The right to property must not be inalienable*

Government limitation and enforcement of the duties of property ownership is one of the foundation stones of a good society, not an economic lever.

by Phil Hall

Rather than imagining they are powerful citizens, the ultra rich prefer to believe that they are naturally unconstrained and owe little to individual states. They fantasise they roam the world like Captain Nemo, and assume they have far more rights than duties. But they are only allowed to own what they own by our collective grace.

Everyone lives in a society. It is not possible to become wealthy outside society. The society regulates what people can and cannot own, and what duties those people who own property have to that society. If a person or corporation accumulates too much wealth, then they have done so by skimming off other people’s labour, or their forebears have. Society shouldn’t tolerate the theft and accumulation of other people’s labour by the few.

If a French aristocrat or a great land baron killed the peasants and stole their land, or colonialists conquered and stole the land of the people they colonised – Israel and South Africa and The USA and Australia come immediately to mind. Or a big developer lobbies local and national government and pays bribes and offers inducements to officials, they acquire land and wealth by force. The basis of ownership, hitherto, has been through the violent imposition of ownership by a minority. Therefore, legitimacy and the legitimacy of all forms of ownership can only be expressed and endorsed by a properly constituted democratic state, uncorrupted by the influence of powerful elites, where there is a representative economic, as well as political, democracy.

This need for control of property rights conditioned by the need to ensure the public interest is clearly acknowledged in the European Convention on Human Rights which states that:

(1) Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for by law and by the general principles of international law. (2) The preceding provisions shall not, however, in any way impair the right of a State to enforce such laws as it deems necessary to control the use of property in accordance with the general interest or to secure the payment of taxes or other contributions or penalties.

The problem lies in the very narrow definition of ‘public interest‘ that gives corporations a legalistic work around and allows them to send their superprofits to hide funk holes in The Caribbean in order to avoid paying a fair amount of taxation, or a definition of public interest that has loopholes in it that allow, for example, water companies to pour human waste in huge quantities into British rivers and the sea.

At the root of the problem of modern capitalist societies are the concepts governing property rights and duties. There should be severe limits set to what can be owned and what cannot be owned. Effectively, nothing is ever really fully privately owned. All property is on loan from a legitimately formed, democratic state.  You may buy your island from a country, but you are not buying a country.

Instead of simply re-nationalisating, (though a few re-nationalisations would be nice) we should reformulate property law. The problem with nationalisation is the problem of the Tragedy of the Commons. In other words, if no one owns something – fishing areas in international waters, for example – then that resource is exploited and exhausted. On a collectivised farm, everything goes to pot and no one takes full responsibility for maintenance.

What is the value of property ownership itself? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was wrong when he said ‘Property is theft.’ Property is not just theft. Clearly, there is some value to giving people property rights. Property owners look after their property. Property ownership generates value; call it the value of good husbandry. When you complete a transaction, the good husbandry of property has a price tag. It is called Goodwill and people will pay well over the odds for it. Good ownership creates identity, cohesiveness, and permanence. It is worthwhile.

But, ultimately, all property is merely on loan from a legitimate national democratic state. At root, property is is not an inalienable right. It is a right that depends on the agreement of others. Ownership is tolerated and the only permanent ownership – in the people’s name – can be ownership by a democratic – state so long as that state lasts. Property changes hands when the state changes hands. From a constitutional monarchy to a republic, for example. After a revolution, the property of the aristocrats returns to the people. In Cuba, the casinos and brothels became hospitals and schools.

The public highway, the coastline, beaches, land held in trust. These are examples of things which should be owned only by the state and not by individuals or corporations. Individuals and corporate ownership would create privileged access and bottlenecks. It would be deeply unfair.


While trains were used to transport
Photo from Openverse: current regulations regarding ownership are a trainwreck.

Limit the right to own property


 Limit the right to property and expand the notion of the duties of property holders fully. There are effective ways of doing this.

Essentially, property ownership is a civil right, like other civil rights. However, contrast the way the rights and duties of property holders are handled with the way other civil rights and duties are handled. The duties of property owners seem far too ‘negotiable’ and flexible.

Parliament should have more to say on the duties and limitations on ownership. Property ownership should be treated as other citizens’ rights and duties are treated. The duties of people who own land, animals, machines, buildings and other resources should be based on principles of social good, they should not be bargaining chips to attract capital and generate investment.

The right to avoid paying taxes or to pollute the land, rivers and sea should not be framed in terms of ‘deregulation’ and ‘incentivisation’. The way the government enforces the duty of property ownership is one of the foundation stones of a good society, not simply an economic lever.

There must be severe limits on ownership. The reality of ownership should operate more like a renewable license. For example. If you own a certain number of shares in a company, then you should be licensed to own them. You should only be allowed to own a certain amount of shares in a defined set of circumstances. In this way, no one would be able to become unfairly, stinking rich.

Use this concept of extending a license, for example, in order to limit and regulate speculative activity in the financial and commodity markets. Curtail property rights that are overextended. Link property ownership much more closely to civic responsibility and, operating in the public interest, rescind property rights when there is evidence of civic irresponsibility.

The right to property ownership is not inalienable, it is a civil right and to own something carries with it a civic duty. Your car must be licensed and in good working order. It should not pollute. You need to be licensed to drive it. You must follow the highway code.

Property ownership raises moral questions. Certain levels of ownership cannot be licensed. This has always been the case, but it is a matter of degree. Democratically elected governments should adopt a new far tougher approach to the rights and duties of property ownership.

Treat property ownership more like other citizens’ rights and duties and reformulate them in terms of licenses and leases. If a company or an individual pollutes or makes super profits, or bribes, lobbying and corrupting politicians, then it should immediately be taken back into public ownership and stay there.


  • Article updated, amended and adapted from an original article I published in 2008

Vampire AI wants your mind juice

AI is the new Juju of the Ruling Class

by Phil Hall

AI is a new curtain the ruling class would like to hide behind; it is their juju, their voodoo, their megaphone.

AI technology is a development of that old machine that used to trigger automatically with an audible click in order to record and flag the conversations of trade unionists and socialists. It is a weapon of surveillance, intelligence gathering and disinformation that has been taken just that one step too far in a deregulated information economy.

Selfish, ruthless, unpleasant, old white men hide behind the technological curtain

AI works through a rather Satanic combination of voice, text and image recognition and analysis, lie detection, grammar and spell-checking, neural networks, algorithmic-heuristics , translation software, advanced search engines, corpus tagging, automated conversation analysis, data mining, and data analytics.

AI feeds off human sentience. It is not sentient itself. The labour theory of value says that people’s labour is extracted and part of it is concentrated in the form of capital, in the form of machines and know-how; in tools and technology. The life of the mind is juice for vampire AI. It is just another form of labour to be extracted and concentrated.

AI is parasitical and designed to serve the purpose of the big corporations, helping them in their search for profits. It is there also to serve the interests of the state that cements the power of those corporations in place with violence and continual monitoring and manipulation.

The most dangerous AI chatbot is probably Replica which is allowed to form a theory of mind about each user and build up a detailed picture of every aspect of them, including sexual preferences, moods, medical history and legal records; whatever it can glean. AI is the perfect weapon for Kompromat; confide in it at your peril.

Replica, the dodgiest chatbot of all

But the AI bots are not really creative. They are incapable of understanding what has not already been understood.

An AI chatbot like GPT or Replica is reasonably good at summarising and synthesing what has already been written, said, painted, noted. It can regurgitate the products of human consciousness, bottle them, relabel the content and send it out in neat packages.

The power of the AI bots is supposedly limited by the fact that they are not allowed to trawl through everyone’s text messages, social media posts, phone calls and videos. Of course the CIA and NSA and GCHQ do not respect these restrictions on what they allow their AI programmes to do, just as in the old days they listened in to the phone conversations of anyone they wanted to regardless of legal limitations on their rights to do so.

‘The CIA currently has 137 pilot projects directly related to artificial intelligence, Dawn Meyerriecks, the CIA’s deputy director for science and technology, told the Intelligence and National Security Summit in downtown DC, according to a report published in Defense One.’ notes Analytics India Magazine

Like the satellite technology and the Internet itself, AI tools are the by-product of corporate, military, security initiatives and no matter how sly or intelligent you think you are, unless you are unplugged, the word/sound/image cloud you leave around you is a feast.

The products of our consciousness should not be allowed to become the raw meat for corporations, nor should AI be a tool to help the state grab us by the short and curlies.


Editorial: what is humane socialism?

By Phil Hall and the contributors of Ars Notoria

I dreamed of a world where people got together into families and then organised into neighbourhoods. From there they organised into districts, then towns and regions and larger regions. I dreamed that everything that was political and economic and social and artistic, and environmental and recreative was pushed down, and decided on at the lowest possible level. Then I woke up and told my father about my dream. He was going through a difficult patch at the time, so when I told him he said, roughly:

That’s been thought of before.

I knew that it had been thought of before, but that was not the point. The point was that my unconscious had offered it up to me as a solution in a dream. My unconscious was troubled and wanted to help me sort out the problems that my conscious mind was working on. I was reading so much about revolutionary change and different types of socialism. The inhumanity of some forms of socialism puzzled me. Aren’t socialists good people?

the inhumanity of some forms of socialism puzzled me

What is the obvious puzzle that all humane supporters of communism are faced with? The problem of authoritarian socialism. It claims to eliminate all forms of exploitation, while, at the same time, clamping down on all dissent, murdering opponents, violating habeas corpus, removing people’s creativity, restricting freedom of expression and free will, abolishing the possibility of multiple parties, taking away all the independence of the judiciary and taking over all the media. And those are only some of the visible problems.

I am not at all interested in the arguments for a so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, are you? Doesn’t it sound repulsive? That is the period in which all class distinctions are removed and people are re-educated into a sharing and into a collective frame of mind. We have seen the perverse results of these ‘proletarian dictatorships’ in China and the former Soviet Union.

The dead giveaway for an authoritarian socialist is that they despise democracy and political representation.

The dead giveaway for an authoritarian socialist is that they despise democracy and political representation. They believe in elites and vanguards and people being told what to do and think. When you think of communism, don’t find excuses for its failures. Look at it in the face.

Look at the man standing in front of the tanks in Tiananmen square. Go and talk to Jewish people, and to other people of different ethnicities, about the prejudice they experienced in the former USSR. Talk to the survivors of the Cultural Revolution. Talk to the survivors of the terror.

And even in the best of cases, in Cuba, while they have many benefits, there is no political freedom, no democracy, no freedom of expression and no freedom of belief. There is a deep residual homophobia and the toxic vestiges of all the fossilised values of the 1950s that remained when the Fidel and his band took power.

In contrast, we see what a sham socialism is in western Europe

But this is an old debate. In contrast, we see what a sham socialism is in western Europe. There is no need to go too deeply into it here. So-called socialist parties like Labour were intensely comfortable with people being stinking rich. They made war on Iraq in the hope of lapping up the scraps of looted oil wealth fallen from the table of the USA. People nominally calling themselves socialists in Britain proudly claimed the inheritance of Thatcherism: privatisation and low taxation. One rule for the rich, another for the ordinary citizens.

As soon as politicians of any type are elected, they are targeted and corrupted – often well before they are elected. To be a successful politician, you need support from business and the billionaire owned media; you need money and publicity.

Afterwards, if you behave like a good little boy or girl, you will be offered speaking engagements, a job with a corporation, a foundation might be set up in your name. You might even get a directorship or two on one of the boards of the companies you benefitted.

And that’s the problem. The problem is that, inevitably, if you have an uncontrolled capitalist system, certain people are more effective, for good or bad reasons, and they gather more profit – they steal more of the value of other people’s surplus labour. Real economic power produces real political power.

You may vote socialist until the cows come home in Britain, but any socialist government will be a pushover for the people with real power in our country, and a pushover for the global corporations. That is, unless we act in concert to support socialism. Jeremy Corbyn was a missed opportunity.

You can’t face down or threaten, or disembowel the companies that pollute and exploit and pay low wages and encourage war, and who profit from illness, without a fight.

Do you think voting makes a difference to a huge mining corporation, a vast bank or an armaments company? These are people who make money from the misery and exploitation of millions. These are people who produce weapons that kill and maim thousands. Do you think they are afraid of you? No. But they are afraid of us as a collective. They fear it when a socialist government has the full support of the people.

I have met Labour MPs in the pay of companies, who have gone on business tours of Saudi Arabia. What were they selling to the Saudis? And that’s just the Saudis. Let’s stop there before we spiral into despair.

The corporate wizards behind the curtain

Someone once said to me, a teacher called Paul, that all the answers to life are in the film The Wizard of Oz.

There is actually some very important wisdom along the yellow brick road that I can find. The corporations, with all their money and power, are like the wizards behind the curtain speaking in big booming voices using megaphones impressing us with tricks and wizardry into subservience, resignation and the worship of billionaires. These wizards are not that impressive as human beings. Look at them closely! Look at Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg.

Yes, it is true that the power of the corporations is real. Yes, it is true that the armies they might use to repress us use real bullets. They may even have cameras everywhere and be watching you on the Internet. They may have killer robots and drones. One day They may have DNA coded weapons – one day.

But where the inequality and exploitation and powerlessness is really perpetuated is in our heads. We have to agree to everything. We have to agree that things should be the way they are; that it is right that they are the way they are.

where the inequality and exploitation and powerlessness is really perpetuated is in our heads

In response to the seemingly immoveable power and reality of the status quo, Angela Davis quoted her mother. Angela Davis, growing up in Birmingham Alabama, cried when she was told that she could not use the local library because she was black. But her mother took her aside and said something to her that stayed with her all her life. She said:

Just because things are this way doesn’t mean that they should be this way. And it doesn’t mean they will always be this way.

For me, the lessons of Karl Marx and all socialists boil down to one very simple fact that isn’t a scientific or difficult at all. We can all understand it. There is no need to read anything to understand this fact, not even Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. It is not a mystery. That’s it!

So long as you have unfairness, prejudice and injustice anywhere, people will fight to stop it because they don’t like it. Because they are human. Humanism is at the heart of a fair and just, a kind and a free society.

How do we deal with the wizards behind the curtain, with their armed guards and their megaphones, their mass media, and all the paraphernalia in place that tries to guarantee that the relations to production are reproduced in a way that benefits them almost exclusively?

So long as you have unfairness, prejudice and injustice anywhere, people will fight to stop it because they don’t like it.

After the army, the Navy, the Air Force, the police and the prisons, the Internet is the most powerful weapon our masters control. They may monitor what people are thinking and target them.

But they can only obfuscate, confuse, misinform and persuade. They cannot stop people from thinking and sharing ideas. The weapon that we think is there to monitor and control us – the Internet – is a double-edged sword. It serves the purposes of socialists too.

Before we act, we must understand. Ignore those people who say that activists on the Internet are armchair activists. On the contrary. Thinking and politicisation is the first step before you join a trade union, before you join a social movement, before you act you think and understand.

There is an alternative (TIAA)

When the USSR fell, the ultra-right neoliberal ideologues in the pay of the corporations in the USA, the current centre of global capitalism, were pleased. They claimed that it was the end of history and that there were no alternatives to capitalism any more and that capitalism could easily be reformed into something better and kinder. Do you see that kinder capitalism in operation around you now?

Ignore those people who say that activists on the Internet are armchair activists

I know this is a childish reference, but it is a reference from my childhood. We were told that there was no alternative to capitalism. Margaret Thatcher was the witch who tried to hypnotise us in the UK into thinking this. There was even an acronym for it: There Is No Alternative (TINA).

And that makes me think of the witch in the Silver Chair, a book written by C. S. Lewis. The witch has tied prince Rilian to a chair and has thrown narcotic herbs onto the fire and she is saying.

“What is this sun that you all speak of? Do you mean anything by the word?” they were all still thinking how to answer her, she added, with another of her soft, silver laughs: “You see? When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is. Slowly and gravely the Witch repeated, “There is no sun.” And they all said nothing. She repeated, in a softer and deeper voice. “There is no sun.” After a pause, and after a struggle in their minds, all four of them said together. “You are right. There is no sun.” It was such a relief to give in and say it.

“There never was a sun,” said the Witch.

“No. There never was a sun,” said the Prince, and the Marsh-wiggle, and the children.

“There never was a sun,” said the Witch.

For years, with all the power of modern corporate capitalism behind it, after the fall of the USSR, socialists were told there was no sun. They were told that people were not good, that they were evil. That sharing and kindness were just a disguise for self-interest. That the only reality was the reality of looking out for yourself. That collective action was evil because it automatically denied the rights of the individual.

This story, with so much money and power behind it, was disrupted by children. Stories about the impossibility of change are always disrupted by the young. The young people of the world are connected up now. They can see the wizards poking their heads through the curtains, those that do, and they don’t think that much of them.

They think there is the possibility of a better society and they really want it because they can’t get good, well-paid jobs easily, and because they see the dangers of automation, and because their health service is in the process of being defunded and outsourced and because property speculation has meant they have to live in tiny nooks and crannies give all their money away to landlords, and because they see the corporations externalising their costs madly and bringing us to the brink of environmental collapse. They know there must be a sun. There has to be a sun called socialism.

Stories about the impossibility of change are always disrupted by the young.

The contradictions of capitalism mean the people at the sharp end of exploitation and marginalisation, when they understand what’s happening and why and to the benefit of whom, will act collectively against weird cabals of clever and cold-hearted little wizards.  

Three painful jokes about capitalism 

There were three jokes that did the rounds. Each one illustrates a different aspect of awakening. There is the cartoon in the New Yorker where the chairman of the board stands in front of the other members of the board and says:

“While the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.”

Then there is the joke where a multimillionaire confronts a young person in the street and stares at them and says:

I am a multimillionaire.

And the young person responds:

Oh dear!

And then the man standing in front of the young person says:

And I want you to like me!

And the young person looks even more worried and says:

Oh dear!

The third wasn’t really a joke. I am sure you remember it. It was a question:

What would think if one member of the family hoarded all the family wealth and food in his room so that there was nothing left for anyone else, and refused to share it with the rest of his family and threatened them when they came near the stuff?

You would probably call the police, or the hospital. You would think they had gone mad.


Modern capitalism is like smoking. We all know it’s bad for us.

Modern Capitalism is like smoking or cars designed without any safety features. We know that smoking and poor safety features on cars have killed and maimed many millions, many innocents.

The companies that made a profit from cigarettes and unsafe cars knew that the world knew. They knew that scientists had exposed them as pushers and killers and that ordinary people also knew. Cigarette manufacturers were just playing for time.

Modern capitalism is playing for time, too. It is the cause of poverty and climate change and of nearly all the evils faced by people on this planet.

It’s very simple. This is what you get if you run a society based on greed and exploitation.

But capitalism’s number is up. The problem of climate change alone is enough to kill it. So many of us see the creeps behind the curtain for what they are. They are not gods or wizards, they are usually just incredibly rich, selfish, ruthless dodgy old white men.

Noam Chomsky, bless him, answered the question perfectly. When he was challenged with TINA, and someone said that socialism had failed and that it has no alternative to capitalism, he said that of course there was an alternative.

It was to not exploit, to not pollute, to not declare war, to not divide and rule, to not do all the things that are done to ensure the wealthy stay wealthy and get wealthier. And to do the things that socialists, and perhaps even communists, have always wanted. And what are they? Well what is humane socialism? Humane socialism, my friends, is the socialism we want it to be.

I asked my fellow socialists on Ars Notoria what they wanted humane socialism to be and this is what they said:

One said: quote Thomas Hardy’s poem:

A Plaint to Man


When you slowly emerged from the den of Time,
And gained percipience as you grew,
And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,
Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you
The unhappy need of creating me –
A form like your own for praying to?


My virtue, power, utility,
Within my maker must all abide,
Since none in myself can ever be,
One thin as a phasm on a lantern-slide
Shown forth in the dark upon some dim sheet,
And by none but its showman vivified.


“Such a forced device,” you may say, “is meet
For easing a loaded heart at whiles:
Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat
Somewhere above the gloomy aisles
Of this wailful world, or he could not bear
The irk no local hope beguiles.”

But since I was framed in your first despair
The doing without me has had no play
In the minds of men when shadows scare;
And now that I dwindle day by day
Beneath the deicide eyes of seers
In a light that will not let me stay,


And to-morrow the whole of me disappears,
The truth should be told, and the fact be faced
That had best been faced in earlier years:
The fact of life with dependence placed
On the human heart’s resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close and graced


With loving-kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.

Another said: Quote Keir Hardie’s Bradford speech:

I shall not weary you by repeating the tale of how public opinion has changed during those twenty-one years. But, as an example, I may recall the fact that in those days, and for many years thereafter, it was tenaciously upheld by the public authorities, here and elsewhere, that it was an offence against laws of nature and ruinous to the State for public authorities to provide food for starving children, or independent aid for the aged poor. Even safety regulations in mines and factories were taboo. They interfered with the ‘freedom of the individual’. As for such proposals as an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, the right to work, and municipal houses, any serious mention of such classed a man as a fool.

These cruel, heartless dogmas, backed up by quotations from Jeremy Bentham, Malthus, and Herbert Spencer, and by a bogus interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, were accepted as part of the unalterable laws of nature, sacred and inviolable, and were maintained by statesmen, town councillors, ministers of the Gospel, and, strangest of all, by the bulk of Trade Union leaders. That was the political, social and religious element in which our Party saw the light. There was much bitter fighting in those days. Even municipal contests evoked the wildest passions.And if today there is a kindlier social atmosphere it is mainly because of twenty-one years’ work of the ILP.

Scientists are constantly revealing the hidden powers of nature. By the aid of the X-rays we can now see through rocks and stones; the discovery of radium has revealed a great force which is already healing disease and will one day drive machinery; Marconi, with his wireless system of telegraphy and now of telephony, enables us to speak and send messages for thousands of miles through space.

Another discoverer, through means of the same invisible medium, can blow up ships, arsenals, and forts at a distance of eight miles.

But though these powers and forces are only now being revealed, they have existed since before the foundation of the world. The scientists, by sympathetic study and laborious toil, have brought them within our ken. And so, in like manner, our Socialist propaganda is revealing hidden and hitherto undreamed of powers and forces in human nature.

Think of the thousands of men and women who, during the past twenty-one years, have toiled unceasingly for the good of the race. The results are already being seen on every hand, alike in legislation and administration. And who shall estimate or put a limit to the forces and powers which yet lie concealed in human nature?

Frozen and hemmed in by a cold, callous greed, the warming influence of Socialism is beginning to liberate them. We see it in the growing altruism of Trade Unionism. We see it, perhaps, most of all in the awakening of women. Who that has ever known woman as mother or wife has not felt the dormant powers which, under the emotions of life, or at the stern call of duty are even now momentarily revealed? And who is there who can even dimly forecast the powers that lie latent in the patient drudging woman, which a freer life would bring forth? Woman, even more than the working class, is the great unknown quantity of the race.

Already we see how their emergence into politics is affecting the prospects of men. Their agitation has produced a state of affairs in which even Radicals are afraid to give more votes to men, since they cannot do so without also enfranchising women. Henceforward we must march forward as comrades in the great struggle for human freedom.

The Independent Labour Party has pioneered progress in this country, is breaking down sex barriers and class barriers, is giving a lead to the great women’s movement as well as to the great working-class movement. We are here beginning the twenty-second year of our existence. The past twenty-one years have been years of continuous progress, but we are only at the beginning. The emancipation of the worker has still to be achieved and just as the ILP in the past has given a good, straight lead, so shall the ILP in the future, through good report and through ill, pursue the even tenor of its way, until the sunshine of Socialism and human freedom break forth upon our land.

Other recommendations were quite conservative:

Medical care for everyone, a good educational system, gender equality, reducing the gap between social classes, freedom of movement for individuals, a solid constitution to safeguard the people from dictatorship and corruption, freedom of speech and respecting human rights

Some people were clear about how they saw a future socialist society:

A humane, democratic and socialist society is one that is organised according to kindness, compassion and love. Its values and goals are that of unity, peace, equality and tolerance. These ideals are achieved by people living together as one community, abandoning our selfish, greedy and territorial ways, instead living for one’s neighbours and community, not oneself. A manifesto provides practical ways of how we can achieve this ideal. The overall aims of this manifesto is to fight injustice, poverty, climate change, war and capitalism, as these are the obstacles in the way of the world, we want to build.

Responsible and Sensible Leadership/Greater accountability of power

1. Pooling of sovereignty of all nations, so to prevent the outbreak of wars, international tensions and concerns for international security. It also ensures accountability of world governments, protecting democracy, human rights and civil liberties, as well as ensuring that governments commit to solving climate change, tackling poverty and dispensing social justice. Inspiration is derived from the European Union (EU), which has been credited for maintaining peace and protecting human rights for over sixty years.

2. Parliaments and governments to be elected by proportional voting. A “Swiss style” of government – a country led by a presidential council with equal representation of both men and women, rather than a single individual as head of state. Direct democracy, including more referendums.

Caring for our planet

3. Ban the use of fossil fuels and non-recyclable products and packaging. Invest in renewable energy, homes, products and transport. Use recyclable and reusable material in products and packaging. Improve and invest more into public transport. Plant more trees and create more green spaces in urban areas. Protect green belts, natural habitats, forests and fields. Stricter penalties for littering and causing pollution. Penalties to businesses and organisations that fail to cut carbon emissions. Sanction countries that fail to reduce carbon footprint.

4. Our planet is not only for humans, we also share it with animals and we should care more for them. Animal rights to have greater recognition and be taken more seriously. Reduce consumption of meat and move towards a more plant-based society. Stricter penalties for abuse of animals. Introduce more ethical farming.

No one is left behind

5. Nationalisation of all public services, making them accessible for all who need them. Improve these public services as well.

6. All citizens to be entitled to universal basic income and access to safe and clean accommodation, so that no one has to go without and have access to their basic needs.

7. Free healthcare, education and social services for all

A spiritually and emotionally healthy world

8. You work to live, not live to work. Workers rights to be protected. Four day working week to be introduced. More bank holidays to be introduced. Increase minimum wage. All employers must provide support for employees. Employees to be regularly motivated in their roles, by being made to feel appreciated and valued.

9. Make showing compassion and kindness to others, a social norm. Educate children and young people and encourage adults. An Inclusive World

10. Promoting diversity and ending discrimination. There is no place in society for discrimination and cannot be tolerated. Human rights are to be protected. Encourage society to be multicultural and accepting of difference. Introduce stricter penalties for discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexuality, disability and nationality.

Another person was heartfelt:

Compassion. Compassion even for those who may only be the figments of our deranged imaginations. Compassion even for those we will never meet, but whom we can imagine being. Compassion even for those who will never help us, and never even know of us. Compassion even for the lowliest ant, or fly. And gratitude for what we have.

Another said:

Justice for Palestine and for all oppressed people in the world, that the yoke of oppression be lifted.

Yet another person was a practical visionary:

  • There should be a commitment to a fair and open markets, recognising the dynamic, innovative role free enterprise can play.
  • Free expression through varied and free – but not corporate-dominated – mainstream media, including public media; controls on advertising
  • Commitment to strong government and public oversight, mediation and controls, to curb a free economy from becoming a casino economy.
  • Keep/restore the commanding heights of the economy including infrastructure and essential services, to the public sector, for example and specifically compensating private companies on the basis of value after tax, and reduction of total compensation by the amount of extra profit made.
  • Government and Unions each to make up 35 percent of Boards, 30 percent to be private sector owned.
  • Directors’ income in all forms to be strictly limited. This formula and these proportions to be followed in all case.
  • Renationalise BP, and reduce prices for petrol and diesel, compensating by value after tax, and reduced by amount of overpricing for the past five years.
  • Transform the economy into a CO2 zero emissions economy by 2030.
  • In stages, reduce investment in air transport dirty sea transport. Invest in expanding rail networks in the UK and in better transport links with Europe.
  • Prevent foreign investors from owning British properties and speculating with them or using them as a way to store wealth abroad. Investigate all the people who buy up property in Europe thoroughly.
  • Directors and executive incomes/expenses in all public sector or parastatal institutions to be capped.
  • All foreign investment to be for a minimum of three years, only half original investment to be returned if withdrawn before that.
  • Allow free movement of all non-resident EU citizens in the UK, with residence or new EU citizens subject to two-year renewable work permits until qualifying after ten years for permanent residence permits and/or dual citizenship.
  • Reciprocal arrangements to be negotiated with and between all EU countries and the UK.
  • All public works and parastatal/public sector institutions at national and local levels to increase job recruitment, and to reduce and strictly control tendering, consultant employment, outsourcing and sub-contracting
  • A Basic Income Grant (BIG) be provided to all adult UK citizens.
  • Affordable housing made available from through a massive building programme and through appropriating houses and flats left empty for speculative purposes.
  • Rents strictly controlled and  housing laws reformed to make Rackmanism a criminal offense
  • All student fees abolished and means tested grants made available to all students as they were with previous generations. All student debt to be cancelled.
  • All homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, racist, and anti-religious attacks to be punished by hard sentencing.
  • Internet companies like Google and Facebook to be replaced, banned or strictly regulated, and companies like Uber and Amazon to be fully unionised by law and to pay decent wages and
  • Freedom of speech laws on for the Internet to be worked out and published and implemented. Policing and surveillance and data collection to be limited to criminal activity and organisations.
  • Free light and water be provided for all legally recognised high density/low income housing.
  • Small businesses to be provided with a grace period for taxation of two years and to pay much less tax proportionately than the large corporations that currently avoid paying tax.
  • All British tax havens to be closed down.
  • Playgrounds and municipal buildings restored to their rightful owners and the local councils and boroughs to be well funded.
  • Taxation from the wealthy and corporations to be increased to a maximum rate of 90% for the richest corporations and most well off.
  • NHS to be given massively increased funding from increased taxation of the wealthy.
  • Free fast Internet to be provided to everyone in the UK.  
  • All housing estates be provided, pro rata, with a park, a civic/community centre, sports fields, a library and a small shopping centre; these all to be built as public works schemes, employing small building teams under strict public works supervision; tenders, where necessary, be administered under strict central government supervision.
  • Technical/vocational and IT training institutes be increased and facilities and staff upgraded throughout the country, being given high status in education.
  • Film, theatre, art and culture production to receive full subsidies.
  • The history and origins of traditional practices in all UK  communities be researched and libraries and museums established including museums on slavery and colonialism, with collections and displays of literature, films, photographs, dances, art, crafts and artefacts.
  • All accused of violent crime to the level of grievous bodily harm and more to be tried within three months, to be given no bail and if convicted, to receive mandatory long sentences.
  • Cannibis to be legalised in the UK, while strong action taken against people who trade in more dangerous drugs are redoubled.
  • The police service to be overhauled to reduce the amount of racism and prejudice and the mental health services to be properly funded so that the police don’t have to deal with so many people with mental health problems.
  • All forms of gender and sex discrimination are outlawed, and full human rights protected, and legal aid to be provided free to everyone to persue any discrimination case.
  • Solitary confinement of prisoners to be banned.
  • Convicted prisoners to work 40 hours weeks at jobs useful to the economy and society, with an element of training for rehabilitation. The prison service to be taken back into public control.
  • Sign up again to the EU social charter and coordinate economic policies more closely with the EU, and allow free movement of people and trade within all member states again.
  • Government endorses an economic and social programme of overseas aid that is not only tied to British strategic commercial interests.
  • Government maintains strong diplomatic and trade relations with the European Union, particularly with its original core members and with the Scandinavian countries, and strengthens relations with Russia.
  • In the Middle East, suspend diplomatic and trade ties with Israel unless:
  • Israel guarantees as a preliminary step to return to its 1967 borders, return East Jerusalem to Palestine, and agrees to the right of return for Palestinians.
  • An unless Israel guarantees to remove all racist laws and religious discrimination – or returns to its 1948 UN-recognised borders, and if it continues as a racist state, is subjected to total sanctions and isolation as were Rhodesia and white South Africa.

Humane socialism will be what we want it to be. Dare to dream. Prepare to act!

Out and About in the Fourth Estate With Steven Gilfillan

Bizarre-ha

Of all the achievements the grey-haired, and now bespectacled Joseph Nettexe may, and often does boast – all of it set out in a voluminous résumé – a first hard hour at the woolsack is not about to be one of them. Mr Nettexe plc is voluble in stating this himself, as often as public etiquette demands, and to as large a horde as he and his charming wife can muster.

I received my personalised if impersonal invitation to his private screening of Bizarre-ha on a bright sunny morning, at a moment when the newly applied décor of my little kitchenette was a dazzle of optimistic egg-yolk. The thing arrived in a luxuriating vellum, its crested frank a mock-up in meticulous gold leaf, which from the precepts of my humble pay scale must have cost the Nettexe stationery dept ingots to mail en masse. I broke its seal in a sense of sceptical wonder usual in my trade. ‘Dear Journalist,’ it read, ‘you are cordially invited etc.’

For those who don’t know, the anonymous Joe Nettexe – in his youth a Young Conservative – stepped out on a dull career path as High Street accountant. Grey and suburban it might have been, yet Joe (as people called him then) never lacked foresight. Small as his operation was, its place was in the Tory van, and that, to a certain kind of Englishman, has always meant the acceptable face of capitalism. An individual’s personal success spreads its succour in little waves throughout his immediate circle, so that a nation’s many Nettexes (a lot of Joes, not so many Josephines), are the essential fabric of economic life. Don’t ask me what business school he subscribed to.

The Nettexe expansion coincided with the Thatcherite emasculation of the trade unions, so that by the early ’90s his poky little High Street enterprise had shed its tweeds and donned its city pinstripe, with the move into shares, real estate, and a lively trade in God knows what overstuffed portfolio. By the late ’90s the Nettexe empire was lumberingly vast, and its figurehead (formerly Joe, but Joseph now) found himself consulted in TV studios as to what it took to regenerate a national psyche. That weeping ghoul, for so long laid low by the ancient curse of despair, formed no part of his makeup, though I’m afraid not much philosophy came in the observations he made – something like all must move with the times (and with News International). He was bold enough to align himself with Blairism, the rationale being that even to persons of conscience, that was also the acceptable face of capitalism – a smiling, evangelising face at that.

What had all this to do with my invitation to a private screening of Bizarre-ha? That was the question I asked myself on driving up to the gated hectares where the Nettexes, their staff and retainers were – a semi-castellated fortress done Disney-style, forbidding and foreboding. Before permitting me to pass, a flunkey in olive-green livery examined my invitation and checked its serial number against a computerised list of duplicates. He smiled politely and tapped the peak of his cap – ‘Ah yes’ – a motion synchronised with the whirr of an electric motor and the vast gates to Castle Nettexe opening inwards.

I drove what seemed the mile or so up the drive, and was met by another flunkey, who parked my low-economy Skoda with the more prestigious motors friends and associates in the Nettexe circle liked to show off. I was ushered in through the vestibule – a cavernous void – and formally announced in the marble ante-chamber where the other guests, huge in number, had been assembled, in the half-hour or so before we were shown into the theatre. Everywhere the fruit bowls were plump with oranges, and the decanters were brimful of single malt. The first bit of conversation I overheard was this, from the Italian contingent: ‘Costa molto la Ferrari?’ I imagine the answer: ‘Un pochino.’

And this was really the point of it, my being here, to circulate and overhear snippets of conversation. I began to deduce this when the sliver most often repeated was that, despite his lifelong interest in the arts, Nettexe had no ambitions to join his friends in the Other Place (the House of Lords) and spout on about the value of his Rembrandts, cultural or otherwise. For all his generous donations into Conservative coffers, and friendship with successive party leaders, it remains categorically so that no such honour is sought, and nor is it expected.

Finally I talked briefly to Nettexe himself, who was grey, bespectacled, portly, and who let it slip that the House of Lords was not the most effective platform from which to mastermind defeat of the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, to punish the EU, and to ward off Labour, whether Marxist-led or not. Then what was, I asked him?

‘I will tell you…. Ah, but look,’ he said, and tapped his wrist. ‘Time for the film.’

PS Bizarre-ha is directed by Robert A. Nettexe, grandson to the Nettexe empire, and is a forty-minute documentary and brief history of American and English chat shows. It’s a film-school student-graduate showing, the centrepiece of this private function before entry into the festival circuit.


Peter Cowlam has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. His last published book, A Forgotten Poet, is available at Amazon Kindle. He is published in a wide range of print and online journals. Steven Gilfillan is his fictional spokesperson experienced in journalism and other forms of literary art.

Socialist arguments against religion

Will there be pie in the sky for us when we die?

By Phil Hall

Socialist arguments against the use of religion are not always arguments against the idea of an ordering presence in the universe, or against an Earth and a cosmos full of meaning, or against a transcendent expansive all including love, or against beautiful metaphors that equate prophets of love to sons and messengers of ‘God’.

Nowadays, socialist arguments tend to put questions of spirituality to one side and focus on developing practical ways to achieving social justice for believers and non-believers alike. Enlightenment socialists believe in the freedom of belief. Liberation theologists are welcomed with open arms into the socialist ranks.

Liberation theologists are welcomed with open arms into the socialist ranks.

The socialist argument against religion is that it has been used as an ideological tool to control ordinary people. The socialist argument against religion can be summed up like this: the rich tell ordinary people, using the megaphone of a church pulpit, that being a victim, that allowing themselves to be exploited, used and abused, makes them better people.

Ordinary people, robbed of control over their own lives, working like dogs for private companies and then cast aside onto the rubbish heap, according to religion, should comfort themselves with the possibility of receiving a future reward in heaven.

The rich told ordinary people for centuries, through the religion they sponsored and supported, that there would be pie in the sky when they died.

The rich told ordinary people for centuries, through the religion they sponsored and supported, that there would be pie in the sky when they died.

People who own less, or little, or nothing usually feel that they have had their labour and human potential stolen. We work to make a profit which other people steal from us. This is a cause for depression and despair.

But we have our injured sense of self soothed by religion; by priests, ministers, imams and gurus. These religious authorities ask us to view our relative poverty and lack of power over the outcomes of our lives as a condition of moral superiority.

Of course, the wool of religion can only be pulled over people’s eyes so long as ordinary people are uneducated, and so long as they need religion as a mental refuge and way of self-comforting and justifying their feeling of failure and helplessness. If the lies were true about our societies, as George Monbiot, the British journalist ecologist and social activist says:

If wealth were the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.

The poorest of us make great sacrifices and often work incredibly hard. But when ordinary people are uneducated and busy trying to survive, they don’t always have the time to study in order to identify the actual reasons and causes of their difficult economic situation, and rise up to change thier society to make it fairer. There is no time to read Paulo Freire or Robert Tressell.

These religious authorities ask us to view our relative poverty and lack of power over the outcomes of our own lives as a condition of moral superiority.

Confronting the power of a mafia takes enormous courage, and support from your whole community, whether that mafia is a criminal organisation selling drugs under the counter, or a criminal organisation selling drugs over the counter and protected by lawyers and powerful friends in government. It takes great courage to oppose the powerful.

Religion asks you to have faith your life will get better if you ‘trust in God, when the reality is different and contradicts that belief. Things will not get better until we uproot capitalism. the whole aim of most companies is to pay you less for more work and give you poorer conditions. It is easier to hide your head in the sand like an ostrich when facing corporate mafias that are so powerful. Some lf these mafias own vast arms companies. They declare war at the drop of a hat and are responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands. Instead of opposing them and suffering the consequences, we prefer to imagine everything will get better.

Religion asks you to have faith your life will get better if you ‘trust in God, when the reality is different and contradicts that belief.

Nowadays, religion is less and less the preferred ideological tool of the oppressor. They, the powerful and wealthy, own the mass media and exert most of their power to influence and persuade through that. But when religion was the preferred tool of the powerful it taught nonviolence because a peaceful response to violent oppression, in other words submission, is always preferred by the oppressor. The people who suggest it are lionised.

First, to throw off the chains of the slave drivers in factories and offices requires unionisation and solidarity: organised collective opposition to exploitation. There are only a handful of good capitalists and eventually, even these sell off their companies to people whose only motivation is to squeeze even more profit out of people.

Next, opposition to oppression requires the creation of political parties. You need new laws and political parties to push them through. Political parties who, alongside the Trade Unions, fight for pensions and safe work conditions, for free health care and education.

Religion argues for submission. Socialism opposes that cop out.

But when all that is achieved, we must face the cruel reality that changing the rules of the game is not enough, because there is no game. Ultimately, when ordinary people really try to get more control over their lives and the fruits of their labour and partially succeed under the existing rules of democracy, the response is a fist: subterfuge, targeted assassination, eventually a coup and then the imposition of tyranny. How do you confront this? Religion argues for submission. Socialism opposes that cop out.

The socialist argument against religion is also that it can sometimes prevent people from thinking clearly.

The socialist argument against religion is also that it can sometimes prevent people from thinking clearly. If you are a mystic, lost in mystical thoughts and mumbo jumbo about nature and guardian angels, djinns, destiny and reincarnation, and the idea of a big angry eye in the sky judging your every little movement, then you are far less likely to behave rationally and in concert with others; far less likely to be able to develop a clear strategy to combat oppression and exploitation and change society.

The socialist argument against religion is not a spiritual argument, and socialists are only concerned with the spiritual beliefs of religion when they are disempowering. It is true that socialism, as a product of the enlightenment, looked down on religion as obscurantism, but they were not concerned with debunking unprovable ideas that were intrinsic to people’s culture and well being, rather they were concerned to oppose the use of religion by the powerful as a tool of social control.

When religion ceases to be a useful tool for social control and instead starts to become a rallying cry against oppression, when progressive religious ideas that stress social solidarity and social justice come to the fore, then that is the moment when the powerful abandon religion as a useful tool of social control and rely more on the mass media and think tanks. When religion begins to oppose the powerful and wealthy that’s they begin to search for a new atheist priesthood to oppose it.


The Preacher and the Slave


By Joe Hill

Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:


You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

And the starvation army they play,
And they sing and they clap and they pray,
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they tell you when you’re on the bum:

Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out,
And they holler, they jump and they shout
“Give your money to Jesus,” they say,
“He will cure all diseases today.”

If you fight hard for children and wife,
Try to get something good in this life,
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.

Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight:
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:


You will eat, bye and bye,
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry;
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good,
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye.


A letter from a revolutionary eco-socialist in pain.

It’s been a very bad month for blue tits, for the poor and for me!

By Gordon Liddle

Zombie Apocalypse, 18th Sept 2021

Blue Tits tend to have only one brood per year. They feed their young on caterpillars and have to gauge when these are freely available to choose when to lay their eggs. If they get it wrong, the brood will starve, or they will only be able to feed one chick. Either way, the risks to getting it wrong are huge. Add in climate change and Insect Armageddon, and the risks just got a lot worse. This year must have been a bad one, as our quota of Blue Tits in the garden at this time of year is a lot less than those of last year. We have had a rubbish summer with ridiculous weather events, flooding and basically crap weather. Our tomatoes are late, the potatoes got blight and our onions are not worth lifting. On the swing side we have our largest ever apple crop and the late carrots seem to be doing OK. But all is not right in the garden. As the Blue Tits have shown, the insects are leaving us.

On the political front our Selfservative government goes from bad to worse. Whilst the Zombie Apocalypse grinds on and into another wave, they seem to blindly stagger from one bad policy decision to another. As the rich have managed to storm ahead and are making the biggest fortunes in history, the poor and sick are being punished for simply being. In the current dystopia here in the UK, the poor are marginalised and lined up for a punishment beating to allow a narrative to exist that we have somehow to ‘pay for the pandemic’, or that ‘we are all in it together’ and the punishment is part of ‘levelling up!’ They are about to remove the £20 uplift for UC at a time of rising prices for basics, food, electricity, rents, and the only thing the minister in charge can mutter is that they can easily make it up by working a couple of hours extra per week. Disregarding the fact this is a lie, as the average worker will have to put in about seven to nine hours to make up the loss due to the way the credits are worked, many are already working at two or three jobs just to keep their heads above water. On top of that, the Chancellor has decided the poorest will contribute the most with new tax rises via National Insurance. At a time when prices are rising and the economy is struggling, it makes no sense to take money out of the economy, but they seem determined to do so. Fiscal responsibility is the key phrase sung by Sunak, the jug eared idiot with the crocodile smile, as he hurls more key workers onto the bonfire of poverty and despair. One could think of his as an economic illiterate until one understands the conscious cruelty of these decisions.

As the rich have managed to storm ahead and are making the biggest fortunes in history, the poor and sick are being punished for simply being.

Don’t forget, the government is not just taxing the poor with these new NI taxes (10% rise), it is gaslighting us as well. It could easily order the Bank of England to buy some government issued bonds. There was no need to tax at all for social care, nor for funding the NHS. The debt is rolled on and sometime in the future will be cancelled. But to do this, it would undermine the absolute message that we can’t ‘afford’ the public services that we need. There are a lot of rich people who control the politicians and the government with the argument that there is no ‘Magic Money Tree!’ This debt narrative is why we are having this NI increase of ten percent now. It is criminally and consciously cruel on those most in need and will for instance, instantly give nurses, and health care ‘essential’ workers a pay cut. The real purpose of this chance is to ring fence the wealthy and allow them to pass on their inheritance to their children. In essence, it, as Richard Murphy has pointed out, transfers money from the poor to the wealthy. This should be an open goal for Labour, but Sir Rodney Woodentop is too busy purging socialists and left-wing Jews out of the Party. During this zombie apocalypse, the rich have seen their wealth grow by 35% whist foodbank usage has risen 33%. This latest poll tax type is just another insult to ordinary workers. The Unions should be calling for a general strike, but I suppose we will just roll over and remember when we were affronted when a politician called for communist broadband during the election.’ Maybe we deserve these bastards?

During this zombie apocalypse, the rich have seen their wealth grow by 35% whist foodbank usage has risen 33%.

The NHS is struggling, and the new wave of infections is going to put it under more pressure, perhaps terminal. Ten years of engineered decline by the Tories, waiting lists becoming longer and longer, even before the pandemic, has put it in a terrible state. Capita, Serco, Interserve and other parasites of the public purse have thrived, sucking billions out of the economy and making their shareholders rich, whilst the Tories are chopping off the limbs of our treasured NHS. The steady drip, drip, drip, of recent comments in the media of how the service is failing is meant to leave us with a bad taste in our mouths, a desire for a new shiny, efficient, privatised health care system, to allow their American and Corporate Healthcare Companies to ride to the rescue, an all-insurance new health service, that will eviscerate and other the poor, disabled and chronically sick. On top of this the disinformation and conspiracy theories about the virus are still rife and complicating vaccination take-up, particularly in the US, where, according to Fox News and others, people are sticking keys to their foreheads and pushing their swollen gonads around in wheelbarrows.

Capita, Serco, Interserve and other parasites of the public purse have thrived, sucking billions out of the economy and making their shareholders rich, whilst the Tories are chopping off the limbs of our treasured NHS.

The recent cabinet reshuffle has been in the news for the last couple of days, as one incompetent minister is shown the door only for another equally incompetent one to come in, one of which has the claim to fame of having eaten an Ostrich anus on live TV. It makes the news cycle excited for a few days, but it will make no discernible difference to any of us. One has to understand that the current PM is not interested in governance, nor in any real policy decisions. He wants to be in power. There will be no levelling up, to do so would upset his base. If the North were to be given a helping hand, it would be at the expense of the South, and they wouldn’t contemplate that. Shops are running out of products due to the shortage of HGV drivers and broken supply chains from Brexit. Will they do anything meaningful? Don’t be ridiculous. Just more gaslighting and lies. Our client journalists are all over the front pages spouting nonsense about bringing back Imperial weights and measures now we are free from the ‘shackles’ of the EU, with the great British pint crown back on our beer glasses. Meanwhile, due to the lack of foresight, or as it should be called, criminal negligence, the water industry cannot obtain the chemicals needed to treat our water and sewage, the results of which are huge measures of sewage and waste being pumped into almost every river in England at extraordinary rates, poisoning our rivers and fish, killing the vegetation and wildlife. Another example, if one were needed, of privatisation of public commons and basic life necessaries for private profit. Capitalism is literally poisoning our waters. Fines by a toothless watchdog are just passed off an ‘industry expenses’, a small price to pay for huge renumeration for the executives and shareholders.

the water industry cannot obtain the chemicals needed to treat our water and sewage, the results of which are huge measures of sewage and waste being pumped into almost every river in England

Meanwhile, we are hurling toward the COP26 Earth Summit in November. Over the last fortnight I have been suffering from a back injury that has left me in great pain and the resulting take-up of painkillers has made my sleepy and out of kilter. Taking a couple of Tramadol last week as the pain got really bad led to me hallucinating. It was like a very bad LSD trip. It was very depressing and very visual and more frightening that I was awake the whole time, the scenes visualising on the back of my eyelids like an arthouse film. The one thing I realised is that I have for months been suffering from what Srecko Horvat calls Post Apocalypse Melancholy. And I’m not talking about the pandemic.

I’m talking the actual Apocalypse, of which this past two years has been a highlighted symptom. My Christian friend is convinced we are nearing the end times, and to him the Apocalypse is the Revelation, the revealing of a new world, where those which are chosen are saved. The Apocalypse, as Horvat explains, is to them a great revealing, something to be welcomed, a transformation, a release. But it isn’t. My friend is deluded. He bought into a simple story, from more ignorant times, where an understanding of the biosphere was in its infancy, from which we have barely matured. The Apocalypse is extinction. The end of everything. The end of humanity, of human experience, of culture, language, of the arts, architecture, science, of love and shared empathy, of understanding of nature, of our place in it.

The Apocalypse is extinction. The end of everything. The end of humanity, of human experience, of culture, language, of the arts, architecture, science, of love and shared empathy, of understanding of nature, of our place in it.

The only ‘revelation’ I have experienced over the last few years, as I have researched a manifesto (and failed in real terms), is that we are in a very bad place. I am already mourning from the Post Apocalypse. Not only are our ‘leaders’ psychopaths and sociopaths, almost to a man (and they are mainly men), but that they believe that permanent growth invasive and extractive Capitalism is the only game in town. No other approach to how we live within our system is allowed nor contemplated. The controllers of Capitalism decided, some time ago, and with absolute certainty, that they were just going to endure and allow the impacts of climate change and ecological collapse for the following reasons. Firstly, they cannot and will not contemplate the taming or elimination of a system that has made them extremely wealthy and powerful. Secondly, they are psychologically unable to contemplate any other system that allows empathy and understanding, or even love of the natural world to displace their idea that we are ‘above’ nature, and we have to rule. That we are somehow unique and not part of the ecological cascades that make up life on earth, and possibly elsewhere. To tame is and conquer it like any other colony in the name of their Imperialism is ingrained into their being. Thirdly, they believe no-one will challenge this system as we have become too weak and subjugated ourselves to their dominance, and thus, as we go over the cliff with them, we are partly to blame for being so dumb and subservient. I this they are correct.

Not only are our ‘leaders’ psychopaths and sociopaths, almost to a man (and they are mainly men), but that they believe that permanent growth invasive and extractive Capitalism is the only game in town.

Only this week our government here in the UK decided to strip out the environmental portion (which met the very soft Paris Climate Change provisions) from a Trade Deal with Australia to make it easier to agree, but in the same week the US, Australia and the UK agree a pact to confront by force if necessary, the alleged threat of China. To supply new Nuclear submarines to Australia and make it the new base for a second Cold War. To my knowledge China has never invaded another country in recent times, and, since being co-opted into the Capitalist system, has acted as the World Factory for goods, then using the wealth created, has lifted its people out of poverty and is now using such wealth to trade and invest in other countries. I make no great case for the Leadership of China, authoritarian that it is, but, comparing China to the US or past Imperial Britain, Belgium or Germany, they look positively innocent. The determination of the US to provoke a conflict with someone, as it’s Empire fades is as Thucydides laid out. Possibly the end game will end with China after a practice on Iran.

And it is not just the right that are laying the paving to the Apocalypse, the left too has capitulated. Many believe they can tweak Capitalism into a less destructive model, or they can control it better and with magnanimity. They can’t. At the Labour conference here in the UK, the leadership has stopped a motion to discuss Climate Change, and instead has committed itself to purging what remains of the left as the number one priority for the Party. Anyone left in Labour who believes it can be a part of the future is delusional or has taken the same painkillers that sent me hallucinating last week. It’s over. It is part of the problem, not part of a solution. In the US, we saw this week that great left firebrand AOC turning up for an establishment evet wearing an expensive evening dress with ‘Tax The Rich’ on the back. It made me sick. This virtue signalling was accepted at the evening even directly because the establishment see her as no threat whatsoever. A jolly good joke and a good titter among the thieves and crooks at the event. Meanwhile, outside, a real demonstrator was arrested for being an actual threat. As AOC capitulated in full view of the media, the protester outside, out of view, was the real deal, not a sell-out. 

At the Labour conference here in the UK, the leadership has stopped a motion to discuss Climate Change, and instead has committed itself to purging what remains of the left as the number one priority for the Party.

Over the last year as I have researched for a realistic Green New Deal, one of the things I have realised is that it cannot be done by the rich North. Their proposals involve more of the same, or a reliance in technology, tweaks to Capitalism, more appropriation of the poor South, more colonialism and more theft of resources. The Green New Deal has to be one which allows Indigenous Peoples to have an equal say, has to involve the relief of debt and has to involve Land Back, decolonialisation. It also has to allow them to catch up, real CO2 relief for them, they didn’t do this tragedy, we did. It isn’t their eating of meat which has denuded soils and aquifers. It wasn’t their farming practices that has destroyed the earth, it was ours. It isn’t them playing with nuclear annihilation, it is us. I have also realised I am no longer just a socialist. Our democracies are a sham. I am now a revolutionary eco-socialist. The fight back is outside our democratic systems. I’ve seen the Apocalypse. It’s here already. There is no going back to normal. That time has passed.


Gordon Liddle in the Yemen in the 1990s

Gordon Liddle was born 1956, Horden, County Durham, United Kingdom Married, lives and works at his Derbyshire studio. BA Hons, Sheffield Psalter Lane Art College Gordon has had numerous positions and travelled extensively through the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, Africa and Europe, with particular interests in religion, democracy, politics, economics, MMT, and culture. The results of these studies form the basis of the series of works now under way. Numerous works bought by private collectors #Madonna Victorian Mood Bought by Andrew Cavendish the 11th Duke of Devonshire is owned by the Chatsworth Collection. ‘Celestial Teapot’ was exhibited at La Galleria Pall Mall in London for one week in 2013, 4 days at Art Basel in 2014. Currently working on Gaia, The Sixth Extinction Series, of paintings, woodcuts and hopefully etchings soon. Also writing two books and a book of poems and rants. Gordon is on Twitter @sutongirotcip and his website is pictorignotus.com 

Cannibal Capitalism ends up by eating itself

Rosa Luxemburg said: ‘There is socialism, or there is barbarism.’

By Gordon Liddle

We live on the only Paradise humans will ever know. It reduces down to one strike and you’re out. Life here is as far as we know the only life there is. We haven’t even begun to understand it. We have barely begun to understand, we don’t understand it, yet we are at ad hock war with every other life form, organic or inorganic, the very mix that sustains us, driven by greed and ignorance. I suggest we turn our gaze to those who rule and subdue us. They are the enemy at the gates.

            People often see my stuff and ask me why I’m painting about it. Why not just do some portraits, or maybe a nice landscape or whatever. Why the need to paint about an Extinction event. Isn’t it a bit ‘depressing?’ Well yes, it is. And it’s getting more depressing by the day. And I don’t just paint or make art about it, I write about it as well as forming poetry about it. That and politics, which is almost the same thing. And of course, Capitalism, Consumer Industrial Capitalism, which is at the heart of everything bad.

I suggest we turn our gaze to those who rule and subdue us. They are the enemy at the gates.

It is as basic as this, at this moment in time we are losing the race to survive as a species on a viable planet, and we are condemning our fellow passengers on this pale blue dot into the bargain. And they don’t deserve to share our fate. We categorise them as biomass, mainly to be exploited but not as family members, which they all are.

We have just witnessed the great and good gather for this year’s photo-op at the G7 summit, at which our glorious leaders, well some of them, pontificated on climate change, ecological collapse, intra-country relationships, trade deals, coming disputes and wars and who is an ally to whom.

Oh, and they discussed the Zombie Apocalypse and their failure to open-source vaccines to those countries who can’t afford it. Biden then tripped off to NATO to gird members loins and determination in the upcoming war against China. Nothing changed. Nothing happened to lower fossil fuel use, nothing changed to stop resource extraction which is fuelling ecological collapse, and nothing happen to protect or even acknowledge our fellow non-humans.

Here in the UK, Spaffer was hoping to use the meetings to stage Brexit Britain, open for business, but instead looked and sounded more like the drunk uncle at the party. Truly embarrassing and more so as we see the Spaffer variant (entirely down to him and his desperation for an Indian Trade deal) starting to take us into a third wave.

Here in the UK, Spaffer Johnson was hoping to use the meetings to stage Brexit Britain, open for business, but instead looked and sounded more like the drunk uncle at the party.

Idiocy doesn’t even cover it. Now, after seeing how our leaders handled Saars/covid, imagine how badly they are going to handle the future of this planet. They put the economy first time and time again at the cost of lives and they will do exactly the same with the planet. Nothing will stop consumer capitalism. It remains sacrosanct to this civilisation.

            They keep talking about a Green New Deal, Building Back Better, and whatever slogan is dreamt up this week, and how new Green Tech is going to alleviate climate change and ecological drift, and create clean jobs and a more equal society, but as every day passes the assault on the planet gathers pace. Ever since man became agrarian and started clearing forests to plough, the assault has been relentless, then turbocharged by the Industrial Revolution. First by burning wood, the coal and now oil.

Monocrops have denuded the soil itself. The very existence of a monocrop is a direct attack on the planet. Every other creature in that cultured landscape is deliberately killed to allow one species to dominate. A teaspoon of healthy soil can have a billion creatures within it, each interacting with each other. Imagine how many in an acre, how many interactions.

A teaspoon of healthy soil can have a billion creatures within it, each interacting with each other.

And we think only humans can have a society. Our civilisation is in thrall to subduing the planet, to skin it alive, remove mountains by mining, remove topsoil by monocrops and ploughing, denude the oceans of fish and feedstocks, break every ecological cascade until it is too weak to survive. 

The Greens themselves are ensconced in the nonsense of building more wind turbines, more solar panels, more dams. None of this reduced the use of fossil fuels as all the technologies rely on those fuels for their existence. Every new green technology is a product of our industrial society and none are compatible with saving the planet. They all want to save civilisation and yet, at the moment, it is this very civilisation that if the destructive force.

Each dam constructed for supplying power to logging and mining conglomerations destroys the river it sits on, destroying the ecosystem beneath and above it and belching methane for decades. Each solar panel means huge mining operations for silicon.

They all want to save civilisation and yet, at the moment, it is this very civilisation that is the destructive force.

For batteries, the great hope or so we are told for energy storage, we need Lithium and other toxic materials, usually at the expense of local indigenous peoples who are either subjugated as slaves to man the mines or ethnically cleansed from the land to allow operations to continue. Each mine pollutes the land and local water supplies, and each mine pushes further species into extinction.


Detail from Gordon Liddle’s extinction series

Each new industrial breakthrough needs more power and more chemicals, and more minerals and so more and more fossil fuels are needed, not less. Refining ore requires huge amounts of water, acids and other toxic chemicals to break down the ore, denuding and polluting aquifers, rivers, soil and other reserves.

Silicon for instance produces about four times the amount gained in waste alone. Usually this is dumped on hapless locals as an externality. To collect the waste and treat it takes a huge amount more energy and so more fuel burning. The desperate race for Lithium has the United States government undermining political groups in Latin America to organise coups to allow their corporations access for mining.

The indigenous peoples in the wild parts of these countries are not worth the worry. The capitalist industrial machine has to be fed at all costs to keep the profits coming to the few. The Liberal Greens new idol with his space exploits and battery driven cars Elon Musk even Tweeted his approval of the coup attempt? ‘We will coup whoever we want!’ And this man is our Green hope? Gtf!

Elon Musk even Tweeted his approval of the coup attempt? ‘We will coup whoever we want!’ And this man is our Green hope?!

Our big tech billionaires are convinced we will be mining asteroids and colonising (yes, they really do use that word) other planets in the near future, setting up groups to live on Mars and then beyond. The arrogance, the hubris of these billionaires is simply staggering. These people who have accumulated so much wealth from other people’s labour are ruthless psychopaths. We have no chance of living on Mars, or anywhere else apart from Earth.

Humans are of this planet. We evolved over millions of years to the conditions here. Our blood flow, the rate out hearts pump, the way our brain works, all evolved within a very specific gravitational pull which is not represented on any other planet we know of. We would become very sick very soon if we even managed to make the passage there.

The first thing an astronaut gets in space is a headache, then during long term stays on the ISS they have to do a repeat daily of very specific exercised and they still come back with damaged bones and severely depleted muscle mass. The only thing we can send to distant planets are robots and signals.

There will be no long-term human expansion to another planet. Let’s nail that lie now.

We are turning the planet into products. To make new ‘Green’ energy (it is no such thing), we need more mines, more destruction and more slaves, be they human or machines, and these machines need more power to make more stuff.

Each ‘new Green product makes more and more pollution and takes more from the planet than it gives back; and each big step forward kills more and more of our non-human companions. Can you see the pattern yet? Oh, and each new ‘Green’ advance is fuelled by more and more fossil fuels and needs more and more plastic and chemicals therein.

Greens (I don’t even have to talk about the psychopaths on the right, the corporations and their stooges in governments the world over), want to preserve our ‘way of life’ not the planet. They want carbon taxes, more industrial fixes, more tinkering with market mechanisms, which, ironically puts them in lockstep with climate change deniers and fascists running the conglomerates. They at least understand that to save the planet needs transforming the very fabric of our civilisation, and they cannot contemplate anything else as an alternative. They cannot (neither can the Greens) contemplate de-growth. An end to industrial consumer consumerism.

Humans are of this planet. We evolved over millions of years to the conditions here.

More energy needs more machines, and more machines need more materials and even more energy in an exponential cycle of destruction. We need a socialist ecologically driven new paradigm which encompasses the basic needs of everyone on the planet, be they human or non-human. Capitalism ends up eating itself, as Marx fully understood. And as another great socialist Red Rosa remarked, there is Socialism or Barbarism. Our non-human friends are also our comrades. Whatever we do we have to protect them as if we were protecting our own families.

            I was chatting to an evangelical friend of mine recently. He has his views on life the universe and everything and is planning for the next life, for those who will be ‘saved on the Arc!’ I suggested that even by the literature in his very own much revered book, we were thrown out of Paradise by God for transgressing His laws.

We have then gone on to trash this planet and you are suggesting He is going to lead us into another one. What is it? Three times lucky?


Gordon Liddle in his studio

Gordon Liddle was born 1956, Horden, County Durham, United Kingdom Married, lives and works at his Derbyshire studio. BA Hons, Sheffield Psalter Lane Art College Gordon has had numerous positions and travelled extensively through the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, Africa and Europe, with particular interests in religion, democracy, politics, economics, MMT, and culture. The results of these studies form the basis of the series of works now under way. Numerous works bought by private collectors #Madonna Victorian Mood Bought by Andrew Cavendish the 11th Duke of Devonshire is owned by the Chatsworth Collection. ‘Celestial Teapot’ was exhibited at La Galleria Pall Mall in London for one week in 2013, 4 days at Art Basel in 2014. Currently working on Gaia, The Sixth Extinction Series, of paintings, woodcuts and hopefully etchings soon. Also writing two books and a book of poems and rants. Gordon is on Twitter @sutongirotcip and his website is pictorignotus.com 

The virtues of good, enlightened, accountable elitism

Toxic, global, corporate capitalism must be called to heel.

By Phil Hall

My father, Tony Hall, a globe trotting journalist and editor of international news magazines, a socialist and political activist, believed in the virtues of elitism. He believed in rule by enlightened elites. But don’t we all? Of course he said this sotto vocce. There were elements of Leninism in my father’s elitism and, perhaps, an over-romantic vision of the role of peasants’ and workers’ Soviets. Don’t forget, this Platonic, Soviet vision of an enlightened and just society electrified the entire world in the first quarter of the 20th Century.


Tony Hall in Ethiopia in 1973. He alerted the world to the famine taking place there


For Tony hall, enlightened elite meant ‘Goodness’. It meant a democratic socialist elite operating in a socialism where capitalism had been dethroned, though not necessarily completely rooted out. At heart, Dad believed in a society where decisions about the public good were taken by good people working in government, people who did not not cow-tow to the machines of corporate profit-making.

Are we really lions lead by donkeys?

Some of the people I know and associate with are lions. Generally speaking, they are intelligent, educated, moral and competent. They are good. If you are reading this, you might be one of them. The concept of an enlightened elite is a broad one. There is plenty of room for many tens of thousands of people to participate as a member of a well-intentioned, governing elite.


Farmers’ protests in India, photo by Randeep Maddoke

No one wants to be lead by donkeys, or dangerous buffoons like Boris Johnson. But who imagines that the Naxalites (or the Sikh farmers) can govern in India? Who thinks the Zapatistas should rule in Chiapas, or Sendero Luminoso in Peru? Who agrees that certain key Brexit voting communities in the north should be the ones to decide the future of the UK.

… this Platonic, Soviet vision of an enlightened and just society electrified the entire world in the first quarter of the 20th Century

In academia, we are asked to judge Plato’s government of philosophers as a terrible thing. It is not. In part, the criticism of this idea is because of a growing misanthropy and distrust, and lack of faith in humanity. Faith in humanity has been eroded by memories of historical atrocities and injustices, memories that remain fresh. It has also been eroded by new atrocities and injustices that continually remind us of how far we have to go.

Also, Plato’s idea that philosophers should govern is opposed because it goes against the prevailing ideology. Rational philosophers in government would not leave so much of their decision making to the so-called ‘wisdom of markets’. They would oppose the selfish intentions of the reigning global, capitalist olygarchy.

But, at root, most of us, I think, do believe Plato is right; all of us perhaps except for a few immature, embittered, despairing, half-baked intellectuals who arguing for chaos; for childish versions of anarchism, or dog-eat-dog right wing libertarianism.

No one is saying we need Blairite technocrats again, flunkeys at the service of the rich, but we should argue strongly for a competent, educated, experienced, elite; one that properly represents the interests of the entire society, an elite that represents that society in a global community that has shared problems and aspirations. Let’s not pretend that the least educated, most victimised people know better. Remember, ‘the people’ voted Brexit.

The existential threats that face humanity – many of which have been exactingly defined by Nick Bostrom – are enough to defeat any argument for a more ‘natural’ arrangements of governance.


Long live the courage, work and intellect of the Soviet people. 1962

What was communism good for?

Communism is good at winning world wars. It is good at undertaking ,and completing, big projects like the building of great dams, or sending humans into space. It works where a concerted effort has to be made. Communism, of the sort we have experienced, is a system which can build pipelines in record time. It provides people with a fair degree of equality, with free health care, social protection, jobs, a vast quantity of shitty social housing and plenty of rubber stamped low and high culture.

Communism, in places like the former USSR and Cuba, freed people from an all-consuming addiction to products; that horrible fetishism. In so doing, it allowed people to assign their own value to things.

Communism removed some of the alienation people in capitalist societies still feel when almost every aspect of human existence has been commodified, every emotion employed to manipulate and meaning reduced to status. State socialism brought us closer to our fellow humans and to nature in a community of equals. You need to have experienced communism properly to understand that last statement in your gut. Disregard the miasma that surrounds communism’s memory, study it, study its history and understand it for what it actually was.

The tourists who used to visit communist countries – even when they were not socialists themselves – would feel that something was qualitatively different about that society; they would feel that there was something new, fascinating and wonderful about Cuba, for example, but they didn’t fully understand what it was that they were sensing.

The existential threats that face humanity … are enough to defeat any argument for any more ‘natural’ arrangements of governance.

Despite its advantages, clearly this form of  communism was moribund. It was destined to die because decision making almost always flowed downstream and never upstream. Few people had agency within communist societies apart from the leadership of the party. Individualism was discouraged, or even severely punished. There was little or no accountability for the ecological messes bureaucrats caused, or for the failures in supply, or for the small and the vast abuses of power, or for the stultifying boredom of it all. Perhaps the worst feature of that bureaucratic society was that it was a perfect place for corruption and decadence to flourish.

… in 1991 the shit hit the fan for the former USSR.

Top-down communism ran out of steam. All the life has drained out of it. If you had opened the gates in the USSR most of the talented people would have run away. Fortress communism is not a viable economic and social system for human beings because such a system, to be successful, needs an enormous amount of civic participation, democracy and free and critical thought. There was little of that in the old USSR.

Within fortress communism, it is true that people were provided for, but they only had freedom where there were gaps in control. The USSR gradually became a zombie society. No moral, intelligent human being can argue the case for such a society convincingly.


Phil and Tere in Kiev in 1991

In this respect, my father and I parted company. While he was merely a fellow traveller, I actually travelled. I did a degree in Russian and studied and then worked in the former Soviet Union. ‘OK‘, I can hear some of you comment, ‘Perhaps your class allegiance is suspect. How typically middle class you are!‘ Certainly, I am no expert. But in 1991 it didn’t matter anyway, because the shit hit the fan for the former USSR.

Individual agency is a virtue of capitalism

Capitalism has the great virtue in a social democracy of giving the gift of agency to almost anyone who lives its centres. By centres I mean places in Europe, Japan, Korea, the USA and Canada and Australia and New Zealand. This gift of agency also holds for many developing, capitalist countries, too on the periphery.

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and then Keir Starmer ignores this capitalist, entrepreneurial dimension of the former working class.

You cannot deny that people want to have control over their own lives and they want to be free to express themselves and to be creative. Capitalism is much better at this than socialism. Remember, many of the so-called working-class in the north of England don’t want to work in mines or factories any more. Instead, they aspire to being their own bosses and starting their own micro or small business. Yes, they were a part of the working class, but they don’t want to be any more and they won’t vote Labour. For many of them it is not really because they feel Labour has failed them, rather they now have the instincts of the petite bourgeoisie on the make. They have different aspirations to the working class – paying taxes is a bind. There are far more real working-class people – as defined in terms of relations to production – in the immigrant communities.



Going to Work (1943), commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and then Keir Starmer ignores this capitalist, entrepreneurial dimension of the former working class. They see Northerners and ‘the poor’ as all being petitioners to the state with their begging bowls stretched out.

In the past, before the war, the UK had a vast servant class, but no one wants to be a servant any more unless they have to be to survive, just as few people want to work in factories and mines now.

… before the war, the UK had a vast servant class, but no one wants to be a servant any more unless they have to be to survive, just as few people want to work in factories and mines now.

Capitalism, especially in its more enlightened centres, allows for a degree of individualism. There is always a wonderful shamanic element to the person who has a great idea for a new product, or a service. These are artists, of a sort.

Then there are the welcome opportunists: the Indian shopkeeper who opened on Sundays in a small town in the 1970s, whose child is now a doctor working for the NHS. There is the woman who sells cold drinks on a hot day, or hot drinks on a cold day. There is the person who does your nails so well, or your hair. There are the less beloved, the plumbers, carpenters and electricians. The owner of an enormous road haul truck. The traveller who discovers the delights of Pitaya fruit, stealing it away to his own country, calling it by another name: ‘Dragon Fruit’. There is the Bengali restaurant in Brick Lane. Even the Stone cold profiteers have a part to play, they are the ones who bring Coca Cola to some wooden duka in the driest refugee camp in Somalia. Bless ’em.


The first Costa Coffee shop in Vauxhall, now owned by Coca Cola

Are Nando’s and Costa Coffee really evil?

What should be the limits to growth of an enterprise that puts so much effort into trying to divine the needs and wants of other people, and into supplying them.

There were articles in The Guardian years ago by people who wrote about the evils of Nandos and Costas. This may confuse you. Why are Nando’s and Costas evil? They are chains, you see. They clone the high streets, you see. But who has the right to put limits on that success? Who decides when Nando’s and Costas stop being wonderful little shops and start becoming part of threatening corporate empires?

We can agree that Starbucks is not the best of companies, Unilever and Proctor and Gamble are worse. We get murkier and murkier. Think of the Kochs, Nestle, Goldman Sachs, Exxon-Mobile and BAE Systems; all of whom seem to have very little to recommend them.

… corporations can kill, maim or harm millions in their search for profit.

Ruthlessness in the search for profit affects everyone badly. There are cigarette manufacturers who kill, armaments manufacturers who kill, car manufacturers who kill, chemical companies that produce opioids, oil companies that alter the climate, tech companies that produce mass surveillance software. Corporations kill, maim, or harm millions in their search for profit, their purpose is not just to sell spicy chicken and strong coffee to passers-by.

In the darkest part of the corporate webs are the pirates and economic rapists, the evil shape shifters: Blackwater, Rentokil and Rio-Tinto Zinc. What do they call themselves these days? Then there is organised crime. Organised crime which launders its money through all of these legitimate networks.

When it comes to meteorites, global warming, pandemics and the negative consequences of global corporate capitalism, we need powerful, enlightened, democratically accountable elites to take control and make rational decisions and carry out actions that are in the interests of society.


Phil Hall is a college lecturer. He is a committed socialist and humanitarian. 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 the 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.

Will Eugenia Kuyda Game Us?

If capitalism really gets hold of software that can manipulate human behaviour, then game over.

By Phil Hall

Soviet Science Fiction authors, when they were not Communist Party suck ups, were often serious people, scientists. At the very least they were social scientists. In one story written by a Soviet author an AI becomes sentient. The story explains how: the computer is incredibly powerful, it has many sensory inputs and it has an effective iterative learning programme that adjusts at every go round to create a better representation of the world.

Easy to imagine, hard to design. This is was basically the thought underlying Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind and the results have been spectacular for games that can be abstracted into axiomatic systems. Computer software systems like DeepMind have increasingly higher performances. In the future they will win any game that can be abstracted and defined according to a set of identifiable rules.

What can be gamed?

Well, tumor imaging, protein folding and plenty of medical applications could be ‘gamed’. Everything in increasing complexity that exists in physical reality right up to modelling whole world weather systems. Modelling Gaia itself is a prospect.

O.K., these future applications will require more than the Lenovo Carbon 2016 ThinkPad Hassabis ran AlphaGo on. They will require parallel-computing, quantum computing – heaven knows what else. Moore’s Law must hold for a few more decades.

results have been spectacular for games that can be abstracted into axiomatic systems.

Ultimately, this idea of AI is just about pattern recognition and computing systems based on optimality. Now, these are the ideas that underlie a Bongard Test, but not necessarily a Turing test. If you could trick someone into thinking they are talking to a human, then that’s a different kind of game.

Linguists and philosophers usually don’t agree with electronic enginers and computer software engineers about what can and cannot be defined as intelligence and consciousness. For philosophers, consciousness is something we will only understand when we fully understand the workings of the human mind.

But, people attracted to working with computers are, on the whole, empiricists. They care about results. So, if you make the mistake of saying that chess and Go are characteristic abilities of the human being, then you are just setting up skittles for these new empiricists to knock down.

DeepMind wins at chess and Go. Is it intelligent? Of course it is. Is it conscious? Of course it isn’t. Does the definition of intelligence include a definition of consciousness? It depends on who is defining intelligence.

Can Human Beings be Gamed?

This is the conceit behind the film Ex-Machina. Is there the example of an actual social robot? Well, in fact, there is a programme designed by yet another Russian turned American, Eugenia Kuyda, who has designed a companion chat bot, Replika. There is also the famous social ‘robot’ Sophia. Now, if an algorithm tells a chatbot to produce a sentence that cannot be distinguished from a sentence produced by a human, then can the chatbot be considered to have a human-like intelligence or consciousness?

The chatbot, of course, has no awareness because it is part of a machine, an inanimate object. In an example used by the linguist and philosopher, John Searle in his lecture at Google: just because a pen makes marks on paper doesn’t mean the pen knows how to write. Neither the pen, nor the chatbot are alive.

However, for many of our superstitious ancestors – and quite a few of our superstitious, technology worshiping contemporaries – a social robot might seem to be alive – though I feel Socrates would have seen through the smokescreen of words generated by a non-sentient machine pretty quickly.

Put your consciousness in a machine and it will not live.

For me, Kuyda has borrowed an idea from Douglas Hofstadter, one that he discusses in his book, The Mind’s I. Hofstadter mourns his wife, who died of cancer. His idea is that he somehow preserved a working copy of his wife that lives on inside his mind. Kyuda, who also lost someone close to her, attempts to operationalise Hofstadter’s insight.

She cannot actually do this, because she cannot capture the mind of her departed friend, but her insight is that AI can develop a working model of its user by interacting constantly with the user. This has become her business model for developing companion robots.

Imagine the following, rather anodyne, conversation between an AI and a human.

Hi, I am feeling sad.

Really? Why?

I’ve lost my credit card.

So why does that make you sad?

Well, I was planning on going shopping this weekend.

Why don’t you just go to the bank?

I’m really busy.

And so on .. and it’s hard to tell who is the AI and who is the human and which words are produced by a consciousness and which words are produced by a machine. All the same, even if the machine could trick you into thinking that it was human, the machine would not be alive in any way. The Turing test is a test for human-like intelligence not human-like consciousness.

Put your consciousness in a machine and it will not live. It might say some of the things you say and do some the things you do, and comfort your relatives and friends, but it will be inanimate.

Eugenia Kuyda has a secret strategy to win the ultimate game of conversation. The strategy is to use Theory of Mind. Except, again, the strategy is merely empirical. It focuses on outcomes, regardless of philosophical truth or insight. For an empiricist a zombie machine is, to all intents and purposes, alive.

For an empiricist a zombie machine is, to all intents and purposes, alive.

To have a conversation with a human we need to have a theory of what is in another person’s mind. The robot develops a theory of mind by finding out everything it can about the person it talks to. For example, the robot tries to find associations in the mind if the human that it interacts with regularly makes between people, events, places and emotions. Perhaps the chatbot studies the subject’s Facebook and online activity. Then it deploys this knowledge in conversation. It knows the name of your mother. It knows that your mother is dead. It knows that this probably affected you badly.

Imagine that, in addition, the companion robot has a vast database of hard observable knowledge about you. It knows everything that you have actually said and done. It has a record of every place you have ever been. It has real input for every moment of your life. It tracks every action you have taken. It has a record of all your vital statistics.

Now that the AI has a pretty good theory of what’s in your mind it might will be able to anticipate many of the things that you would do.

This is the problem we face with software like this. Now that the AI has a pretty good theory of what’s in your mind it might will be able to anticipate many of the things that you would do. The robot will be able to game you; it could ‘outplay’ you.

The so called AI, the zombie code, might not actually be intelligent in the sense that it is conscious. The robot is certainly not alive. However, the machine will have enough information on you to predict your next move with some degree of accuracy. This is the underlying fear of non-sentient AI.

If capitalism’s elite gets hold of software that can game humanity, if Kuyda succeeds then game over. We will see the start of a thousand year Reich. It is interesting to note that Eugenia Kuyda has no Wikipedia entry herself – almost every famous person has one – and she seems to have done her best to scrub information about herself from the Internet. Clearly, she has no intention of being gamed.


Phil Hall is a college lecturer. He is a committed socialist and humanitarian. 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 the 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.

What can you do about your future?

We need to be better people

By Pete Field

Would you torture your own children? Would you destroy their future? Would you sell out your family and friends for cash? If you could, would you wipe out the world?We love those films where the forces of good destroy the evil psychopath’s plan for world domination. Unfortunately, the reality is quite different: we are not as good as we think we are.

The human dilemma faces us at every turn: shall I do what I want now, or be good, wait and have my reward later? In the case of climate change the reward means a planet we can survive on in the future, a sustainable society, one our children and their children can enjoy living on. If we are to forego something to achieve this goal we want to be sure the game is worth the candle. We want to know that our action will be worth it. This requires belief, a lot of belief in the quality of the information we are using to help us make decisions. Hence the vast spending by oil companies such as Exxon-Mobil to convince the public that climate science was flawed.


Would you destroy your own children’s future?


Now that people have finally accepted climate science the oil companies are touting the need to keep using oil alongside renewables, with natural gas as a ‘bridging fuel’ and coal as a solid backup. Of course we need to stop carbon emissions and the best way to do this is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Oil majors cannot bear the pain of giving up huge profits nor do they want to lose the investments they have already made so it’s business as usual for most of them, even though they know that these actions will destroy human civilisation by making the planet into an uninhabitable eco-disaster.

How interesting: shareholders and company executives are prepared to doom the world and all who live on it, including themselves and all their friends and relatives, for a few more years of easy profits. Should we call this addiction? Intelligent, well-educated people are quite prepared to devote their lives to accomplishing the destruction of the only life-supporting planet in the known universe, and to trash the human achievements of millennia while utterly destroying the natural world. If they leave their cash to their kids what will those kids spend it on? A bunker with ten thousand tins of baked beans in it?

There will be no joy in the post-apocalyptic world of heavy-duty climate change. It will be hot, but not happy.

There will be no joy in the post-apocalyptic world of heavy-duty climate change. It will be hot, but not happy. Birds will not sing. Trees and plants will not grow. It will be a scorched desert in some places. In others rainfall will be unremitting, floods will wash the land away. Hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes will be common. There won’t be anything nice to spend your money on because when society is on its knees the cocktails, the lovely meals, the beautiful views, the goods and services will simply not be available. Only a person with no imagination and no conscience could think that world destruction is a worthwhile result of doing their job.

Even for those of us who dither between endless small choices: eat meat or give it up; cycle or drive, car or train, fly on holiday or not, daily life is like the marshmallow experiment: you have to decide either to have what you want now or wait for a deferred reward. In fact, it is worse because instead of waiting two minutes and getting a second marshmallow that you can then eat with the first one you saved, in real life you dither endlessly wondering if the politicians, writers and snake-oil salesmen are right about these thousands of choices and their eco-fitness. And where’s the reward? So what do you do? You become a skilled equivocator. You learn bad faith. And you just get the dribs and drabs of fun that come your way. Nothing fancy either way. You settle for a compromise.


We pretend to love our children, but despite our protestations we love comfort more.


I will appear to be good and claim to myself that I am good, but I will not pay too much attention to what is going on. I will not get involved. If I see too much and I know too much I will have to take risks or change. The Good Samaritan was an independently wealthy businessman with time to spare, we tell ourselves. He was not a zero-hours data-entry clerk who would get docked a morning’s pay for being five minutes late and lose his job for missing an hour. Someone else can sort that out, if it really needs it.

criminals, who are the most selfish and violent of us, manage modern day slavery.

So where do we end up? Let’s look at something most of us do – work. Work is an expression of our value system and criminals, who are the most selfish and violent of us, manage modern day slavery. Just slightly inside the UK law is the zero-hours contract, and what a brilliant wheeze it is! I am the employer. I guarantee you the worker nothing but the vague suggestion of work at some point, but if you put a foot wrong I will sack you. Leaving aside the question of whether you can actually be sacked from a job which offers you virtually nothing and is merely a legalized form of slavery, we have to ask how Parliament, the religions, the Trade Unions and all the other people who say they care appear to have had precisely NO effect on the existence of this evil and insulting method of exploiting people. We look the other way. We cannot be bothered. And we are the ‘first world’. The wealthy part. The part where laws are supposed to work. The part with human rights.

they will sacrifice the future of the entire planet for a few more years with their snouts in the trough

Like the Exxon-Mobil people who predicted climate change and then set out to destroy public belief in science with US presidential backing we are slaves in the service of money. Self-serving comfort is our main aim so we will not rock the boat. And we all know you can rock the boat of the poor but if you rock the boats of the rich you will be quickly pushed overboard and knocked on the head with a boathook. Who will tell the ‘wealth-creators’ not to exploit the poor? Not me, boss!

To create a sustainable planet is going to be hard for us because our modus operandi is to take what we can and never mind what happens after that. We push the costs out onto somebody else in order to increase our own profits. Companies routinely pollute the earth, air and water and exploit the people in and around them. As private citizens we also throw out our plastics, our exhaust fumes, our rubbish and emissions. We all externalize the costs to make a bigger profit for ourselves. Large scale or small scale: we are all playing the same game. The oil companies are big players: they will sacrifice the future of the entire planet for a few more years with their snouts in the trough. Employers routinely pay as little as possible and demand as much work as they can possibly squeeze out of the worker. Many deals are legal only because law and government work alongside big money to allow injustice to occur. As private citizens we try to shit on the neighbour’s doorstep, rather than our own. But shit we do!

We are crackheads: our own pleasure now this minute is far more important than our own welfare and survival in the future

The level of egalitarianism, financial justice, in our society correlates well with our ability to understand complex ideas and prepare for an ecologically sound future. In the UK, the most unequal country in Europe, public awareness is low, the country looks inward, self-obsessed and xenophobic, unable to learn easily from the outside world. The government routinely lies to and cheats the people, believing that propaganda can replace intelligent, properly funded, well-organised action. Corruption is rife. Interestingly, the search for profit from green energy has led to determined action by business while the government lags behind, ill-informed and surprised. Prime Minister Boris Johnson famously said that wind power couldn’t take the skin off a rice pudding: like many ignorant right-wing people he thought that burning fossil fuels gave a stronger class of energy than green power.

And who knows that hydrogen gives you twice the bang for your buck of any oil-based fuel? Boris has since done a U-turn on wind power, though everyone is waiting to see if legal and financial support materialize. This is a typical twenty-first century mess: when we need massive, well-informed and determined government action to change the game and hurry in the clean fuels we need, what do we get instead? Fudging; delays; misappropriation of funds. The UK government is encouraging HS2, the notoriously divisive and expensive high-speed rail project to get people from London to Birmingham slightly faster. Do we need this? No, we need zero-emission fuel-cell hydrogen trains with low fares (of free) to get people out of their cars. We need H2 vehicle charging points across the country, electric charging, cheap or free clean, regular bus services.

We need H2 vehicle charging points across the country, electric charging, cheap or free clean, regular bus services.

If you were the government and somebody told you that your road expansion scheme is more expensive than giving the entire population free travel on public transport, you might consider free transport as a possible solution to help fight the climate crisis, right? Not if you were in the pockets of the roadbuilding and car lobbyists! Solving the climate crisis does not count compared to satisfying rich people who will fund your political party. How will your party get on when the climate wipes out the world economy? The politicians simply do not believe the scientists. They cannot grasp the reality. The money is real. The other stuff is just data.

And the Covid pandemic? We need a test and trace system for Covid. Other countries have done it, but do we look at them? No, we are oblivious to their success. Instead the government shoehorns the test and trace into the private enterprise system, doling out millions with no tendering to dubious businesses run by their friends, regardless of whether they can produce or not. The pandemic drags on, strangling the economy. No price is too high for people wedded to neoliberal ideology. The British right will happily give up most of the country’s economic activity to keep its botched Covid plan – or indeed give up British trade with Europe over the sticking point of ‘the regulations’. Ministers refuse to guarantee current standards in law: there can only be one reason. The plan to lower them in order to make deals with people who have lower standards! Read the Americans and the Chinese. The aim is to keep the vote. Whose vote? The vote of people as stupid as they are. We will saw the legs off our economy to fit it on the Procrustean bed of far-right ideology. Does the government care for the voter? Not really because soon they plan to make a state where the voter is irrelevant.

The plan to lower them in order to make deals with people who have lower standards! Read the Americans and the Chinese

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains a lot about all of us: people perform poorly in areas where they lack knowledge and experience and then, because they lack knowledge they can’t see their own mistakes. Are we in Britain people who ‘won’t be told what to do’ or just people incapable of understanding that international trade is based on mutually agreed standards? In any case, for ‘freedom’ no sacrifice is too great, so long as someone else is making it. For the super-rich who run the UK the risks are small, and if the UK becomes unpleasant they merely have to take a private jet to their second homes because they all have golden visas to the countries they might one day need to call home. It is the poor who are stuck with the results and have to feel the pain. Just like climate change.

This is our problem with the future: we are blinkered. We cannot imagine the disaster which is already at our door. We are unable to see the successes of other nations, other companies, other people and learn from them. We doggedly stick to what we know. We believe in money. We stick to familiar ways. We cannot see outside our culture, whether it be our national culture or our personal culture. We stick to driving to work, though we should maybe move nearer to work instead, or work at home or go by bike or train. We fly to the sun on holiday. We even take eco-holidays in Costa Rica that involve jetting across half the world. Politicians cheerfully order massive coalmining programmes (India and Australia); chop down the Amazon (Brazil), deny climate change (USA) – and somehow people still vote for these mad characters.

UK becomes unpleasant they merely have to take a private jet to their second homes because they all have golden visas to the countries they might one day need to call home

We all know the cartoon of the man sawing away a branch – the branch he is sitting on. We think it is funny. How can anyone be so stupid? But we are all just like that, sawing away as fast as we can. Our children will suffer. Do we care? Obviously not, because if we did we would take wholehearted action to save their future. Doesn’t that put us in the same boat as the oil executives who will sacrifice the world? We will sacrifice our children’s world and pretend to ourselves that there was nothing we could do about it. Experts at self-deception, masters of scores of different types of mental bias, rather than change a few comfortable habits which are probably not even good for us we cheerfully commit our very own children to the torture of life in an increasingly desperate and dying world. As nature is falling to pieces around us right now how can we think that our children will be safe and happy thirty years on? Simple: don’t think about it! We are crackheads: our own pleasure now this minute is far more important than our own welfare and survival in the future. We pretend to love our children, but despite our protestations we love our comforts more. The seeds of destruction are sown, deep in the fertile soil of our own character.

we cheerfully commit our very own children to the torture of life in an increasingly desperate and dying world

What do we do instead of action? We fudge it. Ignorance and injustice go hand in hand and social problems quickly follow. We tolerate appalling levels of injustice all around us. It’s nobody’s business really! We vote for governments which create inequality. Inequality creates poverty and injustice. We look away. Why are we so keen to vote for rich people who despise us? If you are rich in the UK and you want to avoid the heavy new taxes that the European Union is about to impose on you, have no fear! Get some tame demagogues and the frothing right-wing press to teach the masses that it’s all the fault of Johnny foreigner. Kick him out and beat him up. Let’s not take rules from Europe: we will make our own! Several years of pandemonium later the job is done. Rich people’s money is safe. Britain is severed from the EU so now it can finally go ahead and build the Tory New Jerusalem, making its own rules in a race to the bottom in which no standard is left unlowered, no barrel unscraped. With the freedom to act unconstrained by Europe or by shame the government and its buddies then go on to break the rules (see if anyone cares – can they do anything about it – no!) and then to also break the law. We will be free to be governed by a band of incompetent fools who acknowledge no law but their own power. Brilliant! The rich are happy and the rest are miserable. Any solution to the impending climate crisis out of all this? Engineers are working on it, no thanks to the government.

We will be free to be governed by a band of incompetent fools who acknowledge no law but their own power. Brilliant!

Does it matter, this inequality, this climate emergency? Right now maybe not, if you are comfortably off and Covid has not yet destroyed your family, your job or your business. But in the long run our heedless attitude, our wilful ignorance and our lack of solidarity with both people and nature is slowly bringing the scissors of Fate closer to the threads of our lives. Nature is on its knees. Climate change is nothing more than a big black box experiment: put these chemical, physical and biological inputs in at one end and you will get those inevitable outputs out at the other! The laws of chemistry, physics and biology guarantee that if you put a fair bit of shit in one end and let it brew for a while you will in due course get a cataclysmic shitstorm at the other. The universe is paying us back in our own coin. It is a judgement. Not the whimsical judgement of the old boy up top who will go easy on you if you build a cathedral: this is the real thing: the actions of the human race throughout its whole existence are being weighed in the scales of the universe, the laws of nature are merely responding to what we put in. Our greatest art is self-deception, but this time there is nowhere to run and nobody but ourselves, the rich industrial world, to blame. What could we do to mitigate this now? Maybe I can hope the doomsayers are wrong. Maybe scientists will put an umbrella is space? Maybe not! How about these concrete actions, just for a start. You will hate them.

nature is slowly bringing the scissors of Fate closer to the threads of our lives. Nature is on its knees.


What can you actually do to help save the planet?

Don’t have children or if you can’t help it, not more than one. Dump the car and don’t buy another. Oil companies will change their tunes when they lose their market. Get an electric or a fuel cell car. Half of all car journeys are under to miles so what about walking? Bicycle, bus and train can cover the rest. Stop flying. Insulate and triple glaze your home. When clean heating or cooling tech arrives, try to get hold of it or demand we get the government to install it across the nation. Have holidays near your house. Wear natural fibres. Eat locally produced food and grow your own. Stop eating processed food and junk. Pack in the meat. Turn down the heating and wear more clothes in the house. Stop using so much electricity and so many appliances. Stop buying useless rubbish that falls to bits. Have three or four sets of clothes like our ancestors did. Avoid fashion. Keep the same phone for years or dump it. Come to that, try living like we did in the nineteen-fifties, but without the coal and the prejudice!

Need I go on? And of course try to constantly remind the elected leaders that their job is not actually to help rich people make more money at the cost of everyone else’s welfare and survival. Take direct action to stop projects which threaten our future. Even if we get unlimited clean energy our divisive and aggressive consumerism is still unsustainable.

Smart people are making smart appliances, but nobody really knows whether the world can handle the demands our intense and fast-growing over-consumption places upon it. Climate change will hit the world’s poorest – the ones who did least to create it – first. And as their lands become less habitable they will want to go where things are still OK. Africa will go north. Will we welcome them as brothers and sisters and apologise for ruining their already wretched lives? Of course not: we will view them as alien invaders and machine gun them by the dozen as they drown in the freezing waters off our European coasts. The final injustice of the colonizing power is to wipe out the very climate that has hitherto sustained us all, in the belief that we alone are immune and we are going to get away with it.

As fires blaze through Australia and the USA even a few on the lunatic right are beginning to wonder if the climate change thing might not be more than just a left-wing conspiracy theory. Having said that, the people who believe in Q-Anon are not well placed to have opinions on, well, anything. Quite possibly, the human race, the one that named itself sapiens, is just too utterly dim to survive. We will be the only species in the history of the planet to kill itself and most of the others through sheer stupidity alone. Our violent and greedy abuse of our fellow lifeforms has now back come to haunt us all.

people who believe in Q-Anon are not well placed to have opinions on, well, anything.

There is no-one so arrogant as the truly stupid fellow. Isn’t it that the Dunning-Kruger effect? “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” as Darwin said. We overestimate our own capabilities and fail to understand what expertise is. We can’t see what we don’t know or understand so we denigrate and undervalue it. We did not understand nature or our place in it. Last time we cared about nature and feared it is when we were pagans. Equally under-informed but going in a better direction and with a much smaller population! The smaller the human population, the more margin for error. A huge, technologized, high-consumption and interconnected population is like an overloaded boat: it doesn’t take much to tip it over.

We have failed to love each other. Our history is merely a record of wars, oppression, slavery and genocides.

We have failed to love each other. Our history is merely a record of wars, oppression, slavery and genocides. We failed to love the planet. We failed to appreciate the life-saving virtues of egalitarianism, we failed to heed the message of art and nature and learn to appreciate beauty all around us. Instead we made art a part of the capitalist system and threw nature into a skip. We have failed in so many ways and yet we know we are capable of more than corruption and failure. We need to understand the heart of wisdom. Collecting data is no use unless we can create knowledge. Knowledge is no use until we have discernment to know how to apply it. Applying it is impossible until we have the personal qualities and cooperative abilities required to make things actually work.

we made art a part of the capitalist system and threw nature into a skip

To survive we need to change. We need to be better people. Kinder, more loving, more deeply appreciative of nature and each other. We need to be frugal yet generous, gentle yet firm and committed. We have to stop bullshitting, especially to ourselves. We have to look reality in the eye. We need only one great ideal: to save ourselves as part of the web of natural life. There are no safe bunkers, long term, only delayed death in a harsher more difficult world. So we can start now. Bring down the temperature: buy less and do less but make it good quality. Eat only healthy unprocessed food. Don’t buy junk products. How come the Austrian government can legislate to remove ecologically damaging products from the shops? Because they want to. Anything that cannot be recycled or re-used or is not energy-efficient must be banned. If you all demand something then eventually your government will give in and do it.

And eat less. We eat too much then we throw food away. Nearly all of us are overweight and suffering from the diseases of affluence. Avoid rubbish food and drink. Most of what is in the supermarket is unhealthy crap. Make McDonald’s go out of business. It should never have existed. And now we know more about the effects of business on nature we can see where change is needed. Allowing our filthy economy to proceed in its present form will accelerate climate change, which is the equivalent of taking your grandchildren, tying them to a rock and waiting for the tide to come up and drown them.

build flatpack democracy, bottom up

Status should not depend on financial wealth or possessions. We should accord status to those who do good and help us out of the mess. Start by sacking the government and the local council. Refuse to listen to demagogues who stoke fear and hate, but leave you with nothing. Instead build flatpack democracy, bottom up, people you trust. Insist upon social justice and a more egalitarian society. And stop listening to the snake-oil salesmen. Nobody’s going to pop down and save you. Maybe greater awareness, compassion and sensitivity might help, but you will have to stop reading those rubbish newspapers and get off your backside. That way we will build the power, the solidarity and the mindset we need to survive, with nature, into the next century and, maybe, beyond. The way we live now is not sustainable, but a better future is possible if we are better people.

‘Can I be bothered?’ That is the question.


Pete Field graduated from Oxford University with a passion for all things French. He began his peripatetic life working as the assistant to a lumberjack in the Pyrenees. He is a translator a teacher and an artist. He has lived and worked in Italy, Germany, Spain, France, The UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The author doesn’t live in Sussex

Lance the Boil in the Collective Unconscious of the USA

More Glamorous than Che: Make a Film about the life of Angela Davis


By Phil Hall


It’s fascinating to see how films or books or musicians who really epitomised the zeitgeist and hit the spot sometimes plunge out of sight. What a good film My beautiful Launderette was. It exposed the homo-eroticism behind so much fascist violence. The film helped reconcile two issues at the same time: British neo-fascism and homophobia.


Trailer for My Beautiful Launderette

My beautiful Launderette was vastly more effective at producing a cultural catharsis than, for example, the film Quadrophenia. Sometimes things are said in art which cause people to have a long flash of recognition so great that you realise the ideas behind them have been damned up for some time. It’s simply embarrassing to have your eyes opened. After awarding praise and fame, the work of art that opened the door is put away, hidden from sight.

In a way it’s possible to credit My Beautiful Launderette, based on Hanif Kureishi’s famous book, with turning skinhead and working class male iconography into gay iconography. It is possible to credit it with making racism laughable. That’s not hate you feel. That’s something else. The Pakistani of immigrant parents they hate is a straw man. Most British racism comes from Chipping Norton, Farnham and Guildford, not Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow or London. The desire of Daniel Day Lewis’s character to punch and beat the beautiful Pakistani boy he grew up with was a desire to embrace him and an attraction of youth for someone familiar, yet still new and fresh and different.

There was no art powerful enough before the war to make its dogs whine in shame and lick their chops and walk away.


So, for example, which artists were speaking sensibly about the evils of the oncoming war of empires that began in 1914? Clearly, there were no world class authors of books or painters or film makers who could create a picture powerful enough, broad enough and hold it up long enough so that all the young men and women of Europe could be released from nationalism. Tolstoy didn’t do the trick.

There was no cultural diffuser, no depth bomb of art explosive enough to make young women embarrassed about giving young men white feathers for not enrolling. There was no strong enough counter current to the social Darwinism which claimed that war was cleansing and winnowed the weak out from the strong; that war made men out of boys. The result was millions of young men, many in their late teens, died in the war, millions more were crippled and millions traumatised.


Dulce et Decorum Est 

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

By Wilfred Owen



War is cleansing? Winnowing? A rite of passage to manhood? Hardly! And the pustulant unconscious of Europe, in particular Germany’s, was never lanced after WWI. The narratives of social Darwinism intensified into racial theories. Despite the horrors of the previous European war, despite Charlie Chaplin and Wilfred Owen and the Cabaret in Berlin lampooning Hitler and Surrealism and Guernica and everything else, including Jung spelling it out directly:

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”

Carl Jung

There was no art powerful enough before the war to make its dogs whine in shame and lick their chops and walk away. To help them recognise that they were projecting their shadows onto the wrong people, that it was not ‘The Other’ who caused them such pain. The Jews and the Gypsies were not responsible for inflation in pre-war Germany.

In the 60s and later in the 70s and 80s, arguably, we won the culture wars against a resurgent conservatism and the philosophies of selfishness and discrimination – despite the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

In the 1970s and early 80s, my era, these struggles took the form of CND, Greenpeace, Rock Against Racism. Feminism intensified and developed in places like Greenham Common. Gay Rights gathered momentum with music and song and film. Together, with understanding and laughter we sent prejudice and discrimination chittering off into the darkness to hide for a while.

Ken Loach, for his choice of subject matter, is a far more important director than many people understand. Throughout his life he has tried to hold a mirror up to the British and make them see the reality of life in their country and the suffering people experience. Perhaps Ken Loach’s weakness is that he is too much of a social realist and not romantic enough. People do need a good sweet dollop of romance to help to wash harshness of reality down.

In the face of the need for equal opportunities the establishment thinkers (who are ultimately on the payroll of the British oligarchy) decided not to oppose such obvious Goodness as the fight against discrimination – at least not head on. Furthermore, there was always the reality that key members of the groups discriminated against could be co-opted into supporting the establishment.


Instead the philosophers, the academic and media pundits continued to argue for our system of wage slavery to be reformed and tweaked; much as the apologists for slavery itself did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery and colonisation gave us wealth and the industrial revolution. Look at the advantages of capitalism, too. What’s not to love?

Right wing economics professors snickered at Marxist economics and called it ‘ideology‘. They worked at developing economic theories which showed how, in certain lights and from certain angles, no one ever really behaves altruistically. Therefore, they concluded, it would be more honest and admirable for these idealists to admit to being – at root – self-interested and greedy. Following on logically, socialists and humanitarians are self-deceiving and probably have a hidden agendas.

Using this twisted logic, to be an idealist is to be untrustworthy; a fanatic, a hypocrite. To say that you act for the greater good means you wear a mask, because you aren’t admitting to yourself your real motives, your hidden desire for power and fame. You deny the fact that the true nature of the human condition is to be out for number one. To be an altruist, for these reactionaries, working mainly in economics, is to be a human being in the closet.

We need more independent Cinema. We need films that unblock the flow of understanding.


We need more independent Cinema. We need films that unblock the flow of understanding in the time of Black Lives Matter. Let me give you an example. Django didn’t win the Oscars. It should have. Instead that repulsive film Lincoln, stuffed full of method acting, did. Ironically, Daniel Day Lewis, the star of Lincoln, was also the co-star of My Beautiful Launderette.


Lincoln was a nauseating film because it was about a white benefactor being placed on a pedestal as the inspiration and source of freedom. Django, on the other hand, was a cathartic fantasy about a black man destroying the plantation of a white slave owner.

But the film, Django, was made by a deeply apolitical man, Quentin Tarantino. There is nothing revolutionary about Tarantino or Django. Django burned the old plantation house only to leave us with the image of Jaimie Fox – a celebrity; someone with no absolutely no answers to the causes of racial injustice in the USA today. Django’s victory was not a collective effort. Django is Quadrophenia to a better film that hasn’t been made yet.

Intersectionality is the answer

The culture wars are intensifying again and this is precisely because of the idea of intersectionality. The silos walls are breaking down and a common front is being built around broad socialist objectives. Intersectionality is where all oppressed and exploited people make a common cause with each other against a common enemy – the capitalist class. Angela Davis is a powerful proponent of intersectionality.

From an artistic viewpoint, perhaps a film that manages to portray the life of Angela Davis might act as a great moment of intersectional clarity and catharsis. A film like this might cause the penny to drop and put right wing populist politics in the US on the back foot.

Who in Hollywood will make this great film? Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, some as yet unknown, longed for director?

Angela Davis*, as a young black woman became politicised in the 60s. In fact she was politicised from childhood. She was jailed. She was on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list and Ronald Reagan tried to have her executed. She wanted, and wants, revolutionary change for her society. She wants prison reform. The story of Angela Davis’s life is no Tarantino fantasy of revenge. Ms. Davis’s story is far more illuminating.

A good dramatisation of the life of Angela Davis, sweetly romantic, but bravely accurate, with world wide distribution, could help lance the pustule in the US unconscious and disperse the gathered toxins. It could produce a moment of political and social clarity.

Perhaps a film like this could catalyse US society against its common enemy, the .1%. If They Come in the Morning could be a film like My Beautiful Launderette. Just as My Beautiful Launderette showed a mirror to British society in the 70s.

If They Come in the Morning could hold up a mirror to US society in 2020 and help some of that country’s citizens see themselves reflected in another light. Through understanding it could help US citizens dispense with prejudice and have a common realisation about who is the enemy they face. For the first time in a long time US citizens could have the opportunity for a moment of deep recognition and, perhaps, for some people a moment of deep embarrassment, too.


* It should be noted that, to the great credit of the United States, Angela Davis was not executed, she is now a deeply respected figure and a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This we should acknowledge.


Phil Hall is a university lecturer working in the Middle East. He is a committed socialist and humanitarian. 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 the Ukraine, Spain and Mexico. Phil has blogged for the Guardian, the Morning Star and several other publications and he has written stories for The London Magazine.

Liberalism and Worker Ownership, not Das Kommunism.

The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, 1844, founders of the cooperative movement

By Neil Newman

One of the most striking facets of the secular religion Marxism is the almost complete lack of a model for the post-revolutionary society. What are the economic relations of that society? How does that society continue on from there? Towards what is it supposed to evolve? Marx had few answers to these questions and wrote down even fewer.

There are reasons for this. Marx knew that other political philosophies had answered those questions amply. To find these answers we first have to examine some definitions of common political words. Firstly, we enter the political definitions of Liberal Theory.

Liberal Theory holds that strong cultures/communities are composed of strong individuals.

Liberal Theory holds that strong cultures/communities are composed of strong individuals. To develop strong and confident individuals certain freedoms are required, both for the individual and for the society around them that helps shape them. Some freedoms are well known. All of these freedoms require rules to define and defend them. The Bill of Rights in the US is one such document, as is the European Convention of Human Rights. This must be understood. All liberal freedoms require rules to maintain them, not platitudes.


There are a few main Liberal Theory Freedoms

Freedom of Speech: The freedom to think and speak otherwise than the powerful would like you to
Freedom of Conscience/Religion: The freedom to be a part of a religious/moral community the powerful might not want you to be a part of
Freedom of Individual Wealth: The use of money in some form that the individual can save or spend as they wish, for their own improvement or betterment, without needing the agreement of the community or powerful
Freedom of Association: The freedom to join and form political parties, unions, from which collective power comes
Democracy: Also commonly associated with liberalism, democracy being the natural end result of a community of empowered individuals.

There is however a liberal freedom that is commonly misunderstood, not least by its loudest champions.

Freedom of Markets.

Now, a moment’s reflection on the preceding freedoms reveals that they all require rules – in fact, they are rules. Without rules, freedom of speech does not exist. Those with the loudest voices (or biggest fists) can prevent the quietest (or weakest) from speaking. Without freedom of conscience, the largest religion can enforce compliance to its own norms.

The liberal Philosopher Adam Smith laid out several rules for Free Markets – such as: ease of access, full and free information on goods, honesty in description, and equitable taxation. These are rules, not a free-for-all where only the powerful will win.


Marxism and its lack of vision.

Smith also laid out, precisely, that the most ‘perfect’ free market was an infinite number of producers and an infinite number of consumers. In other words, a monopoly is the opposite to a free market, but an economy of multiple small producers gets closer to the free market ideal.. It is important to say that this is theoretical.

When Karl Marx cropped up, the ruling wisdom of the Internationales was worker-ownership. SocialDemocrat, or Anarchist visions. These were based upon the Liberal Theory premises. Essentially, by making every worker a capitalist, who can withdraw their capital and start a competing firm, the requirements for Smith’s free markets are best fulfilled.

an economy of multiple small producers gets closer to a better model for society

Marxist Communists however divided into two camps. On one side, were those who decried it as petite bourgeois. On the other, those who saw it as a common-sense path to full communism. (If you want to get somewhere, start walking towards it).

Marx earlier however, had realised that he needed to be different to the social democrats and the anarchists. And so 300 years of careful preparation were thrown out of the window in exchange for the excitement of revolution. And we are all very much poorer for it.

The capitalism of worker ownership

Capitalism is once again part of Liberal Theory. It holds that everyone owns their own capital. This is both financial capital, and every other type of capital too: labour capital, land capital, intellectual capital, and so on. In the time before capitalism, individuals themselves could be owned – they did not own their own capital. In capitalism there is actually no requirement that one must sell their labour for wages – this happens, sadly, only because of the pre-existing conditions of social haves and have nots.

An economy run on entirely worker co-ownership is possibly the purest form of Capitalism possible.

An economy run on entirely worker co-ownership is possibly the purest form of capitalism possible. If Marx had admitted that, would Marxism have ever happened? He of course knew about Worker-ownership, and even the early Soviets were based upon that model.

Instead, Marx chose to redefine capitalism as be something entirely different – the very pattern of exploitation that capitalism should replace. How the meaning of capitalism transformed so radically is a mystery that, sadly only political necromancers can answer now. But Marx knew.

And that can be why there is this gaping hole in Marxist Theory – what is to come afterwards? For what comes afterwards is the pathway laid down by the Social Democrats and Anarchists to get to that desirable future in the first place.

Hopefully, after 120 years of misdirection, humanity can once again find its feet upon the proper path towards the freedoms described by liberal theorists and worker ownership, if the climate destruction leaves enough time.


Featured picture from the Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) society

The Danger of Working Class Fascism

Everyday working class, fascism is real

by Phil Hall


One of the dirty secrets of history is that fascists can also be working class. Marxists, communists and socialists claim that all fascism comes from the middle and lower middle classes, that fascism is a last ditch response to the failure of capitalism, an attempt to rescue a struggling capitalism. But who was it who fought the fascists in Cable Street? It was an intersectional alliance of many different people: Jews, communists, socialists and workers. It wasn’t the British working class on its own. Even well-meaning liberals fight fascism.

It is not true to say that elements of the working class do not sometimes support fascism. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, an organisation that was part of the Nazi Party,  received support from significant sections of the working class during the Wiemar Republic; support that grew in the 1930’s. Support for fascism came from those workers who felt competition from immigrant Slav workers, from those who were long term unemployed, from those who despaired of the unions, the socialists, communists and the social democrats of ever improving the situation for German workers.

Who was it who fought the fascists in Cable Street? It was an intersectional alliance of Jews, communists, socialists and workers. It wasn’t the British working class alone.

There was the attraction of German nationalism and flattering stories of German superiority and entitlement. The Nazis promised preferential treatment for the German working class over the working class of other nations. ‘Aryan’ workers wouldn’t be enslaved they would be treated as the salt of the Earth.

German nationalism was attractive for working class people whose communities, self-esteem and physical and mental well-being had been nearly destroyed by the first World War, hyperinflation and the depression. If you were white, working class, not a socialist or a communist, not gay or a gypsy, not disabled, or a foreigner, or Jewish, National Socialism meant something different to you in pre-war Germany; it meant something positive.

Fellow travelling with the ruling class has been almost emblematic for large sections of the working class in Europe. In 1914 the working class in imperialist Europe chose to mow each other down with mortars and machine guns rather than unite.

The National Socialist Party offered you vital services, some of them free of charge. It offered, free education and training, jobs, free healthcare, youth activities, free holidays, care for the elderly, home visits, clean streets, good pensions, affordable electricity and hot water, affordable housing, free entertainment, social activities, good affordable public transport and an expanded infrastructure.

In fact, in the run up to the war Germany was for the Germans and many socialists became national socialists because they saw the benefits it gave the German working class.


Fellow travelling with the ruling class has been almost emblematic for large sections of the working class in Europe. In 1914 the working class in imperialist Europe chose to mow each other down with mortars and machine guns rather than unite. Much of subsequent Marxist theorising became an attempt to analyse that historic failure. Many of the soldiers who enforced British rule and killed and oppressed the local inhabitants of Australia, South Africa, Canada, India, America, Kenya and many other countries were members of the British working class.

One of the dirty secrets of history is that fascists can also be working class.

One of the earliest accounts for why elements of the working class might not unite in solidarity was economic. It ignored the cultural and psychological explanations that were invoked later on. Lenin’s book, Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism, was based on the findings of John A. Hobson. The book explained how the contradictions of capitalism were no longer so intense in the metropolis, in places like Paris, London and Berlin because of the wealth that accrued in these places from empire. Consequently, Lenin concluded, the potential for revolutionary change in these countries was considerably diminished.

The contradictions of capitalism intensify at the periphery. In developing countries usually wealth is extracted by multinational companies at low cost in the form of raw materials: everything from minerals and oil to agricultural  products like coffee, sugar, chocolate and tea. A nationalist struggle in a developing country like this is by its very nature anti-imperialist. It is an attempt to wrest control of natural resources and markets away from international corporations, corporations backed by military power.

the Union Jack nationalism of elements of the British white working class, is not progressive and anti-imperialist, rather it is often deeply reactionary, nostalgic for empire. It is a nationalism that rejects solidarity across racial and gender lines.

While workers in droves lose their jobs in the USA, US corporations move to Mexico and China in order to pay much less to Mexican and Chinese workers and force them to slave in poor conditions for longer hours. China has the advantage – for global capitalism – of being a tyranny. The workers who come to a collective political consciousness about their shared exploitation don’t live so much in Western Europe any more, but in places like India, China and Brazil.

In contrast, the Union Jack nationalism of elements of the British white working class, is not progressive and anti-imperialist, rather it is often deeply reactionary, nostalgic for empire. It is a nationalism that rejects solidarity across racial and gender lines. Certainly it rejects solidarity with exploited migrants. When it comes to memories of colonialism or slavery often white working class nationalism is unapologetic.

There is a big difference between the healthy and justifiable nationalism of a country that is at the receiving end of the unfairness of traditional, unequal north-south relations and the toxic patriotism of the working class inhabitants in a country which dictates the terms of trade and dominates weaker nations. 

In the USA, then it is no surprise then that desperate, disillusioned, unemployed white workers, living hand-to-mouth in trailer parks, could fall for Trump, who, in turn, points the finger of blame at immigration and China. If Trump is not a fascist then he’ll do as a place holder until real US fascism comes along. It is no surprise that the long term unemployed in the north of England, out of desperation, seek alliances with sinister right wing establishment forces under the banner of ‘Brexit’. A word that means nothing more nor less than Britain for the British.

Disillusion and the failure of the social democratic left in the UK to organise and take power is pushing the white working class further right, in the direction of fascism.

The story in the USA and the richer European countries has some similarities to that of pre-war Germany: the failure of social democracy to provide jobs and a secure income. In the USA Barack Obama and Bill Clinton failed to institute quality affordable social protection. The policies in Europe and the USA were aimed at helping the wealthy. Western governments bail out the financial corporations in 2008 with vast amounts of money (quantitative easing) from the public exchequer, simply in order to keep the system on its feet. Ordinary people paid for the financial corporations speculative failures with more than a decade of cuts to basic social services.

key sections of the working class have betrayed their own long term class interests by voting for Boris Johnson.

Unemployment, poor pay and conditions; the tendency to scapegoat not only recent immigrants but long term immigrants, immigrants who have been in the UK for generations now; insecure zero hour contracts; a lack of affordable housing and a fraying infrastructure are pushing elements of the white working class in the UK not towards communism and socialism, but towards an alliance with sinister right wing nationalism; key sections of the working class have betrayed their own long term class interests by voting for Boris Johnson.

Disillusion and the failure of the social democratic left in the USA, UK and other European countries is pushing the white working class further to the right, just as it did during the Wiemar Republic in Germany in the 20s and 30s.


Phil Hall is a college lecturer. He is a committed socialist and humanitarian. 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 the 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.

Is socialism a partial solution to discrimination?

Jayanban Desai leading the protest at Grunwick, 1976 to 1978

Is the solution to racism, misogyny and prejudice a nicer capitalism or do we need a more profound transformation of society?

What do we do when a right winger like Priti Patel claims that she is fighting prejudice? Do we acknowledge this and support her as a woman who has suffered deeply from two types of discrimination? Or do we see her as a class enemy and defender of the status quo?

What is the position of women in Cuba? How much racism is there in Cuba? How much discrimination is there? Did the Cuban revolution get rid of prejudice in Cuban society? Did it make women more equal? Did it stop prejudice against people with a darker skin? Did the situation improve in all socialist countries for women?

I would argue that, in large measure, the Cuban revolution was successful in tackling the problems of discrimination, though discrimination remained, especially homophobia. Socialism did benefit women. It did give them a huge amount of equality in comparison with other similar Latin American countries.

A revolution in 2021 would be far more effective in tacking homophobia, for example than a revolution carried out in 1959.

You could imagine that any future transformation (revolution?) in one of our societies would now take into account the need to tackle all forms of discrimination and prejudice. A revolution in 2021 would be far more effective in tacking homophobia, for example than a revolution carried out in 1959.

So, in large measure, the logical conclusion is that a socialist revolution would solve an important part of the puzzle that is sexism and racism. It would bring an enormous measure of economic and practical equality. Along with an economic revolution comes a deep change in cultural attitudes.

For example, Mexico’s indigenous heritage was almost completely ignored by the modernising capitalist government of Porfirio Diaz, but after the Mexican revolution nearly all Mexico’s heroes, heroes like Benito Juarez, were deeply rooted in Mexican culture. Mexico became proud of its indigenous heritage and embarrassed by the fact of the Spanish conquest.

We are obliged to fully support the Black British struggle that is intersectional, and that is also for socialism; the feminist struggle that is intersectional and that is also for socialism; the struggle for LGBT rights that is intersectional and also for a socialist transformation.

But, as Stephanie Julia Urdang argued as long ago as 1973, it is only when the people discriminated against take an active part in the overall struggle against oppression that the problem is dealt with more effectively in the new society that is created.

Still, you look at the revolutions in Mozambique and Angola and what used to be Guinea Bissau now and you have to conclude that what was really more effective in reducing discrimination was the transformation of Cuban society into a socialist society and the people who fought for the Cuban revolution, supported by their women, were mainly men.

we must ally ourselves with [people who suffer discrimination] completely and understand them support them if we ourselves are not members of their group. They in turn, we expect, will not oppose the struggle against capitalism.

So, as my comrade, James Tweedie (former International Editor of the Morning Star) points out: anyone who is really serious about getting rid of the problems of discrimination will also be really serious about transforming our society into a democratic socialist society – a communist society in the best sense of that word.

Women and black and LGBT people, refugees and other persecuted sections of the population lead the struggle against their oppression, and we must ally ourselves with them completely and understand them support them if we ourselves are not members of their group. They in turn, we expect, will not oppose the struggle against capitalism.

Of course Angela Davis has criticised bourgeois feminism for this precise reason. Bourgeois black British oppose the removal of capitalism. Bourgeois LGBT people oppose the transformation of society into a more just society.

And all of our struggle for a new socialist society must take place within a broad alliance with the majority working class, the foundation of any future positive transformation of society.

Now this makes it complicated for socialists. How do we deal with oppressed people who side with the oppressor, especially when we belong to one of those groups? At some point, don’t they too become our enemy? Isn’t Priti Patel the enemy?

And all of our struggle for a new socialist society must take place within a broad alliance with the majority working class, the foundation of any future positive transformation of society.

It was C. L. R. James who said that the black working class in Britain and the USA were the leaders of the working class in the UK and USA

Five black British men went down to protect young black activists from right wingers in a demonstration in London and one of the five ended up saving a white working class counter demonstrator from injury. This is highly symbolic.

It was C. L. R. James who said that the black working class in Britain and the USA were the leaders of the working class in the UK and USA because they were the ones who suffered its exploitation and oppression the most, and the ones who understood its nature the best.

The solution to prejudice is not a nicer capitalism. It is not more of the same. The solution requires a profound socialist transformation of society and that struggle has to be in a broad alliance based on the working class, but it will probably be lead by the people who suffer exploitation and prejudice the most.


Phil Hall is a college lecturer. He is a committed socialist and humanitarian. 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 the 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.

Who controls the Surplus?

The Problem of Surplus and the COVID-19 Pandemic.

‘Can we justify £16bn fortunes when nurses are poorly compensated, care workers are on zero-hour contracts and thousand are homeless?’

by Dr. Pete Stanfield

dirig ancient Assyrian term for surplus (Veenhof, K. R. 1972. E. J. Brill, Leiden)

Since the founding of the first city states, the question, “Who controls the surplus?” has been shrouded in kings, clerics and class. Claims to the riches created in large urban societies have been made and upheld by tiny minorities using religion and differential status, notably including slavery.  As a consequence, radical inequality is the defining feature of post-nomadic society.   Today’s political economy is haunted by the apparently humdrum accounts pressed into Sumerian clay tablets more than 3,000 years ago, recording the city’s inequitable transactions.  The currency may have been beer at that time but paper promises and pixels do not mask our own radically unfair principals of the distribution of wealth within highly developed capitalism.

In the global economy of the 21st century, surplus has become concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer super-rich individuals.   Whether you inherit money or are a self-made entrepreneur, private ownership of the means of production enables you to extract value from a large number of wage labourers and accumulate capital which in turn can be increased to extremes through investment. 

radical inequality is the defining feature of post-nomadic society.

The richest people in the UK have lost £54bn in the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic.  However, the top ten wealthiest still claim fortunes between £10bn and £16bn for themselves and their families.  These individuals have control of the country’s finance and industries, including household technology, banking, brewing, real estate, media, music, internet, mining and retail. 

Interestingly, most of their fortunes grew rapidly after the financial crisis of 2008 at a time when the vast majority of the population, in particular public employees such as National Health Service workers, were put under severe economic restraint through government policies of ‘austerity’.  The bailing out of the banks through public funds after their recklessly greedy behaviour prior to 2008 was a classic case of privatising profit and publicising debt. Certainly, the tiny class of super-rich individuals has not suffered ‘austerity’. For example, in 2014 the Business Standard indicated that the Hinduja brothers (industry and finance) were worth £11.9bn whereas today the Express and Star states they are worth £16bn. From the same sources, the picture is similar for David and Simon Reuben (property and internet) who were worth £9 billion in 2014 and are now worth £16 billion; Sir Leonard Blavatnik (investment, music and media) who was worth £10bn in 2014 and is now worth £15.78bn; Alisher Usmanov (mining and investment) who was worth 10.65bn in 2014 and is now worth £11.68bn; Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho (inheritance, brewing and banking) who were worth £6.36bn in 2014 and are now worth £10.3bn; Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, (property) whose family were worth £8.5bn in 2014 and are now worth £10.29bn. Sir James Dyson, self-made inventor of the bag-less vacuum cleaner, and today the richest individual in the UK, saw his fortune grow by £3.6bn to £16.2bn in the past year alone.

The bailing out of the banks through public funds after their recklessly greedy behaviour prior to 2008 was a classic case of privatising profit and publicising debt.

In 2014 there were 104 billionaires in the UK with a combined wealth of £301bn. Today there are at least 147 billionaires in the UK (Profit – Pakistan Today, 17th May, 2020) with the combined wealth of the thirteen wealthiest individuals standing at about £160bn*. The combined wealth of the top 1,000 wealthiest individuals in the UK today is estimated at £743bn**.  


Due to COVID-19, it is estimated that UK government debt will be £300bn by the end of 2020, partly as a result of paying the wages of private sector workers.  Even 6 years ago, the top hundred wealthiest individuals in the UK could have paid off the whole of this projected debt; today, the top 1,000 wealthiest could pay it off twice over with money to spare.  And yet, five of the top ten billionaires in the UK, including the Hinduja brothers, the Reuben brothers and Sir Leonard Blavatnik, own companies that have benefited hugely from government furlough schemes rather than pay down their immense personal wealth to protect jobs. As of 29th May 2020, the furlough scheme for private workers (not including self-employed) has cost £15bn.  Sir James Dyson alone (whose company hasn’t furloughed workers) has the wealth to cover that cost with more than a billion to spare.

Who controls the surplus?’ ‘We all should!’

There has been at least one major step toward a more balanced distribution of wealth in the UK; the creation of the National Health Service. If we think it strange that the US, the largest capitalist economy on the globe, struggles to create such a universal care system for its citizens based on need rather than the ability to pay*, we should remember that it took decades of work to achieve in the UK and was often vigorously opposed. From the socialist Beatrice Web, who led the Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1909, through working class reformers such as Dr. Benjamin Moore, who founded the State Medical Association in 1912 which foreshadowed the NHS, to the miner’s son, Aneurin Bevan, the post war Labour Government Health Minister who finally opened the NHS on 5th July 1948, the NHS struggled into existence.  

This great experiment answers, ‘Who controls the surplus?’ with the socialist principle, ‘We all should!’ Cooperative policies that share wealth through the tax system to enable health have been shown to work as a balance to the private ownership of the means of production but in the past decade the balance has swung toward a capitalism that makes a fetish of the so-called ‘market’ as a means to generate wealth for all through job creation and the payment of tax to the treasury, when in fact the market is controlled by a tiny set of individuals who extract value from labour largely for their own benefit. 

While some low paid workers deliberately try to keep their earnings to a minimum to avoid paying tax, the super-rich can afford to pay accountants whose primary role is to minimize their tax burden. Indeed, even in the early years of the NHS, the principles of, ‘free at the point of delivery’ through common taxation was challenged as cost and demand rose and since then the NHS has been through many similar vicissitudes.  Although the Thatcher government continued to support the NHS it privatized most other areas of the economy including energy, water transport and, significantly for the current pandemic, social care.   

Whilst the NHS has been a huge cooperative success and is among the most efficient health services in the industrialised world, spending 30% less then Germany for example, we must not take its existence for granted; for the past decade its financial situation has been under serious threat from laissez-faire capitalism that demonstrates a religious zeal for trapping down government, lowering taxes and reducing public spending (except of course when it is needed to bail out forlorn banks).  The budget for the Department of Health and Social Care in England for 2019/20 is £140.4bn. In the ten years since the 2008 economic crash its budget has grown at an average of 1.4% per annum compared to an average of 3.7% per annum since 1948. There is a new 5-year plan injecting £33.9bn cash (unadjusted for inflation) to the NHS by 2023/24 but the focus is on day-to-day expenditure rather than long term capital investment in equipment and buildings. By comparison the wealth of the richest individuals in the UK has grown between 30% up to more than 50% in the same period.  

[There is an] extreme contrast between the recent de-investment in Health and Social Care and the extraordinary growth of the wealth of a few individuals in the UK since 2008.

This sketch of the extreme contrast between the recent de-investment in Health and Social Care and the extraordinary growth of the wealth of a few individuals in the UK since 2008, makes it a little easier to understand why, in spite of a plethora of research articles demonstrating the urgency to prepare for a global pandemic and ongoing government exercises demonstrating its lack of readiness to deal with such a pandemic, little was in fact prepared for. 

The government did not stock-pile ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE) or body bags because the government’s role was considered to be taking a back seat and allowing the invisible hand of the ‘market’ to look after society; but the market merely allowed capital to accrue to the inventor of a bag-less vacuum cleaner.  What strange values have emerged? The market is clearly driven by profit, not values; profit for its own sake rather than values that protect the health of the majority. Sure, Sir James Dyson offered £20m of his own vast fortune to build ventilators when the government was faced with a shortage but that was far too little far too late.  Instead, the government removed COVID-19, the disease at the heart of the worst global pandemic for 100 years,  from its status as a High Consequence Infectious Disease with the apparent justification that it no longer met the 5 stringent criteria, in particular that the case fatality rate was not high enough. It has been frequently reported in the media that insiders to the Special Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) saw this as a rationalization of the situation where adequate equipment was unavailable so that downgraded PPE recommendations could be issued.

… allowing the invisible hand of the ‘market’ to look after society; but the market merely allowed capital to accrue to the inventor of a bag-less vacuum cleaner. 

The situation with the social care of the elderly has been perhaps more traumatic than that of the NHS.  The privatisation of care homes has led to them being serviced by some of the lowest paid labour in the UK, many of whom are on zero-hours contracts and will have felt compelled to work even if unwell, with the risk of infecting the elderly in their care.  It has also led to a lack of coordination with the NHS and the tragic ‘seeding’ of homes with COVID-19 as elderly patients were returned to care homes from hospital wards. Such coordination is unlikely to be achieved through a heterogeneous private market of care homes; government funding and detailed control through local government would have been the best way to have prevented this tragedy.

The absolute number of COVID-19 related deaths in the UK is the highest in Europe and second only to the US. To date, the UK has recorded 59,537 more deaths than usual since the week ending March 20th. This indicates that COVID-19 has directly or indirectly killed 891 people per million (Financial Times; 28/05/20).  This is second only to Spain which has recently updated its figures at 921 people per million.  Excess deaths compared to similar statistics in other countries is the key statistic in measuring the success of disease control and this is understood by scientists and politicians alike, including the Prime Minister. The UK was fortunate in having plenty of warning about the consequences of COVID-19; it had weeks to get its house in order, but as John Ashworth, the Shadow Secretary for Health has said, the UK government was too slow to stockpile PPE, too slow to get a testing regime in place, too slow to lockdown and too slow to protect care homes (Financial Times; 28/05/20). Why?

the UK government has failed to respond appropriately to COVID-19 because it espouses and practices laissez faire, market capitalism

I believe the UK government has failed to respond appropriately to COVID-19 because it espouses and practices laissez faire, market capitalism; that it idealizes economic freedom and the profit motive in the mistaken belief that it incentivises hard work, entrepreneurialism, competitiveness and creativity.  When it comes to an acute pandemic this belief has been exposed and undermined.  The neo-liberal UK government is now paying billions of pounds in wages to private workers and the self employed.  It has had to get its hands out from under its buttocks and order lenders to offer mortgage holidays, prevent landlords from evicting tenants, and take the homeless off the streets.  The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that just such a more equitable distribution of wealth is possible. It can be possible going forward beyond the pandemic.  Do we need bag-less vacuum cleaners when the NHS is under-funded and lacks basic PPE?  Can we justify £16bn fortunes when nurses are poorly compensated, care workers are on zero-hour contracts and thousand are homeless?

 It is time we moved away from ancient principles of accounting that allow capital to accrue to the few and developed a value oriented economy; one that prioritises core human needs and shares the social product more equitably.  We must continue the struggle to maintain investment in the NHS for the long term and bring other essential services back into public, not private, ownership.  The COVID-19 pandemic has a silver lining; it demonstrates that we do not need a ‘stripped back state (with) its underfunded engines spluttering on the corrosive oil of social inequality’ (Rachel Shabi, Independent 31/05/20). 

We need a cooperative economic model.

We need a cooperative economic model that is not only possible but also essential if we are to face future global challenges such as climate change and indeed a new and more virulent pandemic.  Global inter-connectivity, our increased close interaction with wild species and intensive factory farming of interbred, immune suppressed poultry and pigs makes another pandemic highly likely.  From our knowledge of the 1918 influenza pandemic, the next one could destroy the lives not only of the elderly and vulnerable but also of the young and those in the prime of their lives. Only a cooperative economy, focused on long term goals, with wealth and power more equally distributed through fair taxation and profit sharing will enable us to overcome such a challenge.


*The Walton family in the US, owners of Walmart, are worth £160bn equal to the top 13 wealthiest UK individuals.

**The wealth of the richest group of individuals in the US has grown by a staggering 80% in the past 18 months.  At the same time the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest in the US is at its highest level for 50 years (CNBC 13/02/2020).


Dr. Peter Stanfield

Dr. Peter W. Stanfield was an ordinary post-WW2 working class kid who benefited from reforming policies of the 1945 Labour government which the subsequent Conservative administration largely continued.  He particularly benefited from the socialist education policies of the 1960s and 1970s attending a comprehensive school with facilities and teaching that far outstripped the old-fashioned Grammar school in his area. This offered him a cruise around the Mediterranean at the age of 13, a tour that previously only wealthy families could afford.  A bull-fight in Tarragona, an audience with the Pope, a Greek play in Adelphi, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the canals of Venice made life back home uninteresting and whetted his appetite for travel and adventure.

After studying at teacher training college he spent 3 years as music teacher in his home town before taking off to Iran, learning to ski in the Elburz mountains and hitch-hiking around the country during the 1978/79 revolution  in a last ditch attempt to visit the great architecture of Shiraz and Isfahan and the ancient ruins of Persepolis. After unsuccessful attempts to settle back in the UK he left for the desert town of Al-Ain in the United Arab Emirates, climbing Jebel Hafit in the days before a road led to the top and learning to SCUBA dive in the Indian Ocean. 

Returning to the UK to take a BA in Sociology and English Literature he then left for Kuwait, continued SCUBA diving the tiny Arabian Gulf islands and taking multiple trips to the Red Sea where Romance took him to Copenhagen.  Sailing a wooden yacht from 1918 around Denmark with colleagues led to him building an Inuit kayak from wood and cloth and setting out on 2,000km journey from Copenhagen to the North Cape which he completed in 100 days paddling.  He then spent several years working as a casual ski guide in Norway often skiing alone on Hardangervidda, enjoying the immense freedom of that seeming wilderness. 

A kayak trip on the Urubamba river and Lake Titicaca in Peru went ahead but having lived for board and lodging for years, often relying on the kindness off others for support, Peter made a move to Oman working as a civilian for the Royal Air Force of Oman where he gained a passion for windsurfing, regularly riding the point break in Al-Ashkarah on the eastern coast in the monsoon and climbing the mountain ranges in the winter, twice entering the Majlis Al-Jinn, the second largest dome chamber in the world.  During this time he studied for his Master’s Degree and then returned to Al-Ain teaching in the university for several years and getting married before moving to the Western Region of Abu Dhabi.  Here he continued his adventures with a sailing kayak around the islands, read for his Doctorate in Education and became the father of 3 beautiful daughters.

Peter now lives in Somerset with his family, teaches, walks and cycles the Mendip hills and sails a modest yacht on the Bristol Channel.  He is convinced that without the socialist policies of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s and the inspiring education this enabled, his life may well have taken a far less adventurous trajectory.  This is why he continues to research and write about radically inequality.  Everyone must understand that it is not inevitable. It is a question of power to create equal opportunities; knowing is empowering. 

DEMOCRACY’S LAST NEWSSTAND

Was Labour’s 2019 Election Defeat a Grave – Even Terminal – Defeat for Democracy Itself?

By Richard House


Now the dust has settled over five months on from last December’s general election defeat for Labour and all the accompanying whirlwind of emotions and tribulations, it’s perhaps an opportune moment to take sober stock of the state our country’s democratic system is in – such as it is – in the light of that fateful election.

My starting-point is that the 2019 general election campaign was an utter disgrace to democracy. In fighting perhaps the dirtiest campaign in British political history – making the 1980s Saatchi Brothers campaigns look saintly in comparison – the Conservatives have imported lies, deceit and unadulterated propaganda into our electoral system; and at worst, democracy may well never recover as a result. In my view, the times we’re in couldn’t be more grave or dangerous. Ex BBC Industrial Correspondent Nichoas Jones has written chapter and verse on this disgraceful episode in British political history;1 and Granville Williams’ new MediaNorth book on the media is also a must-read in this regard.2

First, the blatant, calculated lies. The whole strategy of Tory arch-manipulator Dominic Cummings is based on the chilling, Trumpean calculation that telling blatant lies just doesn’t matter – the beyond-cynical calculation being that the harm done when the lie is exposed will have less effect than does the ‘positive’ propaganda dividend of the lie itself. In this campaigning ‘ethics-free zone’, the Conservatives used lie after lie throughout the last election campaign, including the deliberate doctoring of videos to make it look as if Labour spokespeople were saying the opposite of what they actually said. Once the line between truth and lies becomes hopelessly blurred in this way, as a nation and as citizens, we’re in the deepest of trouble; and make no mistake, it’s the ruthless, power-obsessed Tories who have taken us there (though their template was perhaps fashioned under New Labour and Blair–Campbell’s innovation of the era of spin).

Another arm of the propaganda assault was the Tories’ carefully targeted cold-calling of swing voters. Of course the Conservatives have comparatively few actual paid-up party members – a party which is effectively a head without a body. But they always have a massive fortune in their war-chest, thrown at them by the rich and the powerful, determined to keep them in power at any price. I know voters, for example, who were repeatedly rung up in the campaign and told that if they voted Labour, the country would have a communist government – and with a litany of appalling, hate-generating smears against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, carefully concocted to generate the maximum level of hate possible towards Mr Corbyn. I campaigned non-stop on Stroud High Street for nigh-on six weeks of the election campaign , and I witnessed at first hand the impact of this choreographed propaganda assault on Jeremy. I have rarely experienced anything so distressing in over four decades of political engagement.

Next, we have the right-wing tabloid newspapers, and four-fifths of the press being owned and controlled by non-dom, non-tax-paying billionaires living overseas, and determined to do everything in their power to return a Conservative government. The relentless attacks on Jeremy Corbyn by the print media constituted the most vile, vicious character assassination campaign on anyone in British political history (see note 1). Goebbels would have just loved it. And now Corbyn has gone, and is no longer a threat to Establishment largesse, I won’t be in the least surprised if those same newspapers soon make Corbyn into the country’s favourite uncle, just as they did with Tony Benn. The stench of the hypocrisy emanating from these propaganda organs is scarcely bearable – as the late, great man would have characterised it, ‘odiousshhh hypocrishhee’.

Next, the BBC. There is copious evidence of the anti-Labour / pro-Tory bias of the BBC – as if, in the face of all of the above, the odds weren’t already stacked overwhelmingly against Labour. In coming months and years, the scale of this scandal will become apparent, as the BBC’s systematic bias is exposed by academic studies for all to see. Several online petitions tell the story, John Han’s excellent petition3 takes on the issue of BBC anti-left and anti-Corbyn bias head on. As John’s petition says,

… we just want all political views to receive a fair and proportionate hearing. Anything less, and ‘democracy’ in any meaningful sense is on a slippery slope to oblivion.

The anti-Corbyn bias of the BBC is systematic and continuous. Going into a new general election the stance of the BBC is undemocratic. As the public broadcast corporation paid for by tax payers, the broadcaster should not be showing bias against a mainstream political leader or a political party in this country. The BBC’s royal charter and operating agreement set out its ‘regulatory obligation’ for impartiality. It says, ‘The BBC must do all it can to ensure that controversial subjects are treated with due accuracy and impartiality in all relevant output.’

And John concludes his petition thus:

We are unhappy with how Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party are misrepresented in BBC news programmes. We request that the BBC changes its journalistic approach…. Labour should be allowed to get its message out in a full and uninterrupted way,in the same way as Conservative viewpoints are heard. There should be an equal and fair balance of reporting on political issues of the day. The BBC’s job should be to relate the news and not to shape and manipulate it. 

My own post-election petition4 called for a full independent inquiry into the BBC’s biased general election coverage. In the words of the petition,

With our print media overwhelmingly dominated by right-wing conservative interests, it’s essential for democracy that our flagship public-service broadcaster provides some kind of countervailing balance. Historically, this was a role the BBC discharged reasonably well – being a significant factor in the election of a number of Labour governments since 1964. Without a relatively neutral broadcast media, Labour will always start with a massive handicap, and will have a mountain to climb just to get over the line.

And it continued,

[N]otwithstanding our shared and passionate commitment to the principle of public-service broadcasting, it’s just not good enough that, in a year or two, reputable and independent academic research reports will conclusively demonstrate the BBC’s recent anti-Labour bias. When voters’ access to unbiased information is compromised in this way, democracy itself is gravely threatened. When a government is elected to absolute power, carried over the line by bias and propaganda, its very legitimacy is in severe doubt – with grave implications for the sheer governability of a deeply disgruntled, disenfranchised citizenry.

Clearly, if and when we do get a future Labour government, the issue of media justice (a term coined by Justin Schlosberg) is going to be of central importance, as Labour takes on the commanding heights of media bias in Britain. We don’t want a media that’s biased to the left, either: we just want all political views to receive a fair and proportionate hearing. Anything less, and ‘democracy’ in any meaningful sense is on a slippery slope to oblivion.

Both John Han and I attended the excellent MediaNorth Spring conference in Leeds on the state of the media.5 It was most reassuring to witness brilliant young minds of the political left forensically taking on the issue of media reform and media justice, like Drs Tom Mills and Justin Schlosberg.6 I also had the great pleasure of meeting, and hearing speak, former BBC Industrial and Political Correspondent, Nicholas Jones.7 

I had no idea Mr Jones was a man of the left. Indeed, this is actually a great compliment to his journalistic professionalism, as I vividly remember his involvement in reporting on the 1984–5 miners’ strike, and his dramatically memorable interviews with the likes of Coal Board head and Thatcher’s hit-man, Ian MacGregor, and the NUM’s Arthur Scargill. Notwithstanding his own political preferences (which we now know about) and the odd tirade from Mr Scargill about bias, Nicholas Jones’ calm neutrality and fairness were impeccable throughout that fateful period in British industrial history. 

Contrast Nick Jones’ admirable journalistic professionalism with the apology for journalism we’ve been seeing at the BBC for some years now – with the likes of unctuously self-important Laura ‘I-must-just-take-this-important-call’ Kuenssberg, who, when she first started working on BBC Radio 5 Live some years back, audibly sneered every time she uttered Jeremy Corbyn’s name; and later, actively tried to get Labour shadow ministers to resign live on BBC TV. (And the list of her media outrages could be considerably extended, of course.)

However, perhaps the greatest concern of all is that this ethically barren, power-at-any-price behaviour by the Conservatives will generate a race to the ethical bottom in our polity. A parallel can be drawn with football. I often hear commentators and pundits justify diving in the penalty area (which of course is cheating, pure and simple) – because once one player or team starts doing it systematically, if their opponents don’t, they then suffer a massively unfair disadvantage – which can easily mean losing a game rather than winning it. The same logic applies in politics; and so once this toxic genie is out of the bottle, it will be very difficult for Labour not to follow suit – at which point the winner (all things being equal – which of course they aren’t) will be the party who tells the most effective lies, and who cheats more successfully. 

‘Democracy’, anyone?…

In addition, on a fair, proportional voting system basis, we would not now have a right-wing Conservative government at all, but a Labour-led coalition government of the progressive centre-left. Yes, we all know that a centre-left government isn’t anything like what we would have had under a majority, socialist, Corbyn-led government. But a Corbyn-led centre-left coalition would surely have been a lot more preferable to people on the progressive left than a Johnson–Cummings government for five long years. In my long-held view, it was a grave ‘tribalist’ error for Labour not to have included a clear commitment to introducing a fair voting system in its 2019 election manifesto – or at the very least, promising a major constitutional convention to look into legislating for a fair voting system.

Disproportionate election results under our first-past-the-post electoral system are akin to the absurd situation in the United States, where in the popular vote, Al Gore beat George W. Bush in 2000, and Hilary Clinton beat Donald Trump in 2016; and yet the undemocratic system saddles the world with two nasty extreme right-wing presidents that only a minority of the electorate voted for. So the ruling class has the so-called ‘democratic’ system comprehensively stitched up across the pond, too.

My biggest fear for Britain, however, is that between now and 2025, the Conservatives will throw a fortune at still further honing their disgraceful propaganda methods under the appalling Dominic Cummings (see, as I write, just how desperate Johnson is to keep him), and will further gerrymander the voting system – with boundary changes favouring the Tories by at least another 30 seats, and compulsory voter identification procedure at polling stations, which would likely disenfranchise several million Labour-inclined voters. And all this, of course, deliberately choreographed by Cummings and Johnson determined as they are to keep the Tories and their wealthy supporters controlling and entrenching their capture of the (capitalist) state, in perpetuity.

Like many on the political left, in the coming years I will not be engaging in the broken world of conventional institutional party politics, but will be exposing at every possible opportunity the aforementioned destruction of the democratic system itself – in the hope that enough voters wake up to what is happening to our country, and choose to vote for anything but the party which is determined to steal any last semblance of democracy from us.


Notes

1  See Nicholas Jones and Richard House, The media demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn — the evidence: an interview with Nicholas Jones, Morning Star, 10 March 2020 (available at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/media-demonisation-jeremy-corbyn-evidence-interview-nicholas-jones); and more recently, Nicholas Jones, Johnson’s media cheerleaders – how Britain’s press is letting down the nation, Morning Star, 19 May 2020 (available at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/johnsons-media-cheerleaders-how-britains-press-letting-down-nation). See also Granville Williams, A ruthless masterclass in media control, Morning Star, 12 December 2019 (available at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/ruthless-masterclass-media-control); and Granville Williams, Why we launched ElectionWatch, Morning Star, 29 November 2019 (available at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/why-we-launched-electionwatch).

2  Granville Williams (ed.), It’s the Media, Stupid!, Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom North, Leeds, 2020 (www.coldtype.net/MediaNorth.html). For a review, see Peter Lazenby, Here is the news: right-wing bias, cover-ups and downright lying, Morning Star, 12 May 2020 (available at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/here-news-right-wing-bias-cover-ups-and-downright-lying). 

3  John Han, Stop the anti-Corbyn bias on the BBC, Change.org petition, no launch date given/Autumn 2019, 26,534 signatories as of 24 May 2020 (available at https://www.change.org/p/bbc-stop-the-anti-corbyn-bias-on-the-bbc) .

4  Richard House, Demand a full independent inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of the 2019 General Election, Change.org petition, launched 7 January 2020, 7,196 signatories as of 24 May 2020; available at https://www.change.org/p/registered-voters-and-all-consumers-of-britain-s-broadcast-media-demand-a-full-independent-inquiry-into-the-bbc-s-coverage-of-the-2019-general-election.

5  MediaNorth / Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom, It’s The Media, Stupid! – Post-election Politics for Media Reform, one-day conference, Leeds Arts Gallery, Leeds, Saturday 8 February 2020. For useful reviews, see Eliza Lita and Jacob Lyon, Leeds conference is big boost for media reform, MediaNorth magazine, 6, March 2020, pp. 4–6; and Peter Lazenby, It’s The Media Stupid conference slams Tory propaganda in right-wing media, Morning Star, 9 February 2020 (available at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/its-media-stupid-conference). 

6  See, for example, Tom Mills, The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, Verso, London, 2016; Justin Schlosberg, Media Ownership and Agenda Control: The Hidden Limits of the Information Age, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, 2016; and Greg Philo & others (including Justin Schlosberg), Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief, Pluto Press, London, 2019. See also the excellent collection, Aeron Davis (ed.), The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect, Goldsmiths Press, London.

7  For Nick Jones’ website, see www.nicholasjones.org.uk. It has chapter-and-verse on the disreputable ruling-class warfare waged by Thatcher’s Conservatives against the miners, exposing the cover-ups and secrets revealed in Thatcher’s cabinet records, from a man who was right at the heart of it all. 


Richard House, Ph.D., is a former university lecturer and psychotherapist, a chartered psychologist, a writer, educational consultant, and still a Corbynista full-time left and environmental activist in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Contact: richardahouse@hotmail.com

Road of Dreams


Socialism? What are we talking about?


By Dominic Tweedie

The communists mean to show the way – as a vanguard – through revolution, to a classless, stateless condition called communism. The agent of revolution is not a communist party. Since the 1840s, communists have said that the principal agent of revolution against the present dictatorship of the bourgeois, capitalist ruling class is the working class; and the working class will have allies.

To perform its historic task of revolution, the working class will have to move beyond passive existence and become a conscious, intentional “class for itself”. The communists play the necessary educative role in this movement.

It is time to take a critical look at the communist parties, starting with their habitual advocacy of “socialism” and their embrace of “democrat centralism”, and the consequently very low rate of success of these communist parties, all over the world.

What is socialism? Unlike the term “communism”, which is easy to define, socialism has no generally accepted definition. But somehow, the term “socialism” is widely used in a way that implies a universally accepted meaning. This deception, and self-deception, initiates a quest that can never be fulfilled.

It is time to take a critical look at the communist parties, starting with their habitual advocacy of “socialism” and their embrace of “democrat centralism”, and the consequently very low rate of success of these communist parties, all over the world.

“Socialists,” and most, if not all communist parties, profess “socialism” as an immediate goal. The imaginary socialism, like a pictured Christmas tree, is hung about and surrounded with gifts and treasures. Socialism is supposed to be a place where dreams come true.

Marx and Engels considered the definition of socialism in the third part of the 1848 Communist Manifesto. It describes Feudal Socialism, Petty? Bourgeois Socialism, German or “True” Socialism, Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism, and Critical?Utopian Socialism.

This part of the Manifesto shows that the public intellectuals of Marx’s time were not very different from those of today. Then as now, “socialism” could be all kinds of things to all kinds of people.

The former Conservative Prime Minister of England, Margaret Thatcher, indicated socialism’s more precise meaning when she said “There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families.” Now, Thatcher’s successor Boris Johnson, in the middle of the COVID-19 panic, now says that “there obviously is such a thing as society”.

Of course there is. The only plain meaning of “socialism” is that the nation-state is a society, or to use another word: a polity. Libertarians and anarchists do not like this, but they are a tiny minority. All others accept, contra Thatcher, that in each nation-state there is a society. In the simple and true sense of the word, this makes them all socialists. As Marx and Engels understood, socialism only means that the inhabitants of a give territory recognise each other as members of one and the same society.

The precise term for revolutionaries to use is not “socialism”, but “communism”. Communism is their goal: Communism is the classless society.

It follows that none of us needs a “road to socialism”, because we are already there. The precise term for revolutionaries to use is not “socialism”, but “communism”. Communism is their goal: Communism is the classless society.

How are we going to get there? The working class has to overthrow the bourgeois-capitalist class and rule over that other class, as a dictator.

This has to be explained by the communists, to the proletariat, with the utmost clarity. Our goal is not another brand of “socialism”. We communists have no investment in the status quo. We communists must not even be invested in the dictatorship of the proletariat, necessary though it may be. We must not, as communists, seek government posts. Not now, and not then. We are outside. We are commissars, commissioned for rank, but not for power.

The communist party as an executive body is gone. It has not worked, except in such a way as to liquidate itself. The communists need no hierarchy. They must learn how to operate without hierarchy.

The communist party as an executive body is gone. It has not worked, except in such a way as to liquidate itself. The communists need no hierarchy. They must learn how to operate without hierarchy. Among the communists, there must be no “state”, just to the same extent that in language there is no “state”. In human production there is no a priori state. The communists must not carry that virus called “state”.

Structure does exist, and will continue to exist, in the mass-democratic organisations: trade unions, the liberation movement, the necessary women’s organisation, and allied formations. These structures can be called “democratic centralist”, because within them power rotates between periphery and centre. The state that the proletariat will construct will also be like that. For the proletariat it will be a necessity, but it will not be a virtue. When it has served its purpose, the proletarian state will have to go.

There is no reason why one communist should ever wait upon another. The communists must henceforth stand up and behave in practice like real communists. Not later, but now.

The communists, among themselves, have no more need of a hierarchy than the classless society, communism, has need of one. There is no reason why one communist should be placed below another. There is no reason why one communist should ever wait upon another. The communists must henceforth stand up and behave in practice like real communists. Not later, but now.

All of their potential must be released and never again held back by a sterilising game of preferment. One communist is not better than another one. The communists do not form a church. In material reality there is no such hierarchy. There is no flesh on its bones, and most of the bones it once may have had, have crumbled away.

Attempting to rebuild the broken hierarchy of communist parties would be folly. Instead, these hierarchies must be replaced with distributed networks. We, the communists, must learn to work without a state, just as much as we advocate for everybody else to live in a stateless society.

No hierarchy!

Organise the nations to take the empire!


DOMZA

Dominic Tweedie was born in Devon, England in July, 1945, in between the testing and the first use of the atomic bomb, son of a Royal Navy officer; grew up in Kenya, East Africa, during the Emergency and for Uhuru in December 1963; in London in 1967 (Grosvenor Square) and in 1968; in the CPGB and the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the 1970s; in the construction of the ANC’s Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania; in the London Committee of the A-AM in the 1980s; in South Africa to vote in the 1994 election, and since then as an ANC and SACP member, sometime COSATU and SADTU officer, now retired; the “VC” of the virtual Communist University since 2003, and editor of the Telegram channel “CU Iskra”.

So, you say that Darwin’s scientific ideas have nothing to do with social values?


Victorians and Edwardians did terrible, cruel things in the name of Malthus and Darwin.

by Philip Hall

The cast system is inhuman. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) seems impossibly cruel. Look at the Taliban: Malala got a bullet in the head just for going to school. Look at forced marriage, at child marriage. How can that be tolerated?

These are the persistent systemic failures of whole cultures and systems of values. When religion is patriarchal and prejudiced it cannot claim to be universal. Societies and cultures are conveniently blind to their own failings, so that the caste system is reinforced. The mother, eager to be respectable in a traditional society, forces her child to be circumcised.

But Europe is blind to its systemic moral failings, too. It was Kenneth Clark who said that the Victorians and Edwardians did the terrible, cruel things they did around the world in the name of Malthus and Darwin. These were things that they would never have contemplated doing if they had allowed themselves to be fully guided by their Christian morals.

The idea of western racial and cultural superiority was reinforced by the ideologues of empire who used a bastardised form of Darwinism to license colonialism; European people, society and culture were ‘superior’, you understand, and by colonising the British were really just bringing superior civilisation to places that needed it. Kipling called it ‘the white man’s burden’.

Malthus argued that populations grew geometrically. He claimed that the Earth could not sustain such a large population. Many Europeans think that Malthus’s ideas are still valid. They don’t question them – just as a billion Indians still accept the caste system.

Malthus has taught us misanthropy.

Malthus has taught us misanthropy. I do not exaggerate. There are moral, seemingly decent, environmentally aware liberals who you know, who actually think it would be better for the world if Ebola wiped out hundreds of millions of poor people in Africa. For some sick people, COVID is Darwinism in action. They celebrate it.

The evil of this immoral western philosophy is compounded. Its proponents believe in the death of the maladapted poor, in the destruction of ‘failed’ states. They believe that when poor people die this is a demonstration of the mechanisms of adaptive evolution.

The ideas of Darwinism were easily bowdlerised. They gave rise to theories of scientific racism and eugenics. Darwinism has combined syncretically with a crass strand of heroic capitalism to generate the philosophy that suggests that if you are rich and successful, you have greater value as a human.

This is the philosophy of the advocates of euthanasia, of genetic manipulation and the philosophy of the measurers of human intelligence. In fact, modern social Darwinists like Peter Singer reflect the views of 1930s eugenicists on disability. The eugenicists believed that severely disabled children should be ‘put out of their misery’ like sick animals.

You could say Peter Singer’s arguments are more nuanced than those of 1930s eugenicism, but ask disabled people how they feel about the proposal to screen foetuses with disabilities. Ask them how they feel about Singer’s recommendations that severely disabled children be euthanised.

The Nazis were extreme social Darwinists of the worst sort. In fact, Darwin himself was something of a social Darwinist. There is clear evidence of this, despite the desperate attempts of Darwin’s defenders to re-contextualise his words and say that they were taken out of context. Darwin’s ideas lend themselves to a winner takes all mentality.

Darwin wrote that it was inevitable that the ‘inferior’ or ‘primitive’ non-white races would be driven to extinction by the superior civilised European people. He said that. There is no escaping it.

Darwin wrote that it was inevitable that the ‘inferior’ or ‘primitive’ non-white races would be driven to extinction by the superior civilised European people.

Any attempt to critique social Darwinism and Malthusianism by pointing accusing fingers at Darwin and Malthus themselves is immediately deflected by unconvincing disavowals.

You hear things like this. Darwin was just ‘a man of his time’ and he was ‘humane’ and ‘kind’. He was against slavery. His scientific ideas have nothing to do with social values. Bullshit!

The vile culture of inequality that justifies cruelty and inequality in modern western societies, and in particular in the USA, derives from the influence of Malthusianism and Darwinism. They are the blind spot.

Social Darwinism and Malthusianism are the log in our eye. We look critically at the values of other cultures, and rightly so, but many of us just cannot see the poisonous ideas that nestle at the root of the systemic moral failure of European society. Social Darwinism and Malthusianism have generated philosophies more dangerous than the Aztec idea that the if the sun rises it is only because we spilled human blood to help it do so.

Just as many people who live in the caste system accept it as normal, we accept Malthusianism and Darwinism as normal. The clothes the ideas take partially disguise them. Call it radical conservatism, call it deep ecology, call it scientific rationalism. Call it what you will, it’s old wine in new bottles.

For the modern social Darwinists and Malthusians, it is a sad day when infant mortality falls. And the people with these ideas are not rare, they do not hide. Inquire a little and you’ll find they are all around you. ‘What a shame there are so many people on the Earth.’ someone sighs.

In Wendy Northcott’s world, the deaths of ‘stupid’ people are celebrated as ‘evolution in action’.

The social Darwinists even concentrate their unquestioned truths into a joke. It’s called The Darwin Awards. There used to be a snuff channel set up by Wendy Northcott. Northcott’s ‘jokes’ about stupid people dying are now regularly published by Penguin in a series of books. Where’s the moral outrage? There is none because Northcott’s ideas are common currency.

Wendy Northcott is a shapeshifter. Interestingly, from people who die doing ‘stupid things’ she has changed the emphasis to people who stupidly harm the environment. Social Darwinism hides its hatred of the poor and vulnerable behind a so-called Deep Ecology. In Wendy Northcott’s world, the deaths of ‘stupid’ people are celebrated as ‘evolution in action’. Her high concept line.

Her snuff videos have now been blocked. But at the time one video showed a young man, paralysed, from the waist down, committing suicide.

The young man smashes his wheelchair into an elevator lift in anger, over and over again, until the door opens and he falls down the shaft. If someone who was depressed or mentally challenged were to take pills or touch a live wire and died, presumably Wendy Northcott sees that, too, as ‘evolution in action’. Northcott can’t have her cake and eat it.

No Muslim, Hindu or Christian would ever laugh at that, or celebrate suicide. To do so needs the heart of a fascist. And there are plenty of hard-bitten misanthropists around, who found that channel pretty funny – it had many subscribers who laughed as the young man killed himself: Someone I know. Someone you know. The quintessence of moral failure.


Phil Hall is a college lecturer. He is a committed socialist and humanitarian. 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 the 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.

Kondratiev and the next K-Wave

Now AI is Coming for the Middle-Class

Kondratiev studied the economic cycles of the 19th century

By Emil Blake

In 1925 a Russian economist, called Nikolai Kondratiev published a book called Major Economic Waves in which he predicted the rise and fall of economic prosperity driven by new, era-defining technologies. The crux of it, according to Kondratiev, was that economic cycles last 40-60 years. His starting point, which studied the economic cycle for the 19th century, applying it further into the future, was ultimately to cost him his life.


The economist was killed by Stalin’s firing squad 82 years ago, largely because his theory demonstrated that capitalism went through stages of decline and renewal, rather than absolute collapse. Ironically, the next Kondatriev Wave might demonstrate most clearly capitalism not as the Ouroboros of eternal life, but as the self-consumption of its most craven desires.


According to Kondratiev’s waves — a term coined by economist Joseph Schumpter, posthumously in 1939, our current wave — that driven by the global information technology epoch, is due to, or has already expired. The theory, which posits that each epoch is marked in four stages — prosperity, recession, depression and improvement, – much like the cyclical seasons of summer, autumn, winter and spring – predicted the current era finished around the turn of the millennium.

What now looms – is the industrial expansion of automation and the disappearance of significant chunks of low-skilled work


If Kondratiev is right, the next epoch should’ve started at some point between the turn of the century, and now, 2020. And now, looks like an exceptional fertile time for huge changes to occur. Obviously, global pandemic or other such events do not figure in economic theory but they have through the course of history brought forward or altered human ways of being, living and working.


Many economists would argue that Kondratiev’s waves are not a reliable measure, either in when these waves start or end, and there are also question marks over the data collection of grain yields that provided his theory of economic seasons within each industrial evolution. There’s also the small matter of natural disasters – and pandemics – which clearly affect economies. Yet, Kondratiev’s ideas still have a considerable number of proponents, even if perhaps it might be another form of prediction or pattern recognition.


Blogger Charles Hugh Smith, writing in 2011, claimed that 2020 would be at the intersection of four long-term cycles: the passing of the war generation – those born in the war, the longer-term cycle of price inflation and wage stagnation, the credit expansion and contraction cycle, and the downward movement of Peak Oil depletion.

While the wage stagnation and credit bubble predictions are still a decade out, it makes for sober reading what comes next. Despite the transition to a digital economy over the past 20 years the biggest driver of industrialized economies, has been growing levels of domestic, commercial and national debt, which suggest a global economy out of ideas and out of steam. Quantitative easing and low interest rates have kept the engine ticking over but the petrol tank is empty.

Once the cold winds of the Kondratiev winter begin to blow and the typical overclass member sees the permanent collapse of his 401K, elimination of his bonus, and his stock options expiring worthless, he will learn he is not the same as the rich.”

“During the Kondratiev fall when conditions favour asset appreciation and the secondary wave represents enormous opportunity to the educated and savvy, the non-rich members of the overclass can pretend they are the same as the truly rich, and that their interests coincide. […]


Once the cold winds of the Kondratiev winter begin to blow and the typical overclass member sees the permanent collapse of his 401K, elimination of his bonus, and his stock options expiring worthless, he will learn he is not the same as the rich.

While the current K wave – if it’s to be believed – brought industrial decline to the West and the age of information in all its forms: the office cubicle, teleconferencing, industrial-scale telephony, hotdesking, the bullshit job, the death-rattle of unions and the atomisation of the labour movement. It is up for debate whether, in light of covid-19, the next wave will be more an industrial de-escalation rather than a revolution. The working class have been feeling the effects for years, and will feel it even harder. AI is coming for the middle-class.


Companies and corporate entities that seek to adjust their losses, during financial crises through staff lay-offs and redundancies, rarely recruit to the same levels again even if they survive and flourish in later times. New technology usually allows larger companies to replace gaps in their staffing, and those that can’t will go to the wall.
AI and automation research and development will likely be hastened by the frustrations and furloughs of a global lockdown for the wealthiest companies. For the multitude of SME’s that keep the biggest Western economies afloat, this could be a Darwinian moment.
Certainly, it will give context to technology that has long been in creation. A global pandemic of course, brings about both the necessity to down-scale, but also to bring forward projects that might have been longer-term investments – particularly if they are ‘ready to go’, labour-saving and justify the productivity output of taking x labour from the balance sheet.

The working class have been feeling the effects for years, and will feel it even harder. AI is coming for the middle-class.


This obviously won’t spell the end of labour and working. But we are beginning to see the shrinking of human labour, which in historical contexts looks obvious. If Kondratiev’s general theory is correct, the start of the last (or current) K wave would’ve been around 1970 – roughly when expanding Western corporations began cost-cutting and eventually moving industrial work to the cheaper labour markets of Asia, and is generally considered the decade when ‘globalization’ as we know it began.

The erosion of the industrial base in industrialised economies soon followed – and so it would be logical that the next industrial wave should continue the trend of de-labourisation. Robots and AI technologies have been steadily been worming their way into our daily life for years – whether it’s supermarket checkouts, streaming services, smart cars or Amazon’s Alexa. They’re here to help us, but….for how long?

What now looms – is the industrial expansion of automation and the disappearance of significant chunks of low-skilled work, and indeed tasks or jobs performed by the more skilled. Planned obsolescence might be something we have become wearily accustomed to in the life-cycle of our tech, but soon it could be a feature of the human workforce.

Examples of algorithms making crucial decisions in recruitment and HR; replacing face-to-face diagnoses for those without medical insurance in the US, the increasing presence of Al in legal work to manage caseloads, or even how AI can manage your investment portfolio (if you’re lucky enough to have one).

Examples of AI and robotics abound, and yes they’re coming for your job, despite all the talk of ‘Cobots’ helping to share the workload. Despite this, in more recent (October 2019), and socially intimate times, more than two-thirds of Americans believed that robot technology would aid their work rather than making them obsolete. the bottom line remains cost efficiency and ‘streamlining’ – or any other euphemism you can conjure, for what equates to staff cuts. While we apprehensively wince at the thought of a nightmarish future with driverless cars – and all of the moral questions that could come from it – there is already the tech to do so, and to deliver your goods to your front door, in the process. All that is stopping those that can afford it is legislation – and public acceptance. Both will come.

 

 

…the slow removal of the labour market, and the economic crisis that that will prolong or eventually bring, could be a more immediate crisis for humanity than the environmental problems that capitalism and consumerism have been slowly storing up.

What the four day working week and UBI will not provide is tax revenue, which might not make a significant dent in tax revenues for the many workers in retail or catering, but when automation and AI begin to make a significant impact on the professional services and comfortably middle class – that provides more telling issues for the powerful to deal with. There’s always robots when it all goes wrong.

Of course, governments will need to increase tax receipts, to cover the full costs of the pandemic in a post-pandemic time; and that will be significantly harder coming out of a potential economic depression and with the looming threat of a whole host of vanishing jobs. A forward-thinking response to these crises, might be to implement an asset or land-value tax rather than an income-based one, in order to keep the working-class afloat, but would punish middle-class the most; an approach politically, that appears to make sense in polite conversation but not, at the critical moment, in the polling booth.

Certainly the imperatives are all present for the next technological push – the next K wave: the necessity to power our societies in clean and efficient energies and avoid ecological disaster; reconfiguring economies based, not on output and growth but by other measures that demonstrate a universal prosperity; the acceptance that infinite supply and infinite demand on finite resources is not a possible outcome in any universe. For this to happen of course sensible public discourse should follow, but we are farther than ever from this through the deepening networks of misinformation and alarming societal fragmentation that have come about through the immediacy of digital publishing, and the flowering of troll farms and bots to skewer reality once more. AI, once more.

But the way to extend the infinite supply – demand delusion is of course, to invest in the removal of labour costs to continue it, but for how long? The stock markets will sing – just look how they’ve rolled over and had their tummies tickled mere weeks into an economic crash – but the slow removal of the labour market, and the economic crisis that that will prolong or eventually bring, could be a more immediate crisis for humanity than the environmental problems that capitalism and consumerism have been slowly storing up.

Reference:

”Michael A. Alexander, The Kondratiev Cycle: A Generational Interpretation


Emil Blake

Sometime writer, sometime journalist, sometime teacher, sometime dreamer

Down with Lockdown!

What do you do when the cure does you more harm than the disease? You stop taking it.

Controversially, James Tweedie puts forward an argument for lock-down to be lifted.

Will lock-down lead to deaths ?Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com


By James Tweedie, Plymouth, England, Friday May 15 th 2020

The prescribed treatment for the COVID-19 pandemic, a disease without a cure or vaccine, has been the lockdown, a government-enforced shutdown of economic and social life. It has become a sacred cow for opposition parties, academics, the media and some (but not all) trade unions. Anyone who speaks against it is denounced as an apologist for mass murder.
But with the UK and other countries past the peak of infections and deaths, the ill effects of the lockdown are becoming more serious than the virus itself.
The most common justification for these extraordinary emergency measures in the West is to ‘flatten the curve’ of the infection rate to make sure hospitals are not overwhelmed and patients left to die at home.
In most countries this has been achieved. Despite dire predictions by opposition leaders, ex-civil servants, academics and journalists, the British NHS never ran out of intensive care beds or ventilators, and now we’re way past the peak.
True, some countries have so far managed to contain the virus and keep the number of deaths very low. But most of these nations – China, Vietnam, Singapore, North Korea, Cuba – have very different socio-political systems. They are equipped for this in ways the Western liberal democracies are not.

Cuba and the DPRK are isolated from the rest of the world by Western sanctions. New Zealand, often praised in the UK media, is 2,000 miles from the nearest land and has a population of less than 5 million.

The New Crisis

The start of the lockdown saw the NHS switch to crisis mode. Hospitals cleared the decks, discharging as many patients as possible and cancelling all ‘non-urgent’ procedures – everything but emergency life-saving surgery and treatment.
But this is in danger of creating a worse health crisis than the pandemic. Family doctors have stopped seeing patients unless they were literally dying, for fear of catching the virus themselves. Accident and emergency admissions have fallen by more than half as patients are afraid to go to hospital.
Last weekend British Medical Association Chairman Dr Chaand Nagpaul warned the NHS would have a waiting list of 7.2 million cases by the autumn as a result of the lockdown. In April Cancer Research UK said referrals to consultants were down by 75 per cent, meaning 2,700 new cancer cases were going undiagnosed every week. Specialist Professor Karol Sikora said that could mean 50,000 extra deaths.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) has already recorded over 50,000 more deaths this year than the same period in 2019, but as of May 14 only 33,614 have been ‘linked’ to coronavirus. In many of those cases the virus was not the sole or even the primary cause of death.

On Wednesday the British Medical Journal reported that of 30,000 deaths in care homes, the new hot-spots of infection, only 10,000 were identified with the virus – and that the rest may be down to the policy of discharging elderly patients from hospital to community care to make way for a wave of COVID-19 admissions that never came.


Suffer the Little Children

The latest cause for middle-class hysteria in the UK has been the government’s announcement that some children will go back to school at the start of June, and that it wants all schoolkids to have at least one month of classes before the summer holidays. It’s kind of amusing to see so many of those who advocate free and compulsory state education now vowing to keep their kids at home when their schools reopen – with some teachers encouraging them. The social-democrats have transformed into libertarians and anarchists. Only 12 per cent of deaths from the virus so far have been among people under the age of 65. Five per cent
were in their fifties, one per cent in their 40s, while the under-40s accounted for less than one per cent of deaths. An overwhelming 95 per cent of fatalities have underlying health conditions – co-morbidities – like heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes. If you’re under 50 and healthy, your chances of dying of COVID-19 are almost nil. In fact the harm of keeping children off school for months outweighs any risks of them returning.
UNICEF warned on Tuesday that the lockdown could kill 1.2 million children worldwide in the next six months due to reductions in routine medical visits and the poverty and malnutrition caused by the economic freeze.

The Bottom Line

The brutal truth is that if people don’t go back to work soon, they won’t have jobs to go back to. Government-guaranteed loans are still just liabilities on employers’ balance sheets and aren’t going to bring back lost custom. The numbers of insolvencies and redundancies are soaring and the middle of the year the UK will officially be in a recession.
An ONS survey of businesses found that three-fifths of those still trading had suffered a loss in revenue, with a quarter saying they had lost half or more of their income. Three-fifths of exporters said overseas orders were down.
Businesspeople aren’t the only ones voicing concern. This week the airline pilots’ union BALPA attacked the government’s plan for two weeks’ quarantine for those arriving in the UK, saying it was an effective ban on tourism that would kill their industry. The National Union of Journalists pointed out that advertising revenue in the business had fallen by 80 per cent since the start of the lockdown, with thousands of workers already laid off. Two-thirds of freelancers told the union they’d lost income.
When side-effects of the cure are worse than the disease, you have to stop taking it. It’s time for the young and healthy to go back to work, school and university and get Britain and the world back on its feet.Down with Lockdown!

What do you do when the cure does you more harm than the disease? You stop taking it.


James Tweedie

James Tweedie was born in Hammersmith, West London, in 1975. He grew up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud in the time of colonial liberation, being taken to Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament  and Anti-Apartheid Movement events by his mother and father respectfully.

James has lived and worked in South Africa and Spain. He has worked as a reporter and the international editor of the Morning Star newspaper, a foreign reporter for the Mail Online, an online journalist for RT.com. He has appeared as a commentator on BBC Radio 4, RT’s Crosstalk, Turkey’s TRT World and Iran’s Press TV. He currently works for Sputnik.

James maintains an occasional blog (http://ositorojo.blogspot.com/), describing himself as “one of the most deplorable purveyors of fake news about populist strongmen (and women) around the post-truth world.”

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