The Beast Destroying the World

 “Capitalism”…I started, but the barman hopped out of a pipkin

“Capitalism”, he countered…”That’s a flat and frothless word

I’m a good Labour man, but if I mentioned capitalism

My clientele would chew off their own ears

And spit them down the barmaid’s publicised cleavage”

“All right” I obliged “Don’t call it capitalism

Let’s call it Mattiboko the Mighty

……..

The poem finishes…

This was my fearless statement

“The Horror World can only be changed by the destruction of

Mattiboko the Mighty,

The Massimataxis Incoporated Supplement

And Gumbo Jumbo the Homely Obblestrog Spectacular”

Audience Reaction was quite encouraging

Adrian Mitchell “Come on Everybody Poems” 1953-2008

 Almost a quarter of my blogposts last year wrestled with various aspects of the economic system which now looks set to destroy the planet.

In my youth, the nuclear threat was what kept us awake at night – and that was particularly the case for those of us who lived a mere couple of kilometres from the US nuclear submarine base on the Clyde. Many thought that the collapse of the Berlin Wall had ended such existential fear - but global warming has now taken its place.

The year started with a couple of posts about important books with “capitalism“ in their title before trying to make amends for the failure of the blog to dealt properly with the ecological issue.

It was, however, Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties” which really got me scribbling last year – initially with a series of posts which reminded me that I had still not managed to complete a book which has occupying me for several years.

Writing a book about a subject you don’t understand is an activity I’ve recommended for everyone to help dispel the confusions we all have (if we’re honest enough)…More challenging is when the topic proves to be more amorphous - and changes shape as you work on it. Such has been my experience with text I started almost 20 years ago – long before the financial crash of 2008…It started with a critique that went as follows –

- Consumerism is killing the planet – and making people miserable.

- The poor are getting poorer

- political culture is getting ever more centralised (notwithstanding Scottish devolution).

- Social democrats like New Labour have sold the state to corporate interests.

- don’t blame individuals such as Tony Blair – it’s in the nature of modern politics. Note the political corruption in Italy, Belgium, Germany, France and even Britain.

- The EU is selfish and lacks vision

The paper then looked at the organisations and people I admired; what they were achieving; where they seemed to be failing and why; and went on to raise the question of how someone of my age, experience and resources might better contribute to society.

Many, of course, will scorn such an aspiration – seeing it as typical of a western “do-gooder”…

I readily admit my natural inclination to intervene in social processes (ie my “activist” mode) and that a lot of the recent writing on “chaos theory” and even “systems theory” seems to me to run the risk of encouraging fatalism – one of the four world views Mary Douglas introduced us to and which Chris Hood’s The Art of the State (1999) analyses so brilliantly

The world is getting increasingly complex these days – so it’s hardly surprising that we increasingly hear the argument for “leaving well alone” (or “laisser-faire” as it used to be called). But we do need to look carefully at who makes - and indeed funds - such arguments. They are the right-wing US Foundations funded by such billionaires as the Koch brothers..

One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted an entire book (”The Rhetoric of Reaction”; 1991) to examining three arguments conservative writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers:

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

Have a look at any argument against a proposed reform - you will find it a variant of these three. But such fatalism offends my sense of what we used to call “free will” (and now “agency theory”). Powerful people exist – whether in corporations, international agencies or governments – who can and do influence events. Our job as citizens is to watch them carefully and protest when we can..

In the 1930s it was not difficult to identify the enemy…Today the enemy is a more voracious and complex system which we variously call “globalisation” or “neoliberalism” and only more recently “capitalism” - whose disastrous consequences the activists of Porto Allegro had exposed……although it took the crash of 2008 to prove the point…

Yanis Varoufakis used the highly appropriate term “the Global Minotaur” for his brilliant 2011 story of how surplus capital had sought its rewards – with all the destructiveness that Joseph Schumpeter had first described in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) – but minus the “creativity”

The Minotaur not only survived but managed the amazing trick of transferring bank losses onto state exchequers and bringing on austerity and further vilification of the state…It was the poisoning of the state I first noticed – thanks to George Monbiot’s The Captive State – the corporate takeover of Britain (2000) and started to blog about in 2009. But within a few years such a critique of the political class had become commonplace.

So, to tempt you into flicking through “To Whom it may Concern” (for which just click the title in the list at the top-right corner of the blog masthead) here is a table with a selection of relevant posts with brief explanations…

Selected Posts about the Beast

Post	What sparked it off	Why it’s worth reading
How will it all end?	Wolfgang Streeck’s “The End of Capitalism?”	Has hyperlinks which cut to the core of the discussion
Why the reluctance to seek consensus?	“Club of Rome” report “Come on! Capitalism”	It’s a definitive report and my post tries to summarise other key texts about the turning point the world seems to have reached
What is wrong with us?	An article in NYRB about the ecological disaster we face	Exhaustive reading list
Populist – and proud of it!	Pelican book sparks off an Old Labourist reflections	The post puts the present concerns in an historical context
The Global Minotaur	Finding an internet version of a political economy book I had read in 2012	The book is one of the best explanations of the financial crash… but now reread as if for the first time
A Better Economics	Finding an internet version of a little-known but superbly-written economics textbook	May have been produced 21 years ago but clearly written by someone very sensitive to readers’ needs
The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties”	Paul Collier’s new book	Explains why the book was so good it inspired 5 posts
Communitarianism, anyone?	Which failed to explore this underlying theme	An agenda is sketched out
Can the genie be put back on the bottle?	Are we no longer masters of our fate?	Some good reviews are summarised
The future of capitalism part IV	Acknowledgements page reminds me how important friends are to drafting process	As well as some critiques
The Beast needs fixed! Part V		A final assessment of Collier – with some suggestions for further reading

Theories of Change - mine and other people's

For the past few years, people in the “development” field have been encouraged to have a “theory of change”. The global technocracy had at last been forced to recognise that its attempts to make political institutions in “developing” countries more open to economic development had not been working - and that a different more local, inclusive and incremental approach was needed if there were to be any prospects for improving the government systems under which so many citizens are yoked….. 

Practitioners of this curious field often use the phrase “Doing Development Differently” – there is a nice short powerpoint presentation here of the main ideas to complement the OECD paper which is the first hyperlink

I.ve had my own theories of organisational change – whether in Scotland in the 1970s and 80s or in central Asia in the 2000s – always (I have just realised) with the assumption that "we" were facing the implacable force of what the great organisational analyst Donald Schoen in 1970 called “dynamic conservatism”

When I was lucky enough to find myself in a position of strategic leadership in a new and large organisation in the mid 1970s, we used what I called the “pincer approach” to set up reform structures at both a political and community level. The organisational culture was, of course, one of classic bureaucracy – but, from its very start, some of us made sure that it had to contend with the unruly forces of political idealism and community power. The regional body concerned was responsible for such local government functions as education, social work, transport, water and strategic planning for two and half million people; and employed 100,000 staff but not has been written about it.

You’ll find the full story of the strategy here – and a short version here. 

Thirty years later. I was doing a lot of training sessions in the Presidential Academies of Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and developed there what I called the “opportunistic” or “windows of opportunity” theory of change against what I started to call “impervious regimes” ie so confident of the lack of challenge to their rule that they had become impervious to their citizens -

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity”. And the preparation is about analysis, mobilisation and trust.

·         It is about us caring enough about our organisation and society to speak out about the need for change.

·         It is about taking the trouble to think and read about ways to improve things – and helping create and run networks of such change.

·         And it is about establishing a personal reputation for probity and good judgement that people will follow your lead when that window of opportunity arises”.

I realised that it would be difficult to implement such an approach in Beijing when I arrived there in January 2010 to take up the role of Team Leader in a “Rule of Law” project and made a fast exit from a project that was supposed to last for 4 years – for reasons I tried to explain in a note called Lost in Beijing.

A year later, I tried to share some of my concerns about how the European Commission was dealing with capacity development in “transition countries” with participants at the annual NISPAcee Conference in Varna. But The Long Game – not the log-frame was met with indifference.

As it happens that was the year the World Bank published its quite excellent People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (World Bank 2011). And it was 2015 before this guide on “change management for rule of law practitioners” saw the light of day    

I said earlier that I had always assumed that reformers were facing “implacable force” in their intervention but need now to question this..…not just because 1989 showed how easily certitudes and legitimacy can crumble….. but also because management writing has in the past 2 decades paid a lot more attention to chaos and uncertainty – even before the 2006 global crisis (eg Meadows and Wheatley).

As someone who has always felt compelled to try to intervene in social processes (ie of an “activist” mode) I readily admit that my initial responses to those who argued that every force attracts a counterforce and, most memorably, that “the flap of a butterfly’s wings can ultimately contribute to tornados”…has been one of impatience. Quite a lot of the writing on “chaos theory” and even “systems theory” seemed to me to run the risk of encouraging fatalism.

One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted a book (”The Rhetoric of Reaction”; 1991) to examining three arguments conservative writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers:

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

He was right to call out those writers; but we perhaps need a similar framework these days to help us make sense of the world of chaos in which we live. I had been aware of systems thinking in the 1970s (particularly in the writing of Geoffrey Vickers and Stafford Beer) and again in 2010 and, finally, in a 2011 post which focused on complexity theory. My brief foray into the subject didn’t greatly enlighten me but I have a feeling I should return to the challenge….

I have therefore a little pile of books on my desk – including The Web of Life (Fritjof Capra 1996); Leadership and the new Science – discovering order in a chaotic world (Margaret Wheatley 1999); Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows 2009) – as well as a virtual book Systems thinking – creative holism for managers; Michael Jackson (2003). 

So let’s see if my older self is capable of new insights…….