IN PURSUIT OF THE JUST ECONOMY

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 18 Jul 2020

Book Review: ‘Capital and Ideology’ by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press Harvard, 2019, pp1091

Thomas Piketty's place as the current scholar of inequality would be hard to dispute. His first huge project, 'Capital In The Twentieth Century' assembled and analysed statistical evidence for economic inequality throughout recorded history, demonstrating that it had remained roughly constant until exponential growth began after the British Industrial Revolution. This growth was interrupted by a pronounced dip between the 20th-century's two World Wars, but has now resumed to a point where 1% of the world population owns 50% of its wealth. 

In this new volume ‘Capital and Ideology’, Piketty applies the same meticulous research methodology to the related question of the different ways that people have justified economic inequality throughout history, and to what was responsible for that dip, which takes him into the realm of political economy. Comparison of his work to Karl Marx's Capital feels inescapable – the significance of his focus on ‘inequality’ versus Marx's focus on ‘exploitation’; the choice of ideology for his second volume, when Marx famously didn't live long enough to fully tackle the subject. However Piketty ends the book with a set of radical and concrete proposals that perhaps demand more attention given the current worldwide crisis. 

Piketty diverges from Marx right from the start, since for him ideology isn’t entirely determined by the mode of production but is conditioned by multiple factors and thus can play out differently at different places and times. In this he is closer to Weber, Veblen, Bourdieu and Boltanski. The gap widens since he treats ‘class’ not as the foundational category it was for Marx but as a secondary effect of factors that include income, wealth and education. He starts the book with a definition of ideology so commonsensical as to be an affront to post-Althusserian, post-modern orthodoxy: 

I use “ideology” in a positive and constructive sense to refer to a set of a priori plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be struc­tured. An ideology has social, economic, and political dimensions. It is an attempt to respond to a broad set of questions concerning the desirable or ideal organization of society. Given the complexity of the issues, it should be obvious that no ideology can ever command full and total assent: ideological conflict and disagreement are inherent in the very notion of ideology.

For Piketty all ideologies exist to answer two categories of question – about borders (who is us and who is them?) and about property (who’s allowed to own who or what?). The bulk of ‘Capital and Ideology’ consists of detailed examinations of statistics about various ‘inequality regimes’ that have arisen throughout history and across the world – this is not a wholly Eurocentric work even if he does apologise for speaking only French and English. 

Like Marx he periodises history, but not into the same eras. For Piketty premodern societies have a ternary or ‘trifunctional’ structure divided between three classes, the military (warriors, kings, nobles), the clerical (priests, lawyers, scholars), and a ‘third estate’ of merchants, artisans, peasants and workers. The French Revolution marked the first overturning of such an order, to inaugurate the era of ownership or ‘proprietarian’ regimes which separate possession of power from property and create the modern state (though for a long time political rights remain confined to property owners). Proprietarian regimes diminish the influence of the clergy and instead ‘sacralise’ private property itself to render it unquestionable by any political agent. 

The first three parts of the book deal with premodern trifunctional and slave societies, proprietarian and colonial societies, and culminate with the more egalitarian communist and social­-democratic regimes that arose in the 20th century after periodic crises of proprietarian regimes generated resistance from the lower, ‘disadvantaged’ classes. It was these regimes which created that mid-century dip in inequality. In a review of this length I can barely sketch the breadth and complexity of Piketty’s analysis so I’ll cut straight to the chase: he regards communism and social democracy as both having failed, causing a return to extreme inequality in the ‘hypercapitalist’ and ‘postcommunist’ societies we are living through in the 21st century.

For Piketty communism failed because dogmatic application of Marxist theory merely sacralised state property instead of private property: the authoritarianism and economic stagnation this engendered undid those regimes so deeply that post-communist regimes in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe have become staunch supporters of 21st-century neo-liberal ‘hypercapitalism’. It also instilled in the Western democracies a “dis­illusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement”.

He concedes that the social-democratic alternative was the more successful, but began to unravel with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (a process completed by the elections of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson). Social­-democratic parties had lost the ability and ambition to redistribute wealth, which allowed the living standards of middle and working classes to stagnate and then erode. Competition between states to lower taxes, encouraged for example by EU membership, compounded this situation. Post-war educational reforms gradually lead to those with higher education voting Left while those without voted Right, an ironic role-reversal that anti-i­mmigrant parties (and factions within older parties) were quick to exploit. Also, while for 50 years the mere existence of a communist counter-model had inhibited capitalist elites and par­ties hostile to redistribution, that inhibition was lifted with the fall of the Soviet Union. But for Piketty the most significant flaw of social-democratic politics lay in confining itself within the nation state, and thus failing to construct the international structures needed to combat capitalist tax evasion and outsourcing. 

For me the crux of his argument, and the most engrossing part of the book, is Part 4 entitled ‘Rethinking The Dimensions Of Political Conflict’. In three chapters on ‘Borders and Property’, ‘Brahmin Left’ and ‘Social Nativism’ Piketty applies his schemas to the current politics of the UK, USA, Europe, India and Brazil. By analysing statistics on voting patterns, wealth and education he demolishes perceptions of the balance of electoral forces on both Left and Right. His thesis will be controversial and likely to evoke furious condemnation from the Left. He contends that the Left-Right cleavage (which he labels as ideologically ‘classist’) is being displaced by a more complex set of contests:

Briefly put, the social hypothesis is this: that the less educationally advantaged classes came to believe that the parties of the left now favor the newly advantaged educated classes and their children over people of more modest backgrounds [...]  the classist left­ right party systems of the postwar era have given way to a system of dual elites consisting of a “Brahmin left” attractive to the highly educated and a “merchant right” attractive to the wealthy and highly paid.

The political struggle is no longer two- but four-sided: inegalitarian internationalists (pro-immigrant, pro-rich); inegalitarian nativists (anti-immigrant, pro­-rich); egalitarian internationalists (pro­-immigrant, pro-poor); and egalitarian nativists (anti-­immigrant, pro­-poor). Older ruling parties, like both Labour and Conservative in the UK and Republican/Democrat in the USA, are often internally split along such lines, and egalitarian nativists may of course merely adopt an egalitarian pose as an electoral tactic – a whole three-page section is devoted to his critique of the term ‘populist’. 

Piketty is certainly a reformist, but not a liberal reformist. In the final chapter 17 of Part 4 he proposes fiscal and legal measures sufficiently radical that if implemented they would, he claims, transcend capitalism: he regards them as a minimum requirement to bring the egalitarian portions of the electorate back together. These measures include a return to steeply progressive taxation, with confiscatory wealth, property, inheritance and carbon taxes. Rather than a universal basic income he demands a universal capital endowment to be paid to everyone on their 25th birthday. Industry is to be co-managed through compulsory representation of workers on all company boards, and fiscal transparency to be imposed through a world-wide financial register. And to top it all off, Piketty recommends constitutional amendments to protect these measures against future diminution. 

He refrains from putting exact figures on tax rates and board numbers on the grounds that these are matters for public, political debate and negotiation, hence his own preferred label of ‘participatory socialism’. Such policies could equally be described as radical, ‘Bernsteinian’ social democracy. Whatever we call them, they’re precisely the concrete political-economic policies so badly needed by, but so conspicuously absent from, recent radical movements like Occupy Wall Street. 

Marx’s ‘Capital’ was the foundational document of 20th-century labour movements and thus changed history, but his insights became ossified into a quasi-religious dogma that still hinders even the democratic Left via an unspoken teleological belief that history leads us inevitably toward success: “would be revolutionaries who argue that nothing can be done until the conditions for revolution are ripe” in Piketty’s words. The 21st-century world he analyses is one already altered by Marx, and his multi-factorial approach can help us understand why the Left/Right demarcation became so confused. 

Capitalists will certainly mobilise colossal resources to oppose these measures, and when I first proposed this review to our esteemed Literary Editor on 19th February 2020 I might well have joined a chorus accusing Piketty of naivety. What neither of us knew was that 9 cases of Covid-19 had been reported in the UK that day. Two weeks later there were 85, a month after that 43,282. That's what 'exponential' looks like, those are the sorts of fact in which Piketty deals. We face economic meltdown of a depth yet to be plumbed, and maybe a moment of historic bifurcation where the only alternatives are something like Piketty’s participatory socialism or descent into a neo-feudal regime with most people jobless and poor, and the insulated, corona-vaccinated 1% as a new ‘nobility’. 

HAS THE INTERNET TRAPPED US?

Dick Pountain/The Political Quarterly/ 11th April 2019 12:23:31

Books Reviewed:

‘The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy ’ by Matthew Hindman, Princeton University Press 2018, pp240

‘Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age’ by Susan Landau, Yale University Press 2017, pp221

‘Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age’ by Martin Moore, Oneworld 2018, pp320

Few will dispute that we’re living through a new Industrial Revolution, but there’s still room for doubt about the precise nature of this revolution. Advances in technology stimulated by World War II, in particular the invention of radar and the digital computer, lead during the post-war decades to a revolution in electronics. The transistor and the integrated silicon circuit made computing power cheap and ubiquitous, and in the process has affected almost every area of our societies. The Internet is the effect of this revolution on our ways of communicating; automation, robotics and now AI (Artificial Intelligence) are having a similarly disruptive effect on work and industry; huge advances in materials science are making renewable energy technologies cheap enough to threaten the dominance of fossil fuels. The political implications of all these far-reaching changes are far from easy to fathom.

The debate is hot, with broadly speaking two main categories of protagonist, techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. In itself this is nothing new, for techno-pessimists have been warning us since well before Blake’s ‘satanic mills’, and techno-optimists reaching for the sky from Icarus to the Wright Brothers. However the 20th century’s communications revolution was of unprecedented scope, reaching around the whole world and into the depths of the mind: audio/visual broadcasting technologies spawned mass propaganda and mass surveillance. Orwell, in ‘1984’, foresaw some of the consequences, but the recent invention of television mislead him to depict it as a one-way problem, Big Brother to the masses. A mere five years beyond Orwell’s fictional dystopia, at CERN in Geneva, English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web which works in both directions, and in 1991 he released the first web browser.

One of the most articulate current proponents for the optimistic camp is Paul Mason, whose ‘Post-Capitalism’ emphasises the way in which Internet technology reduces the production and distribution costs of information to almost zero, in the process deposing old media monopolies, and via automation permitting a reduction of necessary work and increase in leisure time. Early Internet libertarians like John Perry Barlow and Richard Stallman have for years promoted the idea of an anarchistic new order based on Internet-enabled direct democracy. However ‘fake news’, election hacking, mass surveillance and technological unemployment must cast doubt over such rosy perspectives, and the books reviewed here examine three different aspects of this darker side of the digital revolution.

Matthew Hindman, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, argues that the Internet economy is innately monopolistic. Using large web traffic datasets his experiments reveal that though the Internet does open up the production and dissemination of information to everyone, it also inexorably siphons all the revenue into a handful of monopolies every bit as powerful and pernicious as the old ones they are displacing. Individual hackers (he labels them freextremists) started with Stewart Brand’s ‘Whole Earth Catalog’, passed on to the early net libertarians like Perry Barlow and Stallman and the Open-Source movement, then began a rightward march into 4chan, Anonymous, Reddit, Gamergate and a host of teenage nihilist meme artists. Their final destination was the Drudge Report, Breitbart, Bannon, the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails and support for the Trump campaign.

Hindman’s argument employs two key concepts – ‘network effect’ and ‘stickiness’ – that require some explanation. A network effect occurs when the utility of a new technology escalates very rapidly with its number of users. The first telephone was useless except as a demonstration, the second telephone made the first useful to a couple of people, but once hundreds adopted it the number of possible conversations, and the value of the technology, grew exponentially (and was monopolised in the USA by Bell Telephone Company, later called AT&T). This ‘increasing returns to scale’ was in evidence through previous industrial revolutions in banking, steam, steel, electricity and oil too, with Rockefellers, Fords and Exxons coming to dominate their sectors – in the digital economy, the commodity being monopolised is users’ attention.

Paul Mason did single out network effects as an obstacle to his optimism, as they lead digital monopolists to seek rents on intellectual property and to stifle competition, but Hindman goes further. He claims that network effects have been overemphasised and that ‘stickiness’ – the tendency of users to remain loyal to one website at the expense of others – is perhaps more important. His experiments show how stickiness is very hard, and very expensive to achieve, so that only the very largest companies (which initially got that big through network effects) can now achieve it. Getting sticky requires better design and better response speed than competitors, through world-wide server farms every bit as massive and as expensive as the factories of previous industrial revolutions.

Google, Amazon and Facebook no longer depend on the common Internet, whose distributed architecture was designed for resilience by the US military, but employ ‘peering’ over their own private cables to bypass congestion and be faster than competitors. Users are most loyal to those sites which offer the most diverse rather than best quality content, and this diversity comes from millions of users donating their content for nothing. The Internet isn’t free, it’s paid for by advertising, almost all of which is captured by these few mammoth corporations, thanks to their stickiness. I purchase second-hand books on Abebooks. I watch video clips – on music from Bill Evans to Alina Ibragimova, on guitar building and repairing, on Japanese street food – and it really does feels like the space the optimists describe, into which anyone can post videos of their special interests for free. But Abebooks is owned by Amazon and all those videos are on YouTube, which is owned by Google. Everything I buy or watch provides information that will be sold to advertisers, and Google and Facebook between them now collect 70% of this revenue.

Hindman is particularly concerned about the Internet’s effect on news gathering and dissemination. Local newspapers could once garner higher advertising revenues than national ones, since their readership was better-targeted, and this supported the whole ecology of local print news. The Internet reversed this position since the giants now target their advertising with uncanny precision and grab practically all the revenue. Local papers are unable to compete effectively in the digital realm and are pushed out of business.

The digital news sites that replace print, like BuzzFeed and Vice, are financed by investors and major brand advertisers: lacking any tradition of separation between editorial and business they employ in-house staff to generate ‘native’ ads in identical style to editorial content, which they hope be shared ‘virally’. They also delete or redact any user posts that might offend advertisers. This absolute dependence on advertising to subsidise free access means that the Internet giants need to garner all the information they can from users, which nowadays is an awful lot, from geographical location to tastes and even political opinions.

The holding of such data poses multiple problems over privacy. Advertisers use it to target ads specifically at you, but it might also be stolen by criminal hackers, or intercepted by the intelligence agencies of both of your own and foreign states. Susan Landau is another professor, of Computer Science at Tufts and Law at the Fletcher School, but previously worked on privacy at Google and engineering at Sun Microsystems. Her book ‘Listening In’ is the most technical of the three, focussed on encryption and the way that intelligence agencies may breach the privacy of individuals in the interests of state security. In 2016 Landau was an expert witness for Apple, before a US House Judiciary Committee, when the FBI sought to force the firm to decrypt an iPhone taken from two dead terrorists in San Bernadino, California. (The hearing was dropped after FBI cracked the phone without Apple’s help). Her book offers an excellent, accessible account of the histories of digital networks, smartphones and the techniques of cryptography, cybersecurity and hacking. Among Landau’s many examples are: the Stuxnet worm, a US/Israeli hack attack that destroyed many of Iran’s uranium refinement centrifuges; the Russian interference in the 2016 US election; and the Snowden/Wikileaks revelations of state spying on US citizens. Landau is a techno-realist who accepts that the state has a responsibility for the security of its citizens that may clash with their right to privacy, and she firmly declares that this trade-off is a matter for democratic political debate rather than technocratic fiat.

Political rather than economic effects are the subject of Martin Moore’s ‘Democracy Hacked’. A senior research fellow at King’s College London, Moore explores how the Internet’s ubiquity, anonymity and freedom from governmental control is eroding the democratic process. Starting from a summary of the counter-cultural origins of the net, he follows its subsequent transmutation into a vehicle for the Alt-Right. He believes that we’re currently moving out of the long era of rule by rigidly-hierarchical, sporadically-elected, centralised parties and entering a new, barely fathomable, era of algorithmically-targeted campaigns that exploit those massive data sets of voter information collected via the Internet as an invisible side-effect of our routine purchases, video viewing and online socialising.

During the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 the Internet proved very effective at mobilizing mass resistance, but tragically ineffective at defining goals or consolidating progressive regime change. In later years the net-assisted triumphs of Trump, Modi and Duterte, and the UK’s Brexit referendum, hinted that the Right was going to benefit as much as the Left, with Corbyn and Macron as possible exceptions. Moore analyses the 2016 US election to identify three different modes of election hacking: by individuals, by plutocrats and by hostile foreign powers.

Plutocratic hackers include billionaire libertarians like the Koch brothers, Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer and who see the Internet as a way to defeat government. Mercer was a virtuoso programmer who worked on computational linguistics at IBM for 20 years, then made his fortune by applying similar machine learning techniques to hedge-fund investment. An early investor in Cambridge Analytica, he helped apply these techniques to the extraction of personality profiles and political susceptibilities from people’s Facebook data. Mercer and the Kochs in the USA and Aaron Banks in the UK purchased masses of voter data, then paid agents like Cambridge Analytica to perform ‘behavioural analytics’. Their key discovery was that in democratic politics it’s not necessary (perhaps not even desirable) to change a person’s mind but merely their behaviour – whether they’ll vote or not and for whom. Personality traits indicate which emotional tone will prove effective in personally-targeted election messages: subversive but not illegal. Pages 60-70 in which Moore explains this process are alone worth the price of the book.

As for Foreign Power hackers, Moore singles out the Russian model of information and disinformation warfare, showing how president Putin’s KGB experience gives him a degree of tech savvy notably lacking in Western leaders. His final chapters examine ‘Platform Democracy’, his term for the ambition of the Internet giants to usurp the powers of the state. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Uber are working hard to penetrate the healthcare, education and transport sectors with innovative and ‘disruptive’ services that parallel what they’ve achieved in retail, entertainment and social media. A case can be made that the extraordinary infrastructures and AI capabilities they’ve invested in are indeed more efficient than any state equivalent, but they remain commercial and unelected enterprises with no commitment except to shareholders. Moore goes further to illustrate what happens when states themselves do apply such technologies to integrate welfare, security and taxation, using as examples India’s Aadhaar system, Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ and Alibaba’s cooperation with Chinese local government to run a Social Credit system. Leaving aside questions over these systems’ actual effectiveness, they grant the state a sinister degree of extra knowledge and power over its citizens: participating in political protests can be punished by loss of benefits.

In 1988, Guy Debord published ‘Comments on the Society of the Spectacle’, an afterword to his famous work, which anticipated the way communications technologies might revolutionise a state’s repressive apparatus: “Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and flourishing profession.” All three of these books testify in different ways to the accuracy of his warning, and urge us to curb the power of the Internet giants and redeploy their technology for the renewal of democracy, while the choice is still ours to make.

DEMOCRACY’S MID-LIFE CRISIS?

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 28th November 2018 15:06:55

Book Review: ‘How Democracy Ends’ by David Runciman

Publisher: Profile Books 2018

Pages: 250

Bookshop shelves are groaning under the load of new apocalyptic works predicting the imminent demise of Western Civilisation from war, depression, epidemic, climate change, oriental, Islamic or robotic conquest. David Runciman’s is very much not one of these. It could have been called instead ‘How Democracies End’, though one sympathises with his publisher’s preference for the more dramatic singular. What he actually offers is a crystal-clear account of how some real democracies failed, an analysis of possible modes of failure and the kinds of state that may replace them. He then applies this analysis to the UK, USA and Europe, arriving at a best-guess as to how close our democracies really are to collapse.

He starts by using a simplified, functionalist definition of democracy – you have a democracy if you hold regular elections and the losers accept that they have lost – so on the opening page he is watching the 2017 Presidential Inauguration of Donald Trump with a group of his American students. Levity turns to horror at Trump’s Mussolini-style victory speech, and the obvious discomfort of Bush, Obama, Clinton and the military chiefs on the platform. But the speech was only rhetoric, however distasteful, the Democrats had accepted the election result, and Trump remains POTUS for now. Only once in US history had the losers refused, in 1861, and that started the Civil War. As Runciman pithily puts it “democracy is civil war without the fighting”.

Chapter 1 dissects the event that most frequently ends a democracy, the coup. Ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy and also of the coup, with Peisistratos’ seizure of power in 561 BC. Runciman examines more recent Greek history as one of his test cases: the 1967 Colonels’ Coup was a classic coup d’etat with tanks in the street, marshal music on the TV and arrests of the government and opponents, and he contrast this with the events of 2015 during the country’s financial collapse, to illustrate that there’s more than one way to do coup.

Following a classification invented by US political scientist Nancy Bermeo, he identifies six types: the classic military coup d’etat; the Executive Coup where those already in power suspend elections; Election-day Fraud; the Promissory Coup that calls an election to legitimise its rule; Executive Aggrandisement that chips away democratic freedoms; and Strategic Manipulation via gerrymandering and voter suppression but short of actual fraud (very topical).

In July 2015 the left-leaning Syriza government held a referendum that granted them a popular mandate to defy the EU, demand debt relief and threaten default. The European Commission, Central Bank and IMF counter-attacked by threatening to close Greek banks – no government can survive the cash machines shutting down. Finance minister Varoufakis resigned and Syriza capitulated, introducing swingeing austerity. Both Varoufakis and Runciman describe this as an almost-coup, where governmental authority is subverted by financial pressure but democracy survives, after a fashion. Runciman draws an important observation from this 1967/2015 comparison: traditionally coup plotters needed to let everyone know the government had been deposed, but nowadays they will instead try to conceal the transfer of real power.

The examination of coups leads on naturally to a discussion of populism, which is coming to dominate democratic politics everywhere. Runciman asserts that the essence of populism, of both left and right, is a belief that democracy has been stolen from the people by elites, and that claiming it back means flushing these elites out from spider-like hiding places. Hence the logic of populism is the conspiracy theory, the promulgation of which has been greatly facilitated by the rise of social media. He identifies the 1890s (Gilded Age) and late-1940s/early-50s (start of Cold War) as previous periods when conspiracy theories were as rife as they are today, with a nod to Richard Hofstadter’s superb study ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’. As to the causes of rising populism, economic distress, too rapid technological change, rising economic inequality and the absence of war are the main factors.

Shocking as it may seem, war patently favours democratic patriotism over populism, by temporarily suppressing private economic interest, and Runciman examines the different ways that democracy fought off populism before WW1 and after WW2. The populist rage of the 1900s didn’t simply evaporate under Theodore Roosevelt, Lloyd George and Jaures but morphed into both social democracy and fascism in the interwar period. Back then democracy was quite limited, leaving plenty of headroom for its reform: taxes were low; welfare states had yet to be built; unions, political parties and the state were still trusted. None of those conditions apply today.

Runciman’s central thesis is that the appeal of modern democracies is twofold, to both personal dignity and public good. Citizens of a democracy have their views taken seriously (even if later thwarted), and they also reap material benefit from stability, prosperity and peace. However problems arise because dignity is an immediate individual benefit while the material benefits are public, shared (increasingly unequally) and long-term – we come to value our individual dignity higher than the long-term benefits, as witnessed in own-foot-shooting episodes like Trump and Brexit. In the chapter ‘Something Better?’ Runciman applies this thesis to alternatives to democratic government, asserting that the gap between what’s promised to individuals and what to society as a whole is what distinguishes these alternatives.

For example Marxism-Leninism promised to collapse the gap, making personal and political lives the same. Bolsheviks at first believed this would render state power and police force unnecessary, but the result, Stalinism, hardly bore out such a belief. 21st century authoritarian regimes promise instead collective, rather than personal, dignity through nationalism. Material rewards are delivered by economic growth, steered by the state in the case of the Chinese Communist Party, or by ‘trickle down’ in a free market (Trump’s magic MAGA spell). Runciman describes this as “pragmatic authoritarianism”, which also describes Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Hungary and more. It appears to be spreading as fast as was once hoped for democracy.

Another dangerously tempting alternative is epistocracy – rule by experts – which eliminates the personal dignity factor altogether by in effect saying “you’re too dumb to vote because modern societies are just too complex”. It may sometimes look as though we’re there already, since our career politicians are skilled only in political maneuvering and depend upon consultants and experts to run things. However, in what is perhaps the most important section of the book, Runciman carefully distinguishes between epistocracy and technocracy.

Epistocracy has been around ever since Plato complained that democracy meant rule by the ignorant. Versions of it predated most modern democracies, in the shape of limited suffrage. Runciman stresses that true democracy with universal suffrage imposes no conditions on the knowledge or skill of voters, only the condition that they stick around to suffer the consequences of their own mistakes. This is what, in principle if not always in fact, gives it the power to learn and adapt. Technocracy isn’t really rule at all but more of a service through which rulers call upon those experts – from economists to high-tech engineers – who built the machine that is society, to maintain and repair it. These experts can’t and shouldn’t decide whether the machine needs replacing (or even shutting down), and so technocracy can and does co-exist with either democracy or authoritarianism.

Maintaining its twofold benefit is, for Runciman, the positive virtue of democracy, but its equally important negative virtue is the power to (eventually) throw out politicians and governments who don’t deliver. Against the more alarmist commentators, he believes that the positive virtue is currently under more threat than the negative. Globalising digital technologies both enable and encourage divisive demands for personal respect, pushing towards ‘identity politics’ and anarchism, while simultaneously destroying jobs and demanding more and more technical expertise to solve social and economic problems.

Anarchy is therefore another alternative to democracy, perhaps arising after some disaster, nuclear or climatic, or else actively courted by libertarians of both right and left – though the Silicon Valley titans who rejoice in the power of their new technologies to disrupt traditional capitalism prefer to be called accelerationists rather than anarchists. Runciman is not a tech-utopian like Paul Mason or Yuval Noah Harari, but he deals fairly, intelligently and in some depth with potential tech futures, concluding that some will be “wondrous, some terrible, and most wholly unknowable. It is a spectrum of possibility as wide as any human experience has ever known.” All we do know is that the benefit gap grows ever wider, and that while Trump will eventually go, Zuckerberg and his ilk will carry on, precisely because they do not threaten democracy directly, but rather indirectly by sapping our attention.

So is this an optimistic, pessimistic or apocalyptic account? None of the above: if pressed I would have to call it ‘stoical’. Marxists will object to Runciman’s lack of emphasis on class, but the eclipse of class consciousness lies at the heart of his analysis. Social Democrats may object that a Keynesian refloat of the economy could defuse populist wrath, but in his discussion of Thomas Piketty, Runciman points out that inequality on our present scale has never before in history been dispelled without the large-scale violence of revolution or world war. In his conclusion he offers no solutions, but neither does he predict that democracy is going to end suddenly and soon. Gradual erosion is more likely, at a different pace in different countries, and to different degrees. His closing words are:

“Western democracy will survive its mid-life crisis. With luck it will be a little chastened by it. It is unlikely to be revived by it. This is not, after all, the end of democracy. But this is how democracy ends”.

SAME BOAT, BUT IN STEERAGE

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 20th July 2018 13:56:24

Book Review: “A History Of The World In Seven Cheap Things”
Authors: Raj Patel And Jason W. Moore
Publisher: Verso 2018
Pages: 312
Price: £16.99

Consider the humble ant. Its ‘brain’ contains 40,000 times fewer neurons than our own, it lacks language and can’t reason, its repertoire of possible actions is finite and small – and yet it builds nests of great complexity, complete with highways spanning great distances and farms in which fungus is cultivated or aphids milked for food. Ethologists learned that these abilities result from the playing out of very simple ‘rules’, such as ‘move in the direction where the smell of formic acid is strongest’, rather than individual or collective calculation. Or perhaps consider those single-celled cyanobacteria which 2.45 billion years ago transformed the whole planet by replacing its carbon dioxide atmosphere with one rich in oxygen, thus permitting the evolution of the rest of plant and animal life.

What if Homo sapiens turned out to be more like these creatures than we like to believe? What if our own world isn’t the result of any philosophy, ideology, or political program but simply us playing out a simple rule called ‘maximise profit’? That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Patel and Moore’s “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things”. The intrinsic dynamic of capitalism, seeking ever greater profit, generates complex cycles of cheapening of some fundamental resources of the planet.

Patel and Moore call these resources Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy and Lives. You can increase profits by reducing wages, which means food has to become cheaper for workers to surviive: cheap energy is required to make the fertilisers to grow this cheaper food.The family maintains and reproduces workers for free (in the absence of wages for housework). Playing out the profit rule causes periodic crises, which have always been solved up until now by geographic expansion and colonisation, but eventually we’ve run out of planet. Disposal of wastes is undervalued by economists – treated as an unpriced ‘externality’ – so we now face environmental crises over global warming, plastic pollution and more.

The authors arrived here by combining the World-Systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein with the ‘ecological rift’ theory of the early Marx (as revived in recent times by John Bellamy Foster) to analyse capitalist ecology as a whole, closed system in which all resources are finite, not free, and all wastes have to go somewhere. Their analysis weaves together tightly several strands of Left activism that are at present separate, including labour rights and inequality, feminism, modern slavery, post-colonialism, and environmentalism. The distinctive ecological perspective which renders this interweaving possible is the book’s most important aspect, as these separate strands often clash in political practice: feminism versus male labour rights, immigration versus native labour rights etc. etc.

Inhabiting this novel viewpoint forces Patel and Moore to define their Seven Cheap Things in very particular ways – not entirely divorced from everyday usage but more abstract and far deeper. Tthey call them ‘real abstractions’, after Alberto Toscano. As with the ant, so with the human, everything that is produced – food, clothing, homes and workplaces, transport, communications, computers – must be co-produced with the rest of nature. When looking at a farm one can clearly see a connection between labour and soil, but when looking at a software developer there’s no such obvious link, which tempts us to think a distinction between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ processes, as though they were independent of one another.

The authors refuse and refute this distinction. They define ‘cheapness’ as “a set of strategies to manage the relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism’s crises”, where ‘web of life’ refers to those myriad complex cycles of co-production. Cheapness means more than just low cost though: it’s a strategy for mobilising work – human, animal, botanical, geological work – for as little compensation as possible. Capitalism, as Marx saw, transmutes all the invisible relations of humans to nature into production and consumption at the lowest possible price, in a process whereby money flows through nature. Islands of cash exchange exist within oceans of potentially cheap natural resources like minerals, plants and labour, and these islands are bounded by frontiers through which capitalism continually expands in order to resolve its periodic crises.

Patel and Moore begin their historical analysis from the year 1419 when Portugese sailors first sighted the (literal) island that they called Madeira. When they first landed it was entirely covered with trees, but within 40 years half had been cut down for shipbuilding and land to grow wheat for export to Portugal. The rest were cut down later for space to grow sugar and fuel to refine it in the world’s first factories. The small native population were enslaved, then reinforced by more slaves from North Africa. The authors claim this process set in train a great change of mindset, from earlier Christian notions of Providence to a total split between Nature and Society and a relentless pursuit of profit in exploiting the former. This change affected, and indeed still mostly affects, a newly emerging class of capitalists rather than the whole population: “We may all be in the same boat when it comes to climate change, but most of us are in steerage”.

This Nature/Society split sanctioned not just the pursuit of profit but the creation of all the Seven Cheap Things. Illiterate indigenous peoples, being uncivilised, were relegated to the category of Nature, which sanctioned enslaving them. Women, who did not fight, sail or rule but cared for babies, could equally be relegated to Nature rather than Society. The colonial idea spread rapidly throughout Europe, and soon the discovery of the Americas found sources of cheap gold and silver (ie. cheap money) and later cheap guano to act as fertiliser for cheap food, the better to feed cheap factory workers driven from the land into cities. Marriage and the family ensured that these workers were maintained and reproduced, in effect for free, by unpaid wives: “Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care... To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to ask for an end to capitalism”.

Each of the Seven Cheap Things receives a chapter to itself, which traces its changing relation to the others through history, using concrete examples. The levels of recursive influence involved may tax one’s power of visualisation, which suggests the book might reward a second reading (regrettably their Systems approach denies us solace from that old Marxist trick of merely intoning the magic word ‘dialectical’).

Occasionally their ‘real abstract’ view of a thing may feel over simplified – for example marriage among the aristocracy was always more about merging dynastic land-holdings than about the care or reproduction of labour – but that’s intentional, to abstract away from obscuring details. To risk a medical metaphor one might say that while Marx described the skeleton and musculature of capitalism, Patel and Moore expose its circulatory system and main organs, but it remains for many others to put flesh and skin onto its numerous limbs (think Vitruvian Man or the goddess Kali). The authors took a brave and wise decision to decant much of the detailed support for their arguments into copious references: the main book is only 212 pages long, with four to six references on most pages so that end-notes, bibliography and index fill another 100.

The book’s tone is radical but forensic – like a doctor describing a malignancy – and neither sentimental or moralising. The authors understand that capitalist states always in the end perpetrate forms of violence, whether on nature, on animals, or on human lives, during the resolution of their crises. Their chapter on Cheap Lives flaunts an excruciating list of the scientific racist taxonomy used to label possessed peoples under the Spanish sistema de castas in South America: negro, sambo, mestizo, mulato and worse.

In their concluding chapter Patel and Moore align themselves with various indigenous struggles provoked by resource theft or pollution like Standing Rock and Pan y Rosas; with Black Lives Matter; with Occupy and other recent grassroots campaigns. If frontiers are the motors of capitalism, then climate change marks the end of room for further expansion. They propose an agenda of resistance based on recognition (of the problems), reparation (not of money alone), redistribution (of land, energy and food), reimagination (of alternative futures), and recreation (liberation from drudgery by technology). It’s a distinctly anarchistic and anti-state stance, but rather tame given what went before, a flaw that might be fatal were it not shared by most similar commentaries, from Paul Mason's Post Capitalism to Wolfgang Streeck's How Will Capitalism End. The very vagueness tells us something about the daunting size of the task.

It struck me though how well their emphasis on ecology complements Jeffrey Sachs’ The Age Of Sustainable Development (about the UN’s Millenium Goals) which demands global coordination of state and non-state actors to combat simultaneously world poverty and the climate crisis. It also fits rather neatly with David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years as a critique of global finance. Read all three books and you may glimpse the outlines of a new vocabulary for social democrats, one that could prove more palatable to young people than the hermetic Marxist jargon still wielded by too many on the Left. An important book then, which deserves wide discussion.

THE TURN TO THE RIGHT

Dick Pountain/Political Quarterly/12 December 2016 14:49

"The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction": by Mark Lilla
The New York Review of Books Inc (Oct 2016)
Soft cover, 176 pages


To call 2016 a catastrophic year for the worldwide Left would be an understatement. Britain's self-harming Brexit referendum and the USA's toxic (possibly Putinised) presidential election were only the most spectacular of the setbacks, with genocidal civil wars and anti-immigrant activism on the rise all over. Contrast with that period of hubristic optimism before the 2003 Iraq Invasion could hardly be more stark. George Bush's Caring Conservatives and Tony Blair's New Labour thought that together they could fix the Post-Cold-War world permanently for democracy and free markets, but those free markets (plus the immense war costs) lead directly to the financial crash of 2008, which lead to the austerity of 2010, which lead to the great "revolt of the left-behind" that Brexit and Trump represent. It turns out that a majority, admittedly narrow, of European and US populations now reject the cosmopolitanism and liberalism espoused by their political leaders and celebrity role-models.

To make headway against this tide of reaction, the Left needs to understand this mind-set rather than merely excoriating it as racist, sexist, homophobic and whatever. Such tutting and finger-wagging contributed significantly to the current ideological rout. Few scholars are better equipped to provide such understanding than Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University New York. A political scientist and historian of ideas, Lilla has contributed many articles to the New York Review of Books analysing anti-Enlightenment and anti-Modern thought in religion and politics, and his latest volume "The Shipwrecked Mind" is built from expanded versions of several of these.

This reviewer first came across Lilla via his 1998 NYRB essay "A Tale of Two Reactions", while researching my book on the legacy of the '60s counter-culture. Lilla pondered the two revolutions that transformed post-war America, the 1960s "counter-cultural revolution" and Ronald Reagan's neoliberal economic revolution of the 1980s. He characterised both sides as "reactionary" in the strict sense of that term: the Right reacts ineffectually against the moral laxity of popular culture, while the Left reacts ineffectually against privatisation and market forces. But he also observed that young Americans appeared to have no difficulty reconciling the two positions by "holding down day jobs in the unfettered global economy while spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties". That remains largely true in Trump's America, except that those day jobs are harder to come by...

In "The Shipwrecked Mind" Lilla further dissects the reactionary impulse as displayed in the work of several 20th-century thinkers, some famous, others less so, most ignored by intellectual historians who find revolutionaries more interesting and sympathetic. Though his book was written well before Trump's victory, Lilla had already sensed the way the tide was running, that the media, internet and social networks were turning public opinion toward the right. He begins by clarifying an important point:

Reactionaries are not conservatives... They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings... The revolutionary sees the radiant future invisible to others and it electrifies him. The reactionary, immune to modern lies, sees the past in all its splendor and he too is electrified... His story begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God. Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals - writers, journalists, professors - challenge this harmony and the will to maintain order weakens at the top. (The betrayal of elites is the linchpin of every reactionary story)... Today political Islamists, European nationalists, and the American Right tell their ideological children essentially the same tale. The reactionary mind is a shipwrecked mind.

In his first section, "Thinkers", Lilla tackles three 20th-century philosophers: Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. Rosenzweig was a scholar first of Hegel, then of Judaism, who rebelled against Hegelian reason and the "disenchantment of the world" in favour of religious revival. He called for a “battle for religion in the twentieth-century sense” in terms, ironically enough, very similar to those of his contemporary, the anti-semitic Martin Heidegger. Voegelin was German-born but raised and studied philosophy in Vienna. A 1924 fellowship in New York exposed him to the teaching of John Dewey at Columbia, and imbued him with a hatred of racism and totalitarianism that proved embarassing on his return to Austria: in 1938 he had to flee Nazi arrest back to the USA. His major works "The Political Religions" and "The New Science of Politics" attacked fascism, communism and nationalism, but blamed Western secularism for their rise and defended the utility of religion for keeping social order. This makes him popular with the US religious Right, though Lilla argues that they misunderstand him (he also blamed Christianity for the American Revolution!)

The best-known of the three is Leo Strauss, another gifted European philosopher who emigrated to America before WWII. Throughout the 1950s and '60s at the University of Chicago he mentored a whole generation of neo-conservatives in the art of political dissembling. We have him to thank, in part, for US foreign policy under Reagan and both Bushes. His muscular strain of Platonism emphasised the need for a two-level philosophy: a softened, highly-edited version of the world to placate the masses, and a hard, cold (and secret) true picture for their masters. The current furore over online False News might be seen as a Straussian legacy.

The second half of the book covers contemporary reactionary thinkers on both Right and Left. Brad Gregory's "The Unintended Reformation" is an exercise in counterfactual history, where he suggests that had the Pope's side won the 30 Years War, capitalism might have developed in a different, more humane direction, with less consumerism and moral relativism. Er, yes, perhaps... Lilla goes on to skilfully dissect the Swiss Talmud scholar Jacob Taubes, who started the cult of admiration for Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt's work among European Left thinkers, then proceeds to Alain Badiou, who further exemplified such extraordinary intellectual gymnastics by moving seamlessly from Mao Tse Tung to St Paul as his preferred model of revolutionary fervour.

Lilla's last chapter analyses the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015 and their effect on French public opinion, through works by journalist Eric Zemmour and novelist Michel Houellebecq. A few months before the Paris attacks Zemmour published "Le Suicide Français", a tirade against the decline of France that became the second-best-selling book of 2014: not a simple racist of the Le Pen sort, Zemmour blames not just appeasement of Muslims but also the outsourcing, wage-cutting business classes and bankers. Houellebecq, perhaps France’s most important contemporary novelist, used to take a jaundiced, sub-situationist view of French consumer society, but his latest novel "Submission" changes tack with a plot about an Islamic political party coming to power in France in the near future and achieving popular support, thanks to a general decline of moral fibre wrought by secular consumerism. By a macabre coincidence it was published the morning of the Charlie Hebdo murders.

Following World War II social-democratic ideas enjoyed a certain hegemony on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the experience of collective wartime effort. (That even included "wet" Tory governments and the pre-Tea Party GOP to some degree). The 1960s counter-culture dented this hegemony through unrealistic and anachronistic revolutionary posturing, and so it was that on achieving office Margaret Thatcher could denounce the hegemony as "the ratchet of socialism". Between them the Thatcher and Reagan administrations inaugurated a devastatingly effective counter-attack, by playing on popular emotions, the prejudices and fears caused by rapid social change, and by ridiculing the moralising "political correctness" of the New Left. The ideas Mark Lilla examines in this book all contributed to this gradual, drip-by-drip process of undermining the post-war progressive mindset. As he puts it "for an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it". That's where we appear now to be with Brexit and Trump.

A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

Dick Pountain/Political Quarterly/The Knowledge Corrupters/13 May 2016 10:19

"The Knowledge Corrupters: Hidden Consequences of the Financial Takeover of Public Life" by Colin Crouch

Polity Press (Cambridge 2015)

Soft cover, 182 pages

ISBN 9780745669854"

"The Knowledge Corrupters" opens with an example of a truly perverse incentive – the 2014 revelation that the NHS was paying doctors £55 for every patient they diagnosed as suffering from dementia. Inadequate diagnosis of dementia had become a political hot potato, hence this modern solution: pay 'em to find more. Colin Crouch observes that this should surprise no-one because "That as much of life as possible should be reduced to market exchanges, and therefore to money values, is one of the main messages of the most influential political and economic ideology of today's world, neoliberalism."

That very word is currently site of a skirmish in the civil war for the soul of the Labour Party. A December 2015 editorial in the Blairite magazine Progress condemned the term neoliberalism as "lazy use of language" and "a catch-all for anyone with whom you disagree", but since it's mostly Corbynistas who use it against Blairites this was a predictable defensive parry. It's nevertheless true that, as a shorthand for the newly aggressive capitalism we've suffered since the late 1980s, the word is at risk of demotion to a status like that of "fascist" – a loosely-defined insult only vaguely connected to its proper historical meaning. Colin Crouch would be the last person in the world to use the term carelessly: his three previous books "Post-democracy" (2005), "The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism" (2011) and "Making Capitalism Fit for Society" (2013) contained masterly analyses of the crisis of 20th-century social democracy and its ongoing struggle with the neoliberal reaction.

Crouch regards neoliberalism not as an alien imposition, to be eliminated by return to some improbable variant of state socialism, but as a permanent feature of the political landscape, an inevitable response to social democracies that had become ossified, conservative, protectionist: no longer capable of dealing with the globalised power of multinational corporations and demands for choice from affluent consumers. For him a "mixed economy" means not just separate public and private employment sectors but also corresponding social-democratic and neoliberal ideological sectors, locked in permanent struggle for territory and even capable of mutual influence. The neoliberal Old Testament is Friedrich Hayek's 1943 work "The Road To Serfdom", which proclaimed that the market is a repository of superior wisdom which "renders all human attempts to second-guess it through the use of expertise imposed on its outcomes as necessarily inferior". Against communism, social democracy and fascism, Hayek and colleagues claimed that all attempts at planning were potentially totalitarian. During the economic instability that followed the 1970's Oil Crisis some conservative thinkers dared to resurrect this belief, electoral victories by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher enthroned it as the alternative to Keynesian demand management, which forced "Third Way" politicians like Clinton and Blair to entrench it as the new orthodoxy.

Crouch's new book focuses on one specific problem, the concerted attempts by neoliberal agents to restrict and corrupt the dissemination of information, by attacking the status of knowledge professionals and expert advice itself. His first chapter explores neoliberalism as a theory of knowledge, and claims that these attacks erode the feedback mechanisms necessary for democratic governance of modern technological, knowledge-based societies, thus becoming a threat to democracy itself.

Neoliberalism's current assault against the public realm goes by the name of New Public Management (NPM), the doctrine that all public services must behave as though they were in the private sector. NPM first emerged under Thatcher, but was enthusiastically extended by New Labour and continues under Cameron/Osborne. In Chapter 2, "The Corrosion of the Public-Service Ethos" Crouch explains that though proponents can portray this doctrine as democratic and anti-elitist – a cure for the blundering of planners which encourages experts to evolve and improve their skills through market exposure – it also masks a darker, populist belief that people who aren't motivated by profit must automatically be considered lazier and less competent than those who are. This belief prevails among most businesses and throughout our current Tory administration, and it demands several kinds of remedy: privatise whatever can be privatised; outsource all regulation by public professionals to private agencies; set performance targets and assessment regimes for those public professionals who had hitherto been self-governing.

Outsourcing forces public service professionals into closer contact with business, supposedly to teach them efficiency through competition but in practice encouraging corruption by breaking down firewalls deliberately erected after long experience (for example school inspectors or credit rating agencies). Performance targets are the neoliberal's way of evaluating services to which a monetary value can't be directly attached. They are meant to imitate the way businesses choose product lines, but in complex activities like healthcare, education and policing it's not possible for politicians to know which are the most significant aspects of performance to target. The result is dangerous over-simplification that undermines the accumulated knowledge and expertise of the service providers. Providers are also provoking into spending time gaming the targets that could have been spent providing service.

School and university reforms offer grim examples of this kind of interference, as does the police force. When opinion polls suggested that burglary and car theft most influenced public perception of the crime rate, targets were imposed to prioritise those crimes at the expense of police efforts against other areas, like child abuse. Hence new scandals, targets reset, narrow spotlight shone onto newly-crucial areas, a state of perpetual re-re-reform. Crouch calls this kind of excessive politicisation "hyper-democracy": when there are few major policy disagreements between main parties, they explore ever finer levels of detail to promote as distinctive policy, which further sidelines and undermines the knowledge of practitioners on the ground in favour of bright ideas from political ideologues.

Crouch condenses his arguments into five major points, which are:

1) Forcing public services into markets encourages them to over-simplify the knowledge that they demand, and undermines the professionals who create and deliver that knowledge.

2) Though markets do indeed concentrate certain kinds of knowledge, as Hayek claimed, over-reliance on them undermines other forms of knowledge, including science.

3) For earlier free-market theorists like Adam Smith it was axiomatic that market participants would behave with moral integrity, but contemporary Rational Choice theory actually exalts and rewards dishonesty and the corruption of knowledge.

4) Pure market theory presupposes an economy with many producers and consumers, but today's neoliberals tolerate high degrees of monopoly and often permit corporate elites to restrict access to and distort knowledge in their corporate interest (Crouch calls this "corporate neoliberalism").

5) To act fully effectively in a market demands amoral, calculating and self-centred behaviour. As one small component of a total personality this may be tolerable, but as markets spread into ever more areas of life it tends to coarsen us all into calculating machines.

He illustrates these points with copious real-world examples drawn from contemporary affairs and scandals, far too many to catalogue in this short review: suffice to say they include: BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill; the 2011 Japanese tsunami and nuclear meltdown; the Greek bail-out; PPI mis-selling; climate-change science; food nutrition labelling; the Libor, Euribor and Forex fiddling scandals; school GCSE performance indicators (gaming of); university impact targets; PFI building programmes; Big Pharma's suppression of adverse test results; G4S and Serco prisoner tagging scandals; HMRC's leniency to rich tax evaders, and much, much more.

Central to Crouch's critique is a distinction between three different conceptions of the consumer of goods and services: as citizen, as customer or as object. Citizens have rights to participate in discussion and decision-making, rather than merely to consume services. Customers have the capacity to choose to pay for different goods and services in a marketplace. Objects are mere statistics, passive recipients of whatever is offered to them. Neoliberals charge social democracy with reducing people to objects without choices, and preach privatisation to promote them to customers. Crouch agrees with the diagnosis but not the treatment, and would instead promote them to full citizens.

His conclusion is that we can't avoid depending upon markets that will always give suppliers the incentive to ignore important information or to deceive us, upon professionals who don't merit the trust we can't avoid placing in them, and upon politicians who exaggerate both problems to enhance their own power. The solutions he proposes are not such as to set one's pulse racing: more and better inspection regimes and more participation (that is, two-way communication between professionals and their citizen/users).

In fact these prescriptions are both hard to achieve and highly political. Inspectors must again be experts in their field (rather than price-cutting private agencies) which is expensive, and they must be freed from both political and commercial pressures. The recent furore over the BBC's charter renewal shows how political this can become. As for participation, the problem is a gross asymmetry of knowledge and educational level between expert and typical user. The neoliberal solution is to interpose a middle layer of advisory services, often via websites supported by advertising, which merely displaces the problem of trust onto these advice services and so is no solution. Colin Crouch is not entirely pessimistic, observing that in the UK at least strong public support for the welfare state persists, and that the assaults have not so far actually diminished the expert skills required for education and medicine – but for how long?