Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Of supermarkets

Guardian readers hardly need to be reminded that we do 
not live in the best of all possible worlds, despite what our 
present leaders and the bourgeois media would have us 
believe.

Take the case of a woman we know who lives up here on the NSW 
Central Coast. She has two small boys and a husband who has been 
unemployed for months. Howard and Co may crow about how the 
jobless figures fell recently, but the unemployed got little joy 
out of this statistical sleight-of-hand.

It doesn't take a degree in economics to figure out that for 
there to be a significant drop in the real number of people 
unemployed there would have to be surge in the creation of real 
jobs. And blind Freddie can see that that hasn't happened.

Nor will it, of course. Capitalism's drive for profit cannot be 
reconciled with providing full-time, productive jobs for all the 
workers available to it.

Instead of real jobs it provides McJobs, named after the outfit 
that pioneered the large-scale creation of low paid jobs that 
lead nowhere — McDonalds.

Being staunchly anti-union, the giant fast-food chain made a 
point of hiring school kids for its own McJobs. But such is the 
crisis of capitalism today, and the lack of job opportunities 
within it, that grown-ups are now trying to scrape a living 
stacking supermarket shelves at night or returning supermarket 
trolleys from the car-park.

And they count themselves lucky when they can get even this kind 
of work. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise: capitalism is a 
system in ever-deepening, inexorable crisis.

While corporations keep their bottom lines looking healthy by 
mergers and downsizing, shedding jobs by the thousand as they go, 
the system as a whole is digging itself — and us poor bloody 
workers — into a very deep hole indeed.

A society that cannot provide work for its citizens cannot last, 
that is true. Unfortunately, its demise may be long drawn out 
with concomitant distress for the people caught up in its descent 
into ruin and chaos.

We in Australia are not anywhere near the ruin and chaos stage 
yet. But already the signs are there.

My friend with the two sons and the unemployed husband, remember? 
She was telling us the other day about her grocery shopping.

She has to do it at 11.30pm at night. Not because she's an 
insomniac, but because at that time of night supermarkets have 
substantial "specials".

Taking advantage of these late-night specials is the only way she 
can afford to shop for her family. That's a rotten way to have to 
live, isn't it?

Let's see John Howard or the big banks put a positive spin on 
that!

* * *

Endless war

Of course, John Howard can put a positive spin on almost 
anything, if it suits his political purpose that is.

Even Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says that a majority 
of Iraqis are now opposed to the US presence in their country. 
Howard however will have none of that.

According to the Sunday Telegraph, "Mr Howard dismissed 
this, saying he believed opinion polls that have shown widespread 
support for US efforts to rebuild Iraq".

Those must have been curious opinion polls, eh? Can't you imagine 
the questions: "Do you approve of the nationally owned assets of 
your country being handed over to foreign companies?"

Or perhaps: "Do you feel you are better off with the mass 
unemployment and poverty that has come with the US occupation?"

Hard to see how they could possibly get negative answers, really.

Mind you, Howard prattling on about "US efforts to rebuild Iraq" 
were echoed by Foreign Minister Downer, telling radio listeners 
that Australia had a "task" (or was it a "mission") to carry out 
in Iraq and we had not yet completed it, so you see, we couldn't 
leave yet, could we?

All this talk of missions and rebuilding is designed to distract 
attention from the fact that the US, Britain and Australia 
invaded Iraq ostensibly to rid it of a dangerous dictator whose 
weapons of mass destruction threatened not only the countries of 
the Middle East but nations much further afield as well.

No such weapons were found, as we all know (although poor old 
Downer still seems to cling to the fond belief that they may yet 
be found buried somewhere). The dictator has gone, too.

So why are our troops still there? I mean, even the RSL is 
getting twitchy about the apparent open endedness of the venture.

War without end, as Howard will probably learn at the next 
elections, is not a popular concept. Even militarists like to win 
in the end.

In fact, looked rationally, war without end is about as ugly and 
inhuman a concept as it is possible to come up with.

It is also impossible, for the people will not tolerate it. They 
soon see through the lies necessary to start the war, and no 
amount of spin doctoring or even provocations can prolong it 
indefinitely.

The people brought WW1 to an end, forcing the warring bourgeois 
governments and generals to make peace in the face of revolutions 
in Russia, Germany and Hungary and mutinies in France and 
Britain.

They forced Australia out of the Vietnam War, and then helped the 
Vietnamese to defeat the US military.

In trying to walk all over the people, everywhere, the US 
corporate empire has picked on a foe that is in fact even bigger 
— and ultimately more powerful — than it is.

No amount of spin doctoring can disguise who will win that 
contest.