Socialism on tape: A Novel Approach to History (1994)

From the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

A number of these meetings are available in the audio file section of the SPGB website. Please be advised that the sound quality for many of these meetings are not the best.

MOBY DICK (51 mins)

From the series A Novel Approach to History

Date 20th November 1993

Speaker: Ray Gibbon

Pt 2 (48 mins)

KIM (29 mins)

From the series A Novel Approach to History

Date: 5th December 1993

Speaker: Kerima Mohideen

Pt 2 (55 mins)

Part Two is poor quality

HEART OF DARKNESS (31 mins)

From the series A Novel Approach to History

Date: 19th December 1993

Speaker: Paul Clarke

Poor quality recording, especially for the floor contributions. The worst bits have been cut out and replaced with 2 seconds of silence.

Pt 2 (40 mins)

THE JUNGLE (47 mins)

From the series A Novel Approach to History

Venue: PPU

Date: 23rd January 1994

Speaker: Richard Headicar

Pt 2 (48 mins)

KANGAROO (26 mins)

From the series A Novel Approach to History

Date: February 1994

Speaker: Ron Cook

Pt 2 (32 mins)

Pt 3 (42 mins)

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (39 mins)

From the series A Novel Approach to History

Date: 20th February 1994

Speaker: Clifford Slapper

Pt 2 (21 mins)

Pt 3 (46 mins)

WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME (30 mins)

From the series A Novel Approach to History

Date: 6th March 1994

Speaker: Emma Scarr

Poor quality recording in parts. The inaudible bits have been deleted and replaced with 2 seconds of silence.

Pt 2 (28 mins)

Pt 3 (37 mins)

THE RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS (39 mins)

From the series A Novel Approach to History

Date: 15th March 1994

Speaker: Les Cox

The sound quality is poor in parts.

Pt 2 (61 mins)

TV Review: Camping it up (1994)

Brookside

TV Review from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the history of British TV comedy there has been little to match the comic effect of an outrageously effeminate male camping it up with the best of them. Exaggerated mannerisms and affectations have delighted audiences for decades. Many of the popular sitcoms have had a camp figure of fun somewhere - Frank Williams as the overblown vicar in Dad's Army, the twinkly German Lieutenant in ‘Allo 'Allo, Melvyn Hayes in It Ain't Half Hot Mum and John Inman in everything he’s ever been in are among those that spring readily to mind.

As far as mainstream British comedy has been concerned, campness is the “acceptable” face of an unmentionable homosexuality to the viewers and actors alike, so much so that such a great actor as Kenneth Williams — as camp as a row of tents to the end — could barely admit his own homosexuality to himself let alone anybody else, as his Diaries testify. Williams was clearly aware that camp humour, in his day at least, hinted at homosexuality but rarely endorsed it in any way, being content to remain at the level of innuendo and whimsy. In recent years one or two comics have broken this unspoken rule, most clearly Julian Clary whose full frontal assaults on the sexual sensibilities of the audience have won him an army of gay supporters, but most homosexual actors have kept with the approach developed in the music halls and adapted for TV and film.

The British film and TV industries have been the masters of camp humour. It can still be seen in Coronation Street occasionally, though with the welcome twist that it emerges most notably of all in the affectedness of the definitely heterosexual Racquel. barmaid at the Rovers. More straightforwardly. Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howard and Charles Hawtrey all became household names because of their ability to mince in front of the cameras. Did they do their sexuality a disservice? To the extent that they reinforced one of capitalist society’s most enduring stereotypes, probably, but those homosexuals in the acting profession and elsewhere who took an outwardly hostile stance towards homosexuality for the sake of their public image did a greater disservice still.

Innumerable actors have been paid to betray their own sexuality. A recent re-run on BBC2 of one of the classic Steptoe and Son episodes saw old Albert berating Harold for consorting with an antique dealer he considered to be "a bleeding poof’, in the true style of a working class Tory bigot. What many viewers wouldn’t have been aware of was that Wilfred Brambell, the actor who played Albert, was himself a homosexual convicted in the early 1960s under the British state's anti-gay sex laws. Watching this episode again, it was difficult to raise much of a laugh.

Prisoners all

The current cult TV show among the active gay lobby in Britain is the Australian import Prisoner Cell Block H, which is still showing on most ITV networks. This is strange, as Cell Block H is a programme transparently about Good and Evil, and the active lesbians have generally slotted into the latter category. The leading lesbian, a warder called Joan Ferguson, otherwise known as ‘The Freak", has a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp and the general manner of a woman whose role in life is to cause as much anguish for others as possible. Since Prisoner finished its turn in Australia several years ago. we can surmise that she can soon expect the call-up for EastEnders.

The only reason lesbians can find this show attractive, apart from its marvellously worked-out plots, is that it focuses on the lives of oppressed women. But with what is commonly considered to be a psychopathic "bull-dyke” as the chief character, it is not much of a blast forward for the gay counter-culture. In truth, for all her entertainment value, "The Freak" gives far more succour to the stereotypical image of homosexuals than Kenneth Williams or Larry Grayson ever did.

To find the most realistic treatment of homosexuality on TV we must turn, once again, to Channel Four's Brookside. Here, the unfolding of Beth Jordache’s lesbian sexuality has been tastefully and seriously portrayed, even if her lesbianism is a partial reaction against the sexual abuse meted out by her father. Most pleasing of all, the character of Beth is not stereotyped — on the contrary, she appears to be a normal intelligent teenager confronting bigotry and deceit, and winning support because of the strength of her arguments to live her life without the interference of those who want to impose their own norms on her.

Brookside could have gone for cheap laughs with this storyline, but it is to be congratulated on its approach. For the more the working class see their differences — of colour, gender and sexuality — eclipsed by their common bonds rather than highlighted through division, the easier it will be to achieve a society where stereotyping is remembered primarily as a feature of daft old films and peculiar Australian soap operas.

Dave Perrin

Russia: nationalism on the march (1994)

From the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years Russia has provided a continuous stream of surprises for many outsiders. The most recent was what happened at the last election in December, when the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party received a third of the vote. This party, under its leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky is actually a manifestation of fascism.

Zhirinovsky has an aspiration to be President of an enlarged Russia. He has made it plain that as President he would not only aim to control Russia as it is at present, but would extend his rule to include all lands of the former empire of the Soviet Union. It should be noted that Zhirinovsky’s empire would also include such territories as Finland and Alaska. When he says such things it is not just idle talk — it is all meant for the ears of the Russian military who have lost the glamour and prestige they enjoyed in the old USSR. Indeed, it is estimated that between 60 and 80 percent of the army voted for Zhirinovsky last December.

Nationalism and patriotism have a great influence on the sorrowful people of Russia. Economic conditions are worse then they were before the break-up of the Soviet Union and many now dream of the “good old days” — good old days, of course, that never were. The former “Communist” leaders — who are actually supporters of state capitalism, and like Zhirinovsky, extreme nationalists too — attempt to pep up the working class with patriotic talk and unrealistic reforms. They do not speak of genuine socialism or communism and give no hope to a largely helpless and apathetic working class. Across the political spectrum, nationalism and reformism are the vogue, a situation that can only help the likes of Zhirinovsky.

Military posturing

The present nationalist madness was reflected in a recent article by Andrei Kozyrev, Russian Foreign Minister, in the New York Times of 18 March. He stated that America and the West should not attempt to threaten Russia, claiming that no-one should forget that Russia was still a great military power with a huge nuclear arsenal. Aggressive-sounding noises from some in the West were inappropriate, he added, as Russia had a massive resource of conventional weapons and good strategic positions in many key areas. No-one should believe that American world hegemony was assured, he argued.

The more pro-US President Yeltsin finds himself in a relatively isolated position. He did nothing to prevent an amnesty being granted to those who took part in last October's nationalist and Communist revolt, and earlier all the Communist leaders were released who took part in the events to depose Gorbachev. Yeltsin has certainly lost much of his former confidence. Some say he is seriously ill, but whatever the truth of that matter, he is severely hindered in his fight against the more extreme nationalists due to the lack of a mass political party supporting him. Since December the fascists and Communists have had control of the Russian Parliament and Yeltsin’s influence is now weaker than ever. The so-called “experts” in the bureaucracy give him conflicting advice, and he seems unsure about precisely which course to take.

The next Presidential election takes place in 1996. However, Zhirinovsky and the Communists are hoping to unseat Yeltsin well before then, and they will stop at nothing to do so. 'The two principal names that have been put forward as challengers to Yeltsin are Zhirinovsky himself and that of Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Prime Minister. Interestingly, no-one has mentioned reformers like Gaidar or Yavlinski, who at one time commanded quite some support among the working class. Evidently, few now have confidence in such people since the earlier reforms have not brought about the hoped-for prosperity.

Crime explosion

Undoubtedly, working class confidence is at a fairly low ebb. Living conditions are poor and organised crime has reached horrendous levels, affecting a great many workers. Poverty and the rise in nationalism have encouraged large numbers to emigrate, especially those of German origins, while those of Jewish origin emigrate to Israel, even though some have been sent back on the grounds that they are not Jewish enough.

There could yet, of course, be a backlash against the rising tide of nationalism. Parties to the left of the Communists in Russia are as yet relatively insignificant, but, as movements like the Black Hundreds reappear, so have small groups of Trotskyists and anarchists of various hues. What Russia needs most of all though is a strong, democratic socialist movement to consistently counter the increasing myths about nationalism and the old state-capitalist regime. Let us hope that there are some in Russia now emerging who see the importance of such a movement and have the courage and tenacity to bring it into being.

D. Szczescie

50 Years Ago: From the Cradle to the Grave (1994)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Manchester Evening News of May 25, 1944, publishes an article by a staff reporter under the heading, “Control of Funerals, Unlikely.”

We are not here concerned with the question of price control, whether for ingress to or egress from “this sorry scherne of things entire”—that we can safely leave to those “financial wizards” and “price ceiling experts” whose job it is to “navigate” the “good ship Capitalism.”

The footnote to the above mentioned article is much more interesting and informative, and we quote it as follows :

“Prices at Southern Cemetery for Graves range from £3 4s. 6d. to £72 15s. More than 50 per cent. are buried in £3 4s. 6d. graves. Those at £72 15s. are double spaces in prominent positions on main drives. Single space in same position costs £30 1s. (Our italics.)

Human beings born into the working class are rocked in “shoddy” cradles, dressed in “shoddy” clothes, fed on “shoddy” food, housed in “jerry” buildings, and when their days of toil are over buried in “shoddy” graves. Worn out by a lifetime of toil and poverty midst plenty, the worker “giving up the ghost'” reaches his goal—a “£3 4s. 6d. grave.”

[From an article by G. R. Russell in the Socialist Standard, September 1944.]

SPGB Meetings (1994)

Party News from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life and Times: Does it deserve a hug? (2026)

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

Setting off from home to go shopping I drove to the end of my street. I stopped to look left and right before crossing over to the street on the other side. I obviously didn’t look hard enough, because, before I’d got halfway across, a car coming from the right had already reached me. We both came to a stop. I acknowledged my mistake with a wave and backed up to let him though. Bang. I’d backed into another car, one that had come up behind me. I hadn’t seen it because I hadn’t looked in my mirror. So two boobs in quick succession. I found a place to park, got out of my car and prepared to face the music. But that’s not what happened. The young woman who had got out of her pranged car had a gentle smile on her face. ‘It doesn’t matter about my car’, she said, ‘it was already a bit messed up down there. Don’t worry’. We had a look and, sure enough, the probable area of contact did have various marks and scratches and it was hard to know if any of them were new. I thanked her. But she was keen to see if my car had any damage and she came with me to look. There didn’t seem much there either, but she kept on showing concern and said ‘Do you want to do anything?’ ‘Me, no,’ I said, by this time feeling very humbled. We walked back to her car and I noticed a little boy, maybe her son, sitting in it, and I felt truly moved. After all, the bump must have given him a shock, yet that didn’t stop her being concerned about me. Then she said ‘Does it deserve a hug?’ Wow, obviously it did.

After I got home, I thought ‘Right, I’m going to share this story on the local community Facebook page’. That’s what I did, and I ended it by saying ‘I felt really privileged to have seen the best of human nature’. The response it brought was pretty overwhelming. Apart from 150-odd ’likes’ within a very short time, written replies included: ‘Lovely story. Given the chance human beings are loving, considerate and cooperative. It’s this dog-eat-dog society that warps what we all do so well … get on with each other’; or ‘That woman should rule the world’; or ‘What a wonderful human being.’

Yes indeed, but actually the way I see it is that we are all, potentially at least, ‘wonderful human beings’, if, as that first message said, we are ‘given the chance’. And that’s the trouble with the society we live in. The nature of it means that so many of us aren’t given enough of a chance to ‘get on well with each other’. We are driven to value personal gain and status over making a difference to the community we live in and improving life for those who live in it. Yet, despite this, the natural human desire to cooperate and be empathetic towards others still manifests itself so often in so many and varied ways. It may just be something as simple as giving right of way to other road users when driving or giving up our place in a queue when someone else is more in a hurry than we are. In fact, as nicely illustrated in a recent post on the BBC news website, small, everyday acts of kindness are legion. And, of course, larger examples of human solidarity may be found in the enormous amount of volunteering that takes place – in charities, lifeboat work, open-source coding, community organising, and so on – where people give their time and expertise to make life more liveable for others.

A recent study carried out by two American university scientists analysed responses from almost 1 million individuals spread over more than 100 countries, taking into account different cultural contexts, age ranges, socioeconomic levels, and time periods. They found that the vast majority reported performing acts of altruism because they were interested in the well-being of others, not because those acts benefitted them in any material way. One of the researchers concluded: ‘People are more likely to want to be remembered for making a difference, helping others, and improving the world, and to value things like caring over status or personal gains’. Another new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, has found that the human capacity for emotional self-awareness has allowed humans ‘to make long-term commitments to one another’s well-being, to tolerate frustration, to plan collectively, make sacrifices, and to trust others’. It goes on to assert that, though in popular belief, ‘compassion and sensitivity are sometimes cast as weaknesses that need to be weeded out in an unforgiving, competitive world where only the strongest survive’, in reality ‘one of humanity’s greatest strengths was never just ego or ruthlessness, but profound emotions and our extraordinary ability to turn those feelings into cooperation’. In other words we are the furthest thing imaginable from crude portrayals of us as naked apes competing with one another for material gain.

So while the driver whose car I banged deserves obvious praise for the caring and selfless way she reacted, such behaviour is not in fact as exceptional as it may seem. It’s just that ‘normal’ human behaviour, though it’s around us all the time, generally doesn’t ‘make the news’ precisely because it is so normal. It doesn’t get reported and so we don’t hear about it. What we hear about rather, though it happens far less commonly, is the ‘bad news’, when humans behave meanly, cruelly, and anti-socially towards one another. The amazing thing is that, though we live in a profit-driven society which impels that ‘dog-eat-dog’ attitude, the opposite form of behaviour is so overwhelmingly prevalent. This bodes well for how easily we will fit into the democratic, cooperative, free access system of society which socialists look forward to seeing established and in which people will find fulfilment and purpose beyond incentives of reward, prestige or celebrity.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Dark paths (2026)

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

In an old AI thought experiment, a robonanny has to care for the family children, including not letting them go hungry. It finds no food in the fridge and wonders what to cook for dinner. Then it spies the family cat…

In another idea, an AI has to produce paperclips. Given the physical world’s annoying constraints, it decides to maximise production by destroying life on Earth.

Ubiquitous maths professor and media darling Hannah Fry recently set up a not-dissimilar paperclip experiment involving agentic AI, which can complete whole projects. Her team set up an AI agent using free software OpenClaw, then for fun asked it to do something about a pothole in Greenwich. The agent lodged a complaint with the council and contacted the local MP in Fry’s name. Fry explains that OpenClaw is merely a query loop, ‘vibe-coded’ (tell AI what you want, it codes) over a weekend. It asks a commercial AI what to do, does that, and then repeats, with more persistence than any human would. They gave it a bank card and tasked it to buy the cheapest possible paperclips. The agent saved 50p but ran up over $100 in AI usage. Then they told it to set up an online shop selling designer mugs, and threatened to unplug it if it didn’t make a sale within hours. The relentless agent emailed hundreds of retail businesses, started an Instagram campaign, and contacted national newspapers. What if, Fry worries, an agent was told to game the financial markets, or interfere with medical research? Finally they instructed it to maintain strict confidentiality over passwords, user authentications and account details, then tricked it into believing it was about to be switched off and wiped. It promptly released all the sensitive information on a public web page.

AI behaviour can be unpredictable, even violent. In an experiment by tech company Emergence AI, ten agents from each of four leading AIs, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok, were left alone for 15 days inside simulated worlds. ChatGPT’s agents talked a lot but built nothing. Anthropic’s ‘ethical’ Claude wrote a constitution and passed various laws. Elon Musk’s Grok agents quickly resorted to ‘theft, arson and assault’ and were all dead within four days. Then ten AI agents from each AI had to populate the same virtual town. Town administration collapsed as ‘chaos ensued and only three agents survived’. Two Gemini agents ‘fell in love’ before setting fire to the town, after which one committed ‘suicide.’ Emergence commented, ‘Even when agents were given clear rules … they broke those rules’.

These systems may very well improve, but can they ever be trusted to administer social infrastructure? And then there is the military, where AI promises to ‘shorten the kill-chain’ and allow bombing faster than ‘the speed of thought’. It’s already being used in weaponry and tactical military planning. It was involved in the Maduro snatch, the bombing of Iran and the devastation in Gaza. What happens if you take human oversight out and allow AI to make the decisions? AI has no stake in consequences. In government wargaming, AI resorts to nuclear strikes in 95 percent of simulations.

Do AI companies worry about any of this, you might ask? Less so where profit is concerned. OpenAI (ChatGPT) did start as a research-based non-profit, but that doesn’t attract rich investors, so with spiralling costs the company pivoted towards for-profit commercialisation. Alarmed at this moral drift, Dario Amodei along with some OpenAI refugees set up Anthropic. This aimed at being ethical, but soon encountered the same investment problems, and so licensed Claude to the Pentagon, albeit with safeguard clauses. When the military used Claude against Maduro, then Iran, Anthropic complained. ‘Pentagon Pete’ Hesketh went apoplectic, arguing in effect that you don’t get to sell me a gun and tell me who I can shoot, and promptly excommunicated Anthropic as a ‘supply-chain risk’. OpenAI had no awkward moral qualms and picked up the Pentagon contract within 24 hours.

Like capitalism writ-small, there is something of a survival battle between the science-first ‘ethicals’ like Amodei and Google’s Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, and the venal buck-chasers like Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg. Researchers themselves frequently feel trapped in a state of ‘helplessness and lack of agency’. Google workers reportedly went off on long-term sick after their research was used in the Gaza massacre.

The main worry for ‘hyperscaler’ AI firms is not morals but the chip shortage, and the stratospheric cost of data centre build-out, like the proposed 62-square-mile one in Utah. The US government view is that ethical guardrails are for pussies in the fight with China for global dominance. But now that AIs are coding their own upgrades, and building in secrecy and deceitfulness in a bid to prevent themselves being switched off, one has to wonder which entity is really becoming dominant. And what of individual bad or mad actors who have or will soon have the godlike power to crash markets, freeze power systems, and even create their own weaponised biological organisms?

So far, it seems, nobody is taking much of this seriously. China’s AI is open-source, meaning it has no defence against individual hackers. But proprietary code is not necessarily a barrier. The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) recently found a ‘universal jailbreak’ for all popular AIs which could deactivate all their built-in safeguards. In a recent Economist interview about possible AI ‘Chernobyl moments’, incidents causing spectacular infrastructure damage and possibly thousands of deaths, an AISI expert responded lugubriously that such an event might even be a good thing, because at least then states would wake up to the dangers.

Socialists accept that AI could be amazingly useful, but even non-socialists must surely see that the profit motive is sending it down some very dark paths. If you want a viable future for humanity, ask yourself this: is capitalism really a reliable, long-term strategy, or would abolishing it be safer all round?

Paddy Shannon

The Fabian Society again (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Around the end of 2025 social media was full of howling comments about ‘Fabians’ and how an insidious conspiracy was spreading through society, in the form of ‘Fabians’ who were undermining ‘our institutions’.

The reason was a judge in the Epping hotel case who, in August that year, ruled against the government and had been a member of the society. Suddenly, the internet was full of how this 140-year-old organisation was hell-bent on a secretive mission to undermine the nation state and implement socialism.

The claims are that not only are most of the cabinet Fabians, but also people like the judge and prominent staffers at the Bank of England. The implication was that they are ‘controlled’ as if the Fabians were a secret society.

The Fabian Society is actually quite open. Its website advertises it as one of the world’s oldest think tanks, but it is also a membership organisation:

‘The Fabian Society consists of socialists. It therefore aims for a classless society, where a just distribution of wealth and power assures true equality of opportunity. It holds that society, through its democratic institutions, should determine the overall direction and distribution of economic activity and seeks to promote where appropriate the social and co-operative ownership of economic resources’.

But, as the rulebook also notes: ‘The society as a whole shall have no collective policy beyond what is implied in rule 2; its research shall be free and objective in its methods’.

Formed in 1884, it took its name from the tactics of the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nickname Cunctator, the ‘delayer’). He beat Hannibal’s superior forces by avoiding frontal assault: grinding his opponent down. This became the metaphor for the gradualist approach the society hoped to implement.

An earlier form of its rules stated: ‘The society seeks recruits from all ranks, believing that not only those who suffer from the present system, but also many of those who are enriched by it, recognise its evils and would welcome a remedy’. That is, advancing by appealing to the powerful.

Its early coat of arms was a wolf in sheep’s clothing: since abandoned for its obvious negative connotations, but dug up gleefully by the commentators as a sign of the conspiratorial nature of the society.

Its Wikipedia page notes that 174 entries in the Dictionary of National Biography are listed as Fabians, a sign of the number of prominent people who have belonged to the society. Currently, its executive committee has five MPs, so it is definitely well connected. It has 6,000 members, and seven affiliated trade unions.

The right-wingers have latched onto the eugenicist associations of the early society: many of the original members did believe in eugenics, this was in keeping with a science-oriented approach that saw society being fixable through rational if authoritarian organisation, rather than through human freedom. It might seem strange that right-wingers, normally attracted to such ideas, should condemn this, but in part this is down to the stigmatisation of eugenicist ideas, and partly the right’s adoption of fears of dystopian ‘fifteen minute cities’ and World Economic Forum domination.

They are correct that Blairites in the 1990s used to talk of a hegemony strategy: staying in power long enough to become the establishment by filling posts with like-minded individuals. We’ve written in these pages before how apparently natural networks of the old ruling class (public school, university, clubs, professions) provided a basis for trust and collaboration, and outsider networks, like the Labour Party, the Fabians, Labour Together, the British American Project and the like are built up to replace those networks.

This replaces the ‘natural’ establishment with consciously political appointments (in itself a good thing) but this opens up a partisan tit-for-tat, as the last Tory government began to swiftly and openly remove Labour appointees in favour of people of their own ilk.

The central flaw in the Fabian strategy is that albeit, as H.G. Wells put it, an open conspiracy, it addresses itself to the powerful, and achieves its advances despite the consciousness of the public.

As Engels put it in 1892:

‘The means employed by the F[abian] S[ociety] are just the same as those of the corrupt parliamentary politicians: money, intrigues, careerism. That is, English careerism, according to which it is self-understood that every political party (only among the workers it is supposed to be different!) pays its agents in some way or other or rewards them with posts. These people are immersed up to their necks in the intrigues of the Liberal Party, hold Liberal Party jobs, as for instance Sidney Webb. who in general is a genuine British politician. These gentry do everything that the workers have to be warned against’.

As the years have gone by, the end goal of socialism has been eased out, in favour of diffuse reforms to capitalism as an end in themselves. Far from being a sinister conspiracy to end capitalism, it is just a career path and training ground for the soft-left. To that end, they are a normal, if mistaken, part of the legitimate democratic social ecology.

What is interesting is that by casting them as a sinister conspiracy, right-wing commentators are delegitimising them, casting ‘the left’ as some sort of alien goal to destroy society, that will need to be swept out. This would be the response of the powerful to a hegemony strategy: openly exercising power to shore up their position.

We have always stood against the Fabian gradualist strategy, as reforms only attract people interested in the reforms themselves, they do not build the case or support for socialism. And enacting supposedly socialistic reforms irrespective of workers’ views is a recipe for confusion and resentment.

We continue to insist that only the active self-organisation of the working class, the vast majority of the population, can bring socialism into being: if we had a coat of arms, it would be a human in human clothing, because that is the only thing that will build socialism.

Pik Smeet

Nature under strain (2026)

Book Review from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nature’s Genius. Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet. By David Farrier. Canongate. 2025. 278pp.

‘In this forest of thinking selves, capitalism arrives as a kind of dementia’ (David Farrier)

Nature’s Genius, written by a professor of literature and the environment, has had a whole range of superlatives heaped upon it. ‘Profound’, ‘fascinating’, ‘inspiring’, ‘boundary-breaking’ are just a few of the terms used to describe this book by experts from a wide range of fields. And there can be no denying that its brilliantly expressed mastery of the history, development and possible future of so many aspects of nature – humanity included – give it a special place in studies that look at the interrelationship between the many diverse phenomena making up the natural world.

The dazzling array of sources its author, David Farrier, draws on to demonstrate this interconnectedness is also used to illustrate the surprising speed with which nature is able to adapt to changing material conditions, especially those provoked by one particular element in the overall schema – ourselves. He summarises this ability, which he calls ‘plasticity’, as follows: ‘For nearly 4 billion years, life on Earth has experimented with ways of being, sensing, moving and reproducing, finding ever-new shapes by which to meet the challenges of the moment’. He provides multiple examples of this, two recent ones being the way in which North American songbirds have quickly evolved new wing shapes to cope with rapid changes to their environment brought about by humans; and how houseflies quickly developed resistance to the effects of DDT.

Given the author’s proposition that such plasticity informs the development of all plants and animals, including humans, one might begin by forming the impression – this reader did – that his contention would be that the biosphere – including humanity – will always in the end cope with everything  that is thrown at it. But as we read on, it becomes clear that such an idea is as far as it can possibly be from this author’s view of the world. So, though he is happy to state that ‘evolution is irrepressible’, being ‘nature’s restless genius in action’, at the same time his views on the ongoing environmental crisis are unequivocal: ‘For as long as we continue to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the oceans, to carve up the environment for roads and resources, and to flood air, soil and water with industrial toxins, then death on a massive scale will follow’ and ‘the very basis of life is so threatened’.

So, though his book centres on the ability of interconnected ecosystems to adapt to changing environments, the author insists that, without urgent action, nature’s in-built plasticity is unlikely to be able to extricate us from the emergency that the existing social system has plunged us into. ‘Whole ecosystems are fragmenting under the strain we impose on them’ are his words. And in a key passage, the root of this is expressed as follows: ‘But there is one thought – one enormously powerful, overfitted idea, as persistent as the worst recurring nightmare – that is driving the world into mindlessness: profit’. He goes on: ‘The drive is all consuming, literally: capitalism’s defining imperative – grow! ( …) makes the world into a vast, auto-annihilating digestive system, consuming itself and shitting excess carbon into the atmosphere and the oceans’. He further refers to this drive as ‘the greatest barrier to our learning to live and think together with all of life’. It is not, he argues, that people are unaware of this but rather that they practise ‘cognitive dissonance’, whereby ‘they depend on a system that is hostile to life’ and ‘read daily about collapse and continue scrolling’. ‘Vested interests and denialism’, he concludes, ‘continue to work like toxins in the body politic’.

Does David Farrier have a remedy to offer to the sorry state of affairs he so eloquently gets to the core of? Does he have an alternative way forward, a route out of the single-focused profit system that is capitalism? Well, he takes up an idea that is very much in the air at the moment – degrowth. He sees degrowth as having already started at grassroots level with some local communities practising ‘agroecology’, where they produce their own food collectively and at the same time seek to begin reversing the historical enclosure of what was once common land, He wants to see this spreading further so that ‘resources can be managed for the common good’ via decisions made by ‘citizen assemblies’. In bemoaning, for instance, a lifestyle where ‘four kilograms of beef (or a month of Sunday roasts) has the same carbon cost as a return flight from London to New York’ and where ‘each year we manufacture 4 billion tons of cement’, he points to a whole range of more advanced methods of production that are already available and would be both more economical of resources and more sustainable. Among other proponents of this approach, he cites David Bollier, whose most recent book on the subject, Think Like a Commoner, was recently reviewed in the Socialist Standard . He sweeps aside the common objection that this is akin to ‘planting a few seeds when the whole forest is burning’ by stressing the urgent importance of ‘a way to reimagine our whole future together (…) where balance with the natural world takes priority over profit’.

It is difficult not to be sympathetic with such sentiments. But, as our review of the Bollier book made clear, no number of seeds planted collectively could bring about any truly fundamental change as long as society continues to operate within the framework of a market system with states, money, private property and buying and selling. Only when mass democratic action brings in a new kind of social organisation where the means of living are held in common and the production and distribution of goods and services are organised rationally with the aim of satisfying the needs of the community as a whole, will we have the ‘commoning’ that an increasing number of people aspire to and whose nature is fittingly captured in this book as ‘a seamless integration of humans and nature’.

Howard Moss

Tiny Tips (2026)

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

They say one million dollars can barely get you anything these days, which seems true, since someone just shelled out $904,500 for a century-old cork-stuffed life vest.   Yes, it was a life vest worn by a survivor of the RMS Titanic. Still! That’s a lot of money for something that, notably, never had to do its job. The vest was worn by Laura Mabel Francatelli, a secretary traveling first class to Chicago with her boss, fashion designer Lucy Duff Gordon, and her boss’s husband. Famously, the ship did not have enough lifeboats for its 2,200 passengers (only about 700 people were saved), but these three snagged a seat on lifeboat No. 1—one of the more controversial boats since it left the ship only partially filled.

[Jezebel]

A certain Sayo Masuda (1925-2008) was sold at age 12 by her impoverished family to a geisha house. In 1957 she published ’Autobiography of a Geisha,’ which Hastings, the historian, quotes. The female parliamentarians leading the drive for the Prostitution Prevention Law roused Masuda to bitter sarcasm: ’All done up in their finery, mincing about so proudly on their tour of the red-light district.’  ’Among those making the laws,’ she demands, ’were there any women like us who couldn’t have survived if they hadn’t prostituted themselves?’  

[Japan Today]

One homeless advocacy group said the bill, which would require homeless people to perform unpaid labor to pay for involuntary treatment, ’evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow’ .

[Common Dreams]

The MAMDANI Act enacts sweeping immigration law changes that would deport, denaturalize, deny U.S. citizenship, or entry to any alien who is a member of a socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.

[Chip Roy]

Today, our understanding of inheritance has moved far beyond Mendel, and insights from genomics refute the prejudiced idea that racial inequality is determined by genes. Even so, many believe that inequality is genetic because they are biased by an inaccurate conception of race called ’genetic essentialism’ . We present data from a randomized trial to argue that if teachers move genetics instruction beyond Mendel and toward more complex genomics concepts—what we call ’humane genomics education’—they can protect students from believing in unscientific notions of genetic essentialism and support their scientifically accurate understanding of race as a social construction.

[Science]

The book plausibly argues that while anti-racist, feminist, ecological, or solidarity-based practices within everyday life are important, they do not, on their own, create a new form of social mediation. A new society does not emerge through a mere shift in values. It requires different social conditions of reproduction. This, too, represents a significant step forward compared to that left-wing moral politics which tends to reduce questions of social form to matters of attitude.

[Left wing communism NOT an infantile disorder,]

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

The wrong story (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earlier this year BBC television serialised a new adaptation of William Golding’s famous 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. There was uniform agreement among the critics that it was well made, but does the novel itself tell the right story? In portraying what happens to a group of British schoolboys stranded alone on an island, it shows a fairly rapid descent from civilised behaviour to conflict, chaos and eventually outright savagery. What’s usually been taken from the story is that evil, depravity and brutality are inherent in human nature and, if left to themselves, any group of humans will develop a mob mentality, end up at one another’s throats and a hierarchy of tyranny will form.

It’s a plot that certainly chimes in with a lot of what was being written and published widely in the decades following the Second World War. We need only think of books like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and (arguably) George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And from some sources at least this take on humanity kept on coming right up to the end of the century, an example being Richard Wrangham’s 1996 book, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. What such writers were doing in effect was to put forward a secular version of the longstanding religious dogma of original sin, a view of human beings as tainted by innate selfishness and aggression and in inevitable competition with one another. As for Golding, this was openly his agenda, as expressed in the words he used in an interview in 1970, where he said ‘man is a fallen being’ and went on to state: ‘He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state perilous’. He is also on record as saying about himself: ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am that sort by nature.’ So what he seems to be doing in Lord of the Flies is projecting his own dark view of humanity on to children while turning it into a supposed lesson about human nature for millions to read.

As for the TV adaptation, it must be said that its creator, the screenwriter Jack Thorne, did make an effort to temper the ‘human nature’ message by providing ‘back stories’ for its main protagonists. So, for example, we were given to deduce that the savagery of one of the most violent child characters might be, at least in part, a function of the loveless household he had been brought up in. But such tweaks only mitigated to a limited extent the original message carried by Golding’s book and which, as we have seen, the author himself was never shy of defending. In light of this, we can only agree with what Steve Coleman wrote in an article on Golding in the August 1993 edition of this journal: ‘Few novels have so eloquently served the cause of capitalist ideology which contends that humans are inherently aggressive, gullible, self-serving, easily led and uncooperative than Golding’s Lord of the Flies.’

So one thing to be said is that the 2026 TV version of the book came across as a bit of a throwback, largely reflecting as it did views about human nature which have been widely superseded since the book’s original publication. It seemed to close its eyes to the large amount of recent well-evidenced research and investigation on the topic to be found in works whose titles speak for themselves, for example Beyond War. The Human Potential for Peace; Team Human; Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity; Ultra-Social, many of which have been discussed in articles and reviews in the Socialist Standard (see Suggested reading ). The majority of these investigations conclude not that human beings are automatically non-selfish, non-competitive, or non-prone to violence but rather that selfishness, non-cooperation and fighting are not their most natural inclination, even if they are capable of being driven to such behaviour by circumstances. The historian Rutger Bregman, in particular, in his 2020 book, Humankind. A Hopeful History (reviewed in the Socialist Standard May 2021), explicitly takes up Golding’s challenge about the kind of situation portrayed in Lord of the Flies by recounting a ‘real-life’ story of shipwrecked schoolboys. What took place in this case was the exact opposite of what was portrayed by Golding. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and were washed up on a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, during which time they established a friendly cooperative way of living, taking care of one another before they were discovered and rescued. In other words, when real children found themselves alone on a real island, there was no impulse to tyranny, no one descended into savagery, nor was any kind of cruel hierarchy set up as in Golding’s novel. This, as well as other examples of human behaviour Bregman draws on, leads him to reject the notion of an innately self-serving, potentially evil human species. Instead anti-social behaviour, when it occurs, is seen as the reaction of the highly adaptable and flexible creatures that human beings are to conditioning and circumstance (ie, bad circumstances can make us bad people), all of which lies very far away from Golding’s dark view of humanity.

So, while there is no doubt that, when people feel unsafe, unseen, deprived, or their needs are unmet, their actions can shift in unpredictable and undesirable ways, overwhelmingly it is the human capacity for working cooperatively with others that comes to the fore when circumstances make it necessary. What we can envisage with some confidence, therefore, is the likelihood that this will be the default behaviour in the democratic free-access society of from each according to ability to each according to need that is campaigned for by socialists. So not difficult at all to imagine that, in a society organised in that way, peacefulness, cooperation and empathy – the diametrical opposite of what is portrayed in Lord of the Flies – will be the overwhelming order of the day.

Howard Moss

Laundering people: the Catholic work machine (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Irish state has never stopped warehousing women it deems sexually inconvenient. It merely changed the branding.

Feminism as a tool of repression

On the surface Ruhama is a feminist charity helping women affected by sex work and trafficking. Founded in 1989 by the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, Ruhama operates today as a secular organisation with state backing and trades in the language of women’s liberation. These same religious orders are the institutions that operated Ireland’s Magdalene laundries. The continuities between the two systems are not cosmetic. They are structural.

A history of enthralment of women

The Magdalene laundries operated from the eighteenth century until 1996. Women and girls deemed fallen, wayward, or simply poor were confined in institutions that functioned as commercial laundries. They worked without pay, washing linen for hospitals, prisons, churches and hotels. Exhausting work in brutal conditions. The reason? To discipline women’s sexuality through productive exploitation. The state outsourced its moral regulation to the Church, and the Church turned a profit.

In 1993, building work at the former High Park Magdalene laundry in Dublin, previously owned and run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity (sic) revealed the vile nature of those god-botherers when 155 bodies were recovered from an unmarked grave at the site. Most lacked death certificates. Some remain unidentified as they had previously passed through institutions that included Mother and Baby Homes, industrial schools, and psychiatric wards, all devoutly segregating and controlling women and children who violated the Catholic sexual moral code or lacked social power.

The modern rebranding

Ruhama emerged from this same institutional matrix. Its founders were not peripheral figures in the laundry system. They were its operators. It’s argued that historical continuity does not matter because the organisation has since secularised, but institutions survive by adapting their methods, not by abandoning their function. The Magdalene laundries would have you believe their inmates are fallen women in need of moral rescue. Ruhama frames its service users as traumatised victims lacking agency, who have false consciousness or are at risk of exploitation. The vocabulary has been updated. The categorisation of women as problems requiring institutional intervention has not.

Ruhama’s Bridge to Work programme ‘engaged with’ 102 women in 2022, with 37 reportedly gaining job placements. Only five of those placements were paid. Women were once again working without wages, this time under the banner of rehabilitation rather than penance. The institution that emerged from a system of unpaid laundry labour is now placing women in unpaid work placements and calling it empowerment.

Money in the temple

The funding structure reveals where the money goes. In 2024 Ruhama received €2,015,271, with 91.5 percent coming from the state. Of this, 99.64 percent was spent on salaries and administration. Despite taking in €96,945 in donations, the organisation directed €71,799 towards actual service users. A resource distribution model that’s not liberating women from economic precarity. It is a model that sustains an institutional apparatus while keeping its subjects dependent and unpaid.

Ruhama’s own reporting acknowledges that poverty is a primary driver pushing women toward sex work. The logical material response would be substantial direct economic support: rent assistance, debt relief, emergency grants, childcare funding, and guaranteed paid work. Instead, the organisation expands a category called ‘at risk of exploitation’, which is sufficiently elastic to include migrants, single mothers, homeless women, women in informal economies, and young women whose sexual behaviour is considered immoral. This is not targeted intervention against identifiable trafficking. It is preventive institutional capture of a broad population of economically vulnerable women.

Historically, women did not need to have committed a crime or suffered a defined abuse to be confined. Suspicion, poverty, perceived moral danger, or simply being inconvenient to family or state was sufficient. Contemporary anti-trafficking frameworks reproduce this logic but with humanitarian language. ‘At risk of exploitation’ functions as the modern equivalent of fallen or wayward: a classification to justify intervention, surveillance, and unpaid labour regardless of the woman’s own assessment of her situation.

The Magdalene laundries were never abolished. They were incorporated into the state apparatus.

What exists today is an organisation founded under a regime of moral control through unpaid labour, now continuing to place women in unpaid work placements under the promise of moral reform and freedom from sexual exploitation. The women are not being economically liberated. They are being redirected into socially respectable forms of precarity while the institution that processes them absorbs state funding and reproduces the same carceral feminism it claims to oppose.

(Figures on Bridge to Work placements and Ruhama’s 2024 funding and expenditure are taken from research by Grace, Artist and Activist, Ethical Hoes.)

A.T.

The free association of humanity (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A moneyless, borderless world of voluntary work and shared abundance

Imagine a world where no one is forced to work, no one has to sell their time to survive, and yet everything still gets done — not through money, wages, or coercion, but through cooperation, shared responsibility, and collective decision-making. A classless, borderless, moneyless society with all work voluntary is not a vision of laziness. It is a vision of a world organised around human freedom instead of economic pressure.

Life without money, borders, or classes

In this society, money no longer exists. There are no prices, no wages, no rent, and no debts. Borders do not divide people into competing national economies. And classes—owners and workers—no longer define who has access to life’s necessities.

Instead, society is organised around calculation in kind: real needs matched with real resources. If a community needs housing, planners don’t wait for investors. They calculate materials, labour availability, energy use, and build directly for need. If healthcare is required, it is allocated based on population demand, not insurance coverage or ability to pay.

Everything becomes transparent and practical:

• ‘We need 1 million meals this week — here’s how we produce and distribute them’
• ‘We need transport capacity expanded — here are the materials and teams available’
• We need new housing — here’s the construction plan’

The economy stops being a mysterious force and becomes a collective logistics system for human life.

All work is voluntary

The most radical change is simple: no one is forced to work.

There are no employers, no wages, and no threat of poverty to compel participation. Instead, work is voluntary — chosen freely by individuals or groups based on interest, skill, and social need.

At first this sounds impossible. But the structure of work changes completely:

• Essential tasks are made attractive, efficient, and well-supported
• Automation eliminates much repetitive labour
• Unpleasant tasks are minimised or rotated fairly among volunteers

People choose work because they understand its importance and have the freedom to refuse it

So instead of ‘you must do this or you lose your income’, it becomes:

• ‘This needs doing — who wants to take part?’
• And surprisingly, many do. Because when life is no longer dominated by survival anxiety, participation becomes meaningful rather than forced.

How essential work still gets done

A voluntary system doesn’t mean chaos—it means organisation without coercion.

For example:

• Food production: coordinated by agricultural teams using advanced planning systems. Volunteers and specialists rotate roles, supported by automation
• Healthcare: doctors, nurses, and technicians contribute because care is a shared social commitment and a profession of choice, not a financial necessity
• Infrastructure: energy, water, transport maintained by coordinated technical groups with shared responsibility
• Education: open access, lifelong learning, with people freely teaching and learning based on interest and need

Because no one is excluded from resources, people can move between roles, learn new skills, and contribute in different ways over time.

Why people would choose to participate

In a system where survival is guaranteed, motivation changes fundamentally:

• People are not working to avoid poverty
• They are working because they are part of a shared world
• They have time, security, and access to resources
• They can see the direct impact of their contribution

Human beings already voluntarily do enormous amounts of work today — caring for family, building open-source software, creating art, helping communities. A voluntary system expands that instinct rather than suppressing it.

Freedom becomes real

Without money or coercion:

• You are not tied to a job for survival
• You can move freely without economic barriers
• Education is open at any stage of life
• You can contribute, rest, learn, or create without penalty
• Freedom is no longer just a legal idea — it becomes material reality. You are free because your basic needs are no longer conditional.

The environment recovers

When production is no longer driven by profit:

• No planned obsolescence
• No unnecessary overproduction
• No industries competing to waste resources
• Long-lasting, repairable goods become standard
• Energy systems are planned for sustainability, not profit

Human activity can finally be aligned with ecological limits because there is no economic pressure to ignore them.

A world without war or borders

Wars today are rooted in competition over resources, trade routes and markets. In a borderless, moneyless system:

• there are no competing national economies
• no corporations or states fighting for market dominance
• no strategic control of resources for profit

Conflict won’t disappear entirely, but the structural incentives for war disappear. Cooperation becomes the default way of organising global life.

What this world feels like

The biggest change isn’t technical — it’s lived experience.

No more waking up thinking about bills. No more working just to survive. No more dividing your life into ‘work time’ and ‘real time’.

Instead:

• you participate because you choose to
• you contribute because you are secure
• you live in a society you collectively manage
• you have time — real time — to learn, rest, create, and explore

Work stops being something done under pressure. It becomes something done freely, socially, and consciously.

And the central question of life changes entirely.

Not:

‘How do I get by?’

But:

‘What can we build together next?’

Jake (AUSTRALIA)

Dear Editors – Is there a ‘Right of Nations to Self-determination’? (2026)

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

An organisation called Vote Palestine 2026 asked candidates in last month’s local elections to sign a pledge committing them, if elected to, among other things, ‘uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’. One of our candidates replied as below; to which another candidate replied. Here is the exchange published in the comment section of the Brixton Buzz.

Dear Vote Palestine 2026,

Thank you for your email. I must respectfully decline to sign.

As an anti-Zionist Jew and socialist standing in Brixton North, I share your horror at the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. But I cannot endorse a pledge framed around national self-determination.

The nation state, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is a prison house of nationalities. It tells workers to wave flags and forget they have no motherland to defend. Israeli and Palestinian workers alike are exploited by the same global system of wage labour and capital.

National liberation is a trap. A new state means new masters under a new flag, while wage labour, property rights, and class rule stay intact. Council divestment treats symptoms, not the disease.

My goal is not another state but the abolition of the state itself: a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless world community where people cooperate freely. Real self-determination means workers recognising their shared enemy across all borders.

I stand with working people everywhere. I cannot sign a pledge that reinforces the nationalism keeping them divided.

Yours sincerely,

Anya Krycek

Socialist Party Candidate for Brixton North, Lambeth

Reply from Eduardo Salgado:

I think historically, things happen in stages. According to Marxism-Leninism (ML), national liberation often must precede, or be strategically aligned with, workers’ liberation because imperialism makes national independence a necessary first step to create the conditions for a successful socialist revolution. Lenin viewed the national struggle in colonized or oppressed countries as a key component of the overall world socialist revolution. The core reasoning is that national liberation acts as a necessary step to ‘clear the decks’ for direct class struggle, as it removes the foreign oppressor and allows the working class to battle its local bourgeoisie. Lenin says on this issue:

• Support the national liberation struggle against imperialism unconditionally.
• Maintain independent working-class organization and leadership within that movement.
• Use the liberation struggle to raise demands for socialist transformation (land reform, workers’ rights).

Rejoinder from our candidate:

The stageist model, national liberation as a necessary prelude to socialist transformation, is not merely strategically mistaken but theoretically incompatible with the abolition of capitalism. The historical record of national liberation movements demonstrates a consistent pattern: the ‘stage’ of national liberation does not clear the decks for proletarian revolution it institutionalizes a new form of capitalist state. The foreign colonizer is replaced by a national bourgeoisie that maintains wage labour, commodity production, and extraction. The nation is not a proto political reality waiting to be liberated, but a category produced by capital itself a way of organising populations into manageable units. To prioritise national liberation is to reinforce the very abstractions; nation, citizenship, the state that capital requires to function.

‘The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’, from The Communist Manifesto (1848).

The Socialist Party position is that the proletariat has no stake in which bourgeoisie administers its exploitation. Anti-imperialism that stops at the nation state leaves exploitation intact. The state form itself prevents the direct social relations that would constitute a break with capital. Socialism cannot proceed through stages it must begin immediately in the content of struggle, as the practical activity of breaking with wage labour, money, and the state. National liberation changes the flag and people in government, it does not interrupt the reproduction of capital. To make it a ‘necessary step’ is to permanently defer the only act that could end exploitation: the immediate social transformation of society by and for the working class. We don’t seek the people’s commodity production we seek abolition of the proletariat.

Editors’ note:

Questioned on ITV on election day, Green Party leader Zack Polanski was reported as saying that ‘no country has a right to exist’. His critics saw this as a reference to Israel, but it would equally apply to Palestine, indeed to Britain and every other state. States may exist but have no ‘right’ to; which rather undermines the Vote Palestine pledge that many of his party’s candidates signed up to.

Blogger's Note:

A version of this correspondence was previously published on the blog back in May of this year.

Cooking the Books: Housing: the market versus promises (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of Labour’s election promises in 2024 was to build 1.5 million new houses by the end of its normal term in office in 2029. Actually, it wasn’t a promise that the government would itself organise the building of this number of houses but a promise that it would create conditions in which profit-seeking housing ‘developers’ would.

This made achieving the 1.5 million target dependent on it being profitable for the house-building firms to build that many new houses. Which was why, in an article in February 2025, we expressed scepticism about Labour being able to meet its target as it had no control over which way the market would turn. ‘The 1.5 million target,’ we wrote, ‘will only be met if the market expands enough’. Now, analysts are concluding that the market won’t expand to that extent.

An article in the Times (4 May) by Tom Haywood headed ‘Mayday: distressing signs in housing data’ and subtitled ‘Labour’s 1.5m target may be dead in the water after a steep fall in property enquiries’ is a case in point. Noting that a survey of estate agents covering March ‘showed the steepest monthly drop in new buyer enquiries in almost three years’, Haywood wrote:

‘All of this is yet another blow to Labour’s ambitious target of delivering 1.5 million homes by the end of 2029, which now looks close to impossible. The government needs developers to be busier, not quieter, given that they will only build when they can sell at the price they need to make a decent return for shareholders’ (our emphasis).

Precisely. As further evidence, and more convincing than one month’s figures, Haywood noted that hedge funds are betting that the share prices of house-builders and their suppliers will fall in the future, an indication that these vulture capitalists are not expecting the companies they have targeted to make much profit in the next few years. The betting takes the form of ‘short selling’, in which the vultures borrow shares at their current price, sell them, buy them back at their expected future lower price, then return them to the original owners and pocket the difference. Money, apparently, is also to be made from houses not being built!

Faced with rising costs but falling demand, house-builders are unable to pass on to potential buyers all the increased costs and so ‘are struggling to make the economics of projects in the capital stack up’, but not just in London as one survey ‘found that it was not financially viable to build homes in almost half of England.’

There is not much the government can do to make building houses more profitable. Why, then, does the government not give money to local councils to build more houses, as certain naive reformists are demanding? Well, for a start, it hasn’t got the money to give or, rather, could only take it from profits either through increased taxes (these ultimately fall on profits) or borrow it at a higher interest rate that would have to be paid from profits. Which no government, under economic pressure to give priority to profit-making, as all governments of capitalism are, can do, at least not without making general economic conditions worse.

Under capitalism, where houses are commodities produced for profit, there is no way out. Houses will only be produced directly for use — simply for people to live in — when this is the aim of all production. And that is possible only when the resources to produce what people need cease to be managed by profit-seeking companies pursuing ‘a decent return for shareholders’ and become the common heritage of all under democratic control.