In May a man in London died from silicosis caused by cutting kitchen worktops (i, 5 November).
The toxic dust produced by doing this work in small workshops with poor safety procedures has caused a number of other cases, mostly among migrants who have little choice but to work in such conditions. Stone slabs are popular in kitchen revamps, but they have given rise to serious health and safety concerns. Australia has banned engineered stone after nearly six hundred stonemasons have been diagnosed with silicosis since 2015.
The reason behind this is of course profit. Profit for the employer from selling the products, profit which is reduced by taking sensible safety precautions.
Loathsome, monstrous, bigoted, demagogic, sociopathic are among the words used to describe the man who has just won the American election. But it appears that that is what the majority of the Americans who took part in the election wanted and voted for.
What will Trump do? Many fear he will establish a dictatorship taking draconian measures, Mussolini or Hitler style, against all ‘progressive’ forces while promising to cure all ills. Such a prospect is dispiriting for socialists and is aeons away from the world society we advocate.
But we would not have supported the ‘lesser evil’ of a Harris victory and we believe that the well entrenched capitalist democracy in the US will prevent Trump riding roughshod over all opposition.
The row about ‘reparatory justice’ for colonial slavery has rolled round again. Estimates of potential costs for using that expensive word ‘sorry’ vary from billions to tens of trillions. Up to 20% of UK wealth is slavery-related, but today’s rich beneficiaries certainly won’t be giving up their landed estates. Instead they insist that any reparations come out of ‘public money’.
Since ‘public money’ ultimately comes from capitalist profits, this amounts to a plan by the slaveholder descendants to spread the reparation cost across the entire owning class – like sharing a restaurant bill among 10 people, when only two of them ate.
Don’t feel sorry for the capitalists though. They all get rich through our wage slavery. Socialists don’t want reparations for that. We want revolution.
According to a recent World Bank report, global poverty reduction has more or less come to a standstill, with 2020–30 ‘set to be a lost decade’. One person in twelve in the world is in extreme poverty (living on less than $2.15 per day).
Two-thirds of the extreme poor live in sub-Saharan Africa, where in addition nearly everyone who is exposed to an extreme weather event will struggle to recover from it.
If current developments continue, it will take decades to eradicate extreme poverty. This in a world that wastes massive resources on wars and all the paraphernalia of the money system, where producing enough for all is achievable now.
With less than 3 weeks to go, the American presidential election is neck and neck. Trump is favoured by workers from poorer backgrounds with lower levels of education and employment prospects. Harris is supported by workers whose social and educational background enables them to expect better paid wage slavery.
Trump is seen as an unspeakable, bigoted monster by Harris supporters. Harris is seen as a ‘soft touch’ for America’s ‘enemies’ by Trump supporters. Whichever wins will take over the running of the capitalist system that operates, in the US as elsewhere, in the profit-making interests of a tiny minority. The direct opposite of the no-profit, production-for-need society that socialists aim to see established on a world scale.
The capitalist media are featuring glowing comments about Alex Salmond who died over lunch at a conference abroad. What a ‘monumental figure’ (Starmer) who ‘inspired a generation’ (Swinney)!
Socialists have a different view. Salmond was the purveyor of a poisonous flag-waving nationalism which should have no place anywhere in the world, and helped to perpetuate the myth that workers have common cause with the owners of the country in which they happen to be born. His ‘legacy’ is as a contributor to the erection at Holyrood of yet one more greasy pole to test the climbing skill of the politicians who run things on behalf of those owners.
When people learned how to produce (and store) food surpluses, it was a huge advance for humanity. Yet it broke the bonds of communal society, paving the way for a minority to take control of others by grabbing the surpluses and developing a new institution, the state, to keep the majority down by force and/or ideology.
The forms the state takes may have shifted, but whenever and wherever it appears, its purpose remains the same – to protect the minority’s position against internal and external threats. Instead of support for one state or another, for one nationalism against another, we urge you to consider our no-state solution. It’s the only guarantee of peace for us all.
While heated speculation on social media about the behaviour of Starmer is occupying many, the real consequences of capitalism are to be seen in the devastation of untold innocent lives in the conflicts currently continuing across the world. Men, women and children bombed in civilian residential areas, as working class soldiers die as cannon fodder to defend capitalist interests.
Those benefitting from access to oil and from the production of armaments will be content with the profits that continue to be generated from these sources. Production for profit and sales continue regardless of the murderous nature of it all. Politicians on a power trip claim it’s all to save their ‘nation’.
Workers! End the killing spree now. Socialism not capitalism.
It’s bonkers to pay farmers not to grow food, right? Wrong. It’s capitalist economics.
Now that goes for crypto too. Trump and his buddies have the hots for crypto, but Texan republicans are really feeling the heat (Economist, 17 September). Why? Because Texas has an isolated and creaky power grid which can’t cope with crypto mining demands, so now the power company is paying these miners not to mine during summer surge pricing peaks. When prices were high in August 2023, Riot Platforms, the biggest bitcoin mining company, earned $8.6m for mining, and over $30m from the grid for not mining. So they’re cashing in on the state’s energy crisis.
Still think capitalism is the best of all possible systems?
Everybody can now see that, under its present government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel is a rogue state on the rampage even from the point of view of the capitalist world order. Established as a state to protect the members of a particular minority, it now seeks to defend its existence through waging a ruthless war against other terrorists in the region, regardless of how many ordinary people are killed in the process. Their lives don’t matter because they are not members of the same minority group.
Let this be a warning of where nationalism and its mindset can lead – “my” nation uber alles. It is the opposite of everything socialists stand for: one world, one people.
