As the old year is rung out, we will hear repeated everywhere the saying: “Peace on earth, good will to all men and a prosperous New Year to all." But there is precious little peace on earth, very little good will and scarcely any prosperity for the working class. Never were the alternatives of barbarism or socialism, slavery or freedom, war or peace, posed more urgently.
The dominant activity this coming festive holiday time will not be church-going and worship but a different religion - the Christmas shopping spree. Christmas has become a gigantic capitalist spending trap in which consumers are duped to spend beyond their means by fake messages of goodwill. Jesus in the manger has little appeal compared to an X-Box and an iPad. Advertising is not designed to alert people to the availability of a particular product, but to make them want it by creating dissatisfaction with what people already have and create a craving for something else. We are sold the line that the perfect Christmas is something we should be buying. Hallmark gave us the greeting cards and Woolworths gave us Christmas lights. For capitalists ’tis the season to be jolly and make their riches. In the midst of the capitalist feeding frenzy, the lonely and depressed, the hungry children and dying old people will be forgotten, or only thought of as "Tiny Tim" charity cases. The victims of capitalism are so plentiful that a helping hand cannot be held out to all.
At Christmas we pay homage to our Greek and Roman antecedents who originated the celebration of the winter solstice, which occurs when the earth’s axial tilt is farthest from the sun. Although the winter solstice lasts only momentarily (on Dec. 21 in the Northern hemisphere), it marks a symbolic turning point, after which the sun-lit portion of our day begins to lengthen instead of shorten — a moment that also signals the eventual return of a verdant, abundant springtime. Our feasting, imbibing, singing, dancing and fornicating is all about re-affirming the life-loving “guilty pleasures” that religionists of every age have so despised. Any joy or humanity found in today’s Christmas season harks back not to Christian preaching but to our Greco-Roman ancestors. Church leaders in Rome, early in the 4th century, began claiming that the winter solstice was the birthday of Jesus. Such lies were codified by Constantine I, Rome’s first Christian Emperor (306-337AD), whose unification of church and state made possible the brutal millennium known as the Dark Ages.
The tradition of the Christmas tree and and mulled wine by a log-fire came from Germany and the celebration of “Yule-tide” (Yule-time) the name given to the winter solstice festival of German pagans. While the character of Santa Claus derives in part from an actual St. Nicholas, who had a reputation for secret gift-giving in the 4th century, Santa’s “modern look” and unique Christmas Eve routine — the garb, the sleigh, the reindeers — was derived from an original depiction in The Night Before Christmas, a poem published in 1822 by Clement Moore, then a professor of Greek literature at Columbia University. The modern version of Santa Claus was drawn in 1881 by Thomas Nast, “Father of the American Cartoon.”
The merriment that must attempted and the cheery greetings that must exchanged cannot be said to genuinely indicate the joys of the season. Those who work in the mines, the mills, and the different factories have before them a long, hard winter. They have behind them years of bitter toil that have served to sap their energies, shatter their bodies, and render them incapable of enjoying the peace and trnquility that are necessary to true happiness. Even into their festive holidays, the uncertainty of everything about them brings the haunting fear of coming trouble, such as how to re-pay the credit card debt
The real message of Christmas, the message of love and peace and sharing should be the message of every day the whole year round, the message of socialism and soidarity. Yet the realisation that this spirit flourishes for one day gives little reason to rejoice. Christmas after Christmas goes by, and still the workers forget to learn the lesson of standing by one another, and demanding with one voice that the end of the capitalist system and that it should be succeeded by a system in which the wealth of the country should should be produced, distributed and managed for the common weal.
The Toy (sweat-)Shop
Tom Lehrer once said: “Christmas is the time when we all get to reflect on what we most truly and sincerely believe in. I’m referring of course to money”.
Christmas is the time of charity and giving. If you're in the highest tax bracket, a $10 million donation will lower your federal taxes by $3.5 million. But if you're in a lower tax bracket, your deduction will also be worth less: For someone paying at a 15% rate, that same $10 million would only lower federal taxes by $1.5 million. The total charitable deduction will amount to $230 billion between 2010 and 2014. Essentially, average Americans are helping to pay for billionaire’s generosity, though of course they have no say in where his charity goes. Charity is an insult. Charity is a degradation. Charity is also a weapon in the hands of the capitalist.
Of course, we all know that it is not Santa's elves at the North Pole producing the childrens toys but sweated labour in Asia. Exporting labor is cost effective not only because it uses cheaper labor, but because it minimizes corporate responsibility for conditions in the supply chain. According to an investigation by the New York-based watchdog group China Labor Watch, several toy-industry supplier factories in China (which have collectively produced for famous clients like Mattel, Disney and Hasbro) have flouted both international ethical standards and Chinese law. In four factories together employing about 10,000 workers it found illegal overtime pay, excessive overtime, forced labor, myriad safety concerns, a lack of safety training, a lack of physical exams, inability to resign from work, blank labor contracts, unpaid work, a lack of social insurance, use of dispatch workers, a lack of a living wage, poor living conditions, unreasonable rules, and a lack of effective grievance channels.
Indeed, for just $24.99 a child can pretend to work at the local McDonalds with the "Just Like Home McDonald’s Cash Register 10 Piece Playset" complete with built-in credit card machine.
Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that, of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale. Even the goods we might have expected to hold on to are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (wearing out or breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).
People in eastern Congo are massacred, forests are felled and rivers are poisoned to facilitate the manufacture of consumer Christmas crap. This is pathological world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and by the media that we scarcely notice what is happening to us.
China makes more toys than any other country in the world - 75%
ReplyDeletemore than 482 million Chinese — that's 36 percent of the population — live on less than $2 per day. In 2009 alone, approximately one million workers were injured at work and about 20,000 suffered from diseases due to their occupation.
At the toy factories Their living conditions are prison-like with up to six people sharing small cramped dormitories and up to 50 people sharing one bathroom.The overtime work is up to 200 hours a month, which is more than five times the legal limit.
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-china-toy-factories-2012-12?op=1