The four capitalist horses of the apocalypse spread their misery, death, and destruction across the world.
War, global warming, poverty, and disease affects billions of men, women and children. And what drives the four horses is the private ownership of the means of production owned by a minority capitalist class to the exclusion of everybody else.
Based on class exploitation, commodity production and exchange for profit generates war and conflict, pollutes the planet, and leaves millions in poverty, hunger, and ill-health.
The first capitalist horse of the Apocalypse: War
War seems a natural event. It is not. War is a logical outcome of capitalism and a world divided into competing nation states.
As Bob Marley sang: “War in the East, War in the West, War in the north, War in the south”. War in the Middle East, War in Ukraine, war in Africa.
Wikipedia lists around 40 ongoing wars and conflicts. The War in Yemen, for example, has no end in sight and has led to the displacement of one million people, and given rise to cholera outbreaks, medicine shortages, and threats of famine. The war in Syria has devastated cities and left more than 380,000 dead. The Civil war in Libya has killed tens of thousands. War under capitalism never ends.
However, when we come to consider those countries preparing for war, then it is most of the 195 countries in the world, with Russia, Europe, the USA, and China leading the pack.
War under capitalism is caused by countries trying to gain territory and raw minerals such as oil and gas, in protecting trade routes and strategic points and spheres of influence. War is not natural but an outcome of capitalism, nationalist boundaries, international rivalry, and competition.
Preparation for war is reflected in the armaments spent on war. Global military expenditure increased by 75% since the beginning of the century and has stood at around $1.7 trillion annually from 2009 until the middle of the last decade. It is now topping $2.24 trillion a year. (Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute) and will have risen since the Palestinian-Israeli War. Most people have a difficulty getting around a figure of $100,000 let alone the £2.24 trillion – to help digest such a figure – that’s $4,260,000 for every minute of the year. All that money has been spent on killing tens of thousands of people, laying waste cities and towns, and causing untold human misery for generations. Perhaps, you may ask, all that effort and those resources could have been used to alleviate poverty, housing and human needs but capitalism does not exist for that purpose; in its relentless pursuit to accumulate wealth, it totally disregards humankind and the wellbeing of the planet.
Rather than being engaged in designing and producing for human need, hundreds of thousands of workers are creating ingenious ways to kill, maim and destroy other human beings. Instead of relieving pain, producing more food, and finding vaccines for disease, thousands of scientists are working on ways to inflict pain through poisonous gas, irritants, explosives, missiles, and mental and physical torture.
And although most death and destruction in war is through the use of conventional weapons, there are still the nuclear arsenals in the background. In Atomic Audit (pbl.1998) Stephen I. Schwartz claimed the U.S. had spent $5 trillion since 1940 on developing and maintaining its nuclear arsenal.
https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex
The United States maintains an arsenal of about 1,650 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs), and Strategic Bombers and, in addition, some 180 tactical nuclear weapons at bomber bases in five European countries.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that annual spending on nuclear weapons will peak at about $50 billion during the late 2020s and early 2030s.
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/USNuclearModernization
The second capitalist horse of the Apocalypse: Global Warming
The recently published Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report by the United Nations was overtly political. It refused to name one of the four capitalist horses of the apocalypse by its real name. Instead, it was cloaked in the misleading name ‘Humanity’ which the report used 14 times. The Guardian repeated this lie, blaming global warming on ‘humanity’. The BBC decided to blame ‘human consumption’.
However, we live in a class divided planet. There are those who own the means to life and there are those who do not. They have names. The capitalist class are the owners and the working class are the wealth creators. To name is to understand. As the environmentalist Rebecca Solnit wrote:
“To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt – or important or impossible – and key to the work of changing the world is changing the storey”.
And the word we are looking for is ‘Capitalism’, which is the social, economic system and political system that controls every country on Earth. The UN was scared to draw attention to capitalism. Supporters of capitalism like The Guardian and the BBC pretended this social system does not exist. The politics of fear. Unless capitalism is recognised as the cause of global warming nothing can be done.
Humanity is not to blame for global warming but capitalism is. To rephrase The Guardian’s headline (10/ 8/2021), the IPCC’s report on ‘climate crimes’ is the result of capitalism, the profit motive and capital accumulation. It is capitalism that has caused ‘unprecedented’ and ‘irreversible’ change to the climate. The climate crisis has ‘unequivocally’ been caused by capitalist activity over the last three centuries, gaining apace in the twentieth century.
The market is not benign, harmonious, and self-adjusting as Adam Smith thought. The market fundamentalists in their worship of markets were wrong. They were telling a lie and that lie has been exposed.
What will the free-market institutes funded by dark money do? Their clients are in oil, gas and coal. They have the ear of politicians and ministers and tame journalists to uncritically reproduce their pamphlets. For decades they have lauded free markets as benign but, over time, commodity production for profit has been shown to be dangerous. Smith’s market harmony is a myth; the shock to the free-market head bangers must be seismic. Gorged by the money given to them by capitalist benefactors, the free marketeers have fed this particular capitalist horse of the apocalypse and it has bitten their hand.
One of the causes of global warming is poverty. Even in ‘prosperous ’ western countries, most workers live in poorly insulated houses. They cannot afford to upgrade to better insulated homes. The housing stock is not fit for purpose. Global warming is a class issue.
And the poor of the world will be the first casualties of global warming. Poorer countries are struggling to protect themselves against climate change because climate-induced disasters are intensifying and happening more regularly.
In 2020, the Caribbean had a record-breaking 30 tropical storms – including six major hurricanes. The World Meteorological Organisation says the region is still recovering. On islands like Antigua and Barbuda, experts say that many buildings have been unable to withstand the intense winds these storms have brought (BBC News 9/8/2021).
In Uganda, communities in the Rwenzori region have been trying to protect themselves from landslides and floods by digging trenches and planting trees to help prevent soil erosion. The rains have been so intense they have washed away their defences. As a result, there have been multiple landslides on mountain slopes which have buried settlements and farms. Adaptation works based on soil conservation are proving to be increasingly useless in the wake of these extreme weather events (BBC News 10/8/2021). Global warming is a class issue.
Several Pacific Island countries were hit by three cyclones between the middle of 2020 and January 2021. After those three cyclones, communities in the northern part of their country saw the sea walls built as part of their defensive adaption plan, crumbling. Water and wind are repeatedly battering the settlements.
And a study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), stated that 46 of the world’s least-developed countries do not have the financial means to ‘climate proof’ themselves. The IIED says these countries need at least $40bn (£28.8bn; €33.8bn) a year for their adaptation plans. However, between 2014-18, just $5.9 billion of adaptation finance was received. Global warming is a class issue. Private property ownership stands in the way. Class interests stand in the way. The Profit motive stands in the way (BBC News 10/8/2021).
It is not ‘humanity’s’ fault. Global warming is a consequence of capitalism, the profit motive and the anti-social drive to accumulate capital for the purpose of endless growth. Endless growth is a fiction. Capitalism cannot deliver endless growth, just global warming and an impending environmental apocalypse.
Nor is it the fault of the capitalist class. Capitalists have to exploit, they have to produce for profit, they have to keep costs down. Under capitalism they are forced to reinvest capital to make more capital, to expand value as Marx put it in Capital. The capitalists are the servile agents of capitalism “capital personified”, as he put it.
And the politicians and government ministers have to take sides. They have to support the interest of their own country and its capitalist class. They have to steal a march on their competitors and they have to make sure that they do not lose out. This reality is totally ignored by the United Nations and by those who wrote the IPCC report.
The third capitalist horse of the Apocalypse: Hunger
Around the world, 821 million people do not have enough of the food they need to live an active, healthy life. One in every nine people goes to bed hungry each night, including 20 million people currently at risk of famine in South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia and Nigeria.
The COVID-19 pandemic also threatens to increase global poverty. While the full impact is unknown, the World Bank estimates that an additional 88 million to 115 million people will fall into extreme poverty in 2020, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021. (World Vision 29/10/2020).
With a healthy diet costing more than the international poverty line of $1.90 a day, it remains unaffordable for people living in extreme poverty. Across sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, about 57% of the population is unable to afford a healthy diet.
Sub-Saharan Africa is still the region with the highest prevalence of undernourishment, estimated at 22% of the population. This is expected to increase to 29.4% by 2030. The Caribbean also has a high rate — 16.6% of its population. Compare this to North America and Europe, where less than 2.5% of people are malnourished.
In India, the economy has experienced high growth in the last decade. But the most recent data shows that 189.2 million people, about 14% of the population, remain undernourished. In many other countries, the income gap between the rich and the poor has widened. Hunger is a class issue.
https://www.worldvision.org/hunger-news-stories/world-hunger-facts
It is only socialism that can resource community-based courses in which parents will be able to feed children food that will help them grow up healthy and strong. It is only socialism that with provide the social structures and institutions to assist families with agriculture and improve food security.
Until capitalism is abolished, poverty will continue to stunt one generation after the other.
The fourth capitalist horse of the Apocalypse: Disease
HIV, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, and malaria, as well as communicable respiratory diseases such as pneumonia kill the most people. Diarrhoea, pneumonia, and malaria account for nearly half of all child deaths globally.
Neglected tropical diseases affect over one billion people, almost all in the poorest and most marginalised communities. You may not have heard of diseases such as leprosy, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis, soil-transmitted helminths, and trachoma, but they can cause severe pain and life-long disabilities. However, efforts to tackle them have usually taken a back seat to the bigger killers affecting developed countries.
According to the organisation Disease of Poverty only 10% of global health research is devoted to conditions that account for 90 of the global disease burden – the so-called ‘10/90 Gap’. They argue that virtually all diseases prevalent in low-income countries are ‘neglected’ and that the pharmaceutical industry has invested almost nothing in research and development (R&D) for these diseases.
The biggest non-communicable killers are newborn deaths and infant deaths related to poor nutrition, cardiovascular disease and non-communicable respiratory diseases.
Preventable diseases, poverty and capitalism’s profit motive are intimately connected.
Establishing Socialism and Avoiding Apocalypse
We can avoid the four capitalist horses of the apocalypse. However, we urgently need socialism throughout the world. We need the world’s resources to come under the common ownership and democratic control of all of society. We need to remove the capitalist class, the profit motive and capital accumulation from human affairs. We need a society without commodity production and exchange for profit.
We also need a society without borders, nation states and international rivalry. Socialism will be a society without war and conflict. Production will take place solely and directly to meet social need. Socialism will mean universal health care for everyone. Production would take place considering nature, natural resources and biodiversity rather work than against them. Human beings are part of nature.
From a capitalist perspective preparing for war and arming the armed forces is a necessity. For socialists it is a sheer waste of material wealth and labour which could be used to end hunger, poverty, and ill health.
We have the potential to provide better nutrition, clean water, and sanitation throughout the world. No one needs to starve. Poverty can be eliminated. Nutrition can be improved. And so can access to safe water and sanitation, as well as strengthening health systems, is of the utmost importance.
The world’s population would be housed well. The materials to construct sound and spacious homes exist. The architects, the builders and the construction industry also exist to build a physical world fit for human beings rather than an exploited class. What stops workers having good housing is the capitalist system where houses con only be built if there is profit; a system where the social imperative does not exist.
In socialism there will be no nation states, armed forces, and military expenditure. What will prevail will be the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
The entertainment industry pumps out dystopias like “civil War” in which the United States is torn apart by authoritarianism and conflict. YouTube does not broadcast ‘News from Nowhere’ or any uplifting account of the future. It is all doom and gloom. It is all World War Three.
The apocalyptic visions and dystopia need not occur. An optimistic appraisal of the future can be given; one in which the natural world is balanced with human need being met for shelter, food, communication, transport, housing, health services and other necessities of life to allow human beings to flourish.
First a socialist majority has to establish socialism. And to establish socialism requires democratic and political action. That is the answer to the problems facing the world today.
