In their Party Political Broadcast last Thursday, the Greens’ leader Zach Polanski ran through the problems people face and pointed out that a lot of the wealth ends up in the pockets of the super-rich. But went on: “This isn’t just an economic failure. It’s a failure of leadership. The people we elected choose to serve the wealthy … Good leaders put people before profit”.
The people workers elect don’t choose to serve the wealthy. Capitalism, as a profit-making system that can only work for the profit-takers, obliges them to do this. Replacing them with “good leaders” won’t change things.
What is needed is to realise that no leader can do anything for us.
Donald Trump comes across as a spoilt, narcissistic child who demands and gets other people’s toys (eg Maria Machado’s own Nobel Peace Prize). He sulkily told the Norwegian prime minister that, since they didn’t give him the peace prize, he won’t bother to prioritise peace. His demand for Greenland – another toy – has caused a geopolitical crisis.
Is this Kissinger-like Great Power brinkmanship, or deranged MAGA swagger? Capitalism is a dangerous world ‘order’ even when its leaders act like responsible adults. Right now, America’s nuclear button is under the finger of someone who seems divorced from reality and isolated inside a bubble of toadying sycophants. Totalitarian despots and wannabes can barely contain their glee. What could possibly go wrong?
Air pollution causes health problems, especially for those with heart or lung conditions. Recent research has shown that it may also be a contributing factor in dementia. There is a statistically-significant association between dementia and pollutants such as soot (e.g. from car exhausts) and nitrogen dioxide (from burning fossil fuels), possibly via inflammation in the brain.
Dementia currently affects over 57 million people worldwide, a number expected to almost triple in the next twenty years. There are causes other than air pollution, but making the air cleaner would be one way of reducing this unpleasant disease.
And yet we know that capitalists treat pollution as an ‘externality’, and preventable illnesses matter far less than healthy profits.
Is the Iranian regime about to collapse? Protests in every major city suggest it’s possible and if so, not before time. For nearly fifty years the population has been crushed by a medieval theocratic dictatorship which has executed tens of thousands of political prisoners and Muslim ‘apostates’ (non-believers). All this in the wake of a revolution which rejected the hated western-backed shah, together with other western-associated concepts like freedom of thought and women’s equality.
Now, because the regime has been printing excess money, the rial/dollar rate has gone from 42,000 in December to over 900,000 in mid-January. The biggest irony? Far from abolishing capitalism, some of the protesters are demanding the return of the shah’s son as ruler!
We’ll probably never know whether the kidnapping of Maduro has been timed to distract from Trump’s domestic political woes. What we do know is that this latest act illustrates the nonsense of the concepts of international law and national sovereignty.
When one mob within the global capitalist class perceives that its interests are threatened by another mob, it doesn’t take too long for the gloves to come off and the violence to begin.
The propaganda machine is up and running, claiming the kidnapping was about ‘stabilisation’ of the region and the orange clown saying that the US ‘will take care of the country’. Nonsense. It’s just another turf war in the gangster society we know as capitalism.
Around 7 million people in the UK have asthma, of whom some 58,000 suffer ‘really scary’ attacks that require hospitalisation. These severe sufferers will be heartened to know that Depemokimab,, a new ‘ultra-long acting’ medicine that only needs to be taken twice a year, has just received UK approval, having shown it can reduce the number of severe attacks by 72 percent (Sunday Times, 28 Dec).
An ‘important step forward’ then, showing how capitalism has our welfare at heart? Er, not entirely. The paper added that the drug ‘will reduce the time patients need to take off work, as well as free up NHS resources’. Money priorities linger like a bad smell, even over positive news stories.
A recent report endorsed by the economist Joseph Stiglitz warned that the world is facing an ‘inequality emergency’, as an overwhelming share of new wealth goes to those who are already the richest. The economic chasm between them and everyone else will deepen with over $70 trillion passed down to their heirs over the next decade.
But what’s new? We already knew that a tiny proportion of the population owned the vast majority of wealth. The percentages make little difference to most of us whose only resource is the energy we sell to an employer. And that will continue until we vote to bring in a completely new kind of society based on production for need rather than profit.
I feel a bit of a swine sometimes, usually when I’m talking to my mate Chris. Although he knows more than most about Marx’s economics, he recently told me he was pleased about Mamdani’s election as New York mayor because the poor would benefit from free public transport and rent controls. Here’s the swine-ish bit – I reminded him that the law of value applies to every commodity, including labour power, that those two proposals from Mamdani would, if applied, allow employers to reduce wage levels, and perhaps result in a slight shift of wealth from landlords to employers.
‘So it’s nowt to do with socialism then?’
‘That’s right, Chris, sorry!’
For more on this topic see here.
Heat-related deaths now exceed half a million a year, which means about one every minute.
People often just cannot cope with the heat stress caused by continued burning of fossil fuels, quite apart from the air pollution and increased likelihood of wildfires that result.
Governments pay out massive subsidies to fossil fuel companies ($2.5bn a day in 2023), often while spewing out drivel about the benefits of a ‘free market’. At the same time, hundreds of billions of hours of labour are lost because of the heat.
The responsibility for all this is down to capitalism and its motive of making a profit rather than caring for the environment and those who live within it.
The sell-out concert tour of Britain and Europe by Bob Dylan (he’s in his 85th year) presents a prime example of the way capitalism, via its entertainment industry, can sell us meaningless thrills to patch over the uniformity and stress of living in its wage and salary system.
Dylan does have something unique to offer, but the adulation, the hero-worship, as opposed to simple appreciation, of him by the fans at his concerts can only be seen as part of the obsession with celebrity culture that capitalism thrusts upon us as a substitute for mutually cooperative activity. This is something the free access society of economic equality that we call socialism would release.
