Many Labour Party supporters are disappointed and dispirited at the way its government is managing the system. They didn’t expect benefit cuts, ramped up anti-migrant measures and promises of no tax increases for the wealthy. As usual, any principles Labour professes when out of office go out the window once they win power and are faced with the need to keep the anarchic system of capitalism afloat.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Trying to run a system based on trade, wages, profit, and the unpredictable market is bound to leave you flailing. It needs to be replaced by a moneyless, frontierless society of free access – socialism. But the Labour Party never has been and never can be an instrument for that.
Capitalism seems to have descended from tragedy into farce. Trump climbs down yet again from adolescent posturing and cuts the China tariff by 115%. Qatar soothes and flatters him with a free 747 ‘flying palace’ for his presidential toy cupboard.
In a craven sop to Reform UK, Labour plans to ‘get tough’ on legal migration, despite its known advantages for the economy, and a looming demographic crisis. Who needs facts and statistics when scapegoats are easier? Starmer and co are pandering to populist dog whistles.
Elsewhere, autocrats offer peace with one hand and lob missiles with the other.
The deaths pile up while the profits roll in, and the rich celebrate with cocktails on their floating palaces.
A synthesis of a large number of biological studies has shown that humans are responsible for high levels of biodiversity loss (Guardian 26 March).
This decline is driven by a number of factors, namely habitat change, direct exploitation of resources, climate change, invasive species and pollution. This includes use of pesticides, for example.
A Professor of Ecology noted that many species have key roles, such as pollination and seed dispersal. They need larger populations and genetic diversity so they can continue to evolve and perform their functions that keep the ecosystem going.
Of course it is capitalism, with its profit motive and drive to expand, that is responsible for such degradation.
It may seem astonishing, but Victorian diseases such as scabies are affecting more and more people in Britain (Guardian, 3 April).
Doctors are also seeing more patients with illnesses directly related to poverty, whether due to poor-quality housing or inadequate nutrition. Also hypothermia, caused by not being able to heat their homes.
One consultant from Merseyside spoke of patients whose heath conditions ‘are worsened by damp and cold housing, where respiratory illnesses become chronic conditions’, and added that ‘We see the impact of food insecurity, where poor nutrition contributes to long-term health complications.’
So capitalism contributes to poor health and shorter life expectancy for many workers, as well as being the cause of poverty and war.
Is Trump making it up as he goes along? That’s what’s been suggested as he declares ‘policies’ and then changes them under the influence of who knows what. Will it cause a global trade war? If it does, will that be different from the battles, sometimes resulting in actual wars, that take place constantly between governments in order to sustain the profits of the owners of the vast majority of wealth?
In reality neither Trump’s chaotic government nor other apparently more orderly ones have any real control over what is uncontrollable – the forces of the system of production for profit, capitalism. That’s why it needs to be replaced by a system of production for use that caters for everyone’s needs.
Well, according to analysts at global leading insurance firm Allianz anyway. Their reasoning is that the huge cost of extreme weather events is likely to increase, rendering whole areas of the globe virtually uninsurable. Governments won’t be able to fund bailouts, and climate mitigation or adaptation could become impossible. As assessors of risk, the insurance industry is seen as ‘the canary in the coalmine’ when it comes to systemic breakdown.
But does all that add up to destroying capitalism? Would banks, money, the market and rich elites really disappear? Hardly. They do actually need to disappear, because they are what’s causing the crisis. But it’s only us workers, globally, who can make that happen.
For decades, the pages of the Socialist Standard have shown that the very existence of capital (and wage-labour) means that any rational approach to what is most important to every human being (i.e. the production of life’s necessities) is utterly impossible.
Economic chaos is inherent in the capitalist system.
And sometimes, as now, this systemic chaos is made worse by the existence of nation states, within which those who have wormed their way into control of state power are able, with an appeal to ‘patriotism’, to dupe a working class fearful of the future into identifying with one particular ‘national’ section of the owning class.
Time to put an end to these interesting times.
Even before the Labour government’s cuts to welfare spending, it was clear that poverty in the UK has been increasing (Guardian 27 March).
In April 2024 a record 4.5 million children were living in poverty, a hundred thousand more than the previous year. More children than before lived in families reliant on food banks, and were in food-insecure families.
The Domestic Poverty Lead at Oxfam said, ‘We live in the sixth-richest country in the world where billionaires alone saw their wealth soar by £11bn last year. It is morally repugnant that children, disabled people and carers are the ones who are taking the hit.’
This is life under twenty-first century capitalism!
“Now, however, Reeves’s advisers openly admit that the high growth implied by Labour’s manifesto is a pipe dream.” (The Times, 21 March)
Implied? No, promised, in fact proclaimed from the rooftops. If elected Labour would “grow” the economy.
Their excuse for failing (within a year!)?
“‘The world is changing,’ one says. ‘Global uncertainty means growth across the world – in the eurozone, the US and the UK – has been hit’.”
The SPGB has said repeatedly (and experience shows) that capitalism runs to its own uncontrollable economic cycle, so election promises are likely to evaporate in double-quick time.
The only surprise is how quickly it happened this time.
Why are western governments suddenly slashing overseas aid budgets? Partly because it plays well with right-wing voters, who are told it’s all spent on things like transgender mouse research. Partly, in Europe, because states are scrambling to find money for armaments now that Trump seems to be pulling the plug on NATO.
It’s an open secret in aid circles that overseas development aid can very often result in ‘an inverse correlation between aid and per capita growth‘, ie, the more aid a country gets, the poorer the people become.
So much for capitalism’s ‘noble’ aspiration to abolish poverty. Most aid is not for that anyway, but for self-serving reasons. Abolish capitalism however, and there’d be no poverty.
