Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • Confronting the extreme centre

    I often go and sell copies of the Socialist in my local town on a Saturday morning. Most members of the public I meet doing this are very friendly, even if they do not necessarily agree with my politics. So I was somewhat taken aback a couple of weeks ago when my paper-selling comrade and I were aggressively accosted by some people who turned out to be Labour councillors. They began by churning out all the usual stuff about us socialists letting in Reform. Then they accused us of only selling socialist papers in order to make ourselves feel good (?!). Next, they tried to gaslight me and my comrade by telling us that Labour weren’t making cuts to public services. Finally, they accused us of not having a coherent plan for how improved public services could be paid for. Here I shall respond to these points in turn.

    The councillors’ claim that socialists like me and my comrade are somehow letting in Reform is obviously nonsense. In fact this is the clearest case of projection you will ever come across. It is Labour who are opening the door to Reform by offering zero solutions to the problems people of this country are facing and by normalizing right-wing talking points, particularly around the vilification of immigrants. I can also assure you that the reason I give up time to sell the Socialist on a Saturday morning is not to make myself feel good. Rather, it is to spread socialist ideas to the general public, and raise a bit of money for the Socialist Party at the same time. Somebody has to spread these ideas as we clearly cannot rely on the mainstream media to do so.

    The claim that Labour isn’t making cuts to public services is also nonsense. The current Labour government has made many spending decisions that have effectively resulted in real-terms cuts to public services, particularly in ‘unprotected’ areas like local government, the criminal justice system, and the civil service. The claim that the UK government cannot afford to pay for improved public services is similarly nonsensical. However, I do think we socialists need to be careful in how we respond to this assertion. The standard response that we can raise the money by increasing taxes on the rich immediately runs into the counterargument that the rich will then just leave the country, taking their money with them. So how should we respond instead?

    I once asked a wealthy acquaintance of mine how he was able to pay for a house he was purchasing in central London. ‘With money’ came his answer. (Ask a stupid question…) I think that this is how we socialists should respond when faced with the ‘how are you going to pay for it?!’ question that inevitably arises whenever we suggest that we should perhaps try to improve public services a little bit. As I explained in a previous blog post, a sovereign government that issues its own currency has no need to tax before it spends and can effectively create as much money as it likes. In the same way that my wealthy acquaintance had access to money on demand to buy property, a sovereign government has access to money on demand to improve public services (if it wants to).

    The usual retort is that increased government spending without an equivalent increase in taxation inevitably leads to inflation. Indeed, this is precisely what one of the labour councillors said to me when I put it to him that the UK government does not need to rely on taxing rich people to fund public services. The first thing to note about this is the shifting of goalposts. In claiming that an increased budget deficit inevitably leads to inflation, my interlocutor was unwittingly conceding that the UK government can, in fact, increase spending without increasing taxation. The second thing to note is that the claim is empirically false. Japan, for example, persistently runs deficits of over 200% of GDP, more than twice that of the UK, but has had a lower inflation rate every year for the past decade.

    I am not denying that budget deficits can lead to inflation, just that they necessarily do. In the words of American economist Milton Friedman: ‘Government deficits can and sometimes do contribute to inflation. However, the relation between deficits and inflation is far looser than is widely believed.’ Friedman is revered by many on the right and is one considered one of the main architects of neoliberalism. Yet even he concedes that budget deficits don’t necessarily cause inflation. So why is this idea so entrenched? I think it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what gives money value. Most people assume that the value money is driven by the amount of it that exists, whereas the value of money is actually determined by the amount that people have to work in order to obtain it.

    The Labour councillors I encountered on that Saturday morning were an example of what the late, great American anthropologist David Graeber referred to as the ‘extreme centre’. Centrists like to portray themselves as pragmatists, but the truth is that they are often the most dogmatic people you will ever meet. I hope that this blog post will help my fellow socialists to cut through some of their nonsensical arguments.

  • Avoiding yet another COP-out

    The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly known as COP30, will be held in Brazil from 10 to 21 November. In this context, COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and refers to the annual meeting of the nearly 200 countries that have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. At these conferences, representatives from around the world meet to review progress, negotiate new measures, and make decisions on how to tackle climate change. At least that’s what is supposed to happen. As the COP30 name suggests, this will be the 30th of these meetings, yet we are still nowhere near solving the problem of global warming. It seems fair to say therefore that the COP initiative has not been a success.

    One thing COP meetings have been successful in doing is setting targets, such as the agreement to keep warming below 2 degrees (Celsius) and ideally below 1.5 degrees, which was negotiated at COP21 in Paris. Another agreement was made at COP28 to triple renewable energy capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030. But anyone can set targets; sticking to them is what matters. And in this respect, the COPs have been a failure. Global emissions continue to rise, atmospheric carbon concentrations are increasing, and the world is on a path to significantly exceed the 1.5 degree warming limit. Most projections put the world on a path to warming of 2.3-2.5 degrees by the end of the century, with the 1.5 degree threshold likely be permanently breached by the 2030s.

    There are several reasons why the COPs have had such limited success in addressing the climate crisis.  First, there is a lack of political will, with politicians invariably being more preoccupied with short-term concerns. Second, there is a shortfall in climate finance, with wealthier nations being unwilling to provide promised and adequate support to developing countries for climate change adaptation. Third, the negotiating process has been heavily influenced by the fossil fuel lobby, with a large number of lobbyists attending the conferences. Fourth, the agreements made, although legally binding in principle, are not legally enforceable in practice. And fifth, increased geopolitical tensions are now diverting attention and resources away from collaborative climate action.

    All of these reasons stem from the fact that under capitalism, nations and corporations are forced to compete rather than collaborate. To understand why this leads to the issues outlined above, we need to invoke a classic problem in game theory known as the prisoner’s dilemma. This problem involves two ‘rational’ agents, each of whom can either cooperate for mutual benefit or betray their partner (‘defect’) for individual gain. The dilemma arises from the fact that while defecting is ‘rational’ for each agent, cooperation yields a higher payoff for each. Climate change can be modeled as a prisoner’s dilemma because competition leads nations to avoid actions required for global cooperation (i.e. to ‘defect’), even though cooperation would yield the best long-term outcome for everyone.

    To solve the problem of climate change, therefore, we need to find a way to solve the prisoner’s dilemma. Luckily, someone has already done this. The American Marxist economist John Roemer has demonstrated that the dilemma arises from the definition of ‘rational’, which in game theory and in economics more generally is usually taken to mean ‘acting purely out of self-interest’. But there is no reason that we need to define ‘rational’ in this way. Roemer has come up with an alternative definition based on Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’. He (Roemer) then goes on to demonstrate that under this definition of rationality, the prisoners will cooperate and achieve the optimal outcome.

    Now that’s all well and good, a critic might say, but that is not how nations and corporations act in the real world. And of course that’s true, as the lack of action on climate change clearly demonstrates. The reason for this was already stated above: under capitalism, nations and corporations are forced to act out of self-interest. In other words, they are forced to action ‘rationally’ in the usual sense of the term, rather than in the Kantian sense as defined by Roemer. But there is nothing special or natural about the acting out of self-interest form of rationality; it is simply how nations and corporations are forced to act under capitalism. To stop them from doing this, we need to get rid of capitalism and replace it with a system that encourages Kantian-style cooperation. The future of our planet depends on it.

  • What makes someone a capitalist?

    We Marxists talk about class a lot. Specifically, we like to talk at length about how under capitalism there exists two classes – the working class and the capitalist class – whose interests are diametrically opposed. But is this really true? In order to answer that question, we first need to define what we mean by ‘working class’ and ‘capitalist class’. Actually we only need to define one of these, as it is usually assumed that whoever does not belong to one of these classes automatically belongs to the other. The textbook Marxist definition of a capitalist is someone who owns capital – or more accurately, who owns the means of production. Therefore, a worker is someone who doesn’t own the means of production. Straightforward, right?

    Well, not really. All we have really done is defined one thing – a capitalist – in terms of another thing –  the means of production. But what do we mean by that? Broadly, the means of production refers to the physical facilities and resources used by a society for producing goods and services. So a capitalist is someone who owns a factory, machinery, land, or raw materials that get used in production; conversely, a worker is someone who doesn’t own any of these things. This seems like a more watertight definition but there are still a few leaks. Are landlords capitalists under this definition, for example? The answer is yes, although it might not be immediately obvious why. The reason is that under capitalism, property is considered part of the means of production.

    In that case, shouldn’t all homeowners be defined as capitalists? Again, the answer – according to the definition above – is yes, but most homeowners probably do not think of themselves in this way. A complication is that most people who buy a house are only able to do so by taking out a mortgage, thereby effectively committing themselves to working for the next 30 or so years or face having their home repossessed by the bank. But aside from the small number of unfortunate homeowners who find themselves with negative equity, the majority of people who own a home have a net positive position in productive assets, and this is sufficient – again, according to the definition above – to make them a capitalist.

    This doesn’t seem quite right to me though. If this is our definition of a capitalist then we can’t really say that the interests of capitalists and workers are diametrically opposed. The argument set out in the previous paragraph points to a better definition. Perhaps it is not your relation to capital that makes you a capitalist, but your relation to labour. It makes more sense to me to define someone as a capitalist if their material conditions would not deteriorate if they decided to stop working; or conversely, to define someone as a worker if their material conditions would deteriorate if they stopped working. Under this definition, most homeowners are not capitalists, as they need to work to pay off their mortgage or risk losing their home.

    Most landlords would not qualify as capitalists under this definition either as the majority of landlords need to supplement their rental income by working. The ones that don’t are generally those who own a large portfolio of properties, and these people clearly belong to the capitalist class. Such landlords would probably protest that they have to work hard to maintain their large portfolio of properties (my heart bleeds for them). But here I am referring to ‘working’ in the technical Marxist sense of ‘selling your labour power for a wage’. That is not what landlords with large property portfolios are doing when they work, regardless of how hard they may be working. The same goes for CEOs of corporations, even if they give themselves a salary to try to create the illusion that they are merely an employee.

    Under this revised definition it seems fairly clear that interests of workers and capitalists are diametrically opposed. If you need to sell your labour power for a wage, it is in your interest that your wages go up; conversely, if you are the CEO of a corporation and derive your income from profits then it is in your interest that wages go down, as from the point of view of a corporation wages are a cost that eats into profits. The situation with the portfolio-owning landlord is not quite so clear-cut as they are in theory indifferent as to whether wages go up or down. But it is obviously in their interest to increase rents and this is against the interest of workers, at least those who are forced to rent property, as most workers are at some stage in their lives.

    One feature of capitalism which sets it apart from older modes of production such as feudalism is that the class a person belongs to is not fixed at birth. In theory it should be possible for worker to become a capitalist by accumulating a sufficient amount of capital. In practice, it is extremely difficult to do this, and the few that manage it only do so through being extraordinarily lucky (by winning the lottery, for example). Regardless, the perceived fluidity of class under capitalism plays into the hands of the capitalists as it makes it much more difficult to develop class consciousness among workers. Most workers probably do not even consider themselves to be working class, if they even think about class at all.

    The development of class consciousness among workers is a necessary step for overthrowing capitalism. Presenting a clear definition of what makes somebody a capitalist – and by extension, a worker – is a prerequisite for this. I hope to have made a contribution towards elucidating such a definition here.

  • The problem(s) with utilitarianism

    In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions to maximize happiness and well-being, or ‘utility’, for the affected individuals. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which posits that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. The idea that we should aim to maximize utility seems perfectly sensible at first, but dig a little deeper and problems soon begin to emerge. The first problem we encounter is that of quantifying utility. It just isn’t possible to do this in any non-arbitrary way. All we can really do in practice is say that one individual is happier or more well-off than another individual. This demonstrates that happiness and well-being are relative rather than absolute concepts.

    Even if we could meaningfully quantify utility, it would be impossible to do the calculation that utilitarianism requires because the consequences of actions our are inherently unknowable. Then there is the problem of how to aggregate the utility of different individuals. The obvious solution to add together the utility of different individuals (assuming we could quantify them in the first place) leads to paradoxes such as the so-called ‘repugnant conclusion’, whereby an immense population with lives that are only barely worth living is deemed superior to a smaller population enjoying a life of great fulfilment. Other measures of aggregate utility, such as taking the average utility, avoid the repugnant conclusion but create other paradoxes.

    Another problem with utilitarianism, and with consequentialism more generally, is that judging actions based on consequences means the actions of an individual can end up being judged more or less harshly based on factors that are completely outside of an individual’s control. I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where our actions have resulted in consequences which could have been have been a lot worse had outside factors not gone our way, or conversely, could have been a lot better if outside factors had not gone against us. Yet another problem concerns justice. It’s not hard to think of situations where an obvious miscarriage of justice would result in greater overall ‘utility’ – for example, framing an innocent person for a murder in order to provide some closure to the murder victim’s family.

    So we can see that there are many problems with utilitarianism. This wouldn’t matter it utilitarianism was a fringe view, but the whole of neoclassical economics, by far the most dominant paradigm in the academic economics world, is based on the idea of that individuals act so as to maximize their ‘utility’. A neoclassical economist might argue that the point of economics is to describe what people do rather than to describe what they should do, so the philosophical objections to utilitarianism outlined above are irrelevant. The problem with this argument is that these are not just philosophical objections; they are objections based on how individuals act in practice. The idea, for example, that people work out all the possible consequences of their actions before taking them is obviously nonsense.

    This isn’t just an academic argument though: utilitarianism is an idea that has impacts in the real world. Perhaps the most egregious example of the mess this idea can get you into is the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, the American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in 2023. In 2024, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion. Bankman-Fried was vilified in the media, but he was a committed utilitarian who probably thought what he was doing was right. Prior to his arrest and conviction, Bankman-Fried publicly stated he supported the ‘effective altruism’ movement, the philosophical and social movement that advocates calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest overall good.

    What are the alternatives to utilitarianism and consequentialism? Perhaps the most well-established alternative is known as deontology, according to which the moral rightness of actions is based on a set of norms or principles. Immanuel Kant is one of the most well-known deontologists. The foundation of Kant’s ethics is the so-called categorical imperative. Kant gave four separate formulations of his categorical imperative, of which the best known is probably the first: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ Although Kant usually gets the credit for this, this idea actually goes back many centuries, and is often referred to as the ‘golden rule.’ This seems to me a pretty solid basis on which to base a normative ethical theory.

  • A discrete principle of stationary action

    The principle of stationary action is a great unifying principle of physics, and is usually presented in a continuous-time framework. In this blog post I will attempt to present a discrete-time formulation of the principle in accordance with the materialist conception of physics I put forward in a previous blog post. Let x(t) denote the state of a physical system at (discrete) time t. This state may be thought of as a vector x = (x1,…,xm), where xj(t) denotes the position of the particle j in the system at time t. The discrete velocity of the particle j at time t is given by uj(t) = xj(t+1)-xj(t), where for simplicity I have taken the time increment to be 1. If wj denotes the mass of particle j then the kinetic energy of the system at time t is given by K(u) = ∑wjuj2/2, where u = (u1,…,un).

    Let P(x) denote the potential energy of the system, which depends only on the state x. Then the Lagrangian of the system is defined by L(x,u) = K(u)-P(x), and the action of the system is defined as ∑L(x(t),u(t)), where the sum is taken between two fixed time points, which we may take as 0 and T. The principle of stationary action states that the system will take the path that maximizes or minimizes the action. For concreteness, let us assume that the particle takes the path that minimizes the action. Let us denote by S(x,t) the minimum of the sum of ∑L(x(t),u(t)) taken between times t and T, where the minimum is taken over {u(t)}. Then, for each t<T, S(x,t) = min{L(x,u)+S(x+u,t+1)}. This gives us a recursive expression for the function S.

    The momentum of particle j is given by pj = wjuj, and the Hamiltonian of the system is defined by H(x,u,p) = pu-L(x,u), where p =(p1, … ,pm). Note that from our definition of the Lagrangian above, H(x,u,p) = K(u)+P(x), the energy of the system. We want to derive an expression which relates the functions H and S. From the above we have that S(x,t)-S(x,t+1) = min{L(x,u)+S(x+u,t+1)-S(x,t+1)}. We may re-write this formula using discrete derivatives as -St(x,t) = min{L(x,u)+Sx(x,t+1)u}, or alternatively, using the fact that min{a,b}=-max{-a,-b}, as St(x,t) = max{-L(x,u)-Sx(x,t+1)u}. This can be written using our definition of the Hamiltonian as St(x,t) = max{H(x,u,-Sx(x,t+1))}.We have just derived a discrete version of the so-called Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.

    The continuous time version of this equation is a result of the theory of dynamic programming which was pioneered in the 1950s by the American mathematician Richard Bellman and co-workers. It is very similar in form to the Hamilton-Jacobi equation in classical physics, hence the name. The Hamilton-Jacobi equation was in turn named after the Irish mathematician William Hamilton and the German mathematician Carl Jacobi, and is an alternative formulation of classical mechanics, equivalent to other formulations such as Newton’s laws of motion. The Hamilton-Jacobi equation is considered the ‘closest approach’ of classical mechanics to quantum mechanics, as the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics can be derived from it.

    The principle of stationary action can also be used in macroeconomic modelling. In this context, we have an economy which produces m commodities, and the state xj(t) denotes quantity of commodity j produced by the economy t. We also assume that the economy uses n different types of labour, and uk(t) denotes the quantity of labour of type k employed at time t. Note that unlike in the physical case described above, in general m and n will be different. Furthermore, the ‘mass’ wk denotes the average wage for labour of type k, and the ‘kinetic energy’ is just the total wage bill: K(u) = ∑wkuk = wu. Thus, unlike in the physical case, the kinetic energy is linear in u. The ‘potential energy’ is negative and can be interpreted as depreciation: P(x) =-dx, where d is the depreciation rate.

    So the Lagrangian for our economy is given by: L(u) = K(u)-P(x) = wu+dx, which is just wages plus depreciation. Thus the Lagrangian represents the total costs incurred by capitalists. In the physical case, the state of the system evolves according to x(t+1) = x(t)+u(t). The economic case generalizes this to x(t+1) = x(t)+f(x(t),u(t)) for some function f. Just as in the physical case, we assume that production follows the path which minimizes the action ∑L(x(t),u(t)), which is to say that capitalists act in such a way so as to minimize their costs. The ‘momentum’ of commodity j, pj, is just the price of the commodity, and the Hamiltonian of the system is then defined by H(x,u,p) = pf(x,u)-L(x,u) = pf(x,u)-wu-dx, which represents gross profits, as pf(x,u) = p(x(t+1)-x(t)) represents nominal net output, and wu+dx represents costs.

    Clearly, there is more to be investigated here in terms of connections between the two models, but I will leave that for a future blog post.

  • Deaths under socialism and capitalism

    Critics of socialism (or Marxism) love to point out how many people died in socialist regimes. Particular examples they like to cite are the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933 which killed around 6 million people, and the Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 which killed around 30 million people. These numbers seem shocking, but as any quantitative social scientist will tell you, numbers like these are largely meaningless on their own. In order to give them some meaning we need to place them into context. The best way to do that is to compare them against a counterfactual – that is, to try to figure out how many people would have died from these or similar events if the regimes they occurred under had been capitalist rather than socialist.

    This is of course very difficult to do in practice, as who knows what would have happened if the Soviet Union and China had been capitalist at those times. The Soviet Union would have had a different name for a start! What we can do though is compare these events with mass death events that occurred under capitalism. Here, capitalism does not fare too well. The deadliest event in human history was WWII, which killed around 80 million people; and before that there was WWI, which killed around 20 million people. The total death toll from these events was around 100 million, way above even the most inflated estimates of the total number of people killed by Stalin and Mao. These wars were both started by capitalist countries. Even so, does it really make sense to attribute these deaths to capitalism?

    If critics of socialism want to attribute deaths that occurred under socialist regimes to socialism, then by symmetry they must attribute deaths that occurred under capitalist regimes to capitalism. Conversely, if they don’t want to attribute deaths that occurred under capitalist regimes to capitalism, then they cannot attribute deaths that occurred under socialist regimes to socialism. Otherwise, they are cherry-picking data to fit their narrative. Such a critic may counter that of the 80 million that died in WWII, around 25 million were citizens of the socialist Soviet Union. Indeed, some particularly exaggerated estimates of the death toll under socialism include these 25 million deaths. But this makes little sense when these people died as a result of a war started by a capitalist country (Nazi Germany).

    It must be understood that both WWI and WWII were imperialist wars driven by capitalist interests. It is entirely appropriate therefore to attribute the deaths that occurred in these wars to capitalism as an ideology. By the logic set out above, we must therefore also attribute the deaths that occurred in the Soviet and Chinese famines to socialism. This doesn’t really paint either system in a very flattering light. It seems that under both systems there is likely to be an event that will result in mass deaths; the only difference is that under capitalism this event is more likely to be a war, whereas under socialism this event is more likely to be a famine. I think that this tells us something about the nature of the two ideologies.

    The Hungarian economist Janos Kornai argued that the key distinction between capitalism and socialism is that the former is a demand-constrained system, whereas the latter is a supply-constrained system. A demand-constrained system is one where employment and output in the system are what they are because of the level of aggregate demand is what it is; if the level of demand increases then output and employment in the economy will increase, with little increase in prices. By contrast, a supply-constrained system is one where an increase in the level of aggregate demand, say because of larger investment or larger government expenditure, does not have the effect of raising output and employment in the economy, but instead increases prices.

    The fact that socialism is a supply-constrained system means that if demand for basics such as food goes up, the supply does not respond, which creates shortages – and in extreme cases, famines. Capitalism does not have this issue, but inevitably leads to war due to the inherent need for competition, expansion, and profit, which can escalate to conflict between nations vying for resources, markets, and geopolitical power. It may seem therefore that both systems are equally bad; but I think this is wrong-headed. It generally better for a system to be supply-constrained, as then actual production is matched to production potential. If a system is demand-constrained then either production potential is under-utilized, or production is unsustainable. On that basis, socialism is clearly the better system.

    The issue with socialism arises when the system’s production potential falls too low to meet demand. This was the cause of both the Soviet and Chinese famines in the mid-twentieth century. In theory this would also be an issue if socialism was implemented now, as global demand for goods and services is currently higher than the Earth’s production potential: humanity currently uses the equivalent of around 1.8 Earths to provide the resources consumed and absorb the waste produced. However, it is precisely capitalism’s lack of a supply constraint that is the cause of this over-consumption and the resulting environmental devastation. The future of out planet relies on us curtailing our economic activities to a level within planetary boundaries. Such a curtailment will never occur under capitalism.

  • What can we do about climate change?

    The term ‘climate change’ refers to  both global warming – the ongoing increase in global average temperature – and its wider effects on Earth’s climate system. It is generally accepted now that climate change is happening and that it is already having an impact on the environment. Many such impacts have been observed in the first decades of the 21st century, with 2024 the warmest year on record since records began back in 1850. The future impacts are likely to be devastating and will include increased flooding, extreme heat, increased food and water scarcity, more disease (including pandemics), and economic loss. It is not surprising therefore there is widespread public support for policies to mitigate climate change.

    Why, then, have governments been so slow to implement such policies? It certainly isn’t for lack of options. There are several renewable energy sources available: solar, wind, hydropower, bioenergy, and geothermal. Furthermore, these have rapidly become more efficient and cheaper over the past 30 years. The International Energy Agency estimates that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, 90% of global electricity will need to be generated by renewables. Renewables also cause much less air pollution than fossil fuels, improving public health, and are less noisy. The main argument used against moving to renewables, particularly solar and wind, is that they are not available constantly. But how much of a problem is this really?

    There are in fact several solutions to the so-called intermittency problem. These include storage, improved interconnection between different variable sources to smooth out supply, and introducing overcapacity so that sufficient energy is produced even when weather is less favourable. Whilst it might not be possible to rely on solar and wind energy entirely, these sources can still be used to make up the bulk of energy production. Denmark, for example, generates over two thirds of its energy supply using solar and wind. And Denmark is hardly the sunniest country in the world (although it may be one of the windiest). Any shortfall from these variable sources can be made up with renewable energy from other renewable sources: hydropower, bioenergy, and geothermal energy.

    Indeed, we know it is possible for a country to use renewables for 100% of its energy needs, because there are countries that already do this. Albania, Bhutan, the Central African Republic, Costa Rica, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Iceland, Lesotho, Nepal, and Paraguay all rely entirely on renewable energy sources. Hydropower makes up the majority of the energy supply in all of these countries. The major advantage of hydropower systems is their ability to store potential power for later production on demand, obviating the intermittency problem. They have disadvantages too, including dislocation of people and adverse impacts on the local environment; but these can be mitigated by using bioenergy and geothermal energy, which also don’t suffer from intermittency.

    The precise ratios of energy produced by each of the five main renewable sources will be different in each country, and will depend on local geographical, economic and social factors. The key point is that renewable sources are clearly sufficient to meet our energy needs. Unfortunately some countries don’t seem to have got the memo. Less than half of the UK’s energy is currently provided by renewable sources, and the figure is less than a third in China and less than a quarter in the US. This is reflected in CO2 emissions per capita figures: according to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, the UK produced 4.4 tons of CO2 per person in 2023, China 9.2 tons, and the US 13.8 tons (!). Albania, by comparison, produced just 1.6 tons of CO2 per person, and Paraguay 1.1 ton.

    A critic might counter that moving to renewable energy does not guarantee lower per capita carbon emissions. Iceland uses renewables for 100% of its energy needs, yet had per capita emissions of 8.8 tons of CO2 per person in 2023, twice that of the UK (although lower than China and the US). Our critic might also argue that it isn’t fair to compare countries like the US and UK with countries like Albania and Paraguay, as the former are much richer than the latter. And of course that is true. Indeed, all the data shows that there is a massive positive correlation between economic activity and CO2 emissions. This suggests that although moving to renewable energy sources is a necessary step to reduce emissions, it is not sufficient.

    It is possible to weaken the connection between economic activity and CO2 emissions to a certain extent. The UK, for example, has reduced its annual CO2 emissions by around 50% since the year 2000, whilst at the same time experiencing economic growth (albeit weak). But I am not convinced that it is possible to sever the connection entirely. Realistically, to reduce carbon emissions to a level that will not result in runaway climate change (assuming we haven’t passed that point already), I think we need to drastically curtail our economic activity. That will never happen under capitalism, which relies on continuous growth of such activity. The only way we can hope to stop climate change is to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a system that does not rely on endless growth – namely, socialism.

  • How much should we spend on defence?

    In February this year, Keir Starmer set out plans to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, stating that this would be offset by cuts to aid spending. This was met with uproar by many on the left, and its not hard to see why. Figures from the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SPRI) fact sheet show that the UK spent $82 billion on defence in 2024, equivalent to 2.3% of GDP and easily above the 2% baseline required by NATO. According to the SPRI, the UK already ranked sixth on the list of countries by total military spending in 2024. Our military spending in that year was already well ahead of comparable countries like France ($65 billion), Italy ($38 billion), and Spain ($23 billion). The only western European country ahead of the UK was Germany, with spending of $89 billion.

    Why, then, does Starmer want to increase defence spending further? Ostensibly it is to defend the UK from higher threat levels in an increasingly multipolar world. But this makes little sense when other countries do just fine with significantly lower levels of defence spending than the UK. It also makes little sense given that we are a member of NATO. Total military spending by NATO countries in 2024 came to $1.5 trillion, well above the total military spending of the rest of the world put together. It’s not clear why a supposedly defensive military alliance would need to outspend the rest of the world in this way; surely at most it only needs to match the rest of the world’s expenditure. Regardless, the UK cannot possibly be under any serious threat when it belongs to such a powerful alliance.

    The real reasons Starmer has committed to increase defence spending are twofold. The primary reason the UK government spends so much money on defence is not to protect its citizens, but to maintain and increase its power and influence on the global stage. It does this primarily through hard power; that is, by attacking or threatening to attack countries that act in ways the UK government doesn’t like. Thus, ‘defence’ is really an Orwellian euphemism for ‘attack’. The second reason is the power of the arms lobby. BAE Systems, a UK-based company, is number six on the list of global weapons manufacturers, and number one on the list of companies outside the US. This company and others like it actively lobby (bribe) our politicians to make decisions that are favourable to them, which usually involve increased arms production.

    The high levels of defence spending in the UK therefore have little to do with keeping the country safe, and much more to do with attacking our adversaries and kowtowing to the arms industry. This raises the question of much should a country like the UK should spend on defence if the aim is to simply protect its citizens. Is it even necessary to spend any money on defence at all? Some countries have managed to reduce their defence spending to near zero. To find one we need look no further than our closest neighbour. Ireland spends just $1.5 billion on defence annually, equivalent to around 0.25% of its GDP, the lowest per GDP figure in the EU. That’s less than 2% of what the UK spends in absolute terms and around 10% of what the UK spends in per GDP terms.

    Has Ireland’s lack of defence spending made it any less secure? Clearly not. The country has not been under any threat of invasion by a hostile power since WWII. Moreover, Ireland is not a member of NATO, which shows that NATO membership is not necessary for national security (although it is more than sufficient). A critic might counter that although Ireland has not been under any threat of invasion in recent history, that doesn’t men that it won’t come under such a threat in the future, and when it does it will be woefully unprepared. The problem with this argument is that there is no limit to how far you can take it and it can therefore be used to justify any level of military expenditure. In truth, it simply isn’t possible to prepare for every eventuality that might occur at some point in the future.

    Ireland is an useful comparator because it is very similar to the UK in many ways, particularly in terms of culture and geographical location. Comparing Ireland with the UK is about the closest thing you can get to a controlled experiment in geopolitics. Its interesting to note then that despite the fact Ireland was until recently considered a poor country, Ireland’s GDP per capita is now roughly twice that of the UK. I’m not suggesting that Ireland’s impressive economic growth in the last few decades is entirely down to its low levels of defence spending, but I do think it was a factor. It is generally accepted that investing in defence not the most efficient way of encouraging economic growth when compared to investing in other sectors.

    This makes Starmer’s commitment to increase defence spending seem even more nonsensical, especially when you consider that his and Labour’s election campaign was fought almost entirely on the promise of increased economic growth. There is simply no good reason for further increases to UK defence spending, and plenty of reason to think it could be drastically reduced. Unfortunately, for the time being it seems we are doomed to continue wasting even more public money on defence – money that would be much better spent elsewhere.

  • Deciphering Das Kapital

    I have just finished slogging through Volume 1 of Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s magnum opus. I’ll be honest, I did not find it an easy read. Marx may have been a very clever chap who changed the course of history, but he was a dreadful writer. Or perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. It could be that the reason I found the book so difficult to get through is that writing styles have changed significantly in the past 150 years. Whereas today the preference is for short sentences, in Marx’s time the trend seemed to be for endless, rambling sentences, with multiple sub-clauses, which you invariably lose the thread of half way through and half to re-read multiple times to understand what the author is actually talking about. This makes reading books like Das Kapital a rather tedious process.

    Another thing that makes reading Marx difficult is that he invented a whole new lexicon to describe the economy (although he wouldn’t have called it that himself – the word ‘economy’ was only given its modern meaning by Keynes, around 80 years after Marx wrote Volume 1 of Das Kapital). This is partly what made Marx such an original and insightful writer, but it also makes a lot of his arguments rather opaque and impenetrable. In this blog post I will attempt to cut through some of Marx’s jargon. Let us begin with labour, the physical act of working by human beings. This is probably the key term used in Marxian economics and most other terms are derived from it. This should not surprise us as Marx saw human labour as fundamental to the workings of capitalism.

    Given our definition of labour (the physical act of working by human beings), we can define labour power as the capacity to do labour. The distinction between labour and labour power is a fine one: labour power refers to the ability to do work, whereas labour refers to the work itself. A physical analogy may be helpful here. Labour power can be thought of as analogous to the power of a car engine, whereas labour is analogous to the energy expended by the car when it moves. In other words, labour power is a measure of power, whereas labour is a measure of energy or work done. The distinction between the two is important because under capitalism, a worker sells their labour power to a capitalist for a wage, rather than selling the product of their labour

    A worker is of course simply a member of the working class – that is, the set of people who do not own any means of production. In contrast, a capitalist is a member of the capitalist class – the set of people who own some means of production. The means of production is just the aggregate capital goods that society uses to produce things. And by capital goods, we simply mean commodities that are used as inputs for production. A commodity, in turn, is simply a good or service produced by (human) labour and offered as a product for general sale. Capitalism is a system based on the private ownership of the means of production; socialism, in contrast, is a system based on public (or social) ownership of the means of production.

    Marx defines abstract labour as human labour as a generalized activity, in contrast with concrete labour, which is human labour as an activity which has a specific effect. The concept of abstract labour is central to Marxian economics, but is a little tricky to get your head around. I like to think of it like this. When capitalists hire workers they are effectively purchasing their abstract labour power, even if they are hiring them for a specific role. This is why your boss can tell you to do things that are not in your official job description, and in practice there is little you can do to say no. The difference between abstract and concrete labour is therefore somewhat analogous to the difference between labour power and labour itself.

    Along with labour and labour power, Marx also defines the concept of labour time: the period of time that a worker spends doing (paid) labour. In mathematical terms, labour power can be thought of as the derivative or rate of change of labour – that is, the rate at which labour can be expended – and labour time can be thought of as the integral or sum of labour over time. In physical terms, labour has dimensions of energy, labour power has dimensions of energy / time, and labour time has dimensions of energy x time. Labour time therefore has the same dimensions as the action, a central concept in physics. The socially necessary labour time associated with a commodity is then defined by Marx as the labour time required under prevailing social conditions to produce that commodity.

    We may define the labour value of a commodity as the socially necessary labour time associated with that commodity. This means that the labour value of a commodity has dimensions of energy x time, the same dimensions as the action from physics. In a previous blog post I argued that much as the evolution of a physical system is determined by the principle of stationary action, the evolution of a capitalist economy is determined by what might be called the principle of minimum labour values. If this is correct then we have uncovered a law of motion for capitalism – which was precisely what Marx set out to do when he wrote Das Kapital over 150 years ago.

  • Why (some) people hate the left, part 2

    In a previous blog post I proposed an explanation as to why some people seem to have a vehement dislike for those of us on the left. According to the conception put forward there, these people, who I referred to as ‘bourgeois centrists’, hate us leftists because of the damage our well-thought-out, evidence-based arguments inflict on their fragile egos. (They really should read Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday – see another blog post of mine for more details on this). Re-reading my old blog post, however, I realized that I had not provided a complete explanation. There is another reason people hate the left which holds independently of how well-thought-out (or not) our arguments are. To explain this, I will start with a personal anecdote.

    I lived in London for many years and like most Londoners I used to commute to work on the tube, which I absolutely despised. Not that I have any problem with the London Underground; on the contrary, I think it is a brilliant piece of public infrastructure. The problem I had was specifically with commuting on the tube and the air of misery that hung over it. So one day I decided I’d had enough and bought myself a bike for commuting. This had a transformational impact on my quality of life, but it came at a cost: to my surprise, I found myself regularly coming into conflict with drivers. Now a bit of conflict is inevitable when sharing a road with people, but this went way beyond that, with many drivers seeming to be annoyed simply by my existence on the road.

    This baffled me for a long time. After all, I reasoned, wasn’t I doing everyone a favour? By cycling to work I was reducing congestion both on the roads and on public transport, as well as reducing pollution. But after a while the explanation dawned on me. The reason I was coming into conflict with drivers was that they disliked me precisely because of the reasons I just described. They understood perfectly well that by cycling to work I was reducing congestion on the roads and on public transport, reducing pollution, and giving myself a good workout at the same time – and they hated me for it! In their minds I was effectively saying to them: ‘Look, you could be like me, free as a bird cycling to work, realizing all these benefits, but instead you choose to be trapped in a car getting stuck in traffic. You fool!’

    Of course, I wasn’t saying that at all, I was just cycling to work. But that didn’t matter; what mattered was drivers’ perceptions. Not only did they perceive me to be taking the moral high ground, but by cycling I was forcing them to reckon with the fact that by driving a car they were doing something which is actually extremely dangerous. Cars have become so normalized in our society that we tend to forget just how dangerous they are. We would do well to remember that when driving a car, we are manoeuvring a hunk of metal weighing over a ton travelling at speed where one false move could result in accidentally killing someone. Coming across a cyclist travelling on a spindly metal frame with zero protection immediately makes us aware of this, and some people don’t like that.

    I think that some people hate leftists for similar reasons that some people hate cyclists (we are probably talking largely about the same people here). In the same way that people hate cyclists because they perceive them to be taking the moral high ground (even though they aren’t really), people on the centre or right of the political spectrum hate us leftists because they perceive us to be taking the moral high ground (again, even though we usually aren’t). Similarly, in the same way that people hate cyclists because it forces them to face the fact that they are doing something dangerous, people on the centre or right of the political spectrum hate us leftists because we force them to face up to the fact that their political beliefs are fundamentally selfish and immoral.

    As leftists we need to understand that by taking a left-wing position, we inadvertently hold a mirror up to those who take opposing positions, and they often don’t like what they see. This, I think, is the main reason why there is so much hatred and vitriol for those of us on the left of the political spectrum. It is important that we understand this as we then can start to see these overreactions for what they really are: the lashing out of someone who hasn’t yet fully come to terms with what their political beliefs actually entail. This, in turn, should enable us to react calmly in face of provocation, and even feel some compassion and empathy for our political opponents. It is only by doing this that we can hope to win our opponents over and convince them that the left is right.