The Abolition of the Public Good

The Abolition of the Public Good

"In 1965, the people of Britain may have been poorer, shabbier, dirtier, colder, narrower, more set in their ways, ignorant of olive oil, polenta - even - lager. But they knew what united them, they shared a complicated web of beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, loyalties and dislikes."

Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain

I was born in 1965. I remember those poorer, shabbier, dirtier, and colder days. We had a coal fire that was never too easy to get going. The firelighters we bought at the corner shop seemed less than useful. We had an outside toilet, too. Come to think of it, we only got a colour TV in 1982, a telephone in 1985, and central heating in … 2013.

But I remember the warm and affective bonds forged in those times, times of kinship, friendliness, and neighbourliness. I’m not romanticising, I’m merely stating fact. We went out and left the front door open. The vestibule, as we called it, always offered a welcome. Neighbours were aunties and uncles, and people who ever ran out of milk or sugar or anything would come round and we would happily share what we had. We all did. Those days were close and warm.

I remember Tony Blair, too. The jury had come in on Thatcher and neoliberalism and the verdict was overwhelmingly against. Rather than call the day of reckoning, Blair, like Clinton in the US, put his foot down on the accelerator and went full speed towards globalisation, liberalisation, and financialisation. Never before have people paid so much in tax, and got so little in return. It is worse today. It is hard to credit incompetence on this scale. It seems a deliberate strategy to render the citizen body indebted and dependent.

From Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair? I’d rather go back than go forward.

Denationalised, demeaned, degraded, reduced, fractured, and, indeed, abolished, although much stronger language would be more apposite. The easiest thing to do would be to blame others, from socialists and trade unions, ‘the enemy within,’ who merely sought to preserve jobs and communities from the depredations of ‘the market,’ to the EU to immigration. The truth is that Britain did it to itself. The people of Britain either acquiesced in or positively supported sucessive governments that relocated freedom and happiness from the public and social realms that brought us together to the private sphere were we are all alone and isolateed. This process has gone so far that now the call is being made to ‘defend the nation,’ few can identify what nation is anymore, let alone whether it is worthy of defence. People who have been taught to live only for themselves will lack the wit and the will to stand up for anything beyond immediate self-interest.

This is the revolution that devours its own children, the neoliberal revolution that taught greed over the good and self-interest over the common interest.

Some conservative critics have lamented the institutional cowardice of the country’s principal public bodies and cultural organisations. This isn’t so much cowardice as a collapse of confidence. When society’s central institutions come to be governed by people who don’t believe in public good and happiness, why is anyone surprised that the people who run those institutions, people who believe in nothing beyond a private, self-serving, good cave in whenever they are challenged by people who do believe in something, however misguided.

All that there is left to do is to savour the bitter irony of the situation. The old Conservative Prime Minister warned the country about the consequences of a supposed Conservative government selling off the family silver. It wasn’t just economic resources that were sold off, but the political, social, and ethical commons, too.

In 1974, rock band Genesis released an album with a prophetic title: ‘Selling England by the Pound.’

We’ve been sold out and sold short. It is desperately sad. But all too predictable. I remember the 1980s all too well. Far too many people were far too impressed by the quick money to be made, consequences be damned. The loss of national ownership and control was said to be of no consequence if goods and services were expanded and improved. The nation was sacrificed to the market, just as economic relations became increasingly globalised, conceding power to transnational finance and capital whose principal agents have global reach and corporate priorities.

The privatisation strategies of the 1980s were never actually about privatisation and could never have been about privatisation. Only foolish free trade idealists or deluded and deluding ideologues could have believed that the transnational monopoly capitalism that hs emerged out of the ruins of free market capitalism could have entertained notions of the free market. Privatisation, in truth, was a liberalisation in the context of corporatisation and globalisation. It was a strategy that was always going to benefit the pikes over the minnows.

And so it came to pass. It’s still happening. Voters and citizens in each nation are increasingly in despair at the evident futility of their polities, lamenting the fact that their votes for Left and Right produce neither, merely some homogenised and generic technocratic managerialism bereft of political principle. There is a reason for that. The choice between Left and Right was always a floor show. Now the powers that be, with their global links and connections, no longer need the spectacle. They don’t think a people rendered so politically flabby after decades in which political visions have been supplanted by merely private goods have the wit and the will to resist, let alone constitute an alternative.

Roger Scruton said this in an interview:

"In America as in Britain, the indigenous working class has been put out of mind and overtly disparaged by the media and the political class. All attempts to give voice to their anxieties over immigration, over the impact on their lives of globalization and the spread of liberal conceptions of sex, marriage, and the family have been dismissed or silenced."

I agree. Another conservative, Peter Hitchens, can be found saying much the same thing. The problem is that conservatives fought tooth and nail to break the back and break the spirit of the organised working class, emasculate their organisations, subvert their communitiesm destroy their sites and centres of social resistence. There was a class war waged from above agains the working class, quite political in intent and objective. The working class were to be ‘privatised’ themselves, atomised into self-seeking individuals, rendered passive and dependent in face of external economic power.

Conservative critics are big in their condemnation of ‘globalism’ and ‘globalisation.’ But the globalisation of economic relations, breaking down national – both parliamentary and social democratic – controls and inviting the reinstitution of control and regulation at international level was directly facilitated and accelerated by the neoliberal strategies of privatisation and liberalisation pursued by conservative leaders and governments.

These days, I’m more interested in an academic and cultural ‘Left’ that stands in antithetical relation to the working class. Far from being leftists, these people are the cultural wing of the above liberalisation, a process which, like economic liberalisation, proceeds inexorably in the direction of a totalising regulation and control.

And the people who make, move, build, and grow things? Their interests and demands may be ‘out of mind,’ but they themselves are in the sights of the self-appointed Guardian class of globalist masters. The age-old capitalist process of expropriation and enclosure is continuing apace within a new, corporate, phase of development. If conservatives have been found out for their complicity in neoliberalism, leftists are likewise complicit in the cultural and political dimensions of the corporate form.

The working class?

They are feckless and fascist. ‘Despised,’ as Paul Embery’s book puts it.

The farmers are being deliberately targetted; they are to be deprived of their livelihoods. ‘Green’ issues are being used as the pretext for a land-grab. That land-grab is part of the asset- freedom- and power-grab that is underway. The activists and ideologues are the shock troops, the tools, the useful idiots. I have known more than a few of these people, having been a part of the Green movement for the best part of a quarter of a century. I have sought to introduce them to political economy and its critique. I have noticed a pronounced tendency on their part to translate questions of class and capital into politically neutral technical or institutional terms and forms, as if politics were a simple matter of design and engineering. This is either evasion and cowardice, complicity, or a deliberate deradicalisation and depoliticisation. Conservative critics are fond of condemning the Greens as melons, green on the outside, red on the inside. If only! These conservatives are speaking a truth about climate crisis that far too many greens – liberals, technocrats, reformists, and nature romantics in the main – shy away from: the crisis in the climate system is not the real problem but the physical manifestation of social forms, relations, and dynamics that are deaf to the realm of use values. I have put this very point to green ‘friends’ and been either ignored and dismissed or, when pressing the point more forcefully, unfriended and blocked as a climate ‘denier.’ I am certainly a denier of sorts. I put the questions that many eco-activists were prefer not to be asked or answered: who has the resources and capacity to push technology to the scale required to meet ambitious climate targets? For merely asking the question I have been unfriended and blocked. Either the greens I have challenged suspect the horrible anti-democratic, anti-ecological truth and would prefer to suppress it or they know it well and would prefer it not to become common knowledge; either they are useful idiots or they are strategists of the austerian ‘green’ corporate regime. They are not fit company either way. Too few are prepared to address the class roots, material relations, and contradictory dynamics of the climate crisis, because they have been taught to identify such a critique with socialism, which they deride for its association with industry, production, and the working class. But the socio-economic drivers of this crisis are clear.

As it all falls apart, there is some satisfaction in being able to say – this has nothing to do with socialism, labour, and the working class: this unravelling is authored by all those forces who sought to extirpate socialism. They may well have succeeded in their aim. It shows.

Thatcherites and Blairites, this one’s on you. I remember this song very well. Memories of a Left that once tried to fight back against the forces hollowing out communities.

The The – Heartland

The old Left used to think Britain was being sold out to the US. Writer Matt Johnson said later of this song: "I suppose in a way that song was ahead of its time because the Americanization of Britain seems to have accelerated rapidly since then. You see and read about it commented on more and more, just about how much our little island is really losing or has lost."

The problem is not so much Americanisation as liberalisation, corporatisation, and globalisation, forces which are impacting badly on the US, too. It’s the corprations who are cleaning up and clearing us out of the public realm. But the rest is true enough:

Well it ain't written in the papers, but it's written on the walls

The way this country is divided to fall

So the cranes are moving on the skyline

Trying to knock down this town

But the stains on the heartland, can never be removed

From this country that's sick, sad, and confused

Here comes another winter of long shadows and high hopes

Here comes another winter waitin' for utopia

Waitin' for hell to freeze over