Referring to employment as wage slavery is sometimes seen as an exaggeration. After all people who work for a wage or salary are not owned by other individuals and their labour is not enforced by law and violence.
Capitalism is seen as providing freedom. But is it anything more than an appearance of freedom? While you are free to walk away from your job, you can’t walk away from the need to survive, the need for food and shelter. That’s what makes you a wage slave. The system holds you in place not with chains of iron as in the past but with chains of necessity. Only the cooperative, moneyless, free access society that socialists advocate will remove those chains.
The UK government has just published the first ever Land Use Framework for England, in which joined-up thinking, better mapping tools, and free access to ownership data will supposedly rationalise legacy chaos so that “land can support house building and infrastructure, a resilient food system, climate mitigation and thriving nature.”
The framework enthuses about community consultation and partnerships but never, of course, questions the very idea of ownership. 10 percent of land is held in secret and just 8 percent of England is public access. Capitalists got their start by stealing the land off the people, worldwide, forcing generations to live as landless wage-slaves. We will never be free until we take the land and other resources back and abolish capitalist ownership laws.
… there existed an international organisation that could protect the world against the scourge of war, that acted in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, that settled international disputes by peaceful means.
Wait … there’s been one around since 1945, called the UN. But its solemn Charter, from which we nicked the verbiage above, is just fantasy. The real world under capitalism is better described by a nasty piece of work, Stephen Miller, who seems to have a big say in US policy at present:
“talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world … governed by strength … by force …by power.”
Yep, under capitalism. might is right.
The ONS recently reported that there had been small increases in life expectancy in the UK since the 2019–21 period. However, it also revealed that in 2022–24 there had been decreases in healthy life expectancy (HLE) since the previous period.
HLE is the number of years that people can expect to spend in ‘good’ general health. In the more recent period, HLE at birth was 60.7 years for males and 60.9 years for females. The reductions here are 1.8 and 2.5 years, respectively.
So the chances are that at least a fifth of a person’s life will not be spent in decent health, a situation which is deteriorating. That’s life and health under capitalism!
‘We aim to kill 50,000 Russians a month’, Ukraine’s new defence minister has said. This is an almost 50% increase on 2025 when around 35,000 per month were killed. Since the war began there have been around 1.2 million Russians casualties (killed, wounded and missing). Ukrainians have suffered fewer losses – estimates vary from 500,000 to 600,000 casualties. Another 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers are absent without official leave.
In the cold light of day, all this seems pretty unbelievable. But war and the devastation it causes is a constant feature of the capitalist world, where governments are prepared to sacrifice their populations in support of the economic interests of the tiny minority who own or control the vast majority of the wealth.
Driven to despair by capitalism? UK workers can always call the Samaritans, a help-line run by unpaid volunteers. Sadly, those volunteers also face capitalism’s cruelties, in the form of money-saving cut-backs, office closures and a requirement to work in isolation at home.
‘Having sacked volunteers who dared voice concerns about the proposed closure of half of its branches, the Samaritans’ HQ has slapped them with serious misconduct charges and imposed lifetime bans…’ Whistleblowers speak anonymously, fearing reprisals: ‘Leadership have used the concerns and complaints process like the thought police. They are on career paths, some of them very well paid… most of them will never have had to talk a caller down from suicide…’ (Private Eye, 5 February 2026).
When you see a headline like “Why food fraud persists, even with improving tech”, you might reasonably expect to be told why honey is deliberately contaminated with glucose syrup, why melamine was added to Chinese baby formula or why spice is adulterated with industrial dyes.
These are just some of the ‘food crimes’ mentioned in the article, which also bemoans the difficulty/impossibility of monitoring the food we eat. Yet the motive for food fraud – extra profit – is never addressed. Because to have done so, the BBC would have had to challenge the logic of the very system it was set up to defend.
The i paper (5 February) ran a story about a 70-year-old man who is living in a house with five others, the only way he can survive on his pension. Far more people over 65 now share homes than a decade ago.
Also many properties advertised on flat-sharing sites have no living room, as turning a lounge into a bedroom means more income for the landlord, so the tenants each live and sleep in just one room. Yet there are many ‘ghost homes’ in Britain, expensive new flats that remain empty because few people can afford to buy them.
This is the reality when housing is for profit, not to meet human need.
One eagle eyed parent was suspicious of the bottles of play sand on sale at the local Hobbycraft so she did a little research. The bottles of sand contained asbestos. The level of asbestos was below the limit of concentration allowed in its country of origin but well above the UK legal level, which in itself is above the danger level. Any asbestos inhalation is considered dangerous and often fatal over the passage of time.
This highlights just how little the health of consumers is viewed under capitalism. No matter whether it’s food and drink, cladding for dwellings or children’s toys, the contents are often a secret not shared with buyers.
It’s been non-stop this year under Trump. The US has removed Maduro, said it wants to run Venezuela, tried to claim Greenland, killed protestors, put the head of its Central Bank under investigation, set up a ‘Board of Peace’ with Trump as its self-appointed leader….
What next? Some say it’s the end of democracy for the US and perhaps more widely. But we see it as capitalism just going on its merry unpredictable way. What doesn’t change is workers’ lives continuing to depend on finding an employer to sell their energies to. Instead of this, the world needs a different system of society – moneyless, cooperative, where we all freely contribute according to our abilities and take according to our needs.
