Against Technocracy (Part 1) (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a scene in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), where Captain Jean-Luc Picard comments: ‘The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money does not exist in the 24th century…The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity’.

Such sentiments draw on a long tradition of utopian thinking. A common feature of such thinking is the idea of material abundance. Abundance is what renders money obsolete.

In the painting The Land of Cockaigne by the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567), a trio of figures is depicted dozing beneath a tree, their tools of the trade lying unused beside them. This is a magical world in which a cooked goose makes itself available on a platter and a roasted pig trots past with a carving knife stuck in its flank. No need to lift a finger to satisfy one´s hunger pangs.

The painting has attracted different interpretations. For some, it represents a moralising critique of the spiritual emptiness associated with sloth and gluttony (‘consumerism’); for others, the wistful dream of a world beyond grinding labour and material deprivation.

The Cockaignian tradition can be traced to the folk utopias of early medieval Europe and even earlier. What is striking about it is the relative lack of emphasis on technology as the means of achieving abundance. Mother Nature, not human ingenuity, was the provider of plenty.

This began to change over time, Bacon´s scientific utopia, The New Atlantis (1627), being an early example. From the mid-18th century, small-scale cottage industries gave way to the factory system. This was the first industrial revolution based on steam power and mechanisation. We have since had a second industrial revolution, commencing in the late 19th century (Fordist mass production and electrification), a third in the late 20th century (automation and digital electronics) and are currently in the throes of a fourth, featuring such cutting-edge innovations as AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, advanced robotics and biotechnology.

Marx and Engels

When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, the Second Industrial Revolution had not yet begun (the first patented electric light bulb was still decades away). They held that socialism depended not only on a majority wanting it and understanding what it entailed, but also on the productive apparatus being sufficiently developed to ensure the reasonable needs of the population could be adequately met.

In the mid-19th century, this was not possible. For this reason, the Manifesto called for the ‘centralisation of all instruments of production in the hands of the State, ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible’. State ownership was thought to be a more effective way of achieving this by capitalising on economies of scale.

However, by the late 19th century, there was a clear shift in their thinking. Thus, their 1872 Preface to the Manifesto stated that, because of the advances of modern industry since 1848, the state capitalist transitional measures they earlier proposed had become ‘antiquated’ and that ‘no special stress’ should be laid on them.

Interestingly, in 1878, we find Engels writing: 

‘The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here’ (1878, Anti Dühring, Part 3).

New thinking about how to expedite a post-capitalist society was certainly required (and Marx and Engels were moving in this direction), but sadly, many supposed ‘Marxists’ today seem to be trapped in a time warp, their vision limited to nothing more ambitious than the nationalisation of the ‘commanding heights of industry’.

Edward Bellamy

Back then, socialists were not alone in recognising the growing technological potential to supersede the capitalist money-based economy. A foretaste of a non-Marxian technocratic version of this was provided by the American journalist, Edward Bellamy, in his fictional work Looking Backward (1888).

This was an enormously influential book, particularly in America, selling over a million copies shortly after publication. In it, Bellamy described the huge economic benefits that would result from dispensing with money:

‘Another item wherein we save is the disuse of money and the thousand occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an army of men was formerly taken away from useful employment’.

However, his vision of a future moneyless society was a statist one, the ‘nation’ being deemed ‘the sole employer and capitalist’ (reminiscent of Lenin’s later description of ‘socialism’). Production was organised under the aegis of a ‘General Council of the Industrial Army’.

There was limited political democracy insofar as the government was elected, with this kind of society enjoying broad support, but practical decision-making itself was generally top-down and paternalistic. Labour would take a compulsory, quasi militaristic form (unlike Marx´s idea of ‘freely associated labour’) with individual consumption being rationed via a credit card scheme.

Bellamy saw this future moneyless society as being technically advanced and exhibiting a high degree of automation. This was not a vision that appealed to everyone, however. William Morris, who likewise wrote about a future moneyless society in News from Nowhere (1890), was critical of Bellamy´s outlook – in particular, its negative depiction of work as a coerced activity requiring extrinsic incentives to motivate individuals to work.

The idea of work being intrinsically undesirable is also implicit in some contemporary representations of a moneyless future. One example is the concept of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ (FALC), associated with writers such as Aaron Bastani.

Automation will undoubtedly play an important role in a post-capitalist society, particularly when it comes to work deemed dangerous, dirty or monotonous. However, we would surely not want to eliminate all work and the potentially enormous creative pleasure to be derived from working. It is the terms and conditions under which we currently work that are the problem, not necessarily work itself.

All too often, work is unthinkingly equated with waged employment. These are not the same. In fact, even today under capitalism, most work is performed outside the money sector, not within it (María Ángeles Durán 2012, ‘Unpaid Work in the Global Economy’, Fundación BBVA).

We need work, or labour, as a form of creative self-expression. In hunter-gatherer societies, the distinction between work and play tends to be blurred. Much the same approach to work is found in Marx´s description of a higher phase of communist society in which ‘labour has become not only a means of life, but life’s prime want’ (1875, Critique of the Gotha Programme).

The Technocracy Movement

Bellamy´s futuristic society has been interpreted to represent a proto-technocratic utopia. However, the term ‘technocracy’, denoting governance by technical experts, was only coined somewhat later, in 1919, by an engineer, William Smyth. The basic idea behind this subsequently found expression in the rise of a movement in the 1930s in America (also in Canada and parts of Europe), bearing that name: the ‘Technocracy Movement’.

Though Howard Scott and Marion King Hubbert founded this movement, the individual thought to have first clearly set out the basic principles of technocracy was the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in 1921, in an article titled ‘Engineers and the Price System’.

Veblen saw technological development as paving the way to the reorganisation of the economy, leading automatically to the gradual disappearance of money. Technological innovation followed its own developmental trajectory. The price mechanism was regarded as simply a wasteful and unnecessary encumbrance on production. It did not so much ‘guide’ technological development as follow it (and profit from it).

Veblen envisaged the decline of business culture and its replacement by a more technically-minded society in which people like scientists and engineers would lead the way. There was, he suggested, a built-in or deep-seated antagonism between the pecuniary values promoted by financiers and businesspeople and the industrial values embraced by the technicians and skilled workers.

The economist J M Keynes later said something similar in his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Keynes suggested that within a century, technological progress and rising affluence would cause our obsession with money to die out. At the same time, the working week would contract to a mere 15 hours on average.

During the Great Depression, interest in the Technocracy movement grew rapidly, and the movement became quite popular for a brief period (at one point attracting hundreds of thousands of adherents) before going into steep decline following the implementation of Roosevelt´s New Deal reforms that drew support away from the movement.

Among the various ideas it advanced was the suggestion, grounded in Scott´s ‘Energy Theory of Value’, that energy units (joules) should replace money as the unit of accounting in the production and distribution of goods, with citizens being allocated ‘energy certificates’ to regulate consumption. What lay behind this was the belief that the money system was something inherently wasteful and oriented towards the perpetuation of needless scarcity. As one contemporaneous article noted:

‘Technocracy states that price and abundance are incompatible; the greater the abundance, the smaller the price. In a real abundance, there can be no price at all. Only by abandoning the interfering price control and substituting a scientific method of production and distribution can an abundance be achieved’ (Sept 1937, “What is Technocracy”, The Technocrat).

Jeremy Rifkin and Zero Marginal Cost

The claim about increasing abundance brought about by the price-collapsing effect of technological innovation is the stuff of much recent sensationalist speculation. According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of the best-seller The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2015), the ‘emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services, precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism’.

However, Rifkin´s thesis is based on a flawed understanding of marginal cost pricing. Even if the marginal cost of producing some item (the cost of producing one additional unit of this item) fell to zero, there are still fixed costs to account for. Information goods, for example, may be ‘non-rivalrous’ in the sense that if I use the internet to do a Google search, it doesn’t prevent you from doing the same. But, internet-based corporations like Google or Meta still have enormous fixed costs to pay for. They still have to generate revenue to cover these costs and realise the huge profits they make in the process.

For the same reason, the prognosis of people like the billionaire, Elon Musk, about AI eliminating all jobs within two decades is fanciful in the extreme. Remarkably, someone who has profited so much from capitalism seems to know very little about how it actually works.

Capitalist production presupposes sufficient ‘effective demand’, such that a business can expect to realise a profit meeting this demand. Without the prospect of profit, even essential needs will remain unmet. To satisfy them, workers depend on paid employment in a capitalist, money-based economy.

How would this be possible if no one had a job? Living labour, not machinery, is the source of capitalist profit. In theory, if all work were automated, the rate of profit would fall to zero, and capitalism would cease to exist.

However, this is not remotely likely to happen. Well before that, Marx’s famous ‘counteracting tendencies to the falling rate of profit’ would kick in. For instance, growing technological unemployment would depress wages, thereby paradoxically making it more profitable once again to employ more labour.

Thus, there are self-correcting mechanisms that pre-empt the sort of scenario that people like Musk have in mind. Indeed, some studies suggest AI will lead not to a reduction but to an increase in jobs overall, with its main impact being to transform the nature of work under capitalism.

We cannot depend on technological innovation alone to transcend capitalism. This is a major weakness of the technocratic paradigm, which we will examine in Part 2.

Robin Cox

Link to Part 2.

Blogger's Note:

Star Trek: First Contact was reviewed in the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo Column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the sixth century Pope Gregory the First sent monks to Britain to convert the pagans. The pagans worshipped nature and believed that animals, plants, trees and other things in nature had souls and a protective god. The pagans were not so readily seduced by snake-oil salesmen. Greg, not wanting to miss out on the corporate opportunities offered by expanding the business and potential for increasing cash flow through tithes, land ownership and so forth, sent another vanguard across the channel a little while later.

This time, through guile, the pesky pagans were placated with the promise that pagan festivals would basically remain but under the new ownership of Christianity. Over a few hundred years the takeover was complete and Christianity was now top dog.

The Venerable Bede, Anglo-Saxon monk and historian, wrote in the eighth century, De Temporum Ratione, of Eostre, pagan goddess of Spring, fertility and renewal, and noted that feasts were held in Eostur-monath which was the equivalent of April. Eggs and hares were associated with her.

With Eostur-monath on the horizon the question is, what does it mean to people in the UK anymore? For a child brought up in a strictly non-religious household it offered a break away from school, hot cross buns, and lots of sugar-addictive chocolate. The Easter Bunny didn’t put in an appearance at all, or it would have found itself in the cooking pot in no time. Neither was time wasted having to hunt for eggs.

Fast forward to adulthood and the realisation that features of Easter, were, like many other Christian festivals, knock-offs from the previous various faiths which had been… expropriated. And the recognition that despite the ‘goodies’ associated with that ‘celebration’ there were various elements that should have been withheld from children for a very, very long time.

Learning that hot cross buns symbolised crucifixion and embalming fluids, the spices and dried fruit occasioned a distaste for that food which has long lasted. If you’re okay with Catholic communion and transubstantiation, the belief that bread and wine is transformed into the actual body and blood of JC, then nothing probably strikes you as distasteful.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s writings were the basis for Krafft-Ebing coining the word masochism. Might not even Leopold have found the actions of modern-day penitents in places like the Philippines, southern Italy, Mexico and Spain who engage in self-flagellation and ritual crucifixion, a case of going a bit too far?

In the internet market place there are thousands of children’s religious books for sale. These cover a multitude of faiths. Grab a bundle, such as a child’s first bible, something about Noah’s Ark and JC’s disciples. A wide taste is catered for, including colouring books, sticker books, and Easter story books. But at what age is the ‘cuddly’ stuff ditched in favour of learning of punishments imposed by the Romans and what a cross really represents?

One wonders whether the works of Donatien Alphonse François, aka the Marquis de Sade, wouldn’t be less harmful?

DC

Letter: Ending the money system can save the planet (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ending the money system can save the planet

Dear Editors,

Money may feel neutral — just a tool for exchange. And environmental destruction is usually framed as a technological problem, a political failure, or a lack of individual responsibility. But the primary driver of ecological degeneration is the system we live under. It requires endless growth, even though the earth itself does not grow – forests regenerate slowly, soils take centuries to rebuild.

In a monetary framework, nature has value only when it can be priced. So, for example, a living forest is ‘unused land’ and a felled forest is ‘economic activity’. Clean air, biodiversity, climate stability, and future generations tend to be ignored by balance sheets. It is more profitable to extract than to regenerate and so what cannot be monetised is treated as expendable, the result often being not stewardship, but liquidation. This doesn’t happen because people are evil. It happens because the system rewards the wrong behaviour.

The result is that total global debt now equals more than three years of the planet’s entire yearly output — everything humanity produces in one year, multiplied by three, already promised away. But growth and the borrowing that goes with it means more extraction and more pressure on land, oceans, climate, and people. We have in effect built a system that treats Earth as an infinite credit card — and even after maxing it out, it demands a higher limit.

That is why we do not have a problem that can be fixed with better regulation, greener growth, or smarter finance. The system that requires endless expansion on a finite planet is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

This brings us to the question of artificial scarcity. Money-based systems depend on scarcity, but not natural scarcity — manufactured scarcity. There is enough food, yet people starve. There are more than enough homes, yet people are homeless. There is an abundance of energy from the sun, yet we burn the planet for fuel. So scarcity is not a condition of nature. It is a condition of design. And scarcity doesn’t just damage ecosystems. It damages people and a wounded humanity consumes to compensate. Much of modern overconsumption is not driven by greed, but rather by emptiness. When work is disconnected from meaning, when time is stolen from life, when worth is measured numerically, people compensate by seeking status, possessions and distractions.

This is a system that erodes human dignity. You are valued only when you are profitable. So rest must be earned, care must be justified, illness is a liability, and ageing becomes a problem. Your right to exist depends not on being human but on being useful.

But ending money would change the questions. Without money, society would stop asking ‘Is this profitable?’ and begins asking questions like ‘Is this necessary?, ‘Is this sustainable?’, ‘Does this improve life for people and the planet?’ When production becomes needs-based, technology serves life, not return on investment, and durability replaces planned obsolescence.

It’s not that people aren’t trying to save the planet within the today’s monetary system — many are. But every serious environmental effort is forced to operate against the system’s underlying logic. Renewable energy must compete with fossil fuels on price. Ecosystem protection must justify itself in economic terms. Climate action must promise growth, jobs, and returns to be considered ‘realistic’. In other words, nature is allowed to survive only if it can be made profitable. And this creates a constant contradiction: we try to heal the planet while preserving the very engine that requires its continued destruction. As long as money, debt, and growth remain the organizing principles of society, ecological protection will always be partial, fragile, and reversible — tolerated only until it threatens profits. That’s why saving the planet without ending the monetary system is not just difficult; it may be structurally impossible.

You may say ‘What can we have instead? This is the only system we’ve got.’ But is it? When land, water, and ecosystems are no longer owned for profit, extraction loses its incentive, care becomes collective, and long-term thinking becomes natural.

Stewardship replaces ownership. The guiding question shifts from ‘How can we extract as much as possible?’ to ‘How do we keep this system healthy for ourselves and future generations?’ Just as a humanity stripped of dignity will compete, consume, and destroy, a humanity that feels safe, valued, and meaningful does not need to dominate its environment.

So while ending the monetary system does not magically save the planet, it does remove the root incentive that is currently destroying it — and it also gives both Earth and humanity a chance to recover. This is the core vision explored in my book, Waking Up – A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, a story that doesn’t ask whether such a new world is perfect, but whether it becomes possible once the old rules are removed. The question is no longer whether we can afford to imagine a world beyond money. The question is whether we can afford not to.

Harald Sandø

Reply:

We broadly agree, though we see the imperative to growth that is built into capitalism as resulting from its economic drive to make and accumulate more profit rather than from having to make money to repay interest on debt – Editors.

Blogger's Note:

Harald Sandø's novel was reviewed in August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard.

William Godwin, Shelley and Communism (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just over a hundred and fifty years ago died William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, one of the seminal works in Britain of radical criticism of existing class society. Godwin had been born in 1756, the son of a nonconformist preacher, as he himself had been for a few years before coming to see through religion as untrue. The first edition of his Political Justice appeared in 1793, his contribution to the ferment of social and political ideas sparked off by the French Revolution, then still in progress. In 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneer feminist work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Godwin was also the author of a number of novels expressing his views, one of which—Caleb Williams—has been a television serial. In addition his Of Population, written in 1820, was the classic contemporary refutation of the nonsense peddled by Malthus.

Godwin has been described as a “utilitarian anarchist”. This is not an unfair description since he was very much in the Age of Reason philosophical tradition which saw humans as isolated individuals pursuing happiness as a measurable quantity and he could be described as an anarchist insofar as he looked forward to the “euthanasia of government”.

In Political Justice Godwin set out to examine what form of society would have to be established to conform to the principles of justice as laid down by Reason. Defining government as “regulated force”, he came to the conclusion that this would have to be “a simple form of society without government”. What he envisaged was the division of a country like Britain into self-administrating districts which would run their own affairs without the need for laws, or prisons, or “regulated force” in any form and which would send delegates to a central confederal assembly in the rare event of any situation requiring co-ordinated action on a national scale. It is this proposal for a “society without government” that has led to anarchists regarding him as one of their forebears.

But Godwin was not simply an advocate of a society without government. He was also an advocate of “equality of conditions”, “a state of equal society” as he called it. “Equality of conditions”, he wrote, “or, in other words, an equal admission to the means of improvement and pleasure, is a law rigorously enjoined upon mankind by the voice of justice” (All quotes are from 1976 Pelican Classic edition). His argument went as follows:

Human beings are partakers of a common nature; what conduces to the benefit or pleasure of one man will conduce to the benefit or pleasure of another. Hence it follows, upon the principles of equal and impartial justice, that the good things of the world are a common stock, upon which one man has as valid a title as another to draw for what he wants.

In every society, the produce, the means of contributing to the necessities and conveniences of its members, is of a certain amount. In every society, the bulk at least of its members contribute by their personal exertions to the creation of this produce. What can be more desirable and just than that the produce itself should, with some degree of equality, be shared among them?

This was a familiar argument with advocates of an equal society in place of existing unequal class society. It led some of them to advocate “a community of goods to be maintained by the vigilance of the state” as Godwin described one such proposal current in his day. Naturally, as an advocate of a society without government, he strongly rejected this speaking of “how pernicious the consequences would be if government were to take the whole permanently into their hands, and dispense to every man his daily bread”.

What, then, did he propose? How did he envisage goods being distributed in his “free and equal state of society”? Here a misunderstanding has sometimes arisen due to the fact that, in Book VIII (“Of Property”), Godwin defends a right to property. He distinguishes three “degrees” of property. The first is property in the goods an individual uses personally. The second is property in the product of an individual’s own labour. The third is property which entitles the beneficiary to appropriate the labour of others.

For Godwin, this third type of property was unjust as it involves exploitation:

All wealth, in a state of civilised society, is the produce of human industry. To be rich is merely to possess a patent entitling one man to dispose of the produce of another man’s industry.

Privilege entitles a favoured few to engross to themselves gratifications which the system of the universe left at large to all her sons.

This “monopoly of property”, exercised by both landlords and capitalists (Godwin actually uses the term), should simply be abolished by the state ceasing to uphold it. The other two types of property should remain inviolate. Nobody, neither another person nor the community, had a right to deprive a person of their personal effects nor the produce of their own labour. This is where the misunderstanding has arisen, with some misinterpreting this defence of a right to property as meaning that Godwin was not a “communist” but merely a “leveller”, somebody who did not want to abolish property but merely to equalise property holdings within the framework of a commodity society.

But this was not at all what Godwin meant. For although he argued that no-one, not even the community as a whole, had the right forcibly to deprive someone of the product of their own labour, he argued equally forcefully that it was the duty of everyone to make available to other people the products of their labour over and above their own needs. In other words, instead of selling their surplus produce for money and accumulating wealth from the proceeds, they ought to make it available free for other people to satisfy their needs. Godwin did not go into the practical details of how this would work but he was quite clear that buying and selling would not enter into it. Discussing the division of labour, he wrote:

Shall each man manufacture his tools, furniture and accommodations? This would perhaps be a tedious operation. Every man performs the task to which he is accustomed, more skilfully, and in a shorter time than another. It is reasonable that you should make for me that which perhaps I should be three or four times as long in making, and should make imperfectly at last. Shall we then introduce barter and exchange? By no means. The moment I require any further reason for supplying you than the cogency of your claim, the moment, in addition to the dictates of benevolence, I demand a prospect of reciprocal advantage to myself, there is an end to that political justice and pure society of which we treat.

And in The Enquirer, a collection of essays he published in 1797, he was even more explicit:

Were the members of any community sufficiently upright and disinterested, I might supply my neighbour with the corn he wanted, and he supply me with the cloth of which I was in need, without having recourse to the grovelling and ungenerous methods of barter and sale. We might supply each other for this reason only, because one party had a superfluity and the other a want, without in the smallest degree adverting to a reciprocal bounty to be by this method engendered; and we might depend upon the corresponding upright and disinterested affections of the other members of the community, for the being in like manner supplied with the commodities of which we were in want.

So Godwin resolved the problem of who, in his “free and equal state of society”, was to distribute goods according to people’s needs by saying that it would be the producers of particular goods of their own free will. His equal society was to be a “spontaneous equality of conditions” not an enforced one. Although he did not use the term “communism” (which was not then in use) or even that of” community of goods”—in fact, to tell the truth, he was too much in the individualist tradition to have used such terminology—his system was equivalent to what might be called a “voluntary” communism (as opposed to one “maintained by the vigilance of the state”). For, if we assume that the producers deposit the surplus over their needs of their particular product in some general storehouse from which they can take the products of other producers that they need, then we have the classic distribution system proposed by previous pre-industrial communists such as Thomas More and Gerrard Winstanley.

Although the social change Godwin advocated—the euthanasia of government and the abolition of “the monopoly of property”—was a radical one, the method by which he saw this coming about—the slow and gradual “progress of the human mind”—was in stark contrast and led him to oppose any kind of organised political action to further the cause of an equal society. In fact the only kind of organised activity he would accept were philosophical debating societies. In this sense, Godwin was a classical armchair philosopher. However, as often happens in such cases, his radical social criticism was taken up by others who did not share his qualms about political action.

One of those to be influenced by Godwin’s ideas was the poet Shelley, who the previous year had been expelled from Oxford University for producing an atheist pamphlet. Shelley came across Godwin’s works at the age of 18 and was very impressed. He was eventually to marry Godwin’s daughter who, among things, wrote the original Frankenstein story.

So impressed was Shelley by Godwin’s proposals for a new society in which people would be motivated by “disinterestedness” rather than selfishness that he set out to express them in verse, in a long poem called Queen Mab which he published privately in 1813. This is a vision of the past, present and future of mankind. In it Shelley attacks kings, war, commerce and, in particular, priests and religion. In fact the criticism of christianity, in the poem as well as in prose notes attached to it was so hard-hitting that when it was republished in the 1820s the publisher was sent to prison for blasphemy. Queen Mab became the work that publishers used in defiance of the restrictive press laws of the time. Each time they were convicted of blasphemy. But as a result Queen Mab, and thus Godwin’s social ideas, came to be widely read in Chartist and radical circles.

In part V of Queen Mab Shelley attacks commerce which he sees as a product of selfishness in the sense of people wanting to sell their surplus for money rather than give it to others to satisfy their needs:

Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange

Of all that human art or nature yield;

Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,

And natural kindness hasten to supply

From the full fountain of its boundless love,

For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now.

Commerce! Beneath whose poison-breathing shade

No solitary virtue dares to spring,

But Poverty and Wealth with equal hand

Scatter their withering curses, and unfold

The doors of premature and violent death,

To pining famine and full-fed disease,

To all that shares the lot of human life,

Which poisoned, body and soul, scarce drags the chain,

That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind,

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,

The signet of its all-enslaving power

Upon a shining ore, and called it gold:

Before whose image bow the vulgar great,

The vainly rich, the miserable proud,

The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,

And with blind feelings reverence the power

That grinds them to the dust of misery.

But in the temple of their hireling hearts

Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn

All earthly things but virtue.

Later Shelley continues his criticism:

All things are sold: the very light of Heaven

Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love,

The smallest and most despicable of things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep,

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the laws allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man,

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively,

Are bought and sold as in a public mart

Of undisguising selfishness, that sets

On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign,

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe

Is turned to deadliest agony, old age

Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,

And youth’s corrupted impulses prepare

A life of horror from the blighting bane

Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs

From unenjoying sensualism, has filled

All human life with hydra-headed woes.

It is quite clear that Shelley was expressing Godwin’s idea that, in a just society, producers would give away their surplus produce free rather than sell it for money, Hence his opening description of commerce as “the venal interchange of all that human art or nature yield; which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, and natural kindness hasten to supply”. When he later describes what will happen when people are motivated by the “consciousness of good” he naturally states that they will have no need of “mediative signs of selfishness”—of money—and that “every transfer of the earth’s natural gifts shall be a commerce of good words and works”.

This commerce of sincerest virtue needs

No mediative signs of selfishness,

No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,

No balancings of prudence, cold and long;

In just and equal measure all is weighed,

One scale contains the sum of human weal,

And one, the good man’s heart.

Part V of Queen Mab ends as follows:

But hoary-headed Selfishness has felt

Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave:

A brighter morn awaits the human day,

When every transfer of earth’s natural gifts

Shall be a commerce of good words and works;

When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,

The fear of infamy, disease and woe,

War with its million horrors, and fierce hell

Shall live but in the memory of Time,

Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,

Look back, and shudder at his younger years.

It is only by completely ignoring these passages that Paul Foot is able to claim in Red Shelley (1980) that “Shelley was not a socialist. Shelley was a leveller”. Shelley, at least at this time, was just as much an advocate of a “spontaneous equality of conditions” that amounted to a voluntary moneyless communism as was Godwin.

In one sense this argument as to whether or not Godwin and Shelley were socialists is anachronistic since the modern idea of socialism, as the solution to the problems of a majority wage-working class within a capitalist industrial society, had not yet come into being. This is partly why in this article we have used the word “communist” rather than “socialist” to describe the moneyless equal society advocated by critics of the essentially agrarian class society that existed before industrial capitalism developed. It was of course the low level of development of the means of production that accounts for the frugal, even Spartan, character which the pre-industrial communists were obliged to give to the egalitarian society they advocated, but it still remains true that people like (in England) More, Winstanley and Godwin and Shelley and (in France) Morelly, Babeuf and Buonarotti were forerunners of the socialist industrial society of abundance that we modern socialists now advocate.

Adam Buick

Russian gold (1947)

From the November 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

People whose only principle is to praise every act of the government of State Capitalist Russia, need to be very careful how they throw stones at the other capitalist states. In the Daily Worker (23/9/47) Mr. Allen Hutt pokes fun at “our elaborate apparatus for extracting the yellow metal at enormous expense from deep holes in the ground in South Africa in order to bury it again in deep holes in the ground in Kentucky.”

This is indeed one of the daft things that necessarily go with capitalism, but why is it more daft to mine gold in South Africa and bury it at Fort Knox in U.S.A. than to mine it in the gold-fields scattered all over Russia in order to hoard it in Moscow? Already by 1934 Russian gold production, according to the “U.S.S.R. Handbook” (1936, p.197) had been expanded so much that Russia claimed to be second only to South Africa as a gold producer. Mr. Hutt should read “U.S.S.R. in Reconstruction,” May, 1937 (published in Moscow) where he will learn how gold production was increased fourfold between 1930 and 1936 and was still rapidly expanding. He will read how more and more men and materials were being-poured into the remote gold regions, how scientists were perfecting methods of mining, how mines were going to deeper and deeper levels.

“The principal gold fields,” we read, “are situated hundreds of kilometres from railways and navigable waterways. Goods are transported through Taiga, boundless steppe, sand dunes and over mountain ranges to the gold fields.”

And all for what purpose? “Soviet gold flows in a broad stream to the capital of the Union of Soviet Republics, where it is refined and stamped according to the world standard.” Some of it is then sold to U.S.A., to go into the vaults at Fort Knox. The same Russian publication quotes a resolution passed by the Russian Communist Party in 1922 affirming that government policy must be “to maintain the gold fund inviolable and to develop the mining of precious metals.”

Some of the mining is carried on by the State and the rest by individuals organised into co-operative groups. Of course it is all described as “Socialist” gold-mining, whatever that is supposed to mean.

Mr. Hutt in the Daily Worker recalls how Voltaire in “Candide” describes the land of El Dorado, where gold lay about disregarded and treated like dirt. He might also have recalled how Sir Thomas More in his “Utopia ” anticipated the use of gold and silver not as precious metals but to make “chamber-pots.” It was doubtless from that source, or possibly from Kautsky’s book “Thomas More and his Utopia” (p.203), that Lenin got the idea that under Socialism gold would be used “for making public lavatories in the streets of the great cities of the world.” (Quoted by Ralph Fox in “Lenin.”)

Sir Thomas More had another notion, which was that in “Utopia” gold would be used by the masters to make ”chains and fetters for their slaves.” That is certainly the effect on the minds of the workers under capitalism, wherever the worship of the Golden Calf still flourishes.

There is another, more grim, joke that Mr. Hutt overlooked. In U.S.A., while it is an offence against capitalist law to try to make forcible entry into the vaults at Fort Knox, it is at least not illegal to disclose where the gold reserve is situated. In the Russian ‘”Utopia” they have made even that a criminal offence. According to Soviet News (11/6/47, published in London by the Soviet Embassy) the new Criminal Code makes it an offence for a private individual to disclose “information on the current account balance and operative financial plans of the U.S.S.R.,” or to disclose “the place and system and safekeeping and transportation of precious metals of the State Fund, currency valuables and money coins.”

The unlucky Russian worker who lets out that the Russian “Socialist” gold reserve is kept at Moscow or wherever it is “shall be pimishable by confinement in a reformatory labour camp for a term of from five to ten years.”

This “mild” sentence is given “provided such action cannot be qualified as treason or espionage.” What happens for the aggravated offence of giving this information to foreigners and thus committing treason is not stated. If Mr. Hutt had written his little paragraph in Russia he would have been for it.

Edgar Hardcastle

News from Nowhere (1993)

From the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Penguin Classics have just brought out a new edition of William Morris’s Socialist novel as News from Nowhere and Other Writings (£6.99). The other writings include two of Morris's socialist articles "Useful Work versus Useless Toil" and "The Hopes of Civilisation" both of which make it absolutely clear (for those who might doubt it) that Morris was a class-struggle Socialist who saw capitalism as based on the exploitation of the working class and Socialism as a classless stateless, moneyless society that would be the outcome of the struggle of the working class to free itself from wage-slavery

An interesting prophecy (1956)

From the October 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I doubt not posterity will find many things that are now but rumours, verified into practical realities. It may be that, some ages hence, a voyage to the Southern tracts, yea, possibly to the moon, will not be more strange than to America. To them that come after us, it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly to remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey; and to confer at the distance of the Indies by sympathetic conveyances may be as usual in future times as by literary correspondence. The restoration of gray hairs to juvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length be effected without miracle; and the turning of the now comparatively desert world into a Paradise may not improbably be effected from late agriculture." 

[Written in 1661 by Glanvill and quoted by Mumford in The Golden Day.]

Waking up (2025)

Book Review from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the common jibes directed at the Socialist Party is that, though we have been in existence well over 100 years, we have made little or no progress in garnering support for the system we advocate to replace capitalism. We’re talking here about a stateless, moneyless, marketless society of common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – one that will be organised democratically on the basis of from each according to ability to each according to need. Our response to the jibe has always been that what we are at least doing is keeping the idea of that society alive and it will be there for the majority to establish once social consciousness has developed sufficiently for them to see the necessity of it.

Positive signs?

And we do see some positive moves in that direction, evidenced by the idea of a moneyless, borderless world society being advocated from a variety of quarters, often quite independent of any contact with or knowledge of the Socialist Party. In recent times, for example, we have reviewed books such as Beyond Money: A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson from Australia and Description of the World of Tomorrow: A World Without Money or Barter or Exchange: a Civilisation of Free Access by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal from France. A couple of years ago, in the United States, we had Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution from Matthew Holton, founder of the ‘Moneyless Society’ Facebook site, which boasts 20,000 members. Earlier this year, Justin Fairchild, also from the US, brought out Unchained: Living Without Money, advocating a society in which ‘cooperation replaces competition, access replaces ownership, purpose replaces profit’. And now, from Harald Neslein Sandø, a Norwegian living in Spain and writing in English, we have Waking Up. A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, whose subject of exploration is unmistakeably the kind of society we have always advocated, even though he does not call it, as we do, ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’.

Exploring possibilities

Sandø ‘s book also differs from the others in that it is a work of fiction, science fiction in fact. In his introductory note, the author describes science fiction as ‘a canvas for exploring possibilities’ and his book as ‘an invitation to imagine, question and reflect’. It chooses, in fact, to tell the wholly imaginary story of an individual, Benjamin, who, having been cryogenically frozen when about to die from cancer in 2015, is brought back to life 100 years later after a new society has been established. This is a society based no longer on money but on ‘community effort’, where, as Benjamin is told by one of the first characters he meets, there is ‘shared stewardship’ of the planet and ‘no one owns it – we belong to it’, and there is ‘no money, no ownership, no competition’.

We get little explanation of how this new state of things was brought about, apart from asides such as ‘the planet was about to collapse due to climate change and pollution’, ‘the need for a completely different system became clear’, ‘the monetary system was killing the planet as it demanded a constant overconsumption of resources’, ‘it was a global, democratic decision’, and ‘this transformation has been made possible through a new mindset – a mindset of trust and respect’. We are, however, supplied with intricate details about how the society operates via Benjamin’s discovery of the new way of living people have and the unimaginably advanced forms of technology that challenge everything he once knew. He finds a sustainable world in which human beings collaborate with one another, innovation thrives, mutual support has taken the place of conflict, and there are ‘no supervisors, no bosses, no payroll, no urgency’. And he is told: ‘For the first time in the written history of mankind … we have evolved to a stage where we can look at this planet as a whole, see humanity as one family, and live without borders. This is a world where we all coexist peacefully, without war.’ He also learns that ‘through the efficient management of resources, we have achieved a relative abundance that allows everyone to live comfortably in their own way, regardless of where they are in the world’. It has also become a world of regenerative agriculture where ‘rewilded landscapes flourished’ and which ‘thrived not on domination but on unity’. One of the characters Benjamin meets tells him: ‘We take care of each other, and in doing that, we take care of ourselves. There’s no struggle, no scarcity. Just collaboration.’ The same character goes on: ‘Human nature turned out to be not only selfish and violent. You can choose and, you choose friendliness, which I’m very happy for’.

Human interest

A bit of a fairy tale, a pipe dream, some might say. But it is made less of one – and given a certain plausibility – by the author’s continual explanation of how it works in practice, how the highly advanced technology used to make it operate has been developed and keeps developing. This plausibility is enhanced – and the reader is drawn into the narrative – by the ‘human’ story it tells of how the individual who has been brought back to life adapts to the new world he finds. The book had begun by painting a picture of Benjamin’s former existence when he was a billionaire capitalist driven entirely by the need he felt to accumulate wealth. Now on waking up to find that money plays no part in anyone’s existence, he first feels out of place, ‘obsolete’, ‘not knowing where he belongs’, as he puts it, and he (and we) wonder whether he will cope mentally, how he will accept and adjust to the completely new system and mindset he finds all around him..

As a way of trying to comfort Benjamin and ease his integration into the new world, the guide assigned to him puts an ingenious twist into what he is finding by saying ‘We are all capitalists, as we are living off the shared capital of the planet and universe’. He is then pulled into the drama of a small group of ‘renegades’ who seek (unsuccessfully) to sabotage things and return the world to its old competitive ways, but he comes out the other side in clear opposition to this and in support of a ‘borderless globe’, where, in words that he himself now utters, there is ‘seamless harmony between humans and nature’, where everyone leads ‘their own versions of a good life, respecting each other and the planet’. All this lends some genuine ‘human interest’ to what might otherwise be an accumulation of dry technological detail and, in fact, manages to make the book something of a page turner, its 200-odd pages having been devoured by the current writer in a single sitting.

How do we get there?

There is clearly some comparison to be made here with other attempts at depicting life and organisation in a future non-market society of voluntary cooperation and free access. For many it will bring to mind, for example, William Morris’s late 19th century News from Nowhere, Robert Llewellyn’s News from Gardenia from 2012, and, in particular, the very recent attempt by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass (Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics) to provide a kind of day-to-day outline of what a future society ‘without money or a market’ might be like, something they call ‘a total alternative to capitalism’ and offering, as the authors put it, ‘everything from a plan for resource allocation to an outline of what life will feel like’. The main difference between this book and Sandø’s, however, is that, while Vettese and Pendergrass’s depiction is founded on profound knowledge of and reflection on the scientific and technological problems that a marketless society would need to deal with and overcome, Sandø’s vision, while also technological, is far more ‘imaginative’, fantasy-laden one might say. At the same time, it must be said, this is a factor that contributes to its readability.

From a socialist point of view, the main problem that arises from Sandø’s book – and indeed the others mentioned here, including William Morris’s classic – is that none of them deal effectively with the ‘how’, ie, how we get there. None of them specify the spreading of consciousness by the vast majority of workers as the prime condition – the sole condition – under which a socially conscious working class can, by democratic use of the vote, take the power necessary to abolish capitalism and set about organising a genuine socialist society of the kind looked forward to by all these sources – even if they do not all necessarily use the term ‘socialism’ to describe it.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

A number of the other books mentioned in this review have themselves been reviewed in previous Socialist Standards:

• Oct 2022: Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson
• Oct 2022: Description of the World of Tomorrow by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal
• Jan 2023: Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holton
• Mar 2023: Half-Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergras

Getting Socialism. (1908)

From the August 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is much misunderstanding as to the meaning of the phrase “The coming Social Revolution” as used by Socialists. Many inquiring workers, befogged by the teaching of the I.L.P. and of other reforming bodies, complain that they cannot conceive of a comparatively sudden or “catastrophic” change carrying society from Capitalism into Socialism. Hence, it seems, some of the attempted justification of a “palliative” program—a means of sliding into Socialism while the masters are not looking, you know. (Socialism to come upon us “as a thief in the night,” was Mr. Keir Hardie’s felicitous phrase, I believe.)

This misunderstanding would appear to arise largely from an over-consumption of Blatchfordian “rational Socialism,” and of “Looking Backward”-”News from Nowhere” Utopianism —though these, perhaps, are the least noxious of I.L.P. teachings. Certainly, to wake up one morning in Capitalism, do a barricade “turn” and go to sleep that night in Morris’s blissful “Nowhere” is not what the Socialist means by “the coming Social Revolution.”

Say Marx and Engels in the “Communist Manifesto,”

“The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of a ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as a ruling class (italics mine); and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

“Of course in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production ; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.”

Also in recent years Kautsky has said in his work “The Social Revolution” :

“It is therefore, the conquest of the powers of State by a hitherto oppressed class—in other words, the political revolution, which is an essential characteristic of the social revolution in its narrower sense, as opposed to social reform.”

Now to “raise the proletariat to the position of a ruling class”—”the conquest of the powers of State,” is conceivable.

That by dint of economic pressure and of Socialist propaganda and organisation the workers can vote themselves into “the position of a ruling class,” is conceivable.

That, given an organised, prepared, Socialist proletariat become the ruling class, its delegates can proceed to the enactment of transition measures (necessarily temporary) which in the aggregate will knock from under class-divided society its basis—private ownership and control of the means and instruments of production and distribution, thus causing the disappearance of classes, is, we hold, conceivable.

Given the common ownership and control of the means of production, the consequent disappearance of classes, dominant and subject, and the time necessary to get things working smoothly, and Socialism (Industrial Democracy; the Co-operative Commonwealth) is here: the Revolution is accomplished.

Now how about the other alleged practical and “common-sense” method described by Keir Hardie and Co.? Is it conceivable that the workers’ emancipation can be gained by an accumulation of reforms? Let us see.

Noisily trumpeted, apparently palliative reforms are at present dispensed—old age pensions on the cheap and devil-take-the-weak-and-old workmen’s compensation—and are pointed to as proof of the triumphant policy of our I.L.P., S.D.P., etc., etc. reformers. But we point out that a million such reforms, with a little municipalisation and nationalisation of capital thrown in, will still leave the workers poor, subject to competition and unemployment—still a subject class. The bridge that can alone span the chasm between Capitalism and Socialism remains as ever—the acquisition of the control of industry by the working class.

Now the present controllers of industry are certainly not less aware of this fact than are the Socialists ; and since they find domination sweet, and since history records not an instance of a dominant class voluntarily and of sweet reasonableness abdicating its controlling position, it follows that our capitalist masters will defend their control of the means and instruments of production by every device at their command, from reform dispensing to massacre. Long established privilege is not to be so easily abolished. Certainly, that our masters will kindly vote us, and hand over, one after another, the different industries, thus committing suicide as a class, is not conceivable.

The advocacy of reforms is mischievous because it does not prepare the workers for the tremendous task of beating the master class out of power, but rather teaches them to look to the masters for crumbs and, on Keir Hardie lines, for the piecemeal concession of Socialism.

No ! we cannot reform into Socialism because the capitalist class will not abolish itself, while if we gain the power to take reforms we should indeed be foolish to halt on the road and try patching up capitalism. Our clear duty would be to expropriate the capitalist class and re-organise production and distribution as the common interest dictates. That is to say, establish Socialism.

J. H. Halls

Are socialists utopians? (1981)

From the November 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Look at the world around you. Millions starving while food is destroyed. Mass unemployment and an arms race which threatens human survival. Many murderous regimes overshadowing hints of democracy. But how should change be directed? How should society be organised? Socialists have a clear vision of the way forward, and for this are often branded as utopian dreamers. But Utopians base schemes for a future society on abstract principles such as “freedom” or “justice”, without suggesting how society can be transformed.

The Utopians

For most of human pre-history people lived in communal groups, sharing their food. Conditions were harsh, but hardships were shared. With the advent of slavery, people were forced to become the property of others, to be treated like cattle. The first utopias were romantic visions of a harmonious life, and were placed in the past, For example, this passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in the first century BC:

In the beginning was the Golden Age, when men of their own accord, threat of punishment, without laws, maintained good faith and did what was right . . . the peoples of the world, untroubled by any fears, enjoyed a leisurely and peaceful existence, and had no use for soldiers. The earth itself, without compulsion, untouched by the hoe, unfurrowed by any share, produced ail things spontaneously, and men were content with foods that grew without cultivation . . . it was a season of everlasting spring.

This tradition continued through the Middle Ages in poems such as The Former Age by Chaucer

What would have been the point of war?

There was no profit, no property;

But cursed was the time, I dare well say,

When men first did their sweaty business

To dig up bits of metal, lurking in the darkness

Looking for gems in the rivers 

With the development of capitalism, the search for a utopia became popular and urgent, and took on a more realistic element by being placed in the present instead of the past. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was located in the “New World” across the ocean. By the nineteenth century, utopias were being placed in the future. Edward Bellamy, who[se] Looking Backward in 1887, said that “The Golden Age lies before us and not behind, and it is not far away”. But as early as 1652, Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, had tried to combine action with vision. His protest took the form of over the land at St George’s Hill near Cobham for common use, while his hopes were expressed in The Law of Freedom:

If any man or family want corn or other provision, they may go to the storehouses and fetch without money. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers' shops, and receive that they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep, or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling.

The eighteenth-century French ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity were seen as the essence of the 1789 revolution Five years later, Buonarotti and Babeuf organised the “Conspiracy of Equals”. They planned an armed insurrection as the way to communism, which they saw as an ideal to be put into practice at any time regardless of the historical conditions, with the help of Spartan asceticism and moral restraint. In the early nineteenth century, utopian socialists drew up detailed schemes as alternatives to the unbearable conditions under which rapid industrialisation was taking place. Saint- Simon envisaged a technocracy, with bankers directing production by the regulation of credit. He wrote of a time when the “administration of things” would replace “government over people”. Fourier explained how “Under civilisation, poverty is born of superabundance itself” and urged the formation of communal groups which he called phalansteres. At New Lanark in Scotland, Robert Owen directed a cotton mill as a “model colony” of co-operative efficiency.

Political action

The socialist movement became practical about a hundred years ago, with the formation of political parties such as the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League. The latter was founded by William Morris, whose vision of socialism, News From Nowhere, was published in 1890. This work tells of an activist from the Socialist League arriving home after a political meeting and dreaming of the kind of society his party sought to establish. It ends as the people in the dream tell their visitor to go back and see

people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives — men who hate life, though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle.

Socialism was placed on a practical footing when social development was to be based on the interplay of material forces and the class struggle. This was largely accomplished through the work of active socialist speakers and writers such as Marx and Engels. Capitalism was seen to be a struggle between owners of capital and their workers, the sellers of labour power; a struggle ultimately over control of all the productive resources of society. Marx showed how capitalist employers were able to accumulate the “surplus value” produced by their workers because the ages paid, merely enough to keep us fit for more work, are worth less than the the total value we produce. Previous revolutions have taken place when the forces of production (for example, factories) had grown to a point where further development was prevented by the old-fashioned relations of production (such as lord and serf). The contradiction in capitalism which Marx pointed to remains. Wealth is produced by millions of workers across the world, but appropriated by a small minority. This leads to further contradictions such as mass starvation alongside the destruction of food and the universal desire for peace alongside wars.

The end of scarcity

A report produced by the United Nations in 1970 stated that “the surface of the earth has hardly been scratched”. In 1976 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Yearbook showed that “enough grain is now produced to provide everyone on earth with more than 2 lb. (3000 calorics) per day”. In Bangladesh, where half the people are starving, enough grain is produced to provide 2,600 calories a person each day, but it is exported to be sold.

The Head of Policy Planning at the World Bank referred recently to twenty million tons of “surplus grain” guarded by soldiers in India, while chronic hunger continues. In 1966, the US President’s Science Advisory Committee reported that less than half of the world’s arable land was being cultivated, while in 1978, the EEC destroyed almost 200,000 tons of fruit and vegetables (The Times 14/11/ 78). In Nairobi in 1967 about a million coffee plants were burned (The Times 12/5/67). And in 1962, the Director of the International Agricultural Aviation Centre estimated that “the earth could support a population of 28,000 million if food production were organised on lines now known to be practicable” (The Times 24/9/62). (Present world population in 24/9/62 is about 4,000 million.) In September 1976, Robert Loomis declared in Scientific American that current resources could feed more than twelve times the present population. In the same issue, W.D. Hopper explains that

The world’s food problem does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the environment. The limitations on abundance are to be found in the social and political structures of nations and in the economic relations among them. The unexploited global resource is there.

The problem is that, from Moscow to Washington, production is based on the profit of a few rather than the needs of all.

This is most evident in what Kennedy referred to as “planned and subsidised under-production”, when he was US President. The quota system is a huge and barbarically anachronistic fetter on the production of wheat, rice, sugar, rubber, tin and copper. And all this to defend the dividends of shareholders in companies like Nestlés, which has a higher turnover than the Swiss government’s budget (Swiss Information Groups for Development Policy; Nestles Report 1976) and spends more on advertising each year than the entire budget of the UN World Health Organisation.

All this proves that talk of a problem of over-population is a dangerous lie. People’s impressions of population are distorted by living in small areas of absurdly concentrated population. Of 213 million people living in the USA in 1975, nearly three-quarters lived in cities which occupy only 1.5 per cent of the land. The world’s population could be fitted in theory into an area the size of the Isle of Wight with one square foot each. If overpopulation caused hunger, there would be a link between population density and the level of malnutrition. But according to the 1977 FAO Yearbook, France has the same number of people per cropped acre as India, but far less malnutrition. The US Department of Agriculture has estimated that there are about 16 billion acres in the world, as much as four acres per person.

Socialist visionaries

It takes some imagination to envisage a world cleared of the insanity which dominates it today. Alongside the relentless process of debate, persuasion and struggle in the movement for socialism, there is a need for some vision. Not a religious vision of a perfect “Golden Age” or a utopian, detailed plan for life in a future society. What is needed is the kind of passion with which William Morris portrayed work as the great pleasure when under conditions of democratic control, and creation as the driving force to end the destruction inherent in the profit system. Society will be transformed through people understanding capitalism and desiring socialism. Such consciousness inevitably involves strong human feeling.

About a hundred years ago, Paul Brousse boasted of being a “possibilist”. In other words, he was prepared to compromise politically with the system he claimed to oppose. Like thousands who have followed him since, from the SDF to the SWP, he supported what Karl Popper has called “piecemeal social engineering”. To campaign for mere modifications of capitalism is to be absorbed and swallowed by the very prejudices socialists have to fight against. When the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed, it was dubbed “impossibilist” because of its determination to stand openly and consistently for a system of society which is yet to be established. In that sense only, can socialism be called “utopian”: utopia is the Greek word for nowhere, and socialism does not yet exist anywhere, although the forces bringing it about are present everywhere within capitalism. Problems which are fully grasped contain their solution within them. Only humans can think conceptually, envisaging something before building it. This capacity can be used to look at history scientifically. By predicting and organising, we can assert control over the constant process of social change.

Anatole France said that “Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked”. It is because of the misery which still prevails that people are interested in the elusive utopias over the seas and far away. But the time has come to reject the American Dream of “free enterprise” and the Russian Dream of dictatorship flattering itself with the false name of “socialism”. To leave the nightmare of the present, all of the tools are to hand. The raw materials, the machinery, the organisation. The rest is up to you. 

Clifford Slapper

New edition of News from Nowhere (2003)

Book Notice from the November 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oxford University Press have just republished in their “World Classics” series a new edition of Morris’s News from Nowhere, with an introduction and notes by David Leopold (both of which are accurate and useful). Selling at £6.99, it is the cheapest edition currently available of this socialist classic. The ISBN is 0-19-280177-5.

William Morris: Pioneer Socialist (1996)

From the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent article in the Sunday Times bearing the heading "Left or Right, all have designs on Morris" gave a good description of how all and sundry are claiming Morris as their mentor. In fact, it's a matter of historical record that, in all essentials, Morris's ideas mirrored those of the Socialist Party more than any other political organisation.

At the present time “Socialism” is a dirty word. It is something that is supposed to have failed in Russia and East Europe and something that the Labour Party is said to have rejected as archaic. The word has become a turn-off associated with bureaucratic control, regimentation and lack of freedom.

Some positive associations remain, however, and one of them is William Morris who died a hundred year’s ago this year. Morris’s positive image stems from the fact that he was someone concerned about the ugliness of capitalism and about arts and crafts, which are two themes that people are concerned about today.

Revolutionary socialist

Morris was indeed a Socialist, but not just some moderate or milk-and-water social reformer. He was a revolutionary socialist who got many of his ideas from Karl Marx. He was also someone who stood for something quite different from the things which the word “socialism” has come to be associated with thanks to the activities of the Labour Party and Russia. Things such as state control and lack of freedom.

As a matter of fact Morris stood for a society in which there would be no coercive state machine, and in which people would work voluntarily to produce what was needed and would then have free access to it without having to hand over money or any other means of exchange. In other words, he stood for what we in the Socialist Party have always meant by socialism. Indeed what, at the end of the 19th century, the vast majority of those calling themselves Socialists meant by it.

Morris’s main contribution to socialist literature is undoubtedly his “utopian romance” (as he called it) News from Nowhere, though he was also the author of a number of Socialist pamphlets such as Useful Work versus Useful Toil, How We Live and How We Might Live and Monopoly, or How Labour is Robbed which are still worth reading.

News from Nowhere describes social relationships in a society of “pure Communism” from which private property, buying and selling, money, government over people, armies, prisons and police forces have disappeared. This is the exact opposite of the state capitalism which the Labour Party and Russia used to stand for and would be described by them as some form of anarchism. In so far as an anarchist society is a society without a coercive central government that can impose its will on the population, this is true. But then this is what socialism always meant to people like Marx and Engels too. For them socialism was necessarily an anarchist, i.e. a non-state society, though not of the kind advocated by most anarchists in that it was to be based on common ownership and democratic control rather than on rampant individualism.

So by “socialism” Morris meant a moneyless, wageless, stateless society based on common ownership, a classless society of free and equal men and women where social affairs are conducted through voluntary cooperation.

What about the lazy man?

Those who advocate such a society are faced with objections which occur again and again. “It’s against Human Nature”. “What about the Lazy Man”, “What would be the incentive to work?”, “What about the Greedy Man?”, “If things were free wouldn’t people take too much?”, “How would you deal with violent behaviour?”

All of these questions – which Morris encountered as an outdoor speaker and indoor lecturer during his period of intense socialist activity from 1884 to 1890 – are dealt with in News from Nowhere either in the narrative or in question-and-answer sessions with an old socialist.

Morris’s answers didn’t differ from those we ourselves would give. That human behaviour was not something fixed by our biological make-up but something that depends on the kind of society we live in. Why should people take more than they need when they would know that the stores would always be stocked with what they needed for them to take as and when they wanted them? But Morris’s major contribution here lay in his answer to the Lazy Man objection. A whole chapter (XV) is devoted to this entitled “On the Lack of Incentive to Labour in a Communist Society”. In fact all his socialist talks and writings revolve around this theme.

Morris regarded work – the exercise of a person’s physical and mental faculties – as a basic, natural human need. His main criticism of capitalism – what made him become a socialist, in fact – was that it denied the vast majority of humans satisfying and enjoyable work.

Under capitalism work, instead of being the enjoyable activity of creating or doing something useful, became a boring and often unhealthy and dangerous burden imposed on those who were forced to get a living by selling their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary.

This criticism of capitalism followed from Morris’s concept of “art”. Which he defined, not as some specialised activity engaged in by some fringe group of “artists”, but as ”the expression of a person’s joy in their work”; people who enjoyed their work would produce beautiful things. He had inherited this definition which is that of John Ruskin from his pre-socialist days. And when he realised that the nature of capitalism meant that most producers were denied any enjoyment in their work – or, put another way, that it meant the “death of art” – he became a socialist.

No hope under capitalism

His theory of what capitalism did to work shaped his idea of what tactics socialists –indeed anyone concerned about the fate of “art” – should pursue. For in saying that capitalism, as a competitive system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit, necessarily meant the death of art because it had to put the pursuit of profits before the enjoyment of the producers, he was saying that nothing could be done to revive “art” until capitalism had been overthrown. In other words, that what was called for was root-and-branch change not piecemeal reform.

This point has been lost by most of his successors and admirers in the “arts and crafts” movement. Morris was involved in this, but was under no illusions as to what he really doing: training others to provide beautiful things for the “swinish rich” as he described the work of his furniture-making and wallpaper firm. Art, being the expression of the producers’ enjoyment in their work, could never be revived under capitalism. This could come only after a social revolution had abolished the tyranny of seeking ever cheaper and quicker ways of production imposed by the profit system.

Morris’s radical criticism of capitalism also led him to take the side of Revolution in the “Reform or Revolution?” controversy within the socialist movement. When he became a socialist in 1884 he joined the Social Democratic Federation, the first organisation in Britain to publicise Marx’s ideas. But he soon left, in large part over the issue of whether or not a socialist organisation should seek reforms within capitalism. Morris thought it shouldn’t and the new organisation he helped found, the Socialist League, pursued a policy of “Education for Revolution” and “Making Socialists” rather then advocating reforms.

Adam Buick