Capitalism’s ultimate revenge: Coalition Britain

 capitalism, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, democracy, in a hole, politicians, specialisation, specialisations  No Responses »
May 182013
 

If we believe in a history of the masses – not just in one of heroes and heroines – there has to be more to what is going on between Cameron & Co and the rest of civil society than simply the bald intention to fill corporate pockets with even more dosh than they already possess.  There must be bigger movements at play here than simply stupid incompetents being stupidly incompetent.

Firstly, it would appear there is a massive battle being fought between a society of professionals on the one hand and a society of the unprofessionalised on the other.  So it is we have doctors, nurses, teachers and lawyers fighting painfully disagreeable rearguard actions with people who have few actual qualifications to be what they end up acting out: in the main, alpha businessmen and women and politicians of all colours and levels.  These latter two “professions”, if the label can (or should) be usefully applied, currently have few training paths to prepare them for the roles they carry out – supposedly on our behalf but more generally on their own.

Secondly, there does seem to be a recognition out there that specialisation – the very stuff of both charlatans and experts – may in some insidious way itself be destroying society.

In another universe then, quite parallel to Cameron & Co’s, we might appreciate the attempts of what we could charitably describe as Wannabe Renaissance Men (WRM) (there would appear to be few women, thankfully, of the same mettle) to break through the Chinese Walls of self-interested sectors.

The problem, of course, is that these WRMs I describe really aren’t.  They’re not doing what they do in order to break down barriers that divide society but, instead, in order to re-establish – using the most unpleasant methods possible – those barriers which most benefit them at a quite individual level.  It would seem they have so convinced themselves their might is right that anything can be justified – precisely and simply because of who or what originates the acts in question.  And we are so taken aback by the astonishingly unexpected nature of these acts – so massively and confusingly outside our moral scope – that we find ourselves mainly giving in:

Govt using practices we instinctively know are wrong but our inexperience of such immoral behaviour is restraining our outrage. #Disabled

Yes.  It’s possible that Cameron & Co are able to sleep at night because they truly believe themselves on a crusade against evil and interested parties.  They see themselves as cavaliers – as latterday buccaneers of magnificent breaking-the-rules ambitions – in much the same way as top-flight businesspeople often feel themselves hard-done-to by a comfort-seeking society which fails to appreciate the real emotional hardships they run the gauntlet of in their uncertain rise to the top.

No wonder these creatures all become self-seeking and selfish.

No wonder they believe we must become like them.

But, in reality, Cameron & Co are anything but Wannabe Renaissance Men – anything but the far-sighted finally able to shrug off a lazy society’s shackles and liberate a democracy of the dreadfully slumbering.

They sense something that perhaps all of us should sense, it is true, but they are utterly incapable of performing the service civilisation requires of them.  As Pope Francis mentioned the other day, their money is ruling the vast majority instead of serving the same.  And unable to reconfigure it, they have given up at the first hurdle; they have given in and become its hugely detrimental servant rather than its master.

Renaissance Men?  They wouldn’t know a flying machine if it hit them on the noggin.  They’d assume it was a brutal and violent attack by dangerously trained beings on their self-taught, unqualified and intuitive impulses.  Out of such inferiority complexes are born the actions of the essentially brutish.

So who’s lost their moral compass?  Is it ourselves – lost in a sea of society-defining media?  Is it the journalists themselves – as yet another suspiciously discrete body of professionals too?  Or is this actually a case of the pyramid so taking over everything we do, think, say and believe that a 21st century of gloriously compulsory education has only prepared us properly for outright submission?

Maybe, even, Cameron, Gove and their cohort of evil politicos are right in some of what they say – even as they wrong in most of what they do.  Specialisations are destroying society; sectors which know so much about their own workings are never going to be entirely direct about the changes which might prejudice them.

Maybe we are all Wannabe Renaissance Men (and Women, of course).

Maybe that’s the problem.

Capitalism’s ultimate revenge: the diarrhoea of an amateur democracy.

Coalition Britain, in fact – multiplied, now, a thousandfold.  And controlled by those with the biggest chips on their shoulders history has seen.

From a society of supposedly meritorious conduct, those who least deserve to be in charge are those who have most benefited from a social democracy that urged us to value citizens in terms of what they were instead of what they did.

And so it is that the moral black hole this Coalition of half-baked humans inhabits is bound to fail, time and again, to properly impact on our sense of right and wrong.

We’ve been taught for far too long that what you do isn’t what you are.

To such an extent that what they are is affected in no significant way by what they do.

And even as they lambast us for our relativistic ways, they continue to ruthlessly take full advantage of the room for manoeuvre such generous morals do allow.

Revolution ’13: a) on Capitalism and Piracy; and b) on a new kind of Communism

 capitalism, Communism, piracy, revolution, unclassifiable  4 Responses »
Mar 312013
 

Just had my mind blown.  If you watch only one video this year (and I generally don’t tend to watch any online videos), then please, please watch this one.  Amazing, amazing, truly amazing stuff.


http://youtu.be/ja_kOmHBPVA

I can’t begin to communicate to you exactly how much this five minutes of historical wordplay has suddenly made me see the world in a completely different way.  Earlier in the day, I was describing how we should establish a parallel BBC (after two previous posts on similar themes), because something quite fundamental about the one we’ve got really wasn’t as it should be.  Now I see more clearly.  Uncharted waters mean legitimate and illegitimate actions are often interchangeable; cannot be easily separated; exist in the same spaces.  And the biggest uncharted waters we’ve ever faced are around us at this very moment: cyberspace; our genetic make-up as a species; the patenting of cash crops.  It’s all waiting to be “pirated” – not just by those most of us would recognise as “pirates” but – just as significantly – by those who would claim to be quite otherwise.

I never realised the term was as rich and pregnant in meaning and expansion as I now understand it to be.

*

Today has, however, been a day of many felicitous discoveries.  This one, for example, which came my way a few minutes ago via Jeff:

In 2009, at the Economics for Ecology Conference, we’d made this point:

“The prevailing economics systems in the twentieth century were capitalism and communism.  Both systems were hypothetically aimed at creating a means of providing people with comfortable, safe and secure life.

Along the way, in the process of attempting different forms of economics from capitalism to communism, we have managed to pollute and contaminate our own environment to the extent of causing environmental change to the point of quite possible catastrophe for people around the world.  Neither the capitalist system nor the communist system – nor the various fascist systems attempted in such as Germany, Spain and Italy – lived up to their promises.  Communist and fascist systems became infamous for mass murder.  The Western capitalist was less murderous. Overall, capitalism was able to produce a much larger middle class of people between rich and poor, and has gained precedence due to making safe and secure life possible for more people.   But, it’s various methods over the past 100 years left millions of people to suffer and die more indirectly than outright murder.  Those people were dismissed as relatively unimportant, mostly left to die from deprivation rather than outright execution.  In all systems, some rationale was created to either dismiss people and leave them to die, or, kill people outright.  In the end, for the victims, the result was identical.”

To conclude thus:

This is a long-term permanently sustainable program, the basis for “people-centered” economic development. Core focus is always on people and their needs, with neediest people having first priority – as contrasted with the eternal chase for financial profit and numbers where people, social benefit, and human well-being are often and routinely overlooked or ignored altogether. This is in keeping with the fundamental objectives of Marshall Plan: policy aimed at hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. This is a bottom-up approach, starting with Ukraine’s poorest and most desperate citizens, rather than a “top-down” approach that might not ever benefit them. They cannot wait, particularly children. Impedance by anyone or any group of people constitutes precisely what the original Marshall Plan was dedicated to opposing. Those who suffer most, and those in greatest need, must be helped first — not secondarily, along the way or by the way.”

And what is applicable to the Ukraine is surely becoming applicable – now – to the UK:

In a joint report, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist church, the United Reformed church and the Church of Scotland said that the “systematic misrepresentation of the poorest in society” was a matter of injustice that all Christians should challenge.

How capitalism so often comes full circle.  Occasionally entrancingly; usually tryingly; sometimes cruelly.

The last being, now it would seem, our circle.

Time for us all, perhaps, in this evermore uncharted century, to understand properly what it is to be a “pirate”.

____________________

Update to this post, 1st April 2013 (and no, it’s not an April Fools’ update either!): just a quick reference to something Jeff touches on, in his piece linked to above.  In it, and speaking of a latterday Marshall plan, he mentions:

[...] the ‘tools innovations and methodologies’ available today which hadn’t existed 60 years earlier [...].

Just so the dyed-in-the-wool capitalists don’t immediately turn off this meme, then, here’s something I wrote a while ago which describes how the iPhone is a perfect argument for a planned economy.  First this:

The iPhone, perhaps the apex of all latterday manufacturing and publishing industries, is just about as planned and structured to the last detail as anything in this life could possibly be.  It’s an astonishing paradox that Apple is held up to be the paradigm of effective free-market capitalism (even when we know it isn’t free market at all) – whilst being the most control-freaking company in history.

And then this:

What iPhone really shows us, then, is the massively impact planning our whys and wherefores can have on how they turn out.  If we want to use Apple – and its huge cash mountain and its immense ability to deliver products and services people want – as an example to follow, we have to argue it has far more to do with planned economies than the supposedly libertarian, slapdash and light-touch approaches conventional neoliberalism would have us ascribing to.

Provokes trains of interesting thoughts, if nothing else.  Ones we really should have the intellectual honesty to follow.

No?

Worker-owned capitalism – a collaborative alternative we should nurture?

 capitalism, cooperatives, corporations, on a high, workers  2 Responses »
Dec 062012
 

The Guardian published an interesting report a couple of days ago which contained the following statistic:

Little-known fact: about one in ten US workers has ownership in the company they work for. [...]

Worker-owned capitalism to such an extent in one of the most corporate countries in the world?  Well, yes – and as it should be.  We are, after all, talking here about recovering for our own purposes the idea of corporations and their ability to organise the masses.  As Rick and Chris have both pointed out on more than one occasion, high levels of self-employment are no necessary sign of healthy and mature economies.  The latter summarises the issue thus:

[...] Four things make me side with Rick:

- Entrepreneurs are often jacks-of-all-trades. An entrepreneurial society thus doesn’t make best use of the division of labour.

- Self-employment, especially now, is a form of under-employment; people sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.

- Micro-businesses suffer from financing constraints to a greater extent than large firms do. This can prevent them reaching optimal size.

- Many of the self-employed actually want to be relatively unproductive. They see self-employment as a better way of combining work with their commitments to children or the golf course.

There are good reasons, then, why economies of entrepreneurs are often low-productivity ones. Small businesses are very often not tomorrow’s giants or job creators, but rather just mediocre plodders – if they survive at all.

But I think this probably results more from the fact that the next step after individual self-employment – which is to say, the corporatisation of self-employment as per that ten percent of US workers the Guardian mentions – is quite difficult here in the UK to get government, financial and cultural support for; quite difficult to get even a glancing acknowledgement of.

If America can do this – use the corporate structures, tools, processes and procedures to organise self-motivating worker-owned capitalism – then why can’t we?  If America can make self-employment massively efficient and creative, what’s to stop us from doing the same?

It can’t be that the existing vested interests in Britain are fiercer – after all, the US corporate behemoths of a traditional flavour often stride the world in their ability to beautifully create product and unjustly destroy competitors.  Is it – could it – actually be that in the land of entrepreneurship we are discovering that a kind of cooperative capitalism is finding a more fertile ecosystem than here in Europe?  Is it – could it – actually be that our own business infrastructures and people, from the smallest sole trader right through to the grandest blue chip, are simply not up to the challenges a properly-competitive business landscape should present for collaborative capitalism?

Is it – could it – actually be the case that who’s really got used to benefits and feathered nests is not the struggling worker on the poverty line but the reasonably well-protected managers and executives who – whilst being so distant from the production lines, processes and procedures – still take it upon themselves to take the decisions about how companies should operate?

Worker-owned corporates, then? An alternative to nurture?  I think so.  I really do.  The best of both of our worlds.

Are corporations a force for weird good?

 capitalism, Catholic Church, Church of England, corporations, moral crisis, moral deficit, moral democracy, moral industry, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Nov 082012
 

I was quite shocked this morning to hear that an ex-oil executive was to become the new Archbishop of Canterbury – and wondered idly if the next Pope would be ex-CEO to some nuclear company or other.

Now I’m probably being a little unfair here: there’s no reason an experience of corporate activity can’t prepare one better for dealing with its excesses in relation to the most defenceless in society.  It may, indeed, be true that the gentleman in question has lived outside the ivory tower of religious contemplation.  Down amongst the “dirty dirty” readies us for understanding that reality which may be quite beyond the hermits.

It did make me pause for thought, though. And these are the thoughts that occurred to me.

Let’s take a look at the alleged downsides and upsides of corporate experience more generally.  First the downsides:

  • profit-driven above all – they have little sense of other values and missions that might contribute to long-term gain in society
  • selfish and highly competitive – they conceptualise life as a battle and war, where the enemy can undo one at any time
  • unfaithful to the communities that originally created them – always willing to up sticks and move if tax regimes are better elsewhere, they are generally happy to leave their origins and let them disintegrate in their absence
  • cut-throat employment and salary policies – they are not averse to playing one group of workers against another in order to better drive down the easiest costs to reduce
  • disloyal to their workforces in times of economic downturn – you’ll have spent a lifetime working unpaid extra hours, but this will mean nothing when shareholders must be placated
  • union-busting behemoths – the ultimate control freaks
  • politically illegitimate – they use their profits and massive resources to fund political campaigns in order to improve their tax regimes and reduce their liabilities to the state, even as they happily use the infrastructures such states create

The list could go on – I’m no expert, just a simple observer.  But we can get a feel for what’s going wrong in many parts of corporate-land.  And just remember: the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the English, has almost certainly experienced environments which encourage – or have encouraged – the above.

So now – weirdly and dissonantly – onto the upsides I suggest might also exist:

  • evidence-based organisations – they manage huge amounts of data and at their occasional best take logical decisions on transnational scales
  • people-focussed rather than tribal-focussed communities – though they all create the single tribe of company all must be loyal to, within that company it’s occasionally results that count more than ethnicity, sexual orientation or mother tongue: again, where it happens, it happens on a massive scale
  • specialisation – I’m in two minds about this: on the one hand, specialisation makes us necessarily better at what we do; on the other hand, it builds silos of knowledge which unhappily divide us from each other, as well as make it more difficult to identify productive connections between different fields of knowledge
  • repositories of knowhow and good practice – no, they may not always learn from what their workforces have achieved, nor always share effectively their very own intellectual property, but the knowhow and good practice is registered somewhere in their depths – and often manages to improve step-by-step how things are fashioned, engineered and implemented
  • their peaceable instincts – yes, there are many corporates involved up to the hilt not only in warlike discourses but also in war-related activities, but most – the vast majority I would say – look for stability, peace and a steady hand in our civilisations over a churning change and uncertainty: this is not a small virtue in the times we currently inhabit
  • their global perspective – where many if not most politicians turn inward on their nation-states and run their relatively parochial cliques of power with equal gobbets of gusto and reductionism, corporations by their very transnational and expansionary ambitions always turn their eyes towards the wider horizon: in a sense, we have in corporations the colonial impulses of the empires of old – yet with a far greater degree of multiplicity than was ever the case.  That convergent evolution tends to drive them to looking very similar doesn’t remove from our experience of life the reality that a carefully-woven tapestry of internationalised activity does nevertheless exist

To my closing thoughts, then.

Maybe, in corporations, we could reasonably argue that they could be a force for weird good, if only we knew how to usefully inflect their overarching motivations.  That most are generally dysfunctional legal persons at the moment is absolutely clear to me.  But that doesn’t mean the people who work in them are necessarily dysfunctional themselves.  Nor does it mean that such networks of communication and operation couldn’t, in some way, somehow, function far more societally than is the case.

For the vision, post-World War II, of a global and unitary world may – in the end – not come from the hand of politicians and their grubby attempts to covet the votes of the people.  Rather, it may come from the properly renewed forces of commerce which, learning how to be social and moral as well as determinedly commercial, acquire the ability to bring us together in one singular tribe of honest people.

Structural idiocy

 a con, capitalism  No Responses »
Oct 082012
 

OK.  I’m officially getting furious at the obfuscation that’s taking place here.

Today, I stumble across this report:

The past 30 years has seen an increasing proportion of the population of total households becoming overall net recipients of the state, writes Ryan Bourne in The progressivity of UK taxes and transfers.

This has been particularly marked in the past ten years:

  • in 1979, 43.1 per cent of total households received more in benefits (including state spending on benefits in kind, such as the NHS and state education) than they paid in taxes  (including direct taxes such as income tax and indirect taxes such as VAT, fuel and alcohol duties)
  • in 2000/01, this figure was 43.8 per cent
  • in 2010/11, this figure was 53.4 per cent

Now I’ve already suggested it’s time we rebrand the term “benefits”:

“Living a life on benefits” could just as easily mean “enabling an independent life through support tools”.  So if businesses and politicians everywhere are so in thrall to the magnificent idea that is rebranding, why don’t we seriously consider rebranding the concept of “benefits”?

We could use the already mentioned “support tools”; alternatively, how about “freedom enablers” or “liberty ladders”?  We could, in fact, examine and re-engineer the underlying assumptions of a whole society – through a simple and zero-cost change of vocabulary such as the one I am proposing today.

So whilst I’m happy to take onboard the need to reorient our perceptions – “liberty ladder” does, after all, have a certain ring to it, don’t you think? – and whilst right-wing think tanks draw our attention to the rise in the number of benefit recipients, other information out there indicates there might be another side to the coin in question:

The report shows that wages have been falling sharply as a share of the national wealth since the 1970s – but it also suggests there is a huge difference between professions.

Higher earners, including barristers and medical practitioners, have seen huge rises in their income, while those in professions like bakers and truck drivers have seen their earnings actually fall in the last 30 years.

This second take on the situation goes on to point out that:

The real wages (adjusted for inflation) show that medical practitioners have seen their wages leap by 153 per cent, while bakers’ pay fell by 1 per cent. Judges, barristers and solicitors earn 114 per cent more than they did in the 70s – but forklift truck drivers earn 5 per cent less in real terms.

And:

The top 10 per cent of earners are the only group whose income has risen in line with GDP since 1978. Their pay has risen twice as fast as those on median incomes, and four times faster than the lowest 10 per cent of earners.

The report, authored by Stewart Lansley, also says there has been an increase in “bad jobs”, which offer poor wages and job security. The proportion of workers whose wages are at least a third less than the median (£11.09 an hour) has doubled in the last three decades from 12 per cent in 1977 to 22 per cent in 2009.

In the light of the above, then, it could be fair to assume that in a society we once hoped might care to care, the rise in benefits thus described in the first link isn’t so much due to a gratuitous rewarding of laziness unbound over the past three decades but – rather – as a result of the dramatic fall in wages of those condemned to barely survive.

In a society where – for such a long time – we were brought up to believe in the shared upward and onward progress of capitalism, the only upward and onward progress I can see happening right now is the growing injustice of the wages of the living dead.  Especially as this Coalition government now plans to cut the safety nets that decent wages could’ve provided all on their lonesome.

A capitalist society which refuses to contemplate social justice is serfdom by any other name.

And if it marches unthinkingly to societal breakdown, we could even accuse it of structural idiocy.

Europe’s proud decade: from prostituting a benefit recipient to profiting from disability

 a con, ATOS, benefits, benefits crackdown, capitalism, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, Europe  2 Responses »
Oct 012012
 

You know when you’re about to be made redundant – or, alternatively (much the same thing these days), are on the point of leaving school – and they give you classes in “selling” yourself via your CV and then your presence and performance at a job interview?  Well, whilst “selling” yourself is understood in its figurative sense, I suppose even I can’t see there’s very much wrong with it.

But when it becomes literal, when “selling out” becomes the modus operandi … well that’s when we should draw a marker in the sand.

Two stories from the last decade.  First, from 2005, an example of that German drive to be efficient in everything – in this case, in relation to benefit recipients:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

I find this story so hard to believe that I do question its veracity.  But it has been sitting there since 2005 – and doesn’t seem to have received any admonitions from any regulatory body.  I guess, therefore, sadly, that it must be true.

Let’s now fast forward to today.  And this time, from Scotland, this horrifying report which – if true (I’m open to all comments and corrections) – seems to indicate that the company ATOS is looking to make more profit out of its disability processes if it manages to raise the number of people processed by its systems:

Titled “Atos Risk Management Plan”, the dossier shows a predicted £40,535,679 profit from the £206million Atos contract for Scotland and northern England.

That would pay the disability living allowance of 10,851 people for a year, based on the average weekly payment of £71.84.

Atos will collect the colossal sum if they manage to put 15 per cent more people through their tests than broadly expected.

Even if the number of tests carried out is in line with predictions, they will make £28,636,419 by 2017 – enough to pay a year’s disability allowance for 7664 people.

And if they drop 15 per cent below their expected total, Atos will still be in the money, making a profit of £16,712,945.

So in less than ten years, in this European civilisation we were so proud of constructing after two world wars of terrible behaviours, we have two examples originating from three of its major players* of how this cutthroat capitalism is encouraging people and organisations to prostitute their morals.

For what else can you call it when corporate organisations – both public and private – pursue a full-scale involvement in objectivisation systems such as these: systems that so clearly prize profit over humanity?

____________________

*ATOS is a French company.

On capitalism and its variants – our destiny one day to be neither cutthroat nor cuddly?

 Britain, capitalism, unclassifiable, USA  No Responses »
Sep 302012
 

Lane Kenworthy has a beautifully detailed thesis at his place today.  Feeding off a study recently published – which seems to argue, if I have understood rightly, that innovation “spillover” allows allegedly less innovative countries such as those which follow generally European models of welfare and government spending, in particular the Nordic countries, to cream off the benefits of technological development that cutthroat capitalism (read the US here) provides on behalf of the rest of the world – Kenworthy provides a fascinatingly partial rebuttal of the aforementioned argument: fascinating precisely and because of its partial nature.

Essentially, the intellectual crime we’re accused of having committed is that whilst we criticise from our social-democratic pulpits the immorality of massive income inequality which you do find in the US, even so we’re happy to take advantage of the progress which that society’s income structure supposedly enables.

Lane takes this argument apart rather convincingly.  This, for example:

[...] According to Acemoglu et al’s logic, incentives for innovation in the U.S. were weakest in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1960 the top 1%’s share of pretax income had been falling steadily for several decades and had nearly reached its low point. Government spending, meanwhile, had been rising steadily and was close to its peak level. Yet there was plenty of innovation in the 1960s and 1970s, including notable advances in computers, medical technology, and others.

And this:

[...] the Nordic countries, with their low income inequality and generous safety nets, currently are among the world’s most innovative countries. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index has consistently ranked them close to the United States in innovation. The most recent report, for 2012-13, rates Sweden as the world’s most innovative nation, followed by Finland. The U.S. ranks sixth. The 2012 WIPO-Insead Global Innovation Index ranks Sweden second and the United States tenth. Whether or not this lasts, it suggests reason to doubt that modest inequality and generous cushions are significant obstacles to innovation.

Now if you’re happy to accept that the only workable socioeconomic model left us – after the fall of Communism, the banking crises which have assailed us since 2008 and the resulting societal distress as unemployment hits record levels in countries across the world (not to mention the End of Dialectic History in general as it might be conceived) – is some form of capitalism or other, as per, for example, Ed Miliband’s “responsible capitalism” meme, then Kenworthy’s conclusion to this piece will put you in a very happy place:

We may get a test of this moderate-to-high inequality with generous cushions scenario at some point. I suspect this is where America is heading, albeit slowly. Interestingly, the Nordic countries, where the top 1%’s income share has been trending upward (see figure 10 here), might end up there first.

That is to say, the “worst” excesses of cutthroat capitalism will acquire a generous cushion (see Obamacare) just as the “best” examples of entrepreneurial welfare capitalism will acquire the extreme and so called one percent income inequalities of the former.

Is this the destiny of those who would save capitalism from itself?  To allow, even perhaps ensure, that the one percent keep their places at the high table?  Is this the beginnings of the contract with the devil which Blair, maybe necessarily, agreed on in the Nineties – and which Ed Miliband, in Britain, has so far more or less resisted in the 21st century?

I wonder.

It is, nevertheless, whether or not with the implications as described above in Miliband’s case, a fascinating thesis from Kenworthy on convergent evolution – one which clearly deserves a wider reading this side of the Atlantic.

The horrors of cradle-to-grave capitalism revisited (or how the Daddy Coalition knows best)

 ATOS, capitalism, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, conflict of interests, cooperatives, disabled, Paralympics, people with support needs, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Sep 232012
 

When I was a kid – growing up in a half-socialist household of Co-op dividends, milk, funeral services and shops – cradle-to-grave capitalism (perhaps paternalism would be a better way of describing it) was benevolent, attractive and comforting.

We’ve moved on a long way since then, of course – or so, at least, we think.  We now believe ourselves to be empowered consumers capable of all kinds of super-heroisms in the face of massive and practically unbridled choice.

As part of this process where the state disconnects itself from delivering society’s responsibilities, there’s been, of late, especially since the contradictions inherent in the Paralympics, a lot of stuff whirling around the involvement of companies like ATOS in the matter of disability assessments.  Many examples have sadly surfaced of people suffering the indignity of being refused disability support after proceeding with one of these assessments, only for the original decision to be overturned on final appeal.  Meanwhile, lives are degraded and sometimes permanently destroyed by merciless and bureaucratic processes.  The kind of red tape government may quite rightly be looking to remove from commerce is being reintroduced into the treatment of our most vulnerable.

There’s a lesson in that no one seems too eager to learn.

It doesn’t however appear to stop there, I’m afraid.  Two more posts today that took me by the scruff of my neck and shook me harder than I’ve been shaken for a while.

The first relates to the already-mentioned Co-operative group.  You can currently find the content here.  A flavour of the piece to follow:

Welfare campaigners have recently come across this July 2009 announcement on the Atos website.

The Co-operative Group and the Co-operative Financial Services choose Atos Healthcare

London, 22 July 2009
Atos Healthcare, the number one occupational health provider in the UK1 and a business division of Atos Origin, today announced that it has won a contract with the Co-operative Group (tCG) and Cooperative Financial Services (CFS).

Under the new contract, Atos Healthcare will provide occupational healthcare services for the 82,000 employees who serve around 10 million customers a week through food, pharmacy, travel, funeral care, motor dealerships, legal and financial services. [...]

But this is the really extraordinary bit (the bold is mine):

Atos Healthcare will provide pre-employment referrals and absence management including physiotherapy and workstation assessments to help improve employee wellbeing and reduce absence.

“Extraordinary?  How so?” you might ask.  And fairly.  I worked for a large corporation for many years which, before I entered their employ, assessed my condition of mental ill health using an external provider to establish if I was fit for the role I was being offered.  The process was absolutely confidential as far as I know; the provider was not then used for ongoing support services once you became an employee – and, in general, the Chinese walls which protected conflicts of interest were properly and sagely constructed.  So nothing wrong with that.

So what’s really extraordinary – and disturbing – about the Co-op’s relationship as described above with ATOS – if, indeed, it is true (and I’m happy to publish a rectification, if a rectification is found to be wanting) – isn’t just that a supposedly ethical bank should be using an allegedly unhappy provider of disabled services (designed and overseen – it has to be said -  by the people who half-won/half-lost the last general election).

No.  The really disturbing element of the programme and relationship as described above is that even before ATOS’s alleged behaviours came to light, the Co-op happily gave to the same provider pre-employment referral responsibilities as well as ongoing-employment support.  Talk about giving the provider an incentive not to take on people with costly and objective-denying support needs.

The situation now, of course, three years later, is that it would appear many other private-sector companies are using ATOS’s services to assess whether workers are to be considered fit to work for them.

At the same time, it has to be said, as the government is expanding ATOS’s remit to reduce the burden on the state of disability payments to people with clear and obvious needs.

*

The other story then which knocked me sideways this evening?  This one.  It allegedly lays out for all to see how pre-screening of potential employees by companies like ATOS is now also being carried out on public servants.  The questions the poster of this article posts at the end are terrifyingly clear in their implications:

There are two questions I would like to ask Atos:

Do you assess DWP & HMRC staff under the Work Capability Assessment when assessing their ability to work?

How many potential employees who are disabled end up being selected by employers after you have carried out your ‘pre- employment screening’?

My conclusion after all of this?  That avoiding conflict of interest, as a principle and ideal, no longer exists for these pseudo-public-sector services this Coalition is engineering.  Escaping all legal and direct democratic oversight, and if taken to their ultimate extreme, such moves by our government to remove public services from parliamentary and local accountability mean that eventually our politicians and business leaders, working in tandem, will have the means to hand to both declare the formerly disabled fit for work – and the resulting fit-for-work unfit to be employed.

Putting such unfortunate souls in the worst place of all.

A cradle-to-grave capitalism which may lead us directly to the grave.

As I tweeted a few minutes ago:

So companies like ATOS don’t only decide whether disabled are fit for work – they also decide whether fit-for-work are fit for work. #kafka

This, if true, if at all accurate, is a disgraceful state of affairs: a total lack of integrity in constructing the flow of information and its access; in shaping the relationships between different functions; and in fulfilling the needs and rights of democratic citizens in what should be a free and transparent market economy.

Hardly surprising for a system of government which obviously seems to believe the best way to preserve our freedoms is to take them away from us – and put them all together in an undemocratic aspic.

Talk of a nanny state.

This is the Daddy Coalition of “I know best” capitalist instincts – but at their very very worst.

Don’t you think?

The iPhone – an argument in favour of planned economies?

 Apple, capitalism, convergent evolution, iPhone, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations, socialism, socialism for the rich, unclassifiable  5 Responses »
Sep 162012
 

Yesterday, late at night (excuse the incongruences if they exist!), I suggested the following:

[...] I am a child of a technological society – and continuous improvement is the essence of my belief system.  I simply cannot accept that we can refine to a millionth degree a computer, an iPhone or a piece of civil engineering – and yet find ourselves unable to improve the 19th century boom-and-bust cycle of traditional economics.

A Facebook friend responded this morning by arguing in favour of planned economies.

Which got me thinking.

The iPhone, perhaps the apex of all latterday manufacturing and publishing industries, is just about as planned and structured to the last detail as anything in this life could possibly be.  It’s an astonishing paradox that Apple is held up to be the paradigm of effective free-market capitalism (even when we know it isn’t free market at all) – whilst being the most control-freaking company in history.

When you think about it, Apple and traditional capitalism should form an oxymoron.  There is nothing less like a light-touch free-market approach to life than the fruit of Steve Jobs’ legacy.

But instead of indulging in yet another easy bit of Apple-bashing, why don’t we choose to take our lead from it instead?  This is what I posted this morning in our favourite walled garden:

[...] We’ve spent the last fifty years refining our manufacturing ability – and have neglected (probably deliberately) to apply the same principles to our organisational structures. [...]

In essence, what’s happened is that those in charge have truly managed to deliver radical improvements in thought, manufacturing and ideas development processes but – out of unhappy self-interest or perhaps an inability to see beyond the day-to-day – have refused to apply the same ingenuities to the running of our economies and wider societies.  Why?  As I allude, I suspect a combination of self-interest and lack of foresight – the almost feudal and pyramidal system of organising almost everything in politics and society currently benefits those who could otherwise truly effect big changes if they were only prepared to use other structures.

What iPhone really shows us, then, is the massively impact planning our whys and wherefores can have on how they turn out.  If we want to use Apple – and its huge cash mountain and its immense ability to deliver products and services people want – as an example to follow, we have to argue it has far more to do with planned economies than the supposedly libertarian, slapdash and light-touch approaches conventional neoliberalism would have us ascribing to.

The iPhone an argument in favour of beginning to plan our economies all over again?  I think so.  And as I also pointed out in my Facebook response this morning:

[...] where before perhaps our analytical tools were not up to the job, I don’t think this is going to be the case today. [...]

If we are capable of sophisticating our manufacturing processes and consumer durables to such an extent as Apple’s iPhone, we can – where there’s a political and social will, of course – do the same with our societies and economies.

Is this a case of convergent evolution?  A case where the clearest example of 21st century corporate capitalism shows the way forward for a different kind of 21st century socialism?

A return to a sadly failed 20th century model of planned economies – only now, in the light of Apple’s experience, with the potential for a huge new lease of life.

I wonder.

An age of incongruence, incompetence – or inhumanity?

 capitalism, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Sep 152012
 

I’d really like someone who understands these things properly to be able to explain to me – properly – whether it’s an age of incongruence we’re living in or an age of incompetence.

Even the leader of our least right-wing political party embraces capitalism as the least bad system we should use to run our societies.  I’ve already explained why I think this is misjudged.  But no matter, I shan’t labour the issue.

From my position as inexpert observer I would, however, like to know why those who are running this least bad system – posited as it is on a need (as I understand it) for continually expanding markets – are instead doing everything they can to shut its good functioning down.

Such an approach – reducing consumption, reducing demand, giving more and more resources to financial institutions whilst simultaneously withdrawing them from consumers who would otherwise spend – seems quite incongruent.  And if that were really the case, I could live with it.  But I am a child of a technological society – and continuous improvement is the essence of my belief system.  I simply cannot accept that we can refine to a millionth degree a computer, an iPhone or a piece of civil engineering – and yet find ourselves unable to improve the 19th century boom-and-bust cycle of traditional economics.

If our technological society is so unable to make better such an economy, I can think of only two reasonable explanations:

  1. Rank incompetence by those who would claim to be experts in the matter.
  2. Rank inhumanity by those who would benefit directly from the matter.

Either way, we need a revolution – not a bloody revolution where kings and queens are toppled from their pedestals but an intellectual and political revolution which matches our scientific prowesses.

And which seriously takes into account the need to apply humanity’s technological wisdoms to the obviously outdated engineering of its socioeconomic structures.

That’s where the real problem lies, isn’t it?  We’re operating in the 21st century as far as our tools of monetary and economic exchange are concerned – online purchases, automatic invoicing, computers to computers … it’s all as it should be.  But as far as the tools of politics and institutional organisation are concerned, we’re still in some previous – and sorry – century of serfdom and largesse.

We’re just little kids who’ve been given machines and black boxes – gadgets which massively extend the capacity of our braincells.  But, sadly enough, and possibly tragically enough, those braincells are still operating out of a child’s mind – with all its faults.

The cruelty of the very young is not malicious but it is real.  And an iPhone makes us superman – before we are ready.

Why do we see socialism as dogma-ridden and capitalism as light-of-touch?

 capitalism, socialism, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Sep 152012
 

Sunny reports on Ed Miliband’s interview (my take here) with the Telegraph today in these terms.  One extract he highlights catches my eye (the bold is mine):

On Socialism

I bring him back to where he started. Isn’t the great lesson from his parents’ that socialism was a god that failed? ‘No!’, exclaims Ed Miliband vehemently, because socialism is not a rigid economic doctrine, but ‘a set of values’

Miliband is also reported as saying (again, the bold is mine):

It is ‘a tale that never ends’. Indeed, the strange fact is that ‘While there’s capitalism, there’ll be socialism, because there is always a response to injustice.’

Now Miliband is right to say that socialism is “not a rigid economic doctrine”, because it isn’t.  But it’s far more than the corporate-speak he then uses in that all-too-frequently-seen attempt by left-wing politicians to decaffeinate the impact of its conclusions.

What I would prefer to describe it as is a body of locatable sources exchanging and registering thoughts and ideas over a historical and chronological timeframe.  Much much more than simply “a set of values”.  Apart from anything else, to say it’s just “a set of values” is, in some way, to make it seem inaccurately dogmatic and unnecessarily set in stone.  Socialism is surely far more fluid than that: a repository of political DNA which shows how people have seen the world as it has developed over the past couple of centuries.

I also think it’s a mistake to describe it in terms of what most, perhaps even socialists themselves, see as its eternal enemy.  For me, socialism is not only – or even mainly – the counterweight of capitalism.  When we commit the mistake of defining ourselves in terms of what we want to leave behind, we will never manage to leave it behind.  It’s like atheists who define themselves as non-believers in God: they are prisoners of God even as they reject Him.

The real question here is why we see socialism as dogma-ridden and capitalism as light-of-touch.  For me, the best comparison runs as follows: Spanish and French as languages have their own official authorities which determine good and bad usage.  English doesn’t.  English is much more flexible and proactive; Spanish and French tend to be more unforgiving to rapid and sometimes careless change.  In this sense, capitalism is like English – with no official centralised authority, any of its excesses can be denied by its adepts as simply idiotic hangers-on.  Socialism, meanwhile, has a clear line of development, where the connections between different lines of thought are admitted and permanent.  And, indeed, desirable.

In essence, I would argue, we see socialism as dogma-ridden because it is actually a philosophy looking to discover the whys and wherefores of a developing world.  How, in the event, could it avoid having dogma?  You’re always going to get schools who pile up behind one stream of thought or another in all fields of endeavour.

Capitalism, meanwhile (whether by capitalism we understand the corporate stuff that unhappily rules us today or the more free-market sorts which some people have supported in the past), is more a tool of many colours which happily reinvents its image from generation to generation.  It’s not a philosophy.  It doesn’t aim to do much more than cream off money from its workforces; accept that for the rich to work harder they deserve more dosh and insist that for the poor to work harder they deserve more poverty; and produce ever-growing concentrations of money in companies and institutions which always aspire to monopoly-style control of their sectors.

You take a snapshot of a young capitalism and it may look pretty attractive.  But that capitalism is always going to be on its eventual way to an anti-competitive centralising of activity such as Western capitalist societies now demonstrate.  Look at corporations like Apple, Google or Microsoft if you find this difficult to believe.

More wealth for those at the top of the tree; less income for those at the bottom; fewer jobs for the communities where these companies make their profits; and a final disconnect between corporate and social benefit.

Capitalism is seen as light-of-touch because it’s an inevitable process towards an injustice it has no need to question.  It doesn’t really acquire a baggage of ideas because ideas aren’t its purpose.

Meanwhile, socialism is dogma-ridden because it’s a discipline of thought which both cares and dares to question not only that injustice but many others out there.

We may eventually need both, of course – I’m not suggesting that might not be the case.  But I do wonder if it is right to position them as mirror images of the other.  It’s both inaccurate in the case of capitalism as well as manifestly unfair in the case of socialism.

And between inaccurate and unfair, we’re losing a lot of goodwill – as well as precious time.

Saving capitalism from itself stuff? Ed, you’ve got it sort of wrong!

 capitalism, Ed Miliband, in a hole  No Responses »
Sep 152012
 

Ed Miliband makes some rather desultory declarations today (the bold is mine):

Ralph Miliband, his father, was an anti-capitalist of the Marxist left but the Labour leader said he does not think as his father did.

“My dad was sceptical of all the Thatcher aspirational stuff,” he said. “But I felt you sort of had to recognise that what she was talking about struck a chord. I want to save capitalism from itself.“

Whilst understanding the need for a bit of delicate triangulation right now – after all, Labour is only around nine points in the lead over the Tories in the opinion polls, with two parties, the Lib Dems and UKIP, both scoring that difference – I do fear Ed is going to get this monumentally wrong, if he’s not very careful.

He needs to focus on saving the people, not a system; he needs to start with the people, not a tool; he needs to create a humane objective, not make of a means a fetish; in effect, he needs to concentrate on the finites and not the eternals – those perishable goods who have no time to wait in their lives for clever elites to once again decide their futures over their heads.

For if he aims to save capitalism from itself, all he’ll end up doing is save capitalism for itself.

And that story and political narrative is one which brought us here in the first place.

Can predistribution lead to a good democracy – or is it another straitjacket for Labour?

 capitalism, Ed Miliband, Éoin Clarke, Peter Levine, predistribution, squeezed middle, squeezed middle class, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Sep 072012
 

It’s been suggested to me via Twitter this morning that “predistribution” (more from Ed Miliband here yesterday) is another example of an Ed Miliband concept which disconcerts at first – and then acquires a much wider acceptance.  Remember, if you will, “squeezed middle” and “responsible capitalism”.

I’d have to take issue with this particular suggestion – if for no other reason than the latter two concepts kind of explain themselves whilst the first is blandly technocratic.  Already, however, in its apparent defence, those in favour of the concept are producing interesting stats which show that even where the public do not understand the word itself, they are firmly on the side of its implications.

Fair enough.  We don’t understand what you’re saying – but if we did, we’d agree anyhow.

My caveats then for this long-term process of rethinking Labour’s brand which Miliband has clearly embarked on?  With the proviso that this is definitely on an initial and slightly bemused reading of the matter, here are my thoughts as follows:

  1. “Responsible capitalism” is a misnomer.  Capitalism tends towards destructive and concentrating monopoly everywhere and anywhere.  Let’s forget the idea – much better to aim for truly free markets.  The goal is more coherent and easy to administer; the tools, generally virtual, both in the sense of how they empower consumers as well as from the point of view of democratic oversight, are getting better; and free markets are compatible as a concept with a broad range of organisational structures.
  2. “Squeezed middle” is utterly uncritical of the severe poverty the very poorest in society are now suffering from.  “Expanding poor” would be more accurate, though possibly not as acceptable to the mass media.
  3. And thus to “predistribution”.  If it’s essentially about “income equality”, and aims to include the sick, people with support needs and the unavoidably unemployed, why not call it that?  “Income equality” describes the aim not the means.  It seems – from my cursory and inexpert reading of the subject – that “predistribution”, meanwhile, precludes certain policies.  Is that the real intention behind it?  Another straitjacket for Labour?

Of course, there is going to be far more complexity to the concept than I have been able to glean and convey today.  And Éoin may indeed be right – I hope he is – when he argues the following:

The beauty of Pre-distribution is that it does not cost a penny to implement & this is why it is key to winning Labour the 2015 General Election. This goes to the heart of Ed Miliband’s Responsible Capitalism.

But if “responsible capitalism” and “squeezed middle” have already been inexactly chosen, who is to say that “predistribution” has been any more usefully devised?  As Chris pointed out recently:

My point here is, or should be, a trivial one. Language shapes thought and therefore activity, and bad metaphors have bad effects.

And as he argued in relation to “predistribution” itself:

Predistributionists, however, seem to be ignoring these options. But then, social democracy has always been about accommodating capitalists’ power more than challenging it.

Of course, the implications of the latter statement are probably a matter for a completely separate post.  But it’s not something we should ignore when we are looking to substitute one system with another.  As I tweeted a few minutes ago:

@DrEoinClarke Current situation clearly unjust. Really would like replacement system to cost less in human terms *&* financial. @ChiOnwurah

For to paraphrase Peter Levine (and not for the first time on these pages), the definition of a good democracy should contemplate both inclusiveness and efficiency.  And if we cannot take this lesson onboard, after all that’s happened over the past five years, we really do not want – nor care – to save our democratic souls.

____________________

Update to this post: this link has just come my way via the Policy Network.  The essay it leads us to is prefaced with this introduction:

To protect and restore the hallmarks of a well-functioning market democracy, progressives in the United States and elsewhere must rebuild its institutional foundations and shift back the uneven organisational balance between concentrated economic interests and the broad public

Sounds good, and says some things I stumbled towards in this post – as well as in quite a few previous ones on these pages.  Looks like it might indeed be worth our time.

Second update to this post: another link, this time from Black Triangle, seems to further contextualise some of the background to all of the above.  It doesn’t look good.  Are Labour’s leaders really looking to pull Tory wool over our eyes?

Why can’t new ideas in politics ever really be new?

Altruistic capitalism (or how to value and reward doing the right thing)

 capitalism, Richard Branson, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Sep 042012
 

In brackets up there, we have the most important issue in the world right now: how to value and reward doing the right thing.  Richard Branson seems to argue this is already happening.  The mechanisms, he says in his article, are already doing their job.  Perhaps this is a bit of a Petri dish culture at the moment: benevolent antibiotical substances have still not begun to properly vanquish the evil bacteria of ancient capitalist instincts.  But it is interesting to see a man who has created companies as anecdotally ineffective as Virgin Mobile finding the time to alternately say such coherent things as this:

It is urgent that we cast aside old business models and embrace those that value and reward doing the right thing. Over the last several years I’ve been lucky enough to meet lots of great people at companies that are enjoying success while delivering Capitalism 24902.

(More about this strangely named Capitalism 24902 here.  Meanwhile, as a by-the-by to the story on Virgin Mobile I link to above, and after battling for a year with the company to sort out their inefficient billing system, my wife has finally been able to make them see the light: they’ve assigned a real person to her, they’ve texted her, they’ve phoned her – and, most recently, they’ve sent a long and detailed letter to her, explaining the issues in question and refunding her incorrectly billed amounts to the tune of over fifty quid.  So there!  A year’s worth of call-centre complaints can sometimes have their impact.)

The real matter to hand, of course, is not whether we agree that we should value and reward doing the right thing.  I’m sure we can all find it in ourselves to agree to something as manifestly constructive as that.  The real matter to hand is what we understand when we say “right thing”.  For a Milton Friedman-style fan of the “moral obligations to shareholders” way of doing business, screwing the workers – as well as the customers in such a way that they do not realise it – is all in a day’s work for an efficiently latterday managerialist captain of industry.  Meanwhile, if you start from the position that disability is the human condition, you will fashion an entirely different way of approaching society’s priorities and starting points.

As well as the priorities of those actors – both individuals and legal figures – who and which form an essential part of that society.

Which is why I find Richard Branson’s idea of altruistic capitalism interesting.  Not fascinating, mind – just interesting.  It would be fascinating if I didn’t suspect him of PR-ing his way – powering in other words – not only into the traditional cash cows of transport, communications and media but, latterly, healthcare and other grey-generation areas we may only now begin to suspect.

That is to say, whilst he likes – in a very Facebook-generation way – the oxymoron-like idea of an altruistic capitalism, in practice his own overarching structures, his own business constructs, his own inability to do anything but eventually follow the money, will require him to continue marching upwards and onwards in his hardly mould-breaking ways.

A good capitalist, perhaps.  Yes, I think I can take that onboard.  But a good person – in the sense of socially responsible and aware – I do sometimes wonder.

Sincerity, after all, that is to say, the gap between kind words and arguably harsh deeds, hardly seems to ooze from absolutely every one of his pores.

Who’ll be best placed to learn from the 20th century – capitalism or its victims?

 capitalism, Chris Dillow, class war, class warfare, Dave Semple, socialism, socialism for the rich, Soviet Russia, unclassifiable  4 Responses »
Aug 242012
 

Rick describes thus the attitudes of the supposed New Tory Right:

Last week, a group of Tory MPs abandoned all that stuff about ‘hardworking families’ and branded this country Lazy Britain:

Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor.

It’s rubbish, of course. Fact Check pointed out that our full-timers work some of the longest hours in Europe and, even when you add in our relatively high number of part-time workers, we still work longer hours than the Germans. As for the productivity argument, Chris Dillow dealt with that, noting that there is a strong negative correlation between hours worked and productivity. Just working harder, then, won’t improve our economy and, in any case, shouldn’t we aspire to be more like the richer countries that work smarter, rather than the poorer ones that work longer?

Chris had already concluded that (the bold is mine):

I’m pretty sure, then, that Raab is talking rot. What I’m not so sure about is why. One possibility is that he’s so blinded by free market ideology and by romantic ideas about entrepreneurs and managers that he just cannot see that some free market reforms are of negligible benefit and that some bosses are less than heroic.

But you’d have thought that the experience of the crisis – which has seen bankers get multi-million bonuses whilst good workers lose their jobs – would have disabused anyone of the just world theory that capitalism rewards talent and effort. There’s comes a point when a cognitive bias shades into a psychiatric disorder.

This leaves another possibility. It’s that Raab is simply taking sides in a class war. He wants to further empower bosses to bully workers, even if this has no macroeconomic benefit.

Meanwhile Dave, in a comment to my own post, argues the following:

I think your middle paragraph nails it. Do you remember Gordon Brown declaring that boom and bust economics was dead? The truth is that this was pure hokum, in the best traditions of Francis Fukuyama and the end-of-history-death-of-ideology brigade.

Life is a battlefield, but we’ve forgotten it. We’ve had it easy.

Eric Hobsbawm wrote a book about the short twentieth century, from 1914-1991. This is probably mistaken. The twentieth century as an idea lasted until 2008. The fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of the veil behind which capitalism hid, with the crisis and the cuts, are two sides of the same coin. It just took a while for both to be revealed.

Now, I think, we have returned to political struggle almost as it was at the beginning of the 20th century, with no socialist bogeyman to scare people away and no entrenched Stalinist politicians to betray the movement with their bad tactics. We have a clean sheet, for the first time in a century. As prior to WWI, capitalism has geared up for an assault.

If we resist hard, we risk running the same gauntlet as before – war, depression, devastation, even perhaps genocide. But this time we will not make the same mistakes.

And so my question is this: who’ll be best placed to learn from the 20th century – capitalism or its victims?

I wonder.

Victims, throughout recent media history anyhow, have occupied the condition of the passive put-upon righteous.  The noble black man in Hollywood cinema you simply know will die the first in the convoluted plot-line so constructed; the screaming woman who can only be saved by a (generally) white knight in shining armour … how the good must die – or at the very least suffer – on the altars of pathos and tragedy our societies so love to casually devise.

Yet the worldly experience of the US Civil Rights Movement, of feminist struggles everywhere, of men, women and children who have striven to create their own worlds quite at the margin of the consumerist freedoms our century wants to limit us to … surely all of the above shows us that victims do not have to be passive, do not have to lie down and suffer – can, after all, action and lever and inspire positive change.

Yes.  I think Dave is right.  We are right back at the beginning of the 20th century.  And so it is that politicians like the New Tory Right which Rick describes so accurately are simply incapable of appreciating exactly what this means.  They are so wrapped up in capitalism’s tendency to substitute true renewal with simple dog-eat-dog tail-chasing that they are unable to see beyond their short-term hubris.  Their version of capitalism has become so technically and intellectually corrupted – so damnably inefficient on its own terms, for God’s sake – that the seeds of its own destruction have been sprouting for a very long time now.

Will the 21st century, then, be the century that the victims of capitalism learn properly from a previous century’s history – learn properly that being a victim doesn’t have to mean resigning oneself to becoming a downtrodden subject?

Again, I wonder.

And ask you to wonder too.

On the virtues of Darwinian capitalism (and how we ain’t got even that)

 a con, Ayn Rand, capitalism, Darwinian capitalism, free-market capitalism  No Responses »
Aug 222012
 

Those of you who regularly read these pages will know I’m not a fan of what I’ve termed Darwinian capitalism.  The idea that humans in their economic environments should aim to reproduce the conditions that make us most similar to the beasts that populate this earth – instead of amplifying the socialising aspects which differentiate us most from such tooth-and-claw dynamics – is not something that immediately attracts me.

But today, this morning, as I awoke from sleepy unconscious contemplation, and found myself making churros and croquetas for breakfast, I realised that sadly enough we don’t even have Darwinian capitalism.  This is not survival of the fittest but survival of the sneakiest.

The ground rules run as follows: we set up governing structures where the state pays for roads, schools, hospitals and other communications structures; for inspection and oversight systems and procedures; for the writing and implementation of laws; and for security services which help guarantee social order.  In exchange, we are obliged to contribute taxes to make it all work.  This includes future services such as pensions and health and social welfare support for the elderly, who always require more support than the young in society.

You then spend your whole life participating in such an unspoken social contract – only for an economic crisis like the one which currently assails us to pull the rug from under the feet of the poor and middle classes, and thus change the ground rules forever.

Only the ground rules haven’t been changed.  Rather, we were led to misunderstand them.  Life, the economy and everything isn’t structured to provide everyone with opportunities: life, the economy and everything is structured to allow the sneaky to win over the honest and open; to allow the cunning to beat the sharingly creative; to allow the foxily brazen to undermine the sincere; to allow the selfishly individual to overcome the gently social.

This isn’t even Darwinian capitalism.  The playing-field is mined – and battle only commences once we, the poor and middle classes, have struggled across its entire expanse.  The powerful, meanwhile, sit on the sidelines, appearing to spectate more than participate.  And when they do finally enjoin battle, it is with a society so sodden by the mud of unjustly opaque ground rules that the final result will never be in doubt.

If only we did have a real Darwinian capitalism.  In a world where brains can frequently beat brawn, it’s possible that those with considerable support needs might – even so – still win out.  But Darwin has nothing to do with the travesty of justice we are now witnessing.  Pensions which collapse in value; social security systems which are cut so tax rebates and exemptions can benefit grand corporate institutions; banking systems which continue to feed off and profit from the carrion their inefficient managements have converted our economies into … this is not the survival of the fittest; nor the evolution of the most intelligent; nor the development and progress of the species.  This is, rather, the institutionalisation of a casual corruption: so casual we are unable to properly see it for what it is.  A corruption of the virtues and tools of all that humanity is best at: a contamination of goodness and professionalism; of a desire to be efficient and honest; of an instinct to treat others as one might prefer to be treated oneself.

No wonder those who legally rob and steal from our societies – those who set up the rules and regulations with sufficient leeway to allow for their every whim – then fiercely proceed to criticise and condemn those who will inevitably remain far weaker than themselves.

The former know they’re evil in what they do – even if only at a subconscious level.

Meanwhile, the latter are only just beginning to realise the truth.

Perhaps too late to make any difference.

So that’s where we find ourselves: stupid wool-pulled-over-the-eyes broadly educated voting populaces who generally play by rules which the rich and powerful have designed to their own perfection.

Not in the intellectually coherent belief that a libertarian approach to life is simply better for humanity and its social health but, instead, out of a truly hubris-laden comprehension that their deep pockets deserve far more wealth than ours – and just because they say so.

Meanwhile we – who have allowed them to get exactly where they are – deserve everything which now makes our life a misery.

Not because we’re less fit.  Just because we’re not sneaky.

Simply because we’re unhappy to dish out the shit the rich and powerful have come to revel in.

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