October 2022

There are over 13 million people in the UK living in relative poverty (which means in a household with income below 60% of the average income). This includes four million children and nearly 1.7 million pensioners. The figures are for the year to March last year, during which the total rose by half a million.

The Work and Pensions Minister described the situation as ‘wholly unacceptable’. This is right of course, but, like all politicians, she has no understanding of the causes. It’s due to capitalism, a system which, in the midst of potential abundance, relies on poverty and inequality as a means of coercing people into wage labour and hence exploitation.

Referring to employment as wage slavery is sometimes seen as an exaggeration. After all people who work for a wage or salary are not owned by other individuals and their labour is not enforced by law and violence.

Capitalism is seen as providing freedom. But is it anything more than an appearance of freedom? While you are free to walk away from your job, you can’t walk away from the need to survive, the need for food and shelter. That’s what makes you a wage slave. The system holds you in place not with chains of iron as in the past but with chains of necessity. Only the cooperative, moneyless, free access society that socialists advocate will remove those chains.

The UK government has just published the first ever Land Use Framework for England, in which joined-up thinking, better mapping tools, and free access to ownership data will supposedly rationalise legacy chaos so that “land can support house building and infrastructure, a resilient food system, climate mitigation and thriving nature.”

The framework enthuses about community consultation and partnerships but never, of course, questions the very idea of ownership. 10 percent of land is held in secret and just 8 percent of England is public access. Capitalists got their start by stealing the land off the people, worldwide, forcing generations to live as landless wage-slaves. We will never be free until we take the land and other resources back and abolish capitalist ownership laws.

… there existed an international organisation that could protect the world against the scourge of war, that acted in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, that settled international disputes by peaceful means.

Wait … there’s been one around since 1945, called the UN. But its solemn Charter, from which we nicked the verbiage above, is just fantasy. The real world under capitalism is better described by a nasty piece of work, Stephen Miller, who seems to have a big say in US policy at present:

“talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world … governed by strength … by force …by power.”

Yep, under capitalism. might is right.