CAPITALISM: And how it can only be this way. Until it can’t.

Fans of capitalism in its latest neoliberal iteration – and they are all over the place in Europe and the USA, at least among elites and the middle classes – tend to shut their eyes tightly against its latest horrors and the very real fact that the planet’s majority are not enjoying capitalism’s spoils, nor can they ever do so, although they may be unaware that capitalism is a zero sum game. The fans point with great determination at socialism’s failings, pinpointing the worst horrors of communism, many imagined, mostly dredged up from a decades-old past carefully not compared with other decades-old pasts.

Capitalism’s historical horrors are also, well, horrific. A thousand years ago, life expectancy, once childhood was overcome, was around 60 or even 70, especially if one had survived past 30 years of age. Studies of the skeletal remains of affluent people from over 2000 years ago paint the same picture. Childhood and war brought very grave dangers and, without them, healthy life expectancy was not dissimilar to our own. However, at the height of the industrial revolution, life expectancy for the poor in England’s major industrial cities was shockingly low, around 15-17 years in the 1840s.

In the 1960s, Russian life expectancy was above 64 for men, and 73 for women, similar to that of France. Current life expectancy in Cuba is over 78 years (80 for women; 76 for men). For China it is 79 years.

 

The point is that capitalism’s successes are extremely variable. The US, our capitalist hegemon has an overall life expectancy just below that of Cuba, a small and poor country that has suffered crippling sanctions imposed by its mighty rival, the US, for the best part of a century. Geographical differences are reproduced between the 1% richest and the 1% poorest in the USA, where a massive 15-year difference in life expectancy exists. Healthy life expectancy in the US is a mere 64 years.

Why can capitalism not be improved?

Because it is extractive. It extracts resources from poorer or weaker nations and does not pay the real price for them. France’s current economic woes and political unrest are in large part due to 14 African nations joining together and refusing to allow their former colonial powers to continue to steal resources without paying for them and without paying for the environmental damage. These countries are also attempting to put an end to the French imposed currency – the CFA franc - that keeps Paris in control and, from the start, has ensured that wealth is automatically transferred to France. The CFA franc was pegged to the French franc, and is now pegged to the euro. France demands that those 14 African countries maintain 50% of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury.

Another factor is uranium mining. This is incredibly damaging both to the environment and to those who mine it, and Niger is no longer handing it over virtually for free. Thus, France’s historically low nuclear energy prices are a thing of the past and consumers have suffered significant increases. The future cost of decommissioning the nuclear plants and the extremely long storage problems associated with the spent fuel are also unresolved.

The “Green Revolution” is based on filthy lithium mining, unrecyclable wind turbine blades (often full of asbestos) and solar panels, rare earths, unresolved technology and has nothing to do with improving the environment and everything to do with the creation of a new boom. It has hit a snag, however, in that hydrogen cells need iridium which is extremely rare (although Russia has a lot of it), lithium deposits are in places like Afghanistan, Bolivia and Australia (and the latter needs the Chinese to process it), and everything else needs rare earths which are also, well, rare and mostly to be found not in the EU nor the USA, but in African and China, and need costly (both economically and environmentally) and complicated processing. The current wars promoted by our elites as being all about democracy and human rights – killing thousands of innocent civilians as collateral damage – have cut off the tap to the cheap Russian gas that our industries and computing rely on. The problem is that, while we had all the money, they (the “others” in the world) had all the resources (and all the time).

Capitalism’s second inbuilt feature is that it is debt-based. Its extraordinary ability to out-produce other systems is because it relies on money taken from future output. Compound interest means constant and exponential growth and rising populations among which to spread the ever-increasing debt, faster and faster, until the entire Ponzi scheme collapses, as it inevitably will in the cyclical systemic crises faced every few years. Meanwhile, more GDP, more destruction, more construction, more, more, more. Until our modern-time day of reckoning, the Great Reset, in which almost everything we own will be stolen from us. Remember “You will own nothing and be happy”? The first part looks set to be on the way really soon; the second part, never. As a cautionary tale, when the USSR collapsed, life expectancy there fell 10 years over a decade and rampant corruption, crime and murders soared. Our own economic collapse promises to be imminent and no less terrifying.

National debt is nothing but debt that others will have to pay, mostly future generations, but also precisely those who received almost nothing from the billions borrowed. This inbuilt feature leads to political corruption and excruciatingly bad uses of the incoming money today, which is generally not used to build infrastructure, nor useful technologies but for vanity projects and to line the pockets of our elites.

Capitalism also builds up personal debt. The 80s smashing of union power and the opening up of work to foreign competition, and low wages, together with significant immigration and preference for technology over workers, meant that downward pressure was put on salaries and, for consumerism to continue to rise – in order for the products to be sold -, personal debt was actively encouraged.

However, the most damning feature of capitalism is that everything, absolutely everything has a price put on it. The only value is monetary. Surrogacy, unnecessary surgeries, trans mutilations, dubious psychiatry, opiate crises (yes, in Europe as well), sex “workers”, Only Fans, AI pornography, illegals picking fruit without labour protections, unnecessary caesareans and induced births in private clinics, the purchase of babies, “assisted” dying (in other words the assisted murder of the economically useless), the theatre of democracy with the only choice between Team Blue and Team Red, both funded by the same corporations, two-tier justice…; you name it, it’s all for sale. People on disability pensions due to mental illness have tripled over the last 35 years. Why? For the combined reason that our society is alienating, hard to do well in for the 99%, ruthlessly competitive and, to top it, mental health is seen as an individual problem, requiring psychopharmaceutic remedies that are highly profitable for Big Pharma and of almost no use for solving the problem even were it an individual, rather than a social one.

In the chilling documentary The Alabama Solution you can see how the logic of capitalism results in excessive sentences, overcrowded prisons, scarcity of guards, poor personnel selection, lack of rehabilitation, shocking mistreatment of prisoners…, all of it making perfect business sense. Modern-day slavery. In Alabama the mostly white and filthy-rich elites distract the white and black uneducated poor with cheap pageants and other spectacles.

Capitalism's successes rely heavily on unpaid and underpaid labour, that of the illegal immigrant fleeing from countries whose economies have been devastated by the very countries the immigrants go to, “volunteer” firefighters and other workers from among the incarcerated, unpaid overtime… Indeed, fire protection units are being defunded just at the same time as climate change narratives should logically dictate that they should be a priority. Immigrant labour works for peanuts, without proper legal protection, accrues no sick leave nor pension rights, especially if the immigrant is then deported; and, more importantly, it exerts downward pressure on all salaries being competed for. The immigrant who does not return to his or her original country will inevitably further weaken social and ideological cohesion in Western countries. Historically, such weakening has always resulted in rapid civilizational decline. 

Additionally, capitalism traditionally relies on women’s unpaid labour, in the home, bringing up the next generation, and as carers and as workers in many of the badly paid professions (which are ironically many of the utterly vital professions).

But the very worst feature of capitalism is the lack of empathy it engenders in its populations. It belittles all moral value. From the 1980s film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” has so permeated our consciousness that we cannot see how grotesque it is. A social system without moral values is not worth saving. Morality requires courage, itself an intrinsic value, in juxtaposition to our societies’ fetishist competitiveness, hustle, greed and grift. War, famine and pestilence stalk us in the West as we chug down our cocktails on the deck of the Titanic, and we are currently not worth saving.

THE TROLLEY DILEMMA

 

The train or trolley dilemma is basically the following:

 

A runaway trolley is speeding down a track towards five people who are for some reason unable to move or unaware of their impending fate. You are standing next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different track. However, there is one unwitting person on that sidetrack.

 

You have two options:

1. Do nothing: The trolley continues on its path and kills the five people.
2. Pull the lever: The trolley switches tracks and kills one person, but the five people are saved.

The dilemma forces a choice between two outcomes, centring on whether it is better to actively intervene to cause one death to save five, or to passively allow five deaths to occur by not acting. The core issue is whether you should actively maximise the number of lives saved.

 

The philosophical question presented by the philosopher Alex O’Connor in one of his videos is basically two dilemmas:

 

1)      Many people are reluctant to pull the lever and intervene to save 5 people and kill just one, feeling that killing a person is always bad, even if you have saved more people at the same time. Alex asks then, if you have inadvertently already pulled the lever (maybe by falling over) – and yet feel that this should not have been done on purpose –, whether you would be happy putting it back to its default 5-people killed position, or – more whimsically – if you could go back in time would you choose to do so and then not pull the lever (and go back to killing 5 instead of one).

2)      The philosopher Peter Singer’s problem: at what point are we no longer required to give up some of our money/comfort/time to help others worse off than ourselves. If you see a drowning child are you under an obligation to dive in and save it and maybe spoil your new suede shoes? Or if you might endanger your own life? Do you have to keep on diving in to save other children? The extrapolation is then done to whether you should give to charity and save other people’s lives which you cannot see but are no less real for it. Should you keep on giving to charity until you are as poor as those you are helping?

 

Both these problems are utilitarianism ones. We look at the different outcomes and are inclined to compare them. This is partly because we live in utilitarian times, where our default position is based on comparable outcomes, and generally viewed in a very short timescale. Governments typically make calculations based on cost and utility, taking on board that some members of society will end up not having resources designated for them in order for other initiatives to be funded.

 

However, it has not always been like this. Historically, there have been times when the default position would have been based on a certain view of morality and absolute values. Despite what is often erroneously said, utilitarianism is not valueless. By sleight of hand, it seems to be the logical way to go, but it does in fact have itself an absolute value: it typically elevates the value of aggregate human happiness (or welfare) above others. It also has a big problem with when exactly the outcome is to be measured and over what period of time (not to mention why it typically only takes into account human happiness).

 

For example, you might be given the choice in a plane hostage situation to kill one passenger so that the rest are not killed. But, apart from the effect this might in the long term have on your personal morals and wellbeing, it might also make future hostage situations more frequent, or might normalize the random killing of one innocent person with the aim of potentially saving others, and who knows if the others will then actually be saved? You might even find that you have just killed the one person who would have stopped a figure like Hitler from gaining power; or the one person who also knows how to fly the plane when the pilot suddenly dies of a heart attack. You might pull the lever to divert the trolley to kill only one person and then find that the 5 who were saved then had a fatal car crash going home. Had you not pulled the lever, one person at least would have been saved.

 

Utilitarianism is what makes Alex O’Connor’s questions so puzzling. In the first instance utilitarianism is colliding with an alternative value, that of simply not killing anyone on purpose (i.e. not playing God). In the second, utilitarianism would suggest one must keep on giving and giving until one has just enough to survive; or keep on jumping into the pond to save one child after another, eternally; or at least until one is exhausted enough to be in danger of drowning oneself. There is, alternatively, an absolute value in self-sacrifice, but not perhaps to the point of martyrdom. Utilitarianism is also, maybe, what has led us to the very situations that it is so maddingly unable to resolve. In the plane hostage situation, adopting the absolute value of never killing an innocent person on purpose might make such situations disappear in the future as hostage taking would become a futile activity and, thereby, not obeying the terrorists would be the right thing to do in the long term. The problem of perspective and over which timescale is one that is not really solved by adopting an arbitrary point of view or length of time.

 

Utilitarianism in fact makes our societies transactional and calculating, and maybe – happier or not happier, who knows? – worse for it. If one person after another sees little overall benefit in helping others – we are, after all, rarely presented with a pond full of drowning children –, people in general  will start not to act in accordance with moral virtue and this will put a larger burden on the few who will intervene whether overall happiness increases or not. If someone is drowning in a pond because they are suicidally depressed, should we rescue them, endangering our life – or ruining our new shoes – when they will probably be more depressed if we do, and may well try to kill themselves later? Is anyone else going to jump in (in which case on a utilitarian basis we would personally be absolved from doing the same)? Should we expend our energies on trying to get someone else to take the risk, if the end result is the same? (Which doesn’t sound like a nice thing to do.)

 

Western countries are bringing in laws enabling euthanasia (although the reality is a far cry from the “good death” that the word conjures up) under the guise of kindness and allowing individuals to “choose dignity in death”. (We have euthanised our pets for decades, blissfully unaware of what the procedure means in practice behind the vet’s closed door.)

 

Apart from the real questions over whether the new euthanasia laws will be misused – and it is notable that palliative care budgets are being drastically reduced at the same time –, perhaps there will be other effects: making people less resilient, making family members less prepared to care for their old and ill members, making doctors care less about curing/caring and more expedient and eugenicist, making us less stoical and resistant when faced with pain or bad outcomes, making governments more able to dispose of people according to their future monetary worth, and enabling lucrative but dubious medical processes during life that may well be actively making people ill. Will the calculation that killing the old and ill will save money mean that the old and ill themselves will be ruthlessly eliminated (along with their respective costs)? We can easily envisage that AI utilitarian cost-benefit calculations could easily lead to horrible results. Why would the same calculations carried out by humans differ?

 

Utilitarian arguments have enabled warmaking in distant lands under the guise of bringing democracy and freedom to other peoples that, often, have shown scant interest in our notions of democracy. Arguments over political expediency have justified different versions of the “first past the post” electoral method, giving us a pseudo-democracy in which we get a choice between the Team Red and the Team Blue, both of which are funded by the same donors, are corrupt at the top, and give society a shockingly low utilitarian value.

 

Utilitarianism has nothing to say about the intrinsic value of truthfulness, almost encouraging euphemisms and current misuses of lexicon, which is making some discussions almost impossible to bring to a useful termination, and are often permitted under a misguided notion of inclusiveness or kindness. (“Transwomen are women” comes to mind, given that “transwomen” are in fact men; or “safe and effective”, still promoting the covid and flu “vaccines”, when “safe” is not a medical term and “effectiveness” has to be in relation to a specificity.) Are utilitarianism and the current quest for equity stopping the few talented people that typically are produced by every generation from appearing? Will the quest for equity (an equal and supposedly happy outcome for everyone) make us lazier, more useless, more stupid, more depressed and more cynical in the long term?

 

So, going back to the original problems, maybe one shouldn’t pull the lever to save 5 and kill one on purpose, nor to save a million at the expense of one. And, if one tripped by mistake and fell on the lever without wanting to, even if one had the choice of going back in time, one should not do so either. Once again, one should not pull it because the end is irrelevant to morality in behaviour, and not because long-term outcomes cannot be clearly measured.

 

In the same light, one should rescue a drowning child so long as one is not horribly inconvenienced by doing so, because one has a duty to help others, within reasonable parameters. One does not have a duty to die or lose one’s only livelihood trying to help others, although self-sacrifice can be highly laudable. The utilitarian argument would maybe suggest that one has less of a duty to give to others the less one earns. In this way perhaps a person could become a better person merely by earning a little less. This is absurd.

 

As a side note, my personal view is that the existence of high earners who choose to give to their charity of choice does not remotely solve this question, even if many did so. Society should establish a progressive taxation system on wealth and establish a relative maximum permitted that does not allow a few to own more than half of humanity, not just for reasons of fairness but also because no system can benefit most of its citizens if there are a few who can literally buy up economic and political power.

 

Capitalism itself is an economic system praised because the majority of the populations of broadly capitalist countries have an affluent lifestyle. Without having to delve into the question of whether these countries are broadly affluent because they syphon off the monetary and resource wealth of poorer nations and future generations, there is another problem: people in capitalist countries are encouraged to deify wealth and monetary success, becoming less empathetic and more value-free as time goes on. Indeed, our broadly utilitarian-based governments have brought a crisis of identity and belief to large parts of their populations. Worse still, a significant number of people in affluent societies ingest detrimental amounts of drugs and alcohol, and are very often not happy.

 

If you dive into a pond to rescue a drowning child and then drown yourself, the utilitarian would regard this as a very bad act, with negative utility. But there is intrinsic value in trying to save a child and in personal sacrifice for the greater good. The end does not justify the means. Rather, the means justify the end. A completely different trolley dilemma would be if one could personally throw oneself in front of the trolley in order to save 5 further down on the tracks (rather than sacrifice an innocent bystander). In this case, the right course of action would be to do so, all other things being equal. It is so much easier to think of sacrificing another individual than oneself!

 

And maybe the question is not whether you should be diving in to rescue an endless number of drowning children, but rather what caused those children to be in the water with no one else around to stop them getting into trouble in the first place. Maybe once we’ve reached the point where hapless workers on a trolley track will needlessly die whatever one does, we’re already on the wrong track.

Transing Away The Gay

There's a point in the confusion between sex and gender when you realise that it is all on purpose. We are a sexually dimorphic species and all of us are either male or female and it shows in every cell of our body. We are mammals. There is no trans. Woman is simply the adult human female, the same as we give different words to the male and female of all animals we closely interact with (horse-mare, ram-sheep, drake-duck, cockerel-hen, dog-bitch, lion-lioness, stag-doe...). What 'woman' is NOT is a gender identity in one's head, as the trans lobby would have you believe.

Deconstructing sex in order to substitute one's subjective fantasies (and they are ALL about sex, or the lack of it, in the trans group) for reality is much more than a rights question for a vulnerable minority. It IS a tiny minority, but they have the same rights as everyone else, plus some fundamental extra ones now. They demand the right to force everyone else to accept their fantasies as reality, to gaslight us all till we no longer remember what is true; and, in this post-truth world, where memory extends to no more than a day ago, where logic no longer reigns and where group-think is everything, they demand to have their delusions taken as fact.

Everyone born was born to a woman, their biological mother, and until very recently everyone knew this. In our civilisation's death throws, we have been gaslighted and threatened with hate crime sanctions if we do not learn random people's absurd and often contradictory pronouns.

There is, without a doubt, a young generation containing many confused and unhappy people. It could not be otherwise in a constant climate of fear and paranoia, mad terrorists, constant propaganda, the war on 'terror', the war on a 'virus', the incapacity to talk about death and the incapacity not to talk about sex. TV and Tik Tok videos are full of fetish. The Trans Lobby is busy transing away the gay, telling young gay, bi or not- interested younsters that they were born in the wrong body, as though the body were a container and one rattled around inside it and could, and should, change it on a whim. The timing was perfect, as a generation brought up on excessive eating and lack of exercise looked at their bodies in dismay.

Many men, in particular, have lost their role in our society, which has no biological use for their larger size or musculature, their deeper voices, their testosterone. So, deeper voices are being used to shout women down, and deny women their own spaces. Having no new territory to move on to, a small and unpleasantly vociferous group of men are trying to take over women's reproductive capacity, and inundating our culture with unhealthy fetishes, normalising them and preying on young people. It has also allowed men within the trans-identified movement, to behave towards women with breathtaking misogyny, under the guise of 'trans rights'. 

It is all very Big Business with the added attraction of allowing Big Pharma to medicate youngsters for the rest of their (predictably shortened) lives with hormones and Frankensteinian surgeries AND with the bonus of leaving many of them sterile, which fits in nicely with the UN's 2030 Population Agenda being rolled out in all of the Western World.

Additionally, since adopting identity politics and wokeness, the Left is now a sorry shadow of its former self, defanged, stuck in subjectivity and only focused on defending groups of competing special interests, the smaller the better. It no longer poses a threat to rampant capitalism, which thrives on opposing one individual preference against another very well.

Our Godless, Gordon-Gekko 'Greed is good', late-stage capitalistic culture is so very bereft of ethics, so monetised, so lacking in meaning that to live life proclaiming your identity has become normalised. We no longer just are but can, we are told, assume an identity, as though the very serious business of life were merely a performance. The trans lobby will have you believe you can live life with one identity one day, another the next, transitioning from one to another seamlessly if you want. This make-believe is just that, and it is a lie when taken seriously, and gaslighting when imposed on others. Facts and logic matter.

Laws made in all our Western countries to reify the lie and ban reality are just another sign that our civilisation is in free fall. 

There is one good thing that comes out of this. It has given women (not the absurd and insulting 'cis' women epithet, but real women, the only kind) the opportunity to step up, organise and fight for the health of our society (half of which is us), as we have done so many times in the past.

Feminism and Trans Rights (I)

Many feminists of a certain age have grave reservations about the new trans rights laws. Traditionally, we have understood that women collectively form a class, specifically an under-class, although we make up 50% of the population. And, as such, we have class interests.

In the past feminism was generally understood to be aligned with the Left, although socialist parties only paid, at best, lip-service to women's interests. The glass ceiling and the unacceptable fact that the jobs predominantly carried out by women pay less and that women also earn less in the same job were never at the top of the left-wing agenda. 

Right-wing politics and Capitalism itself favour a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest that places brute strength (economic or otherwise) above all other considerations. Our times have shown in crude terms how money purchases power (Citizens United, in the US, bought elections in general, bought judges...) and how late-stage Capitalism brings out shocking levels of inequality.

Jeff Bezos is, as I write, worth a whopping $200 billion. There is no doubt that his work, as such - paid however you like -, cannot be worth this sum. He is interesting in that he is responsible for producing almost nothing tangible. The possible exception, the Alexa and Kindle devices, are a very mixed blessing; their downside being control over what you see or read - your understanding of the world, if you like. They also bring us mass-surveillance and military AI that, together with climate change and nuclear arms, are THE threat to humankind, imminent, so immense and so hidden from us behind the noise of unimportant trivia that fills up our screens that we are individually and collectively incapable of even thinking about it.

The Left used to fight for collective, rather than individual, solutions, solidarity and compassion towards others. Now, the Left has disassociated itself from seeing women's rights as a class issue. In these neo-liberal and individualistic times, women are merely viewed as individuals with a uterus, with no need for specific consideration. In fact the very words 'man' and 'woman' are about to become meaningless. Yet, as so many studies and experiences have shown, words are important and, in a male-dominated world, excluding the word 'woman' excludes many real women from real consideration.

The trans movement is totally in line with our times, tremendously individualistic and a sort of I'm-worth-it badge for a culture that that failed to understand the difference between sex and gender, and has misunderstood form for content. We had decades of misguided women (and a few men) who paid good money to have silicon (and other poisons) pumped into their body, in some instances paid for by the NHS, which had confused true wellbeing with a sort of phycological aspiration created by propaganda and social programming. (Not talking here about beneficial cosmetic procedures due to accident and illness). A man who wears high heels is still a man.

We have a society that re-enforces mind-numbing conformity and only permits those differences that are extremely superficial. Whether Democrat or Republican, they are both pathological lying, warmongering factions of the Corporate Class. Try to explain that ETA in Spain never killed anything like as many people as the illegal invasion(s) of Iraq, in 2003 backed by the right-wing Spanish PP party, and you'll be met by hysterical shrieks of being a terrorist. A culture that confuses the symptom with the disease.

Our binary vision is essentially a reflection of our masculine, patriarchal world. The threat to the neo-liberal, ever-expanding, Capitalistic state is feminist and collective.

The trans movement is a reaction to this hyper-masculine culture, seeking a spectrum of personal experiences and modes of being - but it is the wrong one! Of course, gender should be viewed as a spectrum, and it is high-time that women ditched foot-deforming high heels, time-wasting make-up and feminine wiles. Why any man would want to go down this path is beyond me. 

It is a reflection of how artificial our culture is that in our Western society it is the female that decks itself out in fine colours in order to attract a mate, and not the other way round.

And, of course, we need safe places for all, which really means safe places for women and gender non-conforming people, from those men that are predatory or violent.

And, now we are talking about this, we need less children, because there ARE an awful lot of us, so an increase in the percent of gay people might be a good thing too for the planet.

But from there to the idea that it is a good idea to medicate people, to artificially delay puberty, to operate on them in order to give them artificial body parts or take others out, to give them hormones for their entire life, simply because those people seem to demand it, is bad thinking, superficial and harmful. People are extremely malleable, which is why the advertising industry is worth $560 billion in the US alone. If you normalise something and propagandise it, it will be wanted. Think of back-deforming, body-poisoning breast implants, trout pouts, botox, or indeed smartphones (changed every 2 years, or every year in some countries). Anyone who has had holiday time in a rural area without phone coverage finds that in a couple of days you do not miss it at all.

The incursion of males into female competitive sports is unpleasant and unfair, but probably we would be a lot better off if all remunerative, competitive sports were to go. Just think of how every major male sport (football, cycling, even tennis for God's sake!) has been plagued by doping and corruption scandals over the last decades. The cases of violent men who have been allowed into female-only hospital wards or prisons is also indicative of the fact that most violence, and virtually all rape, is carried out by men. But, once again, the problem is deeper down: prisons are not fit for purpose and hospitals are so underfunded that privacy and security cannot be guaranteed. 

The problem of the disappearance of safe places for women points to a wider problem: ALL places should be vigorously made safe for all.

However, these non-representative instances of abuses, tiny in number, show a real aspect of the trans movement - the invasiveness of men in female areas of life. I say men because the focus of current trans laws benefits men, both trans and non-trans, not women. In this sense the trans movement is behaving exactly how men collectively have typically behaved in our society.

But to go back to the Trans Laws. The fact is that everyone should be able to be as they want to be (without harming others) and call themselves any name they want. But you cannot choose the sex with which you are conceived, and should not confuse the way you want to dress and act with your body's sex. Women and men ARE generally different, they have different hormones, and different biological responses to many situations. Ask a man to close the car window a bit and he'll close it entirely - men are far more binary, which is a good thing in many situations and a bad thing in others. In general women are biologically more careful of life than men and the vast majority of vegetarians and vegans are women for a reason. If a woman wants a female midwife, for example, there are good reasons for this. Perhaps we need a third and fourth gender for trans people, but a man in a skirt with heels, operated on or not, is still a man and should not be legally designated a woman. Desire should not be confused with fact. I may wish to be a millionaire but that does not, and should not, make me one.

The Trans movement is not addressing the underlying sickness in our society (Patriarchy), limiting itself to treating the symptom (pretending to be a woman, instead of being able to be a man and dress and be as you want - and vice versa). With its demand that children be allowed to take puberty-blocking hormones, or undergo surgery, is is serving trans-identified people very badly and children, many autistic, disgracefully. There will be a huge wave of depression from those people who regret their decisions, irreparable later on, and their bad health.

The Trans movement is additionally acting in an intolerant way, implementing what is called the cancel culture, under the guise of not allowing 'intolerance'. This is reminiscent of the political correctness that so enthralled the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. It was not what you did, but how you spoke about it, that was the problem. Women who voice doubts about trans laws and about the wisdom of society sanctioning harmful surgical interventions or "chest-feeding" for babies are simply shouted down or cancelled, in a way that is identical to how traditionally women's voices have been silenced by louder male ones.

Trans-identified people are not the problem - this should not need saying -, but our patriarchal system, by hiding the full spectrum of gender and reducing our lives to binary options within a tiny spectrum of possible life experiences, has misled people into thinking that aggressive surgery and drugs are the solution to a problem that is in fact psychological. The problem of society rejecting one's non-pathological personality is not solved by changing one's body, but by changing society. 

Feminism, instead of demanding parity of economic entitlement, parity of salaries and jobs in medium to large companies, parity in public employment and government, stays distracted with the question of equal maternity and paternity leave. Of course fathers should get paternity leave, and the opportunity to spend time with their babies and children. But much more urgent is ensuring that all women who give birth can stay with their babies until the latter are at least a year and a half; without this breastfeeding, the baby's most basic right, is almost impossible for working mothers. Feminism remains distracted with identity politics, distracted with anything but taking on the root of all these problems - the economic system.

Patriarchy, the enemy of all but the elite, and especially the enemy of women as a class and trans-identified people, has defanged the Feminist movement, and the Left is once again divided, actually excluding many women (even expelling many feminists), and offering us, yet again, individualism rather than collectivism.

Transhumanism

Transhumanism: What Is It?

"A philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology."

Those of us who are paying attention cannot fail to be horrified by some prominent people excited by the possibility of transhumanism, those thinking that they are shortly to become a superrace (with prior testing of methodology on lesser mortals), positioned above the people who have remained simply human. 

There is prima facie a lot inherently wrong with the idea of transhumanism. It is likely to make those tampering with their genes and body cells very ill. It is likely to be irreversible and have huge repercussions on other life on our planet. It is likely to affect future generations, whether by limiting fertility or by passing on disastrously faulty genes - both are possible. The RNA-DNA-altering Covid-19 vaccine on the horizon has necessitated a terrifying plandemic in order for enough people to consider the future DNA-altering vaccine a viable measure. Even so, and despite the fact that most people do believe that CV-19 is extremely dangerous for everyone, approximately a third of people surveyed said they would not initially accept the vaccine. Vaccination is at the best of times the injecting of animal cells, mercury, aluminium and other horrible components into humans, including small babies. There are worries that decades of vaccination and bottle-feeding with cows' milk mixed with microplastics has already changed the composition of what it is to be human.

Those we see on video who are fired up by the possibility of becoming transhuman are - only generalising slightly - unempathetic, physically unattractive, nerdy men (mostly) of little moral vision, who in other times would have lived out their small lives without having access to the money and power that our current economic system gives to the least ideal members of our society. They bring to mind the creators of all the great superheroes following WWII, the talented Jewish men who, following the Holocaust, channeled their trauma into stories of unassuming, mistreated men who could suddenly assume supernatural powers and literally right the world's wrongs. But this vision brought in its own new paranoia: the nemesis, the unstoppable villain. 

The added problem is that huge money brings great power over others, especially political power, and power exacerbates sociopathic tendencies. It is hard to look at Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, for example, and see them as the sort of people you would want in your life. And no amount of money can stop Melinda Gates looking like a reject from The Stepford Wives set.

Binary

But there is another angle on all this. A culture of computer and other devices use has left us very influenced by how algorithms work. Computers are, of course, binary; and randomness is in fact impossible to exactly replicate in a computer, which is why the IT term is 'pseudo-random'. Any programmer knows that you have to think like a machine to programme effectively. The rest of people, the users of the machines, their reactions to content on the screen, whether it be social media, information (or disinformation) sites, etc, is to either click or not click. This is in fact a very masculine way of seeing the world: window open or closed, feeling fine or not feeling fine, take the dog out (for hours) or not take the dog out...

Most will agree that our societies have become polarised and that, worse still, there is a horrible simplicity to everything. You are either with us or against us. If you were against the Iraq War you were for Saddam Hussein. If you thought the Twin Towers was a set-up, you were for Osama bin Laden. You either love everything about Trump or you hate it all. If you do not like Trump, you must like Biden. You either believe in climate breakdown or you do not. And if you do believe it is happening, then you must agree with everything Extinction Rebellion says. If you do not want to be locked-down and do not think it is necessary, then you must be a Trump supporter. If you say that Obama laid the foundations for someone like Trump (while dancing and singing beautifully), you are a Trump-loving racist and misogynist. If you are worried about where neoliberalism is taking us, you must be a raving communist.

Schools constantly test their pupils with on-line yes-or-no quizzes. You either repeat everything you have been told, or you fail. On-line learning is inherently one-directional, allowing for very little debate or behind-the-scenes critiquing of the class content by the pupils.

The tendency is that there are always only two ways of looking at everything.

There is no nuance, no analysis, no holistic understanding about how the planetary ecosystem works; or indeed how politics and the economic system really works, how the financial and electoral political bases, which are very often incompatible, determine what will actually be done and why it will be at such variance with the rhetoric. There is no time nor interest to study information on paper and take detailed notes. The flickering screen beckons with other content notifications and its likes and dislikes. 

The badly-named Right Wing of the political spectrum (those who gain by rampant capitalism) are currently using the Shock Doctrine to ramp up the confusion and lies, making sure that there is literally no time nor inclination to check on facts, so that 'facts' have become a type of triggered opinion. The Left Wing can counter with facts or outrage, but this is not how the game is currently being played; and taking time to take apart one huge lie is useless if the adversary is now onto the next one. In times of aggression, fear and fury, nuanced argument about how capitalism cannot end well, how this is a logical impossibility. finds no receptive audience among those who specifically need a bit of theory in order to understand the world.

We have already become machine-like and, worse still, others are doing the programming.

Debt and War Metaphors

Before CV-19 struck massive debt had been built up over decades in western nations. Trickle-down theory, much propounded by Margaret Thatcher, was in fact more like Make-the-filthy-rich-even-richer, and everyone else quite a bit poorer.

In the UK, external debt is $127,000 per capita (116,135€), ie for every man, woman and child. I bet you did not know you owed quite so much! In Spain it is $48,700 but Spain is a much poorer country and this figure is equally distressing. Of course, this amount does not include what you owe within your country to banks and other lenders, so your patrimony is probably far lower.

The secret of our capitalist world's functioning is debt, which is just another way of saying that our wealth will have to be paid for by future generations (be it money, depleted resources, dealing with climate breakdown, species extinction, pollution...).

The US debt clock is a scary thing to look at, and more so if you look at the bottom and see that unfunded liabilities, ie those with nothing to back them up, are running at $147,506,000,000,000 ($148 trillion) at the time of writing. By the time you look at the clock, it will be far higher. We have, over decades of neoliberal creed and austerity (what an Orwellian term that is!) built up the sort of debt that in other times would have been the result of war and destruction.

Our economic system is also one that mercilessly pits one person against another, where we see others as competitors for resources (be it money, housing, the latest iPhone...), not as collaborators in a common project and certainly not as allies in order to stand up to the real enemy, the 1%, whose lifestyle is trashing the planet and which purchases power and ensures that our democracies, with their two competing and identical parties, cannot function as such. We live in a permanent state of literal war (all the large Western nations are participating continually in diverse wars in which yesterday's ally is very often today's enemy), and in a metaphorical permanent war as we compete with others and against our very selves, battling against disease or punishing ourselves with arduous workouts on a treadmill.

Our current belligerent vocabulary of fighting the virus, being all in it together (the little people, that is), taking it on the chin, etc provides a fitting metaphor for the huge debt, ie fitting for a war economy. The debt itself in turn requires a continual state of austerity for the 99%, itself a state of war against the poor and the very vulnerable. As your birth will largely determine your level of wealth, or in other words as meritocracy is a lie, the idea that the poor should shoulder almost all austerity is truly gross.

When I was a child I had a funny graphic-novel T-shirt that had an ill-looking man and his girlfriend asking him, "Is it angst, Jim, or too much beer?" Now, we are indeed most of us almost clinically alcoholic, like the inhabitants of the USSR at the moment of its decline, enjoying nothing - literally nothing - as much as sinking wearily onto the sofa with a glass, or bottle, of wine. But angst? - there is no room in our world for artistic or alternative visions. Those who cannot man up and march off to work (no CV-19 problem there) and then hurry home, never interacting with others, whether because of street crime or CV-19, to drink a bottle of wine, those people are today termed mentally ill. They will be ruthlessly medicated with antipsychotic drugs that will make them depressed, mad and bad; or thrown out into the street - either way the contribution they could have made to our overly predatorial and funcional society will have been neutralised.

Today's belligerent words, whether it be "war on terror", "battling cancer" or the "war against the coronavirus", these are all empty concepts, but full of emotion nonetheless. Edward Bernays built on Freud's insights, and created the propaganda industry, what we like to call advertising. We are animals manipulated by our emotions and fear overrides everything. We now, in our CV-19 panic, have a war on death!

The physical War on Terror was called, rather aptly "Shock and Awe", synonyms of what we were supposed to be fighting against, although we were in fact inflicting great harm (and shock and awe) on the planet's poorest people. Those who have cancer and die just haven't "fought" enough, although the problem is their own body, parts of which are removed and taken away in a futile show of making them whole again. And governments fighting against a virus - what does that even mean?

Almost the only ones who are dying in this war are old, infirm people, dying alone, scared witless by the incessant propaganda on TV and by the Star Wars-clad medical personnel around them, intubated, inarticulate and in horrendous loneliness, without so much as a cup of tea and chocolate biscuit to ease their passing. This is what our decadent civilisation has to offer as quality of life: useless, repetitive studies, followed by unmeaningful, precarious, stressful work, followed by illness, followed by painful and terrifying death.

Did the 3,000 years following the Ancient Greeks' ideal of a "good life" lead us to this?

The Why's and the Wherefore's of What's Going On

The UK's epidemic expert Neil Ferguson has been drastically revising the coronavirus' mortality ever downwards, no longer the dramatic upper figure of half a million, but now more like 20,000. We have recently found out that the first mortal victim was in February, nearly two months ago, backing up Oxford University's research team that postulates that the number of infected is probably far higher than previously thought, maybe even half the population. Neil Ferguson also accepts that the total number of infected is far higher than he originally thought. This would make the current coronavirus more akin to seasonal flu, as all actual mortality data both in the UK and elsewhere has shown from the beginning. And, if so many have been infected, the CV-19's mortality is far, far lower than the screaming headlines have had us believe.

Two days ago, the OAP residence right next to my house, was found to have 69% of its inmates infected. No surprise there: the lockdown has deprived people of fresh air and has confined them inside in a perfect virus-breeding ground. The Spanish state has taken over the home, converting it into a "hospital" and installed general medical staff to tend to the inmates. All the people in the home are, by definition, old and very infirm. And, yet, no rushing of inmates to a proper hospital. Rather like you would expect if the CV-19 were simply seasonal flu.

The big question is, then, why are we being scared to death about the pandemic, if it is no different to any previous year over the last decade or more, and why are we living in a de facto totalitarian state as a result.

Quite obviously our throw-away, consumption-based world could not continue indefinitely. For all of us to live the American Dream (the one that far less that half of the US population lives), we would need more than seven planets. Our planet is on fire, almost irreversibly trashed, and capitalism cannot find a way out of the quandary, as central planning is anathema to the neoliberal creed. When the western economies crashed in the early 1970s, following the golden years of the 50s and 60s, capital was unleashed as the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher revolution allowed high-street banks to act like investment banks, permitting them to behave like casinos.

Corporations were given rights as "persons", more rights in fact than real people. When pressure on salaries and outsourcing of jobs to the lowest-paid and least-protected worker meant that people could no longer buy the products that capitalism needs us to buy, we were encouraged by cheap interest rates to borrow more and more, on the never-never. When that huge Ponzi scheme went tits-up, we were encouraged to keep on spending as goods got cheaper and cheaper. In the UK people change their mobile phone on average around every two years (without taking into account "burn phones", those that are used for days or weeks before being trashed). The improvements found in the new models are imperceptible for most buyers who simply do not have the necessary technical knowledge, but they get the new model anyway.

Huge pressure is put on countries like Bolivia (which has just suffered a coup and has the lithium that we need to keep all those battery-powered phones and cars running) or Venezuela (which has the largest world reserves of oil and which sets a bad example by being fairly democratic and by not being amenable to US expropriation, unlike head-chopping Saudi Arabia). Almost all the wars in the world - and the US is currently involved in some 134 war zones - are to do with fighting over scarce resources, whether water, lithium, gas, petrol, or rare earth elements. The rest are to do with stamping out the dangerous notion that looking after people, rather than corporations, is a good idea.

So things could not really go on as before. The planet is insufficient, there are so many of us and those that do not conform to being simple consumers are dying out or being exterminated.

In this New World Order, capitalism is once again bailed out, and unbelievable funds are right now being funnelled upwards to the very rich, as always perfectly on time, right after the bulk of bank bonuses had just been paid.

There is no debate on MSM about the hideous inequality in our societies, as all us little people face losing our jobs once the CV-19 scare has passed. We are already being told that China's relaxation of their quarantine rules has been problematic, I suppose so that we never imagine that we shall be able to take to the street and protest once this is over. This state of exception can be brought back at any time in the future.

The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population. Do we really think they are worth it? You are not among them and you will never be! We have computer nerd Bill Gates, made hugely wealthy by mafia-style shenanigans (the original antitrust court case has to be seen to be believed for creepy non-collaboration and amnesia from Mr Gates). Do we really think he is now a health expert, specifically a benign, disinterested health expert? He is the largest single donor to the World Health Organisation and his philanthropy is making him much wealthier as people's health becomes increasingly medicalised. Forget Windows: Microsoft only makes up 20% of his wealth and his net worth is larger than that of 130 countries. His vision is totalitarian: in a recent Ted Talk, Gates says that "eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person" in order to be allowed to travel.

For the 1% to continue living life as they wish, jetting from one mansion to another in exotic locations, the climate crisis dictates that the 99% (all of us) are kept restrained in our unproductive, little lives, as infertile as possible now that AI can do almost all our jobs. Once the CV-19 has disappeared from our screens, we shall no doubt, almost all of us, have our working week reduced, which is a good and necessary thing. But, instead of this being decided upon by us ourselves, we are shortly to join a subclass where, so long as we keep quiet and do not bother the elite, we shall be allowed to carry on. As money is at this very moment funnelled upwards, no one asks us if we think that having an elite with so much money may well be incompatible with democracy.

We have all seen doctors on TV telling us this is a dangerous virus and that they are in a desperate situation fighting it (who does not love being interviewed on TV?). We do not, however, get shown the many other doctors and experts who have a very different point of view. We do not get reminded that many hospitals were overcrowded and overwhelmed long before the virus appeared, or that many hospitals and wards are actually empty as resources are directed to intensive care and Emergency and as elective surgery is postponed. We do not get reminded how many people die every day in normal times and that the overall death rate has NOT gone up with CV-19.

The remaining question is why governments everywhere are overreacting, although they are not all implementing the same measures, not by a long chalk. Most governments operate on political terms. The MP and Ministers are given their information by political advisers primarily (did you really think that ministers were experts in their fields as successive cabinet shuffles move them around?). Western democracy means that political parties are constantly seeking political power and to keep that power. There is a huge political risk, as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have found out, in not taking measures when the MSM is ramping up the panic. It is politically far safer to do more or less the same as other nations, even if the model has been set by a country you have decried for years as totalitarian, unreliable and as a fragrant abuser of human rights (China). And, if it turns out that CV-19 is after all no different from seasonal flu, the MSM, who were the first to tell the lie, will keep quiet about it.

Governments are substituting the very real herd immunity of diseases for the equally real herd mentality of politicians.

There is another huge advantage for our short-termist western political parties, almost all of which serve the corporate state: the measures taken are truly totalitarian in nature, ensuring a compliant, conformist population with no opportunity for dissent.

A Stopped Clock Still Tells the Time

Newspapers and magazines get their money from advertisers, not from sales of the paper itself. That is the reason why free newspapers can be economically viable and why so much media is available online for free. Without a doubt the last four decades or more have seen a change from seasoned journalists to young interns, from the local, on-site reporter to rewriting copy from Reuters, Efe and so on. No media magnate wants to spend money he does not have to. Most people have grown used to seeing no anomaly in finding exactly the same news (sometimes with different words) everywhere they look, and those that notice that this undermines the plurality of human experiences are often too cash-strapped to finance a different sort of media.

We actually live already in a de facto totalitarian system on many levels, with a strict limit on what can be said or even thought outside of determined confines. (Post coronavirus it is likely that our regimes will be fully totalitarian.)

You might find a heated discussion about this or that car, or electric scooters, or travel to one exotic place or another, but you will in general never find serious space given to whether a capitalist economy is a good thing, whether all private transport should be discouraged, whether public transport should be abundant and free... Any newspaper is constrained by its advertisers and will not act against their interests. Once you understand that the newspaper's client is the advertiser and that the you are the product being delivered to the client, you can see why mass media is in fact a propaganda outlet.

All this is the same for TV, with the added impact of its intrusive nature: high, strident volume, imperceptible flickering, saturated colours, false dichotomies, lack of opportunity to stop and meditate on whether the reasoning being blared at one is well-founded...

The BBC, without overt advertising, depends on the government and the constant threat of having the substantial licence fee lowered or abolished and will, as a result, defend the interests of the deep state tooth and nail, and will relentless attack any politician that threatens these interests.

All of us above a certain age remember the shocking propaganda that justified the Iraq War. Actually, it was not convincing at any point: the politicians making the case for war (Bush Jr, with creepy and self-interested Cheney and Rumsfeld in the background, Blair, Aznar) were never going to be reliable truth tellers. Important civil servants resigned, stating clearly that there was no legal case for war. We all knew deep down that it was all about the oil in Iraq, about keeping the region in western hands and about keeping the world addicted to oil, not to mention maintaining Israel's privileges. Years later the mainstream media lamented how they had been hoodwinked and, yet, it is hard to believe they actually were hoodwinked, when so many of the public had seen through the lie (witness the huge antiwar demonstrations).

A massive exercise in cognitive dissonance is ongoing, that of believing the BBC and other MSM yet again, this time about the coronavirus. People are suffering and will die, mainly because of the hideous poverty (what is endearingly called "austerity") that will be rained down yet again as a result of shutting down people's lives and locking them indoors - just the 99%, mind you.

Cramming old people into OAP homes, quarantining them without fresh air or green spaces (a perfect recipe for a flu epidemic), stopping them from having visitors, over medicating them and forcing the flu vaccine on them every year (there is a link with the flu vaccine and getting CV-19) has created a perfect environment for this year's flu. And they are dying. No palliative care for them though. No kind attention to their last wishes of a relative or pet nearby, a warm hand, a cup of tea and a biscuit, none of that. Just scary face masks and latex gloves in the intensive care unit, while those who actually need intensive care (accidents, real acute illness) will be turned away. This is no way to die if you are old.

All the relentless propaganda - after all, who actually reads anything over a screen in length, if that, nowadays? - has made us see reality not as it is but a little off centre. We do not see the big picture as we take the little selfie. If, in your isolation, the clock on your mobile was a little off you could tell the time all day and never get it right. A mad man in the next flat might stare at a stopped clock and happily say all day, "It's 9:30!" He'd be right twice a day though.

Better to be neither of them, not the coherent but wrong individual, nor the mad person. Better to take off the blinkers, switch off the MSM noise, take on the arguments on the other side, and see what there is to them.

The Neo-liberalism Myth

Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution wasn't just successful because it reorganised the economy – it was successful because it embedded a particular narrative about how wealth is created and distributed in society. This is a world where, so long as there is sufficient competition and free markets, every individual will receive their just rewards in relation to their true contribution to society. Where a rising tide lifts up all the boats. There is, in Milton Friedman’s famous terms, “no such thing as a free lunch”. It’s a world where businesses are the “wealth creators” who create jobs and drive innovation, and business owners are entitled to the financial rewards of success – regardless of how enormous they are. It wasn't like that, of course. Every time that the rich and their companies become insolvent, they are bailed out, from easy bankruptcy for the very rich who are then allowed to refloat themselves with cheap and extravagant loans, through subsidies to large corporations that end up paying no tax, lack of action on fiscal paradises, through to bank bailouts. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton’s ‘Third Way’ largely accepted this narrative of wealth creation, and until relatively recently nobody in the mainstream of British politics challenged it. It is what is taught in business schools and really nothing alternative is every studied or taught.

The problem, of course, is that it bears little resemblance to how the economy actually works. While it is true that working hard will generally help you earn money, you won't necessarily earn more this way. And the causality doesn’t hold in reverse: not all wealth has been attained through hard work. In practice, the distribution of wealth has little to do with contribution, and everything to do with politics and power. The current campaigns against inheritance and wealth taxes are supported by many people who will not benefit overall from them. The Thatcherite narrative that taxes are bad took hold and the alternative thesis that they are part of a decent, redistributive, collaborative society has been silenced. The narrative that owners are the only important stakeholders is also palpably false, and excludes others affected by economic activity, such as those who live nearby, consumers and workers.

Someone that is born in the UK will earn more than someone born in Sub-Saharan Africa, even if they perform exactly the same labour. Why? Because one was lucky enough to be born in a powerful country with a legacy of imperialism that has rigged the rules of the global economy in its favour. It is the same in London compared to the north of England, say. The economist Branko Milanovic has estimated that 60% of someone’s income is determined by where they were born, and an additional 20% is determined by the income level of their parents. This means that place of birth and parental background accounts for around 80% of someone’s earning power on average.

Within countries, extreme fortunes almost always derive from control over a scare resource – fossil fuels, minerals, land, monopoly networks, money etc. To the early classical economists, this kind of wealth – attained by simply being a gatekeeper to scarce resources – was deemed to be unearned, and they referred to it as ‘economic rent’. But today the Sunday Times Rich List is dominated by rentiers – financiers, real estate tycoons, oil barons, monopolists and aristocrats.

As Grace Blakeley puts it: “You do not become a billionaire through labour. You become a billionaire through inheritance, corruption or economic rents – or, in most cases, some mixture of all three.”

But it’s not just billionaires that accumulate wealth without working. Over a third of all the income in Britain is paid out as capital income (dividends, rents and interest) rather than labour income (wages and salaries). Capital income is inherently passive: it doesn’t correspond to work or skill, but ownership.

Since 1995 three quarters of all wealth accumulated in the UK – totalling £5 trillion – has come from rising house prices. The driving force behind rising house prices has been rising land prices. But land is not a source of wealth but of economic rent. The truth is that most wealth made through the housing market has been gained at the expense of others who are now seeing more of their incomes eaten up by higher rents and larger mortgage payments. The housing boom is not an example of wealth creation, but wealth redistribution on an unprecedented scale.

And then there is inheritance: around £100 billion of wealth is passed on to new owners every year without any corresponding productive activity, much of it escaping any tax.

Overall, the proportion of wealth in western countries that can truly be ascribed to “hard work”, however loosely defined, is infinitesimally small. The idea that Britain is a meritocracy is objectively false.

This means that we should start to recognise that wealth creation is a collective process involving many different interdependent stakeholders – workers, the government, the natural environment, civil society, and, yes, entrepreneurs. It means highlighting how the mechanism linking contribution and reward for each of these stakeholders is fundamentally broken: workers are being paid less than the value they create, owners are appropriating wealth they didn't create, vast profits are being made by destroying our ecosystems, and the role of the state in wealth creation is undervalued. And it means proposing new mechanisms for distributing financial rewards that more accurately reflect the collective nature of wealth creation, and rebalance power between capital and labour.

Crucially, it also means challenging the idea that rising asset prices – Britain’s favourite form of wealth – constitutes wealth creation. As John Stuart Mill wrote back in 1848:

“If some of us grow rich in our sleep, where do we think this wealth is coming from? It doesn’t materialise out of thin air. It doesn’t come without costing someone, another human being. It comes from the fruits of others’ labours, which they don’t receive.”

The extraction of natural resources and the externalisation of costs that are so intrinsic to capitalism are nothing but the transference of wealth from one future generation to the present one. The ownership of land, together with inheritance laws that protect rich families, enables the concentration of wealth in few hands.

Great inequality is incompatible with democracy because money is used to buy power in a corrupted representative system. Learning that there a now more billionaires than ever, individualistic neoliberalism has encouraged the greedy to think that they too might climb up and be the new Jeff Bezos, and to hardly spare a thought for those unfortunates that aren't winners in this winner-takes-all system, accepting the lie that it's mostly their own fault anyway. If they stopped to think about it, there is no millionaire class if everybody's a millionaire. Being rich requires that you can buy the labour and land off those who are poor. As George Carlin said, ‘it's a big club, and you ain’t in it.’