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Title: Despair Fatigue
Author: David Graeber
Date: March 2016
Language: en
Topics: boredom, hope, UK, austerity, Corbyn
Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2020 from https://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber
Notes: Published in Issue No.30 of The Baffler

David Graeber

Despair Fatigue

Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?

There is reason to believe something like that is beginning to happen in

Great Britain. Call it despair fatigue.

For nearly half a century, British culture, particularly on the left,

has made an art out of despair. This is the land where “No Future for

You” became the motto of a generation, and then another generation, and

then another. From the crumbling of its empire, to the crumbling of its

industrial cities, to the current crumbling of its welfare state, the

country seemed to be exploring every possible permutation of despair:

despair as rage, despair as resignation, despair as humor, despair as

pride or secret pleasure. It’s almost as if it’s finally run out.

On the surface, and from a distance, Britain looks like it’s

experiencing one of the stranger paroxysms of masochistic

self-destruction in world history. Since the Conservative victory of

2010, first in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and now on its own,

the British government has set out to systematically unravel much of

what makes life good and decent in the country. Conservative leaders

started by trashing the United Kingdom’s once proud university system,

while eyeing the greatest source of national pride and dignity, the

universal health guarantees of the National Health Service. All of this

is being done in the name of an economic doctrine—austerity, the

imperative need for fiscal discipline—that no one genuinely believes in

and whose results pretty much everyone deplores (including prime

minister David Cameron, who in private has denounced the decline of his

local public services), in response to an existential crisis that does

not exist.

How did this happen? It appears that the entire political class has

become trapped in the bizarrely successful narrative that swept the

Tories into power after the crash of 2008 and still sustains them long

after its consequences have run beyond any sort of humanity or common

sense.

Boom Crash Opera

Pretty much every major sitting government was booted out after the

crash, and the political complexion of the government in question

largely determined the popular narrative of what had caused the crash to

begin with. In the United States, it was George W. Bush’s fault, so the

popular onus fell on the CEOs and hedge fund managers who Bush used to

refer to, at fundraisers, as his “base.” None were actually prosecuted,

but most Americans felt strongly that they ought to be. In the United

Kingdom, where Gordon Brown’s Labour Party was sitting in Downing

Street, everyone accepted the opposition’s narrative that the British

crash resulted from irresponsible social spending and government

deficits. In fact, the Tories found that appealing to a rhetoric of

shared sacrifice, belt-tightening, and even collective suffering struck

a chord in the British public. This was perhaps most true of

working-class voters. Now almost entirely stripped of any sense of

community, neighborhood, or workplace solidarity by decades of

right-wing social engineering, they saw the hard times and rationing of

World War II as the last time Britons had acted with a genuine common

purpose.

The social effects of the spending cuts—all ostensibly aimed at reducing

the supposedly catastrophic government debt overhang—have been

devastating. British universities, which not so many years ago were (as

in most of Europe) entirely free, have become among the most expensive

in the world. Social housing has been ransacked, subsidies have been

cut, and squatting in residential properties was made illegal at exactly

the moment tens of thousands were being “decanted” from their homes. To

be poor now means to be endlessly assessed, monitored, and surveyed, and

almost invariably found wanting. No one really knows how many thousands

of people have died as a result of the freefall in government support,

but to get just an inkling: between December 2011 and February 2014, the

Department of Work and Pensions reported that 2,380 Britons previously

on disability support were found dead no more than six weeks after

receiving notice that they were having their benefits cut because they

had been determined to be “fit for work.”

One reason this could happen is that there’s been virtually no public

debate on austerity itself. At no point, for example, did a major TV

news outlet host a panel of economists discussing whether public debt

was really the cause of the economic crisis, or debating whether

European-style austerity or Obama-style fiscal stimulus would be a more

appropriate response. The only questions were how much budget cutting

was required and where the cuts should fall. This confident Tory

narrative reigned unchallenged from the rudest hack in the Daily Mail to

the most chiseled eminence of the (supposedly socialist) BBC, and all

figures of public authority held to it even after the immediate effects

of the cuts proved spectacularly ineffective. Even as double dip turned

to triple dip and Tory chancellor George Osborne doubled down by making

increasingly bizarre pledges (that all future governments would run a

surplus, that Britain would completely eliminate its national debt,

etc.), scarcely any major pundit, editorialist, or TV commentator broke

ranks. And when, after years of abject misery, the economy, inevitably,

began to stir a tiny bit, all instantly proclaimed that Osborne was

vindicated.

This consensus, oddly, has next to nothing to do with the opinions of

professional economists. Almost all British economists understood that

the gaping deficits of 2008 and 2009 had been caused by the banking

crisis, not the other way around. Likewise, anyone paying attention knew

that cutbacks of public services to “save money” reduced economic

activity, and hence government tax revenues, and so really had the

effect of raising, not lowering deficits. Most also understood that

deficits weren’t really much of a problem to begin with. But even the

opinion of mainstream economists was, suddenly, excluded from public

debate. By 2012, even the IMF was issuing statements urging the Tories

to lay off. But you’d never learn any of this from the Times, the

Observer, or the BBC.

How could such total, lock-step defiance of reality be maintained in a

country with a formally free press and highly educated population? To

some degree, you find the familiar bubble effect. Politicians,

journalists, lobbyists, CEOs, and corporate bureaucrats rarely talk to

anyone except each other. They constitute a distinct intellectual

universe. Within this universe, economic policies are designed primarily

for political marketability; economic science exists largely to provide

impressive diagrams and equations to sell them with. Phrases designed in

think tanks and focus groups (“free markets,” “wealth creators,”

“personal responsibility,” “shared sacrifice”) are repeated like

incantations until it all seems like such unthinking common sense that

no one even asks what the resulting picture has to do with social

reality. True, the bubble logic can be maintained only by a certain

studied ignorance of how the economy really works. One 2014 poll

discovered, for instance, that 90 percent of sitting MPs, for all their

endless debates on the need to save money, didn’t know where money comes

from. (They thought it was created by the Royal Mint.)

The bubble effect is not unique to Britain, of course. Political debate

in the United States, Japan, or Germany works much the same way. But in

Britain, things have gone so far that we are beginning to see a classic

Big Lie reinforcer effect. When the consensus reality gets this

completely divorced from actually existing reality, when so many

innocent people have suffered as a result, and when anyone pointing this

out has been so consistently and aggressively denounced as a

tinfoil-hat-wearing flat-earther or Trotskyite, to break ranks would

mean admitting that the lunatics were right. There is nothing the

established media is more loath to do.

The divorce between consensus and reality has grown so extreme and

unworkable that even the technocrats charged with running the system

have started to cry foul. In 2014 the Bank of England—its economists

apparently exhausted by having to carry out economic policy in a

made-up, topsy-turvy world designed only to benefit the rich—issued a

statement on “Money Creation in the Modern Economy” that effectively

destroyed the entire theoretical basis for austerity. Money, they noted,

is not created by governments, or even central bankers, who must be

careful not to make too much of it lest they spark inflation; it’s

actually created by private banks making loans. Without debt there would

be no money. The post-Keynesian heterodox economists, regularly

denounced as a lunatic fringe by those commentators willing to

acknowledge their existence, were right.

No major news outlet considered this a story; politicians continued

preaching their morality tales of the evils of debt exactly as they had

before.

Nothing but Class

So what is the real basis of the British economy? It is, after all, the

fifth largest in the world.

It’s important to remember that, despite much rhetoric to the contrary,

the economy of the United Kingdom, like those of other wealthy

countries, is largely self-sustaining. There are still farms, factories,

mines, fisheries, and artisanal workshops, and these continue to meet

most of the country’s material needs. Much of the feeling that Britain

has deindustrialized is due to the decline of the giant factories of

mid-century. But these were always something of an anomaly: from the

heyday of the Industrial Revolution to the Victorian era, when Britain

led the world in production and technological innovation, the economy

was dominated by a combination of high finance and small family

firms—much as it is today.

Still, in many ways Britain resembles an imperial economy: while it does

export machinery, pharmaceuticals, plastics, petrol, and a whole variety

of high-quality artisanal products, in sheer material terms it takes in

far, far more than it sends out. So we must ask a simple question: Why

do other countries continue to send their things to Britain? How is it

that the island manages to take in so much more from the rest of the

world than it gives them in return?

The conventional answer is, of course, “financial services.” The economy

of the United Kingdom now turns aroundits financial hub, the City of

London, whose largest firms play an enormous role in coordinating

international trade. The City’s advantages are partly just those of

Greenwich Mean Time: a billionaire in Qatar or Mumbai can make a call to

his broker in London with only a few hours difference; in New York, let

alone California, it’s likely to be the middle of the night. What’s

more, the same billionaire can speak to a broker with a familiar,

reassuring Oxbridge accent, giving him the pleasant feeling of now

having the grandson of his country’s former colonial officials at his

beck and call.

Surely there is something in this. But it cannot be the whole

explanation. The scale is just too large. Do people in Brazil or Korea

really send endless container ships full of steel, cars, or computers to

Britain because they are charmed by Oxbridge accents or awed by its

skill at paperwork? Because paperwork, after all, is all that “financial

services” ultimately is, and there are plenty of people in Brazil and

Korea who are extremely good at paperwork as well.

Another argument, common in leftist circles, is that Britain is simply

reaping the benefits of its position as loyal lieutenant of the American

empire. The U.S.-sponsored “financial system” is, as economists like

Michael Hudson have argued, largely a shakedown system, a means of

extracting something if not identical to, then very like imperial

tribute from the rest of the world. Britain, so understood, could then

be seen as facilitating the process within its own former imperial

territories, perhaps with a covert eye to flipping its allegiances to

China and India when their time comes. No doubt there is something to

this too, but again, it’s hardly a complete explanation. In the United

Kingdom, “finance” is based above all in real estate, and the real

estate bubble that sustains the City is itself sustained by the fact

that pretty much every billionaire in the world feels they have to

maintain at least a flat, and more often a townhouse, in a fashionable

part of London. Why? There are plenty of other well-appointed modern

cities in the world, most of which have a decidedly more appealing

climate. Yet even more than, say, New York or San Francisco, London real

estate has become something like U.S. treasury bonds, a basic currency

of the international rich.

It’s when one asks questions like these that economics and politics

become indistinguishable. Those who have investigated the situation find

that London’s appeal—and by extension, Britain’s—rests on two factors.

First of all, Russian oligarchs or Saudi princesses know they can get

pretty much anything they want in London, from antique candelabras and

high-tech spy devices, to Mary Poppins–style nannies for their children,

fresh lobsters delivered by bicycle in the wee hours, and every

conceivable variety of exotic sexual service, music, and food. What’s

more, the boodles will be delivered by a cheerful, creative, and

subservient working-class population who, drawing on centuries of

tradition, know exactly how to be butlers. The second factor is

security. If one is a nouveau riche construction magnate or diamond

trader from Hong Kong, Delhi, or Bahrain, one is keenly aware that at

home, something could still go terribly wrong: revolution, a sudden

U-turn of government policy, expropriation, violent unrest. None of this

could possibly happen in Notting Hill or Chelsea. Any political change

that would significantly affect the most wealthy was effectively taken

off the table with the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

In other words, the historical defeat and humiliation of the British

working classes is now the island’s primary export product. By

organizing the entire economy around the resultant housing bubble, the

Tories have ensured that the bulk of the British population is aware, at

least on some tacit level, that it is precisely the global appeal of the

English class system, up to and including the contemptuous sneer of the

Oxbridge graduates in Parliament chuckling over the impending removal of

housing benefits, that is also keeping affordable track shoes, beer, and

consumer electronics flowing into the country. It’s an impossible

dilemma. It’s hardly surprising, then, that so many turn to cynical

right-wing populists like UKIP, who manipulate the resulting indignation

by fomenting rage against Polish construction workers instead of Russian

oligarchs, Bangladeshi drivers instead of Qatari princes, and West

Indian porters instead of Brazilian steel tycoons.

This marketing of class subservience is the essence of Tory economic

strategy. Industry may be trounced and the university system turned

(back) into a playground for the rich, but even if this leads to a

collapse of technology and the knowledge economy, the end result will

only seal in more firmly the class system that produces Tory

politicians: England will literally have nothing else to sell.

Tony Blair’s New Labour policies, which, despite the Labour Party’s

working-class funding base, basically represented the sensibilities of

the professional classes, did attempt to forge an alternative vision.

For the Blairites, the United Kingdom’s future lay in what they called

the “creative industries.” Had not the United Kingdom, regularly since

the sixties, produced waves of popular music and youth culture that had

swept the world, bringing in billions in direct and indirect revenue? It

must have seemed a plausible gambit in the nineties, but it failed

because the Blairites were operating with a completely false

understanding of where cultural creativity comes from.

They naively assumed creativity was basically a middle-class phenomenon,

the product of people like themselves. In fact, almost everything

worthwhile that has come out of British culture for the last century,

from music hall, to street kebabs, to standup comedy, rock ‘n’ roll, and

the rave scene, has been primarily a working-class phenomenon.

Essentially, these were the things the working class created when they

weren’t actually working. The sprouting of British popular culture in

the sixties was entirely a product of the United Kingdom’s then very

generous welfare state. There is a reason that in Cockney rhyming slang,

the word for “dole” is “rock ‘n’ roll”(“he got the sack, he’s on the

rock ‘n’ roll again”): a surprising proportion of major bands later to

sweep the world spent at least some of their formative years on

unemployment relief. Blairites were stupid enough to combine their

promotion of “Cool Britannia” with massive welfare reforms, which

effectively guaranteed the entire project would crash and burn, since

they ensured that pretty much everyone with the potential to become the

next John Lennon would instead spend the rest of their lives stacking

boxes in their local Tesco as part of the new welfare conditionality.

In the end, all that the Blairites managed to produce was a world-class

marketing sector (since that’s what middle-class people are actually

good at); otherwise, they had nothing to show for themselves at all.

The Return of the Future

All this might seem irredeemably bleak. All the more surprising, then,

that the main reaction on the left, beginning tentatively with the 2010

student movement and now exploding everywhere, has been a wave of almost

insolent optimism and a (admittedly hesitant) return to utopian visions.

This is why I started by speaking of “despair fatigue.” There is a still

small but growing realization that if Great Britain is going to enter

history again—if there is going to be any sort of grand, positive vision

for its future—that vision can come only from the left.

When all is said and done, the Tory and New Labour visions aren’t really

visions at all. True, in Thatcher’s time, and even to some degree in

Tony Blair’s, the market reformers managed to pass themselves off as in

some sense the real revolutionaries. But no one makes such a claim

anymore. The same lip service is paid to the idea that market

enthusiasts are young, enthusiastic, and tech-savvy, and that those who

defend the remains of the welfare state are a pack of bitter old geezers

whining at the pub. This pretense is becoming increasingly hollow too.

Having achieved their consensus reality, the only thing the political

classes have left to do is defend it. Everyone knows the Conservatives

hold sway precisely because they have convinced the public they actually

are conservatives; their fabled “competence” really comes down to the

argument that only they can manage to hold things together, roughly as

they currently exist, before the advent of some inevitable catastrophe

whose precise contours we cannot know.

Meanwhile, on the streets and council estates, Britain is undergoing a

sea change, a veritable efflorescence of resistance. It’s very hard to

know the real scale of it because, unlike in generations past, the media

largely refuses to report on it. Perhaps this is because when they do,

the results are rarely what they expect. On May 9, 2015, the day after

the Tory election victory was declared, before the inevitable new round

of cuts could even be announced, there was a minor riot in front of the

prime minister’s offices at 10 Downing Street. Hundreds of student

activists clashed with police; several of them, on being punched and

kicked by uniformed officers, actually punched back; paint bombs were

thrown, flares set off, and the Women of World War II memorial was

daubed with the familiar slogan “Fuck Tory Scum.” The editors of the

right-wing tabloid the Daily Mail decided that the public mood was such

that it might even be possible to actually report this, and ran a huge

spread with splashy pictures under the headline “Anarchist Mob Planning

Summer of Thuggery.” Within twenty-four hours, they were horrified to

discover that in the comments section, opinion among their own readers

was running something like five to one in favor of anarchist thuggery.

Even the “desecration” of the memorial didn’t raise much in the way of

hackles. After all, most Britons are well aware that the first thing

veterans did, on returning from the war, was oust Churchill’s sitting

Tory government and vote in one that promised to preside over the

creation of a modern welfare state. This is precisely the work the

current inhabitants of Downing Street are trying to dismantle. The

rioters were simply defending those veterans’ legacy and enunciating

what they, if alive, would most likely be saying themselves.

Between student occupations, housing occupations, street actions, and a

revival of radical unionism, there has been an unprecedented upswell of

resistance. But even more important, it has begun, however haltingly, to

take on a very different spirit than the desperate, rear-guard actions

of years past. After all, even the legendary poll-tax riots that

dislodged Thatcher were either backward-looking or, alternately, bitter

and nihilistic. Class War’s slogans (“The Royal Question: Hanging or

Shooting?”) were perhaps charmingly provocative, but hardly utopian.

This is where the notion of despair fatigue comes in.

One might argue that its beginnings were already visible in popular

culture. Witness the emergence of the Scottish socialist school of

science fiction, which, after the relentless dystopianism of the

seventies, eighties, and nineties, led the way to a broader trend by

toying with redemptive futures once again. Then there was Steampunk,

surely the most peculiar of countercultural trends, a kind of ungainly

Victorian futurism full of steam-powered computers and airships,

top-hatted cyborgs, floating cities powered by Tesla coils, and an

endless variety of technologies that had never actually emerged. I

remember attending some academic conference on the subject and asking

myself, “Okay, I get the steam part, that’s obvious, but ... what

exactly does this have to do with punk?” And then it dawned on me. No

Future! The Victorian era was the last time when most people in this

country genuinely believed in a technologically-driven future that was

going to lead to a world not only more prosperous and equal, but

actually more fun and exciting than their own. Then, of course, came the

Great War, and we discovered what the twentieth century was really going

to be like, with its monotonous alternation of terror and boredom in the

trenches. Was not Steampunk a way of saying, can’t we just go back,

write off the entire last century as a bad dream, and start over?

And is this not a necessary moment of reset before trying to imagine

what a genuinely revolutionary twenty-first century might actually be

like?

On to Corbofuturism

The first stirrings came, appropriately enough, from Scotland, where in

2015 the Scottish National Party made a virtually clean sweep of

Parliamentary seats, running an explicitly socialist, anti-austerity

platform and trouncing a tepid Labour Party unwilling to fundamentally

challenge the Conservative agenda. (Basically no one in Scotland votes

Tory.) But the real earthquake came a few months later, with the

apparently inexplicable rise of Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow chancellor

John McDonnell to the head of the Labour Party in Westminster itself. In

the eyes of the media, which—even ostensibly left venues like the

Guardian—is absolutely and unconditionally hostile to the new Labour

team, their success is itself a product of political despair: those

whining old geezers in the pub have given up on even trying to win

elections and have spat in the face of the entire system by electing one

of their own. And it’s true; the new Labour leadership is made up of

genuine radicals. Corbyn and McDonnell represent the activist wing of

the Labour Party—until recently, a very small faction indeed, consisting

of, at best, half a dozen MPs. They have been regular supporters and

even participants in the popular mobilizations.

I am not just talking about speaking at rallies here. I can myself

testify to this. When, in the summer of 2014, activists from Disabled

People Against Cuts were chaining themselves to the “sanctuary lawn” at

Westminster Abbey in a vain attempt to focus media attention on the

closure of the Independent Living Fund that promised to leave even more

people with disabilities dead, McDonnell and I were part of the crew

carrying spare batteries for their wheelchairs. Both he and Corbyn

openly support a philosophy that insists that social change can never

come from electoral politics alone, but only from a combination of

political mobilization, union organizing, and as McDonnell once

charmingly put it, “what in the old days we used to call ‘insurrection,’

though nowadays we politely call it ‘direct action.’” One can only

imagine the horror that ensued among the political establishment when

such people were suddenly catapulted to positions of leadership within

one of the country’s two major parties. From their point of view, it’s

not as if Bernie Sanders had taken over the Democratic Party. It’s more

as if it had been annexed by a combination of Noam Chomsky and Abbie

Hoffman.

How did it happen? In the immediate sense, Corbyn’s rise was precisely a

product of the weird conceptual bubble in which the British political

class operates. The Blairite hacks who dominate the Labour Party were

keen to break any remaining power of the unions, and were so convinced

that their manufactured common sense really was common to everyone that

they decided the best way to do this was to change the rules and allow

the party leader to be elected by popular vote. It never seems to have

occurred to them that a significant percentage of members of a still

ostensibly leftist political party might actually respond positively to

leftist values. In the wake of the Tory victory, McDonnell, at least so

the story goes, convinced a sufficient number of Blairite MPs to support

a hard-left candidate for head of the party to “broaden the debate,”

which was balanced on the other side by their own hard-right

pro-business candidate, Liz Kendall—a favorite of England’s notoriously

clueless pundits. Then those same delegates stared, slack-jawed, as

Corbyn heaped in 59.5 percent of the ballot in a field of four, the

biggest landslide ever won by any candidate for Labour leadership.

(Kendall pulled in last with 4.5 percent.)

On one level, the pundits were probably right: Corbynmania was just a

way of giving the finger to the establishment. The man’s appeal rests

largely on a complete absence of conventional charisma. He has no

rhetorical flair whatsoever. He simply tells you what he thinks. In a

political field so corrupt that it often seems the moral spectrum for

public figures runs roughly from calculating cynic to actual child

molester, the idea that a genuinely honest man could successfully run

for public office was a kind of revelation. Corbyn is rooted in the

socialist tradition, but lacks any specific ideology or agenda. To vote

for him was simply to vote for a set of values. Those who supported him

knew that it was only after the election that the real work would begin,

of figuring out how (or indeed, whether) it was possible for politicians

and street activists to synergize their efforts without co-opting or

destroying one another, what sort of economic model the left can

counterpose to the Tories’ marketing of class subservience, and what a

“new politics” based on popular participation in decision-making might

actually be like. It’s still all very much up for grabs, and the whole

project might well shipwreck terribly, leaving the left utterly defeated

for many years to come. Certainly, the entire media and party

establishment have made it clear that they are willing to do almost

anything to reverse the results of the leadership election. But three

things give reason for hope.

First, if a general realignment of British politics really were going

on, this is probably what it would look like. The role of the Bank of

England is crucial here. It has always seen itself as something of a

bellwether. In the mid- to late seventies, the Bank of England’s sudden

and unexpected embrace of monetarist economic models paved the way for

the Thatcherite revolution to follow; and Thatcher, it must be

remembered, was considered as much an outrageous insurgent within her

own party at the time as Corbyn is considered now. So it’s possible that

an uncanny parallel is working itself out.

Second, the new Labour leadership does have a fairly clear route to

power. The United Kingdom’s current economy is based on an artificially

maintained housing bubble, and bubbles do invariably burst. Labour has

four years before the next election. The chance of there not being some

kind of economic crisis in those four years is infinitesimal. For the

Corbynites, the task is twofold: first, to create a narrative about the

dangers of private debt in the same way the Tories did about public

debt, so that the Conservatives will be firmly saddled with the blame

(all the easier, perhaps—or perhaps not—because this narrative will

actually be true); and second, and more difficult, to remain as the

Labour leadership, resisting any internal Blairite coup, until the

inevitable crash takes place.

Finally, the very fact that Corbyn is something of a tabula rasa has

inspired an onrush of contesting visions, an eager concatenation of new

economic and political models vying for attention, which has begun to

reveal just how rich and diverse possible left-wing visions of the

future might actually be. It’s not just the predictable arrival of the

economic luminaries to hold court with the new shadow

chancellor—everyone from Joseph Stiglitz and Ann Pettifor, to Yanis

Varoufakis and Thomas Piketty. Genuinely radical ideas are being debated

and proposed. Should the left be pursuing accelerationism, pushing the

contradictions of capitalism forward with rapid growth and development,

or should it aim toward a total shift of values and radical de-growth?

Or should we be moving toward what Novara, the media initiative that

emerged from the 2010 student movement, began cheerfully referring to as

FALC—or Fully Automated Luxury Communism—encouraging technologies like

3-D printing to aim for a world of Star Trek–style replicators where

everything is free? Should the central bank enact “quantitative easing

for the people,” or a universal citizen’s income policy, or should we go

the way of Modern Money Theory and universal jobs guarantees?

All this is being carried on in the knowledge that existing economic

paradigms—even insofar as they are not simply being mobilized to justify

policies designed for purely political purposes—are no longer relevant

to the problems humanity is actually facing, in Britain or anywhere

else. True, most mainstream economists are capable of seeing through

obvious nonsense, like the justifications proposed for fiscal austerity.

But the discipline is still trying to solve what is essentially a

nineteenth-century problem: how to allocate scarce resources in such a

way as to optimize productivity to meet rising consumer demand.

Twenty-first century problems are likely to be entirely different: How,

in a world of potentially skyrocketing productivity and decreasing

demand for labor, will it be possible to maintain equitable distribution

without at the same time destroying the earth? Might the United Kingdom

become a pioneer for such a new economic dispensation? The new Labour

leadership is making the initial moves: calling for new economic models

(“socialism with an iPad”) and seeking potential allies in high-tech

industry. If we really are moving toward a future of decentralized,

small, high-tech, robotized production, it’s quite possible that the

United Kingdom’s peculiar traditions of small-scale enterprise and

amateur science—which never made it particularly amenable to the giant

bureaucratized conglomerates that did so well in the United States and

Germany, in either their capitalist or socialist manifestations—might

prove unusually apt. It’s all a colossal gamble. But then, that’s what

historical change is like.