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Can we separate the skills of the beautiful game from the ugliness of the money machine that drives it and the rivalries and nationalism it thrives on? Should we regard the emotional investment of fans as people being brought together or a reminder of how alienated they are from their own lives and capabilities. Is it, as one commentator stated, people being sold ‘meaningless thrills to patch over the pain’?
Whatever the case, in the society of voluntary cooperative work and free access to goods and services that socialists look forward to, appreciation of the talents of others – including footballers – will still exist, but side by side with each person having the time and space to cultivate their own talents and capabilities.
“The collective wealth of US billionaires reached a record $9.24 trillion this month [June]—an increase of around $2.2 trillion compared to the same time last year—while millions of Americans struggled to afford groceries, healthcare, and other basic necessities as inflation driven by President Donald Trump’s illegal Iran war eroded their wages.
“America’s 15 centi-billionaires and now one trillionaire alone make up 43% of all billionaire wealth—an astounding $4 trillion—and their wealth is growing over twice as fast as fellow billionaires in the past year,” the group noted. “Just these top 16 billionaires hold more wealth today than every US billionaire combined in September of 2020, less than six years ago.””
From Common Dreams: Full report at:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/billionaire-wealth-new-high
From the World Inequality Report 2026:
“The first and most striking fact emerging from the data is that inequality remains at very high levels… today, the top 10% of the global population’s income-earners earn more than the remaining 90%, while the poorest half of the global population captures less than 10% of the total global income. Wealth is even more concentrated: the top 10% own three-quarters of global wealth, while the bottom half holds only 2%.
The picture becomes even more extreme when we move beyond the top 10%… the wealthiest 0.001% alone, fewer than 60,000 multi-millionaires, control today three times more wealth than half of humanity combined. Their share has grown steadily from almost 4% in 1995 to over 6% today, which underscores the persistence of inequality.”
Full report here:
Red faces in the Socialist Workers Party after their tweet on X in response to the death of Widdecombe was ‘Hooray, she’s dead’, followed by immediate deletion as furore swept the media. Some even confused the SWP with us.
So we should point out that, while we oppose capitalism and all its works, and urge the world’s people to establish a post-capitalist society of democratic common ownership, we have no truck with the SWP’s infantile reaction to the death (probably murder) of a pro-capitalist politician, however detestable that person’s opinions.
Capitalism is a worldwide system of private property and market trading, which can only be replaced at a worldwide scale by a conscious and informed majority, not by targeting individuals.
Is the majority in the world today still equivalent to the Third Estate (Tiers état), which was the vast majority of common folk in pre-revolutionary France? Whom did the French Revolution of 1789 most benefit? Global liberté, égalité, fraternité isn’t with us yet but will be one of the many benefits that socialism brings when it has made capitalism history.
‘Obstacles to Capitalist Development
‘Pre-1789 France is best described as a country in which capitalism had been developing within a framework of political and social institutions inherited from feudalism, which had become an obstacle to its further development. The question that then arose was: how were these obstacles to be removed? By reform from above or by revolution from below? Some of the king’s advisers and administrators were aware of what was required. The conscious economic aims of the revolution (see inset) had in fact been worked out by a group of French Rationalist Philosophers who called themselves économistes or physiocrates. They held that there were natural laws governing the production and distribution of wealth just as there were other laws of nature and that governments should let these economic laws operate spontaneously. Hence their slogan laissez-faire which strongly influenced the similar idea put forward by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations that appeared in 1776. A number of royal officials, including ministers, had been Physiocrats, but had come up against all sorts of resistance in trying to carry out reform from above…
The achievement of the French Revolution was to abolish aristocratic privilege but it maintained, and consolidated, plutocratic privilege. After the revolution it was wealth as such and no longer noble status that constituted privilege. In short, it established a capitalist state in which the only distinction between people was the purely economic class distinction between those who owned property and those who did not. It paved the way for the last class struggle in history, which can only be ended by the victory of the propertyless class and the establishment of a classless, socialist society based on the common ownership of the means of production, as envisaged before their time by Babeuf, Maréchal, Buonarotti and others involved in the Conspiracy of the Equals of 1795-6‘.’
Adam Buick
The whole piece can be read at:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2013/07/1789-frances-bourgeois-revolution.html
They are not yet eighteen years old; often, they are much younger. In most cases, they do not go to school but spend their days in fields, on construction sites, in mechanic workshops, markets, and car washes. Others collect scrap metal or do domestic work. Many work between eight and twelve hours a day, often six days a week, for very low pay. This is the daily reality for countless children in Lebanon, where, after years of economic crisis, political instability, and reduced humanitarian assistance, child labour has become an extreme survival strategy for many families.
On the occasion of World Day Against Child Labour, [June 12, 2026] we want to draw attention to this violation, which deprives millions of children of the right to grow, learn, play, and be protected. In Lebanon, this reality has become increasingly visible and urgent. What INTERSOS observes on the ground is not the consequence of cultural norms, but of growing pressure on families, worsened by war and displacement
Boys account for 60% of the cases identified by INTERSOS and are more often involved in physically demanding and dangerous work. Girls account for 40% of cases, but this figure risks underestimating the true scale of the problem: many forms of work performed by girls remain hidden because they take place inside homes, through domestic work, caregiving, or other informal activities that often remain invisible..”
https://www.intersos.org/en/child-labour-lebanon/
The potteries of Staffordshire have, during the last 22 years, been the subject of three parliamentary inquiries. The result is embodied in Mr. Scriven’s Report of 1841 to the “ Children’s Employment Commissioners,” in the report of Dr. Greenhow of 1860 published by order of the medical officer of the Privy Council (Public Health, 3rd Report, 112-113), lastly, in the report of Mr. Longe of 1862 in the “First Report of the Children’s Employment Commission, of the 13th June, 1863.” For my purpose it is enough to take, from the reports of 1860 and 1863, some depositions of the exploited children themselves. From the children we may form an opinion as to the adults, especially the girls and women, and that in a branch of industry by the side of which cotton-spinning appears an agreeable and healthful occupation.
William Wood, 9 years old, was 7 years and 10 months when he began to work. He “ran moulds” (carried ready-moulded articles into the drying-room, afterwards bringing back the empty mould) from the beginning. He came to work every day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off about 9 p.m. “I work till 9 o’clock at night six days in the week. I have done so seven or eight weeks.”
Fifteen hours of labour for a child 7 years old! J. Murray, 12 years of age, says: “I turn jigger, and run moulds. I come at 6. Sometimes I come at 4. I worked all night last night, till 6 o’clock this morning. I have not been in bed since the night before last. There were eight or nine other boys working last night. All but one have come this morning. I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for working at night. I worked two nights last week.”
The manufacture of lucifer matches dates from 1833, from the discovery of the method of applying phosphorus to the match itself. Since 1845 this manufacture has rapidly developed in England, and has extended especially amongst the thickly populated parts of London as well as in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Glasgow. With it has spread the form of lockjaw, which a Vienna physician in 1845 discovered to be a disease peculiar to lucifer-matchmakers. Half the workers are children under thirteen, and young persons under eighteen. The manufacture is on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness in such bad odour that only the most miserable part of the labouring class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it, “the ragged, half-starved, untaught children.”
Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working-day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal-times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.
In the manufacture of paper-hangings the coarser sorts are printed by machine; the finer by hand (block-printing). The most active business months are from the beginning of October to the end of April. During this time the work goes on fast and furious without intermission from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. or further into the night.
J. Leach deposes:
“Last winter six out of nineteen girls were away from ill-health at one time from over-work. I have to bawl at them to keep them awake.” W. Duffy: “I have seen when the children could none of them keep their eyes open for the work; indeed, none of us could.” J. Lightbourne: “Am 13 … We worked last winter till 9 (evening), and the winter before till 10. I used to cry with sore feet every night last winter.” G. Apsden: “That boy of mine when he was 7 years old I used to carry him on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to have 16 hours a day … I have often knelt down to feed him as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop.” Smith, the managing partner of a Manchester factory: “We (he means his “hands” who work for “us”) work on with no stoppage for meals, so that day’s work of 10½ hours is finished by 4.30 p.m., and all after that is over-time.” ( For all these, children and adults alike (152 children and young persons and 140 adults), the average work for the last 18 months has been at the very least 7 days, 5 hours, or 78 1/2 hours a week. For the six weeks ending May 2nd this year (1862), the average was higher — 8 days or 84 hours a week.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm#S1
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The computer guesstimates child labour exploitation at; ‘Approximately 138 to 160 million children are engaged in child labour globally, with 79 million involved in hazardous work.’
How are you going to resolve that issue? Make capitalism history.