potlatch

my new reports on co-operatives and mutuals

Just as I was leaving my previous job, at the Centre for Mutual and Employee-owned Business, I was involved in three different pieces of writing, a couple of which have now been published (the third will follow in the next couple of months).

Firstly, the Blueprint for a Co-operative Decade has been published by the International Co-operative Alliance. This was something that Cliff Mills and I worked on over last summer, and was discussed first at a discussion of the ICA board in Cape Town in June, then at the ICA annual conference in Manchester in October. So in fine co-operative style, it's the result of much dialogue, and a careful effort to forge consensus. In that sense, Cliff and I are 'anti-gurus'.

Secondly, Measuring Mutuality: Indicators for Financial Mutuals [pdf] has been published by the Association of Financial Mutuals. This is an attempt by Jonathan Michie and I to think through how to evaluate performance of risk-managing institutions, other than in terms of profit. Given how much culpability 'shareholder value' in banking holds for our current malaises, this is an issue whose pertinence must extend beyond the mutuals sector, I'd have thought.

Hope these are of some interest. Happy to discuss them further.

York conference on neoliberalism

Everybody needs to go to this excellent-looking - and free - conference at York in June, Neoliberalism, Crisis and World System. They've assembled some excellent speakers (plus me).

My paper will develop some of the ideas in my neo-communitarianism piece, to reflect on the fact that neoliberalism both began with a critique of the 'social' (in the form of the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s) and is now being arguably reformed or replaced via new logics of 'social' quantification. It strikes me that what facebook et al promise in the form of 'predictive social analytics', for example, isn't that different from what Soviet economists were tasked with doing for a planned economy. So neoliberalism is therefore book-ended by utopian efforts to optimise or rationalise 'the social'. This is the abstract:

Friedrich Hayek referred to the term ‘social’ as “that weasel word”, arguing that it was meaningless and always disguised the true intentions of its user. The origins of neoliberalism can be traced to the ‘socialist calculation’ debates of the 1920s and ‘30s, in which Austrian economists and leftwing neo-classical economists argued over whether efficiency was possible in a planned economy. Neoliberal government has been analysed in terms of the ‘death of the social’ (Rose, 1996) while economists have been accused of ‘colonising’ the social, with economistic theories such as ‘social capital’ (Fine, 2008, 2011). But today, the ‘social’ seems everywhere, in the form of social enterprise, valuation, prescribing, media and so on. This paper reflects on neoliberalism as a failed attempt to cleanse modernity of Rousseauian social theory, arguing that the crisis of the last five years has seen the ‘revenge of the social’, which experts and economists strive to cope with, by reducing it to the psychological.

"when you find yourself in the thick of it..."

A few years ago, while sitting in Euphorium bakery on Upper Street, I observed a couple of Islington characters, possibly undercover lawyers, enter the cafe and sit down at the table next to mine. Both were 30-something men in uniform wacky glasses, sleeveless puffer jackets and ill-fitting jeans. "So how's it going, Simon?" asked one, with more enthusiasm than I could stomach. "Great", replied the other, "I've just started writing a book!". Oh no, please, no. "What's it about?" asked Simon's mini-me. Pausing in search of suspense, Simon eventually replied, "It's about what it's like being a dad".

For the love of god, what is it that you people don't understand? Do you honestly think that the world isn't satisfied with your splurges of human reproduction, that it also needs it publicly documenting?? Haven't we finished with that whole Nick Hornby thing yet??? These are the same people who email in to Radio 6 to let the world know that they once saw a Pixies gig.

All I can say in my hypocritical defence is that I am still of the opinion that other parents are the worst advertisement for parenthood that is out there. Because in answer to the (mysteriously unasked) question 'who has destroyed potlatch for these past three months?', the answer is - she has, Martha Prior Davies, born 31st October 2012.

So I had an idea. From now on potlatch is going to be a baby and parenting blog, dedicated to questions such as "Is it ok to play Wagner to your little one, even though he was rightwing?" and "How to ask the barista nicely whether their babyccinos are made with milk from hand-stroked cows?".

OK, maybe not. But, as Charlie Brooker and Jonathan Freedland both found, with the best will in the world, it's difficult not to discover some public significance in this event. Certainly there is existential and personal significance, though whether people need to hear about that is another matter (Simon). Is there intellectual significance? It's a great pleasure to say 'not that much'. Wittgenstein urged his philosophy students to tackle the painful linguistic misunderstanding on which philosophy is based, by quitting the university and taking a job in Woolworths. He might have added: when a small thigh is so beautifully round and pudgy, that you find yourself having to stretch the skin to wipe the poo out of the creases, then you have truly escaped the curse of theory. And yet...

The existentialism is unavoidable. Maybe that's because most babies, our's included, arrive in hospitals, where suffering and loss might lurk around any corner. In a hospital, every arm around a shoulder might signal mourning. One feels almost guilty - mistaken? - to be swimming against this tide by introducing new life into such a situation. But the morbidity of having a child struck me much earlier. Crossing the Marylebone Road the day I found out I would be a father, I hesitated before running across the path of a juggernaut that was still five or ten seconds away. What if I slipped? What if I had mis-calculated its speed? From now on, life would be a series of pedestrian crossings. Thanks, Martha. That rock'n'roll suicide that I'd had up my sleeve, in case sociology turned out not to be a source of glamourous danger after all, would also have to be shelved.

And still there was more morbidity! As we carried her out into the world on the second day of her life, I had a strange feeling of suddenly understanding the Israel-Palestine conflict. She was so tiny, so fundamentally illogical and so beautiful, that if someone were to harm her, then I could only feasibly respond using violence. I would also never be able to forget that they'd done it. Something about the mismatch between her tiny capabilities and the intensity of emotion brought on a form of paranoia. If, say, the army accidentally killed her with a mis-directed shell, then waging permanent war on the British army would feel like a plausible reaction. When trying to make sense of conflicts in Northern Ireland or the Middle East, we focus on tangible, 'cultural' phenomena of territory and 'religion' - but perhaps human beings can gradually forget about the loss of land and the slow dissolution of ritual. Maybe it's the loss of their children that they simply have no capacity to forgive.

Luc Boltanski writes in Love and Justice as Competencies that what love and violence share is a refusal of equivalence. Where the grammar of justice is to treat people equally with a measure, both love and violence refuse this equality and this measure. They refuse proportionality or uniformity. Hence, Boltanski argues, it is probably fruitless to try and understand how politics descends into violence, purely by focusing on the failures of law. Misdeeds made within a system of justice can be 'repaid' or punished with proportionality. But injuries experienced within the order of love have no proportionate response. This report from Gaza came a few weeks after Martha was born, and made me reflect that the political consequences of such an event will be literally unquantifiable.

 

On the cheerier side of things, I can happily report that babies are conclusive proof of the fantasy of the Cartesian ego. Cogito ergo sum should actually read vomito ergo sum. Did Descartes have children? I know Kant didn't, which shows. I wish someone with children had told me this before I tried to plough through the Critique of Pure Reason. No, it turns out that there is no a priori, transcendental or ontologically separate thing called a 'subject', 'cogito' or 'consciousness', that exists prior to or in parallel to the material world. Before everything else, there is a system of organs to be constantly tended like a very loud and exhausting Tamagotchi. David Hume, on the other hand, clearly did have children: I watch Martha gradually working out that when she smacks herself in the face, the resulting pain is caused by the hand waving around in front of her. What we call 'reason' is really just the learned piecing together of cause and effect. (One day she may even work out that the hand in question is 'hers', but everything in good time).

Visitors coo over Martha in the same way that tourists gasp in awe at Manhattan. They point to the skyscrapers, central park and the delis, as if the island were a self-sufficient paradise. They show no interest in the stream of trucks that pours over bridges in the early morning, bringing fresh produce for ungrateful Manhattanites to consume, and pours back over bridges at night carrying thousands of tonnes of putrid garbage. As Freud understood, it's really not obvious where the baby ends and the parent begins. Babies, like Manhattan, demonstrate the truth of Bruno Latour's 'actor-network' theory. They are individual human actors, yet they only exist thanks to a network of constantly supportive human and non-human actors. Next time you go and visit someone's new-born, ask to see where the real action is: maybe it's time to bounce the breast-pump on your knee or get your photo taken with the bucket of Napisan.

The wonderful aspects of having a child would be difficult for me to describe without sounding trite (pay attention, Simon), and are not what my miserabilist blog is for. The tiresome aspects are too tedious to report. But all I can say is that they're better when people don't harp on about them (Simon!). "The first six weeks are the worst!" someone told my partner, who on the contrary was happily savouring nearly every moment of them. "Your life will be unrecognisable", various friends with children warned me darkly - something which is also true after the death of loved-ones, but you don't hear repeated ad nauseam at funerals.

Tiredness is difficult, but it isn't dangerous and it isn't terminal. I picked up Mark Rice-Oxley's 'depression memoir' recently (which I'm afraid I put down as soon as I came across the apparently unselfconscious line "my heart was racing like a hamster in an experiment"). With all sympathy for his or anyone's mental distress, one passage in a chapter entitled 'Is Dad all there is?' just appeared self-destructive:

Fatherhood is a watershed. The pram in the hallway is the enemy of promise. It depletes. People with small children don't generally distinguish themselves... Look at Beckham, Flintoff, Pietersen, Rooney. Look at Bowie, McCartney, Lennon. Don't tell me any of them were greater at their thing after they became fathers.

This poses the question: if parenthood turns out to be in conflict with an already bipolar culture of performance anxiety, where to turn one's ire? Towards the pram in the hallway, or the Red Bull-swilling sporting icons of neoliberalism? If one's sense of self is rooted in some myth of limitless potential and time, then, yes, a child will do serious damage to that. Time suddenly feels finite, both in a mortal sense and in a practical, managerial sense of how to carry on getting things done. That is a reality that has long preceded the post-68 culture of individual optimisation, which - Alain Ehrenberg's superb book would suggest - deserves far more blame for depression than the arrival of a baby.

One fear that I did hold, before Martha's arrival, was that parenthood would make me rightwing. I wondered if I'd suddenly start to worry about the stock market or crime-rates, in a way that I never had done previously. Maybe I'd go on anti-paedophile marches! But on the contrary, I only feel all the more resentful towards this country's elites, for robbing us of so many possible futures without care. I resent even more the managerialist nonsense that divides people into achievers and non-achievers, leaving me with the only hope that my daughter falls into the former category, and the Newspeak of an education system that uses the term 'excellent' to mean 'acceptable', and the term 'acceptable' to mean 'non-acceptable'. And this is quite aside from the massive NHS-love-in that accompanies child-birth.

That's enough about babies now. We shall enjoy Martha, privately (unless you happen to be friends with me on facebook, in which case you'll have learnt to stand well back), and I shall henceforth get back to blogging about what ads on the tube tell us about the crisis of capitalism and stuff, perhaps with just a tinge less anger.

Speaking at UEL, 6th February

I'm speaking at University of East London on 6th February, at a seminar entitled Security, Community & Democracy. My talk will be developing some of the ideas from my recent piece on neo-communitarianism:

‘Experiments in Community: Relational Government and Audit After Neoliberalism’.

The neoliberal era is – or was – characterised by the extension of economic modes of evaluation into new corners of social, cultural and political life. Various critical scholars noted that it either eradicated the ‘social’ realm as a distinct terrain of action, or else re-imagined it in ways that was supportive of the ‘economic’. But in the wake of various crises of neoliberalism, the ‘social’ has reappeared with its own logic, as ‘social media’, ‘social prescribing’, ‘social enterprise’ and so on. Policy-makers have re-discovered the social, not simply as an economic ‘externality’, but as a psychological or neurological resource, which facilitates wellbeing and behavioural rationality. But what sorts of evidence, audit and evaluation will be required to realise new forms of ‘relational government’? What does it mean for a policy to ‘succeed’, if not in a purely economistic sense? The paper will suggest that audited field experiments in community and behavioural policy, accompanied by data analytics, represent a key methodological basis for governance in the emerging era.

Hope to see you there!

Political Quarterly article published

My article, The Emerging Neocommunitarianism, which I've already uploaded a pre-print of, is now published in Political Quarterly!

conclusion to Uneconomics

I've written a concluding piece for the Uneconomics essay series, that I've been editing over the course of the year. You can read it here (I didn't write the headline) or a chunk here:

A great deal has been said and written about how the present economic crisis has (or should have) undermined the validity of orthodox economic methods. Part of the purpose of the Uneconomics debate has been to develop this challenge, as demonstrated by Phillip Mirowski’s polemical contribution. But less has been said about how this crisis represents an overwhelming endorsement for the emergence of more culturally-conscious forms of economic and political analysis.

Can you really hope to understand why bankers would risk their entire banks, without also understanding something of the destructive exuberance of finance culture since the 1980s? When core pillars of financial governance, such as ‘shareholder value’ and central bank inflation-targeting, start to backfire, surely it is important to understand how certain numerical indicators come to attain symbolic authority in the first place. What is going on when regulators and credit-raters place their faith in statistical risk models?    

Dealing with these issues requires an anthropological sensibility, which is attuned to questions of symbolic representation and organizational norms. So much of the financial crisis comes down to a single problem, of allowing models of reality to be mistaken for reality itself. The paradoxical result was that the quest for transparency began to generate its own opacity. Accounting reports obscured the messiness of organisations. Simple credit ratings hid the intrinsic complexity of the firms, mortgages and products that were being evaluated.

the problem with clever people

Flicking through my Guardian app on my way to work today, I came across David Mitchell's Sunday column, which opened with the following vignette:

My old flatmate, as I've mentioned here before, was fascinated by the question: "Which would you choose, the washing machine or the vote?"... To clarify, I don't mean a washing machine. It's not just swapping your vote for a free washing machine – not many of us would do that. And neither is it the invention of the washing machine. You're not being asked merely to live washing machineless in a world where such things don't exist so you couldn't miss them. No, you stand to permanently lose access to a labour-saving technology, which you will still observe everywhere, in exchange for a continued ability to minutely influence the democratic process.

Mitchell's old flatmate is clearly a 'clever' man (don't try and tell me that kind of smart-ass clever question didn't come from a bloke). Maybe he met Mitchell at Cambridge. He probably studied a difficult subject, like mathematics, or one of those subjects that requires lots of memorising, like law. Something tells me he didn't study politics though. And reading the opening of Mitchell's article, I immediately wanted to punch Mitchell's old flatmate, mostly in the face.

The main reason why I felt this way was that David Mitchell's old flatmate (DMOF heareafter) had successfully planted this thought in my head, like an irritating sonic logo, from where it then refused to budge. If his task was to pollute perfectly good minds with irritating problems that might have fallen out of MENSA-branded fortune cookies, he had delivered on it with gusto. Faced with DMOF's challenge, my instinctive response was to put my head in my hands and wish it would go away. How can I possibly know which I'd choose, the washing machine or the vote you bastard? But what made it worse was the image of the glee that would come over DMOF's clever face, as he witnessed another victim snared in his clever net. Clever old DMOF.

One of the problems with clever people is that they transport their cleverness around like confetti, to chuck at people whether its wanted or not. They turn up at perfectly pleasant parties and events, with pre-prepared conversational gambits and questions, aimed at unsettling people and putting them to the test. They only start cleverness contests that they suspect they will win. They sit at the interface of computer science and bad political philosophy, offering Nietzschean interpretations of the Starwars trilogy, and then changing the subject once somebody starts actually talking about Nietzsche's writing. I suspect that DMOF has already worked out his answer to his own challenge, and that his answer is 'washing machine', for cleverly nihilistic-mathematical reasons that he will explain to an attentive audience, if only he can get one.

But lets suppose, for DMOF's sake, he actually has a background in political philosophy. Then what is he doing? Presumably he is helping us to interrogate many of our most deeply held beliefs, illuminating what is at stake when we claim to be 'in favour' of something. He is using his clever device to put history and social reality on hold for a moment, and helping us explore our priorities. He is doing so for 'heuristic' purposes, maybe even for our benefit. He means to help us, does that generous DMOF!

Or perhaps DMOF has some neo-conservative or neo-liberal sympathies. His games are less innocent than they appear, seeing as they force us to admit how perillous our 'Western' luxuries are. Only through intense work in securing the pillars of Western civilisation might we have either a vote or a washing machine, and we should be damned happy with either. One can imagine Milton Friedman pointing to a 1960s socialist nation, and arguing that we liberals patronise them with our assumption that it is votes that they most want, and not washing machines. DMOF's little games are a reminder of so much that we 'Westerners' take for granted, the 'killer apps' which keep tyranny and hand-washing at bay. Hang on a minute... did David Mitchell once share a flat with Niall Ferguson??

Yet while DMOF can doubtless give endless ingenious explorations of what his choice means, would he have anything to say about the world he has completely erradicated from his clever little trope? If he is interested in the choice between political and economic values, does he then explore ways in which the two are in fact traded off, the policies which promote one over the other, the intellectual shifts through which one colonises the other? I fear not. And yet through his sheer cleverness, he has made political philosophising his own personal terrain, and struck depression into the heart of all those who once aspired to practice it.

One of the reasons I've ended up doing sociology is because it's a good way to avoid people like DMOF. The fact that they no doubt view the feeling as mutual only strengthens that view.

after neoliberalism article

This article on 'neo-communitarianism' is due to appear in the next edition of Political Quarterly. In the meantime, I've tried to outline the argument in a shorter piece, for an interesting new online magazine, Aeon. You can read the article here.

new job

I'm changing jobs. As of next week I will be Assistant Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at University of Warwick, working with Celia Lury and others. So sadly my involvement in the world of co-operatives and mutuals will decline somewhat, although I've been working on three reports on that topic over the last few months, all of which should be published during the autumn. I'll be replaced at the Centre for Mutual & Employee-owned Business by the excellent Ruth Yeoman, whose PhD looks at meaningful work and workplace democracy.

And if you want to know just what the hell a Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies is supposed to do, I will explain in due course. However, some of the rationale for the centre might be detected in this, this [pdf] and this.

Oh, and I've now joined twitter. For the third time.

equality of opportunity has not existed

Like the Judaic idea of God, ‘equality of opportunity’ is something that is only ever spoken of as a perpetual absence. Those who profess to be in favour of it are sometimes able to point to examples of it in the distant past, or imagine it in the future, but it’s difficult to imagine someone pointing at a concrete sociological occurrence and saying – there, that’s equality of opportunity. In fact, when something happens that quickens the pulse of the self-described ‘meritocrats’ and ‘level playing field’ morons, such as Mo Farah winning an athletics gold medal for Britain or Colin Powell rising to become US Secretary of State, the excitement is underscored by a sense that this triumph was radically, statistically unlikely.

Absent the inanity of sporting contest – where the rules of the individual contest are specifically designed to produce the most localised and irrelevant equality of opportunity – and you are left with false memories of the American settlers and of Victorian entrepreneurs. The rest is guff, or ideology as some people prefer to call it. Equality of opportunity simply doesn’t and never has existed.

But I don’t simply mean this in the critical sense, that life or capitalism is intrinsically unfair. I mean it in an ontological, existential sense, that ‘equality of opportunity’ refers to something that has no substance or content; it cannot exist. The notion is entirely formal and abstract, and therefore it is impossible for it to be realised in any set of concrete political or sociological institutions. It is in its nature not to exist.

From a liberal perspective, this is a feature not a bug. In pursuit of something like ‘equality of opportunity’, John Rawls specifically sought to ignore contingent and empirical features of society, and work only with abstract principles, thereby ensuring that his mode of reasoning was consistent with ‘fairness’. Introduce institutions or history, and fairness is lost. But by the same token, it is impossible to then say whether a given economic distribution (as opposed to a legal system) is consistent with Rawls’ definition of justice, precisely because that definition is emptied of any content.

When ‘equality of opportunity’ comes close to actually existing, we cease to call it ‘equality of opportunity’ and it ceases to look like ‘equality of opportunity’. Instead, it looks like the sort of liberal society envisaged by Michael Walzer, in which multiple spheres of inequality exist side by side, separate from one another, with none dominating any other. Hence educational attainment and monetary income have little bearing on each other; the electoral system and the media are mutually resistant to the influence of the other; the judiciary and the executive are genuinely separate. It is the separation of spheres in the present that has bite, and not some abstract set of possibilities for each individual’s future.

To some extent, separation of institutions may have the statistical effect of ‘equality of opportunity’, or what is often referred to as ‘social mobility’. Hence social democratic societies in which state institutions, markets and public debate all have their own legitimate but separate space are likely to have higher levels of social mobility (not to mention higher levels of economic equality). But that is something for the statisticians and wonks. It is not what is actually going on from the pragmatic perspective of individuals and institutions themselves. Nations with high levels of ‘social mobility’ are nations with a distaste for allowing private income to pollute their politics or their education systems. So why not recognise the significance of this distaste?

The liberal left can achieve far more political traction by pursuing a Walzerian separation of rival institutional spheres (primarily putting financial capital back in its box) than in pursuing some abstract or statistical imaginary of a ‘level playing field’. This separation can be pursued as a good, in and of itself, and not merely for the instrumental reason that it impacts upon statistical outcomes. In the process, liberal critique operates in sociologically extant institutional territory, rather than in analytical Rawlsian diagrams or econometric models. There are at least three advantages to this.

Firstly, the critique of excessive institutional integration is also a critique of capitalism, inasmuch as ‘capitalism’ refers to the political rights of capital to dominate people. First and foremost, as Marx argued, capital constantly needs new social spheres into which to expand, and a capitalist society is one in which business and government are constantly seeking to dissolve institutional boundaries, so as to make new spheres available to profit-seeking exploitation. Reinforcing those boundaries, on the basis that boundaries are good in and of themselves, represents a denial of capital’s demand to expand into new territories.

Secondly, this critique is also a critique of neoliberalism, inasmuch as ‘neoliberalism’ refers to the expansion of market-based modes of valuation into more and more non-market economic spheres. As Foucault and some Polanyians have noted, a key distinction between 19th century liberalism and 20th century neoliberalism was that the former was characterised by a logic of separation of state, society and market, whereas the latter is/was characterised by a logic of re-integration, fuelled by economistic measurement (I address this contrast in this paper [pdf]). Examples of this are all over the public sector, in the form of ‘new public management’, or in the third sector in the form of ‘social valuation’. And as Foucault identifies, the metaphor of 'human capital' performs a crucial role in subsuming non-market spheres (school, family, doctor's surgery) within an economising logic. I suspect that 'wellbeing' is now taking a similar logic of integration in a subtly different direction.

The ‘equality of opportunity’ mantra seeks to work with the grain of neoliberalism, by taking the all-encompassing competitive game, and making it fair. Yet, until that game is subdivided into separate games, and until that monolithic culture of economic valuation is replaced by plural (and incommensurable) cultures of valuation, it’s impossible to conceive of what fairness might even look like. Pluralism of measurement systems (for example, restoring some autonomy of judgement and measurement to critics, professions and scholars) is a necessary liberal left response to neoliberalism.

Thirdly, with the focus upon separation of different forms of inequality, and not on equality of opportunity, policy-making no longer runs up against thorny problems of informal conduct. For example, there will always be a variations in how much parents choose to read to their children. This has always been there; it will never go away. Equality of reading-to-children cannot exist. If it transpires that this passes on advantages to children, the only egalitarian response is to ensure that society doesn’t become entirely dominated by a particular type of ability, namely one that depends on being read to as a child. Yes, middle class parents pass on advantages, and yes, many of those advantages are informal and cultural. But if literacy, money, political voice, self-respect and academic achievement do not convert cleanly into one another, this acts as the only possible check on the uses of cultural and informal advantage.

In short, pursuing the separation of rival institutional spheres is also a way of keeping the state out of our domestic and personal lives. Surely it has to be a matter of regret for the Left, if the only way it knows of pursuing equality involves lecturing and interfering in the lives of deprived people. For that reason, other definitions of equality can at least be countenanced.

A liberal re-separation of institutional spheres is a fiercely difficult thing to achieve, in capitalist and neoliberal societies. On the other hand, contemporary crises demonstrate the sense of disgust that results, when excessive integration of power, voice and money comes to light (yes, you, Jeremy Hunt). But then if we also adopt Amartya Sen’s critique of Rawls, and recognise that justice can be pursued incrementally (and not only as an all-or-nothing state of affairs) then perhaps there can be a politics of gradually crow-barring spheres apart. One place to start would be to divert attention away from the interview techniques of Oxbridge, and how to make them ‘inclusive’, start slowly to reduce the freedoms of private schools.