Moving away from the immediate provision of a life of need for all
The capitalist world is collapsing at breakneck speed in a global tsunami of poverty, hunger, lack of medicine, war, and terrible environmental pollution. This tsunami has long swept across vast areas of the world, but what is happening is another story. Billions of people are succumbing to the death squads of poverty, lack of food, lack of water, and deprivation of medicine and treatment in conditions where the volume of international capital, surging beyond all limits of accumulation, self-expansion, and increase, is teetering on the brink of explosion under the pressure of inherent contradictions and the inevitability of crisis. Let us look at the statistics published by Oxfam, the United Nations’ warning, preaching, “charity” institute.
1 – More than 4.5 billion people live below the poverty line, suffering from various degrees of poverty, from deadly hunger to lack of access to adequate food, medicine, treatment, and shelter. The percentage of these people compared to the total world population was about 46% by 2020, and has exceeded 50% in the last 5 years, and is increasing every year.
2 – Every minute, at least 2 people die of hunger in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and South Sudan.
3 – Every 4 seconds a child dies of hunger, this figure is higher in Gaza, Yemen, Africa, and war-torn countries.
4 – Half of the current generation of Africans, the vast majority of whom are workers, constitute the continents underprivileged. They struggle with the acute consequences of hunger. They see no future ahead, 32 million inhabitants of the eastern part of the continent are suffering from absolute hunger, do not have access to the minimum daily food, are deprived of all the necessities of life, and are generally dying of hunger. Tens of millions of them have left their homes in search of drinking water and have been displaced to other places. The number of hungry people on the continent has more than doubled in recent years and is increasing without interruption.
5 – More than 5 billion workers on earth have become poorer between 2020 and today than they were before, unemployed or their real wages have fallen significantly under the scourge of inflation. [A trend that, according to all the evidence of the capitalist world, is irreversible] and is reaching a higher peak every day.
6 – Of the world’s 8 billion population, more than 2 billion and two million (over 25%) lack clean drinking water, suffer from various diseases caused by polluted water, and a significant percentage of them, especially children, are threatened with death.
7 – A review of government budgets in 161 countries shows that more than half of them have reduced the share of medicine and annual treatment for citizens during the outbreak of the Corona pandemic. The rate of this reduction in the so-called “welfare budget” has exceeded 50%. In the case of the education budget, it has even exceeded 75%.
8 – Nutrition and access to food have undergone terrible changes in recent years under the pressure of climatic and environmental factors, agriculture is being destroyed, famine is raging. Hunger has become explosive.
9 – The producers of all capital, wealth, and everything in the world are not able to make a living and provide their daily bread. Note that this is not the word of “communists,” “anti-capitalists,” or “abolish wage labour.” It is a sentence from the Oxfam report.
From Africa and the world, let us enter Europe, the continent of prosperity and democracy, the model of capitalist human rights, let us leave aside the “unprecedented” countries that were previously its camp, let us look with contempt at Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, even England, Germany, and France, let us turn our eyes to the Scandinavian countries, let us gaze at the peaks, let us choose the furthest of them, Sweden, and ask Oxfam again.
1 – More than 2 million, over 25% of the population, are anxious about their future livelihood. They do not feel secure in their livelihood, they do not see a bright future for their children. They complain about the pressure of inflation, emphasizing that they are unable to bear any more expenses, even the inevitable conventional expenses such as sick leave, clinic and hospital visits, unemployment, rising drug prices, electricity prices, travel, and the slightest reduction in government subsidies for medicine and treatment.
2 – Since 2020, 99% of the Swedish population has been on the verge of poverty and is getting poorer every year. More than 10% are poor according to the criteria of the World Food Organization. In 2023 alone, each Swedish worker lost 5% of his purchasing power. Let us supplement this data with objective observations. After 2024 until today, the price of public food and the subsistence needs of the working masses have increased astonishingly and unprecedentedly. The real “inflation rate,” not the caricatured one, has been rising by leaps and bounds. All the evidence screams that in the last three years, 30 to 35 percent of workers’ purchasing power has melted away. In other words, their real wages have fallen by 70 percent, even 65 percent. House rents and household electricity costs have increased dramatically, entrance fees to hospitals, clinics, and all medical centres, and transportation costs have skyrocketed. What has happened during this period under the guise of wage increases has no proportion to the upward trend in prices.
3 – The same trend, perhaps even worse, has been true in other parts of Europe, America, and the world.
All that was mentioned above in headlines was a story of the devastating disasters that befell the lives of billions of workers living on earth in a system of wage slavery. Let us look at the other side of the story, the source of the disasters, capital, the capitalist octopus system.
1 – The capital of the world’s 12 largest capitalists is greater than the total wealth of the 4 billion working people of the land.
2 – In Sweden, the wealth of only 46 capitalists is greater than the total wealth of the 10 million people of the country. Here, 5 capitalists have more than doubled their capital in 4 years.
3 – Between 2022 and this year, the capital of 4 of the world’s largest capitalists has increased by 3 trillion and 300 billion US dollars, and in parallel, 5 billion workers have gone down the slope of increasing poverty.
4 – In the last 40 years, capitalist taxes have fallen from 32% to 22% in different parts of the world to 16% to 15%, while government aid from workers’ labor to these companies to challenge crises has become astronomical.
5 – In the last two decades, 60 pharmaceutical giants have given way to 10 giants. In the agricultural sector, only 2 trusts control 40% of the world’s seed market, and other areas of accumulation have followed the same trend. Competition has disappeared, and the world’s work and production cycle is in the hands of a few ruthless financial giants. They determine wages, the price of public food, prices, whether or not they are produced, the fate of human work and production.
6 – Capitalism has created conditions in which the vast majority of the world’s population does not live, all their struggle is to maybe survive and make it to tomorrow today.
7 – In 2024 alone, the volume of capital of a number of large capitalists tripled compared to 2023.
8 – During the Covid-19 pandemic, only 0.1% (one tenth of a percent) of the total vaccines were distributed to the so-called “underdeveloped” and “developing” (poor) countries, and the rest were consumed in advanced industrialized countries. It seems that the UN calculations are talking about countries and the entire population. Whether or not anything from the top one tenth of a percent went to workers and the poor, the answer is probably “nothing.”
9 – In poor countries, the amount of money that the population has to protect itself against environmental disasters and deadly accidents is, on average, $3 per year. Here too, the share of workers, the underprivileged, is not a single dollar, but only certain death.
The idea that the dimensions of hunger, homelessness, deprivation of medicine, treatment, education of billions of people from the poorer strata, the working masses, can be depicted with the above statistics is an illusion. What is happening to 600 million hungry Indians in the third pole of “prosperity”! Global capitalism or tens of millions of Ethiopian, Kenyan, Somali, Afghan, Palestinian, Syrian, Sudanese, Libyan, Sierra Leonean, Congolese workers is not something that comes under the camera of Oxfam or any statistical institute.
In capitalist Iran, few workers are able to afford the expensive, vital medicines prescribed by doctors for their families. How can workers whose monthly wages are 20-25 or 30 million Iranian tomans (100-125 to 150 US dollars) afford a rare 70 million tomans ampoule for their cancer patient! Up to now, over 4 million workers dismissed due to the war have registered with the Social Security Organization. The regime’s government officials admit that 9 to 11 million workers have become unemployed, all or part of whose livelihoods are tied to the lost jobs online. The total number of unemployed people out of a total of 25 million working-age workers has crossed the 12 million marks. The monthly income of each unemployed person, even if they have unemployment insurance, is so low that it is not enough to feed their families. This is in a situation where prices are breaking new records every morning and evening. Cancer and fatal diseases are rampant throughout the country. 55% of workers do not have a place to live and if this situation continues, they will not be able to pay the rent. They have no choice but to sleep in the grave, in slums, or in cardboard boxes.
Before the war, there were 40 million workers living below the poverty line. The war and the tsunami of unemployment that followed it have increased this figure by leaps and bounds. The threat of starvation has terrified tens of millions of workers living in hell, and the merciless army of the capital state’s killing forces has deprived everyone of the slightest opportunity to protest. The population of several million working housewives lacks a single rial of income; they are not considered unemployed and do not have the right to register in the unemployment system. According to official government statistics, out of the 24 million population under the age of 18, over 15% or 3.6 million people are child labourers. Children who work in the most horrible conditions, in brick kilns or glass melting furnaces and similar places, to provide for their own and their parents’ survival. A large number of them are garbage collectors. Young children who do 12 to 16 hours of hard garbage collection work every day for capitalists who are contractors and partners of municipalities, and in return receive nothing more than a daily bread.
This is the life of billions of workers in today’s world, under the control of capitalism. Every moment of the survival of this system, every round of reproduction and reversal of global capital, regardless of the type of regimes, government models, democracy, dictatorship, fascist, religious, secularity of the states, entails a tremendous acceleration of the deterioration of this situation everywhere in the world. A situation in which capitalism kills one person every 5 seconds, 12 every minute, and 720 people every hour with the knife of hunger. It has contaminated all the water, food, clothing, and the air that humans breathe with poison and disease, it has made the entire planet uninhabitable. Point by point, the world has become a blazing hotbed of war, a furnace of human suffering. The pages of capitalist history, especially during the last few dark decades, have been sounding the alarm with the loudest voice that the struggle for higher wages, better health, a healthier environment, less discrimination, more employment, better models of government, the overthrow of one regime and its replacement with another, will not untie any knots from the sky-high mountain of problems of billions of people. It has not been untied so far and will not be untied in the future in the same way. The system of wage slavery has historically and forever rejected these bargaining’s, compromises, prescriptions, and solutions.
Even the humblest change worthy of the name of improvement and in order to pull billions of people out of this hell has been conditioned and postponed to the formation, growth, and structuring of a labour movement, an internationalist council. A movement in all societies of the world today with the manifesto “Immediately ensuring a free, safe, healthy, and need-free life for each and every human being,” which will fight to remove food, clothing, housing, medicine, treatment, education, water, electricity, gas, household appliances, transportation, travel, the Internet, entertainment, and the daily necessities of human life from the control of any form of buying and selling, to eliminate the economic dependence of women on their husbands and children on their parents, to close the barrier to government interference in human lives, to completely shut down work and production harmful to human health and the environment, to end executions and imprisonment, and to fight against all types of war and war-mongering by governments.
Each of the above demands, the urgent needs of human life and survival, the obvious and primary right of every human being, the necessary condition for each individual to achieve a minimum of freedom, the urgent and inevitable need to save people’s lives from deadly environmental pollution and the unruly flames of war. The continuation of human life in today’s world conditions is locked in the fielding of an internationalist, council and strong movement to fulfil these demands. Let us mention a few key points in relation to this movement.
1 – Why workers? Because the world consists of two classes, the workers and the capitalists. There is no third class, the capitalists, with all their power, protect the existence of the wage slavery system and its barbarities until their last breath, it is only the workers who both have high demands and are forced to fight to achieve them. Leaving aside this, only the working class, the workers’ movement, is capable of imposing high demands on capitalism and the campaign for the destruction of this system and the true liberation of man. It is the workers who produce capital and can completely stop the wheel of its production from turning. They are powerful enough to crush the economic, political, legal, civil, police order, the power of thought engineering and physical and intellectual repression of capitalism.
2 – Why anti-capitalism? Because no reformist, democratic, civil, or human rights movement, whether peaceful or subversive, is willing to wage a living class campaign against capitalism, including the campaign to impose high demands on this system. The ultimate victory expected by the high movements, even those who talk about “anti-capitalism”!! The dream of trimming, reforming, “humanizing”!! is to change the government model or change the form of ownership of wage slavery relations.
3 – Why internationalist? Because firstly – the above demands are the vital matter of the workers of all countries, including the so-called “welfare” and democratic societies. We saw above that in Sweden, a model of the return of the deception of the global bourgeoisie, over 25% of the population is captive to a wave of anxiety for the security of their livelihood. There is nowhere in the world where a large layer of the working class does not feel the severe pressure of concern about unemployment, the high cost of living, and the continuous decline in real wages. Secondly – the workers of the scattered countries, even in places where the working masses are faced with physical repression, massacres, bloodbaths, or less struggles, are still unable to impose their demands on the capitalist class and its state alone.
In conditions where the capitalists of the countries in every sphere of accumulation, every sphere of industry, trade, mining, construction, roads, transportation, agriculture, forestry, timber, education, treatment, research, objectively replace the protesting working masses they exploit with more specialized, cheaper, more submissive labor force from all over the world, the isolated labour movement of the majority of the countries does not have the necessary strength to push back and decisively submit the owners of capital and the state. The capitalist class of each country in the world enjoys the unwavering and galactic support of the poles, other capitalist states in various forms, in huge quantities, in various economic, political, military, and security forms in confronting the struggles, rebellions, and uprisings of the working masses. In the face of this barbaric, inhuman, and class-based solidarity and unity of the global bourgeoisie, the workers of the world also have a vital need for internationalist solidarity.
4 – And finally, let us not forget that the value of any commodity, socially necessary work or labour time is crystallized in it. The complex and varying degrees of productivity of workers in the more advanced industrial poles are multiples of simple labour. The founders of the increased productivity of the labour of this section of the working class are machines, techniques, specialization, robots, artificial intelligence. These do not create value or surplus value, they transfer their own value, the value of dead labour crystallized in themselves, dead labour condensed in the process of its emergence and development to new commodities. In raising the productivity of labour, the competitive power of capital, the plague-like redistribution of necessary and surplus labour, and the drastic change in the distribution of surplus values created by the workers of the world among the capitals and different sectors of world capital play a role.
If we consider these data in relation to each other, as the internal law of capital, the continuous components of the “law of value”, we find that the total international surplus-value is created by the total living labour force or by the total number of workers in the world. All members of this living world labour force contribute in proportion to their working time to the production of the total surplus-value. Surplus-value is distributed among the various parts of capital in the light of the influence of machinery, technique, and the degree of productivity of labour. Owners of more advanced technology and more productive variable capital appropriate a greater share of the proceeds of the exploitation of billions of living labour forces, capitalists with smaller shares, in order to compensate for their losses, bring the pressure of exploitation of workers to the throne, the price of reproducing their labour force is slaughtered in the form of their livelihood, education, treatment, working conditions, everything is their own surplus labour. Thanks to the more astronomical share of surplus value, the capitalists of the first group enjoyed this great blessing that at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the face of the uprising of the labour movement, they retreated a little, became democrats, added a few cents to the price of reproducing the labour force of the working masses, in the form of higher wages, better education and treatment, and in return, they derailed the class struggle against capitalism. Their partners, their rivals in the second group, instead of such a retreat, take the path of bloodbaths, the killing of tens of thousands of workers a day, the pouring of society from the dungeon, the torture chamber, the gallows. Within the framework of this discussion, what the workers of the world should learn from Marx is that if somewhere the working conditions, the living conditions, the possibility of protest are greater, if at the same time they endure the terrible exploitation of capital, the pressure of their exploitation is less, it is not thanks to the capitalists, not even the mere unionist struggle, which is largely due to the more terrifying pressure of exploitation of their fellow workers in the greater part of the world. All are exploited with plague-like intensity by world capital, but the pressure of this exploitation, their living conditions, their well-being and their possibility of breathing protest are slightly different. The workers of the regions of the so-called “welfare societies”! They should not have accepted this distinction and difference, they should have made the anti-capitalist bastion of their class all over the world a storm, ignited it, internationalism is not a moral, humanistic, human rights tendency. The necessity of life, work, is the struggle of the working masses of the world. Those who sold the class struggle and anti-wage labour internationalism to “citizenship” made a mistake and with their mistake gave the system of wage slavery a chance to survive, led history astray. But capitalism is a relationship of excessive production of capital, sacrificing humanity on the verge of unlimited profits. By its nature, it cannot tolerate retreating against the labour movement anywhere for more than a few years. Even though it has been rebellious and rebellious for decades, it has begun the bloodbath resulting from those retreats. A process that has no return. It is time for the workers of Northern, Western Europe, and North America to turn their fingers of remorse to their fellow workers in the rest of the world. To burn the flag of lies and deceit of the International Social Democracy, and to raise the true banner of anti-wage labour internationalism. “The movement for the immediate provision of a humane life for all” can be the first link in the manifesto of the campaign against wage slavery of workers all over the world. In short, the vast working masses of any part of the world will not gain anything from the hollow movements of democracy, civil society, capital, “women, life, freedom”, night protesters, antifa, Wall Street, yellow vests, nationalist anti-occupation and the like. Neither can the workers of Europe maintain even their current livelihood with unionism, nor can the workers of Iran earn a single bite of bread with “women, life, freedom”, nor can the working masses of Palestine and the international street campaigns against the occupation be capable of realizing “freedom, freedom of Palestine”. All the workers of the world must raise the banner of the “movement for the immediate provision of a humane life for all” in every corner of the globe and make this movement the first link in their nationwide anti-capitalist campaign for the liberation of the human race.
Nasser Paydar
May 2026
