It’s going to be Red Nose Day again and you can’t switch on the TV without being reminded that celebrities will be wearing funny noses to collect money to improve the lives of poor children. Does it do any good? A little maybe. But in the end charity can only scratch the surface of the poverty problem.
The Oxfam food policy director Hanna Saarinen, said: ‘We need to reimagine a new global food system to really end hunger; one that works for everyone.’ But this is not feasible in the current system. We need a whole different society, dedicated to catering for the needs of everyone, not producing profit for the tiny minority – one that will render Red Nose Days unnecessary.
Global heating is usually seen as a matter of air temperature, but marine heatwaves, where the sea gets much warmer, also occur. Recent research has shown that there were over three times as many marine heatwaves in 2023 and 2024 than in any other year (Guardian, 1 March).
As a result, storms on land are more severe and affect more people. Commercial fishing is harmed, with anchovies, for instance, moving outside their normal areas. Whales and dolphins are more likely to be stranded as they swim closer to shores.
Capitalism’s impact on CO2 emissions and hence the climate is not restricted to the air we breathe, but affects other parts of our planetary home as well.
Many people appear to be shocked and affronted by the behaviour of those who currently control state power in the US.
They seem to have ‘blackmailed’ Ukraine to force them into an agreement about rare earths. They claim that they will take over Greenland ‘one way or the other’ (for raw materials and ‘defence’ it seems) and will ‘reclaim’ the Panama Canal – presumably by armed force in both cases, if necessary.
This is business as usual for any capitalist state – and that business is the protection of trade routes, markets and sources of industrial inputs. But for now the gloves have come off, there is less pretence than usual.
A true reflection of the economic system that it serves.
The current argument about spending money on ‘defence’ highlights one aspect of the waste of resources, skills and energies throughout the world under capitalism. Allocating an ‘extra £13.4bn’ to weaponry would mean a reduction in aid some of the most poverty-stricken countries.
This is a prime example of how vast resources go into activities that have no socially useful purpose. Apart from the war machine, there’s advertising, marketing, law, charities, security, and all the colossal expenditure of time, materials and resources around money and buying and selling.
Hence the urgent need to replace all this with a moneyless, wageless society of free access organised on the basis of from each according to ability to each according to need.
Our lives are dominated by the fundamental aim of the capitalist system of production – profit for the owners.
A once-progressive system, it has promoted such a huge increase in industrial and agricultural productivity that every person in the world could now have access to all the goods and services needed for a reasonable life.
But a reasonable life for all is denied because the system is driven by the profit motive. If there is no prospect of a profit, there will be no production.
We would be stupid to allow this to continue. But continue it will, until the world’s workers decide to end capital’s domination by turning production for profit into production for use.
Anyone who thinks humans are condemned to nasty and brutish lives in capitalism, because human nature is supposedly nasty and brutish, should note what happens when people go walking on a seashore and accidentally get cut off by the advancing tide.
Do they drown, because nasty and brutish humans couldn’t care less? No, lifeboat volunteers go out in all weathers to rescue them, as happened this month to three students. In January, the RNLI rescued more students in heaving seas during Storm Éowyn. ‘The students were reportedly “extremely grateful” and said they could not believe all the crew were unpaid volunteers.’
Humans help each other whenever they can. That’s why socialism will work.
It’s capitalism that’s nasty and brutish. Let’s hope it’s also short.
The boxer John Cooney died from a brain injury after losing last week’s super-featherweight bout in Belfast. The spectacle of boxing is symptomatic of a society that fosters reckless individualism and violence and calls it ‘sport’. There was no condemnation of this organised brutality, just empty talk of how sad and unfortunate it was.
How symptomatic of a society that presents as entertainment and ‘natural’ the spectacle of two human beings beating the hell out of each other. Never has it been more urgent to create a new society without pervasive insecurity and the cheap thrills offered as a way of patching it over – a society of cooperation and reciprocity, where capital no longer controls people’s lives.
Chris Philp MP reckons that ‘we have got [to] be competitive and it means we have got to work hard. As a country we need to up our game’. What he meant was ‘we have to get you plebs to work even harder’ so that the owning class can up their game on the international market.
Nine million working-age adults are currently not working, he said. You might think this has something to do with unemployment and the state of the job market. But politicians naturally lay the blame on those who are suffering and have no say in the economy.
Our advice to you: tell the owners that the game’s up and help us to abolish the wages system!
There is no doubt that Donald Trump is an unpleasant individual. Many people call him racist, sexist and narcissistic – with good reason. His attitude towards the environment, immigration and the under-privileged is awful.
But social divisions, racism and environmental destruction all existed before Trump’s presidency and they will continue after it. While his language is particularly nasty, like all capitalist politicians he represents a brutal system that puts profits before people. A different president might have been a ‘lesser evil’ but they would not have ended the problems inflicted by the profit system.
We don’t need to get rid of a particular politician or party. We need to abolish the whole capitalist system and the profit-seeking force that drives it.
Back at work on Monday 6 January? Bet it already feels like months ago, and months more before your next decent break. We call ourselves free citizens in a free democracy, but there’s no ‘free’ about it. Food isn’t free, housing and other essentials aren’t free (they would be in socialism), and neither are we. Instead of living our best lives, we are chained by rents, mortgages and bills to the treadmill of wage-slavery.
It will hardly warm your heart to learn that FTSE 100 bosses made more money by noon on 6 January than the average worker (ie, you) makes in a year. You do the work, the rich get richer. Capitalism is rigged. Time for a revolution.
