So What is this Christmas?

One of the most pernicious aspects of capitalism is its compulsion to appropriate everything exciting, energetic and creative, then package it and sell it back to us. This is what Marx called commodification and nowhere is it more evident than in the celebration of Christmas. The only possible response to the perversion of a sacred festival into a range of shopping experiences is cynical revulsion.

And yet we need a festival in the darkest time of the year. We need an excuse to stay inside our warm homes with our friends and not do any work for a couple of weeks. We need to reclaim this midwinter festival by thinking our way back to a time before it was corrupted by capitalism.

The biscuit-box image of Christmas is usually a Victorian one, with Dickensian characters in snowy city streets. But Victorian schmaltz will not do: I recommend a few hundred years further back to Medieval times.

Christmas in Medieval times was a time of misrule. This must have been a necessary counterbalance to the social order of the time, where your occupation gave you a place in a guild and so your identity was fairly tightly constrained. The twelve days of festivities were organised by the Lord of Misrule, a member of the community selected by lot who was allowed to turn all rules on their heads for the duration. I can only assume that the purpose of this was to give people a chance to let their hair down in a society that was otherwise fairly stifling. Something akin to the modern office party.

Further back again we can try to make out the outline of the pre-Christian festival. Because believers in the old religion of this land were burnt and tortured their wisdom has been dispersed but we can find a few traces in traditions we still enjoy. The burning yule log was a symbol that light had not disappeared at the darkest part of the year, and a promise that it would return. The word 'yule' apparently comes from a word for 'wheel', meaning the wheel of the year, that will continue to turn. If you burn a log as part of your festival remember that you can attach to it things you don't want to take into the new year with you, whether bad luck or bad character traits or habits.

Evergreen trees were of special significance because they continued to live in the dead time of the year. Holly was used to decorate the home because it kept bad spirits at bay, hence its association with 'holy'. Mistletoe was the most sacred of all. It still seems mysterious, with no roots in the ground, and maintains a bright green right through the winter. It was associated with death and rebirth and so had a central place at the midwinter festival.

So there are a few ideas to get you doing. Time to design your own festival. Time to reclaim the midwinter festival from the profiteers!

While celebrating your reclaimed festival with your low-consumption friends you will need some games to play to avoid the TV advertising. Ideas on this would be welcome. For a starter I propose Fetish, a game which involves trying to decide on the most pointless item that is being sold this Christmas. Bonus marks are available for items that needlessly produce carbon dioxide.

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The Message of Christmas

‘Peace on earth: good will to all men.’
‘And why not women?’ asked my 7-year-old daughter, in her last nativity play when she yet again missed out on being Mary because she didn't have the right colour hair.

Why do the teachers always choose the girl with fair hair for Mary? Don’t they know where Mary came from? Joseph is also sadly miscast, his tea-towel-and-bootlace headdress a childish imitation of the real thing. It’s curious, really, that we don’t do better when we see an authentic version on the TV news every day. Perhaps we can’t face the connection between Jesus and Yasser Arafat. Mary’s costume has appeared frequently in recent news bulletins too—the burkah is an added extra of course.

‘What’s Christmas in three words?’, asked the television advert of a few years ago. ‘Peace on Earth’ is mentioned only in a joking aside about noisy children, but then it can’t be bought at Marks and Spencer. Our preparations for Christmas focus as usual on consumption of presents and food, providing a contrast to the Muslims’ similarly timed festival of Ramadan, which involves a month of fasting. But the preparations this year are taking place against a backdrop dominated by the Middle East. The appropriateness of this goes unnoticed. But it’s not just the scenery and the costumes that produced the story. Christianity grew out of the same mess of violence that is going on today. Jewish victories over the Philistines are celebrated in the psalms; the battle-lines are unchanged thousands of years later.

So did Jesus fail with his message of peace?’ In a world where a born-again Christian in the most Christian country on earth parades his ruthless killing and boasts of his military might it appears that he did. It’s almost impossible to stomach the hypocrisy of celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace while the slaughter of children continues in the very town where he was born.

The message of Christmas was a message of peace to a world in conflict. Jesus turned his back on the vengeful God of the Old Testament; his life demonstrated his understanding that if you really believe in something you are willing not to kill for it but to die for it. Unable to rise to such high standards I can only wish that all those disunited in hatred as another year ends could follow his example. Tweet

Men and Sheds

This is the name of a book I'm giving my brother-in-law for Christmas. I'm very proud of my brother-in-law, whose name is Nick. He not only won a coveted Ivor Novello award but was also so cool that, instead of attending the presentation, he stayed at home to put up his shed. Also grateful since he has sorted me out for a website and also persuaded me to start this blog having heard enough of my moaning about not selling enough of my books and having my ideas ignored.

So what is it with men and sheds? I can't claim to understand men, never having been one, or at least not in any lifetime I can remember. My guess is that it is something to do with the way women tend to dominate the domestic space. Presumably sheds give men a space where they can be themselves. Homes, these days, have become spaces for competitive domestic consumption, the realm of the domestic goddess. I can see that a shed is a place where you can be relaxed and messy, and perhaps just yourself.

The fetishisation of home furnishing has reached such a pitch that people no longer invite friends into their homes for the shame of what they might find there—last year’s style of sofa would be social death. Fashion was always capitalism’s favourite child, but it has now been allowed to run around all areas of our lives, throwing tantrums if we dare to express our individuality rather than buying the latest designer label. The brand has become an expression of who we are, and those who can only afford the cheaper brands are themselves branded as losers. To avoid this shame a friend insists on pronouncing Lidl as lidèle, imbuing the pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap supermarket with a contintental air that saves his blushes.

What about this example of sofa madness reproduced from the Guardian:

At one minute past midnight last night, Ikea's new flagship store opened in north London, and managers expected that around 2,000 bargain-hunters would quietly file in. The British, after all, have a reputation for being decorous queuers. But Ikea had not predicted that up to 6,000 people would descend on the new store, in Edmonton, with a stampede to get in resulting in a frightening crush. Thousands had been lured by bargains—some of which were only available until 3am even though a 24-hour opening was planned—such as 500 leather sofas for only £45. Cars were abandoned on the roadside as shoppers attempted to reach the store in time to secure the best offers.

Six people were taken to hospital, including a man in his 20s who was stabbed nearby at around 1.30am. He was said to be in a stable condition, and it was not clear whether the incident was related to the opening. According to a senior fire officer, ‘There were crush injuries and people suffering from shock from the pushing and shoving.’ Nine ambulances attended the scene.

This is all unnecessary sacrifice at the altar of the growth fetish, that sanctum sanctorum of neoclassical economics exposed so brilliantly by Richard Douthwaite in The Growth Illusion. It is also unsupportable within the confines of a limited planet that is already creaking at the seams. In spite of the money, energy and intelligence spent persuading you of the need for elaborate consumption patterns, this particular mindgame—elsewhere I have called it ‘Sen and the art of market-cycle maintenance’—is easily defeated. You can get together with your friends, green friends are particularly useful for this, and establish your own ethic of consumption based around minimizing carbon and maximizing self-expression.

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Feed Me!

The publication of a report on ethical consumption sponsored by the Co-operative Bank was rapidly followed by an article in the Economist telling us we are wasting our money. We can ascertain that the real food movement is building in power and starting to threaten the mega-food corporations. This is unsurprising since ethical consumption now accounts for 5% of all spending, overtaking spending on alcohol and cigarettes. The various co-operative shops take up a similar proportion of the total retail market.

The report shows that sales of organic food increased by 30% from 2004 to 2005, with a nearly 40% increase in fair-trade purchases and nearly 55% increase in sales of ‘sustainable fish’. Some of these rather dubious categories cause me to have a little sympathy with the Economist's scepticism, but I interpret these consumption changes as indication of a deeper concern about how we are feeding ourselves.

Food offers a perfect case-study of how the domination of the profit motive distorts the system of distribution in our globalised world. Economics is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of Economics as ‘the study of how scarce resources are, or should be, allocated’ . How can capitalism possibly justify itself as an efficient system, never mind the only system in town, when it achieves this so badly that we have some people dying of starvation and others dying of obesity? No, it isn’t the vending machines, or the corrupt dictators it is the economic system that is to blame. Green politics is about limits and meeting needs, and an efficient economic system would respect these; conventional politics is about profit, and profit can be increased by the encouragement of greed. That is the central explanation for the rise in obesity.

We are encouraged to be greedy, to buy a new sofa to sit on while we over-consume and absorb advertising to persuade us to consume even more, interspersed between programmes instilling our patriotic duty to keep the economy afloat by shopping and terrifying us that we are heading for premature death because of, yes, over-consumption. This is the sort of self-contradictory message which generates internal confusion and mental dis-ease. No wonder that people over-eat to try to fufill the hunger that artificial and chemically based foods cannot satisfy. And no wonder that rates of anti-depressant prescription have increased by 125% between 1993 and 2002. Profits are made by advertisers, food corporations and drug manufacturers, while the costs are borne by us, not consumers but human beings.

Is it too outrageous to see a link between the pseudo-religious commitment to growth amongst policy makers and the accompanying growth in our waistlines? Clive Hamilton identifies the addiction to growth as a ‘fetish’ which he compares to the cargo cults that grew up in Papua New Guinea in the 1930s. ‘Cargo cults and the growth fetish both invest magical powers in the properties of material goods, possession of which is believed to provide for a paradise on earth.’ The fact that ever-increasing consumption does not bring happiness is not an exciting new thought for most environmental campaigners, but the fact that a book called Growth Fetish received such wide publicity may be.

Our need to be fed runs deeper than just our daily bread. We have lost our relationship with the land and with other people. We have lost our ties to those close to us in our own communities in a world where we buy stuff on faceless estates made by nameless children in countries we could not locate on a world map.

Stroud Community Agriculture offers a model for how we might rebuild meaningful economic relationships, and the sense of wholeness and purpose that comes with these. The strap-line for the community agriculture project in Stroud is—‘Become a Member: Share the Harvest’. We do not buy our vegetables, we support the livelihoods of two farmers who manage the rented land by buying a share of the farm; we contribute our own time on fortnightly workdays; and we collect our share of whatever was produced that week. The farm also organizes festivals and events to mark the turning of the year.

This is a wholly different relationship to food and one that leaves you feeling satisfied on all levels. Food arrives not only infused with the vitality of your local soil but with a real sense of belonging to you. Ownership is not a right. Unlike the sanitized meaningless exchange of money for dead, pre-packaged vegetables that takes place at Tesco, in the world of owning your own food pounds sterling are a debased currency and only physical work will do. In the new green economy we have all to become producers; demonstrating our principles through ethical consumption will not be enough.

Find out more about community farms here.

You can find out more details of the ethical purchasing report here. Tweet

Capitalist mantras

Capitalism is a powerful economic system, but more importantly it is also a system of ideas. We grow up with such ideas in childhood and reinforce them in our dealings with each other. The ideas are communicated, maintained and elaborated through a system of mantras, which operate to control our thinking and to tie us in to a nasty, selfish way of behaving in society. I’ve listed some of the most popular further on, with some suggested replacements. On the principle that it would be a good idea not to do the opposition’s work for them I would suggest you begin to eliminate these from your vocabulary, and challenge them when used by others.

Some of these are rather insidious. For example, if you believe that there is no such thing as a free lunch it makes you feel like a ‘loser’ (a tremendous capitalist concept) every time you give something away, such as a lunch for your friends. Your act of generosity immediately becomes a gesture that requires reciprocation. Against the backdrop of this mantra, gift becomes exchange. Kindness is lost to capitalism. I am making a collection of these as a consciousness-raising exercise so please send others on a postcard or by email.

The way to reject the mantras is through active intellectual subversion. If you find one of the mantras pops into your head, or that you are responding to it in your behaviour, you need to switch it for something that has the opposite consequence. I once saw a poster for a band called ‘Shocking Insanesburys’; the name is subversive in itself since the comfortable task of supermarket shopping has been ideologically challenged. The band-name is more accurate for the nature of consumption in modern capitalism, which is no longer about satisfying desires but rather about bringing the competitiveness of production into our homes.

More importantly you can engage in random acts of kindness of pointless acts of beauty. An excellent one you can try is to pay the toll for the person behind you on a bridge or stretch of road. I have tried this on the Severn Bridge and it completely fazes not just the recipient of you generosity but also the toll-keeper. Anything that gets people questioning has got to be good!

Here are a few examples. Please send me more, or better revised versions and I'll add them to the blog:

There is no such thing as a free lunch → Food is for sharing
You can’t get something for nothing → Unless you are a shareholder or landowner
Everybody has a price → Generosity is its own reward
Time is money → My time is my own
If you’re so clever, how come you → If you’re so rich, how come you ain’t
ain’t rich? happy?
Nothing in life is free → The best things in life are free
Money makes the world go round → Love makes the world go round
We need to protect our wealth → We need to rely on the love of others
If it isn’t hurting it isn’t working → If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution Tweet

Green Economics: Expanding the Circle of Influence

The glib phrase ‘economics for people and planet’ is one that green economists frequently use to describe how what they propose for the world’s economy is different. It is really shorthand for expressing a need to move beyond the narrow view of the economy as it is currently organised. So many perspectives are never considered by a system of economics that privileges white, wealthy, western men (see the extraordinary picture of the Bretton Woods conference). The way the global economy is organised can be seen as an extension of a colonial system whereby the resources and people of most of the planet are harnessed to improve the living standards of the minority of people who live in the privileged West. On the one hand, the rights of people living in the global South to an equal share in the planet’s resources should be respected. On the other, their approach to economics, especially that of indigenous societies which have managed to survive within their environments for thousands of years, has much to recommend it and much we may learn from. While we do not glorify low living standards we do see the value in learning from the South.

Even within western societies there are gross inequalities between people. The system of patriarchy has ensured that the majority of resources are controlled by men. Most of the world’s poor are women. The male dominance of the economy has resulted in a situation where women form 70 per cent of the world’s poor and own only 1% of the world’s assets (Amnesty International). According to UNFPA (2005), on a global basis women earn only 50% of what mean earn. And in spite of equal pay legislation in the UK and US the pay gap between the genders persists. Green economics also extends the circle of concern beyond our single species to consider the whole system of planet earth with all its complex ecology and its diverse species. As an illustration of the narrowness of the current approach to policy-making we can use the thought experiment of the Parliament of All Beings (see earlier post).

Policy-makers are happy to use the word ‘exploit’ when talking about resources such as oil or minerals. Yet for green economists exploitation of the planet’s resources is as unacceptable as exploitation of the people who live on the planet. The failure to respect the planet has led to problems as diverse as climate change and desertification. In order to address these problems green economists suggest that we need a completely different attitude towards meeting our needs that involves respecting ecology and living in balance with the planet.

Another short phrase that encapsulates something important about green economics is ‘beyond supply and demand to meeting people’s needs’. This contains an explicit criticism of the discipline of economics with its obsession with graphs and mathematics and its inability to look out of the window and see what is really happening in the world. Green economics begins with people and their concerns rather than with theories or mathematical constructions of reality. Conventional economics will provide a graph with two straight lines representing ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ and then apply this to the complex relationships which are entailed by the production and exchange of goods. Green economics calls for a richer and deeper understanding of people, their relationships, and how they behave and are motivated. The ‘needs’ we are concerned about are not merely physical needs but also psychological and spiritual needs.

The word ‘holism’ sums up the way in which we have to learn to see the big picture when making economic decisions. The absence of holistic thinking is clear in modern policy-making, where crime is punished by incarceration without attempting to understand how an economic system which dangles tempting baubles in front of those who cannot afford them and deprives them of the means of meeting their deeper needs is simply generating this crime. A similar comment can be made in the case of health, where pollution creates ill health which is then cured by producing pharmaceuticals the production of which simply generates more pollution. From a green perspective we need to see the whole picture before we can solve any of these problems.

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So what is green economics?

I feel it may be time to offer some thoughts about what green economics actually means. In a practical sense, my favourite green economists (we are a fairly select group so far!) are Richard Douthwaite (find out more from the Feasta website) and James Robertson, who was a founder member of the New Economics Foundation and has his own archive of work available at http://www.jamesrobertson.com/.

From a theoretical point of view I find the insights of ecofeminism really helpful. Here are three important principles from which we can build a sustainable system of economics:

• Immanence: the source of the sacred in all aspects of the planet and her people;
• Interconnectedness: a belief in the inevitable relationship between all these aspects of the sacred, closely supported by the science of ecology;
• Unity-in-diversity: the need to respect difference and to value the whole as requiring all of its different parts.

Three narratives demonstrate these principles.
The following quotation from James Lovelock’s autobiography illustrates the principle of immanence:

Gaia: The meaning of that cloud-speckled ocean-blue sphere was made real to me by their newly won scientific information about the Earth and its sibling planets Mars and Venus. Suddenly, as a revelation, I saw the Earth as a living planet. The quest to know and understand our planet as one that behaves like something alive, and which has kept a home for us, has been the Grail that beckoned me ever since. It came to me suddenly, just like a flash of enlightenment, that to persist and keep stable, something must be regulating the atmosphere . . . My mind was well prepared emotionally and scientifically and it dawned on me that somehow life was regulating climate as well as chemistry. Suddenly the image of the Earth as a living organism. . . Emerged in my mind. At such moments, there is no time or place for such niceties as the qualification ‘of course it is not alive—it merely behaves as if it were,’

To get a sense of the principle of interconnectedness you have to use your own imagination. I expect that nearly all of us have, at one time or another, been in a car that has hit and killed a small animal while driving on a country road. A squirrel or badger or rabbit has rushed out of the hedgerow and under our wheels before we could do anything about it. It is the feeling that follows this experience that makes real for us our interconnectedness with other species. I challenge anybody not to feel a sense of shock and horror for the life destroyed.

The third principle of unity-in-diversity is severely neglected in our culture, which sets up either-or dichotomies constantly. A simple illustration in a context we are all familiar with comes from the North American Gitksan-Wet'suwet'en people as told by their tribal elder Marie Wilson:

A North American Indian philosopher has likened the relationship between women and men to the eagle, which soars to unbelievable heights and has tremendous power on two equal wings--one female, one male--carrying the body of life between them. The moment one is fractured or harmed in any way, then that powerful bird is doomed to remain on the earth and cannot reach those heights.

These principles are drawn from the ecofeminist wing of green economics. You can download a full discussion of the economic implications of adopting the ecofeminist perspective of the earth as our mother from my webpage on the theme: earthmother.

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