A series of articles has appeared on the BBC food website aimed at passing on tips for saving money on both ingredients and cooking techniques so as to keep Christmas dinner ‘within budget’. The articles are presumably aimed at those who now find themselves in the rapidly swelling ranks of struggling families.
With titles like ‘Energy saving Christmas’, ‘Budget Christmas dinner recipes’ and ‘Christmas dinner hacks to reduce your energy spend’, the section abounds with tips for ‘energy efficiency’ and ‘using ingredients wisely’.
This patronising collection of ‘seasonal’ articles is part of a concerted campaign on the part of our rulers and their media to persuade workers that the present situation is their problem to be dealt with individually, and that the key to squaring the impossible circle of unaffordable energy and food prices and low wages is simply a matter of being sensibly organised. Not so much ‘inform, educate and entertain’ as ‘lie, patronise and blame’.
We reproduce below the response of one of our party members to these seasonal lumps of coal so thoughtfully delivered to a shivering British public by our benevolent state broadcaster.
This is a systemic failure
Merry, frozen, hungry Christmas from the BBC.
The BBC serving its purpose once again to try and minimise the unrest caused by soaring poverty and spiralling cost of living through patronising articles that push the responsibility for the crisis onto individuals.
This is a systemic failure, it isn’t something we can solve by being thrifty or being savvy, nor can the system be put right through tweaks using the increasingly ineffective economic levers like austerity and adjusting interest rates.
Setting up production and organising society in the pursuit of profits, rather than to meet people’s needs, will always tend towards increasing poverty for the many and nearly unimaginable wealth for the few.
To the ones who are still ‘doing okay’, there are hundreds of thousands of people entering poverty yearly, and things have got leaner for you, too. The comfy niche you’ve carved out is vulnerable; ask the upwards of half a million businesses that go under in Britain every year.
You are either a worker, with no other choice than to sell your labour to the owners of the means of production (factories, farms, shops, warehouses, refineries etc), or you are those owners. If you are reading this, chances are you aren’t one of those owners, or are a small owner that has to work and is vulnerable to fluctuations of the market you have no say in.
Capitalism holds nothing for us workers, nothing but increasing poverty, dwindling healthcare and war.
Wars like the dozens raging around the world right now, and greater wars like the ones we haven’t seen in generations that we are screaming towards.
We can sit by and watch this descent, put our trust in the ‘elected’ MPs (representatives of the same big businesses causing these ever-recurring crises), or we can organise together, learn economics, politics and how to set up production and ownership in a way that meets the needs of the producers of everything: the workers.
The choice is: socialism or barbarism?
