Question Everything: Is Greed Good?

By

Mark Featherstone

As George Osborne, Chancellor of the Con-Lib Coalition government announced the ‘emergency budget’ to try to balance Britain’s deficit, I was put in mind of last week’s BBC Hardtalk interview with Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, and subject of Oliver Stone’s forthcoming documentary on the return of socialism in Latin America, South of the Border. Although this may seem like a strange comparison, I think that drawing a contrast between Chavez and Osborne is interesting because it sheds light on both the nature of contemporary society and in my view the key purpose of sociology today.

In the BBC interview, Chavez, who rarely talks to the western media, told us that not only does capitalism not work, but also that it is destroying the world. Unsurprisingly Osborne speaks of ‘economic emergency, toughness, and a prosperous enterprise led future’. Immediately, the difference between the two speakers is clear. The contrast between Chavez and Osborne could not be more stark. In Chavez’s talk the key point is the transformation of capitalism as a system of exchange, which is, in his view, inherently exploitative.

In Osborne’s budget speech the idea of the form of the economic system is bracketed out in favour of an attempt to re-balance the economy, cut debt, and create equilibrium. Clearly, from the realist’s point of view, Chavez’s talk represents a kind of utopian rhetoric. How is it possible to change the system today? Surely the idea of criticising capitalism itself, the system of economic exchange we live by, is madness? The Cold War is over. In the wake of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, all sane people accept that ‘there is no alternative’.

However, once we accept this position we close off the possibility of radical change and George Osborne is one of two characters pushed centre stage. The other is, of course, Gordon Brown. Whereas Osborne represents one phase of capitalism, bust, and the attempt to restart the economy from a stable base, Brown represents the other side of the capitalist economy, boom, characterised by the good times, when we spend money we have not got and worry about it later. George Osborne is bust, worry, and recession embodied and his best hope of maintaining any level of popularity is to try to blame everything on his alter-ego, Gordon Brown, and continue to talk about over-reaching, over-spending, and the over-inflated credit bubble of the New Labour years. Osborne and Brown are, therefore, the two faces of capitalism and they cannot be seperated.

But while these two characters represent the intra-systemic function of capitalism, which is why we will never see an Osborne or a Brown think about the value of the system itself, Chavez sits outside of capitalism and is in this respect extra-systemic. Chavez recognises the evils of capitalism related to poverty, inequality, domination, exploitation, and environmental destruction. He is, however, not the only extra-systemic character on the scene. The other character who reflects properly on the wider system is represented by another Oliver Stone invention, Michael Douglas’ brilliant Gordon Gekko, who famously told us in 1987 that ‘greed is good’.

Why is Gordon Gekko extra-systemic? Gordon Gekko is extra-systemic because he is not concerned with either boom or bust, but rather the ethic of the system. For Gekko the system is not evil, in the way it is for Chavez, but rather good in the original ancient use of the word, meaning the best way of living. Gekko sees opportunity everywhere. There is money to be made in the good times, and as Naomi Klein has recently shown us in her book on disaster capitalism, there is certainly money to be made in the bad times. This is why Wall Street, and Gordon Gekko, are such important cinematic creations. They tell us a lot about the contemporary world. In many respects the dominant philosophy in the world over the last thirty years was summed up by Gekko, ‘greed is good’. We don’t need to say any more.

And one would have to say that greed has been very good for a lot of people in the world for a very long time. The 1980s, 1990s, and much of the first decade of the 21st century have seen massive economic growth across the world, but also an ever widening gulf between the world’s haves and have nots. Supporters of capitalism would, of course, tell us about ‘trickle down’ and the ‘invisible hand’, explaining that society benefits from greedy people making money for themselves in the shape of job creation.

Unfortunately, this does not really help those people who suffer when the bubble bursts, the economy crashes, and we enter a period of bust. For this reason, and because it takes social effects as a by-product that either happen or do not happen, what we might call the social ethic of capitalism is profoundly asociological. The wealth of the greedy individual always comes first in capitalism. If there is a social effect, it is an unintended consequence, a kind of risk of the enterprise, a cost built into the project of making money in the shape of the inevitability that the capitalist will always lose some profit in social effects, thereby inadvertently wasting money giving to others.

However, perhaps even here, in wasting money on others, there is profit to be made if one plays the ethical card, thereby justifying one’s own greed by saying that it is in fact a socially responsible vice whereby making money for oneself makes money for others who are unable to do so for themselves. So update Gekko slightly, telling everybody greed is ethically good, and you can continue to make a fortune at everybody else’s expense, and avoid criticism. It is, of course, enormously important to be able to do this.

The capitalist philosophy of greed is enormously seductive, but it is also sleazy and needs to be kept out of sight, hidden behind a veil of respectability. This is why Gordon Gekko is such a brilliant characterisation of capitalism. An obscene or pornographic invention who says too much, tells it like it is, and reveals everything: greed is good, which one of us would not want to live a life of luxury, riches, and vice, if society allowed it?

For a long time of course this life was the province of the adventurer, the philanderer, the cheat, but what has happened recently is that capitalism has more or less legitimised the pursuit of luxury in line with Gekko’s advice in the creation of a society organised around the principle of enjoyment and pleasure. But quite apart from the fact that legitimation takes all the fun out of fun, the social effects of this transformation are disastrous, and this is part of what has happened in what David Cameron calls contemporary broken Britain. When the individual has no responsibility to anybody but themselves and their own enjoyment, society is in trouble, and no amount of attempts to attach a minimal sociological dimension to greed by talking about trickle down and the socio-economic benefits of consumption will change that fact.

The problem of the capitalist philosophy of greed is, therefore, that it is enormously seductive, because it taps into our base desires, and it produces a normless society, that is endlessly on the edge of collapse, and for this reason makes the philosophy of greed, pleasure, and enjoyment even more seductive. What we can see then is that the kind of society this philosophy produces is not really one anybody would want to live in unless you could be sure you would be able to satisfy your desires and would not consigned to the mass of people consigned to the endless frustration at not being able to enjoy in a society geared around endless enjoyment.

And this is not the worst of the story. The division between those who enjoy and those who are frustrated probably marks out the key division in rich western nations, but the problem of the haves and haves not takes on an entirely new dimension based on survival when we turn out attention to the relationship between the west and the rest. It is here, in the division between two kinds of inequality (rich societies based on a division between those who enjoy and those who are endlessly frustrated versus a global economy of haves who live in luxury and have nots who struggle to survive), that the difference between Osborne and Chavez resides, and the reason why it seems so strange to compare them.

An effective comparison between them requires us, rich westerners, to make a shift in perception, suspend our normal view of reality, and see the world from a different point of view. We have to move from thinking like Osborne, who talks about the economy of enjoyment and frustration, in a society where people more or less accept capitalism as a good way to live, to thinking like Chavez, who talks about the economy of luxury and immiseration, where the situation is more or less intolerable for the majority of people who live on the edge of survival. This is properly sociological.

But making this shift throws up new questions. Why is making money, why is greed, always exploitative? Why can’t I be greedy, have things my own way, and forget about other people. Do I have to hurt other people? Is capitalism really a zero-sum game, where my making money means you must live in poverty? Does capitalism have to divide over enjoyment and frustration and luxury and immiseration? The answer to these related questions sends us back to classical sociology. Karl Marx teaches us that like society, capitalism is a relation, a relation based on unequal exchange and exploitation, and that there can be no real equality under capitalism. If I make money, I make money out of you, and you are exploited. My enjoyment is premised on your frustration and so on.

In light of this recognition one can see that it is perhaps the greatest trick that capitalism has ever played, a trick it has been able to play particularly well over the last thirty years, to conjure the idea that capitalism is fair and that is possible to have some form of equality in capitalist social relations.

In the first phase of industrial capitalism there was little sense that this was a system based on anything but naked exploitation. Hence, the rise of socialism and communism. In the wake of the first great crash in the 1920s, a new form of capitalism emerged based on social responsibility, but the problem with this was that it was honest to its word. The result of this honesty was a contraction of capitalism as a profit producing machine. Hence the rise of the current brand of capitalism based in naked exploitation and the fantasy of reform aimed at producing more equal societies, and a more equal world.

The evidence of this new fantastic brand of capitalism is everywhere. Consider the third way, which suggested that it was possible to have free market profiteering, and a society based in greed, and social welfare, and a fair society. And what about philanthropic capitalists? Contrary capitalist who make enormous amounts of money, only to give a small portion back to the people they exploited in the first place, once they have made their money and secured their position at the top of the economic food chain.

There is no doubt that there is a great deal of fantasy about the new brand of capitalism, but the problem may have been that too many people let the fantasy run away with them and actually bought into the idea of endless enjoyment without exploitative social relations. The problem with the fantasy here is whether it was consciously understood to be a fantasy and was therefore a cynical attempt to deceive people, dampening down their unrest, unhappiness, and frustration, or whether the exponents of the third way actually believed in the fantastic idea of socialistic capitalism.

Regardless of what one thinks about this, it seems that today the idea of endless enjoyment is over, and nobody believes that it is possible to have this, that, and other without paying for it, with the result that we are now entering the so-called age of austerity where we will have to suffer and stop enjoying ourselves. I think that it is likely that the result of this belt-tightening will be the rise of a new form of class consciousness, a new sensitivity to exploitative social relations, similar to that rehearsed by the recent ‘outing’ of the financial sector and bonus culture and MPs and their corrupt expenses culture, and that this will make Chavez’s extra-systemic anti-capitalist message more relevant to those in rich western countries, who have for too long ignored the socialist critique of global capitalism because they simply did not need to bother about the poverty of those in far off places.

It may be the case then that after twenty or thirty years on top Gordon Gekko, the philosopher of capitalism unleashed and desire realised, may be about to give way to Chavez, the champion of public ownership, free health care, and free education, as we are forced to do what Marx told us to do long ago, and good sociologists should always do, question everything, including and especially those things that seem absolutely beyond question, such as the capitalist system itself.

Gifted and Talented?

By Mark Featherstone
Over the last couple of weeks I have heard numerous mention of the Government's 'Gifted and Talented' policy initiative from colleagues and friends with school age children. My own son has not yet reached school age. As I understand it the aim of this education policy is to identify 'Gifted and Talented' children and make special provision for them in the classroom. Although this policy seems innocuous enough, in that it simply suggests that different children have different educational needs, I could not help but feel that there is something rather dangerous hiding behind the idea that gifted children need special attention. Again, there is nothing particularly controversial in the idea that talent is natural, but the overall effect of rooting this assumption in social policy is to make it appear that differences in educational achievement and success in later life are somehow natural effects that should be encouraged, rather than managed by the state. But what does this mean?

Let me explain. The first point we must consider is the idea of the gifted or talented child. Although this notion is rooted in common sense, this does not mean that it does not carry a lot of weight in the world. Quite the reverse. However, having said this, I'm sure nobody would be surprised if it turned out that the majority of gifted and talented children measured by state standards came from middle class families. In other words, it would come as no surprise to anybody if we were to find out that the rich produced gifted and talented children who were therefore deserving of special treatment in order to ensure that they eventually replaced their parents in their privileged place in society. This is, of course, called class reproduction. One response, the conservative response, to this view would be to say that the rich are rich because they are gifted and talented. In other words, society is constructed on the basis of natural abilities. The alternate leftist, and I would say properly sociological, response would be to reverse the equation and say that the rich are gifted and talented because they are rich and that the idea of gifts and talents simply naturalizes social inequality making it seem acceptable to those who are less rich because they can tell themselves that their problem is that they are naturally less gifted and talented.

Nobody would deny gifted or talented children the right to express their abilities, but it is problematic to feed this idea through policy into the education system. The current 'Gifted and Talented' initiative 'naturalizes' inequality. It is likely to reproduce social divisions through education. Such policy is entirely ignorant of the ways in which ability and intelligence are culturally coded and more or less reliant on access in order to emerge into the light of day. Who knows what happens to the child who is excluded from the elite club of the gifted and talented and does not therefore live out the rest of their life under those labels? Moreover, from what position do educationalists presume to make judgments about gifts and talents? In answer to the first question, one would have to assume that life would be a lot easier once one is labelled gifted and / or talented, mainly because one can command the resources given over to the new state-identified brainy elites. In answer to the second question, presumably one must have some knowledge of gifts and talents oneself in order to make decisions about which individuals possess gifts and talents in some embryonic childhood state? Given the current New Labour government's commitment to measure everything by statistics, which always gravitate towards the mediocre, I doubt there is any real sense of how to spot gifts and talents in the current policy makers of the British state. The really gifted and talented will always be outsiders, simply by virtue of their position vis the majority. I think that the idea that such people can be identified and harnessed by the state is the product of the overly bureaucratic idea of reality operative in contemporary New Labour Britain, which is, in many respects, similar to the thought processes that led the East German state to believe that it could identify and produce athletes and swimmers in the 1960s and 1970s.

Finally, I think we have to ask ourselves why New Labour would want to lavish so much attention on our gifted and talented children? Like the East Germans, I think that we must assume that they are not particularly interested in the child's right to self-expression. On the other hand, if the government was interested in real social improvement surely it would be a better idea to try to raise the level of failing children and leave the gifted free to express themselves outside of educational hot houses? I think the answer to this question resides in Gordon Brown's desire to produce a new entrepreneurial elite able to keep Britain in the race that is contemporary global capitalism. Given this aim, and in a capitalist world where innovation is all that matters, the fate of Britain's gifted and talented children is extremely important. Thus the 'Gifted and Talented' policy initiative is indicative of the rise of what we might call the new utilitarianism of brains where all that matters is convincing educationalists that you have some kind of useful skill or creative ability that can profitably advance the cause of Britain in the worldwide knowledge economy.

As a sociologist of utopias and dystopias with an over-active imagination I was struck not only by the comparison between Gordon Brown's efforts to foster gifted and talented children and the East German state's desire to produce communist super-heroes who would demonstrate the superiority of Marxism through athletic success, but also by the similarities between New Labour's 'Gifted and Talented' project and Plato's Ancient theory of the philosopher kings. In both worlds, our contemporary capitalist society and Plato's fictional city, all that matters is convincing the people who matter that you have the brains to become part of the ruling elite. Similarly, in both societies it does not pay to be left out of the elite, it does not pay to be labelled 'ordinary and mediocre', because those who cannot demonstrate special abilities occupy the lower orders and become the service sector workers of society.