On Supermarkets (Why Tesco must die)

Something I've been trying to achieve in recent weeks is to not depend on supermarkets for food. In Preston this has gone rather well, thanks to the market and the independent health food shop, I have been able to source everything I normally buy from elsewhere with the sole exception of soya milk. Recently I read Tescopoly by Andrew Simms, which served as a major inspiration.

I thought it was about time to sum up the main lessons I took from this book. What follows is an account of the damage done by supermarkets in this country, it is not an exhaustive list and steers clear of abuses committed and damage done overseas, as this is a topic much covered elsewhere.

1. Supermarket pharmacies Vs. Community and NHS pharmacies.

In the last few years supermarkets have begun to offer in-store pharmacy services, placing them in direct competition with Community and NHS pharmacies. The problem here is that, whereas supermarkets are only interested in the profit from prescriptions, other pharmacies make around 80% of of their overall incomes from prescriptions, this in turn allows these pharmacies to remain trading and to provide more important and less profitable services i.e. emergency contraception, methadone and in some places home visits to patients.

In situations where anything in seriously wrong with a customer/patient supermarket pharmacies will always refer that person to the NHS. Hence supermarket pharmacies depend on the NHS at the same time as stripping it of a major source of income by way of entering the prescriptions market. It can be seen here that supermarkets only target the high-profit and low-risk areas of healthcare.

As far as supermarkets are concerned, products will always come before services and there will be no consideration on their part for broader socio-economic impacts of their actions. For example if local pharmacies were to go out of business - something supermarkets have been known to pursue actively and irresponsibly - for example, Tesco has previously been in trouble with legislators for offering 2 for 1 deals on painkillers.

The danger is that in the near future there may be areas where the only pharmacy is a supermarket one and as such only offers a fraction of the services that an NHS/community pharmacy would provide.

2. Supermarkets and the (loss of the) Free Press.

In supermarket sales terminology there is a thing known as the 80/20 rule, explaining that supermarkets make 80% of their profits from just 20% of what they stock. For example by selling large quantities of popular titles and mainstream newspapers, whilst just selling a few copies of more niche and specialist publications. As with healthcare, local newsagents and booksellers can use the money they make from high turnover titles to continue trading and provide specialist titles for those who want them. The danger is that supermarkets will put independent sellers out of business and become the sole supplier of published materials to an area. Once the market is monopolised in this way, supermarkets can control which titles are stocked and by definition, which ideas are disseminated.

3. Where money ends up.

If people buy groceries in chainstores and supermarkets, then that money will leave the local vicinity and all that will remain will be the pittance of a wage payed to locally sourced staff. If the alternative occurs and people spend money in locally owned businesses then that money stays in the vicinity and will most likely be re-invested into the community. This has been proved to be effective and some urban areas in the UK use their own to ensure that money cannot be removed from the area.

4. Monoculturing Vs. Household Farming.

This is something more prevalent abroad but does occur domestically. In order to make agriculture supermarket friendly, farmers are encouraged to specialise in single crops and to give up small household farms, intended for growing a variety of crops for their own families, in order to become tenant farmers on these single crop plantations. First this is a massive undermining of the rights of the farmers and destroys their self-sufficiency. Second by replacing diverse eco-systems with the single crops, those crops become more susceptible to disease. Increasing the risks of crop failures and famine worldwide. More needs to be written on this topic but the environmental impact of this will be massive.

Quote of the day #1 01/01/2011

'I sympathize with those who would minimize, rather than those who would maximise economic entanglements between nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel - these are things that of their nature should be international. But let goods be homespun wherever it is reasonable and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national.'

- John Maynard Keynes, 1933.

.Imagine.

Imagine your nearest airport being bombed. Imagine bridges and roads around you being destroyed. Imagine power plants, electricity, hospitals, government buildings being destroyed and sewers that stop functioning. Imagine no water coming from the tap. Imagine no food or medicine or outside humanitarian help being allowed into your country. Imagine a rain of bombs falling over houses, churches and stores so that ten, twenty, fifty civilians are killed every day.

Imagine an army kidnapping half of your government and taking them out of the country. Imagine the same army every night firing sound bombs above your roof so your windows are blown open, nobody can sleep and your kids getting stomach pains from pure stress. Imagine having to pass through military checkpoints every day to get to your job. Imagine being refused to travel outside your country. Imagine a concrete wall, eight meters high, being built around and inside your city. Imagine waking up in the middle of the night and being told that you have five minutes to leave your house because it's going to be demolished by the army's bulldozers. Imagine international sanctions because you voted for the "wrong" political party.

This is what everyday life looks like in Lebanon and Palestine right now. This is just some of the ways that the Palestinian and Lebanese people are being collectively punished by the military supreme Israel. The latest weeks we have heard Israeli officials claim that what they are going to do is to "bomb Lebanon 20 years back" and to "make sure that no one in Gaza can sleep". And this goes on right now, right before our eyes.

What would happen if let's say Iran or Sweden or Russia invaded or occupied your country? What would the UN, USA or EU say and do? What is it that makes Arab lives – Palestinian and Lebanese – less valuable in the eyes of the world than your life and our lives? Why aren't we doing anything? The Israeli occupation of Palestine and the attacks on civilians in Lebanon are serious and obvious crimes against international law and human rights.

Our thoughts are with our brothers and sisters in Palestine and Lebanon.

Peace in the Middle East! Justice for Palestine and Lebanon!

The (international) Noise Conspiracy

-The Black Mask Sub-committee of Violence and passion.

www.palestinemonitor.org
www.electronicintifada.net/lebanon
www.electronicintifada.net
www.palsolidarity.org
www.dci-pal.org
www.stopthewall.org
www.humanitarianinfo.org
www.hrw.org
www.zmag.org

.12. Ready steady go! - The celebration of passion and resistance

Assuming control over creativity and productivity:

Words and images, which surround us constantly - more now than ever - are the language of power. We are totally inundated with commercials and propaganda, everywhere. It's not manipulation, nor a conspiracy. It's the expression of a paradigm which has cast its web over the globe - formulating divisions of labour, using and shaping 'culture', ensuring its evolution, and thus contradicting itself through exploitation and alienation. The paradigm is ours, as is the language, and the imagery which represents it. Alienation is for everyone now, because it is now more than it ever was. It is total. Some won't recognise it, and others revel in it, but all of us feel it. It's easy to be attuned to it in the working class or as a student - it feels like total futility. One is more attuned to alienation when one can't afford to fool and distract themselves with bourgeois luxury, or in the converse, when, through education, one is purchasing boredom and functionalist thoughts in hopes of empowering their life. Will it? Only in so much as you can transcend it - only in its negation. The purpose of being a student now is to redefine that role. In a sense, to use creative and productive energy in opposition to the social forces that seek to harness it for a benefit alienated from yourself. The same applies to broader society. There is a practical manner in which we can combat total alienation - using its means against itself. That is using the means of creativity and productivity against the social paradigm that guides them. As for creative power, we can start with language and images. Every word, image, phrase or scene has a contrasting counterpart which can alter its meaning entirely and critique it. Dada knew it and accordingly was a fantastic reflection and critique of society. Drink from the toilet. Warhol knew it when he painted Monroe's lips a hundred times. The Situationalists articulated it and lived it (and not only in Paris 1968). The word 'propaganda' condescends the concept we're referring to, although to a degree that's what it is. To use this word in its condescending sense is to fail to recognise that everything is or can be propaganda. A more appropriate concept is that of 'satire'. We can stifle the alienation of our creative power through critique, humiliation, insult and self-criticism. Its object should be larger than its subject however: to redefine and reorganise the social control over creative and productive forces in opposition to alienation. After the critique of creative power we are left with the practical side of our social life production. The DIY festival is a powerful example of the assumption of productive organisation on the part of the political community. Insurrection is its broader social counterpart. The former redefines productive energy in its own terms, taking massive organisation into its own hands (even if its goal is only a forum for boring music), while the latter is popular resistance and refusal of the control over creative and productive power. What's next? Is the DIY festival followed by the creation of our own airlines, and is insurrection followed by revolution? If alienation stifles and co-opts creative and productive energy for its own benefit, then satire, self-reliance and resistance redefine them in rejection of alienation.

Much more can be said on these matter. Go ahead.

-The Black Mask Sub-committee of Violence and passion.

.11. Enslavement blues - We are all cultural prostitutes

The perception of time:
The timeline, hours chopped into minutes into seconds into the measurements on living. Life is lived on the basis of time consumed. The standardisation of time in the 19th century was well in tune with the industrialisation's maximum usage of labour power, the need to increase profit. We learn to accept the fact that days are nothing but blocks of time to be consumed. The schematics of living is nurtured from the institutionalised learning facilities also known as schools, also known as breeding grounds for future slaves.

The perception of the room:
The working place, the living place, the consumption place, the enjoyment place; all life reduced to cubicles determining the role you have to play in order to live. Our economical/cultural settings of building spae has not only been reduced to the mere storage of commodities (home) but also to the production of life (theme parks and movie theatres), the accumulation of capital (work) and the consumption of the same capital (malls and chainstores and so on). Living has been reduced to the economy of space.

The perception of self:
Having life reduced to the time/space setting of consumer capitalism means that you are, no matter how hard you try, a part of the commodity abundance that circulates around us and as long as we are living in a system where this is the "law", this relationship will never change. We are paying to live in a system that is based on the usage of humans, we get used to the realisation that the objects that we produce take on more meaning than the producers, we get used to feeling alienated and used. We get survival sickness.

-The Black Mask Sub-committee of Violence and passion.

.10. Will it ever be quiet? - The joyous sounds of progress or ...

Do you remember when it was quiet down here? Do you remember when it was quiet anywhere??? Before the industrialisation, before the factories, before the planes and before the trains and cars and busses. Before The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and punkrock, before MTV, before commercials, before headaches and tinnitus, before inner city fumes and pollution, before the sounds of computers and cash registers.

Noise - silence, relationship in a sinking ship, drags us under and turns us deaf from the roaring of the marketplace. But in secret and in effect there might be a few daring forces using the apparatus available to produce counter sounds, to make so much noise that one day there will be at least a moment of relief. Guided by the mechanism produced during thousands of years and oppression, constructed by the suffering of a million men and women, we must overthrow the relationship between the abuse of noise and the creation of noise and thank the industrialisation for making us amplify our manifestos and enables us to sing and scream and dance.

-The Black Mask Sub-committee of Violence and passion.

.9. Do I have to spell it out - Smash the neo-liberal agenda

organist//n.the player of an organ.

organize//v. tr.(also-ise) 1 a give an orderly structure to, systemize. b bring the affairs of (another person or oneself) into order; make arrangements for (a person). 2 a arrange for or initiate (a scheme etc.). b provide; take responsibility for (organize a wildcatstrike). 3 (often. absol.) a enroll (new members) in a trade union, political group etc. b form (a trade union or other political group). 4 a enable (a group or oneself) to offer resistance against the oppressive discourse of capitalist leadership (the man). b provide a theoretical foundation to understand the fascism-generating structures of the widely differentiated labourmarket (scapegoating so called immigrants would not be as much an issue of ethnicity, but one of class). 5 a promote a less instrumental use of traditional learning facilities (schools, libraries etc.). b encourage learning beyond mere survival. 6 smash the neo-liberal dream. 7 a support the overtaking of the workplace, thus enabling people to build their own communities and fly their own airplanes (see the AAA for space exploration). b give confidence (to a person or group of persons) to realise that heroism can and will be achieved by all. 8 a confirm the suspicion that people are more than a professional title. b encourage the change of (old, boring, forced etc.) identities (see #6). 9 a give meaning to the old abbreviations (CNT, SAC, IWW etc.).b when the time is right, remove the meaning from above mentioned abbreviations (showing that further divisions are most unwanted). 10 a take it into one's own hands. b do i have to spell it out?

orgy//n.(pl.-ies) 1 a wild drunken festivity at which indiscriminate sexual activity takes place. 2 excessive indulgence in an activity. 3 (usu. inpl.)Gk. & Rom. Hist. secret rites used in the worship of esp. Bacchus, celebrated with dancing, drunkenness, singing etc.

-The Black Mask Sub-committee of Violence and passion.