latterday capitalism » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

Volunteering’s place in a society of the selfish (or a case of "Alice in Wonderland" by Kafka)

a con, Iain Duncan Smith, Kafka, latterday capitalism, unemployment, unpaid overtime, volunteering, workfare No Responses »

Feb 252012

On Thursday I came to the following conclusion: workfare is the state’s equivalent of the private sector’s tendency to force people to work for nothing. My reasoning? As follows:

Maybe workfare is just the state’s equivalent – its construct if you like – of what private sector and self-employed individuals desperately spend most of their time struggling with: unpaid overtime in the hope of distant promotion; wining and dining in the hope of distant contracts. And the reason we have workfare, even where it may be illegal, is because – in a reasonably illegal (or at least immoral) way too – the private sector has, over time, had to become accustomed to playing the same unremunerated games.

After all, the state and the private sector are often mirrors of each other: closer in what and how they do the stuff they do than detractors of either would care to admit.

Think about it. Tomorrow is “Work Your Proper Hours Day”. Isn’t this pretty similar to what workfare asks us to do?

Work Your Proper Hours Day (24 Feb 2012) is the day when the average person who does unpaid overtime finishes the unpaid days they do every year, and starts earning for themselves. We think that’s a day worth celebrating.

Over five million people at work in the UK regularly do unpaid overtime, giving their employers £29.2 billion of free work last year alone. [...]

Meanwhile, back in 2010 I reported on Mr Duncan Smith’s penchant for blaming the unemployed for the state in which they found themselves, as I wondered if we were stumbling into “Alice in Wonderland” or Kafka. In the event, and from today’s perspective, it would seem it was a case of the first written by the second. The piece I wrote does, in fact, make for painful rereading – especially in the light of what’s been happening of late.

Prescient, even. Sadly enough.

And I am reminded of when I worked in a large corporation where it was suggested that volunteering activities should form a part of the bonus-attached compulsory annual objectives – that is to say, and I swear this really happened, an HR department of an 80,000-worker company was capable of coming up with the wizard wheeze of making volunteering compulsory.

Things like this do of course give volunteering a bad name. For it’s a small step from not wanting to volunteer any more to refusing to work in good faith under any circumstances. And we certainly don’t want that to happen.

So in a society where capitalism is no longer a force for freedom – and it would appear every capitalist of a successful bent has the perfect right and permission to maximise their personal wealth at the expense of everyone else – what place does the good faith that is this desire to work without being paid actually have?

That is to say, what is the place of volunteering in a society of the selfish?

Does it have any place in a society where everyone who is in charge is only out to maximise their outcomes?

The con that is competition

competition, customers, employees, employers, in a hole, latterday capitalism, managerialism, public sector, Spain, suppliers, total quality management No Responses »

Feb 202012

I remember, whilst living in Spain, working as a language-learning provider for a car components manufacturer. Their job it was to build the plastic linings of car roofs and doors; car and coach seats; and a multitude of other items.

Their customers were companies like Mercedes and Renault. The factories in the group we supplied the language services for were never larger than about 250 workers – and specific to each customer. The machines they used and the methods of working they employed were imposed by the customers too. The relationship was close, claustrophobic, hard-bitten – but relatively long-term. The latter factor was therefore the upside which supposedly helped justify all the other pretty hard-to-live-with downsides.

I also remember my students telling me how they had to work till eight in the evening, designing and redesigning industrial objects of art; and this extra time was never paid as overtime. They were glad of their jobs – and complied with the unspoken requirements. Even though theirs, in the main, were not executive responsibilities. Clocking on in the morning was one of their primary duties; it was just the clocking-off in the evening at any time possible to predict that they were allowed to forgo.

Their philosophy of working was called total quality management – or TQM for short. In their particular version of TQM, they had a decalogue – a kind of industrial Ten Commandments – which the workers in each factory had created for themselves. The first item on the list was common across the group: “The customer is king.” But theirs was not the baleful appeal to external pressures designed to make workers work harder in the absence of effective people managers; the con, that is, which is competition. No. When they said the customer was king, this was on the understanding that everyone in a company was both customer and supplier at different moments in the processes that led to external customers being supplied with their products and services.

For example, if my boss required a report of me by Friday and promised me data to complete it by Thursday, the report made me the supplier and my boss the customer and the data made me the customer and my boss the supplier. The beauty of such a philosophy was that good person management – at least in theory – became par for the industrial course.

In reality, I am pretty sure that in very few places in our latterday capitalism is such a circular paradise of rights and responsibilities properly and pleasingly implemented. Competition is more often than not used – by those who appeal to its supposed virtues – to supplement the insufficient abilities of the managerial class to effectively and humanely carry out their day-to-day responsibilities.

So when ideologues ask for more competition in public services, they should be encouraged to explain why better management wouldn’t – in itself – work just as well. That is to say, the application of a similarly circular form of TQM as described and experienced above.

For it’s not fear on which we should be building the foundations of this 21st century but trust, respect and professionalism.

It’s not the indignity and pain of losing one’s job that should be used to drive us but our pride in doing everything we do as well as we can.

So where – and when – did we begin to get it all so wrong?

What if an excluding nationalism could be a positive force?

a con, anti-freedom, bad capitalism, Big Capitalism, Chris Dillow, corporations, latterday capitalism, managerialism, Nick Cohen, Stumbling and Mumbling 3 Responses »

Feb 152012

I am minded to ask the question because of this article Brian drew my attention to the other day:

One of our era’s foundational myths is that globalization has condemned the nation-state to irrelevance. [...]

The article – well worth reading in full – goes on to argue that in the absence of a true global consciousness, nation-states are all that we can rely on. Indeed:

The global financial crisis has shattered [the myth that nation-states are irrelevant]. Who bailed out the banks, pumped in the liquidity, engaged in fiscal stimulus, and provided the safety nets for the unemployed to thwart an escalating catastrophe? Who is re-writing the rules on financial-market supervision and regulation to prevent another occurrence? Who gets the lion’s share of the blame for everything that goes wrong? The answer is always the same: national governments. The G-20, the International Monetary Fund, and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision have been largely sideshows.

Meanwhile, Chris summarises beautifully how, in the last fifty years, capitalism has become a force for anti-freedom:

During the Cold War, opponents of communism routinely, and not entirely wrongly, claimed to be champions of liberty. Freedom for capitalists and freedom of speech and thought go together, it was claimed. “Freedom is indivisible” wrote Bruce Winton Knight in 1952. “Economic freedom is…an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom“ wrote Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom. And back in 1944 Friedrich Hayek complained that “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.”

Today, though, this seems wrong. Many threats to freedom come from capitalists. The story is no longer capitalism and freedom, but capitalism against freedom. Two of the world’s largest economies – China and Russia – show that capitalism can exist quite happily without political freedom.

Whilst also quoting Nick Cohen who describes with a chilling precision exactly my perceptions of what working in a massive corporation is like:

The managers of private and public bureaucracies justify their elevated status and salaries not only by attempting to run efficient organisations (a task that is often beyond the poor dears) but by monitoring and intimidating those beneath them.

And so it is that I come back to the question at the top of this post: what if an excluding nationalism could actually become a positive force? Not, however, a traditionally excluding nationalism – but, rather, an economically excluding nationalism.

If, through the channelling forces of a different kind of cultural identity, we could raise barricades against the rapacious actions of a latterday capitalism – a latterday capitalism which prefers to localise to their clear disadvantage the actions of workers even as, to its clear advantage, it globalises the movement of money – perhaps we could create cultures based more on a shared desire to fight the anti-freedom of planetary economics than to battle, maybe a shade dangerously, on behalf of the discrete freedoms of individual ethnicity.

In this sense, then, we could conceptualise our nationalisms around:

how we do business instead of how business does us – which is to say, always attracting business on our own terms;
how we define community instead of how community defines us – which is to say, creating shared spaces which are tolerant to every person but not to every intolerance;
how we see the future instead of how the future sees us – which is to say, empowering the people who live under the umbrella of a nation-state rather than giving in to the inevitable currents of a ruling elite;

That a certain kind of capitalism is now the anti-freedom of us all is no longer in doubt. The question is how we can wield most effectively the little power we have to recreate the conditions that once proudly connected good business with political freedom.

And perhaps we are too late. For if this is no longer possible in the 19th century birthplace of corporate capitalism, and is no longer necessary in its 21st-century powerhouses, how can small people across the globe even contemplate changing anything?

Except, as this post might suggest, little by little – and nation-state by nation-state by nation-state …

Chaos at RBS: good, bad and very very ugly

a con, chaos, corporate hooligans, economic blackmail, latterday capitalism, RBS No Responses »

Jan 292012

This, from the BBC last November, reminds us how chaos is in the eyes of the beholder:

Eviction notices have been attached to tents at a protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

The City of London Corporation notice tells Occupy London Stock Exchange (OLSX) activists to clear the “public highway” by 18:00 GMT on Thursday.

The “public highway” being the land occupied by the protest at the time which did not belong to the Cathedral.

Obviously, the kind of chaos this was leading to – on a shared “public highway” – was considered by those who we presume should know more about these things as completely unacceptable in a modern civilisation. Two reactions then: first, this was chaos; second, we should not tolerate it.

And I can live with that conclusion – even where my instincts are not to approve.

This morning, meanwhile, we have another example of chaos – this time as defined by Iain Duncan Smith:

Iain Duncan Smith has said there would have been “chaos” if ministers had overruled the board of RBS and vetoed a £963,000 share bonus for its boss.

The government has come under pressure to act over Stephen Hester’s bonus as it owns 82% of the bank’s shares.

Cabinet Minister Mr Duncan Smith told the BBC “nobody would be happier” than ministers if Mr Hester declined it.

But it had been up to the RBS board – if they had gone, it would have had a huge impact, he said.

The kind of huge impact – on an 80 percent state shareholding, on tens of thousands of workers and on millions of customers – which no one in our society is willing to do anything about, at least in the sense of proactively preventing its occurrence.

Except, of course, by not only giving entirely in to but also sanctioning fully the rights of those making these implicit threats of executive blackmail.

Again, my reactions are twofold: first, as in the case of St Paul’s, this was chaos; second, we have no alternative but to tolerate it.

Oh, people!

Really!

How do you expect us to believe in a socioeconomic environment which behaves like this?

I really find no other way of describing this second example than to call it economic blackmail by corporate hooligans of the very lowest order. And these are the captains of industry whose behaviours we are being asked to support and even emulate?

How very very short the modern representatives of capitalism are happy to sell their baby these days.

Fearful figures on the verge of an economic breakdown

crisis, economics, in a hole, jobs, latterday capitalism, Spain, unemployment, youth No Responses »

Jan 282012

This is indeed a lost generation. The country of my wife and children, Spain, as reported by the Telegraph yesterday, now has a youth unemployment rate of 51.4 percent. Meanwhile, as painted by the English version of the Spanish El País newspaper, the wider picture is just as terrifying:

According to the National Statistics Institute’s (INE) latest quarterly Active Population Survey (EPA), the unemployment rate climbed from 21.5 percent in the third quarter to 22.85 percent in the period October-December. The ranks of the unemployed swelled by 348,700, while the number of people who lost their jobs during the whole of last year amounted to 577,000. The number of people out of work at the end of the year stood at a record 5.273 million.

The solution to this problem? As follows:

The gloomy figures underscored the dire need for an overhaul of the labor market, a task the government wants to complete in the first quarter of this year.

But with an important proviso:

“This shows that the government has to carry out a labor reform that focuses on incentivizing hiring, rather than just on cutting firing costs,” Bloomberg quoted Estefania Ponte, chief economist at Cortal Consors, in Madrid as saying. [...]

And I thought capitalism had all the tools it needed to sort out – all on its lonesome – the pretty mess someone, or something, has got us into.

Oh! It does …

In 2011 Spanish luxury goods sales were up by 25% despite the economic climate in the country.The luxury goods sector brought in 4,500 million euros up to the end of this year.

Truth of the matter is that capitalism by itself offers no convincing solutions for a broader society. It can’t. It’s been so vigorously – and for such a long time – a fundamental part of the problem.

And as any good experienced teacher would tell you, there is no one methodology in the world which can ever teach you everything you need to know or do. We must apply the same principle to economic practice.

Instead of building these self-justifying barricades between different classes and ways of seeing.

I do wonder if the crisis isn’t rather more profound, mind. What if the deficit isn’t really financial? I mean obviously there’s a shortage of political will to spend our way out of encroaching crisis, as perhaps we have preferred to do so on previous occasions – but, in reality, perhaps the problem is actually that we simply no longer have enough jobs to go around. No mystery here – nor a particularly perceptive remark. But, nevertheless, maybe – in the circumstances – worth revisiting. As the past century progressed, automation struck in more and more professions: we now learn by ourselves; medicate ourselves; bank by ourselves; book our holidays by ourselves; even get to the point where we contemplate the possibility of legally representing ourselves. And maybe – just maybe – all the aforementioned just goes to show that the balance generated by our economic structures between jobs and consumers is suddenly and irrevocably tipping in favour of the latter.

That is to say, our latterday Western economies – as they are set up and structured these days (and for some reason my unpractised eye is totally unable to fathom) – require far more of us to play the role of passive consumers than that of productive workers.

Does it have to be that way? I really don’t know. Wasn’t there a time, for a while, in the last quarter of the last century, that a potentially halcyon period of generous leisure activity began to be promised to our future generations? I can certainly remember the predictions made by the technologically minded stories and thinkers who dominated my scientifically influenced thought processes in my more tender years.

Of that – however – we hear little these days, it would seem. Instead, the things they tend to say now remind us we must work for less; work more flexibly; work more insecurely; and, above all, expect no guarantees whatsoever.

Stability of personal income is no virtue or given of modern Western society. As an American called Kirk (and spookily so) apparently said at Davos today:

US trade rep Kirk: “More and more Americans question value proposition of trade… think weve traded jobs for cheap t-shirts /iPads #Davos

And it’s not just the jobs – it’s the nature of those jobs.

For Christ’s sake capitalism – get your bloody act together before it’s too late!

You’d almost think your proponents thought there was no alternative.

But there always is – to everything.

So where have all your competitive instincts gone? Is it in fact – and here perhaps we have a horrifying unspoken truth – that, after so much time spent managing and manipulating and operating in monopolistic markets, our capitalist captains have forgotten what real free markets feel and look like? As well as the instincts which should correspond to such mindsets?

Fearful figures, indeed, then, on the verge of an economic breakdown.

All of us, that is. Sooner or later.

From turbo-capitalism to people’s capitalism in one sly stupid step

a con, David Cameron, in a hole, latterday capitalism, Partido Popular, people's capitalism, people's car, risk No Responses »

Jan 202012

Cameron speaketh thus on the subject:

In the third new year intervention by the main party leaders on what is being described as “responsible capitalism”, the prime minister revived a signature theme of his time in opposition when he said he would preside over an era of “popular capitalism”.

“I want these difficult economic times to achieve more than just paying down the deficit and encouraging growth,” he said. He also announced a co-operatives bill to give public sector workers a greater chance to create mutuals to deliver public services.

“I want them to lead to a socially responsible and genuinely popular capitalism,” he said.

Meanwhile, the truth about capitalism, high-level corporate managers and the relationship they have with their ever-so-absent shareholders probably runs more along these lines than Cameron would care to admit:

The UK government assumes shareholders are the owners and main risk-bearers of companies. This is not the case. Most shareholders are traders and speculators and have little long-term interest in invigilating companies.

And I do wonder where in the world – when something breaks so profoundly as latterday capitalism – the solution is then to be found in spreading even more of the risk amongst its poorest participants: the working-classes. But I suppose, in this, I ought not to be at all surprised: the ways of the world may always have been as described. So it is that whilst risk is spread cleverly amongst the poor – and its downsides, when they come, as in fact they always must, are eventually paid for by the same – any benefits that ever emerge out of the brutal cycle that is unrepentant capitalism will always be reserved for those who manage our economies principally for their own advantage.

So will we, the voters, readily swallow this political hook of Cameron’s? I’m sure we will – if only because anything which denotes “the people” is surely a “good thing”. From that “people’s car”, then, to the rancid right-wing and now governing Partido Popular in Spain (more background here), when politicians get hold of the epithet that describes “common folk” we can only expect the very worst instincts to flourish.

As, perhaps, we in Britain have only too easily come to expect – and, even, given our apparently astonishing levels of tolerance, finally accept. As I pointed out over a year ago now:

Trends like these – and others we may perceive – are working together hard to make our blessed Big Society nothing more than an old boys’ network of the retired and semi-retired. Putting people in their places and pigeon-holes is the game we’re playing now.

We are in the process of disenfranchising politically and democratically whole swathes of the population, re-engineering society’s wider expectations and leaving in the hands of both the conservative and the Conservatives amongst us the running of our schools, hospitals, local communities and neighbourhoods.

And all the above will – one day – be a breeding-ground for petty corruption.

Everything this government is doing is all part of the same long-term strategy.

And in the trees that are the detail of a truly popular protest, outrage and revulsion, we lose sight of the fact that the Coalition is still rapaciously destroying our woods. A generation to destroy; a generation to repair; and barely two years to initiate a final countdown none of us could have expected. This is the story of British politics since the 1980s.

And it’s only just begun.

Employee share ownership is no solution for these times

a con, cooperatives, engagement, John Lewis Partnership, latterday capitalism, Nick Clegg, workers No Responses »

Jan 162012

Nick Clegg appears to have been widely praised for suggesting we should “John Lewis” the economy. This from the Guardian today:

Workers could be given the right to request shares in the companies they work for under proposals put forward on Monday by Nick Clegg, to create what he describes as a “John Lewis” economy.

In a bid to deploy century-old liberal principles to the mounting debate about crony capitalism, the deputy prime minister will argue that the economy is in danger of being “monopolised by a minority” and that wider share ownership among employees could be an answer. “Just as the eighties had been the decade of share ownership, so this decade should become the decade of employee share ownership”, he will say in a speech at the Corporation of London and the Centreforum thinktank.

Now far be it from me to criticise such an idea, especially when John Lewis Partnership has laudable financial structures in place such as these:

[...] every partner [that is to say, employee] receives an Annual Bonus, which is a share of the profit. It is calculated as a percentage of the salary, with the same percentage for everyone, from top management down to the shop floor and the storage rooms. The bonus is dependent on the profitability of the partnership each year, varying between 9% and 20% of the partners’ annual salaries since 2000. The Annual Partnership Bonus for 2007 was the top end 20%, this is before the recession started. The Annual Partnership Bonus for 2008 was 15% of a partner’s gross earnings for the 2007/2008 financial year. The Annual Partnership Bonus for 2009 was 13% of a partner’s gross earnings for the 2008/2009 financial year. The Annual Partnership Bonus for 2010 was 15% of a partner’s gross earnings for the 2009/2010 financial year.

It is, however, worth noting that there exist other structures in modern-day manufacturing and service-industry Britain which would bring about far more engagement between workforces and management – and even help to constructively blur the lines themselves. As this tweet underlined this morning:

Yep. RT @brylip: @GreenSolitaire Funny how “john lewis” brand evoked not “co-op”. Right to request shares long way off industrial democracy.

And to be honest, in a capitalism such as this – a capitalism, remember, we are suffering from – where is the blessed virtue or attraction in investing part of one’s financial reserves in the business one may shortly be ejected from? Especially when – in a capitalism such as ours – the reason why businesses may go to the wall could have very little to do with the entities in question and everything to do not only with violently culpable behaviours in the financial services sector but also a wider mismanagement in political and economic institutions.

Knowing how – in the last few years – the world economy has been entirely turned upside down by a few banks, their cronies and other assorted villains, would you really want to spend every penny in negotiating a perfect financial fit between you and your corporation or medium-sized enterprise?

I know I wouldn’t.

The neoliberal alternatives: manage decline for everyone or engineer success for the few

latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, managing decline, neoliberalism, politicians, politics, success, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jan 012012

Recently, I’ve been buffeted by contradictory waves of thought. I’ve posted on hating august professions as a result of their proclivity to self-interest above wider responsibilities. Then I read Norman on how cold concepts such as egalitarian justice, not love, should drive our socialist instincts.

I’ve also wondered if politicians should spend more time imagining and being creative (more here) than managing and administering our futures – the latter link being a highly considered post from Paul over at Never Trust a Hippy.

And then, via Andrew on Facebook, this piece on economists being imagineers of the future has finally come my way. It’s quite a long piece – and deserves to be read in full. Essentially, it would seem that to date many economists have predicted the future on the basis of what has happened in the past – without taking into account the variable that is human behaviour and its ability to change how it reacts to (mainly) government diktats:

To understand the critique, suppose that the government is considering imposing a new tax on a particular industry. Based upon the government’s estimate of profits in the industry, it expects to collect a large amount of taxes and solve its revenue problems.

But when the tax is actually imposed, profits do not turn out to be as large as expected and tax revenues come in far short of projections. What happened? The firms took steps to reduce their tax exposure, e.g. they used the usual accounting tricks to inflate costs and lower reported revenues to reduce taxable profit. To the extent they were successful, tax collections were lower than expected.

The lesson from this example is that people change their behavior in response to changes in the conditions they face. And this is one of the things that separate what researchers in the hard sciences do from the work of economists. If I tell my TV set that I am going to smash the screen with a baseball bat, it will just sit there. It won’t take evasive action. But a human in the same situation will do their best to get out of the way and avoid harm. When harm is expected, whether it’s physical harm, higher taxes, more work for less pay — whatever — people try to avoid it.

In conclusion, the post argues:

The end of the second essay calls for “attempts to create a future that does not now exist, rather than mindlessly crunching the numbers that do exist.” There are plenty of number crunchers in the profession, and as an applied econometrician I’ll certainly defend their value in grounding theorists in real world data. But there are also plenty of “imagineers” — people who play with toy models and toy ideas to envision worlds that do not now exist, but could — and perhaps one of them will discover the “blueprint for a better way” that Roger Martin hopes will emerge from the broader conception of science he writes about in his essay.

And whilst, as someone fascinated by the act of following trains of thought, I would be inclined to believe that society needs more imagineers than managers, a saddening and depressing thought does – after all the above – come furiously to mind: imagineers tend to find an intellectual driver in following such trains of thought whatever their potential impact on the outside world. Like engineers and designers of weapons of mass destruction, they become isolated from the reality they manage to change as they become capable of effecting massively significant alterations in our environments.

On the back of some of my recent posts, a couple of people have commented that it is when the politicians get their grubby hands on incompletely understood economic concepts that everything – and everyone – tends to go belly-up. But I would find myself arguing that where economists have already gone down the route of imagineers – Milton Friedman is one case which comes immediately to mind – they have succeeded all on their lonesome in occupying the role of engineers of society.

Cheap and nasty second-hand car salespeople who slide into political activity for their very own benefit will always use the hand-me-down ideas of semi-popular science to support their already existing prejudices of how the world should be organised.

But if truth be told, the only profession which has a moral right to imagine the future should be our political class – and that class alone. Scientists should resist the temptation to create social empires on the back of empirical research – it is not their business to recreate the world but – simply and plainly – observe it.

Even where this observation may influence the result on more occasions than we might care to admit.

And yet, given our experience in three successive regimes – Thatcher’s painful epoch of industrial deconstruction; Blair’s influential, and influenced, three terms of compensatory socialism by stealth; and Cameron’s quite evil and savage imposition of a British Year Zero that aims only to fill the pockets of the already rich and wealthy – I do wonder if we really want, or need, another generation of politicians who want to engineer societies.

Manage decline for everyone or engineer success for the few? Are these the only alternatives that neoliberalism has driven us to?

If so, I now find myself thrashing about as to whom I should blame.

Even as I wonder if I am right to want to blame anyone …

Is there any alternative to more for the rich and less for the poor?

Ed Miliband, in a hole, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, neoliberalism, on a high, politicians, politics, pyramid politics No Responses »

Dec 302011

I was debating yesterday in two posts why anyone should care to support Ed Miliband. Today I’d like to analyse more closely why my support for him has increased since he was voted Labour leader.

Before I start, I’d like to say I didn’t vote for him at all.

Mine are not the ravings of unconditional admiration but – rather – an attempt to understand whether a relative innocent can make it to the very top of UK pyramidal politics.

Chris criticises Miliband for a lack of self-awareness. Myself, I am inclined more to agree with Eoin’s perception of the forces ranged widely against the Labour leader, when he says things like this:

Peter Mandleson has not been quiet either. Well actually strike that, he’s been very quiet. But, that’s because he now has people to do his work for him. Through his ‘Policy Exchange’ vehicle he has commissioned several pieces that are about as predictable as is humanly possible from the uber-Blairite. I won’t give his pieces any more air time than they deserve but suffice to say if you get a chance, wander over to their site and view the ideas of Giles, Radice, Byrne, McClymont and others. The point I am making is that powerful forces are working consistently against the Ed Miliband undermining the direction he wishes to take the party and it’s all happening under your very noses.

Yes. It’s true. Ed Miliband may never deliver the political party some of us hope deep down he really wants to create, essentially because either his relative innocence or the more experienced forces ranged against him – or maybe a combination of the two – will simply impede him from fulfilling this unspoken promise.

A Twitter friend of mine yesterday pointed out that any Labour government is better than a Tory government – and I am inclined to agree that it is so. But I reminded this friend that beyond such hoary comparisons – used by those with unimaginative neoliberal economic inclinations to justify the current poverty of both politics and the material world for the majority – there is also the following truth: whilst any Labour government is better than its Tory equivalent, a humane Labour government is better than both.

His arguments focussed around the fact that Ed was unelectable. Mine focussed around his (ie my Twitter friend’s) excessive lack of ambition: the fact that he was settling for a relative carbon copy future where the only difference between Labour and the Tories was the degree to which wealth continued to be concentrated on those who already owned the world, as the poor were obliged to accept the maxim that the workers always need less in order to want to work more.

Which is why I ask the question in the title of today’s post: is there any alternative to more for the rich and less for the poor? Most modern politicians are so in thrall to the demonstrable failures of our current economic system that they are incapable of imagining any alternatives. It’s not a coherent narrative we’re missing – narrators out there we have millions. Rather, it’s a coherent plot, a synopsis which contains a grain of truth, a story which has a beginning, a middle and an end that we find ourselves without – it’s the trains of thought which create structure and meaning and contain and circumscribe our realities that we really find ourselves wanting.

Our politicians got so used to writing best-sellers through those dark arts of marketing that they forgot how to create leading characters which were anything but cardboard and plastic. Our politics is, thus, now the political equivalent of the cheaper and bulkier end of the literary industry: zero imagination, zero creativity, zero ingenuity, zero understanding of reality.

And why I hang on to Ed Miliband – even at this late stage – is because I see in him the potential to break away from the above dynamic. His relative innocence, his relative freedom from self-interested parties, his apparent desire to be good for goodness’s sake … all these things attract me precisely because all his contemporaries only promise more of what has already bankrupted us.

If you have plenty of reasons not to support Ed Miliband for at least a year more, give me just one solvent reason to support any of his contemporaries instead.

And don’t tell me the reason I should break my intellectual back is because electing a carbon copy Labour government to do the dirty work of the rich and wealthy everywhere is sufficient reason in itself.

So whether on the alleged left or the more scurrilous right, is there anyone out there who doesn’t promise more public resource to prop up the greedy banking industry and less public resource to fund the welfare state; more money for the private health corporations and less for the minimum-waged workforces; more tax breaks and opportunities for the 1 percent and fewer life-generating alternatives for the remaining 99 percent; and more sponsored lies hiding the acts of the sly transnationals – organisations which take advantage of the developing poor in the interests of their selfish and uncaring shareholders?

Anyone at all? Even just a little?

Anyone with half a chance of getting into power who isn’t – in the end – going to give it all away as they find themselves obliged to work on behalf of the already wealthy?

Myself, I do wonder if it is time to jettison our attachment to traditional politics and – via parallel structures such as globalised virtual communities – sidestep ourselves what our politicians refuse to re-contemplate.

That is to say, make our own politics outside the current as we decide exactly what we are looking to achieve.

The other alternative is to identify – as in my last few posts I think I have been trying to – existing politicians who might be convinced to both understand our thesis as well as grasp wholeheartedly the potential opportunities.

You may fairly argue that Ed Miliband is not that politician.

So tell me then: who is?

The collapse of capitalism: time to destroy or time to engage?

business, capitalism, David Miliband, Labour, latterday capitalism, Next Left, party politics, politics, unclassifiable 3 Responses »

Dec 042011

This is the clearest evidence one can have – if evidence was needed – that capitalism has failed:

Almost two-thirds of people believe the current generation of children will have a lower standard of living than their parents, as concern about the economic crisis hardens into long-term pessimism, a new poll shows.

And I say this because an essential part of capitalism’s dynamics is the belief and confidence its subjects have in the future. Without these two elements, people do not invest; do not battle with the challenges; do not take risks. So it is that capitalism is mortally wounded.

The temptation must be very great – as we are always going to be sons and daughters of previous generations – to do an Iraq on capitalism even as it is on its last legs: bomb it to bits (figuratively speaking, that is) and then wait and see what flowers all on its lonesome.

I would, however, prefer to believe we are capable of avoiding getting involved in such a destructive cycle for the second, third or fourth time in a generation and – instead – learn from such experiences to a wider societal benefit. Two initiatives do make me wonder if other people think the same. First, this rather idiosyncratic presentation (no web-based context – just an almost automatic download of a .pdf file) of how important the concept of business should be to Labour (more context from Next Left to this project can be found here). Its Foreword provides sufficient background thus:

Foreword
Chuka Umunna
I welcome this collection, which brings together
many important contributions to the discussion on the new
economy we seek to create, and crucially the role of enterprise
within it.
Our economy faces huge challenges, both in terms of increased
competition from the emerging economies of Asia and
Latin America, but also the fact that it is not working for enough
people in the way it can and should. Because of the government’s
decision to cut spending and raise taxes too far and too fast, our
recovery was choked off well before the crisis in the Eurozone.
Living standards are being squeezed harder than in living
memory, unemployment is at its highest in seventeen years and
the ‘British promise’ – the understanding that each generation
will benefit from better opportunities than the last – is at risk
of being broken.
But underlying this are deeper, structural problems which
urgently need to be addressed. Since 2003 wages for middle
and lower income earners have stagnated while rewards at the
top have grown exponentially and so for many in our society,
pay has not kept up with the rising cost of living. Growth has
become too dependent on a small number of sectors and too
few regions, making us more vulnerable to external shocks.
We need an economy structured to deliver the jobs and growth
of the future; which is focused on sustainable, long-term success
rather than the fast buck; which enables us to complete globally;
and which creates high-skilled, better paid jobs for our workforce.
In addressing and overcoming these challenges, the role of
enterprise is paramount: we are clear that growth must be private
sector led – so we need more people setting up, leading
and working in businesses. Our record here is strong – in our
thirteen years in government, over a million new businesses
were created and the turnover of small and medium sized enterprises
grew by over a third.
But, as this collection reflects, we need to do more to champion
entrepreneurship: those who go into business, turning their
ideas into reality, generating profit and creating employment
in the process, taking pride in their work providing consumers
with greater choice or even a new product or service. These
are the values Labour represents. We do not underestimate
the capacity for enterprise to act as a motor of aspiration and
social mobility, providing a ladder of opportunity and enabling
people to make the most of their ingenuity and talents. As ever,
we are ambitious for British business.
Where we fundamentally disagree with the government’s
approach is that we see the state playing a crucial role in
creating the conditions in which businesses thrive. Where
they see the best government as that which does the least, we
see the capacity for active, intelligent government acting as a
partner, enabler and friend, setting the rules of the game, with
the capacity to shape and even create markets. For example, the
last Labour government set the target for all new homes to be
carbon neutral by 2016 – this helped create whole new markets
in architecture, retrofitting and green design.
Government has a wide range of tools at its disposal
including regulation, procurement, competition policy and
taxation – and must use these to support business, developing
and driving an ambition for the new economy. This means
ensuring that markets are competitive, encouraging innovation,
working with business to drive success and backing business
approaches which invest in the long term and do right by
employees, customers, country, and communities.
Clearly, this requires change on the part of government. We
cannot ignore the debate going on in the business world about
how productive businesses can add value to the bottom line
in the form of profit and do the same for the communities in
which they are located – businesses and their communities are
after all interdependent.
That is why the contributions in this book are so important,
exploring how enterprise can deliver the better outcomes we
need: spurring a return to growth and creating jobs, as well as
addressing the longstanding challenges which face our economy.
I have no doubt that Labour’s Business will help inform
and shape this debate as we move forward.
Chuka Umunna MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills

As I pointed out yesterday:

It’s not time to reinvent politics – for politics simply piggybacks on the prejudices and mindsets of business. Politics is the mouthpiece – no longer (was it ever?) the agent.

No. We need to go much further that.

It’s now time to reinvent business itself – for only then will we half a chance of rescuing our scalps. The root problem is business – and so the solution must also lie there.

Meanwhile, today in the Observer we find David Miliband spot-on, at least in this phrase I pick out of his thoughtful piece:

[...] The point of politics is not to compromise values. It is to understand dynamic forces in economy and society, and inch forward changes in the reality of life according to your values.

I think I can agree with many of the things I have quoted from in this post – or, at least, I can agree with them if I take an entirely textual approach to their content. If I forget about who has written them and the political baggage they carry along with them – their biography and and their attributed psychology – then, in a sense, the option of valuing with greater equanimity does become possible.

Time to destroy, then, or time to engage? Do we follow Bush Sr or Bush Jr?

I would hope we could be wise. If politics were as it should be, I would be able to say it’d be up to you and me to decide.

But it’s not.

So the question hangs heavily in the air: who will really decide – and, indeed, when? And how will they choose? Will they engage or, alternatively, destroy everything that is before them?

And will they do it for us all – or simply for themselves?

What capitalism do we mean when we talk about capitalism?

capitalism, Chris Dillow, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, Paul Evans, Peter Levine, socialism, unclassifiable 2 Responses »

Nov 122011

Paul and Chris have both said things over the past couple of days which have made me question the monolithic perception of capitalism which those of us who criticise the latter tend to acquire.

First, Paul. In his piece “Google: ‘No pay? No play!’”, he starts off with this intriguing and revelatory quote:

So, entrepreneurship is “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control” (source). It’s a nice line, and one that sums up a lot of very profitable new tech businesses very nicely.

Meanwhile, at Chris’s place we have this on the behaviours of corporate CEOs (the bold is mine):

It’s widely thought that James Murdoch is either a liar or a fool: either he genuinely did not know about phone hacking, in which case his was failing in his job, or he did know, in which case he misled MPs. As Tom Watson said yesterday:

It is plausible that he didn’t know but if he didn’t know, he wasn’t asking the questions that a chief executive officer should be asking…Either he wasn’t doing his job properly as the chief officer of the company or he did know.

This dichotomy, however, might be a false one. It is quite possible, in theory, for a rational boss to be intentionally ignorant as a tool to increase his bargaining power.

As one of the commenters to this piece observes:

Yes, it’s possible that Murdoch sensed the extent of the problem, but wanted to protect himself by deliberately remaining ignorant of the damning details. He may have been far-sighted enough to calculate that the matter might end with legal or quasi-legal proceedings in which this ignorance would be the cornerstone of this defence. So he may not be a liar or fool, but a very devious and shrewd operator. And these are just the qualities that some people would look for in a CEO.

So here we have two views of what capitalism entails: on the one hand, “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”; on the other, behaving as a “devious and shrewd operator”. Both of these views would coincide with what many on the left might argue are precisely capitalism’s weaknesses: the recent crises in the too-big-to-fail financial services sector being examples of the former; the behaviours of far too many large and medium-sized companies as they substitute the interests of the end-users with those of the shareholders and top-management bods providing examples of the latter.

And yet, in other areas, there are capitalist behaviours even we might argue should be positively recognised – especially if we care to analyse matters from a more historical perspective. Civil engineering of all kinds; utility infrastructures; the provision of sophisticated products and services – where, of course, this does not involve the colonisation and exploitation of workforces in countries which do not care for workers’ rights.

The latter may happen widely – but surely it is not a necessary aspect of capitalism. Surely, capitalism could still function – even if the cash mountains were a quarter of what they are.

Surely, it is far more a question of degree.

So perhaps, in times of such mighty upheaval as now, it should be our duty to decide exactly what kind of capitalism it is we are attempting to criticise.

Though this may not serve to underline your prejudices – nor, indeed, make this a popular post – not everything capitalism has brought is necessarily worthy of criticism. The question – and our current resistance to it – may lie in its discrete implementation just as much as in its systemic reality.

Just as there are, in fact, socialisms and socialisms …

Think about it, anyhow.

And correct me, if needs be.

What happens when capitalism begins to benefit only conspicuous consumption?

a con, capitalism, conspicuous consumption, in a hole, injustice, latterday capitalism No Responses »

Oct 302011

I don’t know if the following is true – but let’s assume it is:

In the U.S. gasoline is 1% more expensive in poorer neighborhoods than rich neighborhoods.

I can see how this might happen, mind. In rich neighbourhoods, people are likely to purchase more petrol and there are – as a result – likely to be more petrol stations. Higher volumes and more (though monopolistic) competition will help to make that very slight difference the tweet above apparently bears witness to.

But isn’t this precisely one damning observation we can make about modern capitalism? Its ability to deliver certain products and services is becoming absolutely self-serving: where there is plenty of money, it delivers plenty of added value; where there is less, it charges more in both comparative and real terms. Thus we have the seeds of a situation where capitalism may start to benefit only conspicuous consumption – and, on the other hand, quite literally, prejudice the poor.

And out of this helix of injustice, no one will be prepared to stand.

We are all slowly beginning to become irrevocably tied to our places in society. Even if we might wish to break free, the structures make it impossible.

These are the conditions that lead to the tipping-points of civil wars, where people suddenly realise the only options are being against or for one’s own.

We need to think again. We need to decide how we can re-engineer this awful panorama of injustice. We need to recover the ability to synthesise common interests – and common goals.

The end of banking as we loved it – or the state as we knew it?

a con, banking, capitalism, End of History, in a hole, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, state 2 Responses »

Oct 272011

Paul has an interesting and apposite post on the difference between money lenders and money changers here. This paragraph, in relation to the #occupylsx movement outside St Paul’s in London, catches my eye in particular:

The protest movement, I suggest, should steer clear of a campaign against the fundamentals of credit and debt as a way of making the world work. As David Graeber has shown, such concepts may well be hardwired into human existence, and what we really should be campaigning for is some form of democratic control of banking institutions and the money supply rather than an end to the whole idea of banking itself.

In essence, what Paul is suggesting here is that the “fundamentals of credit and debt” are tools which may be abused – but, equally, can be rewired for the good of all. This was the same argument I used yesterday in relation to Tim Worstall’s criticism of the Vatican’s supposed naivete in the matter of creating a new world government, when I said:

But surely this is giving up entirely on any chance of improvement. Politics is but a tool. It’s the politicians who are currently abusing it – perhaps with our connivance. If we want to regain its utility, we need structures which tie politicians closer into the people they govern – which ensure the people they govern also become the governors.

We need enablers, not leaders; facilitators, not teachers. We need to change how we use the tool – not disregard and dispatch it forthwith.

So I think I’m inclined to agree with Paul on this one – however much it may pain. Credit and debt are tools we will continue to need – whatever society we engineer.

A warning, however. I quoted from the beginning and end of Craig’s piece yesterday, but didn’t quote from the middle. The middle said the following:

The economic system in which most of our readers live is little to do with capitalism. The value of goods traded is an insignificant fraction of the flow of funds around the world, much of which relates to either bets on the future values of goods, or bets on the consequences of the vectors of financial flows of which the bets themselves are a part.

The whole edifice is based not on a market for exchange of goods and concrete services, but on an astonishing matrix of state enforced legal instruments creating an extraordinary pile of paper money produced by states, but ultimately worth nothing real. This legal framework was designed to shift the great bulk of this wealth from people who actually work for a living to a small financial elite, most (but not all) of whom create little or nothing real.

If the state compelled everyone to play a pyramid scheme, then you could keep it going for decades. As the system started to reach inevitable collapse, the state moved in with bank bailouts and quantitive easing, both of which simply moved yet more money from ordinary people to the super-rich. In fact the last three years have seen the biggest transfer of resources from poor to rich in human history.

It cannot last, and whether it is Greece or Italy or Spain which is this week’s fashionable media focus is irrelevant. In making these vast levied and leveraged transfers of resources from poor to rich, states have exhausted the capacity of their people to actually pay them. That is true all over Europe, the UK and US. The currency crises are a tiny symptom of a very large impending crash.

Perhaps, then, this is not the end of banking as we loved it but rather – far more disturbingly – the end of the state as we knew it.

Have you thought of that?

Is David Cameron, Radicaliser Extraordinaire, the very best thing to happen to society in years?

38 Degrees, a con, Big Society, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, False Economy, in a hole, Labour, latterday capitalism, on a high, pyramid politics No Responses »

Jun 142011

Sometimes, quite despite our efforts to the contrary, things turn out very much for the better. This is the email I received today from that excellent organisation 38 Degrees:

“I’ve seen the difference the work of 38 Degrees members has made to the debate on NHS changes. Today’s announcements seem like significant progress, but there are still big causes for concern and we all need to look carefully at the details as they emerge. Celebrate the success so far, 38 Degrees, but don’t stop speaking up for the future of our NHS!”
Dr Clare Gerada, Chair, Royal College of GPs

Dear Miljenko,

Today, Nick Clegg and David Cameron admitted that the original NHS plans were wrong, and accepted the need for changes. We’ve not won yet – but we definitely have made progress. According to Andrew Lansley’s original timetable, the NHS changes would be law by now. We’ve helped stop that happen.

Clegg and Cameron’s speeches included some steps in the right direction. But we can’t afford to drop our guard. For a start, these are just speeches – we haven’t seen the full text of the proposed laws. We will need to scrutinise the plans line by line as they pass through parliament.

We have got this far by working together. 38 Degrees members voted to start the campaign because we know just how important the NHS is – we can’t trust it’s future to politicians.

If we keep working together, we can keep the pressure on. But what should be our priorities? How can we push David Cameron to keep the promises he has made this week? How can push our MPs to vote down bits of the plans that still look dangerous? What could we do to challenge cuts to services we rely on?

Help decide what we do next together by completing this two minute poll:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-what-shall-we-do-next

Back in April, thousands of us took part in a vote to decide together which parts of the NHS plans we were most worried about.

Today, hundreds of 38 Degrees members have been discussing the announcements and the media coverage on the 38 Degrees website and Facebook page. Here’s an attempt at a summary of what we decided to prioritise and where we seem to have got to:

What we decided together to focus on What David Cameron’s new proposals might mean

Don’t force the NHS to promote competition between private health companies: rule out price competition and promote co-operation and quality of care instead Some Progress. It sounds like the role of the NHS regulator, “Monitor”, will now have an overall focus on promoting the interests of patients not price competition as originally proposed. The devil will be in the detail of how this works, and there is probably still more talk of competition than lots of us would like. Lib Dem MP Andrew George has warned “Monitor” could act as a “trojan horse” allowing more of the original plans to be slipped “through the back door”.

Don’t allow private companies to ”cherry pick” healthcare contracts in a way which could undermine local hospitals: put NHS services and hospitals first Progress. There will be “new safeguards” to stop private companies taking over the job of commissioning health services where hard-pressed GPs are unwilling. But the government wants to keep the policy of “Any Willing Provider” being allowed to run NHS services, including private companies. Many experts say this policy means that in practice it will be extremely difficult to prevent “cherry-picking”. We will definitely need to look hard at this area of the legislation when it is published.

Don’t take big decisions about health spending without experts and patients being involved as well as GPs A lot of progress. It sounds like patients, nurses, and hospital doctors will now be involved in taking decisions as well as GPs. Mental Health Charity Rethink is describing the revised plans as “a real step forward for patient power”.

Don’t allow big decisions about health spending be taken behind closed doors and without democratic scrutiny Some Progress. It seems that local “health and well-being boards”, which include elected local people, will have a beefed up role in scrutinising what GP commissioning boards are up to.

Don’t force any big changes without testing them properly first – trial any changes in one area for several years first, then give parliament a fresh vote A little bit of progress. The timetable for imposing the changes has definitely been slowed down, with many of the original deadlines dropped or softened. But the government still isn’t proposing a local trial, or a fresh vote once we’ve seen how all of the new systems work.

Don’t remove the government’s “duty” to provide a comprehensive health service: keep that duty in law Success? It’s being reported that the Bill will be rewritten to reinstate this comprehensive duty. That would be a massive success – but we need to see it happen in practice before we can relax!

What areas of David Cameron’s new plan are you most concerned about? What should 38 Degrees members do together next to stand up for the future of our health service?

Have your say here:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-what-shall-we-do-next

We won’t know exactly what the government is planning until they release detailed legislation. But we do know that some hardliners are angry that Andrew Lansley’s original plans have been changed and will be campaigning to revive them. If we keep working together, we can make sure that doesn’t happen.

Two weeks ago, before this flurry of announcements, thousands of 38 Degrees members voted to decide what we should do next. So much has changed since then, but here are some of the most popular ideas we came up with:

Aim to deliver copies of the Save our NHS petition to every single member of the cabinet in the next month

Send lots of letters to local papers to make sure they hear how many people are worried about the NHS plans

Hold birthday parties in July to celebrate the NHS’s 63rd birthday

Do you think theses are still the best ideas? Should we do something else? Please take 2 minutes to help decide:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-what-shall-we-do-next

Thanks for getting involved:

David, Marie, Johnny, Hannah, Becky, Cian and the 38 Degrees team

PS: if you completed the poll last week, then thank you, but please do this one too – so much has changed in the past two weeks! http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-what-shall-we-do-next

Notes:

Here are a couple of summaries of the changes to NHS plans:
Department of Health official response: http://healthandcare.dh.gov.uk/government-response-to-nhs-future-forum/
The BBC: Step-by-step guide to NHS changes: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13749880

It’s clear that both this organisation and initiatives such as False Economy, as well as a plethora of other evidence-based social media movements, are taking their toll on this government.

Or are they?

Whilst recent polls suggest that few people want to get involved in David Cameron’s Big Society in its most formal and prescriptive manifestations, it’s absolutely the case that through both online and related offline initiatives the voting public is beginning to radicalise itself in a way that, for example, the Labour movement’s leaders in other very different times would have found difficult to even imagine. David Cameron as the Radicaliser Extraordinaire then? The very best thing to happen to society in years perhaps?

Maybe so. Maybe, indeed, this is the case. Even despite himself. Not quite the Big Society he was looking to engender – but a Big Society of sorts he may yet be able to take advantage of.

And whilst the Labour Party in crisis shows us the real weaknesses of pyramid politics as it begins to frustrate some of those who might in other circumstances have truly placed their confidence in it, the real force for change and for a dynamically continuous improvement in our economy, state and relationships – even where this is effected in a reactive and contradictory sense; that is to say, in opposition to our desires – is precisely constituted in those individuals who Carl, in the first story I linked to at the top of today’s post, slates thus:

Sir/Madame, look at these two. Clegg and Cameron. Are you surprised? Do you wince? Do you think their compassion consists in wanting to share, nay impose, the worst of the lifestyle of the ruling class upon us grounded, not landed, folk?

Sir/Madame, are these conservative men ripping down our institutions from inside? Did they not realise we must desist from change if its success rests upon luck?

Sir/Madame, did they not realise that it was private interest and interference that slowed down and frustrated the national health service during the terms of the last cabinet. Are they aware this service, free at the point of entry, is an inscription of welfare as a right of citizenry, there to stop anyone from falling through the net, commissioned only through donations of that grandest of traditions the state?

Sir/Madame, look at this one. Duncan-Smith. Does he not acknowledge welfare as a right of citizenry?

Sir/Madame, I am under little doubt these thugs understand nothing of what they are doing. But quite why we should tolerate them while they do it is beyond me. Are we yet fit for revolt?

Cameron & Co are so good for society because suddenly, after years of having it all handed out to us on a plate, we are having to define and fight for everything we believe in. We are having to rediscover and assert what really matters to us. We are becoming welfare guerrillas battling for the safety and security of our friends and families. This has, all of a sudden, become a war not to the death – but, rather, on behalf of everyone’s lives.

Cameron & Co are destroying society as we know it – and, in so doing, are forcing us to recover the past: that is to say, the very society they aim to bury. Therein lies the political tautology: they would see themselves as radicals but their impact on us will lead to an overall and net societal conservatism. And even as we see ourselves essentially as radicals, we struggle to conserve the results of our ancient battles.

So does no one know how – or care any longer – to have a truly radical impact on our world these days?

Is the system we live under so absolutely pervading and powerful that there is nothing we can now do to disentangle us from its control?

Is it capitalism, then, which has led us all down the road of absolute conservatism?

I do, actually, wonder if this is the case.

Don’t you?

How the Coalition truly disregards our inalienable rights to mental wellbeing

a con, ATOS, Darwinian capitalism, latterday capitalism, mental health, mental ill health No Responses »

Jun 012011

I’m not an evidence-based blogger. I write quite calmly – but under the surface I am always far too angry to know how to communicate effectively with those who count.

So. Evidence-based blogging is not my forte.

But this open letter to the Coalition government, first published online in the Guardian yesterday evening, provides even someone as emotional as myself with sufficient proof to convince someone as logical as yourselves that something very wrong is taking place at the very highest levels of power in this country.

This is how the United Nations defines our inalienable rights to mental wellbeing:

Q: What is mental health?

A: Mental health is not just the absence of mental disorder. It is defined as a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.

In most countries, particularly low- and middle-income countries, mental health services are severely short of resources – both human and financial. Of the health care resources available, most are currently spent on the specialized treatment and care of the people with mental illness, and to a lesser extent on an integrated mental health system. Instead of providing care in large psychiatric hospitals, countries should integrate mental health into primary health care, provide mental health care in general hospitals and develop community-based mental health services.

Even less funding is available for mental health promotion, an umbrella term that covers a variety of strategies, all aimed at having a positive effect on mental health well-being in general. The encouragement of individual resources and skills, and improvements in the socio-economic environment are among the strategies used.

Mental health promotion requires multi-sectoral action, involving a number of government sectors and non-governmental or community-based organizations. The focus should be on promoting mental health throughout the lifespan to ensure a healthy start in life for children and to prevent mental disorders in adulthood and old age.

Whilst this is today’s reality in Britain, as per Liberal Conspiracy’s overview of the matter – and published today:

Regular readers will know my endless horror at the system of “assessment” in place to now determine whether or not someone is “Fit for Work”.

Run by ATOS, a private company charged with making impersonal decisions, the system uses a computerised, tick box questionnaire of just 15 questions that take no account of variable conditions, no account of consultant or GP based evidence and no account of pain or most symptoms.

In a recent survey, Mind found that an enormous 95% of respondents don’t think that they will be believed at assessment. Evidence abounds of mentally ill people being found “fit for work” simply because they manage to turn up at the assessment centre dressed and washed.

I have to say that my own experience of mental health assessment – a sad and traumatic moment in my life, conducted as it was under the alleged objectivity of GPs and consultants – left much to be desired. But I was one of the very lucky ones. I survived the diagnosis – and managed to put my life back together. And this was under the previous system, where a supportive approach was supposed to be at the heart of the whole process.

Today’s Britain, however, seems aimed at making this almost impossible for the vast majority of sufferers. All part and parcel, in fact, of an attempt by those in charge to ensure that the poor and vulnerable in society will remain under the lock and key of a Darwinian capitalism at its very worst – and, it would seem, for evermore.

Coupled with the move to a free-market NHS, where presumably paperwork for patients at point-of-delivery will multiply a thousandfold, the strategy would appear to become clear: reduce the need to pay for care for those who are suffering severely by ensuring that form-filling and what we might term personal bureaucracy becomes a useful barrier to accessing such services (in my own particular case, for example, I only have to think of the mental pain I go through, even now, when I have to complete the forms to claim back my dental fees).

Where in the world, I then ask myself, does a company propose winning over more potential customers by making it more difficult for the aforesaid individuals to use their products and services? Unless, of course, the idea is to cherry-pick the profitable customers and, in true free-market style, absolutely forget about the rest. You know. Your granny, my auntie and the village idiot down the road.

I really fail to understand how even those who propose these changes are able to live with the daily burden of not squaring the obvious circles. Most of them run large businesses – or are in contact with large businesses – whose main reason for existing is (supposedly) to satisfy the needs of external customers.

(Or, perhaps, not – as the case may be.)

So would their shareholders sanction treating customers with such utter and despicable disrespect? Would they approve of procedures and processes which were designed to make it easier for such companies to operate and more difficult for their customers to engage?

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with latterday capitalism. The real customer of the vast majority of modern companies becomes the internal self-serving owners whose yearly dividends are far more important than any end-user’s experience. And that is the model we are now imposing on our public services.

This is not Darwinian capitalism after all, not the survival of the fittest. This is the survival of the incestuous. The inbreeding of the hypocritical.

And if you thought the public sector needed turning over, just wait until you experience the full force of the private at its most navel-gazing.

Is capitalism in the process of breaking its contract with us?

big business, in a hole, latterday capitalism, social contract No Responses »

Apr 132011

This, from the Economist a couple of days ago, is significant:

Capitalism’s waning fortunes are starkly visible among Americans earning below $20,000. Their support for the free market has dropped from 76% to 44% in just one year. The research was conducted by GlobeScan, a polling firm. Its chairman Doug Miller says American business is “close to losing its social contract” with average families.

In the meantime, Liberal Conspiracy reports (graph here):

The story of how voters are rapidly losing faith in the government’s management of the economy is one the media has shied away from.

YouGov asked the same question since May last year: “Do you think the coalition government is managing the economy well or badly?”

The trend is quite stark and moving in the wrong direction for the government.

Both links have come to my attention via Brian’s Facebook feed.

So why is capitalism and its proponents falling so dramatically out of favour? Maybe, just maybe, because neither it nor they are delivering the goods.

In fact, amongst all of this gloom and doom which is afflicting our British sense of wellbeing, there is another thought which occurs to me. In the massive financial meltdown which Gordon Brown was a part of and which – like all good poachers turned gamekeepers – he managed (mixed metaphors notwithstanding) to defuse, that independent body of control which is the Bank of England doesn’t half seem to have emerged unscathed. Yet all which took place then and all which is hurting us now happened entirely on its watch.

Where exactly was it looking? And why haven’t the media also pursued this other story more vigorously?

For the social contract between business and ordinary working families mentioned above would appear to be breaking up.

So is the same thing happening here in Britain? The privatisation of the NHS, the liberalisation of education practice – all these freedoms clearly go against trends in the global public’s shared mindscape. Who then is to say the intuition of the crowd is wrong? With greater freedoms generally come greater responsibilities – but big business would not appear to be providing sufficient reasons for the rest of us to believe that it understands such behaviours should also apply to its functioning.

It is clearly the turn of businessmen and women at the highest of levels to convince us that they truly know the meaning of responsibility – just as much as they know the meaning of freedom.

In the meantime, perhaps, the freedoms they aspire to should not be conceded. Especially in the light of resistance such as this.