Invest Yourself
February 29th, 2008
Views: 785
It’s very tempting to get sucked into the trap of interpreting the NuLabour government as knee-jerk managerialists, constitutionally prone to respond to problems with ill-thought-out authoritarian ‘headline initiatives’ that soon die off as their absurdity becomes apparent, and from there it’s equally easy to find that the only response left open is to splutter about the irrationality of it all.
It shouldn’t be forgotten, though, that there remains a definite logic behind all this, and one which makes it possible to separate out the true cases of reactarian stupidity (e.g. Blair’s infamous idea of marching people off to ATMs to pay on-the-spot fines) from the consistent approach to policy that underlies other proposals, and which itself rests on entirely determinate presuppositions.
Take the latest proposals to tie drug users’ benefit entitlements to their willingness to enrol on drug treatment programmes. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith:
“If somebody is on work-related benefits or incapacity benefit and what is stopping them from getting back into work is their drug problem, what we are saying is that we will expect people as a minimum to come and have an appointment - a meeting - with a specialist drug treatment adviser,” she told Radio 4’s Today programme.
Or alternatively - and even more egregiously - Caroline Flint:
Flint, who switched from employment minister in the mini-reshuffle after Peter Hain stepped down, said: “It would be a big change of culture from the time when the council handed someone the keys and forgot about them for 30 years. The question that we should ask of new tenants is what commitment they will make to improve their skills, find work, and take the support that is available.”
One of the letters to the Guardian today which express bemusement and anger at the proposals on drug users expresses concisely the problem with the Government’s way of understanding individual agency that requires such an approach to policy.
I was stunned by the crass simplicity of the government’s proposal to withdraw benefits from drug users who drop out of treatment.
The ’simplicity’ of the proposals is indeed the issue. But this doesn’t derive from irrationality or incompetence. Perhaps we’ve become over-used to the idea that the Government is composed of pragmatists who are in favour of ‘what works’ above all to recognise what is at work here. The ’simplicity’ of these proposals - which was even more clearly characteristic of Flint’s - derives however from a set of ideological commitments that have gradually coalesced over the last eleven years, and which place NuLabour entirely at odds with all the principles that formed its historical commitments up until the mid-to-late 1980s. It’s not a Kinnock-style sell-out in favour of vanilla promises to ditch the ideals and just get things running, it’s a wholesale (and radical) ideological conversion.
These commitments have to do with a particular model of how people make decisions and understand their interests, one based very firmly on a body of presuppositions about what constitutes rational - and therefore morally praiseworthy - thought and action. These assumptions reverberate throughout NuLabour policy on education, health, employment and housing. Essentially, they picture people as (to use the Foucauldian phrase employed by the sociologists Colin Gordon and Nikolas Rose, among others) ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’. Going back to the 80s, the introduction of cheap personal credit turned anyone who was able to get hold of it into a capitalist of sorts. It did this by encouraging them to view the main focus of their economic lives as how to get access to financial tools for extracting value from the future in order to extend their ability to change their present conditions of life.
Since that time, the assumptions behind public policy have gradually drifted away from the traditional ‘rational actor model’ of game theory and public choice theory, to see the individual, in all his or her capacities, as a mechanism for investing energy in securing present and future opportunities for increased self-transformation (with the goal simply being maximum ‘flexibility’, the power to take advantage of whatever chances for maximising one’s utility happen to come along in a precarious world). In other words, policy is no longer about the social satisfaction of needs (as under Welfare State consensus models of the relation between State and society), but concerns the means by which people can be disciplined into managing themselves as respositories of human capital. This resource must be invested wisely in order to maximise the possibilty of gain, as with financial capital, and the investment routes used by the individual should be subjected to strict audit.
The policies that keep being proposed by the Government are not therefore entirely irrational, as they manifest a high degree of consistency with the assumptions on which they rest. The question is how far this now deeply-entrenched ideology is itself entirely at odds with reality, and whether we are prepared to ask what wider interests it serves. Their inability to truly ask these questions is the reason why NuLabour’s critics on the right cannot advance beyond reactarian bleating about jerking knees on the one hand and 19th century-vintage jibes about ‘Statism’ on the other. Rather, the issue is an understanding of morality and agency which leads to a massive and almost total extension of the logic of capitalism into more and more areas of what liberals used to call private life.
Brilliant.
Nice one. Chris Brooke did a series of pieces a couple of years back about the ideological similarities between new Labour’s evolving ideology and forms of European fascism:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2005_03_01_archive.html#111227592013074013
and I did something similar myself here:
http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2005/03/gargoyles_and_a.html
We seem to have identified a similar process from different points in its evolution.
Isn’t this just about the same point Adam Curtis made in The Century of the Self? That corporations and, eventually, politicians had spent the past 100 years indoctrinating people using public relations (propaganda) methods into consumerist masses whose sole function was to purchase goods to satisfy their inner desires and express their ‘lifestyle’ choices?
(Videos available from The Internet Archive.)
Certainly an analysis needs to make the distinction between “knee-jerk managerialism” and the ideological basis of the policy proposals [and their implementation] that are a feature of the New Labour approach.
However, a distinction also needs to be made between “knee jerk managerialism” [”ill thought out”; “headline grabbing initiatives” etc.] and managerialism per se. The point being to recognise the ideological underpinnigs of managerialism itself.
I’d argue that in terms of the adopted model, the underlying assumptions, the approach and the implementation process, there is little significant ideological difference between the New Labour approach (as described here and in some of the links other posters have provided) and managerialism.
Identifying the ideological basis of the approach is vital and important but it does not in itself negate the practical stupidity of much of what is proposed and often implemented. Nor does it negate arguments that point out that a particular idea/proposal or implemeted initiative does not correspond to reality and either cannot ,work or will do more damage on the road to ultimate failure (I’m sure many examples present themselves here).
Not that pointing such things out in rationale and coherent way tend to make much difference. I’d suggest here that we are faced with a mindset that seeks to create it’s own reality as described in the now well known quote from an unknown Bush aide in an interview by Ron Suskind in the New York tiumes magazine of October 17 2004:
“The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”"
In this regard the fundemental issue seems not to be one of recognising the differences between the knee jerk type of managerialism and the ideological basis of New Labour’s approach but is instead one between a faith based approach and a reality based approach.
I just wish I had the time to get into a detailed comment on this post: it’s very interesting. For starters, I’ll paste in what I posted over at Chicken Yoghurt:
“…but I would have thought this was connected to the argument that New Labour believes in running the people to suit the economy, backed up with the threat of how globalisation is producing millions of Chinese and Indian PhD graduates who will work for a dollar a day (and yet, of course, we will compete with a world-class service economy as validated by McDonalds). My current lazy description of the process is ‘the workfare state’ (as in New Labour’s line that ‘work is good for you’ - or rather ‘work - if you know what’s good for you’) allied to a policy on Incapacity Benefit which is closer to the practice of patching up soldiers for trench warfare in WW1 than to anything resembling the welfare state).
“PS: Did you read Stiglitz on the cost of the Iraq war? In amongst the figures, the phrase ‘ideology of convenience’ leapt out as a perfect description of New Labour.”
Or as you put it:
“In other words, policy is no longer about the social satisfaction of needs (as under Welfare State consensus models of the relation between State and society), but concerns the means by which people can be disciplined into managing themselves as respositories of human capital. This resource must be invested wisely in order to maximise the possibilty of gain, as with financial capital, and the investment routes used by the individual should be subjected to strict audit.”
In this respect, tuition fees make sense, and it explains why New Labour keeps trying to pretend it’s not ‘really’ debt - it’s ‘really’ an investment set off against future earnings.
But this doesn’t explain what is particularly ‘entrepreneurial’ about going into rehab (especially when the policy doesn’t seem to apply to alcoholics). It just looks like an even more draconian ‘actively seeking work’ test, as pioneered by the Tories.
That said, it also raises the question whether New Labour is aware that all of this is intellectually coherent, or whether it’s simply evolved as a way of riding the globalisation tiger, especially when both Blair and now Brown seem to shrug their shoulders and say ‘what can we do? we’re only the poor ickle government’, even as they try to regulate the people ever more intrusively.
Justin & Jamie: thanks! Thanks also for the heads-up Jamie on yours and Chris’ contributions.
Mike: Two points in response - first, I think that, while Curtis has done us a service in raising the level of TV content (his The Mayfair Set was particularly good), the amount of emphasis he gives to intellectuals (Bernays or von Neumann, for example), means that he ends up presenting a far too conspiratorial picture. The emergence of consistent ideologies and patterns of practice among policy makers depends on far more contingent and haphazard histories than the ideas-led ones that Curtis tends to end up telling. Secondly, the argument I was presenting doesn’t really present people as being coerced into being passive consumers; rather, it’s about making people into active participants in the creation of a different form of society. It’s empowerment, literally - but the power gained is power over a very limited range of options.
Dave: I’d agree that NuLabour-style governance only makes sense when understood against the background of managerialism, and also that there’s a fair amount of faith at work here. But the idea of ‘entrepreneurialism’ here makes the practices employed consistent at a level that a target-led culture of ‘what works’ does not have (despite its own ideological underpinnings). Fundamentally, it manifests a particular idea of the ‘good life’ (here’s the faith-based governance), and seeks to make this a reality by seeking to change the relationship between the present and future of individual agency in a way analogous to how widely-available personal credit altered how we negotiate between what is happening now and the future. Nevertheless - to stress again the point about contingency I mentioned in my reply to Mike above - this doesn’t mean there is some kind of seamless total worldview at work here. Rather, it’s a lash-up - and some of its expressions fall on the side of the plainly ridiculous, it’s true.
redpesto: there’s a high degree of intellectual coherence there, but it’s a by-product of many, many iterations of policy committee meetings and ministerial decisions that define themselves, again and again, against the same ‘outdated’ assumptions. It’s not a covert, fully-thought-out programme - more like, as you say, trying to adapt to processes which are viewed as fundamentally uncontrollable. Over time, as these ideas coalesce more and more, it becomes increasingly likely that they will begin to take an active role themselves in the formation of policy - and once things become a bit more conscious (when a party tries to define what it stands for, etc.) then that’s when the stupidities really begin.
“Over time, as these ideas coalesce more and more, it becomes increasingly likely that they will begin to take an active role themselves in the formation of policy - and once things become a bit more conscious (when a party tries to define what it stands for, etc.) then that’s when the stupidities really begin.”
Too right. Take Asbos - what starts out as a means of dealing with low level nuisance and disorder, first becomes a means of bypassing due process (one can get a longer sentence for breaching the Asbo than for the actual offence), and then gets ‘expanded by analogy’, as it were, to start applying to more and wider groups of people (see also ‘choice’ ). Likewise, labour’s abandoning of social justice as a key part of existence - in favour of…well, what exactly? - leads to Brown’s dodgy rhetoric about ‘British jobs for British workers’ and the lame attempt to import US-style rhetoric into a post-colonial industrialised European country.
Chris,
In other words, policy is no longer about the social satisfaction of needs (as under Welfare State consensus models of the relation between State and society), but concerns the means by which people can be disciplined into managing themselves as respositories of human capital.
Perhaps if you substitute “disciplined” for the word “privatised” then it might make it even clearer to understand what is going on. As your next sentence makes clear;
This resource (THE PRIVATISED INDIVIDUAL) must be invested wisely in order to maximise the possibilty of gain, as with financial capital, and the investment routes used by the individual should be subjected to strict audit.
So of course there is a painful thread of coherence and understanding underpinning Government policy and why, horribly, they appear to target the dispossessed, the needy, the unfortunate - and just occasionally the deserved in the course of there governance. And as an aside it could also explain their nonchalance about non-doms. These are privatised individuals already “…managing themselves as respositories of human capital”. They are not the problem. It’s those that ain’t. A plague on all their council houses if they don’t capitalise themselves soon enough appears to be Government policy to remedy this.
Which then leads to…
The question is how far this now deeply-entrenched ideology is itself entirely at odds with reality, and whether we are prepared to ask what wider interests it serves.
And the answer is contained in the ‘aide quote’ supplied by Dave Hansell. (And isn’t this quote chillingly reminiscent of something O’Brien might have said to Winston in 1984?) The reality is that which is enforced upon us. What does it matter that the ideology might be entirely at odds with ‘reality’ if the reality can be made to fit the ideology - it isn’t anyway. As a former long-term unemployed I read with utter fear and hatred the proposal that said people may lose their council homes if they didn’t get a job. That fear and hatred was/is real. The ideology was/is reality.
So for me, the fundamental issue isn’t whether its “a faith based approach and a reality based approach [to policy]”, it’s a run for your fucking life and get the fuck out of there, approach to policy. Unless you have got the security of disposable income, security of employment, housing, and health, with the ideology that this (and the next few Governments) will pursue, you will be hounded until you start to turn the trick of countable (what is it?) CBA profit. Initially, and perhaps in perpetuity, it will focus on the poorest and least secure, but the logic of privatisation and the ‘privatised individual’ will be that eventually it will rise through the social ranks and effect even those who currently believe they are out of reach of these policies.
So you can surmise that I agree with the tack of your post but think you can say much more. Believe me, I am at the cutting edge of NuLab policy. I was a drain on the economy, I wasn’t a profit making unit (or capitalist prostitute, turning a trick for money) thus I had to flee at the first opportunity for a utilitarian lifestyle. I find myself in South Korea, and am awaiting the others to inexorably follow.
Hope all is well matey.
Allistair
Hi Al. You’re right, there’s a strong flavour of ‘as if’ here - the Government are pushing a strong ethical agenda, based on people who have no resources emulating those who have, substituting their own capacities for investment capital. It’s there that the ‘faith-based’ nature of all this is most evident, as it implies a kind of ‘imitation of Christ’, only with the injunction to ’sell all you have and follow me’ meaning something quite different.
You’re right too in that the faith-based community stuff is (probably intentionally) redolent of O’Brien - but it’s a fantasy of total control that’s implied in it, not a reality, and the same fantasy that ran aground in Iraq. The idea that one can turn individuals into fully ‘privatised’ units can make inroads into reality, but it can’t ultimately transform it wholesale. The danger is that the penal and psychiatric systems might expand to take care of what’s left over.
Let me know how things are going in SK. Take care!
The question is how far this now deeply-entrenched ideology is itself entirely at odds with reality, and whether we are prepared to ask what wider interests it serves.
AND
The idea that one can turn individuals into fully ‘privatised’ units can make inroads into reality, but it can’t ultimately transform it wholesale.
What reality is this then? Responsibility? social justice? fairness? human dignity? equality? compassion? decency? honesty? integrity? intelligence? wit? imagination? democracy? accountability? truth? morality? or, as I suspect, individual agency? I’m curious to know as I can’t necessarily see beyond the reality of losing the roof over your head if you don’t yield to any one of New Labour’s super aggressive beliefs and ideas. The truth about how individuals act and operate is of absolutely no significance whatsoever, unless of course you act in the manner of the rational, economic, self seekers and improver’s as you outlined. In which case the glory of consumer capital nirvana awaits and damn the rest for it.
Therein clearly, we must ponder the level of extraordinary aggressiveness as introduced in the initial piece. The Government does damn us for not possessing the right kind of human agency. The language of Smith, Flint and no doubt others of that ilk is made absolutely more mind twistingly insane and violent by the shear passivity and neutrality of the way the aggressiveness is spoken. Effectively ‘well, it is reasonable for us to want you to do what’s right, both for yourselves and ourselves’. And if you don’t, well, well what exactly? Here comes a chopper to chop off your head I suppose (1789 & 1984) or perhaps more likely, here’s an ASBO for your truculence of human agency, or a prison term for breach of said ASBO in a wild fit of individual peak, or even, here’s a nice comfortable rehabilitation center that so you can rest a while, voluntarily of course, but when you realise the error of your ways we’ll let you back out, ‘becos of course you can’t be trusted cos your not rational like wot we are innit’. Or as you put it,
“These commitments have to do with a particular model of how people make decisions and understand their interests, one based very firmly on a body of presuppositions about what constitutes rational - and therefore morally praiseworthy - thought and action”.
I suppose what I’m getting at is the actual reality of the outcomes that these decisions have. Government decisions may well be informed by a particular view of human agency and interests and for you they may well be at odds with reality, but this in no way mitigates the reality that real people, really find themselves in. Get to the consequences of Government policies and realise just how nervous and under threat ‘real’ people really feel. And whilst of course the reasonably reasonable inert ph neutral language always targets those groups least loved, the druggies, the long-term unemployed work shy, arse scratching lay abouts draining the life blood out of the rest of us hard working decent respectable profit making achievers, so the impact is felt by the overwhelmingly vast majority of the rest otherwise known as the working poor, the elderly (or even just older) the ‘uneducated’ or ‘undereducated’, the ‘unskilled’, single mums, married mums, and single people. There will undoubtedly be more than these groups and in these groups so you will find the true horror, the shear waste of life that New Labours policies lay waste too.
As redpesto put it ‘work is good for you’ - or rather ‘work - if you know what’s good for you’.
Too sodding right and then some, because all the while the Government speaks with the apparent soft tongue of reasonableness, they genuinely and really threaten homelessness, prison (via the ASBOs as above noted) or for those that don’t make even that, the psychiatric system, so yes I do believe that that is a real danger.
I, of course, have just gone off on one and thank you for the space for this rant. However, I have been scared out of my wits by what I’ve come across in these recent times and only surmise that there will be a grim inevitability to it all. What chance your reality asserting itself? Now that’s a challenge for the homeless, dispirited, tired, the impoverished and the hungry.
As I am in Korea I ponder these issues in a couple of ways. Firstly in, and of, themselves. This is usually summed up along the lines of, oh my fucking good god. However, I also ponder (lazily) in an undergrad ‘compare and contrast’ kind of way. Thus a thought struck me a while ago. Whilst reading another shrill commentary of despair emanating from that blessed place I wondered if the reason why so many people or so furiously pissed off with the state of affairs today is because Britain is becoming Asian (and no, not in a colour sense). Long hours, low pay, dwindling social welfare, even less justice, apparently enforced consumerism, institutional corruption (Northern Rock has just popped into my head) increased gambling and I wouldn’t be surprised if revenue generated via the sex trade is on a steep rise too. I just mention this as an idle thought rather than a fully worked up exclamation mark! but it is a thought that might have something in it. As I’m here with apparently not much to do I might see where it takes me. Britain: The New Asia. Wonder where that might end up.
I’m off to the pub to chill, critics and waspish folk alike may well say that that’s the most sensible and clear thing I’ve written. You’re probably right. Twas fun. Cheers.