Documents for the End Times?

Two documents came into my hands this weekend – both with “Agenda” in the title. The first, fresh from the press, was “The New Agenda” (Jan 2022) produced initially by some Italian groups preparing for a G20 summit on global public health and assisted by the indefatigable Riccardo Petrella whom I got to know in the 1980s when, as Head of the EC’s F.A.S.T. programme he invited me to join one of its working groups. I actually wrote a paper for him on the issue  of community power - and remember his interest in global water shortages which went on to become one of his many concerns. The last time I met him was in the mid90s at one of his sessions in Bruges which I heard about and was able to snatch a quick chat. He has since written several books, his latest being In the Name of Humanity 

“The New Agenda” (a link to which I don’t have access to) is a short and curious read – as you might expect from one which has gone through a convoluted collective process of drafting and approval and was of interest to me mainly because it is structured around power – comparing the belief system of “the dominants” with the struggles of “the people of the earth”.

It draws on the annual World Inequality Reports and this recent NATO report on scientific and technological trends from 2020-2040 which I had noticed but not read. And this reminded me that I had also downloaded (and not read) another important report Global Trends 2040 – a more contested world (US Office of National Intelligence) 

What’s important in such documents are the recommendations and this is how it concludes - 

The following actions should be prioritised here and now:

 At the level of the narratives of life, of ethics

Multiply and intensify meetings, happenings, videos, films, shows, articles..., denouncing the ethical illegitimacy, the criminal character, of the current policies of the dominants, especially concerning health, water, dignity, fraternity, biodiversity.

Let's stop the petitions and replace them with denunciations, appeals to the courts, appeals in defence and for the strengthening of the institutions of democracy, especially direct democracy.

It is time for a strong global “I accuse” campaign.

 

 In the field of knowledge and education:

a) abolition of patents on life and on artificial intelligence. The new "lords of life" own more than 120,000 patents! Without this abolition, the predation of life will only intensify and, consequently, the strategy of survival for the strongest will impose wars, exclusions, walls... No real “Other Agenda” could be put into practice

 

b) put the university back into public control both in teaching and in research and development (R&D). The University must be freed from submission to the interests of large private multinational companies

 

c)  encourage the education system, in all its forms and at all levels, to become a place of critical shared learning – (re)knowledge – of planetary ecocitizenship, in the wake of innovative experiences promoted, for example, in Quebec

 

 In the economic-industrial field

Given the deterioration of living and working conditions, it is necessary to broaden the rights of the world of work and to fight for workers' control of their work and the products of their work. The most effective way to do this is to regenerate a new role for public intervention, not only at the national level, but also at the continental and global levels. The world of health care comes to mind in particular. The republicanisation of the entire health industry, including the pharmaceutical industry, must be put back on the agenda.

Health must be reinvented as a global public good and service. Water, health and knowledge must become the first three pillars of the “global res publica”.

 

 In the financial field:

a) stop legalized criminal finance: i.e. outlawing tax havens; abandoning derivative products, which are real leeches on the real economy; managing tax evasion; financing illicit activities (drugs, arms trade...)

 

b) replace the World Bank and the IMF by the creation of a People's World Cooperative Mutual Fund aimed at reorienting finance towards the objective of life security for all members of the global community of the Earth. To this end, hundreds of civil society organisations should launch a citizens' movement for alternative global finance, building on numerous ongoing initiatives, by convening in 2025 an Earth Inhabitants Convention for a new global financial system

 

 in the political-institutional field

C Creation of a World Citizens Assembly for the Security of Global Public Commons (starting with water, seeds, health and knowledge). 

 The second report I’ve been looking at since I discovered it is the United Nations’ Our Common Agenda (Nov 2021) which came out just too late for mention in Petrella’s report – although its origin is in a UN resolution of September 2020. As you would expect from such a rich organisation, the report is well-written if not, indeed, glib

We are at an inflection point in history.

In our biggest shared test since the Second World War, humanity faces a stark and urgent choice: a breakdown or a breakthrough.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is upending our world, threatening our health, destroying economies and livelihoods and deepening poverty and inequalities.

Conflicts continue to rage and worsen.

The disastrous effects of a changing climate – famine, floods, fires and extreme heat – threaten our very existence.

For millions of people around the world, poverty, discrimination, violence and exclusion are denying them their rights to the basic necessities of life: health, safety, a vaccination against disease, clean water to drink, a plate of food or a seat in a classroom.

Increasingly, people are turning their backs on the values of trust and solidarity in one another – the very values we need to rebuild our world and secure a better, more sustainable future for our people and our planet.

Humanity’s welfare – and indeed, humanity’s very future – depend on solidarity and working together as a global family to achieve common goals. For people, for the planet, for prosperity and for peace. 

What follows is a very detailed and comprehensive list of recommendations – stretching to 86 pages (compared with “The New Agenda”s 29). 

Sadly, however, the power structure of the United Nations means that the report is not worth the paper it’s written on. Every country of the UN is led by elites who pay lip-service to this rhetoric but have interests and ideologies which lead them to sustained and total opposition to, and contempt for, the rhetoric. For the most part (as I know from my short experience of working for the World Health Organisation) the staff of its various bodies are well-intentioned if privileged liberals who have diplomatic status - meaning their jobs are sinecures and amongst their privileges are tax-free salaries and monthly entitlements to tax-free products. It’s easy being a liberal when life is easy.

Update; I wanted to check what, if any, critical reviews had been done of the UN document – and was delighted to find that the Trans National Institute (TNI) had last month made available this critical analysis The Great Takeover – mapping of multistakeholderism in global governance

Time to kill the belief in Maximising Profits

The basic argument of the revisionists of the 1950s was that managers had tamed capitalism. And they were correct – if only for a few decades – as a new balance of power came into existence due to (a) the new fiscal power Keynesianism gave governments and (b) the collective power industrial society gave the trade unions.

In the immediate post-war period, for example, the ratio between CEO salaries and those of the average worker was about 15 to 1 compared to the present obscene level of 350 to 1 – with Milton Friedman being one of the people responsible 

The intellectual godfather of shareholder primacy is Milton Friedman, who wrote in 1970 that “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business [i.e., the shareholders]. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible,” without breaking the law or cheating people.

In 1976 - when CEO pay was less than 40 times what the typical worker earned (the multiple is now more than 350) - Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling codified Friedman’s argument with their seminal article, “Theory of the Firm.” The purpose of corporate governance, they argued, is about finding ways to align the incentives of shareholders (whom they referred to as “principals”) and executives (“agents” of the shareholder-owners). This theory has enraptured economics departments and business and law schools for decades and profoundly shaped how corporate officers, shareholders, taxpayers, policy-makers, and even most Americans think about the roles and responsibilities of corporations. 

The theory of the firm may sound a very abstract issue - but is, in fact, one of the most central issues for all societies. Whose interests should be served by a company? The managers? Shareholders? Workers? The wider community?

The sensible answer is a balance of all four. And there was a moment in 1997, at the start of what turned out to be a 13-year period of New Labour, when that seemed possible – when the concept of stakeholder society was a live issue. People like Will Hutton have been preaching for 30 years about this wider concept of the company and Oxford Professor of Management Colin Mayer published this enlightening study in 2013 Firm commitment – how the corporations is failing us and what we can do to restore trust in it. Even the Americans have considered the idea - although The Stakeholder Society came out more than 20 years ago.

Its been making some headway in recent years – but only in the rhetoric. Noone dares taking the idea seriously.

Ideas or Interests?

I had wanted to pursue the question of managerial power but found myself returning instead to the battles of the 1930s from which amazingly – thanks to Keynesianism and trade union strength – capitalism emerged in the postwar period with a complete facelift.

This positive experience lasted precisely 30 years before governments were undone - by a combination of the oil shock of the 70s and globalisation - and trade unions by post-industrialism. 

The fall of communism revealed once more the ugly side of capitalism – to which social democratic governments responded with little more than a shrug of their shoulders. Social democracy since then has been in tatters. 

It all reminded me of a table I had doodled which tried to identify, for each decade since the 1930s, the central issue(s) of the time. It is, of course, entirely subjective – it makes no mention, for example, of Freudianism. It is, however, a useful reminder of the ebb and flow of fashionable intellectual debate and, indeed, raises the question of what exact social conditions crystallised a focus on a topic which previously had aroused little interest. The first excerpt takes us to the 1980s. 

Decade	Themes of intellectual discussion	Key names
1930s	End of capitalism Fascism	John Strachey, Harold Laski Sorel, Gramsci
1940s	The managerial revolution Keynesianism International relations	J Burnham JM Keynes R Niebuhr, EH Carr
1950s	Totalitarianism Brainwashing Meritocracy Revisionism Private affluence/public squalor	H Arendt; Z Barbu. Talmon V Packard Michael Young A. Shonfield; Tony Crosland JK Galbraith
1960s	End of ideology Corporate planning, management Modernisation of society Participation critique of professionals	Daniel Bell R Ackoff, Peter Drucker Peter Berger C Pateman; Ivan Illich
1970s	Costs of economic growth Public choice theory Small is beautiful Change Corporatism Feminism	EJ Mishan, club of rome J Buchanan E. Schumacher; L. Kohr S. Beer; A. Toffler; D. Schon A Cawson Betty Friedan
1980s	Deindustrialisation Privatisation ecology decentralisation globalisation racial equality	Blackaby; Dyson Consultancies; World Bank James Lovelock, Club of Rome OECD J Stiglitz, Martin Wolf B Parrekh

Adam Curtis is a documentarist who has acquired a reputation for splicing film, music and voiceovers to suggest that we are being manipulated by elites with agendas often influenced by writers of the past. I’m no friend of conspiracy theorists – but I do like the idea of writers having influence and it’s in that spirit that I mention a couple of the writers who figure in my table. 

Peter Drucker is universally recognised as the father of modern management. But he was much more than this – as the link recognises. Born in 1909 in Austria, he was first a journalist before moving into teaching and academia and was, at one stage, spoken of as a successor to Joseph Schumpeter. His first book The End of Economic Man – the origins of totalitarianism came out in London in 1939 and won praise from both Winston Churchill and JB Priestley.

By then he had moved to the US where in 1943 he published The Future of Industrial Man - a conservative approach leading to an invitation from General Motors to study the company’s policies and structures which produced “Concept of the Corporation” (1946) and his subsequent amazing consultancy and writing career. 

Unable to classify his work as belonging naturally to any particular discipline within the social sciences, Drucker describes himself as a ‘social ecologist’ who is ‘concerned with man’s man-made environment the way a natural ecologist studies the natural environment’, a discipline in which he also places Alexis de Tocqueville and (among American thinkers) Henry Adams, John Commons (the intellectual mover behind economic and social reforms in the state of Wisconsin which foreshadowed parts of Roosevelt’s New Deal), and ‘above all’ Thorstein Veblen. 

But it was James Burnham who had, just 4 years earlier, written The Managerial Revolution which was to have such a profound effect in the post-war period on our perception of capitalism. Burnham, at the time, was actually a revolutionary socialist and the previous couple of decades had, of course, given the system of capitalism a very bad name. But he was able to use an important book which had come out a decade earlier - The Modern Corporation and Private Property written by Adolf Berle - which had argued that managers now had more control than owners.

And it was this argument that was taken up in the postwar period by European leftist revisionists in the German and British Labour parties such as Anthony Crosland who produced in 1956 the famous The Future of Socialism. And in 1959 Germany’s SDP adopted the Bad Godesburg programme which duly expunged its Marxist heritage.

Typically, it was almost 40 years later before the British Labour party managed to do the same – and the struggle between the British New Left and labour party revisionists is superbly explored in this article. 

So “ideas” do matter – and so do “interests”. 

Further Reading

The British Labour Party in Opposition and Power 1979-2019 Patrick Diamond (2021) it looks a very detailed and balanced analysis of a critical period

Futures of Socialism – the pandemic and the post-Corbyn era; ed Grace Blakely (2020) a short book with no fewer than 27 articles from the left

Shaking Off Managerial Power

Fellow blogger Dave Pollard’s latest post catches the mood perfectly – 

The US is clearly sliding into fascism. The western media seem to have given up all pretence of serious journalism. Climate and ecological collapse are accelerating and completely out of control. Inflation, threatens to deep-six our utterly debt-dependent economy, when interest rates soar to catch up to it and monthly minimum loan and mortgage payments triple. And then there’s the pandemic…

In times like this, I need an uplift. And I got it from a small book I pulled off the shelf and reread from cover to cover – one of the many advantages of small books! The cognoscenti may look down on this format but I’m a great fan. If writers can’t compress their thoughts into 120 pages or so, then they have no right to inflict their verbiage on the rest of us. After all, if they feel they need more pages, they can always try my idea of the “expandable book”

The uplifting title was “Letting Go – breathing new life into organisations” (2013) from the Postcards from Scotland series which first explores the fundamental question of what motivates us before challenging the entire basis of ‘command and control’ management as well as the “tyranny of modern day ‘performance management”. 

They argue convincingly that effective leaders and managers should ‘let go’ of their ideas on controlling staff and instead nurture intrinsic motivation. The book shows that good managers need to develop management systems which actively support the human spirit, enabling creativity and allowing staff to perform their jobs properly. The ideas in this book could breathe new life into struggling organisations and are a breath of fresh air for thinking about the world of work. 

This was just before Frederic Laloux’s famous “Reinventing Organisations” took us by storm in 2014 (followed in 2016 by an Illustrated Version no less). And also before we were aware of the inspiring model of social care offered by the Buurtzorg social enterprise whose website is here. Almost a decade has passed since the critique of managers contained in “Letting Go” came out and a lot has happened since – we’ve become much more aware of algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and the threat of robots whose cause has been advanced considerably by the pandemic.  

And rereading it has certainly encouraged me to go back to the draft of Change for the Better? A Life in Reform and make sure it deals more effectively with the question of how on earth we gave managers so much power. “The Management Virus” forms chapter 4 of that draft and did ask that question but gave no reply…. 

We take managerialism for granted – even although it didn’t exist in the 1960s. “Managerial” then was only an adjective and, thanks to James Burnham, followed by the word “revolution” (at least in the immediate post-war period) to refer to what he first argued in 1941 was the growing influence of senior managers in America’s larger Corporations vis-à-vis its shareholders.

An argument sustained by the likes of Tony Crosland and Andrew Shonfield who persuaded us that the system had now been tamed - although history has demonstrated that this was a brief truce in the struggle between state, corporate and union power. And, further, that shareholders and the importance of "shareholder value" came back with a vengeance in the 1980s....

In 1956, William W Whyte’s classic Organisation Man may have painted a picture of docile managers but change was in the wind - and was prefigured in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) which analysed vague social forces, not deliberative organisational change. Even Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty didn’t envisage significant social engineering – although the power of the economists and number-crunchers was beginning to be felt in the likes of Robert McNamara 

And yet, however slowly, the 1970s saw in Britain the first signs of a new management ethos in both central and local government which, by the late 80s had become a gale-force wind. To most people at the time, public sector reform was a graveyard for reputations….there seemed no mileage in it.

There is an important story here which has never been told properly….which resolves into three basic questions –

·       Why and how, all of 50 years ago, did the “managerial turn” get underway, contaminating our everyday experiences and discourse?

·       How have we allowed managers to gain such unaccountable power?

·       What we can now do to bring them to heel? 

How many of us have actually taken time to ask - How do we know what we know?

Funny how words get invested, suddenly, with new meaning. Until very recently I’ve used the term “sceptical” with pride – it meant challenging what John Kenneth Galbraith called in the 1950s “the conventional wisdom” and few were, for me, better at this than Bertrand Russell whose Sceptical Essays I remember devouring in the late 1950s. In a new Introduction written recently, John Gray says - 

Russell had great admiration for Joseph Conrad and one of the reasons was surely his suspicion that Conrad’s sceptical fatalism was a truer account of human life than his own troubled belief in reason and science.

As reformer, Russell believed reason could save the world. As a sceptical follower of Hume he knew reason could never be more than the slave of the passions. “Sceptical Essays” (1928) was written as a defence of rational doubt. Today we c,an read it as a confession of faith, the testament of a crusading rationalist who doubted the power of reason. 

But now, thanks to climate and vaccination ”sceptics”, the word has become tainted with connotations of conspiracy, irrationality and tribalism. I want to understand –

-       how this apparent retreat to irrationality has happened and

-       what we can do about it 

Let me offer some tentative thoughts

-       for some reason, we have become more polarised in our thinking

-       the general consensus seems to be that the social media are to blame

-       as a good sceptic, I’m not so sure

-       perhaps increased educational opportunities have simply made us more aware of the subjectivities in our “take on reality” (pop psychology is a huge growth industry)

-       we have certainly become more aware, in the past decade, of the importance of “story-telling” whose importance first became obvious to me only a decade ago although people like Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels have been preaching its significance for almost a century and Alex Evans’ The Myth Gap appeared in  2017.

Evans was also the co-author of one of the most thoughtful pieces about polarisation which appeared in 2019 - Rebuilding Common Ground produced by a group which calls itself variously “Collective Psychology” or “Larger Us”. It’s a great analysis about what’s happened – although I’m not quite convinced by his recipes.

I have a feeling that too much of this is driven by attempts to be different and that we need to return to some of the basic issues of epistemology – namely “how do we know what we think we know”? Completely by accident, I stumbled a couple of days ago on a book entitle From Belief to Knowledge published in 2011 by Douglas and Wykowski. The focus may be organisational change but most of the book is a rare intellectual exploration – by 2 consultants - of a subject I have to confess I’ve spent too little time bothering to understand, put off to an extent by its name – epistemology. It’s not the easiest of reads but, fortunately, I also discovered another (downloadable) book which explores the same issue at a much more practical level - The Knowing-Doing Gap (2000)