Life and Times: Detectorists and grave robbers (2026)

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

I recently tuned in to two investigative series on Radio 4. Though they told what on the surface seemed quite different tales, they were linked by an important, in fact fundamental feature of the society we live in. They both equally vividly illustrated the hold that money has on us and the lengths to which some of us will go to obtain it. The first one told the story of two metal detectorists who stumbled upon a hoard of ancient Anglo-Saxon coins and decided not to follow the legal requirement to surrender them to the Treasury but to keep them and try to sell them secretly. The series was aptly entitled ‘Fool’s Gold’, since, in the end, the ‘gold’ they found had disastrous results for them. The second one, ‘The Grave Robbers’, investigated the fraudulent methods used by a covert group to claim the estates of people who die without leaving a will.

Detectorists declaring their discovery of ancient coins or artefacts are entitled to 50 percent of what the Treasury deems to be their value, the other 50 percent going to the owner of the land on which they were found. That value, however, is usually only a fraction of what collectors will pay on the black market. In this case the ‘official’ value of the coins in question was likely to be up to £12m. But the 50 percent of that amount the discoverers would have been eligible to receive was not enough for them and they chose to try to sell the coins themselves. It didn’t work, since, as the series told us, in the close-knit detectorist community secrets don’t stay secret for long, especially as, when some of the coins started appearing at a Mayfair auction house, rumours of an undeclared hoard begin to spread. The upshot was that the detectorists were exposed and went on the run, but finished up in the dock accused of theft and given prison sentences. However, hundreds of the coins remained unaccounted for, and still do.

The other series, ‘The Grave Robbers’, investigated a different kind of fraud, one where a ‘crime group’ uses forged wills to claim ownership of houses when people who lived in them on their own die without leaving a will. The ‘gang’ forges wills, as the programme put it, ‘to take the homes of the dead’, with the result that any genuine heirs that might exist are left with nothing. The series found that the group in question, based in Eastern Europe, was also involved in cannabis farms, money laundering and the sale of fake UK work visas. We hear from neighbours of a deceased man how the gang, using false but legally approved documents, had taken possession of his house, selling everything of value and using the property for whatever purpose they saw fit.

Both these stories illustrate the rampant hold that money or the prospect of it can have on human actions. And they are of course just the tip of the iceberg. We know that every day multiple attempts of all description are made to carry out what has come to be called ‘scam’ activity at the expense of both individuals and institutions, facilitated of course by the tools of electronic media.

Should we be surprised at this? Probably not, since the class-divided system we live in, where a tiny minority own most of the wealth and the vast majority own little but their ability to work for that majority in order to keep their heads above water, is by its nature a dog-eat-dog affair. Though vast wealth rarely brings meaningful satisfaction to the minority who have it, they do have praise and privilege heaped upon them, creating the temptation among others to look for ways of becoming part of that, to ‘get rich’, even at the expense of others who have little themselves. There is much talk of guarding against scams, but, within a system ruled by money, profit and wealth accumulation, such activities cannot be controlled. There may be attempts, via legislation or policing, to curb their extent, but, as with the other multiple problems the system throws up, it is unlikely to end up as anything more than tinkering at the edges.

Having said this, we must also observe that, though few people would mind having more money or being rich, the vast majority of us would not stoop to cheating or deceiving other individuals to achieve that purpose. At the same time, it cannot be denied that, while we are essentially cooperative creatures, we are also capable of a wide range of non-cooperative behaviours according to the situations we find ourselves in or are imposed on us. So, in some of us, the competitive nature of the society we live in can trigger anti-social forms of behaviour – the so-called ‘worst instincts’. Yet we all know from personal experience and on a day-today basis that most of those around us, far from seeking to make gain at the expense or disadvantage of others, are more likely to go out of their way to come to their assistance. It is, in fact, no exaggeration to say that even the very system we live in, competitive though it is at the core, depends on us cooperating with one another on a day-to-day basis in order for it to operate. The remarkable thing is that, though ‘money rules’ is the bane of most people’s existence, dictating actions and priorities and often causing hardship and suffering, this does not prevent so many of us from behaving generously towards others even if it means financial loss or inconvenience for ourselves. The recent World Happiness Report by Gallup, after carrying out exhaustive research, concludes that a key source of human happiness is being generous to others and engaging in volunteering activity. This writer can only reflect on how much more effectively human cooperation and generosity would flourish in the moneyless society based on voluntary work, democratic organisation and free access to all goods and services that we call socialism.

Howard Moss

Proper Gander: Processing progress (2026)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 2020s is a particularly unsettling decade to be living in, and the whole of the 21st century so far hasn’t been the utopia which our forebears might have expected it to be. Cultural historian Matthew Sweet explores this current bleak mood by asking What Happened To Progress? in his BBC Sounds documentary series. The premise is that there is a ‘polycrisis’ in the realms of technology, the economy, the environment and global politics. As none of these are working in a way which benefits most people, our attitude towards progress has been affected. Sweet and other academics, writers and specialists give their views around how ‘one of the foundations of our economic system – progress understood as endless growth and rising prosperity – is looking pretty brittle right now’.

According to artist James Bridle, we have come to think of progress as being a line on a graph, swooping upwards and to the right. The background assumption has been that our children will inherit a better world where they can be happier, healthier, wealthier and wiser than ourselves. As other contributors explain, this concept of progress hasn’t always been part of our collective psyche. In previous societies, expectations for the future were more aligned with the cyclical patterns in nature, or had a ‘rise and fall’ narrative. Classicist Edith Hall reminds us that acquiring knowledge led to a fall in both the Adam and Eve story in Abrahamic religions and Pandora’s Box in Greek mythology. There’s a consensus among the contributors that our modern understanding of ‘progress’ emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries, through the philosophical works of figures such as Francis Bacon, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Progress became more practical with the technical achievements of the 19th century. As author John Lanchester tells us, resources were seen as limitless as economies expanded through industrialisation.

There were improvements in many communities’ living standards, healthcare and literacy which carried on into the 20th century. Sweet says that the First World War ‘broke the link … between technological and moral advancement’, with the slaughter enabled by the knowledge to manufacture ‘tanks, submarines and razor wire’. As a response, multi-national institutions were formed, such as the League of Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations, although these haven’t led to world peace, and war is now more of a threat than ever. As well as weaponry, Artificial Intelligence is another instance of how the results of scientific progress prompt fears about their impact, although climate change is described as the ‘ultimate example’. Contemporary uncertainty around progress comes from the tension between realising it isn’t a simple upward curve and a need for its reassurance, as described by psychoanalyst Adam Philips. Philosopher John Gray expands on this with a lively definition of progress as ‘the crutch, … balm, … therapy, … talisman … to stave off dread or even despair’. Our expectation of progress, as writer Philip Ball says, is out of kilter with how the natural world and society function.

Karl Marx’s views about how society functions are cited occasionally through the series, such as his ‘rival proposal’ to Kant’s ‘fanciful’ idea about a peaceful coalition of states. Historian Margaret MacMillan promisingly describes Marx’s Capital as being about progress to ‘a world in which there are no national borders, no classes left’. But this is only briefly mentioned, confusingly (but predictably) alongside references to Lenin and the so-called ‘communism’ of the USSR and China which had different aims entirely. On the other occasions when Marx is discussed, he’s presented as a poet, with an evocative reading of the ‘all that is solid melts into air’ quote from chapter one of The Communist Manifesto.

What Happened To Progress? is edited so that each contributor only speaks a few lines at a time before the emphasis is changed by someone else. Although this means that a range of perspectives are given, there isn’t the space for explaining in much depth. As indicated by the disparate references to Marx, the fundamental role of the economic structure of society in creating the material conditions for ‘progress’ isn’t explored in any detail. Many of the contributors’ observations and stances would snap into place with the context that progress and our understanding of it are moulded by how capitalism has to function. Goods are produced, services are operated and governments are run according to what is advantageous to the minority who own industries and wield power. Profitability for the few is directly or indirectly the defining factor in whether an innovation takes hold. This means that progress is shaped by what is in the interests of the capitalist class rather than by what benefits humanity in general.

The consequences of this are shown by the ‘polycrisis’ in society and the weakening of our belief in progress. As this notion became established through the advancements of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, it came from an era when capitalism was a progressive force in developing society’s infrastructure. But we have already reached the point where technology and administrative structures can potentially provide a decent standard of living for everyone. The decline in a belief in progress reflects how capitalism is no longer progressive. The documentary winds down with the contributors considering whether we should reject, retain or reclaim the idea of progress, with John Lanchester wondering whether we’re now on a ‘shift to something else’. In our view, to get the world out of its current rut, this would have to be a collective shift to replace capitalism with a social system where progress can mean improvements for all.

Mike Foster

Letter: Closed-minded academics (2011)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Closed-minded academics

Dear Editors,

 

It is infuriating to listen to those sociologists and similar ‘social scientists’, particularly the contributors Professor Laurie Taylor has on his Thinking Allowed programme (BBC Radio 4). These academic circles define the world in a multitude of classes, minutiae of people’s behaviour and so on. They publish books etc on post-communist societies and countries, which reinforce the view that communism has existed. These learned intellectuals stick to the accepted view that communism equals totalitarian state government with central control by a ruling elite. In their lazy thinking that’s it and any advance can only be to liberal democracy or, if they are a little radical, to social democracy.

 

These so-called intellectuals have never bothered to address what is communism/socialism. They don’t seem willing to make the effort to find what Marx and others meant in defining communism/socialism. Because they are part of the intellectual establishment and its output of publications reinforcing stereotypes, they effectively lie or at least mislead about the real meaning. 

 

These people give legitimacy to the view that communism/socialism has existed and is now replaced with a better system. They obfuscate the definition of Marxism on the grounds that we have moved on to the better system of ‘democracy’ but they also misrepresent even this. How do we attack these closed-minded academics and get them to try original thought to their convoluted and erroneous conclusions?

Stuart Gibson, 

Wimborne, Dorset

Proper Gander: Realistically altruistically (2025)

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

Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage has clocked up 32 series of ‘witty, irreverent’ conversations on science-related subjects, helmed by physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince. A recent edition asked ‘How selfish are we really?’, although the panellists focused on the flipside of selfishness: altruism, discussing the notion through the frameworks of psychology and evolutionary biology. Psychologist Matti Wilks and comedian Jo Brand give our usual definition of altruism as someone making an effort to be kind to another person with no expectation of anything in return.

Steve Jones, a professor of genetics, defines it in a more Darwinian way as an act which reduces someone’s fitness to survive (by using their time and energy on something they don’t directly gain from) and which increases someone else’s fitness. Superficially, it could seem counter-intuitive to do this, but as Steve clarifies, our genes will spread if we benefit our group overall, and our brains are wired to get a positive feeling when we behave in a nice way. In day-to-day life we don’t tend to think about altruism like this, and run with a general inclination to be helpful with a background assumption of ‘reciprocal altruism’, that if we act altruistically towards someone, then in future they will act similarly.

The panel ponders the extent to which this exists across the animal kingdom, particularly among our distant relatives. Steve says chimps engage in reciprocal altruism by picking lice off each other, although they also fight more than homo sapiens, which is why we’ve had the evolutionary advantage. Our ancestors went from living and collaborating in extended families to larger groups, and he adds that reciprocal altruism was later embedded by religions which have ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ among their principles, with problems arising because as he says wryly, religions hate each other. He mentions that the structure of The Bible and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species are ‘remarkably similar’, both starting with describing origins and ending with ‘mysterious stuff which you don’t understand’.

Psychologists have aimed to explain altruism through research into our views and behaviour. Matti refers to studies which found that people are prone to empathise with and be altruistic to those they feel akin to, such as Americans giving money to victims of the California wildfires rather than to people in need elsewhere. Children have been understood to also be ‘parochial’ in their ethical outlook, although Matti’s own research has shown they can be more likely than adults to say we should help people in faraway places. This may be because they haven’t yet been socialised to see some people as ‘other’.

The programme doesn’t consider how the type of society we live in shapes relations between people and therefore how we behave altruistically, although it gives numerous examples of this happening. There is the ‘identifiable victim effect’, shown in tests when people gave more money to a charity which used a picture of one person in need than when a picture of several people was shown. While this ostensibly demonstrates that we find it easier to be empathetic and altruistic to individuals rather than groups, the effect depends on there being a context of scarcity and charity, and possibly notions of ‘otherness’ too. Any conclusions drawn about altruism in these studies only apply to this societal situation, rather than necessarily being basic truths of what it is to be human. Further research has found that we’re less altruistic towards large groups, and this could also be socially conditioned. When Matti is asked how altruism expands from small groups (where its benefits are most obvious) to bigger ones, she replies that psychology hasn’t done a good job of illuminating this. To give a socialist perspective not explored in the programme, perhaps wide-scale altruism happens when people see through the divisions between groups which capitalism encourages and recognise our common humanity. This may also explain something else which Matti says psychologists haven’t been able to sufficiently account for: ‘extraordinary’ altruists, those who are exceptionally altruistic to strangers without expectations of reciprocity, such as kidney donors.

Steve cites blood donation as a familiar example of a ‘purely’ altruistic act, at least in the UK, where the only payment the donor receives is a cup of tea and a biscuit. In America, people receive money for their blood, and commodifying the process at this point has meant that to minimise additional costs to profit-hungry healthcare companies, inadequate checks have been done to avoid infected blood being passed on. Matti says that elsewhere, introducing payments to donors has led to a reduction in people coming forward, as the ‘intrinsic motivation’ for doing so had gone when it became monetised.

Economic considerations with altruism are also acknowledged by Matti when she says that it’s a ‘position of privilege’ to be altruistic, meaning that people often can’t afford to give to others if they lack enough goods themselves. This isn’t a blanket rule, though, as levels of trust and compassion in a group affect the extent that altruism is the norm. To try and measure how much altruism there is, researchers have compared which groups have more or less expansive ‘moral circles’, which contain things considered to have moral concern. Trying to quantify these qualities is ‘not as pure a metric’ as comparing countries on their GDP, as Matti says. Asked which country is the most altruistic, Steve jokes that it might be Norway because there’s nothing else to do there.

Steve’s contributions from the perspective of evolutionary biology tell us that we’re primed to act in an altruistic way because this has been evolutionarily advantageous. Some sort of altruism is essential for us to be able to live in groups, especially harmoniously. How altruism is manifested, and how psychology attempts to explain it, are moulded by society’s structures. In capitalism, we are conditioned to view some groups as ‘other’, and behaving altruistically happens through the constraints which a market-driven, divisive society imposes.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: The maxim of maximising (2025)

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

In The Prophets of Profit, a five-part documentary on Radio 4, the BBC’s Business Editor Simon Jack ‘tracks how a simple idea became so powerful and why it shapes all of our lives today’. This idea is a common approach to running companies, and its ‘prophets’ are economist Milton Friedman and his successors. Being a radio programme, there aren’t any visual distractions to the words spoken by Jack’s interviewees or his explanations of the technicalities of commerce, which are more detailed than most documentaries bother with. However, this makes it harder to discern that buried underneath the talk of ‘maximising shareholder value’, ‘creative destruction’ and ‘equity-based compensation’ are the practicalities of goods being made and used by people.

The series takes 1970 as its starting point, when Milton Friedman’s article ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits’ was published in the New York Times. Clear from the title, Friedman’s ‘simple idea’ is that the main aim of corporate executives is to encourage profits, and any responsibilities a company has to wider society are covered by the wealth it generates. The documentary describes his influence through economists such as Michael C Jensen and Bill Meckling, who went from ‘disciples of Friedman to preachers for a new muscular brand of shareholder supremacy’, according to Jack. They, and those they inspired such as ‘corporate finance specialist’ Don Chew, believe that businesses have been held back by legislation and placing too much emphasis on cultural and environmental concerns or perks for staff such as pension schemes.

Chew quotes the view that ‘we’ve reached the point where every corporate interest is represented except for shareholders in the corporate boardroom’. To ‘correct’ this, executives should focus on directly maximising the value of shares, and this would lead to a better return on capital for shareholders than investment in wider issues. A sympathetic government would support this approach by minimising tax rates, regulation and legislation. Techniques to enhance share value which became popular through the 1970s and 80s included firms borrowing more to finance targeted growth, and ‘using cash generated by the business to buy back shares from existing shareholders so they can go and invest the proceeds in new industries’. Chew brags that Americans in particular have become adept at squeezing money out of failing organisations and in to growing industries, so the loss of one company means a boost to others. This is one application of ‘creative destruction’, a concept popularised by political economist Joseph Schumpeter, but which was earlier critiqued by Karl Marx. Those with an optimistic view of capitalism would say that overall this can lead to economic equilibrium, ignoring the hardships workers face when on the wrong end of ‘creative destruction’.

Maximising shareholder value also supposedly creates an equilibrium by being the most effective discipline to mould a well-run company for all, generating taxes for governments to spend while making innovative, decent products and happy workers. With this view, we’re expected to believe that wealth will trickle down to where it deserves to be. The series covers some of the actual consequences of the drive to raise shareholder value. Michael Jensen advocated ‘equity-based compensation’: executives being paid in shares to give them additional motivation to improve the company’s coffers. He didn’t foresee that many would be paid with salaries and bonuses as well, leading to a massive gulf between their income and that of most workers, nor that firms involved in scandals during the 2008 financial crash tended to have executives motivated by ‘equity-based compensation’. And as explained by economist Sir John Kay, a short-term focus on generating wealth can have disastrous effects, such as when crashes of Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft were blamed on prioritising profits over investing sufficiently in safeguards.

The series uses the late-80s privatisation of the water industry as an example of Friedman’s ideas being put into practice in the UK. Michael Howard, the Tory Minister who oversaw this says that when owned by the state, the water industry had to compete for funding with other institutions such as the NHS. He claims that since privatisation, investment in the sector has always been higher than it was beforehand. However, in the ten years that Macquarie Group Limited owned Thames Water, it didn’t invest any of its own money in the business, which was sold off when in debt, with prices to customers subsequently raised. Sharon Graham, the General Secretary of Unite, is in favour of renationalisation, saying that water privatisation has led to poorly run services while shareholders have taken £72billion. As illustrated by Howard, though, being state-owned doesn’t mean that industries will be adequately resourced, or effectively managed either.

The impetus to maximise shareholder value has also led to ‘wasteful’ exercises such as American vehicle manufacturers buying steel from China rather than from more expensive local producers. This led to a decline in the American steel industry, which President Trump has said he’ll address by imposing tariffs on metal imports (presumably leading to ‘creative destruction’ elsewhere). Another example of Trump contributing to a change in what methods are seen as enhancing shareholder value is his dislike of ‘wokeness’ enabling companies such as Meta, Amazon, Walmart and McDonald’s to ditch their ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ programmes.

The Prophets of Profit is timely in being broadcast during a shift back to the directions preferred by Friedman and his followers, especially in the USA. Much of episode four is an interview with Paul Polman, who took the opposing stance when he was Chief Executive of Unilever during the 2010s. Investing in staff and green programmes didn’t prevent Unilever’s returns to shareholders quadrupling in value during the decade Polman was in post. Maximising shareholder value was still the priority, though. This doesn’t really change, even if the most profitable approaches to achieve it alter over the years. The resurgence of Friedman-esque policies is a reminder that supposedly responsible business practices such as safeguards, regulation and workers’ rights can be lost as soon as they stop being compatible with the interests of the capitalist class.

Mike Foster

Life & Times: An everyday story? (2024)

The Life and Times column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’m not a soap opera fan. But I do make one exception: the Archers. I’ve tuned into it more or less daily for years and – though I’ve sometimes found the story lines ridiculous, trivial or far-fetched, and have vowed to stop listening, I still find myself drawn back to the goings-on in the fictitious village of Ambridge, to its improbable cast of characters, and to what the BBC used to call ‘an everyday story of country folk’.

Though rarely referencing current news events, the programme has in more recent times taken to including among its story lines ongoing issues of broad social interest. Examples have been drug dealing, coercive control, modern slavery, alcoholism, and, most recently, the crime of perverting the course of justice as committed by one of its teenage characters, George Grundy. George had always been a problematic young man, causing trouble for himself and those around him, but then he took it to a whole new level. He found himself driving a drunken Alice home in her car and when it crashed, endangering the lives of people in an oncoming car. He moved his torpid, inebriated passenger into the driver’s seat to evade responsibility and incriminate her. It worked for quite some time, but then the truth came out and, despite his genuine remorse about what he had done and how it had affected other people’s lives, he was sent down for three years by a stern, unforgiving judge – a sentence perfectly permissible in law.

Before the fictional court proceedings, online discussion abounded among Archers fans about the likely sentence with most seeming to favour a suspended sentence and/or community service, especially given his guilty plea, his repentance and the fact that it was a first offence and no one was seriously hurt in the incident. In fact George had actually put himself at risk by rescuing from the river the people in the car he’d crashed into. But the judge was implacable, and a fearful, desperate George was sent to a prison for older criminals since all young offenders’ institutions were full. This gave rise to much further discussion and protest among listeners. But there was nothing to be done. The law had spoken.

Obviously, the Archers is a fiction. Yet stories like this do shed light on aspects of the way the society we all live in is organised. Most crimes committed in this society are to do with property or money in one form or another – theft, robbery, fraud, etc. Some of these manifestly cause pain, misery or loss to others. Some do not in the sense that when large institutions (banks, building societies, etc) are affected, there are no manifest individual victims. But in all cases, if the perpetrators are found, the system inflicts punishment on them because a society based on property and money cannot allow ‘illegal’ methods of procuring those things to take place without the threat of such punishment. Otherwise the whole basis of that system would risk being undermined. But does a society, even one based on property and money, need to punish those who violate its norms not by stealing or such like but by what can broadly be called antisocial behaviour, in George’s case, for example, trying to blame someone else for your own misdeed?

Well, certain countries, for instance Denmark and New Zealand, practise what is called restorative justice, whereby individuals who commit antisocial acts are asked to face their victims, discuss with them what they have done, and ideally to understand, empathise with them and work with them to repair the harm – and then hopefully to learn lessons for the future. And even in the UK, some courts and judges take the view that, if there is genuine remorse and understanding on the part of an offender who has behaved in an antisocial fashion, a suspended sentence or work in the community is a better solution than locking that person away. Of course, any such solution is always an individual one, since the social and economic inequalities inherent in the system of society we live under – capitalism – and its dog-eat-dog mentality will always provide a fertile breeding ground for what is known as ‘crime’, even if, despite that, most people most of the time exhibit a natural inclination to help rather than to harm others.

This leads on naturally to thoughts of what the situation will be in the moneyless society of voluntary work and free access to all goods and services that socialists advocate and work to bring about. Clearly in that society theft and other ‘property crime’ will be obsolete. There will be no point in ‘stealing’ what is readily available to all. Also, since it will be a society without the coercion of wage and salary work with each member simply working according to their ability and taking according to their needs, we would expect there to be essentially positive connections between its members. However, it would probably be naïve to imagine that it will be a society entirely without personal conflicts or even violent confrontations between individuals. But if such there were and resolution needed to be found, surely this would be in terms of the kind of restorative practice we have already seen happening at least on a small scale even under the current system, so that genuinely repentant or remorseful individuals are given a ‘second chance’ and punishment such as removal of liberty is only considered if that proves unsuccessful.

George in the Archers was not given that ‘second chance’. So when he gets out of prison, will the troublemaker return to Ambridge a reformed character, or will he just continue as before and keep carrying out ‘antisocial’ acts of one kind or another? If what is known to usually happen in the real world is realistically reflected in the Archers, then the second of these options is the more likely. But time will tell.

Howard Moss

Cash or cachet? (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1860s, William James, one of the founding fathers of psychology, declared that ‘the most deep-seated need in human nature is to be appreciated’. Of course, ideas about ‘human nature’ are many and varied and socialists would argue that there is actually no fixed human nature but simply ‘human behaviour’, which is highly flexible and varies enormously from place to place, person to person and time to time according to the circumstances in which human beings find themselves and the pressures and influences upon them. But whether we call it ‘human nature’ or anything else, there can be little doubt that human beings are, as William James observed, prone to caring deeply about their standing in the eyes of others, about what a recent series of BBC radio programmes called Status.

Ultra-social

The author and journalist, Carl Honoré, who presented the ‘Status’ programmes, traced this tendency to the fact that humans are a highly cooperative species (‘ultra-social’, it is often called) who, had they not been ‘wired’ to cooperate, could not have survived the various different stages of social development they have been through. He pointed in particular to the most long-lived of these stages, the hunter-gatherer one, where survival was based on close collaboration among members of the group in which they lived and where those who excelled at bringing back food to be shared by the tribe were those who would earn the most prestige or ‘status’. This, he went on, was the ultimate reward and, as a driving force, has been fundamental to all the various different forms of human society that followed. So, despite the fact that those societies – and in particular the current one, capitalism – have laid ever-increasing emphasis on competition, this has not prevented cooperation continuing alongside it and at the same time, without which in fact we could not carry on living and working together. And a crucial reason for that, according to Carl Honoré, is that we are built to care intensely about what other people think of us – even if we may not openly admit it. In fact, it is one of the key experiences creating in us feelings of what we know as ‘happiness’.

Of course, modern capitalist society, with its winner-take-all mindset, often frustrates this natural tendency to contribute to the wellbeing of others and the community and the welcome esteem and appreciation it generates for us. This was something emphasised by the programme’s presenter, when he referred to ‘the economic insecurity baked into global capitalism’ as a significant factor preventing us from fulfilling our role as social animals and preventing us from creating ‘relationships and communities that make everyone feel valued’. In capitalism we focus on making a living for ourselves, because we need to, often to the detriment of working together with others, of ‘helping the tribe’ and achieving the satisfaction that creates. Not of course that we never experience such satisfaction. Our natural ‘ultra-social’ urge to help and to be of use to our fellow humans manifests itself in all manner of small ways in our lives more or less every day, helping to offset the ‘zero-sum’ experience that capitalism tends to make of life.

Seeking happiness

In the last of his five programmes, Carl Honoré, called for ‘a political earthquake to fix an economic system that denies basic dignity to so many’ and the need ‘to build a world where everyone thrives’. These ideas sound very much like what the Socialist Party has advocated and campaigned for throughout the 120 years of its existence. He further stated that ‘the first step to settle a problem is to lay it out on the table’ and that too is precisely what we have never stopped trying to do during that period. But it is of course up to workers as a whole, including Carl Honoré, to break free from the current system, to grasp the nettle of that problem and to take the necessary democratic political action to solve it. What is certain – and emerges clearly from what the presenter lays out – is that the natural human tendency to cooperate will be a perfect instrument for the establishment and operation of a moneyless, wageless society of voluntary work and free access based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. In such a society our ‘craving for status’, our desire for the approbation of others, will have full scope for satisfaction, contributing both to the wellbeing of our fellow human beings and to our own personal happiness.

Howard Moss

Not any answers (1996)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Knob-twiddling, the perennial pastime of the compulsive radio listener, has been greatly stimulated by the growth of deregulated airwaves, allowing for new stations of aural passion to be visited by the rover in search of a casual broadcasting relationship. Like trainspotters, the lowest of the lonely in the world of atomised leisure pursuits, the wireless addict delights in finding new programme timetables to collect and tune in to. While the rest of humanity lives its life (or pretends to), the radio junkie listens in to the one-way conversations of radio which serve as cultural life-support machines to the alienated, uncertain aural consumers who want reality sorted out for them on the hour every hour.

I grew up in a world which had just stopped listening to wireless, but in which some of us still listened to radio: the poor cousin of the telly. We laughed at The Clitheroe Kid, worried along with Mrs Dale, squirmed at the pompous smugness of Any Questions (still there; still smug) and went to sleep with the pips from The Shipping Forecast. As infancy' turned to adulthood the Home Service became Radio Four (arguably one of the greatest quality services still relatively undamaged in Britain), the Light Programme became Radio Two (the home of the terminally middle-aged) and the pirates, having been destroyed by the authoritarianism of the then Postmaster General, Tony Benn, gave way to the vacuous ramblings of Tory Tony Blackburn and Radio One.

Deregulation of the airwaves has been a gradual business (and business it is), starting in the early Seventies and culminating in the effective auction of the airwaves which has flogged off licences to whoever thinks they can make a fast buck out of grabbing listeners’ attention. Most people who still listen to radio are fairly fixed in their dial location (with occasional moves within one format, such from Radio One to Virgin or from Radio Three to Classic FM), but for some (the hard-core addicts) the urge has been to roam into hitherto unknown territories.

All of which is to explain how and why it was that a terrible thing happened to me on the way to the phone-in. There I was twiddling merrily in search of the latest from Harry of Hatfield or some other undiscovered philosopher (for, had he been alive today, Socrates would surely have been a regular caller to any phone-in going) and suddenly this lunatic is screaming at me in a fashion reminiscent of an out-of-work evangelist. Now, many a time I have sat transfixed and mortified before my TV set when travelling in the USA, where Coming To Jesus is a big industry. Listening to this previously undiscovered radio station was no different, just more amateurish and more embarrassing for being on the same dial as Radio Four.

Premier Radio is London’s Christian station and, at least at the time of writing, its awfulness has become compulsive. Its presenters, who mainly recite passages from the bible and play songs about clapping your hands for god, do their best to appeal both to the blue-rinsed ladies of Surrey who believe that wireless went downhill the day they allowed an unmarried mother on the The Archers and the fully-certifiable God Squad whose permanent stupor of gullible belief is know by them as being saved. So, the station balances precariously between phone-ins peppered with dull hymns on which old ladies call into to pray that Jesus will come to shoplifters and bad sorts and occasional touches of raving barminess.

An example of the latter was a twenty-minute talk by a born-again vicar whose justification for the laying on of hands so that “Jesus will come all over the sick and cure them” was in no need of Freud to decipher it.

Quite why Premier Radio should exist when socialists are not even allowed to buy advertising space on the airwaves is one question; another is why anyone can still be satisfied by this unadulterated crap. And then yesterday evening, in self-torturing pursuit of the clues, a mock-sincere voice came on and explained how this station was different, for it was there to appeal to those with nobody in the world to care about them: the lonely, the poor, the distressed and lost. God, they were informed, cares about them—as he will carefully explain once they snuff it. And then, instead of turning to Luke or John, as the presenter urged us to, I took another look at that brilliantly descriptive passage by Marx: “the heart of a heartless world . . . the sigh of the oppressed”. Be it from pulpit or high-tech studio, where there is religion there is misery and where religion meets misery its job is to tell the miserable to wait for hope in the next life. The experiment is over; I have heard the voice of salvation and twiddled the knob on my radio until it went away. Of pseudo-saviours the world has had more than its share; and at least everyone knows that The Archers made it up.

Steve Coleman

Proper Gander: Radio Ga-Ga (2020)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Switch over from TV current affairs programmes to those on DAB radio, and you’ll notice quite a shift in tone. The telly’s news bulletins and shows like the BBC’s Question Time or Newsnight appear airbrushed and staid when compared with the more blunt discussions found on the commercial talk radio stations.

With nearly three million listeners each week, the heavyweight in the market is LBC, which as the London Broadcasting Company was the first licenced commercial radio station, back in 1973. It became more widely known after relaunching nationally on the DAB platform in 2014 with the self-aggrandising boast of ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’. In 2017 the station gained further publicity from its interview with Diane Abbott MP when she made a hash of explaining Labour’s funding plans for the police, and also when it ditched Katie Hopkins as a presenter for advocating a ‘final solution’ following the Manchester Arena bombing. Not all of LBC’s hosts are poisonous rent-a-gobs like Hopkins or Nigel Farage, whose regular programme was dropped a few months ago. James O’Brien’s phone-in slot often shows up racists and xenophobes for what they are, and he wearily ran rings around Jacob Rees-Mogg when interviewing him about the practicalities of leaving the European Union. Frosty conversations are a hallmark of LBC.

Less popular, but more populist is TalkRADIO. This station, relaunched on DAB in 2016, follows a similar format of having phone-in discussion programmes helmed by opinionated hosts wearing headphones. While LBC presenters are more likely to try and catch out their interviewees, TalkRADIO hosts tend to bring in guests who reinforce their own opinions, which are invariably of the patriotic, right wing libertarian variety. This stance reflects who ultimately owns the station: along with Virgin Radio, Times Radio and Talksport, it’s part of Wireless Group, which is part of News Corp, owned by pro-Trump Rupert Murdoch.

Among TalkRADIO’s regular presenters is Mike Graham, who refers to the station as being ‘the home of common sense’ for the ‘silent majority’. He lays out his trade when he says on one show ‘we don’t need any lessons in history from the Guardian reading yoghurt knitting lentil munching morons who think that there’s something wrong with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. As well as presenting The Independent Republic of Mike Graham, he chairs Plank of the Week, where he sits with a couple of other pundits to slag off people recently in the public eye. One ‘plank of the week’ was Banksy for his efforts in arranging a boat to rescue migrants at risk in the Mediterranean Sea.

Another frequent target is ‘woke’ culture, which the station associates with transgender activists, Black Lives Matter (‘a ghastly, horrible organisation that would like to see the destruction of everything that is good about Britain’, according to Mike Graham) and Extinction Rebellion (‘pathetic’, so says another presenter, Mike Parry). The station particularly focuses on its rival the BBC’s emphasis on diversity. For instance, Ian Collins in his show called the BBC directive about training its staff in avoiding racial bias ‘absolute cast-iron bonkers’ and other presenter Dan Wootton slated the BBC for being obsessed with ‘vile, toxic, tribal identity politics’.

The ‘wokeness’ of the BBC is also criticised because having a ‘liberal London groupthink’ means that it isn’t as impartial as it is supposed to be. On one of Mike Graham’s shows, regular guest and TV presenter Neil Oliver says that news is expected to be neutral, ‘a magnolia paint colour version of events’, and that the BBC gives this impression to disguise its left-leaning bias. On one of his shows, Ian Collins adds that BBC presenters should leave their political opinions on subjects such as Black Lives Matter outside the studio. But he, and the other TalkRADIO presenters, aren’t shy to inflict their own views on us. They simultaneously berate the BBC for being biased while making the most of their own biased broadcasting.

Whether or not the BBC is partial in the way TalkRADIO accuses, it’s right to point out that the BBC isn’t impartial. And it can’t be impartial, because it is part of the establishment, and therefore reflects the ideology which maintains the status quo. It’s partial towards acceptance of the system overall. TalkRADIO is the same, just in a more extreme and in-your-face way.

While the BBC has to stick to stricter editorial rules than TalkRADIO or LBC, all news broadcasters have to follow Ofcom’s code of guidance about ‘due impartiality’, which means that alternative views should be considered. Earlier in the year, TalkRADIO was found not to have done this and was fined £75,000 after former presenter George Galloway discussed allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party and the role of the Russian state in the Salisbury poisonings. When the station’s presenters do cite different opinions or interview activists, it’s invariably with a dismissive, sneering tone.

TalkRADIO’s preoccupations are shown by how it repeatedly latches on to the same kind of subject in the same kind of way. Its recent fixations have included dance troupe Diversity’s Black Lives Matter routine on Britain’s Got Talent and the possibility of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ being removed from the Proms because of associations with colonialism. While these and any topic should be discussed, TalkRADIO doesn’t scrutinise, for example, Donald Trump or Sky News. Nor does it have programmes about poverty or exploitation or environmental threats or war. The subjects the channel doesn’t cover tell us as much about its stance as those which it does.

TalkRADIO’s critique (if it can be called that) of left-wing ideology would be of interest, but it’s based on a caricature, and it comes from a cynical, cold place. A distorted worldview. Listen to TalkRADIO for too long, and you’d think Britain is divided only into ‘lentil munching morons’ infatuated with diversity quotas, and the Union Jack-waving ‘silent majority’ fed up with ‘political correctness gone mad’.

Mike Foster

The Power of the Radio (1946)

From the August 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

(A reader of the Socialist Standard sends us the following letter, which we publish for the interesting points contained therein.—Ed. Com.)

It must be obvious to everyone that those in control of the Radio exercise a tremendous power over public opinion. During industrial disputes this influence is very pronounced.

Whatever may be said to the contrary, the negative attitude of the B.B.C. towards Marxian teaching is a powerful weapon in the hands of our opponents. This unfortunate circumstance is difficult to overcome. The B.B.C. refuses to grant permission to the S.P.G.B. to broadcast and we are forbidden by law to operate a broadcasting station of our own. The argument advanced against such a proposal is, of course, that if everyone was allowed to set up on their own, chaos would ensue upon the ether. That appears reasonable on the face of it. But why should one side be given the sole monopoly?

The only reply to this is that it is the law of the land, and the reply to this is that as the working class, if the franchise is not a fraud, hold a political majority, hence they like things as they are. However, we must take into consideration that the working class are sadly handicapped. As children they receive their education from schools that support capitalist ideology, every channel of knowledge is polluted, the Press, Pulpit, the Cinema, and now this super force, the radio, gets at the working class night and day. We ask you, fellow workers, how long are you going to stand for this state of affairs, that your champions in the cause of your emancipation are denied the elementary right to free expression of opinion.

F. L. Rimington

Reflections on Right Wing Talk Radio (2011)

From issue 22 of the World Socialist Review

Right-wing talk radio seems in search of a savior, at least those that broadcast the gospel as interpreted by the religious right who seek to impose a biblical order while abandoning the social aspects of traditional Christianity. The religious right holds a quasi-Calvinist view (with the terror of End Times thrown in), according to which God rewards those who outdo their brethren in cut-throat competition to earn the big bucks. So hold on to your job at all costs and climb the corporate ladder, stepping on the fingers of the guy on the rung below. This worship of cut-throat competition is naturally accompanied by cynical paranoia – heated exaggeration, a suspicious attitude, outright dishonesty, and conspiratorial fantasy. Paranoia is hard to confine to one part of the mind and expands into a worldview.

The function of paranoia

Right-wing talk radio is full of distrust and fear – fear of the unknown, fear of Moslems, fear of invasion – and this feeds the paranoia.

Paranoia actually performs an important social function. It’s one way of bringing order to a disorderly world. Seeing conspiracy everywhere you look at least makes sense of things beyond your understanding. The threat of climate change, financial collapse, nuclear weapons, terrorism – these are phenomena of such magnitude that any conceivable action feels like David versus Goliath.

The millions of Americans who listen to religious conservative talk radio are gradually bringing the United States closer to fascism. Is this because a growing number of them believe there is no alternative?

Twenty-five years ago, Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale actually presented the U.S. electorate with real policy choices, even if they offered no alternative to the established system. Today, however, any differences are a mere matter of degree. The neoliberal stance is shared by both parties. Republicans rail against the Democrats’ bailouts, government takeovers, and budget deficits, hoping the populace forgets that all these things also occurred under George W. Bush. Meanwhile, almost every single concept in Obama’s health plan has been pushed by senior Republicans, from Bob Dole to Mitt Romney.

Farewell to Keynes

The Democrats once accepted Keynes’ approach to economic policy. Keynes concern was to ensure social stability by maintaining full employment at relatively high wages. His utopia was a society of leisure and prosperity, beauty, grace, and variety, where “love of money” would be regarded as an aberration. The new neoliberal paradigm sacrifices all social values – and is prepared if necessary to sacrifice democracy itself – on the altar of “sound finance.” Today’s spineless and stupid Democrats also kowtow to the neoliberal god.

Glen Beck bleats over the airwaves that the call of the “socialist” and “Moslem” Obama for voluntary national service is “something out of Maoist China.” But the “progressive” president of “change” and “hope” copied this idea from George W. Bush, and he in turn copied it from his father, George H.W. Bush, who first proposed it in 1989.

With names like “No Spin Zone,” “Nothing But Truth,” and “Steel on Steel,” right-wing talk radio programs appropriate the “news” format and masquerade as news broadcasts. Many liberals get their news from satirical programs like “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report.” The disinformation is so effective that all these people actually imagine that they are hearing the news!

Both political parties represent the same class interests and strive for the same class goals. The strident yap-yap-yap that endlessly streams forth from the radio talk shows does not express any significant policy differences, but is contrived as a substitute for them.

An objective critique must resist all attempts to manipulate its ideas for purposes opposed to its own. “Criticize all that is.”

Joe Hopkins

Life and Times: Behind the crime (2023)

The Life and Times column from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

We all make bad decisions. Sometimes the consequences aren’t that bad, but sometimes they are. That may depend on the circumstances at the time, but it may also depend on the long-term build-up to the decision. This came out clearly in a recent BBC radio programme which looked at the life of a woman whose bad decision – in fact whose series of bad decisions – caused her to end up in prison.

Marriage, abuse and incarceration

Sinem was the daughter of a Turkish family who had fled from persecution in their own country to settle and start a new life in the UK. She told us that, as a young girl, she did well at school but found it hard to fit in with others of her age largely due to the strictures of her home background. This sent her somewhat off the rails. As a teenager she was found in bed with the son of another Turkish family and, given the culture, that meant only one thing – marriage. She quickly had children, which, though it somehow made her feel more secure, did not satisfy her and she managed to enrol on a university course and get a degree. But employment was hard to find and she eventually took a job as a prison officer – in a men’s prison.

This is when things really started to go downhill. Her abusive husband was violent to her and she decided she had to leave him. But in doing that she lost the extended family support she had previously had to help look after her children. This meant she had to reduce her hours of work, and this caused her acute financial difficulty. To be able to pay her rent and other expenses she fell into debt. And this triggered another bad decision. She started smuggling drugs into the prison she was working in to raise money. Inevitably perhaps she was found out and arrested.

But it’s what happened then that, as a listener to this programme, I found particularly interesting and noteworthy. When her smuggling activity was discovered, she was not shunned or blamed by her fellow workers in the prison but treated with great understanding and compassion. Though she had, in a sense, betrayed them, during her arrest they carried on supporting her and treating her like the human being fallen on hard times they knew she was. And when she herself was prosecuted and sent to prison, they carried on keeping in touch with her.

Understanding and compassion

This behaviour by her co-workers seems to accord well with the view now widely expressed by writers and commentators that the age-old idea of an inevitably ‘nasty’ human nature is no more than a myth and that, given half the chance, human beings will be kind to, cooperative with, and supportive of one another – including, and perhaps especially, when someone is ‘in trouble’. Rutger Bregman’s recent massively influential work, Human Kind, for example, argues that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal, kind-hearted and cooperative, something that seems to be confirmed by what happened in Sinem’s case. And Sinem’s incarceration also then turned out positive for her. In the open prison she was sent to, again she found enormous support, especially from the ‘mentor’ assigned to her. This helped her to recover from being the ‘broken person’ she said she was and to be then granted a day release arrangement to begin studying for a further degree and afterwards, when released completely, to end up as a university lecturer in criminology.

So a sort of happy ending. But a lucky one too, since, as the programme pointed out, we are all profoundly marked by the string of experiences that constitute our life. And of course in many cases this does not have a happy ending. In Sinem’s case the earlier experience of a repressive culture, an oppressive partner, and then the pressure of poverty led to an act which could have seen her life spiral entirely out of control. The fact that it didn’t was, to a large extent, due to the kindness of others. This made her realise that, regardless of the ‘crime’ she’d committed, some people were on her side. And this made it possible for her to gain sufficient strength to make a relatively stable life for herself and her children, and also to help educate others.

Autonomy and cooperation

If we look more widely, how many times, in the society we live in – a society that is so advanced in technology and productive capacity but oh so backward in the way it makes use of these things – does lack of money and/or lack of the power and autonomy over their own lives (the two ‘lacks’ often going together) limit or remove an individual’s control over their own life, their freedom of choice, their ability to interact cooperatively and, above all, to make the ‘right’ decision? And how much more likely is it that, in the society organised on the basis of ‘from each according to ability to each according to need’ that socialists argue for, the cooperative ‘nature’ of humans will prevail. And how true too is the writer Tine De Moor’s statement that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’.

Howard Moss

A Knight out. (1930)

From the June 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

I must admit I find the wireless lectures very stimulating. The lecturer has prepared his subject, there are no interruptions, no interjections, no bronchial whoopings, no scuffling feet, no late-comers or early-goers; in short, there is perfection—nearly. I say nearly, because one feels sometimes that the speaker has prepared his paper in some far-distant country, a good many years ago, and has just walked off the steamer into the studio. Unsuspectingly, he says his little piece, and favoured by the absence of a visible audience, delivers himself of some “truth” that had better remained in its coffin. Now perfection would provide for the lecturer being reminded that his data were slightly mildewed ; that possibly in picking up his notes for the lecture on “The Sex Life of Slugs,” be had inadvertently added a leaf from the lecture on “Stamp Collecting in the Stone Age.”

Something of this sort must have happened to Sir James Jeans, for in his “Point of View, ” broadcast on February 24th, be made an astonishing mix-up. It is only charitable to assume some such accident, for no scientist since 1880 would have included such matter in a serious lecture. At a birthday party perhaps, or a Fleet Street “smoker,” but not in any place where the bracing-wind of science can reach.

“Quite frankly,” he commenced, “my point of view is that of a scientist—an astronomer.” He will not need me to remind him that a scientist frames and tests theories based on verifiable data.

We may take it that when Sir James Jeans says, “We believe that the earth is merely a tiny fragment of the sun, which got splashed off, almost by accident, something like 2,000 million years ago,” he could produce some sort of evidence. When he tells the listening world that the earth is millions of years old; that it remained uninhabited for millions of years; that life arrived and passed through the forms of protozoa, fishes, reptiles, and mammals culminating; in man, we may assume he is dealing in facts; that volumes of ordered knowledge bolster up his statements, and that scores of eminent colleagues agree with him. And yet, would you believe a scientist would commit himself, before an audience of millions, to the following fragment of ordered knowledge.

“Our socialist orators tell us much in glowing terms about the hypothetical socialist future. Why do they tell us so little about the socialist and communist experiments of the past, in which their theories were really tested? It is, I think, because those experiments all ended in failure. The truth seems to be that no socialist state ever endures for long—as such. ”

That, of course, is where his manuscript must have got mixed up with the lining of his lunch bag, and he found himself reading a pre-war page from the Swamp Herald or Daily Express. Unfortunately his attention has not been drawn to the happening, and the statement has received the publicity of print in the Listener of March 5th. However, as there may be some few people who think he really meant what he said, I am prepared to make a public confession. I also have wondered in the past why our Socialist orators have told us so little about the Socialist and Communist experiments in which their theories have been tested. I candidly admit my heart gave a great bound, when I heard him raise this question. I thought I was going to satisfy the hope of a lifetime, and hear the names of the Socialist states referred to. Sir James was strangely reluctant to mention them. He himself deplores the reluctance of our Socialist orators to do likewise. I am keenly disappointed, and it looks as though the truth is where I have long suspected. Failing some scientific evidence from Sir James Jeans, I shall be compelled to affirm that he does not know of such a state ; that there never was such a state and that Socialist theories have never been tested “really” or in any way. Both his reluctance, and that of our Socialist orators are founded in the same fog-bank. There never was such a Socialist state. The noble knight must have mixed his notes.

The fact of the statement having also been printed rather complicates matters, and perhaps some little explanation may put things right. The ground has been covered many, many times in this journal, and there is not room in this article to cover it again. But this may be said. As a scientist Sir James Jeans will have heard of evolution. It is the name we apply to the process of development by which life, the earth, and the universe, have changed from simple beginnings to their present state. Nothing is stationary; nothing stagnant—all is ceaseless change. The very Alps were once liquid mud; the mighty oceans were thin gases; the whole earth a boiling globe, incapable of any form of life as we know it. Scientists have described for us the whole wonderful pageant of change, which through millions of centuries, slowly paved the way for the coming of man ; and man is fond of regarding himself as the crown of evolution. Anyway, crown or not, he appeared very late upon the scene and has still a lot of development before him. Like everything in the universe, he has evolved. Although h likes to regard himself as something distinct from what he calls Nature, his links with animal ancestors are beyond dispute. Every baby, born into the world, recapitulates in embryo stages of his journey.

Apparently man has always been a gregarious animal, that is, he liked living in company. Other forms of life do, too, baboons, elephants, whales, birds, etc. This custom has clung to man, ever since he was man. And no matter how his mode of life has changed — hunter, pastoralist, or civilised—he has ever been found in communities. These communities have in turn been the subject of change—in a word, have evolved, and scientists can tell us why one form of human society gave place to another, and how our own form stands at the end of a chain. This will suggest, of course, to the intelligent reader, that there is no reason why this should be the end of the chain. But before we consider that, there is one important point to make. Evolution is only a name we apply for convenience sake to a process. It is not like the word God, which we spell with a capital letter, and use as a convenient cover for all we do not know. Evolution is simply a word for the process of development. It does not imply purpose, or intention. For instance, the Mauretania has evolved from the dug-out canoe, but the prehistoric contrivers of the dug-out had not the remotest conception of the liner. The words you are reading are connected with the marks on the clay bricks of Babylon, but neither Nebuchadnezzar nor his dusky subjects could have seen the printing press in futurity. The Rolls-Royce has evolved from the ox-cart, the tractor-plough from the digging stick, the sky-scraper from the mud-hut, but none of those at the dawn of things had the fragment of an idea of latter-day developments. It was not until comparatively recently that evolution became a mental concept and that mankind realised its possibilities.

The working of evolution has been blind. In mankind Nature becomes conscious and aware of the forces of development. Man applies the methods of science to his own development and the development of his Institution. No longer is he at the mercy of blind forces. He is learning to tame them and use them for his own definite advancement. Wild beasts, famine and pestilence do not play the part they did in human affairs. Every year sees them more under control. The greatest problems man has to face are those arising from his living in huge communities. These communities have arisen in traceable progression, from the collection of mud-huts on the banks of a river to the intricate community of a hundred thousand towns and a hundred million people. But the allied questions of feeding, clothing and sheltering humanity have been treated in a haphazard fashion under civilisations dependent upon trading. Being fortuitous and haphazard, it has had the unscientific results one would expect. In one section of the community too many clothes, in another too few; one section glutted with food to satiety, another on the brink of starvation or living on inferior food and substitutes ; one section with huge houses, well built, well lighted and well furnished ; the other with inadequate shelters, poorly built, meagrely lighted and furnished with rubbish. At one place you will find thousands of hungry people, whilst food is being wilfully destroyed at another. You will find thousands of people contracting rheumatism through lack of proper foot covering, whilst makers of boots are unable to make them; because—crowning absurdity—because they have made too many for the market.

The needs of the community are neither ascertained nor met in any really scientific way. One ruling principle dominates society—the making of profit. When everybody wants something, that is called demand. Numbers of individuals in the hope of making a profit, rush forward with their goods; that is called supply. The rival suppliers try to overreach and ruin each other; they try to monopolise as much of the demand as they can; they waste huge sums in what is called advertising; they drive their workers to produce the greatest possible wealth, in the shortest possible time. Then suddenly it is found that they have produced too much, and those who have made the wealth are rewarded with unemployment and semi-starvation.

There are people who say this method of feeding, clothing and sheltering ourselves, this hapless, planless, mad scramble to make need and supply balance, is the best humanity has discovered. You will usually find such people occupy a fortunate position in society. It would be odd to find them decrying a system which yielded them a very happy life. But there are others who say that now mankind has achieved an understanding of evolution, he can organise his community upon a scientific basis, and one wherein poverty can be unknown. He has no need to leave his present community and proceed to some desolate, primitive country and start building huge machines in the wilderness. Nothing would result from that, but a heap of rust and a few skeletons. No ! he is to take the civilization he has built, and reorganize it upon a basis of communal ownership. He is to abolish the out-of-date cumbrous and unscientific custom of individuals or groups owning communal necessities. Without food we starve; without clothing we shiver; without shelter we become diseased and die; and yet there are people who say these human essentials are best provided by those whose sole motive is their own enrichment. Sounds a bit mad, doesn’t it! How future schoolchildren will smile, and wonder if it was really true. It will seem so obvious to them that the communal necessities should be communally owned. And to think that we can do it, whenever we like; whenever, that is, the working class organises itself to consciously .remould human society on the lines described in our Object.

W. T. Hopley

O. J. (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Certain combinations of letters from the alphabet, without forming words, convey a curious symbolic significance. Phonetically meaningless letter-clusters like JFK, Plc, CP and PhD have entered our common discourse, turning us each into little Second World War codebreakers. We have only to see a Plc to know that They own more than Us (not to be confused with U.S.) and are probably crooked. JFK invokes tedious murder conspiracies and it is hard to think of a CP or an SWP without expecting a dead Russian to introduce himself to you. U.N. equals impotence, E.R. is for arrogance and GMTV is a password for ignorance.

CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC, closely followed by BBC 1, are in the midst of an obsession about O.J. Guilty or innocent? For a state which murdered over a hundred thousand people with two atomic bombs it is a somewhat belated shock at the news of a murder. Daytime soaps have vanished from US TV as millions tune in to the latest dramas of barking dogs and melting ice-creams which comprise the evidence in the O.J. trial. Never since J.R. was shot have so many Americans been so involved in a matter of such earth-shattering triviality.

The fact that O.J. is rich means that he can afford the best defence lawyers on the market. The fact that he is black means that he needs them badly. How many black workers are waiting on Death Row right now while the world holds its breath to see if O.J. will be O.K.? A Los Angeles Times survey conducted last month found that 65 percent of those polled knew the name of the Judge in the O.J. trial (Ito by name, which is possibly two letters in Korean: a man who looks permanently surprised that he is not a waiter in a fancy restaurant), whereas only 45 percent knew the name of Newt Gingrich, the reptilian Republican who makes Toad Clinton look vaguely sane.

Orwell’s horrible prediction that words would one day be so diminished that nobody would have anything left to say which the state did not want them to say is probably no more than a tax inspector’s fantasy. In fact, far from being dominated by Newspeak or suppressed into pitiful silence, the tendency is to let the chattering millions choke on their own babble. A people prattling about whether O.J. is an S.O.B. is unlikely to notice that a black American is more likely to be in prison than in university.

Babble has reached its nadir with the latest pollutant of the airwaves. Talk Radio UK. (Of course, U.K. is a coded euphemism for an enforced combination of countries; what Tory right-wingers would call a super-state when UK is replaced by EU.) You know' how advertisements for the Sun are shouted by loutish buffoons for whom salesmanship sounds like a kind of threat? Well, Talk Radio UK is like that all day; It is like a philosophy seminar conducted by the Mitchell Brothers from EastEnders, with callers who drone endlessly about O.J. and their sexual secrets (revealed to anyone bored enough to listen).

Given the job (assuming for a few paranoid moments that there is such a job) of ensuring the passivity of the working class there would be two potential strategies. One of them, which we may call the Iranian Solution, would be to torture the life out of anyone suspected of an independent thought. This approach is big in Teheran and Damascus and provides healthy profits for torture equipment manufacturers in Coventry, although it is costly on bullets and wages for the army, screws and secret police. The cheaper way can be thought of as the Talk Radio UK Solution. Let them eat cake; let them talk crap — same principle, different century.

Trying to hold a conversation with a fourteen-year-old about computers is an invitation to a world of alphabetical derangement. It is the nearest experience on a personal level to sitting day after day in the Stock Exchange where language has been reduced to figures, catchphrases and communications where buttons have relieved brains of the need for activity. It is a world of codes written by idiots to convey the rules of idiocy.

Talk Radio UK, the First national commercial radio in Britain, tells the story of a world where reality has become a lost cause. They don’t talk about life, they talk about talking about life. The U.S. legal pundits whose daily reflections about the O.J. case give some poor wretches something to wake up for, are not talking about truth or justice or evidence, but about how these things are being talked about—or, more often, not talked about. Blabbering about blabbering: the pastime of a society in which life is increasingly acted out rather than lived. The irony of O.J.’s limited acting talent which was employed to make profits for a movie called [Naked] Gun is only matched by the recent decision of the rock megastar, Prince, who, going one stage further than turning himself into an initialised rock code (U2, UB40, El7, INXS), is to be known in future by a shapeless squiggle. Surely a future presidential candidate in the making here. 

Steve Coleman

Communism and socialism: is there a difference? (2023)

From the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent series of programmes on BBC Radio 4, ‘Britain’s Communist Thread’, looked at the fortunes of a political party established in Britain in 1920 with allegiance to the government calling itself ‘communist’ that had recently seized power in Russia. That party was the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the government it supported was the Bolshevik one, led first by Lenin and Trotsky and later by Stalin. By the 1930s the CPGB had 60,000 members drawn from all parts of the British working class, from intellectuals to manual workers, and managed to get a small number of its candidates elected to parliament. Many of its members were convinced that a better and more equal kind of society that they called communism (or socialism) had or was being established in Russia under Stalin and they wanted the same in Britain. Most of them remained in the Party until the 1950s, for the most part unaware of the maniacal brutality that took place in Russia under Stalinism, since that only began to become widely known after Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khruschev’s succession to the leadership of what had become the Soviet Union. Many drifted away, especially after the brutal suppression of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, and then, even more, after the Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to put an end to the so-called Prague spring.

Euorocommunism

Among those who remained, some still hung onto their support and admiration for the Soviet regime and slavishly followed the Moscow line, but others in the CPGB began to look elsewhere, to the kind of ‘communism’ advocated by parties in countries like Italy and France, so-called ‘eurocommunism’. In reality eurocommunism was a thinly disguised version of the kind of politics practised by the Labour Party in Britain and just an alternative ‘left-wing’ way of administering capitalism. But it led to a split in the CPGB and eventually its dissolution in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union itself had given up on its own ‘communism’ and moved to what looked as though it was going to be a Western-style parliamentary ‘free market’ capitalism. But some in Britain, despite the overwhelming evidence of the horrors of Stalinism and the dead end it constituted, could not let go of their attachment to the Soviet model and, with the CPGB falling apart, set up a new party along the old lines, though with a much smaller membership than before, the Communist Party of Britain, which still exists today with an estimated membership of 1,000.

Many of the people interviewed in the radio series had participated in these events and had first-hand knowledge of the mindset (or perhaps one might say the pathology) of those who stuck with the CPGB through thick and thin. But, whatever their current views, most of the interviewees now saw ‘communism’ as a compromised term, contaminated through its associations with what had happened in Russia. And this was the case even if they were not prepared to disavow some of the ambitions underlying what they saw as the ‘communist’ idea. Indeed, the CPGB itself, at a relatively early stage, seemed to have got that message and had begun to favour the term’ socialism’ rather than ‘communism’ to describe its ideas, as in its standard pamphlet ‘The British Road to Socialism’.

Interchangeable

But despite any associations that these two terms may have, do they actually mean the same thing? Well, historically the answer to that must be yes, even if neither was necessarily used with the content often attached to them today. In the 19th century the two terms were widely used by political thinkers such as Marx and Engels interchangeably to mean a moneyless, wageless, classless world society of free access to all goods and services, characterised by voluntary cooperation and democratic organisation. A society based on the principle of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ was how they described it. So a million miles away from anything that came to exist in Russia during Bolshevik/Soviet times (or more recently in countries like China or Cuba). Which is why, when such regimes or their supporters describe themselves as ‘Marxist-Leninist’, what we are seeing is a simple contradiction in terms. But none of this prevented the labels of ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ being commandeered by the leaders of the Bolshevik takeover, in particular Lenin and Trotsky, who falsely claimed to be basing their politics on Marx’s ideas. When Stalin took over from Lenin, he confused things even more by not only using these terms to describe the regime he was the absolute ruler of, but by seeking to differentiate them with the claim that what was currently happening in Russia was ‘socialism’, which, once it had gone through the necessary stages, would lead to ‘communism’. It never did of course and couldn’t, because the whole premise of a dictatorship leading to any kind of classless democratic society was entirely flawed (and indeed Stalin, if he knew anything, must have known that).

Connotations

However, the label of ‘communism’ stuck to the Soviet regime, so that, when that regime collapsed in ignominy, the label itself was, as one of the radio programme participants put it, ‘contaminated’. Of course, in terms of the substance of what passed as ‘communism’ in Russia, the Socialist Party would regard its demise as a positive development. But that also meant that it was a problematic term to describe the kind of society we advocate and so we tend to shy away from it. The same fate has not befallen the term ‘socialism’, at least not to the same extent. Though socialism may mean many different things to many people, at least it does not tend to automatically send out connotations of one-Party rule, autocracy and suppression of thought and ideas.

And this is perhaps a lucky twist of fate for the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), since, from our establishment in 1904, ‘socialist’ is the word we have normally used to describe our organisation and the society we exist and work to see established. It has often been suggested to us that, to be noticed more widely, we should change our name and use a different term to describe our objective, since, though not as compromised as ‘communist’, ‘socialism’ still does have negative associations in many people’s minds. We have resisted this both on the grounds that it has a historical significance that has not suffered the same fate as ‘communism’ and also because we take the view that, the more we make its meaning absolutely clear, the more its positive significance and content will become evident, especially as social development makes the need for the kind of society it points to increasingly urgent and necessary.

Howard Moss