The capitalist world is being shaken by the most profound economic disruptions, a global pandemic and the growing crises caused by global warming. Around the world, governments are spending hundreds of billions to protect profits but only pennies on reducing carbon emissions. All previous COPs have been nothing short of disasters, so why would we expect the upcoming Glasgow COP26 to be any different.

Paralysed by policy inertia and beholden to vested interests, too many are unable to join up the dots and solve the connected crises of environment leaving the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth paying the highest price. Climate change summits have increasingly failed to offer concrete solutions which has devastating consequences for millions of people. Despite many fine words politicians have made no difference to the world’s worsening environmental situation. Climate conferences have invariably been ineffectual. Floods, storms, drought and forest fires are already claiming victims around the globe. 

The World Socialist Movement say the reasons for this are rooted in the economic system, an exploitative, destructive market system, that cannot be relied upon to abolish the conditions which endanger our well–being and survival. We view the continual process of international conferences as pointless. Governments and corporations are only committed to finding environmental market-friendly solutions which still maintain investment“ growth.” Politicians side with the bankers and businessmen to create a green capitalist economy concentrating upon assigning prices to carbon, for financial centres to trade in carbon credits which are supposed to encourage a reduction in CO2 emissions such as by paying for the planting of trees as compensation for polluting the air, all at the whim of the market.

We in the WSM speak of the failed world system of  capitalism  that generates the ecological crises which threatens to bring the extinction to many animal species and perhaps the end of human civilisation as we know it where many will become climate refugees with literally nowhere to run.

Many campaigners in the environment movement may agree with the WSM’s scepticism that the world leaders have utterly failed in achieving action on climate change  but they must go one step further and acknowledge the problems is rooted in an economic system that can only see the natural world as a source of materials for the production process, or a land-fill for its waste. A socialist critique of environmental destruction must also accept ending the production for profit, private property system and understand that the continuance of capitalism can only lead to further environmental harm and damage. Environmental activists need to reject the false solutions of green capitalism.

As Marx explained:

 “a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, [beneficiaries] and, like boni patres familias ,[good heads of households] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”

The socialist vision is one of a self-administered economy where a variety of inter-locked democratic bodies (whose officials are elected and subject to recall) at the local, regional and worldwide levels with delegates from both factories and neighbourhoods where decisions will be taken at the level at which they can most easily be implemented. And they should be taken at the level where the greatest percentage of people actually affected by them can be involved in the decision-making process. Such a inter-connected network would be empowered to draw up the basic outlines of the economic and environment plans and have the ability to implement them. Redirecting the productive capacity to human needs will require a variety of economic methods and experiments. There could be a combination of central planning (not centralised planning such as the command economies of the former state-capitalist countries), and local coordination. Rational planning will replace anarchy. Coordination and planning of production  will aim at building an economy that will benefit the people.

Some critics of the WSM proposition of free access based on material abundance so to end scarcity would place an unbearable strain on the physical resources of the planet and lead to an ecological problems. The WSM points to the scale of socially wasted resources under  capitalism. The abolition of the military and the accompanying arms industry alone would free up tremendous resources for socially useful production built upon renewable energy sources, and environmentally safe technologies, etc. that could provide an adequate standard of living for the bulk of the world’s population without imposing new demands upon the capacities of the earth. Factories and other productive facilities will be modernised to eliminate backbreaking labour and ecological damage.

 US health insurance companies reported billions in profits in the first quarter of 2021, after making a windfall in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group, reported $4.9bn in profits in the first quarter of 2021 compared to $3.4bn in the same period in 2020 – a 44% increase. The higher than anticipated profits prompted the company to raise its projections for the year.

Anthem also beat estimates in its report of $1.67bn in profits in the first three months of 2021, a 9.5% increase from the same period last year. Humana’s net income was $828m in the first quarter, a 75% increase from the same period the year before.

CVS Health, which owns the Aetna health insurance provider and drugstores, reported $2.2bn in profits, up from $2bn in the same quarter a year before.

Cigna raised its forecasts for the year.

Health insurers have been insulated from this stress because there were sharp declines in expensive, elective procedures, such as hip replacement surgery. People also delayed or skipped doctor’s appointments because of fears of Covid-19’s spread or concerns about the cost of medical care during a recession.

CVS Health’s chief financial officer and executive vice-president, Eva Boratto, said in an earnings call this week: “Covid-19 is expected to have a minimal impact on consolidated financial results for the year.”

Small healthcare providers such as independent doctor’s office and rural hospitals have been in a financial crunch, or closed, during the pandemic. Emergency medical service systems and some larger hospitals have also been under severe financial pressure.

US health insurers report billions in first quarter as small providers face stress | Healthcare industry | The Guardian

 California, America’s Golden State, suffered its first ever annual population fall. It reflects a worldwide trend of population declines. Overall,  the number of babies born in the country in 2020 dropped to the lowest level in more than four decades. 

Japan marked Children’s Day by announcing that the number of under-14s in the country had fallen for the 40th consecutive year to a record low. 

Last year, Italy, the population of Europe’s fourth biggest economy dropped by the equivalent of a city the size of Florence. Since the “baby boom” years of the 1960s, the annual number of births in Europe’s fourth biggest economy has fallen by more than half. The decline gathered pace in 2010 and then, last year, Covid-19 struck, contributing to new records for low births.

Paul Ehrlich author  of The Population Bomb (1968), predicted imminent mass starvation due to overpopulation, but this overly-pessimistic view has failed to happen although many still adhere to the idea, strangely enough even within the environmentalist movement which prides itself in following the science. Despite projections suggesting otherwise, the over-populationists maintain that there will be too many people for the planet’s resources to sustain the numbers.

The UN thinks that population growth will peak at the end of this century, but others think it will peak sooner. Researchers at the University of Washington predicted last year that it would hit a maximum of close to 10 billion around 2064, then slightly decrease to around 9 billion by 2100.

 The discrepancy of two billion people by century’s end between the two predictions is explained by the latter’s assumption that there will better access to contraceptives and female education in Africa. And that is bearing out for many African nations (albeit not every one) where family sizes are already dropping.

 Previous declines in the number of humans on the planet have been through disease or disaster. This would be the first time that it is reduced by low birthrate, after cheap and widely available contraception allowed women to control the size and timing of their families. But there is a threat to women’s rights, when governments that have failed to encourage more people to voluntarily have more children  try to force up birthrates by limiting access to birth control and abortion.

 The end to global population growth could indeed relieve pressure on the environment, particularly because the decline is centred on carbon-emitting wealthier nations.

It may also help a shift in hostile attitudes to migration, as countries which currently have  anti-immigration policies start competing to attract newcomers to bolster the workforce and care for the elderly. 

A socialist society will only come about when a sizeable majority of people worldwide want it and democratically and co-operatively work towards it. As such, it can only happen after many of today’s attitudes have changed, once people have rejected capitalism and its institutions of states, employment, money and classes. Instead of the dead-ends of reformism and division, society will be working together to make a world which satisfies everyone’s self-determined needs and wants.

We can’t say anything certain about what life would be like in a socialist world. That’s for the people at the time to decide, and would vary between communities and regions. How things run will also be shaped by future advancements in technology, and also by what environmental damage has been inherited from capitalism. Although we can only speculate, we can say that a socialist society could only succeed by being based on the principles of equality, democracy and voluntary co-operation.

This weekend of talks and discussion is an opportunity to imagine some of the possibilities of this new world. How might decisions be made? What kind of job roles would we have, and what would motivate us? How might friends and families spend time together? How would free access to goods and services work in practice? And how would we balance a world of abundance with safeguarding the environment?

E-mail enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk. Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £100; the concessionary rate is £50. Book online or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. Day visitors are welcome, but please book by email in advance.

 The capitalist class likes to boast and brag about their charity and compassion towards the undeveloped nations of the world but it is not philanthropy to return a little of what you have plundered and pillaged in the past.

Capitalist powers have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960. Over the whole period from 1960 to today, the drain totaled $62 trillion in real terms. If this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South’s growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today.”

 The U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and the richer countries of Europe appropriate $2.2 trillion worth of resources and labor—embodied in raw materials as well as high-tech commodities like smartphones, laptops, and cars that are increasingly manufactured abroad—per year from developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. That amount of money would be enough to end extreme poverty, globally, 15 times over.

Rich countries have a monopoly on decision-making in the World Bank and IMF, they hold most of the bargaining power in the World Trade Organization, they use their power as creditors to dictate economic policy in debtor nations, and they control 97% of the world’s patents. Northern states and corporations leverage this power to cheapen the prices of labor and resources in the Global South, which allows them to achieve a net appropriation through trade.

The looting  increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, as neoliberal structural adjustment programs were imposed across the Global South. During the 1980s and 1990s, IMF structural adjustment programs cut public sector wages and employment, while rolling back labor rights and other protective regulations, all of which cheapened labor and resources. Today, poor countries are structurally dependent on foreign investment and have no choice but to compete with one another to offer cheap labor and resources in order to please the barons of international finance. This ensures a steady flow of disposable gadgets and fast fashion to affluent Northern consumers, but at extraordinary cost to human lives and ecosystems in the South.

Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around.

Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960 | Opinions | Al Jazeera

 The COVID-19 pandemic, protracted conflicts and climate change have created an untenable situation for the most vulnerable, with 155 million people across 55 territories suffering from severe food insecurity, sending acute hunger figures to a 5-year high.

That’s according to the Global Network Against Food Crises, an alliance of humanitarian partners working to prevent hunger and respond to food crises. 

 It reported that 20 million more people faced acute hunger in 2020 than the previous year.

 The zero hunger by 2030 goal seemed “increasingly out of reach”.

 The report categorised 133,000 people in Burkina Faso, South Sudan and Yemen as being in “catastrophe”, meaning that they need immediate action to prevent widespread death and collapse of livelihoods.

 It stated that children living in food-crisis countries are especially vulnerable to malnutrition. In the 55 food-crisis countries under review, almost 16 million children under 5 years were acutely malnourished, while 75.2 million children under five years experienced stunted growth.

“Tragically, this report is just the tip of the iceberg that we’re facing all around the world,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley.  “The global picture is even more bleak when we consider all countries significantly impacted by hunger. For example, chronic hunger, which was 690 million, is now up an additional 130 million people.”

“Humankind can now pilot a helicopter drone and even split molecules to generate oxygen on the far-off planet of Mars, yet here on Earth, 155 million of our human family are suffering acute hunger and their lives and livelihoods are at risk because they lack the most basic of foods. The contrast is shocking and not acceptable,” said FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu.

20 Million More People Face Food Crises, As Acute Hunger Rates Rise to a 5-Year High | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

The International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States issued its long-awaited report on the U.S.’s police-perpetrated racist violence. The commissioners found that contrary to the popular notion that unjustified killings of Black people by police are merely the actions of “a few bad apples,” the real problem is structural racism that is embedded in the U.S. legal and policing systems.

The commissioners concluded that the systematic police killings of Black people in the U.S. constitutes a prima facie case of crimes against humanity and they asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to initiate an investigation of responsible police officials. The 12 commissioners are eminent experts and jurists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Caribbean.

These crimes against humanity under the ICC’s Rome Statute include murder, severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, persecution of people of African descent, and inhumane acts causing great suffering or serious injury to body or mental or physical health. All of the crimes occurred in the context of a widespread or systematic attack directed against the civilian population of Black people in the United States.

The commissioners made the following findings of fact:

Pretextual traffic stops are a common precursor to police killings and uses of excessive force against people of African descent. Tavis Crane was killed by police after his young daughter threw a piece of candy out the window. Race-based street stops, known as “stop-and-frisk,” often trigger the use of deadly force by police. Eric Garner was suspected of selling individual untaxed cigarettes. George Floyd was suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill.Fourth Amendment violations invariably lead to the use of excessive force and police killings of Black people. Breonna Taylor was killed following the execution of a “no-knock” warrant after a judge had replaced it with a knock warrant. Police routinely use excessive and lethal restraints against Black people. They include Tasers, chokeholds, compression asphyxia, “rough rides” and the use of vehicles as deadly weapons. George Floyd died from asphyxia. Freddie Gray was taken on a 45-minute “rough ride” resulting in his death.

5. Lethal police violence against Black people is exacerbated by officers’ failure to provide medical attention. For example, Andrew Kearse was kept in the back of a squad car for 17 minutes as he begged for help, repeating, “I can’t breathe.” He died of a heart attack in the car.

6. Lethal police violence against Black people experiencing a mental health crisis is systematic. After Daniel Prude’s family called police to provide mental health assistance, he was walking naked in the street. The officers put a spit hood over his head after he began spitting. They held him face down on the pavement for two minutes and 15 seconds, and he stopped breathing.

7. Cis- and transgender Black women, girls and femmes are disproportionately killed by police in the U.S. A friend of Kayla Moore, a mentally ill transgender woman, called for mental health assistance for Moore. Officers found a warrant for someone with Moore’s birth name, but 20 years older. They arrested her, threw her face down onto a futon to handcuff her, and she died of asphyxiation. Then they made disparaging comments about the gender identity of the woman they had killed.

8. Systemic racist police violence kills and traumatizes Black children and youth. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot to death by police as he played in a park with a toy gun. The young children of Jacob Blake witnessed their father being shot and paralyzed by police.

9. Racist police violence traumatizes and devastates families and communities. Manuel Elijah Ellis was hit, punched, choked and tasered to death by police. “We’re broken, generations of us are emotionally tired. Our bodies are weathered, and it causes us physical illness. It causes us lifelong ailments and diseases. It causes us generational trauma that we are passing on,” Jamika Scott, a friend of the Ellis family, testified. “We are traumatized. We live in a constant state of PTSD, we are hyper vigilant, we are fearful, we are anxious, we are depressed,” she added. “It tears holes in families and communities. And it’s not just one family, it’s what happens to one family in this community, it happens to all of us. And it happens, it has lasting echoes throughout generations.”

10. Black immigrants are particularly vulnerable to systemic racist police violence and police killings. Botham Jean, born in St. Lucia, was eating ice cream in his apartment when an officer walked in, mistakenly thinking it was hers, and shot him dead. “What was she defending,” Allison Jean, Botham Jean’s mother, asked, “as the only weapon he held was the color of his skin?”

11. Legal actors are complicit in police violence and killings of Black people through qualified immunity and systemic impunity of officers. Police officers in the United States enjoy impunity for their racist violence. They are rarely held accountable for killing black people, and qualified immunity protects them against liability for violation of constitutional rights.

a) Alarming pattern of destruction and manipulation of evidence, cover-ups and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors have a conflict of interest and medical examiners often do the bidding of police. After Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown as Brown raised his hands and said, “Don’t shoot,” the officer bagged his own gun and washed Brown’s blood off his hands. After police killed Henry Glover, the officers burned the car with his body in it.b) Prosecutorial misconduct and grand jury abuse. The offending officers testified at the grand juries in the killings of both Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, and in neither case was the officer cross-examined. There were no indictments of officers in either case.c) Systemic impunity and lack of oversight by police. Internal affairs investigations invariably exonerate officers. Police can’t be trusted to police themselves. The “blue wall of silence” keeps officers from reporting misconduct by fellow officers. Police unions facilitate impunity of officers. The police union got the body camera footage a few days after the killing of Daniel Prude but it took the Prude family six months to get it, and only after they filed several lawsuits.d) Qualified immunity. A recent U.S. District Court judge wrote, “[J]udges have invented a legal doctrine to protect law enforcement officers from having to face any consequences for wrongdoing. The doctrine is called ‘qualified immunity.’ In real life it operates like absolute immunity.” In case after case heard by the commissioners, victims’ families faced extraordinary obstacles to holding officers accountable for the killing of their family members.

 As is our usual policy, we stood token candidates in the recent elections, in Folkestone and in Cardiff, to challenge all the pro-capitalist parties and ensure that the voice of socialism is not entirely lost amidst the recriminations of the professional politicians about how to run capitalism. As we fully expected we did not receive a landslide victory.

Brian Johnson received 82 votes in  the Cardiff Central constituency for the Welsh Parliament,  0.3% share of the vote. About the same number of votes as in the 2019 General Election but on a much lower turnout.

Max Hess received 61 votes at Central ward for the Folkestone Town Council election. In the Folkestone East County Council election Cde. Hess got 89 votes (3%)

Andy Thomas got 55 votes in the Folkestone West County Council election (1% of the vote)

The Socialist Party contests elections as a part of our campaign to establish a new system of society: one based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

That is our sole object. By common ownership we don’t mean that everyone will not possess personal belongings, but that in a society built upon our mutual effort, we should all benefit and have a say in how the means of production is run and how its products are distributed.

We currently live in a system of society based on a tiny number of people owning the wealth of our world, organised and run by a handful of bosses for their benefit. Their profits come first, our needs come second.

It seems we’re so busy taking care of the businesses of the rich that we don’t have time to take care of ourselves.

Because of this we have endless problems of poverty, poor services and all the issues politicians love to spend time telling you they can solve, if only given the chance.

We don’t believe any politician can solve these problems, as long as the flawed basis of our society remains intact. In fact, we believe only you and your fellow workers can solve these problems.

We believe that it will take a revolution in how we organise our lives, a fundamental change. We want to see a society based on the fact that you know how to run your lives, know your needs and have the skills and capacity to organise with your fellows to satisfy them.

You know yourselves and your lives better than a handful of bosses ever can. With democratic control of production we can ensure that looking after our communities becomes a priority, rather than something we do in our spare time.

We all share fundamental needs, for food, clothing, housing and culture, and we have the capacity to ensure access to these for all, without exception.

If you agree with this aim, then we ask you to get in touch with us, get involved and join in our campaign to bring about this change in society.

Together, we have the capacity to run our world for ourselves. We need to build a movement to effect that change, by organising deliberately to take control of the political offices which rule our lives, and bring them into our collective democratic control.

Our candidates never make no promises, offers no pat solutions, only to be the means by which you can remake society for the common good.

 In a previous post, Socialism Or Your Money Back blog drew attention to eco-fascism, right-wingers attaching themselves to the environmentalist movement.

This was not hyperbole but a serious attempt by the extreme right to infiltrate the greens to promote their insidious propaganda. The Scottish Green party have raised concerns that a previously unknown fringe party calling itself Independent Green Voice, which had several candidates in the recent Holyrood Parliamentary election.

 Alaistair McConnachie, its founder and fuehrer, is a former UKIP activist until a parting of ways after he was accused of holding anti-semitic and Holocaust denial beliefs, which he repudiates, although he admits to doubting whether the gas chambers actually existed. 

Another candidate is ex-BNP,  Max Dunbar, who is on the Scotland South list.is a former treasurer for the Scottish branch of the British National Party.

 Unlike the unrest which happened in Venezuela, we do not witness  foreign governments lodging protests against police violence and expressing sympathy and support for the anti-government protesters in Colombia. 

37 protesters have been killed across the country with hundreds  injured by police officers who have shown little restraint with their brutality. 

David López, a community leader in Siloé,  downtrodden neighbourhood in the city of Cali,, commented that Colombia was “A country where people are getting poorer and they can’t take it any more.”

Yina Reyes, a 39-year-old nurse knows only too well what Covid-19 can do to a person – and to a community. and  has seen patients get sick and neighbours die. Yet she observed, “But the real terror is the Colombian government.” Reyes argued that the government’s heavy-handed response is self-defeating. “The working classes are the engine of Colombia,” she said, ahead of another torturous night of skirmishes outside her home. “If they kill us all they won’t have anything for themselves.”

Covid-19 has claimed more than 75,000 lives and continues to ravage public health, has only widened the gap between the rich and the poor. 

the number of Colombians living in extreme poverty grew by 2.8 million people last year. Red rags were hung outside homes, in a desperate signal that those inside were hungry. And as people got poorer, they also got sicker, with those from the poorest neighbourhoods 10 times more likely to be hospitalized or die from Covid-19 than those from the wealthiest.

 Elizabeth Dickinson, a researcher with International Crisis Group (ICG), a thinktank. “It’s almost like they are on two different planets and talking past each other…“The level of economic distress is enormous.”

‘They can’t take it any more’: pandemic and poverty brew violent storm in Colombia | Global development | The Guardian