Poverty and inequality

The gleaners and society

Gleaning is the ancient practice of going into a field after the harvest and picking up any fruit, cereal or root crops left behind. Its most famous representation is the painting by Jean-Francois Millet, “The Gleaners”, which he completed in 1857. What the painting represented was “updated”, as it were, by French director Agnès Varda in 2000 with her documentary The Gleaners and I . Shot in various locations in France, including the suburbs of Paris, film shows modern day gleaners doing very much what their ancestors have done for hundreds of years. They explain in their own words why they do...

Capitalist “s/v” and mental health

Ludwig Wittgenstein was the most famous philosopher of the 20th century. In his 30s, after getting out his only finished book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , he worked for several years as a primary school teacher in a remote village in Austria. He fled teaching in 1926 because he had repeatedly beaten a student about the head, and the student collapsed. The village people were used to teachers hitting small children, but this was too much. A formal complaint failed, but Wittgenstein had quit anyway (and ten years later would return to the village to apologise). Teachers are now banned from...

Price inflation: facts, prospects, and responses

How much have prices risen? 10.1% (CPI), 13.5% (RPI), 19.2% (food), between March 2022 and March 2023. The high CPI and RPI rates are due to food prices? Not entirely; Germany has 22% food inflation, 7.4% CPI; France 16% food, 5.7% CPI. Food is only 10% of the CPIH “basket”. The UK’s higher rate is mostly due to household energy prices having jumped sharply here between March and April 2022. So the official May inflation figures (for rise between April 2022 and April 2023) will be lower? Almost certainly. Also, world wholesale food price rises have been slowing for a while, and that will...

Ban prepayment meters outright

The regulator Ofgem is lifting the pause on forced installation of pre-payment energy meters (PPMs) agreed in February after an outcry over around 10,000 new PPM installations per month during high energy prices. Solidarity advocates: • pre-payment meters should be banned outright (not impossible: there are none in France ) • public ownership of the whole energy industry, to mop up the vast profits currently made (under the Tories’ energy subsidy scheme) by oil and gas companies, and to speed transition to renewables and nuclear. • every household should get a basic quota of energy free (even...

Too little but also too much

“Private property”, wrote Marx , “has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it — when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc…” Much of socialist effort, within capitalist society, involves supporting working-class struggles to “have” more within this society, to limit the gap between workers and the rich. And we see an emancipatory side even to capitalist consumerism, when it spurs workers to widen aspirations, to seek roses as well as bread. But capitalism remains a society which tilts us ever more...

Economics: trim our ship for storms

What are the lessons from the Budget; the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and Credit Suisse; and the figures showing Feb-2022-to-Feb-2023 UK inflation a tad up on Jan-2022-to-Jan-2023, after three months of slight decline in those year-on-year figures?

DWP cover-up fails

For the best part of a decade disability rights activists have been battling the management of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to prevent the burying of information about deaths of benefit claimants.

Emancipation, class struggle and "classism"

Capitalist society generates and regenerates a class division between capitalists and workers (with at least one large intermediate class, the “petty bourgeoisie”, and many grey areas). Like many other societies, its course is shaped by class struggle. Victory by the working class in that class struggle will bring not a rearrangement, but the withering-away, of class divisions. Not complete and uniform equality of everyone in every respect (hard to imagine what that would even look like), but removal of the class exploitation, domination, and oppression that has blighted life under capitalism...

How capitalism is a class society

The FTSE 100 index of the share prices of top companies has just reached an all-time high, 16% up on October 2022. Those top companies paid out about £83 billion in dividends in 2022, and £50.3 bn in share buybacks. MoneyWeek expects "FTSE 100 ordinary dividend payments to keep setting new records in 2023". To get an idea of scale here, the journalist Philip Inman calculates that a 10.1% pay rise across the public sector would cost the government £8.5 billion (if we factor in the government recouping some of the rise through income tax and VAT on workers' spending). Supporters of capitalism...

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