Politicians pretend that capitalism can solve climate change, but what happens when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests solutions that clash with industry profits?
Surprise surprise, the IPCC, when producing its 2021 Sixth Assessment Report, were heavily leaned on by the global meat industry to water it down and remove recommendations to reduce meat consumption. Advocacy groups have hit back in a letter: ‘Our organizations, representing millions of individuals who are concerned about the future of our planet, are deeply troubled by the potential influence of the meat industry’s years-long campaign of interference on any climate recommendations that include plant-based diets as a solution.’
Now Italy, while trumpeting its carbon targets, has banned lab-grown meat. You can guess why.
UK children’s charity Barnado’s says that a record number of children are in danger of online ‘exploitation’ as parents struggle with the cost of living and can’t afford summer break activities or holidays (Guardian).
By ‘exploitation’ they mean specifically criminal activity (drug dealing) or sexual abuse via online grooming. The treatment of children in capitalism is often appalling, especially when there’s money to be made out of them. But the term ‘exploitation’ should not be confined to cases of extreme abuse. In fact, all workers are exploited. Otherwise there can never be any profit for employers. Ever. Exploitation isn’t just a cruel and unusual feature of ‘bad’ capitalism, it’s built in.
It’s a dog-whistle phrase that right-wingers use to discredit any ‘woke’ notions they dislike, and it’s a joke. Most ‘woke’ activists have probably never read Marx. ‘…paleoconservatives […] point out that Marxists traditionally had no interest in things like rights for gays or transgenderism, and that these are manifestations of the individualist streak in liberalism, not Marxism’ (https://tinyurl.com/muvtjx6).
Does that mean that Marxists don’t care about gay or transgender rights, or feminism, or even (gasp) culture? Of course they do. But, ask yourself, would you be oppressed or discriminated against as gay, or a black woman, if you were rich? Hell no! It’s your class position that makes sure you suffer, by weaponising your ‘identity’ against you.
Critics have accused the Sainsbury supermarket chain of ‘profiting from high prices’. Oh really, you don’t say!
This BBC article is typical of many media reports about price-gouging or ‘greedflation’ at the moment. It reflects a widespread impression that there is a ‘reasonable capitalism’ where companies pay reasonable wages and make a reasonable profit, and an ‘unreasonable capitalism’ where there are price-gougers, snake-oil charmers and rip-off merchants who are just out for profit, any way they can get it.
Capitalism is not ‘reasonable’ in this way. Reasonable firms go bust. Only the most ruthless survive, and to survive, they have to keep maximising profits, regardless of the human or environmental cost.
Lots of people think that global population is too high and that, therefore, a global system of sharing resources (socialism) is impossible. But a new study by War on Want finds that the world currently produces 2.6 times more than the average person needs. That’s a global overproduction of food.
But instead of this making everyone on the planet fat, 2.3 billion people – 1 in 7 – actually go hungry. Why? Because food production is monopolised by a few agribusinesses that continually restrict supply in order to keep prices and profits high. Capitalism can only sustain itself by imposing artificial scarcity.
Meanwhile, populations are actually stable or falling in most countries. So world population is no barrier to socialism.
This is the $400m Serene, more of a palace than a yacht, featuring a giant indoor swimming pool, a snow room, children’s playrooms, two helipads, an underwater viewing room and a $450m Leonardo painting.
It’s owned by the Saudi royal family, who drive gold-plated Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, have gigantic palaces and Louix XIV chateaux, throw $50m parties, and are 5 times richer than Elon Musk and Bill Gates put together. Oh, and they’re 16 times richer than the British royals. Had enough yet? Here’s more.
When you vote for capitalism, this is what you’re voting for.
Just recently a mobile phone company accused rival operators of swindling their customers by deliberately failing to move them onto cheaper tariffs once they’d paid in full for their phones. Naturally the other phone companies protested that the accusations were ‘misleading’ and ‘confusing’ (but, you notice, not ‘untrue’).
Capitalist firms bickering over altruistic concern for their customers? Surely not. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx relates how big factory owners pressed for health & safety measures which small factory owners couldn’t afford, not through concern for workers’ welfare, but simply to drive the other firms out of business. Here, the intention is similar, to stop rivals getting an unfair advantage. It’s backstabbing dressed up as customer care.
For all those who say workers are better off today than they were 100 years ago, well they are, but it’s all relative:
‘A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut…’ (K. Marx).
The top 1% in the UK are now richer than 70% of the population combined, says Oxfam.
They report how the 685,500 richest people in Britain are worth a total of £2.8 trillion, compared with 48 million people in the UK whose combined wealth totals £2.4 trillion.
It’s still early spring in the UK and the government is already talking about water rationing. But researchers say that the rich use up to 50 times more water than the rest of us, with their regularly washed cars, private swimming pools, lush verdant gardens and well-watered golf courses and private estates.
In the last 23 years, over 80 large cities have faced extreme droughts, with global demand expected to outstrip demand by 2030. When the Day Zero drought hit Cape Town in 2018, the richest 14% of the population had used 51% of the water ‘for non-basic needs’, more than the poorest 62%.
Resources in capitalism are all about give and take – you give, the rich take.
If the federal minimum wage in the US had risen over the last forty years at the same rate as the average Wall Street bonus, it would be $42 an hour today, says a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, using analysis data from the New York State Comptroller.
Average bonuses on Wall Street have risen by 1,165% since 1985, not adjusted for inflation. The average bonus paid to traders last year was $176,700, which is 75% higher than in 2008. Meanwhile the federal minimum wage, currently $7.25 an hour, has not moved since 2009.
So trebles all round for traders, while workers continue to grind away in poverty and do all the productive work of society.
