The experts now foresee a long protracted war in Ukraine with further inevitable economic consequences for many other peoples across the world. The burden of war always falls heaviest on the poor and vulnerable. They are taught that their masters always know better, and thus when commanded go out in vast numbers to be killed on the battlefield. And what is their reward? If they escape death they return to face their rulers cutting social and welfare services. You are doomed to sweat to earn a miserable living while the masters enjoy the fruit of your toil. What have you to fight for? National independence? That means the masters’ freedom. Let the workers form one great worldwide union to gain for the workers true liberty and happiness. When millions of workers are set free from making armaments for warfare, then they will be able to turn their attention to building themselves better houses, producing more and better food and healthcare for their families, and they will enjoy the leisure, the comfort, the culture and the education which are now the privileges of the exploiters. Let us work to bring about universal prosperity and peace.

To the Russian soldiers, we say you are being misled and are sacrificing your lives and your family’s happiness in an unjust foreign invasion. You are fighting a most disgraceful and inhuman war. Yours is the robbers’ fight to steal another’s country.  Putin cannot fight even the smallest battle without you. You are the masters of the entire situation. Lay down your weapons, go back home and change conditions back there.

To the Ukrainian soldiers, you are martyring your lives in the name of patriotism so that plutocrats can preserve their privileges and private property. Join your women and children and seek safety outside Ukraine and let the politicians and the employers who benefit do the fighting. Why bleed for the capitalists?

Men and women make their own history, as Marx once said. Imperialism is a product of capitalism and we cannot destroy the one without overthrowing the other. Socialists struggling against economic slavery at home cuts at the roots of war that can only be overcome by the working-class conquest of economic and political power in their respective countries, which will bring to an end the capitalist regime, and call into existence the cooperative world commonwealth.

Capitalism condemns people against one another. Capitalism is the instigator of wars. Instead of uniting the world, it works for its irremediable division and for eternal war. 

The Socialist Party has for years declared against the atrocities of capitalism, but now there are so-called socialists informing us that it is our duty to become accomplices of the rulers in the greatest of all iniquities, the slaughter of fellow workers by fellow-worker, dutifully performing one’s patriotism by taking life, bombing homes, and laying waste to fields of the innocent.

The working class of the world has but one enemy, the capitalist class of the world, those of their own country being at the head of the list.

“Ethical” investing is one of the fastest-growing areas of finance. Corporations worldwide are backing projects to plant or protect carbon-absorbing trees which weighs up a company’s commitment to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

Some environmentalists, however, argue that such efforts are often just cases of “greenwashing” – a way for companies to look like they are taking action to curb climate change without actually cutting their own planet-heating emissions.

“Funding for communities is not bad, but that doesn’t make up for the negative impact that the company may be having on the environment,” said Gustavo Pinheiro, a coordinator at the Institute for Climate and Society, a Brazilian philanthropic organization.

But the current ESG wave means many corporations are investing in forest protection as a way to buy external goodwill, instead of using the money to make internal changes to cut their carbon emissions, said Daniela Teston, Brazil’s corporate engagement manager for green group WWF.

“Sometimes a company supports a specific project and communicates that investment to the public as if it were a part of its strategy in terms of social-environmental conservation,” Teston said. Instead, companies should take “a broader look at concrete actions that are not focused on small projects,” she added.

In Brazil between January and March this year, tree loss in the Amazon rose 64% from a year ago to 941 sq km (363 square miles).

Can ethical investment help protect the Amazon rainforest? (trust.org)

 The Rich Prevail Over the Poor

The 164-member World Trade Organization (WTO) has implicitly rubber-stamped the widely-condemned policy of “vaccine apartheid” which has discriminated against the world’s poorer nations, mostly in Africa and Asia, depriving them of any wide-ranging intellectual property rights.

Max Lawson, Co-Chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance and Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam, said at the conclusion of the WTO’s ministerial meeting last week: “The conduct of rich countries at the WTO has been utterly shameful. The European Union has blocked anything that resembles a meaningful intellectual property waiver. The UK and Switzerland have used negotiations to twist the knife and make any text even worse. And the US has sat silently in negotiations with red lines designed to limit the impact of any agreement.”

 This so-called compromise, he argued, largely reiterates developing countries’ existing rights to override patents in certain circumstances. And it tries to restrict even that limited right to countries which do not already have capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines.Lawson added, “This is absolutely not the broad intellectual property waiver the world desperately needs to ensure access to vaccines and treatments for everyone, everywhere. The EU, UK, US, and Switzerland blocked that text.”

“Put simply, it is a technocratic fudge aimed at saving reputations, not lives.”

Ben Phillips, author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’ explained that rich countries had acted to protect the monopolies of big pharmaceutical companies to determine production levels of pandemic-ending medicines.

In doing so, he said “they are not only causing deaths in developing countries, they are causing deaths in their own countries’ too. It’s not Northern interests vs Southern interests. It’s a handful of oligarchs who cannot share vs 8 billion people who want to be safe from pandemics.”

“Almost everyone in every country in the world”, he said, “would be better off if big pharmaceutical companies made slightly less obscene profits so that enough doses of pandemic-ending medicines could be made by multiple producers across the world to reach everyone who needs them on time.”

“The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the rot of the system of monopolies over production of vital medicines. Everyone can see it, and it will fall. How quickly it falls is the only question left. People are organizing nationally and internationally and they won’t let this pass again,” Phillips declared.

Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organizations (CSOs), said, “unequal access to vaccines is a global scandal that flies in the face of the economic, social and technological progress we claim to have made as humanity”. He pointed out that CSOs around the world have long called for equity in health care and an end to excessive profiteering by the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of people’s well-being.

The Battle for Covid-19 Vaccines: the Rich Prevail Over the Poor | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Black Americans lost 90% of their lands across the United States during the 20th century, government figures show, due to factors such as predatory developers.

White people own 98% of U.S. farmland.

Black farming projects look to recoup historical U.S. land losses (trust.org)

 “True socialists cannot at the same time be nationalists, militarists and capitalist ‘patriots.’ . . . The self-called socialists who are nationalists first and who set the ‘fatherland’ of their masters above the whole earth and above all the workers of the world are not socialists at all but either mild and harmless capitalist reformers and stool pigeons or traitors to the cause.” – Eugene Debs

Eugene V. Debs: Socialist Internationalism Versus Capitalist Nationalism (jacobin.com)

Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, has again been distinguishing himself as a patriot. Bluntly put, Starmer regards it as the duty of Britons to sacrifice themselves in defence of their exploiters should the latter be challenged by the exploiters of any other country. In other words it says that the working class should be prepared to slaughter workers of any other country should their respective masters quarrel over the division of the spoils that has been stolen from the working class.

Every member of the Socialist Party knows that the problem of militarism—like that of unemployment—is inseparable from capitalism. Militarism is an inevitable effect of capitalist domination and the struggle for markets and profit, and so long as the workers are ruled by a master class, so long will their masters use them as cannon fodder. The only solution of the question of militarism from the proletarian point of view is the abolition of capitalist exploitation. It is then our duty to concentrate our efforts upon socialism, upon the triumph of those who labour.

The revolutionary socialist is the truest peace advocate. All socialists call themselves internationalists, and this, to every socialist, means to be in favour of the international union of the workers.

The patriotic left-nationalists say: ‘Present day nations, such as history has made them, are entities whose existence is useful to human progress. However imperfect they may be, however inhuman even they may be for working people, the latter have in each country the duty of defending them when attacked. We are internationalists, but if the country in which we chanced to be born is attacked we will defend it to the death’.

This in plain language means simply; ‘Workers of the world unite; but if your rulers order you to massacre your comrades, do so!’

If a wider war happens to break out over Ukraine between NATO and Russia, workers would have protested through the voices of their respective parliamentarians, proclaiming eloquently the fraternity between peoples  and, then, fraternally, the working classes would have gone to massacre each other.

The workers are ill-treated in every existing country.All nations are equal, or nearly so, in this respect, particularly now that the capitalist regime renders more and more uniform the material, intellectual, and political conditions of life for the labouring class in all countries.No country at the present day, is so superior to the others that the workers of that country should get themselves killed in its defence.

 The Socialist Party is the only party of which it can be said that it advocates undiluted socialism. All the various problems that affect the working class hinge upon the ownership of the means of life, and yet outside of our organisation practically the whole of the workers’ energies are being directed against effects rather than to the removal of the cause of the trouble. The origin of poverty, war and slavery lies in class ownership of the means whereby the people live. The straightest road is the shortest road, and the only way to get rid of the evil of militarism is to get rid of capitalism.

Fossil fuel companies and the banks that finance them “have humanity by the throat,” António Guterres, the UN secretary general has said.

He compared fossil fuel companies to the tobacco companies that continued to push their addictive products while concealing or attacking health advice that showed clear links between smoking and cancer, the first time he has drawn such a parallel.

He said: “We seem trapped in a world where fossil fuel producers and financiers have humanity by the throat. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimise their responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies. They exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.”

Guterres also castigated governments that are failing to rein in fossil fuels, and in many cases seeking increased production of gas, oil and even coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

He said: “Nothing could be more clear or present than the danger of fossil fuel expansion. Even in the short-term, fossil fuels don’t make political or economic sense.”

Guterres has apparently been incensed by the recent behaviour of fossil fuel companies, which have been reaping a bonanza from energy prices sent soaring by the Ukraine war. Much of these bumper profits are likely to be invested in fresh exploration and expansion of fossil fuel resources.

Guterres is understood to be furious that, six months after the Cop26 climate summit, and after three dire reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the “starkest warning yet” from climate scientists – countries and businesses are ignoring the science and squandering opportunities to put the world on a greener path, when renewable energy is cheaper and safer than fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency warned last year that all new exploration and development of oil, gas and coal must cease this year to hold to the 1.5C threshold.

A senior UN official explained: “Even given the secretary general’s impressive track record of speaking truth to power, this is a blistering intervention, to the leaders of the world’s largest economies. The fossil fuel industry is taking a page out of big tobacco’s playbook, and that is utterly unacceptable to the secretary general. He’s determined to call out the fossil fuel industry and its financiers, and he won’t be constrained by any diplomatic niceties.” The official added: “For the secretary general, this is the fight of our lives, and he won’t take a backwards step.”

Fossil fuel firms ‘have humanity by the throat’, says UN head in blistering attack | Climate crisis | The Guardian

With the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the whole world is discussing the question of war and peace. Europe stands on the verge of the abyss. The danger of a wider war is growing from day to day.

Capitalism has brought upon the people of the world numerous wars, including two disastrous world wars. Wars have caused the people heavy suffering, but have also educated them. More and more people have come to understand that to defend world peace it is imperative to wage struggles against policies of war. Socialists throughout the world are duty-bound to promote the peace sentiments of the people and to stand for world peace. They are duty-bound to expose their deceptions and defeat plans for war. They are duty-bound to educate the people, raise their political consciousness and guide the struggle for world peace in the proper direction.

Total war, with its horrible outrages upon civilians, including children, as distinct from the armies engaged in combat, is not the hellish invention of a few individuals; it is the logical expression of present-day capitalism in military conflicts. ”War,” said Clausewitz, “is a continuation of politics by other means.” And politics, we would add, are a continuation of economic conflict by other means.

War is also an industry. The means of production are now mainly utilised to produce the means of destruction: the wage slaves  employed by their masters in producing and using the implements of war. Capitalism is run for profit. War is embarked on by the capitalist class because it is considered by one capitalist group or another that this course of action is the only course open to them in the circumstances in which they find themselves. They calculate they can retain or obtain what they desire only by war.

Whilst war is in the future is given much consideration by those who live on rent interest and profit; they try to discover ways and means of repaying themselves for the trouble and inconvenience the war has entailed. The plans of the profit band are formulated with the above objects in view. It is well to note that neither in war nor peace does the exploiting class produce; labour applied to the natural resources of the earth brings into being all exchange values; this being the case, the recipients of profit do not give to the cost of the war anything more than they have previously wrung from the working class.

Nationalism and patriotism groups people according to their land of origin, as decided by the vicissitudes of history; within every country, thanks to the patriotic link, rich and poor unite against the foreigner.

Socialism groups people, poor against rich, class against class, without taking into account the differences of race and language, and over and above the frontiers traced by history. Patriotism in every nation masks class antagonisms to the great profit of the leading class. Working people have no country. The differences which exist between the present countries are all superficial differences. The capitalist regime is the same in all countries. There is only one war which is worthy, that is class war, the social revolution.

To the poor, the propertyless mass of both sexes, falls the lot of loathsome toil in dangerous or unhealthy trades, long hours which make one disgusted with work. To them starvation wages; to them the insecurity of employment, the rigours of the law at the slightest fault, and if illness, old age, or unemployment comes, privations and dark misery with its procession of sorrows and shame. That’s what a country is – a monstrous social inequality, the shameful exploitation of a nation by a privileged class. There is nothing natural nor logical, than that in every country the poverty-stricken, disinherited, the overworked beasts of burden, ill-fed, badly housed, badly clothed, badly educated, march at the first call of the bugle to war.  Is it not possible for humanity to find a different plan for living, one that would give us security and peace? Then may it be that socialism will take its rightful place in the consciousness of the workers.

The only way in which humanity can bring about social change and build a fraternal society, free of war, is to establish socialism. This will not come about as an expression of non-violence but as the conscious act of a socialist working-class. The attitude of pacifism can be, and has been, adopted by people of all manner of opinions—for example, by members of the British Labour Party, by Christians and so on—all of whom support the capitalist social system which produces violence and which therefore makes pacifism an empty dream. Any organisation which accepts the continuance of capitalism, the cause of war in the modem world, is standing in the way of political parties like the Socialist Party, which seek to end capitalism and with it war.

 An internal document from Amazon, the online retail giant, warns that “if we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the U.S. network by 2024.”

 The report’s findings are the company “was expected to exhaust its entire available labor pool in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area by the end of 2021, and in the Inland Empire region of California, roughly 60 miles east of Los Angeles, by the end of 2022.” The internal research also identified the regions surrounding Memphis, Tennessee, and Wilmington, Delaware, as areas where Amazon was on the cusp of exhausting local warehouse labor availability

“This is crazy. Amazon burns through workers so fast there might be none left soon,” tweeted New York City organizer and writer Joshua Potash, adding that he “can’t imagine how anyone defends a system that treats people like expendable parts like this.”

Amazon’s own data shows that its attrition rate was 123% in 2019 and 159% in 2020, which are high figures compared with the federal government’s estimates for those two years in the U.S. transportation and warehouse sectors (46% and 59%) and retail (58% and 70%).

California Labor Federation’s Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher told Amazon that “maybe it’s time to improve working conditions and allow your workers to unionize.”

Longtime labor reporter Steven Greenhouse similarly suggested that “IF AMAZON LETS ITS WAREHOUSES UNIONIZE, they could become far less grueling places to work and worker turnover could decline greatly.”

“It turns out that low wages and unsafe working conditions are [Amazon’s] biggest labor problem, not unions,” declared Doug Bloch, political director for Teamsters Joint Council 7. “Gee, aren’t those the problems that workers join together in unions to fix?”

Critics Say Amazon Must Improve After Leaked Doc Reveals ‘Looming Labor Crisis’ (commondreams.org)

Out of a total of 211.7 million Brazilians, 116.7 million are experiencing some level of food insecurity, 43.4 million do not have enough food, and 19 million were facing hunger, reveals a June 2022 report by the Brazilian Research Network of Food and Nutrition Sovereignty and Security (Rede PENSSAN).

 Its national survey shows that less than half of Brazilian households (44.8%) were food secure, while 55.2% of households were experiencing some level of food insecurity, and 9% of households were facing hunger (severe food insecurity).

The situation is even worse in rural areas, where 12% of households are affected by hunger, reveals the survey, while explaining that in rural areas, severe food insecurity is twice as high in households without access to water for food and livestock production compared to those with access to water.

 Households with income of up to half of a minimum monthly salary per capita face severe food insecurity at levels 2.5 times the national average.

The study also pointed to persistent inequalities among regions, including disparities in household income, which are important determinants of food access.

The increasing sharp inequalities between Brazilian regions and between urban and rural populations, economic inequality in Brazil has reached extreme levels, despite being one of the largest economies in the world, reports OXFAM International.

The Latin American giant is still listed as one of the most unequal countries on the planet.

In Brazil, someone earning the minimum monthly wage would have to work 19 years to make the same money a Brazilian from the richest 0.1% of the population makes in one month.

At the current rate inequality is decreasing in Brazil, it will take the country 75 years to reach the United Kingdom’s current level of income equality and almost 60 years to meet Spanish standards.

Compared to its neighbours, Brazil is 35 years behind Uruguay and 30 behind Argentina.

Brazil’s six richest men have the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the population; around 100 million people. The country’s richest 5% have the same income as the remaining 95%.

If Brazil’s six richest men pooled their wealth and spent 1 million Brazilian reals a day (around $319,000), it would take them 36 years to spend all their money. Meanwhile, 16 million Brazilians live below the poverty line.

At the current pace of progress, Brazilian women will close the wage gap in 2047. Black Brazilians will earn the same as whites in 2089. Brazil is decades away from wage equality