Behind the label (2004)

Book Review from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not on the label by Felicity Lawrence, Penguin, £7.99

Most of us are probably aware that our food is not quite what it’s cracked up to be, even if it’s not all junk food. But in this book, the Guardian’s consumer affairs correspondent shows just how unhealthy much of what we eat is and why it gets to be that way.

   

One important point made relates to the dominant position of the supermarkets, especially the large chains. They can squeeze the profits of the companies who produce the food, sometimes asking suppliers to pay to have their products on the shelves or in some prominent position. In addition they effectively dictate what we can buy, or at least what range of goods we can choose from when we shop. With their absurd ideas about the kind of food that is acceptable to consumers – such as specific sizes of green beans or Brussels sprouts – they cause an awful lot of decent food to go to waste.

   

Their enormous distribution centres are not real warehouses, since food is only kept in them for short periods: the idea is that it is delivered and then sent across the country to stores in as rapid a turnover as possible, leading to vast numbers of lorries speeding up and down the motorways. And, according to Lawrence, there is evidence that the more miles fruit and veg travels, the lower its vitamin content. Such constant replenishment of the distribution centres relies heavily on casual labour, often undertaken at rock-bottom rates in appalling conditions by migrant workers, a supply of labour that can be turned on and off like a tap, as the supermarkets constantly change their demands for food. It is a workforce that ranges from Portuguese workers in East Anglia to Moroccans in Spain.

   

A further consequence of the retailers’ power is that the suppliers work on decreasing profit margins, and often cannot even afford to get rid of waste (such as diseased carcasses) properly. Chicken factories are now enormous production lines, where a single infected bird can cause thousands to become contaminated with campylobacter. Unwanted skin is made into chicken nuggets, while chicken for sandwiches and ready meals is commonly adulterated with water (plus various additives to keep the water in, including cow waste).

   

Returning to supermarkets, you may have been impressed by the ‘in-store’ bakeries that a lot of them have. In fact, many of these just finish off bread that has been made and partially baked elsewhere. White sliced bread is often sold at a loss, to get people into the shops. Most of it is made by the thoroughly nasty-sounding Chorley-wood bread process, which involves air and water being added to the dough, plus fats to stop the bread collapsing. Ready meals, which have massively increased in popularity over the last few years, are high in processed fats, sugars and starch. Modified starch also plays a big part in low-fat yoghurts, which are not as healthy as they sound. Did you know that a “strawberry-flavoured” yoghurt has at least some strawberry content, but a “strawberry-flavour” yoghurt does not?

   

The kind of food available to workers has changed dramatically over the last few decades, with curries and pastas that were not previously available now regularly finding their way to our gullets. But that certainly does not mean that people now eat better and more healthily. Lawrence makes it clear that considerations of profit are what drive the way the food industry works. Her suggestion is to shop on three principles: local, seasonal and direct. But a better answer is to establish a system of society where food is produced for need not profit.

Paul Bennett

Finance and Industry: Co-operative Movement at a dead end (1962)

The Finance and Industry Column from the December 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few months ago Reynolds News, the Co-operative Sunday newspaper, came out in its new form as the Sunday Citizen. Whatever other reasons for the change there may have been, doubtless the fall in circulation of the old paper from 720,0000 in 1947 to 310,000 in 196I has something to do with the effort to appeal to a new circle of readers. We do not know whether the change has won new readers, but we can tell what readership one of their regular contributors has in mind. He is Scorpio, "Sunday Citizen Economic Expert," who has a column headed Your Money. In the issue for October 21st he urged his readers “ Buy Oil Shares":

My advice has always been that you can't get high income yield, security against loss, quick access to your money, and hope of capital growth all at once.

Today I suggest a chance to come much nearer having it all four ways than you will often get. Buy some British Petroleum or Burmah Oil shares or, better, some of both.

Scorpio, or his editor, obviously thinks that no newspaper can be complete and up-to-date without a city column in which readers are helped with their investment problems. The Sunday Citizen has to keep up with the Jones’s of Fleet Street — what they do it must do, too.

And if Scorpio were to ask what is wrong with a Co-operative newspaper trying to have as wide an appeal as any other Sunday paper, the answer is that there is everything wrong with this particular venture, that of advising workers to risk what little savings they have (or some of them have) in buying shares.

In the first place it is a very dangerous game for workers to play. The inducement is the belief that they can make money. So they may at backing horses, and just as easily lose it. Scorpio's particular advice may turn out to be based on a correct guess about the future of the oil industry and of these two companies but, like all the other City recommendations it can be little more than a guess.

Very much to the point, how does it come about that a newspaper which belongs to the Co-operative Movement is not telling its readers to put their spare money into the Co-operative movement which so badly needs it?

There was a time when enthusiastic co-operators would have been shocked to find in their own Press someone who had so little belief in co-operation. Probably few readers are shocked today because, as a movement aiming at social change, co-operation has long been dead. More worrying still to many of its officials it hasn’t even been holding its own as a capitalist trading group in competition with commercial rivals. 

From the standpoint of the original solid aims of the movement probably few of its more than 12 million members even know what the original aims were. Some of them may have heard of Robert Owen and of the Rochdale Pioneers who formed a co-operative society in 1844, but few will know that for Owen and for the Rochdale Group the trading society was looked on not as an end in itself but as a means to revolutionise society:

. . . . Owen was not interested in "store keeping”. He wanted to set up self-supporting and self-governing villages of co-operation, organised committees providing work and happiness for their members. At first he advocated these as a means of over-coming unemployment, but later he broadened his plan to embrace all mankind.

(The Co-operative Movement. Published by the Labour Party.)

Such aims have been long forgotten as the co-operative movement enrolled its members by the million and gave them the satisfaction of their dividend on purchases. In the co-operative movement\ prosperous years it was possible to recruit new members by publicising the “divi" But the co-operatives have not kept up with the leaders in the race for trade. In 1960 their sales reached the record level of £1,066 million, but their proportion of total retail sales actually fell slightly and their average dividend payment was 11¾d. in the pound, compared with 1s. in the pound in 1953 and 1s. 9½d. in 1939.

In 1958, after two years’ investigation, a committee presided over by Mr. Hugh Gaitskell and with Mr. C. A. R. Crosland as secretary issued a long report on the methods and problems of the co-operative movement. They found that the expansion of membership and trade was slowing down.

In the period 1890 to 1920 the cooperative share in total national expenditure on goods and services more than doubled, but in the next thirty-six years it increased by only one-sixth.

Comparing the I950’s with the beginning of this century, the small private retailers lost ground heavily but the principal gainers were the multiple shops and to a smaller extent the department stores. The Committee found the relative lack of progress of the co-operatives since the war “the most disturbing feature.”

The Committee, some of whose recommendations came in for much criticism, urged big changes, including the amalgamation of retail societies to reduce the number from about 950 to 200 or 300, more efficient management, better service and better staff recruitment, and the improvement of labour relations.

But although some amalgamations are taking place and costly schemes of modernisation are being introduced, the troubles have continued for many of the retail societies:

In 1960 retail sales as a whole rose by four per cent., department store sales by as much as seven per cent.. Co-operative sales by only one per cent. Even the small shopkeeper did better. And now the cut-price super market is menacing the Co-ops’ traditional strongholds. Well may Co-operative officials shiver in their ” Sunday Footwear. 

If there is any mystery about the Co-ops' decline, a visit to the local branch may clear up part of it—though not for people who live in Leicester. Nottingham and certain other places where the Co-ops’ are notoriously efficient. ’’Dowdy, parochial and technically backward” were Mr. Crosland’s words for the Co-op. and the shelves sometimes tend to confirm them. (Daily Telegraph, 11.5.61.)

Trying to compete with private traders, some co-operatives are going in for cut prices but while this increases sales it means, as for the big Liverpool society, that there is no surplus available for the traditional dividend on purchases, for the first time in the Society's 47 years’ history.

Where they have been more successful is in the insurance field. The Co-operative Insurance Society, has just opened its new skyscraper headquarters in Manchester. The Co-operative News (27/10/62) found this noteworthy because it was opened by Prince Philip—

. . . the first occasion on which a member of the Royal Family has declared open a co-operative building.”

As employers the co-operatives have their problems too. Strikes are not unknown (including in the C.I.S.).

Before the war the pay and conditions of co-operative employees compared rather favourably with the majority of their private competitors. It is doubtful if they do so today. A few months ago the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied workers made an inquiry into staffing conditions in a number of Co-operative societies. They found that two-thirds of them were understaffed and two in every five of the Union's branches gave as the reason “that recruits could not be found because of the low wages paid by the Society when compared with pay in outside jobs.” The Socialist attitude towards the cooperative movement is that it solves no working class problem. Even if modernisation enables the co-operatives to recover lost ground in their fight against their retail rivals, they cannot achieve the social revolution which is the aim of the Socialist Movement. The dreams of Robert Owen and some of the Co-operative pioneers can be achieved only through Socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Proper Gander: Not-so special offers (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Supermarkets like to make us think they are there to help us keep the cost of our shopping down, with slogans such as Morrisons ‘Price locked low’ and Sainsbury’s ‘Hey big saver’. Cheesy catchphrases are just one of the strategies which the supermarkets employ to attract punters keen for a bargain. Some of their other tactics were explored in an edition of BBC One’s Panorama called Supermarket Deals: How Good Are They?

Reporter Michelle Ackerley starts with some supermarket own-brand, pre-prepared cuts of meat and fish. The packaging sneakily makes the cuts look larger than they are, with the label or sleeve covering an empty space in the tray instead of more meat. Consequently, the customer assumes they’re getting a better deal for their money than the reality. While this trick dates back as long as goods have been sold, traditional supermarkets such as Tesco and Morrisons have had to find newer approaches since budget rivals Aldi and Lidl have appeared and snared some of their customers. One of the ways they have responded is to advertise that some of their products are the same price as their equivalents in the discount supermarkets. Michelle recruits two families to trawl round the stores looking for ‘price-matched’ goods, who find out that this involves more effort than usual, without much difference in what they spend. Only a few hundred items out of tens of thousands are ‘price-matched’, but the ubiquitous signs around the aisles advertising them give the impression there are more. These signs are often bright red and yellow, colours which, according to Ele Clark, retail editor of Which?, we are ‘programmed’ to associate with ‘a great offer’.

‘Price-matching’ isn’t just a psychologically savvy way of promoting products, though; it also affects how they are made. Michelle compares similarly priced, similarly sized foodstuffs from Tesco and Aldi, which we might expect to be of similar quality. However, chicken nuggets from Tesco had less chicken in than those from Aldi, and tins of Tesco coconut milk contained less coconut than their Aldi equivalent. To match the price charged by Aldi, Tesco have scrimped on the ingredients because their other costs are higher, with both stores’ pricing expected to allow a profit. From the shopper’s point of view, Tesco’s inferior versions are worse value than Aldi’s, and this is disguised by them being at the same price. But more fundamentally, this illustrates how products are designed and manufactured according to what’s most profitable for the companies rather than with the aim of making them as good as possible. The documentary describes another example of this: shrinkflation.

Shrinkflation is the practice of reducing the size of a product while maintaining the same sale price. Shrinking it means saving on rising production costs, allowing a wider profit margin, with the consumer losing out by getting less for their money. Chocolate bars and bags of crisps are most obviously smaller than they used to be, and Michelle shows us how the New York Bakery Co has kept its bagels the same width, but deviously increased the size of the hole in the middle. As Ele says, if the price of something remains the same, we don’t always notice when it has been subject to shrinkflation.

Perhaps to counter the risk of customers being put off by inferior or shrinkflated comestibles, supermarkets aim to maintain them with loyalty card schemes, such as Tesco’s Clubcard and Morrisons’ More Card. When shoppers who have signed up for a loyalty card make purchases, they accrue points which can then be redeemed back as cash vouchers, and they are also eligible for discounts on particular items. A browse round a branch of Sainsbury’s shows that the price reductions which come with having their Nectar card tend to apply to cakes, crisps, fizzy drinks and alcohol, rather than staples such as meat and vegetables. As retail expert Kate Hardcastle says, seeing that something is on special offer can be enough temptation to buy it, even if we didn’t originally intend to. Rebecca Tobi of The Food Foundation adds that because unhealthy snacks tend to be cheap to make, there’s a commercial incentive for companies to push their sales to maximise profits. She wants ‘systemic change’, but defines this merely as having offers on healthier produce. As well as encouraging customers towards profitable comfort food, loyalty cards also provide the supermarket with valuable data on spending patterns which feeds into their marketing machine.

All the tricks and techniques shown on Panorama’s exposé are consequences of goods being commodified, or produced for sale. A can of beans isn’t just a can of beans, it’s an economically quantified unit whose end form has been shaped by what’s profitable for the owners of the companies which manufacture and distribute it. The quality and amount of its ingredients aren’t decided upon to make it better to eat, but according to what’s cost effective. Its packaging isn’t only designed to preserve the food inside, but also to publicise and exaggerate it. And when it’s sold to us, we’re made to believe we’ve got a decent deal if marketing strategies such as price-matching and loyalty cards have worked. These strategies cynically and subtly aim to manipulate our choices so we spend more and keep coming back. Competition between supermarkets for market share fuels a race to the bottom as far as the quality of goods is concerned, while profits for the capitalist class soar.

Mike Foster

Shoplift (2024)

From the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum, well not the forum but a supermarket store, owned by German capitalists. Sunday morning at ten and the place was busier than a Japanese commuter subway station during rush-hour.

This was an unfamiliar store. In familiar ones a yellow sticker on an item signifies that the commodity is near to, or almost past, its sell-by date, so a sharp money-saving eye is always on the lookout for such. Glimpsing such coloured things, they were not as they first appeared. Stickers on items in the various meats section turned out to be security tags. These were then found on many other different goods across the various aisles.

Socialists are generally law-abiding and tend to react as anyone would when their probity is called into question. After reciting the whole of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner the checkout was finally arrived at. Here something unexpected occurred. With the meagre commodities placed upon the conveyor belt the wage slave operating the till asked if the shopping bags could be checked to make sure that they were empty.

Non-plussedness caused temporary speechlessness. Light bulb time. They think there might be commodities in bags that had been appropriated without the gelt made toward the profits of the German capitalists. There’s a first time for everything and this was the first time this writer has ever been confronted with such a request.

Finally, the response was articulated. Yes, one did mind. Till person’s training kicked in as they began the spiel about how such intrusion was company policy and how much shoplifting cost the store annually. This programming of the wage slaves in such occupations means that refusals are a regular occurrence and some behavioural psychologists have worked out that an appeal of this nature would overcome any objections the customer might have. Think of the poor capitalist!

At this point words passionately overflowed regarding the iniquities of capitalism. This did not go down well. Totally misunderstanding at whom the diatribe was aimed the till person responded with ‘if you’re abusive I won’t serve you’!

The thought arose, it’s exploitative capitalism that abuses the vast majority in many different ways.

Some deluded individuals, when confronted with a situation which is an abuse of civil liberties, respond with, ‘I don’t mind, I’ve nothing to hide and neither should anyone mind if they haven’t done anything wrong’. This is an erroneous view in a surveillance society. An under-the-counter button was now being jabbed furiously.

Enter stage left the in-house security. The attitude of this member of the working class couldn’t have been more different. Unlike the cashier he behaved in a perfectly pleasant, reasonable manner. This offered an opportunity to explain the objections to having one’s bag searched.

If this tale was being retold on some confessional social media sites it would end with everyone queuing and listening, then finally bursting into cheering and applause. Followed no doubt by a mass rendition of the Internationale. One has to know when to cut one’s losses.

One glance at the faces of those in the queue behind was sufficient to show that it was time to graciously concede. Explaining that one did not want to keep anyone waiting any longer I said look into the bags if you want to. Just as graciously the security guard indicated that that would not be necessary. The bags were not examined. ‘Security’ was someone the narrator would have liked to have a long conversation with about socialism. Commodities run through till, paid for, exit narrator with mental note never to visit that particular supermarket again.

Socialists are generally very non-prejudiced men and women. Apart from in one case. Socialists are very prejudiced when it comes to capitalism. There are, of course, many people who dislike capitalism, but not all of those, even the ones who term themselves socialists, want to see its replacement by a class-free, wage-free, money-free, leader-free, nation-free society.

There’s none so blind as those who will not see. Knowing that a socialist society would provide free access to quality goods and services if only a majority of the working class understood and wanted it, makes transactions designed to further enrich capitalists hard to bear.

The reasons for shoplifting are varied: the economic necessity of doing so because particular commodities necessary for life are unaffordable or in order to profit by selling on the commodities more cheaply than are available in store. A previous shoplifting article in the Life and Times column of the Socialist Standard in October, points out that some may shoplift as an act of ‘disobedience to the authority of the private property system’. However, as that article explains, ‘it is not a particularly positive or constructive way to help do away with that system’.

Reflection upon that event by the narrator was one of sadness that the other customers and staff, in that location, were unaware that angst-ridden capitalism could be, as Life and Times correctly has it, replaced with a system ‘in which the stores of the world can be made freely available to them – and to everyone’.

Dave Coggan

Life and Times: A bit of your own back? (2023)

The Life and Times column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Someone I’ve known for a long time recently surprised me. He told me he was a shoplifter – a regular one. I say he surprised me because he’s got a regular job and it shouldn’t be something he needs to do to make ends meet. So why does he do it? ‘I’m just getting a bit of my own back’, he told me. What did he mean by that? Well, he explained that, while he had to do a job he didn’t particularly like to keep his head above water, those ‘damned shareholders’ were raking it in for doing nothing. ‘Legalised theft’, he called it. But, I objected, didn’t that mean other people who didn’t shoplift were losing out because the shops would just recoup their losses by putting up prices? No, he said. He’d thought and read about that and his conclusion – which actually seemed to make sense to me – was that they couldn’t put their prices up willy-nilly, because they were having to compete with other shops and stores as well as online retailers and would risk losing customers if their prices were higher than their competitors. It might affect their profitability a bit and their shareholders’ dividends, he said, but he didn’t care about that. So, he insisted, those who said he was penalising ‘honest’ shoppers were advancing spurious arguments.

He also explained that he didn’t shoplift from small shops, since that wouldn’t be fair. Most small shopkeepers, he said, were struggling to make a living and having stuff stolen from them would likely push them over the edge. In fact he told me he despised people who stole from small shops, since it was just poor people stealing from one another.

Trouble in store

What to make of all this? Well, I had a look into it myself and discovered that in recent times there has been what I saw described in one report as an ‘explosion’ in shoplifting. Figures issued by the British Retail Consortium showed thefts across the sector in England and Wales had risen by 26 percent in 2022. In an online article entitled ‘The cost of living started my shoplifting: why stealing goods is on the rise’, BBC business editor Ez Roberts interviewed a number of self-confessed shoplifters and concluded that, while many of them did it because they couldn’t afford food, others who could manage financially just saw it as an easy way to get something for nothing. And easy it is apparently, since, according to a supermarket manager interviewed, ‘little can be done about it’. ‘If staff intervene’, he said, ‘it can lead to violence’. He added that it was hard to get the police to come. ‘We don’t call the police anymore’, he said. ‘They won’t come. Unless the thief has stolen around £500 worth of items the police aren’t interested.’ But police obviously do turn up – sometimes – since their figures from March this year, the most recent available, show forces recording almost 33,000 incidents of shoplifting.

Too many offenders

Having said that, this is obviously only a tiny proportion of all the shoplifting that takes place. Most offenders ‘get away with it’, and even when they do come onto the police radar, they are unlikely to be prosecuted – and increasingly so. That’s because recent reports have shown that the potential prison population is growing faster than the jail cells and other space available, and the knock-on effects of this are that sentences are getting shorter, fewer people found guilty are being sent to prison and fewer people are actually being prosecuted. An increasing number are being given cautions, even for relatively serious offences. In these circumstances, therefore, it looks increasingly unlikely that shoplifters caught by police will get anything more than a ticking off.

The surge

As for the recent surge in shoplifting, though it’s mainly due to the rise in the cost of living and the inability of many people, even those with regular employment, to make ends meet, it seems also to be the case that at least some of the increase is not down to desperate hard-up individuals but to other factors – in particular the sense of insecurity even among those who have a steady income. It will always be a temptation to people living from one pay cheque to the next to steal to make that cheque go further. And then of course there’s the acquisitive ethic the system we live in imbues people with. An example of this came from the BBC report where an Oxford University student interviewed said she shoplifted because she wanted to use her own money to buy the more expensive products her fellow students were able to get.

Disobedience

There are of course other causes too, for example the need of some individuals to obtain drugs or alcohol and also the fact that an increasing number of people feel less intimidated by the ‘rules’ of private property society and the authority it seeks to exercise.

Unfortunately, while disobedience to the authority of the private property system by the act of shoplifting may give some personal satisfaction to individuals, it is not a particularly positive or constructive way to help do away with that system and replace it with another one in which the stores of the world can be made freely available to them – and to everyone.

Howard Moss

Proper Gander: Super marketing (2023)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

What’s the difference between Wagon Wheels and Cart Wheels? About 10p a pack and the colour of their packaging: Cart Wheels are Aldi’s cheaper version of the perennial chocolatey snack, which original maker Burton’s insists hasn’t shrunk over the decades. The differences – and similarities – between established brands like Wagon Wheels and supermarkets’ counterparts were the subject of Channel 4’s Secrets Of The Supermarket Own-Brands. Presenter Denise van Outen checks out the products lining the aisles, and chats with various experts to reveal how supermarket own-brands are more than just slightly inferior copycats of ‘proper’ brands. How they are marketed is as important as how they are manufactured, and the documentary only has enough time to outline some of the methods used to flog us one variety of comestibles over another. With its jaunty music and bright colours, the programme is pitched as a cheeky nudge to be more shopping savvy rather than a hard-hitting exposé of a racket. Despite this, it highlights how much we’re manipulated not just in what we buy, but also what we think we’re buying.

Most supermarkets have at least three ‘tiers’ of own-brand goods: the cheapest ‘budget’ range, the standard one which just undercuts the ‘proper’ brands, and the ‘premium’ one with the swankiest wrapping. Traditionally, ‘budget’ ranges were packaged in an obviously no-frills way, with the apparent cheapness of the design echoing the lower price. A tin of Tesco’s Value baked beans with its stark blue and white stripes looked quite unlike a can of Heinz Beanz. Strategies started to change around 2018, by which time discount chains like Aldi and Lidl had established themselves in the marketplace. Since then, ‘budget’ supermarket own-brands have been more likely to ape the packaging of their branded counterpart, such as Cart / Wagon Wheels and other favourites like Hula Hoops and Robinson’s cordials. Often, the branding will barely mention the supermarket and instead go for an image that suggests a homespun, small-scale producer, such as Sainsbury’s Stamford Street or Tesco’s Stockwell & Co. Both strategies disguise that the products are ‘budget’ own-brands, although the ‘premium’ ranges, such as Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference, aren’t shy with mentioning the shop. All this suggests that supermarkets no longer want their name to be associated with cheapness, even though cheapness is what more people are after since prices rocketed. Still, the strategies are doing what they’re supposed to, proven by how supermarkets generate more profits from their own-brands than from branded products.

The way that own-brand goods are manufactured is planned to maximise profits by minimising costs. Richard Crampton, Sainsbury’s Director of Fresh Food, admits that sometimes the three ‘tiers’ of their own-brand products, from ‘budget’ to ‘premium’, are all made in the same place. One example is their own-brand stuffed pasta, with each range distinguished from the others by slight variations in their recipes ‘enhancing that product’ to the ‘same high standards’, enthuses Crampton. There are also more similarities in the content of branded and own-brand goods than we might expect. For example, Hula Hoops and their replicas are both produced in the same crisp factory, albeit with varying ingredients or processes. And the six most well-known brands of washing powder are made by only two companies, with nearly all own-brand ones manufactured by a third. The diverse range of brands for what boils down to similar products by a few producers gives only an illusion of choice, one of capitalism’s hallmarks.

The companies get away with this because of how their branding strategies are underpinned by an understanding of psychology. One state of mind which they aim to encourage is loyalty to a particular product. We’re most likely to stick with ‘proper’ brands for toiletries, beauty products and cleaning materials, no doubt reinforced by their advertising campaigns which can ‘shout louder’, according to retail expert Miya Knights. While there’s more competition between own-brand and branded food and drink, some long-established names have maintained their loyal followers, such as Coca Cola. The documentary features YouTube food reviewers the Smythe family, whose parents resolutely only buy Coke. However, the predictable result of a blind taste test is that they mistake Lidl’s Freeway cola for ‘the real thing’, showing that the brand they adhere to isn’t as distinctive as they assume.

A related point was made when Denise and brand psychologist Jonathan Gabay set up a street stall to hand out Magnum-like ice creams to passers-by. Some are promoted with a snazzy image and an elaborate back story about how the ice cream gets churned, and others are only announced with the word ‘Aldi’ written in felt-tip. Even though the same ice cream was given out throughout, those which came with the sales pitch were thought to taste better than the ones without, even once the hoodwinked recipients were told the truth.

The two experiments show us how much our preferences, for food in this instance, are shaped by how they are commodified. A small number of producers have dominated the market by finding the most cost-effective ways to manufacture our more popular fodder. Tweaking the details of a basic recipe creates versions of the product which can be pitched to customers grouped by levels of spending ability. This lack of real choice between ice cream, cola or pasta is disguised by varying the branding, either a little or a lot. At its most manipulative, branding can even impact on how appetising we find the product, when we associate its image with good taste. Throughout, money dictates how this process plays out, in the costs of manufacturing and marketing, and then in the sales which turn into profits for the owners. The way that commodification moulds what we consume is inescapable in capitalism, of course, not just in what we use but also what we watch. Secrets Of The Supermarket Own-Brands itself was interspersed with glossy adverts and sponsored by a big name brand.

Mike Foster

What’s In Your Shopping Trolley? (2007)

Book Review from the August 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tescopoly by Andrew Simms Constable £7.99.

This is not just about Tesco but about the ways that supermarkets in general drive other shops out of business, put an end to true community life and exploit their suppliers. Waitrose, for example, are now seen as a big threat by delis and farm shops (Guardian, 3 July).

On the other hand, Tesco is clearly viewed here as the main villain of the piece, being the dominant grocer in 81 of the UK’s 121 postcode areas. In Swansea, for instance, 54p of every pound spent on groceries is spent at Tesco. In the year ending February 2006, it made £2.2 billion in profit. It’s also expanding abroad, e.g. intending to open 47 stores in South Korea in 2006–7. (For more on Tesco see www.tescopoly.org, [Dead link] which is not connected with this book.)

Among the tactics that have made Tesco so (in capitalist terms) successful include: selling some products below cost; selling others at whatever they can get away with; undermining competitors in various ways; paying suppliers less than the industry average. Child labour is common among clothing suppliers, while prices for bananas, for instance, have been constantly driven down (more than halving in real terms over the last forty years). Tesco in effect get loans from suppliers, as they don’t pay for goods till some time after receiving them, while they of course get the money from sales straight away.

Supermarkets restrict our choice of where and to shop and what to buy. They tend to force local shops to go under, and this has a domino effect on other local services, from window-cleaners to accountants. Villages which have no general store of their own ‘quickly lose their identities’, according to the Countryside Agency.

Simms is well aware that Tesco and other supermarkets are simply doing what ‘the system’ allows and what investors expect, i.e. making the biggest profit it can. The global food industry is organised to meet the demands of investors rather than to feed people. He is pleased when people get together to persuade the council to block a planning application from Tesco. But he seems to think that moving to a society of small shops in place of giant superstores is really going to make a big difference. In reality what is needed is further reflection on the idea of food being produced to feed people, and realisation that this means an end not just to superstores but to production for profit, whether of food or anything else.

Paul Bennett

Caught In The Act: Check out (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the August 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Check out

How much would you pay for a bottle of wine? If you can only run to plonk from Tesco or Sainsbury you are unlikely to have been an enthusiastic participant in the recent auction of the contents of West Green House, the Hampshire home of Lord McAlpine, when bottles of something called Chateau de la Tour were going for around £500

You see Lord McAlpine, who is the kind of jolly, informal fellow who likes to be known to one and all as 'Alastair', is a bon viveur and. as any shopper knows, that means he would look on supermarket plonk as only a little less intolerable than strychnine. Selling up his home does not mean that the noble lord is on the slippery slope which ends in Cardboard City; it's just that he had a fancy to move to another sumptuous place with another collection of antiques, art treasures and all the little bits and pieces which make life bearable for a bon viveur.

He was also, until recently, the treasurer of the Conservative Party, a job which did not entail his growing pigeon-chested over fusty ledgers since it mainly consisted of extracting generous donations to party funds from other exceedingly rich people. His background (Stowe public school, where he managed three ’O' levels) and his present circumstances (inheritor of massive wealth and a powerful position in the McAlpine building firm founded by his great grandfather) made him ideally suited for the job. It is said that in the 1987 election he screwed some £23 million out of his fellow tycoons.

Election realities

As part of his fund-raising during that election McAlpine sent a copy of the Labour Party manifesto to 200 selected top business people. The implication was clear; a Labour government would cost them a lot of money. The fact that this is nonsense — as only a cursory knowledge of recent history reveals - shows how little capitalism is understood even by the capitalists whose privileges are nurtured by the system. But to return to those Labour manifestos: when the parties of capitalism go into an election they do so on the assurance that they stand for the interests of all the people. Vote for us. runs their argument, allow us to implement our programme, and everyone will benefit. McAlpine's ruse, highly successful as it was, reveals the truth that elections are fought over which section of the minority ruling class should be that much richer and more secure, over which investments should receive more protection, over which proposals for working class exploitation promise to be more intense and profitable

McAlpine once informed the House of Lords that he was " . . . the builder of the National Theatre". This kind of assertion is often made by capitalists, we hear of them designing buildings, laying out gardens, building houses and so on when in fact they are not to be seen doing any such thing. McAlpine may have dropped in on tho site of the National Theatre — it was a prestigious enough project to warrant his interest in its progress — but he didn't actually sketch it out on a drawing board, or mix the cement or slap down tho bricks or hang the doors This work was carried out by members of the class who need to work for their living and who got a wage which does not allow them to drink Chateau de la Tour. They build places like the National Theatre and West Green House and they live in mortgaged semis or flats or rented bedsits. And at elections they are so impressed by the specious arguments of people like McAlpine that they surge out to vote to keep his class in power and privilege and their own class in exploitation and poverty. Our class has to eat supermarket food, wear supermarket clothes, live in supermarket houses. But this does not mean we have to have supermarket ideas.

Political packaging

The question is — is there some connection between supermarkets and tired, discredited political non-theories? We only ask because there is. apparently, no truth in the rumour that David Sainsbury is about to apply to join the Labour Party This member of a famous, exceedingly rich family whose fortune is channelled through those clattering check-outs where tho operators have little time or motivation to make any human contact with the patiently-shuffling customers and their laden trolleys, was a valued contributor to the late, unlamented Social Democratic Party. Did he, we wonder, receive one of those manifestos from Lord McAlpine? With the collapse of tho SDP there was a hopeful casting of bait among the partyless members by Liberal and Labour and Sainsbury would be a very juicy catch for them. But he has stated that ho remains loyal to the mould breakers even though they hardly exist any more

As a supermarket chief Sainsbury is probably well versed in the theories about the sales appeal of attractive packaging. So was the SDP, whose favourable attention from the media went some way to disguise the fact that they had little more to offer than bits and pieces of the failed policies of the other parties which they were so ambitious to replace. The same can be said about their leaders, who were supposed to have discovered the cleansing relevance of something called moderation. Jenkins. Owen. Williams and Rodgers had all held office in a Labour government and it took a lot of opaque packaging to obscure their association with the impotence of that government to make capitalism work as they had promised

Well this is all history and some history it was: the risible Alliance and then the chaos of the attempted merger with the Liberals and Owen's refusal to accept a vote which went against his wishes. Now he is no longer leading a party, which leaves just Rosie Barnes and John Cartwright, neither of them sure about who is leading whom. And all of this disreputable manoeuvring has been within the party who said it would not play the old game of party politics. So the mould remains unbroken. The SDP deserves, and will probably get. no more than a footnote in British political history

Will Sainsbury stay with them? Whatever he decides, it need not concern the check-out operators nor the queues in his shops Whichever government has held power Sainsbury has continued to prosper; capitalism has gone on its way undisturbed. The company's slogan is that in their shops Good Food Costs Less. What price consistent, viable political principles?

Political pollution

When supermarkets came on the scene thy were recommended to us as part of something called the Retailing Revolution. What that meant was the abolition of the system where customers stood at shop counters while assistants weighed up sugar, biscuits, butter and the like — and knew something about the stuff. This was replaced by the system in which the customer took the stuff off the shelves, which meant that it had to be pre-packed and that brought in another thing called the Packaging Revolution. People who tear their nails trying to get at a packet of biscuits or cheese or whatever may be consoled to know that they are participating in a revolution. Except that the whole episode was a grievous misuse of the word

We mention this because, as the Eastern European dictatorships crumble away, the abuse of political terminology is reaching the scale of a feverish epidemic. In the Weekend Guardian of 16 June, for example, an article on the devastation wrought on the environment by industry in countries like Poland and East Germany was described as "Marxist-Leninist pollution". Leaving aside the fallacious linking of Marx's name with Lenin's — all too common — it is a fact that Marx did not condone the ghastly effects of capitalist industrial development, indeed he devoted a lot of effort to exposing it and to pointing out how it could and must be permanently eradicated.

In its frantic scramble to industrialise, to concentrate human labour power and to expand, developing capitalism has not been concerned about human interests. That is the story behind the slums and their diseased misery, the wrecking of the environment and the pollution of the air, earth and sea. It is the story behind the rush to industrialise in the Eastern bloc countries and the devastation it has brought. Politicians in the West pretend that it is socialism which is responsible for this and which has failed in Eastern Europe. To be charitable, we may assume they say this because they don't understand capitalism and even less socialism. Being rich doesn't save Lord McAlpine and David Sainsbury from being deluded, the working class doesn't have the same excuse, though

Ivan

The supermarket (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

You drive into the vast parking area and jigsaw your car into one of the spaces. The supermarket looms within a few easy strides and in a matter of minutes you are inside the electric-eye doors, selecting a shopping cart; the heat, the cold, the rain or the snow — as the case may be — is left outside and as you push your cart up one aisle and down the next you are lulled by pleasant music, attractively displayed merchandise of hundreds of varieties, the meat counters. the delicatessen counters, the frozen food counters and, occasionally, the smiling demonstrator woman or man who offers free samples of this or of that delicacy.

So you forget, for the moment, all but the fact that here are food items, durables, even — in many instances — articles of wearing apparel waiting to be selected and dropped into your shopping cart. You know you can find good use for much, if not most, of everything in the market and heavens knows! you have been reminded enough that your life will not be full unless and until you have this. that, and the other product in your pantry, your refrigerator, your closets, or some place or other even it in your attic or your cellar! So you sail into the pleasant chore and before you know it your cart is piled high with delectables for the table, with stockings for the kids, with cleaning solvents, can openers and all of the things that go to make a happy home, maybe even a clock radio. Wonderful country, America! Where else could one find so much of what everybody wants under one roof? And all there for the taking. Richest country in the world — highest standard of living — freest democracy—etc., etc. You muse on all of this because you have heard this and read this, time and time again, interspersed between commercials advertising beer, cigarettes, beef, underwear and so forth. "Only in America," you muse.

Then suddenly you are caught up short. “For crying out loud!” you cry out inwardly. “How much is all of this going to cost? I won't have enough money and if I do and I pay for all this I won’t have enough to do till next payday."

Yes! The trouble is that there are cash registers in those supermarkets. And one does not get out of the store with one’s selections until they are paid for — unless you can do it without getting caught, which is quite a trick.

Well, up to a point, this has been a recitation of the right of access to the items which are supposed to constitute a decent standard of living. Capitalism does give one the right of access to what is produced, providing one has the money to pay. But how, you must be wondering, how does this socialist nut think one can run a supermarket without cash registers.

Of course you can’t run a supermarket or anything else without cash registers, under capitalism. The cash registers and the money that is used to transact the business are the hallmarks of class ownership. Everything in the supermarket, including the cash registers has been produced socially by thousands of workers from many different countries using raw materials from areas in far flung parts of the world. But under capitalism, the land, the mines, the forests, the workshops, and the supermarkets are all owned by a capitalist class or a capitalist state — which amounts to the same thing, class ownership rather than social ownership.

When the world is socialist, everything — including the supermarkets — will be run differently. Certainly there will be a variety of the things people want although the chances are that wants — when no longer conditioned by hucksters on the mass media and in the newspapers — will be fewer. But there will be no cash registers, because ownership will be vested in all mankind, not an economic class. The money that changes hands today has nothing at all to do with the production and availability of the goods in the store. Only labor power applied to raw materials can produce wealth. Goods and services under socialism will be produced only to satisfy human needs and wants. The world will become one vast supermarket. Better look into this further.

The Review Column: Co-op in Trouble (1967)

The Review Column from the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Co-op in Trouble

The latest published results of the Co-operative Wholesale Society confirmed something which everyone knew. The Co-op is well down the slippery slope.

Net trading profits are down from over £3 million in 1965 to £792,000 last year; retail societies’ share of the national retail trade has fallen from 11.9 per cent (1957) to 8.8 per cent (1967). The Sunday Citizen has died, the final collapse coming when the CWS management cut its advertising and public relations spending, which the Citizen relied on, by £800,000.

The Co-op has been left behind in the great post war retail boom. While firms like Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer’s were making rich with their skilfully designed stores, their thoughtful employment policy and their keen prices, the Co-op has seemed to exist with a death wish. Some of its cakes and biscuits, for example, taste as if they came out of a cement mixer and some of its fashions look as if they were designed by a man from the government surplus store.

The CWS is now facing the fact that it can either die, or at best exist feebly—or it can compete. It has chosen the latter. Philip Thomas has been brought in from profit conscious Associated British Foods as chief executive. He has appointed several new top managers, among them another man from ABF and one from Boots. And the axes are starting to swing.

At this year’s CWS Annual Meeting. Thomas promised “hurtful and unpopular decisions . . . substantial economies”. Already some staff privileges have been withdrawn and mergers and closures of factories, with consequent sackings, are in the offing.

In all this, only a passing reference has been made to the fact that the Co-op was once supposed to be different— an example of Socialism, no less, within capitalism. The ghost of this ludicrous idea still walks, and Thomas is out to exorcise it. “Commercial realism . . . the inevitability of economic pressure”: these are the words he is incanting as he tries to save Ihe Co-op’s commnercial soul.

Middle East

To anyone who does not understand the word, it is Socialism which has been at war in the Middle East. President Nasser claims to be a Socialist, and so do many of his allies. There is even something, which they do not define, which they call Arab Socialism. Israel once said that Socialism was being built there, that the kibbutzim were a new way of life free from the commercialism of capitalist society, and that within its borders men would find new freedom and dignity.

But in the recent flare-up both countries showed—if this was necessary—their true nature. Egypt intensified her arguments about the legality of Israel’s frontiers, over the conquest of the port of Eilat and over the extent of Egyptian control over the Straits of Tiran.

Disputes over territorial boundaries and strategic positions, carried on within the complexities of international law—and often in the end by armed force are a familial part of capitalism. They have nothing to do with Socialism, which will be a society without national boundaries and international economic rivalry.

Israel is now the most powerful military nation in the Middle East. Conscription there is comprehensive, with even women battle-trained, and the whole thing is backed up by the sort of hysterical nationalism which demanded the appointment of strong man Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defence.

This intensive militarism had its effect against the ill-trained Egyptian army. These are just some of the descriptions used in just one edition of the Times last month, reporting on the Israeli advance: “masterpiece of mechanized war . . . quick thrusts . . . ruthless air attack”.

Militarism and patriotic hysteria are among the most unpleasant of capitalism’s by-products. They are two of the many antisocial attitudes, so common today, which will not exist under Socialism. That they are so powerful in Israel reveals, if nothing else does, the nature of society there.

Cooking the Books: Supermarkets and sub-profits (2023)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cost of living crisis has presented supermarkets with a problem. They depend for sales on what workers spend in their weekly shop but, with workers having to spend more on energy, they have less to spend on other essentials. This is why supermarket bosses have been pressing the government to reduce the amount workers have to spend on energy and to increase the money it pays to those on benefits. Prominent among these has been Richard Walker, the owner and boss of Iceland, which specialises in selling cheap frozen food to the lower-paid and those on benefits.

Last year, in an interview on BBC Radio 4, besides calling on the government to increase universal credit, he called on supermarkets to accept making less profit. Under the headline ‘Iceland boss suggests supermarkets should be willing to make zero profits during cost of living crisis’, Yahoo News reported:

‘A supermarket boss has said businesses like his should commit to making fewer, or even zero, profits during the cost-of-living crisis as food prices continue to rise (…) Richard Walker, managing director of Iceland, has urged supermarkets to show “responsible capitalism” and reduce prices – even if it means a hit to company profits. “I think [there should be] responsible capitalism, I think businesses [should be] accepting lower or no profits”’ (tinyurl.com/9e6ru542).

Actually, this was making a virtue out of necessity. Forgoing some profits is not a case of ‘responsible capitalism’ but something imposed on supermarkets by the state of the market for their wares. As workers are having to spend more on energy and so have less to spend on their weekly shop, if supermarkets put up their prices in line with the increase in the price of their supplies they would lose sales and so profits anyway. No wonder they are calling on the government to give workers more to spend — in their outlets.

But there is another side to the story. In another, TV, interview, he told Laura Kuenssberg:

‘… we pay minimum wage at £9.50. I’m not proud of that and I wish we could pay more, but the reality is to pay £10.90, the Real Living Wage would cost us £50 million, and that’s money we don’t have’ (tinyurl.com/2ca8f7fv).

The minimum wage is already a government subsidy to employers as workers on or just above it with family dependents can get their income topped up under the tax credit scheme.

Capitalists firms catering for the weekly consumption needs of the workers who buy from them are asking to be further subsidised by the government or, rather, ultimately, by other sections of the capitalist class.

This brings out a conflict of interest within the capitalist class. Supermarkets want other capitalist firms to pay more taxes to provide their customers with more money to spend. They would even like them to pay higher wages, but they are not prepared to do this themselves. What they are out to protect is not the pockets of their customers but their own profits, short and long-term.

Richard Walker wants to become a Tory MP. If elected, he will be able to continue to campaign to further the sectional interests of his section of the capitalist class. He might not get his way, though, as governments are there to look after the general interest of the capitalist class as a whole.

Food: why we don’t get the best (1999)

From the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food matters to everyone. People have been led to revolt if unable to obtain enough. But quality, rather than quantity, is just as important. Politicians, their profit-chasing overlords and the marketplace that unites them, are attracting unfavourable scrutiny after successive well-publicised poisonings, adulterations, scams and animal abuse cases. 

Following salmonella, E. coli, BSE and a spate of more recent food scandals, people are unsurprisingly alarmed over just what they are eating and just what can be done to ensure meals are safe. Here are just four disturbing news reports of late which emerged in less than one week: 

The [Pesticide Safety Directorate] working party on pesticide residues found that some of the largest retailers, including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Safeway, sold produce that had levels of pesticides above the maximum residues limit, including illegal growth regulators and known carcinogens (Guardian, 17 September). 

Food hygiene inspectors from the European Commission are to start an urgent investigation into standards in French rendering plants following allegations that untreated water, blood and discharges from animal carcasses, and sewage have been used in making poultry and pig feed. The Commission and the French government have been anxious to play down the accusation for fear of sparking a new European food crisis . . . The common factor in this summer’s crises has been manufacturers’ failure to maintain hygiene standards in the highly competitive food industry (Guardian, 18 August) 

Children who eat fishfingers are being fed ‘undesirable’ levels of two of the world’s most feared poisons, reveals an official report. Dioxins and PCBs—believed to cause cancer and have ‘gender bending’ effects—were found by Government researchers in all the samples of fishfingers bought in different supermarkets. Higher levels were found in the fresh fish on sale, particularly in oily fish such as herring which the Government has been urging people to eat for health reasons . . . Despite the fears, the Government has decided against issuing any warnings when the research—the first of its kind by the Agriculture Ministry—was published quietly in August on an official website (Daily Mail, 20 September). 

Belgium yesterday warned the EU that tests carried out on meat for export . . . show that livestock reared on farms near industrial plants carries higher levels of dioxin contamination . . . Belgium’s food crisis in May caused consumer panic after the revelation that animal feed had been contaminated by potentially cancer-causing dioxins at a food plant in Flanders which allegedly mixed motor oil with fats to bind the feed . . . the Belgian crisis of confidence in food safety worsened yesterday after revelations that sewerage sludge had been mixed into fodder, as in France . . . sludge from toilets and showers, water from slaughterhouses and cleaning products had got into the food chain (Guardian, 22 September). 

The September 18 “highly competitive food industry” reference says it all, and should enlighten concerned shoppers to the total incompatibility between access to continuously high-quality comestibles and competitive production for financial gain, due to market forces always tending to value profits ahead of excellence. 

There will never be a time when most people become wealthy enough to buy only the very best, since while competitive production exists so, too, will competitive employment. And with competing employers, driven by those same market forces to hold down wages and salaries (and taxes that provide welfare benefits) so as to favour profits and stay in businesses, there will always exist a great many working and non-working people with limited incomes who nevertheless must purchase sustenance. This section will vary in size according to the needs of capital. 

Official DSS figures released in February showed that, after deducting housing costs, no fewer than 14.1 million people had below half the average income. While food producers are going to be keen to obtain this poorly-paid group’s money, competition to grab a greater market share by supplying the least expensive food means there will be an ever-present pressure to minimise quality, because superior ingredients, more thorough procedures, better trained employees, etc all cost more. Include today’s international intensification of competitiveness through deregulation and the steady removal of tariffs, trade barriers and subsidies in pursuit of a correctly functioning global market, and the seemingly endless appalling procession of scandalous headlines becomes perfectly clear. 

Uncompetitive regulations 

The Blair Government knows that inferior and dangerous food means antagonistic voters; a situation to be earnestly avoided. Labour certainly doesn’t want to end up like the former Belgium government of Jean-Luc Dehaene—booted out of office largely due to carcinogenic dioxin at up to 700 times permitted “acceptable limits” being found in eggs, chickens and then pigs, just weeks before a general election. So what’s their approach? A proposed “independent” Food Standards Agency. 

The FSA proposal emerged not long after Blair came to power. Large retail firms and manufacturing interests were soon applying pressure, insisting the agency be made less regulatory. Then businesses caused the agency to remain on the drawing board longer by complaining that the FSA should not be funded through levies on their food outlets. And despite the BSE catastrophe under Tory rule, the Ministry of Agriculture—which former minister Edwina Currie said “had long ago set itself up as a trade union for producers”-was once again siding with the food industry. Yum, yum: prole food Yum, yum: prole food. 

There is to be publication of an annual report from the Working Party on Pesticide Residues, who will have a small number of food samples tested, and name retailers selling produce with residues above the “maximum residue limit”, and identify the goods concerned. However, this can be nothing more than a show to dispel the public crisis of confidence in food. 

Can consumers turn to organic foods? Perhaps some will be able to keep paying higher prices to reduce their contamination levels (except from equally dangerous airborne chemicals). But the majority can never have high quality organic food and freedom from various other sources of pollution, because of the international competition that is an integral feature of capitalism. Britain cannot go “green” alone. The additional financial burden on capital to establish and maintain a far safer and healthier environment would result in an economic crisis in no time. Britain simply cannot impose rigorous standards on producers without increasing their costs, and in a global market, that would spell disaster for UK firms. 

Everyone concerned about avoiding dangerous and inferior produce has to ask themselves this question: “What did I vote for at election time?” Since, whenever the electorate empower yet another bunch of politicians to—unavoidably—cater to the needs of business as the priority, the very conditions that give rise to food scandals will remain in place. If different competing groups retain ownership of productive resources, they must continue exploiting those assets in the most profitable manner in order to sell and prosper from what is produced. One result? BSE and 43 people dead (that we know of), and a renewed chilling warning this September from Professor Liam Donaldson, the government’s own chief medical officer: “What is absolutely certain is that the present relatively low number of cases [of nv-CJD] should not lead anyone to conclude that the worst is over. Levels of human exposure at the height of the BSE epidemic would have been high.” 

Misuse of GM technology; pesticide-induced cancers; animal maltreatment; cover-ups; no or inadequate labelling; abysmal hygiene standards. None of these need happen. We do not have to futilely hope profit-biased governments will impose uncompetitive regulations and strict enforcement. There is another option to capitalism’s inability to deliver continuously high-quality food for all. If we all own the means of producing food, then we all own the produce, which means never buying it or having any financial restraints on its quality.

Max Hess

Pathfinders: Say It Loud (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Say It Loud

If you want to take a pessimistic view of humanity’s future, there’s no shortage of evidence. And because the news cycle feeds primarily off bad news, it’s the easiest evidence to find. You have to look a bit harder for the positive news stories to back an optimistic view, but they do exist.

Like the story about the massive expansion of sharing app Olio, where people go out of their way to provide free stuff for people who are in need. Volunteers collect unsold produce from Tesco supermarkets, list it all in an app, and then superintend the hand-out process as local people come in to collect whatever is available.

What’s in it for Tesco? Cynically, one might say it’s good optics, as they are being seen to care, plus it saves them the costs of disposal. Less cynically, they are to some extent undermining their own profits by giving stuff away, so this is at least a concrete act that is a world away from the empty rhetoric and vapid virtue signalling of most capitalist companies.

What’s in it for the volunteers? A nice feeling, presumably, of doing some good in the world, to counteract all the loudly advertised bad stuff. ‘If everybody did something small but meaningful, we’d live in a much, much better society,” says one volunteer, who gets up at 7am every Saturday to collect Tesco cast-offs. And he’s right, of course. But any sentence that starts with the phrase ‘If everybody did…’ is really a political statement about how the world ought to be, and as we know, politics is about more than people just being nice to each other. It’s about thinking big.

Socialism is about thinking on the largest, global scale. And we know that’s a problem because a lot of people don’t seem able or willing to think at that scale. Not even when it comes to an existential threat like climate change. Even though the capitalist money-machine has blindly bulldozed its way across the planet destroying lives, cultures, landscapes and wildlife, people still have a dogged faith in the market system and its governments and politicians to find solutions to the very problems they’re causing.

And here’s a little anecdote about Glasgow and the run-up to COP26 in November which is nothing if not ironic.

Property owners in Glasgow are exploiting the shit out of COP26 by hiking their rents to astronomical levels during the conference period, in a bid to make big bucks out of a climate emergency. Greedy, grasping bastards indeed, but this is capitalist logic at work. If you’ve got a commodity that’s in high demand, you charge the maximum price you can get for it, and never mind scruples.

So it turns out that many climate activists from around the world who want to go to Glasgow to demonstrate their belief in the market system’s supposed magical ability to clean up its own mess, now can’t afford it because of the normal operations of the market system.

Fortunately, not everyone is a greedy, grasping bastard, even when capitalist logic tells them they ought to be. A network of Glasgow house owners has come together to express solidarity with climate activists by offering them very cheap accommodation over the course of the November climate summit (bbc.in/3mnSIbc). There aren’t enough of them, and they’re already oversubscribed, but still it’s some comfort to know that, destroy whatever else it may, capitalism never quite manages to destroy the capacity of humans to treat each other with decency.

Given this, the failure of people including climate activists to engage with the concept of a decent society at a global scale is astonishing and alarming. All kinds of cognitive biases are at play here, as people perform mental contortions to rationalise the irrational world around them, when it would be so much easier to say ‘you know what, capitalism is turning into a catastrophe, let’s get rid of it.’

The problem is the alternative. Influential environmental campaigner George Monbiot has publicly acknowledged the fact that capitalism is the problem, ‘a weapon pointed at the living world’, a conclusion he freely admits he came to slowly and reluctantly, after he had run out of ways to excuse it. Unfortunately he is under the impression that the only alternative is state (ie. soviet-style) ‘communism’, a prospect he is understandably not attracted to and which he recognises had ‘more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit’ (bit.ly/381QB4p).

In fact, soviet ‘communism’ is no alternative at all, it’s a travesty. We said so in 1918, mere months into Lenin’s coup d’état, but it seems our voice is not loud enough to reach Monbiot’s mighty ear. Meanwhile he’s wrestling with a mishmash of trendy behavioural and economic models that stand little chance of being put into practice and in any case don’t address the core problem, the existence of private property and markets, which results in a tiny class who own all the world’s resources and enrich themselves by impoverishing the rest of us and the planet.

People just can’t say the unsayable, which is that we have to abolish private property and markets, and dispossess the capitalist class. Why can’t they say that? In Monbiot’s case, as a regular writer for the Guardian newspaper, he must be aware that the Guardian is known for dumping writers who say anything too radical, as it dumped comedian Jeremy Hardy and even award-winning journalist John Pilger (bit.ly/37ZYFme). Science journalists are in a similar position, depending on employers for their wages. Ditto academics. Ditto social media influencers. No one can speak their mind who relies on the ‘king’s shilling’. Ever wondered why we don’t take commercial ads in the Standard? That’s why.

So there is a lacuna of silence surrounding the biggest question of humanity’s future on Earth. It’s not some deep-state conspiracy. It’s just the normal workings of capitalism. It creates an artificial dependence on money, and then pays everyone money not to question the money system.

As Black Panther activist Assata Shakur famously remarked, no one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. People are starting to question capitalism like never before. Well, it’s about time. But capitalism is not going to encourage that conversation. That’s why socialists need to be vocal, and not just vocal but loud, as in Glasgow this November. The world’s people need an alternative to the market system that plays to human strengths of cooperation and mutual support. It’s up to people like us to show them there is one.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: Something for Nothing (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Large private equity firms have been targeting UK supermarkets, which they view as undervalued and attractive due to their large property portfolios’ (BBC, 5 July). That’s why three different sets of these vulture capitalists were circling Morrisons. It was certainly not because they want to enter the grocery business. Like the BBC says, they wanted the land on which Morrisons’ supermarkets and warehouses are situated which they calculated could be put to a more money-spinning use.

It is not so much commercial profits that they are after as ground rent. Ground rent (not to be confused with house rent, which is a price) is a pure property income that accrues to the owner of land simply because they monopolise a portion of the Earth’s surface. It enables them to extract an income from the industrial or commercial capitalist they let use the land; the better the location and the higher the demand for its use the higher the rent they can extract.

In Volume III of Capital Marx pointed out that one feature of ground rent was ‘the palpable and complete passiveness of the owner, whose sole activity consists (especially in mines) in exploiting the progress of social development, toward which he contributes nothing and for which he risks nothing, unlike the industrial capitalist’ (Chapter 46). At the end of the previous chapter he had described it as ‘something for nothing’.

However, if they are clever, the ground landlord can increase their income from rent if they are prepared to invest some money to make their land more desirable by building houses or shops on it. In addition to bringing them a return on their capital this will increase their ground rent. This is what the aristocratic landowners who own large parts of central London have done. The Cadogan Estate, for instance, which reported recently:

‘Earl Cadogan and his family have controlled about 93 acres of Chelsea and Kensington for 300 years … Retail property accounts for about half of Cadogan’s rental income. A third comes from residential and remainder is offices’ (Times, 1 July).

Their rental income will be partly a return on their investment in the buildings but most will be ground rent (like with houses prices, where most of the price is not for the building but for the land on which it is built).

The vulture capitalists circling Morrisons wanted to get in on this act. They wanted to acquire the supermarket as it ‘owns the freehold of 85 percent of its 497 sites’ (Guardian, 5 July) and to use some of this land to erect different buildings that would bring them more income.

This kind of thing went on in Marx’s day too. Marx quotes the evidence of a London builder to a parliamentary committee in 1857:

‘The builder makes very little profit out of the buildings themselves; he makes the principal part of the profit out of the improved ground rents. Perhaps he takes a piece of ground, and agrees to give £300 a year for it; by laying it out with care, and putting certain descriptions of buildings upon it, he may succeed in making £400 or £450 a year out of it, and his profit would be the increased ground rent of £100 or £150 a year, rather than the profit of the buildings at which …in many instances, he scarcely looks at at all’.

Since the vulture capitalists would be the freeholder (rather than leaseholder as in this case) the whole £400-450 would go to them, as it does to the Earl of Cadogan, Duke of Westminster and Howard de Walden families and other parasites on parasites that ground landlords are.

Cooking the Books: Venture or vulture (2007)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the GMB and T&G unions, the Sainsbury supermarket chain is under threat. It’s reported that the Sainsbury family – including former Labour minister and Labour Party bank-roller, Lord Sainsbury – want to withdraw their capital and that  “venture capitalists” are grouping to buy them out. That’s what they call themselves. Others have different names for them. A GMB official called them “plunderers” while one from the T&G said they “do not create wealth; they extract it for their shareholders” (Times, February). A German minister once called them “locusts”. Other choice descriptions are “corporate raiders”, “predators”, “vultures” and “asset strippers”. 

Socialists apply some of these descriptions to all capitalists, but what have these particular kind of capitalists done to earn such epithets even from non-socialists?

Basically, they borrow money to set up a short-term fund (usually for 5 to 7 years) which they invest in other companies either to start them up or take them over. The venture capitalists then run the business  hoping to make enough money over the period to pay a higher than normal rate of interest to those who put up the money and to make a profit over and over this for themselves. Rates of up to 40 percent a year have been mentioned.

The immediate effect on the business they take over is that its indebtedness increases. Ordinary shareholders only have to be paid a dividend if the directors think enough profit is being made. Lenders have to be paid interest irrespective of whether or not the company makes a profit. Venture capitalists are in effect agents for lenders who take over running the company to ensure that these get their pound of flesh and over a relatively short period of time Then they move on to the next company.

It is easy to see why the unions don’t like this since the main means venture capitalists use to increase the short-term profits they are after is to hive off or close down the less profitable sections of the business with resultant job losses, so as to concentrate on the most profitable ones. The screws are then tightened on the remaining workforce to extract more work – and surplus value – from them than before.

The unions have promised an “ultimate showdown” with any venture capitalists that might assume control of Sainsbury’s. It is not evident that they have the industrial clout to organise and sustain the sort of strike this implies. More probably this is just a bluff to try to deter the venture capitalists from proceeding. The unions are also lobbying to end the tax concession on the money that venture capitalists borrow; in this they have the support of some ordinary capitalists who feel discriminated against when it comes to taking over other companies.

In the end, nothing much is likely to be done about “venture capitalism”. After all, from capitalism’s point of view, they are not doing anything wrong. In fact, they are only doing what comes naturally to capitalists: trying to make the biggest profit they can.