It might have been foreseen, but not by the sightless visionaries of our age: when the old myth of the redemptive power of the workers was shattered, it was predictable that a new one would arise. And what could that be, in a world where wealth is paramount, other than a fable about the rich. These have plundered the ruined secular temples of socialism and seized for themselves the role of redeemers.

The blending of social and spiritual redemption is not a new phenomenon. In some versions of scripture, the meek were to have inherited the earth. It was said to be harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Association of the poor with Christ the Redeemer for a long time made wealth more dangerous than poverty, for it imperilled the immortal soul. This did not, of course, inhibit a church which ‘clothed its walls in gold and left its sons naked’, as St Bernard lamented in the twelfth century. But evicting the poor from their privileged access to God proved a long and painful process.

This was finally accomplished only with the establishment of industrial society. With the promiscuous huddling of humanity in squalid manufacturing towns and cities, the working class arose, a kind of human being never before seen, the offspring of a threatening experiment, destined, in some versions of a secular afterlife, to fulfil the prophecies of Marx. History was once more on the side of the oppressed.

Myths, by their nature, should remain in the realm of poetry, or at least, of theory. The practice of earthly redemption proved as destructive as its other-worldly counterpart; and the fate of the great experiment that was the Soviet Union is now known to the world.

For a long time, the democratic Left took a borrowed lustre from this tale; it seemed the working class was here to stay, and upon its willingness to fulfil the mission entrusted to it, depended the attenuated social democratic dream that was kept alive in much of the western world.

But the working class proved as transient as any other social formation that rises, reaches its zenith and is then dissolved. As long as the making of daily necessities was concentrated within a national division of labour, a certain social and economic coherence persisted, just as the workers were indispensable to its maintenance. The world made sense: we knew where every item in our household came from – cutlery from Sheffield, ceramic from Stoke, hosiery from Leicester, coal from the pits of the North East, Wales and Scotland, woollens from Yorkshire, cottons from Lancashire; and all of it bound together by an imperial destiny.

The dissolution of this division of labour is generally attributed to Margaret Thatcher, although it had begun much earlier – in some industries, at the dawn of the twentieth century. Thatcher merely delivered the coup de grace, with the miners’ strike its climax.

As soon as the working class had been dismantled and absorbed into globalism, its redemptive power was tarnished. It was overrun and vanquished by the golden hordes of the rich who, apocalyptic warriors of wealth, invaded the spaces where mill and mine, manufactory and workshop had been. No time was lost, as they assumed the heroic mantle of those they had displaced. The rich, no longer idle, filthy or possessed of turpe lucrum, set about demonstrating their power. Their hyperactive movements across continents, their hectic schedules in which they immolated themselves with their ruined digestive tracts, heart attacks and ill-health, the urgency of promoting this or that must-have product, their selflessness in the opening up of markets made of them new frontiersmen, worthy descendants of the buccaneers and adventurers who had won an empire. They proclaimed their high function at every turn, and people duly marvelled at their self-sacrifice, the mysterious alchemy that turned so many of former freely-offered gifts between people into commodities, the expansion of the market until it became cosmos.

In the process the wealth-creators spun their own myth: without more, much more, now and for ever, nothing can be achieved. All that we want and desire as a society can only be realised through them, for they alone possess the magical powers that will ensure a future of prosperity and ease. And naturally, to augment the strength of their argument, they threw down golden ladders for the talented and the sharp-elbowed, the ingenious and ambitious, to join them. And all this coalesced in the mystique of ‘business’ – the only area of human activity in which the building of empires is till admissible; business, which has its own culture, its own language, its own initiation rituals and celebrations.

Even the banking crisis did not seriously affect the power of those whose wealth sets them above us. However much they may be disliked or resented, the wizards and magicians of money are revered, since they have everyone in their power; under their spell. The myth of their redemptive capacity is intact. It is more plausible than the discredited stories of workerism. The rich, exalted and admired, are the true agents of deliverance, and a fallen working class is only a memory, a faint grimace on the face of History.

The wealthy, usurpers of a role once attributed to the poor and oppressed, are unlikely voluntarily to set aside the part assigned to them by general acclamation. Theirs is a spiritual supremacy. They have no need of theory; there is no textual prophecy, unless it is the faded palimpsest of laissez-faire. The rich inhabit a supraterrestrial topography which hovers above the world. If, as Arundhati Roy has suggested, the rich have seceded from society, this is only to govern it more effectively from the empyrean which they now occupy, from their thrones above the clouds.

It may be, however, that the rich have assumed – unwittingly this time – another function assigned by Marx to the defeated workers. In the debauch of wealth of the contemporary world, as the treasures of the earth are gouged and the planet simmers, it is possible that the rich, in their frenzy to use up everything, are also becoming the gravediggers of capitalism.

Jeremy Seabrook
1 January 2013

‘Mankind, it seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity. Menaced with an access of riches that would lighten its toil, it makes haste to redouble its labours and to pour away the precious stuff, which might deprive of plausibility the complaint that it is poor.’ These words of R.H. Tawney in 1926 referred to the increased wealth of Europe in the sixteenth century, an access of riches squandered on warfare.

Tawney’s observation has not been invalidated by posterity. For we have acquired the mysterious gift of creating, by means of wealth the world has never seen, a poverty so profound and immitigable that no one can foresee an end to it. A subjective feeling of inadequacy now gnaws away, not simply at those surviving on the edge of subsistence, but also at those who, in a more innocent time, might have been regarded as the rich.

How such a state of affairs has come about is rarely debated; perhaps because of its simplicity and its central importance to what we commonly understand by ‘our way of life.’ For an experience of perpetual inadequacy is a natural response to a world, in which permanent economic growth takes priority over everything else. In the presence of limitless expansion, everyone feels poor, under-rewarded, deprived or unrecognized; none more so than the already wealthy, since they measure riches, not against what they have amassed, but against the multitude of things and treasures they still do not possess.

The individual stands alone before the awful majesty of the market, much as the individual was believed, in a more credulous age, to stand before the throne of God. We assess our ‘worth’ in relation, less to any identifiable human need, than to the power of production of an economy which is potentially boundless. No one can ever expect to fulfil desires prompted by this profane version of the infinite.

This is why it is vain work to rail at the greed of bankers, to censure the excesses of those who give themselves exorbitant rewards, since these are felt by their recipients as essential to alleviate some desperate sense of personal impoverishment. It is significant that bankers now refer to their income as ‘compensation’, as though this were to make amends for some terrible calamity that had befallen them. This is no longer a moral issue in a continuously dilating economic universe. If we feel diminished and powerless, pitifully rewarded, this is because capitalism knows a dangerous but highly profitable secret – how to create a universal sense of neediness, which sets up a wanting without end. Human longing, formerly expressed, sometimes contained, by the consolations of religion, is now simply another business opportunity; and because even the wealthiest can access only a fraction of the plenitude of a global market, they become impatient, frustrated by contemplation of what they do not have; this does not, however, prevent them from flourishing what they do have in the company of those who have less; but they persist in pining for all that remains, tantalisingly, just out of reach of their outstretched hands and overstretched means.

So it has come about that no one can now define the meaning of ‘enough.’ By means of this simple development, we are all poor. Bill Gates is poor – imagine all the philanthropic works forgone in the absence of a few extra billions. Bankers are poor, since they require bulky ‘packages’ in bonuses, money, shares and other specie, so that their atrophied imaginations can search the Financial Times weekly supplement on How to Spend It. Russian oligarchs are poor, since so many must go into exile to protect assets diverted from the State into their own pockets. The great landowners of Britain are poor under the heavy responsibility of maintaining their properties and estates. Chief executives are poor, for how can money ever compensate for ulcers, heart conditions and other symptoms of health ruined in pursuit of wealth; show business celebrities are poor, since their full talent is never adequately perceived, and no gains can ever satisfy their mysterious cravings; even footballers are poor, since the period of their competence is brief. It goes without saying that professional women and men are poor, since theirs, the indispensable work of society, is always under-rewarded. Carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers and electricians are poor, carers and service personnel are poor, domestic servants and cleaners are poor, beggars and the homeless are poor. Under the universal flail of poverty, governments are poor, forced to cut public spending with heavy hearts, a course of action they can contemplate only in the superior light of the national interest.

But what could be more conducive to social peace than that all classes and conditions of people should come together in a common desire to relieve their common affliction? The English riots of August 2011 disturbed this carefully crafted equilibrium, for it snapped – briefly – the single ideological thread that unites rich with poor in combating a sense of relentless insufficiency. This is why they had to be represented by the government as ‘pure criminality’, since to succumb to the proposition that they were caused by ‘deprivation’ would shatter the unity of a people dedicated to permanent enhancement of ‘purchasing power’, not as theory, but in the practice and expectation of daily life.

I interviewed a well-known trade union leader in the 1970s, who solemnly said ‘the most beautiful word in the English language is more’. This epic pronouncement effectively marked the passage of the labour movement from a collective demand for a dignified subsistence into acknowledgement that continuous expansion was the true purpose of society, and to be part of it the true destiny of labour. We are living with the consequences of that fateful renunciation of any other objective, from which it is inconceivable that we should emancipate ourselves, or even form a desire to do so.

How easy it is to look at whatever disposable income slips through our butter-fingers, and to see in it a pitiful shortage of what would be necessary for a half-decent life! When economic consciousness crowds out its social and moral rivals, the consequences are unlikely to be benign. Individuals cannot be blamed for reflecting the dominant ideology of the age. We have collectively assimilated economic necessity and in the process identified it as representing our own needs. In other words, we have made our own the desire of a global economy for permanent expansion, and this is duly reflected in our daily assumptions about the world and our own role in it. The impersonality of an economic system has been ‘humanised’ and we tenderly articulate it as if it were simply an aspect of our own deepest desires.

This is the principal reason why bankers have not been punished for the recent crisis. Their unhumbled pride shows they are well aware of their indispensability, as begetters of wealth and also as a modern version of the Fates, engineers of human destiny; since at the first hint of punitive measures against them, they threaten to return to Asgard or Olympus, taking with them the holy substance on which we all depend.

Despite the general lament of the people – all the people – that they are on the brink of pauperism, poverty is not the real problem of the world. The fault lies with wealth; or rather with a narrow monetary version of it, which has been elevated into mentor and guide, but which also turns out to be oppressor and tyrant. And we race to throw away the vast productive power of globalism, in order to sustain the fiction of enduring poverty, which afflicts those wallowing in wealth no less than the most destitute scavenging for a few grains to eat on the margin of survival.

Tawney wrote of a world ‘which turned the desire for pecuniary gain from a perilous, if natural, frailty into the idol of philosophers and the mainspring of society.’ His cautionary chronicling of how old vices were transformed into economic virtues has been lost to the world. The great truth – that a lack of the means of sustenance makes the life of an individual not worth living has blinded us to an even greater falsehood, namely that wellbeing grows in proportion to the accumulation of wealth. The price of this misperception is to condemn humanity to an impoverishment without end.

Jeremy Seabrook
February 2012

The idea of poverty, raw and elemental, has proved a most effective discipline on labour, which, it is feared, might give way to indolence and evasion of its duties, should it not remain under a salutary threat of destitution. Accordingly, despite periodic attempts of society to shelter people against dereliction, equally powerful forces seek to sweep them away, so that the individual may be free to make his or her private accommodation with loss and want.

There has been constant movement between a desire to expose the people to, and to protect them from, the asperities of pauperism. Institutions established to look after the poor have been repeatedly constructed, according to the wisdom of one generation and then demolished, following the new understanding of the next. Today’s assault on the welfare state takes it place in a long tradition of tearing down attempts to shelter people from the savage vicissitudes of existence, those created both by nature and by political contrivance.

It may be that a sense of security against the expected perils of life does indeed make some people lazy and disinclined to labour. The only problem is that efforts to dismantle such protection have usually resulted in greater suffering than any abuse of it.

The Statute of Labourers in 1351 was enacted to deal with wage-inflation following the Black Death and the loss of one-third of the labourers of England. This required every able-bodied person under the age of sixty with no means of subsistence to work for whoever wanted his labour; and ‘vagrant serfs’ were compelled to labour for anyone who would employ them.

By the 16^th century, population had increased, and ‘surplus labour’ became visible once more, at the moment when the charitable giving of monasteries and religious foundations had been abolished. Punitive enactments against the poor and workless were again passed.

The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 made a distinction between the ‘impotent’ poor, the idle (unemployed) and the able-bodied (unwilling to work). Overseers of the poor were appointed by each parish to make sure the sick, aged and needy received help. Since parishes varied in their generosity, people naturally moved to where assistance was more generous. The Act of Settlement of 1622 gave parishes the right to return paupers to their home parish, unless they possessed a ‘settlement certificate.’ The Statute of Artificers of 1653 reiterated the compulsion to labour of all between the ages of 12 and 60, and unmarried women between 12 and 40. The objective was ‘to banish idleness, advance husbandry and to yield unto the hired person a convenient proportion of wages.’

The able-bodied without employment could be sent to the workhouse from the 1720s. Out-relief decreased, but conditions in the workhouse were so bad that by the end of the eighteenth century scandals over neglect, promiscuity and early death were so common that only orphans, the infirm and the aged were consigned to its mercy, with the lazy and vagrant consigned to the house of correction.

In 1795, the Speenhamland system (named after the Berkshire parish in which it was conceived) guaranteed that the income of labourers should be tied to fluctuations in the price of bread. This – the most comprehensive safety net before the welfare state – created ‘indiscriminate relief’, which was accused of demoralising the people and inducing in them an aversion to labour. It encouraged farmers to lower wages, since they knew the parish would make up the difference. This anticipates contemporary rhetoric about the dependency culture of welfare and the scandal of the competent and able-bodied living on benefit.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was the response to this ‘evil.’ Like most attempts to remedy the abuse of public charity, the cure was worse than the disease. Under this dispensation, the able-bodied were to be relieved only within the workhouse, where conditions were to be made ‘less eligible’, that is, inferior to the status and income of the lowest- paid independent labourer. The shadow cast by this castigation of the poor lay for more than a century over the industrial towns and cities of Britain.

In 1948, the words ‘The Poor Law shall cease to exist’ served as preamble to the National Assistance Act. The welfare state was accepted by all political parties in the aftermath of the catastrophe in Europe; and so it remained, despite complaints in the 1940s that the people were rushing to obtain spectacles, and were having their teeth pulled for the sake of free dentures. Later, complaints arose that welfare was sapping the moral fibre of the nation. Generations of families were discovered never to have worked, and an ‘underclass’ emerged, and the identification of institutionalised fecklessness came to haunt political debate once more.

This has culminated in the Coalition’s determination to stamp out these evils, a promise which galvanises its torpid political base; at the same time, they pledge to respect those who, ‘through no fault of their own’, become a charge on public funds; a distinction that has, as ever, proved to be far easier to make in theory than in practice.

The politics of Britain have never come to terms with the persistence of a poverty which, although essential to the maintenance of the dynamic of the economy, must, at the same time, be castigated. Whether the abuse of charity by a minority is worse than indiscriminate alms-giving is a question unlikely to be settled in the near future, the more so since the punitive sensibility of the Poor Law still colours the ideology of the present administration, and its belief that the economy is an autonomous and natural system that flourishes best with minimal intrusion by government.

The question persists: does human civilisation find its highest expression in efforts to soften the misfortunes we are prey to, or is to be found in letting the economy, which is, after all, a working out of natural laws (set in train by the invisible hand of the Creator), take its course?  We are living through another moment of vindictive reprisals against the poor. It will no doubt pass, and new tenderness for their plight eventually be rediscovered. It is a pity that, rather than oscillating between punishment and protection, more energy is not expended on efforts to discover where or how a secure and lasting sufficiency for all the people may be found.

November 2011

Upheavals in the eurozone raise questions about democracy, ‘governance’ (a term much in vogue, more elevated than ‘government’) and the role of the market in our lives. While governments were called upon to rescue banks too big to fail during the crisis of 2007-8, no such safety-net apparently exists for governments that have squandered resources – even when these were spent on saving the banks.

Whenever packages, bailouts and rescues are negotiated, the outcome may not be put before the people, as the anger engendered in European ruling circles over the Greek government’s brief proposal to hold a referendum clearly demonstrated. The electorate, in this instance, is cast in the role of bystanders, spectators of economic inevitability, caught in the crossfire between government and market, and subject to austerity, cuts, disemployment and impoverishment.

How is this compatible with the supremacy of the popular will? Whichever government is in power – in Greece, Italy or anywhere else – it has no choice over its implementation of measures that satisfy the markets, whose governance is of a higher order than its own.

Whoever voted for markets? Clearly these are autonomous and unbiddable, set above mere politicians and humble electorates. The appeasement by governments of markets is strangely resonant in Europe; for it represents, not the placating of dictators and ideologues bent on control of the world as in the twentieth century, but the soothing of numinous god-like forces – unidentifiable, faceless and incorporeal – whose objective nevertheless mimics that of tyrants of flesh and blood.

While the West is busy making the world safe for democracy, and introducing its version of liberation to the dark places of earth, it seems in its heartlands, democracy itself has become something of a qualified ideal. A recent Guardian commentator observed ‘Democratic legitimacy empowers governments and the international institutions in which they confer, but it does not solve problems. Democracy can even make problems harder.’

From all that has appeared in the continuing crisis, it seems governments are supposed to manage systems, in the liberation of which from their own dead hand they have not only colluded, but made the highest virtue. During the renaissance of laissez-faire under the Washington consensus, the mantras were deregulation, liberalisation and the dissolution of agencies that reined in what used to be known as the excesses of capitalism, but are now taken as natural wonders of the world.

In other words, we are living with the elective powerlessness of governments over an economy become global. National entities have chosen impotence, as they have given way to the supremacy of markets; while the people, most of whom remain captive in the territories in which markets operate, do not enjoy the agreeable mobility with which money and goods seek their own destination.

While the present government in Britain declares its dedication to the abolition of controls, what it still archaically calls red tape, it remains devoted to expanding the liberties of capitalism, and effacing itself to facilitate this happy state of affairs. At the same time, it must also speak of national sovereignty; and indeed, UKIP, the BNP and those Conservatives who would ‘repatriate’ powers from Europe to the United Kingdom, are representatives of a national (if not imperial) pride, which believes we can stand alone, fiercely independent, even though we have long abandoned the manufacture of all items of daily utility, and depend to a disproportionate degree on a narrowing base of inward investment, armaments, finance and ‘cultural products’.

Above us, majestic and implacable, stand ‘the markets’; a homely term, suggesting primitive trestles on town squares heaped with locally produced goods, rather than a demented lightning network of impenetrable electronic transactions, over which control would be as vain as bidding the waves of the incoming tide to recede.

All societies elevate something above themselves which they regard with awe and reverence – indeed, they cannot function without it. Durkheim observed ‘The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social.’ So it has been with us. The market is a fitting object of veneration in ostensibly secular societies. Its aetiology is lost in time, while the more recent narrative that emerged of ‘the invisible hand’, a distant extremity of the Creator, and the ‘discovery’ that the laws of political economy are laws of nature – all serve to command popular faith in a knowing and cynical age.

Of course, the supreme Market has its intermediaries: ratings agencies which determine the creditworthiness of economic entities, companies, corporations and countries; economists who are the interpreters of the signs and portents it gives of itself; financial experts are its representatives on earth, the privileged prophets of the Market; sometimes fallible, but devoted to explaining and forecasting its intentions and tendencies.

But when democracy, freedom, choice and all the other big words of Western civilization must be subordinated to economic reason (that exaltation of the irrational), we arrive at a seemingly irreconcilable contradiction. For out of the mysterious workings of the market arise, in theory, all the liberties we are supposed to enjoy; and yet the market itself, unfathomable and unknowable, at the same time, curtails them according to its whim. We are called upon to bow before these mysteries, much as the people of a more faith-imbued age yielded to the holy words of more ancient scriptures.

Responsibility for our fate shifts between the unappealable and impenetrable mood-swings of the market (now nervous and volatile, now exuberant and self-confident), and those to whom the task of ‘governance’ has been entrusted. The equivocation among politicians in the West over what they will do, when they gain or regain power, depends upon the nimbleness of their dance with economic necessity. In this context, alternating parties serve as a useful foil for blame for their ineffectiveness, citing ‘global interdependence’ for their paralysis. The difficulty facing Greece in creating a ‘government of national salvation’ suggested, not disunity, but a reluctance of politicians to acknowledge their own (self-imposed) limits, and a desire to conceal these from the electorate.

Perhaps this is why we see in global leaders, not the statesmen or women of stature we might expect, but mediocre, status-seeking opportunists, since the most adroit and competent have deserted national politics for a supraterrestrial position in the global economy, that empyrean from where they can exercise real power, and where, because of their proximity to the sacred Market, they can get away with self-serving practices no longer open to the fallen of politics.

November 2011