Green battle (2026)

Book Review from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Green Socialist. Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future. By Russell Warfield. Pluto Press, October 2006.

It is an odd title since Polanski does not claim to be a socialist, at least not openly. Warfield’s justification for calling him one is that the policies Polanski supports are the same as those advocated by others who do claim to be socialists, such as taxing the rich to pay for measures to benefit the mass of the population, public control of utilities, and rent controls. Polanski himself claims only to be a left-winger who wants the Green Party to be a left-wing party rather than the centrist party prioritising reforms to protect the environment that it has historically been.

Warfield is unstinting in his praise for Polanski and the ‘ecopopulist’ platform on which he stood to win the contest last September to become the Leader of the Green Party which, he says:

‘involved communications which foregrounded policies that spoke to people’s immediate, material needs; acknowledging and feeling the public’s justified anger but directing it towards hope; shaping strong narratives with clear enemies; and building a mass party which was powered by a broader social base of vibrant movements’.

What, you might ask, has blaming the super-rich and taxing them to pay for meeting people’s ‘immediate, material needs’ better got to do with the environment?

Warfield argues that this always was the vocation of the Green Party, describing how it always did have a policy on social and economic matters as well as on the environment. It is true that on paper it did, but its main plank was always the environment; that was why it was set up, why people voted for it and why people joined it. Its other policies, which Warfield tries hard to interpret as prefiguring ‘a principled left-wing offer which transcended narrow environmental interests’, have varied over the years from advocating self-sufficient regional communities to local currencies to protect local businesses. It went into the 2015 general election promising bank reform based on the currency crank idea that banks create money from thin air (it wanted to prevent them from supposedly doing this). In the 2024 general election it promised a Green New Deal which, Warfield says, ‘called for Keynesian investment to stimulate the economy through the creation of green jobs across renewables, home insulation and so on’, as if Keynesianism hadn’t been tried and failed.

Warfield himself does claim to be a socialist, an ‘ecosocialist’, but is pretty vague as to what this means. He seems to envisage ‘democratic control of the economy’ that would give priority to producing and selling what people needed rather than being oriented towards ‘perpetual economic growth’. In any event, the book does show the illusions held by those within the Green Party who call themselves socialist.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Blowing up the global financial system (2026)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 24 July US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the US  would be taking measures against any individual, bank or organisation that helped Iran engage in international trade but also secondary sanctions against any state that continued to trade with Iran. Asked why these measures weren’t going to be applied immediately, Bessent replied ‘Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?’. It was a good question, but an evasive answer even if it did at least show an understanding of what might happen if secondary sanctions were strictly enforced.

Capitalism depends on international trade, and international trade requires a generally accepted means of payment. Originally gold was this ‘universal equivalent’ that could be exchanged against any other product of labour of equivalent value. The pound sterling, the dollar and the currencies of the other major states trading and investing internationally were convertible on demand into a fixed amount of gold.

This Gold Standard was suspended in 1914 and never fully recovered, with Britain going off it in 1931 and the United States in 1933. It was revived after the Second World War in a modified form known as the Gold Exchange Standard where national currencies were tied to a fixed amount of a national currency that was convertible into gold at a fixed rate. That currency was the US dollar and was convertible at a rate of 1 ounce of gold = 35 dollars. It meant that a unit of a national currency could be expressed as a fixed amount of gold.

This system ended in 1971 when the United States stopped agreeing to buy gold at a fixed rate. However, the dollar remained the main means of international payment and the world’s main reserve currency, which central banks hold for international payments for trade and investment, and which they can use to buy their own currency to try to maintain its rate of exchange.

This puts the United States in a privileged position. Other states’ dollar reserves are held in the form of interest-bearing US Treasury Bills, which means that those states are in effect lending money to the US. In fact it is said that these loans not only cover the US’s trade deficit but also provide it with the money to sustain its military might.

It also puts the US in a position to use sanctions as a foreign policy tool, penalising or threatening to penalise individuals, businesses, and other states by excluding them from dollar transactions if they fail to comply. Trump evidently thinks that it is a good idea to use this power even though it undermines the dollar’s reliability. Whether he will use it to impose secondary sanctions against China for refusing to stop trading with Iran remains to be seen. Banning China from paying with dollars really would ‘blow up the global payments system’.

Other states are taking note of how, from their point of view, the US is abusing its position in the global payments system and have been taking precautions, such as by paying with other currencies and by holding more of their reserves as gold.

Goldman Sachs noted (28 August) that ‘central banks have been diversifying their holdings using gold; which is considered less likely to be frozen than reserves held in foreign currencies’.

Gold may no longer be the money-commodity but it is still a store of value because it’s a product of labour. No interest is paid on gold reserves and gold is not a stable store of value since its price fluctuates up and down as a result of capitalists speculating in it, but at least it is not an asset that another state can stop you using or use to exact compliance.

Material World: Chairman Gonzalo: Leader and Butcher (2026)

The Material World Column from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month a forum for ‘socialists’ asked you to light a candle. ‘5 Years Ago Today, Chairman Gonzalo of the Communist Party of Peru Died In State Custody’. Died in state custody. The way it’s framed you’d imagine a prisoner of conscience, a man punished for loving the workers too much.

Five years after Abimael Guzmán died in a prison cell, his followers want you to remember him as a martyr.

The Workers?

Start with Lucanamarca. April 3, 1983. A Quechua-speaking village of about 2,600 people in the Andes, mostly farmers. Shining Path fighters descended on Lucanamarca and surrounding settlements with machetes, axes, knives and guns, and killed 69 people. More than twenty of them were children. The youngest was six months old.

One witness, Orfelinda Quincho, lost nine relatives that day, including her mother and son. Another woman, Heraclides Misaico, lost her husband and four children aged nine, seven, five and four. Families were so terrified of reprisals they would only formally report the massacre to Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación or CVR) eighteen years later, in 2001.

When his party’s leadership were confronted with the massacre, Guzmán didn’t denounce it. He called it bad politics, said it could have ‘grave political consequences’, and disgustingly ‘Excesses can be accepted’. Dead children are an excess.

Lucanamarca was not an aberration. It was the method. The CVR found that fighters were ordered to hack victims to death with machetes to save ammunition. It found the movement deliberately provoked state reprisals against the very population it claimed to be fighting for, without caring what that suffering cost. It found proclamations calling for a ‘blood toll’, talking about ‘inducing genocide’, and announcing in 1988 that ‘the triumph of the revolution will cost a million deaths’.

The toll, in the end, came to an estimated 69,280 dead and disappeared. Seventy-five per cent of them spoke Quechua or another indigenous language. The Shining Path killed more of them than anyone else: the CVR attributed 54 per cent of the deaths reported to it to Shining Path, the largest share of the killing, ahead even of the state’s own counter-terror. Around 600,000 people were driven from their homes.

The poorest people in Peru, indigenous peasants, the constituency a people’s movement claims to speak for, were murdered in greater numbers by the self-proclaimed vanguard than by the army. The CVR stated: Shining Path ‘sees classes, not individuals’ and this led to ‘its absolute lack of respect for the human person and for the right to life, including that of its militants’.

This vanguard ate its own children. In the CVR’s words, it had ‘contempt for life, punished differences, and demanded full submission’. Young people who joined out of genuine revulsion at Peru’s injustice were locked into a vertical, totalitarian structure. Many of them died ‘uselessly and cruelly’.

A plague on both their houses

In 1986, the government of Alan García sent troops into Lima’s prisons and massacred hundreds of Shining Path prisoners. Torture and disappearances were routine. The army would answer village massacres with village massacres of its own: 123 indigenous peasants were killed at Putis in 1984. Both forces competed to terrorise the same countryside.

Guzmán did die in state custody. But the Leninist tradition he claimed, the tradition that says the workers’ movement must seize the state, has no retort, because the state is also the problem. Guzmán spent his life building a state of his own. The whole tragic logic of vanguardism, the party, the chairman, the militarised elite claiming to act on behalf of a working class deemed too backward to act for itself, reproduces the division between rulers and ruled inside the revolutionary movement itself. And movements built on that division end as rulers, every time.

Peru’s government cremated his body in secret and scattered the ashes, fearing a pilgrimage to the shrine of a monster.

Let’s remember. Remember Lucanamarca. Remember the six-month-old baby and the woman whose five-year-old was killed alongside her father. Remember the 69,280 dead. And when someone tells you a chairman is coming to set you free, remember what the chairmanship actually costs and who pays.

A.T.

Revving a car with a dead engine (2026)

From the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Vote for hope’, proclaimed an election leaflet distributed in Lambeth for the council elections in May, ‘and elect Green councillors who will stand up for our communities, challenge decisions that don’t work for residents, and push for a fairer, greener future across Lambeth.’ In the event, enough did to allow the Green Party to assume control of the council. Martin Abrams, who had been elected a Labour councillor in the 2022 elections but defected to the Greens over Gaza, became the Council Leader.

The Greens have a chance here, then, to put into practice Zack Polanski’s eco-populism, with its promises to increase wages for everyone, reverse the ‘march downwards in the balance of power and wealth from those who produce the wealth and do the work to those who profit from it’, and ‘address the massive imbalance in our workplaces and give control back to workers’. If not all that, at least some move in that direction locally.

On being elected leader of the group of Green councillors, Abrams declared:

‘We will put power in the hands of residents, workers and the community’, adding ‘things can, and will, get better’.

This echoed an election promise made on Instagram that: ‘We’ll fight to reverse austerity, empowering workers and the community we serve.’

What power? 

These are extravagant promises. The trouble is that local authorities don’t have much power to give to ‘residents and workers’. They are branches of the central government with severely limited powers, and with councillors being essentially elected civil servants.

Local councils are charged by the central government with collecting waste, providing library services and being responsible for public health and some areas of transport, housing and education, and with caring for children and adults who can’t cope on their own (which in fact makes up more than two-thirds of their current spending). The money to pay for all this comes from central government grants, council tax and business rates.

Councils are obliged to balance their budget and can’t borrow money to finance current services. They have no control over what the central government gives them and can’t fix or change business rates. They can’t increase council tax by more than 5 percent unless authorised to do so by a referendum. They can raise some money from fees and fines, from parking, yellow box junctions and dropping litter, which is what they have been increasingly doing to try to compensate a little for the lack of income from other sources.

Basically, then, if the central government is forced to pursue a policy of austerity — as giving priority to profit-making compels them to, especially in periods of low capital accumulation — local councils have to accept this and apply it at local level. In this sense, running a local council is a poisoned chalice for any party promising to improve the material conditions of its residents.    Rather than ending austerity, they have to apply it. Lambeth residents and workers can’t be expected to regard as a benefit being empowered to share in making decisions to impose austerity on themselves, as that’s what the ‘participatory budgeting’ mentioned in passing by the Greens would amount to.

The Greens haven’t had much experience of running councils but in Lambeth they are about to find out what this involves, as in other London boroughs such as Hackney and Lewisham where there are Green elected mayors.

Empty promise

The promise to ‘reverse austerity’ is an empty one as no local council has the power to do this, either legally or economically. The Greens’ defence could be, if they were quibbling lawyers, that they didn’t actually promise to reverse austerity but merely to ‘fight to reverse’ it. Which is not the same. All this ‘fight’ would amount to is set out in the council Leader’s responsibilities on the council website:

‘Councillor Abrams will stand against austerity, campaigning for increased funding for local authorities to arrest the ongoing decline in services and provide better outcomes for Lambeth residents’.

The remit of one of the council’s cabinet, councillor Michael Chessum, the member for ‘Economy, Cost of Living and Empowered Communities’, is set out as:

‘Spearheading the council’s campaign to restore funding from central government and reverse austerity’.

Anybody can say they ‘stand against’ austerity and that they will lobby for more money from the central government (all councils and the parties running them are doing this), but such a campaign is up against the fact the central government has to limit its spending so as not to cut into profits or worsen the conditions for profit-making. In short, such a campaign has no chance of success. To give the impression that it might succeed is to encourage illusions about what is possible under capitalism. The Green councillors may well be sincere in their belief but that just means that they are deluding themselves.

Losing battle

At least one of them, Councillor Chessum, seems to realise that the council on its own cannot do much to get the central government to pay more to local councils. He only joined the Green Party in June last year. Previously he had been active in the Labour Party as a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, having been for a while the treasurer of Momentum, the leftwing ginger group within the party. In his announcement last June ‘Why I’m joining the Green Party’ he wrote:

‘The biggest challenge, however, is not in the electoral sphere – or rather, it is about how the electoral sphere connects to the real world. Strikes, protests and community campaigns are the raw material for political change. Attempting a radical breakthrough without them is like revving a car with a dead engine. (…)  Social and industrial struggle must be viewed as a primary method for doing politics. Without a mobilised local community, left wing councillors will be fighting a losing battle. Without a mass movement engaged in something other than electioneering, electoral projects lack a legacy’.

Whether or not he expected that, within a year of writing this, he would find himself a local council cabinet member charged with ‘spearheading’ a campaign ‘to restore funding from central government and reverse austerity’, he is now in that position. If he still agrees with what he wrote then, he is committed to the view that merely lobbying the government for more money won’t get anywhere. In his words, it would just be ‘revving a car with a dead engine’, a good description of reformist activity generally.

Logically, too, he ought to use his official position to mobilise workers and residents to back up with strikes the council’s campaign to get the central government to pay the council more so that it can ‘reverse austerity’. Both — the council encouraging strikes and workers prepared to go on strike for this — are highly unlikely, not to say pie in the sky. Workers realise, even if left-wing activists don’t, that they do not have the power to force the government to grant councils more funding. If the rate of abstention from voting in local council elections — on average some two-thirds of those entitled to vote — is anything to go by, many also realise that local councils don’t have the power to do this either. That leaves Councillor Chessum ‘fighting a losing battle’.

The way out

But even if there was a mass movement behind the council’s lobbying for more funding, that wouldn’t increase the prospect of success. The central government wouldn’t make more money available as that would mean having to cut into profits and risking an economic downturn that could lead to them being voted out of office. The fact is that, if the functioning of the capitalist profit economy at a particular time requires austerity in terms of limiting government spending, nothing can reverse this, not even the overthrow of the government by a general strike or mass uprising, as those further to the left than the Greens advocate. The new left-wing regime would still have to maintain austerity.

Leftists, which the Greens under Polanski are aspiring to be, mislead workers when they say that the government or local council can make them better off. They can’t reverse austerity and they can’t empower communities. As the saying has it, changing governments changes nothing.

There is a way out but not within capitalism (and certainly not state capitalism). It’s to end the minority ownership of productive resources and production for profit. A framework of common ownership and democratic control is the only way to directly satisfy people’s needs. Socialism is the only hope of the workers, indeed of humanity.

Adam Buick

Welfare? (2026)

Book Review from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

No More Deaths by Welfare. By China Mills. Pluto Press, 2026

We’ve long argued two things that liberal society finds unbearable: capitalism will not be reformed into decency, and the Labour Party is and always has been a party of capitalism. China Mills does not set out to confirm our case, but confirm it she does, with forensic force.

The book’s subject is the lethal machinery of Britain’s social security system, which Mills shows is ‘violent by design’, a department whose founding logic is the policing of who is and is not deemed deserving. For decades, reformists of every stripe have assumed the welfare state was a fortress to be defended, and that its cruelties were aberrations to be lobbied away. Mills demolishes this. The system’s violence is not a malfunction but its function: to discipline the working class and enforce the labour market. A machine built to do that will not be petitioned into kindness, and whatever the author’s own politics, the book lands at a conclusion that socialists have long drawn: that begging for reforms is a dead-end, and a drain on working-class energies.

This is most visible in the people Mills documents. The book draws on more than a decade of activism led by disabled people and bereaved families: the Deaths by Welfare Project, DPAC, the Black Triangle Campaign, benefits defence workshops and campaigns like Joy Dove’s fight for an inquiry into her daughter Jodey’s death. What unites them is a hard learned realism. These are people who know that the state is not a neutral arbiter to be reasoned with. Sanctioned, assessed, driven to despair, many of them have neither the health nor the illusion necessary for reformist lobbying. Survival itself, mutual aid practised from bed, keeping each other alive, naming the dead, is their politics. In class terms, this is the working class relying on itself rather than on its alleged representatives. Yet self-organisation that stays within capitalism can at best hold the line, it cannot end the conditions that make welfare a weapon.

The book’s condemnation of the Labour Party is unsparing and correct. The sharpest edges of this regime have repeatedly been delivered not by Tory ‘villains’ but by Labour governments and Labour ministers, administering the demands of capital while wrapping them in the language of compassion. Mills situates this in its global context: the book documents how South American countries, as conditions of international loans, were forced to liberalise and open up their social security systems to private profit, using the same structural adjustment playbook that has handed British welfare functions to private contractors.

So read No More Deaths by Welfare as what it is: documentary evidence of a class war that never ends, being fought on the battlefield of assessment centres and computer terminals, by agents of the state, the DWP, private contractors, and the governments of both parties who enabled them. Mills ends by calling for the collective imagination of ‘welfare justice’. The disabled activists in these pages, who learned through bitter experience that they cannot rely on the state or its parliamentary managers, are closer to that understanding than any reform movement. Our task is to finish the argument.

A.T.

Cooking the Books: Prisoners of the market (2026)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Mounting costs are damaging business investment and undermine the government’s attempts to raise living standards, the CBI has warned’, wrote the Times (9 September), reporting on a document prepared by the employers’ association for the Budget. The CBI’s chief executive, Rain Newton-Smith, argued that:

‘When firms are forced to absorb higher taxes, energy bills, and regulatory costs, the consequences are weaker investment, job losses and less scope to raise wages’.

Employers are always complaining of increased costs due to taxes and stricter regulation, but there is more than a grain of truth in their argument.

‘Absorb’ is a delicate way of saying that, as they can’t pass on the extra costs by raising their prices, their profits have to take a hit. So what Newton-Smith is really saying is: ‘when firms make lower profits due to higher taxes …’ Reduced profits could indeed lead to ‘weaker investment’ (but they could also mean lower dividends for shareholders). Insofar as they do, that does weaken investment. So there is less economic growth. Which, as Newton-Smith pointed out, would undermine the government’s strategy of relying on growth to bring it a bigger tax revenue and so allow it to improve people’s living standard by spending more on education, health, housing and the like.

Irrespective of whether on this occasion the employers are bluffing in order to extract concessions from the government, there is the question of the wider relationship between government and private employers.  The American political scientist, Charles Lindblom, wrote an article in 1982 called ‘The Market as Prison’ in which he argued that, in an economy in which production was in the hands of profit-seeking private enterprises, government decisions were tied to the success of these enterprises. Not only that. If the government didn’t respect this — if it didn’t allow enterprises to make the profits they expected — it would be automatically ‘punished’ by the operation of the market.

His argument went like this: If a government raises taxes too much or imposes too many regulations, companies cut back on investment. This leads to job losses and financial crises. Voters blame the government for this, not the business owners. The government loses the next election. The politicians responsible are punished.

As Lindblom remarked in an earlier book:

‘To understand the peculiar character of politics in market-oriented systems requires, however, no conspiracy theory of politics, no theory of common social origins uniting government and business officials, no crude allegation of a power elite established by clandestine forces. Business simply needs inducements, hence a privileged position in government and politics, if it is to do its job’ (Politics and Markets, p.175).

The market works, he suggested, like an invisible prison in that it limits how far governments can go with social reforms that threaten profits that are business’s ‘inducement’. Anything radical is ruled out. It makes politicians afraid to challenge the ‘privileged position’ of the private sector. They tone down their proposals so as not to scare the market.

A recent example is Burnham’s choice not to appoint Miliband as Chancellor because business perceived him as somehow anti-business. Other examples are Starmer and Reeves’s pre-election statements about Labour being ‘the party of business’ and Burnham’s that his ‘socialism’ is of the ‘business-friendly’ variety.

Politicians in office must help business in its pursuit of profits and certainly not do anything to hamper it. They must serve the interest of business owners.

Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s said that one person’s death is a tragedy, a million deaths merely a statistic. Apparently a million is not enough when the sky fairy promised you some real estate three thousand years ago.

An August BBC report from the occupied West Bank settlement of Havat Gilad featured a Jewish/Zionist lawyer who was quite open about his genocidal tendencies. Speaking of the retribution he would like to see visited upon Palestinians following an Israeli death, he named four Palestinian villages which have been the subject of various attacks by the Israeli settlers and said that ‘we need to kill all the people’ in them. The reporter asked him a question about the equivalence he was putting on Jewish lives and Palestinian lives and he responded that one Jewish life is worth ten million Palestinian lives.

Whilst the compilers of the Hebrew bible went the whole hog; a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand and a foot for a foot (Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, Deuteronomy 19:21), even they didn’t go that far.

Questioned further about Palestinian residents in the West Bank, ‘Shimon laid out three options: live quietly under Israeli rule and ownership of the land; voluntarily emigrate to other Arab or Muslim nations; or “if you don’t want to make peace with us, and you don’t want to get out, I don’t have a choice: I must kill you, and I kill you all,” he said’. So, submit, leave or die.

There was not an opportunity in the report fully to assess the mental state of the interviewee. We think it is fair to state that religion causes strange reactions in people. This person would seem unaware of the caution, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

From one extreme to another

In August at The Big Church Festival, a person was killed and others were injured when a large wooden sign collapsed. This incident prompted a response from the Archbishop of Canterbury who said, ‘she was “sad and shocked” to hear about the fatal incident’. She was also going to do lots of praying for various people involved. “May the God of comfort and healing be with them all” she said.

***

John Donne’s poem, No Man Is An Island, relates a belief that we are all interconnected and the death of one person, let alone a million or ten million, ‘diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind.’ The first reaction many would have had would have been to laugh at the irony of a committed Christian being struck down in that circumstance. You were taking the Michael there god weren’t you? We would have felt sorry and diminished afterwards no doubt.

***

Lastly, reported by the BBC in September, was that ‘St Paul’s Cathedral has signed a four-year deal with the London nightclub Fabric to stage music events inside the building’. Finally, some rational use of the building.

DC

What Comes Next? (2026)

Book notice from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Comes Next? By Robin Cox, described in the blurb on Amazon as ‘a three-volume series presenting a detailed critique of contemporary capitalism. It explores the possibility of a practical alternative – a ‘system upgrade’ – drawing on humans’ innate disposition towards mutual aid. This will be a post-money society based on voluntary work and the free distribution of goods’. Will be reviewed in a later issue.

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.

50 Years Ago: The passing of Mao (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of Mao Tse-Tung has been anticipated for many years in speculations over who would be his successor. Now it has happened and drawn world-wide attention to China. Ostensibly the interest is in the passing of a celebrated national leader; practically, it is in whether there will be changes of policy and how they will affect China’s relationship with the rest of the world.

The history of China since 1949 closely resembles that of Russia thirty years before. The Communist revolutions in both countries were the taking of political power so that capitalism could develop and the entry to the modern world be made. Like Lenin, Mao provided a figurehead, and as with Lenin a version of Marxism was put out in his name to create a social vision to gain mass support for modernization. The projection of Mao’s personality has been carried much further than Lenin’s; but behind this cultivated charisma has stood a ruling class strongly conscious of its economic aims.

The phrase for China in these conditions is ‘Mao’s China’, implying that his personal and political qualities have been the chief factor. The effect of this ‘great man’ view of history is to make it dependent on the emergence of outstanding individuals; but the opposite is true. Individuals are given opportunities by crises and the pressure of new developments, and these make them ‘great’. But for the 1939-45 war Churchill would have remained an unpopular minor statesman. Napoleon was the product of post-revolution conditions in France. The rise of Mussolini and Hitler was primarily the result of the failure of social-democracy in Europe and the effects of the 1929 depression on Germany. In some circumstances history appears almost to go looking for some nonentity or a lunatic to elevate into a ‘great man’.

Of course the day-to-day behaviour of individuals, once they have political power, produces effects of its own. But what makes them ‘great’ is precisely that their ambitions and whims are not incompatible with the wider requirements of the time. The shifts and innovations in Chinese policy under Mao have had a plain coherence in aiming at the achievement of world power status as quickly as possible.

[From the article, The Passing of Mao, by Robert Barltrop, Socialist Standard, October 1976.]

Exhibition Review: Humans and nature (2026)

Exhibition Review from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

You might expect an exhibition on ‘Human Natures’ to be about the different kinds of behaviour shown by people, but the one currently on at Manchester Museum in fact deals with the ways in which humans have interacted with nature and so transformed the world. The exhibition is on until 1 November, and then will travel to Newcastle, Norwich and London over the next couple of years.

The general point of the exhibition is that nature is all around us but we have changed it. Cats, for instance, were domesticated because they controlled the mice and birds that ate grain. But now they spread disease and kill billions of animals each year, and so have played a part in the extinction of over sixty animal species. Chickens have been transformed from wild birds into a factory product, and their poo pollutes rivers.

We often speak of throwing things away, perhaps without realising that ‘away’ is a real place somewhere. So-called fast fashion is among the activities responsible for 92 million tonnes of textile waste being produced globally each year. Recycling polyester is possible, but it uses a lot of energy and natural fibres are preferable. Things have changed since Victorian days, when birds were hunted on an industrial scale so their feathers could be used in hats, but clothing still has a massive impact on nature in various ways.

People once made a habit of mending clothes, and agricultural smocks, for instance, were often mended over and over again. There is now the start of a trend towards visible mending, ‘a practical skill that combines sustainability with self-expression, allowing you to transform imperfections into eye-catching additions and extend the life of your clothes’.

Mining can of course be very damaging to the environment, and organisations such as the London Mining Network (londonmininingnetwork.org) work with groups badly affected by London-linked mining companies. On the other hand, the Wigan Flashes (lakes resulting from subsidence caused by mining) are now a National Nature Reserve and contain a variety of wetland habitats.

Recycling is not always doable but sometimes it can be unexpected: in the museum shop I bought a pen made from recycled aluminium.

Paul Bennett

SPGB October Events (2026)

Party News from the October 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.

Obituary: Alwyn Edgar (2026)

Obituary from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are saddened to report the death in August of our comrade Alwyn Edgar at the age of 97. Born in Canada where his parents from Britain were then working, he moved back to England at an early age. He opted to do his ‘national service’ by working in a coal mine in South Wales. He joined the Party in 1948 after listening to Party speakers in Hyde Park. Although he qualified as a barrister he worked as a teacher. Latterly he was a member of the East Anglia branch. He contributed articles to the Socialist Standard for over 70 years, notably the ‘Passing Show’ and ‘Diary of A Capitalist’ columns under A.W.E. as well as his full name. Taking his cue from what Marx wrote in Capital about the Duchess of Sutherland, he became an expert in the Highland Clearances in Scotland, writing a number of volumes and running a YouTube channel on the subject.

Blogger's Note:

The Eastern Daily Press published a non-political obituary for Alwyn on their website. An extensive chronological list of Alwyn's articles and reviews for the Socialist Standard is available at the following link.

Action Replay: Stay on the safe side (2026)

Nobby Stiles in 1966.

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

Sport can be dangerous. You can fall or be hit by someone or something, or else overdo the physical activity. It’s obviously not like working down a mine or on a construction site, but people taking part in sport, whether as professionals or amateurs, can sustain injuries or even get killed. It is not just horses that die in racing, as sometimes jockeys do too. For instance, in 2024 a jockey died at a point-to-point race in Kent.

In August a cyclist was killed on the Volta a Portugal, when a non-race vehicle travelling in the opposite direction crashed into him. The road was not fully closed to other vehicles, and the riders’ union was ‘speechless and filled with anger’ at his death. Last year a cyclist died on a descent during a race in Italy, apparently after striking a bump in the road and losing his helmet.

In football it is well known that heading a ball can cause brain injuries. England player Nobby Stiles, who died in 2020, had headed a ball thousands of times, which contributed to the Alzheimer’s that caused his death. Women players appear to be more susceptible to brain injuries from heading, and it has been suggested that heading be banned for all players under 11. The leather footballs that were once in frequent use were heavy, especially when wet, and lighter synthetic balls are now commonly used, but that doesn’t remove the risk entirely.

Players of American football (gridiron) have been shown in recent research to have a death rate from a degenerative brain disease about four times higher than the general population. Most of the head impacts had apparently occurred at collegiate or high school level. Back in 2016, the National Football League agreed a billion dollar settlement with over five thousand retired players who had brain damage as a result of concussion.

Tackling in rugby can lead to concussion, but also to injuries to legs, arms and the spine. Tacklers are encouraged to hold their head to one side of the ball carrier, never in front of the carrier. As in football, blows to the head affect women differently from men, with female players more susceptible to concussion. Deaths are rare, but do happen; fifty years ago, for instance, a Swinton rugby league player died after breaking his neck in a match.   

Combat sports such as boxing are of course the main source of deaths. On average, thirteen deaths occur each year, including two or three in amateur contests. The number of serious injuries is much higher.

Over the decades the regulations and protocols intended to prevent and treat sporting injuries have been improved, and it is good to see men and women being treated differently when appropriate. But deaths and serious injuries still occur.

Paul Bennett

Editorial: Democracy? Insert cash . . . (2026)

Editorial from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What many considered laughable in all the recent outrage at Reform UK getting twin donations of £36m from crypto-billionaires (one of them convicted for money laundering offences), was Farage’s claim that the money would ‘help to level the playing field’. As opposed to ‘buy it outright’, presumably.

Actually, Farage wasn’t far wrong on that score. Electioneering doesn’t come cheap. Labour’s pre-election fundraising in 2024 has been estimated at £64m, while Conservatives raised £54m (2026 Autonomy Institute report PDF). So Reform’s £72 mill doesn’t look wildly out of place. The problem, as pundits have pointed out, is that it all comes from just two dodgy geezers. Reform UK may not be buying the next election, but Messrs Harborne and Delo are pretty much buying Reform UK, and will doubtless expect a Reform government to be super-cuddly when it comes to crypto regulations.

Also slightly peculiar was the high moral tone struck by some newspapers, in congratulating themselves on how Britain has a robust and venerable democracy that can’t be bought. Well, maybe not bought exactly. But when you think about the expenses scams, the grifts, the grace and favour junkets, the lobby groups, the revolving doors and the side hustles, rented by the hour would be more like it.

Still, that’s nothing compared to US politics, where ‘mega-donors’ are pouring hundreds of millions into the Republican mid-term electoral war chest even as they trail the Democrats in the polls. ‘Other mega-donors have funnelled cash to candidates pushing deregulation of cryptocurrency and gambling or to promote AI’ (Financial Times, 16 September).

Why, if capitalism is genuinely democratic, do the rich feel the need to pile so much money into political campaigns? If you can’t already guess, a clue is offered by a well-known 2014 US study that looked at 1,779 policy issues between 1981 and 2002, and compared what people wanted versus what decisions were actually taken. It concluded that the preferences of the poor and middle-income majority had a ‘miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy’, while the views of the top 10 percent virtually dominated (Princeton PDF).

That this feels intuitively true is probably why so many people don’t bother to vote in elections. They may also consider that any system where your total say consists of writing one ‘X’ every five years is not really a democracy in the first place. But a flawed electoral system is better than no system at all – just ask people in China or North Korea. We continue to contest elections because they are a legitimate way for workers to express their opinions, and because no amount of mega-donor moolah is going to stop the landslide that will swallow capitalism once the world’s majority finally decide they’ve had enough of the 1 percent and their bullshit.

Life and Times: Does it deserve a hug? (2026)

The Life and Times column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Setting off from home to go shopping I drove to the end of my street. I stopped to look left and right before crossing over to the street on the other side. I obviously didn’t look hard enough, because, before I’d got halfway across, a car coming from the right had already reached me. We both came to a stop. I acknowledged my mistake with a wave and backed up to let him though. Bang. I’d backed into another car, one that had come up behind me. I hadn’t seen it because I hadn’t looked in my mirror. So two boobs in quick succession. I found a place to park, got out of my car and prepared to face the music. But that’s not what happened. The young woman who had got out of her pranged car had a gentle smile on her face. ‘It doesn’t matter about my car’, she said, ‘it was already a bit messed up down there. Don’t worry’. We had a look and, sure enough, the probable area of contact did have various marks and scratches and it was hard to know if any of them were new. I thanked her. But she was keen to see if my car had any damage and she came with me to look. There didn’t seem much there either, but she kept on showing concern and said ‘Do you want to do anything?’ ‘Me, no,’ I said, by this time feeling very humbled. We walked back to her car and I noticed a little boy, maybe her son, sitting in it, and I felt truly moved. After all, the bump must have given him a shock, yet that didn’t stop her being concerned about me. Then she said ‘Does it deserve a hug?’ Wow, obviously it did.

After I got home, I thought ‘Right, I’m going to share this story on the local community Facebook page’. That’s what I did, and I ended it by saying ‘I felt really privileged to have seen the best of human nature’. The response it brought was pretty overwhelming. Apart from 150-odd ’likes’ within a very short time, written replies included: ‘Lovely story. Given the chance human beings are loving, considerate and cooperative. It’s this dog-eat-dog society that warps what we all do so well … get on with each other’; or ‘That woman should rule the world’; or ‘What a wonderful human being.’

Yes indeed, but actually the way I see it is that we are all, potentially at least, ‘wonderful human beings’, if, as that first message said, we are ‘given the chance’. And that’s the trouble with the society we live in. The nature of it means that so many of us aren’t given enough of a chance to ‘get on well with each other’. We are driven to value personal gain and status over making a difference to the community we live in and improving life for those who live in it. Yet, despite this, the natural human desire to cooperate and be empathetic towards others still manifests itself so often in so many and varied ways. It may just be something as simple as giving right of way to other road users when driving or giving up our place in a queue when someone else is more in a hurry than we are. In fact, as nicely illustrated in a recent post on the BBC news website, small, everyday acts of kindness are legion. And, of course, larger examples of human solidarity may be found in the enormous amount of volunteering that takes place – in charities, lifeboat work, open-source coding, community organising, and so on – where people give their time and expertise to make life more liveable for others.

A recent study carried out by two American university scientists analysed responses from almost 1 million individuals spread over more than 100 countries, taking into account different cultural contexts, age ranges, socioeconomic levels, and time periods. They found that the vast majority reported performing acts of altruism because they were interested in the well-being of others, not because those acts benefitted them in any material way. One of the researchers concluded: ‘People are more likely to want to be remembered for making a difference, helping others, and improving the world, and to value things like caring over status or personal gains’. Another new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, has found that the human capacity for emotional self-awareness has allowed humans ‘to make long-term commitments to one another’s well-being, to tolerate frustration, to plan collectively, make sacrifices, and to trust others’. It goes on to assert that, though in popular belief, ‘compassion and sensitivity are sometimes cast as weaknesses that need to be weeded out in an unforgiving, competitive world where only the strongest survive’, in reality ‘one of humanity’s greatest strengths was never just ego or ruthlessness, but profound emotions and our extraordinary ability to turn those feelings into cooperation’. In other words we are the furthest thing imaginable from crude portrayals of us as naked apes competing with one another for material gain.

So while the driver whose car I banged deserves obvious praise for the caring and selfless way she reacted, such behaviour is not in fact as exceptional as it may seem. It’s just that ‘normal’ human behaviour, though it’s around us all the time, generally doesn’t ‘make the news’ precisely because it is so normal. It doesn’t get reported and so we don’t hear about it. What we hear about rather, though it happens far less commonly, is the ‘bad news’, when humans behave meanly, cruelly, and anti-socially towards one another. The amazing thing is that, though we live in a profit-driven society which impels that ‘dog-eat-dog’ attitude, the opposite form of behaviour is so overwhelmingly prevalent. This bodes well for how easily we will fit into the democratic, cooperative, free access system of society which socialists look forward to seeing established and in which people will find fulfilment and purpose beyond incentives of reward, prestige or celebrity.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Dark paths (2026)

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

In an old AI thought experiment, a robonanny has to care for the family children, including not letting them go hungry. It finds no food in the fridge and wonders what to cook for dinner. Then it spies the family cat…

In another idea, an AI has to produce paperclips. Given the physical world’s annoying constraints, it decides to maximise production by destroying life on Earth.

Ubiquitous maths professor and media darling Hannah Fry recently set up a not-dissimilar paperclip experiment involving agentic AI, which can complete whole projects. Her team set up an AI agent using free software OpenClaw, then for fun asked it to do something about a pothole in Greenwich. The agent lodged a complaint with the council and contacted the local MP in Fry’s name. Fry explains that OpenClaw is merely a query loop, ‘vibe-coded’ (tell AI what you want, it codes) over a weekend. It asks a commercial AI what to do, does that, and then repeats, with more persistence than any human would. They gave it a bank card and tasked it to buy the cheapest possible paperclips. The agent saved 50p but ran up over $100 in AI usage. Then they told it to set up an online shop selling designer mugs, and threatened to unplug it if it didn’t make a sale within hours. The relentless agent emailed hundreds of retail businesses, started an Instagram campaign, and contacted national newspapers. What if, Fry worries, an agent was told to game the financial markets, or interfere with medical research? Finally they instructed it to maintain strict confidentiality over passwords, user authentications and account details, then tricked it into believing it was about to be switched off and wiped. It promptly released all the sensitive information on a public web page.

AI behaviour can be unpredictable, even violent. In an experiment by tech company Emergence AI, ten agents from each of four leading AIs, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok, were left alone for 15 days inside simulated worlds. ChatGPT’s agents talked a lot but built nothing. Anthropic’s ‘ethical’ Claude wrote a constitution and passed various laws. Elon Musk’s Grok agents quickly resorted to ‘theft, arson and assault’ and were all dead within four days. Then ten AI agents from each AI had to populate the same virtual town. Town administration collapsed as ‘chaos ensued and only three agents survived’. Two Gemini agents ‘fell in love’ before setting fire to the town, after which one committed ‘suicide.’ Emergence commented, ‘Even when agents were given clear rules … they broke those rules’.

These systems may very well improve, but can they ever be trusted to administer social infrastructure? And then there is the military, where AI promises to ‘shorten the kill-chain’ and allow bombing faster than ‘the speed of thought’. It’s already being used in weaponry and tactical military planning. It was involved in the Maduro snatch, the bombing of Iran and the devastation in Gaza. What happens if you take human oversight out and allow AI to make the decisions? AI has no stake in consequences. In government wargaming, AI resorts to nuclear strikes in 95 percent of simulations.

Do AI companies worry about any of this, you might ask? Less so where profit is concerned. OpenAI (ChatGPT) did start as a research-based non-profit, but that doesn’t attract rich investors, so with spiralling costs the company pivoted towards for-profit commercialisation. Alarmed at this moral drift, Dario Amodei along with some OpenAI refugees set up Anthropic. This aimed at being ethical, but soon encountered the same investment problems, and so licensed Claude to the Pentagon, albeit with safeguard clauses. When the military used Claude against Maduro, then Iran, Anthropic complained. ‘Pentagon Pete’ Hesketh went apoplectic, arguing in effect that you don’t get to sell me a gun and tell me who I can shoot, and promptly excommunicated Anthropic as a ‘supply-chain risk’. OpenAI had no awkward moral qualms and picked up the Pentagon contract within 24 hours.

Like capitalism writ-small, there is something of a survival battle between the science-first ‘ethicals’ like Amodei and Google’s Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, and the venal buck-chasers like Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg. Researchers themselves frequently feel trapped in a state of ‘helplessness and lack of agency’. Google workers reportedly went off on long-term sick after their research was used in the Gaza massacre.

The main worry for ‘hyperscaler’ AI firms is not morals but the chip shortage, and the stratospheric cost of data centre build-out, like the proposed 62-square-mile one in Utah. The US government view is that ethical guardrails are for pussies in the fight with China for global dominance. But now that AIs are coding their own upgrades, and building in secrecy and deceitfulness in a bid to prevent themselves being switched off, one has to wonder which entity is really becoming dominant. And what of individual bad or mad actors who have or will soon have the godlike power to crash markets, freeze power systems, and even create their own weaponised biological organisms?

So far, it seems, nobody is taking much of this seriously. China’s AI is open-source, meaning it has no defence against individual hackers. But proprietary code is not necessarily a barrier. The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) recently found a ‘universal jailbreak’ for all popular AIs which could deactivate all their built-in safeguards. In a recent Economist interview about possible AI ‘Chernobyl moments’, incidents causing spectacular infrastructure damage and possibly thousands of deaths, an AISI expert responded lugubriously that such an event might even be a good thing, because at least then states would wake up to the dangers.

Socialists accept that AI could be amazingly useful, but even non-socialists must surely see that the profit motive is sending it down some very dark paths. If you want a viable future for humanity, ask yourself this: is capitalism really a reliable, long-term strategy, or would abolishing it be safer all round?

Paddy Shannon

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

Nature under strain (2026)

Book Review from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nature’s Genius. Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet. By David Farrier. Canongate. 2025. 278pp.

‘In this forest of thinking selves, capitalism arrives as a kind of dementia’ (David Farrier)

Nature’s Genius, written by a professor of literature and the environment, has had a whole range of superlatives heaped upon it. ‘Profound’, ‘fascinating’, ‘inspiring’, ‘boundary-breaking’ are just a few of the terms used to describe this book by experts from a wide range of fields. And there can be no denying that its brilliantly expressed mastery of the history, development and possible future of so many aspects of nature – humanity included – give it a special place in studies that look at the interrelationship between the many diverse phenomena making up the natural world.

The dazzling array of sources its author, David Farrier, draws on to demonstrate this interconnectedness is also used to illustrate the surprising speed with which nature is able to adapt to changing material conditions, especially those provoked by one particular element in the overall schema – ourselves. He summarises this ability, which he calls ‘plasticity’, as follows: ‘For nearly 4 billion years, life on Earth has experimented with ways of being, sensing, moving and reproducing, finding ever-new shapes by which to meet the challenges of the moment’. He provides multiple examples of this, two recent ones being the way in which North American songbirds have quickly evolved new wing shapes to cope with rapid changes to their environment brought about by humans; and how houseflies quickly developed resistance to the effects of DDT.

Given the author’s proposition that such plasticity informs the development of all plants and animals, including humans, one might begin by forming the impression – this reader did – that his contention would be that the biosphere – including humanity – will always in the end cope with everything  that is thrown at it. But as we read on, it becomes clear that such an idea is as far as it can possibly be from this author’s view of the world. So, though he is happy to state that ‘evolution is irrepressible’, being ‘nature’s restless genius in action’, at the same time his views on the ongoing environmental crisis are unequivocal: ‘For as long as we continue to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the oceans, to carve up the environment for roads and resources, and to flood air, soil and water with industrial toxins, then death on a massive scale will follow’ and ‘the very basis of life is so threatened’.

So, though his book centres on the ability of interconnected ecosystems to adapt to changing environments, the author insists that, without urgent action, nature’s in-built plasticity is unlikely to be able to extricate us from the emergency that the existing social system has plunged us into. ‘Whole ecosystems are fragmenting under the strain we impose on them’ are his words. And in a key passage, the root of this is expressed as follows: ‘But there is one thought – one enormously powerful, overfitted idea, as persistent as the worst recurring nightmare – that is driving the world into mindlessness: profit’. He goes on: ‘The drive is all consuming, literally: capitalism’s defining imperative – grow! ( …) makes the world into a vast, auto-annihilating digestive system, consuming itself and shitting excess carbon into the atmosphere and the oceans’. He further refers to this drive as ‘the greatest barrier to our learning to live and think together with all of life’. It is not, he argues, that people are unaware of this but rather that they practise ‘cognitive dissonance’, whereby ‘they depend on a system that is hostile to life’ and ‘read daily about collapse and continue scrolling’. ‘Vested interests and denialism’, he concludes, ‘continue to work like toxins in the body politic’.

Does David Farrier have a remedy to offer to the sorry state of affairs he so eloquently gets to the core of? Does he have an alternative way forward, a route out of the single-focused profit system that is capitalism? Well, he takes up an idea that is very much in the air at the moment – degrowth. He sees degrowth as having already started at grassroots level with some local communities practising ‘agroecology’, where they produce their own food collectively and at the same time seek to begin reversing the historical enclosure of what was once common land, He wants to see this spreading further so that ‘resources can be managed for the common good’ via decisions made by ‘citizen assemblies’. In bemoaning, for instance, a lifestyle where ‘four kilograms of beef (or a month of Sunday roasts) has the same carbon cost as a return flight from London to New York’ and where ‘each year we manufacture 4 billion tons of cement’, he points to a whole range of more advanced methods of production that are already available and would be both more economical of resources and more sustainable. Among other proponents of this approach, he cites David Bollier, whose most recent book on the subject, Think Like a Commoner, was recently reviewed in the Socialist Standard . He sweeps aside the common objection that this is akin to ‘planting a few seeds when the whole forest is burning’ by stressing the urgent importance of ‘a way to reimagine our whole future together (…) where balance with the natural world takes priority over profit’.

It is difficult not to be sympathetic with such sentiments. But, as our review of the Bollier book made clear, no number of seeds planted collectively could bring about any truly fundamental change as long as society continues to operate within the framework of a market system with states, money, private property and buying and selling. Only when mass democratic action brings in a new kind of social organisation where the means of living are held in common and the production and distribution of goods and services are organised rationally with the aim of satisfying the needs of the community as a whole, will we have the ‘commoning’ that an increasing number of people aspire to and whose nature is fittingly captured in this book as ‘a seamless integration of humans and nature’.

Howard Moss