Aqua Car with watermelon umbrella. Photograph by Lies On

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Real needs and wants, not “money votes”, should determine what is produced and innovated.

by Phil Hall

In a classic 1951 British Ealing Studios satire called The Man in the White Suit, starring Sir Alec Guinness, Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, a research chemist working at a Northern England textile mill. He develops a revolutionary synthetic fibre that is completely indestructible and dirt-repellent. The mill owners realise that if people only ever need to buy one suit or pair of trousers in their lifetime, textile empires will collapse. So they lock Sidney up and try to bribe or force him to hand over the formula. Just as they corner him, his suit disintegrates off his body.

Capitalism does not innovate for human need, but for profit. It suppresses useful, long-wearing technology when that technology threatens artificial scarcity, built in obsolescence and profit margins. Of course, nowadays the idea of an indestructible plastic coat horrifies us, but it would not have horrified people living in post-war Britain.

Innovation is something capitalism boasts of, and it used its proud record in innovation to attack socialism, especially during the so called ‘Cold War’. The Soviets were famous for the relative simplicity and durability of their products. Though it should be noted that they did put a satellite and a human (a man and a woman) and a small dog called Laika into space before anyone else managed it.

First, let’s give a respectful nod in the direction of the enormous creative and productive power of capitalism before launching into a critique. Note that slavery was also productive and impressive system from the time of ancient Greece and Rome to the time of the Caribbean and southern US plantations. The Colosseum was built by slaves, and the aqueducts, too. Few people will rush to the defence of slave owners in the 21^st century. More will sally forth to defend capitalism.

Waste, Misallocated Brainpower, and Corporate Greed

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Innovations under capitalism prioritise profit far above social issues like the need to mitigating global warming or produce non-toxic food. Sewage companies extract profits for shareholders while pouring untreated sewage into rivers and seas. Most so-called “innovation” under capitalism goes into finding new ways to extract more profit. Intelligent, talented people end up wasting their productive lives working as risk analysts in the financial sector when they could be discovering cures for cancer, preventing crop blight, developing affordable housing, or advancing intermediate energy technologies.

Innovations that cannot generate money are often discarded. Genuinely cheap alternatives have sometimes been suppressed, sometimes violently, by those who control supply and benefit from gathering the fruits of other people’s labour in the form of profit. Innovation under capitalism pours vast resources into developing luxury goods and armaments to preserve elite dominance.

The Illusion of Capitalist Choice

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Under the cosh of capitalism, enormous resources are spent unsustainably to wastefully produce hundreds of different varieties of products at a time when these days all thinking people are deeply concerned about the environment. For example, shoes are produced using an enormous range of materials, plastics, highly advanced textiles, all of which require an insane amount of resources. The entire capitalist system is extraordinarily wasteful and profligate in its search for profit.

The swizz of capitalism is that it leaves cheap glass and chrome trinkets on the beach for us to collect in return for our labour. The Capitalist Devil wears Prada and makes sarcastic comments about ordinary people’s fashion and choices, but under socialism, we can engineer a system that allows us to decide what we want to make. And then make it. Simplicity and quality would be valued. In a socialist country, you would have a variety of shoes that are hard-wearing and of high quality. What is produced would respond directly to expressed human tastes: new varieties of shoes would be developed based on perceived needs, designers’ craftsmanship, popularity, and feedback from consumers.

Commodification and the Degradation of Quality

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Consider a housewife in Puebla who makes the perfect tamale. Her family and friends encourage her to open a stand, and when she does, everyone loves her tamales and buys them. But once a corporate conglomerate acquires her brand name, the product is stripped of its quality. The objective shifts from making a great tamale to maximising the profit margin per unit. Ingredients are swapped for cheaper substitutes, shelf-stabilisers and artificial flavour enhancers. Use value and genuine quality are gradually cast aside.

Under corporate capitalism, spending thousands of hours and taking great care to make a wonderful product for ordinary people with ordinary budgets is viewed as wildly inefficient. Not so when it comes to producing armaments, which serve as an infinite sink of resources, or luxury cars. Poderoso señor Don Dinero rules.

Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy walks up to a Nutri-Matic Drinks Dispenser machine, selects tea, and gets:

“…a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”

The machine claims to analyse a person’s taste buds and nutritional requirements to create a customized drink, yet out comes that exact same unsatisfactory slop.

Consider a thousand different strawberry jams, each with its own factory, each with slightly different gradations of colouring and sugaring, but essentially all just strawberry jam. The more corporations mess with it, adding sugar, flavourings, colouring, and chemicals, the less it resembles real strawberry jam.

Furthermore, vast effort is wasted on marketing, labelling, packaging, advertising, and global transport. Jams brought in from other countries require shipping and freight trains, leaving a massive carbon footprint. Instead of spending time simply producing wholesome jam, people waste their productive lives on costly additional marketing, administrative and logistical nonsense.

Elitism, Exploitation, and Historical Parallels

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One of the reasons for adopting a socialist / communist economy is to ensure that innovation serves the vast majority of people’s needs, rather than funding projects that conserve elite power and luxurious lifestyles. It is deeply alienating to watch ultra-luxury products like mega-yachts or Ferraris absorb vast amounts of innovation due to the influence of “money votes,” thus benefiting only a tiny fraction of the global population. This is an echo of medieval times in Europe, when all innovation went into luxury living, weaponry, castles, palaces and cathedrals for those in power, not in areas of life that helped the poor, like better sanitation.

Many modern capitalist “innovations” such as Amazon or Uber have replaced older systems where ordinary workers and communities benefited far more. Whole areas of human activity are being paved over to generate more profits for US-based global corporations; a reminder of colonial times when poncho makers in Argentina and weavers in India were driven out of business by cheap fabrics from the cotton mills of Lancashire, Lord Palmerston’s gunboats shelling Buenos Ayres and by British sepoys breaking the hands of Indian textile workers.

Good, handmade, simple, long-lasting products that ordinary people used to possess are now reserved for the wealthy. Handmade quality goes to the rich, while shoddy mass-produced products are sold to the poor. The elites continue to eat venison while their avatars in the media encourage the working class to eat food made of insects. Capitalism has our number, but it is not our friend.

Engineered Addiction and “Mr. Sugar”

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Capitalism uses food science to exploit human biology. Products are filled with sugar and brightly coloured dyes after deliberate experimentation to induce people to eat foods despite their harmful side effects. A clear example was demonstrated by Jamie Oliver in a television programme where he tried to get children to reject factory-processed chicken nuggets. He took the worst scraps of leftover chicken skin and fat, grinding them into a disgusting sludge. Yet once he shaped them into nuggets and fried them, some of the children were desperate to eat the result.

There is a book written in America by Mexican migrants some of whose children were suffering from obesity. Mr. Sugar Came to Town / La visita del Sr. Azúcar was published in 1989 by Children’s Book Press. It is adapted from a puppet play developed by the Migrant Farmworkers Outreach Program in California’s Central Valley. The authors are Harriet Rohmer and Cruz Gomez.

The book describes “Mr. Sugar”, a smiling man delivering sweets. But Grandma Lupe rips his mask off, he looks horrible underneath; very unkind and unhealthy, and with very bad teeth. This is the real Mr. Sugar: a cruel capitalist with no genuine smile. Migrant parents try to teach their children to avoid sugar, but poor children often have far more access to cheaper, more sugary snacks rather than the alternative of fresh, wholesome food that does not need artificial sweetness to be palatable.

We face a choice of philosophy: disposable cheapness versus sustainable reuse. You can buy fast fashion from Primark or reused clothes from a second-hand shop. You can buy fresh milk produced by British cows sold in recycled glass bottles, or buy plastic cartons containing processed variations of milk and milk substitutes imported from 100 different sources. The fundamental question is: do you want a sustainable pattern of consumption?

Innovation under capitalism goes hand in hand with increasingly shoddy products and built-in obsolescence. Innovation under capitalism is Mr. Sugar’s business.

Strategic Scarcity, Propaganda, and Wasteful Research

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Consider nuclear power. Massive capital was invested in it primarily to build weapons. It was developed commercially in the USA because it provided high capital barriers to entry, allowing large corporations to control supply and sell energy for profit. This represented a massive opportunity cost: resources were funnelled into nuclear energy rather than intermediate technologies, recycling technologies, or solar energy, which could have been made increasingly efficient. Concentrating and controlling energy sources is where the profit lies.

Granted, once capitalism develops technology for war and elite control, there can be civilian spin-offs, such as jet engines and computers. Spin offs and innovation from war include: plasters and sanitary pads, plastic surgery, microwave ovens, doughnuts, wristwatches, zippers, duct tape, super glue, stainless steel, blood banks and many other products and services.

But history shows that true society-wide advances, such as social medicine and social welfare, only occurred when working people organised into trade unions and political parties and took direct action to fight for their own well-being.

Double edged Data Centres for Propaganda

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Today, vast data centres consume immense amounts of money and energy to support the strategic deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). While presented as purely technical infrastructure and as AI ‘assistants’, the primary purpose and value of LLMs is to function as massive propaganda machines. Their purpose is to censor and gaslight on behalf of those who hold wealth and power. But let’s also remember our many and intense experience of sharing and the Internet. Digital technology and software involving the free exchange of ideas, freed from intellectual property laws, paywalls, and corporate monopolies are natural for socialist development: open-source software, free public academic publishing, shared data for medical research.

Abstract Science and Weaponry

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The search for dark energy, dark matter, and ever-smaller subatomic particles represents another immense waste of resources under capitalism. Nuclear power and atomic bombs were the insanely powerful results of abstract physics; thus, the desire to delve deeper into the nature of matter is driven by military and geopolitical interests rather than altruistic curiosity. A trillion pounds has been spent on research into particle physics with no practical benefit for the public. Few of us would agree to spend a trillion pounds searching for the unspoken reason of discovering something more destructive than a Hydrogen Bomb. A “Higgs Boson bomb” perhaps. That spending decision is made for us, whereas society would far prefer those resources to be spent in a million other ways that improve daily life. Under current conditions, theoretical physics is co-opted or funded through military-industrial channels. The issue isn’t fundamental knowledge itself (Since when has capitalism ever been altruistic?) but the wasteful and speculative misallocation of resources while basic human needs go unmet.

Socialist Technological Evolution in Practice

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Can we conceive of a new kind of innovation, a socialist response to the oncoming crisis brought on by global corporate capitalism’s lack of sustainability, deep inequality, pursuit of war, and jaded and irresponsible consumerism. Can we think up and develop new kinds of humane socialist ways of producing and innovating in an age when the problem of information flows that plagued the Soviet system seem largely to have been resolved? I think we can.

For a start, under socialism we can begin by rescuing existing technologies developed under capitalism and repurpose them and evolve them to suit the public good. For instance, small nuclear power generators, such as those developed for nuclear submarines or the Russian Burevestnik, could be extremely useful to generate large amounts of relatively clean energy in remote regions around the Arctic and Antarctic, in rural backwoods areas, in the mountains, in desert communities or even on the moon.

A single, compact nuclear generator could power an entire isolated city. This is innovation focused on public utility and the commons. Under a socialist framework, power generation would be decentralised and democratically managed wherever possible, mixing solar, wind on local small energy grids alongside safe small to medium nuclear reactors.

Criteria for Evolutionary Technology from a Socialist Perspective

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Under socialism, continuous design evolution means products naturally become more effective, durable, and sustainable over time. When technologies evolve, they become cheaper, better, and more efficient. Under capitalism, when evolving technology that becomes more efficient that reduces the opportunity to extract high profit margins, leading corporations to sabotage product longevity. We need socialist criteria for innovation:

Use value for the majority: Innovation should be directed towards what the large majority of people actually need and want, not what a tiny elite desires. The test is not whether a product generates profit, but whether it satisfies genuine human needs: a good selection of functional shoes, seasonal wholesome food, efficient heating systems, reliable environmentally friendly transport, good people’s housing, good free healthcare and education. Luxury yachts, Ferraris, and a thousand varieties of strawberry jam and puffier Adidas shoes fail this test.

Sustainability and resource efficiency: Technology should minimise the consumption of energy, raw materials, and carbon. It should favour durability, repairability, reuse, and recycling over built-in obsolescence and disposable cheapness. Glass bottles over plastic cartons; second-hand clothes over fast fashion; hard-wearing goods over endless novelty.

Evolution rather than revolution: Innovation should build cumulatively on existing, proven designs, improving them incrementally rather than constantly retooling whole systems of production, sourcing, and personnel. The model is the Italian shoemaker or the classic product refined over generations, not the annual change to make the Prada Devils happy.

People’s participation: The direction of innovation should be decided collectively through planning, trade unions, consumer feedback, economists analysing real sales and resource use, and public deliberation, rather than by money votes in a market ruled by bullies. People should get what they want and need not what advertising and artificial scarcity persuade them to buy.

Humanistic allocation of resources for production: Resources, respecting the input of people’s mental and physical labour invested in them should be allocated sensibly and humanistically. Labour should not be wasted on direct marketing call centres, marketing tricks, overwrought packaging, and stretched out logistics and the offering and distribution of needless variety. Resources for production should be directed towards producing real goods and freeing people’s time.

No harm to people or environment: Innovation must not harm the environment or human health. It should be free of toxicity, planned obsolescence, and the deliberate engineering of unhealthy consumption, such as sugary, highly coloured foods designed through experimentation to make people eat despite themselves.

Public and open development: Real innovation very often comes out of universities and government programmes. It should remain in public hands and be freely shared, rather than captured by capital to create barriers to entry, artificial scarcity, and monopoly profits. Nuclear power is a cautionary example: researched because it allowed capital barriers to entry, not because it was the most efficient path.

Swords into ploughshares: Where capitalism has already created powerful technologies for war, control, and elite consumption, these should be repurposed for civilian and social ends. Jet engines, rockets, and nuclear power are examples; small nuclear generators such as those used on submarines or the Burevestnik could power remote cities in the Taiga, the backwoods, or the desert.

Transparency and Truthfulness: Technology, including artificial intelligence, should serve truth and open inquiry, not narrative control, censorship, gaslighting, and propaganda on behalf of power. Data and computing resources should be open source not double edged mechanisms of control and energy-consuming propaganda machines, but tools for genuine understanding. Whatever your gaslighting LLM says to you, what happened in Gaza was, objectively, part of an ongoing genocide.

Avoidance of vanity driven speculative research: Research priorities should be judged by social benefit not by the prestige and power interests of money-minded masters. The trillion spent searching for dark energy, dark matter, and ever-smaller particles, with nothing found, is the perfect example of how the concentration of power leads to waste. Abstract knowledge has its place, but it should not be pursued at vast public expense merely because it aligns with the military or prestige desires of those who fund it.

Breakthroughs and improvements: We want genuine breakthroughs and improvements that align with these social criteria. Evolutionary technology does not mean stagnation or the rejection of the new. Real advances coming out of universities and public programmes should be welcomed, provided they serve the majority, remain sustainable, and do no harm. The distinction is between innovation for profit and innovation for human benefit, not between change and stagnation.

Fun, enjoyment and ‘self-actualisation’: There is no reason why a socialist society should be drab or ascetic. Criteria for innovation should include fun, enjoyment, and the possibility of self-actualisation. Technology and production and human activity on all levels should give people the time, resources, and freedom to play, create, learn, follow their hobbies, build relationships, and flourish at all ages.

Exploration and the enhancement of life: Curiosity, discovery, and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge are genuinely what we care about. The exploration of space and oceans, alongside research into health, longevity, and life extension, are worthy goals for a socialist programme, pursued openly, safely, and for the benefit of all.

Novelty for human reasons, not for control: Innovation should expand human freedom, agency, and joy. It must not function as a mechanism for manipulation, addiction, surveillance, or domination. Novelty must serve human flourishing rather than the engineering of consent and the hooking of minds to the machinery of profit.

A Socialist People’s Car

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Let us take that favourite instance: the motor car. An advanced car designed under socialist criteria (a People’s Car) would be fun, useful, shared, unpolluting, and multi-purpose. The car visualised above, would be safe and harmless to pedestrians and cyclists, would be constructed from recycled materials, and designed using open-source principles. The Commons Utility Wagon would be a lightweight, open-source electric vehicle designed as a durable shared car rather than a status symbol: so it would be built from modular recycled-aluminium framing and unpainted flax-hemp bio composite panels. It has higher ground clearance, protective lower cladding, all-terrain tyres, and a soft yet reinforced pedestrian-friendly nose. It is fully repairable with standard tools, and its battery is swappable. The car is free of locks and not designed for planned obsolescence. The Commons Car would be optimised for cooperatives, mixed urban-rural use, and it would be easily reconfigured between passenger and cargo roles.

Crucially, it would not require massive highway networks that destroy nature, nor vast, costly energy infrastructure that allows a vampiric elite to extract wealth from the population. The car would be judged not by its top speed, luxury branding, or annual cosmetic redesigns, but by how effectively it serves human flourishing at minimal environmental and social cost.

Conclusion: innovate for the people not for the 0.01%

The overarching criterion is simple: Let’s ask ourselves first. Innovation for whom? Well, under socialism, innovation is not for the benefit of profit and the few who want to steal and hoard the surplus and keep the system that way. We reject innovations that sustain and reproduce the current entrenched system of global corporate capitalism.

From a socialist perspective, technology should evolve to serve the needs of the majority sustainably, humanistically, and democratically, rather than generating profit, artificial scarcity, and elite control. That service encompasses joy, self-actualisation, exploration, and the enhancement of life, going far beyond bare material survival. Technology must liberate people rather than hook, manipulate, or farm them.

Like systems of slavery and feudalism before it capitalism and global corporate capitalism has shaped our lives and unleashed enormous, unparalleled productivity and innovation. Now let’s imagine just how creative and innovative we could all be for the sake of all eight billion humans, and life on Earth, and not just the parasitic .01%

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Phil Hall is a college lecturer. He is a committed socialist and humanist. Phil was born in South Africa, where his parents were in the ANC. There, his mother was imprisoned, and his father was the first journalist from a national paper to be banned. Phil grew up in East Africa and settled in Kingston-upon-Thames. He has also lived and worked in Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi. Phil has blogged for The Guardian, the Morning Star, and several other publications, and he has written stories for The London Magazine. He started Ars Notoria in May 2020.