In a recent letter to a national newspaper, somebody wrote ‘Christmas is a celebration of capitalism and not spending is blasphemy’. This observation captures well the true ‘spirit of Christmas’.
Any religious message has been truly eclipsed by the need of the system we live in to produce and sell goods and services for profit, the more the better, whether these serve any useful purpose or not.
Christmas presents a golden opportunity for capitalism to follow its ’grow-or-die’ imperative and drive its never-ending merry-go-round faster and faster. It will carry on doing so until the majority of the world’s workers decide to replace it and opt for a moneyless, wageless world of production for use and free access to all goods and services – the society we call socialism.
US research shows that 5 days before the Hamas attack on Israel, there was a very large increase in short-selling of Israeli company stock on the New York stock exchange, ie, people betting money that Israeli shares would drop significantly in value. Typically as a trader you would only short-sell a company if you happened to know in advance that something disastrous was about to happen to them.
The trading of 227,820 shares in the Israel Exchange Traded Fund was orders of magnitude higher on 2 October than the usual 2,000 shares.
So Hamas not only instigated a blood-soaked holocaust, it looks like they might have cleaned up on the stock market while they were at it.
China is positioning itself as Gaza peace broker. Earlier this year it also underwrote a rapprochement between sworn enemies Iran and Saudi Arabia, and last week hosted a Middle East summit. Why the interest? Because it wants Middle East oil and gas, while aiming to eclipse the USA’s control by offering a ‘business first, values free’ approach which local rulers, sick of US sanctions and/or pettifogging interference in their Orwellian domestic regimes, will find hard to resist.
The Chinese ‘Communist’ Party is not concerned with the plight of innocent Palestinian or Israeli workers. This is a power play to determine ‘the principles and the rules that are going to run the world order in the 21st century’ (tinyurl.com/3parwvry).
The man who bombed neutral Cambodia ‘back to the Stone Age’ and then got the Nobel Peace Prize, prompting songwriter Tom Lehrer to declare ‘satire is obsolete’, has finally died at 100, an age never reached by his tens of thousands of helpless victims. He backed Chile’s murderous Pinochet regime and was implicated in Operation Condor, a South American mass-assassination programme. His world view was ‘shaped by pessimism and a dim view of humanity’ where ‘power is the best aphrodisiac.’
Our only regret is that we can’t collectively dance on his grave. Instead we make the case for post-capitalist common ownership, where war will not exist, and power-crazed psychopaths like Kissinger will never be created.
We hadn’t either until last week. It seems to have slipped across the Atlantic like the Black Friday confest and it falls on 28 November. The charitable foundations of zillionaires such as Gates and the Heinz family are backing it to promote ‘radical generosity’.
We won’t be hanging out the bunting on the day. We say that the working class has been radically generous to capitalists for far too long, drudging away to create the wealth that funds the lives and charities of Gates and his ilk. So our response to Giving Tuesday, which also originated out west: “You can stick it where the sun don’t shine”.
It has become common recently to talk of a ‘cost-of-living crisis’ in the UK and elsewhere, as people’s incomes struggle to keep up with price increases.
A dramatic example of this is the recent Autumn Statement from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that two million households in Britain have in recent months turned off their fridge or freezer in order to save energy and money. And a quarter of low-income households have run up debts to pay for food, while a third sold belongings to raise cash.
This in the fifth richest country in the world (measured by total household wealth)! Such is capitalism, and this is why it needs to be replaced.
So refugees and asylum seekers cannot be sent to Rwanda. That’s what the Supreme Court has ruled. While that’s something those potentially affected will celebrate and socialists will welcome, we would see it as the best outcome if it raised the whole question of borders and states as a means of controlling and defining people and fuelling nationalistic and racial divisions.
While it’s true that to demand to abolish borders and states will seem to many as unthinkable as it was once to ask to abolish slavery, slavery was finally abolished. Borders and states can be too – but only as part of the abolition of money and wages and the whole of the profit system, since they are all part of the intricate jigsaw that makes up capitalism (see this review)
Sudan has fallen off the mainstream news agenda. This despite the fact, as reported by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), that ‘some 14 million children in Sudan are in urgent need of life-saving humanitarian assistance’ and ‘many of them are living in a state of perpetual fear – fear of being killed, injured, recruited or used by armed actors’.
Around 10,000 civilians have been killed and close to 6 million people forced to flee their homes with horrific reports of rape and sexual violence. The struggle, as wars generally are in capitalism, is largely over resources and strategic positions.
Funny that this conflict isn’t getting the same attention or protests as the ones in Ukraine and Gaza.
What with the ongoing horrors in Gaza, the seemingly endless Ukraine-Russia war, the thousands of people fleeing conflict and extreme deprivation to seek refuge in safer places, and the relentless rise of global temperature, it is tempting to despair of finding any solution to the world’s problems. It’s important to remember, however, that there is a solution – to dismantle the system that is the root cause of all of these problems – capitalism – and replace it with a humane society that does not have money or borders – socialism.
A moneyless, non-market, democratically run society of common ownership and collective production would eliminate war and poverty, and allow us to concentrate on limiting the environmental damage caused by modern industry.
Wikipedia co-founder Lawrence Sanger recently accused the CIA, FBI and other US intelligence agencies of manipulating the online encyclopaedia for ‘info warfare’ over the past 15 years.
This won’t come as a huge surprise, given that there have been many previous reports of politically motivated ‘tampering’. What is a surprise is that Sanger is claiming that this state interference is too left-wing, and that Google conspires to bury more ‘trustworthy’ alternatives like Conservapedia well down the results page.
Meanwhile other activists have noted that US agencies have tried to remove information about Iraq War casualties and Guantanamo Bay. How terribly left-wing of them!
Wikipedia is to information what socialism would be to resources. Typical that capitalism would make it a warzone.
