Better 'oles still in short supply

From the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard ‘Many people complain that the Christmas sales campaign starts too early. But as the market is stimulated to grow, and as it grows, so will the effort to exploit it. This might mean an even longer sales drive in the future—wasn’t there a story about a business man who said that Christmas was good business as long as they kept religion out of it?’  (Socialist Standard, December 1965). 

Although it appears to have been so three months ago because that’s when Christmas commodities started to appear in retail outlets. Even more than the rest of the year the mantra is purchase, buy, consume, spend! It’s no wonder that alcohol consumption soars and family rows escalate in this period of joy and peace. Coping with capitalism creates enough stresses on a daily basis in itself but, at this time of the year, especially for parents, but not just confined to them; they increase many-fold life’s everyday pressures. Sympathy must go out for one to the residents of towns served by Medway Council in Kent because it has ‘cancelled all its Christmas lights this year just to save £75,000. Medway Council in Kent announced the “sad and difficult decision” after identifying a potential overspend of £17 million this financial year.’ Local folk have labelled the Council ‘Scrooge’ (Sun, 10 October). Think that can be filed under the heading of ‘First World Problems’. Snowflakes It’s very hard to get through this period without Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol impinging in some way or other.

 George Bernard Shaw channelling Scrooge, (before the ghost’s visitations) in a 1946 letter to Reynolds News expressed his vehement opposition to Christmas:

‘I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and anyone who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages’.

Perhaps Santa let him down as a child. Proper pantomime villain, boo, hiss? Did Outraged Christian of Easily Offended inundate the letters page with their outrage? The latter-day aficionados of Christmas are rushing to social media to express their umbrage at a particular seasonal advertisement.

Speaking of outrage, there’s always a competition amongst capitalist enterprises to ‘win’ the best Christmas advertisement. The purpose being to maximise sales in the ‘golden quarter.’ Back in November an ‘edgy’ anti-Christmas advertisement from Marks and Spencer apparently upset some as M & S were forced to apologise because the destruction shown of party hats in an open fire was deemed to be an insult to Palestine. How, you ask? The colours of the hats were also those of the Palestinian flag! Even socialists know that red and green are traditional Christmas colours.

This is surely taking taking offence to the level of the absurd. The events across the world in 2023 are more demanding of offence, outrage and umbrage.

A world of dread and fear

John Donne’s 1624 Meditation XVII piece, No Man is an Island seems particularly relevant almost four hundred years on:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man

is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;

if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe

is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as

well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine

owne were; any mans death diminishes me,

because I am involved in Mankinde;

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

As in other years of mass bloody conflicts the bell has tolled for far too many in 2023 in places other than Europe.

Almost forty years ago Band Aid released a charity record, Do they know it’s Christmas? in response to famine in Ethiopia. The lyric included, ‘It’s Christmas time, There’s no need to be afraid, At Christmas time we let in light and we banish shade’. And ‘There’s a world outside your window, And it’s a world of dread and fear’. It is to be fervently hoped that, over the intervening weeks, the chilling prospect of more ‘dread and fear’ will not have spread to a far wider arena.

In 1961, at his presidential inauguration, John F Kennedy said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country.’ Sixty plus years on this exhortation would seem to now mean ask what you can do for the capitalist state engaged in armed conflict with the full support of the capitalist state where you reside – or else. A reminder that the global working class have no country. Patriotism is the refuge of the scoundrel, even if is it being forced upon many; but many, even if they do not, as of yet, understand that socialism is the only viable solution, are resisting the brainwashing and propaganda. But, without the realisation that socialism is the only alternative, nothing will change.

When the working class of many states were engaged in capitalist wars in the early part of the twentieth century, black humour was much evident as a way of coping with great adversity.

Bairnsfather’s 1915 cartoon of two British soldiers under fire in a foxhole with the caption ‘Well, if you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it’ is an example.

Well, we do know of a ‘better ‘ole’. It’s a money-free, leader-free, state-free society where conflicts and wars are forever abolished and consigned to the dustbin of history.

DC

Wannit, gotta ‘ave it

 

And what’s this year’s must-have gift that you should offer to the man or woman who has everything?

Well, it’s a no-brainer for the small minority that really do have everything. They’ll only be happy if they get exactly the same from you as you gave them last year – and the year before that.

And what was it?

Nothing, nowt, zilch. Except your consent to them living on the backs and the efforts of the vast majority. So easy to do, it doesn’t need any thought, or even any wrapping. Just imagine the happy smiling faces of the capitalists when they realise that you don’t yet realise that they’re mugging you every day. Ho bloody ho!

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/

Pawns in the game

'There are lies, dammed lies and statistics. The figures given below should be looked at sceptically. Whether correct or not the figures given for Ukrainian casualties, and the unknown Russian ones, are unacceptable and a tragedy.

To these should be added the number of innocent lives being sacrificed in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

'More than 400,000 people have joined the Russian Army in 2024, Defence Minister Andrey Belousov revealed during a meeting of top officials in Moscow. Around 1,200 people voluntarily sign up for military service every day, he said. We continue systematic work on staffing the armed forces Since the start of the year, over 427,000 servicemen have already been recruited, Belousov stated.

In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that increased the number of armed forces personnel to 2.39 million, including 1.5 million military personnel. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained at the time that the decision was based on the increasing number of threats currently faced by Russia, including the extremely hostile situation on the Western borders and instability on the Eastern borders.

The decree came into force on December 1. The Russian Army had previously been increased to 2.2 million in December 2023, including 1.32 million military personnel, amid the Ukraine conflict and the ongoing expansion of NATO towards Russian borders.

Belousov did not specify the total number of Russian troops taking part in Moscow’s military operation. Russia also does not make public losses incurred in the conflict with Kiev. However, according to the minister, the Ukrainian Army has lost more than half a million troops in 2024 and over one million since the escalation of the conflict in 2022. He noted that, unlike the Russian military, which has been steadily boosting troop numbers, the Ukrainian Army is severely understaffed, with fewer than 50% of frontline positions currently filled.’

More outrage is being expressed about the assassination of a Russian General in Moscow than against the crime of the continuing annihilation of the many who are used as pawns in capitalism’s ‘game.’

It’s totally against the rules of war! Military do not kill other military in that fashion is the cry. As if capitalism has any conscience in its pursuit of its aims of power, resources, competitive advantage and hegemony.

‘The US has denied any involvement or prior knowledge of the bombing that killed Russian Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov and his assistant in Moscow. Both the Pentagon and State Department have distanced themselves from the targeted assassination, which is believed to have been carried out by Ukraine.

The commander of the Russian Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Défense Forces was killed along with his aide in an explosion outside his apartment early on Tuesday morning. Multiple media outlets have reported that the assassination was executed on the orders of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU).’

What is the reason that the working class, the majority who run capitalism on behalf of the exploiting minority, submit to such heinous manipulation?

One explanation may be that of ‘nationalism.’

The below is from the Socialist Standard March 1973

‘In the struggle to win the minds of the working class Socialists have to contend not, on the whole, with rational critiques of the Socialist position but with deeply held and unquestioned values. A few of these, for example, might be religion, "human nature", "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work" or the association of Socialism with Russia. One of the strongest of these sacred beliefs, and one of the biggest obstacles to the establishment of Socialism, is nationalism ― the loyalty felt by many members of the working class to "their country", the political unit in which they happen to reside.

Socialists hold that the only real divisions which exist in the world are horizontal ones, between different social and economic groups. In advanced capitalist countries this consists in a division between the capitalist class, which owns and controls the means of production, and the working class, which owns none of them and which has to sell its mental and physical labour-power to the capitalist class in order to live. Feelings of loyalty to a nation-State are purely subjective, having no basis in reality; the working class in Britain has more in common with the workers in other countries than it has with the British capitalist class.

Classes not Kingdoms

There, is however, an alternative view of the world. This is the belief that the important divisions are not horizontal, between different classes, but vertical, between various nations. A "nation" consists, according to this view, of a hierarchy of men and women who, although having differing incomes, social status and power, all have a common interest in working in harmony for the benefit of the whole unit and, if necessary, in fighting against other nations to defend this interest. This completely erroneous outlook is the one held by most members of the working class and nearly all political parties (including the Labour Party). Most historians reject Marx's declaration that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle", preferring instead to see history as a succession of struggles of nations against foreign domination, of subjects against tyrannical kings and of nations and races against each other.

Broadly speaking, nationalist ideologies and movements represent the interests of the capitalist class. Nationalism as such did not exist in pre-capitalist society and its growth and development represents the parallel development of the capitalist class. Nationalism as we know it today first made its appearance during the French Revolution. In the early stages of the revolution cosmopolitan ideas were prevalent ― it was believed that the rest of Europe would be inspired by France's example and would likewise overthrow the old order. When this failed to materialise strong feelings of nationalism developed; France was seen as a chosen nation, picked out to be the standard-bearer of revolution throughout Europe.

Politically, nationalism is ambiguous, in that it can take on a "rightwing" or a "leftwing" form. This depends upon the position of the capitalist class in the particular time and place. If political power is held by the aristocracy or nobility, and the middle-class is struggling to assert itself, then nationalism will have "leftwing" connotations. This was the case in Europe until 1848, when nationalism was a romantic, revolutionary force against the traditional ruling class. However, once the bourgeoisie has captured and consolidated its power, then nationalism becomes a conservative and rightwing force.

Although every nationalist movement believes it is unique, there exist basically these two forms of nationalism side by side. In the advanced parts of the world ― the United States, Britain, Western Europe ― nationalism is conservative, whilst in pre-industrial countries engaged in struggles against a foreign ruling class, nationalism is a "leftwing" force.

The World Socialist Movement opposes all nationalist movements recognizing that the working class has no country. There are certain other groups ― the Communist Parties of the world, and the so-called revolutionary left ― which, though claiming to have a class outlook, have a wholly opportunist and ambiguous attitude to nationalism, which reflects not so much the interest of the working class as it does Russian or Chinese foreign policy. These groups fully accept the mythology of the existence of "the nation". For example, from an Anti-Internment League pamphlet:

"The people of each nation have the right to determine how they shall be governed. Foreign interference is a fundamental attack on that right. When one nation takes offensive action against another, by introducing troops or in any other way, we cannot sit on the fence . . . And so to Ireland: Ireland is a nation; Ireland is not Britain; and the Irish have a right to decide whether or not they wish to have any association with the rest of these isles."

This attitude is a complete denial of Marxism; it is almost incomprehensible that people who describe themselves as Socialists should write of the "right to re-establish Irish nationhood" (from the same pamphlet). The Irish republican movement is in essence no different from any other nationalist movement; it was brought into being because of the need of a fledgling capitalist class to break away from Britain and erect protective tariff barriers in order to build an industrial economy. Socialists give the IRA and Sinn Fein no support whatsoever.

What Marx Meant

It will be argued that Marx and Engels supported nationalist movements and that therefore Socialists should do so today. Such an assertion is based on a faulty understanding of the materialist conception of history. Marx and Engels were living in an era when the bourgeoisie was engaged in a struggle to assert itself against the old feudal regimes. The victory of this class was a historically progressive step at that time in that it brought about the re-organization of society on a capitalist basis, the essential precondition for the establishment of Socialism; and it created an urban proletariat, the only class which can bring about Socialism. This was why Marx supported the rising capitalist class in their bid to capture political power. However, once capitalism reaches the point where Socialism is a practical proposition, there is no need for Socialists to advocate the capitalist industrialization of every corner of the globe; they can concentrate fully on the task of establishing Socialism. Hence we give no support to any nationalist group, and in place of the opportunism and hypocrisy of the myriad Bolshevik groupings in advocating "national self-determination", Socialists echo the rallying cry of Marx and Engels, "Workers of All Countries, Unite!"

Brendan Mee

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-poison-of-nationalism-1973.html

The Position of the SPGB

'The Position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain

The SPGB has a single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources (land, water, factories, transport, etc.) are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants. This aim is central to the SPGB’s view on the role of ‘the party’.

The abolition of private property in the productive resources will be mirrored by free and equal access for all to the wealth (food, clothing, housing, telecommunications, health and education services, entertainment) that can be produced socially. Its abolition will also be mirrored by democratic control of those productive resources – there will be a need, for example, for informed decision-making about how much effort is to be expended on the consumption goods and services mentioned above and how much effort to expend on production goods (like machinery and new factories). This would take place on a local, regional or wider level, depending on the scale of each issue.

Clearly, such a society will not build a completely new system of production from scratch. In fact, it depends for its establishment on the existence of the productive capacity that wage workers have developed under the rule of capital. It will inherit, or more precisely, appropriate the existing system of production, which is, of course, an interconnected worldwide system. This of course means that the new society must be worldwide.

Considered from the perspective of the current situation, where a minority own and/or control almost all of the productive resources, where production is determined solely by the need for profit, realised by the production and sale of commodities on a world market, we can describe the key aspects of the socialist (for us, socialist and communist mean the same thing) society that the SPGB advocates as one that is without classes, without money or any other form of economic exchange, with neither states nor frontiers. And one in which people work collectively and co-operatively to meet society’s material and psychological needs.

It’s not for us to describe in detail how people will choose to organise their lives once a socialist form of production has been introduced: the different resources, technology and mindsets which will exist then are difficult (impossible?) for us to empathise with now. But there is one very important fact of which we can be sure, and it is this: where there is free access to socially-produced wealth, there will be no connection between what an individual consumes and the amount or type of work that they do or don’t do at any given time in their life. The lash of poverty, or threat thereof, that the owning class currently wields over the wage-earners to coerce them into work, will no longer exist. 

Yet the natural circumstance that we, as a species, need to work in order to survive (and also, we would argue, to fully realise ourselves as human beings) will remain, despite the utopian nonsense about fully automated luxury communism. 

So, throughout and after the revolution, the majority will have to be ready to be proactive participants in the socialised system of production, and have the confidence that a socialist form of production will better serve their various needs and wants than the capitalist system ever could.

The Role of the Party

For the SPGB then, the role of the revolutionary party in the present non-revolutionary situation is to put forward the case for a socialist system and against the capitalist system, to help our fellow workers to understand why, as wage earners, they can never be free from economic insecurity and exploitation, and to understand that the threats of war and environmental devastation have their roots in the capitalist system of production.

Obviously, we must seek to attract members to share the work of developing and spreading socialist ideas, but we have never tried to do so by promoting reforms of capitalism – nor will we do so in future. Experience has shown that the dynamics of capitalist economics turn reformism into an eternal misery-go-round that might catch a few crumbs as they fall from capital’s table during a boom, only to have many of them sucked away again in the inevitable succeeding slump.

For this reason, when the SPGB stands candidates in general and local elections, we make clear our stance against reformism, as opposed to all reformist parties left or right. We stand candidates in capitalist elections in order to make use of what passes for ‘democracy’ to promote socialist ideas until such a time that enough socialists are voted in to power over the state machine in order to abolish it, as part of the revolutionary process, and establish an administration of things rather than a government over the people. 

If we are to establish the non-coercive, non-hierarchical, classless society, the majority will have to understand, want and be actively involved in the attainment of the objective. Given that mass socialist understanding, the political vehicle the socialist majority choose to win control of political power must be fully democratic, reflecting the sort of society they are seeking to establish.

Leaderless and Democratic

So, the mass socialist party must not be a vanguard party controlled by a leadership, but a democratic party controlled by its members; in fact there must be no leaders or leadership, just administrative bodies carrying out the democratically-arrived at decisions of a membership that wants and understands socialism. When there is a mass socialist party with aligned parties across the world, the revolution will be a more readily-achievable goal, and so the party should have practical proposals for how the means of production will become owned in common. The party in a pre-revolutionary climate, such as now, has to primarily work to attract support to grow the movement. It should be organised in a way which puts the principles of democracy, equality and co-operation into practice as far as possible. This demonstrates that people can work together in ways which go beyond what is demanded by capitalist organisations with their hierarchies, to get as close as we can now to unalienated labour. To this aim, the SPGB is organised through branches, which nominate delegates to various committees to carry out party work, with some roles and decisions agreed through majority vote of the membership as a whole. This framework isn’t intended as a blueprint for how organisations should be run in socialism, and it would also likely have to be adapted to suit the circumstances and size of a mass socialist party, but what would remain constant are the socialist values underpinning the organisation.'

https://prometheusjournal.org/2024/12/13/the-end-and-the-means/

Syria: What next?

'When the brutal 50-year tyranny of the Assad dynasty collapsed last month, people danced in the streets in many parts of Syria as they contemplated an unprecedented new beginning. Joyous crowds looted the Presidential palace, while the titular head of the Ba’ath party dictatorship skulked off to Moscow.

The fall of the secular Arab nationalist dictatorship alters the balance of power between the various states in the region, with Turkey and the United States the winners and Iran and Russia the losers. The winners took quick advantage of the initial power vacuum. Turkey sent its proxies to attack the Kurdish nationalists who control a large part of Syria including the oilfields. Indeed, Turkey must have given the victorious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamists the green light to march on Aleppo and then down to Damascus.

The United States benefits from a weakened Iran, the main threat to its current domination of the wider region and the oilfields and the trade routes out of it.

Israel, too, wasted no time in exploiting this tense, multiplayer Game of Thrones scenario, by bombing Syria's navy to the bottom of the sea, as well as a host of other targets, and pressing forward in the Golan Heights. Their reasoning is obvious. One or other group is eventually going to take power in Syria. If it's a group that hates Israel, they can hate Israel without missiles and a navy. In a world where relations between states is based on ‘might is right’, Israel wants another weak neighbour like Lebanon.

What was surprising was the rapidity with which the dictatorship collapsed. Its conscript army was reluctant to fight and the general population, suffering from increased economic hardship due to Western sanctions (the cruel way the West employs to undermine a dictatorship it doesn’t support) was ready to welcome a change of regime

HTS seems keen to solicit international recognition, which means making some concessions to capitalist liberal democracy, but it has been designated a terrorist organisation by the West, and there’s a $10m price on the head of its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Indeed this former al-Qaeda and ISIS fighter has publicly praised the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and faced home-turf protests that his Sharia-law regime in the province of Idlib was as bad as Assad's. But he has also faced protests by Islamic hardliners who think he's not fundamentalist enough.

The political direction of travel is not obvious at the time of writing, and any spark could set off civil war. For the sake of the people of Syria, newly released from a tyranny that looked eternal, we can only hope not. As for the long-term future, it would seem almost churlish to point out that, if the country doesn't go into meltdown, they'll get the wage-slavery and the limited political ‘rights’ that workers have in many other capitalist countries, while a new privileged Syrian ruling class exploiting them emerges. That, unfortunately, is the best-case scenario, in the absence of an imminent global socialist revolution. The worst-case scenario doesn't bear thinking about.'

SPGB Meeting TONIGHT 13 November 1930 GMT ZOOM

 *LIFE AND TIMES OF THE SOCIALIST STANDARD*

*Speaker: Howard Moss*
https://zoom.us/j/7421974305

The divide grows wider

‘The twelve richest people in the US now have a combined worth of over $2 trillion (inequality.org, 3 December); that’s a 2 followed by twelve zeroes. The newest member of this exclusive club is Jensen Huang, boss of the software company Nvidia, whose wealth is now $122bn, over twenty times what it was four years ago.

This is at a time when there are over 36 million people in the US living in poverty by the official definition, including nearly ten million children. Over 650,000 are homeless, a figure that has increased for each of the last six years.

That’s capitalism for you: unbelievable wealth for a very few, varying degrees of poverty for many.’

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/

Be of good cheer?

The below is from the Socialist Standard December 1965

‘Christmas, we shall be told again and again during the next few weeks, is for the children. There is, of course, another side to it, represented by the flood of gaudy rubbish which fills the shops, the big campaigns to sell it, and by the tinsel of nonsense with which the whole thing is embellished. This is not so romantic a vision as that of innocent, starry-eyed kiddies hanging their stockings by the chimney—and it suggests that, whatever enjoyment children may get out of it, Christmas is for a few other people as well.

As the City columns, the advertising agencies, and the trade statistics make clear, Christmas is that thing so beloved of a section of the capitalist class—a spending spree. Millions of people save up, perhaps for the entire year, for this one great splash-out. This is the time when savings vanish, bonuses are blued, hire purchase debts cheerfully taken on. These debts have partly replaced the old loan clubs, which used to have their big pay-out at Christmas. In fact, hire-purchase does no more than the clubs—it simply moves the payment date from one part of the year to another, but this is enough to make it one more piece of evidence for those who are trying to prove that we are all so much better off nowadays.

Christmas is responsible for an amazing expansion of the retail market, lasting for about a month at a time when trade would probably otherwise be slack. For example, the sales of one suburban branch of a famous retail chain bound up to around thirty thousand pounds on Saturdays during December; the manager can almost forecast what his sales figure will be for each weekend. These sales are in the established, non-seasonal goods such as clothes, which simply become more hectic during the Christmas rush. There are plenty of other examples, as people determinedly smoke more cigarettes, eat more food, and of course drink more alcohol during the space of a couple of days than they do in a normal week.

Apart from the established trades, there are the seasonal sales, with an appeal confined exclusively to the Christmas period. Christmas crackers, for instance, are being turned out all the year round; even the men who compose those dreadful jokes and mottoes are hard at it months in advance. The result of all this is that about one hundred million crackers are sold at Christmas, some of them abroad.

We must not forget Christmas cards. The first of these was sent in 1843; the idea did not catch on for about twenty years and since then the market has steadily expanded until now something over six hundred million cards, worth about 15 million, are sent each Christmas. This is good business for the firms which make the cards (one of whose executives said a little while ago “We are in the sentiment business”) and for the Post Office, who rake in something like £8 million in postage on the cards, not to mention the extra revenue on Christmas parcels, greetings telegrams, 'phone calls and the rest.

It is anyone’s guess, how much of the spending at Christmas goes in a genuine effort to have, or to give someone else, a good time. A lot of the drinks, presents and smokes are sent as bribes (there is no other words for it) from the directors of one firm to those of another which, they hope, will buy their products. A host of calendars, diaries, packs of cards, are produced as advertising material. Some Christmas cards are sent out by firms as reminders that they are still in business—and magnificent pieces of work some of them are.

Apart from the business world, there is no doubt that a lot of money is spent at Christmas in an effort to impress other people. We have all seen—perhaps some of us have actually received—those Christmas cards which have so obviously been selected with the motive of convincing us that the senders are more wealthy and important than they actually are. We have all read the advertisements which say that no card is really gracious unless it has the senders’ name and address printed on the inside. It is an unpleasant fact that the acquisitive nature of capitalism gives strength to this sort of appeal; for those who fall for it, sending Christmas cards is a highly competitive business, in which a defeat has to smoulder for a whole year before the chance for revenge comes round again.

The fact is that Christmas is in some ways a time for people to show their less attractive side—and for the massed forces of commercialism to cash in on the situation, ruthlessly and to the full, with the only justification they need—in the end they have more profit than if they had not played up to peoples’ snobbery, their insecurity and their distorted conception of the world in which they struggle to live.

In other ways, too, commerce turns the screw at Christmas. A walk around any department store reveals an astounding variety of junk which is being sold at equally astounding prices. There are toys which are dangerous, or which will not last from Christmas to Boxing Day in the hands of any child. There are cakes of soap and bath cubes, stuck in a fancy box and covered in cellophane, selling for much more than their usual price. There is a bewildering mass of tinsel, plastic and coloured paper—and all the time there is the drive to sell, sell, sell for a Merry Christmas.

Yes, this is an enormous, briefly inflated, market; each year the note circulation leaps up to accommodate it. (Last year it increased from £2,583 million in the first week in November to £2,766 million in Christmas week.) The firms which hope to cash in on the boom lay their plans a long time ahead. From the summer months onwards, they are discussing and deciding on their advertising campaigns, their special wrappings and what they like to call their “presentation”. There is always the temptation for them to try to get in first, which they have to resist for fear of opening their campaign too early. But none of them can afford to leave it too late—they have such an awful lot to sell. So it is not uncommon for us to be able to buy Christmas decorations, wrappings, cards and so on in October; and before Guy Fawkes night there are not a few big stores with their Father Christmas, usually an unemployed stage extra, to induce people to buy by working on their children.

Many people complain that the Christmas sales campaign starts too early. But as the market is stimulated to grow, and as it grows, so will the effort to exploit it. This might mean an even longer sales drive in the future—wasn’t there a story about a business man who said that Christmas was good business as long as they kept religion out of it?

He must have been an ungrateful fellow; religion, after all, does him many a good turn. In any case, as we point out elsewhere in this issue, Christmas has nothing to do with Christianity; the Christians simply pinched it to suit their own purposes. What more natural, then, than that the capitalist social system, which is so faithfully supported by Christianity, should itself adopt Christianity’s most important festival for its own ends?

It was the Industrial Revolution which was responsible for reducing the old twelve days’ holiday at Christmas to a single day. The rise of capitalism meant that masses of people sold their working ability to the master class by time—and time spent on holidays was time not spent producing the masters profits in the factory or the mill or the mine. Capitalism, with the help of its religious lackeys, built up a massive condemnation of what it called idleness. And among other things it destroyed the ancient Twelve Days of Christmas.

More recently, capitalism has reduced the opposition to Christmas to a handful. Nobody now holds the opinion expressed in a Puritan pamphlet of 1656, that Christmas was ". . . the old Heathen’s Feasting Day . . . the Papists’ Massing Day, the Superstitious Man’s Idol Day . . . Satan’s That Adversary’s Working Day” but until fairly recently there was a solid, articulate opposition to it. This is now all but silent, as the festival has been blown up into a vast, commercialised orgy of selling and consumption, one of the many working class Festivals of Delusion.

The great Delusion of Christmas is that dormant within us there is the Christmas Spirit—a gentle compound of benevolence, co-operation and goodwill which is roused at this time of year by the appeal of religion. When we are possessed of the Spirit we are wise and generous and loving; if only (says the Delusion) we could keep it up all the year round the problems of the world would be solved. If we would only cast out the Scrooges among us (and we all have our own idea of who Scrooge may be) and live by the Christmas Spirit there will be no more poverty, or war, or oppression.

This is no joke; the Delusion is powerful. It brought both sides out of their trenches to fraternise in No Man’s Land in 1914 (officially, that was the last time they did it). It inspires countless maudlin speeches at office parties and family gatherings. It runs through the entire Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day. It is powerful—and it is dangerous.

For the Delusion fosters the idea that the troubles of capitalism are caused by anything but the essential nature of the system. It promotes the nonsense that the world today is a fearsome, disturbed place because people are bad and that if only people were better the world would be a better place. It encourages people to think in terms of good and bad spirit, when they should be asking themselves why they behave as they do, and why the world is as it is. And as a final irony, the Christmas Delusion even encourages some people to think that there is something inconsistent in the determined way that capitalism exploits Christmas for all it is worth.

To start at the right end of this problem, we should first of all realise that there is nothing essentially wrong (or right, for that matter) with most people. It is the conditions of living and working under capitalism which largely make them what they are. Capitalism is constantly working out ways of exploiting us more efficiently, which means more intensely. It is always pushing us that bit harder, crowding us in that much more, making us into that much more of a cut-throat in the competitive scramble for the better job, the bigger house, the easier money.

In these conditions, people live at an intense pressure. Events which in themselves are trivial—a telephone which rings, a child who behaves like a child—are an intolerable strain. It is only when we relax, when we put aside the worry of making ends meet, when we try to live like human beings, that we begin to get a better perspective on it all. Perhaps this is what a lot of people do at Christmas. Some of them, for a couple of days at any rate, actually succeed, and they put it all down to the Christmas Spirit.

The big laugh about this—if anyone can stand another joke at this time of year—is that if the working class really grasped the implications of this they would take a hard, sober look at capitalism and see it for the wretched way of living that it is. That old chap Scrooge had a word which aptly describes the delusions of capitalism, its cynicism and its hypocrisy. Humbug.’

Ivan

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/12/christmas-great-delusion-1965.html

Socialist Sonnet No. 174

The Unmasking of Tyranny

 

The tyrant feels secure in his redoubt

Amidst his cabinet of sycophants,

Where all his cold calculations and rants

Are applauded. He has the power to flout

Even pretences of democracy.

None oppose him who’re generously treated,

The few who do are swiftly deleted,

Or at least they’re detained indefinitely.

Yet aquifers of resentment and fear,

Build pressure, underground initially,

While the surface seems superficially

Stable, a violent rupture’s always near.

The brute once felled, might circumstance recruit

Not a liberator, but another brute?

 

D. A.

Rising Heat over heating bills revisited

 Like many other people the writer has been notified that utility bills are to rise on 1st  January 2025.

This is a repost from SOYMB October 2013. We're still waiting to  put an end to  the current iniquitous capitalist system.

'The churches used to explain God’s motives as inexplicable to us simple mortals. Now Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, says: “I do understand when people feel that this is inexplicable,” in regards to the domestic energy bills that workers now face paying.

 But the reason why bills are rocketing is not inexplicable - it’s very easy to explain. It’s called profiteering. The energy companies are hiking our bills because they can. And they know that the current UK government, which always puts profits before people, won’t do anything to stop them. After all, It’s easy to be blase about sky-high heating bills when you’re a millionaire, as more than two-thirds of the current UK Cabinet are. In 2011, then-Energy Minister Chris Huhne, another very rich Cabinet member, criticised members of the public for not spending more time on seeking out better energy deals.  "They do not bother," Huhne said in an interview. "They spend less time shopping around for a bill that's on average more than £1,000 a year than they would shop around for a £25 toaster," declared the snobbish politician, who in 2013 was sent to prison for perverting the course of justice after seeking to avoid penalty points on his driving licence.

First it was Scottish Southern Electric (SSE), which hiked its domestic bills by 8.2 percent.  Then the formerly state-owned British Gas announced a 10.4 percent rise in electricity bills and an 8.4 percent hike in gas bills. Now, today, the third of the so-called Big Six energy companies operating in the UK, German-owned Npower, has said it will raise its electricity and gas prices by 9.3 percent and 11 percent respectively.

Between August and December 2012, the Big Six announced price rises of between 6 percent and 10.8 percent. In August 2011, British Gas raised its gas and electricity prices by an average of 18 percent and 16 percent. In December 2010, SSE raised gas prices by 9.4 percent, while British Gas put its gas and electricity prices up by 7 percent.

 Forget the old excuse that companies are being forced to raise prices because of rising wholesale prices: wholesale prices of gas and electricity are only marginally higher now than they were back in 2009.  Stephen Fitzpatrick, the founder of a small energy company, Ovo Energy, told the BBC that he had not seen a wholesale price rise for over two years. “If they're buying more expensive gas, more expensive electricity, in a large part we think this is because they're selling it to themselves," he said.

 Around 5.3 million households in Britain live in fuel poverty and the number continues to rise. Last December, the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group estimated that 9 million people would be living in fuel poverty by 2016. The latest price hikes mean more misery and the likelihood of more people losing their lives this winter due to inadequately heated homes.

Are we just going to sit back and allow people to freeze to death this winter because of the profiteering of a handful of greedy companies? Or are we going to demand the political changes which will lead to an end of the current iniquitous capitalist system?'

Slightly adapted from here

'Honour' and the Greasy Pole

'Thirty days out to sea and the weather was fine
The wind that we'd prayed for and making good time
The honour of first home was soon to be mine
To homeland and to Queen'

Honour and Praise, a song by John Duncan Richards, covered by Fairport Convention, tells of a Victorian sailing ship, possibly a goods transporting clipper, whose captain is intent on being the first ship to arrive back at England with its cargo. But in racing across the ocean the ship is capsized in a storm and all the crew die except the narrator, the captain.

'And I've lived with the thought for the rest of m' days
That I'd given the lives of the crew just to pay
In search of the garlands of honour and praise
And I wish that I'd drowned in the storm'

'Mayor of London  Sadiq Khan is reportedly being lined up for a knighthood in the New Year honours list after securing a historic third term as London mayor in May. He is expected to be awarded the gong for his political and public service, having previously served as the MP for Tooting before he left the Commons in 2016. Mr Khan is first Muslim mayor of the capital also served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Sources told the Financial Times he is expected to receive the honours alongside a number of Labour veterans, including Islington South MP Emily Thornberry.'

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/sadiq-khan-set-for-knighthood-in-new-year-honours-list/ar-AA1vnpHC?ocid=BingNewsSer

Greasy pole indeed.

The piece below from the Socialist Standard May 2006

'We have been here before. We were here when New Labour were gleefully exploiting the Tories’ embarrassment over episodes of sleaze like Neil Hamilton and his cash for questions, while Tony Blair was encouraging the voters to believe that everything would be better, more open and honest, when he was at the head of the government. The party rosettes and the election manifestos had hardly been pushed down into the waste bins when that particular deception was exposed by the Bernie Ecclestone affair. Since then there has been a steady trickle of similarly discomforting events. And now there is the engulfing flood of revelations of “honours” being awarded in exchange for donations and loans to the party or to finance some of Blair’s desperate sticking plaster reforms of hospitals, schools… It is serious enough to involve the police, with one person arrested.

This raises the question of why there have been no prosecutions for something which has been illegal since 1925. It was Lloyd George who, as might be expected, was most infamously involved in what he described to a Tory MP as “… the cleanest way of raising money for a political party. The worst is that you cannot defend it in public”. In line with this he defended and promoted it in private, by appointing an agent, Maundy Gregory, to arrange the sale of honours – for, of course, a suitable commission. Gregory operated from a dauntingly expensive office in the heart of Whitehall, complete with uniformed flunkey. His price list varied from £80,000 to £120,000 for a viscountcy to £10,000 to £15,000 for a knighthood. Less affluent clients were also looked after; for them Lloyd George invented the OBE, which cost about £100. The Labour MP Victor Grayson, perhaps in an effort to revive a flagging political career, denounced the sale of honours through the work of “a monocled dandy with offices in Whitehall”. Soon afterwards he was mysteriously beaten up and then disappeared in suspicious circumstances, leading to the assumption that he had been murdered. Apart from such regrettable lapses Lloyd George and Gregory ran a civilised and profitable business, quite unthreatened by the fact that Lloyd George had sneered at the Lords as “… five hundred men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed”.

Retirement

So blatant was the racket, from which Lloyd George made about £1.5million (about £150 million today) and Gregory about a fifth of that amount, that in 1925 it was deemed necessary to pass the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, which should have landed a whole clutch of politicians, Tory as well as Labour, in trouble. In fact the only person to have been prosecuted was Gregory himself, who in 1933 was sent to prison for two months. After this “punishment” he retired comfortably to France on a generous pension as the price of his silence. The Tory MP who brokered that deal was awarded with a knighthood by the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who whinged that the Tory Leader Baldwin had involved him “… in a scandal by forcing me to give an honour because a man has paid £30,000 to get Tory headquarters and some Tories out of a mess”. Was this, we may wonder, the same Ramsay MacDonald who had once described himself as a socialist?

And that was not the end of the affair, because since Gregory went about his odious business the sale of honours, under many guises, has continued to thrive. The Wilson government created Lords Sainsbury and Hamlyn, both of them contributors to party finances. Notoriously, the owner of the company which manufactured the Gannex raincoat so beloved by Wilson was ennobled as Lord Kagan; he was later jailed for corruption. Then there was Sir Eric Miller, who avoided further attentions from the Fraud Squad by committing suicide. That many of the peerages arranged by the Wilson government were rewards for donations to Labour Party funds was confirmed by Joe Haines, who was a kind of predecessor to Alastair Campbell in Wilson’s Downing Street. Although there is evidence that Wilson was not entirely happy about his awards, feeling that he was under pressure from party fund raisers, his retirement nominations (the infamous “lavender list”) was full of party donors and cronies. Haines refused to be included in it because he “…did not wish to appear in the kind of list which had Joe Kagan and Eric Miller and others whom I regarded as undeserving”.

Heath

Among all these double dealings Ted Heath was something of an aberration. Although he reversed Wilson’s decision to stop giving out political honours he was so sparing in his awards that he thought he had “… caused some grumbling among party members”. During his three and three quarters years in office he nominated 34 new life peers, in contrast to the following five years of Labour government under Wilson and Callaghan when 144 “suitable” candidates were put up. The payback for what Heath called “grumbling” came when he was confronted with Thatcher in the 1975 leadership contest. A number of backbenchers seemed likely to have taken revenge for their disappointment at being overlooked for a comfortable, unchallenged seat in the Lords which they saw as the just reward for their long abasement to the needs of the party.

With the advent of Thatcher things in the Tory party got back to what might be called normal. The Iron Lady established a reputation second only to Lloyd George’s for systematically using the honours system to raise money for the party or to reward or cajole restless backbenchers. Between 1979 and 1985 eleven industrialists were made peers after donating a total of £1.9 million to party finances; among them were Victor Matthews who gave £210,000, shipping magnate William Cayzer who gave £410,531 and Frank Taylor of the building firm Taylor Woodrow who donated £367,510. Then there were the knighthoods for the likes of Keith Showering (£424,000) and Nigel Broakes (£210,000). It was all summed up by the former MP, Chief Whip and Foreign Secretary Francis Pym who, undeterred by the fact that he himself had been ennobled as Lord Pym, told the Neill Committee on Standards in Public Life that “… a person had to put money where their mouth is to be considered for an honour”.

Labour

But all of that was supposed to have ended when New Labour arrived in Downing Street with their pledge to replace sleaze with transparency (politician’s jargon for motivated obscurity) and reward on merit (to be assessed on the size of a donation). In some cases big money has been given to support the new city academies, which are supposed to be an improvement on schools which were “failing” because their pupils were performing as might be expected from the area they live in, the depth of their family poverty and the bleakness of their life horizons. The latter-day Maundy Gregory with the job of organising these donations was Des Smith, a head teacher who was also a schools adviser to the government. Smith was persuaded to tell an under cover reporter from the Sunday Times that someone could expect to get one of a range of honours depending on how much money they put into the academies, from an OBE for one academy to a knighthood for two and a peerage – a “certainty” – for five. As a result of his venture into that particular branch of New Labour transparency Mr. Smith has been the subject of close interest from the police.

But in a sense donations to the academies are actually to the Labour Party, since they are designed to boost the party’s chances at the next election by financing one of Blair’s pet projects. Rather more straightforward were the loans from individuals, which the party has defended on the grounds that the money was lent at “commercial” rates – which raises the question of why they did not simply approach their bank instead of people who had rather a lot to gain through lending the money. For example there is Rod Aldridge, chairman of the company Capita which paid him £501,000 in 2004. He also has shares in the company worth some £60 million. Capita has contracts to supply “support services” to the Criminal Records Bureau (which was not among their finest achievements); it runs call centres for the BBC and the NHS and it collects the London Congestion Charge. Aldridge has lent the party £1 million; he got an OBE in 1994. Another lender is Barry Townsley, chairman of a stockbroking firm who was barred from the Stock Exchange trading floor in the 1980s after a scandal involving some share deals. He has lent the party £1 million. Townsley was recommended for a peerage by Tony Blair but he refused the offer, saying it was not worth the negative publicity.

Ironic

It is clearly misleading to refer to the baubles and titles dished out to venal business people and party hangers-on as honours. There is nothing honourable about them, except that they conform to the morality of capitalism. This is a society based on, and ruled by, the principle that sale and profit is a celebration while redundancy and loss is a tragedy. Yet the mouthpieces of capitalism, when it suits them, tell us that there are rewards for a finer morality where human service counts above the crudities of the balance sheet. It is ironically appropriate that even capitalism’s “honours” are for sale. Yes we have been here before and will be here again.'

Ivan

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/05/greasy-pole-honour-rooted-in-dishonour.html