The super-rich signify wealth concentration. The rich have become richer and richer. Whatever figures are used, we are dealing with rising inequalities. 

While in 1982 the hundred richest Europeans were worth an average of $230 million each, their average wealth in 2005 was ten times that, namely $2.6 billion. Since 2005, the gap has widened. 

Merrill Lynch’s World Wealth Report tells the story. Its report divides the rich into two groups:

1) High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) and the

2) Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWIs).

By the year 1996, there were about 4.5 million HNWIs with $16 trillion of individual wealth. By 2019, there were five times as many – twenty million – HNWIs with $74 trillion of individual wealth. 

At the same time, the World Bank reports that “more than 40% of the world’s population – almost 3.3 billion people – live below the $5.50 a day poverty line”. 

 In the field of conspicuous consumption, first came  Bentley and Rolls Royce limousines to now the private jet countless “executive” Gulfstream aircraft to about fifty private Boeing 747s and 777s owners, planes that normally carries four hundred passengers. Mega-yachts are experiencing an unprecedented construction boom.

Then there is the art market which also plays a special and especially subtle role in the field of conspicuous consumption. Today, at a Sotheby auction a Picasso can be bought for $95.2 million, or a Monet sold for $5 million.

Taken from here

The Structure of Wealth and the Global Money-Making Apparatus – CounterPunch.org

Five talks have been added to the Audio section of the Party website:–

Industrial Revolutions

Andy Thomas, 26th March 2021

Open Mic Night – A Syndicalist View

Tony, 2nd April 2021

Unwrapping Democracy: What and How?

Leon Rozanov, 9th April 2021

FAQ What reforms might socialists welcome?

Paddy Shannon, 14th April 2021

Dangerous Women – Eleanor Marx

Adam Buick, 16th April 2021

Here’s the text of the talk that Cde. Bill Martin gave at the virtual May Day Rally on 30 April

 “Comrades, friends, thank you for coming along with us to our Mayday celebration. So, my question is, really, why are we celebrating?  I think the simplest thing to say is: because it is our day.  A day that belongs to the people who work: the so called key workers and non-key workers alike by whose labour wealth is generated and our society is kept running.  But, so what, what if it is our day?  Why is that worth celebrating?

Well, let’s just pause a little and – as with all good science, ask what seems an obvious question: what is a day?  That might seem very straightforward, but I wouldn’t have much of a talk for you if I couldn’t pick it apart, just a little.  

Of course, the answer that’s springing to all your minds is that a day is the time it takes the Earth to complete one rotation around its axis, relative to the sun.  Conventionally, we say that that takes 24 hours – but of course, it does, in reality, vary a little due to the way the Earth spins.  But it’s only a matter of second (of course, seconds add up).  Apparently, the exact scientific definition of a day is 86,400 seconds – I could hit you with more detail, but you’re just as capable of reading the Wikipedia entry for day as I am.

But, my point is this, this is a relatively modern definition of day, one born of an industrialised mind-set that measures everything and wants to standardise everything into neatly defined infinitely reproducible and replaceable commodities.  The idea of a day was around long before that.

As we experience it, a day is defined by sun or absence of sun.  By those hours of daylight in which humans, certainly in the pre-electric light days, could be active and safe in the world, as opposed to night, that time of danger and darkness from which we sheltered in our homes and by light of fires.

Some of us experienced this a little during lockdown.  With the options of brightly lit pubs, restaurants or cinemas to go to of an evening, the short daylight hours confined many of to our homes for much of the day: especially women.  Whereas I could go for a walk, friends of mine reported being reluctant due to the darkness and actual attacks in their areas.  During those days, my active hours of daylight became entirely taken over by my hours of work.

So, a day is something other than an arbitrary measure of time, or some objective aspect of a spinning rock in space.  It is a unit of activity.  We have evolved, uniquely, on that rock, with its spin and alternating passages of light and dark.  And in our bodies we feel the effects of that evolution: we sleep in the night.  We give up about eight hours a day (if we’re lucky) to that sleep.  Days are something hard wired into our bodies.

It’s been recently reported that there was a scientific experiment in France.  A group of people were sequestered in a cave, without communication devices, clocks or other pieces of modern paraphernalia (but with electricity, light and cooking equipment).  They were there for forty days with no means of telling the time, and they were asked to perform tasks like to prepare a presentation in three days time.  This was an experiment in isolation and bodily time sense: it will be interesting to hear the results.  It is interesting people are looking at what happens when we are separated from the day/night cycle.  There are obvious implications for space travel and colonisation, because removed from the Earth we lose the obvious thing that marks days.

It’s also interesting, and telling, that this experiment looked at how people functioned without knowing day nor night.  To get to the meat of this chat: a day is the fundamental unit of human activity.  Our days are defined by what we do, and what we can do is limited by days.  To be able to go on performing tasks efficiently and well, we need to break them up into days and nights with time to sleep, refresh and rest between.

To put this in its basic form: the rough life expectancy of a person in Britain will be about 28,800 days.  I won’t give you that in seconds, because we don’t live life in seconds.  Those twenty eight thousand days are the only ones we will ever have, we never get refunds, we never get do overs, at best we can increase our allotment of days: with a bit of help from medical science.  For someone who works full time, assuming a full career from 18 to 65 working five days a week, they will give over 12,220 of those days to their employers.

OK, that’s just at the raw level of days.  Of course, not every second of each of those days is given over: but usually, the best hours are, the active alert able to perform hours.  Eight hours of each of those days is given over to sleep (preparing for another day of work), another couple of hours each day are spent travelling to and from work, leaving the rest for eating, relaxing or meeting up with friends and family.  But all the other activities are conditioned by being able to turn up to work the next day.

So, here we have the idea of the class struggle.  When we give our time over to our employer, we give it to them to achieve the ends they desire.  In a capitalist society that means producing commodities: good and services, which they can sell with a view to making a profit.  The longer we work for them, the more they can use us, the more we do for the, the more goods and services they can sell for more profit.  Thus, they will want as many days from us as they can get.

But, here’s the thing, the struggle isn’t just over days as such, it is about the very definition of  day: what amounts to a days work?  The number of hours we spend working for them increases how much they can get us to do for them.  The fewer hours we work for them, the more time we have for ourselves, for our friends families and communities.

But it’s not just the length of the day: it can also be about the intensity: working harder during the hours we give over also increases the amount of work and profits we produce for the day buyers.  The harder we work at work, the less we can do in our own time, the more it becomes a time for recovery to return to work.

  Employment contracts are written in the language of abstracted absolute hours, but the reality it is it is what are are capable of doing – or being made to do in a day – that defines what happens to us and our employers.”

The capitalist world is being shaken by the most profound economic disruptions, a global pandemic and the growing crises caused by global warming. Around the world, governments are spending hundreds of billions to protect profits but only pennies on reducing carbon emissions. All previous COPs have been nothing short of disasters, so why would we expect the upcoming Glasgow COP26 to be any different.

Paralysed by policy inertia and beholden to vested interests, too many are unable to join up the dots and solve the connected crises of environment leaving the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth paying the highest price. Climate change summits have increasingly failed to offer concrete solutions which has devastating consequences for millions of people. Despite many fine words politicians have made no difference to the world’s worsening environmental situation. Climate conferences have invariably been ineffectual. Floods, storms, drought and forest fires are already claiming victims around the globe. 

The World Socialist Movement say the reasons for this are rooted in the economic system, an exploitative, destructive market system, that cannot be relied upon to abolish the conditions which endanger our well–being and survival. We view the continual process of international conferences as pointless. Governments and corporations are only committed to finding environmental market-friendly solutions which still maintain investment“ growth.” Politicians side with the bankers and businessmen to create a green capitalist economy concentrating upon assigning prices to carbon, for financial centres to trade in carbon credits which are supposed to encourage a reduction in CO2 emissions such as by paying for the planting of trees as compensation for polluting the air, all at the whim of the market.

We in the WSM speak of the failed world system of  capitalism  that generates the ecological crises which threatens to bring the extinction to many animal species and perhaps the end of human civilisation as we know it where many will become climate refugees with literally nowhere to run.

Many campaigners in the environment movement may agree with the WSM’s scepticism that the world leaders have utterly failed in achieving action on climate change  but they must go one step further and acknowledge the problems is rooted in an economic system that can only see the natural world as a source of materials for the production process, or a land-fill for its waste. A socialist critique of environmental destruction must also accept ending the production for profit, private property system and understand that the continuance of capitalism can only lead to further environmental harm and damage. Environmental activists need to reject the false solutions of green capitalism.

As Marx explained:

 “a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, [beneficiaries] and, like boni patres familias ,[good heads of households] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”

The socialist vision is one of a self-administered economy where a variety of inter-locked democratic bodies (whose officials are elected and subject to recall) at the local, regional and worldwide levels with delegates from both factories and neighbourhoods where decisions will be taken at the level at which they can most easily be implemented. And they should be taken at the level where the greatest percentage of people actually affected by them can be involved in the decision-making process. Such a inter-connected network would be empowered to draw up the basic outlines of the economic and environment plans and have the ability to implement them. Redirecting the productive capacity to human needs will require a variety of economic methods and experiments. There could be a combination of central planning (not centralised planning such as the command economies of the former state-capitalist countries), and local coordination. Rational planning will replace anarchy. Coordination and planning of production  will aim at building an economy that will benefit the people.

Some critics of the WSM proposition of free access based on material abundance so to end scarcity would place an unbearable strain on the physical resources of the planet and lead to an ecological problems. The WSM points to the scale of socially wasted resources under  capitalism. The abolition of the military and the accompanying arms industry alone would free up tremendous resources for socially useful production built upon renewable energy sources, and environmentally safe technologies, etc. that could provide an adequate standard of living for the bulk of the world’s population without imposing new demands upon the capacities of the earth. Factories and other productive facilities will be modernised to eliminate backbreaking labour and ecological damage.

 US health insurance companies reported billions in profits in the first quarter of 2021, after making a windfall in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group, reported $4.9bn in profits in the first quarter of 2021 compared to $3.4bn in the same period in 2020 – a 44% increase. The higher than anticipated profits prompted the company to raise its projections for the year.

Anthem also beat estimates in its report of $1.67bn in profits in the first three months of 2021, a 9.5% increase from the same period last year. Humana’s net income was $828m in the first quarter, a 75% increase from the same period the year before.

CVS Health, which owns the Aetna health insurance provider and drugstores, reported $2.2bn in profits, up from $2bn in the same quarter a year before.

Cigna raised its forecasts for the year.

Health insurers have been insulated from this stress because there were sharp declines in expensive, elective procedures, such as hip replacement surgery. People also delayed or skipped doctor’s appointments because of fears of Covid-19’s spread or concerns about the cost of medical care during a recession.

CVS Health’s chief financial officer and executive vice-president, Eva Boratto, said in an earnings call this week: “Covid-19 is expected to have a minimal impact on consolidated financial results for the year.”

Small healthcare providers such as independent doctor’s office and rural hospitals have been in a financial crunch, or closed, during the pandemic. Emergency medical service systems and some larger hospitals have also been under severe financial pressure.

US health insurers report billions in first quarter as small providers face stress | Healthcare industry | The Guardian

 California, America’s Golden State, suffered its first ever annual population fall. It reflects a worldwide trend of population declines. Overall,  the number of babies born in the country in 2020 dropped to the lowest level in more than four decades. 

Japan marked Children’s Day by announcing that the number of under-14s in the country had fallen for the 40th consecutive year to a record low. 

Last year, Italy, the population of Europe’s fourth biggest economy dropped by the equivalent of a city the size of Florence. Since the “baby boom” years of the 1960s, the annual number of births in Europe’s fourth biggest economy has fallen by more than half. The decline gathered pace in 2010 and then, last year, Covid-19 struck, contributing to new records for low births.

Paul Ehrlich author  of The Population Bomb (1968), predicted imminent mass starvation due to overpopulation, but this overly-pessimistic view has failed to happen although many still adhere to the idea, strangely enough even within the environmentalist movement which prides itself in following the science. Despite projections suggesting otherwise, the over-populationists maintain that there will be too many people for the planet’s resources to sustain the numbers.

The UN thinks that population growth will peak at the end of this century, but others think it will peak sooner. Researchers at the University of Washington predicted last year that it would hit a maximum of close to 10 billion around 2064, then slightly decrease to around 9 billion by 2100.

 The discrepancy of two billion people by century’s end between the two predictions is explained by the latter’s assumption that there will better access to contraceptives and female education in Africa. And that is bearing out for many African nations (albeit not every one) where family sizes are already dropping.

 Previous declines in the number of humans on the planet have been through disease or disaster. This would be the first time that it is reduced by low birthrate, after cheap and widely available contraception allowed women to control the size and timing of their families. But there is a threat to women’s rights, when governments that have failed to encourage more people to voluntarily have more children  try to force up birthrates by limiting access to birth control and abortion.

 The end to global population growth could indeed relieve pressure on the environment, particularly because the decline is centred on carbon-emitting wealthier nations.

It may also help a shift in hostile attitudes to migration, as countries which currently have  anti-immigration policies start competing to attract newcomers to bolster the workforce and care for the elderly. 

A socialist society will only come about when a sizeable majority of people worldwide want it and democratically and co-operatively work towards it. As such, it can only happen after many of today’s attitudes have changed, once people have rejected capitalism and its institutions of states, employment, money and classes. Instead of the dead-ends of reformism and division, society will be working together to make a world which satisfies everyone’s self-determined needs and wants.

We can’t say anything certain about what life would be like in a socialist world. That’s for the people at the time to decide, and would vary between communities and regions. How things run will also be shaped by future advancements in technology, and also by what environmental damage has been inherited from capitalism. Although we can only speculate, we can say that a socialist society could only succeed by being based on the principles of equality, democracy and voluntary co-operation.

This weekend of talks and discussion is an opportunity to imagine some of the possibilities of this new world. How might decisions be made? What kind of job roles would we have, and what would motivate us? How might friends and families spend time together? How would free access to goods and services work in practice? And how would we balance a world of abundance with safeguarding the environment?

E-mail enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk. Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £100; the concessionary rate is £50. Book online or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. Day visitors are welcome, but please book by email in advance.

 The capitalist class likes to boast and brag about their charity and compassion towards the undeveloped nations of the world but it is not philanthropy to return a little of what you have plundered and pillaged in the past.

Capitalist powers have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960. Over the whole period from 1960 to today, the drain totaled $62 trillion in real terms. If this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South’s growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today.”

 The U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and the richer countries of Europe appropriate $2.2 trillion worth of resources and labor—embodied in raw materials as well as high-tech commodities like smartphones, laptops, and cars that are increasingly manufactured abroad—per year from developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. That amount of money would be enough to end extreme poverty, globally, 15 times over.

Rich countries have a monopoly on decision-making in the World Bank and IMF, they hold most of the bargaining power in the World Trade Organization, they use their power as creditors to dictate economic policy in debtor nations, and they control 97% of the world’s patents. Northern states and corporations leverage this power to cheapen the prices of labor and resources in the Global South, which allows them to achieve a net appropriation through trade.

The looting  increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, as neoliberal structural adjustment programs were imposed across the Global South. During the 1980s and 1990s, IMF structural adjustment programs cut public sector wages and employment, while rolling back labor rights and other protective regulations, all of which cheapened labor and resources. Today, poor countries are structurally dependent on foreign investment and have no choice but to compete with one another to offer cheap labor and resources in order to please the barons of international finance. This ensures a steady flow of disposable gadgets and fast fashion to affluent Northern consumers, but at extraordinary cost to human lives and ecosystems in the South.

Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around.

Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960 | Opinions | Al Jazeera

 The COVID-19 pandemic, protracted conflicts and climate change have created an untenable situation for the most vulnerable, with 155 million people across 55 territories suffering from severe food insecurity, sending acute hunger figures to a 5-year high.

That’s according to the Global Network Against Food Crises, an alliance of humanitarian partners working to prevent hunger and respond to food crises. 

 It reported that 20 million more people faced acute hunger in 2020 than the previous year.

 The zero hunger by 2030 goal seemed “increasingly out of reach”.

 The report categorised 133,000 people in Burkina Faso, South Sudan and Yemen as being in “catastrophe”, meaning that they need immediate action to prevent widespread death and collapse of livelihoods.

 It stated that children living in food-crisis countries are especially vulnerable to malnutrition. In the 55 food-crisis countries under review, almost 16 million children under 5 years were acutely malnourished, while 75.2 million children under five years experienced stunted growth.

“Tragically, this report is just the tip of the iceberg that we’re facing all around the world,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley.  “The global picture is even more bleak when we consider all countries significantly impacted by hunger. For example, chronic hunger, which was 690 million, is now up an additional 130 million people.”

“Humankind can now pilot a helicopter drone and even split molecules to generate oxygen on the far-off planet of Mars, yet here on Earth, 155 million of our human family are suffering acute hunger and their lives and livelihoods are at risk because they lack the most basic of foods. The contrast is shocking and not acceptable,” said FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu.

20 Million More People Face Food Crises, As Acute Hunger Rates Rise to a 5-Year High | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

The International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States issued its long-awaited report on the U.S.’s police-perpetrated racist violence. The commissioners found that contrary to the popular notion that unjustified killings of Black people by police are merely the actions of “a few bad apples,” the real problem is structural racism that is embedded in the U.S. legal and policing systems.

The commissioners concluded that the systematic police killings of Black people in the U.S. constitutes a prima facie case of crimes against humanity and they asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to initiate an investigation of responsible police officials. The 12 commissioners are eminent experts and jurists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Caribbean.

These crimes against humanity under the ICC’s Rome Statute include murder, severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, persecution of people of African descent, and inhumane acts causing great suffering or serious injury to body or mental or physical health. All of the crimes occurred in the context of a widespread or systematic attack directed against the civilian population of Black people in the United States.

The commissioners made the following findings of fact:

Pretextual traffic stops are a common precursor to police killings and uses of excessive force against people of African descent. Tavis Crane was killed by police after his young daughter threw a piece of candy out the window. Race-based street stops, known as “stop-and-frisk,” often trigger the use of deadly force by police. Eric Garner was suspected of selling individual untaxed cigarettes. George Floyd was suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill.Fourth Amendment violations invariably lead to the use of excessive force and police killings of Black people. Breonna Taylor was killed following the execution of a “no-knock” warrant after a judge had replaced it with a knock warrant. Police routinely use excessive and lethal restraints against Black people. They include Tasers, chokeholds, compression asphyxia, “rough rides” and the use of vehicles as deadly weapons. George Floyd died from asphyxia. Freddie Gray was taken on a 45-minute “rough ride” resulting in his death.

5. Lethal police violence against Black people is exacerbated by officers’ failure to provide medical attention. For example, Andrew Kearse was kept in the back of a squad car for 17 minutes as he begged for help, repeating, “I can’t breathe.” He died of a heart attack in the car.

6. Lethal police violence against Black people experiencing a mental health crisis is systematic. After Daniel Prude’s family called police to provide mental health assistance, he was walking naked in the street. The officers put a spit hood over his head after he began spitting. They held him face down on the pavement for two minutes and 15 seconds, and he stopped breathing.

7. Cis- and transgender Black women, girls and femmes are disproportionately killed by police in the U.S. A friend of Kayla Moore, a mentally ill transgender woman, called for mental health assistance for Moore. Officers found a warrant for someone with Moore’s birth name, but 20 years older. They arrested her, threw her face down onto a futon to handcuff her, and she died of asphyxiation. Then they made disparaging comments about the gender identity of the woman they had killed.

8. Systemic racist police violence kills and traumatizes Black children and youth. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot to death by police as he played in a park with a toy gun. The young children of Jacob Blake witnessed their father being shot and paralyzed by police.

9. Racist police violence traumatizes and devastates families and communities. Manuel Elijah Ellis was hit, punched, choked and tasered to death by police. “We’re broken, generations of us are emotionally tired. Our bodies are weathered, and it causes us physical illness. It causes us lifelong ailments and diseases. It causes us generational trauma that we are passing on,” Jamika Scott, a friend of the Ellis family, testified. “We are traumatized. We live in a constant state of PTSD, we are hyper vigilant, we are fearful, we are anxious, we are depressed,” she added. “It tears holes in families and communities. And it’s not just one family, it’s what happens to one family in this community, it happens to all of us. And it happens, it has lasting echoes throughout generations.”

10. Black immigrants are particularly vulnerable to systemic racist police violence and police killings. Botham Jean, born in St. Lucia, was eating ice cream in his apartment when an officer walked in, mistakenly thinking it was hers, and shot him dead. “What was she defending,” Allison Jean, Botham Jean’s mother, asked, “as the only weapon he held was the color of his skin?”

11. Legal actors are complicit in police violence and killings of Black people through qualified immunity and systemic impunity of officers. Police officers in the United States enjoy impunity for their racist violence. They are rarely held accountable for killing black people, and qualified immunity protects them against liability for violation of constitutional rights.

a) Alarming pattern of destruction and manipulation of evidence, cover-ups and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors have a conflict of interest and medical examiners often do the bidding of police. After Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown as Brown raised his hands and said, “Don’t shoot,” the officer bagged his own gun and washed Brown’s blood off his hands. After police killed Henry Glover, the officers burned the car with his body in it.b) Prosecutorial misconduct and grand jury abuse. The offending officers testified at the grand juries in the killings of both Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, and in neither case was the officer cross-examined. There were no indictments of officers in either case.c) Systemic impunity and lack of oversight by police. Internal affairs investigations invariably exonerate officers. Police can’t be trusted to police themselves. The “blue wall of silence” keeps officers from reporting misconduct by fellow officers. Police unions facilitate impunity of officers. The police union got the body camera footage a few days after the killing of Daniel Prude but it took the Prude family six months to get it, and only after they filed several lawsuits.d) Qualified immunity. A recent U.S. District Court judge wrote, “[J]udges have invented a legal doctrine to protect law enforcement officers from having to face any consequences for wrongdoing. The doctrine is called ‘qualified immunity.’ In real life it operates like absolute immunity.” In case after case heard by the commissioners, victims’ families faced extraordinary obstacles to holding officers accountable for the killing of their family members.