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IS REVOLUTION THE ONLY ANSWER? by Bill Lee

As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)


According to CNN (Isadore, 2022) the oil corporate giants, ExxonMobil and Chevron both reported massive second quarter, three-month profit gains “thanks to record gasoline prices during the quarter”. Exxon's profit, came in at an obscene $17.6 billion, almost double what it made in its very profitable first quarter as oil and gas prices started to surge in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to the CNN wording. Its 2nd quarter profit was up a stunning (to me) 273% from the same period last year. Chevron raked in a $11.4 billion, up 74% from the first quarter and 247% last year.1 It has been reported (Milman, 2022) that the oil industry as a whole amassed a profit of over one hundred billion (100,000,000.00] dollars in the first quarter of this year..

Three months brothers and sister, three months.

Of course, we are all aware that this kind of “windfall” is by no means a unique happening. ExxonMobil and Chevron are by no means the only monster corporate entities to be engaging to experience this kind of wonderful financial fortune, some might call it profiteering. And the oil sector is not, by any means the only one where profits are pilling up. So, the corporate grand larceny continues and continues. This little snapshot of wild corporate accumulation the is simply another example of how the gods of the capitalist system works, and, if we are honest, the way it is supposed to work. That’s why governments of every stripe in the much discussed “post-industrial world” construct favourable tax regimes and look the other way as avoided taxes are squirrelled away in friendly, and opaque off shore tax havens (Canadians tor Tax Fairness, 2021). In the free neoliberal capitalist world in which we have been existing for decades the acquisition of more and more money and power by fewer and fewer businesses and people is the rule. Meanwhile, the rest of us must make do, so the storey goes, and the wealth gap continues to grow (Schaeffer, 2022).


One of the most appalling consequences of this extreme domination by the rich is the refusal to act in a decisive way so that the human race can responsibility meet the deadly challenges of the climate crises. This should not be surprising since that the capitalist system has rendered both labour and nature as commodities to be used in the creation of profit. So, it should be no surprise that the poor, in wherever country they live are at great risk. (Nisho, A. (2022). Yet what we hear and read from the spokespeople for Fossil Fuel industry, as well as their abetters in many governments, for example, the Texas GOP and the UCP in Alberta, is that we must be patient, must not move to fast (i.e., Don’t mess with our profits). Global warming of course, pays no attention


So, the question must be, how long can this anti human situation be sustained? How are the working/middle class (Like Rick Salutin, the Toronto Star columnist, I see no difference in that we all work for wages paid out by an employer) supposed to hope, let alone believe in a stable and dignified economic or human future? And then of course there is the climate crisis which is being driven by the amoral lust for economic growth by corporations and their stock holders. That will have huge negative repercussions for the majority of human beings, but these will be especially disastrous for the poor. The capitalist system clearly “works” only for the rich. We, as a people, must, need to do and be better at confronting the behemoths of industry the corporations. But how can we, when the system in which we find ourselves is one which is geared for the obscene profits of the few and ultimate misery and degradation of the majority, where, in the USA at least these soulless things are considered “people”. How, outside of a revolution, is there any logical and genuine way to see the end of this criminal system and behaviour?


These questions are not rhetorical nor do I ask them out of some idle curiosity. I ask them in all seriousness. What is to be done?


Resources


Canadians for Tax Fairness (2021). FACTSHEET: TACKLE TAX HAVENS. https://www.taxfairness.ca/en/resource/factsheet-tackle-tax-havens. September. Hartman, T. (2022). “Unequal Wealth. How Corporations Became 'People' - and How You Can Fight Back”. The Hartman Report. https://www.thomhartmann+sunday-excerpt@substack.com. July 32.


Isidore C. (2022) $2,245.62 a second: ExxonMobil scores enormous profit on record gas prices. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/energy/exxonmobil-chevron-earnings/index.html. July 29.

Milman, O. (2022). “Largest oil and gas producers made close to $100bn in first quarter of 2022. The Guardian”. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/13/oil-gas-producers-first-quarter-2022-profits. May 13.


Nisho, A. (2021). “When poverty meets climate change: A critical challenge that demands cross-cutting solutions”. World Bank. https://blogs.worldbank.org/climatechange/when-poverty-meets-climate-change-critical-challenge-demands-cross-cutting-solutions. November 5.

Schaeffer, K. (2022). 6 facts about economic inequality in the U.S. Pew Research. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/07/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s/. July 2.

1 CBC Radio One News report on August 2 of this year stated that in the USA ExxonMobil paid taxes of 1.8% for last year. Poor Chevron, paid 2.8%.

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