Captain Caveman 76:
Rjan:
[…]
I get your point, that any member of a population has to have a symbiotic relationship with that population. If they have rights, they have to have responsibilities. I agree completely. But where do those responsibilities end?
I’d put it the other way, that if you have responsibilities, then you have to have rights. If you have the responsibility for looking after yourself and your family, then you have to have the right to a decent and secure living - whereas the Tories always want to insist that your responsibilities are absolute, but your rights minimal when it comes to your level of pay, conditions, or job security.
In general, a more individualist society is one that places more responsibility on individuals, and gives them fewer means to meet them.
Sometimes, for an average person on the street like me, it seems like my responsibilities are being increased beyond what I’m comfortable with. This seems especially so when I repeatedly see people’s parasitic relationship with society. I’m not saying that society has to be fair, but it has to be SEEN to be fair.
Indeed, your responsibilities will feel like they have increased over time, because the responsibilities on corporations and the state have been dramatically reduced. I agree society has to give everyone a fair deal, but the parasites you have in mind are probably not the ones I have in mind. Indeed, not all of the parasites are personified as individuals, but are parasitic structures.
The market mechanism is an example of a parasitic structure. In passing, I would acknowledge that parasitic markets exist to support the suckers of parasitic individuals who extract profit, but not all of the waste arises as profit, but rather arises as a myriad of bullsh!t jobs and wasted effort.
I always give the example of “switching” in the case of basic household utilities - the time and effort that customers waste in comparing market prices could be done entirely by computer, with switching occurring several times a day between providers if necessary. But instead consumers are yoked into spending unnecessary time and attention on these matters, because they say it will “destroy competition” if consumers are not forced to compare and switch prices manually. More probably it will simply destroy profits, by putting the consumer on an equal technological footing with the suppliers and allowing them to automate their responses to changing market prices, so that the suppliers can no longer shaft consumers who delay or overlook switching.
In the heyday of the electric and gas boards and so on, it was left to those boards to determine the cheapest and most efficient way of delivering utilities. The national electricity grid, the national gas distribution system, the telephone networks, the water reservoirs, the computerised billing systems (including the Giro Bank infrastructure) that eventually supported these, the power stations, the storage systems, they were all built by the state and were incredibly structurally simple and efficient, with the available technology of the day used to maximum effect - and almost everyone involved in them had good secure jobs, and all the consumers had good affordable prices.
By contrast today, suppliers are frequently taking 10% returns as pure profit to return to their owners - these are predominantly the parasites who are the idle shareholders. Then of course there is the management class, the gaggle of CEOs in each sector, taking high wages - and each company having to bid against all the others for these niche skills. But consumers are not simply paying 10% more, representing the final profits of the activity for shareholders. They’re also paying all the extra structural overheads of having several sets of managers, one for each firm involved. They’re paying all the extra advertising budgets, the contract managers that handle the commercial relationships between the dizzying matrix of firms involved, the sales execs who spend all day scheming how to shaft the consumers, the several sets of head offices, the bureaucratic infrastructure that supports switching and decentralised billing, the bungs that suppliers make to comparison websites, the duplicate call centres and the administrative effort, the inability (or unwillingness) of the firms involved to simplify or reorganise for efficiency on a sector-wide scale, the list is endless.
And the end result of all this marketisation has not been falling prices, rising workforce wages, lower cost infrastructure, and reduced government subsidies. In fact, things have become much worse one or more of these measures: consumer prices have gone up, wages have gone down, the cost of infrastructure has gone up, or subsidies are as bad as ever. In fact it is only the dramatic attacks on wages, conditions, job security, and pensions, that has meant prices have not risen even more dramatically for consumers in newly-marketised sectors. The NHS today creaks with market bureaucracy - with new bureaucracy often being introduced at the same time as budget cuts.
The pro-market scounderel usually argues “at least lots of jobs have been created”, but of course they have not. It has simply replaced many good jobs with crap jobs, and those crap jobs are to a greater extent involved in doing things that don’t need to be done thereby eroding overall productivity, and has also created new but unpaid jobs for consumers who, on top of paying higher prices, have to wrestle with all this market complexity and constant upsetting of established prices and basic services.
The point I make is that our economy is infested with parasites. It is infested with parasitic unearned incomes, and it is infested with the market structures that are themselves parasitic upon the economy (not because they involve unjust earnings, but because they waste the effort of so many workers and consumers alike).
Unemployment itself is parasitic, but not because it involves the victims receiving a sliver of social security to keep body and soul together (or in the case of families, to allow children - future workers - to be raised to a very basic cultural and material standard that is appropriate to our society). Unemployment is parasitic because it involves potential useful effort being wasted, and because the excess competition for jobs that arises (particularly if social security is poor) changes the relations between bosses and workers (in favour of the bosses).
Maybe I’m not in possession of all the facts. Maybe my experiences have tainted my point of view. But from my position as a single bloke with no kids down here in the ghetto, past policies have failed and I don’t know how they’re going to get better. Maybe my voting Brexit was the equivalent of lifting Ceaser’s balls, but it was the only way I had of showing my dissatisfaction of the way things are.
Past policies did not fail, though. The post-war policies worked extremely well for our society and others. Other European societies continue to fare extremely well with social-democratic policies. By contrast, those societies that have adopted neoliberalism to the greater extreme have not fared well. Britain has been on the way down since the 1980s. American society has also. The societies that have adopted free markets, that laud individualism and self-interest, that have brutal states that enforce individual responsibilities but convey no effective economic rights, that push markets into every aspect of life, they are not the great societies of tomorrow - they are decadent societies on their way down from their peak. The nation that put men on the moon is today the nation of soup kitchens, supermax prisons, school shootings, and widespread surveillance that would have made Stalin breathless.
It is not that voting Brexit is necessarily the equivalent of “dusting Caesar’s balls”. Brexit so far has been extremely good for creating political engagement. But it is apparent that very few are scrutinising where it is going.
For the right-wing, “taking back control” doesn’t really mean more democracy for workers - it means more compulsion for workers to sell their labour to the lowest bidder. More freedom for right-wing governments to drive down pay, drive down working conditions, drive more markets into the economic arena and drive democracy further out of it - and to vandalise any future possibility of an EU democracy by re-stoking nationalism and the vulgar, self-interested nationalistic competition that impoverished workers in the early 20th century (by deflecting them away from challenging the rich) and led to two bloody big wars (which ironically enriched America most of all and left Europe smashed).
