Part of the World Socialist Movement
December 24, 2023
In the last few decades the growth of institutional investors, in particular, in the guise of various kinds of funds – such as mutual funds, pension funds and, more recently, hedge funds – has been a powerful force in shaping the development of financialisation. Their large size has afforded them the leverage to impose a …
November 28, 2023
There is an interesting report in The Conversation of a recent paper by a group of academics on optimal land use for agriculture and carbon capture (see ‘Benefits and trade-offs of optimizing global land use for food, water, and carbon’ in the journal PNAS. They ‘targeted three key ecosystem service (ES) indicators: total carbon (C) …
October 27, 2023
It may seem oddly Monty Python-esque, but insurance agents have become significant players in the Russo/Ukrainian war. In August it was reported that: ‘Insurance companies have notified charterers of ships operating in Russia’s Black Sea ports of an increase in additional payments known as “war risk premiums”’ (tinyurl.com/4p5rwap9). According to the same report, this could …
Read more “Material World – Insurance: a branch of the betting industry”
September 26, 2023
Clicking through to the commodities news section on the internet (such as reuters.com/news/archive/GCA-Commodities) is like taking a glimpse into the future. The stories there detail the raw stuff of life and the struggles to come to secure access and control over those things. Headlines such as ‘Gold eases as US dollar bumps higher before Powell’s …
August 21, 2023
We learn from the Guardian about a food programme aimed at primary school children in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Seventeen percent of the Kenyan population, over nine million people, live in extreme poverty (worldpoverty.io/map ). From the article: ‘According to Save The Children, 26% of children in Kenya are living with stunted growth due …
Read more “Material World – Emptying the ocean with a teaspoon”
July 29, 2023
Socialists want a world without countries or borders or passports, where people are part of the great human family and can come and go as they wish, with no concept of migration or asylum. This is part of our aim of a global society with no poverty or hunger or war, where people co-operate for …
June 26, 2023
Biodiversity is vitally important to human society and human survival – not just the biodiversity of the wilderness but also the agrobiodiversity of domesticated plants and animals. One has to be constantly wary of the risk to such biodiversity posed by genetic erosion and species loss. These work to shrink the genetic pool – the …
May 30, 2023
Figures from the British Retail Consortium show an increase in the cost of food which is impacting the standard of living on many; especially the low paid and those on fixed incomes. Aren’t the majority of the British working class low paid these day? ‘Food inflation accelerated to 15.7% in April, up from 15.0% in …
April 26, 2023
The high seas — the sea beyond the territorial waters of coastal states — and the seabed beneath them, belong to nobody. They are in effect a ‘global commons’, available in theory to everybody, but in practice only to private or state capitalist enterprises in pursuit of profits. Given capitalism, what happens is a classic …
March 28, 2023
When the UK raised the age of retirement and heightened the national insurance contribution criteria to be eligible for a state pension, there were complaints from women who were particularly affected by the changes but very little wider protest. It has not been as easy for the French government plan to raise the retirement age …