McKibben on Cameron
October 22nd, 2008
Views: 526
Posted by ChrisG at 12:19 pm
I’d be happy to recommend this excellent analysis by Ross McKibben of the dilemmas currently facing David Cameron (given his political baggage) on the grounds of this alone:
What is the function of the Conservative Party? It is to defend inequality: to make acceptable the social and economic unfairness inherent in a predominantly capitalist economy; to preserve the interests and privileges of social elites.
But it also contains this swift and succinct account of what happens when established instutions designed to embody and buttress social solidarity are overrun by the logic of a debt-based, future-colonising economy. Or alternatively, when the message of dominant political and economic ideologies is that, yes, everyone can be a capitalist, so long as one is prepared to put one’s access to stability and shelter up for collateral.
Fundamentally, private housing has become a compensation for the increasingly gross maldistribution of income. Inadequate incomes mean that large numbers of people don’t have access to the style of life that has always been the ultimate justification of neoliberalism and to which, reasonably enough, they now believe they have a right. What does give them access to it (in the short term) is credit. But credit has to be secured, and that’s what housing does. However, it works only if house prices keep rising and people have enough income to repay debt. When prices stop going up and people can no longer repay what they owe, the financial system begins to disintegrate. This is what has happened; and it has happened because we have replaced something like social democracy with credit democracy, or universal access to credit, and credit is a thoroughly inadequate substitute because sooner or later it has to be repaid. Which means that people’s incomes have to be sufficient to repay it, and in many cases they aren’t. What we have put in place is a dynamically destructive cycle. The number of houses is rationed in order to force up prices; people buy houses in order to secure credit on the strength of those prices; this encourages a heady belief in perpetual profit and thus both risky lending and risky borrowing; this renders the banking system unstable; and lending both to individuals and among banks then collapses.
In a word privatisation, or I’m I being too simplistic. Ah fuck it, so what.
Maybe you can infer something else too. Not only has
‘private housing … become a compensation for the increasingly gross maldistribution of income’.
but maybe it replaced income itself, both through the gaining of credit as outlined above and through the perceived wealth of the individual/family. It’s not as if wages have gone up in any meaningful way for millions, for years, rather ‘wage costs’ have been warred on for decades. And yet and yet and yet there was an acceptance of this because in one way, your house was your income. Who cares if you weren’t paid properly so long as house prices went up, up and up. For sure you’ll grumble at an annual 2.7% pay increase, but you won’t take to the streets and demand a change when your house gives you a monthly income rise of 5% (or whatever) wa-hoo, let’s go to the Maldives for the weekend.
However, the Maldives will be off the radar this year but I have a feeling they will be more popular than ever in the not too distant future. Here we have a perfect opportunity to alter this incredibly dumb and iniquitous system but what is happening is that the system is being bailed out and supported and with our future money. Privatisation of the future, you bet.
I want to rant more but I’m going to thrash some golf balls. I think I’ll feel better. Just shit it all. It’s still too much for me.