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Capitalism and Social Progress: The Future of Society in a Global Economy
Why are America and Britain wealthier than ever but millions of children live in poverty, neighbourhoods want for basic amenities and the middle classes fear for their families, jobs and futures? The answer is not to be found in globalization, technological innovation, or our personal failings to adapt to changing circumstances as we are so often told. The answer lies mainly with the historical legacy of the 'golden era' and the obsession with market individualism. An obsession that the New Democrats in America and the New Labour in Britain have failed to exorcize. Yet the forces of knowledge-driven capitalism provide an unprecedented opportunity at the beginning of the twenty-first century to build societies based on the individual and collective intelligence of all. Capitalism and Social Progress shows how this can be achieved.
- GenresEconomics
352 pages, Paperback
First published February 23, 2001
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December 20, 2017
One of the books I push on people is ‘The Global Auction: The broken promises of education, jobs and incomes’. It was written in 2011 and this one is by two of the same authors, but written a decade earlier. And now I have read this, I have another book to push on people, so that has to be a good thing.
What I particularly like about this book is that it gives a kind of sociological history of work, but then ties this to the development of capitalism, explaining the difference that globalism has made to both work and education, and then what this has meant for our understanding of intelligence. Yeah, I know – it almost sounds like these guys have had this huge lucky dip with all of my favourite subjects in it and have picked out five or so of my very favourite topics at random and written a book about them.
This book is much more optimistic than ‘The Global Auction’. You can tell that from the subtitles. The future of society they foresaw in 2001 was centred around notions of a social wage, a carers’ wage and a shift towards collective intelligence – by 2011 they were talking about false promises.
Early in the twentieth century, capitalism became dominated by Fordism (or Taylorism). The idea was that if you broke work roles down to their constituent parts and then articulated these so that workers were responsible (wrong word – since by definition they were ‘not responsible’) for doing one task and only that task you could put the manufacture of products onto a conveyor-belt and then you would have control over the pace of production. Except, it was much more than this. By applying the principles of ‘scientific management’ you could analyse the actions of workers and work-flows and find the best (which meant most efficient and effective) ways to do any task. And just as with the other inputs to the production process that needed to be standardised – like the quality of the metal, cow-hides, rubber and so on – so, too, did the quality of the labour. The point of capitalism is to reduce the cost of labour and you do that by making the tasks that the labourer performs as standardised and simple as is humanly possible. Basically, if a child can do it then you only have to pay ‘child wages’ and such standardised labour can be learnt and performed by anyone at a fixed quality. This is, I feel, a large part of the reason why wages have flat-lined since the 1970s, given that all jobs (white and blue collar) have become de-skilled due to mechanisation, but a good book to read about that is either the global auction or Labour and Monopoly Capitalism.
The Fordist factory, however, needed more than just human-like drones – although, a quick read over Taylor’s book on scientific management makes it clear that these are exactly the types of people the factory was designed for. Instead, the factory also needed trades people, engineers and an extensive bureaucracy located in the offices in the city to make sure the inputs and the outputs of production were where they needed to be and accounted for. As the authors point out, this meant humans could be divided up into suitable I.Q. banded jobs. With the senior managers from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities, middle management from middle tier universities, and workers who would finish primary or the first couple of years of high school. This bell-curve of intelligence in the population matched the bell-curve of educational completions and exclusions, which also matched the bell-curve of jobs in society – the education system was designed to make the necessity of ending up with such a social gradient appear both natural and inevitable, and in fact, to make it all appear as if it was based on merit.
Perhaps people ought to have wondered how the universe could have conspired to ensure that the distribution of I.Q. in society would just happen to be bell-shaped and the jobs needing particular levels of I.Q. also happily was bell-shaped too – thank goodness we didn’t need 10% more managers, because, since I.Q. was defined as something fixed and that you were born with, there wouldn’t have been 10% more people with those 'natural' abilities.
The marvel of the education system was that it was constructed to ensure that virtually everyone who left school without 'finishing' did so through ‘self-exclusion’ – that is, rather than kicking people out, the system made it clear to them that they were just too stupid to go on and so they left of their own free will. That meant they left in the full knowledge of the fact that they were stupid and that learning wasn't for them.
I have a personal story related to all this. I was the first in my immediate family to ever go to university and when I was about to finish my first degree we were having a barbeque and a friend of the family asked me, in all seriousness, when I was going to stop going to school. He didn’t ask it out of curiosity, but rather out of bemusement. He couldn’t for the life of him understand why I would want to still be ‘going to school’. He asked as if I just hadn't caught on to the fact that I was allowed to leave.
The near infinite cruelty of the system of education that convinces the majority that they are too stupid to understand the beauty of acquiring knowledge belies my ability to describe it. We are talking about a system that convinced hundreds of millions of people that they lacked the capacity to understand those things that make us most truly human. In fact, rather than art, literature, mathematics or science being a source of life-affirming joy and wonder, we have made them, through a kind of aversion therapy called schooling, a source of humiliation and pain for the majority of the population. Is it any wonder that in most western societies intelligence is looked down upon as a kind of disease?
But such an individualisation of intelligence and ‘merit’ paved the way for a society that rewards the few, while punishing the many – as the passage of the latest tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy in the US today make all too clear. The problem is that we are undermining the social contract that has provided the basis for social cohesion for most of the 20th century – that is, that people were prepared to trade a large part of their lives to work in the most autocratic and mindless jobs, as long as this was rewarded with rising living standards and economic security. But globalisation has undermined this bargain. Now there is a literal global auction and capital seeks the cheapest labour – or, at least, this is true in the Anglophone nations of the west. In some European nations rather than reducing wages they have been prepared to suffer high levels of unemployment. But these seem to be the only options – either a poorly trained work-force that washes in and out of employment with the tides of the economic cycle, or a large structural unemployed group of society, but a relatively secure and highly trained workforce.
The authors offer hope, their view is that it is becoming increasingly clear that a society based on the rabid individualism redolent of Ayn Rand is simply not sustainable. Rather, they propose that we need to find ways to redistribute wealth so that it recognises not only the powerful and their ability to keep for themselves the lion’s share of social production, but rather that we are, none of us, isolated islands – that none of us are self-made. Rather, that we are social animals and that all of us owe much more to society than we like to admit. That we have a duty, if we are to be human at all, to ensure we live in a more equal society.
I think their solution is a little optimistic – and as I said earlier, their later book seems to have modified this optimism. The shift made by Reagan and Thatcher was fundamental, it changed the complexion of capitalism and I can’t see what power is available to wrestle back what has been gifted to the obscenely wealthy. I also can’t see why they might allow themselves to lose what they believe is truly and rightfully theirs. Perhaps I go too far by having no hope at all, but I am convinced of the power in the infinity of greed, the fetish of more, the inability of those with the most to even say the word ‘enough’. I’m convinced that the world will be reduced to ash before the wealthy give up the smallest scrap from their hoards. And in much the same way as the education system was able to convince us throughout the 20th century that we were just too stupid to be fully human, we will continue to be convinced that we are not deserving of being among the few elect with even the minimum to have a reasonable life. I can’t say I’m particularly happy with this prophesy, but I can’t say I can see anything that might forestall it, either. Fortunately, being a Cassandra, my prophesies are likely to fall on deaf ears.
What I particularly like about this book is that it gives a kind of sociological history of work, but then ties this to the development of capitalism, explaining the difference that globalism has made to both work and education, and then what this has meant for our understanding of intelligence. Yeah, I know – it almost sounds like these guys have had this huge lucky dip with all of my favourite subjects in it and have picked out five or so of my very favourite topics at random and written a book about them.
This book is much more optimistic than ‘The Global Auction’. You can tell that from the subtitles. The future of society they foresaw in 2001 was centred around notions of a social wage, a carers’ wage and a shift towards collective intelligence – by 2011 they were talking about false promises.
Early in the twentieth century, capitalism became dominated by Fordism (or Taylorism). The idea was that if you broke work roles down to their constituent parts and then articulated these so that workers were responsible (wrong word – since by definition they were ‘not responsible’) for doing one task and only that task you could put the manufacture of products onto a conveyor-belt and then you would have control over the pace of production. Except, it was much more than this. By applying the principles of ‘scientific management’ you could analyse the actions of workers and work-flows and find the best (which meant most efficient and effective) ways to do any task. And just as with the other inputs to the production process that needed to be standardised – like the quality of the metal, cow-hides, rubber and so on – so, too, did the quality of the labour. The point of capitalism is to reduce the cost of labour and you do that by making the tasks that the labourer performs as standardised and simple as is humanly possible. Basically, if a child can do it then you only have to pay ‘child wages’ and such standardised labour can be learnt and performed by anyone at a fixed quality. This is, I feel, a large part of the reason why wages have flat-lined since the 1970s, given that all jobs (white and blue collar) have become de-skilled due to mechanisation, but a good book to read about that is either the global auction or Labour and Monopoly Capitalism.
The Fordist factory, however, needed more than just human-like drones – although, a quick read over Taylor’s book on scientific management makes it clear that these are exactly the types of people the factory was designed for. Instead, the factory also needed trades people, engineers and an extensive bureaucracy located in the offices in the city to make sure the inputs and the outputs of production were where they needed to be and accounted for. As the authors point out, this meant humans could be divided up into suitable I.Q. banded jobs. With the senior managers from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities, middle management from middle tier universities, and workers who would finish primary or the first couple of years of high school. This bell-curve of intelligence in the population matched the bell-curve of educational completions and exclusions, which also matched the bell-curve of jobs in society – the education system was designed to make the necessity of ending up with such a social gradient appear both natural and inevitable, and in fact, to make it all appear as if it was based on merit.
Perhaps people ought to have wondered how the universe could have conspired to ensure that the distribution of I.Q. in society would just happen to be bell-shaped and the jobs needing particular levels of I.Q. also happily was bell-shaped too – thank goodness we didn’t need 10% more managers, because, since I.Q. was defined as something fixed and that you were born with, there wouldn’t have been 10% more people with those 'natural' abilities.
The marvel of the education system was that it was constructed to ensure that virtually everyone who left school without 'finishing' did so through ‘self-exclusion’ – that is, rather than kicking people out, the system made it clear to them that they were just too stupid to go on and so they left of their own free will. That meant they left in the full knowledge of the fact that they were stupid and that learning wasn't for them.
I have a personal story related to all this. I was the first in my immediate family to ever go to university and when I was about to finish my first degree we were having a barbeque and a friend of the family asked me, in all seriousness, when I was going to stop going to school. He didn’t ask it out of curiosity, but rather out of bemusement. He couldn’t for the life of him understand why I would want to still be ‘going to school’. He asked as if I just hadn't caught on to the fact that I was allowed to leave.
The near infinite cruelty of the system of education that convinces the majority that they are too stupid to understand the beauty of acquiring knowledge belies my ability to describe it. We are talking about a system that convinced hundreds of millions of people that they lacked the capacity to understand those things that make us most truly human. In fact, rather than art, literature, mathematics or science being a source of life-affirming joy and wonder, we have made them, through a kind of aversion therapy called schooling, a source of humiliation and pain for the majority of the population. Is it any wonder that in most western societies intelligence is looked down upon as a kind of disease?
But such an individualisation of intelligence and ‘merit’ paved the way for a society that rewards the few, while punishing the many – as the passage of the latest tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy in the US today make all too clear. The problem is that we are undermining the social contract that has provided the basis for social cohesion for most of the 20th century – that is, that people were prepared to trade a large part of their lives to work in the most autocratic and mindless jobs, as long as this was rewarded with rising living standards and economic security. But globalisation has undermined this bargain. Now there is a literal global auction and capital seeks the cheapest labour – or, at least, this is true in the Anglophone nations of the west. In some European nations rather than reducing wages they have been prepared to suffer high levels of unemployment. But these seem to be the only options – either a poorly trained work-force that washes in and out of employment with the tides of the economic cycle, or a large structural unemployed group of society, but a relatively secure and highly trained workforce.
The authors offer hope, their view is that it is becoming increasingly clear that a society based on the rabid individualism redolent of Ayn Rand is simply not sustainable. Rather, they propose that we need to find ways to redistribute wealth so that it recognises not only the powerful and their ability to keep for themselves the lion’s share of social production, but rather that we are, none of us, isolated islands – that none of us are self-made. Rather, that we are social animals and that all of us owe much more to society than we like to admit. That we have a duty, if we are to be human at all, to ensure we live in a more equal society.
I think their solution is a little optimistic – and as I said earlier, their later book seems to have modified this optimism. The shift made by Reagan and Thatcher was fundamental, it changed the complexion of capitalism and I can’t see what power is available to wrestle back what has been gifted to the obscenely wealthy. I also can’t see why they might allow themselves to lose what they believe is truly and rightfully theirs. Perhaps I go too far by having no hope at all, but I am convinced of the power in the infinity of greed, the fetish of more, the inability of those with the most to even say the word ‘enough’. I’m convinced that the world will be reduced to ash before the wealthy give up the smallest scrap from their hoards. And in much the same way as the education system was able to convince us throughout the 20th century that we were just too stupid to be fully human, we will continue to be convinced that we are not deserving of being among the few elect with even the minimum to have a reasonable life. I can’t say I’m particularly happy with this prophesy, but I can’t say I can see anything that might forestall it, either. Fortunately, being a Cassandra, my prophesies are likely to fall on deaf ears.
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