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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
3 4 December - January 2017
T
HE CONSUMERISM-generating-capitalism-
generating-consumerism cycle that
characterises the developed or ‘Northern’
world depends on inequality, even as it pur-
veys certain equalities, and is the main
obstacle to tackling climate change, the most serious
long-term problem facing humanity.
Capitalism is struggling to maintain itself. In one
formal sense this is good for equality. A crucial weakness
of capitalism (not sufficiently noted by the Left) is that
by relentlessly pushing its ‘free’ market into every corner
of life to seek profit, it puts a cash-price on everything,
and it thereby becomes a great
social leveller: status, is replaced
by capital or money as the meas-
ure of societal eminence. As a
result, other than the great ine-
qualities of money, we now live in
communities with a level of per-
sonal and legal equality that was
totally unimaginable throughout
human history or even 40 years
ago - for gender, sexual orienta-
tion, race, ‘legitimacy’, nationality, and religion, for
example. Capitalism eschews the personal inequalities
which torpid caste-based civilisations emphasised. Only
money matters now.
But the crucial point is that the promotion of personal
equality by capitalism also causes constantly growing
agitation by workers for a just share of their social pro-
duction as they now see themselves as equal to their
bosses.
In response to this growing agitation for equality, the
capital-owning class must react, like any ruling-class or
Mafia, in two ways: one section of the exploited must
violently be repressed, the other will be bribed to keep
it usefully loyal, inside. England, as one of the biggest
Imperialist powers has done this regularly and system
-
atically. It did it in the 1819 Peterloo massacre of
demonstrating workers. It did it in the 1840s when
famine starved a million people in Ireland while massive
amounts of food were being exported under British army
guard to Liverpool. Towards 1850 when Chartist agita-
tion for equality again became strong in England, instead
of violence the Corn Laws were dropped to allow imports
of cheap food as the ‘bribe’ to quieten agitation. Colo-
nies were brutally plundered by England’s Imperialism
to deliver bribes to English workers. Friedrich Engels
noted this in a letter from 1882 to Kautsky: “English
workers gaily share the feast of England’s colonies”.
Ireland at this time was used as one source of those
bribes as part of the effort to maintain the English work
-
ing-class comfortable enough to forgo dangerous
agitation, even to join the Imperial army. But the equal-
ity drive continued, Ireland demanded and won
independence, and after two diverting world wars and
the likes of the Jarrow march in the 1930s, in the 1970s
and 1980s there again arose agitation among the English
working-class against capitalism’s economic inequality
-most noticeably the 1974 and 1985 Miners’ Strike and
opposition to the poll tax from 1990, in spite of the mate-
rial benefits to the working classes third world imports
of cheap food and raw materials. There was also strong,
often violent agitation by the colonies, following Ireland
and Viet Nam‘s example, for national liberation, for the
equality of races and nations. This new agitation was a
dangerous crisis for capitalism, and as there were no
further colonies to plunder, a new source of wealth,
beyond cheap food and raw materials, had to be found.
Thatcher’s capitalism achieved this: up to the 1970s
colonies were generally not allowed to manufacture, this
was reserved for the North so that for example India was
The consumerism-capitalism
symbiosis can’t deal with inequality
or climate change
by Jaime Dixon
Capitalism generates
‘social’ equalities but
increases the consumerist
appetite for exploitation and
the third-world appetite for
the same equality
POLITICS
How maths will
destroy capitalism
December - January 2017 3 5
forced to send its raw cotton to England and to buy back
spun and woven goods. The new policy was that the ex-
colonies and third world in general needed to get the
national liberation they were increasingly demanding
and could then develop manufacturing on their low
wages to export the new agitation-quitening bribe of
cheap manufactured goods back to England. Reagan and
the North in general did the same. Ireland had become
part of this group, exploiting not exploited. This new
system worked well and subsists: a surfeit of cheap man-
ufactures from the Southern nations, often produced by
children working in horrible conditions, as the North’s
diminishing manufacturing drifts toward a financial
economy where billionaires speculate to produce dam-
aging bubbles and get bailed-out when a bubble bursts,
as Thomas Piketty notes in ‘Capital in the 21st Cen-
tury’. The class-struggle, previously within
nations, has become global, between
nations.
The ‘bribes’ mentioned are not
just cash incentives, there is an
intrinsic turbocharge for the
enthusiastic wealthy consumer.
Consumerism thrives when a
worker in the US or Ireland
receives the equivalent of $15/hr
while the worker in, for example,
China producing equally-sophisti
-
cated manufactured goods is only paid
$2/hour. Capitalists gloat at the classic
opportunities to trade the spoils, the only issue is
the ‘terms’ of trade. A worker in the US or Ireland can
trade one hour’s labour, in a shopping mall, for several
hours of equal-quality Chinese labour. This looks like a
winning gambler cashing in the chips. The more you
shop for consumer goods the more your profit grows as
you indirectly exploit foreign workers. This is the eco-
nomic basis of that particular ‘buzz’ element of our
Consumerist consciousness. The incentive is inbuilt, the
process stacked to the advantage of consumers in the
North.
It is the instinctive grasp of this situation by a worker
who is comfortable with capitalism that matters.
A worker might exchange 30 minutes labour at a routine
retail job for the price of a pair of imported jeans.
The cotton must be: planted-grown-harvested-spun-
woven-dyed-cut-sewn,then zips-pockets-hems-buttons-
belt-loops-rivets-labels applied, and the lot transported.
The same is true, though it is less obvious, if both
workers are on car-assembly lines in their own countries.
The consumerist ‘buzz’ arises from an unequal worker-
to-worker relationship, not worker-to-capitalist.
In striking contrast shopping for manufactured goods
before 1980 felt like the much cruder experience of being
mugged by capitalists as the wages earned exchanged
for a less than equal amount of labour because when a
worker shopped, those workers who produced the man-
ufactured goods were in the same economic area and so
were paid the same wage rate (the missing labour-value
of course expropriated as profit by capitalists). This is
why shopping for the working class didn’t have that
seductive ‘profit-buzz’ it has gained since spanking
1980s Consumerism arrived.
This profit by Northern workers from global exploita
-
tion compensates for their own exploitation by our
own capitalist class, and is the fundamental
reason we in the North still vote for capi
-
talism. For example the US has a
$300bn trade surplus with China, so
a working-class US family may be
expected to get a kicker of 20% to
its wages. That’s just from China,
then there’s US trade with Mexico,
Bangladesh (wages $2/day!) etc.
This system is also reflected in
how Northern workers increasingly
define themselves as ‘Middle Class’ (in
England, 36%; the US, 50%). This eco-
nomic term originally described a working
shop-owner, blacksmith, in Ireland perhaps a sub-
stantial farmer, who at the same time was profiting from
having a few employees, so were in the working-class
and capitalist-class at once, in the ‘middle’. As described
above this is replicated in Northern workers doing a full
day’s work but when consuming are profiting from devel-
oping-world workers, so they instinctively - and correctly
- term themselves “Middle Class.“ Also reflecting this is
the diminishing of campaigns for shorter working hours
and strikes, both common in the 1970s, because such
actions reduce the immediate money income to swap for
that consumerist profit (US: in 1970 381 strikes; in 2012
11 strikes ). Many of the Northern working-class have
joined the middle-class, a class which consumes more
than it produces.
But as noted the capitalist-generated demand for
equality is always increasing, leading to growing insist-
ence on democracy and equality by workers in the
ex-colonies and Southern world in general, repeating
Ireland has moved from vicious colonial
exploitation with starvation while food was
being exported, to finally reach external
equality with the historically biggest exploiters
such as England and France
The class-struggle,
previously within
nations, has become
global, between
nations
3 6 December - January 2017
globally the struggle for what was historically won by
Ireland along with other Northern working-classes up to
1970 within their own countries, and again putting mas-
sive pressure on capitalism.
But this time there are no new colonies to plunder to
answer this demand, so the response by the capitalist,
along with endless imperialist wars, is to claw back some
of the gains of their own Northern workers. This is hap-
pening in our spreading austerity “crisis” as Northern
workers increasingly get kicked out of their middle-class
consumerist lifestyle to face the hard reality of capital-
ism: pay cuts, mortgage debt, zero-hours contracts,
rising medical and education costs, in Greece strict aus-
terity, in the U.S. in tent cities on charity food and
medicine, and the present generation will often be
poorer than their parents. This has produced a move to
supposed alternatives such as Brexit, Trump, Sanders,
Corbyn; and in Ireland the rise of Sinn-Fein and other Left
groups, though we are still diverted - as is the US - by
loyalties to civil-war based parties.
Ireland has experienced this whole historical gamut,
from vicious colonial exploitation with starvation while
food was being exported, to finally reach external equal-
ity with the historically biggest exploiters such as
England and France. But that capitalist-generated star-
vation and poverty hasn’t just evaporated, it has now
gone globally to places such as Africa, Bangladesh, etc.
Ireland’s harsh historical experience might explain our
neutrality and the importance of charities here. But with
the problem of global warming this is not sufficient.
While wages stay low enough in the South our self-
centred competitive consumerism will continue to divert
many in the North. It will therefore remain difficult to
build that society which champions the unity and caring
which is the prerequisite for a deep enough understand-
ing of the sacrifices needed to stop climate change. This
is not totally unrealistic, we can note the material sacri
-
fices people willingly accepted in countries such as
England during WWII, and afterwards there was
considerable nostalgia for the
sense of community, focused
on a moral cause and therefore
socially unified despite the
frugal amount of rationed con-
sumer goods.
But without an inspiring
cause, would we in Ireland,
now part of the developed
‘North’ consuming at a rate
that would require four planets
to sustain, accept our one-
planet equal share to halt climate change: one airplane
trip every 5 years, a family car for only two days per
week, fish twice, meat once, one egg (though plenty of
bicycles and green vegetables)? I don’t, and certainly
most of the North would not, though countries like Cuba
manage it. So we in Ireland, like the rest of the North vote
with our feet” to consume 4 planets: no surprise then
that we still vote for consumer capitalism through our
ballots.
Because Consumerism arises from an unequal worker-
to-worker relationship, it will end as workers in the
third-world do the maths to demand equality and justice,
as Ireland did some time ago. This will diminish exploi-
tation as global wages increase to follow production,
replicating what Northern working-classes won within
their own countries. When these wages reach even one-
third of our Northern wages there will be little margin left
to fund our diverting consumerism and finally capital-
ism’s austerity, inequality and injustice will again be
fully experienced by most Northern workers. Our middle-
class Consumerism will collapse and action on the
climate can emerge.
In Ireland we can help by reducing our own consump
-
tion while supporting Southern workers in uniting to
demand that global equality which will end our Consum-
erism. If this fails there is little hope of avoiding climate
disaster.
Because Consumerism arises
from an unequal worker-to-
worker relationship, it will end
as workers in the third-world do
the maths to demand equality
and justice, as Ireland did
some time ago
POLITICS
