Introduced by state Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville (R–Monroe), the legislation will restrict graduate students from achieving status as public employees, thereby preventing them from claiming collective bargaining rights and obtaining representation from a union. Yesterday’s vote comes just one day after it had passed through the Senate Government Operations Committee, and the bill will now move on to the state House of Representatives. The vote also comes on the heels of an emergency meeting by the University’s Board of Regents to pass a resolution in opposition to the bill. The regents voted 6-2, along party lines, to approve the resolution and instructed Cynthia Wilbanks, the University’s vice president of governmental affairs, to garner support among state legislators to vote against the bill. Bob McCann, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer (D–East Lansing), said Senate Republicans approved the bill so quickly — it was introduced last week — to avoid interference from negative public feedback.

The negative public feedback bit is where you come in. I don’t know how many CT readers are Michigan residents – I strongly encourage those who are to contact their state level representatives, whether Democratic or Republican, politely but firmly telling them what a horrible idea this is. I’d also be grateful if those who have useful information (i.e. relevant email addresses of political figures) or other helpful suggestions could leave them in comments. Time is of the essence; I also get the impression, perhaps mistaken, that graduate student union have only very limited resources to fight this kind of fight (they don’t have the direct political connections to local policy makers that other collective actors have. So please do what you can, and spread the word.

Update – Patrick O’Mahen supplies some useful phone numbers in comments.

Mark Ouimet District 52 (517) 373-0828
Rick Olsen District 55 (888) 345-2849
Pat Somerville District 23 (517) 373-0855
Nancy Jenkins District 55 (855) 292-0002
Kevin Cotter District 99 (517) 373-1789

Jase Bolger is the Speaker of the House and is always useful to bother on these issues (as he’s a veto point and all): (517) 373-1787

Finally, governor Rick Snyder can be reached at (517) 373-3400.

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years begins with a conversation in a London churchyard about debt and morality and takes us all the way from ancient Sumeria, through Roman slavery, the vast empires of the “Axial age”, medieval monasteries, New World conquest and slavery to the 2008 financial collapse. The breadth of material Graeber covers is extraordinarily impressive and, though anchored in the perspective of social anthropology, he also draws on economics and finance, law, history, classics, sociology and the history of ideas. I’m guessing that most of us can’t keep up and that we lack, to some degree, his erudition and multidisciplinary competence. Anyway, I do. But I hope that a Crooked Timber symposium can draw on experts and scholars from enough of these different disciplines to provide some critical perspective. My own background is in political philosophy and the history of political thought: so that naturally informs my own reactions as do my political engagements and sympathies. So mine is merely one take on some of the book’s themes.

Most people who work in the capitalist West are in debt: both individually and collectively. That indebtedness takes many forms. I have a mortgage, and I have to work to pay it off. Many of the consumer goods I enjoy are bought on credit. My students, thanks to “reforms” to the British higher education system initiated by “New Labour” and put into operation by the ConDem coalition will have massive debts that they will be seeking to redeem for their entire careers. My employer has long standing debts to the banks, underpinned by covenants that require that it carry out its business to certain standards or face unfavourable renegotiation of terms. The entire people of Greece are in debt and face, as a consequence, years of austerity and the loss of much of their political autonomy. And many other countries are in the same position. As Graeber points out near the beginning of his book, many third world countries, having been sold loans from pressurizing Western banks, loans that they can’t repay, have had to implement “austerity” and accept tough conditions imposed by international bodies, such as the IMF. Debt reflects on these recent events in historical perspective, seeking out precedents, but also giving an account of the emergence of the debt and money as social institutions and the way in which out ambivalent attitude to these is infected by the way our moral language and our folk conceptions of sociality are infected with ideas of debt, owing, repayment, obligation and the like.

Graeber argues that human societies are always structured (despite appearances) around three competing moral principles: communism, exchange, and hierarchy. “Communism” is the principle familiar from Marx: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Each contributes what they can and we are sensitive to the vulnerability of other members of our family or community. This is the principle governing the “camping trip” of G.A.Cohen’s recent Why not Socialism? and, ideally, the principle at work in many families and friendships. Graeber argues (101) that this “baseline communism” is the “ground of all human social life”. “Exchange”, by contrast, is governed by an ideal of strict reciprocity among free and equal persons. I give you something and you give me something in return. It is, among other things, the ideal principle of market exchange. “Hierarchy” is a principle of authority and status: we are not equal, I have the right to command and you to the duty obey, in virtue of who we are. These principles aren’t mutually exclusive, and they have peculiar ways of morphing into one another. And it can be a matter of controversy and judgement which principle (or combination of principles) is at work at any particular moment. A moment’s reflection on the nuclear family will confirm the truth of this. There’s communism there, certainly, in the community of goods. There’s hierarchy in the relations between parents and small children. And there may be exchange too as we do deals to balance paid work and housework for example. One partner’s appeal to communism may look like a violation of exchange and reciprocity to the other, and, perhaps, a tacit assertion of domination and hierarchy.

There isn’t one particular way that these principles should ideally be instantiated. That is going to vary from one society to the next, perhaps depending on factors like size and technology. But when the exchange principle is coupled with money and with a system of lending and recording debt, the possibility exists for a kind of tyranny that is inimical to normal human sociality, to love, care, and friendship and which drives human beings to extremes of tyranny and degradation, always under the guise of meeting moral obligations. Such is the logic of the market backed by the state: those who find they have borrowed too much must repay, and must either subject themselves directly to their creditors or act in ways that promote the discharge of their debts to those creditors whatever the deeper human costs. As Graeber tries to explain the moral catastrophe of the Spanish conquest of the Americas he writes “For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise.” (319) Creditors (who, in turn may themselves owe to others) are similarly caught in a web of amoral calculation: ”… at the key moments of decision, none of this mattered. Those making the decisions did not feel they were in control anyway; those who were did not particularly care to know the details.” (319)” Such episodes and calculations recur though the book as slaves are sold and debtor parents consign their children to debt peonage or sexual exploitation.

Central to Graeber’s historical account is a transition from what he calls “human economies” to “commercial economies”. Both are societies with some form of monetary equivalence, and with the possibility of debt and credit. But in a human economy, an individual is part of a network of particular social relations (as mother, brother, cousin, wife) and the principal function of exchange is to maintain that system of relations and to effect “moves” within it. Debts may be incurred as the result of harms and get repaid with appropriate compensation. A marriage may require the bride’s family to pay or receive some token (in cows or sheep perhaps). Similarly, gift exchange is a way of affirming and reproducing a system of social relations. In a commercial economy, by contrast, money is used to buy and sell things and the commodification of the necessaries of life (housing, clothing, food) raises the possibility of the oppressive subjection of the needy to their creditors, a subjection that is all the more humiliating because is between supposed equals.

One way of reading Graeber’s musings on the three distributive principles and the transition from a “human” to a commercial economy is as a version of the “crowding out” hypothesis, familiar from thinkers such as Daniel Bell. According to the crowding-out hypothesis, market-based motivation has an intrinsic tendency to marginalize more other-directed forms of motivation, and, eventually, to undermine itself as the patterns of interpersonal trust and co-operation on which the market tacitly depends themselves become the object of instrumental calculation by market participants. On such accounts, the market itself depends on pre-modern systems of personal connection and on moral ties, which the market, a morally-free zone, erodes over time. Capitalism is its own gravedigger. The difficulty with this hypothesis is its tendency to see market society only in its most rapacious and competitive guise and not at all as a system of cooperation capable of generation new forms of sociality peculiar and appropriate to it. Yet as Sam Bowles has shown, market societies can actually engender high levels of mutual trust and dispositions to pro-social punishment (of free-riders and the like) which more clannish and “human” societies struggle with. Moreover, Graeber himself seems to recognize this when he discusses Medieval Islamic ideas of the market – “the world’s first popular free-market ideology” (278) – ideas supposedly influential on Adam Smith. Graeber mentions the Islamic economic scholar Tusi (1210-1274 AD) whose account of the the division of labour and the the way it enables individuals to realize the benefits of the complementary talents of everyone is strongly reminiscent of Rawls’s discussion of social union in section 79 of A Theory of Justice (a conception that Rawls also attributes to Wilhelm von Humbolt). Graeber’s discussion of medieval Islamic market society seems to pose a problem more generally for his account since it is in tension with his usual picture of commercial society as, essentially, the creature of coercive state power and raises the possibility of extended market-based co-operation based on trust and reciprocity.

Graeber’s tendency to see commercial society always in is most ruthless light is also manifest in his discussion of the genealogy of the modern concept of freedom, which he traces to the power that Roman slave-owners had over their households. He is certainly not entirely wrong about this. The idea of freedom as self-ownership, that individuals’ rights over themselves are best understood as being akin to those which a slave-owner would have over a chattel slave, is certainly alive and well both in political philosophy and in the folk-conceptions of freedom prevalent in capitalist societies. Ideas of freedom as rights to non-interference taken from Roman law have also been influential (I hesitate to identify the two conceptions, since Kant rejected one whilst, in his political philosophy, affirming the other). But it is hardly as if these understandings of freedom have been uncontested and it is probable that outside the Anglo-Saxon world (and sometimes even within it) they have not even been dominant. Discussions of two, or even three, concepts of liberty show that the reality is much messier than Graeber sometimes allows.

Taken together, the rejection of the idea that some version of commercial society might also be or become a system of cooperation and the assimilation of freedom to quasi-libertarian self-ownership implies that Graeber discards social democratic (or social liberal) visions of what the just society might look like. J.S.Mill, Hobson, Hobhouse and Rawls, along with Beveridge and Eleanor Roosevelt don’t get considered as a serious alternative. Presumably Graeber thinks that they either simply mask the nasty reality or represent a possibility that was briefly realized in the postwar years, but is now unrealistic. That may be fair enough, but not everyone will share his pessimism about the social-democratic project.

At the end of the book, Graeber discusses the future and alternatives to capitalism. Though he has some things to say that are highly congenial to me about the environment and about the tendency of capitalism to drive us all to excess work, this passage is quite deliberately somewhat open-ended and non-commital. I wonder whether a better expression of Graeber’s own political agenda is actually to be found somewhat earlier in the book, at the end of his account of the Axial age where he writes about it religious movements:

Where physical escape is not possible, what, exactly, is an oppressed peasant supposed to do? Sit and contemplate her misery? At the very least, otherworldly religions provided glimpses of radical alternatives. Often they allowed people to create other worlds within this one, liberated spaces of one sort or another. It is surely significant that the only people who succeeded in abolishing slavery in the ancient world were religious sects, such as the Essenes – who did so effectively by defecting from the larger social order and forming their own utopian communities. Or, in a smaller but more enduring example: the democratic states of northern India were all eventually stamped out by the great empires … but the Buddha admired the democratic organization of their public assemblies and adopted it as the model for his followers.” (250)

Does Graeber find in utopian and democratic resistance to the Axial empires an historic precedent for the Occupy movement to emulate? Perhaps our best possibilities lie not in grand schemes of societal transformation but in developing the “baseline communism” and the democratic instincts that persist even in the heart of modern capitalism. The anarchist writer Colin Ward used a phrase from Ignazio Silone – “the seed beneath the snow” – to make a similar idea vivid. We cannot take the beast on in a direct assault, and nor should we, but we can work together to develop a more human society within the nooks and crannies of the commercial one.

(2) The True Life of the Mind. Academics are devoted to the true pursuit of knowledge, and gain immaterial benefits therefrom. This may be disturbed by the intrusion of grubby material considerations such as ‘money’ and ‘working conditions’ into relationships that should surely be subordinated to purely intellectual concerns. There surely is something to the claim that academics, including TAs and RAs, get some benefits from pursuing knowledge – that is why many, perhaps most, of us are in it. But, for most of us well established professors, it is rather easier to pursue this life since we are doing so from a position of relative comfort and stability. Few professors e.g. would be willing to endure genuine material privations to pursue knowledge for its own sake (there are a few virtuosos and saints no doubt, but hardly enough to make the system work). And the numbers of professors who care more about salary raises and parking spaces than disinterested intellectual inquiry is rather higher than one might like. In short – I don’t think that professors can reasonably demand ideals from TAs/RAs that they themselves would have great trouble living up to.

(3) The Laboratory Leviathan. Here, the presumed claim is that the kinds of intense collaborative environments that characterize e.g. research labs require good working relationships if they are to work. This is best provided by allowing the principal investigator effective carte blanche – so that when someone pisses the PA off, they need to leave, if necessary with forcible encouragement, lest they poison this precious relationship. This set of claims is recognizably a version of Hobbes’ argument for absolutist rule in Leviathan. And it is subject to all the problems thereof. Most simply, it ends up being a pretty nice deal for the absolutist ruler, but not so much for his or her subjects (there is some incentive for the ruler to look to the interests of the ruled, but not very much). More generally, the literature on trust and collaboration, as I read it (I am a participant in these debates, and hence not disinterested) would seem to me to suggest that collaboration works better in a system where hierarchical subordinates do not live in fear of being canned summarily if they do something to annoy the boss. Protections against this certainly may be a nuisance for the boss, but the argument that they are likely to undermine collaboration seems to me a weak one.

(4) We Are Obliged to Screw You by the Forces of Ruthless Competition. A variant of (3) which emphasizes the competitive nature of the research environment, scrabbling for grants etc, and how this limits the choices available to PAs, forcing them to require 80 hour workweeks and such. You can make this argument – but if you want to make it, it is equally, if not more true for companies in the private sector, which typically face even harsher competitive pressures. If you seriously think that this is a viable claim, you have to either come up with an account of how research labs face even tougher competition than small private sector firms, or line up with the US Chamber of Commerce hacks. Which will then oblige you to come up with a compelling account of how respecting workers’ rights invariably hurts quality etc, which (in my, again doubtless subjective opinion), is a quite tall order, especially given that lots of labs (just like lots of firms) seem to thrive quite nicely in countries where they are obliged to recognize rights.

(5) Cos We Are Too Jedi Masters! Or, at Least, We Are Masters with Apprentices, Who Should Be Humble So That They Can Learn from Our Tutelage By Working. This is, to be blunt, an ideological confection. The idea that guilds used to do right by their apprentices in the good old days is, as best as I can tell from a reading of the history, fiction. Abuses of apprentices, and indeed journeymen were rife in history. The nub of truth in this argument is that students can learn by doing, and later put those skills to good use. But workers learn by doing in pretty well any workplace you can mention. Again – it seems to me to be hard to make a good argument that academic labs are somehow unique in this respect.

(6) Will No-One Think of the Students? Usually applied to TAs rather than RAs, and used to suggest that the victims of graduate student organization efforts will be the unfortunate students taking courses. Seen in its most fully-fledged form in the last outbreak of this debate on CT, where David Velleman proposed that the appropriate solution was to terminate all the brutes. Again, rather difficult for any leftist to maintain without giving up on organizing rights wholesale, since labor action in any sector usually ends up inconveniencing customers/clients/end users.

I imagine that some commenters will disagree with these characterizations of the relevant arguments, or come up with new ones. But I can’t for the life of me see how one could be generally on the left and in favor of organizing rights, without extending that set of principles to the academy. The justifications that I’ve seen for drawing distinctions, arguing that the academy is Truly Special are pretty remarkably underwhelming, and seem to me to be a variety of forms of special pleading on behalf of a case that isn’t actually that special. This isn’t necessarily to doubt the sincerity of those doing the pleading – it’s easy to believe in the worth of social arrangements that you are used to and that (perhaps in some cases) benefit you – but belief on its own does not make people’s arguments good or convincing.

I’ve seen what I understand to be the email in which Dibbern’s supervisor (who, by Dibbern’s account, was vehemently opposed to the organization effort) first states concerns about Dibbern’s lack of focus, a few weeks before she is summarily kicked out. The email, after laying out a number of general complaints (that Dibbern seems unfocused; that she had not emailed a colleague about doing some work on Sunday, although she had gone ahead and done the work) goes on to say:

I realize you have many other things going on but an increased [sic] in your focus on research is urgently needed. This will probably require you to decrease your involvement in non-research related activities.

Dibbern states in her timeline that in a person-to-person meeting a couple of days later:

Goldman repeatedly instructed Ms. Dibbern to stop all outside activity, this time in person. When Ms. Dibbern asked for clarification, Goldman stated, “you know what I mean.”

On the face of it, this seems problematic. If a student RA under my supervision was deeply involved in some political or social cause that I vehemently disagreed with, say, campaigning for the mass deportation of immigrants, I don’t think it would be at all appropriate for me to suggest that they stop doing this, especially in the context of an email suggesting they were falling down on the job and needed to start pulling their weight or else. Obviously, my students’ political opinions and activities should be their own business, and I think it would be entirely reasonable for the student to interpret my suggestion as a threat. If I felt that they weren’t doing their job properly, I’d say so – but I wouldn’t for a moment connect this criticism to their extraneous political activities (how they manage their time to carry out their various responsibilities is entirely up to them).

Under the most generous reading that I can come up with, communications along the lines described are wide-open to misinterpretation. And the generous reading is certainly not the only possible reading. It is quite possible that there is another side, or other sides to this story (supervisor-supervisee relationships can be complicated, and battles like this often have a Rashomon quality to them). Still, at the very least, there is enough of a question here that a blow-off ‘move on: nothing to see here’ press statement from a university official is very definitely unsatisfactory.

Schor explained that labour-time reduction had been an issue twenty years ago (I guess she was thinking of people like André Gorz) but has slipped out of the policy debate during the boom years. Now, in the post-2008 world, governments are pushing the line that we all need to work harder, for more hours and for more of our lives. But that, argued Schor is exactly wrong. Working-time reduction offers the threefold benefit of few people being unemployed, of less ecological damage and of people having more time to spend on social activities (cue mention of The Big Society). Even if we could grow our way to full employment, we shouldn’t. Rather we should reorient away from overconsumption towards leading better quality lives. More time-stressed households are have more carbon-intensive lifestyles. She held up the Netherlands as a model of how to start moving in this direction. Apparently, the Dutch are the slackers of Europe generally and, some years ago, made new civil service contracts 80%. You have the freedom there to choose to be a five, four, three, two or one-day-a week employee. And she specifically referred to the one-day-a-week Professor (so maybe Ingrid can comment!). [UPDATE: (after gastro george’s comment below) – Schor didn’t envisage a scenario where people would be on shorter hours and less pay, but rather one in which pay is held static but productivity gains get channelled into shorter hours. So the reduction would be gradual. Since we currently have a situation (at least in the US and the UK) of static pay but productivity gains funding increased income for the 1 per cent, this gradual shift would be redistributive in an egalitarian direction.]

Skidelsky was next up. He began by talking about Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren in which Keynes foresaw a radical reduction in working hours and asked why Keynes’s vision hadn’t come to pass. He offered a range of possible explanations (the joys of work, fear of leisure, increased inequality, pressures from employers on a cowed workforce, and pathological consumerism). The business of government should be human well-being in some all-things-considered sense (shades of Sen here) and government should act to enable people to negotiate shorter working hours and, perhaps, by introducing a universal basic income. Government should also act to reduce social pressures to consume via intervention in the advertising industry. He also floated ideas about a progressive consumption tax, but I didn’t get any clear sense of how this would work.

Finally: Tim Jackson. I took fewer notes during Jackson’s contribution, so I probably missed some detail. What was interesting, though was the way he challenged a key assumption behind Schor’s and Skidelsky’s talks. Whereas they had been very gung ho about the need to channel increasing productivity gains into shorter hours, he challenged much of the talk around productivity itself, especially in the service sector and the public sector. In this regard he cited a “recent study” which showed how nurses, subject to productivity pressures from managers in the NHS, had started to feel less empathy for their patients because of the stress they were under.

My brief, but unscientific reactions to the whole project. First, I’m sympathetic, I really am, to the idea that people should work and consume less and that we should attend more to real life quality. But this doesn’t seem very realistic in my own life for two reasons: first, even if my employer were sympathetic (unlikely) I feel very hard pressed now to produce the level of research output necessary for me to stay competitive with other academics (not just in the UK, but elsewhere). I suspect this generalizes to many people in professional jobs: we couldn’t achieve the kinds of things we want to in our careers on those kinds of hours. This isn’t necessarily a problem, so long as there isn’t compulsion. Some (many) people have shitty jobs with low intrinsic rewards: removing the burden of work for them would be an unqualified good thing. Second, it is all very well Juliet Schor telling us to transition to a low hours/lower consumption economy. I’m cool with consuming less. The problem is that I, and just about everyone else, has taken out huge mortgages and bank loans to pay (in part) for the consumption we’ve already had. Hard to reduce the hours unless (or until) the debt goes away. Third, there was distressingly little discussion of the politics of this. Whatever the real social and economic benefits, the French 35-hour week wasn’t a political success (perhaps because it was watered-down) and Sarkozy was able to campaign effectively on behalf of the “France qui se lève tôt”. Some kind of post-mortem on this experience would have been helpful, albeit that it took place in a different, pre-crisis, environment.

Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings. In this situation it is mankind’s dream that we should do away with both work and war. The only drawback is that the Americans will say that if we do so, we shall arm our enemies. And in fact, there is a kind of dominant stratum in the East compared to which John Foster Dulles is an amiable innocent.

Adorno: We ought to include a section on the objection: what will people do with all their free time?

Horkheimer: In actual fact their free time does them no good because the way they have to do their work does not involve engaging with objects. This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.

h/t Brian Leiter.

A final, more critical, point on Cavanagh’s otherwise excellent report. A policy-oriented think-tank like IPPR is under different constraints from political philosophers like me. I understand that, and what is politically realistic many not chime with what ideal justice requires. But I’d have liked to have seen a little more in the report about what a just global migration regime would look like. As it is, Cavanagh acknowledges the legitimacy of democratic anti-immigration sentiments and objectives and stresses – to counteract them – the economic benefits of admitting highly skilled workers. On the other side, he pushes back against “progressives” who “reflexively” oppose the tightening of controls. But even aside from whether such voices are correct, it seems to me that the moral defence of the rights and interests of would-be migrants can help frame the debate too (and give the Lib Dems, at least, pause) and that it may be a mistake tacitly to concede that the boundaries of acceptable policy discourse are to be set by economic growth and populist anxiety.

Belief 1: As a keen reader of Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong (yes, really), our own John Quiggin and other left-leaning econobloggers, I believe that most Western economies need a stimulus to growth, that austerity will be counterproductive, and that without growth the debt burden will worsen and the jobs crisis will get deeper.

Belief 2: As someone concerned about the environment, I believe that growth, as most people understand it, is unsustainable at anything like recent rates. Sure, more efficient technologies can reduce the environmental impacts of each unit of consumption, but unless we halt or limit growth severely, we’ll continue to do serious damage. There are some possibilities for switching to less damaging technologies or changing consumption patterns away from goods whose production causes serious damage, but the transition times are likely to be long and the environmental crisis is urgent.

Belief 3: Some parts of the world are just too poor to eschew growth. People in those parts of the world need more stuff just to lift them out of absolute poverty. It is morally urgent to lift everyone above the threshold where they can live decent lives. If anyone should get to grow their consumption absolutely, it needs to be those people, not us.

Belief 4: The relative (and sometimes absolute) poverty that some citizens of wealthy countries suffer from is abhorrent, and is inconsistent with the status equality that ought to hold among fellow-citizens of democratic nations. We ought to lift those people out of poverty.

If I were to attempt a reconciliation, I’d say that this suggests zero or negative growth in material consumption for the wealthier countries but a massive programme of wealth redistribution among citizens at something like the current level of national income, coupled with a commitment to channel further technological progress into (a) more free time (and some job sharing) or a shift in the mix of activity towards non-damaging services, like education (b) switching to green technologies© assistance to other nations below the poverty threshold. All of those things need mechanisms of course if they’re to happen—and I’m a bit light on those if I’m honest, outside of the obvious tax-and-transfer. What we don’t need is more in the way of “incentives” to already-rich supposed “wealth creators” and the like. What we certainly don’t need is a strategy that purports to assist the worst off in the wealthiest countries by boosting economic activity without regard to the type of activity it is, in the hope that this gives people jobs and, you know, rising tides, trickling down and all that rigmarole. The trouble is that Belief 1, which I instinctively get behind when listening to the austerity-mongers, is basically the same old tune that the right-wing of social democracy has been humming all these years. It is just about the only thing that will fly for the left politically in a time of fear, joblessness and falling living standards, but it seems particularly hard to hold onto if you take Belief 2 seriously.

There’s some stuff that cuts the other way. When I said that Matt has to believe that inflation-adjusted income tracks real levels of well being, he doesn’t have to believe that all the way up the income scale. Given familiar facts about the diminishing marginal utility of income, it is probably the case that extra money does very little for the rich. But it really does make the lives of the poorest better off, other things being equal. The trouble is, that as far as I can see, other things aren’t equal and their inequality leads to all the bads in the preceding paragraph.

There’s a risk in the points I’ve made and one that has recently been exploited (at least rhetorically) by Britain’s Conservative-led government. That is to say, that, since there’s a disconnect between income and well-being, we should not worry about the former. This then gives the right-wing a license to cut programmes that tranfers to the worst off on the grounds that you can’t solve their problems with money, etc. Naturally, I don’t agree with that. My point is not that we shouldn’t care about the real incomes of the worst off, but rather that we shouldn’t pursue policies that have the effect of increasing their incomes but which also have side-effects involving inequality and natural and social deterioration that swamp the gains and actually make them worse off, all things considered.

the European left has to find a more certain voice. It must argue passionately for a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment.

I’m not sure who this “European left” is, but, given the piece is by Hutton, I’m thinking party apparatchiks in soi-disant social democratic and “socialist” parties, often educated at ENA or having read PPE at Oxford. I’m not sure how many battalions that “left” has, or even whether we ought to call it left at all. Anyway, what struck me on reading Hutton’s remarks was that calls for the “left” to do anything of the kind are likely to founder on the fact that the only thing that unites the various lefts is hostility to a neoliberal right, and that many of us don’t want the kind of “good capitalism” that he’s offering. Moreover in policy terms, in power, the current constituted by Hutton’s “European left” don’t act all that differently from the neoliberal right anyway. In short, calls like Hutton’s are hopeless because the differences of policy and principle at the heart of the so-called left are now so deep that an alliance is all but unsustainable. That might look like a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. Assuming that what we care about is to change the way the world is, the elite, quasi-neoliberal “left” has a spectacular record of failure since the mid 1970s. This goes for the US as well, where Democratic adminstrations (featuring people such as Larry Summers in key roles) have done little or nothing for ordinary people. Given the failures of that current, there is less reason than ever for the rest of us to line up loyally behind them for fear of getting something worse. Some speculative musings, below the fold:

Haven’t things always been a bit like this, though? Well not really. Once it was possible for people on the left to pretend that differences among us were primarily about means. We all shared the same sort of egalitarian, science-fictiony, abundancy, holding hands, economic democracy vision of the far-off future, but some people were more committed to electoral persuasion than others. (I realise there was a great deal of dishonesty, self-deception, wishful thinking and delusion about that pretence, but it had some kind of reality.) Now the overt differences of aim and value between various currents calling themselves “left” are deep and irreconcilable. So what are those currents:

1. The technocratic quasi-neoliberal left as incarnated by the likes of Peter Mandelson. Pro-globalisation, pro-market, pro-growth: keep the masses happy by improving their living standards. It’s the economy, stupid. Prone to witter self-regardingly about “grown-up” politics. Fixated on electoral competition with the right, with winning elections the essential prerequisite to changing anything. Who is in this box? Well I guess New Labour in the UK, plus (in practice) the leaders of the main European social-democratic parties. In power, this group (or those who think like them) have achieved very little. They certainly haven’t done much to stem the rise of inequality, to protect working-class communities from the winds of globalisation, to end poverty, or, for that matter, to protect the environment. Their attitude to those to their left has been to call for discipline and silence, for fear of frightening the median voter, coupled with hostility, ridicule, character assassination. Their appeal to the left has always and only been that they are slightly less bad than the full-on right wing. (If they have a feature one can admire, it is their comparative lack of xenophobia and racism, however much moved by a desire for “free” labour markets.)

2. The “left” version of populist nationalism. Culturally conservative, worried by immigration (and willing to indulge popular anxieties), anxious about the effects of markets on working-class community. Maybe “blue Labour” in the UK is an example of this, though, of course, plenty of Labour politicians are willing to swing both “new” and “blue”, whistling a communitarian tune whilst relaxing planning laws for the supermarkets, which would be anathema to the core blue Labourites. British Labour leader Ed Miliband was plainly flirting with this current in his most recent speech. Like the first group, power is important for this current. But power isn’t everything, for two reasons: (a) being in government and not achieving improvement in social justice would be pointless for those members of this group who are not career politicians and (b) unlike the left-neoliberals there are things they can do outside of parliamentary politics: they can organize, resist, use the power of the trade unions (such as it is). The trouble for this group is that their core group of supporters, on whom they can rely at election time, has been getting smaller for decades and the solidaristic norms that used to be the conventional wisdom of their supporters are fraying, and will fray more as the material and institutional supports of the labour movement erode further (cf André Gorz, I suppose). The current UK government may be upsetting a lot of voters with its cuts policy, but, long-term, they are also chipping away at an important social support for this kind of politics: public sector employment.

3. The eco-left. Highly egalitarian. Deeply sceptical about the capacity of capitalism to provide real improvements in people’s lives through “growth”. Anxious about the way in which both the natural and the social environments that make life tolerable are being undermined by neoliberalism. Tending to communitarianism and anarchism. Not very coherently both localist/communitarian and cosmopolitan in outlook. Highly connected to the social movements that have in fact given us most of the left’s real policy gains in the past 40 years. Again, this group doesn’t need to win parliamentary elections to make a difference, since it can, to some extent, both organise resistance to government policy and implement alternative ways of living in the here and now. Obviously there are worries about thinking of this group coherent at all, since it takes in all kinds from the Zapatistas to Colin Ward-inspired anarchists, to UKUncut, the the Spanish street protesters, to Greens and maybe even some of the people who had washed up in the Lib Dems in the mistaken belief that it was to the left of Labour in the UK.

4. The old Leninist hard left. Naturally they fancy themselves as the people strand 3 need to give them organization and direction. I don’t think so. Washed up, marginal, authoritarian and unappealing.

I have a lot of sympathy with the eco-left strand. The trouble is, whilst having, in many ways the most attractive long-term vision, it is probably electoral suicide (for now) for any left-of-centre party to run on a platform that eschews wealth-creation and rising living standards. And in the anglo-american world at least, associated ideas for shorter hours and job sharing are seen as marginal, impractical and extreme. Still, I see this group growing ever larger over time, as the environmental crisis becomes deeper, and as promises based on growth become both harder to keep and harder to translate into real improvements in quality of life. As this group grows in strength, the 1+2 alliance will become less stable since the compromises with global capitalism required by the quasi-neoliberal left will not be met be any compensating benefits for the constituency of left populist nationalism. Their voters, the swing voters of the left I suppose, will either move towards the eco-left or will drift towards xenophobic right-wing nationalism. How all this plays out, though, is surely going to vary a lot from country to country, depending on whether it is possible to build a coalition that could win elections or, as the next best thing, one with whom deals would need to made in order to govern. But I can’t think that the old 1+2 social democratic formula can be a winner for the left any more.

At the same time, there clearly exists a boss class which has become increasingly self-assured (in fact, bossy) over recent decades and is grabbing a steadily growing share of the economic pie. The top 1 per cent of income earners receive something like 25 per cent of total income and Paul Krugman has pointed out that 10 per cent of all capital gains in the US accrued to just 400 individuals. The recent attacks on public sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere reflect the political power of this class, and the resistance to those attacks reflects the possibility of a more general movement to protect the interests of workers against the claims of the bosses.

Given the decades of retreats and defeats we have experienced, it seems somewhat quixotic to call for a revival of traditional trade unionism. On the other hand, there is no apparent alternative, and unions have managed to carry on the struggle with at least some success (for example, the defeat of WorkChoices in Australia).

The debate over austerity provides one possible way of linking these issues. The demand for austerity has been pressed primarily by the same financial corporations that caused the crisis in the first place. They, and not public sector workers, or workers in general, are the ones who should pay. But only with strong unions and a political movement openly supportive of workers against the top 1 per cent can this be achieved. The political case is there, and would, I think attract plenty of support, but the political movement is not.

I’d welcome suggestions of a way forward, pointers to positive developments around the world and so on.

Update. Commenters here and elsewhere have reminded me that much of the labour that used to be done by the working class in developed countries is now done in factories in China[3] and other developing countries, along with the same oppression and class conflict and at least some of the resistance we celebrate on May Day. In this context, can I give a plug to Labourstart, which links to labour struggles all around the world, and links today to a great collection of May Day songs.

fn1. Most Australian states celebrate Labour Day on a different day, usually commemorating the achievement of the eight-hour working day in the 19th century. In the subsequent hundred years of so, we managed to whittle that down to 7.6 hours, and get Saturdays off, but for many, the reduction in the standard working week has been snatched back since about 1990.

fn2. 1:32 for a sprint (750/20/5) – not competitive, but a personal best

fn3 The fact that the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” in this instance is by far the world’s largest and most politically successful communist parties is one of those ironies that make history a depressing study.

Because of the day that’s in it, here’s a simple Aperture Science Keynote Theme. The theme requires you have Univers installed. For maximum effectiveness, the use of this theme is best accompanied by a well-prepared text, a clear speaking voice, and—for fielding questions—a functional Aperture Science military android. I’ll probably use the theme in class tomorrow (though the turret is still being shipped to me). Here are some samples:

Title Slides Should Credit Your Supervisor.



Use images to convey pertinent information.

Cake will be served after the Q&A.

To use the theme, download the zip file and unzip it into ~/Library/Application Support/iWork/Keynote/Themes/. If you do not have the Univers typeface installed you will likely get errors about missing resources, but falling back on Helvetica will work OK, too.