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