Mayhem in Middlesbrough (2026)

From the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent horrifying car crash on the A66, which took seven lives, has shone a light on the community in Middlesbrough and its conditions. Five young men and boys and two police officers lost their lives, when the young men – in a car with cloned plates – tried to avoid police pursuit by going the wrong way on a dual carriageway at three o’clock in the morning. The two officers had not been involved in the chase, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After the smash, it became clear that wider criminality had been involved, with the police swooping down and arresting 12 people on various organised-crime charges. Another car had been rammed into the house of the father one of the boys, and there is a suggestion that they took to the roads in response to this.

The immediate response was one of outpouring of sympathy for the dead officers. A suggestion by local MP, Anna Turley, that all of the victims be remembered was met with politicised rage. The right-wing hate machine of X (formerly Twitter) began by making suggestions that the five were from a traveller community, then quickly pivoted to calling them underclass scum when it turned out that they did not belong to any ethnic minority.

Instead, calls for the police or the army to be sent in to sort them out and remove them from the community became the agreed line (the machinery of social media bots and trolls is a swarm learning system that tries various tacks until if finds something that works and gets traction and responses). This line then fed into the response to the families of the five beginning to commemorate their loss. They held ‘balloon releases’ to remember their lost loved ones. The fact that the grieving families were themselves innocent of killing the policemen was lost in the vituperation of those who demanded a form of damnatio memoriae for the five.

When their funerals were held, the case became a national controversy, as local schools closed because of the perceived risks to the children from the disruption they may cause. Young men on quadbikes and motorbikes formed part of the funeral corteges. At one of the funerals, a sort of Viking send off of burnt stolen cars was arranged. Some of the friends of the five maintained that the police had killed them.

In the 1990s, it was commonplace to find burnt out cars on school playing fields in Middlesbrough. The twockers, as they were called, sometimes avoided charges of theft by giving back the cars they ‘took without owners consent’ (the origin of the word twoc). Burning them destroyed the evidence of who had taken the car for a joyride. Any large carpark around Teesside could become a venue for handbreak turns and reckless driving. The young men who did that then are the spiritual (if not biological) fathers of those who died on the A66.

Middlesbrough is a community in visible decline. Linthorpe Road, once an arterial row of useful shops has become a long stretch of fast-food outlets: the larger department stores have closed down. The industries upon which the area was built – steel and shipbuilding – have disappeared. Whilst it retains a lot of brownfield space recovered from its industrial past, which is useful for building new industries, any new activities are far from labour-intensive.

It is a feature of the wages system that whilst some are subjected to arduous toil, others, necessarily, are condemned to idleness. A reserve army of labour is required for several reasons. The reserve provides recruits to work when necessary and holds down wages. The threat of being thrown on the scrapheap serves as a visible reminder of what can happen to anyone who challenges the rule of capital. It can also serve as a source of political shock troops.

The more enterprising and energetic of the long-term unemployed can show an entrepreneurial flair by turning to crime, and finding means of getting hold of money that doesn’t involve themselves becoming employees. There is a plausible case that the young men in the car had themselves been ‘groomed’ into criminality. We’re a long way from getting to the bottom of what exactly happened.

The knock-on effects of long-term decline are a spiral of lack of incentive to educate or get educated, much less to try and integrate into a society that seems hell-bent on controlling people it sees more as a problem than as fellow citizens. It’s not a wonder that many of the young men see the police as a hostile force. The neglect begins early, and the children’s services on Teesside are overstretched and dealing with multi-generational neglect.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that there was serious anti-immigrant rioting in Middlesbrough, and there will be an overlap between that and the current wave of disorder. The people without access to the high-skilled jobs market, left behind by the current system and in an insular community, will have been easily incited to campaign about in-comers.

The objective effect of last year’s disorder and that around the funerals will be as if there has been a form of collective bargaining by riot, the public authorities will try to buy social peace, while at the same time putting more resources into policing. Far-right opposition will rail against giving anything to those who cannot even be seen to be useful to the labour market ‘surplus population’, while there is little prospect of attracting any new industry that could absorb (or make it worth training) the available labour pool.

Technological advances on a global scale means that an area built on mass industry has had to reassess its identity and the way in which it organises itself. Instead of writing off whole areas and the individuals within it, we can end the wages system and enable free co-operation instead of idleness characterised by police and criminal organisations.

Pik Smeet

 

 

Blogger's Note: 

Readers might be interested in the Socialist Standard article, Dreaming spires and screaming tyres, by Iain Jamieson, that dates from December 1991, which touches upon some of the same issues raised in Pik Smeet's article.

The Fabian Society again (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Around the end of 2025 social media was full of howling comments about ‘Fabians’ and how an insidious conspiracy was spreading through society, in the form of ‘Fabians’ who were undermining ‘our institutions’.

The reason was a judge in the Epping hotel case who, in August that year, ruled against the government and had been a member of the society. Suddenly, the internet was full of how this 140-year-old organisation was hell-bent on a secretive mission to undermine the nation state and implement socialism.

The claims are that not only are most of the cabinet Fabians, but also people like the judge and prominent staffers at the Bank of England. The implication was that they are ‘controlled’ as if the Fabians were a secret society.

The Fabian Society is actually quite open. Its website advertises it as one of the world’s oldest think tanks, but it is also a membership organisation:

‘The Fabian Society consists of socialists. It therefore aims for a classless society, where a just distribution of wealth and power assures true equality of opportunity. It holds that society, through its democratic institutions, should determine the overall direction and distribution of economic activity and seeks to promote where appropriate the social and co-operative ownership of economic resources’.

But, as the rulebook also notes: ‘The society as a whole shall have no collective policy beyond what is implied in rule 2; its research shall be free and objective in its methods’.

Formed in 1884, it took its name from the tactics of the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nickname Cunctator, the ‘delayer’). He beat Hannibal’s superior forces by avoiding frontal assault: grinding his opponent down. This became the metaphor for the gradualist approach the society hoped to implement.

An earlier form of its rules stated: ‘The society seeks recruits from all ranks, believing that not only those who suffer from the present system, but also many of those who are enriched by it, recognise its evils and would welcome a remedy’. That is, advancing by appealing to the powerful.

Its early coat of arms was a wolf in sheep’s clothing: since abandoned for its obvious negative connotations, but dug up gleefully by the commentators as a sign of the conspiratorial nature of the society.

Its Wikipedia page notes that 174 entries in the Dictionary of National Biography are listed as Fabians, a sign of the number of prominent people who have belonged to the society. Currently, its executive committee has five MPs, so it is definitely well connected. It has 6,000 members, and seven affiliated trade unions.

The right-wingers have latched onto the eugenicist associations of the early society: many of the original members did believe in eugenics, this was in keeping with a science-oriented approach that saw society being fixable through rational if authoritarian organisation, rather than through human freedom. It might seem strange that right-wingers, normally attracted to such ideas, should condemn this, but in part this is down to the stigmatisation of eugenicist ideas, and partly the right’s adoption of fears of dystopian ‘fifteen minute cities’ and World Economic Forum domination.

They are correct that Blairites in the 1990s used to talk of a hegemony strategy: staying in power long enough to become the establishment by filling posts with like-minded individuals. We’ve written in these pages before how apparently natural networks of the old ruling class (public school, university, clubs, professions) provided a basis for trust and collaboration, and outsider networks, like the Labour Party, the Fabians, Labour Together, the British American Project and the like are built up to replace those networks.

This replaces the ‘natural’ establishment with consciously political appointments (in itself a good thing) but this opens up a partisan tit-for-tat, as the last Tory government began to swiftly and openly remove Labour appointees in favour of people of their own ilk.

The central flaw in the Fabian strategy is that albeit, as H.G. Wells put it, an open conspiracy, it addresses itself to the powerful, and achieves its advances despite the consciousness of the public.

As Engels put it in 1892:

‘The means employed by the F[abian] S[ociety] are just the same as those of the corrupt parliamentary politicians: money, intrigues, careerism. That is, English careerism, according to which it is self-understood that every political party (only among the workers it is supposed to be different!) pays its agents in some way or other or rewards them with posts. These people are immersed up to their necks in the intrigues of the Liberal Party, hold Liberal Party jobs, as for instance Sidney Webb. who in general is a genuine British politician. These gentry do everything that the workers have to be warned against’.

As the years have gone by, the end goal of socialism has been eased out, in favour of diffuse reforms to capitalism as an end in themselves. Far from being a sinister conspiracy to end capitalism, it is just a career path and training ground for the soft-left. To that end, they are a normal, if mistaken, part of the legitimate democratic social ecology.

What is interesting is that by casting them as a sinister conspiracy, right-wing commentators are delegitimising them, casting ‘the left’ as some sort of alien goal to destroy society, that will need to be swept out. This would be the response of the powerful to a hegemony strategy: openly exercising power to shore up their position.

We have always stood against the Fabian gradualist strategy, as reforms only attract people interested in the reforms themselves, they do not build the case or support for socialism. And enacting supposedly socialistic reforms irrespective of workers’ views is a recipe for confusion and resentment.

We continue to insist that only the active self-organisation of the working class, the vast majority of the population, can bring socialism into being: if we had a coat of arms, it would be a human in human clothing, because that is the only thing that will build socialism.

Pik Smeet

Who spread Christianity (2026)

Book Review from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Domination : the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity. By Alice Roberts. Simon and Schuster, 2025. ISBN 9781398510081

In the foreword of this book, the author explains that she became interested in ‘whether we can trace the spread of ideas and beliefs through changes in material culture’ and also how did ‘Christianity reach the West’ and become a dominant idea over such a wide region from its western Asian origins. Her account rebuts any idea that evangelist saints spread the religion solely through their faith or the inherent correctness of their ideas.

As she notes, she had to check herself from thinking about Christianity as an ‘it’ as if it had agency, but instead ‘who had spread this religion. Who, how and why?’ Throughout the book she repeatedly corrects herself, and although she never expressly describes her method as materialist, nevertheless, she does give a clearly materialist account of how real individuals in concrete situations found that what they perceived as their best interests was to produce, reproduce, spread and adhere to the ideas of what is now known as Christianity.

Possibly this book was intended as a treatment or idea for a television series, as it follows the format typical of modern history series, moving from one location to another, in this case from South Wales, to Brittany, to Rome and eventually to Constantinople (although her account does not stretch as far back as the foundation of Christianity itself in the Levant). The reader can picture her striding determinedly past ruins and archaeological digs, and in musty museums looking at the artefacts she discusses.

Accompanying that is a bit of showmanship as she purports to be ‘astonished’ by what she found, as if uncovering some ancient mystery Scooby Doo style. Her claim is that Christianity never was an anti-establishment religion, and that, indeed, its spread was very establishment indeed.

She begins with the evangelist saints who came to post-Roman Britain. She notes that Christianity had already been here as part of Roman culture, and many of these saints were members of elites who had what amounted to a traditional Roman education. The very prominence of these saints was connected with the relative power of churches, places of pilgrimage and the peoples associated with them.

As she notes, in the collapsing Roman Empire, wealthy and powerful families sought to protect their interests by sending sons off for education, and then ensuring their placement as bishops in the church, with the command of land, money and status that brought. This came about, in part, because of the charitable role that the church established for itself as it grew in Rome, supporting widows and orphans; and also providing some of the civil bureaucracy of running regional centres within the empire. As a part of this, the church obtained incentives through tax breaks.

The church had grown within a small and mobile professional class, as it spread through the Roman world. It was never a majority in that world, but plague and financial stresses on the empire may have helped it grow, with its institutionalised resilience alongside its doctrines of salvation and life eternal. It became, as she says, a business of charity.

It was Constantine, an emperor proclaimed in York, who further institutionalised Christianity by making it the official religion of the empire. Roberts doesn’t resolve whether Constantine was a Christian by conviction, but she does note how his rhetoric shifted as he defeated his rivals within the empire, adopting Sun cults and eventually Christian attributes in a traditional imperial display of divine favour for his rule. The suggestion seems to be that, as he consolidated his power, it became useful to tap into the institutionalised networks of Christianity.

To that end, he convened the Council of Nicea, which organised and collated the doctrines of the previously dispersed and differing (and thus bickering) Christian communities, to make a single doctrine and a state religion. As Roberts notes, the fine hair-splitting about whether Jesus existed before his birth, or was of one being with God, became a means of organising factional fights within the Church, which could spill into civil disorder, as it had in Alexandria. Obviously, the idea of one god over everyone appealed to the one emperor of such a diverse and far-flung empire.

In her final analysis, she contends that ‘in a very real way, the Empire became the Church’. The church then became the way that the empire survived its collapse. This is a very readable cross-discipline account of the way that the church grew and became the thing we know today. The metaphor of a business model that she uses throughout is very useful.

If there are any weaknesses, they may lie in sidelining the ideas. As other authors note, one tool the church used was a command of rhetoric and logic: creating effective and plausible arguments would have been an advantage: a business model needs a good sales pitch, and some of those doctrinal disputes may well have had a practical effect on the way the pitch landed.

Pik Smeet

General Strike (2026)

From the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Union branches will be passing resolutions and holding events to commemorate the centenary of the General Strike that ran in the United Kingdom from 3 May to 12 May 1926.

As an event, it is a Rorschach test: people see what they want to see in it. For Trotskyists, it was a failure of leadership at a revolutionary moment. For the Labour left, another example of betrayal. For the Labour right, a foolhardy adventure, which proves that sensible electoral politics is the way forward.

The background was declining productivity of British coal: around one and a half million men worked in the mines. Output per man was falling, and it was facing competition on the international markets (particularly from the return of German coal). This was compounded by Chancellor Winston Churchill’s attempts to return to the gold standard (effectively over-valuing the pound, making British exports expensive).

The mine owners reacted by wanting to cut wages to restore their profits. The response of the mine workers was ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’. They sought an assurance of support from the TUC that other unions would back up the mine workers in their dispute, which was agreed.

The Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin intervened: simultaneously buying time by engaging a commission to examine the coal industry and agreeing a temporary coal subsidy, whilst also preparing to meet a widespread strike organisationally. The commission was headed by Herbert Samuels, a former liberal Home Secretary (and recently returned Governor of Palestine). He had, whilst an MP, represented iron mining districts in North Yorkshire.

The report noted that ‘the dominant fact is that, in the last quarter of 1925, if subsidy be excluded, 73 percent of coal was produced at a loss’. It recommended that the state take ownership of the coal in the ground, with compensation for active mines; that mines be amalgamated; that coal mining work more closely with other industries; that research in coal technologies be intensified; that more integration of distribution be carried out; and while the mining day remain at 7.5 hours, working time should be cut from 6 days to 5.

This was a substantial pay cut. Baldwin was happy to accept these proposals, but the miners’ union, obviously, rejected it (along with rejecting compensation for the nationalised mine owners). Without agreement, the government ended the subsidy, and on 30th April the mine owners locked the men out.

The dispute was placed in the hands of the General Council of the TUC, which, according to Miners’ Union General Secretary A.J. Cook’s account, took the dispute out of the hands of miners. As a TUC account of events has it:

‘The only principal unions initially called out in support of the miners were those of the railwaymen, the transport workers, the builders, the iron and steel workers – and the printers, engineers and shipyard workers were called out after the first week.’

As they note, the unions preferred to refer to it as a national strike, rather than a general strike. The strike was enthusiastically supported (better than had been expected by any party).

The government swung into action, and began to call for volunteers to help keep the railways and other services running. They tried to take the high ground. They represented the print workers’ refusal to print the Daily Mail (because its editorials attacked the strikers) as an attack on free speech. They laboured their democratic mandate as the constitutional government. Although police and troops were called out to protect scabs and break picket lines, Baldwin refused Churchill’s call to use armed force against strikers.

The nascent BBC found itself in the firing line: Baldwin was able to broadcast to the nation, but Ramsay MacDonald and the strike leaders were not permitted a voice. Lord Reith did, however, rebuff Churchill’s call for the nominally independent company to be put entirely at the service of the government.

The time won by the subsidy for organisation was put to good use.

As Baldwin said in Parliament:

‘I do not think all the leaders when they assented to ordering a general strike fully realised that they were threatening the basis of ordered government, and going nearer to proclaiming civil war than we have been for centuries past. They laboured—that is, many of them—with the utmost zeal for peace up to the very end. Perhaps they thought that there was nothing more at stake than bringing a certain amount of spectacular pressure to bear, which might suffice to persuade the Government to capitulate without serious damage to the liberties of the nation. But they have created a machine which they cannot control.’

MacDonald’s contribution was ‘With the discussion of general strikes and Bolshevism and all that kind of thing, I have nothing to do at all. I respect the Constitution’, plus a call for ‘co-ordination’ in the industry, which was, after all, the entirety of what he aspired to and called ‘socialism’.

The leaders of the TUC had not intended to overthrow the government, but to win an industrial dispute. The unions and strikers did not represent the whole of the working class (for example, there were as many domestic servants as there were miners). Faced with a resolute government, the TUC backed down and asked for no reprisals (which the government would not commit to). Cook believed that had the TUC held out a few more days, the government would have backed down – and the miners continued their action.

Although a defeat, which led to laws banning sympathy and general strikes, the action was not a disaster. The unions had brought the government to the negotiating table; they had shown the strength of union organisation and feeling. They also survived with their organisation intact. In the end, the reality of coal mining productivity prevailed and world markets asserted themselves. The working class demonstrated resolve and solidarity, but could not overcome the organised power of the state without a clear plan and resolve to that end.

Pik Smeet

Material World: Gangsterism rules OK (2026)

The Material World column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whether you believe the stories about US officials issuing veiled threats by reminding Vatican diplomats of the Avignon Popes (when the French Crown asserted secular power over the church and moved the seat of the Bishop of Rome to France), that they are circulating at all is a sign of the widely held sense of American lawlessness. An American official, according to the gossip, opined that the US has the power to do what it likes in the world, and the Catholic Church should take sides. Some have seen this as a threat to the Pope.

It has been doing what it likes for decades. In 2001 the US Congress passed a resolution, Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001, which stated:

‘That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.’

In justification, it noted:

‘the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.’

This became the basis for the campaign of targeted killing by executive order, as part of the so-called War on Terror. It was a carte blanche, and, as with any executive authority, the office holders since that date have sought to strengthen and extend the scope of authority for actions taken under this resolution. It extended from the battlefields of Afghanistan to become a universal reach, justifying strikes in Libya, Somalia, Oman and even, under the present administration, to the strikes against alleged narcotrafficking boats in Venezuelan waters.

In 2011 even Obama took the step of killing an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in an overseas strike.

Although there are no exact figures available, the estimate is that in over 14,000 strikes, over 10,000 people were killed and wounded, of whom around 15 percent were civilians, including hundreds of children.

The laws of war

The ‘rules of war’ permit civilian casualties in proportion to the value of the military objective to be achieved: that is, the decision to adopt the targeted killing policy was a decision in advance to kill entirely innocent civilians.

The argument of presidents and their hangers-on is that such death tolls save more lives and stretch the limits of liberty and legality less than alternatives. But it does, in the end, put the President in the same place as a gangster, killing anyone who might get in his way (and threatening anyone thinking of doing the same). It turns the end sequence of the first Godfather film, where Michael Corleone orchestrates a string of murders of rival bosses, from a fictional scene into real government policy.

Of course Trump, who most likely will have encountered the real-world mafia in his career as New York real estate developer and casino owner, has extended this policy even further. His strikes on Iran this year included the direct slaying of the Iranian head of state, as well as top government officials. This is close to saying all bets are off.

The laws of war, such as they are, were developed by professional militaries and soldiers to make a life of warfare possible. They limit the actions either side can make to prevent a cycle of violence so destructive that the entire game of war grinds to an exhausted halt. It was always a hypocritical gloss on the murderous business, but it did offer some respite and protection.

The chief victims of Trump’s extension of the remote murder strategy are likely to be members of other governments. The US position is that it will retaliate with untold ferocity should someone dare to slay its head of state: but other governments may not have that luxury. And, as Iran has demonstrated, the technology for a sudden and surgical missile strike is within the reach of many countries.

Iran, for its part, has come out swinging: its retaliation against US bases and the countries that host US bases has been to try and impose costs on any US attempt to repeat the Iraq adventure of siege and invasion. They aim to pressure the US to back off by causing pain to US allies.

Whilst the fog of war still prevails, it’s clear that deaths have been many and widespread: at the time of writing over 2,000 Iranians have been killed, with over 20,000 injured. Around 15,000 have been injured in US-allied states (with around half of those in Israel), and about 200 dead (including 15 Americans).

Given the interconnected worldwide system we all rely on, the direct casualties in modern wars are very likely dwarfed by the number of deaths later incurred due to damage to infrastructure. Both sides in this war have threatened desalination plants essential for life in the region, as well as power plants (including nuclear installations).

Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will lead to disruption around the world, as we see fuel prices rise dramatically (already there are serious fuel protests in Ireland).

With Trump threatening to counter-blockade the strait (which will bring the US navy within range of Iranian missiles), the prospect of damaging the world economy in the medium term is real.

Leaving simple morality to one side, war makes us all poorer. Every death is the loss of a mind that might have come up with brilliant insights in the future. Houses, roads, bridges all get destroyed and inhibit economic activity in a wide area (the same has already happened in the war between Russia’s and Ukraine).

Universal gangsterism over trade routes and resources means everyone has a stake in ending war, and the only means to do that is the common ownership of the world.

Pik Smeet

Land reform in Scotland (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, land reform has been a significant issue. It is widely recognised that there is considerable concentration of land ownership in Scotland. Typically, land reform is an issue in formerly colonised countries, where the occupying power has concentrated land ownership, such as in South Africa and Zimbabwe, to benefit the colonisers and exert control.

The concentration of land in Scotland, through the famous Highland Clearances, was a precursor and a part of the same process, appropriating land for the ruling class and sending people out to colonise other parts of the world.

According to the Scottish Land Commission: 1,252 owners hold 67 percent of privately owned rural land. Of these estates, 87 are estimated to be larger than 10,000 hectares (67 of these are in the Highlands), 667 are 1,000-10,000, and 371 are smaller than 1,000 hectares. There are 5.5 million people in Scotland.

As they note, this is not unusual:

‘Ownership of agricultural land is becoming increasingly concentrated in Europe, with one percent of agricultural businesses controlling 20% of agricultural land in the EU and three percent controlling 50%. Conversely, 80% of agricultural businesses control only 14.5% of agricultural land (European Economic and Social Committee, 2015)’.

Early in the parliament’s existence, the then Labour government passed laws to abolish the last vestiges of feudal land ownership – no longer requiring the payment of feudal duties and creation of outright ownership of land.

The Scottish Parliament took the opportunity to make changes, now it was no longer confronted by the power of landowners in the House of Lords. By 2004, it passed its first Land Reform Act, which included a broader right to roam than in England and Wales, and also introduced community right to buy, where populations up to 10,000 could register a right of refusal on land sales and transfers. This legislation also placed responsibilities on landowners for the management of their property.

The SNP have continued the process by passing further acts in 2015, 2016 and 2025. The 2016 legislation gave Scottish ministers the power to intervene in land sales. Some of this legislation was refinements of the process following human rights cases that upheld the right of private ownership against the provisions of the Land Reform Acts, particularly Salvesen v Riddell.

The 2016 Community Empowerment Act gave communities rights to intervene in disused or neglected land causing harm to communities (including urban properties). The 2025 Act includes a requirement to consider reasonable requests to lease land or convert parts of it into crofting land. This act also requires a plan which will improve biodiversity, adapt to climate change and contribute to net zero.

The large estate owners continue to fight a rearguard action, maintaining that large estates can be run more efficiently and with economies of scale (eg, when a part of the estate has a lean year, they can cross-subsidise from other parts of the estate to continue paying staff for maintenance and other costs).

Campaigners maintain that there is evidence that large estates stifle development, and concentrate power into a few hands:

‘Scotland’s current pattern of landownership frustrates economic development within fragile rural communities. Most of these responses were very general in nature but the overall perception was that because landowners have a very high degree of control over decisions about how land is used, they also have the capacity to either help or hinder economic development. The implication of this is that where local economic development is not regarded as a priority by the landowner, then it will not happen.’

Further, some landowners are perceived as ‘trophy’ owners, holding the land as a status symbol (mostly for shooting); whereas some charities are seen as hindering economic development in the name of conservation. As the land commission notes, ‘This indicates that the issue here is more to do with concentration of power and resources more generally, and that land holdings are acting as an outlet for the exercise of this power rather than its source’.

These frustrations reflect the desire of small-business folk and entrepreneurs who are locked out by their more powerful rivals. Indeed, part of the impetus behind land reform is securing the votes of rural population, including farmers and small-business people. The fact that the legislation is locked in with significant requirements for Scottish ministers to intervene, means that wealth and social connexion may, however, be the real determinant for how much, or how little changes. It will be interesting to see how much this will affect land held by the King in his own right (rather than as Crown land, which itself is managed by Scottish ministers and accounts for 35,000 hectares), such as Balmoral, and if ministers will be willing to impose conditions and lettings on any of his land.

So far, there has been little change in the pattern of land ownership, and sales and transfers of large estates are few and far between. Much as in land reform in many parts of the world, the power and right of property tends to chafe against any attempts to constrain it.

Where land is owned by public bodies, such as ‘Forestry and Land Scotland,’ commercial imperatives still apply, so the logic of capital predominates regardless of titular ownership. It is this logic that will continue to predominate even if the land is parcelled up into smaller lots.

Socialists want to end the private ownership of land and want to see it used rationally to benefit the needs of the whole community. That means, not state ownership or ownership by forestry commissions or trusts, but common ownership and democratic control.

Land being held in common doesn’t mean that people won’t be free to use their initiative to employ the land, but that under properly understood and agreed common and democratic rules, people would be able to co-operate to meet their individual and collective needs without all the layers of complexity and chicanery that come with the private ownership of land.

Pik Smeet

What right to housing? (2002)

From the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every week we are treated to the latest front-page-filling concern for the paid scribblers of the capitalist class. The current crisis is concern over the spiralling cost of housing. In recent weeks, we have had announcements by banks, such as the National Westminster, that they intend to withhold mortgages on houses in certain post-codes (mostly in London), for fear of a burst in the house-price bubble. Simultaneously, on 7 February, we were treated to a round of reports about the average house price exceeding £100,000 in Britain. At the root of all this is the continuing inability of the market system to provide for even this most basic need of a human being, a place to live.

Over the last century, the structures of home ownership in Britain changed dramatically, from a situation where most people rented their home (with an average of 4 people per household), to a situation where the majority of homes are privately owned by their occupiers, with the famous 2.4 people per household. As the population of the UK grew by some 50 percent in that century the number of houses tripled. Since the 1970s the numbers in rented accommodation has steadily fallen, and now represent only 8 million out of 25 million households. Over that century, we saw numerous initiatives from rents controls, to council houses and housing associations to try and ensure proper provision of housing, none of which worked over the long run.

In the aftermath of the Thatcher regime, housing has been left almost exclusively to the open market, with councils at best being able to cut deals with developers to build “social housing” in exchange for planning permission on lucrative projects. Between 1988 and 1996 production of new houses fell yearly (especially compared with the simultaneous clearance of slum housing stock). In 1988 a net gain to the housing stock of 234,500 houses was made, compared to net gain of only 178,000 in 1996. This fall can be seen more clearly in the general reduction in output (in terms of raw materials for houses) of building products over the same period, with bricks being the best example, falling from 4,654,000 tonnes in 1989 to 2,939,000 tonnes in 1999.

Much of this malaise will be due to the falling investment by the state. In 1988 the state (central and local governments) spent a total of £5,273 million on housing expenditure, this plummeted to £2,825 million in 1999. Some of that fall was achieved by transferring housing stock from the public to the private sector in 1999. As has been noted in the columns of this journal before, the state is currently in the processes of divesting itself of as much capital as possible, hoping to transfer it into the private sector where it can be both valorised for profit, and used in a capitalistically more “efficient” manner. This has obviously, though, had some knock-on in terms of building of new houses.

This is particularly so with regards to being unable to manage the demand thrown up by the uneven nature of the market system. Given that workers must migrate to where they can find work, in some areas, such as London, the cost of houses is much higher than in areas of low employment, such as Hull. As the labour time that goes into their building and maintenance will be about the same, the difference is the price of the land on which they are built. What this illustrates is the difference between the cost of the house itself and the cost of the land it is on.

Land monopolists

In an agricultural economy, the rental value of the land would be derived from the differences in the quality of the soil. That is, land which could produce more, say, grain per hectare per hour of labour would give up a higher rental value than the least productive land (that is, land which could be exploited only for the given rate of profit in the economy). This remains partially true of land for industrial use. In the big cities, such as London, however, there is not the remotest chance of returning the land to agricultural use, and so it becomes human geography that provides land an income, from firms wanting office space, or volumes of people (with particular disposable wealth to hand) wanting housing.

Rent is derived not from any inherent feature or use of the soil, but solely through the titular owners’ parasitic capacity to prevent capital from being invested in an area without them being given a share of the surplus value generated (usually any in excess of the average rate of profit prevalent in the economy). This capacity is derived solely through their possessing property rights legally enforced upon others. The price of land itself, not being a product of labour, is calculated by taking the income it can generate and projecting it as a rate of return on capital over a number of years (so land that, say, generates £1 million rent per annum at a rate of 10 percent would have a nominal value of £10 million).

This is, in part, recognised in the national accounts, in that the “subsoil value” of land is now listed alongside computer software patents and electromagnetic spectrum rights as “non tangible fixed assets”. It is not the quality of these “things” that creates their rental/asset value, but merely proprietorship over them.

Pressure on wages

In recent years – as part of the “property owning democracy” gimmick – government policies have tended to encourage workers to buy houses and use them as a form of savings and investment to try to climb the property ladder. This increases the number of housing transactions (as some people speculate), and also means that the government is locked into policies which must attempt to ensure the continuing appreciation house prices (or which at least prevent negative equity).

According to the Office of National Statistics, in 1998 the average person was paying 17 percent of their gross income on housing costs. Obviously, that is a percentage of wildly differing incomes, so the top 10 percent of incomes would be paying £120.80 per week on housing, whilst the lowest would be paying £19.80. Even then these figures are somewhat deceptive, since many of the lower income households were only meeting their full housing cost of an average of £59.40 per week through housing benefit (which is tapered to achieve the 17 percent cost).

This means that any increase in demand for housing due to labour migration, or other events outside a general rise in wages, will increase the share of wages needing to go into housing, and thus create upwards wage pressure. An example of this is the current plan to raise the London weighting on salaries from £2500 to over £4000. This effectively means a potential transfer of wealth from productive capitalists to landholding ones (as well as some of the financial intermediaries involved). Given that the workers could press for higher wages (thus cutting profit rates), to off-set these rises in housing costs, unlike employers landowners have no direct interest in holding such costs down. Since the employers need their workers – and during periods of growth, more and more workers – they have to surrender this indirect tribute to the landowners.

This is why capital was once willing to accept rent and housing market controls to prevent the landowners taking its profit. Hence why, now, the state pays a portion of rent to smooth out the proportion of wages spent on housing. Given, though, the size of the housing benefit budget, and the notorious capacity of landlords and tenants to make “fraudulent” claims, the state is under pressure to curb even that mechanism for taming housing costs.

What all this means is that the anarchy of capitalist production – with its self-seeking economic agents, periods of boom and slump, its uneven migratory population pressures – creates a clear contradiction between profit seeking and providing for human needs. In a world in which everyone could be easily housed, even in a country like Britain we find millions leaving in what even the government classifies as housing unfit for human habitation and actual homelessness on the streets, while nearly everyone has financial worries over satisfying this basic human need.

Pik Smeet

Britain’s energy trilemma (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The approach of the UK government to energy is characterised by a trilemma. It tries to balance out the need to reduce carbon emissions, supporting national energy security and control the costs of the transition. The hidden premise behind all of these, is the class nature of society and the need for the government to negotiate with the owners of energy generating resources, without threatening their control of their property and securing a tribute from them to allow the change.

People speak about the costs of transferring to renewables. Initially this was largely down to the fact that the infrastructure for generating energy through fossil fuels already existed. The cost of energy, like any commodity, depends on how much labour it typically takes to produce it. Capital, that is past labour, reduces the need for fresh effort. So, no good or process has an inherent cost, just the relative cost of how much society is geared towards carrying out the activity.

Renewables and other sources of generation originally appear more costly compared to oil and gas, but that is only because the means of obtaining and using the latter are already in place. To build a renewable energy network within a capitalist society means persuading the owners of capital that there will be profits to be made in carrying out that activity: but the structural advantage fossil fuels have means that the markets, of their own accord, will not promote this change.

UK government has created designed markets. Renewable Obligation Certificates were used, as a means of transferring payments from people who obtain their electricity from fossil fuels to renewable companies. These are still supported by the government, but the scheme is closed, and has been replaced by Contracts for Difference (CFDs): the government auctions off licences to supply energy at a fixed cost, the supplier will repay any excess income, or be paid if market prices for electricity fall below the fixed ‘strike price’. This removes volatility from the market, and allows capitalists to invest with an almost guaranteed rate of return.

Even then, there have been auctions where few firms applied at the stated strike price, and the government has had to raise their offer in order to entice more investment.

Finally, there is a cost of ‘balancing the grid’, paying producers to stop producing or start producing, to offset the unbalanced and intermittent nature of renewables (or if, say, the wind is generating energy too far away from where the grid can carry it to be used adequately). This is expected to reach a cost of £8 billion per year by 2030. Effectively transferring profits to the energy producers via taxation.

The overall market price tends to be set by the most expensive resource, which in the case of energy, is unsubsidised gas on the world market. The loss of Russian gas from the market (and the wider shocks of the Russia-Ukraine war) has pushed the cost of gas up, which means, overall, we have seen significant upward pressure on energy bills, which in the end hit the consumer. Those on fixed incomes will bear the brunt, whilst workers in employment will struggle to pass on the burden to their employers.

This isn’t helped by the anti-democratic approach governments take. In order to hide their powerlessness in the face of the capitalists’ interest, they simply plough on with the policy behind closed doors. The system of subsidy and incentive is opaque (at best) alongside the complicated character of the energy markets that have grown up. Most people will only see the cost of heating their homes going up.

Into that space step voices which claim climate change is a hoax, that subsidies to renewables are making electricity more expensive and that if we just resumed extracting fossil fuels bills would come down. Such voices have the backing of some in the energy industry, or other capitalists who rely on cheap energy for their operations. They would put immediate profits against the cost of the effects of climate change (or even gambling that the costs won’t affect them primarily).

In the meantime, the changes already made have been impressive. In 1991, according to the National Grid, only 2 percent of electricity came from renewable sources compared to over 50 percent by 2023. Coal has been practically eliminated as an electricity generation source. The UK has a target of <50gCO2 per kW hour, in 2023 the average was 140g. Nonetheless, total emissions were 50 percent of those in 1990.

Total renewable energy generation needs to double by 2030 to stay on track. Most of that, apparently, is planned. This will be helped by the tumbling of the costs of renewable generation on a global scale, partly due to China’s massive investment in renewable energy. Although over half of China’s electricity comes from coal, growth of coal generation there is slowing, and renewables are expanding faster. This enables China to export renewable technology. For the first time, this year, less than 50 percent of a growing electricity output worldwide came from non-renewable sources.

This fall in costs, though, presents a problem for the subsidised capitalists, as it means that overall renewable electricity generation will never be as profitable as they would hope.

As we build socialism, we will be confronted by the context of climate change, and will inherit the energy system as it is now. Obviously, we would be able collectively and democratically to discontinue some wasteful branches of energy use, but we would still need to heat homes and provide power for the projects we do want to carry out. The Royal Society has carried out research that suggests all of the UK’s energy needs could be met from wind and solar alone (with sufficient capacity for storage in the form of hydrogen).

The issues of energy generation and climate change are solvable, even within capitalism, but the need is urgent and worldwide democratic co-operation offers us the best and speediest chance and that will require ending the tribute to capital.

Pik Smeet

Peter Mandelson: arch Labour Party careerist (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A friend and former Labour councillor reported to me how Peter Mandelson spoke at an online seminar. He had been impressed by one comment, summed up as: ‘If you have a good idea, don’t bother asking everybody, just go ahead and do it’. This seems to sum up all that was wrong with the New Labour project, even if you are achieving good results, not asking people makes them feel divorced from the outcomes. Even worse, it can lead to disastrous and unintended consequences, as those who know more could warn you about in advance.

Mr. Starmer thought appointing Mr. Mandelson as ambassador to Washington was a good idea, and he just went ahead and did it. The consequences have been disastrous for him.

Mandelson’s biography is well known. Grandson of wartime Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, he had a natural ‘in’ into the Labour Party and movement, beginning his career (much like many Labour figures, including Jeremy Corbyn) as an employee of the trade union movement, working for the TUC.

It’s not necessary here to reprise his whole biography: it is widely available. Suffice to say that, apart from a short stint working in television, he worked as a Labour movement staff member, specifically in charge of communications. Once in parliament and then in government, he twice stepped down as a cabinet minister: once for taking an unsecured loan from a cabinet colleague, Geoffrey Robinson, for a house worth (at the time) £475,000. The second scandal was around him intervening in the passport application of billionaire businessman Srichand Hinduja. Although in both instances formal inquiries cleared him of any wrongdoing, the perception was that he was into palling around with – and getting favours from and doing favours for – very wealthy people.

It’s notable, now, that he lives in a £12 million house. This was paid for by the infamous revolving door of government ministers going into private lobbying and well-remunerated directorships after leaving office. While a well-known phenomenon, thanks to the publication of all of the notorious paedophile Jeffery Epstein’s correspondence, we now get a glimpse of the process working in practice.

Epstein advised Mandelson on how to apply for directorships, including with Deutsche Bank, that could have been worth $4-10 million per year. In the end, Mandelson didn’t want to work full time, and so got a job with a firm called Lazard for one day a week, worth a mere $1 million per year. He also set up his own lobbying firm, Global Counsel, which, as Mandelson said in one email to Epstein, paid his expensive mortgage. Epstein advised him on how to find clients for that firm. Global Counsel has had firms such as JPMorgan, Palantir and Anglo-American as clients.

These roles sought were, in part, to avoid regulation around former ministers taking jobs that relied on their former political roles or were intrinsically linked with them: and it is clear that what was for sale was general political, not financial advice, how to get things done, including introductions and network access. This is clearly not an uncommon situation. Epstein, it seems, also gave similar advice to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. After all, as we have written in these pages before, this was Epstein’s business, helping manage other people’s wealth, for a cut.

Itch to live like them

It is, perhaps, not surprising that people who find themselves rubbing shoulders with the fabulously wealthy should not feel the itch to be able to live like them, especially as, when entering the room as government officials they are functionally treated as peers of the wealthy: individuals of power and respect. It is equally understandable that the wealthy should want to encourage such feelings and throw a few crumbs to the politicians to win their loyalty.

As the case of Mandelson demonstrates, it does not have to be the naked bribery of plain brown envelopes. Continued loyalty (in his case as Business Secretary in the UK, and Trade Commissioner of the EU) can be generally rewarded by these advisor roles, directorships or other supposed jobs where the ultra-wealthy can name the price. We’ve noted before that the book-publishing and speaking-tour game is a simple way to transfer substantial sums to former politicians in ways which no set of rules could ever stop. Any attempt to ban such channelling of funds will always simply be circumvented, as Mandelson and Epstein managed to do.

Epstein gives us a great example, in one of his emails, where he leadenly says ‘supporting [Gordon Brown] will be seen as bad form commercially’: Mandelson’s own interests in the subsequent selling price of his skills and contacts depended on him being seen as helpful to commercial interests. That he had the lack of sense to forward secret and commercially sensitive government documents to Epstein will certainly come to be seen as bad form commercially. It is inconceivable that other ministers through the ages have not, in private conversations and communications, given wealthy friends and acquaintances tips and winks about what was coming up, but that would never be provable. There have just never been email dumps like this one before to let the cat out of the bag. And even if, again, Mandelson is formally cleared, his misjudgement in leaving evidence behind will be remembered.

What should also be remembered is that all of this flows, not just from personal cupidity, but structurally, from a society of immense inequality. A society in which a handful live in luxury, and can spare some of their wealth to tempt and buy whomsoever they please. Journalists have come out, after Mandelson’s fall, with stories of how he would threaten their jobs because he knew their boss (shades of the Savile playbook). Where people depend for their livelihood on their job, such threats have power.

His wealth of money and connections fed back into his ability to influence the machinery of the Labour Party, and restore it as a party safe for capital. But, again, it is not him alone as some sort of cuckoo in the nest – any party that seeks to manage an unequal society will inevitably end up being run for the benefit of the people who benefit from that inequality.

Pik Smeet

Beyond the state (2026)

Book Review from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radical abundance: how to win a green democratic future. By Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell. Pluto Press, 2025. ISBN 9780745351353

This is an interesting attempt to consider the transition to a society of common ownership in a concrete and practical fashion. The authors identify what they call the two invariant aspects of transition: ‘popular protagonism’ and ‘contested reproduction’, and these are necessary to overcoming the ‘metabolic control of capital’. That is, changes to formal ownership and state control are insufficient means for dealing with what they call the dialectic of ‘bullshit abundance’ (ie the abundance of pollution, authoritarianism, inequality, etc.) and artificial scarcity (the failure to meet real human needs) of commodity society.

As suggested by the title, this book is partly a rebuttal to the ‘Abundance’ deregulation theme that has emerged in the United States (as exemplified by the book of that name by Klein and Thompson, which we reviewed in our November 2025 issue). What they propose though, is something they call ‘Public Common Partnerships’. This is a riff on public private partnerships, or what they identify as the process of the state de-risking capital investment as a means of promoting economic growth. In their version, assets and enterprises that are otherwise unprofitable for capitalists can be taken over by tripartite bodies, made up of representatives of the workforce, representatives of the public authorities and a community trust. The last of these has a responsibility for distributing any surplus generated by the enterprise: either as a return to workers, further investment, or support for other such partnerships. As such, these bodies bring in those more broadly concerned with the reproduction of society, eg those engaged in child rearing or caring, rather than those directly employed. The surplus is in the hands of the community.

They argue that these bodies would enable ‘contested reproduction’ and ‘popular protagonism’ fulfilling community needs while also being an educational tool for increased popular participation in the economy. The authors are clear they do not consider this a magic bullet, but rather a practical tool for spreading de-commodified practice and an educational experience. They pose it, rather, as a political wager, that might move things in the right direction. As they note, they are not calling for the abandonment of other forms of struggle, but adding this into the mix.

They do, in one chapter, though, speculatively examine how a network of these PCPs could plan food production across an entire country. They look to leveraging ‘Council Farms’ which, despite decline, cover thousands of hectares in the UK. They look to movements in Brazil, Venezuela and Kerala as examples to follow.

The authors themselves work on such structures as practitioners, and they point to a number of examples of where such models have been implemented: including a take-over of an in-door market in Tottenham and a pharmaceuticals plant in France.

This does come close, though, to the islands of socialism suggestion that is frequently put to us: the idea that socialism can be created in bits, rather than as a hard change-over from capitalism, which can simply ‘outcompete’ capitalist methods.

The issue is that their examples come from taking on peripheral parts of the capitalist system, bits that it no longer finds productive, which means that these PCPs mostly survive precisely because they are not a threat to the metabolic control of capital. Should they ever become so, the state would be called in to intervene. As the authors note, by the 1970s, in the UK, around a third of housing was council housing: Margaret Thatcher disposed of that with the stroke of a pen, and there is no reason to suppose that a ‘self-expanding commons’ of PCPs could not meet the same fate.

While the authors might well in fact relish such a contest as an opportunity to expand the contestation of reproduction, it seems likely that the result would be the same as the outcome of the Thatcher era: state power would prevail.

Particularly, as the authors claim it doesn’t require political organisation to set up PCPs, but rather public agitation (although how political/governmental bodies come to be involved other than through sympathetic politicians getting involved seems to be a question). If political organisation becomes required, then why go the roundabout way of challenging capital through these bodies, rather than striking at the legal and political structures that sustain it?

This then brings us back to the problem of using PCPs as some sort of educational tool. The working class already manage capitalism from top to bottom, we just do not do so in our own interest. There is no reason to suppose that those, like the Tottenham traders, who engage in a PCP to save their local market or bottle plant, or whatever, will have a desire or interest in challenging the ‘metabolic control of capitalism’. As with any reform-minded movement, the majority of those attracted will be for the immediate goal itself, and they would balk at going further, or even be actively opposed.

This leads us to suggest that there may be a third invariant aspect of transition: consciousness. Unless there is a conscious desire to do away with capitalism, and at least some idea of what is supposed to replace it, there cannot be meaningful popular protagonism, much less contested reproduction.

This book raises important issues around the way in which transition to a non-commodity society can be achieved. The proposed PCPs are at worst harmless, and at best could form a part of the way that the working class can defend its own interests within capitalism (or, maybe, even organise society post-capitalism).

The authors are correct that a wider network of activity is required beyond the state, but for us that is the conscious mass movement for socialism that must include taking political control of the state as a minimum to stop it being used to prevent the spread of a self-managed and co-operative way of organising society from emerging.

Pik Smeet

Gangster strategy (2026)

From the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Famously, US President Theodore Roosevelt said ‘speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far’. He expanded: ‘If you simply speak softly the other man will bully you. If you leave your stick at home you will find the other man did not. If you carry the stick only and forget to speak softly in nine cases out of ten, the other man will have a bigger stick’. In practice for international relations, this has been interpreted as having credible military capacity, relying on diplomacy and ‘soft power’ first.

In effect, this is the ideology of gangsters. The aim is to get your way by any means, talk backed up by force is the easy way. As the late David Graeber observed, capitalism was founded on an ‘alliance of financiers and warriors’ so this gangsterism cuts to the essence of the worldwide system in which we live. The talking quietly part, though, usually entails telling stories that deny this gangsterism and instead making the narrative about democracy versus autocracy or good versus evil.

The current US President seems willing to dispense with the ‘speak softly’, as evidenced by the recently published National Security Strategy (2025) which with typical modesty envisages a ‘roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history which possesses ‘inherent greatness and decency’. Much of it reads as much of a manifesto as a strategy document, but it is very revealing, especially considering that for years we and others have been arguing that the goals of state foreign policies are to support their access to trade routes and vital resources, and here they are admitting this is the case. Take this piece of nonsensical bombast:

‘President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being “pragmatist,” realistic without being “realist,” principled without being “idealistic,” muscular without being “hawkish,” and restrained without being “dovish.” It is not grounded in traditional, political ideology. It is motivated above all by what works for America—or, in two words, “America First”’.

This can be summed up as flexible, self-interested and unprincipled. However, the document is clear about the strategic way to achieve that self-interest:

‘We want to recruit, train, equip, and field the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military to protect our interests, deter wars, and—if necessary—win them quickly and decisively, with the lowest possible casualties to our forces’.

They want to do this to keep ‘the Indo-Pacific free and open, preserving freedom of navigation in all crucial sea lanes, and maintaining secure and reliable supply chains and access to critical materials.’ Given this was precisely the background to the wars in Vietnam and Korea, this merely displays Palmerston’s axiom ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow’.

The document recognises, however, that ‘As the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself, we must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others’. Securing these interests means preventing anyone else being able to challenge them. Hence ‘We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass’. This is at least an honest expression of what has been America’s long-term strategy in the Middle East, except with a determination not to become embroiled in war there.

More broadly: ‘We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests’.

National interests above human or individual rights, a bleak authoritarian doctrine, especially, as the strategy affirms: ‘The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.’ Indeed, the aim seems to be precisely to enable such domination by inhibiting transnational bodies.

This can be seen in the section about Europe: ‘We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity’. The fetishised ‘Western identity’ politics that sees America as a successor to Rome lives in the minds of many of the current faction in charge of the government there. Hence they also state ‘America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent— and, of course, to Britain and Ireland’.

The document sees ‘the larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty.’ To that end ‘America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.’ In other words, the strategy document seeks to fragment Europe into nation states, which the US can dominate and use.

An interesting note is that the US seeks to end ‘the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance’ and to ‘reestablish strategic stability with Russia,’ and ‘prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war’ in Ukraine.

The real focus is on the Indo-Pacific part of the globe which ‘is already the source of almost half the world’s GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP), and one third based on nominal GDP. That share is certain to grow over the 21st century’. The US there seeks to avoid war ‘by preserving military overmatch’ and to deal with China as a near peer.

Perhaps most unfortunately, the strategy states ‘We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries’. Climate change is a real security threat, that pales all the rest. This document envisages energy dominance and using energy resources to grow the American economy and military power.

This dismal manifesto sees the world continuing to settle disputes, as Shaw put it ‘as dogs settle a dispute over a bone’.

Pik Smeet

The Russian Revolution (2026)

Book Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924. By Robert Service ISBN 9781529065855

Continuing his popular histories of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Robert Service seeks to look more broadly at events, rather than through personalities and political decisions alone. Rather, he seeks to ‘explore […] how ‘ordinary’ people coped – or failed to cope – with the shattering dislocation of Russian and global affairs’ during the revolutionary period.

He utilises the diaries of the likes of Alexei Shtukaturov, a worker who was conscripted into the Imperial Army, and Alexander Zamaraev, a peasant, too old to be conscripted. Embedded within the stories of events, their own words reveal frustrations and aspirations. In part, this helps unveil the political sophistication of those often dismissed as ignorant peasants (as Service notes, ‘peasant’ was a legal, rather than an economic category). Nonetheless, the frustrations of the peasants form a significant backdrop to the events of the revolution.

Zamaraev lived in Totma district, Vologda, where 92 percent of agricultural land belonged to the state, church, and Imperial family. His diaries reveal concern over conscription, support for the Tsar and for the war, and over access to food as the war continued.

Service effectively brings home the conditions under Tsarism during the war, and helps show how common people were far from passive objects during these great events. At this time, one-third of European Russia was placed under martial law, and 13 million men went through the army (Service notes its harsh discipline.) Many others also laboured in the civilian economy. This fact, and the way that previously toothless local government bodies took on increasing responsibility for welfare provision, such as food and medicine, in a co-ordinated fashion (later to be joined by industrial committees) prefigured the kind of state that was to come out of the war.

Service is critical of Tsar Nicholas, especially his war aim of trying to gain Istanbul (or Tsargrad, as they referred to it) for the Russian empire. Service also notes the racist suppression of Jews and Poles within the Empire, the Tsar’s failure to grapple with its massive structural problems, and the way he vigorously resisted the changes needed to fight a modern mechanised war.

He notes that the Bolsheviks did not expect or want the specific revolution that they found themselves involved in, but that the line of party discipline and a one-party state were part of their core ideas from the very beginning: ‘They opted for force over persuasion; for central authority over democratic accountability’. They had no more legitimacy than the provisional government of Kerensky, but they were more prepared to use force to get their way.

The book draws out the role of the peasants, economically, politically and legally, and the way their frustrations formed a significant part of the backdrop to the drama against which the political leaders played their parts. In his assessments, though, Service does not look at whether there was any alternative path available which could have led to a different outcome.

Pik Smeet

Age of corporate greed (2025)

Book Review from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vulture Capitalism: How to Survive in an Age of Corporate Greed. By Grace Blakeley. (Bloomsbury Publishing) ISBN 9781526638069

The aim of this book is to demonstrate its idea that ‘Life under capitalism means living in a planned economy, while being told you are free’. As such, the author makes a strong case that capitalism is not defined by ‘free markets’ but by the existence of a class of owners and a class of workers.

As the author notes, most of this is not new thinking, and that she is drawing together well-known texts in academic circles and bringing them to a popular print market. Indeed, a concise bibliography, rather than scattering references in end notes, would have been useful.

Using many examples, such as Boeing, WeWork, Blackrock, she shows the mix of personal perfidy and structural power that characterises contemporary capitalism. She states ‘Large powerful firms are able, to a significant extent, to ignore the pressure exerted on them by the market and instead act to shape market conditions themselves’. As evidence, she shows the efforts these powerful firms go to control and influence political institutions to achieve these ends.

The nub of her case is that these corporations are practically monopolies. Monopoly does not mean the complete elimination of competition, but it does mean that price is not the only route to capitalists competing. She notes that monopolies appear not to have a totally free hand on pricing, and would rather cheapen the costs of labour they employ, rather than price-gouge the market.

This is a point she under-develops, and she could have noted that the class competition will always remain within capitalism: the capitalist class collectively exploiting the working class, and then fighting among themselves by various means (legal, financial, criminal) to get a cut of the profits raised. But this would have blunted her emphasis on monopoly capitalism.

She ends by looking at examples of ‘democratic planning’, finding real world examples of alternatives to the corporate capitalist planning. These range from Allende’s ‘Project Cybersyne’ in Chile, to Preston council, Jackson Missouri and Blaenau in Wales. Unfortunately for her argument, many of these examples rely on isolated powerful individuals, rather than mass movement; but her central point stands that there are real world examples of attempts within capitalism to engage in democratic planning that show how a different world could be organised.

She does acknowledge that, ‘More planning does not, then, equal less capitalism. The only way to get less capitalism is to constrain the power of capital,’ and that political action would be required to attain that (let alone abolish it).

The book is engaging and entertaining, and provides a useful contribution and perspective to building the case for common ownership. She is commendably clear, in her conclusion, that widespread consciousness of the need for change and our capacity to organise society for ourselves is needed in order to make the change.

Pik Smeet

Yes in My Back Yard (2025)

Book Review from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundance: How We Build A Better World. By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. ISBN 9781805226055

This book has caused quite a stir. It has even made Chancellor Reeves’ summer reading list, and been cited – in passing – by Robert Peston. It is part of the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) trend. Its central theme is that government regulation is choking the capacity for effective action to generate wealth, and that instead the liberal left has been concentrating on the parcelling out of scarcity, rather than trying to improve the overall material wealth of society.

The authors mention the expensive failure to build a high-speed railway in California, citing environmental laws and litigation as the reason: alongside the excessive bureaucracy to plan the route. They also note California has higher rates of homelessness than comparable cities in Texas, and attribute the blame to zoning and to authorities loading environmental, building and labour standards into permissions, making building uneconomic for developers.

In their narrative, they do discuss the nature of landholding and the fact that residents’ houses are also financial assets, only to skip blithely over them to discuss bureaucratic complexity again. In so doing, and returning to their theme that it was the failure of efforts to restrict the power of public authorities that is to blame, they ignore the role of private property.

The state is restricted in order to secure the power of private property. The litigation is there to protect property rights. It’s there to protect economic interests (and some firms do benefit from regulation). The complex funding arrangements and financial regulations are there precisely to keep the interests of wealth superior to state power. This is a political choice, and one that those who fund the political parties will continue to demand.

At points, the authors seem to indicate that it would be better to allow constructors to build slum housing than to continue allowing homelessness. They also suggest reducing quality controls and demands on construction: in essence, they are allowing that the working class cannot afford decent housing. Although their ‘lens’, as they say, is increasing supply, they ignore the lack of effective demand for the majority.

They find time in their conclusion to reference Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto talking about unfettering productive forces to produce abundance. But they ignore what those fetters of capitalist society are: the law of no profit – no production, and the law of no profit – no employment. The growth of income streams alongside the capacity to produce so much that profit margins would be reduced to zero.

Absent an understanding of the role of private property and the class struggle from their narrative, they are reduced to a simple call for de-regulation coupled with bold state action. They do not see that the litigiousness they decry is meant to exclude a thorough-going democratic control that includes all voices. The abundance they seek can only come from the common ownership and democratic control of productive wealth.

Pik Smeet