It’s a news story that you might’ve missed, but on Friday, someone bought all the cocoa. All of it.

At least in Europe anyway: a chocotastic total of 241,000 tonnes of cocoa beans, something which sent er, ripples of chock through the galaxy, in a move that some are already dubbing the ‘credit crunchie’, honest.

There’s something very shady about all of this: someone, in the space of one day, was able to buy up the whole supply of a commodity in an entire continent. Stock-trading like this is nothing unusual in itself: it’s part and parcel of the capitalist economic system, where stock-traders and investors try to make as much money as possible by doing precisely fuck all. It’s pretty clear what the intentions of the mystery trader who bought all up the cocoa is though: to force the price high, monopolise the market, and then, yes, make lots of money. This is what we call “free trade”.

It’s already had the effect of pushing cocoa to its highest price since 1977 – which won’t take long to translate into, brace yourselves… higher chocolate prices for everyone. While a few pence extra on the price of a bar of chocolate is maybe nothing to get your snickers in a twist about, it’s scary the way the price of anything can be manipulated by nothing more than the insider machinations of a few investment bankers and stock traders who’ve never set eyes on a cocoa bean in their life. This is what we call “capitalism”.

What is unusual about this case though is that the buyers have take physical delivery of the cocoa beans – meaning that they’re now sitting in warehouses under the control of the buyers, which again can be used to force the price up by creating an artificial shortage of cocoa!

The only beneficiaries of this are, of course, the parasitical stock traders who now own the stuff. The farmers who actually grow the cocoa – largely in Uganda and the Ivory Coast, are unlikely to see any ‘trickle down’ effect, as they’ve already sold the crop at fixed prices. Prices fixed by middle-men, chocolate companies and these very same investors, you understand. It’s the curly wurly (milky) way of a (cadbury cream egg) twisted economic system.

Well, as socialists are now groaning and rolling up their sleeves for years of struggle as the Tories and the Liberals prepare to attack living standards and services, and with Labour and the SNP mouthing opposition but doing nothing to stop them (and passing them on through local parliaments and councils), there is another aspect which adds to the farce which is the current state of politics and society in this country.

That is, the wishes of the population, including which type of coalition government, which type of electoral system, and which type of policies people want to see have barely had a look-in in our ‘democracy’ since our election in an already crap electoral system. Rather, we all seem to be slaves to the will of this omniscient presence called ‘the market’.

Now I am no economist, but the way the political elites and journalists have been discussing the needs of ‘the market’ in terms of the desirable form of government (i.e. a Tory-Liberal coalition) that needed to come from this election, makes our financial system sound like some kind of all-powerful supernatural presence. Indeed, so encapsulating and overwhelming is ‘the market’, that we have no choice but to bow down and prostrate ourselves to its will, which right now is that ‘it’ (or he or she, who knows?) wants a strong government to push through brutal cuts. Anyone that thinks otherwise just isn’t a properly trained economist, like all those ones who astutely spotted the financial crisis way before if happened (whoops!) and pushed the deregulation of the financial markets which led to the crisis in the first place.

Thus, ‘the market’ demanded a strong coalition government that could ‘tackle the deficit’ i.e. make the poor pay for capitalism’s crisis, rather than city financiers losing money because shares may go down a little due to uncertainty over the next government. However, hearing the coverage of the hung parliament, you’d have thought we’d all be cast back into the stone age if the desired Tory-Liberal coalition wasn’t agreed sharpish, as you can see in this BBC coverage here.

This is just another reminder of why capitalism, most of all deregulated finance capitalism, can fuck off as far as I’m concerned. The market is not our god, and its servants -- Labour, Tories, Liberals and the SNP -- are not our rulers. Their attempts to make us pay for the current crisis in capitalism may give them a sharp wake-up call on that count.

If humanity is to have a future, we need real participatory democracy, and for political and economic power to be in the hands of the population, not ‘the market’, ‘the city’, or any other representations of the shitty, ailing capitalist system that politicians are desperately trying to prop up. In other words, we need socialism.

Rant over. For now.

You might’ve heard. Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name Of is the Christmas number one. Yes! It’s finally happened: we got a bunch of politckul rap-rockin’ revolutionary Maoists from LA to the top o’ the pop charts. ‘We’ being the disgruntled social-networking masses, fed up of the contrived, tedious pish that is the X Factor and it’s commidified, profit-driven attitude to music. And Simon Cowell. Cunt.
So what did it prove? That a lot of people don’t like reality television karaoke contests, enjoyed the idea of participating in a mass social media led prank, and were prepared to spend 79p to prove it.
Much else? The two days since Rage were declared number one have seen various proclamations of this being ‘the birth of people power’, the beginning of a new mass movement, the beginning of the end for shit music. Probably, mostly, bollocks?

#ratm4xmas may not herald the revolution. But it undoubtedly has been an eye-opener for tens of thousands of people: that huge numbers of people, acting together on an issue, can bring about ‘change’, however superficial in this case it may be. As socialists, we should surely encourage this mindset!

A quick look at the facebook group confirms this, and indeed, bluntly displays  that there’s vast numbers of, largely young, people desperate to rebel against something, anything, amid the chaos of capitalist crisis, mass unemployment and a corrupt ruling class. And in this state of utter confusion, the fightback against ‘the system’ has formulated itself in a battle against the monotony culture of commercialised, pre-packaged, throwaway pop music – in many ways, emblematic of the consumer capitalist society we inhabit.

This rage now needs to be channelled through more effective channels. Not by getting the Sex Pistols to number one for the Queen’s birthday, or NWA’s ‘Fuck The Police’ to Xmas No. 1 next year (awesome as that might be), but by translating anger against um, the ‘machine’ itself: capitalism. As Tom Morello of Rage himself stated:  “whether it’s a small matter like who’s the top of the charts, or bigger matters like war and peace and economic inequality, when people band together and make their voices heard they can completely overturn the system as it is.”

Yeah we all know that, as every wanky broadsheet columnist has been gleely pointing out at any opportunity, that Sony Records were the ‘main beneficiaries’ and made lots of money out of it. But that’s really besides the point… it was fun! And it’s probs the first number one single for insurrectionary-workers-peasant-movement supporting lefties since the Manics in 2000! And it may, just may, have raised that first inkling of class consciousness among scores of young people – of the ability to fight, and win. Venceremos!

“What you need is what they’re selling, makes you feel like buying is rebelling”
‘No Shelter’, Rage Against The Machine