As part of the growing army of the unemployed created by the biggest crisis of the capitalist economic system since the Great Depression of the 1930s (and soon to be compounded by the onslaught of the Con-Dem government’s ‘austerity’ measures), I think it’s about time someone brought up one of the less talked about aspects of how shite it is being on the dole: constant job applications.

While most jobs under capitalism involve more than their fair share of boring, repetitive and socially unproductive tasks, few can compete with the demoralising process of filling out application form after application form, in full knowledge that with the vast majority of them, you are wasting your time. For young people especially, with dozens and even hundreds of people going after every available job, chances are someone with more experience is going after each and every job you apply for. Of course we’ve little option but to keep on plugging away, doing searches, filling out forms, writing covering letters, editing CVs, changing the focus to what we think each particular employer wants – much like a really dull office job but without the compensation of actually getting paid a wage for it.  This situation isn’t helped by the sheer irrationality of the job application methods used by many employers, most of which seem deliberately designed to produce an experience more frustrating than watching Nick Clegg on the news.

What follows is a list of some of the worst, most irritating features of contemporary job application procedures, compiled from my own experiences over the last few months. The list is far from comprehensive – please add some of your own in the comments section below. Consider this article as advice to employers (though I doubt they will take any notice), or as a guide for ‘what *definitely* not to do’ in organising work in a post-capitalist society; but for the most part treat it as some light entertainment for those of you (and I know there are plenty) who know exactly what I mean, having encountered exactly the same things yourself. For those lucky enough to not yet have experienced that depressing trip to your local Jobcentre Plus, to be condescended to and checked up on in return for a meagre £51.85 a week (£65.45 for over 25s – lucky for some!), consider it a sample of the kind of crap you’ve got to look forward to, especially if the planned government spending cuts are allowed to go ahead.

Attention all prospective employers:

• If you don’t have a specific reason –e.g. genuinely unique (non-bullshit) questions – then you don’t need an application form. Consider the amount of time people have to spend copying out the exact same information (education, work history, other skills and experience, blah, blah, blah…) into whatever poorly formatted word processor document you’ve thrown together with little thought. Does it really help you all that much to have all applications fitting your arbitrarily defined layout, with 4 year degrees squeezed into one thin column of a table, and a big block of empty space to describe some crappy temp job, just because it happened to be the most recent?  Could you not just have mentioned what information you want a CV to include and save us all a fuckload of time and wasted effort?
• If you do require a huge, complex, 15-page application form, maybe keep that for a second stage of the application process, for people already being seriously considered. Spending 1-2 hours filling out a massive form only to never even receive a reply is just taking the piss. To any employer who has ever done this (and that’s the majority of them): fuck you.
• If you don’t know how to format a Word document so that blank fields work as blank fields, then don’t do it. Please do not just put blocks of underscores in the same way you would for a printed document. This does not work.
• Stop asking stupid questions. You know the sort of thing I mean. “Give an example of a time you have succeeded in doing x” or “Explain how you have dealt with a situation where y”. These are more common at job interviews, but appear in some application forms as well. They are essentially designed to test the applicant’s ability to bullshit. In interviews they test your ability to bullshit on the spot. Generally there are two types – questions far too vague to provide any real insight beyond “can this person think of something relevant/make something up that sounds like what (we think) we want to hear” (examples include “Give an example of a situation where you’ve had to solve a problem”), and those that are far too specific, seemingly designed to test whether you already have the particular knowledge or skills that you could only really acquire by doing the job that you’re being interviewed for!  (Advice: don’t attempt to subtly point out how stupid a question is during an interview. This doesn’t go down well, it seems).
• Online (web-based) forms are great, if:
  - they can be saved half-way through, or are short and to the point
  - they can be used for multiple applications
  - they work properly (most are buggy, poorly designed, and end up covering all the same information you have to submit in separate CV upload anyway)
• Don’t make us repeat ourselves. Stop making us say the same thing more than once. If you base application form questions on the structure of a job description, be careful not to put very similar things in different parts of the job description. Clue: using the same word or word groups in slightly different ways (‘organisational/organising/well organised’) does not mean you’ve written a new question or have created a new type of skill.
• Send a reply, regardless of the outcome. If you’ve got an email template ready it takes a couple of seconds per applicant. It’s not hard.
• Offer feedback if possible – if someone’s making the same mistake in all their applications and you don’t tell them about it, you are a dick.
• This one’s for recruitment websites – if your website is just going to convert my Word file to text, while fucking up the formatting, CV upload services are pretty much worthless. I can copy and paste text myself.
• I don’t know what I’ll be doing in two years time. Nor in five years time. This is at least in small part because I don’t know if you’re going to give me this job or not. Be realistic – nobody only applies for one type of job. If you ask me this question, you are essentially testing my ability to lie convincingly.  Apparently I’m not that good.
• Maybe, just maybe, it might be nice to let people know by when they can expect a reply.  And then stick to it. Y’know, like actually reply. Especially if they’ve already made the effort to travel across the country for an interview. kthxbye

Campaigners fighting cuts recognise the next generation are facing a tougher future than their parents

Note: A version of this article was originally published here.

We approach the new year of 2011 with a prevailing sense of doom and gloom: that things are going to get worse, rather than better. For most of us this applies to how we view world events, politics, and society. For some of us this also applies to our personal lives.

In fact we are experiencing a unique moment in modern history. Our generation, is set to be the first generation which is likely to have a worse standard of living than our parents. The signs are everywhere: poverty increasing, the super-rich getting richer, the rest of us getting poorer, unemployment rising, pensions shrinking, opportunities closing, and benefits shredded. All of the measures which gave people a measure of security in their lives within a capitalist society are under attack. Meanwhile, for those who are determined to follow their aspirations in life, and those who are simply trying to survive, life becomes an increasing struggle: we sign-on, we study, we intern, we work, we stress…we hope everything will work out  and we can have the same standard of living as our parents, or better. We allow ourselves to be exploited, underpaid, taken advantage of, in the hope of our imagined future. We have become 21st century philanthropists. Let’s hope it’s worth it.

Meanwhile, events in the wider world contribute to the pervading pessimism which grips the general mentality. ”We” occupy the second-poorest country in the world, have destroyed another, and at home are losing civil rights and subjected to increasing surveillance in the name of an illusory “War on Terror”.  As John Pilger has written, this is an Orwellian inversion of the truth: the war is terror. And behind this new imperialism is the source of the malaise, capitalism. The effects of an economic system predicated on limitless growth, the exploition of man by man, and the exploitation of nature by man, are becoming ever clearer. Among humans, the ownership of the majority of humanity’s wealth and the means by which that wealth is created, by tiny privileged elite, is creating an ever-increasing gap between the richest and the poorest, with the majority being exploited ever-greater in order to survive: from garmet workers in Export Processing Zones in Asia and Mexico, peasant farmers in Africa and South America, to cleaners and bar workers in the UK. Meanwhile the need to ever-increase profits not only necessitates the increased exploitation of human labour but also of our natural environment which we depend upon for our survival, with rainforests, habitats, and species disappearing, fossil fuels beginning to run out, and resources such as fresh water under strain. The planet and humanity cannot continue to afford such continued exploitation for the  limitless increase in consumption and profit. Yet for its supporters and beneficiaries the current crisis in capitalism allows and necessitates further attacks on the majority of humanity: in western countries leading to attacks on public services, benefits, and any notion of collectivism or a common good.

Yet, against this backdrop, I cannot help but be optimistic. This might seem like “pie in the sky” thinking in light of the rise in reactionary thinking in the UK and further afield along lines of gender, race, sexuality and class. Moreover, the absolute poverty of ideas, policies or possibilities in the “mainstream” media and political establishment [Labour, Tory, SNP, Lib-Dem] could encourage the notion that “There is No Alternative”. Are we faced with a slow (or not so slow) decline in the human species, and indeed the state of our planet? Are our ideas, creativity, and efforts at shaping our collective future for the better exhausted, leaving us with no option but to try and salvage the best for ourselves while letting the world slide into a century of barbarism? The answer must be an emphatic No.

Capitalism may be entering its final decline, but humanity is not. However, securing a viable and meaningful future for ourselves means fighting to transform the basis upon which we organise human society. The fight cannot be only individual, via deciding to “live better” or “opt-out” of the system. It has to be collective. Also, both the means and end of such a struggle necessitates democracy: equality of decisionmaking among all those affected by a given decision as far as is practicably possible. This is important both for the grassroots strength and creativity of a genuine popular movement, avoiding a movement’s co-option and loss of authenticity, and to allow for everyone’s full human development.

Ultimately, we need to end the exploitation of man by man. We need to abolish the ownership of humanity’s collective wealth and the earth’s resources by a tiny elite. We have enough food, water, housing materials, and means of providing healthcare and education for everyone on the planet. Between us, we have enough labour power to do all the necessary tasks needed for us to survive and develop with no one being unemployed and no one working for the dominant portion of their lifetime. Both of these social facts are rooted in capitalism’s need for our labour to make a profit from the capitalist who buys it from us. Rather, our resources, wealth, and labour power need to be organised in a way that allows everyone to attain their full development as human beings: a society characterised by the principles of from each according to their means, to each according to their needs and wherethe free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. A society where all forms of slavery (wage, bonded, chattel, trafficked) and oppression (of gender, culture, race, sexuality) are opposed, overcome, and abolished. A society were we end our alienation from ourselves, our labour, and our planet. In our current era, confronted with widespread pessimism and disillusionment, especially among my generation, this is time to be bold. We should not accept the TINA mantra from capitalisms’ acolytes, nor simply fight a defeatist reargaurd action to defend gains won in past struggles, with no sense of winning any victories of our own. We must proclaim ourselves as fighting for the emancipation and liberation of humanity, and the fight starts now.

The above sentiments may sound utopian. I’ve already argued that against the bleak prospects for the next generation(s) of humanity, the best defence is offense: in the form of radical, participatory, and emancipatory politics. Of course, no one can realise their own ideal version of what humanity should and could be. Many of the most advanced ideas for society may not be realisable in our lifetimes. But consider this: it is better to struggle for emancipation and liberation and have partial success, and help beat the path for movements to come, than sit back and watch our decline to barbarism. “I’ll fight for a new world, but I’m happy to start with free public transport” (not to mention the redistribution of wealth, the elimination of poverty and gross inequality, the mass expansion of education and opportunity, an increase in cultural and political activity and expression, the complete respect for all human rights, public ownership of major sectors of the economy, and the self-management of workers, to name but a few…).

In our current reality, we need a movement to fight for such a future, creating forms in the present which build bridges to the kind of society we want to live in. Such a movement, a genuine* socialist movement, is not only desirable, but necessary. Rosa Luxemburg’s choice is put to us ever more urgently: socialism or barbarism?

And for those who have their historical blinkers on, think on this: capitalism has only existed for a few hundred years, and its reign will end, as did feudalism before it. Indeed, capitalism is currently ailing and in decline. In an era of globalisation, human society is changing ever-faster, and we have the collective power to shape the trajectories and development of our societies. Even in the last few hundred years, social movements have made massive gains in democracy, human rights, equality, welfarist measures, and more in the fight for complete emancipation and liberation.

Therefore, for 2011, I raise a toast for optimism and hope: to make capitalism history, and socialism the future**. Ignore “whit the hoodies croak for doom“, roll up your sleeves, and get active. There is, as they say, no time like the present.

*Important characteristics include: grass-roots, mass-based, pluralistic, internally-democratic, eco-socialist, creative, radical and coherent.

**Or if not socialism, whatever word you prefer for the sentiments expressed in this post.

When international charities illustrate the immensity of poverty and deprivation in areas of the ‘Third World’, they often use a statistic of how many children die per minute from preventable diseases due to a lack of cleaning drinking water and sanitation. A common response to the brutal realities of capitalist production, distribution and consumption on a global scale is to externally lament the plight of far-off peoples while internally feeling glad that we live safe and secure in the developed world, the land of the ‘have’s’ and not the ‘have not’s.’

Yet, poverty and deprivation also affect our own societies profoundly. A fifth of the UK population lives in poverty , while around 4 million children live in low-income households.

Many vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, are choosing between heating and eating this winter

With Christmas approaching and one of the coldest winters in living memory gripping the country, one of the clearest examples of how deeply poverty affects our society and how brutal its effects are is this: every nine minutes last winter a pensioner died of a cold-related illness. In fact, last winter there were 25,400 cold-related deaths (i.e. deaths occuring in the winter months due to cold that are above average levels of deaths during the rest of the year) in England and Wales, which is relatively far higher than other countries with colder climates than ours.

What is disgraceful is that just as with a lack of clean drinking water in Africa, cold-related winter deaths are prevantable. They happen in the home where with adequate heating people can protect themselves from the health consequences of dangerously low temperatures. The elderly are particularly vulnerable: of the 25,400 deaths last winter mentioned above, 20,600 (81%) were people aged 75 and over. The central cause is fuel poverty: when households spend over 10% of their income just to keep warm, and extreme fuel poverty, where over 20% is spent. In Scotland, a third of Scots live in fuel poverty: 770,000 households, and the figure has been rising steadily over the previous decade: it was under 300,000 in 2002. This Christmas, vulnerable groups of the population are choosing to forego food in order to afford their heating, and many families are choosing to live in only one room of the house in order to afford their heating and keep warm. As a spokesperson of Citizens Advice Scotland recent reported in the Herald:

“One-third of Scots are now officially living in fuel poverty and that is completely unacceptable.

“Advisers across Scotland have reported to us that many people are so worried about their fuel bills that they are going without food in order to keep the heating on.

“Others are planning to spend the Christmas holiday period living more or less in one room, so they don’t have to pay to heat the whole house.

“We’re hearing of too many vulnerable people – including pensioners, sick people and families with young children – who are sitting shivering in their homes this Christmas. Many of them are suffering adverse health problems as a result.”

Four of the biggest six energy suppliers, who provide around 97% of British domestic energy, have increased their prices this winter, prompting criticism from Consumer Focus and Ofgem.

And that is the culprit driving up fuel poverty and inflicting such suffering and even death upon the most vulnerable people in our society: capitalism. Energy companies have been increasing the cost of heating, far above increases in the wholesale price of fuel, in order to make increasing profits from selling us the gas and electricity we need to keep warm. In fact, prices have increased by almost 20% between July 2008 and July 2009. When wholesale prices (the prices at which energy companies buy fuel) rise, energy companies invariably pass this onto consumers, and thus still maintain and increase their profits. When wholesale prices fall however, bills stay the same or even continue to rise, so the energy companies still make massive profits. This the logic of the profit motive, and how it utterly conflicts with human need: as winter hits and the need for heating increases (most of all from the vulnerable) energy companies increase bills to profit from the human need to stay alive through keeping warm. The result is increased profits for the companies, and increased fuel poverty, deprivation, missed meals, and winter deaths for the vulnerable.

This is where calls from socialists for a system which values “people not profit” and “human need and environmental protection, not private profit and ecological destruction” show themsevles not to be just slogans, but real demands which draw attention to the contridictions of capitalism. In the example of fuel poverty, there are two ways of dealing with the problem. One is to put a ‘human face’ on capitalism: increasing winter fuel payments to the vulnerable, one-off  ‘windfall’ taxation of company profits and using the money to subsidise heating bills and improve home efficiency. However, while massaging the logic of capital in this fashion may help to alleviate the worst effects of the problem, but it will not eradicate or solve it. This is because the privately-owned energy companies exist to make profit: without this they cannot exist. As soon as these are threatened, political moves will always be made to scrap those measures which hinder the ability to make maximum profit, including protecting the vulnerable from the negative effects of the profit logic. In many ways, this is the story of what has happened to the welfare state. Rather, in today’s political climate the impulse is for the opposite, where winter fuel support may be further reduced. In any case, such a solution is like a temporary patch on a permanent leak: it never fully deals with the problem and it always in conflict with the overall logic of the situation.

The other solution is to remove the profit motive and to run the system on the motive of serving human need instead. Such a system requires the means of energy extraction and distribution to be publicly owned, i.e. owned by and run for the whole of society, not in order to make a profit for stockholders. The result is that rather than being seen as a commodity to make a profit, energy is seen as a resource by which we are able to heat ourselves in order to stay alive, protect the vulnerable from the negative health effects of winter cold, and allow us to get on with our lives without having to choose between heating and eating. Such an energy system could operate in several ways which would have to be debated, including maximum billing (e.g. no more than 2.5% of any households income) with the rest of the cost met through taxation, to high billing of the super-rich and corporations for energy with the money used to reduce bills of the poorest, to a combination of taxation and subsidies to remove bills from either the most vulnerable or everyone altogether.

Of course, the details of such a move would need to be debated democratically and on a mass basis. The point is: this winter, both poor families in Africa, and in Scotland, indeed all over the world, will be suffering from the logic of capitalism: private profit coming before human need. In our society, fuel poverty is but one example of the structural violence capitalism inflicts upon us all. For me, the only answer for humanity is to develop an alternative that puts human need and the logic of human development at the heart of society. That is why we must debate, develop, and struggle for a socialism fit to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

For an excellent and personal article on fuel poverty in Scotland, read Aiden Kerr’s previous post on the blog here.

The minimum wage machine

Check this out: artist Blake Fall-Conroy has designed a machine to help people understand the reality of exploitation in a mimimum wage job.

The box is full of (American) pennies, and you have to crank the handle hard in order to get out a penny every 5.04 seconds, which adds up to $7.15 (about £4.50) an hour, the minimum wage in the state of New York. If you stop turning the handle, you stop getting paid.

The artist says in his statement that he wants his projects to be “socially conscious”, “easy to understand,” and that he’s “more interested in communicating ideas than making art.”

This project is great at communicating the reality of what minimum wage labour is, drudgery for a pitiful reward. If you imagine that a boss was deriving some other benefit from you cranking the handle (generating energy say), and you only get paid every 5.04 seconds, then you come to realise that all the times you crank the handle for no reward you are basically a slave, receiving no compensation for your labour. This is where the money that makes rich people rich comes from: all the work you do that they don’t pay you for.

(Thanks very much to LydiaTeapot for being first to spot this and show it to me.)

It’s a news story that you might’ve missed, but on Friday, someone bought all the cocoa. All of it.

At least in Europe anyway: a chocotastic total of 241,000 tonnes of cocoa beans, something which sent er, ripples of chock through the galaxy, in a move that some are already dubbing the ‘credit crunchie’, honest.

There’s something very shady about all of this: someone, in the space of one day, was able to buy up the whole supply of a commodity in an entire continent. Stock-trading like this is nothing unusual in itself: it’s part and parcel of the capitalist economic system, where stock-traders and investors try to make as much money as possible by doing precisely fuck all. It’s pretty clear what the intentions of the mystery trader who bought all up the cocoa is though: to force the price high, monopolise the market, and then, yes, make lots of money. This is what we call “free trade”.

It’s already had the effect of pushing cocoa to its highest price since 1977 – which won’t take long to translate into, brace yourselves… higher chocolate prices for everyone. While a few pence extra on the price of a bar of chocolate is maybe nothing to get your snickers in a twist about, it’s scary the way the price of anything can be manipulated by nothing more than the insider machinations of a few investment bankers and stock traders who’ve never set eyes on a cocoa bean in their life. This is what we call “capitalism”.

What is unusual about this case though is that the buyers have take physical delivery of the cocoa beans – meaning that they’re now sitting in warehouses under the control of the buyers, which again can be used to force the price up by creating an artificial shortage of cocoa!

The only beneficiaries of this are, of course, the parasitical stock traders who now own the stuff. The farmers who actually grow the cocoa – largely in Uganda and the Ivory Coast, are unlikely to see any ‘trickle down’ effect, as they’ve already sold the crop at fixed prices. Prices fixed by middle-men, chocolate companies and these very same investors, you understand. It’s the curly wurly (milky) way of a (cadbury cream egg) twisted economic system.

Well, as socialists are now groaning and rolling up their sleeves for years of struggle as the Tories and the Liberals prepare to attack living standards and services, and with Labour and the SNP mouthing opposition but doing nothing to stop them (and passing them on through local parliaments and councils), there is another aspect which adds to the farce which is the current state of politics and society in this country.

That is, the wishes of the population, including which type of coalition government, which type of electoral system, and which type of policies people want to see have barely had a look-in in our ‘democracy’ since our election in an already crap electoral system. Rather, we all seem to be slaves to the will of this omniscient presence called ‘the market’.

Now I am no economist, but the way the political elites and journalists have been discussing the needs of ‘the market’ in terms of the desirable form of government (i.e. a Tory-Liberal coalition) that needed to come from this election, makes our financial system sound like some kind of all-powerful supernatural presence. Indeed, so encapsulating and overwhelming is ‘the market’, that we have no choice but to bow down and prostrate ourselves to its will, which right now is that ‘it’ (or he or she, who knows?) wants a strong government to push through brutal cuts. Anyone that thinks otherwise just isn’t a properly trained economist, like all those ones who astutely spotted the financial crisis way before if happened (whoops!) and pushed the deregulation of the financial markets which led to the crisis in the first place.

Thus, ‘the market’ demanded a strong coalition government that could ‘tackle the deficit’ i.e. make the poor pay for capitalism’s crisis, rather than city financiers losing money because shares may go down a little due to uncertainty over the next government. However, hearing the coverage of the hung parliament, you’d have thought we’d all be cast back into the stone age if the desired Tory-Liberal coalition wasn’t agreed sharpish, as you can see in this BBC coverage here.

This is just another reminder of why capitalism, most of all deregulated finance capitalism, can fuck off as far as I’m concerned. The market is not our god, and its servants -- Labour, Tories, Liberals and the SNP -- are not our rulers. Their attempts to make us pay for the current crisis in capitalism may give them a sharp wake-up call on that count.

If humanity is to have a future, we need real participatory democracy, and for political and economic power to be in the hands of the population, not ‘the market’, ‘the city’, or any other representations of the shitty, ailing capitalist system that politicians are desperately trying to prop up. In other words, we need socialism.

Rant over. For now.

You might’ve heard. Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name Of is the Christmas number one. Yes! It’s finally happened: we got a bunch of politckul rap-rockin’ revolutionary Maoists from LA to the top o’ the pop charts. ‘We’ being the disgruntled social-networking masses, fed up of the contrived, tedious pish that is the X Factor and it’s commidified, profit-driven attitude to music. And Simon Cowell. Cunt.
So what did it prove? That a lot of people don’t like reality television karaoke contests, enjoyed the idea of participating in a mass social media led prank, and were prepared to spend 79p to prove it.
Much else? The two days since Rage were declared number one have seen various proclamations of this being ‘the birth of people power’, the beginning of a new mass movement, the beginning of the end for shit music. Probably, mostly, bollocks?

#ratm4xmas may not herald the revolution. But it undoubtedly has been an eye-opener for tens of thousands of people: that huge numbers of people, acting together on an issue, can bring about ‘change’, however superficial in this case it may be. As socialists, we should surely encourage this mindset!

A quick look at the facebook group confirms this, and indeed, bluntly displays  that there’s vast numbers of, largely young, people desperate to rebel against something, anything, amid the chaos of capitalist crisis, mass unemployment and a corrupt ruling class. And in this state of utter confusion, the fightback against ‘the system’ has formulated itself in a battle against the monotony culture of commercialised, pre-packaged, throwaway pop music – in many ways, emblematic of the consumer capitalist society we inhabit.

This rage now needs to be channelled through more effective channels. Not by getting the Sex Pistols to number one for the Queen’s birthday, or NWA’s ‘Fuck The Police’ to Xmas No. 1 next year (awesome as that might be), but by translating anger against um, the ‘machine’ itself: capitalism. As Tom Morello of Rage himself stated:  “whether it’s a small matter like who’s the top of the charts, or bigger matters like war and peace and economic inequality, when people band together and make their voices heard they can completely overturn the system as it is.”

Yeah we all know that, as every wanky broadsheet columnist has been gleely pointing out at any opportunity, that Sony Records were the ‘main beneficiaries’ and made lots of money out of it. But that’s really besides the point… it was fun! And it’s probs the first number one single for insurrectionary-workers-peasant-movement supporting lefties since the Manics in 2000! And it may, just may, have raised that first inkling of class consciousness among scores of young people – of the ability to fight, and win. Venceremos!

“What you need is what they’re selling, makes you feel like buying is rebelling”
‘No Shelter’, Rage Against The Machine