Tiny Tips (2026)

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

United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres says that 800 million people around the world are living in extreme poverty… [He] had previously stated that nearly three billion people are living in inadequate housing conditions.

[8am media]

In Shanxi, the province that sits at the heart of China’s coal-mining industry, there’s long been a saying: ‘Only go down a coal pit when you have no other way out’. For decades, life in these pits was intertwined with tragedy. It became so common that it gave rise to other sayings: about how miners were ‘exchanging their lives for money’ or ‘staking their lives for tomorrow’ when they ventured into underground tunnels where they died from gas explosions, flooding and shaft collapses. Over the past decade, safety reforms steadily erased the industry’s deadly reputation, and those days were thought to be behind China – until 22 May, when a blast at the Liushenyu coal mine in Shanxi killed 82 people and injured more than 120 others.

[BBC]

A leading Nicaraguan indigenous leader has died after being detained by the ruling authoritarian regime for nearly three years. Brooklyn Rivera, who founded the central American nation’s indigenous movement Yatama, died due to ‘physical and neurological deterioration’ linked to a Covid-19 infection, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health stated on Sunday. The government, headed by President Daniel Ortega, took 15 hours to confirm the death and are refusing to release the 73-year-old’s body to his family, opposition media report. The Nicaraguan government is routinely accused of political oppression, and Rivera is one of a growing number of dissidents to die in custody. 

[BBC]

Greta Thunberg… has said little publicly about the recent protests in Iran. Similar criticisms have been directed at a number of prominent left-wing intellectuals and activists in Europe and North America, including Tariq Ali, Naomi Klein, Alain Badiou, Richard Falk, and others. The pattern extends beyond silence. Judith Butler, the American philosopher and feminist theorist, has previously expressed support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, describing them as progressive social movements that form part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle.

[International Policy Digest]

An elderly man spent days on the floor of his HMO while maggots infested wounds in his legs before he was discovered and later died, a report has found. The 69-year-old from Oldham, named ‘John’ in a safeguarding review, was discharged from hospital just two weeks before the fall that led to his death … The recently published report found the local authority and medical professionals at Royal Oldham Hospital ‘missed opportunities’ to support John. Prior to his death, John was treated for severe malnourishment and an acute kidney injury. At the time, he shared with staff that he ‘did not feel safe in his home’, as he lived in a HMO with five other people, all of whom had serious alcohol and substance abuse issues.

[Oldham Evening Chronicle]

 

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

Life and Times: The World Unspun (2026)

The Life and Times column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since I can remember I’ve had a subscription to the New Internationalist magazine. Its watchword, ‘The World Unspun’, marks it out as a campaigning publication which aims to present matters of both local and global importance in as direct and straightforward a way as possible. Its main focus has always been what used to be called the Third World, now more commonly known as the Global South, but it also ranges more widely across issues it sees as vital to humanity as a whole. Its stance is supportive of what it sees as ‘progressive’ movements reflecting a will to see humans across the globe live in a more peaceful and united fashion than at present.

Even if I don’t always necessarily share its analysis of situations and developments, I’ve never found it anything less than a refreshing read with a lively Letters page that’s ready to publish readers’ views, even if in disagreement with its own stance. Over the years some of these letters have come from members of the Socialist Party, including myself. Its 80-odd pages always range widely over a variety of themes, normally of a topical nature, with a layout, presentation and illustrations which are always of the very highest professional standard.

The current edition (Jan-Feb 2026) has as its ‘Big Story’ a series of articles on nuclear weapons and the arms trade, while several short pieces look at, for example, the effects of Hurricane Melissa in Haiti, Malaysia’s round-ups of Rohingya refugees, plans to reinstate the death penalty in Kyrgyzstan, and Trump’s deportation drive in the US. There are reports from Ethiopia, Venezuela, Iran, Peru and India, and its ‘View from Brazil’ is an example of how, while broadly supportive of the more liberal government that recently came to power there, it does not fail to analyse and be critical of how the authorities’ war on drug gangs has led to the deaths of many innocent and poverty-stricken people. Its longest single feature, entitled ‘Neocolonialism in Gaza’ refers to what is happening there as ‘repackaged neocolonialism’ and provides powerful and dramatic descriptions of a war that has not yet fully abated and where ‘365 square kilometers … has been subjected to the equivalent of six times the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima’ and ‘the bodies of thousands of slain Palestinian are yet to be recovered’. It warns chillingly of a future in which ‘a site of mass killing’ is turned into ‘a stage for profit’.

And there is much else. For example, an informative and extremely well-formulated and designed 4-page ‘cartoon history’ of Christopher Columbus depicts the horrors that the explorer’s ‘discoveries’ inflicted on countless indigenous people. And there are several pages of book, film and music reviews, and even an ‘Agony Uncle’ column, which, in the current issue, tries to answer in an entirely serious and balanced way a reader’s ‘ethical’ dilemma about cat ownership in the face of the mass killing of birds and other mammals by domestic cats. The regular two-page ‘country profile’ in this issue is on Iran and provides a highly informative and objective sweep of that country’s history and its current situation complemented by interesting and statistical analysis, none of which is complimentary to the current regime there. The magazine also contains a certain amount of advertising, mainly for ‘ethically’ produced goods and services, some of them coming from the New Internationalist cooperative itself.

While the overall thrust of the New Internationalist is what socialists would see as reformist in its support for political and social reforms and gradual improvements in economic conditions for the working majority, it does not seem entirely antagonistic towards the more ambitious objectives of the Socialist Party. This is as instanced by its willingness to publish letters our members have sometimes sent pointing towards a more profound, indeed revolutionary, kind of social change, where the current system of individual states and production for profit would be replaced by a united world society of common ownership, democratic control and free access to all goods and services.

Indeed, I am waiting to see whether a letter I myself have recently sent to the magazine will be published. In it I’ve replied to another reader’s letter which expressed dissatisfaction with the suggestion made in an article that governments throughout the world could be divided into two types: ‘authoritarian regimes’ and ‘liberal democracies’. The reader saw that division as over-simplistic and suggested rather that states should be divided not into two types but into seven according to their political complexion. What I have suggested in my response is that, although such distinctions might be useful for some purposes, what’s far more significant – at least for those of us looking forward to fundamental social change – is not what divides countries and nations according to type of regime but rather the overarching economic system they are all part of (ie capitalism), with its characteristics of wage labour, buying and selling, and tiny minorities owning or controlling the vast majority of the wealth. And this was the case, the letter goes on, whether countries are run along totalitarian lines, or as so-called liberal democracies, or anything in between. It concludes that it’s the economic system as a whole that needs to be got rid of via majority global consciousness and democratic political action and replaced by a society of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and production solely for need.

As I’ve said, the New Internationalist is pretty good at publishing letters that don’t align with their own preoccupations. Will they publish this one? Let’s see.

Howard Moss

Material World: Paycheck to paycheck (2026)

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

We’re used to hearing that the overall standard of living in the West is significantly higher than in the countries that make up what used to be known as the ‘Third World’ but are now commonly referred to as the ‘Global South’. For many of these, most sources indicate progress in expanding access to basic necessities such as water, sanitation and health facilities. Yet a recent joint report by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that approximately 1 in 4 people globally, or close to 2.1 billion, lack access to clean drinking water and that this contributes to roughly 3.5 million deaths per year, nearly 400,000 of these children under five.

More broadly, according to an Oxfam International report from June 2025, 3.7 billion of the world’s population, or around 45 percent, live in conditions of moderate or severe food insecurity with over 700 million living on less than 2.15 dollars per day and 3.4 billion living on less than 5.50 dollars per days. This means that many are unlikely to have the money to eat regularly and so will often skimp on food or skip meals. In addition, the business data website Statista has reported on a United Nations estimate that around 1.1 billion people worldwide, including around 50 percent of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are living in slums, described as ‘areas of self-built, unsanitary housing where extreme poverty is rife’.

How does all this compare to the standard of living in what is seen as ‘the richest country in the world’, the USA? We would expect it to be a lot higher overall, and indeed it is. But what are things actually like? Wildly differing figures on living standards, poverty and deprivation are to be found depending on the sources you consult. For example, the CNN Business website recently reported on a Bank of America analysis which estimated that around 1 in 4 (24 percent) of American households are barely getting by – living ‘paycheck to paycheck’, as they put it.

The bank’s statisticians combed through data on millions of customers to track how much they spent on basics such as housing, groceries, childcare and utilities and found it constituted over 95 percent of their income ‘leaving little to nothing left over for the “nice-to-have” things like going out to dinner or taking a vacation, let alone saving’. One of their interviewees who had a degree but was working in a construction business about to shut down is quoted as saying ‘to be 34 and living paycheck to paycheck with no savings, things are pretty crappy right now’.

However, a different survey came up with a quite different result, which was that the proportion of workers living paycheck to paycheck was not 24 percent but 67 percent. This figure emerged from the Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report by the PNC Bank, based on workers aged 21 to 69 working full time at companies with more than 100 employees. It painted a picture of workers struggling to cover everyday expenses, especially with cost of living currently outpacing wage growth. A Newsweek report on this survey quoted Taylor Nelms, vice-president of research and insights at the Financial Health Network, as saying: ‘The percentage of U.S. households that say they spend more or the same as they bring in has been remarkably consistent, hovering around 50 percent over the past several years but right now it’s compounded by high housing costs, insurance premiums, and the return of student loan payments. These are the areas where households feel most squeezed’.

There’s clearly a big difference between these survey results, but whichever figure you take as reliable, it’s clear that many millions of people in the world’s ‘richest country’ are not only not rich but are materially insecure and struggling to keep their heads above water, with some in particularly straightened circumstances. The CNN report highlights some of the typical symptoms of this – people falling behind on their bills, minimum credit card payments being made, an increased percentage of borrowers late on their car loans (referred to as ‘a clear sign of financial distress, especially since car loans are historically the last payments Americans are willing to miss’), and people filing for bankruptcy having incurred large medical debts while ill. Nor does any of this take into account the undoubtedly worse conditions of those who have no employment at all or are homeless or not registered to work. The current estimate of the number of unemployed people is 4.4 percent of the workforce, so 7.6 million people living in even worse circumstances than those ‘just getting by’.

What conclusions can we draw from this? First and foremost that, though wage and salary workers in what is usually considered the most advanced part of the Western world are undoubtedly better off on the whole than their counterparts elsewhere, this does not prevent many of them from suffering poverty and insecurity. And this in a world which, if it were organised rationally (ie, with a system aimed at catering for the needs of all and not the profits of a few), could provide abundantly for all of its 8.3 billion population. Already in fact the world possesses enough productive capacity to eliminate global poverty many times over. Yet this can never happen as long as we have a system – the market system – which ensures vast wealth inequality between the tiny minority of people who own most of the resources and the large majority who own little more than their skills and energies and their ability to sell these for a wage or salary.

It is no kind of aberration, therefore, that the USA has, according to Forbes Magazine, 905 billionaires with a combined wealth of 7.8 trillion dollars and that, according to Federal Reserve data, the top 1 percent of households in the United States hold 30.5 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent. Rather it is the inevitable consequence of a system (production for profit) that has no mechanism for meeting the basic needs of the whole of humanity and will always fail to do that. This being the case, it is as clear as it can possibly be that the majority of the world’s workers need to take collective and democratic political action to bring that system to an end and replace it by one that will be cooperative, moneyless, wageless and based on free access and production for use.

Howard Moss

Faith, poverty and lies (1993)

From the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religion has an irrational,
 non-materialist ideology 
which can result in
unrestrained barbarism. In 
the battle over birth
 control women workers are
in the front line and are 
suffering appallingly

During a recent visit to the United States, the Pope encountered considerable criticism of his views on "natural methods of birth control" and the rights of women to termination of pregnancy. Gallup polls conducted before his arrival such as in USA Today/RCC concluded that 75 percent would sooner follow their own consciences than accept papal doctrines. Another poll indicated that 83 percent of Catholics aged 18-25 years "believe they can disagree with Church teaching yet remain good Catholics". ("Catholics for Free Choice/KRC Research and Consulting", Lancet, 21 August). Other views expressed have been more critical. Frances Kissling, president of a movement called Catholics for Free Choice concludes that Pope John Paul is "lost in the pelvic zone as he increasingly insists on fidelity to his restrictive views on sex and reproduction".

The Catholic Church seeks to maintain and recruit followers based on strongly-held precepts or dogma. The purpose of the Pope's travels abroad is to reinforce these, including the Church’s views on contraception and termination of pregnancy.

Far from taking account of the views expressed in opinion polls by his adherents he is at present working on an encyclical entitled "Veritatis Splendor" which is said to be more extensive than the "Humanae vitae" put out 25 years ago. Leaked versions of the forthcoming encyclical do not indicate any compromise by the Pope on these issues. He is also working on yet another encyclical concerned about "questions of life" which will be concerned with questions of sexual morality.

Encyclicals are meant to be binding and obeyed. This may have been the ease in mediaeval times when the Catholic Church had total control of all information and ideas and their availability to the subject population but it is certainly not the case today.

The harsh reality of the world's problems and the futility of applying these outmoded concepts is brought home forcibly by A.A.Verkuyl, a gynaecologist working in Zimbabwe:

"In large areas of the world, health care is provided by the RCC and the Church’s powerful position prevents effective access to reliable contraception. In Rwanda one-third of the health facilities are administered by the RCC. The bishops refuse to discuss the possibility of promoting condoms for contraception or even for Aids prevention purposes while 40 percent of the under-five population are malnourished, the population doubles every I9years, and HIV prevalence in urban areas is more than 20 percent.As in sub Saharan Africa, so in tat in America and the Philippines " (Lancet, 21 August).

The author describes instances of what the Church's attitude results in:

"Take Maria. She is a girl of 17 living in abject poverty in one of the enormous third world cities. No running water or sanitation. Maria looks after her siblings while her mother can just scavenge enough to prevent starvation. Her only chance of escape is to marry someone with a good job. If she finds a candidate, he will most likely blackmail her into having sex before marriage. She assents out of fear of losing him. There are dozens of other girls who see him as an escape vehicle from terminal poverty, and thus he acts as a transport medium for gonorrhoea, syphilis, and HIV between them. The end result is that his girl friends experience infertility, ectopic pregnancies, backstreet abortions, and Aids. If they ever give birth, the baby may die of Aids or congenital syphilis, or become an orphan. Maria refuses to have an abortion. To provide for her child and herself she has to give sexual favours to a dozen men. Five years later she dies of Aids without dignity. Her son is a street urchin."

Another case deals with a recently-qualified nurse:

"she is happy to get a job in a remote RCC hospital even though her husband is obliged to stay in town and look for work. At Christmas her husband visits her . . . there are no condoms in the hospital. At the end of her 6 months’ probation the nuns in charge of the hospital will make here have a pregnancy test. If it is positive she will not get the job. Six weeks before the urine test she misses her period. A traditional doctor in a nearby village tries to help. She dies of a perforated uterus."

The Muslims are no less reactionary than the RCC in these matters. They consider a child to be a gift from Allah. Verkuyl quotes the case of a 12-year-old girl:

"Her father is a staunch Muslim, thinks that education is not important for girls. She had had her menarche so a marriage is arranged. She never had sex education and has no idea about antenatal care and what is supposed to happen during delivery. Her mother cannot tell her; she died during her eleventh pregnancy. After three days' labour at home she is encouraged with hot irons on her hack to push harder. In the end a dead baby is born. Three months later she is able to walk more or less normally and is rejected by her husband because the huge hole in her bladder causes her to smell and leak. Her family do not want her back. So much for 'natural methods ’."

The lifetime risk of death from pregnancy is greater than one in twenty-five in Zaire and in Muslim northern Nigeria whilst the risk in western Europe is one in 25,000 Both religions are united in their outmoded view that women should not have a say in deciding how many children they have.

Commenting on the argument that family planning is unnatural the author writes that:

"These arguments would not be used by somebody who flies in an aeroplane all over the globe and has a natural tumour removed by unnatural surgery under unnatural general anaesthesia."

On a recent visit to Brazil the Pope pursued the same authoritarian line that he has elsewhere. The murder of the street urchins in Rio recently emphasizes the consequences of these policies in Latin America."Almost two million Brazilian girls aged between 9 and 17 are prostitutes, an inquiry has been told in Brasilia" (Daily Telegraph, 24 August).

The Roman Catholic Church and the Islamic leaders have millions of followers. But how obedient are they to the outmoded view's of these religions that deny any fundamental right to women and take no account of the economic problems facing ordinary workers or agrarian workers anywhere? The vast majority of Catholics do not practice natural methods as defined by the Church. J. Poole writing in the Lancet in 1992, in an article entitled "Time for the Vatican to Bend" commented:

"It is hard to see how Western European and American Catholics, 80 percent of whom have themselves rejected the teaching of Humanae vitae, can vote to deny effective family-planning to the women of the poor nations of the world." In other words the Pope and the Muslim leaders are out of touch with the views of their own followers and fail to realize that they cannot turn the clock back as far as the development of human ideas are involved, which finally are shaped by the everyday material problems people have to face world-wide.

So what is the significance of the Pope’s visits abroad and the above comments from people grappling with the everyday problems of living and in many eases literally barely surviving? It is clearly incontrovertible evidence that chinks are appearing between these leaders and their followers as the views fail to have any application to the consequences of modern capitalism.

To the Socialist, religion or any concept based on the supernatural is a means of keeping the masses subservient to a given class-divided society. It is a barrier to social progress and can only exist where there is a minority owning the means of production and the bulk of the wealth produced. People who believe in a life hereafter are more likely to tolerate adverse conditions here on this planet.

Marx had no doubts about this. He wrote:

"It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions." (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843).

When the resources of the world are owned and shared by those that produce them, then the palliative needs satisfied in some cases by religion will disappear.

Terry Lawlor

News in Review: Quick look around (1965)

The News in Review column from the August 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quick look around

To those who find the headlines depressing, and who prefer to look for the news in the newspapers’ smaller columns (“Vicar, 73, Weds Secretary, 21”) we can offer little comfort.

Events which are considered of minor importance reflect the same drab image as the big news.

Nearly two million people are receiving National Assistance in this country, which shows that many more than two million are not sharing in whatever the Tories meant when they talked about our rising prosperity. About three quarters of those on National Assistance are pensioners, which shows again that although the shadow of want may have been lifted from some people (for example the judges who are soon going to get a twenty-five per cent rise in their already big wages) it still hangs over the retired worker.

We have been promised that the report of the government’s Study Group on the North West will shortly be published. The Group found that parts of the North West have the highest mortality rate in the country, due to the fact that so many of its people live in towns and cities, under squalid conditions. It also discovered a fact which some other people had known for a long time; that there are still plenty of slums in this country, and that they are increasing fast. The Group concluded, in fact, that it will take fifty years, at the present rates of clearance, to get rid of the North West’s slums.

In Geneva, United Nations Secretary General U Thant said that on present showing there will be more unemployment, more hunger, more malnutrition, in 1970 than there is today. “The misery of the developing world,” he said, “is a progressive misery. It threatens to grow worse in the second half of the decade.” The only comment to make here is that this gloomy opinion comes from someone who, with the job which he has, must obviously be one of the world’s top optimists.

There is no reason to hope that the news will get any better. It is apparent that there was something seriously lacking in the perceptive powers of the man who first said that every day, in every way, things are getting better and better.

Vietnam mission

It is fairly safe to assume that Mr. Wilson was not heedless of the political advantages to be gained from the publicity which was bound to accompany the suggested peace mission on Vietnam.

Perhaps it was even hoped that in the excitement few people would have realised that the mission had not actually done anything, or gone anywhere and that indeed most of its members had split up and gone home.

The mission was the same sort of empty gesture—like Chamberlain’s trip to Munich, like the Locarno Treaty in 1924 — which convince workers that capitalism’s leaders are about to solve the problem of war.

This conviction rests upon a delusion; that wars are caused by international statesmen omitting to talk before they start shooting—or rather, before they tell their workers to start shooting for them. (At one time there was a popular theory that Stalin’s intransigence could be dealt with by getting him to raise a Kremlin cricket team to play an XI from Westminster.)

In fact, there is no lack of opportunity for capitalism’s leaders to confer. And, as the Vietnam mission has shown, there are also plenty of informal channels through which they can communicate, even if they do not recognise each other’s existence. It is clear .that they fail to do so only when they think there are other ways of settling their differences.

It is also clear that wars are not caused by a failure of communication. They are caused by conditions which cannot be affected by any conference, and they start when further talking is pointless.

The Western powers are now trying to get the Vietcong to negotiate, when they are convinced that they are close to victory. This is something like Hitler trying to impose his terms on the Allies as his empire was collapsing in April 1945. Like any other war, the one in Vietnam has its own momentum of ruthlessness and it will be played out to its bitter end.

That will not be the end of the matter; Vietnam is only the latest of the small wars in the greater struggle between the world powers over which shall control and exploit South East Asia. There is no sense, no reason, no humanity, in such conflicts—and no “right” either on any side.

It is typical of Labour Party hypocrisy that they should pretend that normal human standards can be applied to the war in Vietnam. They are among the supporters of the social system which produces the war there and which could make it (to use the current ugly jargon) escalate into something which even Mr. Wilson does not pretend to be able to control.

Algerian conflict

During the long war for Algerian independence, the people who suffered in the nationalist cause were comforted by the thought that out of their tribulations freedom would be born in Algeria.

At that time, as the French forces were daily committing the most brutal of excesses, it was easy to represent the FLN as fighters for liberty.

One of the heroes of the rebellion, who quickly emerged as the effective ruler of Algeria after independence, was Ben Bella. He was supposed to be the man who, once the French had been banished, would lead the poor Algerian peasant to freedom and prosperity.

One of Ben Bella’s closest associates, the man who stood by him and did so much to help him root out opposition after the rebellion, was Colonel Boumedienne. If anyone bears a load of responsibility for selling Ben Bella as Freedom’s Messiah, it is Boumedienne.

Yet now, according to the Colonel, the whole thing was a mistake. Ben Bella does not stand for freedom—he is a despot, a demagogue. He squandered Algeria’s resources, he frightened off investors. (We should remind ourselves here that the Colonel, who has pledged himself to encourage investment in Algeria, calls himself a Socialist.)

It is too late, now, to discover that the Algerian rebellion was to result in replacing one despotism by another; it would have saved some lives if at the time Boumedienne had reminded his followers that nationalist risings often have that effect.

All nationalist movements claim that they are fighting for freedom, and not a few of them also claim to be Socialist as well. But when they get power, and the moment of truth arrives, they frequently impose dictatorships.

Algeria is only the latest of several countries in which this has happened recently, and in which the leaders of the rebellion, after they have won, have split and denounced each other as despots. In one after another of the new African states this has happened—sometimes until the imposition of a one-party state has silenced the opposition and left only one side to put over its point of view.

These are the fruits of nationalist rebellion. There can be few causes which have induced so many people to waste so much time, energy and blood.

Gaolbreak

One fact is often overlooked by the man-in-the-street advocate of the deterrent effect of heavy sentences. The more severe the sentence, the greater the incentive to escape.

Heavy sentences are often imposed on members of big and well-organised mobs like the Train Robbers, who are well enough equipped, in daring and organisation, to bring off a rescue from gaol.

The prison authorities are of course aware of this; if rumours are true they have thwarted plans to free two of the Train gang. But the criminals have the same sort of advantages as guerrilla fighters—they can move freely in the world outside, they can watch and wait and pounce when they think the moment has come.

The rescue of Ronald Biggs has confirmed what the escape of Charles Wilson showed—that big time crime is now refined and organised enough not to reject any job. Perhaps some criminals with a sense of humour might reflect that they at any rate are responding to the Labour government’s appeal for greater technical expertise in our work.

It has been often said that men like the Great Train Robbers would make excellent soldiers or big business men. It is apparent that they do have the required amount of ruthlessness to succeed in these fields.

At the moment, however, they prefer to rob people in ways which capitalism says are illegal, and to ignore other methods which are likely to bring them a place in the Honours List.

One thing the robbers fear above everything else, above imprisonment, above the nervous stress of their work, and that is to be a normal member of the working class. They cannot face the prospect of the daily journey to the factory or office, the clocking on and off, the monotonous routine jobs, the kowtowing to the boss, the leisure time spent in visiting or cutting the lawn.

This is one of the influences which persuade them to be criminals. It is also one of the influences which persuade the capitalist class to hang on to their privileged situation, and to the rights it brings them to be legalised robbers.

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Global warming is not the inevitable result of “‘human nature,”’ argues economist Parrique in this blistering debut study. Instead, “‘the primary cause of ecological derailment is… capitalism,”’ more specifically “‘the frantic pursuit of growth,”’ or increased production. 

[Publishers Weekly]

When challenges combatting the majority in India, from unemployment, lack of basic amenities, threat of their houses being demolished or being actually razed to the ground and more are taken note of, each is a pointer to the hard reality –- that of bleak future for those already facing hard circumstances. In essence, these certainly are not suggestive of their being raised above their present economic status. They certainly cannot be counted among those who seem to have been raised above the index of extreme poverty. 

[Counter Punch]

The regime has systematically abandoned United Nations agencies that have questioned its rule. First came the Food and Agriculture Organization in February, after it ranked Nicaragua among the countries with the highest levels of hunger in the world… The logic is simple: the regime rejects any body that questions it, seeking to consolidate absolute control by eliminating all external oversight.

[Civicus Lens]

In a new report, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said the government has missed most of its key targets to tackle AMR [antimicrobial resistance]. It’s also dropped the ball on its surveillance programme, on improving environmental protection and on engaging with other countries on the subject. Instead of taking responsibility, the PAC said, the government is dialling down what it actually wants to achieve. “‘There is arguably no more haunting silhouette on the horizon for the entire world than AMR,”’ the committee’s chair, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, said. “‘If left unchecked, it could rewind medical progress by a century.”’ 

[TBJ Uncovered]

Trump deported, via removals and returns, approximately 1.8 million people during his first term. By comparison, Biden oversaw approximately 2 million deportations, excluding Title 42 order expulsions. Obama, once labeled as “‘deporter in chief,”’, removed about 5.2 million over his eight years. In his current term, Trump has struggled to meet internal ICE targets…. The more Trump lashes out, the more it becomes clear he cannot control the system he claims to command.

[The Hill]

Trump’s approach is not new, and criticisms of it are not either. As labor organizer Emma Goldman wrote over a century ago, “‘The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.”’ Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are charlatans selling us a lie about people in our communities being inherently dangerous. Just like Hitler, who used similar language about “‘blood poisoning”’ to justify his atrocities. Every despot in history has had to first convince people that other humans aren’t worthy of moral consideration… And every act of solidarity proves what despots fear most: that true power is our commitment to one another, our refusal to dehumanize and discard anyone in our community.

[Common Dreams]

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

World view: What causes world poverty? (2001)

From the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The World Development Organisation claims that the policies of governments and multinational businesses cause poverty. Are they right?

“The world has the wealth and means to end poverty. Yet nearly half of the world’s population live on less than £1.40 a day And over 11 million children will die from poverty-related illness this year alone, read the leaflet that fell out of a recent issue of the New Internationalist. This particular leaflet, entitled “Isn’t it time we tackled the causes of poverty?” was issued by an organisation called the World Development Movement but it could have come from any of the numerous other campaigning charities in this field.

What they say is true – the world does have the wealth and means to end poverty – and, yes, it is more than time that we tackled the causes (or rather the cause) of poverty.

So what causes world poverty? Clearly, this is the key question since if you don’t get the answer right, you’re not going to get the solution right either.

According to the WDM, what causes world poverty are the policies currently pursued by governments and multinational companies:

“Policies of governments and companies are keeping people poor. Policies that ensure global trade benefits the rich, not the poor – the three richest men in the world are wealthier than the 48 poorest countries combined. Policies that give increasing power to multinational companies – for every £1 of aid going into poor countries, multinationals take 66p of profits out. The powerful are exploiting the poor to make bigger and bigger profits.”

The WDM’s solution to the problem of world poverty follows logically from this analysis that it is “the policies of governments and companies” that is the cause:

“We lobby decision makers to change the policies that keep people poor.”

They claim that this can work, if enough pressure is brought to bear:

“In rich countries like Britain, decisions are made which can make or break the lives of the poor. We can influence those decisions. That’s why our actions matter so much. Together we can be powerful and win change for the world’s poor.”

Is this true? Is world poverty caused by the mistaken policies of governments and multinationals? Can lobbying and campaigning get these policies changed?

As socialists, we have to say that the answer to both questions is “no”. Governments don’t pursue policies that put profits before poor people because they have chosen to do this rather than chosen not to. Nor have they given in to pressure from the rich and powerful to pursue policies that favour them. They don’t have any choice in the matter, because they are not in control of things.

Governments operate within the framework of an economic system, and the current economic system – capitalism, to give it a name – is based on wealth being produced for sale on a market with a view to profit and on the competitive pressures of the market dictating that these profits be accumulated in the form of more and more capital invested to make yet further profits.

The aim of production under capitalism is not to satisfy people’s needs but to accumulate profits. This is not a policy choice but an economic necessity imposed by the operation of impersonal and uncontrollable economic laws which governments have to abide by, unless they want to risk making things worse by provoking an economic crisis and stagnation in the area they rule over.

In short, governments put profits before poor people because they are obliged to by the impersonal workings of world market forces, not out of choice. The same goes, even more forcefully, for capitalist corporations. Their whole purpose is to make a profit on the capital invested in their businesses so that their shareholders can benefit. That’s the nature of the beast, and we can’t imagine that the World Development Movement is really so naïve as to believe that private companies, whether national or multinational, could pursue any other policy than to maximise their profits.

Classic reformist mistake

The WDM and the other campaigning charities are making, on the world level, the same classic reformist mistake that used to be made at national level: blaming policies pursued by governments rather than the economic system, and so seeing the solution as changing the government or even just its policies rather than changing the economic system. Not just in Britain but in many other countries too, governments have been changed but the policies involving putting profits before people continued just as they did under the old government that openly upheld the status quo.

So, to be frank, campaigning charities like the WDM have got no chance at all of getting governments, and even less multinational companies, to change their practice of putting profits before people. And it is not because they believe merely in lobbying that dooms them to failure; not even the most violent street demonstrations can bring about a change in this practice. As long as the international capitalist system continues to exist, its economic laws will operate to put profits before people, and governments will have no choice but to dance to this tune.

But what are the alternative policies that the WDM and the others would like governments and companies to pursue? The WDM don’t go into details in their leaflet but you can find out if you return their cut-off coupon. But this is not really necessary as another leaflet that fell out of the New Internationalist provides the answer. Issued by Christian Aid, and entitled “Trade for Life” it claims that “every day trade rules keep millions in poverty and a few in riches”:

“Trade affects almost everybody on earth. Over the centuries it has become an increasingly powerful international force. But it is being manipulated by rich countries and companies to suit their interests. Poor people are missing out on the opportunities trade could bring. They are forced to continue living in poverty, sacrificing their lives and livelihoods for others to get rich.”

But if the current “rules” governing trade are the cause, then the solution, logically, is to change the rules, and this is precisely the declared aim of the “Trade for Life” campaign:

“With new rules, trade could become one of the greatest solutions to global poverty. Trade has the power to create jobs, improve healthcare and benefit people’s lives and livelihoods. The Trade for Life campaign calls for a major overhaul of the rules that run the international trading system.”

Trade – the buying and selling of goods and services – should not be confused with the physical transportation of goods and services from one part of the world to another to be used there. The two are not the same, though trade usually involves the latter. In fact, it is precisely because there is trade – and not mere transportation – that goods and services are not distributed today to people according to their needs.

Trade is buying and selling, and this means markets and that goods and services are only produced to be sold on some market with a view to making a profit. It means that production is carried on not to satisfy people’s needs, but to satisfy only paying needs, i.e. needs backed up by what pro-capitalist economists call “effective demand”. In short, it means the application of the economic principle of “can’t pay, can’t have”.

It is because the millions of people living in absolute poverty, who organisations like the WDM and Christian Aid are rightly concerned about, do not have any money, or not enough money, that their needs are not met: they don’t constitute a market, or only an insufficiently profitable market. Because their demand for decent food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and sanitation is “ineffective”, trade and the international trading system ignore them. No change in the rules of international trade is going to change this since it is the “international trading system” itself (aka the world market, aka capitalism) that is the cause.

What is required is not a reform of this system such as demanded by the World Development Movement, Christian Aid and the others, but its abolition and its replacement by one in which the Earth’s resources become the common heritage of all humanity. Only on this basis can these resources be mobilised to eradicate world poverty and ensure a decent life for every man, woman and child on the planet. Yes, the world does have the wealth and means to end world poverty. And, yes, it is high time we tackled the problem.

Adam Buick

The Life of a Common Ugandan (2001)

From the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The treatment of diseases is by native and modern medicine. The native medicine involves drugs extracted from parts of plants and or animals. They are in powder, liquid or cream forms and can be applied externally or taken orally. Most common diseases here are infectious diseases such as dysentery, malaria and typhoid. Others include pulmonary tuberculosis and cholera. The prevention is not successful, because of lack of information and education involving the diseases, lack of proper hygiene.

When such cases appear, patients are either taken to local herbalists or to health units. The patients are carried on stretchers made locally. For cases of pregnant women, some complications are always encountered at birth such as excessive bleeding or “stillbirth” due to delayed surgical operations on the expectant mother. People have fear of undergoing operations for fear of dying during the operation from technical, operational or surgical problems.

Treatment is not always easily accessible by the poor who have problems of payment of the medical fees that are now charged in all health institutes be they private or public. In the public health institutes it is charged in the name of cost-sharing. Some get the medical bills when it is already too late for their ailments to be handled and consequently death follows. Some of these ailments come from poor diets and feeding habits. It is common to find people eating and drinking from the same utensils. Drinking local brews using natural straws which are shared being an example of one of the causes of TB.

Few people have a reasonable education say beyond primary level and this renders them unable to read or listen to educational materials and programmes. Income is on average about 50 pence per day per adult person. Also there are poor or no communication facilities to deliver urgent information in case of emergencies. People have to travel long distances (say 12km) on foot before they can reach the nearest health facilities. This is because there are either no transport facilities (with no roads) or the person involved is unable to pay for them.

In some cases such poor people are facilitated by paying in kind by way of doing manual work at the health institutes when they have completely recovered or it can be done by their friends or relatives on their (patients’) behalf.

Women are commonly seen having over eight children as they rarely apply family planning methods or due to religious indoctrination, especially the catholics and the moslems.

Because families are always big they end up being overcrowded in their grass-thatched houses built out of mud and wood. There is rarely any ventilation. This accelerates health problems.

Because of poverty doctors are compelled to sometimes only handle the symptoms of the disease not the disease itself for the patient may be able only to afford payment of the former rather than the latter.

It is also common to find people living with domestic animals such as goats, sheep, rabbits and hens.

High blood pressure, diabetes and cancer are referred to as the diseases of the rich. This is not because they only involve in rich people but because the poor die of them without ever having them diagnosed because of the expenses involved.

Pit latrines are used to substitute toilets and in overcrowded villages and town slums, such latrines are used by more than one family. Consequently there arises associated sanitation problems and rarely do such families co-operate successfully to maintain such facilities. Water to drink and for household use is always fetched from running streams and wells which also serve domestic animals.

Such water is always drunk without even being boiled because of fuel problems as firewood, which is the main fuel source, is becoming scarce.

As most houses are not cemented there is an infinite scourge of dust, which contributes to respiratory problems. With this dust there is the associated problems of jiggers (sand fleas). In fact recent press reports had it that from one individual over 400 jiggers were extracted from his extremities.

Notwithstanding all these health evils, there’s also the AIDS scourge that is “harvesting” the population in its thousands. AIDS has also affected the social-economic situation of the common Ugandan in that there are orphans who end up in towns as street kids. Also the number of widows and widowers there are has increased and people are burdened by the attention and care given to their terminally-ill friends and relatives.

Rarely do people undergo any medical examinations except only when they are compelled to do so, when say going abroad, so as to know their medical status.

Weijagye Justus, 

Uganda

Booms and Slums (2007)

From the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who has read Frederick Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England will long remember much of what it says. Page after page describes the lives of workers in the big cities in 1844. Two boys in London, for instance, were arrested for stealing a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop: the magistrate discovered that their mother had sold or pawned all the family’s possessions in order to buy food. Many others had little or no furniture and slept on the floor, covered in rags.

The accounts of slum dwellings are sometimes hard to believe. Perhaps the worst was the Little Ireland area of Manchester, where four thousand people lived in overcrowded, unsanitary, decrepit cottages and the filth and stench were all but intolerable. Similar conditions were found in Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Glasgow, and so on. It is difficult to disagree with Engels’ statement that working people were enduring ‘a condition unworthy of human beings’.

In 1971 Robert Roberts published The Classic Slum, an account of his upbringing in Salford in the early twentieth century. In 1910, he records, his mother cajoled their landlord into installing a cast-iron bath (which meant an extra shilling a week in rent). Several neighbours came to look at the bath, its taps and so on: they had never used or even seen a bath before. Workers scrimped and saved to afford a rag rug and a couple of framed pictures, let alone ‘luxuries’ such as a watch or a bike. Getting by from week to week often relied on pawning their Sunday best clothes. In looking back at his childhood and the lives of his neighbours, Roberts refers to ‘the spoiled complexions, the mouths full of rotten teeth, the varicose veins, the ignorance of simple hygiene, the intelligence stifled and the endless battle merely to keep clean’. Such were the good old days amid the flourishing of the British Empire.

And is it all just in the Victorian and Edwardian past? While homelessness and bad housing still exist, can it be said that slums — crowded, filthy, nasty — are no longer the lot of most? Mike Davis’ book Planet of Slums describes a world where one in three of the urban population, mainly in the ‘Third World’, live in slums. It goes without saying that slum life is bad for your health and life expectancy. Landslides, floods and earthquakes threaten those who live in shoddy housing in marginal areas. Fires, whether accidental or deliberately set by property developers, can spread so fast that nobody can escape.

Sanitation is another disaster area, with the situation having changed little since Engels’ day. Sewage systems are virtually non-existent in many cities: Davis cites one slum area in Nairobi which had just ten working toilets for forty thousand people. But there is hope for the future, as in some places pay toilets have become a hugely profitable growth industry — though of course they’re not so convenient for the millions who cannot afford to use them.

Profiting from poverty is widespread. Such is the population density in slums that landlords make plenty of money from even the poorest neighbourhoods. Many cities in Asia and Africa are effectively owned by small numbers of landlords, and those who rent from them are the most powerless of all. Squatting becomes increasingly difficult as vacant land is developed and forcible evictions increase: over three-quarters of a million evicted in Harare in 2005, for instance. Slum-dwellers often have little choice but to fight back by building their own homes or resorting to food riots.

Cities like Manchester in Engels’ time were essentially the result of the Industrial Revolution. But in contrast, Davis argues, the growth of megacities and hence of megaslums over the last twenty years or so has been marked by deindustrialisation, as factories have closed in places such as Mumbai, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo. Like Mexico City and Jakarta, these have enormous populations but far smaller economies. The new slums are also mostly on the peripheries of the cities rather than in inner-city areas, and so usually lack any half-way decent transport infrastructure.

The financial institutions of global capitalism have played a major role in maintaining the regime of slum living. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have helped finance slum ‘improvement’ programmes in city after city, via privatisation of housing supply and the ending of food subsidies. The result has not been to eradicate slums, of course, but to spread ‘informal’ employment which lacks contracts and bargaining power. Along with this has come an expansion of child labour along the lines recorded by Engels and Dickens.

The development of capitalism, then, has not done away with the horrors of slums. Inadequate housing continues to exist in ‘advanced’ countries, with an estimated 100,000 homeless people in Los Angeles and one child in seven growing up in bad housing in the UK. Perhaps two million American families will lose their homes over the next couple of years, as the sub-prime crisis bites. Worldwide, as many as one billion people live — or do their best to create some kind of life — in slums. While the rich reside in their gated communities, the poor dwell in conditions of scarcely-imaginable squalor, marginalised in terms of work and family life. A Socialist society would face a tremendous task in replacing slums with decent housing, but that is a problem that capitalism can never tackle let alone solve.

Paul Bennett

So They Say: Non-starters (1977)

The So They Say Column from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Non-starters

The Labour Party is always assuring us that they stand for a “fairer and more just society” (Mr. Ron Hayward, General Secretary of the Labour Party, 15th March) but we think it reasonable to add that all of the parties who try to run capitalism would claim the same. Circumstances however always seem to intervene before they, or the others, can actually put their words into action. As unemployment and prices rise, as they have done under the Labour Government, and wages and public services fall, there are the men like Mr. Hayward talking about the unfortunate circumstances which newly confront us and so prevent “the fairer and more just” from taking immediate effect.

Were a bookmaker to assure his clients that he stood for “fairer and more just” racing results so that all of them would win, they would know that something was up. When the Labour Party does it, and explains the inevitable losses in terms of circumstances—the going as usual got rougher than we thought and you’ve all lost again—it should signal the time to stop betting on these three-legged creatures.

Winning

To be fair to Mr. Hayward and other members of the Labour Party, they do not give pride of place to this notion of a “fairer and more just society.” This is usually thrown in as an after-thought, and Labour supporters should not put too much weight on it. They would be best advised to put none at all, which would at least make honest men and women of them. Mr. Hayward has identified the fundamental objective of Labour.

Membership of the Party involves joining an organisation whose objective is to win and retain power in order to reform our society in the direction of our democratic socialist beliefs and ideals. Let me emphasise that objective—to win and retain power.

News Release:  Party Information Dept. 15th March 77

And having won and retained it, to let the workers face the circumstances.

The Self-Interest Thing

The director of the US Office of Population is concerned about “over-population”—a term used in capitalist society to justify the starvation, or near starvation, of millions, while alongside them exist the privately owned means to meet their requirements of food, clothing and shelter. Overpopulation to the capitalist and his well-fed entourage refers to those who cannot be used in the process of accumulating wealth. Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, the aforementioned Director, describes as his office’s aim the creation of medical technology to render infertile 100 million women in developing countries. This they call “advanced fertility management” and the programme they have launched will operate over the next nine years.

Although different people will draw different moral conclusions on the correctness of the programme, this should be seen for what it is, a capitalist “solution” to a “problem” which has arisen because the capitalist mode of production denies access to the means of life, unless it makes a profit for someone. That the means of life are in existence, or could be readily brought into existence, is irrelevant in this society.

The US Office of Population does not plan to limit future generations in an attempt to curtail misery from any moral standpoint however, their Director was most explicit on the intentions: Population control was needed to maintain

the normal operation of US commercial interests around the world. Without our trying to help these countries with their economic and social development, the world would rebel against the strong US commercial presence. The self-interest thing is a compelling element. If the population explosion proceeds unchecked, said Dr. Ravenholt, it will cause such terrible economic conditions abroad that revolution will ensue.

London Evening Standard, 11th May 77

Confessions

There is a strange figure who occasionally appears in detective stories and radio plays, best described as "the innocent man who proclaims his guilt.” Inevitably towards the end, this gallant red-herring is discovered, and receives a minor ticking-off because he had acted from the best intentions. How then are we to take India’s Prime Minister, Mr. Maraji Desai, who gave a press-conference on his way to the Commonwealth Conference.

Would India sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty? Certainly, he replied, when those asking me decide to give up nuclear weapons. Those who commit thefts have no business to tell me not to be a thief.

The Times, 8th June 77

Mr. Desai, it will be remembered, is not a character in a radio play.

Of his own colour too

One of the more colourful scientific debates centres around the probability of 100 chimpanzees, who are confined in a roomful of typewriters together with an endless supply of paper, being able to bang out by accident the entire works of Shakespeare within a given period. Although highly improbable, it is generally conceded that the task is not impossible. The odds of success for the chimps are in fact infinitely higher than those of the eight international economists who have been confined for some time deep within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s centre in an attempt to find “a path out of the economic quagmire which threatened to end more than two decades of growth and high employment.” They have been working on the premise that it is possible to remove capitalism’s problems, without removing capitalism 

The chief primate in the group, Mr. Paul McCracken, has offered their version of “the complete works” after only two years confinement, which, as far as probability goes, is stretching belief. We do not know how many typewriters they had at their disposal, but this is the result.

Fitting budgetary targets into regularly revised medium term projections would provide the required flexibility to adjust the longer-run budget posture to unexpected events and changing public preferences with regard to longer-term economic and social priorities.

The Times, 10th June 77

Roughly translated this means that their solution, in Shakespeare’s words “is shaped sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is and moves with its own organs; it lives by that which nourishes it; and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.” These economists are learned men indeed.

Alan D'Arcy

World View: Poverty entrenchment (2002)

From the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Poverty eradication” programmes in Africa only act to further entrench manufactured poverty

In Africa it has become imperatively fashionable for governments to embark upon “Poverty Eradication” programmes. It is an initiative forced upon them, as usual, by the World Bank and the IMF. And the rapidity with which the programme is gaining momentum is so great that it will be no surprise to see, in the foreseeable future, ministries being created to take charge of Poverty Eradication.

What is “Poverty Eradication”?

It is a term that the “experts” at the IMF/World Bank drawing rooms coined to add to two earlier terms – “Poverty Reduction” and “Poverty Alleviation”. In spite of the semantic differences of the three terms, they are meant to be one and the same and as such they are used interchangeably. By these terms the “experts” in the West and their cronies in the South simply mean helping the poor and vulnerable in society to get out of their poverty. To achieve this goal, they adopt a three-dimensional strategy. In the first place there is what they call “capacity building”. This concerns efforts at reaching out to the poor and sensitising them on their poverty. It stems from an arrogantly elitist and childishly paternalistic notion that the poor do not know that they are poor or why they are poor. So they sink huge sums into organising seminars and workshops during which they try to let the poor “realise their potentials”. But that the organisers are mere parrots repeating their masters’ voice is clearly discerned through the hollow and meaningless phrases they use anywhere in Africa that they meet – “civil society”‘; “grassroots groups”; “gender equality”; “empowerment”; “awareness”, etc.

The second strategy they use is what they call their “social service window”. Under this category such “social services” as erecting waiting sheds at village clinics and health centres; constructing dwarf-walled sheds to be used as classrooms; organising the villagers to dig pits to bury rubbish; periodic clean-up campaigns in and around the market or church or mosque etc, and are what they pursue.

The third component of poverty eradication programmes involves the provision of small-scale loans which they euphemistically call “grants” to groups or individuals. It takes two forms: in cash or in kind. The latter is realised through the provision, on credit, of a milling machine; a kiln (for pottery); a tractor or ploughing services and provision of imported seeds for those in agriculture; or providing biogas facilities to provide household fuel for lighting and cooking, etc.

The kitten gift 

There is a popular parable among the Dagbamba of northern Ghana which is similar to the story of the Trojan Horse. A man wanted to help out a friend who was going through hard times. He gave the poor fellow a kitten so he could sell it when it grew up. The poor man was very happy with the gift but it did not take any length of time for him to realise that the gift was after all a curse. He used whatever little money that came his way to buy milk for the kitten while he himself kept starving.

The poverty reduction/alleviation/eradication scheme tells a similar tale. In the first place the amount of cash and material devoted to the programme is usually appallingly infinitesimal. On the individual level, the amount of money loaned out to a person is always not enough to start a viable business. As such the money soon evaporates into thin air and the beneficiary is now left with the more burdensome task of repaying the loan. I saw this kind of situation myself when as an elected member of the municipal parliament in Tamale (Ghana) in the early 1990s, I organised the women of my constituency into a group. A NGO (the 31st December Women’s Movement) in collaboration with a financial institution in town, approached us with the aim of granting our women soft loans under the Poverty Eradication Scheme. The funds came from IFAD. Ten of our women were to benefit from the programme. However the NGO who were our benefactors would only assist us on condition that the tenth person was one of them (the NGO). Our women agreed. The amount per head was fifty thousand cedis, about US$70.00 at the time.

The whole programme ended with some of the beneficiaries being threatened with court action. None of them benefited from the project.

In Gambia it was recently reported that the micro finance officer, Mr Mohammed Jammeh, boasted that the Social Development Fund which is responsible for poverty alleviation had disbursed 3,022,275 dalasis to 6,129 individuals between 1999 and October 2001. This means that on average each person received less than 500 cedis, the equivalent of about $30. How can one start a business with less than $30?

The story is equally grim with groups or associations who are assisted collectively. Here the funding agencies normally make these groups to contribute an initial amount to which the benefactors add whatever they have to dispose of. The total amount is then used to set up the project – usually kilns for pottery; looms for weaving projects; food processing projects; ploughing services or even tractors, land, imported seeds (cowpea, cotton, cashew, etc). In most cases women are the beneficiaries or target groups. Contrary to the initial hopes that are whipped up by the donors, a good lot of these projects end up as white elephants. Those that get going usually benefit only the leadership of the target groups and the officials of the implementing agencies. But most often than not petty squabbles arise and eventually the projects collapse.

Competitive markets 

Even where a few projects manage to see the light of day, their relative successes are negated by the capitalist globalisation of production and distribution of products. Needless to say the end products of these poor, mostly rural, folk have to compete against goods dumped cheaply from the West. Here again the case of the women at the Nalung Weaving Project in Tamale reveals a lot. These women were trained to weave material for smocks. After the training they were sold looms on credit. Their main input for their business was thread which they could only buy from the capital, Accra, about 500km away. Two problems soon arose. First to sell at a price that would enable them to cover the cost of production meant that no-one would buy as it was seen to be rather exorbitant. Secondly the quality of the thread used, which was even imported, was of an inferior quality and consequently the cloth woven was far inferior to the type produced by the traditional weavers. Added to these was the presence, in the markets, of relatively very cheap second-hand clothes from the West.

In Gambia there is something similar taking place, at the Bakau Women’s Horticultural Project. These women toil morning and evening and produce vegetables. They all harvest at the same time and so prices are very low as a result of glut. Even the onions and shallots they produce are shunned in favour of onions from the Netherlands. No wonder therefore that the women keep marking time economically. As for those who are into cash crops such as cashew, cotton, cowpea, groundnuts etc, the least said about them, the better, considering the pitifully disadvantaged bargaining power of the producers of primary products (in the poor countries) under the current capitalist world economic arrangement.

Wasted energies

One other factor which needs highlighting in this hoax of poverty eradication is the magnitude of human resources deliberately channelled into such unproductive, in fact retrogressive work. Millions of people world-wide are enticed into taking part in this futile venture. Having been made poor by the system, the people, like a drowning man who will cling to a straw, keep flocking to the system only, each time, to be hoodwinked. But more agonising is the fact that people who champion this global ruse are the elite who, most often than not, know they are engaged in an activity which is worthless to the target groups. These elite are the staff of government ministries and agencies (NGOs). They pilfer items and embezzle funds meant for the projects in addition to their bloated salaries. In short they are used as willing tools in the entrenchment of poverty.

Ending poverty 

Experts of development studies are often heard saying that “the poor will always be with us”. That may be why we see the phrases “poverty alleviation”; “poverty reduction” and “poverty eradication” as being the same. Their confused use of terms gives expression to the real nature of the capitalist system – a system of legalised deceit and thievery.

But even what the sentence quoted above, tries to conceal is the fact that these poor that we have with us are growing in number and intensity. As more and more people join the class of the poor, the poverty grows worse and worse. In other words, global poverty is increasing both horizontally and vertically. All this, in spite of the alienation/reduction/eradication propaganda.

Poverty is caused by the unjust economic order prevailing in the world today. The wealth and resources of this world – land, factories, transport and communication, etc – are owned and controlled by a few people, who use these resources to make more wealth. They majority own nothing but their ability to produce. They are therefore forced to work for the few idle owners. These workers are paid wages just enough to keep them alive in order to continue to work.

As long as such production relations persist, more and more people will continue to join the ranks of the poor. For just as the IMF and the World Bank and the West give loans to poor countries in order to get them more into economic crisis, so do the peanuts these institutions trickle down as loans to poor women and groups only serve to deepen their poverty.

The only choice lies in a radical change in the ownership and control of the world’s wealth and resources. There must be collective rather than today’s minority ownership. Control over social wealth must be democratic with all having an equal say in the management, production and distribution of the products of human labour. Under such a system, everybody gets involved in determining what to produce; takes an active part in the production process; and finally has a free and equal access to goods and services. It is only then that poverty will be eradicated (not even alleviated nor reduced – empty phrases). Then there will be no room for some to have more than they need whilst others have less than they need. Attaining such a society is our collective responsibility.

Suhuyini

Cooking the Books: Poor Woman’s banker (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Muhammad Yunus, an economics lecturer and banker from Bangladesh. The spread of “micro-banking”, which he thought up and put into practice, was judged to have contributed to world peace.

Leaving aside whether he should have got the Economics rather than the Peace prize, what is micro-banking? Actually, it is not all that different from ordinary banking in that it is still based on a bank lending out money that has been previously deposited with it. The difference lies in who the money is lent to. The Grameen bank, which Yunus set up in 1976, lends to poor self-employed people.

The established banks in Bangladesh had shunned such people because, being so poor, they had nothing to offer as collateral for any loan and so were not considered credit-worthy. In order to start up or keep themselves in activity, poor self-employed people had to resort to local money-lenders who charged usurious rates of interest. A typical example would be the woman in the story about how bank got set up:

“In the village of Jobra, Dr Yunus met a woman who made bamboo stools. Because she had no assets and was unable to borrow from conventional sources, she had to resort to the money lenders. For each stool, she borrowed the equivalent of 15p to buy the raw bamboo. After repaying at extortionate rates of interest she made barely 1p on each stool. This woman was hard-working and talented but was being held back by a lack of access to finance. Inspired by her story, Dr Yunus started a series of experiments and lent tiny sums of his own money to villagers. They used the money to set up small businesses such as basket weaving and raising chickens. He found that his borrowers — mainly women — repaid in full and on time” (Times, 1 September).

What Yunus had shown was that the poor self-employed can be credit-worthy. Banks based on his principles lend out very small sums for a year which have to be repaid, with interest (at just above the ordinary banks’ rate), from current sales. While a means of freeing the self-employed in countries like Bangladesh from the clutches of the money-lenders, micro-banking is not a solution to global poverty. Not only because not everybody in such countries could become a basket weaver or a chicken farmer or a maker of bamboo stools, but because those the bank lends to remain poor and dependant on the vagaries of the market.

Nor is there anything anti-capitalist about the scheme. The Times described Yunus in an editorial (14 October) as “the Adam Smith of the Poor” and their correspondent in Dhaka reported:

“Professor Yunus insisted that he was not against the free market, but that he wanted the market to be free for everyone. ‘I am a free-market guy and even the poor should be part of the free market’, he said. ‘Two thirds of the population of the world are not able to participate, so it is not free’”.

The way the Grameen bank works also confirms the Marxian view that banks cannot create credit out of nothing. Like other banks it can only lend what has been deposited with it. If certain banking theories were correct — that if you deposit £1 in a bank, it can then lend out £9 rather than only 90p — then Professor Yunus would have been able to help the poor self-employed of Bangladesh by a mere stroke of the pen. But if he had tried to run his bank on this theory it would have rapidly gone bankrupt, and the only prize he would have got would have been a booby prize for either stupidity or naivety.