"Rule Britannia"

Today I went to a festival in my city, where I was greeted by a small choir singing “Rule Britannia”. The chorus is catchy, I'll admit it. However, all I kept hearing was “Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves. Britons never ever ever shall be sane”. I am not joking, that is exactly what I could make out. I had to ask my boyfriend, who promptly filled me in on what the lyrics actually said. “Britons never ever ever shall be slaves”.

It’s interesting to note that the choir was singing this song here in Wales.

Wales; a country whose history, for what I have gathered, consists of the pillaging and plundering by England.

It is even more interesting to note that yesterday, for the first time, I found myself saying out loud that I believe the British have been colonised by the American Empire, much like the rest of the World, only with far less opposition by its citizens.

And I stand by my words. Britain is a proud country, used to rule the world after being an Empire for centuries. It seems easier for British citizens to carry on believing that they (more or less) still rule the world. They seem content with the fact that everyone else speaks English, just like them.

They don’t question, for instance, why is it that there’s a McGonnagal’s, a Burger Minging and a PlanetsBucks in every British High Street. Every effing British High Street. Would the British react differently if the forsaken fast food establishment were called, say, “Don Alonso’s”?

I saw an ad on the telly some time ago for this “New British Drama!”. Except that it seems to take place in America, everyone has an American accent, the look and feel of the images is indistinguishable from an American Drama and, wait for it, there’s an American flag waving at the end of the ad.

I could go on all day.

Let me say this loud and clear:

Britain is not America. And the ruling empire is the American Empire, not the British Empire.

Britain is not pulling the strings, America is. See Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya.

As a foreigner, I notice how every culture in the world is being superseded by the Great American Culture.

I have felt for the culture of every country I’ve lived in, its personality, charm and unique qualities trodden upon by a big, unstoppable Monster nobody is supposed to acknowledge or question.

I feel for British culture as well.

But of course, British culture is not the only victim of the American Empire.

There's also the British Welfare State. A source of national pride and a strong example of “doing it right” which American activists themselves have relied on to prove to their governments that “there is a better way to do things”. That British Welfare State is being decimated by policies and laws that have a distinct Neoliberal appearance.

Put it bluntly, the welfare state is being killed by the American economic system that rules the world.

Put it more bluntly still, in a few more years, the British economy will be indistinguishable from the American one.

This is simply a continuation of the American Empire exercising its influence over Britain. And it’s only a taste of what the rest of the world has been dealing with since the beginning of the American Empire.

Yet you don’t hear right wing groups like the EDL crying about defending “British Values” while opposing American ones.

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I was just listening to this very song on ITube. The video consisted of a long series of paintings showcasing the might of the British Empire. The last one? “Side by side Britannia”, an image of Uncle Sam and Britannia herself, their arms locked, smiling at each other.

Perhaps the artist forgot to add a speech bubble: Uncle Sam whispering to Britannia "Do as I say or else". 

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)

The Problem With "Live And Let Live" - More on Moran

During the Newsnight debate, Caitlin Moran revealed to Paxman and the audience her life motto of "live and let live" (adding after that "when my head hits the table, please order me a taxi". Presumably because it sounds transgressive and "edgy".)

Moran’s bubbly, perky and boisterous cry of “live and let live” fits the neoliberal agenda to a T. By doing nothing on a social level, by “allowing anything to happen” we are literally leaving the doors wide open for corporations to do what they want. It’s not a far cry from “deregulation”. And we know how well that went with the banks.

Think about the actual meaning of “live and let live”. What it doesn’t say, but is implied, is this:

A) we will allow everyone to do what they want, we won’t stop anyone from doing what they want. Translation: we will allow businesses to sell whatever they want, and if people want to buy, that’s their choice. (And if the product is bad for them, it's their own fault for buying)

B) we assume that “doing” stuff is good. Translation: buying trumps not buying. We will allow the selling of everything.

C) we can’t say that anything is “bad”, and therefore we can’t stop people from doing what they want. Translation: we can’t judge anything as morally "wrong", but we can nevertheless say that stopping a business is not allowed, while allowing a business to exist is.

What this type of ideology never addresses is this: why is it that “live and let live” always translates into more businesses opening rather than less? Wait, that’s not a good way of putting it. Here’s another: why is it that “live and let live” comes to mean “stuff will be produced and sold” and it never means “stuff will not be produced or sold”?

For a clear-cut example, why is it that nobody ever, like, EVER, brings up this argument to use it against the arms trade? Nobody ever says “look, I believe in live and let live, so stop making weapons”. AHA! How about “I believe in live and let live, and since cars kill tens of thousands of people every year, it would be a great improvement on letting other people live if we all gave up cars”. Instead, the argument, which is never applied to this case by the way, takes the form “look, let people have cars, live and let live”.

Do you see it now? Even when the “letting people do whatever they want” actually gets in the way of people living, the argument “live and let live” is still applicable. Why? Because it’s not the innocent request for “everyone to get along” or "respect other people's choices" . It’s actually the nasty propagandistic shtick used to silence dissidents by painting them as “intolerant”. What they really mean is “let people do whatever they want” and under they breath they add “because there is no such thing as society”. Your actions should never get in the way of another person’s actions. Because, it is assumed, that the actions of another will never affect you or anyone else. 

And that, my friends, is at the very core of every exploitative economic system. So long as the actions of another never affect you, the ruling classes can get away with doing anything to anyone. And that’s important to remember: while we argue over whether something is “good” or “bad”, whether it has “negative” or “no” consequences, while we get into discussions and end up, out of sheer frustration, “agreeing to disagree” and stating that “there is no way to know”, corporations get busy with ruling the planet, opening new shops and malls, and before you know it you can’t get together outside of the city library because it belongs to John Lewis. Yes, you read that right. We, the public, argue over which member of the public should decide for all of us. And while we argue, what is left of the public space gets appropriated by corporations. We can stop arguing then, surely. There’s no point anymore: we no longer control our lives.

WHOOPS! It seems like somebody decided what was “good” while we were busy arguing over whether it should be done or not.

I leave you with a really cool post I found accidentally while searching for Moran and "live and let live" titled "When the personal becomes apolitical", by Frances Grahl at shareorshelve. Sometimes the internet works.