This book wasn’t one that I ever expected to write, although I’m glad I have, and it’s only thanks to the persistence and patience of my colleagues at Polity – George Owers and Julia Davies – that it’s come about at all. Keir Milburn and Alex Williams both read and commented on a first draft and were insightful and supportive as ever.

The phrase ‘twenty-first-century socialism’ obviously isn’t one that I coined: it was being used in various publications from the late 1990s onwards, and probably much earlier. I used this phrase polemically once or twice before, but the first time I used it as the title for anything, it was at the behest of Craig Gent, who asked me to write a short piece on the topic for Novara Media that in some ways ended up becoming the intellectual kernel of this book. In broader terms, the present volume draws on arguments that I’ve made in earlier, more academic work, such as my books Anticapitalism and Culture and, most importantly, Common Ground. Perhaps more immediately, it draws on commentary that I’ve written for publications such as Soundings, the Guardian, Red Pepper and New Statesman over many years – but above all for Open Democracy. Perhaps most directly it draws on the pamphlet ‘Reclaim Modernity’, which I wrote with Mark Fisher and which was published by the think tank and lobby group Compass in 2014. I’m grateful to all these outlets and to my editors, readers and collaborators there.

More than any of those sources, however, some of the book’s key sections on the nature of capitalism and socialism and on the defining features of recent and contemporary history draw on my many years of teaching undergraduates at the University of East London. Teaching students on degree programmes in cultural studies, sociology, music, media studies, politics, history and English – trying to equip with them with a comprehensive and comprehensible account of how the world works and how it got that way – has often been a challenge, but always a rewarding one. It’s a matter of great regret that most of those degree programmes no longer exist, but the many students who passed through them are all owed a debt of gratitude for helping me to shape and hone much of the account and analysis offered here. So are my colleagues at the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at UEL, which thankfully persists in its commitment to public discussion, freed education and political analysis as well as to exploring the boundaries of cultural studies and cultural theory.

Above all, of course, like most writers, I owe a permanent debt of gratitude to my immediate friends and family for their ongoing support and inspiration. Jo Littler and our children – Robin and Isla – make every day special and make the future matter more than ever. It would really be impossible to list all the friends and colleagues who contribute to and stimulate my political thinking every day, but over the past few years friends connected to and taking part in the Culture, Power, Politics seminar series, as well as organisations and projects such as Compass, Momentum, The World Transformed, the New Economy Organisers Network and #ACFM have all been crucial sources of insight and interlocution. Many thanks to all of them.

‘Socialism’ is a word that was coined almost two hundred years ago.¹ In practice, it can mean many different things. But, in principle, it means something simple. It is the belief that the quality of human life can be improved if people are enabled and encouraged to cooperate for the common good, rather than being forced to compete among themselves for access to resources, power and status.

So why should anyone believe that this nineteenth-century philosophy could have the answer to twenty-first-century problems?

Because our major problems today have exactly the same cause as the major problems faced by people in the early 1800s: industrial pollution, urban squalor, growing inequality, social insecurity, a widespread sense that society was falling apart and that nobody knew what to do about it, while a few were getting very rich as a result.² Sounds familiar?

The Cause of the Trouble …

The most obvious cause of such problems is, always, technological change. The Industrial Revolution swelled the cities of Britain, poured smoke into the atmosphere and spelled the end of an older, agricultural way of life. In recent decades, the revolution in information technologies has made it possible for jobs to be relocated from one side of the planet to another at the click of a mouse, producing insecurity and inequality all around the world. Millions have been forced to migrate or reinvent themselves in the search for steady wages. Global trade – dependent on road, sea and air transport – has accelerated to the point where climate change threatens the very viability of life on Earth.³

But social changes like these are never simply the direct effect of new technologies. It was never inevitable that the invention of steam power, canals and railways would lead to grinding poverty in the cities of northern England. In the 1960s, many commentators assumed that the development of computing and robotics would make us all richer and happier: we would work shorter hours, communicate instantly, and be free to fill our days as we please, because machines would be doing most of the work.⁴ Things could have turned out that way; but they didn’t.

In each case, the way things have actually turned out has been the outcome of technological change taking place under very specific circumstances. Some people have made themselves rich and powerful mostly by using those technologies in order to make things and sell them.

But the best technology in the world cannot enable an individual entrepreneur, or a chief executive, to make and sell things without help from other people. Those other people have to be paid. And, if they are paid too much, it will not be possible for the entrepreneur or corporation to accumulate vast profits. So, for the most part, corporations and their chief executives used new technologies to try to keep down their wage bills, at their own workers’ expense, whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Capitalism

For all this to happen, the social circumstances had to be right. There had to be a small group of people rich enough to use the new technologies in these ways. There had to be large numbers of people around who had no choice but to work for the wages that they were offered. There had to be a whole legal system in place, and a culture, that treated the accumulation of vast profits by private individuals or corporations as legitimate, legal, and morally acceptable. These conditions actually wouldn’t have obtained in most human societies that we know to have existed since Homo sapiens first appeared as a species. But they did in many European countries by the end of the eighteenth century. And they soon would almost everywhere else.

There is a name for this specific set of social circumstances: ‘capitalism’. This term refers to a situation in which private individuals or corporations are allowed to use any means available to them – short of openly violent coercion – to accumulate vast profits from the sale of commodities, even if, in the process, they are paying workers very low wages, wrecking the local environment, or forcing people to change their way of life against their will.

This was already happening in the early nineteenth century and is still going on today. It is in the pursuit of unlimited profits that corporations undertake fracking, chop down rainforests, and belch carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. When companies relocate manufacturing plants from one country to another – disrupting communities, spreading insecurity throughout the working population of a whole region – they very rarely do it because they absolutely have to in order to make any profits at all. They do it because, however much profit they are making at that moment, they will make even more if they move.

Why Is It Called ‘Capitalism’?

‘Capital’, in the economic sense of the term, refers to wealth that exists in a form that allows it to be invested, or lent (and often this means the same thing), in the expectation of returning a profit: a profit that will take the form of more capital.⁵ ‘Capitalism’ is a word that only started to be used towards the end of the nineteenth century, but the term ‘capitalist’ had already been around for decades, designating someone who profits from his or her ability to invest capital. And, at its simplest, ‘capitalism’ can mean only this: it can just be a word for what capitalists do, which is to invest capital with the aim of increasing their total stock of capital. As we will see shortly, ‘capitalism’ can also refer to a whole way of ordering society, and to a set of values and beliefs about how society should be ordered. But at its most basic it can simply refer to a type of activity: investing capital with the aim of accumulating profit in the form of more capital.

This is what economists call ‘capital accumulation’. This isn’t the same thing as merely making profits. If you generate a lot of profit, but you use it all to finance a luxurious lifestyle – or even just to keep yourself and your employees comfortable – then you are not necessarily doing capitalism. Capitalism is what you are doing once the accumulation of further capital becomes the principal objective of your activities. So ‘capitalism’ can just mean the pursuit of capital accumulation through investment.

But nothing is that simple. For one thing, even before Karl Marx (the greatest analyst of capitalism in the nineteenth century)⁶ began writing, economists were clear that the profitability of such investment was generally dependent on capitalists employing workers, while paying them as little as possible for their work.⁷ This doesn’t mean that every business owner who employs a couple of dozen people is an enemy of the people. In fact it doesn’t mean that such a person is necessarily a capitalist: if he or she is not engaged in a relentless pursuit of unlimited profit, then it might be that he or she is not really practising capitalism at all. On the other hand, it does mean that, even today, every profitable ‘investment’ that is derived from the pursuit of capital accumulation is always dependent on the exploitation of someone’s labour somewhere. If your pension fund owns shares in Apple or Facebook – two organisations that are absolutely committed to capital accumulation – then the profits that accrue from those investments don’t simply materialise out of thin air. They are dependent on the labour of actual human beings: assembling phones in China, coding in Bangalore, moderating ads from Menlo Park.⁸