Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • Indo-European velars after *s

    It has long been recognized that the distribution of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) velars is highly skewed after *s, with plain velars occurring far more frequently in this position than palatovelars and labiovelars. In Pokorny’s 1959 Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (IEW), there 118 entries with a plain velar occurring after *s or mobile *s, as opposed to 13 entries with a palatovelar and 4 with a labiovelar (here I have included entries with a velar after *z, the voiced allophone of *s). Similarly, in Rix et al.’s 2001 Lexikon der Indomanischen Verben (LIV2) and Wodtko et al.’s 2008 Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon (NIL), there are 35 entries with plain velar occurring after *s or mobile *s, as opposed to 7 entries with a palatovelar and 3 with a labiovelar.

    How can we account for this distribution? The obvious explanation is that the opposition between the velar series was neutralized after *s in PIE. The problem with this is that we still find all three types of velar occurring in this position. In the case of mobile *s we can posit analogical change to account for this, but that doesn’t work for roots with non-mobile *s. There are 5 entries where a palatovelar occurs after non-mobile *s in IEW: sk’ed- ‘cover’, sk’eH(i)- ‘shimmer’, *sk’er(d)- ‘defecate’, *sk’eu- ‘throw’, and *mosg’hos ‘young’. There are 4 additional entries where a palatovelar occurs in this position in LIV2 and NIL: sk’eH2i- ‘separate’, sk’eH2id- ‘split’, sk’end- ‘cover’, and *tresk’- ‘squeeze’. Let us go through each of these in detail.

    The root sk’ed- ‘cover’ only has reflexes in Indo-Iranian among the satem languages. Whereas the Iranian reflexes suggest an original palatovelar, the Indic reflexes point to a plain velar. This discrepancy can be explained by positing that palatalization was not blocked after *s in Iranian when the velar was followed by a front vowel. This also applies to sk’end- ‘cover’ which is obviously a nasal-infix variant of the same root. The same explanation can be applied to the root *sk’eH2i- ‘separate’ if we assume that the laryngeal was lost in the zero-grade forms sk’H2i- prior to the palatalization in Iranian. It can also be applied to the roots *sk’eH(i)- ‘shimmer’ and *sk’er(d)- ‘defecate’ if we assume that the root was originally *s-mobile and that the Balto-Slavic reflexes are derived from the variant without *s.

    The root *mosg’hos ‘young’ only has reflexes in Armenian among the satem languages, where the palatalized reflex can be explained by positing that *-sgh- yields -z- in Armenian. This rule was established by the Australian linguist Robert Woodhouse in 2014, as was the rule that palatalization was not blocked after *s in Iranian when the velar was followed by a front vowel. The root *tresk’- ‘squeeze’ should be reconstructed with a plain velar it only has unpalatalized reflexes in the satem languages. The same applies the root sk’eH2id- ‘split’. This root is clearly derived from *sk’eH2i- ‘separate’ (see above), which provides further evidence that the latter root should be reconstructed with a plain velar. The root *sk’eu- ‘throw’ is not probative as it only has reflexes in Balto-Slavic.

    Thus none of the entries with a palatovelar after non-mobile *s stand up to scrutiny. What about the examples with a labiovelar in this position? There are no entries where a labiovelar occurs after non-mobile *s in IEW, and just 1 entry where a labiovelar occurs in this position in LIV2 and NIL: *Hosgw– ‘knot’. In his 2014 paper Woodhouse also provides 3 examples of a labiovelar apparently occurring after non-mobile *s: *sgwhH2el- ‘stumble’, *skwelH- ‘split’, and *mosgw– ‘knot’. However *sgwhH2el- ‘stumble’ is reconstructed with a mobile *s in LIV2 to account for the Latin reflex; and  *skwelH- ‘split’ is reconstructed with a plain velar in LIV2 to account for the Hittite reflex. The labiovelars in *Hosgw– ‘knot’ and *mosgw– ‘knot’ are reconstructed based on single words from Gaulish and Old Norse respectively and are therefore far from certain.

    Thus none of the entries with a labiovelar after non-mobile *s stand up to scrutiny either. The obvious conclusion is that the opposition between the velar series was indeed neutralized after *s in PIE.

  • What is to be done?

    Vladimir Lenin was born Vladimir Ulyanov into a upper middle-class family in 1870 in the provincial Russian city of Simbirsk, which has since been renamed Ulaynovsk in his honour. His elder brother was executed by Tsarist forces for revolutionary activity when Lenin was just 17. This event had a huge impact on the young Lenin and from that point on he became a committed revolutionary himself. In 1897 Lenin was exiled to Siberia, after which he fled Russia for Western Europe. He returned to Russia in 1917 and in October that year led the successful revolution which removed the Tsar for good. However leading the revolution took a huge toll on Lenin’s health and he fell seriously ill four years later. His health never recovered and he died in 1924.

    What Is to Be Done? is a book written by Lenin in 1901 and published in 1902. Having just finished reading What Is to Be Done? I thought I would provide a short summary. The book’s central focus is the ideological formation of the proletariat. Lenin first confronts the so-called ‘economist’ trend in Russian socialism that followed the line of the German Marxist Eduard Bernstein. Economism in Marxist usage means reducing the workers’ movement to immediate economic demands – wages, hours, and workplace conditions – and treating broader political struggle for independent class power as secondary, derivative, or unnecessary. Lenin argues forcefully that workers will not develop class consciousness through economism.

    Reflecting on the wave of strikes in late 19th century Russia, Lenin observes that “the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness”; that is, the conviction that it must combine into unions and petition the government for pro-labour legislation. Lenin refers to this unguided, raw, and natural struggle of the working class as ‘spontaneity’, and argues this alone will never result in the overthrow of capitalism. Instead, Lenin argues, workers need a centralized vanguard party of professional revolutionaries to lead them. According to Lenin, socialist theory and political awareness must be brought to the working class from the outside by educated intellectuals and dedicated activists.

    Lenin argues further that the revolutionary movement requires a tight, highly disciplined organization of professional revolutionaries, and that a centralized newspaper should act as the collective organizer, linking scattered local groups and spreading political ideas. His call for a core of professional revolutionaries stirred controversy and contributed to the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in 1903. Many treated What Is to Be Done? like it was Lenin’s last word on revolutionary organizing, when in fact it was an early formulation by him on how a small group of Russian socialists could begin to build an effective movement. Many also misread Lenin’s views on spontaneity, claiming he was hostile to spontaneous struggles when he was not against these struggles per se but against relying on them exclusively.

    There has been much debate about whether What Is to Be Done? is still relevant. In my view, the three core arguments put forward in the book – the insufficiency of economism and spontaneity, the need for an organized group of professional revolutionaries, and the importance of theory in underpinning the revolutionary movement – remain as applicable today as they were when Lenin wrote about them 125 years ago. On the other hand, there is a lot of detail that is specific to Russia at the turn of the 20th century that is not so relevant now. What Is to Be Done? is written as a manual for underground resistance, which was necessary in Tsarist Russia but not so applicable to the freer societies most of us live in today.

    One criticism often leveled at What Is to Be Done? is that the concept of a centralized vanguard party is fundamentally undemocratic and inevitably leads to dictatorship and totalitarianism. Those putting forward this criticism tend to point specifically to the red terror: the brutal campaign of mass arrests, torture, and executions launched by the Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1922. Enforced by the secret police known as the Cheka, its goal was to crush political opposition and secure communist power. Some high-profile contemporary Marxists, such as Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Kautsky, were highly critical of the Bolsheviks for this approach. There are even some who even argue that the vanguard party concept paved the way for Stalinism and all the horrors that unleashed.

    Proponents of the red terror argue that extreme violence was a compulsory, defensive reaction to existential threats. The Bolsheviks faced civil war against the White Army, foreign invasions, economic collapse, and assassination attempts, including the near-fatal shooting of Lenin in 1918. These proponents claim that crushing the bourgeoisie and counter-revolutionaries was required to prevent the return of Tsarism or capitalist exploitation. There is certainly some truth to this. When assessing the red terror we do need to take into account the fact that there was a brutal war going on at the time. And as the architects of the first ever socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks faced an existential threat from capitalist countries whose leaders were terrified of the revolution spreading beyond Russia’s borders.

    It is notable that the red terror did not begin immediately when the Bolsheviks came to power, but only after the assassination attempt on Lenin, which occurred almost a year later. The Bolsheviks had brought in a lot of progressive policies in the meantime, such an 8-hour workday, free education, a literacy campaign, and land redistribution. Thus rather than seeing the red terror as an inevitable consequence of the vanguard party concept, I think it is better viewed as a defensive manoeuvre instigated in response to the situation the Bolsheviks found themselves in. They may have overstepped the mark in terms of the level of brutality required, but it’s easy to say that when there isn’t a civil war going on and with the benefit of 100 years’ hindsight.

  • Kantian and correlated equilibrium

    Game theory is the study of mathematical models of conflict. Such models generally involve a finite set of players labelled 1,2,…,n; a finite set of actions Ai available to each player i; and a reward or utility function ri for each player i. The reward function maps the set A = ∏j Aj to the real numbers, with the interpretation that ri(a) represents the reward or payoff to player i when the players take the action profile a ∈ A. A mixed strategy pi for player i is a probability distribution over the set Ai, with the interpretation that pi(ai) represents the probability that player i will take action ai ∈ Ai. It is generally assumed that each player will play a mixed strategy. It is also usually assumed that these strategies are statistically independent of each other.

    Statistical independence means that the action taken by each player tells us nothing about the actions the other players will play. This is expressed mathematically by saying that probability the players take the action profile a ∈ A is given by the product p(a) = ∏j pj(aj). Then the expected payoff for player i is given by ∑A ri(a)p(a). A key concept in game theory is the Nash equilibrium, named after the American mathematician John Nash. The mixed strategy profile p is said to be a Nash equilibrium if for all players i and actions ai,bi ∈ Ai, we have ∑A ri(a)p(a) ≥ ∑A ri([a,bi])p(a), where [a,bi] ∈ A is defined by [a,bi]i = bi and [a,bi]j = aj for i ≠ j. In other words, in a Nash equilibrium no player can do better by unilaterally changing their strategy.

    Recently, the American Marxist economist John Roemer has devised a novel solution concept for game theory he refers to as a Kantian equilibrium, named after the 18th century German philosopher Emmanuel Kant. It formalizes Kant’s categorical imperative – acting according to a maxim you would wish to see universalized – into mathematical optimization. Instead of asking “What is my best response if I hold others’ strategies fixed?” (the Nash approach), a player in a Kantian equilibrium asks: “What action would I want everyone to take if everyone were to do the same thing as me?” This solution concept only makes sense when the players’ action sets are all the same, and the players only have two actions available to them, so we can set A1 = A2 = … = An = {0,1}.

    In this model a mixed strategy for player i can be represented as a number qi in the interval [0,1] representing the probability that player i takes action 1, and a mixed strategy profile can then be represented as a vector q = (qj). For a ∈ A let J(a,0) and J(a,1) denote the set of indices j where aj = 0 and aj = 1 respectively. The probability that the players take action profile a ∈ A is then given by the product p(a,q) = ∏J(a,1) qjaj ∏J(a,0) (1-qjaj). The mixed strategy profile represented by  q is said to be a (multiplicative) Kantian equilibrium if for all players i and real numbers c with 0 ≤ cqj ≤ 1 for all players j,  the following inequality holds: ∑A ri(a)p(a,q) ≥ ∑A ri(a)p(a,cq). In other words, no player can do better if all players scale their mixed strategies by the same amount.

    A correlated equilibrium is a game theory solution concept which relaxes the statistical independence assumption and is therefore more general than the well-known Nash equilibrium. If p is a probability distribution over A then p is said to be a correlated equilibrium if for all players i and actions ai,bi ∈ Ai, we have ∑A ri(a)p(a) ≥ ∑A ri([a,bi])p(a), where again [a,bi]i = bi and [a,bi]j = aj for i ≠ j. Thus, a Nash equilibrium is a special case of a correlated equilibrium where the actions taken by the players are statistically independent; that is, where p(a) = ∏j pj(aj). On the other hand, a Kantian equilibrium can be seen as a special case of a correlated equilibrium where A1 = A2 = … = An = {0,1} and the actions taken by the players are linearly dependent. I will leave the demonstration of this to a future blog post.

  • Debunking race science

    In 2023, Jason Arday was appointed a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge, attracting media attention as the youngest black professor in the university’s history. Earlier this year, it emerged that Arday may have plagiarized some of his writings, falsified research, and made false claims in his academic history and autobiography. An intense witch-hunt followed, orchestrated by media outlets such as the Times, the Telegraph, and the Spectator. Last night, Arday was found dead in his London home having apparently committed suicide. It appears he was hounded to death by the right-wing media. This tragic episode tells us a lot about how racism is alive and well in this country. It also tells us that the concept of ‘race science’ has not yet been fully eliminated from our public discourse.

    Race science is based on the belief that humanity divides into biologically distinct groups with inherent behavioural or intellectual characteristics. It emerged during the European Enlightenment and 19th-century colonialism to justify social stratification, slavery, and imperial dominance. Early race science relied on flawed and biased practices like craniometry (measuring skull sizes) and IQ testing to assign intellectual capacities to different groups. It led to the development of the field of eugenics, which advocated for improving the genetic quality of the human population through selective breeding. This inspired harmful social policies and forced sterilizations under the guise of improving human hereditary traits, and ultimately led to the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the mid-20th century.

    These atrocities demonstrated what happens when these ideas are taken to their logical conclusion and led to a significant diminution of interest in race science. It did not go away completely however and was kept alive by a small group of dedicated individuals. One such individual is Charles Murray, who in 1994 co-authored a now infamous book with Richard J. Herrnstein called The Bell Curve. Murray and Herrnstein argued that human intelligence (measured by IQ) is a better predictor of life success than parental socioeconomic status and contributes heavily to group performance disparities. In so doing, they argued that humans can neatly be divided into races, and that these races have measurable disparities in intelligence. These are the core propositions of race science.

    Another such individual is Nathan Cofnas, a self-defined ‘race realist’. Cofnas was sacked by Cambridge University in 2024 and underwent a disciplinary investigation into a blog post about black academics which suggested that in a meritocracy, there would be ‘close to zero’ black professors. He is at the centre of the storm around Arday as it was Cofnas who first alleged plagiarism in Arday’s PhD thesis. Of course, there is nothing wrong with academics highlighting plagiarism; indeed, they have a duty to do so. And it may be that Arday was guilty of plagiarism, although that is not clear at this stage. But there is no doubt that Cofnas went out of his way to find a black professor who he could discredit so as to back up his preexisting beliefs.

    It is tempting to simply dismiss individuals such as Murray and Cofnas as racist cranks – particularly as their ideas have been roundly debunked by the scientific community. However the furore around Arday demonstrates that these ideas have not yet been fully discarded by the wider public. This is despite the fact that the core propositions of race science are embarrassingly easy to debunk. Modern genomic research demonstrates that human genetic variation is continuous rather than categorical, meaning two people of the same perceived race can be genetically more distant than two people from different racial groups. Thus the idea that humans can neatly divided into races does not tally with the scientific evidence. This demonstrates that race is a social (i.e. constructed) rather than a scientific concept.

    The fact that humans cannot be neatly divided into races means that it doesn’t make any sense to argue that different races have measurable disparities in intelligence. But let us suspend disbelief for a moment that humans could be neatly divided in this way. Would it make sense then? The answer is no, for the obvious reason that there can be no single measure of intelligence. There are many types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential, creative, practical, and so on. Many of these are difficult or even impossible to measure quantitatively. How would we go about quantifying interpersonal intelligence, for example?

    The idea that these different types of intelligence can be boiled down into a single ‘intelligence quotient’ metric is nonsense. The standard IQ metric really measures just logical-mathematical and spatial intelligence. And it doesn’t even do that particularly well. So even if it was the case that human beings could be neatly divided into races, and it could be shown that there was a difference in IQ between these races, that wouldn’t really tell us anything interesting. It certainly wouldn’t tell us anything about why different people experience different outcomes. The truth is that disparities in health, education, and socioeconomic outcomes are driven by environmental, historical, and systemic inequities rather than innate biological traits. So why can’t scientists convince people of this?

    In a 2025 article published in Evolutionary Human Sciences, evolutionary biologists Kevin Lala and Kalyani Twyman identified five barrier to the effective countering of racist pseudoscience. The first such barrier is a widespread belief in genetic determinism. The second is an overly simplistic conception of heredity that attributes the inheritance of traits, and of their differences, to genes and genetic variation. The third is belief in the naturalistic fallacy: the false idea that traits that evolved are desirable or inevitable. The fourth is the failure of relevant scientific disciplines to take responsibility for teaching the science of racism. And the fifth is the self-promotion of academic fields, many of which are tarnished with a history of racism and eugenics which they are too embarrassed to talk about.

    All of these factors are undoubtedly relevant. But I think a better explanation lies in the fact that a widespread belief in race science among the general public is beneficial to the ruling class, as it makes it that much easier for members of this class to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy, which in turn makes it that much easier for them to cling to power. The implicit message underlying all the furore around Jason Arday in the mainstream media is that people from ‘lesser’ races should not get ideas above their station. Arday may well have been a fabulist who arguably should not have been made a professor. But he was also a human being who was unfortunate to find himself directly in the firing line of the ruling class’s divide-and-conquer culture war. Perhaps now he will find some peace.

  • 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.