“Being a wage slave, even with the best conditions, is no life at all” 

At the next election, the working class will decide which party’s appearance is the most appealing and we shall have a Labour or a Conservative government and capitalism will stay with us. Some voters think that only certain politicians make a mess of things; in fact, the whole of the capitalist system is a mess. It is working-class ignorance and apathy which keep that mess there; and, ironically, it is the working class who pay the price of their folly.

Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The ruling class have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is a ruler, then no one is a ruler. The more power everyone else has, the less power our current rulers would have over us. This is why so much politics goes into ensuring that votes have as little effect as possible on the operations of the state and making sure everything stays the same no matter what the public wants. In a system where money is power, the ruling class naturally needs to suppress the wealth and power of its subjects in order to continue to rule.

Imagine if working people started having as much influence over the direction human civilisation as the oligarchs and plutocrats. Imagine if everybody could work less and relax more, and start discovering what’s really going on in the world. Our capitalist world is perpetually at war, social injustice is rampant, and human and animal suffering is too commonly accepted or overlooked. Capitalist greed drives this malevolence. Capitalist greed with its insatiable appetite for profit creates chaos.  Socialism affirms our compassion and shared humanity, replacing violence with harmony. The world’s predicament is not one that can be resolved via piecemeal legislation. In the end, it’s either profit over people or people over profit – and, if the latter arrangement is ever to be obtained, it requires nothing less than a comprehensive overthrow of capitalist society.

The worker is the source of all wealth. Who has raised all the food? The worker. Who built all the houses and warehouses, and palaces, which are possessed by the rich? The worker. Who manufactures all the products? The worker. Yet workers remain poor and destitute, while those who do not work are wealthy. 

One of the first goals of a socialist world would be to put all of these important economic resources under the common ownership and collective control of the people. By doing so, the majority of the population would decide what the priorities of production and distribution should be. Technology could be used to link every workplace and every suburb in a city, every city and every region in the world to determine the needs and availability of resources for every community, a way that would let the system know how much it had produced of certain goods and how much of certain other goods its population needed for the week (or the day). The system would then balance out all the claims and society would immediately know where there were excesses and where there are shortages can alter production accordingly. It sounds so simple as to be utterly utopian. But this is basically the way the world works already. Take the extensive global supply chains linking farms to food processors, warehouses to supermarkets—everything is coordinated down to the last kilogram between buyers and sellers.  

Somewhere a supermarket manager is scanning barcodes and tomorrow a supply truck will turn up with whatever it was that they ordered. It’s as simple as that. When it comes to this sort of distribution, capitalism is in general incredibly efficient. However, in today’s world the process today is carried out only if they believe it will make money and a profit. That’s the limitation to the capitalist economy and its efficiency. But there’s no technical reason that this operation couldn’t be run instead to meet human needs. The whole process is already carried out by workers—from producing the food to transporting it to stacking the shelves in the shops. All that would need to happen is for production and logistics to be put under the democratic control of the people who do all the work. Under capitalism, shareholders reap the rewards of the impoverished, exploited workers.

With socialism, working people would reap the rewards of their own labour and communities would turn around and say, “We need a hospital”—and it would happen. It’s not materially or technically different; it’s just a different set of priorities and beneficiaries.

Along with its inability to distribute things equitably, capitalism generates a huge amount of waste.

First is the mountain of things that are thrown out because they aren’t sold. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted. In the United States, it’s about 30 percent of all food. Of that, up to a third of wastage happens at the farm and one-quarter at the retail level. It’s actually extra work to keep people starving—food producers and sellers have to put extra time into organising to dump or remove unsold produce, rather than simply allow it to be distributed, in the usual way, to those who need it. Plus they wasted all the labour producing it in the first place only to see it rot. It was also a massive waste of soil nutrients and precious water resources. 

Second is the huge amount of planned obsolescence in capitalist production: many things are designed to fall apart or with short lifespans so that people come back and buy them over and over again.  It’s such a waste of labour and resources, but it’s the production model that makes companies the most money. In many cases, it is cheaper to drive wages lower and just produce more and more new things than it is to create durable or serviceable products.

Third is the monumental waste of entire industries and the staff associated with them: things like the legal profession or sales and marketing. One estimate of the cost to end global hunger (using existing capitalist economic means) is about US$33 billion per year over ten years. Compare that to the investment in marketing: that in the United States alone will reach US$4.7 trillion in 2025. That’s trillions of dollars and millions of labour hours, every year, expended by companies trying to convince us to buy their products, which will soon fall apart, rather than their competitors’ products, which are generally the same and also fall apart.

Socialism would get rid of most of this waste almost overnight by starting with simple questions that the whole population can respond to:

First, what do we all need?

Second, what do we want?

Third, how many resources do we have?

Fourth, what are our priorities?

A huge amount of office space, factory space, fertile land, machinery and, above all, labour time, would be freed up by starting with those questions, rather than the capitalists’ questions of:

“How do I make people want to buy this product? How can I generate a profit?” 

Think of all the millions of hours of wasted labour and energy that could otherwise be used to increase the production of things in short supply, or to reduce the working week by either producing things to last (therefore reducing the need to produce so much) or by bringing in a greater number of workers into productive industries and reducing everyone’s working hours, while still providing for everyone’s needs. 

Socialism would be more rational. Defenders of capitalism always talk about how innovative their system is.  But take the ongoing economic addiction to oil, coal and gas. How innovative is it, really, to be wedded to energy sources from the nineteenth century? The problem again is profits: the huge companies already invested in and determined to squeeze every cent out of the fossil fuel economy just won’t let go. Socialism, being run by the majority in the interests of all, simply would not allow our planet to be trashed so that a few of us could live better than the rest.

Getting to a socialist economy will not be simple—we need a workers’ revolution to get past capitalism. But once we are there, it will be quite easy to use existing technologies and processes to run the world according to the maxim, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. 

Adapted from here

What Would Be Different About a Socialist Economy? | Portside

 Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief organization says 54 million Americans are going hungry today. 

Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) cites 140 million poor and “low-wealth” people in America today, which is 42 percent of the U.S. population. 

The poverty rate is 14.4% as of Feb. 2022.

In America today, 1 in 6 kids are in families below the poverty line. 

The child poverty rate in January 2022 was 17%. Some 3.4 million children live in poverty in America as of February 2022.

Some 14.4 % of America’s population or around 46 million Americans live in poverty today.

 6 in 10 Americans don’t have $500 in their savings account. Some 69% of Americans have less than $1000 in their savings account

 Inflation has surged to the fastest in the last 40 years.

54 Billion for Ukraine While in the U.S. Millions Suffer in Poverty (informationclearinghouse.info)

  A new report  by Yale Law School, the number of prisoners subjected to “restrictive housing”, as solitary is officially known, stood at between 41,000 and 48,000 in the summer of 2021. They were being held alone in cells the size of parking spaces, for 22 hours a day on average and for at least 15 days. 

This is in breach of minimum standards laid down by the United Nations which considers such isolation a form of torture.

More than 6,000 prisoners have been held in isolation for over a year. They include almost a thousand people who have been held on their own in potentially damaging confined spaces for a decade or longer.

The new solitary study, Time-In-Cell: A 2021 Snapshot of Restrictive Housing, extrapolates its findings from the reported figures of 34 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Studies have shown that even short periods of solitary can bring on severe mental health problems including depression, aggression and suicidal thoughts. Its destructive harm was highlighted by the death earlier this month of Albert Woodfox who, before his release from Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison in 2016, was the longest-standing solitary confinement inmate in the country. He was cooped up for 43 years almost without break in a 6ft by 9ft cell. In his 2019 book Solitary, Woodfox described the impact of decades of isolation on him. He had regular terrifying bouts of claustrophobia which forced him to sleep sitting up to avoid the sensation of the walls closing in on him.

Nearly 50,000 people held in solitary confinement in US, report says | US prisons | The Guardian

 Emmanuel Macron has warned the French they are facing sacrifices.

Macron said France and the French felt they were living through a series of crises, “each worse than the last”.

“What we are currently living through is a kind of major tipping point or a great upheaval … we are living the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance … the end of the abundance of products of technologies that seemed always available … the end of the abundance of land and materials including water.” 

“This overview that I’m giving, the end of abundance, the end of insouciance, the end of assumptions – it’s ultimately a tipping point that we are going through that can lead our citizens to feel a lot of anxiety. Faced with this, we have a duty, duties, the first of which is to speak frankly and clearly without doom-mongering,” he said.

Philippe Martinez, the secretary general of the powerful CGT union, said Macron’s comments were “misplaced” and that many in France had never known abundance.

“When we talk about the end of abundance, I think of the millions of unemployed, the millions of those in a precarious situation. For many French people, times are already hard, sacrifices have already been made,” Martinez said.

The leader of the French Communist party, Fabien Roussel, a presidential candidate earlier this year, expressed astonishment at Macron’s speech. “Unbelievable! It’s as if the French have had no worries and been over-indulging themselves. We have 10 million poor in France because of President Macron’s carelessness and the predatory behaviour of the rich,” Roussel tweeted.

Macron’s speech came as it was revealed that the dividends paid out by major French companies reached a record €44bn in the second quarter of 2022, as a result of what was described as exceptional profits in 2021. The dividend payout was almost 33% up on the previous year.

Macron warns of ‘end of abundance’ as France faces difficult winter | France | The Guardian

  Empty office space in London is estimated at roughly 2.88m sq metres (31m sq ft).

 That’s about 2.88 sq km (712 acres), and it’s 50% more than the mere 1.8m sq metres available in the capital in 2019.

  Four-year-old Yasmin, a Rohingya, has lived a life of uncertainty, unsure where she belongs. Born in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, living in India’s Delhi she is unable to return to t family home in her ancestral village in Myanmar.

 Fertility rates have “declined markedly” in the past six decades says the OECD – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But the trend has been particularly pronounced in South Korea, where family sizes have reduced in the span of a few generations. 

At the start of the 1970s women had four children on average but South Korea has again recorded the world’s lowest fertility rate with the number sinking to a new low.

 Emily Maitlis, the former Newsnight presenter highlighted the role of Sir Robbie Gibb, who previously worked as Theresa May’s director of communications and helped to found the rightwing GB News channel. She described him as an “active agent of the Conservative party” who is shaping the broadcaster’s news output. Gibb was appointed to the BBC’s board by Boris Johnson’s government.

 Maitlis said the BBC often slipped into a “both-sides-ism” approach to impartiality that gave a platform to individuals that did not deserve airtime.

She also said attacks on the media can cause journalists to “censor our own interviews to avoid the backlash.”

Despite queues at the British border and economic issues piling up, such outlets are still reluctant to discuss the impact of Brexit “in case they get labelled pessimistic, anti-populist, or worse still, as above: unpatriotic”.

Maitlis warned that the traditional media is becoming increasingly afraid to stand up for itself in an era where “facts are getting lost, constitutional norms trashed, claims frequently unchallenged”.

She explained,  “And yet every day that we sidestep these issues with glaring omissions feels like a conspiracy against the British people; we are pushing the public further away. Why should our viewers, our listeners, come to us to interpret and explain what is going on when they can see our own reluctance to do so?”  

While journalists do not have to be campaigners they should avoid being “complaisant, complicit onlookers”.

Emily Maitlis says ‘active Tory party agent’ shaping BBC news output | BBC | The Guardian

 Emily Maitlis, the former Newsnight presenter highlighted the role of Sir Robbie Gibb, who previously worked as Theresa May’s director of communications and helped to found the rightwing GB News channel. She described him as an “active agent of the Conservative party” who is shaping the broadcaster’s news output. Gibb was appointed to the BBC’s board by Boris Johnson’s government.

 Maitlis said the BBC often slipped into a “both-sides-ism” approach to impartiality that gave a platform to individuals that did not deserve airtime.

She also said attacks on the media can cause journalists to “censor our own interviews to avoid the backlash.”

Despite queues at the British border and economic issues piling up, such outlets are still reluctant to discuss the impact of Brexit “in case they get labelled pessimistic, anti-populist, or worse still, as above: unpatriotic”.

Maitlis warned that the traditional media is becoming increasingly afraid to stand up for itself in an era where “facts are getting lost, constitutional norms trashed, claims frequently unchallenged”.

She explained,  “And yet every day that we sidestep these issues with glaring omissions feels like a conspiracy against the British people; we are pushing the public further away. Why should our viewers, our listeners, come to us to interpret and explain what is going on when they can see our own reluctance to do so?”  

While journalists do not have to be campaigners they should avoid being “complaisant, complicit onlookers”.

Emily Maitlis says ‘active Tory party agent’ shaping BBC news output | BBC | The Guardian

 The numbers leaving Honduras are rising as the country grapples with the economic fallout of the pandemic, the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the cost of living crisis, as well as the more entrenched issues of gang violence, poverty and climate change. It’s impossible to know how many people leave Honduras. One estimate is that every year, 130,000-150,000 people try to reach the USA.

The route to the US is full of danger, and migrants are “extremely vulnerable”. Some perish from exposure to the elements in the desert that lies along the Mexico-US border; others are killed in road accidents or die grisly deaths on “the beast” – a freight train that traverses Mexico; some are detained by authorities; and some, like Rosa and her daughter, fall victim to criminal gangs in Mexico, who view migrants as a business opportunity.

“There are multiple factors here in Honduras that force people to migrate,” says Rolando Sierra, director of the faculty of social sciences at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. “Honduras has a high percentage of the population living in poverty without opportunities for employment. And, if levels of violence, corruption and impunity don’t reduce, then neither will migration.”

The International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project documented that between January 2014 and March 2022 at least 6,141 people died or disappeared along migratory routes on the American continent. Between 2007 and 2021, the Jesuit Migrant Service attended to 1,280 cases of missing migrants in Mexico, of which 71% were from Central America. In Mexico, where many go missing, there is a forensic crisis, with more than 52,000 unidentified bodies lying in mass graves, forensic service facilities, universities and forensic storage centres.

 In Honduras alone there are 3,500 people listed as missing.

Sierra adds: “In Honduras, there are no policies in place to deal with irregular migration. There are no specialised services to investigate what has happened to people who disappear or to support their relatives.”

There is no central database of missing people, which “invisibilises the phenomenon”, according to Jérémy Renaux, coordinator for the programme of disappeared people at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Families face obstacles in reporting cases, and then receive no help.

Eva Ramirez, who founded the Comité de familiares de migrantes desaparecidos Amor y Fe, a group of people with missing relatives, explains, “People don’t leave the country because they want to. They leave because they have to. We live in a country that expels people through extreme poverty and a lack of opportunities, and violence, among many other factors.”

‘Sell your organs to raise the ransom’: the Hondurans risking kidnap and death to reach the US | Global development | The Guardian