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Big Companies, Tiny Tax Bills

Picture an individual who pays more tax per year than the gargantuan coffee titan that is Starbucks. A firm that has over 800 outlets. A world renowned brand which employs 7,000 staff in the UK alone. Who is this person? Bill Gates? No, it’s actually me. I’m not eating caviar, as I write, I am slurping a bowl of porridge made from value-brand oats and contemplating a 4000% APR payday loan to cover the rent.

At this point you may be quite confused. How can someone in such circumstances pay so much tax? The truth is quite simple. Starbucks pays even less. How much? Billions of pounds worth of sales but they haven’t paid a single penny in tax over the last three tax years. Of course having so many staff and stores does create large overheads but in reality Starbucks are still doing pretty well in the UK. A large chunk of their overheads are actually paid to other portions of the business for their coffee which they buy at an inflated cost, and perhaps more staggeringly, for the ‘intellectual royalty’ of the brand; bear in mind Starbucks is not predominantly a franchise.

And it’s not just Starbucks, Google and Amazon have also been under fire from a committee of MPs this week. Google paid a not-so-eye-watering £3.4m in tax on a much more impressive £2.5bn in sales. Amazon on the other hand paid £1.8m on its considerably less substantial turnover of £200m. Of course, companies only pay tax on profit, not turnover and herein lies the problem. Much like Starbucks, Amazon and Google are accused of using, in the committee chair’s words “immoral” and “evasive” tactics to avoid paying tax by coming up with ways to massage overheads and using tax havens to ferry money around.  

With so many struggling, ordinary people having to pay taxes while these giant companies get away with paying next to nothing, this news, a little like my porridge, is a bit hard to swallow.

The August Riots: a question of responsibility?

The riots that occurred throughout London and other cities in the UK following the fatal shooting of Mark Duggen by police seem certain to leave a heavy scar in the British psyche which will continue to smart long after the mess is cleaned up and the damage repaired. Indeed, the scenes witnessed had that palpable air of a watershed moment for British society. What the real legacy of the riots becomes is yet to be decided and how we react and move forward as a society will determine what that will be. Either we let it turn the cracks of divide along generational, racial and economic lines into chasms, or we take the riots as a sign of some endemic problems in our society and come together as a community to address them via dialogue, compromise and greater understanding.

Let me start by saying this: I sincerely feel for anyone who was attacked or intimidated, who lost their homes, livelihoods and in some cases loved ones as a result of the riots. I cannot even begin to understand the pain of what some of you are going through. I won’t however, be shedding a tear for the banks or big businesses who had property damaged; they are insured up to the hilt anyway and I sincerely doubt this will adversely affect them. More than any shop windows, or stolen goods it’s our communities that have been really damaged and for that there can be no excuse. Ultimately, because they have free will, each individual who was involved in the riots is personally ‘responsible for the predictable consequences of their own actions’ and I believe the majority were misguided and their anger misdirected. But these actions do not take place in a bubble, detached from society, so it seems only right for us to examine the cultural, political and economic conditions which made so many British people feel so incensed or at least inclined to go on such a destructive rampage. These conditions are the responsibility of every one of us.

What follows is some of what I believe to be the general contributing factors. It is worth noting that these factors cannot account for every individual involved, perhaps some of the rioters and looters were not affected by any of these issues, perhaps it was case of getting ‘caught up in the moment’ or of sheer opportunism for some, but I would imagine they would be in a VERY small minority.

No respect for authority

It seems fairly obvious that most people involved in the rioting and looting had diminished respect for at least some forms of authority. But can we really blame them? David Cameron et al have spoken of a breakdown in the moral fabric of certain sections of society. I would agree wholeheartedly, but it is the bastions of authority in this country as much as any who have shown themselves to be anything but ‘moral’ or ‘decent’; setting a precedent for the rest of society which is supposed to respect them. For some, the shooting of Mark Duggen was viewed in the context of a string of deaths at the hands of police with zero accountability; there have been more than 333 deaths in police custody since 1988 but not a single conviction. This has eroded an already strained relationship between police and certain communities. The Met’s involvement in the hacking scandal has done little to ameliorate its reputation.

Of course, certain sections of the media- another bastion of authority in our society- had their morally bankrupt underbelly laid bare for all to see in the said scandal. Politicians if anyone are surely meant to set an example to the general public; what kind of message did they send out when hundreds of them thought they could get away with defrauding the taxpayer? Is it any more moral to commit theft by fraud than by looting? Nick Clegg was even convicted for arson aged 16 and David Cameron and Boris Johnson whilst in the infamous Bullingdon Club, were ritualistically involved in public disorder, including smashing windows and starting fires. Given this, their harsh words about rioters are more than a little hypocritical. Finally, bankers and business leaders hold positions of authority; in the city a cut-throat approach to business is positively encouraged, business leaders like Phil Greene have looted millions in taxes and ‘reckless behaviour’ by investment bankers is rewarded with bonuses. Do any of these things justify rioting or looting? No. But they do explain why, quite rightly, many people question the legitimacy of certain authorities.

Lack of prospects

Whilst not all of those involved are in such an unfortunate position, it seems safe to assume that many of them are stuck in situations where they have few options available to them. When you feel you have no prospects it engenders frustration, boredom and a sense of hopelessness each of which are surely contributing factors in causing such people to loot and riot. The current job market is a vicious place. For anyone who is unemployed they face fierce competition for even the most menial jobs; there is currently one vacancy to every ten unemployed people.  Take a second to digest that. That means that even if every unemployed person were driven, well qualified and well educated nine out of ten of them would still be jobless. In reality many are despairing, with no previous experience and poorly educated; what chance do these people have of securing employment? A majority of those so far arrested in connection with the riots are under 18. This age group have just taken a blow to their educational prospects in the form of the scrapping of EMA and the tripling of student fees, not to mention a slashing of up to 80% of youth projects’ funding. Whilst it could be argued that these policies have yet to really ‘bite’ their mere existence feeds into the notion for many young people that they have no future and that politicians and wider society don’t really seem to care. If you felt trapped in a room with no doors open to you and the only ‘windows of opportunity’ were those stuffed with consumer goods you were told to want but you couldn’t afford, is it really so unfathomable that you might lash out? When someone feels so hopeless, so powerless that the only power they feel they have left is that of destruction the acts of rioting and looting can be seen as a desperate attempt to feel powerful, even if just for a few fleeting hours. 

Marginalisation and disenfranchisement

Judging from the footage and the arrests made so far it seems that the vast majority of people involved in the riots were either young, poor, non-white or any combination of the three. Each of these categories of society have faced considerable marginalisation over the last few years (if not decades). Astonishingly, a black person is 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than a white person. Additionally, black people on average get paid 18% less than white people and are more likely to be unemployed. Rather than blaming this on some fault of black people, which would be incredibly racist, we must accept that it is at least partly attributable to a residual societal prejudice, which may be unconscious and extremely subtle at times. The marginalisation of young people is very similar to that of black people; studies have shown that the public perception of youth involvement in crime is severely over-estimated. The media also have a part to play in this, with one study suggesting that a whopping 71% of media coverage of young people was negative despite the fact that this week, our young people once again produced the best A-level results ever for the 29^th year in a row. Finally, poor people, those in receipt of benefits especially, have been subjected to a vicious smear campaign by both politicians and the media accused of being lazy scroungers, many of whom commit allsorts or ridiculous benefit fraud. In fact, fraudulent claims make up less than 1% of the total benefits bill and are on average 31 times lower than an MP’s expenses overclaim. This has fed into a wider perception in some sections of British society that poor people are ‘vile’, ‘scummy’ ‘chavs’ (see Owen Jones’ Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class) and for this we are all partly responsible.

I know from my own experience as a youth worker, that if you treat people as if they are badly behaved they will act as such, whereas when you treat them as if they are responsible and mature they more often than not earn those labels. The same goes for the young, the poor, and non-whites; treat them like criminals by stopping and searching them and overestimating their criminality they will be more inclined to act as such. Call them lazy, vile, scum they will often earn those labels. When people feel marginalised by society they begin to feel that they have no stake in that society. If they feel that society doesn’t care about them then they will reciprocate those feelings by not caring about society, making rioting and looting seem less wrong. Added to this, many people (not just rioters and looters I might add) feel disenfranchised; like the political processes do not represent them nor are they able to have their voices heard through these means. The fact that over 80% of the cabinet are millionaires and only one of them is not white is just one indicator that perhaps our politics is not as representative as some might claim. Disenfranchisement makes people feel they don’t have a voice which can lead people to express their discontent in other ways.

Culture of greed and violence

Some senior politicians have blamed a culture of ‘greed and violence’ for the riots and it certainly seems reasonable that those desensitised to violence are more likely to riot, those who are ‘greedy’ more inclined to loot. I would vehemently agree that greed is a problem that riddles our society and violence does tend to be glamorised constantly in popular culture. But Mr. Cameron blames rap music and ‘gang culture’ for these problems which strikes me as more than a little crass. Admittedly, some rap music is overly materialistic and does reify some sickening consumerist excesses but this is merely a reflection or comment on wider society. Blaming rap music for ‘rampant consumerism’ is like blaming a rape victim for giving birth to their attacker’s child. If materialism is to blame surely the finger should be pointed at the companies who bombard us with thousands of adverts every day, leaving almost no public spaces unbranded. Even worse, many brands aggressively market their high-priced goods to poor demographics, like Nike whose primary target audience is black ghetto youths. Similarly, gangster culture is overly glamorised, fetishised even, but anyone who is actually living that lifestyle will be the first to tell you it is far from glamorous. I see no-one pointing the finger at Hollywood for the endless reel of gangster flicks that are churned out. Even if the politicians were blaming the Nikes and the Hollywoods it seems a vulgar contradiction coming from a government who sanctions the dropping of bombs on foreign soil that routinely kill innocent civilians; a government only too happy to allow the world’s largest arms fair to take place in London next month. It sticks in the throat to hear these millionaires talk about greed when they’ve recently effectively handed banks and businesses that already make billions the biggest tax break in living memory. Human behaviour is learned and it stands to reason that greedy, selfish societies that glamorise violence will inevitably produce some individuals who act accordingly.

I started the article by saying that those involved in the riots were responsible for the predictable consequences of their misguided actions. Now hopefully, we are equipped with the context within which those actions took place. But if we are to expect the rioters, many of whom are from underprivileged positions in society, to accept responsibility for their actions it is surely only fair to expect the same of the most privileged in our society. This is not to suggest that the riots were necessarily a ‘predictable consequence’ of any individual or collective action, however, some sort of reaction was surely to be expected. Politicians have a lot to answer for, both individually and as a group. They seem aloof of the realities of normal people’s lives, robotically dodging questions with the same scripted answers making them unaccountable; this fuels the feeling of disenfranchisement experienced by so many. The expenses scandal has eroded trust in authority figures more generally and set a terrible example of criminality. The Government’s cuts are choking off the already limited prospects of many. Greed and violence are explicitly endorsed by facilitating the greed of the City and dropping bombs on innocent Libyans, Afghans and Iraqis. The police too must surely have expected some sort of consequence for their unaccountable and unlawful killings. Business elites and bankers enshrine the culture of greed and rampant materialism but we all participate in it to a degree. Finally, society as a whole but the media in particular, must accept some responsibility for the marginalisation felt by so many young, poor and non-white people. Essentially it is the responsibility of us all to not only rebuild our communities but to make them stronger and together to tackle the underlying issues discussed.

Super(imposed)models: The Unobtainable Ideal of Beauty

In this consumerist society, our hopes and aspirations are mediated by unobtainable ideals from all directions. The insatiable desire for the latest gadget or fashion is forever unfulfilled because something new is always around the corner. The dreams of wealth and fame force-fed to us by Hollywood will never be realised no matter how much we wish for it. We will never live up to the impossible ideals of beauty personified by music videos and Supermodels. The lucky few, those beautiful, wealthy, famous people are held up, sycophantically worshipped as proof of the quintessential capitalist ideal that anyone can make it. But it’s all an illusion. Famous people long for normality. Billionaires obsess about how to make even more money. Even Supermodels have their pictures airbrushed and undergo cosmetic surgery. If the poster men and women of these ideals can’t live up to them then what chance have us mere mortals?

These false ideals affect us all in myriad ways, with greater impact on some than others.  However, there is no question that the beauty ideal affects women more than men. I often hear the argument that in our ‘civilized’ Western Society sexism, for the most part, has been consigned to the dust-bin of history. Feminism is as much a dirty word amongst young aspirational women as it is for chauvinistic old men. But the asymmetric pressure on men and women with regards to their looks is just one striking example of how patriarchy is still alive and well. Patriarchy is not merely men being sexist towards women; it is an inherent feature of capitalism. It is systemic, operating from top to bottom, and as such, is internalised by women, many of whom unconsciously (re)produce it on a daily basis through their choices, discourse and consumptive habits.

We are constantly defining and redefining ourselves in relation to the media we consume, the music we like, the clothes we wear etc. This identity formation is an ongoing process which starts during childhood, we learn about who we are heavily configured around the social constructs of race, sexuality, gender and class. The first point of reference is usually our parents who implicitly teach us about gender roles, inform our racial identification and shape the aspirations which will come to define our class. Increasingly though, it is the media that plays a pivotal role in our identity formation, especially during our teenage years. It is also this demographic who are most aggressively marketed to, creating a dangerous cocktail of identity-seeking teens and image-laden media. Sex is used to sell products to teenage boys, supermodels are plastered across glossy magazines and air-brushed pop-stars dance semi-naked in music videos. All of these things combine to influence the identity and self-image of young women. Naturally, many aspire to live up to these warped ideals of beauty which are harvested purely for the profit of multiple industries from media outlets and cosmetics corporations all the way to companies selling sofas.

This ideal of beauty is not only sexist; it is also classist and racist. Even non-white models conform to a “white” notion of beauty; their skin is doctored so as to appear lighter, Caucasian facial features are favoured, straight hair is the norm and of course they are extremely skinny whilst often having (unnaturally) voluptuous features. The supermodel image is also about being affluent and so is classist in this sense. This creates compounded pressure on non-white, poor females wishing to conform to the image of beauty. The models themselves rely on professional make-up artists, routine air-brushing of images and often cosmetic surgery to live up to the standards set by society. And it’s no longer just teenagers feeling the pressure; recent studies have shown girls as young as six are concerned about their body image and consistently wish to be thinner. At the other end of the spectrum mums and even grandmothers calorie-count and fixate themselves on living up to our warped notion of beauty. When even their mothers and grandmothers are perpetuating these ideals in concert with the media, what chance do young females have of maintaining a healthy self-image?

It is of little surprise then that much of the Western world is in the midst of an epidemic of eating disorders. Records seem to be smashed year on year as levels of obesity and anorexia spiral out of control. Both are partly the product of not being able to live up to such warped standards of beauty. It is our responsibility as a society to teach young women that it is both normal and acceptable not to look like a supermodel. We have to reveal the unobtainable ideal of beauty for what it is: an illusion which is cultivated for profit. We must cast aside the homogenous ideal of beauty which is skinny, affluent and euro-centric and celebrate the beauty of diversity.

The Illusion of choice: Conservatives, Liberals and the real Washington Consensus

As a British citizen I can’t really imagine our two main political parties going at each other on fundamental moral issues such as abortion, the use of torture, gay marriage or the death penalty. In recent decades, the Conservatives have become more ‘liberal’ and cosmopolitan on such matters, in public at least. Heck they even listen to ‘rebellious’ pop music chums. Not so in America. Conservatives and Liberals over on the other side of the pond often have egregious, emotive debates about just such topics and the polarisation seems extreme at first glance. But we all know appearances can be deceptive. Dig a little deeper and it’s quite easy to see that those on both sides are dancing to the same tune. 

I’m not talking about the fact that pernicious patriotism and war-mongering have proved just as high up Obama’s list of priorities as Bush’s. I’m not even talking about Obama’s frankly embarrassing u-turn on Guantanamo Bay. The crucial similarity between Conservatives and Liberals is that they both concur with the somewhat aptly named, ‘Washington Consensus’. This is basically an economic outlook which favours neoliberal policies both at home and abroad. It encompasses free-trade, open markets, heavy privatisation, de-regulation and generally low taxes for the super-wealthy behind the facade of job creation. In the American context, the domestic and international components of these policies are often contradictory.

As the beacon of free-market capitalism, successive US governments of either orientation have been keen to roll out this model to the ‘developing’ world (hereafter let’s call it the two-thirds world as two thirds of the world’s population lives here and it has no history of colonialism or racial inferiority attached to it). With the help of institutions such as the IMF, WTO and the World Bank, the US is willing to offer economic aid to struggling nations, particularly in South America and Africa. All they have to do in return is open up their markets to foreign investment, adopt a model of free trade and ensure that their labour movements don’t kick up too much of a stink. This invariably leads to the exploitation of the natural resources of the two-thirds world country involved with a hand-full of indigenous middle-men getting rich in process; a fact lauded as proof of progress. Or worse, as was the case in Bolivia, where the water system was privatised by US company, Bechtel, in the name of ‘efficiency’. They increased the cost prohibitively leaving thousands without running water and with little improvement in the service.

At home on the other hand, both Republican and Democratic governments are happy to renege on the ‘free-trade’ policies they so forcibly promote abroad, often engaging in protectionism to help domestic industries, the most notable being agriculture which gets considerable subsidies. Regulation and taxes on corporations are kept to a bare minimum with the bogey-man of capital flight, that is, big business moving their operations abroad and taking their jobs with them, used to justify such policies. The reason that capital flight is even possible is thanks to the very same ‘Washington Consensus’ policies being adopted over the last 30 years in the first place.

It would be easy to claim that Conservatives and Liberals in the US are fairly indistinct because ultimately they are both mercy to the market and other economic forces and are therefore severely restricted in what they can do. This is a traditional, economically determinist, Marxist analysis that asserts that the economic determines the political. In fact it is much more complicated than that simple one-way causality. A more sophisticated analysis would be to say that economic, political and cultural forces in society are involved in a symbiotic relationship, each complementing and affecting the other in myriad ways. This relationship is unbalanced though, quite heavily towards the interests of capital so that the politics in the US never call into question the underlying economic system and the hegemonic culture similarly reifies the status quo.

This analysis allows for degrees of variation in the political and cultural spheres but due to the imbalance this always tips in favour of capitalist interests. Essentially, the preferences of corporate elites (economic), members of government and the state (political) and the mass media (cultural) all interlock and share a common interest in maintaining the status quo that keeps them all in positions of privilege and power. Not only that, they also run in the same social and professional circles; business and government ‘experts’ speak on the news, ex-government officials get on the boards of large companies and corporate elites are handed positions in the government apparatus by their friends in congress. Ultimately the media, big business and both Conservatives and Liberals share the same broad class interests. One only has to look at the last Presidential campaign to see that both sides represent the interests of capital, with a combined expenditure of roughly $2.4 Billion, with the more ‘Liberal’ side actually spending more than their more ‘Conservative’ counterparts. 

The pretence of democracy in America, and much of the ‘One-third World’ is a major facet of the dominant capitalist ideology and culture; it placates the masses by giving them the illusion of choice. This is combined with the constant cultural reification of the status quo in the media, another illusion of choice defended by the logic of supply and demand. These illusions keep the general populace compliant, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, so successfully that many will virulently defend the system that oppresses them. The purely cosmetic differences between Conservatives and Liberals in America help give credibility to the illusion of choice but make no mistake, those on both sides want things to stay the way they are on the issues that really matter. They want the rich to keep dominating the poor and the poor to keep thanking them for being such benevolent leaders. The real Washington Consensus then, is between corporate elites, politicians and the media at the expense of everyone else and the sooner we realise this the sooner we can wage a proper fight back...

From Apathy to Activism: as Easy as ABC?

For at least the last two-decades, British politics has gone through a malaise. Notable exceptions, such as the million-strong demonstration against the Iraq War aside, the period has been something of a political dark age; far removed from the turbulent battles of the 1980s or the explosion of free expression in the 1960s. Public appetite for all things political has dried up; treated with indifference at best and unmasked contempt at worst. And this is by no means an exclusively British phenomenon. It seems to be an inherent feature of so called ‘Western Democracy’ that politics is treated with abject apathy by the vast majority of the population.    

Ruminations on the causes of this widespread lethargy have been the life works of many a political thinker, but few explained the phenomenon with greater clarity and insight than Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascist State. It was his belief that the continued success of late capitalism and the concurrent inertia of working class movements could be explained by a process he termed hegemony. The hegemony of the ruling classes means that subordinate groups actually consent to their own exploitation. The reason for this consent lies in the effectiveness of bourgeois culture and ideology which is built upon the premises of insatiable consumerism, profit over people and the illusion of democratic choice.

These tenets of consumer capitalism saturate all aspects of everyday life, oozing from the pores of mainstream art, literature and film and reinforced constantly by the mass media. This is a fluid process which absorbs dissident elements, commodifies and nullifies them before amalgamating them into the status quo. This hegemony is so effective that the majority in these societies internalise elite interests as their own and they become ‘common sense’ unquestionable truths. The few who can see through the malaise rightly treat the political process with suspicion or apathy: for all major political parties are but puppets to the invisible hand of the market and indistinct from each other in all but name, colour and logo.

It is wrong for those on the true left to bemoan the apathy of the masses towards ‘big P Politics’ because given the circumstances it is a perfectly rational and intelligent choice. To engage the masses with politics we need to reconfigure what is meant by politics, make it relevant to the masses and demonstrate that it can produce real life benefits in local communities. What follow are three steps that must be taken to reinvigorate the general populace in their thirst for politics:

A) A)   Focus on politics in local communities, by local communities:   

Politicians are out of touch with normal people and few believe the official political processes really represent them. Progressive forces must shed the cloistered confines of Party Politics and take democracy back to the grass-roots level. For too long the left has abandoned working class communities to extreme right wing groups such as the British National Party (UK), Tea Party (USA) and The Front National (France) who are willing to get their hands dirty and engage with these communities. Local groups that are independent of the state are a great way of opening up lines of dialogue within communities.

Social centres and squatted spaces can be used to host events which will aid integration and rather than being overtly political, work more effectively when gently promoting a shared responsibility for the local area, a sense of mutual benefit and community spirit. The wider the appeal the better, family friendly events can be interspersed with workshops or performances that would interest young adults and so on. Decisions should always be taken democratically and it is important community members have a sense of ownership in whatever the group may be. A shared sense of purpose and realistic goals are useful but community groups must remain versatile and able to adapt to changing needs and membership. Whilst the focus should be local, thanks to the internet such groups and centres can share ideas with similar groups in communities both nationally and internationally, creating a loose, decentralised network of progressive forces, free from hierarchical power structures.

Putting the community at the centre of our understanding of politics should be an effective gateway to wider debate and discussion about the bigger political questions globally, even amongst sections of the community who have been apathetic towards such concerns in the past. Whilst this idea is all about the community providing services for itself outside of the state apparatus, it should not be confused with the top-down, back-door privatisation of David Cameron’s “Big Society”.

B)  B)    Make political protests have a wider appeal

Whilst work in local communities must be the bread and butter of any progressive movement, it cannot truly succeed without demonstrations of the power and unity of such movements in the form of protests, marches, occupations and strikes. Such events are essential both for demonstrating the will of the people and galvanising the members of the movement. With the mass demonstrations across the Middle-East and North-Africa these are certainly exciting times for bottom-up peoples’ movements. In Britain, the student protests seem to have awoken much of the youth’s dormant political consciousness.

The success of the student protests lies in the appeal they have had to the younger generation, not just University students but school kids as well. What self-respecting teenager wouldn’t want to skip class to take to the streets, chanting and listening to music with their classmates and thousands of others? The group UKUncut are becoming well known for their creative and engaging protest actions which vary from comedy bail-ins in high-street banks to hospitals set up in chemists and story-telling outside tax-dodging retailers. Capturing the imagination of the wider public and making protests accessible and entertaining is vital to broadening the movement.

Organisers of protests, especially in the ‘Western’ world need to be acutely aware that the protest-goers of today have multiple identities and protests must be varied and dynamic to reflect this. Gone are the days of card-carrying socialists and virulent feminists; I for one am an Anarchist-Communist-Feminist who is also very concerned about the environment and much more in-between. A healthy combination of marching, chanting and music along with less traditional forms of protest such as occupation, direct action and artistic expression can all come together to create a protest movement as diverse as its participants.

C)    C)  Make Your Own Media and Contribute to the Counter-Culture

If Gramsci was right and the continued prosperity of capitalism and concurrent political apathy of the masses is due to the success of the hegemonic culture then we need to fight fire with fire. It is essential that we use our creative outlets to propagate a counter-culture to the mass-produced, glossily packaged and pro-capitalist mainstream. If you are an artist question accepted aesthetics; a film-maker tell a story of resistance; a writer use humour to poke fun at the establishment; a journalist give a voice to the voiceless; a musician make music for the revolution! The richer and more diverse the counter-culture becomes, the alternative it presents will seem more tenable.

The mass media is owned by the state and big businesses and as such it is of little surprise that it reinforces their interests, not only in the stories it does tell but also in what is left out. Thanks to technological advances more average people now have the means to record and disseminate their own media and it is essential we make the most of the tools available to us. Writing a blog on current affairs or uploading a video taken on a mobile phone of police brutality may not be seen by millions like the circulation of the top media outlets but the more widespread alternative media becomes the better. Websites such as Indymedia provide a platform for ordinary people to give their own eye-witness accounts on what really happens at events and allows the people to decide what is newsworthy. When these accounts are corroborated it is frightening, if unsurprising, to see the amount of distortion and lies that are disseminated by ‘respected’ outlets such as the BBC and CNN. Even if you do not have the will or the means to be a content producer, you can contribute by posting links to good articles (like this one!) or footage on social networking sites and helping to spread the message.

Whilst capitalist hegemony is at times an overwhelmingly daunting enemy in the battle for the hearts and minds of ‘the masses’ there is certainly good reason for cautious optimism. The sea of mass movements sweeping across the Middle-East and North Africa, along with the torrent of civil unrest at austerity in ‘the West’ certainly seems to suggest the tides are changing. Whilst we face a different challenge in ‘the West’, if we employ a combination of the three suggestions I have posited I am confident we can begin to make progress. Noam Chomsky says: “You are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions”, so use this as a starting point. Think of ways that you can implement the ideas suggested on a personal level and spread the message: local solutions, global solidarity!