completed until after the Games are over.

And it’s not just in Cortina. A new ice hockey venue in Milan was still unfinished at the end of January, with the hospitality boxes and press area far from ready. There had also been complaints that the rink was too small and the ice was unsafe. Demonstrations took place in the city over the environmental impact of the Games, to which the police responded with tear gas and water cannons, and there were reports of sabotage of railway lines.

Another controversy has been over the role that the thuggish US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will play. Let’s ignore jokes to the effect that Trump misunderstood the kind of ice needed at the Games. Describing them as ‘a militia that kills’, the mayor of Milan said they would not be welcome in the city. It appears that in fact a separate ICE department, Homeland Security Investigations, will provide intelligence and so on, as it has done at previous large sporting events, but will not conduct any kind of enforcement operations (officially, anyway).

As at some previous Olympics, there will be a new sport at this one, ski mountaineering (skimo), a combination of skiing and mountain climbing. At least it’s more clearly a sport than breakdancing, introduced at the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Paul Bennett

Trespass and Roaming (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Contested Commons: a History of Protest and Public Space in England. By Katrina Navickas. Reaktion Books £20.

In 1908 the Socialist Party asked Manchester Corporation for permission to hold a weekly meeting in Alexandra Park in the south of the city. The response was that only two meetings could be booked at a time.

This is an example of the situation concerning the use of various kinds of public spaces, which is surveyed here. There is a brief mention of Alexandra Park, and several references to the Social-Democratic Federation (SDF), the organisation from which the founders of the SPGB split. It is stated that an ex-anarchist became a member of ‘the Socialist Party’, but this should be the British Socialist Party, a later name of the SDF.

Besides parks, other forms of public space are dealt with, including pavements, squares, grass verges, footpaths and different kinds of ‘common’. Common lands are not really owned by ‘the people’, and their boundaries frequently change. There is no general right of assembly or right to roam in England, and it took the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932 for many customary ‘rights of way’ to be legally recognised as such. Regulating the commons was a form of enclosure, and this was not just a matter of the many parliamentary acts enforcing enclosure but ‘an ongoing process of accumulation of property through dispossession’. The 1899 Commons Act empowered local authorities to regulate the commons so as to stop ‘nuisances’, which could include marginalised communities such as Roma, and also workers holding demonstrations or just enjoying the open air.

Some Liberal politicians saw open spaces as a way to reduce the supposed threat from urban workers to the social order, but on the whole the elite wanted to limit workers’ access. It was also a matter of the ‘four Gs’: gathering grounds (space for reservoirs, canals and so on), grouse moors, golf courses and guns (military training areas). In all these cases, ‘waste’ land was requisitioned for ruling class purposes by excluding the public. Thus the ‘upland landscapes of northern England were transformed during the nineteenth century’.

As suggested above, parks were important places for political propaganda, with the SDF and SPGB among many organisations that held regular meetings there. Yet even Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park was not a true commons but part of the Crown Estate and so subject to definite rules. Trafalgar Square was from its construction a major site of protest, but the violent police response on Bloody Sunday in 1887 showed how the establishment could constrain political activity there if it wished. In the 1930s the police brutally put down demonstrations by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, but did not intervene so much in fascist rallies.

In more recent years, press and television coverage have sometimes exposed police responses to demos, and CCTV has been used to monitor events. A new Public Order Act was passed in 1986, and trespass in public spaces became known as ‘aggravated trespass’. There was some opening up of the right to public spaces, such as the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000, but since then much legislation has restricted the freedom to protest. Navickas’ book provides a comprehensive account of public space in England, plus attempts to expand and to restrict it.

Paul Bennett

Coping with losing (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Burnout: the Emotional Experience of Political Defeat. By Hannah Proctor. Verso £14.99.

In May 1871 the Paris Commune was brutally repressed, with many people executed and over four thousand of its supporters exiled to New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific Ocean, 750 miles east of Australia. Unsurprisingly, many of those exiled experienced feelings of hopelessness and despair. These were examples of what the author terms ‘pathological nostalgia’, which she contrasts with ‘political nostalgia’, which ‘looks to the future rather than the past’.

Nostalgia is one example of the different emotions identified here, the others being melancholia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma and mourning, though the distinctions among these are not always clear. The focus is on left-wing movements, where prolonged activity, with little achieved, can lead to exhaustion and disillusion. One woman, who had campaigned in the US on abortion issues, found herself in the 1980s with no partner, children or secure job, and wondered if it had all been a waste of time. On the other hand, many women who played an active role in supporting the UK miners’ strike felt really changed by it, meeting new people and becoming aware of the unjust nature of the British state. One woman (wife and mother of miners) found that contributing at the local soup kitchen helped combat her agoraphobia, saying, ‘I know that I’ve got to keep active after the strike.’

There is an interesting if somewhat unclear discussion of the impact of the Bolshevik takeover of 1917 (about which Proctor says ‘the October Revolution was not defeated’). The ensuing civil war, coupled with pre-1917 events, meant years of violence and famine, which ‘took a heavy physical and mental toll’. Many former activists became exhausted, in some cases this was due to ‘despair over the course the new society was taking’ (some more detail here would have been helpful). In 1921–2 over fourteen thousand people voluntarily left the Bolshevik party, and ‘there was a spate of suicides among the membership.’

Some left-wing groups go in for abuse and bullying (sometimes of close friends), while criticism and self-criticism sessions among the Weathermen in the US in the 1960s and 70s could inflict serious psychological damage on members. In the US ‘Communist’ Party, those who left could find themselves simply ignored in the street by those who had stayed on.

Proctor quotes Rosa Luxemburg as saying that revolutionary struggle involves thunderous defeats but will lead inexorably to final victory. Perhaps more realistic is her comment on the famous last words of Joe Hill: better to both mourn and organise.

Paul Bennett