Cultural Capitalism

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THIS WASN’T INTENDED AS IRONY, BUT IT IS BLOODY IRONIC.

This article is about how capitalism has become part of working class culture.

There have been fine examples of culture created within capitalism. Hollywood films from Terminator to Transformers can be enjoyable, as can music from the Beatles to Boyzone. Food from Michelin starred restaurants to tins of spam. You may enjoy any or all of these examples, but that isn’t the point.

Capitalism has many ways of thinking that we need it. The one I’m on about is food.

Capitalism has this snidey way of making us accept the shit. By making it cheap, making it everywhere and also by making us think that we poor workers only deserve cheap shit.

The band Crass, though their politics are not the same as ours, got this spot on:

Whether it’s Wetherspoons, Greggs, a Tesco Meal Deal or a ‘cheeky’ Nando’s,* large corporations have engrained in our minds that they are part of our culture, using slogans, advertising and online communities

I will not argue against the cheapness of these, as I will not argue that a bottle of Taurus cider** is cheap. I will argue that they are wealthy corporations who manipulate our poverty and convince us that their business is our culture.

Is poverty our pride? I’d say no, our class should be our pride, and our strength!

Our ability to work and organise lies in our own class, but that is not what the ruling class want us to think.

The need for cheapness has been turned into a cult of worship with its own rituals. Reddit has a Greggs Appreciation Society, for God’s sake.

Greggs is seen as a staple of the working class. Founded in Newcastle, it’s seen by some as some kind of northern “fuck off” to the posh bakers down south. Yet it wasn’t founded by some Toon-mad Geordie lad, it was founded by a freemason and is now run by his son, a worker-hating donator to the Tory party.

Cornish bakers especially were mocked for resisting Greggs and asked “if your pasties were so good, why would you mind the competition?”

This is just promoting the myth of competition under capitalism. Greggs does not win by having better pasties, but by having cheaper pasties and more stores than any other bakery in Britain.

It was also known for taking advantage of the apprenticeship scheme (of course it’s not fucking available) paying trainees far below minimum wage, but not to train them as bakers, but in Customer Service.

As well as putting skilled bakers out of business, it is preventing future generations from learning those skills.

As socialists we want skilled workers to make food, we want all workers to be skilled, to be trained properly.

We also want food and drink to be affordable, without it being of low quality, or made affordable through the exploitation of low skilled workers.

Under socialism, we would not sacrifice quality for convenience and as the profit-making is taken out of the equation, the food would still be affordable.

Tim Martin, the owner of Wetherspoons, is criticised for his anti-EU views. This has been extended by some to despise Wetherspoons as a pub chain frequented by the typical ‘knuckle-dragging, wife-beating Brexiteer’ with HP Sauce*** all down their England shirt, shown to us by the likes of the Guardian or Kevin Maguire of the Mirror.

While it is wrong to think like this, it does not mean that, by default Tim Martin is some champion of the working class. I voted leave, as did a lot of socialists and communists.

He is known to be anti-union and outside of Brighton his workers are paid a minimum wage and given the benefit of a free meal at lunch time.

Even his plans for Brexit involved allowing free movement of workers (to allow him a constant supply of those desperate enough to work for minimum wage) and to allow the importation of cheap ingredients for the ready meals you can buy there.

Two points that people voted Leave for. To have better British jobs and to rely less on imported food we could otherwise grow here.

Two things that can’t happen under capitalism. They won’t happen under capitalism because it will reduce profits for those who run these establishments.

He did nothing to lower the alcohol tax before or after it, despite having friends in government and despite that being something that would benefit all pubs (his own chain can keep prices low as they are able to buy more in bulk and make enough profit through the sheer amount of pubs they have).

Wetherspoons itself, as an establishment, has only one thing going for it. The price. People go there because it’s cheap. I’ve been there many times, because its cheap and the ale isn’t bad, but why praise Tim Martin for winning at capitalism, through exploiting workers here and abroad?

Wouldn’t you rather be able to get a decent pint, better food and better service and still be able to afford it? To drink in more traditional settings, to enjoy the atmosphere of a community such as we used to have in the boozers regular working class people are being priced out of?

As a success in our market economy, the giant pub chain is stopping us from doing that and is encouraging the gentrification of the local, the corner pub, the countryside inn and pushing us who can’t afford it into their soulless arms.

Wetherspoons also has its online ordering, turned into a daft game by students who will randomly order bowls of peas for people they don’t know, which is both wasteful and inconvenient for staff and customers. There is also a ridiculous trend of queuing at the bar in certain venues.

None of this is part of our pub culture. A traditional working class pub does not have queues. We wait at the bar and are served by barstaff, who recognise who was first and remember you when you come in again. Barstaff who should be well paid as this is a skilled job.

Local newspapers waste time reviewing Wetherspoons and Tesco Meal Deals. As one of the benefits of chains is their familiarity, reviewing them is redundant. Therefore, they are also having a knock-on effect of causing other workers to become non-productive.

Tesco has increased its profits year on year since 2016, during the so-called cost of living crisis. They made record profits of £62,880 million in 2024

Pre-packaged sandwiches are invariably of poor quality. They are refrigerated, to keep bacteria from growing on the fillings.

However, this reduces the quality of the bread and also diminishes the flavour of the filling. The short breaks given to office workers don’t even allow those sarnies to come to room temperature.

Joe Swash recently called the Meal Deal “British Tapas” on a documentary he did about it. Now he was probably being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the way we have been manipulated into loving the meal deal will have some believing that a cold, under-filled sandwich, a bag of Walkers**** crisps and a can of Monster is the height of British cuisine.

There is also the ridiculous amount of profit made from such sarnies (or whatever you call them locally). I don’t even need to provide a link for stats on this. You know how much a loaf of bread, a block of cheese and an onion costs.

They are expensive because at every stage of their production, someone, who is not involved in the production process, but owns the means to produce, be it land or be it a factory, is making a profit. A third (fourth, fifth) party is employing people to turn already expensive bread, vegetables and proteins into what should be so cheap that it’s free.

But pre-packaged sarnies are needed by office workers, who don’t have enough time to make their own. Workers who barely have time to enjoy a dinner break. Does this make Tesco the saviour of the city worker?

Does it fuck, it is a problem created by capitalism, solved (in a really shit way) by capitalism.

Why can’t we have something like an Imbiss Wagon or a mlecki bar (I’m sorry that I can’t provide links describing these, Google and Wikipedia have actually removed articles about them, but they were state-funded food carts that provided local, healthy, affordable food to workers) like they had in Germany and Poland? Why can’t we adapt them to our local tastes, using local produce? Imagine if a scouse wagon rolled up on your dinner break in Liverpool, imagine if pie wagons turned up in Wigan, eel wagons in London, subsidised by a workers’ state. The idea of this is literally being removed from the internet, for an increasingly large amount of us, the main way we communicate.

Once nobody can afford a hand-made pastie, or a pint in an independent pub, all that will be left will be the chains. Then they will have monopoly and won’t be cheap for very much longer.

I’m not calling for boycotts here, they rarely work and when we have little money, we can’t afford the luxury of a boycott. Nor am I condemning people who, like myself, can not afford good quality things. I am condemning the system that puts us in this situation and not just glorifies it, but encourages us to glorify it as well.

Yes, we are poor, but don’t think that because of our poverty, that the rich are our saviours for allowing us cheap produce.

Capitalism makes us poor, it pays us part of the capitaitalsts profits to the workers who have created their wealth in the first place.

Under capitalism cheap means worse.

Instead of demanding better, we’re accepting worse. Instead of demanding change, we’re keeping things the same. Instead of demanding the earth, we are shovelling its shite.

Chris Haws

June 2025

* Nando’s was founded by a South African billionaire, and is neither cheap nor good quality, but is seen as fancy dining because of the way it’s promoted

** Cheap 4.5% cider from Aldi, which I usually buy. No, I don’t think that Aldi is the saviour of the drinking class

*** HP sauce was shown in a survey to be in the top ten of brands favoured by Leave voters, despite it being owned by Americans and produced in the Netherlands.

****Another famous “British” brand that was bought by PepsiCo in the 80s and is now ran from Switzerland. Through Walkers, Pepsi bought the popular Brannigans crisp brand, reduced the quality and eventually discontinued it when people stopped buying them. In 2019 Pepsi also tried to sue Indian farmers for growing the same variety of potato that are used to make Lays crisps (Walkers sold outside of Britain)