March's free article
Why and where should the axe fall?
The orthodox view seems to be that visibly savage and painful
cuts are necessary to maintain the confidence of international
creditors, on whom we must depend until our country can pay its own
way in the world. Relative to other countries, UK manufacturing and
trade have declined continuously since the 1870s, with increasing
dependence on the international role of the City of London as a
site for speculative investment. Soon after this relative decline
in industry began, more thoughtful people began to realise this was
an illusion, sustained at the expense of the real economy — real
people with real skills doing useful work to produce what people
need — not just what they could be persuaded to want. Now we are
being asked to slash all that we most respect, just to prolong this
illusion; until the next crisis reveals the terminal weakness of a
casino economy.
We need fundamental change. Anyone who denies this is a fool.
Constraining the life and work of an immense majority of people who
live from what they do, to sustain the power of a small minority
who live from what they own, is not change, but stagnation. We are
descended from people who have seen and endured all of this before,
and know where it leads. The deniers and fools are those who want
to repeat the same follies, to sustain the same illusion.
Yes, our situation does need surgery, real social change. Bank
of England governor Mervyn King is more intelligent than Montagu
Norman, his equivalent in the 1930s, whose colossal loans gave
Hitler the means to reduce mass unemployment and build his new
armies. Even among experts, few have learned anything since that
last great crisis of global capitalism. Here in Wales, Professor
Alan Lovell, Dean of University of Glamorgan Business School,
offered this advice:
‘... the singular shareholder
wealth-maximising objective must be removed from company law to
prevent executives hiding behind the law as an excuse for their own
lack of commitment. Profit would thus become a constraint, not an
objective.’1
Coming from a business school, this is a remarkable and
revolutionary conclusion, a surgical solution. It goes back to Adam
Smith, who rightly perceived that useful things can be produced
more efficiently with profit rather than human needs as the
objective; by workers functioning as machines, rather than as
creative human beings. But there are limits, among them the
appalling effects of first turning people into cogs for a profit
machine, then binning them when primitive machines are superseded
by something producing even more, even faster, with even less human
input, for whatever people can be made to want.
None of our labour-intensive human services can afford to lose a
single job, without more damage to our sick society. The axe should
fall wherever it can help to change our course, away from
investment only for profits, toward rational investment for human
needs. If we in the UK were to act, our signal to the rest of the
world would find a mass response. Don’t wait until we have nothing
left to lose.
Julian Tudor Hart
Reference
1. Lovell A. Letters. Guardian 2009; 8 Sep:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/08/climate-change-councils-business-religion
(accessed 16 Feb 2010).
DOI: 10.3399/bjgp10X483652
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