Part of the World Socialist Movement
November 22, 2024
Oxfam regularly publishes reports about global poverty. Its most recent one points to how ‘the richest 1% have more wealth than the bottom 95% of the world’s population put together’. It accuses the ‘ultra wealthy and powerful corporations of tax dodging and exercising monopoly control of important products such as Covid vaccines to increase profitability’. …
October 27, 2024
A recent Daily Mirror headline ran ‘Mum of five dies after butt-lift treatment’. It explained how Alice Delsie Preet Webb failed to recover from an operation by an unregistered practitioner which involved injecting hyaluronic acid and dermal fillers into the backside (a so-called ‘Brazilian butt-lift’). This apparently was the first time anyone in the UK …
September 27, 2024
All the necessary techno-infrastructure required to enable a post-capitalist society to function effectively already exists today; we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. A self-regulating system of stock control involving ‘calculation-in-kind’, making use of disaggregated physical magnitudes (for instance, the number of cans of baked beans in stock in a store) rather than some single …
Read more “Material World – Non-market socialism is feasible”
August 24, 2024
Every four years the Olympics give us a demonstration of human skills, determination and intelligence. Athletes from around the world compete for honours: yet in each Olympics, it seems, only a handful of countries take home the bulk of the medals. We could reasonably expect raw human ability to be evenly distributed around the globe, …
July 26, 2024
In capitalism, the basic marker or criterion of status is material wealth. The more wealth you can accumulate and display, relative to your peers, the more status you attract. The same goes for them. We are talking, in other words, of a zero-sum game. Crudely speaking, if Jane’s accumulated material wealth increases and overtakes John’s, …
June 25, 2024
According to mainstream economic theory as taught in schools and universities, the capitalist is fully entitled, by definition, to whatever they receive, be this modest or spectacularly large; they bore the risk by investing ‘their’ capital and so fully deserve the return it yields – a risk, nonetheless, that they can mitigate by expanding their …
May 24, 2024
Nationalist sentiment was the form of collective consciousness that emerged as the one best adapted or suited to the needs of capitalism. The nation-state, after all, constitutes the most fundamental unit of spatial organisation from the standpoint of the accumulation of capital and the coalescence of capitalist interests into separate and competing groupings – namely …
April 26, 2024
That capitalism’s vast and ever-growing structural waste is a major practical impediment to the realisation of a post-scarcity society should be obvious. This is because of the extent to which it diverts human and material resources away from the goal of mitigating scarcity itself. But what of technology? Could the very thrust and momentum of …
Read more “Material World: Will technological innovation lead to a post-capitalist society?”
March 26, 2024
In environmental legislation the ‘polluter pays’ principle is an attempt to force businesses to bear at least some of the costs resulting from their polluting activities. However, this runs up against the logic of market competition. That logic encourages businesses to seek ways of externalising their costs as far as possible and to resist any …
February 27, 2024
Plastic is everywhere. It is difficult to imagine how we could live our modern lives without it. According to UNCTAD, the UN trade and development agency: ‘Global exports of plastics or goods made from plastic has more than doubled in value since 2005, passing the $1 trillion benchmark in 2018 and reaching nearly $1.2 trillion …