World Socialist Radio

This episode explores how the word “revolution” has been overused and misunderstood, much like marketing buzzwords such as “game-changer.” The speaker argues that revolutions are a normal and essential part of human progress — from mastering fire to agriculture, industry, and modern technologies like AI and genetics. Societal revolutions happen gradually and often unnoticed, just as we don’t feel...

This episode argues that war and large-scale violence are not primitive constants built into human nature, but rather they became widespread only with the rise of hierarchical, agrarian and class-based societies. For most of human prehistory — during the long era when humans lived as small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands — there is scant evidence of systemic war. It was only with the advent of...

Proposals for “free buses” under capitalism—like the plan by New York politician Zohran Mamdani—paint a misleading picture: there’s no such thing as “free” in a system based on profit. While fare-free public transport would indeed make travel easier and lower emissions, the column warns that funding it via higher local taxes essentially subsidises employers by reducing the cost of living, which in...

This is a talk that was given on 31 Oct 2025 on a general maritime theme. There's no particular point being made, just some observations on a number of vaguely related news stories from earlier in the year. World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, fa...

This Socialist Standard article “Pathfinders – Basic Skills” critiques claims that declining literacy and “cancel culture” stem from abandoning phonics, arguing instead that capitalism’s chaotic priorities—not conspiracies—drive educational failures. It notes that both US and UK literacy levels are poor, worsened by social media and AI, which promote effortless but shallow learning. The author hum...

This episode examines how UFO narratives have been shaped by secrecy, misinterpretation, and capitalist interests. It discusses the BBC4 documentary “What Are UFOs?” , which revisits pilot Alex Dietrich’s 2004 “tic tac” sighting and the 2015 “gimbal” video, both later explained by experts as camera and motion distortions of ordinary aircraft. Many so-called “unidentified” incidents, the article no...

Even in a socialist society the legacy of capitalism would pose deep challenges—particularly in areas tied to personal behavior, health and consumption. The episode points to obesity, processed foods, addictions, pollution, synthetic drugs and industrial toxins as examples of harms created under capitalism, and raises the question of how a socialist world would responsibly manage them without exac...

This episode criticises Kirk’s activist legacy, arguing that his aggressive right-wing tactics — including demonisation of queer people, unions, and students — laid the grounds for the backlash that culminated in his assassination. It frames his death not simply as violence against a provocateur, but as the inevitable consequence of a combative ideology that treats politics as warfare rather than...

This episode criticises how Labour and other self-described “socialist” parties trumpet the label without a coherent understanding of socialism, arguing that most of their proposed reforms—such as nationalisation, higher taxes, expanded public services—do nothing to challenge capitalism’s fundamental logic of production for profit. It describes a “Your Party” meeting, where despite participants’ r...

From the October 2025 issue of The Socialist Standard , written by Robin Cox Nationalism is a product of capitalism: it emerges to glue culturally diverse societies under a shared identity, but in fact tends to erase local diversity and enable state control. This episode traces nationalism’s rise alongside capitalism’s growth (via literacy, print culture, mobility), shows how “traditions” are ofte...

From the September 2025 issue of The Socialist Standard : This article warns of the growing crisis posed by generative AI’s propensity for “hallucinations”—fabrication of false or harmful content presented as fact. It highlights alarming examples, including a case where Google’s AI falsely informed council-house tenants they could be evicted to make way for asylum seekers—dismissed by a housing so...

Creating an egalitarian society through a redistribution of wealth within capitalism is a pipe-dream as it goes against the logic of the system. Capitalism is based on a minority owning the means of wealth production and on these being used to generate profits that are accumulated as more wealth for the owners. Inequality of wealth ownership and the tendency for the wealthy to get wealthier are bu...

Labour didn’t fundamentally reform capitalism. Instead, capitalism reshaped Labour, gradually pulling it away from egalitarian ideals toward embracing profit-driven policies and business-friendly governance. Originally formed in 1906 as a trade union pressure group in parliament, in 1918 the Labour Party adopted as its long-term aim a nationalised economy. This, together with a redistribution of w...

We love watching cop shows. The bad guy gets caught, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and law and order are secured for another day, again. The detective’s a heavy drinking, chain-smoking, emotionally wrecked mess, but somehow they get the bad guy. Usually some rich, powerful bastard who almost gets away with it, but justice wins in the final act. We get to feel good. Satisfied. But that’s not...

A short story about planned obsolescence, free market ideology and everyday interactions. Written by Hud and taken from the September 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard. World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are ta...

The Socialist Party and the World Socialist Movement affirm that capitalism is incapable of meaningful change in the interests of the majority; that the basis of exploitation is the wages/money system. The Socialist Standard is proud to have kept alive the original idea of what socialism is -- a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless society or, defined positively, a democracy in which free and...

Taken from the July 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard. Walter Kendall advanced the view that Bolshevism-Leninism was something that was alien to the formally democratic traditions of the working class movement in Britain, introduced from an economically and politically backward part of the world where conditions were quite different. Collins, writing as a Leninist, argues that in fact those w...

Capitalism is not just a class war; it is a war of the mind. It demands conformity, punishes difference, and uses trauma as a tool of control. Still, resistance keeps bubbling up. Neurodivergent people often develop ways of thinking that refuse to follow capitalist logic, question authority, and imagine new ways of living. Taken from the August 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard. World Sociali...

Apple have always been known for being control freakish and attempting to lock their customer base into their own exclusive ecosystem, including a special patent-protected charging cable that no one else is allowed to make and which doesn’t work with any third-party device. People say that capitalism drives brilliant technical innovation, but when you look at the way this happens, ‘brilliant’ is n...

The Spending Revue: Governments can’t control the way that the capitalist economy works. They can, however, decide how they are going to spend the money that they have or plan to have. This is the annual budget. From time to time, in Britain, the government takes a longer view and sets out their spending plans over a period of three or four years. Did Marx respect the rich?: ‘Even Marx respected t...

A criticism of modern-day would be vanguard parties, and a comparison of the vanguardist position with what Marx actually wrote. From the July 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard. Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

With characteristic opportunism, Nigel Farage, sniffing political power, is seeking to present himself as the leader of a kind of neo-Labour Party who will fix everything Labour has always promised to fix for workers but never has. In the end however, he is only an extreme example of the opportunism inherent in all capitalist political leaders as they seek to control a system that breeds economic...

Healthcare under capitalism and socialism. Article from the July 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard. Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

On cooperation, selfish competition and the plasticity of human behaviour. Article from the July 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard. Featuring music: 'Pushing P (Instrumental)' by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

A description of the broad features of socialism, a society of free and democratic co-operation. Excerpt of a longer article taken from the May 2025 edition of The Socialist Standard. World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc...