SPGB Meetings (1952)

Party News from the April 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

• Fulham Branch's meeting on "Sex and Sin", with Tony Turner as the featured speaker, apparently generated a lot of interest.
• The June 1952 Socialist Standard carried reports of the SPGB May Day rallies which took place in London and Glasgow.

SPGB Snippets: Poverty grows (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

April 8, 2026

There are over 13 million people in the UK living in relative poverty (which means in a household with income below 60% of the average income). This includes four million children and nearly 1.7 million pensioners. The figures are for the year to March last year, during which the total rose by half a million.

The Work and Pensions Minister described the situation as ‘wholly unacceptable’. This is right of course, but, like all politicians, she has no understanding of the causes. It’s due to capitalism, a system which, in the midst of potential abundance, relies on poverty and inequality as a means of coercing people into wage labour and hence exploitation.

Sting in the Tail: The common factor (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The common factor

Following the Estonia tragedy:

"Swedish and Finnish ferry lines admitted hushing-up six serious incidents which preceded the Estonia’s sinking ” (Teletext 30 September).

These roll-on roll-off ferries are liable to capsize when even a relatively small amount of water enters the vehicle decks, yet Alan Clark, ex-Tory MP, said on Question Time (29 September) that marine architects can quite easily design ships which prevent this, but, with touching concern for human life asked “would this really be worth all the expense and inconvenience?”

And this is what it is all about:

“The economic reason why vehicle decks are not subdivided to prevent rapid capsize is that this would obstruct bailing, increase turnaround times and reduce the number of cars or lorries a ship should carry. That would mean higher fares, lower profits, or both — and at a time, so far as British operators are concerned, when ferries are facing fresh competition from the Channel tunnel” (Guardian 24 September).

Every disaster which comes along, be it Piper Alpha, the King's Cross Underground fire, the train crash at Clapham Junction or the Herald of Free Enterprise, provides evidence aplenty that capitalism’s remorseless drive to cut costs at the expense of safety is the prime cause of them all.

Healthy profits

Today’s economic climate has seen many employers cut the wages and conditions and increase the workload of their employees.

This often leads to the deterioration of the physical and mental health of the workers involved, but some other employers recognise that this approach is counter-productive and are concerned to protect and even improve the health and well-being of their employees.

Companies such as Grand Met, Glaxo. Sainsbury, Marks and Spencer, IBM and Nestle are participating in the Wellness Forum which promotes preventative health care by health screening along with weight control, anti-smoking and anti-alcohol abuse programmes.

There are sound commercial reasons behind this. A spokesman for the Institute of Personnel and Development told the Independent:

“Employers in their own interests have got to maximise the use of people at work as far as they can. Absenteeism is very expensive ” (9 September).

This absenteeism is estimated by the CBI to cost £13 billion a year, and the Independent adds that the Forum has “a belief in the correlation between a healthy workforce and healthy profits”.

Looking after the goose that lays the golden eggs always made more sense than killing it.

YC’s get KO’d

A new book True Blues, claims that Tory Party membership has slumped from 2.8 million in 1952 to below 500,000 now and is still falling.

Feeling better? Well, there’s more good news, because the Young Conservatives are set for the chop. And no wonder. Having been taken over by the “radical right” in much the same way as Labour's youth wing was by Trotskyists, the YC’s have long been a thorn in the side of the parent party.

There were well-publicised links with the BNP and other racists groups, support for apartheid, jokes about the Holocaust, vicious faction fighting and lots of hooliganism From a peak of 100,000 membership has plunged to around 5,000, so Tory Central Office probably reckons that what’s left isn’t worth the hassle.

A Tory' youth organisation may well continue to exist in one form or another, but the heady days when the YC’s seemed to consist of youngsters all desperately trying to outdo one another in sounding more reactionary and bloodthirsty, are probably over for good.

Heller’s history

Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, published in 1962, was a brilliant and hilarious account of the corruption and insanity of capitalism set against the background of World War Two.

The long-awaited sequel is now ready, so Sally Vincent travelled to interview Heller, and her account of their meeting appeared in Weekend Guardian (24 September).

Heller’s perception of capitalism has not dimmed. According to Sally Vincent he thinks:

“We can produce enough food to feed the world, hut simultaneously can V because there's no profit producing enough food. ”

And he apparently thinks that “Marx was right”, although about what he didn't say, but his perception leaves him when it comes to interpreting history which he thinks is “autonomous and proceeds independently of the people who make it.”

Marx took a very different view: 

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. ” 

As a novelist, Heller takes some beating, but when it comes to explaining history then it has to be Marx.

Doubting Thomas

The sacking of the Sussex vicar Anthony Freeman for revealing that he doesn’t believe in God highlights the problem facing many of these sky pilots.

Take the example of an anonymous Church of Scotland minister, whose dilemma was reported in Scotland on Sunday (14 August):

“Thomas does not believe in God. There was no virgin birth, no resurrection, Jesus was a mere inspirational mortal like Ghandi and there is, most sadly, no life after death. The last bit gets tricky, for he must pretend to believe in some kind of afterlife to soothe many of the pensioners he talks to each Sunday from the pulpit. "

All workers must sell their ability to work for a wage or salary, and these professional holy men are no different. Here is what our reverend gentleman has to say about it:

“To be honest, I've got a family to feed and a career and a pension to think about. I don't think I should put my job on the line just for the sake of discussion of some arcane beliefs and ideas that probably don't really matter anyway. ”

Blogger's Notes: 

• Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was reviewed in the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard.
• The King's Cross Underground fire was covered in the March 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard.
• The Piper Alpha disaster was covered in the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Capitalist agriculture . . . the profits of doom (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since Malthus, population growth has been the subject of heated controversy. By and large, disputants in the debate have tended to polarise into two camps.

For the Neo-Malthusian pessimists there is no prospect of an end to world hunger while population growth continues, indeed it could well increase as the latter begins to exceed — and thereby undermine — the carrying capacity of the land.

Then there are the Technological Optimists. For them, the concept of a “carrying capacity” is problematic; it is not something that is fixed but can be enlarged by human effort and ingenuity. Indeed, Ester Boserup has argued in her book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth that population pressure, far from being a harbinger of doom, is a prime stimulus to technological change. Thus, extensive farming practices, which become subject to diminishing returns, are abandoned and more intensive forms of land use are introduced, resulting in an increased “carrying capacity”. In fact, some of the wealthiest parts of the world — like Western Europe — are also amongst the most densely populated.

Where do Socialists stand in this debate? At first glance, we appear to side with the technological optimists in asserting that the world is not overpopulated. We base this claim on an empirical analysis of the relationship between global food demand and the global capacity to satisfy that demand. This suggests that the world could adequately feed its population. According to the World Bank in its 1986 Report Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in Developing Countries, enough grain is already produced to provide everyone with 3,600 calorics per day, well above the recommended 2,400 calories for an adequate diet — though, much of this, it should be said, is (inefficiently) used to feed livestock.

The prevalence in hunger does not arise from any shortfall in agricultural potential but from the operation of economic factors which impede full realisation of this potential for the benefit of all. The objective of capitalist production is not primarily to meet human needs. Instead, human needs are only met to the extent that these are backed up by purchasing power. That is why vast quantities of food are destroyed and why farmers are paid not to produce, while millions starve because they lack the means to buy or grow food. In short, the much-vaunted productivity of capitalism has now reached the point of open and irreconcilable conflict with its social relations of production, its mode of distribution.

There is a further point on which we part company with many technological optimists. This concerns the nature of technology itself. This is not independent of, but is profoundly conditioned by, the social relations of production. In this regard we share the concern of many environmentalists about the impact of modem capitalist agriculture on the environment. It is conceivable that this, rather then pressure of population, may ultimately precipitate the doomsday scenario. Unless, that is, a socialist transformation of society — and thus of its productive methods — can intervene first.

Not neutral

Technological innovation does not occur in a vacuum; it has socioeconomic consequences in a capitalist economy which benefit some but often at the expense of others. An example is the Green Revolution initiated in the 1950s 

This represented a major incursion of an industrialised mode of fanning into Third World countries. Based on the introduction of new high yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereal crops, it sought to increase the productivity of local agriculture. However, this required the application of a whole package of inputs, around which HYVs were specifically designed having in mind, the interests of multinational conglomerates supplying such inputs. This absence of any one of these inputs meant that the expected gains in productivity would not be realised, and HYVs would tend to perform poorly compared with traditional crops. Thus, without irrigation, nutrient uptake would be much reduced, without pesticides, the very inputs, such as chemical fertilisers, that promote crop growth, will encourage a proliferation of weeds, and so on.

It is this in-built complementarity of inputs, not just the costs of individual inputs, which explains why it is mainly richer farmers, particularly in Asia and Latin America, who have benefited from “Green Revolution” technology, accentuating the process of land concentration in these countries at the expense of poorer farmers. It raises the critical threshold at which farmers are able to afford, and make effective use, of such technology.

But what of the long-term productivity of an industrial mode of fanning promoted by capitalism, i.e. its sustainability? To increase output, more land could be cultivated. However, much of this uncultivated land is ecologically marginal and would be highly vulnerable under capitalist industrial farming. Alternatively, cultivated land could be made more productive. Since the 1950s, rapid increases in output — faster than population growth except in Africa — have been based upon increasing applications of four major non-land inputs: artificial fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation. However, there are now growing doubts about the wisdom of such an approach. Since the 1970s, there has been a levelling-off of per capita output.

According to J. Harris in World Agriculture and the Environment, these earlier increases were made possible because they occurred in a world not yet heavily damaged by soil erosion. But today, the current annual rate of topsoil loss — 25 billion tonnes — is such that the world can expect to lose 50 percent of its topsoil by 2050. Since there is a strong correlation between topsoil depth and crop yields, this is an alarming development for the future of fanning.

Soil erosion

Applying yet more fertilisers to compensate for the loss of soil fertility will not solve the problem in long run. Indeed, US agriculture today uses five times more fertiliser than in 1947 to produce the same amount of crop, but it is not clear whether this growing demand for fertilisers — particular phosphates — can be indefinitely met. There are also many minor nutrients and trace elements, lost through harvesting, which are not being replaced by industrial fanning, but which may be essential to long-term maintenance of yields. Furthermore, excessive applications of fertilisers actually exacerbate the problem of erosion by facilitating a breakdown in soil structure — both directly, through its effect on soil chemistry and, indirectly, by allowing farmers to dispense with organic recycling, leading to a decline in humus content which binds the soil together and helps it to hold water and oxygen essential for plant growth.

A similarly worry emerges in the case of other major agricultural inputs. The narrowing down of the genetic basis of farming, typified by HYVs, and the simplification of the agro-ecological landscape associated with market-oriented monocultures, has created ideal conditions for the spread of pests. To counter this threat, chemical pesticides have been applied on an increasing scale. However, it is often the natural predators of pests which are more severely affected by this than the pests themselves which, because of their larger populations, are more easily able to develop mutations giving them resistance to pesticides. This in turn, tempts farmers to apply more frequent, and stronger, doses, but the evidence suggests that, as with artificial fertilisers, this too may be subject to diminishing returns. As a result, farmers find themselves trapped in what is aptly called a “pesticide treadmill” while a significant proportion of output — some 45 percent overall — continues to be lost through pests.

Increased mechanisation and tractorisation too contributed to soil erosion through deep ploughing, a practice that is particularly damaging when applied to the fragile soils of many tropical countries.

Sustainable

Technology, as pointed out, is not neutral; it is conditioned by the economic system in which it is applied. Capitalist agriculture is constrained by the profit system and the need to maximise output in the short-term without regard to wider consequences for the environment and society. The type of technology this entails cans only be modified with extreme difficulty. Farmers must, afterall, seek a financial return on any investment they make.

The trend towards environmental deterioration and social dislocation associated with capitalist agriculture, is likely to gather pace as recent developments in the world economy unfold. An example is the new GATT agreement which covers 90 percent of the world’s agricultural trade which will further strengthen the hand of agribusiness at the expense of many small farmers and undermine much existing environmental legislation. Similarly, structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF on many debtor countries to reduce their debts will increase pressure on them to expand cash crop production and to that end employ industrial methods of farming, despite the fact that the cost of these have risen far more steeply in recent years in comparison with the price of agricultural commodities.

In short, agriculture today stands at a critical crossroad; where we go from here will have profound repercussions for both urban consumers of the products of farming as well as farmers themselves who, lest we forget, still constitute a majority of humankind. We can choose to retain the status quo and risk going down the road of possible, if not probable, ruin. Or we can decide to take Earth, and all that is in and on it, into common ownership and democratic control. By fundamentally changing our relationship to one another, we shall fundamentally change our relationship to nature. You cannot do one without the other.

Freed from the constraints of market competition, we could begin to adapt our technology to suit our needs within limits imposed by nature We cannot predict precisely what this entails but we can tentatively sketch the broad outlines of a new agriculture:

• A scaling-down in the overall use of industrial inputs with some redistribution towards those parts of the world where marginal productivity of such inputs is still relatively high.
• The adoption of a more labour-intensive approach to farming, particularly in the more developed areas, where today the proportion of socially unproductive labour is highest, i.e. occupations essential to the functioning of capitalism which will disappear in socialism.
• Greater emphasis to be placed on small-scale mass-produced “appropriate technology” which would rapidly transform the situation that currently exists in the less-developed areas of the world.
• Selective reversion to traditional farming practices, such as intercropping and agro-forestry, combined with a careful "holistically-oriented” application of useful innovations in the field of biotechnology, e.g. self-fertilising crops.
• Blurring of the distinction between town and country; a huge expansion of small-scale horticulture in and around existing conurbations with the aim of ensuring a substantial and diverse supply of locally-grown food, thus incidentally reducing the costs of transportation.
• Related to the above, a massive phased programme to systematically overhaul existing urban infrastructure to facilitate the return of off-farm wastes to the land.
• Finally, to conserve ecologically marginal land by restricting the use of it to rotational/extensive farming.

To those who dismiss this, our response is quite simple: never has the need for a clear and practical alternative to the chaos of capitalism been more pressing, more vital. Only on this basis can we ensure a fruitful and sustainable future for ourselves and our children’s children. The seeds of that future lie within us; it is up to us to nurture and cultivate them.

Robin Cox

Labour, Tory . . . Same Old Story (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can you spot the difference? Which is the party of Law and Order, Family Values, Prudent Public Spending, the Market Economy: Labour or the Tories? Such is the public confusion over this that even the Tories have thought of exploiting it:

“Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor, and other key members of the Cabinet favoured attacking Mr Blair as a pale copy of the Tory party. This is called ‘the Coke option’ by researchers who say the Tories represent ‘the real thing'” (Independent, 26 July).

Since Blair became Leader in July Labour’s strategy has been to criticise the Tories on their terms –as incompetent managers of the economy and unable to implement tough policies against criminals, single mothers and other scroungers. Guided by their marketing advisers, Labour politicians don’t attack the Tories’ policies but only the incompetent and ineffective way in which they are carried out. Vote for us, Blair is saying, and we’ll carry out these policies better than the Tories. The aim is to attract enough ex-Tory voters for him to be able to enter Number Ten as Britain’s next prime minister.

Labour being the vote-catching party it always has been, it had to come to this sooner or later: the end of Labour as a party of radical reform of capitalism. Labour never was a socialist party but it did once see its role as trying to shift the balance of power and wealth under capitalism in favour of working people. They never did do this of course nor, given the nature of capitalism, could they have done so. But this was what they said and this at least showed that they thought capitalism was far from being the acceptable economic system they now think it is.

Incredible as it might seem today, Denis (now Lord, of course) Healey told a cheering Labour Conference in 1973 that he was going to squeeze the rich till the pips squeaked:

“Our job is to get power, and we join battle armed with the most radical and comprehensive programme we have had since 1945. Its aim is honestly stated, to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families . . . We are going to introduce a tax on wealth. We are going to turn the estate duty into a real tax… I warn you, there are going to be howls of anguish from the 80,000 rich people. “

Labour got to power, but it was working people who ended up getting squeezed till the pips squeaked. The result was a massive wave of strikes in the public sector over the winter of 1978/9 – and the election of the Tories under Thatcher pledged, as she openly boasted, to undo everything Labour claimed to champion. Which, as demanded by capitalism’s worsened economic conditions, she did and, spiteful woman that she was, with glee. State industries were privatised, council houses sold off, local services axed, welfare payments slashed and the health service subjected to market forces.

Power for what?

Today all that Labour has retained of Healey’s rhetoric are the first six words: “our job is to get power”. Since radical phrases, indeed any definite policies, are now perceived to be a drag on this drive to get power they have been ruthlessly abandoned. Just attack the Tories as incompetent and clapped out, the marketing team advise, and, anxious for power, the Labour politicians oblige.

But power for what? In the end, since they are only projecting themselves as better and more competent managers of the status quo, it amounts to power for its own sake. The Labour leaders want power because they are professional politicians and the ambition of every professional politician is to become a government minister.

Is this being too cynical? Can they be that bad? Perhaps not, but it doesn’t really matter since even if they were sincere (and, on the law of averages, some of them must be) they still wouldn’t be able to make the capitalist market economy work other than as a system that puts profits first and so as a problem-ridden system incapable of meeting human needs properly.

In so far as they might have a theory of what they would do if they get power it will be no different from that behind the failed policies of ail previous Labour governments : trying to redistribute profits towards socially desirable projects such as a better health service, better education and better housing.

This involves accepting the profit system – not a problem of course for Blair and company – and allowing firms to make the maximum profits, justified on the grounds that this also supposedly maximises the resources available for social spending.

The trouble is this makes what a reformist government can do depend on the profitability of capitalist industry. As Richard Crossman, a Labour politician who was to become a senior Cabinet Minister in the 1964 Wilson Labour government, wrote following Labour’s defeat in the 1959 election on such a classic reformist programme:

“A Socialist Government, it is often argued, would be able to finance the huge extension of welfare, education and other pubic services by encouraging a much faster rate of development in the private sector of industry and then taxing away a sufficient amount of the profits. This was the policy put forward by the Labour Party at the last election and in the short run any Labour Government would to attempt it. But experience should have taught us that the run might be very short indeed. In the Affluent Society no Government is able to give orders to Big Business. After one budget a Labour Chancellor who tried to squeeze private industry too hard would soon discover that he was not master in his own house and that there is a relatively low level above which taxation rates, whether on the individual or the company, are only raised at the cost of provoking tax evasion and avoidance so widespread that revenue is actually reduced. If the motive of your economy is the profit-making of large-scale modem private enterprise, a Labour Government must be prepared to allow very large profits indeed and to admit that the number of golden eggs he can remove is extremely limited. ” (Labour in the Affluent Society, 1960)

His answer was that Labour should therefore seek to establish an enlarged state sector so as to give a Labour government more room to manoeuvre. The present Labour leaders would recoil in horror at such as suggestion, not that anyway it would have worked to protect a Labour government from the economic pressures of capitalism to keep costs down and profits up. Nor that the Labour governments of which Crossman was subsequently a member made any real attempt to do it.

Profits first

In fact Labour ministers ended up making speeches accepting that profits should be encouraged. Here is how one of them (Harold Lever who, like Healey was later ennobled) put it:

“Labour’s economic plans are not in any way geared to more nationalisation; they are directed towards increased production on the basis of the continued existence of a large private sector. Within the terms of the profit system it is not possible, in the long run, to achieve sustained increases in output without an adequate flow of profit to promote and finance them. The Labour leadership know as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot be made to move faster without extra fuel.” (Observer, 3 April 1966).

This could be Blair or Gordon Brown or any of the other Labour leaders speaking and well sums up what will be the only economic policy that a future Labour government will be able to pursue. Profits First, that’s the economic law of the capitalist system, which all governments of capitalism have to accept and apply.

If you accept the profit system, then you have to accept that profits have to be made and all that this implies, including opposing strikes, restraining wages and keeping taxes on Big Business low. Labour does accept the profit system, much more openly than they have done in the past, to the extent that today they are even prepared to advocate these things while still in opposition.

Nobody who is against the profit system has any place in Tony Blair’s bland new Labour Party. If you want more Law and Order, more Family Values, more blurred nothingness you might as well join Labour as the Tories or Liberals. But if you are a Socialist and want to get rid of the profit system you should be in a democratically-organised socialist party campaigning for socialism and nothing else.

Adam Buick

The Rise and Fall of Clause Four (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1918 the Labour Party transformed itself into a national organisation. At the same time it adopted a list of Party Objects, the fourth of which read: ‘To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.”

This was the nearest the Labour Party ever came to committing itself on paper to Socialism, since this could be interpreted as a somewhat wordy definition of real Socialism not all that different from the Object we in the Socialist Party adopted when we were founded in 1904: ‘The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.”

However, since it was drawn up by the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and since the Fabians stood for a state capitalism run by an educated elite, it was meant to be understood as a reference to state ownership, or nationalisation, i.e. state capitalism.

This was confirmed when in 1929, as a result of left-wing pressure to commit the Labour Party to the nationalisation of the banks, the words “distribution and exchange” were added after “the common ownership of the means of production”. This made it absolutely clear that what was envisaged was not real socialism but state capitalism.

To talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange is a contradiction in terms. Where there is common ownership there can be no exchange since exchange can only take place between separate owners, i.e. where private ownership not common ownership exists. In a socialist society based on common ownership goods are simply distributed not exchanged, so there is no need for money, banks and the rest of the financial system.

After Labour lost the 1959 election the then leader Gaitskill tried to get rid of Clause 4 on the grounds that it was an electoral liability, but had to back down in face of the opposition. Now Tony Blair is going to try again, with more chance of success it appears.

In a sense he his right: Labour does not stand for state capitalism – it stands for working within the present profit-driven market system dominated privately-owned companies. It stands for capitalism pure and simple. The dropping of Clause 4 will merely make this absolutely clear.

Pressures in the Ivory Towers . . . (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

As ever when the A-level results appear in the middle of August, there was a mad scramble by would-be students to get onto the university course of their choice, or at least the best compromise between what they wanted to do and what their exam results would enable them to do. But this year it wasn’t just a matter of students fighting to find a university and department that would accept them. Universities, too, were desperate to attract enough students to get the maximum income from their paymasters. From newspaper and TV adverts to teletext announcements, universities vied to publicise themselves and those of their courses that still had vacancies.

The government boasts about the expansion of university education, but as usual what lies behind such assertions is more revealing than the claim itself. In part the “expansion” has been achieved by simply renaming polytechnics and some colleges as universities. The growth in numbers of students to over a million (double the figure 15 years ago) has not been matched by increases in university funding, meaning accommodation shortages, larger classes and overcrowded libraries. Most significant of all, student grants, which were never exactly generous, have been replaced by a mixed system of grants and loans. With the recession meaning that vacation jobs have all but dried up, and with restrictions on the claiming of benefit, students are now in a really precarious financial situation. Half finish their courses with a debt of £4,000, while one-in-five have considered giving up their courses because of financial problems. One-in-four take part-time jobs during terms, which is bound to affect their academic performance

About one student in eight now fails their course or drops out “voluntarily”. This is due in part to financial pressures, and in part to the increased staff-student ratio, which means less individual attention. Also many students end up in the rush for a degree place by taking courses in which they have little interest but which still have vacancies. In the recession a degree is no guarantee of a job ( not that it ever was) but it is still a qualification that many employers demand. One simple sign of the extent to which job requirements have invaded the university system is the number of courses with “Applied” in their titles: everything from Biology to French or Social Sciences can now be “applied” (to the real world of profit-making, of course).

The government decision to expand higher education was intended to provide a supply of trained graduates for a technological society demanding a high level of scientific and managerial skills. As we just said, this was to be done on the cheap, with the cost per student being drastically reduced. The teaching year is gradually being increased, and the pressure for two-year degrees is mounting. Universities were instructed to pile-’em-high, with financial penalties for not reaching their quota of students. The high drop-out rate is a complete waste as far as the government is concerned. The recession put paid to the need to carry on increasing the supply of graduates, but student demand for university places continued to rise. This seems now to have reached its peak at 400,000 applications for 270,000 places.

Since they ceased to be privileged enclaves where the sons of the ruling class could study Classics, universities have never been ivory towers. Rather they have come more and more to resemble factories with production lines and quotas. Money and the demands of capitalism are the vital criteria, while educational considerations take a back seat. 

Paul Bennett

Life and Times: Decline (and fall?) (2026)

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

The other day I walked down what used to be the main shopping street of my city centre. When you drive down it, as I frequently do, you don’t take in too much of what’s around you. But on foot I had a close-up view of the stretch that, not so long ago, had some of the best known and most popular shops and businesses in town. What did I see? As I walked along from one end of the street to the other, these were the establishments on view:

1. T’s Nail and Spa (operating)
2. Flamingo’s Vintage (closed and to let)
3. Shaw’s Drapers (closed and to let)
4. The Hanbury Pub (open – having closed and reopened several times)
5. Winning Post Betting Office (operating)
6. Della Cura Authentic Italian Restaurant (closed and not operating)
7. Info Nation NHS Health Board Support (closed and not operating)
8. Chic and Elegant Bridal Wear (open)
9. Ali’s Barbers (open)
10. Greyhound Rescue Charity Shop (open)
11. Warhammer Shop (open)
12. RSPCA Charity Shop (open)
13. Kings Mart Convenience Store (open 6am till late)
14. Brides Bridal Wear (open)

What did this tell me? Firstly, it told me the obvious thing – that this city centre like so many others across the country has taken a hit as a place for people to come and do their shopping, to mingle and maybe to socialise over a drink. It also told me that shops that close are likely to stay closed or, at best, be turned into charity shops, barbers or open-all-hours convenience stores. All of which gives the place a bit of a run-down, derelict look. But, as well as this, walking along that stretch also made me think of the loss of livelihood and perhaps way of life for the people who’d previously worked there, whether as bosses or employees. Some of them at least (for example, the women who’d worked in Shaw’s Drapers for years and I’d got to know a bit from going in there) would have had their existences upended. True, some may have found opportunities or jobs elsewhere, but others may not and the very process of needing to look would have been likely to cause worry, anxiety and maybe even deprivation, all of course hidden from public view. Not that what I saw on that street is unique to this particular location. A similar situation is to be found across many towns and cities in this country and others with bleak effects both on the urban environment and on the people who worked in it.

How much does it matter? After all, people can still obtain most of the goods or services those shops once provided either online or from those large, if usually soulless, edge-of-town or out-of-town stores and supermarkets. And the chances are that most of the people working in the establishments that have gone will have found other work that enables them to make ends meet. As for the visual decline, if the loss of shopping outlets means that people have little or less need to frequent city centres, then they will rarely even come into contact with that.

But isn’t there another side to it? The degeneration of town and city centres has not just lessened their attraction as places to shop but has also meant the diminution of a communal environment for people to meet and fraternise with others and generally feel part of a wider community. Such closeness to fellow human beings has been a fundamental feature of human societies over the 300,000 years that the species has existed, even if it’s something that today’s capitalist’s society militates against. With profit as its mainspring, human togetherness and community hardly feature among its priorities.

And in fact, apart from the demise of community, what we are seeing on my High St with the disappearance or at best rapid turnover of small businesses, is the tireless, unrelenting mission capitalism imposes on all who live under it. It is a system that simply can’t keep still. It ducks, dives and twists at every moment as the market dictates and in pursuit of financial returns. The system’s very nature allows nothing else and at its sharp end are those who do all the work, be they self-employed business owners or, more overwhelmingly, wage and salary workers.

But isn’t there a bright side? On the one hand we have the competitive dog-eat-dog mentality that the system’s money-driven, growth-at-all-costs logic drives and that some say is just part of ‘human nature’. Yet, on the other, the fundamentally friendly, cooperative and empathetic nature of human beings never ceases to shine through in the countless exchanges that take place between people every day and everywhere. It may be in the concern for the welfare of others to be seen in charity and other voluntary activities or just the simple everyday exchanges between vehicle drivers as they slow down or stop to let others pass and are acknowledged with a wave. This gives us hope that, whatever the fate of the High Street shops and businesses in my own city or elsewhere, the basic ineradicable feeling of fellowship that characterises humans will eventually be fully activated and be part of what drives workers to unite to replace the current production for profit society with a quite different one of production for need.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: David and Goliath (2026)

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

Possibly one of the least attractive neologisms of the modern tech era is the word ‘enshittification’. But its coiner, science fiction author and post-scarcity activist Cory Doctorow, doesn’t much care. It’s an ugly word for an ugly thing. And once you are aware of it, you can’t unsee it, because it’s everywhere.

It all starts with a basic and age-old capitalist conundrum. How, as a manufacturer or service provider, can you come to dominate the market and crush all the competition? If you are hopelessly naïve, you might plan to do it by having the best quality product. An easier way, as practised by the likes of Amazon, Uber, Shein, Temu, and many others, is to borrow vast amounts of venture capital (VC) in order to sell at a loss, for long enough to undercut and wipe out the opposition. Then, when you’re the last company standing, the fun can really start.

Your VC-funded product doesn’t need to be perfect, just better and cheaper than the rest. People will flock to it, never suspecting a thing. After all, don’t we live in a world of limitless improvement? That’s how capitalism works, right?

And thus, you conquer the market by making your customers 100 percent happy. You’ve hit peak product. Nothing to change. Nothing more to do. Just sit back and watch the direct debits roll in.

In theory, anyway. Degrowthers and Doughnutters argue that the finite planet can’t afford infinite growth, but what if the economy could achieve a ‘sweet spot’, neither growing nor shrinking, that observes environmental boundaries? All manner of sustainable social benefits could flow from that. It’s a seductive idea. But capitalism is not a static system. It has its own laws of motion. Nobody has the choice to stand still. If you’re not racing ahead, you’re losing ground to the competition. Eat their profits, or they’ll eat yours. If the system isn’t racing ahead, there are no new profits to attract new investments. It either grows, or it withers.

And let’s not forget that you achieved peak product and market dominance at a loss. First you need to claw back those losses, and then your Silicon Valley VC investors will want a big fat return on top. But you’ve already maxed out the market. Where do you go from there? The answer, the only possible answer, is enshittification. Here’s how it works.

You’ve locked in your customers and killed the competition, so now you can price-gouge them. But it doesn’t stop there. Instead of one-off sales, you force subscription models on them so that they have to keep paying forever. If you run a streaming service, open up new income by riddling it with adverts your customers have to pay extra not to see. If it’s a social media platform, collect oceans of personal data to sell to third parties. If you own a phone product, issue updates that make it progressively ‘laggy’ until the customer surrenders and buys a newer model. If you own an electric car company, entice buyers in with fancy software services and then save money by shutting them down. If you own an operating system, design a new version that won’t work on existing computers, forcing everyone to chuck theirs in landfill and buy a new one. Cram it with unremovable resource-draining bloatware and charge extra for a ‘premium’ clean version. Build in intrusive and interfering AI that nobody asked for, with forced logins for simple desktop tools. Add a handy ‘Recall’ function that photographs their desktop every second, including all their passwords, website visits, personal messages, Tinder profiles and online banking details, and stores that information in your company servers where it’s a target for hackers. Ignore the protests. You know what your customers need better than they do. And besides, you’ve fired all your human customer service reps so now the whingers and wailers have to navigate a tortuous odyssey through concentric rings of automated responses and AI chatbots. In short, start with customer satisfaction, end with customer extraction, which Chinese scammers call ‘pig-butchering’. Lock in the suppliers too, and repeat up the chain.

Windows 11 is getting furious blowback for being enshittified. Users are turning in disgust to Linux, which is free, has no viruses and runs on any old machine with a fraction of the resource requirements. Others are resurrecting the antiquated Windows 7, now topping lists on pirate bittorrent sites. Piracy itself, once neutralised by the ease and reach of ad-free Netflix, is now resurging as the streamer market has fractured into a proliferation of platforms, each demanding your money while thrusting ads at you. The subscription model backfires as customers adopt the same cynicism as the corporations: ‘If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing’. The double standards are obvious to many: ‘If people downloading a song are criminals, what are the CEOs of AI companies using the entire internet to train their LLMs?’.

Last month the Norwegian Consumer Council released a video of someone cutting holes in socks, and sawing legs off tables to make them wobbly. The video was part of a global campaign to draw attention to the ‘deliberate degradation of a service or product’, urging politicians to take action against enshittification, including enforcing data protection, breaking digital monopolies, and giving consumers ‘more power to control, adapt, repair and alter the products they already own’. The council admits it’s a David and Goliath battle, ‘but… David won in the end, right?’.

Doctorow isn’t claiming he’s discovered some new phenomenon. He’s savvy enough to know how the world works. Enshittification is not just about how profit sabotages tech development, making things worse instead of better. It’s really a metaphor for capitalist production itself, which has generated eye-watering wealth yet imposes poverty on billions. In this version of the bible story, David is the bad guy, the tiny rich elite, while Goliath is the world working class, the sleeping giant that needs to wake up.

Paddy Shannon

No socialism in one country (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is not a collection of separate national systems; it is a global network of production, trade, and competition. Every country is tied to the world market, and survival within that system requires competing for profits, investment, and economic advantage.

Because of this, any attempt to build socialism in one country alone would be forced to operate under capitalist pressures. It would have to maintain wages, compete in international markets, and prioritise economic survival over human need. Step by step, the original goal of a cooperative and democratic society would be pushed aside by the demands of global competition. History shows that isolation does not abolish capitalism — it reshapes it under new management.

Socialism, therefore, is not a national project but a humanity-level one. The working majority everywhere shares the same condition: we produce the wealth of the world yet remain dependent on wages and subject to economic insecurity. Our struggle is not against other nations or peoples, but against a system that divides us while relying on our collective labour.

The necessary conclusion is clear: real emancipation requires conscious, democratic action on a global scale. When people understand their shared interests beyond borders, they can replace production for profit with production for use, competition with cooperation, and economic domination with genuine human freedom. Socialism is not merely an ideal — it is the logical and practical next step in the struggle for a world organised by and for humanity itself.

Global networks

What is often missed in discussions about ‘banana republics’ is that the decisive transformation was not simply political independence but the globalisation of capital itself. In the past, domination appeared visible because it was concentrated in a single corporation or foreign power controlling land, labour, and government institutions directly. Today, control is more diffuse and therefore less obvious. No single company needs to govern a country when financial markets, credit systems, trade dependence, and technological monopolies can discipline entire economies.

Modern states are not passive victims; they actively compete to attract investment, secure export markets, and integrate into global production networks. This creates a situation where governments formally exercise sovereignty while simultaneously adapting policies to maintain competitiveness within the world market. The pressure no longer comes from a colonial administrator but from capital mobility itself — investment can simply move elsewhere.

This helps explain why countries with very different political ideologies often pursue similar economic strategies. Whether governments describe themselves as left, right, nationalist, or progressive, they must operate within the same global framework of profitability, productivity, and trade balance constraints.

In this sense, the historical ‘banana republic’ has not returned, but neither has dependency disappeared. What has emerged instead is a system in which economic power operates structurally rather than territorially. The question today is not who rules directly, but how global economic relations limit the range of choices available to every nation-state.

Structural problem

When reformist governments promise improvements within capitalism, they inevitably collide with economic factors they cannot control — investment decisions, profitability, need for capital accumulation, and global competition. When reforms stall or are reversed, disappointment follows, and many workers understandably turn elsewhere, sometimes towards right-wing populists who appear to challenge the status quo more decisively. This recurring pattern points to a deeper structural problem rather than individual political failure.

Historical examples like the reforms under Lyndon B. Johnson, subsidised education, or public transportation systems in countries such as Brazil show that significant social concessions can exist within capitalism. Free or subsidised services, however, were never simply the result of goodwill; they emerged under specific economic and political conditions — periods of growth, social pressure, or geopolitical competition. When those conditions change, reforms become vulnerable to cuts or restructuring, regardless of which party governs.

This helps explain why debates framed as a struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ administrations miss the underlying issue. Policies may differ, but governments operate within the same economic framework, which ultimately prioritises accumulation and fiscal constraints over permanent social guarantees.

The recurring cycle — reform, limitation, frustration, and political backlash — suggests that the problem may not lie primarily in voter misunderstanding or conspiracies, but in the expectation that lasting social security can be achieved through reforms that leave the basic economic structure unchanged.

Understanding this dynamic may be more useful than attributing political shifts solely to ideology or manipulation, since it highlights why similar outcomes reappear across different countries and historical periods.

Moral denunciations

The controversy surrounding Noam Chomsky and his association with Jeffrey Epstein has generated intense debate within the left, but much of the discussion reveals a deeper political confusion. The focus has largely shifted toward personal morality and individual guilt rather than examining the social structures that allow power, wealth, and influence to concentrate in the first place.

Capitalist society consistently brings intellectuals, politicians, financiers, and academics into overlapping networks because access to funding, publishing, and institutional influence depends on proximity to wealth. This is not primarily a question of individual virtue or hypocrisy, but of how a system organised around capital inevitably connects cultural authority with economic power.

Sections of the left tend to respond to such controversies through moral denunciation, as if removing flawed individuals could purify politics. Yet history shows that replacing personalities does not alter the underlying social relations that reproduce inequality and elite influence. The problem is systemic, not psychological.

A serious socialist perspective therefore avoids both personal hero-worship and moral panic. Intellectual contributions should be evaluated critically and independently of personal reputation, while recognising that meaningful change cannot come from reforming elites but from conscious democratic control of social production by the majority itself.

In that sense, the debate should move beyond personalities and return to the central question: what kind of social organisation continually produces these concentrations of power, and how can society collectively move beyond them?

R.

The hollow cry of ‘self-determination’ in a world of borders (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The air is thick with the rhetoric of ‘self-determination.’ From the hallowed halls of the United Nations to the televised addresses of national leaders, the principle that ‘all peoples have the right to freely determine their political status’ is touted as a moral absolute. Yet, for the global working class, this ‘right’ is nothing more than a cruel joke—a deceptive mask worn by the state to protect the interests of the ruling class.

The hypocrisy of the nation-state

The very states that harp on about self-determination are the ones that have historically opposed it whenever it threatened their own economic or military interests. For example, British imperial history is a masterclass in this hypocrisy; the idea of self-determination was seen as a direct threat to the control of colonies essential for economic benefits, military strategy, and international prestige.

Even today, the nation-state remains a ‘prison house of nationalities’. Leaders preach the moral superiority of national self-determination over sovereignty to justify their own territorial claims or to undermine rivals, yet they remain the routine managers of a capitalist system that thrives on exploitation.

The myth of national interest

Socialists maintain that there is no such thing as a ‘national interest’ that includes both the exploiter and the exploited. The nation-state is a territorial entity that identifies itself with a particular ‘people’ only to better manage them for the benefit of the capitalist class. When workers are told to wave national flags, they are being encouraged to block the path to any higher human synthesis and to ignore the fact that they have no fatherland to defend.

In this elemental chaos, the state uses nationalism and racism as tools to divide the working class, making more privileged groups feel that their interests lie with their masters rather than their fellow workers.

The real victim: working-class self-determination

While leaders argue over where to draw lines on a map, the true self-determination of the working class is systematically trampled. We define real socialism as a society where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and organised for the benefit of all.

Under the current system:

• Freedom is an illusion: workers are forced to sell their labour power for a wage, which entails providing the unpaid labour that forms the basis of capitalist wealth.
• Democratic rights are suppressed: governments and unions often cultivate a myth of an all-powerful government while insisting that nothing can be done about the systemic inequalities of capitalism.
• Solidarity is sabotaged: by emphasising national boundaries, the state ensures that workers of different nations view each other as competitors rather than allies against a common enemy.

A world without borders

We affirm that capitalism is incapable of meaningful change in the interests of the majority. The struggle for national liberation is frequently a trap; when a new national bourgeoisie takes power, the working class finds itself exploited by a new set of masters and mistresses under a new flag.

Our goal is not the ‘self-determination’ of new states, but the abolition of the state itself. We advocate for a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless society – a frontierless world community where men and women cooperate freely to produce what is needed. Only by recognising that they are exploited by the same enemy class in all countries can workers reclaim their true identity and achieve real self-determination through a global democratic revolution.

Jake Ambrose (Australia)

Work: paid and unpaid – Part 1 (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of my working life was spent teaching in a university. I consider myself to have been reasonably well paid for the work I did. And the superannuation scheme I paid into has yielded a reasonable pension. The same applied to my workplace contemporaries, fellow wage-slaves who started and finished their careers at more or less the same time as me. But, if I look at them, they’ve not all had identical reactions to ending their paid employment.

‘Bored out of my skull’

Some of them have carried on with a particular aspect of the work they did before – their academic research – but independently. And even though they’re no longer paid for it, they seem reasonably content. Others have been less happy. They’ve found themselves at a loose end with no teaching or associated work, and see no point in carrying on with any research given that it’s no longer connected to a day job. They see working in isolated fashion as no longer affording them the recognition and approbation of their colleagues and of their wider academic community. I found an example of this when I ran into a former colleague some time ago, several months after he’d retired in his early 60s. I asked him how things were going. He seemed pretty miserable and replied: ‘I’m bored out of my skull’. He sounded and looked angry and frustrated. I didn’t know what to do other than wish him well.

Volunteering

So these are a couple of the kind of reactions that workers in what was my own line of work may have in response to no longer doing paid work. But there’s also a third category – those who, having finished their paid employment, feel they’ve been set free, and this has made them decide to involve themselves in activities which are usually unpaid and often quite different from the paid work they did. Sometimes it’s a continuation of things they devoted a certain amount of time and energy to in their spare time before, such as looking after family members, for example grandchildren, or involvement in political or social activity such as campaigning or charity work, or participation in a voluntary group of some kind. In my own case, for instance, I agreed to be recruited to a committee of volunteers who run my local Community Centre. Once there, I found that two of my former work colleagues, now retired like me, were also active there and in the community more widely. One of them was heavily involved in helping to organise a local food bank of the kind that has sprung up in increasing numbers in recent times. A common factor in this kind of activity is the obvious personal satisfaction people who engage in it derive from their new unpaid, ‘non-professional’ work. And it is of course a form of work, in that it involves expending mental or physical energy, even if many people wouldn’t necessarily think of it as such, since there’s no suggestion of any financial recompense from it. But, however they regard it, the motivation, rather, is the perception that they’re doing something useful, experiencing a sense of community, and also enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.

As well as this, two other activities have absorbed my own time and energies in a practical and satisfying way since retirement. The first has been increased activity in the trade union that, though retired from work, I’m still a member of. With the forbearance of my former employer, I’m still able to handle personal cases or pension matters for members, as I did when I was employed. And I have more time to do this than those colleagues who also volunteer for union work but still have paid jobs. The second has been playing an increased part in Socialist Party activity – helping to organise my local branch, giving talks, going to events to try and spread the socialist message, writing columns, articles and book reviews for this journal.

Hierarchical work

Some of the reviews have actually been of books on the subject of work in its various different aspects. This seems, in fact, to be an area in which there’s a good deal of interest at present – interest stimulated by the fact that, in recent times, say over the last 30-40 years, the face of employment has changed in a number of noteworthy ways. In particular, it has become increasingly what may be called ‘hierarchised’. The ‘flat structures’ in the workplace that were being talked about and to a certain extent practised in the 1960s and 70s and seen as the way of the future began to fall out of favour and to give way to more rigid, authoritarian line management systems, so that most workers effectively had someone ‘higher up’ breathing down their necks, assessing them, judging their work or productivity – and sometimes intimidating them.

I saw that in my own field of employment, where it was accompanied by the invention of various terms, such as ‘lean production’ or ‘agile working’, to try and give a benign, softening impression to a more rigid form of workplace organisation. Critics of this new form of work discipline gave it other names such as management by stress or managerial feudalism (or even managerial fascism). The way American mathematician and political activist Eric Schechter characterises it in his video ‘Only Revolution Can Save Life on Earth’ is brutally simple: ‘workplaces are dictatorships’. Certainly, in many cases, the process consists of workers’ performance being subjected to close surveillance, with their efficiency or productivity judged on a regular basis via performance targets, sometimes referred to as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). And this with the shadow of a possible ‘capability process’ hanging over them, which can potentially lead to dismissal.

An irony here of course is that the manager conducting the KPI operation is usually her or himself subject to the same process at the hands of the person who is their manager. It’s hard not to be reminded here of Oscar Wilde’s famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, where he writes: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it and degrades those over whom it is exercised’.

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone, authors of the book Wageless Life, are just as uncompromisingly critical. They describe work of whatever kind under capitalism as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’, describing it as ‘a war of profit against life on earth’, in which workers are denied the ability to control how they work and so suffer a disconnection that ‘separates them from the material conditions that allow humans to flourish’. Capitalism, they go on to say, fosters ‘the utter worship of paid work’ and in so doing ‘thrives on producing docile subjects who are alienated from their surroundings’. One of their conclusions is: ‘We live in a world sculpted by money but populated by the moneyless.’ Very much akin to this, if expressed in milder language, is Martin Luther King’s well-known maxim: ‘profit forces people to be more concerned with making a living than making a life.’ A similar more recent characterisation says: ‘the greatest prison has no bars, just a paycheck, a routine and weekends off’.

Not all ‘bullshit jobs’

While we would broadly endorse such an analysis, it is also necessary to point to the fact that not all paid work is equally dispiriting, unsatisfying and alienating. So while it’s surely true, for example, that, if they didn’t need a wage to survive, no man or woman would willingly choose to sit at the entrance to a supermarket all day looking at a screen to check if anyone is stealing or looks as though they might steal, at the same time there’s no doubt that some paid work, even if accompanied by conditions of insecurity or duress, can give significant pleasure or satisfaction to those who carry it out. And while that supermarket guard job is one of the many millions that exist across the planet in the system we live under (so-called ‘bullshit jobs’), constituting a colossal waste of talents, energies and resources, in some cases even the rigid and unforgiving employment practices already mentioned can be offset to an extent by an individual’s passionate interest in the work they are engaged in – maybe for example as a naturalist, a scientist, a computer programmer, or as a gardener or a builder.

It’s only fair to point out too that some challenges have arisen to the hierarchy and intensification of employment practice in recent years, and from some quarters there have also emerged striking (sometimes revolutionary) ideas and recommendations concerning work organisation. These are the areas that Part 2 of this article next month will discuss before going on to look at ways in which work might be organised in the different, non-coercive, moneyless production for need society that socialists campaign to see established.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone's 'Wageless Life. A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism' was reviewed in the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Cooking the Books: AI, profits and Engels (2026)

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

City gents reading the business section of their Times (24 February) might have been surprised to come across a photo of Engels. Socialists would have been intrigued more by the caption ‘could AI create a new Engels pause, named after Friedrich Engels’. The term ‘Engels pause’ was not coined by Engels but by an economic historian, Robert Allen, to describe the course of economic development that led to the workers being in the situation described by Engels in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Normally, a period of sustained capital accumulation should lead to some increase in working-class living standards, both because of employers bidding up wages as they compete for workers and because the increase in profits means they can afford to pay more. Allen noted that this had not happened in Britain during the period of rapid industrialisation from 1790 to 1840 as wages had stagnated. As in the period after 1840 wages did increase, Allen called this a ‘pause’ and named it after Engels.

Engels might not have regarded this as a compliment. He might have preferred the term ‘the Engels profit bonanza’ as, if wages stagnate in a period of economic growth, that means that profits will be more than they otherwise would.

The article in the Times, by its former business editor David Wighton, discussed two views of the possible economic impact of AI. He quoted a former Google executive as saying that ‘the most likely outcome is an economy in which corporate profits explode as labour costs fall, while workers’ share of output shrinks’. In short, another ‘Engels pause’. The opposite view was put by Jamie Dimon, the head of the bank JP Morgan Chase, who is quoted as saying that while AI will increase profits, ‘this isn’t like you’re going to build three points of margin and you get to keep it — you don’t’. Competition sees to that.

Who is more likely to be right? Critics of capitalism might be tempted to agree with the one-time Google executive as it would be another good argument against capitalism. However, Dimon has a point. His view reflects more accurately what happens when one capitalist enterprise makes extra profits by reducing its costs through some innovation and outcompetes its rivals.

‘An enterprise or industrial sector with an above average level of productivity (…) economizes in its expenditure of social labour and therefore makes a surplus profit, that is to say, the difference between its costs and selling prices will be greater than the average profit. The pursuit of this surplus profit is, of course, the driving force behind the entire capitalist economy. Every capitalist enterprise is forced by competition to try to get greater profits, for this is the only way it can constantly improve its technology and labour productivity. Consequently all firms are forced to take this same direction, and this of course implies that what at one time was an above-average productivity ends up as the new average productivity, whereupon the surplus profit disappears. All the strategy of capitalist industry stems from this desire on the part of every enterprise to achieve a rate of productivity superior to the national average and thereby make a surplus profit, and this in turn provokes a movement which causes the surplus profit to disappear, by virtue of the trend for the average rate of labour productivity to rise continuously’ (E. Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory.)

That’s the likely outcome of the spread of AI to production and business. A temporary increase in profits for the firms that are the first to use AI in their branch of activity but no ‘profit explosion’ in the sense of a general increase in profits for all firms which eventually adopt it.

Potential abundance (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

August 1970 Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

Howard Moss