The role of the state has changed, from providing public services and welfare benefits, to ensuring a low-tax, low-regulatory regime which encourages “foot-loose” capital to invest in your country, rather than someone else‘s.

This gives rise to three stratas within the workforce:

At the top of the hierarchy are the “integrated“: workers who “serve global production and finance in reasonably stable employment”.

Next are those who may have well-paid jobs, but who are not essential, and are therefore at risk of “downsizing” or “outsourcing”.

Their employment is “precarious”.

Finally, the “excluded” who are either permanently unemployed or “who eke out a living through forms of employment marginal to the production economy “.

A UN estimate puts the numbers in the excluded group for Latin America and the Caribbean as over 70 per cent of the workforce.

Worse, social mobility between these groups is on the decline.

The media has come to play a vital role in reinforcing the grip of globalisation.

Just as other services have been deregulated, so controls on ownership of the media have been weakened.

The trend towards monopoly is illustrated by the fact that in 1983 there were 50 media corporations in the USA, which had dropped to six in 2000.

In this situation “no content - news, entertainment, or other public messages will reach the public unless a handful of corporate decision-makers decide that it will”.

The author notes the “tabloidization of news… (the) pursuit of profits and sensationalism rather than enlightenment and democracy “.

In dominating “ the incessant flows of images, sounds, goods and services … then it (promotes) a culture of consumerism … it seems that every human expression from art to sex to outrage, is … used to sell a commodity”.

Consumption and consumerism are not the same thing:

“What is new about the culture of consumerism is that consumption is now elevated to the predominant value and central activity of human culture, so that it is no longer an activity to whose primary purpose is to satisfy needs (either biological or spiritual) but rather an activity driven by induced wants; for this reason, it never satisfies since new wants are all the time being created by the culture … commodities are therefore being consumed not for themselves, but rather for the meanings associated with them, as is well illustrated by the central role played by branding in this culture.”

Thus the importance of a transnational advertising industry.

The question arises: how do people on modest incomes participate in globalised consumerism?

A study of Chile’s “credit card citizenship” illustrates the ‘solution‘.

“Through the use of multiple credit cards, people can achieve levels of consumption beyond what their income would permit. By this means they achieve their social identity and sense of belonging, thereby replacing an earlier practice of citizenship through belonging to political parties, trade unions and other collective organisations ...”

Globalisation has placed economics above politics, and in commandeering culture it has altered the bases of identity and belonging.

Intriguingly, Paedar Kirby argues that as the idea of identity with one’s country declines, earlier forms of identity return, particularly with those who are - or feel - excluded from the new consumerism.

“ … it becomes more tempting to define oneself in terms of a cultural community such as an ethnic group, a religion or belief, a gender or a mode of behaviour.”

At this point in the book Peadar Kirby introduces the work of Karl Polanyi, author of “The Great Transformation” which is a critique of market economics - laissez faire - as it developed in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars.

Polanyi’s view - which is challenged - was that laissez faire was a reversal of the previous relationship between society and economics, in which economics was subordinate to social constraints.

Be that as it may, any such subordination vanished, leaving: “fear of starvation with the worker, lure of profit with the employer”.

This early form of globalisation was destroyed by the First World War - which resulted in the return to tariffs, and the Second World War which saw the rise of social democracy and communism.

Social democracy was not to survive the collapse of communism, and was followed by the return of laissez faire/globalisation after 1989.

Now there were new factors: the “insatiable demands of consumerism” widens “scandalous inequalities”, and also poses extreme threats to the natural environment.

Here Peadar Kirby introduces the negative impact on Western ideas of Cartesian dualism.

He cites two examples: the dualism implicit in the split between nature and human life; and the dualism implicit in treating people, not as social animals, but as machines.

The mentally ill are at the sharp end of the problem: they are treated as machines when their problems might be social, economic, political or ecological.

“Denial of the desire to live in harmony with the natural world … leads to alienation, numbness, anxiety and depression.”

Peadar Kirby concludes that:

... vulnerability and violence are not accidental side-effects but rather inextricable features of a world in which the state (namely those institutions that embody the public authority) facilitates market forces and indeed imposes them on society while eroding or failing to reinforce coping mechanisms against the onslaught of the market.

... if the market is not re-embedded (in social institutions) it will lead to social and environmental destruction of ever greater proportions, doing violence to individuals and society.

Hungarian-born Professor Karl Polanyi, who died in 1964, was the author of a seminal book - "The Great Transformation" - published in 1944.

In it he traced the rise of economic liberalism in Europe from roughly 1700 to 1900.

Described as "the ultimate Social Democrat", Polanyi believed that, prior to "market economics", the economic order had been embedded into the social system.

As Peadar Kirby puts it:

In societies before the advent of the market system, such as those of ancient city states, feudalism, thirteenth-century urban life, the sixteenth-century mercantile regime or eighteenth century regulationism invariably the economic system was merged in the social and incentives sprang from a wide variety of sources such as

“ … custom and tradition, public duty and private commitment, religious observance and political allegiance, judicial obligation and administrative regulation, as established by prince municipality or guild. Rank and status, compulsion of law and threat of punishment, public praise and private reputation, insure that the individual contributes his share to production.”

The economics of laissez faire which emerged in early 19th Century Britain turned this structure of society upside down, replacing these earlier motives with

... fear of starvation with the worker, lure of profit with the employer ...

Polanyi came to believe that the unfettered market system that developed before 1914 had in fact come to an end after 1945, with the rise of social democracies in Western Europe, and, Peadar Kirby argues:

(The) resurgence of the market system at the end of the twentieth century would have come as a great shock. He (Polanyi) presumed that the market society was a 'utopian experiment' of the early nineteenth century ... which, by making social needs subservient to the market

produced the typical strains and stresses which ultimately destroyed that society

in the first half of the twentieth century, hastened by the two world wars.

Yet Polanyi also knew that the emergence of the market system ... served to focus attention on the essential challenge facing mankind:

How to organize human life in a machine society ... Behind the fading facade of competitive capitalism there looms the portent of an industrialzed civilization, with its paralyzing division of labour, standardisation of life, supremcacy of mechanism over organism, and organization over spontaneity. Science is haunted by insanity. This is the abiding concern.

Why Disembedding Cannot be Successful

Polanyi argues that creating a fully self-regulating market economy requires that human beings and the natural environment be turned into pure commodities and this assures the destruction of both society and the natural environment.

In his view, the theorists of self-regulating markets and their allies are constantly pushing human societies to the edge of a precipice.

But as the consequences of unrestrained markets become apparent, people resist; they refuse to act like lemmings marching over a cliff to their own destruction.

Instead, they retreat from the tenets of market self-regulation in order to save society and nature from destruction. In this sense, one might say that disembedding the market is similar to stretching a giant elastic band.

Efforts to bring about greater autonomy of the market increase the level of tension. With further stretching, either the band will snap - representing social disintegration - or the economy will revert to a more embedded position.

Though he wrote The Great Transformation during W.W. II, Polanyi remained optimistic about the future; he thought the cycle of international conflict could be broken. ...

Polanyi sees Roosevelt’s New Deal as a model of these future possibilities. Roosevelt’s reforms mean that the U.S. economy continues to be organized around markets and market activity, but a new set of regulatory mechanisms makes it possible to buffer both human beings and nature from the pressures of market forces.

Through democratic politics, people decide that the elderly should be protected from the need to earn income through Social Security. Similarly, democratic politics expands the rights of working people to form effective unions through the National Labor Relations Act.

...

Of course, Polanyi’s optimism about the immediate post-World War II era was not justified by the actual course of events.

...

Planned global economic cooperation gave way relatively quickly to new initiatives to expand the global role of markets. To be sure, the considerable achievements of European social democratic governments, particularly in Scandinavia, from the 1940’s through the 1990’s provides concrete evidence that Polanyi’s vision was both powerful and realistic.

But in the larger countries, Polanyi’s vision was orphaned, and the opposing views of market liberals like Hayek steadily gained strength, triumphing in the 1990s.

...

Taking Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum - "There's no such things as society" - as his starting point, Paedar Kirby digs deeper in search of possible reasons as to why the concept of society has been so degraded.

He finds the problem goes back to Descartes:

... the dominant Western psychology of the self ...(is) ... based on a Cartesian mechanistic worldview, where the whole is separated into parts.

It is short step to the belief that there is a 'dualism' - a polarisation - between nature and human beings.

Our control of nature has allowed us to exploit it for our own benefit, to the point where the dangers facing life on earth from massive consumerism, resource depletion and pollution are unprecedented.

So it is not just our increasing technological ability to rob the earth of its resources that is at the heart of the crisis, but more our deep loss of connection to the Earth.

Our belief in a separate self has numbed our innate response to the danger ... it is hard to credit our pain for the world, if we believe we are essentially separate from it.

'We have a mechanistic sense of the natural world, not a sense of an inherent sacred quality'

A narrow definition of self ... which disconnects from nature, is not only at the heart of the environmental crisis but also leads to an increasing impoverishment of the psychological self ... (leading) to alienation, numbness, anxiety and depression.

The idea of the self-sufficient and supreme individual ... of Thatcher's denial of society, turns out therefore to be a dangerously truncated and atomised understanding of the human person.

Consider in this context the life and work of Martin Buber.

Martin Buber is most famous for his thesis on human existance which he sees as consisting of encounters with others.

This encounter exists at two levels:

• "Ich-Du" - I-thou, and
• "Ich-Es" - I-it.

But only the first is a dialogue; the second is a monologue, and it is this latter mode which is increasingly dominant:

In the Ich-Es relationship, an individual treats other things, people, etc., as objects to be used and experienced. Essentially, this form of objectivity relates to the world in terms of the self - how an object can serve the individual’s interest.

Buber argued that human life consists of an oscillation between Ich-Du and Ich-Es, and that in fact Ich-Du experiences are rather few and far between. In diagnosing the various perceived ills of modernity (e.g. isolation, dehumanization, etc.), Buber believed that the expansion of a purely analytic, material view of existence was at heart an advocation of Ich-Es relations - even between human beings. Buber argued that this paradigm devalued not only existents, but the meaning of all existence.

Consider examples of the increasing polarisation of society into winners and losers:

This week, the Henley Centre published its annual findings for a question it has been asking us for 20 years: "Do you think the quality of life in Britain is best improved by: a) looking after the community's interests instead of our own; or b) looking after ourselves, which ultimately raises standards for all?" From 1994 to 2000, the overwhelming majority chose a. But since then, the gap has been closing. This year, for the first time in a decade, a majority (53%) chose b.

Apart from election campaigns, when rising support for far-right political parties in areas such as Dagenham causes alarm, the traditional working class is largely overlooked. When politicians say that some communities are failing to integrate with mainstream society, they mean Muslims from the Indian subcontinent. When campaigners complain that schools are failing some children, they often cite black boys. Yet the nation's most troubled group, in both absolute and relative terms, is poor, white and British-born.

The Howard League for Penal Reform will ... say that female prisoners are suffering shocking levels of suicidal behaviour, sexual abuse, mental illness and drug addiction, and pressure on prison spaces means many have to be held far from families and friends. It suggests that custody should be reserved for a handful of violent, dangerous women - possibly as few as 100 - with offenders given community sentences instead.

Have you the muscle to be an alpha male?

Read each question and give it a score that ranges from 0 for ‘strongly disagree’ to 10 for ‘strongly agree’

No matter what, I don’t give up until I reach my goal.
When I play a game, I like to keep score.
I sometimes rant and rave when I don’t get my way.
My opinions and ideas are usually the best ones.
When others don’t agree, I lose my temper.
I am accustomed to being the centre of attention.
People have described me as a ‘natural born leader’.
I believe the end usually justifies the means.
I only collaborate with peers when I have to.
There are a lot of people who are just plain stupid.

HOW DID YOU DO?

0-25 Absolute wimp: keep tissues on your desk
25-50 Bit of a pushover
50-75 Ambitious but afraid to wield the knife
75-100 Kerrang! You’re an alpha male

On the same day as The Guardian described the tax haven for the mega-rich, the following effects of the degredation of the public sector were also reported:

1. 100 women raped or assaulted in hospital

   WOMEN were the victims of more than 100 incidents of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment in NHS mental health units over two years, according to a confidential report being held by the Government.
   
   The Times has learnt that the report, which gives details of more than ten rapes and, in a single year, three unwanted pregnancies, has yet to be published eight months after it was received by the Department of Health.
   
   The findings bring into question the Government’s claim to have set up single-sex wards that are safe and ensure personal dignity across the health service. The pledge, made by Tony Blair in 1996, was supposed to have been met by the end of 2002. ...

2. 60% of NHS trusts admit care failings

   Most NHS trusts in England have admitted they are failing to achieve basic standards of safety and quality of care that all patients are entitled to expect, the Guardian can reveal. ...

3. Patients 'put at risk' by A&E cuts

   Patients are being put at risk by the reduction of services at accident and emergency units, doctors have warned.
   
   The British Association for Emergency Medicine (BAEM) claimed the scaling back of casualty departments was being used to bail the NHS out of its cash problems. ...

Consider now the increasing trend to reach for the criminal law as a solution to problems which, increasingly, will have been enhanced and magnified by government's decision to put the corporate-globalised agenda before the needs of society:

Where will it end - 4,000 new offences? Perhaps 5,000? Would 10,000 new offences make us all feel safer and keen to re-elect New Labour?

Ironically, with the "fear of crime" still high, it might be that the best way to convince the electorate that "something is being done" is to do nothing at all.

Alternatively, we might elect a government that was keen to look beyond the statute book and deal with those structural factors in our society that impact on crime.

A government that saw its purpose in creating opportunities for employment; ensuring that our children get access to good schools and well-qualified teachers; and that this was all under-pinned by a welfare safety net to provide a bulwark against the extremes of poverty.

If we were to elect a government that got these things right, we would deliver the circumstances in which people could go about their lives peaceably and that would also make others behave without the need for more and more "crimes".

Consider the difference between 'citizens' - society - and 'consumers' - dystopic individuals who neither offer nor expect the support of others:

Turbo-consumerism is the driving force behind crime

Blog responding to Neil Lawson's article:

redshrink

June 29, 2006 7:40 AM

The article and its comments show a very British phenomenon: Neal Lawson argues about social mechanisms driving crime while the commentators blame the individual for their failure as citizens and consumers. In 25 years of rampant free-markt economic reforms, people are now incapable of perceiving or behaving as a "society", characterised by mutual understanding and a sense of solidarity. In Britain, I am alone, I work, I earn, I shop. Tough if the next bloke cannot keep up. Not my problem. My extent of my participation in this state is defined by my economic contribution. Being poor means not participating. The notion of a "citizen state" has probably never existed in Britain (if it ever has, must have been before my time here); people have moved straight from being subjects to consumers. In this sense, Britain is like a big discount supermarket--the only common goal is everyone's desire to find a good bargain. We have all become competitors for the best deals and jobs. Pointless asking your rival for solidarity or empathy. How convenient then, to blame the poor for their lot. In other places, at other times, when people thought of themselves as belonging to a larger social unit, the poor might have revolted in unison--strikes, revolutions. In Britain, it is the individual that breaks the rules that disadvantage him through crime. That has nothing to do with the "noble poor"; it is the perfectly normal consequence of the world we all create. Marx spoke of religion as the "opium for the people"--little wonder that Mr Blair is so keen on promoting religion. But large numbers chose as their opium, well, opium. Good stuff, too, keeps the poor from making a fuss, as they cycle from addiction through prison and treatment, and it makes them feel guilty, as they should, right?

The Guardian 29 June 2006

Finally consider janfrank's response to the same article, which argues that it is not only the poor who need society:

janfrank

June 29, 2006 08:12 AM

In early Victorian times there were precious few laws about providing decent living conditions to the hoi polloi. Fresh water, fresh air, ventilated rooms, adequate space, decent drains, sewage disposal - hey, the market will provide, or not, as it suits the profit motive. The rich could live somewhere else, away from the squalor and poverty. Till Prince Albert died from, if I remember, cholera. Finally the rich realised that if you don't provide minimal decent conditions for the underdogs, sooner or later the underdogs will use their teeth. It's only after the Prince Consort's lamentable death that laws were enacted that insisted that minimal provision of hygienic living conditions were provided. What has that to do with the present discussion? Well, all people with a good job and plenty of consumer goods can try and imagine what it's like not to have them. Not until we make sure that - psychologically, sociologically or whatever - that the have-nots don't feel that they are pariahs, will the better-off be secure. Or do they like living in closed communities, driving with their car doors locked, not being able to walk outside without being worried that they'll be mugged? It's a choice we can make now, or wait till the 21th century equivalent of Prince Albert dies of cholera.

The Guardian 29 June 2006

Welfare Reform UK

The appearance of the word "sacred" in a book like Peadar Kirby's is bound to raise hackles, but I believe it should be possible to use this word as a shorthand for anti-dualism, and the reverse of the Cartesian. (Gaia?)

Whilst it is dangerously simplistic to romanticise non-Western cultures, it might be helpful at this juncture to compare and contrast the hyper-individualism - the dualism - of the present consumerist culture, with the belief systems of the indigenous North American peoples.

The fact that their way of thinking - and feeling - is now so totally alien to most of us ought in itself help us to call into question our current path:

The transition from collective, rural, slow-change societies to today's individualistic, competitive, change-driven society is worth examining in greater detail, since threats to identity and community are now systemic.

The pursuit of sudden and dramatic "culture change" by top-down means occurred in England as a consequence of the Reformation.

In an exploration of the themes underlying the works of Franz Kafka, Erich Heller begins by discussing the breakdown of the "model of reality" offered by the Catholic Church before the Reformation:

The intellectual foundation of every human society is a generally accepted model of reality.

One of the major intellectual difficulties of human existence is, I think, due to the fact that this model of reality is in every single case a mere interpretation of the world, and yet exerts, as long as it seems the valid interpretation, the subtly compelling claim to being accepted as the only true picture of the universe, indeed of truth itself.

This difficulty, manifesting itself in the deeper strata of doubt, by which, at all times, certain intellectually sensitive men have been affected, develops easily into a mental epidemic in epochs in which a certain model of reality crumbles and collapses.

It seems we have lived in such an epoch for a long time. One of its main characteristics was the uncertainty, steadily increasing in the minds and feelings of men, about the relation between mundane and transcendental reality, or in other words, about the meaning of life and death, the destiny of the soul, the nature and sanction of the moral laws, the relative domains of knowledge and faith.

As far as Christianity was the representative religion of the Middle Ages, their model of reality was essentially sacramental. A definite correspondence prevailed between the mundane and transcendental spheres.

Susan Brigden, describing the cultural world of England before the Reformation in her book "New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors" helps to bring Heller's theory into sharper focus:

Christian rites and sacraments were central to people’s lives. They created and validated relationships, made new affinities, and sanctioned passage from one stage of life to another.

The sacraments of baptism, marriage and extreme unction sanctified a believer’s birth, marriage and death.

Confirmation marked the end of one stage of childhood. The sacrament of ordination allowed the priesthood to celebrate the others. All these sacraments were celebrated only once in a lifetime, but two others - penance and Mass - regularly brought the sinning Christian close to God.

Baptism and marriage were celebrations, accompanied by feasting, to which kin, friends and neighbours came as witnesses as well as worshippers. Sacraments were a unifying bond of the community.

Or once they were.

At the Reformation, the nature and number of the sacraments changed. Only baptism and the Eucharist stayed as sacraments which were means to grace, and even their significance was more cautiously defined.

Yet the human need for sacraments remained.

The Medieval "model of reality" was demolished in a few years on the whim of one autocrat's collision with a church that had refused him a divorce.

Henry had compelling reasons: a kingdom without a male heir was believed to be in peril of a return to the civil strife which had only ended during his father's reign.

Less altruistic motives were also at work: church lands could be broken up and the spoils shared out amongst the aristocracy. In any event, it was a "top - down" revolution, and it was not to take place without resistance: the Pilgramge of Grace.

… in the religious houses a mood of desperation prevailed, and a sense of impending disaster; the greater houses, surely, could not escape the fate of the lesser. The testimony of their great defender, Robert Aske, given after he was condemned and had nothing left to lose, is compelling:

‘When the abbeys stood the people not only had worldly refreshing in their bodies but spiritual refuge’; without the abbeys, ‘The service of God is much diminished … to the decrease of the Faith and the spiritual comfort of man’s soul.’

The religious, however unworthy their individual lives, stood for an ideal of Christian life, ‘of ghostly (spiritual) living’. Their first purpose was to pray, to pray for souls, in a society which believed that prayers availed the dead.

‘The abbeys were one of the beauties of this realm’, ancient and numinous landmarks, now to be plundered and laid waste.

These quotes are taken from the Wikipedia site which appears not to be available currently.

The impact of the Industrial Revolution on the pre-industrial society was similarly dramatic, and echoes down to our own times.

In "The Great Transformation", Karl Polanyi quotes the words of Robert Owen, written in 1817:

The general diffusion of manufactures throughout a country generates a new character in the inhabitants; and as this character is formed upon a principle quite unfavourable to individual or general happiness, it will produce the most lamentable and permanent evils, unless its tendency be counteracted by legislative interference and direction. ...

They are at present in a situation infinitely more degraded and miserable than they were before the introduction of those manufactories, upon the success of which their bare subsistence now depends.

Neither Henry VIII, nor the owners of the new "manufactories" were interested in the opinions of those forced into sudden and dramatic changes in lifestyle.

The suggestion that their views were important would have been treated as laughable, in the same way that the views of the indigenous people of Bolivia are treated by the ideologues at the World Bank, or the casual manner in which Indian farmers livelihoods are damaged by Coca Cola's devastation of their water supplies.

In summary, a series of political, economic, and cultural revolutions have threatened cultural cohesion - and thus identity - since the sixteenth century.

Up until the Reagan-Thatcher Era the nation state - and in Britain the monarchy - played a supreme role in promoting cultural cohesion.

Now it is largely nostalgic, an embarrassment both to the multiculturalism of well-heeled, pseudo-leftist Guardianistas, and also to neoliberalism's "world citizens" jetting across the planet in their Gulfstreams.

The new patricians imagine they are above the insecurities that afflict Robert W. Cox's 'precarious' and 'excluded'.

George Bush's "Democratic Capitalism" - with its Keynesian bail-outs - has confirmed their ability to hold "Main Street" to ransome.

Noting the effect of globalisation on people's sense of community and indentity, Peadar Kirby, quoting Jonathan Friedman, points out that as the nation state weakens, identity based on "citizenship" is replaced by:

... an identity based on 'primordial loyalties', ethnicity, 'race', local community, language and other culturally concrete forms.

He might have added fundamentalist religious beliefs to that list.

Thus globalisation's need for an international labour force - immigration - provides fertile soil for the growth of anti-global forces such as the BNP. This is not only a UK issue.

Harold Meyersen, of the Washington Post, discusses the downsides to globalisation - and in this case NAFTA - as it impacts on "working-class Americans and working-class Mexicans":

With the number of immigrants illegally in the United States estimated at 11 million, the tensions between Americans and Mexicans -- chiefly, working-class Americans and working-class Mexicans -- are rising.

And those are tensions that congressional Republicans, who don't look to have a lot of other issues they can run on this fall, are eager to stoke.

New Labour addressed such issues with facile gimmicks such as the centralist "Respect" agenda, and something equally top-down called Community Cohesion. Cameron's Big Society con also acts as pretence that vanished social norms can be resurrected hand-out from Whitehall to suitably non-political organisations like a library in Liverpool!

Again, we have to turn to Peadar Kirby to be pointed in the right direction for an answer.

Competitive societies - societies predicated on winners and losers - see the individual but no longer her/his communal context, or the pain and damage caused by the degrading of it. [DSm]

They are simply the losers. In the context of neoliberalism, government's efforts to ameliorate the problem from offices in London have all the hallmarks of pretence: "Do less - make it seem like more".