Material World: Malawi after capitalism — chaos or common ownership? (2026)

The Material World column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following interesting communication.

Comrades, friends, fellow workers of across the world.

To begin, I shall explain why the Socialist League of Malawi exists today. Although LESOMA was first formed in 1974 to oppose Banda’s dictatorship, the objective of our founding fathers led by late Dr Attati Mpakati who was assassinated in 23 March 1983, was never simply to replace one government with another. LESOMA objectives then, as now, is the establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole society.

The current situation in Malawi: A crisis of the market, not of nationality

Sixty-two years after formal independence, the working class of Malawi remains trapped in the wages system. Successive governments — MCP, UDF, DPP, PP, have all administered capitalism. The results are before us:

1. Economic: Malawi remains a supplier of raw tobacco, tea, sugar, and uranium for the world market. 70 percent of us live on less than $2.15 a day. Yet warehouses are full of maize that cannot be sold at a ‘profitable’ price. Hospitals lack drugs that sit unused in private pharmacies because patients lack money. The kwacha collapses, debt rises, and the IMF dictates our budget. This is not ‘underdevelopment’. This is capitalism working normally.

2. Political: We have multi-party elections, but every party stands for the same thing: managing the market, attracting foreign investors, and maintaining the state. Corruption scandals from Fieldyork and Cashgate to fertilizer subsidies are not abuses of the system, they are the system. The state exists to protect property and profit, not people.

3. Social: 4.4 million Malawians face food insecurity in 2026 despite good rains. Our youth flee to South Africa for piece-work because there are no wages here. Women carry water 5km while bottled water is exported. Cyclones Freddy and Ana showed that climate breakdown hits workers first, because safety is unprofitable.

LESOMA’s position: There is no Malawian road to socialism

Since our reconstitution, LESOMA has set out its objectives clearly in our Constitution and Declaration of Principles. We do not seek to ‘develop’ Malawi inside capitalism. We do not call for a ‘national democratic revolution’ or alliances with employers. Capitalism is a world system and can only be replaced by world socialism.

What does that mean for Malawi?

1. Common ownership: The land, the tea and tobacco estates, the uranium at Kayelekera in Karonga District, the lake, the factories — all held in common, not by the state, not by foreign companies, not by ‘patriotic’ businessmen. Democratic control by the whole community.

2. Free access: Food, housing, healthcare, education, transport provided for use, not for sale.

3. No state, no borders: The armed forces, police, and prisons exist to protect property. Without property, their function disappears. Administration of things replaces government over people. There will be no ‘Malawian’ socialism, because socialism cannot exist in one country.

This is now a practical option. Workers in Malawi and worldwide have developed productive capacity to meet everyone’s needs. The barrier is not technical. It is the market. We produce for profit, not for use. That is why fertilizer is locked in warehouses while farmers need it. That is why nurses are unemployed while clinics are understaffed.

The international socialist stand in 2026

LESOMA seeks partnership with your party and all serious socialist movements worldwide. Our position is unchanged since 1974:

1. We reject all war. Competition for oil, lithium, trade routes, and markets caused the wars in Congo, Sudan, and Ukraine. Even now it is the cause of the war between Iran and Israel and the United States of America. Only common ownership ends the economic basis of war and environmental destruction.

2. We reject reformism. Trade unions, minimum wage laws, and aid projects cannot abolish the wages system. They can only negotiate terms of exploitation. We do not oppose workers struggling for better conditions, but LESOMA’s sole objective is socialism, not better-managed capitalism.

3. We reject self imposed leadership. Socialism cannot be brought by a vanguard, a coup, or a guerrilla army. It requires the democratic action of the majority. Our task is education and organization, not to lead workers but to make socialists.

Our immediate work in Malawi

Once we get registered and have enough funds, LESOMA intends to:

1. Educate: Spread the case for a world of common ownership in Malawian languages like Chichewa, Tumbuka, including English which is the current official language in Malawi. We will explain to the masses why fertilizer subsidies, ‘youth empowerment funds’, and foreign investment cannot solve poverty.

2. Organise: Build a political party hostile to all other parties — because all other parties stand for capitalism. We will contest elections, not to run capitalism, but to win a mandate to abolish it.

3. Internationalism: Work with workers in Zambia, Mozambique, South Africa, and worldwide. The problems of a miner in Karonga Malawi and a call-center worker in London are the same: no access without money.

We will not call for armed struggle. Violence is the method of capitalists.

Chaos or common ownership?

Malawi today faces rising debt, climate shocks, and political disillusion. The danger is not only poverty, but that workers turn to ethnic parties, religious sects, or military strongmen out of despair. That is chaos.

The alternative is not regime change. It is change in economic system. Given free access to the means of life, the energy and creativity of Malawi’s workers could end hunger in months, not 40 years.

Comrades, there is no ‘Malawian solution’. There is a world solution, and Malawi’s working class is part of it. The time has come for workers to stop electing new managers of our poverty, and instead to organise for a world of free access. When the majority wants socialism, we can have it.

For world socialism,

Patrick Nthakomwa, President, Socialist League of Malawi (LESOMA)

The smokescreen of prices (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The prices shown for delivery on online platforms do not tell the full story of the goods and services we buy. The amount we pay for delivery does not tell the tale of low pay for drivers, fragmented work, and daily risks on the road. The visible cost is only the surface: a simple figure that hides the real human and material costs.

Nor is this limited to delivery. More generally, the market price of a good or service rarely includes all the costs of producing it. A significant part is shifted elsewhere: onto the environment, workers, society, or the future.

Many low-cost products depend on production chains that use natural resources with no attention to environmental impact. Deforestation for non-essential goods, intensive use of energy and water, and pollution generated in production have no direct impact on the selling price. The same is true of working conditions – low wages, insecurity, and limited safety – which remain outside the cost on the market.

Another layer of this smokescreen lies in product design. Planned obsolescence and poor reparability, especially in electronic devices, shift costs onto consumers over time and increase waste. The initial price may seem low, but the overall cost—economic and environmental—is much higher.

There are also less immediate effects: impacts on health, as with ultra-processed food; the growing burden of waste that is hard to recycle; and the degradation of ecosystems. These costs are largely borne by society, often through public spending or a loss in quality of life.

This does not result from a single actor deliberately hiding costs. It is a feature of a system in which firms compete to lower prices and raise margins, while many indirect costs—so-called externalities—are not properly accounted for.

The result is a distortion: what is cheap in the market can be costly for society as a whole. Price acts as a smokescreen, simplifying and concealing, and making it harder to judge the real consequences of our choices.

A more radical approach is to question the system itself. If market prices tend to exclude social, environmental, and human costs, then the issue is not only how to correct the system, but whether it should be replaced.

In a system oriented to human needs rather than profit, production will not be driven by returns to investors but by social usefulness and sustainability. This will require forms of planning—more or less decentralised—able to take real costs into account from the start: decent working conditions, environmental limits, durability and reparability, and health factors.

In such a context, price will be abolished as a means of access to goods and services, making them freely available. This would not mean a lack of coordination, but a different kind of coordination. Production and distribution will be organised through planning, shared priorities, and participatory decision-making, giving the ability to deal with both potential abundance and real scarcity. The production of unnecessary or harmful goods will be reduced – not because it is unprofitable, but because it is recognised as socially and environmentally unsustainable.

This raises important questions. How can complex systems of production be coordinated without prices? How can inefficiency, concentration of power, or rigid bureaucracy be avoided? How can innovation and flexibility be maintained? These are not trivial issues. But the tools and knowledge to make costs visible—and to organise production differently—already exist. The issue is not technical, but political and collective. It requires not only awareness, but a conscious and collective decision to reorganise society on a fundamentally different basis. The sooner we begin to take this seriously, the sooner we can stop treating as inevitable what today may appear ‘natural’ but is simply an expression of the way society is organised at this particular point in time.

Gian Maria

Party News: Local Election results (2026)

Party News from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here are the results in the wards of the London Borough of Lambeth which we contested:

Brixton North: Labour: 1415, 1365, 1189; Green: 1388, 1304, 1169; Independent (Shake It Up): 372; Conservative: 261, 252, 167; LibDem: 215, 200, 186; Reform: 189; SPGB: 77; TUSC: 53.

Clapham Common & Abbeville: LibDems: 1331, 1195; Labour: 1116, 789; Green: 441, 423; Conservative: 347, 331; Reform: 194, 173; SPGB: 14.

Stockwell West & Larkhall: Labour: 1438, 1301, 1244; Green: 1234, 1211, 1098; Conservative: 420, 358, 265; LibDems: 377, 348, 273; Reform: 374; Independent (Shake It Up): 351; TUSC: 72; SPGB: 68.

The Greens replaced Labour as the largest party and are likely to be running the council for the next four years. They are making ambitious promises. Here is the new leader of the Green group on the council:

‘We will put power in the hands of residents, workers and the community. Things can, and will, get better.’

And one of his deputy co-leaders:

‘Again and again, residents told us the same story – a political elite, locally and nationally, is prioritising the needs of developers, big business and themselves over the needs of people and planet. We will do things differently’.

Power in the hands of workers; not giving priority to the profits of big business. They sound like Labour politicians in the olden days before they learned the hard way that under capitalism priority has to be given to profits and not to making things better for workers.

SPGB June Events (2026)

Party News from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Blogger's Note:

Justin Fairchild's book, Unchained. Living Without Money, was reviewed in the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo Column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

J Gordon Melton, executive director of the Institute for the Study of American Religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told The New York Times that 40 to 45 new religious movements emerge each year in the United States’ (Wiki NRM).

One of the more notable, newer ones is Ahmadi, Religion of Peace and Light (AROPL), birthed in 1999 (which has no connection to another, older breakaway Muslim sect, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, also known as Ahmadis)

The new kid on the block lays out what it thinks is its unique selling point:

‘The movement’s literature states that it is the new religion foretold by the Holy Household of the Prophet Muhammad to emerge in end times, that it is the one true universal religion and that its members are God’s chosen people’.

End times – tick, only true religion – tick, chosen people – tick. Not so unique, straight out of the playbook used in the USA, the only difference being the holy household.

As you do when meeting by accident a divine being or angel or the Twelfth Imam, you start a new religion. But the equivalent to the People’s Front of Judaea was split by the Judaean People’s Front which became the AROPL. Fast forward, the AROPL’s current leader, according to the Religion Media Centre (RMC), is an Egyptian-American who claims some sort of lineage back to Muhammad.

It has, of course, its ‘sacred book’ published in 2022. The RMC says that one of the beliefs held is that currency is a scam and when the Divine Just State happens people will ‘contribute what they can and have their needs met by the community’. RMC says also that AROPL ‘believes that 99 per cent of every religion is wrong’. It has some David Icke-type beliefs and a relaxed attitude towards some positions the fourteen hundred year-old parent considers inviolable. This makes Ahmadi heretical in some states.

AROPL would have passed under our radar completely until it found itself the subject of some unsavoury reporting in the media. The concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ isn’t always adhered to in media generally and social media in particular. The Guardian and other media, at the tail end of April, correctly used ‘allegedly’ and we note the story headline without making any judgmental comments on the incident reported: ‘Crewe religious group raided by police investigating allegations of serious sexual offences’.

The allegations follow a familiar but sad pattern found many times before in large and small religious sects. Or should we say cults? The Guardian writes that the raid on the Cheshire headquarters carried out by five hundred police occurred because of a complaint by a woman, previously a member, of rape and sexual abuse. Arrests took place on suspicion of trafficking, sexual offences, forced marriage and slavery.

If legal proceedings follow, then whatever the outcome, the sense of persecution this will engender will only serve, sadly, to reinforce the adherents’ loyalty towards something that lures with false rhetoric. It cannot ever make their lives better.

DC