The Tiny Tips column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard
If you make $60,000 a year after taxes, in order to make $700 billion, you’d need to work for nearly 12 million years. ‘The richest 1% own half the stock market (49.9%), while the bottom half of the U.S. owns just 1.1% of the stock market’. ‘The richest 0.0001% control a greater share of wealth than in the Gilded Age, an era of U.S. history defined by extreme inequality’.
The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — went up for auction Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s in New York. The starting bid for the 223-pound, 18-karat-gold work was about $10 million. Cattelan has said the piece, titled ‘America’ satirizes superwealth. ‘Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise’, he once said.
Mother Teresa is still praised around the world for her charity work, but her legacy is deeply controversial. Reports from former volunteers and medical professionals claimed that many of her care homes were unsanitary and neglectful, with patients denied pain relief because she believed suffering brought people closer to God. Despite receiving millions in donations, her organization frequently failed to provide proper medical treatment or transparency regarding the use of the funds. She also accepted money and praise from dictators and was firmly against abortion, contraception, and divorce, even in extreme cases.
There are still people who say that Marx is outdated because Russian socialism collapsed … In Russia, capitalism was interpreted as being about private property and private ownership of the means of production, and the Soviets’ proposal was, ‘What if we nationalize everything?’ Then they found that state control ended up being absolute. If you look at the situation of the workers, it didn’t change that much from one system to another. In capitalism, it’s the employers who exploit the workers. During Soviet socialism, the workers were exploited by the Communist Party or by the bureaucrats.
The Russian communist party has awarded North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the “Lenin Prize” for his outstanding contributions to ‘socialist construction’, praising him for standing up against ‘imperialist aggression’ by supporting the invasion of Ukraine.
The cobbled streets of Newport in Middlesbrough survive from the Victorian era. The staggering levels of child poverty here also feel like they belong in a different time. Six out of every seven children in Newport are classified as living in poverty.
It’s time to stop settling. ‘The working class is going to have to look at itself as a whole and say, “Our divisions in race, politics, religion, sectors of the workforce — all that will have to be laid aside,” he says. “It’s a ‘workers of the world, unite’ situation. We’re all in it together against the billionaire class, and it’s going to take that in the fight to win”’.
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