Connection Lost: the crisis of social democracy

I'm not going to claim to have predicted Cameron's success and Labour's defeat in the general election: that would suggest an expertise in psephology that I don't possess, as well as being in poor taste. I will claim though to have expressed a bad feeling about the way things were going for some years before the disaster. For example in reply to a Facebook friend who reposted Paul Krugman's excellent refutation of the case for austerity on April 29th I said this:

"A very good article on economics, as you'd expect from Krugman, but this election is about politics. Austerity is really about punishing 'welfare scroungers' and the immigrants who 'steal our jobs'. The Tories and UKIP are succeeding in selling this story to a large part of the public. Never underestimate the desire to punish. Labour is trapped by this story, as it can't be seen as soft on either scapegoat group. It's not about the real economics at all."

That reply contains the kernel not only of my critique of Labour's recent campaign and policies, but also of my analysis of the crisis of social democracy all over the world. The Tories have managed to sell their rationale for austerity thanks not to a superior grasp of economics, but rather of social psychology: they spotted and capitalised upon a shift of public mindset to which Left ideology has made Labour blind. A standard trope in most recent Left analyses of neoliberalism is that one of its most important effects is the promotion of the economic over the political, the invasion of the social world by market forces and pricing. The conclusion drawn from such an analysis is that the Left needs to assert a more powerful moral position, to mount a Gramscian counterattack which substitutes empathy and social solidarity in place of commerce and competition. This conclusion, that the Left needs to become more moralistic, was a major factor in the recent defeat. A new critique is certainly necessary, and it does indeed need to start from non-economic grounds, but from social psychology rather than morality.

Since World War II, and at an accelerating pace from the 1960s onwards, affluent Western societies shifted from being mostly organised around production (which we've largely outsourced to the East) in favour of services and consumption. This seismic shift created a profound change of mindset, or character if you prefer, among the population. The type of bourgeois individualism preached by Rousseau and analysed by Max Weber placed a high value on work as a source of both identity and virtue, but our post-60s individualism is more hedonistic, even narcissistic. We've lost most of our deference to authority and adopted in its place a prickly sort of confidence that recoils from any kind of political paternalism. Most of us tend to value pleasure and personal autonomy over social solidarity (except towards family), and sentimentality (rebranded as "emotional honesty") over stoicism. And in recent years the advent of social media like Facebook and Twitter have reinforced this shift enormously, especially among the young, bringing us to the cult of the "selfie".

In the UK dwindling faith in organised religion has lead to morality becoming more personal, arbitrary and even contradictory: on the one hand we dislike people being "judgemental" toward us, while on the other we mercilessly refuse forgiveness to transgressors like "love rats" or celebrity paedophiles. The prevalent attitude of "middle England", of the tabloid press, indeed of a narrow majority among most Western populations, it presents many such contradictions which doom to failure any attempt to analyse public opinion in terms of Left versus Right (or, in the USA, Liberal v Conservative). A deep adherence to personal autonomy might lead someone to support gay marriage while opposing immigration, to resent anti-discrimination laws, to support taxes to pay for the NHS but not for foreign aid, and to despise those who depend on welfare. And this unreadability is compounded by a growing generation gap.

The 35 years following the end of WWII saw governments that were in effect social democratic, even when sometimes called plain Democrats (USA), Christian Democrats (Europe) or one-nation Conservatives (UK), who constructed welfare states that guaranteed a high degree of security in employment. By contrast the last 35 years have seen free-market reforms - under both Tories and New Labour - claw back much of the power that organised labour acquired after WWII, resulting in far less secure employment, and with rewards for the lower-paid static or even falling. Over the period we've witnessed the rising power of the mass media and "celebrity culture", accompanied by a divorce of remuneration from productivity among the upper echelons, a phenomenon that Robert Frank and Philip Cook called "The Winner-Take-All Society" and Slavoj Žižek has dubbed the "surplus wage". Top executives, artists, performers, fashion designers and the like behave like self-selecting, invitation-only clubs in which the rewards are orders of magnitude greater than those for normal jobs.

Young folk in their 20s and 30s are faced with debt and uncertainty, only slightly counterbalanced by the small but real possibility of entry - if they're both talented and lucky - into these "creative industries" which might bestow great wealth. Two generations of left-leaning teachers (the ones Michael Gove would have loved to eradicate) have inculcated values of anti-racism and ecological awareness deeply into most of these youngsters, while popular culture adds a topping of sex, drugs and <insert any one of two hundred+ new genres here>. Old folk in their 60s and 70s on the other hand, faced with a similar loss of certainty, security and identity are offered no compensation beyond a free bus pass: they're among those tempted toward UKIP, toward transferring some of their pain onto scapegoats like immigrants and "welfare scroungers". Fundamentally opposed as some of their attitudes are though, these different age cohorts share a profound dislike of ideology, a keen nose for hypocrisy and contempt for politicians, and - as rampant individualists, forced to forge their own character rather than accept those imposed by work and church - an unprecedented sensitivity to tone.

Commentators on the election debacle seem puzzled why the list of Labour manifesto policies - some stolen from the Tories, some sensible and progressive - failed so badly to capture public support. The answer isn't in the policies' content but the tone in which they were delivered. Ed Miliband performed far better than expected on television, and even managed to convey a degree of passion. It was exactly the wrong sort of passion. Agreeing to continue austerity-lite might have been expected to cover both bases, prudence and compassion, but it wasn't believed because it was delivered without the Tories' special spice, punishment. (It's not only "cheats" and "scroungers" that need spanking, but also a little smack bottom for ourselves for running up so much debt during the boom years). Immigration was equally fraught. Every TV interviewer from Jeremy to Krishnan asked rival politicians the question "how many new immigrants is too many?", and of course received no answer because a liberal-minded orthodoxy forbids such a quantitative approach as potentially racist. A sizable proportion of the public think the answer is "not many" but they bitterly resent being accused of racism and so don't express it: instead they allow Nigel Farage to express it for them in his well-rehearsed, cheeky-bar-room-wag manner. This question is pure poison to Labour politicians, from whom it brings out their inner Methodist. The 2015 public hates to be lectured or scolded more profoundly than any before. This mindset - descendant from what David Robins and I called "Cool" in our 2000 book - is not reversible by hectoring or propaganda but is a result of structural changes in the nature of work, and it's wholly at odds with the prevailing voice of the Labour Party.

The same problem affects, or will soon affect, social democratic parties the whole world over as electorates recoil from the collectivist moral tone that's formed the basis of social democratic thinking for a century, which renders them more amenable to libertarian and free-market rhetoric even where that directly threatens their "real" interests. Labour's recent defeat is the culmination of a process that's been more visible than ever since 2008: Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown's prompt action really did save the world's banking system from collapse, but rather than thanks they get blamed for rescuing greedy bankers; the extent of global inequality is widely known and understood, but attacks on the "1%" get brushed off as envy; the crooked bankers, financiers and tax evaders who precipitated the financial crisis and still profit from it today aren't pursued with any great moral outrage, but instead the Tories' wafer-thin excuse that they are the "wealth creators" is swallowed. There's a complete disconnect between economic facts, Labour's analysis of them and the public's perception. It's a Habermasian failure of communication that can't be fixed by quoting Habermas (that only makes it worse). Labour needs more than just a new language: it needs to reorient its whole relationship to civil society and the state if it is to survive, which is by no means guaranteed.

An Armistice 
Social democracy does not mean employing reformist rather than revolutionary means to achieve a state-socialist society. It is not an alternative way of "winning" the class war. Instead social democracy is an armistice in the class struggle, whereby the employed classes agree not to expropriate the employing classes in return for a fair share of the profits, paid not only through wages and salaries but through free or subsidised services like health, education, firefighting, policing and so on, administered by the state and financed by universal progressive taxation. The economy remains resolutely mixed, with publicly-owned utilities operating alongside private firms, and with unions representing the interests of the employed. Social democracy in this sense has been the dominant type of economy throughout most of the Western world for 70 years, even when it doesn't use that name. That least social democratic of nations, the USA, still hasn't repealed every trace of Roosevelt's New Deal, while every UK Conservative government since the war, Thatcher's included, has been forced to live with a large degree of social-democratic compromise. However this compromise is now under attack as never before, and the result may well a complete breach of the armistice.

Since the 1980s many centre-right commentators have been predicting the collapse of social democracy on economic grounds, as a failure of Keynesian economic management, but this is only a small part of the problem. The real problem is a deep structural problem with the second half of its name, "democracy". Social democrats eschew revolutionary violence and authoritarian rule, governing populations who are free to live as they wish, within the constraints of a market somewhat moderated by redistributive welfare measures. Society remains divided into classes, some of who own means of production and others who don't.

Classes aren't biological entities and your class is not encoded in your DNA, though it most definitely is greatly affected by your birth, that is by your parents' position in the hierarchy of ownership. Since class isn't biological it must therefore continually renew itself (humans have a finite lifespan) by sifting and sorting, recruiting and rejecting new members into each class, and two of the most potent class-forming forces in modern Western democracies are housing and education. The deeper crisis of social democracy isn't so much the funding of welfare through taxation (important though that is), but more to do with a movement among the middle classes to segregate themselves from the working classes, both geographically and educationally, thanks to their superior exploitation of their economic freedom. Ideologues of the Right understand these forces as well as, maybe better than, those of the Left, and Conservative governments ever since Thatcher have been devising policies to accentuate this defection and division - with an effect that far exceeds their hopes since they're pushing at an open door. The middle classes are tremendously effective and self-organising in their desire to defend higher remuneration and superior social status through housing and school choice. Those countermeasures that social democrats once employed during their successful era, provision of social housing and excellent state education, have ceased to be effective.

Social democracy has been eroded by an interlocking set of sociological vicious-circles. Its very success in expanding the consumer economy after WWII lead to an affluence that increased the confidence of the middle classes, while the high wages achieved by the working classes prompted manufacturers to outsource production to the orient. Politicisation of education combined with a collapse of deference lead to a decline in the quality of state education, drove more and more of the middle classes back to private schooling, and produced a barely-employable underclass of undereducated youth. Loss of deference toward the professions, coupled with a deskilling of many arts through new technologies, lead to growth of a "creative class" and stimulated the aspiration to enter this class, to escape from wage labour into creative, non-manufacturing jobs and bohemian lifestyles: Žižek's "surplus wage" and the zero-hours contract are two sides of the same debased coin.

This being the case, why not just let social democracy die, mutter RIP, and wipe away a small tear? One good reason is that it's indispensable for the survival of the human species. The alternative of state socialism was tested to total destruction by history (and let's waste no more time on all that sectarian bullshit about "actually existing socialism" versus "deformed state capitalism" and the rest). The alternative of totally free markets is about to be tested to destruction right now, but this time the destruction will affect most lifeforms on the planet through increasing ecological catastrophes, through mass migrations, through financial meltdown and universal impoverishment. Social democracy on a world scale is the only imaginable way that the necessary regulation can be applied to steer capitalism back toward sustainable progress, and reverse the defection of a tiny super-rich minority at everyone else's expense. Social democracy really is just an armistice, and the result of breaking it won't be some kind of benign anarchistic cooperation but rather an epidemic of terrible new forms of authoritarianism and mayhem.

If there's any role left for social-democratic parties in this changed world, it can only be as honest referees of the armistice. They can no longer be partisan advocates for either the middle or working classes. A social democratic party needs to re-educate the electorate about the necessity for a mixed, regulated economy, which might not be impossible in the UK given the British public's continued adherence to the NHS. It mustn't be afraid to call itself social democratic and to explain what that label means. It needn't suck up to "business" and finance capital in the lubricious way that New Labour did, but nor must it pander to the public sector and unions uncritically: it must remain a referee. It needs to seek cooperation with other international parties and institutions to pursue tax evading corporations vigorously and plug the revenue leaks that threaten to sink the ship of state. It needs to enforce equitable rules about employment rights, work-place safety and welfare matters, but its job is not to promote the public's aspirations, which are their own business, nor to judge their moral failures (except those that breach the law). In short it needs to step back out of people's personal lives and concentrate on the context and infrastructure that supports those lives. Abandoning PC rhetoric will be as a hard as giving up smoking, but it has to be done.

Starting a new social democratic party from scratch isn't a sensible option and the only party in the UK whose history suggests that it could become such a party again is the Labour Party: the LibDems have imploded, while the SNP can't help but be suspected of trying on a social-democratic mask over its nationalism. Whether or not a potential Labour leader exists with the will, charisma and political nous to reforge its broken halves into such a party is something we won't know for at least five years, perhaps a lot longer.

Here Come The Robots?

Criticism of Silicon Valley's blueprint for a future society has begun to gather some momentum over the last couple of years. Privacy of communications is still perhaps the biggest source of public concern, along with cybercrime and the security of online shopping and banking, but questions about automation and its effect upon employment are now starting to be raised too. This is a concern that resurfaces periodically with every major wave of technical innovation.

In the 1960s the prospect of the abolition of work by automated machinery could still be treated as a utopian goal by groups like the Situationist International: back then trade unions were sufficiently strong that it was taken for granted that wages could be maintained as working hours shrank. The neoliberal reversal of the last 30 years has ensured that labour lacks any such power nowadays (if it ever had it). The matter cropped up again in the early 1980s when it looked as though the personal computer "revolution" might do away with millions of white collar jobs, but that turned out to be a false alarm too. In fact PC operating systems and application programs were so primitive and unreliable that many new jobs had to be created in IT departments tasked with trying to keep them all running.

The latest version of this problem is being raised just now, thanks to dramatic advances in robots controlled by AI ("artificial intelligence") software. Google's driverless car is one uncanny example, and the giant online retailer Amazon has been rumbling about employing pilotless aerial drones to deliver ordered goods to customers. It seems extremely unlikely that the powers who control airspace will permit this any time soon, but Amazon more realistically talks about AI-driven automation of the location and retrieval of inventory in its chain of huge warehouses, which poses a genuine threat to jobs that are already scandalously underpaid. In a recent interview with the online magazine Slate, Professor Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business, was asked by interviewer Niall Firth "Are robots really taking our jobs?" and he replied by offering these three alternative scenarios:

1. Robots will take away jobs in the short term, but more will be created and a new equilibrium reached, as after the first Industrial Revolution
2. Robots will replace more and more professions and massive retraining will be essential to keep up employment
3. The sci-fi-horror scenario in which robots can perform almost all jobs and "you just won't need a lot of labour" 

McAfee believes that we'll see scenario three in his lifetime.

When asked further about any possible upside to this automation process, McAfee described the "bounty" he saw arising as a greater variety of stuff of higher quality at lower prices, and most importantly "you don't need money to buy access to Instagram, Facebook or Wikipedia". One doesn't need to have actually read Keynes to recognise that though McAfee might know a lot about robotics, his grasp of political economy is rather weaker. If employers "just won't need a lot of labour" then they just won't need to pay a lot of wages either, unless forced to do so by some agency whose identity is very far from obvious right now. If no-one outside that fraction of a percent of the population who own the robots has money to spend on food or housing, then the prospect of free access to Instagram and Facebook is unlikely to appease them very much. It's entirely possible that they will employ their spiffy new 3D printers to reconstruct Madame Guillotine, and Prof McAfee might perhaps be misremembered as a 21st-century Marie Antoinette for that line.

This blindness to the political - perhaps the most important victory the neoliberal ascendancy has achieved - is amplified a thousandfold in a survey conducted at the start of 2014 by the US Elon University and Pew Internet Project, in which 1,896 highly-qualified practitioners in the fields of AI, robotics and networks were asked to comment on this question of job loss. One of the survey questions asked respondents to share their answer to the following query:

"Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025? Describe your expectation about the degree to which robots, digital agents, and AI tools will have disrupted white collar and blue collar jobs by 2025 and the social consequences emerging from that."  

Respondents were fairly evenly split between three scenarios similar to those that McAfee proposed, and I was fairly unsurprised by the lack of any mention of real politics by any of them. I searched the summary of the survey results, to discover only a single occurrence of the word "politics". To be sure there were 20 occurrences of the word "political", but most of those instances conformed to a similar, vague template, something like:

"...our political and economic institutions are not prepared to handle..."
"...economic, political, and social concerns will prevent the widespread displacement of jobs..."
"...humans are in control of the political, social, and economic systems that will ultimately determine..."
"...unemployment should be addressed primarily by creating a smarter political system that serves the citizenry..."

These really are little more than pieties: mustn't appear too technologically deterministic, ought to mention social effects, there... done. Among this stratum of techno-utopians actual politics is regarded as something rather old-fashioned that happened before social networking, a type of natural disaster that only re-emerges at times of social breakdown (and some of them are of course actively engaged in deploying the new technologies to suppress dissent under those circumstances). If McAfee's third scenario were to come about it would certainly generate a faster rise in inequality even than at present - even than that envisaged by Thomas Piketty - and it would be likely to precipitate some sort of social breakdown. The question is, what sort of breakdown?

If the notorious 1%, the rentier class and their heirs, did end up with more or less all the money and all the property, what kind of economic model could they operate? Not even the most pony-tailed of tech-utopians believes that robots will be able to design themselves by 2025, and so a tech-elite will still be required to do that job. Here Slavoj Zizek's notion of the "surplus wage" comes in handy once again: the owning class can pay very generous salaries to those people who invent the robots for them, and those who work on their fabrication. Such a surplus wage, one not directly related to productivity, can always be withdrawn to suppress dissent, making membership of the tech-elite into a sort of lifeboat, with a queue of people waiting for your seat if you should stumble. (That implies that some degree of technical education must be retained to keep the queue full).

This wouldn't be an entirely unprecedented state of affairs as something quite like it already prevails in the popular entertainment business - movies, TV, music - at all levels below that handful of top stars who can extract enough to set up as producers themselves. Under such a model any resurrection of a labour movement and trade union power becomes all but impossible, since people who have neither jobs nor workplaces can't easily unionise, even if there were a will in the Labour or Democratic parties to reform anti-union legislation (which there isn't). For the same reasons any revival of Leninist/Bolshevik communism is improbable - no workplaces to organise in - while anarchist/mutualist movements like Occupy similarly lack any purchase on the real economy, as well as any adequate source of funding.

The most likely scenario would be emergence of some kind of new Jacobins, renegade members of the privileged tech-elite who stir up and manipulate mobs of the unemployed to attack the rentier elite. The US Tea Party already displays many characteristics of such a movement (it would need to turn against its Koch brother backers, but such about-faces aren't uncommon in the history of right-wing extremism). Putin's FSB-oligarch state has some of the right stuff too. In China such renegade factions already pose a threat to the ruling party, as recent purges of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang suggest. A succession of such revolts would install more or less identically impotent juntas, who might persecute and expropriate the super-rich for their own gain but fail entirely to restore employment (a bit like Argentina then). Fairly quickly the capacity to conduct advanced electronics research would be eroded and the robot age would grind to a rusty halt.

Personally I doubt that McAfee is right about his third scenario, not because large corporations lack the will to throw most of us out of work (they do not) but because the abilities of AI have always been hyped way beyond the reality, in order to extract grants from ignorant and gullible politicians. Everyone forgets that the fighting drones which the USA wields to such devastating effect in Afghanistan and Pakistan are controlled by people, not by AI computers. The Russians have just announced an autonomous war robot, a small armoured car on caterpillar tracks equipped with a radar-, camera- and laser-controlled 12.7mm heavy machine gun. It's being deployed to guard missile sites and will open fire if it sees someone it doesn't like the look of. Now there's an IT department I wouldn't want to work in...

Nevertheless such speculations are far from useless. Like the climate change debate, they concentrate minds on what a short time window we have to prevent such horrible future outcomes. Preserving incomes at the cost of profits is a matter for politics, and for unfashionable class politics at that. We  need to be inventing and researching a swathe of new policies, from John Lewis-style mutual ownership, through universal basic incomes or negative taxes to job shares and reduced working weeks, that might gain electoral appeal if McAfee's second scenario turns out to be the more likely.

Gilt by association

"Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you!"
Anon

To be frank I can't be arsed to Google for long enough to discover the originator of this well-known aperçu (it may have been Joseph Heller, it certainly wasn't Nirvana, though they did put it into a song). All that matters about it to me is that while I once thought of it as a joke, I've recently begun to consider it as a profound truth. And I'm not talking, as you might perhaps expect, about the NSA and GCHQ and their clandestine mass surveillance of our communications. I'd accepted long ago that was happening, and what's more - regardless of whether you accept them or not - there are publicly-aired justifications for such actions as necessary functions of the modern State.

No, I'm talking about an altogether deeper and more dangerous kind of paranoia, on a par with "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the Zinoviev letter or the Fu Manchu novels, fantasies about tiny cabals of malign actors who have the power to alter the course of history. As a marxisant social commentator I've spent the last 50 years rejecting, refuting (perhaps even pooh-poohing) all such paranoid theories. Capitalism isn't a thing, let alone a person who could have malign intentions. It's a form of organisation of human labour that has no overall director apart from abstract property laws, and which follows its own unpredictable logic to produce a multitude of different outcomes, some better, some worse, for some people and not for others. This tendency to imagine dark conspirators plotting the spread and development of capitalism is something I've been resisting for most of my life.

So what happened to make me start doubting the viability of such scepticism? It was reading Paul Krugman's review of Thomas Piketty's seminal book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" in the New York Review of Books. But surely neither Krugman nor Piketty is a conspiracy theorist? Of course not. What Piketty has done is analyse the overall development of capitalism over the last centuries, using new and powerful analytical tools. What Krugman's review does is to explain Piketty's analysis with admirable clarity, and bring out its social implications, which are so alarming that it was they that introduced this doubt into my mind. Given the facts presented in this review (I've yet to read Piketty's book itself: regrettably too busy for next few months), the only way I can explain Krugman/Piketty's findings to myself is by supposing that the financial crash of 2008 may have been in some way an act of deliberate sabotage by some conscious group of actors, rather than just the working out of impersonal market forces.

Krugman's excellent review is entitled "Why We're in a New Gilded Age", a nod to one of the key facts emerging from Piketty's analysis, namely that income inequality is set to revisit levels last seen during the first US Gilded Age between 1870 and 1910. That was the period when the great monopolistic fortunes were being accumulated in oil, railroads, steel and banking by family dynasties like the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies and Morgans. I won't waste space and your time by repeating all the facts Krugman picks out here: do try to read his review for yourself. He reproduces a pair of Piketty's graphs that plot After Tax Rate of Return to Capital and Growth of the World Economy from antiquity (0 BCE) up past the present day and projected forward to 2050:

The profit graph is nearly flat for most of recorded history, with only a shallow rise from the Renaissance to World War 1, then a precipitous V-shaped descent spanning the whole 20th century which represents the dramatic decrease in inequality between the two world wars caused by the power of organised labour. The growth graph rises steadily from the 1500s up until the 1970s, a steady 500-year increase in equality caused by growth spreading wealth more widely.

That growth rate has been declining now for more than 60 years and the graphs crossed sometime in the '80s so that by 2050 Piketty projects that inequality will be back to levels not seen since 1820. There's a significant difference between earnings inequality and inherited inequality, and inheritance of wealth among the top 0.01% has become such as to generate a new crop of dynasties (highly visible among Hollywood and Rock brats in the pages of Tatler for some years now). Krugman also remarks that one difference between this New Gilded Age and the first is that income inequality now trumps asset wealth by numbers, though not by total worth: those managerial and financial classes who pay themselves multi-million-dollar fat-cat salaries far outnumber the 0.01% who live solely off ownership of huge corporations.

What struck me so forcibly was that Piketty's book and Krugman's review bring together, and make sense of, several disparate themes that I've been banging on about in this blog, and in my book reviews for The Political Quarterly, for the last decade: a crucial turning point in the mid-1970s when labour began to lose out, which is often blamed on the "oil crisis" but actually far more than that; and the concept of the "surplus wage",  paying salaries that are no longer remotely connected with productivity as a legal way to loot the assets of companies.

One of the more important books I've reviewed in recent years was Winner-Take-All Politics by two US economics professors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, in which they painstakingly unravel the ways in which the Republican party helped turn the tide against organised labour since 1971, in the face of complacency, collaboration and incompetence from the Democrats. Contrary to conservative mythology it wasn't Reagonomics that turned that tide but a blunder by Carter Democrats in refusing tax and regulatory measures offered by Nixon that were more liberal than anything Obama can dream of. It was also a tax law of Nixon's that permitted clever and diligent Republicans to pay for George W. Bush's upper-class tax cuts by trapping the middle-classes in a higher tax band, thus turning them into enraged tax-cutters and paving the way for the Tea Party. By dominating those boring committees that actually run America, Republicans have permanently shifted the balance from labour back to capital. As Krugman has it:

 "Nor is this orientation toward capital just rhetorical. Tax burdens on high-income Americans have fallen across the board since the 1970s, but the biggest reductions have come on capital income—including a sharp fall in corporate taxes, which indirectly benefits stockholders—and inheritance. Sometimes it seems as if a substantial part of our political class is actively working to restore Piketty’s patrimonial capitalism. And if you look at the sources of political donations, many of which come from wealthy families, this possibility is a lot less outlandish than it might seem."

And there you have the germ of my paranoia, "a lot less outlandish than it might seem". Krugman's statement is fairly radical for a mainstream US economist, in that it acknowledges that the Republican Party pursues class politics (a forbidden topic that neither party nor the US voting public like to hear spoken). My concern however goes way beyond that: is it "too outlandish" to suggest that a small cabal of libertarian Republican bankers and lawyers actually forsaw and abetted the crash of 2008?

Harvard Law School, Skull and Bones, Goldman-Sachs' boardroom, the ratings agencies, the Fed under Ayn-Rand-libertarian Alan Greenspan. It doesn't require the hypertrophied imagination of a Thomas Pynchon or a Bruce Sterling to conjure up from those ingredients the possibility, if not probability, of a small, informal clique with the determination, technical know-how and prescience to understand that unfettering mortgage-lending might bankrupt the public finances, thus cripple the State's regulatory capabilities and open up a once-only opportunity to reverse all the gains made by labour over the course of the 20th century...

The conclusion of Piketty's book, more or less endorsed by Krugman, is that in democracies we could still do something about this rising inequality if we wanted, the more obvious measures being steep progressive taxation on both incomes and wealth, transaction taxes and the breaking up of monopolies (as was done by the Anti-Trusters before World War 1). But it's perfectly clear that the political will is lacking for such measures both in the UK and the USA, where both parties and electorate have largely bought into an anti-tax, austerity agenda. Add to this the fact that US democracy itself has now become so dysfunctional as to prevent any significant reforms from being passed.

To add to my paranoia, we're entering a period where our giant corporations are no longer the railroads and steel but in electronics, and they're finally poised on the brink of a technical revolution that's dogged both the radical political and science fiction imaginations for a century - the possibility of employing robots to displace human workers. Superimpose this onto Piketty's projections of wealth-concentration and dynastic succession and you glimpse the outlines of a very grim society indeed, dominated at one end by shanty-towns and favelas (the World as Detroit) and at the other by gated communities and private islands.

In that world only a minority of the population would be in paid employment, medicine and policing are privatised, and the suppression of civil disturbance is automated and terribly effective. Sounds like a script treatment for yet another dystopian sci-fi/action movie starring Vin Diesel, but it's not that far from the vision Guy Debord arrived at in his (paranoid?) Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988. Another theorist I greatly admire was Thorstein Veblen, he who best analysed the first Gilded Age and influenced the first Anti-Trust movement: so I'll fade out to a characteristically sarcastic comment of his on unearned income:

"... in modern times and in the civilised countries, those immemorial principles of privilege equitably vested in the master class have fallen into discredit as being not sufficiently grounded in fact; so that mastery and servitude are disallowed and have disappeared from the range of legitimate institutions. The enlightened principles of self-help and personal equality do not tolerate these things. However, they do tolerate free income from investments. Indeed, the most consistent and most reputable votaries of the modern point of view commonly subsist on such income."

 The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919) 

after rain

after rain, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

This photo of mine has gone viral on Flickr with 6000 views in a day

New openDemocracy article

I have a new article called Thoughts on 2013: A Slow Motion Train Wreck on the openDemocracy website

Onward Into the POO

Slightly ashamed that I haven't written anything for this blog for some six months, but the current state of UK politics is so depressing that I don't feel obliged to offer much else in the way of excuse. Anyway, here's a small philological contribution just to keep it rolling.

In a thoughtful essay on the openDemocracy website Professor Cas Mudde recently analysed the prospects for a return to social democracy in Europe. He was not optimistic, expressing a view that "(Real) social democracy is not just unknown to several generations of voters, but it is contradictory to their individualist or ethnicized worldview", a case for which he offered several strong arguments.

I commented on his essay to say that a major part of the problem was the refusal of the rump of New Labour to even utter the words "social democracy". Here's an extract from my comment:

"I believe a crucial first step is purely semantic: getting people to even use the words 'social democrat', which Labour Party people will tie themselves in knots to avoid saying. The fact that for those 30 successful years following WW2 most of Europe and the USA were social democracies *in effect*, though not in name needs to be better explained. The difference between social democracy and authoritarian state socialism needs to be resurrected and preached in non-technical language, since few to the left of Labour appear to understand it. Even Russell Brand's recent quasi-anarchistic TV outburst was couched in a rhetoric that rejected representative democracy and hinted at coercive expropriation - oppositional youth nowadays appear drawn to the worst of anarchism in unholy mixture with the worst of state socialism."

As a sometime dictionary author I'm greatly impressed by the power of language and the need for accurate nomenclature. As well as restoring the meaning and usage of the term "Social Democracy" we need some equivalent that describes the form of wonky capitalism that's been sprouting in the post-2008 epoch in the UK, USA and Europe. I suggest that a suitably descriptive term would be "Property-Owning Oligarchy", or POO for short.

Oh, and a Merry Christmas to one and all!
  

Ressentiment?

ressentiment, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

"We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

A Caustic Prediction Come True

 

A fake bomb detector: Photograph: City of London Police/PA

"Modern society, which up to 1968 went from success to success and was persuaded that it was loved, has since then had to renounce these dreams; it prefers to be feared. It knows full well that 'its innocent air will no longer return.' A thousand conspiracies in favor of the established order tangle and clash almost everywhere, with the overlapping of networks and secret questions or actions always pushed harder; and the process of rapid integration is pushed into each branch of the economy, politics and culture.

The degree of intermingling in surveillance, disinformation and special activities continually grows in all areas of social life. The general conspiracy has become so dense that it is almost out in the open, each of its branches starts to hinder or trouble the others, because all these professional conspirators are spying on each other without exactly knowing why, or encounter each other by chance, yet without recognizing each other with certainty. Who is observing whom? On whose behalf, apparently? And actually? The real influences remain hidden, and the ultimate intentions can only be suspected with great difficulty and almost never understood."

Guy Debord: from "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" 1988 (chapter XXX)  

[Read the whole text at http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html]

Still Posting Here!

I haven't given up posting to this blog but recently have been active elsewhere - two pieces published on openDemocracy. I will be continuing to post stuff here though and I've also created Kindle (MOBI) and PDF format books of all my blog posts up to June 2013, for anyone who prefers to read them all in one lump. Download them for free by clicking the cover picture.


Here are the links to my two oD pieces, the first of which is a revised version of my last post here:

The Battle between Countries and Companies

Cool Capitalism: changing principles of protest

THE CRUNCH

With the current outbreak of indignation over tax evasion by multinational corporations, we're finally coming face-to-face with the biggest problem of our times: one more important than the financial crisis, than terrorism or sexual abuse, more immediately important even than global warming. What's at stake is the continued existence of the state as we've known it for the last several centuries, without whose powers none of those other problems are soluble (despite any fairy tales that libertarians and Tea Party whackos may tell you). Without revenues there can be no state, a fact that's perfectly understood by those Republican billionaires whose purchased congressmen are currently preventing the USA from being governed.

The recent visit of Google's CEO Eric Schmidt to London rubbed the point in. Explaining that "if you change the tax laws, we'll obey them", he treated UK PM David Cameron with the amused air of a cheeky schoolboy talking to a nagging teacher, but that amiable levity was a mask for the fact that he now wields more power than a mere PM and knows it. In my current PC Pro column I had this to say about another of the tax-evading internet giants, Facebook:

"Katherine Losse was a pioneer Facebook employee who used to ghost-write posts for Mark Zuckerberg himself, and in her recent book 'The Boy Kings' she offers a disturbing picture of his thinking. The main points of his credo include youthfulness, openness, sharing power and 'companies over countries'. Asked what he meant by the latter he told her 'it means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world.' So the model for a new world is the Californian youth-oriented corporation, untramelled by pesky laws and regulations, by messy old-world stuff like pensions and having to win elections. The Nation State is just plain out-of-date, it still practices stupid stuff like secrecy and taxation, it doesn't get the New Digital Narcissism where everyone can be an (unpaid) star of their own channel. All rather reminiscent of the 1960s counterculture mixed with a dash of Orwell's Oceania, Eurasia, EastAsia. But actually it starts to look rather like a new variation on feudalism where you'll only get fed if you become a retainer of one of these mega-corporations, as the boring old centralised state and its services wither away."

Commentators are beginning to wake up to the scale of this problem. For example in a recent blog post Robert Reich notes that while politicians are all talking the talk about ending tax evasion and havens, nothing actually ever gets done about it:

"The same disconnect is breaking out all over the world. The chairman of a British parliamentary committee investigating Google for tax avoidance calls the firm 'devious, calculating, and unethical,' yet British officials court the firm’s CEO as if he were royalty. Prime Minister David Cameron urges tax havens to mend their ways and vows to crack down on tax cheats, yet argues taxes must be low in the UK because 'we’ve got to encourage investment, we’ve got to encourage jobs and I want Britain to be a winner in the global race'. These apparent contradictions are rooted in the same reality: global capital, in the form of multinational corporations as well as very wealthy individuals, is gaining enormous bargaining power over nation states."

Of course modern nation states are still more powerful than corporations like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, if only because they make the laws and can enforce them, in the last resort by using a police force and an army which those corporations don't possess. In a sci-fi fantasy film the next step would be for the corporations to buy their own private armies, but that isn't how the real world works - the danger is actually far more insidious than that. It involves a subject I've touched on here in another recent post, the idea of the "surplus wage".

Over the last three decades or so the world's economy has tended to decouple reward from effort, an effect that's visible not just in bankers' bonuses and "fat-cat" managers' salaries, but also in the lifestyle and remuneration of sportsmen, popular entertainers and other celebrities. Slavoj Žižek has analysed this phenomenon in terms of payment of "surplus wages", which are entirely unrelated to actual productivity but get paid to insiders accepted into certain cliques and professions. This phenomenon can be looked upon as a legal way of looting the wider economy. The ineffectuality of the Left's attempts to agitate about the current economic crisis is in part due to the fact that many people who 50 years ago might have taken to the streets in protest, are now pacified by the slim hope of gaining entry to the privileged ranks of these surplus-waged. Methods of entry can include nepotism, winning the lottery, wangling a local government sinecure, starting an internet business, making it as a footballer or conceptual artist, writing a hit tune in your back-bedroom or winning a TV talent show, being discovered as a model, or joining a drug dealing gang.

The very greatest danger we face is that our politicians - those who spend our tax money to run the state supposedly on our behalf - will become entirely suborned by the giant corporations that they're supposed to be taxing, by enrollment into the surplus waged club. There's already ample evidence of this happening, from the instant millionaire status so quickly achieved by the Tony Blairs and Bill Clintons on the international speaking circuits, through various hushed-up bribery scandals of recent years, to the lonely death of Margaret Thatcher in her humble suite at the Ritz. The corporations have most of the money and increasingly most of the power too since they monopolise mass communication channels in ways that our none-too-technically-bright politicians barely comprehend. These corporations are generous in doling out the surplus wage to secure the fidelity of the right people. What if the political class as a whole in effect changes sides, representing only the interests of these corporations? The dismantling of the post-WWII democratic welfare states could proceed unhindered and Chinese authoritarian capitalism would become a template for the future. 

The real Catch-22 is that the contempt for politicians this process engenders merely inflames the problem. It turns people against the state itself and toward empty Tea Party style libertarian rhetoric. It will require nimble political footwork at a level that no-one I can currently see possesses, to defend the role of the state effectively against this pincer movement of billionaire lobbyists and populist rabble rousers. Amid all the twitter and yap of declining consumer capitalism it's far too easy to overlook the fact that the social-democratic state, rather than the "free market", is what gave us all our current freedoms, that it was the fruit of two centuries of labour struggles - and that it's being stolen from under our very noses. 

NOTE: For a deeper analysis of the ideology of Californian hi-tech corporations, see Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (no relation) on The Californian Ideology

Attention Please!

Do I have your full attention? Chances are that I do until around the end of this sentence, but after that I might lose it pretty fast. My previous post here was about the physiological basis of emotion, and a natural follow up to that is to discuss “attention”, the way that emotional triggers guide our senses  toward opportunities and threats in the outside world. Attention is a function we share with most of the higher vertebrates, basically all those animals that can look you in the eye (something equivalent perhaps exists even in sessile creatures like corals, but on hugely longer time scales). At its root attention is a negative phenomenon, where the animal brain censors or filters out much of the information that pours in through eyes, ears and nose to permit concentration on just those important things that an animal might want to eat, or mate with, or which might want to eat them. To see attention at work watch a cat stalk a mouse, a sheepdog crouching in the field, or look an eagle in the eye (that’s pure attention). 

We humans tend to experience attention subjectively as something positive, a searchlight beam of intelligence that we project out onto the world and shine on its most interesting parts. Communication between humans is almost impossible without attention: if I don’t have your attention then I’m not really talking to you at all, I’m merely talking at you. In a quite deep sense your attention is who you are, a beacon that transmits your desires out onto the world and other people, which is why advertisers, performers and demagogues fight so hard to capture it. It can be stolen too: a most odious aspect of the latest communication technologies is the way they can monopolise attention to the detriment of face-to-face interaction. Who hasn’t had the experience of talking to someone who is more-or-less surreptitiously glancing at their smartphone? (The very latest development, Google Glass, enables people to apparently interact with you while simultaneously giving their attention to a website or some remote communicant. I find it rather encouraging that already within weeks of its release some bars in California have started to ban the use of Glass, and have coined the excellent insult “glassholes” for people who persist…)

The only satisfactory philosophical account of attention I know is that given by George Santayana, most rigorously developed in Scepticism and Animal Faith, a difficult and densely compressed work in which he laid out the foundations of his mature philosophical system. There he starts out from what philosophers call a “solipsism of the present moment”, where all one is allowed to know is that I am, here, now. There's a more readable account in Santayana's 1933 essay Locke and The Frontiers of Common Sense: 

"Animals that are sensitive physically are also sensitive morally, and feel the friendliness or hostility which surrounds them. Even pain and pleasure are no idle sensations, satisfied with their own presence: they violently summon attention to the objects that are their source. Can love or hate be felt without being felt towards something – something near and potent, yet external, uncontrolled, and mysterious? When I dodge a missile or pick a berry, is it likely that my mind should stop to dwell on its pure sensations or ideas without recognising or pursuing something material? [...] But when aroused to self-transcendent attention, feeling must needs rise to intelligence, so that external fact and impartial truth come within the range of consciousness, not indeed by being contained there, but by being aimed at."

He goes on to assert that any sentient and mobile creature must evolve attention, because the world is too full and exposure to all of its sense data must swamp any consciousness. Animal faith, crudely-speaking, means a set of default assumptions about the nature of the world that are hard-wired by evolution – basic stuff like, things fall downwards when you drop them, things remain where they are even when you don’t look at them, some things are dead while others are live agents, etc etc etc. Such assumptions aren’t philosophical axioms, don’t need to be defended by reason, and are by no means correct in every circumstance. They permit the brain to filter out most transient phenomena and focus its spotlight of attention onto the significant, a skipping of focus that accumulates the trail of snapshots which we call memory. The “beliefs” that comprise any particular animal faith will vary between species according to the niches in which they evolved, and by definition evolution ensures that they correspond well-enough (though never perfectly) to those creatures’ actual material environment.  

Santayana’s concept of animal faith overlaps in some respects with Kant’s “categories”, and likewise finds ample support in the latest findings of neuroscience. Philosophically it was the ladder he employed to climb above the endless and fruitless debates between epistemological idealists and realists. 

It seems to me that a good theory of attention is absolutely central to any materialist theory of aesthetics. In addition to writing columns and blogs I like to take photographs (the best of which I post on Flickr). It’s tempting to think of a camera as an extension of your attention, or at least as a tool for freezing the object your attention for all time. There may be a grain of truth in this, but the brute fact remains that the camera itself doesn’t possess attention, not being a sentient animal. Admittedly the latest digital cameras incorporate ever-smarter features like autofocus, face and even expression recognition, but they come nowhere close to the attention even of a newly-hatched sparrow.

It’s not a bad thing that the camera lacks attention: that means it grabs everything, even those things that weren’t in your attention when you took the shot. Great photographers like Brassai or Cartier-Bresson make these peripheral goings-on in a street scene half of their art. Every good photographer injects a certain amount of attention into their pictures, for example by controlling depth of field to blur out a background, or by shifting the focus point off centre. And of course, in the era of Photoshop and Picasa you can scream for viewers’ attention by colouring a single object within a black-and-white image, as Spielberg did that red coat girl in Schindler’s list. Such powerful but pulpy tricks sink really fast into tackiness though. I went through a phase of playing with High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography in which all the detail from three or four differently-exposed shots of the same scene are compressed down into a single image. The result is hyper-realistic, containing levels of detail that exceed what the human eye could ever capture for itself. Used with restraint this trick can sometimes induce a goose-pimply feeling that something strange is about to happen, but iron self-control is required to avoid it degenerating into over-the-top Hot Rod art (and of course advertisers now routinely employ it to enhance their wonderlands of conspicuous consumption).

Part of my reason for writing about attention just now is an excellent London Review of Books lecture by Nicholas Spice called Is Wagner bad for us? I won’t spoil things by revealing his answer, but will just concentrate on Spice’s critical approach which is based on Wagner’s acute ability to manipulate attention. As an interesting exercise he asks us to compare the first minute of Bizet’s Carmen, Verdi’s Falstaff, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Berg’s Wozzeck with the first minutes of each opera of the Ring cycle. (Thanks to the genius of Spotify this is an experiment I could carry out even while still reading the article). Spice argues that these other composers all more or less fail to learn from Wagner’s real innovation, because their first minutes are stuffed full of multiple themes and layers of counterpoint, creating a complexity that even a professional musician can’t absorb in a live hearing:

“There’s so much going on and in such a small space that although all of the music registers somewhere in our brains, we would be hard pressed, if asked a moment later, to describe more than a few of its salient features”.

By contrast Wagner’s openings all employ simple harmonic structures that slowly build and lead you into the drama: 

“Wagner builds his music over the longer timespan through a gradual accumulation of discretely presented elements. The power and excitement of the orchestral prelude to Die Walküre, for example, is intrinsically dependent on the extreme simplicity of its ingredients [...] The simplicity of the musical components allows us to feel that we are at the controls of this infernal machine, its drive our drive – and this is the authentic Wagnerian experience.”

In other words, rather than assault our attention with a barrage of contrasting materials, Wagner gives us the illusion that it’s our own attention that’s steering the music, seducing us into a degree of empathy that can notoriously turn into out-and-out addiction.

At a far-removed edge of the cultural spectrum, modern forms of electronic dance music employ beats to a similar end (techniques that you can historically trace back to the influence of African drum musics). Extended regular rhythms can capture the attention completely, in a state similar to a trance where one’s surroundings recede into irrelevance. Note the way that dance music producers are extremely scrupulous about the precise tempo (measure in beats per minute) of their tracks, and in fact bpm is one of the main criteria used to differentiate between the bewildering number of sub-genres: Wikipedia lists over 200 of them. It’s perfectly possible that different tempos induce different resonances with heart rate or brain-wave rhythms that contribute to the pleasure of dancing. Keeping the same tempo though, however compelling, for too long is to risk boredom and so the principal skill of a good DJ is knowing exactly when to interrupt or change it.

This principle is pushed further still in the bizarre genre of dubstep, to which I’ve found myself strangely attracted recently (even though it’s wholly inappropriate to my status as an OAP). Dubstep tracks typically employ a tempo around 140bpm, but then brutally disrupt this by a device known as “the drop”, whereby the tempo suddenly slows while becoming terrifyingly loud and combined with grotesque and humorous sound-effects that draw deeply on the emotional vocabulary of bad horror movies. Your attention is grabbed in more or less the same way as when you notice a runaway cement truck approaching. Wagner used techniques that were structurally (though certainly not harmonically!) similar, for example in the prelude to Die Walküre (around 2:15). As Spice says, Wagner wanted a listener to abandon himself unresistingly to the work so that he “involuntarily assimilates even what is most alien to his nature”.

Attention can be profoundly modified by the emotions, as for example when the release of adrenaline by a fright notoriously amplifies all your senses and causes your attention to become strongly focussed. Stimulant drugs operate by mimicking the effects of such stress-released hormones, and in this sense music is a sort of drug too (and a strong one at that) operating through its effects on attention. Drugs, art, music, sport, the internet, even religion, all are competing for and capturing your attention. Do take care lest you grant it too freely.

Nothing To Fear But Neuroscience?

I just watched Mel Gibson's 2006 movie Apocalypto on television. It's pretty remarkable coming from such a proselytising Christian, because its message to me appeared to be pure Nietzsche - innocent and virtuous pagans destroyed by not one but two evil organised religions, the Mayan blood cult and Spanish Christianity. Early in the movie its hero meets the remnants of another forest tribe who just escaped a massacre, and his father uses them as a lesson: "Fear. Deep rotting fear. They were infected by it. Did you see? Fear is a sickness. It will crawl into the soul of anyone who engages it. It has tainted your peace already. I did not raise you to see you live with fear. Strike it from your heart. Do not bring it into our village." The purple prose may be straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but the content is quite profound. The infectious and debilitating nature of Fear has been well known to those who deal in Power for millenia, from Mongol conquerors and robber barons to US neo-cons. It's been theorised in depth by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Vico and many more, and their theories nowadays find material confirmation in modern neurophysiology, from the systemic effects of corticosteroid hormones that render victims of Fear passive and submissive.

Modern liberal democracies are supposed to have renounced the use of Fear as a political weapon, as famously stated by Franklin D Roosevelt in his 1933 inaugural speech:

"... first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

(As an aside, one hopes Barack Obama might rediscover some of this spirit during his second term as he confronts the Republicans' attempt to close down the US government, but I'm not holding my breath). Democratic politics actually took a serious step backwards after 9/11 as regards the handling of Fear. The so-called "War on Terror" aimed at the exact reverse of what its name implies, in effect seeking to re-introduce Fear into Western societies grown complacent. It may  not have been a conscious conspiracy, but rather a contingent convergence of aims between: Islamic terrorists seeking to punish the USA for its support of Israel; the mass media who understand that nothing attracts more eyeballs, faster, than a good disaster; the US military/industrial complex, ever fretful of maintaining its bloated budget; and politicians who know that the promise of security can be an election winner.  

Fear is as important a factor in economics as in politics. In the 1930s, the last time we were in such a deep economic mess as now, it was John Maynard Keynes who best grasped the role of emotion in economic calculation. Confidence is an essential condition for the operation of markets and Fear is its opposite, the poison that causes crashes and bank runs. His advocacy of strong government intervention to restore confidence after the crash became favoured policy for most of the world’s democratic governments from 1945, until Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas's neo-liberal ideas gained influence in the mid 1970s following the inflation caused by the Middle East oil crises. Fear causes people to hoard money, stops them spending and so stalls the economic cycle - the Cyprus bailout fiasco has given us a recent demonstration of its power.

Classical economists worked from the simplifying axiom that human economic behaviour is rational, which it clearly is not, and Keynes' acknowledgment of this irrationality had important effects. Economic actors aren't always able to calculate their own best interests, and markets are not the perfect, self-stabilising systems for disseminating price information of theory. The assumption that market prices are the sum of “rational expectations” (buy if you expect good news, sell if you expect bad news) is a simplification too far. Human behaviour isn't entirely or even mostly rational, as in everyday life (if not in the laboratory or seminar room) imagination and emotion often distort reason. Some traders merely imagine bad news and start selling, infecting others and send the whole market into a self-reinforcing downward spiral. Renowned hedge fund manager and currency speculator George Soros made billions from such irrational markets, by refusing to believe in rational expectations. His 2008 book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets treats of such feedback loops and explicitly separates traders’ perceptions of the market from its actual state. Acting on perceived market conditions changes those conditions which in turn alters the perception. When such feedback is negative we have that self-correcting behaviour that rational expectations theorists so admire, but once in a while it flips into a self-reinforcing howl of positive feedback, producing bubbles, bull runs, panics and crashes.

Keynes's recognition of the role of emotion lead to a crucial and historic victory for the democratic Left after WW2, but his lesson was not properly learned, and nowadays it's the Right that has mastered the manipulation of emotion. Advertisers persuade us to fear bad breath, embarassing stains, microbes lurking on every surface, while proclaiming that we deserve wonderful shining hair that will make us irresistible because "we're worth it". Politicians stoke our fears of immigrants and crime to distract our attention from their looting of the financial system and demolition of the welfare state. The Left is barely able to mount a coherent response to such tactics for several reasons: partly because these were its own tactics (agit-prop), turned against it; partly because its own emotional palette is impoverished and obsessed by history (righteous rage and compulsory optimism); but mostly because a naive rationalism prevails among Left intellectuals that makes them suspicious of emotion and squeamish of talking about it.  

Cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists are (very early) in the process of revolutionising our understanding of emotional behaviour thanks to smart laboratory tests, as pioneered by Daniel Kahneman, and advances in fMRI scanning that allow observation of living, thinking brains. As with most scientific discoveries their results tend toward the morally neutral, and so can be interpreted and recruited to support opposing political positions. The media tend to be interested only in claims to have discovered genes or hard-wired brain circuits (eg."gay" genes, genes for "selfishness") that confirm pre-conceived views of "human nature", often accompanied by evolutionary just-so stories intended to explain their purpose . Worse still our current popular culture espouses emotion in an incontinently romantic and hyper-emetic fashion: think all that TV-sitcom-speak like "being there for you", "emotional intelligence" and "do you do hugs?", think all those fluffy kitten videos on YouTube. But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that the typical popular understanding of what emotions actually are is profoundly misleading. The phenomena we call "emotions" in everyday life - love, hate, joy, jealously, contentment, amazement and so on - would better be called "feelings" because they are our subjective perceptions of our body's response to the emotions proper, which are unconscious, semi-automatic physiological processes (and far fewer in number than the feelings by which describe their combined effects).

We could revive the archaic term "passions", as used by Spinoza and Hume, to describe these physiological emotions, but that doesn't help much because "passionate" has been co-opted into everything from yoghurt to hairspray advertising. The scientific study of these emotions is called affective neuroscience, and one of its most stimulating and controversial practitioners is the Estonian-American psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp. I can't go into great detail here, but I've written in more depth in this yet-to-be published book chapter. To summarise very, very briefly, all mammals share seven or eight emotional subsystems whose evolutionary roles concern those behavioural basics fight, flight, fornication, play and bonding (the latter crucial to mammals whose offspring are wholly dependent on suckling). These subsystems are located throughout the brain's limbic system and get triggered by the amygdala when it recognises dangerous, sexy or whatever perceptual stimuli. Each subsystem works via a different set of hormones and neurotransmitters, flooding them into the brain and bloodstream so effects are felt throughout the body. This happens automatically and is difficult, often impossible, to resist through conscious will.    

Panksepp calls these fundamental systems SEEK, CARE, LUST, PLAY, FEAR, RAGE, PANIC (others might add DISGUST). The SEEK or expectancy system evolved to govern foraging behaviour. It causes our feeling of satisfaction whenever some goal is achieved by releasing dopamine as a reward. It's implicated in almost all learning behaviour, induces curiosity and motivation but is also responsible for addictions. RAGE, FEAR and LUST trigger aggression, flight and sexuality, mediated by adrenaline, noradrenaline, the various sex hormones and stress hormones like cortisol. CARE and PANIC are two sides of the mammalian parent/child bond: PANIC is that special deep anxiety displayed by young mammals when separated from their mother, while CARE drives her to protect them. Both work through oxytocin, vasopressin, prolactin, brain opioids and probably more yet to be discovered. PLAY drives young animals to rehearse important adult behaviours like social etiquette, fighting and fleeing without causing physical harm (humans, dogs, cats and many other mammals retain its influence as adults). DISGUST causes recoil from unpleasant and dangerous stimuli and is present in most higher animals, not just mammals: in humans it controls our vomiting reflex and is partly regulated by serotonin. The hypothesis is that all our more complex feelings are ultimately driven by these elementary subsystems, working together in various combinations with other bodily processes. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues further that memories get labelled with the emotional state prevailing at the time they were laid down, and that these labels are retrieved and processed whenever we remember, which is why emotion and reason are inextricably intertwined.  

Congratulations if you're still reading after all that biochemistry, but I am struggling towards a political point. In his recent book On Deep History and the Brain, Harvard historian Daniel Lord Smail shows how recent discoveries in affective neuroscience can impinge on the social sciences. He starts from the fact that we're social animals, and that in all social species the context upon which evolutionary selection operates ceases to be "raw" nature alone but includes society and culture. Individuals try to modify the emotional states of others in ways likely to be either socially or individually beneficial. Among ants and bees, and perhaps even lower primates like baboons, such interaction is almost entirely mediated by pheromones (which operate between us too but aren't yet well understood). Human societies employ artefacts, rituals and institutions to release hormones that modify both our own and other peoples' behaviour, in ways beyond voluntary control. Dancing and other courting rituals increase the chance of mating (aka "pulling") through vasopressin and testosterone. Religious services induce trance-like states (serotonin and norepinephrine) that provoke anything from spontaneous preaching to signing up as a suicide bomber. Sporting events promote bonding among our side, rage against theirs, as well as play. And from baboons and chimps, to mediaeval robber barons and Iraqi car bombers, terror has proven effective at subduing and subjugating its victims, thanks to the debilitating effect of the stress hormone cortisol. Why else were most of the traded commodities crucial to the early development of capitalism - like spices, sugar, opium - to do with pleasure, and why are alcohol, drugs and tobacco still so subject to political interference?

Many people on the Left instinctively take against neuroscience, in reaction to the crudely reductionist way it's being used in the mainstream media. I believe we should instead embrace its findings as part of a multi-layered explanation of the way individual behaviour gets aggregated into political force. Materialist explanations of mind need not be reductionistic, while attempting to exclude or traduce the effect of mind in politics and economics - as vulgar Marxists, behaviourists and free market economists have done - just produces disaster after disaster. Keynes lead the way to putting emotion in its proper place, but since then contemporary scholars like Steven Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Frans de Waal, Jaak Panksepp and Antonio Damasio have made valuable contributions that we need to assimilate.

All these considerations push me to suggest that the conquest of Fear needs to be placed at the very centre of any programme to lift the world out of its current crisis: a programme that's notably lacking from otherwise-admirable movements like Occupy. Such a programme could seek to re-deploy and re-regulate the institutions of both state and private industry to free us from:

Fear of starvation
Fear of homelessness
Fear of illness
Fear of discrimination
Fear of false imprisonment
Fear of torture
Fear of war
Fear of crime

We need to adopt a language of what Isaiah Berlin called "negative freedoms" in place of the positive "rights" that occupy most current Left thinking, and to shift the debate from the sole terrain of the economic where it's been trapped for the last 30 years. For example, don't promise absolute equality of income, but resist granting employers greater freedom to fire. Negative freedoms can be more concisely stated (and breaches more easily recognised) than positive ones. Rather than listing everything that's permitted of right, let everything not explicitly forbidden be permitted. Negative freedoms leave more open space for personal autonomy: the state can't and shouldn't guarantee freedom from embarassment, irritation or boredom. Anton Chekhov's famous credo "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom – freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves" displays a similar spirit: positive virtues whose equality cannot be guaranteed, alongside mandatory negative freedoms.