One piece of legislation that fell by the wayside when the election was called was a bill to ban what are known as ‘no-fault evictions’. These involve a landlord giving tenants notice, even though they have paid their rent.
In the north-west of England, such evictions have increased by more than a fifth over the first three months of the year compared to the same period last year. A charity in Manchester has been handing out sleeping bags to families facing homelessness in these circumstances. ‘People are coming to us with suitcases and belongings after being evicted,’ said one manager.
Providing decent housing for everyone is perfectly feasible, but not in a society based on the profit motive.
You’ve heard of ‘climate justice’ but what about ‘epistemic justice’? This is the idea put forward by international food experts that knowledge should be democratised so that global food systems can incorporate ‘traditional, Indigenous, and place-based knowledges into decision-making processes to address blind spots in current food system policies and actions’.
Nothing wrong with this proposal, except that it won’t work. Capitalist production is a secretive, competitive affair pursued only for profit. It’s not interested in being open, collaborative, democratic or even in feeding people. Its decision-making processes are a private matter. Its blind spots prefer to remain blind.
What else would you expect in a chaotic rollercoaster of boom & slump market fluctuations? Ditch capitalism first, then let’s talk.
The contaminated blood scandal is a perfect mirror of the society we live in. It is a society ruled by the god money.
Why were 30,000 people infected with hepatitis and HIV? Simple. The infected blood was collected ‘on the cheap’ from suspect sources, administered on the cheap without proper testing and then its victims were ignored because it was not going to be cheap to compensate them.
Speed the day when we have a moneyless society where resources used and work carried out correspond to human needs and not to the gods of money and profit.
Using his brilliant observational skills over the last weeks and months, Sunak has concluded that Britain faces dangerous, transformational times. Who’d have thought it? But don’t worry – he has a plan to ensure a secure future for us all, should he win the next election. Presumably, it will also result in fairness and opportunities for everyone.
And squadrons of pigs are preparing for take-off too.
But let’s not be harsh on Rishi alone – Davey, Starmer and the rest will promise anything to slime their way into administering the system for the owning class. The socialist, in comparison, can only promise to keep exposing the lie that capitalism is the best that humanity can achieve.
The data platform Statista recently published a list of how wealthy a person supposedly needs to be in order to rank in the richest one percent of the population in different countries.
Examples include $12.9m in Monaco, $5.8m in the US and ‘only’ $3.1m in the UK.
But the real question is why such a distinction exists between a tiny elite and the vast majority of people. Even more so when you realise that the very richest don’t get so rich by their own hard work. They live off the unpaid labour of their employees, the working class, who really do have to work hard to get by, and are exploited by the parasite capitalist class.
We keep hearing about ‘neoliberalism’ (where private firms operate with little or no government interference, meaning increased insecurity for workers) as though it were something new. It isn’t. It was practised through the 19th and a good part of the 20th century, when it was simply called the free market.
For a time governments changed tack and practised increased intervention to try and ‘tame’ capitalism – to make it less prone to crises. It didn’t work so they moved back to what they had before, except they gave it a new name: neoliberalism.
But it’s not neoliberalism that’s the problem, it’s capitalism. It’s not a change of policy that’s required, but a change of socio-economic system.
The news that Tory MP Richard Drax is set to make £3 million by selling his family’s former slave plantation will raise righteous wrath among Barbadians and many others who think today’s heirs should not benefit from their ancestors’ barbarity.
But look around you. Little of the world’s wealth belongs to you, because by a whole series of acts of barbarity, the ancestors of today’s rich grabbed control of the land all around the world, leaving your ancestors starving and desperate. Desperate enough to become factory fodder, wage slaves, whose sole job was to make the rich richer. And now you are part of the new generation of wage slaves, while inequality has gone stratospheric.
Let’s abolish the barbarity of capitalism!
This old guff has been churned out again recently, this time on behalf of the president of the EU Council (press release, 19 March).
But peace can never be guaranteed as long as the world’s productive resources remain in the hands of the capitalist minority. Because the factions within that minority will always be forced to vie for control of resources, markets and trade routes. And when it comes to it, out will come the weapons.
No point wishing things were otherwise. It’s the rule of their deadly game, a game prepared well in advance by their nationalist poison.
So if you want peace, you must prepare for socialism.
A recent piece in the i newspaper dealt with a 78-year-old widow, who retired when she was sixty after working for over forty years, but now can barely get by, living on her state pension of £203 a week. Her energy bills in winter are nearly £80 a week.
She cannot afford to go for lunch with her friends, and says that ‘Having two coffees a day is my one luxury.’ She has not had a holiday in decades. She cannot go out as much as she would like, and this damages her mental health. Of course there are many, many others in a similar predicament.
Just one worker’s life, but it says so much.
UK government figures for 2023 show 12 million people suffering food insecurity and being unable to heat their homes. A report by Which? magazine shows a sharp increase in households defaulting on ‘essential payments’ and one in six skipping meals.
Although millions do keep their heads above water, living reasonably comfortable lives, this is usually at the cost of working hard for a lifetime, never being free of financial insecurity.
We cannot trust the anarchic, irrational market system to fulfil the most basic human needs such as decent housing and food for everyone. Dedicated to producing profit for the tiny minority, it is not designed to cater for the needs of the majority, let alone for the most deprived members of that majority.
