Idiotism: Capitalism and the Privatisation of Life

185 Pages·2012·1.66 MB·English

by  Neal Curtis

Idiotism
Curtis T02433 00 pre 1 10/10/2012 08:33
Curtis T02433 00 pre 2 10/10/2012 08:33
IdIotIsm
Capitalism and the
Privatisation of Life
Neal Curtis
Curtis T02433 00 pre 3 10/10/2012 08:33
First published 2013 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
distributed in the United states of America exclusively by
Palgrave macmillan, a division of st. martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Neal Curtis 2013
the right of Neal Curtis to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
IsBN 978 0 7453 3156 0 Hardback
IsBN 978 0 7453 3155 3 Paperback
IsBN 978 1 8496 4788 5 PdF eBook
IsBN 978 1 8496 4790 8 Kindle eBook
IsBN 978 1 8496 4789 2 EPUB eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data applied for

this book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the
country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing services Ltd
typeset from disk by stanford dtP services, Northampton, England
simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and
Edwards Bros in the United states of America
Curtis T02433 00 pre 4 10/10/2012 08:33
Contents
1. Enclosing the World, or Idiotism 1
2. The Ideology of Idiotism 29
3. Idiotism and Economics 55
4. Idiotism and Politics 85
5. Idiotism and Culture 112
6. Opening the World, or Democracy 139
Bibliography 166
Index 170
Curtis T02433 00 pre 5 10/10/2012 08:33
Curtis T02433 00 pre 6 10/10/2012 08:33
1
Enclosing the World, or Idiotism
This book was conceived in the aftermath of the ‘Great Financial
Crisis’ (Bellamy and Magdoff 2009) that first came to public
attention in 2008, but continued to devastate lives as I began to
write in February 2011. No doubt it will continue to do so for
many years to come, even as those most responsible quickly return
to their multi-million dollar bonuses euphemistically referred to as
‘compensation’. The state of the economy at the time of the crisis
can be highlighted in a couple of quite startling facts that John
Lanchester sets out in the opening chapter of his book Whoops!.
First of all, throughout the years known as the war on terror, or
economically speaking the security bubble, global GDP rose from
$36 trillion dollars in 2000 to $70 trillion in 2006, largely driven by
profits in the financial sector (2010:xii). Secondly, at the time of the
crisis in 2008, the largest company in the world with assets of £1.9
trillion was a bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland. This is significant
because the UK’s GDP in 2008 was only £1.7 trillion (22). By any
standard these figures are extraordinary. However, considering that
regulation of the financial sector was negligible there was little if
any oversight of this anabolic growth. This was because, according
to Robert Lucas, Chicago University professor and 1995 Nobel
prize winner, ‘the “central problem of depression-prevention […]
has been solved”’ (in Krugman 2008:9). This supposedly overcame
the need for state regulation or intervention in line with the old
Keynesian model. The market alone – run by and for an oligarchy
of plutocrats also known as the ‘Super Rich’ – was sufficient. Even
more disturbing is that despite the crisis, and not withstanding some
minor technical adjustments, nothing has really changed. Even if
we exit this crisis that is still to be played out in the sovereign debt
crises of the Euro-zone and the US, many economists believe that
a second crash will not be far off.
The roots of the crisis stem from an ideology of privatisation
and free markets that goes back a long way. The idea that the
pursuit of private interests in a free market of goods and services
is the best way to achieve the common good can be traced back to
1
Curtis T02433 01 text 1 10/10/2012 08:33
2 IDIOTISM
the eighteenth-century liberalism of Adam Smith, but the idea that
common land is more productive under private ownership dates
back to the seventeenth century and the work of William Petty and
John Locke. Locke in particular gave the philosophical justification
for the enclosure of common land and resources that, aside from
war (or increasingly in conjunction with war), remains capitalism’s
primary means of accumulation. However, while this long-standing
privileging of the private is integral to our current socio-economic
condition the most proximate causes of the crisis are quite recent,
stemming from the financialisation of the economy that began in
the 1970s with the Thatcher government in the UK and the Reagan
administration in the US. At that time conditions emerged for the
ideology of free market economics to gain a much greater and more
radical purchase on our political imagination. The media constantly
relayed bulletins promoting competition, consumer choice, council
house sales, upward mobility, credit, privatisation, deregulation,
designer labels, branding, gentrification, and the democracy of share
options. Everyone was encouraged to join in the fiction of this
new wealth and the seemingly endless supply of money created
by the great sell off. Even the UK’s pop stars were dressing up like
bankers. We all lived in the brave new world of the Square Mile.
Likewise in the US, the counter-culture that a decade earlier had
preached resistance and the importance of finding onseself were
now seamlessly folded into the niche-marketing of lifestyle choices
and the new individualism.
By 1997 the emergence of New Labour in the UK under the
leadership of Tony Blair came to signal the completion of a consensus
around financialisation and privatisation that had shifted from the
terrain of ideology to increasingly become part of a new common
sense. By this I mean to say something akin to the popular folklore
that Antonio Gramsci (1971:419) attributes to this term: something
that is shaped by a coherent ideology, in turn supported by ‘the great
systems of traditional philosophy’ (420), in this case utilitarianism
and positivism, but remains ‘ambiguous, contradictory and
multiform’ (423), retaining elements of nationalism, and racism, for
example, mixed in with the new language of supposedly neutral, free
market universalism. Nevertheless, despite elements of incoherence
this new common sense projected a dominant conception of the
world, one in which socialism, certainly, but even the postwar
Welfare State and the politics of the New Deal were seen to be
out of date. In this respect the use of the financial crisis to make
a renewed case against public spending was the key to getting rid
Curtis T02433 01 text 2 10/10/2012 08:33
EnclOSIng ThE WOrlD, Or IDIOTISM 3
of the anachronistic, yet stubborn element of welfarism that had
continued to survive in a much reduced capacity within it. Although
the New Labour government claimed to be pursuing a social
democratic agenda and believed in a public sector of sorts, Blair had
been converted to the ‘truth’ of market fundamentalism, and like
the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton in the United States did
much to further entrench the power of private forces both nationally
and globally. Tony Blair’s zeal for all things private and the Labour
Party’s conversion to the truth of market forces can also be explained
in part by Gramsci’s understanding of common sense because, as
he points out, with common sense being ‘crudely neophobe and
conservative’, the ability to bring about ‘the introduction of a new
truth is a proof that the truth in question has exceptional evidence
and capacity for expansion’ (423).
During the 1980s and 1990s, then, there was a great deal of
debate amongst academics and activists about the nature of this
new truth that was rapidly dismantling socialised economies around
the globe and the cultures not predicated on consumption that
stubbornly stood in its way. At a time when diversity and plurality
were seen as democratic ideals to be promoted, and social and
cultural theory was dominated by the discourses of hybridity and
flow, it became increasingly apparent that powerful Western nations
such as the USA and the UK, together with transnational capitalist
institutions such as the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF were
becoming increasingly less tolerant of any form of social life that
resisted the dogma of the global free market. Despite the ascendancy
of multiculturalism free market capitalism increasingly became
the only model for social organisation. In effect you can have free
market capitalism with any kind of topping, but the stipulation is
that you must have free market capitalism. For some, like many
of the evangelical Christian communities in the US, an anti-state
commitment to privatisation is an integral component of their
cultural expression, for many others, however, it was an aside, and
as long as the system permitted differentiated cultural expression the
shape of the economy was of only a minor concern. For theorists
like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) the acceptance and
encouragement of a variety of cultures went hand in hand with the
post-Fordist model of capitalist growth via niche production and
marketing where each cultural difference comes with its own glossy
magazine. Rather than standing for something that countered a
centralised dogma the ‘multi’ of multiculturalism underpinned the
global extension of the free market and was used to legitimate it.
Curtis T02433 01 text 3 10/10/2012 08:33