The Generosity of the Working Classes

Whenever workers are accused of being greedy for wanting their wages to keep up with inflation – as RMT members, BT workers and train drivers are now, in common with workers generally in the late ’70s – it always puts me in mind of two Austrian economists.

One is the über free-marketeer, and also Margaret Thatcher’s favourite practitioner of the ‘dismal science’, Friedrich Hayek. He was adamant that society would benefit, and become immeasurably wealthier, if everyone was motivated solely by profit. “In fact, by pursuing profit we are as altruistic as we can possibly be,” he said, “because we extend our concern beyond to people beyond our range of personal conception.”

Another Austrian, Karl Polanyi (technically Hungarian but he was born in Vienna and lived there for many years), noted that this admonition to behave as selfishly as possible in economic matters pointedly didn’t apply to workers. In fact if wage earners didn’t act in precisely the opposite way – with admirable restraint and concern for the common good – the whole profit maximising system would rapidly fall apart.

If, Polanyi noted in his most famous book The Great Transformation, what workers are selling – their labour – is just the same as any other commodity produced for sale, like sugar or bottles of vodka, they should seek the highest possible price for it. If, that is, they are motivated solely by maximising profit, which Hayek and his predecessor Ludwig Von Mises thought everyone should be. Polanyi elaborated:

Consistently followed up, this means the chief obligation of labor is to be almost continually on strike … The source of the incongruity and practice is, of course, that labor is not really a commodity and that if labor was withheld in order to ascertain its exact price (just as an increase in supply of all other commodities in similar circumstances) society would very soon dissolve for lack of sustenance.

Naturally workers would not be allowed to continually renegotiate the sale of their labour in this manner. This is where the neoliberal solicitude for freedom crumples like leaves on a bonfire. Margaret Thatcher famously used the power of the state to destroy the influence of organised labour the moment it ceased to be a compliant partner of employers and tried to protect the living standards of its members. And in response to the actions of the RMT and others, Liz Truss, the favourite to be next British Prime Minister, wants a legal requirement to maintain “minimum service levels” even when public sector workers have balloted for a strike. If enacted Truss’s promise would return Britain to the salad days of the liberal utopia (coincidentally the original title of The Great Transformation) before disputes between employers and employees were made civil matters and when workers could be – and were – jailed for breaking their employment contract.

Liberal Fascism

And this, shall we say, fickle relationship with freedom is by no means a new impulse on the part of conservative-liberals. In the 1920s, one of the original economic liberals, Ludwig Von Mises, thought the merit of Italian Fascism would “live on eternally in history” for having “saved European civilisation” by smashing, quite literally, the workers’ movement in Italy.

It is illuminating that wage earners – flesh and blood people with bills to pay and other people to look after – are the only element of the economy expected to exercise restraint in economic matters out of concern for the common welfare. Nobody in power really thinks for one moment profit should not be maximised by corporations. And despite the propaganda that in these enlightened times, corporations ‘do well by doing good’, it certainly is being unashamedly maximised. Both Shell and Centrica (British Gas) recently posted record profits notwithstanding predictions that energy bills will soon triple. According to research by the union Unite, profit margins for the UK’s FTSE 350 companies (big business in other words) were 73% higher in 2021 than they were before the pandemic.  Despite Sir Keir Starmer telling us that “When business profits, we all do”, the bedtime story that high profits produce economic growth and rising wages like parched earth blossoms after a cloudburst just won’t wash anymore. Are we supposed to ignore the experience of last three decades?

Not selfish enough

The conclusion that economic selfishness is in fact a virtue when practised by those legal entities called corporations is defended despite the fact that excessive profits are a more likely inflationary culprit than high wages (which in fact have been stagnating or falling for years). In the words of the father of market economics, Adam Smith, “Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

One could argue that workers in Britain – and elsewhere – far from being too selfish, aren’t being selfish enough. The RMT is demanding a pay rise of 7% which when inflation is at 9.1% is obviously a real terms pay cut. And here lies the crucial difference between wage earners and other elements of the economy, or ‘factors’ in production. When employers seek sky high profits or when landlords raise the rent by way above the rate of inflation, they do so because they can and because the practice is socially validated. When workers submit to whatever wage they can negotiate (usually whatever they are offered, even to get a trade union recognised is an immense struggle) they do so because they have to. Because, lacking independent means, they have to procure the means to survive for themselves and their families.

Historically, this unequal ‘deal’ been accepted, partly out of brute power, and partly because it promised benefits – to consumers, to workers receiving rising wages – that seemed to accrue from submission to the demands of capital. But what if, as in happening now in the West, the bounty stops flowing. How long are we going to continue to oppress ourselves?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Banality of Obedience

 

In trying to understand the Milgram obedience experiments, the most important thing, in my opinion, is not to be dazzled by what they purport to show. The surface narrative – still loyally recounted in popular renditions every time the name Stanley Milgram is uttered – is that ordinary people can effortlessly be transformed into heartless torturers, that beneath our civilised veneers lurk potential concentration camp guards. In the next breath there are, invariably, earnest warnings about the Nazis and the Holocaust.

In fact, the truth is simultaneously more mundane and more disturbing.

What Milgram actually said was that we easily allow ourselves to be turned into agents for those above us in hierarchical organisations, doing what they want rather than what we ourselves would do. “Relationship,” as he put it, “overwhelms content”. That content can involve inflicting pain and death but – and this is rarely remarked upon – it can also involve content that is neutral, even benevolent or merely one link in a chain whose ultimate purpose is destructive or damaging. The specific action might appear innocuous but when placed together with other innocent looking parts of the whole, the ‘end product’ might be immensely harmful.

The crucial element is the relationship. Clearly the Milgram experiment (s) would not have achieved lasting fame had he asked volunteers if they wouldn’t mind passing a stapler (‘Psychology professor reveals we are all stapler-passers under the surface!’). Though it would have been interesting to know if anyone would have refused.

Commonplace obedience

This little noticed element in obedience to authority in fact produced the highest obedience rates. When Milgram’s subjects were merely asked to read out the word-pairs while a confederate of the experimenter actually pressed the buzzer supposedly inflicting electric shocks (the experiment was presented as a test of the effect of punishment on memory), obedience levels went through the roof. They registered 92.5%, the highest in the entire series of experiments.

Most replications of Milgram in the 1960s and ‘70s produced broadly similar results. One study didn’t however. That was by Wesley Kilham and Leon Mann in Australia in 1974. They reported obedience as low as 40% (and 16% for female subjects). This was the “notable exception” alluded to in Part One. However, when Kilham’s and Mann’s subjects became mere ‘runners’ – transmitting the experimenter’s instructions to a person playing the role of the teacher/shocker – disobedience was transformed into obedience. It hit 68% for men and 40% for women.

This is how contemporary obedience researchers, Dariusz Doliński and Tomasz Grzyb, describe this variation of the Kilham and Mann study:

As it turned out, people whose task was simply to transmit successive instructions to press the generator’s switches were even more pliant than those who – as in Milgram’s original experiment – were supposed to be the direct (physical) culprits responsible for causing physical pain to another person. This demonstrates that the role of being a cog in the bureaucratic machine facilitates the sense that one is neither the instigator of anything evil, nor directly causing any harm. As can be seen, in this particular type of situation, it is particularly easy to generate submissiveness and obedience. (From The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, pp 39-40)

The “particular type of situation” which lends itself so effortlessly to kindling submissiveness and obedience, is as emblematic of the corporation – which is in essence a private bureaucracy – as it is of the state machine. This is difficult to see in part because of the vehement ideology of freedom that accompanies corporate capitalism. But it is also obscured by the image, assiduously developed over the last 40 years or so, of the individual as a self-interested aggrandizer, always on the look-out for the best online deals, demanding faultless service, perpetually seeking fitness and attractiveness, constantly honing their CV. We may be irredeemably selfish but under a ‘free market’ system, we answer only to ourselves and our own desires.

However this was never true and still isn’t. As noted by the mid-20^th century economic historian Karl Polanyi, if we were purely self-interested negotiators always seeking the highest price for selling the commodity of our own labour, as theoretically we should do under the ‘laws’ of the market economy, we would be “almost continually on strike”. This obviously isn’t the case and is not solely due to coercion and the power of the law and the police. The added ingredient is the power of obedience.

The vast majority of us willingly enter – or we think we do – Milgram’s agentic state, where we temporarily become instruments for the wishes of people above us in the hierarchy (as they are instruments for people above them). The crucial element, as Milgram observed, is the sense of voluntary choice. This creates a sense of obligation, allied to a feeling of being absolved of any real responsibility, which is a powerful and dangerous brew.

The element of our economy which is always stressed by the media and the powerful is our freedom as consumers. But this, as the book elaborates, is at best half the story. We also spend much of our lives within – or bound to – hierarchical organisations which operate under the expectation of unquestioning obedience.  

As above, so below

It would be a mistake to think this cast of mind is restricted to the lower half of the economy, though it may be more explicit there. Most of us are agents for others. Since the 1970s, for example, ‘the agency theory of the firm’ has grown in popularity. This asserts that a company’s senior managers (chief exec, head of finance etc., often on salaries which place them in the 0.01%) are mere ‘agents’ of its ‘principals’, the shareholders, and should be expected to do their bidding. Whether these managers are in fact genuine agents for the company’s owners is open to question. At the higher echelons of the economy, people often have the power and wealth to pursue their own interests. But what is interesting is that they’re expected to be٭.

If anything obedience has grown in intensity since Milgram’s time, though not in the way that might be first thought. It occupies an unrecognised, though essential, space in the economy. Thanks to burgeoning information technology, ‘scientific management’ can control and keep tabs on employees’ behaviour in ways never dreamed of by its 20^th century pioneers. In efforts to increase productivity and minimize ‘loafing’, workers are regularly spied on and tracked by their own smartphones, with data compiled about their activities. Online wanderings are subject to screen capture and keystroke monitoring.  In some cases, a worker’s every action is planned out by headsets or hand-held devices, with punishment for deviation.

As one writer observes, this is not just about maximising profitability but “a vision of obedience and acquiescence”.

Gratefully oppressed

What makes these developments especially sinister is that they are accompanied by a powerful feeling that, beyond extreme infractions, this is the way things should be. In a market economy, where we freely choose which little dictatorship to rent ourselves out to, it is only natural that we obey the instructions of superiors.

In The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, Doliński and Grzyb give numerous examples of employees, or people assuming the role of employees in psychological experiments, obeying the instructions of superiors to carry out ethically dubious actions. For instance, racially selecting new employees or marketing an unsafe drug. Interestingly, the crucial factor does not seem to be an inherent desire to maximise profits, but fulfilling the wishes of senior figures in the organization of which these ‘employees’ are a part.

In my opinion, this is a form of obedience unique to the corporate capitalism societies we inhabit. There is an often fervent identification with the interests and aims of employers but one that can be seamlessly transferred to a competitor. This is serial obedience – in contrast to older types of obedience, around a nation or a religion for example, which tend to be quite fixed.

This feeling of habitual obedience is stiffened by a pervasive aura of disposability – the fear that if we don’t live up to expectations there is always someone else, maybe a robot, who can replace us. In this mindset, there is nothing wrong with obedience. Quite the opposite, it is questioning obedience that is pathological.

Evolution’s children

The natural objection to this thesis is that obedience is not imposed on us, but evident throughout history – so much so that it might be thought of as part of human nature.  In The Disobedient Society I refute Milgram’s contention (which echoes historical giants like Darwin) that obedience is an “evolutionary adaptation”. Actually, the evidence suggests that early humanity was able to knowingly flit between hierarchical and egalitarian social relations. Features such elite rule, social ranking or territoriality might be put into effect at certain times of the year and then dissolved. This indicates an element of choice in obedience which debars it from being a genetic flaw, or depending on your view, an innate advantage.

I refer also to Murray Bookchin’s distinction between first and second nature. Evolution, in the form of first nature, endows humans with the capacity to develop extra-biological tools and to consciously intervene in the natural world through a sophisticated collective organisation. However, the nature of this collective organisation is not determined by first nature. It lies in the realm of second nature – the domain of experimentation which can take many forms and is not governed by the ‘laws’ of natural selection.

The belief that obedience is immovable really relies on a different contention, however. That with the fragmentation of tasks within the complex organisations of the modern world, a degree of obedience is essential. We can never return to the simple freedom of earlier stages of human development, where a person might undertake an action and see it through to completion without the input of others. In short, if we want civilisation, we have to have obedience.

I don’t believe, however, that obedience is synonymous with the division of labour. Rather it is a kind of reflex, an unthinking giving away of authority and ethical responsibility to others. Obedience has a habitual character – it is a form of behaviour it is easy to slip into without noticing.

But the habit can be broken, just as a person who is lightly dozing can be jolted into wakefulness. Despite its tenacious hold, the origins of obedience are not evolutionary. And disobedience, does not, in spite of its reputation, repudiate complex organisation and discipline. Murray Bookchin coined the phrase “episodic sovereignty” – in reference to the Indian Crow societies of North America – to indicate how the yielding of individual initiative can be temporary and limited to rational and well-defined ends. Permanent institutions based on the expectation of command and obedience are not inevitable.

Basic disobedience

Not inevitable, but certainly well-entrenched, however.  I would suggest that if the grip of obedience is to be loosened, radical steps need to be taken. One is a basic income set at a level that a person can live well on without the need to become an “agent” for the hierarchical organisations that pepper and essentially control society. This would instil a sense of confidence and security, a willingness to breach conformist norms and the self-assurance to resist the demands of ‘the economy’. The cowed and malleable workforce of today would be transcended and more genuine forms of democracy might follow.

Secondly the perpetual motion machine of capitalism needs to be halted. At its molecular level capitalism entails the re-investment of profits which leads (usually) to more profits which have to be reinvested again, and so on ad infinitum. This leads to an irresistible imperative to meet existing consumer demand, and create new needs to satisfy this ever-growing “wall of money”. Thus the signature institutions of capitalist society embody obedience – hierarchical organisation with employees obeying precise instructions from above – as simply the most efficient means to achieve the task in hand. If society is ever to advance beyond command and obedience, this background fixation needs to change.

I am not suggesting that obedience did not exist before capitalism or that it may not infuse the kind of society that will exist after capitalism. But Milgram’s insistence on the essentially voluntary nature of obedience makes him, sixty years after his original obedience experiments, presciently relevant.

 

٭ The problem of a corporation’s executives not actually being genuine agents for its owners was thought to have been circumvented by paying them partly in stock options. This, it was believed, would align their interests with those of the shareholders, in that both would want a high share price. However this ‘solution’ also managed to subvert a core principle of the market economy. Theoretically, a company share price should reflect whether investors think it will make healthy profits – and thus pay healthy dividends – in the future.  However, paying executives partly in stock options encouraged the practice of share buy backs, whereby a company buys its own shares to jack up the overall price. This practice was legalised in Britain in 1981 and in the US the following year. Share buys backs are now a huge ‘industry’, ironically diverting funds which may have gone into actual industry.

Sylvia Pankhurst and feminism, part two

The destinations of the leaders of the Suffragette movement in Britain were, as shown in part one, utterly contradictory. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the WSPU, became a zealous supporter of the First World War, fervent anti-communist and, in time, Conservative party candidate. Sylvia Pankhurst, her daughter, worked to improve the conditions of working class women, opposed the First World War, agitated for universal suffrage and unreservedly backed the Russian Revolution when it burst onto the scene in 1917. In fact, the East London Federation of Suffragettes morphed, after several incarnations, into the first British Communist party, although Sylvia Pankhurst swiftly became an anti-Leninist council communist.

These outcomes were not accidental but pre-determined by a feminism informed by class in contrast to one that regarded class an irrelevant distraction. Sylvia Pankhurst’s support for ‘human suffrage’, her urgent desire to improve the lot of the working class and her instinctual backing of the Russian Revolution did not subsume her feminism. She advocated a system of ‘household soviets’ in order that mothers could be represented in how society was managed and refused to get married, instead co-habiting with an Italian anarchist in Essex. But she became unequivocal socialist.

 A sheen of equality

The other kind of feminism is doomed to play an ultimately conservative role by buttressing already existing institutions, albeit with the caveat that they be opened up equally to women. There is an unmistakable echo of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Party in the assertion of Hillary Clinton’s former speechwriter, Anne-Marie Slaughter, that gender equality will achieved by closing the “leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders.”

There is undoubtedly value in doing this, opening up roles to women that have been the province of men for decades or even centuries. But it is a tightly constricted form of progress. The value will be felt, and already is being felt, by middle class women who will fill those roles as social mobility stagnates or goes into reverse. In the OECD, a club of 34 rich countries, half of the well-paid professional and managerial “class 1” jobs are now held by women. Norway has a law demanding that 40% of company directors are women. Its effect has been extremely limited, aside from creating a tiny elite of rich women. What changes like this do achieve, however, is to lend a sheen of equality and diversity to institutions that don’t merit such validation. They also leave in place, even solidify, armies of poorly paid, overwhelming female, workers doing ‘caring’ jobs such as nursery assistant or cleaner. Gender equality becomes synonymous with elite concerns.

Chartism and other ‘male’ movements

We would do well not to cast ‘patriarchical’ male-dominated movements of the past into the dustbin of history. When the first extension of the vote in Britain in 1832 confined enfranchisement to middle class men only (13% of adult males), the result was the formation of co-operatives and trade unions throughout society. Chartism, the original movement to enlarge the franchise which swiftly followed, was inherently sexist – it demanded the vote for all men only. But this did not stop it being bitterly resisted and posing an existential challenge to the order of things. Male democracy was deemed a mortal danger to the newly minted capitalist system by the liberal rulers of the day and, according to one historian, “the mere demand for the ballot was often treated as a criminal act by the authorities.”

Chartism was accompanied by a wave of strikes and the right to vote was extended gradually, only once the ruling class was convinced workers had become sufficiently docile. “Only when the working class had accepted the principles of a capitalist economy and the trade unions had made the smooth running of industry their chief concern did the middle classes concede the vote to the better situated workers,” wrote economic historian Karl Polanyi in the 1940s, “that is, long after the Chartist Movement had subsided and it had become certain that the workers would not try to use the franchise in the service of any ideas of their own,”. Syndicalism was similarly male dominated (the document quoted in part one from the Welsh miners’ union refers to ‘men’ determining how work shall be done) but it nonetheless represented a radical challenge to how society and industry should be managed.

What this means is that divisions among white men will be replicated among women and people of different ethnicities and, conversely, movements for equality among white men can be adapted beyond their original sexist and racist defects. To take one historical example, Ancient Athens was patriarchical to an absurd degree - women were not allowed outside the family home unless under male surveillance. It resembled, in this respect, modern-day Saudi Arabia. But Athens pioneered a form of direct democracy and political equality that can be used to increase female participation in public affairs. Sortition – where decision makers are chosen by random selection as opposed to elected to a position – has been demonstrated to be far more representative of the population than conventional forms of democracy, reliant on universal suffrage and the vote. The very rights the Suffragettes fought for. Nearly 90 years after women gained the vote in Britain, working class women are the most unrepresented group in the House of Commons. Formal equality and enfranchisement have clearly not had the seismic effects both the Suffragettes, and their opponents at the time, imagined.

Economic inequality and class

But class is very definitely still with us. One of the chief television ‘entertainments’ of today in Britain are reality programmes about the lives of people on welfare benefits. Their tone is uniformly contemptuous and stigmatising, to the degree that, were they about an ethnic group, they would be deemed irredeemably racist. The current width of the UK’s Overton Window permits the suggestion that people who don’t pay sufficient taxes should have the right to vote taken from them, while businesses should be enfranchised. The higher echelons of politics, the judiciary and the corporate world are dominated by the privately educated and Oxbridge graduates, while 91% of the general population go to state schools.

The Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, published in 2010 by the last Labour government, found that inequalities among individuals from the same social group (for example gender or ethnicity) were much greater than differences between the social groups. “Even if all differences between groups were removed, overall inequalities would remain wide,” it concluded.

For this reason, the push to increase gender inequality at the summit of major social institutions, though necessary and valuable for other reasons, will not dent overall inequality which is now huge and getting more extreme. An overwhelming concentration on gender will not make class disappear. This is something Sylvia Pankhurst understood very well. It is why there are statues of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst opposite the Houses of Parliament but not of her.