Grimly facing drought, hosepipe bans, wildfires and yet another heatwave? You won’t be comforted to know that ‘greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea level and ocean heat content all reached record highs in 2025’ (phys.org). European rivers are at record lows. The US has had its hottest July on record, as has the Sahel, Central America, France and Spain. And don’t stock up your freezer with ice cream because you could soon be facing rolling energy blackouts.
It’s not all bad news though. Water company bosses are still getting bonuses, oil companies are cashing in like never before, and tech stocks are going stratospheric.
Still think capitalism is humanity’s best hope? We say it’s time to consider the alternative.
Infantino’s “shabby, opaque, backroom deal” apparently prepared in secret with private capital is ditched after UEFA and others statement that “demonstrated to FIFA’s President that football is not for sale”.
Hang on!! Football was sold long ago and is increasingly organised to suit pay-to-view media. This explains why fans of EPL and EFL teams now ‘benefit’ from league matches on any day from Friday to Tuesday at kick-off times to suit the TV schedules (and bugger the away fans!). This is also why the mis-named Champions League has so much group-stage dross (similarly for the Copa Libertadores) to plug so many mid-week gaps.
Sadly, the sport I love is now just an interlude between ads for bookies.
You might expect that a walking trail called the Severn Way would largely be alongside the river from which it takes its name. But in fact most of the section between Shrewsbury and Telford is not along the river at all.
This is just one illustration of the extent to which there is a lack of public access to river banks in England. In almost three quarters of cases, there is no right of way within a hundred metres of the river, with most reservoirs and lakes also being off-limits.
Private ownership of land drastically restricts people’s ability to enjoy the countryside (not just rivers) and seek some relief from the recent heatwaves.
Andy Burnham pledged ‘to finally end long-term rough sleeping across the UK’. He previously aimed to prevent rough sleeping in Manchester by 2020, and in 2019 the Conservative Party manifesto committed to ending ‘the blight of rough sleeping’. Instead, in 2025 the number of people estimated to sleep rough on a single night in England was the highest recorded, at nearly 4,800.
Rough sleeping is not just about housing. Rough sleepers are among the most marginalised and victimised in capitalist society. Support services, however ‘well-funded’, can only ever offer limited palliatives as they are working within a system that pushes people into homelessness – why previous attempts to end rough sleeping have failed, despite Burnham’s ambition.
Can we separate the skills of the beautiful game from the ugliness of the money machine that drives it and the rivalries and nationalism it thrives on? Should we regard the emotional investment of fans as people being brought together or a reminder of how alienated they are from their own lives and capabilities. Is it, as one commentator stated, people being sold ‘meaningless thrills to patch over the pain’?
Whatever the case, in the society of voluntary cooperative work and free access to goods and services that socialists look forward to, appreciation of the talents of others – including footballers – will still exist, but side by side with each person having the time and space to cultivate their own talents and capabilities.
Red faces in the Socialist Workers Party after their tweet on X in response to the death of Widdecombe was ‘Hooray, she’s dead’, followed by immediate deletion as furore swept the media. Some even confused the SWP with us.
So we should point out that, while we oppose capitalism and all its works, and urge the world’s people to establish a post-capitalist society of democratic common ownership, we have no truck with the SWP’s infantile reaction to the death (probably murder) of a pro-capitalist politician, however detestable that person’s opinions.
Capitalism is a worldwide system of private property and market trading, which can only be replaced at a worldwide scale by a conscious and informed majority, not by targeting individuals.
A report on wealth inequality graphically illustrates the class divide in 2026.
Apparently, the 56,000 wealthiest adults on the planet – who could fit inside a single football stadium – own three times as much wealth as the poorest 2.8 billion adults (add their families, that’s HALF of humanity).
Those 56,000 must have really worked their arses off…
Just kidding! That wealth has been sucked from the world’s working class and, as Marx predicted in Capital, the nature of capitalist economics has resulted in increasing concentration of real wealth.
The report’s suggestion? Higher taxes for the rich and spend more on education (!!). In other words, tinker around at the edges and leave the cause of the problem alone. Sad or what?
The government has just repealed the Vagrancy Act of 1824, which made rough sleeping a crime. There are about a million empty homes in England alone with more than a quarter of them empty for more than six months. So there is absolutely no need for anyone to sleep rough.
In London, there are over 47.000 homes that have been empty for more than six months, enough to house the estimated 13,000 people sleeping rough there each year, and the 200,000 living in temporary accommodation.
In this supposedly relatively wealthy country, the possibility of providing decent homes for everyone is perfectly feasible, but capitalism’s profit motive prevents it from happening.
So Keir Starmer has resigned and Andy Burnham is likely to take over. Will it make any difference? It probably will to Labour’s standing with the electorate. For most people, perception of a leader’s personality seems, unfortunately, to be the key element in what passes for political thinking.
But will a new leader be able to do anything different to resolve the problems of the crisis-ridden system we live under? The answer to this has to be a resounding no. There will only be any difference to speak of when we decide collectively to scrap that system and replace it with an entirely different one that uses the abundant resources that already exist to satisfy all our needs the world over.
Workers in China are feeling jaded nowadays. After Tiananmen Square, Deng Xiaoping stopped pretending China was ‘communist’ and pulled the capitalist stops out. In 1980 home ownership was 20%. Today it’s 96%. So a success, right? But wait. 10% own over 70% of wealth (Economist – paywall).
The ‘entrepreneurial’ generation were ‘faced with open roads, you could go far even on a three-wheeled cart’. Now ‘the roads are jammed, and… the [wealthy heirs] can take helicopters’. Seeing nil prospects for success, today’s young people are ‘lying flat’ instead. ‘They think that effort is no longer rewarded… and that the keys to success are connections and being born rich.’
Welcome to our world. Capitalism is pretty dismal for workers, and utopia is only for the rich.
