Saturday 12 November 2022

Poverty a Political Choice

Why do some people in the UK have more than enough, others have enough, whilst some have no rights to the basic necessities of life, of food, shelter and clothing? How can we exercise political choice?

The marathon task ahead is for groups of individuals to study the workings of the financial system within the daily lives of our own households, our places of waged employment and our local neighbourhoods. The quest is to develop a worldwide concept of municipal economics firmly rooted in a sense of place and community. On a pluralistic planet of difference, they embrace multiculturalism. And as our times plead for innovation, they exude creativity. Reasons enough, – good reasons, why mayors and their fellow citizens can and should rule the world.

In 1949, Huxley wrote in the foreword to a new edition of Brave New World:

“Overall, it looks as if we are much closer to utopia than anybody could have imagined 15 years ago. At the time, I put this utopia 600 years in the future. Today, it seems quite possible that this horror will come upon us within a single century” (Huxley, 1949).

Huxley was amazingly prescient with this prognosis. Given current trends, 2032 seems like a realistic date for the realization of this dystopia. It seems that the 21st century is the one in which we have to prevent a dystopia from becoming reality-one that is already well recognizable in its contours. We will only be able to prevent it from becoming reality, if we manage to unmask its dystopian qualities, and the plan behind it, in time, before people have lost their ability to imagine alternatives.

A possible route out of this impasse is suggested by Benjamin Barber in his most thought-provoking book entitled “If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities” (2013). He argues:

As nations grow more dysfunctional, cities are rising. When it comes to democracy, they command the majority. Rooted in ancient history, they still lean to the future. As we reach the limits of independence and private markets, they define interdependence and public culture. On a pluralistic planet of difference, they embrace multiculturalism. And as our times plead for innovation, they exude creativity. Reasons enough – good reasons why mayors and their fellow citizens can and should rule the world.”

Barber’s central question is where lies the best hope for global democratic governance capable of addressing problems that seriously threaten humankind and the planet such as ecological sustainability, energy, food and water availability, migration, economic stability and inequality. He defines the city as an aggregation of features: dense population, relational networks, public spaces, voluntary identity, secularity, cosmopolitan, mobility, multicultural, trade, arts – overall providing the creative, pragmatic, non-ideological and open networking that democratic global governance requires. Urban living is rapidly increasing, encapsulating more than half the planet’s 7 billion population and estimated to reach 70% by 2030. City populations range from 50,000 to 20 million upwards. There is much in Barber’s argument seriously to question nation-states’ capacities to assure the planetary public good and he provides strong justification for mayors, actively mandated by their citizens, to help hold nations to account and grow a powerful contribution by cities to global governance. In this context, reform of the wages system becomes an urgent priority.

The wages system

Under the wages system, the worker has no say in the planning of the work or in the conditions of work. Workers are engaged to follow orders given by a superior. The worker is rewarded by a money wage or salary which is taxed according to the rules determined by the powers at the top of the centralised pyramids of power. Hence the big banks and the big corporations of bureaucratic capitalism determine political and economic policy. As Guild Socialists Maurice Reckitt and C.E. Bechhoffer explained a century ago:

The fundamental basis of the revolutionary case against Capitalism is not that it makes the few rich and the many poor – though this is true; not that it creates social conditions which are a disgrace and an amazement in a civilised community – though this is also true; not that it brutalises the rich by luxury, stifles beauty, and frustrates the hope of craftsmanship for the worker – though, indeed, it does all these things; but that it denies and degrades the character of man by the operation of a wage-system which makes the worker of no more account than a machine to be exploited or a tool to be bought and sold. The seed of all our glaring social failure and distress today lies not in any imagined ‘problem’ of poverty, nor in any inevitable ‘stage’ of economic development, but in a vile conception of human relationship that has entered into and now dominates all our social life and has invested it with its character of injustice and insecurity. This spiritual failure to which we have come finds its concrete expression in the wages system. Its assumptions and even its ideals (if we can call them so) have won so great a victory over the minds and wills of every section of our countrymen that its creed is the credo of England today. Few challenge it; few have the spirit even to desire an alternative, far less to struggle for one. That men should be forced by the menace of starvation to accept a price for the labour which is all they have to sell, to subdue all their purposes and all their gifts to the purpose of others (and that purpose profit), to lay claim to no right of control over the conditions of their working lives, nor any power of government over those who direct them in the workshop, to be divorced from responsibility and all the attributes of free status, to have upheld before them no standard but that of gain, no incentive but the bribe (often fallacious) of higher wages – this pathetic distortion of human fellowship, this vile and perilous imprisonment of the human spirit, is actually accepted as natural, and even providential, by nearly all those who triumph( by means of it, and by the vast majority, indeed, of its victims.” . (See: Maurice Reckitt and C E Bechhoffer (1918) The Meaning of the National Guilds, Cecil Palmer, London.)


 

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