Christmas —the great delusion (1965)

From the December 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

Cooking the Books (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pat a cake, pat a cake, Baker's man.
Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
Prick it, and pat it, and mark it with
. . . E for Education? or Exploitation?

"Children at infant schools in England and Wales will be expected to study marketing skills and profit-making under radical proposals for design and technology teaching to be implemented by the Government next year," says a report in the Guardian (21 June) by its Education Editor.

Proposals drawn up by a working party as part of the new national curriculum include teaching children to become computer literate from the start of infant classes, and their becoming able to devise their own computer programmes by the age of eleven. The Guardian report continues: “Design and technological activities should cover a broad range of contexts— home, school, recreation, community, business and industry". Given this context.

  considerations such as client and consumer satisfaction, the importance of quality, added value, business structures, serviceability of products, market size, environmental impact, finance and deadlines can all arise naturally. At the same time, work-related activities can foster and demonstrate the value of personal qualities such as the ability to work constructively with others, a spirit of enterprise (taking initiatives and risks, seeing opportunities, identifying needs), self-discipline. persistence in the face of difficulties and a sense of responsibility.

Lady Parkes. who chaired the working party, said. "The aim of our proposals for design and technology is to prepare pupils to meet the needs of the 21st century.”

Since the prevailing ideas in society are those of the ruling class, it certainty makes both political and economic sense to "catch 'em young”. The Jesuit maxim, "give me a child until the age of seven and it is mine for life," seems very applicable here. However, the proposals, designed to ensure that by the age of seven children should be aware that goods and services were designed and made, distributed, bought and sold: that resources were not infinite; and that some technological solutions could damage the environment; and that the “brightest” children should understand the role of advertising and the need to make choices about resources like materials and time, are not designed to turn children into little capitalists, but into supporters of capitalism. To be capitalists they would have to be born into the minority class who own the means of production. The majority of them belong to the working class, the vast majority who have to sell their labour power in order to exist.

Although capitalism is a world-wide social system, by its very nature capitalists are in competition with each other. Whilst the working class may believe, as capitalism has taught them, that the minority ruling class owe their superior position to greater intelligence, business acumen, or some god-given right, in reality capitalism is run for capitalists by the skill and abilities of the majority, the working class. In order that capitalists in particular economic units, or countries, should not surrender their competitive edge to their rivals, it is important that they endeavour to ensure that their workers are trained in the necessary skills which will result in increased productivity of their labour.

Repressing Personality
Pupils would “thus begin to appreciate the challenges of a career in this field", translates as these future workers will not stop to question the alternative to spending their lives being economically exploited by a minority class. A recent survey by Incomes Data Services examined the recruitment methods of six large organizations, including Jaguar Cars and Vauxhall Motors. It detailed the changes in recruitment procedures that are now likely to confront those seeking manual jobs, including personality tests, which were previously associated with managerial recruitment.

  These tests are often designed not just to measure skills and aptitude for the the required tasks but also to assess whether a person is able to work in a team, show initiative, and in some cases adopt the organization's philosophy or 'culture'. At the same time work-related activities can foster personal qualities such as the ability to work constructively with others, self-discipline and a sense of social responsibility.

Translated, this means not rocking the boat, not being industrially militant, and not querying the stupidity of a system that produces for profit, not for need, whose economic exploitation of the majority overrides all other, human considerations.

The capitalist class is determined to hang on to its monopoly of political and economic power. The weapon of no work, no eat, means that those trying to sell their labour power are expected to embrace the "philosophy and culture” of their prospective masters. Being a member of the working class means having to spend your life repressing your personality in order to meet some employer's criteria of a pliable, compliant worker. This process begins in the infant school.

Are your children being educated, or merely trained to meet the demands of a class system whose sole aim is the accumulation of more and more capital. If you and your children want to fulfil your full potential as human beings it's never too late to learn. It's not too late to learn about Socialism, the only alternative to the repressive system of capitalism. Within a classless, moneyless, wageless, stateless, leaderless society people will develop their skills and abilities both for personal satisfaction and to benefit everyone. Education will become an on-going life experience, not just something to enable you to get a job and spend the rest of your life subservient to the capitalist class. Prick it, and pat it, and mark it with F . . . for Freedom.

Dave Coggan

The Car (1998)

A Short Story from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A year ago we sold our car. Nothing unusual in that of course, happens all the time. The buying and selling of second-hand cars is a common enough activity for those of us who cannot afford new cars. No, it was the way it happened and I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since.

Our car was one of those Volkswagen Golfs, about 8 years old and pretty well dead on its feet. It was on its third engine and even that had a tendency to stall every twenty minutes or so—something about the mixture of the petrol in the engine. The only solution was to leave it for a quarter of an hour till it cleared itself. On top of that the electrics were dodgy and I had managed to burn the clutch a couple of times. In truth we were desperate to get rid of the vehicle. It had given us no end of trouble and we’d already spent too much money in cheating garages to keep it running. If the opportunity came to cut our losses and sell the car we would be only too glad.

Moreover, my partner and I had worked hard that year and we were keen to get away from our draughty flat for a holiday. We decided to do away with a car completely and rely on so-called public transport. We had a number of people interested in our advert and one by one they test drove our car. Funny how when you’re young and idealistic you can condemn others so easily for how they live and what they do. Then as you learn to survive on your own you begin to make compromises with how you live your life, often without realising it. I’m not even sure now how it happened. It just sort of seemed to follow from the position that we were in. I mean we didn’t tell any outright lies, just economical with the truth as civil servants say. I remember us being in the back seat as the two men who eventually bought the car took the car around the neighbourhood. I just wanted them to finish before the engine did.

When we came to the part where we haggled over the money we were nervous and unsure of ourselves, no Arthur Daley’s us. We managed to get a price of £1,300 and we quickly received the cash, anxious to finish the whole thing. Only later in the safety of our home did we discover that we had only been paid £1,200. Looking back I realised that the buyers had been aware of the shortfall and may even had planned it. I was initially relieved, as if the lack of honesty on their side somehow reduced the guilt on ours. Later I was depressed and since then, every time I’ve thought about the incident, I’ve been depressed again.

The motor trade is one of the best examples of how the buying and selling system reduces people into being less than they really are, or at least less than they could be. How often have we all been manipulated to manipulate others for some pathetic economic gain? Through a half-worthless car I had lost some of my own worth. Sometimes it seems that the material value that we accumulate is mirrored by a reduction in our own value as humans.

As I write this article my mind drifts forward to tomorrow when I shall go to the office, forced to work alongside a semi-racist colleague, and where we will all pretend to like an egotistical boss none of us respect. How did this all come about? How long can we tolerate an economic system that thrives on human dishonesty? And how long can we put up with the damage that this system does to us as people? Some people say that we live in something called society. Sorry, but I can’t, at least not a human one.

G. T.

"Death of a Salesman" (1952)

Film Review from the August 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

Death of a Salesman, directed by László Benedek (1951)

This film version of the successful play was recently generally released (though not to the main circuits) and is well worth a visit to one of the few cinemas that will show it. Its theme is somewhat different from the conventional Hollywood dramas and it has a social significance that is all too rare in films. It is the story not merely of Willie Loman, ageing merchandise salesman, but of the whole business of buying and selling in a highly competitive society. Usually, screen characters are shown as wholly “good” or “bad” and undergoing no significant change in outlook as a result of what happens to them. For once we see, in this film, recognition of the fact that men are largely made what they are by the sort of environment in which they have to live.

Willie Loman, superbly played by Frederic March, is portrayed as a failure who refuses to believe that he is not the success that he thinks he should be. At sixty-three, having been “on the road” all his working life, he is worn out, more mentally than physically, through having tried to make himself well known, well liked and remembered by his customers. He makes a fetish of the “power of personality” as a factor in business success. He is, in Hollywood jargon, “all mixed up” and is shown as re-living past episodes and talking in his imagination to people he knows. In one scene he wonders if he has brought up his two sons to believe in the right things, and has an imaginary conversation with his dead, but successful, brother about them. Brother Ben, to show that you must be tough to make your fortune in this world, invites one of the boys to take a punch at him, and after a short struggle the boy is on the ground with a cane pointing in his face. Then come words which should haunt the memories of all who have lauded the merits of the scramble for wealth and power—"Never fight fair with a stranger in the jungle."

The film pulls no punches in depicting the sort of behaviour and situations that result from the condition of cut-throat Capitalism, though unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) it does not refer to the system directly. It has presumably been given an “X” certificate (adults only) because of the suicide, and its failure to disguise the prostitute as the usual “barmaid” or “ hostess.” Other touches of realism are the references to the hand-to-mouth existences of the vast majority of people, even in the “prosperous” cities of America. Faced with the problem of meeting the last payments on his car and refrigerator, Willie remarks, “ It seems they make these things so they’re worn out just when you finish making the payments on them.”

Part of the story deals with the efforts of his two sons to earn their hirings on the basis of their father’s teaching about success, and the importance of being well liked as the royal road to it. One of them has had a number of jobs, most recently working on a farm, and is keen to become an executive with the firm for which he once worked as a shipping-clerk. The fatherly advice includes “Don’t tell him you worked on a farm—say you were in business in the West”— typical of the fantasy and deception that abound in the whole business world.

When, having lost his job, Willie makes it obvious that he intends to commit suicide, his uncle tries to talk him out of it by saying that no one is worth anything dead. But Willie, whose life is insured for 20,000 dollars, knows otherwise. At his graveside his uncle says, “Willie was a salesman and as a salesman he traded in dreams." Yet nobody, no matter how accustomed to the almost ritual happy endings, could really believe that with the death of one salesman had died the evil which was the underlying theme of the film.

The purpose of this review is not to prove that such films as “Death of a Salesman” are a form of propaganda for Socialism. Not for one moment does this particular film hold out the prospect of a world in which the necessity to buy and sell would not exist. But it does, at any rate, constitute a powerful criticism of the capitalist way of life and reinforces the arguments of socialists against prolonging it.

Stan.

Car Boot Capers (2010)

From the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shopping, it’s said, is the new religion, the new opiate of the people.

Once upon a time, as a youngster, Sundays – pre-television and transportless – used to stretch in front of one like the dry and arid sands of the Sahara Desert; never ending and devoid of activity. The oasis in the day, for me, was the evening time when the crackly sound of Radio Luxemburg playing the pop music hits of the day came over the transistor radio. My mom’s Sunday roast was always appreciated though even if I didn’t know then the hard work that went into it in a very non-labour-saving kitchen. For a very brief spell I was packed off to the local Sunday school but I’m happy to say that the boredom of that experience outweighed even that of the traditional ‘day of rest’ with restricted pub opening hours. Consequently I did not succumb to the mind-numbing brainwashing of religion.

Recently I watched a Nick Hornby film, Fever Pitch, and was struck by the piece where Ruth Gemmell berates Colin Firth for his obsession with measuring out his life according to the length of the football season. We all measure out our lives in ‘coffee spoons’ in one way or the other whether by the natural seasons, sporting ones, or in artificial capitalistic ‘financial years’ or ‘results quarters’. For the majority of us this measure is that of waiting for the next weekly wage packet or monthly salary cheque. The long-ago Sundays to which I refer were days to be endured rather than enjoyed. In those days a tramp around a muddy field was just that. Fresh air and exercise but without the added excitement of boxes of vinyl singles and long playing records to leaf through, and beef burger stalls filling the air with the smell of fried onions.

For some the season that provides most joy is ‘on hold’ pending dry weather and the certainty of not getting one’s car bogged down in the ‘parking area’. Wikipedia tells us, cautiously, that the world's first 'Boot Fair' or 'Boot Sale' was held in Kent in 1980. ‘The title or name 'Boot Fair' was coined by the originator and organiser, Barry Peverett, in order to create the curiosity that ultimately ensured that car boot sale events became a run-away popular success and a burgeoning nationwide weekend activity.’

Shopping, it’s said, is the new religion, the new opiate of the people. One of the arenas where this is demonstrated is the Car Boot. Bargains galore! A visit to a Car Boot evokes many sensations. I’m not sure if one of these is the adult equivalent of a child visiting a toy store or sweet shop. A cornucopia of commodities, a positive plethora of unused, unwanted possessions, a galaxy of gew-gaws awaits the early bird and the searcher of useless plastic objects! Car boots offer an opportunity to acquire some practical commodity, or simply something ‘because it was cheap’. Fifty pence? I’ll give you twenty five. Ok, thirty, sold. You can get unwanted children’s toys, outgrown clothes, VHS cassettes – superseded by a newer technology, DVD copies – cheaper than the original!, You can get electrical goods that scream at you caveat emptor!

Buyer beware! You can get books that should have been remaindered the day they were published. You can get knick-knacks, the garish, the gaudy, the tasteless and much more at the car boot.

Not everyone might be so flamboyant as the couple profiled in the Daily Mail who sold ‘a silver-plated tray, a pair of candlesticks and some designer shirts’ from the back of a Bentley and made £260 which they planned to use for ‘lunch at Le Gavroche,’ but the motivation is the same. (Link). Why would you rise at half five in the morning to load your vehicle with all the prerequisites necessary to stand in a field for seven hours and display your wares for the approbation of the passing crowd? Simple. To convert those items into cash.

Each of those items whether useful, worn out, kitschy, or merely decorative shares a common constituent. Each was made to be sold, most so that the ‘surplus value’, i.e. profit, in it could be realised. Each item wasn’t made to be aesthetically pleasing, long lasting, efficient, or made to contribute to the benefit of society or to the happiness of the individual. Apart from the trinkets produced for tourists the rest was originally made solely to produce profit for the benefit of a minority.

You will often find a stall displaying the sign, ‘free’. I once heard someone asking at such a stall, ‘how much are these then?’ The concept of giving away things that you no longer want to people who can make use of them is an admirable one. There are sites on the internet dedicated to acting as a ‘middleman’ to facilitate such actions. But not everybody is convinced of the argument for a society based upon free access: ‘At least one of your founding bloggers saw the bumper sticker below plastered on someone’s car today. ‘Healthcare for people – not for profit.’ Would anyone blame a doctor for taking a baseball bat to the car this was affixed to? We can’t help but wonder what other professions the morons who believe this slogan think should have all incentive removed. Homes for people not for profit; food for people not for profit; education for people not for profit. This list could go on forever” (Dead Link). Actually, yes it could.

Those Sundays of long ago might appear, to me, with the passing of time, to represent a more innocent, less exploitative time. If that were so then I would be talking nonsense. The social system then, as now, compelled those who owned nothing but their ability to work to seek out someone prepared to pay for those abilities in the knowledge that such as one-sided contract could be of benefit to one party only. One cannot turn the clock back. We can, though, turn the clock forward. Is a car boot all you really aspire to?

Dave Coggan