Election Special: Where We Stand (1964)

From the October 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wages and Prices

Our capitalist world is topsy-turvy and generally unpredictable. Bold indeed is the man who dares to say what things will be like in twelve months, or even twelve days time. Nevertheless, there are some things on which we can speak with some certainty. We do not know which party is going to win this election, but whichever it is will have the question of wages and prices as one of its major preoccupations.

Wages are always a headache to employers and governments, and we do not have to look far to find the reason. If the manufacturer is to sell the goods which his workers have produced, he has to offer them at competitive prices, as high as the market will bear, but not so high as to leave the market to cheaper competitors. If wages increase too much his profit suffers, so he needs something to act as a brake on wage claims. Before the war the brake was there in the form of large unemployment, but this generally has been missing in the post-war years. As the purpose of capitalism is profit making, our rulers find themselves in a quandary.

Should they fight the unions over every wage claim? But that would mean bringing factories and transport to a standstill, at enormous cost in lost production and profits. So they have to try other methods, such as “wage freezing” under Labour and “wage restraint” under the Tories, both meaning the same thing. They will try to persuade the workers to forgo, or at least reduce, wage increases "in the national interest.” All sorts of arguments will be used in support of this line, all boiling down to the same theme. The less we have, the better off we shall be, even at a time when generally prices are rising.

But didn’t they all say how much they deplored the rise in prices and promise to put a stop to it? Yet the Labour Government went out on a tide of rising prices, for all its controls. Who will forget the garish Tory posters up and down the country, telling us that they would succeed where their opponents had failed? We can see how little their promises were really worth. In fact, just like the Labour Party before them, they have given the nod to price rises by currency inflation, in attempts to offset wage increases.

As far as workers are concerned, the struggle for improved wages and conditions must be pressed at all times, regardless of price movements and government propaganda. The alternative under capitalism is a worsening of conditions—there is no such thing as “stability.” But the only real solution is to replace capitalism with Socialism, which will mean the ending of both wages and prices and instead the production of goods solely for the use and enjoyment of all.

Housing

Our politicians are constantly talking about it. The newspapers print loads of articles on it. The telly shows us heartrending pictures of it. All as though it is something new, something that will soon be over and dealt with, given the right political party—Tory, Labour, Liberal.

They call it the housing problem.

But a hundred years ago and more they were talking about a housing problem. Far from being new, it's as old as capitalism, as old as the working class itself.

Let us go back a hundred years—to 1864. Hardly believable though it is, many of the houses that had already been standing for twenty or thirty years then are still with us now. Everybody has heard of Coronation Street—after whose coronation was it named? Not after George VI in 1937, nor after George V in 1910, nor even after Edward VII in 1901, but after Queen Victoria’s in 1837. And in Salford they have only just got round to pulling down Waterloo Place, built in 1815 and named after the victory over Napoleon!

Today in this country there are more than one million houses—many probably worse than those in Coronation Streets—reckoned to be unfit for human habitation. So low are the standards, anyway, that one million is certainly an underestimate.

In Glasgow, tens of thousands of people live three to a room.

In Liverpool there are 88,000 houses beyond any prospect of repair; in Birmingham 50,000 families are on the waiting list; whilst in Oldham it is estimated that no less than one house in four is unfit to live in. And in London, perhaps the worst area of all, many families of the homeless are reduced to walking the streets.

Our capitalist politicians all tell us, of course, how upset they are over the problem. The same as they were telling us years and years ago. Now the Labour Party reproaches the Tories for building only 300,000 houses a year: the Tories answer back and remind the Labourites that they have nothing to shout about because when they were in office they only once managed to get above 200,000!

But this does not stop them telling us what fine things they’re going to do if they are elected. What truly wonderful promises they have given us over the years! And still they have not even got to the stage of building enough houses to keep pace with those rotting away into slums, let alone starting to fulfil those high ideals they treat us to every time an election comes around.

Yes, there’s a housing problem alright, the same one that has been with us for the past hundred and fifty years. And the capitalist political parties are just as far from getting rid of it today as they were then. Promises, we shall get promises galore. If words were bricks we’d all be living in palaces by now!

But they’re not, and we shall still be hearing about the housing problems—the overcrowding, the million slums, the long waiting lists, the wandering homeless—when the next General Election comes round!

Education

In this election all other parties are making grandiose promises to improve education.

But anybody who wants the best education, for themselves or for their children, can get it now. There is, of course, a snag. It will cost about £370 a year, which is the price of sending a pupil to a typical public school.

The public schools give youngsters the sort of education which develops their abilities to the full. Only a minority, however, can afford to go to them. What about the rest?

For them, a state school where, as both the Newsome and the Robbins Reports have shown, the educational environment is unfavourable.

Why are there so many promises to improve education?

The Times Educational Supplement, commenting on the Newsom Report, said:

The need is not only for more skilled workers to fit existing jobs, but also for a generally better and intelligently adaptable labour force to meet new demands.

What these “new demands” are was indicated by the same periodical in their discussion of the Robbins Report:

The committee was impressed by the fact that plans for expansion (in Europe and America) often far surpassed present British plans.

In other words, education is being improved and expanded to provide workers with different skills from those of their fathers, so that British capitalism can compete more successfully with its foreign rivals. On this the Labour, Conservative, Liberal and other capitalist parties are agreed.

Workers are misled into believing that a better education will basically improve their condition. In fact, it will leave them relying upon their wage for their living, even if their job is a “technical” one for which they need a university degree.

The restrictions and insecurity of working class life will continue to afflict them. Just like their fathers before, they will have been educated for a job.

Education under Socialism will be free of the shackles which capitalism’s profit motive imposes upon it. We shall all learn about the world we live in, our abilities will be developed to the full. Then we shall be able to offer the best to, and receive the best from, life.

Technology

A great driving force in capitalism is competition. This often leads to the growing productivity that is a feature of the system. The fiercer competition becomes, the quicker is the pace of technological innovation and the more acute the need for scientific research. This is precisely the position today.

The growing competition which British firms are meeting in the world market has highlighted the need for various reforms if they are to remain competitive. These reforms are needed primarily in education and scientific research. The era of automation demands a higher level of skill and education among the population than at present. Thus education and technical training must be improved and expanded.

But this is not enough. To be efficient and remain competitive a firm must invest in research. At present, however, few firms can afford the large outlay that this demands. In other spheres overlapping of research takes place. Here the capitalists’ need is for some national organization to finance and co-ordinate research. This is why the “scientific revolution” has become an election issue. This is why both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are emphasising the need for more universities, more science students, for better technical education in secondary schools, more research and other similar reforms. These reforms will come whichever party wins, for modernization is the order of the day.

But what will this modernization mean for the majority of workers? Technical progress under capitalism always presents a threat to some jobs. The measure of a firm’s efficiency at such times is the number of workers it can lay off. For the wages bill is a cost and costs must be reduced to a minimum if a firm is to remain competitive.

Many of the inventions which will result from this scientific revolution will be labour-saving, that is, job-killing. This means an increase, even temporarily, in redundancy. Old skills will be useless. The faster pace of machines will mean an increase in shift-working. It should not be thought that this threat is confined to factory workers. Computers and automation represent a threat to the jobs of thousands of managers, bank clerks and other white collar workers. All in all the total result will be the same old insecurity for all sections of the working class. This is the experience of American workers. It represents our future during the much-vaunted scientific revolution.

A trade union struggle against this threat will not be enough. Such a struggle, though necessary, can only be a rearguard action as everything favours capitalism. Something more than trade union struggle is required, namely, a political struggle to end capitalism. The Socialist Party offers a constructive alternative in Socialism. Only then will the fruits of scientific progress be used to satisfy the needs of humanity instead of, as at present, the greed of capital.

Pathfinders: The next big thing (2025)

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

Mainstream news stories are an endless diet of misery which activists seem to force-feed themselves, under the highly contestable assumption that bad news motivates people to action, rather than into depressed fatalism. If you feel the need for an injection of positivity this January, you ought to try the many free science news websites.

The reason science stories are often positive is because science is about solving problems instead of despairing over them. Now it is true that sometimes those problems are ones that science itself accidentally created. Nobody’s perfect. The law of unintended consequences is always at work, so we ended up with lead in petrol, CFCs in fridges and ‘forever chemicals’ in Teflon. Worse, because science is forced to obey the capitalist prime directive of profit, too often these unintended consequences become ‘unattended externalities’.

Even so, reading science news is a good way to maintain a ‘can-do’ perspective on the world. And socialists have another reason to be interested, because science can offer glimpses of emerging tools and techniques that global socialism might, just might, be able to use in the future, even if they are deemed uneconomical in the present.

Take the current anxiety about micro and nanoplastic particles now being found in almost every animal cell on Earth, together with those forever chemical compounds which don’t break down naturally and have been found in human blood, organs and breast milk. The long-term consequences of all this are unknown, and mainstream news treats it as an unmitigated disaster. But new research has shown how to remove up to 94 percent of nanoplastics from water by just using carbonised epoxy, while a team in China have developed a sponge filter that they say can remove 99.9 percent of microplastics. Forever chemicals can be broken down using expensive high-energy processes, but new light-powered catalysts are thought do the same job at a fraction of the energy cost.

As is well known, renewable energies are intermittent and require back-up storage, generally in the form of lithium-based batteries. But lithium mining or via brine extraction is energy intensive and environmentally destructive. A new study suggests that half of all lithium requirements could actually come out of wastewater instead while an alternative approach offers a low-energy and sustainable means to extract it directly from seawater.

Socialist society will most likely pivot away from the unsustainable capitalist-era obsession with private car ownership, towards comprehensive public transport, but there will still be a role for electric vehicles. At present the battery is the most expensive and least durable part of an EV, but a new type of single-crystal electrode lithium-ion battery could outlast the vehicle it’s in, and then see a ‘second-life’ usage as grid energy storage. Lithium is used because it’s light, so it has an optimal power to weight ratio, but the heavier sodium has similar properties and is 500 times more abundant, so sodium-ion batteries are under development for grid storage, which doesn’t need to move. Problems to date have been low power and slow charging times, but a high-power sodium-ion battery is in development that can charge in seconds.

Battery life and weight currently make long-distance aviation infeasible, but what about old tech in the form of airships? Sustainability concerns are changing attitudes to next-gen air transport, and multiple airship models are in development, including the carbon-fibre and all-electric Pathfinder 1 (no relation), the hydrogen H2 Clipper and the helium Flying Whales, with the UK Airlander 10 expected to be in commercial service by 2026. Helium is hard to get, but the manufacturers point out that airships don’t consume it, they store it, and only need occasional top-ups. If capitalism can do airships, why not socialism?

For short hops, some European companies are developing electric vertical take-off and landing (EVTOL) craft for use as low-cost, noiseless and emission-free air taxis. But they’ve run into funding problems recently as investors are sceptical of getting a good return on investment (ROI). That’s one problem the technology wouldn’t face if a democratic socialist society was, for some reason, smitten with the idea of roof-hopping public transport systems.

In other tech news, AI is an order of magnitude greater consumer of electricity than conventional computing, and an important question is where all the electricity is going to come from. One team believes they can cut AI power consumption by 95 percent simply by rejigging some algorithms. Global warming is creating a global water crisis, and desalination plants are power hungry, but a new method promises zero-electric solar desalination. There’s a plan to stop millions of tons of e-waste by printing circuits onto tree leaves. And self-heating concrete is a thing, if you mix it with paraffin, and could be used for de-icing roads.

In health news, a new biomaterial can regrow cartilage in old joints, meaning no more knee replacements. A twice-yearly injection reduces HIV risk by 96%, more effective than PrEP pills which have to be taken daily. Asthma research has seen the first breakthrough in 50 years with a monoclonal antibody treatment that isn’t a steroid so it doesn’t lead to osteoporosis. And a raft of new research confirms what we already suspected, that nature is good for us. Studies show that time spent in woods, fields or gardens – especially if you get mud on your skin – seems to realign your body’s microbiome with ‘good’ bacteria that are lost through urbanisation and are now believed to inhibit a colossal range of gut-implicated ‘urban’ illnesses (Good Nature, Kathy Kelly, Bloomsbury, 2024).

This only scratches the surface, and of course not all developments will pan out. But the key takeaway from science news is the awareness that the next huge breakthrough, the discovery or invention that changes everything, is just as likely to happen tomorrow as in a hundred years. If that’s not a reason for optimism, we don’t know what is.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: How much does Dark Matter? (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pure science, from a capitalist point of view, is a bit like kissing frogs. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before one turns into a handsome princely profit. Sometimes – rarely – a technical project offers a large and obvious return on investment (ROI), even though the payout might be years or even decades away. With nuclear fusion, for example, the potential ROI is enormous and alluring, but while the boffins swear the idea works in theory, the technical challenges of putting the sun in a box are immense and not always known in advance, which usually means spiralling costs. The €5bn price tag for the experimental Iter fusion plant in southern France has more than quadrupled to €22bn, and now the schedule has been put back a further ten years. This puts European state investors in something of a sunk-cost bind. The risk of fusion never working is not as bad as it working, and China or Russia getting the jump on it. The British state recently managed to Brexit itself out of the Iter project, but Euro-governments generally see no option but to continue shovelling money into it.

Nothing about science is guaranteed. Even if it works, it might never result in any marketable technology. One project that paid off is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, the rarest kind of all-level success story. As is commonly known, protons and neutrons are not fundamental particles, but are made up of combinations of quarks. Such combinations go by the name of hadrons, and smashing them together at super-high speed to see what pops out seemed like a very good idea, from the boffins’ point of view. From a government funding point of view, the ultimate composition of matter promised no ROI that mattered, but since one can never be sure, and because this was leading-edge research, they rolled the dice anyway.

CERN proved to be a smashing success, discovering more than 50 new hadrons, not to mention the Higgs boson in 2012 (tinyurl.com/yeyn92vk). It also unexpectedly spawned a side-bonanza for capitalism that had nothing to do with hadrons, or even physics. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working at CERN, came up with the worldwide web, which revolutionised capitalism.

So, CERN has become the poster child for capitalist science in Europe. But the hard questions of physics remain intractable. The ‘standard model’ has gaping holes. Assuming that Einstein’s theory of gravity is correct even at the largest scales, there should be around another 30 percent of ‘stuff’ in the universe to explain why galaxies don’t spin themselves to bits. No current device can detect this ‘dark matter’. Furthermore, nobody can explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, except with a putative ‘dark energy’ which represents 70 percent of ‘stuff’ but also can’t be detected.

Since smashing stuff together seems to work, experimental physicists have proposed an obvious solution – smash even more stuff together even more violently with a vastly bigger installation. They want to build the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a €20bn monster that would make the LHC look like a desktop pinball game (tinyurl.com/mr2vj67j). But this proposal to find fundamental answers raises fundamental questions about what investors are willing to stump up for.

The problem is, if the FCC enthusiasts are saying €20bn now, and if Iter is anything to go by, the actual cost could end up being multiples of this estimate. Euro ministers are choking on their lattes at the idea, and even some physicists are calling it ‘reckless’ and questioning whether ‘bigger, faster, harder’ is the best way to go. The biggest possible Earth-based collider could anyway never achieve more than a fraction of the colossal energies released in cosmic rays, meaning such exotic conditions will always be out of reach. And what if dark matter turns out not to exist, and is instead, like phlogiston, a supposition based on a wrong theory? Then, obviously, the FCC won’t find it. Would the boffins then demand even bigger and more expensive colliders, one after another, until they’ve got one the size of the solar system? Besides, with the climate crisis, pandemics, AI and other more immediate concerns, aren’t there bigger priorities for science budgets right now?

Government money comes from taxes on profits, which the rich get by exploiting us workers. We don’t get any say in how governments spend this cash, but the rich certainly do have an influence. And it’s a moot question how much the nature of reality actually matters to them, especially when the costs keep going up. Will they get tired of stuffing coins into the fruit machine of physics and watching the lemons whizz by?

Workers, meanwhile, have a more pressing concern, to get rid of capitalism and the rule of the rich. But a socialist society will still have to answer the fundamental question, which is how badly we want to know and how hard we are collectively prepared to work to find out. There’s always the possibility that people in socialism will not be willing to construct mega-colliders, despite what physicists say, and will decide to put their creative efforts into other things like space exploration, or undersea cities, or transhumanism, or rewilding the planet, or creating great art. But there’s no doubt that human beings do value the quest for knowledge for its own sake, in any society that claims to be civilised. The specific problem for science in capitalism is that it has to follow capitalism’s skewed money-agenda, where lofty goals may be celebrated, but the decisive factor is usually the bottom line, the factional advantage, and that all-important ROI.

Paddy Shannon

Science, Capitalism and the New Order (1941)

From the November 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British Association recently organised a meeting to “discuss plans for a new order in which science will play a leading part.”

Early in the conference Mr. Eden told the scientists that science had brought about inequalities, selfishness, and unfair division.

Here we have another instance of a professional champion of Capitalism selecting a scapegoat to bear the blame for the evils that Capitalism itself actully produces.

Unfortuntely, the view that science is wholly responsible for some of the grim and sordid features of modern life is held by many members of the working class.

How many workers, for instance, believe that science’s inventiveness has, without pressure from behind the scenes, created the ingenious machinery that has thrown many workers on the scrap heap ? How many believe that the inventing of planes and bombs, and the discovery of poison gases, are the things that actually create war ?

Let us see whether examination will throw light upon the question.

We live in a society wherein a comparatively small section, by virtue of its ownership of the mines, mills, factories, railways, warehouses, etc., is able to acquire a mass of commodities by exploiting the larger non-possessing section of society—i.e., the working class.

But unless each competing section of the Capitalist class can ensure a large and ready sale of their commodities by keeping down, and even lowering, their commodity prices, they will find themselves ousted by other competitors.

Capitalists, therefore, to keep up the sales that will ensure large profits, must undercut their rivals.

This can be done in two ways—by lowering wages, or by reducing the amount of labour spent on the production of their commodities.

The lowering of wages, however, has, from the Capitalist viewpoint, this disadvantage—wages cannot profitably be lowered below the level that will maintain a standard of satisfactory working fitness.

Therefore, in order to reduce the prices of their commodities, Capitalists find themselves mainly reliant upon reducing the amount of labour embodied in commodity production.

The only means of doing this is by displacing human labour by machinery.

Thus we find sections of the Capitalist class competing keenly against each other in the introduction of machinery, by which means alone they can appreciably lower their commodity prices and thus capture the trade of their rivals.

Only the introduction of such machinery will assist in retaining that essential in Capitalist competition—a rate of profit that will prevent being ousted from the competitive field.

Only such machinery, therefore, will be in great demand by the Capitalist class, and the competition to secure this machinery will send up its price and bring a rich reward to the owner of the invention. On the other hand, machinery that will bring benefits to mankind will not be in great demand unless it also aids the raising or maintaining of profits.

Inventors and scientists, therefore, faced by the fact that only the ideas that will fill a Capitalist need will bring ample payment, are, in the main, compelled to concentrate on such ideas. When the competition for trade, fields of exploitation, etc., can be divided by the border-lines of the competing countries, you will find the Capitalists of each country uniting against the menace of being ousted by a Capitalism from outside.

Diplomacy may for a time maintain a tolerating relationship between each country, but so urgent is the need for Capitalist countries to expand their markets, and secure new fields for trade that the strings of diplomacy are overstrained, and finally break, throwing the people of the opposing nations into the blood-drenched arenas of modern war.

When this happens the most urgent need of sectional Capitalism is for its own nationalistic entity to survive against the nations that threaten it. Thus the individualistic competition within the opposing countries is, temporarily, almost abandoned, and every muscle is strained to achieve a greater task for national Capitalism—i.e., winning the war.

In this manner the demand for labour-saving machinery is almost entirely displaced by the demand for machinery most effective in the prosecution of the war; machinery, in short, that would be most destructive against the opposing country.

Once more the demand for certain machinery sends up its price, and makes it the only mechanisation that will bring adequate recompence to its originators

Thus, although certain machinery will certainly throw many men out of work, or bring new horror into warfare, scientists, in order to live, are compelled by Capitalism to create such machinery. Not until Capitalism is ended and replaced by Socialism will there be a welcome for all mechanisation beneficial to society. Only then will inventors and scientists be unrestricted by the question, “Will it be profitable to the Capitalist class?”

Frank Hawkins

Pathfinders: The Tomorrow People (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tomorrow People

Future society will be populated by very special people. Within their ageless bodies will exist rejuvenated organs cloned from versions of their cells that have been made younger; youthful hearts and youthful lungs that will beat and breathe forever. Beneath their skin will scamper nanobots: blood-cell sized robots which, like highway maintenance vehicles, will rove their bloodstreams destroying pathogens, removing waste, correcting errors in DNA and reversing the ageing process. The same tiny machines will also enable brain-to-brain communication – telepathy of sorts – via the internet and ensure a vast expansion in human intelligence. Arguably, those special people may become less human as their bodies merge with a technology so advanced that it gradually begins to exceed and replace mere flesh and blood. At least, that’s the prediction of Ray Kurzweil, a Massachusetts-based inventor and writer, in his article ‘Human 2.0’ (New Scientist, September 2005). As is all too common with techie gurus, he has only the vaguest concept of political realities, so it doesn’t occur to him to question whether the future in question will be capitalist or socialist. If Kurzweil even grasped the difference, he probably still wouldn’t understand why the question was relevant. He observes certain anti-progressive tendencies in modern society, and ascribes them to some anomalous general human behaviour, rather than class, specifically capitalist class, behaviour. Consequently he proffers dire warnings about what we ought to do with our collective human knowledge, without ever addressing why we, the vast majority, are not in a position to control or determine what is done with that knowledge. Those of us who take an interest in the scientific adventure feel frequently piqued at the tendency of ‘futurologists’ like Kursweil, Toffler et al to overlook the fundamental political issues arising from the fact that human society is class-based. Scientists can be very far-sighted but at the same time have only a very narrow field of view, like a blinkered racehorse. Still, given our interest in the implications of science for a future socialist society, his predictions are interesting nonetheless and could be seen as relevant to it.

Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and technological singularity. He is also an enthusiastic advocate of using technology to achieve immortality. He predicts that ‘we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress’ due to exponential rather than linear techological change which will result in the Singularity, ‘technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history’ (http://en.wikipedia.org).

The concept of a singularity, a new technological ‘big bang’, is an exciting one, and Kurzweil is clearly very taken with it. It is fairly obvious that science does not progress in linear fashion, like a train along a railway, but in geometric fashion, doubling and doubling again. Revolutions in science are almost a weekly event these days, and it is therefore not hard to imagine a ‘super-revolution’, a point where the whole of human society has to change very suddenly. In a way, a socialist political revolution is almost implicit in such an event, as the fetters and restrictions of outmoded social practices are blown to pieces in a matter of days or weeks by the devastating power of the singularity.

Of course, he could be wrong. There may be no singularity, despite all the indications. Alternatively, the powers that be might be able to prevent or limit it. You don’t get rich by giving things away for free. There is every reason to suppose, for example, that nanotechnology, one very likely factor in causing the singularity, will be strictly controlled and limited, a bomb kept in a concrete box.

Tellingly, Kurzweil comments that ‘to proscribe such technologies will not only deprive human society of profound benefits, but will drive these technologies underground, which would make the dangers worse’ (New Scientist, September 2005).

It’s not difficult to see how the proscriptive tendency of capitalism, governed by the rule of production for profit not need, could put a dampener on Kurzweil’s technology-enriched version of humanity. If such technology does come onto the market, to whom will it be available? All of humanity without exception, as Kurzweil perhaps hopes, or only those wealthy enough to afford it? After all, it is likely to be expensive treatment, making its beneficiaries not only economically superior, but genetically superior also. Yet another proscriptive tendency is intellectual property right (see Patent Absurdity, and also ‘Intellectual Property: a further restriction on personal freedom’ for a fuller discussion of this subject).

Kurzweil likes to define humans as ‘the species that seeks – and succeeds – in going beyond our limitations’. But we will really start making some progress when the scientific community succeeds in going beyond its own limitations, and recognising the political dimension of the human project. Many scientists individually seem to understand the restrictive and anti-progressive nature of current practices, but somehow assume that explicit political positions are outside their remit, or even beneath them. In fact, all humans take a political position, whether they admit it or not. Science does not sit in a rarefied world above politics, it is part and parcel of it, and scientists who care about the world’s future ought to have the courage and honesty to declare themselves, and stop worrying about peer-group pressure. It’s not the professional suicide it once was. If you oppose the restrictive practices of capitalism, then you oppose capitalism. It doesn’t take an Einstein or even a Kursweil to work out what that means.

Patent Absurdity

Patent and copyright laws exist to ‘protect’ their authors and to provide a profit incentive to develop new ideas and technologies, according to the lobby which advocates strengthening patent law. But this lobby generally consists of large companies who have zealously bought up libraries of patents in order to lock out competitors, while the opponents of patent restrictions tend to be small companies unable to get a foot in the door, and who argue that such restrictions hold back development.

Human Genome Sciences of Maryland are well known for patenting much of the human genome, and once tried to patent one of the bacteria that causes meningitis, while Incyte Pharmaceuticals of Palo Alto, California own the patent on Staphylococcus aureus, a species whose study is crucial because it is known to evolve resistance to antibiotics (New Scientist, May 16, 1998).

An independent commission on intellectual property rights reported in 2002 that the World Trade Organisation were strong-arming developing countries into signing intellectual property rights (IPR) agreements which were of no benefit to them, because they had very little to patent, but instead force up prices and inhibit technology transfer. The report concluded that IPRs effectively rip off poor countries (New Scientist, Sept 21, 2002).

The issue of patents is always going to be thorny, because both arguments are correct – in capitalism. Ownership of intellectual property has to be protected in a property owning society, as anyone who has had their house burgled, their car stolen or their idea robbed will tend to agree, but there is no denying that intellectual property rights do indeed stifle innovation in every field, because of the tendency of patents to concentrate into the hands of the intellectual property rich. The scientific community is divided on the question, between those who believe in knowledge for its own sake and therefore wish to pool ideas, and those who wish to profit personally from their research by denying others access. Since this is precisely the same debate as between socialists and those who support capitalism, one might describe scientists who wish to abolish patent and copyright restrictions as closet socialists.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Final Frontiers (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A spectrometer is haunting the universe, the spectrometer of the James Webb Space Telescope. Or it will be if, at the time of writing, the Ariane 5 launch goes ahead on 22 December as planned and doesn’t face yet another delay. The spectrometer will measure the differing light signatures of the various elements making up planets and stars, and space boffins are hyperbolic at the prospects for new science that this might bring. For one thing the JWST is much bigger than the Hubble telescope, about the size of a tennis court, with a gold-covered reflector the height of a 4-storey house (it had to be shipped in secret to South America because of the risk of pirates). The large size means it can see what Hubble can’t see – a lot further into space and so further back in time, almost to the doorstep of the big bang. It’s also an infra-red telescope, because stars are more red-shifted with distance, and spectral patterns show up better in IR than in the visible spectrum. Among other things, scientists are hoping to see very early stars made of nothing but the three lightest elements, hydrogen, helium and lithium. If they see any heavier elements, they’ll know their cosmology needs a rewrite.

What is all this is costing and who’s paying for it? The cost is around $10 billion, stumped up mostly by the US government but with a whip-round from others including the UK and Canada. This is fairly small potatoes to the US, whose 2019 military budget was $686 billion, but still, a capitalist beancounter might ask, why pay good money to discover something which can’t possibly be of any practical use to anyone? Well, government-funded science is always a gamble. They might get nothing out of it, or they might get the next computer revolution. Or just the next Velcro. Either way, you’ve got to be in it to win it, and the Chinese and Russians are in it, so other governments are too.

There’s another reason to invest in big-ass telescopes, of which several more are due in the next few years (bit.ly/3dKcpV3). That is, finding Earth-like planets in other solar systems, since there aren’t any more in ours. Around 4,000 exoplanets have been identified so far, by measuring the relative dimming of stars as large bodies pass in front of them, but this is very low-res and can only detect Jupiter-sized gas giants, which we couldn’t live on, or huge rocky super-Earths, whose gravity would crush us. The JWST should be able to spot Earth-sized planets, particularly those in the relative Goldilocks zones around their stars, by seeing them directly. Spectroscopy will determine if they are Earth-like, ie, with the right life-sustaining mix of elements. If life as we understand it exists anywhere out there, these planets would be the best places to look.

Could we ever live on any of these planets though? The question becomes more compelling the worse the climate situation on Earth gets. But the vastness of space would seem to prohibit that idea. Apollo 11 travelled at a speed of 25,000 miles per hour. The Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, is expected to reach 430,000 mph by 2025. That’s over 250 times the speed of an average bullet, but even at that impressive lick, it would still take over 6,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system.

Not that this has prevented people discussing the possibility. If you loaded up a rocket with 50 breeding pairs of humans (this minimum viable number has been exhaustively calculated, you’ll be pleased to learn – see bit.ly/30isMVK) who didn’t object to themselves and 240 generations of their descendents living and dying in a tin box in space, and if nothing went wrong technically or because they went stir-crazy, they might make it. But the chances are, they would get there and discover that humans were already there, in fact had been there for thousands of years (bit.ly/3pT2jH0). How could that be? Because those left behind on Earth, in the intervening millennia, might have come up with a much faster way to travel, thus passing the first rocket on the way and getting there first, which would defeat the whole purpose of such an unthinkable sacrifice. Given this possibility, at what point would anyone volunteer to get on the first rocket? This is known as the Wait Calculation problem, which concludes that there is no optimal time to volunteer, unless humans somehow manage to invent a Star Trek-like warp drive that can reduce the trip to days or weeks.

Believe it or not, two papers were published last year showing that a warp drive was theoretically possible, ie, travelling faster than light without breaking the laws of physics. Essentially you don’t travel faster than normal, what you do is warp or squash the space-time in front of you so there’s less of it to cross (bit.ly/3DMLaUA). The earliest suggested warp drive technique involved using never-observed negative mass and negative energy equivalent to the mass of the universe. The new papers show how it could be done without either of these.

These are mathematical models only though, so don’t hold your breath. Or maybe do, in cryogenic suspension, with your body and brain embalmed with antifreeze in a container of liquid nitrogen. It might sound unappealing but people are already doing this. For instance, for $28,000 you can have yourself preserved at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, which already has 137 ‘residents’ (including pets) and 1,273 more on the pending bucket list. It’s cheaper if you only want to preserve your head, by the way. Meanwhile in Colorado a local man is frozen in a shed and the locals supply 700 kg of dry ice a month to keep him that way, and they even hold a Frozen Dead Guy festival every March (bit.ly/3yi7oMQ). Cryogenics might be a way to get to the stars, except that nobody has tried to wake a human up again so nobody knows if it really works.

Would people in socialism be that bothered about visiting or colonising other star systems? Impossible to say. We might regard it as humanity’s ultimate endeavour and a fitting testament to our limitless curiosity. Or we might just see it as a sensible hedge against future extinction when the sun turns red and fills the sky. At first though, we’ll probably be too busy fixing the damage that capitalism has done to the planet. Which brings the question back down to Earth. Whatever else becomes possible later, for now, abolishing capitalism is the frontier we need to cross.

Paddy Shannon

Alternative energy . . . fuel for thought (1977)

From the May 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the rapid rise in the price of oil, the idea of using “alternative energy sources” has become increasingly fashionable. However, only a small fraction of current energy research is put into alternative energy sources. For example in the EEC’s 1977 energy research budget, only 5.3 per cent, was allocated to solar power and nuclear fusion research. The question this article attempts to answer is why governments are investing so little money in alternative energy sources compared to nuclear fission. In doing this, it will be seen that the so-called “energy crisis” arises out of the problems of capitalism, not out of any shortage of natural resources.

There are two aspects to the question: First, production of energy and second, its efficient use. Until recently the latter question was completely ignored, but it is very important because capitalist production is enormously wasteful of natural resources in general and energy in particular. A good example of this is that in the generation of electricity a large quantity of reject heat is produced in the form of hot water. Somebody unfamiliar with the workings of capitalism might assume that this hot water would be used for domestic supplies, to heat buildings, etc. In fact, with the exception of one power station in the UK, the only thing this hot water is used for is the pollution of rivers. The reason for this is given in the Government discussion document “Energy Research and Development in the UK”, as follows:

  The capital costs associated with upgrading, distributing and utilising the reject heat (from power stations) would necessarily be large, and might be difficult to justify while there are available less capital intensive alternatives of meeting energy needs such as the supply of natural gas through existing mains direct to consumers. Furthermore, the development of significantly large markets for the heat would take place only within a long time scale and in many cases the associated costs could more than offset the fuel saving attractions, (HMSO 1976)

In short, hot water is used to create thermal pollution instead of heating homes while OAP’s die of hypothermia, for one simple reason—profit. This is a classic example of capitalist production; it creates the technological potential to satisfy human needs but does not do so because production is determined by the needs of the market, not by human needs. 

One of the most important uses of energy is in agriculture. It is interesting to note that modern agriculture could provide all its own energy by using the energy of the inedible parts of crops. This is not based on the claim of an alternative energy freak, but on an article by Professor Revelle of Harvard

University. He writes:-

  Most, perhaps all of the energy needed in modern high-yielding agriculture could be provided by the farmers themselves. For every ton of cereal grain there are two tons of humanly inedible crop residues with an energy content considerably greater than the food in the grain. If only half of this energy could be recovered by the fermentative production of methane or alcohol, the energy requirements for modern agriculture including energy for the production of chemical fertilizers, could be fully satisfied.

(Scientific American, September 1976)

It is possible to give many other examples of how wasteful capitalist production is. As one instance of how ridiculous it is to talk about conservation in terms of capitalist production, consider the recent “save it” campaign. This of course was stopped because the CEGB wanted to sell more electricity, not less!

One of the most talked-about forms of alternative energy is solar power. The reason for this is simple; there is so much solar energy around. While the sun is shining, the energy equivalent of a gallon of petrol falls on the area the size of a tennis court about every ten minutes. It is not just solar fanatics who realize the potential for solar power. For example Bruce Chalmers, Professor of metallurgy at Harvard writes:

  It is paradoxical that Americans should be concerned about their supply of energy even as the US is receiving energy from the sun at 500 times the rate at which they use it for all purposes.

(Scientific American, October 1976)

Photovoltaic cells can convert this energy into electricity with an efficiency of up to 25 per cent. The explanation of the paradox is money, of course. As Chalmers explains, solar power must be achieved “at prices that are competitive with those of other sources of energy.”

At present, solar power cells cost $20,000 per kilowatt compared to about $500 per kilowatt for a fuel-burning power station. The reason for the high cost is very small-scale production and the expense of silicon. Yet silicon is one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust. (So much for the “shortage of resources” theory!)

The reason for the high cost of semiconductor grade silicon, according to Chalmers, is that the precise manufacturing process calls for “much time and labour on the part of skilled workers who grow the crystals slice the wafers and fabricate the finished cell.” When it is remembered that there are millions of unemployed workers throughout the world, it can be seen that there is no shortage of skilled workers; it is just that under capitalism, skilled labour-power is an expensive commodity. Chalmers says that the speed of development of solar cells depends on how fast “the necessary engineering development can be achieved. No new scientific breakthrough is needed, only a great deal of meticulous engineering to put proved ideas into practice.” Even if solar cells could be built at the cost of $500 per kilowatt they would not be economically feasible in capitalist terms because ‘‘a conventional power station (also costing $500 per peak kilowatt) can generate a return on its capital investment day and night rain or shine,” whereas solar power stations can only generate one-third to one-half as much return per peak-kilowatt compared to a conventional power station. Other ways of using solar energy are putting solar cells into orbit above the earth and then beaming the energy down to earth or using mirrors to focus light on a solar boiler to generate electricity, as in the recently opened power station in the Pyrenees, or to produce hot water.

Another potentially large source of energy is geothermal energy. For example, J. C. Rowley writes:

  The interior of the earth represents an enormous reservoir of energy. Most of it with the exception of the relatively thin surface-crust material, is either close to or above the melting point range for the rock and metallic alloys that make up the mantle and the core. Yet this great energy reservoir is not at present a generally useful resource, being currently tapped only in a few small sites where surface conditions permit an economic yield. 

(Physics Today, January 1977)

There are four main types of geothermal reservoirs. The first type, high-pressure steam and hot water, is already used fairly widely because it is relatively cheap.

  Western Siberia like Cornwall “floats” on geothermal waters, and Soviet energy experts like the British periodically expound on the significance and profitability of this fact. The Soviets already use some of these waters for practical purposes. In and around Omsk is the main area of exploitation. The Omsk textile mill apparently saves from 33,000 to 44,000 roubles a year by using geothermal waters for heating.

(New Scientist, 5th February 1976)

This particular example illustrates the world-wide nature of capitalism. In Russia, as in any other capitalist country, production of energy takes place, just like the production of any other commodity, if and only if there is a prospect of making a profit.

The second type of geothermal reservoir consists of hot fluids. This source will probably be more expensive to utilize, but developments in materials technology could change that, so this type of source is now being explored. The 1975 US geological survey estimated that in the US this source contains an energy equivalent of about 5 billion tons of coal. This is about 1,500 times the total energy used by the us in 1973. The US geological survey also estimated that there are similar quantities of energy available from the other two types of geothermal reservoirs, dry hot rocks and magnia.

Another type of energy source that has been discussed recently is wavepower. There is a large amount of energy in waves and according to Wolley and Platts: -

  Compared with other permanent sources of energy— the wind for example—wavepower has a high availability; there are always waves arriving around Britain from somewhere in the Atlantic. 

(New Scientist, 1st May 1975)

Floats moving up and down with the waves could convert wave energy into electricity very efficiently. “Laboratory tests show great promise of a device with a basic efficiency of more than 50 per cent.” Wolley and Platts say. They are in fact engineers employed by a firm called Wavepower Ltd. They are not therefore working to produce a socially useful product for the benefit of mankind, but a commodity which their employers can sell at a profit, as they themselves freely admit:

  Public debate has concentrated on the high specific powers and high mechanical efficiencies of particular locations and devices. The true criterion for wave development should be THE POWER PRODUCED FOR A GIVEN CAPITAL OUTLAY. While there is immense power available in the Atlantic, it is not necessarily economic to tap it. Power in the North Sea for example, is contained in a comparatively narrow band of wavelengths; and the machine designed to suit them may well be more efficient in terms of capital cost per KW output, than a bigger device to cover the wider spread and larger waves in the Atlantic approaches. (Emphasis added)

Finally, it is worth noting fusion, because its development would provide an almost unlimited supply of energy. The development of fusion power is not just a technological problem, it requires new scientific development. However, there is little doubt that if the work is done it will be developed; it is merely a question of how long it will take. That is a big “if’ under capitalism because fusion research is expensive and governments are reluctant to pay for it. Bruno Coppi, in Scientific American (July 1972) writes that “the recent progress of fusion research has been limited by the lack of adequate financial support.” 

This article has been limited by space considerations, but seeks to illustrate two things. First, energy is a commodity and its production is therefore determined by the same laws of economics as those for any other commodities. Second, there is no shortage of energy resources on this planet. There is more energy available than man could possibly use. When the working class takes the means of production into its own hands, it can utilize all energy resources of the earth to solve all the physical problems that man can encounter.

Tony Weidberg

Socialism and scientific advance (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

What has been called “the problem of production”— how to produce enough to satisfy the needs of every man, woman and child—was solved by about the turn of the century. From then on scientific knowledge and technological ability could have banished for ever all human misery resulting from a lack of material resources: starvation and malnutrition, unhealthy living conditions, disease and ill-health, ignorance and superstition.

This knowledge and this ability has not however been applied to benefit Mankind in this way. Instead, production has remained geared to profit-making and the accumulation of profits as capital. The result has been not only continuing material poverty and misery but two world wars— and many lesser ones—during which millions of human beings have been massacred and mutilated. As the problem of production had already been solved all this human suffering was unnecessary and could have been avoided. It is the price Mankind has paid for the maintenance of capitalism into the Twentieth Century.

Scientific advance did not, of course, stop in 1900 but has continued ever since, making the production of enough wealth to adequately feed, clothe and shelter the whole of the world’s people ever less of a problem. In 1900 electricity was only beginning to be applied to production and the internal combustion engine and aeroplanes were just about to be developed. Since then we have seen the coming of (and we make no apologies for this list, as we hope it will help to ram home the extent to which the problem of production has been solved): radio, plastics, TV, jets, radar, rockets, electronics computers. nuclear power, transistors, artificial satellites, men on the Moon.

Every scientific advance makes capitalism even more obsolete and socialism even more practicable. But there are more advances to come in the near future. The popular science and science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, in his book Profiles of the Future (reprinted by Pan books last year), mentions as the next two major technological advances: the application of nuclear fusion to produce electricity and the invention of an efficient system of electrical storage.

At the moment there are a number of ways of generating electricity but not of storing it efficiently. Today's batteries are clumsy and so prevent the development of clean, electrically-powered vehicles. Existing petrol- and diesel-burning internal combustion engines continually pollute the atmosphere and would be phased out as rapidly as possible in a rationally-organised society. This lack of an efficient way of storing electricity is also holding back the development of solar and other clean sources of energy like wind-power, although the latter have the disadvantage of dependence on natural conditions. But this would not matter so much if an efficient system of storing electricity existed since the electricity generated on sunny, or windy, days could be stored for later use; the electricity generated in summer could be stored for use in winter.

Clarke gives the 1980s as the date for the invention of an efficient system of electrical storage. Fusion power he puts in the 1990s. Existing nuclear power stations are based on nuclear fission. On splitting atoms of heavy elements like uranium. In this process a radioactive “waste” is produced. Society may well eventually find a way of using the energy this radio-activity represents; it will then cease to be waste and become a “by-product”. At the moment, however, it is dangerous waste which no one knows what to do with. People are right to be concerned about this; the priority capitalism gives to making profits leads to the adoption of inadequate safety measures.

Nuclear power is an obvious future source of energy, helping replace the relatively wasteful burning of non-renewable fossil fuels. Arthur C. Clarke puts this well:

  Today, there can be little doubt that the long-term (and perhaps the short-term) answer to the fuel problem is nuclear energy. The weapons already now stockpiled by the major powers could run all the machines on earth for several years, if their energies could be used constructively. The warheads in the American arsenals alone are equivalent to thousands of millions of tons of oil or coal.
   It is not likely that fission reactions (those involving such heavy elements as thorium, uranium and plutonium) will play more than a temporary role in terrestrial affairs: one hopes not, for fission is the dirtiest and most unpleasant method of releasing energy that man has ever discovered. Some of the radio-isotopes from today's reactors will still be causing trouble and perhaps injuring unwary archaelogists, a thousand years from now.
   But beyond fission lies fusion—the welding together of light atoms such as hydrogen and lithium. This is the reaction that drives the stars themselves; we have reproduced it on earth, but have not yet tamed it. When we have done so, our power problems will have been solved for ever—and there will be no poisonous by-products, but only the clean ash of helium. Controlled fusion is the supreme challenge of applied nuclear physics: some scientists believe it will be achieved in ten years, some in fifty. But almost all of them are sure that we will have some fusion power long before our oil and coal run out, and will be able to draw fuel in virtually unlimited quantities from the sea.

Deuterium, the isotope of hydrogen which is a raw material for the fusion reaction, exists in the sea in the proportion of 1gm per 30 litres. So much, then, for the dire predictions of the scaremongers about running out of resources and the sick justification of poverty as the result of inevitable scarcity.

Society has not yet mastered the technology of nuclear fusion but is on the way to doing so. Its coming won’t lead to the breakdown of capitalism as the wages-prices-profits system becomes clogged up by an abundance of very cheap goods, as is sometimes suggested. But it might lead to people realising that capitalism is an utterly irrational way of organising the production and distribution of the world’s wealth. For, once nuclear fusion has been shown to be a practical and efficient way of generating electricity—once society has acquired the practical ability to apply it to the production of wealth—it will be more than ever obvious that poverty, misery and deprivation are quite unnecessary. We must move on to socialism.

With the means of production the common heritage of all the people of the world, the scientific knowledge and technological skill which society now possesses can be used for the one purpose of satisfying human needs in accordance with the long-standing socialist principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Adam Buick

Socialism — the politics of reason (1978)

From the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

A pessimistic view of man might see him as condemned to the pursuit of illusions. It might see him as preoccupied with meaningless objectives or otherwise held compulsively in the grip of self-destructive causes. Who could deny that there is some truth in such a view? For all man’s efforts, his best hopes remain constantly denied. The organisation of life about human needs evades us. In place of cohesion we have dislocation and violent conflict. The most disturbing feature of society is the unwillingness to recognise reality. The gap between understanding and experience is filled by false ideas which prevent us from solving problems.

This kind of pessimism is recent and can be contrasted with the optimism of the 18th and 19th centuries—the so-called age of enlightenment. Then it was thought that human progress followed inevitably from the new spirit of rationality and the development of the sciences. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, political economy and philosophy were all subjects of intense theoretical speculation. A new confidence grew out of expanded knowledge in every field of enquiry. Although the mood had its detractors it was felt that the new knowledge and its use in more efficient productive techniques and improved communications would improve the quality of life.

Disillusion
Now that confidence has been shattered, not only because man has been unable to solve his social problems; in this century, man’s inhumanity to man is unprecedented. The disillusion is particularly with science and its application in technology which many people see as worsening or even causing social problems. They point to pollution of the air, the spoiling of the environment, the depletion of resources, the development and use of nuclear weapons. They see the technical culture as being humanly sterile, resulting in consumerism and the alienation of man in the work process in vast industrial complexes. The application of science seems more frightening than reassuring, and the times are described as the age of anxiety.

Even rationality itself has come to be suspect, and the politics of irrationality are pursued by some as being more to the human point. In their attack on science, advocates of the counter culture argue that in striving for objectivity man separates himself from the most important human values. In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak writes,

  "Objective consciousness is alienated life elevated to its most honorific status as the scientific method. Under its auspices we subordinate nature to our command only by estranging ourselves from more and more of what we experience, until the reality about which objectivity tells us so much finally becomes a universe of congealed alienation.”

The disillusion with science could not be more -complete than this. He writes,

   “. . . the primary purpose of human existence is not to devise ways of piling up ever greater heaps of knowledge, but to discover ways to live from day to day that integrate the whole of our nature by way of yielding nobility of conduct, honest fellowship, and joy.”

The absurdity of Roszak’s attack on science is that in his systematic analysis of the problem he classifies three destructive mental characteristics of objectivity which if true must apply to his own objectivity thereby destroying his own argument.

To attribute the misuse of science to science itself is an idea which is not only false but dangerous. Human beings abandon rationality to their cost. One expression of political irrationality is fascism. In a published lecture, Professor Lipset of Harvard University has said

   “If one looks at the literature of the Nazi Student Movement and particularly of Nazi intellectuals, one finds an emphasis on a belief in romanticism. It condemned technology, the products of modern science, modern developments that came out of the university, and they saw the scientific method as undermining the truth which they thought men had to feel. They stressed the virtues of nature and what men felt—from their backgrounds, from their internal feelings—as overriding what their minds told them in any kind of scientific way.”

Professor Lipset argues that the Nazi movement was created or sustained by waves of discontent fed by inflation and depression. We would agree with this. It was an irrational response to conditions which were not clearly understood. The pervasive nostalgia of the fascist appeal to mythology, nationalism and race was a refuge of despair. The Nazi movement created the illusion of strength, solidarity and purpose. In fact it was an irrational retreat from reality, in which frustration and a deep feeling of powerlessness gave rise to hate, hostility and the persecution of political scapegoats.

Irrationality of Fascism
The irrationality of fascism cannot be dissociated from the total irrationality of the social structure which still persists. The situation where men do not understand how it is that their needs remain unsatisfied, and where the social experience is one of frustration and prolonged failure, is always dangerous. In seeking election, conventional reformist parties such as the Labour and Tory parties, help to create false expectations. In their interaction with the prevailing confusion they pretend that they can solve problems. Though they would disclaim it, and even actively oppose it, there is a connecting link between the failures of reformist governments and the rise of fascist attitudes. Once again we see the regrowth of fascism in a variety of forms. Once again the failure of reformist parties in worsening conditions of recession, unemployment and inflation is being expressed through the politics of hate.

The National Front is an obvious example. There are other groups who would disclaim any similarity with fascism and yet can be found to share many fascist attitudes'. There are so-called “leftist” groups who hold democratic procedures in contempt, are disposed to violence, who justify any means with illusory ends, who are elitist and orientated towards leadership and who fee! that out of the creation of chaos some kind of better order can grow.

Ill-Informed Frustration

The Baader Meinhof group is one such organisation which generates a romantic heroism and places a value on “action” against the apparent invulnerability of existing social structures. These are dangerous people who arrogate to themselves an absolute sense of right and who are mirror images of the authoritarianism they claim to oppose. They are born in the irrationality of ill-informed frustration.

The anti-science attitude in politics leads to social degeneracy, but the 19th century optimism about science was also unjustified. In general terms it cannot be doubted that in the expansion of knowledge man has a greater understanding of nature and can see his own existence as part of nature in a clear and more realistic perspective. More than that, man’s knowledge of his total environment has increased his ability to manipulate it to his advantage. But it also remains true that the free use of science for the benefit of man remains distorted and checked. The reasons why this is so penetrate directly to the contradictions of capitalist society.

We might ask, under what order of priorities does society use vast resources of labour and materials, including the work of brilliant physicists, for destructive purposes? Why do we produce spy satellites? In the face of human need why do we stockpile nuclear weapons and undistributed food side by side? How can we account for the grotesque paradox in which brilliant success is achieved in the technology of human destruction while men starve and the productive potential is not developed for human need?

Science does not operate in a social vacuum. The purposes for which science is used are the purposes of society in general. We can only understand the perverted priorities given to science and technology by understanding the overall political and economic motives of capitalism.

The negativism of the so-called counter culture, which deludes itself into thinking that positive results can be achieved by contracting out, and the vicious irrationality of fascism, are both signposts to further human disaster. Yet both these viewpoints are only exaggerated aspects of the confused thinking which in general shows little cognisance of the reality of life in capitalist society. This is the gap between experience and the way that experience is understood in political terms. This lack of understanding of the way capitalism functions is the main barrier against the solution of social problems. But this confusion has its own social explanation, it is a fact that irrational ideas serve the dominant economic interest. Men are socially organised about economic objectives which have no relevance to their real needs and which in fact are hostile to their needs and in this they remain politically unaware. This is the basis of the prevailing social insanity which is marked by a dislocation of thought, experience and need.

Equality of Access

Socialism describes an alternative society based on equality of access and co-operation, but also it is a study of man in all the consequences of his productive relationships as an historical process. The socialist analysis establishes knowledge which brings into consciousness the reality of social experience and in doing so makes possible a society where man controls his social life to satisfy his needs.

The Socialist Party is not a Marxist party in the sense that it upholds all the political attitudes of Karl Marx. Our attitudes are developed independently and are only attributable to ourselves. We do take the Marxian method, the labour theory of value and the materialist conception of history, as being the most useful theoretical means for clarifying man’s social problems and how man arrived where he is.

These theories are elaborated in socialist literature but reference can be made to the way in which some basic propositions meet the reality of everyday experience. It is everyday experience that wealth is produced in the form of commodities which are sold on markets with a view to profit. Stockpiles of food remain undistributed to prop up the market. Where there is no market, and no profit in view, production does not take place and workers are unemployed. Who can doubt the reality of the fact that human needs are sacrificed on the altar of the profit motive?

The socialist analysis shows that these contradictions stem directly from the economic relationships of class divided society. The means of producing wealth have been developed by man’s social labour throughout the ages. Under capitalism the means of production and the earth’s resources are monopolised by a privileged minority—the capitalist class. The working class, in their work activity, are forced by their separation from the means of production to be the objects of economic exploitation. This is the basis on which our society is erected, and the reason why the insanities of profit and class privilege predominate over the needs of man.

The dominating interests of capital hold all man’s skills and talents in the grip of its anti-human objectives. Where it does not channel them into destructiveness, it squanders them in waste or exploits them for profit, while the urgent need to improve the quality of life is ignored. This includes science and technology. Technical development is conditional upon the overall possibility of exploiting labour and the realisation of profit. This is the barrier against the free use of science and technology in the human interest.

The establishment of a society where social organisation fulfills the needs of man must begin with an understanding of existing problems. The socialist analysis achieves this. The first condition of a sane society, in which science and technology can serve human needs, must be the dispossession of the capitalist class of the means of production. The whole apparatus of production must be owned in common by the whole of mankind and used freely in relationships of equality and co-operation to serve human need. The ideology of capitalism can now only fight a rearguard action against further social development. This fight is essentially against the recognition of reality; to this end it will foster any confusion, exploit any prejudice, and use any distortion of human possibilities to make the task appear more difficult than it really is.

Those who suffer most from the inequalities of capitalism—the working class—must do their own thinking. The responsibility for creating a better world rests with them. They must consider the socialist argument in the reality of their everyday experience. Time and again they have shown that they can cooperate together in causes other than the solution of their own problems.

Pieter Lawrence

Exhibition Review: Robots (2018)

Exhibition Review from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some of the earliest objects that could be considered as robots were constructed by the catholic church from around 1500. They were clockwork machines that, for instance, showed Jesus on the cross shedding drops of wooden blood. Most people had no idea how they worked and regarded them as being based on magic. Thus the machines demonstrated the power and authority of the church.

So begins an exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, on until the middle of April, which covers robots from the early days to the present and even the future. In medieval times anatomists described the human body as a complex machine, while clockwork models were used to show the movements of heavenly bodies. Later, automatons were built that performed actions such as dancing, and these enjoyed a golden age in the eighteenth century.

But it was in the last century that robots began to come into their own, with electric batteries used rather than clockwork. There is a section on cinematic representation of robots, including a replica of Maria from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, which is described as ‘the first blockbuster robot’. Industrial robots began to be used in factories from the 1960s, to carry out specific repetitive tasks, and for safety reasons they could not work with people.

There has been much technical progress in recent years, some of it exemplified in the displays. For instance, one company makes 3D-printed bionic hands that can be used not just by robots but also by people with amputations. Kaspar (developed at the University of Hertfordshire) can help children on the autism spectrum, for instance to read facial expressions and to feel less intimidated. Other examples included in the display are Baxter and YuMi, both of which can work alongside people. All this raises the problem of robots displacing human workers: a recent report (Guardian, 29 January) argues that up to a quarter of jobs in the northern UK could be replaced by robots by 2030, with Mansfield being the worst hit.

A question posed at the end of the exhibition we can lead to the reader to ponder: should robots be gender-neutral? 

Paul Bennett

Capital, science fiction and labour (2009)

From the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can we rely on technology to bring down capitalism?

Near-future science fiction frequently explores the possibilities of imminent technologies  – gadgets that haven’t been designed yet, but could be given recent real advances in technology and design. Whilst its track record on such predictions – such as us getting to Mars by 1977 and everyone having rocket cars by 2002 – have been a bit wide of the mark, others have been much closer and in fact actively conservative compared to the real historical record.

 Authors such as Charles Stross in his Halting State or Ken Macleod in his Night Sessions explore a future where mobile phone technology linked up to glasses which display information to the wearer can link up with technology like google Earth and GPS systems to tell them, just by looking, who lives in a house and what criminal records they have and other known details. They explore the expanding pace of technology, as the machine intelligence of computers begins to exceed that of the living human beings. Iain M. Banks in his Culture novels explores the after-effects of that process, where humans served by loyal robots live in a post-scarcity, anarcho-communist, space-faring society.

 A tool enables a human to do a job, while a machine effectively replaces human labour. A robot is a sort of machine. The word itself is Czech, coming from a play about automatons, and it means worker, but with connotations of slavery. The international standards organisation defines a robot as: “an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose, manipulator programmable in three or more axes, which may be either fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications." In other words, a type of machine.

 Robots do not have to be physical, and many expert systems can be described as a robot of sorts. When your word-processor corrects your spelling, that is a type of robot.

 Futurists talk of a “singularity”. This represents an "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development past which present models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers, following the creation of strong artificial intelligence or the amplification of human intelligence. Futurists predict that after the Singularity, humans as they exist presently will cease to be the dominating force in scientific and technological progress, replaced with posthumans, strong Artificial Intelligence, or both, and therefore all models of change based on past trends in human behaviour will be obsolete.

 The technological singularity refers to a situation in which technological advancement begins to accelerate to the point where new designs are produced, basically, before old ones are implemented: where super-intelligence exists. More prosaically, when the robots begin to be able to do our thinking for us. Proponents of such an eventuality point to growth of computer processing power and the growth of communications and transport technology. They mark how the time taken for products to reach ubiquity and obsolescence is falling – it took 70 years for telephones to become ubiquitous, the iPod has managed it in about 8, for example.

 Already 3D printers have been developed that can make models and parts out of silicon and plastic – and that will lead to faster development of prototypes. Those 3D printers can also produce 60 percent of their own parts. If they get to 100 percent we’d have multipurpose machines that could reproduce themselves, and maybe even adapt for different tasks.

Drastic effect

 Machines making machines. That would have drastic effects on the labour market. Robin Hanson writes in the on-line magazine IEEE Spectrum:

“The relative advantages of humans and machines vary from one task to the next. Imagine a chart resembling a topographic cross section, with the tasks that are ”most human” forming a human advantage curve on the higher ground. Here you find chores best done by humans, like gourmet cooking or elite hairdressing. Then there is a ”shore” consisting of tasks that humans and machines are equally able to perform and, beyond them an ”ocean” of tasks best done by machines. When machines get cheaper or smarter or both, the water level rises, as it were, and the shore moves inland.” (“Economics Of The Singularity”)

 Depending on how these contours actually lie, this could mean mass displacement for millions of workers: redundancy on a grand scale. From shop staff to clerks, essentially human posts could be done away with by “simple” intelligences or machine expertise.

Of course, this trend has been continuing since capitalism began. As Hanson notes:

“The (…) proliferation of machine-assembled cars raised the value of related human tasks, such as designing those cars, because the financial stakes were now much higher. Sure enough, automobiles raised the wages of machinists and designers.”

 Throughout history, the labour market has had winners and losers, swings as well as roundabouts. New workers have always been recruited to replace those thrown on the scrapheap; but in this scenario, new workers can be designed, trained up and introduced faster through machinery than it would take to breed and train a new generation of humans.

 The suggestion throughout discussion of a technological singularity is that productivity would soar. In essence, it would herald an abundance economy. For some radical “transhumanists”  – those who foresee the human body being merged with machines – this would mean the end of capitalism.

 The capitalist mode of production carries with it a strong impulse for this sort of increasing productivity:

“The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions.”

 The result of which is the fact that:

“…the growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the labour-power incorporated with them, is an expression of the growing productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour-process as compared with the objective factor.The additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation serve particularly as vehicles for the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries, and industrial improvements in general. But in time the old capital also reaches the moment of renewal from top to toe, when it sheds its skin and is reborn like the others in a perfected technical form, in which a smaller quantity of labour will suffice to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw materials.”  (Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Chapter 25)

In a bind

 Capitalism is in a bind – it wants to use as much labour as it can as little as possible. That is, while it, on the one hand, sets its production goals as limitless, an infinity of riches and products, it wants to spare the precious labour that gives it an edge in the competitive battle. This is what the shackles of capital mean to labour – that goals and activities that are within the practical bounds of human endeavour are left unsurmounted because it is not capitalistically efficient to do so. Capitalism prefers the increasing refinement of the productive process to the actual attainment of any specific outcomes or goods.

 This brings us to an important factor. As E. P. Thompson noted in his The Making of the English Working Class – the working class made themselves. Workers, and their demands for waged labour as compared with the previous forms of bonded labour, were in the forefront of promoting market relations. Professor Robert Allen of Nuffield College, Oxford, an economic historian, goes so far as to suggest that a significant contributing factor to the Industrial Revolution occurring in Britain was the relatively high (at that time and in the world) real wages of the workers here. Particularly, they were high relative to fuel costs and capital costs. The importance of this is that it incentivised innovation and mechanisation. Similar features have been attributed to American industrialisation. The high costs of labour, and capitalism’s drive to spare labour if at all possible is a key motor of capital accumulation.

 This, then, presents us with a bind. Capitalism spares labour, cuts labour and labour costs, while it grows. Further, as we’ve seen above, whilst it accumulates, it cheapens the products of industry. This presents us with a situation in which fewer people are employed in production, and in which the cost of employing productive labour actually falls. The mass of use values they can command may well increase, but the value of their pay declines. We can see this in the recent history of the United States “Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20 percent of households” – that’s from the CIA’s 2005 factbook on the US economy.

Emancipating Labour

 Hanson sees a situation in which we would all have to become capitalists, living off interest, because labour would no longer pay, but if what has been suggested above comes to pass, then we simply wouldn’t have that option, and a form of labour feudalism could emerge.

 In response to a questionnaire, when Marx was asked what were his goals, he simply replied “The emancipation of labour.” This brings us to the crux of the matter - technology emancipates us from labour, but so long as a vast swathe of humanity depends on the sale of its ability to work labour will be in the chains of capital. Socialism, the emancipation of labour, would see a situation in which rather than try at all costs to spare labour, we will freely chuck it at problems because we would be working towards definite ends, rather than an ever increasing size of profit.

 It would be nice to think that technological progress would simply evolve capitalism away. If we believed that, we could shut up shop and simply become cheer-leaders for advancing bleeding-edge technology. The dangers of the alternative, a kind of stagnant capitalism based on cheap super abundant labour unable to fight back, is quite terrifying. We've seen how capitalism does have a drive to advance technology, but one that may be undercut by its dependence on waged labour. Waged labour has not been the passive tool of capital, but an active and essential participant in driving capitalism onwards. We as workers cannot sit by and hope that a magic bullet will solve our social problems, and our active organisation remains essential to attaining socialism.

 Productive forces encompass more than technological capacity, and include the organisational and mental capacities required for a given form of society. The friction between capital and labour was a source of technological innovation, that friction was a productive force. Socialism will free up labour, irrespective of technological capacity, to use whatever technological powers are available. Socialism is not a by-product of technology but of social consciousness.

Pik Smeet