CLIMATE IS A CLASS ISSUE: Poorest people hit hardest by heat stress

New Research: 25% of the world’s people will face more heat wave days than all the rest combined

Climate & Capitalism | February 11, 2022

Source: American Geophysical Union

People with lower incomes are exposed to heat waves for longer periods of time compared to higher income people, due to a combination of location and access to heat adaptations like air conditioning. This inequality is expected to rise as temperatures increase, new research shows.

Lower income populations currently face a 40% higher exposure to heat waves than people with higher incomes. By the end of the century, the poorest 25% of the world’s population will be exposed to heat waves at a rate equivalent to the rest of the population combined.

World Inequality Report: Class Divide Explains More than Regional Divisions

by Sanjay Roy

Peoples Democracy | January 23, 2022

WORLD Inequality Report 2022 underlines the sharp divide between the rich and the poor that occurred as a result of neoliberal policies pursued by global capital using the hegemonic and asymmetric architecture of global institutions. The report clearly shows how the class divide has become relatively more important than the regional divide in determining global inequality. This simply tells that in today’s world where one is born and brought up has relatively less impact than in which class the person belongs to in explaining relative earnings and wealth status. It however says further that even if inequality between countries shows a decline but still the difference continues to be high.

Environment, human rights and class power

Farooque Chowdhury

MR Online | March 12, 2021

Environment is human right, said and resolved a recent UN meet. It’s a reiteration of an already discussed issue–essential to all of the human society. It’s a much important issue to the peoples in countries facing forces ravaging environment; and, ravaging of environment is an act against people as the act denies people’s right to life and existence.

Reiterating and implementing the environment right empowers people, created/widens people’s space for a democratic life, as environment itself is an area for democracy, for people’s participation. There’s no scope for individualism, neither for person nor for capital–irrespective of capital’s power–in the area of environment. The reasons:

[1] No individual or a coterie of individuals create/can create livable environment at no level. Having a livable environment is collective contribution.

[2] No capital or an alliance of capitals create/can create livable environment with its own power. Without labor, capital is lame, useless–incapable of moving a single grain of sand a millimeter.

2020 Witnesses Largest Growth in Billionaires

POLITSTURM | October 02, 2021

According to a report published by Wealth-X, 2020 witnessed the largest growth in billionaire individuals since they started recording this data. The United States has the largest share of the world’s billionaires with 29%. China and India had the highest percentage growth of billionaires at 19.9% and 19.5%, respectively. 

The growth in billionaires over the previous year was largely attributed to “expansive government support measures [which] propelled a dramatic rally in financial markets, after an initial pandemic-driven collapse.”

The report also suggested an increasing centralization of privately-held wealth, with billionaires representing 1% of the population of ultra-high net-worth individuals yet holding 28% of the cumulative wealth.

The Southern Key: Class, Race & Radicalism in the 1930s/40s

U.S. HISTORY

Haymarket Books | Streamed live on November 8, 2020

Culture, Class and Civilisation

CULTURE AND CLASS

Dave Lordan

Culture Matters | September 16, 2020

About 10,000 years ago, after 3.6 million years of the Stone Age, humanity began to slowly and stutteringly transform itself. A nomadic species made up of small egalitarian groups and surviving (or not) on the given bounty of the Earth, changed into a settled, class-based, accumulative society. It was based on agricultural surpluses, and institutional hierarchies and gross inequalities were to become a permanent feature. The domestication of certain animals such as the sheep and the goat, cultivation of high-yield grains, and improvements in food storage methods, irrigation, and farming methods and technologies, gave humanity for the first time the problem of more than enough stuff to go around – surplus – and what to do with it.

Narrow Streets: Publishing and the Class Conundrum

CLASS IN WRITING AND PUBLISHING

Lyndsey Ayre

Culture Matters | September 10, 2020

On the inside cover of the 2019 edition of Tove Ditlevsen’s Childhood – the first of her autobiographical Copenhagen trilogy – there is a short paragraph describing the writer’s class and upbringing. It goes something like this: Ditlevsen, one of Denmark’s most important writers, grew up in the early 20^th century, in a working-class neighbourhood called Vesterbro. From an early age, she knew she was different, that she was going to be a writer with ‘long, mysterious words crawling across her soul.’ ‘Inevitably,’ the bio continues, Ditlevsen came to the realisation that to pursue this dream she would have to ‘leave the narrow streets of her childhood behind.’ The message is clear: her working-class background was a problem that had to be navigated and escaped before she could blossom into the successful author and poet she was destined to become.

Creativity and Class

CLASS AND CULTURE 

 Dave Lordan

Culture Matters | July 17, 2020

Poetry is indispensable – if only we knew what it was for.
– Jean Cocteau

Before any major hunt the women of the Baka family group will sing “yelli”. This they will do in the early morning before dawn and while the men and children are in their huts. One voice starts – a beautiful, haunting melody reverberating through the trees. After a few minutes another voice joins in, then another. Each voice will sing their own repeating melody, each one with its own rhythm and cycle, and yet all of them sitting together as one song composed of magical polyphonic harmonies that carry far into the forest, blending in with the unending night-time songs of the insects.

To paraphrase the Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk, creativity is putting things together to make new things. It is the modality by which humans shape the material world to meet their various needs and serve their various purposes. In the broadest sense then, it is similar to the Marxist conceptions of labour or work. Creativity is work and work is creativity.

Without considering class, bike-friendly city is impossible

by Anne Lusk

Designing for bikes has become a hallmark of forward-looking modern cities worldwide. Bike-friendly city ratings abound, and advocates promote cycling as a way to reduce problems ranging from air pollution to traffic deaths.

But urban cycling investments tend to focus on the needs of wealthy riders and neglect lower-income residents and people of color. This happens even though the single biggest group of Americans who bike to work live in households that earn less than $10,000 yearly, and studies in lower-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Boston have found that the majority of bicyclists were non-white.

Marx at 200

Beyond Capital and Class Alone

by Kevin B Anderson

Economic and Political Way | Vol. 53, Issue No. 40, 06 Oct, 2018

As we mark Karl Marx’s 200th birth anniversary, it is clear that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.