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ECLIPSE AND RE-EMERGENCE OF THE ECONOMIC MOVEMENT
This year, media commentators are celebrating "1968", the sepia-tinted
central event of their youth. Others who never clambered out of the Left
vanity press reflect these celebrations with rancour. Did 1968 lead to
Thatcherism? Scan the biographies of the New Right for evidence... But such
suspicions touch only the student movement, implicating a set of prominent
radicals whose careers were established that year. The proposition collapses
if "1968" is taken to mean the social movements in the ten years from 1965:
struggles in factory, housing scheme and shopping centre (in forms varying
from country to country, area to area) - in sum, a contestation of authority
in any form.
Faced with the emergent "consumer society" of the fifties and sixties,
modernisers of socialism could highlight the status and struggles of the mass
worker in the factories turning out cars, etc. and the dismal new towns built
to house them. The contestation movement fed from the alienation and
socialisation of such workers.
Whatever vitality did exist in society at the time appeared to be driven by
the criticisms which such movements made of the existing state of things.
Legitimised by this, the Left functioned as an energiser in the institutions,
taking areas out of contestation (the process described as
"de-commodification" in the article on "'New' Social Movements" in Here & Now
5) and often eliciting participation where none was volunteered. Whether as
the "artificial negativity" of which Piccone wrote, or as Baudrillard's
political class trying to elicit response from the a-social black hole, the
Left performed a vital r?le in society's functioning.
A path to the future was clear: even an economist could write that "exertion
of active control in place of passive submission corresponds directly with
the elevation of the political will over the blind interplay of economic
forces." (Heilbroner, "Business Civilisation in Decline", p62)
Acquisitiveness being "a dubious source of social morale", it seemed
"plausible that the economic institutions of socialism may prove superior to
those of planned capitalism" (p47).
This could hardly have been written subsequent to 1976. In the years since,
the situation has seemed to have changed almost completely. Contestation, in
the forms and at the levels previously seen, decreases under the onslaught of
"the crisis" and its panacea: Enterprise Culture. The areas of
"de-commodification" have come into crisis: despite the Left's
self-recognition as providing rationality (matching Heilbroner's position),
much of what was provided was the arbitrary. The result is the onslaught of
re-commodification.
The downturn in such contestation necessitates re-appraisal, not merely of
contemporary developments in the organisation of life (in work, leisure and
domestic arrangements), but also in the whole area of radical politics. The
crisis generates an ever-bigger subclass, on which many radicals pin their
hopes for the future. Some (such as Guattari & Negri) insist on a continuing
pressure, effortlessly blending the Italian movements, Solidarnosc, the
Iranian Revolution and South Africa. But this hardly touches the dynamics of
life for the larger number in work, for whom recent years have brought
pressure for new mentalities. We feel that these must be explored,and have
started trying to do so in Here & Now.
Enterprising
What then is enterprise culture? It presents itself as a re-emergence of
eternal truths which had become shrouded, as radical novelty which returns to
the well-worn path. It must be viewed from various angles, both in the
present and in the past which it claims for itself.
Restructuring within the enterprise has subverted the fusion of individual
and collective goals. The solidarity of those who work together is tapped by
defining them as a production or project team, designated as a profit or cost
centre (as described in "The Invasion of Exchange" in Here & Now 4).
Discontent with line management then increases this team-spirit, thus
diverting it towards the enterprise's goals. Simultaneously, possibilities
for increase in salary and status are individualised through performance
review systems and gradings.
Such measures are common in "enlightened", un-unionised, high-tech
enterprises, and other firms aspire towards it as a way of dissipating
potential trouble. "Old" attitudes are undesirable - so recruit the wives of
those who worked in the older industries. In the case of Nissan in Japan,
such management arose with the training of a new workforce after a protracted
"old-style" industrial struggle was met by the "new-style" response of "Sack
the lot".
In those instances of recognisable mass struggle which do erupt, it is often
the individualisation of reward which is contended, particularly by the Trade
Union hierarchy, who see their collective bargaining rights evaporating.
Apparently all they can now offer is a "better" personnel package through
single-union deals. The solidarity of order-takers against order-givers which
some saw in the struggles of twenty years ago appears to give way to the
pursuit of individual liberation through cash relations.
As important as material changes in work relations has been the
relegitimisation of the idea of the entrepreneur-as-hero. Seen in the growing
respectability of Management Studies course and textbooks and their bastard
offspring, managerial memoirs, it matters little that yesterday's hero may be
today's casualty (Laker, Sinclair, Saunders...) The r?le remains, and a
can-do attitude is a popular self-image (particularly for those who
get-others-to-do).
Local Labour councils, too, aspire to the enterprising r?le, anxious to be
seen as more than grudging providers of basic services (of which more later).
The fashionable name for a council-funded office becomes "Enterprise Centre",
for example. The former apostles of a planned economy now fall prey to
"visionaries" who can sell them a "plan of the future". In Central Scotland,
for example, around ?1m has gone into Stirling Futureworld - a grandiose
tourist-based vision of glass escalators and international hotels, which has
amounted to little more than artificial turf on the local football ground!
From time to time, terms such as "service industry" are brought into play to
denote some vital project. Strategic deployment of such concepts effortlessly
conflates and neutralises two extremes of the working environment: the
highly-paid sector of managing finance capital circulation and the low-paid
hamburger-shop sector. All they have in common is a vigourous working
environment and the 'designing-out' of means for pursuing collective goals.
Similarly, self-employment has been promoted, not merely as a way of reducing
the dole queues but also as a means of restoring Capital's values to their
rightful dominance, supposedly bringing corresponding social benefits.
Rewriting the History Books
In written and administered prescriptions, programs of re-commodification are
being realised. Most disturbingly, their power often derives from their also
seeming to be the re-insertion of the human into stultified social processes.
Revisionist histories legitimize such feelings. In Britain (as Pete Grafton,
following Orwell, noted in his book "You, You and You!") a widespread (and
perhaps pre-revolutionary) discontent with the rulers in the period around
the Dunkirk rout, was healed as much by the myth of national effort as
anything else. The courage of Jack Hawkins on the Bridge and a Cockney
sparrer in the Engine Room diverted attention from such conflicts as the 1944
Lanarkshire Miners' Strike. A postwar electoral consensus around the
spectacle of Labour leaders elected in officers' uniforms brought the
implementation of the liberal Beveridge proposals on the building of a "New
Jerusalem".
Until recently, only anarchist writers (many of whose attention remains
focussed on that time) highlighted chinks in the armour of postwar consensus.
Even if the policies of the consensus were dead, the founding act was above
denigration. Now, however, the spectacle of the-nation-pulling-together has
become fair game. In war historian Corelli Barnett's "The Audit of War: The
Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation", each sector of the War
Effort (coal and steel production, ship and aircraft building) is examined in
turn, and demonstrated to have shown little of the supposed "productivity
miracle".
Barnett's attack is socially and historically wide-ranging. He is
contemptuous of the culture of the British Ruling Class, the Arnold ethics of
the Public School, the pro-classics, anti-engineering bias dominant from the
mid-19th century; he has scant more regard for the provincial engineering
capitalists with their complacent acceptance of "rules-of-thumb"; and
little-to-none for the industrial working class itself, in its attempts to
maintain craft traditions in the face of imposed change. Barnett sees the
"New Jerusalem" approach of the writers of the Beveridge Report as an almost
willful avoidance of an economic reality which should have been paramount, as
an uncosted refusal to modernise the economy, with consequences faced only in
the 1980s.
Barnett's willingness to stress the importance of class conflict in his
historical model (although regarding it as an obstruction to economic
necessity) indicates the different perspectives admissable in the New Right.
Sympathetic as they may be to his contempt for such moralisers of social
engineering as Beveridge, new Conservatives such as those around The
Salisbury Review find such a class-driven outlook unacceptable. Nor would
they be attracted to any replacement of moral education by technocracy.
But such Conservatives would agree with the tone and nature of Barnett's
concluding remarks, in locating the roots of many social ills, when he states
that "the illusions and dreams of 1945 would fade one by one... at the last,
New Jerusalem itself, a dream turned to a dank reality of a segregated,
subliterate, unskilled, unhealthy and institutionalised proletariat hanging
on the nipple of state maternalism" (p304)
Making Claims
Welfarism is under attack on various grounds. Some claim it to be
redistribution of resources from the poor (whose taxes finance it, but who
are less likely to take-up benefits) to the well-off (who are more likely to
"know their rights"). By this neat sleight-of-hand, the Islington Leftist who
demands proper NHS treatment is accused of exploiting the Bengali sweatshop
worker who lacks the articulacy in English to obtain such treatment. From
this viewpoint, only a true living wage allows everyone the freedom to obtain
equal treatment.
Others, such as former Prime Ministerial adviser Ferdinand Mount, consider
that the first two terms of the present Conservative Government curbed
inflation and trade-union power, and that the overall task of the third is a
"reclaiming of yob England": the working class apparently failed to live up
to the expectations placed upon it by the founders of the Welfare State. A
former minister having claimed that "council housing breeds slums,
delinquency, vandalism, rent arrears and social polarisation", Mount saw much
of this as having been founded in "the worst mistakes of the Welfare State -
the virtual destruction of the old Friendly Societies, the building of the
council tower blocks, the erosion of the independance of the church schools,
the destruction of the grammer schools, and so on". (The Spectator, 28/6/86)
Housing policy is central to much contemporary political debate. In the first
place, there is the current Government's bias towards individual home
ownership - probably inefficient in direct capitalist terms (a reinvestment
of resources in fixed materials), but extremely efficient in its
fragmentation and reconstruction of the community. Secondly, in the field of
public housing, there is the developing critique of the postwar housing
scheme programmes. "The Material Community" (in Here & Now 2) tried to place
the development of the crisis in this area in the context of development of
Capital's needs.
Both our critique and that promulgated today are driven by the experience of
involvement with local authority Housing Departments. Even the Left concede
that this has often been unpleasant: "Even a brief browse through [Local
Government Ombudsman reports] gives the unavoidable impression that Labour
authorities make lousy landlords... (Council) housing is an undemocratic
jungle and it's partly the fault of Labour landlords. The concept of
choice... is quite absent." (Jolyon Jenkins, New Statesman, 19/2/88) A
free-market conservative like Sir Alfred Sherman instead stresses that
"...benefits like council housing leave such wide scope for administrative,
political and personal discretion as to generate arbitrariness, unfairness,
political corruption and eventually personal corruption." While both
acknowledge the crisis in allocation schemes, the ex-Marxist Sherman
emphasises the systematic level, while Jenkins wishes a more humane
implementation of the current system. A similar crusade for "choice" is the
prevailing tone of the Kinnock-Hattersley "Statement of Democratic Socialist
Aims and Values": tail-ending "enterprise culture" by celebrating consumption.
In the mid-1970s (as described in "The Material Community") the housing
crisis was acknowledged under the rubric of "urban deprivation". Many ills
identified by the New Right were perceived then, but were subjected to
institutional palliatives intended to manage them out of existence. More
recent critical perspectives step outside that perspective and attempt to
provide a historical rationale for what went wrong with public housing,
rejecting any systematic critique of everyday life but allowing a certain
reflexive space. The fashionable palliative measures for housing schemes are
those recommended by Professor Alice Coleman in "Utopia on Trial: Vision and
Reality in Planned Housing" (1985) and subsequent reports.
She places much of the blame on the application of the Garden-City-type
housing ideas of the early 20th century: Utopia "aimed to liberate people
from the slums but has come to represent an even worse form of bondage. It
aspired to beautify the urban environment, but has been transmogrified into
the epitome of ugliness." (p180) Abandoning the failed deterministic belief
that the new housing schemes would improve human behaviour and happiness, the
housing bureaucrats substituted a possibilism, that "it is perfectly possible
for everyone to be good and happy regardless of the nature of the environment
and if they were not, it was because they were problem people. The concept of
'sink estates', populated by the dregs of humanity, followed in the wake of
this volte-face..." (p19) She instead proposes investigation of the extent to
which environment does affect social behaviour.
The provisional conclusions were that a set of structural alterations could
affect behaviour. Broadly, these were to increase the tenants' "defensible
space" by dismantling overhead walkways, reducing the numbers of people using
each external doorway, splitting the "confused space" of large green areas
into individual gardens. Such measures resemble neighbourhood watch schemes
in that they elicit a limited community self-policing, returning a limited
amount of self-respect and reducing the extent to which people feel
themselves to be mere objects of a Housing Department allocation plan.
It may be surprising that such technical assessment of housing scheme design
while ignoring the wider social background, was initially unpopular with the
technicians of the central government bureaucracy. However, design assessment
by indexation of dog turds and urination could have appeared as statistics
gone mad. Only after they were taken up by "enlightened" commentators (such
as Robert Chesshyre in The Observer) was a more enthusiastic response
generated. Her proposals appear to offer a scientific, commonsense solution
to 1980s social disorder. Sometimes this is explicit, such as when their
publicity level rose dramatically in the wake of the Broadwater Farm events.
Now these are officially encouraged, as the Dept. of the Environment's
decentralist Priority Estates Project and the Home Office's "Crime: Together
We'll Crack It" campaign. So not the least reason why housing is a central
issue in political debate is that it deals obliquely with the control of
space and circulation.
Coleman's ideas were probably received coldly because she considers such
remedial work as only making the best of a bad job: "It would be far better
to quietly phase out the DoE's intrusion into housing design and return
housing initiatives to the free market, with minimum regulation and maximum
consumer choice, so that architects, builders and developers can become
responsive to residents' needs? Housing choice and responsibility for one's
home should be decisions made not by the bureaucrats but by the occupants."
(p184) So here again, maximum "freedom" is seen as resulting from otherwise
disinterested principals coming together in the market place: the equality of
the commodity.
Healthy Crisis
This article has said little about the crisis engendered by the Conservative
Government, except to note that "crisis" as lifestyle becomes a form of
permanent revolution in the profit centres of the large corporations as well
as of supposedly weaning people off the "dependency culture". The most recent
changes in social security may yet prove to be a step too far, widening a
perception of injustice done. But the immense power of the project comes from
a simultaneous centralisation and abdication of power through
recommodification, which deprives opposition of a material target.
The ground for the debate over the "crisis" in the funding of the National
Health Service has shifted in a similar manner. Once a model is accepted
within which the productivity of the economy is a real limit to resource
allocation, the supposedly "rational" decision-making on the allocation is
laid open to challenge. As Stuart Hall put it "What the Right argue is that,
once this limit is reached... then there is not much to choose between
rationing by price (which they would prefer) and rationing by queue (which is
what has been going on in the NHS for decades)." (Marxism Today, March 1988)
And such rationing by queue has always been overlaid by irrational and
arbitrary criteria: people have been present in the system as objects. And,
as mentioned above, privilege has been present (but hidden), almost as much
as in private medicine.
While the Right as a whole sees virtue in the promotion of Enterprise
Culture, this virtue is not perceived as identical to the pursuit of money in
itself. In this respect, for example, The Spectator has published editorials
opposing the yobbishness of city yuppies interested only in money and against
"economic value" being taken as the only social value (for example, in
closure of University Departments which don't "give value for money"). As
mentioned above in relation to the re-appraisal of the Beveridge heritage,
social conservatism and economic liberalism criss-cross in complex ways.
The major triumph of recent years has been feelgood consumerism. Parallel
with the stress on balanced books has been a consumer boom paid-for by
credit. The collateral for this boom has come from escalating house prices
and escalating investment incomes, and, internationally, from the depressed
prices of raw materials since the recession of the early Eighties. The events
of Black Monday last October may indicate that this was only a passing phase,
with a true crisis to come.
One of those most deeply involved in the consumer boom, Sir Terence Conran
(of the Mothercare-Habitat-BHS conglomerate) has recently begun making gloomy
predictions: "We have reached a consumerist plateau... People do not want
more. They have lived the cycle of the early eighties when they demanded
goods that were exciting, new, desirable - not just the postwar commodities
they once needed. Now people no longer want anything much... there is no
imperative to go out and buy. With low inflation, consumers are not moved to
buy unless excited or in need, Arguably the only goods people need are food
and nappies." (The Observer, 21/2/88)
At first sight, this would seem to be an example of the naturalism of needs
to which the Left used to be prey ("People only need so much") coming from
someone who has made his money from knowing better than that. On the other
hand, Conran may just be confusing the consumerist phase of those who bought
in his shops with the consumerist phase of those like himself who spent the
period devouring other companies. But the quotation remains strange?
In each aspect described above, Power is re-fragmented in ways which would
have seemed unthinkable to the Left of a previous generation, who saw only
the prospect of a steady growth in monolithic power. And this fragmentation
proclaims a new freedom for all, confident that in each of its moments, with
each transaction, Capital as the principal social relation is being renewed.
The crisis has been a remarkably successful manoeuvre for re-volatilising
society around an acceptance of economic relations. Left journals, by
stressing familiar concepts of crisis and struggle, have tended not to do
full justice to the extent of success of the economic project. Can it be more
than wishful thinking to suggest that the values espoused be turned against
their advocates? Certainly, nothing will come of any project privileging
decision-at-the-point-of-consumption, the purchase of lifestyle masquerading
as self-will, as the Labour Party Policy Review seems likely to favour.
Alex Richards
From Here & Now 6 1988 - No copyright