“I WISH you … every happiness for the new year,” Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels in December 1861, before adding: “If it’s anything like the last one, I … would sooner consign it to the devil.”

Marx might mainly have been referring to his personal economic woes, but a century and a half later we live in a world where his contempt for the previous 12 months tends to resonate each December, while his clarifying 19th-century critique of capitalism continues to do so. And for all his foresight, Marx might have struggled to imagine circumstances in which a mere 56,000 or so people control three times more wealth than half of humanity.

Similarly distressing statistics abound in this month’s World Inequality Report 2026, but what’s perhaps even more appalling is the insouciance of governments across every continent.

Of course, there are innumerable other horrors, but they are hardly likely to be front of mind for the vast segment of humanity whose primary concern each morning is to wonder where the next meal will come from. What a wonderful world.

Israel’s genocide against Palestinians continues, despite an ostensible ceasefire, and just yesterday, its main architect was in Florida, wallowing in the adulation of his........

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