Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • What am I doing with my life

    I recently reached something of a milestone in my career. In April this year, I passed the point at which I had been in full-time employment for exactly 20 years. I have done a variety of jobs during that time, but all of them have involved the same kind of work: setting up spreadsheets, writing documents, responding to emails, attending meetings, and so on. Typical office work, in other words. There have been some highlights I could mention, but these have been few and far between. My overall feeling when reflecting back is that the entire thing has been a complete waste of time. To be clear, I have done things outside of my professional life in the last 20 years which definitely have been a good use of time. But work-wise? Not so much.

    What makes this all the more galling is that I did everything by the book. I worked hard, got good grades, went to a good university, and got a good degree (actually two good degrees). Entering into the working world in my mid-20s I was motivated by putting my skills to use in making the world a better place – as many young graduates are. Yet here I am 20 years later, realizing that despite all the hard graft I have put in, everything I have done in my professional life has basically been pointless. Or worse than pointless in fact, as being forced to work on meaningless tasks has effectively prevented me from doing things that would have had some positive impact on the world. How did this happen? Where did I go wrong?!

    A sympathetic reader might argue that I am being too hard on myself, and that the work I have done might have had some positive impacts that I am unaware of. The problem with this argument is that there are many, many people in the same boat as me. A 2015 survey found that around a third of British workers feel their jobs do not make a meaningful contribution to the world. And in the 2015 American Working Conditions Survey, around 1 in 5 respondents answered ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ to the questions on whether they had  a feeling ‘of making a positive impact on community and society’ and ‘of doing useful work’. Clearly, millions of people across the Western world are doing jobs they consider to be pointless. These people can’t all be mistaken.

    If anything I would say that surveys such as these significantly underestimate the number of person-hours wasted through performing pointless tasks, for two reasons. First, people in otherwise purposeful jobs are increasingly being forced to spend time on tasks that were not part of their job description and which add no value – filling in forms, attending corporate away days, and so on. And second, in my experience people in non-purposeful (or ‘bullshit’) jobs are often blissfully unaware of just how pointless their jobs are. Many seem to have convinced themselves that they are doing something of value. It appears there is a Stockholm syndrome-type phenomenon going on here, whereby people form an emotional bond to their pointless job as a kind of coping mechanism.

    I totally understand why people would do this. I wish I could do the same myself! It must be a lot easier to get through the working day if you can convince yourself you are actually doing something useful. Unfortunately, it seems that once you’ve seen that your job is pointless, you can’t un-see it. And the spiritual damage that arises from this realization is profound. Karl Marx’s theory of alienation describes how capitalism causes a deep psychological and emotional disconnect, as workers feel estranged from the product of their labour. But in Marx’s day labour did at least have a product. These days, there is often no end product at all. It is as if we are being punished like Sisyphus, condemned to roll a rock up a hill for all eternity for no reason whatsoever.

    What did we do to deserve this punishment?! The answer, of course, is nothing at all. A better question is: how has the situation arisen whereby millions of person-hours are wasted every day? As the American anthropologist David Graeber pointed out in his 2013 article on bullshit jobs (where coined the term), this is precisely the situation that isn’t supposed to arise under capitalism. To resolve this dissonance we can invoke the so-called POSIWID principle: the purpose of a system is what it does. If a system constantly fails to achieve its stated goal, you cannot claim that its purpose is to achieve that goal. Its purpose is proven only by its behaviour. The fact that people are continually forced to perform pointless tasks under capitalism shows that this is a feature of the system, not a bug.

    It is not difficult to understand why capitalism has this feature. In the words of George Orwell, there is nothing the ruling class fears more than a populace with time on its hands. In early-stage capitalism this wasn’t an issue as there was more than enough work to go around. Under late-stage capitalism, however, that is no longer the case. Increasingly, the purpose of employment is not to get things done: on the contrary, it is to prevent people from getting things done, by keeping them busy on pointless tasks. (The Australian economist Steve Keen summed this up nicely when he said that he couldn’t wait to retire as then he might actually get some work done.) This ridiculous state of affairs causes deep psychological damage and demonstrates once again what a dystopian system capitalism is.

  • Fighting for trans rights in the UK

    Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) was a group of lesbians and gay men who supported the National Union of Mineworkers during the year-long strike of 1984–1985. The Thatcher government had sequestered the funds of the National Union of Mineworkers, meaning that it was pointless for supporters of the strike to send donations to the national union. Instead, support groups in Britain were encouraged to partner with the various mining communities around the country. Three months into the strike, LGSM was established in London and twinned with several miners support groups around Swansea in South Wales. Inspired by the London group a second LGSM group was independently established in Scotland.

    The members of LGSM gave their support to the miners from a socialist standpoint and belonged to various political organisations including the Labour Party, Communist Party of Great Britain, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Organiser and International Marxist Group. The campaign forged alliances between the gay community and labour groups, and proved to be an important turning point in the progression of gay rights in the UK. Miners’ labour groups began to support, endorse, and participate in various gay pride events throughout the UK, including leading London’s Lesbian and Gay Pride parade in 1985. And at the 1985 Labour Party conference, a resolution committing the party to the support of gay rights passed, due to block voting support from the National Union of Mineworkers.

    The fight for gay rights in the mid-1980s has much in common with the fight for transgender rights being waged today. The UK was one of the last countries in Europe to introduce legislation allowing transgender people to legally change their gender, with the Gender Recognition Act of 2004. Transgender people are only recognised under UK law as their ‘biological sex’ as assigned at birth, which means that trans women are considered men and trans men are considered women. Transgender people in the UK continue to face significant challenges, including barriers to healthcare, discrimination and prejudice, increased media focus, and widespread opposition to their rights. Gender affirming care is considered difficult to access for adults and is banned for youths.

    This state of affairs is not helped by prominent British celebrities, such as JK Rowling, Graham Linehan, and Ricky Gervais, going out of their way to whip up transphobia. The core value uniting all transphobia is a rejection of trans identity and a refusal to acknowledge that it could possibly be real or valid. Transphobes think they know what is really going on inside the heads of transgender people, and that transgender people are either lying or somehow mistaken about their own subjective experience. This attitude is not just supremely arrogant; it is based on a logical fallacy. It is impossible in principle for anyone to know what another person’s subjective experience is like. In philosophical jargon, another person’s subjective experience is ontologically unknowable.

    Why do these celebrities dislike trans people so much? What have trans people ever done to them?! In a previous blog post I suggested that transphobia stems partly from the fact that from an early age we are conditioned into thinking that all human beings are neatly partitioned into one of two genders, to the extent that this becomes ingrained in our brains. Suggesting that we don’t need to categorize people in this way feels jarring to many people as it involves shattering this core belief. Still, that doesn’t fully explain why celebrities such as Rowling, Linehan, and Gervais are so horribly transphobic. After all, these are relatively intelligent people who are more than capable of updating their beliefs, as jarring as that may feel.

    In another blog post I suggested that Linehan’s transphobia stems from his overly-inflated ego not allowing him to admit that he was wrong and forcing him to dig himself deeper and deeper into a hole. I think the same thing is going on with Rowling and Gervais. It is notable that the careers of all three have followed a similar trajectory: a period of success followed by a longer period of not producing anything of value whatsoever. (Anyone who has had the misfortune to sit through an episode of Gervais’ ill-fated sitcom Derek will know exactly what I am talking about here.) The dignified thing would have been to accept their best days are behind them, take their money and ride off into the sunset. But their puffed-up egos won’t allow this, so instead they resort to spouting transphobic views for attention.

    What can we do to stand up to this anti-trans rhetoric? One thing we definitely shouldn’t do is leave trans people to fight this on their own. Here I think we can learn lessons from the striking miners in the 80s. They understood that it wasn’t enough to simply say that you support gay rights; you have to go out and fight for them. It is incumbent on non-transgender people to fight for trans rights – particularly as transphobes are more likely to listen to a non-transgender person. Transphobia stems partly from fear of the unknown, so the more we can talk to transpohobes and help them see the error of their ways, the better. It is only through active solidarity that we will defeat the wave of anti-trans sentiment that is currently engulfing British political discourse.

  • A brief history of Argentine favouritism

    Two weeks ago Spain beat Argentina in the World Cup final. The 1-0 score line belies just how one-sided this game was. Spain did not so much beat Argentina as ritually humiliate them, with 20 shots to Argentina’s 2, 12 shots on target to Argentina’s 0, 65% possession to Argentina’s 35%, and 762 accurate passes to Argentina’s 358. Even these remarkably one-sided statistics do not tell the full story. Argentina did not attempt a shot on goal until three minutes before the end of extra time, when they were 1-0 down and desperately trying to avoid defeat. They became the first team ever to amass 0 shots on target in a World Cup final. The previous low was also set by Argentina in the 1990 final, when they managed just a single effort on goal in their 1‑0 defeat to West Germany.

    The similarities between 2026 and 1990 are striking. On both occasions, Argentina had won the previous World Cup. On both occasions, Argentina had a mediocre team built around a fading superstar. In 2026 it was Lionel Messi, who at 39 can still influence games but is clearly way past his best. In 1990 it was Diego Maradona, who was only 29 but whose career was already on a downward trajectory due to a combination of injuries and a serious cocaine addiction. And on both occasions, Argentina was the beneficiary of some questionable good fortune, both in that World Cup and the one prior. I have already been through the examples of this good fortune in the 2026 and 2022 World Cups in a previous blog post so I won’t rehash them again here (see that post for more details).

    In 1990, Argentina played the Soviet Union in the second game of the group stage. Both teams were much fancied going into the competition, Argentina as holders and the Soviet Union as finalists of the 1988 European Championship. However both teams found themselves on the brink of an early elimination: the Soviet Union had unexpectedly lost their first game to Romania, and Argentina had even more unexpectedly lost their first game to Cameroon. With the game tightly poised at 0-0, the Soviets had a shot on goal which Maradona clearly saved with his hand. For some reason however it wasn’t clear to the referee, who failed to send Maradona off or even give a foul. Argentina went on to win 2-0 and the Soviets were out.

    In Argentina’s second round game against Brazil (the first game of football I can remember watching), the Brazilians battered Argentina for 80 minutes, hitting the woodwork three times. Then Maradona produced a trademark piece of skill, drew in three Brazilian defenders, and slid the ball through to his teammate Claudio Caniggia who dribbled around the keeper and side footed home. “And Caniggia… SCORES!” went Barry Davies’ memorable commentary. Argentina would go on to win the game 1-0, and even as a 9-year-old boy I could tell that this was an injustice. After the game it was alleged that the Brazilian defender Branco was handed a tranquilizer-laced water bottle by the Argentine training staff. Years later, Maradona all but admitted on television that the water bottle had indeed been spiked.

    Maradona’s handball against the Soviet Union was reminiscent of his infamous ‘hand of god’ goal against England four years earlier, when everyone in the stadium could see that he had used his arm to score – except, apparently, the referee. Four minutes later Maradona would score what has since been dubbed the goal of the century. But even that was not without controversy, as there was a clear foul on an English player just before Maradona took possession of the ball to start his famous dribble, which was again not picked up by the referee. Had VAR existed back then, both goals would have been disallowed and it is likely that England would have gone on to win the game. (On the other hand this is Argentina we are talking about, so perhaps VAR would not have been invoked even if it had existed.)

    So just like their victory in 2022, Argentina’s World Cup victory in 1986 was somewhat controversial. But the controversy surrounding these wins is nothing compared to the controversy surrounding their first World Cup win, on home soil in 1978. Argentina at that time was ruled by a right-wing military junta who were desperate for a victory to boost its popularity and image on the world stage. In their second round match against Peru, Argentina required a victory of at least three clear goals in order to progress to the final. They beat them by six in a shambolic exercise which tarnished the image of the entire tournament. Although nothing has ever been proven, it is clear that pressure was somehow exerted on the Peruvian players to lose the game heavily and allow Argentina to progress.

    Thus all three of Argentina’s World Cup wins – in 1978, 1986, and 2022 – are shrouded with controversy and accusations of favouritism. And in all three cases this favouritism can be attributed to right-wing politics. As already noted, the 1978 victory was deliberately fixed by Argentina’s right-wing military junta in order to enhance its standing, both domestically and internationally. The favouritism shown to Argentina in the 1986 and 2022 World Cups, on the other hand, may be attributed to Argentina possessing the world’s preeminent global football superstar at that time: Maradona in 1986 and Messi in 2022. This meant that the longer Argentina stayed in these tournaments, the longer people would continue to watch. And the longer people continue to watch, the more money FIFA makes.

  • Can solar power meet our energy needs?

    The term solar power refers to the conversion of energy from sunlight into electricity. This can either be done directly using photovoltaic cells or indirectly using concentrated solar power. Photovoltaic cells convert light into electricity using semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect: a physical phenomenon whereby a material generates electric energy upon being exposed to light. This was initially solely used as a source of electricity for small and medium-sized applications, but is now being used for industrial electricity generation. Concentrated solar power, on the other hand, involves systems that collect solar heat for the generation of electric solar power, by using mirrors to concentrate a large area of sunlight toward a receiver.

    According to the 2026 Global Electricity Review, solar power generated 9% of global electricity in 2025. This is encouraging but is still a relatively small proportion. It is well-known that geography affects solar energy potential because some places are sunnier than others. Land availability also has a significant effect on the potential for solar energy deployment. The obvious question then is: what percentage of our electricity could realistically be generated using solar power? Theoretically, the earth receives enough sunlight to supply 100% of global energy needs, but practical generation limits depend heavily on weather, availability of grid storage, and costs. As a result, expert opinion is divided on whether a fully solar-powered grid is possible or not.

    Solar power contributed around 6% of the UK’s annual power generation in 2025, according to Ember, an independent global energy think tank. Whilst the sunniest parts of the UK receive much less solar radiation than the sunniest parts of Europe, solar radiation in the south is comparable with that of central European countries that generate more of their electricity from solar: the equivalent proportions for Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany were 15%, 21%, 30%, and 18%, respectively. Derry Newman, chief executive of the UK’s largest solar company, has pointed out that the UK’s “famously overcast weather does not make it an unsuitable place for solar power, as solar panels work on daylight, not necessarily direct sunlight.”

    The UK’s total energy usage in 2025 was approximately 300 TWh, of which solar contributed around 18 TWh. According to the Solar Power UK, of the total solar capacity in the UK around 50% is accounted for by ground-mount solar farms, 30% by residential rooftop installations, and 20% by commercial rooftop installations. So we may assume that in 2025, ground-mount solar farms generated around 9 TWh, residential solar around 6 TWh, and commercial solar around 3 TWh. Approximately 6% of houses in the UK have solar panels and around 5% of commercial buildings in the UK have solar panels, according to figures from Sunsave and Solar Energy UK respectively. If these proportions were increased to 100% then rooftop solar power could in theory generate around half of the UK’s energy requirements.

    In order for solar to generate all of the UK’s energy requirements the remaining 150 TWh would need to be generated by ground-mount solar farms. This would require scaling up the ground area covered by existing solar farms by a factor of 17. Solar farms currently cover roughly 0.07% of the total land area in the UK, according to a study by Lancaster University. Scaling this up by a factor of 17 would result in 1.2% of the UK’s land area being covered by solar panels. This would not be popular with many and is probably not feasible in practice. However it is worth noting that solar panels have been getting increasingly more efficient over time, and have almost doubled in efficiency since 2010. If this trend continued then we would be able to gradually reduce the land area devoted to solar farms.

    Another way to view this is on the micro- rather than the macro-level. The obvious question to ask here is: what percentage of a building’s electricity can be generated using solar power? According to figures published by Meel Group, a standard residential or commercial solar panel setup typically supplies 30% to 65% of a building’s electricity use. With a solar battery storage system, that coverage can increase to about 80%. All of which raises the question of why we are not rushing to install solar panels on every building in the UK. The main reason is that installation of solar panels has been outsourced to the private sector, which means the cost of installation must be borne entirely by the owner of the building, and this is a cost that many simply can’t afford.

    The same problem arises with other clean energy technologies such as heat pumps. Although installation of these technologies is often subsidized, they are rarely subsidized to the point that they are actually affordable. Thus we find ourselves in the bonkers situation where we have clean energy technology available that will help to mitigate the climate crisis and save people money on their bills, yet people are unable to install this technology as they cannot afford it. The government could easily run a mass heat pump or solar panel installation program if it wanted to. The reason it doesn’t do this is not lack of money but the prevailing neoliberal ideology which dictates that everything must be done by the private sector.

  • How the state co-opted Christianity

    Religion has always played a significant role in politics, and the institutions of religion have been instrumental in oppressing ordinary people for all of human history – perhaps none more so than the Catholic church, and more recently the Evangelical Protestant movement. However the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus are generally quite progressive, even by modern standards. Where the Roman Empire valued strength, Jesus said “blessed are the meek” and taught his followers to turn the other cheek. In a society that was deeply sexist towards women, he washed the feet of prostitutes. The parable of the good Samaritan is a lesson against racism. And a fundamental tenet of Christianity, forgiveness of sin, says that justice should be about rehabilitation rather than punishment.

    There is also a significant amount of what we would now call anti-capitalist messaging in the New Testament. After all, Jesus was the one who chased the merchants out of the temple and who brought us such phrases as “the love of money is the root of all evil” and “it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” As I pointed out in a previous blog post, if Jesus was alive today we would call him a revolutionary socialist. Fast forward 2000 years and a gigantic schism has opened up between the original teachings of Jesus and the actions of many of his supposed followers. How did this schism occur? And how do right-wing Christians resolve the cognitive dissonance between what they claim to believe and the way they behave?

    At the time Christianity arose, the Roman Republic – the classical Roman civilization – had collapsed under the weight of its internal political instability, coming to an end in 27BC with the establishment of the Roman Empire. The religious movement that arose in the name of Jesus rejected everything that the Empire stood for and spread like wildfire throughout Roman occupied lands. By 300AD Christianity had spread to all of the Empire’s occupied states and even to Rome itself. It became clear that the Empire would not survive the rise of this movement, so something had to be done. Since every culture had integrated the ideas into their own belief systems differently there was no unified and cohesive doctrine among them. The rulers of the Empire realized they could use this fact to their advantage.

    In AD325 the Council of Nicaea was formed, ostensibly to resolve theological disputes within Christianity and come to a consensus on doctrine. What arose from this was the formation of the Catholic church, a centralized narrative on Christianity that had been set by the Roman aristocracy. In AD381, Catholicism was adopted as the official state religion of the Roman Empire and in AD391, Emperor Theodosius formally forbade any non-Christian or non-Jewish religions. By instituting a hierarchical clergy, the Catholic church alienated the clergy from their communities and removed any sense of spiritual agency from ordinary people. Rather than having a ‘personal relationship with God’, worshippers were instead required to go through a priest as a middle man.

    Instead of ideas spreading organically through a community they were now handed down from on high by an authority figure claiming to represent God. The forgiveness of sins now required confessing to a priest, giving them leverage and the power to control people. This was incredibly convenient for a state that was looking to crack down on political dissidents, since these dissidents would just tell them everything they had done. Meanwhile wealthy people could just buy forgiveness with indulgences. As most ordinary people were illiterate, only the clergy were able to read the Bible, and thus had to be taken at their word.  This was particularly advantageous in regions outside the imperial core the that needed bringing into line as the Bible could legally only be written in Latin.

    Thus the progressive core of Christianity was subsumed into the broader apparatus of state control through a combination of centralization of power under the clergy, construction and distribution of a twisted narrative by the ruling class, and alienation of ordinary people from a sense of spiritual agency. Even though the Roman Empire collapsed in AD476, the institution of Catholicism survived and is still going strong today. For almost 1000 years it was the uncontested doctrine within Christianity, until the birth of the Protestant movement. This arose in the early 1400s in Prague, when Jan Hus and the Hussite movement attempted to break away from the Catholic Church in what is known as the Bohemian Reformation.

    Much like the original rise of Christianity, the rise of Protestantism saw ordinary people challenging existing power structures. But through the institutionalization of Protestantism that original ideal was lost and replaced by doctrine, in the same way that had occurred with Catholicism 1000 years prior. The next major challenge to Christianity came in the late 1800s when Charles Darwin set out his theory of evolution. Prior this people had believed in the divine right of kings, and that the upper, middle and lower classes were different breeds of humans ordained for their specific societal roles by God. The theory of evolution seemed to suggest that this was not the case, and that the aristocracy was not in fact ordained by God at all.

    The establishment responded by arguing that members of the aristocracy had risen to the top of society in the first place because they were genetically superior, and because these superior people had been breeding among themselves, they had evolved to a higher form of human. Karl Marx was outraged by this and made the case that material conditions, essentially dumb luck, played a far more significant role than genetics. But that didn’t stop people from taking these eugenicist ideas and institutionalizing them. Thus again we see the same pattern emerging. Whenever an idea arises that could challenge the interests of the ruling class, the idea is subsumed and twisted, and made a part of the state machine. This will continue as long as we continue to live in a hierarchical society driven by class interests.

  • Do irrational numbers exist?

    Cantor’s diagonal argument is a purported proof that there are infinite sets which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers: 1,2,3, and so on. It is named after the mathematician Georg Cantor who published it in 1891. The argument runs as follows. Let S be the set of all infinite sequences of binary digits (i.e. each digit is 0 or 1) and let (s1,s2,s3,…) be a sequence of elements of S. Next, let s be the sequence whose nth digit is complementary to the nth element of the sequence sn. By construction, s is a member of S that differs from each element in the sequence (s1,s2,s3,…) since their nth digits differ. As the sequence (s1,s2,s3,…) was arbitrary, it follows that the set S cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers.

    In a recent YouTube video, the Scottish Marxist and computer scientist Paul Cockshott claims to have refuted Cantor’s proof. His argument runs as follows. Let sn be the sequence with digits equal to the digits in the binary representation of the natural number n-1 but placed in reverse order, so that s1 = (0,0,0,…), s2 = (1,0,0,…), s3 = (0,1,0,…), s4 = (1,1,0,…), s5 = (0,0,1,…), s6 = (1,0,1,…), and so on. Next, let sn be the sequence whose ith digit is complementary to the ith digit of the sequence sn for i ≤ n, and equal to 0 for i > n. Cockshott shows that for each n, the sequence sn belongs to the sequence (s1,s2,s3,…). This is clearly true for the first few values of n as s1 = (1,0,0,…) = s2, s2 = (0,1,0,…) = s3, and s3 = (0,0,1,…) = s5. Cockshott demonstrates by induction that this holds for arbitrary n.

    So does this mean that Cockshott has refuted Cantor’s celebrated proof from over a century ago? Well, no. What Cockshott has actually demonstrated is that some of the rational numbers in the interval [0,1] can be placed into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. To see this, note s1 may be associated with the rational number 0, s2 with the binary rational number 0.1, s3 with the binary rational number 0.01, and so on. It is not difficult to see that every element of in the sequence (s1,s2,s3,…) can be associated with a rational number – that is, a number with a terminating binary expansion – in the interval [0,1]. But mathematicians have known since the time of Cantor that the rational numbers can be placed into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers.

    However, Cockshott’s alleged proof raises an interesting point about the real numbers. These numbers may be divided into two groups. The first group contains the rational numbers: those which can be represented as a/b where a and b are natural numbers; or equivalently, those with a terminating or repeating binary (or decimal) expansion. The second group contains the irrational numbers: those which can be represented as a/b where a and b are natural numbers; or equivalently, those with a non-terminating, non-repeating binary (or decimal) expansion. As already noted, the rational numbers can be placed into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, whereas the irrational numbers – and therefore, the real numbers – cannot.

    Another thing that distinguishes the rationals from the irrationals is that the former can be constructed using a finite number of steps, whereas the latter cannot. Most mathematicians do not have any problem with things that cannot be constructed using a finite number of steps and are therefore perfectly happy to accept the existence of irrational numbers. However, there is a philosophy of mathematics known as finitism which only accepts the existence of finite mathematical objects – or equivalently, mathematical objects that can be constructed from other mathematical objects using a finite number of steps. According to this philosophy, infinite sets do not exist, and neither do irrational numbers.

    I’m sure most mainstream mathematicians would scoff at the idea that irrational numbers do not exist. After all, many of the most ubiquitous constants in mathematics – √2, e, π, and so on – are irrational. Does it really make sense to say that these numbers are just figments of our collective imagination?! I would argue that it does, for the simple reason that irrational number such as √2, e, and π never occur in the natural world. How could they when they require an infinite number of steps to construct? What we actually find in the natural world are numbers very close to √2, e, and π, but never exactly equal to them. For example, the diagonal of a 1×1 square is never equal to √2 exactly, although it may come very close to it.

    I am not the only one who is suspicious of irrational numbers. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras – he of the eponymous theorem – taught his followers that everything in the universe could be written as a natural number or a ratio of natural numbers. When a his contemporary Hippasus used geometry to prove that √2 could never be written as a fraction, Pythagoras’s followers took Hippasus out to sea and drowned him (according to legend). Whilst I wouldn’t advocate following this approach – the philosophy of mathematics isn’t that important – I do think Pythagoras was on to something when he said that everything in the universe could be written as a rational number. We could even go so far as to say that Pythagoras was the first finitist mathematician.

  • It’s not coming home

    Just under two weeks ago the England men’s football team was eliminated by Argentina in the semi-final of the World Cup. England’s last and only trophy in a major international tournament came 60 years ago when the won the 1966 World Cup on home soil. The next time England had home advantage in a major tournament was 30 years later when they hosted the 1996 European Championship. This marked the inception of ‘Three Lions’, a song written by the English comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner and the rock band the Lightning Seeds. The lyrics to this song famously reference ’30 years of hurt’, as at that time it had been 30 years since England had won a major international trophy. The implication was that 30 years was far too long a wait for a major football nation like England.

    Fast forward 30 years and England fans are still waiting for their team to win a second major trophy. (I am talking specifically about the men’s team here; the England women’s team has won the European Championship twice in that time, in 2022 and again in 2025). England’s elimination from the 2026 World Cup means their trophy drought will go on for over 60 years and has left some wondering whether England will ever win another major international competition. Their 1966 victory is increasingly starting to look like an aberration – or at least, a victory from a different era, like Uruguay winning the World Cup in 1930 and 1950. This sense was reinforced with the 2023 death of Bobby Charlton, England’s star player from the 1966 tournament, leaving Geoff Hurst as the only survivor from that team.

    The song Three Lions is best known for the refrain ‘football’s coming home’. This was originally a reference to the fact that the 1996 tournament would be played in England, supposedly the home of football. Since then it has been sung by England fans at every major tournament whenever England start to do well and look like they might be in with a shout of overall victory. I have a couple of issues with this. The first is that the lyrics are inaccurate as football was not really invented in England. As I noted in a previous blog post, forms of football have been played throughout the world for thousands of years. It’s true that football was codified in England in the mid-1800s, but that’s only because Britain was the preeminent global power at that time.           

    The other issue I have with people singing ‘football’s coming home’ is that it subconsciously reinforces an idea I think many England fans have that one day, England will inevitably win a major trophy. But of course there is no guarantee that this will happen. Moreover, I think this idea seeps into the psyche of the players and adds an extra layer of pressure on them. This additional pressure becomes apparent as soon England comes up against another major football nation. It has become a cliché to point out that England’s players inevitably wilt as soon as they come up against a major power such as Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, or Spain, in a knockout game. There have been a couple of exceptions to this rule but in general it has held pretty well now for 60 years.

    Another way this additional pressure becomes apparent is through England’s propensity to throw away a lead in crucial games. Since 1966, England has been eliminated in knockout games of major tournaments on 16 occasions, despite taking the lead in 9 of these games. This happened in the World Cups of 1970, 1998, 2002, 2018, and 2026, and in the European Championships of 1996, 2004, 2016, and 2020. (England were also eliminated in knockout games in the World Cups of 1986, 1990, 2006, 2010, and 2022, and the European Championships of 1968 and 2012, but they didn’t take the lead in these games.) Of course this is a biased sample as we are looking specifically at games that England lost. Even so, the fact that England lost over half of these games from a winning position seems remarkable.

    In the wake of England’s latest knockout exit to Argentina, in which they again threw away a lead, the England manager Thomas Tuchel has come in for a lot of criticism. And to be fair, I think this criticism is deserved. The substitutions he made during the game were bizarre to say the least and made it very difficult for England to take control the game and see out victory. Tuchel’s response been to argue that controlling games is not in England’s ‘DNA’. This has led to even more criticism and suggestions that Tuchel does not fully believe in the team he is managing. But the fact that the same patterns have been recurring now for 60 years, as noted above, suggests there is more than a kernel of truth to Tuchel’s claim.

    What makes all this so frustrating is that England consistently produces talented players, yet they always seem to fall short when it matters. The fact that this keeps happening, even with completely different groups of players and coaching staff, points to something going on at a deeper level. However rather than blaming England’s ‘DNA’ (whatever that means), I think we need to look at England’s psychology. As already noted, I think the idea that England is somehow entitled to win a major tournament at some point puts extra pressure on the players which causes them to bottle it at the crucial moment. England will never win another tournament until it removes this psychological block. In this sense, ‘football’s coming home’ has become a self-defeating prophecy. So perhaps it is time we stopped singing it.

  • How to start a global revolution

    For Karl Marx, economics was not a subject to be studied for its own sake. He was interested in how it materially affected the lives of people around the world. Marx never published any theory of imperialism, although he did make reference to colonialism. Today, Marxists define imperialism as the state of capitalism that occurs when colonialism has taken over the world. This definition comes from Lenin’s work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. The term imperialism is also used by Marxists to describe a powerful nation acting at the expense of a lesser powerful one. What these definitions have in common is that they involve some form of exploitation. Although he published no theory of imperialism, Marx was well aware of it as he lived for most of his life in London, the heart of the British Empire.

    Historians tend to divide the imperialist era into two periods. The first is the period of mercantile capitalism, which began in the 16th century and involved large companies governing foreign countries. The second is the period of colonialism, which involved countries taking over governing power from these companies. Marx and Engels wrote a great deal about Britain in relation to its most profitable colony, India. The British East India Company already had a long history before Marx began to write about it, having been founded in the year 1600. More generally, Marx saw the globalization of capitalism as inevitable. He believed that profits would tend to fall and that capitalists would seek to arrest this decline by opening up new markets overseas.

    Marx was proved correct towards the end of the 19th century as the US, Britain, and other European countries flooded the world market with cheap goods. However capitalism was not allowed to develop in other countries as they were deliberately held back in order to prevent them from competing with the western powers. Marx believed that revolution would only take place globally once the capitalist system had been exported to every country around the world. In his view the revolutionary process will have two stages. First, there will be a ‘bourgeois revolution’ against imperialism, which would allow capitalism to develop on countries where it hasn’t been allowed to develop before. Then, and only then, will there be a global revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

    The first part of Marx’s prediction was vindicated in the middle of 20th century as revolts in Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America removed direct foreign rule. To put this into context: in 1940, the British Empire spanned roughly a fifth of the world’s land area and held a quarter of its population, encompassing over 500 million people across all continents of the world. Today, the British Empire no longer exists aside from 14 overseas territories such as Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands, which hold well under 1 million people between them. It would be fair to say that the British Empire collapsed, although the decline is rarely described that way in Britain. This collapse was spurred to a large extent by the rise of nationalist movements in the colonies.

    We are now at the stage where capitalism is the default mode of production in all but a handful of countries around the world. If Marx is to be believed – and his predictions have turned out to be correct so far – the next stage is a global proletarian revolution. However a synchronized global revolution seems highly unlikely at this point due to deeply fragmented national interests, powerful state policing, and ideological divides between nations. Whilst global stressors like economic inequality and resource scarcity cause widespread friction, we currently lack a unified international coalition or shared vision that would be required to overthrow global systems all at once. So how might we go about establishing such a coalition?

    There is no single switch to flip here. In general, though, global movements grow when people connect local struggles, use creative communication, and withdraw cooperation from unjust systems. The first step is to identify a universal pain point. Luckily capitalism provides us with a lot of these! An obvious contender is climate change, but this may be too abstract for most people (although perhaps not now, with global temperatures spiking). A better contender, I think, is economic inequality, as this directly and obviously affects peoples’ material conditions. The next step is to spread a clear message, using digital media, art, and humour to make the message simple, viral, and hard to ignore. We also need to build a shared understanding of why the current system fails and how change is possible.

    The revolution must be built from the ground up, starting with grassroots groups and trade unions. However we must also connect globally, using cross-border digital platforms to share tactics, resources, and solidarity with parallel movements in other countries. We can also use strategic strikes, economic boycotts, and public demonstrations to disrupt the pillars of support that keep unjust systems in power. Of course a global revolution is not going to happen tomorrow, even if we do all these things; it might not even happen in my lifetime. One thing is sure though: it won’t happen if we don’t work to make it happen. It may seem a futile effort at times. But if we continue to apply pressure to the rotten capitalist system then at some point, inevitably, the dam will burst.

  • Was the World Cup rigged?

    The 2026 World Cup finished just over a week ago. As I have noted before on this blog, it was a World Cup that was mired in controversy from long before a ball was even kicked, and this controversy continued throughout the tournament. One particular cloud that hung over the latter stages of tournament was created by a growing sense that the World Cup was rigged in favour of Argentina, or more accurately in favour of its star player, Lionel Messi. The main evidence put forward in defence of this claim relates to some questionable refereeing decisions. Of course questionable refereeing decisions happen all the time in football; it is arguably just part of the game. But what is being alleged here is a systematic bias in favour of Argentina.

    Perhaps the most egregious example of this apparent bias occurred in Argentina’s round of 16 game against Egypt, when a Video Assistant Referee (VAR) review overturned an Egyptian goal for a foul on an Argentina player in the build-up. The foul was far from obvious, if it was even a foul at all, so the goal should not have been overturned by VAR, which is only meant to be invoked for clear and obvious errors by the referee. There was also controversy surrounding the length of time between the supposed foul and the goal being scored. In Argentina’s quarterfinal against Switzerland, VAR reversed a call against Argentina, dismissing a Swiss player for simulation (diving). Again, VAR should not have been invoked in this situation.

    In the semi-final against England, the Argentina players spent the first twenty minutes or so basically beating up the English players, with little intervention from the referee. The Argentina players also faced no punishment from FIFA for holding up a political banner after the game. Then in the final against Spain, the Spaniards had a perfectly good goal disallowed for a foul that nobody apart from the referee could see. The final also saw a particularly unedifying incident when Messi attempted to get Spain’s Marc Cucurella sent off for covering his mouth whilst talking. Although technically this is a sending off offence, it was obvious to everyone (including Messi) that Cucurella was simply indicating where his teammate had been injured.

    This latter incident added to a sense that Messi had been attempting to influence – and in many cases, succeeding in influencing – referees throughout the course of the World Cup. And not just in this World Cup. Footage has emerged of an incident during Argentina’s quarterfinal against the Netherlands in the 2022 World Cup when an Argentina player deliberately handled the ball and Messi apparently instructed the referee not to give a foul. The knowing look on the Netherlands’ captain Virgil van Dijk’s face said it all. Argentina was awarded no less than 5 penalties during regular and extra time in the 2022 World Cup, setting a record for a single team in one tournament. Needless to say, it was Messi who took all of these penalties.

    Footage has also emerged of an incident during Argentina’s quarterfinal against Germany at the 2010 World Cup when the young German player Thomas Müller, who was having the tournament of his life up to that point, was booked for a handball when the ball had clearly hit his chest. It was again Messi who apparently influenced the referee to give the foul. Argentina were already 3-0 down at that point and would go on to lose 4-0, thanks largely to the disastrous management of former legend Diego Maradona. But Müller’s yellow card meant he missed Germany’s the semi-final against Spain, which the Germans narrowly lost 1-0. Who knows what might have happened in that game had Müller been eligible to play.

    I was initially sceptical of the claim that the World Cup was rigged in favour of Argentina. Having reviewed the evidence, however, I think it is undeniable. My initial scepticism that the World Cup was rigged was based partly on me not wanting it to be true. I have loved the World Cup ever since I was a 9-year-old boy and the idea that it might be rigged is anathema to me. But we cannot deny the evidence in front of our eyes. Moreover, FIFA had a clear motive to rig the World Cup in this way. Messi is the preeminent global superstar in football and the longer he and Argentina stayed in the tournament, the more likely it was that people would continue to watch. And the longer people continue to watch, the more money FIFA makes.

    Those who are still sceptical of the claim that the World Cup was rigged might argue that Argentina did not ultimately win the World Cup, which counts against the theory. There are a few things to say in response to this. First, Argentina made it to the final, which was enough to ensure that they and Messi stayed in the tournament until the end. Second, Argentina were so hopelessly outclassed by Spain in the final it would have been impossible to rig the game in Argentina’s favour without making it completely obvious (although the referee did make an attempt with the disallowed goal I mentioned above). And third, the appalling reaction of the Argentina players at the final whistle suggested that on some level they believed victory was in the bag.

    What the Argentina players perhaps didn’t realize was that FIFA was walking something of a tightrope. On the one hand they clearly favoured an Argentina victory; but on the other, they couldn’t make their bias too obvious without completely discrediting the whole competition. Given the way Argentina played (or didn’t play) in the final, allowing them to win would have been a travesty that could have irreparably tarnished the image of the World Cup and football more generally. Thankfully FIFA had just enough sense to not allow that to happen. Even so, the obvious bias ran throughout this tournament, and particularly in the latter stages, will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of many football fans around the world.

  • Marxist economic theory

    Das Kapital was Marx’s major work on economic theory. However his work on economic theory began before he started writing Das Kapital, in an 1857 work known as the Grundrisse, German for ‘foundations’. Marx wrote other works on economic theory around this time too, such as A Critique of Political Economy written in 1859 and Theories of Surplus Value written in 1861-1863. His economic theories can be interpreted in different ways as his views altered slightly through time. Das Kapital itself consists of three volumes. In volume 1, Marx looks at the form the capitalist economy takes and explains his economic theories in great detail. Volume 2 deals mainly with the way money is transformed into capital, and volume 3 deals with capitalist production and the role of competition in the economy.

    I myself have only read volume 1 of Das Kapital (so far). As I have said before on this blog, it is not an easy read. Part of the reason for this is that it is not solely a book on economics but is an amalgam of economics, politics, philosophy, and history. It employs a philosophical outlook that has come to be known as ‘dialectical materialism’, although Marx never used that phrase himself. In a previous blog post I explained that Marx was greatly influence by his fellow German philosopher Georg Hegel and his use of the dialectic: the belief that a thesis is always followed by an antithesis after which both combine into a synthesis. Marx himself used the phrase ‘materialist conception of history’ to describe his outlook and Engels later shortened this to ‘historical materialism’.

    Historical materialism is an important part of Marxist economic theory, for it implies that a capitalist economy can only develop by swinging between boom and bust and will eventually collapse as a result of its internal contradictions. Marx came to this view by studying how the capitalist system developed historically. He observed that there had been four main stages in this development. The first stage he referred to as ‘primitive communism’ and refers to a classless society of hunter-gatherers. The second stage is a slave society in which some people gain power over others. The third stage is feudalism, where land is divided up between nobles and a strict class hierarchy is enforced. And the fourth stage is capitalism, where society is divided into two main classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

    Marx dated the beginning of capitalism as the end of the 18th century, when the industrial revolution led to the factory system of production. Under feudalism, workers had been tied to plots of land without rights. Under capitalism, workers were allowed mobility so that they could move to cities to work in the factories. In feudal or slave societies, a person would usually exchange a commodity for another commodity in the market, and money, if it was used at all, was just an intermediary in the process. Marx characterized this as C-M-C, where C stands for commodity and M for money. In capitalist societies, money is invested by a capitalist to produce commodities which are then exchanged for more money. Marx characterized this as M-C-M’ and referred to the difference M’-M as ‘surplus value’.

    The term surplus value had been used by classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo but the concept had not been examined in detail by them. Marx, on the other hand, wanted to understand where surplus value came from. It was obvious to all that under the feudal system, surplus value was created by the labour of the serf and appropriated by the landlord. Marx realized that exactly the same thing happened under capitalism, with the worker taking the place of the serf and the capitalist taking the place of the landlord; the only difference is that under capitalism, this arrangement is hidden. The idea that surplus value is created by human labour is referred to as the ‘labour theory of value’. Marx developed his own derivation of the labour theory of value which I will now briefly summarize.

    According to Marx, commodities have two different values: a ‘use value’, the value the commodity has by dint of meeting the needs of a consumer; and an ‘exchange value’, the value the commodity has relative to other commodities traded in the market. Use values are not dependent on markets, whereas exchange values are. Because exchange values of commodities can be compared, they must have some essence in common. The only thing all commodities have in common, Marx reasoned, is that they are products of human labour. Hence, human labour must be the source of exchange value. Under capitalism, surplus value is realized through exchange, so human labour must also be the source of surplus value. Marx considered this a proof that the labour theory of value must hold under capitalism.

    Nonetheless, Marx puzzled over the way in which the capitalist was able to extract this surplus value. He eventually realized that the answer lay in the distinction between labour power (the capacity to do work) and labour (the actual work done). When a capitalist hires a worker, their labour power is turned into labour. There is a difference between the exchange value the worker receives for their labour power and the exchange value of what they produce. This is the surplus value which is appropriated by the capitalist. Marx saw that the working day is divided into necessary labour – the time a worker spends actually earning amount they are paid in wages – and surplus labour – the time spent producing surplus value for the capitalist. It is through surplus labour that workers are exploited under capitalism.

  • What caused the Spanish Civil War?

    The Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936 to 1939 between the left-wing Republicans and the right-wing Nationalists. The Republicans, loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, included socialists, anarchists, communists, and separatists, supported by the Soviet Union. The opposing Nationalists were an alliance of fascists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. General Francisco Franco gradually emerged as the primary leader of the Nationalist side, becoming the dictator of the Spanish State by 1937. The war became notable for the passion and political division it inspired worldwide, and for the many atrocities that occurred.

    In 1868, popular uprisings led to the overthrow of Queen Isabella II and the First Spanish Republic was proclaimed. The First Republic was marred by political instability and was overthrown in 1874, after which the monarchy was restored under Alfonso XIII, Isabella’s son. However resentment and resistance to the monarchy and government continued into the 20th century. Following WWI, wide swathes of Spanish society united in hopes of removing the corrupt central government in Madrid. King Alfonso, relenting to popular pressure, called municipal elections in 1931. This backfired somewhat as left-wing parties won in almost all the provincial capitals and Alfonso was forced to flee the country. The Second Spanish Republic was formed and remained in place until the Spanish Civil War commenced.

    The Republic initially had broad support from all segments of society. However the first plans of a counter-revolution against the Republic were discussed on the day it was proclaimed. A brutal crackdown by the Spanish Army against striking workers in Seville led many to believe the Republic was just as oppressive as the monarchy. On the other hand, the Republican government instituted an eight-hour day and redistributed farmland to workers. The government also enforced secularisation on the staunchly Catholic country, which included the abolition of Catholic schools and charities, a move which was met with opposition. The first military coup against the Republic took place in 1932 and ended in failure. However the extreme right did not abandon plans for overthrowing the Republic.

    In 1933, right-wing parties won the general election. Among the members of the victorious coalition was a new party, the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups (CEDA). The CEDA proclaimed their goals to dissolve workers’ movements and parliamentary democracy, purge Marxists, freemasons, separatists, and Jews, and to establish an authoritarian corporate state. Some socialists declared they would launch a revolution if the CEDA entered government, and the following year made good on their word. But the resulting uprisings were crushed in a matter of weeks. Reversals of land reform resulted in expulsions, firings, and arbitrary changes to working conditions in the countryside. This emboldened landowners who often resorted to violence against farm workers and socialists.

    The left-wing Popular Front narrowly won the 1936 general election. At this point the right began enacting plans to overthrow the Republic. Shortly after the Popular Front’s victory, groups of officers, both active and retired, got together to discuss a coup. Prime Minister Santiago Casares Quiroga ignored warnings of a military conspiracy involving several generals who had decided that the government had to be replaced to prevent the dissolution of Spain. Their plan for the new regime was a ‘republican dictatorship’, modelled after Salazar’s Portugal and semi-pluralist authoritarian rather than fascist totalitarian. Franco was a key player because of his prestige as a former director of the military academy.

    In July that year Socialist Party member José Castillo was killed by Nationalists in Madrid. The following day Republicans went to the house of  prominent Nationalist José Calvo Sotelo and executed him. The lack of action against the attackers led to public disapproval of the government and was used as justification for a coup. The rising was intended to be a swift coup d’état, but the government retained control of most of the country. Prime minister Quiroga was replaced by José Giral who ordered the distribution of weapons among the civilian population, facilitating the defeat of the insurrection in the main industrial centres. However, the coup was not crushed completely, and Nationalists gained control of an area of Spain containing almost half the population. The civil war had begun.

    Arming the workers’ movements and formation of militias, especially in the anarchist strongholds of Aragon and Catalonia, led to a vast social revolution in which the workers and peasants implemented socialist organizational principles such as collective farming and collective democratic management of the industry, and seized political power at local levels. The revolution was pluralist in its nature, and the political factions participating in it were competitive with and even hostile to each other. Collectivization of resources was pursued mainly by the anarcho-syndicalists (that is, anarchist trade unionists) of the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) and the revolutionary Marxist socialists of the General Union of Workers (UGT).

    The war was cast by Republicans as a struggle between tyranny and freedom, and by Nationalists a struggle between as communist and anarchist red hordes and Christian civilisation. The coup had divided regular forces fairly evenly, with around 52% in the Republican zone, which covered most of the eastern part of Spain plus the northern coast and a central area around Madrid, and 48% in the Nationalist zone, which covered the rest of the country. During the first few months, both armies were joined in high numbers by volunteers and kept growing in size. As the war dragged on, however, the principal if not exclusive source of new men on both sides was forced conscription. Slowly but surely the Nationalists gained control of the war, and by 1939 they had gained control of all of Spain.

  • The nuclear option

    The atomic nucleus is the small, dense region consisting of subatomic particles known as protons and neutrons at the centre of an atom. A nuclear reaction is a process in which two nuclei, or a nucleus and an external subatomic particle, collide to produce one or more new nuclei, releasing a massive amount of energy in the process. Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity, and is usually considered a safe and sustainable energy source that reduces carbon emissions. However the dangers of nuclear power were raised again recently when Russian forces occupied of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Although no radiation leaks have been reported, the occupation has highlighted the danger of such a plant falling into the wrong hands.

    The world’s worst nuclear accident also occurred in Ukraine, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. The resulting explosion created a cloud of gas containing 20 times the amount of radiation realised by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had the wind been blowing in the opposite direction on the day, towards the densely populated city of Kyiv rather than sparsely inhabited countryside, the human cost would have been catastrophic. The Chernobyl reactor was of a type which, rather worryingly, are still in operation across former states of the Soviet Union. Western observers attempted to pin the blame on features specific to Soviet communism, deliberately ignoring the fact that a similar explosion occurred 7 years earlier at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the US.

    In 2011, within weeks of the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe, a disaster took place at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan when an earthquake struck just off the coast. The earthquake cut off electrical power to the plant’s cooling system, but the diesel-powered back-up system kicked in as planned, so things seemed under control at first. However the earthquake also triggered a tsunami which easily overcame the coastal defences around the plant, putting the diesel generators out of action. This caused the plant’s reactors to massively overheat, ultimately resulting in an explosion which released a cloud of radiation into the atmosphere, just as with the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters.

    The nuclear lobby had claimed that the release of significant radiation was extremely unlikely at Fukushima due to the reactors’ failsafe design. (This is reminiscent of the claim that the Titanic was unsinkable.) When that was proved not to be the case, the nuclear lobby changed its position, claiming that even if a large amount of radioactive waste is released the danger to humans is acceptable. It is hard to counter this claim definitively as it is very difficult to estimate the human cost of nuclear disasters. Estimates of the number of deaths resulting from the Chernobyl explosion vary wildly: a UN report in 2008 estimated the number at 4,000, whereas other sources put the death toll far higher. But even if we take the most conservative estimate of 4,000 deaths, this can hardly be considered negligible.

    Aside from people dying, there is also a long-term health risk caused by low-level radiation leakage. Again it is difficult to estimate the impact of this with any certainty. However a study at the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona estimated that radiation leakage from the Chernobyl plant will result in around 25,000 incidences of cancer by 2065. Another problem associated with nuclear power is that of storing toxic nuclear waste. To give an idea of the scale of this problem, 88,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste had to be stored in the US in 2023. This material will remain radioactive for around 100,000 years. Nuclear waste is either buried underground or dumped at the bottom of the ocean. Neither of these methods is guaranteed to be safe and secure for 100,000 years.

    In the face of the uncertainty surrounding the number of victims of nuclear accidents and low-level radiation leakage, as well as the unsolved problem of how to safely store nuclear waste, a precautionary approach seems sensible. Advocates for nuclear power argue we should press ahead as whatever the risks are, they will be small when compared to the devastation caused by global warming. This argument implicitly assumes there are only two alternatives available to us for energy generation: nuclear power or burning fossil fuels. But of course there is another alternative: renewable energy. It is often argued that renewable sources are too expensive and / or insufficient to meet our energy needs. I think this view is wrong-headed. I will explain why in a future blog post.

  • Marx and philosophy

    Marx is usually thought of as an economist or political theorist, but he started out as a philosopher. His interest in philosophy began when he was a student at the University of Berlin. The main debate among philosophers at that time centred on the difference between idealism and materialism (see my previous blog post on idealism and materialism for an explanation of these). At the time Marx was a student the debate between idealists and materialists had been renewed by the German idealist philosopher Georg Hegel, but it had been rumbling on from at least from the time of the ancient Greeks and probably since long before then. As the aim of philosophy is to explain the truth behind life itself it must have been around for as long as mankind has existed.

    In the Western world, the first philosophers as we understand the term today were the ancient Greeks, who focussed on criticizing religious beliefs. This sparked off a conflict between organized religion and free-thinking philosophers that would run for centuries and is still going on today. However it was not until around the 15th century that a truly free debate was allowed to happen, and it was only with the French and American revolutions in the 18th century that the Church began to lose its dominance over the masses in the Western world. Even then, religion still played a major role in philosophical thought. One of the main preoccupations of materialist philosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries was whether God’s existence could be proved by scientific means.

    There are three ancient Greek philosophers who strongly influenced Marx. The first was Democritus, who believed that the world could be explained by scientific laws; the second was Epicurus, who believed that the world operates on mechanical principles; and the third was Aristotle, who aimed to integrate all knowledge into a unified philosophical theory. There are also three (relatively) modern philosophers who appear to have directly influenced what Marx wrote. The first was French philosopher René Descartes, who believed that knowledge could be unified by mathematical means; the second was English philosopher John Locke, who believed strongly in social equality; and the third was English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who was one of the first to study society scientifically.

    Another group of thinkers who influenced Marx were the so-called Utopian Socialists, who lived and wrote at the beginning of he 19th century. Although there was no specific movement that called itself Utopian Socialism (Marx and Engels invented the term later), it makes sense to consider these thinkers as a coherent group. The three Utopian Socialists who most influenced Marx were the British social reformer Robert Owen, who believed character was formed by social conditions; the French social theorist Charles Fourier, who believed society should be reorganized into self-sufficient units or communes; and the French aristocrat Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, who believed the upper class had served a function in the past that was no longer necessary.

    Marx was also strongly influenced by revolutionaries and anarchists. Four particularly strong influences were the French revolutionary Louis August Blanqui, who believed in violent  revolution and was the first to speak of the power of the proletariat; the French philosopher and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who rejected both capitalism and communism and invented a new form of anarchism he called mutualism; the French socialist Louis Blanc, who believed social equality should come about by democratic and peaceful means; and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx who believed that communism was not an end in itself but instead should be seen as the first step towards anarchism.

    Marx was heavily influenced by the philosophers of his homeland, Germany. The strongest such influence was undoubtedly Hegel, whose philosophical arguments are based on two key propositions. The first is that human civilization comes about through intellectual and moral progress rather than divine intervention; and the second is that the development of civilization is best viewed as a series of conflicts or ‘dialectics’. According to Hegel, this development happens in three stages: 1) thesis: an original idea is set up; 2) antithesis: a second idea is set up which contradicts the first; 3) synthesis: an amalgamation of the two opposing views occurs. Another German philosopher who influenced Marx was Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, who proposed that man creates an illusory god based on human ideals.

    Although Hegel’s ideas were important in the development of his philosophy, Marx did not ascribe to them exactly. Hegel said that people felt alienated from the world around them because of religious views that mean they are striving to live in an ideal world that does not exist. Marx, on the other hand, realized that it is not religious views that alienate people, but money. On realizing this Marx decided to devote his life to studying economics and the way it affects social development, and began to read works of political economists – in particular Adam Smith, who believed the capitalist system was an extension of peoples’ natural propensity to trade; and David Ricardo, who also saw capitalism as natural but thought there would be a class struggle over the division of profits.

    Finally, it should be noted that Marx’s long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels also had a significant impact on Marx’s philosophical outlook. As the son of a wealthy manufacturer, Engels was able to support Marx’s family financially, allowing Marx to carry out his research. Although we know from documentary evidence that Marx contributed the most of the writing on their collaborations, it is alleged that Engels sometimes wrote newspaper articles on Marx’s behalf. It is also well-known that Engels completed the second third volumes of Das Kapital, Marx’s magnum opus, from unfinished notes Marx left behind after his death. When Marx died in 1883 Engels became the authority on Marx’s theories until his own death in 1895.

  • The critical threat of global warming

    We are currently in a period of unprecedented warm weather here in the UK. Temperatures of 35°C or higher have now been recorded in May, June and July of the same year for the first time in Britain since records began. And it’s not just the UK that’s suffering in the heat. With temperatures spiking across the world, it seems likely that 2026 will be the hottest year on record globally. Moreover, this year is not an anomaly. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the 11 years prior to this one were the 11 hottest on record. In the past, climate change deniers could claim there was no evidence that the world is getting warmer. Up until the 1990s, and even into the 2000s, evidence that global warming was taking place was strong but not conclusive. That is demonstrably not the case anymore.

    The science tells us that this global warming is being caused by human activity. More specifically, it is being caused by increased greenhouse gas emissions creating a strengthened greenhouse effect. This is the process by which the earth’s surface temperature is kept around 30°C higher than it would be otherwise, a difference necessary to support life. The strengthening of this effect has led to global mean surface temperatures increasing by over 1°C since the 1850s. This might not sound like much but it represents a massive shift in the Earth’s total energy balance and masks huge local variations, whereby the hottest temperatures in regional climates can spike by 5°C or more. That is why countries like the UK are experiencing increasingly dangerous summer heatwaves.

    The greenhouse gas emissions which drive global warming have been rising steadily since the mid-1980s and reached a record level in 2022, according to the WMO. This suggests that things are only going to get hotter. Precise forecasts of future warming are difficult and tend to be based on a range of scenarios. But even the most sanguine forecasts predict that temperatures will continue to rise. The existence of so-called ‘tipping points’, which occur when a positive feedback effect reinforces global warming, means that the temperatures will not necessarily increase in proportion to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. One such tipping point might occur if methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, starts to be released from melting permafrost.

    Just as there is a wide range of forecasts for temperature rises, there is a wide range of forecasts for the resultant environmental impacts. But again, even the most sanguine forecasts predict that these impacts will be severe. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a 1.5°C increase in global mean surface temperatures could put around 15% of species at risk of extinction, put around 1 billion people at risk of drought, put around 2 billion more people at risk of floods, and cause around an 80% decline in the extent of coral reefs. These forecasts are based on a 1.5°C increase above the baseline 1850 level, and we have almost reached that point already. The impacts will become even more severe if the global temperatures increase further than that, as they almost certainly will.

    These forecasts point to a rapidly worsening environmental situation and raise the question of whether it is already too late to do anything to mitigate these impacts. Some argue that because greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperatures will remain high for the foreseeable future and some climate impacts are already irreversible, there is no point taking action. This is fatalistic nonsense. In reality, the severity of the impacts with vary enormously depending on what action is taken. According to the IPCC, we can limit the global mean surface temperature rise to 2°C with immediate and deep action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. This undermines the free-market theory that it will only be possible to tackle global warming at some unspecified point in the future when incomes have risen sufficiently.

    If nothing is done over the coming years and environmental disaster results, the ruling class will inevitably resort to trying to find a quick fix for the problem. One such fix, known as carbon capture and storage, involves capturing CO2 at source and storing it away where it can’t do any harm. Indeed, the scenario proposed by the IPCC under which we can limit the global mean surface temperature rise to 2°C assumes that some CO2 emissions are captured in this way. But at present this technology is unproven and has not been developed on the scale needed to make a significant impact. Another potential fix is reforestation, which would remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but this is unlikely to make a significant impact even if implemented on a global scale.

    There is now overwhelming evidence that global warming is happening, is being caused by human activity, and is having a negative impact on the environment. Despite this there are still those who deny some or all of these facts. These people question not only data but also the motives and integrity of climate experts, and have been given more confidence with the election of far-right wingnut and climate change denier Donald Trump. This is to some extent understandable and is an example of the so-called ‘ostrich effect’: the cognitive bias whereby people ‘bury their head in the sand’ by avoiding learning of potentially negative but useful information to prevent psychological discomfort. We must always be mindful of this effect when laying out the case for action on global warming.