The New Certainties

Strange how we can at one and the same time deplore the “bubbles” in which people operate and yet, unthinkingly, demonstrate groupthink in our own behaviour. George Parker used the opportunity of a George Orwell award to draw attention to the new mood of “certainty” and tribalism which has been evident in the world these past few years 

When we open a book or click on an article, the first thing we want to know is which group the writer belongs to. The group might be a political faction, an ethnicity or a sexuality, a literary clique. The answer makes reading a lot simpler. It tells us what to expect from the writer’s work, and even what to think of it. Groups save us a lot of trouble by doing our thinking for us.

Politicians and activists are representatives. Writers are individuals whose job is to find language that can cross the unfathomable gap separating us from one another. They don’t write as anyone beyond themselves. But today, writers have every incentive to do their work as easily identifiable, fully paid-up members of a community. Belonging is numerically codified by social media, with its likes, retweets, friends, and followers. Writers learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers 

For Parker, it was the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in 2015 which started the process – when 200 US writers objected to the award that year of PEN America’s first Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French weekly.

 

Thereafter, it became an award for American political activism. PEN was honoring heroes on its side—public figures whom the majority of American writers wholeheartedly support. The award became less about freedom than about belonging. As Charlie Hebdo showed, free speech, which is the foundation of every writer’s work, can be tough going.

 

The fear is more subtle and, in a way, more crippling. It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.

Last year I taught a journalism course at Yale. My students were talented and hardworking, but I kept running into a problem: They always wanted to write from a position of moral certainty. This was where they felt strongest and safest. I assigned them to read writers who demonstrated the power of inner conflict and moral weakness—Baldwin, Orwell, Naipaul, Didion. I told my students that good writing never comes from the display of virtue. But I could see that they were sceptical, as if I were encouraging them deliberately to botch a job interview. They were attracted to subjects about which they’d already made up their minds.

 

Certainty has a flattening effect. It washes out the details of human experience so that they lose their variety and vitality. Certainty removes the strength of doubt, the struggle to reconcile incompatible ideals, the drama of working out an idea without knowing where it will lead, the pain of changing your mind. Good writing doesn’t deny or flee these things—it explores them down to their depths, confident that the most beautiful and important truths are found where the glare of certainty can’t reach.

Of course, in Russia these past few days, that certainty has now been enshrined in a brutal new law, passed unanimously in the Russian parliament 

which bans news organisations from reporting anything except state approved press releases (it is now illegal for any broadcaster to call events in Ukraine, for example, “a war”). The new legislation, which has also caused the BBC and most other news organisations to suspend its reporting in Russia, will see journalists and media owners who contravene it jailed for up to 15 years. BBC director general Tim Davie said the law “appears to criminalise the process of independent journalism”

But, even in the West, people are, increasingly, expected to toe the “official line” in comments as analysed in this article by Michael Brenner, Emeritus Professor at Pittsburgh and John Hopkins’ Universities. And it takes a courageous writer these days to write a balanced piece about the war in Ukraine such as Wolfgang Streeck’s recent piece 

Both Russia and the United States have long been facing the creeping decay of both their national social order and international position, apparently making them feel that they must halt it now or else it will continue forever. In the Russian case, what one sees is a regime both statist and oligarchic, confronting growing unrest among its citizens, rich in oil and corruption, unable to improve the lives of its ordinary people while its oligarchs are getting immeasurably rich, a regime increasingly turning towards the use of a heavy dictatorial hand against any organized protests. To sit more comfortably than one can on bayonets requires stability derived from economic prosperity and social progress, in turn dependent on global demand for the oil and gas Russia has to sell. For this, however, it needs access to financial markets and advanced technology, which the US had for some time begun to deny.

 

Similarly with external security, where the US and NATO have for nearly two decades now penetrated politically and militarily into what Russia, only too familiar with foreign incursions, claims as its cordon sanitaire. Moscow’s attempts to negotiate on this have led to post-Soviet Russia being treated by Washington in the same way as its predecessor, the Soviet Union, with the ultimate aim of regime change. All attempts to end the encroachment have led to nothing; NATO has moved closer and closer, recently stationing intermediate-range missiles in Poland and Romania, while the United States has increasingly treated Ukraine as a territory it owns – viz., Victoria Nuland’s vice-regal proclamations on who should lead the government in Kyiv. 

I should make it clear that Streeck,  although a very highly respected German sociologist and political economist, does not pretend to have any particular expertise in International Relations – although he has ventured in the last few years into the field of analysis of German politics. For really solid analysis on issues of security I’ve found Anatol Lieven very reliable and in mid November last year – in the middle of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan “The Atlantic” published this piece of his reminding us that “Ukraine was the most dangerous place problem in the world” – to which there was then a solution (Minsk II) that, however, the US was resisting

Such inconvenient truths are quickly pounced upon and held up to ridicule by the liberal  mainstream media; this New Republic article has indeed invented a new name -  “westplaining” – for what it calls the 

“unending stream of Western scholars and pundits condescending to explain the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, often in ways that either ignore voices from the region, treating it as an object rather than a subject of history, or claiming to perfectly understand Russian logic and motives. Eastern European online circles have started using a new term to describe this phenomenon of people from the Anglosphere loudly foisting their analytical schema and prescriptions onto the region” 

Wolfgang Streeck is, of course, on the list – but I have to say that his geopolitical analysis gives us the sort of balanced view which any attempt at negotiation will desperately need. With Ukrainians struggling for their lives under murderous aggression, we are understandably focused on the human suffering involved. We are currently in war mode but need to think ahead…. 

After the media debacle of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, showing strength vis-à-vis Russia seemed a safe way to display American muscle, forcing the Republicans during the run-up to critical midterm elections to unite behind Biden as the leader of a resurrected ‘Free World’. Washington duly turned to megaphone diplomacy and categorically refused any negotiation on NATO expansion. For Putin, having gone as far as he had, the choice was starkly posed between escalation and capitulation. It was at this point that method turned into madness, and the murderous, strategically disastrous Russian land invasion of Ukraine began.

 

For the US, refusing Russian demands for security guarantees was a convenient way to shore up the unconditional allegiance of European countries to NATO, an alliance that had become shaky in recent years. This concerned especially France, whose president had not long ago diagnosed NATO to be as ‘brain-dead’, but also Germany with its new government whose leading party, the SPD, was considered too Russian-friendly. There was also unfinished business regarding a gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Merkel, in tandem with Schröder, had invited Russia to build it, hoping to fill the gap in German energy supply expected to result from the FRG’s Sonderweg running out of coal and nuclear power. The US opposed the project, as did many others in Europe, including the German Greens. Among the reasons were fears that the pipeline would make Western Europe more dependent on Russia, and that it would be impossible for Ukraine and Poland to interrupt Russian gas deliveries should Moscow be found to misbehave.

The confrontation over Ukraine, by restoring European allegiance to American leadership, solved this problem in no time. Following the lead of declassified CIA announcements, Western Europe’s so-called ‘quality press’, not to mention the public-broadcasting systems, presented the rapidly deteriorating situation as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, the US under Biden versus Russia under Putin. In Merkel’s final weeks, the Biden administration talked the US Senate out of harsh sanctions on Germany and the operators of Nord Stream 2, in return for Germany agreeing to include the pipeline in a possible future package of sanctions. After the Russian recognition of the two break-away East Ukrainian provinces, Berlin formally postponed regulatory certification of the pipeline – which was, however, not enough. With the new German Chancellor standing next to him at a Washington press conference, Biden announced that if necessary, the pipeline would definitely be included in sanctions, Scholz remaining silent. A few days later, Biden endorsed the Senate plan that he had earlier opposed. Then, on 24 February, the Russian invasion propelled Berlin to do on its own what would otherwise have been done by Washington on Germany’s and the West’s behalf: shelve the pipeline once and for all.

 

Western European governments dutifully suppressed all remaining memories of the deeply rooted recklessness of American foreign policy, induced by the sheer size of the United States and its location on a continental-sized island where nobody can get to them, regardless of the mess they make when their military adventures go wrong – and, astonishingly, gave the United States, a far-away non-European declining empire with different interests and a host of problems of its own, full power of attorney in dealing with Russia over nothing less than the future of the European state system.

What about the EU? In short, as Western Europe is returned to ‘the West’, the EU is reduced to a geo-economic utility for NATO, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help ‘the West’ encircle Russia on its Western flank.  

Further Important Reads

https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/what-to-read-on-ukraine/ - a fascinating commentary and selection

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/03/vladimir-putin-ukraine-war-chechnya - an interesting analysis of Putin whose biography by Masha Gessen reports his being kicked out of the Pioneers for being an uncontrollable lout. Plus ca change

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/03/02/russias-attack-on-ukraine-represents-a-demand-for-a-new-world-order/ Some people consider that Putin invaded Ukraine because he fears democracy – this energy blog offers another explanation – relating to energy supplies from which at the moment Russia is making almost 1 billion dollars a day.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/04/what-would-ukraine-russia-peace-deal-look-like - a very recent article from Anatol Lieven (see body of post)

Ukraine and Russia – from civilised divorce to uncivil war Paul d’Anieri (2019) - apparently a very balanced analysis

https://samf.su reading listbstack.com/p/space-and-time?s=r - military analyst Lawrence Freedman’s latest assessment

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/domino-effect?pc=1426 

follow the money my favourite (Canadian) blogger gives his take – the discussion thread is worth following

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/the-prospect-podcast-219-peter-ricketts-how-to-stop-putin - Peter Ricketts was a UK Ambassador to NATO and he's interviewed here by Alan Rusbridger

The Ukraine War

 Romanian television is full of images of refugees crossing from Ukraine into Romania from its northern border – some of them Romanian-speaking since the border a hundred years ago under the Austro-Hungarian Empire used to be much further north and towns like Czernowitz part of Romania. Gregor von Rezzori based his famous trilogy there. 

Like most people, I’m constantly refreshing the news to get updates about the horrific events occurring there and trying to make sense of it all. One of the things I realise is how little I can trust the commentators for whom the war seems little more than a spectacle – with roles of goodies and baddies too easily assigned. Only the likes of Paul Rogers (Professor of Peace Studies and respected military analyst) and Lawrence Freedman (Professor of military history and author of the recent amazing “Strategy – a history”) seem able to rise above this - although I reference some others at the end of the post 

Anthony Barnett is someone I can rely on to articulate most clearly our hopes and fears – whether on issues of democracy, nationalism, Brexit or the pandemic. So it’s not surprising that it is a typically nuanced piece of his which has spurred me into a few words about what a Moscow historian has courageously called “the most senseless war in history”

I have never been so wrong about a major event that was so clearly forewarned. I was convinced that Vladimir Putin would not be so reckless as to launch a full-scale conquest of Ukraine, if only for the simple reason that he would lose. I had assumed he was a cunning dictator who hated democracy, was smart enough to play on the corruption of a West enamoured of rentier capitalism and therefore had a cold measure of realities. I also thought he felt profoundly threatened by last year’s uprising in Belarus. The possible contagion of a democratic revolution there would threaten him personally, and the West’s sanctions, while not enough to undermine Lukashenko’s regime, were a close call. So I reckoned – perhaps I should say hoped – that the huge mobilisation of Russian military forces around Ukraine was a feint, whose real aim was to consolidate Russian control over Minsk, not Kyiv. This, it seemed to me, was bad enough.

It is important to hold onto one’s disbelief and the reasons for it. There is a danger in defaulting to self-regarding huff and puff, especially if you are British, with righteous declarations of how dictators must not be appeased. Putin should – and more importantly, will – be defeated. Now is the time for war, given that he has chosen it. It will be fought and suffered by the people of Ukraine, and we must extend to them solidarity and support. In the spirit of such solidarity, this also means it is time to begin to plan the peace that follows when the would-be conqueror is vanquished, and Russian forces withdraw. Ukraine’s heroic President Zelensky is right to put his country’s neutrality on the table in any negotiation. For if we do not wish to return to the old cycle that has led to this war, we have to acknowledge where we are coming from. 

There were, Barnett argues, two reasons why Putin’s invasion was ‘unbelievable’. “First, Ukraine is a large country with a proud people and long borders. It cannot be successfully occupied against determined patriotic resistance. Even if the Russian forces can completely subdue Ukraine’s professional army, which is not yet clear, they cannot withstand a long insurgency fed with the latest infantry weapons, night-vision rifles and drone technology, supported by US surveillance and cyber-warfare. The premise of Putin’s assault, as set out in his historically insane address, is that the people of Ukraine are really Russian. As his troops will learn, this is untrue. Nibbling off part of an oblast is one thing – seeking the conquest of an entire, functioning country that borders NATO does not make sense”. 

Putin is a product of the disastrous way that the US replaced the Cold War. As I write in ‘Taking Control!’, then-president George H W Bush expressed 30 years ago “the joy that was in my heart” at the way America had “won the Cold War”. He was thrilled that “a world once divided into two now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America”.

But America’s solo hegemony was responsible for a period of unrestrained unfairness. Its wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq were indecent disasters and its insatiable financial system exploded in the great crash of 2008.

Nowhere was more indecently and unfairly treated than Russia. After 1992, the US could have supported its transformation into a relatively uncorrupted democracy as its people wished. Instead of extending an updated Marshall plan to a defeated enemy, as the US had so successfully done with Japan and Germany after 1945, Russia was ravaged by economic ‘shock therapy’ and bankrupted. Putin is the foster child of Washington’s greed and myopia, determined to take revenge on the forces of the capitalist family that also orphaned him even while he has been personally enriched and empowered by it. 

Other useful analyses

https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/27/hedges-the-greatest-evil-is-war/

https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/hedges-the-chronicle-of-a-war-foretold/

https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/remembrance-of-nuclear-things-past

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-eu-oil-gas-trade-russia-budget-military-spending-ukraine-war-crisis/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/liberal-democracies-must-defend-their-values-and-show-putin-that-the-west-isnt-weak

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-power

Adam Tooze Chartbook 90

Just added - Rebel Wisdom – sensemaking Russia and Ukraine A recent find, this website gives original insights. This long post is the most amazing assessment of useful commentaries and very much reflects my own feelings  

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340 An interview with Fiona Hill, the Brit in the US Foreign service who is a good Russian analyst

https://samf.substack.com/p/russias-plan-c?s=r Lawrence Freedman’s post of 2 March

https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/01/on-humiliation-and-the-ukraine-war/ 1 march

Ukraine and the art of strategy; Lawrence Freedman (2019) in which the military historian links the events of the past 8 years to the lessons from his great opus on “Strategy – a history”

https://indi.ca/white-empire-is-playing-russian-roulette-with-sanctions/

https://unherd.com/2022/02/vladimir-putins-reckless-gamble/

https://palladiummag.com/2022/02/24/what-happened-in-kazakhstans-january-rebellion/

https://palladiummag.com/2022/02/18/waiting-for-the-russians-in-ukraine/

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii87/articles/volodymyr-ishchenko-ukraine-s-fractures of historical interest (the mood in 2014)

https://warontherocks.com/ a US security website “with a Realist” lens.

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?