The smokescreen of prices (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The prices shown for delivery on online platforms do not tell the full story of the goods and services we buy. The amount we pay for delivery does not tell the tale of low pay for drivers, fragmented work, and daily risks on the road. The visible cost is only the surface: a simple figure that hides the real human and material costs.

Nor is this limited to delivery. More generally, the market price of a good or service rarely includes all the costs of producing it. A significant part is shifted elsewhere: onto the environment, workers, society, or the future.

Many low-cost products depend on production chains that use natural resources with no attention to environmental impact. Deforestation for non-essential goods, intensive use of energy and water, and pollution generated in production have no direct impact on the selling price. The same is true of working conditions – low wages, insecurity, and limited safety – which remain outside the cost on the market.

Another layer of this smokescreen lies in product design. Planned obsolescence and poor reparability, especially in electronic devices, shift costs onto consumers over time and increase waste. The initial price may seem low, but the overall cost—economic and environmental—is much higher.

There are also less immediate effects: impacts on health, as with ultra-processed food; the growing burden of waste that is hard to recycle; and the degradation of ecosystems. These costs are largely borne by society, often through public spending or a loss in quality of life.

This does not result from a single actor deliberately hiding costs. It is a feature of a system in which firms compete to lower prices and raise margins, while many indirect costs—so-called externalities—are not properly accounted for.

The result is a distortion: what is cheap in the market can be costly for society as a whole. Price acts as a smokescreen, simplifying and concealing, and making it harder to judge the real consequences of our choices.

A more radical approach is to question the system itself. If market prices tend to exclude social, environmental, and human costs, then the issue is not only how to correct the system, but whether it should be replaced.

In a system oriented to human needs rather than profit, production will not be driven by returns to investors but by social usefulness and sustainability. This will require forms of planning—more or less decentralised—able to take real costs into account from the start: decent working conditions, environmental limits, durability and reparability, and health factors.

In such a context, price will be abolished as a means of access to goods and services, making them freely available. This would not mean a lack of coordination, but a different kind of coordination. Production and distribution will be organised through planning, shared priorities, and participatory decision-making, giving the ability to deal with both potential abundance and real scarcity. The production of unnecessary or harmful goods will be reduced – not because it is unprofitable, but because it is recognised as socially and environmentally unsustainable.

This raises important questions. How can complex systems of production be coordinated without prices? How can inefficiency, concentration of power, or rigid bureaucracy be avoided? How can innovation and flexibility be maintained? These are not trivial issues. But the tools and knowledge to make costs visible—and to organise production differently—already exist. The issue is not technical, but political and collective. It requires not only awareness, but a conscious and collective decision to reorganise society on a fundamentally different basis. The sooner we begin to take this seriously, the sooner we can stop treating as inevitable what today may appear ‘natural’ but is simply an expression of the way society is organised at this particular point in time.

Gian Maria

SPGB Snippets: Money down the drain (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

April 22, 2026

People often defend the capitalist market system on the grounds that the ‘price mechanism’ is the most effective and realistic way to regulate production and consumption. But because price only reflects paying potential, not actual need, this often leads to bonkers outcomes, like milk being poured down drains.

Right now there’s a global energy crisis, due to the Iran war. But UK electricity providers are telling consumers to use more power, not less. Why? Because the government expects a glut of renewable power this summer, and will have to shut down solar and wind plants, and reimburse providers for lost revenue via expensive ‘constraint payments’ (Guardian, 14 April).

Socialism, where everything is free, would be so much simpler!

Potential abundance (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundance. How We Build a Better Future. By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Profile Books. 2025. 289pp.

The August 1970 edition of the Socialist Standard was a special issue with the phrase ‘A World of Abundance’ emblazoned across its front page. It featured a series of articles seeking to demonstrate how humankind already had the knowledge, the resources and the technology to produce an abundance of the things needed by all the people in the world but how their use and development were being held back by the economic and social restrictions of our present profit-based system of society – capitalism. How much truer this is now – more than 50 years on – given the vast further advances in knowledge and technology. Yet the same system still grinds on failing to use its potential and resources to satisfy everyone’s needs and instead condemning vast swathes of people to live in poverty, most others to get by on the insecurity of one month’s pay to the next, while permitting a tiny minority to enjoy untold amounts of wealth which they will always seek to increase.

So any discussion of this phenomenon or proposal to remedy it, such as promised by the title of this book by the two well-known American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, can only be welcomed. This is especially the case as the book’s back cover is unequivocal in the view it expresses: ‘We have the means to build an equitable world without hunger, fuelled by clean energy. Instead, we have a politics driven by scarcity, lives defined by unaffordability.’ What’s not to like about such a statement?

More specifically the book’s authors allow themselves to imagine a breathtaking future in which, for example, climate change can be reversed by removing carbon dioxide from the air, overuse of land for growing crops and feeding animals can be remedied by ‘vertical greenhouses which feed far more people while using far less land’, and technology will permit ‘an economy with robots that build our houses and machines that take on our most dangerous and soul-draining work’. They consider furthermore that, with appropriate and effective use of sun and wind in particular, humanity has ‘the gift of abundant energy’ and, contrary to advocates of ‘degrowth’, is capable, if it uses that gift correctly, of supporting its current population (and more) without exacerbating ecological breakdown.

August 1970 Socialist Standard

Yet, despite such radically invigorating leaps of the imagination and the words ‘abundance and ‘better future’ in the title of this book, anyone thinking that the authors’ proposals for building that future will involve radically changing the society that currently exists so as to make that abundance available to all is in for a disappointment. That is not what they are calling for. Their quest rather is to explore the ways in which what they see as the bureaucratic excesses of capitalism can be reduced to make that system run more efficiently and less wastefully and thereby provide a somewhat better, somewhat less unequal system for most people.

They back this up with an admirable wealth of information, evidence and documentation. They have thoroughly immersed themselves in the details of capitalist organisation (especially in the US), thereby putting themselves in a knowledgeable position to critique its waste and inefficiencies on what might be called a micro level. But it is not their purpose to go any further than this, for example to challenge the system’s underlying profit imperative or to consider whether the best (or only) way of realising the potential for equality and abundance is a complete change of social organisation.

To be fair, however, the authors’ efficiency and anti-waste agenda is at least aimed at suggesting ways in which the existing system can, at least as they see it, be made ‘more equal’. So they are writing from what might be called a humanitarian perspective, looking for what they see as practical forms of adjustment to the system – ways, for example, of providing homes for the homeless, of making poor people less poor and of providing easily accessible healthcare. Most of this they consider achievable through state intervention in the economy, which they hope can lead to a fairer distribution of wealth and to more people having decent living standards, even if this means ‘fettering’ some producers’ ‘obsession with profit’.

The trouble is that experience in many different countries has shown that governments cannot ignore or overcome the economic laws of capitalism and its market and, if they try, via reforms of one kind or another, the success they have is limited. And if they go too far, this can trigger reduced investment leading to economic crises, recession and unemployment, leading them to change policies or be voted out of office. The simple fact is that, however governments may try to release the potential abundance that technology promises, the system presents them with insurmountable obstacles, since by its nature it cannot be redirected from profit-seeking to meeting people’s needs.

So, the limits of this book’s ambitions are clear to see, shot through as it is with acceptance of the status quo, of the system of working for wages and salaries, of buying and selling, of governments and governed, and of division of the world into those competing economic units known as nations. In stating that they would like to see us ‘align our collective genius with the needs of the planet and each other’, Klein and Thompson are certainly proposing an admirable goal. But it is one that can only be achieved after capitalism has been abolished and society reorganised on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the earth’s natural and industrial resources.

Howard Moss

Editorial: Manpower and the Crisis (1947)

Editorial from the March 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remedy the Labour Government Cannot Use

Capitalism breeds war, waste and want as a jungle swamp breeds pestilence. Practically every minister in the Labour Government has acknowledged the truth of this some time or other and has pointed the obvious moral that if you want to remove the pestilential effects you must remove the capitalist cause, and introduce Socialism in the place of Capitalism. They said this, but did any of them understand what they were saying? Probably not. If by chance some of them did then by taking office in the Labour Government they were acting a deliberate lie for they were promising something it was not in their power to do. There can be no Socialism until there are a majority of convinced Socialists in the electorate and even the most deluded of Labour leaders would surely not claim that the 12 million Labour voters were Socialists. A government cannot impose Socialism on an unwilling electorate. This should be obvious, but it took the recent crisis to jolt the “Daily Herald” into even a partial recognition of the facts. The “Herald’s” admission, a veritable masterpiece of understatement, was framed as a warning to Ministers not to entertain the “treacherous delusion” that would “regard the whole electorate as enthusiastic converts to Socialism” (February 8th, 1947). The same Editorial goes on to claim that “a peaceful revolution is being wrought in this land which will bring solid benefits within our lifetime, and will confer blessings untold on posterity.” We can leave posterity to speak for itself and content ourselves with foretelling a time when the electorate will count it an immediate blessing to be rid of the Labour Government.

The reader is of course entitled to ask us why we are sure that Labourism cannot succeed. The answer is to be found in the opening paragraph of this article. Capitalism we know; Socialism the workers can have when they are ready to grasp it; and there is no other choice. The root fallacy of Labourism is the belief that a Labour Government can administer capitalism in a non-capitalist way. With all the good intentions in the world it cannot be done” Labour Ministers may make election promises with perfect sincerity, but in office they learn day by day what it really means to keep this exploiting, profit-making system .going, in competition with the rest of the capitalist Powers. It means resisting wage claims so that the capitalists can go on making profit. It means perpetuating the vast gulf between rich and poor. It means maintaining the armed forces and struggling with rival Powers for trade, raw materials and colonies.

It is hardly necessary to say that it also involves swallowing past declarations of what ought to be done, such, for example, as Sir Stafford Cripps’ complete reversal of his views on trade rivalry. Now he is chief director of the export drive. Five years ago he declared, “If, after the coming of peace, we were to start once again the vicious circle of international trade competition, we should be lost, and in a few years would be confronting another war” (interview with a Brazilian newspaper—”Sunday Express” November 8th, 1942).

The recent crisis, forerunner of others, took on the appearance of a problem of fuel and manpower, brought to an acute phase by an “Act of God,” the British weather. It was, however, not a crisis of coal or of cold, but of capitalism. Let us examine this and see how capitalism, which caused the problem, prevents the Labour Government from solving it. The second World War (itself a product of capitalism) destroyed vast amounts of wealth and left a legacy of shortages of housing, food, fuel, clothing, transport, etc. Not that want was a new experience for the working class, but the war aggravated the problem by the immensity of the destruction it wrought all over-Europe and Asia. What would a sanely organised human society have done about this, assuming that such a form of society had to tackle the problem? It would have stopped all waste of labour and materials, halted the production of armaments, and of luxuries for the rich, and would have concentrated on producing the necessities of life in the quantities urgently needed by the population of the world. How did the Labour Government (and all the governments in all the countries) tackle it? They spoke the right words, but proceeded to apply fiddling half-measures. The British Labour Government said they needed man-power in production, but they found that British capitalism had a still more pressing need to keep 1,500,000 men in the armed forces and other hundreds of thousands supplying the needs of the forces and preparing for future wars. They said they needed more workers producing coal, food, houses, etc., for the millions who lacked bare necessities, but they left intact the class structure of capitalism, with its hundreds of thousands. of wealthy idlers consuming without producing, and its hundreds of thousands of workers engaged in banking, financial and other operations that only arise because of capitalism. There are over 700,000 non-industrial civil servants, about 350,000 of whom are Post Office workers. The great bulk of the remaining 350,000 are doing work rendered necessary only by capitalism, as is also much of the work of the Post Office. We are told that many civil servants are employed on insurance and similar work which the Labour Government regards as socially useful; but it is only the mind habituated to capitalism that cannot see what this work really is. Staffs handling unemployed and health. insurance are not there to see that the needy (needy because of capitalism) receive enough to satisfy their needs, but to protect capitalism against the needy receiving more than the niggardly amount allotted to keep them quiet.

The same contradiction between proclaimed aims and practical activities can be found in every sphere. The luxury needs of the wealthy have not been sacrificed to speed up the provision of necessities. On the contrary, the Government has encouraged the planning of luxury liners, luxury air travel, and luxury goods for export. These schemes are defended with the plea that luxury exports make it possible to import necessities unobtainable in other ways. The curious thing is that the governments of other war-damaged countries (France, for example) are doing the same and on the same plea, so that some luxury goods are being imported by all the countries which declare their inability to supply enough necessities for their populations. What it shows is that, despite Labour Party talk about a “new world,” the British and other Labour Governments are basing their plans for the future on the continuance of the same old capitalism, with its extremes of wealth and poverty. They are all catering for the needs of the wealthy.

Here then is the simple problem and the simple solution. On a conservative estimate the production of useful goods could easily be doubled in short time if the armed forces and propertied idlers and the workers doing work necessitated only by capitalism, were brought into production. Why doesn’t the Labour Government even attempt to do it? They don’t do it because even if they wanted to they dare not. They were put into power by an electorate that does not understand or want Socialism and which therefore gave the Labour Government nothing more than a man¬ date to go on administering capitalism.

The recent crisis arose because the capitalist state needs to have millions of people taken from production for the armed forces and other non-productive activities and therefore cannot take simple straightforward measures to make good the destruction of war. It led to great suffering and to the increase of unemployed to about 2,500,000 at the peak. In due course another and more usual type of capitalist crisis will blow up. Goods will be produced in excess of what can be sold at a profit, then unemployment will soar again. Then the Labour Government will be looking for other excuses than the cold weather to explain the failure of its plans. The “New Statesman,” which shared all of the foolish Labour Party beliefs in the possibility of applying so-called Socialist policies to capitalism, has in anticipation already coined the appropriate face-saving formula for the next crisis: “… the Government is confronted with the certainty, now that the illusions about a liberalisation of America’s trade policy have finally been dispelled, that a Socialist experiment confined only to this country is bound to fail” (February 8th, 1947). So the “New Statesman,” shedding one illusion, grasps at another equally absurd. It proposes that Britain cut adrift from trade and financial ties with U.S.A. and collaborate instead “with other countries which are experimenting with planned economies.” If it is a fallacy, as it certainly is, that a Labour Government can apply Socialist plans to capitalism, common sense should make it clear that you do not escape from the dilemma by linking up with other countries in which similar governments are trying to perform the same impossible feat. Capitalist crises know no frontiers, and Labour Governments here and elsewhere will no more escape the next crisis than they did the “economic blizzard” that blew down the British Labour Government in 1931 and simultaneously toppled over the Labour Government in Australia.

For the world’s workers there is no escape from the problems and crises caused by capitalism except by introducing Socialism.

Better, not more (2026)

Book Review from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier. By Patrick Grant. William Collins £10.99.

In the August 2022 Socialist Standard, we reviewed Phillip Coggan’s More, which deals with the expansion in production over the centuries. Grant’s book is a kind of counterpart to that, advocating the making of fewer things. The author is a fashion designer, business owner and judge on a TV programme to do with sewing. Here we will focus on his general remarks, rather than his account of his own history in business (he is founder of the Blackburn-based Community Clothing, communityclothing.co.uk).

The development of capitalism meant that the interests of business took precedence over everyone else, including those who did the work and produced the goods. Only the rich benefited from this, and the emphasis switched to increasing output and consumption, rather than happiness. The fashion industry in particular grew via social manipulation, with seasonal fashions having a fixed shelf life. Many companies spend more on marketing and selling their products than on making them, and over thirty percent of all the clothing made is never sold, with fast fashion brands such as Shein and Temu leading the way here. Shein’s marketing strategy is simple: ‘make an unfathomable quantity of incredibly low-quality stuff, sell it cheaply, aggressively acquire customers, swamp the competition.’ A new product is launched every three seconds. A mention of Oscar Wilde’s remark that ‘fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months’, would have been apposite here, except that it seems now to be a matter of days rather than months.

The quality of much of what is produced has declined over the last several decades (though cars may well be an exception). Cheaper products usually mean higher profits, of course. Fewer raw materials means clothes are often skinnier, shorter or thinner, and overcoats contain far less wool than they did fifty years ago. From the 60s and 70s, synthetic fibres such as nylon, polyester and acrylic became widely available and many manufacturers of natural-fibre fabrics went out of business, especially as offshoring became more common. The owners of companies that produce poor-quality goods are extremely rich (H&M, for instance). When you buy a garment online, you cannot judge its quality.

Moreover, few people nowadays love their jobs, even though work can contribute to personal happiness. These days far fewer people actually make things for a living, and there is a lack of workers in manual trades, which are not just ‘manual’ as they require a lot of knowledge and cognitive processing. One aim should be the creation of skilled fulfilling local jobs. Clothes, the author argues, can be produced in a way that will ensure that they age so as to provide pleasure to the wearer. Older second-hand goods can still be of high quality, and the better an object is, the more likely it is to be repaired.

There seems to be no mention here of degrowth, but a lot of what Grant advocates would imply a reduction in the amount produced and even an end to the continuous economic growth of capitalism. Much of what he says here could certainly be considered for adoption in a socialist world, but it is hard to see how it could be implemented under capitalism.

Paul Bennett

Voice From the Back: The benefits of globalisation (2001)

The Voice From the Back column from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The benefits of globalisation

“With a “catastrophe” in the world’s trade and many growers facing starvation, a leading coffee buyer appealed to the International Coffee Organisation in London yesterday for a tax of $1 on a 50kg bag to save farmers . . . “It is a huge and wealthy industry, yet the beans are grown almost entirely by very poor people who receive hardly anything for their labours.” . . . Prices have halved to $75 a bag this year, mainly because of a World Bank-financed drive to plant coffee in Vietnam. Production has risen from 4m bags to 16m. Big firms, including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Sara Lee, which owns Douwe Egberts, have kept prices up to benefit shareholders while the price to growers has halved.” Guardian (27 September). The rich get richer and the impoverished producers get poorer. Sound familiar? The answer isn’t a $1 tax but the complete transformation of society from one based on production for profit to one based on production solely for use.

Futile reforms

“The recovery of the ozone layer could be delayed significantly because the chemicals produced to replace those banned in the Montreal Protocol are proving equally damaging and are not controlled by international law, the UN Environment Programme reported.” Times (17 October). Another example of how reforms often don’t solve the problems of capitalism and another reason to get rid of it.

Save the children

During October the charity organisation Save The Children mounted a massive publicity drive to raise funds. According to their appeal “Around the world today, one in four children live in poverty – poverty serious enough to blight their lives just as they are beginning. Poverty can leave children without enough food to eat, rob them of the chance to go to school and force them into poorly paid work – vulnerable to adult abuse and exploitation.” How abusive can be gauged by the experience of a nine year old who worked for two years as a sari embroiderer, fell sick, was sent home and was paid nothing for 2 years work. The charity’s solution – send £3 a month! If only these well-meaning people would look beyond the effects of poverty to its cause we might really be able to save the children.

Same old Tories

Anyone who thought that two crushing electoral defeats would change the core policies of the Conservative Party can rest assured that the old Tory Party is sticking by its principles – support the rich against the poor. The columnist Matthew Parris writing in the Times (10 October) on their annual conference illustrated that very well when he observed: “The Shadow Chancellor, Michael Howard, railed yesterday against a Government he accused of leaving people to die in the queue for heart treatment – and was met with stony silence. Then he scolded the Government for cheating the shareholders of Railtrack – and was greeted by applause.”

Land of the free?

It reads like an Orwell-inspired dystopia, a nightmarish piece of fiction, but it is a recent letter to the editor of a mass circulation magazine. It reveals the frightening mind-set of some workers scared by the World Trade Towers disaster. Capitalism breeds paranoia and xenophobia, but even by capitalism’s standards the following is pretty scary stuff. “Our people must take an active part in the vigilant protection of our country. Civilians must assume roles in our civil defense as block watchers, neighborhood police, campus observers and providers of information to authorities about those who act suspiciously or who voice anti-American opinions.” Patrick Grant, New York City. Time Magazine (15 October).

More waste makers

Many years ago in his book The Waste Makers, Vance Packard wrote about “planned obsolescence”; the artful dodge of manufacturing products that needed to be replaced all the time. Some 40 years later we have the perfect example of this in the music business. Concerned about the misuse and selling on of the latest singles released to music executives for compiling play lists, the ingenious boffins of the music business have come up with a cunning ploy. “Tornado, the distributor of digital media products, has found a way of making Mission Impossible come to life. It has designed a voice recording that self-destructs after it has been played.” Sunday Times (7 October). There is no limit to the ingenuity of capitalism when it comes to protecting profits. Inside socialism, human inventiveness will be used for something more important than Mission Impossible recordings.

Classless society?

In his recent book Almost Like A Whale the geneticist Steve Jones comes up with some figures on land ownership that would seem to contradict those who argue that we live in a classless society where the barriers of ownership have been broken down. “Half the private land in Scotland is owned by three hundred and fifty people (in a country where half the population has no landed property at all); and the greatest proprietor of all, at a quarter of a million acres, is the Duke of Buccleuch. The Duke’s lesser titles include a couple of Earldoms, a Barony or two – and the Lordship of Eskdale”

Election Special: World of Waste (1964)

From the October 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live today in a world of waste—a ludicrous waste of buying and selling; a criminal waste of war and preparations for war; a useless waste of ticket clipping, accounting, form-filling.

Only now and then does the utter stupidity of the whole futile business pull us up short and make us see things as if for the first time. We stand amazed at the way human beings can go on putting up with such a crazy world, so out of keeping with its real needs and interests.

When more than half the population of the world are going hungry and destitute, the British government will spend something like £2,000 million this year on what it likes to call “defence.” The United States will spend more than ten times as much to the same end and no doubt the Russians will be doing the same.

Every country in the world reserves up to one-tenth of its total national wealth in preparing for war. Some of the weapons they make are obsolete before they actually begin to leave the factories, others even before they are off the drawing board. Many more are scrapped after they have seen only a few months service.

Probably no one will ever know the full amount that has been spent by this country on its atomic programme, and the expenditure by other countries is equally shrouded in secrecy. That the sums are vast is certain.

When the Americans launched Colonel Glenn into space, it cost the staggering sum of £150 million. Britain has spent the better half of £1,000 million so far on rocket missiles. Even greater sums have probably been spent by the Russians, yet Kruschev told the Russian workers only a little while ago that he hoped that by 1980 every Russian would be able to eat an egg a day !

We are so bemused by governments talking in these astronomical figures that they lose all significance. It takes a conscious effort to turn these vast numbers of pounds into such basic things as houses, oil refineries, washing machines, boots and shoes, bread and butter.

In these days when families roam the streets looking for somewhere to live, the productive resources represented by the £150 million spent on the Glenn circus could have built 30,000 houses (and we mean houses, not the glorified chicken coops which currently pass for them). For the same sum five times as many homes could have been provided with good furniture to make them a pleasure to live in. Or perhaps a quarter of a million cars could have been built, or three million refrigerators, or ten million vacuum cleaners, or just a decent pair of shoes for every adult in the country.

Capitalism measures everything in terms of money.

These are the millions, the hundreds of millions, the thousands of millions of pounds, dollars, roubles, francs, marks, yen, and all the other currencies one can think of, that capitalism wastes each year. And this only in misdirected production —we leave out all the other ways in which human labour and resources are uselessly frittered away.

Translate all this vast accumulation of wasted wealth and labour into the worthwhile things of life and into the things that produce them—into houses and brick factories, into electricity and power stations, into food and agricultural machines, into clothes and spinning mills, into coal, oil, roads, railways, and ships.

Stop and think of all this when next you hear some glib politician talking at election time of the millions that are going to be spent on a new rocket, a bigger tank, a faster aeroplane, another atomic test.

Our case in brief. (1915)

From the October 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

At such a time of appalling misery and waste of human life as the present, it may be useful to review again the claims of the Socialists, and to set out once more the means by which they propose to reach their goal. The writer has nothing new to tell—nothing at all that he has not said many times over in these columns. Nor can he hope to say it in a different way from which he has said it all before. But the message must be repeated again and yet again, though the messenger grows sick at heart. Conditions are always changing, if the message is not, and therein lies hope sufficient for the day.

Socialists claim that human happiness rests primarily upon the security and sufficiency of the necessaries of life—food, clothing, and shelter They do not say that there are no other sources of happiness, or that security and plenitude in these things must necessarily banish all unhappiness. What they contend is that these material things are the basis of human happiness viewed generally, just as they are the basis of human life itself.

Socialists maintain that the wealth produced at the present day is sufficient to afford ample of the necessaries of life to every man, woman, and child in the community, while the means at the command of society are sufficient to enable that wealth to be produced by the expenditure of a comparatively small amount of the time and effort by which the working class gain their meagre livelihood to-day.

The first of these contentious, namely, that human happiness depends primarily upon the means of living, hardly needs any enlarging upon at this time of day. Everybody understands, even if he had never thought seriously about it before, that before one can have any experience at all, happy or otherwise ; before one can think or act or desire, one must eat—for the simple reason that every organic activity results from the consumption of food, from this to the proposition, that lack of the means of subsistence is bound to cause physical distress and, in highly sentient beings such as man, mental distress also, is a logical step. This physical and mental distress, which, where it exists and in proportion as it exists inevitably undermine all happiness, can only be banished by giving sufficiency of and security in the means of subsistence.

Now as to the amount of wealth which is produced today, let us take the evidence of the opponents of Socialism. Mr. Chiozza Money, the Liberal M.P., an accredited capitalist statisti­cian, estimated the national income in the year 1904 at £1,710,000,000. and he says in his book “Riches and Poverty” (page 29), “if the income the nation were equally distributed amongst its inhabitants a family of five persons would enjoy an income of about £200 per annum.” It is seen, then, that sufficient wealth is produced to afford ample means of subsistence to all.

It must, of course, be granted that much of the wealth produced to-day takes a form which would be useless in a society where the products of labour were equally enjoyed by all, but as all this wealth is simply nature-given material to which human labour has been applied, either to change its from (as in the case of cannon) or to change its position (as in the case of coal), or to change both form and position, as in the case of most things, it would be the simplest of matters to direct all labour into channels, and turn all useful materials into forms, which would contribute to the end in view.

Is it true that the means which we possess for producing wealth to-day are sufficiently developed to enable us to maintain the present output of wealth with the expenditure of far less time and energy per head of the able-bodied population than the working-class bread-winner of to-day has to give, on the average, to the gaining of his livelihood ? To commence with, think what happens to every commodity which is produced before it becomes available to fulfil the function for which human toil has fitted it— that is, before it can be consumed. It has to be sold, and perhaps sold several times. It is, in fact, produced in order be sold, not in order to be used though unless it was capable of being used it could not (except under false pretences) find a purchaser. This means that, an enormous number of clerks, travellers, salesmen, shopkeepers, and others too numerous to mention must be maintained in labour which adds not one iota to the wealth which is produced. According to the Census returns of 1901 there were 504,294 commercial travellers and commercial and business clerks engaged in this useless labour in the United Kingdom—apart from thousands of other clerks and touts, such as those employed by lawyers, political and other organisations, for example. How many shop-assistants are wasting their time waiting for customers who do not come ? How many baker’s and butcher’s carts chase each other over the same ground ? How many canvassers, agents, and house-to-house distributors swarm the streets ? And all this because goods must be sold when they are completed, instead of then being immediately available for consumption.

And as goods are produced under the present system only to be sold, so they are only produced while they can be sold. Hence there is at all times an immense army of workers unable to find employment because there is not sufficient sale for the sort of goods they are producers and distributors of. In the year when the stupendous amount of wealth mentioned by Mr. Money was produced the “percentage of members of Trade Unions making returns who were out of employment was 6.8” (“Statistical Memoranda,” Cd 4671, Local Govt. Board). It is generally admitted that the unorganised trades would show an even larger unemployment percentage, but this figure applied over the whole field would give about a million workers in the country in enforced idleness.

Then even before the war there were in the Army, Navy, Police force and Prison staffs, the very pick and flower of the race another half-a-million men adding nothing to the wealth of community, while 50,000 parson “labour” but to keep us in the land of nod.

Everywhere around us we find energy wasted, from the railway ticket-collector and the ‘bus company’s spy to the jeweller setting diamonds in the collar of her ladyship’s Pekinese pup and the flunkey buttoning up his dilettante master’s breeches. And on top of all this there is that great group of the master class, to the number of about 5,000,000, who produce nothing, and who would, if they contributed workers in the same ratio as the working class, add another 2,000,000 to those available for production.

These figures, even if they may be disputed on the matter of strict accuracy, are sufficient to show that society has means to hand to produce vastly more wealth than is at present produced with the same average expenditure of time and toil which the members of the working class who are in employment render for their bare, miserable subsistence, or the same amount with far smaller average expenditure of time and effort. But we must find a method by which all these idlers, compulsory or voluntary, shall be brought into production, and all these workers whose efforts are directed into wrong channels shall become fruitful in their labours.

* * *

Before we go any further let us make up our minds for the wholesale destruction of preconceived notions, it is quite apparent that, the enormous waste of human labour entailed, in the selling of all the products of man’s industry cannot be eliminated by anything short of the abolition of sale and therefor of production for sale. Nor can unemployment be abolished, it is equally evident, until men’s employment ceases to be dependent upon the sale of the goods they produce—which again means that production for sale must go. And again, it is quite certain that we shall have to have a very different set of social conditions and a very different distribution of social power before those idlers, the master class, can be brought into production and distribution, and compelled to contribute their share to the common labour fund, in return for the food they eat, the clothes they wear, and the houses they live in. So it is plain that the method we are looking for must involve very great changes in our social structure, and that before we can accept, such changes many of the ideas current among us to-day, and many of our common ways of looking at things, must go into the melting-pot together.

* * *

Why do working-class men and women have to sell their strength and skill (commonly but wrongly called their “labour”) to the masters for wages or salary ?

Because the masters own and control all the means by which people to-day can produce the things by which they live…..that is, all the land, mines, factories, machinery, raw material, railways, ships, and so on.

Why do the masters not have to sell their strength and skill, or, indeed, why do they not have to work at all, in order to live ?

Because they own the means and instruments by which all wealth is produced and distributed, and owning these things, own also the wealth which is produced with their aid.

Why are there at all times many workers who are unable to get employment ?

Because the goods in the production of which they seek employment are only produced for sale and when such goods cannot be sold the owners of the means of production will not employ workers to produce them,

Why will not the owner of these means of production employ workers to produce goods which cannot be sold ?

Because, firstly, in order to maintain himself in the position of property-owner (that is, to keep solvent) he must pay his way, which he can only do by turning the wealth his employees produce into money, or in other words, by selling it ; secondly, in order to live without himself producing wealth the employer must secure that produced by others (his employees). But as he cannot satisfy his needs with the actual goods his employees produce, any more than he can pay his debts with them, again he must sell them. And if he cannot sell them he could [not] continue to stand the expense of their production.

It is seen how all these things have their root in the basic condition—the private ownership by a class of the means and instruments of production and distribution. Clearly, then, private ownership in these things—in all things which are necessary for the sustenance and well-being of mankind, in fact—must go.

That, in brief, is the Socialist remedy. Private ownership in the instruments of labour and the raw material, in the land, mines, factories, machinery, railways, canals, ships, and the like of all these things, must cease. They must become the property of the whole community, and be controlled and operated by the whole community. Can anything be simpler than that?

Socialism, after all, is very simple. There is never any need to wrap it up in hard terms. It is just a social system based upon the common ownership of the means of living, as the present social system—capitalism-is based upon the private ownership of these things.

In a future issue it will be shown what will follow from the changed property condition.

A. E. Jacomb

Letter: Resource database (2011)

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

Resource database

 

Dear Editors,

 

Congratulations to Stefan on the excellent article, ‘Money – a waste of resources’ (Socialist Standard, July). In my view this is just the sort of empirical approach needed to clinch the argument for socialism, and one that I’ve promoted via www.andycox1953.webs.com.

 

Theory has its place, but let’s face it, more often than not, a theoretical exposition on Marx’s labour theory of value or the class struggle is likely to be met with a snort of derision or a glazed expression. Facts on the other hand have a kind of primacy that demands a considered response. Hence the urgent need for a robust, wide-ranging, and up-to-date database which Socialist Party members and others can access. 

 

A word of caution, however, should be added at this juncture: When constructing a database, one is likely to come across countless factual inconsistencies. Stefan’s source, for example, has it that there are ‘145,000 people working at casinos and other gambling joints (in the US)’. In my webs.com database, I cite a source (‘Economic Impacts of Commercial Casinos and On-Line Gambling’ by Alijani, Braden, Omar and Eweni, 2002 (?)) which produces statistics showing that there were 364,804 commercial casino jobs in the US in 2001 (205,151 in Nevada alone). 

Andy Cox (by email)

Into Battle! The War over Soap Substitutes (1950)

From the July 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to all reports, the first salvoes are now being fired in what promises to be one of the biggest trade-wars we have seen in this country for many a long year. The contestants in the struggle are the manufacturers of detergents, or soap-substitutes.

The set-to in Britain is actually the second round of a contest which has only just come to an uneasy (and probably temporary) end in the United States. Here, Proctor and Gamble an American firm, and Lever Bros., the Anglo-Dutch combine, fought out a bitter struggle for many months before Lever Bros, were defeated and forced to content themselves, for the time being at any rate, with only a minor share of the American soap-substitute market.

Now the scene has changed to this country, though the chief contenders are the same. On the one hand is Thomas Hedley & Co., the British subsidiary of Proctor and Gamble; on the other. Lever Bros, once more, fighting this time on their own ground. In addition there are a host of smaller fry, all trying hard to keep a foothold in a very precarious and uncertain market.

All of them, big and small, are spending large sums on advertising (Hedley’s and Lever Bros, are employing two of the biggest firms in the business). Hedley’s are reported to have already spent £72,000 on Press advertising for “Dreft,” besides about £100,000 on film publicity. Now they are busy launching “Tide” on the public, with what seems like lavishness of advertising even greater than that devoted to “Dreft.” Lever Bros, in their turn have already spent £73,000 on “Wisk,” and £22,000 on their liquid product “Quix.” Both seem ready to spend a lot more besides. These two big firms, it will be noticed, are playing the game of running two products, so giving themselves an opportunity of pitting one against the other, as well as against the products of their rivals. When one product really begins to outstrip the other, then they will probably drop the poorly-selling one and concentrate on the one that is selling well. One of them, perhaps both, may even now be working out plans to launch a third, so getting the additional advantage of newness—an important factor when each new product is launched with lavish publicity.

Just recently, the situation has been further complicated by a new big rival, the American Colgate-Palmolive-Peet combine, which plans to put its own product “Fab” on the market in a big way. The smaller fry are, of course, now some way behind, but they are all struggling hard for their own little place in the trade. Domestos Ltd., for example, have already spent £39,000 on advertising “ Stergene,” and the Brobat Mfg. Co. £33,000 on “Brobat.” Boots with “D.10,” and the Co-op with “Cascade,” are of course at some advantage in that they can distribute their products in their own shops, but their trade will in effect be confined to their own distribution system. They will not stand a chance on the open market unless they are prepared to risk a great deal of money in pushing their products. Having taken a look at the jungle outside, they have no doubt already decided to stay at home!

This high-pressure advertising is, of course, only the prelude to the fight. The first real blow was struck by Lever Bros, when they offered, temporarily, to let housewives have two packets of “Wisk” for the price of one. Hedley’s replied by covering large areas of London with vouchers offering a 1s. 7d. packet of “Tide” for 6d. Apart from stunts, prices generally are already on the way down. “Fab” recently dropped from 1s. 9d. to 1s. 7d.; “Dreft ” from 1s. 7d. to 1s. 4d.; and “Cascade ” from 8d. to 6d. (Price differences are largely accounted for by differences in the sizes of the packets). All of them are probably working frantically to think of other bright ideas which will enable them to gain an advantage.

Even when soap-rationing is abolished, all the manufacturers seem convinced that there is a future for detergents. If they did not think so, they obviously would not be doing what they are doing. Reinforcing them in their belief is their determination to bring down the price of detergents below the price of soap. One of the main ways in which this can be done is by reducing the price of the raw materials from which detergents are made.

Detergents, as is well known, are derived from petrol, and just as competition is now rife among the detergent manufacturers so is competition among the oil-producers. At least four companies are already producing raw materials for soap-substitutes, and others are thinking of doing so. Shell are the biggest producers at present with “Teepol.” After them come I.C.I. with “Lissapol,” Anglo-Iranian with “Comprox,” and Monsanto Chemicals with “ Santomerse ”— all struggling hard to get hold of as much of the rapidly growing market as they can. For detergents to really compete with soap, the oil-producers will have to cut their prices. That they can do so was shown when the soap ration was last increased—prices immediately dropped. They will probably find means of doing so again when rationing is fully lifted and their products have to compete on equal terms with soap.

Whatever form the struggle takes, it should be interesting to watch. The contestants may fight to the limit, as they did in the United States. They may try to reach a compromise, which will certainly be an uneasy and temporary one. Perhaps the abolition of soap-rationing will prick the whole bubble. We do not know, nor do we wish to speculate.

What is worthy of comment is the stupidity of a system in which huge sums of money are being spent in selling, one against the other, products between which there is probably not a scrap of difference worth troubling about; the stupidity of a system in which adults in complete possession of their senses spend their working hours thinking up new and better stunts to help sell these products; the stupidity of a system where other fully mature men and women worry themselves sick wondering whether “this” is a better name than “ that,” or “that” is a better name than “this” (we have it on no less an authority than the Financial Times that enormous care and market research is expended on choosing just the right brand name). The example of soap-substitutes can be multiplied a thousandfold, and the wastefulness in terms of wealth and human effort is correspondingly greater.

Capitalism has introduced a substitute for soap. When are you workers going to introduce the substitute for capitalism—socialism?

Stan Hampson

Waste (1950)

From the July 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Waste, ruthless and rife, is indisputably one of the outstanding characteristics of present-day capitalistic society.

War, of course, is synonymous with waste; some of it’s recognisable features being the mass destruction of useful lives, the squandering of human energy and the prostitution of scientific achievements so laboriously acquired through long years of intensive social effort. Man’s age-long struggles with Nature culminating in the vast areas of habitable territory and the useful buildings of the times fall swift prey to the ravages of war.

So man must work, and war must take! “War and Waste” could fill the pages of quite a hefty tome but as it is not the title of this particular article we will proceed on more general lines.

Recent reports have appeared telling of unrestrained and deliberate acts of food destruction in the U.S.A. in particular and elsewhere wherever the profit motive in production prevails. That makes one wince most for the intake of food being man's strongest impulse coupled with the tragic fact that hundreds of millions of the world’s inhabitants are at the present time, in the throes of actual and partial starvation—or else in the relatively happier condition of never having really enough to eat!

Waste is apparent in the distribution of most things in most places. Individual needs are ignored in homage to capitalism’s lust for keeping markets “open” and prices “right.”

A particular example looms up into memory as these words are being written, which occurred about three years ago. Following the Peace-that-was-to-have-been-Eternal, the War Office found itself with about sixty thousand surplus, but good and usable, radio-sets on its hands. The Press and other mediums were then, as they still do from time to time, featuring appeals from interested individuals and welfare organisations asking that free sets should be issued to the chronic bed-ridden, T.B. sufferers, old-age pensioners and others who are for the most part confined to the home, and could not possibly afford to buy sets out of their meagre pensions.

Were those surplus thousands diverted to that necessitous channel?

Not a bit of it! For away in the West Country were some nice, disused and apparently inaccessible quarries deemed by His Majesty’s Labour Government —War Department, to be even more worthy recipients!

In passing, it should be noted that the issue of free wireless-sets to the registered blind has no connection with the disposal of governmental stocks. These sets are bought new direct from the makers with funds raised by charitable associations formed for that express purpose.

So the halt and the lame and the chronic bed-ridden are still without, for the most part, whilst those disused quarry-pits in far-away-places hold fast to what should have been the means of bringing much needed music and mirth (the latter in more senses than one!) into dreary lives.

But it should not be imagined that it is only the industrial rejects who are too poor to buy necessities. The great majority of the workers in this country are, for the present, in constant work and yet cannot afford to buy the requirements of a decent existence.

The harvest of work and wages (such as they are) engendered by the War is steadily petering out. Soon the relatively small acts of, say, throwing edible fish back into the seas as takes place frequently in this country and the destruction of good wheat in the Argentine will magnify and accelerate into far greater dimensions than ever before encountered. For, with the development of capitalism the workers progressively receive relatively less of the total wealth they produce.

It is not to be inferred that it is only the concrete commodities that are wasted, for look at the many and varied ways in which labour-power is dissipated on services that would have no place in a socialist system of society.

They are so very numerous that it is difficult to know where to begin. But as we have already touched on the subject of war and waste it may be as well to commence with those unfortunate fellow-workers, who are mainly forced into the armed forces by economic pressure or legal conscription. In addition, there are all those engaged in the making of all manner of destructive weapons and equipment for the war-machine. Amongst the exceedingly large number of unproductive occupations are those of the police-force, prison-warders. workhouse attendants, burglars, forgers, arson-mongers, "black” and "white” marketeers and spivs generally. Stock-exchange and insurance workers; politicians and trade-union officials; bankers and pawnbrokers; priests, pimps and parsons besides the advertising and time-motion-study parasites. Then there is the enormous gambling fraternity, all those engaged in whatever capacity in horse and hound racing, football pools (such an enormous industry) etc., and the terrific army of printers, clerks, electricians and telephonists involved.

The long procession of unproductive workers continue on and on and on . . . but the pages of the Socialist Standard do not so we will strike a concluding note with a reference to those large numbers of domestic workers; cooks, charwomen, boot-blacks, waiters and waitresses, chamber-maids and so on who slave for those usually in a far better position to do their own chores than the servants themselves through having superior material conditions under which to live.

Man, that creature with the sensitive hands, the agile brain and the keen senses, has already done much that is useful and good under severely limited social conditions. How much more will he do; will he want to do; when the earth and all that is on it—and can be on it—with all avoidable waste eliminated, becomes the common property of all mankind?

That state of Affairs will be known as Socialism and it is up to you to help hasten the day.

Linda.

Dial 118 for Murder (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

BT’s 192 directory enquiries service is closing in August, and we are told to be grateful for new competing services. Instead of an easy-to-remember 3-figure number, there’ll now be dozens of companies offering over 300 different 6-figure numbers beginning with 118.

Have people really got the time or inclination to work out who’s best by comparing all the different charges for land lines and mobiles, standing charges, minimum charges and costs per minute? And what’s the point, they’ll only keep changing in the rivalrous pursuit of profit, just as credit card companies keep trying to take more market share with constantly altering offers.

118??? callers will, doubtless, have even more of their precious time within capitalism used up by time-wasting tactics, resulting in bigger dividends for shareholders from higher per-minute charges for users. Yet more time will be wasted as newspapers fight for our attention with adverts, and TV and radio broadcasts fill our heads with ‘catchy’ images and inane jingles. “One-one-eight — four-three-two — buy from us brain-washing you”, probably won’t be heard.

Capitalism tells us that competition offers us more choice and lower prices, but it’s lies. Sure, companies like BT, having switched call centre jobs from the UK to India, where wages are as little as £5 a day compared to around £5 an hour in Britain, will cut costs. But these savings will be used to increase profits. And after years of this wearisome ridiculousness involving constantly changing prices, 118 business competition will have knocked out the weaker firms leaving just one or two dominating, who will not then be under pressure to sell cheaply.

A competitive society does not benefit the exploited working class majority. Even if capitalism could maintain pressure on businesses to always sell at the lowest possible prices, capitalists would still be the winners, as market forces also apply to employment. With less money needed to buy goods and services, workers’ demands can be supplied by lower pay, and that’s precisely what a competitive work market brings about, leaving most people, as always, constantly struggling through life until they finally get to rest, in their coffins.

There is no so-called “freedom” to “shop around” for competing businesses offering directory inquiries, credit cards, gas, electricity, telephones, insurance, loans, life insurance, car insurance, home insurance etc. All this activity is actually a debilitating cancer that eats away at those parts of your life not already consumed by profit-taking capitalists, or by time spent bill checking, bill paying, bank statement checking, tax form filling, benefit form completing, cash till queuing and all the other money-associated madness.

And while people maintain a junkie-like addiction to moolah, comparing RRP resin, using COD crack, sampling APR angel dust, getting high on HP horse and regularly dropping ATM acid into wallets and purses, they will be easy prey for the profit-taking, parliamentary and advertising pushers forever telling them they’ve got just what they need. And those totally hooked will fail to see or care that money peddlers control them, or how, and so will just go on feeding their habit by selling themselves and their acquiescence for a wage or state handout.

Stop making those attempts at complex monetary calculations which companies deliberately make complicated so customers can’t easily figure things out, and give up, submissively paying out to avoid stress and hassle. Dial 020 7622 3811 for details of real socialism.

Max Hess

How we live and how we might live - Part 8 (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

‘[The claim] that every individual is required to work is a social convention and disciplinary apparatus rather than an economic necessity’ (Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work).

The post-capitalist society being argued for here is one where productive activity is taken up voluntarily by individuals, and access to the social product is open and free. Last month we showed how an objection often made that members of such a society would prefer to lie down and starve rather than do anything to meet their needs was unfounded. We can now look at the many immediate benefits that the structure of such a society would bring even before it developed more elaborate institutions. We have already seen how a system of free access would render ‘greedy’ behaviour pointless or counterproductive. We can now show that the same system of society would undermine the lazy-person argument.

The most immediate impact a free-access society is likely to have on its members would be a huge reduction in the amount of effort they would need to put in to sustain it. Capitalism is immensely inefficient in its use of human labour. Its system of corralling individuals, families and businesses into independent and competing property units, and then routing production through the profit motive, requires a gigantic social apparatus to sustain it. Not only does it force capitalism to maintain an elaborate monetary mechanism, it also requires a means of managing the resulting inefficiencies. Moreover, the competitive nature of the system creates much duplicated effort, and results in a great deal of labour being devoted to the production of useless and shoddy goods.

Wasted labour

In almost all capitalist states large numbers of jobs are dedicated to the management of a central banking system which, besides making valiant attempts at stabilising capitalism’s financial system, concerns itself with the production and issue of money. Upon this foundation whole industries have developed to finance business operations and to service the system’s property relationships. The pensions, insurance and brokerage industries are three of the largest of this kind. Out of a total UK working population of 43 million people well over one million are employed in this sector alone.

The property system also requires capitalist governments to employ armies of civil servants and local government officers to devise and administer welfare and unemployment payments to maintain the workforce through periods of unemployment, to provide for those unable to work, and to top-up the incomes of those whose wages are inadequate. Governments also employ workers to register ownership of land and property, assess and collect taxes, enforce weights and measures, etc. These systems require not only labour for direct planning and administration but also for the production and development of equipment such as computer hardware and software, buildings, stationery products, transport systems and sources of energy.

The bulk of capitalism’s legal systems, its judiciaries and police forces, is dedicated overwhelmingly to adjudicating property contracts, property disputes, and property transgressions, along with crimes against people motivated by monetary gain. Businesses based on gambling like casinos, amusement arcades, bookies, betting shops and stock exchanges flourish in the win-lose system that is central to capitalism. Capitalist states consume labour in the production of armaments and military hardware, for sale to others as well as for their own use. They maintain military personnel to further the interests of businesses within their territories in the international competition for markets, resources, trade routes, and the ability to project power and manoeuvre strategically to secure these essentials. In the aftermath of conflict labour is then deployed for rebuilding what has been destroyed.

Monetary tasks

In the world of business, firms of all kinds must dedicate labour resources to monetary tasks such as bookkeeping, accounting and debt collecting, while the demands of profit maximisation through competitive sale on the market forces them to devote huge labour resources to the advertising and marketing of brands and products. Companies work ceaselessly to bombard us with advertising online, in newspapers and magazines, on TV, at the cinema, on roadside hoardings, on the sides of lorries and buses, on bus shelters and railway platforms and on every available space. Capitalist companies employ labour to research and implement sophisticated psychological techniques for creating artificial wants in consumers. We are pressurised into buying by limited time offers, or into believing we are getting a bargain by supposed discounts, or into purchasing a lifestyle or an identity through branded items. In-store lighting, music, shelf placement and shelving layouts are designed to exploit our instincts and vulnerabilities. ‘Product placement’ on our favourite video channels keeps goods relevant to our interests in the forefront of our minds. Online ‘organic communities’ built around brands proliferate to keep us talking about a company’s products. PR consultants like the notorious Frank Luntz gleefully explain in their writings the techniques used to manipulate the public by a careful choice and placing of words and images.

And we submit to all of this because capitalism’s restless search for profit has uprooted or unsettled our communities. It has isolated us emotionally and economically. We buy stuff to fill up an emotional void. A halo of excitement surrounds each new product on the shelf or online platform and entices us to buy. At home, the excitement persists for a few days or weeks, but then fades and the exciting object becomes just one more thing we have. Our new possession morphs into junk or household clutter, or it falls apart or goes out of fashion. Still hungry, still unsatisfied, we dispose of it to make room for more. And more labour is then eaten up in transporting and disposing of the waste.

Planned obsolescence

Since the 1950s capitalism’s drive to maximise profit by ramping up sales has increasingly taken on various forms of planned obsolescence, so much so that it is now a regular sales strategy. Companies produce cheap products that soon fall apart and have to be quickly replaced. Parts or whole products are entombed in plastic or in spot-welded metal casings rendering them inaccessible and unrepairable. Companies use screws with proprietary heads that cannot be removed with an ordinary screwdriver. Spare parts are quickly withdrawn from sale, or they are sold at exorbitant prices that make it cheaper to replace the whole item. New components are designed to be incompatible with old ones. White goods that once were built to last 30+ years now break down in six or seven. Fashion houses rush out new fashions weekly or even daily. Smart phone manufacturers introduce new designs every year, simultaneously swamping public spaces with advertising, while about the same time punters begin to notice that their old phones are unaccountably starting to go slow.

A great deal of labour in capitalism’s competitive society is mopped up in the production of consumer goods that originate not in the spontaneous wants and demands of the population but in the requirements of profit making. In the mid-20th century, pundits predicted that rapidly advancing technology would result in a rise in the productivity of labour. As a result, they believed we would have to work fewer hours in the future. As early as 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes declared that by the millennium, when his generation’s grandchildren had grown to adulthood, no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week. Keynes was right about capitalism’s drive towards increased productivity. He was wrong, however, about the forces that drive capitalism. In a profit system capital takes on a life of its own. It becomes ravenous. It must constantly seek out new outlets for investment, new ways of creating ever more capital. Inevitably this means that new products, new services are constantly being puffed into existence. Instead of reducing the work needed by society, the profit motive keeps us at work generating ever more ephemeral stuff. So we get not just the kind of unproductive work that the late anthropologist David Graeber referred to as ‘bullshit jobs’, but jobs dedicated to producing bullshit products, and then to marketing them to the ‘consumer’.

Eliminating the profit system

By eliminating capitalism’s class system together with its profit motive, huge amounts of unnecessary labour and whole industries would cease to exist. In the same move, the direct connection between production and consumption would be restored. The quantity of social effort required to meet social need would plummet, and the population would gain a new level of social control over its labour time. It would be free at last to decide how much effort it wanted to expend on production and how it wanted to use it.

Eliminating the profit system would transform the whole nature of work. When society is founded on common ownership and free access, work ceases to be ‘work’: the sale and exercise of labour power on behalf of an employer, and becomes productive activity, a voluntary social act, undertaken by individuals for social purposes. The aim of production would no longer be maximisation of profit by competing firms, but the meeting of social needs. And social needs include those of the producer as well as the consumer. Under capitalist conditions, unpleasant, mindlessly repetitive work often conducted in unhealthy conditions, with unsociable hours and overseen by a harsh disciplinary regime, is the product of the individual capitalist firm’s need to minimise costs. With the profit system removed like a glitch in software, only one social purpose for productive activity remains: the meeting of social needs.

Social psychology has known for decades that extrinsic ‘rewards’ or ‘incentives’ like wages and salaries are poor motivators for action. And to say this is already to miss something important. To a large extent, wages and salaries in capitalism are not primarily rewards or incentives. For the majority of the population they are an imposed necessity. The motivation for doing a task – any task – comes principally from intrinsic rewards, that is, from the rewards which arise out of doing the task itself. Human beings are primarily motivated by three things: by the ability to control their own lives; by the desire to master skills; and by social belonging. These are incentives that capitalism is very bad at providing. As we argued earlier, it provides intrinsic incentives only occasionally and only in certain industries where profits are temporarily above average and where there are shortages in the labour market.

In a post-capitalist world of common ownership and free access where class conflicts of interest are eliminated, communities engaged in productive activities can organise their work to meet those human needs for control, for mastery and for community. They can provide themselves with conditions of work that maximise their own satisfaction, and not the profits of their employers. Under these conditions productive activity becomes not a sacrifice of time and effort for an extrinsic wage, but a collective activity carried on for collective ends and as a seamless part of a community’s social life.

The final article in this series next month will dive deeper into what motivates human beings and answer the question of who will do the dirty work.

(A representative list of tasks required by capitalism’s money system is given in Chapter 3 of the SPGB’s pamphlet: ‘From Capitalism to Socialism: How we Live and how we Could Live').

Hud.

Thoughts on money (2025)

From the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money has been around for thousands of years but only in capitalism, which overcame prior feudal and slave relationships, has it come to dominate all human and natural life.

Money exists in the modern world as a means of rationing the wealth available to most people while allowing it to exist in hyper-abundance for the few. On a planet with finite resources, approaching minimalism in our ownership of possessions may be a treasured ideal, however the rationing imposed by money on the majority does not derive from such idealism or concern. The very focus of the minority making money is to monopolise as much of the wealth as possible from the majority, and to exploit the natural world far beyond not just what is sufficient to meet our needs, but beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. The money system works hard to convince working people that it promotes freedom, liberty, and incentive, but this ideology is always the exact mirror image of the truth. It is the thinking of the rich, its liberty to exploit the majority and the planet with impunity, with minimal legal obstructions. But for those whose meaning in life is to provide that leisure class with a life of indolence and obscene indulgence, life is the very opposite of liberty, and can best be described as a modern form of subservience and oppression.

History illustrates powerfully the impressive creativity, imagination, reasoning, and persistence of the human species. It is therefore a great insult to the human race that most of it must spend its life with the primary objective of sustaining the elite’s extravagant lifestyles. The rich will hire this ingenuity, problem-solving and perseverance for its own ends, but these are wasted, when they could have served humanity as a whole. Money is without doubt a form of power. Today, money’s empire greatly rivals those of the kings of Versailles. It has found its way into all corners of the earth, leaving no stone untouched.

Money has also destroyed the family, sending adult offspring far from their original homes to find jobs, and financial worries fuel the mental ill health of both workers and the instability of their marriages. Once in place, the market system’s wheels just turn, blindly, irrespective of the damage they do in grinding up human lives and relationships, regardless of the dying planet they spin upon. Money, representing the commodity in which the value of all others is reflected, possesses no human values. We have surrendered and entrusted our entire lives and our living world to an institution that is the least responsible, the least flexible, the least stable.

Because the accumulation of money is an impersonal motive for production, it leaves a mountain of waste in its trail. Companies attempt to seduce demand by tempting people into oftentimes useless objects through vast expenditures of resources in advertising. Buildings, equipment, land, and professions require a massive infrastructure of insurance, which as with advertising firms, globally taking up millions of workers, energy, equipment, office and parking space, all for a completely unproductive cause. The same is true for professions devoted to buying and selling stock, to opening doors or sitting at reception desks, to assisting administrators, and such entire professions as lawyers, lobbyists, ticket sellers, marketers, and the military. These agencies, departments and professions, listed in Bullshit Jobs (2018) by anthropologist David Graeber, but also by socialists for over a century, illustrate the unnecessary complexity of a system based on money, one marked by an eye-boggling degree of waste of human lives and precious energy and resources.

Money also brings out the worst sides of human beings. By offering temptation, since it has the power to satisfy needs and wants, it invites built-in corruption in companies and governments everywhere, requiring vast policing resources to monitor and arrest a minority of offenders. Drug-dealing and theft are themselves primary examples of how a money system can trigger leeches at best, and potential murderers at worst, depriving society of even the best minds and bodies of a generation who turn into addicts, career criminals, and prison inmates.

Most people, even economists, cannot even imagine a world without money. Professionals whose specialty is the monetary system insist that incentive, entrepreneurship, and meeting a seemingly endless rainbow of needs, requires a monetary system. However, psychology knows otherwise. Our needs and wants are not infinite and, if anything, are artificially enhanced by the monetary system.

The complexity of the money system boggles the imagination. Right now, every individual and family in the tall building in which I live must spend time shopping for items that could easily be shared among a few hundred people. We all go out to shop because a money society has destroyed our collective natures and lifestyles (which were quite evident even in late feudalism, in which humans enjoyed, on average, rich relationships with extended family and other town residents). We must all do our food shopping even though in one go we could procure sufficient ingredients to cook a meal for a room of several dozen residents or neighbours. We look at any city street and see a long line of unused cars.

A human world consisting of billions of citizens should probably encourage a minimalist home, especially if the well-studied factors that most determine our happiness and meaning are such psychological variables as freedom, work, health, relationships, solitude, creativity, feeling part of the community. Without doubt hobbies require resources and possessions (musical instruments, books, screwdrivers) but it is not clear what little we could get by with if most items were shared and our lives could return to the collective form which is our archaic nature.

Our economists are failing us if in the face of today’s problems, including a dying world, they are not devoting their science (if it is one at all) to devising improved economic systems in which humans and the living world might thrive.

The money system has its obvious problems for those of us who must work in the Western world for an employer, but the system did not evolve similarly throughout the world. The institution of money is even more brutal in countries which still have theocracies, military juntas, one-party governments, or autocracies. Wars over resources or the competing ideologies and sense of entitlement of power-hungry rulers, starvation, extreme poverty, cartels, and environmental despoliation, are the symptoms of a monetary institution that fails because it is not based on meeting needs, although its ideology insists it does. It is time for economists to devise outlines of possible non-monetary systems that might better meet our needs. Until such a time, it is down to ordinary citizens such as ourselves to keep promoting such a vision. It may be hard to imagine such a future at this time; we may even at times feel crazy doing so. But our world is so rife with insecurities that alternatives are desperately needed.

Dr. Who