The C.O.S. and fish. (1913)

From the August 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

The question of the price of foodstuffs, we are informed, was dealt with by the Council of the Charity Organisation Society in a discussion raised by the reading of a paper by the Rev. J. C. Pringle. It turned upon the effect on prices of a large supply of fish and the necessity of keeping prices up by destroying part of the catch.

When a Socialist agitator makes it a count in the indictment of capitalism that a portion of the wealth produced must be destroyed to keep up the price of what is left, he is accused of exaggeration—or worse. Yet the reverend gentleman takes the acceptance of his statement for granted.

“At present, part of any great catch was thrown into the sea to prevent a fall in prices. It was too great a risk to sell it as manure. Yet it was admitted that each fall in price brought out an army of customers, who could not, or would not, pay a high price. Social workers ought surely not to rest until they had satisfied themselves that everything had been tried which might obviate the necessity of throwing fine food into the sea within sight of hungry people.”

And there is no plainer or more direct condemnation of this ridiculous system called capitalism than this plain fact. Fish is most frequently the commodity dealt with in this way, but it is by no means the only one. Fruit and agricultural produce is similarly treated—fruit being allowed to drop and rot upon the ground when the market price is not high enough to pay for picking, packing, and marketing. And while the products of the land are so treated, we have alleged democratic agitations to get back to the land, and prominent statesmen drawing lurid word-pictures of the town-dwellers scrambling after smallholdings, and bits of dirt generally.

But while fruit is very nice in season, and dropped fruit may be tolerated sometimes, it cannot be accepted as a staple article of diet all the year round. The effect produced on the market by the multiplication of fruit growers, what time fruit won’t pay for marketing, may be imagined but cannot be described.

To return to our muttons—or our fish—the effect of this on the fish market would be similar.

“Applied science was coming to the aid of the fisheries, and some plaice recently transferred to the Dogger Bank multiplied several times as fast as they did in the place they came from. When it came to marketing it was difficult to believe that human ingenuity could not devise a means of giving the public the benefit of great catches without injury to the business people to whom the public owes it that it had fish at all.”

The difficulty is not that there is a shortage of fish, but that there is too much fish. Why, then, take the plaice from one place and place it in another place to make it grow quicker? It is only for manure or to be thrown into the sea at the finish. Human ingenuity within the limits of capitalism cannot devise a means of selling fish or anything else at a profit at a price that eliminates profit. And we are grateful to learn that it is to the business people we owe our supply of fish. The business people are, presumably, the manipulators of the market, the owners of the fleets, and the shopkeepers—the people who decide how much to market, how much to use for manure, and how much to put back in the sea. We should have thought in our simplicity, not belonging to the C.O.S., that we were indebted to the men who caught it—the men who, at great risk of life and limb, issue from every nook and cranny along the coast-line to catch fish—fish being a food, and men having been fishermen ever since they shed the simian tail and came down out of tree-tops.

The report of the discussion at the Council of the O.O.S. in the “Daily Telegraph” does not tell the conclusion that body came to on what it calls “a vexed question.” The disputants took two sides, one claiming that articles were sold cheaper to poor people, the other claiming that there was no selling at lower prices except to get rid of surplus stocks. It would seem in the face of it the latter must be more correct or there would be no necessity to destroy the surplus. There is no doubt plenty of demand—hungry stomach demand—for fish, fruit, and other foods ; but there is no “effective” demand—no £ s. d. demand beyond a certain limit. That limit is fixed by wages.

There is an argument that wages are rather to be measured by the use that is made of them than by their actual quantity. This argument reaches its zenith with the teetotaler who would say that if you spent nothing on beer you would be able to eat all the fish and none would have to be thrown away, Of course, that overlooks those who merely eat fish—well salted—as a necessary preparation for preventing any beer being thrown into the sea ! But the argument of the teetotaler shifts the question without solving it.

The argument has another phase, one shown during the discussion of the recent budget. The extract belongs to Mr. Masterman, presumably, but it has been cut out without the introduction being preserved. As it was received with great gusto and Ministerial cheers, it will not be repudiated :

                                      “COMMUNITY’S EXTRAVAGANCE.”

“He agreed that the evidence of the Budget provided facts for seriousness as well as satisfaction. There was evidence of amazing extravagance in all classes of the community. There was little evidence of laying up or even of anticipation of bad times that might succeed good times.”

All we can say about it is that, if the argument is taken too seriously, we shall have the C.O.S. discussing “vexed questions” affecting a great number of industries, and the working class will be in the position of the unfortunate donkey who, by a process of elimination, was to be reduced to one oat a day, and who, having been successfully got down within sight of the desired end, disappointed everyone concerned by inadvertently deceasing.

Obviously, when fish is produced for the feeding of the community, the contradiction of having hungry stomachs clamouring for food on the one side, and the business people to whom we are alleged to owe the fish we get throwing it away on the other, will be impossible. If production for a capitalist market necessitates such a state of affairs, so much the worse for capitalism. It is, perhaps, too much to expect the C.O.S. and its “social workers” to view “throwing fine food into the sea within sight of hungry people” as a necessary and inevitable result of capitalist production, to be remedied only by changing the entire method and producing fish—as everything else—for the enjoyment and the use of the community organised into the Co­-operative Commonwealth.

D. K.

Leicester—and after. (1913)

From the August 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month we dealt briefly with the position occasioned by the bye-election at Leicester, and pointed out to the workers generally, and to the workers of Leicester in particular, the necessity for understanding their class position in society. How necessary this is has been demonstrated by the fact that a very large number of workers voted for the Liberal candidate, believing that their interests would be best looked after by the Liberal Party, and that if they abstained from voting it might be taken as “a graceless disregard of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s position.”

The refusal of the National Executive of the Labour Party to endorse the candidature of the Leicester Labour Party’s candidate can only be taken as evidence of their adoption of the “one-and-one principle.”

The truth of our contention that the Labour Party is not independent and is mainly concerned in keeping the Liberal Party in office is amply confirmed in three recent issues of the “Labour Leader.” (It is worth while to remember in this connection that it was the Liberal Government who passed the Payment of Members Bill, and, of course, £400 a year is worthy of serious consideration.)

Since the declaration of the poll we have been treated in the capitalist daily Press, and especially in the “Weekly Journal of Socialism, Trade Unionism, and Politics,” to yards of explanation from the official Labour Party.

The “Labour Leader” (July 13) says: “We all want a clearer manifestation of our independence. We all want a more vigorous denunciation of the Government’s tyranny at home and abroad.” A letter from the secretary of the Bermondsey branch of the I.L.P. appears in the same issue, in which he states, among other things, that “the Leicester business has given us a staggering blow in Bermondsey. Our members are broken and crushed. They feel they can no longer face the enemy, as they know that the criticisms levied against the ‘independence’ of the Labour Party are justified after all, and that they can no longer honestly continue to repudiate the allegations. They are sick and tired of ‘explaining’ and ‘apologising’ for the Party, and the culminating business of Leicester can neither be explained nor apologised for. It can only be condemned.”

In another issue of the “Labour Leader” we find a special article by Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, in which he tells us : “Our Parliamentary policy is exactly that which the most revolutionary Socialist Party would adopt if it had 40 members in the House of Commons in the year of grace 1913.”

This is, indeed, nonsense. When the workers become class-conscious they will reject the Labour Party for the spurious body of rogues and fools that it is. Understanding what they want, and having sent 40 members of “the most revolutionary Socialist Party” to the House of Commons, it is certain these representatives would have to carry out the instructions of the workers who had sent them there. Knowing that they were sent with specific instructions they could not play a two-handed game, and we should not witness that, sorry spectacle which the Labour Party has treated us to—a “revolutionary” party voting against their own amendments in order to save the Government.

Last year there were several bye elections, and as a result of three cornered contests the Conservative candidates in some instances managed to secure the seats. This caused much discomfiture amongst the Liberal and Labour Parties.

Why the workers should be perturbed at the loss of Liberal seats the present writer cannot understand. Are not the Liberal Party ever ready to bring out the armed forces to maim and murder the workers with as little compunction as the Tory Party ? Belfast, Llanelly, Tonypandy prove that they are. Yet this is the brutal party that Mr. Ramsay MacDonald is prepared to “bargain” with. The following from “Reynolds’s Newspaper” (6.10.12) is pretty significant :—

“Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, in a speech on Wednesday last, stated that there would be no more three-cornered contests if the Liberal Party would recognise the right of the Labour Party to 80 members.”

“This would seem to indicate the readiness for a ‘deal’ on the part of the latter in view of the next election” is an editorial comment.

Independence, forsooth !

In the “Labour Leader” of July 17 appears an article by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald under the heading : “What is Independence ?” He says that his critics are “nothing more than anti-Liberal,” and asks : “If Lord Selborne had been in South Africa instead of Lord Gladstone what would have been the difference ?”

What this has to do with the “independence” of the Labour Party it is difficult to understand. The reference to Gladstone and Selborne is, of course, an admission of the truth of our contention that the Liberal and Tory parties are really one party, who are only concerned with the robbery of the working class. But if the working class are to derive any comfort from the fact that things would have been no different on the Rand had Lord Selborne been there instead of the Liberal butcher, they should find balm in the reflection that the miners would have been just as ruthlessly murdered had Mr. MacDonald been there instead of either.

A recently joined member of the I.L.P. said publicly : “After what you have done about Leicester, it seems to me that I might just as well have stayed in the Liberal Party for all the good we are doing” (“Labour Leader,” July 17.) Quite so.

Fellow workers, the only organisation worthy of your serious consideration is the Socialist Party of Great Britain, because it is the only party standing for Socialism.

S. W. T.

S.P.G.B. Lecture List For August. (1913)

Party News from the August 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Once again, I don't have enough room in the label section to include all the listed speakers, so some brief information on some of the speakers missing from the sidebar.

• C. Elliott was a member of the Tooting Branch, originally joining the SPGB in September 1909. There is no record of when they lapsed their membership.
• F. J. Rourke was a member of the Tottenham Branch, originally joining the SPGB in June 1909. Their membership was lapsed in February 1914. ("Moved away".)
• H. Joy was a member of the Tooting Branch.
  William Lewington was a member of the Tottenham Branch, originally joining the SPGB in March 1907. He resigned from the SPGB but no date is given for his resignation.
  C. Gatter is possibly Alfred G. Gatter, who was a member of Stoke Newington Branch. They originally joined the SPGB in February 1910, and their membership was lapsed in April 1919.
  A. L. Cox was a member of Islington Branch.
  B. Seach was probably G. Seach, who originally joined Hackney Branch of the SPGB in September 1912. His obituary appeared in the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard.

SPGB Snippets: Himalayan flash floods (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

August 27, 2026

With record summer heatwaves and ‘weather whiplash’ events, global warming is fast becoming normalised. Now shocking video has emerged of unsurvivable flash floods in Nepal and Tibet, probably caused by a melting Himalayan glacier. Geologists have been warning about this for years, and there have been similar previous floods.

The death toll continues to rise as the water recedes. Rescue work is underway as local villagers scramble to help survivors, and aid workers pour in from elsewhere. But in the boardrooms of the world’s corporate powerhouses, eyes do not move from the bottom line figures. Nothing matters except profit, even while capitalism heats the planet and melts glaciers.

Until we abolish this inhumane system, these human tragedies will continue.

SPGB Snippets: Poverty in families (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

 

August 27, 2026

A recent study showed that nearly half of parents are struggling financially after having a baby.

In some cases this has even led to them watering down baby formula milk in order to save money. This can be really serious for an infant, as it may result in growth problems and developmental delays. Baby banks supply clothes, nappies and baby wipes to parents, but get few donations of baby milk.

This is what life can be like for some of the poorest workers under capitalism: essential items such as baby formula can barely be afforded. A society that results in this level of poverty needs to be replaced by one where meeting human need is the priority.

Socialist Sonnet No. 243: Mr. Presidents . . . (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Mr. Presidents . . .

 

Mr. Presidents in Washington and

Moscow, presiding on a mystery:

What’s made them myopic to history?

Have they seen some virtue in what they’ve planned,

Ignoring examples of Stalingrad,

Of bombing Hanoi back to the stone age?

The blitzing of London provoked cold rage,

But no surrender, no matter how bad.

Missiles and drones don’t defeat, they incense.

Kiev and Tehran shaken, yet do not fall,

While the shattered dead lie beneath it all,

Civvy Street victims of absence of sense.

Mr. Presidents, brother to brother,

Look in the mirror and see the other.

D.A.

SPGB Snippets: Mass Delusion? (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

August 21, 2026

‘Mass delusion’ is among the many labels that have been attached to Donald Trump’s rule and the support for him by tens of millions of Americans. But what about the delusion that affects the vast majority of the world’s population? They believe it’s natural and inevitable that millions should suffer grinding poverty while the 56,000 wealthiest people on the planet own assets three times as large as those of the poorest half of humanity combined .

There’s nothing natural/inevitable about this at all. We can fix it but only if that majority comes together to set up a system of common ownership and voluntary cooperation with free access to the abundant goods and services the world could provide..

Socialist Sonnet No. 242: Culpa (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Culpa

 

          Firstly Venezuela shaken,

Many thousands dead and injured,

More homeless, living with the dread

And the sorrow for those taken.

Columbia had felt the shock,

The persistence of danger shown

By a sudden quake of its own.

The earth trembles and buildings rock

And fall. A tumble of concrete

And shattered glass on those who die.

A question: Where does the fault lie?

Between plates, the one that’s discrete?

The most deadly fault seems to be

That which’s running through poverty.

D. A.

Life and Times: Hoarding – a disorder of our time (2026)

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

Many years ago, when I was a youngster, we were often visited at home by Harry, a relative who had had a difficult upbringing, lived on his own and showed signs of self-neglect. He started to give increasing cause for concern and my parents wondered what could be done. So my father and older brother went to his house to check on how he was managing. On their return I remember my brother saying ‘It’s a rubbish dump with a roof on’. Not long after this Harry was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

How hoarders feel

All this came back to me on reading a recent Big Issue article on hoarding and what causes anyone to adopt a practice so manifestly detrimental to their own wellbeing. It talked about how, though hoarding is generally associated with physical mess, the mess is also in the mind and is likely to have psychological drivers such as trauma, fear of scarcity, or loneliness. It went on to say that, in turn, the consequences of being known to live a hoarder’s life can be shame, fear or reinforced feelings of isolation, but that the intense anxiety felt by hoarders about discarding possessions, regardless of their value, is linked to how ‘objects often carry deep emotional meaning or represent security against loss’.

Hoarding and homelessness

Given its appearance in the Big Issue, the article’s main focus was, perhaps understandably, on how hoarding can lead to eviction or homelessness for those affected and how they suffer a much higher rate of it than for the general population. And it explained that this was the case even though hoarding disorder had been officially recognised as a distinct psychiatric condition and only recently – in May of this year – there was, though little noticed, a National Hoarding Awareness Week. But while drawing attention to the not negligible suffering of people who hoard and to the potential of this condition to lead to even worse consequences, what the Big Issue did not attempt to do was to delve into the reasons why people become hoarders in the first place.

Tendencies triggered

The first obvious thing to consider is that, just as no one is born a thief or a tyrant or a miser, no one is born a hoarder either. It’s generally accepted that human beings are eminently flexible creatures whose behaviour is highly dependent on the society they live in and the conditions in which they grow up. Individuals do of course have differing potential tendencies, capacities and talents, which may or may not be realised depending on the events and circumstances of their lives. For example, therefore, would my relative, Harry, have become a hoarder if the early difficult life circumstances he had experienced had not triggered in him the potential for it? Hard to be sure, and it might be said that many of us have a tendency to accumulate objects of a certain kind, often somewhat irrationally. That’s certainly the case with me personally when it comes to books which I sometimes feel the need to stock my shelves with even if I know at bottom that I won’t read them all. And the same is the case with other people I know when it comes to clothes.

But we can maybe call these minor quirks which may or may not have their origin in some kind of innate tendency in particular individuals but, in any case, are unlikely to have a profound impact on their lives. The same cannot be said of the kind of extreme examples of hoarding that we see depicted in those semi-exploitative TV series on the subject. These are largely the consequence of highly negative situations into which the hoarders have fallen and it seems fair to think that, had circumstances been different for them, their potential for that behaviour may well have remained dormant.

Insecurity

What kind of circumstances are we talking about? Well the Big Issue article talks about ‘trauma, fear and loneliness’ with possessions functioning as ‘emotional anchors’ and representing ‘memories, identity or a sense of security in an unpredictable world’. Of course the majority of us, whose lives are based on the need to work for a wage or salary in order to survive, manage, flexible beings that humans are, to negotiate that ‘unpredictable world’ without falling into some kind of addiction or psychosis. In other words, most of us stay sane despite the uncertainty and insecurity visited upon us by capitalism, where the ups and downs of the market and the needs of the profit system can quickly change the complexion of our lives.

But some of us are more fragile and need something to cling to, something that seems to offer a sense of safety – illusory as that may be – in an uncertain, divisive world. This may be drink, drugs, worship of sports or entertainment heroes, or even, in the case of the hoarding habit, something as seemingly banal as filling your life and space with possessions that serve no apparent purpose.

A cure?

So, is there a ‘cure’ for hoarding? Well, in the alienating, crisis-prone system we live under, probably not, other than a switch to some alternative obsession or addiction. Could there be a cure in a different kind of system, one without the pressure of wages and salaries, one where we have free access to all goods and services and the space to develop our talents and capacities both for our own satisfaction and for the common good? We would have to say yes, definitely. But for this to happen, we first need majority consciousness by wage and salary earners of their plight and then democratic political action to sweep away the profit system and establish the society of togetherness and community that we call socialism – a society based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Lost generations (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like a collective summer madness, the World Cup has passed into memory. While it’s tempting to see such events as a harmless flag-waving celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity, the raising of a Malvinas banner after the England-Argentina semi-final was for many a dump of cold water. Rather than being a source of communal pride, nationalism is a nasty and manipulative ideology used to set the poor against each other in defence of the rich.

As media pundits pointed out before the game, the Falkland Islands have been a source of simmering resentment in Argentina ever since the 1982 war. Possibly the thinking is that because the islands are next to Argentina, they should belong to Argentina and the Brits, being not even in the same hemisphere, should keep their grubby hands off it. Silly argument over a few sheep, perhaps, and on that logic much of the world’s land should not ‘belong’ to the non-contiguous states that claim it, for example Greenland, Hawaii, Gibraltar, Guam, Alaska, Guadeloupe, Kaliningrad and a host of other overseas territories. But silly arguments don’t stop Russia from pulverising Ukraine, Israel slaughtering the population of Gaza, the RSF slaughtering people in Sudan, China waging a grey-zone war against Taiwan, or any of the approximately 130 armed conflicts going on right now around the world.

But never mind sheep or patriotic fervour, the Malvinas thing is more about mineral rights, with possession of the Falkland, South Georgia and South Sandwich group giving the UK – which is to say the British owning class – formal rights over 745,000 square miles of ocean and oil and mineral-rich seabed, much of which overlaps with Argentine claims. And what’s keeping the issue hot is that Argentina’s president Javier Milei is enjoying a cosy ‘bromance’ with Trump, and may conceivably be tempted to ‘do a Galtieri’ on the assumption that a) the US would support him rather than the UK, b) it would reinflate his wilting popularity given his brutal austerity regime at home, c) the UK has virtually no navy left with which to defend such a far-flung territory, and d) the global rules-based order has been ripped up and gunboat (or chainsaw) diplomacy is back in vogue.

Why does nationalism work? Because humans like simple explanations, and we like to belong to a group. This combination makes us rather easy to manipulate. Scientists, who strive after objective truth, are not perceived as offering simple explanations. Instead we go for politicians who spin easy but self-serving us-and-them narratives. They make us feel superior while conveniently obscuring questions about who exactly owns all the power and wealth in ‘our’ country.

Science and rationality are not born human instincts, they’re skills we have to learn, and our education systems are paradoxically lukewarm about encouraging that. Capitalism needs workers to be smart enough to boost productivity, but also dumb enough to be consumers who don’t ask questions. It needs scientists, sure, but it doesn’t need a general population with basic science literacy, who can tell what’s plausibly true from what isn’t. That’s why people believe in cosmic woo-woo, and why some, in the recent heatwaves, forked out up to £120 on hoax air-con systems that supposedly cooled a room in 90 seconds.

On the plus side, scientists are getting media savvy these days. New Scientist is now doing YouTube, presumably for the same reason as the New Statesman, Private Eye and others, to boost paper sales in a shrinking market. Arvin Ash does quantum theory, Sabine Hossenfelder rants against physics and the standard model, and Kurzgesagt does it all as cartoons for kids. Cambridge maths professor Hannah Fry is all over YouTube ‘shorts’, explaining with engaging insouciance how to instantly cool your overheated car, and how we know when modern humans first migrated from Africa to Europe (approx 100-170,000 years ago) by tracing back the DNA of human body lice, which evolved to stick to clothes.

Harvard professor of genetics David Reich, author of the groundbreaking Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018), also has lectures on YouTube. These explain how the new discipline of palaeogenetics has since 2010 shone a new light on the lost generations of prehistory, including a revision of the ‘Kurgan hypothesis’ relocating Proto-Indo-European origins from Anatolia to Iran and Armenia, and the discovery of Sapiens, Neanderthal and Denisovan interbreeding. In ‘Your ancestors aren’t who you think they are‘, he runs through the huge amount of new genetic evidence which reveals that human populations have been in constant flux in time and space, migrating, merging and mixing, such that concepts like ancestry, ethnicity and nationality have no scientific meaning. In short, we are all from everywhere.

But politicians don’t care about any of that. It’s much easier, say in the UK, to blame immigrants for a crumbling infrastructure and falling quality of life than to cite the country’s long-term geopolitical, industrial and economic decline after two ruinous world wars and the loss of a global empire. In today’s miasma of misinformation, bottom-feeding grifters like Farage, Lowe and Robinson can whip up xenophobic paranoia and hope the populist swell carries them into the corridors of power. It’s the same story everywhere, a collective madness that won’t pass.

The price of flag-waving is ultimately blood. The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the First World War and has in some ways recapitulated that ghastly conflict. The survivors at the front – many of them teenagers – now don’t even dare to sit in trenches, but hide in underground dugouts from loitering drones. The war has become ‘gamified’, with competitive points awarded for drone kills. Both states lie about the death rate, but it’s certainly enormous. And this keeps happening. Capitalism, like a crazed psychopath, kills its own children, pouring the flower of youth wholesale into nationalist wars that benefit only the rich. We owe it to these voiceless lost generations, and to our descendants, to abolish this capitalist madness forever.

Paddy Shannon

Zeitgeist: a moneyless society with alienation (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx’s insight in Capital, Volume 1, remains startling in its simplicity. He writes about how spiders spin webs out of instinct, and bees also create architecture in their hives from instinct. He writes about how humans must first imagine what they are to do before making something a reality: the worst architect surpasses the most industrious bee because humans first construct in imagination what they later build in reality. This capacity for conscious, creative design – the ability to envision and reshape our world – defines our species-being. Yet under capitalism, this distinctively human power becomes alien to most humans. Workers execute plans conceived by others, their labour becomes separate from their creativity.

The resulting tragedy is the systematic suppression of human creative potential. Under capitalist production, the worker ‘does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind’ (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). The creative architecture of society – what we produce, how we organise our collective life, toward what ends we direct our energies – becomes the exclusive province of capital accumulation. Profit, not human flourishing, determines the shape of our world.

Marx, of course, wrote about the need for the working class to emancipate itself from the capitalist mode of production by creating a borderless world where money and governments have been abolished. He was very clear about socialism being a moneyless and stateless society: ‘In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated’ (Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 18, Section II), and ‘But the whole programme, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles, or rather, it is a compromise between these two kinds of beliefs in miracles, both equally remote from socialism’ (Critique of the Gotha Program, Section IV). There is also the famous building block for socialist society, ‘From each according to ability; to each according to need.’ This highlights that humans are individuals with unique gifts and talents.

One might expect movements explicitly rejecting capitalism to restore this creative capacity to humanity at large. Yet the Zeitgeist Movement, despite its anti-capitalist rhetoric and vision of a moneyless society, proposed to reproduce the same alienation under different management.

The Zeitgeist Movement proposed a ‘Resource-Based Economy’ where scientific experts and technocrats manage society through rational calculation and technological optimisation. Computers would track resources, engineers would design production systems, scientists would determine social organisation according to ‘the scientific method.’ Money would disappear, but so would democratic participation in the creative decisions that shape collective life.

The structure of alienation remains intact, merely changing personnel.

Under capitalism, creative control flows to those who own capital, justified by property rights. Decisions about production, distribution, and social organisation follow the logic of profit maximisation. Workers execute designs conceived by others in corporate boardrooms and management consultancies.

Under Zeitgeist’s technocracy, creative control flows to those who possess technical expertise, justified by scientific knowledge. Decisions about production, distribution, and social organisation follow the logic of efficiency and resource optimisation. The majority execute designs conceived by others in technical committees and research centres.

In both systems, ordinary people remain alienated from their natural creative capacity. The creative/conceptual moment – that distinctively human capacity to imagine before building – stays concentrated in an elite class. Whether that elite derives authority from property ownership or technical credentials changes the justification, not the fundamental separation of mental from manual labour, of conception from execution.

Marx himself advocated something fundamentally different: democratic planning, not technocratic planning. In his vision, the associated producers would ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’ (Capital, Volume 3, Ch 48). Note the emphasis: ‘collective control’ by the producers themselves, not management by experts on their behalf.

This requires, as Marx understood, abolishing the division between mental and manual labour itself. Not placing mental labour in charge of manual labour, but reuniting conception with execution in the lives of actual people. Education, rotation of tasks, democratic control over technology, genuine participation in social decision-making – these begin to restore human creative capacity.

The Zeitgeist Movement’s failure lay not in its rejection of money, but in its preservation of hierarchy. It promised liberation while maintaining the structure that produces alienation. A moneyless society where technocrats design your life remains a society where you are separated from your creative essence, where the distinctively human capacity to imagine and build your world belongs to someone else.

So the choice between the two moneyless systems lies in what kind of humans we want to be: do we each want to engage in the creative architecture of building our society, or do we just want passively to allow our mental and physical energies to be directed by others?

Dan Mullens

Material World : Reformism in the USA: Bernstein rides again (2026)

The Material World column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article in Counterpunch in June on ‘What’s Wrong with the American Left’ David Schultz says he is writing in the tradition of ‘the democratic socialism of Eduard Bernstein, who tied the classless society to the ballot rather than the barricade, and of Michael Harrington whose The Other America forced a prosperous country to look at its own poor’.

Bernstein, he says, was ‘betting that universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy’. Bernstein, Harrington and others he mentions ‘believed, as I do, that the point of the left is to assert that capitalism does not get to dictate how democracy operates, but the reverse’. The reverse is of course that democracy gets to dictate how capitalism operates. Which is what Bernstein’s reformism set out to try and do. Whatever else might be said about US self-confessed reformists, they are more theoretically minded than their counterparts this side of the ocean. Ask a reformist here who Bernstein was and they wouldn’t know (unless they had been in some Trotskyist sect when they were a student).

Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) was a member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) who, in exile in London, had worked closely with Engels. He had even written a book in 1895, applying the materialist conception of history to the English revolution, published in English in 1930 as Cromwell and Communism which introduced its readers to the Levellers and the Diggers. At the turn of the 20th century, however, he sparked off a controversy in the German and international Social Democratic movement by suggesting that Marx and Engels had been wrong on certain key points and criticising those who argued that socialism would result from a violent revolution following a catastrophic collapse of capitalism. Instead, it would come about, and was in fact already coming about, as a result of democracy gradually spreading to all aspects of society, including the organisation of the production and distribution of wealth. The book in which he expounded this ‘Revisionist’ position was given the English title of Evolutionary Socialism. Rosa Luxembourg’s pamphlet Reform or Revolution is a polemic directed against Bernstein. We joined in the ‘Revisionist controversy’ with an article in the October 1909 Socialist Standard entitled ‘Bungling Bernstein’.

An article in the January 1956 Socialist Standard on ‘The Fabians, Bernstein and Revisionism’ summarised Bernstein’s views as:

‘That the numbers and wealth of large and small Capitalists tended to increase and society to become more democratic. That class antagonisms were being modified by ethical and patriotic considerations. That crises were decreasing in size and frequency through a process of adaptation largely influenced by trusts, cartels and the like. That the Materialist Conception of History overestimated the economic factor; the influence of the economic factor was diminishing whilst the influence of ideological factors, including the ethical, was increasing. That Capitalism had undergone fundamental changes since the middle of the 19th century when Marx made his analyses, but, though true for the time of which he was writing, they no longer applied. That the theory of surplus value was incomplete and needed the addition of the theory of final utility. That the workers have now become citizens of the country and therefore have a fatherland to defend. That as Germany is becoming more and more dependent upon products from the colonies, these colonies should be developed and protected. Savages have only a conditional right to the land occupied by them; the higher civilization of advanced countries can claim a higher right. That Socialism is a long way ahead and will only come by a process that is gradual and almost imperceptible; consequently we should not worry about the future but concentrate on the present, on the extension of the political and economic rights of the working classes and “In all Advanced countries we see the privileges of the Capitalist bourgeoisie yielding step by step to democratic organisations” (Preface, page XI). That the Social Democratic Party should form alliances with the Capitalist parties nearest to them.’

It is easy to see from this why Bernstein is regarded by Social Democrat reformists as their mentor. He anticipated what after WW1 became the practice of all European Social Democratic parties, including the SPD, despite some of them still being committed on paper to Marxism. It was also the practice of the Labour Party even though they never made a theory of it.

Bernstein’s gradualism has been tried for over a hundred years now. But the result has not been any progress towards socialism. Production is in still the hands of profit-seeking companies and oligarchs. The economy is still driven by the pursuit of profits. There may be a ‘welfare state’ of sorts but that’s being eroded not extended. There is no democracy in workplaces. Rather than the Social Democratic reformists gradually changing capitalism it has been the other way round. Experience of governing under capitalism has changed them into mere managers of the capitalist economic system, accepting and applying its logic that priority must be given to profit-making.

Although Bernstein was not all bad — he did oppose WW1 and he was right about capitalism not collapsing of its own accord — his gradualist reformism must be pronounced a failure. Political democracy has not got to dictate how capitalism operates and never will. It is rather that capitalism dictates how governments act by giving them only the choice of putting profits first. He bet that ‘universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy’ and lost.

Adam Buick

Blood and Cattle (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

How to Save the Amazon: a Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers. By Dom Phillips & Contributors. Ithaca £10.99.

The introduction and first four chapters were written by Phillips, but the book was unfinished when he and indigenous specialist Bruno Pereira were murdered in 2022 (one man confessed to the killings and others have been arrested, but it is not known who was behind them, though they were presumably carried out to silence witnesses). A further six chapters were completed by various journalists on the basis of Phillips’ notes. Phillips was clearly a courageous and painstaking investigator; as the people who assembled the book say in their foreword, ‘these pages have been stained by blood.’

The Amazon rainforest plays a crucial role in stabilising the global climate, storing billions of tons of carbon, among other things. But it is currently under various kinds of threat, most notably deforestation caused by cattle ranching. Fires are used to remove trees and clear land; almost nine-tenths of deforested Amazon land has become cattle pasture. The reason behind this of course is profit, and there are plenty of other attacks on the forest for the same reason, from hydroelectric plants and gold-mining to large-scale fishing and oil exploration. Indeed, the Amazon itself may already be close to a ‘tipping point’, when it no longer produces enough moisture and may change into a semi-arid savannah. All of this is exposed here, with considerable detail and personal stories.

Biodiversity is another crucial aspect of the Amazon. Having large numbers of different plants can help to build fertile soils. Also, the area is likely to contain drugs that can help combat disease, but about which the outside world knows very little. The indigenous people who live in the rainforest have a great deal of knowledge about possible uses of plants, and made use of some of their own remedies to fight Covid. But as deforestation continues, biodiversity will decline and some potentially useful plants may disappear.

The policies of the Brazilian government have had a major impact on the Amazon. The right-wing populist government of Jair Bolsonaro encouraged land-grabbers and illegal miners to invade the forest and extract natural resources. Since the election of left-winger Lula da Silva as president in 2022, things may have improved a bit, and he promised zero deforestation by the end of the decade, but it remains to be seen if anything close to this will materialise.

Defending the Amazon rainforest would contribute to limiting climate change and would also protect the indigenous communities that live there. Rather than the people being a means to the end of defending the Amazon biome, the forest should be saved to prevent indigenous genocide. They are not just hunter–gatherers but also ‘rainforest gardeners and technicians’. Massive construction projects ‘convert self-sufficient forest peoples into the urban poor’ (rather like capitalism originally forcing people off the land to become wage slaves in factories).

The book reminds us how many inhabitants of the Earth view it rather differently from those who live under capitalism.  As an indigenous representative says in the afterword, ‘That land could be owned by a single person is unthinkable to us because everyone’s survival depends on it. We can’t imagine how anyone could pollute, divert or dam water for their own profit.’

Paul Bennett

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres says that 800 million people around the world are living in extreme poverty… [He] had previously stated that nearly three billion people are living in inadequate housing conditions.

[8am media]

In Shanxi, the province that sits at the heart of China’s coal-mining industry, there’s long been a saying: ‘Only go down a coal pit when you have no other way out’. For decades, life in these pits was intertwined with tragedy. It became so common that it gave rise to other sayings: about how miners were ‘exchanging their lives for money’ or ‘staking their lives for tomorrow’ when they ventured into underground tunnels where they died from gas explosions, flooding and shaft collapses. Over the past decade, safety reforms steadily erased the industry’s deadly reputation, and those days were thought to be behind China – until 22 May, when a blast at the Liushenyu coal mine in Shanxi killed 82 people and injured more than 120 others.

[BBC]

A leading Nicaraguan indigenous leader has died after being detained by the ruling authoritarian regime for nearly three years. Brooklyn Rivera, who founded the central American nation’s indigenous movement Yatama, died due to ‘physical and neurological deterioration’ linked to a Covid-19 infection, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health stated on Sunday. The government, headed by President Daniel Ortega, took 15 hours to confirm the death and are refusing to release the 73-year-old’s body to his family, opposition media report. The Nicaraguan government is routinely accused of political oppression, and Rivera is one of a growing number of dissidents to die in custody. 

[BBC]

Greta Thunberg… has said little publicly about the recent protests in Iran. Similar criticisms have been directed at a number of prominent left-wing intellectuals and activists in Europe and North America, including Tariq Ali, Naomi Klein, Alain Badiou, Richard Falk, and others. The pattern extends beyond silence. Judith Butler, the American philosopher and feminist theorist, has previously expressed support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, describing them as progressive social movements that form part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle.

[International Policy Digest]

An elderly man spent days on the floor of his HMO while maggots infested wounds in his legs before he was discovered and later died, a report has found. The 69-year-old from Oldham, named ‘John’ in a safeguarding review, was discharged from hospital just two weeks before the fall that led to his death … The recently published report found the local authority and medical professionals at Royal Oldham Hospital ‘missed opportunities’ to support John. Prior to his death, John was treated for severe malnourishment and an acute kidney injury. At the time, he shared with staff that he ‘did not feel safe in his home’, as he lived in a HMO with five other people, all of whom had serious alcohol and substance abuse issues.

[Oldham Evening Chronicle]

 

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Socialist Sonnet No. 241: Record Breaking (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Record Breaking

What was seen as this green and pleasant land

Is being relentlessly bleached into straw

By desiccating sun, its dazzling glow

Frazzling all in between mountain and strand.

Our carbon abundant atmosphere acts

As a lens magnifying remorseless rays

Through unremitting procession of days,

Focusing attention on climate facts

That’re surely undeniable unless,

Of course, economic necessity

Requires oil to lubricate equity;

Then the market cannot resist the press.

As long as demand for profit exists

It’ll create naysayers and populists.

D. A.