By Michael Rustin, Professor of Sociology at University of East London
The second instalment of the Kilburn Manifesto, Vocabularies of the Economy[1] discussed the permeation of everyday language by discourses of consumption, of buying and selling, as the dominant way of conceiving modes of being and relationship in a society now dominated by the ideology and manufactured ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism.
As Doreen Massey, the writer of that instalment put it:
On trains and buses, and sometimes in hospitals and universities too, we have become customers, not passengers, readers, patients or students. In all these cases a specific activity and relationship is erased by a general relationship of buying and selling which is given precedence over it.
She argued that the inculcation and normalisation of this way of thinking and naming was powerful in its effects. It defines a world in which only market relations are assigned value, and in which alternative kinds of relationship are eclipsed. This is the case even if the so-called ‘markets’ which are legitimised by this way of thinking are to a significant degree rigged, and whose large players gain special advantage from the privileges accorded to corporate power by governments which operate largely under their sway. Think of the private partners in Private Finance Initiatives, or the holders of quasi-monopoly franchises such as the railway or water companies.
In this instalment, I argue that the picture of pleasure-maximising, self-interested individuals, whose lives are organised through rational market exchange, falsifies much of what happens and needs to happen in human lives, even in a market society. I contrast relationships of natural dependency and interdependency, whose participants are concerned not only for their own well-being, but also for the well-being of others, with the pervasive endorsement of motivations of self- interest.
Drawing on ideas that were very influential during the periods of expansion of welfare systems, I point out in the third instalment A Relational Society[2] all those phases of the normal life cycle in which human beings are not and cannot be self-sufficient. Infancy (both for babies and their parents), childhood, periods of sickness, and old age, are the most obvious of these phases of natural dependency. It is around such phases of vulnerability that the welfare state and its services were organised, with free education, health care, and support in old age among its principal spheres of social action.
Even William Beveridge (no socialist he) recognised in 1944, remembering the large-scale unemployment of the pre-war years, that in adult working lives such situations of dependency upon the support of others would be often likely to arise, and a system of social insurance was devised to share the risk and burdens of this. Peter Townsend later showed[3] that ‘poverty’ was a condition in which many people found themselves at certain stages of their lives, not a condition which merely afflicted an unfortunate minority. He linked this circumstance to family responsibilities, for example for the care of children, or the ill, of the very old, which took people out of the sphere of paid work, for a time at least, but also to economic cycles and fluctuations and their consequences for employment.
But my argument is that relationships of dependency and of care are not located only in specially vulnerable moments of the life-cycle, but are the preconditions of nearly everything of human value. It is contractual relations, based upon exchanges of pure mutual self-interest, that are the exception, not those of dependency and interdependency.
This is especially evident at moments of transition. Think of a young person entering their first job – or any job come to that. How can they ‘find themselves’ and be enabled to function with satisfaction to themselves and others, if no-one gives them any attention, or makes it known to them that they are valued?
Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, gave an enlightened account of his responsibilities in an interview reported today when he described the recovery of one of his players, Aaron Ramsey, from a serious double fracture of the leg when he was only 19, which had threatened to destroy his career.
He said he always took a long term view with the player. “I decided to be patient with him. When you have been injured for such a long time, it takes a long time to get back to your best. You never know if he will come completely back. But when you are injured before 20 you come back to your normal level and improve like you have not been injured.”
So here is someone who looked after this no-doubt traumatised and frightened young footballer, as anyone in a position like his should do. and in this case seems to have enabled him to make a full recovery.
So ubiquitous is this need to be recognised and given consideration, that those who organise market exchanges – those responsible for sales and customer relations – often try to convey to the customer that he or she is indeed of value. For this reason many of the experiences one has as a customer can be quite agreeable. I think this is essentially because giving and receiving such human attention are intrinsically satisfying (even if there is an ulterior purpose) so the instrumental purpose of the exchange is given another dimension – even sometimes subverted – by those engaged in the actual work. Thus an element of gift exchange enters the commercial transaction. I think Doreen was describing such an aspect in Vocabularies of the Economy when she said that both she and the gallery assistant she met had enjoyed their conversation, even though its manifest instrumental purpose was rather disilllusioningly conveyed to Doreen by the ‘Customer Liaison’ designation on the staff member’s tee shirt.
The Problem We Have
The problem we have is this. The idea that people are motivated in their relations to each other and to their different activities and objects by being valued for what they are, for their distinctive and particular properties, is being ruthlessly attacked. What this attack is doing to is to drain the idea of intrinsic value from many fields of social interaction. If there is an ideological belief that no-one can be trusted to do anything simply because they believe in it, or care about or are committed to it, then it follows that they must be constrained to do things from other motives.
What are these other motives? One of them is hope of gain, formulated in terms of money (more pay) or status (a high position in some league table), or power. The other is fear, instilled through the setting-out of rules and regulations which individuals are compelled to follow, at pain of punishment and shame.
Those who work in educational or NHS organisations will be aware of the strong pressure to displace intrinsic motivations and values, with such extrinsic and instrumental ones. No-one can be trusted to do anything, so everything has to be regulated, accounted for, inspected and audited, and maybe (at the higher levels of authority) rewarded in money. What does the vast increase in the rewards of high level managers in both public and private sectors signify, other than that they can no longer be trusted to do what they do from a sense of responsibility and love of their calling? Incidentally I think this situation, and the coupling of high salaries and perks with huge pension pots and severance payments, also signifies that no-one expects long-term commitments or loyalty from such people, so it is arranged that even a short tenure in a post will be amply rewarded. This is very different from the slow annual progress up incremental and promotional ladders that some of us were used to, and which of course in their own way did reward loyalty.
This disregard of intrinsic values can be perverse in its effects. Because people are compelled and incentivised to look out for themselves, they are encouraged to neglect their primary ‘objects’ of attention and care. Not the students, nor the academic subject, become the main passion of the university lecturer, but the CV, the survived inspection, the recognised research output without which a career can come to a dead halt, or worse.
Because institutions cease to believe that anyone cares for anything except themselves, they becomes extremely distrustful and paranoid. Rules are written and imposed to counter ‘risks’ that in reality scarcely exist. [4] Concerns with how an activity appears, and is accounted for, becomes obsessional, in the absence of any normal trust that people will do their jobs properly without such draconian surveillance. Of course the primary values of the work, whatever it is, suffer greatly in such an atmosphere of paranoid anxiety and distrust.
It is notable that when tragedies occur, such as in child care or hospitals, the routine response is (a) to find someone to blame and (b) to devise additional forms of regulation and documentary accountability (tick-boxes, paper trails, etc.) Not that is, to find out what happened in that institution, network or culture, which caused the normal commitments of nurses to their patients, or care workers to their at risk children, to break down so catastrophically (and often, exceptionally). A single failure can be used to legitimise a much more general distrust.
I am not in fact against either market exchange, or regulation and inspection, as means of ensuring that goods and services are provided to people’s satisfaction and according to necessary standards. But these need to be seen mainly as framing devices, as containers within which commitments to intrinsic values in whatever sphere of activity we are thinking of, can be trusted to give rise to value – such as learning by pupils, the care of vulnerable children or patients, and even the generation of new knowledge.
Think, as an example, of how a play is produced or a film is made. There are regulations – minimum wages, contracts, lunch breaks, health and safety rules, etc. – which must be observed. There is always a financial requirement – an audience must be attracted, or grants must be won in competition. But neither the rules nor the revenue-stream themselves can make the play or the film. For that, there need to be writers, designers, actors, cameraman, electricians, box office staff, who care about what they do, and the intrinsic value that it has, within the larger assemblage of the theatre company or film crew. This seems to me to be a paradigm for the production of value.
The Politics of Value
It is not easy to say how one can make these quite obvious reflections, into an effective alternative politics. Markets and regulations are not enough, especially of course when the former are grossly rigged in favour of the powerful and the rich,[5] and the latter are enforced in such mindless and insensitive ways. A good society respects many different values, and seeks structures and systems which nurture and support instead of undermining them.
Can we identity those kinds of discontent and suffering [6] which these regimes of market and regulation themselves give rise to, and show how destructive, even self-destructive they are? We can see for example how the pursuit of short term profits, at the expense of the long- term needs, capacities and commitments of enterprises and their members, are actually wrecking the British economy, and turning much of its private sector in the parasitic clients of the State.
One of our problems is that values are particular, and different from one another. Neoliberalism, by contrast, homogenises everything. The idea of ‘economic growth’ and a ‘lower deficit’, are unitary ideas, whereas a good society has many different fields of value which should be sustained within it. The domination of social discourse by the disciplines of economics and accountancy are an academic facet of this problem, since these perspectives (unlike, for example, anthropology or historical study) eclipse non-economic kinds of value in their conceptions of the world.
In a development of this case for the primacy of human relations, I argue that we also need to think of Nature and the material world as bearing value of its own, and not as a mere subject for exploitation by humankind. [7]
I think these arguments are of value as a diagnosis and critique of where we are. Diagnosis and critique are important, in that we need a systematic description of our present social order, and an understanding of the harms it causes, to develop and promote challenges to it. Activities and institutions which embody relational and value-rich ways of doing things are vital too. Alternatives to the present system probably need to be found, created, and lived in experience, they can cohere into a larger political programme. Such initiatives can be thought of as a ‘prefigurative’ politics.
But what we do not yet have are the evidence of sufficient contradictions, conflicts and new agencies arising from this social condition, which can turn back the neoliberalism tide, and set a new direction for society.
[1] http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/pdfs/Vocabularies%20of%20the%20economy.pdf
[2]http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/pdfs/s54%20rustin.pdf
[3] In Poverty in the United Kingdom (1979)
[4] Some of this pervasive anxiety is projected on to the threat of terrorism. A brilliant article by Henry Porter, on the gun culture of the United States, (The Observer, September 22) pointed out that since the events of Nine Eleven, 324,000 have been killed by firearms, compared with 20 by terrorist attack.
[5] Colin Crouch (2011) The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism describes the overwhelming of markets by corporate power.
[6] I have suggested a psychoanalytic dimension to this argument from an ‘object relations’ perspective, in a paper, ‘Belonging to Oneself Alone- the Spirit of Neoliberalism’, given at a New Imago Forum seminar in Oxford on September 7 2013. This is available by request to m.j.rustin@uel.ac.uk.
[7] Relations with the Material World is the second part of the printed version of this Manifesto instalment, and is in Soundings 54, pp 31 – 36. This is also availably on-line to Soundings subscribers.
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