Tropes of the crisis… March 3, 2013
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy.trackback
It’s well worth examining the comments here to see an interesting trope that has emerged amongst some in relation to the crisis, that being that IBEC doesn’t represent ‘real’ businesses, that those businesses it does represent are not ‘real’ businesses (monopolies, etc etc), and this can be extended to an attitude that the banks somehow – deregulated and unsupervised as they were by government – aren’t really private sector.
It’s quite some intellectual and ideological contortion to arrive at such positions, but it makes a certain sort of sense if one’s ideological approach is that the state is responsible for almost all ills, the market is responsible for more rather than less all positive outcomes and and therefore any manifestation of private sector/capitalist malfeasance cannot per definition be the fault of the market and is either directly or indirectly linked to the state.
What it ignores entirely is the manner in which the state itself (the political system, its worldview, subsidiary institutions and so on) has been ‘captured’ by parts of the private sector – albeit to greater and lesser degrees.
It’s quite a common theme in busiiness-idealist discourse, I think. What can you do? You’re dealing with a religious impulse, not an intellectual one.
Still, somebody show me a leading business figure who was against bank deregulation. You won’t find many.
+1
I seem to recall reading somewhere and I haven’t been able to find it again, that even a year or two into the present crisis the FF government had a cabinet sub-committee on deregulation in the financial sector – the assumption being that it was a good thing. Has anyone else heard about that?
The only pure business transaction would be if one entrepeneur bashes in the head of another with a rock that was lying around, and personally carries off all his goods, on foot.
For anything else, the ‘state’ (code for the lazy grwat unwashed masses, undeserving unlike our hero) can be blamed for each and every disaster that befalls caveman economics.
Commentators like Marc Coleman and Sarah Carey have been pushing the line for years that Ibec and Ictu are culpable for the crash because they were central to partnership negotiations, therefore branches of the state. The upholders of the true faith are Isme, who were ‘innocent’ of Partnership, and this explains the apparent illogicality of Isme’s constant advocacy of pay cuts.
Speaking of old tropes, it was interesting to hear a minister (Carey) saying this week that PS workers were ‘not to blame’ for the crisis. It would be an article of faith with the Coleman/Isme tendency that public servants are to blame, because they belong to unions, who were in Partnership, which was a creature of the State etc…
It’s all a little “true Scotsman”, isn’t it? When neo-liberalism fails, it is because we didn’t go far enough. It wasn’t really neo-liberalism. But if a leftist policy or state fails, it is because it is inherently flawed and it demonstrates how all left wing policies don’t work.
I think you come close to nailing it ejh. It isn’t an intellectual impulse, but rather than religious, I would say a-rational.
There is a descriptive term used in psychology known as an extinction burst. It is a phenomena observed in all creatures (especially humans) Basically it describes how when an organism carrys out an action that previously achieved a desirable goal, and that action fails to achieve that goal, they increase the frequency and intensity of the behavior. Another feature of the burst is it generates novel forms of the original behavior.
The longer the burst goes on for, the greater the possibility that the original behaviour or one of its variants will encounter success. Gamblers have lucky socks for a reason.
In business, you see an example in the policies of ISME. ISME are notable for their shortsightedness. They focus on cutting costs at any cost. During the boom, ISME had their wage/tax cutting policies rewarded because the wider economy was growing. Now they fail to realise that cutting wages and public services only serves to destroy their customer base.
Bottom line, the schedules at which these people have their actions rewarded or punished, determine how impervious their beliefs are to reality. Bizzarely, the less frequently ISME members contact success with their policies over the coming months and years, the more likely they are to persist in shouting for cuts as a behavior that is on an intermittent schedule of reinforcement is the hardest to extinguish.
Further to EJH’s point in post 1 I think it is fair to say that there’s a quasi-religious impulse to this insistence that neo-liberal orthodoxy should be followed whether it works or not.
But I think there’s also what I’d characterise as a Sadistic impulse at play, a barely hidden desire that people should be taught a lesson and made to suffer. It’s there in Dan O’Brien’s insistence that more cuts should be sought and in most of what Coleman and Carey write. One of the great humane statements, IMHO, is Chekhov’s, “people must never be humiliated – that is the chief thing.”
Yet these commentators and the orthodoxy they represent seem to proceed from entirely opposite premises. People should be humiliated and their work conditions made ever more miserable so that instead of enjoying any small bit of comfort and security they must be pushed to the very breaking point. Hence the desire to reduce public sector terms and conditions to the Hobbesian condition pertaining in much of the private sector, nasty, brutish and on short term contracts.
I was speaking recently to a guy who told me that in his company, a large, respected and venerable company it is too, the pension fund has fallen short to the extent that people who paid into it for forty odd years will end up with a very meagre return. It would be more in line for the champions of the private sector, and its representative organisations, to tackle abuses like this instead of bleating on about ‘gold-plated,’ pensions in the public sector.
Why is it that the likes of O’Brien, Coleman and Carey are so filled with hatred? I’d honestly suspect that this has much to do with pathology as ideology, given that at least two of them don’t seem to have the nous to fully grasp an ideology anyway.
The thing is that people have voted for a combination of FF and FG for many years because by and large most people want a quiet life. I know this is anathema to people who want to see a better and more just society created but it’s understandable enough on an individual basis. But the notion of a neo-liberal ‘permanent revolution’ where people’s standard of living is steadily attacked will result in anything but a quiet life. So I think there will be a backlash and that backlash can only be effectively led by trade unions or at least be most effectively led by then. I don’t think marches will put the fear of God into government to anything like the same extent that strikes will. Whether the union leadership can damp down the disillusionment of their members is the key thing. I believe that leadership are aware that they still hold more power than any comparable pressure group and that this rather than emboldening them actually frightens them. Again this is understandable to an extent. Who wouldn’t want to go back to the comforting days of partnership and prosperity. But of course this is as pointless a wish as those you see tacked on to the end of punk videos by teenagers expressing the desire to go back and experience the music of the seventies at first hand.
+1 on the subject of unions and on the desire for a ‘quiet life’. As you point out the latter is no longer an option unless you are one of the few that can live from unearned wealth.
I personally don’t think the new militancy will occur within existing trades unions but in parallel structures.
Think Italy in the 70s.
“I believe that leadership are aware that they still hold more power than any comparable pressure group and that this rather than emboldening them actually frightens them.”
Great line. Very true. People will know I’m very pessimistic about union power as currently exists, but… there have been moments in the past five years where a much stronger approach – I think of the first (and pretty much last) big march in Dublin, would have reaped rewards. And of course if they were more explicitly champions of workers in both public and private sector.
‘Who wouldn’t want to go back to the comforting days of partnership and prosperity’
I think that this sentiment is common throughout Irish society in general and is a key element of lack of intensity of resistance to austerity here compared to Southern Europe.
On the braying of the shills in the times etc, i’ve always felt that their increasing shrillness was a sign of their weakness and that they sense the coming ‘backlash’ as well. However rather than being conciliatory in the hope of alleviating it just pushes them to be more reactionary. A case of path dependence perhaps?
Aren’t such ‘no true scotman’ tropes the standard libertarian fall back argument when one pointing out the disparity between ‘actually existing capitalism’ and their market theology?. I would say so from my experience.
I always derived a dark sense of amusement of the parallel between it and the ‘USSR was not real communism’ line. An argument that I guess wouldn’t get much mileage with libertarians.
The ‘no true scotsman’ was invented by a libertarian (Anthony Flew) to attack the ‘USSR is not real communism’ bit. There is no lack of irony that it has become a standard line for many libertarians.
Ha ha beautiful.
On the rare occasions when organisations like ESRI or OECD come out with reports that don’t perpetuate the neoliberal narrative, it’s noticeable that attention is drawn to their alleged public sector bias. Coleman in particular is a past master of this.
I’m less bothered by the one-true-Scotsman people than I am by the people who, having said around 2007 that everything was going swimmingly because the structure of the economy was fundamentally healthy and sound, have been saying more recently that the economy is so fundamentally dysfunctional and uncompetitive that it requires years of cuts and recession to put right.
Which is lots of very influential people, obviously. My view is that if they were so very wrong about something they are now saying was so very obvious, then they really need to shut up. Curiously, they don’t.