Mustn't Grumble!

Compulsory optimism is an important feature of many social systems: in the Catholic church it's the "Hope" in Faith, Hope and Charity; in the army it's called "morale"; in the nation-state it's called patriotism. Its opposites are not mere intellectual pessimism but "despair" (a Deadly Sin), "defeatism" (a shooting offence under both Hitler and Stalin) and in more recent times "negativity". All of these formulations serve the same purpose, which is to quench criticism of the status quo. Until fairly recently however it hasn't been too prominent a feature of liberal democracies, precisely because a democracy must always remain open to critics. To be sure conservatives will often deploy terms like "moaning minny" as a straw-man when combating leftwing critics, but it's always remained a rhetorical device without any material sanction attached. That's why I was so fascinated by an excellent Short Cuts column in a recent London Review of Books (Vol. 35 No. 1, 3 January 2013) in which senior editor Paul Myerscough dissects the peculiar and disturbing case of the Pret A Manger sacking.

In brief, Andrej Stopa, a Czech student, was fired from the St Pancras branch of the fast-food chain Pret A Manger (in London's York Way) last September, ostensibly on the grounds of homophobic comments he's alleged to have made almost a year earlier to a work colleague. The fact that Stopa had been active, two weeks before his sacking, in setting up the independent Pret A Manger Staff Union (Pamsu) appears to be merely coincidental. Myerscough goes on to describe the work ethos at Pret A Manger, which has a distinctly New Age tinge to it:

Pret will have been disappointed to discover that any of its staff were unhappy enough in their work to have want of a union. Pret workers aren’t supposed to be unhappy. They are recruited precisely for their ‘personality’, in the sense that a talent show host might use the word. Job candidates must show that they have a natural flair for the ‘Pret Behaviours’ (these are listed on the website too). Among the 17 things they ‘Don’t Want to See’ is that someone is ‘moody or bad-tempered’, ‘annoys people’, ‘overcomplicates ideas’ or ‘is just here for the money’. The sorts of thing they ‘Do Want to See’ are that you can ‘work at pace’, ‘create a sense of fun’ and are ‘genuinely friendly’. The ‘Pret Perfect’ worker, a fully evolved species, ‘never gives up’, ‘goes out of their way to be helpful’ and ‘has presence’. After a day’s trial, your fellow workers vote on how well you fit the profile; if your performance lacks sparkle, you’re sent home with a few quid.

I was rather taken aback by such a blatant outbreak of compulsory optimism and so I dashed straight off to Pret's website to make sure Myerscough wasn't exaggerating. I drew a blank because, although the page "The Pret Behaviours" is still listed on the navigation menu, the page appears to have been removed (one wonders whether as a result of Myerscough's article). Further along in Myerscough's piece he explains the most unusual bonus system the company employs:

    To guard against the possibility of Pret workers allowing themselves to behave even for a moment as if they were ‘just here for the money’, the company maintains a panoptical regime of surveillance and assessment. Not only do workers watch each other, chivvying, cajoling, competing, high-fiving; they are also watched. Mystery shoppers visit every branch of Pret A Manger every week. If their reports are positive – more than 80 per cent of them are – the entire staff gets a bonus that week. Workers cited for ‘going the extra mile’ get a further £50 in cash, which they have to distribute among their colleagues. But if the mystery shopper happens to be served by someone momentarily off their game, who may be named and shamed in the report, no one gets rewarded. The bonus is significant, £1 per hour for the week’s work, upping the starting salary of £6.25 (just higher than the UK minimum wage of £6.19) by 16 per cent.

Now I've recently finished reading Daniel Kahneman's seminal work on economic psychology, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", and that trick of getting the bonus receivers to distribute their £50 among their colleagues sounds exactly like the sort of games that Kahneman devises in his lab when probing the human perception of fairness. Indeed Pret's personnel policy is impeccably modern in making maximum use of that most emetic of modern concepts, "emotional intelligence". It's the very model of David Cameron's socially-responsible capitalist company. Not only is it solicitous of the feelings of its customers, who must not be annoyed by moody or bad-tempered staff, but it demands that staff be happy themselves, which is best achieved by neither worrying about money nor dwelling on any "over-complicated" ideas (presumably ones like Keynesian economics or god forbid, Marxism).

This phenomenon, which is by no means confined to Pret A Manger, poses an interesting paradox for moaning minny social critics like me, because concern for the welfare of employees looks very like the sort of policy that the Left has always supported, and in many of its aspects it seems to be adhering to the strictures of Political Correctness (PC for short) which is usually supposed to be an agenda of the Left. Another odd symptom is that pseudo-PC attitudes have been professed from the political Right during several recent scandals, from the rape charges against Julian Assange and Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the recent call by a government minister, Lynne Featherstone, for the Observer to sack Julie Burchill for offending transsexuals.

Now analysing the origins and nature of the PC attitude has fascinated me for many years. When David Robins and I were writing Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude we were quite certain that PC and Cool shared some common origin, but were not able quite to analyse how they diverged into almost completely opposite attitudes. We had linked Cool firmly to consumption - it wholly aestheticises life by elevating taste and the possession of Cool artefacts into a supreme virtue. (A paradigm case is of course the recent history of the late Steve Jobs' Apple Corp and its shiny products, whose ascent to glory came just too late for our book). What if Political Correctness is merely the same psychic process but applied to production rather than consumption, the aestheticisation of the workplace by removing from it all the grit and friction (ie. class struggle)? The connecting concept between PC and Cool is perhaps Authenticity, the highest virtue of both. Paul Myerscough points up this connection in his article:

    ‘The authenticity of being happy is important,’ a Pret manager tells the Telegraph, ‘customers pick up on that.’ It isn’t clear which is the more demanding, authenticity or performance, being it or faking it, but in either case it’s difficult to believe that there isn’t something demoralising, for Pret workers perhaps more than most in the high street, not only in having their energies siphoned off by customers, but also in having to sustain the tension between the performance of relentless enthusiasm at work and the experience of straitened material circumstances outside it.

In other words, back in the bad old days workers could moan, gripe and fake it at work while reserving all their authenticity for life outside the workplace. Now service employers are demanding some of that authenticity for their own time, extracting a kind of value that's crucial for any service-oriented company, namely authentic (and hence believable) niceness toward the paying customers. In a service industry negativity actually reduces productivity and so it can be seen as a form of Thorstein Veblen's "sabotage", as I discussed in a recent post on this blog.

It's hardly surprising if compulsory optimism increasingly creeps out of the workplace and into everday life: I find myself encountering more and more people who wear its fixed manic smile, and become visibly uncomfortable with any negative or critical conversation. Depression has become the industrial disease of later consumer capitalism - affecting 8-12% of the population in any recent year according to The Office for National Statistics - and I think it's at least plausible that compulsory optimism may become also a personal tactic for holding it at bay. The way things are going it feels as though complaining might soon become a recklessly anti-social activity: after The Diggers and The Levellers, perhaps The Grumblers?

Why We Can't Solve Big Problems | MIT Technology Review

I highly recommend this thoughtful piece on technology by the editor-in-chief of the MIT Technology review. Its serious, concerned and informed tone is a very welcome antidote to the vacuous bullshit we're continually  showered with by the spin-doctors of the IT/Communications Complex, and by the frothing ranters of the Republican Billionaire Climate-Change Denier axis:

Why We Can't Solve Big Problems | MIT Technology Review

A New Age of Sabotage

I haven't posted much recently because every time I think of something to say, the extraordinary pace of events makes it sound lame by the next morning: New York under water, Obama re-elected, News International in the dock, rockets falling on Tel Aviv, and that's even before we reach the Mayan apocalypse on Dec 21. However I've finally plucked up courage to wade into the torrent of the miraculous-horrific thanks to a fortunate discovery on the web. In this previous post I confessed an increasing interest in the radical Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen, but that interest was quite narrowly based on reading only three of his works, namely The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Theory of Business Enterprise and his important essay The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers. This wasn't just due to laziness but to the difficulty of obtaining many of Veblen's books, which have been out of print for a long time.

But I re-read Veblen's Wikipedia entry all the way to the bottom, and there found links to some recent online editions. The book I'd most wanted was The Engineers and the Price System of 1921, and sure enough there was a link to a free PDF from Batoche Books of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada dated 2001. Reading it was similar to my experience on first reading The Leisure Class — it felt like an important truth about the way society operates that has somehow been lost, obfuscated or concealed from popular consciousness. In Leisure Class that truth was the opposition between predatory and workmanlike economic attitudes, while in The Engineers it's a truth about "sabotage", which Veblen defined as follows:

    “Sabotage” is a derivative of 'sabot' which is French for a wooden shoe. It means going slow, with a dragging, clumsy movement, such as that manner of footgear may be expected to bring on. So it has come to describe any manoeuvre of slowing-down, inefficiency, bungling, obstruction.

[The Engineers and the Price System, p4]

Veblen isn't easy to read because of his repetitious style, his love of playing of devil's advocate which can confuse the unwary, and his straight-faced sarcasm which even extends to the terminology he employed ("sabotage" being a perfect example). He appropriates this familiar term and gives it a technical economic meaning broader than, though clearly connected to, its popular usage. He delighted in thus provoking the economic establishment by mocking and ironic use of terms like "idle curiosity" (science), "captains of industry" (business men) and "parental bent" (altruistic behaviour).

So, a partisan dynamiting a railway line, a striking worker who drops a spanner into his machine, or the ISP who throttles your internet feed because you've watched too many movies this month, are all committing sabotage in Veblen's terms. That is, they are deliberately reducing productivity to achieve some definite end. Veblen defined sabotage more succinctly as "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" and always employed it in a non-pejorative sense, proposing that:

"...the common welfare in any community which is organized on the price system cannot be maintained without a salutary use of sabotage... such restriction of output as will maintain prices at a reasonably profitable level and so guard against business depression".

This amounts to a claim that the "free market", which neoliberals have managed to raise to the status of graven idol over recent decades, is a sham. Pricing has become a science that creates strange paradoxes: you might naively believe that maximum profit would be obtained by producing the largest amount of some highly-desirable commodity, but that's very far from the truth. Most often maximum profit can be achieved by somewhat restricting supply in order to raise its price.

The archetypal case is of course the De Beers family's rigid control over the world supply of diamonds, but the oil industry is a pretty good example too. For most of the 20th century there was always a large surplus of oil reserves, but oil companies wouldn't pump too much because that would lower the price too far. OPEC was set up for no other purpose than to restrict (ie. keep high) the price of oil. The drug pricing policies of the big pharmaceutical companies are equally instructive examples. Contrary to free-market dogma, companies not only do not enjoy competition but very large companies will go to great (sometimes too great) expense to avoid or subvert it. Sabotage is seen at its most blatant in the energy sector, and recently became a source of great embarassment to David Cameron's plucky little band of free-market adventurers, who can only wriggle and smoulder as the energy companies sabotage their chances of re-election through naked profiteering.

For Veblen the problem with using sabotage to control production is not that it's morally wrong, but that it creates unemployment and waste. Whenever you deliberately curtail production to raise prices you tend to thereby employ less labour:

"The mechanical industry of the new order is inordinately productive. So the rate and volume of output have to be regulated with a view to what the traffic will bear — that is to say, what will yield the largest net return in terms of price to the business men who manage the country's industrial system. Otherwise there will be 'overproduction', business depression, and consequent hard times all around. Overproduction means production in excess of what the market will carry off at a sufficiently profitable price. So it appears that the continued prosperity of the country from day to day hangs on a 'conscientious withdrawal of efficiency' by the business men who control the country's industrial output."

Marx thought that capitalism makes overproduction structurally inevitable, because the extraction of surplus value by owners guarantees that total wages paid will be insufficient to purchase all of the product. For Veblen sabotage is capitalism's mechanism for controlling overproduction, and Keynes later added to this that governments could intervene during crises of overproduction to sustain demand via public works and welfare payments — though he conceded that such measures would only delay the problem, which must periodically recur and drive the dreaded boom/bust cycle. Our current global economic crisis is ultimately caused by overproduction, and more particularly by the cheap credit that was freely ladled out to temporarily hold it at bay. The overselling in the USA of cheap mortgages (still too dear to be repaid) prior to 2007 lead directly to contamination of the world financial system by the resulting bad debt, cunningly concealed inside the sugared pills of complex and unfathomable financial derivatives. This contamination has not yet been removed — despite all the quantitative easing and other fiddles employed over the last five years — and can't be without imposing massive losses on banks, investors and bond holders that might sink the whole ship. With banks unwilling to lend and employers unwilling or unable to invest and hire, it would seem that sabotage is becoming the norm, just as it was in the mid-1930s. And the spread of debt contagion to states themselves, in the shape of sovereign debt, renders Keynesian intervention less and less feasible.

So how then could the current crisis be solved? One solution, advanced by some anarchists and Occupy communitarians is to abandon the pricing system altogether and make everything free. Experience teaches that this leads to massive overconsumption (the so-called "tragedy of the commons") and that eventually goods would ration themselves by some other means. Most of those means — like Mao and Stalin's famines, or our post-war rationing — are not nice, worse in fact than the problem. A similar (and equally doomed) illusion, embraced by almost all of the far Left and some of the far Right, is that this crisis will so impoverish the masses as to cause a renaissance of militancy and the eventual overthrow of capitalism, in favour of a planned socialist economy or corporate state. There's little evidence that this is about to happen in Europe or the USA: political involvement is everywhere in decline rather than rising, with all party memberships falling, while the democratic Right is already successfully pitting hard-pressed employed workers against the unemployed, for example by carefully juggling the levels of tax credits and welfare cuts. George Osborne's recent fable about working people going to work in the morning and seeing their lazy, dole-dependent neighbours sleep-in is a perfect example — it twangs the appropriate raw nerves and smothers Labour's attempts to revive an anachronistic class solidarity.   

A return to that semi-stable state of almost-full employment and fairish wages that prevailed for 30 years or so following WWII, by paying employees better within a market economy at the cost of some forgone profitability, might be the most desirable solution but there are reasons to doubt whether most people would actually welcome it. In our book Cool Rules David Robins and I anatomised the profound change of attitude created by the 1960s counterculture, a collapse of the Protestant Work Ethic to be displaced by an outlook based on individualism, hedonism and withdrawal of deference to authority. This collapse of previously prevailing mores applied just as much to the economy as to the rest of the "fabric of society" (the irrational exuberance and cocaine-fuelled greed of the recent financial boom was of a kind with the orgiastic lifestyles of rock and movie stars). Since the '60s the political Right has been seeking to restore older puritanical rules to society in the so-called "culture wars", but not to the economy, whereas the Left would like to restore them to the economy but not to society. It's hard to imagine that any such restoration is possible at all, but if it were then it would have to be for both.

A return to post-war social democracy in the UK seems unlikely then for at least three reasons:
1) It would require repeal of most of Thatcher's anti-union legislation and renewed agitation for higher wages on a massive scale, which no imaginable Labour government is likely to embrace.
2) The Tories' "anti-scrounger" assault proved quite effective at the last election and may too in the next. You may object that they failed to secure a majority and were forced into coalition, but had the crash been pushing popular sentiment to the Left they ought to have done far worse.  
3) Most crucially, it may be that younger generations are adapting to the current casino economy with all its gross inequalities. A most noteable feature of the last three decades' economy has been a decoupling of reward from effort, visible not only in bankers' bonuses and "fat-cat" managers' salaries but also in the lifestyle and remuneration of sportsmen, popular entertainers and other celebrities, lottery winners, not to mention drug dealers and gangsters. Slavoj Žižek analyses this phenomenon through the notion of a "surplus wage" entirely unrelated to productivity, which gets paid to insiders accepted into certain cliques and professions:

"Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for–some–intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc). The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability."

          ["Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie", London Review of Books, Vol 34 No 2, 26th Jan 2012]

It's therefore possible, depressingly, that our current economic stasis and austerity might become a permanent state of affairs. That post-war period of social democracy was a kind of semi-stable equilibrium in which relatively high wages and welfare provision maintained mass consumption and kept overproduction within bounds, but systems as complex as human economies typically exhibit more than one stable or quasi-stable state, at different levels of key parameters. It could be that we've flipped into such an alternative state, a low-wage, welfare-poor economy that's grossly unequal, with a small hyper-rich elite and a bare majority in poorly-paid and insecure employment, but in which many people are sustained by a slim hope of gaining entry to the privileged ranks of the surplus-waged, by hook or by crook, by luck or by nepotism (like winning the lottery, wangling a local government sinecure, starting an internet business or making it in football, writing a hit tune in their back-bedroom or being discovered as a model).

The world already contains many societies that display almost all these features, currently concealed behind robust growth through exporting to us the things we no longer make. I'm referring of course to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) which many economists applaud and would have us emulate. There are already signs that stagnation in the Northern hemisphere is beginning to curtail their growth, and what remains will look far from pretty. The whole world economy appears to be converging toward a burned-out condition that in some ways resembles a modern feudalism, with huge local concentrations of wealth that foster corruption of the public and favour private fiefdom. (When a star has burned up all its hydrogen and helium it collapses to become a "Red Dwarf", an irony that might not be lost on ex-readers Black Dwarf and Red Mole).

If that hasn't depressed you too far to read any further, there remains the environmental question. Climate-change sceptics of both Right and Left want a resumption of economic growth — in the Right's case to carry on business as usual and in the Left's to repair the partly-dismantled welfare state — while climate-change believers demand zero growth (or less) to avoid catastrophic global warming. The latter might eventually be prepared to accept, even perhaps to welcome, the sort of static and enfeebled economy that is emerging, which would be an instance of sabotage so extreme it would have Thorstein Veblen spinning in his grave. On the bright side, that Mayan apocalypse probably won't happen.

All Downhill

WAGES AS PROPORTION OF GDP FROM 1955-2008

This graph, based on one printed in Stewart Lansley's excellent book "The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy" (Gibson Square 2011), tells you almost everything you need to know about the roots of our current crisis.

It depicts the percentage of UK GDP paid out as wages from 1955 to 2008. It starts around the ~59% level that prevailed almost from the end of WWII until the 1973 oil crisis, then shows the sharp spike up above 65% during the union militancy of the mid-70s (whose impact on prices and profits drove the country into the arms of Thatcher). In effect it's a graph of the British class struggle over that crucial half century.

A steady downward trend following 1979 as labour lost out more and more has taken it below 54%, a level at which demand in the economy is severely curtailed. The answer is not more QE to put cash into the banks, but to put cash in people's pockets, restore this measure to around 59% and restart the economy.

[Subscribers can read my review of Lansley's book in the next issue of The Political Quarterly, Volume 83, Issue 4 (not yet online), and my PQ reviews over two years old of other books are readable on my blog here]

Elders of Zion >> Zinoviev Letter >> Innocence of Muslims

Given the current febrile state of the world the temptation to succumb to conspiracy theories is very strong indeed. Nevertheless I can't restrain myself from saying this: doesn't this Arab rioting, and killing of the US ambassador to Libya, just two months before the US presidential election, smell of a provocation to anyone else? In the grand old tradition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Zinoviev Letter? Remembering what happened to unpopular Democratic president Jimmy Carter after the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1980? All the usual suspects are involved: petty criminals with pseudonyms, bogus consultants, mad evangelical pastors. But no connection to the Republican Party (yet). 

Higglety Pigglety Pop

Finally we have the answer to the nature of Matter, the Universe and Everything (and it isn't 42 after all). It's all a vast herd of quarks (some strange but many charming) milling around in Peter Higg's field until they get heavy. Now we know, can we please shut the fuck up about it and concentrate on the real problem, which is to prevent a tiny elite of greed-crazed rentiers from stealing our grandchildrens' lunch money.

A Sad Canticle

A Sad Canticle is a computer-generated tune I created using Ableton Live with a vocoder filter that gives a no-language/all-languages or Esperanto effect. Its punning title is deliberate, alluding to the horrors being perpetrated in Syria. Readers new to this blog might form the impression that I'm only interested in politics, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In particular I've been passionately interested in music for most of my life. I started listened to, then playing, black American music - blues, R&B and soul - in the early 1960s, progressed to jazz, particularly bop, post-bop and '60s free jazz, which lead me onto modern composers like Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok . From there I explored backwards in time to absorb the classics from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner and Richard Strauss. I've spent many, many nights at the opera and concert hall and am a regular patron of the Wigmore. My tastes in popular music are highly eclectic and highly selective, stretching from rock, bluegrass and country to reggae, as a glance at my Spotify playlists will confirm.

I haven't bought many records or seen live performances of popular music for decades - I was once keen on new wave bands like Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, as well as dub reggae, but as for many people of my generation the era of hip-hop and dance music became a big turn-off: too old for raves and clubbing but the music not sufficiently interesting for me to just listen. However the last few years have seen a change in my attitude. Though popular music is now fragmented as never before and the extraordinary animus between fans of the myriad different genres is pretty off-putting, I recently find myself attracted to a lot of the experimental music being produced - it feels as though, bored with the blandness of commercial pop, young musicians are rediscovering for themselves the fascination with pure sound that was there in free jazz and other '60s modernisms. The technology of music production has also advanced enormously, so that they can now create on a laptop computer extraordinary sounds that once were the exclusive domain of the avant-gardists of Paris's IRCAM. Some of the sounds coming out of the dubstep scene and its million descendents, or from musicians like Beck, Jack White and Saint Vincent, are really very exciting indeed, recalling the spirit of Coltrane, Mingus, Coleman, Shepp and Albert Ayler.

As a keen practitioner of obscure computer programming languages I've also, since the early 1990s, been interested in computer composition (more about my efforts in algorithmic composition on my website here) it was pretty well inevitable then that I'd eventually buy myself a copy of Ableton Live (the tool of choice for much dance music) and start to produce electronic music of my own. I'm all too acutely aware of the potential for ridicule in the spectacle of old codgers getting "down wiv da kidz", and so I deliberately steer clear of attempting house, techno, dubstep and other beats-oriented genres. In any case I'm not really interested in getting people to dance as there's a surfeit of people doing that already.

I'm more interested in playing with sound and rhythm for their own sakes and to disturb various musical conventions. I've recently been experimenting with synthesised nonsense vocals that nevertheless, because they so resemble real human voices, have an emotional effect that's devoid of overt meaning: I suppose if a label is needed it would have to be "expressionist", because I constantly find myself creating tunes that remind me of my outrage at certain current political events. This music is rather a long way from easy-listening, but I do hope that people might at least be upset by it. (I have to warn that if you don't like either modernist music or free jazz, you're unlikely to enjoy this at all). I post my most successful compositions on the popular SoundCloud website, which is mostly frequented by young dance music composers, and here's a widget through which you can hear some of my pieces: