It’s highly appropriate that, at the end of the week during
which I have been thinking and about blogging the difficulties what, for lack
of a better phrase I have to call “social reform”, a blistering article appears.
I won’t spoil the effect by revealing, for the moment, the
identity of the writer. What is important for me is that the author gives
central place to the notion of a “re-balancing” of power and systems. Have
patience – the excerpt is a long one! So I’ve taken the liberty of adding some
headings……
The notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the
metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the
fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to
about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
The great irony of it is that the only thing that actually
works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and
never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection. It's
pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of
free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And
that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that
gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess….
Some history
A working class that had no discretionary income at the
beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages was turned it
into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they
needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't
need, and that was the engine that drove us.
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had
the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and
started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living
made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to
either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of
that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an
argument that meant neither side gets to win.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the
equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it didn't matter that
they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time
and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the
equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth
more.
The big mistake
Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of
trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to
the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken
seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me.
But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a
profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I
don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids
other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me
roar.
And so in my country (the US) you're seeing a horror show. You're
seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment
of basic services, such as public education, functional public education.
You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs
that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most
incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of
people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put
into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the
number and rate that we are.
I’m no pansy!
I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be
the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over.
But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how
you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in
the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.
And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of
victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless
we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of
Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed
unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.
But things can’t go on like this!
Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and
the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was
married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is
capitalism.
The idea that the market will solve such things as
environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our
problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the
economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market
is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile.
It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately
and we're going down the tubes.
And that's what The Wire was about basically, it
was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe
10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy.
It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential
crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless
still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going
to have to endure somehow.
The great horror show
That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with
all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting
when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial
fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the
higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were
marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.
And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the
economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat,
so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or
they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain
faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and
market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just
about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are
you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?
So?
So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because
they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's
going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get
the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made
between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have
some hope.
……..Or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at
which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this
mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get
to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm
losing faith.
Looks like we have to throw bricks
The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now
is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the
electoral process in my country.
The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles
against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate
moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and
what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the
electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.
Right now capital has effectively purchased the government,
and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m
that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order
that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative
process.
So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the
representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if
we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure
we can affect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the
Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.
This emphasis on the importance of balance was the focus of
a very good (but neglected) paper which Henry Mintzberg published in 2000 about
the
Management of Government which starts with the assertion that it was
not capitalism which won in 1989 but "the balanced model” ie a system in
which there was some sort of balance between the power of commerce, the state
and the citizen. Patently the balance has swung too far in the intervening 20
years! Mintzberg is a very sane (Canadian) voice in a mad world – ás is obvious from
this article on
managing
quietly and his
ten
musings on management.
I mentioned his paper on the blog
a couple of years ago when he seemed to be writing a book about the need for re-balance but his
website contains now
only a promise of a pamphlet. Mintzberg is one of the few people familiar with the relevant literature who could develop an appropriate typology to help us move forward from the desparate shouting......
