… with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see”
Allowing him a little artistic licence, John Winston Lennon got it about right. We modern wage-workers are just as subjugated as any feudal serf – the difference being that we are coerced not by physical force but by market forces. While the owning class don’t screw us in broad daylight with openly exploitative forced labour, the capitalist wages system lets them achieve the same, if not better, result as any feudal lord – they end up with the loot without having to raise a finger for it.
Free? Us? Yeah, right!
The UN has reported that the ten hottest years on record have been in the last decade, including 2024.
Many temperature records were broken last year, and many countries saw a prolonged heatwave. And it’s not just temperatures: while some areas had a reduction in rainfall, in the Philippines there were six typhoons in a thirty-day period.
In the words of a researcher at Imperial College London: ‘Extreme weather is clearly causing incredible suffering in all corners of the world.’
Global heating and other forms of climate change are having devastating impacts on humanity and the planet we inhabit. Capitalism with its profit motive and imperative for growth are behind it.
Labour are in trouble for not delivering ‘growth’. But given that the planet is being consumed and the climate turned upside down by ever-increasing growth, why doesn’t political success lie with ‘no-growth’ policies?
Because capitalism needs ‘growth’ to deliver profit for that small percentage who own most of the planet’s wealth. Yet scientific research shows we can already produce enough to provide a comfortable living standard for everyone on the planet without overburdening the world’s ecosystem.
But this could only be implemented within a system of common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources with production geared to meet needs not profit. As the futurologist William Gibson said: ‘The future is already here. It’s just not being evenly distributed.’
According to a food waste non-profit group, in 2023 food retailers in the US ‘generated 4.45M tons of surplus food, nearly 35% of which went to landfill or was incinerated as waste.’ That 35% works out at around 9 lbs (4 kg) of food per person in America. With food prices sky high and 47 million Americans facing hunger, including 1 in 5 children, destroying food ‘surpluses’ could be regarded as a crime against humanity.
Yet today’s food industry exists not to provide food but to make a profit. US retailers do give away some surplus to charity, but they destroy far more to keep prices high. What an indictment of the capitalist economic system, to destroy what people need!
And what’s this year’s must-have gift that you should offer to the man or woman who has everything?
Well, it’s a no-brainer for the small minority that really do have everything. They’ll only be happy if they get exactly the same from you as you gave them last year – and the year before that.
And what was it?
Nothing, nowt, zilch. Except your consent to them living on the backs and the efforts of the vast majority. So easy to do, it doesn’t need any thought, or even any wrapping. Just imagine the happy smiling faces of the capitalists when they realise that you don’t yet realise that they’re mugging you every day. Ho bloody ho!
The twelve richest people in the US now have a combined worth of over $2 trillion (inequality.org, 3 December); that’s a 2 followed by twelve zeroes. The newest member of this exclusive club is Jensen Huang, boss of the software company Nvidia, whose wealth is now $122bn, over twenty times what it was four years ago.
This is at a time when there are over 36 million people in the US living in poverty by the official definition, including nearly ten million children. Over 650,000 are homeless, a figure that has increased for each of the last six years.
That’s capitalism for you: unbelievable wealth for a very few, varying degrees of poverty for many.
Astonishing news for Syrians that the 50-year tyranny of the Assad butchers seems to have collapsed amid a lightning offensive by coalition rebel forces. They have seized the opportunity to exploit Assad’s weakness in the absence of support from his military backers Hezbollah, crippled by Israeli strikes, and Russia, distracted in Ukraine.
The rebels have entered Damascus saying ‘After 50 years of oppression under Baath rule, and 13 years of crimes and tyranny… we announce today the end of this dark period and the start of a new era for Syria.’ At very best, Syrians can hope for the pseudo-democracy of capitalist wage-slavery. At worst, factional civil war as in Libya. They’re celebrating now, but the hangover is to come.
A 40th anniversary version of the Band Aid song ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ has been released to celebrate, as promoter Bob Geldof says, ‘keeping millions of people alive’.
This says everything. In a world with the capacity to feed the global population several times over and give everyone a decent comfortable life, capitalism’s system of producing food (and everything else) for profit means that we’re stuck where we were 40 years ago – ‘keeping people alive’ (with of course many not being kept alive).
Only a society of free access to all goods and services can solve hunger permanently, and end the need for charity of all kinds. Otherwise we’ll be stuck here forever
The 2024 report from the URI Global Rights Project reveals that ‘most countries around the world have failed to adequately protect the human rights of their citizens’. Countries with fail grades were more than double those with passes. 62% earned an F grade, while just 18% earned an A or B.
Hardly surprising for a global system built on wage-slavery. In any case ‘human rights’ don’t really make sense. There is the ‘right’ to bear arms, and the ‘right’ to kill apostates. But where is the ‘right to eat’ or the ‘right to a home’ or even the ‘right to peace’?
Never mind demanding concessionary ‘rights’ from the boss class. We need to seize our freedom through global revolution.
If you’ve being paying attention recently, you will have heard Labour ministers claiming that they are “fixing the foundations” of the economy. Convinced? Neither are we. Because the foundations (actually, foundation singular) of the current system is profit-seeking, which works best when it is able to screw the maximum possible amount of unpaid labour from the workers.
Like the previous lot (who were going to Build Back Better, remember?), Starmer, Reeves et al love a construction analogy, but daren’t let on that the capitalist edifice, foundation included, was built for the benefit of the capitalists, and that the role of government is to try to ensure continuing ‘peaceful enjoyment’ of said edifice for the minority class.
