Parents these days have it tough. They are endlessly accosted with the dangers facing their children: drugs, gangs, TikTok, strangers, junk food, Fortnite, vaping.
So while it pains to add to the list, there is a much greater threat that never gets a second of airtime: liberal centrism. Luring victims into official politics with talk of “change from within” only to suck out their souls and fill the hollow shell with careerist ambition—now that’s scary.
Parents from the radical left should not think their offspring are immune. Former US President Barack Obama, aspiring president Kamala Harris and federal Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg all had a socialist parent. But each embraced the Democratic establishment abyss with the imperial nihilism of the glassiest-eyed Washingtonian dynasty. 
Barack Obama Sr., an economic adviser in newly independent Kenya, criticised the government’s pro-market development strategy, advocating the maintenance of communal land ownership and the nationalisation of foreign companies. “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation, so that not only a few individuals shall control the vast magnitude of resources”, he wrote in a <a href="https://www.politico.com/pdf/PPM41_080411_bhobama_article_1965.pdf">1965 paper for East Africa Journal</a>. “The government should tax the rich more ... Theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income.”
Barack Obama Jr., on the other hand, bailed out America’s largest banks and companies, destroyed union agreements and cut spending on social security. During his first term, 95 percent of all income gains in the US <a href="https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf">went to the richest 1 percent</a>. In his second term, Obama <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/us/politics/obama-offers-to-cut-corporate-tax-rate-as-part-of-jobs-deal.html">appealed to Republican lawmakers</a> to help him cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent. 
Joseph Buttigieg produced the first English translation of the Prison Notebooks, written by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci while imprisoned under Mussolini. Buttigieg <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/303230?seq=1">described </a>Gramsci’s legacy as one of “selfless commitment to the socialist vision ... of unwavering dedication to the cause of the oppressed; of brave, unyielding and very costly defiance of the fascist dictatorship”.
The legacy of his son Pete Buttigieg, formerly an intelligence officer in Afghanistan and corporate consultant for McKinsey &amp; Company, now the transport secretary to Genocide Joe, is decidedly less noble. “The secretary has focused on intervening to support American supply chains ... including measures to help cut in half the long-dwelling container congestion at America’s largest ports”, the official US Department of Transportation website <a href="https://www.transportation.gov/meet-secretary/secretary-pete-buttigieg">notes</a>.
Liberal centrist ghouls stalk elite universities’ law schools and political science departments, hunting for prey. Those in freshman tutorials who flirt with notions such as social justice and systemic racism are shepherded like proverbial lambs into career politics. 
In his Oxford University days, Pete Buttigieg and his friends talked of pushing the Democrats of their native US to the left and away from the “Third Way” centrism of Bill Clinton. But “over time, I’ve come to appreciate more the policy work that comes out of moderate organisations”, he <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/12/03/784151111/pete-buttigieg-spent-his-younger-days-pushing-democrats-off-middle-ground">told National Public Radio in 2019</a>, ahead of his failed presidential nomination bid. 
Donald J. Harris, a left-wing academic at Stanford University, was once <a href="https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1976/11/03?page=4&amp;section=MODSMD_ARTICLE11">described</a>
by the Stanford Daily as a “pied piper leading students astray from neo-classical economics”. He dedicated his 1978 Marxist work Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution to daughters Kamala and Maya.
Kamala Harris apparently loved the first two words of the book’s title but didn’t care for the rest. Economist Adam Tooze called her a “straight-up, main-line, big tech-identified happy Californian Democrat” on his podcast Ones and Tooze. Her presidential campaign has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/22/technology/silicon-valley-trump-biden-democrats.html">“invigorated” Silicon Valley</a>, as venture capitalist cash flows back into Democratic coffers. 
Between her father’s generation of radical Caribbean diaspora, who understood the criminal “justice” system to be a weapon of racist oppression, and Kamala’s campaigning as a tough prosecutor who knows how to put felons behind bars, something went terribly wrong. 
The liberal centre is clearly a danger to our youth. So let’s picture the television advertisements we might run if we finally sounded the alarm. 
A middle-aged radical sits on a couch, Che Guevara on her T-shirt and a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X on her lap. Low strings begin to throb menacingly. A deep voice-over asks: “Do you know where your child is right now?” 
Cut to the Sine Institute at the American University in Washington, DC. Nineteen-year-old College Democrats in blue blazers are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAqtK-WFd7w">conversing politely</a> with Young Republicans in red blazers. “The best part is that they’re going to talk about what they agree upon”, says Sine Institute director and disgraced former Democratic National Committee CEO Amy Dacey, laughing maniacally into the camera.
Fade out. 
“Is your child seeking common ground with Republicans? Stop it before it’s too late.” 
We pan down thousands of billowing, blood-soaked American flags to reveal Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi grinning and shaking hands with a conga line of Republican congressional representatives in celebration of the record number of <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/biden-managed-put-together-many-bipartisan-wins-rcna61883">bipartisan bills passed</a> under Biden.
Cut back to the university room, now all but empty. One last student from the audience, slinging a backpack over their shoulder, is about to leave when a shadowy figure in a knee-length <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/power-coats-inauguration">power coat</a>
approaches. A leaflet is placed in the curious student’s hand: “Campaign launch for Kamala: Meet your elected officials!”
Next shot: a speechifying Kamala Harris sports a sheriff’s badge the size of Arizona and wields a red-white-and-blue judge’s gavel in each hand. The lectern is branded with her official campaign slogan: Vote Blue Literally No Matter What We Do. The voice-over asks: “Does your child accuse you of supporting Trump any time you raise a criticism of the Democrats?”
Fade. The music grieves now, like a requiem mass. The screen fills progressively with a collage of photographs: college students smiling rapturously in selfies with Obama, Biden, Clinton, Harris, Schumer or Pelosi. 
A man strolls soberly into the centre of the shot.
“Every eight minutes, a law student accepts a summer job in a Democratic Party office. Look at these photos: notice the deadness behind the eyes, the ruthlessly pragmatic grip. At this point, it’s already too late. Liberal centrism claims thousands of young people like these every year. Without early intervention, your child could be one of them.”
A young woman’s blurred face speaks to the camera: “I told Mum and Dad I wanted to study law to fight systemic racism in the courts. But in sophomore year, I joined the College Democrats. Now I see everything is a lot more complicated than Daddy made out. If we don’t get tough on crime, we’ll lose office. Then how would we begin cautious police reform in 2044?”
A black screen; silence. A line of text appears: “Don’t let your child be sucked into the centre”.
We hear a final, sombre voice-over: “Know the warning signs. A meme about brat girl summer or coconut trees might look harmless at first. But suddenly, your child is canvassing for Top Cop Kamala. It’s never too early to start talking to your child about the true history of the Democratic Party”.

April Holcombe

Kids: Just say no to liberal centrism

China’s boom is well and truly over. Through the 2000s, the economy enjoyed double-digit annual growth. Now, few expect it to hit the 5 percent target announced at this year’s National People’s Congress, the dictatorship’s rubber-stamp parliament. Previous pillars of growth, property and infrastructure are teetering on mountains of debt, and the United States is trying to block the country’s advance into high-tech manufacturing.
In anticipation of an economic slowdown, President Xi Jinping has long centralised political power. “The current leadership believes that it can survive an economic downturn by tightening its control over society, eradicating autonomous elite factions, and adopting a more assertive posture on the international stage amid rising geopolitical tension”, Ho-fung Hung writes in New Left Review.
That assertive posture involves directing investment into “new quality productive forces”. The first group of outputs in this category includes solar panels, electric vehicles and lithium batteries, areas it already dominates in terms of global production. China hopes to remain the pre-eminent manufacturer of such goods. 
The second group includes silicon chips, IT systems and artificial intelligence. Here it faces sanctions and other obstacles because such technologies are crucial for military hardware and are of supreme importance in the country’s rivalry with the United States. With growth slowing and foreign investors leaving, a single-minded focus on technological innovation means squeezing greater profits from Chinese workers.
Modern China’s meteoric rise involved two phases. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the country welcomed a flood of foreign direct investment into low-end manufacturing and assembly plants, attracted by seemingly inexhaustible reserves of cheap labour held down by the “Communist” dictatorship. Deeply dependent on exports and foreign investment, China narrowly avoided being dragged down with the West during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. 
It shifted rapidly to a second, domestic phase of growth: infrastructure development. In his book Ghost Cities of China, Wayne Shepard described the country in the 2010s as like a giant construction site. “The old is being replaced with the new, and the new is being replaced with the newer, in a cyclical process of creation and destruction”, he wrote. Local governments were given free rein to sell land and build bridges, roads, airports, shopping centres and apartment blocks. Beginning in 2002, the government built a high-speed rail network from scratch. By 2015 there were 12,000 kilometres of tracks; today, the network stretches 45,000 kilometres.
While the United States and Europe stagnated through what Marxist economist Michael Roberts called “the long depression” (beginning with the financial crisis), China enjoyed another decade of strong growth. Yet this led to enormous government debts, the world’s largest property bubble, and significant excess industrial capacity. The government is now banning new highway and building projects in ten of China’s most indebted provinces, according to documents viewed by the Financial Times.
Many Western commentators anticipate China falling like a house of cards under this debt burden. But Kevin Lin, a researcher specialising in China and its labour movement, is sceptical of such prognoses. “There have been predictions of an imminent economic crisis going back twenty years now”, he tells Red Flag. “It’s not just a prediction, it’s almost like a hope.” 
The regime keeps a tight grip on national banks, allowing it to simply “roll over” what is owed by local government and state-owned enterprises. This is something Shepard also noted. “When considering domestic ‘debt’ in China, what we’re really discussing is the amount of money the Communist Party owes to the Communist Party”, he wrote.
That the debt might indeed be manageable is evident in the country’s property sector. Housing has been the number one investment for China’s burgeoning middle classes. And decades of untrammelled private investment in urbanisation resulted in skyrocketing valuations, which reached US$52 trillion combined, according to US investment bank Goldman Sachs. The speculative bubble centred on the world’s largest property company, Evergrande. Rather than let it burst, the government began a controlled demolition of the firm before it was finally liquidated. The process has lowered property prices and squeezed many households. But it also prevented a financial crisis.
“It hasn’t eliminated the risks—some of them are structural to capitalism, so they won’t just go away because of better economic management”, Lin says. “But if we take the longer view, instead of a crash, the economic crisis may be a continual slowdown for years to come.”
There are undoubtedly additional problems. Depressed consumer spending and falling prices have hurt economic growth. But President Xi Jinping has no plan to expand service industries or increase welfare. That would mean raising wages, increasing holiday leave and taxing the rich to fund higher pensions for a rapidly ageing population. Instead, spending is being directed towards the “new productive forces”. So bosses are suppressing wage growth and increasing the number of hours worked, while Xi tells young people that they must be prepared to “eat bitterness”.
Unemployment, like bitterness, is growing. Twenty-one percent of young people were unemployed by June 2023, before the government suddenly stopped publishing figures (then changed its calculation method). The solar panel giant Longi will sack more than 20,000 workers due to a supply glut, according to Bloomberg, one consequence of capitalist over-investment.
Why is the government doubling down on investment in manufacturing? Over 30 years, the world has relinquished its manufacturing capacity to China, profiting from low wages and economies of scale. It’s not just shoes or iPhone assembly. Last year, the United States built ten commercial shipping vessels. China built more than 1,000.
The focus on “new productive forces” is about pressing this advantage. The regime under Xi Jinping is building what he calls “national champions” to dominate global markets. The “old trio” of textiles, furniture and appliances has given way to the “new trio” of solar panels, electric vehicles and lithium batteries.
So far, it is steamrolling the competition. The New York Times reports that China installed more solar panels in 2023 than the United States has in its history. Its ultra-cheap exports drove European solar companies out of business long ago. Electric vehicle company Tesla has fallen to second place behind China’s BYD in terms of global sales. “In many sectors such as EVs, [Western countries] are—for the first time in modern history—in a technological catch-up mode vis-a-vis a more advanced competitor, which they also consider a key geopolitical rival”, Paolo Gerbaudo wrote in a recent article for political economy website Phenomenal World.
The West is retaliating with what Lin calls “open economic warfare”. The US Congress’s vote to ban Chinese-owned app TikTok is only the latest move towards IT “decoupling”. As Intel, Dell and IBM pull out of Chinese markets, the Communist Party has announced a plan to “Delete A” (“A” being America) and replace all foreign software systems in government computers by 2027. The European Union is poised to impose tariffs on electric vehicles it accuses China of “dumping” into its markets. All this has culminated in foreign direct investment falling to a 30-year low. 
Crucially, Chinese capitalism faces the prospect of being blocked from buying the most advanced silicon chips from the United States, Taiwan, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and South Korea. In response, the government has invested heavily to try to develop its own. Although lagging a generation behind Taiwanese nanochips, China has just released a new Huawei phone series powered by domestically produced chips.
This economic warfare is not only, or even primarily, about short-term profits. “More than the economic benefit to the US, the underlying motivation is to maintain US global hegemony”, Lin says. High-tech manufacturing, especially of semiconductors, is the foundation of military “innovation”. Any country whose missile components are produced in enemy territory has a big problem. The key reason that US imperialism is preventing China from accessing foreign technology is to prevent its military expansion. Mass reserves of foreign exchange will furnish China with the capital to build its own, so the US is trying to block Chinese exports as well. 
Beijing is not, however, entirely left out in the cold. Russia and Iran have forged closer economic ties with it to recover from Western sanctions. The Economist magazine estimates that Russia has become the largest importer of Chinese cars: sales have tripled since the invasion of Ukraine, and Russian gas exports to China have spiked in return.
China remains the major trading partner of 120 countries. Despite complaints of Chinese steel dumping, most countries are unlikely to block super-cheap cars, phones and laptop computers. Some middle-ranking powers are exploiting the rivalry between Washington and Beijing, moving politically closer to one and economically closer to the other.
But if the aim of economic strategy is to build military power, China has a long way to go. Military spending has more than doubled since 2015, and its nuclear stockpile is set to quadruple by 2035. This still puts it far behind the United States, which is shoring up its comprehensive system of alliances.
China has rapidly developed its navy (by some measures now the world’s biggest) but can barely project power past its own coastline. Aggressive moves into waters to the east and south have angered its US-allied neighbours along the “first island chain” of the Pacific. Japan is negotiating its first new security pact with the United States in 60 years, while the Philippines has granted the US military access to more of its bases. Taiwan, which faces almost daily intimidation by China’s navy and air force, launched its first domestically built submarine in February. 
Chinese armed forces also suffer from corruption, inefficiency and inexperience. “China’s military has definitely achieved a major upgrade from twenty years ago, but I don’t think the government leadership has full confidence in their military”, Lin says. “They have not engaged in any conflict since the invasion of Vietnam in the late 1970s.”
China’s economy is slowing and vulnerable—but not weak. Its high-tech export plan is a strategy to maintain growth and build military power. That’s because, as tensions increase between powerful countries, everything from electric cars to media apps is treated as a potential weapon.

China after the slowdown

Channel Seven gives special treatment to special people.
Former Liberal Party staffer Bruce Lehrmann, who assaulted his colleague Brittany Higgins on a senator’s couch at parliament house, is just the most recent. Lehrmann is a rapist—but a rapist whose $2,000 weekly rent was paid for by Seven News until early April, once his disastrous defamation case came to a head.
To clinch exclusive interviews with Lehrmann for the Spotlight program, the network also paid a total of $10,000 for Thai massages, paid for flights for a golf trip to Tasmania and reimbursed Lehrmann for his outlays on cocaine and sex workers, according to ex-producer Taylor Auerbach. The subsequent Spotlight puff pieces gave the rapist a national platform to try to destroy his victim’s reputation.
“Gutter journalism” is too lofty a term: this was scraping the bottom of the sewer. Yet this was no one-off.
It follows Seven’s support for war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith in his defamation suit against Fairfax journalists. That case backfired too: the court on 1 June 2023 agreed with reporters that the decorated ex-SAS soldier murdered four Afghans in cold blood. Total legal costs, which reportedly reached $35 million according to an article in the Guardian, were paid for by Seven West Media’s billionaire owner and chair Kerry Stokes. 
Is this also the tale of a slimy commercial power struggle? Lehrmann’s defamation suit targeted Network Ten journalist Lisa Wilkinson, while Roberts-Smith fought reporters from the Nine Entertainment Company. The war for market share between Seven, Nine and Ten is the stuff of corporate legend, and perhaps played a part. But it is not the full story: Seven also backed Lehrmann, and especially Roberts-Smith, to push the toxic politics of its billionaire owner.
Stokes is arguably the country’s most influential news mogul. As well as the television channel, Seven West Media controls 30 newspapers and exercises a near-monopoly over Western Australian news. 
In 2022, Perth Mayor Basil Zempilas introduced him as “the man who really runs the state” at an annual dinner hosted by Stokes and attended by then WA Premier Mark McGowan, according to the Australian Financial Review’s Mark di Stefano. “Stokes gathers oligarchs to kiss the ring”, the newspaper headlined its report of the following year’s gathering.
It’s easy to see why Stokes backed Roberts-Smith: his undying support for Australian militarism. In the 1990s, Stokes founded the charity SAS Resources Fund to support returned soldiers and served as chair of the Australian War Memorial from 2007 to 2022. Roberts-Smith was general manager of Seven Media Queensland, and fellow ex-SAS Andrew McMahon was chief operating officer for Stokes’ private company Australian Capital Equity.
In the Lehrmann case, Liberal partisanship played a role. Seven’s decision to pay more than $100,000 for mudslinging interviews was partially damage control for a party still haunted by misogyny scandals.
Some are questioning whether Seven can survive. Free-to-air television is already the sick man of the media, kept on life support by declining year-on-year advertising revenue. SWM’s share price of $0.21 is far from its 2007 peak of nearly $15. The company is currently worth $323 million—down 48 percent since August. It’s a fraction of Stokes’ total wealth of $10.1 billion, which overwhelmingly comes from investments in property, mining and construction.
But Stokes may be determined to hold on to the ailing network, because owning a traditional media empire pays in other ways. For example, it can disseminate ideas that its owner wants more people to hold, and therefore is quite a political tool. 
You can partly thank Seven for Pauline Hanson’s rehabilitation after a decade in the political wilderness. The disgraced former politician resurfaced on morning show Sunrise before the 2016 federal election. The network paid at least $5,000 for 20-odd appearances, according to Crikey estimates. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation went from zero to four senate seats in that election, and still has two. 
When Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant slaughtered 51 Muslims in Christchurch in 2019, Sunrise host David Koch described his white supremacist manifesto as “like One Nation immigration policy”—but Seven kept Hanson as a regular guest anyway.
Then there’s plain-old Seven “news”: round-the-clock promotion of law-and-order politics, turning the camera away from society’s most elite criminals and zooming in on its pettiest. On 22 April, the top twenty headlines at 7news.com.au included twelve related to interpersonal violence and car crashes, including “Man attacked and robbed by women after kind act” and “Domino’s worker allegedly throws pizza at customer”.
Finally, with its power to steer policy debate, and make or break political careers, traditional media acts as a force multiplier for big business’s built-in leverage. Describing the influence of the West Australian, Glenn Dyer and Bernard Keane write at Crikey: “That paper functions as the in-house newsletter and chief enforcer of the mining and fossil fuel lobby that controls that state and its government-for-hire, currently managed by WA Labor”. Now, mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is funding the launch of another Stokes project, online newspaper the Nightly.
With 30 established newspapers and another just released, the sewer at Seven is just one burst main in Kerry Stokes’ empire of shit.

Kerry Stokes’ empire of shit

Big companies are pulling the rip-off of the century. Coles and Woollies, Qantas and Virgin, AGL and Origin Energy, and the Big Four banks are passing on inflated prices and interest rates to consumers, cutting workers’ real purchasing power and boosting company profits to record highs. 
Last month, Coles and Woolworths were put in the spotlight. A Four Corners report exposed how the grocery duopoly, which controls two-thirds of the supermarket sector, is driving up the cost of the weekly shop. They have been doing so by means of things such as “shrinkflation”—when products get imperceptibly smaller for the same or greater price—and “was/now pricing”, a trick played with the “discount specials”: for example, when goods are advertised as “50 percent off” a price they were never sold for.
The anger is palpable. The federal Labor government is under pressure to do something, and a parliamentary inquiry is now under way. Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci’s resignation after a train wreck interview was a delicious interlude, but predatory pricing will carry on as usual.
The most obvious and immediate fix—government-mandated price caps on essential goods—is also the most popular, supported by 70 percent of the population, according to a 2022 Guardian Essential poll. But the very idea draws gasps from economists and journalists. Sydney Morning Herald business columnist Elizabeth Knight described a maximum price on a loaf of bread as “draconian”, “extreme” and “beyond the pale”. Labor for its part refuses to make any encroachment on corporate power.
The only solution offered by commentators and “experts” is to introduce more competitors against corporations with too much market power. Even an Inquiry into Price Gouging and Unfair Pricing Practices commissioned by the Australian Council of Trade Unions identifies the problem as “Australia’s less than fully competitive economy”.
Why would more competition help to lower prices? Economists argue that when customers have more options, each retailer feels more pressure to offer goods that are cheaper, better quality or both. 
The same argument is used to justify the selling of public utilities and services (often “natural monopolies”). Qantas, for example, was once government-owned and run with fully unionised workforces. When it was sold, thousands of workers were sacked, and their benchmark pay and safety standards were torn to shreds. Last year, the airline was revealed to be selling tickets to overbooked or cancelled flights. Now the experts say Qantas, already opened to competition, just needs to “open up to competition”. What did Albert Einstein say about insanity?
Economists cannot get their story straight about monopolies. Big corporations are just as often accused of “flooding” the market with cheap goods (such as when Coles introduced $1-a-litre milk in 2010) as of artificially inflating prices. Well-unionised monopolies such as Sydney Trains are accused of providing workers with “cushy” pay and conditions, while non-unionised ones such as Amazon are condemned (rightly, and by very different people) for the most aggressive forms of exploitation and management despotism.
The problem is not monopoly, but the profit motive. Every company, big or small, is allowed to produce what our society needs entirely for its own selfish gain, in ruthless competition with each other. As a class, the capitalists enjoy a collective monopoly over everything we need to function and survive. 
When workers collectively organise and strike against this state of affairs, things can improve. When they don’t, businesses always take the shortest path to profit: cutting wages, worsening services or raising prices.
Spreading capitalist power across several companies gives us no more control over the prices and distribution of goods and services. It can even make things worse.
Streaming is a good example. The free and easy age of torrenting whatever you liked was monopolised by Netflix. That was bad. When Netflix was “opened up to competition”, we got Binge, Stan, Hulu, Disney, Amazon Prime and Apple TV, each with a separate subscription fee and a separate slice of the popular shows.
Capitalist competition inevitably gives rise to its “opposite”, monopoly. Telephone monopoly AT&amp;T Company (founded by Alexander Graham Bell) was forced by US courts in 1984 to break up into many “baby Bells”. By the 2000s, the babies had merged back to form AT&amp;T Inc. and two other giants that still dominate US telecommunications.
In fact, the freer the competition, the faster the concentration of capital. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook each began as one of many start-ups battling in a deregulated, globalised free-for-all. Within a generation they were some of the largest corporations ever to roam the Earth.
Adding five or six more competitors is a pro-capitalist diversion from a cost-of-living crisis fuelled by competition. Let’s take “too much market power” to its logical conclusion: let’s just have one food distribution system in the same way we have one road system. 
The whole food supply chain—from farms to warehouses to supermarkets—should operate according to a single, democratic plan. The population can decide collectively on what goods should be produced and for what price—if any. The workers at each stage of the process should plan together how to carry out their part of the work. The concentrated wealth, technology and organisation of modern-day monopolies make this a far more realistic proposal than breaking them up. 
Under democratic planning, however, there’ll be no place for profit and exploitation. So for defenders of capitalism, “beyond the pale” doesn’t begin to describe it.

Market forces got you down? Try more market forces

What would you do with $1.5 million? You could put down deposits on ten median-priced Sydney houses, or you could buy one outright and spare yourself the crushing mortgage repayments.
What about the next $1.5 million? And the next? If you were mining barons Gina Rinehart and Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest or billionaire real estate developer Harry Triguboff, the question would be posed repeatedly. Since 2020, the three richest Australians have collectively amassed this much money every hour.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for four years.
Welcome to the “New Gilded Age”. That’s what British charity Oxfam is calling this era of post-pandemic wealth accumulation. Its 2024 report Inequality Inc. estimates that Rinehart, Forrest and Triguboff have increased their wealth by $50 billion, while the richest 47 Australians enjoyed a 70 percent surge.
It seems like impossible fortunes to spend, but they find ways. Twiggy’s got a $42 million luxury resort island off the Great Barrier Reef. Triguboff bulldozed and rebuilt his $100 million Vaucluse compound. With their recent respective buyouts of R.M. Williams and Akubra (Twiggy), Driza Bone and Rossi Boots (Gina), Australia’s two biggest mining bosses are trapped in a sartorial showdown: who can most own the high-fashion-outback-billionaire look?
“You’re rich, but are you family office rich?”, Primrose Riordan asks in the Australian Financial Review. Family offices deal with dynastic fortunes so enormous that the families in question require full-time staffers to manage them. These firms have doubled to more than 2,000 in a decade, KMPG researchers say, and offer discretion or downright secrecy for clients. 
“They don’t want the employees of the company knowing what they are investing in or spending their money on”, one family office founder explained. When surveyed by the Private Wealth Network, 70 percent of family office clients said they hid their wealth from friends and relatives too, to avoid the “awkward”, “uncomfortable” and “isolating” situation of being asked to share any of it.
If the age doesn’t feel very gilded for you, it’s because you’re footing the bill. These fortunes are built dollar by dollar on the labour and losses of the rest of us. Underneath Australia’s rosy image as an egalitarian “lucky country” lies a deep and wide class divide. There is luxury and extravagance above us, and poverty all around. 
Even before the pandemic, in the decade after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a staggering 93 percent of the benefits of all economic growth in Australia went to the richest 10 percent, according to research by the think tank Australia Institute. 
Now, an even greater transfer of wealth from workers to bosses is taking place. Real wages last year fell at their fastest rate in four decades. Rising prices on the shelves have forced 70 percent of people to cut back on groceries, a Guardian Essential poll found last year.
For corporate profits, it’s the opposite. A new report on price gouging from former Australian Consumer and Competition Commission chair Allan Fels tells us that they reached their highest level ever recorded in 2022 and were the key driver of inflation. 
On housing too, it is the best of times and worst of times. Rents are up 30 percent since 2020, according to CoreLogic’s latest Rate Review. So are property developer Lang Walker’s profits, the Financial Review informs us. Mortgage costs have skyrocketed with interest rate rises, while the big banks recorded $32.5 billion in profits last year.
Colleen Carina, a 60-year-old assistant nurse working in aged care, is living out of a Coffs Harbour motel room provided by Mission Australia. “I’m looking at rentals at $460 a week”, she told the Guardian in August. “Say I’m making my average wage, maybe $600 or $700 a week, by the time you pay for fuel, you put money away for electricity, or even a car account—how do you live?”
If you ask the rich, it’s Colleen’s own fault. Once workers cut back on non-essentials like haircuts and dental care, we’ll finally have more money to give to our needy banks. “Put your shoulder to the wheel”, Sally Tindall, research director at RateCity implored ABC radio listeners on 7 February. “If you put just an extra $200 a week to your mortgage, you could save tens of thousands of dollars down the line.”
It is tempting to think that, because our hard work appears like magic in their bank accounts, the rich are sincerely this uncoupled from reality. But then they give the game away. In a clip since gone viral, developer Tim Gurner tells a Financial Review Property Summit that workers have forgotten their place:
“We need to see unemployment rise—unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 percent, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
Gurner belongs to a new generation of “longevity bros” with so much money they are terrified of dying before spending it all. With $150 million, he is opening a chain of exclusive anti-ageing clubs called Saint Haven. Members will pay tens of thousands a year to access meditation caves, cryotherapy, IV drips and spiritual healers.
“It’s not just superstar business elite, we’ve got an incredible musician who will be a member, we’ve got one of the top bankers in Australia, we’ve got a jewellery store owner, an artist and a restaurant owner, a completely diverse mix”, Gurner explained to the Financial Review, before adding that “it will be quite cult-like”.
I’ll take the eternal abyss, thanks.
“Corporate power”, Oxfam says, “is an unrelenting inequality-generating machine”. Fuelled by increased exploitation, the machine is speeding up.

Australia’s ‘New Gilded Age’

Davos, a small skiing town in Switzerland, once a year becomes the world’s most consequential insane asylum. On Europe’s highest populated mountaintop, 3,000 of the global elite meet to ponder why the climate they pollute is so polluted, why the people they impoverish are so poor and why the world they fight over is at war. 
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is the ruling-class Comic-Con, a fantasy fortress where the 1 percent’s 1 percent can save the world that they are sending to hell. 
The 2024 iteration in mid-January offered five days of unadulterated bullshit. (All sessions can be viewed at weforum.org.) One session was about “liberating science”; another was about “empowering humans and machines in industry” (empowering machines?). Amid the melting slopes, hundreds, including “ecopreneurs”, arrived on carbon-spewing private jets to hear skiing equipment CEOs talk about the challenge of “alpine economies at +2°C”. 
This year’s conference theme? “Rebuilding trust”.
And who wouldn’t trust Ronald W. Hovsepian, CEO of Indigo Agriculture. “For so long, we’ve taken advantage of those natural resources and not put that into the economic equation”, he told attendees on 17 January. “So we do look at it and we include it in the way we look at the markets and how we’re going to tie together a number of the players to bring the value chains to life as part of that overall journey.”
That sentence sure was a journey.
Davos coincides with the release of British charity Oxfam’s annual report on global inequality. The 2024 issue, Inequality Inc.: A Gilded Age of Division, estimates that, in the last four years, the wealth of the world’s five richest men more than doubled to US$870 billion, while the poorest 5 billion are even poorer than they were in 2019. 
“The sharp increase in the cost of food and other essentials that began in 2021 has become a grinding new reality for many families across the world as they try to buy oil, bread or flour without knowing how much they can afford this time, or how hungry they and their children will have to go today”, the report notes. 
Meanwhile, at US$190 billion, the combined annual profits of oil and gas companies are triple their pre-pandemic average. Luxury goods profits have doubled—evidenced by the suits, watches, jewellery and handbags opulently displayed at Davos. Women, by the way, made up 28 percent of all attendees, which conference organisers said is really good for a creepy old-boys’ club and “marks a significant milestone in the 54-year history of the annual meeting”.
The point of the WEF appears to be demonstrating that the rich live, quite literally, in a different part of the atmosphere. According to swissinfo.ch, up to 5,000 Swiss armed guards were deployed to protect the conference. That’s called rebuilding trust one hotel-rooftop-sniper at a time. 
Architects of Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza lined up at the conference buffet. Israeli President Isaac Herzog, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen all spoke about the democratic, rules-based order. In the same week, a Palestinian doctor in Gaza told Al Jazeera about having to amputate his own daughter’s leg without anaesthetic. 
On 19 January, attendees were safely, soundly and warmly “anticipating the Middle East in 2024”. The region is a century-long victim of the West’s rapacious competition to secure oil, gas and trade routes. Now that it’s teetering on the edge of general war, Davos-goers wondered how they might extract even more profits from the place. 
That was a common theme at the conference’s more serious sessions. Capitalists don’t solve problems; they anticipate them. They try to keep pace with the “risk environment” created by their own blind profiteering. If the Congo introduces child labour restrictions in its cobalt mines, how badly will margins be affected? If Taiwan is invaded and millions are vaporised in a nuclear war, where will be the next happening place for silicon chip production? When will interest rate hikes finally lift the unemployment rate and reduce the heat on wage bills?
But for many, the WEF was about getting down to brass tacks. The talks, delusionally self-serving as they were, were a flimsy pretext for getting the world’s shiniest shoes into the same building and under the same tables. 
“Ask almost anyone who is here, and they will tell you—some freely, some coyly—that their chief purpose in Davos is to get several weeks’ worth of high-level business meetings and networking done in three to five days”, Hans van Leeuwen, the Australian Financial Review’s Europe correspondent, reported. “I didn’t overhear anyone during my trip discussing climate change, the challenge of artificial intelligence, the likely fate of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia this year, or the world’s economic prospects.”
Behind the images projected to the world (was anyone watching?), Davos was capitalism in all its glory. Thousands of executives and politicians wheeled and dealed, wined and dined. An arms deal here, a fossil fuel project there, a tax break on top. 
Freshly gorged and eyes glazed, they sauntered to another plenary to pretend to listen to think tankers, stakeholders, thought leaders, trendsetters, philanthropists, trustees, advisors, editors, commissioners, directors, professors, consultants, analysts, wonks—an army of grubby bullshit artists waxing and wanking over issues their coked-up audience couldn’t care less about—unless there’s a buck to be made. Show us the money!
It is amazing that Thomas Hobbes’ famed war of all against all never broke out on the conference floor. But the wars are always fought by people other than these. The WEF spirit is to revel in what the parasites share in common: a lifestyle, a worldview, a set of economic interests to exploit, pillage and plunder.
If you thought the prospect of the whole world going down the capitalist gurgler would provoke a reflective thought or two, think again. The Davos set are doubling down. New far-right Argentine President Javier Milei gave the keynote address, which the Financial Times reports was “met with warm applause”. According to him, there is not a thing wrong with the system: 
“Talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures ... Thanks to free trade capitalism, the world is now living its best moment. Never in all of mankind or humanity’s history has there been a time of more prosperity than today ... I would like to leave a message for all businesspeople here ... You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen.”
These people rule the world. Davos is not a padded cell for Ayn Rand LARPers debating how much heroin in children’s lollipops would maximise marginal utility. It’s real life, just not as we know it. 
“The Davos Matrix is plugged directly into the mainframe”, Hamilton Nolan wrote in the Guardian about last year’s conference. “The decisions that these people make in their little atmosphere of illusion percolate out into the real world, leaving the rest of us holding the bag as wealth trickles further and further upwards.”
Little wonder that polls show all-time low levels of trust in governments and corporations, as capitalists rampage across the globe leaving destruction, poverty and resentment in their wake.
“Yes, it’s a volatile, tense world we are living in”, Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm admitted in a panel discussion on 18 January. “But it’s opportunity rich. And I think the opportunity far outweighs the problems.”
That’s the Davos spirit.

At Davos, the inmates run the asylum—and the world

Taiwan’s 13 January presidential and legislative elections were a three-way fight between the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the conservative Nationalist Party and the new “third way” Taiwan People’s Party. The DPP held onto the presidency for a third term while the People’s Party soaked up significant pools of disaffection from both major parties.
For international policy wonks, this election was a critical verdict on “cross-strait relations”—a euphemism for whether Taiwan can avoid being invaded by China or becoming ground zero in a US-China war. So China quite literally “loomed” over Western press coverage. 
“China <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/12/china-taiwan-election-xi-jinping-united-states/">looms</a> over Taiwan’s fateful election” (Washington Post, 12 January); “For China, Taiwan’s elections are a <a href="https://www.economist.com/china/2024/01/04/for-china-taiwans-elections-are-a-looming-crisis">looming</a> crisis” (Economist, 4 January); “China’s Xi claims ‘reunification’ with Taiwan is ‘inevitable’ as crucial election <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/27/china/china-xi-jinping-taiwan-reunification-intl-hnk/index.html">looms</a>” (CNN, 26 December); “Taiwan presidential election: Opposition in chaos as China <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/06/taiwan-presidential-election-opposition-in-chaos-as-china-looms-in-background">looms</a> in background” (Guardian, 6 December).
The return of the DPP is viewed as a “blow” to Beijing. But the election was not fought primarily over China relations. It was about the economy. All three parties downplayed their traditional cross-strait positions, and the biggest beneficiary was the one that did so the most—the People’s Party.
Popular national-democratic sentiment did secure a third term for the historically pro-independence DPP under new president Lai Ching-te. But the victory was narrower than in 2020, Lai receiving just 40 percent of the vote compared to 57 percent for his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen. The DPP also lost its outright majority in the Legislative Yuan (parliament). 
The Nationalist Party, for 40 years the leader of a one-party military dictatorship, is closer to Beijing and socially conservative. Its candidate, Hou Yu-ih, an ex-cop, won 33 percent of the vote. The stridently pro-independence New Power Party, once a rising star born of the 2014 Sunflower movement, suffered a complete parliamentary wipeout.
Voters swung sharply towards the People’s Party, which fielded a presidential candidate for the first time. Ko Wen-je, a surgeon and the mayor of Taipei, won 27 percent of the vote, allying with the Nationalist Party but downplaying the China question. Ko talked more about his housing policy and touted a number of progressive social positions, despite the People’s Party not being a working-class or progressive organisation. 
Ko is a careerist with close ties to Foxconn billionaire Terry Gou, who has jumped between the “Pan-Green” (pro-independence, pro-Washington) and “Pan-Blue” (pro-unification, pro-Beijing) camps to ride alternating waves of political disaffection. 
The claim that Taiwan is part of China is historically baseless and cruelly dismissive of the democratic rights of Taiwan’s majority. Young people in particular are practically unanimously against unification with China and identify only as Taiwanese. Yet they also value peace and oppose moves that would provoke Chinese aggression, such as formally declaring independence. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s inflammatory visit in 2022 and China’s threats of reprisal brought the issue to its tensest in decades.
But the daily grind of Taiwanese capitalism seems to be weighing heavier than the prospects of a future invasion. Inflation is eroding the value of wages, which can barely cover rents. 
Workplace exploitation, nuclear power, anti-migrant racism, and women’s and LGBT rights are more important issues for many young people than the intrigue involved in the politicians’ cynical balancing act between military superpowers. The DPP poses as a progressive alternative on these social issues, but rules in the interests of big business. That was the main reason it lost so much support. 
Taiwan is home to some of the world’s most advanced semiconductor plants. Yet economic growth has been sluggish for years. Most workers are not employed in the high-tech industries, but in low-end manufacturing and the services sector. 
According to Marxist economist Michael Roberts, real wages have barely risen in twenty years. While the median annual wage at silicon chip giant TSMC is A$84,000, workers in most sectors earn around $18,000 a year. Migrant cleaners and farmworkers from Thailand and the Philippines fare even worse.
Economic hardship has increased during eight years of DPP rule. In 2016, the new government “revised” the Labour Standards Act, scrapping minimum overtime pay and other conditions. Taiwanese workers now have the fourth-longest working week in the world. Tsai’s government made deep cuts to teachers’ pensions and increased their retirement age by eight years. House prices have risen by 50 percent in the past five years, while youth unemployment sits at a near-record 12 percent. 
Taiwanese capitalists, on the other hand, are living it up. The Forbes 50 richest Taiwanese have a combined wealth of $232 billion. And inequality is at its highest level since 1983. The DPP is too busy serving business interests to care about this.
The party was on track to lose badly in the 2020 elections. But in that campaign’s closing months, the island watched millions of Hong Kongers heroically rise up against the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship, only to fall under its brutal baton. The DPP enjoyed a stunning reversal of fortune and won in a landslide, banking on its reputation as the leader of the 1980s democracy struggle and champion of Taiwan’s de facto independence from China.
Yet the DPP is a nationalist one-trick-pony. The constant threats and warnings from a belligerent, imperialist China, enabled it to claim another election victory. But it is wearing thin on a working class suffering degraded living standards. The problem is that the other parties represent different interests among the Taiwanese elite, rather than any break with it. The debate in the political class is about how to balance profitable Chinese trade and investment with strong military ties to the United States. 
So sweatshop billionaire Terry Gou and microchip billionaire Morris Chang can stand on opposite sides of the China-US debate but be in broad agreement when it comes to policies screwing over workers in Taiwan and China. 
One breath of fresh air in the campaign was a labour protest held in Taiwan’s major cities on 23 December. A few thousand in Taipei and Kaohsiung demanded higher wages, higher pensions and shorter working hours. Smoke bombs were thrown outside the presidential building. 
“Protest leaders said they had submitted their demands to all three candidates, but none of their replies had satisfied them, so they would not ask their supporters to vote for any specific candidate”, the Taiwan News reported.
More of this kind of working-class independence is sorely needed. Otherwise, the Taiwanese people will remain squeezed by Chinese aggression on one side, US domination on the other, with the self-interested Taiwanese capitalists and politicians occupying the space between the two.

Taiwanese election a verdict on Taiwan, not China

“There will probably never be anything I can do to make my lifetime impact net positive”, Sam Bankman-Fried wrote in his diary after the collapse of his cryptocurrency company FTX. His high-profile criminal trial for corporate fraud is giving us another glimpse into capitalism’s moral abyss.
In a few short years, Bankman-Fried rapidly amassed a vast fortune from cryptocurrency, becoming the 60th richest person in the world with a net worth of US$26 billion. As CEO of hedge fund Alameda Research, he secretly and illegally funnelled US$10bn from his second company, FTX, to pay lenders and shareholders. When the value of cryptocurrencies plummeted last year and investors tried to withdraw their funds from FTX, the fraud was exposed. Both companies filed for bankruptcy in one of the biggest financial frauds in US history.
It’s classic billionaire behaviour. But Bankman-Fried was supposed to be different. He was a convert to “effective altruism” before he set about making money. Effective altruism is “a programme for rationalising charitable giving, positioning individuals to do the ‘most good’ per expenditure of money or time”, in the words of critical philosopher Alice Crary. So, as a young undergraduate in 2012, Bankman-Fried made the decision to maximise his utility: he was going to make a fortune and then give it away. 
With dull predictability, he did not do this. Trial proceedings have detailed a fortune not only fraudulently shifted between companies, but one that Bankman-Fried lavished on himself and his ambitions: an enormous Bahamas mansion in which to live with friends and associates (most of whom are now selling him down the river to save their own skins); millions on crypto-friendly politicians from both the Democrats and the Republicans; private jet trips to Washington, DC, for wheeling and dealing.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. Effective altruism calls on everyone to give what they can, and to give it where it will do the most good. As the graphs and statistics on the official website effectivealtruism.org make clear, the focus is on clear-cut results backed by cold, hard data—not moral codes, worthy intentions or “warm and fuzzies”. Or, as Bankman-Fried explained on a podcast episode of Conversations with Tyler: “In the end, you turn things into numbers and you decide which number is biggest”. 
The greatest good for the greatest number—who could argue with that? Advocates point, with appropriate horror, at the millions who starve each year from economically induced famines, or the children dying from preventable diseases such as malaria. Even a small donation could help to save a life, they say: so why don’t you give?
Yet from its outset in the early writings of Peter Singer, the effective altruist movement firmly denied that capitalism was the cause of poverty. Governments and the rich might have greater means to give, but all individuals had a responsibility to donate to charity, and all shared the blame for global suffering. “Most of the major evils—poverty, overpopulation, pollution—are problems in which everyone is almost equally involved”, Singer wrote in a 1972 essay, “Famine, affluence and morality”. To call for systemic change instead of individualist charity was simply “an excuse for inactivity”. 
From these sanctimonious beginnings, effective altruism has transformed into a multibillion-dollar money pot, the latest cult of benevolent self-image among the world’s richest elite. Almost every billionaire, from Microsoft’s Bill Gates to Facebook’s Dustin Moskovitz, has a pet philanthropy project to save the world—and to reduce their taxes. Even the cartoonish megalomaniac Elon Musk, mostly moved by the plight of the unpeopled surface of Mars, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that effective altruism “is a close match for my philosophy”.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) was established in 2011, but capitalist philanthropy is nothing new. Ever since the industrial revolution threw millions into lives of eternal poverty, squalor and toil, the rich reaping the profits have used charity to self-style themselves as benefactors. 
In his 1844 work The Condition of the Working Class in England, revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels made this point blisteringly clear. The capitalist, he wrote, “conceals [his egotism] under the vilest hypocrisy. As though you rendered the workers a service in first sucking out their very life-blood ... and then give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them”.
Effective altruism eschews the sentimentalism of nineteenth century philanthropy for a more hard-nosed rationalism. Good deeds are calculated and optimised with the operations of private enterprise and market exchange. Scottish philosophy professor and co-founder of the CEA Will MacAskill recalls with pleasure the moment he proved to his mentor that the money he committed to curing blindness could be better spent. 
“My first big win was convincing him about deworming charities”, he told the New Yorker. “When measured in ‘quality-adjusted life years’, [deworming] would be a hundred times more cost-effective than a sight-saving eye operation.” 
For liberal moral philosophy, our desire to do good slips frictionlessly into the individualised consumer economy. In the market, a certain number of dollars can be made the equivalent of a human life. Four thousand dollars, to be precise: according to hedge fund analysts at Bridgewater Associates, a donation of this size to Against Malaria is the most efficient way of all to save a life.
But the illusion of consumer morality hides an important truth about power and capitalism. Small amounts of money can’t shift the overbearing weight of exploitative class structures. Yet money enough to solve a problem becomes the problem. It becomes capital: grease for the wheels of industry, which only turn one way—grinding down workers’ wages, squeezing wealth from the poorest countries and people, racing to secure fossil fuels, military hardware and vaccine patents. Even the most honest or “efficient” charity cannot keep up with the suffering that capitalism produces daily, hourly, with every transaction and investment.
To take one of the most celebrated initiatives as an example. The Against Malaria foundation has provided insecticide-treated bed nets to millions of people in Africa. And cases of and deaths from malaria fell between 2000 and 2015, attributable in part to these nets. Since then, the World Health Organization reports that cases and deaths are on the rise again in at least thirteen countries. 
“Escalating costs due to the global financial crisis is [sic] making the cost of delivering malaria interventions much more expensive”, the WHO noted in an August 2023 report. “Climate change including increased flooding and cyclones are [sic] affecting vector distribution and malaria transmission.”
By 2020, almost every sub-Saharan African country was spending more—up to seven times more—on debt repayments to international financiers than on public health. Citigroup, one of the world’s largest banks, is an official sponsor of Against Malaria. It is also an official adviser to the Kenyan government—“helping” it to cut public services to repay the predatory debts. The rich giveth and the rich taketh away. But they taketh with considerable interest.
Promoters of charity smear political radicals, accusing them of “folding their arms when something could be done right now”. But their best efforts often become PR for global kingmakers of poverty and pain. Indeed, in the past decade or so, the commitment of Effective Altruists™ to status quo economic power has produced several philosophical “breakthroughs”.
First was “earning to give”. If money can do good, then more money can do better. Just when Occupy Wall Street protesters were squaring the blame on the 1 percent, Will MacAskill was aggressively campaigning to anyone with a guilty conscience to get as rich as they possibly could. Advocates were convinced to quit their comfortable jobs as lawyers and engineers—the kind of people who can already afford to donate in conspicuously virtuous quantities—to become cutthroat traders on Wall Street. 
Habiba Islam was head of Amnesty International at Oxford University. “I know people who were committed to climate change as their thing—a pretty good guess for what’s important—before getting involved in EA”, she told the New Yorker. Now she works as a consultant for PwC.
It was a few months later when MacAskill met Sam Bankman-Fried, an ambitious undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the child of two Stanford law professors. MacAskill convinced him to “earn to give”. After Bankman-Fried had amassed a fortune of billions, he appointed the professor as his Future Fund adviser.
After “earning to give” came “longtermism”. Bankman-Fried was not interested in the humdrum ills of starvation and malaria. “[He] considered neartermist causes—global health and poverty—to be more emotionally driven”, said MacAskill. Eliminating malaria may save a few million people here and there, but if a pandemic or artificial intelligence were to wipe out the entire human race, then potentially trillions or quadrillions of future lives would be snuffed out before they even existed. 
The marginal utility of investment into AI or biosecurity is potentially many thousands of times greater than donating to combat malaria. Such is the conclusion of MacAskill’s latest publication, What We Owe the Future. In a staggering coincidence, altruistic and egoistic capitalists alike, short-term profiteers and long-term architects of the future, have all converged on the next tech frontier to make mega-profits—or save the world, take your pick. 
Singer and MacAskill have disavowed Bankman-Fried, but it is too late for that. Effective altruism has come full circle: from morally cajoling individuals to make better choices with their money, to embracing the market as a mechanism for virtuous people to gain the power to make change, and finally to a fully fledged philosophical justification for billionaires to make the money and fund the projects that make the world so unjust in the first place. 
That all this wealth could, or even should, be under the democratic control of billions, not the enlightened whims of billionaires, never occurs to these moral professors. Singer, MacAskill and their acolytes take entirely for granted that elites will always rule society and are the only ones with power to change. 
“[MacAskill’s] practical morality leads him to ally with the powerful entities that could change at least some things in our current historical moment”, James Kent and Michael Lazarus write in a recent piece for Logos journal. “But of course, this change would be conditional on things staying the same. Ethics ... is reduced to a form of personal administration: who to vote for, which charity to donate to, and which billionaire to root for.”
The effective altruists and all sorts of “pragmatists” hold radical critics of capitalism in haughty contempt. Unlike the purist revolutionaries, they are willing to get their hands dirty and get results. Their hands are very dirty, I’ll give them that. But the results?
An end to suffering and injustice will take collective action and political struggles against the class that profits from misery and poverty. The global poor do not need our charity, because they will not benefit from it. It is our solidarity and fellow participation in strikes, protests and revolts that they need: our determination to demand the wealth, to take it back without asking and not to wait for the mythical “better nature” of the rich and powerful. There is no shorter path to solving the world’s ills than a radical reconstruction of society from the bottom up.

Sam Bankman-Fried and the moral abyss of the market

Why do we compete so much? Every year, tens of thousands of year 12 students have their academic merit precisely graded from top to bottom with an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank. We compete for our livelihoods—for jobs, housing and promotions. Companies compete in the economy for market share. Countries compete for global influence. The outcome of these competitions determines the fate of everyone in the world. Frequently, competition leads to war. 
Since our lives are peppered with a million little contests for reward, it can appear that economic and military competition arise from the same essential human drive as in board games and swimming carnivals. After all, there are even contests for who can grow the most gigantic pumpkin (Stefano Cutrupi, 1,225kg) and who can eat the most hot dogs (Joey Chestnut, 63 in 60 seconds).
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection—“survival of the fittest”—is still often raised as scientific proof that our nature is hardwired to see all others as rivals whom we must out-compete. Yet this is wrong. Capitalism has existed for only a few hundred years; humanity, on the other hand, has survived for more than 200,000. Competition was not a feature of society at all for most of that time, whereas it is now the central dynamic. The economic competition at the heart of capitalism breeds endless other forms—not the other way around. 
This competitive drive is hurling us towards senseless civilisational destruction. It seems as if, despite knowing what is happening, we are powerless to stop it. Why? The answer lies within our market society.
Markets are an unplanned, chaotic scramble by private players to make as much profit as quickly as possible; almost all goods and services provided in our capitalist system are produced for a market. If something won’t make profit on a market, capitalists won’t invest in it—even if it is essential, useful or enjoyable for human life. The madness of capitalism is that some of the most profitable industries are the most destructive to our society: fossil fuels, military hardware, financial speculation.
In the idealised market system, anyone with enough money can set up a business and produce goods or provide a service to sell to others. If that business can make a profit that rich people deem a worthy return on their investment, the owners will be able to expand operations and make themselves rich as well. If their business makes low or unreliable profits, it will most likely go under or be taken over by a larger competitor.
Capitalists cannot simply mind each other’s business. “I don’t understand how anyone could have a billion dollars and feel like they need more”, is a common and sensible refrain from people the world over. Yet the greed of the world’s richest people is not a quirk of personality: it’s the logical consequence of producing for profit. They cannot quietly work in their corner of the marketplace, making only as much money as they deem sufficient for their own tastes. Capitalists are constantly fighting to stay ahead of the pack—so that investors are attracted by the high rate of return, and so that the business has the money to continue expanding and thus crowd out its rivals.
The effect of this competition over the longer term is to thin out the playing field. More profitable businesses get bigger. Bigger companies can afford more advanced machinery, can open more stores and can produce at vast scales that flood the market. They can then buy other companies and absorb them (as Google did with YouTube) or drive their rivals to the wall (as Facebook did to MySpace). The “mom-and-pop” grocers, butchers and bakers can’t compete with the convenience, prices and reach of Coles and Woolworths.
As smaller businesses are knocked out, a tighter and tighter circle of the super-rich come to control the national economy. Most industries in a country are dominated by three or four major corporations. Worldwide, there are fewer than 750 corporations that between them account for 80 percent of all business wealth. Silicon microchips, one of global capitalism’s most essential goods, have taken this to a whole new level. Building a single fabrication plant can cost US$20 billion. No surprise then, that a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, produces 55 percent of all the world’s microchips, and up to 90 percent of the most cutting-edge versions.
Contrary to the “wealth trickles down” slogan of the free marketeers, a gigantic flood of our social wealth is accelerating upwards. That is why, over the last four years, two-thirds of all wealth produced in the world has gone to the richest 1 percent, according to estimates from Oxfam International. And the wealth of the world’s billionaires is increasing by US$2.7 billion a day.
One percent sounds like a tiny minority—and it is. Yet in Australia, that is still roughly 250,000 people. After mining magnates Gina Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest, media mogul James Packer, Gerry Harvey of Harvey Norman and Andrew Pratt the cardboard box billionaire, that leaves 249,995 capitalists whom none of us have ever heard of. This army of shareholders, directors, CEOs and executives constantly press big business forward. 
The overall competition may be driven by the big businesses, but this doesn’t mean that small businesses are playing a nicer game. Small businesses love to say, “We’re like a family here”. So does the Sicilian mafia. But because small business profit margins are often slim, and the owners don’t usually have deep financial reserves, the difference between a good and bad year is bankruptcy. Up to 60 percent of all small businesses in Australia fail in the first three years. To keep their heads above water, they must maximise output and reduce expenses. Small business owners are therefore some of the most cutthroat employers, as any worker at a local restaurant or cafe can tell you. In fact, a 2018 FairWork investigation found that 80 percent of all restaurants on Sydney and Melbourne’s busy streets were illegally underpaying their staff—and getting away with it.
Competition does not take place only between businesses. As individuals, no matter who we are, we have to compete in the marketplace. The current madness of Sydney’s rental market is a perfect example. At each property inspection, dozens of people are lining up with the desperate hope of getting a place to live. This should be a basic human right. People feel the pressure to outbid everyone else there by making a private offer higher than the listing. Meanwhile, 150,000 properties remain empty in the city, used as overpriced Airbnbs, or just kept empty to drive up scarcity and artificially inflate prices.
It’s the same for most necessities. To buy the things we need, we first need money. Most of us don’t have anything we can sell except our ability to work. So we have to go to a capitalist, big or small, who wants workers and offer our services to get the money we need to survive. Here there’s competition as well. A boss won’t hire Andy for $30 an hour if he can get Bilal to work for $25 an hour. If Carlotta offers herself for $22 an hour, then she’ll probably get the job. It’s a race to the bottom between the workers. 
Supporters of capitalism say it goes both ways. Workers are free to join or leave any job of their own volition, they say. And if another boss offers better wages, they can poach that worker. But there is an obvious imbalance in the market economy. Workers are held to ransom by the fact that they risk starvation, homelessness, destitution if they do not sell themselves to someone. As workers, we can theoretically choose our boss, but we can’t choose not to have one. Bosses, on the other hand, have the advantage of capital on their side. They have assets and goods that they can sell to make money—assets and goods produced by the workers they hire. Even in the best of economic circumstances, there are always enough desperate unemployed workers to choose from and to compete for a job. 
We can see the long-term effects of this endless drive to exploit workers harder. In 1975, a time that was, we are constantly told by politicians and the press, the economic “bad old days”, around 58 percent of all income produced in Australia went to workers’ wages. Nowadays, however, workers receive a record low of just 44 percent of all income created. This is because, as bosses have attacked trade unions (part of whose job is to reduce competition and increase cooperation among workers), workers have lost a lot of their collective power and been forced to act as individuals in the economy.
Capitalism is a global system. Economic competition spills over national borders—and it doesn’t remain purely “economic”. This is why modern history has been wracked by destructive and large-scale conflict: the colonial scramble for Africa, two world wars, the Cold War and the intensifying conflicts of the 21st century. The capitalist system of nation-states competing to give their corporations the strongest position in the world economy has led to an arms race that has been going on for more than a hundred years. Today, US$2 trillion is spent every year on militaries around the world, a fraction of which could provide clean drinking water to everyone on the planet. 
The competition at the heart of capitalism is said to be essential for innovation and efficiency. There is no doubt that competition has driven vast technological changes over the last few centuries. Companies and states have tried to get an advantage over their rivals by finding faster and cheaper ways to produce more advanced goods and services, and greater quantities of them. 
Yet the goal of this innovation has not been to improve the lives of working people. That is why labour-saving technologies such as automation and computers haven’t much shortened the working day, despite massively increasing economic output. Also, innovation is inhibited by being in the service of profit. Many goods, for example, are “innovatively” designed to break down or become obsolete so that people have to buy another in a relatively short time. And instead of sharing the results of research and development, private companies—whether in pharmaceuticals, computing or green energy—jealously conceal their findings and patent their inventions to prevent them being replicated or improved on. 
Pooling human knowledge and science together would allow us to make qualitative steps forward: think of the rapid progress made in developing COVID-19 vaccines on <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/13-04-2020-public-statement-for-collaboration-on-covid-19-vaccine-development">the rare occasion that more collaboration occurred</a> between the world’s most advanced medical research institutes. Yet in the end, the profit motive of competition was allowed to reign again: a handful of companies made billions and have since slowed the research into better vaccines.
In short, competition is not “natural”; it is naturalised because it is at the heart of how capitalism operates. The world would be a better place, and life would be much easier for workers, if cooperation were put at the heart of how we live and organise society.

Competition: capitalism’s irrational engine

On one side of Sydney’s College Street, the rich and powerful friends of Cardinal George Pell stepped out from luxury cars and entered St Mary’s Cathedral for his funeral service. On the other, about 250 protesters gathered around a huge rainbow flag and chanted. A sign painted in giant letters informed funeral attendees across the road that “PELL IS IN HELL”.
Three weeks earlier, Cardinal George Pell, the patron saint of right-wing culture war, had finally died. “Hallelujah!” most people thought.
Not official society, however. They mourned the loss of one of their most distinguished bigots. Editorials and obituaries in the Australian described the late Pell as a “Christian gentleman”, “a great servant and teacher” who led “a life of dedication to church and state” with “the love of Christ [as] the heart of [his] life”. 
But it wasn’t just the usual right-wing suspects. Liberal broadsheets such as the Sydney Morning Herald adopted a more conflicted tone, yet still could not bear to treat a member of Australia’s noble elite with the savage contempt he deserved. “Pell’s achievements overshadowed by his defence of church’s interests”, the Herald editors wrote on 11 January. He was “an efficient financial administrator”, which makes his flaws—such as his virulent misogyny and lifelong complicity in systematic child rape—all the more tragic. 
This putrid gush of admiration was topped off with a lavish funeral at St. Mary’s 2 February. The cathedral is well-known to progressive activists because the church hosts an annual “Day of the Unborn Child” march against abortion rights. In the week leading up to the funeral, survivors of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests tied thousands of ribbons to the cathedral fence in remembrance of the victims—only for church officials to cut them down.
“George Pell was a vicious bigot, who fought against every step forward for LGBT and women’s rights and was profoundly complicit in horrific abuse within the church”, said Eddie Stephenson, a Community Action for Rainbow Rights Activist (CARR) and chair of the rally. 
“When people like Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton come out to publicly celebrate a monster like Pell and carry on his political legacy, it’s important that they’re met with a loud, angry protest that reminds them we’re going to fight back for the rights of the oppressed every step of the way.”
In the days leading up to the funeral, NSW police called and demanded that CARR move their protest away from the service. Activists refused to back down. Police then tried to prohibit the march entirely, hauling rally organisers in front of the NSW Supreme Court at the eleventh hour. 
This provoked a flurry of media attention, and CARR pledged to protest and march whatever the court decision. Under such public scrutiny and pressure, police were forced to concede the protesters’ right to assemble directly opposite the church and march right past funeral attendees. 
The protest heard from a variety of speakers with experience fighting the homophobia, misogyny and abuse of the Catholic church. Ken Davis, a gay socialist who helped to organise the first Mardi Gras in 1978, led the crowd in a chant of “Not the church, not the state, we shall decide our fate!” 
Protesters marched across the street towards the police barrier, facing down Catholic thugs who looked as though they took their communion with protein powder. As the crowd chanted, “George Pell, go to hell, take Dutton there as well!”, some fascists foamed at the mouth, dangled their crucifixes and hurled homophobic abuse. Jesus did not heed their call to strike down the protesters, who carried banners for LGBTI rights all the way along College Street and up Oxford Street to Taylor Square.
The main enemy in attendance, however, was not a few papist shock troops, but the “dignitaries” important enough to get a seat inside. This was an ecumenical gathering of the establishment’s hard right wing: federal opposition leader Peter Dutton, former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard, radio shock jock Alan Jones and anti-trans crusader Mark Latham. Their common credo is not Catholic doctrine but a political program: extreme social conservatism, climate denialism and a smirking attitude to abuse of the vulnerable. The only Catholic among them, arch bigot Tony Abbott, delivered an utterly depraved eulogy. It was a call-to-arms to carry on the right-wing culture war.
“It’s surely now for the Australian church to trumpet the cause of its greatest champion”, Abbott said to rapturous applause. “There should be Pell study courses, Pell lectures, Pell high schools and Pell university colleges, just as there are for the other saints.” Pell, the crowd was told, had endured a Christ-like crucifixion over allegations of child sex abuse and his subsequent imprisonment. Abbott also found time at the pulpit to quote the cardinal that the climate change movement was a “pseudo-religion”. 
The right’s paeans to Pell are so brazen that there is something of a wink and a smirk about it. They know he’s guilty of terrible crimes. But so what? He’s one of them. Sin is for the plebs; the ruling classes are absolved by their unshakeable faith that they were born to rule. Though Pell is now desiccating in a crypt and the influence of the Catholic church continues to decline, bigotry and abuse go much deeper than one man or one religion. 
A celebration of Pell’s death broadcast across all the airwaves—including on international news—was a breath of fresh air. Official society had worked overtime to generate an atmosphere of deference. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spinelessly offered his condolences. 
“It was powerful and palpable: you could see, walking past the people watching the service, what we’re up against, you could see the hatred directed towards us, right in front of us”, Vivian Moore, a LGBT activist and child sex abuse survivor, told Red Flag. “This rally gave a voice to survivors and people who have been oppressed by the church in all manner of ways.” 
Yet the struggle continues. The ruling class warriors who attended his funeral are taking inspiration from the rise of the far right around the world. From the US to Brazil to Hungary, culture wars against women’s rights and progress for LGBTI people play an important role in cohering far-right audiences around a violently oppressive worldview. Left-wing people must now get active in fighting Pell’s acolytes and the whole system that protected him.

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Protesters drive final stake into George Pell

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