Millions of people face the dilemma of cutting spending on food and clothing to pay their energy bill, one supplier’s boss has said.

   “We have no choice but to take food from the hungry to feed the starving.” –  the chief executive of the World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley

‘Take from the hungry to feed the starving’: UN faces awful dilemma | Aid | The Guardian

 Agency seafarers who were unwittingly hired to replace sacked P&O staff at Cairnryan turned and left when they realised what the job entailed.

 Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked significant rises in energy and food prices.

A US think tank – the Center for Global Development – is now warning that the scale of these spikes could push more than 40 million people around the world into “extreme poverty”.

 Russia and Ukraine account for 29% of the world’s wheat. Russia and Belarus account for one-sixth of the world’s fertiliser.

In the past two decades, there have been two significant spikes in food commodity prices, 2007 and 2010. The World Bank estimated the 2007 spike may have pushed up to an extra 155m people into extreme poverty with separate work suggesting the 2010 surge had the same effect on 44m people. 

Food prices are already high, and tens of millions will fall into extreme poverty and go hungry in the coming year. 

Price Spike Caused by Ukraine War Will Push Over 40 Million into Poverty: How Should We Respond? | Center For Global Development (cgdev.org)

“The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility,” said the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The fight for socialism is now more than a fight to end poverty and inequality, to abolish the exploitation of man by man. Today the fight for socialism is a fight to prevent the annihilation of the human race. Mankind must now exterminate the capitalist system – or possibly be exterminated.

The war in Ukraine is a crime against civilised humanity. It is of little use to cry out against war while we tolerate a social system that breeds war. Capitalism makes war inevitable. Capitalist nations not only exploit their workers but ruthlessly invade, plunder, and ravage one another. The profit system is responsible for it all. Abolish that, establish industrial democracy, produce for use, and the incentive to war vanishes. Let us show the people the true cause of war. Let us arouse anger against war. We are against all wars.

The workers who side with the bosses and support capitalism politically and otherwise, and are therefore responsible for capitalism, are also responsible for the hell they get in war and the poverty they endure in peace. To conceal the true source of war, capitalist propagandists divide the nations into “aggressors” and “peace-loving.” This is a lie. The people of every nation hate war, for they are its victims. They are plunged into war by the capitalist rulers, who alone profit from it. No trust whatsoever can be placed in the “peace-loving” declarations of the statesmen of capitalism in this or any other country. 

Workers must awake, and awake quickly, to the realisation that war with all its horrors is the product of the capitalist system.

The nature of capitalist imperialism cannot be changed. The yearning of the peoples of the world for lasting peace on earth and goodwill among men and women can be fulfilled only through a social system based on human needs. That is international socialism. World socialism is the goal of humanity. It is the only way to have peace and security. 

Inequality contributes to the deaths of at least 21,300 people each day—or one person every four seconds. 

This is a “highly conservative estimate” for deaths resulting from hunger, lack of access to healthcare and climate breakdown in poor countries.

Oxfam outlines the fact that the climate crisis is one of the most harmful drivers of inequality.

Since the covid pandemic began, a new billionaire has been created every 26 hours. The world’s small elite of 2,755 billionaires has seen its fortunes grow more during Covid-19 than they have in the whole of the last fourteen years combined, says Oxfam in its report about inequality.

“This is the biggest annual increase since records began. It is taking place on every continent.”

It is enabled by skyrocketing stock market prices, a boom in unregulated entities, a surge in monopoly power and privatisation, alongside the erosion of individual corporate tax rates and workers’ rights and wages.

“Over the past two years, people have died when they contracted an infectious disease because they did not get vaccines in time. They have died of other illnesses because they could not afford private care. They have died of hunger because they could not afford to buy food…And while they died, the richest people in the world got richer than ever and some of the largest companies made unprecedented profits.”

“The climate crisis affects us all, but it doesn’t affect us equally. The richest 1% of people in the world, about 63 million people, are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.”

Since 2000, the UN estimates that 1.23 million people have died and 4.2 billion have been affected by droughts, floods and wildfires. We all suffer from a heating planet when rich countries fail to address the effects of their responsibility for an estimated 92% of all excess historic emissions.”

The number of climate-related disasters has tripled in 30 years, with currently one extreme weather event recorded per week.

Last year, Oxfam reports, the world saw a record 50 billion US dollars worth of damages from extreme weather disasters exacerbated by climate change, pushing nearly 16 million people in 15 countries to crisis levels of hunger.

“People in low-and lower-middle-income countries are around five times more likely than people in high-income countries to be displaced by sudden extreme weather disasters.”

Destructive weather, rising seas, unprecedented fires and historic famines. “Climate change is happening now. It is one of the most harmful drivers of worsening hunger, migration, poverty and inequality all over the world.”

“In recent years, already with 1°C of global heating, there have been deadly cyclones in Asia and Central America, huge locust swarms across Africa.”

Inequality is not an abstract issue, affirms Oxfam  “It has devastating, real-world consequences… It is rigged into our economic systems and is tearing our societies apart.”

According to a World Bank’s report, four out of five people below the international poverty line still live in rural areas, and half of the poor are children. Women also represent a majority of the poor in most regions and among some age groups.

Of the global poor aged 15 and older, about 70% have no schooling or only some basic education.

And more than 40% of the global poor live in economies affected by conflict and violence, and, in some economies, most of the poor are concentrated in specific subnational areas. About 132 million of the global poor live in areas with high flood risk.

Inequality Kills One Person Every Four Seconds | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Are universities really places of higher learning? 

The University of Florida has changed the names of one of its library study rooms that was called the “Karl Marx Group Study Room.”

“Given current events in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world, we determined it was appropriate to remove the name of Karl Marx that was placed on a group study room at the University of Florida in 2014,” Hessy Fernandez, the school’s director of strategic communications.

Are these academics even aware that Marx was born in Trier which was in the Rhineland that later became part of Germany and not Russia. Did this education establishment know Marx wanted a class-free state-free society with no top-down control, or that Russia has a capitalist economy? Didn’t their politics or history department explain that Marx was virulently anti-Russian and supported the independence of Poland as a buffer against the autocratic Tsar?

University of Florida strips study room of ‘Karl Marx’ nameplate | Washington Examiner

 We would imagine elsewhere the death totals of civilans would be headline news and international action demanded to bring peace.

Disappearances are considered the perfect crime because without a body, there’s no crime. And the cartels are expert at ensuring that there is no body.

The phenomenon of Mexico’s disappearances exploded in 2006 when the government declared war on the drug cartels. For years, the government looked the other way as violence increased and families of the missing were forced to become detectives. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government was the first to recognize the extent of the problem, to talk of “extermination sites” and to mount effective searches.

It wasn’t until 2018 — the end of the last administration — that a law passed, laying the legal foundations for the government to establish the National Search Commission. There followed local commissions in every state; protocols that separated searches from investigations, and a temporary and independent body of national and international technical experts supported by the U.N. to help clear the backlog of unidentified remains.

The national commission, which was supposed to have 352 employees this year, still has just 89. And Macías’ state commission has 22 positions budgeted, but has only filled a dozen

Nearly 100,000 disappearances. There are 52,000 unidentified people in morgues and cemeteries.

And people continue to disappear. And more remains are found.

There is no progress in bringing the guilty to justice. 

More than 1,600 investigations into disappearances by authorities or cartels opened by the attorney general’s office, none made it to the courts in 2020.

a member of the Tijuana cartel confessed to having “cooked” some 300 victims in caustic lye. Eight years later, a report from a public university investigation center showed that what officially had been a jail in the border city of Piedras Negras, was actually a Zetas command center and crematorium.

https://apnews.com/article/europe-mexico-caribbean-forensics-4248edf042a13cce16801d58ee6ffea2

 When soaring housing costs are taken into account, living standards have been falling for most working-age households since 2002.

 House prices have risen 20% since the start of the pandemic and are at a record high, both in absolute terms and relative to earnings. 

This leaves growing numbers of people trapped in the private rented sector, where about a third of their income is gobbled up by rent alone. Average rents have risen 8.6% in the past year and now stand at over £1,000 a month. This comes on top of a decade where rents already rose far faster than wages. 

Of course, renters’ losses are landlords’ gains. Attracted by these outsize returns, buy-to-let investors have swallowed up a substantial chunk of available homes in recent years.

We see the same patterns elsewhere.

Britain’s childcare system is the third most expensive in the world: bad news for parents but good news for the private equity investors buying up nurseries.

 Meanwhile, about £1 in every £10 spent on social care is extracted from the system by highly financialised companies that own and control assets within it – contributing to an eye-watering 30% increase in costs for self-funded care since 2012. 

Rail fares have risen 20% in real terms since privatisation

 And water bills 40% – with excess profits inflating the latter by an estimated £2.3bn a year. 

Meanwhile, as the thinktank Common Wealth points out, the monopoly owners of the electric grid are achieving 40% profit margins, and pay out over £1bn a year to shareholders.

High energy costs may have millions wondering how they will heat their homes, but BP’s chief executive boasted unashamedly that they turn his company into a “cash machine”. BP’s and Shell’s profits soared to a combined $32bn last year, with BP shareholders standing to benefit from a $1.5bn share buyback. 

In the US, where corporate power is even more concentrated than in the UK, the real danger is not a wage-price spiral but a “profit-price spiral”. 

US corporate profit margins are at a 70-year high, and have risen 37% in the past year alone. 

In one survey, more than half of retailers admitted to raising prices by more than their increase in costs – with larger firms most likely to be doing so. The narrative about inflation offers a convenient smokescreen for fattening margins, as investors brazenly admit.

 In the words of one asset manager: “What we really want to find are companies with pricing power. In an inflationary environment, that’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

 Morgan Stanley recently argued, it’s profits that must shrink to absorb the pain of inflation – making up for decades in which capital has increased its share at the expense of workers and consumers alike.

Who’s profiting from the cost of living crisis? Right now, it’s big business owners | Christine Berry | The Guardian

WORDS ARE OUR WEAPON

So capitalism has again unleashed the horrors of war. The Socialist Party’s attitude is clear. Wars are never justified from a working-class point of view. They are fought by capitalist states over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets and investments. None of these is issues of concern to workers. The outbreak of any war is an unmitigated disaster for the working class. It is the workers who are hired or conscripted to do the fighting, the destroying, the killing – and the dying. It is workers and their families who suffer from the bombings, the destruction, the restrictions, the food shortages and the disruption to health services that accompany all wars. War brings nothing but suffering and misery. 

This is why, as the Socialist Party representing the working-class interest, has been opposed to all wars. Always. We are not prepared to support under any circumstances the killing and maiming of our fellow workers in the pursuit of capitalist profits. Ideally, from the point of view of the working class within capitalism, it would have been better if the capitalists had settled this conflict peacefully and, now that the war has started, it should stop immediately. Unfortunately, this can only be wishful thinking. Capitalism does not work that way. War will always be a policy option invoked by capitalist states from time to time.

The truth is that capitalism is triumphant everywhere because the working class are blind to their own class position, and are still persuaded that they have an interest in leaving power in capitalist hands. It is only a degree worse that in some countries large numbers of workers go further on the road of stupid servility, and help to place power in the hands of demagogues such as Putin. The only people who can end this are the workers themselves. It is the duty of each national section of the working class to struggle against their own capitalist masters, aided to the extent that is possible by the international movement. The way to prevent war is not by engaging in anti-war campaigns. These are quite useless because they leave the causes of war untouched. The only preventative is to take away the urge to war; take away the profit motive. Socialism is the only means to defeat the warmongers. 

The Socialist Party has always and everywhere been pro-working class and nothing else. We are internationalists, and our slogan is “The World for the Workers”; not for the British or for the white races, but simply for the workers. Our internationalism rests on a firmer foundation—the sure knowledge that national sections of the working class stand or fall together.

We can reject the notion that human nature is essentially warlike.  Mankind’s nature is just what conditions make it, and there are no naturally militarist races. Modern wars have their cause ultimately in economic rivalries and are the unavoidable accompaniment of capitalist civilisation. It is not suggested that tradition, religious beliefs, and racial hostility do not play their part, but these tend more and more to become mere auxiliaries to the main forces—means to the ends of our politicians, and excuses rather than causes. War as we currently see may come at any time unless the workers abolish capitalism. War is competition for profit writ large, the continuation of business by other means. It is not enough for the capitalists that the workers must suffer from continual exploitation, earning only enough to keep them in a fit mental and physical state in order to accrue more profits for their “masters”. 

What adds injury to insult is when the workers are conned into fighting workers of other nations suffering under the same exploitative system—all for the right to be exploited by the more affluent victor. The working class has in reality only one enemy: the capitalist system. We denounce the war as yet another example of the barbarous nature of the capitalist system and call upon our fellow workers in all countries to unite even more urgently to bring the war-causing capitalist system to a speedy end by establishing in its place a world socialist society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s resources by all the people of the Earth.