ECLIPSE AND RE-EMERGENCE OF THE ECONOMIC MOVEMENT

This year, media commentators are celebrating "1968", the sepia-tinted 
central event of their youth. Others who never clambered out of the Left 
vanity press reflect these celebrations with rancour. Did 1968 lead to 
Thatcherism? Scan the biographies of the New Right for evidence... But such 
suspicions touch only the student movement, implicating a set of prominent 
radicals whose careers were established that year. The proposition collapses 
if "1968" is taken to mean the social movements in the ten years from 1965: 
struggles in factory, housing scheme and shopping centre (in forms varying 
from country to country, area to area) - in sum, a contestation of authority 
in any form.

Faced with the emergent "consumer society" of the fifties and sixties, 
modernisers of socialism could highlight the status and struggles of the mass 
worker in the factories turning out cars, etc. and the dismal new towns built 
to house them. The contestation movement fed from the alienation and 
socialisation of such workers.

Whatever vitality did exist in society at the time appeared to be driven by 
the criticisms which such movements made of the existing state of things. 
Legitimised by this, the Left functioned as an energiser in the institutions, 
taking areas out of contestation (the process described as 
"de-commodification" in the article on "'New' Social Movements" in Here & Now 
5) and often eliciting participation where none was volunteered. Whether as 
the "artificial negativity" of which Piccone wrote, or as Baudrillard's 
political class trying to elicit response from the a-social black hole, the 
Left performed a vital rÜle in society's functioning.

A path to the future was clear: even an economist could write that "exertion 
of active control in place of passive submission corresponds directly with 
the elevation of the political will over the blind interplay of economic 
forces." (Heilbroner, "Business Civilisation in Decline", p62) 
Acquisitiveness being "a dubious source of social morale", it seemed 
"plausible that the economic institutions of socialism may prove superior to 
those of planned capitalism" (p47). 

This could hardly have been written subsequent to 1976. In the years since, 
the situation has seemed to have changed almost completely. Contestation, in 
the forms and at the levels previously seen, decreases under the onslaught of 
"the crisis" and its panacea: Enterprise Culture. The  areas of 
"de-commodification" have come into crisis: despite the Left's 
self-recognition as providing rationality (matching Heilbroner's position), 
much of what was provided was the arbitrary. The result is the onslaught of 
re-commodification.

The downturn in such contestation necessitates re-appraisal, not merely of 
contemporary developments in the organisation of life (in work, leisure and 
domestic arrangements), but also in the whole area of radical politics. The 
crisis generates an ever-bigger subclass, on which many radicals pin their 
hopes for the future. Some (such as Guattari & Negri) insist on a continuing 
pressure, effortlessly blending the Italian movements, Solidarnosc, the 
Iranian Revolution and South Africa. But this hardly touches the dynamics of 
life for the larger number in work, for whom recent years have brought 
pressure for new mentalities. We feel that these must be explored,and have 
started trying to do so in Here & Now.

Enterprising

What then is enterprise culture? It presents itself as a re-emergence of 
eternal truths which had become shrouded, as radical novelty which returns to 
the well-worn path. It must be viewed from various angles, both in the 
present and in the past which it claims for itself.

Restructuring within the enterprise has subverted the fusion of individual 
and collective goals. The solidarity of those who work together is tapped by 
defining them as a production or project team, designated as a profit or cost 
centre (as described in "The Invasion of Exchange" in Here & Now 4). 
Discontent with line management then increases this team-spirit, thus 
diverting it towards the enterprise's goals. Simultaneously, possibilities 
for increase in salary and status are individualised through performance 
review systems and gradings.

Such measures are common in "enlightened", un-unionised, high-tech 
enterprises, and other firms aspire towards it as a way of dissipating 
potential trouble. "Old" attitudes are undesirable - so recruit the wives of 
those who worked in the older industries. In the case of Nissan in Japan, 
such management arose with the training of a new workforce after a protracted 
"old-style" industrial struggle was met by the "new-style" response of "Sack 
the lot".

In those instances of recognisable mass struggle which do erupt, it is often 
the individualisation of reward which is contended, particularly by the Trade 
Union hierarchy, who see their collective bargaining rights evaporating. 
Apparently all they can now offer is a "better" personnel package through 
single-union deals. The solidarity of order-takers against order-givers which 
some saw in the struggles of twenty years ago appears to give way to the 
pursuit of individual liberation through cash relations.

As important as material changes in work relations has been the 
relegitimisation of the idea of the entrepreneur-as-hero. Seen in the growing 
respectability of Management Studies course and textbooks and their bastard 
offspring, managerial memoirs, it matters little that yesterday's hero may be 
today's casualty (Laker, Sinclair, Saunders...) The rÜle remains, and a 
can-do attitude is a popular self-image (particularly for those who 
get-others-to-do).

Local Labour councils, too, aspire to the enterprising rÜle, anxious to be 
seen as more than grudging providers of basic services (of which more later). 
The fashionable name for a council-funded office becomes "Enterprise Centre", 
for example. The former apostles of a planned economy now fall prey to 
"visionaries" who can sell them a "plan of the future". In Central Scotland, 
for example, around £1m has gone into Stirling Futureworld - a grandiose 
tourist-based vision of glass escalators and international hotels, which has 
amounted to little more than artificial turf on the local football ground!

From time to time, terms such as "service industry" are brought into play to 
denote some vital project. Strategic deployment of such concepts effortlessly 
conflates and neutralises two extremes of the working environment: the 
highly-paid sector of managing finance capital circulation and the low-paid 
hamburger-shop sector. All they have in common is a vigourous working 
environment and the 'designing-out' of means for pursuing collective goals.

Similarly, self-employment has been promoted, not merely as a way of reducing 
the dole queues but also as a means of restoring Capital's values to their 
rightful dominance, supposedly bringing corresponding social benefits.

Rewriting the History Books

In written and administered prescriptions, programs of re-commodification are 
being realised. Most disturbingly, their power often derives from their also 
seeming to be the re-insertion of the human into stultified social processes.

Revisionist histories legitimize such feelings. In Britain (as Pete Grafton, 
following Orwell, noted in his book "You, You and You!") a widespread (and 
perhaps pre-revolutionary) discontent with the rulers in the period around 
the Dunkirk rout, was healed as much by the myth of national effort as 
anything else. The courage of Jack Hawkins on the Bridge and a Cockney 
sparrer in the Engine Room diverted attention from such conflicts as the 1944 
Lanarkshire Miners' Strike. A postwar electoral consensus around the 
spectacle of Labour leaders elected in officers' uniforms brought the 
implementation of the liberal Beveridge proposals on the building of a "New 
Jerusalem".

Until recently, only anarchist writers (many of whose attention remains 
focussed on that time) highlighted chinks in the armour of postwar consensus. 
Even if the policies of the consensus were dead, the founding act was above 
denigration. Now, however, the spectacle of the-nation-pulling-together has 
become fair game. In war historian Corelli Barnett's "The Audit of War: The 
Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation", each sector of the War 
Effort (coal and steel production, ship and aircraft building) is examined in 
turn, and demonstrated to have shown little of the supposed "productivity 
miracle".

Barnett's attack is socially and historically wide-ranging. He is 
contemptuous of the culture of the British Ruling Class, the Arnold ethics of 
the Public School, the pro-classics, anti-engineering bias dominant from the 
mid-19th century; he has scant more regard for the provincial engineering 
capitalists with their complacent acceptance of "rules-of-thumb"; and 
little-to-none for the industrial working class itself, in its attempts to 
maintain craft traditions in the face of imposed change. Barnett sees the 
"New Jerusalem" approach of the writers of the Beveridge Report as an almost 
willful avoidance of an economic reality which should have been paramount, as 
an uncosted refusal to modernise the economy, with consequences faced only in 
the 1980s. 

Barnett's willingness to stress the importance of class conflict in his 
historical model (although regarding it as an obstruction to economic 
necessity) indicates the different perspectives admissable in the New Right. 
Sympathetic as they may be to his contempt for such moralisers of social 
engineering as Beveridge, new Conservatives such as those around The 
Salisbury Review find such a class-driven outlook unacceptable. Nor would 
they be attracted to any replacement of moral education by technocracy.

But such Conservatives would agree with the tone and nature of Barnett's 
concluding remarks, in locating the roots of many social ills, when he states 
that "the illusions and dreams of 1945 would fade one by one... at the last, 
New Jerusalem itself, a dream turned to a dank reality of a segregated, 
subliterate, unskilled, unhealthy and institutionalised proletariat hanging 
on the nipple of state maternalism" (p304) 

Making Claims

Welfarism is under attack on various grounds. Some claim it to be 
redistribution of resources from the poor (whose taxes finance it, but who 
are less likely to take-up benefits) to the well-off (who are more likely to 
"know their rights"). By this neat sleight-of-hand, the Islington Leftist who 
demands proper NHS treatment is accused of exploiting the Bengali sweatshop 
worker who lacks the articulacy in English to obtain such treatment. From 
this viewpoint, only a true living wage allows everyone the freedom to obtain 
equal treatment.

Others, such as former Prime Ministerial adviser Ferdinand Mount, consider 
that the first two terms of the present Conservative Government curbed 
inflation and trade-union power, and that the overall task of the third is a 
"reclaiming of yob England": the working class apparently failed to live up 
to the expectations placed upon it by the founders of the Welfare State. A 
former minister having claimed that "council housing breeds slums, 
delinquency, vandalism, rent arrears and social polarisation", Mount saw much 
of this as having been founded in "the worst mistakes of the Welfare State - 
the virtual destruction of the old Friendly Societies, the building of the 
council tower blocks, the erosion of the independance of the church schools, 
the destruction of the grammer schools, and so on". (The Spectator, 28/6/86)
 
Housing policy is central to much contemporary political debate. In the first 
place, there is the current Government's bias towards individual home 
ownership - probably inefficient in direct capitalist terms (a reinvestment 
of resources in fixed materials), but extremely efficient in its 
fragmentation and reconstruction of the community. Secondly, in the field of 
public housing, there is the developing critique of the postwar housing 
scheme programmes. "The Material Community" (in Here & Now 2) tried to place 
the development of the crisis in this area in the context of development of 
Capital's needs.

Both our critique and that promulgated today are driven by the experience of 
involvement with local authority Housing Departments. Even the Left concede 
that this has often been unpleasant: "Even a brief browse through [Local 
Government Ombudsman reports] gives the unavoidable impression that Labour 
authorities make lousy landlords... (Council) housing is an undemocratic 
jungle and it's partly the fault of Labour landlords. The concept of 
choice... is quite absent." (Jolyon Jenkins, New Statesman, 19/2/88) A 
free-market conservative like Sir Alfred Sherman instead stresses that 
"...benefits like council housing leave such wide scope for administrative, 
political and personal discretion as to generate arbitrariness, unfairness, 
political corruption and eventually personal corruption." While both 
acknowledge the crisis in allocation schemes, the ex-Marxist Sherman 
emphasises the systematic level, while Jenkins wishes a more humane 
implementation of the current system. A similar crusade for "choice" is the 
prevailing tone of the Kinnock-Hattersley "Statement of Democratic Socialist 
Aims and Values": tail-ending "enterprise culture" by celebrating consumption.

In the mid-1970s (as described in "The Material Community") the housing 
crisis was acknowledged under the rubric of "urban deprivation". Many ills 
identified by the New Right were perceived then, but were subjected to 
institutional palliatives intended to manage them out of existence. More 
recent critical perspectives step outside that perspective and attempt to 
provide a historical rationale for what went wrong with public housing, 
rejecting any systematic critique of everyday life but allowing a certain 
reflexive space. The fashionable palliative measures for housing schemes are 
those recommended by Professor Alice Coleman in "Utopia on Trial: Vision and 
Reality in Planned Housing" (1985) and subsequent reports.

She places much of the blame on the application of the Garden-City-type 
housing ideas of the early 20th century: Utopia "aimed to liberate people 
from the slums but has come to represent an even worse form of bondage. It 
aspired to beautify the urban environment, but has been transmogrified into 
the epitome of ugliness." (p180) Abandoning the failed deterministic belief 
that the new housing schemes would improve human behaviour and happiness, the 
housing bureaucrats substituted a possibilism, that "it is perfectly possible 
for everyone to be good and happy regardless of the nature of the environment 
and if they were not, it was because they were problem people. The concept of 
'sink estates', populated by the dregs of humanity, followed in the wake of 
this volte-face..." (p19) She instead proposes investigation of the extent to 
which environment does affect social behaviour. 

The provisional conclusions were that a set of structural alterations could 
affect behaviour. Broadly, these were to increase the tenants' "defensible 
space" by dismantling overhead walkways, reducing the numbers of people using 
each external doorway, splitting the "confused space" of large green areas 
into individual gardens. Such measures resemble neighbourhood watch schemes 
in that they elicit a limited community self-policing, returning a limited 
amount of self-respect and reducing the extent to which people feel 
themselves to be mere objects of a Housing Department allocation plan.

It may be surprising that such technical assessment of housing scheme design 
while ignoring the wider social background, was initially unpopular with the 
technicians of the central government bureaucracy. However, design assessment 
by indexation of dog turds and urination could have appeared as statistics 
gone mad. Only after they were taken up by "enlightened" commentators (such 
as Robert Chesshyre in The Observer) was a more enthusiastic response 
generated. Her proposals appear to offer a scientific, commonsense solution 
to 1980s social disorder. Sometimes this is explicit, such as when their 
publicity level rose dramatically in the wake of the Broadwater Farm events. 
Now these are officially encouraged, as the Dept. of the Environment's 
decentralist Priority Estates Project and the Home Office's "Crime: Together 
We'll Crack It" campaign. So not the least reason why housing is a central 
issue in political debate is that it deals obliquely with the control of 
space and circulation.

Coleman's ideas were probably received coldly because she considers such 
remedial work as only making the best of a bad job: "It would be far better 
to quietly phase out the DoE's intrusion into housing design and return 
housing initiatives to the free market, with minimum regulation and maximum 
consumer choice, so that architects, builders and developers can become 
responsive to residents' needsˇ Housing choice and responsibility for one's 
home should be decisions made not by the bureaucrats but by the occupants." 
(p184) So here again, maximum "freedom" is seen as resulting from otherwise 
disinterested principals coming together in the market place: the equality of 
the commodity.

Healthy Crisis

This article has said little about the crisis engendered by the Conservative 
Government, except to note that "crisis" as lifestyle becomes a form of 
permanent revolution in the profit centres of the large corporations as well 
as of supposedly weaning people off the "dependency culture". The most recent 
changes in social security may yet prove to be a step too far, widening a 
perception of injustice done. But the immense power of the project comes from 
a simultaneous centralisation and abdication of power through 
recommodification, which deprives opposition of a material target.

The ground for the debate over the "crisis" in the funding of the National 
Health Service has shifted in a similar manner. Once a model is accepted 
within which the productivity of the economy is a real limit to resource 
allocation, the supposedly "rational" decision-making on the allocation is 
laid open to challenge. As Stuart Hall put it "What the Right argue is that, 
once this limit is reached... then there is not much to choose between 
rationing by price (which they would prefer) and rationing by queue (which is 
what has been going on in the NHS for decades)." (Marxism Today, March 1988) 
And such rationing by queue has always been overlaid by irrational and 
arbitrary criteria: people have been present in the system as objects. And, 
as mentioned above, privilege has been present (but hidden), almost as much 
as in private medicine. 

While the Right as a whole sees virtue in the promotion of Enterprise 
Culture, this virtue is not perceived as identical to the pursuit of money in 
itself. In this respect, for example, The Spectator has published editorials 
opposing the yobbishness of city yuppies interested only in money and against 
"economic value" being taken as the only social value (for example, in 
closure of University Departments which don't "give value for money"). As 
mentioned above in relation to the re-appraisal of the Beveridge heritage, 
social conservatism and economic liberalism criss-cross in complex ways. 

The major triumph of recent years has been feelgood consumerism. Parallel 
with the stress on balanced books has been a consumer boom paid-for by 
credit. The collateral for this boom has come from escalating house prices 
and escalating investment incomes, and, internationally, from the depressed 
prices of raw materials since the recession of the early Eighties. The events 
of Black Monday last October may indicate that this was only a passing phase, 
with a true crisis to come.

One of those most deeply involved in the consumer boom, Sir Terence Conran 
(of the Mothercare-Habitat-BHS conglomerate) has recently begun making gloomy 
predictions: "We have reached a consumerist plateau... People do not want 
more. They have lived the cycle of the early eighties when they demanded 
goods that were exciting, new, desirable - not just the postwar commodities 
they once needed. Now people no longer want anything much... there is no 
imperative to go out and buy. With low inflation, consumers are not moved to 
buy unless excited or in need, Arguably the only goods people need are food 
and nappies." (The Observer, 21/2/88)

At first sight, this would seem to be an example of the naturalism of needs 
to which the Left used to be prey ("People only need so much") coming from 
someone who has made his money from knowing better than that. On the other 
hand, Conran may just be confusing the consumerist phase of those who bought 
in his shops with the consumerist phase of those like himself who spent the 
period devouring other companies. But the quotation remains strangeˇ

In each aspect described above, Power is re-fragmented in ways which would 
have seemed unthinkable to the Left of a previous generation, who saw only 
the prospect of a steady growth in monolithic power. And this fragmentation 
proclaims a new freedom for all, confident that in each of its moments, with 
each transaction, Capital as the principal social relation is being renewed.

The crisis has been a remarkably successful manoeuvre for re-volatilising 
society around an acceptance of economic relations. Left journals, by 
stressing familiar concepts of crisis and struggle, have tended not to do 
full justice to the extent of success of the economic project. Can it be more 
than wishful thinking to suggest that the values espoused be turned against 
their advocates? Certainly, nothing will come of any project privileging 
decision-at-the-point-of-consumption, the purchase of lifestyle masquerading 
as self-will, as the Labour Party Policy Review seems likely to favour. 

							Alex Richards
From Here & Now 6 1988 - No copyright
