“…to conflate the tiny stake in capitalism of individual labour sellers – aka the many – with that of the capital owners – aka the few/the ruling class – is to miss the point spectacularly.”

Well, darling (I can’t say I haven’t been expecting you to rumble into view for the past few days), it would be if I had, but I hadn’t, so it isn’t. Rather, I was expressing (though admittedly without too many clues, the better to enrage the clueless) what I think of as the phenomenon of “grabbing what is being freely given”. That is not the leap of a accidently trapped wild animal from the hands of its releaser without so much as a backwards glance, but in the crowd of desperate people being released some desperate situation, those who, despite the knowledge that a lifeline has finally been established and will not quickly disappear, rather will be back tomorrow and the day after that, nevertheless fight off their equally desperate fellows to grab more than their share, so a truck (say) that carried enough to relieve all until its next visit tomorrow departs empty with a sizable proportion of the crowd that was behind it receiving relief holding nothing or scrabbling on the ground for scraps. Not just on the first day but the day after that and the day after that, effectively until the end of days. Such scenario, which plays out in a multitude of highly diverse situations every day, from those with a cast of two in a workplace to those with thousands in caught in a drought, or whatever, illustrates the single biggest impediment to the establishment and maintenance of socialism (let alone communism) that exists. And it–greed driven by unacknowledged fear–is inherent in our makeup, as–in their different ways: binra here, Jiddu Krishnamurti there, others elsewhere–keep on telling us. Not only at the identifiable personal level, but at the anonymous crowd, community, national and–now–supranational level as well.

“Like the reduction of capitalism’s war on Nature to you and I dutifully recycling our trash – but even more so – a few zealots forswearing bank accounts would be a piss in the Atlantic.”

I’ll skip the ignorant slur on (the probably old-school Republican) Jennings’ seldom (never?) publicly voiced personal gesture (the ambiguous nature of which he was no doubt fully aware) to quote the ever-public voice of V.I Lenin, a Bolshevik in matters of capital but a personal and public degenerate in matters of power but, nevertheless, an exceedingly perceptive analyst, with a half-remembered quote that delayed this response until I tired of looking for it in the output of others and widened my search;

…rentiers, i.e., people who live by ‘clipping coupons’, who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.

It’s called complicity and it’s the mire in which the individual piss in the ocean’s fear-driven greed snares the “lowly” as surely as the “highest”. If you ever wondered what the explanation for the average Israeli’s sheer incomprehension of what any Palestinian could reasonably complain about, and how Netanyahu has been returned for yet another term: now you know. If you ever noted and wondered what could cause the average American’s near complete unconciousness of the potentially disastrous impact their individual vote could have on the rest of the world, now you know.

There is nothing special humanitywise about the captains of nations and finance in the world at large, they are simply you and me rendered largely omnipotent in human affairs through the amplification of our own massed voices, including the otherwise silent inner voices of the overwhelming proportion of the putative socialists amongst us.

As the WWII British Colonel Blimpey had it:

Hitler has only got one ball,
Goering has two but they’re too small,
Himmler has something similar,
But poor old Goebels has no balls at all.

So the big mystery (NOT) is: where did the movers and shakers of the Third Reich get the balls to act so destructively on the world stage?

” …all your comments seem driven by bile and marked by ad hominem abuse. You pen as if rudeness were a virtue. Why is that?”

No more than a proportionate degree of bile, all things considered, and not too many ad hominems expressed beyond those some individual instances of our common greed for assets–money or power or love-cum-adulation–catch my attention for one reason or another.

Why? Because my life’s socio-political journey has been the reverse of most, perhaps because I was geographically, physically (and probably also or hence psychologically) isolated as a child, so to survive I had to assess the people and the society around me pretty much as they were and it was, rather than imagine them or it from the safe distance afar to which most kids immediately run when they begin to feel threatened. That led to an intensely conservative, right wing early adolescent who could not possibly go further right but, contrariwise, and contrary to the average drift, has become with age a geriatric nut case of a wildly extreme-left anarchist bent. While compared to a master (and pushy to say the least) wit like Diogenes the Cynic, the output of this pale echo that you perceive as bile and gratuitous ad hominems is mostly simple, uncompounded disgust at the grossly self-deceptive, and now seemingly multiple species destroying behaviour–despite the clear and present danger obvious in my childhood–of my fellow hominids. You don’t like it? Hey, I long ago learned not to care and my now well-established “retirement” saw a great reduction in the restraint that the need to feed had contributed to the mix. Perhaps the “next” or “scroll past” functions of your browser would help?

I remember when I was in the army firing off ammunition in a few minutes worth more than most people earn in a year to pay a mortgage and support a family, and it only gets worse. In WW2, a Spitfire cost £7,000 and a Hurricane £5,000. In the 1970s, a Phantom jet cost £2.5 million, a MIG21 £350,000. AB2 bomber cost $2,200 million per unit. An F35 $400 million. Northern Ireland cost the country well over £750 billion, and this is a big under estimate. I think if people just thought about the money side of things, it would make a difference. Apart from all the death and suffering, we could all be sitting on a little pile of gold and diamonds, driving Rolls Royces with holiday homes in the Bahamas, using £50 notes to light our cigars. But of course that will never happen.