By Mark Featherstone
Two news stories caught my
attention over the last couple of days – first, a report from the House of
Commons Library, which showed that wages in the UK have fallen sharply since
2010, and second, an article
focused on the Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, and his view that Labour
needs to ‘put its cards on the table’ in order to offer voters a viable
alternative to the Conservatives in the next general election.
Reading the first piece we
learn that UK
wages have experienced the fourth largest fall in the EU (5.5%) and that only
Greek, Portuguese, and Dutch workers have seen a greater decrease in their real
wages since 2010. Given that German and French workers wages rose (2.7% and 0.4%)
over the same period, and that the overall average decline in wages across the
EU was 0.7%, it seems clear that in the UK, the workforce has been asked to
carry the can for the crash in 2008. In light of this, it seemed strange to
read an article concerned with the problem of Labour politics. In the BBC
report, we learn that Burnham thinks that Labour needs to capture the
electorate’s imagination now, and offer an alternative to the Coalition. I
agree - what is strange, however, is that this has not happened already. Why is
this the case? Why is it that austerity, and the commitment to reduced public spending,
has such a strong hold over the political, and perhaps more importantly,
popular imagination in the UK?
If we consult recent
sociology on austerity, such as Stuckler and Basu’s ‘The Body Economic’, the
problem of austerity becomes very clear. In periods of recession it makes
little sense to cut public spending because this simply reduces consumer
confidence and destroys any potential for growth. The result of this is that
the economy gets caught in a kind of downward spiral. According to more
humanistic measures, we might argue that under conditions of mass unemployment
it is not a good idea to dismantle the social safety net, which can help to
stabilise society, because this will simply exacerbate the problems caused by
economic stress – i.e., depression, alcoholism, and ultimately suicide. This,
of course, supposes that a government cares about the health of the people.
However, Stuckler and Basu take the view that the health of the people matters
and paint a bleak picture of Europe in the age
of austerity. They show that in countries where the social safety net has been
attacked as bloated and wasteful the health and welfare of people has suffered.
This much would seem clear – surely in a society where the economy contracts
and people suffer from unemployment and other stresses, society should ‘bail them
out’ and support them? This is, after all, what happened to the banks.
As I have explained on many
occasion on this blog, austerity makes no sense, and has been proven to fail in
the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, unless
its aim is to restructure the industrial or post-industrial base of a society,
and make it more competitive by slashing public spending, driving wages down,
introducing more flexible contracts, and generally providing a retrofit to the
economy. This is largely what I think we see taking place today – the aim of
austerity is not simply to reduce the national debt, but also to reduce the
cost of labour, and the responsibility of the state, in order to make the
national economy more competitive in a global market, where competition may
come from China and India. In these
new industrial powers labour is cheap and the state has little responsibility
for supporting the body of the people. Of course, this means that they are
perhaps the most competitive economic powers in the world, save for the US, where the
worker is similarly expected to weather whatever economic storm hits. However,
even in the US,
Obama understood that the way out of recession was taxation and social
spending, rather than wage reduction and social austerity. The result of this
decision is that America has
emerged from recession much quicker than the UK.
We will, of course,
eventually escape recession and austerity in the UK, but the problem will be that
this will happen on very different terms than we entered this dark period. Under
the new austerity landscape growth will take place on the basis of low-wage
labour, contracts that offer little protection for workers, and a minimal
social safety net. In sociological terms, the kind of society that we may find
ourselves living in will be very friendly towards business, but less
favourable for the lives of people. And here is the main point of my blog today
– much of what I have written is well known, and we have read work by Naomi Klein
and Zygmunt Bauman, which explains the problems of disaster capitalism and
austerity. However, what I think the current period of history demands that we
do, and this is especially important for students and young people, is to start
to think about the kind of society they want to live in.
What is it that matters in
life? Is it most important to have a society organised around profit, where
competition is everything, and life is precarious? Or should society forsake
profit, and make economic value subordinate to other life goods – such as
health and welfare? What is it that makes a good society? This is what I think
Labour really need to do. They need to open up a debate about what matters to
people. Are commodities the be-all and end-all? Are people prepared to accept
precariousness to make more money? Are they happy to accept vast inequalities
in society? Is it acceptable to have children going hungry because their
parents do not have enough money to feed them? It strikes me that the very fact
that politics is not the normal
debate about these kinds of fundamental questions, and that a senior politician
has to talk about the need for an alternative to austerity, is enormously
problematic. I think this illustrates our deep lack of social and political
imagination and shows how far our political elites have fallen and / or leapt
into bed with business where the only good that matters is the bottom line.
We must escape from the grip
of this law of the bottom line - currently we are still caught under the spell
of what we might call the fetishism of economic growth, growth at all costs,
growth even if it kills people. I think that we need to escape from the fantasy
of this idea. As Marx taught us over a century ago, the economy is not more
important than people. The market is not a living thing and it is the height of
stupidity and brutality to sacrifice people to a machine that produces nothing
that can rival the value of human life.
