We note with anger and derision the fanfare being made at a fall in the rate of inflation as if it were pennies from heaven!
In whose straw poll do hands shoot up to the question ‘have you noticed your pay/benefits/tax credits outstripping inflation?’
The way the current pundits portray the reduction in the rate of inflation as a beneficial experience in our daily lives is a complete fiction. The rate of increases in prices has slowed a little. Prices are not coming down our lives are not becoming more affordable.
The causes of inflation are invariably political, the result of choices of who pays for capitalist crisis. Those in power, those with the money make those choices. The rest of us choose between heating, clothing, accommodation and food.
All over the country, record numbers are queueing at food banks, warm hubs and social supermarkets. These voluntary institutions themselves being clear that they are increasingly unable to fulfill their remit, with rising running costs and costs of goods, production, delivery etc.
The pound in our pocket buys a third less than a decade ago. Nearly 15% less than two years ago.
Whatever measly increase in our wages they have given, still less in the paltry level of benefits, may look like on paper now inflation is claimed at 4.6%, it is nothing but a charade of smoke and mirrors.
It hides the reality that our standard of living has declined and our struggle to survive has grown harder since the great banking collapse of 2008.
And it’s not just about numbers on paper, it’s about the disappearance of services of social value to meet the needs of working-class people and our communities.
It’s no good being able to afford your heating if you can’t afford your home! You may be able to buy a cushion, but you can’t afford the sofa; if you can afford dental care, you can’t find an NHS dentist, if you can afford your medication, the treatment to remove your need for it is put of further and further into the future for the absence of doctors and medical care.
As for social care, disability aids, childcare, mental health services, children’s activities, holidays, well, most just can’t have access for love nor money.
And of course, it’s the poor and marginalised to take the blame. Too lazy to work, not really unfit. Refugees gaming the system while our government games Rwanda. Banks raking-in interest driven profits while the homeless make selfish lifestyle choices.
Perhaps little highlights the lies behind the cost of living more than the unacceptable cost of dying. It’s no wonder our TV screens of full of adverts for “we’ll come and take your body away and deliver back your ashes by van for a fraction of the cost”.
It’s hardly surprising that we can’t afford to live with dignity when we can’t even afford to die with it!
Where has all the money that is supposedly unavailable, gone? We know it’s there; we produced it through our work, our skills, through the labours of our minds and bodies.
It is there, not hiding, but in plain sight. The billions that aren’t personally Rishi’s and his friends, we see blowing up Gaza and Ukraine every day. Making room for more profit-making expansion plans. The profit driven inflation claimed back from us through austerity.
The poverty of our daily lives is a reflection of the poverty of morality and values of the capitalist class and its proxies. The only good news about inflation is that it ends with the end of capitalism.
By Dreyfus
AnarCom Network 