On Consumer Choice... and the Lack of it

Aditya Chakraborttywrote today in The Guardian about how the

“British are more powerful shoppers than ever before, at work they are becoming less independent”.

He describes how the number of choices in a McGonnagal’s menu has gone from a few items in 1984 to some 49 or so dishes today.

But, he argues, the other side of this picture is worker’s loss of autonomy. In other words, today’s workers have less and less choice over what they do.

Aditya is missing a key piece of this puzzle, and without it the picture doesn’t make much sense: : why would the increase of menu options in a McGonnagal’s relate to the decrease in agency for workers?

What Aditya is missing is that this increase in consumer “choice” goes hand in hand with decrease in consumer “choice”. Yes, you read that right.

It is true that McGonnagal’s menu now has a bazillion choices, but the important question is: who many alternatives are there to McGonnagal’s?

I wasn’t in Britain in the 80s but I’m pretty sure that back then there were far more independently owned restaurants, cafes and “chippies”. Keep in mind that one single independently owned business is a “one of a kind”, while yet another McGonnagal’s is another example of the same thing.

If we were to mathematically compute “choice”, then each independent business would count as “one”, while McGonnagal’s as a whole brand would count as “one” as well. McGonnagal’s may have thousands of restaurants, but they all sell exactly the same thing. 

But forget about computing “choice”. The fact that I was having the same meal as Aditya while living in a different continent approximately 9 thousand miles away tells us all we need to know about the presence of “choice”.

The political meaning of “choice” isn’t “how many combinations of McGonnagal’s ingredients are there in the menu” but rather “how many alternatives are there to McGonnagal’s”.(And if you wanna get really political, the question is actually "who owns these businesses").

Incidentally, for a lot of poor people, the answer is increasingly “none”. There aren’t many places in town for the poor to go to relieve their hunger. Ok, I’m exaggerating: there’s always Burger Ming.

Speaking of which, yesterday I passed a coffee shop that is no more. It was open last month, though.

And in entirely unrelated news, another “Costa” has opened its doors, this one next to the Students’ Union. How nice. Now young people can pay their fees while learning the skills they will need for future employment… of barista, that is.

Aditya is right of course when he speaks about the loss of autonomy for workers. People have less and less “choice” or (“voice”) over what they have to do in their workplaces.

But how does that relate to McGonnagal’s menu choices?

Simple. Whereas before you had a McGonnagal’s, and a coffee shop, and a Chinese restaurant, and a chip shop, and a bakery, now you have… just a McGonnagal’s. Oh, and a PlanetsBucks, of course.

And what do those two have in common? They are humongous, global brands with thousands of venues.  

It’s easy to understand why the larger a company is, the less power workers have over what they do.

For instance, if you work for a small Chinese restaurant and you want to change a recipe, all you have to do is talk to the cook and/or owner.

If you work for a McGonnagal’s and you want to change a recipe… well… you can’t. Those decisions are taken thousands of miles away, somewhere in the US, by someone so up the food chain that you would never have access to them.

And it’s not like you could just change a recipe and get away with it. Because brands like McGonnagal’s require that every product is the same everywhere. They call it “brand consistency” and it matters, for some reason, that everywhere in the whole planet people are tasting exactly the same burger as everyone else.

Brands like McGonnagal’s and PlanetsBucks get larger at the expense of smaller businesses; that’s why their menus grow. This can only mean that people are working for them instead of opening their own shops.

And the larger these brands get, the more hierarchical and “top down” workplaces get.

The same story repeats itself on every aspect of the economy, so you can apply the same idea to your area of choice. For example, the number of magazines at the supermarket rack hides the fact that they are all owned by a few companies.

* I know that according to “journalistic” standards I should refer to him by his surname, “Chakrabortty”, but “Aditya” is such a nice name!

On the Matter of This Nov30 Strike...

Here it is; in just a few hours, the biggest strike in living memory will be taking place in Britain. Well, a big enough strike anyway.

And I have nothing but pain and disconnected thoughts in my head.

First and foremost, yes, I am indeed very glad to see Unions getting their act together and finally taking industrial action.

And yet, I feel that familiar frustration with the nature of the strike and the kind of unions involved in it. I experienced the same feeling during the last “anti cuts” demonstration organised by the Unions a while ago.

That frustration watches them and asks… “Really? After all that’s going through only public sector workers go on strike and over the matter of pensions? Really?”

It has a general feel of… middle class England wanting to better their lot. You know, that portion of Britain you see on the media, the only portion that seems to matter. They drink expensive fair-trade lattes, read the Grauniad, are ubiquitously white, and only “see” the misery of those at the bottom of society twice, three, four times removed. By which point the truth has been bleached and sanitised so much that they mistake making better consumer choices with saving the world.

I fully realise that these feelings are just that: feelings, not an accurate depiction of reality. And I know that the better conditions public sector workers have, the better the working conditions will be for all workers. That the better pensions they have, the better pensions everyone will have. And I’m also aware of the fact that Thatcher has made “general strikes” almost impossible, unless they are over pensions.

But still… pensions? Really? Did everyone miss the riots?

I am entirely convinced that “middle class England” simply has no idea how bad things are for the poorest members of society. And I literally mean NO EFFING CLUE.

They don’t understand the desperation, or the urgency for that matter.

They have the luxury of thinking about their “pensions” because their position in society is, relatively speaking, so “good” that they can physically think about the future and plan ahead.

They cannot imagine how it feels to not be able to even think about next month, next week even, because the future can only mean more of the present, which is unbearably painful. They can’t imagine what it’s like to be stuck in a cycle of “nothing ever gets better”, of “nothing to look forward to”, of “more of the same crap day after day”.

They are not, in short, “numb” to the future. They have the luxury of thinking about pensions.

Then there’s the Occupy movement, which, by its very nature, is born out of desperation, out of frustration of seeing no other “tactic” work. Occupiers go and stay there; not because they hope to achieve something, but because they literally can’t stand to carry on like this. They share one certainty only: things have to change.

People are so politically exhausted that they deal with their desperation by turning it into action. Nothing is in the world works anymore, so they go and do something that doesn’t work either. And they keep on doing it. Because at least while the Occupation is taking place, “something” is working; even if it’s just a small general assembly, to try to keep functioning something that could be swept away at any minute.

The Occupy movement feels like the politics and the actions of the hopeless. “Work without hope”, as a WWII poet once wrote.

The strike, the Occupy movement and the riots. From the most privileged workers, who “do the right thing” and “keep Britain running”, to the most desperate amongst us, who are literally told “they do are not part of society”.  

From public sector workers striking to keep things as they used to be, to the Occupy movement demanding an end to the “1% and the 99%”, to the riots, the most literal manifestation of “wealth redistribution” there could be.

You know what I would like to see? More strikes; for longer periods of time; over many more issues. Public sector workers should leave the workplace and stay out. Or occupy it and not work.

It is not enough to strike over pensions. Public sector workers, as the most privileged members of the work force, need to show solidarity to everyone else. I don’t know how; but they need to find a way to do it. Enough of trying to fix a broken system, or forcing the bad to not get so much worse; we need to start moving towards building an alternative.

Perhaps public sector workers could organise sit-ins with unemployed people? That could be rather fun. And I am pretty sure it would build solidarity like nothing else.

In a few hours most of us will be either striking or joining demos. Remember this: 2.5 million workers will, according to David Cameron, “draw Britain to a halt”.

Presumably the 2.6 million workers who are unemployed merely provide the desperation that keeps the cogs in the machine compliant and obedient?

As for me, I won’t be striking, since I don’t have a job. Instead, I’ll be doing by first ever “subbing” session for Women’s Views onNews. Voluntary work I hope one day will turn into paid employment.

Because I’m desperate. And I only know one this: things have to change.

The Divide Between "Reform" and "Change"

I’m beginning to notice a “divide” in the dissident movement, between the boomers and generation X (for lack of a better word), between those with jobs in the public and voluntary sector, and those who have only known the “private” one, between those who have made quite a nice middle class living through a job that consists of “making society better” and those whose jobs have only involved making shareholders wealthier, who have no hope in Hell of a middle class livelihood, and who don’t believe this system is redeemable.

I want to explore this because if such a divide does exist, I believe it is better to prepare ourselves for it so we deal with it better.

In essence this divide takes looks like this: while the boomers want reform, calling out for using existing institutions to make things better, generation X either wants a radical overhaul of society or nothing.

This may very well be caused by the differences between the old and the young. But is there more to it than that? I have noticed it doesn’t always take the form of “old” vs “young” but rather “person employed in the public sector” vs “person who has only worked in call centres”.

I was reminded of this divide once again yesterday, during a social gathering with fellow feminists. I noticed those discussing their jobs with pride and joy, jobs which consisted of “doing very worthy things for society”, while others remained suspiciously quiet. I was amongst the latter. Working part time for Evil Coffee Company on the minimum wage is not something that brings me (or my mother) either pride or joy. It is also something which most certainly does not consist of a “very worthy thing for society”. If anything, the opposite is true.

Today this “divide” showed up in the form of a post inLiberal Conspiracy, on the topic of people’s low trust for public institutions. From the title alone I could tell that the author must be middle aged. She was. I have never heard a young person wondering why the public doesn’t trust the institutions in our society. Compared with what we have to face in our daily lives “trust” is the least of our worries.

So while middle aged, middle class public sector workers ask “how do we improve the system we have so that it works better for people”, young dissidents go on a mad one and ask “smash the damn system!”. Or they remain entirely apathetic; one extreme or the other.

I seems to be the case that older dissidents working “inside” the system, believe it to be a possible force for good. And believe it has been a force for good. However, for those people “outside” of the system, who have neither benefited from its good deeds, nor have contributed to it, the “system” is an alien entity that must be ignored or gotten rid off. In short, we can’t work with it. It never gave us anything, it has never come to us asking for our opinion, why should we even consider it when trying to build an alternative?

This attitude is dangerous. The public sector may be under attack; it may be dwindling away; it may have been out of its depth for the past few decades. But it’s still there, and ignoring it won’t help. It may be a crap ally, but it is the only ally we have in an otherwise very corrupt system.

Similarly, it may not be very wise to put all our eggs in the public sector basket. The public sector is, at the end of the day, a grand collection of plasters. It does contain the torrent of pain and misery that the system would otherwise inflict but it can’t stop it.

The solution may lie somewhere in the middle. If the goal is to help people who are suffering, the first port of call should be meeting their most urgent demands. That is something the public and voluntary sector can do. However, in order for things to really change, in order to capture the hearts of people, we need to keep waving the flag of radical political reform. Revolution. Socialism. You name it. In the face of universal suffering a bit of reform here and there won’t do.

As always, it all starts with compassion. (I believe this will be the sentence I shall use the most in my whole “career”). I would greatly appreciate it if middle aged, middle class people could try to imagine what it must feel like for a struggling young person in today’s world. I know they can do it.

Last year a 40 year old man working with young people said to me, very plainly, that things are “sh*t” for young people, there’s nothing for them. And it’s true. A young woman working with homeless people said that banks, when dealing with crisis loans, “treat you like a piece of sh*t”.

I know for a fact that working in the public sector does not automatically blind people to the reality of the dispossessed. Yet it must be said that those two public sector workers I mentioned were members of the Socialist Workers Party, an organization that, for all its defects, keeps the fine tradition of rebelling against the economic and political system alive.

The current system has failed us, or we wouldn’t be in the position we are in at the moment. Improving people’s lives momentarily is a very noble goal. But if we want to radically change society, we need to go back to political struggle. Except for those who have never left.

Buying and Not Buying - A Cheap and Cheerful Respone to Market Fundamentalism

The easiest and quickest way to challenge the “people buy it” is to believe in a higher moral authority. What do I mean? I mean an authority that can say “This is wrong no matter how many people buy it”. If you believe in God, you are sorted *. There are lots of things God is opposed to, despite most people wanting to do them because "they are bad for people".

If you believe in an alternative to God, be it Goddess, Universe, life energy, the Creator, then you are good to go as well. Because all of these entities know better than us humans what is “right” and what is “wrong”, what is “good” and what is “bad”, it becomes much easier to say “yes, lots of people buy it, but that doesn’t make it good”.

This idea of questioning the will of the majority doesn’t sit well with our social democratic values. If you are squirming in your seat as you read this, comfort yourself that what you are experiencing is entirely normal. We have come to accept that “lots of people buying it” means that the product bought and the business that makes it must be good. It’s a sort of democracy through purchasing. Facing the statements “people buy it” or “the majority of people in society buy it” and replying “that doesn’t make it ok” is a difficult thing to do. And yet, you may have noticed, people still do it. Why?

Because no matter how much we are told that these products are good, there remains something in our heart of hearts that knows better. This should be enough to convince everyone that humans have an inbuilt moral compass. People can still tell when something is wrong, even if we are all blindingly doing it. For the record, market fundamentalists don’t believe in either God or a moral compass. Yes, it is precisely because it works against their interests. (And yes, it has a lot to do with what the Rich West is doing to Muslims.)

What you have to do in short is to stand up and call “foul” on something that is (seemingly) popular. It’s easier if you have a God/Creator to fall back upon. If you don’t, then trust your moral compass. But you will need this strength in order to question the system.

Focusing on the Absence of Competition

Now, I’m going to share with you a little trick that I use to deal with the towering force of “people buy it”. Here it is: “it doesn’t matter if people buy it; what matters is whether they can make an alternative”. (The phrasing may need some reworking). In other words: it doesn’t matter if people buy something because, at the end of the day, they can’t compete with it. People cannot open an alternative to Tesco, for instance. Small businesses have been “priced out”. This is unfair competition.

The strength of this argument lies in the fact that you are shedding light to this other side of the “market” equation. Nobody wants to bring this up because the whole illusion that “things are fine they way they are” would come crashing down. So whenever market fundamentalists talk about “people buying, businesses prospering and bad businesses dying out”, they conveniently forget to mention this other bit of their theory. That for “good businesses to prosper and bad businesses to die out” there must be more than one business.

The way their theory is actually defined, when you look into it, is “people open a business and sell X; but if someone else opens another business and sells better X, then the previous business either goes bust or finds a way to improve its X”.

And here is the reason why, even to their standards, our current system does not look like what they advocate: nobody can open a business and compete with the giants. Nobody can open a business and sell better “X”. Nobody can open a grocery shop and sell better products at cheaper prices than Tesco. Nobody can compete with the high street fashion labels, which ship their production to Thailand to pay less in wages. Nobody can compete with giant providers like “Sky” or “Virgin”.

And when nobody can compete with the giants, people have no choice but to work for them and buy their stuff.

Without a good amount of competition, even by the rules of the “free market”, there is no way for bad businesses to go “bust” because a better business has come along. Only fellow giants can compete with each other. Tesco and Asda can be rivals (and when you look into it, you find that they aren’t), but it would be pretty impossible for you or me to open a grocery store and stand a chance against them.

So when people talk about “people buy it”, what we should ask is “yes, but what are their changes in making something different?”.

You find that the bigger the giants gets, the smaller “we” get in return. And the smaller the competition, the worse the products being sold in the market. The giants can quite literally get away with selling us whatever they want, and we have to shut up because, what are we going to do?

This response to why “people buy it” is far from ideal. It is handy when you need to come up with a reply in a short space of time, but it won’t do to challenge the whole economic system. But it's a start.

* There are a good number of Christian socialists and Islamic socialists who go back to the teachings of either Christ or Muhammad and conclude (shockingly!) that their prophet was all about equality and sticking up for the poor. Similarly with Judaism, though minus the prophet.

Buying and Not Buying - A Primer on Neoliberalism and the Free Market

You have probably heard this comeback a thousand times already. Whenever anyone dares to raise an issue about the evil practices of evil businesses, it’s only a matter or time before someone chimes in: “If people stopped buying, it would have to close down”.

Ah, if only people stopped buying… Why can’t people just stop buying from those evil companies? If only everyone stopped buying, we would no longer have Tescos and Starbuckses. And our world would be inhabited only by small, friendly businesses, where kittens and puppies would greet us at the door, lead by the Churchill Dog.

This is “the” number one justification for not controlling corporations and businesses. It cuts to the core of the present economic system. We have to understand how this system works if we want to change it. In this particular case, we have to understand how it colours our perception of the world and what we can in it.  

Ok, kids, gather round for Mary’s short talk on “Economy 101”

(NOTE: If you are encountering these ideas for the first time, don't panic. It takes time to understand all this properly, and I'm still not all that clear on it myself. Have patience with yourself, don't obsess over what you don't understand (unlike me) and feel free to ask me anything you don't quite get).   

You may have heard that we live in a Capitalist system. It’s true. Now, Capitalism has many variants, and our current one is called Neoliberalism. It wrecked my country and it’s wrecking the world.

Neoliberalism’s motto is “let businesses do what businesses do”. This system is powered by the belief that if we just let businesses do whatever they want, things will eventually turn peachy. The name for this belief is “market fundamentalism” or “free market fundamentalism” and it is the most “fundamentalist” set of beliefs out there. Its basic assumption is that “markets regulate themselves”. Ok, what the Hell does that mean? It means this:

A business opens. People buy from it or not buy from it. If people buy, the business prospers. If people don’t, the business goes bust. This means that in time the only businesses that stay around are those that people liked. Which means that, in time, the only businesses that stay around are those which are “teh awesome”. The universe where “businesses” and “customers” interact with each other, is called “market”. Saying that “markets regulate themselves” means saying that this interaction between businesses and customers works into making things better for everyone. The Government, therefore, needn’t do nothing at all. In fact, it should take a hike, Mike. And that is, in short, the way the “free market” works.

Neoliberalism is now 30 years old. And we are still waiting for “teh awesome”

Now you may have read the above explanation and concluded “hey, that makes a lot of sense”. Yes, it does… when presented this way. This is the way market fundamentalists define the whole “markets regulate themselves” dynamic. It is also “the way things work / the way the world works” according to the vast (vast) majority of the population, who have either never lived under a different system, or haven’t heard of an alternative.

This is not “the way things work”. It’s the way we are told that things work. We are never presented with an alternative, are we?

If you have been following the banking crisis then you may have spotted the problem with the whole “markets regulate themselves” dealio. You may have raised an eyebrow when I said that “if people don’t (buy), the business goes bust”. After all, weren’t the banks in the proverbial sh*t when the estate stepped in and rescued them from total bankruptcy? Why yes, indeed. It turns out that in the real world, markets don’t actually regulate themselves very well.

So what exactly is wrong with this system? Well, approximately everything. But let’s start with the basics. The problem with the explanation of how things work is that it’s incomplete. So, let’s add the ending.

A business opens. People buy from it or not buy from it. If people buy, the business prospers. If people don’t, the business goes bust. This means that in time the only businesses that stay around are those that people liked.

The businesses get bigger, and buy out the competition. They start buying the government, which in turn gives them more power to do whatever they want. With more power and more freedom to do whatever they want, these businesses grow even bigger. Eventually, no other business stands a chance in competing with them. They become giants. Because no new businesses can compete, in time, they are the only ones running the show. Which means that whether people “buy or not buy”, becomes more or less irrelevant.

And here we have arrived to our initial problem. The comeback from the people who don’t like it when we complain about evil companies was “If people stopped buying, it would have to close down”.

It is true that whether people buy or not buy has an impact on whether businesses prosper or go bust. The problem is that when companies get so, so big, they have millions and millions of customers. This means that they can fare well if you stop buying. They can fare well if you and your family stop buying. They can fare well if you, your family, your friends, your community, your nation stopped buying. So in order to stop one of this giant corporations, you and your army need to convince millions and millions of people around the globe to stop buying. And that’s where our problem lies.

Now I’m going to explain one direct consequence of believing that “markets regulate themselves”. It’s important to understand this because it explains a lot about modern society. Here it is.

People are hammered consistently throughout their lives with the idea that “people buy, business grows; people don’t buy, business stops”. Eventually, people believe in this unquestioningly. They come to accept that “if people stopped buying, the business stops”. More importantly, they believe in the “opposite” of this statement: that all and every business that hasn’t stopped is popular with customers. Try and wrap your mind around this because it is that relevant to the way we have come to see the world. People believe that every business they see is well liked, its products are bought a lot, and, by extension, they come to accept that this business is good and moral. (Don’t worry for the moment if you don’t understand that last bit).

This means that people go through life accepting everything they see. This idea is literally a bottleneck in people’s minds. Nobody can question anything that is because everything is as it should be. If you go down the high street of your choice and dare mention to someone that “this business is doing something wrong”, the reply you are more likely to get back is “people buy it”. This idea has got in-built complacency. Nobody can question reality because if it’s real, it must have been chosen by lots of people. And that automatically makes it good, because nobody would dare suggest that anything which has been chosen by millions of people could possibly be wrong.

Spend some time with this idea. It explains so many things. Imagine what it does to people’s minds to not be able to question any aspect of the world around them because “people buy it”. If you can, read about the way that neoliberalism shapes people’s thinking. I wish I could suggest a book to you, but everything I know I’ve learnt it through reading bits and pieces here and there, and then putting the whole thing together myself.

How to break away from this “bottleneck”. If I had an answer to the comeback “people buy it”, I would be a famous writer. Unfortunately, I don’t. I don’t know of anyone else who does either. But I can help you chip away at this poisonous idea. 

And that's exactly what I'm going to do in my next post. (This one is too long already). Stay tuned!

(Hat tip to the ragged robin for getting me to explain the "free market" to an actual human being. Hope I've done a better job here)