Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In almost all regions of the world, the top 1% of the population is richer than the combined 90%. Wealth inequality increases further with each passing day, mostly due to the lack of political will to stop it.

[Popular Resistance]

In China, inequality remains high… The top 10% of earners capture about 43% of national income, while the bottom 50% receive just 14%. Wealth disparities are particularly large, with the richest 10% holding nearly 68% of total wealth and the top 1% about 30%. 

[World Inequality Report]

Nearly half of Kenyans live in extreme poverty, i.e., on less than KES 130 [£0.75] per day. Yet a few have amassed enormous wealth. The richest 125 Kenyans have more wealth than more than three-quarters of Kenyans, about 43 million people. 

[Oxfam]

We celebrate the ‘recovery’ of fish populations that are stabilized at 5% or 10% of their historical population, mistaking the management of ruins for conservation. To understand the magnitude of what has been stolen, we must look back before the industrial age. In the 17th century, the ocean was a different planet. When Christopher Columbus sailed through the Caribbean in the late 15th century, he described the seas near Cuba as being ‘thick with turtles’, so numerous that it seemed his ships would run aground on them… in numbers estimated between 33 and 39 million adults in the Caribbean alone. They were a biological dominance that defined the seascape. Today, those populations are a shadow of the ‘mother sea’ that once existed. This report is an autopsy of the decline. It is an investigation into the specific species that the fishing industry has sacrificed on the altar of commerce. 

[Sea Piracy]

As both the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) monitor and Reuters noted, Poland is among multiple state parties in the process of ditching the Mine Ban Treaty. Citing the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the news agency reported that “antipersonnel mine production could begin once the treaty’s six month withdrawal period is completed on February 20, 2026”. 

[Common Dreams]

Greenpeace is a strong example, having emerged from ecological protest movements in the 1970s and 1980s, but having eased into largely cooperating with capitalist corporations and governments over time and giving legitimacy to their propaganda about individual lifestyle choices being the way to solve climate change.

[Counterfire]

The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, which has previously slammed vaccine skeptic Kennedy as a ‘paranoid kook’ whose ‘tinfoil hat is blocking out all sense’, tore into the Trump Cabinet member for his war on what it called ‘one of the biggest public health wins of the last century: the widespread use of disease-eradicating vaccines’. 

[HuffPost]

Therefore, we do not offer any support to wars waged by any capitalist state or any faction aimed at creating or strengthening a new state, whether aggressor or aggressed, whether or not they describe themselves as ‘socialist’ or ‘democratic’. 

[Internationalist Perspective]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Voice From The Back: Business as usual (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Business as usual

The International Monetary Fund calculates that up to £1,000 billion made from drugs, prostitution, fraud and extortion is sloshing around the world’s 15 offshore tax havens. The secret BND (German intelligence service) report, The Money Laundering Community in Liechtenstein, reveals that billions of pounds of assets have been placed in secret trust funds by the American Mafia, the notorious Colombian Medellin cocaine cartel and the Juarez drug cartel of Mexico . . . One secret service source said: “Liechtenstein is at the epicentre of money-laundering in the world. Tough news laws in Switzerland mean that the Swiss are moving all their dirty deals to Liechtenstein. They can pass all the laws they want there, but as long as the same bank experts and lawyers are in charge there will not be any change.” Financial Mail on Sunday, 16 July.

Cruel Britannia

One of the claims made by Blairite supporters is that we now live in “Cool Britannia”, a land where artists, film-makers and trendy “in” people thrive. A recent Unicef report paints a different picture: “The Observer (11 June) has obtained a report by Unicef, the children’s arm of the UN, which says that Britain has one of the worst records on childhood poverty in the industrialised world. Nearly 20 percent of young people live in families which are below the official poverty line—judged as a household income below half median earnings.” Behind the statistics lies real misery of almost Dickensian proportions: “Children are eating main meals which consist of little more than toast and beans, and rice pudding. Many live in terrible surroundings with damp running down the walls and inadequate heating. Parents often cannot afford to buy new clothes as the little money they have is spent on food. Some lone parents have less than £100 a week with which to bring up their children and pay the bills.”

Student letter

“I go to university all day, come home and do my projects and homework then work part time at the weekends. It’s exhausting. The final straw came when I applied for free prescriptions and was told that my wages (£30 per week) and my student loan, which is classed as earnings, is over the government threshold. According to ‘New Labour’, students can live on £46 a week. So I would like to ask our politicians: how can a loan be classed as earnings when it has to be repaid and how can a student live on less money than a pensioner?” Evening Mail, 29 July.

Greenpeace futility

The latest Greenpeace leaflet appealing for funds paints a gruesome picture of capitalist society in the future: “A flailing dolphin gasps madly for air. Where once there was living forest, now silence reigns. More and more of our children are choked by invisible poisons. Fields of genetically modified crops dominate the countryside, bereft of song and life . . . This is not science fiction. It is a realistic vision of a world without Greenpeace.”

So what do Greenpeace propose to do about pollution? They claim they have succeeded in getting Unilever to remove GM ingredients from their products; that they have forced the president of a G7 country to stop a nuclear test and have designed a “green” fudge. They hope to “keep the North Atlantic alive” and are striving to protect the Amazon rainforest from illegal logging”. All of these are doomed to failure because the cause of all environmental problems is the way wealth is produced. The whole purpose of production is to make a profit, and if it is necessary to pollute the planet in order to realise that profit then that is what capitalism will do. Persuading presidents and petitioning multi-nationals are pathetic operations. The need is for a new society based on production solely for use.

Profits first and last

A British company, Premier oil, went ahead with a £500m project to pipe gas through Burma despite warnings that its partner, the Burmese military, was using slave labour—including children—on the pipeline . . . Premier’s American partner, Texaco, has since pulled out of Burma. But despite the British government taking the unprecedented step in April of asking Premier to leave, the oil company has refused. Guardian, 27 July.

Letters: The money system (2009)

Letters to the Editors from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The money system

Dear Editors

The letter by Ken Scragg and the articles by Janet Surman in your issues of December 2008 and January 2009 herald a further evolution for homo sapiens.

We are a primitive lot. Every few decades the money system collapses and we write tomes trying to explain why, but we still cling to it as if it were sacrosanct, an integral part of us. Yet it is no more than a reflection of the primitive assumption that resources are scarce, a set of symbols that are supposed to represent those resources; but symbols are not the resources themselves nor do they produce anything, only lead to the infinite complexities of marketing and exchange in which everything that we do is controlled by cost. In a moneyless system there would be only production and distribution according to demand, a simple matter in these days of instant communication.

Economists hope that the recession will end and once again be followed by boom, but there is a limit to the creation of ever-more trivia to employ us and to stimulate our greed, so that unemployment is likely to increase without limit.

The basic tenet of the capitalist system and the one over-riding impediment to social advance is the limit we impose on the quantity of money in circulation to preserve its value, so that to rid ourselves of the money system would require no more than to allow the quantity of it to increase until it lost all value, a process that, despite all our efforts to control inflation, is happening gradually all the time.

Without that impediment there would be an advance in human understanding as significant as were the development of speech or writing. Money is just a parasite.

We are very clever but by failing to distinguish between cleverness and intelligence, cause and effect, we have allowed our primitive emotions of greed, selfishness and aggression to control our intellectual and social development, leaving us struggling against each other in wars and political/economic cut-and-thrust that defeat all attempts at social advance.

Directly or indirectly all social problems, all human sufferings have their origin in the money system. There would be no arms trade, so none would be produced or promoted; and with drugs available only on prescription we would be healthier.

Janet Surman mentioned a few of the inefficiencies and wastes of the money system, its inequalities and use of power. Its endless complexities frustrate all human endeavour. No doubt she could have gone on and on for the simple reason that nothing can be done with money that could not be done more efficiently without it. Efficiency depends upon simplicity.

Melvin Chapman, 

Bath

Reply: 

Actually, what we want is not just to abolish money but to see established a society based on the common ownership of the means of wealth production, where money would be redundant. We don’t think this will happen through money gradually losing its value, as you seem to be suggesting. It will require a determined political struggle against those who currently own and control the means of production and benefit from the money-wages-profits system that is capitalism – Editors.

Greenpeace 

 

Dear Editors

For what it is worth (really nothing) I have supported Greenpeace over a number of years. In response to a recent questionnaire as to what I thought of Greenpeace I said that the world’s problems in my opinion could only be resolved by the dismantling of capitalism. I received a reply recommending me to have a look at the New Economics Foundation.  I did this and replied as follows.

I have looked at the NEF Website and have to say that NEF is simply another reformist outfit that thinks with a little tinkering capitalism will work. On this evening’s BBC 5 o’clock news mention was made that 40,000 homes having been repossessed in the current crisis – 40,000 homes lying empty. I heard Dyson (vacuum cleaners) the inventor saying that by encouraging children in schools to learn engineering Britain could reclaim some of the lost ground in manufacturing, etc. We live in a society in which goods and services are carried out solely with the aim of making a profit. People are ejected from good homes because they haven’t the means to repay debt. Goods are manufactured abroad because labour is cheaper and owners can achieve more profit. These are the laws of the ‘free’ market economy. Oceans are poisoned because of ‘cheap’ disposal of waste. Rainforests are cleared to make way for moneymaking industries. Farming, cattle raising etc. Despite the efforts of the likes of Oxfam and Greenpeace, etc the world situation is worse now than ever. People in the Third World starve not because there isn’t enough food but because they are too poor to buy it. Think of that.

The alternative is a cooperative form of production whereby goods are produced not for profit but to meet needs. This means that ownership of the means of creating wealth, i.e. factories, land, resources have to be taken away from the few who currently own them so that they become the property of all the people under democratic control.

Just think – governments are currently subsidising car manufacturers to keep people producing cars that are not needed in order to keep people in jobs. I have sympathy for the poor devils thrown out of jobs leading to all sorts of problems (loss of homes etc) but what a crazy state of affairs.

I received a reply saying that by their calculations we’ve only got about seven years to get on top of the problem of climate change and that the writer didn’t think the change of economic system I was suggesting could be made in that sort of timetable. Maybe not, but what if the problem just cannot be solved within the present economic system? That would be seven wasted years.

Peter Finch, 

Reading

Pathfinders: The Only Way Is Ethics (Not) (2018)

Iceland's palm oil ad

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is there anything you do, eat, wear or travel in that isn’t bad for the environment? Palm oil, used in a zillion products, is now being demonised as the new plastic, and one frozen food company has taken the ‘ethical’ decision to stop buying in palm oil products, while astutely trying to capitalise on this strategy with a Christmas ad featuring a cutesie kid and baby orang utan who sadly shows her his forest utopia being charred and bulldozed for the sake of her hair products. The ad went viral on YouTube after it was banned from the TV by regulators because it was produced by Greenpeace, deemed a ‘political’ organisation although by our definition they’re not as they don’t stand candidates for parliament. At the time of writing there is a heart-warming online campaign to overturn the ban (‘Iceland Christmas ad: Petition to show it on TV hits 670k’, BBC Online, 13 November). No doubt the firm’s marketing director can expect a stuffed bonus in their Christmas stocking for this crafty coup.

Christmas is always the perfect time for guilt-trips which invite you to pause and reflect, during your orgiastic overspending, on your ethical profile, that thing about which you feel least certain and most guilty. But what do we understand by the word ‘ethics’ and how useful is it? Dogs, elephants and other animals are known to have a moral sense, and we humans regard the absence of a moral compass as a clinical defect. We devise moral frameworks, often hi-jacked by religions as the work of some deity, to codify our values, our social concepts and our politics. This is probably a form of evolutionary heuristic, or short-hand guide, since we don’t have smart enough brains to calculate good survival strategies on demand. Instead we feel them as right or wrong, through some obscure associative process nobody really understands.

But there are inevitable problems with allowing your moral compass to do the driving. What if you have the wrong information? Have you corrected for your internal biases? If your morality doesn’t square with other people’s, who is to say who’s right?

A group of programmers currently grappling with the complexities of moral codes are those trying to design the AI systems in self-driving cars. What has them perplexed is the nightmare no-win crash scenario known as the ‘Trolley problem’, in which you can only avoid killing one lot of people by diverting your runaway tram (‘trolley’) down a different track and killing a different bunch of people. You can tweak this problem any way you like, by varying the characteristics of your two groups of ‘victims’, to see what difference this makes to people’s ethical choices.

Being good scientists of course, they approached this scientifically and conducted a numbers exercise to see if they could derive a baseline consensus. What would most people want a self-driving car to do in such a situation? Unfortunately it depends who you ask. The Moral Machine survey collected 40 million decisions from across 233 countries, and found that while on average humans were prioritised over animals and younger people over older (unless the humans were criminals, in which case they rated lower than cats), the regional differences were strikingly hard to integrate into a viable framework. For instance, the young-over-old ethic was much less apparent in Asiatic and Islamic countries, as was the high-status-over-low. South America and French colonies were less inclined to save humans over animals, unless they were specifically women or non-disabled people.

The problem for the programmers is that computer code relies on absolutes, and with morality there are no absolutes, only relatives. No wonder one ethicist describes the task of giving morals to motor vehicles as ‘finding the right comedic parabola, or the right colour of dance, or the right frequency for spaghetti’ (New Scientist, 27 October).

As soon as you start asking ethical questions you get contradictory answers, and there is no objective yardstick, upon which all can agree, by which to judge them. So is it possible to use such a subjective approach to arrive at a consensual programme of action for the planet?

No, it isn’t. That’s why when we’re making the case for socialism we prefer to stick to the facts. If the world is going to steer its way to a sustainable future instead of destruction it’s going to need a practical and accurate roadmap more than it needs gods or cutesie ads or an impassioned polemic.

Place Your Bets Please

If you prefer gas to electric cookers it’s probably because of the zero-response time when you adjust the heat settings. Cooking with electric involves too much thinking ahead, and an adjustment that’s fractionally too high can result in milk boiling over the stove. A similar problem exists in long-latency industries like oil, where adjustments today ‘feed through’ to supply or price levels years down the line. This gives rise to a volatile futures market, which speculates on supply and price in the future. Today’s US sanctions against Iran have caused large producers to pump at full capacity, but fears of future oversupply are depressing the futures market, in turn causing rampant selling and falling stock prices today, which of course will have knock-on effects on industry including food production (‘Oil rally faces tidal wave of supply’, Reuters, 4 November). So today’s activities are not determined by today’s objective and demonstrable necessities, but by some people’s guesses at what the price of these things will be in a few years’ time. If you think that sounds like reckless fast-buck gambling instead of responsible resource management, you’ve just hit on one essential difference between capitalism and socialism.

Paddy Shannon

Letter From Europe: Greenpeace killing (1986)

The Letter From Europe column from the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

When he visited the French nuclear testing site at Mururoa in the middle of the Pacific Ocean last October the French Prime Minister. Laurent Fabius, who was there to witness an underground nuclear explosion, described the opposition of ecologists and the population of other Pacific islands as 'irrational". What! Which is more rational: to participate in an experiment designed to develop a nuclear bomb that will kill people without destroying property; or to protest against such a patently obscene form of human behaviour?

Clearly Fabius has a warped sense of rationality, but what are we to think of the mental state of the newly-appointed French Minister of Defence, Paul Quilès who, asked what he felt just after the test explosion, replied "happiness" (bonheur) and "pride"? And Fabius and Quilès have the insolence to call themselves socialists! Not even Tory Ministers in Britain defend nuclear bombs in these terms, preferring to justify them as a necessary evil, the world being what it is.

In a sense, this is right. The world being capitalist, states need to arm themselves with the most destructive weapons they can afford in order to deter other states from encroaching on their interests and enter into negotiations on all sorts of issues with a strong bargaining hand. Mitterrand who accepts the logic of capitalism explained this very well in answer to Gorbachev's proposal to include French and British nuclear weapons in the farcical disarmament talks currently going on between Russia and America. The French nuclear arsenal, he said, is already at the minimum level to be credible and so can't be reduced without undermining France's vital interests. A few weeks later Thatcher made the same point in answer to the same proposal.

The simple fact is that, under capitalism, no state can agree to disarm. On the contrary, all states are obliged to arm themselves and to go on arming themselves to keep up with the latest techniques of mass killing and destruction. This is why disarmament is impossible under capitalism and why so-called "disarmament talks" in Geneva and elsewhere are a cruel trick played on world public opinion. At most there might be an agreement to scrap some obsolete weapons so as to be able to concentrate resources on other, more efficient rockets and bombs. If capitalism continues, it is inevitable that more and more states will acquire nuclear weapons, so increasing the probability that they will sooner or later be used again.

States which want to develop nuclear weapons have however one problem: they need some isolated area in which to carry out their tests. This presented no problem to America, Russia, China and India with their vast land areas, but did to densely populated Britain and France. Remote Scottish islands may be alright for testing chemical weapons, but not for nuclear tests. So at first Britain used Woomera in Australia and now carries out its tests in America (hence the so-called "special relationship” between Britain and America, the complete dependence of the British state on the American state for its nuclear weapons). France, which developed its bomb later than Britain, had at first thought of using the Sahara desert in Algeria but a colonial war and the subsequent withdrawal of France from this area put an end to this idea and Mururoa, a remote Pacific island seized by French imperialists in the last century, was chosen. Here from 1963 to 1975 France carried out nuclear tests in the atmosphere, even though it had by then been scientifically established beyond a shadow of doubt that the fall-out from such tests was biologically harmful. Since 1975, however, having caught up with the three nuclear powers - Russia. America and Britain - who had signed the (atmospheric) Test Ban Treaty in 1963, France too now only resorts to underground tests. But for over ten years the French government was responsible before future generations for knowingly polluting the world's atmosphere with Strontium 90 and other radioactive substances.

Mururoa, then, is vitally important to the French capitalist state as the place where it develops its "credible" nuclear weapons in line with the advances in mass killing techniques. Indeed, keeping Mururoa is basically the only reason France wants to maintain a colonial "presence" in the Pacific area. For, despite assurances by the French government that its underground tests are perfectly harmless to people and the environment. there is no question of it carrying out such tests in France itself, say in some remote area of the Massif Central. There would be far too, many "irrational" people around to protest (as they did over the conventional weapon testing ground at Larzac. for instance), while the protests of South Sea islanders and outside ecologists can easily be brushed off . . . or dealt with in other ways.

It was because Greenpeace - and New Zealand - were protesting so much against French nuclear tests in the Pacific, and because such tests were so vital to French capitalist interests, that the French government decided to send in a team of hired killers to sabotage the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. There is still some controversy as to exactly who in the French government gave this order; it was probably the former Defence Minister. Charles Hernu (who was quite as mad as his successor, his fetish being to dress up in combat uniform and be driven around in a tank or an armoured car whenever he could), but may even have been Fabius or Mitterrand. Hernu was eventually forced to resign over the affair, but this has not harmed his political career. Far from it. He was given a standing ovation at the French "socialist" party’s recent Congress in Toulouse and has been chosen to head the party's list in the Lyons area in next March's general election. He has even been giving interviews hinting that he might be a presidential candidate in 1988 — as well he might be, as long as he keeps well away from New Zealand, where the two members of the French state terrorist gang who didn't get away are serving a ten-year sentence. Incidentally, despite declarations by Mitterrand and Fabius at the beginning of the affair that those responsible for the blowing-up of the Rainbow Warrior and the killing of one of its crew would be punished in France if found to be French citizens, the rest of the terrorist gang — whose names are known — have gone scot-free and are continuing their training as hired killers in the service of the French state. The only members of the French Secret Service to have been put in prison over the affair are those who leaked the truth to the press.

This double standard when it comes to terrorism is typical of the dirty business of administering a capitalist state. Denunciation of private-enterprise terrorist groups or of terrorist groups controlled by other states, but excuses for your own state's terrorist activities. There is even a diplomatic word for this: raison d'Etat in French. Realpolitik in German. The fact remains that the biggest terrorist organisations in the world are the various armed states into which it is artificially divided. They kill, maim and torture many, many more people than the IRAs, the ETAs and other such maniacs. It is the task of the socialist movement to sweep away all states, with their willing servants like Mitterrand. Fabius, Hernu, Quilès and other such grotesque non-entities — and establish a world stateless community in which weapons of war. conventional as well as nuclear, will not exist because they will not be needed.

Adam Buick (Paris)