Monday 22 August 2022

Crisis Britain: the inhumanity of an all-killing capitalist disorder


"When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-men's organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder..."

At what point can the state's mass disregard for human life be deemed 'social murder'? When does a ‘cost of living crisis’ tip over into a full-scale crisis of hegemony for the ruling class? And what kind of civil resistance to that inhuman system might this crisis yet unleash?     

Rocketing prices, double-digit inflation for the first time in forty years, massive energy hikes, overwhelmed food banks running out of supplies, and the prospect of even more spiralling fuel bills from October. 

Welcome to crisis Britain, the latest in a long history of capitalist crises where the seeming 'resolution' always involves the intensified brutalisation of the poorest.  

As the usual 'market rules' and 'corrections' play out, there’s a gathering mood of public anguish, rising hostility, and even the serious prospect of civil insurrection. 

Yet we're still being encouraged to focus on the fallout effects of the crisis rather than the true structural causes. Unlike affordable goods on supermarket shelves, distracting narratives are in plentiful, cheap supply. 

We've had the whole tortuous Truss-Sunak hustings promotion, picking over whether or not tax cuts can 'alleviate' the economic burden. Tell that to poverty-waged and benefits-struggling families now having to decide over heating or food for their kids.  

In the same vein, two exponents of the primary greed-protecting party - one an extravagant multi-millionaire, the other a new zealot Thatcherite threatening the most basic trade union rights - continue to peddle the patronising sham of 'levelling up', all without the slightest challenge or derision from a service media.

There’s also the standard blame game of Ukraine. After provoking Russia’s invasion, an ever-expansionist US/UK is now intent on prolonging this disastrous, human-sacrificing and economic-impoverishing war, conveniently casting Putin as responsible for the energy crisis, global wheat shortage and ‘starvation of the world’. 

Amid the epic war propaganda, how many ever question the UK's obscene level of military 'aid' to Ukraine (£2.3 billion, to date, including a £1 billion increase collected from "departmental underspending") via profit-soaring arms corporations? All for intensified killing rather than peace-seeking solutions, while denying humane interventionist spending at home.

And, of course, we have Brexit, relentlessly cast as the 'primary cause' of the crisis. 

Whatever the apparent issues over border controls, product supplies and labour shortages, none of this gets to the true heart of why the poorest always have to suffer the most from capitalist disruptions.

Beyond the Europhile hype, are we seriously to believe that a deeply-neoliberal, corporate-dominated, NATO-aligned, war-pushing EU would ever offer any kind of radical deliverance from poverty economics? 

The readiness of a shrill liberal class to invoke Brexit as the ‘great calamity’ driving this crisis speaks volumes about its own vital role as 'office manager' to neoliberal orthodoxy. 

What can never be seriously discussed as the elemental issue in all such crises is corporate greed. We can never have capitalism itself in the dock.

Shell, BP and Centrica are among the mammoth corporations recently posting vast profits. 

Yet while such announcements have elicited a torrent of public anger from people contemplating alarming fuel and cost of living rises, we're still being discouraged from asking truly critical questions of the system at large.

How could it be that human lives will be extinguished, people will literally die, because they cannot afford warmth for their bodies? 

In what kind of ‘rational’ system do people go hungry when billions are being banked by a few mega-grocers? 

What sort of 'civilised' order would permit such a tiny elite to own and control all the basic resources of life?  

NHS heads have now written an urgent letter to the government warning of a humanitarian crisis and unprecedented levels of death this winter for those without adequate heating.

Alongside the multiple thousands already sacrificed to ‘austerity measures’ and covid negligence, is this not the latest glaring indication of the capitalist state's capacity for socialised killing?


This is the same all-knowing, callous commissioning of social murder as the elite’s insatiable warmongering, pandemic criminality, and killing of the planet. 

Perversely, fearing adverse public reaction, we even now have the bosses of energy companies urging more government support for customers, a clear case of the state having to subsidise rather than curb profit-grabbing corporations.

While RMT and other struggling public sector workers have been forced into strike action, nothing of these corporate demands are being scrutinised by a compliant media. 

Nor is the interventionist role of Transport Minister Grant Shapps, working to ensure there's no resolution of the rail dispute on reasonable, union terms.     

As responsive mass industrial action unfolds, it's been instructive to watch the establishment's struggling efforts to handle the highly capable and popular rail union representative Mick Lynch. 

Not only is Lynch calling for fair, inflation-matching pay, urging protection of existing rail services, and making the laudable case for rail nationalisation, he’s framing it all in an intelligible class politics about need versus greed. 

The ruling class are looking after their interests, he asserts, it's time we, the working class, started looking after ours. 

Indeed, Network Rail chiefs themselves have consistently dominated the public sector high earner table. Its chief executive Andrew Haines is currently on a whopping £590,000 annual salary, following a recent rise of £46,000.

Meanwhile, the public have been bombarded with reports about the 'disruptive' and 'irresponsible' conduct of striking workers. And yet, enamoured in no small part by Lynch's own media performance, sympathy and support for their actions remains strong. 

This, in turn, is forcing a hostile media to move with expedient caution; still pushing the same 'need to curb union militancy' line, yet seeking to be ‘onside’ with the angry public mood.  

Such is the process of hegemony - cultivating both social division and consent for repressive measures. 

As Malcom X famously put it: “If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

Yet, after the staggering handouts to business friends during covid, and now corporate energy bonanza, the grasping of ‘crisis wealth’ by the few is now so brazen, the political defence of it so naked, that the whole neoliberal edifice itself is coming under crisis examination.

For those desperately seeking alternative political goods, alas, there will be no delivery from Keir Starmer’s Labour. 

The very minimum policy pledge from Labour to the energy crisis would have been to nationalise the big five energy companies. Predictably, there's not even a murmur of it from Starmer. 

One might also note here the posturing of Nicola Sturgeon, now calling for UK energy nationalisation despite having ditched a much-hailed conference commitment to form a National Energy Company for Scotland. 

True independence - if ever delivered - will require energy sovereignty as well as political sovereignty. 


As with a corporate-captured SNP, a now hollowed-out Labour party has shown its abject refusal to offer any radically different agenda. Disgusted members have been responding accordingly

It’s also why Enough Is Enough, endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn, is now displacing Starmer’s neo-Blairite party, rising as a real crisis-facing movement. 

And with this has come a new class assertiveness in handling establishment forces. 

When media interviewers seek to portray striking rail, cleansing and other vital workers as 'greedy',  'irresponsible', and 'holding the country to ransom', Lynch and other union leaders are not only pointing to members' paltry wages and basic needs, but the real rampant greed of corporate elites and basic immorality of capitalist life.

As Eddie Dempsey illustrates, "if we woke up tomorrow and the billionaires were gone, there’d be no change to the running order of our daily lives. If the same happened to the workers, the country would grind to a halt. And they know it."


This is a renewed and welcome class politics, confident in its radical voice, re-energised by the historical understanding that everything people ever gained in life had to be struggled for in the face of unmoving authority.

In a truly rational order it would be elementary to hold in common trust the core things that sustain human life. 

But so entrenched is the ideology of neoliberalism these past decades that privatisation has been normalised as a ‘public good’ rather than a charter for unconfined greed. 

The only 'rational' course for corporate capitalism is ever-expanding profit. It's why, long knowing the risks of climate change, Exxon, British Petroleum and the rest of Big Oil have been able to plunder the earth, decimate populations and take us to a point of environmental abyss. 

It's the same inbuilt 'logic' with the US/UK/NATO war machine and corporate-driven weaponry. Relentless production, expansion and human misery. 

In every such case, it's people who 'must' suffer and die while a greedy few profit from death and destruction.

And with a war propaganda machine now in overdrive, public conformity is being cultivated on an even greater scale, while any 'recalcitrant' voices can expect to be 'ghosted', 'algorithmed' or closed down completely.

But is wider obedience to that dominant orthodoxy now unravelling? As people contemplate this latest capitalist winter of discontent, is a disillusioned and weary public more readily seeing through the veil of political lies? Has the flaunting of corporate greed while people face increasing hardship created a new space for meaningful resistance? Is there a coming 'October revolution'? 

It's always important to remember the ruthless energy and resources of the ruling class in co-opting, infiltrating, undermining and breaking-up any real radical formations. Remember the fate of Occupy?    

Yet the same enduring issues and challenges remain. Whatever form any such resistance takes, it must have as its central aim true systemic change, rather than token amelioration of this latest capitalist crisis. It must be guided by a true politics of compassion that puts people and environment before profit and wealth.    

Indeed, the old schemas for socialistic change don't even cover what's truly required any more. What’s really needed is not just the nationalising, but the humanising of all our vital resources - energy, food, health, transport and so much more - garnered, organised and distributed in sustainable and equitable ways. 

Instead of energy 'price caps', we need the urgent imposition of wealth caps, from ending the vast billions appropriated by corporations and obscene rises for leading CEOs, to slashing the extravagant salaries of public sector directors and top BBC figures, as well as questioning the remunerations of all those lofty presenters castigating workers for daring to demand a decent living wage.     

In truth, there is no 'cost of living crisis'. The poorest have always faced a daily crisis of existence. What we see before us, unfolding on a now vast and existential scale, is a cost of greed crisis. 

Only a systemic understanding and tackling of that crisis will permit the wellbeing, and very presence, of human life on this plentiful but now greedily threatened planet.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is plenty to agree with here John. The impact from the wealthy “boys at the top” controlling the trickle down society we live in amounts to nothing more than social harassment of the many. As we now tread water in new-age Thatcherism, whilst the likes of Sunak and co, sit comfortably on their metaphorical yachts, or not so metaphorical yachts; how can we simply accept the injustice thrust upon us. Whilst there are billions of pounds being locked away by the super rich, vast amounts of people will suffer and ultimately perish because they couldn’t lift the temperature in their living room by a few degrees. Despite the flairs being fired, the government sit on their hands and watch those round about them sink.

John Hilley said...

Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Anon. Yes, it's truly criminal to see the abandonment of struggling people to callous market forces by a ruthless political class in this country of plentiful wealth. The emergency situation faced by cold and hungry people this winter will be matched only by the emergency efforts of the ruling elite in trying to contain public discontent and prevent a major revolt.