This month’s issue of the Socialist Standard drew attention to the dire conditions being faced by Sri Lankan fellow workers suffering under an economic melt-down. It has seemingly grown worse.

Every day motorists line up at fuel pumps at the break of dawn and wait hours until they open. The military has posted soldiers at hundreds of gas stations on March 22 after complaints of stockpiling and inefficient distribution, and farmers and fishermen have joined a growing wave of protests. While Sri Lanka was in economic trouble even before COVID-19 with struggles to pay foreign debt and slow growth, the series of lockdowns dealt a major blow to the informal sector, which accounts for nearly 60% of the country’s workforce. Job losses and reduced earnings increased poverty in the country of 22 million.

The share of the poor based on a daily income of $3.20 was estimated to have grown to 11.7% in 2020 – or by more than half a million people – from 9.2% a year before, according to the World Bank.

Central bank data shows that the government had identified 5 million families with “fragile financial status of low-income households” and provided them a 5,000 rupee allowance during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Economic crisis forces Sri Lankans to moonlight as prices soar (trust.org)

The word “billionaire” didn’t even exist until 1844. Fifty years later, we got “multibillionaire.” And for the next 127 years, that was enough. 

How disappointing that Reich’s answer is simply redistribution of wealth through taxation, rather than a fundamental change to how wealth is accrued. 

 Brian Martin, the head of technical policy for building regulation, told the public inquiry that he found it hard to express how sorry he was as he could have potentially prevented the Grenfell Tower fire on a number of occasions.

But Martin also pointed to government policies deregulating the industry that left him as “a single point of failure” in an under-resourced department.

The farmworkers who feed us are on the frontlines of climate change, poverty, and the broken immigration system. They shouldn’t be treated as sacrificial or replaceable—especially when they’re nothing short of essential.

There are between 2.5 and 3 million agricultural workers in the United States. Migrant farmworkers account for an estimated 75 percent of these, and 50 percent of migrant farmworkers are undocumented. Many live in this country at risk of deportation, in substandard housing conditions, and in extreme poverty.

Because most farmworkers lack basic working protections and are paid “per piece”—that is, for how much they harvest—they’re often forced to choose between going without pay and working long hours through dangerous conditions. In recent years, they’ve had to work through heat waves, extreme drought, and even wildfires.

In 2021, the United States experienced the hottest summer on record, and some farmworkers died because of these unpredictable circumstances. Heat is now their leading cause of death on the job—in fact, farmworkers are 20 times more likely than other workers to die from heat-related illnesses.

The piece-rate wage forces workers to put in 10- or 12-hour workdays and still leaves many food-insecure and impoverished. And due to their immigration status, farmworkers are often unable to protest dangerous working conditions or poor wages, incentivizing employers to exploit them further.

Opinion | It’s Farmworker Awareness Week. Here’s What Those Who Feed Us Deserve. | Ennedith Lopez (commondreams.org)

A new analysis conducted by Oil Change International, Greenpeace USA, and Global Witness estimates that U.S. oil and gas corporations are poised to rake in windfall profits of up to $126 billion this year as they exploit Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine to raise prices at the pump.

“Under conservative estimates, we find the U.S. upstream oil and gas industry will collect a windfall of $37 to $126 billion in 2022 alone,” the groups’ report states. The higher-end profit estimate is dependent on oil prices spiking to $120 per barrel this summer and remaining elevated as the West moves to restrict Russian oil imports—a major opportunity for U.S. fossil fuel companies, particularly as the Biden administration looks to ramp up gas exports to Europe. If oil prices average $88 per barrel, the new analysis finds, the U.S. oil and gas industry would reap $37 billion in additional profits in 2022.

US Oil Companies Set to Reap Up to $126 Billion in Extra Profits Amid War on Ukraine (commondreams.org)

The two-day national level strike by workers given by 10 central trade unions and other supporting organizations in India drew a strong response by over 200 million (20 crore) workers on March 28 and 29, according to organizers. These workers included those from ports and mines, railways and transport, banking and insurance, refineries and telecom, public as well as private sector (including multinational companies). There was a significant presence of women in the strike, particularly those employed in various development schemes, often at very low wages.

The strike was in addition supported by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, an umbrella organization of 40 farmers’ organizations that had spearheaded a massive and successful farmers’ protest movement last year.

This strike came at a time of increasing reports of the twin burdens of unemployment and inflation. Rates of urban unemployment have been at high levels, while the price of essential goods has been increasing. In the process, most worker households have faced increasing difficulties in making basic needs. Reports of workers being made to work for longer hours in more difficult conditions have appeared increasingly, resulting in several industrial and construction site accidents.

There are increasing apprehensions of workers losing jobs and rights in the course of policies of relentlessly increasing privatization under different names and schemes. Instead of striving to rapidly increase social security cover for unorganized sector workers who are largely deprived of this, the policies of the government are widely seen to be creating more uncertain and difficult conditions for workers. 

India–Massive Strike Of 200 Million Workers Draws Attention To Increasing Problems And Apprehensions Of Workers| Countercurrents

 “The fraternisation of the workers of the world is for me the highest and most sacred thing on earth; it is my guiding star, my ideal, my fatherland. I would rather forfeit my life than be unfaithful to this ideal!” – Rosa Luxemburg

Capitalism is a dangerous society. We live in a harsh, brutal society. Every day we read on the media about poverty, hunger, war and crime. The Socialist Party is true to itself and the working class and makes its stand staunchly in favour of the class war, the only war that can put an end to all war, and quite as staunchly against every war waged by the ruling class to rob and kill and enslave the working class. Uncompromising socialist opposition against war, against those who caused it, who profit by it, who want to continue to support the war. The first step in the struggle against war is a clear understanding of the nature and causes of war.

Capitalists of every major nation are faced with the following situation: In order to sustain the system which sustains them, they must find continuous outlets for capital investment and re-investment; but the domestic market, provided by the capitalist mode of production within any single nation, is not, sufficient to re-convert into capital values the values of commodities turned out even by existing capital equipment, much less of new. 

Consequently, the capitalists of each nation are forced to seek outlets for capital investment (and likewise consumer markets) beyond the national borders. Since the world is limited in extent, since the areas available for new forms of capital expansion and exploitation are growingly restricted, conflict is not only likely but inevitable. The battles of the capitalists have been fought out on a worldwide scale. Into the satellite states, economic blocs, spheres of influence, flow the surplus capital funds, expecting to be set to work at making profits. capitalist society is continuously at war, first trade wars, later proxy wars, then open hostilities. It is war all the time, changing only in the form it takes, in the degree of violence.

The new war crisis is no longer a matter of prophecy and prediction. It is already here, inaugurated by the launching of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We have entered the period of the armed conflict of the imperialist powers for a re-division of the world. This does not, of course, mean that open world war is scheduled to begin immediately. Delay, hesitation, manoeuvering are still, for the moment, possible. What it means is that the approach of the world war has now become the decisive and determining diplomatic factor in international and national developments.

The problem of war is the supreme test for the working class and the party of the working class. Once again it is the war crisis that strips bare the pretenders within the working class, the left-wing patriots. The construction of a new society which will wipe war and the threat of war from the face of the planet can be achieved only by the action of the international working class. A brief study of the nature and causes of modern war is sufficient to prove that war is an essential part of capitalism. The inner conflicts of capitalism lead and must lead to war. War is not the cause of the troubles of society. The opposite is true. War is a symptom and result of the irreconcilable troubles and conflicts of the present form of society, that is to say, of capitalism. The only way to fight against war is to fight against the causes of war.

 Since the causes of war are part of the inner nature of capitalism, it follows that the only way to fight against war is to fight against capitalism. It follows that the only possible struggle against war is the struggle for the workers’ revolution, for a world socialist society.  The capitalist nationalist system breeds wars, and we shall have to build a cooperative commonwealth in order to be secure in peace. On the question of war, every responsible person must be completely serious. No evasions, no half-truths can be accepted. The only answer to war is the full answer, with no sugar-coating. The great aim of the World Socialist Movement is the abolition of war. Modern warfare threatens not merely suffering and death to working people, but if it turns nuclear, the actual destruction of human civilisation, the thrusting of humankind back into barbarism. No one can doubt this to be literally true.

The camouflage that war carries – appearing as due to “national” or “cultural” differences, as follows – must not be allowed to hide the fundamental conflicts which are the true source of modern war. Though these other factors may provide the final push that sets open war going or may modify the character of a war, there is nothing in their own nature that must necessarily lead to war. They are the tools of the forces making for war, not the cause of these forces.

 For climate campaigners, fossil fuel energy is a key driver of war and needs to be phased out and replaced by renewable energy.  

“More investment and reliance on fossil fuels is music to the ears of despots and warmongers all over the world who recognize this is an energy system that benefits them,” said Global Witness Murray Worthy. “If Europe truly wants to get off Russian gas, the only real option it has is phasing out gas altogether.”

“We have the unique historical chance and obligation to choose now for a radical shift of the way we generate and consume energy,” said Andy Gheorghiu, a Germany-based anti-gas and -fracking campaigner. “But the solution our trans-Atlantic governments presented was nothing but business as usual.”

 The EU has turned to the US for an alternative gas supply. An extra 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) — sourced largely from hydraulic fracking wells that have mushroomed across the United States will now arrive in  Europe this year. Concerns are also growing about the immediate climate impacts of LNG fracked from shale deposits deep under the ground. Though fracking is banned across much of Europe due to its environmental impact, including the use of chemicals that contaminate groundwater, the EU is happy to source fracked gas from the US.

“The agreement puts the EU and the US on a misguided and dangerous path by fast-tracking new infrastructure to import fossil gas into Europe,” said Murray Worthy, gas campaign leader at the environment NGO Global Witness. “Building new import terminals would mean locking in fossil gas imports for years to come, long after the EU needs to quit this climate-wrecking fuel for good.”

It has severe climate implications because of LNG’s high methane emissions. In Texas, for example, high emissions from so-called methane flaring often go unregulated, allowing leakage from the tens of thousands of wells in the Permian Basin, which stretches into New Mexico — its gas reserves have been labelled “some of the dirtiest in the world.”

Indeed, a 2019 study attributed a decade of growth in global atmospheric methane emissions to the fracking boom in the United States. It concluded that shale-gas production in North America may be responsible for “over half of all of the increased emissions from fossil fuels globally” in the previous decade.

Researchers Amanda Levin and Christina Swanson, from the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council, have concluded that US attempts to ramp up LNG production and exports could scupper any chance of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F).

They describe the “rapidly expanding” export of LNG as a “bridge” to the clean-energy transition — gas emissions are about 50% lower than coal — will “lock in fossil fuel dependence, making the transition to actual low-carbon and no-carbon energy even more difficult.”

The climate impact of LNG will double when extraction, transport, liquefaction and re-gasification are added to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of gas burning, the researchers note.

The 130 to 213 million metric tons (143-235 short tons) of new GHG emissions in the US generated by a tripling of exports between 2020 and 2030 will be like putting up to 45 million more fossil fuel-powered cars on the road annually — it will also reverse the 1% annual GHG decline achieved in the past decade, according to the authors. 

The European Union’s imported LNG is also being used as a feedstock for plastics and fertilizers. With import contracts often locked in for up to 20 years, such fossil fuel availability will be a disincentive to decarbonize these high emission raw material sectors. 

However, necessary infrastructure such as terminals will take two to three years to construct, making the European Union’s goal of cutting Russian gas imports by two-thirds by year’s end unlikely. 

The true cost of fracked US ′freedom gas′ | Environment | All topics from climate change to conservation | DW | 28.03.2022

 нет войне

Once again European cities are being bombed.

Once again displaced persons are on the move. This has never ceased to be the fate of people in Africa and Asia but one of the claims of Western capitalism was that it had at least established peace and prosperity in Europe.

Once again full-scale war has returned to Europe.

Once again the illusion that permanent peace and prosperity is possible under capitalism has been shattered.

Once again the socialist assertion that nationalism can never serve the interests of the working class is being attested to daily amidst the horrors of the war in Ukraine.

The simple fact is that worker is butchering worker – for the privilege of rearranging capitalist state borders. Needless to say, in this as in all wars it is the working class who suffer most. They do the fighting and the dying and it is their lives and homes that count for most of the “collateral damage” whether or not they swallow the nationalist filth of their leaders.  This war is not the result of ancient hatreds or peculiar Slavic mentality, they are the result of capitalism and can therefore happen anywhere in the world, even here. Even by the barbaric standards of contemporary capitalism, the situation in Ukraine is dire. 

We in the Socialist Party place on record our complete abhorrence with regard to the plight of our class brothers and sisters in Ukraine and have no equivocation in denouncing the murderous gangsters who have blood on their hands. The Russian missile strikes on Ukraine are aimed not just at direct military targets but at the industrial infrastructure of power stations, fuel depots, factories, chemical plants, roads, railways and bridges which serve civilian purposes as well as supplying the Ukrainian military machine. All this represents the destruction of useful wealth. As socialists have always said, war means social regression.

Wars are inevitable under capitalism because of the economic competition between states that is built in to it, but is normally only a last resort when a state’s “vital interest” is involved. Governments are little more than the executives of their respective master classes and in the cut-throat world of capitalist competition they must be seen to be promoting their profit-oriented interests, and to hell with the cost of life. In other words, this war is no different from any of the wars that have taken place in modern times. It’s a business war.

 Capitalism is driven by the competitive struggle for profits between corporations and states. Conflict, economic, political and, as a last resort, the military is built-in to capitalism over sources of raw materials, investment outlets, markets, trade routes, and strategic points to control and protect these. When a state judges that its “vital interest” is threatened – e.g. needing to secure access to a key raw material, trade route or military outpost-it goes to war. The USA and the UK did this when they invaded Iraq in 2003 and Russia is doing this now by invading Ukraine.

Capitalism breeds war, though most people would prefer to live in peace. Consequently, massive propaganda exercises are employed by the state to stoke their fears and anxieties that stem from material poverty and insecurity. Invariably they also endeavour to present it as being in some way humanitarian. This is because people have a healthy horror of war. They know war means death and destruction. Death not only of the soldiers on both sides, but also of women, children and old people as “collateral damage” – who make up many of the casualties of modern war – and destruction not only of military installations and hardware but also of bridges, roads, power stations, ports, hospitals and other socially-useful installations.

Many people’s gut reaction is simply that war is crazy. Socialists share this anti-war sentiment. It is one of the reasons why we are real socialists, advocates of a united world community without frontiers based on all the Earth’s resources, natural and industrial, becoming the common heritage of all humanity and being used to satisfy people’s needs instead of for profit. We have concluded that capitalism means war and that therefore to get rid of wars and the threat of wars and the constant preparation for war represented by maintaining armed forces-you have got to get rid of capitalism.

That voices are raised against the war, millions of voices shows that there is hope. That workers – whose experience of life stems from using their energies and talents to cooperatively solve problems and achieve goals; who realise the potential for mutual dependence and support; who enjoy some security of life won through the class struggle – are determined to oppose the war shows that opposition to war has its basis in material reality rather than mere moral condemnation.

War is completely unnecessary. We are living in a world that has enough resources to provide plenty for all, eliminate world poverty, ignorance and disease, to provide adequate and comfortable life for everyone on the planet. Yet under capitalism resources are squandered on armaments, of the individual as well as of mass destruction, and, as now, in actual war. Even in times of peace-as the armed truce between wars is called capitalism’s pursuit of profit pollutes and plunders the planet and upsets the balance of nature with potentially devastating consequences. The economic law “no profit, no production” applies implacably, resulting in millions dying of hunger and related diseases every year simply because it is not profitable to produce the food to feed them and, in fact, often while the food that could feed them is destroyed so as to maintain prices and profits.

As we have announced several times in the past, if we are to prevent the 21st century from becoming a more violent re-run of the 20th, that witnessed two world wars, the first use of nuclear weapons and many hundreds of smaller conflicts—all in the name of profit—it is essential we, the victims, the cannon fodder, the class that has the biggest price to pay to satisfy the whims of the mighty, begin to organise now, not tomorrow and nor in years to come when the air-raid sirens are screaming. We as a class have suffered too much and have too much to lose to leave decisions regarding the future of our planet in the hands of a group of arrogant, conceited and profit-crazed individuals. Let’s really organise to take their power away, before it is too late.

The Socialist Party will be standing two candidates in the local elections in England on 5 May.

One in the Clapham East ward of the London Borough of Lambeth and the other in the Pantiles & St. Marks ward of Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent.

The nomination papers for our candidate in Lambeth — Danny Lambert — were handed in and accepted today. So the campaign there is off.

Here is the election address:

End Capitalism

The other candidates in this election don’t want change. Instead, they will be wittering on about how they propose to fix the faulty system we live under – capitalism – so it’s maybe a tiny bit better for you and yours. But every politician says this. In every party. In every election. And they never really fix anything.

The reason they can’t fix capitalism’s problems is because capitalism IS the problem.

Why? Because it only works for the tiny minority who own most of the wealth. Capitalism has revolutionised our science and technology so that we can now produce enough for everybody worldwide. That means we could make everything free if we take the world back from the rich and run it collectively as a communally owned resource.

What’s causing poverty, inequality, wars and global warming is that we have a 21st-century planet being trashed by an obsolete 19th-century economic system that puts profits before meeting needs.

The natural and industrial resources of our planet Earth are the common heritage of all humans.

Universal free access would be simpler, faster, and smarter. And it’s an upgrade the world badly needs, so show your support by voting for the Socialist Party (World Socialist Movement) candidate, Danny Lambert.