Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • The solution for Palestine

    The primary proposed frameworks for ending the Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestine may be broadly classified into three types: two-state solutions, one-state solutions, and confederation models. Two-state solutions involve the creation of an independent, sovereign, and contiguous Palestinian state (comprising the West Bank and Gaza Strip) coexisting alongside the State of Israel, based largely on the pre-1967 borders, with Jerusalem as a shared or divided capital. These solutions are supported by a large majority of the international community, the United Nations, the Palestinian Authority (Fatah), and numerous member states (including recent collective pushes by global alliances). They are also supported by the Socialist Party of England and Wales.

    One-state solutions, on the other hand, involve a single, shared state encompassing Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, granting equal citizenship and political rights to both Israelis and Palestinians, or structured as a bi-national arrangement. These solutions are supported by a smaller fraction of polled populations and varying factions on both the Israeli and Palestinian side. Confederation models, meanwhile, involve linking two separate states (Israel and Palestine) under a cooperative institutional framework with shared or open movement, joint governance on specific issues (like the environment or security), and distinct local self-rule. Such models represent a kind of half-way house between two-state and one-state solutions.

    The Socialist Party argues that neither a capitalist two-state solution nor a capitalist one-state solution can be viable, maintaining that true liberation and any lasting solution require working-class movements in Israel-Palestine to challenge and remove capitalism. I wholeheartedly agree. The overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism must necessarily be part of any long-term solution to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. The problem is that enacting this solution will likely take years or decades, and that is time Palestinians do not have. As I noted in a previous blog post, the people of Gaza cannot simply sit around and wait for Israeli workers to bring down Israeli capitalism. They need a solution that can start being implemented immediately.

    The Socialist Party might counter that Palestinians should unite and attempt bring down Palestinian capitalism. But it is not Palestinian capitalism that caused the naqba, or that has resulted in the deaths of 75,000 Palestinians since October 7th 2023. To end the bloodshed in Gaza and elsewhere in the region, we must attack its root cause: Israeli Zionism. It should be clear to everyone by now that Zionism is a racist, settler-colonial ideology. Zionism promotes an ethno-nationalist framework that grants privileged rights, status, or land access to Jewish people over non-Jews, leading to systemic discrimination, apartheid-like conditions, and ultimately – as we have witnessed over the past three years – ethnic cleansing and genocide.

    Proponents of Zionism claim that it is a legitimate national liberation and self-determination movement for the Jewish people, comparable to other national movements. These proponents emphasize that supporting the existence of Israel as a Jewish homeland is separate from critiquing specific policies, actions, or right-wing administrations of the Israeli government. Some even argue that characterizing Zionism inherently as racism is a form of antisemitism. The Green Party of England and Wales came in for a lot of criticism recently when it voted to define Zionism as an ethno-nationalist and racist project at its conference. Although most of this criticism came from the right of the political spectrum, many on the left were also critical of the Greens for taking this stance – including some in the Socialist Party.

    However the claim that Zionism is a legitimate national liberation movement quickly disintegrates on contact with reality. The idea that ethnic and religious groups should automatically be entitled to their own nation state is obviously unworkable. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such groups across the world without their own nation state and with little chance of ever getting one. Even if it was workable, the solution would be to grant these groups a nation state where they currently reside, not thousands of miles away on a piece of land currently occupied by another ethnic group. And to be clear, Zionism does not just refer the idea that Jews are entitled their own nation-state; it refers specifically to the idea that they are entitled to their own nation-state in the holy land.

    It is this aspect of Zionism – the idea that Jews have a greater right to live in the Palestine than the people who already live there – which inevitably leads to racism and ethnic cleansing. In this sense, it is entirely appropriate to label Zionism as a form of racism. Indeed, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution back in 1975 which equated Zionism with racism. So it is surprising to see the Greens come under attack from the left for their ‘Zionism is racism’ stance, which was really just a statement of fact, equivalent to saying that 1+1 = 2. I think part of the reason for this is that people worry that it might offend the Jewish community. But we are talking specifically about the ideology of Zionism here, not about Jews or Judaism, or even Israelis per se.

    The Socialist Party would argue that although it would have been against setting up the state of Israel in the first place, we cannot ignore the fact that it was set up and has now existed for nearly 80 years. Today, approximately 80% of Israelis are native-born and just 20% are immigrants. There is clearly a strong national consciousness in Israel, which is why the Socialist Party supports a two-state solution. The problem is that for most Israelis, this consciousness is inextricably linked with Zionism. A viable two-state solution would require severing this link, which would be very difficult to do in practice. Of course, as socialists we have to believe peoples’ consciousness can be changed. But then that undercuts the rationale for favouring a two-state solution in the first place.

  • Einstein’s scientific theories

    Albert Einstein’s scientific career began in 1901 when, at the age of 21, he published a paper on an effect known as capillary rise. Four years later, in 1905, Einstein submitted his doctoral dissertation to the University of Zurich, in which he derived an estimate of the size of molecules. During 1905 Einstein also published four groundbreaking papers, leading many to refer to this as his ‘annus mirabilis’ or miracle year. The first of these papers provided an explanation for the so-called photoelectric effect, whereby light hitting certain metals causes these metals to give off electrons. Building on the work of his fellow German physicist Max Planck, Einstein explained the photoelectric effect by postulating that light is made up of particles. Einstein would be awarded the Nobel prize for this work in 1921.

    The second of these papers was on thermodynamics: the study of heat and how it moves and interacts with matter. Einstein showed that if a dust particle is diffusing randomly through the air, then the distance that the particle can travel from its starting point can be determined by a simple mathematical equation now known as the Einstein relation. This relation is expressed as D = mkT, where D is the diffusion coefficient, m is the mobility of the particle, k is the Boltzmann constant, named after German physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, and T is the air temperature. In this paper Einstein was able to explain a phenomenon known as Brownian motion, named after Scottish botanist Robert Brown, which refers to the apparently random motion of particles suspended in a medium.

    The third of these papers was on the special theory of relativity. During the 19th century, physicists believed that light waves were ripples in a substance pervading the whole of space, which they referred to as the ether. The existence of this substance implies a preferred frame of reference for the universe. Einstein hated this idea, arguing instead that all frames of reference are equally valid – a notion he referred to as the principle of relativity. There was a problem with this however. In 1861, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell put forward his theory of electromagnetism, which predicted that the speed of light is a fundamental constant of nature. This is at odds with the principle of relativity, according to which the speed of light should vary according to the reference frame of an observer.

    Einstein’s solution was to postulate that light travels at the same speed in all frames of reference. It was this insight that led him directly to the special theory of relativity. The crux of this theory was a set of equations linking properties of objects in frames of reference moving at different speeds. The theory involved unifying of space and time into a four-dimensional object known as space-time. One consequence of this theory is that two events measured as occurring simultaneously in one frame of reference are not necessarily simultaneous in another. Another is that if faster-than-light travel is allowed then it is possible for the order of cause and effect to be reversed, leading to paradoxical situations in which outcomes happen before the events that caused them.

    The fourth and final paper published by Einstein during his annus mirabilis developed the principle of mass–energy equivalence, expressed by the equation E = mc2. This is probably the most famous equation in the whole of physics and drops directly out of the mathematics of special relativity. It expresses a relationship between energy, E, mass, m, and the speed of light, c, and essentially says that energy and mass are equivalent. So, for example, if you burn a lump of coal, the mass of the ash will be less than the original mass of the coal, with the difference in mass multiplied by c2 equal to the energy released during combustion. This paper and equation led to the discovery and use of nuclear power decades later.

    Einstein knew that his special theory was incomplete because it applied only to the special case of objects travelling at uniform speed, and not to objects undergoing acceleration. He was also aware that the special theory was inconsistent with gravity. Soon after the development of special relativity it dawned on Einstein that these concepts are intimately entwined: gravity and acceleration are also equivalent. By 1912 it had occurred to Einstein that one route to incorporating gravity and acceleration into his theory could be to bend the flat space-time of the special theory. With the help of a friend and colleague, Swiss mathematician Marcel Grossman, he turned to a branch of mathematics developed in the latter half of the 19th century known as differential geometry.

    Differential geometry is a way of using equations to represent how points an surface are connected to one another. This is done using a mathematical concept called a tensor: a multidimensional array of numbers which generalizes vectors and matrices to arbitrarily many dimensions. Einstein defined a tensor which describes the gravitational curvature of space-time, which is now known as the Einstein tensor. All that remained now was to link the Einstein tensor to the contents of space-time, which could be described using another tensor known as the energy-momentum tensor. The so-called Einstein Field equation is the formula which links these two tensors and became the lynchpin of the general theory of relativity.

  • The downfall of Russell Brand

    Russell Brand has just been convicted of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault following a four-week trial at Southwark Crown Court in London, marking the definitive collapse of his career and public standing. It has been quite the fall from grace. Difficult as it is to imagine now, Brand was a hugely popular and widely admired public figure when his fame was at its peak in the mid-2000s. I was in my mid-twenties at that time, living in London, and I distinctly remember the buzz that seemed to surround him wherever he went. Many of my friends and acquaintances at that time were in his thrall, for reasons I could never quite fathom. At the risk of being wise after the event: I always thought the man was a prat. That said, I never could have imagined the depths of his depravity.

    It is a sign of the extent to which Brand’s star has waned since then that countless people will have rejoiced at this verdict, which has been coming for some time now. Brand’s downfall was precipitated by a 2023 Dispatches documentary entitled In Plain Sight, but rumors about his behavior had been swirling since long before then. He will be sentenced next week and a custodial term is now inevitable. How long he’ll be incarcerated for is not clear at this stage but it will certainly be measured in years, maybe as many as 20. The case has left many wondering how such an abusive narcissist was ever allowed to rise to the top of his profession – particularly as evidence of his appalling behavior was right in front of us all along.

    Perhaps the most egregious piece of evidence came in 2008 when Brand, who was presenting a Radio 2 show at that time, along with his guest Jonathan Ross, left a series of voicemail messages for the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs boasting of how Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter. As a result Brand was forced to resign and Ross was suspended for three months. Yet many were astonished that Brand – “a predator, live on air”, as former BBC executive Lorraine Heggessey put it – was able to keep his job for as long as he did. In one prior episode of his show he openly joked about following a woman into a toilet and exposing himself to her. In another he offered to send his female assistant, naked, to his celebrity guest: Jimmy Savile.

    Brand’s crimes were well-known on the comedy circuit. His fellow comedians called him out on stage for years before the law caught up with him, and several clips have now emerged of comedians saying they knew all about Brand’s behavior. Despite this he continued to have a successful TV career for many years and even starred in a couple of Hollywood movies (albeit they were terrible). Brand even bragged about his assaults in a book that reached #1 in the Sunday Times best sellers list. What makes all this so difficult to understand is that Brand is not remotely funny, clever, or likeable. The man is a con artist who somehow managed to convince everyone that he is a comedian and an intellectual. But he was never either of these things. He is, and always was, an insufferable blowhard.

    It seems people in the entertainment industry were happy to look the other way when they thought they could use Brand to further their interests. TV and radio executives gave Brand a pass because they knew that – for some reason – he was popular with their audiences. As soon as Brand became toxic they suddenly developed morals and dropped him like a hot potato. Many have remarked on how Brand was not able to convince a single person to act as a character witness (other than his wife). Yet during the height of his fame, his celebrity ‘friends’ were often more than happy to jump on the Brand bandwagon, presumably because they knew it would help them further their careers. He was even feted by ‘left-wing’ journalists such as Owen Jones and George Monbiot.

    Whilst Brand had the nation under his spell he could get away with whatever he wanted, but as soon as the spell was broken the fall was always going to be hard. Brand himself seemed to anticipate this: when allegations against him first emerged, he became a YouTuber so that he could convince everyone that the eventual court case was an establishment stitch-up. He then conveniently discovered Jesus and started carrying a Bible wherever he went. Brand actually seemed to think he was going to be redeemed, saying he could “feel god’s presence” whilst walking into court. Unfortunately for Brand, by that point not even god could save him. He will now go to prison where he’ll likely find out what it’s like to be at the receiving end of the kind of abuse he was apparently dishing out for years.

  • A brief history of Israel

    For centuries, the world’s imperialist powers have intervened in the Middle East for their own political, strategic, and economic interests. During the feudal era, the caliphates encompassing Palestine and other Arab territories were conquered by the Turkish Ottoman empire and remained under its control until the empire collapsed after WWI. The British empire then ruled Palestine after WWI until the creation of Israel in 1948. The way had been paved for an Israeli state by the 1917 ‘Balfour declaration’, named after Britain’s then foreign minister Arthur Balfour, which declared Palestine to be “national home for the Jewish people”. This was a great gift to the Zionist movement but a massive blow to Palestine’s Arabs, who at that time comprised around 90% of the population.

    Balfour made clear the racism and imperialism behind his statement when he wrote in 1922 that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”. Jewish immigration to the region significantly increased following the declaration, causing growing alarm to the Arabs. Zionism itself dates back to the late 19th century and was essentially a reaction to the widespread anti-Jewish racism of that time. The goal of Zionists wasn’t to fight Judaeophobia but to escape from it. However in the early 20th century most of the politically active Jews were not looking towards Zionism but rather to workers’ organisations and struggles.

    Unsurprisingly, support for Zionism increased following the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, leading to a strengthening of the Zionist movement. Following the end of WWII, British forces reached a crisis in their ‘divide and rule’ strategy in Palestine, and in 1947 the UN voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab (referred to, slightly confusingly, as Palestine) and the other Jewish (referred to as Israel). The Zionists settlers were not satisfied with this however and in 1949 unleashed a monstrous campaign known by Palestinians as the ‘naqba’ (Arabic for catastrophe). This resulted in Palestine effectively being wiped off the map, with around 750,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes and becoming refugees.

    It goes without saying that the mass killing of Jews during WWII could in no way be used as justification for the naqba. But rather than becoming a pariah state, in 1949 Israel was able to obtain armistice agreements with its four Arab neighbours: Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Jewish immigrants began pouring into Israel, with 1.6 million arriving during the three decades following WWII. Many of the earliest Zionist immigrants lived in Kibbutzim agricultural communities, which distorted socialist ideas into a form of camouflage for the project of colonizing Palestine. In reality, Israel was an imperialist capitalist state from the outset. One of the key projects of the new nation was building up the Israeli Defence Force armed with hi-tech weaponry and an unpublicised nuclear capacity.

    US imperialism came to have increasing political interest in aiding Israel as part of its strategy in the cold war. The US and other Western nations wanted to counter the influence of the left-wing secular Nasser regime in Egypt, which they perceived as a threat to their interests. The so-called ‘Jewish lobby’ in the US was also a factor in US-Israel relations and still is today. For its part, Israel’s ruling class feared the arming by the USSR of hostile Arab regimes, and wanted US protection. In 1956 Israel initiated the Suez war by invading Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, following a secret pact with Britain and France. This was not welcomed by the US however, which was desperate to prevent disruption to oil supplies and other trade, and forced Israel to pull out of Sinai.

    In 1967, Israel launched military attacks on Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in what became known as the ‘six-day war’. Israeli forces had dramatic and unexpected success, gaining control of the West Bank, east Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Sinai from Jordan, Egypt and Syria. In November 1967 the UN Security Council passed its well-known resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from the areas taken. But with the exception of Sinai these areas remain occupied by Israel to this day. The war created around 400,000 Palestinian refugees, some for the second time. Within months of the end of the six-day war Israel started building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, along with developing a regime of brutal repression against the Palestinians living there.

    A group of Palestinians formed Fatah, a reverse acronym for  ‘Palestinian National Liberation Movement’ in the late 1950s, led by Yasser Arafat. By 1969 Fatah was the dominant party in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), an umbrella for numerous Palestinian organisations. However the PLO did not attempt to build mass mobilisations of the Palestinian working class and poor against Israeli oppression, but instead carried out armed attacks against Israel’s military and infrastructure. In later periods, mass movements such as the Palestinian intifada in 1987-92 or the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings of 2011 demonstrated the potential power of mass mobilizations, which arguably proved to be more effective than the guerrilla campaigns that had been conducted by the PLO.

    Today, Israel is a capitalist, class-based society with the second highest level of inequality in the industrially developed world. Ordinary Israelis are certainly not happy with the state of their country and the number emigrating is high. There have also been a great many workers’ strikes in Israel. Clearly, though, Palestinians cannot simply sit around and wait for Israeli workers to bring down Israeli capitalism, as each conflict initiated by Israel draws more Israelis into supporting the use of military might. In my view, we need to undertake a process of de-Zionisation in Israel and across the Western world. This may be compared to the process of de-Nazification that took place in Germany and elsewhere after WWII. Then, and only then, might we finally see peace in Palestine.

  • How should Man City be punished?

    Since 2018, Manchester City F.C. has been implicated in a major financial scandal, following the publication of leaked internal emails alleged to reveal that the club had committed systematic, deliberate violations of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) and the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability (PSR) rules. The FFP rules are a set of regulations established by UEFA to prevent professional football clubs spending more than they earn in the pursuit of success, and in doing so not getting into financial problems which might threaten their long-term survival. The PSR rules are a set of regulations established the Premier League for the same purpose. In response to the leaked emails, UEFA and the Premier League opened separate investigations into the club’s financial behaviour.

    UEFA announced that it was opening an investigation in 2019. The investigation concluded in February 2020, with City being found guilty of “serious breaches of the UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations”. However, City’s appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport successfully overturned the ban in July that year. Then, in 2023, the Premier League charged Man City with 115 breaches of its financial regulations, spanning a nine-year period from 2009 to 2018. And in September this year, the Premier League announced that it had found Man City guilty of all 80 charges related to financial wrongdoing, and 34 of 35 charges of failure to cooperate with the league investigation. The verdict is currently being appealed by the club.

    The case has garnered significant interest from sports media, players, managers, and fans during its course. Following the verdict, Man City co-chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak released a statement in which he said that “nothing has changed”. But few are buying his claim, which is no more believable than when Theresa May tried to claim the same thing after her party was forced into an embarrassing policy U-turn during her disastrous 2017 general election campaign. Meanwhile, other Premier League clubs are reported to be planning legal action against Man City to seek compensation for potential sporting and sponsorship losses, during the period in which Man City were found to have violated Premier League rules.

    The verdict of the appeal will be published early next year and no punishment will be handed out before then. But it seems highly likely that the appeal will fail, and it therefore makes sense to start discussing punishments now. The possible punishments are: (1) a massive points deduction resulting in enforced relegation from the Premier League; (2) retrospectively revoking Premier League titles won during the infraction period; (3) multi-million-pound or billion-pound monetary penalties; (4) forced sale of the club; (5) expulsion from the football league; (6) multi-year transfer bans; and (7) forced compensation being paid to rival clubs (as mentioned above). In my view, if the appeal fails then punishments (1)-(4) should all be imposed on the club, but not necessarily punishments (5)-(7).

    Given that Man City deliberately broke Premier League rules, it seems to me a no-brainer that they should be kicked out of the Premier League. Similarly, as they won their titles as a direct result of breaking these rules, it seems a no-brainer that they should be stripped of these titles, and that should be forced to pay back any money they made as a result of winning them. This raises the question of what should happen to these titles if they are taken from Man City. One suggestion is that they are awarded retrospectively to the team who finished second in the league. But I doubt fans of the affected clubs would derive much pleasure from ‘winning’ a title retrospectively in this way. Better to say that nobody won the league in those seasons, to create a clear historical record of Man City’s cheating.

    Those who are opposed to meting out such punishments argue that they will impact most on innocent people, namely the players and coaches employed by the club, and the club’s fans. I have little sympathy for the players or coaches in this situation. As the charges have been hanging over Man City since 2018, most of them would have known – or should have known – that this scenario was always likely to occur when they joined the club. I do have a lot of sympathy for the fans however, as none of this is their fault, and most fans will have supported the club since long before 2018. Personally, though, I would rather the team I support didn’t win any trophies at all rather than won them by cheating, as cheating in sport rather seems to defeat the object.

    The punishment that would have the biggest long-term impact would be the forced sale of the club. Man City is currently owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an Emirati royal and the Vice President and Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. As such, it is effectively owned by a nation-state. This creates a number of issues. In recent times, oil-rich nation states have used ownership of high-profile football clubs to project ‘soft power’ and distract from domestic human rights records. This includes Man City, Paris Saint-Germain, and Newcastle United, which are effectively owned by the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia respectively. This has distorted transfer markets and wage structures, making it difficult for traditionally fan-owned or privately-run clubs to compete fairly.

    State ownership introduces diplomatic complications and makes clubs vulnerable to shifting international relations. And treating historic community institutions as geopolitical assets strips the soul away from local football culture. The same goes for treating football clubs as corporate assets. Football clubs should be owned and controlled by their supporters. The most positive thing the Premier League could do in this situation is to force Sheikh Mansour to sell Man City to its fans. Sadly, though, I don’t see that happening. Football is a microcosm of wider capitalist society, whereby services that should be publically owned by the people who use them are instead increasingly put into private hands. We need a socialist revolution in football, just as we need a socialist revolution in society as a whole.

  • Why is HS2 so expensive?

    High Speed 2, or HS2, is a high-speed railway which has been under construction in England since 2020. The new track is being constructed between London Euston and Handsacre just north of Birmingham, where a junction will connect HS2 to the West Coast Main Line. The length of the new line has been reduced substantially since the scheme was first announced in 2012: it was originally to be split into eastern and western branches north Birmingham, with the eastern branch terminating in Leeds and the western branch in Manchester. The project was scaled back mainly due to spiralling costs and a weakening business case, with the estimated cost of the project rising from around £33 billion in 2010 to over £100 billion currently.

    An official assessment by the Department for Transport and HS2 Ltd – the company set up to develop and promote the new line – attributes the soaring costs to several core factors. Around two-thirds of the increased cost can be attributed to management and delivery failures. Construction began in 2020 before detailed, finalized designs were completed, causing out-of-sequence work, poor productivity, and major inefficiencies. HS2 Ltd and its contractors lacked sufficient capability, client relationships, and project controls to manage a build of this magnitude. And commercial contracting strategies failed to properly incentivize performance or fairly allocate risks between the client and builders. The remaining one-third of the cost increase can be attributed to higher inflation across the UK economy.

    These increased costs mean that when completed, HS2 will be the most expensive high-speed railway in the world in terms of cost per unit length. A standard European high-speed rail line costs between £25 million and £32 million per kilometre. By contrast, the remaining London-to-Birmingham stretch of HS2 is projected to cost roughly £200 million per kilometre, making it over 6 times more expensive than the European average. Why is the gap so massive?! Data from the Transit Costs Project and UK infrastructure studies pinpoint three structural reasons why Britain must pay so much for high speed rail compared to its neighbours: excessive engineering, a speed and straightness premium, and planning bureaucracy.

    Because England is densely populated and property rights are fiercely protected by common law, HS2 was forced to mitigate local complaints by going underground. The project includes 32 miles of tunnels, many of which were dug entirely for aesthetic and noise-blocking purposes rather than geographical necessity. HS2 is designed to run at top operating speeds of up to 250mph – faster than France’s TGVs (~200mph). To maintain safety at that speed the track must be perfectly straight, which requires building expensive viaducts and deep cuttings. And in the UK, environmental disputes and construction happen concurrently, creating a continuous loop of costly delays. This contrasts with countries like Spain and France where construction permits are largely secured before contracts are awarded.

    It is always worth remembering that one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when we hear about spiralling costs for HS2, we should ask ourselves who is benefiting. And as usual, the answer is: private firms and their shareholders. According to the website Construction Briefing, over £32 billion of the £44 billion spent so far has gone to 13 giant construction firms, with Balfour Beatty and Vinci receiving over £5 billion each, and Kier and Eiffage each receiving over £2 billion. These amounts will only increase as more money is spent on the project. Clearly, these firms are treating HS2 as a cash-cow they can use to extract billions of pounds from the UK government – money that could have been spent on schools, hospitals, and other public services.

    It doesn’t need to be this way. As already noted, high-speed rail is much cheaper to construct in mainland Europe. All that is required to bring the UK into line with other European countries is a few simple changes in legislation. We could weaken property rights and change planning legislation so that construction permits must be secured before contracts are awarded. We could also drop the requirement for the trains to run at 250mph, as it’s not clear why trains are required to run at such high speed in a relatively small country like the UK. The reason these changes aren’t made is because they would disbenefit members of the capitalist class – in particular, landlords who own property in South-East England, and the large construction firms who are making a fortune from HS2.

    Given how HS2 has become such a lucrative cash-cow for the capitalist class, you might wonder why the extensions to Leeds and Manchester were cancelled. I think the reason is that the costs of the project had spiralled to such an extent that it became politically infeasible for it to continue according to its original scope. In effect, the capitalists killed their golden goose. But as construction had already started the London to Birmingham section, they could argue that it made sense to complete this part of the project (this is an example of the ‘sunk cost fallacy’). You might also wonder how nobody predicted the increased cost. My suspicion is that the cost was systematically underestimated to ensure that the project went ahead.

    That might make me sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. But there is no need to posit a coordinated conspiracy here. To ensure that a desired result is obtained, all that is required is that the incentives are lined up a certain way. I have worked in the transport industry myself (I actually worked on a forerunner of HS2, over 20 years ago) and have seen first hand how this comes about. There is an obvious bias towards underestimating costs / overestimating benefits of projects that are likely to benefit the capitalist class. Any transport planner who does not share this bias will eventually find themselves out of a job. At present, our entire transport system is set to up for the benefit of capitalists. Only through socialist change can we build a transport system which benefits all.

  • The real Lenin

    In the 100 years following Vladimir Lenin’s death, numerous books have been published which seek to distort his political legacy. One such book is Lenin: A Revolutionary Life, written by British historian Christopher Read in 2005. The book is a 300-page scholarly biography of Lenin examining his personal life and political career, as well as the growth of Leninism. It uses post-Soviet and Glasnost-era archival materials alongside traditional sources to offer a humanized portrait of the Soviet leader. Key themes are Lenin’s monastic lifestyle, propaganda methods, his relationship to Marxism, and his reaction to war and imperialism. However although it is more sympathetic than most biographies of Lenin, the book distorts the real lessons of his life in several ways.

    The work is peppered with descriptions of Lenin as ‘brutal’ and ‘a dictator’, ignoring the fact that there was a civil war going on for most of his tenure as leader of the Soviet Union. The author incorrectly depicts Lenin as a hair-splitter who reserved his most vicious criticism for those whose position was closest to his own. Meanwhile Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s long-time revolutionary comrade and collaborator, barely gets a mention. Lenin’s theory of socialism emanating from socialist intellectuals in his 1905 work What is to be done? is adduced as an indication of his ‘elitism’. In my view, this is a misrepresentation of what Lenin actually argued. I think what Lenin really meant was that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class by a dedicated party of professional revolutionaries.

    Lenin was a vocal proponent of ‘democratic centralism’: the organizational and decision-making principle that combines free, open internal debate with strict, uniform action once a decision is made. This approach was vindicated by the success of the 1917 Russian revolution. Nobody else has led a successful socialist revolution either before or since (I consider the subsequent ‘socialist’ revolutions of the 20th century to be Stalinist rather than socialist.) Read does not mention that Lenin vehemently denounced those of his followers who tried to use the principle of democratic centralism to exclude workers from the management of the party. Instead, he cherry-picks quotes from Lenin’s writings to accuse Lenin of adopting a ‘top-down’ approach.

    Read has nothing to say about Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’, which says that a socialist revolution cannot stop at democratic or national reforms and must continue until class distinctions are eliminated on an international scale. He also has little to say about Lenin’s theory of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry’, which says that in an agrarian semi-feudal society like early 20th century Russia, only an alliance between workers and peasants can carry out a successful revolution. Trotsky in turn argued that only the working class could wield power in this alliance as the peasantry was too heterogeneous. Lenin himself came to the same conclusion as Trotsky in his 1917 April Theses.

    Lenin set out a number of democratic principles in his 1917 work The State and Revolution; but Read declares that these principles were never implemented in the Soviet Union, and concludes that the Russian revolution was a ‘coup’. In reality, the Bolsheviks had widespread support among the masses, who generally supported revolution and correctly concluded that only the Bolsheviks could successfully bring one about and take power on behalf of the working class. Read does highlight Lenin’s asceticism, which applied to all the leaders of the Bolsheviks and to the party as a whole, pointing out that salaries of party leaders were limited by Lenin to no more than four times the average wage of a worker. Does this really sound like a leader and party who were only interested in taking power for themselves?

    None of the parties who professed to accept democracy were outlawed when the Bolsheviks came to power. However Read points to Lenin’s 1918 dissolution of the Russian constituent assembly as evidence of a ‘democratic deficit’, arguing that Lenin did this because the Bolsheviks lost the 1917 election and viewed the body as a threat to his newly established Soviet regime. The truth is that the results of the election were invalid because the voter lists did not account for a major split within the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Read correctly points out that at one stage in 1919, the Bolsheviks controlled just one tenth of Russian territory. Yet despite this the working class was eventually able to defeat the counterrevolutionary forces and consolidate the revolution.

    The latter part of the book analyses the situation following the international isolation of socialist Russia. One of the key themes here is that Lenin remained fundamentally detached from the working class. In fact, as Trotsky later remarked, Lenin had developed an ability to tune in to the mood of working class through some chance remark or comment. It is important to note that the regime of Lenin and Trotsky was a million miles from the regime that would later emerge under Stalin. And in fairness to Read, he does not attempt to link Lenin’s actions after the revolution to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, as many historians have done. But Read does not seem to have understood either the process of revolution or the nature of the bureaucratic counter-revolution launched by Stalin.

    Forced collectivization by Stalin was a monstrous mistake which resulted in civil war in the countryside against the richer peasants, or kulaks. But there is nothing to suggest that this policy was a natural continuation of anything Lenin or the Bolsheviks did. Indeed, in order to consolidate his power, Stalin was forced to murder the last remnants of the Bolshevik party (including Trotsky). The purges of the late 1920s and 1930s created a river of blood between Leninism and Stalinism, and Stalin’s subsequent rule represented a gross perversion of genuine socialist ideas.

  • What is causing the UK drought?

    The drought situation in England has continued to worsen over the past two weeks, despite some rainfall across parts of the country. According to the Environment Agency, reservoir levels are exceptionally low, with national storage at 54% of capacity, around 20% below the average for this time of year. On 15 October, the government declared severe drought in parts of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, East Sussex and West Sussex. Public water supply reservoirs and groundwater storage are continuing to decline in many areas. There are growing concerns that farmers may not be able to refill water storage reservoirs over the winter because reservoir levels are so low and river flows remain below normal, particularly across central and southern England.

    The ongoing drought is being caused by a combination of persistent low rainfall, record-breaking high temperatures, accelerated soil and water evaporation, and long-term infrastructure pressures. A prolonged lack of rain through the spring, summer, and autumn of 2026 left rivers, groundwater, and reservoirs severely depleted. Successive summer heat waves have dramatically increased water demand and accelerated moisture loss from soil and water bodies. High air temperatures speed up evaporation rates from rivers, reservoirs, and agricultural land, creating a feedback loop where dry ground cools the air less and pushes temperatures even higher. And historical underinvestment in new reservoir capacity and high rates of pipe leakage have left water supplies vulnerable during dry spells.

    Human-caused climate change has shifted seasonal weather patterns, making hotter, drier summers and extreme heat waves significantly more frequent and intense. That means this year’s drought is unlikely to be a one-off. On the contrary, it is more likely a harbinger of things to come. This was the year that the climate threat became real. Far from being a slow-moving crisis which will effect us at some point in the future, climate change is now giving rise to sudden and disastrous weather events in the present. These events often strike too suddenly for us to be able to react to them. As a recent leader in the New Scientist points out, we would be fools not to prepare our infrastructure now for future severe weather and its fallout.

    The obvious way to prepare for future droughts is to build more reservoirs. Unfortunately building new reservoirs in the UK seems to be extremely difficult, and no new reservoirs have been opened in the UK since 1991. There are several reasons for this, including high costs, planning hurdles, and environmental concerns. But the main reason is the 1989 privatization of the water industry, which shifted focus toward short-term profits and way from long-term infrastructure investments. It is no coincidence that the last new reservoir was completed in the UK just two years after privatization took place. Aside from the shift towards short-term profits, privatization has created a fragmented industry where no single actor has either the resources or motivation to invest in large-scale infrastructure projects.

    Another way to prepare for future droughts would be to fix leaky water pipes. Leaky pipes in the UK are a major issue, with water companies losing nearly 3 billion litres daily across the grid. This is not just a waste of water; it also creates other issues such as structural damage to buildings, health hazards caused by mould, and water contamination caused by pathogens being sucked back into the water supply. Water companies argue that stopping 100% of water loss is physically impossible and presents massive technical, financial, and regulatory challenges. In reality, the root cause of this lack of action is the prioritization of corporate profits, shareholder dividends, and executive bonuses over infrastructure improvements.

    We are facing a situation where we know droughts will only become more frequent and severe over time, but are unable to update our infrastructure to adequately prepare for this. Both of these problems have the same underlying cause: the capitalist system we are all forced to live under. Capitalism is directly causing climate change with its structural demand for continuous economic growth and reliance on fossil fuels. It is also responsible for the privatization of water in the UK, which is the reason we cannot update our ageing infrastructure. Thus not only is capitalism devastating the environment; it is also stopping us from acting to mitigate the effects of this devastation. It is only through socialist change that we will prevent climate catastrophe and build a world which is habitable for all.

  • Privatized water has been a disaster

    In 1989, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government privatized water in England and Wales, making them the first – and to this day, only – countries in the world to have fully privatized water system. The Water Act of 1989 created protected monopolies, giving the new private owners exclusive concessions to provide water and sanitation services. To attract investors the government sweetened the deal by writing off £5 billion of debt (£14 billion in today’s money) that the regional water boards then owed and provided an additional cash infusion totaling £1.5 billion (£4 billion today). Private owners began with a clean financial slate and with substantial freedom to re-price their services. It was claimed that privatization would lead to greater investment, improved services, and lower bills.

    Instead, the exact opposite happened. The National Audit Office has estimated that in the 15 years after privatization, the average household bill for water and sewerage rose by 40% in real terms. This money did not go into investment. On the contrary, infrastructure investment has collapsed since privatization: despite an increase in demand for water, not a single new reservoir has been built in the UK since 1992. It is not difficult to see where the money has gone, as shareholders in water companies have received £85 billion in dividends since privatization. Meanwhile water companies have been loaded with a collective £60 billion of debts, meaning that customers are now paying almost 30p in every pound for debt servicing.

    After the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the government cut interest rates to historically low levels, making borrowing money extremely cheap. After this, the amount of debt owed by water companies exploded, as they realized that their most profitable business model was to borrow to pay for maintenance whilst using customer bills to pay shareholders. Then, in 2022, interest rates rose and water companies suddenly faced huge increases in their interest payments. This led directly to the collapse of Thames Water, Britain’s largest water company, in 2023. Rather than re-nationalizing Thames Water, the government instead drew up plans to move its debts onto its own balance sheet so that the franchise could be sold again on the private market.

    Regulators and water company executives spent the first half of 2024 locked in negotiations to prop up ailing water companies. But as these companies fail to keep up with their debt repayments, they are less able to pay dividends to their shareholders, meaning that they have even less incentive to invest. None of this should be surprising. In our capitalist system, success doesn’t mean developing a water system that provides affordable clean water to people and disposes of wastewater safely; it means extracting as much money as possible for shareholders. People are often surprised at the huge salaries paid to water executives, but from the perspective of the shareholders who decide these salaries, the water company executives have done an excellent job!

    Anger over the state of the privatized water industry in England intensified earlier this year after the screening of Channel 4’s docudrama Dirty Business, which portrays a decade-long investigation into raw sewage being dumped into English waterways. The series intertwined the investigation with tragic real-life accounts, including families impacted by severe E. coli infections and health hazards from polluted rivers and beaches. It highlighted how privatized water companies in England and Wales have accumulated massive debt and paid out billions in dividends, whilst under investing in infrastructure and relying heavily on combined sewer overflows that discharge raw sewage directly into our rivers and seas.

    The solution to all of these problems is obvious: do what every other country in the world does and run water as a public service for the benefit of the people. Unfortunately, our current Labour government has signaled that it has no desire to do this. So what can we do about it? One thing we can do is refuse to keep paying our water bills. Such mass refusal has a powerful history in the UK, and was used to successfully bring down Thatcher’s hated Poll Tax in 1989. The campaign group Take Back Water is encouraging people to sign a pledge to withhold their bills, with mass refusal planned once a critical mass is reached. So far 15,000 people have signed up. I have signed the pledge myself and I encourage others to do so too.

    What makes all this so distasteful is that water is something which is absolutely essential to human survival. Access to water is legally and morally recognized as a basic human right. The very idea that such a basic right can be privatized should strike us as both ridiculous and utterly abhorrent. (What next – privatized air?!) The existence of a privatized water industry demonstrates once again what dystopian system capitalism is. Refusing to pay our water bills might have an impact in the short-term. But the only way we will permanently rid ourselves of such monstrously exploitative arrangements is to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a system focused on people rather than profits – namely, socialism. Bring on the revolution!

  • The lure of right-wing conspiracy theories

    Canadian writer Naomi Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger, focuses on how people constantly confuse her with US writer Naomi Wolf, particularly on social media. Wolf has always been something of a conspiracist. In her first book, The Beauty Myth, Wolf put forward the view that ‘the patriarchy’ was actively attempting to undermine feminism. But it was the COVID-19 pandemic transformed Wolf into a full-blown conspiracy theorist, as she became a prominent promoter of vaccine misinformation. As an anti-capitalist, Klein is understandably perturbed to be mistaken with someone who actively promotes far-right talking points. According to a recent article in Socialism Today, however, Klein’s book does not adequately explain why people fall for such ideas nor how they can be combated.

    In Doppelganger, Klein explores the effect a shock such as COVID-19 and the 9/11  terrorist attacks can have in shaping consciousness, pointing out that “conspiracies have always swirled in times of crises”. These events arouse and amplify genuine fears about the world, and those who buy into conspiratorial ideas at these times shouldn’t simply be dismissed as crazy fascists. Those sowing misinformation and baseless claims for political ends exploit and fuel what are genuine fears. However, crises can also have the effect of shaking people out of their slumber. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 changed the political outlook of millions (including me). In many countries the fallout from the crisis drove a turn towards collective struggle.

    Unfortunately, the ‘bourgeoisification’ of traditional workers’ parties created an opening for right-wing populist forces to take advantage of the growing anger. So when COVID-19 struck, the arguments that Wolf and others were making gained some purchase. Measures such as mandatory masks, lockdowns, and ‘vaccine passports’ could be framed as attacks on individual freedom imposed from above. Wolf and others were also able to tap into understandable fears about Big Tech mining our personal data to make money, arguing that the information collected by vaccine apps could be exploited by those in power. Thus what was in reality a combination of panicked policymaking and pandemic opportunism became reframed as a plot by governments and corporations to control our lives.

    Klein writes that COVID-19 created a disparate alliance of “strange bedfellows”: traditional right-wingers, alternative health subcultures, concerned parents, small business owners, and so on. It is notable however that nowhere did this heterogeneous alliance coalesce into a significant political force. Instead we have witnessed the rise, fall, and in some cases rise again, of right-wing populist political movements. A genuine anti-capitalist political alternative would have cut across these populist sentiments. Klein laments that the pandemic did not act as a catalyst for a movement that would bring about structural change, but has few suggestions on how we might organize to make this happen. She has nothing to say about the role of trade unions in bringing about such change, for example.

    Similarly, Klein is scathing of the fragmentation of progressive political movements, but offers little analysis of why past alliances collapsed. She also writes about her involvement in Bernie Sanders’s second attempt at becoming Democratic presidential candidate in 2019, but has apparently failed to learn the critical lesson; namely, that rather than attempting to work within the confines of the capitalist Democrat party, Sanders should have built on the mass support he had ignited and created an independent party. Of course there were weaknesses in Sanders’ program, as there were in Jeremy Corbyn’s in the UK. But the building of a mass workers’ party is a necessary factor in advancing collective struggle and forming a counterweight to the ideas of the populist right.

    The European Commission’s definition of a conspiracy theory is “the belief that certain events or situations are secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces with negative intent”. However, as Klein points out, this leaves out the most important factor: whether or not the theory in question is true or false. As I explained in a previous blog post, a theory is only a conspiracy theory if it is not backed up by evidence. As soon as it is backed up by sufficient evidence it becomes a fact. There are countless examples of what appear to be conspiracy theories which on closer inspection turn out to be correct. The truth is that capitalist governments and corporations conspire all the time to cover up their actions and the resulting consequences. This is the message we socialists need to get across.

  • Materialism and empirio-criticism

    In 1909, Vladimir Lenin published a book entitled Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which took aim at the at-the-time fashionable philosophy of ‘empirio-criticism’. Founded by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius and closely associated with the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, empirio-criticism sought to rid philosophy of a-priori assumptions and the mind-body dualism that historically separated the inner mental world from the outer physical world. Lenin’s analysis in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was soon overtaken by the new scientific theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, as a result of which the book is usually overlooked, even by hardened Marxists.

    A core thread running through Materialism and Empirio-Criticism is the distinction between materialism and idealism. Broadly speaking, a materialist believes in the objective existence of a world around us, whereas an idealist doesn’t. Lenin argues that anyone agnostic on this divide will inevitably fall into ‘solipsism’: the belief that nothing outside your own mind can be said with certainty to exist. In setting out his thesis Lenin argues against his fellow Bolshevik Aleksandr Bogdanov, who had adopted the philosophy of empirio-criticism under the label of ‘empirio-monism’ (monism is the view holding that all of reality is fundamentally unified as a single substance). Lenin argues that Bogdanov’s philosophy is idealism disguised in Marxist garb.

    Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was recently given some publicity by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli in his book Heligoland, published in 2020. In this book Rovelli looks at past philosophical ideas that might help inform debates on the strange nature of quantum physics and concludes that Lenin’s attack on empirio-criticism was misplaced, accusing Lenin of philosophical dogmatism. However Lenin was far from dogmatic when it came to scientific theory, arguing at length that scientific theory can and should change as new evidence emerges. He was writing at a time when new experimental evidence was challenging accepted theories and was well aware of contemporary scientific developments that were taking place.

    Lenin recognized that previously accepted models of science would prove to be correct only within certain limits. The canonical example of this is Newtonian mechanics, which only gives an accurate picture of he world around us at certain scales; describing the world smaller scales require quantum mechanics, whereas describing the world at larger scales requires general relativity. Neither of these theories had been conceived by the time Lenin wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, although they would be developed not long after. However a new finding that Lenin would have been aware of was the discovery of particles we now call electrons, as well as the discovery that the mass of these particles depends on their velocity.

    Lenin was clear that the fact that these new particles were apparently mass-less does not in any way undermine materialism. Rather, he stressed that new theories questioning the existence of matter simply represented another step towards understanding the nature of objective reality. It is the existence of this objective reality that materialists insist upon, not any particular description of it. In Heligoland, Rovelli argues that the distinction between materialism and idealism is irrelevant. But there are many millions – perhaps billions – who adhere to an idealist worldview. The world’s major religions all teach that reality is fundamentally spiritual rather than physical. Although religions are not strictly idealist in the philosophical sense, they share deep metaphysical overlaps with idealism.

    The debate between the Bolsheviks Lenin and Bogdanov on empirio-criticism has similarities with the debate between the physicists Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohr was content with abstract mathematical descriptions; Einstein felt these were incomplete. There is still significant debate around this interpretation today. Heligoland was in part written to publicise Rovelli’s own interpretation which he calls ‘Relational Quantum Mechanics’, which says that physical properties exist only as a relationship between the observer and the system, rather than as objective facts. It is open to debate whether this constitutes a form of idealism. I will leave discussing this for a future blog post.

  • Is AI destroying mathematics?

    The equations for describing how fluids flow were first derived around 200 years ago. Since then, understanding the Navier-Stokes equations – named after French mathematician Claude-Louis Navier and English mathematician George Gabriel Stokes – has been a long-running quest for mathematicians. Last month, American corporation OpenAI stunned the mathematics world by announcing that its AI agents had answered a longstanding question regarding these equations, namely: do they sometimes result in infinite solutions? The answer, according to these agents, is: yes. Whilst mathematicians had always suspected that such solutions were possible, nobody had never able to demonstrate this – until now.

    The way this discovery has come about is likely to have a dramatic effect on the mathematics world. OpenAI began working on the problem after discovering that a pair of mathematicians had made progress on it. A few days later, their agents had solved it. This is not an isolated case either: over the past few months, AI has made breakthrough after breakthrough in mathematics. It is not clear at this stage how many other longstanding mathematical problems will fall to AI, but it is likely to be many. Not all mathematicians are excited about this though. Some argue that AI does not really understand mathematics in the way humans do. Others contend that AI tends to produce convoluted, hard-to-follow arguments which give little insight into the underlying problem.

    Where does this leave the world of mathematics? These are unprecedented times, although it should be noted that mathematics has gone through upheaval before. One such upheaval occurred when French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes made a link between geometry and algebra in the 17th century. Mathematicians of the time worried that this discovery would turn them into drones who simply manipulated symbols and came up with no new insights. But 300 years later most would argue that making the link between algebra and geometry was a huge step forward. This suggests that future generations might say the same about AI. I doubt many present-day mathematicians will be convinced by this argument though.

    On the face of it, the reticence of mathematicians to embrace AI-generated proofs of longstanding mathematical problems seems quite strange. You’d think they’d be glad that these problems were finally being solved! In any other scientific field that would indeed be the case. I expect most physicists would be quite happy if AI solved a longstanding mystery about the nature of the universe. And if AI discovered a cure for cancer then I’m sure all medical professionals would be overjoyed. So why are mathematicians apparently so averse to AI solving problems in their field? I think this reticence to embrace AI-generated solutions reveals something interesting about the nature of both mathematics and mathematicians.

    In his 1940 essay A Mathematician’s Apology, the English mathematician G. H. Hardy defended the pursuit of mathematics for its own sake. One of the main themes of the book is the beauty that mathematics possesses, which Hardy compares to painting and poetry. For Hardy, the most beautiful mathematics is that which has no practical applications. He saw real mathematics as essentially a creative activity, rather than an explanatory or expository one. Hardy’s essay came in for a lot of criticism from his fellow mathematicians, many of whom pointed to applications of mathematics to justify their existence. But I think Hardy’s essay represents an honest assessment of what actually drives mathematicians to do what they do.

    For mathematicians, the value of mathematics comes not from the results they derive but from the process by which they derive them. The obvious difference between mathematics and creative pursuits like painting is that whereas a painter’s output can be appreciated by the layperson, fully appreciating a mathematician’s output requires detailed technical knowledge that most laypeople do not possess. In fact the mathematics world has become so fractured now that it is probably fair to say that most new mathematics is not understood by most mathematicians. The process of doing mathematics is better compared to that of creating some obscure avant-garde jazz that only a handful of people in the world are able to appreciate. In which case you rather have to wonder what the point is.

  • Fight for socialist change!

    We are constantly told by those at the top that wealth trickles down, enriching everyone who works and contributes to our economy. We are also told that if we just work hard enough, we can “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” and become business owners and wealthy entrepreneurs. This individualist attitude implies that we only have ourselves to blame when we can’t afford to heat our homes or buy groceries. However it does not account for the fact that under capitalism, working people only see a fraction of the wealth that their labour produces. This unfair distribution of wealth is the main reason we socialists believe that capitalism is fundamentally unjust and does not benefit working people in any shape or form.

    Unfair distribution of wealth is not the only consequence of a system that values profit over people. Capitalism is also directly responsible for climate change and the destruction of the world’s habitats. Under capitalism, corporations are incentivised to pursue growth at any cost, which inevitably leads to them plundering the world’s resources. Oil extraction and its burning for energy is one of the worst contributors to the climate crisis, yet the global economy relies on it. Access to this most precious commodity has motivated many imperialist wars in the Middle East. Meanwhile renewable alternatives aren’t profitable so investment is nowhere to be found. Mitigating the damage already done to the environment requires investing money and resources too – but what’s in it for the capitalists?

    Exploitation of workers, particularly in poorer countries, is a key feature of capitalism. For example, Amnesty International reports that in the production of smart phones, companies such as Apple and Samsung have sourced the cobalt used in their phone batteries from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where an estimated 40,000 children work for next to nothing in cobalt mines. The conditions in these mines are widely considered a human rights violation, with workers subject to extremely unsafe conditions and sometimes made to work for 24 hours at a time. This dirt-cheap labour supply from the global South allows the billionaire class to rake in ever-increasing profits at the expense of human lives.

    To cover up their crimes, capitalists attempt to redirect our attention to anyone but themselves. Asylum seekers and migrants have become key scapegoats for the elite, who claim that they are stealing jobs from white British people. In fact asylum seekers have a limited ability to work, whereas other migrants are treated as an expendable resource. A working week of 80 hours or more has been reported to UNISON, the largest trade union in Britain, by some migrant care workers. Others have been made to do 19-hour shifts without a break and forced to be always available for work. They also face the threat of deportation when a care company goes bust because there is no safety net to protect them financially or help to find a new employer.

    Capitalists would have have you believe that the reason people struggle is that they are lazy and workshy. This criticism often gets levelled at young people in particular. The truth is that most young people want to work or study, but are facing a crisis. One million young people in Britain are currently not in education, employment or training (NEET for short) and youth unemployment is at its highest level in over ten years. Young people have been hit hard by years of austerity which has left public services understaffed, cut to the bone, and in many cases on the verge of collapse. Most young people today will have only ever experienced a world blighted by needless cuts and austerity. Is it any wonder that many fear for their futures?

    It is clear that capitalism has many systemic flaws: wealth inequality, environmental destruction, worker exploitation, and lack of opportunity, to name just a few. The first of these – wealth inequality – could be addressed with common or worker ownership of the means of production, which would result in wealth being distributed more fairly. Worker-managed cooperatives would allow employees to democratically decide pay scales, leadership, and policies. Public control over key sectors like healthcare, utilities, and finance, would enable us to prioritize human needs over profit margins, leading to reduced environmental destruction and worker exploitation. Properly funded public services would lead to more opportunities for young people.

    None of these changes will occur under our current system because the rulers of this system are incentivized to make sure they don’t happen, as an exploited and immiserated working class is easier for them to control. If we want to see these changes we have to fight for them. Thankfully there are signs that this is fight is already beginning to take place. A wave of student protests is currently sweeping across Europe, the likes of which has not been seen since 1960s. And on 20th November there will be an international day of walkouts and protests to build momentum for a new socialist youth movement. With every major party is promising more austerity we know that change is not going to come from within our capitalist system. We demand better.

  • Indo-European velars after *u

    In a previous blog post I argued that the highly skewed distribution of velars after *s in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), with plain velars occurring far more frequently here than palatovelars and labiovelars, can be explained by positing that the opposition between the velar series was neutralized in this position. Another position where the distribution of velars is highly skewed is after *u. In Pokorny’s 1959 Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (IEW), there 103 entries with a plain velar after *u, as opposed to 16 with a palatovelar and 6 with a labiovelar. And in Rix et al.’s 2001 Lexikon der Indomanischen Verben (LIV2) and Wodtko et al.’s 2008 Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon (NIL), there are 32 entries with plain velar after *u, as opposed to 5 with a palatovelar and 0 with a labiovelar.

    The obvious explanation that the opposition between the velar series was also neutralized after *u in PIE runs into the problem that we find all three types of velar occurring in this position. However a closer inspection of the data suggests that this might not be the case. One of the entries in IEW where a palatovelar occurs after *u – *peug’- ‘stab’ – only has reflexes in the Centum languages and therefore cannot be securely reconstructed with a palatovelar. Two more entries – *bhreuk’- ‘stroke’ and *ghreug’- ‘rub’ –  only have reflexes in Balto-Slavic and therefore cannot be securely reconstructed for PIE, particularly as the first violates a known root structure constraint whereby voiceless and voiced aspirate stops cannot co-occur in the same root.

    Of the 15 remaining entries, three should be reconstructed with a medial laryngeal – as *bhuHg’- ‘goat’, *gheuHg’h- ‘hide’, and *gʷreuHg’h- ‘grind’ – to account for the long vowel reflexes, so the palatovelar would not have been in contact with *u in these roots. Two more entries should be reconstructed with a plain velar after *u – as *k’euk- ‘mix’ and *reug- ‘roar’ – to account for the Balto-Slavic reflexes. The entry *leug’- ‘break’ shows divergent reflexes in the satem languages, with plain velar reflexes in Indo-Iranian and Albanian and palatovelar reflexes in Baltic (the Armenian reflexes are not probative as all velars were palatalized after *u in Armenian). This root is reconstructed with a plain velar in LIV2, which creates a connection with the root *leug- ‘bend’ and suggests the proposed Baltic reflexes are unrelated.

    Similarly, the entry *leuk’- ‘light’ has divergent reflexes in the satem languages, with plain velar and palatovelar reflexes in both in Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. The acute tone in the Baltic reflexes points to a variant with a medial laryngeal, *leuHk’-, where the palatovelar would not have been in contact with the *u. That leaves us with 6 entries where a palatovelar occurs after *u: *gneug’- ‘knot’, *ieug’- ‘excite’ *meuk’- ‘scratch’, *peuk’- ‘stab’, *puk’- ‘press’, and *(s)leug’- ‘slide’. To this list we may add *seuk’- ‘suck’ from LIV2, although again this has divergent reflexes in the satem languages, with plain velar reflexes in Baltic and palatovelar reflexes in Slavic. Thus it seems that palatovelars do occur after *u, although they are rare in this position.

    Four of the entries in IEW where a labiovelar occurs after *u – *bhleugʷ- ‘overflow’, *bhoukʷ- ‘hum’, *H₂eukʷ- ‘cooking pot’, and *ugʷ- ‘damp’  – were shown not to require the reconstruction of a labiovalar by the Australian linguist Robert Woodhouse in a 2017 article. Another entry, *H₁ugʷh- ‘speak’, is a zero-grade variant of the root *H₁uegʷh- where the labiovelar would not have occurred after *u, and indeed the reflexes of the zero-grade form show the expected delabialization. The final entry, *ugʷsen- ‘bull’, contains no evidence for a labiovelar whatsoever; the labiovelar in this word is reconstructed based entirely on a speculative connection with the root *uegʷ- ‘damp’. Thus it seems safe to conclude that labiovelars do not occur after *u.

    To sum up then, there is evidence for only two types of velar occurring after *u: palatovelars and plain velars. In a series of previous blog posts I have hypothesized that PIE only contained two types of velar consonant: plain velars and labiovelars. This hypothesis is consistent with the evidence if we assume that plain velars palatalized after *u in the satem languages and labiovelars delabialized after *u in the centum languages. This would imply that the delabialization after *u occurred separately in the individual centum languages and cannot be traced back to PIE. This is not problematic however as there is independent evidence of delabialization occurring in this position in all of the individual centum languages, and the assumption that it occurred in PIE itself is therefore superfluous.

  • Can socialism solve the climate crisis?

    I recently finished reading a book entitled Planning for the planet: How socialism could save the environment, by Pete Dickenson. In this book Dickenson puts forward two inter-related claims, namely: (1) capitalism cannot solve the climate crisis; and (2) socialism can. I have argued for the first of these claims in a series of recent blog posts so I won’t rehash those arguments again here. In this blog post I will focus instead on Dickenson’s second claim, that socialism can solve the climate crisis. Of course it does not automatically follow that socialism can solve the climate crisis from the fact that capitalism can’t. Indeed, there are many historical examples that could be used to argue that socialism cannot solve the climate crisis either.

    Perhaps the most obvious case studies that could be put forward here are the Soviet Union and China. Both countries went through a period of rapid industrialization in the mid-20th century, the environmental impacts of which were catastrophic. And today China, a nominally socialist country, produces more CO2 per head of population than many capitalist nations due to its heavy reliance on coal for energy. The obvious rebuttal is that the Soviet Union and China were never really socialist countries. Many socialists would refer to the former as a deformed workers state and the latter as state capitalist. However both countries had planned economies, which in theory should have enabled them to develop industrially without destroying the environment in the process.

    The reason the Soviet Union and China created such immense environmental devastation lies in their desperation to catch up with the industrialized West. It must be remembered that both countries were backwards agrarian societies when socialism took hold and felt they needed to rapidly industrialize in order to compete with more advanced Western nations. This highlights how competition between nations is the main impediment to successfully tackling the climate crisis. That the Soviet Union and China were so desperate to compete with other nations demonstrates that although they had planned economies, they were not truly internationalist and therefore were not truly socialist. Thus I don’t think they can be held up as examples of socialism’s inability so tackle climate change.

    Again, though, it does not automatically follow that socialism can solve the climate crisis. Socialism may be necessary for this but that does not mean it is sufficient. In order to effectively solve the climate crisis we also need a plan. What should such a plan involve? Obviously it must involve a rapid move away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources, as Dickenson argues at length in his book. However Dickenson argues against the widespread adoption of nuclear power, for three reasons. First, it creates a security risk, as nuclear power plants inevitably become a single point of failure that can be targeted by nefarious actors. Second, we can never rule out the possibility of accidents occurring. And third, we have not yet come up with a way to effectively deal with radioactive nuclear waste.

    Those in favour of nuclear power argue that although nuclear accidents have caused several thousand deaths, these pale into insignificance when compared to the millions of deaths that have already been caused by burning fossil fuels, and the millions more that are likely to result from climate change. In my view, however, this is argument is an example of ‘lesser-evilism’. Instead of comparing nuclear power with what is clearly the worst energy generation method we have available to us – burning fossil fuels – we should compare it with generating power from renewable sources. Although it should be noted that moving to renewable energy sources will also inevitably result in some accidental deaths, such as maintenance workers falling off wind turbines and so on.

    Rather than getting into the weeds of a debate on whether we should or should not adopt nuclear power, I think it is better to view nuclear power as one of a range of clean power generation options that also includes renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, and so on. The decision on whether or not to adopt nuclear power should then be made as part of a wider decision on what mix of energy sources to use. The actual mix used in practice would depend on a range of environmental, technological, economic, and social factors. But the point is that this is a decision that should be made democratically by the people rather than imposed from above. It is only under socialism that such democratic decision-making could effectively be carried out.