Critics have accused the Sainsbury supermarket chain of ‘profiting from high prices’. Oh really, you don’t say!

This BBC article is typical of many media reports about price-gouging or ‘greedflation’ at the moment. It reflects a widespread impression that there is a ‘reasonable capitalism’ where companies pay reasonable wages and make a reasonable profit, and an ‘unreasonable capitalism’ where there are price-gougers, snake-oil charmers and rip-off merchants who are just out for profit, any way they can get it.

Capitalism is not ‘reasonable’ in this way. Reasonable firms go bust. Only the most ruthless survive, and to survive, they have to keep maximising profits, regardless of the human or environmental cost.

Lots of people think that global population is too high and that, therefore, a global system of sharing resources (socialism) is impossible. But a new study by War on Want finds that the world currently produces 2.6 times more than the average person needs. That’s a global overproduction of food.

But instead of this making everyone on the planet fat, 2.3 billion people – 1 in 7 – actually go hungry. Why? Because food production is monopolised by a few agribusinesses that continually restrict supply in order to keep prices and profits high. Capitalism can only sustain itself by imposing artificial scarcity.

Meanwhile, populations are actually stable or falling in most countries. So world population is no barrier to socialism.

This is the $400m Serene, more of a palace than a yacht, featuring a giant indoor swimming pool, a snow room, children’s playrooms, two helipads, an underwater viewing room and a $450m Leonardo painting.

It’s owned by the Saudi royal family, who drive gold-plated Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, have gigantic palaces and Louix XIV chateaux, throw $50m parties, and are 5 times richer than Elon Musk and Bill Gates put together. Oh, and they’re 16 times richer than the British royals. Had enough yet? Here’s more.

When you vote for capitalism, this is what you’re voting for.

Just recently a mobile phone company accused rival operators of swindling their customers by deliberately failing to move them onto cheaper tariffs once they’d paid in full for their phones. Naturally the other phone companies protested that the accusations were ‘misleading’ and ‘confusing’ (but, you notice, not ‘untrue’).

Capitalist firms bickering over altruistic concern for their customers? Surely not. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx relates how big factory owners pressed for health & safety measures which small factory owners couldn’t afford, not through concern for workers’ welfare, but simply to drive the other firms out of business. Here, the intention is similar, to stop rivals getting an unfair advantage. It’s backstabbing dressed up as customer care.