Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • Fixing the crisis in public services

    It’s fair to say that public services in the UK are in a bad way. The quality and performance of these services has declined significantly in recent years according to many studies, and confidence in public services is currently at an all-time low. The primary cause of this malaise is lack of funding: Local Authority grants have been going down in real terms for some time, and particularly so since the launch of austerity in 2010. Decades of under-investment in public services means they end up costing more in the long run. Add to that a workforce crisis caused by public sector workers being treated like garbage and things are looking pretty bleak – particularly when you consider that the decline disproportionately affects those who rely on public services most, generally the worst-off in society.

    As ever, the fundamental cause of all these problems is neoliberal capitalism. However, when it comes to public services there are exacerbating factors that have made these problems even worse. First, there is the Health and Social Care bill, which has been increasing for many years for reasons nobody seems to fully understand. The Health and Social Care Select Committee says we need to spend a lot more money on this but the money just isn’t being provided to Local Authorities. Then there was COVID, which put health services under intense pressure and highlighted the impact of years of under-funding. COVID may not be a one-off either: we are told that pandemics are likely to become more frequent in future, and may even become the norm.

    Before talking about what can be done about these problems, it might be worth dispensing with a  couple of red herrings that are often cited as reasons for the decline. First there is Brexit, the centrists’ bogeyman. There is no reason I can see why Brexit would have any more than a marginal impact on the provision of public services in the UK. Then there is immigration, the right-wingers’ bogeyman. It is often said that this is contributes to the problem by putting additional pressure on public services; but the truth is that immigration is keeping UK public services afloat. I have personal experience of this: my mother-in-law has Motor Neurone Disease and requires round-the-clock care, which is provided almost exclusively by foreign-born carers.

    The problem in a nutshell is that although we can all agree that public services need to be improved, Local Authorities just don’t have the money to make the required improvements. Local Authorities are in a bind as they face increasing outgoings for services they are legally required to provide but have limited ways to generate revenue. The obvious solution is to increase council tax, but this is highly regressive. Another obvious solution is to increase business rates, but this leads to concentrations of wealth in certain areas and concentrations of poverty in others. Wealthy areas attract more businesses, so can raise more money in business rates and become more wealthy; conversely, poorer areas don’t attract as many business, so become even poorer.

    The best solution of course would be to end austerity and give Local Authorities the money they need to fund public services effectively, but obviously this is in the hands of central rather than local government. Local Authorities must do what they can within the existing neoliberal system. In fact some have fully embraced the neoliberal mindset by trying to raise revenue through speculative investments, often with disastrous consequences (Woking council, I’m looking at you). A more sensible approach, I think, would be to try to raise revenue from their existing assets. In particular, local road networks are a key piece of infrastructure that are owned by Local Authorities, and there are a couple of ways in which these could be utilized for revenue generation.

    First, Local Authorities can introduce Clean Air Zones in towns and cities. These are often unpopular and criticized on the grounds that they are regressive, as they tend to target older vehicles that create more pollution, and older vehicles tend to be owned by poorer people; but they don’t need to be designed in this way. How about introducing Clean Air Zones that specifically target gas-guzzling SUVs? (There is nothing more ridiculous than seeing an enormous American pick-up truck driving through a quaint English town.) In a similar vein, Local Authorities could increase car parking charges in town centres. Both of these measures would raise revenue and discourage the use of cars, reducing congestion and pollution.

    Those are just a couple of ways in which Local Authorities could raise revenue; there are surely others. It’s maddening to see Local Authorities so strapped for cash, particularly those in affluent areas like Surrey where I live. They should be able to tap into some of that wealth somehow. Ultimately though, a long-term solution to the crisis needs to come from the centre and this will never happen as long as we have a government that pursues an austerity agenda. Until we get a some more sensible people in charge, public services will be stuck in the same doom-loop and will only get worse.

  • Systems thinking and dialectics

    Which came first, the chicken or the egg? As we all know, this question has no answer, but it is instructive to think about why it has no answer. The reason, as we all intuitively understand, is that there isn’t a linear relationship between chickens and eggs; rather, there is a feedback loop between the two. As the number of chickens goes up, so the number of eggs goes up, and vice versa; similarly, as the number of chickens goes down, so does the number of eggs. This is an example of a feedback loop known as a reinforcing loop. A characteristic of reinforcing loops is exponential increase (or decrease). So why is the earth not covered in chickens and eggs? The answer, of course, or at least one of the answers, is that chickens have predators such as foxes.

    As the number of chickens increases or decreases, the number of foxes moves in the same direction. However, as the number of foxes increases or decreases, the number of chickens moves in the opposite direction. Thus an decrease in the number of chickens leads to a decrease in the number of foxes, leading to an increase the number of chickens, leading to an increase in the number of foxes, leading to a decreasing the number of chickens, and so on. This is an example of a feedback loop known as a balancing loop. In the 1920s two mathematicians, Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra, independently came up with a mathematical formulation of predator-prey systems such as the one just described. Their formulation has come to be known as the Lotka-Volterra equations, to which we will return shortly.

    The models outlined above may seem very simple, but they encapsulate some key concepts of an approach known as Systems Thinking. In each case we have specified how a system’s constituent parts interrelate, including feedback loops, then used this to work out how the system will evolve over time. These models are arguably already more sophisticated than a lot of models used by economists, which are generally linear and static (i.e. they have no feedback loops and don’t predict how a system will evolve over time). Even the most sophisticated economic models tend to be based on the idea of equilibrium, which is fundamentally antithetical to Systems Thinking. To find economic models that are not based on equilibrium we generally need to look outside of the mainstream.

    In the 1960s the economist Richard Goodwin derived a system of equations to model the interaction between wages and economic activity which is mathematically equivalent to the Lotka-Volterra system. The logic behind Goodwin’s model is that as economic activity goes up, so does employment, and as employment goes up, so does workers’ power to bargain for higher wages. These higher wages eat into firms’ profits, so firms have less money to invest, which results in a reduction in economic activity. This in turn results in reduced employment and bargaining power for workers, resulting in lower wages, increased profits for firms, higher investment, and an increase in economic activity; and so the cycle begins again.

    This logic can be traced all the way back to Marx, who saw it as one of the key contradictions of capitalism: if workers do anything to improve their lot, ultimately it rebounds back on them through increased unemployment. In Marx’s view, this demonstrated that a capitalist system will always result in immiseration for the worker. In fact Goodwin’s model is often referred to as ‘Goodwin’s class struggle model’ as it neatly encapsulates the struggle between workers and capitalists. Since the model was developed in the 1960s, a significant amount of empirical evidence has been adduced to show that so-called ‘Goodwin cycles’ do actually occur in the real world. This can be seen as a clear vindication of Marx’s theory.

    Marx would have come to this hypothesis through his use of Dialectics, and it turns out that there is a lot of overlap between Dialectics and Systems Thinking. Both approaches emphasize interconnectedness and dynamic change over linear, static thinking. Furthermore, there are correspondences between many concepts used under the two approaches. For example, the Dialectical concept of ‘interchange of cause and effect’ corresponds to the Systems Thinking concept of a feedback loop; and the Dialectical concept of ‘transformation of quantity into quality’ corresponds to the Systems Thinking concept of a phase transition. You could even go so far as to say that Dialectics and Systems Thinking are two different terms to describe essentially the same thing (although some might disagree).

    This overlap between the two approaches is helpful, for me at least, because it helps to pin down exactly what is meant by the slightly slippery term ‘Dialectics’. It also potentially opens up Marxist ideas to the many scientists and engineers who may be unfamiliar with Dialectics but are familiar with Systems Thinking. Even economists schooled in equilibrium models are starting to realise that Systems Thinking is required to really understand how a capitalist economy works. It simply doesn’t make sense to model a complex, dynamic, interacting system like the economy using linear, static, equilibrium-based models. This demonstrates once again that Marx was on the right lines when he was writing about this stuff over 150 years ago.

  • Why is public transport so bad in the UK?

    I just returned from a holiday in France, during which I visited three medium-sized cities (Rouen, Le Mans, and Tours). Something that struck me about these cities was how nice they seemed compared to cities in the UK. Now obviously this is biased sample as I specifically I went to these places because I knew they would be nice to visit; but even so, it is hard to shake the impression that towns and cities in mainland Europe are more livable than their British counterparts. What particularly impressed me were the extensive tram networks. Trams are my favourite type of urban transit: they are clean, efficient, and can run directly through urban streets, which means they are accessible to all and give riders a nice scenic tour of the city. They also alleviate traffic congestion, and therefore pollution, in city centres.

    On returning to the UK I was wondering whether it was just that the places I visited happened to have tram networks or whether this was a sign of a broader phenomenon. A bit of research suggests the latter: whereas the UK has 7 cities with tram networks, France has 28, four times as many; and Germany has 54, almost eight times as many. And it’s not just trams where the UK lags behind. According to the FT, British cities are more poorly served by public transport than those of any other Western country – including the US! It’s not just within cities either. Take the HS2 debacle: originally intended as a high-speed rail network covering the whole of the UK, it has been increasingly scaled back to the extent that when it is finally built it will basically run as a shuttle service between the UK’s two largest cities.

    Focusing in on trams again, the obvious question is: Why can cities in Europe build tram systems when equivalent-sized British cities can’t? A bit of digging suggests that the main reason is cost. According to Britain Remade, a campaign group advocating for reforms to the UK’s planning system, building a mile of tramway in the UK costs almost double what it costs in France and over three times what it costs in Germany. Of the ten most expensive tram projects per mile in the world, five of them are British. But why are tram construction costs so high in the UK? One of the main reasons, according to Britain Remade, is that the necessary reconfiguration of utilities must be done entirely at the tram project’s expense.

    It is always worth remembering that one person’s cost is another person’s income. If tramway construction costs are being inflated then somebody somewhere must be benefiting, and appears that this ‘somebody’ is the utility providers. In the UK, tram promoters have to pay 93% of the cost of reconfiguring utilities like electricity, gas, and telephones, with only 7% being covered by the providers. This creates an incentive for providers to move more utilities than is necessary, so that they get newly installed infrastructure at the expense of the tram project. In France, by comparison, diversion costs for utilities are covered by the providers themselves. Since they are covering the costs, they will only divert the utilities that actually need to be moved.

    The obvious solution, as pointed out by Britain Remade, is to get utility providers to contribute a fairer share of diversion costs. So why don’t we just do that? All it would require is a simple change in legislation. The answer almost certainly lies in the privatization of utility provision. I suspect what is going on is that privatized utility companies vehemently oppose any such change in legislation as it would impact on their bottom line, and therefore lobby (bribe) politicians to prevent it from happening. It is worth noting that Britain has the only fully privatized energy services in the whole of Europe, and England and Wales are the only countries in the world(!) to have fully privatized water and sewage systems. It seems we have here yet another reason why privatizing utilities is a terrible idea.

    What’s particularly galling about all this is that the UK used to have an extensive tram system, but then got rid of it! According to Wikipedia, in 1925 the UK had over 100 electric tram networks operating in towns and cities across the country. These networks began to be removed in the 1930s to make way for cars and (occasionally) buses, and by 1965 only one remained (in Blackpool – and this was only retained as a historical curiosity). The widespread replacement of a clean public transport system with a dirty, polluting, privatized transport system must be one of the daftest policy choices we as a society have ever made. Sadly, it is one we are still paying the price for today.

  • The destructive pursuit of efficiency

    Two recent articles in the Socialist newspaper once again highlight the callous stupidity of neoliberal capitalism. The first tells an all-to-familiar story of public services being cut to save money: in this case, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire Service is facing £1.6 million of cuts, which will result in 30 firefighter jobs being axed, as well as cuts to vital safety equipment. The second describes the inevitable failure that has been the privatisation of the National Grid, using the power outage earlier this year at Heathrow Airport to illustrate the point. What unites these stories is that they both involve public services getting worse for the sake of improved efficiency. In the first case, improved efficiency means fewer firefighters; in the second, it means reduced resilience and a higher likelihood of power outages.

    Where does this drive for efficiency come from? In the fire service example, it stems from the erroneous belief that public services are funded by taxpayers’ money, and therefore that they should be run in as efficient way as possible so as to ensure value-for-money for the taxpayer. In fact, there is no such thing as taxpayers’ money: all money ultimately comes from the government, not from taxpayers (as I explained in a previous blog post). In the National Grid example, this drive comes from the category mistake of treating the National Grid as a company rather than what it actually is; namely, a piece of critical national infrastructure. This means that it becomes beholden to the profit motive, and one way to increase profits is to reduce costs – in this case, by not completing essential maintenance.

    More generally, this drive comes from the neoliberal capitalist ideology which permeates our world, under which success is measured in terms of crude financial measures such as efficiency, value-for-money, and profit. This is bad enough in the private sector, but measuring the success of public services in this way makes no sense whatsoever. For public services to function effectively a certain amount of redundancy must be built into their operations. Take the fire service example: a certain number of firefighters need to be on hand in case a particularly big fire needs to be put out, but for the majority of the time these firefighters won’t be needed to put out any fires. On a purely financial basis, the fire service is operating inefficiently and therefore, according to neoliberal doctrine, must be defunded.

    The problem of course is that when a particularly big fire does occur, there won’t be enough firefighters around to put it out, and people will die as a result. And let’s be clear: people will die as a result of these cuts. In fact many people already have died under the drive for efficiency that has stemmed from the UK government’s pointlessly cruel austerity program. Research suggests that between 190,000 and 335,000 excess deaths occurred in the UK since 2010 due to austerity policies. To put this into context, the latter figure isn’t much lower than the number of UK citizens that died during WWII. Furthermore, this program, which included cuts to local government funding and social security benefits, is also associated with a reversal of life expectancy.

    You may wonder why a government would willingly implement a policy that kills so many of its own citizens: surely they must have no choice, right? Wrong! The vast majority of economists agree that the austerity is at best pointless and at worse wantonly destructive. Even economists who buy into the completely wrong-headed ‘government as household’ analogy argue that austerity measures depress economic growth and ultimately cause reduced tax revenues that outweigh the benefits of reduced public spending. So, why do governments do it?

    There are two possible answers to this question. Either our politicians are so brainwashed by neoliberal ideology that they genuinely think they have no choice but to slash government spending, even if it does result in widespread suffering; or, they know that they don’t need to slash spending, but do it because they want to cause widespread suffering, or are at least indifferent to it. Perhaps the most likely answer is a combination of the two: our politicians have been brainwashed by neoliberal ideology and have no incentive to re-educate themselves because they just don’t care about the suffering they cause.

    What’s particularly insidious about austerity is that although it kills people, it does so in a way that isn’t entirely obvious, so people often don’t make the connection between austerity and the suffering it causes. It’s also instructive to note that the people most affected by austerity are generally the worst-off in society. Put simply, austerity is eugenics by stealth. Neoliberal capitalism is a dystopian system that values saving money over saving lives. The sooner we get rid of it, the better.

  • Is Labour doomed?

    In June last year the Labour Party won a 174-seat majority in the UK general election, the third-best showing in the party’s history and its best since 2001. Fast forward to a little over a year later and the party is in disarray. Recent polling suggests that less than 25% of voters would vote for Labour if an election was held now, down from 34% at the general election. And it gets worse: polls that include the new Corbyn/Sultana party have Labour on just 15%, tied with this still as-yet-unnamed party. If Labour’s vote share carries on decreasing at this rate literally nobody will vote for them at the next general election. On top of this dreadfull polling, the party leadership recently had to face a massive and embrrassing backbench rebellion on its propsed welfare ‘reforms’ (read: cuts). So what’s gone wrong?

    It’s important to note first of all that Labour’s victory in the 2024 election was nowhere near as decisive as the large majority might lead you to believe. As has been pointed out many times (although not in in the mainstream media of course), Labour won with fewer votes than it received in 2019 and with significantly fewer than it received in 2017, despite the fact that it lost both of these elections. In interpreting these results it must be remembered that Labour was led into the 2017 and 2019 elections by the supposedly unelectable Jeremy Corbyn and both times was subjected to a malevolent smear campaign from the media-political establishment. Starmer’s Labour was given the easiest of rides in comparison, yet still received fewer votes.

    In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the Conservatives lost the 2024 election than that Labour won it. Whereas the number of people who voted Labour was roughly the same in 2024 as it was in 2019 (although slightly lower in 2024), the number of people who voted Conservative halved. The Conservative vote basically collapsed, largely as a result of a loss of confidence following the Truss/Kwarteng debacle. Furthermore, desperation to get the Tories out led to a wave of wishful thinking about Starmer’s Labour by some on the left, who seemed to be under the illusion that Labour would veer left once in government despite there being no evidence to suggest this, leading to an artificial inflation of Labour’s vote.

    Anyone paying attention to any of this in the run-up to the 2024 election would have realized that Labour’s position was quite precarious and would have expected their support to diminish at some point. However, I don’t think many were expecting it to implode quite so quickly and spectacularly. It is tempting to blame the utter hopelessness of Starmer and his cronies for such a rapid implosion. And let’s be clear, they are hopeless. Starmer is a man who seems to have zero political instincts, which perhaps isn’t surprising given that he is actually a lawyer who has only been a politician for a few years. On top of that, he and his chancellor Rachel Reeves seem to have no understanding of basic economic theory. You wonder what they actually get taught on these Oxbridge PPE degrees.

    But to blame Starmer and his cadre for Labour’s plight would be to fall for for the ‘great man fallacy’ (or perhaps the ‘incompetent man fallacy’ would be more appropriate). To really understand why Labour’s support is collapsing we need to look at the international context. Support for centre-left parties has been declining across Europe and other Western countries since global financial crisis of 2008. This is often referred to as ‘Pasokification’, after the Greek party PASOK, which saw a declining share of the vote in national elections throughout the 2010s. In fact, the UK Labour Party did relatively well during this period compared to its international peers, mainly because it became a genuine left-wing party, as opposed to a centre-left party, during the period 2015-2019.

    Contrary to what the mainstream media would have you believe, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership actually arrested the decline of the UK Labour Party. This decline had started to become apparent in the 2015 general election when Labour unexpectedly (to mainstream commentators anyway) lost ground to the Conservatives. This led to the party reforming the rules around leadership elections, which ultimately led to Corbyn being elected as the party leader and to the party massively increasing its vote share in 2017. What we’re seeing now is the reversion of the UK Labour Party to the level of support that it would have had if Corbyn had not taken leadership of the party in 2015. Note that I am not giving Corbyn all the credit here: the key thing was the move away from centre-left politics.

    It is not difficult to see why centre-left parties have become so unpopular over the last 15 years or so. These parties have generally supported austerity in the period following the 2008 financial crisis, and austerity makes ordinary people less well-off and worsens their material conditions. Why these parties support such a pointlessly destructive policy is a much more difficult question to answer – particularly as it is inimical to their own electoral interests. You get the distinct impression that centre-left parties are more concerned with piling misery on their fellow citizens than with getting re-elected or affecting change. Is it any wonder people dislike them? The surprising thing is that anyone still votes for them at all.

  • Debunking some myths on Israel-Palestine

    Since Israel began its genocide of Gaza nearly two years ago there has been a massive outpouring of grief and support for the Palestinian people from the general public here in the UK and across the world. Although this has been heartening to see, it is also concerning that a large section of the public seems to be at best unmoved by what is happening, and at worst supportive of Israel’s actions. I refuse to believe that anyone outside a tiny proportion of the population is actually indifferent to the suffering of other human beings (we usually refer to such people as sociopaths). Rather, I think this ambivalence is down to a handful of widely-held myths about the nature of the conflict. In this blog post I will attempt to debunk some of these myths.

    Myth: Hamas started the conflict by attacking Israel. The roots of this conflict obviously go back many decades and to claim that it all started on October 7th 2023 is absurd. Palestinians have been caged into a small strip of land in Gaza for years, and it was inevitable that at some point some of them would try to break out. Israel was well aware of this and was waiting for it to happen to given them the pretext to begin mass exterminating the Palestinian people. Whilst we should never condone violence against civilians, we need to be clear that Hamas is not the aggressor here: it is a resistance group fighting an illegal occupation, which it has a right to do under international law. If they were resisting occupation by a country the West wasn’t allies with they would be labelled as freedom fighters rather than terrorists.

    Myth: This is a war and both sides are at fault for the suffering. The term ‘war’ implies a conflict between two relatively evenly-matched adversaries, but you only have to glance at the casualty statistics to see that this is not an accurate description of what is happening in Gaza. Since October 7th 2023, around 2,000 Israelis have been killed and around 80,000 Palestinians have been killed, a ratio of 40:1. Furthermore, of the 2,000 Israelis killed, less than a half were civilians; whereas of the 80,000 Palestinians killed, scholars estimate around 80% were civilians. This puts the ratio of civilian deaths at around 64:1 – and this ratio will only increase over time as more Palestinian civilians are murdered. We are not witnessing a war here, we are witnessing a massacre.

    Myth: The conflict would end tomorrow if Hamas released the remaining hostages. Israel is quite clearly using the hostages as a pretext for genocide. Releasing the hostages would obviously remove that pretext, but it seems likely that Israel would then simply find another excuse and carry on the genocide as before. It’s worth remembering that releasing the hostages wasn’t always the pretext: the original justification was that Israel was merely defending itself, which was quietly dropped once it became clear to everyone that Israel’s actions went way beyond self-defense. Then there’s the fact that in May this year, Benjamin Netanyahu said that there was no way Israel would halt its assault even if a deal was reached to release more hostages. It’s difficult to argue with that one.

    Myth: Palestinians are motivated by Jew-hatred and would do the same to Israel if they could. The logic here seems to be that Palestinians support Hamas, and Hamas is motivated by Jew-hatred, therefore Palestinians must also be motivated by Jew-hatred. There are problems with both links in this chain of reasoning. First, according to recent polling, only around half of Palestinians support Hamas. And second, whilst the 1988 Hamas charter was described as antisemitic, Hamas’s 2017 charter removed the antisemitic language and declared Zionists, not Jews, the targets of their struggle. Hamas has also condemned the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the persecution of Jews. This seems to be yet another example of the deliberate conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

    Myth: Hamas is at fault for using human shields. In previous conflicts, Palestinian armed groups have stored munitions in and fired indiscriminate rockets from residential areas. This is in violation of international law, but whether this counts as ‘using human shields’ is debatable. In any case, according to Amnesty International, there is no evidence that Hamas has been doing this during the current hostilities. Hamas spokespeople have reportedly urged residents in some areas of Gaza not to leave their homes after the Israeli military warned people in the area to evacuate; but such statements could have been motivated by a desire to avoid further panic. Regardless, even if Hamas was using civilians as human shields, that wouldn’t in any way excuse Israel murdering those civilians.

    Myth: This is all the fault of Benjamin Netanyahu, not Israel. This is an example of the ‘great man fallacy’: the idea that history is primarily shaped by the actions of individuals rather than by broader social forces. Whilst it’s true that Netanyahu is a psychopath who wants to keep the conflict going for as long as possible to save his political skin, it’s also true that there are dozens of equally psychopathic Israeli politicians waiting in the wings who would happily carry on the slaughter if Netanyahu was removed. Then there is the fact that the Israeli people support their government’s actions: according to polling, nearly half of Israelis support killing all Palestinians, and most support expelling Palestinians from Gaza. Israel is a country gripped by genocidal mania and removing Netanyahu would not change that

    In attempting to debunk these myths I am not claiming to be an expert on Israel-Palestine. On the contrary, I am just an interested layperson with access to the internet. The fact that I, a layperson, can so easily drive a coach and horses through these arguments with just a bit of Googling shows how pathetic they really are. These myths fall apart on the slightest contact with reality. There is simply no justification whatsoever for supporting Israel’s actions in Gaza, and anyone who does is either brainwashed or deranged.

  • The illusion of free will

    There is a longstanding rift in the world of philosophy between those who think we have free will and those who think that we don’t. I have always been inclined to side with the latter group as I’ve never been able to see how free will can possibly be compatable with determinism – that is, the idea that all events, including human actions, are causally predetermined by prior events. However there is a school of philosophy, to which the majority of philosophers apparently adhere, which says that they are compatable; this view is known as ‘compatabilism’, for obvious reasons. But what do we mean by ‘free will’? The popular notion of free will is actually quite easy to define. This refers to the intuitive feeling we all have that if we could re-run the tape of our lives, we could have done things differently.

    Now I think both compatibilists and incompatibilists agree with me that this popular notion if free will is incompatible with determinism, and as determinism is true, this intuitive feeling that we have must be incorrect. The difference between the two schools lies in how they respond to this fact. The incompatibilist response is to infer from this that we must be mistaken and that free will must therefore be an illusion. The compatibilist approach is to say: Nonsense! Free will does exist – we just need to refine what we mean by ‘free will’! To me, the incompatibilist response seems to be the logical one, and the one that is most likely to advance our understanding. An analogy might be useful to explain why I think this.

    For thousands of years humans believed that the sun went around the earth, until a few hundred years ago it was discovered that it was actually the other way round. Acceptance of this was the first step in allowing us to completely revise our view of our place in the universe. Now suppose that instead of accepting this, people had responded by saying: Nonsense! The sun does go around the earth – we just need to refine what we mean by ‘go around’! We could have then spent the next several hundred years trying to come up with a new definition of ‘go around’ which is compatible with the facts, but where would that have got us exactly? The answer is, not very far – yet this is what compatibilists seem to be trying to do with free will. Therefore, I don’t think we should take their arguments very seriously.

    The non-existence of free will has many practical consequences, almost all of which are, as it turns out, positive. For example, a logical consequence of the non-existence of free will is that nobody is truly responsible for their actions. This means that hating someone for their actions doesn’t make any sense, and neither do other negative emotions like pride and shame. In fact, the whole idea of retributive justice makes no sense. Just think how many prison places we could free up! These practical consequences are what I think makes the subject of free will so interesting. It’s not just a load of old philosophers pontificating about something which is of no relevance to everyone else (not that all philosophers do that of course).

    Determinism is closely related to materialism. A materialist perspective, which posits that only matter exists, implies that our choices and actions are ultimately predetermined by physical processes. That is, materialism implies determinism; and therefore, as determinism is incompatible with free will, materialism implies that free will is an illusion. Thus any committed Marxist has to accept the non-existence of free will. This makes perfect sense as the lack of free will completely undercuts right-wing ideology, which is based around individual freedom and the idea that people should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The ‘self-made man’, an idea beloved by conservatives everywhere, is a myth.

    What’s interesting about the argument I am putting forward here is that it suggests the split between left and right does not merely reflect a divergence of opinion, as is usually assumed. Rather, it reflects a split between those with beliefs based on logic (the left), and those with beliefs based on a logical fallacy (the right). The idea that people are fundamentally responsible for their own actions is central to right-wing ideology, but it simply cannot be correct. It is the material conditions people find themselves in that determines their actions. Only those on the left have fully internalized this fact and thought through its consequences.

  • Why is antisemitism on the rise?

    Antisemitism sadly appears to be on the rise again, and there has been no shortage of coverage of this in the mainstream media. For example, writing in The Spectator last week, Brendan O’Neill stated that ‘Britain is experiencing one of the worst eruptions of anti-Jewish hatred in decades’; and this is just one of dozens of recent articles that make similar claims. The statistics seem to bear this out: the Community Security Trust (CST), a British charity set up to protect British Jews from terrorism and antisemitism, recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents in the UK in 2024, the second-highest total ever reported in a single calendar year. The highest ever was in 2023, with 4,296 incidents recorded. These figures are far in excess of the equivalent figures for 2022 (1,662), 2021 (2,261), and 2020 (1,684).

    As the CST itself states, the trigger for this sudden increase was the Hamas attack on Israel on 7th October 2023. However, it is not clear whether was the attack itself that was the trigger, or whether it was Israel’s response to the attack. According to the CST’s 2023 Antisemitic Incidents Report, there was a rise in anti-Jewish hate following the attack and before Israel had set in motion any extensive military response in Gaza; but this doesn’t make much sense as Israel declared war on Gaza and began bombing it on 7th October, just hours after the initial breach of the Gaza perimeter by Palestinian militants. Either way, it is clear that targeting British Jews because of a war going on thousands of miles away, which most of them have nothing to do with, is both stupid and totally unacceptable.

    So why would people do this? The explanation put forward by the CST is that Hamas’s attack emboldened those with an underlying hatred towards Jews and legitimized antisemitism in these people’s minds. The main problem with this as an explanation is that it doesn’t really explain anything (why do these people hate Jews so much?). An alternative explanation is that there has been a deliberate conflation of Judaism with Zionism the mainstream media over recent years and this may have led some to blame the actions of the Zionist Israeli state on Jews in general. Of course, this does not in any way excuse these antisemitic attacks, but it does offer a more nuanced explanation as to why they have increased so significantly.

    The latter explanation also has the advantage of being more consistent with the data. If the rise in antisemitism was caused by those with an underlying hatred towards Jews being emboldened following Hamas’s attack, then why it still at a higher level now, almost two years later? The CST would probably point to a spike in cases immediately following the attack; but this spike could also be explained by the higher salience of the Israeli attacks on Gaza in people’s minds around that time. Furthermore, the explanation put forward by the CST does not explain a similar (albeit smaller) spike in antisemitism during the Israel-Palestine crisis in May 2021, which was sparked by Israeli forces storming a mosque compound in the West Bank.

    This once again highlights the importance of maintaining a clear separation between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. And they are definitely separable: Judaism is a religion which has been around for thousands of years, whereas Zionism is a political ideology which has been around for just 150 years. Furthermore, not all Zionists are Jews; the Christian United for Israel is an evangelical organization which is also the US’s largest pro-Israel lobby. Critics may counter that the majority of Jews consider themselves Zionists, or are at least sympathetic to Zionism. That may be so, but there is still a significant number of Jews who are anti-Zionist. In fact, I would argue that Zionism is itself antisemitic as it puts Jews around the world at greater risk.

    Finally, I think we should make sure that we keep the recent rise in antisemitism, disturbing as it is, in perspective. Of the 3,528 antisemitic incidents in the UK in 2024, the vast majority – over 80% – involved ‘abusive behaviour’. This is a quite a broad term that apparently (according to the CST’s own case study) includes schoolkids making antisemitic remarks to their fellow classmates. At the other end of the spectrum, just one of the 3,538 reported cases involved extreme violence (specifically, alleged arson). Obviously that is one too many, but it pales in comparison to what the Palestinian people are currently going through. For these people, the most extreme violence is the norm day in, day out, with no end in sight. They are the ones who most need our support right now.

  • Socialists must embrace MMT

    What are taxes for? Everyone thinks they know the answer to this question: To pay for public services. In this blog post, I will put forward the idea that this answer is incorrect, and that taxes do not pay for public services at all. This idea comes from an economic school of thought known as ‘Modern Monetary Theory’, or MMT for short. The basic tenets of MMT are: 1) a currency-issuing government can pay for any goods and services it needs that are on sale in that currency without having to obtain the money first; and 2) a currency-issuing government can never default on debts issued in that currency. In a nutshell, MMT argues that contrary to popular belief, government spending must come before taxation and borrowing and it can never be the other way round.

    To see why this is so, ask yourself the following question: If the government didn’t spend the money first, then where else would the money to tax or borrow come from? A moments reflection should be enough to convince you that the question has no answer. Where else could the money possibly come from other than from the government that is solely responsible for issuing the money? An educated critic might respnd that private banks create money when they make loans, which is correct (although is again contrary to popular belief which holds that banks simply act as intermediaries that loan out other people’s deposits). But private banks are only allowed to do this under strict rules and by licence from the government, which effectively has a monopoly on money creation.

    So if taxes aren’t needed to fund public services then why tax at all? The answer is that taxes give money value by creating a demand for it. Governments levy taxes on their citizens and decree that these taxes can only be paid in the currency they issue, which ensures that people willingly give up goods, services, and labour-time in order to obtain this currency. The idea that governments need to create a demand for money seems absurd at first as we are used to there being a constant demand for money. But when you think about it, what’s actually absurd is that people willingly give up things they value to obtain some made-up numbers with zero intrinsic value. It is necessary for governments to imbue these made-up numbers with value, and they do this by levying taxes.

    Similarly, you may ask: Why do governments borrow, if they can simply spend money into existence? The thing to note here is that government ‘borrowing’ isn’t really borrowing, at least not in the sense that people normally understand the term. Rather, it is the process of issuing bonds – essentially, savings accounts – to the private sector. Most governments have a rule that any difference between government spending and taxation must be made up with borrowing (i.e. bond sales) of an equivalent amount; but this rule is self-imposed. There are various theories as to why governments really do this which I won’t go into here. But the key thing to note is that a currency-issuing government never needs to borrow money in order to make up a budget deficit.

    There are a few caveats that should be made at this point. First, the arguments sketched out above only apply to currency-issuing governments, so do not apply to local or regional administrations that really do have to obtain money before they can spend it. They also don’t apply to otherwise sovereign nations within currency unions such as the Euro-zone (which is one reason why joining the Euro is a terrible idea). Furthermore, they don’t apply when a currency is linked to a commodity such as gold, as was the case for countries on the gold standard. It is also possible for currency-issuing states to rack up debts in currencies they don’t issue and to then default on these debts. But the majority of nations today issue their own currency, are not on the gold standard, and do not have significant foreign-denominated debts; for these nations, the arguments above remain perfectly valid.

    MMT is an explanation of how government spending, taxation, and borrowing really work, and as such is in theory apolitical. In practice, however, those on the right of the political spectrum tend to despise these ideas and try to tear them down at every opportunity. One reason right-wingers hate MMT so much is that it cuts right through the narrative that governments have no money and therefore must obtain money from the private sector in order to pay for public services. This narrative is extraordinarily beneficial to the capitalist class, as whenever governments threaten to increase taxes on them they can threaten to leave the country and deprive the government of the money it needs. MMT demonstrates just how empty this threat is: a currency-issuing government simply doesn’t need rich people’s money.

    Another reason right-wingers hate MMT is that if taxes are not required to for raising revenue, that frees up taxes to be used for other purposes – in particular, wealth redistribution. Yet another reason is that MMT  cuts through the narrative that governments cannot do anything about unemployment. Maintaining a class of unemployed workers is essential to the functioning as capitalism, as it disciplines the working class and ensures wages don’t get too high so that capitalists can maintain their profits; this is what Marx referred to as the ‘reserve army of labour’. MMT economists often propose the introduction of a job guarantee, whereby the government provides a job to anyone who cannot find one in the private sector. A currency-issuing government is able to do this as it is not revenue constrained.

    MMT is the theory that naturally emerges once you accept that currency-issuing states can create money at will. Almost everyone accepts this basic premise but relatively few people seem willing to accept the conclusions that logically follow. As we have seen, this reluctance is political rather than economic. It is particularly important that socialists embrace the MMT narrative – primarily because it is true, but also because it neatly debunks so many erroneous economic arguments put forward by capitalists. Until we do, we will be confined to fighting economic battles on terms dictated by the ruling class, and these are battles we can never win.

  • Why does the West support Israel?

    Like most people, I have been horrified by the events that have unfolded in Gaza over the past two years. What has made these events so much more difficult to watch is the knowledge that they are not the result of some unavoidable natural disaster but instead are being perpetrated deliberately by a regime that seems hell-bent on complete annihilation of the Palestinian people. Worse, our government in the UK, instead of intervening to stop the slaughter, has instead helped speed it up by continuing arms sales to Israel – despite the fact that over half of people in the UK support the immediate cessation of these arms sales. So much for representative democracy! Which raises a question: If our government isn’t working on our behalf, then who is it working for?

    The obvious answer in this case is Israel – or more precisely, the Israel lobby. But why is the Israel lobby so powerful? Why does it have such a stranglehold over Western politicians? Clearly the West sees Israel as a strategic ally, as it gives Western countries a foothold in the Middle East, an oil-rich and strategically important region. But the support Western governments give Israel seems completely out of proportion to any benefit they get in return, and comes with massive downsides – in particular, the erosion of democratic legitimacy of these governments. In any case, the ‘strategic ally’ argument doesn’t explain why other countries in the region that are allied with the West, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, do not have equally powerful lobby groups.

    The answer may simply that Israel wants to commit genocide, it needs the support of Western countries to do this, so it lobbies (bribes) Western politicians to provide that support – be it arms sales, military support, diplomatic cover, or a combination of the three. Other countries could presumably do the same if they wanted to, but they don’t need to as they don’t want to commit genocide. What’s particularly striking is that when these bribes are exposed, the sums of money involved are often pathetically small. How is it so easy to influence Western politicians?! Although it’s tempting to respond that it’s because our politicians are spineless money-grubbing morons with zero principles – which of course is true – that doesn’t explain why there isn’t more public uproar over this. So what does?

    One factor, which applies especially in Europe, is holocaust guilt. This has been ably weaponised by the Israel lobby to shut down criticism. Another factor is that anyone who points out the power of the lobby will often be accused of buying into the ‘Jews control the world’ trope. This makes people wary of being labelled an antisemite – despite the fact that we are obviously talking specifically about Israel here, not Jews in general, and it is in fact considered antisemitic to conflate the two. In America, a major factor is the prominence of fundamentalist Christians who have a literal interpretation of the bible and actually support what Israel is doing. But perhaps the most important factor is that the general public is simply unaware of the bribery and corruption going on behind the scenes.

    There are reasons for optimism however. Israel is starting to lose the propaganda war, and it’s great to see. More and more people are waking up to the true nature of the Israel lobby and the power it has over Western governments. Even right-wing commentators like Tucker Carlson have begun to turn against Israel and the politicians who support it, as demonstrated by his recent interview with Ted Cruz. The UK Labour party is currently tanking in the polls and this is due in large part to its continued support for Israel. At some point, surely Western politicians will have to take public opinion into account if they want to stand any chance of re-election (assuming that they actually care about this – I am starting to wonder whether the UK Labour Party actually does). Until then though, our foreign policy will continue to be dictated by a small country in the Middle East and its out-sized lobby.