I had an unusual summer. I didn't ask to be given the media attention I got, but it happened. I didn't ask to observe Jeremy Corbyn's campaign from close quarters, but again, I did. And I do not want to waste what I learned.
The knowledge I acquired is framed in three ways. First, there is my background as a 57-year-old who has been keenly interested in politics since the 1970 general election. Second, there is my career experience, whether as a chartered accountant, campaigner or political economist. Third, there are my own ethics; those of a left-leaning, middle-class, heterosexual, white, male Quaker. They all influence how I see things, of course. The point is that what follows is not objective: it is a personal perspective. That's what we all bring to debate.
Having said all of which I think that what I have witnessed suggests something quite significant is happening. I first really felt it in Scotland more than a year ago. I have now witnessed it in England. It felt like the seeds for the same change might exist in the north and south of Ireland when I was there recently. Having a Crown Dependency senior minister tell me that not all my analysis was wrong a week or so ago may not be part of the same process, but who knows? It may be.
What's happening? That's harder to define. That's because, in a sense very little is happening as yet. The left has won, and won, and won again in Greece, for sure. It is rising in Spain. But so too is Catalan independence. And Scottish independence. And, lest we forget it, UKIP and the National Front in France. These are, I think related phenomena, although they move in different directions.
The rise of the right is linked to fear: the retreat that these parties offer is a reaction to a perceived threat. How big the threat might be is hard to tell. What it is, interestingly, is easier to say. The fear is of people who have an identity. For many that identity is their Muslim faith. For others it is their identity as people wishing to change their economic well-being. In both cases the threat is not, I think, their ethnicity, their language or their customs. The threat is from their confidence. They believe. That belief, whether it be in a creed or in themselves, is what makes them threatening.
This is what I think is so significant about this summer: what the people who have flocked to Jeremy Corbyn have responded to as an idea; a belief, if you like. That idea may not be as clearly stated as everyone would wish. Whether it is backward, or forward, looking has been the subject of much debate (for the record, I can't see the backward element). What the consequence is must be uncertain as yet.
But that there was a reaching out for belief appears to me to be beyond dispute. The unease that arose from 2008, and which saw the rise of the Occupy movement, has now created something bigger. And I do not think that the timing is coincidental. Thirty-five years of the post-war consensus was followed by thirty-five years of the neoliberal era. Both were, of course, based upon broadly consensual thinking. The post-war era was built upon a belief that a common good could be built collectively, within which framework all could materially thrive. The neoliberal era was, in part, a rejection of this idea as a consequence of its embrace of individualism. The idea was that you were to make what you could of life, without consideration for the consequences.
What is most striking now is that thirty-five years of the nihilism of individualism has left people without a sense of who they are; hence the fear of some of those with belief, and the quest of others to find others with whom they might share common ground.
The difficulty for the right is that in this situation all they have to offer is the jingoism of hatred: the caricature of the benefits scrounger was not created by chance and no one should deny its power. The right have always, when suffering stress, maintained their position by vilifying outsiders.
For the left the challenge is different. The Occupy Movement spent a long time looking for a statement of belief, and eventually came up with tax justice. Maybe it is unsurprising that Jeremy Corbyn has started from the same point. There is no harm in that: the issue clearly resonates. But, and I say this is one of its exponents, it is not in itself enough to be the foundation of a whole political movement.
Such movements must be founded on collective narratives And, as I have already (I hope) demonstrated those need to be simply and briefly stated. So what is the collective narrative that underpins Corbynomics (or its more broadly defined replacement) if the term is to have sufficient meaning to inform politics (which is the normal direction of travel). I am not suggesting I have the whole and complete answer to that: I see no reason why I should. But, I think my one sentence summary of the new era which may be arriving, and which many crave, is one where the individual seeks to achieve their purpose within the constraints that the planet now so very obviously imposes upon us.
I explored purpose in The Courageous State, and do so, briefly, here, where I say:
Perhaps most contentiously (although it seems to me absolutely unambiguously), a person has a need for meaning. I call that their purpose. It could be called a spiritual need. I would be happy with that, but know that might alienate some, and I think purpose, in any event more encompassing. Either was, in I stress that it is definitely not religion. This is the quest for the answer to the question ‘why am I here?' Unless that question is addressed it seems pretty unlikely to me that a person can achieve their potential.
I contrast purpose in the economics of The Courageous State with materialism. I don't in the process deny for one minute the need for material well being. What I am saying in doing so is that materialism has crushed our quest for meaning and with it our belief. The result is a collective existentialist crisis that is crippling our society in a way migration is not.
Why is this relevant to economics? It is because achieving purpose is about substituting meaning for material consumption. Not only is this a necessary direction for travel to constrain consumption (which explains my interest in taxes that achieve that goal) which is itself necessary to ensure we do live within our means but this also is the direction for future employment (or occupation, because being paid is not a necessary condition for useful activity) at a time when the processes of work are bound to change, as Paul Mason has explored in Post Capitalism.
Achieving our potential is, I suggest, the real object of growth. Finding our purpose is the goal of that process. We are right now at the polar opposite of that within our economy, where material consumption is the suggested indication of a life well lived. The fact that this goal has been reinforced by the advertising industry, which is the one and only sector whose sole aim is the creation of human dissatisfaction with what we have, should be the clearest indication of the vacuity of this current objective.
I think it's the rejection of materialism in the search for something more important that is motivating current political change. What's more I think the change will drive the next wave of economic development. What is more, I think we can build a viable economy on this basis. But in that case no wonder the political divides are getting sharper. The stakes are increasing, dramatically and the challenge to neoliberalism is real. We could be in for interesting times.
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Thank you for that, Richard. We agree on much. I disagree, however, on why others are seen as a threat. What belief or confidence does a benefit scrounger have that instils envy or fear into the fearful or the envious? What makes these people – migrants, refugees, the poor – a threat, is simply a finger pointing repeatedly at them and away from the real reasons for insecurity, poverty, or lack of any fulfilling identity.
That aside, thanks for expanding what little I know of economics. Interesting times, indeed.
Anvil.
I don’t agree
The finger pointing feeds the insecurity of those who the Pinter wants to recruit to their cause
The fear being exploited is that these people might threaten the material security of others – and the success of the strategy is dependent on exploiting the paradoxical belief tgat material well being is the goal of a life well lived when the person whose fear is being exploited knows in some deep seated way thatt there is more to life than this, and that those striving for a better life may have access to some understanding of thus tgat those with material well being cannot access
I stress, this is clearly not universally true: some do want material well being
It is a hypothesis, but I think a plausible one
Neo-liberalism is, in effect, enacted cynicism, in the sense that it “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing”, and it is “value” that has been drained out of our lives by 35 years of Thatcherism, using “value” in a very broad sense as implying worth, content (stressed on 1st syllable here), meaning, even purpose and hope.
Last night I caught the end of a TRULY preposterous programme on ITV entitled “Eternal Glory” (!!!), which bigs itself up as a unique competition, but is really nothing more than the “same old, same old” of modern equivalents of the Roman arena, intended to distract viewers from their inner emptiness, and divert them from their mental vacuity, by offering them mere entertainment, and the facade on mental engagement. People really have had their brains boiled and pickled, but to have such a competition bigged up as being on a par with Achilles or Alexander the Great by entitling it “Eternal Glory”!!! shows how much we have been given the shadow in place of the substance.
Whatever faults there may have been in the first period you refer to – the Atlee arrangement that lasted until the advent of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in 1979, no one can say that it robbed us of meaning, of worth, of value.
The truly worrying additional factor to the rise of neo-liberalism to a hegemonic status is that it has allowed the emergence of the hidden heart of neo – liberalism, namely the profoundly antidemocratic forces of neo-feudalism, which stand ready to take advantage of our weakened sense of our own value.
We really are engaged in a life and death struggle, it seems to me, between freedom and tyranny, value and valuelessness, hope and despair, belief and vacuity – the existential struggle to which you have so eloquently referred in your post. Politics and struggle have never been so important, as the Tory Party lapse back firmly into its persona as the Nasty Party, ascevidenced by Theresa May’s ill-considered attack on migrants, and IDS’s assault on the vulnerable.
As usual, I agree
Well put Andrew – the utter vacuousness is palpable and has been a gradual extinction of almost every cultural value that makes life worthwhile-in short, it is the finacialisation of the human soul-what gives you worth is being a rent extractor or the extracted from-I think I’ve said this before: it’s not surprising that the zombie as a metaphor has such prominence as it really is a human sucked dry of real content- Osborne/Hunt/Cameron/Smith all have this grinning vampire feel about them and Duncan Smith’s blog nick-name of ‘Nosferatu’ is more prescient than the apparent ad hominem unpleasantry might indicate.
I also agree that it has the quality of ‘life and death struggle’ so asphyxiating and toxic is the political climate.
Cameron’s speech included an implicit attack on social housing-be financialised or go without a roof!
Hunt reduces people to mere drones on a treadmill
Smith continues marginalising and tarring the vulnerable with the brush of inadequacy
I think the word ‘Nasty’ has to be replaced with something stronger, ‘vile’, ‘iniquitous’ seem better.
Does your vision of less materialism apply to the developing world, or just the west?
Excess consumption is mainly a western phenomenon
The Ghastly teresa May is stoking more hatred and resorting to a disgusting sub-reptilian devise of blaming migrants for causing low wages when we know that wages have been stagnating since 1975.
Like all of these hideous utterances, it is based on keeping disguising the neo-liberal roots of these issues and fuelling knee-jerk, simplistic explanations.
This is why it is not falling into Godwin’s Law to refer to them as proto-fascist.
I simply don’t know if what I’m about to write is either a real concern or an over-reaction but I feel compelled to write it.
So much of what passes itself off as common sense, at least when it comes from the brains/mouths of certain politicians, reminds me of pre-war Germany:
– The demonising and treatment as scroungers of those that cannot either work or find adequately rewarded work.
– The idea that poorly paid work is more motivating and better for self-esteem than financial security – in other words, that work, any work, makes you free.
– The demonising of the dispossesed through the use of such words as “swarm” and “hordes”, in particular Muslims, as some sort of virus we must exclude for fear that they might overrun us.
– The exclusion of those without the means to pay from full access to the law.
– The suggestion that shop stewards should wear armbands to identify themselves; to whom?
– The abject failure to address the sins of those who control, or have vast impact over, our economic performance.
– The endless use of simplistic, and plainly wrong-headed, explanations of how the economy works.
All of which amount to propaganda; reassure the proles that all will be well for them while maintaining and/or increasing inequality and division, ie divide and conquer.
Was I alone in finding Boris Johnson’s words yesterday, that we must bind together for the good of all, spectacularly hypocritical?
Why does it have to be like this?
The Road to Neo-Feudalism demands it
That’s a description, Nick, not an over reaction. Johnson, of course, is a highly dangerous thug disguised as a tousled hair buffoon. Everything pouring out of the Tory conference requires the application of a ‘double-speak’ translator.
Simon, Nick
Your reference to doublespeak reminded me that at some point last year there was a thread on Richard’s blog where we likened much of what we hear from the Tories to “Newspeak” – from Orwells 1984, of course. I wasn’t aware of this until yesterday but not all versions of the book contain the appendix that covers in detail “Newspeak”. Apparently the American versions of 1984 don’t have it (or didn’t).
But anyway, I shan’t post the same excerpt as I did previously, but reading the appendix (‘The Principles of Newspeak’) again this morning I though this appropriate when considering what May, Hunt, Osborne, IDS, and Cameron (as well as hordes of lesser Tories have uttered these past few days:
‘Its [Newspeak]vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever. To give a single example. The word “free” still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as “this dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds”. It could not be used in its old sense as “politically free” or “intellectually free”, since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.’
It seems to me that the neoliberal project – and thus those who are its champions – are a long way down the “Newspeak” road, and by choice, though they would never dare admit it.
On the car radio, I heard cameron saying we have the lowest social mobility in the developed world. He didn’t say why he thought that was. He can hardly blame socialism as Scandinavia has high levels of social mobility. I think regular readers of this blog are able to tell him.
Cameron will say,no doubt, that it’s because people aren’t working hard enough and it’s the welfare state that is getting in the way of them experiencing the exhilarating motivation derived from the fear of homelessness, food banks and utter penury with a nice sprinkling of the ‘American Dream’ (George Carlin- “it’s called a ‘dream’ because you’ve got to be asleep to believe in it”).
On the matter of not wanting to waste what one has learned it seems worthwhile to observe the fact that Caroline Lucus MP is calling for a UK Truth Commission on debt, similar to one she has recently been looking at in Greece.
No doubt such an initiative would require people with a range of relevant expertise, knowledge, and experience in various aspects of economics………….
RE Guido Fawkes clip from Cameron’s speech. I have blogged on this making the point that it might encourage more people to read your book and hence come to their own conclusions. We are in a different and dangerous world that is changing rapidly and this does mean new politics and new economics. If we go on as we are we will find out the hard way.
Sorry if this duplicates, had a problem. Re the Guido Fawkes item on Cameron’s speech, have blogged on this to the effect that it might encourage people to read your book and come to their own conclusions. Given the pace and nature of change at present we are going to have a new economics and politics whether we like it or not and are just not prepared for it.
Perhaps the simple way of saying it is that Neoliberalism has increased the undermining of “representational equity” for human beings not just in electing a nation’s central and local governments but at the level of the workplace and the pretence that the Invisible Hand is an adequate substitute no longer carries conviction amongst an increasing majority. This is an ancient narrative unfolding in pendulum fashion between the necessity of Individualism and Mutualism and yet repeatedly we fail to recognise it until we start to suffer from the negative effects in both forms.
New thinking about economics is certainly needed.
The economic model as we have it has come to the end of its useful life-cycle. Otherwise we would not have 0 interest rates, rising indebtedness, and rising inequality.
Another example is, how nonsensical the policies are which are currently being proposed. The Tories offer a wealth fund, they say, but what is behind it? They have just stolen the name, it does not make any sense to have a wealth fund for public pension funds investing in UK infrastructure.
Here is why it is nonsense:
https://radicaleconomicthought.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/economics-of-the-bullingdon-boys-wealth-funds/
Well, if that doesn’t get a man aroused, then nothing will.
Whilst I have sympathy with may of the points on materialism you raise, you do seem do view much through a West/First World prism. What always disappoints me though, is that the Left always regard themselves as the Goodies and the Right as demonic. There is a Centre ground if you want a label, indeed the same person can hold a mixture of views.
Complete nonsense
On the matter of mixtures of views it would seem reasonable to go further and state that too many people do hold a mixture of views, and herein lies a major problem. Because in far too many cases that mixture of views is, as Orwell noted, largely contradictory.
It is, for example, quite common to witness a mixture of views which indicate the holder would willingly die in a ditch along with their entire family in support of Capitalism in terms of the free movement of Capital, which has destroyed whole industries, communities and regions in the UK and elsewhere, whilst at the same time complaining bitterly that the free movement of labour is impacting on jobs. Totally ignoring the contradiction that the free capital movement has destroyed far more jobs than the free movement of labour or that if you support Capitalism you cannot pick and choose which bits of the package you want – free movement of capital but not labour.
Totally bizzarre!
Or, again, the so called mixture of views which one finds extremely common, which holds that hanging, drawing and quartering is too good for those who cheat the benefit system but at the same time leap to defend wealthy individuals and corporations when they regularly cheat up to fifteen times more tax that benefit fraud.
Ditto when it comes to “benefits” where many older people complain about benefits other people are receiving but when challenged on the benefits they receive, bus passes, winter fuel allowance, free prescriptions, Christmas bonus etc genuinely believe they are not benefits.
It is all very well holding a mixture of views but those views need to consistent rather than contradictory otherwise they are of no use, value, worth or practical utility.
And the key problem is that man f these people consider themselves, and are re re considered by others, as occupying this mythical position labelled the “Centre Ground.”
Which brings up a further problematic issue because once again the is a contradiction in too many minds between the reality occupying the heads of so many, which is that the “Centre Ground” is a permanantly fixed position, and the actual realty in which it is constantly moving to the right.
Perhaps a reading of Tariq Ali’s recent book The Extreme Centre might help in this regard?
A very well structured article. I support his idea that we need to ask the question of ourselves. Why are we here?
I was taught many years ago about the “Heirachy of Need”. It seems to me that the majority of people are all struggling with the basic ” need for shelter” and “the need for food” and only a small percentage progress beyond that. Those that do rarely reach the level of “self realisation”. Why is that? Is it because the craving for comfort in materialism is skewing their ability to reach that level? The preference for self as opposed to belonging to a wider group perhaps?